A/N:This chapter has been chopped up and put together from several different versions of itself and then ironed over and smoothed out. Hopefully. I give up and am just going to post this now. I've been stuck on this and the last chapter for months now, and it's time to let go. I sincerely hope it works. Since we're on the subject of hoping, I hope you have a nice day and week and time, wherever you are!


The term of eidetic memory is derived from a greek word.

Eidos.

Which translates to „seen".

There have been hardly any proven medical cases of eidetic memory in the history of mankind, and the phenomenom in and of itself remains rather questionable in its very existence.

But then, you know, there are people like Daniel Tammet who have recited Pi down to its 22,514th digit in five hours or so.

People have always been suspicious of Myka as well, her keen eye for detail. Her ability to quote, years onward random phrases from books most had forgotten they even read at the time.

Her uncanny knack for languages.

And she has to admit, that it has been easier for her to be termed as some sort of savant, someone with mnestic superpowers, as Pete would put it.

Someone with a mild case of autism with an insular, extraordinary capacity for.. words.

Aspergers.

It would have explained all of the social awkwardness, the way she felt trapped inside a bubble of loneliness amidst people for most of her life.

It would simply have been a pathology, something she could be grateful for only having a mild case of.

A sickness.

Or maybe it was a miracle.

One of those cloaked ones that only revealed their blessings much later in life.

Myka clung to that thought, to the diagnosis, from the first moment she had heard of Asperger's and autism, which of course, had been rather early.

The thing was however, that nothing, whatsoever, was wrong with her.

Autism had gained wider media attention and more precise assessment tests had been generated and at some point Warren Bering had swallowed down his pride, seeing one of his girls the shining popular beauty queen, while the other was quiet and withdrawn, with little outlook on a happy and full life, and had taken Myka to a „Specialist".

Something was wrong with her, he knew, and he,too had heard of the phenomenom his daughter mentioned rarely, but implied often.

She had heard it mentioned by him first, actually, in a quiet argument their parents entertained in the bookshop after hours, assuming both of their daughters would be fast asleep.

And she had not forgotten the word.

The diagnosis.

The Specialist had been a man with a shock full of white hair and crinkles around his eyes that betrayed his kindness and his tendency to smile, and Myka who knew she was in the office of a shrink, arduously filled out all of the papers he provided her with and dilligently performed all of the tests.

There were boxes to cross and pictures to draw and questions to answer.

It had taken a while, but finally, after a week of evaluation, daughter and father were called back in to discuss the results.

„Mr. Bering ," the doctor had said in his calm and smooth voice,"the only unusual finding I was able to gather,has been,that your daughter is growing up in a book shop."

Her father had only raised his eyebrows at the other man, and Myka could almost sense his anger bubbling up and over into the room.

„Myka," the doctor continued and sent Myka a genuine smile that accentuated the wrinkles around his eyes,"is a perfectly healthy, intelligent young lady, with a deep love and appreciation of literature and mathematical and deductional skills are above average as well. She should not encounter any trouble getting into the college of her choice.", his eyes crinkled further, „unless she hits a rebellious streak in her teenage years, that is."

Myka could feel the weight that had settled upon her heart a very long time ago, suddenly grow wings and fly away, while another uneasiness grew in the pit of her stomach.

She wasn't sick.

But she was different, if this wasn't it.. what then? She was healthy and now, she was lacking a diagnosis.

Maybe it was something different then, but wouldn't the tests have shown that as well?

Her father spoke up as though his daughter wasn't even in the room.

„But she is spending too much time in her head, no friends. I'm worried about her future.", he said the last sentence quietly, and Myka realized, in that moment, that he did,actually, love her.

In his own way.

It was this moment that made her hold on for the years to come, when he would criticize the most inane things about her, she would only hear that last sentence, and it made everything bearable and remind her that whatever he said, it was out of love.

Nothing was wrong with her, but he was worried.

And he always would be.

The doctor pondered this over a bit, looking Myka over briefly.

„What about physical exercise? Some sport or other?" the authority on socially inepts queried musingly into the room, before addressing Myka directly.

„Is there some sport which you'd like to play?" he asked calmly, and before Myka could help herself, she blurted out,"Fencing!".

Warren Bering groaned, knowing his daughter was in her „French Period" at the time, and had finished Dumas' „The Three Musketeers" only recently, while the doctor allowed a smile to spread over the entirety of his face.

Of course the young bookworm would choose a solitary sport, a competitive one, no less.

But what amused him most, was that this 12 year old appreciated classical arts and forms, and whether she knew it or not, fencing would actually teach her rules of communication and conduct, and per the nature of the sport, force her to interact with others, and hone that interaction by necessity, at the pointy end of a blade.

It was perfect, really.

„Fencing it is,then." he smiled back at her, and turned to the father in the room." Of course only if that is alright with you, Mr. Bering ." he added almost as if on afterthought.

„Of course." Warren growled,not pleased that his daughter didn't pick a more available sport.

One that she could do at school and grow some friends there.

He wasn't expecting her to want to join the cheerleading team, like her sister did, but soccer,for example, would've been a reasonable choice.

But then, he had come here for advice, and he had been given advice, and he was good enough of a father,to know that it made no sense whatsoever to force your kids into an activity they did not enjoy.

So, fencing it was.

And it did teach her to crawl out of her shell on the mat and develop a brashness and quick creativeness that prove desastrous to her social interactions in college, but gold as a female agent in the Secret Service.

It would take an impossibly childish partner and a grumpy boss who genuienly cared for them both in a Warehouse full of endless wonder to finally dull the blade in the years to come.


It is very early morning and the soft light is fighting its way through the half drawn curtains.

But sleep has left her for a while already.

Of all the things Myka could be thinking about in this moment, she is thinking about her children's psychiatrist.

But she only thinks about him, because these days, whenever she isn't trying explicitly not to, she is thinking about her life.

Weird and unconnected little snippets, that suddenly reveal their magnitude in the shaping of her path.

So many things had changed back then, in that one day, with the doling out of a non-diagnosis.

So many things.

And so many things are about to change again.

She still loves fencing.

She still loves books to a fault.

And she still loves her father.

But she hasn't told him,yet, and she isn't sure whether it's from love or cowardice.

She hasn't told her sister either.

Maybe she will tell Tracy first.

Maybe not.

Conveying bad news over the phone is a big no,no that has been imprinted onto her since her first clinical exploration class in pre-med school, but Myka simply can't deal with flying out to Colorado right now.

Any member of her family coming by for a visit at the B&B is even more unfathomable.

And undesirable.

Maybe she will tell them after the surgery, when the dice have rolled and the stakes been set.

Maybe then.

It will give them a few more days of an unperturbed worry free life, that they are not even aware of, right now, while she is struggling with the words and the how to destroy it.

Myka feels her eyes drift again in contemplation.

The sun is drawing merry patterns of light onto the floor as she feels Helena stir beside her.

There would be a lot to tell.

Myka had never told her parents why exactly she had left the Warehouse when she had.

In all fairness:

She hadn't even dared to think it to herself at the time.

But the books..

The books had told her.

Of course there had been an acutely sharp ache every time HG Wells' name had crawled across her vision at the store.

It had spoken most of all of...betrayal.

She had suggested a new system for the books to her father at the time, who had been eerily compliant, and she had left the letters R through Z up to him to sort.

This had also meant having to give up browsing through her beloved Shakespeare and had landed her with Hemingway, that unfettered cynic.

She had never been too great a lover of his lack of scenery, his dullness, his voidness of emotion, which he only seemed to overcome for the sake of fishing or hunting.

Myka had meant to travel beyond Colorado in her books, and so, in her teenage years, she had preferred Ondaatje to take her on a trip to the Kilimanjaro mountain.

But in that dark time after the Warehouse, Ernest's tone and mood suited her just right.

She read "Fiesta", just because she never had.

And she read "For Whom the Bell Tolls", and gained a whole new appreciation for the man.

And after that "A Farewell to Arms", because that was what this was, wasn't it?

A Farewell to Arms?

Her gun, her badge, the Warehouse, but also..

The book tore at her.

"I'm not brave any more darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me."

Suddenly, in the darkness of the bookstore, it was Helena's voice in her head.

And it was Christina, lying mauled in a beautiful house in a picturesque valley, and Helena going back in time and trying to save her and failing.

Again and again.

"Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do."

And Myka felt the bile rise in her throat.

The pictures suddenly dancing in her mind did not belong to Italy, but South Dakota.

They were standing in Artie's office Helena and her, and Artie had known and warned her and Pete had guessed and been suspicious.

And she had known,too, in that deep unnameable recess of her being, that had led her out of pre-med and pre-law and pre everything else, and right into the Secret Service.

Instinct.

But she had wanted to be lied to.

She had wanted to be believe.

And that made all the difference in the end.

Lie to me.

So out of character for Myka Ophelia Bering, who was always best known for her string adherence to rules.

To rules and truth and literature.

To order.

But everything had changed.

Everything, because...

"When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me."

And Myka shut the pages of the book for a long time and leaned her head against the bookshelf named "H" at four in the morning and did not fall asleep.

"And you'll always love me won't you?"
"Yes."
"And the rain won't make any difference?"
No."

And the tragedy of it was...it didn't.

It really didn't.

It still didn't.

Myka had been happily lied to.

She had risked the world, willingly.

And what kind of Warehouse agent did that make her?

What kind of irresponsible,unreliable Warehouse agent did that make her?

Where was the difference between McPherson and herself who had risked the lives of thousands, of millions for their personal agenda?

What did it matter that her motive hadn't been money or power, but that she had let herself be willingly blinded by..by...that she had chosen to cling to misled hope instead of better knowledge?

It was time that Myka needed, time to empty half of her parents' wine cellar and reorganize three quarters of the bookstore.

Time to wander back over to Shakespeare and loose herself in between his pages.

And after even more of a while, after the anger had finally faded, in the middle of the day, while handing a book with a quote on it to a customer, Myka suddenly realized what kept tugging at her so consistently.

What hurt so unbearably much:

"Eternity was in our lips and eyes."

Helena had loved her back.

And she had trusted in that love to keep her safe, to keep the world safe, in between a gun and a trident.

And she had been, after all, right to trust in that, in her.

To trust in Helena, whom she had known better than she had known herself.

If only..if only..

They could have had that eternity.

If she wouldn't have been as broken...


Eternity.

The word mocks her now.

The wind brushes softly against the curtains and pours another game of light onto the floor and the white sheets of Myka's bed, tearing her form her thoughts.

There is a lot to forgive.

Helena's smell invades her nostrils and, as always, it makes her heart stop and splutter in happiness for a brief moment.

The agent sighs softly and shakes her head at herself.

She can't remember ever being in love like this before.

Not even as a teenager.

Indeed, she was more collected at the age of thirteen than she has been at the age of thirty.

When Helena walks into a room, it's like the sun has suddenly decided to rise indoors.

Everything gets brighter and warmer, and she feels impossibly alive.

It's almost as though a part of her is a dog, that yaps happily whenever its mistress gets home.

Including the abysmal memory of a dog's..

Or a magnet,that cannot help feeling so inevitably drawn towards its other half.

Its opposite.

And yet the same.

She sighs again.

But there is also a heaviness that she can't deny.

Must not deny.

Of course she understood her, when she saw Adelaide.

Of course she did.

There were Rebecca and Jack in whose shoes Pete and her had been walking, literally.

There had been these moments when she was wondering about the inevitable destiny the Warehouse held for her.

And she did, yes indeed, she too did dream of a white picket fence and a labrador mix and maybe a kid or two that she would drive to school in the mornings and burn dinner for at night.

Sometimes.

Rarely.

How much more prominent must these dreams have been for a woman, no matter how extraordinary, that was raised in Victorian times?

A woman who still felt the abyss of grief over her own, lost child?

Helena had been looking for normalcy in the midst of madness.

In the middle of a loud and crazy, brave new world.

And her brand of normalcy included a life far away from the Warehouse.

Far away from her.

Myka did understand that.

She still does.

But it still hurts like hell, to be refused like this.

It is better if her mind forces her body to remember that other feeling.

The very physical sensation of having a cold bucket of water dumped over herself.

Because that is how she felt when Nate suddenly appeared in the doorway after Helena had called her, and she hadn't heard from her in so long.

She, Myka Ophelia Bering had always been a very in control kind of person, but still up to these days, if she just reads the name of Helena's town on a map, tears rush into her eyes.

She must have looked the mess she felt then, too, because Pete kept trying to feed her his entire array of snacks on the way back to Univille and got her a package of Twizzlers, each and every single time they stopped for gas, which was surprisingly often.

No, she had been a mess, and she knew that Pete knew that she was a mess, and probably the why of it, too, but he knew, that she would slaughter him on the spot if he as much as alluded to it.

So Twizzlers it was, all the way to South Dakota.

It's great being so very in tune with your partner sometimes.

She glances over at the raven haired woman sleeping beside her.

It's horrible to be so in tune with your partner sometimes.

With a sigh she presses her head deeper into the pillow and stares up at the ceiling.

Despite the resolution her mind is very firmly set on holding on to, her heart sings in her chest, butterflies flutter nervously around her abdomen and give her a sense of nausea and dizziness.

It is better to get up then, Myka decides and scurries quietly to the bathroom in the hallway to brush her teeth, and well, hide for a little bit and collect her senses.

When she returns to her room, Helena has shifted only a little bit on the bed, and the taller Warehouse Agent quietly pads over to her dresser to and commences to lay out the clothes for the day.

She is still dressed in yesterday's outfit, minus the shoes and the socks.

It had been hard enough to haul a very exhausted Helena up the stairs, but the other woman had stubbornly refused to let go of her, which had finally led to their sleeping arrangement.

Thankfully, the inventor had released her iron hold sometime in her restless shifting throughout the night, but both of them had gotten rather stuck in their outfits from the previous day.

Myka's mind is still lingering on the evening as she begins to undo the upper most buttons of her blouse.

Her motion stills as she feels a warm palm through the thin cotton material come to rest on her right shoulder blade.

It's brethren settles on her left and Helena spreads her hands and allows their planes to map a parallel path down and over the expanse of the woman before her.

Myka bows her head at the gesture, butterflies and hearts and thoughts forgotten as her companion of the night takes a step closer and radiates the warmth that still clings to her from the bed.

The hands get lost somewhere, but return to settle lightly on each side of her throat, wide and warm and soft.

Helena's index fingers come to rest just behind her ears, while her thumbs caress the back of her neck, just before the shorter woman rests her forehead in the same space.

Myka, suddenly weak, clings to the wood in front of her.

But the author's hands travel outwards this time, brushing her shoulders briefly before gently encircling her upper arms and moving on to travel along her forearms, only to come to rest above the hands that are desperately holding on to the edge of the furniture as though Myka were about to drown.

"Helena", Myka whispers as her head falls back and her forehead comes to rest against the other woman's temple as Helena intertwines the fingers of their right hands.

"Shhh." the shorter woman only breathes at her, before her left hand begins to map out the details of Myka's face.

And Myka knows, what she is doing.

Because, in this they are quite different.

Helena, the inventor, the engineer's mind does not rely solely and strongly on visual input, like hers does, her mnesis has a strong haptic component to it.

Helena's hands are committing her to the memory of her skin.

And Myka knows she ought to protest, or feel saddened or outraged, but she finds herself strangely comforted and peaceful and the sensuality of the gesture is like a wind in her head that disperses all thought and intent.

She finally feels Helena draw both of their arms around her in a tight embrace, feels the other woman mold herself to her back, all of their fingers tightly intertwined and her eyes flutter shut at the sensation.

"Thank you for last night." the dark woman whispers against her jaw, and her breath strikes up goosebumps where it caresses the taller agent's throat.

They stay like this for a few heavy heartbeats and shallow breaths before Myka turns around and simply gives up and curls into the embrace of the woman in front of her.

The only person that knows her better than she does herself.