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abnb_ficship/ships: Mark/Eduardo
workcount: 1682
---
“Do not respond to that tweet,” Eduardo’s voice echoes down the marble corridor from their living room.
Mark can’t help but snort to himself. So much for his claims of being ‘above watching this pathetic pissing match play out’. Mark can already hear him padding down the hall in his house slippers. The dog’s claws skitter along behind him, collar charms jingling in time.
Eduardo stops where the tiles turn to carpet, and leans heavily against the door frame. Mark can see him out of the corner of his eye. Eduardo’s arms are crossed tightly over his loose grey pullover and he’s making that expression that he thinks gives the impression of being firm. It’s never worked on Mark yet, but it’s cute that Eduardo thinks it does.
Fulvia has no such compunction. She runs in directly and darts immediately under Mark’s desk to claw at his bare calf. “Ow,” he says to her, under his breath. He picks her up, turns her around and boosts her back in Eduardo’s direction. Not difficult given she’s a four pound chihuahua. She immediately refocuses and launches an attack on Eduardo’s slipper. Mark smirks, glancing up at Eduardo to share his mirth, but Eduardo is still pretending to be angry.
Mark sighs and opens his mouth, but Eduardo rolls his eyes and before Mark can even speak, Eduardo’s mimicking Mark, and he’s doing a piss-poor job of it - he’s always been the worst at impressions. Chris was always shockingly good at them, somehow.
“‘He started it, I’m just finishing it’. Is that what you were going to say?”
“No,” Mark lies, grimacing at the weird nasally tone Eduardo affects when he tries to imitate him.
Eduardo just stares at him, still ignoring the terrible behaviour their feral rescue dog is exhibiting. He slowly pulls his phone out from where it’s tucked into the crook of his elbow. He clicks the screen on and makes a show of opening up Threads. Mark can’t help but spot that he has to swipe out of Twitter first, which just proves it, Eduardo has been watching along as he grinds the moron’s ego into the dust, just like everyone else.
Mark hasn’t done anything , obviously. His phone would be buzzing even harder than it already is if he had. He doesn’t really consider a couple of sly comments stating that he finds something innocuous to be ‘concerning’ to be particularly provocative. Apparently Eduardo disagrees, judging by the way he’s huffing and puffing as he scrolls through his feed. Mark waits patiently for the verdict. Eventually Eduardo looks up, eyes narrowed, but obviously resigned to admitting that Mark hasn’t retaliated. Yet.
But Mark can’t resist pushing his luck. He locks eyes with his husband and slowly lets the corners of his mouth tick up.
Predictably. Eduardo. Loses. It. He storms over the six feet of plush carpet between them and clamps his hands over the back of the ergonomic chair. “Mark, I forbid you from whatever it is you’re thinking of doing to escalate this stupid fight.”
Fulvia growls a little, unhappy with the speed at which her slipper prey has escaped her maw. Her adorable little pea-sized brain redirects her quickly, and Mark hears her scamper off down the hallway, headed in the direction of the kitchen.
Eduardo doesn’t say another word, seemingly waiting for Mark’s reaction to his demand. Mark doesn’t historically respond well to demands. Although, this one is more amusing than it is frustrating or offensive. Mark purses his lips in thought, and twists around a little in his seat so he can see Eduardo’s flushed face a little better. Interesting.
“...What did you think I was going to do?”
Eduardo opens and then shuts his mouth, and looks away, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I don’t know,” he huffs, but it’s unconvincing. He releases the chair and starts flicking apps closed on his phone. “Something completely immature, as usual.” Eventually he runs out of apps and has to turn off the phone screen. He reluctantly meets Mark’s gaze.
“Did you think I was going to, like…” Mark mimes unzipping his fly, an uncontrollable grin spreading across his face. “Prove it?”
“ No,” Eduardo says immediately, in a strangled tone that says that he very much had considered that Mark might fish himself out of his boxers and stage an amateur home office-themed photoshoot to pwn a fake engineer on the internet.
“You really did,” Mark counters, on the verge of laughing as he says it, which is something that is one hundred percent guaranteed to irritate Eduardo to the point where he starts getting punchy.
And Eduardo is fun when he’s angry. He gets pushy and frowny and his accent starts slipping out as his voice gets shriller and, well, it reminds Mark of college - the fun parts , specifically, to be absolutely clear - way back in Mark’s freshman year. Dustin had started some kind of feud over bathroom etiquette or something inane with both the groups of guys in the suites on either side of them in Kirkland and then Chris had gone and slept maybe-not-completely-accidently with the boyfriend of one of the girls in the rooms above them too, and Kirkland had pretty much devolved into a war zone for a solid ten weeks.
Eduardo had followed him home from a mixer sometime in the middle of all this and then hadn’t stopped coming over, for some reason. Even weirder, he’d been super offended on their behalfs, which was hilarious, because Dustin and Chris had definitely been in the wrong in their respective fights, and honestly it wasn’t like Mark or Billy had been taking their turns cleaning the showers either. Plus, Eduardo was completely incapable of shutting up while he was getting fucked, which probably hadn’t endeared the residents of H33 to anyone else in their vicinity.
“Well, what were you going to do?” Eduardo snaps, throwing his hands up.
Mark waits a beat, watching Eduardo’s shoulders ratchet up by increasingly furious degrees. He relents. “I haven’t decided,” Mark says, truthfully. “He makes it too easy. I need to think of something really good…”
He nearly gets distracted again, eyes going back to his curved monitor. The cursor in Notepad++ blinks slowly next to the bracket he’d last closed before Eduardo had yelled the place down. His current pet project doesn’t have a relevant use case when it comes to accelerating the humiliation of someone he can still code circles around (it’s a clunky first go at pulling Fulvia’s auto-feeder data into something that will hopefully tell them and their vet something useful about how her fluid intake data correlates with her activity tracker). But Mark can think of a couple of fun old scripts that would probably disrupt Twitter functionality in much the same way they used to back in 2012.
“Mark,” Eduardo says, exasperated. “Please, leave it alone. He just wants your attention. Obviously .” His tone is derisive, gratifyingly so.
Mark can’t help but preen slightly. Eduardo leans over the back of the chair to sling arms around Mark’s shoulders. Mark tolerates the squeeze, the pressure pleasant despite the afternoon heat. Eduardo smells good too, like body wash and cologne, even under the faint doggy scent Fulvia leaves behind when she naps in his lap.
Eduardo’s right, Mark should let the man sweat for a few hours while he cooks up something more creative. He saves his progress and closes Notepad++. Eduardo squeezes him again, obviously satisfied with what he considers a win.
“It’s not like he’s even challenging you to something you could possibly lose at.” Eduardo mutters under his breath, still right next to his ear.
Mark pauses, his mouse pointer freezing over the Start Menu icon.
Eduardo picks up the shift in his movement immediately. He goes rigid, his arms like long skinny noodles around his shoulders.
Mark can literally feel the regret coming off of him. Mark can’t help but grin from ear to ear, even as he turns his head to the side to fully appreciate Eduardo’s pained expression.
“Oh? ” Mark enunciates slowly, watching Eduardo grit his teeth as Mark’s smirking lips brush over the five-o’clock shadow on his cheek. “Is that a testimonial? You’re confident that I’d win a dick measuring contest?”
“Mark,” Eduardo says slowly, overly cautious, in the same gentle tone he uses when he’s coaxing their insanely aggressive chihuahua out of the Big Dog section of the local dog park. “Mark. Please . Do not –” He lunges then, snatching for Mark’s phone on the edge of the desk. Too slow. He hasn’t allowed for the fact that Mark always charges his phone at his desk and it’s plugged firmly into the USB hub. “ Fuck !”
The phone goes flying, swinging off the side of the desk. Mark catches it mid-swing by the very tips of his fingers and he takes the opportunity to yank the charging cord loose and duck out from under Eduardo’s compromised embrace. He takes off pelting down the hall, bare feet loud on the tile. He heads in the same direction as Fulvia had trotted off to earlier, towards the end of the house with the dog food and the soft furnishings.
Usually Eduardo can outrun Mark at an easy lope, thanks to his stupidly long legs, but his house slippers are really holding him back today. They’re slapping and sliding around, and he is incensed .
“Mark, I swear, if you post anything on Threads that insinuates that I have said anything about the size of your dick I will end you, and then Meta, and then myself.”
Mark has never exactly managed to bat one thousand on predicting exactly what will push Eduardo over the edge, but he likes to think he’s got a pretty good handle on the trajectory of Eduardo’s temper at this point. Ninety percent of the time it trends towards pushy, bitey, slightly Brazilian-accented sex. Mark tries not to get bogged down in game theory too often at this point in his career, but there is something beautiful about a non-zero-sum game.
