Archive of Our Own

“Wait, what?” a voice asks, and then, “Is this an office?” and then, “Shit, is this Lumon?”

Sounds like a potential security breach. Or maybe just a new colleague who’s been onboarded badly?

Mark turns in his seat.

It’s strange, the things that hit him and in what order. At first glance, the new arrival is just a dark-haired man in a blue suit. It’s an instant later that Mark registers how familiar the guy’s suit and tie are, a moment after that when—

Mark gets to his feet, so sharply that he almost knocks over his chair.

“What just shot up your ass?” Dylan asks.

Mark stares at himself.

It’s himself. Right? It’s not normal for people to look that similar to each other, right? Unless Lumon just hired his identical twin – and, shit, he guesses he might have an identical twin, how would he know—

The other guy is staring at him, too. It looks like Mark’s not the only person who’s pretty sure this is weird.

A moment later, he’s gone.

Mark keeps staring. He walks over to the place his duplicate was standing a moment ago, waves his arm through the air where the man used to be. He can’t feel anything there.

“Mark?” Helly asks.

“Did you guys see that?” Mark asks, turning around.

Helly folds her arms, leaning back in her chair. “By ‘that’, do you mean you being weird?”

“How many of me?” Mark asks. “How many of me were being weird?”

“Uh, the normal amount,” Helly says. “What’s going on with you?”

Mark turns back to look at that empty patch of carpet. There’s still nobody there.

“I don’t know,” he says, quietly.

It’s later in the day when it happens again. Mark’s just getting himself a drink, and suddenly another him is right there, so close that Mark jerks back and nearly spills water all over himself.

“What is this?” Mark demands, too loudly. He glances around to make sure no one’s in earshot.

“Yeah, I could ask a similar question,” the other Mark says. “I’m meant to be coming out of the elevator, not... wherever this is. Am I on the severed floor? Are you supposed to be me at work?”

The question had crossed Mark’s mind, obviously. But it’s not possible, right? “Are you my outie?”

“But there aren’t two of us,” the other Mark says. “They don’t clone me to work. So what’s happening here?”

He’s looking at his outie. It’s hard to process it. All this time knowing there’s another version of him out here, knowing he’ll never really be able to communicate with him, and—

He’s letting himself get caught up in illusions. “I’m hallucinating, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought,” the other Mark says. “But I was in the elevator. There shouldn’t be room to hallucinate. The version of me with these memories isn’t supposed to be experiencing anything right now.” A pause. “Maybe something’s gone wrong with the chip. I’ve heard it’s not as permanent as they say.”

It’s a tempting explanation. If the chip is malfunctioning, maybe he really is communicating with his outie somehow. But it’s an explanation that came from his own probably-a-hallucination; he can’t let himself forget that.

Mark has so many questions that it’s hard to know where to start. He casts around in his mind, manages to find something concrete. “What’s my last name?”

The other Mark frowns. “Is this a test?”

“No. No, it’s just a question.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m just Mark S,” Mark says. “All of us, we just have the initial. I mean, all of us who are severed.”

The other Mark stares at him for a moment with an expression he can’t read. “It’s Scout.”

“Scout,” Mark whispers.

But it might be nothing. This might not be real; he might just be making up a name for himself.

“How do I know you’re real?” Mark asks.

The other Mark reaches out to touch his arm. Mark can see his hand there; it looks solid, it’s not passing through his skin.

But he can’t feel it. He can’t feel anything.

“Huh,” the other Mark says. “I guess that didn’t help.” A pause. “If it’s any consolation, I’m not sure you’re real either.”

“Okay,” Mark says. “If this is real, uh.” How can they communicate with each other? They can’t write notes; they can’t—

A possibility hits him.

“I’ll leave my tie at the office,” he says. “If you go home without a tie on, you’ll know this was real.”

His outie nods. “I’ll wear something tomorrow. I’ve got—” He cuts himself off. There’s a pause. “I’ve got a bow tie. From, uh, from my...” Another pause. “Anyway, I’ll wear a bow tie.”

The thought of wearing a different style of tie makes Mark abruptly uncomfortable. It’s an alien thought; the idea of not wearing a tie is alien enough to begin with, and at least he can just take it off right before he leaves. If his outie comes in wearing a bow tie, he’ll be stuck with it all day.

Wait, no. If he’s leaving his tie here, he can just swap ties. It’ll be fine.

“Okay,” Mark says. “So... what do we do if—”

The other Mark is already gone.

It feels stupid and pointless, suddenly, that Mark was trying to establish a way to know if this is real. Of course it isn’t real. He was just so overwhelmed by the possibility of actually meeting his outie that he couldn’t think straight.

But he leaves his tie in his desk drawer that evening, just in case.

“Nice bow tie,” Helly says, with a snort. “Makes you look like a ventriloquist’s puppet.”

Holy shit. He saw it when he came out of the elevator, obviously, but he wasn’t sure if he could trust it. If he could hallucinate another version of himself, he could hallucinate a bow tie. If Helly can see it, it’s real.

“I’m not the one who picked it out,” Mark says.

It can’t be a coincidence, right? Two years, and he’s never found himself wearing a bow tie before.

Which means he actually talked to his outie. Something must have gone wrong with the implant, he guesses, and both sets of memories were somehow able to coexist at the same moment. The other version of him probably wasn’t actually physically there, but that conversation was real.

All he can think of now is all the things he should have said, all the questions he should have asked.

He got his name out of it, at least; he didn’t completely waste the opportunity. Scout. Mark Scout.

It’s not like he can do anything with that. But he knows it, and that’s more than he had before.

He’s constantly looking around for the rest of the day. But there’s no sign of his other self.

Now that Mark’s made contact with his outie, he can’t stop thinking about it. It was different when talking to his outie was an obvious impossibility, a pointless daydream. He needs to contact him again; it’s like an itch. But there’s no way to get a written message out of here.

He ties the cord of his keycard around his wrist as he gets into the elevator at the end of the day. Something different, just as a way to say hi, I’m still here, I got your message.

When he steps out of the elevator, he checks himself for something in return. It’s a moment before he sees that he’s wearing cufflinks in the shape of little cats.

Mark keeps finding excuses to go into private corners and look at his cufflinks. He guesses it’s not technically something he has to hide; there’s no rule against novelty cufflinks. But it feels like he’s communicating with his outie, and that’s definitely not allowed.

“I guess you like the cufflinks,” a voice says, dryly amused, while Mark is admiring them by the vending machine.

Mark turns, sharply, grabbing his own wrists to hide the cats. It’s his outie; it’s the other version of him.

“Hey,” Mark says, suddenly embarrassed to be caught in the act. “Uh, yeah. They’re cute. I’ve never worn anything like this before.”

“Honestly, neither have I,” his outie says. “They were a gift. It’s the first time I’ve actually taken them out of the box. It was the cats or the hearts, and I didn’t want to look like I was flirting.”

“This is real, right?” Mark asks.

“I guess?” His outie spreads his hands in a shrug. “I didn’t think this was possible. But, if I’m imagining things, I’ve been imagining them for two days.”

Mark wants to reach out, wants to touch him. But he remembers how disconcerting it was when his outie touched him last time: seeing someone else’s hand on his arm, feeling nothing there but air.

“Which means this really is the severed floor, I guess,” his outie says, looking around. “So... what’s the work? What am I actually doing here?”

Mark’s thought a lot about what he might ask his outie, if he ever somehow had the chance. He’s never really thought about the questions his outie might have for him. “Uh, macrodata refinement.”

“What does that mean?”

“We...” Mark hesitates. “We, uh, refine macrodata.”

His outie shrugs. “Fine. I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell me.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Mark says. “We get numbers. We deal with the numbers. I have no idea what the numbers are.”

His outie raises his eyebrows. “And I still have to get my memory erased to work here? Lumon is really weird about security.”

“Sorry,” Mark says. “I guess that wasn’t a very interesting answer.”

“I’m talking to my own mindwiped self. I don’t think I can really complain about things not being interesting enough.”

Mark winces. “We don’t really like the term mindwiped here.”

His outie looks a little startled. “I guess. Uh, sorry.”

If you thought of it as mindwiping, why would you...?

“Why did you put me in this place?” Mark asks.

His other self doesn’t say anything.

“I’ve been here for two years,” Mark says. “I don’t – I don’t just mean I’ve been working here for two years. I mean I’ve been here, I’ve been in this building. I get in the elevator at the end of the day, and then I get right back out and get back to work. I’ve never seen anywhere else.”

“Shit,” his outie breathes.

“You get the money I earn,” Mark says. “Don’t you at least owe me an explanation?”

“Shit.” A pause. “I guess I never really thought about – fuck. That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Mark agrees. He guesses he can’t really judge his outie for not looking that hard at the situation; he just kind of accepted it himself, for a long time.

“Sorry,” his outie says. “I wasn’t trying to...” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Fuck. Okay. I took the job because I needed to forget something.”

That’s... not what Mark was expecting. He’d thought maybe his outie was just lazy, wanted to have a job and get paid without consciously having to do the work himself. “Forget what?”

“My wife died.” He takes a deep breath; it sounds a little unsteady. “I mean, I guess she was our...” He shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “My. My wife. I can’t say ‘our’. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mark says. He wishes he could get more offended about it: she was my wife too. But the word wife feels alien to him. He doesn’t know her name; he doesn’t know her face. He can’t picture being married. “I’m – I’m sorry too.”

“I just wanted not to have to deal with it sometimes,” his outie says. “I honestly thought you’d be better off than me. I mean, I thought I’d be better off when I was at work. I didn’t really think of you as another person.”

Married. Not just married, but widowed. Mark’s wondered before if he has a spouse; he hasn’t considered that he might have lost one.

Death is something that’s supposed to stay outside Lumon’s walls. Mark hasn’t had much cause to think about it, before recently. Before Petey left, no warning or explanation; before he found Helly in the elevator.

“Did we have kids?” Mark asks.

The other Mark opens his mouth, then closes it again. Shakes his head.

Halfway through the gesture, he vanishes.

The elevator starts to rise, and suddenly Mark is in the wrong place. This room is—

This room is overwhelming, colours and ornaments and furniture and – and bookshelves, shit, there are books here—

Wait. Is this the outside world? His outie’s been visiting him involuntarily at Lumon; it hadn’t occurred to him that it might work the other way around.

He blinks, scans the room again, and – yes, his outie is a few paces away, looking at him. He didn’t even notice him at first; there’s so much here.

“I guess this isn’t just happening at Lumon,” his outie says.

Mark can’t stop looking around. He’s never seen anything like this, not outside the Perpetuity Wing. He’d half-assumed that every house just looked like Kier Eagan’s. But this is different, the layout is different, the furniture – and the books, so many different colours on one shelf—

There are windows.

Mark hurries to look outside. There’s snow on the ground; there are real trees out there, more than he can really get his head around. The sky is getting darker, or maybe lighter, pale blue near the horizon fading into dark as he raises his gaze. There are clouds here and there, there are birds flying overhead, living creatures, and it’s all too much, suddenly. He turns back into the room.

“You okay?” his outie asks, watching him carefully.

“I’m fine.” Mark closes his eyes for a moment. “I’m fine. It’s just, uh, it’s a lot.”

A brief moment passes before his outie speaks. “I guess there wasn’t much to look at in that office.”

“Not really.” He never really thought about it, before. “Not like this.”

He opens his eyes. This world is more intense than he’s ever really grasped; he can’t imagine living in it. It feels like his head’s stopped spinning, at least.

There’s a table with chairs. He tries to pull one of the chairs out, to sit on it, and has to stop. It looks like he’s grabbing the chair, but he can’t feel it, and it isn’t actually moving under his hands. The mismatch between what he’s seeing and the reality is starting to make him nauseous.

“What do I do out here?” Mark asks, trying to distract himself. “For fun, I mean. It’s kind of hard to picture how I’d spend my time if I wasn’t just working.”

“You used to like to read.” A pause. “I guess now you mostly just like to drink. I probably owe you an apology for all the hangovers.”

Yeah, that explains a lot. “I actually put in a request with management, early on, to ask you to drink less. I don’t know if it ever reached you.”

“Oh, it reached me,” his outie says. “I was so pissed off I punched myself in the face to spite you.”

Mark raises his eyebrows. “Wow.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t doing great,” his outie says. “I mean, I’m still not doing great, but I really wasn’t doing great back then. If it’s any consolation, I regretted my decision immediately.”

There’s a pause.

“I guess it fucks you up that I don’t eat enough, too,” his outie says. “Shit. I’ll try to be better about that.”

“Mark?” a voice calls through from somewhere else, absolutely scaring the shit out of Mark. “Who are you talking to?”

Mark’s outie shoots him a sharp glance before calling back. “Just myself.”

“Wow.” A woman comes through the doorway. Mark sees new people so rarely; it seems insane that a stranger could just walk casually into the room he’s in. “If you’re that bored, I guess I’m being a bad host.”

Mark watches the conversation between his outie and the stranger quietly, trying to figure out their relationship. They talk so – so casually, so easily, about things that aren’t related to work at all. Although Mark’s outie occasionally glances warily at Mark before saying something in reply.

“Thanks for not interrupting,” Mark’s outie says, once the stranger has excused herself and left the room. “I think Devon’s worried enough about me without seeing me talking to nobody.”

“Devon,” Mark says, seizing on the name. “Who is she?”

His outie looks startled. “Shit, I guess you wouldn’t know. She’s my sister. Your sister.”

“She loves us.” It was... so strange, watching that conversation. He wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to look at a complete stranger, see her fond smile, hear the amusement in her voice, and know she loves him. Or a version of him, at least.

“I have no idea why,” his outie says. “But yeah.”

Mark looks at the door she left through, caught up in a strange, indefinable longing. His sister is in this house right now; he could go and see her. But he can’t speak to her, and she wouldn’t know him if he did.

Mark’s outie looks like he’s struggling with something. It’s a moment before he speaks. “Do you have people you... care about, at work?”

“I care about my team,” Mark says. “I don’t know if there’s much room for love in that place.” He’s been thinking a lot about Helly. It might just be that she’s shaken his life up in ways it’s hard not to think about. “There’s Petey. He was my best friend. But he left.”

Something sudden and dark comes over his other self’s expression.

“And, you know,” Mark says. He shrugs; it’s an effort. It’s getting hard to keep his voice steady. “If someone leaves, that’s it. You’ll never see them again. I guess they wouldn’t be the same person if you did.”

It’s a long moment before his outie speaks. All that he says, in the end, is, “Sorry. That sounds rough.”

One second he’s in the elevator; the next second he’s somewhere completely different again. It’s going to take a while to get used to that.

Mark looks around, trying to get his bearings. It’s dark here, disconcertingly so; darkness is a rarity on the severed floor. It makes him feel like he’s about to have a waffle party.

He manages to parse it after a moment: he’s in a bedroom, the lights out. His other self is in the bed, and Mark barely has time to wonder whether he’s asleep when the figure stirs and swears very loudly.

“Shit!” His outie sits up sharply, clutching his chest. “Oh, fuck, it’s you.”

“Sorry,” Mark says. “I can’t really control it.”

“Jesus. Okay, I’m not going to be getting to sleep for a while.” His outie shuffles back against the headboard, switches on the lamp. It’s interesting to see lighting in the outside world; it’s so much warmer than it is at Lumon. “How are things going at work?”

It’s strange to be asked that. The only people Mark ever sees are his colleagues. “Fine? It’s fine, I guess. The newest member of the team is starting to settle in a little. I think. Maybe.”

“Is there anything you want me to buy?”

Mark blinks. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” his outie says. “I get the money you earn. It seems like you should get something out of it. Is there anything you want me to buy for you?”

At first, it seems like so big an offer it’s almost dizzying. He could ask for anything; he doesn’t have to stick to a list of corporate perks.

A camera, maybe? It’d be nice to have more photos of the team than the one on their desks. But cameras are forbidden for severed employees, and he’s pretty sure most cameras have writing on them; it’d be discovered in the elevator.

“Maybe a photo of Devon,” Mark says at last. He’ll need to be careful with it; there’s going to be trouble if it’s discovered. But it seems like something it would be possible to bring into the office and easy to hide.

His outie raises his eyebrows. “You want a picture of my sister? That’s a little weird.”

“She’s – she’s my sister too,” Mark says. “She’s family.”

Family he doesn’t actually know; family he has no memory of ever speaking to. But she’s his family, and she cares about a version of him, even if it’s not this one. That means something, doesn’t it?

His outie seems to relent. “I mean, sure, but that’s not going to put a dent in my bank account. Anything else?”

It’s hard to think of anything. Books aren’t an option, obviously. New clothes?

“You don’t have to buy me anything,” Mark says. “But it’d be good if you could keep wearing the cat cufflinks.”

His outie snorts, softly. “Good to know I lost all my taste with my memories. Yeah, fine.”

“What the fuck just happened?” Mark’s outie demands, the moment the last Temper is out of the door.

Mark was a little embarrassed when he’d realised his outie had appeared during the waffle party; it’s supposed to be a private affair. He’d expected questions afterwards. But he’s still a little taken aback by the vehemence in his outie’s voice.

“This is what happens when I say I’m fine with staying late at the end of the quarter?” Mark’s outie asks. “They said I was getting rewarded for my hard work. I didn’t know I was getting rewarded with an orgy.”

“It’s not an orgy,” Mark protests, feeling himself flush. “It’s a waffle party.”

“A waffle party?” his outie echoes. “I didn’t see any waffles. I saw a lot of things, but none of them were waffles.”

“I’d already had the waffles,” Mark says. Pulling on his clothes as fast as he can; his outie has made him very selfconscious, suddenly. “There’s a re-enactment afterwards. Kier taming the Four Tempers.”

“Kier – what?”

Mark’s too confused to reply, for a couple of seconds; he can’t wrap his head around saying the name Kier and not being instantly understood. “Kier Eagan. The founder of the company.”

“The founder – is that who that creepy mask was supposed to be?”

Mark nods. “One employee takes the role of Kier, and four others are the Tempers, and Kier, uh, tames them. It’s meant to be a way to pay tribute to—”

“Mark,” his outie says, startling him into silence. They’ve never addressed each other by name before, Mark, as if they really are separate people. “None of this is normal. Do you – do you not know that?”

“What do you mean, this?”

“This,” Mark’s outie says, gesturing at the room around them. “Normal offices don’t have a bedroom where people get dressed up as the founder and have – and have – and have ritual sex with their coworkers. This is unbelievably fucked up.”

Mark stares at him. He... yeah, the first time he had a waffle party, he thought it was pretty weird. But a lot of things seemed weird to him back then; he was still trying to adjust without his memories.

“I guess other companies have different founders,” Mark says, “and they’ve done other things. So there probably wouldn’t be anything exactly like—”

“There is nothing even close to this out in the rest of the world,” Mark’s outie says. “A normal company would stop at the waffles. If an employer tried to make me do something like this, I would quit immediately.”

They stare at each other for a moment. It’s sinking in for Mark, and probably for his outie too: an employer did make him do something like this. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

“Don’t quit,” Mark says, quietly.

“This is a cult,” Mark’s outie says. “I think we need to get out of here.”

“I can’t get out of here,” Mark says. “If you quit, where do I go?”

His outie hesitates. “We’d probably keep having these... these flashes, right? We’ve been getting these moments when you get to be conscious in my life.”

Maybe. But his team would still be in here.

He’s already lost Petey. The idea of never getting to see Dylan or Irving or Helly again—

“Please,” Mark says.

Mark’s outie presses both fists to his forehead, closes his eyes for a moment.

“Okay,” he says at last. “Fine. I forced you into this life. I guess I should let you make the choices about it now.”

Mark wasn’t prepared for how it would feel, hearing that. Being given that small measure of control.

“Just... no more work orgies, okay?” his outie asks. “I’d like to know where my body has been when you hand it back to me.”

“You can withdraw permission for me to stay late,” Mark points out.

“Okay. Okay, yeah, I’ll do that.” Mark’s outie rubs a hand across the back of his own neck. “Sorry if you miss out on any waffles.”

It startles Mark into laughing, just a little. “I’ll be fine. At least Dylan will be happy not to have the competition any more.”

“Jesus. What’s wrong with this place?” His outie folds his arms, goes quiet for a moment. “Is it okay with you if I, like... look into this? There are anti-Lumon organisations out there. Maybe an insider could help them get you a less fucked-up workplace.”

The idea is a little terrifying. If Lumon finds out that Mark’s outie is taking any kind of action against them, Mark doesn’t know what the consequences might be.

But he probably owes it to Helly to say yes. And... honestly, he’s touched by the idea of someone trying to help them on the outside, out in the real world. There’s no reason for anyone to care about the fragments of people working in here. But his outie wants to make things better for them.

“That’d be good,” he says. “Thanks.”

“Did you find the photo?” Mark’s outie asks.

Mark can’t answer. He’s at his desk; his colleagues would hear. All he can do is give his outie a puzzled look.

“You asked for a picture of Devon, remember?” his outie asks. “I left one in your pocket.”

Mark puts his hand in his jacket pocket. There’s definitely something in there.

He shifts in his seat, trying to make sure the partitions will hide what he’s doing with his hands. Draws the picture out.

“Sorry it took a while,” his outie says. “All my photos are just on my phone. I... honestly, I stole that one from my brother-in-law.”

Mark barely hears him, looking at the photograph. It’s himself and Devon, laughing, her arm around his back. The sky behind them is a bright, intense blue. It looks like the picture was taken someplace high up; there are mountains in the background, trees, a river winding through a grassy landscape far below, and he’s suddenly more aware than he’s ever been before that he’s spent his whole life underground.

But he hasn’t, not really. He’s been to this place in the picture; he just can’t remember it.

He only asked for a picture of Devon, but he finds himself glad that his outie is in the photo as well. In some strange way, his own self has become a friend to him in this place. He’s found himself looking at the glass portrait of himself on his desk sometimes, pretending that it’s his outie.

“Thanks,” he says, looking up.

“For what?” Helly asks.

His outie smiles at him, a little awkwardly. Mark isn’t sure he’s really seen him smile before. “No problem.”