Archive of Our Own ^beta

“If you could go back in time and change something you did, what would you do differently?” Gemma had once asked the question a while after they started dating. A basic, cheesy question to get to know someone better once the ice had been broken. “I don’t know.” He had scoffed and shrugged it off. Forgotten the question under a barrage of charged jokes between the two of them. He had forgotten the question until she couldn’t ask it to him. Every time he had asked himself the question since, he had answered that he’d go with her in the car. That he’d love her better, care for her more. Not despised that he couldn’t give her a child, not take out his own despondency on her. That he’d have died with her, if he couldn’t have saved her. The last feeling as the flames melted their flesh being her, being one. Being warm.

“If you could go back in time and change something you did, what would you do differently?” Helly had once asked the question when they were under their makeshift tent on the Severed Floor. Her next to him. Him next to her. Their heat radiating off onto the semi-translucent sheet. Mark scoffed. ‘Not work at Lumon, for one.’ He thought to himself. It was obvious. Spare himself from the endless blinding hell of workers’ rights violations that made up Lumon and congealed into the Severed Floor. But Helly was here. Helly. His Helly. His light in the abyss. Without Helly, what would he be? “I don’t know.” He spoke calmly,  truly. 

“If you could go back in time and change something you did, what would you do differently?” The question echoed around his mangled mind as he staggered around the blaring Severed floor. The lights hadn’t stopped since he broke Gemma out, their intermittent red dying the blood streaming down his nose into a muddy brown shade. He wasn’t sure which Mark he was. A Rebis of Outside and Inside screaming for control as they ripped each other apart in a tangle of half memories and scrounged feelings. And in spite of all this time, all his minds, all of him being sewn together like a movie monster, he still didn’t know. He could have chosen to leave with Gemma, abandon Helly. Spend his existence with the woman he loves, forsake the woman he loves. He could have chosen to forget his wife. Exist in joy outside, spend his life inside with Helly. Thrive with the woman he loves, forget the woman he loves.

Hell, he distantly recalled, had no fury like a woman’s scorn. Like the hatred of one that you love. He distantly recalled, too, everytime Lumon was called hell. The descriptor fit especially as the lights blazed around him. Lumon was nothing compared to the rage of the woman he loved. 

By every right he should have forgotten Gemma. Ignored her, lost the desire to save her after all of it. The ORTBO, the pain. He would do it again. Every part of it. He could sit in The Breakroom, repeating that he didn’t love her for all of time and never mean it. He would never regret her. By every metric he should hate Helly. Helena. Hellyna. Her. And yet in every memory of her, meeting her on a conference table Inside and meeting her at Zufu Outside, he loved her. He could see Helly in Helena, hidden as she was. No, not hidden. Torn. Helly was the parts of Helena ripped from her far too soon. Washed and groomed away like Helena would her hair before tying it behind her head. “I didn’t like the person I was on the outside.” She told him. He thinks that’s true. That given the chance, Helena would leap to be Helly. To be loved, to be free. He would do it again. Fall for her, be betrayed by her, hold her and tell her that he only cared who she was with him. That he loved her. Because he loved her.

If hell had nothing to a woman’s scorn, heaven -he reasoned- must have nothing next to her love. Never had Mark felt better than when being loved by the women that he loved. Women. Loved. The blood had stopped, the pounding pulse of the headache only exacerbated by the blaring of the alarms around him faded into a dull pressure in the back of his skull. He remembered everything. Every second Inside and Out. He loved them. 

And though Mark’s reasoning was sound, equivalent. He was ever so slightly incorrect in his definition of heaven’s power. Heaven, it would seem, hath no power to Man’s devotion. For it would be nothing without it.