Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“In lieu of flowers,

send him back.”

—Andrea Cohen, Refusal to Mourn

Gemma knows she is going to die.

It’s not a matter of if, but when. That has been a certainty since the start, perhaps the only one. Although time has stretched in an inexplicable manner—beyond her every expectation—there was never a doubt about it. Through the looping hours that bled into each other, through the months—years? Lifetimes?—she hardened herself against the lies: your relevance is unquestionable, you will be the key to a mighty, everlasting legacy; you will be the catalyst for an unprecedented historical advancement; the world will be forever in your debt for your indubitable sacrifice; you will never again know pain or ailment or affliction none; you are happier here, you are happier here… She is important; she is unimportant. It is all the same. To all intents and purposes, she is already gone. Death has carved itself in her veins in a way that is independent of the body or the mind. Death comes for her every day in the form of a threshold, in the shape of a chip lodged like shrapnel inside the brain. Death is the absence of movement and light and warmth and freedom and love. God, is the sky cloudy today? Is it fall or spring? What is Mark doing?…

After all, she has no way of knowing which will be the final execution. The hands that guide her through the corridors are the same hands that herd cattle into the slaughterhouse.

Then sometimes.

Sometimes in the artificial dark, when all fight abandons her, when all the possibilities narrow down to one, she begs and prays to everything and nothing that they won’t be so selfish as to keep her body too. Although her ability to picture things has dwindled to the point of blindness, this she can envision, with a sort of ghostly detachment: whatever that remains—a thoughtless, faded carcass—held in stasis, floating in amber liquid, preserved in a frozen chamber or forever sealed away in a box underneath a Lumon label. It is in those moments that everything crumbles. Please. Please. Please. Let my body return, God, to the sunlight, to the place of living things. She can make her peace with that. Let my body return home, and when you get there, just let me go. Upon the garden or their doorstep, it doesn’t matter. Mark will be there to find her. If nothing else, her body can make it back to his arms and, in a way that transcends language, say all the things she will never be able to say. I was here. I was here. I never left. I never wanted to leave. I tried to find my way back. I never stopped trying to find my way back. I’m sorry. Don’t forget about me. Don’t forget. Don’t forget. Don’t forget-

It’s all crap, of course. Lumon devours, Lumon swallows you whole. Like a black hole it takes and never gives back. They have already feasted on her body and her mind, used her in every way possible, and there will be no one to stop them from keeping her flesh and bones as well. When all is done, she will still belong to them.

This thought has become a repetition, recently; an obsession. There is very little that manages to disturb her these days, but the idea of her body rotting, decomposing, putrefying down here fills her with a new, deep-seated horror. For a long time, her thoughts were deliberately consumed by the possibility of escaping. What has changed? Why now? Why is the image of her own lifeless body suddenly so very clear on her mind? Is it because time is truly running out? Is it because she found herself at the base of the elevator, again?

Cold Harbor.

Only a few wakes-up ago, she passed that plaque. Shiny. Brand new. It is the name of the last, nameless room, and she’s already been to all the others. What comes after that? She asks, even though she knows exactly the fate that awaits her. She asks. She always asks, choosing to focus not so much on the wording of the reply, but on anything else that might bleed through. A crack, a sliver of something that gives it away. Gemma doubts she’ll ever find it, because the faces of her captors do not allow for such things. They communicate in a tongue different from any other: one that has no need for emotion, inflection, expression; only a categorical, calculated, cryptic symbolism. It offers no answers and no comfort. She has learned to speak that language too—her fifth after English, Russian, Polish and Nepali—but sometimes, it still slips from her.

It happened just this morning.

When she stepped into the dressing room and the closet door slid open, suddenly there was no air left to breathe. The sight before her familiar and maddening. The sight before her making her lose her balance for a second. The clothes. Her clothes. Her clothes. Her clothes. Her clothes. Her clothes. She remembers knitting that scarf in the winter that… She asks. The tremble in her voice betrays her. The tremble in her voice is not allowed in the Lumon vocabulary. The nurse tells her that everything’s fine, and that is how she knows.

Today is the day she dies.

***

“Let’s go,”

Gemma fiddles with the sleeves of her coat, and the fabric feels almost alien in her hands.

She checks her pockets, which are empty, even though she remembers clearly what she put in them the last night she was alive: her house keys, her car keys, her college ID card, two tissues and a handful of parking tickets that she wanted to double check. Hardly significant, just a few traces of an ordinary life, but now it seems perverse that they discarded them, burned them down to nothing, less than nothing. When she first woke up underground, they had taken her wedding band. Just like that, the memorable and the banal erased from existence in the blink of an eye.

Is there anything left? Is there anything they cannot take away? What point is there in crawling out of her cage in a mocking joke of familiarity when she’s already been stripped of everything else?

Under the anaemic light of the fluorescent tubes, nurse Cecily spares her a glance. Almost sympathetic. Almost. She walks and Gemma follows, just a few steps behind. They make a sharp turn to the left, and from there it’s a straight line until the last door. This is the distance that separates her from the unknown shore; this is the distance between her and the unending night of the soul. For a brief moment, she considers running away again. She considers a futile, desperate attempt to delay this for as long as possible, until they grow tired of her and decide that more drastic measures are needed. But Gemma knows every inch of this place with the same lucidity that she knows there is no place to run.

She keeps walking.

Whatever this is, it is not peaceful. It is vicious and sordid and obscene. It is full of sorrow and regrets the likes of which she never imagined. She thinks of her mother holding her hand during dentist appointments when she was only ten; she thinks of Mark holding her hand when they went to the clinic only to hear bad news; she thinks of all the times when touch was familiar, and comforting and soothing. This is not one of those times. There is none of that now. The last strings that tied her to the outside world have finally been cut.

Gemma once read that death isn’t singular; that we all might suffer a number of deaths before disappearing completely. That the heart does stop, but the love remains until memory fades from the minds of the living. The last years in isolation have altered the order of these factors for her. Outside, the grieving is done, the memory has vanished—but down here the flesh keeps on beating, the blood flowing still, in its perpetual orbit.

It is, perhaps, what Dr. Mauer had tried to tell her. If they’ve all forgotten her, then the loss of the body is simply irrelevant.

The door is open before her. Her breathing quickens, falters, and there is only horror laying ahead, but she cannot allow herself to be a coward. No. Not now.

One foot in front of the other, she marches on.

***

Immediately—something.

Something instead of nothingness. How odd.                        

She is thrown mercilessly back into her own body—shivering, startled, petrified—all at the same time. But there is only a fraction of a second to categorize these sensations, because a figure coalesces promptly into her field of view. It’s someone else. She knows this with eyes unfocused; she knows this even despite the treacherous spots clouding her vision, because the figure is dressed in black and red. It’s incongruent. It’s new.

She blinks.

Slowly.

Oh.

Oh.

Gemma experiences in an instant the exquisite pain of seeing a memory come back to life. It’s Mark. It’s almost like he’s right there, within her reach, just mere feet away from her. Except it’s not a memory, no, it can’t be, because in her recollections he never looked like this: gaunt and thin to the extreme, his hair wild and longer than she’s ever seen it and a shocking trail of blood that starts at his left cheek and cascades down his entire suit, impossibly; like he’s been to war, like he’s survived a massacre.

She waits; a second, two, unable to break the spell. It cannot be. It cannot be. It cannot be. The imperfections of the flesh reveal that this is no elaborate illusion—the wrinkles, the lack of breath, the shivering form—but still reason eludes her, fails to find a logical explanation. What happened? How, and why? Against all odds he is here, and she cannot say it out loud, because one word at all would mean jinxing them both. Because the powers that might or might not be, the gods and rulers of this labyrinth, will see just how desperately she wants this to be true and rip him away from her.

Still, she risks everything.

Still, she asks.

“Mark?”

And this alone is a sight she could live in forever, the lines of a face that had begun to blur and fade in her memory, now sharper and more vibrant than ever, breaking into a smile. And in just an instant the border is crossed, gone along with the ghosts and the tricks and the apparitions, as he throws his arms around her. He laughs, breathless, against her shoulder. And Gemma attempts to laugh too, and that goes poorly because all that escapes is a sob, and it takes only one second before tears engulf them both.

“M…” she mumbles, and what she means to say is “you’re here, you’re here, how are you here?” but Mark hugs her tighter as if he knows, and this time his lips find her hair, her temple, every inch of her face.

They’re crashing into each other. Reality asserts itself again and again, in the fierceness and the desperation and the solidity of their hands: gripping the shoulders, the lapels of his suit, tangling in her hair. And what a miracle this is, that there is no distance at all between them when just a second ago it seemed like they were oceans, light years, universes away.

She pulls back, the need to find his eyes—the eyes, the eyes, the eyes—too great, and immediately she does. And in doing so, suddenly, like a new threshold, she remembers. Suddenly, she’s not the starved, amputated creature they’ve kept chained underground, forged by needles and drills and lies; monitored from a hundred screens. She is herself, Gemma Scout, who’s been teaching at Ganz college for fifteen years, who prefers Dostoyevsky over Tolstoy, who still dreams of taking the Trans-Siberian railway at least once in her life, who can identify an Australian Banyan just by the shape of the leaf; who took her first plane when she was only four; who likes to be busy on Saturdays and lazy on Sundays; who loves the way Mark’s nose presses against her cheek when they kiss.

Everything is coming back at once as he cradles her face.

“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me. I’m here, It’s me. It’s okay, it’s me…” his voice is threadbare, broken beyond repair, but then, so is hers.

“They said-, I thought you-, I thought I was never going to…”

It’s an unintelligible string of murmurs and hiccups and sobs—the immensity of what has happened impossible to convey—but she would rather die than leave this unvoiced.  

And Gemma thought she had banished tears from this place; she had made it a necessity to erase all signs of weakness, because no one on this circle of hell had a right to a sliver of her pain. No one had a right to watch her suffer and smile behind a screen. If they refused to view her as fully human, then she wouldn’t behave as such. No tears, no smiles, no outbursts, not a twitch of the hand. Nothing. She had vowed herself to lethargy with no hopes of waking up. She had been so ready to never feel again, but now here she is: wrapped in a newfound, impossible safety and in her trembling arms is the only person whose eyes are worthy of seeing her pain, whose touch is worthy of her battered skin, and the floodgates are open. And God, her face hurts with every expression she thought she’d forgotten, and the smile she can hardly manage is obscured by the tears, but it doesn’t matter because Mark kisses them away. And after the torment of the gloomy, antiseptic nights, the countless hours spent thinking forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, forgotten-

“My baby,”

He says it in prayer, in disbelief, in agony, like he has missed her to the point of insanity, and maybe he has. Mark can’t stop shivering and yet he stands like a fragile shield between her and this fucking nightmare, and she desires nothing more than to exist a little longer in this moment, in this stolen fragment of time waiting to be shattered.

Their hands are mirrors of each other, caressing and worshipping and adoring until they bring their foreheads together, settling something aching and raw somewhere deep in the soul.

“My baby…” again and again and again, whispered just for her. And what an extraordinary beauty: the blood mixing with the wetness on their cheeks, the inhales and exhales mingling in their closeness, the pain mixing with the tide of immeasurable, inexplicable joy.

And pressed like this, Gemma feels an infinite surge of relief, and triumph, and faith, and pride and shame and everything at once. Defying the forces that stole her from the world, they prevail: two bodies beaten and bloodied and weak, but found.

The next time she opens her eyes, the world is tinted in red.

They’re both unafraid and completely terrified.

Suddenly, they have everything to lose. 

And so, hand in hand, they run.

***

Out. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out. They’re making their way out and everything is a blur: metal railings, concrete walls, concrete floors, glass panels, glass ceilings. It’s all new. Variables upon variables with the only constant of their bodies in motion. Gemma is overwhelmed with the taste of the air, because already on the other side of the stairwell it’s different, it is distinct and unfiltered and free. She had been buried alive and now it’s like breathing for the first time, like resurfacing from the depths of the ocean. It’s over. It’s almost over. One last door. They all but crash against it and there’s an explosion of cold, icy air and there it is. The sky. The clouds. The trees. The snow. God, there was snow on the road back home; that was her last sight of the world. It's still there to welcome her back.

Unannounced, her knees give out and Mark almost tumbles down the stairs in a sudden double act of gracefulness. They’ve been running with astonishing efficiency so far, but now it’s like their limbs stop working altogether, a total collapse of their motor skills, and what an irony it is—that they’re tripping over their own feet when they’re just one step into freedom. Come on. Come on. Come on. They help each other up, and Mark has lost a shoe, somehow, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because in an instant he is screaming like a madman, gesturing wildly with open arms.

There are people waiting for them. They’re waiting for her. They’re waiting for her. They’re waiting for her. After all this time, they’re waiting for her.

“Devon! Devon!!!”

It’s an absurd, lunatic, absolutely delightful commotion until, only a few seconds later, a roaring car drives up to them—a mundane, almost vulgar machine rendered unique and unstoppable in her eyes. Then another voice cries out, answering the call.

 
“Gemma! Gemma!!!!”

Her name is still amongst the living, her name still has a place; it is being uttered in the pale, winter sunlight and it does but bring more tears to her eyes. And when yet another familiar face materializes out of nothing, it’s too much. Between one blink and the next they have crossed the vastness of the grey parking lot and collided against Devon’s arms and fallen to their knees.

Gemma’s consciousness expands like a fisherman’s net in the raging sea: she can feel the atoms, the sharpness of the light and the turn of the Earth and the touch of her family bringing her back to life. With breathtaking certainty, she knows she loves them and that she is still loved. And with words unsaid, she reaches out. She clings to their arms with force enough to break bones, to tear through walls, to carve into stone. This is the only way to make it known that she’s home. She’s home. 

And that is how, tear-stricken and bloodstained and unharmed, she is guided back into the world. 

Chapter Text

“I am learning to live

Where losses hold fast

And grief lets loose and unravels.

Where a new kind of knowing

Can pick up the thread.

Where I can slide palms

With a paradox

And nod at the dawn,

As the shadows pull back

And spirit meets bone.”

—Carrie Newcomer

Hell is disappearing.

Hell is just a mirage in the rearview mirror, and Gemma won’t turn her head to look behind. Behind. Behind. Behind. Finally, it’s all behind her. She has left the opaque, unfathomable confines of the box where no sound or colour could reach. And after an eternity of sterile, blank walls, floors, surfaces, every sense is overwhelmed—but sitting here in a worn backseat she is aware only of what’s essential: the way her head is nestled in Mark or Devon’s shoulder, the way their arms tighten whenever she shivers. The world is in motion beneath their feet and their destination is still unknown. Gemma cannot bring herself to care; as far as she’s concerned, she already made it exactly where she wanted to be.

Everything outside is dimming, the landscape across the glass nebulous and moving and reminding her of the changeable nature of things; and she doesn’t know how long they stay there, locked in an embrace that is both an anchor and a lifeline. What she does know, is that the moment she raises her head, her eyes meet a pinprick of light, a constant point of radiance in the horizon—until it diffuses and multiplies and scatters. Stars. God, there’s still stars.

“Look,” is the only thing she can muster, barely above a whisper.

And they do, Devon and Mark turning their heads, eyes wide open in wonder as though they, too, have been deprived of this sight. There is a thin veil making everything seem softer, keeping the turmoil and the chaos and the harshness at bay—it covers the three of them. Gemma feels a kiss being dropped on her temple, and the myriad of constellations accompany them for the rest of the journey.

It is only as they stumble out into the night that other things become apparent: their whereabouts, the biting cold, their total unpreparedness for it, and the inconspicuous presence of their silent driver. She is a silver-haired woman in a dark suit, and she avoids her eyes in complete detachment from the scene before her. And Gemma has walked in and out of enough rooms to be able to tell with surgical precision the meaning of her intuitions. A crawling of the skin, a spark of recognition. They’ve met before. Indubitably, they have met and yet all she can conjure is this vague, abstract resentment towards her. In the exceptionality of her situation, she is not entirely sure whether she would’ve pursued this further, but she loses her chance the moment Devon drags her along onto the pavement.

Mark closes the door behind him, and suddenly his sister’s are no longer eyes but enormous saucers as she looks him up and down.

“What the hell happened to your shoe?” she exclaims, as if the crux of her brother’s problems is a missing shoe and not the fact that he’s covered in blood from head to toe.

Mark looks on equal parts disoriented and mystified—as if he’d be glad to walk on one shoe for the rest of his life—and when Devon produces a coat and a new pair of snow boots, he throws his arms around her.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you…” tears flowing freely, Mark presses a kiss on her forehead. It is the first time she has witnessed such heartfelt display between the siblings, the ever-present snark and banter that used to make her laugh gone, replaced instead by this frantic, all-consuming rawness. The sudden certainty that this is the result of their joined, herculean efforts is overwhelming, threatening to shatter the last pieces of her.

When she gets a glimpse of her, she can make out Devon’s features, twisted in something halfway between pain and happiness, and crying, too; undone in a way that’s entirely unfamiliar, and she promptly pulls them both in another hug. And Gemma doesn’t know how to break her silence, how to bridge this distance, only that she must, so she just says:

“Are you okay?”

Devon scoffs, the utter stupidity of the situation not lost on any of them. “You’re alive… You’re both alive,” and she tries to make herself taller, standing on her tiptoes, tall enough to press kisses into her hair. God, had Devon always been this short?

“Okay, okay, okay,” she sniffles, straightening up, running a hand through her hair before returning it to squeeze Gemma’s shoulder. “I don’t know what’s happening, or what happened down there, but above anything else I need you to know that we do love you, so much, and that this dumbass right here is devoted to you to the point of risking everything, including his own life, so,” from the trunk she produces something that registers only belatedly in her mind as a backpack. She crudely tosses it to her brother. “You’ll be safe. Please be safe here. Please be safe,”

And she repeats these last words like a mantra as she reaches to touch her yet again, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. It is a gesture so utterly devastating in its sweetness that Gemma might as well be dead, might as well treasure for the rest of eternity every single one of these touches. She knows this is the desperation that precedes a farewell, but on the land of the living things are mutable and not set in stone, and some farewells aren’t forever.

“I’ll be back,” Devon assures them, jumping back to the passenger seat. Then she turns, all be damned, and presses the horn without a care in the world—a strident, gorgeous blare cutting the quiet of the night in half. “And fuck Lumon!”

***

It is only through the summoning of all the strength she has left that she is able to cross this doorway—a plain, ordinary, unremarkable thing—but who’s to say whether it obeys the laws of nature or the laws of hell? Terror suddenly rises up, curls around her veins. But when Mark squeezes her hand in reassurance, and she remains entirely herself, it is done. They’re safe. They’re safe. They’re safe. Exhaustion clings to her very bones, and she all but collapses on the hideously carpeted floor of this remote motel, bringing him down with her.

All that matters about her surroundings is that they’re starkly, clearly and beyond a shadow of doubt, not Lumon; all that matters about her reality is the person crumbled here with her. And almost immediately the urgency begins anew, the irrepressible need to find what she lost, what was taken from her. Now it’s her turn to take his face in her hands, pressing against his neck, his jaw, his brow, as though she was left blind and this is the only way she can remember. However clumsy her gestures, Mark seems to cherish them all the same, his bloodstained hands coming up to cover her own; eyes bright and almost as disbelieving as she knows her own must be. He looks worn, and rougher and older in a way that has nothing to do with the passage of time—in a way that only a prolonged suffering can explain. As she smooths a thumb over his cheekbone, she realizes all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to memorize every change and hurt and ravage that has taken place. But it is him—it is him, and that is more than Gemma could ever have imagined she'd have again. And when she looks—deep down, past everything on the surface—she is stunned to find the most inconsolable part of him, the one he used to hide, out there in the open, like a bleeding heart. And it’s beautiful. And all of her questions about how, how, how, are answered in the same instant she reaches to cradle the back of his head. For there she finds an uneven patch of hair, something distinct and different from the blood and the grime, an artificial contraption fixed in place upon his scalp. It feels like gauze under her fingertips and there is no question as to what it hides: a wound whose depth goes beyond the confines of the body. It is the same wound she carries, too.

“I’m sorry,” he sobs. “I’m sorry, I’m… they- they approached me when you were gone, and when they mentioned the procedure, I said yes. Oh, God. All this time- all this time I was just one floor above, and I didn’t know… I didn’t know…”

The severed floor. The severed floor. The severed floor. There were a hundred barriers between her and the world. That was one of them. The only reason they managed to overcome it successfully today is because he split himself in two and then made the other half of his mind complicit in the most ludicrous, impossible plan. Somehow, he managed to avoid the self-sabotage that frustrated her every attempt to escape. It strikes her as pure genius and absolute madness. But as the crude reality starts to sink in—that she wasn’t the only one they were after, that they were both caught in their snare, that Lumon got him, too—Gemma can only join in the sharing of this pain.

“They did it to me, too,”

That much is obvious; but there is something scarred and mutilated in her words, something that pierces through Mark like glass and makes him take her in his arms again, clutching her fiercely to his chest as though he could undo the damage, even when it’s already done.

Gemma breathes in. In the tangle of their arms, she manages to guide his hand to the back of her head, where she knows her own scar lays. It is easy to find and rough to the touch from all the times she picked at it while it healed, because she didn’t want it to heal. And what a great irony this is—these wounds paralleled in their sameness, these wounds that are two but might as well be only one.

Mark’s hands slide back to her face, incredulous and adoring and unbelievably tender, until the pull is too great and they’re falling in to press their mouths together.

“I thought I was gonna have to die to see you again,” he breathes against her lips.  

And that alone paints a picture with sheer, total clarity: a world crumbling and unravelling, an absence so profound it collapsed in on itself, a desire so unspeakable and dark it could only be fulfilled in death. It is something she herself is painfully familiar with. And Gemma wants to know everything: every ugliness and crookedness and weakness and failing, and love him more for them.

All she has to do is ask, and the night is a confession. Clinging to each other through the words—spilling, overflowing—an uncontrollable flood after entire ages of drought: there was a funeral, two years ago, and a closed casket, and there was a house rendered empty and uninhabitable and their life packed in boxes; there was a memorial at the college and more than two hundred unopened emails; there was no sleep and no rest at all; there was drink, a lot of it, and there grieving students watching a grieving, gutted man and a temporary suspension that turned into a resignation, and then—then there was Lumon.

***

“Do you wanna see it? The sun is rising,”

The blood is gone. The clothes licked by the flames of hell are gone. Every barrier that still stood between them has vanished. Everything has been laid bare, and it is somehow too much and not enough. Mark’s words have chased her own monsters away, but in turn they have opened up the gates to a world torn asunder by her absence. The truth—finally, the truth—is in her hands, and she does not quite know what to do with it. Gemma is at the center of all this, feeling in waves, in multitudes: heartbreak and pain and anger and uncertainty, but also relief and a terrible, all-encompassing love. She knows it’s something that will only make sense in time—time that she has, time that is hers—but for now all that stands is Mark’s offer and the softness in his voice.

Stepping outside, they find the sky has begun to clear. They reach the railing of the first floor and follow it to a back, deserted corner, where they’re able to sit down on what might or might not have been a broken dryer. Eventually, the shadows part—and in no time at all they’re both cast in crimson, set ablaze by the warmth of the star around which they orbit. It’s yet another thing that hasn’t disappeared. And Gemma thinks before this rising sun she may have been only a silhouette, shapeless and unformed—and as the first rays emerge in the horizon, she is given form and definition, bathed in colour and detail and unmistakably alive. The cold air pours in, making them shiver and huddle closer together, and she watches their breaths rise skyward, twin columns of smoke. And under the newness of the light everything stills—the needles of the pine trees glistening, the flakes upon the snow bejewelled, the birds not yet awakened.

“We have a niece,” Mark says.

There is no preamble. He says it like he was dying to tell her, the need to share this one happiness with her suddenly more important than anything else. And she wonders just how many other things he may have wished to tell her—important things, inconsequential things, silly things—but couldn’t; how many desperate times he conversed with the dead before it broke him. It is in this precise instant that Gemma realizes there is a miraculous transmutation happening right in front of her eyes: an incurable hurt metamorphosing into joy.

A second ticks by, but it takes an eternity for the content of his words to make sense in her mind. A niece. A niece. A niece. An entirely new person. A person she’s yet to meet. A part of her family. Devon and Ricken’s… child. A barrage of memories and sorrows and lies starts to rain over her shoulders, and it is painful and bittersweet, because such is the nature of life; and Gemma is lucky to be alive, to be here to experience this news at all. The brightness of this moment simply cannot be overshadowed.

“We do?”

Mark nods, the shine of new tears evident in his eyes. “Eleanor. She’s tiny. I was there when she was born,” he starts, but soon his voice falters. “And all the while I kept thinking- oh God. I- I- but it’s okay now. Because we’ll be there. As she grows up. You and I. Uncle and aunt, can you believe it?”

Gemma smiles. In the fragile permanence of this instant, she is willing to believe everything and anything. That life hasn’t ended. That she wasn’t left behind. That she might still see a thousand more sunrises and she will not be alone. That there is still a place in the life she was ripped away from. That every good and blissful and mundane thing is waiting for her.

“I hope she looks like Devon,” she says, sounding decidedly like herself for the first time since they came back. The sun is starting to hurt her eyes, and she wraps her arms around Mark to hide her face in the safety of his shoulder.

And Mark laughs in a way she recognizes, tremulous and familiar, untainted by danger or pain or fear—the first genuine laughter she has heard in a long time.

Chapter Text

“I have love in me the likes of which

you can scarcely imagine,

and rage the likes of which

you would not believe.

 If I cannot satisfy the one,

I will indulge the other.”

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Hell is empty.

Gemma had often fantasized about it that way: the lights dimmed down, her quarters silent and deserted, and her captors none the wiser. She would dream of crawling through the ventilation shafts, slipping through a crack in the wall and disappearing. She would dream of clawing her way above, with her own hands, to the surface, and then what? This was always where her fictions took a turn towards the needless and the elaborated. She would need money, she would need a phone, she would need to know where she was. What about transportation? Sometimes, she imagined turning up in the middle of nowhere, miles away from anything remotely civilized and doomed to die of thirst or hunger or hypothermia, whichever came first; others, she imagined turning up in a busy street, everyone turning their eyes to look at her. Please, I need help. Please, it’s been so long since I last saw the sun. I was a prisoner, I was underground. Please, you have to believe me. Please, help me.

This was another haunting, bone-chilling certainty: that her testimony would be invariably met with mistrust and suspicion—people hustling by, brushing her off like one would brush off an undesirable thing, a repulsive thing. That Lumon’s total omnipotence would overshadow anything else, no matter where she was. That her words would mean nothing, and it would simply be too ridiculous believe her. That Mark wouldn’t believe her. Oh. That was the worst fear of all—irrational as it was—but he hadn’t always understood, and when that happened the distance grew between them and it tore her apart.

Now, however, as she sees him drag the headboard across the motel room—because she awoke with a start, unable to shake off the harrowing feeling that they were being watched—something different dawns on her. How misguided her belief was. How blind she had been.

When did it happen? Was this meant to be? How could she have known? That they shared the same scar on the back of their heads, that all along they shared the grief and the all-consuming desperation, the missing pieces, the gaps in their memory—that they had both fallen prey to the same vicious evil masquerading as a corporation, walked through hell and back for each other?

He’s been down there. He understands; perhaps the only person that does. The floorboards creak; the headboard leaving a deep indentation on the wood that will be there tomorrow morning, and every day after. It’s a turbulent, impromptu rearrangement induced by waves of paranoia: they’re moving every single piece of furniture across the room, the noise jarring and incessant in the middle of the night, undoubtedly disturbing the sleep of every other unsuspecting guest. Opening drawers, checking mirrors for hidden reflections, lifting the mattress, unscrewing the air vents to look inside.

They must look insane.

The same brand of insane, at least.

***

The plan is as follows: they will leave the second motel and reach the next town on foot, where a rental car will be discreetly waiting for them along with their papers and cash, compliments of Devon. They will only use cash from now on; a modicum of insurance to ensure their steps stay as hidden as possible. Untraceable, that’s what they need to become. They have no other choice; the risk is too great for anything else.

On the map that is to guide them says it’s eighteen miles, which is by all means more than a decent hike. An entire day walking, in fact. And Gemma wonders how many white corridors could fit in eighteen miles, cannot but imagine a network of tunnels branching off underneath them, a distorted mirror world of the one aboveground.

They leave with the clothes on their backs and hardly anything more: Devon’s backpack, containing a dwindling stash of snacks, batteries, two Nokia phones and a stolen blanket from the motel. They were also able to procure a pair of sunglasses for her, because after that first dawn it became apparent that the quality of natural light was still too much for her eyes. So the world acquires a different tint—hushed, subdued, but still vibrant in a way that leaves her breathless. Snow crunching beneath their boots, they move in stretches, trudging in a poor and uncoordinated manner, far too slow to be considered efficient. For Gemma, it is the steepness and abruptness along the path that prove an arduous task. When the terrain becomes uneven, that’s when her steps falter, used as they are to the bare, polished flatness of the halls. Unsteady, wobbly, she needs to let go of Mark’s hand to support herself, a hand on each knee. And when the ground flattens again, they rejoin; and as they walk they make a list, aloud, sharing facts of everything they know Lumon owns, manufactures and markets.

This was Mark’s idea. After the terror from last night, he became desperate to assuage a panic without borders or terminations; something dark and macabre and unknown in size. He’s had his own share of it, but hers is simply insurmountable—fear, alertness, sharpness—they’re like a second skin to her, and it is not rare for an appeal to reason to work better than well-intentioned but empty comforts. This was true before, as well. She finds it helps: to know what to stay away from, to know what to avoid. It makes her feel like they have some measure of control, when control is something that was for too long denied to her. It’s a lot, though. Gemma says injections, hormones, acne creams, deodorant, soap, even dried fruit snacks. Mark names a series of restaurant chains, toothbrushes and toothpastes, bottled water, SIM cards.

“Cigarettes,” he adds.

“Cigarettes…” she repeats, shaking her head. “They really sell both the sickness and the remedy,”

It is during one of these moments that the path in front of them bifurcates: one trail by the road, the other diverting into what appears to be a junkyard of some kind. They pass it by at first. But it’s too curious a sight, one that has materialized out of thin air: a broken, corroded fence among the slight trees, the metal twisted in the same angles as the curling branches. It is lugubrious and uninviting, seeming to shelter an amalgam of old, broken-down cars, wide metal boards and long-forgotten remnants of what were perhaps, in another life, office appliances. The snow melts to reveal all sorts of detritus, the decadent signs of a town fading into obscurity, a town being swallowed by the growing corporate machinery.

Gemma looks at it and cannot help but find a strange reflection—like a vision being beamed back at her, a prism through which she can see slivers, splintered versions of her own damage. Deviating from their path, she approaches the fence. Feeling the curve of the metal underneath her fingertips, she allows it to guide her, deeper into the bones, the very foundations of the place. She takes her time, walks around without any particular purpose, just because she can, even though they really should get moving. When she looks back at Mark, his expression is one of surprise, but he dares not ask; he simply stops, leaving the backpack against a tree, hesitating to join her. Some things, she simply doesn’t have an explanation for.

In front of her—car tyres, an amputated front bumper, and—there is also a half-buried piece of metal. A plaque obscured by the dirt and the blackened snow, but otherwise intact; it still retains its original, strikingly vivid colouring: blue; a particular shade of blue. A blue she knows all too well.

Fuck it.

She pokes it with her boot until what she realizes is a small billboard is staring at her in the face. “Don’t let woe weigh you down! Only Lumon antidepressants indicated for and proven effective in the long-term treatment by the American Pharmatheutical Association. Be yourself again!” It’s written in big, bold, stupidly simplistic lettering. The ad is clearly a regurgitated copy of the popular aesthetics of the 1950s, exuding a vague sense of hypocrisy and vulgar Americana. The picture itself features a big artificial smile stitched on the face of a beautiful white woman; she holds up a small colourful box, as though there were candy inside.

She blinks. Slowly. Bile rises up in her throat.

Be yourself again! She thinks of Mark identifying a burned body that wasn’t hers. She thinks of him crying until he is too exhausted to cry. Bottles. Bottles. Empty bottles in a trash can. Pills. More pills. She thinks of Mark buying pills from the company that ruined them—ruined their lives—thinks of Lumon providing a mocking joke of a remedy while keeping him in agony. And when the pills inevitably fail, he will let them drive a drill into his skull, and it will feel like a mercy.

Be yourself again! White corridors, footsteps, dressing rooms, breathe, keep breathing, what are you scared of, questions, questions, scalpels, needles, blood, arrows, arrows, red arrows, nothingness, the doors open and back again. Twelve, eight hours lost today, three, four, five rooms yesterday, seven the day before. Wake up, wake up, wake up, hallways, doorways, footsteps, dressing rooms, footsteps, sweet dreams, eyes, eyes, eyes, monitors in every corner. How many rooms today?

Be yourself again! Be yourself again! Be yourself again! Be yourself again!

She can feel rage taking over her features. Something floods her system like an instant poison, dark and twisted, and in the blink of an eye she’s in motion. There are half a dozen scattered steel poles from what might have once been a display rack, and her hand wraps around one of them. It is a far better weapon than anything she had down there, and she brings it down in a clean, wide swing. The billboard suffers instant devastation: the previously unblemished woman now unrecognizable, fractured and grotesque. Again. Again. Again. She beats the metal plaque until it’s impossibly bent, until it’s reduced to nothing but a chipped, battered wreck of peeling paint.

“Gemm-?”

She leaves the billboard with a resounding kick, and she can feel rather than see Mark flinching at the sound, somewhere behind her. Of all people, it is him that should bear witness to this derangement, this aberration—the reveal of the depths of her monstrosity, the rotten ruins of the person he married. His are the eyes that should never see have to her in this state—and yet, somehow, the only ones she’d ever want here. She doesn’t have it in her to feel either vindicated or ashamed. She cannot reply, for suddenly she is unreachable—far away from any semblance of sanity or self-control. Gemma is here and also she is not. The infinitesimal, minuscule portion of her brain still capable of rational thinking wonders, just for an instant, if he will try and stop her.

He doesn’t.

Instead, like a disease, it spreads.

This blind rage taking possession of her seems to infect him too. Mark breaks from his stupor, and suddenly he rises to smash a car window holding God-knows-what. And then they’re sharing this trance, this roaring maelstrom—this corruption tainting every sensible instinct and reducing them to crass, senseless violence. And who can blame them? Who can blame them, when they’re at the eye of this storm they didn’t even see coming? When they’ve become ingrained in a mechanism profiting from the essence of their very souls?

A guttural echo reverberates in the clearing—cutting through matter, atoms, the very fabric of reality—and it’s not until her throat starts to hurt that she realizes it’s her own voice. Some of it is profanity, some of it just wordless shrieks; the first outward manifestation, perhaps, of a pain so soul-deep it has no bottom, a pain that just keeps going and going. There is nothing human to it—it’s something primal, something dying to be heard, a brokenness making itself present. And suddenly every object seems tinted in blue, that fucking shade of blue; wherever she looks, wherever she steps—there’s a teardrop logo in every piece of scrap. And it’s not enough. The bluntness of the steel is simply not enough; she needs to pierce, tear, burn, obliterate from the face of the earth and existence itself. She swings and smashes until the steel pole vibrates from the impacts, rendered weaker with every blow. But she cannot stop. What she lacks in aim or reach, she more than makes up for in force and thoroughness.

Zurich. Trinity. Coleman. Rhodes. Yakima. Billings. Wellington. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

Eventually, her arms get slower, shakier—chest heaving with each breath. Her hands unclench of their own accord, as though the skin has peeled back entirely and only the raw, tender nerves remain. And when she finally drops the pole, there is no clang on the ground, no nothing. The snow absorbs all the sound, and all that is left is her own ragged breathing. There is nothing left to do: what used to be derelict scraps is now pulverized and atomized and hollowed out. Her sunglasses were carelessly discarded at some point during the process, and now she pays the price, for even the act of keeping her eyes open hurts. And her surroundings still and sharpen as she regains control over herself, hands on her knees before they collapse altogether, and Gemma all but falls next to the wreckage of a car. She can feel the snow melting where she has landed, seeping into her clothes, and she has some vague regret for what will be a miserable walk next town with her wet, frozen ass.

It takes only a few seconds before he crumbles, too. Two pathetic, wet asses sitting right next to each other. Two twin chips dormant inside their heads.

Mark swallows, closing his eyes, seems to gather his strength, his thoughts, his words, his everything. He’s about to open his mouth, she can tell—and really, what is there to say? In the wake of their implacable destruction, in the inconsolable aftermath of their pain and despair, against the backdrop of the irreversible entropy of their lives? What is there to say?

“I love you,”

Chapter Text

“Nothing in me is wasted,

A use for grief, even.

I wore it on my left hand.

I was married to it.”

—Robin Ekiss

Waiting for them is an old Volkswagen pickup from the 80s. They can hardly make out the shape of it, a chiaroscuro silhouette against the bright floodlights of an empty parking lot. It’s funny, all things considered—she didn’t remember the world being so full of parking lots. What a country they live in.

Gemma pushes through willpower alone, faring only slightly better than her husband. The truth is night caught up to them faster than they expected, the sky lowering, melting into shades of opalescent indigo, then cerulean blue, then the colourless half-light of twilight. Terror coiling along with their exhaustion, both of them had feared to be left in low visibility and completely lost, helpless with nothing to guide or illuminate the way. It’s only by sheer luck that they managed to reach the end of the trail, the meeting point with civilization.

They’re dead on their feet and still walking when they see another stark, familiar silhouette standing beside the vehicle.

“You fucking made it!”

She covers the ground in quick strides to intercept Gemma first, emotions quickly rising in their embrace, and her grip all too similar and desperate to the one she had back at the Lumon driveway. But it is only now that she can appreciate the difference, knowing that her best friend is a mother now—someone’s boisterous, perceptive, insanely clever and absolutely dazzling mother.

“Congrats, Devon,” she says softly in return.

She pulls away only the necessary distance to look her in the eye. “Oh my God, you know about…?” it is in that precise moment that the tears do fall. “I’m so happy that- that… I can’t wait for you to meet her, babysit, the whole fucking package deal,”

She cups Devon’s face in her hands. “I know,”

Before any of them are able to compose themselves, Mark joins them, enveloping them both. Devon wordlessly pats his shoulder, and then, only when the sleeve of her coat has absorbed the best part of her tears, she declares: “Here, this workhorse is for you,” as she hands Gemma the keys of the car. “It reminds me of the one our parents had when we were kids. Right, Mark?”

But he’s still catching his breath, looking like he agrees but cannot find the words.

“Look,” Devon starts, gesturing wildly across the air like she does whenever she’s uncertain or nervous. “I know you’re still reeling from- everything, but I took some liberties with the, um, the stuff. I thought you might need them,”

Vaguely, she points towards the hauling surface at the back of the car. Behind the cab sits an amorphous set of shapes covered in tarp, like the profile of a mountain slope blanketed in deep green. When Devon lifts it, the sight of several unfamiliar boxes packed underneath welcomes them, and even though they seem rather harmless on first instance, they cause all the blood in Mark’s face to drain completely. Suddenly, he looks close to fainting.  

“Oh,”

“Also, here’s the three grand I owed you for the dinnerless dinner,” and she produces a bundle of bills, secretively, as though they have been thrown into the middle of a heist movie. “Also, on that note, we need to empty and close your bank account. Open a new one elsewhere,”

“O-okay,”

With her usual flair, she informs them on their way to the next motel of various similar issues, most of them about money, others about anonymity concerns, cutting ties, assembling documents, passports, medical insurance—about the validity of papers and such. Once they’re up in one of the suites, Devon is quick to arrange things to her liking, insisting she makes herself comfortable while commandeering Mark around, in the way she’s seen her do a hundred times, her sisterly privileges taking precedence in the social hierarchy; this time righteously sending her brother off to fetch the boxes and buy some food from the motel’s canteen.

Whether too grateful, too tired or a mix of the two, there are no complaints from his end on this occasion, and Mark gives an extravagant bow accompanied with a “yes, milord” before leaving on his assigned quest.    

But Gemma feels like she still cannot trust the laws of physics—like losing sight of someone she loves means complete obliteration, the eradication of every molecule—the crossing of that fateful threshold meaning an instant, utter vanishing. She gives it her best efforts, trying to still her nerves by sitting down and picking at the checkered quilt covering the bed. Somewhere in her brain, she is still aware that she should be mindful, polite—not this blundering, inarticulate mess.

“How’s Ricken?” she says by way of small talk. Her voice feels rusted with disuse.

The question seems to throw her off, somehow; dejection taking over Devon’s features as she lets out a small, mirthless laugh.

“Oof,”

Gemma doesn’t know what to make of that.

“He’s fine, I guess. A bit in shock, to put it in some kind of way,”

She plops down onto the bed beside her with a sigh, but there is something careful and not entirely at ease about the motion.

“It is strange… Returning,” she lets the words form slowly, heavily, stringing them together in the most congruous way she can, hoping Devon can feel the enormity of them as she reaches to hold her hand. This way, the tension in her friend’s muscles passes on to her own like an undercurrent, like swelling sparks of electricity, and she doesn’t even need to look up to know her brow is creased in concern, lips pressed tightly together. And it wears on, this silence—it cements itself. It used to be so easy to talk to her about everything, anything—now there’s this thing between them, something with claws and scalpels and drills and mangled flesh, something that has rendered her irrevocably different from before. 

“How much do you know?”

It hurts to bring this question to the surface, to talk about it at all. With Mark, everything is a shortcut—there is no need to explain the whiteness of the halls, the elevator, the names of the rooms, the switch between one state and the other, the disturbing nature of it. Those things, they share to an extent. The telling of the details are something that require a different sort of strength—distance too, perhaps—they can come later on.   

“I know that you… That you’re-”

Severed. Something there is no coming back from.

“I am,” she confirms, letting the weight of the word go unsaid. “Just not in the way Mark is,”

Devon seems taken aback by this, her features suddenly loosening, giving way to confusion. “What?”

Gemma knows too much. “Severance has more than one use. They’re only just beginning. And they needed me for something. Something big,”

“W-we suspected, I mean, I suspected other things might be at… But- why you? This is insane. All that fucking psycho said was that there were files, or some shit. And the last one was named Cold Harbor, and-”

“Files? Those were not files, they were rooms,” she retorts. There is a prolonged, charged silence before she can continue, fighting the invisible noose that seems to be tightening around her neck. “That’s all I’ve been doing for the past two years. Going in and out of rooms,”

Devon stares at her, thinking, working, filling in the gaps, eyes blown wide with cold, icy terror.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she gets up, abruptly, to pace the room like a caged animal—frenzied, bristling—gnawing at her thumbnail, like she can’t help herself. Gemma gave up pacing on her fourth month underground.

“Gem, have you called your parents yet?” Devon asks, as though on the verge of a precipice.

“No,” she replies, honest. The thought of her parents brings a new sort of ache, the erosion of memory somehow worse with them. All the images she can conjure are hardly glimpses from her strict upbringing, their disdain for her chosen career, their distant gazes. Only one sharpness remains—one particular phone call—their resentment over the speaker evident as the complained that there were no grandchildren. They had no idea what she and Mark were going through, and she never told them. When Mark handed her the Nokia in the aftermath, it had been the first thing on her mind to call them, but she had gradually, shamefully deflated. 

“Why not?”

Gemma struggles to get the words out at all. “I don’t know what to tell them,”

A distinct knocking sound comes from the other side of the door.

The familiar exchange of “hey” gives her a slight reprieve from the tension building inside the room, and Mark stands awkwardly there, sensing but not quite knowing that the air is unmistakably different from when he left. Nonetheless, he looks as deeply relieved as she is to find them both still here, safe and sound. Most noticeable about him is the clunky sort of trolley that lags behind him, allowing him to carry all three of the boxes; he also clutches a steamy plastic bag. She and Devon help, facilitating the process so the stuff is soon out of the way and they can all sit together. In front of them Mark places a basket of French fries, another of onion rings, along with three chicken Caesar wraps.

It strikes her that this is the closest to a full meal she’s been allowed to have in the longest time—not snacks or boiled food capsules—but a real meal. The thread of their conversation promptly dies out, cast aside as the food busies their hands and mouths, and Gemma herself finds not simply hungry—but ravenous. The texture of the bread and the meat and the crisp of the fried sides are unlike anything she’s tasted, every tang and flavour that meets her tongue a benediction, overwhelming all five of her senses. She is only distantly aware of the physical machinery involved, the working of her jaw and her teeth suddenly irrelevant—her mind consumed by an unavoidable intensity.

She is done with her share far too quickly, after which she proceeds to jump frantically from the onion rings to the fries; and almost casually, without meaning to, she registers that they’re staring—Mark and Devon—not with malice or displeasure, but she can glimpse something akin to pity in Devon’s eyes and that she was not prepared for. And she means to tell them, no, it’s not like that, they didn’t starve me down there, they assured me the food was perfectly nutritious, they even gave me vitamins. Except the truth of the matter is she is starved, in more ways than one, more ways than she can ever hope to convey—and she’s ashamed of this uncontrollable manifestation bursting at the seams of her sanity, making her act in compulsions and not with moderation or rationale.

Mouth half-full, she can only avert her eyes, babbling: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”

It takes only a few seconds before the dam breaks and she’s spilling wild, scorching tears, bitter and frustrated and mortified at her own weakness over an otherwise mundane occasion. To make things worse, it takes exactly ten minutes before she’s scrambling for the bathroom, every muscle in her abdomen spasming with nausea. It’s unsurprising, really. She projectiles rather than empties the contents of her insides—the fries, the slices of chicken, the everything—retching into the toilet hard enough to send more tears streaming down her face. The waves come and go intermittently, her whole body tensed-up like a live wire. And that’s exactly how they find her, following close behind—with her hands gripping her thighs stupidly, painfully hard, hovering over the toilet as she waits for the next blow to wreck her. It comes back with even more force than before—a ruthless alteration of her entire organism—and this time, when she doubles over, she feels her hair being held back. There is no question as to whose doing that is, and she knows Mark must be shitting his fucking pants from seeing her like this, but she cannot be helped in this moment. The world is dissolving around her, dots like television static threatening to cloud her vision. The uncomfortable sensation of saliva pooling in her mouth, sweat beading on her head, and it’s only a few seconds before she’s convulsing again.

And there are other images, too, blurring, blending in behind her eyes—memories from below, of sickeningly similar times when they forced her to throw up, her bowels turning up pen caps, pieces of plastic or paper she did not remember ingesting. 

“Jesus Christ…” Devon panics, and then, voicing what they’re all too scared to ask. “Gemma, what have you been eating?”

She feels the gaping emptiness that confirms her body has exhausted its strength, its efficacy, muscles transitioning from solid to liquid. Instead of replying, she leans against the nearest wall and lets herself slide down to her knees, miserably, regaining her breath. And the light is suddenly too harsh, the bathroom tiles just too white—and it’s spinning, spiralling, its dimensions shifting into the unmistakable shape of a hallway—a thousand indistinguishable hallways. Oh, God. It isn’t over. It isn’t over. It isn’t over. It isn’t over. It isn’t over…

“She needs to drink water. Plenty of it,” she adds, with fierce determination.

But Mark is already on the floor beside her, a professional worrier at his core. It is with an unfair dose of cosmic irony that she realizes this is not the first time they’re both shattered and crumbled on a bathroom floor. “Yes, Devon, okay. But not right now,”

Lingering for two, three seconds, she listens to their panicked breathing as they take in her state—gouging whether or not to wheel her to a hospital, and whether there would be any chances of that hospital being operated by Lumon. A hand rests gingerly on her shoulder.

“Baby, can you stand?”

She achieves a very not-reassuring shake of her head, eyes closed—determined not to let any amount of light in.

“Okay,” she feels Mark’s exhale close to her temple. “We’re going to help you move somewhere more comfortable. Is that alright?”

The chances of her meltdown worsening are few and far between, so she has to nod. She tries not to think about the way their arms haul her up—gently, carefully, because it’s them, brother and sister, the very people intent on seeing her alive and free—but the motion is too physical, nearly identical to the repetitions executed with calculated, robotic efficiency by the doctor and the nurse when she broke down. When she had to be escorted back to the beginning of the labyrinth. It makes her skin crawl—her stomach clenching not with nausea, but with horror.

She does not remember walking, but suddenly the motel bed appears in front of her like an oasis, just one step away, and that is certainly a manageable distance, that much she can do. They’re alone when Mark helps her change into a pair of soft pants, and it hurts that she cannot even communicate how grateful she feels. Then she’s lying down, instinctively, curling up in the least painful position, even though she’s not exactly sure what hurts. When she can feel her turmoil finally subsiding, she murmurs belatedly:

“Jello food,”

Mark sits down beside her, trying to make out her hushed voice. To be able to meet his eyes at all in this moment is more than she ever could’ve bargained for.

“What?”

“Tell Devon I’ve been eating Jello food,” she continues, barely, sounding with all probability more confusing than clarifying. “Rendered marrow, macerated kale… It wasn’t bad, just… weird,”

She knows she must seem delirious, incoherent and half-gone, but her words are genuine. A few seconds pass before anything else is said. Perhaps she is not making sense. But then, the affectation in Mark’s tone tells her all she needs to know.

“Okay. I’ll tell her,” he croaks, like he’s choking on something, and smooths a hand over her bicep, gentle as anything. “I’ll be back in five minutes, alright? I promise.”

But her eyelids are heavy with sleep and the concept of time is slipping away from her reach—it has been slipping for way too long, an eternity that only now has coalesced into two years—and in her recent experience, there is very little difference between five minutes and five hours. Time, time, time, time… She can only hope to fully grasp it again.

***

When she returns to wakefulness, she does not wake to a prison cell, layer upon layer of insurmountable walls—her world an infinite tangle of straight lines and vanishing points leading nowhere. Gemma breathes a different air. It is nothing short of miraculous. The low ceiling of her bunk is not there, replaced instead by a mold stain high above her, a smoke detector flashing intermittently nearby. The semi-darkness enveloping her surroundings is not artificial, programmed, man-made, but a natural transition—a reminder that the earth still rotates on its axis.

The night seems poised in a strangely peaceful way, as if it had just been waiting for her to open her eyes. The drapes reeking of cigarette smoke are only half-pulled, thin beams of resplendent moonlight filtering through the cracks, and their beauty alone could transfix her for hours. As it is, a glass of water has been left on her bedside table, directly and very conveniently in her line of sight.

The realization that she is not alone comes gradually—a soft inhale and exhale behind her. She turns to find Mark conked out beside her, deep circles under his eyes, looking more temporarily incapacitated than truly resting; one hand splayed out next to her shoulder, but not quite touching. That he might hesitate before touching her shatters the last, undamaged part of her soul.

Something sparks in her, a sudden relief but also a certain restlessness—the sour aftertaste in her mouth more evident now, and she decides to get up, drinking the water before ambling silently about the room. She could go outside, if she so desired; she could stand in the cold air until it numbed her, she could—her eyes fall onto the three brown boxes that have been placed in the nearest corner.

They all bear her name—the letters capitalized in a familiar handwriting—and they only seem to grow heavier in their significance, as though the floorboards might give in under them.    

There is a shift, then. The bed quilt rustles under Mark’s weight. “Hey… how are you feeling?”

Gemma doesn’t turn, closing the distance between her and the boxes.

“Better. I drank some water,”

Tracing the cardboard surface, across the letters that read “Gemma’s winter clothes”, she decides: “I want to open them now,”

Mark says nothing of the abrupt request. He simply comes to sit on the floor beside her, and softly, he reaffirms: “Okay,”

She is clearheaded: she knows she won’t find any of the missing pieces of herself at the bottom of these boxes. But when she pulls away the cardboard flaps and looks inside there’s the unmistakable woolly texture of jumpers—her jumpers, her shirts, the black turtleneck that she always paired with that brown blazer, her Ganz college sweatshirt. And it’s too much. Her fingers almost flinch as she takes it out of the box, gingerly bringing the fabric closer to her nose. And it is there still—the smell of detergent and perfume, of the wooden interior of their wardrobe. It is like casting a spell over the wheel of time, reversing the turn of the tides and the seasons, allowing her to reach into the person she once was, and realizing she is as distant now as a relic, a strange memento. Gemma blinks, slowly—and breathes out. This will be the first time in two years she can choose what to wear. God. The enormity of this smallness loses her, and straying from her own mind, between creases and folds of fabric, her fingers accidentally brush against something—finding that tucked away there is also a small velvet box she’s never seen before.

Inside, two familiar glints of gold.

Before she knows it, an airless gasp escapes her—the same one that made her shudder at the sight of the very clothes she had deemed lost in the accident. “I thought it was gone,”

They talk in whispers now, anything above that sounding wrong in the fragility of this instant.

“They gave it to me… at the hospital,”

Out of all the things he’s told her, this freezes her in place—hitting her with such renewed force she can distinctly hear something breaking, impacting, the collision of a deafening asteroid against a barren, desolate surface.

It is in that moment, with a sudden pang of clarity, that she becomes aware of the efficient inner workings of mechanised, manufactured evil; of the ruthless corporate body that swallowed and absorbed the precious pieces of them before spitting them out: that as they sedated her, somewhere underground, as they undressed her, took her watch and her earrings and her wedding band, her belongings had shifted from the hands of surgeons to the hands of strangers—to the hands of silent accomplices who gave them back to him, just like that, in a neat plastic bag, with nothing to offer but a clinical “I’m sorry” and a death certificate placed coldly in trembling, disbelieving hands. The nature of this parallel journey is so abysmal, so abhorrent, so utterly disturbing it makes her want to smash everything—furniture and glass and metal and scraps—all over again.

She is sure she must be shaking, the room temperature seeming to have dropped too many degrees. Mark’s hand is very warm when he touches her.

“May I?” he asks, the ring displaced from her palm to his in a delicate gesture—but all of a sudden he stops himself, unsure, as if doubting whether he has permission to continue.

“Sorry,” he hesitates. “I mean, do you still…?”

His eyes are so open and earnest it makes her heart stop. There is no doubt on his part, that much she knows—what lingers of this unfinished question is a call to her, a leap into the unknown depths of her damage; a question of whether or not something remains among the ashes, of whether time or distance or torture have managed to erode this thing between them. They haven’t.

“There was a point, down there, when I stopped… knowing things,” Gemma explains, and she’s not dodging the question, not really.

Mark listens. His hand, the one with the ring, is cradled between both of hers.

“Like, at first, I knew you were thinking about me. Obviously. I knew everyone else was thinking about me, too,” she scoffs, her tone failing to bring any lightness at all, poisoned by the plutonic shadow of gravity instead. “But as time passed, I stopped being so sure,”

She can feel something terrible and uncontrollable building up in her chest.

“I could only guess, and after a while, not even that. Was there a place to come back to? Was there anything to return to?” the words are streaming out of her now, flowing and surging and raging and crashing. “Nothing made sense. And as they kept sending me to these rooms, different rooms… I had a revelation. What if none of it was real? What if the living quarters, the dressing room, the corridors, were the only reality I had ever known? What if Ganz, the entirety of Ganz, the college and our house and everywhere else, could fit inside four walls? What if it was simply another room behind another threshold? What if the life I thought was mine had just been… a fantasy? What if I had grown attached to a spectacle they orchestrated?”

“Gemma…” he starts, the pain intolerable, but she cannot bear to look at him right now. She needs to get this out before it gets eternally lodged in her throat, before it turns into a cancerous tumour—before it threatens to collapse in on itself.

“I know- I know it’s stupid, but… I couldn’t hang onto anything. I was slipping away. And then I woke up from the last room, and I saw you, and- suddenly I knew. I- I just knew,”

There are many things she will never be able to express—not in this lifetime, or the next one, or the one after that. The ceasing to be—human, a full person—the face reflected back in the mirror just a foreign, mercurial shape; the breathless, gorgeous shock of seeing a loved one again after thinking all was lost; the awe of life expanding, blossoming after being confined within sterile walls; the birth of hope in the most hopeless place. And yet Gemma knows that, somehow, in this very moment he’s feeling every single one of her words down to the marrow of his bones, said or unsaid.

“This was true,” she concludes, steadfast, turning the ring in her right hand. “Before Lumon and during Lumon. And it is still true now. I want this back. I do,”

Neither of them are intact. They’re both cracked open along all their edges, fractures painfully visible—an instance of sheer, naked vulnerability. If either were to reach out this instant and feel, like a devout, the bleeding stigmata upon the other, they would gladly welcome the touch.

His breath struggles brokenly out of him, and Mark is doing all he can to still himself. There is a sheen to his eyes that gleams like pearly beads in the soft moonlight, and she knows he longs nothing more than to reach out to her. To his credit, he does manage to slip the ring back on her finger, trembling just like he was the first time he did it. A flicker of a feather-light déjà vu. Then everything else melts as she leans into him, arms looping around his neck until they’re buried into each other, ribs against ribs, bones slotting like puzzle pieces. Mark stops breathing altogether, and for a second she fears she has crushed the air out of him—but then he's slipping one arm around her waist while the other desperately cradles her shoulder. As closely as she clings to him, as tightly as he holds her, it is remarkable that matter does not cede, that the bounds of reality force them to remain two separate beings.

“Please, please, please,” he begs, muffled against her shoulder. “Don’t think that. Not for a second. Never doubt it. Never. It was real. We were real. We are, we are-”

“Mark…” and he turns his head to kiss the tender crook of her neck, time and time again like it isn’t enough. Like this closeness isn’t enough.

Gemma shifts, skin sliding until she finds his cheek, his nose, his lips, until she can respond in earnest and bruise him with one kiss after another. And even though all she wants is to go back, to sink further into the safety and the softness and the tenderness of him, there is no halfway with this. Limbs untangling, she reaches again for the box and the twin of her ring, feeling the inner engraving with the tip of her fingers.

Then—a discovery, a rumble across the very foundations of her mind. For it is only in that precise moment, up close—as she takes his left hand—that she notices. A dark circle around his ring finger, right where the band used to be. God. How had she not seen it until now? It’s not fresh, not healing; it is but an afterimage, an incurable bruise. And how terrible it is to think of its significance, how utterly perfect a metaphor that is: how the body remembers even when oblivion is imposed upon the mind, how an absence can linger with such intensity that it becomes a presence; how enduring and indelible the impression of her is. 

Mark’s face twists with an unbearable guilt. “I shouldn’t have taken it off. I’m sorry, I- I should’ve insisted, I should’ve questioned them, I should’ve…”

She knows it was impossible. The finality brought by the sight of a lifeless body is inescapable, unquestionable—as was the subsequent plunge into grief. In their story, that moment was an invariable, fixed point in the fabric of time and space, the forces at work too great to be countered. They were watched; they were tricked; they were mocked; they ripped them apart; they used them. But they fought back, rained hell upon hell itself. That was also an inevitability.

“They made sure we were kept in the dark. But not anymore,” She finds herself saying, and as the words leave her mouth she is struck by their quality, crystal clear, the resolve and tenacity contained in them. This is something unfaltering, something that leaves no room for doubt or vacillation. “There is no name for what they’ve done to us, Mark.” Slowly, with utmost care, she slides the ring back on his finger, and just like that, the bruise, the wound—disappears. “We cannot forgive. And we cannot forget.”

As far as vow renewals go, well, they leave much to be desired: uttered without an audience in the darkness of a room they’ll never see again after tomorrow. They are probably the shittiest any of them have ever heard, but all be damned if they care. Everything else is fading, falling into a lower layer of reality—and them above it all, floating, unwavering, in the place where journeys end and begin, where they are whole and they are found.

Their eyes meet.

“We won’t.”