Chapter Text
Mark woke up.
It was like the flick of a switch, exactly like every other day coming to in the Lumon elevator. Except this time, he was somewhere else. Gone were the blinding whites of the halls and the ugly, shag green carpets. He had never seen so much color at once.
It was night, something he had never seen before. He existed from 9-5, under the sickly glow of fluorescent lights.
The light filtering in through the window was a soft, dim blue.
He took in the details one at a time. He was in a bedroom. There was a window above him, and a small pile of blankets pooled at his feet. If he listened closely he could hear birdsong.
If this was what a dream was like, it was no wonder that Irving kept falling asleep.
He brushed his hand against the blankets, and the fabric felt soft against his skin. Irving had told him once that his dreams were vivid yet intangible. That in dreams everything felt fast, but his senses felt dull. He couldn’t taste anything he ate, feel anything he touched, and often the rules of the universe themselves were, at best, a suggestion.
This felt different. The world had taken on an idyllic slowness, and the blankets felt warm under his hand. Mark took a moment to gather himself.
The last time Mark had woken up was at the party. He had no idea how long it had been since then- at the very least a few hours had to have passed, considering he was at home and wearing different clothes. (A red sweater, and pajama pants with little red hearts on them.) The chance of it still being the same day as the party was slim, but he had no way of knowing for sure. He sincerely hoped that Dylan was not still at Lum0n, straining against the machine. He shuddered. Perhaps Dylan had found a way to rig the machine so that they all got their time in the sun. That was a nicer thought.
He tried not to dwell on it all the same; he didn’t know how much time he would have to look around, and he didn’t want to risk wasting time if he could help it. Each moment he spent outside of Lumon was borrowed, and he couldn’t afford to take it for granted. The mission came first, even if he had no idea what to do- or even what step they were on in the first place.
Maybe writing a note would help. He’d never gotten the opportunity to truly communicate with his outie, not since the first few weeks of work. Even then he was never certain that his resignation letters were ever delivered.
The idea of opening up communication was, frankly, nerve-wracking. He had no idea what to write. No words felt like they would ever possibly suffice. It all sounded like nonsense outside of the situation itself. What would he even start with, the dead wife or the baby goats?
Mark swung his legs over the edge of the bed, trying to ignore the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the nightstand and the clothes piled up at his feet.
The living room carried the same theme. If not for the years of dust on the baseboards he would have thought he was still in the process of moving in. There was no art on the fridge, no photos on the wall, and when he went to turn on the light only one bulb seemed to work. If he were to try to piece together the man his outie was, the lack of thought or love put into the home spoke more than any hobbies ever could. This was a place of deep stagnation, a house that had failed to turn into a home.
Days, maybe months of papers were piled up on the coffee table. Some of the messages looked to be from family, others from a nearby college addressed to a ‘Professor Mark.’ If he had ever written a reply, there was no evidence of it.
He grabbed a pen off the top and flipped to the back side of one of the less important seeming papers. He wondered if the other Mark shared his handwriting.
“My name is Mark S,” he wrote. “I don’t know what day it is, or what woke me up, but I’m your innie. I was able to get in contact with your sister, Devon, during the party – though I’m not sure how long ago that was.”
He briefly considered his wording. It would have been presumptuous to assume Devon also considered him, the Mark that he was, to be her sibling. It felt too presumptuous to even hope for something like that.
“She should know the story, but if you weren’t aware, everything you’ve heard about severance is a lie.” He paused, unwilling to write more. It might have been necessary to talk about the things they had to go through as employees, but he wasn’t willing to open up about it either. The thought made his head swim, made him sick.
“My friends are in danger. Their names are Helly R, Irving B, and Dylan G. I was also close with a former employee at Lumon named Petey K. I’m sorry that I don’t have much more to go on, we never learned our last names. I’ll write down everything I know about them below, and maybe it will give us something to go on for now.
Please keep them safe.”
He wanted to write about the break room, about the torture they endured, but he couldn’t find it within himself. His pen tapped the paper a hundred times, and stalled before it even wrote a word. He had to trust Devon to relay the message where he couldn’t. There was something so blasphemous about revealing his struggles to the part of him which put him in there. It went against his every instinct to even consider. He had no idea who the other Mark was, or if he had ever cared. If the house was any indication, he wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself. Perhaps the self loathing ran deep enough that torturing part of himself wouldn’t phase him. He had to pray that if his innie’s humanity wasn’t enough to care about, that he would want to help the others.
Mark spared an additional moment to make a chart of people’s hair colors and approximate ages, in a little mock-up of a spreadsheet. It wasn’t much, but he hoped it would be enough.
The act felt final to him. A stepping stone towards progress, but... he was still here.
The thought of spending a whole day by himself felt unbelievably luxurious. It was the kind of thing he would daydream about during his few moments between tasks, but despite that he couldn’t bring himself to relax. not when he didn’t know why he was here, if it was a test, or if his friends were safe.
He was afraid to touch too much, breathe wrong, or exist in this space without permission. The house felt as though it was not made for living. He would have said it felt like it was made for someone else, but there was no personality, just an emptiness where it should have been. It felt like a place with no history. Any memories made here had been forgotten or drank away.
Maybe he could fix that.