DISCLAIMER: Don't own, don't profit.
NOTES: Written to the Benny Goodman Quartet recording of "Moonglow". Prohibition, "the best thing to ever happen to jazz," ended in 1933.
When it's over: when the bomb is defused and Pete is pinching her to make sure she's real and the darkness in Claudia's eyes has wiped out her laugh lines and Artie looks shaken and Leena somehow has the presence of mind to order dinner and H.G. won't look anyone in the eye.
No one speaks over the white paper cartons of lo mein and fried rice. What do people say after another near apocalypse? What do people say when the new guy with the peaceful eyes died for them and they almost lost anyway?
Claudia shuts herself in her room and Pete looks between her and Leena. They both shake their heads; not yet. He takes a plate of cookies and a glass of milk to her door, anyway. Myka hears him leave it with a whisper and thinks: Claudia's never lost anyone. Even with Joshua, she always had hope. Claudia's never lost hope.
When it's over: when feeling is winning but feeling is dying, too.
Leena brings it up first, after Artie gets up without even a grumble and returns to the Warehouse. "H.G... About your room..."
The whole time, H.G. hasn't said more than three words, but every so often her gaze softens and rests calmly on Myka, on her hair or hands or her face. This time she's caught, but she just gives that enigmatic smile.
Myka breaks eye contact first, but H.G. is the first to speak. "Dead agents vault, no doubt?" and her tone is that breezy, cavalier, escapist one. "And to restore it requires Regent authorization and we have no Regents, do we?"
Leena wrings her hands helplessly. "Three Regents, actually. Because it's so… unusual. Mrs. Frederick said they'll be here in the morning for you, but until then-"
"She'll share with me," Myka whispers. "No worries. Excuse me."
Bolting is cowardly and wasteful but she needs to not be so exposed when dealing with this... rawness. Tomorrow. Of course they were going to take her back. She wasn't supposed to be here, she wasn't supposed to be whole, Emily Lake was supposed to be a school teacher in Colorado and H.G.—Helena, Helena, majestic Helena—was supposed to be an apparition, a ghost with just enough juice to break Myka's heart again and again and again.
And put it back together, she reminds herself, and presses her forehead to the cool glass of the solarium windows. It's a downpour; the road to town might wash out again. She wonders, not for the first time, what the hell the point of the football is. What exactly Artie does with it. Who made it in the first place.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow is cruelty. H.G. helped save the world, shouldn't that cancel out trying to destroy it?
Sometimes in the night, Myka wakes up with Helena's grief-mad eyes flashing like sirens in her brain. She can't ever go back to sleep those nights, thinking of living a hundred molasses-slow years with nothing but that type of pain just below a surface of bronze.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
She turns to see H.G. closing the door to the solarium behind her. The chandelier from the dining room casts enough light to navigate the furniture but not enough to make this anything but intimate.
"Tomorrow isn't fair."
H.G. smiles, weaves around the white rattan loveseat. "Apparently making up for trying to destroy the world is a tall order." Her fingers, spread out and oddly delicate like copper wire, flutter along the edge of the wooden sideboard toward the back of the room. Myka can barely see her now; only the paleness of her skin stands out against the rain and shadow. Was she always so pale? Was that Emily Lake's body that hid from the sun or Helena's soul, trapped in the orb?
"It's not fair," she repeats weakly. "It's too soon. This isn't enough."
Helena glances up and it's those grieving eyes again, but her body is resigned. "No, darling, it isn't."
The rain comes down harder and they just look at each other for what feels like the whole night. Finally Helena lowers her chin, looks back at what her hands are doing, and Myka starts paying attention. H.G. is setting up a record player. Myka hadn't even known one was out here. "Is that-"
"An original Victor Talking Machine. Not the original; that, of course, is in the Warehouse. But one of them." H.G. holds up a few discs, smiles at whatever she sees. "You know, the one thing I really truly regret about spending a century bronzed—" Myka winces and H.G. sees it, looks at her just longer than a glance but carries on loading a record "—is that I missed the whole jazz age."
She can't help but smile, feels her tongue press against the back of her teeth with all the things she wants to say. "Not Elvis?" is what she settles on.
H.G. smirks, shakes her head as she sets the needle. "Too much machismo for my taste." She steps away from the player as the first piano notes fill the room. "No, I'm sorry I missed jazz. Springing up to fit around the absence of a good drink, celebrated in covert booze dens. All about secret sin and love in all its terrible joys."
Myka feels her lips trembling. She doesn't have any words, not even a lame line, to take over when the clarinet line diminuendos.
H.G. is crossing over to her, eyes no longer grief-mad but still, definitely, wild. "What do you think we might have done, you and I, in a gin joint?" She takes Myka's right hand, draws her over to the open space on the east end of the room, into the darkness.
"I—I don't know," she stutters. She should know this song, she should know what to say—
"Dream for me, darling," H.G.—no, Helena, Helena when she is like this, all darkness and bright. "I think I would have watched you smile and sing along all night. And then when the band was tired and everyone was starting to slip away, I'd pass the piano player a whole dollar to play just the right song and I'd come up to you, sitting so pretty and demure at a table by the bar, and I'd ask you to dance." Helena slips her right arm around Myka's waist, and for the briefest moment she catches that devil-may-care smile, the original intoxicating one. "Dance with me, darling," Helena whispers in her ear, and starts to turn them, slowly.
Myka closes her eyes and breathes, smells incense smoke and the faintest hints of cider from Helena's hair. Helena's holding her close, cheek to cheek like the song, and she feels herself start to tremble.
"Myka?" Helena's voice breaks in the middle of her name and that's it, that's all it takes. Myka turns her head just enough and kisses her. Desperate and afraid and curious and above all else grateful, grateful, grateful for even having this, for even having one dance.
Helena kisses back. Of course she does. And of course she's thorough and she is wild, heady and bold and still... And still. For all the tongue, her hands don't move from their dance position, even though Myka's do, even though Myka's fingers tangle in her ever perfect hair, even though Myka's hand strokes at those weak points on her neck and tap out tattoos over her pulse. Helena's hands stay demure and proper but her fingers are twisting in the fabric of Myka's shirt like fate and logic and words and history everything else that has failed since that day in London.
They break for air and resume and break and resume and Myka realizes she's walked Helena back into the wall. And, also, that she's pretty terrible at breaking for air.
Helena grins at her, wild and decadent and bright. "I was hoping to be minty fresh for that, but I should have known you'd... modify the timetable."
She chuckles and feels herself blushing, so she steals a peck and then another, tracing one finger over Helena's left eyebrow, down her jawline, over her lips. "Dance with me, darling," she echoes, and settles her cheek to Helena's shoulder.
A sigh from Helena, and their feet start moving again. She brings their joined hands in to rest at her heart, presses a quick kiss to Myka's forehead.
They turn and turn and turn and the rain keeps coming down.