and now: Yuletide post-reveal commentary, part one
I wrote two fics for Yuletide this year, both Warehouse 13. First up, we have the story of how HG Wells got herself an apprenticeship at Warehouse 12.
Illumination
What I really wanted to call this story at first was “I like long walks and sci-fi movies,” or some variation on that line - “Fake Palindromes” is SUCH an HG song. But I thought it was too much of an anachronism, considering the story is set before movies (or much in the way of science fiction), so I went with a one-word plot-related title along the lines of season 1.
This was a treat, written after I saw phoenixchilde's letter requesting HG backstory of any sort; later I'll get to the line that really pushed me to write it. I waited until I had my assignment in hand, thought up some pertinent details on that, and let my assignment cook while I worked on this. Fun fact: While I called this The Treat That Wouldn't Shut Up, it's half the length of my assignment.
Helena sighed, and resisted the urge to pace the length of the drawing room yet again. It would do nothing to resolve any of her current dilemmas, nor to move her latest story forward; still, she felt entirely too restless to sit idly by and wait for Bess to call, as she’d promised she would.
Helena refused to believe in writer’s block as a matter of course; if one wanted to write badly enough, one would write, and worry about the quality of the piece once something was on paper. But for all of that, she’d been having a truly horrific time of it for the last week. She suspected her latest attempt to publish something in her own right was to blame; it was hardly her fault she’d been born with a pair of breasts as well as an unbridled imagination, but the printing houses seemed to look upon her efforts as quaint when she presented them.
This is about the point where I went ‘...this sounds nothing like my usual work and I KIND OF LOVE IT.’ Also: I chose Helena throughout because I think that’s who she is in her own head.
And yet, she thought, I could send Charles in with the same thing next month and they’d sing praises to its brilliance. It makes no bloody sense.
She was in no mood to write of a visitor to a better future - or perhaps a worse one; she hadn’t made up her mind as to how her fictional adventurer’s visit was to go, just yet. Her frustrations with the present were winning out, and she couldn’t think of any other way to give them voice. She had half a mind to build something, but it wouldn’t do to be immersed in that sort of work when Bess arrived. Bess had seen her tinkering before, of course, but depending on the tenor of her call--
“Miss Helena?”
Helena jolted from her reverie, splashing a trail of ink across her paper.
“Beggin’ your pardon for startling you, Miss Helena,” the maid said, “but Miss Elizabeth’s arrived. Shall I show her in?”
“By all means, Colleen, and you really needn’t apologise. I was far too lost in thought for my own good.” Helena tried to give the poor girl a reassuring smile, but Colleen only bobbed a curtsy and returned to the front of the house, leaving her with little idea of how well she was disguising her mood.
Random trivia: Colleen is named after ‘Jane’ the maid in To Say Nothing of the Dog. I realised I needed a maid and ran with it.
It hardly mattered; Bess was shown into the drawing room a few moments later, and Helena could always find genuine cheer for Bess.
“Colleen, be a dear and get us some tea, would you?” she said, and moved in to hug Bess as soon as Colleen left the room. “It has simply been too long, darling, we oughtn’t wait for months before your next call.”
“I... that’s part of why I came to talk to you.” Bess pulled back from the hug, eyes on something behind Helena’s left shoulder. “I’ve accepted a proposal.”
I am one of many people who wants to know more about this whole ‘many of my lovers were men’ thing. For the sake of this fic, an old-school romantic friendship seemed to be just the ticket - but partly due to the time and place and partly as a symbolic cutting of ties before the Warehouse comes into HG’s life, it couldn’t end any other way than the typical ‘well, wasn’t that touching, now go get married like good little girls.’ (For Bess, anyway; HG doesn’t strike me as the marrying type.)
Helena felt her heart drop into her stomach. “Bess, no.”
“I can’t wait any longer, Helena, I’m very nearly whispered about as it is. He’ll provide for me, I’ll be happy, and it’s not as though I’ll never be able to see you again.”
“But you expect the shape of our friendship to change overnight?”
Bess reached out and tucked a lock of Helena’s hair behind her ear, and for a moment, Helena almost thought she’d imagined the beginning of their conversation. “It’s hardly overnight. The wedding’s not for another year. Besides, we both knew this could never stand indefinitely, and it’s not as though you’ve been without your own... I don’t want to call them indiscretions, but that may be the best word for them.”
Helena fought back a pang of guilt, despite the fact that they had talked about her encounters with men - and the occasional woman, though that felt more like a betrayal of Bess, aside from being harder to procure - before she’d had any of them. “That’s not the same, Bess, I’ve always come back to you--”
I do, however, think HG greatly enjoys sex in all forms.
Bess closed her eyes, and Helena barely noticed Colleen setting the tea service on the table and leaving again. “I’ve never been as - adventurous as you are. I need a kind of stability we’d never have, if we struck out on our own. You would love every second of it, I’ve no doubt, but I’d be miserable, even with you there. I do love you, Helena, and I always will, but I couldn’t bear the sort of life you’re seeking.”
Helena sighed, and wished for a moment her novel’s time machine were real enough that she could return to when they were sixteen and this was the simplest thing in the world - and then, perhaps, on to a future where they might be able to have something for themselves.
HG would’ve made a great bluestocking, if given the chance. Bess, however, I think would need to be in a more modern era before she’d take the chance on an openly-acknowledged relationship.
“The tea is getting cold,” she finally said. “I - can you... at least stay for the afternoon?”
Bess smiled, as warmly as though she hadn’t just turned Helena’s world upside down. “Of course, darling. You didn’t think I wouldn’t make a proper call of the day, did you?”
Bess stayed all afternoon, and the tea wasn’t without hope, but Helena could barely hold back her tears when it came time for Bess to leave. In an effort to stave off the worst of the hysterics she was sure would come, she found the newspaper, after Bess left, and began reading.
She read the front page, then set the newspaper down and went to her work room.
***
“Helena Gretchen Wells, where on earth do you think you’re going?”
That line, right there, is why I wrote this story. It and bits of the ensuing conversation wouldn’t leave me alone.
Helena sighed, and turned to face her brother - who had, of course, chosen the only chair in the drawing room to face the hall. “Charles Everett Wells, what on earth ever gave you the idea you could be as intimidating as our father?”
“You’re changing the subject, Helena. Where are you going at this hour?”
“Whitechapel. I’m conducting an experiment.”
Charles rose to his feet, which would have made him a far more imposing figure if he hadn’t become so sedentary in recent years. “You certainly are not going to Whitechapel, especially not in the middle of the night! They’re saying that habitual murderer’s struck again--”
I love the description of Charles at the beginning of this paragraph, I gotta say. Also, the way these two argue.
“Which is precisely why it has to be now, I’ve a theory about how he--”
“--and that’s no part of town for a lady such as yourself, and - are those my trousers?”
Helena rolled her eyes. “No, Charles, they’re my trousers. I would fit into yours thrice over, what sort of fool do you take me for?”
I think this exchange is my favorite set of lines in this fic.
“Fool enough to go to Whitechapel, of all places, during the night, when someone’s been murdering whores and unfortunates, dressed in such a way that he might take you for one of them.”
“His victims’ class is no reason for their deaths to remain a mystery, Charles. I’ve had this theory since the double event, and I intend to put it to the test whether you’d like me to or not. More to the point, I would have done sooner, but I only got half the work done before the killings stopped.”
The ‘double event,’ for those not up on their Jack the Ripper (I admit my research was pretty much Wikipedia): Two murders in one night. This was a point where I wrote one thing and had to double-check myself before I posted it to make sure I didn’t butcher the timeline. (I am also counting a few more murders than the five officially attributed to Jack the Ripper as his work, for the sake of this fic. The ones I’ve tacked on rode the media hype, though.)
Charles sighed, picked up his brandy, and began making his way to the drawing room’s doorway. “I hardly know what to do with you anymore. I agreed to turn a blind eye to your dalliances if it meant you would stay at home, I agreed to provide a public face to your writing--”
“I never should have let you name that public face, either. ‘Herbert’? Really? I told you I would have much preferred ‘Horatio.’”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert. Perfectly respectable name, that one. You ought to consider yourself lucky I didn’t name you after Great-Grandfather Hoban.”
First, Hoban: Yes, that is a Firefly reference.
Second, Charles and HG as I see them: There’s several years between them; he’s the elder sibling, and rather protective of his sister in his way. He kinda wants her to just be normal already, even though he resigned himself to the fact that she wouldn’t be a long time ago. And he figures if she lives at home with him, at least it’ll be a little harder for the world to hold her eccentricities against her. He means well, but I think even if the Warehouse didn’t come into HG’s life at this point, she’d start to chafe at his treatment of her.
Helena shuddered, and made what she was sure was a wholly undignified face. “Well, ‘George’ is rather better than ‘Gretchen,’ I’ll grant you that.”
“You changed the subject again, Helena. I can find it in myself to live with your refusal to take a husband and your wild ideas, but this - hare-brained quest of yours is simply too much. You’re truly chasing after windmills if you think you can solve the Whitechapel murders where no proper authority has succeeded. I have every investment in your happiness, but I cannot allow you to go tearing after criminals every night.”
“Funny, how you say you cannot allow me as though you have any real hope of stopping me.” Helena knew at least five ways out of the house that Charles either wouldn’t consider or could no longer fit through; while this would be far easier if she could leave by the front door, she would have no trouble getting out of the house tonight.
Charles sighed again. “I’m well aware of that. And since I cannot block your exit, I wash my hands of the affair. If you get yourself killed, you’re on your own.”
Helena laughed. “I rather expected I would be no matter what,” she called over her shoulder, as she made her way to the front door.
She had arrived at her theory regarding how the Whitechapel killer kept his victims still for so long after the double event got her reading the reports. In each of the first four attacks, as well as the ones that had followed last year, residents near the scene mentioned a queer yellow light in the vicinity during the night. How a light could have such an effect on people was even beyond Helena’s imagination - she would have to see the mechanics of the thing, if she were right - but she had begun building a possible countermeasure at the time, and the newspaper from the day of Bess’s call had reminded her of the project.
She had tested the goggles as best as she could, under laboratory conditions; she could only hope that would prove to be enough, if she did have an encounter with the Whitechapel killer.
I think these might be the goggles MacPherson was using in “Nevermore,” when he had the lantern out. (As to how it got out of the Warehouse after being demonstrably gathered in this story: He made Leena do it.)
Unfortunately, if the Whitechapel killer was at work again, he was taking his own sweet time in choosing another victim. Helena found nothing that night, nor any night for the next week; after that, she decided to scale back for a bit, the better to get something like a constant amount of sleep.
***
Charles continued to protest every time he saw her going to Whitechapel to conduct her experiments; Bess, when she learned of Helena’s plan, was quite worried for her safety, which almost caused Helena to let the matter drop entirely.
Perhaps she would have, were Bess not now engaged; but as things stood, she thought that Bess would at least have someone to console her, should the worst come of the experiment.
She quickly grew accustomed to spending her nights surrounded by women with little choice but to offer themselves to any buyer, be it to provide food or the next bottle of gin. It greatly pained her that she could do little to ease their suffering, or to end the social ills that drove them to such desperation - but if her work amounted to something, she might at least be able to remove one terror from their lives.
I wanted to work in some of where I think HG’s crazy came from: She really does want to make the world a better place, in her way, and it constantly frustrates her that people are so dumb about how to do it. Combine that with her earth-shaking grief for her daughter and I can see a convincing recipe for crazy. (Though I still wonder: The Regents must have known she was unstable, if that were the case. Why reinstate her so readily?)
In September, two months after Helena began her search in earnest, she got her chance to test her goggles in the world.
She found that chance quite by accident, happening to catch an eerie yellowish glow that did not match any of the street lights from the corner of her eye. She slipped her goggles on, allowed herself a few moments to adjust to the colored filter, and followed the odd light into an alley.
Unfortunately, by the time she reached the alley’s mouth, the killer, face obscured by a dark hood, had finished the bulk of his work. Helena sighed, and did her best not to look at the poor woman’s remains - and got a full view of the killer’s lantern for her trouble.
I decided fairly early on, when I knew what I’d be working with, that I didn’t want to try to name the person behind the murders. That’s not as important to the story as the Artifact, and besides, I don’t know nearly enough about the Jack the Ripper... let’s call it a mythos to even try to speculate. For all I know, it’s a woman under that hood, even though HG and the Warehouse agents who show up assume it’s a man.
She froze, hoped the lantern hadn’t made its way past her goggles after all, and cursed herself for making a sound and attracting the killer’s attention. After a tense few moments, the killer moved toward her, knife raised; as he brought it down toward her, Helena raised her arm to block the blow.
The killer hadn’t been expecting a fight; his hood, combined with the element of surprise, gave Helena the upper hand for long enough to knock the knife from his grip. However, she had only been able to train herself a little, so her advantage didn’t last for very long. The killer grabbed for her goggles several times, and Helena soon had to focus most of her attention toward keeping them on her face; she had no desire to find out what that lantern would do without her protective gear.
My logic here is that given the era, HG couldn't find many people willing to spar with her. Self-training would've covered her for a while, but not for long. I think most of her training came as part of her Warehouse 12 work.
She was beginning to feel that the fight was taking a turn for the worse when she heard footsteps from behind; she braced herself for more trouble, but the new arrival kicked the killer in the groin rather than attack Helena in any way. The killer fell to the ground and dropped the lantern, which Helena and the new arrival reached for as one. Only then did they pause to assess each other.
Her rescuer was a tiny Indian woman, wearing a tunic, loose trousers, and a highly suspicious expression. “What are you doing here?” she said, far more of London in her voice than Bombay.
I LOVE PRIYA. And I kind of want to write stories about her epic Warehouse adventures. In my head, the Warehouse has always been and will always be an equal-opportunity employer; it moves around too much to show any real sort of preference beyond aptitude for the job. I think Priya found herself caught up in a case in India a good ten or fifteen years before this story and got an apprenticeship of her own.
Helena took her hand off the lantern, not without a pang of disappointment that she was likely surrendering her chance to examine it more closely. “Same as you, so it would seem. I had a theory and decided to test it.”
‘Same as you’ is a callback to canon; considering how often HG says it to the team, it seemed fitting.
“You could have been killed. You nearly were.” The woman turned the lantern toward the deserted alley, muttering something about civilians taking an interest, and pressed a button on the back; as the alley went dark, Helena lifted her goggles.
“How is it that you weren’t at all slowed down by that thing?” she asked. “Judging from his reaction when I blocked him, he was quite used to its help in his... work.”
“We have precautions of our own,” a man’s voice said; its owner approached a few moments later. He had something in his hands, but the light was so dim that Helena couldn’t tell what it was.
“For goodness’ sake, Edwin, put that away,” the woman said. “This woman is perhaps fatally stupid, but she’s no threat.”
“It’s not for her, it’s for him.” The man waved his occupied hand at the killer’s prone form. “Unless you wanted him to follow us back to--”
The woman waved him off with her free hand. “Very well, then, I suppose kicking him once will have to do. Since you couldn’t be bothered to assist in the fight, were you at least useful enough to bring the containment with you?”
“Naturally, Priya. Now, if you will allow me to see to our unwelcome guest?”
I tried not to make these two ‘VICTORIAN PETE AND MYKA,’ and I’d like to think I succeeded.
Helena watched with interest as the man began fiddling with the object in his hand. “Does that mean I’m a welcome guest?”
“It means...” The woman hesitated for a moment. “It means you are a person of interest,” she finally said. “Whether that makes you a welcome guest is for people other than us to determine. Do hurry, Edwin, I’ve no desire to be out here all night.”
The man raised the object in his hands to his mouth and blew; something smacked into the killer, and Helena raised an eyebrow, though she had her doubts that the others could see it. “Blow darts?”
“Of a sort,” the man replied, handing a canister of some sort to the woman. “A particularly useful piece from Cambodia. Would you care for some company on your walk home? I would be more than glad to be of assistance.”
Hey, they had to use something before HG picked up the Tesla guns. I am nnnnnnot at all certain what they used in place of the Farnsworths; the canister is like the can o’ goo Claudia takes to the bookshop in “Nevermore,” since I couldn’t picture Warehouse 12 having the baggies.
“I’m sure you would,” the woman muttered, as she opened the lid on the canister and dropped the lantern into it; Helena had to shield her eyes against a flurry of sparks.
“Thank you, but no,” she said, once her eyes had readjusted to the darkness. “I got myself here in one piece; I dare say I should be able to get myself home again as well.”
They parted ways at the mouth of the alley, and Helena kept herself quite occupied with the events of the night during her walk home, and for several hours after she ought to have gone to bed.
***
Bess called three days after Helena’s successful outing in Whitechapel; she was quite relieved to learn that Helena would not be going forth again, and the call felt far more like old times than many of their visits had since Bess announced her engagement. Yet before they had finished their tea, Colleen came to the door of the drawing room.
“Miss Helena, there... are some people at the door,” she said. “They say they met you the other night?”
“Oh! Oh, show them in, do.” Colleen bobbed a curtsy and left the room, and Helena turned to Bess with an apologetic smile. “I hope you don’t mind, darling. It’s only that I had a few more questions, after the way things went in Whitechapel, and I wasn’t expecting them to call today--”
“It’s all right, Helena, it’s...” Bess dropped Helena’s gaze, and smiled a little herself. “I was here to see Charles, actually. We’ve some planning to do.”
I dithered on whether to include this twist. In the end, it felt right to the plot; as Bess says, it would have given them the chance to remain close, if HG had stayed. And in HG’s eyes, it gives her all the more reason to leave.
Helena tried to speak, but rather felt like she had swallowed her own tongue. “You... Charles. You’re marrying Charles.”
Bess nodded, without meeting Helena’s eyes again. “I thought that way, we could at least be close.”
“It would never be the same.” Helena sighed; this was what she got for not reading the newspaper or talking to her brother during the course of her experiment. “Should he hurt you, I will make quite sure he lives to regret it.”
Her temper regarding people hurting her family has been there for a long time, I think. And at this point, Bess is easily more important to HG than her brother is.
“I’ve no doubt you will.” Bess stepped forward and hugged her briefly. “I’ll go and talk to Charles, and you can discuss things with your new friends, and - I suspect it’ll be all right, in the end.”
“I hope so.” Helena wanted to say more, but Colleen returned with the man and woman she had met in Whitechapel, and Bess made her excuses to go to Charles’ study. She took a deep breath, the better to attempt to regain her composure, and said, “Good afternoon. What brings the two of you here?”
The woman smiled a little. “It would seem,” she said, “that you are a welcome guest after all, if you would be interested in an apprenticeship.”
“An apprenticeship... doing what, exactly? Chasing habitual murderers into seedy parts of town?”
“Oh, there’s rather more to it than that,” the man said. “And it’s very dangerous, but given the circumstances of our meeting, our employers think that you can rise to the challenge.”
Helena grinned. “I think I would very much like to learn more.”
Illumination
What I really wanted to call this story at first was “I like long walks and sci-fi movies,” or some variation on that line - “Fake Palindromes” is SUCH an HG song. But I thought it was too much of an anachronism, considering the story is set before movies (or much in the way of science fiction), so I went with a one-word plot-related title along the lines of season 1.
This was a treat, written after I saw phoenixchilde's letter requesting HG backstory of any sort; later I'll get to the line that really pushed me to write it. I waited until I had my assignment in hand, thought up some pertinent details on that, and let my assignment cook while I worked on this. Fun fact: While I called this The Treat That Wouldn't Shut Up, it's half the length of my assignment.
Helena sighed, and resisted the urge to pace the length of the drawing room yet again. It would do nothing to resolve any of her current dilemmas, nor to move her latest story forward; still, she felt entirely too restless to sit idly by and wait for Bess to call, as she’d promised she would.
Helena refused to believe in writer’s block as a matter of course; if one wanted to write badly enough, one would write, and worry about the quality of the piece once something was on paper. But for all of that, she’d been having a truly horrific time of it for the last week. She suspected her latest attempt to publish something in her own right was to blame; it was hardly her fault she’d been born with a pair of breasts as well as an unbridled imagination, but the printing houses seemed to look upon her efforts as quaint when she presented them.
This is about the point where I went ‘...this sounds nothing like my usual work and I KIND OF LOVE IT.’ Also: I chose Helena throughout because I think that’s who she is in her own head.
And yet, she thought, I could send Charles in with the same thing next month and they’d sing praises to its brilliance. It makes no bloody sense.
She was in no mood to write of a visitor to a better future - or perhaps a worse one; she hadn’t made up her mind as to how her fictional adventurer’s visit was to go, just yet. Her frustrations with the present were winning out, and she couldn’t think of any other way to give them voice. She had half a mind to build something, but it wouldn’t do to be immersed in that sort of work when Bess arrived. Bess had seen her tinkering before, of course, but depending on the tenor of her call--
“Miss Helena?”
Helena jolted from her reverie, splashing a trail of ink across her paper.
“Beggin’ your pardon for startling you, Miss Helena,” the maid said, “but Miss Elizabeth’s arrived. Shall I show her in?”
“By all means, Colleen, and you really needn’t apologise. I was far too lost in thought for my own good.” Helena tried to give the poor girl a reassuring smile, but Colleen only bobbed a curtsy and returned to the front of the house, leaving her with little idea of how well she was disguising her mood.
Random trivia: Colleen is named after ‘Jane’ the maid in To Say Nothing of the Dog. I realised I needed a maid and ran with it.
It hardly mattered; Bess was shown into the drawing room a few moments later, and Helena could always find genuine cheer for Bess.
“Colleen, be a dear and get us some tea, would you?” she said, and moved in to hug Bess as soon as Colleen left the room. “It has simply been too long, darling, we oughtn’t wait for months before your next call.”
“I... that’s part of why I came to talk to you.” Bess pulled back from the hug, eyes on something behind Helena’s left shoulder. “I’ve accepted a proposal.”
I am one of many people who wants to know more about this whole ‘many of my lovers were men’ thing. For the sake of this fic, an old-school romantic friendship seemed to be just the ticket - but partly due to the time and place and partly as a symbolic cutting of ties before the Warehouse comes into HG’s life, it couldn’t end any other way than the typical ‘well, wasn’t that touching, now go get married like good little girls.’ (For Bess, anyway; HG doesn’t strike me as the marrying type.)
Helena felt her heart drop into her stomach. “Bess, no.”
“I can’t wait any longer, Helena, I’m very nearly whispered about as it is. He’ll provide for me, I’ll be happy, and it’s not as though I’ll never be able to see you again.”
“But you expect the shape of our friendship to change overnight?”
Bess reached out and tucked a lock of Helena’s hair behind her ear, and for a moment, Helena almost thought she’d imagined the beginning of their conversation. “It’s hardly overnight. The wedding’s not for another year. Besides, we both knew this could never stand indefinitely, and it’s not as though you’ve been without your own... I don’t want to call them indiscretions, but that may be the best word for them.”
Helena fought back a pang of guilt, despite the fact that they had talked about her encounters with men - and the occasional woman, though that felt more like a betrayal of Bess, aside from being harder to procure - before she’d had any of them. “That’s not the same, Bess, I’ve always come back to you--”
I do, however, think HG greatly enjoys sex in all forms.
Bess closed her eyes, and Helena barely noticed Colleen setting the tea service on the table and leaving again. “I’ve never been as - adventurous as you are. I need a kind of stability we’d never have, if we struck out on our own. You would love every second of it, I’ve no doubt, but I’d be miserable, even with you there. I do love you, Helena, and I always will, but I couldn’t bear the sort of life you’re seeking.”
Helena sighed, and wished for a moment her novel’s time machine were real enough that she could return to when they were sixteen and this was the simplest thing in the world - and then, perhaps, on to a future where they might be able to have something for themselves.
HG would’ve made a great bluestocking, if given the chance. Bess, however, I think would need to be in a more modern era before she’d take the chance on an openly-acknowledged relationship.
“The tea is getting cold,” she finally said. “I - can you... at least stay for the afternoon?”
Bess smiled, as warmly as though she hadn’t just turned Helena’s world upside down. “Of course, darling. You didn’t think I wouldn’t make a proper call of the day, did you?”
Bess stayed all afternoon, and the tea wasn’t without hope, but Helena could barely hold back her tears when it came time for Bess to leave. In an effort to stave off the worst of the hysterics she was sure would come, she found the newspaper, after Bess left, and began reading.
She read the front page, then set the newspaper down and went to her work room.
***
“Helena Gretchen Wells, where on earth do you think you’re going?”
That line, right there, is why I wrote this story. It and bits of the ensuing conversation wouldn’t leave me alone.
Helena sighed, and turned to face her brother - who had, of course, chosen the only chair in the drawing room to face the hall. “Charles Everett Wells, what on earth ever gave you the idea you could be as intimidating as our father?”
“You’re changing the subject, Helena. Where are you going at this hour?”
“Whitechapel. I’m conducting an experiment.”
Charles rose to his feet, which would have made him a far more imposing figure if he hadn’t become so sedentary in recent years. “You certainly are not going to Whitechapel, especially not in the middle of the night! They’re saying that habitual murderer’s struck again--”
I love the description of Charles at the beginning of this paragraph, I gotta say. Also, the way these two argue.
“Which is precisely why it has to be now, I’ve a theory about how he--”
“--and that’s no part of town for a lady such as yourself, and - are those my trousers?”
Helena rolled her eyes. “No, Charles, they’re my trousers. I would fit into yours thrice over, what sort of fool do you take me for?”
I think this exchange is my favorite set of lines in this fic.
“Fool enough to go to Whitechapel, of all places, during the night, when someone’s been murdering whores and unfortunates, dressed in such a way that he might take you for one of them.”
“His victims’ class is no reason for their deaths to remain a mystery, Charles. I’ve had this theory since the double event, and I intend to put it to the test whether you’d like me to or not. More to the point, I would have done sooner, but I only got half the work done before the killings stopped.”
The ‘double event,’ for those not up on their Jack the Ripper (I admit my research was pretty much Wikipedia): Two murders in one night. This was a point where I wrote one thing and had to double-check myself before I posted it to make sure I didn’t butcher the timeline. (I am also counting a few more murders than the five officially attributed to Jack the Ripper as his work, for the sake of this fic. The ones I’ve tacked on rode the media hype, though.)
Charles sighed, picked up his brandy, and began making his way to the drawing room’s doorway. “I hardly know what to do with you anymore. I agreed to turn a blind eye to your dalliances if it meant you would stay at home, I agreed to provide a public face to your writing--”
“I never should have let you name that public face, either. ‘Herbert’? Really? I told you I would have much preferred ‘Horatio.’”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert. Perfectly respectable name, that one. You ought to consider yourself lucky I didn’t name you after Great-Grandfather Hoban.”
First, Hoban: Yes, that is a Firefly reference.
Second, Charles and HG as I see them: There’s several years between them; he’s the elder sibling, and rather protective of his sister in his way. He kinda wants her to just be normal already, even though he resigned himself to the fact that she wouldn’t be a long time ago. And he figures if she lives at home with him, at least it’ll be a little harder for the world to hold her eccentricities against her. He means well, but I think even if the Warehouse didn’t come into HG’s life at this point, she’d start to chafe at his treatment of her.
Helena shuddered, and made what she was sure was a wholly undignified face. “Well, ‘George’ is rather better than ‘Gretchen,’ I’ll grant you that.”
“You changed the subject again, Helena. I can find it in myself to live with your refusal to take a husband and your wild ideas, but this - hare-brained quest of yours is simply too much. You’re truly chasing after windmills if you think you can solve the Whitechapel murders where no proper authority has succeeded. I have every investment in your happiness, but I cannot allow you to go tearing after criminals every night.”
“Funny, how you say you cannot allow me as though you have any real hope of stopping me.” Helena knew at least five ways out of the house that Charles either wouldn’t consider or could no longer fit through; while this would be far easier if she could leave by the front door, she would have no trouble getting out of the house tonight.
Charles sighed again. “I’m well aware of that. And since I cannot block your exit, I wash my hands of the affair. If you get yourself killed, you’re on your own.”
Helena laughed. “I rather expected I would be no matter what,” she called over her shoulder, as she made her way to the front door.
She had arrived at her theory regarding how the Whitechapel killer kept his victims still for so long after the double event got her reading the reports. In each of the first four attacks, as well as the ones that had followed last year, residents near the scene mentioned a queer yellow light in the vicinity during the night. How a light could have such an effect on people was even beyond Helena’s imagination - she would have to see the mechanics of the thing, if she were right - but she had begun building a possible countermeasure at the time, and the newspaper from the day of Bess’s call had reminded her of the project.
She had tested the goggles as best as she could, under laboratory conditions; she could only hope that would prove to be enough, if she did have an encounter with the Whitechapel killer.
I think these might be the goggles MacPherson was using in “Nevermore,” when he had the lantern out. (As to how it got out of the Warehouse after being demonstrably gathered in this story: He made Leena do it.)
Unfortunately, if the Whitechapel killer was at work again, he was taking his own sweet time in choosing another victim. Helena found nothing that night, nor any night for the next week; after that, she decided to scale back for a bit, the better to get something like a constant amount of sleep.
***
Charles continued to protest every time he saw her going to Whitechapel to conduct her experiments; Bess, when she learned of Helena’s plan, was quite worried for her safety, which almost caused Helena to let the matter drop entirely.
Perhaps she would have, were Bess not now engaged; but as things stood, she thought that Bess would at least have someone to console her, should the worst come of the experiment.
She quickly grew accustomed to spending her nights surrounded by women with little choice but to offer themselves to any buyer, be it to provide food or the next bottle of gin. It greatly pained her that she could do little to ease their suffering, or to end the social ills that drove them to such desperation - but if her work amounted to something, she might at least be able to remove one terror from their lives.
I wanted to work in some of where I think HG’s crazy came from: She really does want to make the world a better place, in her way, and it constantly frustrates her that people are so dumb about how to do it. Combine that with her earth-shaking grief for her daughter and I can see a convincing recipe for crazy. (Though I still wonder: The Regents must have known she was unstable, if that were the case. Why reinstate her so readily?)
In September, two months after Helena began her search in earnest, she got her chance to test her goggles in the world.
She found that chance quite by accident, happening to catch an eerie yellowish glow that did not match any of the street lights from the corner of her eye. She slipped her goggles on, allowed herself a few moments to adjust to the colored filter, and followed the odd light into an alley.
Unfortunately, by the time she reached the alley’s mouth, the killer, face obscured by a dark hood, had finished the bulk of his work. Helena sighed, and did her best not to look at the poor woman’s remains - and got a full view of the killer’s lantern for her trouble.
I decided fairly early on, when I knew what I’d be working with, that I didn’t want to try to name the person behind the murders. That’s not as important to the story as the Artifact, and besides, I don’t know nearly enough about the Jack the Ripper... let’s call it a mythos to even try to speculate. For all I know, it’s a woman under that hood, even though HG and the Warehouse agents who show up assume it’s a man.
She froze, hoped the lantern hadn’t made its way past her goggles after all, and cursed herself for making a sound and attracting the killer’s attention. After a tense few moments, the killer moved toward her, knife raised; as he brought it down toward her, Helena raised her arm to block the blow.
The killer hadn’t been expecting a fight; his hood, combined with the element of surprise, gave Helena the upper hand for long enough to knock the knife from his grip. However, she had only been able to train herself a little, so her advantage didn’t last for very long. The killer grabbed for her goggles several times, and Helena soon had to focus most of her attention toward keeping them on her face; she had no desire to find out what that lantern would do without her protective gear.
My logic here is that given the era, HG couldn't find many people willing to spar with her. Self-training would've covered her for a while, but not for long. I think most of her training came as part of her Warehouse 12 work.
She was beginning to feel that the fight was taking a turn for the worse when she heard footsteps from behind; she braced herself for more trouble, but the new arrival kicked the killer in the groin rather than attack Helena in any way. The killer fell to the ground and dropped the lantern, which Helena and the new arrival reached for as one. Only then did they pause to assess each other.
Her rescuer was a tiny Indian woman, wearing a tunic, loose trousers, and a highly suspicious expression. “What are you doing here?” she said, far more of London in her voice than Bombay.
I LOVE PRIYA. And I kind of want to write stories about her epic Warehouse adventures. In my head, the Warehouse has always been and will always be an equal-opportunity employer; it moves around too much to show any real sort of preference beyond aptitude for the job. I think Priya found herself caught up in a case in India a good ten or fifteen years before this story and got an apprenticeship of her own.
Helena took her hand off the lantern, not without a pang of disappointment that she was likely surrendering her chance to examine it more closely. “Same as you, so it would seem. I had a theory and decided to test it.”
‘Same as you’ is a callback to canon; considering how often HG says it to the team, it seemed fitting.
“You could have been killed. You nearly were.” The woman turned the lantern toward the deserted alley, muttering something about civilians taking an interest, and pressed a button on the back; as the alley went dark, Helena lifted her goggles.
“How is it that you weren’t at all slowed down by that thing?” she asked. “Judging from his reaction when I blocked him, he was quite used to its help in his... work.”
“We have precautions of our own,” a man’s voice said; its owner approached a few moments later. He had something in his hands, but the light was so dim that Helena couldn’t tell what it was.
“For goodness’ sake, Edwin, put that away,” the woman said. “This woman is perhaps fatally stupid, but she’s no threat.”
“It’s not for her, it’s for him.” The man waved his occupied hand at the killer’s prone form. “Unless you wanted him to follow us back to--”
The woman waved him off with her free hand. “Very well, then, I suppose kicking him once will have to do. Since you couldn’t be bothered to assist in the fight, were you at least useful enough to bring the containment with you?”
“Naturally, Priya. Now, if you will allow me to see to our unwelcome guest?”
I tried not to make these two ‘VICTORIAN PETE AND MYKA,’ and I’d like to think I succeeded.
Helena watched with interest as the man began fiddling with the object in his hand. “Does that mean I’m a welcome guest?”
“It means...” The woman hesitated for a moment. “It means you are a person of interest,” she finally said. “Whether that makes you a welcome guest is for people other than us to determine. Do hurry, Edwin, I’ve no desire to be out here all night.”
The man raised the object in his hands to his mouth and blew; something smacked into the killer, and Helena raised an eyebrow, though she had her doubts that the others could see it. “Blow darts?”
“Of a sort,” the man replied, handing a canister of some sort to the woman. “A particularly useful piece from Cambodia. Would you care for some company on your walk home? I would be more than glad to be of assistance.”
Hey, they had to use something before HG picked up the Tesla guns. I am nnnnnnot at all certain what they used in place of the Farnsworths; the canister is like the can o’ goo Claudia takes to the bookshop in “Nevermore,” since I couldn’t picture Warehouse 12 having the baggies.
“I’m sure you would,” the woman muttered, as she opened the lid on the canister and dropped the lantern into it; Helena had to shield her eyes against a flurry of sparks.
“Thank you, but no,” she said, once her eyes had readjusted to the darkness. “I got myself here in one piece; I dare say I should be able to get myself home again as well.”
They parted ways at the mouth of the alley, and Helena kept herself quite occupied with the events of the night during her walk home, and for several hours after she ought to have gone to bed.
***
Bess called three days after Helena’s successful outing in Whitechapel; she was quite relieved to learn that Helena would not be going forth again, and the call felt far more like old times than many of their visits had since Bess announced her engagement. Yet before they had finished their tea, Colleen came to the door of the drawing room.
“Miss Helena, there... are some people at the door,” she said. “They say they met you the other night?”
“Oh! Oh, show them in, do.” Colleen bobbed a curtsy and left the room, and Helena turned to Bess with an apologetic smile. “I hope you don’t mind, darling. It’s only that I had a few more questions, after the way things went in Whitechapel, and I wasn’t expecting them to call today--”
“It’s all right, Helena, it’s...” Bess dropped Helena’s gaze, and smiled a little herself. “I was here to see Charles, actually. We’ve some planning to do.”
I dithered on whether to include this twist. In the end, it felt right to the plot; as Bess says, it would have given them the chance to remain close, if HG had stayed. And in HG’s eyes, it gives her all the more reason to leave.
Helena tried to speak, but rather felt like she had swallowed her own tongue. “You... Charles. You’re marrying Charles.”
Bess nodded, without meeting Helena’s eyes again. “I thought that way, we could at least be close.”
“It would never be the same.” Helena sighed; this was what she got for not reading the newspaper or talking to her brother during the course of her experiment. “Should he hurt you, I will make quite sure he lives to regret it.”
Her temper regarding people hurting her family has been there for a long time, I think. And at this point, Bess is easily more important to HG than her brother is.
“I’ve no doubt you will.” Bess stepped forward and hugged her briefly. “I’ll go and talk to Charles, and you can discuss things with your new friends, and - I suspect it’ll be all right, in the end.”
“I hope so.” Helena wanted to say more, but Colleen returned with the man and woman she had met in Whitechapel, and Bess made her excuses to go to Charles’ study. She took a deep breath, the better to attempt to regain her composure, and said, “Good afternoon. What brings the two of you here?”
The woman smiled a little. “It would seem,” she said, “that you are a welcome guest after all, if you would be interested in an apprenticeship.”
“An apprenticeship... doing what, exactly? Chasing habitual murderers into seedy parts of town?”
“Oh, there’s rather more to it than that,” the man said. “And it’s very dangerous, but given the circumstances of our meeting, our employers think that you can rise to the challenge.”
Helena grinned. “I think I would very much like to learn more.”