LC2L

In Every Line of Code 1/2

2011-11-12T17:27:33Z

Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Length: 18,900 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Mark's parents buy him Eduardo - a state-of-the-art, brand new, tailor made robotic best friend - for his birthday. The only problem is, Mark asked for a laptop.
Warnings: Language, make-outs, allusions to violence, completely unrealistic and unresearched technology/coding talk, Sean Parker as a villain, so much angst.
Notes: All of the love for altogetherisi who read it as it was being written, pressured me into finishing it so she wouldn't have to live in suspense and betaed the whole thing into something readable.
Also the chatfish for the cheerleading and the wordwars. <3 you.

Read at AO3

When Mark returned from lectures, there was a brand new, highly advanced, supercomputer powered robot standing in the middle of the room.

Damn it.

"Mark," said the robot, turning with a smile that seemed to brighten the whole room. It had big innocent eyes, limbs that looked a little too big for its body and it looked like a boy, so at least they'd got that right. "Hello."

Mark pushed past it to get to his desk, and it bounced along after him like a particularly hyperactive puppy.

"How was your lecture? What are you up to? When are Dustin and Chris coming home?"

So Mark's parents had done their research. Mark sighed and sat down in his chair, spinning it so he could meet the robot eye to eye. He held up one hand and the robot slammed its mouth shut obediently. Apparently it could still beam with its mouth closed. "Do you have a name?"

"Wardo," it said brightly, folding its ridiculous legs up so it could sit on the floor at Mark's feet.

"Okay," Mark said. "Wardo. You're a robot."

The robot—Wardo—tilted its head to the side, its bright smile very clearly saying 'I know this is a joke but I will humour you because we are best friends.'

"Seriously," Mark said. "A robot. You're a carefully engineered piece of hardware and software from Cybernet industries programmed to be the best friend money can buy. I filled out a whole personality profile and they built you to match up with me."

Wardo's smile faltered a little but he covered it with a nervous laugh.

"You're the new big thing," Mark continued. "What upper middle class parents get their children for their birthdays."

Wardo glanced down at his hands then back up at Mark. For a long moment they sat there staring at each other. Mark imagined he could see the tiny cameras in Wardo's eyes.

"I don't get it," Wardo said, brow furrowing a little. "What's the joke?"

Damn program. Mark pushed his chair back to sit on the floor opposite Wardo. "You think we've known each other forever, right? You think we're best friends? You don't think it's at all strange that I had to ask your name?"

"Um," Wardo said.

"There's a subroutine in your program that tells you to ignore everything that doesn't quite match up," Mark said. "I'll take that out later, I can't imagine it being anything other than an annoyance."

"Um." Wardo glanced down at his hands again. "So I'm... you asked for me?"

Mark sighed and stood up. "No, I asked for a new laptop. You can't have everything."</p>

Dustin arrived twenty minutes later to see Mark coding on his laptop and Wardo staring intently at each side of a rubix cube in turn as though it might fix itself through force of will. "What are you doing?" he asked, stepping around Wardo to lean over and read over Mark's code.

"Jailbreaking my robot," Mark said.

"Cool," Dustin sat down beside him. "Can I help?"

Chris got in around dinner time when Dustin was looking through the cable drawer, Mark was tapping his fingers waiting for his code to compile and Wardo was turning each side of the cube in turn, apparently trying to solve it through process of elimination. "Do I want to know?"

Dustin looked up with an Ethernet cable in one hand and a red vine in the other. "Mark has a robot," he said "But it's programmed to never believe it's a robot, so we're hacking it." He gave each of the items careful consideration before tossing the cable and eating the red vine.

"Uh-huh," Chris said in his familiar 'I'm just going to pretend that made sense' voice before turning to Wardo. "And you are?"

Wardo's fingers trembled a little on the cube. "Hey Chris," he said. "I'm Wardo. I suppose you don't remember me either."

Chris frowned, looking between Mark and Dustin before settling on Mark. "He's the robot? Your parents bought you a robotic best friend?"

Mark shrugged. "I asked for a laptop."

"Victory!" Dustin interrupted, rolling over with a USB cable held high. "Now, where do I stick this?"

There was a moment of silence during which Mark blinked, Wardo drew his legs up against his chest and Chris looked seriously tempted to knock his head into something heavy.

"Okay," Dustin said, slower and more carefully. "Everyone can stop thinking dirty thoughts in three... two..."

Chris snatched the cable from his hands and turned to Wardo who was now rocking back and forth a little on the floor. "Didn't he come with a user guide?"

Mark glanced back at his code. "There might have been an email attachment with instructions."

"Where is it?"

"I deleted it and told them to send me a laptop."

Chris let out a low sound of despair and tossed the cable at Mark before crouching down in front of Wardo, touching one hand hesitantly to his shoulder. "Do you come with a manual?"

Wardo buried his face in his knees. "I don't know," he said, muffled by the denim. "I don't know and I'm not a robot and this isn't funny anymore." He turned his head to throw a desperate look at Mark. "I remember your fifth birthday. There were red balloons with fire trucks on and a bouncy castle. You had a cake in the shape of a hedgehog and you ate so much you threw up and I was there."

"It was a caterpillar," Mark said, pushing Wardo's head round and forward to bare the back of his neck. "And no, you weren't. You're not even five years old. Dustin, in a minute I'll need you to search something."

"I remember it."

Chris reached out to take one of Wardo's hands. "Memories constructed from data given by Mark's parents, most likely. You're programmed to believe them without question, it's barbaric and wrong and I'm starting a campaign but—"

"No one cares," Mark said, sliding his fingers carefully across the synthetic flesh on the back of Wardo's neck until he found the small indent. He dug his fingernails into the edge, ignoring Wardo's slight tremble, and pulled up the flap to reveal the control panel complete with USB port, a whole array of switches and a serial number. "Dustin, google a user's guide for a Cybernet AI unit, EdURD0."

Dustin rolled over to his desk and typed something, then paused. "Like Eduardo?"

"You always call me Wardo," Wardo muttered, hands clasping and unclasping on his knees. "Always."

"He's midrange," Dustin called, wheeling back into the room with his computer on his lap. "Pretty decent from the looks of things. Good at math, capable of learning, enough memory for at least ten more years of input data."

Mark picked up the cable and wired Wardo up to his laptop, pulling the computer down onto his lap so he could scroll through Wardo's memory drives. "You think we've known each other all our lives, hey?"

Wardo's head dropped against his knees, pulling the cable tight. "I'm dreaming. This is just some stupid, crazy dream or you're playing a trick or something and it's not funny anymore. I don't like it and I want to wake up." He reached behind him with one hand, feeling where the skin of his neck lifted away to reveal the control panel, his fingers closing around the point where the cable plugged in.

He tore his hand away. "It's a dream. It's just a—"

Mark dragged his new program across to the centre of Wardo's command structure and started it running, reaching out to close his fingers on Wardo's hand. He only meant to stop Wardo from pulling the cable out, but Wardo's fingers closed almost painfully tight on his the moment they were in range.

"He works as a speaker," Dustin said, wheeling in from the other room. "There's a button to open him up and there should be an iPod dock somewhere inside."

"We can look inside?" Mark asked, already scanning the few buttons on the control panel. It's not that he had any plans to open Wardo up and pull out the incredibly powerful circuitboard powering him. He was just curious enough to hit the button and take a quick peek.

Wardo's hand went loose, his head falling forward until it hit his knees.

"Mark," Chris snapped. "What did you—" he broke off as the back of Wardo's head split open, parting his hair to reveal the soft blue glow of the tech inside.

There was an ipod dock secreted neatly at the base of Wardo's skull, a few slots for additional graphics or memory cards but more importantly there was a circuitboard that Mark had never seen the like of outside of advanced computer theory. "Dustin?" he said slowly, pulling his hand free of Wardo's limp fingers. "What hardware should he have installed?"

Dustin rolled a little closer. "Latest intel processor, Cybertronix learning chip and a Flashback memory card all on the Cybernet basic unit?"

"Yeah," Mark said, ghosting his fingers around the curve of Eduardo's skull. "He doesn't have any of that. This is... I don't even know what this is. It shouldn't be possible."

Dustin leant forward to get a look and let out a long whistle. "Wow."

"Okay," Chris said. "All I see is chips and circuitboards. What am I looking at?"

"The most powerful theoretical tech ever," Dustin said. "It's supposed to be impossible to manufacture but the theory is that every time the computer learns something or commits something to memory, storage only increases. This isn't a slow programmed learning curve, this could download, like, all the information in the world ever and understand it." He leant forward a little further. "There's a whole load of inhibitors on it, but theoretically it could be used to run anything and I'm not talking a small company website I'm talking a small country. Or a large country. Or, like, the entirety of google could run off that one chip. No one in their right mind would put it in a basic robot companion."

Mark was still staring at the board, running through everything he could do with it from destroy the world to create world peace. "Chris, if you bought a pack of cornflakes but found a chocolate bar inside and didn't return it, the chocolate bar would still be yours, right?"

Chris frowned. "I think technically yes?"

Mark nodded. "So it's my technology. They made a mistake and I get to keep it." He tilted his head to get a better look at how the board was attached and what the best ways to get it out would be. "Dustin, I need a toolkit and a—"

Chris slammed the two halved of Wardo's head back together, hiding the world's most complex technology beneath the universe's most mysterious hair. "He's yours to have as a friend and look after. If that board is as good as you say it is he should be the most advanced AI out there which means what's in his head belongs to him and it's up to him to decide what he wants to do with it."

"Chris," Mark hissed as Wardo started to stir. "This is futuristic technology. You don't throw the future inside any old robot and then let it make its own mind up as to what happens next."

"I don't care," Chris threw back. "I am not sitting here and letting you tear him apart."

Wardo's head jerked upwards between them, his hand pulling away from his neck. "Did I-" he looked around for a moment. "You switched me off?"

Mark glanced at his laptop to see that—yes—his program had finished running. "What are you?"

"Wardo," Wardo said absently, running his face with one hand. "Eduardo. I'm a robot, I'm—" he turned slowly to look at Mark. "I'm your robot."

"And," Dustin added, waving his laptop. "You're programmed to fall in love with him in six to eight weeks. I know love should be a surprise but I thought I'd tell you because it's Mark and no one should be forced into that without warning."

Wardo looked up at Mark. He had big brown eyes that logically hid cameras but all Mark could see in them was slight confusion and complete trust. Somewhere behind this face was the most powerful circuitboard in the world and all it wanted was to be here with Mark Zuckerberg.

"Yeah," Mark said, reaching out to pull the USB cord out from Wardo's neck and slide the flap closed over the control panel. "You're my robot."

***

"You were called in front of the ad board."

Mark blinks, looking away from the window to the woman sitting opposite him at the long table. "That's not what happened."

Gretchen frowns—a neat little tilt of the brows—and consults her notes. "You weren't called in front of the administrative board?"

"No, back. Back when I met Wardo—I didn't—I wasn't going to break him up for parts. Where would you even get that?"

"The data is a transcript of the video recorded by the robotic unit's external cameras while in standby mode. The Eduardo unit was programmed to send back-ups of all its data to the Cybernet servers at regular intervals." She pulls up another page of notes. "You successfully disabled the function on your third day of ownership along with a whole list of other core functionalities of the unit." She slides the page across for Sy to pick up. Mark doesn't bother looking.

"There were inhibitors on the chip and the other hardware to make him seem more human. I disabled them and I cut the links to Cybernet industries as it was detailed in the terms and conditions that jailbreaking Wardo would result in him being cut off from updates so it didn't seem necessary to keep the link in place."

"Why did you want him less human?"

Mark swallows and tries to work out the best way to word this. "At the time I wasn't interested in the personality construct programmed to become my friend but I was interested in the hardware which the construct could help me understand. I left Wardo's personality intact but took out the inhibitors that stopped him using the hardware to its full potential."

Gretchen nods, taking a few notes. The man beside her looks sour. "So you were called in front of the ad board?"

Mark picks up his pen and presses it against his note pad. "It wasn't a big deal. We were messing around and we crashed the network."

"How did you crash the network?"

"It doesn't—"

"Mark," Sy says. "Answer the question."

Mark twists his pen on the pad, digging through the top layers of paper. "We wanted to test the capabilities of Wardo's tech so we hooked him up to the internet and he tried to download it. There was too much data and it overloaded the Harvard servers. I was given a month's academic suspension and instructions to take better care of my technology." He stabs his pen hard against the page. "It wasn't a big deal."

"It made the Crimson," Getchen remarks, pulling out a clipping.

Mark doesn't look at it. He knows what it says, all that shit about proper robot care and how a computer science major should know better. "It was a slow news day."

"So one week into ownership, you had already expressed an interest in dismantling the unit, removed some of the humanising functions of the unit and put the unit in a state where it could have been overloaded and destroyed. I think this shows—"

"No," Mark interrupts, ignoring Gretchen in favour of the man to her left. "No, you know as well as I do that Wardo wouldn't have overloaded. The servers would always have gone down before his memory chip filled up. I knew that, Dustin knew that and Wardo knew the risks when he said we could."

"Oh Wardo said you could," the man drawls, leaning forward in his chair a little. "How lucky we all are that you remember Eduardo giving you permission to do all of these things since we can no longer ask him. I mean, if it wasn't for you remembering we might have cause to doubt that he had ever said anything at all."

Mark clenches his fingers around the pen and wonders how effective it would be as a missile flying straight into the man's smug, self important mouth. "He was my robot. I would never have hurt him."

"You are truly delusional, Mr Zucker-"

"At least I'm not filing stupid lawsuits far too late to actually fix my mistakes."

"Because we all know how you've never made any mis-"

"I make it eleven thirty-five," Sy interrupts, grabbing Mark's arm to drag him away. "Let's call that lunch."

***

"A robot called me a dick today," Mark said, slamming the dorm room door shut behind him. "Some generic friendship bot who was in my lecture taking notes because its owner couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. I mean, surely even with its limited intelligence drive it would know that I was less of a dick than the asshole that bought it."

"You say that," Chris said from the sofa. "But we all watched Wardo doing your homework yesterday."

Mark waved this off with one hand. "He likes math. He's also good at it because he actually has intelligence installed." He grabbed a beer from the fridge. "I mean, anyone could see it was just a stupid prank and Wardo barely even started to overheat before the servers crashed and everyone knows he survived." Mark had barely landed on the sofa when Chris's bottle opener was in his hand. "If the fucking Winklevii can figure out that Wardo isn't a normal robot, surely another robot could work it out."

Dustin rolled into the room. "What's a Winklevii?"

"Tall, big shoulders, rows crew, two of them." Mark opens the bottle and takes a long swallow. "They found me after I walked out of my lecture."

Chris immediately pulled away. "You walked out of class? Mark—"

"Don't bother telling me off," Mark said. "Wardo has a lecture saved for times like these and I'd hate to disappoint him by learning my lesson before he has a chance to play it to me. Anyway, if I hadn't left I wouldn't have bumped into the Winklevii and-" He glanced towards his closed bedroom door. "Is Wardo still switched off?"

"We haven't been in there today," Dustin said, rolling over to them. "What did big, strong and seeing double want?"

"Chris, could you go check on him? If I left him off, bring him out." Chris gave him a long look. "Please," Mark said. "It's been a long day of being intimidated by rowers and hated by robots."

"I bet Wardo could out row the Winklevii," Dustin said thoughtfully. "In fact, we could just rig up an engine to plug into his USB port and power the boat that way. Unless that's cheating."

"I am going to get Wardo," Chris said. "So you can repeat that to him and he can do whatever he did after you tried to hook him up to a popcorn machine that made you creep around guiltily for days."

"It's not fair," Dustin said, rolling up next to Mark. "He has Bambi eyes." He leant his head on the back of the sofa and watched Chris disappear into Mark's room and shut the door. "Okay, so what is so terrible it can't be said in front of Chris?"

Mark looked down at his beer. "The Winklevii heard about us crashing the network. They think I somehow upgraded Wardo's circuit board on my own and they want it."

"They want you to upgrade all their circuit boards to holy-shit-Wardo circuit boards?"

Mark glanced at his bedroom door to check that Chris wasn't emerging with Wardo. "They're building a website," he said, quickly and quietly. "Like match.com for Harvard guys—they also asked me to code it for them—but they want to run it off something simple like, say, a single computer. They only need one board."

Dustin's disappointed face says all Mark really needs to know. "Are you asking me because you think I'm more likely than Chris to say yes or because I'm less likely to hurt you when I say no?"

Mark swallowed and repositioned his hands on the neck of his beer. "Their final offer was three hundred thousand dollars, Dustin. Three hundred thousand and we don't even have to—we could pick up a normal Cybernet circuit board for five hundred bucks and transfer most of Wardo onto that instead. Chris wouldn't even notice. Just think of all the things we could do with the money. I have this idea for a website—it would blow the Winklevii's idea out of the water but we'd need some start-up cash and we don't know anyone with that kind of money."

Mark's bedroom door swung open. "I can't find the on switch and he's heavier than he looks," Chris said, stepping back into the room. "Get in here and switch him on. Dustin, tell me what the Winklevii wanted."

Mark met Dustin's eyes and tried to make his expression sufficiently pleading as he stood up and headed for his room.

"They have an idea for a website," Dustin said behind him. "And they've come to the clearly ridiculous conclusion that they want Mark's help with it. Clearly in a week they will be so fed up of him they will change their minds."

Mark closed the door behind him. Chris had got as far as pulling Wardo out from under the bed. It wasn't the greatest storage space ever, but Mark's room was small and a switched off Wardo was too still and heavy to share a bed with.

Mark lifted his head up to reach underneath for the control panel and flick the small on/off switch into its other position. Wardo's fingers twitched, his eyelids flickered, and he sat up so fast Mark had to jerk backwards so they didn't headbutt each other by accident.

"I'm awake," Wardo said, then turned his head to see Mark sitting back. "Shit, sorry, did I hit you? What time is it?"

Wardo would run fine off a less powerful computer. Mark passed robots in the hallways every day. Sure, their expressions had no subtleties and they didn't have the random knowledge of a sizable chunk of the internet stored in their memory banks but they could run a personality construct.

Wardo turned his head to look at Mark properly, eyes wider than normal in defiance of all laws of physics. "Mark?" he said, sounding so hesitant that Mark moved forward to take his hand before he really registered what was going on.

"Is there a problem?" he asked, reaching up to close the flap over the control panel. "Are you functioning okay?"

Wardo reached up with his free hand, touching his fingertips to Mark's cheek. Five small points of cold lab-grown skin that slowly traced the lines of his face, following the curve of his lips and the slight frown of his brow.

"Can you see okay? Do you need me to take a look inside?" He reached back for the control panel but before he could even touch Wardo's neck, Wardo flinched back, pulling away fast enough that he hit the bed and his hand was torn out of Mark's.

"Don't!" He reached back, pressing his palm against the back of his neck as though to stop Mark getting at it. "I'm fine, my eyes are fine, everything's fine, please don't sell me." He said the last bit fast, then turned his head away.

His hands were shaking, eyes flickering closed and face twisted up in something like fear.

Mark couldn't stop himself moving forward, reaching out to touch Wardo's shaking hand and his stupid frumpy hair. "Hey, it's okay. It's okay, I'm not—why would you say that?"

Wardo swallowed and looked down at the hand shaking in his lap. "I heard—the Winklevii. They want to wipe me and use me for a website. You said—you need the money."

"Chris said you were switched off," Mark said, stupidly. He tried to remind himself that it was three hundred thousand dollars for one tiny circuit board but it was so hard to think objectively when Wardo was curled up by his bed rocking back and forth.

"Standby," Wardo mumbled. "I was on standby, I don't switch off and I can still see and hear but I wasn't going to tell you because you wanted a normal robot and they switch off but I heard you and I don't want to die."

Mark stared at him for a long moment because—because he'd been turning Wardo off at night and sticking him out of the way like he was just another computer even though his brain was just as complicated as Mark's and probably more complicated than any fucking Winklevii's.

But he hadn't even wanted a robot and his parents never listened and he didn't need this responsibility. A normal robot on a normal chip wouldn't be intelligent enough to understand the complexities of hurt feelings. They wouldn't get sad and confused and they would turn off whenever they weren't needed. Wardo was complicated and deep like a person and Mark did not sign up to look after a whole person. He couldn't look after so much as a plant.

"I have to keep reminding myself that you've only known me for a week," Wardo said, unfolding himself a little so he could press his cheek against Mark's shoulder. "I've known you as far back as I can remember but you met me a week ago. You don't remember everything we've done together, all the plans we had." He closed his eyes. "It's so strange, how I can be nothing to you when you're everything to me."

Mark let his fingers slide through Wardo's hair, feeling the slow pump of Wardo's cooling system against his chest. Like a heartbeat.

"Don't transfer me to another chip," Wardo breathed. "I've seen those things and I don't want—you should remember me like this." He took his hand slowly off the back of his neck, resting it against Mark's knee.

He was circuits. Circuits and wires and silicon and somewhere inside him a fan was blowing so warm air would brush Mark's neck like breath.

Mark pushed him off and stood up, walking over to push open the door. Chris and Dustin were sitting on the sofa, pretending they hadn't been watching the door like hawks. "New rule," Mark snapped. "Nobody is turning Wardo off again. Not ever. And we're going to beat the fucking Winklevii at their own game and nobody is selling anybody to anyone for anything."

Chris sighed in his ' I knew you weren't telling me everything' way but he was smiling. Dustin beamed, tilted his head to the side and asked if he was allowed to sell Chris to Billy Olsen for cupcakes.

Mark shut the door on both of them and turned back to Wardo. "I didn't ask for a robot at all," he said. "But I got you and I don't know what a normal friendship robot would be like but if they're nothing like you then I'm not interested so you should just act like you and be honest with me."

Wardo stared up at him for a long moment while Mark bounced on his toes and waited to be told that he was an asshole or a dick and if Mark wasn't planning on breaking him up right now, Wardo would just leave.

Then Wardo's face broke into a bright smile and he bounced across the room to pull Mark into a hug, burying his face against the side of Mark's neck. "I knew you were the Mark I remember."

Wardo turned his head and Mark thought they were pulling apart so he moved too and the kiss that was aimed at his cheek brushed his lips instead. A moment of stillness, then Wardo kissed him again, one hand moving up to cup Mark's neck and tilt his head back.

Wardo's mouth was warm, his lips soft and his teeth hard where they bit lightly on Mark's bottom lip.

Mark closed his eyes and held Wardo closer. "I'll try to be."

***

"I don't understand," says the woman Mark thinks is called Marylin. She's pulled a salad out of her bag to eat in the room. Mark looks across the empty chairs at her and wonders if Sy told her to keep an eye on him. "If they programmed the robot to fall in love with you, can't they just look at the list of instructions and see if they programmed him to give you whatever you wanted?"

Wardo always used to hit Mark for laughing at other people's ignorance. He doesn't really feel like laughing now. "Try to define love," he says instead. "Describe it in short, simple words that can be typed into a computer program."

"I—" her fork hovers in the air over the salad. "I guess it's needing someone or, wanting them to be around? Wanting them close but not just as a friend."

"Tell a robot to need another person and they'd crash whenever that person left the room. 'Not just as a friend' covers everything from apathy to 'kill on sight.'" Mark shakes his head. "You can't write a list of statements to define love, you can't write it into code." He taps his fingers on the table. "Do you know how a personality construct works?"

She shakes her head.

"It's just like a person," Mark says. "It starts with the very basics of a personality, the building blocks of life. These come from a questionnaire that each person fills out when they're purchasing a robot. After that, memories are installed and the personality is left to process each one, growing more advanced with every reaction. Once it is installed on a circuit board and implanted into a body unit, living is just gathering more memories and letting the personality react to them."

"So if there isn't a program, how do they make it fall in love?"

Mark shrugs. "They didn't make Wardo fall in love with me. They made him to be a perfect match to my personality, made sure I was his type and he was mine. The rest happened naturally." He can't help smiling a little at the memory. "His personality was etched in every part of that circuit board, colouring everything he did and everything he saw. They think they own it, but why would they? It was Wardo's head, Wardo's tech, Wardo's in every sense of the word. They put so much money into making him human and now they claim he couldn't make his own choices."

"If he was human," Marylin says, soft and surprisingly free from accusation. "There'd be a different word for what you did."

Mark closes his eyes, all traces of a smile fading. "He was a person and he was in love. That's all."

***

"Okay," Mark said, pouring out three more shots and lining them up on the floor between his knees and Wardo's. "So do you have any memories that I'm not in?"

Wardo thought for a long moment, even though he had a search function installed that would let him know in nanoseconds, then downed the three shots. "No."

"Really?" Mark picked up the bottle to refill the classes then paused. "And that didn't strike you as strange? Were we Siamese twins in your memory? Did someone handcuff us together at birth?"

Wardo punched him in the arm, far softer than he was capable of. "It was just another of those things I was programmed not to notice until you went into my head and took it out." He looked down at the replenished shot glasses. "How many of these do I have to drink for you to scientifically establish that I can't get drunk?"

Mark looked down at them and tried to remember how many Wardo had already done. The bottle was definitely nearly empty now as opposed to half full when Chris and Dustin had left for their Caribbean party. "You should be able to get drunk. I've seen robots drunk."

Wardo shrugged. "I can't. I bet you any money it wasn't real drunk, they just throw an inhibitor in to fuck with our functions when a sensor detects alcohol. You probably took it out without even realising."

Mark picked up one of the last shot glasses and downed it instead. "For that I apologize."

Wardo laughed and punched him again. Now he'd worked out how to control his strength so he didn't bruise, he seemed to believe casual violence was totally okay. "So I know I'm not human, I don't backup and I can't get drunk. I'm the uniquest robot around."

Mark downed the second shot so he wouldn't have to think about Wardo's back-up system. "Yes," he agreed. "All other robots know what is and isn't a word." He picked up the third shot. "Anyway, I doubt Cybernet's back-up units are suitable for storing the amount of internet you have crammed into your brain."

Wardo beamed. "You should hook me up to a projector, I have some kick ass porn up here."

"You didn't tell Dustin that, did you? Please don't suggest that to Dustin."

Wardo pushed him and Mark had probably had a bit too much vodka earlier because he fell over way too easily. He grabbed Wardo on the way down so they collapsed on top of each other. The nearly empty vodka bottle span off across the carpet but more importantly Wardo's hands landed on either side of Mark's face and Wardo stilled, his lips less than an inch away from Mark's.

"I can get drunk," Mark said, reaching up to cup the back of Wardo's neck with one hand. "What's your excuse?"

Wardo leant in to press his lips lightly against the corner of Mark's mouth. "I need an excuse now?"

Mark tugged him forward into a real kiss. Wardo let his knees rest on the floor on either side of Mark's hips, his legs pressing tight against Mark's thighs and his tongue sliding into Mark's mouth. Mark's free hand slid up to push under the ridiculous shirts Wardo always wore and drag across his bare back.

Wardo moved his hands to Mark's shoulders and somehow flipped them both in one movement so that Mark was lying on top of him without breaking the kiss. Mark had the distinct advantage of not being filled with a tonne of heavy electronics so he could rest all his weight against Wardo and Wardo's hands were free to slide into his hair.

"What did Dustin say before he left?" Mark breathed as Wardo kissed a trail from his mouth to his ear then back down his jaw.

"No sex on the couch," Wardo said breathlessly. "And Chris outlawed the table."

Mark slid both hands up under Wardo's shirt—tearing a handful of buttons in the process. "No one said anything about the floor?"

"Nope."

"Good." The rest of the buttons tore just as easily and Mark had the whole expanse of Wardo's chest spread out before him.

"See," Wardo said, shivering as Mark dropped a kiss against his collarbone. "It's moments like this that make me glad my every thought is no longer backed up on someone else's database."

Mark dragged one hand up Wardo's bare side and kissed down the side of his neck. "I don't want them to have a backup," he said against Wardo's skin, because he was selfish and a shitty person and he didn't care. "I don't want anyone else to have you."

Wardo's smile widened and his fingers tightened on Mark's hair, because mistaking Mark's possessive jealousy for affection was something he did all too well. "Yeah, I like you a lot too."

And Mark could've said 'that's not what I meant' but he had meant what he said and if Wardo chose to interpret it as... whatever, well, that was his decision.

Mark pushed his thoughts away and pulled Wardo in for another kiss.

Chris came in with a hand over his eyes. "I hear typing," he said. "But after Wednesday I make no assumptions about what that could mean."

Mark deleted a bracket and added another line of input data. There was a movement against his leg and he looked down in time to see Wardo raise his head and wave in the direction of the doorway. Mark nudged him with one foot. "Wired in means no distractions."

Wardo turned his head to kiss Mark's knee. "I hear sleep also means no distractions. Just think about it, lying in bed with your eyes closed and no distractions at all."

Mark had to take a hand away from his keyboard to attack Wardo's hair which not only stopped him coding but was a complete waste of time because Wardo's hair looked the same whatever you did to it. "Stop talking and work."

Chris dropped his bag beside the doorway. "You don't actually have to do his homework for him just because he asks you, Wardo. We all know you're capable of saying no."

"It's not homework," Mark said. "He's writing algorithms for the site."

"Ah." Chris turned so he was headed for the fridge instead of his bedroom. "This would be the super magic awesome site that you keep coding even though you can't afford any of the hardware required to get it to run?"

Mark took his hand out of Wardo's hair to add another line of code. "I applied for three credit cards and a loan today." Wardo passed his pad of paper up and leant back so his cheek was pressed against Mark's leg.

Chris opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer. "I see. Did you remember to go to class?"

"I reminded him," Wardo said, because he was a complete traitor. "But he didn't go."

"It's all a waste of time anyway," Mark said, and all these distractions were causing him to make mistakes. He wished Chris would go into his room so it would just be Mark and Wardo's warmth pressed against his leg. "Either I already know it or I don't care." He stretched out a hand to Chris. "Thanks."

Chris raised his eyebrows and sat on the sofa with both bottles of beer. "Get your own, I need at least two for this conversation. Have you eaten today?"

Apparently he was staying. Mark took his hand back off the keyboard to rummage under the desk for his headphones. "Wardo made me a sandwich."

"What was in it?"

Mark shrugged. "Food."

Chris nodded. "Uh-huh, and when was the last time you slept?"

Mark shook his head but Wardo looked up. "He fell asleep at his keyboard for three hours earlier, but he keeps refusing to go to bed."

Mark stopped rummaging for his headphones and looked down at where Wardo was carefully not meeting his eyes. "You are a terrible, terrible friendship bot. You promised to wake me up if I fell asleep."

"You haven't been to bed in forty eight hours," Wardo pointed out. "Only one of us runs on batteries."

"That's what red bull is for. The Winklevii have a similar idea, remember? It's shitty and terrible but if it goes live first then the audience will split. It's all about users. We have to be up and stay up and get users and keep users and—"

"And not fall asleep on our keyboards."

"Guys?" Chris said, reaching underneath him to pull out a crumpled piece of paper. "Can you stop acting like an old married couple for five seconds. Did someone get punched?" he glanced sideways at the couch. "And, wait, is that another one?"

"Wardo," Mark said, electing to give up on code for as long as it took to get Chris out. "Everyone wants the best robot on campus, I've lost all respect for Final clubs. Are we done?"

"How do they know he's special?"

"There's a Cybernet guy poking around campus and shockingly the most intelligent students at Harvard are capable of putting two and two together after the internet stunt." He read over the last few lines of code but what he had been planning to type next had slipped out of his head. "Hey Chris, don't you have a credit card?"

"No," Chris said. "No, you are not sucking me into this."

"I need server time and a domain name and a router and a dedicated linux box running apache with a mySQL backend. It'll only be about one thousand dollars to get it all online and you can have... fifteen percent of the company."

Chris tossed the two letters onto the sofa and drained the rest of his beer. "I'm going to take a nap. Wardo, don't let Mark bully you too much."

"Can I bully him?" Wardo asked.

"Any time you like." The door swung shut behind him and Wardo turned his head so his eyes were fixed on Mark.

"Please come to bed with me," he said, pulling out the ultimate puppy eyes and leaning his head sideways against Mark's thigh with his lips slightly parted as if to say 'this is what you are turning down.'

"I just want to finish this page," Mark said, reading over the last three lines of code at breakneck speed and typing too fast to worry about spelling mistakes.

Then there was an arm like an iron bar around his stomach and his hands were moving away from the keyboard as Wardo slung him over one shoulder.

"One page," Mark protested, putting up a token amount of resistance even though he knew it was a complete waste of time. "Put me down or I'll—I'll reinstall your strength inhibitors and I'll download you onto my laptop so you have to run as a text only chatbot or I'll just take out your primary circuit board and stick you in a robot dog or something so all you can do is bark."

Wardo dropped onto his bed, manoeuvring his grip so that Mark was cradled against his chest instead of flung over one shoulder. The room was dark and Wardo was warm, his stupid hair tickling the side of Mark's face.

"I'll find Dustin's porn collection," Mark continued. "And download it all onto your memory card with innocent names so you're just scanning for a memory and bam lesbian space pirate porn."

"Uh-huh," Wardo said, combing one hand through his hair and kissing his forehead. "Good night, Mark."

"I'll sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said and his eyes weren't drifting closed and that wasn't a yawn he was just getting ready to fight his way free so he could get back to his website. "Only I won't tell them that you're actually the computer so they'll think you're a butler robot and you'll have to do what they say all the time." Wardo was actually really, really comfortable and Mark was totally just going to close his eyes for like thirty seconds to summon the energy to fight his way free.

"'M not gonna sell you to the Winklevii," Mark said, his voice muffled by Wardo's shirt. "'M not gonna do anything you don't want me to."

"I know," Wardo said, but Mark could hear him smiling. "Go to sleep, you idiot."

Mark buried his face in Wardo's neck and closed his eyes for a minute.

***

"Facebook went live in February, 2004."

Mark opens his eyes and looks up at Gretchen's impatient face. "TheFacebook," he says, to see her lips purse and her fingers tighten on her notes. "TheFacebook launched on February 4th, 2004." His head is hurting and he wants to curl up, his head tilting to the side the way it always does before his subconscious can catch up to the fact that Wardo won't be there to lean on. "Wardo went to a phoenix initiation to get the mailing list and we emailed the link out."

"How did you afford the costs of running the site?"

Mark drags a hand back through his hair. "The same way anyone runs a website. I maxed out three credit cards and my overdraft to rent equipment and server space."

Wardo should be here. He should be here to smile and know all the right words to placate everyone so that somehow no one leaves with what they wanted but everyone is happy with what they have.

Mark hasn't needed to tell anyone this story in so long now.

He misses Wardo more than he ever knew he could.

"Wardo was listed on the masthead as a co-founder, yes?" Gretchen asks.

Mark nods and Sy elbows him in the ribs to remind him that there is someone typing everything up. "Yes," he says. "It was more of a joke than anything, because he was always around while I was building it." He reaches for the glass of water in front of him. "He isn't on there anymore."

The man beside Gretchen laughs—a snide noise with no trace of actual humour. "Of course, it couldn't possibly be that you finally realized Eduardo still belonged to us and you didn't want to risk us having a claim on your website."

Mark almost expects the glass to shatter between his fingers, but he's no robot. "You have no grounds to claim a stake in anything related to Facebook." He's leaning forward, the water sloshing back and forth as his hand shakes. "Mark my words, Mr Mahoney. You can fight for my time, my money and my technology but you will not lay a finger on my website."

Sy rests a hand on Mark's shoulder and tugs him lightly back into his chair. Mark finally takes a drink, but it does nothing to dislodge the lump in his throat.

"Mr Zuckerberg," Gretchen says, shifting her notes as though nothing is wrong. "Can you tell me what happened after the initial launch?"

Mark drops the glass on the table and picks up his pen, drawing circles within circles within circles all over the pad they gave him. "Is everyone here over eighteen?"

"If you needed money to start a website, why not sell the robot to my clients? You knew they had money and you weren't using the unit for your project."

Mark keeps his hands under the table so no one will see them ball into fists. "Wardo was a birthday present from my parents, he made a useful assistant and he was also my best friend. He wasn't some cheap trinket to be torn up and pawned for cash."

The Winklevii look venomous, Narendra snorts and Gage raises his eyebrows. "So if I wanted to meet with him now I could, I suppose? If that's how you treat your friends, I'd hate to be your enemy."

Mark presses his fists against his legs and says nothing.

***

Wardo's leg was pressed against Mark's, one of his arms resting against the back of Mark's chair. His fingers kept brushing the shoulder of Mark's hoodie, not enough to touch Mark's arm but enough to distract him from the speaker.

"-the first artificial intelligence was white text on a black screen but people's reactions to it were still so strong. This was a computer that they could talk to, that they could have an actual conversation with. So Joe came to me and said 'Look, it's going to happen without us. We have to start it now.' And so I said, 'Okay, you're right. Let's get personality constructs out there.'"

A few people laughed, mostly those with the awkward, perfectly upright figures of robots sitting next to them. The others, the ones who had only spoken with constructs online or in passing sat in polite bemusement.

Wardo slumped his head on Mark's shoulder and blew a line up and down against his neck. "We already know all this," he said. "I'm the next stage in robot evolution, I can slump and smile when I'm sad and remember the entirety of Paradise Lost. Can we do something interesting?"

"—at this stage we were working with the most basic robots. Unless you paid extra for a full computer—which at the time meant your robot was three times heavier and five times more bulky—you got three emotions, tops."

Wardo's fingers trailed across Mark's leg. "Mark. Maaark. Maa-aark. Maybe TheFacebook's crashed. We've left it on its own for like three hours now. Don't you think we should go check?"

Mark pulls out his phone to show that he has no new messages. "Dustin is with it. It hasn't crashed."

"But it might. It might be preparing to crash and if we don't leave now we won't get there on time and Dustin won't know what to do."

"I promise you, TheFacebook is not going to crash."

"Not ever?"

Mark rolled his eyes. "Not ever. Come on, Wardo, you watch me sleep for eight hours a night, how is this more boring?"

"Hah," Wardo said, twisting in his seat so he could lie back with his feet on an empty chair and his head in Mark's lap. "Like you ever sleep eight hours straight."

Mark curled his fingers in Wardo's hair.

"Free," Wardo said, twirling around on the path and almost falling into a bush. "Do you smell that, Mark? That is the smell of freedom."

Mark pushed his hands into his pockets and watched Wardo twirl a pretty Chinese looking girl who smiled shyly and blushed when Wardo kissed her hand, then ran over to her friend to whisper something and giggle. "It was a two hour lecture," Mark said, leaning against the wall to watch Eduardo spin across a puddle, his legs flying in all directions and sending him into a heap on the floor. "Remind me why I'm friends with you?"

Wardo shook hair out of his eyes, sending drops of water flying in all directions. "Because I'm the latest thing, the future of technology the—what was it—pinnacle of modern engineering." He held out a hand imperiously.

Mark rolled his eyes and ignored the hand. "You're an idiot," he said. "And I'm not taking that hand because I know you and I have better things to do with my evening than wonder around being pulled into puddles."

Wardo made a face much like a wounded deer, then beamed and flipped onto his feet. "We should go to a bar. This pinnacle of modern engineering wants to go to a bar."

"Mark? Mark Zuckerberg?"

Mark turned to see three guys standing by the exit, watching him. None of them looked like robots, but some robots were better at subtlety than others. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Stuart Singer," the middle guy said. "I'm in your O.S. lab."

Mark tried to place him, but couldn't. He tried to remember when he'd last gone to his O.S. lab but couldn't recall that either. "Sure." Wardo stepped up behind him, pressing his warm chest against Mark's back. Mark took a moment to note that Wardo was warmer than he should be; that was definitely something worth checking out. Then he realized O.S. lab guy was still talking.

"Awesome job with TheFacebook."

"Awesome," echoed one of the other guys who could also have been in Mark's O.S. lab.

Mark nodded, reaching back for Wardo's hand and reflecting that actually they should have just gone to the bar. "Thanks."

"I swear he was looking at you when he said the future could soon be living among us."

Mark's attention was pulled back into the present by the third guy who wasn't looking at Mark, but staring over his shoulder. Wardo bent down a little, as though he could hide behind Mark's hair. "Uh, I don't think—"

"I don't even know who the speaker was," the guy said, though his eyes were a little too sharp and way too focused for Mark's taste.

"Bill Mahoney," Wardo said, too quickly, tugging away from Mark without releasing his hand. "Founder and lead researcher at Cybernet. We have to go."

"We could come with you, I'd love to talk about your work."

Sometimes Mark forgot how strong Wardo was. He was dragged almost a metre through the mud before his feet managed to catch up with his body and he could half jog to keep a position by Wardo's side. "What was that about?"

Wardo shook his head. "Nothing. I don't know. I didn't like him."

Mark froze long enough that he got dragged through a puddle. "Do you think Mahoney recognized you? Is that what you were worried about?"

Wardo shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. "They didn't know what unit the circuit board ended up in but they would have known the approximate time so he could have come here to check up on me and if anyone told him." He dragged his free hand back through his hair, somehow achieving the impossible and actually slicking it back for two whole seconds. "I know you think all this—" he waved at his head. "—is yours because of their mistake but they won't see it that way."

Mark took advantage of the moment of stillness to wrap his arms tight around Wardo. For a moment he was stiff as a board, but slowly he relaxed against Mark's shoulder. "It's going to be okay," Mark said. "I won't let anyone take you."

Wardo buried his face in Mark's neck and wrapped gangly arm around Mark's waist. "Can we go to that bar now?"

Mark kissed his jaw. "What if TheFacebook crashes while you're getting me drunk?"

That got a small smile. "No crashing," Wardo said, his voice muffled against Mark's skin. "Ever. You promised me."

"Yeah," Mark said. "Promise."

Wardo's hands were everywhere, his lips pressed against Mark's cheek, his neck, pulling the zip of his hoodie down to bite a line across his collarbone. Mark's head slammed back into the tiles, cheek pressing against 'fuck Harvard Law' and 'DM <3s TASIHA'. Hands shoved his hoodie up, slender fingers tracing his ill defined chest, dipping in and out of his belly button as they traced ornate patterns across his skin.

The bathroom door opened and slammed. The sound of footsteps came in, followed by knocking cubicle doors and taps turning on. "Wardo," Mark hissed.

Wardo looked up at him, eyes shadowed by dark eyelashes, and one hand off Mark's stomach to press an index finger against his lips. "Shh."

His second hand slipped around between Mark's back and the wall of the stall, fingers pushing under Mark's waistband to touch bare skin.

Mark bit down on his lip and clenched his fists tight. Wardo pressed up against him, catching Mark's moan in his mouth and holding him in a silent kiss as his second hand reached to tug at Mark's belt.

"Fuck," Mark moaned as softly as he could bear when Wardo pushed his pants down and his lips left Mark's mouth, his head dropping lower and lower.

Wardo had to lift one of Mark's hands off the wall, stretching out the fingers one by one and resting it in his hair because Mark was gone, Mark couldn't think he just clenched his fist again in Wardo's hair and tilted his head back so he wouldn't have to look at Wardo's face, Wardo's mouth around him, Wardo's half closed eyes.

"Do it," Wardo breathed and Mark came in a shivering, helpless wreck.

"God," he said, hoping whoever came in had left but not really caring because Wardo's hands were tight on his hips even as he pulled away. "God, fuck, Wardo, fuck."

Wardo stood up and kissed Mark again, pressing his tongue back into Mark's mouth and Mark could feel each of Wardo's fingertips as a separate point of pressure on his skin, each almost hard enough to bruise but not quite. Not quite.

Wardo's hands slid up under his hoodie again. God, he was still in a hoodie, his pants wrapped around his ankles getting damp from the floor. Wardo wasn't undressed at all, the soft cotton of his pants warm where his thighs encased Mark's. "Mark," Wardo whispered, kissing and biting his way down Mark's jaw, his fingers pressing even harder against Mark's skin. "Mark, Mark."

"I love you," Mark said, one hand fisted in Wardo's hair and Wardo suddenly still against him. "You know that, right? I fucking love you."

Wardo's body was pressed against him, his hands tight on Mark's hips and it took Mark a moment to realize he wasn't moving. It took another moment for him to smell smoke.

"Wardo?" He reached up with his free hand to shake Wardo's shoulder. "Hey, are you ok - holy shit is your arm on fire?"

Wardo blinked at him. His face was slowly rearranging itself into a smile like his system had just been forced to reboot and he looked down at his arm just in time for the tiny spark to catch into actual flames across the arm of his jacket. "Shit. Fuck, Mark."

They tumbled out of the cubicle all flailing limbs and alarmed cries and threw Wardo's jacket and shirt to the floor. Mark pulled his pants up and jumped up and down on the burning clothes while Wardo ran his arm under the cold tap, watching the water steam up from the surface of his thankfully fireproof skin.

Mark looked up from the floor and met Wardo's eyes through the smoke and steam and suddenly they were laughing. Rich, half hysterical laughter of 'how is this our lives' and 'thank god we're okay'.

"I said I loved you and you caught fire," Mark said, falling across the floor to lean against Wardo's bare chest. "You caught fire from my love."

Wardo blushed and pushed him and tried to hide a smile. "You knew my cooling system's on the brink. You knew and you went off saying things that would overload my processors and disable the coolant pump."

"Disable the coolant pump," Mark said. "Catch fire out of love. Same difference."

"You," Wardo said, spinning around to push Mark back against the sinks. "You are the most ridiculous, obnoxious," Each adjective was punctuated with a kiss to Mark's cheeks, chin, forehead, throat. "Crazy, obscure, brilliant and I can't even believe you."

Mark wrapped his arms right around Wardo's waist and Wardo buried his face in the side of Mark's neck, his breathy laugher pressed into Mark's skin. "Anyway," Mark said. "It's been, like, four months. Shouldn't you love me back by now? Do I need to call customer services and complain?"

Wardo let out a noise that was either a despairing laugh or a hysterical sob. "You are an idiot," he mumbled into Mark's skin. "Seriously, Mark, you are the stupidest genius I have ever met."

"Says the robot who caught fire from my love."

Wardo pushed his face further against Mark's skin, muffling his laughter even as he shook. He held Mark tighter, pulling him close as though maybe if he tried hard enough they could melt into one. "You're such a complete idiot. I've been in love with you forever."

Oh, Mark thought as Wardo's mouth opened to press against his neck. He felt a sudden wave of sympathy for Wardo because if he was a robot he would be a fucking furnace right now.

"Oh," he managed out loud. That was not fair, all Wardo had to do was a system reboot, Mark didn't have the luxury of switching himself off and back on again. "That's—oh."

Wardo lifted his head and if he was human there would have been tears of laughter all over his cheeks. "You are such an idiot," he said again.

Mark felt his face relax into a smile. "Yeah," he said. "But you love me anyway."

"I do," Wardo agreed. "Fuck but I do." Then his mouth was on Mark's again and his hands were lifting Mark up onto the sinks. Anyone could come in at any moment but Mark found he didn't care at all.

Part 2

Boy Falls From the Sky 1/3

2011-09-04T15:09:27Z

Fandom: The Social Network
Pairing: Eduardo/Mark with canon compliant amounts of Eduardo/Christy and plenty of Eduardo/badassery on the side.
Rating: PG-13 (comic book levels of violence)
Length: 32,000 words
Summary: In which Divya Narendra is an evil mastermind, Sean Parker seems like a supervillain and Eduardo can't go to Palo Alto because he's too busy in New York being Spiderman.
Notes: ALL OF THE THANKS to altogetherisi who prompted it when I had no ideas, didn't complain when I completely failed to stick to the plan and betaed the whole mess into something readable (:
Also elipie and insteadofdeath for the most amazing art.

Trailer by elipie

Cover by insteadofdeath

Fic in full at AO3

Then

He should've known the moment he saw the spider. Red and electric blue with a bite that stung like crazy while Eduardo gritted his teeth and stumbled over Daniel Chester's name.

He should've known when it took supreme force to crush it and when he was compelled to scoop it up afterwards - barely broken - and transfer it to a jam jar.

He really should have known when two days later he had gained abs and the spider was crawling around in its jar none the worse for wear.

"And you found this in November?" Dr Jones asked, holding the jar up to the light.

The spider hissed and attacked the jar as though it could break through this one too. Eduardo really should have known. "That's right. My doctor told me to show it to you." He hesitated long enough for it to become clear that further explanation was expected. "I've been busy."

Dr Jones gave him a moment longer, in case he had anything else to add. What was Eduardo supposed to say? I had work for class? I had to go home over Christmas or my father might disown me? My best friend is building a website that could be worth a whole lot some day but right now he really needs someone sitting behind him with red bull and the occasional reminder to sleep?

Even in his head it sounded ridiculous. Thefacebook was just another dotcom project that would fade into obscurity the moment they made a mistake.

"I'll have to do some tests, of course," Dr Jones said and apparently he'd been talking the whole time. Hopefully about nothing important. "Are you sure you're the only one who's had contact with it?"

"Yes." Mark would never go to Eduardo's room even before he had thefacebook to fill his entire life. He probably didn't even know where Eduardo lived.

"And you just picked it up? It didn't bite you?"

Eduardo hesitated. On the one hand an unknown species of bright blue spider had left a bite on his leg that swelled to the size of a golf ball before it healed. On the other hand it was healed now and he really had better things to do that hang around in a lab for tests. He had to meet Mark and thefacebook could go live any minute because Mark would never stick to a schedule or tell anyone about these things. "What would happen if it had?"

Jones scratches his head. "Tests, obviously. You'd have to go into quarantine for a month or so, at least until we know more. Obviously we'd need your consent for any invasive tests but if you show me the bite we can start now."

"I wasn't," Eduardo lied. "I wasn't bitten. I was just asking, really." He grabbed his bag off the floor. "I'm late for a business meeting but let me know what you find, okay?"

He was CFO of a company now. He had responsibilities and thus far the most notable side effect of his magic spider bite was the ability to do a perfect back flip. Not exactly the stuff apocalypses were made of.

"Mr Saverin?"

He'd almost made it to the door, but if he didn't stop it would be suspicious so he turned slowly on the spot to face the biologist, still clutching the spider jar in both hands.

"If it didn't bite you, why did you go to a doctor?"

Eduardo cast around for anything. Anything at all. "Worms. I had worms. And the doctor and I, we just got talking."

"Worms," Jones echoed, disbelief pushed into every drawn out letter.

"You should put him in something else," Eduardo said. "If he wants to get out, the glass won't stop him."

While Jones panicked, throwing he jar away from himself and searching for a suitable container, Eduardo scarpered.

Now

Mark is chained to the ceiling, three robots pointing advanced weaponry at his head. Eduardo is just about patient enough to stand still while the villainous plan is explained before he destroys all three robots by throwing them into the walls and trusses up the controller in a web about a meter from where Mark is chained up.

Eduardo considers leaving him up there. Unfortunately, that isn't a very Spiderman thing to do.

"That was... kind of amazing," Mark says. Slowly, Eduardo supposes, because the idea of anyone other than him doing something amazing is alien to Mark.

This is usually where Spiderman would give some useful advice and then take the victim home. "Get the fuck out of here," Eduardo says.

So sometimes Spiderman has off days. It's not like Mark can't afford the cab.

Anyway, Eduardo has a deposition to attend in the morning.

Then

Mark wasn't in when Eduardo arrived at his door after running all the way from the train station. Of course, Mark wouldn't know prompt if it bit him in the ass but three hours late was possibly pushing it a little.

If the long sprint across the whole of campus had actually exhausted Eduardo he might've been more pissed off, but as it was he noticed it about as much as the walk from his dorm.

He rubbed his ankle with one hand. Jones thought it was serious - serious enough for quarantine - and he spent a lot of time with Mark. Enough time that if it was contagious Mark might catch it.

So he'd just explain. About the spider, about his doctor saying he should see a professional and the professional noting that the bite was fading but recommending he talk to a biologist. About Dr Jones and his ideas about quarantine.

Mark was out of breath when he arrived, his feet soaked; he had clearly just run across campus.

Mark would probably love spider powers. Eduardo had certainly found himself needing to sleep less, though if Mark slept less he would just be not sleeping at all.

Mark brushed past him and it took all of Eduardo's reflexes to catch the door before it slammed shut. There were shadows under his eyes and it looked like he hadn't slept since Eduardo was last here—forcibly taking the headphones off his head and holding his thumb over the computer's power button until Mark took a nap.

He was already at the computer by the time Eduardo made it into the room. The homepage was up on the screen, alongside the stream of white-on-black text that was as incomprehensible to Eduardo as Portuguese was to Mark.

It looked good. More than that, in an era of glitter text and headache-inducing colour it was clean, simple, the kind of website people didn't even realise they were looking for. "What did you write?" Eduardo asked, as Mark finished the new stream of code.

If asked, Eduardo could have scrolled through thefacebook coding and located the exact section that controlled relationship status. He still didn't know how to change his own.

"And that was it," Mark said, hands off the keyboard for the first time in weeks.

For a moment, Eduardo's mind continued winding down the trail of how 'relationship status' would redefine the site, the uses of the site. Then his ears caught up with his brain. "What do you mean?"

"It's ready."

Eduardo's mind stuttered to a complete halt, staring at the culmination of all that work and thinking 'It's ready' as though that could make it any more real.

Eduardo Saverin, the masthead read. Co-founder and CFO.

Spider powers had nothing, nothing on this.

Now

Spiderman has made the papers in the morning. 'Masked Menace Terrorises City: The Spider-Man Strikes Again.' It would probably be 'unheroic' to sneak into the news office and break the editor's nose for libel. It would definitely be overkill to do the same because they spelt his name wrong.

What kind of idiot hyphenates their superhero name?

"Would you mind addressing him as Mr Saverin?" asks Gretchen—the one decent lawyer in this city who doesn't bat an eyelid at her client missing meetings, ducking out in the middle of the depositions and occasionally sticking to the furniture.

"Gretchen, they're best friends."

"Not anymore."

The mobile in Eduardo's pocket vibrates and he has to drop his hand down to slide it out. There's a fire in an apartment building, half an hour's walk and ten minutes swing away.

The second text gives a more detailed address.

The third says there's a child inside.

"Mr Saverin, what happened after the initial launch?"

Eduardo kicks his chair back, reaching into his pocket for the mask and already planning a route to the roof, a closet on the way where he can change. "It exploded."

Gretchen pulls her files closer as Eduardo brushes past. "Let's take a break there."

There are red marks on Mark's wrists and bags under his eyes from where he clearly didn't sleep. Eduardo doesn't care.

He has people to save.

Then

The first person Eduardo saved was Bill Gates. He never exactly believed in starting small. He was supposed to be waiting for Mark around the front of the building where Gates was speaking, but the place had a particularly dark back alley with no windows opening onto it—the kind of secluded location that Eduardo had been looking for since the moment a week prior that his hand had stuck to his bedroom door.

He could climb walls. He could place his hands against the bricks and they stuck allowing him to climb walls and when he finally found a moment to speak to Mark properly, Mark would not believe how cool this was.

He climbed level with the first boarded up window then pushed himself back, off the wall and into a perfect back flip where he landed on his feet.

That was when he heard shouting from further down the alley, in the shadows where he couldn't quite see.

"Give us the bag."

"This computer is one of a kind, made specifically for me. You wouldn't even be able to run it. Do you want money? I can give you money. How much? Just let me write you a cheque. I'll make it blank, you can put any number you like in."

Eduardo reached back to pull the collar of his jacket up and placed his hands back against the wall, climbing up as high as he dared—if his magic hands failed, he didn't want to fall to his death—and creeping slowly sideways to get closer to the shouting.

"Give us the bag!"

Eduardo couldn't see the victim clearly, but the muggers were visible enough in black balaclavas, holding guns up at their target's head.

"Please," the man said. "Please, I swear you don't want—"

A gunshot rang out and Eduardo's world slowed to a crawl. He could see the bullet twisting up towards him, smell gunpowder on the air, his eyesight had sharpened enough that he could count the freckles on the shooter's nose and his movements sharpened enough for him to flip backwards. The bullet missed Eduardo's foot by inches as his feet swung up leaving him clinging crablike, front out on the wall.

"Next one goes through your head," Freckles shouted, waving the gun through the air.

His partner was sharper, beady eyes staring up at where the bullet had gone, squinting through the shadows. "Did you see something?"

"Do you have any idea who I am?" the victim asked.

"Someone's here," said Beady Eyes, moving his gun away from the victim and somehow contriving to point it directly at Eduardo's head. "Give us the bag, hurry."

"My name is Bill Gates, I have more money than you can dream of and you can have however much you like as long as you leave my computer alone."

"Shoot him."

Freckles leered, aimed and fired.

Eduardo was already moving, his fingers detaching from the wall so he could drop faster than a stone, faster than should have been possible, knocking Bill Gates to the ground as the bullet flew over his head and into the wall. Eduardo twisted as he landed, hands splaying out and feet scrabbling for purchase so he could catch his own weight, balanced over Bill Gates like a bridge.

The computer slid out across the alley but Freckles and Eyes were too busy staring at Eduardo with their mouths hanging open to notice. Eyes was faster to acknowledge the situation, shifting his aim from the shadows to Eduardo's head. "Where the fuck did you spring from?"

Bill Gates was shaking, but still very much alive. Eduardo pushed himself slowly to his feet, watching Eyes' gun move as he moved, tracking Eduardo's head with the barrel. "Put your hands up."

"He was on the wall," Freckles said, still in shock. "He was on the wall, Ernie."

Eyes slammed a fist into Freckles' stomach. "You, shut the fuck up. You—on the wall, were you? Like a spider? Like a fucking spider man? Get your hands where I can see them."

Eduardo raised his hands above his head, reaching out with one foot to snag the strap of the computer. (He probably shouldn't be valuing a computer over his own life, but Bill Gates had the same look in his eyes when he spoke about it that Mark did whenever he talked about TheFacebook.)

"We have to shoot you both now," Ernie explained, reaching up with his non-gun hand to pull the balaclava off. He had cropped dark hair and a mole in the middle of his forehead. He looked far more threatening this way. "Can't risk you running off knowing my name. Now, I've got things to do and people to see so if you have any last words, you might want to say them now."

Eduardo caught the strap on his toes and silently prayed that Bill Gates had built an indestructible laptop. He swung his foot, the bag whipping around and catching Ernie's legs, sending him sprawling and the gun firing harmlessly up into the sky. Eduardo didn't hesitate, closing both hands around the gun to keep it pointing up and driving his knee up into Ernie's crotch.

No one ever said he had to fight fair. Ernie released the gun, crumpling to the floor as Freckles finally got his act together enough to aim. Eduardo pushed himself off the ground, the bullet going harmlessly under his feet, and lashed out with one foot, catching the man hard enough on the side of the head to send him down.

Eduardo landed in a roll, snatching the second gun off the floor and finishing on his feet, both weapons up and aimed at the two men's heads. "What's that you were saying?" He placed his foot on the laptop back and kicked it backwards for Gates to catch. "Call the police."

Gates scrambled in his bag for a phone. "What was that? Who are you?"

Eduardo looked down at Ernie's face, caught in a vicious hatred that could cut steel. Spiderman.

"No one," Eduardo said, kicking the man hard enough to break his nose. "No one at all."

They were both late for the conference.

Now

Eduardo comes back smelling of smoke, the sole of his left boot sticking with every step where it melted on a particularly hot surface. He's going to have to pick up another packet of shoe soles on the way home which means finding a new shop because the cashier in the old one has started giving him strange looks each time he goes in.

He's also going to have to wash the whole damn costume if he wants to get the smell out and knowing him he'll shrink this one too and then it'll ride up in the crotch enough to be painful for the next three weeks until his few tiny moments of free time combine into long enough for him to make a new one.

He has a collection of red and blue wetsuits in his wardrobe, but adding all the Spiderman details takes time. The more time he takes making suits, the less time he has on the streets and the more people die because he wasn't there.

His clothes are still folded in the closet where he left them. He tugs them on over his uniform, checks his hair in a metal bucket and pushes the mask down into his pocket.

Mark's eyes flick to him briefly when he enters the room, then drop back to his very important scribbles.

"Thanks for taking time out of you busy schedule to return," Mark's lawyer says coldly. "Might we could resume?"

Gretchen pulls out Eduardo's chair and when he sits down her finger rubs against the underside of his ear and comes away with soot on it.

Whatever he's paying her, he should probably double it. "Of course," he says. "Where were we?"

The note-taker looks up. "'It exploded.'"

Then

Eduardo trusted Mark. He did, that was always the thing. Dustin and Chris mocked him about it because he didn't trust anyone else—first and foremost Eduardo had always been a businessman, he expected people to try and screw him over and usually they didn't disappoint—but apparently he'd managed to attach himself to, in their minds, the least trustworthy soul on the planet.

They were wrong about that. You could trust Mark as long as you both wanted the same thing.

"We need to monetize the site," Eduardo said. They both wanted TheFacebook to do well, they both wanted it to be a business.

"How do you want to do it?"

Eduardo hesitated because Mark didn't look convinced and Eduardo wasn't sure how this was going to work if they weren't on the same page. "Advertising," he said simply. The site was clean, there was a surfeit of space. They had enough users to get interest, enough to generate sufficient revenue.

"No," Mark said. No reasoning, no arguments, just a straightforward no.

Eduardo tried to argue without saying 'at the moment I am paying for your party,' because that would just be a dick move and it wasn't like he didn't have the money. He was Mark's friend and he trusted that in the end Mark would do what was right for TheFacebook, if nothing else.

He tried not to think about what would happen if what was right for TheFacebook wasn't what was right for Eduardo. He was Mark's only friend, Mark's best friend. He put one of the beers he was holding on the mantelpiece, planning to change the conversation to mention the whole Spiderman thing.

He'd almost decided not to tell Mark, but now he could climb walls and he had saved the life of Bill Gates. That was definitely classed as cool and he intended to brag about forever the moment Mark knew everything.

But hen his eyes fell on the letter he had just put the bottle on top of and he froze. A cease and desist letter. They stole TheFacebook. Mark copied the whole thing from HarvardConnection and now he had a cease and desist letter and he hadn't told Eduardo. "What is this?"

Eduardo told himself that he shouldn't have been surprised that Mark didn't tell him. Mark was never a particularly open person, he didn't say anything that he didn't think needed to be said. If he believed he was right—if he believed not touching their code was enough—he wouldn't say anything because he wouldn't imagine it would concern anyone but him.

Intellectual property theft is hard to define, harder to prosecute and hardest to defend against particularly when there was no denying that Mark knew about the Winklevii's idea.

"The letter says we could face legal action."

Mark reached to take it. "No, it says I could face legal action," he said—proving once against that he didn't quite understand how this worked. Eduardo funded it, put his support behind Mark 100%, his name was on the masthead and if his father found out that the whole thing was stolen—

"I didn't use any of their code," Mark said, firm and solid in his convictions because he understood computers, code and absolutes. He didn't understand people, and how they wouldn't care about the truth except to work out how far they could spin it.

Eduardo closed his eyes for a moment then spoke slowly, trying to make Mark understand that this couldn't be all about him anymore. TheFacebook was bigger than that, bigger even than the two of them. "Now, is there anything you want to tell me?"

It all came down to the decision about whether or not he trusted Mark, and Eduardo had always known that when that happened he would end up on the side of trust.

Maybe Mark deserved it, maybe he didn't.

"No," Mark said, and Eduardo let himself believe it.

Now

"Are you actually going out looking for trouble?" Eduardo demands, driving his elbows backwards into the solar plexuses of the two men coming up behind him.

Mark shrugs his shoulders as best as he can while he's roped to a chair. "I was just walking home."

Eduardo takes out two men with a jump spinning kick and the last with a side kick to the ribs—they crack and the man whimpers before dropping to the ground with his comrades. Eduardo puts his foot down and winces unexpectedly. The sole of his foot is burning like a bruise and—fuck—he must have kicked too hard because the sole has split entirely which means the side of his bare foot just caught the man's holstered gun.

"Are you alright?" Mark asks as Eduardo limps over to him and starts tugging at the ropes. "Did he get you with something?"

You are not allowed to talk to me, Eduardo says silently, thinking of a day spent with Mark trying to defend himself and acting like he's been the victim all along. You do not have anything to say that I would ever want to hear. He abandons the knots—he was never a fucking boy scout—and crouches down to grab a knife off one of the would-be kidnappers.

"I think they were working for someone," Mark says as the ropes fall away. "Should we interrogate them? Is that what happens now?"

Eduardo drops the knife and it sticks between the floorboards, hilt quivering a little. He doesn't need to ask the men, doesn't need to look in their pockets for the cheque that will inevitably be there. He turns away from Mark and heads for the exit. "I know who they were working for."

Mark pushes the last of the ropes to the ground and jogs to catch up. "How do you—can you tell me who? I think it would make avoiding these situations a whole lot easi—" he breaks off when Eduardo slams him against the wall, one hand around his throat.

"What would make avoiding these situations easier is if you left your meetings in a cab like any other New Yorker. Possibly you could also avoid walking down dark alleys, getting lost or stopping to ask for directions from a man who may as well have had 'flunky' tattooed on his forehead, you idiot."

Mark swallows—Eduardo can feel it through his gloves—and says something that might be 'urk'. Eduardo tugs his hand away and watches Mark slide down the wall, breathing heavily. "I—" Mark says. "Were you following me?"

Eduardo fires a web up and escapes out one of the roof windows.

He follows Mark all the way to the hotel and spends half of the night sitting on the balcony in case anyone else decides today is a good day to kill Mark Zuckerberg.

It's not like he has anyone else to go to at night anymore.

Then

Christy was everything Eduardo had ever dared to dream about finding in a girl. She was clever, beautiful and didn't care where they fucked as long as they were having sex as often as possible, for as long as possible.

Also, she said 'facebook me' like it was an actual word, a normal phrase people really said to each other. She said it to Eduardo, to her friends, to strangers that she met. It was like she was a walking talking advertisement and Eduardo had not previously believed so much goodness could come at once.

He had yet to learn the true meaning of the phrase 'be careful what you wish for.'

"I feel like a rock star," Eduardo had said to Mark that evening, standing outside the bathroom of a club while their girlfriends cleaned up inside.

Mark had only smiled his 'I just had sex' smile and said nothing.

Mark didn't date Alice—he changed the subject quickly whenever Eduardo asked, talking about code pushes or bug fixes—and occasionally he looked at Eduardo and Christy as though he was looking for something that wasn't there.

Eduardo failed to tell Mark about the spider thing. There was always something about TheFacebook to deal with or Dustin was doing something stupid in the background or there were girls—these days there were always girls—and the few moments when it was just the two of them Eduardo didn't want to disrupt Mark's peace by talking about stupid spiders of all things.

But Christy found out after they'd been dating for only a couple of weeks. She came over to drop off a book he'd leant her on economics—pretty and clever, he's hit the ultimate jackpot—at the same time as he was sneaking out in jeans and a hoodie he'd stolen from Mark to go and practice jumping on the quieter side of campus.

He hadn't really been thinking about spider powers when he'd jumped casually towards his desk from his bed, more focused on getting off the bed to pick up the magazine on the desk then head off to get something to eat. When he looked back and realised he'd just jumped three meters up through thin air he realised maybe he hadn't fully tapped the depths of spidery potential.

"What's this?" Christy asked, holding the six hundred page, hardback textbook like a weapon. Eduardo tried not to think about how effective it could be.

"I'm just going out. For a few minutes. There are things I need to do."

"In this?" she reached out to pinch the sleeve of his hoodie and her eyes sharpened. "Is this Mark's hoodie?"

Several responses flicked through Eduardo's head, ranging from 'hoodie, what hoodie?' to 'I don't think I know this Mark you speak of'. "What?"

She took a step closer, which would have been more intimidating if she wasn't a head smaller than him, and peered up into his face. "Are you seeing Mark? Are you going behind my back to see Mark?"

Eduardo blinked because this was never a conversation he really expected to have. "Um... what?"

"Don't you 'what' me, Alice told me what vibe she got off him and you two are certainly very close."

It actually took him a moment to figure out what to say and a moment longer to convince himself that he was actually going to have to say it, however ridiculous it seemed. "Christy. I am not sleeping with Mark Zuckerberg."

She stared at him a moment longer, then stepped away with a nonchalance that said 'pinning my boyfriend against the wall while accusing him of an illicit affair with his best friend? Me? You must be mistaken.' "Where were you going?"

"I was—" he cast around. "Going to the library. To study."

She raised her eyebrows. "Dressed like that?"

Eduardo looked down at himself. He was wearing jeans. Jeans, a hoodie and sneakers and Christy was right to doubt that he would ever so much as leave his room in this outfit. "These are my studying clothes."

She folded her arms. "Are you going to tell me the truth, or are we through?"

Eduardo swallowed, then pushed himself off the wall and locked the door to his room. "Come with me."

So Christy knew.

Now

"Did you sleep last night?" Sy is speaking to Mark in a low voice when Eduardo arrives at the office the next morning. Eduardo coughs to make his presence known before walking past them, trying to give off the air of a man who hasn't even noticed they're there.

As far as Eduardo knows, Mark didn't sleep last night. Facebook never sleeps and Mark is worrying about being so far from it, so this means he puts even more time into coding and planning and speaking to his developers than he does in California.

"You look tired," Gretchen says when Eduardo drops into the chair next to her and reaches for the coffee cup in front of him. "I've told you time and time again you need to get a good night's sleep before these meetings."

Eduardo shakes his head slightly and she stops talking as Mark's team enter the room. The headline on the newspaper under Sy's arm reads: 'Two Million Dollars Stolen from Downtown Bank: Where Was Spider-man?'

He doesn't ask to see the paper. It'll say exactly the same thing as all the others. If Spiderman shows up, he's a menace to society. If he's somewhere else, he's a failure.

"So," Sy says, settling his notes on the table as Mark enters. "You expanded to Yale, Columbia and Stanford."

Then

Eduardo spent three days trying to design a costume before he hit the jackpot idea of getting Dustin and Chris so drunk they would remember nothing in the morning and then persuading Chris design one for him. Once Dustin was drunk, getting a police scanner was surprisingly easy. Eduardo pushed Dustin in the general direction of a policeman and swiped the radio off the man's belt while Dustin was complimenting his uniform and talking about this 'amazing new site that I'm totally building and oh you should get an account, hey Chris can we get this man an account as a special privilege for being my best friend.'

Eduardo slid the radio onto the back of his belt and pulled Dustin away. "Let's leave the nice man alone, Dustin. Maybe if we go back now Mark will make a special account for him."

Dustin beamed and let himself be draped over Chris' not-much-steadier shoulders. Eduardo apologised to the police officer without moving his face clearly into the light then dragged the two of them back to the dorm room.

"Hey Mark," Dustin said. "Hey Mark, hey Mark. I need you to make an account for a police officer."

Mark frowned over his shoulder at Eduardo, who shrugged innocently and fled back to his room where Christy was comparing the prices of red and blue wetsuits.

Eduardo eyed the dummies they were using on the websites. "You know, I think I could wear jeans. I'm sure a jeans-based costume would work. Jeans, a T-shirt and a mask. No one would know it was me."

Christy gave him the Look that he would come to dread and held out a hand. "Scanner." He gave it to her. "Costume." He passed her the napkin with Chris's sketch on and she eyes it for a long moment. "It'll do. Now," she picked up a tape measure, stretching it out. "Get your clothes off."

The wetsuit was just about loose enough for him to breathe. Christy walked around him a few times making tutting noises then put him on a diet and gave him a list of instructions for how to burn the designed pattern into the wetsuit. Eduardo only nearly set it on fire once, which he decided was enough of an achievement.

The eye coverings on the mask played havoc with Eduardo's depth perception but Christy informed him that they were absolutely vital to the overall effect, and if he was going to insist on leaving his fingers bare, he had to put as much effort in elsewhere as possible.

Naturally she brushed off his point that he kind of needed his fingers free because they were the only thing holding him onto the walls that she made him climb stupidly high up so if the grip failed he would fall and die, neither of which were part of TheFacebook's long term business plan.

She made him keep the suit on when they went to bed.

Originally, Eduardo had only wanted a police scanner because he was pretty sure Batman had one in the cartoons. The first few nights when he went out onto the streets without it the most action he got was finding a lost wallet that he couldn't actually take into the police station because—you know—he was wearing a Spiderman costume.

A costume that didn't have pockets, meaning he had to hold the scanner in one hand and during a mugging the next night he had to keep tossing it into the air, throwing a punch, and then catching it before it could smash on the ground.

Christy was very sceptical about his complete lack of telepathic abilities, but she did add a tiny loop on his waistline that he could clip a pager onto. She agreed to sit with the scanner and page him about anything worth hearing. It was a system. Not the greatest system, but a system.

The day he foiled his first bank robbery was the day he first appeared in the papers—a tiny mention of a masked figure helping the police—and the start of his endless quest to get the journalists to spell his name correctly.

Now

When Mark leaves to go to the toilet and doesn't come back, Eduardo seriously considers quitting the superhero business entirely. Sy reads through his notes, shifts them around, reads through them again. Gretchen taps her foot and watches her watch. The young woman who's just here to watch keeps looking over at the door as though she is actually worried about Mark.

Maybe Eduardo should toss the Spiderman mask at her and tell her to go help him herself.

"Should we—" she starts, flushing a little and looking around as though not at all convinced she's allowed to speak. "I mean, do we think he's okay? Sy?"

Sy goes to push back his chair. Eduardo focuses on the amount of publicity Facebook will get if the news breaks that the creator has been threatened/kidnapped/shot and stands up first. "Since we're apparently on a break, I think I'll use the facilities too." He looks over at the woman. "If he's in there, I'll try to hurry him up. Some of us have things to do."

He ignores Sy's scoff and his muttered, "This could have been over yesterday if someone didn't keep vanishing for hours on end," in favour of letting the conference door slam closed and ducking into the worryingly familiar broom closet to tug off his suit and pull the mask over his head.

The only trace of Mark in the toilets is a trail of water leading away from the sinks, which wouldn't even be notable except that the hand towel dispenser is full. The only reason for Mark not to dry his hands would be if he had to leave quickly.

A janitor does a double take when Spiderman steps out of the bathroom. Eduardo pushes past him and to the end of the corridor where he almost pushes the call button for the lift before remembering how that will look.

He can see the headlines now. 'Spider-man Waiting for Elevators Instead of Saving Our City'. He pushes open a window and climbs up the wall instead.

Mark is on the roof. Eduardo hesitates below the lip to listen. "What do you want from me?" Mark asks.

"What do you think we want?"

"You're not touching my site." It's nice to know that when his life is under threat, Mark's voice still shows no emotion unless Facebook is involved. There are still constants in the world. "And you can tell whoever sent you—whoever sent all of the goons you have running after me—that no one will get their hands on Facebook as long as I am breathing."

Oh, bad move, Eduardo thinks. Really bad move. He edges sideways two meters and counts down from five under his breath. He's barely on three when Mark falls backwards off the roof and into his outstretched arm.

If Eduardo was a naive idiot, he might've thought from Mark's expression that Mark was actually happy to see him. "Has anyone ever told you you're an idiot?" he snaps instead.

Mark curves an arm around his shoulders, hanging on for dear life. "Aside from you?"

There are footsteps getting, someone coming to check that Mark's dead. Eduardo has Mark in one hand, the building on the other and if this attacker also has a gun—

"I caught a cab home," Mark says. "And another one this morning. Apparently that just makes them more persis-"

A masked man leans over the side of the building, and Eduardo drops Mark.

He will never tire of the shocked looks on people's faces when they see him. Eduardo grips the side of the building with both hands and flings a leg up and over, heel slamming into the man's face. With one hand on the horizontal surface of the roof and the man staggering backwards, he lets go with the other and takes his eyes off the assailant long enough to glance down, aim and shoot a web down that sticks to the back of Mark's falling form.

Something very solid slams into his head and for a moment all he sees is stars. The web starts to detach and he slams the end into the side of the building, praying that it sticks before letting go as the second enemy—of course there were two—grabs his arm and drags him up. "You're becoming a problem."

"I do try," Eduardo says, shooting webs into the man's eyes.

Then

In the beginning, Eduardo had no idea why white pus was leaking from his wrists. Christy scraped some off allegedly to analyse but the only result she came back with was that it was perfect for gluing on false nails.

"Maybe this is the negative side," he offered, pressing his wrist to his bedroom wall and leaving a white spot that he could attach a poster to. "I mean, I've got lucky as far as reactions to a spider bite go, maybe this is the compromise." He took a step back to admire his handiwork. "Do you think I should call Dr Jones? What if this stuff is toxic?"

"We're going to have to redesign the suit," Christy said, holding the sleeves up for closer inspection. "Or you'll stick to it."

"I'm going to New York with Mark, I could visit Dr Jones then. But what if Mark notices these?"

Christy looked over at him. "I thought you were just waiting for the right time to tell him everything?" At the time, Eduardo pretended not to hear the faint bitterness in her voice. It was his secret, not theirs and he could tell whoever he wanted. "Surely a week in New York with just the two of you would be the right time?"

Eduardo closed his eyes, turned his wrists down and rested his head against the back of his hands. "Christy, I'm not sleeping with Mark. I'm not dating Mark, I'm not interested in Mark, Mark isn't gay."

Christy's head jerked up like a lion spotting its prey. "Mark isn't gay? Just Mark?"

"Christy, fuck, I'm not gay. You know I'm not gay, you've had plenty of evidence to support that. You are my girlfriend, I'm with you, I'm only with you."

"You're with Mark all the time," she remarked, picking at non-existent dirt beneath her new fingernails. "You talk to him about everything." She sucked her lips in, glancing up at him. "You never take me to New York."

Eduardo didn't bother to fight the groan that rose up at this. "You've never asked," he reminded her, forgetting momentarily that she was crazy. "And I'm going to New York for meetings with advertisers, not for fun. It's for Facebook."

"Oh it's for Facebook. Oh, Facebook is the most important thing ever. You've definitely been spending too much time with Mark." One of the nails snapped and anger flashed briefly across her face, replaced all too quickly with a sickly sweet smile. "Hey, what will you do if they ever develop a way to have sex with a website? Then, Mark won't need you anymore."

"Christy."

"Eduardo."

"Get out."

She snatched her bag and the police scanner from his desk. "Call me when you get home. Buy me something sparkly."

Eduardo dropped into a chair. "Whatever you want."

"And tell Mark he's an asshole." The door slammed behind her. Eduardo reached for his costume and the scissors, slicing the lower arms off with sharp, violent movements that left rough edges and didn't alleviate his anger at all.

The cut pieces stuck to his wrists and when he tried to tug them away the white stuff stretched out like webbing. After he'd used the scissors to cut that too, he called Dr Jones.

Now

The two identical, black-suited figures are unconscious when Eduardo stumbles over to the edge of the building and reaches down to grab the end of the web that Mark is dangling from. By the time he has coaxed his aching muscles enough to bring Mark up to the edge so he can pull himself over, the villains have fled. Through a door, off the edge of the building, by a silent jet. Eduardo doesn't know and right at this moment he is far too tired to care. He drops onto the wall at the edge of the building and wishes the whole world would just leave him alone for a little while.

Unfortunately, the world spits on all his wishes and Mark sits awkwardly behind him. "Thanks," he says. "Again."

Eduardo doesn't say anything.

"You know you have a Facebook fanpage," Mark says. Of course Spiderman has a fanpage, everyone and their cat apparently does these days. "If there's anything you want on it, I could... you know."

"Cut the hyphen out of Spiderman."

Mark turns very faintly red. "I already did," he mutters. "I mean—you left notes and it was never hyphenated so I just thought."

Eduardo pushes himself to his feet. "I should go. I hear sometimes people who aren't you need saving in this town." He climbs down the wall, redresses and slips back into the conference room, arranging his face into a puzzled expression.

"So I just saw Spiderman in the hallways and he told me Mark Zuckerberg is on the roof. Apparently billionaires going for walks and getting stuck behind locked doors is something superheroes have to deal with in this town."

Sy immediately rushes past him to go and fetch his client. Eduardo waits until most of Mark's team have joined him, before daring to walk across the room—unable to stop himself letting out soft gasps every time he puts weight on his left leg.

"Are you okay?" Gretchen asks

"Tripped," Eduardo bites out, dropping into his chair as Mark's team spill back into the room. "I'll be fine."

Mark sits slowly and stares out the window, clearly thinking about something completely different and really they didn't need to wait until he got back, he could've ignored them quite easily from wherever the twins took him.

"So," Gretchen touches his hand briefly in reassurance then returns to her notes. "Why did the meetings go terribly?"

"Mark was asleep."

Mark looks up. "I was not asleep."

Eduardo meets his eyes and thinks you would be dead if not for me. "I wish Mark had been asleep."

Then

Eduardo was antsy almost from the moment they arrived in the city. On the walk from the station to the hotel they passed three dark alleys, two banks with frankly shocking security and a bar fight that Eduardo couldn't break up because Mark would start asking questions.

It only got worse when the meetings started. There were two on the first day and Eduardo had spent so long planning for these, working out every tiny thing they might ask, every point where they could come up with a question that might make everything go wrong. He planned for these moments, anticipated them, wrote out model answers and memorized them. He had remembered thinking as long as he didn't have to rush out to fight crime, nothing could go wrong.

He hadn't accounted for Mark. It hadn't even occurred to him that Mark would agree to meet with advertisers if he was still opposed to advertising. Somehow he had managed to convince himself that Mark had agreed to all of this. He had become complacent.

"Is he asleep?" the head of advertising for Mountain Dew asked, cutting through Eduardo's carefully prepared statistics to listen to Mark snoring.

"No," said Mark, reclining the office chair as far as it went.

"Then why are you making that sound?"

Mark raised his head to meet the man's eyes. "Because I am bored, this is boring and I hate wasting my time with people who can't offer my site anything it needs."

The man turns his gaze on Eduardo. "I don't think we can work with you at this time. Good luck with your project. In six months, when you find you need a real job, come talk to me."

Mark slid his hands into his pockets and left without another word. Eduardo forced himself to smile and shake the man's hand—so many years of his father's teaching finally paying off—before running after Mark's retreating back. "What the hell was that?"

Mark shrugged. "I told you, no pop-ups for mountain dew."

"Then what should we advertise? I forgot, the site's cool, isn't it. Maybe we should try drugs? Alcohol? I bet we'd increase our audience exponentially with a scheme like that."

"I said no ads. Not yet."

Eduardo had to count to ten in his head to stay calm. "Then why did you come out here with me?"

Mark only shrugged again.

Back at the hotel, Eduardo called Christy and invited her out to New York. Mark's expression soured, but he just tugged his laptop out of its bag and wired in.

"I'm going out," Eduardo said, hanging up on Christy and checking the time on his watch. "Just stay here and code until I get back."

Naturally, telling Mark to sit still and code was the one thing that would make him look up, pushing his headphones back with a frown. "Where are you going?"

It was the perfect opportunity to explain about Dr Jones, the spider bite, the sticky white pus that he was covering up with plastic wrap and bandages. He could lift up his shirt to show Mark the costume, explain about saving lives and how that was important. He should definitely tell Mark that sometimes the Winklevii get worrying looks in their eyes and Mark should watch his step when they're nearby.

"Out," Eduardo said. "I promised I'd visit a friend."

Mark's frown only grew. "I didn't know you knew people in the city."

"You don't know everything about me, Mark," he said—truthfully this time. "I'll be back later. Try not to break the site while I'm gone."

Mentioning the possibility of TheFacebook breaking had the desired effect, Mark's eyes darted immediately back to the lines of code. Eduardo grabbed his backpack and slipped out so Mark wouldn't have to pretend to care any longer. He caught a bus across town, arriving at the same run down lab he had first visited. Dr Jones answered the door, tugging him past various whirring machines to a desk covered in the kind of wasteland Eduardo would expect to see after an explosion.

Dr Jones brushed half of it off onto the floor and sat, gesturing to Eduardo to do the same. "You say there's a white fluid coming from your arms?"

Eduardo tugged the wristband off his left wrist (snatching a letter opener from the desk to slice the strands of webbing that stretch out when he does so) and lay his arm flat on the desk for Dr Jones to examine. "I thought it might have been a side effect of contact with the spider," Eduardo lied.

Dr Jones gave him a look that suggested he knew exactly what Eduardo wasn't saying, then turned to his wrist, using the letter opener to tug a few strands of web up. "Just like the other one," he said, with something akin to triumph.

Eduardo froze. "Other one?"

"Your spider," Dr Jones said, releasing his arm and reaching into the drawers for a battered box. "Does not like being kept in captivity and has been discovered to be capable of eating through several layers of safety glass."

Eduardo felt his face heat up. "You should leave him with a puzzle or something. I think he just gets bored."

Dr Jones sighed and reached into his drawer for a second, smaller box. "One of our interns was bitten. Fortunately we developed a cure which he was able to take." He opened the second box to reveal a syringe full of a yellowy orange fluid. "Before we did so he presented many symptoms that we were able to analyse including the ability to walk up walls, superhuman strength, advanced senses and the production of a mucus stronger than steel, capable of carrying impossible weights and sticky enough to attach to anything without letting go. Some of the staff were wondering what could be done with this when it was still just gunk on the arm and they developed these."

He opened the second box, revealing two metal wrist band type contraptions. "The mucus is sucked in here, passes through a mechanism not unlike the firing of a gun, and shoots out from this hole at a high speed. It should drag out a trail of mucus behind it, leaving an impossibly strong and sticky rope that could be used to swing on, climb, or fight with."

Eduardo raised his eyebrows. "Like a spi-"

"Grappling hook," Dr Jones said. "Just like a climber with a grappling hook." He placed the device back into the box. "Now obviously this is lab property and the lab cannot be seen to associate with vigilantes that may or may not be in the vicinity. Unfortunately for us, we have terrible security to the point where if I turned my back and one of these boxes had vanished, I would not be able to say where it had gone." He closed the lid on both. "Now if you'd excuse me, I have to go check some data."

There were gloves and boots in with the web propellers, made from a material thin enough that it didn't impede his gripping abilities at all.

He swung on the webs all the way home.

Now

Eduardo says nearly everything he can remember about the meeting with Sean. He leaves out the extensive background check he did, where the only concrete conclusion was that Sean Parker hadn't yet done anything worthy of the title 'supervillain' and the fact that Christy kept retreating to the bathroom to check the police scanner, then returning and sending him off—again on pretext of going to the bathroom—to foil three muggings, a bank robbery and a jewellery heist.

When Gretchen asks what it was that he disliked about Sean, he can't say 'my spidey sense was tingling.' So instead he comes up with a lot of bullshit very quickly about former companies and reliability.

That's when the hallway explodes, followed swiftly by the window and the side wall. Sy dives under the table, grabbing at the legs of Mark's chair to tug him after them. Eduardo grabs Gretchen and shouts "Run," before pulling her through the side wall and into chaos. The offices down the hallway are exploding one by one, sending flaming paper and computer parts flying across the hallway. Eduardo keeps one hand on Gretchen's head to make her stay down, and drags her into the girls' bathroom where the sinks provide adequate cover.

"I was here the whole time," he shouts, tugging his deposition clothes off over his head. "Whatever happens next, it wasn't me."

He pulls gloves and mask on while running back out of the bathroom and through the collapsing ceiling to the depositions room where a block of concrete is causing the table to weaken in the middle, cracks spreading out across the wood veneer.

Eduardo grabs the block, throwing it out the gaping hole that used to be a window, remembering at the last minute to toss a few webs that catch it and hold it suspended above the street.

"Well well well," says the last voice Eduardo wants to hear. "Didn't you get here fast."

The two black suited figures are standing in the space that used to be the back wall, lights flickering above their heads and chaos falling around them. Eduardo turns away from the window. "Just doing my civic duty," he says, flinging two webs forwards where they stick to the two figures and he can tug backward, sending them both slamming into the wall.

Eduardo drops the webs, sinking to a crouch so he can see under the table where Sy is huddled into a ball and Marylin has an arm around Mark's shoulders to keep him down. Eduardo addresses his comments to her, since apparently she's the one person capable of keeping her head. "Get Mark out."

Something hits him in the back of the neck, snapping his forehead into the side of the table. Marylin is running already, dragging Mark behind her as he says something indistinct about not leaving his laptop behind. Programmers, they're all the same.

Black suit #2 is moving around the table after them while #1 takes the chance to slam Eduardo into the table again. He shoots webs from both wrists, tripping #2 at the same time as giving him leverage to tug himself up, out of #1's grasp and drop into a two footed downwards attack between his shoulder blades.

There is the distinct sound of the faceless figure's neck breaking, but Eduardo doesn't have time to worry about that now with Marylin and Mark barely out of the room and #2 powering after them like a rampaging bull. Eduardo flings two more webs in his way and leaps into the fight, blocking the figure's wild jabs and driving his own hard punches into #2's stomach until—gasping for breath—the villain falls to his knees.

Then Eduardo has time to look back at #1, where Sy is tugging the black fabric mask up. "Is that... Cameron Winklevoss?"

Eduardo flings a web back to snatch the body from Sy's grasp, loops an arm under #2's armpits to hoist him up and shoots a web at the building opposite, leaping out of the window with both villains in tow.

Cameron Winklevoss's mask falls off mid flight, his head lolling at an impossible angle. Definitely dead then. Eduardo makes a mental note to add it to the tally.

Then

They returned from New York. The site still had no ads, and whenever Eduardo brought it up Mark would mutter about 'ending the party at eleven' like whatever Sean Parker said was gospel truth.

Eduardo did more digging, went into every record he could legally access and a whole handful that he couldn't, but he didn't turn up anything more than he already had. Sean was paranoid, delusional and a complete dick, but he hadn't done anything that fell under the category of 'evil supervillain plots' yet. Not unless you were a major music label.

Then Eduardo was accused of animal cruelty and Mark revealed—off hand—that he was planning to move to California over the summer.

Eduardo stormed back to his room in a foul mood, thrust the chicken into Christy's hands with the advice: "don't feed it chicken," kicked his clothes off and left through the window.

He had told Mark as soon as they returned to Harvard that he was going to go back to New York over the summer, making up some bullshit about an internship because Mark was too distracted to really take in anything Eduardo said, making it a bad time to mention the Spiderman thing. Eduardo had stopped two major crimes and one supervillain during the short time they were in New York. He was needed there. That was where he was supposed to be.

He smashed through the window of the Crimson offices feet first. The only person still there was a secretary, sorting files into piles and jumping off her chair when Eduardo landed in a mess of glass shards on her carpet, the web shooters slicing him free of the cable he swung in on. "Who was your source?" he demanded. "For the Facebook article, who planted the story?"

She trembled, but managed to open her mouth. "I'm not supposed to disclose—"

Eduardo smashed the other window.

"Divya Narendra! He had pictures and he told us to mention Facebook as much as possible to lower its credibility." She cowered back a little. "Freedom of the press says we can—"

Eduardo left out of the smashed window and went back to his damn chicken. He fed it—grains—and went to bed. The next day he tracked down Divya Narendra, which took far more time than it should've since apparently rich students didn't stay in dorms, they had top secret hide outs on the edge of campus with three Bentleys parked outside and a noise like some giant generator running inside.

He had to run back to his room for his costume, and by the time he got around to scaling the wall it was already getting dark. Inside, however, was still brightly lit. If he clung to the wall near the top, he could see through the windows to the large, open-plan space. The generator was in one corner, cables running power from it to a second machine in the centre of the room, a huge glass and steel structure full of strange coloured chemicals and spinning dials.

Divya Narendra was standing next to it, a Winklevii on either side, saying something about damages and punitive relief which presumably meant Mark's carefully worded letter hadn't quite done the trick of throwing them off their case that Facebook was some kind of HarvardConnection knock off.

Three men, two of which were Olympic athletes and one of which was a story selling asshole. Spiderman could take three men. He smashed the window with his elbow, instantly attracting the attention of all three men as he slid inside. The Winklevii both stepped forward, Divya shrinking back into the shadows behind them. "Spiderman," he called, full of the confidence that comes with being hidden behind two much larger men. "So you got here first. I suppose you picked up on the clues I left at the Great Gold Heist?"

Eduardo couldn't remember anything that great about stopping a couple of black masked thugs from running off with a briefcase of gold bars, and he certainly hadn't hung around long enough to pick up any kind of clues. "First?" he said, to keep them distracted while he crawled upside down on the roof, looking for the right angle.

"Of course, I'm expecting someone else to show up for vengeance at any moment. I capture and kill you now so that when he comes, you are incapable of swooping in for a daring rescue the way you have foiled so many of my plans."

Divya had the same glint in his eyes that Sean got whenever he mentioned case equity. "Which plans?" Eduardo asked.

Divya opened his mouth, then closed it with a satisfied smile. "Really, did you think it would be that easy to get me to disclose all my—"

Eduardo dropped directly onto Tyler's head, Divya still wittering on for half a moment before he realised he had been played as a distraction. His cry of outrage was barely a flash on Eduardo's attention, however, as Cameron was already swinging in with two quick punches. Eduardo blocked one, tensed his stomach for the second and head butted Cameron under the chin, sending him stumbling backwards as Tyler pushed himself to his feet.

"You—Spiderman—are going to rue the day you interfered in my—"

Eduardo blanked Divya out completely, focusing on blocking the punches from both sides, taking Cameron out with a spinning kick to the groin, landing catlike on all four appendages as Tyler's foot caught his leg and sent him stumbling.

Cameron was getting up again behind him. Eduardo pushed himself onto his hands so he could slam both feet into Tyler's chest—sending him flying back against the far wall of the warehouse—and flipped to his feet in time to block Cameron's right hook.

They had to be on steroids, Eduardo decided as Tyler pushed himself out of the wall to rush him again. Or they had been bitten by some kind of radioactive rhino. Eduardo waited until Tyler had sufficient momentum before leaping out of the way, sending Tyler careering into his brother like some kind of cartoon.

Eduardo's ribs ached, and when he tried to put weight on his leg, it buckled beneath him. Still, he turned to Divya in the brief moment of rest as the Winklevii attempted to push themselves up at the other side of the hall. "You're going to go away for everything you've done," he said, trying not to pant too heavily. "You're going to go away for a long—" His spidey senses kicked in a moment too late, giving the man behind time to grab him, wrapping his arms into a tight bear hug and holding him so tight he couldn't move.

Divya's smile was like ice down Eduardo's back as he walked forward and reached out to grab the top of the mask. "I want to look into your face when you die, Spiderman." He tugged hard enough to tear the mask as it slid up Eduardo's neck and over his nose. His hair was going to be completely unmanageable after this, not that that would matter if he lost his entire head.

Divya stared into his eyes for a long moment, then laughed. "Well, when I said two birds with one stone I didn't realise they were both the same bird, Mr Saverin." He gestured to whoever was holding Eduardo and the man increased the pressure, making it almost impossible to breath.

Eduardo thought he might have heard one of his ribs crack. "Why did you plant the story about the chicken?"

Divya laughed. "Because I am very concerned for animal welfare, naturally. Also I knew the news would bring you here and I thought I could use you to send a message to Mr Zuckerberg."

Eduardo shifted his weight as best he could, testing his chest. "What kind of message?"

"Shut down TheFacebook," Cameron said, walking up beside Divya.

"Or you'll never see your CFO again," Tyler finished, stepping onto his other side.

"It is a pity," Divya said. "I was quite looking forward to killing Spiderman, but I suppose I can always get to that later. Right now I just have to get you locked up where no one will ever look for you. Tyler, lock him up." He turned to walk, the Winklevii both turning with him.

The man holding Eduardo lifted him off the ground, his arms loosening very slightly for the instant that Eduardo required to lash out at his legs—knocking him off balance—then drop to the ground and fling the man over his back and into the far wall where his head smashed into the concrete.

He fell to the ground, face up. Tyler Winklevoss's face up, in fact.

Eduardo looked over at Divya Narendra, turning back with a Winklevoss on each side. "Well," he said coolly. "Now I can't let you leave."

Eduardo looked slowly between the dead Tyler Winklevoss on the ground and the living Tyler Winklevoss at Divya's side. "That's not possible. How is that possible?"

"The Winklevosses are genetically enhanced clones," Divya said. "Honestly, I thought you had to be clever to get into the Phoenix." He threw Eduardo's mask across the floor, where it spun to a halt at his feet. "Goodbye, Spiderman." He pressed a button on the wall, before pushing through the door and slamming it shut behind him.

His Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss both turned. "Prepare to die," Cameron said, picking up a chair from the side and swinging it to get accustomed to the weight.

"You're going to kill me, I suppose?" Eduardo said, regulating his breathing and trying not to show how much his chest ached. "You and what army?"

Naturally that was the point where the side on the giant machine rolled up to reveal at least fifty Winklevii clones, all in black suits and all looking in the mood for a good murder.

Eduardo picked up his mask and wondered if he should call Mark to say he'd be late.

Part 2

Boy Falls From the Sky 2/3

2011-09-04T15:02:07Z

Fandom: TSN
Pairing: Eduardo/Christy, Mark/Eduardo

Part 1

Now

Sy turns to a new page of his notes. "Mr Saverin," he says. "Can you tell me what you were doing in New York?"

Eduardo coughs to give himself a moment to think. "I was meeting with the heads of various companies in the hope of finding sponsorship or advertising. I believed without Mark's presence, the meetings would go far smoother and—"

"And what were you doing the rest of the time?"

Eduardo tried not to freeze too obviously. "I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?"

"I have here—" he pulls out a pile of papers—"the records from thirteen meetings you arranged over the period. Three of them you missed, two you left early and did not return, two you fell asleep in." He turns a few pages over. "I haven't been in contact with all the others, but the evidence is against you. The internship you say you quit on the first day—though interestingly I could find no records that it ever existed. You lived in an apartment with your then girlfriend for a significant period of time and I would like to know what you were doing that meant you couldn't be in Palo Alto with the company you co-founded."

"Well," Eduardo says. "That's a very interesting question."

Then

His pager went off, distracting him for the single moment required to earn him a punch in the face. He stumbled backwards, reaching for his belt to shut off the beeping as he ducked another blow from Tyler Winklevoss #112.

"Don't you people ever get tired of trying to kill me?"

Cameron Winklevoss #98 attempted a jab at the bottom of his ribs, Eduardo spun on the spot and snapped his wrist backwards before he could make it.

"Oh yeah. You only get one chance each." He snatched Tyler's gun off the floor and slammed the butt into Cameron's head, sending him crashing to the ground. "Now," he said, aiming the pistol at Tyler's head. "You can take me to your hideout, or you can die. Your choice."

Tyler spread his arms. "So kill me. More will come and they will keep coming and one day you won't be so lucky."

Eduardo's pager went off again, somehow rather ruining the moment.

"Do you want me to wait while you get that?" Tyler asked. Eduardo shot him in the head and tugged out his pager.

'Bored,' the first message read. 'Can I come out next time?'

'Buy popcorn on your way home.'

Eduardo slammed the pager back onto his waist and jumped out the window, leaving the bodies for Divya to clean up. He swung home, ignoring the various cameras pointing his way—maybe tomorrow morning he could buy a paper and find out that Spiderman killed puppies and hated children, oh no sorry, Spider-Man—and landed on the apartment block fire escape, changing into the clothes that were still stuck on the wall where he'd left them before jumping down into the alley and walking into the building through the front door.

Christy was lying on the bed painting her nails and watching CNN where a hostage situation had just been resolved in a particularly bloody and unpleasant fashion downtown. Eduardo snatched the controller, putting the screen on mute. "Why didn't you tell me about that?" he demanded, gesturing to the screen where people were being carried out on stretchers.

Christy lifted her hand and blew on it, deliberately meeting his eyes over the purple paint. "Your inbox was full."

"There were three messages," he snapped, pulling the pager from his waist and throwing it at her. "And they were all from you. How long have you been watching this coverage? Wasn't it on the scanner?" He scanned the rest of the room for the first time. "Where is the scanner?"

Christy started on her second hand. "I dropped it," she said carelessly.

"You dropped it?" He crouched to look under the bed. "Where, in the toilet?"

"Out the window." She lifted her thumbnail to examine the covering. "Have you worked out how to break into Dr Jones's lab yet?"

Eduardo pushed himself to his feet and crossed to the window where he could see tiny black shards scattered across the pavement. "I'm not stealing the spider from Dr Jones. He's analysing it and keeping it safe and I'm not letting it bite anyone else, not even you."

"I could help you," she said, dragging the brush across her index fingernail. "I'm bored."

He threw up his hands. "You have a job, you have a perfectly good job that you keep calling in sick to because you want to stay in bed and watch movies."

"Are you still going to Palo Alto at the weekend?"

"Yes."

"Will Mark be there?"

"Mark will be there, yes. I'm not sleeping with Mark, Christy, how many times do you need me to say it before it sinks in?"

She finished her last nail. "I'll just call the criminal underworld and tell them to take a few days off, shall I?"

"That would be lovely, thanks," he said, too tired to argue, and locked himself in the bathroom to check on his new collection of bruises.

"Did you get my popcorn?" Christy called after him.

Now

"So this must be the millionth time you've saved my life," Mark says, clinging to Eduardo's back for dear life as Eduardo climbs up the side of the pit away from the exploding robot.

"Fifteenth," Eduardo corrects.

Mark takes one hand off Eduardo's neck to count against his shoulder. "I thought eight," he says slowly.

"Three while you were sleeping," Eduardo says. "Two that you didn't notice, one you were just looking the wrong way. The fifteenth time I actually saved Facebook, but I figured I could count that anyway." He reaches the top of the building, reaching back to throw Mark over the lip and crawl over after him as there's another explosion below them.

Mark brushes soot off his jeans. "I should be paying you," he says, half joking but with a look in his eye that suggests maybe he's half not.

Eduardo is suddenly reminded of Christy mentioning the vibe Alice got from Mark. He moves away. "You can pay me by finding some way to stop the attacks. Have you considered hiring a bodyguard?"

"What should I put on the ad? Must be able to protect from avid fans, rival companies and giant robots?" He reaches into his pocket to touch the USB stick that he's been checking on every five minutes since the giant robot reached into his hotel room and plucked him out of it. "Are you available? I know you have the superhero thing but I must be distracting you from other—I could pay you in Facebook stock. Or I could just pay you. I—I have a lot of money." Which is, quite possibly, the understatement of the century and the irony of it makes Eduardo want to laugh or weep. He isn't sure which, so he does neither.

"Do you need a ride home?"

Mark pushes himself up to look over the edge of the pit as another explosion sends the robot's eye high enough in the air that it lands on the opposite side of the pit. "I don't know where I am," he looks back. "But if you could drop me off at the road, I could catch a cab."

Eduardo picks him up, flings him easily over one shoulder and swings back to the hotel where there is a monster-fist sized hole in Mark's bedroom wall. Eduardo drops him in amongst the rubble and turns.

"Do you usually stay to watch me sleep?" Mark asks, kicking concrete lumps off his suitcase.

Eduardo bites down on all the scathing replies he could come up with to that particular gem. "You've managed to gain a reputation for the most attacked person in New York. I go where the trouble is."

Mark reaches into the case and tugs out a hoodie, shaking dust off it before pulling it over his head and resting his hands in the pockets. "You could stay inside. You know, if you wanted."

Eduardo shoots a web and jumps out the hole without giving a reply.

Then

"I'm in New York—" 'saving people, saving the world and defeating evil' all ran through his head but he couldn't explain anything when Mark was like this. He couldn't—they had to be best friends like they always had been. Not like this with Mark in the thrall of a soon-to-be supervillain. He couldn't risk Sean increasing his control over Mark, or Mark telling Sean Spiderman's true identity.

This was clearly all part of Sean's plan. Somehow, Sean had arranged for all of this to happen, he had driven Eduardo away and he was just biding his time before he could seize control of Facebook and use it to destroy the world.

Thiel must be in on it too. Maybe he was Sean's boss. Maybe Sean was his boss and Mark was just a helpless pawn caught up in the middle of a giant conspiracy that Eduardo was going to foil.

"I'm in New York," he tried again, but if he said 'looking for advertisers' Mark would want results and Eduardo didn't have any because he'd missed all his follow up interviews—damn that bus full of school children—and eventually they'd all stopped calling. He just trailed off and could watch as the tiny glimmer of hope died in Mark's eyes.

"You're in New York," Mark agreed, turning to leave.

So many things went through Eduardo's head—'Don't trust Sean' or 'you're being manipulated' or 'watch your back, I'm worried about you'. "What did you mean get left behind?"

Mark looked back at him. "There's a camp bed in my bedroom, Wardo. This is where the company is—this is where our company is. You could come to the meeting, you could come to all the meetings. I want you out here."

Not five minutes ago it had been 'I need you out here.'

Eduardo watched him leave, then tugged his phone out of his pocket. He planned to call Christy and say there was crime to be fought in Palo Alto so he was going to be gone a few more days. He had one new voicemail and thirty eight texts. The texts were all from Christy, the voicemail from an unknown number.

"Hello, hello, is that Eduardo?" Dr Jones's voice came through the speaker, muffled and occasionally completely obscured by the sounds of falling objects and utter chaos. "This is Dr Jones. Someone has stolen the spider you gave us, destroying half the lab in the process. We're attempting to prevent a major disaster, but we could really use your help." There was the sound of a small explosion somewhere in the distance. "I have to go. We need to find that spider." There was a click as he hung up.

Eduardo didn't hesitate; he grabbed his bag and ran down into the hallway where Dustin was still coding and Sean was back on the phone, speaking with his 'I know you're going to do what I want' voice.

Eduardo crossed the hall, snatched the phone from Sean's hand and pinned him up against the wall with a forearm to the neck. "You think you've got it all figured out," Eduardo said, pressing hard enough that all Sean could do in reply was choke. "Don't you?"

"Wardo?" Dustin said, spinning around on his chair and looking from Sean to Eduardo. "What the fuck?"

"You don't see anything," Eduardo mocked. "You're writing code."

Dustin pushed his chair back. "I should get Mark."

Sean pushed at Eduardo's elbow with one hand, which obviously had no effect because Sean was fucking puny and Eduardo was Spiderman.

"Whatever trick you're planning," Eduardo said. "Whatever angle you're playing I promise I will get to the bottom of it and I will stop you if I have to bring you, the guy you're meeting and his entire company crashing down." He pulled his arm back too fast for Sean to find his footing or do anything other than slither down the wall to the floor.

"Are you completely insane?" Sean gasped, rubbing his throat with one hand.

"And if you hurt him," Eduardo added, swinging his bag over one shoulder. "I will end you."

On the way back to the airport, he froze the bank account.

Now

Eduardo is lying on his back on Mark's hotel bed, waiting for the giant slug in the bathtub to melt away—the only way to guarantee it is actually dead, not just waiting for the right moment to strike—so he can go home.

"If someone you hated was in trouble," Mark says. "And you could save them, would you do it?"

Eduardo looks up. Mark is sitting at the desk, his chair turned away from his laptop for the first time since Eduardo finished killing the slug. Clearly whatever disaster had struck is over. "Yes."

Mark frowns, reaching out with one hand to shut the lid on his laptop. "Really?"

Eduardo shrugs, lying back down on the bed. "Wouldn't be much of a hero if I didn't."

He has thought about it—thought about what would happen if Sean was falling off the edge of the statue of liberty. No one would think anything of it if his webshooters just missed by a couple of inches. It would just be a tragic accident, and every hero is bound to have a few of them every once in a while.

Mark sits down on the bed next to him. "Can I?"

Eduardo glances over to see Mark's fingers hovering inches over the fabric of his gloves, his expression caught in that intrigued look he gets whenever he's come across a particularly interesting piece of code. "Go ahead."

Mark's fingers brush across the top of his glove, tracing underneath to the metal of the webshooter. "They're mechanical?"

Eduardo aims his wrist to the left of Mark's head and fires off a strand of web so Mark can see the way the metal covering of the shooter shifts aside and the tiny spark as the mechanism fires.

"You designed these?" Mark asks, running his fingers up and down the close to find where the webshooter ends.

"A friend," Eduardo says, remembering Dr Jones's bright smile when he showed off the latest prototype. "He used to help me out a lot."

"You have friends?" Mark says, in surprise. "People who know who you really are?"

Eduardo closes his eyes as the memories of the last time he saw the doctor, after it got out that Jones might know the true identity of Spiderman and Narendra had sent an entire army of Winklevii clones to the lab. Eduardo had got there as fast as physically possible, fought as many as he could to get the doctor out but he hadn't been quite fast enough.

When it came to the doctor, he never seemed to be fast enough. He would never forget the way Jones had laughed weakly when Eduardo asked how long he'd known.

"Well," he'd said, reaching up to tug off Eduardo's mask with one hand. "If you'd called yourself Wasp-man, I might not have figured it out."

"Not anymore," Eduardo says, as the slug rolls out of the bathtub and into the room for round two.

Then

He called Dr Jones as soon as he got through customs in New York. "I'm in the city, what's happening?"

"The lab's done for. We had to evacuate and call the emergency services, they're trying to contain the fire. Fortunately the explosion was small enough that only the lab was destroyed, but we've lost everything. All the data, all the equipment and the CCTV tapes, meaning we have no images of the person who took the spider."

Eduardo stepped onto the street, hailing a cab with one arm. "Did anyone see them?"

"One of the interns thought he saw a girl with long, dark hair but it doesn't seem at all like—"

Eduardo hung up on him, turned away from the taxi and was about to run for the toilets to change when he remembered that his webshooters were still in the apartment because of stupid airplane safety regulations and his taxi was already pulling away with someone else in it.

He hailed a second one, pushing aside a thug and a woman with three children to throw himself into the back seat and shout his address at the driver.

He pushed through his apartment door twenty minutes later, throwing his bag down on the sofa to check the bathroom and the kitchen. There was no sign of anyone and he couldn't hear a thing so he went back to his bag, pushing through the piles of clothes he'd never so much as unpacked looking for his phone.

"Eduardo?" The bedroom door swung open to reveal Christy, holding a tiny squirming flash of red and blue up between her thumb and forefinger.

Eduardo dropped his phone back into the bag. "Chris, what are you doing with that?"

Christy raised the spider to her eye level, tongue flickering as though she was thinking about tasting it. "How did you make it bite you? Make it bite me."

Eduardo took half a step closer and noticed something wrong—other than the obvious fact that his girlfriend was crazy. "Why does it only have six legs?"

Christy laughed and answered his question by reaching up and tugging a third one off, dropping it directly onto the carpet. "I was trying to make it angry so it would attack," she explained, walking into the bedroom and letting the door swing behind her. Eduardo leapt forward to catch it in time to see her sit on the bed, eyeing the spider intently. "It didn't work. What's so different about you? Why did it bite you? Where? When?"

Eduardo tried to remember how you were supposed to deal with a crazy person. "Chris, please," he said, taking a step forward. "This is crazy."

She smiled a bright smile at him, pulled a gun from her purse and trained it on his head. "Don't come any closer."

Eduardo stopped moving. "Did you blow up Dr Jones's lab?"

"Where were you when it bit you?"

"You don't want this, Chris. It's insane, it takes over your life."

She flicked the safety catch off with her little finger. "Where were you?"

Fuck fuck fuck, he could even see his webshooters on the table behind her but without them all he could do was stand here with a gun pointing at his head and she could shoot at any moment. "Harvard. I was in Harvard, by the statue. It was winter, I was outside doing initiations for the Phoenix. Please, Christy, put the gun down."

Christy tilted her head to the side, apparently to examine the spider from a different angle. "Is that it? Do you need to be cold?" Her eyes snapped back to Eduardo. "Is there ice in the freezer?"

"Chris, you're scaring me. Can we please drop this? Put the spider down. Put it down and we can talk through this." A bullet hit the wall over his head, sending plaster dust crumbling onto his shoulders.

"Ice. Now." As Eduardo backed out the room her heard her muttering. "Who's a hungry spider? Who's a good ravenous beast?" she said, as though she was speaking to a kitten.

A kitten that she had just cut one and a half legs off. Eduardo crossed to the kitchen, catching the strap of his bag with his foot as he walked past so it dragged behind him all the way into the kitchen. "Ice?" he called, pulling open the freezer door with one hand and reaching into his clothes for his phone with the other.

A bullet flew so close to his head, his life was flashing before his eyes. He turned to see Christy in the doorway, moving the barrel of the gun sideways a little so it was aimed back at his head. "The frozen peas," she said, gesturing into the freezer with the gun. "Put them on top of the bag, and kick them both to me." She waited while he did so. "Now put your hands on your head."

Eduardo did as he was told, watching as she rested the peas and the now legless spider against her leg, sitting on his bag and pulling out his phone with one hand. "So how was Mark?"

"He's fine, I barely saw him."

"Why not?"

"Because I was hardly there five minutes before I got a call from Dr Jones to tell me that a complete psych—" The bullet actually grazes his shoulder, he can feel the hot burn and the warm blood pumping against his shirt.. "That someone was breaking into his lab and it could blow at any moment."

"Oh," Christy looked up from his phone. "Oh Dr Jones called, did he? So you didn't look at one of my 47 texts—did you know I sent 47 texts?—because maybe if you'd opened one you could have saved the lab but I suppose you were too busy with Mark to care about your girlfriend." She threw his phone to the floor, where it spun on the tiles before coming to a stop between them. "If I even am your girlfriend."

Eduardo looked between the phone and the gun, hoping for any way to get the former without being killed by the latter. "What?"

"Why is the relationship status listed as single on Spiderman's Facebook page?"

Eduardo actually froze halfway through moving one of his hands to put pressure on his bleeding shoulder, just because the statement was so completely ludicrous that he didn't believe for a minute that Christy was even serious. "I didn't even know Spiderman had a Facebook page."

"No, you didn't change it so you could screw that reporter Gwen Stacy every time you save her from ravenous trolls."

"I only saved her from trolls once. And also I would never, Gwen has a boyfriend."

"Are you screwing him?" her eyes narrowed. "Does Mark know you're Spiderman?"

Eduardo's phone rang. "I am not having sex with Mark Zuckerberg. I have never had sex with Mark Zuckerberg." He threw himself into a roll, snatching the phone in one hand and landing on Christy, sending the gun spiralling off onto the floor d he flipped his phone open and held it to his ear. "Hello?"

"My spider," Christy cried, writhing beneath him. "What happened to my spider?"

"You froze our account?" Mark asked.

"I—" he let out a cry of pain as Christy briefly sank her teeth into his wrist. "I did."

"He's crazy!" Christy shouted. "Save me Mark, save—" Eduardo pressed his hand against her mouth.

"You froze the account," Mark said.

"I had to keep it away from Sean." He pressed the mouthpiece against his shoulder, turning back to his girlfriend. "Christy, you are not Spiderman. You are not going to become Spiderman. You need help, serious help, that I am prepared to—" he caught something down the line about the company. "Mark, this really isn't a good time—"

That was when Eduardo went flying across the room, back slamming into the far wall as Christy pushed herself to her feet and shook the spider off her leg to reveal a tiny spider bite, red spreading out further with every second.

"Without money the site can't function," Mark's voice could just be heard coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the fridge as Eduardo pushed himself to his feet. "Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everybody else—"

Christy ran towards him, throwing two punches that Eduardo could easily block before she drove her knee into his groin and headbutted him hard enough to break his nose. Eduardo stumbled back, eyes watering. "Christy, please, you don't have to do this. Okay, you got bitten, you can have what you wanted, we can be partners."

"Like you're partners with Mark?" Christy threw herself into a jump front kick that sent him flying into the wall, shitty plaster raining down from the ceiling like snow. "Like you're partners with Gwen and that red head—don't think I haven't seen her 'damsel in distress' routine—and anyone else who gives you the time of day."

Eduardo blinked hard to clear his vision, falling onto all fours on the floor close enough to the hidden phone to hear "If one domino goes, all the dominoes go—"

"Mark, this is really not a good time," Eduardo shouted as he span on the floor to sweep Christy's legs out from underneath her, sending her sprawling to the ground in an undignified heap. He turned away briefly, using the brief respite to scan the floor for his damn cell phone.

Something hit him on the back, knocking Eduardo flat on the floor with a crash and shards of glass dripping around him, down the back of his neck. He turned his head in time to see Christy snatching up a pile of plates from the side. "What is wrong with you?"

He flipped to his feet, kicking the first two plates out of mid air and snatching a breadboard from the side to block the others before flinging it at Christy's head. She ducked the board but missed Eduardo's fist coming up from below to catch her underneath the chin and send her flying into the main room.

Mark's voice was still audible, just. "Did you like being nobody? Did you like being a joke? Do you want to go back to that?"

Christy snatched up the table, sending magazines and empty coffee mugs flying in all directions. "You never wanted me to go with you," she shouted.

"I never wanted you to get hurt!" Eduardo kicked a cupboard door off its hinges, snapped it into two thinner planks and held one in each hand. "And I needed someone I trusted to keep an eye on the news."

Christy eyed his two planks then smashed the table against the floor, grabbing the two sharpest looking shards and spinning them around as Eduardo stepped out of the kitchen.

One of the table shards snapped at the first impact, while the other drove into Eduardo's leg hard enough to cut through the leg of his pants and far enough into his thigh that when Christy let go to jump backwards, it stayed in. Eduardo threw one of his planks after her, kicking a table shard up into the air so he could catch it and use a cross of wood to pin her against the wall.

She reached underneath and tugged the wood out of his thigh, sending a whole new wave of pain flooding through his body. Blood poured down his leg.

Eduardo slammed his uninjured knee into Christy's stomach, leaving her pinned to the wall and gasping for breath as he ran back into the kitchen and finally found the phone on the floor down the side of the fridge.

"I'm sorry," Eduardo panted down the phone. He snatched a towel from the side, balled it up and pressed it against his bleeding leg. "I was angry and maybe it was childish but I had to get your attention because Sean is—"

"Wardo, I said I've got good news."

Eduardo looked back over to the main room in time to see Christy tug one of the planks out of the wall and drop to the ground. "What is it?" he asked, crossing over to the gun and tossing it out of the window, keeping both eyes on Christy trying to catch her breath on the floor.

"Peter Thiel's just made an angel investment of half a million dollars."

Christy raised her head to look at him, then ran into the bedroom. Eduardo snatched the bread knife from the knife stand and stepped into the main room, holding it loosely and keeping an eye on the closed bedroom door. "What?"

"A half million dollars, and he's setting us up in an office. They want to—"

Eduardo knocked open the bedroom door to see Christy standing in front of the dressing table, her back to him. "Christy? Chris, we can talk about this."

"Get your ass on the next flight back to San Francisco," Mark said, voice echoing through the phone's speakers loud enough that Christy's spider hearing would pick it up. She tensed up a little. "I need my CFO."

Eduardo held up both hands, switching his grip on the knife so he couldn't attack with it too easily. "Chris?"

Christy spun around, and she had his webshooters fixed tight around her wrists. She shot two strands of thin white webbing over his shoulders, stretched like elastic so as soon as they attached she flew forward, feet outstretched to catch him in the chest, sending him sprawling to his back. Christy continued forward and crashed through the window, shooting off strands of ribbon as she haphazardly swung away down the street.

"Wardo," said Mark.

Eduardo held the phone up to his ear, lying on his back and wondering if maybe he could just never move again. "Yes?"

"We did it."

Eduardo closed his eyes, letting the phone fall from the floor and reaching down to press the heel of his hand hard against his bleeding leg.

They did it.

Now

Technically, today Eduardo is allowed to stand over Mark's shoulder and watch him write out a cheque, except that it's not actually a cheque that is being written out, it's a contract returning a significant portion of Facebook shares to Eduardo's ownership, and it's not Mark signing the papers, it's one of Facebook's legal aids because Mark didn't show up, and Eduardo isn't watching because he's in the same place Mark is.

"Is this some kind of clone army?" Mark demands, grabbing a knife from one of the decked Winklevii clones to cut the bonds on his hands. Of course the Winklevii are all masked, but there's no mistaking the identical posture, movements and muscle on each.

"What," Eduardo says, sweeping the legs out from underneath five Winklevii. "So a giant slug, an angry robot and a hoard of ravenous trolls are all perfectly normal but a clone army is completely impossible and shocking?"

Mark grabs the chair he was previously tied to and stabs it into the face of a clone who managed to get past Eduardo. "I was surprised by the trolls," he protests, smashing the chair over his Winklevii's head. "Trolls in New York, very unexpected."

Eduardo drives his elbow backwards into one clone, then his fist forward into another. "You were coding, Mark. You were sitting in the back of a taxi in the middle of a hoard of ravenous trolls and you were coding. You are worse than Bill Gates, Mark. Worse than Bill Gates."

"If they're clones," Mark says, tossing a long sharp piece of chair from hand to hand. "Are we morally allowed to kill them?"

Eduardo snatches a knife from the belt of Winklevii number he's-really-lost-count-by-now and throws it into the head of Mark's victim. "You have morals?" he asks, driving his head into the clone's stomach and sending him spiralling backwards into three more clones. Eduardo takes advantage of the brief respite to snatch Mark around the waist and fire a web up, springing them both up into the rafters.

"Laptop," Mark reminds him and Eduardo clings onto the roof, firing a second web down that sticks to Mark's laptop bag and pulls that up, incidentally knocking out three more Winklevii as it rises. "Also," Mark says, pulling the strap over his head and holding the bag close. "You don't actually know me or my morals so—" He shifts around to loop his arms around Eduardo's neck, keeping his laptop between them.

Eduardo smashes the window and climbs out, keeping his fingers pressed against the bricks as he scales the walls to the roof. "So those meetings I see you at, you're not being sued of cutting your best friend out of the company you started together?"

"You know about—" Mark lets go, dropping onto the roof and glancing down straight away to check his laptop hasn't been harmed. Then he looked back up at Eduardo. "It's more complicated than that," is all he says, sitting on the corrugated iron to pull his laptop into his lap and boot it up.

The night is cold. Eduardo bounces on his toes and keeps his eyes on the surrounding city, looking for Narendra's people coming to clear up the mess. "Can't you wait until we get back to the hotel to sort your damn code?"

"They were tinkering with it," Mark says. "I need to make sure they haven't taken anything out that we might have to go back for."

If Mark insists on Eduardo going back into that fucking death trap to grab his graphics card or his disc drive or something, Eduardo is just going to knock him out and take him home. Eduardo paces across the roof, checking the roads and the alleys and the small crowd of Winklevii that are scattering out from the doorway of the warehouse. In the sky a news helicopter is circling for some story, the noise of the propellers making it difficult to think.

"They installed some malware," Mark calls across, like Eduardo cares. "I should be able to get rid of it, it'll just take a minute—"

There's the crack of a gunshot and time runs slow, like treacle. Mark is on the roof in plain sight and the glint in the helicopter isn't a news camera; it's a gun sight. "Down," Eduardo shouts, running cross the roof as three more shots ring out. He catches the back of Mark's jacket, relying on Mark's inner sense of computer-preservation to save the laptop, and keeps running, jumping off the edge of the building and flinging out webs, the only aim to get as far away as possible.

His vision is blurring, he has to shoot three times before his third web hits anything and Mark feels far heavier than he should, even with the laptop pressed between them, shouting something into Eduardo's ear that is too garbled to understand and all the while the helicopter is still droning behind them. It must be really fucking close because Eduardo can hear it roaring in his ears and Mark is shouting and he misses entirely with his webshooters sending them both tumbling into an alley.

The laptop goes flying past his head, smashing into pieces against the wall and Mark's going to be pissed. Except, the helicopter is giving Eduardo a headache so they're probably going to die anyway and they'll both go to whatever circle of Hell is 'betraying a friend' and then Mark will be pissed about the laptop.

Mark's fingers are pressing painfully into Eduardo's side—maybe he's already noticed the smashed computer—and his eyes are wild. He's shouting something, lips moving at a thousand miles a minute which is strange because Eduardo is feeling very slow. He moves his arm, trying to lift it to shoot more webs, but the air is thick and heavy like treacle.

His hand drops onto his side, over Mark's, and he feels a hot, sticky warmth spreading over his costume.

Oh.

"Am-bu-lance," Mark's lips are forming the shapes slowly, tapping his pockets to indicate that he doesn't have a phone. Eduardo has a phone, Eduardo totally has a phone - it's sitting on his table at home.

Eduardo shakes his head through treacle. "No ambulance," he says, even though it's hard to talk because he can't really breathe properly. "Have to—there's a bullet. Get it out."

Mark stares like Eduardo just recommended open heart surgery. Eduardo pushes Mark's hand away so he can find the hole. Not a shotgun, thank God, so just the one bullet. But it's a deep wound; he's going to need tweezers and a scalpel and after that it'll need cleaning. "Taxi," he says, clutching at Mark's hand. "Taxi. My place." His vision is blurring again and it's hard to move but Mark thinks enough to press Eduardo's hand against the bullet hole and Eduardo can put pressure on it, feeling the blood oozing out around his fingers.

He must black out for a while because suddenly he's in a taxi and Mark is shouting something about his address which he manages to garble out—remembering to give the address of the new apartment not the old one which is still full of those giant snails.

One day, one day soon Eduardo is going to get around to tracking down giant-insect-guy and killing him because it's disgusting and the snail trails are impossible to get out of the carpet. All he'd have to do is follow the glistening ooze and he'd find the god awful machine that produces them. It would be far easier than tracking down a clone army all of whom look perfectly normal when seen on their own and he can't exactly put an ad in the paper asking for any information on the Winklevii twins.

Mark's hand is cool on his forehead and Eduardo can't see the laptop anywhere. Maybe it's on the floor. Mark is saying something but his lips are moving too fast for Eduardo to follow and then the taxi is stopping and Eduardo has to somehow make his legs work.

Hah. Legs. Legs legs legs. They wobble like jelly but he puts his weight on Mark's shoulders and Mark's here, Mark's in Eduardo's apartment block with the lift that smells of piss and the graffiti on all the walls. They take the piss elevator up to the fifth floor and in the blurred metal walls Mark looks like he's panicking and Eduardo looks awesome, like fucking Spiderman or something.

"Key?" Mark asks.

Oh. Door. Eduardo stares at it for a moment while his brain catches up with his eyes and then he reaches out and slams the heel of his hand onto the tiny knot of wood up and to the left of the handle.

The lock pops out and the door swings open. Eduardo should totally fix that, one day, except then he would have to carry a key as Spiderman and where would he put it? Pockets, he needs a suit with pockets.

Mark pushes blueprints and files off the sofa and drops Eduardo onto it instead. He's still talking about ambulances and paramedics and drugs. Drugs would be nice right now. Eduardo is totally pro-drugs.

Eduardo blinks, watching his ceiling swim in and out of focus like he's underwater. "I heal fast, just get the bullet out." He forces himself back into a vague alertness. "There's a box in the bathroom—" a hand flailed wildly in the right direction will have to be enough to convey the location. "With scalpels and tweezers."

Mark flees to the bathroom and returns with a wet cloth, a handful of scalpels in varying degrees of hygiene and a pair of tweezers which he drops onto the box beside the sofa, dragging it out so he can crouch between the tools and Eduardo with a look of panic. "I really don't think I can do this."

Eduardo scrabbles on the box for a scalpel, using it to cut the hole in his suit larger so Mark can dab gingerly at the blood around the bullet hole. He looks like he's about to throw up. "It's just like fixing a computer," Eduardo says, pushing the scalpel into Mark's unresisting hand. "Just don't touch any of the important parts and I'll be fine."

Mark's hand is shaking like crazy. "I'm really more of a software guy," he tries, but Eduardo is already closing his gloved hand on Mark's skin, positioning the scalpel in a good place to widen the cut.

He blacks out again. When he next opens his eyes Mark is holding the tweezers over the mess of a wound, his eyes screwed tight shut. "Just do it," Eduardo spits. The tweezers drop towards the wound and he passes out again but this time he opens his eyes to see Mark holding up the tweezers, a bullet clutched tight in the tips.

"Vodka," Eduardo bites out, waving a hand to the box which Mark tugs open, pulling out a bottle of supermarket spirits. Eduardo pours half the contents of the bottle on the wound and pushes up his mask to get the rest in his mouth.

Mark bounces on the carpet, running bloody hands through his hair. "What now? Does it need stitches? Should I call an ambulance?"

Eduardo nestles the remains of the bottle under his arm within easy reach and squeezes the edge of the wound together with one hand. "Now you can go. I will lie here and soon enough I'll be good as new, on the streets ready to save you tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that."

Mark reaches out with the cloth, touching awkwardly around Eduardo's fingers and only succeeding in getting more blood on Eduardo's chest. "I'm not leaving you. What if they come after you?"

Eduardo shakes his head weakly. "No one knows I'm here." He knows this because he only moved yesterday, out of the somewhat-shitty apartment he was in and into this very-shitty apartment. Eduardo is on a very slippery scale in terms of apartments and soon he'll just be in a box somewhere.

"What if they followed the cab?"

Oh. Yeah. Eduardo can't think of a good answer for that and all the reasons why it's a bad idea for him to have Mark Zuckerberg in his apartment are sort of being eclipsed right now by the holy-fucking-shit pain coming from the massive great bullet wound in his side.

"Can I use your laptop?" Mark asks, crossing to the computer on the desk and for a moment Eduardo panics because Mark will see his emails and his documents and—fuck—his sign in name is 'E.Saverin' how much more obvious can he be?

Then he realises his laptop is in its bag in his bedroom where he dropped it after coming back from the depositions yesterday; the computer Mark is inches away from touching is the one that has been sitting there ever since he took it from Dr Jones' lab. It's even still plugged into the tiny mechanical who-even-knows-what that was the last thing Dr Jones would ever build for him.

Eduardo lets himself relax, tugging the mask back over his chin. "Whatever you like."

"Can I—" Mark turns back to him. "You could take that off. I wouldn't... I won't tell anyone. If it would be more comfortable—I don't want to sit here while you suffocate or something."

Eduardo doesn't take his fingers away from the mask, holding it in place. "The mask stays," he says, too tired for reasons or warnings. "Use the computer, do whatever, I'm going to sleep."

Mark crosses over to him and crouches down, touching Eduardo's shoulder awkwardly with three fingers like he's read about human interaction but isn't really sure about the applications. "I'll be here when you wake up."

Eduardo closes his eyes.

Then

Eduardo called Christy at least fifty times on the way to the airport, so much so that the security man had to snatch his phone away from his ear and throw it into a tray so he could walk through the metal detector gate and grab it on the other side. This time he hadn't brought any bags with him—his girlfriend was crazy, and her spider powers were increasing at an incredible rate—Eduardo really had to get back as soon as possible.

He closed his eyes and reminded himself that they had done it. The company had money and offices and was going to be successful. The airline staff insisted that Eduardo turn his phone off during the flight. They didn't quite understand how serious Eduardo was when he said 'my girlfriend is crazy.'

When he landed he had no messages and there was an intern waiting with his name scrawled on a piece of paper. It wasn't Mark, but it was better than a taxi in the rain. Eduardo followed him through the airport, dialling on his phone with one hand.

"Who are you calling?" the intern asked.

Eduardo should probably know the guy's name. God, he really was distant from the company. Maybe he could convince Mark to start up a second office in New York, or talk a few supervillains into moving to California so he can fight them there. "My girlfriend," he said, listening to the dial tone.

The intern nodded as Eduardo tugged the phone away from his ear and hit redial. "Did you have a fight?"

He'd had to use the toilets in the airport to bandage his leg, wrapping it up until he was fairly sure he wouldn't start bleeding onto his pants and he was still limping now. "You have no idea."

The intern drove a mini, keeping religiously to the speed limit all the way through unfamiliar streets to a glass building surrounded by people carrying boxes and computer equipment.

It was pretty amazing. Larger than Eduardo had expected, with walls that were actually windows and open plan desks instead of cubicles. Mark was already set up—of course—typing code with headphones on and too engrossed to look up when Eduardo waved.

Sean looked up though, and actually smiled. He must've been in a really fucking good mood. Eduardo stepped out of sight behind a pillar and made a mental note to look out for bombs.

"Nice, isn't it?" the intern said, ushering Eduardo in through the front door. "Thiel found it, apparently it was a real steal in the current market."

Eduardo glanced at him. "You know about the current market?"

The intern grinned a little ruefully. "Well, no, I'm just here to write code."

"Wardo!" Dustin shouted, pushing back his chair and ignoring Sean's cry of 'you're writing code' to cross the floor and pull Eduardo into a bone crushing hug. "Look what Sean got us!"

The 'so please don't strangle him against a wall again' was left implied.

"It's amazing," Eduardo said, and found he was smiling for real. It felt like an accomplishment, like they had a real company and everything was finally going to start going right. It was potential and a company worth—hell, maybe Sean was right—a billion dollars. He loved it and he loved Peter Thiel and right at this moment he only hated Sean with the force of a thousand suns rather than a million.

That didn't mean he was lowering his guard. Sean was still working some angle here and Eduardo was still going to expose him, he was just going to do it in a way that meant they got to keep the office.

Eduardo's phone rang and he held up a hand to stop Dustin telling him all about the facilities while he answered. "Christy?" he said, without bothering to check the caller ID.

"I'm afraid not," said Dr Jones.

Eduardo's heart plummeted. "What's she done?"

Now

When he wakes up, the room is dark. Mark has turned on the lamp on the desk where he's working, but hasn't bothered with the main lights. It doesn't look like he's moved in the last five hours.

Eduardo stretches, wincing as he cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders back into place. He can feel his feet now, and it's somewhat upsetting that he regards that as a great achievement. He knows better than to expect Mark to notice him waking up, so take a few moments to check his wound. There's a little blood around it, but not too much; that suggests Mark cleaned it the last time he remembered to look around.

Eduardo touches his mask, but it's still in place and Mark is still here so he must have obeyed Eduardo's request for him not to look. "Hey," Eduardo says. Sitting up hurts, but he feels a whole lot less vulnerable.

Mark starts, turning in his seat as though he'd forgotten he wasn't alone. "Hey. Are you okay? Do you need help? Medication? An ambulance?"

Eduardo touches the hole tentatively. It's definitely smaller than it used to be. "I'm fine. Are you working on the site?"

Mark rubs the back of his neck with one hand. "No. I'd need the backups from the laptop that broke to even start recovering everything I lost. I sent a few emails—Dustin, my friend, to let him know what happened."

Eduardo wishes he could take off the mask and rub his itching eyes. "And that took you... five hours?" he asks, squinting at the clock on the wall that was there when he moved in and is precisely forty seven minutes wrong.

"No, I was—" he picks up the device that's been plugged into the laptop for weeks now. "You were working on this, I think? It was lying there and you were pretty close so I thought I'd take a look at the code."

Eduardo goes from groggy to alert in an instant, though standing up turns out to be a mistake because he stumbles and Mark has to catch him before he goes falling to the floor.

"Shit," Mark says. "I didn't realise it was a private project, I just thought I'd take a look and then I got involved. A lot of your code was far more bloated than it needed to be, I cut down on the memory needed pretty easily. Not that—I mean—you're a better coder than I would've thought, for a masked vigilante."

Eduardo falls into Mark's chair, staring at the screen full of letters and symbols that mean as little to him as the code of thefacebook did all that time ago. "It wasn't me," he says, before Mark can keep talking. "My friend—more like this guy I knew. It was the last thing he ever made for me." He taps his hand on the desk, staring at Mark's code. "I never even knew what it was for."

"Oh," Mark leans over him to pull up a second window with a map and a tiny pulsing red dot. "It's a tracking device, designed to be subtle. It incorporates a heat seeking element so it will automatically attach to a human if it can. It's actually really clever, just the code needed some work. I'm nearly finished, but I could still make it so much better if you would let me take it back to my room. I can make a few adjustments with some files on my laptop."

"You know I have no idea what you're talking about," Eduardo says absently, clicking through the map to watch the way the red pulse stays on the corner where his apartment is. "But yes, you can take it."

Mark hesitates for a moment, and then reaches over Eduardo's shoulder to pick it up. He pulls out the cord that connected the tracking device to the computer and slides it into his pocket. "Did he also make your -?" he says, touching his wrists to indicate the webshooters. Eduardo nods. "Must have been a really good friend," Mark says.

Eduardo closes his eyes. "Shouldn't you be rushing back to your laptop to see what you can save from the alleyway?" His side is aching; he's not as healed as he thought he was and all this rushing about isn't helping.

"I saved the most important thing," Mark says softly, which means he has the laptop's hard drive secreted in one of his many pockets. Eduardo pushes himself up, leaning on the desk to stop himself stumbling.

"I need to lie down," he says, looking across to the bedroom door. It seems a stupidly long way away until Mark ducks under his arm to drag him across.

"The bed's through here?" he asks.

Eduardo's suits are in the wardrobe and his laptop is on the floor in a bag filled with paperwork and he can't quite bring himself to care because he's falling onto the bed, smearing blood on his only sheets. He closes his fingers on Mark's wrist, which keeps him close and away from all the things that would give Eduardo away. "You should sleep too," he says, pulling Mark onto the bed beside him. "Long day."

Mark lies down. He is slightly closer than is really necessary but Eduardo is cold and Mark is warm so the arrangement works. "Why do you live here?" Mark asks.

Eduardo closes his eyes. "Parents cut me off, haven't got time for a job. It's amazing how quickly money goes when there's no more coming in."

"Why did they cut you off?"

"Made some bad decisions," Eduardo says. "It's fine, I should be coming into some funds soon. They'll keep me going for a while."

Just a bit longer and then he'll have plenty of capital, and an income from the stock. Some of it will go right away since this apartment could be compromised now and he's quite like the next one to have running water. He pulls Mark's warmth closer, and Mark doesn't protest.

"I hope you can get something off that hard drive," Eduardo murmurs, already half asleep.

"What?"

"That you saved from the alley. The most important thing."

"Oh." Mark's hand is on Eduardo's waist. It isn't exactly unpleasant. "Yeah. I hope it works out."

Then

Eduardo should have read the contracts properly but his mind was so full of 'eight school buses, one more every hour, says they're rigged to explode' that he could barely even concentrate on what the lawyers were telling him. He vaguely caught some details about things he'd covered them in class.

"How many shares?" he asked, already scrawling his name on one of the documents.

The number was crazy-high and the percentage wasn't much better. "34.4%, now why the increase from the original 30%?"

Eduardo signed his name on the second sheet of paper. "You need to dilute the shares to allow for new investors."

The man smiled a self-satisfied smile and if Eduardo was in costume he wouldn't hesitate before breaking the guy's nose. Lawyers, supervillains, they were all the same. "I love working with business majors."

"Economics," Eduardo corrected, signing the third piece of paper.

"Here, and here," the man said, pointing to other points on the paperwork. "Mark's already diluted his shares to 51%."

Eduardo looked up, pen still in his hand but no longer writing anything. "Mark needs to be protected," he said, and for a moment the guy just looked at him as though he were crazy. Eduardo had to tell someone though and just because all lawyers looked evil, that didn't mean they were. "He doesn't care about money but he cares about the company and he has to keep it. He needs to be protected."

Over Eduardo's shoulder, Sean was drinking champagne straight from the bottle. Eduardo was going to take him down. The very moment he made a mistake Eduardo was going to beat him to within an inch of his life and have him locked up for the rest of forever. He should stay, stay to work out Sean's plan and foil it, stay to protect Mark because Mark needed protecting and if he lost Facebook now it would break him.

But he couldn't.

Eight school buses. Rigged to blow.

He had to go.

Eduardo scrawled his name on the last dotted line and turned to run back to the airport.

Mark was standing in the doorway. "You signed them?" he asked, as though Eduardo might not have done.

Eduardo grinned at him, letting the reality of what he had just done sinking in. They had sponsorship. Sponsorship and an office and Eduardo also had the name of the guy who owns 7% of the company to investigate the moment he got back to New York, just in case Sean was using Peter Thiel as a henchmen in his evil plans. "I have to get back to New York, could you find that intern for me?"

Mark's eyes dropped to the floor, his hands resting in the pocket of his hoodie. "I can drive you."

Sean watched them leave from across the room, his eyes narrowed. Thankfully he didn't comment; Dustin might pop if Eduardo started strangling Sean again. Mark still drove the same car he always had, the one that needed you to turn the key three times before it would start and sounded as though it could break down at any moment.

"It's not too late," Mark said, pulling out into the traffic. "For you to stay in California, I mean."

Eduardo looked out at the lights outside the window. There was probably crime in California, there was definitely at least one supervillain but it was nothing like the same scale.

Eight school buses.

"I have to get back. I have some important business to take care of."

"Oh." Mark stared down at the steering wheel and Eduardo was too distracted worrying about bomb timers and where Christy might be to bother trying to read the expression on his friend's face.

"You've got to come back," Mark said, as though he was following a script. "Peter wants to throw us a party for a million members. You have to come back for it."

Eduardo pressed his forehead to the glass. "A million members. Remember the algorithm on the window at Kirkland?"

Mark pulled up outside the airport and didn't look at him. "Yeah."

"I'll be there," Eduardo promised. He climbed out of the car and watched Mark drive away without a word.

It was raining.

Now

Eduardo wakes up. His side is sore, his mouth tastes of feet and he's sharing a bed with a sleeping Mark Zuckerberg.

He pushes the mask up with one hand, taking in deep breaths of clean air. He runs his fingers down his side to find that his wound has mostly scabbed over. It should heal soon if he doesn't do anything too strenuous.

The third thing is more of a problem. One of Mark's arms is resting on Eduardo's side and Eduardo's fingers are gripped tight on Mark's wrist. He can vaguely remember there being some reason for this, though what it actually was escapes him. "Mark? Hey, Mark?" He remembers—a moment too late—to disguise his voice, but Mark isn't waking up anyway and slowly he eases back, loosening his grip and slipping out from under Mark's arm.

Mark doesn't stir. Eduardo picks up his laptop bag, his wallet, anything that could have his name on and sticks them in the safe at the top of the wardrobe. Sure, Mark could conceivably look through Eduardo's suits and recognise the ones he'd worn for the depositions but Eduardo highly doubts Mark was ever focused enough to notice his clothing.

In the kitchen he starts a pot of coffee brewing and flicks on the police scanner. There's a drugs bust downtown, but they have enough cops on it and he can't move too fast or his side will split open again. The police can have that one.

He takes a shower, letting the nearly-hot water wash away the grime from the alley and the blood. There's blood on his hands, his hair, trickling down to his legs and he watches the water running down the plughole until it flows clean.

The bloody and cut up costume goes in the bin, though he salvages the gloves, boots and mask, dropping them on the side. The last thing Eduardo wants to do is put a dirty suit back on so he pulls out jeans and an old hoodie, pulling the mask on and the hood up over it before stepping out into the main room.

He pours himself a mug of coffee, drinks it, then pours himself another, mask rolled up to just below his eyes.

"Spiderman?"

Eduardo reaches up to tug his mask back down before turning to see Mark standing in the doorway in his rumpled T-shirt and shorts. "You should go," he says. "I have things to do, people who are not you to save." He holds a second mug out and Mark takes it.

"You should be resting."

Resting would be amazing. Eduardo dreams of resting. "Crime doesn't sleep, Mark. And now they know where I live so I need to find a new apartment, pay the last month's rent on this place. Not all superheroes are billionaires, you know."

Mark inhales his coffee and passes the mug back to Eduardo for a refill. "The depositions are over," he says, slowly. "Well, one is and the other is finishing today when I pay up."

"You're paying the Winklevii?" Eduardo says, before he can think it through.

Mark looks a tiny bit pleased. "You watched that one too? Yeah, I'm paying them. I have the money, it'll get them off my back." He stares at is empty mug until Eduardo refills it again. "With them both over, there's no reason for me to stay in New York."

Eduardo hadn't thought that far ahead; in his mind Mark had become this constant that he was going to have to keep saving forever. "Oh," he says.

Mark taps his fingers on the mug. "I'm going back to California at the end of the week."

Eduardo forces his mind to catch up before he can say 'oh' again. "I guess I'll have to go back to saving the people who aren't billionaires. There goes my exciting brush with the high life."

"Whoever's after me," Mark says. "We know they can control robots, giant slugs, trolls and clone armies."

Eduardo sighs. "I said, I know who's after you and they only control the clones. They've been subcontracting."

"What if they follow me to California?"

Oh. Eduardo pushes his mask up a little so he can take a long drink of coffee. "They won't follow you. They've known where you live for years but they wanted to take me out first so I can't go sweeping in to rescue you. Also they're pissed that I got all these powers without any effort."

"And me?"

"They just really, really hate you."

Mark looks down at his mug. "So they'll come after you again? After I'm gone? What if they get you?"

"Well, then they'll probably come to California. You should hire a bodyguard."

"What if we take them out before I leave?"

If Eduardo didn't have super-sticky palms he would have dropped the mug. "There is no we, Mark. There is you and your company; there is me and my life. I saved you because it's what I do and that's the end of it. You should leave."

Mark hesitates for a moment then reaches out to put the mug back on the side. "Maybe I'll see you again before I go?"

"I hope not."

Then

Christy answered her phone for the first time when Eduardo stepped out of the airport. He wondered if she was watching, or if she had just hired someone else to keep an eye on him. "Chris?"

"Boom," she said and he could hear the explosion echoing down the line.

"Christy, please, you are better than this. Just tell me where you are and we can talk. You have the webshooters, you have the upper hand just let me help—"

"Boom."

He shuddered at the second explosion.

"Brooklyn Bridge. Come alone." She hung up.

Eduardo ran for the taxis, pushing aside a whole queue of people to leap in the back of one ready to pull away. "Brooklyn Bridge, drive like your fucking life depends on it."

There must've been a seriously scary expression on his face, because the driver didn't so much as hesitate. He just pulled out immediately and zipped through the lanes like traffic was something that happened to other people.

"I'll pay you eight hundred bucks and won't kill you while you sleep if you don't mention this to anyone," Eduardo said, tugging out the mask and slipping it over his head, leaving his suit on the back seat of the cab. Sometimes he could use his shitty publicity to advantage. "Wait," he said suddenly. "There's somewhere I need to go first."

Part 3

Boy Falls From the Sky 3/3

2011-09-04T14:57:28Z

Fandom: TSN
Pairing: Eduardo/Christy, Mark/Eduardo

Part 2

Now

Eduardo watches Mark write a cheque to the Winklevii, resisting the urge to break through the window and beat up the latest pair of Winklevii clones Divya has chosen as his personal guard.

He follows Mark home, sitting on the balcony of Mark's new hotel room as Mark checks his plane tickets, does some work on Facebook and plays around with the tracker device.

When Mark goes to bed, Eduardo goes home.

Then

The road was blocked off half a mile from the bridge. There was a barricade of police cars keeping people away and beyond that was a stack of civilian cars, piled like bricks in a wall, held together precariously by webbing and lurching violently with every breeze. Some of them still had people trapped inside.

Eduardo left his clothes in the back of the cab and ran towards the chaos, keeping to the shadows so the police didn't see him and start shooting. There was one cop at the side, holding his gun in shaking hands. Eduardo climbed up the wall silently, jumping off and spinning to pin the man against his own cop car, and pressed a gloved hand over the man's mouth. "If you try to call out," he warned. "I will knock you out. I'm here to help."

The cop nodded, eyes wide and scared. Eduardo pulled his hand away. "How are you here?" the man asked. "If you're here, who's on the bridge?"

Eduardo closed his eyes and counted to five until the urge to hit something—anything—faded slightly. "Has she been saying she's me?" he demanded. "Did none of you think that Spiderman was unlikely to be a girl?"

The cop looked over Eduardo's shoulder as though hoping someone else might come along as any moment to rescue him. "Um," he said. "She has your powers and she's wearing the same kind of costume and there are webs all over the buses."

"See, that's where you should have found a problem, because I don't kidnap school buses because I'm not a crazed supervillain." There was the sound of another explosion from the bridge. He had to be quicker. "Tell me the situation. She's already blown up two buses?"

The man swallowed. "Three, we think, but none of them had people in. There's a hostage negotiator trying to talk to her but she doesn't seem to be listening."

Eduardo nodded absently. "Yeah, that sounds like Christy."

The cop's eyes widened. "You know her?"

Something else exploded, and dust rained down on them over the car-barricade. "She's my girlfriend," Eduardo said, before he slammed the cop's head into the car, knocking him unconscious. He climbed over the top of the police car and started scaling the pile of civilian cars.

"You there!" A second police officer shouted through a megaphone. "You on the barricade, get down and get back before someone gets hurt."

Great, Eduardo thought as the police fired a warning shot over his head and a car hit the pile from the other side, sending it tumbling like jenga. Way to go telling her where I am. He jumped from car to car, staying away from the falling vehicles as best he could before diving forward through a gap and landing in a roll on the far side.

Christy was standing in the centre of the bridge, surrounded by five school buses all locked up with webbing and full of children; their faces could just be seen, pressed against the window in various expressions of panic. Christy was wearing a black costume with identical markings to Spiderman's own design but in white, and instead of a full face mask she only wore a plain black band around her eyes.

"Hello Spiderman," she said into a police megaphone. "Nice of you to finally join us."

"Christy!" Eduardo shouted, over the noise of screaming children, the police negotiator and the burning husks of school buses scattered around him. "Christy, you have to listen to me!"

"How about you listen to me for a change? How about you pay attention to me? I do all this and you're still only here for these children, still finding strangers more important than your own fucking girlfriend."

Eduardo wondered if normal couples could fight without anything exploding. "Okay, okay, so how about you let all these people go and then we can head home and talk? Just you and me."

"Hah. Like we'll even get through the door before you have to go running off to a mugging or a hostage situation or to Mark back in Cali-fucking-fornia. Why is it that instead of dating you I seem to be dating Spiderman, a website, an asshole and an entire fucking city? Everyone is more important than me, aren't they? Every single fucking person."

"Miss Spiderman," the hostage negotiator shouted, clearly not knowing any better than to push into the middle of a couple arguing. "Perhaps you and your partner could move this argument elsewhere."

Eduardo and Christy both turned to him at the same time. "Shut up," Christy said. "And throw him your megaphone, I can't hear him properly over all the sirens."

"This megaphone is police property and I can't—

Christy kicked one of the buses, sending it through the side of the bridge and plummeting towards the water below. The megaphone landed at Eduardo's feet, and Christy shot out three webs to catch the bus inches above the waterline. "Much better."

Eduardo raised his megaphone slowly. "Pull the bus back up, Christy. Pull the bus back up and then we can talk."

Christy looked at him, then kicked a second bus off the other side of the bridge, catching that one too and transferring the webs across to one hand. "You know," she said. "These are all pretty heavy. I think I may drop one at any moment. Maybe you should shoot some more webs to help me out, I think it would make you a pretty terrible superhero if you didn't. It would be almost like you were my accomplice."

Eduardo could feel the stares of all the police watching turn on him. Under the gloves, his webbing gloop was sticking to his sleeves and getting all over his hands. It was no use at all.

"Spiderman," a child screamed from one of the buses. "Save us!"

"Yeah Spiderman," Christy said into her megaphone, bouncing the buses up and down. "Save them."

Christy was holding up two buses in one hand which meant that in spite of her claims that they were heavy, she was stronger than Eduardo.

"What are you waiting for?" the negotiator shouted.

Eduardo spun on his heel and wished looks could kill. "How about I go stand up there yelling inane shit and you save the children? Does that sound like a plan? No? Okay, so shut up and let me think." He turned back to Christy. "Okay, you've got what you wanted. You have my complete, undivided attention. What happens now?"

Christy sat on the bonnet of an abandoned car. "Now you can tell me the truth about you and Mark. If I believe you, the children are safe. If I think you're lying, they go in the river."

Eduardo blinked, for a moment convinced that he'd heard wrong. "You have blown up three buses, taken five more captive with their passengers and you are going to kill fifty children just to find out if I cheated on you with Mark?"

"That's not a no."

"I did not cheat on you with Mark. I have never cheated on with you anyone. Spiderman's relationship status is single because I did not set up Spiderman's facebook page. Mark is incapable of being interested in an actual human being and I think he hates me. You, Christy, you are my girlfriend and I am worried about you. I went to California to sort out our finances for the future so that we could keep the apartment and keep fighting crime and I did not sleep with anyone. I am sorry I ignored your forty seven texts but I was a little busy trying to stop Mark from going into business with a supervillain." He took a step forward, finally remembering to breath. "Now can you please pull the buses up so we can go home."

Christy looked at him for a long moment. "I don't believe you."

Eduardo snatched at the nearest car and threw it at her head, running after is as fast as he could. When she ducked to avoid it the webs slipped through her fingers—Eduardo threw himself forward into the gap and reached out his fingertips to just grasp the very ends of the webbing.

The buses kept falling, naturally. Eduardo was pulled right to the edge of the bridge and had to brace his legs against the concrete.

He ducked on instinct and a moment later the same car went flying back over his head, spinning past the suspension cables and down into the river. It only just missed the boat that was working its way ever so slowly down the waterway to get underneath the two suspended buses. Eduardo could feel his arms being slowly pulled out of their sockets, his legs straining against the concrete sidewalk.

"Why don't you just admit it?" Christy shouted as Eduardo ducked a second car. "You like Mark, you like him more than me, he's better in bed than me. Are you ashamed?"

Eduardo gritted his teeth, watching the boat inch underneath the bus. The driver raised one hand to make an 'are you okay' gesture. If Eduardo had any free hands, he would've made a rather less polite reply.

"See, I think you were just using me. You wanted some nice normal life to come back to in New York and you used me to get money for the apartment and for food."

The driver held up one hand flat then waved down. Eduardo didn't waste time analysing what it could possibly mean; he dropped the lower bus directly onto the deck, waited a moment for the boat to steady and then dropped the second one. It landed half on top of the first then fell on its side on the deck.

Christy's foot caught Eduardo around the back of the head and sent him flying into one of the other buses, denting the side and throwing a group of children into their neighbours. He couldn't feel his arms, the soles of his shoes were worn through and Christy was coming after him, tossing the megaphone off the side of the bridge. "Is that it, Eduardo? Am I your pathetic attempt at a normal life?"

Eduardo curled up, reaching into his left boot. "I am Spiderman," he bit out. "There is nothing normal about my life." Then he flipped to his feet and slammed his fist towards her face. Christy's hand closed around his fist and again threw Eduardo toward one of the other buses. However, this time he managed to flip around in the air and Eduardo's hand came out of his boot with a syringe clutched tight in it.

"What's that?" Christy demanded. "Is that from the box in your apartment that Dr Jones gave you? Is it a performance enhancer?" She shot a web out and tugged the syringe from his outstretched hand. "Or adrenaline? I know he was working on something for you. I thought I destroyed it all but I suppose if one vial escaped it couldn't hurt to try."

"Don't," Eduardo said.

Christy snorted at him and pressed the needle into her arm, pushed the plunger down and sent the liquid into her skin. "So what is it?" she asked, tossing the spent syringe to the side. "What was he working on?"

Eduardo let himself drop off the edge of the bus, his feet tangling up beneath him to send him sprawling to his knees. "I took that at the same time as the gloves and webshooters," he explained, slowly as he got his breath back. "Back when he still didn't know if I was in this for the long term." He pushed himself slowly back onto his feet, leaning heavily on the bus for support. "He gave me the shooters to help me fight crime, and that vial in case I ever decided to give up." He almost wished she could see his smile. "It was the cure."

Christy's eyes widened, her mouth falling open as she scrabbled at her arm, squeezing the skin as though she could somehow force it out. "You can't do this to me!" she screamed. She tried to fire web at him but could only manage short limp strands that faded out quickly and landed like worms on the tarmac before they could reach him. "I'm your girlfriend, you can't treat me like this!"

Eduardo limped over to her, blocked her two punches easily then knocked her to the ground. He tugged the mask off her face, held her down with one hand and her kicks were barely noticeable landing on his back. "You are seriously crazy, Chris. Like, to the point of being actually unwell and I think you should mention that to your lawyer because you are going to need a lawyer when I let the police through the barrier and they come to arrest you."

He reached up to tug his mask off his face so she could see his expression very clearly. "You are going to prison, Chris. You are going for a long time and you won't have powers or any way to escape." Eduardo crouched over her, tore her sleeves up and retrieved his webshooters from her wrists, where the last drips of web were drying up on her skin. "Also, I'm breaking up with you."

Now

Mark is sitting in the corner of the bank vault, typing quickly on a borrowed laptop. He looks up when Eduardo smashes the door open with one of the rhino/human hybrid's heads and doesn't bother to hide his smile. "I thought I'd see you again."

Eduardo tosses rhino-boy aside and stalks into the vault, grabbing Mark and flinging him across his shoulders. "If you got yourself kidnapped just so you could see me again before you left, I swear to God I will kill you myself."

"It wasn't intentional," Mark says, closing the laptop and pushing it between them as Eduardo turns and storms out of the bank. "It just happens."

"What do we do with these?" asks a very nervous looking bank clerk, kicking the unconscious body of a rhinoboy that's blocking the doorway.

Eduardo kicks out one of the glass windows. "Call the police," he offers. "Burn it as an offering to the god of rhinos. See if I care." He fires a web at the opposite rooftop and swings until he reaches Mark's balcony. "Does anyone know you're here?" he asks, as Mark opens the unlocked balcony door to step inside.

Mark shrugs. "No one's kidnapped me from here yet. Do you want a beer?"

Eduardo should go and see if anyone else needs to be saved. He ducks inside. "Okay."

"I was thinking," Mark says, holding out an open bottle. "About the people who are after us."

Eduardo takes a long drink from his beer. "You don't need to think about them. I'll keep fighting them and maybe one day I'll find their hide out and blow up that damn cloning machine and then they'll be too scared of actually dying to attack either of us anymore."

"But it doesn't have to be one day," Mark says. "It could be today. People keep kidnapping me and you keep interrupting them before they can get me to their final destination. If you just wait until I get there then you'll know where their hideout is and you can go swooping in to rescue me."

Eduardo takes another drink. "If they see me following, they'll just lead a wild goose chase until they can get me off their tail and then you'll end up in their base with no idea where you are and then they'll kill you without anyone being any the wiser." Mark doesn't look particularly terrified by this. "They'll steal Facebook first," Eduardo snaps.

Mark hesitates, but presses on. "You wouldn't have to follow." He holds up his wrist where he's wearing a watch Eduardo doesn't recognise. "Your tracking device, I planted it in here. You just follow the signal right to me, do your superhero thing and we're both free to—you know."

"Go our separate ways and never see each other again," Eduardo provides. It does sound like a nice conclusion, but the plan is stupid and risky. "Do you know what would happen if Facebook's CEO got killed?"

Mark shrugs, staring down at the cap of his still sealed beer. "Half my shares and the company go to Dustin, god help them; and the other half go to you in the hope that you'll buy yourself somewhere halfway decent to live."

Eduardo stares at him for a long moment, then drains his beer. He is far too sober for this conversation. "You're giving half your shares to a guy in a fucking mask? You really don't have any friends, do you. No. The answer is no. You're not putting yourself in danger, I'm not letting you risk it. I'll sit here all night if I have to and drive you to the airport tomorrow myself."

Mark nods slowly. "I thought you might say that," he says. "That's why I brought you in here."

"What, so you could spend the whole night trying to convince me to change my mind?"

"Oh," Mark says, in the tones of one who hadn't considered that previously but is now realising it would have been a good idea. "No, I drugged your beer."

Eduardo stares down at the dregs of his beer. "You fucking shit—" he manages, before he loses control of his legs and crumples to the floor. The bottle slides out of his hand, rolling across the floor.

Mark crouches down, pressing a tiny computer into his hand. "You can track me on this. I don't know how long the drugs will last, the internet had no idea about the effect they'd have on Spiderman so you should probably come as soon as you wake up." He bounces on his toes for a moment. "I don't actually want to die so, uh, please come?"

Eduardo can see Mark's feet as he stands up and walks away but can't actually move to do anything about it other than tighten his fingers around the computer in his hand.

The door swings shut on Mark's flip-flops.

Eduardo swears loudly and loses consciousness.

Then

Eduardo slept on the plane, the new airport security safe webshooters pinching his wrists, and arrived in California around midnight. He caught a cab to Clarium Capital, used his improved night vision as a guide when climbing up the 80 storey building.

They had a highly advanced alarm system that he'd memorised the schematics of before coming, but it was all designed to stop people forcing the windows or doors. On the tenth floor a janitor had left the window open—presumably thinking no one would be able to climb that high. Eduardo rested in the hallway, folding his trousers, shirt and jacket into the rucksack he'd taken on the plane and pulled on the mask, gloves and boots instead.

Peter Thiel's office was on the thirtieth floor. Eduardo took the elevator up and used a credit card from his wallet to pry open the office door. No alarms sounded.

He had clearly been over-thinking this particular adventure, or simply over-estimating the amount of effort Sean would put into keeping his nefarious plans a secret.

Of course, Eduardo had long suspected Thiel and Sean were working together. All he had to do now was go through Thiel's papers until he found the Plot.

He looked around the office; it was filled with stacks of papers, bulging folders and filing cabinets. Eduardo cracked his knuckles and started reading.

Now

Eduardo wakes up slowly. For a moment he's groggy, can't think where he is or how he got there. Then his fingers tighten on the tiny computer in his hand and his eyes blink away the blur to see the bottom of the drugged beer bottle where it rolled across the floor.

He's alert in an instant, hitting any buttons on the computer until the screen lights up and shows him a map of who-fucking-knows-where with a tiny blinking red dot that is presumably Mark that asshole.

Eduardo should leave him there. He should throw this fucking computer in the nearest bin and leave Mark to get what he deserves. Dustin can take over Facebook and turn it into a giant farmyard for all Eduardo cares and Eduardo will get Mark's shares which would be enough to retire on. He could hire a fucking army of superheroes to protect New York with Mark's Facebook shares.

Mark left Spiderman his Facebook shares. He didn't leave them to Peter—that jerk—or Sean—that asshole. He didn't even cut his losses and leave all of them to Dustin to spend on cakes and ponies.

He left them to Spiderman, because Spiderman lives in a shit apartment and is running out of money and saves people all day every day for no reward. Because Spiderman saved Mark and kept watch over him and hung out with him, drank his beer and let him talk.

It had always taken so much effort to be Mark's friend, but Eduardo had never stopped trying.

He looks down at the computer in his hand. Zoomed out, it pinpoints Mark's location in the downtown warehouse district.

"Fuck," Eduardo says loudly, then throws himself off the edge of the balcony.

Then

Peter Thiel arrived at nine, when Eduardo's eyes were blurring and his back was aching from sitting in one position for hours going over numbers like he hadn't had to since revising for his fucking economics finals.

Thiel's eyes widened when he saw Spiderman spinning in his office chair reading a sheet of figures, but to his credit he didn't flinch. "Suzanne," he called, leaning back out. "Why is there a—"

Eduardo shot two feet of webbing slamming fast as a bullet into the wall beside his head, and raised one finger to his mask in the international gesture for 'shut up.'

"Never mind," Thiel finished. "Fetch me some coffee, would you?" He stepped into the office, letting the door swing shut. He turned back to Eduardo. "Spiderman," he said. "I thought New York street crime was your speciality."

He was definitely more henchman material. Eduardo lifted the sheet of paper he was reading, turning it around so Thiel could see it. "This was right next to your shredder," he commented. "Along with this whole pile here. Do you know what this is?"

Thiel swallowed. "It looks like records of financial dealings between this company and some of its clients. Of course, we respect our clients privacy but if you are conducting an investigation into any of them we will do our best to—"

Eduardo shot webbing over his other shoulder. "This is all the evidence of various embezzlement scams you've been running as the head of this company. Also your plans for the Case Equity investment into Facebook." Eduardo placed the page on top of the small pile. "You really thought you could steal that much money without anyone noticing?"

Thiel took half a step forward. "This is ludicrous. If you don't get out of my office right now I will be forced to call the—"

Eduardo used the chair as a springboard to leap forward and pin Thiel up against the wall with one arm so that the man's feet dangled five inches off the floor. "Sean Parker," Eduardo threw at him. "You put the money back where it should be, keep Facebook's finances secure and tell me how Sean Parker is involved, I'll let you go. I know all your plans, if a single cent goes missing from any of your companies in future I will know about it and don't even think you can hide from me."

Thiel was trembling now, eyes wide and darting and he was scared enough to be listening. "I'll cut you in," he said. "Seventy-thirty and we'll get away clean, I promise."

Eduardo slammed him against the wall hard enough that the shelves rattled. "Sean Parker," he said again. "Tell me everything."

Thiel stared at him for a long moment. "Sean Parker, as in, president of Facebook Sean Parker?"

Eduardo threw him across the room. "Sean Parker, as in asshole Sean Parker; as in evil bastard Sean Parker; as in conspiring with you somehow Sean fucking Parker." He flicked the lock on the door just as someone tried the handle from the other side. "You will tell me every single thing he has told you, everything he told you to do, anything you know about his plans."

"Mr Thiel?" the assistant shouted from the other side of the door. "Are you alright?"

Thiel shook his head desperately as Eduardo stalked closer. "There's nothing, I visit occasionally. He sets up meetings, he has ideas for the site, he owns seven percent of the company, that's it I swear. Everything... less than legitimate is on that pile and it's done, I'm done, please don't kill me."

Eduardo snatched up the pile, riffling through it for the millionth time but it still didn't contain Sean's name or references to anyone who might be connected to him. "Sean isn't using you? You're not working for Sean?"

"I swear, I swear, cross my heart and hope to die. Please, I have a family."

Eduardo pulled his rucksack close with one foot, shoving the papers in behind his clothes. "If I find out you're lying to me, I will come back. If you touch anyone else's money, I will come back. Do you understand?"

The door was shaking on its hinges, letting out a loud thud as something heavy hit it from behind. "Mr Thiel? Mr Thiel!"

"I understand," Thiel stammered, cradling his arm as though it might be broken. "No lies, I swear. No more scams, no more nothing. God, you're supposed to be a superhero, how the fuck do you know about this."

"I'm an economics major," Eduardo said, smashing the window with a coat rack. "Bitch." He leapt out as the door splintered into fragments, tugging the bag over his shoulders as he swung through the streets.

He needed a drink. A drink, food, and possibly a long sleep before he had to change and head on to the Facebook offices and all he'd managed to ascertain was that Thiel wasn't in league with Sean.

Which obviously begged the question 'who was?'

Now

Eduardo smashes through the roof level window of the warehouse Mark's tiny red blip has led him to and lands in a crouch on a rough concrete floor in the middle of a crowd of at least three hundred Winklevii clones.

He somersaults over three punches and a kick and decides that in future he will scope out all hostage situations beforehand. "Mark?" he shouts, staying in the air by jumping from Winklevii head to Winklevii punch. "Mark, are you in here?"

"Spiderman?" comes a shout and Eduardo spins around to see Mark chained to a wall at the far end of the warehouse. There are at least two hundred Winklevii between the two of them. "The clones are Winklevii," Mark shouts. "As in, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. And the evil mastermind behind the whole thing is—"

"Divya Narendra," Eduardo finishes as he fires a web up vertically so he can hang onto the bottom of it and stay two meters above the hoard of Winklevii clones. "I told you I knew."

Something closes on his foot and he looks down to see the clones stacking themselves on top of each other to reach him. He slams one boot into his assailant's face and shimmies further up the web, swaying from side to side in an attempt to get a swing going.

"You are an idiot, by the way," he shouts to Mark. "And I hate you and I seriously considered not coming." He has enough of a swing to fire another web and leap for it, getting him further across the warehouse toward Mark and sending the Winklevii pile topping as they try to lean after him.

"This was a stupid plan," Eduardo continues, "and we are both going to be killed and it will be all your fault." He swings again, trying to get higher on the next web because the Winklevii up ahead are getting the idea and starting to pile up in preparation. "Are you hurt?"

"No," Mark says. "They want me to sign a contract giving them all rights to Facebook. They want to rename it Connect-2-U. Obviously I said over my dead body."

"However," says Divya, stepping out onto a raised platform at the edge of the building flanked by a host of five Winklevii. "We thought Mark's dead body would be entirely inconvenient." He makes a gesture and one of the Winklevii pulls out a gun. Eduardo instinctively curls into a ball to present a smaller target but the shot misses him entirely.

For a moment he thinks he just got incredibly lucky.

Then he falls, the useless half of web falling from his hand as the Winklevii snatch at his arms and legs, holding them out of the way so all he can do is struggle and his webs shoot out through the crowd to hit the wall or the floor. The Winklevii holding the gun re-aims, this time making no secret of the fact that the barrel is pointing directly at Eduardo's struggling chest.

"So, Mark," Divya says. "Sign that contract or your good friend Spiderman will get a bullet right through that masked head of his."

"I settled, I gave you your money," Mark shouts. "You guys just have no idea when to let something go, do you?"

The first bullet lodges in Eduardo's leg and he has to fight the desire to cry out. He can feel blood pooling on his suit and the bullet is pressing in his flesh stopping the wound from closing so he can't kick with that leg, can't put his weight on it.

"Tell you what, Divya," Eduardo shouts through gritted teeth. "You let me go, I'll get you your signature and then I'll kill Mark for you. I'll even take my mask off to do it. That should appeal to your sense of the dramatic."

Mark is staring at him, as though waiting for some sign that Eduardo is lying.

Divya lowers his signalling arm slowly, taking half a step closer to the edge of the balcony. "Aren't you supposed to be the hero of this story?"

The grips on his arms are loosening. "Don't you read my press?" Eduardo asks, forcing his voice to stay casual. "Anyway, you of all people know I have reasons to hate Mark Zuckerberg. If someone I hated was in trouble, I wouldn't save them."

Mark's head jerks back up, his eyes finding Eduardo's face in an instant, the unspoken question etched into every line of his face.

Divya waves a hand and the Winklevii release Eduardo, letting him get to his feet and stretch out his arms. "And why should I trust you?" he asks, coolly.

Eduardo swallows. "You have your sniper pointing a gun at my head," he says. "Worst comes to worst, you kill both of us. It can't be that different to your original plan."

In the quiet of three hundred clones breathing in perfect unison, Eduardo can hear Mark's chains clinking and Divya's fingers tapping a slow, regular rhythm on the rail of the balcony. "Fine," he says, after a long moment. "If you can get him to sign the contract, he's yours to kill. If you can't, I'll shoot you both. How does that sound?"

The Winklevii are parting between Eduardo and Mark like a sea and Eduardo limps between them, horribly aware that the exit is behind him and he's moving further and further from his way out.

Mark's feet are chained level with his head. Eduardo looks up to see the bottom of Mark's flip-flops and the hems of his cargo shorts.

He shoots a web straight up and starts to climb slowly.

"Whatever I've done to make you hate me," Mark says. "I'm sorry."

Eduardo swings upside down, putting his wounded leg level with Mark's free hand. "You're just saying that so I won't kill you. Sign the contract."

Mark's mouth curves into a half-grin. "You're not going to kill me," he says, scrawling something across the bottom of the piece of paper.

Behind them, Divya claps his hands together in delight. "If I didn't hate you so much, Spiderman, I might suggest we go into business together."

"How do you know?" Eduardo asks Mark. He released the web with one hand to reach for the bottom of his mask, rolling it up slowly over his chin.

Mark's fingers press against the blood on Eduardo's leg, sliding into the bloody hole. "You came," he says, leaning as far forward as the chains allow to press his lips against Eduardo's.

The angle is surreal—what with Mark being chained to a wall and Eduardo being upside-down—but Mark's lips are warm and soft against Eduardo's own, and as they kiss the bullet that had been in Eduardo's leg falls from Mark fingers to the floor. The kiss breaks slowly, leaving Mark grinning an idiotic grin while his fingers are covered in Eduardo's blood and Eduardo thinks he might be grinning just as stupidly back.

Because this is Mark and it will never work and they're surrounded by three hundred evil clones, and Mark as just signed over Facebook and they're both about to die.

"Wouldn't be much of a hero if I didn't," Eduardo says as all hell breaks loose.

Then

The lawyer—the same lawyer as before, Eduardo remembered—placed the contracts in front of him and Eduardo had been about to laugh before he realised that nobody else was. No one had so much as made eye contact, not even the lawyer who pushed his pen across the table then stood back so Eduardo could read.

He was shaking by the end of the first page, by the time he'd scanned the second he felt sick. He could see his father's face, could hear what he would say and was saying it all over and over in his own head. How could you be so stupid? Don't you think? Call yourself a businessman, you're not fit to run a hot dog stand.

"What is this?" something of Spiderman must've echoed in his voice because the lawyer actually took half a step back, staring at the table as though it might leap up to protect him.

"Well, as you know we had some new investors—"

Eduardo raised the contract, inches away from pinning the lawyer against the wall and punching him to within an inch of his fucking life. "What is this?"

The lawyer gulped, glancing over Eduardo's shoulder.

Eduardo wanted to blame Sean, he was burning to blame Sean but Mark. Mark must have approved this. Mark was CEO and all decisions like this would have had to go through him. Eduardo wanted to scream, to hit something, to pummel some supervillain into the ground until he couldn't even think anymore.

"If you'll let me—"

It must have been Mark. Mark had done this. Eduardo turned on his heel to see Mark sitting at his laptop, headphones blocking out the whole fucking world because nothing in it could possibly ever compare in importance to that of the fucking code he was working on. Mark typing some fucking shit about how to betray his only fucking friend and Sean leaning there next to him like some kind of bodyguard.

Maybe Sean wasn't the supervillain, maybe it was Mark. Maybe it had always been Mark. Maybe Eduardo would be totally justified in killing Mark because Mark was an asshole and at some point Eduardo must have made some kind of decision because he was pushing through the doors and storming through a crowd of people who didn't dare to even look at him.

"Mark!"

Sean took half a step forward because he didn't know how many different ways Eduardo had planned to kill him. "He's wired in."

Like Mark was some fucking robot that Sean could plug it and make it do tricks. Like he was some kind of money making machine spewing out code to get Sean his seven fucking percent to spend on hookers and crack. Eduardo wanted to smash Mark's face and shatter Sean's ribs and he settled for grabbing the laptop out from under Mark's fingers and smashing it down.

It broke into an almost satisfying number of tiny, unrecoverable pieces. "How about now? Are you still wired in?"

Mark's fingers hovered for a moment in the air as though he couldn't quite understand why he wasn't still typing. Then he looked up.

"You issued 24-million new shares of stock," Eduardo said and he could hear his voice shaking, his hands clenching into fists at his sides so they wouldn't reach for Mark's neck and a tiny part of his mind wishing Mark would deny it. Just deny it, misunderstand it, act like he had no fucking clue and it was all Sean's fault and then Eduardo could just kill Sean and be done with it.

But Mark's face was shut down and he didn't quite meet Eduardo's eyes. "You were told that if new investors came along—"

It was like fighting ravenous trolls, how the second always stayed hidden until they could deliver the perfect punch right into your gut. "How much were your shares diluted, how much were his?" He could see the answer in Mark's eyes, the flash of triumph in Sean's.

"You signed the papers," Mark said, like that was all it was. Like a lawyer didn't write the papers, Mark didn't approve the papers, everything comes down to the fact that Eduardo fucking signed them.

"You set me up." Oh God, it was so clear now. All those months Eduardo had spent saving people, trying to make New York a safer fucking place, trying to work out what Sean could be up to and all that time it was Mark. Mark making plans and pushing forward.

What did you mean get left behind.

"It's gonna be like I'm not a part of Facebook."

"It won't be like you're not a part of Facebook," Sean said. "You're not a part of Facebook."

"My name's on the masthead," Eduardo said. He was still talking to Mark, Mark who was ignoring him to the best of his ability, probably thinking about all the code he'd just lost and how long it would take him to redo.

"You might want to check again."

Eduardo froze, actually froze his mind whirring without him for a moment while all he could do was stand there and stare at Mark's unresponsive head. Thoughts ran from his head from 'what a good joke' to 'you are going to die and no one will hear you scream.'

None of them helped. No one was joking, and he couldn't kill anyone. "This is because I froze the account," he said—stupidly—because they were still staring at him and maybe if he said it out loud he could start believing it.

"You think we were going to let you parade around in your ridiculous suits pretending you were running this company?"

Eduardo turned on him, focusing all his anger at this one fucking thorn in his fucking side and for a moment he didn't care if Sean was a supervillain or not. "Sorry," he threw like a punch. "My Prada's in the cleaners along with my hoodie and my fuck-you flip-flops you pretentious douchbag." He wasn't entirely sure if he was talking about Sean or Mark or both. He really didn't care either way.

Sean took half a step away from him. "Security's here. You'll be leaving now."

Eduardo was tempted—sorely tempted—to show Sean just how effective his precious 'security' would be against Spiderman by beating them to a pulp, and then beating Sean and Mark and—fuck—anyone else who got in fucking range.

But what difference would it make? Mark wasn't even looking at him, distracted already by code and by Sean Parker's amazingness and whatever the fuck else. "Tell me this isn't about me getting into the Phoenix," he asked Mark's back. "Tell me this isn't—" He'd barely even gone there, never found out of he'd made it all the way because he'd missed so many initiation ceremonies out saving lives.

But Mark didn't know that. He's been so obsessed with those damn clubs and Eduardo had never even tried to explain that there were more important things. But a finals club, all of this over a fucking finals club? No, this had to be personal and the only think Mark cared about was Facebook. Facebook and the users of Facebook and the reputation of Facebook.

He swallowed, remembering Divya Narendra's smug grin."Is this about the story with the chicken?"

If only Narendra could see them now. "I bet what you hated most is that they identified me as a co-founder of Facebook, which I am. You better lawyer up, asshole, because I'm not coming back for my thirty percent. I'm coming back for everything."

Sean looked over his shoulder at the two security guys. "Get him out of here," he said, like the two bodybuilders had a hope in Hell of taking Eduardo anywhere he didn't want to go.

Mark didn't look up. There was nothing else to be done here. "I'm going."

"Hang on," Sean took a step closer, a tiny hint of a self satisfied grin on his face as he tugged a check out of his pocket. "I almost forgot, there's your $19,000. I wouldn't cash it though, I drew it on the account you froze—"

Eduardo drew back his fist to smash Sean's smirk to a thousand tiny pieces and felt a jolt of satisfaction as he watched Sean flinch away.

He flinched away from Eduardo. Not even from Spiderman, from Eduardo because when it came down to it what the fuck was Sean Parker? A few lucky breaks and a smile he practiced in front of the mirror.

I'm Spiderman, Eduardo thought as Sean took a stumbling step back as though he still expected to be punched. Bitch.

Eduardo laughed. "I like standing next to you, Sean. It makes me look so tough."

He didn't look at Mark again, just turned on his heel and let security follow him out like bodyguards to royalty.

For the first time it occurred to him that Sean couldn't possibly be a supervillain. He didn't have the balls.

Now

The cloning machine burns blue and green. It's pretty, in a 'thank god that's over' kind of way and they sit on the roof of a neighbouring building to watch it. Mark's flip flips are knocking against Eduardo's red and blue boots as they hang in mid air. Eduardo folds Divya's contract into a paper airplane and tosses it carefully down into the flames.

Mark rests his head on Eduardo's shoulder and Eduardo's arm falls casually around his waist, like one kiss in a high pressure situation means they're dating now. Eduardo cares less than he probably should. Mark doesn't seem to care at all.

"You're an idiot," Eduardo says, in case this one sinks in where the last thousand or so haven't. "And if you ever drug me again, I will kill you."

"Hmm," Mark says, which notably isn't 'of course Spiderman, whatever you say Spiderman.' "We got them though. Most of them anyway."

Divya had escaped, sadly, in a helicopter with the last two Winklevii clones. Mark had shouted something about going after them but Eduardo didn't want to chance the propellers, and anyway, two Winklevii he could deal with. "Well, we won't win the Olympics without them," he offers.

"Isn't using genetically enhanced evil clones against the rules?"

"Since when did you care about the rules?" Eduardo says, squeezing Mark's side to indicate that he's joking. Mark's face is strangely relaxed, his guard low enough that there's a small smile on his lips, as though he could be happy right here on a roof at dawn with a guy in a mask.

It's almost like being back at Harvard, back before Facebook, Facemash, even before Erica; and Eduardo is suddenly reminded of seeing a curly haired kid asleep at a laptop in the corner of the library, of walking over to shake his shoulder and check he was okay.

They were friends. At one time, they were friends.

"So what happens now?" Eduardo asks. "Are you going back to California?"

Mark shifts a little closer, getting more comfortable. "I suppose," he says. "It's about time I went home." He glances up and asks, "What about you? Where's home for you now?"

Eduardo looks down at him. Mark is leaving in the morning, and all the papers for transferring money to Eduardo are signed and sealed. Settled. "Singapore," he says. "Allegedly."

Mark stiffens ever so slightly as Eduardo knew he would, but he doesn't look angry. He just tilts his head to one side as though searching for something. Finally he quietly murmurs, "Wardo?"

Eduardo reaches up with one hand to tug the mask off. He shakes out his hair and starts choking on the heavy smoke, the weight of it throwing him into a coughing fit that almost rocks him off the roof and distracts him enough that he doesn't notice the hand slapping him on the back for a long moment.

He blinks tears out of his eyes, gasping for breath, and turns to see that Mark hasn't recoiled or run away screaming. If anything, his smile is wider. "Wardo," he says again when it is clear Eduardo is going to survive. "You're Spiderman?"

Eduardo closes his eyes, expecting Mark to have gone by the time he opens them. "Yeah." He manages a weak smile. "Well. You always wanted to know what I was doing in New York."

His eyes are startled open by the weight returning to his shoulder as Mark resumes his original position, this time with his eyes closed as though he's thinking of going to sleep right there. "I thought you'd gone back to school," he says. "I thought—if you chose school over Facebook it had to mean you didn't care and that made it okay."

Eduardo tugs off one of his gloves and rests his fingers in Mark's hair. "Why would I go back to school?"

Mark looks down at his hands. "For some reason 'he's not here, he must be Spiderman' just didn't occur to me." He trails off. "If you had said—I thought you just didn't care." He sounds so earnest, and Eduardo knows this is probably the closest he is going to get to an explanation and an apology.

As far as Mark knew, Eduardo was studying and occasionally beating up Sean.

Eduardo sighs. "I was going to tell you," he says. "I was just waiting for a time when you weren't completely 100% focused on Facebook."

Mark has the decency to look slightly abashed. "Oh."

"Hey Mark," Eduardo says, fingers teasing lightly through Mark's hair. "I'm Spiderman."

It's the closest thing to acceptance that Mark is going to get, but Mark seems to understand because his mouth twists into a lazy smile.

"You don't seem all that surprised," Eduardo says. It's either that or 'why aren't you leaving?' and for some reason he doesn't want to prompt Mark to leave.

"I kinda guessed," Mark says, and Eduardo almost pushes him off the roof in surprise before he clarifies. "Well, I didn't. But I thought." He worries his lip between his teeth and Eduardo remembers kissing those lips, the faint taste of red bull and twizzlers mixed in with something inherently Mark. "Just, things you did. Nothing specific, but I couldn't look at you without thinking of, uh, you." His hand rests lightly on Eduardo's leg. "I wasn't sure. At all. Chris said I was projecting. Like, I've only ever really had a crush on two people so my subconscious decides they're the same person, starts projecting Eduardo's characteristics onto Spiderman and vice versa. You don't want to know what Dustin did."

"Why?" Eduardo asks, to distract himself from 'only ever had a crush on two people' and suddenly wishing he could pull the mask back on to hide the red of his cheeks.

Mark shifts around until his head is in Eduardo's lap and he can stretch out across the roof top. "Suffice to say, nothing rhymes with 'Spider-Wardo'."

Eduardo laughs. "Is it bad that I miss him?"

"Crazy," Mark says, finding Eduardo's hand through touch and not letting go of it. "But I wouldn't say bad." He pauses. "You're a shareholder now, you could come back. Sean's gone, mostly."

Eduardo's laugh dies as quickly as it came, but he supposes they have to get this over with. "I thought Sean was a supervillain," he says, and it sounds so ridiculous saying it out loud that he can't believe he didn't doubt it sooner. "All my senses were on red alert when he was around. The way he talked, the way he smiled, the way he acted. It all screamed supervillainry."

"Oh." Mark opens his eyes to see Eduardo looking down at him. "Was he?"

"No," Eduardo says, disappointment ringing through it. "He was just your average asshole."

Mark nods absently, eyes drifting shut again. He doesn't seem at all surprised or insulted to hear Sean being called an asshole, possibly he was intelligent enough to work that out for himself. Eventually. "Well, Divya was a supervillain and the Winklevii turned out to be evil clones so I guess you can be forgiven for being suspicious of anyone."

He's got Eduardo yawning now too. "Christy went crazy, blew up three school buses and held about fifty school children hostage because she thought I was cheating on her with you."

Mark raises his eyebrows. "Really?"

"Yeah." He goes back to threading his fingers through Mark's hair. The warehouse flames are fading out to the normal yellow now; whatever mysterious chemicals that made cloning possible have burnt out. Mark's breathing levels out, becomes slow and steady to the point where Eduardo is starting to wonder what time his flight is and whether he should be woken up.

It's almost like they're back in Harvard; Mark with a nine am class and Eduardo looking down at the tousled head—calm, for once—and thinking whatever he's supposed to be studying can't be that important. Not really.

Only ever had a crush on two people, flitters through Eduardo's mind again echoing with the taste of Mark's lips and Mark's asleep so he could just lean forward and—

Mark's eyelids flicker open just as Eduardo starts to tilt forward. "Someone arranged a cab from the hotel," he says, looking around as though a clock will materialise from thin air. "I should get back." He sits up, and Eduardo's lap is suddenly full of nothing but cold air.

Mark glances over his shoulder with a tiny smile. "I should've known it was you," he says as Eduardo picks up his discarded glove and his mask, pulling them back over all his bare skin.

Eduardo raises his eyebrows questioningly while Mark can still see them.

Mark smiles. "Anyone else would have given up on me by now."

And if that makes Eduardo beam like an idiot, his mask is already pulled down so no one has to know.

Then

He burnt the papers he'd taken from Thiel's office. If the man wanted the screw over Facebook, let him fucking try. He finally went though the one closet, tossing all of Christy's clothes into a bin bag along with the old webshooters, any torn or bloodstained costumes, and the box that used to contain the spider antivenom.

He threw away all his school notes from Harvard, the suit he'd worn to sign the first contracts and the ones today, the silk scarf he'd bought for Christy but never had the chance to give to her.

He turned on his cell phone, jotted down Dr Jones's number and then he threw that away too. Economics text books, cracked mugs, the stupid hat he'd been wearing when Mark first approached him with an idea.

He went through three bags, taking them all down to the garbage round the back of the building before letting himself collapse on the bed, reaching out with one hand for the police scanner.

'Armed suspects at grand local bank, send reinforcements. Repeat, send reinforcements.'

He hooked the mask on his index finger as he swung out the window.

Now

They land on Mark's hotel room balcony. Mark's case is still unpacked, Eduardo's empty beer bottle is still lying on the floor. Mark steps through the mess, picking up his replacement laptop and sliding it into the bag. "The room's paid up to the end of the week," he says, looking around at the mess instead of at Eduardo on the balcony. "If you need somewhere to stay."

No one is actively gunning for him right now, as far as he knows, but Mark's suite is still infinitely bigger and nicer than his apartment. "Thank you." The words are awkward in his mouth, he doesn't know how to breach the subject of the kiss or Mark's hand in his or the way Mark looped his arms around Eduardo's neck and hung on from the front for the first time, leaning his cheek against Eduardo's shoulder.

He doesn't know how to say that he liked it. That he doesn't necessarily want Mark to leave just yet.

There's a sharp rap on the door. "Mr Zuckerberg, your car is here."

It's so strange to hear him called 'Mr Zuckerberg.' Mark with his hoodies and his flip-flops, clutching the strap of his laptop bag as though it's the one constant in the world.

"You should go," Eduardo says at the same time as Mark turns to say, "Why though?"

"What?" Eduardo asks.

Mark bites his lip, looking down at the suitcase. "Why?" he says again. "The suit, the heroics. You're trying to save an entire city and it just seems... why?"

Eduardo can't help smiling a little. "I looked after you for two years," he says. "New York had to be a piece of cake in comparison to that."

Mark looks surprised, and a little pleased as he turns to go down to his taxi, back to California, and finally out of Eduardo's life.

"Mark," Eduardo says, before the door can open. Mark turns back. "If you get kidnapped again, call me."

A hesitant smile touches the edges of Mark's mouth. "I don't have your number."

Eduardo crosses into the room, snatches a biro and scrawls his number across Mark's arm. Mark smells of unwashed hoodie, Winklevii and brightly coloured smoke. Eduardo doesn't move away. "Or if you're not kidnapped," Eduardo says. "You could still call."

Mark reaches up, fingers brushing the bottom of Eduardo's mask.

Somewhere behind them a very harried bellboy is knocking on the door calling Mark's name. More importantly, Eduardo's mask has fallen to the floor and his fingers are twisted in Mark's hair, Mark's mouth open under his and full of so many possibilities.

The Future

There is a henchman pointing a gun at Eduardo's head. The Villain of the Week—Eduardo can't remember her name but there are a lot of snakes around so he's guessing something with a whole lot of sibilants—claps her hands together. "Ssso, Ssspiderman," she says.

"I get it," Eduardo interrupts before he can go any further.

Apparently unused to being interrupted mid-speech, Sibilants hesitates. "You... get it?"

"Snakes," Eduardo says. "You have a lot of snakes, your thing is snakes, you're the Incredible Snake Girl or whatever. Please stop hissing at me."

"The Snake Charmer," the Snake Charmer says, bending down to let something green and scaly slither onto her arm. "Remember that name for it will be the last one you ever hear." She sounds a lot more confident when she's delivering death threats. Good for her. "Now, put down your weapon before my assistant is forced to shoot."

She had far too much fun with the word 'assistant' for Eduardo to even think of taking her seriously. Unfortunately, her assistant is a seven foot bodybuilder and the gun is real enough. Eduardo drops the baseball bat at his feet and kicks it away from himself, sending it spinning across the floor in their direction.

"Now," she says. "I think you will put your hands on your head and not make any sudden movements while we tie you up."

Eduardo watches the bat spin between them, coming to a halt at the feet of the figure with the bag on his head tied to a chair behind them. "Do you?" he asks. "Because if so, you really don't know me very well."

A warning shot slices through the air above his head. "You do not know me at all," she hisses. "But if you did you would know not to cross me. You should know when to give up, Spiderman. This is not something you have faced before."

"Actually," Eduardo says.

"We do this a lot," says Mark, pulling the hood off his head and swinging the bat hard into the side of the henchman's head.

He has to stand on the chair to do it, but Eduardo will save the mockery for a moment when they're not both surrounded by poisonous snakes. "So," he says to the Snake Charmer as Mark pounds the bat threateningly into his palm. "I think you should put your hands on your head and not make any sudden movements while I tie you up. Mark, what do you think?"

Mark is looking down at the snakes, suddenly realising how close he is to a venomous death. "I think we should do this quickly," he says. "And then there can be pizza."

Not quite the snappy one liner Eduardo was angling for but still... pizza.

*

They leave the Snake Charmer tied to the chair with webbing, though Eduardo has to carry Mark on his shoulders until they're past the snakes. Mark flicks the blades he used to cut the ropes back into their hidden compartments on his watch while Eduardo texts an 'anonymous' tip-off to the police, who totally have his number on file.

"I thought the hero was the one supposed to get the cool gadgets," Eduardo says.

Mark finishes clicking his watch back together. "Clearly this means you are my sidekick," he says. "Don't worry, sidekick is a very reasonable position."

Eduardo punches him lightly on the shoulder. "I don't think heroes should sleep with their sidekicks, it just seems so inappropriate somehow—"

"Partners," Mark interrupts. "We can be partners." He thrusts out a hand imperiously and Eduardo takes it, gloves fingers pressing against Mark's skin. "So, the Fantastic Four," Mark says, as though their phone conversation hadn't been interrupted by his kidnapping and Eduardo's 6 hour plane journey. "You really think they could work out?"

"Well there are four of them," Eduardo points out. "I know New York is big and all but there's been one of me for years and I've managed. They got radiation from some comet, I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention. Hey, did I tell you that Reed offered to pay me a salary? He even said he could backdate it from when I started, that is one rich scientist."

"What did you say?"

Eduardo grins over at him. "I explained that I had an independently wealthy boyfriend who was perfectly capable of keeping me in the manner to which I have become accustomed. Obviously I used those exact words." He tugs Mark back into the alley where he left his clothes and tosses his mask on the ground, leaning in to kiss Mark properly. Mark doesn't hesitate, lips parting and tongue darting out and Eduardo is pulling him closer, pressing in close, wishing the Spiderman costume was easier to get out of.

"So," Mark says, slightly breathless, as Eduardo moves away to find his clothes. "You're saying you could retire, set up shop somewhere else." He manages to wait all of five seconds. "I hear California is nice this time of year."

Eduardo tugs off his mask and gloves, dropping them on the ground and reaching for his trousers. "Really?" he says. "I don't know, I was thinking Florida, maybe Miami. Or Europe, I hear good things about Euro-"

He's interrupted by Mark kissing him again, pressing him back against the wall of the alley and sliding his hand down Eduardo's side like he knows just how fucking uncomfortable the suit is when you have a boner.

"We should go on a date," he says, moving away with a taunting smile. "Give the Fantabulous Five a test run for the night. We haven't been on a date since I got captured by giant spiders that one time."

Eduardo tugs on his jacket, resting his arm across Mark's shoulders to head out the alley. "So you mean one of those dates where you take your laptop, I take my police scanner and we both bail before the end?"

Mark is grinning like an idiot, but he nods. "I know an Italian where you pay when you order."

Eduardo stops. "Mark, why are you smiling?"

Mark glances at him and turns faintly pink. Blushing and smiling. Maybe he was poisoned by snakes, perhaps Eduardo should be calling an ambulance.

"You told Reed I was your boyfriend," Mark says.

"No," Eduardo protests, pushing him away though he can feel the same stupid smile touching his own face. "No, you do not get to pretend like I'm the one who made this relationship official. Not when you hacked into Spiderman's Facebook page to change the relationship status months ago."

Mark tries for 'innocent' but the grin keeps poking through the cracks. "I don't trust that Gwen Stacy," he says. "Always being abducted by aliens or nearly falling off the edge of buildings. You can't trust a girl like that. Don't leave me for a girl like that."

Eduardo laughs and kisses him right there in the street for everyone to see. Okay, so, there's only really one old guy on a bench nearby, but it's the gesture that's important. "I promise," he says. "My point stands."

"Fine," Mark says, but doesn't stop smiling.

Eduardo elbows him in the ribs. "You're worrying me, Mark. Stop being happy about the fact that we're dating, damn it."

Mark turns and positively beams. "You're coming to California."

Eduardo could say that he hasn't decided and he really likes French bread so he's thiking maybe—but they both know how ridiculous that is. "For a trial period," he says. "I mean, maybe the Fantastic Four won't be able to take it. I wouldn't say I had absolute confidence in Reed and they came with their own supervillain which they might need help to handle so—"

Mark reaches out to press his hand over Eduardo's mouth. "You're coming to California."

Eduardo sighs, but when he reaches up to tug Mark's hand away he is grinning just as widely back. "Yeah," he says. "I'm coming to California."

We Fill This Empty House

2011-06-14T23:35:15Z

Fandom: The Demon's Lexicon
Pairing: Seb/Anzu
Spoilers: To the end of book 2 (written pre-book 3)
Length: 2215
Summary: Anzu reached out a hand, fingernails like talons, to beckon him closer. "Three times I call him. I call on Sebastian."
Notes: Thanks to eternal_vows and nyn17 for reading through it and altogetherisi for beta-ing.

It started because Anzu was always there. He was there when Seb was left alone in the house with Celeste's 'don't break anything' echoing in his unappreciated ears. It was like he was a dog. A dog they had brought to their house and trained to do tricks.

Even Jamie got more attention. Jamie with the demon mark burned into his face making it very clear that he was a fucking spy and should be sent straight home, but no it was 'so sorry about your mother, Jamie' and 'Why don't we go somewhere private so I can teach you some spells, Jamie.'

Seb never got taught any spells. He just got shut up with the cleaning, the silence and the demon.

"You missed a spot," Anzu said.

Seb swore at him and caught the damn spot with the damn duster. Anzu chuckled so he swore at him again, and then at the magicians and Jamie and the whole world for good measure.

"Touchy," Anzu said. "Feeling a little left out, are we?"

Seb threw the duster at him. It passed straight through a hole in the centre of Anzu's body and stuck – burnt down to a single stick – in the far wall. "Oops," said the demon, looking down through the hole. "Don't know my own strength."

"I hate you!" Seb found himself shouting. He wasn't sure who he was yelling at more, the demon who had killed because of him or the magicians who had fucked his entire life up then left him to clean up after them. "I hate you I hate you I hate you!"

Anzu sat back in his circle and laughed. "Come in here and say that."

Seb stormed out. Later on, he watched through a crack in the door as Gerald stepped down into the summoning room, glanced around distastefully and cleaned the whole place with a flick of one hand.

Anzu stared directly through the crack at Seb. "Some people," he said. "Are just unappreciated, wouldn't you say?"

Seb turned on his heel and ran up to his bedroom as Gerald sighed, "Have you gone mad now too?"

On the stair, Jamie looked at him with concerned eyes even as the sparks from all the magic Seb couldn't do danced around his fingertips. "Are you okay?"

He was beautiful and caring and considerate and Seb had loved him once. That was before they came here, before Jamie was the golden boy and all his morals somehow vanished into nothing. Seb had always believed Jamie was the proof that he could be better. Now he knew that Jamie was more evidence for Gerald's casual claim, 'everybody falls.'

Seb hated him so very very much. He pushed him to the floor, ran into his room and tore up every page in his sketchbook letting the scraps fall to pieces all around him.

*
Anzu was gone the next day. Seb sat in the summoning room for a time – walked back and forth through the empty circle – but no magician showed up to summon him and the room stayed empty.

Gerald was in the reading room Seb discovered, when he finally gave up on waiting. The sandy haired magician glanced up when the door opened, his eyes staying on Seb long enough to establish that no one important was waiting and not a moment more.

"If you're here," Seb said. "Can I go out?"

Gerald turned a page and made a note on the paper beside him.

"I haven't been outside in a week," Seb said. "You've all been doing top secret magician work and it's just been Anzu and I."

Gerald looked up with a long aggravated sigh. "Sebastian, I'm trying to work. Get out of here."

Seb closed the door as quietly as possible and took that as permission.

There was a pub Seb knew two tube stops away. It was a tiny shithole with filthy windows and glasses that hadn't seen a cloth in years, but the man on the bar never asked for ID and the house beer tasted of piss, but was cheap enough that Seb could buy lots of it.

If he downed the pint quick enough, he barely had time to taste it. He also got drunk a whole lot quicker.

When he started to explain to the barman that all his problems were Jamie's fault, and the magicians should let Seb help out with more spells because maybe he would be better if he was just allowed to learn – the man stopped serving him.

Seb passed the empty pint glass from hand to hand as the light through the windows changed from 'grimy and dim' to 'grimy and dark.'

He was just starting to think about heading back – Celeste would be home by now, ready to shout at him for not getting her permission, for treating Gerald like he had authority. Gerald would act like he'd authorised it because he wanted to seem like he had authority and later on he would explain that he hadn't meant his remark like that.

Gerald's low explanations were infinitely worse than Celeste shouting. Gerald could sound disappointed and deadly as the same time, and afterwards he would summon a demon into every summoning circle, locking Seb in with them all night.

If all the circles were full, there was barely enough space to stand, let alone lie down.

A hand landed on Seb's shoulder, jolting him out of his thoughts and back into the pub which was filling up with all the clearly underage kids trying to show how grown up they were with their piss beer and their big talk about the 'ladies.'

Seb shrugged the hand off. There were tables in the corner, let this kid find his own seat. So Seb was too weak – too useless – to do magic without the backing of a demon. He still had a killer right hook. He almost hoped the kid started something, it would be nice to finally fight something he could hit.

The hand touched his shoulder again and Seb spun around, raising his fist to slam it into –

A young man stood behind him, short blonde hair, a chiselled jaw and a small smile which was surprising considering Seb was one inch from punching him in the face. The man's smile only grew when Seb let his arm fall, lighting up his face. He was gorgeous. At least twenty five and so far out of Seb's league it hurt, but gorgeous nonetheless and Seb found himself stammering. "Do you want me to move?"

The man didn't say anything, just tilted his head like a bird as though Seb was a puzzle he wanted to figure out.

Seb lifted his wallet off the counter, ducking his head so he wouldn't have to meet the stranger's eyes. "I'll move."

The stranger caught his hand, holding him still as he tried to slip off the chair. They kissed without a word of introduction. Seb didn't take him home. There was an alley out back and it was dark.

The man was totally silent as he fucked Seb so hard it hurt like hell just to walk home.

Seb tried not to think about what that might mean. He slipped into the house without a word and there were no consequences. No one had even realised he was gone.

The next day he didn't bother asking, he just left at nightfall and followed the path. The man was waiting outside, hair shimmering gold in the shadows.

Seb looked into his eyes to see two black pits. "Anzu," he said.

He'd known, he supposed. He'd always known.

The stranger grinned, teeth glittering like diamonds.

*
By the third day, the alley felt almost comforting. After two weeks it felt positively like home, a welcome fucking respite from the rest of the fucking world.

Anzu's stolen body didn't look quite so beautiful now, but the magic that poured out from him as he tried to hold it together made up for that. It brushed across Seb's skin like hoards of tiny fireflies, hundreds of thousands, enough to drown in.

"You're not going to last much longer," Seb said, even though Anzu couldn't understand him. "Are you?"

Anzu pinned him against the wall and reached for the clasp of his trousers.

Seb tried not to think about screwing a dead man.

*
He got drunker and drunker in the bar the day after and when Anzu didn't arrive he took the tube back across town and sat in the summoning room watching Anzu's circle, arms clasped around his knees.

There was a faint popping sound just before Anzu reappeared. He had taken the form of the man, back at the start of the fortnight. Back when he was fresh and beautiful.

There was a slight hook to his nose and two golden wings coming from his back, but they were just Anzu. Seb opened his mouth, then realised that he had no idea what to say. He couldn't acknowledge what they... he should never have... he would be killed if anyone knew.

Anzu grinned, his teeth sparkling as flames caught around the edge of his circle. "Hey, lover."

Seb ran.

*
He went back the next day. Everyone was out, buying the groceries or hunting down the goblin market or other such things Seb could not be trusted with.

"So not lover," Anzu said, as though there had been no break in their conversation. "What do I call you then?"

Seb clutched the doorframe blindly with one hand. "Sebastian."

Anzu's lips curved into a grin and all Seb could think was I know what that tastes like. "I call on Sebastian," the demon said with a smile. "I call on the one who everyone screws around. I call on the one who does a fair amount of screwing around himse-"

"I'm already here."

Anzu reached out a hand, fingernails like talons, to beckon him closer. "Three times I call him. I call on Sebastian."

An exorcism means naming the demon and commanding it.

He took a few steps forward, closer to the flames and the circle and the demon who was not smiling at him. "You can't call on a human," he said, as though he hadn't just obeyed Anzu's command. "That's not how it works."

"So you can have me but I can't have you?" Anzu grinned a wicked grin. "Funny, it always seemed like it was the other way ar-"

"Shut up!" Seb shouted, clamping his hands over his ears. "Shut up shut up shut up!"

One of these days Seb was going to rub the speaking lines off Anzu's circle. Then the demon wouldn't be able to say anything and Seb could just... could just...

It occurred to him that if he had stayed upstairs he wouldn't have been able to hear Anzu either. He didn't leave.

"So," said Anzu, clapping his hands together. "Do you want to know his name? The body? Jamie always wants the names and everyone knows how you want Jamie so I thought –"

"I'll send you away."

"And someone will call me back with very little inconvenience to anyone. They might send you away, though. After all, I'm so much more valuable than you. So much more... powerful."

Seb let out a cry of rage and frustration and god only knew what and slammed the door on his way out.

There was no oven in the house and he was too tired and confused to have any handle over his sporadic-at-best magic so he ate baked beans cold and tried to bottle his emotions.

Jamie came home and saw him sitting on the kitchen counter with his head in his hands and the empty can of beans on the side behind him. "Seb?" he called uncertainly. "Seb, are you okay? I was just out with Gerald, he was showing me the adventurine circle. You know, the big one made of stones. We left you a note... are you o-"

Seb slid off the counter and punched him in the face before he could ask again if Seb was fucking okay.

He didn't even crack a joke. He just clutched at his nose and said a surprised little "Ow."

"Yeah. Fucking ow." He stormed past him and went upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and not telling Gerald that his pet could well be bleeding to death. He used to be in love with Jamie, back before Jamie was a liar and a hypocrite, playing nice with the old school bully to sooth his conscience when he fed people to demons.

Anzu was a demon. The face he wore was the face of a now-dead man whose body Seb knew intimately but who he had never met. Anzu tricked and mocked and was never tried to be anything more or less than what he was.

Seb painstakingly gathered all the pieces of his sketchbook - all the drawings of Jamie back when he was something to aspire too - dropped them in the metal bin in his room and used a match to set them on fire.

Then he went back upstairs. The magicians could lie and trick and leave. It didn't matter, Anzu was always there.

He did quite like shooting the baubles

2010-12-28T23:32:20Z

Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Spoilers: None (:
Length: 674
Summary: Sherlock did not approve of the tinsel which dropped small sparkly ribbons everywhere. He disliked the tree which blocked his view of the window and all the goings on in the street below. He strongly disagreed with the notion that John might need a 'day off' to spend with his 'family and friends'.
Notes: written for caecandy who asked for Sherlock/John with no other prompts and since it was christmas time I wrote christmas fic (:

Sherlock did not approve of the tinsel which dropped small sparkly ribbons everywhere. He disliked the tree which blocked his view of the window and all the goings on in the street below. He strongly disagreed with the notion that John might need a 'day off' to spend with his 'family and friends'.

He did quite like shooting the baubles, but that was in no way an indication that he approved of this 'Christmas' concoction forcing its way into his flat and his life where it really had no place.

John did not see his acceptance of the decorations as the heroic sacrifice it truly was. "I don't actually work for you, Sherlock. I can go home for as many days as I like."

Sherlock props his head on the couch and shoots a particularly loathsome bauble. "What if someone dies?"

John rolls his eyes in that way he only does when Sherlock is around and thrusts a second shirt into his bag, even though he'll only need one shirt because he's only going for one day. "You'll deal with it, I'm sure. You did solve crimes before you met me."

Sherlock blows the top of his gun because he saw it in one of those stupid movies John watches sometimes. "What if I die?"

John lifts his feet to pick up today's paper (or last week's paper, or possibly tomorrow's paper... Sherlock loses track of these things). "Try not to," he says, which is sensible advice but doesn't solve the current problem. "Mrs Hudson has promised to bring you some Christmas dinner back when she returns from visiting her family. Maybe you should try and get out, go see Mycroft."

"He's busy." Sherlock tosses the gun from hand to hand and thinks about shooting the tinsel. "People to see, things to bomb, how about you stay here?"

"Christmas is a time for family, Sherlock."

"It's a Christian appropriation of a pagan festival. With decorations." John pushes him sideways so he's only taking up half the couch and John can grab his jacket from where Sherlock was lying on it. "Anyway," Sherlock adds. "I'm your boyfriend. That's family."

John turns bright red. "One time, Sherlock. Having sex one time does not make you my boyfriend. It just... complicates things and you said you'd forget it."

"I never forget the important things." John stops pressing against his arm so he grabs at the other man before falling back across the sofa, contriving to bring John down on top of him. "How about twice? Would you have to stay then?"

John's breath catches a little. "If I say no, will we still have sex?"

Sherlock considers this for all of half a second. "Yes."

John rolls off the couch some time later, slumping on the floor with his head against Sherlock's arm. "Remember when you said you were married to your work, and there was no way we would ever end up dating?"

Sherlock remembers that conversation very clearly. It is one of the few times he has ever been wrong. "I thought it was like the decorations. You asked me if you could put them up even though you knew the answer was no and then when I said no you put them up anyway."

John stands up and grabs his bag, swinging it over one shoulder. "And I was right about them, they do make the place feel more Christmassy."

Sherlock doesn't say 'you're still leaving' because he doesn't believe in stating the obvious. "We could have sex again," he offers as John walks towards the door. "And you could stay."

John glances back, then sighs and crosses the room to look down at Sherlock's face. From this angle, he is upside down, but still John. "You could come with me."

"It's a family thing, I wasn't invited."

John holds out a hand and smiles. "You're my boyfriend. That's family."

Sherlock dislikes the tinsel and the trees and the having-to-leave-London.

But Harriet laughs when he shoots all her baubles and the sex is awesome.

We have danced in hurricanes

2010-12-28T23:28:03Z

Fandom: The Demon's Lexicon
Pairing: Anzu/Nick
Spoilers: Up to the end of Lexicon
Length: 686
Summary: Anzu's body is rotting and breaking down already, but magic holds it upright and magic creates the arcs of red light over his shoulder like wings.
Notes: Written for azurelunatic who asked for 'dancing and hitting'

Anzu's body is rotting and breaking down already, but magic holds it upright and magic creates the arcs of red light over his shoulder like wings. He is wearing a long black coat but he sheds it as he steps into the clearing so Nick can see where his black hair turns into feathers running down his back.

He steps across from the circle then smiles a little and crosses the lines to step inside. "We used to understand each other without this magic between us," he says, scuffing the speaking lines with a bare toe. "We used to understand each other without words."

Nick steps into the circle too and instantly can feel Anzu's presence a hundred times stronger, can feel his magic and his rage and beneath it that strange emotion he can't classify because he still doesn't understand love.

Anzu's nose curves like a beak, flesh hangs off his stolen body like an ill fitting suit and his eyes are black as coal, black as night, black as Nick's.

He must feel the punch coming before Nick's arm even starts to move, but doesn't even try to block it. His hooked nose breaks and blood pours over his lip, dripping down to the hollow of his throat. Nick's second fist catches him in the stomach and shreds of skin drop when he moves his hand away.

"Is that supposed to hurt me?" Anzu moves quicker than thought, fingernails like talons raking across Nick's shoulder to leave five thin lines of blood on the skin. His second hand drives into Nick's chest, five points digging deeper and deeper as though he can catch Nick's stolen heart in the palm of his hand and keep it for his own.

"What do you want?" Nick says.

Anzu pulls his hand back and watches as Nick heals the body. He leaves his nose dripping and uneven, that body is already spent. "Dance with me," he says, stepping backwards, keeping two stolen feet on the lines of the circle. "I want to dance."

Nick steps back, his heavy boots resting on the same lines as Anzu's bare, broken soles. "Have we done this before?"

Nothing shows on Anzu's face, but Nick feels his faint betrayal and disappointment. "Of course," he says, his voice giving nothing more away. "We have danced in thunder and in lightning. We have danced in tidal waves and hurricanes and earthquakes." He reaches out to lace his fingers through Nick's, his nails piercing Nick's skin like tiny knives. "I want to dance in bodies."

Nick steps, and Anzu moves with him. Somewhere, in the distance, he can hear the sound of drums then he looks at Anzu and realises it is the sound of his heart beating and his feet stepping and the drip-drip-drip of blood on the stones.

Anzu releases his hands as the body collapses to the floor and Nick is standing in a summoning circle without his talisman. Anzu's hair becomes plumage, black feathers standing tall on his head and the two red arc of light are fleshed into full wings but he doesn't break the rhythm and now Nick is free of the clasp of hands he can throw his hands up into the real movements and turn on the lines of the circle, tracing patterns over and over with his feet as Anzu chants "fall, fall, fall," to the beat.

He throws his arms up, twists and holds it for an instant. Then the position falls and the rhythm breaks and he is standing in a circle with Anzu's talons scraping his cheek.

"Did you miss me?" the demon asks.

"I didn't remember you."

Anzu laces his fingers behind Nick's neck, pulling him off the line and into the circle. "Do you miss me now?"

It is like kissing a beak full of knives with daggers digging into his back and soft feathers brushing his arms as they wrap around him. It is like kissing a demon who has red eyes and feels like anger and rage and something Nick can't define.

"Yes," Nick says. "I miss you now."

Are We Now or Have We Ever Been

2010-08-02T21:22:09Z

Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Spoilers: Episode 1 and 2
Length:
Prompt: 'You know that scene in the Blind Baker, the one where Sherlock asks John out on a date? Well, between that and Sherlock introducing John as his "friend" I'm convinced Sherlock is aware of his feelings for John and actually was asking him out on a date. So I'd love some oblivious John and frustrated Sherlock.'
Notes: prompt by anonymous here: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/575.html?thread=335167#t335167

Books. Sherlock isn't sure how many books there are in the world – he had a vague idea once upon a time but those blasted people keep writing more – but he is sure the number in his flat is somewhere in the region of 'far too many to be going on with.'
Our flat, he corrects himself.
A book everyone owns (only not everyone, obviously. John doesn't seem to have a book to his name). A book that should now be in this building three times, in Van Coon's boxes and Galbraith's boxes and somewhere on his copious shelves.
He's not getting anywhere. He needs new threads, more parts of the pattern. There is a dog barking somewhere, Mrs Hudson is thinking downstairs and there are too many books.
It isn't the bible, unless 'I' is some kind of hidden message that only the two men knew (which is highly improbable but not impossible so just like every other word he's memorized he can't eliminate it just yet.)
"I need to get some air, we're going out tonight." The first part is just a formality because John seems to think explanations are in order and Sherlock has to do what John wants him to do. That's how these things work, as far as he can tell.
"Actually, I've –uh – got a date."
Sherlock would like it if John stopped inserting meaningless sounds into his dialogue. It is a ridiculous habit that prolongs the delivery of important information and always distracts Sherlock from the task in hand. John has either not picked up on Sherlock's distaste or hasn’t fully researched the rules of relationships as Sherlock has.
Then he realises John said he had a date and wonders when he got around to asking and why he can't remember. "What?"
John is looking confused (and if Sherlock has forgotten about this date of theirs that is probably why). "You know, when two people who like each other go out and have fun."
Perhaps this is John asking him on the date. Improbable but not impossible, Sherlock already knows that John has strange habits. "That's what I was suggesting," he agrees.
"No it wasn't."
This conversation is going in circles. Sherlock suggested a date, John said he was on a date that evening. Sherlock probes the conversation, trying to work out how exactly they're not in total agreement about this.
"At least I hope not," John adds, with a smile that Sherlock cannot quite place until he looked up and focuses on his face more clearly.
There is a very faint smudge of lipstick on John's left cheek. For the first time he can remember, Sherlock hopes his deduction is wrong. "Where are you taking her?"
It is very difficult to remain calm when John says "Cinema," without a care in the world. As though cheating on a committed relationship is such a normal, every day affair that it doesn't even matter that Sherlock knows.
Sherlock knows a lot of cheating happens in committed relationships, but he had thought John wasn't that kind of man.
"Dull," he says. "Boring. Predictable." Who would take going to the cinema with a girl over the chance to solve crimes at a Chinese circus with Sherlock Holmes?
He pulls the flyer from his pocket. "Why don't you try this?" he offers casually, because if he goes too then it's not really cheating, right? He knows the laws of relationships say he has to dump John for cheating and he really doesn't want to (even though there's a funny little pain in his chest and he's not entirely sure of the scientific cause) so he has to find a way around it. Laws are made to be circumvented, after all. "In London for one night only."
John looks down at the flyer as though he hasn't seen it before, which means he probably hasn't and Sherlock should learn to ask his dates out earlier in future. "Thanks, but I don't come to you for dating advice."
No, Sherlock thinks. You come to me for dates. Even though they haven't had many so far, but the ones they have had John seems to have enjoyed. He got rid of the blasted cane for good after the last one.
He books two tickets in his own name and then when John has gone rings back to book a third. It will be like a threesome, he supposes. There's no cheating involved in a threesome and he's always been curious about how such situations are arranged.
*
It doesn't really hit him until he's standing in the shadows of the theatre watching John and his doctor that John asked a girl out. Even though he was dating Sherlock already. Even though Sherlock had shown no prior interest in a threesome.
"I don't think so," John says. "We only booked two."
"And then I called back and got one for myself as well," Sherlock explains, stepping out of the shadows to look at John's doctor. He holds out a hand to her and reflects that she's a little plain but John hasn't mentioned sex to him yet and if this speeds things up, he can go along with it. "I'm Sherlock."
She seems surprised to see him, but then John is being terrible at explaining himself today, giving off mixed signals and generally being as frustrating as he can be. "Hi," she says.
"Hello," he replies, because it is the accepted response and he is being polite for John's benefit even though the other man is doing nothing for him.
Then he walks away because John will follow (he always does) and he needs the privacy.
"You couldn't let me have just one night off?" John demands.
Sherlock is certain this is not how a relationship works. You don't get to take one night off just because some pretty doctor girl caught your eye.
He explains his theory about the circus instead, in the hope that John will tell him he's fantastic again.
John says nothing of the sort. "Come on Sherlock, behave," he snaps in the same tones everyone usually uses to tell him to piss off.
Sherlock bites back on his anger and finishes explaining in clipped sentences. It's not supposed to be like this with John, it's not supposed to be difficult and awkward and John is the one person who isn't supposed to look at him like he's an insufferable know it all.
"All I need to do is have a quick look round the place," he says waiting for John to volunteer to come with him so they can find a small dark corner somewhere and the doctor can just get tired of waiting and leave without them (fuck the case, John is presenting a far more frustrating puzzle with a far better prize).
"You do that," John says. "I'll go take Sarah for a pint."
No. No, that is not how this goes. He sends a text saying 'Come here' and John comes. That's how it works, that's their thing. "I need your help," he grinds out, wondering if John would get the bloody hint if Sherlock just kissed him right there and then.
"I do have a couple of other things on my mind this evening."
"Like what?" Sherlock demands.
"You are kidding," says John, as though Sherlock would do anything so... so childish in the middle of a date.
"What's so important?"
"Sherlock, I'm right in the middle of a date," John hisses, as though Sherlock doesn't already know this, but he wishes John would stop being so ambiguous and make up his mind as to whether he was dating Sherlock in the stairwell and leaving the doctor behind or pulling them all into one awkward threesome. "You want me to chase some killer while I'm trying to..."
He trails off, which is frustrating in its own way because Sherlock would love to know exactly what John is trying to achieve. "What?"
"While I'm trying to get off with Sarah," John says very loudly and clearly without mentioning Sherlock or threesomes at all.
So he is being cheated on. John doesn't seem at all ashamed of it, as though it's his right to have one night off from the relationship (when it's really barely begun) and Sherlock has no idea what he's supposed to do now.
He walks away. There is still the case to figure out
He can't dump John. He hasn't had anyone for this long in... well, he can't remember ever having someone for his long. John is his. His friend, his partner.
*
He cannot resist showing off his intellect a little during the show, but John doesn't compliment him again. In fact, every time he speaks John just gives a little sigh as though he had briefly forgotten Sherlock was there.
Sherlock leaves them to it and goes backstage. Fighting a sword wielding Chinese man with a can of spray paint is perfect for his mood.
He gets kicked in the face, then knocked backwards onto the circus stage and suddenly John is there (because John is always there) pushing back his attacker with no thought for his own safety. Sherlock has no breath to cry out, to tell John to get the fuck away because he could get hurt and he isn't allowed to get hurt, getting hurt is Sherlock's job.
Then the doctor – Sarah – is whacking the man with a club and pushing him away from John. Sherlock thinks maybe he could like her after all.
Then she is the one who gets to hold John's hand when they run and he doesn't like her even a little bit. She's just a boyfriend stealer.
But John is alive. The important thing is that John is alive.
*
She follows them around for the rest of the night, gets herself kidnapped and threatened and John has to put himself in danger (again) to save her (because Sherlock was too slow. If only people would refrain from hitting him).
"What did you mean," Sherlock asks, once she has been sent home and they are back in the flat with the hundreds of books that he no longer has to search through. "When you told her the next date wouldn't be like this?"
John moves a pile of books off his seat so he can sit down in it. "Well," he says slowly. "Most dates aren't, really. Generally there's more romance and less mindless violence. Anyway, she says she'll never see me again so-"
Sherlock sits on a pile of books. "All your dates with me have been like this," he points out.
John looks up at him. "Sherlock... I haven't been on any dates with you."
"Of course you have. There was the thing with the taxi, that time you shot a man to save my life and I got a free blanket. Oh, and the railway at night."
"Um," says John, which is just as irritating as ever because Sherlock has no idea why he looks so confused. "Sherlock, those... they weren't dates. They were cases."
Sherlock is quite possibly the smartest man in London and it is galling that is takes him several moments to realise what is going on here. "Of course they were dates. We like each other, we went out, we had fun."
"We almost got killed! On several occasions!"
Sherlock considers a day when he doesn't almost get killed as a waste of time, but he supposes John might be slightly more inclined to self preservation (which is a good trait in a partner because if John died he suspected the funny ache in his chest would come back). "Yes," he agrees. "But we weren't actually killed and I've just decided you're not allowed to die."
He sputters for a few moments. "Not allowed to die?"
"No," Sherlock agrees, even though he hates repeating himself. "Because I think I would miss you, and that would make it difficult to concentrate and I haven't got this far by being unfocused. No more charging recklessly at sword carrying Chinese men."
Sherlock watches John carefully as he sputters some more and notes the slight blush on his cheeks. "You can't tell me what to do," he says eventually. "I mean, we're not dating. I'd know if we were."
"I don't know," Sherlock offers. "You can be an oblivious idiot sometimes."
"Yes," says John. "I mean no. I'm not an idiot and we're not dating. To date, both people have to know. There's a certain amount of asking involved."
Sherlock frowns a little, thinking through all the evidence he collected. "We show clear symptoms of people who are dating," he points out. "I simply arrived at the logical conclusion."
"We haven't even kissed!"
"Is that essential?" Sherlock asks, and when John nods he crosses the room and leans forwards to kiss John experimentally on the lips. It is... interesting. They are far more chapped than they look from a distance, perhaps Sherlock should buy him some lip salve. "Are we dating now?"
John throws up his hands in despair, but his cheeks are pinker than ever. "Sherlock," he says loudly. "Will you go out with me?"
This seems like a far too simple answer to what has so far appeared to Sherlock as a very complicated puzzle. "I have been."
John gives a long sigh. "No," he says wearily. "No you haven't. We haven't been dating. We can start dating, would you like to date me?"
"Yes?" he offers, wondering if this is a trick question.
"Great." John reaches out to grab him on either side of the head, pulling him forwards into another kiss only this time his lips parted and somehow both their tongues got involved.
Sherlock had always thought this looked unpleasant and certainly unsanitary. He was surprised to find it was actually quite nice.
When John pulls back they are both panting and Sherlock's heart is racing as though he has just pulled off a daring rooftop chase. (He dares to think, very briefly, that maybe this is better.)
"Now we're dating," John says breathlessly and apparently it is that easy.
*
The bed is covered with books, John convinces Sherlock to go for a walk in the park and kisses him against a tree which is awkward and uncomfortable and oh so good don't stop don't stop. He almost forgets to analyse the moment but then he is distracted by a tramp with a newspaper and next minute the answer to the missing diamond is right there in front of him and they have to run across some more rooftops and fight large men with knives and make out in alleyways, stumbling home covered in sweat and other people's blood.
*
Sherlock tells John he's returning the diamond, but since no one knows they have it he stashes it away instead. He's in a relationship now, and all the research he's done so far shows that at some point in a relationship he will require a diamond.
*
They burn the books.