midnightdiddle

*blink* I wrote it for

akashacatbat, so...yes. Gah, don't kill me! I probably slaughtered characters, but I tried...

And there's even shameless stealing of song titles... *hides*

Goodbye Love

When Mark stopped and looked around, he'd find himself stuck in an empty spot, somewhere between one street and the next. Everyone was gone and dead, buried under snow and grass and flowers. Mimi died not long after Roger came back, and then Collins. Roger died a few years later, and after the funeral, things just kinda stopped for Mark. Joanne and Maureen disappeared in pages of address books and tapes of voice mails, and in the minutes that passed like years, there just wasn't time to call.

"Speak."

Mark was painfully alone. He's survived, to be alone, because he was always alone. The irony nearly escaped him, but he caught the tail-end one night when he was looking through his films. Snip out some frames, reel it in, snip more frames. Weave the frames together, and he could pretend, for a few minutes, that when he looked up, Roger would be sitting on the couch, tuning that guitar.

Mark was growing talented at pretending.

"Mark? It's your mother. You should call us sometime. Christmas is coming, and we'll miss you-"

He'd never thought he'd be jealous of a dead person, but sometimes, when he was shoving more film into his camera, winding it in, he'd stare at his fingers, watch them move, and wonder why, exactly, he was still alive. If he looked at his life in a cold, calculating view, he could figure things out. He was alive because he'd done something right. He hadn't messed up like Roger or Mimi, and so he was going to live to be an old man who would die in his sleep.

So, if he'd done so much right, why did it feel like he was the one who got fucked over?

"Mark?"

God, he missed Roger.

Erm... I'll write a better one when I've seen Rent again. Yeah...