Work Text:
mark my words, there’s a thousand things
that don’t wash out with anything
They ask her what name they should give her innie. A liability, they say, for her to keep the one she has. Helena hesitates. Lets them provide suggestions. Helen, Hannah, Lena. None of them, all of them, she doesn’t care.
Severance, most basically, reduces a person to infancy. A person with no memories, a person who has not lived, yet.
Helena is seven years old when she gets called into her father’s study and is instructed to hold out her arms. When she does it, hesitantly, her father walks over and places the first Book of Kier on top of her outstretched forearms. She’s confused, was expecting punishment for knocking her glass over at the Lumon dinner that night, for tripping over her words when talking to the mayor.
It’s time you learn the gravity of your position, Helena.
She looks up at him. He looks away, sits in his chair. Doesn’t speak for the next two hours while Helena’s thin arms burn and shake uncontrollably. She knows better than to drop the text.
Finally, on the minute, he stops working, takes the book from her, and tells her to kneel. She isn’t expecting that either. She’s taken her punishment as he wished. Hasn’t she? She asks, and he directs a hard look at her but does not answer.
He opens the book. Sets it on the floor in front of her. Her shoulders stay ramrod straight. She does not look down at the pages once.
Helena repeats the compunction statement three-hundred-and-eighty-seven times before he lets her get up and leave his office. It’s well past dark, hours past her bedtime. There are tear tracks down her rounded cheeks. Her father takes a finger and swipes at a lone tear on her face.
Dearest Helena.
He says it as though he were fond of her.
It is not easy to tame the tempers, but it is my honor to help you befit your destiny.
She takes off the dress she’d been instructed to wear for dinner, claws the fabric away from herself in a desperate attempt to be freed. She stares into her pajama drawer. She hates, for the first time. She hates that dress. She hates her destiny.
She doesn’t put her pajamas on. She yanks her other drawers open and gets dressed.
It’s relatively easy to slip past the few cleaners left in their house, to grab her boots, and to slip past their gardener, sweeping leaves from their drive with a headlamp. She sneaks around to the side of their property, hides herself behind a bush, and pulls on her shoes. Then, she spots the trees in the distance and starts sprinting.
She isn’t stupid. She knows she has nothing. Not even a coat. She doesn’t care. She makes it into the woods, and keeps running. The trees are blurring around her, and the snow, all the white colorlessness of it all feels like it’s swallowing her up.
She doesn’t stop. It’s freezing, but it doesn’t matter. Her skin feels like it’s burning with rebellion. She’s never felt so good in her life.
She actually makes it to a town two miles away by morning, when somebody calls to report a little girl running through the local park with a wild mane of red hair and no jacket.
When the police finally catch her, they ask her why she left home, why she was running. She isn’t naive enough to answer, or to give them her name.
She’s picked up by a driver. In the back of the car, she starts to shiver, the cold finally catching up with her. Back in Kier, her father doesn’t even look as though he was worried about her. Her mother cries, but stays silent standing next to him. Tears roll down her cheeks much as they did Helena’s the night before.
It’s her fault, she thinks. That her mother is crying, crying like father made her cry last night. She is gripped then with a horrible feeling that she is akin to him. He guides her with a hand too tight on her shoulder. The feeling doesn’t go away, wraps itself heavy and painful around her insides.
She has to read the entirety of the book that sat, too heavy, in her arms the night before aloud in her father’s study. He sends her away after without a word.
She falls asleep on top of her covers, and wakes to her mother stroking her ratty hair. She’s covered in a blanket now, and she’s no longer so cold.
She blinks up at her. Her mother smiles at her, sadness in the edges as Helena has come to know it to be. She sits up, and her mother grabs her hairbrush from her vanity and brushes out her hair, smooths through her curls and braids back the unruly poof it makes. Her mother gently pulls two strands out on each side of her face and loops them around her finger, styling. Helena peeks at herself in the mirror from where she sits on the bed, and likes what she sees. Her mother, finished, takes a soft hand and holds one of her cheeks, looking her over. Helena tips her head down and starts crying. Her mother brings her to her chest.
Oh, Helly.
“Helly. Her name should be Helly.”
“And her surname?”
“Oh, anything. R? Helly R?”
It isn’t a question.
It is her mother’s maiden name, Riggs. If Helly only existed to her mother, she should bear her name, she’s decided.
So Helly R. is born (again) on the severance floor, and in her first act of defiance, takes off running. When Seth tells her this, she laughs. She lets him believe that it’s cold-natured, like it’s above her to care about such pointless behavior.
She tries to believe it, too. Helly never really lived. Certainly not as she was supposed to. Always a sad, pathetic being, less than the person Helena was meant- was destined to be.
But still, it’s like she’s picking up where she left off.
She asks him if Helly has been aptly punished. Seth informs her that yes, of course she has. Helena doesn’t really believe him, for some reason. She tells herself that it’s just now that she’s cut out Helly from her own psyche for good, she can’t feel her anymore. Her first and last act of rebellion, snuffed out completely with her final, and largest, service to Kier. An offering. A sacrifice. Helena is purified. The ideal entity to lead Lumon. She must be, after this, although she does not feel it. She tries to force herself to. She tells Helly that she isn’t a person, so certain it may as well be truth. In moments of doubt, though, she fears that she, Helena, is the one who isn’t living, who hasn’t since she and Helly were one and the same, long before she had her surgically removed like she wasn’t strong enough to do it herself. There’s an ever so faint suspicion bubbling under her skin that she hasn’t quite been alive since the day she burned so brightly she made it clear across town lines. Since the moment her father told her to read from page one of the Book of Kier, and she stood trying to subdue her violent shivers and the chatters of her teeth, terrified that he’d make her start over again.
It’s the same thing that will happen to Helly R. Again. Not really. Technically not, Helena reminds herself. She is not you. But she is. She was. It is just another version of herself that will be molded into a servant of Lumon.
So she valiantly denies Helly’s humanity and things die down. Seth isn’t waiting for her to tell her of her innie’s newest offense when she wakes again, and Helena tries not to think about how little time it took them to beat her down. How this time, she helped them.
Still, she walks into the elevator the next morning, slips out of consciousness with her heels planted evenly under straight shoulders, and snaps back to herself with a gasp that doesn’t fill her lungs and feet that don’t touch the floor.
It’s only a few moments, maybe forty-five seconds, that she kicks and struggles before she ultimately passes out, or goes back past the severance point, or dies.
But in those forty-five seconds, everything burns.
And it’s the best she’s ever felt.