Disclaimer: I don't own Sanctuary or the Sanctuary characters, and I'm making no profit from this.
Sixty years is a long time; a lifetime in some parts of the world. Time to be born, go to school, grow up, marry, have children and a career, grandchildren, and die surrounded by loving family.
Nikola Tesla died January 7, 1943, at the age of eighty-six, having led a full and extraordinarily productive life. Government agents raced to secure his papers, believing among them would be found the secret to his "death ray", which was not a ray at all but a particle beam weapon. No design or description of such a device was ever found.
Nikola was rather relieved when his funeral was over. The eulogies and world-wide mourning had been quite gratifying, but at least now he would no longer be hounded by governments and agents of secret organizations, all after his amazing device. He had invented it as a purely defensive weapon, imagining all nations having their borders entirely secured by a series of particle beam installations. He thought it would be the end of invasions, of war itself. Okay, he had been naïve, he admitted it.
He had been hidden from public view for years anyway, spending the years of the war in Washington D.C. and London creating and breaking codes, inventing new ways to communicate, and lending his immense intellect to the Allied war effort. The pitiful old man they had stuck in a New York hotel room to pretend to be him and befuddle the Axis had finally died and would be buried with great honor along with the name Nikola Tesla.
Of course he himself, being a vampire, looked as young as he chose to look, generally mid-thirties or so. It was a good age; old enough for other men to take him seriously, young enough for women's eyes to still follow him around a crowded room.
Nothing much really changed for him after his death. He was still hidden away in secret facilities, and no one would have believed he was really the eighty-six year old Nikola Tesla; except perhaps the Cabal, and a few people very highly placed here and there who knew what he really was. Unfortunately, some of those people were Nazis and other unpleasant types that would continue to look for him no matter how convincing his demise.
By the end of the war he was rather tired of the whole thing. He missed being able to go where he wanted and do what he wanted when he wanted to do it. But particle beam weapons, atomic bombs, and a great many other things were in his head and the US Government feared very much that some other nation or organization would find a way to extract them if they let him leave; he was more a prisoner than the POWs that were being repatriated.
As a vampire, he could have broken out, but he would have had to kill a number of soldiers to do it, and then he would be a hunted fugitive from his own government. His US citizenship was one of his prized possessions, and he intended to keep it in a clean and honorable condition. Besides, they knew him well enough they might be able to find him.
After everything he had done for the Allies, even governments felt a little guilty keeping him locked away. It wasn't right- he deserved a life. But it couldn't be as Nikola Tesla, there was no way to guard him for the rest of his natural life, which could be centuries or even millennia. So Nikola Tesla had to permanently disappear.
Nikola didn't like using a pseudonym, especially when the 3-star general in charge of hiding him in plain sight vetoed all the family names he suggested – Mandic, his mother's maiden name; Kalinic, his father's mother's maiden name; Budisavljevic, his mother's mother's maiden name, were all rejected- too unusual and easy to trace.
Nikola tried Duke for his mother Djouka, and Dane for his brother, whose name was spelled the same but pronounced Dahnay. No, and no. Frustrated, he suggested the name of his childhood cat- that, the general accepted, so he became "Nicholas Macak". Macak, of course, just meant "tom cat" so perhaps that was a good cover for him; being mostly celibate, no one would associate it with him.
So in early 1946, Nikola sent final messages to his friends bidding them farewell. There weren't that many- James, Nigel, and of course Helen. Little did he know he wouldn't see any of them again for sixty years- well, sixty-one and a half to be precise.
The general arranged background papers for him- a doctorate in physics from an undistinguished university, a wartime work record at a government facility, a birth certificate, and a Wisconsin driver's license. He would have preferred Colorado or New York, but he was told those were places that would be watched; he didn't mind Wisconsin. He had spent a year in Chicago and three years in Milwaukee with Allis Chalmers, so it wasn't entirely unfamiliar territory.
Of course he wouldn't be anywhere near a big city. He was known to like cities, to like big hotels and fancy restaurants, so he was to be buried in a small town teaching high school science. He demurred- high school, really, wasn't that a waste of his genius?
He was forbidden to go anywhere near a university. Universities had research programs, encouraged publishing and patenting by their staff, and any attempt to do either and he would be back in a secure facility as fast as Special Forces could get him there.
Well, they couldn't watch him forever, could they? In a few years people would stop looking for him, the government would give up watching him if he kept his head down. He expected to be bored half the time, but it was worth it to be free. And what were a few years to him, anyway? The world was still out there, and after a while he would just melt away into it.
They flew him to Madison accompanied by two agents seated apart from him on the plane. In Madison he was given the keys to a used 1938 Ford and a small house in a town of 20,000 people, some cash, and a bank book that showed the balance of the money he had earned from the government. He thought it a rather small amount, considering what he had done for them, but it was better than nothing; and the house and car were paid for, title and deed in his name.
It was colder in Madison than he was used to; he would need to buy an overcoat. Not that he was particularly cold, but he stood out from the crowd without one. He walked to the car carrying his two suitcases, and put them in the trunk. The rest of his things would be shipped to his new address, although there wasn't that much; he wasn't an accumulator, except for tools and experiments in progress, which the government had confiscated anyway.
He started the car, found he had a full tank of gas, and checked the map. It would be a three hour drive or more, he didn't know the condition of the roads. He had no reason to worry though, he was quite sure he would be followed and if he ran into difficulty help would miraculously appear. He pulled out of the parking lot, and was on his way to his new life.
A/N: This story will be slow coming out because I am still writing "The Lady and the Prince" on Fictionpress. But I miss playing with Nikola, so this is just a stand-alone until I finish the other story.
