Devon thinks she might be sobbing. Gemma is running across the parking lot, looking so like herself she feels like a mirage. The first inkling Devon has that something might be wrong is the tears streaming down Gemma’s face. The second is that her brother is not immediately behind her, that Gemma doesn’t seem to be heading for Devon’s car so much as just away from the emergency exit.
Devon scrambles out of the driver’s seat. “Gemma!” She calls, her voice shattering under the word. “Gem—“
She sees the moment Gemma notices her, the way her eyes widen. Devon jogs toward her and Gemma changes course, speeds toward Devon instead of the edge of the parking lot. They crash into one another with little regard for anything else, Devon wrapping her arms around Gemma’s middle and tugging her close. They’re both crying, so hard that Devon’s vision has begun to blur, and Gemma is shaking in her hold.
“Gem, Gemma,” Devon repeats, softening her voice and lifting a hand to rub circles on Gemma’s back. “You’re okay. You’re okay, honey, I’m here.”
“He’s gone,” Gemma says through tears, breathing so heavily that Devon takes a second to parse the words.
Her hand stills against the plane of Gemma’s shoulders.
“He didn’t— he didn’t come with me,” Gemma says into Devon’s clavicle. She pulls away just enough to look Devon in the eyes, her face desperate. “Why did he stay, Devon?”
“What?” Devon manages, her heartbeat in her ears. “What do you mean, stayed?”
Gemma shakes her head, disbelief stamped plainly across her face. “There was— he turned around.”
Devon’s stomach flips. “No,” she says, unwilling to believe it. She puts her hands on Gemma’s shoulders, peers around her as if she’ll see Mark rounding the corner. “He wasn’t— he was supposed to come with you. He talked to—“ She cuts herself off, reeling.
Gemma, the two of them always able to read each other, must see something in her eyes. Despite whatever she’s just escaped from, the pull Devon feels to comfort her, Gemma reaches up to grasp Devon’s hands and gently pull them down, pulls her into her own brusingly tight hug.
Devon sobs into her hair.
Devon hadn’t realized there was a version of this story where her brother stays in hell. A version of him who wants so badly to live that he’ll let the other half of his brain die for it. Had her brother felt that way?
She bites down on her lip, hard, blinks back tears. No, not felt, she corrects herself. Feel. Mark Scout is not dead. Not anymore than Gemma had been, and she’s here snoring gently beside Devon on the couch in their new apartment. (Ricken had kept the house, perhaps that spiteful part of him that had first reared its ugly head when he’d reminded her writing Lumon’s propaganda for them would keep her housed in luxury.)
It startles Devon to realize she doesn’t know the answer. Her brother wanted Gemma to live, and his innie had granted him that wish, but she’s adrift with regards to if he cared about his own life nearly so much as his work counterpart must, to love life so much even through despair that you’d give anything for just another moment of it. The Mark she knew was so deep in depression that she’d welcomed his choice for experimental brain surgery in the name of capitalism with open arms, hoping it might return some piece of her brother to her.
She remembers what she’d told his innie, when he’d begged her for answers. He’d hoped to spare you the pain. She’s afraid to think about what it means that, though it hadn’t worked, some piece of her brother had clung tightly onto life despite.
Gemma hadn’t had enough of the pieces, had desperately tried to puzzle out why the man she loved had turned away from her. He was looking at this woman, she’d told Devon, wrung dry of her tears for the moment, just staring at her.And I was screaming at him, begging and crying, and he just… walked away.
Devon barely has enough to comfort her, has only met her brother’s innie the two times, one of which was punctuated with his anger, his distrust. She can’t lie, it stings, even still. She knows that piece of her brother has no memory of her, no childhood to call upon, but she’d hoped there was some innate connection they shared despite.
She settles for walking Gemma through what she does know, hoping it helps. It’s not about not loving you, she says, because she’s certain of that— as sure as the sky is blue, her brother loves Gemma— it’s… we asked him for a suicide mission.
Looking back on it, Devon can’t find it in herself to be ashamed of the request. She doesn’t do the whole innies aren’t people thing that Lumon thrives on, that Cobel and, to some extent, every employee of Lumon she’s ever met, has tried to sell her on, but it’s her brother— the outie— with the real, actual life. The sister, the niece, the wife. The childhood and the trauma and the opinions and the instinct to lash out when he’s scared. She’s got empathy for his innie, but Mark wasn’t trying to give him a bad life. They could’ve shared his, messy as it is.
Her brother had explained— after his innie had stormed out on them, handed them the ultimatum— that his innie had freaked out about it being Mark’s life, not his. Which isn’t, Devon had gently pointed out to him through his frustration, untrue. But she’d been right by her brother’s side on the idea that the life his innie would be losing was… incomplete. Unhappy.
It honestly kind of fucking astonishes her that there exists some version of her brother that had protected even the shittiest facsimile of life.
She’d called Lumon, in the immediate aftermath. Mostly dealt with voice recordings and chipper assistants, phone trees that circled the drain and led nowhere. So she’d called Cobel, demanded that they release him.
“He’s not a prisoner,” Cobel had replied, that tinge to her voice that reminded Devon she considered herself above explaining the intricacies of any of this to someone like her. “Mark S wants to remain alive. Even if I were on the severed floor, I could go up to him and offer to take him all the way to the exit myself, and I expect he’d turn me down.”
It wasn’t the answer she’d wanted, so she’d gone to her brother’s house, let herself in with the key under his mat for emergencies. Dug through his files until she found the contact for Seth Milchick, a neatly embossed business card that pre-dated the ascension to floor manager Mark had described. And then called him.
“At Lumon,” he’d begun, after her rambling had come to a stop, and Devon had immediately known he was about to spew some bullshit company line, “we support our employees in whatever decision they feel best supports their work-life balance.”
She’d hung up on him and thrown her phone across the room.
Gemma had elaborated some on what she remembered of the testing floor, the discussion prompting Devon to drop to the floor beside Gemma where she’d collapsed into tears and wrap her in a back-breaking hug, swaying them from side to side.
Though she had no memories of what each room had entailed, Gemma had explained, there had been twenty-six of them. Some of them she’d visited again and again, others only once. She always came out the other side with a raw, uncertain ache, sometimes physical.
“My jaw,” she’d told Devon, her hands balling into fists at her sides. “My hands. My legs. All over, sometimes. They wouldn’t tell me why.”
Devon had been struck, then, with the memory of driving up to the birthing cabins with Cobel, with Miss Marsha White and one of Jame’s and the horrifyingly indicative interior decor. She’d felt distinctly ill.
Devon buys way too much takeout that night, spreads it out across their shitty little coffee table and spends hours fighting to make Gemma laugh instead of cry.
As the days roll on, it becomes clearer and clearer that Devon’s brother is not coming back, not so long as his innie is in control. What she really needs— assuming reasoning with this version of her brother is out— is a way to put her brother back at the wheel, even just for a moment. She won’t give up, can’t, not even for a minute.
Devon is a determined woman, a woman who kept driving her alcoholic, grieving, suicidal brother to stupid events and parties and dinners and anything just to get him out of the house, get him in front of people. She took his rage when he dished it out and pushed back, yelled at him for smelling like a distillery and snapping at people. She hadn’t let him slink silently into the shadows, and she won’t let his fucking worksona keep him trapped in Lumon.
The problem is she doesn’t exactly have a plan. She had one inside man, and he’s currently clutching his life between his teeth. The few Lumon employees she knows are loathe to help her, and neither Cobel nor the neurosurgeon, wherever and whoever she is, give two shits about bringing him home safe and sound.
The one small relief she has is that Mark’s innie clearly is no longer his employer’s biggest fan. He isn’t staying in capitalist hell because he likes the view, he’s staying because it’s that or death. And that, at least, Devon can understand. Can respect.
She runs this all down to Gemma, because that’s what she does now. She makes two cups of coffee in the morning, watches Gemma tend to her flowers as they overtake the apartment, and tells her everything she’s thinking— listens to everything Gemma has to share in return. It’s an odd but not unwelcome sensation, the switch from being with Ricken because she knows how to read him, knows what to expect of him, to opening herself up to someone simply as a display of trust. Something human amidst the chaos— I will be honest with you as you are honest with me and we will make our way through this shitstorm together.
Of course, she knows Gemma too— has known her as long as Mark had been bringing her around, since they’d been dating— but it’s different. This is Gemma after an unreasonable trauma, something she doesn’t even have all the answers to because they were stripped from her head, Gemma with holes in her heart and her memory that Devon can’t hope to fill. All Devon can do is be there with her, allow her to be angry and vengeful and horrified and miserable in turns, and be grateful when Gemma returns the favor.
There is no such hole in Devon’s memory. Instead, she is acutely aware of the years where Gemma was absent, the way grief sucked her brother in like a black hole and never returned him. She remembers sobbing at Gemma’s funeral, taking an orchid home from the plant store a week after they put her casket in the ground and watching it slowly die for days until she finally stayed up until four AM deep-diving into how to take care of orchids and wrenched it back from the brink of death. She remembers borrowing Anna Karenina from the library and reading it again and again because Gemma had recommended it to her years before and she’d never tried to crack it open. The loss of her family, one of her people, and the way she fought like hell to stop it from meaning the loss of another.
So, because it’s how their life works now, Devon explains her grief to Gemma.
“Jesus,” Gemma replies, once she’s laid it all out. She reaches across the kitchen counter and grabs Devon’s hand, gives it a comforting squeeze. After a moment, before Devon can find the words to thank her, Gemma speaks up again. “We won’t leave him there, Dev. We’ll get him out. You guys didn’t leave me in there.”
Devon’s hit by a wave of pain, uses her free hand to scrub down her face. Because they had left Gemma in there, is the thing— not once they’d realized she was trapped in the labyrinth, but before, they’d easily and willingly believed her dead and gone. They’d buried her.
“I’m sorry,” Devon says, watches the confusion play out across Gemma’s features. “We shouldn’t— we should’ve looked for you. Should’ve clung to your life.”
The confusion melts into understanding, so tender it hurts to look at. “Devon,” Gemma begins, leaning forward to catch her eye as Devon ducks her head, “I don’t blame you and Mark. He identified my body. The police came to our doorstep. I wouldn’t have wanted him to spiral into hysteria, telling everybody he was sure his wife whose funeral you’d all been to wasn’t really dead. God knows what would’ve happened— they would’ve put him in a psych hold.”
Devon isn’t sure the alternative was any better.
Still, it’s enough to remind her of the extent of the cover-up, the way Mark had lost his temper at her in the diner and listed off the horrible ways the grief of Gemma’s death had haunted him, the reasons he was unable to follow her in her suspicions of his innie’s words. Her jaw tenses, a fresh pulse of anger.
“Whose—“ She cuts herself off, swallows hard. “Whose fucking body was that, Gemma?”
Gemma’s eyes widen, something like horror reflected back at Devon. “Holy shit,” she replies eloquently, and Devon can’t help but nod.
There’s a death certificate, Devon thinks mutely, flexing her hand in Gemma’s as she recalls it. And then, another thought, like a bright light on the other side of the tunnel— the certificate is at Mark’s house. In the basement, with the rest of Gemma’s things. It’s so close she can taste it.
Gemma’s watching her carefully, like she’s not sure what to expect next.
“We can take them down,” Devon says, jumping from thought to thought with all the dexterity of a Scout. Gemma is practiced in the art of their train wrecks of processes, follows along without stopping her. “Gem, that’s how we get him out—” She laughs, perhaps semi-hysterically, with the relief that follows the realization. “Let’s see that PR bitch spin this.”
Gemma tilts her head curiously at the epithet, but there’s a smile growing on her face, the kind Devon has missed for years.
“Natalie,” Devon clarifies, “Kalen, I think? She’s like their fucking puppet, it’s beyond creepy.” She cuts herself off again, winces at her choice of words. “Not— I mean, she’s not severed, I don’t think. She’s Lumon’s public face, more so than the Eagans. And she has a direct line to their board, or something?” It’s a part of the story she got from Cobel, actually, when she’d been telling Mark and Devon about his innie, distinguishing Helena Eagan, the next in line for the throne, from the face they were used to seeing on talk shows defending the company line.
Helena had been more public since her own severance, what with the televised exhibit that made Devon sick to her stomach, the desperate, fearful speech replayed for days afterward. Helena had released a statement shortly after brushing it under the rug, calling the whole thing a joke, but it didn’t exactly strike Devon as funny. The timing had lined up a little too neatly with a version of her brother she hadn’t seen since he was a child appearing at Ricken’s reading, pulling her aside and turning her world inside-out.
After a minute, Gemma snaps her fingers, the pieces clicking together. “The one who flirted with Ricken,” she echoes, recalling Devon’s own description of the events that lead to her and her husband’s separation. She smirks, that sly little expression that tugs at something deep in Devon’s gut she’d rather not examine for fear of what she’ll find. “You don’t have to be jealous of her, you know.” She lets her eyes drop down Devon’s frame meaningfully. “No way she’s giving you reason to be.”
Devon scoffs, warmth flooding her cheeks. She hopes she’s not blushing, god. “Alright,” she says, all played up disbelief at Gemma’s teasing, primarily for the way it makes Gemma throw her head back in laughter, “keep it in your pants, Gem.”
It’s good to see her light again, to see her moving and breathing the way she’s only been in dreams for too long. So much of her liveliness is now often marred by weariness, grief, and rage, that when Devon catches a spare moment of Gemma’s joy, she wants to clutch it tightly between her fingers.
Still, they return to the topic at-hand, their smiles settling into rueful little things. “Ready to tear them to shreds?” Devon asks, squeezing Gemma’s hand again, still intertwined with her own on the butcher-block counter.
Gemma takes a wavering breath and then sets her face into a serious, hard line, her eyes full of fire, and nods.
Devon grins. “You fucked with the wrong family, Eagans.”
The thing about dragging the corpse of a company into the light is that it’s fucking exhausting. It’s early wake-up times for video calls into television news networks; sending emails to deny the crazy Kier fanboys interviews; people somehow finding their fucking cellphone numbers even though Gemma’s is brand-new, a replacement for the one that was taken out of service after her funeral. Ricken watches Eleanor Tuesdays and Thursdays and Devon tries her best to schedule stuff for then, desperate not to give her ex-husband more time with her daughter than strictly necessary.
He’s been trying to convince her to come back, sending her pleadingly verbose texts that remind her of his books and make her sick to her stomach. I love our child, he’d said, as Devon placed her baby carefully in the bassinet in the house she used to share with him, you know that. This beautiful little collaboration we created. I love you. We can make this work, babe— I want what you want.
Devon had rushed out of the house. She’s not sure she breathes again until her car pulls into the driveway of the apartment, Gemma safely tucked under an afghan on the couch inside.
When she unlocks the door, Gemma peers up from behind the edge of the blanket, a soft little sleepy smile on her face that goes protective in an instant when she registers Devon’s expression.
“What did that dumbass do?” Gemma asks, sitting up and scooching to one side of the couch so Devon can take a seat beside her.
Devon snorts out a teary laugh. “He’s trying his best,” she defends, though she’s honestly not sure why. After a beat, she relents, collapsing against the back of their shitty thrift-store couch. (A dead woman and a stay-at-home mom do not a life of luxury make.) “Fuck,” she says, exhausted, covering her face with her hands, “why does he have to be such a fucking idiot?”
There’s the warmth of Gemma’s thigh touching hers, an encouraging little hum from beside her even though Devon is still staring at the pinpricks of light peeking between her fingers.
“I just wanted— I wanted someone who would take care of me, of our family,” Devon says, slowly dragging her hands down her face until they complete the journey and land in her lap. She groans. “Is that so bad? Was that really such a fucking selfish thing to want?”
Gemma shakes her head. “Ricken is… odd,” she replies carefully, “he’s always been a little off the beaten path, but you— you thought you knew what to expect of him. There’s no harm in choosing the safe option, you know. The pragmatic one.”
It’s a balm to Devon’s frayed nerves, Gemma who has always seemed to be both practical and constantly doing the right thing, and Devon’s lips curl up in appreciation. She leans her head on Gemma’s shoulder, settles against her with a sigh.
“I hate that I was wrong,” Devon admits, something shameful in it. “I wish he had just been… just been silly, y’know? Harmless.”
There’s a long quiet moment where they just sit, pressed together, the itch of the wool of the afghan just brushing Devon’s cheek. In the silence, Devon realizes she can hear the sound of twinkling piano in the background, the classical music Gemma sometimes favors to unwind on low from the record player on the bookshelf.
She’d used to enjoy jazz more than she does now, Devon thinks, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, pulling Mark or Devon or Ricken or whoever would indulge her into overdramatic dances. Since her return, since she crawled out of hell and back into Devon’s arms, Gemma hasn’t played jazz once.
“You know,” Gemma begins finally, and Devon had become so sure she had nothing more to say that the words send a little shock through her, “Lumon owned the fertility clinic Mark and I used.”
Devon hadn’t known, actually. She pulls away from the crook of Gemma’s neck to see her more clearly, lets her face reflect her surprise.
The resolve is clear in the set of Gemma’s jaw, so Devon does her the service of not pointing out this is part of the story she doesn’t need to share.
“That’s how they found me,” Gemma says, her voice firm and unwavering, “the reason they knew where I was. They were—“ She pauses, blinks back a wave of grief. “They’d been watching me. Watching us,” she corrects, “and Mark was— he was so not their biggest fan.” She laughs dryly, maybe at herself or maybe at the memory. “I can’t even imagine why he decided that was a solution, Dev, god.”
Devon feels it necessary to interject here, having witnessed her brother’s downfall after Gemma’s ‘death.’ “Grief makes people do crazy things,” she says, and Gemma sighs, nods.
“Anyway. My point is— or my question is, I suppose— am I to blame for Lumon’s actions?” Gemma asks, every bit the philosophical Russian lit professor Devon remembers.
Devon feels the question snap in her chest, a rubber band pulled tight and released. “Fucking— of course not. Jesus, Gemma, of course not.”
Gemma smiles, closed-lip, rueful. Lets the silence hang and raises an eyebrow.
Something slides, warm and slow, up Devon’s spine.
She sighs. “I hate it when you’re right.”
Gemma laughs, then, so bright and full-throated that Devon feels a smile growing on her face despite herself. “No you don’t,” Gemma chimes, and then, teasing, “and I’m always right.”
Things haven’t been going well, exactly, but it’s been such relatively smooth sailing that it’s a surprise when things go downhill, fast.
It’s a bright, sunny morning, Gemma humming to herself while she waters her plants. They have a follow-up interview scheduled with The New York Times, wanting to clear up some details with the pair of them after reaching out to Natalie to get a quote from Lumon. Devon’s not exactly excited to see what the company had to say, especially after her calling Mark their prisoner in her own interview.
Abruptly and without warning, Gemma staggers, the watering can shaking so violently in her hands that it spills into a neat little puddle on the hardwood floor.
Devon scrambles up from the kitchen table, grabs at Gemma’s biceps and ducks her head to catch her eye. There’s a distant, nervous kind of gleam in Gemma’s expression and it makes Devon’s anxiety spike. “Gem?” She calls softly, her brows furrowing.
“Where— where am I?” Gemma asks haltingly, and Devon blinks back tears at the words.
“You’re at home, honey,” she replies, “you’re safe.” These two things, at least, she knows to be true.
But Gemma’s face doesn’t clear. Cold, hard fear settles like a rock in Devon’s gut, followed by a sudden suspicion that she’s mad at herself for not planning for in advance.
“Do you know my name?” She asks Gemma, lets one hand fall to her side so she’s not trapping her, just cradling one arm to keep them tethered.
Gemma shakes her head apologetically. “I just had an appointment,” she says, “shouldn’t there be time before the next one?”
It’s so painfully like Devon’s previous experience with innies, except somehow not at all the same, the version of her brother having some sort of grip on his own needs and wants. Mark had seemed so like himself, just… off-center. Gemma seems lost in comparison, and Devon wants to smash something.
“No appointments today, sweetie,” Devon replies gently. “I’m Devon. I’m going to take care of you, okay?”
Gemma nods, but she still looks wary. “Sometimes it feels like all there ever is is appointments,” she says, “but that can’t be right, can it?”
Devon bites her tongue, thinks she might taste blood. She forces a smile, so fake it stings her cheeks, and steps away from Gemma, points her toward the couch. “Why don’t you sit down,” she suggests, “and I can make you something. Tea? Coffee?”
Gemma moves slowly toward the couch, finally taking a careful seat, and then seems to consider Devon’s question. “I… don’t know,” she replies, after a moment. “I’m sorry.”
Devon shakes her head. “Nothing to apologize for,” she insists. “Why don’t I make you a cup of tea, something with lavender? Good for the nerves,” she suggests, and Gemma nods.
Gemma’s favorite brand of tea is sitting on the counter, and Devon digs a bag out of the box, sinks it in a mug full of hot water. In her back pocket, her phone buzzes with an incoming text.
Overtime Contingency, it reads, from an unknown number. Not so fun when you’re not the one in charge, is it?
Devon drops her phone on the counter with a clatter, presses both palms to the wood to ground herself.
“Are you alright?” Gemma asks from behind her, closer than Devon expects. The question is so painfully Gemma that it hurts.
Devon spins on her heel, sees Gemma standing at the doorframe between the living room and the kitchen, her head tilted curiously. The fear is mostly gone from her expression, now.
“I’m fine,” Devon replies tightly, then, reminding herself that this is not Gemma— or, at least, that it’s a version of her to be gentler with— she amends, “I’m okay, thanks.”
Gemma’s lips twist like she doesn’t believe her, but she doesn’t challenge her. Behind Devon, her phone buzzes again, the noise louder now that it isn’t muffled by her pants pocket. Devon feels her whole body tense. Before she can turn to look, Gemma’s eyes fall shut, something like nausea passing across her expression. Devon steps forward, terrified, as Gemma’s balance wavers again, and she stumbles into Devon’s arms.
When her eyes open again, Gemma breathes out Devon’s name. Devon tugs her into a crushing hug, feels the way Gemma’s hands settle on her back, confused but certain and comfortable.
“What happened?” Gemma asks. “What— Jesus, I could’ve sworn I was doing my rounds with the plants.”
Devon chokes out a tearful, shocked laugh. “Yeah,” she agrees, her voice breaking. She coughs, tries to get her legs back under her. “Um…” She stares at Gemma for a long moment, at the contours of her face and the familiarity in how she holds Devon close to her. “I want you to come look at something,” she decides after a moment, and leads Gemma to the other side of the kitchen, until they’re staring at Devon’s phone, still sitting on the counter beside a steaming mug of lavender tea.
Gemma reaches for them both when Devon pushes them in her direction, the message alerts still taunting on her lock screen. After the first, there’s a new one, the one she’d heard just before Gemma came back to herself.
Do be careful who you make your enemy, Ms. Scout, it reads, and Devon hears the way Gemma’s breath catches as she reads it. Her hand stops cold before it reaches the mug of tea, frozen in numb shock.
“Gemma?” Devon asks carefully, watching the way her hand closes into a fist, moves back to her side without the tea.
“I want to burn them to the fucking ground,” Gemma replies, quiet, but calm and steady and sure.
Devon reaches for her fist, unfurls her fingers and laces them with her own. “We will.”
The thing about the mess and the grief and the rage is that Gemma and Devon are alone in it, the two of them amidst a sea of enemies and uneasy allies. The nation is on their side, mostly, but it seems to depend on the day, on how recently and neatly Natalie has crafted a trap out of her words.
It’s easy to feel, then, like it’s the two of them against the world, like all that’s keeping Devon sane is the noise of Gemma clattering around in the bathroom, the sight of all the little pieces of her in the apartment they share.
It’s easy, then, when Gemma says can I do something unbelievably stupid, to nod. Devon thinks she might not ever deny Gemma anything she wants ever again, not even when her response to Devon’s easy agreement is to step closer and box her against the bathroom sink, just their breath and the smell of Gemma’s soap between them.
Still, because Gemma is the most thoughtful woman Devon has ever met, even when she’s making decisions from deep within her grief, she pauses, hesitates just an inch away from Devon’s lips. Are you sure, her eyes are asking, and Devon curls a hand to her jaw and pulls her the final few steps.
It is, undeniably, the worst decision either of them have ever made. Devon slips Gemma’s bottom lip between her teeth anyway, savors the little groan she makes in response. Gemma slants their lips more comfortably together, kisses her deeper, needier, and Devon’s blood is singing, her veins on fire. Gemma’s hands slip underneath the hem of Devon’s shirt, play against the stretch marks on her skin that Eleanor left on her way out.
It’s impossible to care about the repercussions, like this. Gemma is real and breathing and her nails are scratching up Devon’s spine as Devon’s hand slides further into her hair, tugs at the length of it.
I get it, she thinks, half-wild, the way you want to demand and defend even the slightest hint of life in the middle of all your chaos. I get it now, she thinks, and licks into Gemma’s mouth. Forgive me.