Fic: Perhaps not to be (4)
See Part One for warnings
Myka stays, in the end.
They settle down at the kitchen table, Helena taking the seat opposite Leena - it’s a little less disconcerting to watch her face whenever Helena moves the pen. Her arm still feels peculiar, a little flush from the contact as if she stole some of their body heat, and she trails her own fingers over the path Myka left. Leena looks across at her, frowns, and looks away.
“-So it’s like Document Recovery, we think, but the artefacts are gone,” Claudia’s busy explaining, and Myka fidgets with her mug. “Probably. And I guess your body, too.”
“We won’t know until we try.”
“Yeah, well.” Claudia shifts in her seat, and Myka looks down at her coffee cup, away from Claudia. Helena thinks she can take a good guess as to why. “The Warehouse needs a Caretaker, anyway. So, you know...”
‘Claudia,’ Helena writes, because it’s the only thing she can think to say. ‘I was at the Warehouse site. I heard everything.’ She folds the paper over and slides it towards Claudia - Myka cranes her neck, as if she’s trying to read it, before she remembers herself and looks away. Claudia’s face goes carefully blank, and she licks her lips a few times before just nodding and putting the message into her pocket.
“Here we go,” says Leena, rejoining them just as the silence is beginning to grow uncomfortable. “Helena, I made you a cup, too, if you want to try...?”
“Ah, thank you.” Helena looks for a piece of scrap paper, but there’s nothing immediately there, so she settles for tracing the letters out in the air.
It’s been a while, and remembering Caturanga had made her a little nostalgic, so Helena isn’t surprised to feel her eyes fluttering closed and a smile creep into her mouth when she breathes in the smell. When she first arrived at the Warehouse, Helena had tried their herbal teas with good humour, but Leena had gone out and bought some Assam and Darjeeling and Ceylon, real tea, and made room for it amongst all the boxes of rosehip pomegranate elderflower nonsense. The realisation that she can smell the tea - that it makes her think of oak and brandy and chess games - is so surprising that she forgets how to hold things, and drops the pen straight through her leg.
Leena laughs; Claudia takes a sip of tea, pulls a face, and plops five heaped teaspoons of sugar into it, and Myka reaches for the biro and holds it out towards her. When Helena leans forward to take it back - and it takes her a moment or two to remind her fingers not to drift through the plastic - she can see Myka pull away from the cold patch.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, and looks away.
*
As it happens, Myka is the first one to suggest that she could do with something stronger.
The entire table agrees.
*
That’s the reason why, forty minutes later, Pete finds them making their way through a bottle of premium vodka Leena had managed to conjure up a touch too easily. Helena isn’t partaking, of course, but Claudia poured some into a glass for her and she practices pressing her fingers down on the rim of it, wonders if it would have felt any different if she were back in her own body.
“Ooh, am I barging in on a party? Perhaps of the slumber variety?”
Helena says, “A wake, perhaps,” and raises her pen in a mock-salute. Myka’s response - “Bite me, Pete” - is rather more to the point, and only very slightly slurred.
Still, though, Pete has brought down a stack of index cards, and he edges closer to drop them on the table before Helena. It’s a nice gesture - and, while Helena is the first to admit that her judgment is not infallible, she’d never thought he had it in him to be thoughtful.
‘Thank you.’ She prints the word clearly on the top-most card and holds it in mid-air.
“Yeah, well. They’re Artie’s, we just figured you’d want them.”
“Why?”
“Ah, Mykes-“ Pete breaks off, and frowns at the glass in Claudia’s hand. “Are you-“
“Yeah, yeah, it’s the alcohol that’s crossing a line right here.” Claudia drains the rest of her glass. “Hanging out with dead people and killers, nbd, but we’re all opposed to the evil that is underage drinking.”
After a beat, she adds, “No offence, HG.”
“Pete, what’s going on? You hate Helena.”
Helena removes the cap from the biro and presses it against the index card, leaving a little blue line. Then she sets the pen down and shuffles the cards a little more, unsure of what it is she’d like to say, unsure of how to say it.
“She saved my life and now I’m trying to bond with her?” Pete ventures. Myka thumps him in the arm. “Ow!”
“Pete-“
“Artie says the Regents are on their way.” He massages the spot where Myka’s blow connected, and then looks at the chair in which Helena is sitting. “But, hey, they did say that you were probably right about you being artefactified, so...”
Myka closes her eyes, though whether it’s in relief or disappointment, Helena doesn’t know. Her voice is blank as she says, rather than asks, “They’re coming to take her away, aren’t they.”
“No.” Claudia uses the table to push herself to her feet and, to her credit, only wobbles a little bit. “No way. They can’t-“
“They’re the Regents,” Myka continues in that same hollow voice. “They can.”
“We don’t know they’re gonna do that. Look, she- I mean, you- saved us. And they kept you around before, even after-“
“-Trapped inside a coin, Pete, they didn’t even leave her with a body-!”
‘It wasn’t all unpleasant,’ Helena writes, but Myka and Claudia both wave the card down. Leena frowns a little when she reads it, but says nothing.
“Look, I’m just saying that maybe they’ll think of another way to fix this-“
That was, it appears, precisely the wrong thing for him to say. Claudia’s fist flies into the table with such force that her glass spins off the edge and shatters, Leena gasps, and Myka repeats, her voice stretched tight, “Fix this?”
“She’s still here,” Claudia tells them, ignoring the glass at her feet. “And I don’t get why I’m the only person feeling happy about that.”
“Fix this how, Pete?” Myka carries on saying. She isn’t shouting - she’s quiet, but there’s such an edge to her words that only a fool would have thought her calm. “How do you go about ‘fixing’ someone’s existence?”
‘I’ve found most sharp objects will suffice,’ Helena writes while Pete gropes for an answer. Myka’s attention is still focused entirely on Pete, and so Helena walks through the table to push the card into her hands - her attempt at humour doesn’t quite have the desired effect, however. As Myka reads it, her lips retreat further into her mouth, and Pete takes the opportunity to shuffle just out of punching range.
“Not funny.”
“What?”
Myka screws up the card. “Nothing. This is not the time, Helena.”
“Well, I do have something of a history of ‘screwing things up’, don’t I, Myka?” With no other means left to vent her frustration, Helena throws the stack of index cards against the wall. They bounce against it and come apart, falling over the floor. Myka looks down at them, then back at the space where she thinks Helena is standing, and scoffs.
“Yeah, that’s real mature.”
“Real-ly.”
Almost as soon as the retort leaves Helena’s mouth, she regrets it, if only because it sounds so utterly pathetic. It’s probably just as well that Myka can’t hear her.
Helena makes a small noise of displeasure, stomps towards the pantry to find the dustpan and brush, and sets about cleaning away the broken glass in jerky, furious strokes. Claudia shuffles a little while she works around her, but doesn’t move away - she only lifts her feet when Helena knocks them with the brush. It, well, it definitely doesn’t rank amongst their finest moments.
Naturally, that is when the Regents decide to arrive.
*
The Regents, being Regents, do not bother to knock. They just walk straight through to the kitchen, two of them, a man and a woman. Helena has never seen the man before, and has only a brief recollection of the woman - someone she had passed inside their holding facility, nobody with whom she has any real history. After a moment, she stills her hands. The man blinks a little to see the brush set itself down, but the woman is focused on something else entirely.
“Oh, Peter,” she’s saying, pulling Pete into a tight embrace. He returns it easily, and places a soft kiss on her cheek.
“Love you, Mom.”
“And I love you.”
A not-quite-so-small, mean part of Helena thinks Ah, nepotism. That explains it. The man - a tall Asian man who looks barely older than Claudia - gestures towards the dustpan but says nothing, and Leena scurries to finish tidying them away. Despite herself, Helena almost feels scared - her palms prickle, and she feels her fingers twist together, needing something to hold.
“Miss Wells,” the younger man says, as his partner releases Pete. Helena slides to the right, pushes through the chairs, until she’s a few feet away from the spot he looks at. “I see the news is true.”
Myka places herself in front of him, blocking his view of the chair. She isn’t standing close enough to threaten him, Helena doesn’t think, but there’s something adamant in the way she just interposes herself between the Regent and where she thinks Helena is.
“You can’t hurt her,” Claudia murmurs. While Myka has been stripped down to that solid core of Do Not Screw With Me, adopting a posture Helena recognises as pure Agent Bering, Claudia’s voice is wispy, uncertain. “You can’t.”
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Pete’s mother tries to say, and Helena doesn’t believe a word of it. “But we need to know what happened.”
“I won’t let you.” Helena appreciates the sentiment - she does - but Claudia’s sudden flash of anger has already faded, and she doesn’t look able to defend anyone just yet.
“Claudia.” It’s Pete who sighs her name, it’s Pete who walks over to her and tries to hold her hands, and Claudia accepts the contact for all of a second before she snatches her hands away. “Claudia, if this is about an artefact, then we should know that, right? Right?”
A round, fat tear slides down the length of Claudia’s nose. She makes no move to wipe it away, just gives a loud sniff. “I-“
“I know, Claud, I know,” Pete says and Helena watches him pull Claudia against him and rub her back. “I know.”
The female Regent, the one Pete called Mom, takes a step forward. Myka doesn’t move much, turns a little way towards her, and that’s enough to make the woman halt immediately. Helena’s first thought is much the same as her second, third, fourth and fifth: Run. Nobody will know, and the Regents have as good as admitted that they wish to do something unpleasant to her - not that Helena needs confirmation; as far as assumptions go within the Warehouse, it’s always been something of a sure thing - and if this invisibility lasts, she’ll be damn hard to trace. Her sixth thought reminds her that she had been willing to die for some of these people, and that there are always consequences when it comes to artefacts.
Her sixth thought isn’t enough to stop her. She had told the truth, after all - that she isn’t this noble, that she isn’t good - and so she leaves. Tells herself that it’s probably for the best, just to fade away, and so she winds through the people, being ever so careful not to brush up against them, and only pauses when she reaches the closed door. Her fingers reach towards the handle all of their own accord before she remembers there’s another way, and without looking back, Helena takes a deep breath and walks through the door.
Artie loiters at the bottom of the steps, but he doesn’t notice (Of course he doesn’t notice, there’s nothing for him to notice) when Helena makes her way towards the front door and tries to pass through that, too. Tries. Can’t.
She thinks initially that she’s just doing it wrong, a little too solid around the edges, but the resistance she meets feels more than physical. In fact, it feels pretty damn similar to the resistance Helena encountered back at the Warehouse, the strange line she hadn’t been able to cross until-
She closes her eyes and thinks of leaving, and she can feel the world tilt around her. The first thing she sees when she opens her eyes is Woolly the bear, and her own locket. She’s back in Myka’s room.
“On the bright side,” she muses to the stuffed toy, “This does lend some credence to my theory about the locket.”
Woolly doesn’t look impressed. That’s fair enough, really; Helena isn’t much impressed by herself right now.
*
Helena returns to the kitchen after a little while. Leena turns her back when she does, but Helena catches a glimpse of the small smile she’s hiding.
“-The rest of the night,” the man is saying. “But that’s all. Do you understand?”
“Whatever.” If Claudia has anything else to say on the matter, then Helena doesn’t hear it - the young woman is already turning her face back into Pete’s shirt, and the man is talking again.
“Miss Wells?”
“Not really, no. Shall I turn into a pumpkin come morning?” Helena scoops up one of the index cards and the pen and writes ‘Yes’ even so. Myka gives an outraged “What?”, and the only reason her expression doesn’t convince Helena that this is a misstep is because Helena’s already guessed as much.
Pete’s mother, at least, has the decency to look a little uncomfortable. It looks as though Helena surmised correctly - a Cinderella deal; they’ll hunt down and destroy whatever artefact is keeping her here in the morning, which means she has a few hours left in the Bed and Breakfast at most. After which, presumably, she will be asked to say goodbye to them once more.
She aches all over at the thought. Asks herself how many more times her heart can break. And then she smiles at that, bitter, twisted, because this will be the very last.
*
Part Five
Myka stays, in the end.
They settle down at the kitchen table, Helena taking the seat opposite Leena - it’s a little less disconcerting to watch her face whenever Helena moves the pen. Her arm still feels peculiar, a little flush from the contact as if she stole some of their body heat, and she trails her own fingers over the path Myka left. Leena looks across at her, frowns, and looks away.
“-So it’s like Document Recovery, we think, but the artefacts are gone,” Claudia’s busy explaining, and Myka fidgets with her mug. “Probably. And I guess your body, too.”
“We won’t know until we try.”
“Yeah, well.” Claudia shifts in her seat, and Myka looks down at her coffee cup, away from Claudia. Helena thinks she can take a good guess as to why. “The Warehouse needs a Caretaker, anyway. So, you know...”
‘Claudia,’ Helena writes, because it’s the only thing she can think to say. ‘I was at the Warehouse site. I heard everything.’ She folds the paper over and slides it towards Claudia - Myka cranes her neck, as if she’s trying to read it, before she remembers herself and looks away. Claudia’s face goes carefully blank, and she licks her lips a few times before just nodding and putting the message into her pocket.
“Here we go,” says Leena, rejoining them just as the silence is beginning to grow uncomfortable. “Helena, I made you a cup, too, if you want to try...?”
“Ah, thank you.” Helena looks for a piece of scrap paper, but there’s nothing immediately there, so she settles for tracing the letters out in the air.
It’s been a while, and remembering Caturanga had made her a little nostalgic, so Helena isn’t surprised to feel her eyes fluttering closed and a smile creep into her mouth when she breathes in the smell. When she first arrived at the Warehouse, Helena had tried their herbal teas with good humour, but Leena had gone out and bought some Assam and Darjeeling and Ceylon, real tea, and made room for it amongst all the boxes of rosehip pomegranate elderflower nonsense. The realisation that she can smell the tea - that it makes her think of oak and brandy and chess games - is so surprising that she forgets how to hold things, and drops the pen straight through her leg.
Leena laughs; Claudia takes a sip of tea, pulls a face, and plops five heaped teaspoons of sugar into it, and Myka reaches for the biro and holds it out towards her. When Helena leans forward to take it back - and it takes her a moment or two to remind her fingers not to drift through the plastic - she can see Myka pull away from the cold patch.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, and looks away.
*
As it happens, Myka is the first one to suggest that she could do with something stronger.
The entire table agrees.
*
That’s the reason why, forty minutes later, Pete finds them making their way through a bottle of premium vodka Leena had managed to conjure up a touch too easily. Helena isn’t partaking, of course, but Claudia poured some into a glass for her and she practices pressing her fingers down on the rim of it, wonders if it would have felt any different if she were back in her own body.
“Ooh, am I barging in on a party? Perhaps of the slumber variety?”
Helena says, “A wake, perhaps,” and raises her pen in a mock-salute. Myka’s response - “Bite me, Pete” - is rather more to the point, and only very slightly slurred.
Still, though, Pete has brought down a stack of index cards, and he edges closer to drop them on the table before Helena. It’s a nice gesture - and, while Helena is the first to admit that her judgment is not infallible, she’d never thought he had it in him to be thoughtful.
‘Thank you.’ She prints the word clearly on the top-most card and holds it in mid-air.
“Yeah, well. They’re Artie’s, we just figured you’d want them.”
“Why?”
“Ah, Mykes-“ Pete breaks off, and frowns at the glass in Claudia’s hand. “Are you-“
“Yeah, yeah, it’s the alcohol that’s crossing a line right here.” Claudia drains the rest of her glass. “Hanging out with dead people and killers, nbd, but we’re all opposed to the evil that is underage drinking.”
After a beat, she adds, “No offence, HG.”
“Pete, what’s going on? You hate Helena.”
Helena removes the cap from the biro and presses it against the index card, leaving a little blue line. Then she sets the pen down and shuffles the cards a little more, unsure of what it is she’d like to say, unsure of how to say it.
“She saved my life and now I’m trying to bond with her?” Pete ventures. Myka thumps him in the arm. “Ow!”
“Pete-“
“Artie says the Regents are on their way.” He massages the spot where Myka’s blow connected, and then looks at the chair in which Helena is sitting. “But, hey, they did say that you were probably right about you being artefactified, so...”
Myka closes her eyes, though whether it’s in relief or disappointment, Helena doesn’t know. Her voice is blank as she says, rather than asks, “They’re coming to take her away, aren’t they.”
“No.” Claudia uses the table to push herself to her feet and, to her credit, only wobbles a little bit. “No way. They can’t-“
“They’re the Regents,” Myka continues in that same hollow voice. “They can.”
“We don’t know they’re gonna do that. Look, she- I mean, you- saved us. And they kept you around before, even after-“
“-Trapped inside a coin, Pete, they didn’t even leave her with a body-!”
‘It wasn’t all unpleasant,’ Helena writes, but Myka and Claudia both wave the card down. Leena frowns a little when she reads it, but says nothing.
“Look, I’m just saying that maybe they’ll think of another way to fix this-“
That was, it appears, precisely the wrong thing for him to say. Claudia’s fist flies into the table with such force that her glass spins off the edge and shatters, Leena gasps, and Myka repeats, her voice stretched tight, “Fix this?”
“She’s still here,” Claudia tells them, ignoring the glass at her feet. “And I don’t get why I’m the only person feeling happy about that.”
“Fix this how, Pete?” Myka carries on saying. She isn’t shouting - she’s quiet, but there’s such an edge to her words that only a fool would have thought her calm. “How do you go about ‘fixing’ someone’s existence?”
‘I’ve found most sharp objects will suffice,’ Helena writes while Pete gropes for an answer. Myka’s attention is still focused entirely on Pete, and so Helena walks through the table to push the card into her hands - her attempt at humour doesn’t quite have the desired effect, however. As Myka reads it, her lips retreat further into her mouth, and Pete takes the opportunity to shuffle just out of punching range.
“Not funny.”
“What?”
Myka screws up the card. “Nothing. This is not the time, Helena.”
“Well, I do have something of a history of ‘screwing things up’, don’t I, Myka?” With no other means left to vent her frustration, Helena throws the stack of index cards against the wall. They bounce against it and come apart, falling over the floor. Myka looks down at them, then back at the space where she thinks Helena is standing, and scoffs.
“Yeah, that’s real mature.”
“Real-ly.”
Almost as soon as the retort leaves Helena’s mouth, she regrets it, if only because it sounds so utterly pathetic. It’s probably just as well that Myka can’t hear her.
Helena makes a small noise of displeasure, stomps towards the pantry to find the dustpan and brush, and sets about cleaning away the broken glass in jerky, furious strokes. Claudia shuffles a little while she works around her, but doesn’t move away - she only lifts her feet when Helena knocks them with the brush. It, well, it definitely doesn’t rank amongst their finest moments.
Naturally, that is when the Regents decide to arrive.
*
The Regents, being Regents, do not bother to knock. They just walk straight through to the kitchen, two of them, a man and a woman. Helena has never seen the man before, and has only a brief recollection of the woman - someone she had passed inside their holding facility, nobody with whom she has any real history. After a moment, she stills her hands. The man blinks a little to see the brush set itself down, but the woman is focused on something else entirely.
“Oh, Peter,” she’s saying, pulling Pete into a tight embrace. He returns it easily, and places a soft kiss on her cheek.
“Love you, Mom.”
“And I love you.”
A not-quite-so-small, mean part of Helena thinks Ah, nepotism. That explains it. The man - a tall Asian man who looks barely older than Claudia - gestures towards the dustpan but says nothing, and Leena scurries to finish tidying them away. Despite herself, Helena almost feels scared - her palms prickle, and she feels her fingers twist together, needing something to hold.
“Miss Wells,” the younger man says, as his partner releases Pete. Helena slides to the right, pushes through the chairs, until she’s a few feet away from the spot he looks at. “I see the news is true.”
Myka places herself in front of him, blocking his view of the chair. She isn’t standing close enough to threaten him, Helena doesn’t think, but there’s something adamant in the way she just interposes herself between the Regent and where she thinks Helena is.
“You can’t hurt her,” Claudia murmurs. While Myka has been stripped down to that solid core of Do Not Screw With Me, adopting a posture Helena recognises as pure Agent Bering, Claudia’s voice is wispy, uncertain. “You can’t.”
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Pete’s mother tries to say, and Helena doesn’t believe a word of it. “But we need to know what happened.”
“I won’t let you.” Helena appreciates the sentiment - she does - but Claudia’s sudden flash of anger has already faded, and she doesn’t look able to defend anyone just yet.
“Claudia.” It’s Pete who sighs her name, it’s Pete who walks over to her and tries to hold her hands, and Claudia accepts the contact for all of a second before she snatches her hands away. “Claudia, if this is about an artefact, then we should know that, right? Right?”
A round, fat tear slides down the length of Claudia’s nose. She makes no move to wipe it away, just gives a loud sniff. “I-“
“I know, Claud, I know,” Pete says and Helena watches him pull Claudia against him and rub her back. “I know.”
The female Regent, the one Pete called Mom, takes a step forward. Myka doesn’t move much, turns a little way towards her, and that’s enough to make the woman halt immediately. Helena’s first thought is much the same as her second, third, fourth and fifth: Run. Nobody will know, and the Regents have as good as admitted that they wish to do something unpleasant to her - not that Helena needs confirmation; as far as assumptions go within the Warehouse, it’s always been something of a sure thing - and if this invisibility lasts, she’ll be damn hard to trace. Her sixth thought reminds her that she had been willing to die for some of these people, and that there are always consequences when it comes to artefacts.
Her sixth thought isn’t enough to stop her. She had told the truth, after all - that she isn’t this noble, that she isn’t good - and so she leaves. Tells herself that it’s probably for the best, just to fade away, and so she winds through the people, being ever so careful not to brush up against them, and only pauses when she reaches the closed door. Her fingers reach towards the handle all of their own accord before she remembers there’s another way, and without looking back, Helena takes a deep breath and walks through the door.
Artie loiters at the bottom of the steps, but he doesn’t notice (Of course he doesn’t notice, there’s nothing for him to notice) when Helena makes her way towards the front door and tries to pass through that, too. Tries. Can’t.
She thinks initially that she’s just doing it wrong, a little too solid around the edges, but the resistance she meets feels more than physical. In fact, it feels pretty damn similar to the resistance Helena encountered back at the Warehouse, the strange line she hadn’t been able to cross until-
She closes her eyes and thinks of leaving, and she can feel the world tilt around her. The first thing she sees when she opens her eyes is Woolly the bear, and her own locket. She’s back in Myka’s room.
“On the bright side,” she muses to the stuffed toy, “This does lend some credence to my theory about the locket.”
Woolly doesn’t look impressed. That’s fair enough, really; Helena isn’t much impressed by herself right now.
*
Helena returns to the kitchen after a little while. Leena turns her back when she does, but Helena catches a glimpse of the small smile she’s hiding.
“-The rest of the night,” the man is saying. “But that’s all. Do you understand?”
“Whatever.” If Claudia has anything else to say on the matter, then Helena doesn’t hear it - the young woman is already turning her face back into Pete’s shirt, and the man is talking again.
“Miss Wells?”
“Not really, no. Shall I turn into a pumpkin come morning?” Helena scoops up one of the index cards and the pen and writes ‘Yes’ even so. Myka gives an outraged “What?”, and the only reason her expression doesn’t convince Helena that this is a misstep is because Helena’s already guessed as much.
Pete’s mother, at least, has the decency to look a little uncomfortable. It looks as though Helena surmised correctly - a Cinderella deal; they’ll hunt down and destroy whatever artefact is keeping her here in the morning, which means she has a few hours left in the Bed and Breakfast at most. After which, presumably, she will be asked to say goodbye to them once more.
She aches all over at the thought. Asks herself how many more times her heart can break. And then she smiles at that, bitter, twisted, because this will be the very last.
*
Part Five