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'What the fuck?' a stranger thinks with Mark's thoughts, and Mark feels the dread in his stomach like a spilled cup of coffee.
It isn't exactly a sound, so Mark doesn't exactly startle, but something had felt distinctly strange about it. Except that he already can't quite remember what.
It must just be the headache, he tries to convince himself. He's had a pretty bad one since the nosebleed earlier that he hasn't told anyone about. Something tight and insistent in his chest had reacted like a centipede caught under a water glass when Miss Huang had asked, and Mark had already known to keep his mouth shut before it could tip over into something approaching a full blown panic. Helly had been the one to insist they go get help earlier, because neither of them could know for sure whether it would stop bleeding like papercuts do or if it would just keep going, but Mark knows better — generally — than to be really honest, especially not with a supervisor.
He's had the sense that something is wrong with him all day, but he's been trying hard not to think about it. There's too much going on, lately, to take any risks. If Mark thinks about it too much, someone else might notice, and Mark knows better than to think any good could come of that.
The pain in his head spikes, and Mark bites down on his tongue and squints through it, corralling a patch of data on the screen and sorting it. Woe, he thinks distantly, and tries not to take it like a sign. There's a line of agony piercing through the corner of his eye like a staple, digging in to the center of his brain. Mark has had headaches before — he's familiar with them. Things have been better, recently, but when he'd first started working, it used to be every day he'd wake up with pounding, aching pressure coating the inside of his skull — manageable by the time he had to clock out, and then right back at the peak in between blinks.
Something about this feels different, though. This feels big and overwhelming, the way he'd felt when Mr. Graner had wordlessly plugged the bathroom sink the last and final time Mark had tried to write a message under his shirt. When Mark had stared at the growing pool of water in the basin and thought 'Something bad is going to happen to me.' Simple, cold, unavoidable.
Mark has that same thought now, as the pain in his head shifts almost imperceptibly, but he doesn't know why.
He tries to focus in on the data. They're not sure where Dylan is, but if he'd gone to get Irving's map himself after all, they need to have the work done enough that they can justify a break to anyone who might ask. They're already behind, and they have to catch up. All Mark has to do is focus.
There's an alien feeling of curiosity leaning in over his shoulder, though, that's making it hard to stay on track. Mark cordons off a patch of Dread and strains his eyes to try to look in its direction without turning his head, but some part of him already knows he won't see anything. The bad thing isn't coming for him from somewhere outside of the office, it's already found its way inside of him.
Mark watches the percentage at the bottom of the screen go up a tick, and has the thought that it makes sense, now, why Petey had claimed the work was still hard to understand.
'What does that mean?' he thinks to himself, baffled. Petey had always seemed like he couldn't care less about what the work itself had been. He'd never really participated much in their lunchtime debates over what it really was they might be doing all day. Would laugh along at Dylan and Irving's suggestions, and seem equal parts sad and reassuring whenever Mark would get nervous and tell everyone to be careful whenever he'd thought he'd heard footsteps in the hall, but Petey had never really offered many of his own suggestions. He had always seemed like he'd had other, more important things on his mind.
Something in him disagrees —Petey had been bothered by the idea of what the work might be, hadn't he? — and Mark falters. Is he remembering it wrong? He doesn't think he is, but he tries to look back and remember, think of a specific conversation and double check, just to be sure, but the details slip out of his hands. The longer Mark thinks about it, the less real it all feels. Like none of the conversations had ever happened at all.
None of that makes any sense. A feeling rises up the back of Mark's throat. He double checks all of the data on his monitor and can't find anything that's out of place; the dread is his own, swiftly giving way to panic. That doesn't make sense. The conversations did happen, Mark knows what Petey was like. So why does he feel so unsure? Why can't he remember it better?
His heart is starting to race. "Come here, Mark S.," he remembers Mr. Graner saying, firm, and Mark had gone despite the certainty in his chest that something terrible was happening to him, because what other choice did he have, really? Already on the precipice of knowing that there was nothing he could do, because they would always catch him, and no matter how hard he fought there would never be any way to win, he'd never have any other choice but to listen. And Mr. Graner had reached for the soap dispenser, and grabbed the back of Mark's neck with his other hand, and -
Why is Mark remembering this now? he wonders, shifting uncomfortably and trying to catch his breath. His head hurts. Mr. Graner had been fired ages ago, Mark hasn't seen him since, so why is he-?
The pain behind his eye deepens and grows. Mark purses his lips against the strange, crowded ache of it and tries to focus. He just has to get the work done; he doesn't even mind the work, really, he just has to focus.
Mark sees a flash of red in the center of his eye and the panic catches and blooms into outright fear — did Dylan get caught with the map? Did he try to leave with it, for some reason? But Mark turns his head towards the office door to see if he can catch a glimpse of what's going on, and feels something cold slam into him harder than anything Cobel had ever thrown in his direction when he sees Petey silhouetted in the door frame.
'What the fuck are you wearing?' he thinks on a knee-jerk instinct, and then is glad he hadn't said it out loud. This isn't real, he thinks from somewhere outside of himself, the same way he'd known when he'd gotten confused at the fridge earlier, but more important is the thought that Mark had come up with way better sentences to say when he'd imagined Petey coming back before.
'I've missed you,' he thinks instead, more deliberately, and then he looks closer and realizes that the strangely colored robe is not the only thing that's wrong, because Petey is looking at Mark like a confused, cornered animal, and there is thick, coagulated blood oozing out of his nose and into his mouth, and he's staring out at Mark like Mark will know what to do, but both of them seem frozen in something like fear. Mark wants to get up, to go over to him, but his body refuses to move no matter how hard he tries to make it. And something is wrong and Petey shudders strangely in a red flash of light and something is wrong and something is wrong and Petey's knees start to give out beneath him and Mark's hand clenches tight around the cold metal of his car door and the nausea rises up Mark's throat and the pain in his head crests high enough that something in his vision shakes with it and Petey collapses lifelessly against the concrete and Mark surges unsteadily to his feet and the doorway is empty and there is no blood on the carpet at all.
Something is terribly wrong, but Mark knows better than to ask Helly if she'd seen it. Mark turns on his heel and goes to lock himself in the bathroom before anyone else can see.
'Take that back,' he snarls at the dark spot of agony in the center of his skull. He locks himself in a stall and braces his back against the door. He sees Petey collapse again, staring out at Mark like he's looking for something and not finding it, and Mark flinches away from the cold ache of it, pressing a palm against the raw wound behind his eye. 'Take it back.'
The ache grows a pit of guilt at the bottom of Mark's stomach and doesn't respond. Mark doesn't want its guilt or its pity.
'That wasn't real,' Mark insists at it. 'It wasn't. Petey's fine. He's not dead, he's just not here. He's fine. You're lying. His outie quit, he just quit.'
He almost startles as the pain gets worse. "You feel it in there, too," he hears the ghost of Petey's voice in the back of his head, "You just don't know what it is," and Mark stumbles forward to his knees with just enough time to vomit into the toilet without making a mess.
'You're lying,' he argues through the tears and the grief and the agony of it, but he already doesn't believe it.
'What the fuck is happening?' he thinks instead, desperate, leaning back against one of the walls as the pain in his head spikes again, sharp like Ms. Cobel throwing pens at him, sharp like Mr. Milchick hitting his hand with the wooden ruler, sharp like Mr. Graner holding his head under the water and why is he remembering all that right now, and why does it feel like he's seeing the memories for the first time, and- why- 'What the hell is-?'
And Mark realizes all at once that the guilty feeling in his stomach doesn't belong to him at all. Neither does the memory of Petey with blood all over clothes like Mark has never seen before. Neither was the strange thought from earlier.
Someone is remembering these things, but it isn't Mark.
'Fuck,' he thinks with a steadily growing horror. 'What the fuck did you do?'
'What I had to,' says the thought that isn't Mark's at all, and Mark slams the heel of his palm against his temple and gags through the agony of it and the grim satisfaction of feeling the other part recoiling too.
'This isn't fair,' he screams at it, biting down on his sleeve to keep the words kept inside of his head. Someone else might notice if he talks out loud, if he screams the way he really wants to — Mark knows better.
"None of this is fair," the other part rages back in a whisper, because it doesn't seem to. Because the outie doesn't seem to, and Mark shakes his head hard enough to rattle them both and forces them to share a memory of Petey's office tour with pointed glances at every single camera until Mark had finally caught on and noticed them all, and the outie shuts up.
'I was looking,' Mark thinks into the silence between them, frantic and outraged and sick with the horror of it. 'I was looking for her. We were going to get her out for you. We were going to do it, and you were going to kill me for it, and I would have been okay with that because Ms. Casey didn't deserve to be stuck down here if she didn't have an outie that was rejecting her resignation requests, but this isn't fair.'
He thinks of himself just a couple days ago, when Helly had caught up with him after Irving's funeral. "It doesn't matter," he'd snapped at her, "because they are smarter than us, okay?" and he feels sick with the realization that it is happening all over again. It's happening all over again, an outie lying and tricking him and taking him apart to use him just because they can, and there's nothing Mark can do about it, and he shouldn't be surprised, should he? Mark had known it would happen — "They know everything" — so why is he surprised that it did?
Because some stupid, naive part of Mark hadn't thought it would, he realizes, feeling numb to it. Something small and childish that should have learned better by now but hadn't — "My outie wouldn't do that."
But he is.
And it's worse than being killed, Mark thinks distantly, staring blankly into the bile and blood swirling together in the toilet. It's worse, because at least when they got Ms. Casey out and his outie never came back to Lumon and made Mark stop existing, at least he would have died as himself. At least he would have seen it coming. At least everything that had been his, what little he'd had here in this life, would have stayed his.
His outie isn't just killing him, he's looting Mark's corpse. Taking everything that was Mark's and making it his own. He'd watched Petey die and hadn't helped. He'll peel apart all of Mark's memories until they aren't his anymore. It's Helena all over again, taking something that should have been theirs just because she wanted to, just because she could. Because Mark isn't a person they have to respect, or be nice to, he's just...
He's just an innie, and that doesn't count.
'That isn't-,' the thought tries to interrupt, but it falters because Mark already doesn't believe it.
'You already had everything,' Mark thinks bitterly, reaching up to flush the toilet mechanically and then burying his face against his knees to muffle the ugly sound of his breathing. This isn't fair. He thinks about his outie getting to choose when to call out sick, and getting to pick what he eats for every meal, and getting to decide what to wear every day, and getting to know what it means to be drunk and not just hungover, and getting to know what history is enough to teach it to other people, and getting to have a sister that loves him and getting to talk to her whenever he wants, and getting to have a niece and a brother-in-law and a wife even if she is dead, because he also got to mourn her without being told that he doesn't deserve to miss her, without being told that he'll get in trouble for talking about her, without never knowing what happened to her and without having to replace her the same day she'd died with someone that had hated him, and all Mark has ever had for himself were his memories, and now they're not even fully his. 'Why did you have to take stuff from me too? He was my friend. There are my memories, they aren't yours. I don't want to be you, I was me. This isn't fair.'
'You didn't even tell him goodbye,' he thinks, sadder or angrier or something else entirely. 'We didn't go anywhere, I didn't know I had to say goodbye that day. I didn't know.'
'I didn't know either,' his outie thinks back, and the weight of his words in Mark's skull is disorienting, and strange, and he doesn't like it. He doesn't like any of this at all, but it doesn't matter, Mark thinks, steeling himself to it. It doesn't matter what Mark wants, it only matters that he can adapt to it anyway, and Mark is good at adapting, at least; he's never had the choice to be anything else.
'I'm sorry,' says the outie half of Mark's brain, and Mark almost thinks he can believe he means it, but Helly's voice through the door says, "Hey, Mark, are you alright? I think Miss Huang is going to come by again soon," and it doesn't matter what Mark thinks because that means this is the end of it anyway.
So Mark grits his teeth, and goes back to work, and tries not to think about it, about any of it. If Mark thinks about it too much, after all, then someone might notice something is wrong, and Mark knows better than to think that they could ever care about helping him.