Chapter Text
“Night, Ms. Eagan. Night, Mr. Scout.”
“G’night, Judd.”
Mark and Helena, in companionable silence, stand at their lockers and trade in their severed worker ID cards. Helena takes her fur coat out, and Mark, his watch. It takes him too long to put it on though, because, like usual, he’s a little too fixated on his wife doing absolutely mundane, ordinary shit, like bundling up her coat as tightly as she can because she hates the cold. Born to live in California, he alway tells her, and she’ll always smile, that look that crinkles her eye Iike she can’t quite believe someone’s making a joke with her, the grin that he really has to kiss every time he sees it.
She sees him staring, because she always does, and he raises his eyebrows. Watcha gonna do about it? His wife is pretty. Sue him.
Helena rolls her eyes before reaching back into her locker, and it’s another minute before she speaks again.
“You think they like each other?”
“Who?”
“Our innies.”
Mark Scout makes 40000 a year. He has good hours, enjoys teaching, and lives in a modest size house. It has lots of natural light but not so many windows as to lose all semblance of privacy.
The Eagan home has windows from floor to ceiling, and yet even at four in the afternoon in April, the dining room is almost oppressively dim.
Kind of like his girlfriend today.
Back ramrod straight, sitting with a napkin folded across her lap, one hand resting there and the other gripping his under the table. Jame Eagan, a man who owns everything in town except for three gas stations and a really shitty casino, with eyebrows like evil caterpillars weighing down over his eyes (like a muppet, a really creepy evil muppet) judged not him, at least, not solely him, but his daughter. His daughter, who sits ramrod straight, her hair pinned and slicked back, skin so pale that whatever little light had leaked into the room reflects off her like the moon at midnight.
“How do you feel about piercings?” He asks, his voice drenched in raspy age.
Helena has earrings, big dangly gold ones that Mark had personally helped pick out, and yet her father looks to him.
Mark's eyes flit to Helena. “Uh…not a fan, personally.” She gives a barely-there smile.
Mark has a large serving of very fancy pasta, drenched in vodka and sauces that probably cost more than his house. Jame has the same. Helena has one of those rich people pudding dishes, where the plate is as big as her face and the food as small as her fingernail. She’s only eaten half.
“What about children?”
Helena twitches, imperceptibly, but then, like a switch being turned off, or maybe on, glances at him but clearly speaks to her father, “We haven’t discussed it much yet, but obviously we’d have children to continue the family.”
Her frantic, clammy hand squeezes his desperately under the table. He returns it.
Jame considers his daughter for all of three seconds before looking at Mark.
“Oh, uh, well…I’d certainly like kids, yeah, if it’s something Helena wants too.” It’s not as difficult to smile here, at least he’s telling the truth, even if his girlfriend still looks like a computer dunked in water, sparks and sizzling.
“Good.”
Four courses, three hours, and several uncomfortable nonalcoholic drinks later, Jame Eagan unceremoniously retires to bed. He shakes Mark’s hand, nods to his daughter, and their last glimpse of him before being ushered to the car is of Jame turning his back to them.
Mark pauses slipping off his nondescript Lumon watch. Helena has her eyes fixated deep in her locker, but he knows by the hunch of her shoulders and the tension held in her slender neck this isn’t a casual slip of the tongue.
Since being severed, just about three weeks ago this coming Monday, Helena has oscillated between being tightlipped and corporate about her severance, promising in polite tones that this is what’s best for the company, that she doesn’t mind, and, of course, on video, ecstatic, telling the world that it sounded ‘freaking awesome’ (and Mark in all five years of knowing her, had never heard her say anything remotely that stupid and choked on his drink)
The other side, late at night when they’re curled up in bed, when the cameras have turned off after 16 hours straight of PR, is resentment and hatred. She doesn’t consider her innie seriously very often, but when she does, she tightens, like a pipe holding on so as not to burst and flood the house. Seething remarks and quips about how her innie must be an idiot, or a mindless drone, sometimes mean spirited and other times stated just as a simple fact.
Mark doesn’t consider his innie at all. He’s there, he works, and Mark never knows how he’s doing up there. And that’s perfectly fine. He did this for her, after all.
So to hear his wife asking plainly about her innie without lavishing verbal abuse on her is…new.
But then she shuts her locker and looks at him, eyes wide in a trust that he only ever sees when they’re alone. He wonders if her innie ever looks at him that way.
“Maybe,” he smiles. Helena’s face relaxes enough for him to feel good about reaching his hand out to her.
“Maybe they have crushes on each other,” she muses once they’re out of the building. She laughs a little and elbows him with the arm that’s linked up by their hands. “Maybe they’re ‘dating,’” she teases, raising her eyebrows, like talking about children on a playground giving each other dandelions.
Mark snorts and squeezes her palm. “Doubtful.”
The ride is deadly silent. But Helena is very used to silence, growing up in a home where the best thing you could do for both kier and your father was to maintain a quiet and tranquil home. Even her dolls grew up mute and deaf.
Helena looks out the passenger seat at the road rushing by in the dark. She won’t look at Mark any more than she has to. Why would she burn the memory of his face into her mind any more than it already is?
She’s always been good at forgetting the things her father had taken away from her.
But Mark’s hand lands on her thigh, warm and solid, the heat melting through the silk of her dress to her skin. Why he’s being cruel, she doesn’t know. Maybe it’s what she deserves. For believing even for two weeks that she could have had a companion, had someone just for herself, someone who could have overlooked her jacked up family and life and overlooked her even, that she could have had love.
So she leaves his hand there to torture her. But she won’t look at it or him or the drivers side of the car. Just waits for the trees and townhouses and little shops passing them by to blur together until she doesn’t feel anything. Or something like that.
Thirty minutes of a dead silent drive passes by until Helena realizes they’ve pulled into Mark’s driveway. With his damn fairytale cottage house and the Santa inflatable he hasn’t bothered to take down yet.
Her throat constricts. “Okay, sure, whatever,” she laughs bitterly.
“What?”
Helena focuses on digging through her tiny clutch for her phone, letting her fingers clumsily maneuver around it before pulling it out to stall. “I know it was bad, but you couldn’t even drop me off?” Her place isn’t even twenty minutes away, the asshole.
Despite her dogged insistence to not ever see his stupid adorable face again if she can help it, Mark’s light touch on her wrist stills her movements (she’s never ordered an uber before, but she’s smart, she’d figure it out) and her head reflexively turns to him, dammit. He looks like a confused baby deer and Helena has never hated everything in the world more than she has in this moment.
“I thought you wanted to come here…not…I don’t know,” he shrugs sharply, the fingers on her pale wrist gently starting to curl over, warming her frigid skin. “I just figured that since we usually go to my place, that’s what we were doing today? But we can go to yours,” he offers. He’s already reaching for the keys again.
Helena stares at him. And keeps staring.
“Mark,” she begins very slowly. “You remember what just happened at dinner, right?”
Now he’s the one giving her wide-eyed, did-you-get-a-concussion looks. “Yeah…it was a really weird dinner and your dad is crazy…I’m sorry, how was I supposed to interpret that as you wanting us to be at your house instead of mine?”
Helena finally gets her hand back when she very nearly flails in her seat, laughing, a bit hysterically, “Mark! My father asked you if you wanted kids! If we’d had sex yet!” He’d lied through his teeth, thankfully. “He looked you in the eye and asked why you’d fallen into the temptation of a drinking problem. My family is gone except for me and him, and it’s absolute shit, and you just…”
She flounders there, words trailing off. What else is there to say? How do you convince someone to leave you when it’s the only thing anyone has ever done to her? She’s never had to make a man leave.
But Mark just looks at her, dark eyes incredibly kind and open, not speaking a word.
And there it comes, a pressure behind her eyes, a pull at her mouth, a threat she’s trained so hard to ignore and manipulate when it suits her, but in front of Mark, who isn’t running, who isn’t discarding her like the weird, wrong, broken person she is, all her control is slipping and panic seems the only reasonable course of action.
“You saw all that…“ her traitorous voice cracks in half on a pathetic sob. “…saw the giant-ass painting of Kier on the wall, sat through the worst dinner a not-boyfriend has ever been subjected to and, what? Just…took me home to watch a movie on your couch?”
Tears streak down her face and down onto her lips. Her makeup must be ruined, so she looks disheveled, her last weapon, her looks, her sex, running away.
But Mark looks at her like one would a frightened, abused dog chained to a fence, something else she’s never seen before…Helena would like to imagine, in the deepest corner of her mind, that maybe it’s heartbreak, but she wouldn’t recognize what that looks like if it made love to her.
“Helena…” he sighs, his voice pained, before cupping her wet cheeks in his palms. He kisses her, licks the tears from her lips, and Helena’s resolve to keep him at an arm’s distance during this breakup comes crashing down. She makes a desperate grab for his wrists, pulls him closer, bites, licks, takes whatever she can steal for as long as he’s willing to give it.
His breath is hot and run straight into her mouth. She squirms, trying to get closer to him, but the car, the seats, everything is in the way…Mark doesn’t pull back, but murmurs through kisses, “Helena, I like you. Your family…your whole…” he half waves in the direction of the road that brought them away from her hell, “…sucks. It’s shitty. “But I still want to see you. You’ve gotta believe that, alright?”
(It’s not a question, but an order)
She shakes her head even as he cradles her. “Mark, he’s…and I’m…”
She couldn’t save herself from this hell, can never save herself, but she can save him, can keep him far away from the expectations, the obedience, the dark looks between men in hallways, the things the women say at luncheons, the plans she’s pretended not to find in her father’s desk…she can keep him from all of it.
Helena tugs on his hair. “Mark, please, it’s better this way.”
This time the kiss is burning, bruising, violent and insistent. It feels more like the rest of her life, but this time, there’s a pleasant ache behind it, something warm and meaningful. It can’t be love but she has no other name for it.
Mark seals the words against her mouth, “I don’t care.”
Her chest caves in. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
“Mark!”
It’s a quiet shout but says volumes in the small space, and he doesn’t even flinch. Her hysteria peaks, shaking his shoulders.
“I’m…I’m never going to be normal!” she whispers in words that sound even to her own ears like blood and misery. “I’m always going to be connected to all that. I can’t…leave. I can’t.”
He nods like he understands and she knows he doesn’t but he nods anyway and she could strangle him. “I know. I still—”
”No!”
“Yes.”
“Mark…”
The rest of her words die in his mouth, and she spills the rest of her soul in great, heaving tears into his throat.
(He takes her inside that night. She cries and rages against him again, but he hold her the whole time, even as embarrassment and agony claws from her ribcage. He lays her down in his bed, pulls the covers over her, kisses her auburn hair, and promises her things no one has ever even teased her with — love, acceptance, humor, joy and all of it unconditional. She doesn’t believe it but just like her family, she doesn't have the strength to fight it off)
(This time though, she doesn’t mind the surrender.)
Helena freezes. “Wh…what do you mean?” The wind rushes past her face, pushing thick hair just under and around her face. She looks like a doe-eyed bunny asking what death is.
“Helena,” he teases, “I landed you once, what are the chances of that happening again?”
The anxiety melts, but Helena purses her lips, and Mark has to physically bite his tongue to stop himself from planting a kiss right on her mouth.
“You know I don’t like when you say that.” It’s her boss voice, the CEO-in-waiting tone he loves so much.
Despite the frigid weather biting into their skin, even through his thick layered coat and her black fur monstrosity, Helena tugs him close, lets him feel the cold breathe that intermingles between their mouths, and then kisses him, long and slow, sucking on his bottom lip until Mark sees stars.
The whimper he lets out against her is a little pathetic for a man who’s fully married to this woman, but it’s worth it, because when she pulls back, her cheeks are that much pinker.
Helena huffs another little breath and pokes an insistent, perfectly manicured finger into his chest. She nods once. “So…yeah. Don’t say that.”
Mark smiles like an idiot. “Got it, boss.”