Shards of Trust
Summary: Mark’s response to Celine leaving and his empty bank account.
Prompt: Goretober, Torn in Half
Warnings: downward spiral, betrayal, broken trust, numbness, loss of trust, self isolation, unhealthy love, grieving failed relationship, being reminded of Celine by everything, brief infidelity mention, pure angst, if this doesn’t make you sympathize with Actor!Mark I don’t know what will.
Note: day 10!! Apparently half of this month is just going to be different points of Mark grieving his relationship with Celine. Hope you don’t mind, but I like this one and hope you do as well, despite the repetitiveness^^
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Fingers hooked and tense, Mark grasps the splayed edge of wallpaper, ripping it from the wall. Teeth bared, anger bubbling, he rips apart the walls of his home.
Laughter bubbling, laughter dying, Mark spirals. There’s nothing funny about this, nothing to laugh about, but seeing his home the way it was was making him sick. They were plastered over the walls, lurking behind the corners and taunting him with their memory.
They had left. They had betrayed him, stolen from him, broken him.
Mark had trusted them, loved them both, in different ways. He would have trusted them with anything, and they had thrown the shattered shards of his trust back in his face.
So he’s ripping off the wallpaper, the decorative paper that Celine had picked out, that William had volunteered to help put up. They live on the walls, in the now tattered vinyl paper lining the hall.
Alone in his home, the only occupant not paid to be there, he wants all reminders of previous inhabitants gone. They had left, had abandoned it, him, so their memory didn’t deserve to stay, to live as a coat on the walls, or a photo in his room.
Using the remains of his trust, broken, shattered, sharp, he cuts out the reminders of those who broke it.
Throwing the framed photo against the table, bits of glass spewing out, he breaks and cracks the glass protecting William’s photo. Grinning behind a web of cracks, the aftermath of his lies and betrayal, William sits, preserved and happy and safe. Curled lip, shaking hands, Mark destroys all evidence of the two who left him, but he keeps the photos.
Anger jolts through him whenever the one displaying him and William, together, happy, catches his eye. It’s a reminder, to be careful of who he trusts.
Strangled, torn out strings, Mark doesn’t trust anymore.
Not his butler, or the chef, or Damien, who has remained blissfully neutral on the matter. Sitting on the sharp edges of his trust, surround by the snapped, cut strings that had tied him to the people he’d trusted, he isolates himself.
The tattered wallpaper is burned and Mark feels nothing when he stands beside it and breathes in the toxic smoke. It clouds in his lungs, sticking to his throat, burning his eyes. He only leaves when there’s nothing left but a black stain on the stone and a layer of ash covering it.
Days, weeks, months pass.
He doesn’t speak.
He goes through the motions. Waking up, eating, sitting listlessly in a chair, showering whenever Benjamin forces him into the bathroom, going to sleep. Staring at the ceiling in the dark and trying to forget how his bed had felt when he wasn’t the only one in it.
He misses Celine, misses William, misses Damien and Abe and everyone he’s locked out. Keeping his silence is hard, when it’s just him and empty air, but when he hears word that someone is reaching out — a phone call, a knock on the door, a message sent through the post and delivered by Ben — then he wants to speak. Wants to break in the shelter of someone’s arms and have them assist in piecing him back together. But whenever someone shows, or when he has a chance to reach for their outheld hand, he locks up. His throat freezes and words climb up his throat just to die on the battlefield of his tongue.
Alone, empty, drowning in the silence he sentenced himself to, he feels lost. Lost to a prison of his own design, his own making, serving out a sentence no one placed upon him, a sentence he doesn’t deserve. He did nothing wrong, not really, nothing to warrant this self punishment.
In the end, he wasn’t the one who had lied and broken his vows. Yet he was the one left behind, shouldering a burden that wasn’t his to bear.
Celine should be bearing it, should be standing with the sky on her shoulders, like Atlas. She was in the wrong, but because Mark loves her, he is taking the fall. Even if this time, it all falls upon her and he has every reason to hate her.
He can’t bring himself to do so.
Loving her is all he has and even if it feels like poison, sharp hooks buried under his skin, piercing through bone and muscle, without it he has nothing. Loving her had been his redemption, his piece of good that couldn’t be disputed by the gossip magazines and tabloids.
Unwittingly, Celine has utterly broken the man she’d proclaimed to love.
Now, she was wiped clean from the house she had shared with him. Photos of her were no longer proudly on display, but broken and collecting dust in an old trunk Mark vows to never open. Clothes she’d left behind were thrown out, her perfume shattered in the bottom of a bin and clouding the foyer with the scent for days.
It had been pungent, strong and piercingly sharp. It had smelled like her, and the scent had overtaken the bottom floor, the staircase, the halls. The scent of her reeked through the house as if she was around every corner, behind every door and just a step away.
During that time, he kept thinking that she had come back, that she’d realized her mistake and was now looking for his forgiveness. He thought that she was filled to the brim with apologetic regret, was coming to apologize and grieve what she had ruined.
She never came back. It was just the scent of her perfume in the air.
There’s a secret, in the back of his closet, buried and hidden. Screaming, his heart begs him to be rid of any piece of her, big and small alike. Broken, lovesick heart, Mark can’t bring himself to obey. In the back of his closet, sits her wedding dress.
Identical red robes line the front, close enough so he can reach in and grab one without peering inside and spotting the white satin hanging in the back of the closet. After she left, he started to wear nothing but those red robes.
Cleared from any obvious space, Celine is dead to her house of marriage, the house of loving vows and matching silver bands. In the corners, in the shadows, in places of hidden sight, she still breathes. Turning her home of happy matrimony into a house of despair.
Divorced in heart, Celine still holds too much power over Mark. She is behind his every decision, beside him with every breath. She is a ghost, dead only to him, of whom he cannot shake. Poisonous to his mind, his deteriorating mental state, but she is what he’s clinging desperately to, unable to look at her, but even more unwilling to let her go.
Fine line, he holds her without having her. It’s gut wrenching and heart breaking and wrong. He knows that he needs to let her go, that he needs to move on and continue his life.
But moving on was too hard. At the start, when he gave it a try, it had hurt. Fire had burned in his lungs and clogged his throat with smoke. His bones had been fragile and cold and crafted from ice. His skin had been heavy, too tight and constructing. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t let her go.
He learns that the hardest part of loving someone isn’t losing them. It’s letting them go.
Wispy memories of her in his hands, he can’t bring himself to climb the mountain and feel the pain of letting her go. Cowardly, stupidly, he decides that he loves Celine Fischbach and he will love her until the day he dies. Probably even then. As long as there is a piece of existence that vaguely resembles him, in any form, he will love her.
Letting her go is a choice that he would have to make and doing so feels like giving up, like admitting that his love was a mockery and fake and just another act of his, another face he wore in front of the masses. It is a choice he can’t bring himself to make, not when the implications of doing so are false.
Despite the numbness, the distant realization that he should be in pain, he can’t let her go. Not when she was the only good he ever had. Even though she is already lost to him, he can’t let her go.
He doesn’t. Her memory, the only thing he really has of her, besides the wedding dress he can’t bear to look at and the hidden photos and the burn on the back porch from the fire.
Betrayed, broken, untrusting, mute, Mark forgives the worst kind of crime. If he didn’t, his love would falter. Wrongfully, that is his priority. No one can honestly accuse him of not loving her. Not when it was one of the few things he did right.
To him, the loyal, doting husband, that the only thing he can ask for that he has a chance of receiving. He’d like a time machine, to go back to when they were newly wedded and he still had her love.
He’s not sure when he lost it, where he went wrong and what he did to lose it. Short answer, he didn’t. Mark, despite his dramatic, flamboyant nature had done everything important right with her.
It was her fault that that wasn’t enough. Celine is the one with a list of faults, and she is one guiltless, free while her innocent husband rots in her failure to love.
Surrounded by broken things, sharp edges cutting out and snagging on his skin, Mark breaks. For her, because of her, he breaks. His love holds strong, dripping poison and edged with tempered steel. No longer a point of pride, a happy thing, he loves. Celine turned his love, his redeeming quality, the best thing he had, into something destructive and grotesque.
Broken wedding vows, discovered infidelity, Mark meets the start of his end, the prologue to his tragedy. Spiraling, tumbling, reeling, he falls. Stained love, skewered view, Mark doesn’t want to love her anymore.
He still does.
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Masterlist
Sorry this is late, the end took a minute to figure out.
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