#B&W holiday gift exchange
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for @barbarawar as part of the @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange <3
#hi @barbarawar i hope you like this!!#bering and wells#b&w holiday gift exchange#beringandwellsedit#warehouse 13#wh13edit#joanne kelly#jaime murray#syfysource#scifiedit#wlwedit#tvedit#tvgifs#wistfulwatcher#my post#*m.gif
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Asleep
Happy @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange to @kla1991 , our fearless leader, who of course knew I was their gifter, and who requested “a bed-sharing scenario that doesn't immediately turn sexy,” one that might involve tensions and/or physical discomfort. I’ve tried to approach that assignment in the appropriate spirit, with a bit of spin, although I suppose it all really depends on what any given person considers “sexy”... anyway, I’m pretty sure there are two sides to every story. Two sides to every bed, too. Here’s the first side. (This takes place in a post-season-five world, because why not raise the difficulty level?)
Asleep
My arm is asleep.
Normally, a person would, upon realizing this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.
Normally.
But very little is normal about the situation in which Myka’s arm is asleep.
She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the extremely limited “normal” portion of the situation.
Here begins the rest: she absolutely must not move. This is because she can hear, and can as a molecular disturbance feel, the steady push-pull of Helena’s breathing, near her neck, so near. She feels also the unfamiliar proximity of Helena’s body, offering heat across what must be only nanometers separating her from Myka’s back. And then there is Helena’s hand, what must be her right hand, resting in sleep, what must be unconscious sleep, on Myka’s hip.
They have never been in a bed together before tonight—but also, sadly also, they are not in a bed together now. They are simply two people in a bed in a hotel room, one of them obviously sleeping, obviously fulfilling her role in the “two agents are sharing a hotel room and getting some rest” play they are performing.
Myka, however, is not asleep. No: instead she is on fire because of Helena’s breath and heat and hand but unable to do anything about any of that, and thus desperate to escape and suffer her mortification in private but unable to do anything about any of that either—a terrible combination.
And now her arm, as if in intentional mockery, is asleep.
She has arrived at this pretty pass due to a series of events that had seemed, in their unfolding, to be at the very least manageable...
... starting with Helena’s return to the Warehouse.
That return had at first struck Myka as a beautiful dream—and, equally, a reward for awakening from a nightmare.
The particular nightmare from which Myka had awakened was the fugue in which she’d imagined she might have romantic feelings for Pete. How perfect it had seemed, then, for Helena to present herself to resume agent duties at the Warehouse, so soon after that enormous error had been rectified. “A reboot, I believe it’s called,” Helena had said of her change of heart, and Claudia had laughed uproariously at that, shouted “Turn it off and turn it on again!”, and hugged the obviously befuddled, but just as obviously pleased, rebooted agent.
Myka had not hugged Helena, not then. She’d thought to save such an action, such an aggressively bodily action, for an even more meaningful time, progress toward which would, at long last, begin.
But progress had not begun. In the reboot, Helena was a collegial colleague to Myka.... and that was all.
Helena did not, as she had in old times (old shows?), make comments that even usually-oblivious Myka could read as flirtatious. She did not step close, too close, as she had in old times, waking Myka’s body to possibility and want. She did not, in fact, mention old times at all. No words about “Wells and Bering”—as Myka had hoped to one day again correct, however incorrect Helena found the correction, to “Bering and Wells”—having ever done anything together.
And Myka of course could not assault such a collegial colleague with an anguished Why? She could do nothing but wish for a reboot of her own, or at least a do-over, one in which the minute Helena stepped from Claudia’s embrace, Myka herself initiated one that made her hopes clear.
But no such reboot was forthcoming.
That disappointment was, Myka found, manageable. Crushing, but manageable. It was made more so by the fact that Artie sent Helena on retrievals with Steve, sometimes with Claudia as adjunct; thus her collegial interactions with Myka did not have particularly meaningful stakes. At least, none that were Warehouse-specific, and that was what counted. That had to be what counted.
Until one morning at breakfast, when Artie tossed a folder at Myka and said, “Tomorrow you’re going to San Antonio to bag a camera.”
Then he pointed at Helena. “And you’re going with her.”
“Am I?” Helena asked, even as Myka voiced, “She is?
“She’s the one who stole it from Warehouse 12,” Artie told Myka. To Helena, he said, “So I assume you’ll know it when you see it.”
Well, that tone in Artie’s voice was like old times—old shows. But Helena did not respond with her back-then defiant chirp. She said a simple “oh,” a chastened wince that seemed pulled from a different show entirely.
Artie should not be inflicting this on her, Myka thought. After a moment, she revised that to, Artie should not be inflicting this on her or on me. Her first counter: “Maybe Helena could just tell me what it looks like.”
“If that would be easier,” Helena said, with a quickness suggesting she agreed that something was indeed being inflicted on somebody, “I certainly—”
“Did I stutter?” Artie demanded.
He didn’t. But after a bit of time, Myka thought she could, just maybe, manage the situation, both because of Helena’s apparent trepidations and as a way of sidestepping her own feelings. “I’m not sure this mission with Helena is a good idea,” she tried saying to Pete later that morning.
“How many times do I have to tell you the vibes aren’t bad anymore?” he asked, annoyed, as if she’d been making a habit of hitting him with this concern whenever he was trying to get comfortable with a comic book.
In fact, he’d told her that once since Helena came back. Once. It had happened when Myka had said, in a moment of exhaustion that had allowed her management to slip, “I miss how Helena used to be,” and he’d rolled his eyes and told her, “That’s dumb. The vibes aren’t bad anymore.”
Now Myka said—because why fight about it?—“Obviously more than once. But I just don’t think it’s a good idea. For her, I mean. Artie said that thing about the stealing and she... I don’t know. Wilted.”
“Okay, so tell that to Artie.”
Was that vaguely reasonable advice? “I guess I could give that a—”
“Like that’d work! Ha!”
“You’re very unhelpful,” Myka informed him.
“Keeping it on brand.” He flexed his biceps. “Just like these big boys.”
To which Myka could say only, “I am so devoutly grateful we aren’t together.”
“Me too. Different reasons though.”
“I’m devoutly grateful for that too,” she said.
She was grateful also, when it came down to it, for his total lack of interest in parsing the differences between their reasons.
Pete’s unhelpfulness aside, she still had the greater part of a day before her scheduled departure on this Helena-accompanied retrieval, and she hoped it might still be possible to extricate herself, Helena, or both of them from it.
Who would be more helpful in such an endeavor: Claudia or Steve? Claudia, who might be more sympathetic to the overall difficulty... or Steve, who would probably be more persuasive in helping to take a plan to Artie...
She went with Steve.
She opened with, “I need to talk to you. No, wait, before you wince: I need to talk to someone, and I think you’re my best bet.”
“I’m not overly flattered, but my prefrontal cortex appreciates the revision. Also my sinuses.”
“I have a problem.”
“My prefrontal appreciates that too: direct, no nuance. And I know we haven’t talked about this out loud, but if your problem’s with me? Totally justified. I got the you-and-Pete thing wrong.”
“No, my problem’s with Helena.” That was probably too revealing. “But the other thing, he and I got it wrong. You were just a witness. Regrettably.”
“But I... pushed?”
“Probably it was a thing he and I had to test to know for sure. And we did, so now we do. I like to think I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
That got her a twist of a smile. “You like to think, but this H.G. thing. I know you two have history, so is this that?”
Myka would have preferred to say “no,” but she figured she should continue giving his sinuses a break. So instead she said, “See, you’re discerning. This is why you’re my best bet.”
“What’s the problem then? You both seemed less than thrilled at breakfast, but—”
Now Myka could tell a truth. “Exactly. She clearly doesn’t feel okay about this artifact, and she shouldn’t have to deal with anything that would make her regret having come back. Right?” Before he could agree or disagree, she presented her plan: “You should do the retrieval with me instead. And I’ll need help selling this to Artie, so if you could gently ask her about the camera and then tell him you’re just as likely to recognize it when you—”
“Wanting to spare her discomfort is admirable. Really. But that wasn’t your issue, not at first. The very instant Artie said H.G. was going too, you tensed up.”
He is your best bet, Myka reminded herself. She sighed and said, “Fine. I’m not sure I can go on a mission with her.”
He winced and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Okay, yes,” she acknowledged. “I’m sure I can. I’m just not sure I want to.”
He didn’t release the pinch. “Unfortunately for both of us, that’s also a lie.”
That one, she resented. “Maybe you’re too discerning.”
“And yet I’ve heard I’m your best bet.”
“Right. Maybe I do want to. But the problem is, everything’s different now.”
“Also, I’m sorry, a lie. That last part. Everything isn’t different. What’s the same?”
Far, far too discerning. “I don’t want to say.”
He smiled. “Aaaaah. Very truthful.”
“Here’s something I do want to say: would you take my place instead?”
“Either way,” he said, his smile morphing into an apologetic grimace, “I don’t think that’s how this works.”
“We just have to make a case to Artie, which I know is a heavy lift, but something like how much easier it would be for Helena to go with you since you’re her wrangler now, so—”
“No, I mean logistically. I’m not her wrangler at all, by the way, but also the plane tickets are already in your names, right?”
Well, that was annoyingly true. “Fine. I hate it, but fine. And even if I could find an artifact that would change names on plane reservations, I couldn’t use it because that would really be personal gain.”
“Would it though?” Steve asked, lightly, but with an undercurrent.
Myka did not want to answer that question.
So she and Helena went.
On the plane, Helena said to Myka, “I’m sure you’re wondering about Artie’s statement.”
Accurate, but: “Not if you don’t want to talk about it,” Myka said. “In that case, any and all wondering canceled. Canceled like... an underappreciated cult TV show.” That was something a colleague would say, wasn’t it? A particularly collegial one, such as, for example, Claudia, from whom Myka had copied and pasted the words about television.
This wasn’t the first time she’d plucked words like this; articulations of her own, she feared—even more so now than in the past—were likely to reveal too much.
Helena raised an eyebrow. “You sound like Claudia.”
Mission accomplished, if a bit too well, so Myka shrugged and said, “I’ve heard characterization can get weird in a reboot.” That was also from Claudia, who had asked Myka, not long ago, “Do you think H.G.’s okay? I know characterization can get weird in a reboot, but she seems a little off,” and Myka had pleaded ignorance as to the entire concept, despite her wish to opine at length on how Helena seemed definitely, from Myka’s perspective, not okay. Definitely off. More than a little.
“I did use that word,” Helena said.
“You did.”
“I did also steal the artifact in question.”
“Napoleon Sarony’s camera.”
“Yes. I gave it to Oscar Wilde.”
“You did?” Oscar Wilde. Okay.
“I told him to have someone use it to take his photograph.”
Obviously this has something to do with its effect, but Myka has no idea what. Helena clearly wants to be drawn out on the point, so Myka probes, using what she knows, “Because it was what Sarony used to take those photos of Wilde when he was on his big star-making tour in the U.S.? Or because of the Supreme Court copyright case about that one Wilde photo he took? Oh, that case, I bet it’s why the camera’s an artifact, but—”
“You’re correct on the why of the artifact. But do you know its effect?”
“I didn’t have time to look it up before we left. And it’s not in the file.”
“Artie left it out, I suspect.”
“Because it’s exculpatory?”
“Because it’s explanatory. As far as anything could be, given that time. Obviously nothing is exculpatory.”
Isn’t it? “Do you want to explain?”
“Want,” Helena said, and oh god if Myka could have given herself leave to understand that word said differently. But this was not that reboot. After a throat-clear, Helena went on, “It was... post.”
Myka didn’t need to ask post-what.
“So many artifacts there were,” Helena continued, “so many unhelpful to me in my extremity. Nevertheless I thought to help. To make some difference. Where I could, as opposed to where I could not.”
In old times, Helena had not said this much about her mental state... post. Fleshy, this admission was, and Myka did not know what to make of it. Was it a step closer, akin to the old sort of physical proximity? Or was it just... explanatory? “The effect?” she prompted, gently, hoping for clarification.
“Artistic enhancement of the subject photographed. Oscar too was... post. Imprisonment had diminished him so terribly. I thought an artifactual photograph might help restore his writerly prowess.”
“Did it work?” Myka asked.
“I can’t prove causation,” Helena said. “Nevertheless, post-photo, he did write ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’”
That was one of those utterances Myka would be processing for quite some time. Separate and apart from her outsize feelings for Helena as Helena—as a physical body to which Myka’s own body has for years now compulsively responded—there was the ongoing absurdity, the near high comedy, of Helena speaking factually about events of such cultural-historical import. “I can’t think that was a bad outcome,” Myka eventually managed to say.
“I can’t either.”
They had not had so genuine, so genuinely substantive, a conversation since Helena’s return.
However, their renewed familiarity, if that’s what it was, did not outlast the plane.
They found the camera, and they neutralized it with minimal difficulty—if a bit more consternation on the part of the gentleman who believed he had the right to possess the piece.
That was all very... collegial.
And—but—they then tried to check in at their hotel. Or rather, Myka did. Helena was occupying herself with the snacks on offer in the lobby. “Steve usually checks in,” she’d said. “Do you mind?”
How could Myka have been less accommodating than Steve? Also she was—she had to concede—more than a little charmed by Helena’s seeming admission of... well, not incompetence. Just a slight slink away from responsibility.
Please, a more cynical part of her said with a snort of derision, you’re charmed by the way she does everything. Walking, talking, existing. Inspecting potato-chip bags across the lobby in a hotel’s snack pantry.
“Bering and Wells,” the desk clerk said in confirmation of the reservation, and Myka wanted to thank him for that ordering of names. He followed up with, “One king.”
She didn’t want to thank him for that. “No,” she told him, and it was good that Helena was out of earshot. “Two. Kings, queens, doubles, twins, I don’t care. But two.”
“Sorry,” said the clerk. “Full up.”
So one king it had been.
And now, in that one king, Myka’s arm is asleep.
“Are you asleep?” she wants to ask of Helena, aloud, to ascertain the true contours of the situation, but the very asking might—would?—change the contours, and Myka isn’t sure she’s in any kind of state to handle any certainty or any change. So she thinks the question at Helena instead, thinks it over her shoulder at that warm body over and over, Are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, until she’s estranged from the question as anything but words, until “asleep” in particular begins to strike her as bizarrely archaic, its construction completely uncontemporary, and she interrupts her telepathy to think, It is archaic; we don’t ask “Are you abed” or anything like that anymore—
—but she interrupts herself again, for that doesn’t ring quite right. So she calls up the dictionary, the A’s, riffling her way through, and the exercise offers her all sorts of examples that show how very unarchaic indeed it is to say “asleep”: ablaze, abuzz, aground, ajar, alight, aloud, amid...
The list goes on. It’s far longer than she expected, but she continues, doggedly, to the end of the A’s, through “astray,” “aswoon” (she doesn’t linger on that one), on to “atingle” (that one either), on and on, ending with “awhirl.” She’d been by then vaguely looking forward to something like “azoom,” but alas.
Such a lengthy jaunt through the initial chapter of the dictionary surely must have eaten up significant time, perhaps even more than she imagined; perhaps morning is at last approaching, and the alarm will ring, and all this physical consternation can be resolved by sudden wakefulness on everybody’s part.
The clock on the nightstand tells her the journey took three minutes.
Spectacular.
Well, fine. If the A’s were three minutes, the rest of the dictionary should offer her at least an hour of distraction—both from her arm’s discomfort and from the physical, emotional, and existential discomfort created by the presence at her neck, back, and hip.
She starts in on the B’s. First comes “b,” defined, in entry 1a, as “the 2d letter of the English alphabet.” No doubt it’s important to periodically refresh one’s memory of such things.
The B’s proceed, slow and thorough; after “b” comes “baa,” and on and on... “bedlam” catches her attention, in a Warehouse-y way; “bed of roses” does too, as it’s “a place or situation of agreeable ease,” which this certainly is not—
—in sudden, striking emphasis, Helena’s hand on Myka’s hip moves, a minimal slide-glide toward thigh, and oversensitized Myka can’t control a too-violent twitch in response, one that jolts her toward the bed’s edge, which was nearer than she realized, for now its surface is an abrupt absence, and a crash to the floor is imminent, and instinct, instinct: her brain shouts for an arm to break her fall, but the volunteering limb is the stupid somnolent one, and OH GOD she has never known pain to manifest like this—she’s taken a bullet but this is more, for “seeing stars” is no mere metaphor, as she’d always imagined; her vision is literally stellating, even as she hears herself yelp in prelinguistic anguish.
The horrific fullness of the situation settles on her as she additionally hears, directed at her from some angel perspective, the voice of her dreams but now this nightmare saying “Myka? What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Myka moans at the unforgivingly injurious floor, and then the stars win.
TBC
#bering and wells#warehouse 13#fanfic#Asleep#B&W holiday gift exchange#kla1991#endured bodily discomfort can lead to terrible outcomes#or maybe eventually to nonterrible ones?#we'll see#all definitions quoted from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate 10th Ed#(it's nearest to me on the bookshelf)#(and maybe was once nearest Myka too)
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Sign Up for the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024!
Hello everyone!
It's American Thanksgiving, which means sign-ups for the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange are officially open!
Here's how this event works:
Send a message or ask to this blog (@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange) or directly to me (K, your host, @kla1991) stating that you would like to participate. Sign-ups begin today and close on the Winter Solstice, December 21st.
If you sign up, you'll receive the name of your giftee on Christmas, December 25th. You will then have one week to *anonymously* contact your giftee to tell them what kind of fan works you make (art, fic, gifs, etc.) and ask for ideas or requests.
Between New Years', January 1st, and Valentine's Day, February 14th, you'll work on your gifts, and on the 14th we'll all post what we've created for our giftees and enjoy all the gifts!
If you have questions of any kind, feel free to reach out to this blog or to @kla1991 to ask. And even if you don't plan to sign up, please reblog this post to spread the word!
Happy American Thanksgiving, and happy Bering and Wells Gift Exchange Season!
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Happy @bering-and-wells-exchange to @kla1991!
Based on their fic “Listen”
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A Bering & Wells Gift Exchange comic story for @lady-adventuress. Happy Palentines Day, friend! There are typos and drawos, even after my very extensive, not-at-all rushed, proof-reading, so, many advance apologies. Thank you for the ideas, I tried to stay in line with mistaken identity/long lost theme. Hope it is enjoyable!
Myka was seventeen when Emily Lake, her best friend, disappeared. Whisked away into the night by Mrs. Frederic, crying and inconsolable, cursing her father’s name. It was unreal, all of it, from first kiss to final goodbye. But whatever disbelief Myka had held onto, wide awake in her bed most of that night, shattered entirely on her walk to school the next morning.
She remembers hearing the sirens as she’d finally drifted into sleep but there were always sirens. Sirens were never unusual.
She should have known. She should have known.
Emily Lake’s house was burned to the ground. A smoldering pile of charred rubble, surrounded by crime scene tape, police vehicles, and a white Coroner's Office van.
She could only get so close but she could see all she needed to see.
She doesn't remember losing consciousness, though she supposes no one does when they come to. She remembers the spinning. She remembers the falling.
And she remembers waking up in the back of an ambulance with Mrs. Frederic by her side.
//
Myka sees Mrs. Frederic a lot over the years. Not by choice or chance. Not by want for that woman to be in her life. Just by the mere fact that she loves a ghost. A girl that's supposed to be dead.
Burned up in a house fire.
Buried in the ground.
They'd pulled two bodies from the rubble of Emily Lake's house, too badly burned for an open casket. Too unknown and unrelated to anyone of means to have a proper burial.
Myka went to Emily's memorial at the high school. She listened as others spoke about a girl they knew nothing about. And while she grew angry at their forced tears and fabricated associations to a dead girl they never knew, she, herself, had absolutely nothing to say about it.
Her best friend, Emily Lake, had died in a fire.
Some girl she loves, called Helena, arose from her ashes.
//
Myka sees Mrs. Frederic once when she's nineteen. This time she hasn't passed out. She's at a cafe on her college campus, listening to music through a set of headphones, and drawing in her sketchbook.
Mrs. Frederic sets a flyer down on the table in front of Myka and takes a seat in the chair across from her.
She doesn't wait for Myka to remove her headphones or even acknowledge her presence.
"This is not cute," the older woman tells her while gesturing down at the paper. "This is too close."
Myka eyes the flyer. It isn't hers per se but she'd been hired by someone on campus to draw it for an upcoming event. It's a very simple drawing of two women holding hands, but one of those women looks a lot like herself and the other looks a lot like someone she used to know.
"You don't like my art?" Myka sighs, turning her attention back to her sketchbook.
"She's dead," Mrs. Frederic recites, not at all for the first time.
Myka puffs out a soft laugh, glances up at Mrs. Frederic, and says, "And yet here you are. Again."
"It isn't safe yet, Myka."
Myka drops her pencil. "When will it be?"
Mrs. Frederic looks away from Myka, over her shoulder, out of a window. She says, without ever turning back, "I told you to forget her. She told you to forget her. You know the consequences of not doing that. You've seen what they're capable of."
"I don't know anything. I certainly don't know the consequences or who they are."
"And believe me when I tell you that you do not want to."
"Is it witness protection?"
"Do I look like I work for the Marshal's office, Ms. Bering? Do our interactions scream Federal Government to you?"
Myka eyes Mrs. Frederic up and down but says nothing at all. In response, she receives a huff of annoyance from the older woman across from her.
"The amount of time I have spent running interference between you and that girl is both baffling and exhausting."
That makes Myka smile. Just a little.
"Finish school, Ms. Bering. Keep your head down. Stop this," Mrs. Frederic taps the paper on the table, "and forget her." She stands and turns then adds, just over her shoulder, "I won't be repeating myself."
Myka sits back in her chair, smiles softly up at the other woman, and says, "Let's do this again sometime, hm?"
Mrs. Frederic rolls her eyes up and sighs. Then turns and walks away.
//
When Myka graduates college at twenty-two, she catches a glimpse of Mrs. Frederic in the hallway of the auditorium where her commencement ceremony is to take place. She is mentally and emotionally preparing herself to fend off all of that woman's criticisms, about what she should and shouldn't be drawing, about how she should and should not be living her life, about who she should and should not be remembering.
But Mrs. Frederic never approaches her. She disappears into the crowd.
Myka has always just assumed that she is being watched, that Mrs. Frederic is watching her. But Mrs. Frederic has never, before now, allowed herself to be seen in return.
//
Myka starts dating a boy named Sam when she is twenty-five years old. Sam doesn't remind her of Helena and it's the thing she likes most about him. It's easy. He's nice. They have fun together.
Myka doesn't see Mrs. Frederic the entire two years they are dating. And somehow, somewhere inside of her, she's a little sad about that.
//
Sam is killed in an accident when Myka is twenty-eight.
They had been broken up for a year at that point but they were still close. Still really good friends with a shared love of art and creating, still collaborating to make what dreams they may have into reality.
A lot of Myka's art shifts back into dark places and in those dark places comes reminders of dark histories. Of grief and sadness. Of love and loss. Of all the pain suffered and endured and, mostly, overcome when the perfect person comes along and holds your hand through it all.
For years, that had been Emily.
Helena.
They'd suffered and endured. They'd held hands through it all. Comforted each other, whenever the other needed it most. Together, they'd imagine themselves on fantastic journeys. The innumerable marks on their skin, souvenirs from their mishaps and adventures.
Myka hasn't cried in so long but she cries the night Sam dies. She cries hard and long, for hours and hours. And when she's all cried out over Sam, she starts crying all over again for Emily Lake.
For the girl named Helena whose last name she doesn't even know. She cries until she falls asleep, then wakes up and does it all over again the next day. She does this for a whole week until the day of Sam's funeral and she doesn't know who she cries for more, Sam, Helena, or herself.
It's been nearly four years since their last encounter but Myka isn't surprised when Mrs. Frederic appears. After the casket is lowered and the crowd dispersed, she steps to Myka's side and stands there just beside her for several moments in silence.
And when Mrs. Frederic has decided she's had enough of the quiet, she says, "You did try. I'll give you that."
Myka doesn't know why but this comment, a simple and useless recognition from the woman who gives almost nothing at all, makes her full belly laugh, crying tears of laughter until she can cry no more.
//
Myka is almost thirty when she almost dies of a heart attack. And then, immediately after that, almost dies by large-toe bludgeoning.
"I'm glad to see you attempting to move on with your life."
"Oh, fuck!" Myka drops a mixing bowl of cooke dough and the very thin, suddenly sharp lip of that bowl lands square on her big toe. When she turns to Mrs. Frederic, in her kitchen somehow, she swears that woman is smiling.
Even if just barely.
"That's a new trick." Myka growls, calming her racing heart.
"New to whom? You seem to be an expert in the field of accidental self-inflicted wounds."
"I mean you. In my kitchen. Inside of my apartment." Myka sighs. "How did you get in here?"
"Certainly not by working at the Marshal's office." Mrs. Frederic quirks a singular brow in Myka's direction.
"Certainly not." Myka mimics, lowering herself to the ground, to clean the cookie dough from tile floor. "What have I done now?"
"I've seen the draft of your very telling graphic memoir. I thought we were clear on the lines that should not be crossed."
Myka stops cleaning. "Speaking of lines that should not be crossed, I won't bother asking how you've seen something that exists solely on my computer." She stands and crosses her arms and tells Mrs. Frederic, "It doesn't mean anything to anyone except me. Nobody else would know it's her and it's not like it's going to bring her back."
"Myka."
Myka laughs softly, "Wow. First name basis? I have definitely crossed a line."
"The problem is, that is exactly what could happen. It could bring her back. Give her no choice but to return."
"She has a choice now? Because that's not what it looked like when you dragged her away."
"I did not drag her. I simply urged her to move forward, faster. You saw, with your own eyes, what the result would have been had she lingered with you. Two homes might have burned that night and your family--"
"I have a lot of respect for you, Mrs. Frederic, despite your constant intrusions. But please, do not talk about my family."
"Fair enough," Mrs. Frederic concedes after a sigh.
"You know, I thought I'd have more hope over time. That she was alive. That she'd one day come back. That I could go to her. Or that holding on to her the way I do would eventually mean something. Anything.
"But after all this time, I find myself more often grieving Emily's death. Because it's the only thing that's real in my mind, it's the only thing that happened.
"Helena is just... she's an old memory that I struggle to keep alive. Ten minutes in one night in the entirety of my life. And I don't even know if anything about those ten minutes is real. If it even means anything. If it's worth holding on to."
Mrs. Frederic watches Myka in thoughtful silence.
"I do know that I never want to forget the way she makes me feel. They way she always made me feel. As Emily, before Helena. She taught me so much. She helped me open up. She opened up to me.
"If I can't talk about her, in a book about my life, there is no book.
"She was my best friend and I loved her. I do what I love because of her and having known her and loved her, for the little time that I was able to, still impacts my life today. Every single day."
Myka gestures to Mrs. Frederic and smiles.
"You, Mrs. Frederic, are living proof of that." She pauses to laugh and adds, "Or the most prolific stalker the world has ever seen."
The older woman remains quiet, pensive. And for a second, one tiny fraction of a second, Myka thinks she's going to show some kind of emotion. Sympathy. Sadness. Contentedness. Amusement? At this point, Myka would even take her usual dose of exhaustion. But Mrs. Frederic's face remains a facade of unconvinced underwhelm and boredom.
Her words, however, belie genuine emotion.
"I have a story for you."
Myka arches a brow. "How suspicious."
"Two little girls grew up together, lived similar lives with similar fathers, who mistreated them in very similar ways. In a single night, they had the nerve to fall in love, right in front of my eyes. A youthful, foolish love that should have ended a decade ago. And yet, here I stand, an intermediary between two foolish girls who refuse to let each other go. Even as they risk their very ends.
"One of those girls is the daughter of a dangerous man who once had the power to demand ungodly things be done to the families of even more dangerous people.
"And the other girl, Ms. Bering, is you."
Myka breathes in slowly. Breathes out one long steady breath.
"I have... so much work to do. And yet, for some reason, I spend, have spent, most of my time intervening in various shenanigans between the two of you."
"Me, living my life like a normal human being, not constantly under threat by some faceless boogie man, is not shenanigans."
Mrs. Frederic ignores Myka's interjection and goes on.
"Intercepting every little whim of the heart you two decide to try and throw out into the world, in order to find each other without blatantly finding each other, when you both know, very well, that is the last thing you should be doing."
"She's... she's trying to find me?"
"Not the point," Mrs. Frederic cuts in. "The point is that she should not be. She knows that. Nor should you be and you know that. Because they could leverage you to get to her to get to her father. They have tried and they will continue to try. And I will continue exhausting myself to keep you two safe because that is what I am, unfortunately, obligated to do.
"No matter how hard you make the task. No matter how many times you want to laugh in the face of it, believe me when I say that he is not worth either of you dying."
Myka remains quiet. She stills. When Mrs. Frederic says no more, Myka takes in another steadying breath and says, "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you actually care about me."
"I care to keep you alive. And her. Until such a time that I no longer have to care about keeping either of you anything for the foreseeable future."
"I do appreciate what you supposedly do, Mrs. Frederic, but in all of our time together, I have never, at any point, felt unsafe or watched by anyone but you."
"And you are welcome for that."
That, to Myka, is the most unnerving thing she has ever heard Mrs. Frederic say to her. In all of their time.
"So what, her dad was some sort of mob boss's hit man?"
"That's a close enough analogy."
"Why didn't you just tell me all of that from the beginning?"
"You were a child. You're no longer a child. I've seen what you've survived. Even if I myself don't find it amusing, I do understand why you laugh when threatened. Now, do you understand the gravity of this ongoing situation?"
Myka nods, "I do."
"I don't believe you."
Myka rolls her eyes. "I understand that I'm supposed to stop doing what I love to do most, drawing and telling stories about my own life, because you want this to end, sooner rather than later."
"No," Mrs. Frederic corrects, "because your life could end, sooner rather than later. You would not have a life to draw or tell stories about."
Myka breathes in deep.
"I am not asking you to give up your passion, Myka, I'm simply reminding you to be mindful, as your passion influences art that grows in popularity, about how much personal information you impress upon it.
"Or one day you'll turn around and it won't be me standing behind you."
//
Myka is thirty-two years old when Mrs. Frederic appears in a bookstore for one of Myka's book signings and, for whatever reason, that woman chooses to stand in line. Myka catches sight of her when she's at least eight people back, and after three more signings, she motions for Mrs. Frederic to come forward.
To Myka's surprise, the woman does.
Nothing about the way she looks has changed, except that she seems a little less baffled, a little less exhausted. Her visits had slowed, once more, as Myka's preoccupation with Helena's absence continued to wane over time.
"I could have waited," the woman tells Myka.
"The looming anticipation of your next threat was too much for me to handle." Myka smiles. "How is our girl?"
The older woman sighs heavily. All of that exhaustion and bafflement returning to her expression. But Myka is surprised, more than that, when Mrs. Frederic answers her genuinely.
"Insistent. Stubborn."
Myka smiles at the thought of Emily/Helena interacting with Mrs. Frederic in these little ways she occasionally interacts with Mrs. Frederic. A thing she used to think about often but doesn't think about so much anymore.
"Thank you," Myka says softly, lowering her head to face the table below and wiping away a stray tear. When she looks back up to Mrs. Frederic, she adds, "I appreciate knowing she hasn't changed one bit."
Mrs. Frederic reaches into her purse and pulls out a copy of Myka's book. She sets it on the table in front of Myka, who smiles wide.
"You bought my book."
"A birthday gift," Mrs. Frederic says, "for our very insistent friend."
//
Myka is thirty-four when Mrs. Frederic unexpectedly sits beside her on a park bench then holds an envelope out in front of her. And for the first time, in a long time, Myka isn't startled. She almost expects that other woman's arrival.
She says to the older woman, without ever looking at her, "I don't know what they're paying you but I'm sure it's not enough."
Myka doesn't immediately take that envelope but she can see that her name is on the front. She can see that the handwriting is Emily's. Recognizable in comparison to all of the old notes she has stashed away from high school.
Still, she straightens in her seat and asks, "We're on writing terms now?"
"Proof of life."
"Seventeen years ago, you told me she died." Myka cautiously takes the envelope. "You told me to forget about her."
"And nearly two decades later, look where that has gotten us."
"You've suggested on several occasions that I'd be murdered."
"I resisted the urge myself on many of those occasions."
"A joke?"
Mrs. Frederic arches a brow. The playfulness of that expression, Myka finds, is unnerving at best.
"You said they are dangerous people."
"They were."
"They were?"
"We're on the cusp of a resolution."
"A resolution? With very dangerous people? More dangerous than the man who committed heinous crimes against them?"
Mrs. Frederic nods and simply says, "Even dangerous people grow old."
"Then I guess I feel comforted that you haven't aged a day since we met."
Myka can see Mrs. Frederic suppressing a smile.
"You know, in all these years that I've come to know you, Mrs. Frederic, you don't strike me as the type to negotiate with, much less protect, a man who has done ungodly things to anyone. Dangerous people included."
"You refer to her father as a man, which is something I haven't done in over three decades." A pause follows a thoughtful sigh as Mrs. Frederic turns away from Myka and says. "Still, I find even calling him the monster that he is to be too generous."
Myka gives a subtle, understanding nod.
"The thing you may or may not have come to understand, without the proper context, is that some very terrible people are more valuable to when they are alive, worthless when they are dead, when the survival of many more good people depends on what they know. My employers find value in his living, so he remains alive and, by default, protected."
"And Helena? Where does she come into all of this talk of value and worth?"
"She is her father's collateral damage." Mrs. Frederic turns to Myka. "From the moment she was born, he has been using her existence to further his malintent. Without her, he would already be dead."
Myka can feel her blood rising.
"He had money. He had custody. He had power. He doesn't have any of those things now and I promise you, Myka Bering, that he is not worth the energy you will burn being angry at him."
Myka doesn't quite let the anger go. But she breathes a little steadier now.
//
Weeks later, Myka finds a Post-It note on her refrigerator door that she didn't place there and doesn't recall seeing the night before.
It reads: Answer the call. - F
Within the hour, Myka's cell phone rings. No name or number appears on the screen. And when she answers, it's with a tease. She says, "It only took you twenty years to realize you could threaten me over the phone instead of constantly sneaking up on me in public?"
"I told Irene," a soft, distantly familiar voice starts, "you'd tire of her appearing act sooner than most."
The voice hits her hard. Harder than the combined weight of every moment in her past that she has felt sorrow or grief or loneliness beyond measure. She has to steady her hands to not drop the phone. She has to steady her breathing to not fall to the floor.
"Helena?"
Soft breathing turns to soft laughter which turns to soft crying, on both ends of that line.
"Is that really you?"
"It really is."
Myka sits before she falls, carefully lowering herself to the kitchen floor. Clutching that phone in her hands. Her back to the cabinet doors. Her legs folded up before her.
She decides to start off small and easy.
"Hi."
And is rewarded beyond measure.
"Hello again, my love."
#bering and wells#b&w holiday gift exchange#lady-adventuress#dickens draws#sorry this is so late#i usually draw and post and then write when i post#and this writing took on a mind of its own#i wasn't even done i just cut myself off lol
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Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells
Additional Tags: Fluff, Established Relationship, Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024
Summary:
Myka can't wait for winter to be over. On the first day it feels like spring has finally arrived, her and Helena have a picnic.
This was written for @purlturtle as part of the 2024 Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange, who gave me the following prompt:
"how about something spring-themed (since the gifts will be exchanged for Valentine's, IIRC)? Like, being at the tail end of winter and longing for spring, or experiencing the first day when it really feels like spring is in the air, that kind of thing?
Alternately, maybe something to do with chocolate? (I love chocolate)"
I had a lot of fun with the prompt (started writing it pretty much as soon as I got it) and I tried to include everything. Hopefully you enjoy it :)
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Happy B&W Gift Exchange @madronash!
(Virtual) Reality: Helena gives a virtual reality headset from FarGames a try, and Myka watches fondly. Set post-series, in a better version of the series where the silly bullshit didn't happen.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/45041281
@madronash
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Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells, Claudia Donovan
Additional Tags: Gift Exchange, uh I can't write short things anymore, so this is just the first chapter of... some chapters, you know how it goes, Established Relationship
Summary:
Myka and Helena are in Paris on a retrieval - which is already complicated enough for these two - when something even more complicated is put in their path.
For @mfangeleeta - happy gift exchange!
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Happy Bering and Wells Day! This year, @apparitionism gave me a wild set of prompts to play with, so here's what I ended up with.
@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange
#warehouse 13#helena wells#myka bering#bering and wells#b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange#apparitionism#bering and wells exchange
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VeryHappy Holidays, @xinambercladx!
I wanted to do colors but my BW sketch grew on me in the end, I hope you don't mind.
Yes, he's on Earth. And yes, he's trying cheese!
Bon appétit!
🎄❄️🧀💙
#Cad Bane#Cad Bane fanart#star wars#star wars fanart#2022 gift exchange#happy holidays#duros#space cowboy#cheese#snowfall#tcw#the clone wars#bounty hunter#I always have to do hatless#bw#black and white#b&w#DBS art#deepbluespace art
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Asleep 2
For the anniversary this year, I have the second “half” of my @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story for @kla1991 : an involuntary bed-sharing situation that turns not sexy but disastrous. The first part took on Myka’s perspective; this conclusion is written from the other side of the bed. A confession: I find in-universe Helena’s head voice a somewhat difficult register to compose—because while she can’t be fully insane, she needs to teeter or list, sometimes more than a little (but without falling into histrionics). Which is to say that if you don’t entirely buy the turns of thought and/or coping mechanisms I’ve given her here, your skepticism is well-placed. Ultimately I hope it’s the case that a person can be broken but still want in a way that’s... pure? Justified? Sweet? Reciprocatable? Maybe just “vaguely recognizably human”?
Anyway, this is long, first because it extends well beyond the point at which the first part ended, but also because when a Bering and a Wells get to talking (as they at last do!), they need to work things out at their own pace...
Asleep 2
My arm is asleep.
Under normal circumstances, a person would, upon becoming aware of this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.
Under normal circumstances.
But very little is normal about the circumstances under which Helena’s arm is asleep.
She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the disturbingly limited “normal” portion of the situation.
Here begins the larger portion: she absolutely must not move.
Irony guts at her with that, a shiv-and-twist remembrance of bronze restriction—but that prohibition had involved a significantly different auxiliary verb: “cannot” rather than “must not.”
Grammatical particulars aside, her immobility now is barely less a torment. This is because her other arm, her alive right, terminates in an even-more alive sensate hand, one that now rests—but is in no way at rest—on Myka’s right hip.
Myka, too, is lying on her left side, a small distance in front of Helena, lying in this hotel-room bed. Such proximity in such a space might, under other circumstances, signify the fulfillment of a long-held dream... but here, now, it seems a nightmare. For Myka is Helena’s colleague and no more; they are in this bed for sleep and no more; and Myka is playing her part correctly while Helena is not, in contravention of what she has sworn to herself she would do no more.
Such drowsy sense the placing of that hand had seemed to make, when she had found herself facing Myka’s back. She had in the past regarded that length covetously, relishing the idea of touch both salacious and tender.
For all her coveting, however, she had in fact only once laid hands on that back, both hands with intention on the clothed blades of Myka’s shoulders: a terrifying embrace, one that was in the most basic physical manner right but overall searingly wrong, screaming bodily truth but surrounded by words that said nothing they should. A perversion of promise, like so much else that had happened in Boone.
Yet Helena had clung to its memory all the same.
She’d thought, here in this unexpected proximity, to supersede that, to touch once again, once again but brief, once again though brief. To erase and replace.
First she touched the right blade, light; yet her hand wanted stillness, more connection than a mere pat against cotton-clad bone. And there was Myka’s hip, a beckoning promontory jut... a place to rest. Rest, however brief.
Once placed, however, her hand had proved reluctant to retreat.
Brief, she reminded it.
No, the hand had responded. I belong here.
Helena knows this is true. She knows also that it cannot be true.
But she is no stranger to holding contradictory thoughts in her head. This has been essential to establishing and maintaining, in these new Warehouse days, a functional equilibrium. Functional. Indeed her goal, in this “reboot,” has been to function, which she has lately defined as something on the order of “to move through time nondestructively.”
This definition had come about due to her realization, pre-reboot, that her difference from others, her inability to fully perform a modern self—her arrogance about that inability, even as she attempted to hide both the inability and the arrogance—chipped at, chipped from, the good (the good nature, the good will, the goodness) of those around her. Over time, such chips accrued as wounds.
Nate. (Adelaide.) Giselle.
She had as a result finally understood that coming back to the Warehouse would mean, at the very least, that those with whom she interacted had already made a bargain, perhaps even a peace, with the inevitable violence of history: with the way the forces of the past could—would—affect, even infect, the present. Helena herself was, at her simplest, merely one more of those forces.
She did consider requesting that she be re-Bronzed, now absent any pretension of traveling through time, but rather as a way of neutralizing a dangerous, and demonstrably unstable, artifact. But then an image had come to her, possibly as an omen, possibly as only a desperate wish: Myka’s devastated face upon hearing such news.
Boone all over again.
Thus the reboot. Because the most significant entry under “function,” with additional emphasis on the “nondestructive” portion of that definition, was her resolution to spare Myka pain. In the past, Helena had been both careless and careful—surgically so—in her infliction of damage on Myka above all others. But she had sworn to herself that those days were done.
Done, but Helena knew she had not paid anything near a sufficient price.
So. To maintain distance, no matter how troublesomely ardent her wish to close it, was—had to be—part of her penance. And to do so decorously was—had to be—the gentlest approach. That was what Helena told herself in her more rational moments.
This moment, in this bed, is not one of those. If it were, she would simply remove her hand. Simply remove it, then roll over.
But her mind races, finding complication: She doesn’t know what sort of sleeper Myka is. Had Helena’s placing of hand awakened her? If she had awakened, has she now fallen asleep again? If she has, would she then be reawakened by the hand’s removal? Or would she, if still awake, draw some negative inference about the entire situation based on removal?
Ideally, Helena would maintain a facsimile of entirely blameless sleep while engaging in that removal, but can she make such a performance believable?
Never in her life has Helena been so concerned about her ability to mislead convincingly as when she has attempted to deceive Myka. That was the case in the past, even at her most nefarious, and now she worries day-to-day that her strictly disciplined disguise of near-constant wishing ache will slip and fail. A simple I am asleep should be... well... simple. But it is not, and Helena is reminded of Claudia’s tendency to observe, in situations both dire and banal, “Here we are.”
Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to the idea of sharing a bed with Helena.
Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to history.
Here we are, and that latter indifference is a surpassing irony, due to the fullness of—
Helena sees that she needs to divert her train of thought, as descending into unjustified anger will help absolutely nothing.
First, she entertains a fantasy of sitting up, turning on a light, and explaining to Myka that this entire situation is untenable, and that if they are going to share a bed, they should share a bed. But it’s true that Myka did not seem even to consider that as a possibility, which seems ludicrous, given the past... no, that’s back to unjustified anger, for who is Helena to resent what Myka wishes not to consider? And indeed, who is she to interpret the past in such a way as to believe she understands what Myka would have considered?
Focus on the facts, she tells herself. What actually happened in that nefarious past. And do so dispassionately.
Regrettably, the word “dispassionately” brings to mind another word: “passionately.”
Again. For she had thought that word not long after she and Myka had first entered this room, first entered it to find, as Helena’s unrestrained fantasies might have conjured, only one bed. That they were clearly intended to share. Thus her mind’s unruly leap to... an adverbial manner in which they might do so.
But Myka had said not one word about the accommodations, so Helena had held her tongue as well. She nevertheless couldn’t help but feel it an elaborate lack of remark on both their parts, the silence practically baroque in its fullness.
Baroque too had been the courtesy with which they jointly prepared for bed, a you-first-no-you stutter-choreography of politeness that ensured privacy, yes, but also reinforced the barrier between their past and their present.
Which Helena understood was necessary. It did nothing, however, to mitigate the breath-hold of preparing to lie down beside Myka.
Once she had managed that lying down, however (with a relative aplomb for which self-congratulation was not, she felt, unjustified), she hoped her torment might ease. A bit. If she could manage the additional task of pretending the body beside her was no more significant than any other human. Some flesh, recumbent.
But when they were situated thus beside, Myka spoke. “You seem a little upset,” she said.
Helena had barely been able to restrain a snort. Now Myka saw fit to comment? As if allowing this portion of the play to pass without remark would create some undue strain upon collegiality? As if their incongruous bonhomie might buckle under the weight of that silence? Oh, that was rich.
Bottling her pique, Helena questioned: “With?” To make Myka say it. Mere saying wouldn’t hurt. Would it?
“You haven’t been yourself since you put that camera in the static bag. Was it a problem, seeing it again?”
Helena held herself rigid so as to keep her body from betraying neither her disappointment at the question nor, contradictorily, her relief...
It was a reasonable question. A good question. Not one on which Helena particularly wanted to focus (although it indicated a certain attention on Myka’s part, an attention on which Helena suspected she should not dwell), but it did deserve an answer. “It closes a door, doesn’t it,” she told the ceiling, for turning her head to address the other body directly seemed an invitation to peril. “That one I opened so nefariously, long ago.”
“Or—and—maybe it closes a loop,” Myka said.
Unexpected. “A loop?”
“Right after college, I went through a self-help phase,” Myka said. She paused, and Helena found herself on relative tenterhooks regarding the applicability of this (new!) information to the current situation. Which reminded her how much she had missed talking with Myka... because of the very sound of her voice, yes, but also because her conversation could range so unanticipatedly. So rewardingly unanticipatedly. Helena had known few people who could lead her on such unpredictable, yet productive, journeys.
Was Myka’s apparent willingness to begin such a journey now indicative of... anything? A softening, perhaps, of relations between them? Not a rebooting of their once-burgeoning intimacy, for that had to remain taboo, but could it be that some restoration of their previous intellectual engagement might be, at the very least, neutral rather than harmful?
Helena had moved a tentative pawn in that direction during their conversation on the airplane. Perhaps this was Myka’s answering move?
With an exhale that seemed like resignation at what she was about to say—to reveal?—Myka said, “I felt like I needed to be someone different—someone better.”
Another pause. Helena considered that such a feeling seemed very Myka (and she heard that phrase in Claudia’s voice), but also very misguided. Of course she was not at all placed to make such judgments, and even less so to convey them to Myka. Thus she said a simple, “Did you,” to encourage without prejudice.
“So I read a lot of books,” Myka said, to which Helena had responded internally, Of course you did. “One was about how to get things done.”
“All things?” Helena asked.
“Sort of.” That was followed by yet another pause. Yet another puzzle.
All these pauses. Was Myka on the verge of sleep? Helena said, soft, thinking she might go unheard, “Perhaps I should read that book. As a help to myself.”
At that, Myka had laughed, more delay, but also soft. “I don’t think it’s any kind of help you need. The guy who wrote it had a big system, all these rules, and I love rules, but these... I admit I didn’t stick with most of them. Honestly, any. But an idea that did stick was actually a pretty minor part: open loops. Stuff you track subconsciously, all the time, because it’s incomplete. How troubling that is. And what a difference it makes when you close a loop, when you each a resolution. I mean, he was talking about stuff like answering emails.”
“Emails,” Helena echoed. So far from artifacts.
“Which this is so much bigger than,” Myka said, exhibiting, not for the first time, an uncanny ability to scoop from Helena’s thoughts. “But maybe the principle holds. You don’t have to tell me. But I hope you have fewer open loops now than you did. Before.”
“Yes. The number. Fewer,” Helena said, factually.
She of course couldn’t say out loud (but it was equally factual) that Myka herself was the loop most capaciously open. The one that gaped, superseding, never mind the number of lesser.
Indeed, however, that number was now minus-one. Oscar. Oscar and his ballad... that loop closed.
Helena had in fact, while handling the camera, begun to ideate a wish that someone (Steve? Claudia?) might be persuaded to use the camera to capture her image... for it had occurred to her that a spark of art, some production on which to concentrate, might animate this reboot... something to pursue, rather than to be pursued by...
But. Lying abed, still and strangely hopeful—a state she should have known would not endure—a realization had struck her, as an open hand to the face, a realization of why Myka had brought up loops and the closing thereof: she had somehow discerned Helena’s wish, via that scooping of thought, and was discouraging her from pursuing it.
So much for any softening. This was instead a warning: Helena should not open a loop that Myka might be obligated to close. And Helena had no trouble grasping that the warning was in no way limited to the use of a single artifact... no, it doubtless applied to any burdensome loops Helena might be thinking of opening, any new incompletions that might come to trouble Myka.
“I understand,” Helena had said, regretting that pawns could not be moved backwards.
At the same instant, Myka said, “I’m glad.”
That collision had canceled communication entirely; in its wake, Myka had turned out her light and turned away from Helena.
Leaving Helena to her thoughts.
Well, fine, had been the first of those.
Next had come an equally mulish sniff of And I will have no difficulty directing any subsequent away from this shared bed.
Whereupon she had proven herself both wrong and right, thinking about history, about the fact that, whatever Myka’s commentary or lack thereof had or hadn’t signified, the fact of Warehouse agents lodging together, sharing beds completely platonically, was certainly nothing new.
This line of thinking had enabled Helena to distract herself by recalling a mission with Steve and Claudia, one in which Steve had announced, after checking in at their hotel, “Bad news. Just a king room left, but they said they’d bring up a cot.”
He had then immediately assigned Claudia to said cot, prompting her to protest, “No way! This situation screams rock-paper-scissors tournament! Loser gets the crappy night’s sleep!”
“No way,” Steve protested back, far more mildly. “The father of science fiction gets first dibs on the lumbar support, and my back’s got a decade on yours, so I call second. If that father agrees.”
Helena had. Sharing with Steve had been fine.
Sharing with Myka should of course have been no different.
Should of course have been...
But now, here in the impossible present, as Helena’s left arm slumbers and her right hand sparks, what should have been? Isn’t isn’t isn’t.
She needs further distraction, so she casts her mind again to Claudia and Steve, to the compensations they have offered her during this strange and estranging reboot: at first Claudia, who had welcomed Helena back so unreservedly and continues to offer wholehearted allyship; and then Steve, who had quickly become an unanticipated boon companion, a partner upon whom Helena has felt increasingly, and increasingly exceptionally, lucky to be able to rely.
And yet these compensations, though Helena hopes she conveys all appropriate gratitude for them, are never sufficient, for Myka—necessary yet unreachable—is always present.
She’d been so, even during that cot-delineated retrieval. Its aftermath had (so much for distraction) involved a significantly Myka-related incident, for Helena had dared, as she, Steve, and Claudia were relaxing in the hotel lounge prior to retiring, to broach Myka as a topic of conversation. As one might do, she’d thought: speaking about a colleague.
“I have an inquiry,” she’d phrased it. To make the ensuing question sound... scientific?
Dispassionate, she jeers at her recalled self.
She jeers also at what she’d said next: a too-bald, “How is Myka?”
She had known, even at the time, that what she had truly wanted was to say that blessed name, to speak about that blessed person. She could not speak to Myka in any meaningful way, and she was starving.
Steve and Claudia had then shared what seemed an extremely charged glance, so Helena hastened to dissemble, making sure to use questions so as to prevent Steve from finding her immediately untruthful: “Given that her liaison with Pete ended? They’ve... recovered, as it were? Both faring well?”
But her tone had struck her own ears as too bright; a desperation rippled behind it, and Helena knew from experience that behind that tiptoed a still deeper threat of rupture, which required work to be kept at bay. As Helena had been instructed by her most successful therapist to do when such awareness overtook her, she began to breathe with attention.
Neither Steve nor Claudia spoke as she did so.
When the danger passed, she smiled, as best she could, to signal to them her appreciation—and to herself, her success.
Steve then said, “You’re not asking about Pete.”
Helena valued—as a personality trait—Steve’s discerning willingness to push. She did not in that moment value how he thus so easily revealed a glaring flaw in her initial approach: she should have asked about Pete; with that as her entrée, the talk might organically have turned to Myka. Foolish of her to think so unstrategically... or was her failure to do so a paradoxically positive sign?
“Give it time,” Steve said, and Helena knew he was making no reference to Myka and Pete’s recovery.
“My relationship to time,” she said, with contempt. Time: she’d taken it. Now she had to give it? A forfeit. Well, that was fair.
Claudia said to Steve, “Speaking of, we’re wasting it. Are we gonna do the thing?”
“Only if H.G.’s on board,” Steve told her. It was an unexpectedly mind-your-manners utterance.
“What is the thing?” Helena asked.
“Claudia’s trying out alcohols,” Steve said. “We can’t do it around Pete, obviously, which means retrievals are our—”
“So many questions to answer, right?” Claudia interrupted, her avidity increasing. “You know, am I über-suave James Bond with the martinis? Or a fights-against-my-general-cool-geek-vibe Carrie Bradshaw with a cosmo?”
Helena had had no idea what she was referring to, but the investigation seemed entirely fit for someone her age. “What have you determined thus far?”
“Turns out cosmos don’t work for me,” she said, “as the prophecy foretold, and Bond-wise, I like a martini all vodka, no gin; sorry, Vesper.”
“Is that all?” Helena asked.
Further avidity: “Oh god no. Vodka drinks aren’t perfect: white Russians are way too sweet. Also in the white family, the wine category pretty much bores me. Also there was this one time Steve ordered a gin drink called a white lady that I couldn’t even think about because it had an egg white in it and one look made me retch.”
“Quite the wide-ranging experiment,” Helena said, hoping to forestall further off-putting description. “Not conducted with inappropriate... ah... intensity, one hopes?”
Steve patted Claudia’s shoulder, at which she rolled her eyes. “I’m supervising,” he said. “No more than a few tries in one sitting, and we’re doing it mindfully.”
Claudia abandoned her attitude and nodded. “Paying attention to what I’m tasting. How to find, you know, notes and stuff. Except for the disgusting egg-white thing, it’s honestly been fun.”
“I’m not opposed to fun,” Helena said, and she was a bit surprised—but pleased, and pleased to be pleased—that Steve didn’t squint in response. “So, Mr. Supervisor, what’s next?”
“I’ve been pushing for the wide and wonderful world of beer, but—”
“Seems too jocktastic,” Claudia said. “You know, ‘Beer me, bro.’”
“I don’t know,” Helena said.
“Anyway that’s really not me,” Claudia continued, as if Helena hadn’t spoken. She did have a tendency to ignore Helena’s ignorance, a tendency that Helena enjoyed and found frustrating in equal measure.
“Her beer perspective is severely limited,” Steve lamented.
“I myself have always found a strong stout ale quite enjoyable,” Helena said: her contribution to Steve’s cause. It was also true, the fact of which he seemed pleased to affirm with a quirk of lip and a quiet “so you have.”
Claudia’s expression remained skeptical, but she shrugged weakly and said, “I guess I could give it a shot?”
“Oh, because H.G. says so,” Steve twitted.
To that, Claudia squared her shoulders. “Yeah. Don’t you know who she is?” she demanded.
“Who I was,” Helena hurried to emphasize, “and given that Steve assigned me the bed on that basis, he—”
“Who you are,” Claudia corrected, throwing the emphasis back.
“And who is that?” Helena asked. What distinction did Claudia imagine was relevant?
“The person who told me my destiny was glorious. You’re still that guy, right?”
Relevant indeed. Helena was taken aback, indeed taken back to that extremity, back in a novel way. She had been so mired in the Myka of it all in the intervening time, that she had lost her view of the bright salience of Claudia’s presence. Wrongly. “I am,” she said. She hoped Claudia believed her.
“Okay,” Claudia said. “So I’ve got this big-as-Pete’s-biceps incentive to hope the stuff you say is true. And by the way, one of you has to casually drop in front of him how I said that, because I want the points.”
Steve snickered and said, “I know my job. But in the meantime, I think I’d like to toast to all these sentiments, and to the agents offering them. With a strong stout ale.”
They tasted the three strongest the hotel bar had on offer, and Claudia pronounced that her favorite, one purporting to convey roasted notes of coffee, chocolate, and other darkness, was “way too complicated for your average broseph.” Which Steve seemed pleased by, as a judgment, so the overall experience scored a success.
There was no further talk of Myka, however, the avoidance of which topic seemed quite deliberate... as if Steve and Claudia had determined that Helena would not benefit from it.
Or that she did not deserve it.
For the best, Helena had concluded. Either way.
Now, in a similar “for the best either way” sense, she makes to raise her hand, with that intended overlay of feigned sleep, so as to shift away and at last regain equilibrium, restoring feeling to her sleeping arm and calming that oversensitive hand. But instead—in what she can interpret only as a stupidly id-driven attempt to bank some never-to-be-repeated sensation, to the memory of which that desperate id might cling in a touch-deprived future—she moves her hand, not away from Myka, but further down her leg.
And her worst fears are instantly realized: Myka’s body reacts violently, as if in revulsion at the very idea of Helena touching her.
It was only a hand at rest, Helena begs, with no conception of why or to whom she is rendering that supplication. That was all.
Alas, that was—is—not all, for in the next split second Myka is falling from the bed and crying out in pain.
Helena, at a loss, attempts a faux-innocent inquiry, which Myka answers unintelligibly. In trepidation, Helena ventures to the mattress-edge, then lowers herself to the floor next to Myka—and she is appalled, for the situation that confronts her is all debility, even more so than the absurd “my arm is asleep” with which this farce began: Myka’s shoulder is dislocated.
Further, Myka is now unconscious.
Spare Myka pain. How utterly unsurprising Helena finds her inability to obey such a dictum in even this most basic physical sense.
Unsurprising... worse, dispiriting, and it brings her low, such that again the incipient rupture asserts its subterranean power, urging Helena to give up, to run away and leave this broken Myka to someone else to bind up and save.
You’ve done it before.
That resounds in her head as both accusation and affirmation, and the voice pronouncing it might be Myka’s, or some deity’s, or that of any of the other personages who jockey audibly for primacy in that space, including Helena’s own.
She initiates breathing with care, even as an eddying undertow tempts her to entertain the notion that escape, too, might be rebooted, tempts her to entertain and revel in its ostentation as a response to Myka’s indifference, her rejection of history, even her revulsion.
Here is my answer to all that, a departure would declare.
Helena labors to breathe herself away from such perfidy, but the scenario creeps along, with an undertone of sinful relish, as she imagines leaving Myka to awaken alone and in pain.
But then—because her labor leads her there—she further imagines the various permutations of “someone else” who might be called upon to save the day in her absence. Whereupon the thought strikes her that moving through time nondestructively requires her to think seriously of, and to think seriously out, such knock-ons... how, for example, would Steve and Claudia respond to having to clean up this mess, knowing that Helena had made it?
Moving through time nondestructively. Interesting, here, the overlap with moving through time selfishly: selfishly, she does not want to destroy Claudia’s image of her as someone whose opinion matters. She does not want to destroy Steve’s image of her either, for it seems to have at least some positive components. Further, she does not want to destroy the fellowship they three are building.
If for no other reasons than those, she concludes that having caused this quite specific damage, she must fix it.
Because she can.
The fact of the matter is, Helena cannot fix most things. She has tried mightily to maintain the pretense that she can... but she has been forced over and over to confront the absurdity of that bravado. This very specific fix-it, however, she can perform. And while that performance—inconveniently, in the present circumstance—requires touch, here it can be functional. Perhaps in success she might in some way efface her earlier invasiveness...
Yet she can do nothing without two functional arms. She thumps her still-insensate left against the bed, hard—too hard, for Myka’s eyes open. She mumbles out something Helena decodes as “whatareyoudoing.”
“Preparing to remedy a situation,” Helena says.
“Okay.” Myka murmurs. She seems oddly comforted by the answer, to such an extent that she relaxes, losing consciousness again.
That’s fortunate, given the required manipulation.
Helena prepares herself to do it quickly, efficiently, as she has done in the past... rather dramatically on one occasion, as she recalls, for an agonized Wolcott... but she should not think of Wolcott. For the regret.
She sets that aside, preoccupying herself instead with the necessary activity. Her manipulation, determined and strong, is rewarded: what begins as a sluggish resistance resolves into a slip-pop of relocation, one that shudders a familiar path through her own bones. She then cushions Myka’s arm with a fresh towel and uses a pillowcase to fashion around it a tight sling.
Levering Myka up onto the bed would most likely cause further injury, so Helena sits beside her on the floor, ensuring periodically that she continues to breathe. The wait is calming, cleansing, its peace a renewal of a soothing activity of which Helena has been long deprived: observing Myka closely, at actual leisure. At no point since her return—so at no point in, literally, years—has she had such an opportunity.
She’s reminded, in that observation, of the true fundament: this precious person. Who could never be merely some flesh.
After a lengthy time, during which Helena is pressed to consider, to remember, to value Myka’s singularity, that precious person’s eyes flutter open.
That person tests her bound arm, a tentative physical investigation that approaches elegance in its delicacy.
But Myka’s delicacy and elegance, too, Helena should not think of. For the regret.
“I’m not in the hospital,” Myka burrs.
Reasonable, practical. This is what Helena should think of. “Not yet,” she says. “But we’ll go if necessary. If you’re in pain.”
Myka’s face contorts. “Not if. I am. Some. More than some. I’m sorry.”
“For being in pain?”
“That. But also, for changing this whole thing.”
Helena leaves the latter alone, for she cannot begin to interpret it. Focusing on functionality, she asks, “Can you dress yourself?”
Myka nods, but she winces far too much with even that motion, so Helena screws her courage to it and says, “I’ll change and then help you.”
Herself, fast, then Myka: Functional, she snarls internally as she addresses the situation, and even faster. She’s relieved to find that Myka’s trousers and boots are less complicated than she’d feared, and as it happens, preventing Myka suffering additional physical pain—even while undressing and redressing her!—is, paradoxically or not, far easier than navigating emotional shoals, or even hand-on-hip physical shoals. Focusing on Myka’s face for twists, listening for labors in breath, adjusting accordingly... it’s distractingly, satisfyingly concrete. Only the present moment matters.
Only the present moment matters. This is the mantra Helena iterates internally as they proceed to the nearest urgent care facility.
Yet as they wait there for attention, Helena finds herself increasingly unable to ignore why they are waiting there for attention. In the present moment, which matters. She begins—or does she intend it as an ending?—with, “I’m assuming you flung yourself to the floor in an attempt to escape a circumstance.”
Myka hiccups a laugh that makes her cringe in protection of the shoulder. “That’s weirdly accurate. As an assumption.”
Helena recoils at the confirmation, but she must acknowledge it. “A circumstance in which I touched you in a way that was unwelcome,” she agrees, with gloom.
“Unwelcome,” Myka echoes.
It’s so... definitive. It was one thing for Helena herself to think it, believe it, say it aloud. Quite another—though it shouldn’t have been—to hear it from Myka.
A punctuating end to what never truly began between them: there is some consolation, if only philosophical, in the idea that after so many starts that were false, they may at least enjoy a finish that is true.
“Of course it was,” Helena says, following with, “and how could it have been otherwise.” She puts the final period upon it by adding a bare, spare dig: “Given history.”
Myka closes her eyes... in acceptance of the cut? When she opens them, they are glistening. Tears? Helena is egotistically gratified by such a response, never mind that it means she has yet again failed to hold to her resolution.
“Helena,” Myka says, and now Helena is gratified simply by Myka’s low utterance of her name. Myka does not always use that deeper voice, and Helena does love (yes, love) the rare pleasure of hearing her name in it. “I’m so tired,” Myka says next.
That is less gratifying. It’s yet another utterance Helena should leave alone; of course Myka is tired. But in what she is sure is a mistake, Helena says, “Of?”
“Everything. But particularly, you.”
A dagger, that was. A cut back. Testimony to Helena’s concatenating mistakes.
“This you,” Myka adds.
The additional twist of blade leaves Helena unclear on the devastation Myka intends. “Of course” is all she can think to say.
Myka closes her eyes and exhales heavy, a near-sob. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she intones, but what need has she to apologize? “That was the pain talking—or, no, I still know you well enough to know you’ll hear that wrong. What I mean is, I’m saying something I could keep holding back if the pain wasn’t cracking me open.”
The pain. Cracking her open. Which would never have happened in the absence of Helena’s stupid, thoughtless touch. Which in turn makes abundantly clear that the stupid, thoughtless person who applied that touch is the “this you” Myka means.
If Helena is to remain in this situation she must take measures, so she lengthens her inhales and exhales, entirely ashamed both at needing such a crutch and at having to exhibit that need.
After a moment of silence, Myka asks, “Are you breathing differently than you were just a second ago?”
Myka isn’t Steve. Helena could at least attempt to lie about this, to cloak her shame... but it’s effort, either way. “Yes,” she says, choosing the unpredictability of Myka’s interpretation over the unpredictability of her own performance.
“Is that good or bad?” Myka asks. “Or both?”
The questions stop Helena, stop her in the same way her at-leisure observation of Myka had. I still know you well enough, Myka had said, and it is true. This is why, Helena would say if she could. Your knowing to ask that.
But she can’t say it, and, worse, she doesn’t know what she should say. What should come next.
Apparently Myka doesn’t either. That not-knowing persists, hanging, until “next” arrives, as an intrusion from outside their suspension: medical attention is at last directed Myka’s way; she is escorted out of the waiting area and taken elsewhere.
“We’ll call you when you can see her,” Helena is told.
Alone in the waiting area—for no other human seems to have suffered damage this night—and uncomfortably situated on a hard plastic chair, she tilts her head back against a similarly unforgiving plaster wall.
She closes her eyes. She’s had no rest, no rest for so long. She is drained. Physically empty.
Philosophically as well.
She imagines trying to sleep... or rather, she imagines not trying to remain awake.
Doubtless futile, either way.
She next imagines constructing an airtight argument that could not help but persuade all who hear it—Myka in particular, but all others as well—that this entire situation is Artie’s fault.
Also futile.
This despite its being the fact of the matter, for indeed he did bring the situation about. Perhaps not in a proximate sense, but in the ultimate... the idea of which, after a moment, strikes her as both comic and tragic: Artie as the ultimate cause? Of anything, from the universe on down? Though he would doubtless like to imagine himself so... even at the Warehouse, however, he must be not even penultimate, given the bureaucracy that sits over the entire concern...
Helena thus spends the bulk of her time in the waiting area stewing about—stewing over? stewing under?—the relative positions of god, Mrs. Frederic, and various Regents in the universe. None of it, however, requires her to alter her breathing; rather, she composes in her head the opening paragraphs of several publishable monographs on these and related topics. It isn’t restful. But is evidence of something other than emptiness.
When someone does at last call her to see Myka, everything has changed.
Well. Not everything. Helena herself hasn’t, as her bureaucracy-pantheon thought may have been philosophically valid but made no difference.
Myka, however, has changed entirely: her arm is now professionally dressed, but more importantly, the knit of pain has left her face. “They medicated me,” she says, giving the word “medicated” a rapturous cast. “The X-rays said I didn’t break anything, so we’re waiting on results of a scan to see if I need surgery but in the meantime I feel better than I maybe ever have in my life and I am so happy to see you. All these doctors were like ‘why did she think she could fix you’ but I knew why and it was because it’s you. and that scan? It’ll shout out how Helena Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder so she didn’t need surgery, and they don’t know this, but actually H.G. Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder, which is even more amazing. Wait, that’s not more amazing. You’re the most amazing when you’re you than when you’re that guy. Even though I guess you are that guy. Sort of. Wait, Claudia’s been saying ‘that guy’ a lot now. And I cut and paste from her so much, but I don’t like it. The way things are.” She heaves an enormous sigh and blinks at Helena, as if she’s just re-understood that another person is present.
Is there some ideal way to answer this flood? Helena settles for an antiseptic “I’m pleased to see you out of pain.”
Myka gasps and flails wildly with her uninjured arm, which gesture eventually resolves into an index finger directed at Helena. “That’s it exactly. I’m out of pain. All out. No more pain to give. Particularly not to you. So saying I’m tired of you? I regret it, and I apologize for it, and I promise that’s the end of it. I was wishing to get something back, and you don’t want it back, and so I have to be fine. Without it. Without you.”
Without you. Helena supposes she should be impressed by how concisely Myka can foreshadow disaster. “Should I not... be here?” She braces herself for the answer.
“Of course you should. I have to be fine without how you were,” Myka says, very quietly. The collapse of her volubility gives Helena pause.
She knows it would be better not to probe; she ought to, as Claudia says, “take the win.” But “Of course you should” is only facially a win... “How was I?” she asks. To wound herself by making Myka clarify what has been lost.
“Oh, how you were...” Myka says, her words dragging. How much—any, all?—of this might be due to the varying effects of the medication? “Putting me into this story,” she continues. “It was so big, and I didn’t understand what it was, really or at all, but it felt so big. Yearning and tragedy, and there I was, still me, but in it, so in it, all in it, next to you. Bigger than life, and I... loved it? Needed it? Something to take me over. But my wishing for any of it back, when of course you don’t?” She raises that free arm, then lets it fall. Futility, it says. “So small. Only somebody little and desperate would want to make you revisit any of that.”
Medication effect or not, Helena can’t let Myka keep on with this. “Make me revisit it? Yearning and tragedy? I’m the one who inflicted that, and with malign intent; I damaged you. And I cannot imagine a scenario in which that debt is discharged.”
Myka squints. “Debt,” she says, as if articulating a new noun, but not one that names an abstraction; no, this thing is big and blunt, a dumb object that takes up space. Unfunctional furniture. That I carry on my back, Helena moods.
“Oh!” Myka then yelps, her tone shifting to excitement. “But I just damaged myself. So now we’re even!” She delivers that last bit big and broad, for all the world as if she’s the comic lead in a panto.
Helena has not spared a thought for panto in years. “That makes no sense at all,” she says, because it’s the case, but also to scorn the memory. This is no time for that past.
“Would you like me to dislocate your shoulder?” Myka asks, as if it were a reasonable proffer. Still comic, but now strangely sincere.
Helena meets this bizarrely compelling, ridiculous combination with as much severity as she can muster. “Honestly no. I would not.”
“I see,” Myka says, and she points again, this time without preambling flail. “Some prices you aren’t willing to pay.”
Helena can at the very least be honest about this. How nice it would be if Steve were here to verify. “Willing to... in the sense of volunteering to? No. In the sense of understanding that I deserve to? Certainly. So do me damage if you must. In particular, do me damage if you think it could even the score between us. It won’t, but if you think it could? Please do.”
“That’s pretty twisted,” pronounces the only arbiter who matters.
“You sound like Claudia again,” Helena observes. To push the judgment away? Yes, and she tries to make certain of it with, “Is that another cut and paste?”
“Maybe. But now that I think about it, she sees things pretty clearly a lot of the time. Don’t you think?”
“I would like to think,” Helena is compelled to admit. Hoist by her own petard.
At this point—suspending any resolution—a doctor reenters the curtained area. “Good news: no surgery,” she tells Myka.
“See, I told you she fixed it,” Myka preens.
“You did,” says the doctor. “Several times,” she adds, dry.
Helena says “I’m so sorry,” only to hear Myka say, at the same time, “Sorry not sorry!” Another echo of Claudia... this one, however, clearly heartfelt.
The doctor turns to Helena. “Don’t try anything like this again. You got ridiculously lucky.”
“That’s kind of her M.O.,” Myka says. “Except when it isn’t.”
The doctor sighs. “I’m pretty sure that’s my point. And listen, make sure to follow up with your local doc. They’ll prescribe a ton of PT, so brace yourself.”
Myka snorts. “Brace myself? Sure, but not for the PT; my boss is going to flay me alive.”
The doctor barely reacts. “Oh, maybe this one can fix that too,” she deadpans, directing an eyeroll at Helena, accompanied by a murmured, “not a suggestion.”
“Oh, she’s in for the flaying,” Myka says, with more than a little cheer. “If not for this, then for something. Eventually.”
The doctor shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “Good news for me: I don’t have to care.” She points at Myka: “You go to PT.” Now at Helena: “You don’t try to practice medicine.” At both of them, her eyes flicking back and forth with purpose: “Got it?” Helena nods; she senses Myka doing the same. “Excellent,” the doctor says. “Or whatever. I’m done with you now.”
She conveys with her rapid exit that interacting with both of them has been a most exasperating experience.
While Helena does not appreciate being chastised—and especially not for attempting to care for Myka—she does appreciate expertise. Especially when it contributes to Myka’s well-being. It’s a conundrum. “I find your doctor’s aspect strangely appealing,” she says. “Speaking of bracing.”
Myka grins. “I was totally thinking the same thing.”
“And yet I would practice that medicine again.”
“For me that’s good news.”
As they prepare to depart, Helena says, “I confess I’m curious as to what you intend to tell Artie.”
Myka offers a slight stretch of her right shoulder in the direction of her ear: the only version of a shrug available to her, bound as she is. “Maybe I should leave that to you. You’re the writer.” Forestalling Helena’s reflexive objection, she adds, “I know, I know. The research. The ideas.”
“And yet I don’t have any. I certainly don’t see a path to inventing anything that would—”
“How about I take your photo with that camera? Think that’d help?” This is accompanied by a different grin: sly.
Whither the warning? Or is this a test? Myka isn’t Steve, yet Helena goes with truth: “It might. With any number of things.”
“If only,” Myka says, inscrutably. “Anyway I intend to tell Artie that this is all his fault, because he sent us on this retrieval in the first place. Obviously I won’t say what really happened.”
While Myka bestowing such grace is not surprising, it moves Helena all the same. “Thank you,” she says.
Myka opens her mouth, then closes it. She does it again. This wait... it’s grace too. “You’re welcome,” she eventually says. “I mean I’m tempted to tell him how you saved the day—the arm—but I know I shouldn’t, because I don’t want to draw attention to the hotel charging us extra.” To Helena’s quizzical eyebrow, she says, “For the missing towels and pillowcase. Which I tried to talk the nurses into giving back to me, but they’d already tossed them as hazardous waste. Or something. Or maybe I’m just not very persuasive? Or clear in what I’m asking for?”
Helena would very much like to explain that her own answers to those questions are negative and affirmative, respectively: no, you are persuasive; but yes, you are unclear.
“On the other hand, they did medicate me,” Myka says, perking up. “I keep thinking it’ll wear off, but not yet!”
The consolations of intoxication. “To the delight of your shoulder I’m sure,” Helena says. To my delight as well, she wishes she were free to say.
Their return to the hotel room offers another “everything has changed” hinge: no longer a stage for new and awkward performances of politesse, the space is now familiar, a place they have reentered. For the next act of the play?
Myka, who has preceded Helena in, stops and sways—just a bit, but Helena instinctively steps close, taking her by the elbow of her uninjured arm with one hand, stationing the other around the curve of her waist.
She feels Myka’s breath catch at the contact; immediately, she curses herself, loosens her hold, and says a terse, “I’m sure you want to lie down.”
“More than maybe anything. Or, wait, no, not anything.” Myka turns and catches Helena’s eyes with hers, but Helena cannot use that gaze as the basis for any inference.
She backs away as Myka lowers herself onto the bed; eventually, she backs her way into the room’s one armchair. It lacks give. It also lacks arms at a height that might provide anything resembling support. Helena slumps down, trying to be grateful that it exists at all.
Long minutes pass. As in the hospital’s waiting area, Helena imagines trying not to remain awake.
Similarly futile.
She chances a glance at Myka, who meets her eyes again and says, “That looks uncomfortable. Or what I mean is, you look uncomfortable. Which honestly is pointless, unless you’re doing some hair-shirt thing, because we’ve got this big bed. Not a lot of hours before we have to leave it, but we’ve got it for now.”
“That went poorly before.”
“I think circumstances have changed. Don’t you?” Weighted.
Circumstances are always changing, Helena could say. Usually for the worse. Instead she ventures, “You’d let me lie down with you?”
“I never wouldn’t.” Myka squints. “Wait. Did that come out right? Anyway, yes.”
Medication: not yet worn off. “You’re sure?” Helena asks.
“I’m pretty sure this bed is almost as big as a field where Pete’s favorite sport happens. It’s at least as big as an ice rink anyway, and those aren’t small.”
Helena refrains from pointing out that that was no help in the previous disaster. She doesn’t, however, appreciate being able to recline. For the first while, the fact of being beside Myka is less relevant than the slow loosening of her lower back and hips.
“Can you sleep?” Helena asks, as they are both evidently lying with eyes open to the ceiling.
“Not now,” Myka answers, and the sentiment seems clear: not after all of this. All of this with which we must deal.
The bed first, perhaps.
She turns to look at Myka, if minimally. “Did you request a cot?” she asks, because she doesn’t know. Because the answer might reveal... something?
Myka’s eyes widen. “Oh my god I should have,” she says. Stricken.
“Why didn’t you?”
“It didn’t even cross my mind.” She’s talking more to herself—or perhaps to the room at large?—than to Helena. Is this continued evidence of the medication?
“And do you know why that is?” Helena asks, hoping for that revelation, even if drug-induced.
“Honestly I think I thought I was being given an ultimatum. Like it was something I had to be fine with or else.”
“Fine with ‘or else.’” Helena means the echo as rueful agreement.
But: “Sharing a bed with you. Platonically,” Myka says, taking it instead as a request for explanation.
“Platonically,” Helena scoffs, unable to avoid the idea that agreeing to accept that adverb would, paradoxically, usher in others. (Passionately.) (Speaking of paradoxically.) “That word is so often misused.” It’s a push-off. A push-away.
“But I’m using it correctly.” Myka sounds not offended, but rather self-satisfied.
Fine. Harden the position. “You are not referring to our consciousness rising from physical to spiritual matters.”
“Well... but how about love for the idea of good? As a path to virtue?”
Myka is well-read. In this moment, that fact is not entirely pleasing. “I suppose we were both attempting to be courtly,” Helena concedes.
“I mean I’ll grant you that nobody ended up transcending the body,” Myka says. Helena is about to agree, to snap away from churlishness, to express regret and apologies, when Myka exclaims, “Hey! I just had the best idea for a joke. So you’re not a hologram anymore, right? So you know what you were trying to be? Last night, in bed?”
Jokes. They confound Helena nearly as completely as metaphors do Steve. “I have no idea.”
“A Platonic solid,” Myka declares, triumphant.
Helena is mortified to find that in this case, she “gets it.” “Myka,” she sighs.
“Too soon? But come on, it’s not bad!”
“Alas, it is.” This quality, Helena can recognize.
“Right, but the good kind.”
Helena is not made of stone. Or bronze. How much easier everything had been then, sans choice and sans reason... and most importantly, sans the near-irresistibility of this one human. “I did always enjoy the word ‘icosahedron,’” she tenders.
“See,” Myka says, now in indulgence rather than triumph. “Pretty sure you have more than twenty faces though.”
“You do as well. Some revealed only under the influence of opioids.”
“Here’s one I don’t think I’d have the guts to use otherwise: my explain-it-to-you-using-words face.”
“Explain what to me?” Helena asks. It’s a surrender. She should better have said she did not wish that face revealed, but that would never have stopped a determined Myka.
“Why I flung myself to the floor.”
“I thought that had been explained? You were attempting to escape a circumstance.”
“First, the flinging was more involuntary than an attempt. And second: your hand.”
“Perhaps you don’t remember”—a strange thing to say to Myka—“but we had this conversation previously.” Helena does not want to have it again.
“Not this conversation. In that one, you drew the wrong conclusion. Or relied on an invalid assumption. Actually both of those. Anyway, your hand.”
“Please stop saying that,” Helena requests. Begs.
“Fine, I’ll finish the sentence: Woke up every nerve in my body,” Myka says, causing Helena to cringe and wish she could this very instant construct a truly useful time machine so she could fly backward, overleaping this latest passage so as to muzzle Myka before she could say that, because she believes it but knows it leads nowhere functional. To her continued mortification, Myka carries on, “Woke them all right up.” This, she says rhapsodic. Helena feels that tone in her gut, a hot twist of something she deserves as pain, but that manifests, shamefully, as pleasure. “Then your hand moved, and it shorted out the system—my system—and I fell out of bed, and the rest is history.”
“On the contrary, the rest is quite present.” Helena tries pushing all of it away, striving for detachment. For function.
“So, your hand,” Myka says again.
Helena raises the offender. “Also present.” Detachment. Humor, even; pushing, pushing, pushing. Trying to maintain.
“No, I mean why,” Myka pushes in turn.
Helena bats back, in faux innocence, “Why is it present?”
“Why was it present. On me.” Low now, her voice, just as compelling as, and even more commanding than, when she uses it to utter Helena’s name.
“I have no excuse,” Helena says.
“I don’t need an excuse. I need a reason. Do you have one?”
“It isn’t exculpatory.”
“As long as it’s explanatory.”
No escape now. No excuse, and no escape. “Here is my reason: I wanted to touch you. So against all better judgment, I did. Intending only that, nothing more.” Myka’s response to these words is an exhale. Loud. Unlike the hospital sob, however, this is slow and controlled. Helena allows a decorous pause, but no words ensue, so she goes on. Myka deserves an explanation that is complete. “But then I found myself unable to... un-touch you. Competently. And the rest will at some point be history, upon which I will never cease to look back and berate myself.”
Waiting for whatever may come next, Helena feels exhaustion inch through her, infiltrating her eyes, limbs, brain, sapping every vestige of energy... her surrender to the creeping leach is imminent when Myka says, “I like that reason.”
All right then. Awake and aware. “You do?”
“You really can be impossible to talk to. Listen to me: if I did that—touched you—I would find myself the same. Unable to un-touch. Do you understand?”
What would be the cost of abandoning her resistance? “I don’t know...” she begins, then reverses course and begins again. Truth, never mind the cost. “Yes. I do understand. But I don’t know what to do about that.”
Myka turns her head full toward Helena, twisting her long neck. Helena turns her own head, but that isn’t enough, so she shifts onto her side—her left side, punitively aware that it will be weeks before Myka can turn in such a way.
They look at each other, Helena both knowing and fearing how her guilt must freight her gaze. Regarding Myka so close, looking now into eyes that are open, is a boon she does not deserve.
After a time, Myka says, “I know what I want to do.”
Her intent is abundantly clear. The entirely of Helena’s being balks, stranding her again in Boone: if she makes a move for the momentary better, it will most likely end worse. She cannot find the... courage? or is it foolish disregard for consequences?... to reach for that moment of joy. Neither, however, can she find the discipline to dismiss its possibility.
“But I also know I shouldn’t,” Myka says, breaking with clarity into Helena’s indecision.
Well. Helena can certainly see the wisdom of that, so perhaps at last they are approaching a real accord that will render all hopes and wishes moot, so that neither courage nor discipline features in the—
“I can tell the meds are messing with my head,” Myka says, “and if there’s one thing I want to remember in picture-perfect detail, it’s this.” She moves her right index finger near to Helena’s lips, then withdraws it.
Unable to un-touch. That withdrawal reaffirms that Myka believes what she says. “This,” Helena echoes, mesmerized.
“So I’m going to wait till tomorrow to—listen to me saying it out loud—kiss you. For the first time. I want to be all there when it happens.”
There is a practicality to Myka’s thinking, and to Myka, that Helena worships. She tries to match it with a bit of her own: “If it happens.”
Myka’s jaw drops. “Come on! I said it out loud! It’s real now!”
“It’s been real for some time, hasn’t it? But I’m being realistic about the circumstance. You might not remember that you wanted to.”
“Seriously? I’ve remembered it since we met.”
Helena has remembered it just as long. She has. Denying it is pointless. But she has a larger concern, and though this is the wrong time to address it, perhaps medicated Myka will afford an unfiltered read...
“Or you might think better of it.”
“Of kissing you? I don’t think so.”
“Of what could ensue. The possibility of a... relationship. Between us. What if it doesn’t work?”
“Relationship.” After she says the word, Myka’s lips part and close, as if the very word is savory. “What if it does?”
It is savory. However. “I’m asking as a practical matter, not philosophically. I’m constrained: I can’t leave again. That’s why I came back.” The thin strand to which she is clinging... refraining from attempting to rekindle an intimacy hasn’t been only to keep Myka safe. It has also been to keep the Warehouse safe for Helena herself to inhabit.
“Then don’t leave again.”
“But what if that means you do?” This is not philosophy either. This, too, is history.
“If I do, then I do, but I’d like to think I won’t. We’ve both had our walkaway crises, and they didn’t take. So if it doesn’t work, we put it behind us like adults. If Pete and I could, then so can you and I. But I’d rather not have to. So let’s be careful.” She pauses. “Breathe however you need to.”
The words are an embrace. A physical clasp might be more galvanizing, but right now, Myka is managing just fine with words. “If this works, it will be because you say things like that.”
“Good news, because I mean things like that. And I intend to keep saying them. Hey, speaking of saying, do me a favor and write down what I said just now, about the adults and the careful, because I want to remember it.”
Sluggishly, Helena ideates rising, going to the room’s desk, finding logo-bearing paper and pen, writing...
****
Helena and Oscar are in a salon. They are engaged in a dispute regarding choices and consequences. Helena is standing at a lectern, and Oscar is reclining on a lavishly upholstered chaise longue, kicking his right leg such that its calf bounces in a languid little rhythm against the low cushioned edge.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
“The choices that create a circumstance will not, repeated, resolve it satisfactorily,” Helena says. Is she reading from a monograph? “As we see in the case of your own Ballad of Reading Gaol, do we not? And yet injury need not lead inevitably to future debility, so clearly some choice in the matter is—”
“Helena,” Oscar says, interrupting her monologue. “Helena,” he repeats. He sounds nothing like himself, but rather someone else, and Helena is straining to connect the voice to the correct person.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
“Time to wake up,” Oscar-as-someone-else admonishes. Encourages?
“I know,” she tells him, hugely frustrated, fighting. “I’m trying.”
His impassive mien is no help. It never was.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
Trust Oscar to cast some part of himself as the pendulum of a particularly annoying clock—
“Seriously, wake up,” Helena hears, and consciousness jolts at her: Myka’s voice.
Oscar dissolves. Into laughter or tears, no doubt, as he was wont to do...
Helena’s eyes open, meeting Myka’s, and she is brought back to it all: the hotel, the bed; the shoulder, the hospital... then hotel again, bed again... and finally words, as if for the first time.
Myka is lying on her right side, facing Helena. Her eyes are bright, her gaze intense.
“Are you in pain?” Helena asks.
Myka leans forward, as if that were a signal. The signal: for Helena is the astonished, grateful, transported recipient of a kiss, a first kiss—the first kiss—one that is swift but soft, gentle, genuine. Like morning... “Better now,” Myka says when she pulls back. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Stay there.”
Better now. Not lost on Helena are all the ways that signifies, including: better that this happened now than at some point in the desperate past. Then, such a kiss would have been a tragic wish for all they would never have. Now, instead, it can stand as a reward for having survived all of that, as well as, universe willing, a mark of embarkation.
By the time Myka returns, Helena has sat up, stationing herself on the edge of the bed. She has also realized that she must apologize—for they should not embark on this new voyage with yet another of her many faults unaddressed. “You charged me with writing down part of our conversation. I didn’t. I fell asleep instead.”
Myka hesitates before joining her on the bed’s edge, clearly considering which arm should be next to Helena. She chooses the functional right. “It’s okay. Even if I don’t remember exactly what we said, I remembered what we needed to do.”
“Needed to,” Helena reprises. She could supply words of her own, but why? Myka is saying the ones that matter...
“Needed to,” Myka affirms. “So where were we?” She raises her useful hand to Helena’s cheek, cradling. Helena leans into it, saying nothing, because silence now says everything.
This is a longer kiss, more wandering, more suggestive of possibility, more likely to lead to such possibility... Helena is the one to this time pull away. “A place quite new,” she says.
“And yet I’m pretty sure we’ve been headed here all along.”
“It wasn’t inevitable,” Helena says. She is thinking now of dream-Oscar, who is slipping from her mind, dropping, like a poorly initiated painting, but he must have obstreperously been maintaining something about inevitability. He always did.
“No,” Myka agrees. “And it still isn’t. So let’s be careful.”
“You remember that part? Despite my stenographic failure?”
“Even if I didn’t—but I do—I’d know it’s important.”
Helena turns and touches her right hand to Myka’s right hip. She would certainly not be able to do this now if she had not done so in the night... the night’s ontogeny recapitulating the phylogeny of their shared history. Myka covers Helena’s hand with hers, and there is healing in the simple fact of their sitting. But eventually that is not enough, and another kiss ensues, longer still, and lips outweigh quiet hands—or no, lips add to quiet hands, but hands are not content to remain so calm, and so this continues and might continue—
Myka makes a noise that is clearly not of pleasure; she moves entirely away, her right hand pressing protectively at her left shoulder. “We’re going to need to be careful about this stupid shoulder too. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You’re sorry? I’m the one who can’t keep my hands to myself.” Ontogeny, phylogeny.
“It’s not like I’m some paragon of self-control... and I am sorry, because I’d like to be able to participate fully. But also I’d like to not have to hurry on account of catching a plane. In good news, eventually my shoulder will heal. I know we can’t stay here till then, but...”
“It would help,” Helena supplies.
“If only because we have to come up with how this supposedly happened. I still think maybe I should take your picture. Or you could take mine? Because by the way, here’s a funny thing: I was trying to write a novel.”
“You were?” More that is new... “Speaking of icosahedra,” Helena notes.
“I want to tell you about it.”
“You do?” Trying to convey her incredulity. That Myka would allow her such... access.
“I want to tell you everything. But in the meantime we have to tell Artie something... I guess we’ve got both flights plus the layover in Denver to get our story straight.”
Stories. Narrative. Novels? “But we’ll tell Steve the truth. Won’t we?”
“Of course we will. And Claudia, right?”
“Also necessary. Although most likely mockery-inducing.”
Myka smiles. It’s a sunrise. “Stress testing. If we can take it from her, we’ll be fine. Then again we might need the time on the planes to rest up for that.”
“Weren’t you able to sleep, this past while?”
Myka shakes her head, and just as Helena opens her mouth to express regret and apologize again for her own sleep, Myka silences her with a kiss, one that lingers, lingers, lingers... still half against Helena’s lips, she says, “The un-touching part really is difficult. But don’t worry about my not sleeping: for the first time in a long time, I was happy to be awake.”
END
#bering and wells#warehouse 13#fanfic#Asleep#part 2#B&W holiday gift exchange#kla1991#also anniversary!#which this year arrived a bit unexpectedly#so I decided to do this mashing up of occasions#because I apparently cannot work fast or well anymore#but as for this story#something something sleep and wakefulness#and when one finds oneself in those states#and whether one recognizes the state one is in when in it#or when finally out of it#and of course there are also the transitions
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GIFTS ARE DUE IN ONE WEEK!
Just a reminder that we all have one week left to complete our gifts!
If you will need more than one week to finish, or if you think you might, please let me and your giftee know now so there's no confusion on February 14th. Your gift will be just as gratefully received later if need be!
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Hello, Bering and Wells gift giver here. Is there anything in particular you’d like to see for your gift?
Hi! Not quite sure what your area of expertise is, but I have prepared prompts for a fanfic and art and can be a manip?
Fanfic:
Could be canon-compliant. Helena keeps secrets again and Myka, still a little traumatized by Helena living double lives, struggles to trust her. Helena's secret: she's writing again. 200 years being consumed by anger and grief, setting her entire life aside, she finds joy in writing again. I'm not too particular about it. It's just a random excuse to show an exploration of their relationship after the series.
Art prompt:
Book cuddles. They're reading different books, existing in the same space and have at least a single limb touching the other person.
Lol. Go ham with it. You could completely just ignore the prompt or take whatever idea you prefer. Whichever works best for you.
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Hi!! /waves I am your Bering and Wells gifter this year. I hope you are having a good week/holiday season if you celebrate. I can make gifs or draw things as preference, but I can also write if necessary. Do you have any thoughts as to what you might like? Plots? Tropes? Prompts of any kind? Also is there anything you absolutely don’t want to see? Nothing would make me happier than to make you a gift that you love, so please don’t hold back with the wishlist. I will do my absolute best with it ❤️
Hello hello! I love GIFs and drawings and am open to pretty much anything. I am a big fan of gif fic (is that what we call it?) and/or a nice big serving of the classic Bering and Wells angst & pain. (Resolved, preferably.)
I couldn’t really narrow it down but I love both fluff and angst. So however you do the magic that you do, I’m here for it.
Thank you and Happy New Year!
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Chapters: 1/2
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells, Christina Wells
Additional Tags: Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2023, contains some angst
Summary:
The Time Machine breaking down has unforeseen consequences and Christina Wells finds herself in Paris, 2010.
Made for @lilolilyr as part of the @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange . It is a little bit late, I'm so very sorry. And I'm afraid I got a bit too carried away and what was supposed to be a one-shot will end up having two parts, I hope that's okay. I hope you like it, and part 2 should be up in a week.
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Hot tip for those participating in the Bering and Wells Gift Exchange who are new to the process or, like me, fools: You gotta remember to check your giftee’s blog for the reply to your ask! Since it’s anonymous, they have to post the ask with their answer, and they can’t tag you or anything.
I’m working on a strategy to make this easier, like maybe posting all replies to the official blog or having people tag it in a specific way. Any ideas are welcome!
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