AN: Um...yeah, picking the "substitute" prompt was probably my first mistake.
Spoilers: For King and Country
Disclaimer: Still, if you can believe it, not mine.
Character/Pairing: Helen Magnus/James Watson
Rating: M
Summary: She's not exactly sure when they stopped talking about this.
Communication
She's not exactly sure when they stopped talking about this.
There's a murder in Edinburgh that no one can solve. James stays awake for three days, never leaving his office and doing more and more cocaine until Helen finally breaks the lock on the door and throws every note and newspaper clipping on his desk into the fireplace. He doesn't even get up from his chair until she turns back to face him, and then he's pushing her up against the mantelpiece and pulling at her dress, and she breaks her own rule about avoiding him when he's high and reaches for his trousers.
Of course, they've never precisely ever talked about it. But they've stopped pretending that they should. Somewhere after bustles fell out of fashion and collars became less stiffly starched, but before they agreed to murder for hire, they just ceased to pretend that they had anything but complete and utter understanding for one another.
When it becomes apparent that Gregory is never coming back, Helen's grief mostly channels itself into fury that he hadn't taken her with him. James weathers the worst of it, taking mercy on the staff and sending as many of them as possible away. After a week, he refuses to avoid her any more and simply invites himself into her bed. She lets him cosset her, which very nearly destroys him, but even then he can't bring himself to leave her there, and wraps himself around her in the dark.
Sometimes, particularly when she finds herself whispering the wrong name as a hand runs through her hair, or when he pulls her onto her stomach and covers her from behind, she wishes it was something more than simple understanding. She wishes for the passion she felt when it was another's hand between her legs, someone else's fingers fumbling with the fastenings on her clothing. She knows that he wishes the same thing.
James finds a box in the basement that he can't open. He knows it's hers and he knows it has its own energy source and he suspects it's keeping something frozen and he knows that Nikola must have built it for her, which makes him unreasonably jealous. He is completely unprepared for her reaction when he asks about it. She is desperately angry with him and he has no idea why, and she is bent over the desk with her skirts flared out around her before he realizes that he's not sure which of them is misleading the other.
It was easier, before. When they had each other as friends and someone else to fill the gap between them. Then, affection came simply enough and never needed to extend any further. After, they'd both been so uniquely devastated by their own separate failures that she felt they deserved one another. It's months before she wakes up in his bed one morning and realizes that she is no longer punishing herself. It's a long time before she realizes that he never does.
The first year Helen is in America, James barely sleeps at all. Instead he spends long nights trying not to remember that he used her to forget, and mourns for a friendship that might never have existed in the way they always thought it did. He never tells her, and never suspects that she endures the same thing.
More and more often, Helen finds herself wishing that James would use the telephone so that they could just talk.
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, January 29, 2011