Chapter Text
“I want boys,” Helly R said as she lay in Mark S’s arms. They were entwined around each other on the very narrow mattress in the very small room that they had designated as their own little apartment during the occupation of the severed floor. They had done their best to make it homey. Mark had dragged a fake plant from the plant room and stuck it in a corner. Helly added a new drawing, usually on printer paper, to the walls nearly every day. They had a chair to sit on and a few shelves to store any spare clothing and to display Helly’s paper clip sculptures. Two desk lamps provided a more ambient lighting than the single overhead, fluorescent light. The room was really an unused storage closet and it was stuffy and smelled like them, but it was their home and most importantly, the first home they had built together.
“You want boys?” Mark asked. For a moment, he didn’t understand what Helly meant. Was she talking about getting some of the boys in C&M to move furniture or something? Form an army? Or—and the thought made Mark go cold—she wanted to know what sex was like with another man?
“Yes, little boys. Baby boys. Mark Juniors,” Helly said enthusiastically.
Finally, Mark realized what she was talking about. Sometimes, he and Helly liked to imagine that they could have an actual life together; their brains pieced together bits of information that they’d retained to help them picture what life together could be like outside. They talked about houses and travelling to places like Europe and Delaware and going to the circus, whatever the heck that was, but they’d never talked about kids before. Well, except for baby goats which were actually called kids, according to Lorne. So, actually, they did talk about kids, but not human kids of their own.
“Like…a baby?” Mark whispered. Instead of being alarmed by the talk of babies, something deep inside him seemed to open up. Some long forgotten desire was bubbling to the surface. A baby. If Helly had a baby, he would be a dad and the idea of being a father filled him with an indescribable wonder.
“Yeah,” Helly snuggled closer against him, if that was even possible. She’d burrow herself in him if she could. “Little baby boys with your hair and eyes and nose. Two of them. I’ll name them Marco and Marcus.”
Mark chuckled. “But what if we have girls?” He kissed the top of her head then smoothed down her hair. “Two little girls with red hair. And their names would be…Shelly and Kelly.”
Helly snorted. She’d never heard weirder names in her life. “We’re not having girls.”
“Maybe we could have one of each? A boy and a girl?”
“No,” Helly said firmly. “Just boys. I don’t know anything about raising girls. I want boys.”
“Since when do you know anything about raising boys?”
“Emile is a boy.”
“Emile is a goat,” Mark pointed out. “Your favourite goat, but a goat.”
“Still,” Helly murmured sleepily. “I want boys. Maybe three, and I’ll name the youngest Emile. But they’ll all look like you.”
Mark laughed softly but Helly was already asleep, falling abruptly into sleep like she often did. Or so he thought. Suddenly, Helly lifted her head and looked at him. In the dim light, Mark saw her face scrunch up in puzzlement and curiosity.
“Mark?” she asked. “How exactly do people get babies anyway?”
******
Seven years later
The dishwasher hadn’t been turned on.
At this discovery, Helly’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Meanwhile, the baby balanced in the crook of her arm screamed. The toddler in her highchair raged. And the six year old clinging to her leg was crying because the toddler had smashed the popsicle stick house she had brought home from school.
And to top it all off, Mark had forgotten to turn on the whisper-quiet dishwasher before leaving the house that morning which meant the toddler’s blue bowl was still unwashed and god forbid if she ate her macaroni out of a different bowl.
“Melanie,” Helly said to the eldest, who being the eldest was expected to behave with a little more dignity than her baby sisters. “I’m sorry about your house, but we can’t fix it now. Please stop crying and take Beth’s bowl out of the dishwasher for me.”
“I hate Beth!” Melanie sobbed against Helly’s leg. She already sported a bruise on her forehead where Beth had thrown a block at Melanie’s head an hour ago. Melanie was having a rough morning.
“Please don’t say you hate your sister.”
“But I do! I hate Beth!”
Helly groaned. Melanie was supposed to be at school but she’d awoken yesterday morning with one of those mysterious fevers children sometimes got and had spent the day in bed, mostly sleeping. Mark had cancelled his day of office hours and had stayed home, helping out between grading papers and naps—the kids’ naps, not his own. He’d been especially great with Beth, as usual, and he would have been the best at handling Beth right now. But he couldn’t miss his lecture today, and so when Helly had decided that Melanie was still too sick and weak to return to school, she was on her own.
“Just take out the bowl and wash it for me, would you?” Helly asked, anything to distract the kid from her hurt feelings.
The distraction worked. Melanie begrudgingly pulled out the bowl from the rack, transferring her anger at her sister to annoyance at the task her mother had set her. The dish was spattered with spaghetti sauce and with what looked like drops of coffee from one of the mugs in the rack above. With a moue of disgust, Melanie dropped the bowl into the sink. Without needing to be told, she pushed her step stool in front of the sink and climbed up it so she could reach the tap.
That taken care of, Helly turned her attention to the instant pot. One arm balancing and bouncing her wet and hungry infant, she added shredded cheese and milk to the cooked noodles and stirred it all using her free hand. Next to her, Melanie handed her Beth’s bowl which dripped water on the floor, but whatever.
“Thank you, sweetie,” Helly said. She ladled two careful servings into two separate bowls. One for Melanie, one for Beth. She handed Melanie her portion and told her to carry it carefully to the table. Helly then carried the precious blue bowl within Beth’s orbit but did not set it on her highchair tray.
“Mommy, I don’t like orange cheese,” Melanie said from her chair. Now she told her.
“That’s all we had, Mel,” Helly replied. She turned to the angry toddler. “Bethie, look at Mommy. I brought you your food. It’s in the blue bowl. You can stop yelling now.”
“No!” Beth shouted. No was her favorite word. She shoved tiny hands against the tray and shook furiously, determined to push it off. Her second favourite word burst from her mouth. “Out! Beffie out!”
Against her better judgement, Helly set the blue bowl like a peace offering in front of her second daughter. And as she should have known, Beth picked it up and hurled it. It hit Helly in the chest and bounced off the baby. Cheesy macaroni covered them both. The baby’s cries reached a feverish pitch; Beth screeched and struggled against her restraints with renewed fervor.
Helly could scream. Or cry. Or both. Whatever it was, she was going to lose it if this continued.
“Orange cheese is gross,” Melanie said unhelpfully over the wails of her sisters. “And now you look like a cheese monster, Mommy.”
Helly had nothing to say to that as she shook and wiped the noodles off. This was her life, the ordinary life she had dreamed of, and some days she took it with good humor, some days she just managed to keep herself from screaming. With one hand, she unfastened the highchair tray and the straps holding Beth in place and didn’t say a word as the toddler took off like a shot, trampling macaroni underfoot as she ran off to wreak havoc in another part of the house.
Melanie was poking at her bowl of orange macaroni with a disgusted expression. “I don’t want this.”
“Just make yourself a sandwich. You know where the peanut butter is,” Helly snapped, her voice harsher than intended and she knew she’d hurt Melanie’s feelings but couldn’t find herself to care at this time. And sure enough, Melanie’s brown eyes began to fill with tears.
Helly took a deep breath and walked out of the kitchen carrying her wailing baby.
*
When Mark returned home four hours later (about two hours later than he’d planned) it was to a house that was eerily silent. He would have left the college sooner, but the dean had cornered him in his office as he was getting ready to leave and it had taken 30 minutes to get out of that encounter, with the dean making a jab about him going home to his young family, emphasis on young since there was a rumor that Helly was at least 20 years younger than him. Mark hadn’t corrected the rumor because no one had actually come up to him and asked him directly how much younger his wife was. Would he tell them if they did? The entire thing was so stupid and hypocritical considering all the scandals and goings on over the years between professors and their TAs and students. Unfortunately, such things happened a lot. And the dean himself was probably the worst offender but he’d never been disciplined or faced any sort of consequence for his behavior, had in fact been rewarded over the years, and now he was the dean of history. Asshole.
The dean was probably the one who started the rumor when Mark had been a new hire. Helly, who had been studying visual arts at the same school, used to visit Mark occasionally at his office or met him for lunch on campus. For awhile, Mark’s colleagues assumed he was banging a younger, hot art student before they learned Helly was his wife. It wasn’t exactly untrue that rumor, because Helly was, and was still, hot and younger than him, and he banged her as often as possible. However, his colleagues must have pictured another type of person at his side when he’d told them during his first days at his job that he was married.
After a longer than usual drive because of the icy road conditions of an early spring storm, he stopped at the supermarket. Helly had texted him a few hours earlier asking for white cheddar cheese among a few other things. NOT ORANGE CHEESE, she’d added in caps. But his supermarket stop lasted a little longer than expected. There was an issue with his card being expired but he had no recollection of ever receiving a new card and he’d spent 20 minutes on the phone with the bank sorting through that.
And then he'd gotten stuck driving a snail’s pace behind a very large truck salting the roads.
Inside the house, he kicked off his boots in the entry and called out an idle “hello” before moving to the kitchen to put the groceries away, feeling a bit bereft without the little girls running to greet him. Beth always demanded that he lift and throw her in the air, because the toddler was fearless, while Melanie hugged him around the legs and sometimes stood on his feet so he could “walk” with her. And how would Vivian, their unplanned oops baby, react to Mark’s arrivals once she was walking was anyone’s guess, but he was sure it would be cute.
“Helly?” Mark called out. Helly’s car was still in the driveway. Had they gone out for a walk in this weather? It seemed pretty unlikely although not unusual; Helly tried to get out of the house at least once a day with the babies, no matter the elements. He and Helly were the kind of weird parents who took their kids out in all types of weather. But Melanie was sick, so probably they had stayed home today. He wandered through the main floor, even peering outside into the backyard at Helly’s studio—barely used these days—but it was dark. And when he went upstairs to change, the bedrooms were empty. That left the half-finished basement and sure enough, as soon as he opened the door to the stairwell, the high pitched voice of an annoying children’s show character assailed his ears. It must have been a bad day if Helly had succumbed to using the television as a distraction. Mark felt a pang of guilt; he still felt bad about getting Helly pregnant for a third time before Beth had even started eating solids, although he could hear Helly’s retort in his head that she hadn’t exactly been an unwilling participant in Vivian’s conception.
His girls were sprawled on the huge sofa across from the mounted flatscreen TV, Helly on her back with the baby on her chest and the two other girls squeezed on either side of her. The four of them were asleep, even Helly. Beth, who was squished against the back of the sofa, had somehow turned herself upside down so her feet were level with Helly’s stomach and her head was near her mother’s knees. Perilously close to the edge, Melanie’s head was nestled under her mother’s shoulder, and she was clutching to Helly like a drowning person to a raft. Helly had an arm around her to keep her from falling. Vivian was simply on her back on Helly’s chest, stretched out like a fallen star, her little eyelids buttoned shut and her wispy, short black hair standing up as it always did, giving her a permanent mad scientist look.
And somehow, in this pile of daughters, Helly slept.
Grinning, Mark turned the volume down on the TV and then took a picture with his phone. He was debating to himself whether Helly would kill him if he sent it to Devon or even Irving or Dylan, when she whispered his name.
“Mark.”
Mark looked up from his phone to see Helly watching him with hooded eyes. “I hope I didn’t wake you. Rough day?” he asked quietly as he pocketed the phone.
“It was shit,” she stated in an equally low voice. She gently moved strands of Melanie’s red hair from her face so Mark could see the nasty bruise on her forehead. “Started with this.”
“Did she fall?”
“Beth threw a block.” Helly rolled her eyes at Mark’s expression. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking.”
Mark had to smirk. He was indeed remembering the first time they had met when Helly had thrown a speaker at his head. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree and all that.
“She okay? Feeling better?”
“A bit cranky, but she should be okay to go back to school tomorrow.” Helly gently stroked Melanie’s sleeping face. “Mommy was a bit cranky today too,” she admitted quietly. Mark saw guilt there; Helly was too hard on herself. She was a good and attentive mom but had a hard time forgiving herself anytime she lost her patience with the children.
Mark, meanwhile, felt bad that he wasn’t always able to be home to help her, especially on days like this. “I don’t have to be at work until ten tomorrow,” he said. “If you want to go swim or jog early or whatever, I’ll stick around.”
Helly looked so relieved. “Thanks. That sounds great.”
“So,” Mark said, falsely casual. He gestured at her under her pile of daughters. “Feeling trapped by motherhood, are you?”
“Literally,” Helly responded in a deadpan voice, but her mouth twitched in a familiar half smile.
Since Vivian’s birth last October, and even before in the last months of her pregnancy which had made her exceptionally sleepy, he often came upon similar scenes. He did what he could to help, but he did have his job. Mark had broached the subject of a nanny to her, someone to help out during the day so that Helly could focus on her art again or find a job, if that’s what she wanted. Helly had always been a hands-on kind of mother and naturally energetic, but two babies at once was pretty daunting.
She had responded “absolutely not and don’t fucking bring it up again” in her best Helena the CEO voice. Mark should have known. She had trauma related to the nannies of her youth, some of whom were cruel while others had just simply vanished from her life just as she was forming an attachment. He understood, even if he did think she was making things unnecessarily complicated for herself. Not all nannies were Kier-cult zealots.
At least there was a spot opening for Beth at the daycare of their choice in a few weeks, so there was that. Helly, at least, wasn’t resistant to daycare as long as it met her standards.
Mark carefully picked Beth up off her mother. She was a heavy, floppy rag doll in his arms, her head lolling. One thing about Beth, she played hard and then she slept harder. He pressed his lips against her silky black hair as she settled against his chest. The toddler sighed in her sleep as her thumb found her mouth. Mark knew they should break the habit soon, but didn’t have the heart to. She’d been weaned much earlier than Melanie and thumb sucking was her comfort.
Helly was able to grasp Vivian and ease herself into a sitting position without knocking Melanie to the floor. But the little girl’s eyes flew open and, in a moment of startled panic, she flailed. Mark managed to lean over and press his free hand against her back before she fell.
“Mommy!”
“It’s all right, Melanie. Mommy’s here. You’re okay,” Helly soothed in that soft, modulated tone she had mastered over the years. Her Helena voice.
Melanie’s entire body relaxed at the sound of her mother’s voice and she fell back asleep again.
Mark eased himself to sit down next to Helly. He carefully adjusted Beth in his arms and she continued to sleep. But Vivian was awake, smiling up at her mother who smiled back, both their smiles full of mutual adoration.
It was pretty tough with two children in diapers (god, he’ll never forget how Devon had howled with laughter when Mark told her Helly was expecting their third so soon after the second), but neither parent regretted their beautiful little oops baby at all.
After a few quiet moments, Mark’s stomach let out a noisy and unmistakable growl.
“So, kids, what’s for dinner?”
The look Helly gave him could have shattered glass.
“I’m joking,” Mark laughed. “I’ve taken the chicken pot pie out the freezer and I’ve bought some ingredients for a salad. I’ll put it together.”
“Not funny, Mark.”
“I thought it was pretty funny.”
Helly rolled her eyes. “Asshole. Good thing the girls are here to protect you from my wrath.”
But, despite his assholeness, she snuggled against him and they spent a few quiet moments encouraging the baby’s smiles and talking about random, ordinary stuff.
Later, as they were about to set the table for their meal, Mark and Helly discovered that the dishwasher still hadn’t been turned on.
**
About the kids' names:
Melanie is a severed floor baby and her name derives from Mark+Heleny. I also wanted a name that means "dark" which is what Melanie means.
In my head-canon, Helena Eagan wasn't permitted to read anything not related to Kier and one of the first books she read post-reintegration was Pride & Prejudice, so she named her second daughter after the second daughter in that book. However, Elizabeth was quickly shortened to Beth. I had forgotten there was a minor innie character named Elizabeth in the show. I just can't imagine this imaginary kid with another name so I'm keeping it.
Vivian's name means "life" which I think is a really fitting choice for two former severed people.