Title: Life's game
Author: DiBee (di_50)
Characters/Pairing: Helen Magnus, John Druitt, Ashley Magnus, hints at John/Helen
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: on sfaflashfic #12 Games
Summary: Sometimes, life plays dirty tricks on you. This is one game John never really won, one time destiny ran him over. Because she always meant trouble for him, a real heartbreaker.
Note: writing this fic was nearly like an 'out of body experience'. I was writing it, I was reading it as I wrote it, and I felt like the words flew and yet had no idea where from. It was completely unexpected.
Many thanks to Passionate Cec' for sharing what is left of her neurons, being awesome/cheeky and making me laugh so much.
Inspired -partly, kind of in retrospect- by this line : (I don't remember which episode it is exactly, just that's disc 2 of season one, Helen to Ashley :) "They always did call you a heartbreaker, from the time I had you in a stroller."
Music recommendation: anything calm/melancholic, especially : Time forgets, by Yiruma
Sometimes, their prolonged life felt like playing Russian roulette without any bullet. Life was meaningless, and the seconds could as well have been years. Years turned into decades and soon, there was another century. The fashion changes, the wars breaking out and the massacres felt surreal and he would come to cherish his solitude that much more. He had gone to about every place on Earth he could come up with. One day Moscow, the next Rio de Janeiro. He had never bothered learning any other language than English, and still, today, he sounded like a foreign speaker whenever he set foot in an English speaking country. He was not only from another place, he was from another time.
This time, he was somewhere near Vancouver. A busy, yet quiet place, a nice park, nature calling in the middle of a buzzing madness. It called to the still sane part of him, retreating farther and farther with each teleportation. That's when he saw her, beautiful as ever, even more so if it was ever possible. She had colored her hair, but something about her, even like this, in a distance, called to him. She was from another time, too, and yet fitting in, like any other mother. His heart clenched as he saw the blond child in the stroller, watching her surroundings with curious eyes. Her mother's, with no doubt, he had no need to see her better to guess that. And yet, Helen was alone, and it felt natural, or maybe it was just his minds playing tricks on him.
Helen stopped a couple benches away, freeing her daughter from her restraints, letting her take a few steps in the surrounding grass. Even from where he was, he could hear the old lady's voice who said as she stopped by : "A real heartbreaker, this one". She had a smile on her face, and John's felt his heart sink. For a second, the whole of time he had gone through weighted on his shoulder more than it ever had before. Still, it was good to know she was happy. He could feel her laugher tremble in his heart. For a second, as she bent to retrieve a toy that had fallen out of the little girl's reach, he caught the child's glance. Maybe she didn't have her mother's eyes. Not quite. Those were blue as well, but even more familiar.
He teleports the second the child starts pointing at him, making sure Helen can't see him, letting his madness take over, trying as hard as he can to erase that image from his memory.
Sometimes, he wishes Helen had aimed right in the first place, or that life's cruel game had finally surprised him and reached its goal. This way, at least, it would have ensured no pain of his would be inflicted on this child. His, child.
