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Mark didn’t want to, but he felt like he owed it to the District Attorney, after…
After.
He goes to their house two weeks after the doomed party at the manor. Two weeks of absolutely no word from anyone who should have come back out. Not Abe, not Benjamin, not Chef, not the Colonel –
They’ve all…vanished.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like that, it wasn’t , it was just supposed to be the Colonel, but then it turned into somehow trapping Celine and Damien in that dark dimension, and stealing Damien’s body and now, the further he runs and hides from the world, the more his horror grows at everything he’s done, at what he allowed himself to fall into–
Everyone he’s ever cared about, everyone he's ever loved, is gone. And it’s all his fault.
The attorney is gone (missing, the newspapers say, but Mark knows in his heart that they must be dead) and it’s his fault.
He realizes, as he walks through the door of the attorney's home, that he hasn’t been here since the day their friendship imploded in the most spectacular of ways.
“You can’t deal with trauma and heartbreak like a normal person, so you make rash, life-altering mistakes that end up hurting everyone around you—”
Their painful accusations have never left his mind. They haunted him during the two years after their fight when he isolated himself in that house and let the darkness envelop him. Before, those words were more and more reason to do what he did. Now…they’re a reminder of all he’s done. All he’s ruined.
Their house hasn’t changed since he was last here. Outside, the key is in the same spot, under a false rock by the birdhouse. Inside, there is minimal clutter. A jacket on the back of the couch, a blanket on the piano seat, an empty tea cup on the coffee table. The sight of one of the scarves Ruth made when she was still alive makes his chest tighten so hard it almost sends him to his knees.
Mark moves his feet forward one step. Two steps. Three. Until he gets to the dusty mantle and the pictures on top. He stares at the images. One of a young DA and their parents and their estranged brother (he resists the urge to cut the bastard out of the frame). Another of just the DA and their mother, after she returned from the war. Another…
Another of them, after his first big play. The attorney, just a law student at the time, and Damien, and Mark. Mark is holding the rose they gave him after the show.
The sight of the three of them happy, smiling, almost giddy. To think, the whole time, he had been completely clueless to the truth.
“I’ve been in love with you for half my life, Mark.”
They’d loved him. They…
The pictures grow blurry as tears fill his eyes. He’s destroyed so much. In his ignorance, his arrogance, his anger…
He thought that Celine leaving him was the worst thing that could have happened to him, the worst he would ever feel. Then that, somehow, paled in comparison to losing his friend afterwards, when he latched on to them, tried to pull them into the water with them in his attempts to save himself from drowning.
This is worse. This is so much worse.
He can’t stay here. He doesn’t deserve to live in their home, and he would never presume so.
Mark wipes away his tears, grabs the pictures off of the mantel to put into his messenger bag, and leaves again.
He tries not to look back. But he does.
(And decades later, when he’s rebuilt most of his fortune and fame, he will hear that this neighborhood is slated for demolition. He buys the house and the lot around it, saves it from the demolition crews. Preserves it. He doesn’t know why.)