I Could've Lost You
Summary:
He rescues her from imprisonment for the sake of a letter she doesn't want to admit exists.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sanctuary. I do own an apparently Teslen-loving muse, who hates my NaNoNovel.
A/N: No, this isn't my NaNoNovel. Admittedly, I did already have it written. However, my NaNoNovel has also been annoying me to no end, and I'm afraid I'm going to end up chalking getting to 50k.
I wrote this while I was writing The End Is Where We Start From, actually, because I loved the idea of the love letter. Not my best, I have to warn you.
(1483 words)
"I'm not fragile," she snaps, even as her step falters and it takes all of her attention not to lose her balance. This doesn't escape the vampiric sense of the man watching her. He looks at her with pity and, what hurts more – as if pity from him didn't hurt enough – empathy.
Empathy from the vampire whose fault it was that she had been imprisoned for the last three weeks! Empathy from someone who had waited out those last three weeks in the comfort of her Sanctuary where the forces which had taken her posed no threat to him! Empathy from the man who had assumed control over her team and then promptly told them she was dead!
He is completely incorrigible when he gets those silly heroic notions into his head.
"I am a perfectly functional human being," she continues, uninterrupted by her own internal monologues. "And while I may be one hundred and sixty-one years old–"
"One hundred and sixty," her old friend interrupts, correcting her.
Fine. If he knew her age but not her birthday, she wasn't going to bring up the fact that she had been imprisoned on her birthday, all thanks to him.
"–we both know that the Source Blood made my age irrelevant to my health," she finishes, unfazed by his false corrections.
"Being imprisoned for three weeks has certainly done wonders to your attitude," he tells her, his tone biting into her flesh as part of him once wanted to do.
"Oh, because it has nothing to do with the fact that my welcoming committee consists of you."
"You were just this sarcastic around the children!"
"They're not children!" she reprimands exasperatedly, her tone growing louder than she would, under normal circumstances, want it to. But she is too tired and annoyed to care about that right now. "They're perfectly capable adults, and I expect you to treat them as such!"
"Really? Really, Helen? You come home from three weeks of imprisonment and as soon as you're deemed physically fit enough not to be locked in the infirmary, the first thing you do is attack me for fondly referring to your assistants as the children that they act like?"
She slaps him, hard, across the face before he can even have a chance to realize that's what she's planning to do. For a short moment, the impact leaves a bright red welt on his cheek, but his latent vampire DNA kicks in a short moment later and takes care of the unattractive mark.
"Fine," he says in a disgusted voice. He turns on his heel and storms away from her, abstractly wondering in the back of his mind whether the Wolf-boy would be mad enough to seriously challenge him if he set off a major EM pulse in his anger that just happened to centrally located around the complicated technology the werewolf loves so much...
Helen can't sleep, and she knows it's all her own fault. She shouldn't have snapped at him like that, but she couldn't help it. She had been so scared that she was going to die, that she was never going to see him again, that she had lived all these years and yet never admitted the one truth that mattered most.
Knowing that her attempts at falling asleep this late in the night will be next to useless, she pulls herself out of bed and sits down at the desk that she has always kept in her bedroom, wherever that permanent sanctuary of her own is. She pulls out the bottom-left drawer and tosses it unceremoniously aside. Lifting the false bottom to reveal a quite hidden storage place, she pulls out the envelopes with names on them.
As she traces each name written in her own hand, she feels no tingling of loss at the names of people long lost. She's prompt about moving those letters, burying them with the friends she's had to say goodbye to already. Instead, the feeling that permeates the names of her teammates, her fellow Heads of House, the people still important in her lives is one of thanks, tinged with regret. Thanks that she can put aside the worry of how her death will affect this many people, yet regret that the secrets she's only courageous enough to spill onto these pages here have not been given to their benefactors.
Lost in her trance of feeling, she misses the name she's looking for, so she goes back through the envelopes again, taking care to make a note of each name.
"Nikola" is not among them.
Barely taking the time to throw a dressing gown over her revealing nightclothes, she runs from the room barefoot.
After her long run through the Sanctuary, she's surprised the thumping of her feet hasn't woken all its inhabitants and left them wondering what the ruckus is.
Finally, thoroughly out of breath, she makes her exhausted way to the last place she's willing to look. It's a long shot, but her own affinity for the space makes her guess that maybe he, too, comes up here for a break from the sometimes unending pain of living when everyone else dies.
The stone beneath her feet is cold as she steps out onto the roof. Suddenly, facing the target of her search, she realizes that in all her time searching, she hasn't once thought about what she's going to say, and she finds herself speechless.
Thankfully, speechlessness is something which rarely plagues Nikola Tesla, and he's more than happy to fill the silence for her. "Couldn't sleep?" he asks gently.
She shakes her head.
"Me neither. And considering I don't need to, I can't see the point in trying. Not," he adds lewdly, "that I would mind trying with you. I'm sure I could think of perfectly reasonable ways to exhaust ourselves beforehand."
When she barely responds to his taunting, his forehead creases in a frown she finds remarkably cute. He moves forward to comfort her, and with a remarkably relaxed sigh – like finally giving in to something, the foolishly optimistic part of him thinks – she leans into his chest, nestles her head below his chin, and bunches the fabric of his crisply pressed shirt in her fists.
She can hear his heart beating, and neither of them says a word.
Her state is so heart-wrenchingly scared and hurt that his protectiveness rears up like an angry beast only trumped by his feeling of helplessness. It's worse now than two weeks ago, worse than when he was given proof from her captors that she was dead. Then, he had a perfectly justifiable reason for going into a mad rage that overnight had turned into a clear-minded desperation.
That change had scared the children, but it was from a strengthening of his own resolve. He had found the letter she had left for him in the event of her death after nearly tearing apart her bedroom in anger and helplessness, the letter in which she had admitted her love – the love she had only been able to admit when she could not fear the consequences.
He was determined to bring her home then, dead or alive, and with his determination and brilliance, it had only taken them another week to find her and bring her home. And, in true Magnus style, had promptly bitten off all of their heads for taking three weeks to bring her home.
Here she is, wrapped in his arms like she hasn't been since the Five were strong and happy, and she's crying and he's helpless. It's not something he ever wanted. It's not how he wanted this to happen – not that Rome went exactly according to plan, either. He had spent so long away from the people he had made those lifelong connections to that he forgot to think about her reaction to his attempting to kill her.
"I love you," he whispers, softly, into the top of her head. Without her usual heels on, she fits just perfectly in his embrace, her head nestled in the space under his chin, his cheek resting on her head, his arms winding around her and holding her close. They're so meant for each other, yet neither is willing to say anything about it, not in a way that perhaps the other could have reason to leave their close friendship.
To his sudden surprise, her hands snake out from where they were clutching at the fabric of his vest and encircle his waist. She pulls her head back slightly so that she can look up and into his eyes.
"I love you, Nikola," she answers in a tone just as soft as his, her eyes sparkling and wet with emotion. When he leans in to kiss her, it's not like one of his stolen kisses, but a true expression of a love that has been so long denied.