There was something about the girl that was absolutely compelling. It wasn't everyday Helen strolled the markets of Bangkok, but she'd decided to indulge after a successful mission to treat an injured mermaid in the mangrove forests of the Thai coast. The smells, the fabrics, the chatter of languages, it was the still exotic thrill that sent her back to being a young woman, one who still had hopes and dreams. She was one hundred and eleven years old today, and a bowl of papaya salad from her favorite street stand was more a celebration that any cake.
But she'd gotten within twenty feet of the stand and seen the girl standing in front of the stand, caucasian and freckled with a cloud of frizzy red-gold hair that made her utterly unique. She was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, or simply tall for her age, but she chattered away with the vendor in a happy flood of perfect Thai. The accent wasn't entirely correct, but still...at first Magnus was concerned. Was she a victim of kidnapping? Forced into the sex trade?
But there was nothing beaten down about this girl. She was brash and full of life, and she looked oddly familiar. Something within her seemed to thrum in recognition as she drew closer, hiding behind stacks of spices and fresh herbs at the closest stand. There was something in the way she moved, the way she seemed to glow with energy and intelligence - Helen could swear that the girl was an abnormal, and one she should recognize.
And then a man with a brown lump strapped to his chest turned the corner and her world went cock-eyed.
"Nikola!"
Her shout was instinctual, filled with surprise tinged with unexpected longing. It had been sixteen years since she'd seen him, and she'd not heard a word from him confirming that he was still alive.
He turned away from the girl he'd clearly been chastising and smiled widely, a heart-stopping grin filled with such clear comfortable affection that she held her breath in shock.
"Found her, moj dragi. Told you she'd be here."
She walked on unsteady legs toward her old friend and this strange girl with the sullen expression that seemed universal to teenagers. The two of them clearly knew each other, and a dozen odd possibilities turned over in her mind until she saw the brown lump move and a tiny arm rise up to whack Nikola in the chest. He turned down to look at the baby in the sling on his chest and smiled widely, again, "Awake now then, coveculjak?"
The babe was his, as was the girl. Recognition seared her heart. Nikola Tesla had children. Two children. Jealously roared to life in the pit of her stomach. He had the family she'd always wanted. Some woman had him, when he'd said that he would wait. He was supposed to be...
The girl turned to her, "Mum, I'm perfectly capable of making a jaunt in the market without surpervision. Really, there was no need to mount a search party for me."
She blinked staring at the girl as her heart thudded in her chest. The baby peaked out of the sling and let out a soft whimper, arms reaching out.
"Look like he's hungry, ljubavi. I..." Nikola stopped suddenly, his eyes growing very wide as he looked at her. He proceeded to start swearing in Serbian enough to make her ears bleed, and the girl at his side start to giggle.
"Da! Mum is going to murder you for talking like that in front of Dan." The girl turned to look at her, clearly expecting a reaction. Her brow furrowed and suddenly Helen could see the resemblance, the turn of the nose and the twist of the lips.
"Oh bugger, you're not Mum. Well...not..."
"Shut up, young lady! Before we all manage to disappear."
"Nikola?" she swallowed thickly. "Nikola, how...what..."
"I can't answer, Helen. You have to forget you ever saw us. Please."
"But how...what..."
"You really can't know. Not yet." The voice came from behind her, and she spun around to look in a mirror. A living breathing mirror.
The woman had long dark hair and slightly wider hips, but otherwise the woman in a loose tunic and flowing trousers was clearly herself.
"Who are you?" Helen whispered, confronted with a vision of herself with a life she had given up as lost.
"You. Someday," her own voice said back, before the woman strode around her, stepping up to Nikola and handing him something in her hands before extracting the baby from the sling, a chubby little boy with a tuft of wild dark hair on his head. She bounced him on her hip and smiled down at him. Helen was absoltuely frozen, her eyes impossibly wide.
Her eyes turned to look at the girl, and she was smiling at her, curiously ablaze in her eyes. "This is so bizarre. It's like a TV show."
This made Helen chuckle. A whispered conversation ended between Nikola and her duplicate, and the other Helen jerked her head at the girl, taking her by the hand and walking away, turning for a moment with a sympathetic smile on her face, as though she knew every thought running through her head.
Desire, anger, jealousy, and the beginnings of a hysterical euphoria that bubbled up in her chest. She was dreaming. She was deluded and dreaming and missing a man, an opportunity, that had long fled.
A bark of a laugh erupted from her lips, and then he was there, gripping her shoulders. Her vision filled with Nikola Tesla - husband and father. Impossible and oddly perfect and lost to her.
"Helen. You are not dreaming. This is your future - a future you can't know about. I'm sorry." Then he pulled her toward him and captured her lips, and after a moment of shocked protest she melted into the kiss, warm and soft, still tasting of wine and the subtle tingle of electricity. Her body came to life, her heart opening as though a weight in her chest was being lifted away. She wrapped her arms around him, thrust her tongue into his mouth and tasted him, dueled with him, relishing the familiar thrill of him and all the danger to her heart he represented.
He pulled away, his eyes full of love, but his expression one of regret. "I'm so sorry, ljubavi. Try to remember I'll always be yours." He raised up something like a gun and she paled with shock, stunned that he would truly harm her. But when he fired there was nothing but a buzzing in her ears and the pain of a crushing headache, dulled by the feel of his lips pressing against her temple, words of adoration whispered in her ear as she blacked out.
She woke suddenly from a daydream, a bowl of papaya salad in front of her and a spoon in her hand as she sat at a rickety table in the market. Whatever had she been thinking about so hard that she'd forgotten even ordering her food? She was truly getting senile in this old age. There had been a girl...and a mirror, and a familiar face of a man who'd abandoned her. She wondered if she would ever see Nikola Tesla again. If she did, she'd have to shoot him, or kiss him, she wasn't sure which would come first.