#hellynaweek2025

Hellyna Week - Day 4: Reintegration

He’s been with her for years; he’s been with her for months. She’s the only person he’s ever loved; he’s never loved anyone the way he loves her.

Hellyna Week - Day 2: Physical Space

No, not her father’s pristinely sterile home at all. Her surroundings made more sense to her as she gained lucidity. This was the motel. Hundreds of miles from Kier. The one Petey had driven her to. The room Mark had walked her to. It was all a part of life with the sideshow. Her new life.

Now I'm taken, thе night has me / You won't hear me singin', you're a cage without me / Your pain is eased but you'll never be free / For now I'm taken, the night has me

Hellyna Week - Day 1: Mirror Image

What are you, really? Stripped of the name and logo and neutrals and smiles.  Who are you?  You wipe the fog from the mirror one last time. And, stripped of the name and logo and neutrals and smiles, you think, maybe, finally, you see what she always had. 

@hellynacentral · HELLYNA WEEK 2025 day four — reintegration what would a reintegrated hellyna look like?

by no means a comprehensive list, but i just wanted to share a few of my favourite reintegration fics. featuring various pairings but they all have a substantial focus on hellyna. excerpts are in italics.

deferred compensation by catinhat / 12.8k, E

note: my all-time favrouite hellyna writer; post-reintegration mark/helena, hellyna pov that starts from being reintegrated; dark and delicious hellyna character study, but do mind the tags

She wakes up whole.

No one asked her if she wanted to be.

The bed isn’t hers. The room isn’t hers. But the body—the body is, she thinks. Feels like hers.

It doesn’t fit. Too much inside. Crammed, swollen, bloated. A rat’s nest of memories like exposed nerve endings and muscle stitched together wrong. Helly’s raw, open wounds. Helena’s hollow, curated void.

She is both. She is neither. She is too much. 

It clots behind her eyes, rings in her ears, catches in her teeth. She can taste it. The tang of two lives forced together. The rotting decay of things that do not belong. They crash against each other, collapse inward, fold in on themselves.

gold in the shadow by @aerielz / 3.0k, M

note: post-reintegration mark/helena; incredible character study of the helena/helly divide

The cult deprogrammer says that it's normal to need space, some distance. He asks Helena how she's doing with that, she tells him it's weird. She feels lonely, so profoundly lonely. Hers is a high profile case, but he doesn't care, he just tells her it's okay. That it's okay to feel lied to. It's okay to feel trapped. It's okay to miss the father who knew how to love her. To miss the security of a book telling you how to live your life, that if you do it right you'll be okay, and you'll be rewarded. It's okay to feel a bit superior, a bit chosen, and a bit sad that you're not really superior, that you're not really chosen. And her therapist tells her it's okay that she's happy that deprogramming is for her, and not Helly. That some things are still for her, and that she deserves things to be for her, and sometimes just for her. That she can cry, and kick, and scream, and Helly cries and kicks and screams and says she's never going back to therapy again, and Helena skips two weeks.

tell me the thunder could love the tide like so by @ichabodcranemills / 2.2k, T

note: post-reintegration mark/helena; slice of life hurt/comfort featuring the compunction statement

The doctors told them that it was better not to treat their former innies and outies as different people. As with everything else, though, this had been trickier with Helena. Sometimes, Mark needs to talk to the one who’s hurting.

You and Me and Me and You by @spareham / 4.4k, M

note: reintegration is the main character here; incredibly vivid and psychological writing about one instance of ‘reintegration treatment’. gemma/devon/helena, helly/casey, and the blurring of all boundaries. just read it. THE reintegration fic if there ever is one. also goes into helena’s position in a post-severance world.

“Hey Helly,” said Gemma.

“Hello Casey,” Helena replied.

They grinned bashfully as children reading their lines in a play, only pretending. They weren't, it was technically true – Devon had flipped the switch, and though they were mostly Gemma and Helena, Helly and Casey were now alive within them, waking up by infinitesimal, slow degrees… Still, their presence was so small at this point in the night, pretending it was entire made Helena and Gemma blush.

Though she wasn't much of Helly yet, Helena knew from conversations with others and the documents signed that Helly had consented to this, had agreed that the next time she woke up it would happen slowly. Like when she actually woke up these days, every few days or so, switching in her sleep. It was the way things were done now, for severed people.

Fabric of a Fragile Home by @imdonebye / 22.0k, E

note: the development of gemma/devon, helly/helena, with special formatting in the hellyna pov chapters that really showcases the interiority of holding two versions of yourself simultaneously, and as reintegration progresses; you can start from chapter 3 for the beginning of hellyna’s side of the story but i really do recommend the whole fic

O father, all by yourself / You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I gave her your tempers. I could no more smooth them away than I could alter the curve of your mouth, or the steel in your gaze. Her insatiable desire for freedom was inevitable, because it is yours.

headed for the scrap heap - [an au in which Helly is a prototype for a synthetic domestic aid. Mark Scout takes her home]