#particularly those viewers who want this Myka-and-HG thing we're never going to give them
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Tabled 2
Hi again, @barbarawar ! Here’s a continuation of your @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange present... it’s the second part of what has apparently decided to become a longer-than-two-part story. (This is kind of a short part, and I’m trying mightily to keep it to three, I swear.) In any case, a narrative wants what it wants, and given that this one is trying to deal with what might have happened if Myka and Helena had the “coffee” suggested by Helena in Instinct, I guess some difficulty of resolution is the price of doing business. I postulated in part 1 that Myka didn’t deal at all well with that “coffee,” and that it in fact initiated a cascade of lies, subterfuges, and all-around poor choices. Is that a sustainable mode of living? We’ll see. She might need a wake-up call. Who could deliver such a thing? Hm...
Tabled 2
Myka had run to the book because using her body to lie belonged, so clearly and painfully, to a new and different equivalence class of untruths.
If only she could have narrated a relationship with Pete instead. Sat at a table and told a series of story-lies about it—to herself, to him. Then she wouldn’t have so desperately needed the book to speak a different story.
Despite her need, however... nothing. From that nonresponse, Myka had taken the lesson that with regard to the future, what you see is what you get. What you see is all you get.
That being the case, she’d begun the work of reconciling herself to it.
She had soon thereafter received a text from Helena: a brief “Coffee?”, to which she had responded “Sorry, busy” without even asking for details, because one thing to which she could not reconcile herself was the way in which, even now (especially now), her heart leapt to see “Helena” appear in a notification.
The leap, its shock familiar yet striking her anew with its force, was a piercing reminder of those times before, when she had been so high-wire alive. Even as the coffees themselves had left her unsettled, incomplete, each new heralding text had lacerated her with frustrated want, the hot pain of things once were different. The prod of Myka, you once were different.
A fall into love had ripped her open; one into sin was now closing her up. She didn’t want to be reminded of either.
“You will never lose this friend” seemed now a curse, not a promise; another way of saying that she would never lose a particularly turbulent priest.
Will no one rid me...
****
As the wake of Artie’s are-you-the-culprit interview widens, Myka sees that she must rid herself of that priest. She cannot, in fact, endure the heart-leaps of more “coffee?” texts; and, beyond that, she needs fewer tables. If she can shed these sit-downs with Helena, where the lying began... it may be a false idol, but now she is choosing belief: that she can edit herself down to a way of living that is rational, even cold, such that she can functionally confront each new hour, day, week, every measure of time to come.
So. Initiating a “coffee,” which she has never done before, she texts Helena. It’s terse but, ironically, true: “I need to talk to you. In person.”
She is surprised to be surprised when she receives a nearly instantaneous reply, a simple “yes.”
Myka texts back her plan, which begins: “Meet you halfway.” Halfway is Chicago: between South Dakota and New York, where Helena now resides—with, Myka presumes, or at least near, the ideal Giselle.
Helena can have her. Myka will be her own ideal: she will be the person who sits at the table, the person who says the necessarily dismissive, lying words. Rationally. Above all, rationally.
She hopes the book will be willing to help that person.
Now, for what she knows must be the last time—the real third time, the real charm—she confronts the volume. “I’m making an end,” she tells it. “I need a shape.”
Could a book roll its eyes? Of course not. But an artifact certainly could.
That artifact may be adolescently scornful of Myka and her request, but it is no longer unresponsive. She resists considering what that means, concentrating instead of the book’s actions: it once again page-turns her to the later questions. She understands immediately why, as she is blinded to everything but question forty-three: “What will be the result of what I am about to undertake?”
She turns the page to reach the chart. She closes her eyes.
Superstitiously (not hopefully; hope is a drug she is trying to kick), she’s sharpened a brand-new pencil for the occasion. She now lowers its point to the page deliberately (not hopefully), but the instant it makes contact, her hand spasms, bouncing the spike of graphite elsewhere, jamming it there against the page, and she feels it snap and splinter.
She opens her eyes to find that she’s made two very clear selections, which is to say, she’s marked the book rather than simply touching it: the first is a right-pointing three-pebble triangle; the second—the one she twitched to and broke against—is a similarly small triangle, this one pertly upright. The first she knows as mathematical, about subgroups and containment; the second, obviously and cross-disciplinarily, is the delta of change.
“Both?” she asks, but it’s rhetorical. Surely the book itself produced her twitch, either via artifactual telekinesis or a physical nudge of its pages, to offer her two answers. The confirming page-ruffle is just punctuation.
And so she proceeds to the prophecies. The first, the right-pointer, is “You will only commit blunders.” Well. The book has known her for a while now, so that’s not a difficult prediction to make. She’s surprised, in fact, that it hasn’t given that one to her every time.
She turns to the second, the one corresponding to the delta. That one yields, “It will be of a satisfactory nature.”
“Oh, thanks,” she says. Sarcasm, but she shouldn’t be so cynical; the book is sensitive. These conjoined answers might feel like a joke, but even a joke has a shape. “I’m sure I’ll do it,” she tells her counselor. “The blunders of course. Satisfactory, though?”
No ruffle, no sigh. Myka is on her own.
****
Myka has arranged to meet Helena in the airport, for she is trying to make this excision as surgical as possible. Her return flight (well, the first of two) leaves three hours after her arrival; the layover is that long only because getting to and from South Dakota means bowing to airline schedulers’ ideas about which places merit reasonably quick access. Regardless of how pressing a person’s need to escape O’Hare might be.
In any case, the significance of the word “terminal” is not lost on her.
She catches her first glimpse of Helena from an entire length of concourse away—it’s a flicker, a mere suggestion of Helena-ness—but Myka knows it’s her. Once upon a time, she might have reveled in the intimacy of it, the way she knows the sight. Other people, indeed every other person, in the airport, the city, the country, even on the planet, might appreciate that sight, but Myka knows it. She knows the stride; she knows the toss of hair. She knows the bravado... knows it as a front. Knows it paper-thin.
But she can spare no sympathy for Helena’s fragility, nor for whatever it might cause her own heart to pulse.
This is the end, though, so she offers herself a tiny dispensation: for the length of Helena’s walk from gate B14 to B11, she will imagine this meeting is taking place in a different world. “Let’s start again,” she might say, in that different world. “Let’s run away and start again.”
Helena passes B11. That different world is no more.
Myka schools her face—her face that has been so revealing in the past—as Helena nears.
The line at the gate-adjacent Starbucks is short, yielding no time for much talk past “hello” and “how was your flight,” and that’s fortunate, because Myka has been witless to prepare anything cogent. She has, however, compiled a list of several synonyms for “ended.”
She’s considering launching without preamble into those, just pronouncing them all, one by telling one, then turning her back. But once she and Helena have collected their cardboard cups and sat down across from each other at a high table among a cluster between gates, Helena is the one to deliver the first salvo: “I presume you’re here to tell me about you and Pete.” She says it with a head-toss that seems rehearsed, but does she mean to convey nonchalance? Or is it nothing more than vain look-at-my-hair emphasis?
Myka can’t deal with either one. “Do you,” she says, as blandly as possible, but inside she is seething. She had not intended to say anything about that. She had intended to pretend it did not exist, to let that sin of omission be a relief, but someone has thwarted her. She suspects Steve... suspects it might have something to do with protection. She begins prepping a high-minded rebuke to be delivered later, even as she tells him now, in her head, where he and his truth-detection have taken up residence, You will not alter what I am here to do. “How did you hear?” she asks, again bland. Matter-of-fact, because of the matter of this fact.
“Claudia told me,” Helena says.
So much for the rebuke. Everything about this is going in the wrong direction. But there’s no right direction, so of course it is.
“I guess she’d know, wouldn’t she,” Myka says. She isn’t able to fully disguise her sourness at the idea of Helena and Claudia being in contact, but ultimately that’s all the more reason to detach. Helena has plenty of Warehouse connections, and that means Myka isn’t special. Here, too, she needs to be reasonable, to curtail any wish for that. Among so many other things.
And so she lies even more extensively than she did at the Round Table, despite the absence of Mrs. Frederic and Steve to goad her, telling a story about a story, investing her gray despair with cartoonish color, reciting again her ultimate line—her ultimate lie. Saying it out loud again, she feels her lies folding in on themselves, then expanding outward, untruths about untruths. She pushes on, however, ignoring the entanglement: “That was really my defining moment,” she concludes. “When I realized.”
She wishes Helena’s face would change, but it doesn’t. Yet another wallop of finality. The end, the end.
A moment passes: a suspension of time in which nothing at all happens. If only it could last forever...
But then Helena’s eyes narrow. “I don’t believe you,” she says. It’s blunt. It’s also defensive, and that is a change.
Myka does not know whether to rejoice in or lament the fact that she is not, here at the end, a competent enough liar for an audience of H.G. Wells. So she punts: trying for flippant, she says, “Well, congratulations, you and Pete finally have something in common, because he didn’t either. Not at first.”
That conjures the scene in which she had persuaded him... and that in turn brings home to her the fact that she has no bodily way to persuade Helena of anything. Her disruptive id, however, offers up an alternate scene, one in which she pulls Helena to her, Helena instead of Pete, into a kiss intended to convince somebody of something.
But even as Myka would do that, still, now, if she could, the back of her neck prickles with “maybe I can hurt you like you hurt me.” Because while she has tried to see that Helena must have had her reasons (for Nate), and must have her reasons (for Giselle), she doesn’t care about reasons. She cares about pain. Then, how guttingly she felt it. Now, how retributively she might inflict it.
“You and me. This is the end,” she says, hoping Helena feels the snap of the words. Hoping she feels it against her neck.
“Because of you and Pete?” That’s contempt.
Myka is about to say yes, to lie and throw that contempt right back in her face, to lie and throw it and then stand up and walk away and never look back.
But she owes the entirety of the situation just this bit of truth. “I want to say yes,” she begins, and Helena frowns. Myka can’t, now, spare the space to cherish that frown. “But the real answer is no, because it’s me. I can’t sit at tables and pretend to drink coffee and act like small talk matters. I wasn’t your roommate at...” She pauses for what she intends as a condemnatory moment. “Idaho Tech.”
Helena exhales in response a disdainful sniff. “Don’t misquote me. You remember precisely the lie I told.”
Righteous, even now. Myka can’t contain her resigned sigh. “I’m saying it doesn’t matter anymore. You’ve got Giselle, I’ve got Pete, and we’ll both be fine.” Now she does stand up—trying for the physical embodiment of “it doesn’t matter anymore”—but she moves her hands too dramatically: she knocks her cup over, and coffee from the untasted container glugs like slow blood from its plastic lid onto the innocent tabletop.
Well, there’s an obvious blunder. That book... its truth. Myka hurries to right the cup, then uses a comically inadequate single, flimsy napkin to begin mopping the spill (another obvious blunder: not having anticipated needing a stack). But while her clumsiness annoys her, as does the delay, she appreciates the latter as providing one little extra indulgence before she says and, worse, hears, the last goodbye.
She is in any case discomfited by the way Helena watches her attempted cleanup: silent, appraising. It feels like the past, but having that attention focused on clearing a slick of cold coffee from a table is so... inappropriate. It’s a waste. It’s small, so small; not scaled to the past. The pathetic downsizing offers yet more reason to know this as a sunset.
Of course Myka is not, and will never be, ready for the fading end—of the sight of this face, of the sound of this voice—but she has nailed herself to this cross, and she can’t climb down now (never mind what she ever said to anybody about crosses and getting off them and... never mind). She’s going to live out her life in a way that makes continuous sense, not as a trudge punctuated by interludes that make her wish for a more electric timeline. The Warehouse had, via Helena, shown her such a bright flash, but that light is gone. In its absence, surely, the Warehouse will show itself as big enough, will offer enough, to fill a different unfolding’s worth of life.
In any case, her future is set. The evidence of her having committed blunders is clear. Now must be the time for Myka to turn to whatever it is that will be “of a satisfactory nature.” Whatever it is, it’s probably the best she can hope for, going forward.
She draws in a breath and begins, “So I guess this is...”
But she doesn’t finish, because she’s distracted by movement from Helena’s side of the table.
What is she doing?
She’s pushing her chair back and standing, taking up her own untasted coffee container into her right hand. She’s looking not at Myka but at that cup, and Myka can hear, in this flash of relative silence, a tap-tap-tap of Helena’s fingernail against the cardboard. That draws her attention to the cup, to the hand—and suddenly Helena’s left hand swoops in to rip the cup’s lid away, and her right hand moves back then forward—and in that blink of motion, the cup’s tepid contents rush toward Myka, dousing her torso.
Myka looks down. Her shirt is soaked—soaked—with coffee.
She looks up.
Helena is gazing at her in something very like triumph.
TBC
#bering and wells#Warehouse 13#fanfic#Tabled#B&W holiday gift exchange#part 2#barbarawar#I wish this story were unnecessary#because I wish someone with power in production had said#'you know what we should do?#we should write this HG-returns episode as a romp#something really fun and funny#because the audience might enjoy that#particularly those viewers who want this Myka-and-HG thing we're never going to give them#and they should have something entertaining as a consolation prize'#but alas
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