Author's Note: Consider yourselves lucky I chose not to make this a cliffhanger. I was tempted.
Side note- As a vampire, Nikola still has a heartbeat, right? For the purposes of this, he does, just because I think he does. :P And because I've seen him bleed, even if he doesn't die from it.
Disclaimer: I sort of wish I owned the characters and show, but I don't and they seem to be in capable hands.
Sanctum
-((-))-
Working
One of his hands was on the small of Helen's back, guiding her back upstairs at a sedate pace. They followed the path he had taken the night she had arrived, back to his lab upstairs. As he closed the door behind them, she glanced around.
"Not bad." She murmured.
"My lab is never anything but extraordinary." He said correctively, folding his arms. "Now, with a small adjustment to my new shielding, I believe I can make it easily transportable. Say, for two people to handle."
Helen picked up a glass bottle and swirled the contents. "Alright." She said gamely.
"The problem is, I need an extra pair of hands to do so." He'd realized soon after she had showed up at his door, after she was finally stable enough to leave alone for a minute or two, that he couldn't make his device work by himself. The reason he had been failing was because the charge had to be tuned to the right frequency and the connection adjusted at the same time the device was being finished and hooked to the power source. As genius as he was, he only had so many hands with which to work. He explained this to her, in part, and watched as her gaze grew decisive again.
That was his Helen. Give her a plan and an objective and all you really had to do was sit back and watch her go. It was like viewing a speeding locomotive. In no time, he was seated on the edge of a stool before the table, once again working the delicate wiring. Not far away, Helen was adjusting the wires to the power source. Suddenly, she yelped and pulled back, her fingers clacking together as she shook them hard and fast. "Bloody hell, Nikola. Did you replace the wiring?"
He couldn't help but smile at her. "You told me to, didn't you?"
"And?"
"Helen, why would I ever do anything but exactly what you tell me?" He honestly tried not to laugh but she was just so adorable, shaking her fingers free of the electrical charge and then sticking the tips in her mouth for a second. It wasn't that different from the early days of their working together. Her excitement over their experiments had given him an insight into what Helen must have been like as a child. She was never the repressible sort, but he'd wondered for a long time what had happened in her early years before they had met to dampen such spirits to nothing but the scientific arena.
"I agreed to help you with this only because I want to get out of here with my skin relatively intact." She continued, studiously ignoring what he had said. "If you aren't going to do your part-"
"I did do it! I swear." He shook his head, bending so the device was at his eyes level. "And I wouldn't have needed your help at all if you hadn't distracted me from my work. I would have been done and gone before they even got here. Just because this is a two person job, does not mean that it needed to be your... skillful little digits. That maid would have made a fine pair of extra hands."
She stopped long enough to give him a disgusted look at his innuendo. "Since when do you rob cradles, Nikola? She's practically still a child."
"Do I hear a note of jealousy, my dear?"
Her head jerked upward, that characteristic double-take that made his blood flow faster. He'd hit a nerve; how interesting. It appeared to be the same one that made her stiffen every time he did. He sometimes akinned the feeling of finding just the right thing to evoke that response to the thrill of the chase; something Helen was oh so good at provoking. It almost distracted him from hearing her next words.
"Please, she's almost catatonic right now with fear. I'd hardly call that something to be envious of. Whose to say that she even could have helped you. I'm having a hard time following this and I've known you for more than a century."
"What is so hard to understand? Right now, the 'bad guys' are outside, we're inside. When they get in here, we'll either be gone, or we'll die. If we finish this, we'll follow through on the first and more attractive option and you'll still have time to collect your furry little bunny's when we're done. Everybody wins. Well, at least everybody we care about winning, which is the two of us."
For a minute she simply worked on retuning the charge again, while he fiddled with the same wiring he had been struggling with when she had arrived.
"And this will help us accomplish that how?" She asked finally, looking at it skeptically.
"As I said-"
"Yes, a vague reference to your new shielding and transportation." She interrupted. "Just because you mumbled it when you dragged me up here, does not mean I understood what in the world you were talking about. I see nothing that would keep them from just following us."
"That's because for all your beauty and intelligence, dear, when it comes to non-medical situations, you lack my artistic vision."
"You mean the skewed view of your own superiority?"
"Now you're just being mean." He pouted at her.
"You asked for it." She shot back.
"The thing that will help us escape, is the same thing saving our lives right at this moment." He said, moving his tools back and forth as he spoke. "As you so astutely quoted, like-charged objects repel, opposite-charged objects attract. Right now, our shielding is charged by me, as is theirs, allowing us to repel them. However, once they switch off their shielding, it will automatically switch to the power source I created for them. All we have to do is get them to turn the shielding back on and presto, their stuck to the house like bugs to fly-paper."
"And this helps us, how exactly?" She asked incredulously.
"While they are stuck, we'll turn on our wonderful little personal shielding, which will repel us because..." He left it open for her to finish.
"We'll have shielding charged like the houses shield." Realization filled her cool blue eyes.
"Eureka! She can be taught." He grinned as she sent an affronted glare his way. "We leave the shielding on long enough to get away, then turn it off. Probably about as long as this power source will last anyway. Meanwhile, the house's shield reverts to the energy stored in the amber and we're home free."
"You thought this through for once, it seems." She grunted, her tone edged with a hint of appreciation. She was mildly delighted.
"Yeah, don't get used to it." He griped.
-((-))-