Te Amo
by Alicia

It was only natural for a child of Gregory Magnus to speak Latin as easily as she spoke English. Occasionally this would get her into trouble with the children in her primary school. They spoke perfect British English and memorized stumbling Latin phrases to get passing marks on exams, who looked with alternate disdain and jealousy on the strange, quiet girl who took notes in two languages. "Te amo," her father would always say when she told him. "I love you." And that was all Helen needed. Together, she and her father could handle anything the world could throw at them.

One

Somber hymns echoed through the little church, as the priest proclaimed that Nigel Griffin could see them from Heaven. He had been eighty-seven years old. Besides his daughter, who stood in the front with her head covered to shield her from her father's old colleagues, no one was expected to miss Nigel the young man. No one could have known that his four best friends were there to say farewell, hidden in different corners of the crowd.

Tesla was the first of the group who Helen spotted once the service was over. Or, rather, he spotted her – perhaps smelled her, who knew how his head and senses worked – and pushed through the crowd to wrap Helen in a hug. She expected him to pull back. It was a pattern they had repeated through more than fifty years. Nikola did not believe in love, and he especially did not believe in John's love, so he challenged John for Helen at every chance he had. Playful kisses turned into something like a family ritual, and in that moment, Helen would have welcomed the release. But Nikola did not kiss her. He just held on. Too long, until tears started to prick her eyes. "Nikola," Helen said softly. "Enough."

He released her, still with that uncharacteristic quiet. Nikola Tesla wasn't supposed to be quiet. Nikola Tesla was supposed to drink half the wine and then deliver monologues that most geniuses weren't capable of producing sober, all the while proclaiming alcohol didn't affect him. Nikola Tesla wasn't supposed to stand there, hollow-eyed and silent.

"Helen, Nikola," James Watson said. He brushed a hand against each of their cheeks in a gesture as tender in its own way as a hug would have made.

"James, you made it," Helen said.

He didn't look much older. So far the technology they had developed was holding up; it was a pity it hadn't been compatible with Nigel's abilities. "Of course," James said simply.

They all saw him at the same time: John Druitt, hovering at the back of the crowd thronging out of the church in the same way he'd hovered at the back of the crowd when they had been inside. He took one step toward them, as his eyes swept the crowd, looking, Helen was sure, for an opportunity to teleport away. But then John's eyes locked with Helen's, and they were the Five again. Even the Five less one.

"Te amo," Helen murmured, looking first at James' hand, which she hadn't released, and then at Tesla. She caught John's eyes last. Although he was well out of hearing range, his face registered that he had read Helen's lips and caught her meaning. Then he was gone.

Two and Three

"What in the name of all the seven hells is going on here?" Helen shouted, throwing open the door of the SHU's one vacant room. The few items that had been stored there were torn to rival the devastation in the Big Guy's cell when he had been ill with the Lazarus Virus. A mutated Henry faced off against a rather scratched and disheveled Big Guy in the far corner. It attested to Helen's familiarity with both that she took in their injuries before registering that Henry was a large, blue, angry creature.

Henry's only answer was a roar, charging the Big Guy for what could not have been the first time, or the tenth. The Big Guy rolled backwards, putting one knee in Henry's stomach and tossing him into the already broken metal bed. Henry snarled and charged.

Helen calmly stepped right into the middle of the fight. "Stop," she said.

Henry, who had never flat-out ignored Helen in his life, sprang up from the bed, threw Helen into it – not using his full strength, she noticed – and resumed charging the Big Guy.

The Big Guy casually backhanded Henry. Helen extracted herself, ran over, and grabbed his arm. The Big Guy backhanded her too – again, not using his full strength, not much more than his ordinary gestures, but enough to get her out of the way – and wrapped his arms around Henry in a wrestling pose.

Helen backed out of the room, grabbed the intercom device that was occasionally used to speak to the SHU's more hard of hearing residents, and bellowed, "Stop it this instant or I will have both of you thrown in separate cells and locked up!"

Miraculously, they listened this time. The Big Guy withdrew to the door, his posture receding to normal from the fighting tension. Henry slowly reverted to human form in the center of the devastated room.

Helen put down the microphone and strode right up to her friends. "Better," she said. "Now that you can speak, perhaps you can answer my question: what the hell were you doing?"

"He started it," Henry and the Big Guy said in unison.

"By doing what?"

Stone silence.

"I started it," Henry muttered, looking at his feet.

At the exact same moment, the Big Guy said, "No, you didn't." He came over to Henry, this time casually, the way he did every day of their lives, and gently cuffed the back of Henry's head. "Better?"

Henry's face went through several exasperated emotions. He raised his fist again, but it stayed small and human, and most of the tension had left his frame. "Did ya mean it?"

"It is hard to tell when Helen is crazy. But that's not why you're angry. Tell her." He turned from Henry, to leave the SHU. "And you," he said, cuffing Helen on the way out with rather more force than he'd used to throw her out of their fight, "Apologize."

"Yes, sir," Helen quipped to the Big Guy, but there was not a lot of humor in the room, especially without him there. Silence hung in the air again. Henry looked defeated. She had never seen him quite this way, not even when he'd returned from the Cabal's torture sessions, which he'd revealed to her by way of secure medical file, just in case, never to be spoken of again. Not even at Ashley's funeral.

"I'm not sure what he was talking about," Henry muttered.

"You said I was mad. He said that he couldn't tell the difference. You attacked him."

Henry didn't have to say anything. His face said, pretty much.

"I do owe you an apology. I'm sorry. I was so focused on my own plans and the existence of telepathy in the Sanctuary…"

"Stop," Henry said. "You don't need to explain."

"Why didn't you fight him in human form?"

"Oh, sure, so I've gotta explain?"

"Touche. Will you just accept my apology?"

"No" Henry said. "You did what you had to do." Henry looked as if he was done speaking, but then he mumbled. "And I'm going to be alone. Ashley, the Big Guy, you…in the end, I'll be standing alone."

"No," Helen said. She crossed the distance between them, grabbed his hands. "Henry, I am so sorry. You know our work; you know the risks involved for us all. But I can promise you one thing." Without letting go of either of his hands, she said, "I will never again do something that forces me to lie to those I love."

Four

It wasn't his fault, kept cycling through Helen Magnus's head, over and over and over, alternately in English and in Latin, which she reverted to especially when she thought of John and of the old days with the Five. It had never been John's fault. What had she done; what had they all done? What had he done?

Even after all this time, after all the years of believing him dangerous and unstable, of even believing at times that he hated her and Ashley, John Druitt was the one person Helen could picture herself saying "love" to, intentionally, in English. Or Latin; it wouldn't make much difference to him. Their relationship had been full of deep thought, of double meanings and obvious-to-them references going back and forth like so many ping-pong balls.

But in her dreams that night, those weren't the words she said to John. Rather, she said, "I've missed you," "don't go," "I was wrong," and "stay." After a particularly vivid dream in which the events of the night looped, over and over, she found herself awake. She was screaming, or whispering. She didn't know, and there was no difference anyway. "John, I'll go with you. I'll go with you!" Any place he was, was her home. She would follow him anywhere.

Five

There was no chance of further sleep that night. Helen was nothing if not pragmatic about this, especially because there were times when she required no sleep in favor of a mission. She pulled her robe over her head, stuck her feet in the soft functional slippers she kept by her bed for late-night Sanctuary emergency calls, and padded to the kitchen to make tea. But the tears froze on her face in the chilled hallways of the dark building, and instead she turned toward her study, and halfway there toward Will's room. She steeled herself, knocked.

He answered the door, dressed for work and composed. "Hi."

"Will? You're up at four in the morning."

"Well, I knew you wouldn't sleep," he said logically. "Come in. I made more tea."

"I'm … not ready to talk about everything," Helen said, half her mind on her words, half on her unfamiliar surroundings, the neat piles of clothes and research books. Did Will ever do anything undignified?

"I know," he said, jolting her back to the Sanctuary. This place, not any other.

some time earlier

Tuesday came without the blinding pain that Helen had prepared herself to expect. She was surprised at first. Then she realized that the birthday was no more a reminder of Ashley's absence than the empty place at the table, or the scattered beads of the necklace Ashley had borrowed and broken and Helen could not bring herself to restring. The crippling emptiness always had been there and always would, and the day was just another day.

She led the daily staff meeting with her usual calm composure, then went to her study to look over her notes. All a very normal and natural routine, calculated to keep everyone in the Sanctuary from worrying about her – not that it would have mattered with Henry and the Big Guy away, since none of the rest of the staff even knew that it was different than any other day.

She expected Will, with his near-psychic abilities to read people and his intimate knowledge of her specifically, to walk into the room with a cup of tea and a history nerd speech designed to cheer her up. When all was quiet for an hour, Helen started to worry. When all was quiet for two hours, Helen went looking for Will. The lab was empty, and all of Will's normal patients, those still adjusting to life as abnormals, were quietly going about their daily routines. Not that there were a lot of them at the moment, or that any were suffering, but it still wasn't like Will to neglect any of his responsibilities. The kitchen was uncharacteristically quiet too, without Ashley and Henry to fight over the cereal -- don't think about that -- but it was okay, the sight of the box produced the same stab every morning, and this one was no different. The umbrella rack was ajar, and Will's umbrella was gone.

The roof. It would normally have been too bright and exposed for either her or Will there, in the middle of the day, but it had rained solidly for more than a week, and the skies were leaden enough to provide a place to hide.

Will registered no surprise at Helen's arrival. Of course; Will was too obsessively neat to leave the umbrellas messed up by accident. He'd wanted her to come.

Will was staring off at the rain as it lashed down. "She kissed me here," he said, quietly.

"Clara," said Helen.

"She said," Will laughed painfully, "that it was too romantic a place not to."

"Will…"

"I'm sorry, Magnus," he said. "I know … I know what day it is. I was waiting up here until I was strong for you."

"You don't always have to be strong," she said. "Isn't that what you're always telling me?"

"Yes, but…Ashley…"

"You miss her too," Helen said. She couldn't say anymore, but she found that without realizing it she'd drifted to her customary place here on the roof, at Will's side with only a hair's breadth of space between them. She took his hand.

He held on tightly. "I was going to find you," he said after several beats. "I just needed time first."

"I'm sorry," she said. "For keeping you here. For telling you the day. For making you feel these things instead of being with …"

Will squeezed her hand. "Forgiven," he said. "I told you once that grieving Ashley all alone wasn't doing you any good. Guess I should take my own advice every once in awhile."

Helen waited for him to speak. Usually – although not lately – Will tried so hard to be the perfect protégé, that he was nearly as reluctant about showing weakness as she herself.

"I guess you have to choose," Will said. "We have to choose. This life. You can't see this world, and yet explore the one outside."

"I told you that you needed to get out while you could," Helen said softly.

"Oh, no," Will said, not meeting her eyes, looking out over the balcony and the rain. "It's worth it. It's even worth losing people like Clara and Ashley."

Helen edged closer, holding Will's arm tightly wrapped around her waist. The words slipped out without conscious thought. "Te Amo, Will."