Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2025-02-17 03:40 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2025-02-17 03:40 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: Finding Air (Severance, Macrodata Refinement OT4)
Holy shit, I've finally managed to get the whole Macrodata Refinement team into bed together. Success at last! All I had to do was, uh, inflict a load of trauma.
For a while, I thought I wouldn't be able to write this fic; I liked the concept, but I just couldn't pin down how to make it work. It turned out the problem was that I was trying to plot it out from Irving's perspective, which meant it was difficult to make the opening clear. The instant I switched to Helly's perspective, the words started coming!
Title: Finding Air
Fandom: Severance
Rating: 15
Pairing: Helly R/Mark S/Dylan G/Irving B, Helly R & Irving B
Wordcount: 3,300
Summary: Irving makes a terrible mistake on the ORTBO.
Warnings: Severance spoilers up to episode 2.04, 'Woe's Hollow'.
There’s freezing water in Helly’s nose, in her mouth, in her eyes. She chokes for breath as Irving drags her up, barely manages half a lungful before she’s plunged under again.
Irving. Irving is doing this to her.
She’s trying to scream when he pulls her up again. The water in her throat smothers her voice; all she can manage is a thin high sound that doesn’t sound like her at all.
“She’s not Helly,” Irving is shouting. “Turn her back!”
I’m me. I’m me. I’m me.
She can’t say it. The water closes over her head again.
There’s shouting from above; it sounds muffled, distant. Irving’s grip is painful in her hair, but it’s nothing to the pain of the cold. Is she going to die; is she going to die here?
Some unclear amount of time later – ten seconds or a minute or a year – Irving’s hold on her jolts, loosens, and then there are arms pulling her out of the water, someone’s holding her. Irving is still yelling – she’s not Helly, she’s not Helly – and someone grabs Helly’s hand, holds it. She doesn’t know who it is, Mark or Dylan or fucking Milchick, but she grips back like it’s the only thing keeping her on dry land.
All she can see is the pale sky above her as she breathes and breathes and breathes and breathes. The unknown hand is tight on hers; her lungs are burning. She can hear Milchick’s voice from somewhere nearby: “Abort the ORTBO, now!”
An instant later, she’s in the elevator. Whoever was holding her, they’re gone; she’s alone.
She buckles, falls to her hands and knees, and the doors slide open in front of her.
Dylan and Mark are outside the elevator. They rush in and help her to her feet, asking if she’s okay, asking a lot of questions she doesn’t have an answer for. Their arms around her feel like safety, and all she can think is that, half an hour ago, she might have thought the same about Irving.
Someone clears their throat nearby, and the three of them turn to see Miss Huang standing there.
-
“Where’s Irving?” Dylan asks, the moment they’re escorted into Milchick’s office.
“Who the fuck cares where Irving is?” Helly demands, her voice spiking higher than she was aiming for.
“I get it,” Dylan says. “It’s fucked up, what he did to you. But he’s still Irv, right?”
Helly spreads her hands. “Maybe he’s not! Maybe he’s the one whose outie got into his body, and that’s why he decided to fucking murder me.”
“You got rid of the Break Room, right?” Dylan asks, focusing on Milchick. “He can’t be there. So he should be here. Where the fuck is he?”
“Irving B,” Milchick says, “is currently in an isolated productivity chamber, focusing on a solo project, until he has learnt to treat his colleagues with respect.”
Isolated productivity chamber sounds a lot like solitary confinement.
Good. That’s what he deserves. He was holding her head underwater ten minutes ago.
More time has passed for her body since then, obviously. The physical effects are gone. But somehow it’s still hard for her mind to grasp that she’s not freezing, choking on water, struggling for breath against one of the three fucking people she trusted.
-
She drags Mark into the bathroom at the first opportunity. “Fuck me.”
“Uh,” Mark says.
She tears her top off over her head. Stands there in her skirt and bra, breathing hard. She’s nothing but adrenaline right now, and it has to go somewhere, or her body is just going to keep convincing herself it’s dying.
“Are you sure?” Mark asks. “It felt like something might happen in that tent, but then... well, it didn’t. I thought maybe you didn’t—”
“Mark,” Helly says. “I almost died. Take your pants off.”
He kisses back, fervently, when she kisses him. But a moment later he pushes her gently away from him, holds her at arm’s length, his hand on her shoulder. “You really are... you, right?”
“Mark,” Helly says, appalled, desperate. A part of her is terrified he’s about to shove her face into one of the sinks.
“Right, yeah, of course. Sorry. Of course you are.” He kisses her again. “I know you are. I’d be able to tell if you weren’t.”
-
It’s been nearly two weeks without Irving.
It’s starting to get to Helly.
It was getting to Dylan from the beginning; that’s obvious. He’s been more subdued than usual, more snappish. It started to bother Mark not long afterwards; Helly could tell. She just gritted her teeth and focused on her work, determined not to miss him.
Fine. She misses him, she fucking guesses. The guy tried to drown her, and apparently that’s exactly the kind of person she wants in her life.
Not that she has many people in her life. There are three people in the whole fucking world she cares about. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that it doesn’t feel great when one of them is taken away.
She wonders how Irving feels in his isolated productivity chamber.
-
Halfway through the third week, Milchick brings Irving into the MDR office.
Helly gets to her feet without thinking; she’s vaguely aware, at the edges of her focus on Irving, of the other two doing the same. She and Irving hold each other’s eyes for a long, long moment.
“Irving B,” Milchick says, “has taken some time to reflect, and regrets his actions on the ORTBO. He is being released back to the care of your department on probation. Any further acts of violence will be met with immediate termination.”
Helly barely listens. Nothing Milchick says can be trusted. She’s more interested in what Irving has to say for himself.
“You gonna tell me why you nearly drowned me?” she asks.
Irving swallows. The way he’s standing feels stiff, awkward. “I thought I was saving you.”
“From my outie, right?” Helly asks. “You still think I’m her?”
Irving shakes his head. “I was... paranoid, on the ORTBO. When I look back, I didn’t have enough evidence. I—” He takes in a breath. Even from halfway across the room, Helly can hear the way it wavers. “I’m sorry, Helly. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She believes him. There’s shame in every line of his stance.
“I’ll leave you to repair your workplace dynamic,” Milchick says.
It feels like Helly can breathe a little easier, once Milchick is out of the room. But, when she looks at Irving, a part of her can still taste icy water in her throat.
“So, what evidence did you have?” she asks, with sarcastic emphasis on evidence.
Irving breaks eye contact with her. It’s a moment before he speaks. “I had a dream.”
“You had,” Helly says, “a fucking dream?”
“It told me you were an Eagan.”
She’s about to protest – it didn’t tell you anything, it was a dream – but that stops her in her tracks.
“Holy shit,” she says. “You’re actually right.”
“Helly?” Mark asks, sounding alarmed.
“But that’s not me,” she says, quickly. “That’s my outie. I was going to tell you guys. Just—” When she’d come to terms with it herself; when she’d braced herself for their reactions; when the thought of talking about it didn’t make her want to throw up. “When it would be useful, I guess.”
“Okay,” Dylan says, “we definitely need to talk about that later. But right now...” He’s looking at Irving. “You’re back for good, right?”
“I tried to resign,” Irving says. He meets Helly’s eyes again. “I didn’t want to force you to work with someone who’d attacked you. My outie refused my request, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus,” Dylan whispers.
Helly’s throat tightens, a little, at the thought that Irving could have resigned. That they might finally be seeing him again, only to learn he’d be leaving their lives permanently. She finds herself taking a few steps towards him.
“Yeah, outies are bastards,” she says. “I guess I can’t blame you for trying to drown mine.”
Irving makes a small, choked noise, and a moment later he’s pulled her into his arms. It startles a quiet sound out of Helly in return. She can count the number of times she’s been hugged on one hand.
“I’m so sorry,” Irving whispers into her shoulder.
-
She wishes she could just forget about it. He didn’t want to hurt her; he was trying to attack her outie. It’s not like Helly can’t understand that particular impulse.
But every morning she sees Irving’s face and she finds herself back there, struggling against him as he drags her towards the water. They can’t talk the way they used to; they can barely even look at each other. The office is even quieter now than it was when it was just the three of them.
She has to do something about it. This office is her whole fucking life; she’s not going to give up the very few bright spots she gets here. She misses the closeness; she misses—
The thought catches in her mind. She misses the closeness.
At lunch, she stands from her desk and stretches. “You guys want to take a trip to the perpetuity wing?”
-
“Why did you bring us here?” Irving asks, as Helly leads them into Kier’s house. “There are closer places to have a frank conversation, if that’s your intention.”
It looks like Mark might already have a sense of what’s on her mind. His eyes flicker between Helly and Kier Eagan’s bed.
“There aren’t closer places with a bed, though,” Helly says.
Something closes itself off in Irving’s expression. “If you and Mark just came here to consummate your sordid workplace relationship, why are you wasting our—”
Helly raises her eyebrows at him. It’s her ‘you tried to drown me; are you really giving me shit right now?’ expression, and Irving evidently gets the intent behind it. He cuts himself off.
“For your information,” she says, “we’ve already consummated our sordid relationship. I brought the whole team here because I thought it could be a little more sordid.”
“Wait, seriously?” Dylan asks. “Uh, that applies to everything you just said. Seriously?”
“Uh, wait,” Mark says, over him, “are you saying...?”
Helly grins at them. She’s trying to give off a casual air – this is light, this is fun, this isn’t a big deal – but she can feel her own heart beating hard; this definitely isn’t something she’s done before in her short, restricted life. “I think we should all fuck.”
Irving makes an inarticulate noise. It sounds like something is stuck in his throat.
“Uh,” Mark says. There’s a pause of a good five seconds while he apparently searches for what comes after that. “It... feels like we could have discussed this in advance. I feel like our sordid workplace relationship should give me a say in this.”
“Sorry,” Helly says. “You’re probably right. I’ll add it to the department calendar next time.”
“Next time?” Mark echoes.
She has to laugh at the look on his face. “Okay, let’s talk about this.”
“Okay,” Mark says. “I – I’d like to know... why you’re suggesting this, I guess.”
Helly takes a deep breath, opts for honesty. She’s seen where mistrust leads.
“The ORTBO was fucked up,” she says. “I’d like to forget about it. And I thought... I don’t know, maybe we could do our own team-building thing. To replace it in our heads, kind of.”
“Team-building,” Irving echoes, a little faintly.
“Most of our lives is just sitting at those desks,” Helly says. “I don’t know about you, but anything that’s different really sticks out in my memories. I don’t want the last big different thing we all did together to be that.”
Mark doesn’t say anything. But his expression has shifted, a little, from confusion to something more sympathetic. It makes Helly a little uncomfortable, makes her want to lighten the tone.
She drops her voice. “And, hey, you can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to fuck on the Kier bed.”
Mark and Dylan exchange quick glances in a way that Helly suddenly really wants to know more about.
She tries to stay focused. “It’ll be fun. And it’ll be – I don’t know. I like you guys. It’d be nice, you know? To do this with you.”
“I... I understand, I think,” Mark says, after a moment. “It kind of makes sense to me.”
Helly waggles her eyebrows at him. “You sure you don’t want to keep me all to yourself?”
It’s a joke, kind of. But, at the same time, she’s really asking. She wants to do this, but...
“I don’t think it’d really matter if I did,” he says. “If it’s something you want to do, I don’t want to stand in your way. This place has taken enough choice away from us already.”
“I mean,” Helly says, “yeah, but your choices matter too. I’m not going to make you bang your colleagues if you don’t want to.”
Mark’s eyes widen slightly. He looks quickly at Dylan, at Irving. “Oh, so you’re not saying – you’re not saying you just want to—”
“I said we should all fuck,” Helly says. “Do you want me to draw you a diagram?”
Dylan raises a hand. “I actually kind of want to see that.”
“I’ll draw something afterwards, if this is happening,” Helly says. She probably can’t manage anything more than lewd stick figures, but, hey, she never said it’d be a good diagram. “It can be a memento of the occasion. Are you interested in doing this?”
“Yeah, sounds kind of awesome,” Dylan says. “I’m in.”
Helly grins. “Glad to have you on board.”
She crosses to him in a couple of steps. Kisses him.
She’s clumsy with this, she’s pretty sure. She still doesn’t have much experience, doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to feel like. If this is supposed to be something she gets the instinct for from her outie, it’s just another of the many ways her outie has let her down.
But Dylan kisses back with a confidence she wasn’t expecting, like he actually knows what he’s doing. There’s a fluttering in Helly’s abdomen when she eventually steps back, laughing a little. She’s suddenly really looking forward to getting him into bed.
She turns to Mark and finds him staring, his eyes intent and dark, in a way that makes her forget herself for an instant.
“Irv?” Dylan asks. “You in?”
It breaks whatever spell Mark’s expression had over her, and she turns. Irving has taken a seat, at some point, on a wooden chair; it feels strange to see him on anything other than their chairs in the office. Dylan is standing over him, holding out a hand to him.
“I – I don’t know,” Irving says. He’s not quite looking at any of them. “If it would help Helly, I suppose I’d like to...” He hesitates. “It’s a little outside my wheelhouse.”
“C’mon,” Dylan says. “It would suck without you.”
Irving looks up at him. “You’d really...?”
“I know I’m not the guy you’re really into,” Dylan says. “But, like... I’d like to make you feel good. You know, if I can.”
He leans down. Seems to hesitate.
Irving shuts his eyes, for a long few seconds, and then closes the last of the gap between them.
Helly’s never seen a kiss from outside before. She watches it hungrily, fascinated by every small noise or shift in expression, the way Dylan’s hand moves from Irving’s arm to his neck to his jaw.
When she looks at Mark, he’s watching Dylan and Irving with the same intensity she saw in his face after she kissed Dylan herself, and she knows: he wants them just as much as she does.
It makes her want him even more, somehow.
She touches Mark’s shoulder, moves in to kiss him, but he gets there first. He grabs her arms, kisses her like he’s lost something inside her and he’s trying to find it. It’s clumsy and desperate, almost violent, and she craves that: a violence that won’t actually hurt her, that she chose. Something she can think back to, instead, when her mind tries to tug her into the memory of drowning.
She wants the same thing from Irving, suddenly, and she breaks away. Irving and Dylan have finished their kiss, but they’re still close together, talking quietly. It feels intimate; it almost makes her feel bad for interrupting.
She’s going to interrupt anyway.
“So,” she says, breathless. “Irving? Are you going to kiss me or what?”
Irving seems to hesitate, for a long moment. “Er. What, I’m afraid.”
“Okay, what the hell?” Helly asks. “You were making out with Dylan a second ago, so I know this isn’t just about Burt.”
“I’m – I’m sorry.” He looks like he really means it, which mollifies her a little. “I’d like to... fulfil your desires, of course, if I could. Especially after what I’ve put you through.”
“But?” Helly prompts him.
Irving shakes his head. “I don’t think I could... touch a woman in that way.”
Huh. It somehow hadn’t crossed her mind that he might just not be interested. She trusts the rest of the team, she cares about them, so she’d be happy to let them touch her; it’s as simple as that. She guesses it’s not the same for everyone.
“Okay,” she says. “Are you okay with me being here? ’Cause this whole orgy thing was kind of my idea, so it’d really suck if I got kicked out for being a girl.”
“Hey,” Mark says, “no, we want you here. We want Helly here, right, guys?”
“I’m not looking to, ah, kick anyone out,’ Irving says, with careful enunciation. “I’ll return to my desk, and you three can pass the time however you’d like.”
Helly shakes her head. “I’m not saying you have to leave. I’m just saying, if you’re okay with having a woman around, we can figure things out. We can both be part of this without having to fuck each other.” She gestures to Mark with one arm, Dylan with the other. “I mean, there are two other people here. We’ve got options.”
-
Helly keeps to her word, obviously. She fucks Mark, and she fucks Dylan; she leaves Irving alone. She catches his eye at one point, when Mark and Dylan are more focused on each other, and she has to look away quickly.
Somehow, even if he’s the one she’s least involved with, Irving feels like the person on the bed she’s most aware of.
Maybe it’s because she has to stay aware of him, if she doesn’t want to accidentally make contact in a way that makes him uncomfortable; she can be less careful around the others. Maybe it’s that he’s the one who nearly drowned her, he’s the one whose actions she’s trying to replace in her memories.
She wishes she could pull Irving to her, let him touch her in some way that’s not shoving her head underwater. There’s a twining envy in her stomach when she sees Mark kiss him. But he doesn’t want that from her.
She reaches out to him anyway. Not to touch him; she just leaves her hand there in the air between them, a kind of offering, although she doesn’t know what she expects him to do with it.
Irving catches her hand and holds it.
It’s not sexual, but it’s intimate; she can feel the sweat of his palm, she can feel the way every thrust – of Mark into her, of Irving into Dylan – jolts their hold on each other. She meets Irving’s eyes and smiles.
He drops his gaze, as if he’s embarrassed. But he looks up again, a moment later, and smiles back.
For a while, I thought I wouldn't be able to write this fic; I liked the concept, but I just couldn't pin down how to make it work. It turned out the problem was that I was trying to plot it out from Irving's perspective, which meant it was difficult to make the opening clear. The instant I switched to Helly's perspective, the words started coming!
Title: Finding Air
Fandom: Severance
Rating: 15
Pairing: Helly R/Mark S/Dylan G/Irving B, Helly R & Irving B
Wordcount: 3,300
Summary: Irving makes a terrible mistake on the ORTBO.
Warnings: Severance spoilers up to episode 2.04, 'Woe's Hollow'.
There’s freezing water in Helly’s nose, in her mouth, in her eyes. She chokes for breath as Irving drags her up, barely manages half a lungful before she’s plunged under again.
Irving. Irving is doing this to her.
She’s trying to scream when he pulls her up again. The water in her throat smothers her voice; all she can manage is a thin high sound that doesn’t sound like her at all.
“She’s not Helly,” Irving is shouting. “Turn her back!”
I’m me. I’m me. I’m me.
She can’t say it. The water closes over her head again.
There’s shouting from above; it sounds muffled, distant. Irving’s grip is painful in her hair, but it’s nothing to the pain of the cold. Is she going to die; is she going to die here?
Some unclear amount of time later – ten seconds or a minute or a year – Irving’s hold on her jolts, loosens, and then there are arms pulling her out of the water, someone’s holding her. Irving is still yelling – she’s not Helly, she’s not Helly – and someone grabs Helly’s hand, holds it. She doesn’t know who it is, Mark or Dylan or fucking Milchick, but she grips back like it’s the only thing keeping her on dry land.
All she can see is the pale sky above her as she breathes and breathes and breathes and breathes. The unknown hand is tight on hers; her lungs are burning. She can hear Milchick’s voice from somewhere nearby: “Abort the ORTBO, now!”
An instant later, she’s in the elevator. Whoever was holding her, they’re gone; she’s alone.
She buckles, falls to her hands and knees, and the doors slide open in front of her.
Dylan and Mark are outside the elevator. They rush in and help her to her feet, asking if she’s okay, asking a lot of questions she doesn’t have an answer for. Their arms around her feel like safety, and all she can think is that, half an hour ago, she might have thought the same about Irving.
Someone clears their throat nearby, and the three of them turn to see Miss Huang standing there.
“Where’s Irving?” Dylan asks, the moment they’re escorted into Milchick’s office.
“Who the fuck cares where Irving is?” Helly demands, her voice spiking higher than she was aiming for.
“I get it,” Dylan says. “It’s fucked up, what he did to you. But he’s still Irv, right?”
Helly spreads her hands. “Maybe he’s not! Maybe he’s the one whose outie got into his body, and that’s why he decided to fucking murder me.”
“You got rid of the Break Room, right?” Dylan asks, focusing on Milchick. “He can’t be there. So he should be here. Where the fuck is he?”
“Irving B,” Milchick says, “is currently in an isolated productivity chamber, focusing on a solo project, until he has learnt to treat his colleagues with respect.”
Isolated productivity chamber sounds a lot like solitary confinement.
Good. That’s what he deserves. He was holding her head underwater ten minutes ago.
More time has passed for her body since then, obviously. The physical effects are gone. But somehow it’s still hard for her mind to grasp that she’s not freezing, choking on water, struggling for breath against one of the three fucking people she trusted.
She drags Mark into the bathroom at the first opportunity. “Fuck me.”
“Uh,” Mark says.
She tears her top off over her head. Stands there in her skirt and bra, breathing hard. She’s nothing but adrenaline right now, and it has to go somewhere, or her body is just going to keep convincing herself it’s dying.
“Are you sure?” Mark asks. “It felt like something might happen in that tent, but then... well, it didn’t. I thought maybe you didn’t—”
“Mark,” Helly says. “I almost died. Take your pants off.”
He kisses back, fervently, when she kisses him. But a moment later he pushes her gently away from him, holds her at arm’s length, his hand on her shoulder. “You really are... you, right?”
“Mark,” Helly says, appalled, desperate. A part of her is terrified he’s about to shove her face into one of the sinks.
“Right, yeah, of course. Sorry. Of course you are.” He kisses her again. “I know you are. I’d be able to tell if you weren’t.”
It’s been nearly two weeks without Irving.
It’s starting to get to Helly.
It was getting to Dylan from the beginning; that’s obvious. He’s been more subdued than usual, more snappish. It started to bother Mark not long afterwards; Helly could tell. She just gritted her teeth and focused on her work, determined not to miss him.
Fine. She misses him, she fucking guesses. The guy tried to drown her, and apparently that’s exactly the kind of person she wants in her life.
Not that she has many people in her life. There are three people in the whole fucking world she cares about. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that it doesn’t feel great when one of them is taken away.
She wonders how Irving feels in his isolated productivity chamber.
Halfway through the third week, Milchick brings Irving into the MDR office.
Helly gets to her feet without thinking; she’s vaguely aware, at the edges of her focus on Irving, of the other two doing the same. She and Irving hold each other’s eyes for a long, long moment.
“Irving B,” Milchick says, “has taken some time to reflect, and regrets his actions on the ORTBO. He is being released back to the care of your department on probation. Any further acts of violence will be met with immediate termination.”
Helly barely listens. Nothing Milchick says can be trusted. She’s more interested in what Irving has to say for himself.
“You gonna tell me why you nearly drowned me?” she asks.
Irving swallows. The way he’s standing feels stiff, awkward. “I thought I was saving you.”
“From my outie, right?” Helly asks. “You still think I’m her?”
Irving shakes his head. “I was... paranoid, on the ORTBO. When I look back, I didn’t have enough evidence. I—” He takes in a breath. Even from halfway across the room, Helly can hear the way it wavers. “I’m sorry, Helly. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She believes him. There’s shame in every line of his stance.
“I’ll leave you to repair your workplace dynamic,” Milchick says.
It feels like Helly can breathe a little easier, once Milchick is out of the room. But, when she looks at Irving, a part of her can still taste icy water in her throat.
“So, what evidence did you have?” she asks, with sarcastic emphasis on evidence.
Irving breaks eye contact with her. It’s a moment before he speaks. “I had a dream.”
“You had,” Helly says, “a fucking dream?”
“It told me you were an Eagan.”
She’s about to protest – it didn’t tell you anything, it was a dream – but that stops her in her tracks.
“Holy shit,” she says. “You’re actually right.”
“Helly?” Mark asks, sounding alarmed.
“But that’s not me,” she says, quickly. “That’s my outie. I was going to tell you guys. Just—” When she’d come to terms with it herself; when she’d braced herself for their reactions; when the thought of talking about it didn’t make her want to throw up. “When it would be useful, I guess.”
“Okay,” Dylan says, “we definitely need to talk about that later. But right now...” He’s looking at Irving. “You’re back for good, right?”
“I tried to resign,” Irving says. He meets Helly’s eyes again. “I didn’t want to force you to work with someone who’d attacked you. My outie refused my request, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus,” Dylan whispers.
Helly’s throat tightens, a little, at the thought that Irving could have resigned. That they might finally be seeing him again, only to learn he’d be leaving their lives permanently. She finds herself taking a few steps towards him.
“Yeah, outies are bastards,” she says. “I guess I can’t blame you for trying to drown mine.”
Irving makes a small, choked noise, and a moment later he’s pulled her into his arms. It startles a quiet sound out of Helly in return. She can count the number of times she’s been hugged on one hand.
“I’m so sorry,” Irving whispers into her shoulder.
She wishes she could just forget about it. He didn’t want to hurt her; he was trying to attack her outie. It’s not like Helly can’t understand that particular impulse.
But every morning she sees Irving’s face and she finds herself back there, struggling against him as he drags her towards the water. They can’t talk the way they used to; they can barely even look at each other. The office is even quieter now than it was when it was just the three of them.
She has to do something about it. This office is her whole fucking life; she’s not going to give up the very few bright spots she gets here. She misses the closeness; she misses—
The thought catches in her mind. She misses the closeness.
At lunch, she stands from her desk and stretches. “You guys want to take a trip to the perpetuity wing?”
“Why did you bring us here?” Irving asks, as Helly leads them into Kier’s house. “There are closer places to have a frank conversation, if that’s your intention.”
It looks like Mark might already have a sense of what’s on her mind. His eyes flicker between Helly and Kier Eagan’s bed.
“There aren’t closer places with a bed, though,” Helly says.
Something closes itself off in Irving’s expression. “If you and Mark just came here to consummate your sordid workplace relationship, why are you wasting our—”
Helly raises her eyebrows at him. It’s her ‘you tried to drown me; are you really giving me shit right now?’ expression, and Irving evidently gets the intent behind it. He cuts himself off.
“For your information,” she says, “we’ve already consummated our sordid relationship. I brought the whole team here because I thought it could be a little more sordid.”
“Wait, seriously?” Dylan asks. “Uh, that applies to everything you just said. Seriously?”
“Uh, wait,” Mark says, over him, “are you saying...?”
Helly grins at them. She’s trying to give off a casual air – this is light, this is fun, this isn’t a big deal – but she can feel her own heart beating hard; this definitely isn’t something she’s done before in her short, restricted life. “I think we should all fuck.”
Irving makes an inarticulate noise. It sounds like something is stuck in his throat.
“Uh,” Mark says. There’s a pause of a good five seconds while he apparently searches for what comes after that. “It... feels like we could have discussed this in advance. I feel like our sordid workplace relationship should give me a say in this.”
“Sorry,” Helly says. “You’re probably right. I’ll add it to the department calendar next time.”
“Next time?” Mark echoes.
She has to laugh at the look on his face. “Okay, let’s talk about this.”
“Okay,” Mark says. “I – I’d like to know... why you’re suggesting this, I guess.”
Helly takes a deep breath, opts for honesty. She’s seen where mistrust leads.
“The ORTBO was fucked up,” she says. “I’d like to forget about it. And I thought... I don’t know, maybe we could do our own team-building thing. To replace it in our heads, kind of.”
“Team-building,” Irving echoes, a little faintly.
“Most of our lives is just sitting at those desks,” Helly says. “I don’t know about you, but anything that’s different really sticks out in my memories. I don’t want the last big different thing we all did together to be that.”
Mark doesn’t say anything. But his expression has shifted, a little, from confusion to something more sympathetic. It makes Helly a little uncomfortable, makes her want to lighten the tone.
She drops her voice. “And, hey, you can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to fuck on the Kier bed.”
Mark and Dylan exchange quick glances in a way that Helly suddenly really wants to know more about.
She tries to stay focused. “It’ll be fun. And it’ll be – I don’t know. I like you guys. It’d be nice, you know? To do this with you.”
“I... I understand, I think,” Mark says, after a moment. “It kind of makes sense to me.”
Helly waggles her eyebrows at him. “You sure you don’t want to keep me all to yourself?”
It’s a joke, kind of. But, at the same time, she’s really asking. She wants to do this, but...
“I don’t think it’d really matter if I did,” he says. “If it’s something you want to do, I don’t want to stand in your way. This place has taken enough choice away from us already.”
“I mean,” Helly says, “yeah, but your choices matter too. I’m not going to make you bang your colleagues if you don’t want to.”
Mark’s eyes widen slightly. He looks quickly at Dylan, at Irving. “Oh, so you’re not saying – you’re not saying you just want to—”
“I said we should all fuck,” Helly says. “Do you want me to draw you a diagram?”
Dylan raises a hand. “I actually kind of want to see that.”
“I’ll draw something afterwards, if this is happening,” Helly says. She probably can’t manage anything more than lewd stick figures, but, hey, she never said it’d be a good diagram. “It can be a memento of the occasion. Are you interested in doing this?”
“Yeah, sounds kind of awesome,” Dylan says. “I’m in.”
Helly grins. “Glad to have you on board.”
She crosses to him in a couple of steps. Kisses him.
She’s clumsy with this, she’s pretty sure. She still doesn’t have much experience, doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to feel like. If this is supposed to be something she gets the instinct for from her outie, it’s just another of the many ways her outie has let her down.
But Dylan kisses back with a confidence she wasn’t expecting, like he actually knows what he’s doing. There’s a fluttering in Helly’s abdomen when she eventually steps back, laughing a little. She’s suddenly really looking forward to getting him into bed.
She turns to Mark and finds him staring, his eyes intent and dark, in a way that makes her forget herself for an instant.
“Irv?” Dylan asks. “You in?”
It breaks whatever spell Mark’s expression had over her, and she turns. Irving has taken a seat, at some point, on a wooden chair; it feels strange to see him on anything other than their chairs in the office. Dylan is standing over him, holding out a hand to him.
“I – I don’t know,” Irving says. He’s not quite looking at any of them. “If it would help Helly, I suppose I’d like to...” He hesitates. “It’s a little outside my wheelhouse.”
“C’mon,” Dylan says. “It would suck without you.”
Irving looks up at him. “You’d really...?”
“I know I’m not the guy you’re really into,” Dylan says. “But, like... I’d like to make you feel good. You know, if I can.”
He leans down. Seems to hesitate.
Irving shuts his eyes, for a long few seconds, and then closes the last of the gap between them.
Helly’s never seen a kiss from outside before. She watches it hungrily, fascinated by every small noise or shift in expression, the way Dylan’s hand moves from Irving’s arm to his neck to his jaw.
When she looks at Mark, he’s watching Dylan and Irving with the same intensity she saw in his face after she kissed Dylan herself, and she knows: he wants them just as much as she does.
It makes her want him even more, somehow.
She touches Mark’s shoulder, moves in to kiss him, but he gets there first. He grabs her arms, kisses her like he’s lost something inside her and he’s trying to find it. It’s clumsy and desperate, almost violent, and she craves that: a violence that won’t actually hurt her, that she chose. Something she can think back to, instead, when her mind tries to tug her into the memory of drowning.
She wants the same thing from Irving, suddenly, and she breaks away. Irving and Dylan have finished their kiss, but they’re still close together, talking quietly. It feels intimate; it almost makes her feel bad for interrupting.
She’s going to interrupt anyway.
“So,” she says, breathless. “Irving? Are you going to kiss me or what?”
Irving seems to hesitate, for a long moment. “Er. What, I’m afraid.”
“Okay, what the hell?” Helly asks. “You were making out with Dylan a second ago, so I know this isn’t just about Burt.”
“I’m – I’m sorry.” He looks like he really means it, which mollifies her a little. “I’d like to... fulfil your desires, of course, if I could. Especially after what I’ve put you through.”
“But?” Helly prompts him.
Irving shakes his head. “I don’t think I could... touch a woman in that way.”
Huh. It somehow hadn’t crossed her mind that he might just not be interested. She trusts the rest of the team, she cares about them, so she’d be happy to let them touch her; it’s as simple as that. She guesses it’s not the same for everyone.
“Okay,” she says. “Are you okay with me being here? ’Cause this whole orgy thing was kind of my idea, so it’d really suck if I got kicked out for being a girl.”
“Hey,” Mark says, “no, we want you here. We want Helly here, right, guys?”
“I’m not looking to, ah, kick anyone out,’ Irving says, with careful enunciation. “I’ll return to my desk, and you three can pass the time however you’d like.”
Helly shakes her head. “I’m not saying you have to leave. I’m just saying, if you’re okay with having a woman around, we can figure things out. We can both be part of this without having to fuck each other.” She gestures to Mark with one arm, Dylan with the other. “I mean, there are two other people here. We’ve got options.”
Helly keeps to her word, obviously. She fucks Mark, and she fucks Dylan; she leaves Irving alone. She catches his eye at one point, when Mark and Dylan are more focused on each other, and she has to look away quickly.
Somehow, even if he’s the one she’s least involved with, Irving feels like the person on the bed she’s most aware of.
Maybe it’s because she has to stay aware of him, if she doesn’t want to accidentally make contact in a way that makes him uncomfortable; she can be less careful around the others. Maybe it’s that he’s the one who nearly drowned her, he’s the one whose actions she’s trying to replace in her memories.
She wishes she could pull Irving to her, let him touch her in some way that’s not shoving her head underwater. There’s a twining envy in her stomach when she sees Mark kiss him. But he doesn’t want that from her.
She reaches out to him anyway. Not to touch him; she just leaves her hand there in the air between them, a kind of offering, although she doesn’t know what she expects him to do with it.
Irving catches her hand and holds it.
It’s not sexual, but it’s intimate; she can feel the sweat of his palm, she can feel the way every thrust – of Mark into her, of Irving into Dylan – jolts their hold on each other. She meets Irving’s eyes and smiles.
He drops his gaze, as if he’s embarrassed. But he looks up again, a moment later, and smiles back.
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This is really lovely.
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Oh, this is really well-written!
I love the shock of the physical transition from something that's just happened in her mind to suddenly it being later.
That is perfectly consistent with the vibe of the show, the blend of corporate speak, infantilization, and torture.
I keep wanting to say something about this, but all that comes out is keymashing and then deciding my keymash looks weird and deleting it.
That's an extremely Irving response!
Waffle parties!
Helly discovers some pople are gay.
Aw!
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I'm glad you picked out the 'I’d be able to tell if you weren’t' line! I thought that would be a fun touch to include, and by 'fun' I mean 'awful'.
Thank you so much! ♥