Rated T for now, may change

Warnings: Language, suggestive themes. Other warnings to be announced when I figure out where this is going.

I do not own Hey Arnold or the Characters.

Thanks for catching my mistakes. I swear to grass I Edited it it three times!

Now or Never

Chapter 1

Hours of waiting all came to this. Helga gnawed on her perfectly manicured nails. She had just gotten them done when the accident occurred. Her cell phone bursting to life with lights and sound. Of course she had to let her nails dry and so could not pick up. She didn't think anything of it.

Phoebe, whose ringtone it was, called her on a regular basis and so Helga just went right on relaxing. Never did she fear that the call would change her life forever.

After a few minutes of waiting for her nails she picked up her phone and shuttered, one missed voice mail message, three emails, and six text messages. She checked her texts first.

Why aren't you answering?

There's been an accident!

Turn on the news!

Highway 51. Doesn't Arnold take that way home?

Please answer!

He's not picking up. I'm calling Gerald next.

Helga could feel her heart drop. Her hands went numb and she nearly dropped her phone but she couldn't lose her only line to information on what was going on.

Helga ran back into the nail parlor and grabbed the remote from the owner and, under protests, flipped the channel to the local news station.

Right away she was shown a picture of rubble; the same rubble that was once the Highway 51 overpass. She watched, her eyes scanning the bottom of the screen. At precisely three-o-clock that afternoon a truck carrying fifty ton bricks caused the overpass to sink and cave in on the road beneath it.

Helga was livid, there was an order ten years back stating that trucks were not permitted on the overpass.

Suddenly the camera scanned over another section of rubble. Helga's face paled at the sight of the familiar color of twisted metal that what was once a car. It was now beneath a column of concrete. Blue. A specially ordered shade of blue that could only belong to one person. Arnold.

She wasted no time. She had to know Arnold was safe, was he resourceful enough to get out of his car or find a way to be safe? She rushed to her pink convertible Porsche hopped in and slapped the keys into the ignition. She was off, out of the parking lot and down the street, flying as fast as her car would take her. She ran lights and maneuvered perfectly. When the traffic on the 51 started to build she knew she was close. But sitting in traffic was taking too long and she would be too late. She pulled the car to the side and decided to run.

She ignored the protests put on by the cops as she sprinted past cars. She could see the lights of emergency vehicles flickering like thousands of mini fireworks. The flashes of red drew her into herself she could feel her heart beat, her blood pulse through every vein.

And then she saw it.

Arnold's car.

It looked a hundred times worse in real life. The top had completely bent in on itself and the beautiful paint was permanently etched into the asphalt. The tires were a shredded mess of metal and rubber. But that wasn't what distressed her, what did that was the small pool of blood that collected just underneath her beloved's blue Prius.

Helga broke down there, she fell to her knees and grabbed her long flowing tresses and pulled. Her eyes watering in an instant. She was sure she would die there with her heart torn to shambles. She tried to scream but her throat only managed a long strangled sob.

"Miss are you okay?" She didn't register that anyone was talking to her. She had reached the end of her rope. Her hopes for a future were gone. There was nothing left without him.

"Miss?"

"Better take her to the hospital" another voice suggested.

The two men picked her up and placed her in an ambulance. But this wasn't right? He had to have been saved or something.

"Survivors?" Helga managed. "Him?" She pulled out her locket and showed them the picture of a, now twenty year old Arnold.

"Hey, it's the kid with the football shaped head"

Helga's head picked up and she grabbed the man by his collar. "Where is he!"

"And you are?" the first man asked

"Ugh! He's my! Never mind that just… I have to know"

"He's headed to the hospital. He's lost a lot of blood" the second man said

"Well it's a good thing we are in an ambulance! Let's go!"

The ambulance tore off through the highway, a perfect path being carved through the streets as cars let them pass. Helga's leg twitched and ached with the need to do anything but sit and wait. What if there was nothing they could do for her beloved? What if he were no longer in the same world as her?

She held a hand over her already unstable heart and pressed hard. She couldn't live in a world where he wasn't alive… where he didn't exist. Never having him return her feelings was one thing but to not even have him know her feelings was worse. She needed to know he was okay? Helga held back her tears, surely her bond with Arnold was strong enough that she could tell if he were in mortal danger.

I'm always there to save him, she thought, it's not supposed to be this way. Tears stung at the brim of her eyes. Her hand drifted to the inside of her shirt where she pulled the locked out, she traced the edge of the heart locked, her mind went back to fourth grade. All of it was for this? For her to lose him even before their lives had even started?

The ambulance stopped and Helga jumped out only to be greeted by Gerald and Phoebe. "How is he?"

"We don't know. We just got here."

"So he is here then?" Gerald cringed "I'm going to find out where he is. Gerald walked off into the hospital. Helga looked away; she wasn't ready to find out.

"Leave it to the football head to get into trouble like this!"

"Helga!" Phoebe warned. "Stop. It's time to stop. Arnold is in there… maybe it's time to admit that you love ice-cream."

"You're right."

So here she was watching the monitor in front of her, Arnold was a number now, a number on a screen. She could find out where he was by watching. Currently Arnold was in the O.R. and had been there for hours. Helga paced and watched, all the while coming up with a way to tell Arnold how much she loved him.

Helga glanced around the waiting room, she was alone. Gerald and Phoebe had gone to Arnold's to pick up things he might need if he were to make it… she gulped… out of the surgery alive. The pain was back again, this time she fell to her knees. "Please, god… I know I never come to you for help but if you could… could find it in your heart to spare my beloved. If not for me then for the world. He is likely the last kind-hearted soul left in the universe. We need him… I need him."

Helga peeled herself off the ground and watched as the screen filtered through different names. "Helga Pataki?" the doctor walked in with a clip board in hand. "I'm afraid it doesn't look good."

"Don't… don't say that."

"He just lost too much blood, we… did all we could… he's not going to make it another day." He whispered.

"No! That's not true! I haven't gotten to tell him my true feelings for him. Not in a real way. This can't be happening!"

"I am sorry Ms. Pataki."

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