Chapter Text
When they were kids, Mark had been the brave one. He’d dare Devon to touch the creepy house at the end of the block and she’d point out that he was acting like Dill Harris from "To Kill a Mockingbird," whom they both hated. He'd say, “You’re stalling.” She’d say yes she was (she was always frank even as a kid) and then she would go touch the house. She loved her brother too much to tell him no–- until he called her and said he was going to sever himself. They had yelled at each other like shit that day. She’d said the kind of things that she instantly wished she could take back. That she hated him, that he was shallow, and worst of all that Gemma would never have forgiven him. And when Mark had gone ahead and done it anyway, she secretly couldn’t decide whether to think of it as the most cowardly thing he’d ever done or the bravest. The first day he went to work at Lumon, she had stared at the phone thinking about what would happen if she dialed their number, the one plastered on all those buses downtown that made severance look like a vacation cruise. If she called and asked for Mark, who would answer the phone? The mere thought that whoever it was–- whatever pale substitute of the brother she had held close and pushed away all at once, had screamed at and loved and messed up and healed– wouldn’t even know her name... that made her want to scream.
She didn't call.
Instead, she let Ricken drag her to the library and buried herself in a thriller and tried to keep herself from thinking about this other life Mark would have now. About the reason he’d insisted on creating it. About how much more he might break if even the memory of Gemma was gone completely.
She hated him for erasing her– not just because it was wrong, but because she couldn’t. She wasn’t like him. She could never give herself to those creeps, so she had to live with her grief like a normal goddamn person. She had to remember every detail of the cream dripping down Gemma’s face in her and Mark’s favorite wedding photo, the abashed, shameless grin on his face as he held the remnants of the pie, standing almost out of frame at a good angle for ambush, hands raised in an appeasing gesture. Gemma had said with no trace of humor, “I’ll get you back, Mr. Scout,” as if he were an errant recruit, and when he’d looked terrified she’d kissed him on the mouth. In the next moment, after Devon had taken that picture (no one had wanted a professional photographer telling them where to stand and how far apart) Gemma had whispered, “I mean it,” and Mark had said, “Okay, calling the cops,” and as his eyes closed in laughter, she’d hit him with the pie behind her back. That was the best action shot Devon ever took.
She had to remember everything that made that day a rock around her neck. The ring of the phone at 2 AM, Mark saying he was drunk, her asking why. His voice, matter of fact, clipped: “The baby died.” The unbearable silence then. She finally whispered, “I’m coming,” because what else could she say? She couldn’t even summon those words after the car crash, and some twisted corner of her mind wonders if he holds that against her. That she could find words when a theoretical baby died, but not for his wife.
She had to carry around all that, while this other Mark– this "innie," he called it, didn’t he see how degrading that was– got off easy.
He must feel lucky. He must, in actual fact, be fucked up.
The first time he actually stood across from her, she couldn’t say any of this, because she could hardly believe he was even real.
In the next room, Ricken explains his pivotal moment of awakening, and Devon waits for Mark to make some gently snide comment so she can put up a pretense of scolding him. It's only when Mark is sarcastic that she sees some fragment of the person she knew four years ago, but now his face has settled into the blank mask she’s gotten used to.
“I need to talk to you,” he repeats.
“You already said that. I’m right here,” Devon says. She tries to coax a smile out of him, but his eyes jump everywhere, his body held comically stiff as if he doesn’t remember how to control it. Most people would think that means he’s shutting down, but Devon feels a sudden urge to back away. Something is about to explode out of him.
She closes the gap between them. “Tell me what’s happening with you.” Her words come out sharper than she’d intended, but for the first time in months, Mark doesn’t flinch or joke or snap. He nods once, like a mannequin, as if to say, orders received.
“Well,” he says, and pauses, as if that was all he could get out, his mind misfiring and rebooting. Devon studies him. He gets this way–hesitant in every word, every gesture– when someone asks him about Lumon. Usually all he needs to mumble is, “I’m severed,” and then Devon manhandles the conversation back to pseudo-comfortable territory, but even those two words sound heavy on his tongue, alien. She waits for him to spit it out, though some part of her knows he won’t go there unless she drags him over the line. Patience has never been a strong suit in their family.
“If you need to talk to me, you have to form words,” Devon says finally. “With your mouth.”
Mark’s eyes stop skittering. He glances at Devon, but his whole face shudders, and he stares at the abstract painting over her head. He says, “Look, I’m guessing you're his sister, and if you are this is going to sound really fucking weird, but I don’t know how to put it. I’m from Lumon. I’m the version of your brother– or whoever, I don’t know, platonic best friend– that works at Lumon, and I have no idea where we are or what’s happening and I don’t know your name, but I have to-”
Insane laughter bubbles in Devon’s chest. She forces it down, and in a moment she doesn’t need to because what about this could be funny? This is her surrealist nightmare. Mark is still talking but how can she process his words with her mind fixed on what he’s just said? Has it happened? How can there be a stranger in her brother’s body, stealing his vocal chords and swapping out his memories? She's always known he exists, but he was never supposed to come here. She was never supposed to know someone who looked at her with her brother’s eyes but couldn’t see her.
“Are you fucking with me?” She knows that voice has to be hers on an intellectual level, but it remains flat while her feelings throw themselves against her chest and head and eyes, desperate and terrified to escape.
“Of course not! Why would I lie about this?” Mark throws up his hands, and the gesture sends a spike through her, because that’s him. He does that every time he wants to yell. How can his gestures still be the same if he’s forgotten her?
Then she sees the dried blood. The little scar just above it Mark said was apparently from getting his hand caught in a door. At work.
“What happened to your hand?” she says, almost harshly. If his answer changes, and if she doesn’t sense BS, this must be real.
“What’s your name?” he says. His voice grows taut with something more than impatient tension, and tears constrict Devon’s own throat. She swallows them down and says:
“I’m Devon. You really have no idea?”
“I didn’t, but now I will.” Mark flashes a quick grin, but it vanishes immediately, and Devon blinks, realizing how much she wants it back. It wasn’t exactly his, but at least it was on his face.
“They’re going to turn me off soon. I broke out and they’re going to turn me off.” Mark inhales sharply, the way he’d done when he tried to fight off panic attacks in the months after Gemma’s accident. “Whatever he’s been telling you isn’t true. It can’t be, he doesn’t know shit!” With a savage thud, Mark’s foot connects with the woodwork of the doorframe. He groans.
Devon takes him by his uninjured left hand. “Bud-Mark, breathe, okay?” Her detached tone now gone, she wants more than anything to embrace him. But Lumon stole that. “Just tell me what happened to your hand. We’ll start there.”
“Okay… I- I guess that might tell you what it's like.” Somehow, Mark’s voice flattens out. Devon thought it was already as toneless as it could get. “When we break protocol at work, Mr. Graner– he’s uh, head of security, or he was, don’t know what happened to him– he takes us to the Break Room and we have to…apologize for whatever we did.” He pauses and looks at her expectantly, as if that explains everything. Then he says, “Okay, I need to talk to people, fast, can you ask Ron-”
His name is Ricken. The automatic, condescending correction never makes it out of Devon’s thoughts– why did she even think of that with something awful scratching at her skull? Something she can’t contemplate.
“Let’s rewind,” she says. “And this time, let’s include the part about what actually happens in the Break Room and why it makes you look so scared and what the hell it has to do with the fucking blood on your hand!”
“I’m really not supposed to talk about it,” Marks says, his words a script memorized to the point of deadly precision.
Devon’s stomach rolls once, twice, seven times, and when it stops, she feels something clawing at her throat. She knows what that line means. How the hell could she not, when she reads articles and books on abuse with a sickened curiosity? When more than one friend has told her how hard it was to leave a partner who constricted and shamed them, because of how completely they learned to compartmentalize the public and the private?
The inside and the outside.
Much more softly, she says, “Do they hurt you?”
“I think so,” Mark whispers.
“Did they hit you? Is that why you’re bleeding?”
“If you can’t get it right after a while, they can hit you. It’s in the handbook.”
Devon runs her tongue over her teeth again and again, fighting to speak, fighting to keep something in as Mark fights to let it out. They put the worker abuse policy in the handbook.
“Did they tell you that’s okay?”
“All I have is what happens there,” Mark shouts. “That’s my life!” His voice becomes a small child’s. “Is it normal, Devon? Because I came here to tell you I think it’s not.”
“It’s evil,” Devon says. And Mark has always been the brave one, and now here he is again, fighting everything to get to her because he already knows how wrong this is, and what can she do in the face of something like this?
Devon holds her lost brother to her, and truly doesn’t care who he is or what he remembers. She says: “I'll get you out.”