Disclaimer: Characters of Warehouse 13 do not belong to me, sadly. I'm just borrowing them for a while, but I'll put them back once I'm done.
A/N: A fic I posted over on tumblr to smooth out any creases caused by the super angsty fic I'd previously posted. Here there be minimal angst, somehope, and a dash of fluff.
It was a rare thing, for them to speak so little to one another. Especially when you considered the events that had so recently transpired and the innumerable things that they should almost certainly be talking about. But whenever Myka tried to speak, words failed her.
They'd failed her moments ago when she and Helena had parted ways in the hall and all she'd been able to do had been reach out and take the inventor's hand in her own, squeezing it firmly before allowing to to fall away.
They'd failed her earlier that afternoon, when Claudia had caught her by the elbow and gazed at her, concern swimming alongside the tears in her eyes. She'd asked if Myka was okay.
And they'd failed her that morning as she'd stood at what had been the detonation site, in that other Warehouse that had seemed so very much like this one, only she'd been convinced that they couldn't possibly be the same. She'd seen hers ripped asunder. And yet the Warehouse was indeed a place where the impossible was often more than plausible, and she'd found the proof of that standing in the same spot in which Myka had seen her last. H.G. Wells, once more flesh and blood, had stolen Myka's words along with her breath. So she'd let her silent tears speak for her.
They had spoken eventually, after returning to Leena's and finding themselves alone for a few moments, but the conversation had been filled with wondering glances and half-broken sentences, questions with no answers birthed only to die halfway to existence. It wasn't that there was nothing to say; there was too much.
Her mind, however, would not quiet now that she was hidden behind the door of her bedroom, lying motionless beneath her duvet, enveloped in the darkness of her room that made her feel as though it was swallowing her whole. Words overflowed, pouring into a pool behind her eyes and melding until nothing made sense, and emotions began to overwhelm her. Anxiety swelled up from the pit of her stomach, breaching the metaphorical banks that would have otherwise contained it, and Myka felt its cold fingers gripping at her neck. The prickling of tears agitating her eyes, she swallowed hard against the lump in her throat and brought her hands up to press the heels of her palms too harshly against her closed eyelids.
Behind them, there was a blazing fire, and Helena's brilliant, blinding smile.
She gasped, almost choking on her own breath and threw the covers from her. Her legs felt just as numb as the rest of her as she swung them over the side of the bed, and she wondered if it was still the shock or due to the maddeningly inexplicable anxiety that still held her in its frigid vice-like grip. It shook her fingers as she slid them partway into her hair and gripped a handful of curls, tugging a little less than gently as she tried to take deep breaths and just calm down.
But the calmness would not come, and the shadows of the room kept advancing on her, taunting her with the sense of dread and doubt that they elicited. The unsettling feeling that one who had not slept in days becomes burdened with, when everything around them seems dream-like and unreal, blanketed her so heavily that she couldn't shake it. Her heart pounded, giving a rhythm to the deafening silence that was soaking into the walls.
She was drowning, floundering for a lifeline that she could no longer convince herself was still there. Had ever actually, against all odds, been thrown to her.
Standing on unsteady legs, Myka walked them across the room and to the door. She paused, forehead pressed firmly against the wood surface and hand clutching at the doorknob. Her insides were quivering, she could feel every nerve in her body just vibrating, and yet the anxiety would not be satisfied, would not leave her. She twisted her wrist and pulled the door open as quietly as she could, yet with a jerking kind of desperation, and then sent a quick glance to either end of the hallway before striding from her room. Her bare feet made no sound as they crept quickly across the hardwood floor and carried her towards the door a few paces along the landing.
When she reached it she halted once more, unable to completely block out the small voice that had been buried somewhere deep down inside of her, the one that was urging her to return to her own room. To just go back to bed and screw her eyes closed, to somehow force herself to stay calm, because this wasn't supposed to happen. She governed a strict control over her emotions and this was not part of that.
Of course, Helena had always been her exception to everything.
Blinking wide, tired eyes, Myka decided against knocking and opened the door onto further darkness, then slipped inside. She closed it behind her without looking, her eyes already scanning the room, and she felt her breathing quicken with each passing second. Until, finally, her vision adjusted and her gaze caught the errant moonbeam that had glided in through a gap in the curtains. The pale light caressed its way along the contours of H.G. Well's face, illuminating certain features and casting others into shadow, creating an ever-changing dance as the woman breathed.
As she breathed.
Helena's dark gaze landed on her as Myka began moving once more, towards the bed, as if drawn in by some gravitational pull that she was unable to resist. The inventor had been lying on her back beneath the duvet when she'd entered, an arm bent at the elbow and her hand cradling her head, but as Myka neared she shifted so that her upper body was propped up on her forearms.
"Myka?" Fathomless brown eyes that always, impossibly, seemed even more endless when surrounded by darkness stared up at her, but there was no trust left in Myka for speech. So, with the tone of Helena's question evoking that of a rhetorical one, she said nothing.
And so they simply gazed at one another.
Her eyes felt red and sore around the edges, slightly swollen, and Myka wondered if Helena could see that in the dimness.
Somewhere in the room there was a clock ticking and she was only vaguely aware of the smallest hand's noisy movements as it counted the passing moments, too focused on Helena to really notice anything else. The former Warehouse 12 agent was slightly dishevelled, Myka assumed from an inability to succumb to sleep despite the fact that it surely must have been calling to her, and there were countless things about the other woman's appearance that another person might have lingered on. But Myka was consumed by a single, almost undeniable facet.
She was breathing. And the weight upon her chest was lifted slightly, and she found she could breathe a little easier in the face of that.
Yet, it was only 'almost'.
Releasing her lower lip from the snare she hadn't realised she'd caught it in, Myka ran her tongue along the length of the now tender skin and exhaled shakily. Helena hadn't moved, not a muscle, and appeared to be the embodiment of someone waiting. For something, anything, all the while wearing her confusion upon her face as a slight frown. Because there was no way she could know what Myka was thinking, not when Myka herself could not quiet her thoughts long enough to wrestle a coherent one free. Her mind was too busy, and so she stopped trying to make sense of things.
She reached out, watching as Helena's expression shifted from confusion to concern as Myka's fingers closed around the edge of the quilt. Then, with a final moment of hesitation, Myka gave in and slipped wordlessly beneath the blanket. Helena shifted to make room for her and Myka stiffly lay flat on her back beside the inventor, heart sputtering erratically behind her ribs.
She willed herself to calm down, to feel the presence of the woman beside her and allow that to syphon the anxiety from her still quivering muscles, but although her breaths came with less difficulty, her mind would not be convinced. And feeling the other woman's warmth radiating from her body, something that had been fractured finally broke.
With a swiftness that undoubtedly startled them both, Myka rolled onto her side and pressed herself close to the unarguably solid form of the woman she'd been near convinced she'd never see again. Her arm rose of its own volition and she could find no strength to even consider stopping her hand as it came to rest upon the patch of bare skin just above the neckline of the sleep-shirt that Claudia had offered Helena. Idly, she registered the soft skin under her palm, the undeniable swell of a breast, but there was no room for true comprehension.
Because there was a heartbeat beneath her hand.
A noise left Myka at the feel of it, unexpected and unstoppable, half-choked and wet with a sudden onslaught of tears. She closed her eyes, freeing a first and then a second, and her fingers gently dug into the flesh at their tips without her conscious command. Moving her head, she buried her face into the hollow of Helena's neck and inhaled deeply as her tears fell to their deaths. She felt the other woman's heart beat erratically against her palm, could hear her breath coming in quick, shallow spurts as Myka's nose brushed against the inside of Helena's neck in a manner so much more intimate compared to the touches they had once grown accustomed to receiving from one another.
There was the feather-light press of lips against pale skin, and then Myka ceased all movement.
Slowly, as Helena's heart rate began to slow and shift into a more steady rhythm, Myka's thoughts began slipping away. Like the dispersal of a crowd, people filtering off around the edges until the middle became less and less dense and only a few remained, lingering until they too decided to depart. And then there was a different kind of silence.
As Helena carefully extracted her arm from its place half buried between Myka and the bed to place it around her shoulders, Myka curled in closer and felt her shakes begin to ease. Then tension and anxiety that had been slowly working their way from her suddenly evaporated, and as she felt the strong beat of a heart thud against the underside of her palm, her eyes began to droop.
The darkness, so similar to the that which she had found so oppressive when in her own room, no longer seemed intent on smothering, and instead she found its embrace comforting. Accompanying the quiet that she'd come to understand as peace.
And words did not fail either of them then. They simply were not needed.