Chapter Text
Maclaurin Building, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Spring 2017
Mark prided himself on his ability to work through just about any distractions. Some would say it wasn’t a particular strong suit of his, as he had already sat through two fire drills and a few other accounts that he didn’t need to list. Though, he could usually perform this without difficulty, it wasn’t easy when he had nothing to focus on and every movement from his office cohabitants made Mark want to shove a screwdriver through his shitty monitor.
Not even Apex Twins’ hypnotic rhythm kept him distracted from them.
There wasn’t usually a need to leave his office often during working hours. Who would when all the necessities were supplied within a 2-minute walk? If anything, he could dip into Dustin’s office and take whatever was necessary, not like the other man would notice something missing in the mess that was sprawled amongst the Engineer's office.
While it wasn’t often Mark felt that need, it wasn’t impossible that it would arise. Sometimes he felt claustrophobic in there, despite having a huge window; sometimes he got sick of the coffee, even though he had Red Bull on standby; he could drum up a dozen other reasons why he would want to get out. Today it was his inability to think beyond the LaTeX loading screen and his coworkers’ typing echoing in his head like pennies in a can.
His key fob was attached to his carabiner, which was attached to his jeans and his wallet chain, so it wasn’t like he would lock himself out, and his phone never really left his hand, so he wasn’t worried about that either. Though his mind always made him worry about getting locked out, he pushed that aside and exited into Killian Court.
While the greenery was more comforting than the white walls of his office, the onslaught of engines from the highway and the smell of the Charles River made him feel a bit more grounded in the city he had spent the better half of his life in now.
Like always, his feet took him along, and he just let his mind wander away from his current failures that were building upon him like a Reaper planting bricks upon his back.
He tried to ignore those thoughts as he walked down Albany Street and tried to find something else to focus on. In moments like this, he could have been better prepared with some headphones. There were still 15 hours of audio on his iPod to keep his mind distracted when it came to things like this. The recorded speakings of fellow Scientists he kept track of, and a select few of his colleagues, though it was a very select few.
It was better to keep a narrow view of his field, he always told himself, to avoid running into him. There was no need for mental distress when his work was already giving him a near constant headache.
Mark must have succeeded in distracting himself, as he arrived at the bakery he would go to when he needed to get away from it all.
With a huff, he pushed his glasses back up his nose and reached for the door. Though he was aware that his reaction time was often impaired, he swore he had not seen this man coming or even registered that someone was exiting, until he had scorching hot coffee on his person and the sound of his own cursing made him go red.
(Redder than the hot coffee already made him.)
There was a mess of apologies from the other person, and some more words that flew over Mark’s head as he tried to wrap his mind around the current event. He felt hands trying to clean up the mess made with napkins, but he didn’t realize his silence until the question was repeated.
“Are you okay?”
It got to him this time, and he nodded, unsure if it was true, but he didn’t feel damaged, just wet and awkward. His eyes were on the pavement under his feet, though he could see shiny loafers across from him.
“My roommate was looking for a reason to throw this shirt out anyway,” Mark said after looking down at his ruined shirt. The man had removed his hands, standing in front of Mark with dirty napkins and one less coffee than he had left the Bakery with.
There was an awkward moment of silence, filled with the sounds of cars, chatter of people, and a few cyclists that whizzed past them. Then Mark heard a chuckle from the other man, which finally made him look up, and he regretted not doing it earlier.
Laughing at his shirt, was the most beautiful man Mark had ever seen on the Physics campus. There he was, laughing at a ‘resistance is futile’ shirt that Mark had been wearing for 15 years. It was a rarity that Mark knew people outside his office, especially people who worked outside his field. If someone at MIT was making accomplishments, he would hear about it without having to know them, he had his sources.
In front of him stood one of the new hires to the Mathematics department, Eduardo Saverin.
For once, out of the suit, but just as shocked as Mark seemed to be at the situation. It wasn’t odd to run into a fellow researcher, especially since they worked in the same building—but this was one of the few people that Mark actually knew, and now the man had dumped his coffee on him. Strange coincidence.
(Chris would argue that knowing someone was a two sided street).
“Can I at least offer you a clean shirt?” Eduardo asked, breaking Mark out of his projections.
Not knowing how to say no, Mark shrugged, feeling the wet mess move with him and repressing the urge to gag at the feeling.
Eduardo led him to a door not even half a block down from the Bakery. Which made Mark wonder how he could afford a place this close to the University, on a researcher's salary. He was also wondering why he was getting an offer for a shirt when the man didn’t even know who he was, Mark could have been an Axe Murderer for all Eduardo knew, and he was leading him up the cream painted stairs to his home.
“I really do apologize, I hope you can forgive me. I’ve been all spaced out today and I just wanted to get out of the office and—”
Mark had to cut him off, while he hadn’t been listening that attentively earlier, a bit preoccupied with the hot coffee on his body, this was the third time Eduardo had apologized. “I wasn’t paying attention, stop apologizing, it won’t change what happened.” He cringed internally, that sounded way harsher than he had meant. While he reflected internally about what a raging asshole he was, he looked around the apartment he had just stepped into.
A large poster of CMB stood out to him, and it made Mark snort at Eduardo’s use of the phrase ‘spaced out’. Besides that, there were a good handful of degrees and awards, a few pictures of people, and a blown up picture of what looked to be a tornado, though Mark wasn’t positive.
As he soaked up the surrounding space, he tried to pick apart who Eduardo Saverin was outside of his LinkedIn profile. The man didn’t have a Twitter, and all the other social media Mark had dug up had long since been abandoned. Mark had discovered that Eduardo was a man of many passions and skills, with an affinity for Meteorology, that never seemed academically pursued, but more something based in Hobby.
“Here, you can use anything in the bathroom you need,” Eduardo said as he gestured to the door in the corner of the room.
Mark took the shirt from his hands and promptly changed. Of course, he snooped a bit, but there wasn’t much to find in the cabinet, very bare. Most likely a guest bathroom, going by how unlived in it looked. He splashed his face with water and cleaned his glasses before he returned.
It didn’t look like Eduardo had moved since he had been in there, which made Mark feel a bit strange, but not more than he already had wearing Eduardo Saverin’s shirt. (It was a bit too tight in the arms but too loose around his midriff, which gave him almost too much information.) Mark did note that Eduardo had a cup of coffee in his hand, Mark had no idea why he even went to that café, if he could make coffee in his apartment that quickly.
“Well—”
“I’ve seen you before—”
Mark shut himself up as soon as he heard Eduardo repeat the words he hated hearing.
Recognition.
Infamy.
He stayed silent, which Eduardo took as an indication to keep talking. He seemed not to pick up on that Mark wished the Miniature Black Hole that the LHC was supposed to spring into life was actually a reality. The Quack Physicists were never in the right, and Mark’s bodily collection of particles stayed all in one piece.
“I’ve seen you sit in some of my lectures before, you work in Physics, right?”
He shrugged back, holding up his mess of a shirt in his hand as a response. It doesn’t mean much, he could be an engineer, considering how Dustin gave him that shirt.
Eduardo shook his head and laughed.
Mark watched him sip his coffee almost pensively, as if he was trying to find a way to say what was on his mind without offending him. Unsure why Eduardo was still entertaining him, he kept his mouth closed and tried to ignore how uncomfortable he felt holding his brown stained shirt in the freakishly clean apartment of the man he had been keeping up to date with, (Dustin said it was stalking. Mark refused to listen to him on any matters regarding relationships.) and surprisingly, said man had just recognized him.
“Not the shirt, but you were sitting in on the lectures where I did Schur’s Lemma and where I was talking about physical manifestations of Linear Algebra in terms of Spin and,” he cut himself off, his eyes narrowed, “-you were in a lot of my lectures.” Eduardo’s realization gave Mark the feeling he should leave.
“I was in five, which isn’t a lot. I just had free time.”
Lies. Mark was 3 months into his Fellowship, and time was the last thing he had, besides perhaps money, which was maybe one point under time. With awkward steps, Mark moved towards the door he had come from.
“Wait, you’re Mark Zuckerberg, right?”
He stayed silent, he should have just said yes. Who was he fooling at this point.
“I just mean, you obviously know my name, can’t I know yours?”
“You seem to know it,” Mark stood still again, unsure how to proceed. He never really intended having a face to face with Eduardo. One of his other skills was avoiding speaking to people whenever necessary, usually successfully pushing conversations to emails, phone calls, the occasional Twitter fight.
Eduardo gave an affirming nod, then a smile. “It seems so. Just wanted to confirm my suspicions.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Mark didn’t mean to curse, or maybe he did. He had been thrown off by Eduardo’s smile. He felt like he was being toyed with, and if he hadn’t known what that felt like, it would have gotten mistaken for flirting. Now there was no way he was going to leave, fuck his research, and the buzzing from his phone.
“I’ve heard about you,” Eduardo answered, though with no indication that it had been bad things.
He shifted from one leg to another, trying to calculate if this conversation was going well, unsure if his next move would have him checkmated. “I liked your paper about canonical bases.” Might as well not waste the chance he got at a face-to-face, even if it was unpredicted and in an (admittedly) unknown man's apartment. He watched Eduardo peer at him, before he smiled.
“You read it?”
“Among other things…”
“Can I get you a coffee?”
Everything followed that simple ask.
—
Mark really hated the smirk that Dustin always wore when he spoke about Eduardo. He also hated that Dustin was partially correct for the reasoning behind it.
When Mark had first heard of Eduardo, he was in the depths of worrying if he would be accepted regarding his fellowship application. He was already doing postdoc work at MIT, after Harvard gave him the boot a few years prior, he really didn’t have any other options for his research. Not without moving, which was a dealbreaker. Might as well pack his bags for Switzerland if he had to move.
He spent a lot of time online during that time, which is where he found the first mention of the Eduardo Saverin.
Multitalent Mathematician Eduardo Saverin Jr. joins MIT after another strong year at UFRN, following in his Father’s legacy of multicontential professor?
The article headline was clickbait, but Mark loved reading gossip, which is how he fell down the rabbit hole of the Saverin’s.
Dustin found Mark in a pitch black room, typing at his keyboard, almost 6 hours after he had first discovered the article. Eduardo’s IIP page was open on part of his desktop and what was on the other part, well, Dustin quickly shut it down and woke Chris up.
It had been months since that, but Mark couldn’t shake Eduardo from his mind. He got the fellowship under Cappellaro, saw his parents as a celebration, and dove back into the depths of his work. He worked a lot, in a field that expected an inhuman amount of work, he somehow superseded that. Until he couldn’t.
The day that he ran into Eduardo was the fifth day that he hadn’t been able to continue his work, as usual. A complete mental block that only culminated with time.
So there he sat across from his roommates (his best friends, but nobody would ever hear him say that.) Dustin’s stupid smirk that made Mark want to stop talking, but as if Chris could read his mind.
“Ignore him, he likes thinking he has the ability to predict the future,” Chris said as he stirred his tea with a spoon, trying to dissolve the giant glob of Honey he had just put into it.
“I just want to find something to add besides fucking around with the index—I’ve resorted two years worth of notes, trying to find something, but the only thing I can think of is his green couch!”
Dustin and Chris shared a look as Mark’s face grew red, embarrassed by his outburst. He didn’t want to respond, so he just stared at them and hoped they could read that on his face. Of course, they could, they knew Mark’s silence could speak worlds.
Of course, Chris tried to switch the topic and probe into Mark’s emotions, as he always did, but not to much avail. It was always a fruitless attempt, but an attempt nonetheless. Mark couldn’t say he appreciated it, but sometimes it was nice to know there was something resembling a caring about him.
“Personally, I think that you work too much,” Dustin announced as if he pioneered the discovery of a new physical law, and wasn’t speculating on why Mark couldn’t keep his focus. “You’ve used up all your juice, I mean you did more work in the last three months than half your office could get together in a quarter of a year. You should have held some work back, ‘cause I’m sure Cappellaro is going to want to see something new soon.”
Mark chewed over Dustin’s works for a while, but then he shook his head, it wasn’t an appropriate comparison. Most of his colleagues (he used that word with an air of disdain, as he did not consider them to be on equal footing.) were only in it for the money, were there due to military investment, or the hopes of tenure; investing far more time into scooping up whatever lectures were available than doing research.
“That would just be an omission of my actual failure to produce anything substantial since our last meeting,” he responded.
Chris looked annoyed as he drank his tea, he probably was, Mark wouldn’t blame him. Him and Dustin still wonder why Chris put up with them, but they’ve yet to get past 3 bullet points after over 10 years of wondering.
“Mark, I know you only have the capacity to think about a few subjects at a time, but it feels like you have a lot of input right now that’s busying your mind. I think you should work on finding a way to keep unwanted distraction out, though I would once again emphasize a balanced lifestyle.”
There Chris was again with his balanced lifestyle, as if that was going to save Mark from the all consuming void of obsessive cycles. Small distractions were not the end of Mark’s world, but they were a painful reminder that he existed outside his work.
He didn’t mean to start a rant, especially since he wanted this conversation to end, since they weren’t talking about Eduardo anymore. It wasn’t really a purposeful rant, but Chris asked (he hadn’t), and Mark had to unload it onto someone who wasn’t his mom. His worries from his office overestimation poured out, his hatred of the lights in his office, his coworkers’ lack of creativity, and being surrounded by military contracts which put him on edge. The fear of having to engage with more students and faculty, as the university demanded more of him than he knew how to supply. He didn’t even get into how the price of his insurance was rising, and he was pretty sure his antidepressants were causing his early morning nausea.
Chris, of course, had a bunch of suggestions that Mark tried to argue with, but they both knew there wasn’t a reason to argue. “You should ask HR about accommodations, I think they would be able to help,” Chris said as a closing note. This was a topic they had discussed many times before, though Mark always pushed back.
This time he didn’t, just acknowledged Chris with a shrug and turned back to his laptop, placing his headphones from around his neck over his ears. His way of saying, ‘thanks for the help’.
He of course didn’t miss how Dustin started to bug Chris and their move to the sitting room, where they started talking in a serious tone. It was loud enough that they must have thought that Mark couldn’t hear them, and while he didn’t hear everything, the most important words stood out.
“…midlife crisis…obsession…wake up one day…he’s in Paris…his mom?… meet this Eduardo guy…do you think?…again…”
It was annoying to hear them speculate, so he turned up his headphones and went back to reading Eduardo’s Paper on the quiet revolution of numerical weather predictions from 2 years prior.
—
In partial adherence with Chris’ suggestion, he found new places to work other than his office, though a third of them didn’t seem to be too fond of him being there. He had actually grown a bit fearful of Dustin’s coworkers, he has had enough wires thrown at him in his career to know how much they hurt.
Nestled in corners of abandoned rooms, lounging on couches that weren’t his nor anyone that he knew. He even ended up running into some of the undergrad students he had held a speech for a few weeks prior when he somehow made it to one of the libraries on campus. All attempts to evade them failed when he almost dropped his iPad and one of the undergrads caught it for him.
It had been embarrassing enough that they said something about his outfit, but even worse, he just said, “You too,” before walking away as fast as his slides allowed him. He spent ten minutes walking down somewhat familiar halls, past his own office, and ducked into the first vacant room he could find.
The lighting lured him in, not the awful white sticks of death that haunted the rest of the building, golden light came from the bulbs in the ceiling. He pulled out his laptop from his backpack and plugged back into his iPod, just to stare at his screen blankly again. The folder full of his scribbled equations imported from his iPad had pulled up on his other screen, so he swept over to remind himself what he was stuck on.
Maybe Dustin had been right, maybe he had exhausted all he had, and he had just reached a point where there was nothing left to flow from his fingers. A blank mind when looking at a wall of equations was usually a bad sign. A blank mind after two weeks? Mark felt like he was reading another language, when it was his own handwriting, the concepts he had carved out with tears and pain, he had fought for and proven himself with. His dug his fingers into his hair, swiped back to his LaTeX document, and watched the cursor blink.
He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. Maybe it would come to him in a dream. Relaxing in his chair, he focused on his breathing. There was a vague realization that someone had joined him, but he barely processed it over the smell that accompanied the feeling he got whenever he stopped being alone.
“I think I see your issue, if you’d let me correct you,” Eduardo spoke from above him, and Mark almost fell out of his chair in shock.
It hit him all at once, the smell of Eduardo’s cologne, the way he held a respectful distance from Mark but still looked over his shoulder at his work. Mark tried to process it all, including Eduardo’s deep red suit, Maroon maybe if anything, Mark wasn’t great with colors in that wavelength.
Mark nodded and turned the laptop towards Eduardo, his way of saying ‘take the wheel’.
After looking over everything, Eduardo produced a whiteboard marker from his suit jacket and took to the grand whiteboard on the wall. In blocky but elegant writing, he started jotting down all the key elements of Mark’s equations and then slowly wove them together. It got real when Eduardo produced a different colored marker to underline certain elements.
Eventually, Mark couldn’t just sit there and watch. He joined Eduardo and worked on the board, his own cramped writing in between the lines of Eduardo’s calculations. While Mark’s methods of working through calculations were usually brute forced and long, Eduardo’s was elegant and perfectly strung together and organized. The conclusion was like following a flowing river just to end at a beautiful pond, hosting life never seen before.
Not only was Mark’s mistake obvious, but it was painful now that he reflected upon his previous attempts. There was no way to brute force the pattern that Eduardo had pulled out of the handful of equations Mark had set up, and Mark recognized that now.
He tried to contain the buzzing in his body when he realized what Eduardo had just done, he was stuck between wanting to kiss Eduardo and running out of the room to tell everyone.
“So, what does it mean?” Eduardo asked him, after Mark had drawn a box in the bottom right corner and snapped a picture with his phone.
Mark waved his hand, as he tried to keep his excitement contained, his eyes flew over the calculations again. “Well, I will have to get some time in the LLSC to confirm it, but this is an exact representation of a many-body systems interacting in quantum matter. It’s based off the idea of a hidden layer that mediates the wave function, which is based off the DBM—”
“DBM?” Eduardo questioned.
“Deep Boltzmann Machine, it’s a three layer generative model. Mostly the Restricted Boltzmann Machine was used to simulate complex wave functions for in quantum many-body physics, but it has its own restrictions— The DBM is an extension of the RBM’s energy function. I think this is it, it has to be—”
He slipped his phone back into his pocket, and his laptop back into his backpack, as he exited the room in a hurry. Mark felt dizzy as he sped down the hall and barely heard Eduardo yelling after him, “You’re welcome!”
—
It was almost a week before he thought about Eduardo again. Dustin would attest that Mark hadn’t really thought of himself either, the only thing that existed for him was his laptop and the notebook he used to write out ideas. Occasionally he ate the food that Dustin put on his desk, which gave his friends a sign of life.
When Mark left his office late Friday night, everyone else had long since left and only a skeleton staff were around, he felt the urge to talk to Eduardo. He knew that without the other man spotting his mistaken approach, he would had never gotten further.
Eduardo’s office was seared into his mind, just like the layout of the entire building had been when he started his academic pursuits at MIT. What Mark hadn’t realized was that the room he had been in earlier that day was directly across from Eduardo’s office.
He still made his way there, his shoulders and back incredibly sore but not more than usual. There has still been a few lights on in the offices he walked past, which was always to be expected in that building. Mathematics and Physics did not obey the constraints of time zones.
When he made it to Eduardo’s office, he was a bit surprised to find the light was still on. In the past, when Mark had gone by the same office, it was almost always dark and locked by 6 PM.
Despite the pain curling around his spine and the searing behind his eyes, he knocked at the door.
There was no answer and Mark was about to turn away, but then the door was opened. As he looked from top to bottom, he was a bit shocked. There was the disheveled hair, the wrinkled clothes, and on top of that all, he wasn’t wearing shoes, just black socks on his feet. Eduardo looked worn out, and Mark felt like he had just walked in on a completely different side to the man.
“Oh, hey Mark.”
“Hey yourself,” Mark shifted his bag a bit, the weight uncomfortable on his sore shoulder. “You’re not usually around at this hour.” It was an observation, but it didn’t reveal too much to freak Eduardo out, apparently memorizing people's schedules freaked them out.
“Papers to grade,” Eduardo said with a wave of his hand, towards his desk. “How's your multi-body connection going?”
Mark peered past Eduardo, there were multiple stacks of paper on the desk. The whiteboard that was rolled next to the next desk had a chart on it, halfway filled out with Eduardo’s neat writing, but Mark had no idea what was being charted.
“Multi-body systems,” Mark corrected him quickly and nodded. “I have a two hour slot in the LLSC on Monday, so we will see. I am confident.” His own voice did not make him feel confident; he was more curious about what was on Eduardo’s whiteboard and how he could simplify it in a spreadsheet. He hadn’t realized Eduardo had been talking.
“—really need to get back to it,” Eduardo shifted from one leg to another.
Mark, who hadn’t heard much Eduardo had just said, shoved his hands in his pockets and asked, “Do you want to come with me?”
“What?”
“To the lab.” Mark clarified, trying to curb his tone that often pissed people off, he was just stating the obvious.
“Um, I’m not sure about my schedule. I have lectures and papers, you know,” Eduardo’s hands flailed a bit at his sides, but Mark just nodded.
“I’ll send an e-vite to your email, let me know.”
Not knowing what else to do, he nodded and left at a fast pace. Mark considered that as much of a success as he would imagine, and it was as close to getting to see Eduardo intentionally as he could get. That’s what Chris and Dustin had been pushing for, right? Talking to Eduardo on a one on one basis. Mark knew that it would take 30 minutes top for his simulation, and most of that was just waiting and trying to ignore the all consuming humming of the monitors.
All that was left was to await Eduardo’s response and figure out how to cope with the pain that had been wrapping around all the joints in his body. Eduardo would say yes, Mark knew his schedule, he had perhaps taken a look at Eduardo’s email account and the linked Google calendar.
Mark headed home on the Subway, with his iPad dead, all he could do was think about the sliver of chest hair that he had seen due to Eduardo’s two opened buttons on his shirt. Unusual, as Mark had only seen him all put together before. It made him think about how he could get Eduardo all disheveled.