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She’s walked through severed doorways hundreds of times now and the experience is always nearly identical, much like the doorways themselves. She opens a nondescript door with some seemingly random name monogrammed next to it, experiences an intense sense of vertigo, and suddenly she’s stepping out of that same door in the opposite direction. Sometimes she’s left with a physical or emotional sensation that wasn’t there moments before, teeth inexplicably aching, shoulders tense with frustration, contextless fragments of experiences she’ll never know, and of course whatever inane costume they’ve made her wear changes from room to room, but otherwise it’s always the same.
So it’s immediately jarring when she opens the door to Cold Harbor and finds herself stepping out with a hand held in hers, and the shock only intensifies when she sees who it belongs to.
It’s Mark. He’s paler and thinner than she remembers him, sickly looking even, and his hair is much longer (jesus christ, how long has she been down here?), and it frames his face in a vaguely unflattering way that makes it obvious that its length isn’t deliberate, but it’s him. He’s wearing a suit and tie and his beard is gone, a combination she’d only really ever seen on him before at their wedding, and that realization makes something deep in her chest ache. The familiar sight of his angular face softening as it breaks into a blinding smile feels like coming home in an almost painfully vivid way that makes it feel like her entire heart is cracking open, even if that face is even more angular than it used to be.
Also he’s covered in blood.
She should probably be more worried about that then she is, but it feels almost insignificant next to the overpowering relief of having him here in front of her, being able to see him after years of not even being allowed photographs from her former life, being able to touch him after years of her only human contact being accidental brushes with the nurse, being able to hear his voice after years of desperately trying not to forget it.
“Mark,” she chokes out, and he laughs, and then they’re embracing and she kisses him for the first time in god knows how long, both of their tears intermingling and smearing across each other’s faces. She’s getting blood all over her clothes, the ones that are actually hers that she bought herself (something she hasn’t gotten to wear in the entire time she’s been here), but she can’t bring herself to care. Her hands tangle themselves in his too long hair and his hands tangle themselves in hers, and they press their bodies against one another so hard it’s like they’re trying to melt together into a single entity.
Suddenly the security alarm trips and they’re bathed in red, the sweet but near unintelligible stream of relieved mumblings he’s been murmuring to her cut off by the blaring of a horribly familiar siren. This is far from her first escape attempt, she’s made the mad dash through these halls to that accursed elevator more times than she can count, she just has to do it one more time. She takes his hand and starts running, and he follows her lead,
It’s a tense chase, Mauer is at their heels the entire time, but eventually the elevator comes into view. It’s being propped open by a corpse. Well, at least now she knows for sure that the blood isn’t Mark’s. They clamber over the dead body as the doctor closes in, and Mark manages to shove its legs out of the elevator just in time for the doors to close right in front of Mauer’s screaming face.
The both stand there for a moment, gasping for air, eyes readjusting to the light, before he turns back to her, cradles her head in his hands, and starts peppering her face with little kisses like he’s trying to map out her face with just his mouth, before finally his lips are on hers again. She leans into the kiss, grabbing him by the waist to pull him closer to her, and-
And suddenly she’s standing in a stairwell, and the warmth of his body on hers is gone. Dazed, she turns around to see a door with a window. Mark is there, standing on the other side.
“Wait, what? Come on, we have to go.” He doesn’t say anything in response, he just blinks at her owlishly. Something is wrong, something is very very wrong.
The first concrete thing she notices is that he’s standing funny. His posture is ramrod straight in a very tense manner that makes her shoulder blades ache in sympathy just looking at it, and the way he holds his arms is strangely stiff, like he’s somehow not as used to having them as he was just moments ago. The second thing she notices is the look on his face. His eyes are wider than she’s ever seen them before, and his deer-in-the-headlights gaze is locked onto her, barely blinking, the rest of his face strangely blank, almost despondent. Combined these two anomalies give the bizarre impression that she is not so much looking at a man as she is staring down some kind of prey animal.
“What are you doing? Open the door, we need to get out of here.”
She’s still disoriented so it takes her a couple of seconds to put two and two together: the lack of familiarity in his eyes, how she’s standing in an exit stairwell while he’s still hovering in a decidedly Lumon-esque hallway. That is not her husband. That is not her husband. Oh god.
She had thought he was safe. That, at the very least, he was safe. Even in the nightmarish scenarios of the outside world Dr. Mauer had tried to convince her were true he was safe, happy even. One of the only comforts she’d had the past however-long-she’d-been-down-here was the knowledge that the people she loved were okay. She could endure anything they threw at her as long as she knew that he and Devon and Ricken and her parents were up there, would be whole and just as she left them when she got back, when she finally got through this. It had been the light at the end of the tunnel she’d manufactured for herself, her lone beacon of hope, but it seems so stupid now. How could she have ever believed that anything in this county was beyond Lumon’s reach?
The man who is not her husband is still standing there stock still, staring at her through the window in the door with impossibly big, cautiously untrusting eyes. For a brief, wonderful moment those eyes flicker down to the push bar of the door and his hands move towards it ever so slightly, and the hope overtakes her like an oncoming tide. “Mark, please, we need to go home.”
She regrets the words as soon as they leave her mouth. She doesn’t know the exact reason why, but it’s immediately clear that this was the wrong thing to say. He’s looking at her like she just punched him in the face: hurt, indignant, guard pulled up even higher than it was before. If she thought he looked untrusting before she doesn’t even know what to call the way he looks now. His hands shake as they return to his sides and his entire body shrinks away from the door.
“No no no no, I’m sorry, please just come with me!” She’s begging and it’s humiliating but she doesn’t even care at this point, she’s so close, they’re so close, he’s right there! The man who isn’t Mark takes a step backwards, and something inside her she didn’t even know was still whole breaks. “Please!” He takes another step away from her. “Please just come with me, I’ll give you anything you want, just bring him back!” Another step. He’s still facing her, eyes locked on hers. The hurt and indignation are still there, but now they’ve been joined by something much worse: pity. “Come back!” He turns on his heels ever so slowly, keeping his eyes on her until the last possible second, and then he starts walking back into the red darkness at the end of the corridor.
“Mark!” She yells his name even though she knows it’s futile. He can’t hear her, he’s not there, and whoever is has no reason to want him to be, and she doesn’t know enough about this person to convince him otherwise. The man who is not her husband breaks into a run and is quickly swallowed up by the shadows beyond her reach. She wants to keep yelling after him, to try to break down the door keeping them apart, to fall to her knees and start crying over how fucking unfair it all is, but she can’t, there’s no time to process her emotions. She’s tried to escape enough times to know that when it comes to outrunning Lumon, every second counts. She takes a deep breath, peels herself away from the window in the door, and starts running up the stairs.