"Just to make it clear, I think this is the most stupid plan!" muttered Helena as Richard opened the attic door and peered down the wooden stairs.
"You've mentioned that, dear, but I would have thought you would think the whole experiment was the top on the stupid list," Richard responded back. The smirk on his face betrayed his inner feelings.
"Well, that was before you decided to go downstairs to make sure everything was all right. If there is something down there, its not going to hesitate to kill you!" she caught his eye, giving him a hard look.
"Keep that cuddley attitude for when I get back, would you?" he asked sarcastically.
"Just be careful down there, would you? Just 'cause you think you are safe, doesn't mean you are."
"Nah. I thought i'd bake another pie while I was down there." He smiled and ran the back of his hand over her cheek. "Don't worry. I know what i'm up against."
"Did you think the same thing when you created this scientific apocolypse?"
"Don't hurt yourself with those big words!" He joked with a laugh.
"Oh, fuck you!"
"Promise?"
A laugh escaped from her lips and he smiled at her response. He loved her laugh. How it spilled from her lips like a small brook and sat in the air, brightening up anything.
"Don't keep me too long, k?"
"Course not! You have a promise to pull through with!"
With a quick, yet loving, kiss on her cheek, he walked down the stairs and opened the door onto the hall of the second level of the house. He looked back, gave a quick wink, and closed the door behind him.
"Be careful, you big oaf!"
Then, Helena clung Zeus to her breast, hoping and praying that it would help him before she turned back to her croqueted safety.
Everything seemed to be going in slow motion as Richard moved cautiously through the hall. Helena always said that the hall was like their personal museum. Framed paintings of graceful swans a top still lakes and seas in the calm of the storm lined the white walls. Personal photographs incased in a modern picture frame posed on a glass and metal end table that was placed under a window at the end of the hall. But, no picture or painting could ever, ever capture that chaos that they were feeling in England right now. No one could write out the words on a piece of paper, or a hundred pieces of paper. Helena hadn't seen anything, nor did Richard want her to. Her mind was fragile like the swan's neck in the painting. How it curled so its beak could touch its breast in a look of melancoly. One could see the loneliness in the way it hid it's face from the world, a realization of how deprived he was of the simple pleasures of company.
And Richard would not allow Helena to become that long swan, sitting and waiting for the simplest fact of knowing someone was there for her. Always. Is that what England was right now? That one swan? Surely, England's peers would come to their aid! It was inhuman to ignore them! Maybe they were frightened. They should be. They hadn't seen Barb charge at them with red eyes and beating hands. They hadn't heard the shrieks or the howls she, or the other chimps, emitted angrily. They hadn't felt the sheer pain from terror's dagger or the katauna of reality that picked at the raw skin. And they never would.
England was that swan. Perfectly contained in its own world away from everyone else. Its invisible walls were not the expensive frame Helena indulged in but the water that surrounded it.
"Bloody swan!" he cursed to himself.
A crash that came from what sounded to be their living room rang clear. It took a second for his body to turn rigid and another second for him to realize that if an infected persone came up the stairs, he would be a sitting duck. Or swan.
Enough about the swans! They are just birds!
Shaking his head to rid of his thoughts on his feathery nemesis, he went back to what he had come down here for. It wasn't to 'make sure everything was okay'. He had come for something else. Something that he would only understand the point of having. Perhaps Helena in due time. If time was on their side.