"So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men."
Dreams were funny things. You could know you were in one, you could be fully aware but yet fully enmeshed in it nonetheless. Helena was old enough to know she was dreaming – her time in the bronze sector had been a century-long nightmare – but she was powerless to resist. She was holding a trident in one hand, and a cold, heavy gun in the other. Clear green eyes filled her vision, filled her heart, but rage and grief and despair filled her soul. Some part of her knew that this had already happened and that she had given up her murderous plans in the face of Myka's wondrous trust, Myka's entirely unlikely regard for her. But in her nightmares she instead feels the evil within her well up, stronger than her love, stronger than any modicum of goodness she has ever had in her, and she pulls the trigger, hears the thud as the body hits the ground, watches the light go out in the most beautiful eyes she has ever had the good fortune to behold. She hears Artie's coarse scream of grief as she jams the trident home for the last time. She sobs in her unconscious state, tears running from beneath closed lids. "This must be what hell feels like," she breathes, as the world fades to blessed oblivion.
Myka Bering had always been an analytical soul. Her emotions didn't enter into most of her decisions, not until the Warehouse. Or, more accurately, not until Helena Wells had burst into her life and turned her perfectly ordered world on its head. Her world before HG Wells entered it – the real one, not the moustached face of HG Wells that was presented to the world in the 1890s – was a cold and empty one in so many ways. Her work was satisfying and fulfilling, and she cared a great deal about her colleagues, but her work was the only thing she had going for her and she knew it. Her personal life was a veritable desert. Since Sam died she hadn't let herself feel much for any other person, not much past simple affection for her teammates – but something about Helena unlocked a well (she chuckled at the unconscious pun) of previously unfelt emotions. Not only for Helena. Her feelings for Pete, for Claudia, for every one of her friends and family, became stronger and deeper than ever before. A light went on in her that even Helena's betrayal at Yellowstone Park couldn't extinguish. The betrayal devastated her, broke her in so many ways, but it couldn't take away what Helena had awakened in her. She didn't really have a word for it, but it was something like passion. Something she might have snorted at derisively before, but that was now irrevocably part of her soul. She, too, was in a dream, and she, too, was fully aware of that, but she couldn't lessen the pain it was causing. She found herself standing in an innocent looking suburban kitchen that somehow felt to her like the death of hope. She watched Helena's face flush as she said the words she wished she could take back, and also the words she wished had changed Helena's mind. "You are denying who you are to chase a ghost. This life, it's not who you are." Helena's face fell, her eyes blazing with rage. Myka knew that she in a dream, but this moment...this moment was the death of all she had dreamed since her heart awoke that day in London. They had disagreed before, but never had she angered Helena like this. She remembered the moments after, when they said goodbye to one another, and the feeling of Helena holding her for what she knew was going to be the last time. Something inside her chest erupted in red-hot pain and she fell back against the hated suburban cupboards of Helena's new life, broken sobs escaping her as if torn from her body. The world swirled and faded to blackness.
