It was dark before Myka even realised where she was driving to. She was on autopilot, and that meant Colorado. It meant a tiny bookstore on a main street. It meant home. She was sitting in evening traffic on the freeway staring at the clock. She'd been driving for about 8 hours, another two and she'd be home. She laughed a little to herself but the noise got stuck in her throat and it sounded more like a sob wrenched from the very core of her being. Or at least, that's how it felt.

Home. She'd never be home again. Not really. She'd left her real home. The one place she'd felt truly...like she actually...the one place that she felt wanted, just by being herself. Another sob ripped itself from her throat; she'd never be home again. Her home had been bundled into the back of a black SUV by two nameless regents. Her home had betrayed her, had crushed...no, not crushed her heart...ripped it out, and tesla'd it. Her home was gone.

Myka felt the tears start to gather behind her eyes again. She couldn't start crying again. She was too exhausted, and she still had another two hours of traffic to get through, and then dealing with her parents. Oh God. What the hell was she going to tell her parents? The truth? She could imagine how that would go down. "Myka, what are you doing home?" "Oh you know, I fell in love with H.G Wells, who is actually an amazing, beautiful, brilliant woman, and still alive. But her depression turned her into a suicidal, homicidal, psychotic maniac, so I asked her to shoot me, and then when she didn't, I got her arrested and quit my job because I'm still in love with her. So I decided to come home and work for dad. Cool?"

Yeah...maybe not. She hadn't even gone back home when Sam had been killed. Her mother had asked her to, she'd even offered to come down to Denver and stay with Myka for a few days. Myka had refused, she just didn't need that. She couldn't deal with her mother. Didn't want to deal with her mother. She was hurting. She was grieving.
This was different though. As much as she couldn't (didn't want to) tell her mother the truth, all she really wanted was to fall into her arms and cry and have her Mommy tell her that everything was going to be okay. And more than anything, she wanted that to be true. She wanted everything to be okay. But it wasn't.

The traffic started to move around her again, she didn't realise at first, not until the guy (jerk) behind her beeped his horn at her. She was so tired. It had been a long day. It had been a long couple of days actually. The last time she had been in her bed was...

The images came unbidden to her mind. Waking up wrapped around Helena who was wrapped around her. Kissing her forehead, and her nose, and then her lips. The feeling of Helena's smile as she woke up to that kiss. Helena's eyes, like pools of melted chocolate, staring back at her, sleep still clouding them but Myka could have, probably still would swear that she saw love in them. Maybe it was only her own (foolish) love reflected from her own eyes. But, Myka had been so sure, and Helena hadn't been able to shoot her, Helena hadn't wanted to shoot her. Somebody, probably the jerk behind her from before, overtook her – over the speed limit, she noticed – and beeped at her. She needed to pull over. Think Myka, 8 hours straight of driving on no sleep for two days, not good. Her brain kicked in. Underneath everything she was still Myka Bering. The smart one, the good one, the sensible one. And oh God, wasn't that just perfect. Because really, underneath it all, somewhere, very, very deep down, hadn't she known that it was a bad idea? Hadn't she known that there had to be more than just the occasional nightmare? Okay they were the wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat-screaming kind of nightmares but even so, she should have known that with a hundred years of only herself to talk to, with a hundred years to sit and ruminate on her pain and grief and her anger and her sorrow that nightmares and lingering looks off into the distance when Myka just knew that she was thinking about her baby, were only the surface of what she was truly feeling.

She needed to stop. There was a motel not far off. There may have been a few evenings spent there in her college years. Hmm, perhaps she wasn't always the sensible one. She pulled off into the slip lane and parked in the car park. She turned off the engine and looked around.

How was this her life? Sitting in the parking lot of a motel, by a freeway. Further away from her real home, closer to a place that she had fought so desperately to leave. Ripped to shreds by a woman who should have been long, long dead. No! What if the regents had killed her? They couldn't do that...could they? They wouldn't do that. They'd just...they'd bronze her again. They'd put her back in the warehouse. Myka took a deep breath. She had done the right thing by leaving. She couldn't be in that warehouse day after day knowing that her...her love...was there, immobilised but conscious. She hated Helena in this moment, but she wouldn't wish that on anybody (lest perhaps the bastards that killed Christina, had Helena not gotten to them first), it was a fate worse than death.

She got out of the car and pulled the backpack from behind the driver's seat. It had her gun, and her ID, the most important things. A change of clothes too. She needed to get out of this shirt. She'd worn it to spite Helena, it was Helena's favourite on her, but she had ended up spiting only herself.

In the motel room she lay on the bed. It felt empty and wrong. She took the pillow and turned the opposite way. It still felt wrong. It felt wrong to be in any bed without Helena. God, how had she not seen it? She shared a bed with her, spent her nights wrapped up in her, speaking in soft moans and quiet sighs, shared her heart with her.

Myka's breath caught, she had shared her heart with her. But...had Helena known that? Those last few moments that morning before Claudia had started shouting for them. When Myka had opened her mouth to say the words, those words, and then, at the last minute hadn't. She wouldn't tell her when they had to leave. She had wanted to tell her when she had the time to show her, really make Helena feel her love.

If she had seen it earlier. If she hadn't pushed in Egypt...or if she had. Was it Egypt that pushed her over the edge? She had seen Helena look heartbroken before; after nightmares reliving Christina's murder, but never anything like in Egypt.
Could she put in another report? She had been honest in her last report – final report – but unemotional. She didn't mention what any of them had seen. What they had been forced to see. And she couldn't help but feel a little sad at that; what the medusa had shown her was the warehouse. She felt a fresh set of tears settle behind her eyes, it hadn't been Helena. But then, Helena hadn't seen her either, not that she ever could – or would ever have tried to – compare to Her Christina.

That tiny coffin. There was a reason that she had asked Pete to look inside it. Yes, she didn't exactly enjoy seeing dead bodies, but she had seen plenty before. No, it was because, after listening to Helena talk about her, getting to know her almost, through her mother's eyes, Myka felt...attached to Christina as well. She couldn't see her like that without breaking. And if she had have broken she wouldn't have been able to stop Helena. As it was she almost had broken. There was a moment – a LONG moment – when Helena had the gun pressed to her head that she really didn't care. Helena had already broken her heart, why not break her body too. She would gladly have had Helena pull the trigger, and Myka suspected that that was the moment that Helena realised she couldn't do it.

That Helena hadn't pulled the trigger was almost worse than if she had have. Not being able to go through with made Myka sure that Helena loved her. Or at least, had loved her. She needed to stop thinking. She needed to stop thinking about Helena. She needed to stop loving her. Ha! She would never not love Helena. Just like you'll never not love Sam. A voice inside her head said. No, Helena was different. Even if Helena was...she couldn't even think the word inside her head, if Helena was the same way as Sam now...Myka's eyes glanced to the bedside table, she had left her gun there.

She was trained to take a bullet. She had been prepared to take a bullet at Yellowstone.

She couldn't...she wouldn't. Helena hadn't. She gasped sharply and it hurt her chest. Her throat was dry, but it was the emotion behind the gasp that hurt the most. Helena hadn't. Hadn't shot her, but also hadn't shot herself. Helena had been prepared to die though. She wanted to die. Tears started flowing again.

"Fuck!" she whispered into the darkness.

If she'd have told her that morning that she was in love with her, maybe it would've pulled her back.

"It's my fault." Myka admitted "I didn't give her what she needed"

Myka took a last look at her gun and turned away from it. She couldn't look at it. She was afraid that if she did, she'd use it.