"I just— I have a, uh…I have a thing to do."
It was.
Myka hoped, all while she bit back weeks of pent-up tears and drove away from Pete, from the warehouse, from her family, she really hoped that just this once the cosmos, determined though it had been to make every success in her life the result of only the most concerted effort and resolve, would play nice.
And if this really was the end for her, or something like it, she was going to do it her way. The other shoe could drop only after she'd finished this thing. Her thing. The thing she had to do.
She had the plane ticket. The ring. The intentions. The last little spark of courage that sapped what little energy she had left in her these days. She was exhausted and in increasingly-excruciating pain and had already sworn up and down to Pete that she would, in fact, go through with the surgery, but she was finally ready.
And she would be damned if the cosmos had other plans.
Myka was proud to be infuriatingly stubborn that way. She knew this. But she did it because she cared. Compassionate to the end.
"You think you can save everyone, Agent Bering. What about the greater good?" the director asked, eyeing the woman over the top of his glasses.
"There can be no greater good if you don't stop to help the people who threaten it," the young agent replied steadily. She kept her gaze on the wall just above the director's shoulder. "Sometimes all it takes is a little compassion."
The director shook his head, fighting to keep the twinge of a smile off the corner of his mouth. "That compassion will get you killed someday."
Maybe it was illogical to wear the compassion on her sleeve. She'd learned that much, at least; tamped it down, tucked it away, applied it only when necessary.
But there was a part of her, beneath it all, that wanted to believe she could save everyone.
Or die trying.
She considered this as she drove up to the hangar, fighting the trembling in her chin. Most warehouse agents didn't live long enough to die from cancer. No, they just ended up crazy, evil, or dead. Of course, if Myka could've had any say in it, though, she'd pick the potentially-fixable thing every time. It was one thing if the cancer's cause was something as simple as statistics or genetic roulette or good old karma, and if the universe had that big of a vendetta against her for feeling responsible for people, then she knew she must be doing something right.
It was another thing entirely if an artifact were to blame; she would be willing, then, to accept that the cosmos really did have it out for her. And if there were such things as downsides that couldn't be fixed with a vat of neutralizer, she might have to brace herself for the distinct possibility that the holy warehouse manual was wrong, and Myka didn't think she could handle the associated emotional fallout from that.
She blinked back an errant tear. Sniffed. Tamped it down, filed it away, buried her pain somewhere beneath the layer of compassion she'd stored down there after Denver all those years ago.
How fitting she'd find herself in a new job and home where the cosmos practically begged her to bring the compassion back to the playing field, challenged her to fight its arsenal of shades-of-grey with her principled black-and-white.
She remembered the precise moment when compassion had mattered most. Funny that the thing she had to do was what brought it all full circle.
The logical answer would have been to stop Helena. At any cost. All costs.
But, Myka had reasoned, that makes me no better than her.
Helena had been the death knell for the reaping of civilization, her fellow humankind for which she had once possessed such fascination (why else would she write of it in her books, turn it over in her words, examine and explore it as she had during her time at Warehouse 12?) but so damaging were the years she spent encased in bleak solitude that even humankind, for all its successes and accomplishments, failed to bear its weight upon the scale which she had vindictively placed it.
Destroy. Erase. Start anew.
At any cost. All costs.
And that was where Myka drew the line. She was not so coldly analytical or passionately revengeful that she could disregard and lay to waste centuries of human evolution. That was just a bad investment. Poor planning. Bad deduction.
It was true, Myka prided herself during moments in which she could see the big picture emerge from scattered puzzle pieces long before others could. Something about Denver had brought that into focus for her, after she recognized that compassion was a fine thing until it became a risky distraction. So she kept everything and everyone at arms' length, tamped things down, meticulously filed them away, buried them. Of course, it was good to smile and pat one's back occasionally, if not for herself, then for the comfort of others. She would be on the fast(er) track to Artie's Lonely Hearts Club if she didn't.
But she didn't elevate this particular Big Picture and all the analysis involved to such ridiculous levels only to undo it all, rewrite it, as it were, with three fell swoops of an ancient trident. Not because she didn't think herself capable (she would be the first one to volunteer getting the job done if the stakes were different and stabbing the earth's surface repeatedly with a sharp object somehow meant saving the world—imagine the pat on the back she'd get for that) but because she cared about this particular set of puzzle pieces enough to keep it right in front of her at all times. Because this situation, the first one like it in years, had called for something a little closer than arms' length. She cared. Too much, even, a shrink on the government's payroll might add. It really was that simple.
Of course, she was not so misunderstanding of the situation as to think Helena didn't care. In fact, Myka knew she did. Or had, at one point. Helena just cared differently now. It was simply a matter of caring too much about all the wrong things.
Myka hadn't sat around stewing in bronze for a century and that was all the perspective she knew she didn't need. Losing Christina might have felt like a cosmic wrong, but, Myka had begun to understand since acquainting herself with the revived author, it was by at-times-chaotically-acquired experience and lucky possession of a unique skill-set that Helena had made it this far in her attempts to right it. If her time machine hadn't spectacularly pissed off the cosmos, then Helena's time in the bronzer most certainly had. And the way things looked, Myka certainly hadn't been planning to die that day because of it.
But in the end, Myka still cared.
And if she were being honest, if she were to take the last few years' experience as a warehouse agent and offer it up as proof, not enough people did. The cosmos only seemed to care insofar as it was assured, at the end of the day, that humanity was still around to be its plaything.
That's where Helena hurt.
And that's where Myka wanted to help.
Wanted to shoulder the weight of the hurt.
At any cost. All costs.
So when Myka's twice-rung doorbell and succinct knocks went unanswered, she did not turn on a heel to leave and resign herself to whatever horrors and pending medical procedures awaited her back in South Dakota. Instead, she simply opted to take a leaf from a book in her well-stocked mental library and followed its instructions: Lock Picking 101.
She cared. Too much, even.
She went so far as to believe that maybe, just maybe, if the cosmos considered itself at all grateful for the not-so-smooth, entirely messy, heartbreakingly flawed, and characteristically human rescue that day in Yellowstone (and Myka was even willing to overlook the other little saves here and there during her time as an agent, as if plagues and power-hungry ex-caretakers could ever be considered little), it would do her a real solid and wait until after she had finished breaking into Nate's house and finished this thing—her thing—before letting the pain that had been building in her gut become unbearable and render her unconscious. And if the cosmos was in any mood to take requests (might as well, she thought as she picked at the lock on the patio door, because gosh, the threat of a new ice age must've been rough. What would the cosmos do without having humanity to torture?) she would prefer to be near a hospital before passing out, at least. Didn't even have to be in South Dakota, for that matter.
She had armed herself with the analyses of several anticipated outcomes: those in which Helena was home and would answer the door as Helena; those in which she would answer them as Emily (though the odds of that were increasingly unlikely, given the circumstances of their last meeting); those in which neither Helena nor Emily answered the door, but in which Nate and/or Adelaide did; and those in which no one did.
The last outcome was now her circumstance, and she realized, suddenly and with a lurch of her gut, that while she may have anticipated it, she hadn't fully prepared for it. In hindsight, conceded she hadn't allowed herself to. But here she was, and it was the thing she had to do.
She had the ring. The intentions. The courage. The more-than-compassion. The thing that defied the very logic she actively used and benefited from and which gave her all the more reason to believe she really could save everyone if she tried hard enough: love.
But by now, the cosmos had waited long enough, she supposed. Pain was a weapon in its very special arsenal, and even though love was great—the key to saving humanity, at times—it wasn't quite the same thing as getting a much-needed blood transfusion right about now.
She was running out of time. And, sooner or later, consciousness.
Myka entered what she deduced to be Helena's room, and was strangely relieved, albeit a touch surprised, that it still was. She saw the locket that so rarely left its place over Helena's heart tucked into a drawer in the nightstand beside the bed, next to the other pieces Helena had liberated from the Escher vault.
She paused, one hand over the pocket in which she'd tucked the ring, the other hand pressed firmly against a cramp that ripped its way across her abdomen.
Time's up.
The idea materialized as soon she laid eyes on the yellow notepad under the halo of lamplight. She grabbed a pen and scribbled the note, leaving it unsigned.
It was all she needed. Brief, but familiar. Simple, but effective. Helena would understand. Maybe wouldn't know all the reasons why just yet, but she would see what Myka had been trying to do. She always did, eventually.
She left the ring atop the note and turned to leave, clutching her side as she did. At the threshold, she stopped, glanced back at the nightstand, caught the glint of light on the tiny inlaid diamonds.
If she was about to die, then that was that. And Helena would at least know the truth.
But if Myka was about to live, well…call it a good investment. Decent planning. Solid deduction, with some compassion mixed in.
Or maybe, maybe… it was just love.