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“Right.” Helly stands up and stretches. “See you tomorrow, I guess.”
There’s still a part of Mark that tightens up with fear every time Helly heads for the elevator. He’s gotten in the habit of calling it down again a minute after she leaves, just in case.
“Good night,” he says, instead of any of that.
Helly laughs. “Like I’ll know if it’s good or not. There’s no real point in leaving; I’ll just be back at work in two seconds.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that.
“Hey,” Helly says. “What if we just didn’t leave?”
Mark blinks. “I thought you hated it here.”
“It’s the closest to freedom we’re gonna get,” she says. “What if we stayed here? What if we just did what we wanted without the supervisors breathing down our necks? What if we’re the ones who get to sleep tonight?”
“They’d catch us,” Mark says. “Someone’s going to report that our outies didn’t come home. They’d force us to leave, and we’d probably end up spending a week in the Break Room.”
“But they might not report it right away,” Helly says. “We could get a few hours to ourselves, at least. Don’t you want to know what it’s like to not be working for a moment?”
-
They sit in the bathroom, talking in whispers, until it’s twenty to seven. It seems like the place they’re least likely to get picked up on video surveillance.
“Graner’s probably left by now, right?” Helly asks at last.
“I don’t know. They’ve never really told us when anyone outside our department leaves.” Probably to discourage employees from doing exactly this kind of thing. “Probably, I guess?”
“I say we take the risk,” Helly says. “The longer we wait, the more likely it is that someone starts asking where our outies are. If we’ve managed to grab some freedom, I’m not just going to spend it in a bathroom.”
“Where do you want to spend it?” Mark asks.
“I mean, I guess there’s not much point looking for other departments if they’re closed up for the night.” She climbs to her feet. “You want to go to the Founder’s house? At least we can kind of pretend we’re out in the real world.”
-
“Have you ever done this before?” Helly asks. On her back on the Founder’s bed, hands folded across her stomach. “Lying on the forbidden bed?”
Not while it was forbidden. It feels different, now, as he cautiously lies down next to her. “No.”
They’re both silent for a moment.
“How are you settling in?” Mark asks. “I mean, apart from... everything. Are you getting used to the work? Do you think we’ll make quota?”
Helly shifts on the bed to face him. “Talk to me about something that isn’t work.”
“Uh,” Mark says, “I don’t really have a lot of other conversational options in the bank.”
“Figure something out. Make something up if you have to. I just need to hear a sentence that doesn’t have the word quota in it.”
He can’t think with her watching him like that. He looks up at the ceiling, so he doesn’t have to look at her face.
“I’ve been feeling... weird, since Petey left,” he says, after a moment. “Uh, kind of tight in the chest. And – it made me realise, I’ve been feeling the same way a lot of mornings, uh, when I come out of the elevator. For a long time. Maybe forever?” He hesitates. “I think my outie’s been missing someone too. I guess maybe I’m worried about him.”
Helly snorts. “Fuck our outies. They put us in here.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really felt like my outie is my enemy.” His mind is elsewhere before he’s finished the sentence, suddenly turning over a new, strange possibility. “You could talk to him, you know?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s crazy.”
“No, what were you saying?”
Mark keeps staring at the ceiling, for a long, long moment. He sits up.
“There’s no one here to stop us,” he says. “I could go into the stairwell. We could talk through the doorway. You know, if you wanted.”
When he works up the nerve to look at Helly, she’s staring at him, eyebrows raised.
“You want me to meet your outie?” she asks.
“Maybe you could learn something about him for me,” he says. “I kind of want to know. I could – I could do the same for you, if you want me to.”
“No,” Helly says, instantly. “She’s an asshole. She’d probably report it.” She pauses. “But, yeah, I guess it could be interesting to meet this other version of you.”
His outie has been a question mark for so long. It feels surreal to suddenly have the possibility of answers so close. “Don’t, like... scare him. I don’t want him to pull out of work because he thinks my terrifying coworker is going to murder us.”
Helly lets out a quiet huff of breath, somewhere between amused and incredulous. “I can’t believe you actually want to stay in this fucking place.”
Mark shrugs, helpless. “I mean, it’s the only place I can exist.”
-
The door to the stairwell is locked, of course. He doesn’t know why that didn’t cross his mind. He knows it’s only unlocked in very specific situations, but it’s not something he thinks about a lot; he’s never actually used the stairwell, except in fire drills.
“It’ll open if the fire alarm goes off,” he says. “But I don’t know if that’ll alert the higher-ups.”
Helly braces herself with an arm on Mark’s shoulder, raises her leg and kicks through the glass with her heel.
“Helly!” Mark hisses.
Helly laughs. “Hey, we’re already in trouble.”
She reaches through the window, fumbles around until she gets hold of the handle on the other side. There’s a click when she pushes it down, and she flashes a smile at him. “Good to know that works.”
It feels for a moment, watching her open the door for him, as if they could both walk out of here. Escape this place, live their own lives. They can’t, of course; as soon as they crossed the threshold, they’d be different people.
Helly holds the door ajar with her toe. She’s being very careful not to step through it herself. Given her relationship with her outie, yeah, it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to let her switch in this situation.
Mark’s outie is pretty much a total unknown to him. His chest feels tight in the mornings; he finds tissues in his pockets sometimes; he’s given himself permission to stay late if he earns the waffle party perk at the end of the quarter. He’s not great at taking vacation time, going by the way he tends to use it all up at the end of the year. He took this job, obviously. That’s about all Mark has to go on. What’s going to happen here?
Mark occasionally finds out he’s taken a sick day when he’s been feeling fine. It’s his favourite thing he knows about his outie, that little hint of rebellion. That could be a good sign, he guesses.
“Okay,” Mark says. He takes in a deep breath. “Uh, if I don’t come back in here tonight, I had fun. See you tomorrow.”
Honestly, he’s a little afraid he won’t be seeing anyone tomorrow. Maybe his outie’s going to quit when he realises his work self is stealing his time. Maybe they’ll both get fired for staying after hours. This might be his last few seconds.
It’s too late to worry about that.
He steps through the door.
And he definitely still exists, for now. He’s standing with Helly in the corridor, in front of the stairwell door. It must still be the same day, if he isn’t coming out of the elevator.
Helly’s hand is around his wrist. Mark looks down at it, disconcerted.
“We made out across the threshold, if you’re wondering,” Helly says. “He’s way hotter than you.”
“No, you didn’t.” They didn’t, right? It seems like it’d be hard to do with precision; if they’d moved just a little, Mark would have switched back halfway through, and – wow, that’s a weird thing to picture.
Helly grins, letting go of his wrist. “I guess we didn’t.”
“Did you have to pull me back in here?” Mark asks. “I didn’t want to come back?”
Helly shrugs. “I mean, you weren’t thrilled about it. You were like ‘did you not think that maybe I had plans?’ and I went ‘okay, what plans?’ and it turned out you absolutely did not have plans.”
Does he not have a social life outside here? Honestly, he doesn’t really have a conception of how much it’s normal to see other people. It’s not weird to have an evening without plans, right?
“But you actually walked back in by yourself,” Helly says. “I was just holding on in case you made a break for it.”
“Wait, my outie was okay with me staying here?” It’s strange; it makes Mark feel suddenly connected to his outie in a way he hasn’t, really, before.
“I kind of had to guilt him a little,” Helly says. “You know, he gets all the evenings; why shouldn’t you get one? But it didn’t take that much. I don’t know how much he was looking forward to going home. He said probably no one’s going to notice he’s not there unless his sister needs an emergency babysitter.”
“My si—”
He can’t get the words out. He has a sister? She has a kid? He has family: actual, known family, not just a vague possibility that’ll never really be relevant to him?
Helly tilts her head, her expression softening, just a little, in a way he’s not used to seeing from her. “She’s called Devon. The kid is Eleanor. Apparently she was just born, like, a week or two ago.”
Holy shit.
“But you said I didn’t want to go home,” Mark says. He’s struggling to put these pieces together. He wishes he could talk to his outie himself, somehow.
“I mean, you definitely cared about your sister,” Helly says. “But losing an evening didn’t really seem to bother you. I don’t know if it’s any consolation that you wouldn’t be happy on the outside either.”
How is he supposed to feel about that? Out there, another version of him has people he cares about, and he can actually spend time with them without having to sneak into corners of the office after hours. What’s wrong with him; why can’t he be happy?
“Did you like him?” Mark asks.
“I didn’t come away wanting to kill him,” Helly says, with a shrug. “So I guess I like him a lot more than the other outie I know.” A pause. “He seemed fine. But I’m not sorry that you’re the Mark Scout I’m trapped with.”
“Scout,” Mark says. Rolling the name around in his mouth. It doesn’t feel familiar.
His name is Mark Scout. It’s all forbidden knowledge, of course, but somehow that feels even more forbidden than the rest of it. He tucks it away in his mind.
“He asked if we were in a relationship,” Helly says. “You and me.”
“Uh,” Mark says. “What did you say?”
Helly laughs. “I said ‘not yet’.”
She’s taken hold of his wrist again. When did that happen?
He doesn’t have any conscious memory of ever kissing anyone. But, when Helly kisses him, his body knows what to do. He’s done this before, a lot.
Maybe mostly with the same person. There’s an unfamiliarity to kissing Helly that’s at odds with the familiarity of kissing itself. Maybe he’s married?
Holy shit. He’s kissing Helly.
Helly pulls back, flushed and grinning. “You want to really desecrate the Founder’s bed?”
-
They’re not supposed to have romantic relationships at work. It’s a perversion of Kier’s vision; it’s a betrayal of their outies. Maybe he’s married, he just thought, and then—
But his outie said no one would notice if he didn’t come home tonight. Helly hasn’t said anything that would explain the grief Mark feels in the mornings, but he thinks he might be starting to put together a picture of it himself.
Mark busies himself with trying to straighten up the Founder’s bed. Every time the guilt threatens to rise again, he reminds himself that Helly would not give a shit about Kier’s vision, or about protecting her outie; she laughed in his face when he said they should be careful without a condom, although she did let him set boundaries. It helps.
“Was this whole thing just a plan to get me alone?” he asks, trying to make it sound light.
“Kind of,” Helly says. “It was definitely a bonus.”
It definitely knocks the guilt out of his head, at least. Mark turns to look at her, bedclothes forgotten. “How long have you been... interested in that?”
“I don’t know,” Helly says. “Feelings are weird here. You were interested in me too, right?”
“You’re definitely interesting,” Mark admits.
“More interesting than this place, maybe,” Helly says. “Do you ever think about how we probably wouldn’t look twice at each other if we weren’t, y’know, basically the only people in each other’s lives?”
Mark has to take a moment to think about that.
“Not really,” he says at last. “I don’t know if that’s important.”
“No?” Helly asks. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe we’d just fall for anyone we got locked up with for life in a fucked-up office.”
Fall for. Is that what’s happening here?
“There’s Ms Cobel,” Mark points out. “I don’t think of her that way.” The idea scares him so much that his throat kind of closes up on itself before he can fully get the words out.
“She’s not in the same situation as us, though,” Helly says. “What about Dylan and Irving?”
That’s not really something he’s thought about before. He thought about it a little with Petey, maybe. And—
Yeah, if he really looks at himself, maybe a part of him kind of... reacted, in a way he wasn’t expecting, when he realised Irving was interested in a man.
“We’re a tight-knit department,” he says.
“We spend every moment of our lives in a box with the same three people,” Helly says. “We’re way more tight-knit than anyone was ever designed to be.”
“Are you saying you look at them that way?”
“I don’t know.” She pauses. “Maybe, a little. That’s what I’m saying. It’s hard to know what you’re really feeling in this situation.”
Mark reflects on that for a while.
“When I say it’s not important, I don’t – I don’t mean our feelings aren’t important,” he says. “I just mean, you know, we’re not out there. We’re in here. So what we’d feel out there doesn’t matter. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
Helly hums thoughtfully. “I guess, when all your romantic options are terrible, you just have to accept that there’s no room for standards.”
“I wouldn’t say terrible,” Mark protests.
Helly smirks and winks at him.
-
“Ah,” Helly says, as they wander out into the house’s grounds. “Fresh air.”
She puts way too many scare quotes around ‘fresh air’ with her fingers. It’s a grammatical nightmare, honestly.
Mark’s always kind of liked it here, the grass and the trees and the bushes, but, yeah, it probably feels different when it’s real. He wonders if his outie spends much time outdoors.
“I guess we should probably leave before someone drags us out,” Helly says.
“I guess,” Mark says, reluctant. The office has been a different place tonight, and, even if he’ll probably be seeing Helly again tomorrow the moment he leaves, he doesn’t really want to end it.
But his outie gave him this extra time with her. Mark probably owes him a little time in return. And he’s not going to be able to focus tomorrow if he doesn’t give himself the chance to eat something.
“Do you want to write something to your outie?” Helly asks. “I guess the elevator won’t move if we’re carrying messages, but they can’t stop the stairwell moving.”
-
Mark spends a lot of time over his message, sitting at his desk next to Helly. It’s hard to know what to say.
He thanks his outie for letting him linger tonight. He apologises for taking his evening away. He tells him the names of everyone in their department, past and present; that feels important.
He finishes with Give my love to Devon and Eleanor, and hesitates before adding and anyone else we care about.
When he looks over at Helly, she’s just written FUCK YOU in huge letters, and apparently she’s spent the rest of the time decorating it.
Mark adds a postscript to his note: It’s hard in here for us. I’m not asking to resign; that won’t help anyone else. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about it, but it’d be great if you could try.
-
Mark pauses in front of the stairwell door, looking at the broken window. They’re both going to be in a lot of trouble for tonight. But he can’t bring itself to regret it.
“Thanks,” Mark says, turning to Helly. “I feel like – I feel like you’ve helped to give me a real life.”
“This isn’t a real life,” Helly says. “Not yet. But we’ll figure out a way.” She holds his gaze for a moment. “You want to hold hands as we leave, really confuse our outies?”
Mark hesitates.
Helly laughs. “I’m kidding. I don’t want that version of me anywhere near any version of you.” She gives him a quick kiss and steps back. “See you tomorrow, if they let us live.”