"Can you imagine? Four or five little Johns and Helens running about? Following in their parents' footsteps… Oh, poetry and science. Helen, don't you love the way they… intermingle?"
"You're talking in riddles again, John Druitt. And you're getting ahead of yourself. I don't know if I want four or five. Maybe one or two…"
"Hmm, yes, one or two," he agrees willingly, never horribly argumentative with the woman now wrapped up in his arms.
"And you know how people will talk if we don't wait until we're married," she says, but she can't stop kissing him, kissing him, kissing him some more, because his lips are like poetry and his body is warm.
"Hmm, true, true. We had better marry quickly then," he murmurs into her neck.
She gasps quietly at his attentions, and then the gasp is a laugh while he playfully nibbles at her collar bones.
But he's already become a killer, and she does not know until it's much, much too late.
Or perhaps… perhaps she finds out just in time, she thinks so many years later; funny how hindsight will change one's outlook. Eternal youth has its blessings and its curses, and although she's showing no signs of being more than one and a quarter centuries old (or young, perhaps), she can't help but feel she missed her chance at being a young woman somewhere in that whirlwind of struggle to attain something that should have been impossible—and in the impossible's improbable outcome. Even Helen Magnus has her limits, and she's well past the ability to conceive a child for anyone—even if there were any likely prospects for a father. She's had her chance, and her chance became a monster.
But she's lonely, so lonely, and her fingers clench against her belly as she eyes herself in the mirror, lips drawn. Protégés and friends, colleagues and lovers never seem to be hers, no matter how many years go by. How many friends and lovers before she finds something that belongs to her?
Suddenly, she's angry. Angry because she's sad, she thinks, but she shakes the rationale away; she'd rather be angry. Anger is easier than sadness on any day of the week, and she scowls at the lifeless woman in the mirror, who seems to scowl back more lifelessly and more deeply than Helen herself can muster.
She's in tears when she reaches the lab despite her denial of her own grief, and in a moment, she's made a terrible, irrational decision. A week later, she dreads it; but a week later, it is once again too late. One decision, hastily made; one chance, botched.
Or executed to perfection.
Her pregnancy is punctuated by fits of self-loathing and moments of hope, but when she weeps as her little girl's newborn cries pierce the wailing quiet in her head, only the hope remains. When the babe is swaddled and lying in her arms, she drops her face against the tiny body and allows herself one of those rare, precious, self-indulgent moments. "Shh, shh. It's okay, Ashley," she chokes, muffled by the blankets and her own sobs. "You're mine. You're mine, and we're going to take care of each other. I promise."