It's an Ache I Still Remember

Nikola was perhaps less surprised by the reveal of her underground paradise than she might have hoped but he more than makes up for that now.

"A lab all of my own? Why Helen it's almost as if you want to keep me around". She shakes her head and smiles at his childlike enthrallment. He walks through the spacious room, trailing his fingers over the benches, inspecting each piece of equipment, and brushing away any flecks of dust or dirt besmirching his otherwise pristine lab. The thing about Nikola is that when he's happy, he's not just happy with a smile and a gleam in his eyes, he's happy with his whole body and she can see that unbridled joy in him as he steps lightly through the room. She can almost see the experiments he's thinking up written in the air in front of him and it's more than worth all of the effort she put into this place to see his excitement at it all.

"So I take it it passes muster?" she calls out and he's slightly surprised to find she's still there.

"Well..." he spins about, one hand on his hip and the other raised to gesture disparagingly. "I guess it'll do" he says, and that deprecating tone is all the more a compliment to her.

"Do you want to see your room, Nikola?" She expects any number of clever little innuendos in reply but he has already begun fiddling with one especially interesting machine and it's a testament to the hold she has over him that she gets any reply at all, even if it is a mere absent-minded

"In a bit".

She chuckles to herself and walks across the hall to see how Henry is faring.

"Henry?"

"Doc?" There's a clash and an "ow!" and then Henry emerges from under one of the lab benches. "Sorry there were some ummm hardwiring ...issues." She smiles indulgently as he scrambles with the electronics already strewn about his workspace. "Good news though! We should have a network similar to the old one up and running in a few days! I'm just taking the chance to rewrite a few sectors, polish up some of the code, you know?"

"Very good, Henry."

"Kate!"

"Magnus, hey."

"I take it you're settling in well?" Helen asks as she looks around the comfortable squalor in Kate's room.

"Oh yeah for sure. I'll uhhh I'll be cleaning this up soon."

"Uh huh." Helen replies and Kate has worked for her long enough that she knows that is a virtual impossibility. "I'd just prefer it if nothing grew legs and walked out of here on its own, okay?" Kate nods and Helen realises that with the Big Guy gone they were going to have to figure out some sort of chore wheel around the place.

"The abnormals all seem well settled in," Kate's comment tears her away from her reminisces over the loss of a great friend.

"Yes, well. They've been here a tad longer than the rest of you."

"Yeah of course. Are we still using the same feeding schedule."

"Essentially, yes. Though you may wish to check in with Henry on that account. I believe we have some new residents with whom you have yet to be acquainted."

"Okay. Cool."

"You know, Kate. I'm a bit surprised that you're here. And not out there, working on New Praxis." Kate shrugs,

"It was time for me to come home, ya know?" And Helen knows that feelings all too well.

"And," she pauses, unsure if she's overstepping her boundaries. "Garris?" Kate sighs.

"That's... Yeah that's not gonna happen." She grimaces. "It's fine. Really. I'm good." Helen wavers, unsure if she should press the issue but that's really not her forte and she figures if Kate really has something to say she'll say it.

"Good... Good." She hesitates again, offers Kate a small smile and lets herself out.

It mirrors four years previous almost perfectly. Hurt girlfriend, reticent Will. Only this time it's him grabbing his stuff from her. And no one has run him over with their car. Yet.

"So you're really doing this? Abandoning everything you have here to go join the remnants of the Sanctuary team who-knows-where and keep doing whatever it is you think you're duty bound to do?" He barely keeps himself from asking the obvious question what do I have left up here. Because the answer is simple. Her. But he doesn't even have that anymore and once more work has won out in the eternal struggle of work vs. love (stage side tickets now an all-time-low price of base humiliation and apathy). He snorts to himself at his own joke.

She sighs and he can hear the fight go out of her voice. "God Will, I just don't understand it. I always knew you were devoted to Magnus but I never thought you would be quite fanatical enough to follow her ghost"

He shakes his head. He really wishes he could tell her but the days of Abby and Will Fight the Abnormals were fleeting at best and this is about so much more than just them.

"Look, Abby. I'm sorry, okay?" he tries to add to that but, well, there's nothing left to say except, "take care of yourself." He pecks her on the cheek and hefts his duffle bag of things over his shoulder. Note to self: breaking up with your girlfriend is about 16 times more awkward when you've been crashing at her place ever since your boss blew up your house; would not advise.

He walks, lost in his thoughts (not regrets, not now, not any more and is only shaken out of his reverie by the squelch of sewer underfoot. He walks down through the now-familiar passageway until he reaches that big door and when he steps through that doorway into the lush green surrounds of the New Sanctuary he takes a few deep breaths and feels everything slip away.

Will walks into the Sanctuary. He passes Helen's study and hear a snippet of conversation as he walks past.

"Hey you're the one who gave me a lab Helen."

"A lab, yes, not a carte-blanche to take over my Sanctuary, Nikola!"

"I did not 'take it over' I merely made a few, very sound, very reasonable changes to your security system."

"Yes and in doing so managed to screw up the system of the high-security rooms."

"Nothing got loose."

"It was down for an hour! And you didn't even bother to tell me."

Will is curious, but not curious enough to get in the middle of that, so he moves past and up through the still-unfamiliar halls to the room he knows has been marked as his own.

Will walks into his room and drops his duffle on the ground at the foot of the bed. He's halfway done going through his closet when he hears footsteps behind him. He turns to find his best friend looking slightly awkward as he stands at the entrance to Will's room.

"Henry!" He walks forward to envelop the shorter man in a hug. God it's good to breathe in that familiar scent again.

"Dude it's been like two weeks. You're acting like it's been two years." But despite his comments, Henry hugs him back just as hard. They break apart,

"I know. But it's not like you gave me a heads-up as to where you were going or what you were doing or even if you were alive." Henry nods,

"I know and I'm sorry but it was just everything happened so quickly. I mean BAM the Sanctuary blows up and Nikola's looking all confused and tore up and then we're trying to get our bearings when Magnus comes up out of nowhere wearing my Full Outer Shell Safety Shield System—it worked!—and she and Vlad do their whole voodoo we've-known-each-other-for-hundreds-of-years-and-can-communicate-without-words thing and suddenly they're off to the sewers and dragging me with them and then kapow, we're here. So I didn't really have time to, you know, go find you and drag you along too."

"Yeah what is up with those two?"

"Who? Oh, Magnus and the magnet?"

"Yeah."

"Hell if I know. All I know is he has his own lab here and they switch between non-stop bickering and extreme science bros more quickly than hormonal teenagers."

"Oh. Huh. You don't think they..." Will trails off and defaults to some fairly explicit hand gestures to get his point across.

"Gross. Dude! She's like my mom. I do not wanna think about it"

"Okay. Okay. I'm just saying..." Henry shudders and Will drops the subject. "So. How's Erika?"

"She's uhhh she's good! I don't know how much she loves being pregnant, hopefully this morning sickness stops soon, but she seems to be fine! Says Declan's keeping a pretty close eye on her."

"He's a good guy"

"Yeah he is."

Their conversation trails to a standstill and both stand there looking a bit awkward. Will's scrambling, trying to think of something they can do, some activity that will allow them to hang out but will also preferably keep any discussion to a minimum.

"I uhhh, I downloaded the new Sherlock episodes?" Henry says hopefully. "Unless you already watched them?"

"No! I haven't. That sounds..." Perfect his mind supplies. "Awesome! Dude that sounds... Awesome."

"Cool. I dunno how much of this place the doc showed you but there's a rec room on the ground floor with a sick 60-inch plasma."

"Aww no way!" And Will smiles as Henry leads the way.

It's the next night and they are all there, Magnus, Tesla, Henry, Will, and Kate; silent and sorrowful as they mourn the loss of one of their best friends.

"I still can't believe it" Henry says with a sigh. "I just... I can't..." He trails off and the others nod their heads. The idea of never seeing Biggie again is so... unattainable. Any second now he should be coming around the corner, carrying a tea tray or a duster, and casually smacking them all upside the head.

The wake is silent, for the most part, even Nikola, who is rarely without a snarky comment, keeps his mouth shut. A few times someone speaks up to share a story.

"I can remember when I was really little, pretty soon after the Doc brought me home to the Sanctuary, I was afraid and worried and really confused." Henry says. "But the Big Guy, he never made me talk, you know? He just would sit with me, bring me broken electronics to tinker with, that sort of thing. And sometimes, when I was really lucky, he'd let me ride on his shoulders as he cleaned or dusted." And he grins in fond remembrance of those happy times.

"He was always willing to watch the crappiest tv with me. I mean, you wouldn't have pegged him a Say Yes to the Dress guy, but if it aired on TLC he'd watch it. When everyone else was busy or away we'd take a few hours and put in a dvd of, oh god, the shittiest reality tv we could find. It was just our thing, you know? He'd be so embarrassed if I he knew I was telling you guys about it. We never talked about it." Kate takes a steadying breath. "I don't think I'll be able to watch Paranormal Witness without him."

"I remember right after I healed him. I expected him to go back to his people. I understood so very little about their culture then, I didn't know I had doomed him to a life away from them. But I gave him sanctuary when he needed it and I expected nothing from him." Helen smiles, her eyes glistening. "I can still recall, walking into my office and there he was. He had this stack of tea cups in his one hand and a duster in the other. I tried to tell him he didn't need to do so. He just told me that obviously someone needed to. Here I was, thinking I was doing well at keeping my house tidy. But then this patient of mine, still in his hospital gown, was standing in the middle of my study telling me that it didn't meet his standards. Even 50 years later he was still the same. Ever-loyal, of course, but always the first to tell me when something in the Sanctuary wasn't up to his standards."

They sit there together, throughout the night and mourn the loss of one of their best friends.

There's no coffin, no urn of ashes, Biggie's body was lost in the explosion.

But in a small antechamber of the new sanctuary there sits a young woman's powerful black motorcycle, a magnifying glass in homage to a brilliant mind, and the feather duster of a gentle giant.