Standard goodies: Not my characters, not my world. This is set during Nevermore, an episode I don't really like, and yet I love the turning point it brings to character development. I thought I'd play around with perspective, so I thought I'd give Leena's perspective a whirl, this time. Special thanks to KJay99, for the tremendous amount of time and energy you devote to my stuff.
Leena had just finished putting fresh sheets onto Myka's bed when she heard the front door downstairs squeak with an almost urgent pitch, right before it slammed into the wall behind with a jarring reverberation that she swore she could almost feel from her place upstairs, at the complete opposite end of the house. She rose to her full height, shooting an annoyed look at her own reflection in Myka's mirror as her back crackled its disapproval, either at being hunched over, or at yet another drizzly day, she wasn't sure which. Probably both, she mused.
"Yeah, you're not the only one who disapproves," she muttered at her cartoon-ish mental image of her very grouchy spinal structure. Her back always ached a little when the weather shifted too quickly, as it had done this year. Just a few days prior, central South Dakota had bidden a very sudden farewell to winter, the frigid days and near-polar nights giving way to what seemed like randomly-shifting pressure systems and enough rain that she was pretty sure Mother Nature must be in violation of the Geneva Convention. She'd been hoping not to have to hire Mr. Waverly in town to come grade the road between the B&B and the Warehouse for another season, but after her drive to the Warehouse yesterday, the highlight of which was having to contend with wheel ruts deep enough to swallow a medium-sized child, she'd resigned herself to having to fit that service into the budget sooner than later.
"Oh well," she muttered to herself as she scooped up the dirty bedding and heaped it into the laundry basket along with Pete and Claudia's bedsheets. "At least the vegetable garden will do better this year than last... if it doesn't get washed away." As she came to the top of the stairs, the light cast across the bottom step reminded her that she'd heard the door creak open earlier, and now that she thought about it, she hadn't heard it close. Leena frowned at that. Of course it couldn't have been a member of my team, she thought. They'd never dream of leaving the door standing wide open, after the very stern talking-to she'd given them back in November, when a particularly heart attack-inducing utility bill had come in the mail.
Leena rolled her eyes at her own sarcastic thought.. she'd been pretty sure that Pete and Artie had both used that lecture to practice the art of listening to someone while simultaneously already forgetting that the speaker had said any such thing. Taking quick inventory of available defensive weapons just in case, she slowly descended the stairs, watchful and alert even though she felt no particular "uh-oh" sense that usually warned her of impending doom. At the bottom of the stairs, she found the door swinging slightly in the humid breeze of yet another rainy day. No car was in the driveway, and while damp footprints clearly marked someone's path across the porch, that someone's shoes had evidently dried off on the oversized welcome mat – there were no tracks continuing into the house. And, weirder still, she didn't hear any sound that suggested friend or foe. In fact, she didn't hear any sound at all.
"Okay, little more uneasy now," she muttered, almost inaudibly, as she set down the laundry basket quietly. She glanced around, again taking stock of the situation. This was just strange enough to demand a more defensive reaction. As she continued to glance around watchfully, small fingers reached out almost of their own volition to grasp the baseball bat Pete kept propped against the telephone table nearby, lifting the piece of ash up to shoulder height, ready to swing if she needed to. By the time she got herself armed and had begun creeping, back to the wall, toward the kitchen, though, the mystery fairly well solved itself. Artie stalked by without acknowledging her presence, a file folder in one hand, two or three rolled-up scrolls pinned under his elbow, while he juggled a book and a news magazine in the other. Leena rolled her eyes and put the bat back into its place with a clatter. Even that only got an instinctive reaction from the elder agent... or at least, that's what she thought the grunt might have meant, as he barreled into the living room.
"Hello, Artie," Leena said with overly-fake cheerfulness, as if he were the most sociable person on the planet. "Nice day to air out the house, isn't it?" she continued, closing the front door firmly, just bordering on having slammed it shut. That finally got a reaction from the distracted agent. He turned around just enough so that by tilting his head, he could almost make eye contact with this woman who seemed to have this crazy idea that his well-being was her responsibility.
"Forgot to close the..." he muttered as he gestured towards the now-closed door, allowing the scrolls to fall from his tenuous grasp in the process. Leena wasn't sure, but she thought that might have been an attempt to apologize for leaving the door open, one that probably would have gone better if he were mentally present. But it was increasingly evident that his thoughts were quite a distance away. She wondered idly if his mind was merely in another place, or another time period entirely. It didn't matter, of course, but now and then she really wondered where he would go when he was like this. Leena leaned against the living room doorway and simply watched Artie work, observing the clues around him. Once she took notice of his aura, she could see the darkness of a chaotic mind closing in on his usually driven, duty-oriented nature. She'd once told him that his aura looked like hell. Hell would look good in comparison to this, she mused. What had wound him up so badly; what had him digging through the bookshelf as if lives depended on it? Especially the bookshelf here at home... it wasn't anything in comparison to the Warehouse library, after all.
Suddenly, in the midst of the scattered search for... well, something, Artie stiffened up, then turned away from the table and sneezed all at once. Leena watched pain flicker in his eyes even as he tried to suppress it and keep working. The second sneeze, though, caused him to drop the book in his hands and grab the edge of the table to hold himself up. That one had to hurt pretty bad, she knew.
"Artie, you need to be resting," she muttered, knowing full well there was no point in pushing the issue. He was going to do whatever made him feel determined and in control; that was simply Artie's way. Just the evening before, she'd lit into him pretty good about the stupidity of his plan to fly to Colorado with a raging ear and sinus infection, not because she thought it would do any good, but just on the principle. She'd been shocked and pleased when he'd responded by ordering Claudia to go help Pete and Myka, and Leena to bring the antibiotics he'd been refusing to take for the better part of a week. But Leena hadn't expected it to last, so she wasn't remotely surprised to watch him working as if he were not only healthy, but impervious to the force of mortality as well. She watched for a moment longer as Artie continued to stumble, obviously hampered by illness, through... well, through whatever he was doing. Blowing out a small, very ladylike sigh, Leena gave up hopes of sending Artie to bed with some soup, and resigned herself to this reality.
"What do you need?" she asked, finally choosing to approach Artie, hands stretching out to grasp the materials he was flipping through. If she couldn't convince him to rest, then she at least intended to help her peculiar friend with the task at hand, to share the weight of the demanding yet vital job that threatened to overwhelm him in his run-down state. "Artie, let me help you."
"... bifurcated artifacts," Artie muttered, still not entirely present in the moment. Leena reached out and laid a gentle, yet firm hand on his shoulder, finally shaking Artie out of his own little world as he jerked his head up to meet her gaze for just a moment. In that moment, she saw the fatigue of mild yet painful illness, and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty raining down over the entire landscape of his mind, the downpour threatening to wash out everything else. It confirmed her impression of his overall aura, and pointed her again towards the most efficient way she could do her own job of supporting the Warehouse agents.
"Artie, bifurcated artifacts are incredibly rare," Leena said, shifting into agent-mode. It wasn't her talent or calling in life, so to speak, but it was a handy skill, picked up through years working with Artie.
"Once in a lifetime," he responded, turning back to the books he was flipping through. "Which means after... after this many years, we're probably overdue for one." Leena stepped back, shooting her friend a disbelieving look, before logic set in. He was more or less right, she realized. Of course, everyone encountered the odd artifact that had broken into two or more pieces from the effects of time and decay. But a true bifurcated artifact, composed of two distinctly separate items? Neither she nor Artie had encountered one outside the Warehouse, let alone active and in the wild.
"And you have reason to believe that Pete and Myka are dealing with one," Leena said, a statement more than a question, even though she was indeed seeking answers.
"Claudia got to Colorado. They put Poe's journal into a canister of neutralizer, and instead of neutralizing the artifact and curing her father, the neutralizer turned to ink," he said gruffly, by way of explanation. Leena allowed the feelings of surprise and concern to be momentarily evident on her face.
"All right... sounds like they have a bifurcated artifact. How do we find the other component?" she asked, curls bobbing around as she began to sort and stack the journals of agents past, that he'd been pulling off the shelf. She'd never thought these books would come in handy, and had mostly kept them just because they looked pretty on a shelf, but they really needed some personal stories from previous agents, right now.
"The other component is his pen," Artie answered, plowing right into Leena's question before she'd even let it form in her mind. His aura was starting to give her a headache. "The manifestation of ink... it has to be, well, I'm pretty sure... it has to be his pen. And if Poe's journal resisted neutralizer, then the pen is intact and active. But I'm not getting any pings serious enough to warrant pulling any of the team away from Myka's father... especially if he does, does... well." Artie gestured with one hand, afraid to even say aloud that Myka's father would certainly not survive if they didn't figure this out quickly.
"All right; how do we identify it?"
Artie opened his mouth twice, as a worried look flickered across his face. "I don't know," he finally answered. Leena frowned slightly at that. Those were the words Artie feared the most, she knew... especially when the lives of people he cared about were on the line. She watched Artie turn back to the books, opening one and peeking at the first page over the rim of his glasses, as if that would somehow help. "It's probably... maybe... in the system already," Artie continued. "I just can't find it. But, one turned up in the 40s… a bifurcated artifact…" He absently set the book aside and picked up another. "….Agent Wallace. Thought I'd try checking these, see if he kept notes."
Leena almost whined aloud at that. Agent Wallace had been a prolific writer with, to put it politely, the worst penmanship the world would ever know. He'd left behind dozens of beautifully leather-bound, but utterly unreadable journals when he'd... resigned. She paused, trying to think of anything she could remember about the topic, that might help them figure out how to narrow down their search. She knew that mental search would come up empty, though, so she only pursued it for a moment. Resigning herself to the fact that she wasn't going to stumble upon a lightning bolt of understanding within her own mind, Leena lowered herself to the floor and picked up one of Wallace's many leather-bound books.
The pair fell quiet as they sifted through the journals and books, Leena sitting on the rug while Artie stood over the table, periodically pulling another book off the shelf and handing it to her. She wanted to tell him to sit down, but she had a nagging feeling that Artie was of the mind that standing up was the only thing keeping him awake and productive. She opened yet another book and closed one eye, hoping that would help her read the scrawling date at the top of the first page. 1957, maybe, or was that a smudged 2? Leena flipped through a few pages of entries, looking for a more certain clue. There... there it was. Elizabeth took the throne in England, and Agent Wallace had thought to make a note of it. That was 1952... this book wouldn't contain information about his hunt for the bifurcated artifact he'd snagged.
Leena absently laid the book aside, shoving the toppling pile of already-rejected journals off of her leg as she reached for the next one that Artie was already handing down to her. This one looked like a better choice, right from the beginning. She wasn't entirely sure of all the words, but this one was far more readable than most, and the year was 1947. Agent Wallace had spent a few weeks of his summer in France, snagging Charlemagne's sword, but neutralizing it hadn't had quite the expected effect, and Mrs. Frederic had tasked him with researching what else the warrior might have also left charged with artifact-like properties.
"Artie... Artie, I think I have it," Leena said as she continued to read. "I know Charlemagne's sword and shield go together, and here's where Agent Wallace got the sword. He doesn't say anything about the shield... not yet, anyway." Artie dropped his book the few inches onto the table in his rush to sit down next to Leena, peering with her at the surprisingly neat handwriting... neat for Agent Wallace, anyhow. Leena turned the page, prompting Artie to reach over her shoulder and turn it back. She sent her curls bouncing all over with a shake of her head, and handed the book over to Artie. "You figure this out. I'm going to fix you some lunch while you're here." She pushed off of the floor with both hands, pausing momentarily to smooth her clothes out before she made her way to the kitchen.
Lunch would be easy. Leena took a block of chicken soup out of the freezer and let it rest in a pot on very gentle low heat. While the soup did its thing, she busied herself making Artie's favourite biscuits. They weren't the usual from-scratch sourdough bread that she served with soup, but he would appreciate them just the same, she knew. While she mixed and kneaded dough, she allowed her mind to wander over the few things she'd picked up in her brief time with the journal.
Charlemagne's shield had lay somewhat silent for months after the sword had been discovered. But that autumn, it had suddenly become more active, and while it still wasn't what Leena would consider a "big" ping, it had coincided with increased activity in the sword, and off Agent Wallace had run to Nevada.
She wondered if that would be what happened here, if the journal would simply remain active for months on end until, for some reason, its companion artifact suddenly made itself into a big enough spot on the radar, for Artie and Claudia to take note. Myka's dad didn't have that long, of course. She didn't want to think about the possibility, but if that's how it played out, she knew Myka wouldn't have the emotional ability to prepare herself for that outcome – it would hit her like a freight train. And Artie, in his usual introverted fashion, would leave the rest of the team to pick up the pieces of Myka's heart.
Leena suddenly realized she was kneading the biscuit dough to death as she'd been watching the many thoughts and concerns drift around in her mind like the smoke from an oil lamp. Picking just one, the puzzle of how to locate the second component of this artifact, she continued her process of pondering as she formed biscuits and dropped them with unceremonious little splats onto a baking sheet. She wasn't getting anywhere in her thoughts, and this aggravated her, but she forced herself to continue turning the problem around in her mind, looking for just the right perspective. How would Poe's artifacts manifest themselves? The journal was sucking the life out of Myka's father, literally drowning him with apathy and depression, to the best of Leena's understanding. But what would its companion do? More apathy, more depression... anger, maybe? Hopelessness? Or would it do something entirely different and complementary? The two-piece artifacts she knew of in the warehouse seemed to fall in both camps about equally, some working by enhancing each other's power, and others being different components of the same person's temperament. It was Poe, so it had to be dark, but that was the case with all artifacts that caused enough trouble to end up in the Warehouse. Leena stirred the thawing soup as she pondered.
"The bedsheets!" she suddenly gasped, dropping her soup spoon with a clatter. In all the fuss, she'd completely forgotten that she'd been doing laundry. Leena checked on her biscuits before she made a dash into the foyer to nab her laundry basket, and then doubled back through the kitchen to the laundry room. With practiced efficiency, she shuffled each load of laundry along its journey before pausing to separate the laundry by owner, a habit she'd learned after she'd assigned the folding chore to a very domestically-impaired Artie, only to be subjected to a week of complaints from everyone about having ended up with the wrong items.
Leena smiled at the neatness and order in the small room, as she stepped back into the kitchen to tend lunch. She briefly thought of setting the table properly, but she instead opted for a thermos and a plastic dish for the biscuits. Artie, in his current mood, would simply skip lunch if she didn't bring it to him. She wasn't entirely sure he would eat anything placed in front of him, either, she realized when he didn't even acknowledge her as she perched his lunch on the table near him. Leena thought briefly of nagging, but if he hadn't starved to death while mired in work yet, it probably wasn't going to happen. And there was a long list of chores and repair tasks calling her name, so she left him to his business.
Leena decided while she was re-mounting the painting that Pete had managed to pull off his bedroom wall, that it was probably time to check in on Artie, since she hadn't seen or heard him for upwards of four hours. After a quick tug test, making sure that the painting was as Pete-proof as it got, she dusted her hands off, dropped her tools unceremoniously back into the toolbox in the linen closet, and made her way back down to the living room. In a gesture reminiscent of earlier that day, she paused and leaned against the doorframe to observe first, feeling out the territory of Artie's mental space before she entered it. He had two journals, now, spread out on the table along with his own leather-bound notebook.
"How's the research going?" she asked gently, which caused her colleague to jump, startled. "Sorry," she muttered with a giggle, sounding a lot less sincere than she meant it to be.
"Finding the shield was a fluke," Artie answered without looking up. "It wasn't active for months... and it turned up in Nevada, of all places."
"Why didn't the sword cause ill effects on the people exposed to it, until it was reunited with the shield?" Leena asked.
"It... the gentleman who found and inadvertently activated the... the sword..." Artie began, stumbling through his words. Leena watched fear attempting to overtake his determined nature, and knew what the end of that sentence was. She wanted to hear Artie say it aloud anyway.
"Spit it out," she encouraged.
"It killed him," Artie said in a rush, along with a huge sigh. In response, Leena merely nodded, observing the way that simply speaking the words had made it easier for him to view the situation in his usual pragmatic light, free of the emotion and concern for Myka that had begun to trip him up.
"How did the shield get awakened?" Leena asked after a few moments of quiet. Artie flipped through one of the journals, consulting several pages before he shrugged. Obviously that hadn't been figured out yet. "Artie, how did a ninth-century shield end up in the middle of nowhere, Nevada?"
"I have no idea," Artie responded, "but it did." Leena simply shook her head. There were just some things, she had learned over the years, that had no answer, no matter how badly she wanted them to have one. After a moment, he glanced up, realizing she was still there. "Was there something you needed?" he asked, hinting very strongly that he would prefer to be alone. Unfortunately for him, however, there was something else on her mind.
"I was filing expense reports for the regents earlier today," Leena began. Artie grunted and turned back to his work yet again, bringing a smile to Leena's face. He'd been known to exceed his budget a great many times, as a field agent, and even now he had an instinctive negative reaction to the process by which the Warehouse's expenses, and employees, got paid. She continued, choosing to ignore his reaction. "Did you know that, on the backs of his motel receipts, Pete is drawing an ongoing comic strip entitled..."
"I am aware of what he calls his so-called art," Artie answered before Leena could mention the title.
"Should I be bothered about sending receipts with doodles on them, to the regents?" she asked, getting to the point of having brought this up. Artie shook his head, then stopped and glanced up at his companion.
"I'll talk to him," he muttered. "Maybe introduce him to the concept of a notebook... or scratch paper... don't motels put a pad of paper by the phone anymore? No, probably... budget... anyway. I'll talk to him." Artie fell silent, and Leena finally got up to leave. As she moved toward the door, she paused one more time, turning back to interrupt her friend.
"Do you want me to take those dishes?" she asked, gesturing towards the half-eaten lunch that was taking up valuable real estate on the small table he was working at. She smiled as she watched his aura shift more fully away from empathic concern for Myka and her father, toward determination and stubbornness; this was why she had pushed to irritate him.
"No, I'm still picking at it," Artie answered. Of course he wasn't, and she knew it, but the dishes didn't matter. Her work here was done; she could get back to her own job without feeling the need to check in on him again.
Every item on her list was crossed off, and dinner was halfway cooked when Leena finally paused long enough to walk back into the living room, where she found Artie sitting on the couch, still surrounded by the writings of Agent Wallace. He'd dragged the side table over to act as a desk, and opened out his own journal to take notes as he worked. She gathered up his abandoned, half-finished lunch dishes with an intentional clatter, jarring him out of his thoughts before she fixed him with a pointed look.
"It's seven o'clock. Dinner will be served in the dining room in half an hour." Her infuriating colleague shook his head and turned back to his work.
"I'm not hungry," he muttered with a dismissive wave of the hand.
"Artie, no," she said, earning herself a look of disdain for putting her foot down like that. Artie knew Leena could out-stubborn him any day, but it wasn't often that she tried. "You have been working nonstop, and you need a break. Your time will be much more productive when you return to it with a fresh perspective." Leena held Artie's gaze as he considered her words. After a few moments, he glared, but nodded his assent, though she wasn't sure if he'd figured out she was right, or was just too worn-out to mount an argument. Leena smiled gently and went back to tending the stove.
She was slightly less impressed when, as she was setting the table, Artie scuttled in and dropped into his usual place, notebook and pen in hand. But he'd left Agent Wallace's journals in the living room, so she let it be. She knew that being sick had wiped out his usually robust appetite, so getting Artie to take a few minutes to stop and simply reflect upon his research was really the best she had hoped for, anyway.
"What are you thinking?" she asked once plates had been filled, prompting him to consider all he had read in the past eight or so hours. Artie glanced up at her, then back at his own journal while he buttered his biscuit. He shook his head, then flipped a couple pages, and blew out a sigh.
"It's interesting how Agent Wallace found the shield," he began. Leena bit back a chuckle at that. Of course he would want to rehash the history before he got on to life application. But, knowing that this was often how he made connections and figured things out, she let him go on. "The sword didn't neutralize the neutralizer; it just didn't spark, and it showed as an artifact disturbance on the computer. That was part of why the neutralizer dispersal system was upgraded that year, actually. The shield didn't turn up until October of that year."
"October?" Leena asked, her curiosity suddenly raised. "What happened to awaken it?" Artie half-smiled at her, obviously just a little bit eager to share his knowledge with somebody.
"Agent Wallace says that there was some kind of secret military testing going on, and one of the support staff was affected. Wallace didn't even have clearance to know what it was, but they got the ping on October 13, 1947." Leena frowned in thought.
"October... Nevada... Artie, that's the day before the first supersonic flight," Leena said, getting a perplexed look from Artie in response. "I enjoy aviation," she answered his unspoken question, as if that bit of trivia were the most natural thing in the world for a person to know. Artie continued to gaze at her with a mystified expression for a moment, then shook his head.
"Chuck Yeager took the Bell X-1 out for one last practice run on the morning of October 13, and that was when it actually happened." Leena chuckled, more in surprise than amusement. Even now, she learned something new every time she chatted with her old friend.
"So in the course of carrying out those test flights, something must have happened to bring the shield into contact with people, or to activate it," Leena mused aloud, more a question than a statement.
"Probably the sonic boom," Artie answered, already studying his notes again. "The sword tended to make people attack... the shield produces more of a defensive, paranoid reaction. They... they were textbook examples of an artifact being imbued with the characteristics and actions of their user, while they were being used." He fell silent at that point, continuing to read his own notes as he sort of picked at and pretended to eat his biscuit. Leena wondered idly if he was planning to eat anything else, or if the biscuit was going to be it for tonight.
"So all we know for certain," she clarified, "is that we're looking for a pen, or something we think is a pen, imbued with some characteristic of Edgar Allan Poe, probably something that he would have been feeling as he was using that specific pen and journal." Artie nodded at that.
"And given that the journal drowns a person in a sense of hopelessness, I think we're looking for... for an artifact with an effect that's very literal, very concrete." Leena hummed her agreement of that. While some artifacts tended to have powers only tangentially related to their original owners, such as Harriet Tubman's thimble, this journal did seem to be more obvious in its relationship to its owner.
"Well that narrows your criteria a little bit," she said. "But I think we already knew we were looking for something particularly dark. After all, Poe was the original emo train wreck." Leena froze when she noticed the strange look Artie was giving her, as if she'd just told him the purpose of mankind's existence. She watched with unguarded interest to see what would happen next.
"I.. you.. I have to go!" Artie said as he leapt from the table with a clatter, looking more alert than he had in a couple days. He scooped up his book and bolted for the room, then doubled back to grab the uneaten half of his biscuit before running out the door. Leena, for her part, simply shook her head. Part of her wanted to make him rest and recover, but he was a terrible patient even in the best of circumstances. Dealing with a case that put his agent's family member's life on the line, there was no way he was going to take it easy, and really, she didn't want him to. Not right now, anyway, not with this much at stake.
After giving Artie half an hour, Leena finally threw a couple cookies into a baggie and made her way to the warehouse. Maybe she could help him pinpoint the pen's location, and hurry this process along. When she got to the Warehouse, however, she found Artie sitting back in his computer chair, staring at the computer with a satisfied expression. He grinned slightly when he saw her.
"Find the pen?" she asked, getting a nod from her friend in response. "Where is it?"
"It's in Oregon, and Pete and Claudia are on their way to find it."
"How did you find it?"
"Pete and I had been working at narrowing down the list," Artie said, pausing to glance over his shoulder when the computer beeped unexpectedly. He shook his head and turned back to Leena. "It was when you said 'emo train wreck' that I remembered, there was a ping at a high school. It didn't seem remotely related at the time, but at the exact moment that Myka's father screamed about tigers and fire, a kid's school locker exploded in a ball of flame in Portland, Oregon. So I did just a little bit of digging... turns out... what's that?" Artie's smug explanation turned to curiosity when he saw something in Leena's hand. She smiled as she let the baggie unfold, revealing the cookies inside.
"Celebratory snickerdoodle?" she offered, handing them to Artie. He took one from the bag and nibbled at it, still not feeling up to eating much. "Come on, Artie... you did your job, and then some. Go to bed."
"But what if..." he began, gesturing toward the electronics. With a good-natured eyeroll, Leena simply picked up Artie's Farnsworth, slid it into his sweater pocket, and handed him the sweater. He grumbled, weighing his concern for Myka and her father against his own body's need for rest. But in the end, he pulled it on and began shutting down the office for the night. Leena was right, after all; staring at computers all night wasn't going to change how well the case went. As he passed the table on his way out of the office, Artie snatched the one remaining cookie out of the baggie Leena had brought with her, munching it as he went.
Leena smiled as she made her way back to her car. It wasn't done yet, but she had a very good feeling about Myka's father, and an even better feeling about how soon her house would again be bustling with the activity and intensity of the field agents and their teenage apprentice.