Fic: Perhaps not to be
Title: Perhaps not to be
Rating: 12A
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Characters/Pairing: HG/Myka undertones; Claudia; team
Warnings: Spoilers for the S3 finale; character death (of a sort); terrible puns
Disclaimer: I don't own Warehouse 13, or any of its characters.
Summary: HG Wells may be dead, but that's no reason to stop being exceptional.
Notes: This was written for the smallfandombang; the wonderful scripted_sra created a fanmix which you can listen to over here
Perhaps not to be
Years later, as the sun dips low over the horizon, they make their way back towards the Warehouse.
Pete sprawls all over the seat behind Myka, his head tipped back and his limbs askew. He snores softly, although Helena knows him well enough now to realise that he’ll deny any such suggestion. Myka’s hands are curled loosely around the steering wheel, and every so often her eyes flick upwards towards the rear view mirror. Helena, politely pretending not to notice, watches the landscape pass them by with one eye, watches Myka with the other.
Retrieving the artefact had gone well, or at least as well as any mission involving Simone de Beauvoir’s notebook and a women’s college could be expected to go- Pete nearly died, Myka threatened to kill Helena twice, and now all that’s left to do is check in with Claudia and wait. Helena holds the Farnsworth loosely in one hand with the screen tilted towards Myka, and lets Claudia’s voice wash over her.
“Snagged, bagged and tagged?”
Myka nods, not looking away from the road. “We’re bringing it back to you now.”
“And that’s why I pay you the big bucks.”
Pete chooses that moment to grunt and mutter something incomprehensible about jelly babies; the three women roll their eyes as one and Claudia ends the call with a warning about the snow.
“Thanks, Claud. We’ll see you soon.”
The road back to the Warehouse - back home - stretches out in front of Helena, bright with everything she has yet to do, and she flips to the back of her notepad where all her work on time travel is accumulating. It began with the schematics for her old time machine and has rapidly turned into a research project into the nature of the universe itself. Claudia, of course, is right there with her for all her experiments; Myka tolerates most of their work; Artie detests it, and none of the others have said anything on the matter in front of Helena.
“What are you working on now?”
By way of answer, Helena holds up the diagram she’s puzzling over. Claudia is a wonderful young woman, without an artistic bone in her body, and Helena can’t quite decide if she’s looking at a diagram of a duckling or of Arthur Prior’s wristwatch. The sub-heading, in Claudia’s block capitals, is only ‘WTFWHGWDAFTTDTW (and srsly, isn’t the distinction between physical and mental time travel kinda arbitrary when your dead differently alive NOT CURRENTLY IN POSSESSION OF A REAL BODY??!!)’. Helena strikes through the ‘your’, changes it to ‘you’re’, and makes a note to ask Claudia about the schematics later.
Myka wrinkles her nose. “Yeah, I don’t know what that is.”
‘Nor I,’ Helena scribbles on the next page, and Myka laughs. The sound is sweet and low, and Helena finds herself setting the notebook to one side for now - there will be time enough to wrest some meaning from Claudia’s work later, but now Myka is laughing, and Pete starts to stir.
“S’matter? S’all good?” Pete says, his voice thick with sleep.
“Yeah,” Myka tells the road before them. “We’re all good.”
They’re going home.
*
Now, though, Helena’s dying.
*
It goes a little something like this: she takes a breath, saves Myka’s life, and has just enough time to explain matters before the Warehouse tears itself inside out and Helena’s world burns. There’s an instant - just as the explosion comes - in which Helena’s view of the barrier is obscured with heat and grit, and she has just time enough to hope that she was correct before she falls into the fire. She struggles to balance, as if she’s standing on the brink of something, and then the nothing swallows her whole.
Helena has never truly considered the possibility of a life after death, dismissed it as wishful nonsense long ago, which had been a most singular attitude for an agent at Warehouse Twelve to hold. Most agents soon reasoned that all things seemed to exist, somewhere, and so they tended to adopt a general, non-specific faith in just about everything, from lycanthropy to reincarnation. Helena, on the other hand, was raised to believe in the divine in much the same way as she was raised to be a respectable Victorian lady: unsuccessfully, no matter how useful it may be to suggest otherwise.
So, her final moments are spent entirely without fear. She has no illusions about eternal paradise- her immortal soul is, if not completely rotted, then surely a little scuffed around the edges - and this sudden propensity for self-sacrifice could never absolve her of her sins. It just doesn’t particularly matter to Helena: the day had been saved, the barrier looks to be working, and she thinks the world can ask nothing more of her. There are, on the whole, worse ways to die.
And then the moment passes, and Helena wakes up.
*
The three of them - Myka, Artie and Pete - are still standing before her, and the barrier lowers. Helena closes her eyes, some strange mixture of relieved and confused, and hears her breath shudder back into a normal rhythm.
“Oh, thank goodness.” The words stumble past her lips all of their own accord, and she runs her hands through her hair. “I thought- I was confident that the barrier would hold, but I wondered-“
Nobody responds. It doesn’t strike Helena as particularly rude - they are all at the end of a rather trying day, after all, and the others stare at the space around them. It is a bit of a mess, and trying to put that right is a daunting task, but she’s too happy that they survived to let that distract her.
“I am- I am so glad,” Helena says, with a smile that feels too wide for her face. “I am so very glad that I was right. I...”
Her voice trails away. There’s a nagging thought at the back of her mind, something that isn’t quite right - although, Helena does have very little experience of the aftermath of such destruction. She can almost hear Pete now; he’d say, “Not for lack of trying,” or something to that effect, but her point still stands: she isn’t quite sure what the ideal scenario for the Warehouse’s destruction would be, and she can’t really expect to identify one peculiarity amidst the ruins. All that is left of the place is the small circle of floor protected by the barrier, and-
Oh, the penny drops. Oh, my.
“I don’t suppose you can see me, can you?”
Helena watches as Myka, Artie and Pete make their way cautiously through the ashes of what had been the Warehouse. What had once been Helena, too, come to think of it - And isn’t that a pleasant image, Helena thinks, watching Pete splutter on some ash. Myka doesn’t even glance towards him, and after a few seconds, he grimaces a little and quiets down.
“No, I thought not. Or hear me?”
This... this is not quite what I was expecting.
Pete loops his hand across Myka’s back and Artie, deciding against answering any of their questions, places the pocket watch back into his pocket.
“We should- We should call Claudia.” Myka presses her fingers deep into her temples, so that her palms cover her eyes. She takes a deep breath, inhales a little more dust than she probably intended, and pulls a face. “We need to tell her what happened.”
Pete rubs his hand in small concentric circles on Myka’s back, and Helena thinks, absurdly, of Christina. She had done the same once to her daughter, hadn’t she - drawn rings and loops and the letters of her name, C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A, in patterns all over her back whenever Christina couldn’t sleep?
It doesn’t matter now. Helena’s dead, she’s actually dead - and she’d thought, for just a little while, that everything had worked itself out, and now-
Helena pushes her fingers through her hair again, feeling the soft weight of it. Her hair - her whole body, actually - hadn’t quite felt the same in the Janus coin, and she’s suddenly unsure if this was how it had always felt, or if death had changed her form once more. She can’t remember, that’s the problem - can’t remember how her own body felt, can’t remember what it meant to be Helena without outside interference, and she can’t stop herself from making a funny little sound that lies somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
It isn’t as if anyone can hear her, anyway.
Artie fishes out the Farnsworth from one of his pockets and looks between the two of them. Pete appears to be in much better shape than Myka - Helena can’t quite imagine that Myka would allow anyone to coddle her like this were things not so deeply wrong - but he shakes his head no for both of them. Artie casts one last look at the scorched earth before taking a few paces further away and flipping open the device.
Pete tries to pull Myka’s body a little closer to his. “Myka, come on, this is the Warehouse. We’ll fix it. We’ll figure it out. What’s a little nuke before breakfast, huh?”
“Don’t, Pete - just don’t, okay.” It isn’t really a question, but Myka is in no position to give commands right now. It makes - it would have made - Helena’s chest hurt a little, the sight of Myka as anything less than self-assured, but. Well. The sudden lack of a chest does complicate matters somewhat. Right now, Helena feels that her eyes should be prickling, and her throat should feel heavy, and her chest should feel tight. She feels that emotion without any of the physical trappings with which she could have distracted herself - just sad. She feels sad.
Pete releases Myka, holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, sorry. But everything’s gonna be fine-“
“You think? The Warehouse is destroyed, Pete. Steve was murdered, and Helena went and blew herself up-!” Myka’s voice grows steadily higher and higher in pitch, and Helena feels inexplicably guilty.
“Well, it wasn’t as if I was exactly enamoured with the idea myself,” she would quite like to say, but doesn’t.
“She saved us all,” Pete reminds her, and Helena finds herself - for once - in complete agreement with the man.
“Exactly!” Helena practically crows, and then claps her hand over her mouth -except, No, of course I don’t, she thinks. She presses what she imagines to be her hand over what she imagines to be her mouth, because she doesn’t have either any more.
This is ridiculous, she says, irritated that her heart should hurt over this again. She reminds herself that it’s far from a new experience, that Helena is no stranger to having her body stolen away, put out of reach, under the control of another. Helena should have learned better now - should have learned how to keep her body hers, or else not to mind at all, because Lord knows she’s been here before. She gives herself a little shake and resolves to stop feeling this way at once.
It works, mostly.
“She killed herself in front of us,” Myka is insisting to Pete, and Helena would quite like to sigh, because really, she has the distinct impression that Myka hasn’t quite grasped the point of the exercise - it had nothing to do with Helena. Dying, she wishes she could assure Myka, was the last thing she had wanted to do today; the only thing that had mattered at the time - as soon as it became clear that they were in danger - was finding a way to save Myka, and the other two. And her solution had worked. They are all safe. It isn’t ideal, of course it isn’t - Helena would have preferred the chance to enjoy being corporeal for a little longer - but it was necessary, and Myka will surely understand that soon.
It just doesn’t seem as though Helena will be the one to explain it to her.
Artie soon rejoins the two of them and they speak in hushed tones about the future of the Warehouse. Helena turns her attention away from them, content for now to stare up at the soft white clouds (cirrus, cumulus, stratus; she rolls the Latin over her teeth, and half-remembers the nonsense language she had once shared with Charles. They’d played at black magic, at knights and Merlin, until Helena had convinced him that a demon was coming to steal him away in the night and he’d gone bawling to their mother) and to let the sounds of other people’s voices wash over her for the first time in months. It’s enough, to be here and to be real, and to see the world burnt into nothing. Everything seems so wonderfully connected that all Helena can do is tip her chin (except, no, not my chin) towards the sky and wait for her judgment to begin.
She stays there, even as Artie, Pete and Myka drive away. There doesn’t seem to be anything else for it, after all.
Evening comes, and Helena watches the stars, wishing she could commit them all to memory exactly as they are now. A soft breeze kicks up the tiny grey flecks around the Warehouse like autumn leaves, sending them spinning in tiny spirals, and Helena watches those, too. She knows - she must do, by now - that her existence is not dependent on a physical form, but now there isn’t even a point of reference. Her breasts and legs and stomach haven’t been handed over to another but destroyed, erased from the world entirely. It’s an odd thought, but it isn’t entirely unwelcome.
Helena used to assume, as a very young child, that her body would drip away soon enough. That as she grew older, she would inherit her father’s height and posture, and be able to dash around London just like Father, in smart suits with hundreds of pockets and sweets kept inside every one. That as she grew older, she would change, just as her parents liked to warn, and that one day, Helena would know that she had finally become herself. It’s funny, she thinks with a gentle twinge in her chest, that the most she’s ever felt like herself should come after her death, but-
Oh well. There’s little I can do about that now.
She had worn the damn suit eventually, though.
*
Helena stays there for a little more than four hours, and then decides that she has waited long enough. She marches to the very edge of the scorch mark and stands so that her toes just graze the untouched earth.
(This isn’t right.)
“Well. Sod that, anyway,” Helena announces to anyone who may be listening. Nobody - not even a Regent - has yet arrived at the site of the Warehouse’s valiant last stand, but it feels a little less awkward to imagine that someone may yet recognise Helena’s continued existence.
Unless I’ve gone quite mad, that is. Thinking that I exist at all may be nothing more than delusion. It seems as likely an explanation as any. Helena smiles at the thought, and her not-quite teeth feel like cut glass.
There is a whole world on the other side of that line. Helena can see trees and a pile of cow manure, but in the distance - roads, and people, and billions of little lives being lived without the faintest awareness of the kind of danger in which they are to be found. It boggles the imagination, it truly does, but it means something more: possibility. The chance that Helena could now be free of the Warehouse entirely, albeit in a rather limited capacity.
(She also thinks that it shouldn’t take too much to bypass the limitations of her new form. A little time and access to some real data, and Helena imagines she can think her way out of anything. Granted, research will be made more difficult by virtue of the fact that she is no longer on speaking terms with the living, but Helena knows better than to let a trifle like that deter her.)
Helena attempts to - well, it doesn’t seem quite like taking a step, but she does try to move past the thin strip separating the rest of the world from the charred earth. The boundaries Sykes managed to draw seem important in a way she can’t quite justify, but the space beyond promises trees and flowers and people, and Helena has had enough waiting to last a lifetime.
She goes to move past the boundary. Can’t. She tries again - faster this time, less hesitantly, and feels herself slap against something around the edges. She staggers back - but how can I be staggering? How can I have felt anything impact against me? - and tries a third time, directing herself towards freedom. Whatever psychic force she expends on the movement rebounds and she snaps back like an elastic band to the very centre of what used to be the Warehouse.
“Damn it!” The curse is tugged out of her mouth, still slippery with all the things she should have said, and she wishes she could cry. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
She smashes her fists into the ground before she has chance to realise that it doesn’t make sense, over and over and over again. Her body has been taken away from her again, and she died with so many things left she wanted to do, and Christina is always somewhere else. Hot tears splash onto the back of her hands, and she feels her whole body shaking - she’s angry and hurt and it isn’t fair. She was never this noble, and she thought - they all thought - that Sykes had lost and that they’d won, and this isn’t how it was supposed to be.
Her fists stop at the top layer of soil, but they pass through the little piles of ash without even registering their existence. It isn’t quite like it had been within the Janus coin - Myka’s touch through her chest had been a strange sensation, but at least Helena had been able to feel the pressure of her hand against what should have been flesh. Now, though, Helena’s hands and the remnants of the Warehouse are simply able to occupy the same space without influencing one another in the least.
It doesn’t make sense, but Helena, frustrated and confused, doesn’t give a damn anymore.
*
Part Two