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As soon as Helly's last word escapes her lips, the breath is knocked out of her, and it doesn’t come back.
A substance heavier than air fills her mouth, and the sensation is sluggish and unique, but not entirely unfamiliar; Helly is drinking water. Or, rather, she’s taking it like an inhale, with desperate force. It’s cold and crisp, laden with metallic undertones, and maybe water isn’t the right word for it, because this liquid is so different from that of the office coolers. The substance weighs a ton as it crawls down her throat, and Helly is suddenly very aware of what happens when water is breathed—
A sharp yank from behind, and Helly’s body convulses. The water comes up in a violent gag.
She’s shaking. She doesn't know why. Her entire body is pins and needles and pathetic trembling, and her crowd is gone—
“I’m sorry.”
The voice is difficult to recognize for a moment, but Helly feels an unmistakable warmth pressed against her disoriented body, and she looks up. The man is mumbling over her.
“I’m so sorry, Helly.”
Irv. Irv is cradling her. There’s an unusual discomfort that tells her she’s drenched, and her pins and needles have hardened into stabs of cold. She’s staring into an unending sea of illuminated off-white, a vision she cannot help but assume is the sky. Her trembling body shifts.
Irving handles her like a fragile thing, and Helly lets him, burying her face in the dense fuzz of his jacket as he pulls her up against him. He has one arm tightly clinging to her torso, the other against the back of her head, holding her to his chest. He’s apologizing over and over. Helly raises her face to him and, through spastic lips, forces a few words: “What’s happening?”
There’s no answer. Irv hushes her, and her own panic does nothing more than compel her to burrow further into his coat. In the pit of her stomach, Helly hates this. She feels like some small, pathetic creature, the frantic way she seeks warmth. But she’s cold, confused, and for all her experience teasing death, she is so incredibly scared. She’s crying. Sobs of every emotion bubble up inside of her, and she can’t tell her tears from the water streaking her face.
“Helly!”
This is another voice. It’s farther away than Irv’s, but familiar in a way that Irv’s is not. Helly perks up.
Mark is at her side in moments, first fussing frantically over her soaked form, then lowering beside Irving and taking Helly into his own lap. She’s happy to see him; Helly peels off of Irv to look up at Mark’s face—terrified, she notes—and draws herself closer to him. He grips her like a vice.
A third voice cuts through the air, this time deep and hostile. Milchick. She tenses as Irv straightens, and Mark pulls her up into his arms.
Helly was just there. The gala, the crowd, the cameras. She was speaking, moments ago. She was tackled. Now her body vibrates with distress that does not feel entirely her own.
Helly is a pitiful animal, seeking warmth, watching her friend approach Mr. Milchick with a ball of dread in her stomach. Helly is a backscratcher for someone incomprehensibly important; Helly is an Eagan. She has no idea where she is. Helly is fucking terrified. And as pathetic as it truly does make her, all she wants in this moment is to be coddled and cooed at in Mark’s arms. She wants him to tell her that she’ll be okay.
Mark’s eyes are fixed on Irv and Milchick.
“You have threatened collegial murder in the pond of Woe’s Hollow.”
Milchick’s words are venomous, sharper and steadier even than his tone in the breakroom. As Helly’s nervous system splits its attention—staving off the cold, drinking in the scenery, worrying for her friend—the sentence registers like gibberish, all except for murder. Irving—a murderer? The same man who held her so tenderly, who hushed her fraught whimpers and pushed sopping hair from her eyes…
“For this there can be no penalty but immediate and permanent dismissal.”
The cold is taking over, stinging along her skin and permeating into the marrow of her bones. Helly remembers what mortality once reduced her to, the animalistic writhing compelled by a sudden loss of air, but this feels different. Freezing is slow and subtle. It muffles her senses, and in the depths of her thundering chest, she knows that it’s dampening the parts of her that want to scream.
“There shall be no formal valediction, catered or otherwise.”
The words still don’t quite register. Helly’s head swivels from Irv to Mark, trying to make sense of it all, but they don’t speak to her. They are fixed on each other, filled with emotion Helly doesn’t know how to interpret. And then, as though from the heavens:
“Irv! I’m sorry! I should’ve listened!”
Dylan. It’s all four of them, then. Helly cranes her neck, attempting to find the source of the voice, but Mark’s arms lock around her, and she’s too numb to fight him. She settles back into the warmth of the collective embrace, waiting for the heat of Mark and Irving’s bodies to bring the fire back to her features.
It’s a fleeting hope; Irving stands, and half of Helly’s body is exposed to the chill.
“It’s okay! It’s all okay.”
There’s a sense of finality in Irving’s voice that fiddles with her instincts and makes her squirm.
“Just remember, hang in there.”
“Please refrain from any further speech, as you are no longer authorized to consort with any severed employee, nor they with you.”
“ Leave him alone! ”
The desperation in Dylan’s voice sends sparks through Helly’s body, but Mark tightens his grip before they can ignite. He’s holding her down. Some part of her knows that his protectiveness is only further reason to fight, but her breaths are still coming in uneven chatters.
“ Turn around. ”
It’s too much. Dylan is yelling again, and Helly can’t feel her face. She turns in a frenzy, looking up at Mark, silently imploring an answer, but he simply puts his hand on the back of her head, tucks her closer— like Irv did —and says nothing. His eyes are directed at the pair of monoliths before him: Milchick and Irving, in silent confrontation.
The outside atmosphere is far different from what Helly expected. Wind is a vicious thing, and the open air has a weight to it. For a moment, Helly considers the ridiculous idea presented to her: Irving B, a murderer.
But Milchick barks an order, and after a final lingering moment, Irving obliges.
As Irv steps into the woods, Mark locks Helly against his chest, grip almost unbearably secure. He directs her face away from the scene in front of her, and this brings some of her bite back to the surface: she’s being treated like a child, shielded from the realities of her world as though it will ruin her. She wiggles in Mark’s arms, trying to get loose. Mark’s fingers only press down and dig into the fabric of her jacket. Milchick yells “now!” , Mark flinches, and the next gulp of air that enters Helly’s lungs tells her just how close she was to suffocating. Her head was underwater, and she was jerked back by her hood—
Irving B, a murderer?
“Mark S., Dylan G., Helly R.? Come with me, please.”
This new voice is unfamiliar, Helly knows that much. It’s stern, but high pitched. Young.
There’s some argument on Dylan’s end, and Helly hears Irv’s name hysterically repeated. In her small bubble of warmth, though, Mark leans down to whisper to her.
“Do you think you can walk?” His shaking voice stutters over every syllable.
“I– maybe?” Helly attempts to stand, but half her mind is fogged and half her body numb. She wobbles. Mark wraps his arm around her torso.
Helly waits for the reassurances she’s been anticipating, Mark’s earnest and frantic repetitions of “ Are you okay? Can I help?” but they never come. Mark tugs her along. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“You…you need to get warm.” The determination is his voice is detached, and it startles her.
“Mark, where- where are we? What happened? Did you wake up?”
Mark goes rigid.
“ Mark .” Her voice is small and desperate.
“We can talk about it in the tent, Helly.”
He says her name like he’s unsure of it, and Helly’s stomach drops, but she doesn’t speak. She lets Mark support her as they trudge through snow, skirting the pond and the waterfall in which Helly found herself drowning. It hits her here, as blood rushes back to her brain, that she’s been dropped into some type of history. The others were awake before her, and she was already half-drowned.
She.
Helly suddenly feels very short of breath.
***
There is hardly time to note the child monitoring the campsite before Mark pulls Helly into a tent and situates her by the heater. A gasp is drawn from her lips as she huddles up to it, her body immediately aware of its adjacency to frostbite, and she stays still for a moment, wordless mumbles crackling on her tongue; she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
Mark spectates her from a considerable distance. It’s not really far, of course, and he watches her like she’ll die if he looks away, but she was expecting to have him beside her. Instead, he is opposite to her, and the expression on his face is one of both anguish and horror.
“Mark.” Once Helly is able to wrangle her voice, it comes out firm. “What the fuck is going on?”
He takes a deep breath. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Helly feels the color drain from her face. Fear comes to a rolling boil in her body and leaves goosebumps on the surface of her skin.
“The OTC. I…I woke up.”
“What did you see?” Mark’s voice is an apprehensive whisper.
Tears gather in Helly’s eyes as she remembers blinking into existence, the way her confusion was cut with a knife as she stepped into the elevator—
“I’m one of them out there,” she mutters, voice creaky with restrained tears. “I’m an Eagan.”
Horror. That’s what’s on Mark’s face, pure and plain. He shakes his head slightly, eyes flitting around the tent, and he begins to speak: “Oh my god. Oh my god, my god —”
“Mark, I swear— I’m not like her. I’m going to take her down. She was giving this speech, and I got in front of everyone and told them what was really happening—”
“So it wasn’t you?”
Mark’s voice punches her, and stuns her for a moment. Her mind briefly stops working.
Her head was already underwater, her coat already on, her friends already awake. Irv was apologizing— why was Irv apologizing?
Collegial murder.
Of who?
“Helly, you have to tell me.” Mark’s voice is tearing itself apart. “It wasn’t you? ”
“Mark,” she says carefully, “I haven’t seen you since the OTC. Since we…”
Mark flinches at the mere insinuation of the kiss, and Helly inches a little further away from him.
“Oh my god,” he mutters again. He buries his face in his hands. “This whole time…”
“Mark–” she’s gone from anxious to demanding “–what the fuck is happening?”
There’s a moment of silence, filled only by the dull hum of the heater, thawing Helly’s body and bringing back her spirit. Mark’s words are almost imperceptibly quiet.
“It’s been a week.”
“Since the OTC?”
“No, it’s been months since the OTC. You’ve been at work for a week.”
The implication is heavy in the air. Helly doesn’t need confirmation; she presses for more.
“But how did we get here? ”
“We woke up here yesterday for the ORTBO thing… ” He chews on this foreign word for a moment. “It was just a long hike, honestly.” He gives her a wide-eyed look upon saying this. “And then we ended up here, at the campsite. We sat by the fire.” Mark shakes his head violently. “Irving knew. He kept pressing you. He kept telling me not to trust you.”
Helly wishes he would stop saying you. It’s not her. It was never her. It was the furthest thing from her.
But then again, Mark is speaking of Irving’s suspicions, not his own. Helly knows herself well enough to recognize that she is nothing like her outie, but maybe Mark doesn’t.
There’s something missing here, something in the way Mark hesitated opening the tent for her. Helly can taste it in the air. “What happened after the campfire?”
“We got into the tents to go to sleep.”
Sleep. It’s been at the top of her list of ambitions for a while now, the ability to blink in and out of existence. She’s never managed it, despite a few attempts to make herself doze off in the bathroom. Helly wants to ask him what it feels like. She doesn’t, though. She knows there’s more, she just wants to hear it from him.
“Did we?”
Helly knows his answer before he gives it to her. Mark’s face is scribbled with fear, apology, hurt, and guilt, directed in every direction. Helly herself has been sore in some odd way, a feeling she initially attributed to her freezing and disoriented state, but has come to understand as something far more distressing.
“I mean, eventually,” Mark says softly.
“So we had sex?”
We feels like a strange word in this context. We because it was her body, though Helly had no say in what happened to it. We, because it was easier than saying they, Helena Eagan by way of Helly R.
“Yeah. We did.”
Mark won’t look at her, and suddenly, she can’t look at him. Helly wonders what he sees of her now, now that he’s seen all of her. She wonders what he knows that she does not; maybe there’s a birthmark on her lower back, or a scar between her shoulder blades, that Mark S. is now able to locate. She wonders what parts of her Helena has given Mark access to, that Helly has never been allowed to access herself.
It’s silent for a long while, each of them shying away from the invisible barrier now built up between them. There’s fear and anger on Mark’s end too, and Helly understands it— he thought it was you —but she can’t fully muster sympathy. Irving, the man most scandalized by her rebellious escapades in the months prior, had realized something was wrong. Mark, the man who had consoled her after her failed hanging, and walked down empty halls with her, and kissed her goodbye at the end of her last day, had not. He’d taken her to bed, he’d done this — but then again, it was Helena who lured him, and tricked him. There’s a parasite between them, sucking the veins of their connection, and Helly is its vessel. She knows this. She fears this. She wishes Mark weren’t so blind as to let it bite him, too.
Finally, Mark speaks up.
“I did wake up.”
Helly’s eyes are downcast, but she plays along. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I, um, I learned a bit about my outie.”
“Anything useful?”
“Ricken Hale is my brother-in-law.”
Helly scoffs.
“And…I had a wife out there. She died. That’s why my outie chose to sever. But I found a wedding picture, and it was…” He takes a sharp breath in. “It was Ms. Casey.”
“Ms. Casey?” This perks Helly up a bit. “Did you let her know last week?”
Helly feels a little bad for the spitefulness in her words, considering the vulnerability in this confession. Mark does nothing to acknowledge it, anyway. “No, she’s just gone. I mean, just disappeared. We—” Mark stops himself “--- your outie has been helping me look for her.”
“Hm.” Helly nods. She lets his statement fester before responding. “I’m assuming no luck.”
“No.”
The awkward silence comes back to them at full force, though Mark is now stealing small glances at her from his turned-away position. He breaks it with a breath, quiet and uncertain, as he reaches out to her. Helly’s brows furrow in a way that is almost hostile. Mark shakes his head.
“I need a way to know that it’s you.”
Helly hesitates for a beat, staring down at his hand. Then, slowly, she takes it. She puts her thumb in his palm, covers it with her other hand, and presses down into the creases of his skin in five pulses. Something that the security cameras cannot capture. Something that the detectors in the elevators cannot sense. Something that is hers, and not Helena’s.
“There,” she says softly. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
They stay like that for a while.
Anger writhes in Helly’s stomach. She wants to hate him for being so blind and careless, for tricking her into thinking he understood her. But really, the longer she sits with it, the more her anger begins to reflect back at herself. The truth is stark: Mark does care about her, enough to want her here, enough to feel betrayed by Helena’s manipulation if only because it deprived him of Helly. But Mark was fooled, because no matter how much Helly wants to pretend otherwise, the similarities always bleed through. Too stubborn to live, too stubborn to die. Two reflections, each willing to kill if only to prove the other wrong. Sore losers, both of them. Whatever beauty Mark saw in her, he also glimpsed in the version of her that does not see him as a person. Helly’s shoulders begin to shake.
She’s absorbed enough of her situation to understand that Irving is not coming back. She’s trying not to think about it, but it eats away at her, his apologies and gentle caresses. To her family on the outside, Helly is subhuman; but here, with these people, she is someone worth fighting for. Irving told her, in the Perpetuity Wing, that it is unnatural for a person to have no history. He found his history in the Eagans. She hopes he knew, in the end, that an Eagan had found her history in him.
A part of her wishes he’d gone through with it, collegiate murder. She’s a liability, her outie is provenly dangerous, and the only person in the world who cared enough to tell the difference has been lost. But now, a sort of guilt underlines her quiet yearning for death; Irv is gone, and he did it to save her. She thinks it was idiotic— but it can’t be for nothing.
Mark’s hand is warm in Helly’s, and her anger is beginning to ebb. Helena has frayed both of them, but Helly can be parasitic, too. She can tear Lumon apart from the inside out. She will.
Her mind drifts back to her kiss with Mark. She knows it will never feel the same in her memory, not after this. But she catches upon her own words that, in this moment, feel like the last thing Mark and Helly have ever or will ever say to each other.
In case we don’t come back.
She presses her thumb down again. 5 pulses. Mark squeezes her hand.
Or, I don’t know—
In case we do?