Work Text:
It hurt, Petey thought, to watch his spirit break.
He remembered being reluctantly charmed by the tenacity of that little spitfire on the table. Shaggy haired, red eyed, wincing at the pain of being so recently severed and still threatening to kill the mysterious voice who had asked who he was somewhere in the ballpark of twenty times. His hands had shook and his jaw had clenched, unimpressed.
Reluctantly charmed, and apprehensive, Petey had internally amended. This new hire, one Mark S., would either be the spark his team needed to kick them out of their current slump after the loss of Steve L., or just another reason to give him more grey hairs than he already sported.
Mark S. didn't disappoint on either assumption.
Mark was stubborn. He was feisty. He wanted out. He snapped at Mr Milchick, he refused to read the Macrodata Refiner's Orientation Handbook with anything more than a passing glance, he riled up Irving with his irreverence to an almost impressive degree.
He spent a lot of time in the Break Room.
Petey had thought, he was ashamed to admit, that he would fall in line after his first stint with Milchick and the endless, mind numbing repetition of the compunction statement. Even after his freshman fluke and the discovery of a more efficient way to refine, a rotating crystal head commemorating his success with the Allentown project that Carol D. had eyed with undisguised envy, he didn't slow down in his attempts to escape.
(The incident with the post-it note and the saran wrap and the long hour spent in the bathroom with Milchick made him hesitate for a short time, the rest of the MDR team diligently working through the muffled sounds of gagging and retching. Mark couldn't look anyone in the eye for a week without flushing red and looking vaguely nauseous. It would have almost been funny if it didn't make his own stomach squirm in discomfort. The sandwiches were wrapped in brown paper from there on out.)
But he knew Mark would adapt - knew it from the moment he sorted his first set of data, eyes wide and mouth opened as the small FR metre in the second bin ticked up by a fraction. He had turned to Petey then, watching over his shoulder, had looked up at him with his lips spreading into the most ridiculously dopey smile he'd ever seen.
"Look Petey! I did it," he'd said with such genuine, infectious enthusiasm that Petey could feel his own face mirroring Mark's as he slapped a hand on his shoulder, a well-worn warmth in his chest that he couldn't find a word for. Clever kid.
("Dad look, I'm doing it!" A young girl with dark hair, a guitar in her arms, a familiar chord progression being played by her tiny hands. He could almost tear up, he was so proud. Clever kid.)
He knew it was a good omen when Mark's first recognisable data set were Frolic numbers. It almost distracted from the red and swollen knuckles that sorted them.
-
Mark kept a concerned eye on Carol.
It gave Petey the opportunity to scrutinise Mark in return, distracted as he was by Carol's slow, laborious movements as she worked. He'd mentioned to Petey the other day that he worried about her, how she complained that her fingers ached all day now, how her back gave her issues, how even with her glasses she struggled to focus on individual numbers. Mark didn't know what would happen, when her Outie decided to retire. He didn't want to accept that an Outie could choose to end their Innie's life any time they chose to.
Mark looked as he usually did in the mornings; eyes and nose red, a little rumpled, his hands steady as they usually were for the first few hours of the day. The marks on his knuckles were long since faded and his voice seemed to have recovered from his previous workday's hours in the Break Room.
It made him wonder what Mark's Outie thought about the discomforts he experienced when he left the Severed Floor, whether he cared at all about what happened when he shut his brain off and let Mark S. live for eight hours of the day. Considering the mornings that Mark turned up anxious, sweating, light-headed, his stomach roiling and mouth dry, Petey was of the opinion that he just didn't give a shit.
There were days when Mark didn't eat lunch. When he forewent coffee, and picked listlessly at a packet of dried fruit from the vending machine. At first, Petey had assumed it was to punish his Outie, to make the process of coming to work so hellish that he'd quit - it'd taken weeks for Mark to open up to him, for him to realise that Petey himself was as much trapped in this space as he was, before he opened up about the persistent nausea he felt in the mornings, and the tremors that shook his hands in the evenings.
They must both be monsters on the surface, to resign someone, anyone, especially a version of themselves to this hell.
Still, Mark was starting to work diligently, not scoffing at Irving when he quoted Kier, not interrupting Carol when she waxed on about the outlandish scenarios in which she received her various aches and woes (all four of them pretending not to notice when her voice broke, when the dread of her approaching final day overwhelmed her), no longer arguing with Petey when he insisted that there was a life to be had here in Macrodata Refinement. He began to cling to those words, that a life here was possible. He was settling in. He didn't have any other option.
With this however came a worrying change. Interspersed by periods of frantic energy and listless melancholy, he seemed obsessed with the doorway to their office. Every few minutes, like clockwork, his eyes would flick up to look at the entrance - if the divider between his and Petey's desks was pulled up, he'd stand and fake a stretch. He never had too much of a reaction when Mr Milchick was around, aside from the appeasing laughs and smiles that were hardly convincing with the tension around his eyes. What was interesting, however, was his reaction to Ms Cobel - in the time that Petey had worked in Macrodata Refinement, he could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen Ms Cobel outside of the bureaucratic necessities that came with being the head of his department. Mark seemed to be more familiar with her than a newbie should ordinarily be.
Petey wasn't sure what to think of it.
Mark looked up from his fretting about Carol, glanced at the doorway, then met Petey's eye, searching for something on his face. A moment passed.
Mark's eyes turned back to his monitor without another word.
-
It was the day after Carol D.'s retirement. Her seat was still empty, for now.
Petey and Mark stood in the kitchenette together, shoulders touching, Mark subtly leaning his weight onto him without conscious thought. It was one of those thoughtless things that made Petey think about what Mark's Outie must be like, if he had someone he could instinctively lean on, a sibling or a partner or a best friend. Whether or not he realised he carried that instinct to the Severed Floor, and applied it to the closest person he had there.
"I can't believe she's gone," Mark said under his breath, all too aware of prying ears and watchful eyes.
"We knew it was going to happen eventually," he replied, his voice showing the same amount of conviction as his thoughts, which was to say very little conviction at all. "We got to say our goodbyes before she left us."
"But, like, it's unfair, isn't it? It's not fair. This isn't fair."
Petey leaned harder onto Mark's shoulder, a silent show of solidarity even as his words contradicted him.
"This is what we get, and we should be grateful for it. It was Carol's time to go."
The tightness of his lips as he looked at Petey's face conveyed what he thought of that statement. The more intentional push against Petey's weight let him know that he acknowledged the camaraderie.
-
Mark couldn't seem to help himself, even after all these months.
Dylan G. hadn't been there at the start, he hadn't seen how truly contrary and stubborn Mark was at his core. He hadn't seen the snarling and the spitting and the schemes. He seemed shocked when Mr Graner stormed in, demanding to know where Mark was - not here, was the answer. Graner left as fast as he'd appeared.
He told Petey what he saw the next morning, after he'd stayed a few minutes later than he was meant to, determined to finish the Longbranch file.
("Dude, I mean it, Mark was totally soaked - Milchick and Graner were basically dragging him to the elevator.")
Mark didn't turn up that day.
-
Yeah, it hurt to watch his spirit break.
Small indignities that would have previously had him vehemently protesting were reduced to nothing but grimaces and hesitant compliance.
Moments of objected infantilisation turned to meek appreciation.
(Ms Cobel called him a 'good boy,' once, in front of the team. Mark seemed to shrink into himself, shoulders rounded, about as timid as Petey had ever seen him while he offered a tight smile for her. His mind conjured the image of a stressed dog. It made something in his guts twist terribly.)
His resignation requests grew more sparse and less tenacious.
He threw himself more wholeheartedly into Lumon Industries, into the work and the environment, into his friendship with Petey. They were glued at the hip nowadays, even Irving commented on it. Petey almost felt guilty for relying on Mark's dependence, were it not that they both benefitted. Feeling needed, feeling necessary, made the burden on his shoulders seem paradoxically lighter. Mark relied on him therefore he must be reliable. He trusted Mark therefore he must be trustworthy. Something wasn't right here at Lumon and he needed an ally, someone who he could unquestionably put his faith in.
If it was ever going to be anyone, it was going to be Mark.