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Once Irving has walked into the woods, Milchick gathers the rest of the team and has them standing on a semicircle.
“We’re going back to Lumon now,” he informs them. His voice is not as harsh as it was when he condemned Irving to death, but his usual perky tone is gone. He says something to his walkie-talkie that Helly can't discern.
And just like that they find themselves on the severed floor.
Helly imagines their outies didn’t come to be out in the wilderness—Helena, after only a couple of minutes, drenched and half frozen—and had to take an awkward drive back to the company grounds. Lumon must have something much more sinister in place.
Normally, she would be curious about it.
Right now, she just had about fucking it.
-
They take her to a changeroom, so she can take a shower and put on something dry and warm. She almost tells Milchick to let that bitch deal with the half-freezing state she’s in, but she bites her tongue. Helly has no idea if she’ll come back once she’s gone, so she won't risk what precious time she has.
When her outie told her she wasn’t a person, Helly thought there was no way she could’ve been more angry at that other woman. Now, looking at her flushed, frostnipped cheeks in a Lumon communal shower mirror, she realises that the anger she felt back then had been child’s play. This is proper anger. She is so angry she can barely breathe.
Helly feels the urge to smash the mirror and make ribbons of the skin of her arms with the shards, but she is simply too cold and too tired for it.
So she goes inside the shower, gets the water running as hot as she can take and lets it prickle at and redden her skin until the cold has left her bones.
It’s the first shower she ever had in her life, she realises. Helly looks at her slender fingers, pays attention to the motion of spreading soap over her arms, her legs, between her toes. She traces the scar on her left knee, the one she had already noticed, beneath her work pencil skirts, a rare mark in her mostly unblemished skin.
There’s other stuff. Small bruises that seem freshly made. Helly doesn’t linger on them.
The clothes they provided her are nothing like the professional outfits Helena has her wearing for work. It’s a pair of soft flannel pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Helly has never seen an inmate in a mental health facility, but some vestigial knowledge makes her guess that this would be what they would wear.
Great, they’re treating her like a suicidal patient again. Though that’s what she is, isn’t it? Helena Eagan’s personal permanent suicide risk. So they treated her accordingly.
Helly doesn’t look in the mirror again as she leaves.
-
Milchick, Dylan and Mark are waiting for her outside the changeroom. All of them dry and changed from their heavy winter coats, though their clothes seem more normal. Not their usual business suits, but nothing so impersonal and beige as hers. Maybe their outies had sent them those, for their outdoor retreat.
Milchick doesn’t offer her his faux polite smile. That facade is gone, and well. Small blessings.
“I understand the three of you would like to talk before the end of the working day. You will be permitted such time, in the kitchenette, until your outie has to leave. Miss Huang will call you at those times. I will see you all on Monday.”
Monday, Helly thinks. If she is to be permitted Mondays ever again.
They remain silent until they are left alone. Helly has no illusion that their conversation is private, but it’s nice not to have prying eyes either way.
Dylan makes them tea. Helly keeps playing with her hair while he does it. It's curling as it dries, just slightly more than usual, poofing around her head in a slightly wild way. Which means that usually Helena does something to make it straighter and Helly files that away as another reason to hate her. It's almost comfortable in its smallness compared to the rest.
When Dylan sits back down, he doesn't drink his tea. He and Mark look down at their own cups and not at her.
Oh, of course. They’re expecting her to take the first step.
“What the hell happened?” she asks. Her voice is hoarse. Half drowned.
“At the ORTBO?” Dylan starts. We-”
“Since the OTC,” she corrects him. “It was the last time-” her hands shake and she has to stop to take a breath. “How long has it been?”
“Um, when I awoke,” Mark says. “Mr Milchick said it had been five months, but I’m not sure if we can take his word for it.”
“And that’s been…?”
Dylan and Mark look guiltily at one another. “A couple of weeks,” Dylan provides.
“Couple of weeks,” Helly repeats, looking at her coworkers with a smile that’s the most miserable facial expression she's ever used.
“Helly, are you sure we need to do this?” Mark asks, his hand travelling halfway through the table, as if to reach hers, but it doesn’t go all the way through. “You should rest, we can tell you everything another time.”
Helly takes several seconds before speaking, when she’s sure her voice won’t betray her. “I don’t know if or when she’ll give me another time. I want to know now.”
“Helly, she wouldn’t-”
“Mark,” she interrupts him. “Just tell me.”
He looks at her, such a tender expression on his face it’s almost too much for her to bear. “I-uh, I woke up first. Milchick told me this story, said we had become the face of severance reform. But none of you were here, he said none of your outies wanted to come back. And these three new people were working here. But I… I demanded that they bring you back. I tried to reach the Board and then, next time I awoke, you were here.”
She scoffs. “Some of us were.”
“Helly, I-” he tries to reach for her hand for real this time, but she pulls it back, laces both of hers in her lap.
“What else?”
“Excuse me, refiners,” the little girl, Miss Huang, interrupts them. “It’s time for Dylan G to go home.”
Dylan looks at her, then back and Helly and Mark, struggling with what to do. Helly nods at him. He has a family. He should go home so he could go back, like Irving never will. And get away from her. Away from the liability that is Helly.
Dylan stands up, gives Helly another concerned look and squeezes her shoulder for a moment.
“Welcome back, Helly. It’s... It's good that you’re here.”
They say goodbye and both she and Mark watch him go in silence. Helly doesn’t look at Mark before speaking again.
“Go on.”
Mark sighs. “Then we spoke about the OTC. Irving wouldn’t tell us what he saw. And I…”
He doesn’t talk for another whole minute. Helly lifts one eyebrow. “What?”
“I-I learned about my outie’s wife.”
If she wasn't so cold inside already, Helly thought it would break her heart, this new layer of ice. “What about her?”
“She’s… Ms. Casey.”
“Ms. Casey?”
“Yeah,” Mark leans in closer to her and whispers conspiratorially. “But outside, they all think she's dead. So we began searching for her down here. Irv went to O&D and you and I-”
“She,” Helly interrupts him, coldly. “Not me.”
Mark pales. “Uh, right. Sorry.”
Helly is afraid he’ll stop talking and she’ll have to coerce him again. But Mark seems to gather courage by himself. He squeezes his eyes shut and keeps on talking. “We found more goat people. They had seen her as well, but no one knew where she went or what happened to her. So we just kept on working for a couple more days and, and… Today we woke up out there.”
Helly wants to speculate, to imagine possibilities with him. To ask what Mark thinks that all of this means. But she can’t. Helly feels drained of everything that isn’t exhaustion and anger. An anger she can’t even quite look at for fear it’ll swallow her whole.
“And what happened there?” she forces herself to say instead.
Mark is looking at her again. Carefully and softly. “There was… there was this stupid mission we went to. To find another Lumon book, a secret one. Some bizarre story about Kier’s lost twin.”
Helly scoffs and Mark’s face does something weird at that. Kind of like he wanted to laugh alongside her, but held it back. She feels her stomach churning, an acrid taste in her mouth.
“What else?”
Mark shakes his head, tears are pooling in his eyes. “Helly…”
She knows it, even if she can’t remember. Even if she tried to ignore every way in which her body feels different. She knows it from the way Mark held her when she woke up, so careful and apologetic. From the way Dylan has looked at them since.
She knows it because Mark is absolutely reeking with guilt.
She locks her jaw. “Tell me what happened there.”
He swallows, opens his mouth several times with no sound coming out of it. “We…” he begins, finally. “I… Look, I thought she was you,” he says, reaching for her hand again and again Helly snatches it out of his reach.
Helly can see that he’s hurt. She could, perhaps, have more sympathy for him. Helena has, after all, deceived him.
But Helly was the one who was gone, who had her time stolen, who had basically ceased to exist until Irving had to hammer someone’s head in the water—her head—to be brought back.
“The least you owe me, Mark,” she says, leaving no place for argument. “It’s the truth.”
Mark shrinks back in his chair. His breath is shallow. The silence around them is very fragile.
“Irving was angry,” he says with a soft voice. “Because he knew something was weird. Because the story she told about what she saw in the OTC made no sense, and I… I wouldn’t see it. We were sitting by the fire, Milchick was reading from that stupid book and you- she,” he corrects himself before she can even open her mouth. “She annoyed Milchick and he had Miss Huang burn all our marshmallows. And they sort of fought, Irving and her. They both said some harsh words, and she… She was upset. I… I went to her tent and we-”
“And then you had sex with Helena Eagan thinking it was me,” Helly finishes for him because she’s not sure she can bear hearing him say it.
“Helly,” Mark says, his eyes huge and concerned, scanning her face. “I’m so-”
“Because you couldn’t tell it wasn’t me,” she interrupts him. “For two weeks. She comes here. And she steals my life, and none of you-”
Her throat tightens and she can’t utter another word. Helly stands up, the chair scratching the floor loudly as she does. She walks to the nearest wall and rests her forehead there. If she looks at Mark for another second she might punch him. Memories of throwing a speaker at his head, of suggesting they cut the skin of his face, come to her mind.
Even though it’s not his fault. Not his fault that Helena infiltrated and chipped away at every inch of Helly’s life. She wasn’t even a person to her outie’s eyes, was she? Just, apparently, resources to be exploited.
But he hadn’t noticed.
“I wasn’t there, Mark. I haven’t been anywhere for five months and a couple of weeks. And the only person who noticed is dead.”
She’s not crying, which strikes her as odd. It seems like a situation where a normal person would be crying.
But she’s not a normal person. Maybe Helena Eagan has cauterised her tear ducts so as to never show human emotions.
Or maybe she has gone past sadness. Maybe she just wants to go into that elevator and end it all for good.
“Helly,” Mark says quietly behind her. “I was just so relieved to have you back. I was so happy to have you around, that I ignored… the oddities. I thought it was okay if you didn’t want to tell us what you saw. That was your business and whoever you were outside didn’t matter.”
Mark stands up and walks towards Helly until he is inches from her. She can feel the heat irradiating from his body.
“I wanted to be with you.”
It’d be easy, to turn around, to let him envelop her again, as he had when he took her from Irving’s arms. She’s exhausted and hurt in too many ways to count. She hasn’t been alive since she stood at a Lumon conference and tried to change their world. Meanwhile, her other self has spent weeks down here with the man she kissed in a final, desperate act before it all went down.
She wanted to be with him also. Now she's not so sure.
Because she can't forgive him, at least not yet, not even understanding Mark couldn't have known, because she wanted him to just know. She wanted him to have fought for her, to have noticed, in her, something innately Helly’s that Helena couldn’t have emulated.
She wanted him to not have an outie wife he was looking for. She wanted all of Mark all to herself. And Helly realises she’s selfish.
Just like Helena.
So maybe that’s what Mark had seen in Helena, what had eluded him. That Helly trace that her outie also had.
Another reason for Helly to hate her. You made me with the same vileness you have in you.
Her breath falters, her heart quivers out of control. Rage that threatens to swallow her. So Helly turns to her fear instead. “And what happens when she does it again?
“What?”
Helly turns around, backs herself against the wall. Mark takes one careful step towards her, but she shakes her head and he stops.
“I’m a liability, Mark,” she says, quietly.“I have been since the first day and after the OTC she must’ve decided it was one too many. She only created me for a publicity stunt, and I was no longer worth the hazard. She brought me back because Irving forced her hand, but I-”
Her throat shuts again, her chest tightens. Helly takes a deep breath, stares at her own feet instead of at Mark.
“Anytime now she’ll realise that she doesn’t want to suffer me anymore and then I won’t come back. I’ll be gone and erased, same as Irv, and I-,I.”
The tears finally come. So you are human, after all. Helly falls to her knees on the carpeted floor, gasping for air as she chokes on her tears.
When Mark comes to her, she lets him hold her this time.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and she doesn’t interrupt him. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers against her hair.
“Helly, look at me,” Mark calls. She gazes at him through dazed eyes, her tears making a kaleidoscope out of Mark's features.
“They won't erase Irv and they won't erase you.”
She sniffs and twists her fingers into his shirt. He leans in closer and whispers in her ear.
“I’m not gonna let her. I’ll find a way to bring you back, no matter what. I swear.”
He puts her forehead to hers. Helly places her hands on his waist. She isn’t sure she’s ready to kiss him again, but this seems like enough for now. To hold him like this. Her anger ebbs away slowly. She would be okay lingering in this half-dream state forever.
-
They stay like that, huddled together, sat on the kitchenette floor for what seems like an absurdly long time. But Miss Huang comes for them eventually.
She doesn’t comment on their position, or on Helly’s tears. Just announce that it’s time for them to go.
Helly goes in first, doesn’t jump out of the elevator to kiss him. But Mark holds the door as she steps through. He looks at her, intensely, fiercely. He wants to, but is waiting for the permission she can’t find in herself to give.
At least not yet.
“See you Monday, Helly,” he says.
Helly’s not so optimistic, but if she doesn’t have hope, there’s nothing left for her to have at all. “See you, boss.”
The doors close and the elevator dings.
And Helly opens her eyes to the severed floor.