The idea for this came from a PM exchange with tantedrago awhile ago where we talked about how it seems like we see a lot of seductive!Helena and angsty!Helena and a decent amount of evil/crazy!Helena but very little lonely!Helena, even in season 2 fics where she was probably lonely quite a lot.
So here's my shot at it. It's an extended missing scene from 2x07, "For The Team" and will be two chapters long. (Disclaimer: I didn't rewatch the episode before writing this, so I apologize for any continuity screw-ups). MaLu, this one's for you.
Edit: belatedly noticed an internal continuity error, so I fixed it.
It was an airport hotel, which meant they paid the price of a mid-rate hotel in other places for a shady dump that had strands of other people's hair still stuck in the bathtub and required you to bring your own shampoo.
Still, it meant that Myka and Claudia had been able to book their own rooms within budget—something that Myka insisted upon every time she travelled with Claudia, who liked to stay up and channel surf long after Myka preferred to be into her second REM cycle.
Claudia was fine, she said. Copacetic. Sympatico. Super, one-hundred-percent A-OK. Just, you know, tired, and in need of a shower and possibly to burn these clothes because there was no way she'd ever manage to wash out the smell of sweat.
"I should stay with you tonight," Myka said. "Just… you know. To make sure there aren't any lingering side-effects."
"Really, Myka," Claudia sighed, "you don't need to do that. I'm fine."
"Claudia—"
"Okay, to be blunt? I'm gonna go in there and take a long shower and then I want to sleep naked like a starfish on top of the blankets so I can have a break from the feeling of, just, like, clothes, and stuff, sticking to me. And don't take it personally but this?" Claudia gestured toward herself, her hand dropping down her profile once, "is need-to-know, and you kinda don't."
Myka pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, then she shook her head and chuckled a little. "I'm staying here until you get out of the shower," she said. "And I want you to make sure your Farnsworth is set to my frequency and I want you to keep it where you can reach it overnight and if anything, anything, feels even the slightest bit off—"
"I'll call you," Claudia finished. "yup, got it."
"Okay," Myka said.
Myka grabbed the remote and channel-surfed for a few minutes while Claudia showered. Nothing worth watching, really. Football, basketball, infomercials, one of those reality shows about a pawn shop and another that looked like it was probably part of that "Real Housewives" series. She tried CNN for news, but found Crossfire instead. She hated that show and its asinine polemics. Eventually, she settled on some low-budget made-for-TV movie about aliens invading Manhattan.
After awhile the water shut off. A few minutes later, Claudia cracked the door.
"Hey, Myka?" she said, "I was serious about the naked thing, and the towels in here are sized for orcs instead of humans, so…"
"Okay," Myka said. She stood and picked up her briefcase and the neutralizer canister with the spoon inside. "Really, Claudia, if anything…"
"I got it. Don't worry. Go get some sleep."
"You too, Claudia. Goodnight."
In her own room across the hall, Myka hung her coat in the closet and pulled a folder out of her briefcase so she could begin to fill out her reports. Fifteen minutes later, she had filled out her name and the date, and had watched probably a dozen planes circle in to land at the nearby airport.
Her bag leaned against her foot, with the hard cylinder of HG Wells's grappler resting on her instep.
Myka tried, and failed, not to imagine how this day would have played out if HG hadn't suddenly appeared. Her mind lingered there, and lingered. And lingered. And then Claudia's sweaty face became intermittently eclipsed with another face, older and male with blood dripping down his forehead.
She swallowed hard, clenched her fingers tighter around her pen and moved her hand to the top of the empty box that read "Description of artifact," but her fist twitched and shook and she realized that writing… wasn't going to happen.
If HG hadn't shown up, she'd have another life on her conscience.
Did that make her the luckiest secret service partner ever, or the unluckiest?
She rolled her neck and shoulders and then tipped her head back, letting the weight and the angle pull her airway open. She really, really wanted a drink.
It was only then that it occurred to her that she could have one. She never would, when she was travelling with Pete, but now….
The hotel had a grimy bar, and even the grimiest of hotel bars should be able to serve her some kind of decent whiskey.
\\
Hotels in America, Helena thought, were one part of life in 2013 that paled in comparison to the nineteenth-century English counterparts she'd left behind. Massive, impersonal, ill-decorated monstrosities, all.
Her shoulder ached.
When she first arrived in the dismal room, she lined the ice bucket with one of the plastic bags lying beside it and filled it from the noisy machine in the alcove by the elevator.
She sat, now, on the bed furthest from the door. She tied a knot in the bag of ice and wrapped the whole thing in a rough hand towel, and deposited it on her shoulder.
Helena was reasonably strong for her size, but her size was still relatively slight. Agent Bering's body weight combined with her own had to total somewhere around eighteen stone, she reasoned. That was a lot of weight to put on one joint. It was no wonder, really, that it was so sore.
The curtains were open, and from her darkened room, Helena could see the flashing lights of airplanes circling over the nearby airport.
Thrilling things, airplanes. She had been disappointed to learn that a pair of nameless American brothers had been the ones to first build and patent the functioning flying machine, ahead of Nikola. She had asked MacPherson, once, how the blasted contraptions stayed aloft; he had settled her in front of a computer and instructed her to "google" the word "aerofoil." The physics of it were so simple, really, she endured several days' frustration that she hadn't come up with the design herself.
The remote control for the television sat on the bedside table. She reached for it and pressed the red button to switch the device on; the screen lit up with an advertisement for the hotel's various amenities ("Did you know your room key gives you 24-hour access to our fitness center on the second floor?", "Forgot something? Don't worry! All basic toiletries are available for purchase from our front desk!"). The channel above that showed children's animated programmes. The next one showed one of those strange dramas that wasn't a drama, where it appeared someone had simply recorded the goings-on of a group of individuals' daily lives—or, rather, facsimiles of daily lives, as the element of performance never lurked far beneath the surface. She kept clicking: weather report, advertisements, athletics, more athletics, and—a science fiction film! This might be interesting. She set the control down beside herself and sunk back against the pillows she had stacked against the headboard, readjusting the ice pack as she settled in. Ten minutes later, though, it became clear that this film was more about the spectacle of humans fighting aliens than about any of the mental and philosophical exercises that science fiction could so adeptly engage.
She picked up the remote again. Advertisements, advertisements, news report. Against her better judgment, she lingered there long enough to hear a handful of commentators banter on the impacts of the explosion of an offshore oil rig on near the southern coast of the United States, and then to move on to discuss the implications of a suicide bombing that had taken place that day in Jerusalem.
Destroying everything, humanity was. Some things never changed. Never would, apparently. She turned the television off and picked up her book from the nightstand – Lady Chatterley's Lover, selected from a "read banned classics!" shelf she'd found in a bookshop a few days earlier. It didn't take long for her to figure out why it had been banned three decades into her bronzing. The gritty sensuality and harsh language oscillated between discomfiting and, well, a little bit thrilling.
It had been such a very, very long time since she had experienced intimacy of any significance, after all.
Helena's vision blurred over the page as she remembered the feeling of Agent Bering's body against hers, just for that short moment as they swayed above the roadway. She hadn't meant to… well, to notice, really, the parts of their bodies that touched each other. The firmness of the Agent's grip, the solidity of her torso. Such women had been terribly hard to find in Helena's previous life.
The ice, somewhat melted now, didn't want to stay perched on her shoulder. Helena gave up on the book. For several long minutes, she watched the circling lights of the planes through the glass.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway beyond the door, accompanied by the drone of one of the brilliant little wheeled suitcases that had become so very popular.
Then thick, cotton-mouthed silence, like a tin can full of sand.
Helena shook her head, rolled her neck, flexed her fingers just to remember they would move. She lifted the half-melted ice from her shoulder and dumped it in the bathroom sink, and then shrugged out of her jacket – damp, now, from the condensation on the bag—and into a different one. This hotel did, if nothing else, have what looked like a rather unpleasant bar on the ground floor, and Helena had learned that one of the few blessings of the 21st century was that even unpleasant bars tended to be stocked with moderate-quality English dry gin.
\\
It was the kind of bar that kept the lights dim in the hope that customers wouldn't notice the chips in the fake wood paneling covering most of the furniture. The dartboards hung crooked and there were marks on the linoleum bartop that were probably left over from when it had been legal to smoke in here. The TVs were tuned to a basketball game and a poster featuring the Tamalpais University football schedule hung by the door; the neon "open" sign in the window facing the street flickered like it was about to blow a fuse.
Myka leaned, more than sat, on the stool by the end of the bar, one heel hooked over the rung, while she sipped on a double Jameson, rocks.
The bartender looked like her fourth-grade teacher—not in a good way—and she was glad she was going home tomorrow so she could wash the film from the bartop off the shirt, but the liquor was cold and familiar and savoring it offered an easy resting place for her attention.
When the gentleman—a little older than her, well-dressed, and not unattractive—sat down next to her, she didn't mind, at first. Talking was better than thinking on nights like this, as long as she was careful not to create the impression she had any, you know, intentions or anything.
He took the lack of outright rejection as an excuse to begin talking about his recent divorce. His euphemisms for his ex-wife were less than creative and all delivered, awkwardly, as though he could seduce Myka by making her an ally against a woman she'd never met.
Myka refused, on principle, to down her drink and walk out just to escape him. So she sipped at it, avoided eye contact, and responded to him only as much as necessary to avoid being overwhelmingly rude.
\\
Helena was halfway through the entrance to the bar when she noticed Agent Bering propped on one of the stools, talking to a man Helena had never seen before.
Well—listening to, perhaps.
Barely even that, actually.
Even here, from across the room, Helena could read the straight line of Agent Bering's spine, the way her weight rested more on her foot on the floor than on the barstool behind her, the way she let her hair fall between her own face and her… interlocutor's. The good Agent was clearly not interested in this conversation. The gentleman, however, proceeded apace with his words, his head and shoulders turned toward her, gesturing intently to emphasize his points. When he leaned over and bumped her shoulder with his, she smiled tightly in a way that failed to reach her eyes and then shifted away from him.
A moment later, he reached over reached over and rested his fingers on her wrist. This, apparently, was the line, crossed: Bering picked his hand up with two fingers and deposited it back on the bartop.
"Don't take this the wrong way," she said, "I'm sorry you've gone through such a shitty divorce and everything, but I'm not looking for—I'm just, I'm not interested."
The man had his back to Helena, so she couldn't hear his reply; she saw Agent Bering's eyes widen, and then narrow, indignantly. "You should pay your tab and walk away from me right now," she said.
The man began to say something else, and Bering interrupted him: "What, did I—did I stutter or something?"
Helena couldn't help but smile, just a little, at that particular rendition of that particular sentence. She saw the bartender begin to make her way across to them from where she had been standing near the cash register.
Agent Bering met the man's next rebuttal with an open-handed slap to the bar-top followed by retrieval of her credentials from her pocket.
"Look, buddy, I'm a law-enforcement officer of the type that's never off-duty and always armed. Get out of my space."
The man shrank back and raised his hands by his shoulders in a defensive gesture. The bartender had frozen in place when she saw the badge, but she came into movement as it was stowed safely away in Agent Bering's pocket.
"Everything okay here?" The bartender asked. "I think you've had enough, sir. Why don't you just head back up to your room and let the good officer enjoy her drink."
"I'm pretty sure he still needs to pay," Bering said.
The bartender shrugged, propping herself on the bartop. "Well, I think we can let that go if he's willing to just—"
"No, ma'am," Agent Bering said. "He's going to settle his tab like the law-abiding citizen he is. Right, Brendan?"
By this point, Helena had been standing half in the door for a minute or two, but she couldn't bring herself to walk closer or to leave this scene. It thrilled her to no end to watch this happen: a woman enforcing order and decorum in a public space without being accused of being meddlesome, or something else equally patronizing.
Thus it was that the Agent's eyes found her as they followed the man—Brendan?—out of the bar after he completed his payment. They narrowed, slightly, before she turned back to face the bar and took a sip of her whiskey.
Well, Helena supposed, she might as well say hello.
"Neanderthals," Helena said, as she leaned on her forearms on the bar-top in the space Brendan had vacated.
Agent Bering exhaled in a quick laugh and swirled the dregs of her drink. Helena's gaze was drawn to the shape of her fingers, long and defined and strong—almost androgynous by the standards of Helena's previous life, with their short, unpolished nails and visible, corded tendons—as they curved around the tumbler. Water coalesced from the condensation on the glass, around the edges of her fingertips.
"You're stalking me," Bering said. "That's illegal in this century."
Helena smiled. "Come now, darling. Stalking? Even out-of-time geniuses of questionable intent do sometimes crave a bed to sleep in."
"And you just happened to pick the same dump where Claudia and I are staying." Myka turned to look at Helena, an eyebrow cocked, glass dangling from her fingers.
"Well, it makes things simpler, doesn't it. How is the young miss Donovan recovering?"
"She's fine. And don't think I didn't notice that redirect you just pulled."
Helena looked down at her hands, clasped together on the sticky bar surface, and decided to gamble on honesty.
"I followed you here from the factory," she said.
"From the factory," Myka repeated. "Okay. Why?"
"I feel I have adapted quite rapidly and well to this new era, all things considered, Agent Bering," Helena said, "but it has been… exhausting. When I said I had no tether here, I meant it. No face in this century is better-known to me than yours. I was overcome with the desire to share a roof with someone familiar, even if you never knew I was here. I never intended for you to find out that I was here, actually, but it appears we both sought the same refuge at the end of a long day."
Helena gestured toward Agent Bering's glass.
Myka smiled a little, softly. Loneliness was an emotion she could certainly understand.
Helena's dark eyes found hers and Myka noticed the subtle shift of pupils dilating, brows unfurrowing. Helena's lips parted and quirked, just a little, and Myka's eyes lingered on them, just a fraction too long. And Helena smiled.
And then the moment broke. Helena turned to face forward across the bar again. She cleared her throat loudly and pulled her fingers through her hair.
Myka downed the last of her drink. "So," she said, "I can owe you. Did you mean that, or do you just have a flair for the dramatic?"
"I suppose we shall both find out when, or if, I call to collect on the debt, shan't we?" Helena smirked.
"I suppose so," Myka replied, as she set a few bills on the bar and weighted them with her empty glass. She stood up and walked toward the door. By unspoken agreement Helena followed. They crossed through the hotel lobby in silence and Myka pressed the call button for the elevator.
"Your room, not mine," Myka said, as the elevator dinged its arrival.
"As you wish, darling," Helena said, following Myka into the car. She pressed the button for the fourth floor.