AN: Another installment in "Helen Does the Time Warp, Again", this section comes after Long Road Home, Begin Again, Enter Athene and Dog Days are Gone, and before To The Letter, but you should still read it first. Time travel! Who knew! ;)
Spoilers: Into the Black
Disclaimer: I only wish I was that cool.
Rating: Teen
Characters: Helen Magnus, Nigel Griffin
Summary: Her new life begins with death.
The Keeper of Death
Her new life begins with death.
She fires again and again and again, until he is pressed up against the railing and has stopped twitching. If she had a knife, she would slit his throat, but she settles for shooting a fourth bullet between his eyes from point blank range. After that, it is easy enough to lift him up and cast his body into the river below. She turns away before he hits the water, is walking away before the splash, but she hears it anyway, in the late London night. There are no cars or planes to drown out the noise, only the fog and the church bells, tolling out the hour. She knows it's time to disappear.
Lissandra has ideas about that, it turns out. Helen has only been here for a few hours, frenetic and bloody, and she isn't ready to plan anything yet, beyond the need to be somewhere else as soon as possible. There will be too many temptations if she stays. Helen was only out for a few hours, so little time to set everything right, but that was enough time for Lissandra to plan.
"You don't need to disappear entirely," Lissandra says. "And I don't think you should. You've never been good at fading into the background. I don't fully understand why you need to hide, but I think hiding in plain sight is a better fit for you."
She's probably right. Helen has never been good at taking the back seat, and even though she's in a century where the back seat is mandatory, she has no intention of letting that get in her way. She hasn't told Lissandra much, but the woman's far from stupid, and Helen knows that her age shows in her eyes, if not her face, and that Lissandra can probably see the years.
"I think I should go away for a while, though," Helen says. "To reacquaint myself, as it were."
"Very well," Lissandra says. "Have you any messages to send? You'll need money, even if you only disappear for a short time, and that's the one thing I can't give you."
Helen stews for a moment, deciding between the lesser of three evils, two, really, since Nikola is in America and nearly always flat broke during this historical period anyway. Nigel, then. It's not that she doesn't trust James, but she's had time to get used to Nigel not being there, and he's far less likely to read his death in her face.
"Yes," she says. "I've a message. Please send your boy round to Mr. Nigel Griffin, and tell him this address and word 'Winchester'. He'll know what it means."
"Very well," says Lissandra, and goes out to send the message.
It takes Nigel less than an hour to arrive. He's taken a cab, which makes him stick out in the neighbourhood but made his journey much quicker. 'Winchester' is the word they use for urgent business that has to remain hidden from James. It is not the kindest of codewords. It dawns on her that he never did figure it out, any more than she figured out whatever word it was they used when they were conducting business that excluded her.
"Helen, what the Hell," begins Nigel as soon as he is through the door. Then he stops dead in his tracks and stares at her.
"Nigel, please," she says. "Sit down. This may take a while."
As quickly as she can, she tells him the bare minimum. She blames her time travel on an abnormal, not too much of a stretch, really, and tells him that she needs money and utmost secrecy.
"I swear, this is why I've stayed clear of you lot since you decided to make this your life's work," he says, not unfondly. He was never the sort of adventurer the rest were, for all he was always game to try whatever was suggested. "But if you give me a couple of hours, I can get what you need."
She knows he means to steal for her, and she doesn't reprove him. It was part of why she requested him, after all. She hears John's mocking tones, reminding her that she reviles him until she needs him, and does her best to ignore the similarities. While Nigel is gone, she busies herself packing the clothes that Lissandra got for her into a simple bag. She's going to miss proper toothbrushes, not to mention other toiletries, but at least soon there will be regular plumbing.
Nigel is back in two hours on the dot, just before dawn. He carries a bag too, too big for just money, and he takes out the dress he stole from Helen's own wardrobe with a flourish. She probably didn't need anything quite so fancy. By the time she returns to civilization, it will be badly out of fastion, but at least she'll look respectable on the train.
"I always wondered where that went," Helen muses, smiling. "Any trouble?"
"None at all," Nigel says. "Though you really ought to do something about the locks on the windows that face the garden."
"You're in luck, Nigel," she says. "I can do nothing of the sort."
He grins, and then something in his face darkens.
"Do I die?" he asks. "Properly, I mean."
She considers him, remembering wars and Louisiana and prohibition, and can't help the smile that spreads across her face. His is a long life, and a happy one, more or less, but also finite, particularly compared to the rest of them.
"Yes," she says, because it's the truth and she can give it. "You die properly."
That is the first time Helen Magnus tells someone about their death.
It takes a very long time to get to Inverness, where she knows a cothold will be for sale. A dragon lived there once, in happier times, but the dragon is moved to Oban and the farmer has died and his children are selling the farm so that they can follow another Helen Magnus to London. She buys the property through a lawyer so they never see her face. She finds a letter in the barn and keeps it, because she knows it doesn't get sent for a century and more.
She writes. She writes with the pen she happened to have in her pocket until it goes dry, and then she switches back to the quill and ink of her youth. Fountain pens are massed produced in London, have been for more than a decade, but nothing comes to Scotland in a timely fashion, be they pens or trains, and besides, she's trying to avoid shopping in town as often as she can.
She writes by daylight because the candles make her eyes water. It's not the light of them; it's the memories. So much of her life was candlelit and now it is all happening again and she cannot watch it. Day to day, she's not sure whether or not she even wants to. She writes down everything she remembers: names, dates, events. When the pen scratches out Albert Einstein she remembers something about time, and decides that so long as she doesn't change anything she knows happened, she might be safe to move about in the world, as Lissandra had suggested.
She makes a list. She cannot kill Adam. She cannot kill John. She cannot save Ashley or Ghandi or Amelia. The list is long, but even as she makes it see can see the spaces it leaves, the cracks through which she can touch the world and make things better for herself and others by careful action.
There is a small abnormal community in Inverness, fostered by her father's interest in the remote nature of the area. It is easier here, away from cities and Victorian etiquette to be unusual, though technically they're all Edwardian now, and Inverness is no longer the end of the world. Those abonormals, though, they are the people that notice her. Some can sense her age, the path she's walked, seeing it in her eyes as Lissandra did. Not all of them can read, but the understand what the book is, why she writes the details of her life so she won't forget them and accidentally live them again. It is in Inverness that she first hears them whisper about the Keeper of Death, who writes living and dying into a book and keeps it next to her heart. Helen doesn't mean for it to happen, but she doesn't stop it when it does.
She is ten years in Scotland. In 1908, she knows where everyone is. The Five have come together again, and Helen is about to make her deal. She won't stop it, won't change anything directly, but she goes to Adam's flat and disables the booby-traps that would surely have killed John when he teleported in.
When that doesn't destroy the world in paradox, The Keeper of Death makes her next plan.
finis
Gravity_Not_Included, August 29, 2011