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rionaleonhart) wrote2025-02-02 06:39 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2025-02-02 06:39 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: Overwritten (Severance)
I watched the latest episode of Severance ('Who Is Alive?') and immediately lost my mind. Twenty-four hours later, here I am, posting a fic.
Title: Overwritten
Fandom: Severance
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Mark, immediately after episode 2.03.
Is he dead?
Mark isn’t prepared for the terror that floods his severed half, once that half of him realises what’s happening. He was just going up in the elevator, and then he’d found himself somewhere new, the thought is this the Overtime Contingency? swiftly followed by wait, there’s someone else here – there’s someone else in my head—
Is he dead? His entire mind has been revised and expanded and overwritten. Does that mean he doesn’t exist any more?
The original Mark has existed for so much longer than him, has experienced so much more. It feels like there’s no room for the severed Mark in their suddenly shared head. It feels like he’s drowning in someone else’s memories.
An instant later, the part of him that knew Petey crashes headlong into the part of him that went to Petey’s funeral. He claws the wires off his head and stumbles halfway to the bathroom before he throws up.
-
A person is speaking to him. Someone Mark’s never seen before. He’s been meeting more new people recently, with his visits to other departments, but he’s still never entirely prepared for—
No. Reghabi is speaking to him. Asking how he’s feeling.
He has no idea how he’s feeling.
“Stay in touch,” she says. “Any unexplained bleeding, let me know.”
“Am I going to die?” Now that it’s too late to undo this, he finds himself thinking about Devon and Eleanor, thinking about Helly and Dylan and Ir—
Who are these people?
“You shouldn’t,” Reghabi says. “If it’s any consolation, though: if you do die, the media’s going to have a lot of questions about the mysterious death of two severed employees in quick succession. You might still bring Lumon down.”
Petey. Fuck, he feels dizzy.
“Not really the specific role I’d like to play in that,” Mark says.
“Not the best time to be having second thoughts,” Reghabi says.
He guesses she’s right.
Suddenly becoming two people is, it turns out, kind of a fucking insane experience, and he thinks he might need to talk to someone about it. But Reghabi’s already packing up; it’s clear that her main priority is getting out of here. He’s not sure how sympathetic she’d be, anyway, even if she’s probably the only living person who could halfway understand Mark’s situation.
In a weird way, it feels like an awkwardly rapid conclusion to a one-night stand. This person just changed Mark’s life, and now she apparently can’t wait to get out of it.
(Another part of him, the part that doesn’t have any experience of one-night stands, compares it to the typical awkward conclusion of a waffle party, and... holy shit, okay, he guesses that’s a concept he’s going to have to process once he’s actually capable of thinking about things.)
He needs to talk to Devon. She’s going to tear him to pieces for not talking to her before he did this. But she’ll listen.
Once Reghabi is gone, he grabs his car keys and takes two steps out of his front door. Freezes, his eyes flickering over the houses, the streetlights, the road, the cars, the snow, the sky—
There are stars. He’s never seen more than a long corridor’s distance in front of him before. Those points of light above him are millions of miles away.
There’s too much to see. There’s just too much. It’s so overwhelming it’s almost painful.
He has to shut himself in the bathroom and close his eyes until he’s stopped shaking.
-
When he ventures back out into his home, he keeps the lights turned off at first. Maybe it’ll be easier if it’s dark, if he can’t see all the things around him: everything he doesn’t know from Lumon.
It doesn’t help. He’s used to bright lights at Lumon; darkness puts that part of him on edge, makes him think that something’s wrong. He switches the lights on and sits on the couch and tries to avoid looking at anything too colourful.
Just sitting on the couch feels weird. A part of him isn’t used to seating being this soft.
He hadn’t expected reintegration to be like this. He – the original Mark, he guesses, the outie Mark – he just thought it’d be... getting his memories back. He’d go from a guy without his memories of work to a guy with his memories of work, like he’d just been going to a normal office all these years.
This really isn’t that. His new memories aren’t just of himself at work; they’re basically a different person. His innie has completely different relationships, completely different experiences; there’s really no overlap with Mark’s everyday life. He thinks differently: his outlook, his attitude. There’s grief there, for Petey, but he copes with it differently; it doesn’t line up with Mark’s grief for Gemma.
Having everything in his head at once makes it impossible to process; it’s overwhelming. It’s easier if he tries to draw a rough distinction between the two halves, talks aloud to himself like they’re having a conversation.
“We, uh, unsevered,” he tells himself, before switching the set of memories he’s trying to focus on.
“Yeah, I got that. Holy shit. I didn’t know this was possible.”
I might have killed us. He can’t bring himself to say it, even if it doesn’t really make a difference; he’s thought it, so both halves of him know it. “It might not be a great idea.”
“I get it. We had to do it.”
Is that really what the innie side of him feels? Or is that just what outie Mark is telling himself to make himself feel better? There’s no way to draw a clear, perfect line between the two people in his head.
-
He manages to sleep, a little. He dreams of Gemma in white corridors, or of Ms Casey. It unsettles him, when he wakes up, to realise that he can no longer be certain of which version of her he’s seeing in his dreams.
Ms Casey. He’d struggled to believe Gemma could be alive, even after speaking to Reghabi. But there she is, in his innie’s memories; it nearly stopped his breath to find her there.
Missing, though. She said she was being retired; he hasn’t seen her since. Where is she? Out here, somewhere, in the real world?
Why wouldn’t she have come to find him?
The question makes him feel ill. He tries to put it to one side, tries to focus instead on combing through his innie’s memories for Ms Casey: every moment their eyes met, every strange, stilted conversation.
He’s furious with himself for not loving her. He’s been in the same room as Gemma; he’s seen her face, he’s heard her voice. It’s everything Mark has desperately wanted for the last two years.
Why wouldn’t he love her? What’s wrong with him?
His innie had found love, Milchick told him. Mark hadn’t really been able to believe it at first. When he’d had confirmation from Reghabi that Gemma was inside Lumon, a part of him assumed that his innie must have fallen for her as well; who wouldn’t? But...
This other side of Mark has feelings for a woman Mark’s never even seen before. Or – he’s seen her once, he realises suddenly, his severed self searching through his memories for her. Outside the office. He nearly hit her with his car; she snapped at him in return (and of course she did, he thinks now, with a kind of fondness; she’s so fiery). But that would have been a different person.
There’s a strange dread tied up in that memory for him, now that half of him is in love with her. He nearly hit her with his car.
Your feelings aren’t real, he wants to tell the part of himself that loves Helly. Gemma is what’s real. We were married. We were together for years. How long have you known Helly: a few weeks? Did you just fall for her because there’s nobody else in your life?
But they’re not just his innie’s feelings; they’re Mark’s feelings, now, the single person they’ve become, and he feels them as intensely as he’s ever felt anything.
-
He calls Milchick. Freezes up with dread when he hears his voice on the phone, and that’s new.
He tries to get hold of himself, manages to tell Milchick he’s not feeling well. He’s really not ready to go into work right now. He’s going to have to act like nothing’s wrong, avoid letting on that he knows more than he should, and that’s not a deception he’s capable of when his mind is actively falling apart.
Okay. He doesn’t have to worry right now about learning how to function at Lumon. He guesses he should devote today to relearning how to function in the world outside.
-
He manages to walk out into the open without flipping out, this time. A part of him feels exposed, vulnerable; it doesn’t feel right, being in a place without any walls. But he makes it to the car without having a total meltdown.
He needs to make sure he’s able to speak to people. It unsettles his innie self, seeing people walk past, just going about their lives. He’s not used to seeing anyone he doesn’t know.
He pays a visit to Devon. She’s not exactly someone Mark doesn’t know – even his innie has met her before – but she seems like a safe starting point; he doesn’t want to throw himself straight in at the deep end. And, anyway, he kind of needs to see her.
She asks why he’s not at work. He doesn’t know why he didn’t anticipate that.
“Just wasn’t feeling well,” he says, with a shrug.
“Mmm. And you thought you’d give me and Eleanor the gift of your germs?”
“You’re fine. It’s not contagious.”
“Got a hangover?” Devon asks, raising her eyebrows.
It’s as convenient a story as any. “What else?”
“Yeah, you look like it,” Devon says. “What can I do for my poor ailing brother?”
“I just thought maybe we could talk.”
“Oh.” Devon pauses. “Just, like, a casual conversation, or a ‘we need to talk about something’ talk?”
He’s not ready to tell her. Not yet. He needs to get himself a little more under control before he can tell her. “Just a chat. I think I just need to hear someone’s voice.”
-
It’s easier than he thought it might be, talking to Devon. The part of him that knows her kind of takes over. It’s a relief; he was afraid she might suddenly feel like a stranger to him.
Maybe that means his innie self will be able to handle conversations with his coworkers, too. Maybe seeming normal at work won’t be as difficult as he thought it might be.
He still tries to practise talking to people, though, just to get his innie self used to it. He does his grocery shopping, makes small talk with the guy at the checkout. He goes into a café, orders coffee and a warm croissant from a young woman who almost certainly doesn’t get her memories erased after her shift.
When he bites into the pastry, he goes still for a moment, intensely aware of how warm and flaky and buttery it is. He’s never eaten anything like this.
What is he thinking? It’s just a croissant; he’s eaten hundreds of them. Gemma used to pick them up from the local bakery for breakfast every weekend.
But it’s a new experience for half of him, and suddenly he wants to seek out more of those.
He orders three more types of pastry, all of which are delicious in a way he’s never really noticed before. He heads to a park he hasn’t visited in two years, watches the squirrels for nearly an hour; his innie has never seen anything that moves the way they do. He pushes his fingers into the snow, experimentally; it’s cold and kind of unpleasant, but it’s also new and fascinating.
As the evening draws in, he drives down to the lake and watches the sun set over the water.
This isn’t going to be easy. It feels like he’s split his own skull open and forced in more than it can really hold. He’s not sure how he can reconcile the two people inside him.
But the sky is a rich, warm gold, birds calling to each other as they fly overhead, and maybe this doesn’t all have to be bad.
Title: Overwritten
Fandom: Severance
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Mark, immediately after episode 2.03.
Is he dead?
Mark isn’t prepared for the terror that floods his severed half, once that half of him realises what’s happening. He was just going up in the elevator, and then he’d found himself somewhere new, the thought is this the Overtime Contingency? swiftly followed by wait, there’s someone else here – there’s someone else in my head—
Is he dead? His entire mind has been revised and expanded and overwritten. Does that mean he doesn’t exist any more?
The original Mark has existed for so much longer than him, has experienced so much more. It feels like there’s no room for the severed Mark in their suddenly shared head. It feels like he’s drowning in someone else’s memories.
An instant later, the part of him that knew Petey crashes headlong into the part of him that went to Petey’s funeral. He claws the wires off his head and stumbles halfway to the bathroom before he throws up.
A person is speaking to him. Someone Mark’s never seen before. He’s been meeting more new people recently, with his visits to other departments, but he’s still never entirely prepared for—
No. Reghabi is speaking to him. Asking how he’s feeling.
He has no idea how he’s feeling.
“Stay in touch,” she says. “Any unexplained bleeding, let me know.”
“Am I going to die?” Now that it’s too late to undo this, he finds himself thinking about Devon and Eleanor, thinking about Helly and Dylan and Ir—
Who are these people?
“You shouldn’t,” Reghabi says. “If it’s any consolation, though: if you do die, the media’s going to have a lot of questions about the mysterious death of two severed employees in quick succession. You might still bring Lumon down.”
Petey. Fuck, he feels dizzy.
“Not really the specific role I’d like to play in that,” Mark says.
“Not the best time to be having second thoughts,” Reghabi says.
He guesses she’s right.
Suddenly becoming two people is, it turns out, kind of a fucking insane experience, and he thinks he might need to talk to someone about it. But Reghabi’s already packing up; it’s clear that her main priority is getting out of here. He’s not sure how sympathetic she’d be, anyway, even if she’s probably the only living person who could halfway understand Mark’s situation.
In a weird way, it feels like an awkwardly rapid conclusion to a one-night stand. This person just changed Mark’s life, and now she apparently can’t wait to get out of it.
(Another part of him, the part that doesn’t have any experience of one-night stands, compares it to the typical awkward conclusion of a waffle party, and... holy shit, okay, he guesses that’s a concept he’s going to have to process once he’s actually capable of thinking about things.)
He needs to talk to Devon. She’s going to tear him to pieces for not talking to her before he did this. But she’ll listen.
Once Reghabi is gone, he grabs his car keys and takes two steps out of his front door. Freezes, his eyes flickering over the houses, the streetlights, the road, the cars, the snow, the sky—
There are stars. He’s never seen more than a long corridor’s distance in front of him before. Those points of light above him are millions of miles away.
There’s too much to see. There’s just too much. It’s so overwhelming it’s almost painful.
He has to shut himself in the bathroom and close his eyes until he’s stopped shaking.
When he ventures back out into his home, he keeps the lights turned off at first. Maybe it’ll be easier if it’s dark, if he can’t see all the things around him: everything he doesn’t know from Lumon.
It doesn’t help. He’s used to bright lights at Lumon; darkness puts that part of him on edge, makes him think that something’s wrong. He switches the lights on and sits on the couch and tries to avoid looking at anything too colourful.
Just sitting on the couch feels weird. A part of him isn’t used to seating being this soft.
He hadn’t expected reintegration to be like this. He – the original Mark, he guesses, the outie Mark – he just thought it’d be... getting his memories back. He’d go from a guy without his memories of work to a guy with his memories of work, like he’d just been going to a normal office all these years.
This really isn’t that. His new memories aren’t just of himself at work; they’re basically a different person. His innie has completely different relationships, completely different experiences; there’s really no overlap with Mark’s everyday life. He thinks differently: his outlook, his attitude. There’s grief there, for Petey, but he copes with it differently; it doesn’t line up with Mark’s grief for Gemma.
Having everything in his head at once makes it impossible to process; it’s overwhelming. It’s easier if he tries to draw a rough distinction between the two halves, talks aloud to himself like they’re having a conversation.
“We, uh, unsevered,” he tells himself, before switching the set of memories he’s trying to focus on.
“Yeah, I got that. Holy shit. I didn’t know this was possible.”
I might have killed us. He can’t bring himself to say it, even if it doesn’t really make a difference; he’s thought it, so both halves of him know it. “It might not be a great idea.”
“I get it. We had to do it.”
Is that really what the innie side of him feels? Or is that just what outie Mark is telling himself to make himself feel better? There’s no way to draw a clear, perfect line between the two people in his head.
He manages to sleep, a little. He dreams of Gemma in white corridors, or of Ms Casey. It unsettles him, when he wakes up, to realise that he can no longer be certain of which version of her he’s seeing in his dreams.
Ms Casey. He’d struggled to believe Gemma could be alive, even after speaking to Reghabi. But there she is, in his innie’s memories; it nearly stopped his breath to find her there.
Missing, though. She said she was being retired; he hasn’t seen her since. Where is she? Out here, somewhere, in the real world?
Why wouldn’t she have come to find him?
The question makes him feel ill. He tries to put it to one side, tries to focus instead on combing through his innie’s memories for Ms Casey: every moment their eyes met, every strange, stilted conversation.
He’s furious with himself for not loving her. He’s been in the same room as Gemma; he’s seen her face, he’s heard her voice. It’s everything Mark has desperately wanted for the last two years.
Why wouldn’t he love her? What’s wrong with him?
His innie had found love, Milchick told him. Mark hadn’t really been able to believe it at first. When he’d had confirmation from Reghabi that Gemma was inside Lumon, a part of him assumed that his innie must have fallen for her as well; who wouldn’t? But...
This other side of Mark has feelings for a woman Mark’s never even seen before. Or – he’s seen her once, he realises suddenly, his severed self searching through his memories for her. Outside the office. He nearly hit her with his car; she snapped at him in return (and of course she did, he thinks now, with a kind of fondness; she’s so fiery). But that would have been a different person.
There’s a strange dread tied up in that memory for him, now that half of him is in love with her. He nearly hit her with his car.
Your feelings aren’t real, he wants to tell the part of himself that loves Helly. Gemma is what’s real. We were married. We were together for years. How long have you known Helly: a few weeks? Did you just fall for her because there’s nobody else in your life?
But they’re not just his innie’s feelings; they’re Mark’s feelings, now, the single person they’ve become, and he feels them as intensely as he’s ever felt anything.
He calls Milchick. Freezes up with dread when he hears his voice on the phone, and that’s new.
He tries to get hold of himself, manages to tell Milchick he’s not feeling well. He’s really not ready to go into work right now. He’s going to have to act like nothing’s wrong, avoid letting on that he knows more than he should, and that’s not a deception he’s capable of when his mind is actively falling apart.
Okay. He doesn’t have to worry right now about learning how to function at Lumon. He guesses he should devote today to relearning how to function in the world outside.
He manages to walk out into the open without flipping out, this time. A part of him feels exposed, vulnerable; it doesn’t feel right, being in a place without any walls. But he makes it to the car without having a total meltdown.
He needs to make sure he’s able to speak to people. It unsettles his innie self, seeing people walk past, just going about their lives. He’s not used to seeing anyone he doesn’t know.
He pays a visit to Devon. She’s not exactly someone Mark doesn’t know – even his innie has met her before – but she seems like a safe starting point; he doesn’t want to throw himself straight in at the deep end. And, anyway, he kind of needs to see her.
She asks why he’s not at work. He doesn’t know why he didn’t anticipate that.
“Just wasn’t feeling well,” he says, with a shrug.
“Mmm. And you thought you’d give me and Eleanor the gift of your germs?”
“You’re fine. It’s not contagious.”
“Got a hangover?” Devon asks, raising her eyebrows.
It’s as convenient a story as any. “What else?”
“Yeah, you look like it,” Devon says. “What can I do for my poor ailing brother?”
“I just thought maybe we could talk.”
“Oh.” Devon pauses. “Just, like, a casual conversation, or a ‘we need to talk about something’ talk?”
He’s not ready to tell her. Not yet. He needs to get himself a little more under control before he can tell her. “Just a chat. I think I just need to hear someone’s voice.”
It’s easier than he thought it might be, talking to Devon. The part of him that knows her kind of takes over. It’s a relief; he was afraid she might suddenly feel like a stranger to him.
Maybe that means his innie self will be able to handle conversations with his coworkers, too. Maybe seeming normal at work won’t be as difficult as he thought it might be.
He still tries to practise talking to people, though, just to get his innie self used to it. He does his grocery shopping, makes small talk with the guy at the checkout. He goes into a café, orders coffee and a warm croissant from a young woman who almost certainly doesn’t get her memories erased after her shift.
When he bites into the pastry, he goes still for a moment, intensely aware of how warm and flaky and buttery it is. He’s never eaten anything like this.
What is he thinking? It’s just a croissant; he’s eaten hundreds of them. Gemma used to pick them up from the local bakery for breakfast every weekend.
But it’s a new experience for half of him, and suddenly he wants to seek out more of those.
He orders three more types of pastry, all of which are delicious in a way he’s never really noticed before. He heads to a park he hasn’t visited in two years, watches the squirrels for nearly an hour; his innie has never seen anything that moves the way they do. He pushes his fingers into the snow, experimentally; it’s cold and kind of unpleasant, but it’s also new and fascinating.
As the evening draws in, he drives down to the lake and watches the sun set over the water.
This isn’t going to be easy. It feels like he’s split his own skull open and forced in more than it can really hold. He’s not sure how he can reconcile the two people inside him.
But the sky is a rich, warm gold, birds calling to each other as they fly overhead, and maybe this doesn’t all have to be bad.