Fic: Perhaps not to be (8)
See Part One for warnings
Leena finds her sitting in the den an hour later, her face pressed up against the window. Glass is difficult - Helena thinks it’s the transparency - so she has to focus if she doesn’t want to just float right through it, and that focus means her mind is too full to think about other things. The window is cold and smooth against her skin, and Helena tries to focus only on that feeling, and wonders why she came back wrong. Wonders why she came back at all.
“Hello,” Leena says, settling into the chair opposite and holding Helena’s notebook towards her. “You left this upstairs.”
Helena takes it, and Myka’s blue marker someone had tucked inside the wire spiral. She removes the pen and, as an afterthought, lifts up the front cover for a count of two buttercups.
“You’re welcome.”
The two of them sit in what Helena supposes she could describe as companionable silence for a few moments, until Leena excuses herself and comes back with two mugs of hot, sweet tea, and some custard creams. Being the devious little sneak Helena half-suspects she is - Leena certainly knows more than she ever cares to admit, anyway - she waits until Helena is happily munching on a biscuit before bringing up the little spat.
“Pete thinks you’re jealous that Claudia wants to bring Steve back instead of you, and Myka thinks you’re angry because she brought up Christina.”
‘And you?’
“Does that matter to you?”
“No,” Helena says. It doesn’t.
Claudia might have seen something worth emulating in Helena, but moments like these are all the confirmation she needs that she’s still beyond redemption. Leena doesn’t matter to her. Few things do.
She may have died to save Myka, but that had nothing to do with goodness or whatever strength of character Claudia imagines her to possess. Helena just loves stupidly, perilously, hurtfully, and people often seem to die as a result. Helena has saved people and killed them both out of love, and it feels about equal to her: she knows it shouldn’t, morally speaking. Doesn’t care. So although Leena’s pleasant, and Helena appreciates how helpful she’s been, that doesn’t mean Leena’s important.
‘I tried to leave,’ Helena tells Leena, because she’s smart enough to know when not to answer a question, too. ‘And Claudia and I are looking into my existence. We might find something that will bring it to a close.’
Leena nods, considers it. Says, “That doesn’t matter to me.”
‘Oh?’
“I know Claudia and Myka would miss you, and it would be a shame for their sakes. But personally, I wouldn’t miss you in the least.” Leena places her hand on top of the page, like an arm on Helena’s shoulder. “I miss Mrs Frederic. I know the others didn’t know her as well as I did, but they don’t talk about missing her at all, and I still wish she was here.”
‘Rather than me?’
“I wouldn’t mind.”
*
When they finish their tea, Leena just looks at Helena’s bare wrist and reminds her that Artie will be home soon. He is getting better about acknowledging that Helena’s there, it’s just normally accompanied with a warning that she should be on her very best behaviour in front of him. One more slip-up, he assures her, and there will be consequences - though what exactly they may be, Helena doesn’t think he knows.
There’s only so much with which you can threaten a ghost.
She goes to reclaim the whistle anyway - it’s no longer in front of Myka’s door, and Helena contemplates just wandering straight through the wall unobtrusively before deciding no, and knocking.
“Come in.” Myka’s voice is a little calmer now, which might be a good sign. It might also mean that she’s decided on a course of action Helena wouldn’t like, and isn’t about to let anything get in her way. She’s hard to read like that.
Helena opens the door and walks in.
“Hello,” Myka says.
‘Hello.’
She’s sitting in the middle of her bed, knees drawn all the way up to her chest, and has the orange string tangled around her fingers.
“I’m still really angry with you.”
‘Likewise.’
Myka wrinkles her nose at that and looks about to argue, but then sighs, “Yeah, that’s fair.”
“I know.”
The pea inside the whistle rattles a bit when Myka moves, and the length of string between her thumb and index finger, the one where the whistle part actually is, is pulled taut. Helena reaches over and gives the whistle a little push, like a garden swing, and it grazes Myka’s palm as it moves.
“I was already angry with you, though. Before- Before you said. About Claudia.”
Helena believes that Myka was the one who had said almost everything about Claudia, really, but that isn’t the point. She pushes down on the whistle, makes it still.
‘Claudia is an adult, Myka, and she needs this.’
“Yeah. Well. She’s still just a kid, too.”
‘And our superior. Artie’s, too.’
Myka’s grin trembles a little. “I know- when he realised...”
‘I thought he was about to have a fit.’
“This is... This is really weird. More than usual.”
‘And we do have a fairly high tolerance for the unusual, don’t we?’
“You can say that again.” Myka’s smile is growing a bit more sure of itself, and there’s more than a touch of Agent Bering in the way she spins the whistle around the string and asks, “Did you just say that again?”
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,’ Helena writes. “Yes, I did, yes.”
She adds, ‘Myka, may I ask why you were angry?’
“You want to take a guess?” That was definitely more Agent Bering, with a voice that could snap necks - even she looks a little surprised by her own anger, and Helena clamps down on her own irritation. Sometimes, with Myka, she can almost feel something fragile and warm flutter between them - something more, something new, something which would be so easy to trample and forget- but she also knows that another cussing match, while at least familiar, would destroy it before Helena has the chance to take it apart and figure it out for herself.
‘I died in front of you?’ It had been a bit of a sticking point before Helena managed to announce her presence, anyway.
Myka snorts, a little chuff of air which blows through Helena’s forehead. “Yeah. That didn’t help. And then, Helena, you came back.”
That stings a little more than Helena thought it would. It isn’t as if the universe offered her much choice in the matter, but even so, she hadn’t believed her presence was quite that objectionable.
‘I don’t understand.’
“You came back, and then you almost die all over again. Pete says you might be able to move on if you go finish some ‘unfinished business’, so what do you do? Tell us you have some. And then Claudia thinks she can help, so you smash things trying to stop her, and when that doesn’t work, you yell at her, and when she still manages to save you, you go and make her work on your time machine with you. You tell me, is that a good enough reason to be mad at you?”
‘I think it is.’
Myka’s muscles tense. “That’s all you have to say?”
The thing is, Myka’s right. So is Helena, but about something else entirely: they’ve always been very efficient, saying lots of things at once, but it’s a bit of an inconvenience in situations like this when they’re having two separate arguments. Helena hurt Myka, yes, and she regrets it. But Myka hurt her, too, and she’s going to hurt Claudia if she doesn’t let Claudia make her own decisions. She writes as much, and although Myka doesn’t look thrilled with that response, she does nod, like she understands.
“Yeah. You’re right.”
‘I like to think we both are. Wells and Bering.’
‘Bering and Wells,’ she expects Myka to say, and is a little disappointed when all it gets from her is a grimace. Apparently, they aren’t quite there yet.
‘Myka, I don’t know how to fix this. If I could-‘
“What, you’d be magnificent for me?” Myka tilts her head towards her pillow - next to Woolly, Helena can see a very familiar stack of index cards covered in her neat script. She had wondered where they’d disappeared to, and half-hoped that Claudia had destroyed them without reading them. “Turns out that’s a terrible way of saying goodbye.”
‘Time was ever so slightly of the essence.’
“Well, a bit less advice on how to murder someone would have been useful.”
‘Self-defence, and those were intended for Claudia’s use.’
“Helena,” Myka says, but it isn’t only exasperation in her voice. Helena thinks she can take that, that it’s good enough for now. “Next time, try Hallmark first.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.” Helena leans in towards Myka very briefly, the sort of contact that could easily be dismissed as a light breeze, and then moves back.
‘I would fix this, if I knew how. If I could.’
Myka doesn’t say anything for a very long time. Helena watches her drop her head against her knees, wiggle her toes just a little, and then, without raising her head, state very quietly, “I don’t think we can.”
‘I know.’
*
That might have been reason enough, perhaps, to cut their losses and walk away. Whatever it is between them, however deeply Helena has come to care for Myka, she knows that it isn’t enough to heal them. If it can’t be fixed, and if it can’t fix them, then - well, Helena has hurt Myka enough for two lifetimes, and a considerable chunk of her post-mortem period.
Besides, Helena and Myka have both had more than enough practice at saying goodbye. They should, between the two of them, be able to find a way.
*
So that might have been enough, to end whatever it is between them, but Myka raises her head and looks expectantly towards Helena. There’s the spectre of something that might be a smile around her lips, and Helena feels the corners of her mouth twitch in recognition.
Helena has been broken beyond repair for most of her life, and she has never let that stop her before. She thinks, when Myka starts to speak, that maybe it’s a lesson they’ve both learned.
“We’ve got another charming American idiom you might like, Helena, ‘Go big or go home’. So you choose now- you want to haunt me? Fine, but you do it properly. You’re gonna be here when I get up in the morning and when I go to sleep. If you can break into my dreams, so even they aren’t a respite from you, you’ll do that. You can take my things and break them, and leave messages in pig blood if you have to, but you’re going to make sure I know that you’re still there, that I’m living with a ghost.” Myka unwinds the string from around her fingers slowly - Helena can see the white lines it leaves in Myka’s skin, like the ghost of the whistle, and she goes to help. The orange spreads between them, a tiny web, and Helena begins to wind it back around her wrist.
“If you can’t do that,” Myka tells her. “If you can’t do this right, if you can’t ruin me- if you’re going to leave again, you should go now.”
In another time, in another life, she thinks she could have treasured Myka’s company - they could have been such dear friends, or lovers, or partners. They could have been happy, and not dead, and it would have been so very simple, for a Helena who was able to confine Myka’s role neatly to just one corner of her life, to bid her farewell before they manage to make matters even worse.
Now, though, there isn’t a name for who Myka is to her. They’re Bering and Wells (Wells and Bering), and it feels like they’re becoming so much more.
And so Helena chooses.
*
Years later, as the sun dips low over the horizon, they make their way back towards the Warehouse.
Pete mumbles something incoherent, and then goes back to sleep. Helena glances back at him and notes with only a little distaste that yes, he does drool in his sleep. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
The radio is busy burbling to itself, a low hum, and Myka’s fingers tap out a slow rhythm on the steering wheel. Helena adjusts her position a little, unclasping the seatbelt so she can make herself a little more comfortable.
“Put that back on.” Myka rolls her eyes, and then tugs on the locket at her throat.
‘Because my death in an automobile accident is a very real possibility?’
“Driver’s rules, now buckle up.”
It’s Helena’s turn to roll her eyes at that, but she yields all the same and settles for pressing her head into the little gap between the door and her seat. She likes that spot - tucked in just enough, she can feel the engine chug along, and has an unimpeded view of the driver’s seat and the scenery before them. The road stretches on for miles, and the sunset sky looks warm and downy. Little puffs of cloud reach out towards them, like arrows pulling them home.
‘Cirrocumulus,’ Helena writes. Myka doesn’t say anything at all, but she doesn’t say anything in that awfully expressive way she has of raising her eyebrows and smirking that winds up saying a lot.
‘Some of us take an interest in the world around us.’
“And some of us just like showing off.”
‘I wasn’t aware the two were mutually exclusive.’
Myka’s voice is fond, even as she laughs and says, “Good job, I guess, or else you’d be in trouble- Oh, come on, you spend all your off hours trying to pull apart the fabric of the universe.”
‘Not for the sake of my ego, though.’ Myka concedes the point with a guttering smile.
“I know.” Gone is the lightly teasing tone - her voice is still soft, yes, but sad, too. “I know why. And you’ll manage it one day.”
‘I know.’ One day, Helena knows, she will manage it - perfect a time machine which will allow them to change the past, or at the very least, change the scientific laws that have henceforth prevented her from saving Christina’s life. But that is for one day in the future: now, Myka needs a partner, and Claudia needs a lackey who can walk through walls, and their research is progressing slowly.
There are days - and Helena thinks today will be one of them - when she asks Claudia’s permission to work on their pet project. Claudia always refuses, says that she’s too busy or tired or has a headache, and Helena’s grateful for that. Glad that with every move they make towards a solution, Claudia understands how she has to hold her back. It’ll take decades, at least, to figure everything out; decades in which she’ll just have to haunt them both.
Christina is still in danger, but this is time travel: she’ll never even know it. If Claudia has hit on something with this artefact, it could be just the breakthrough they need to push forward with the machine, and that means that Claudia needs to put the brakes on quickly.
They have all the time in the world. Helena intends to use every second of it.
“Although you can’t say the same thing about that grappler,” Myka says, having regained a little more of her playfulness.
‘There is nothing wrong with my grappler. My grappler is incredibly useful.’
“I still say it’s old-fashioned.”
‘And I still say that it’s saved your life. At least seven times, as a point of fact.’
“We agreed the squid didn’t count.”
Helena doesn’t bother answering. Instead, she looks over towards Myka. Thinks of relics, holy bones -reverence- and decides that she would have been a spectacularly awful pilgrim. She presses the tip of her pen into the curve of Myka’s wrist. It isn’t quite a caress, more a kiss by proxy, but a cautious heat bubbles up between them all the same.
And then, because she catches sight of Pete’s open mouth in the rear view mirror, because she owes him for his comments last Tuesday, because she wants to and she feels happy and Myka looks dangerously tender, Helena tears off a tiny strip of paper, rolls it into a ball, and throws it towards him. It hits his nose and goes wide, but it’s enough to have him jerk awake, look around for what hit him, and then launch her projectile back towards the front passenger seat.
“Don’t make me pull over, Pete.”
“She started it!”
‘Excuse me?’
They bicker and they laugh and they keep pressing forward, back to the others. Back to the Warehouse.
They’re going home.
And that's that. Thanks again to scripted_sra. Constructive criticism is, of course, more than welcome, and thank you for reading.
Leena finds her sitting in the den an hour later, her face pressed up against the window. Glass is difficult - Helena thinks it’s the transparency - so she has to focus if she doesn’t want to just float right through it, and that focus means her mind is too full to think about other things. The window is cold and smooth against her skin, and Helena tries to focus only on that feeling, and wonders why she came back wrong. Wonders why she came back at all.
“Hello,” Leena says, settling into the chair opposite and holding Helena’s notebook towards her. “You left this upstairs.”
Helena takes it, and Myka’s blue marker someone had tucked inside the wire spiral. She removes the pen and, as an afterthought, lifts up the front cover for a count of two buttercups.
“You’re welcome.”
The two of them sit in what Helena supposes she could describe as companionable silence for a few moments, until Leena excuses herself and comes back with two mugs of hot, sweet tea, and some custard creams. Being the devious little sneak Helena half-suspects she is - Leena certainly knows more than she ever cares to admit, anyway - she waits until Helena is happily munching on a biscuit before bringing up the little spat.
“Pete thinks you’re jealous that Claudia wants to bring Steve back instead of you, and Myka thinks you’re angry because she brought up Christina.”
‘And you?’
“Does that matter to you?”
“No,” Helena says. It doesn’t.
Claudia might have seen something worth emulating in Helena, but moments like these are all the confirmation she needs that she’s still beyond redemption. Leena doesn’t matter to her. Few things do.
She may have died to save Myka, but that had nothing to do with goodness or whatever strength of character Claudia imagines her to possess. Helena just loves stupidly, perilously, hurtfully, and people often seem to die as a result. Helena has saved people and killed them both out of love, and it feels about equal to her: she knows it shouldn’t, morally speaking. Doesn’t care. So although Leena’s pleasant, and Helena appreciates how helpful she’s been, that doesn’t mean Leena’s important.
‘I tried to leave,’ Helena tells Leena, because she’s smart enough to know when not to answer a question, too. ‘And Claudia and I are looking into my existence. We might find something that will bring it to a close.’
Leena nods, considers it. Says, “That doesn’t matter to me.”
‘Oh?’
“I know Claudia and Myka would miss you, and it would be a shame for their sakes. But personally, I wouldn’t miss you in the least.” Leena places her hand on top of the page, like an arm on Helena’s shoulder. “I miss Mrs Frederic. I know the others didn’t know her as well as I did, but they don’t talk about missing her at all, and I still wish she was here.”
‘Rather than me?’
“I wouldn’t mind.”
*
When they finish their tea, Leena just looks at Helena’s bare wrist and reminds her that Artie will be home soon. He is getting better about acknowledging that Helena’s there, it’s just normally accompanied with a warning that she should be on her very best behaviour in front of him. One more slip-up, he assures her, and there will be consequences - though what exactly they may be, Helena doesn’t think he knows.
There’s only so much with which you can threaten a ghost.
She goes to reclaim the whistle anyway - it’s no longer in front of Myka’s door, and Helena contemplates just wandering straight through the wall unobtrusively before deciding no, and knocking.
“Come in.” Myka’s voice is a little calmer now, which might be a good sign. It might also mean that she’s decided on a course of action Helena wouldn’t like, and isn’t about to let anything get in her way. She’s hard to read like that.
Helena opens the door and walks in.
“Hello,” Myka says.
‘Hello.’
She’s sitting in the middle of her bed, knees drawn all the way up to her chest, and has the orange string tangled around her fingers.
“I’m still really angry with you.”
‘Likewise.’
Myka wrinkles her nose at that and looks about to argue, but then sighs, “Yeah, that’s fair.”
“I know.”
The pea inside the whistle rattles a bit when Myka moves, and the length of string between her thumb and index finger, the one where the whistle part actually is, is pulled taut. Helena reaches over and gives the whistle a little push, like a garden swing, and it grazes Myka’s palm as it moves.
“I was already angry with you, though. Before- Before you said. About Claudia.”
Helena believes that Myka was the one who had said almost everything about Claudia, really, but that isn’t the point. She pushes down on the whistle, makes it still.
‘Claudia is an adult, Myka, and she needs this.’
“Yeah. Well. She’s still just a kid, too.”
‘And our superior. Artie’s, too.’
Myka’s grin trembles a little. “I know- when he realised...”
‘I thought he was about to have a fit.’
“This is... This is really weird. More than usual.”
‘And we do have a fairly high tolerance for the unusual, don’t we?’
“You can say that again.” Myka’s smile is growing a bit more sure of itself, and there’s more than a touch of Agent Bering in the way she spins the whistle around the string and asks, “Did you just say that again?”
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,’ Helena writes. “Yes, I did, yes.”
She adds, ‘Myka, may I ask why you were angry?’
“You want to take a guess?” That was definitely more Agent Bering, with a voice that could snap necks - even she looks a little surprised by her own anger, and Helena clamps down on her own irritation. Sometimes, with Myka, she can almost feel something fragile and warm flutter between them - something more, something new, something which would be so easy to trample and forget- but she also knows that another cussing match, while at least familiar, would destroy it before Helena has the chance to take it apart and figure it out for herself.
‘I died in front of you?’ It had been a bit of a sticking point before Helena managed to announce her presence, anyway.
Myka snorts, a little chuff of air which blows through Helena’s forehead. “Yeah. That didn’t help. And then, Helena, you came back.”
That stings a little more than Helena thought it would. It isn’t as if the universe offered her much choice in the matter, but even so, she hadn’t believed her presence was quite that objectionable.
‘I don’t understand.’
“You came back, and then you almost die all over again. Pete says you might be able to move on if you go finish some ‘unfinished business’, so what do you do? Tell us you have some. And then Claudia thinks she can help, so you smash things trying to stop her, and when that doesn’t work, you yell at her, and when she still manages to save you, you go and make her work on your time machine with you. You tell me, is that a good enough reason to be mad at you?”
‘I think it is.’
Myka’s muscles tense. “That’s all you have to say?”
The thing is, Myka’s right. So is Helena, but about something else entirely: they’ve always been very efficient, saying lots of things at once, but it’s a bit of an inconvenience in situations like this when they’re having two separate arguments. Helena hurt Myka, yes, and she regrets it. But Myka hurt her, too, and she’s going to hurt Claudia if she doesn’t let Claudia make her own decisions. She writes as much, and although Myka doesn’t look thrilled with that response, she does nod, like she understands.
“Yeah. You’re right.”
‘I like to think we both are. Wells and Bering.’
‘Bering and Wells,’ she expects Myka to say, and is a little disappointed when all it gets from her is a grimace. Apparently, they aren’t quite there yet.
‘Myka, I don’t know how to fix this. If I could-‘
“What, you’d be magnificent for me?” Myka tilts her head towards her pillow - next to Woolly, Helena can see a very familiar stack of index cards covered in her neat script. She had wondered where they’d disappeared to, and half-hoped that Claudia had destroyed them without reading them. “Turns out that’s a terrible way of saying goodbye.”
‘Time was ever so slightly of the essence.’
“Well, a bit less advice on how to murder someone would have been useful.”
‘Self-defence, and those were intended for Claudia’s use.’
“Helena,” Myka says, but it isn’t only exasperation in her voice. Helena thinks she can take that, that it’s good enough for now. “Next time, try Hallmark first.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.” Helena leans in towards Myka very briefly, the sort of contact that could easily be dismissed as a light breeze, and then moves back.
‘I would fix this, if I knew how. If I could.’
Myka doesn’t say anything for a very long time. Helena watches her drop her head against her knees, wiggle her toes just a little, and then, without raising her head, state very quietly, “I don’t think we can.”
‘I know.’
*
That might have been reason enough, perhaps, to cut their losses and walk away. Whatever it is between them, however deeply Helena has come to care for Myka, she knows that it isn’t enough to heal them. If it can’t be fixed, and if it can’t fix them, then - well, Helena has hurt Myka enough for two lifetimes, and a considerable chunk of her post-mortem period.
Besides, Helena and Myka have both had more than enough practice at saying goodbye. They should, between the two of them, be able to find a way.
*
So that might have been enough, to end whatever it is between them, but Myka raises her head and looks expectantly towards Helena. There’s the spectre of something that might be a smile around her lips, and Helena feels the corners of her mouth twitch in recognition.
Helena has been broken beyond repair for most of her life, and she has never let that stop her before. She thinks, when Myka starts to speak, that maybe it’s a lesson they’ve both learned.
“We’ve got another charming American idiom you might like, Helena, ‘Go big or go home’. So you choose now- you want to haunt me? Fine, but you do it properly. You’re gonna be here when I get up in the morning and when I go to sleep. If you can break into my dreams, so even they aren’t a respite from you, you’ll do that. You can take my things and break them, and leave messages in pig blood if you have to, but you’re going to make sure I know that you’re still there, that I’m living with a ghost.” Myka unwinds the string from around her fingers slowly - Helena can see the white lines it leaves in Myka’s skin, like the ghost of the whistle, and she goes to help. The orange spreads between them, a tiny web, and Helena begins to wind it back around her wrist.
“If you can’t do that,” Myka tells her. “If you can’t do this right, if you can’t ruin me- if you’re going to leave again, you should go now.”
In another time, in another life, she thinks she could have treasured Myka’s company - they could have been such dear friends, or lovers, or partners. They could have been happy, and not dead, and it would have been so very simple, for a Helena who was able to confine Myka’s role neatly to just one corner of her life, to bid her farewell before they manage to make matters even worse.
Now, though, there isn’t a name for who Myka is to her. They’re Bering and Wells (Wells and Bering), and it feels like they’re becoming so much more.
And so Helena chooses.
*
Years later, as the sun dips low over the horizon, they make their way back towards the Warehouse.
Pete mumbles something incoherent, and then goes back to sleep. Helena glances back at him and notes with only a little distaste that yes, he does drool in his sleep. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
The radio is busy burbling to itself, a low hum, and Myka’s fingers tap out a slow rhythm on the steering wheel. Helena adjusts her position a little, unclasping the seatbelt so she can make herself a little more comfortable.
“Put that back on.” Myka rolls her eyes, and then tugs on the locket at her throat.
‘Because my death in an automobile accident is a very real possibility?’
“Driver’s rules, now buckle up.”
It’s Helena’s turn to roll her eyes at that, but she yields all the same and settles for pressing her head into the little gap between the door and her seat. She likes that spot - tucked in just enough, she can feel the engine chug along, and has an unimpeded view of the driver’s seat and the scenery before them. The road stretches on for miles, and the sunset sky looks warm and downy. Little puffs of cloud reach out towards them, like arrows pulling them home.
‘Cirrocumulus,’ Helena writes. Myka doesn’t say anything at all, but she doesn’t say anything in that awfully expressive way she has of raising her eyebrows and smirking that winds up saying a lot.
‘Some of us take an interest in the world around us.’
“And some of us just like showing off.”
‘I wasn’t aware the two were mutually exclusive.’
Myka’s voice is fond, even as she laughs and says, “Good job, I guess, or else you’d be in trouble- Oh, come on, you spend all your off hours trying to pull apart the fabric of the universe.”
‘Not for the sake of my ego, though.’ Myka concedes the point with a guttering smile.
“I know.” Gone is the lightly teasing tone - her voice is still soft, yes, but sad, too. “I know why. And you’ll manage it one day.”
‘I know.’ One day, Helena knows, she will manage it - perfect a time machine which will allow them to change the past, or at the very least, change the scientific laws that have henceforth prevented her from saving Christina’s life. But that is for one day in the future: now, Myka needs a partner, and Claudia needs a lackey who can walk through walls, and their research is progressing slowly.
There are days - and Helena thinks today will be one of them - when she asks Claudia’s permission to work on their pet project. Claudia always refuses, says that she’s too busy or tired or has a headache, and Helena’s grateful for that. Glad that with every move they make towards a solution, Claudia understands how she has to hold her back. It’ll take decades, at least, to figure everything out; decades in which she’ll just have to haunt them both.
Christina is still in danger, but this is time travel: she’ll never even know it. If Claudia has hit on something with this artefact, it could be just the breakthrough they need to push forward with the machine, and that means that Claudia needs to put the brakes on quickly.
They have all the time in the world. Helena intends to use every second of it.
“Although you can’t say the same thing about that grappler,” Myka says, having regained a little more of her playfulness.
‘There is nothing wrong with my grappler. My grappler is incredibly useful.’
“I still say it’s old-fashioned.”
‘And I still say that it’s saved your life. At least seven times, as a point of fact.’
“We agreed the squid didn’t count.”
Helena doesn’t bother answering. Instead, she looks over towards Myka. Thinks of relics, holy bones -reverence- and decides that she would have been a spectacularly awful pilgrim. She presses the tip of her pen into the curve of Myka’s wrist. It isn’t quite a caress, more a kiss by proxy, but a cautious heat bubbles up between them all the same.
And then, because she catches sight of Pete’s open mouth in the rear view mirror, because she owes him for his comments last Tuesday, because she wants to and she feels happy and Myka looks dangerously tender, Helena tears off a tiny strip of paper, rolls it into a ball, and throws it towards him. It hits his nose and goes wide, but it’s enough to have him jerk awake, look around for what hit him, and then launch her projectile back towards the front passenger seat.
“Don’t make me pull over, Pete.”
“She started it!”
‘Excuse me?’
They bicker and they laugh and they keep pressing forward, back to the others. Back to the Warehouse.
They’re going home.
And that's that. Thanks again to scripted_sra. Constructive criticism is, of course, more than welcome, and thank you for reading.