Title : Love can be one's deepest secrets
Author : DiBee(di_50)
Characters/pairing : Helen/John, James
Rating : K+
Warnings (if any) : Hints of serial killing
Challenge : #2 secrets
Summary : Helen's secrets, some that she shares, one she would never tell of.
Author Note : At first, I saw the prompt as covering an extreme range of different possibilities. Then this story popped in my head. Written for the second prompt of the sfaflashfic community. on lj
Helen Magnus was a woman of many secrets. Some were kept more carefully than others. Some seemed so obvious no one could realize what they truly meant. For Helen, John was a secret on his own. He had brought so much to her, and taken so much away from her she should not be drawn to him as she still was. But the most candid of her secrets was probably that of her inability to stop loving him. She had tried, and tried again until giving up whenever her eyes would meet his.
S is for Sin
Their first meeting was trouble. One look, and Helen could feel the Earth move beneath her feet, her heart suddenly captive of his quiet glance. Before meeting him, she had sworn herself to celibacy. A simple brush of his hand on her waist, and she had fallen into Life's biggest trap : Love. They had kissed before being engaged, became lover before even being married. Her father's work had seen her meet many dangers over the course of the discoveries of abnormals, but John was to be the greatest she had been faced with her entire life. A danger she could not quite run from.
E is for Eternity
When it had been clear their love was reciprocated, they had soon become the other's air, suffocating in their absence. They had professed their love many times, in many places, but the same word would always get associated with their feelings. Eternity. He had promised to be hers, and she his for the rest of eternity, but it had not quite turned out the way they would have wanted to.
C is for Crime
The day she had had to face the reality of what the Source Blood had awoken in him, she had seen her life fall apart before her eyes. Her eternity was suddenly reduced to a stretch of nothingness by the quick work of a blade against a poor girl's skin. James, too obsessed by the crimes, had not seen the signs telling him, shouting at him to open his eyes and discover the abominable truth. She had been the one to suspect it first, and had gone on her own, in her own version of a quest for truth. Nothing could have prepared her for what she had found, not even the gruesome details of James' descriptions. Behind the appearance of her lover, the criminal had taken over, leaving nothing of the tender man she had once known. When the blade had cut the victim's throat, it could as well have been her heart.
R is for Reason
James, at first, had been too obsessed with his own blindness to see what exactly was troubling his closest friend, past the loss, pain and anger of the betrayal. It had been nearly too late when he had read the signs of her pregnancy. Convincing Helen to keep the embryo in a frozen state had not been as hard as he would have thought, John's exaction having left her with barely no strength to fight anything or anyone back. Whenever the technology, and her heart would be ready, she would bring the last remain of their love to life, starting anew. Even when he reappeared some years later, she had not said anything. She still saw the murderer behind every word of the man.
E is for Evolution
She had taken her decision, no one could change her mind. When she had announced to James her will to start a new Sanctuary, a new life in America, he had first seen her gesture as one of desperation, her need to keep away from the place where so much had happened, but when he had seen the light twinkling in her eyes from her project, he realized she had come back to life, for real. It had taken years, decades for her not to be reminded of her former fiancé everyday that passed by. In reality, she was just better at concealing it from the world than before, but starting over, in a place where she would not see his shadow behind each corner of her house, was very tempting indeed. So he had let her go, thinking she was freeing herself from the ghost haunting her every night. Thinking, maybe, she would give up the idea of birthing his child. He could not have been more wrong.
T is for Temptation
She had settled in Old City, seemingly at peace, her recurrent nightmares barely casting a shadow under her eyes anymore. She had shown the brightest side of her being again, and carried on founding Sanctuaries, keeping Old City as her base of operation, her home. She would come and visit England quite often, spending some time with James, and, to his greatest regret, visiting the embryo. Whatever promise she had made to herself, she intended to keep. Then one day... She had presented him with a solution to safely have this child she already spoke of so fondly. He had not even tried to dissuade her, he could read in her eyes a strength he had not seen there for decades. They had shared the same impression when the child was born, adorable, innocent, sharing many -too much?- traits of her father's. It could have been the end of the story. It should have. That is, until the man came out of the shadow again. Using their daughter to save Helen. His motives might have been pure, but even over the phone, James had heard her voice catch as she pronounced his name. Their love, their eternal trap, would never really end.
S is for Salvation
Together, side by side, they had fought their way through what would become the worst hardships of their existences. They had lost James, Ashley, and the unity they had once shared. After that, he would come help once in a while, his one time too many forcing them to go over their old nightmare again. He was saved, freed, for an instant, the next the beast had taken over again. In their last moment, she was reminded of everything. Their love, their sin, their eternity, her reason or lack thereof, her quest for a new life, their child, their loss. What no one would probably believe, was she ever ready to reveal her biggest secret, is that was she given the choice, she would do it again.