This was written quickly as a response (commentfic) to a video someone posted on Tumblr and tagged with Myka and H.G. I didn't proof this at all before I posted it there...and it's lazy of me, but I'm not going to proof it now. I'm simply sharing.
And cursing the day I was saddled with a muse that delights in inspiring me on nights where I should be doing something far more productive.
Also, signing up for Tumblr may have been the biggest mistake of my adult life.
But I digress.
In her greatest moments of brilliance, her ingenuity was fluid, like a dose of elixir that slowly matriculated through her veins. An idea would begin with a complete set of problems to be solved, and then one by one the quandries would pass through the powerful filters of her fantastic mind and be unmade until a singular, flawless blueprint for her next great achievement was left.
In her greatest moments of grief-stricken depravity, H.G. Wells was equally meticulous. The plan would begin with a goal, and each obstacle to that goal was reasoned inert before action was taken, before idea was made action, before revenge was made manifest.
In her dark, long night, behind the curtain of cold metal and nothingness, all she had taken with her was her sorrow. Like spirits or a poison, its insidious whispers drove her to complete the thought puzzle she had bronzed herself to escape. Her future – the future was an obsession.
But like any other thought puzzle, there were problems to be solved, and prerequisites to be fulfilled.
Helena had looked for signs of education in the people of the future, had expected that with better health and modern convenience that mankind would avail itself of inexpensive and readily available information for sheer pleasure. She discovered instead that convenience and ingenuity was abused, that those marvelous portals through which information simply gushed were used to consume frivolous, meaningless tripe. Indeed, even politics – horrifically corrupt, even in her day – had grown worse with such new and mindless way to distribute misinformation to the mob. Rather than using the gift of democracy to build a better world for themselves, the peoples of the world were doing little better than holding popularity contests on election day.
Thus fell the first wall between the people and their demise.
She had look then for some form of redeeming compassion between neighbors and communities. The worldwide relief effort underway for the nation of Haiti brought a warm, welcome hope, but it ended as she learned more about the history of the place, the misappropriation of that aid, and the squallor it had created in an already decimated place. It wasn't long before she learned more about how little the peoples of the planet cared for one another, about how close the most powerful nations had come to destroying themselves and how many times they had only barely missed creating their own nuclear winter. She learned about the world wars, and the atrocities committed on all sides of the second, and the conflict that raged in the deserts of the cradle of life that only served to further hostilities between nations.
When she discovered how easily relief organizations had gained their money, that human beings truly cared as much about donating to a worthy cause as they did purchasing some program to enable them to share their own foolishness with the world, it was with no small amount of disgust that she crumbled the second barrier to dust.
Her last hope had been justice. There had been none given by society to the men that had taken her beloved daughter's life. Government-run agencies had been formed during her detention that had brought such amends to the world. There was recompense for every crime, technological marvels that aided in solving cases that would have been impossible to resolve in her day. She believed the constabulary might have been able to find her daughter's killers, had they such aid.
But justice is meant to be granted for all great wrongs, and she was horrified to discover how brutally beautiful souls were treated for the crime of being different, and sickened to discover that the greatest criminals were often within the governments, leading the people of the world, so entrenched in their power that they stood out of reach of even the most impartial law.
There was nothing redeemable about such a future.
"Wait...I don't understand. Why would you kill millions of innocent people?"
"Innocent?"
The woman before her had been a friend – a like-minded captive of that desolate destiny. She, above all others, should understand her intentions.
"Open your eyes, Myka! Have you looked at the world in which you live?"
They had a bond, the two of them, and it was something that even in all her time and experience she struggled to understand. This modern Warehouse agent was fiercely intelligent, and unreasonably kind. She had accepted Helena with little convincing, and at first the displaced Victorian had written the other woman off as an asset to be used and discarded. It had taken surprisingly little time – minutes, really – before she began to see something else.
Any ally. A partner.
Ten feet from her, the closest confidante she had left in the world showed no signs of understanding. Her body stood taut, ready to spring into action at the slightest opening, and her murky green eyes were hard and darkened by anger.
"So because you lost your daughter, because you're angry-"
"No! Don't you dare! This may have begun with Christina's murder but it's not about that! I foolishly believed that if I could find a way to travel through time that things would have improved! A utopia would have emerged, but here we are over a century later and things have actually gotten worse!"
The heavy instrument in her hand flared, its inner power curled around her fingers like a listless lover. It was ready to do what she required of it, if she would only strike.
But not yet. She had to explain to some member of this ill-fated species why it deserved to be destroyed.
"The divide between rich and poor, hunger and famine, war and violence and hatred...all flourishing beyond control. Indeed men have found new ways to kill each other that were inconceivable in by day, even by fiction writers!"
"But millions of us are struggling against that every day!"
Myka's eyes were pleading, beseeching, begging for answers that she wanted to hear.
"This planet needs a rest from what you've done to it. It needs a chance to repair itself."
She could provide no clearer answer.
"Oh, my God...you seriously intend to start another ice age."
"The only way to save this world is by destroying the parasites who are eating it alive!"
She lifted the great weapon in her hands and pointed it toward the ground, intent on setting her final, flawless plan in motion. She found herself excited for it – glad for it.
And there was an interruption – a slight fracas from a firearm aimed at stopping her. This, too, had been a problem that needed to be solved before that perfect gem of an idea was ready to begin. Artie was fortunate that he hadn't struck a more critical point, but it was an effective demonstration. She would be unhindered.
When the trident met the ground for the first time, when the earth cracked before her feet, her heart began to race.
Her achievement, her masterpiece was so close.
Myka rushed back into her view, the snub-nosed pistol used only moments ago in hand, and trained on Helena's own head. It wasn't the first time the two of them had conversed at gunpoint, and never before had Myka followed through with the threat.
But if she had not convinced the taller woman of the virtue of her plan, there was no hope of it now. They were at odds.
"I wouldn't," Helena warned.
Her words were heeded, the gun was lowered, and she was glad to see it. Despite their new positions on opposite sides of a short battlefield, she truly didn't wish to see Myka harmed.
"So..what? The entire planet is subject to your judgment now? What about the millions of mothers that are gonna lose their daughters, just like you lost Christina? Is that right?"
This, too, had been a tangle in the thread of logic, but one that had been solved easily.
"This is no world for a child."
The anger melted from Myka's face at her words, and it gave Helena pause. Perhaps she could still reason with her friend.
They had shared nearly every moment together since her reinstatement as a Warehouse agent, and if there had been a safe harbor from every contemporary atrocity it was the effortless, open smiles, the wide, expressionate eyes, and the adorable, infectious laughter of that beautiful woman before her. She admired – no, adored the woman, and though she was utterly committed to her task, she could never bring herself to hate Myka Bering.
"I don't think you believe that," she said softly.
"I do," Helena replied firmly, lifting the trident once more. "Watch me."
Myka screamed in protest as she plunged the weapon into the ground once more. She needed repeat the action only one more time.
But her friend was flung backwards by the newest quake, landing heavily against the ground.
Her heart – so filled with nervous excitement as she neared the end of her quest – seized briefly as she noted how slow the other woman was to rise once more.
"You are lying to yourself!"
Despite being, at this point, over a century old, Helena had also not failed to notice how stunningly gorgeous Myka was. Her body was thin and lithe, and though the woman was naturally very athletic those attributes were gracefully hidden behind soft curves and lean lines.
There were abrasions on her hands, a tear in her pants that revealed torn, bleeding skin beneath. They were basic and simple wounds, but damn it all, Myka looked like she was in pain when she spoke again.
And maybe she was, Helena reasoned sadly. After all, betrayal hurt as keenly as a knife to the heart.
"You never wanted this! If you wanted to kill Pete and me you would have done it at Warehouse 2, or in Paris, And Artie...you would have let him die in Russia but you didn't."
She leaned heavily against the trident, still in the ground, her grip white-knuckle tight against the shaft. The urge to finish what she had begun was beginning to feel less like a desire and more like a ragged need. The alternatives were unacceptable – the world could not be allowed to continue as it was. It needed to be healed just as surely and desperately as Helena needed to strike the third blow.
"I needed you to trust me," she replied, though the excuse sounded hollow even to her ears.
"No. You needed us to stop you. You wanted us to follow you and stop you. That's why you called Pete this morning."
Yes, she had needed just as completely as she needed to reach the end of her journey.
"Think, Helena!"
She had needed Myka. God help her, she had wanted Myka.
The weapon came loose from the ground one last time as the there woman neared her.
"You are so filled with grief and anger, but there is a part of you – I know it – there is some small part of your soul that knows that this is wrong."
Myka stood a foot from her, eyes and presence pleading her own case as effectively as her words. They stood so near one another that Helena could smell soap and shampoo and this other, buried aroma that was so distinctly her, and it overwhelmed her senses until she hesitated to move a muscle.
"And that part is still alive and it's just pushing to get through."
She shook her head in protest, but she was beginning to realize for the first time that the threads of her plan were not as clean as she had thought.
There was a flaw in her logic. And it was standing right in front of her.
"Yes."
Her plan required absolute commitment. She knew there would be casualties – millions of faceless, nameless casualties, and perhaps some that were not so anonymous. Upon her emergence from the bronze, upon meeting her savior face to face, her commitment was cemented and her path was set upon an irreversible course.
Myka smiled slightly, warming the soul she had let chill on purpose.
Helena hadn't yet met the other woman when she'd made such a commitment.
"That's the part that refuses to kill the very people who can stop you."
Myka reached for the trident, and Helena reacted instinctively, angrily. "No! Stay away from me!" she shouted, both a vicious command and a desperate request.
"All right," came the soft reply.
For the briefest of moments, there was nothing but relief. If the American could only put a safe distance between herself and the trident-
"If I am wrong, then kill me."
The firearm was shoved into her hand so quickly she wasn't sure what had happened until it was done.
And then the nose of it was flush point-blank against Myka's flawless forehead, held in place by the woman's own hands.
"Do it!" she shouted. "Kill me now! I mean we're all gonna die anyway, right, so what's the difference?"
Helena had committed herself to being an unstoppable force in this endeavor long ago.
And Myka, dear, stubborn, loyal Myka, was now an immovable object.
"So shoot me! Shoot me now."
Her voice trembled on the last line, tugging at that part of the Englishwoman that loved her friend as dearly as she had loved anyone, breaking what remained of her hardened heart.
"Kill me...but not like that. Not like a coward."
The hand that held the gun aloft trembled as its owner realized the horrible choice presented before her.
"I want you to look me in the eyes and take my life."
For a moment – the briefest of moments – she let the thought puzzle itself out. Pulling the trigger meant the realization of all her plans. It would mean the culmination of three lifetimes worth of work, the end of the greatest enigma her mind had ever worked through. It would be a hard reset for the world, a forced scenario in which only the clever and intelligent would survive. A world in which those three things so craved by society might thrive.
But to bring about that mighty hope, she would have to use a weapon she had sworn never to touch, one that simply did not have a place in civilized society, and she would have to destroy the one thing left in the world that she cared about.
That she loved.
Education. Charity. Justice. Those were the three qualities missing from the modern world. But hadn't she found them in the woman standing before her?
"C'mon. Do it."
Her finger twitched of its own volition, a hair away from making the decision for her, but she stilled it at the last minute.
In all her tedious planning, in the redundant tracing of line after line of logic, she had missed this one complication: she would trade it all, give it all away for just one thing.
"Do it!"
As Myka shouted, Helena's hand was already hurling the gun downward, throwing her frustration and her rage and her dreams and a hundred years of her life away as if it they were all as vile and accursed as the object she cast aside.
All that time was wasted, all the planning for nothing. She collapsed under the weight of her own crushed intentions and wept for all the pain she had caused, and all the pain that others would continue to feel.
She'd traded it all to save the only thing on earth that resembled the future she'd dreamed of: she'd give it all to Myka Bering.
And as she realized she would do it again a hundred times over, she wept harder.