Chapter Text
“There you are,” he said, letting the bathroom door close behind him. Helly was standing at a running sink, looking in the mirror.
“Oh,” she said, glancing at Mark. She took her time turning off the faucet before turning toward him. Her nose and eyes were slightly pink, standing out against the pale green of the room.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He had come in to ask if she was ready for lunch, but now he felt like he was interrupting something.
“I need to talk to you, actually.” Her low voice reverberated off the tile.
“Yeah?” He narrowed the gap between them. Kissing distance, he thought, his heart twinging.
She lowered her voice. “Look, I’ve been thinking.” She seemed unable to meet his gaze. “There’s no way for me to win here.”
“What do you mean?” he asked quietly.
Even under the fluorescent glare, there was something warm about her. A flame he was drawn to. A light.
“Since the day I woke up on that table, I’ve been trying to escape,” she began slowly.
Lately, memories had been rushing over Mark, like a waterfall he was unable to tame. The memories were random, without context, swinging wildly from one emotion to the next. One minute he was falling off his bike, skinning his knee, and the next he was walking down an endless white hallway, blue numbers swimming in front of his eyes. They jumbled together, shuffling like cards. Sometimes he didn’t know when he was.
He had been getting through it by focusing on something solid in front of him; his desk, a poster on the wall, his TV. They were the life rafts he clung to until the swirling stopped. It felt like being drunk and fixing on the horizon to avoid being sick.
Helly was always grounding. He could pin her in time, because the moment she woke up on that table, she had set his life in motion again.
“I think I knew deep down from the beginning, but since I came back… I only exist down here,” she continued. “Even if I got up the elevator, out the door… it’s not me who’s leaving.”
Mark’s heart started beating faster, the beginning of something he didn’t want to admit tugging at the corner of his mind.
She took a deep breath and looked directly at him. There was something fierce in her expression.
“This… us… what’s the outcome? We’ll never get to be together out there. We’ll never get a coffee, or take a walk outside… or do anything.” Her face flushed. What if she was assuming too much by saying she wanted to be with him out there?
Relief flooded through him.
“Helly, you know I’m…” he trailed off, touching the back of his head. He had told her what the nosebleeds meant. “You could do it too. I could talk to your outie, we could find a way…”
“Do you really think my outie could be convinced? Helena, who thinks we’re not people? And it’s not an exact science, is it? You almost died. But even if everything went perfectly… I’m a monster.”
“Helly, you’re not.” He took a half step toward her, reaching out to touch her elbow. But she shifted slightly, avoiding it. He looked at her with a clear, open expression. “The Helly I know always does the right thing. She’s kind and funny and brave. She’s not a monster. How could you say that?”
“Mark, I’m responsible for this,” she said, gesturing around the room. “For all of us being down here. Or at least, I never stopped it. That’s evil.”
“Yeah, but it’s not you,” he said softly. “If you reintegrated, maybe you could change your outie.”
“We’re the same person!” she said above a whisper. “I don’t have her memories, but we’re not separate people.” She lowered her voice again. “Even if we reintegrated, she’s not going anywhere. At best, I could try to make her nicer, but I can’t change her past. I’d still be the person who tricked you, Mark! Who took your wife from you! Could you ever really forgive that? Because I can’t.”
She took a shaky breath and turned away from Mark, her back to the sink.
Mark felt a chill wash over him.
“Helly, we could try. We have to try.” He hated the way his voice sounded. Whiny, desperate.
She looked over at him. There was a hardness to her face, an unreadable look in her eyes.
“I’m never going to escape this place. I only exist on this floor, and any day, my outie could decide never to come back. I’ll be gone like Irving.”
Her voice caught on his name. The words conjured icy water for them both.
“What I’m going to do with however long I have — that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m going to help you find your wife. We can leverage my outie’s position with Lumon to get more information. I’ll figure out how to get her a message from me, and you can talk to her outside. We know she likes you.”
She was speaking with a determination Mark had always loved about her. But now he was seeing traces of Helena in her expression. He felt dizzy.
“No, Helly, please don’t give up —“
“I’m not giving up,” she said coldly. “I’m helping you the only way I can.”
“But —“
“Please don’t try to change my mind.”
She looked at him and there were galaxies between them. She was as far away from him as when she first woke up on the table, lashing out like a caged animal. Her yielding softness seemed like a distant memory, lost in the riptide of all his other memories. Of Gemma, of home, of love.
She walked past him, out into the office. The door swung shut behind her.
Numb, Mark followed.