Anything for You

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Eduardo is hunched over his morning coffee in a nice little secluded coffee store when the news breaks. He’s still in New York as he has at least another five business meetings to attend, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s bitten off more than he can chew. He probably has, but knowing this won’t make the workload go away, so he’s huddled over the steaming mug in front of him, inhaling the tangy fumes and hoping that they’ll help him get rid of the hangover that’s threatening him in the back of his head. There’s a headache lurking there, niggling him, and he’s hoping against hope that it won’t manifest itself into anything more than a threat.

That is, of course, until he hears the words Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg coming from the television screen in the corner of the shop. He starts, curses under his breath in Portuguese, and then closes his eyes and tries to make some sort of deal with the Gods so he can wake up in his hotel room and have none of this happen. As if he needs any reminding of that man after what happened last night ... after what he’s been putting up with every damn day for all these years.

Still, he finds himself listening as he catches the tail end of the story. The news is ... intriguing, to say the very least.

"Facebook has offered no explanation in their statement, only that Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of the website, has commented that the glitch won’t be fixed in the near future. Speculation has started over the nature of the message, but most people we have spoken to seem to be more angry than curious ..."

Eduardo blinked. Did he just hear that right? Facebook was glitching ... and Mark wasn’t fixing it?

"He’s on drugs," Eduardo mutters to himself. "That’s the only explanation. Mark’s a crackhead."

A wry part of him sniggered that this news wouldn’t be very surprising if he were still rubbing shoulders with a certain Mr. Parker, but Eduardo swallowed the annoyance down and instead reached for his laptop, shut away in the bag propped up against his chair leg. He was curious, he knew that, and he was wondering if it was something to do with what had happened between them last night. He didn’t want to mention that to himself, of course – Mark hadn’t cared about him or what had happened to him for the last Lord knew how long, so why the Hell should a few drunken words neither of them remembered very well suddenly make a difference?

No, Eduardo thought to himself, as he switched the laptop on and connected it to the store’s WiFi. He was simply checking in on a business that he owned shares in. As a shareholder he had a responsibility to do these things, and if something was happening that was affecting it, he had the right to know. That’s why he was checking – nothing more, nothing less.

"What the –" Eduardo muttered to himself, as he brought up the all-too familiar homepage to find that it wasn’t familiar at all anymore. He blinked in disbelief, and then stared at the screen in front of him for a little too long.

I’d do absolutely anything for you.

"No way," he muttered, shaking his head, and there’s a soft laugh from behind him and he turns to see one of the employees looking at the screen over his shoulder in disbelief.

"Can you believe it?" she asked. "I tried to get on before work, around six in the morning. It was down then, too. Apparently it’s been down since around two this morning. No one can get onto it – my sister in Florida says it’s down there and our cousin in Australia told us it’s completely down on that side of the world, too."

"It’s worldwide?" Eduardo asks, forgetting that he’s not supposed to care about Mark’s sanity for a moment. "I thought ...?"

"No, from what I can tell the whole thing’s down," the girl said, shrugging. "It’s really annoying; I can’t ever remember it being down like this before. I don’t think it’s ever happened."

"Trust me, it hasn’t," Eduardo mutters, pressing on the bridge of his nose and shaking his head.

"Makes you wonder what’s going on, doesn’t it?" she asks, as Eduardo takes a large gulp from his coffee and wishes that it were something stronger.

"It does," he agrees, even though he had a fair idea what’s going on.

His phone takes that opportunity to start vibrating in his pocket, and he pulls it out, hoping for any sort of distraction. The number on the caller ID is one that he certainly doesn’t recognize, but it doesn’t take a forensics team to work out who it could be. Eduardo rejects the call and slams the phone down beside the laptop, staring at Facebook’s plain homepage for several more seconds before bringing up Google and trying to work out exactly what’s going on. The search has been boosted to the top and more results are coming in every second.

"You always had to cause a scene, didn’t you, Mark?" Eduardo mutters, clicking around several news stories to find the same annoying lack of information. "You could never just do something normally, could you?"

His phone’s vibrating again, and as Eduardo’s eyes scan over some financial expert’s comments on the losses Facebook could expect if this continues, something rises up inside him and he snatches up the phone, hitting "Accept" and having to force his voice to remain at an indoor level.

"How did you get this number, Mark?" he demands, and there’s an awkward pause on the other side of the line before Mark’s timid voice crackles over it.

"I ... err ... just looked around for it," he mutters guiltily, and Eduardo rolls his eyes.

"You hacked me," he states, and Mark snorts.

"It’s not hacking if you provide the information, Wardo, I just knew where to find it –"

"Don’t call me that," Eduardo hisses. "What do you want, Mark?"

He hears Mark cough awkwardly and then start fiddling with what appears to be a phone charger of some description – Eduardo can hear it scraping against the phone on Mark’s side.

"We need to talk," Mark eventually says, sounded nothing short of terrified. "Can we ... can we talk?"

"We’re talking now."

"Not like that. I mean, face to face. I ... I need to talk to you."

"I’m busy, Mark. I can’t just drop everything whenever I want, you know."

"I can wait."

Eduardo inwardly groans. He sometimes forgets how impossible Mark is, and he wonders how he hasn’t been murdered yet.

"Why do you want to talk to me all of a sudden?" he demands, and he can hear Mark’s breathing getting slightly heavy, as though he’s trying to keep his voice even. That in itself is unusual – Eduardo can’t remember that last time Mark’s voice changed from anything but its normal, monotonous, sarcastic drawl.

"Please," he says softly, and something in his voice makes Eduardo’s chest hurt and he closes his eyes as the coffee store swims slightly around him.

"Mark, I –"

"I need you."

Eduardo knows he’s still in the coffee shop but all of a sudden he feels more like the timid junior at college who heard those words coming from the same man he’s on the phone with now, and for a brief second he wonders if Mark knows that’s what he’s thinking and if that’s why he chose the words. But back at Kirkland, Mark hadn’t needed him. No, he’d always needed something Eduardo could provide – his links, his money, his algorithms ... never just him.

"What do you really need, Mark?" Eduardo practically spits, but this time Mark doesn’t even hesitate.

"You."

The phone’s gone dead now, and Eduardo still holds it to his ear for several minutes, feeling like an idiot but being unable to move either way. Everything was happening so fast, and although he couldn’t lie to himself when he thought about his desire to finally talk things through with Mark, to perhaps finally get some sort of closure, he couldn’t deny that all this seemed too good to be true. If all it had taken was a few choice words at an alcohol-fuelled function, why hadn’t it happened sooner? Eduardo knew that they had caught eyes across the room more than once, more than several dozen times ... so why now?

Part of him simply hoped that somewhere along the line, Mark had found his conscience. However, he knew Mark a lot better than that and he couldn’t fully convince himself. Perhaps that’s why the nervousness was pooling in the pit of his stomach, and why he suddenly felt nausea bubbling in his stomach which was nothing to do with the alcohol still retreating from his system?

He brings up Facebook’s homepage once more and stares in disbelief at the message, still there, being showed to literally hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

I’d do absolutely anything for you.

"You know," says a voice, and Eduardo turns to see the employee from earlier, smiling to herself as she cleans a table next to him. "I think that if the stories are true and Mark Zuckerberg put that there himself ... I think whoever he’s referring to is a very lucky person."

"Oh, you do?" Eduardo asks, and he can’t really see it, if he’s honest.

"Well, yeah," the young woman laughs, and she smiles at him as she straightens up. "It takes some serious passion to sabotage something as big as Facebook ... especially if it’s your own creation, your own business. I think that whoever that message is referring to should probably get in touch, or who knows how long we’ll all be Facebook-deprived for? It might be that I’m some hopeless romantic, but I think that message right there is some serious love."

Eduardo blinks.

"Right," he says, because that’s all he can say, and the girl just laughs again.

"Can I get you anything else?" she asks, and Eduardo shakes his head as he switches off his laptop and repacks it, shoving his cell phone into the pocket on the front of the case.

"No, thank you," he says, and she nods.

"Good luck, Mr. Saverin," she winks, and Eduardo’s heart drops as he leaves the shop. He doesn’t look back.