Disclaimer: Characters of Warehouse 13 do not belong to me, sadly. I'm just playing with them. I'll put them back once I'm done.
A/N: Written for alittlebitaces.
"Claudia!" Myka yelped, skidding to a stop just on the other side of the aisle she'dglanced down. She back peddled and made her way, wide-eyed, to where the young woman was attaching what looked very much like jumper cables to some kind of metal contraption H.G. was wearing on her head. "What are you doing? What are those? H.G., why are you wearing that? What is going on here?" She sputtered, questions spilling forth unhindered despite the frantic pace with which she delivered them. Glancing up from the cables in her hands, Claudia responded by way of raised eyebrows and little more and H.G. appeared to have to strain her head a little in order to look at Myka.
"Darling!" She beamed; that bright, genuine smile that had been a rarity before but had become a more frequent occurrence over the past few months. "How marvellous that you should stumble upon us at such a pivotal point in our experiment."
"Experiment." Myka balked, coming to a stop before them and staring hard at the pair. Helena was sitting in a weathered-looking armchair that they'd probably found lying around somewhere, aforementioned contraption fixed to her head, whilst Claudia stood behind and to the side of her, surrounded by cables at her feet and partly obscured by a rectangular machine that looked, at first glance, like an old-fashioned heart monitor. She folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head, shaking it a little in some manifestation of her utter befuddlement. Her lips worked for a moment, though no words left them, and then suddenly, she exploded. "What are you doing?! Why is that," she pointed with no small amount of vehemence at the thing on H.G.'s head, "on your head?" then at the woman herself. "And why are you hooked up to a heart monitor? Does Artie know about this? I swear, if someone doesn't start explaining things soon I'm gonna-"
"Myka!" Claudia bellowed over the sound of the taller woman's anxiety attack, bringing her hands up to hold them palm down in the air and then lower them again in the universal sign for 'hey, dude, chill the frak out'. "Defrag for a second, jeez. And for the record, of course Artie doesn't know. Dude's a major genius buzz-kill." She picked up a circular control panel that had been lying beside the monitor and started pressing buttons. Myka flinched, arms flying out to wave erratically at the redhead.
"Stop it! What are you doing?"
"I can assure you that it's quite safe, darli-" The glare Myka shot her was enough to silence her as well as curdle milk.
"Your version of 'safe' is the same as base-jumping without parachute, Helena." The inventor's eyebrows quirked upwards and her lips pursed ever so slightly. "Also, I remember what happened the last time I caught you two in the middle of some hare-brained scheme." Claudia grunted her distaste.
"You make it sound so dirty. Besides, nothing really bad happened last time anyway."
"Claudia, there was an explosion that set fire to an entire aisle of the Warehouse." The redhead held up a hand, curling back all digits but her index finger and pointing it at Myka.
"An empty aisle. I think we can all agree that it could have been much worse." And it was the way that she said it, with such dismissiveness, that caused the blood to boil in Myka's veins. Beginning to lose her mind as well as what was left of her patience, Myka tugged harshly at her curls, pushing them behind her ears as she took a deep breath.
"Can you please just explain to me why you have my girlfriend hardwired into something that looks like it fell off the back of a recycling truck as it pulled out of a hospital?" H.G.'s head jerked, as much as it could under the weight, and she stared up at Myka clearly affronted.
"Girlfriend?" But Claudia beat her to the punch, raising an eyebrow and then wrinkling her nose at the term. "Seriously? That's the word you're using for H.G. Wells?"
"I beg your pardon?" H.G. said snippily, shifting to cross her arms over her torso. "I'll have you know that that 'recycling reject' is years beyond any decrepit hospital technology and what it lacks in modernisation it more than makes up for in antiquated charm."
"Kind of like its inventor." Claudia mused with a wry smile, prompting Helena to turn her head towards the young prodigy and proffer a half-smile, half-smirk.
"And vice versa to you, my dear." Resisting the urge to groan aloud, Myka settled for a restrained eye roll as she shoved her hand into her back pocket and produced her Farnsworth.
"I am two seconds away from calling Artie and providing him with video evidence of what the two of you get up to when he isn't around and why in the hell is Pete here?" She finished, staring down at the ferret as it brushed by her legs and sniffed its way towards Helena.
"It would appear as though your little creature has taken quite a liking to me." Helena said with a lilting sigh as she peered along the length of her nose to observe the long streak of white and grey fuzz currently winding himself around her legs. "Curious, considering my overt distaste of most things of covered in fur." But the way in which she looked at Pete the ferret was lacking in the obvious revulsion that had been present when the topic of Dickens had been initially broached, and if it had been any other time Myka would have jumped on the chance to tease Helena about her apparent soft spot for the little animal, but it was not any other time. It was a time that found the Warehouse's resident geniuses up to their eyeballs in stuff that Artie would have a stroke over.
"Two seconds." She reminded them pointedly and Claudia tipped her head back, throwing a groan up into the rafters.
"Fine!" She griped, bringing her head back forward and meeting Myka's annoyed gaze. "Like H.G. said, it's totally safe." She gestured towards the Englishwoman's, for lack of a better term, helmet with the control panel. "We're just going to trade out her brain for mini-Pete's to see what happens." The only sound that could be heard in the suddenly quiet Warehouse was the hum of the generators and the light scratching of Pete's claws against the cement floor. And then a kind of strangled gurgling sound worked its way up from Myka's throat and past her parted lips as she gaped at them, eyes as round and as big as those jelly doughnuts that human-Pete liked to see how many he could cram into his mouth at one time, and Claudia watched as a vein close to Myka's temple started to throb.
"Are you-" Myka blinked, cheeks turning red with her inability to draw breath, "do you even-" and she dropped her attention to Helena, expression one of horror. "Have you lost your mind?" She screamed, not caring that she was close enough to the other woman to potentially perforate her eardrums. And to Myka's extreme outrage, Helena simply beamed up at her.
"Not yet and with any luck, it shall return intact." Myka's hands went to her hand, fingers sliding in to grip at her curls as she tried to keep her own mind from slipping away, and just as she felt the on-coming of cardiac arrest, Claudia started laughing.
"Mykes, it's to measure her brainwaves." And to Myka's outrage, H.G. started chuckling too.
"Really, Darling. Mind transference? With a ferret?" And she made a 'tut-tut' sound through her laughter.
Even as a Secret Service agent, there was only so much a person could take. Claudia had gotten up to enough mischief when it had just been her, but with the addition of Helena it was like handing a chronically hyperactive child a bag full of Pixy Stix powder and telling them to huff away. They were, quite literally, each other's drug and enabler and they were going to be the death of her, of that Myka Bering was sure.