Chapter Text
“Are you ready?”
Mark glanced up from where he sat—on the edge of the bed that could very well be his grave—to see Reghabi standing over him, some kind of medical device in hand. He nodded, locking eyes with her: partly to show her he meant it, and partly to keep from looking at whatever she was holding.
“Okay,” she said. “And you’ve already called out for tomorrow?”
That had been a whole thing on its own: because his innie had no way of knowing he had to fake being sick, Reghabi had insisted on Mark doing anything he could to make sure he felt like shit today. That had meant minimal food, no water (to create some semblance of a sore throat), and no sleep the night before. He still wasn’t entirely himself—though in the grand scheme of things, he figured he probably never would be again.
“Yeah,” he responded, wiping his hands on his jeans. “All set to go, I guess.”
“Look at me, Mark,” she said. He did. “When you wake up, you’re going to be confused.”
He thought about Petey. “I know. I’ve seen.”
Reghabi almost smiled. It wasn’t kind. “No, you haven’t. When you met Peter Kilmer, he’d already been reintegrated for almost two weeks. Sure, his…behavior didn’t do him any favors, but the first forty-eight hours are a critical period. Do you understand what I mean by this?”
His mouth felt dry. “Um,” he tried. “Sort of, yeah.”
“What I mean,” she continued, perching next to him on the bed, “is that I’m going to have to do things that are going to scare you. Injections, samples, things like that. Most likely, you’ll need to be restrained.”
“I– I mean, like, sure, okay,” he said, puzzled. “Whatever you need to do, right?”
“I know you understand, Mark. You’re a smart man.” She brought a hand up and, to Mark’s surprise, touched his shoulder. “But very soon, you’re not going to remember this conversation. So I need you to look me in the eyes, right now, and I need you to believe down to your core that I’m here to help you. That you can trust me.”
Mark exhaled; hated how shaky it sounded. “Does it help? If I do?”
Reghabi smiled. Shrugged. “Well, it can’t hurt,” she said, “but you are only my second patient.”
He let out a hollow laugh. “Fair enough.”
Reghabi didn’t respond. She was already over at the small cart by the bed: checking and double checking her army of small tools, rearranging them into different—more efficient?—configurations. “Lie down, Mark. We don’t have much time.”
For a second, he thought about bolting; about grabbing his coat and speeding away. Using his fake sick day to hang out with Devon, or maybe asking Alexa for another shot. Living his life, day after day, like he had the past two years.
But, fuck. Gemma was in there. His stomach lurched, and all of a sudden everything was urgent, immediate: what the fuck had he been doing? How did he not know, somehow? Hell, why was he even getting reintegrated in the first place instead of blowing a hole in the side of the Lumon building? That tape Petey had played him—if they had her living in there, living through that—God, he had to do something. He had to do something now.
“Mark? You still with me?”
His head snapped over to Reghabi—and finally, bravely, to what she had in her hand: some kind of drill, it looked like, which made sense. Strangely, it put him at ease. Whatever that thing did to him, he wasn’t going to come out of it the same. This was it. This was him doing something.
He nodded once, then lay down on the table. Sorry about this, he thought to his innie: one last, futile message in a bottle while it still mattered. Don't hate me. His memory of the operation stopped there.
Once he was out—once the thing was done—Reghabi changed. She held his hand, talked him through it. Was Devon, was Gemma, was Petey, was Helly—whomever he called out for in the moment. It wasn’t personal; just part of the job. Mark would never know about it, either way.
Eventually, finally, his breathing evened out. Reghabi set an alarm for an hour later, sat herself in a chair, and joined him.
Mark woke up almost exactly twenty-four hours later to the sight of a doctor—Reghabi, some part of him thought, that was her name—waving a hand in front of his face. He blinked, looked around.
“W–” he tried, hoarse, “which one am I?”
Reghabi just looked at him, mouth a firm line. He craned his neck, glanced from side to side. This didn’t look like Lumon. The outie, then. That made sense. But then why–?
Pain cut him off mid-thought, searing its way down his brainstem and into his spine. He thought he heard Reghabi curse under her breath, the clattering of some drawers, but it all felt very far away. He squeezed his eyes shut, fingers straining as his hands tried to clench even further into fists. He was trying not to panic, but God, hadn’t he just stepped into the elevator? Had they made another plan to activate the OTC? He didn’t remember it feeling like this the first time.
Maybe, he thought helplessly, it’s like childbirth. So horrible that your brain makes you forget.
He felt something wet on his upper lip, tasted it, realized his nose was bleeding. Thought, oh, like Petey. Then, horrified: when did I ever see Petey like that? And suddenly he was too many places at once, none of them right: watching helplessly from his desk as Petey took the fall for him, stumbling hollow-eyed out of the break room day after day; pounding half-heartedly on the office vending machine as Dylan laughed from behind him; sitting in the Wellness lobby, waiting to see Gemma—no, Ms. Casey. Who’s Gemma? And then his heart soared, higher, higher, his innie half feeling all at once what it was like to fall in love with her.
She’s in there, someone said, she’s in there, she’s in there, and it sounded like his own voice; a mantra carried through his brain over and over, centrifugal force pinning it to his skull. And he realized he was right, and what that really meant, and he knew he was going to get her out. It was possible. Petey had done it. He did?
Another bolt of pain shot through his skull, and if he’d been standing he’d have sunk to his knees. There it was: the bleeding, the funeral. God, he’d come and found him. All those days spent agonizing over what he could’ve done differently, he’d been going home to Petey—disheveled and beautiful on his basement couch, wrapped in Ricken’s stupid fucking robe. Even then, he couldn’t save him. Maybe he just wasn’t the saving type.
Mark, a voice said. Mark, I need you to hold still. Was he not? He couldn’t tell. But then it went dark again, and the issue was suddenly, blissfully out of his hands.
The work day ended. Mark said goodbye to Irving, thankful it wasn’t his job to shut the office down anymore (like everything else, it had gotten repetitive). He put his jacket on, stepped into the elevator, blinked, and found himself strapped to a bed. The room was dark, cold. If Mark wasn’t so used to being underground, he might have clocked it as a basement—but much as a fish doesn’t feel wet, the thought never crossed his mind.
“What?” he said. “Hello?”
“Mark?” a woman’s voice called. “Are you awake?”
“Helly?” But he knew it wasn’t. “Or, who…who’s there?”
A woman in a lab coat came in, which probably wasn’t a good sign. New people at Lumon rarely were. He must have really fucked up, this time. Maybe it was delayed retribution for his plea to the board. Or maybe, he thought, taking stock of the medical equipment surrounding him, I’m dying. It didn’t seem too far-fetched. The Lumon he’d come to know (the Lumon that was apparently hiding—resurrecting? kidnapping?—people’s presumed-dead wives) would absolutely have a dripping fucking hospital room hidden somewhere in its halls.
“Here,” the woman said, handing him two small pills, “take these.”
Mark blinked, looked down at his hand. When had she untied him?
The pills started to dissolve a little in his hand. “Am I dying?”
The woman shook her head, but her face remained completely unreadable; something about the whole situation told him that death had not been entirely out of the question.
She guided the hand with the pills up toward his mouth, then handed him a glass of water. “I know what you’re thinking, but it looks good. Your readings are much better than Peter’s were at this stage.”
Mark’s brow creased. “Peter? Who–” he dropped the pills in his lap, absentmindedly shaking the residue off his hand. “Sorry, Petey? Petey K.? Is he back?”
The woman’s eyes widened. She collected the pills and water, then turned to open a cabinet behind her.
“Hello? Lady?” No response. Mark’s heart was racing like he missed a stair. “Look, I– what do you mean at this stage? Did you do something to him?”
She came back, this time with syringe in hand. They killed him, he thought, oh my God, I knew it. They fucking killed him. He tried to move but his legs felt heavy, unused.
“Please,” he said, “please, if you’re going to kill me, just tell me what happened to him. I– I deserve to know. I won’t tell anyone.” He laughed, high and strained. “I mean, not that I even could, if–”
“Mark,” the woman said, and he braced himself: for what, he wasn’t sure.
She bent down until her eyes were level with his. One of her hands landed on his arm. Mark still couldn’t read her, and he hated that.
“I’m a friend of Peter’s,” she said. “Petey’s. His last name is Kilmer.” She paused, considering. “Yours is Scout.”
Mark sat, mouth half-open. It was far from the most earth-shattering news he’d gotten this week, but he still wasn’t used to people volunteering that kind of thing. Kilmer, Scout, his brain echoed, almost sing-song. Scout, Kilmer, Kilmer, Scout. “Is…” he swallowed; it didn’t help. “Is he okay?”
The woman’s eyes kept flitting over his face. Mark felt like she was checking him for holes. “He introduced me to your outie. He wanted me to get you out of there.”
Hope fluttered in his chest. “Is he here? Can I see him?”
She paused. “Not yet.”
Yet. Mark could live with that. “Okay. That’s okay.”
“Do you trust me?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then froze. On the right lapel of her white coat, he saw it: a Lumon teardrop, embroidered in thick, black thread. His throat closed up.
“Mark. Mark, look at me.”
He did, against his better judgement. Looked right into her eyes; saw nothing at all.
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” he said, before he could even think about it. It was true, he realized, and he had no idea why.
She sighed. “Good. This is going to sting.” And then the syringe in her hand was poking into Mark’s neck, blurring his vision at the edges.
“You’re just regulating,” he heard her say from underwater. “You’ll feel better soon.”
Regulating, he thought. I’m regulating.
“Though, for the record,” she said, “if you do remember this later, I’m sorry for lying.”
Before Mark could even begin to parse what she meant, he was back under.
When Mark’s memory started back up, he was sitting upright, eating a slice of white bread. He looked down at it, puzzled. Was this a dream?
“–two hours for the next three days,” someone was saying. He looked up. Reghabi was staring at him expectantly.
“...Sorry, can you repeat that?”
“I said, you need to eat something every two hours for the next three days. At least.” She looked him up and down. “I’ll tell your sister, too, in case you forget.”
Mark nodded. “So, it went okay? Like, I’m just the one guy now?”
She sat in a chair by his bed. Mark noticed she had her own slice of bread, though—and pathetically, he felt a little jealous about this—she had spread some butter on hers.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”
Mark thought for a second. He remembered Devon, but either of them could’ve said that. Remembered Ricken—how he used to be, before Gemma died and everything became about Meaning. And he remembered Irving, too, sneaking off to O&D, and Dylan cursing Petey out for scooting his mug of finger traps right to the edge of his desk.
“I think so. I think it’s me.” Mark looked at her. “All of me, I mean. Or– both?”
Reghabi sighed in relief, rubbing her face with one hand. “Whatever you want to call it, Mark. Just let me get a drink first.”