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The first time it happens, Gemma thinks she’s having a nightmare. Even in the bowels of Lumon, her dreams tended to center around Mark, memories of his wry laughter and awkward tenderness, and so it feels almost unnervingly apropos to dream of his innie while sweating through Devon’s guest room linens.
Except the details feel a little too fresh, her blood rushing in her ears as she slips into the elevator with her husband, relief tied up in horror tied up in fear. Still, it doesn’t occur to Gemma how strange it is to not even witness the events between her spurts of consciousness from some sort of distant, imagined perspective, that hard cut from one moment to the next engrained in her DNA by now. So she bangs on the window, screams and demands and begs, some part of her certain that if she just makes her point clearly enough, Mark will open damn door and lace their fingers together, will follow her down the stairs.
Still, he turns away. Still, she catches the redhead’s gaze, can’t place her finger on why she seems so achingly familiar.
Cut, print.
Except: Gemma doesn’t wake up.
Instead, Mark’s hands are back on her cheeks, desperation clawing its way up his throat to match her own. She kisses him again, presses herself closer like they might melt into one another, tries to ignore the creeping dread of something being Not Quite Right that she’s become achingly familiar with during her time on the testing floor.
Again, they make it into the elevator, breathless from their escape, and again, Gemma blacks out, doesn’t return to herself until she’s behind a pane of glass.
Pieces are starting to come together.
She slams both fists against the door, hard enough to break the skin on her knuckles. Mark feels a thousand miles away. She wonders, distantly and for the first time, if he even knows who she is. Her calling careens rapidly into screaming, something raw and brutal tearing its way through her chest.
It happens eleven times more. Gemma counts each with a growing detachment, like she’s watching a particularly violent play from the cheap seats. The blood and the tears and Mark, clutching onto her tightly and then abandoning her. The longer she spends reliving it, the more Gemma finds herself able to commit entire sections of her brain to considering the parts she isn’t seeing again: the race down the back stairs, the fresh air on her face for the first time in forever. Devon’s weepy embrace and the way her car still smells like a mix of her musky perfume and sweat. Did I ever get out, she wonders, did I ever actually hunker down beneath the scratchy old afghan Ricken knitted the year after Mark and I got married, staring into the middle distance and thinking about how fucking weird it is to hear the television playing?
It’s starting to feel like the answer is no, like she maybe never even saw Mark again at all, like she’s dreamed him up after ages of trying not to forget his face. It makes her nauseous.
So she locks onto the other woman. A new face, one she has no reason to have crafted wholecloth. The stranger who seems unable to tear her eyes away from Gemma, even through the flash of the emergency lights. It feels strikingly like looking into a mirror.
Cycle twelve, Gemma changes tacks. “Hey, you,” she calls, and then, when neither Mark nor the woman seems to respond, “can anyone fucking hear me?”
The redhead’s eyes go big for a split second, shock— perhaps at Gemma’s tone, the hard pivot from the expectation of sobs— before the tiniest smile curves her lips.
It’s not an answer, certainly, but it’s something new. Gemma clings onto it like water in a desert.
Cycle thirteen, she cuts right to the chase. “Redhead!” She shouts, banging a fist against the wall. This time, even Mark turns, confusion and a fierce protectiveness warring on his face. Gemma surprises herself with how little she cares.
It occurs to her the next time Mark hustles her to the doors to shove her foot in the frame, force it back open. Mark hasn’t accounted for the possibility, and it buys her an extra half second before he can figure out how to respond. It means she sees her before Mark does— the stranger, that is. Their eyes catch, no pane of glass between them, and Gemma watches the redhead stutter step, her gaze locked inextricably on Gemma’s own.
I know her, Gemma thinks, the thought so vehement and instinctual it surprises her. It knocks her back, a blow to the solar plexus, and the door shuts once more.
“Who are you?” She asks, the next time she gets the chance. She doesn’t account for any spiral the question might elicit, but, as it turns out, she doesn’t need to. There’s no hesitation before the stranger speaks, her shoulders set and her voice firm.
“I’m Helly.” And then, curiosity winning out, “you’re getting out?”
Gemma smiles ruefully. Doesn’t seem that way, she thinks, preps for the blackout, the return to the doorway and Mark’s arms and the adrenaline rush all over again.
It doesn’t come.
Helly— Gemma mouths the name to herself, tastes it like jam on her tongue— raises one frustratingly perfect eyebrow. “Or not?”
“No,” Gemma insists, not sure who she’s trying to convince with her foot stuck in the door like it is, “I am.” She pauses, long and quiet, looks between the intrigued quirk of Helly’s mouth and the uncertain nervousness of Mark’s. The next words that come out of her mouth shock her with their ease. “He’s not coming with me.”
It’s half a question, half certainty, the sort of thing borne from watching the same movie a million times.
“We’re… it’s not us, out there.” Helly sighs a little as she speaks, drops her eyes meaningfully to Gemma’s careful positioning in the doorframe.
Gemma nods, blames the endless repetition of the past fifteen minutes for her lack of fight. “Helly,” she says, watches Helly’s neck snap to attention at the sound, “be safe.”
She doesn’t know this woman from a hole in the wall, but it feels important to say, both of them staring down the barrel of an oncoming train as they are. Gemma bears no belief that either of them have won or lost today— just a bone-deep understanding of the woman in front of her, clinging to life with her bare hands.
Helly smiles again, a small, sad thing. “You too.”
Gemma steps back, lets the door swing shut after her, and books it down the stairwell.