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"Shit!"
Oliver's voice cuts through the quiet of the early morning as he stares in dismay down at the place where the third button on his favorite shirt used to be.
"You okay?" Mark calls from the bathroom through a mouthful of toothpaste. Oliver glances over at Mark, eyes still bleary from the early morning, and feels his heart grow warm.
Well, that can't possibly be good for my health.
"I'm fine," he answered belatedly, realizing he'd just been standing there staring like an idiot. "I just somehow managed to lose one of my buttons. And off my favorite shirt, too!"
Oliver sighs and starts to unbutton the shirt once more. He's got an interview with BU for an Adjunct position in an hour and a half, and had specifically slept at Mark's last night because it was closer to campus than his own apartment, but he's suddenly wishing he'd stayed home. Maybe he could stop at Target on the way to the interview?
"What are you doing?" Mark asks, suddenly behind Oliver, and Oliver jumps. He hadn't heard Mark move, so caught up in his own thoughts.
"It's ripped," he says slowly. "I can't wear it."
"It's just a button, Oliver," Mark says, eyeing him from the side. "It's an easy fix."
"It is?"
"Sure," Mark says, going to pick up a box Oliver's never noticed before from his bedside table. "C'mere, take that off, I'll teach you."
Oliver stares, dumbfounded, as Mark opens the box, pulling out a silver needle and a spool of lightly colored thread that matches Oliver's shirt almost perfectly.
"Here, hand me the button."
"How'd you learn to do this, anyways?" Oliver asks, settling gingerly at the edge of Mark's bed. They've only been... Together... For a few weeks now, and Oliver still feels like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mark Bryant is too good to be true, and Oliver is just waiting to be reminded about how much he really just isn't good enough.
"What, sew?" Mark asks, looking up from where he's attempting to string thread through the tiny eye of the needle he's holding. He smirks down at his hands, but it's a sour thing, small and resentful.
"I was an... Adventurous kid," Mark begins, and Oliver shifts on the bed to get more comfortable, turning his whole body to face the other. He can sense that this is a story Mark hasn't told many, and it warms his heart to think that Mark trusts Oliver with this part of his life.
"I was a kid, you know? Always up and down trees, getting into trouble, falling constantly. I was a clumsy-ass kid, nothing like Joanie, who always seemed put together; I was always bleeding from some part or another. I really thought I could fly, some days... This was before I knew I, ya know, probably could, given the right circumstances."
Mark stops for a moment, huffing out a short laugh, and Oliver can see it, in his mind's eye - tiny Mark, shorter than Oliver ever was, climbing towards the top of a large tree in the middle of a park somewhere. Tiny Mark is surrounded by friends in Oliver's imagination, still as effortlessly charismatic and magnetic then as he is now. It makes Oliver's heart ache.
"Anyways, my parents... Well, they weren't around much when I was a kid, you know. I always thought they had kids just because it was what was expected of them, you know? They liked each other just fine, but they... Really weren't cut out to be parents. They left Joanie and me home alone a lot."
He's finished threading the needle by now and has knotted the string together at the ends, leaving the flashing silver needle hanging in the middle. Oliver stares at it, wishing he could use it to rip through time and space to go back and hold Tiny Mark in his arms.
"My mom was a bit of an intense person," Mark continues, and Oliver smiles.
"So that's where Joan gets it from." Oliver says, teasing. Mark laughs and the tension in the room snaps, only for a moment, but enough that Mark settles his shoulders back down where they belonged instead of scrunching them by his ears like a turtle retreating into its shell.
"Yeah, pretty much," Mark agrees. "Anyways, she was kinda a hardass about buying us new clothes; it was always why can't you be more careful, Byron? and why can't you be more like Joan, Byron?"
Mark laughs again, but it's bitter this time, rich with years of not good enough never good enough why can't you be more like your sister? He lifts Oliver's shirt into his lap and stares at it, pensive.
"It got to the point where, every time I ripped a pair of jeans, my parents would yell at me. I was a disaster, in their eyes; never good enough for them. So I stopped asking for new things when I ripped them, just wore the ripped stuff in public."
"Mark..." Oliver says softly, horrified.
He thinks of his own family, big and loud and boisterous, so loving and on top of one another it was almost stifling some days. He contrasts that with his mental image of Tiny Mark, small and alone in a world so much bigger than him, and his heart aches.
Mark shrugs, like it is what it is.
"Turns out, wearing ripped clothing to school garners comments from concerned teachers, even on disaster kids too clumsy for their own good," he says. "I learned to sew out of self preservation."
Mark looks up to meet Oliver's eyes for the first time since beginning his story, and Oliver can see now how hard it truly was for Mark to hand Oliver this piece of himself. He can't help it; he reaches forward, grasping Mark's face between his hands and bringing Mark's lips to his. Mark deserves to feel appreciated, every moment of every day; Oliver swears as he sits on this bed, having been presented with a piece of Mark's soul, that he will protect this man with every ounce of his being.
He kisses Mark until he can't breathe, until the shirt lays abandoned on the bed and the button has rolled away onto the floor never to be seen again and thinks of how lucky he is to know Mark Bryant.
(Later - much later, but still with time to spare before his interview - Oliver will sit and watch as Mark threads the needle up and down, through his shirt, through the buttonhole, hands moving so fast the needle looks like nothing but glints of silver in the sunlight. He'll trace his eyes down Mark's face, stopping to stare at the way Mark pokes his tongue out through his front teeth, and he'll want to kiss Mark so hard it'll feel like he's dying with the need to taste that dedication. He'll watch as Mark hands him back his shirt, good as new, and think to himself - I am going to marry this man.
That's for later, though. For now, he is focused on Mark.)
Fuck the elder Bryants, Oliver thinks with resolve. I will never let him feel that unwanted ever again.