Author's note: -take this a drabblish prologue if you will to a much longer work. Since I am more than a little irked that Bering and Wells shall only be in one episode of the final series I decided to do a Helena centric long work. Hey Dars, long time no see, sorry no more Tango at the mo, but this one is for you.
I am seeking a beta since it is intricately plotted and need a fresh eye to knit any holes, so if you like how I write but can spot how I cam improve and will also deBritishify some of my expressions for some of the warehouse gang, the position is yours.
Helena's view of her time on the earth was refracted through a kaleidoscope lens. A dizzying array of sensations and visions constantly re-arranging and evolving, often puzzling, rarely consistent. Mostly she found herself giddy, unable to make sense of it all, distracted as she often had been by the next vista, another novel revelation blowing her off course, making her seasick with confusion and unnamed anxiety. Boone was drab in its ordinariness. Its boxy gray buildings filling streets of angular grids and squares of limes and lawn with obscure frontier dignitaries forgettable to all but the pigeons that sat on them and the suburban commuters who masticated impassively before their granite forebears. But after the Warehouse, it was time to return to some stolidity and Boone provided the landscape that suited her mood in retirement.
Helena was learning to focus on the small shiny beads of simple pleasures in her kaleidoscope, to breathe in slowly and examine them in their comforting colourful minutiae. She would learn to appreciate the little things even if it killed her, she told herself. Actually she would love them precisely because they would not make her self-destruct and destroy bystanders that she had come to care deeply about. The grand gestures of heroism and villainy of her distant and near past were immaterial. They had made no difference to the world as it turned on its axis indifferent to her and her acts of attention-seeking hubris. She had been chastened by the fairground carousel of life in the twenty first century and her seeming irrelevance to it.
One hundred and thirty years was enough to earn anyone a retirement. She would revel in the quotidian. Thus this small town crime lab technician newly settled in America's Dairyland should know how to cook.
But the gods continued to torment her, she thought ruefully, as she struggled in the Culinary Fundamentals class at Boone's community college. Her station was covered with flour and shallot peelings. A knob of butter had smeared itself across her face, making her red cheeks shine in vivid contrast to her usual pale and calm demeanour.
She was distracted by an electronic high pitched bleat, persistent and irritating, She paused a couple of beats, her memory trying to recall its possible source from the list of acquired modern contraptions, turning the pages over in her mental ledger.
"Damn and blast it" she stormed as she grabbed the cast iron pan off the gas ring. She waved the heavy pan fruitlessly in the air looking for a place in her station to set it down, but her haphazard prepping had left nowhere. Cursing inwardly that staff were no longer a middle class accoutrement, she yelped as she realised that she should have at least used a tea towel to pick up the metal handle of the pan. It dropped with a heavy clatter onto the neater station next to her, where its occupant had been diligently rolling out his pastry.
"Heavens. I am so sorry," she said as she shook out her hand and winced.
The man rushed to her and held onto her injured wrist taking her to the cold water faucet.
"Let's see to that first."
Helena flinched when he grabbed her wrist in sudden remembrance of Myka touching her in the same way. That awful day in Yellowstone, the wretched heaving anger that threatened to drown her in inner turmoil and with her, Myka. Myka's eyes steady and clear but pleading as she wrested the gun out of her hand only to point at her own head. The gun that Helena had only managed to holster that morning but had felt alien and disagreeable in her hand with its cold steel precision. A weapon designed solely to take life by means that were intended to be emotionless and clinical. The disconnect between Helena's feelings and her action were so obviously reflected in the dark forest green and gold of Myka's eyes. Those eyes that spoke of love and compassion and that challenged her to be true to her convictions. She had crumpled bent double in overwhelming grief. Helena snatched at her breath as the memory assailed her.
But this stranger's hand had a strength that was comforting rather then confrontational. Its warmth and steadiness helped the panic subside. His eyes gazed steadily at her with a calm concern and not little interest.
Moments passed and the water ran unnoticed by both of them. "Oh God," he muttered.
"Here we go again," thought Helena as she sought to charm him as reflex dictated and curiosity piqued her. But her flirtatious smile fell on Nate's back as he turned back to his station, gingerly picking up the heavy pan. Below it sat the shattered glass and shining remnants of his watch.
The front was clearly smashed into shards and the tiny-teethed cogs and wheels were scattered on the counter. The metal plate of the watch face was bent out of shape and tarnished by the soot and heat of the copper-based skillet. He picked through the detritus with his index finger uselessly, distress writ large on his broad expressive face.
Her pride a little piqued, Helena walked across to his station to see what had made him so forlorn. On seeing the ruined watch, she quickly touched his arm in sympathy,
"Oh my, I am so terribly sorry I did that. I could offer to fix it for you myself," she offered.
"You're a watchmaker?" he asked almost incredulously, though his eyes remained resolutely on the broken item before him.
"Well, not exactly", Helena clarified. Her voice gaining some of its usual mellifluence as she sought to assure him.
"But I do have quite some experience in working with complex time mechanisms. I might not be a fully-qualified horologist, but I would certainly be able to reassemble your watch without much difficulty."
He looked up at her with some surprise. His eyes a little glassy. When he finally spoke it was with a little trepidation,
"It is not worth a huge amount, but it has a lot of sentimental value. It was from my late wife."
He looked away clearly embarrassed by the revelation. He began to clear up the mess, keeping his eyes firmly on the marble counter. Helena felt a tug something quite forgotten.
Later, she realised that his unexpected outburst and consequent discombobulation was akin to that of her brother Charles. In public, a tad patronising and paternalistic; the epitome of proper and correct Victorian sentiment, but at home, kind, generous and vulnerable. For the first time in months she reached out to someone.
"Then it is settled. I will fix your watch in exchange for you so gallantly coming to my rescue. It is the very least I can do for you."
She indicated to the burnt remains of her failed attempt at cooking.
"At least you can rescue your Beef Wellington. Mine seems to be more of the rubber galoshes than the edible variety."
He looked a little confused at first, before laughing politely at her poor pun. Turning away, she had swallowed down a further quip about her father serving in the duke's retinue, the dish's namesake.
When she got home to her small apartment, she sat a her desk, switching on the angle-poise lamp, and focused on all the pieces that had been hastily wrapped in cling film. Sipping a cup of tea, she delicately turned each piece over, cataloguing in her mind's eye the exact location and use for each of the components, setting aside those that need further work as a priority. As she bent over her desk a brass magnifying glass over the glistening field of metal on leather, her mind and fingers absorbed with the task at hand, the miasma of guilt and regret that clung to her receded a touch. The separating of the timepiece into its component slivers and finely toothed cogs with her narrow pincers emptied her mind of troubling thoughts.
Finding the round silver backplate, she flipped it over. Upon it she saw that the following words had been engraved, a beautiful cursive script spiralling into the centre of the watch. "To my darling Nate from Carrie on the birth of our little Adelaide". The fevered tempo of her magpie mind slowed and the kaleidoscope settled and coalesced into a wondrously simple image true and clear. That night Helena sat up late working on the timepiece. As she sat bathed in the small pool of light cast by her lamp, she was able to ignore the shadows of truth standing as ghosts in the darkness beyond her.