The ones by KissTheBoy7 and HeadlinesBreadlinesBlowMyMind are my favorite. Both of them are on Archive Of Our Own.
I’m also going to use this as a place to promote my own fics-I’m transmarkcohen on Archive, and I do quite like my fics. While it may seem that self-advertising is a bit gaudy, I’d rather think of it as a boost of self-esteem.
Also, you’re welcome Mark! Love your fics. (@headlines-breadlines-blowmymind - that’s my boyfriend!! Love you dear.)
Untitled Marker kidfic from the drafts folder of my old email
I have absolutely no explanation for this. Credit to Olivia for directing the plot.
rated T for Teen
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It's Roger's first day of middle school, so he's expecting changes. He's expecting, in fact, to be swept away in a whirlwind of eleven-year-old excitement. He's grown up now, he tells Mark proudly- it's the first year they've had to ride separate buses since they met when Mark entered kindergarten the year after him. Being in different grades, different classrooms had never perturbed them but this bus business was getting them both emotional.
Yeah, his only regret is not being able to take Mark with him- but he will next year. He promises.
By the weekend, Roger has discovered that middle school is, indeed, just as easy as elementary school in the homework department. He’s never been so relieved.
After all, he has better things to do than stupid algebra. He has to learn a song.
Saturday morning finds him squinting, bright and early, at his brand new sheet music as he settles the acoustic in his lap. If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t the best player in the world- but he was only eleven. He had plenty of time to become a rockstar, plenty of time to practice until he was perfect, no, beyond perfect. And once he’d achieved greatness, he could invite Mr. Eli to one of his concerts and knock his socks off.
With this firmly in mind, Roger tentatively begins plucking strings.
If he couldn’t learn American Pie by lunchtime, then he didn’t eat. It was decided.
It’s been two weeks since his guitar lessons ran out and he’s slightly rusty. The guitar feels almost foreign in his hands- he can’t recall exactly how to position it in his lap, how to stretch his fingers to the strings, but Roger has always been one for winging it so he isn’t too worried. In fact, he’s certain that he’s holding it wrong. But that’s okay. Reading the notes on the page is the hardest bit for him, always has been, so he leans forward and squints at the nonsensical ink on the page before him and tentatively plucks at the strings.
The vibration that travels through the wood and into his waiting lap is not at all expected.
He stiffens, sucking in a sharp breath and slowly lowering his gaze to the instrument in his hands. What was that? Images of his quirky music teacher flash quickly into his mind and he whimpers as his pants tighten, the guitar seeming to press more firmly against his lap. Curious, hunches awkwardly around it and strums again.
Oh. Oh, that feels good…
It doesn’t particularly bother him that this has never happened before when he played guitar. His teacher had been a girl, a freckly thing in baggy clothes and dark makeup that he’d heard referenced as “goth” and he had no interest in her. Now, though, with his favorite teacher so clearly in the forefront of his thoughts, it’s ten times better.
Listening for a few moments to be sure that his mother hasn’t rolled out of bed yet, Roger slowly lifts his hips off of his bed and toward the dented instrument, head swimming with torturous pleasure. It’s not really enough, but he’s not sure of what, just that he likes guitars even more than he did before. He strums again, randomly, the sheet music flown from his mind, and shivers as the vibrations course down the length of his…
God, he couldn’t even think the word. His mother would slap him.
But, rebel that he was, Roger rubbed up against his guitar and swallowed his anxiety down in favor of the pleasurable sensations. Irrationally, excitement bubbled up, flushing his skin.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to wait that long after all to impress Mr. Eli. This was adult, wasn’t it? He could be an adult if he wanted to be, eleven or not.
ASDFGHJKL
For the life of him, Roger can’t figure out what he’d done wrong. He just knows that Mark is acting funny and it must be his fault, because he was fine when he got here but now all of a sudden he doesn’t want to wrestle, doesn’t even want to stay and play watch movies. He says he has homework, but Roger is pretty sure that he’s lying.
Why would he lie?
Here he’d thought that Mark was his best friend! He watches him from his bedroom window as he walks to the car with his mom; she’s saying something and Roger can’t read her lips, but Mark shrugs her off so it can’t have been that important. He furrows his eyebrows, trying his best not to feel betrayed.
As the engine revs and the Cohen car pulls out of his driveway, he lies back on his bed with his arms folded behind his head and stares morosely at the ceiling. He never did learn American Pie all the way through, but screw that- right now he has Mark to worry about, not some dumb teacher, even though Eli kind of reminds him of Mark sometimes with the way he moves his hands and scrunches up his nose and his glasses and his crooked smile…
Making a face, Roger shakes the thought from his head. I’ll learn it tomorrow. Mark had been as excited as he was at first when he’d told him he was learning a song on his guitar, sat right down and watched as he played. The thrill of having an audience had made the weight of the guitar rubbing against his lap all the more enticing. It had been the best feeling in the world…
So how had be managed to ruin it?
Was it the way he talked? His mother told him he was obnoxious sometimes, but Mark had never seemed to mind before. He tightened his mouth, an unpleasant knot in his stomach.
Normally, he told Mark everything- Mark above everyone else, even his mom and his cat and his blanket when he was alone at night. But now Mark was mad, or sad, or something weird like that. He couldn’t talk to Mark about Mark… So who was he supposed to tell?
ASDFGHJKL
Meanwhile, in Mark’s very own bedroom a drama is unfolding.
The moment he’s alone, he’s hyperventilating. Oh, God. Oh God! He’d always known that one day it would start to matter that he was younger than Roger! He’d been waiting for this day, well maybe not this in particular, but he’d been waiting for Roger to realize it and now he was going to and he was so far ahead, and he was going to leave Mark behind and get himself into a world of trouble like Roger was always apt to do and Mark wasn’t going to be able to save him!
The blonde boy paces in tight circles, eyes darting about as if a solution will miraculously appear before his disturbingly blue eyes. Roger Roger Roger… He usually monopolizes Mark’s mind anyways, but this time it’s not a pleasant experience at all. Instead of the pretty shade of green his eyes are or the way he crinkles them when he laughs, instead of the powerful confident aura surrounding him, instead of the way he doesn’t mind when Mark wants a hug like the other boys do now, all he can see is that damn guitar.
What was he going to do? Had he really seen what he thought he’d seen? Or was it just his overactive imagination? Cindy always did say that he liked to make up stories…
But why would he want to make this up? He didn’t want to see his best friend having sex with inanimate objects! He didn’t want to see his best friend having sex at all! The way the nurse had explained it, and his mother afterwards, it seemed like sex was worse than any other crime.
And besides that- because Roger had never been one for rules in the first place and that surely wouldn’t keep him abstinent- sex could give you diseases! Sex could get you pregnant. As far as Mark could tell, Roger had been humping the wrong side of the instrument, but what if next time he turned it around? What if he put his penis in the hole?!
Part of him is distracted by the amusing idea of half-Roger, half-guitar babies walking around on spindly legs of woven nylon strings but he shakes it out of his head, shuddering. There had to be something wrong with that… Roger would never want to bring something that unnatural into the world, would he? And Mark had been right there. What if he got pregnant, too?! Could that even happen? He didn’t have a vagina…
Did he? He realizes now that he’s never bothered to check.
Oh, God! Roger can’t possibly have an inkling of how a baby is made if he’s put both of them in that kind of danger. Mark had a flash of panic, his whole body seizing up- Roger could screw his whole life up! A father at eleven! And not a good one. What if he got AIDS from that dirty old guitar of his?! He doesn’t know where it’s been! Then the guitar babies would starve and die and Mark would have to go to their funeral alone-
That’s the final straw. Mark has kept every secret of Roger’s he’s ever learned, from his fascination with nail polish to his sporadic bedwetting problem, but there’s no way he can keep this to himself. Not when it could wreck his best friend’s life, and his as well.
He takes a deep breath and, still wringing his little hands, creeps out of his room and down the stairs. In the living room, his mother is watching early afternoon soap operas with a fruit salad in her lap that she’s not really eating. No sign of Cindy.
He swallows and pushes his glasses up his nose, nodding to himself as he opens his mouth.
“Mom? Mom can- can I ask you something?”
She looks up from the t.v to her son on the stairs, peering at her meekly, and immediately seems to sense that something is wrong despite his earlier denial. She smiles warmly and pats the cushion beside her; he slowly makes his way over to sit beside her, trying to maintain the burst of confidence he’d had only moments ago.
“What is it, honey?” she asks, brushing a strand of ginger-blonde hair back into place. He forces himself to meet her eyes.
This could be his only chance. He ought to take advantage before Cindy got home.
For the babies, he reminds himself.
“It’s about-“ he cringes. “… It’s about Roger.”
ASDFGHJKL
“Mark come on, talk to me!” Roger pleads, doggedly pursuing his friend up the walk to his house. He’s not really sure at this point why Mark invited him over in the first place, if he was just going to ignore him. At first he’d been hurt and a little angry but now… now, overshadowing everything else was a heavy sense of doubt, acute anxiety that set his teeth on edge. It was as though the air had decided all at once to mutiny, pressing down on him from all sides and making it difficult to breathe. He couldn’t think about anything, not even his guitar or his teacher or the song he’d barely begun learning to play. Mark had taken over his thoughts without a word.
And maybe it was just because he was his only friend but Roger had to admit that he was afraid that he would cry if Mark broke up with him. He’d seen it happen already, the friendships of elementary school dissolving in the face of a bigger building, but he hadn’t thought it could happen to him. Now, though, it was looking as though Mark was getting sick of him.
What if he did tell him he didn’t want to be friends again? What then? He’d cry, he knew he would cry no matter how hard he tried not to… And then they’d sit in awkward silence, and Roger would be sniffling like a pathetic baby and Mark would ignore him because he didn’t care anymore and he would have to wait until his mother came back to pick him up and take him away from this impossibly awkward, heartbreaking situation-
“Where are we going?” He interrupts his own thoughts, nervously glancing around the Cohen’s living room as they enter it. Mark just shrugged and led him into the kitchen, straight through to the dining room where he was faced with Mrs. Cohen, smiling at him with unusual warmth.
“Roger,” she greeted him, gesturing to the chair across from her. Numbly, he stares and awaits his impending doom. Obviously Mark has told her that it was he and not her son who had drawn a family portrait in red lipstick on the walls of her perfect white living room when they were four, and he was going to hell.
He feels a hand on his shoulder and jumps before he realizes that it’s his mother, following him in and moving to sit beside Mark’s mother with a tense smile that said she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this situation. Roger wondered vaguely why the hell she wasn’t getting him out of here if that was the case, but Mark is sitting next to the chair that he’s supposed to be in now and he belatedly realizes he’s supposed to sit, too.
The moment his butt touches the seat, Mark’s redheaded mother with the crow’s feet and the tired blue eyes is talking. “Do you know why you’re here, boys?”
He glances to Mark, whose nodding with that guilty little look he used to get whenever Roger convinced him to steal candy from the 7/11 down the street. Suspicious now, he turns back to the two older women with narrowed eyes. “No…”
“We thought that it was about time that we sat you boys down for a talk about the birds and the bees.” His own mother speaks, now, but her voice wavers and it’s obvious that this wasn’t at all her idea. He pleads to no avail with his eyes to be allowed to stand and pelt out of the room like a startled deer. She just continues. “You’re getting to that age… where… your body starts changing.”
“You’re going to be going through puberty soon,” Mark’s mother adds, remarkably less awkward than her nervous counterpart. “We know that it might be a little alarming, the way your bodies are changing, but it’s completely natural.”
Vaguely, Roger recalls far more vulgar conversations he’s overheard in the halls of his new school that sounded just slightly like this and it doesn’t bode well. He opens his mouth to protest but his mother shushes him and he closes his mouth reluctantly, sinking back in his seat and bracing himself as the women spin a horrifying tale of smelly, greasy, hairy beasts known as teenaged boys and their urges, which never, ever, ever lead to anything good.
It’s a long hour.
His anxiety isn’t unwarranted. Mark cringes right along with him, but he gets the feeling that he’s heard this all before. Roger doesn’t believe a word of it, to his credit.
After all, doesn’t it contradict itself that he has the thing but he’s not supposed to use it? And if those freaky diseases really exist, then how does anybody have babies at all? Why don’t they all just drop dead?
But he endures it, and by the end he has a pretty good idea of what exactly it is that’s changed over the summer. Thinking of his guitar will forever make him blush like a tomato, and thinking of Mr. Eli… well… that- he doesn’t even know what to think about that.
Maybe he has a vagina that he just never told anyone about, and that’s what’s so attractive about him.
It doesn’t matter. When their mothers release them, both boys bolt from the room, and the moment they’re alone Roger finds himself mock gagging.
“DUDE. That was horrible,” he shudders, shaking his head furiously. Their brief awkwardness is a thing of the past and Roger feels like an idiot for worrying at all, because this is Mark leaning against him and laughing and nodding and he’s never going to leave his side.
“I know. Parents are gross,” he agrees, but he’s beaming. Roger doesn’t think too hard about the fact that Mark had known all of this already. He doesn’t feel ahead anymore- maybe there are still things that his friend knows that he doesn’t… But at least he still has Mark, and that’s the important part.
“Sex sounds like something I might want to try,” he speculates, grinning and relishing Mark’s horrified look. He pushes his friends glasses up his nose for him, cheeky. “When I’m older,” he adds, pinching his cheek like he’d seen his mother doing to him before.
“Ow.” Swatting him away and blushing furiously, Mark ducks his head and frowns. “Don’t joke about that, Roger, you could die!”
“Nah. I’m too cool to die,” he boasts, striking a pose. His eyes light up as he remembers his earlier ambitions. Yesterday seems weeks away, but his guitar is calling to him again now that he’s patched things up with Mark. His friend is giggling, hiding behind his hand as usual, as though that meant that he couldn’t still hear the sound.
He liked Mark’s giggle, though. It wasn’t girly if Mark did it.
He liked it a lot more than the look he had given him Saturday, watching him play, watching him think about something he hadn’t even known was wrong. And he decides that as good as it feels to play guitar and think of his cute teacher, as much as he wants to make it even better, it’s worth putting it off if he gets to hear Mark laugh like this every day.
“Hey, Mark?” he finally says, waiting until his friend’s fit has subsided. “When- when we’re older- will you promise me something?”
“Course I will,” is the instant reply, just what he was looking for. He smiles in an intense wave of relief, grabbing for his hand in an uncharacteristic display of tenderness.
“When we’re older- will you- can we-“ Bright red, he finally manages to stammer out his foolproof plan. “I don’t think I want to have sex with girls… Just you.”
He’s silent for a long moment, long enough that Roger twists anxiously around to look at him and try in vain to decipher his thoughts. Mark chews his lip, mulling it over, and finally looks up.
Blue eyes meet green, and suddenly a smile breaks across his face like waves on a shore, inevitable and invigorating.
“Yeah. Me too.”
They lock pinkies as children do and the future was as airtight as ever.
Roger vows to himself not to look twice at his music teacher tomorrow last period. He has better things to do, better people.
Because he knows who he’s marrying one day, and it isn’t Mr. Eli.
Mark is going to be his forever, just the way he always wanted it to be.
I'm not sure if anyone's even aware of the fact that I still have my old url but um it's a sideblog now? And I'm going to start posting all of my Marker fic on there okay for your viewing pleasure.
