Character death in this chapter, but it's canon character death so it shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who's watched the show.
I thought about holding off on publishing this chapter until I had more written on the next one, but - screw it. Also, I'm cautiously hoping to have more time to write next week so hopefully the gap between this chapter and the next will be shorter than the gap between when I published chapters 8 and 9.
Thanks, again, to Hermitstull for beta-ing this chapter when I wasn't sure if it was coherent or fair to the characters. Shameless plug: her Warehouse 13 fic is amazing and you should read it if you haven't yet. It's all up on AO3, not much here.
"Did you hear her?! Did you hear it?!" Helena comes bounding into Charles's room, Christina on her hip.
Charles rubs his eyes and looks over from the manuscript on his desk.
"I didn't," he says.
Helena grins and bounces Christina on her hip. "Say it again, darling. Say it."
Christina blinks at her.
"Say 'mama,' Christina. Say 'mama,' just like you did before."
Christina, her fingers wedged deeply into her mouth, buries her face into her mother's shoulder.
"She said it, Charles! I promise she did!"
Charles smiles. "Perhaps we needn't rush her into speaking, hmm? Once she finds her words, we'll have the rest of our lives to hear them."
"Oh, pish," Helena says. "She will have her uncle's way with words, won't you, my darling girl? You'll be a storyteller, won't you?"
"She'll have her mother's way with words, too," Charles grins. He winks at Helena. "So—shall we write a novel?"
Helena shifts Christina higher in her arms and rolls her eyes. "Perhaps when the shrink ray is finished," she says.
/
Christina is three and big enough for her own room, her mother says. That's why she's moving things out of her extra room and that's why they're buying another bed.
Christina likes the bed, she likes the chest for her dolls and her toys and her rocking-horse and she likes the green-and-yellow paper on the walls. She starts most nights in her bed.
But the house is big and creaky and Christina doesn't like noises, she doesn't, so every night for the first fortnight she slides out of bed and wanders to Mama's room, where Mama is usually awake and wearing glass things over her eyes and moving her pieces around, but for Christina she stops, she smiles, she tucks Christina into mama's bed and then Christina falls asleep to the tinkling and scraping of her mama working on her things.
She wakes again, just a little, when the mattress moves and Mama climbs in; she turns down the lamp on the table and then curls herself around Christina so Christina feels small and warm and safe, like a badger in a den.
/
"My goodness, they grow up so fast," Helena says to Charles. "Everyone says it, of course, but now, to watch it happen…"
Christina is sitting on the floor of the drawing room, carefully lacing and tying her own shoes.
"Look, Mumma! Uncle Charles, look!" Christina leaps to her feet and lifts her skirt to show the lopsided but firm bows in her laces.
"How marvelous, darling!" Charles says. He bends over to scoop her up into his arms. He's less frightened of it, now, than he was when she was an infant and felt so very, very fragile. Helena reaches over and cradles her daughter's cheek. "Bravo, my darling," she says.
Christina wriggles down, exclaiming that she must go upstairs to show Sophie, and Charles watches as she climbs the stairs, one hand on the supporting rails of the bannister, one careful foot after the other.
"Sometimes I forget what she looked like as a baby," Helena says. "It saddens me."
The droop in her shoulders and voice seems more pronounced than it should be for such a small statement, Charles thinks, in passing. But he is used to this, with Helena, this unpredictability of emotions and reactions.
He doesn't expect it, though, when Helena straightens and swivels her head toward him, eyes gleaming with a faint mania. "I've an idea for our novel," she says.
/
Christina learns to sleep alone when her mother leaves for ten days with Mr. Wolcott and Mr. Crowley. The first night she climbs the stairs and sneaks into Sophie's room. Sophie is sitting at her table, writing something.
Sophie turns her head when the door opens and when her eyes settle on Christina, Christina feels herself blush.
"Well, come in," Sophie says, and Christina does, clutching her doll under one arm and bunching the material of her night-dress in the other.
"What's the matter, child?" Sophie asks. She leans forward and lifts Christina onto her lap. Christina curls against the fabric of Sophie's blue dress, playing with the fine lace trim along the collar, and says nothing.
"Are you frightened, downstairs?" Sophie asks.
Christina nods.
"You needn't be frightened," Sophie says.
Christina shrugs. She knows that, she does, but the house creaks, and without Mumma here, Sophie and Uncle Charles are so far away from her room.
"I'm going to tell you a secret, little one," Sophie says. "Whenever you're frightened, you need only hold up your hand, like this—" Sophie raises her hand, palm outward, fingers pointing up—"and say, 'I'm not afraid!'" and then nothing that frightens you can approach. Did you know that?"
Christina shakes her head against Sophie's chest and clutches her doll tighter.
"Try it with me," Sophie says. "Put your hand out."
Christina isn't sure about this, she isn't sure at all, but Sophie is never wrong about things, even less than Mumma. So she holds out her hand, just like Sophie had done.
"Good," Sophie says. "Now say, 'I'm not afraid!'"
"I'm not afraid," Christina whispers.
"No, no," Sophie says. She encourages Christina to sit up further, straighter. "Say it like you mean it."
"I'm not afraid," Christina says, louder this time.
Sophie smiles. "Good! Again."
"I'm not afraid!" Christina says.
And like magic, just a little – she starts to believe it.
"I'm not afraid!" she says again, louder still. And then, shouts: "I AM NOT AFRAID!"
She's smiling now, shouting it over and over, until Charles comes to the open door and inquires "What the dev—dickens is going on here?"
And Christina giggles at him, and Sophie says, "Perhaps it's best not to shout, hmm?"
Christina smiles, an leans close to hug Sophie before she slides down and runs to her uncle and wraps her arms around his thighs, her doll trapped between the two of them.
"Goodnight, pumpkin," he says, and he runs his hand over her head in the way she likes.
"G'night, Uncle Charles," she says, and grins at him, and begins the long walk downstairs to her bed.
/
Helena writes "Select Conversations with an Uncle" in the space of a month's time, while the Warehouse is quiet. She steps almost immediately into "The Time Machine." She is so engrossed in the process, Caturanga tells Sophie, that she has asked him to be put on reserve duty from the Warehouse for a month so she can finish her third tome, "The Wonderful Visit."
"I couldn't very well tell her no," he says, "though I do miss our chess games."
They are walking together in the park. Christina hikes alongside them in the grass, a tall stick in hand; periodically, she lifts her hand to shade her eyes and squints off to the distance.
"I'm looking for Morlocks!" she explains, when Caturanga asks.
"Look, over there! Across the pond!" Sophie points.
Christina yells, "I see them!" and takes off running.
Caturanga laughs. "I never thought I'd see you play along with a child like that, Sophie."
But Sophie isn't smiling as her eyes follow Christina across the grass. "I worry about her, Rajinder."
And Caturanga stops laughing. Sophie is a stern, serious woman—so unlike himself, in that regard—but there is a gravitas to her demeanor that surprises even him. "About Christina?" he asks. "Heavens, why? She seems a lovely girl."
But Sophie shakes her head. "About Helena," she says.
Caturanga sighs. "She is… yes."
"You haven't seen her, these past months," Sophie says. "There's a kind of obsession, a kind of mania that haunts her with this writing. For years, Charles tried to persuade her to write a novel with him, and she refused. And now she writes three, in sequence, on her own. I hear her late at night at her workbench, putting pieces of things together to see if they'll work as her story requires. A fortnight ago, upon the third day of her wearing the same dress, I went into her room and took her pen from her hand and insisted that she bathe and spend time with her daughter. You should have seen how she looked at me, Rajinder. I thought she might strike me."
Caturanga is surprised by the bile that rises in his throat. "She wouldn't—"
"I think she would, under the right circumstances. But she didn't."
Caturanga knows that she would. He has known Helena, now, for almost five years. What he would have said was She wouldn't dare, because she knows that, were she ever to harm Sophie, he would never forgive her for it.
He glances at Sophie in the corner of his eye. She is watching Christina, who, across the lawn, is wielding her stick like a sword, fighting off imaginary monsters.
"She needs to be drawn away," Sophie says. "Can you send her on one of your missions? Whatever artefact comes up next?"
Caturanga smiles a little at that, eyes sparkling. "I've just the event for her," he says.
Sophie smiles back. "You do, do you?"
Caturanga nods. "The upcoming World's Fair in Chicago is bound to be a hive of artefacts masquerading as new technology," he says. "And who better to separate the modern from the mad than our dearest artificer?"
"You're full of good ideas, Rajinder." Sophie smirks.
"I have them from time to time," Caturanga smiles. He offers her his arm, and with a tip of her head and a self-conscious smile, she takes it.
/
"But Mummy, I don't want you to go!" Christina sobs, arms wound around Helena's ribs, face pressed into her blouse.
"Darling," Helena murmurs, crouching down to her. "It will only be for one month's time, and I shall bring you a wonderful gift from America."
"I don't want a gift from Erica," Christina sniffs, "I want you to stay here."
"You shall have such a wonderful time with Sophie and Uncle, darling, you won't even know that I'm gone."
"I will! I will know!"
Helena looks up at Sophie with eyes tinged with desperation and Sophie can only shrug.
Helena winds her arms around Christina's thighs and lifts her to hold her in her arms. "You're far too grown for me to carry you like this," she huffs. "Come."
Sophie watches Helena carry Christina over to Agent Crowley, who is tucking his pocketbook into his coat after having sent their cases off with a valet. Crowley smiles indulgently at Christina, offering his hand to shake.
"I shall return your mother to you safely, Miss Wells," he says, smiling. "I promise it, most solemnly."
He is orange, when he looks at Christina: tender, indulgent. Fatherly, despite having met the girl only once or twice before, and Helena is mauve when she looks up at him. They do make a striking combination of colours and Sophie wonders, not for the first time, what might have become of them had Agent Crowley not been married when they met.
Half an hour later, when they boat's horn sounds and it slowly begins to chug away from the pier, Charles awkwardly holds a sobbing Christina in his arms while Sophie—who cannot, at her age, be expected to hold the weight of a five-year-old for any length of time—stands beside. Caturanga stands beside her.
"I don't understand what business Scotland Yard has interfering with affairs in America," Charles huffs.
"Confidential, my good man," Caturanga says, as he turns to walk to the cab stand, where they will take a hansom to the train. "Confidential."
/
The World's Fair is, on the whole, a delightful caper, Vincent thinks.
He and Helena enjoy themselves tremendously as they sneak and lie their way into backstage areas and discreetly test all kinds of devices, from small metal coils to long swaths of woven fabric, to see if they react with the neutralizer.
In their hotel, they pose as husband and wife, and they are free in their exchanges of nighttime intimacies—so free that he finds himself reluctant to leave the bed in the morning when she laughs at his diligence and tugs him back beneath the duvet—only to throw the duvet back and give him far more compelling reasons to stay there with her.
On their fifth night, Helena is taken, completely smitten, with a display of some electrical mechanism called "alternating current," developed by some Germanic export to the colonies named Tesla.
"We must test that device," Helena says, so they break into the showroom at midnight but find, to Helena's apparent shock, that nothing reacts with the neutralizer.
They should leave. There are security guards making rounds, and it won't do for them to be caught here, where their Scotland Yard badges will give them reprieve from legal action. But Helena is mystified, peering into the joints and crevices of the machine, hovering her fingers over its deactivated coils.
"Remarkable," she says.
"Helena—"
"Vincent, this is a feat of engineering that could change the face of new technology," she says, reverent.
"I'm sure, Helena, but the guards will be back any minute."
"I don't think you understand the magnitude of this genius," Helena says, circling the device again.
"And you can explain it all to me when we return to the hotel."
In the end, he tears her away by agreeing to leave her to meet with this Tesla fellow the following day, once they have completed their investigations.
He does not anticipate that she will not return, the following night, from that investigation, though she sends him a message the following morning at breakfast to say that she's all right.
She does not come home the following night, either, nor does he see her in the intervening day.
The day after that she meets him in the hotel for breakfast, under the querying and slightly judgmental gaze of the Maitre D'.
"What a fascinating fellow, Crowley, you must meet him!"
"I'm sure I must," Vincent huffs.
He reminds himself of the things she's said to him before—perfectly reasonable things. That he has a wife, and she has no husband. That he cannot expect exclusive commitment from her when he is unable to return it.
At Helena's insistence, they dine with Mr. Tesla that night, and Vincent is infuriated to see that Tesla is a handsome man, unmarried, a decade closer in age to Helena than he, himself, is, and clearly more able to converse with Helena on the scientific matters she so adores.
"Do you understand what this technology could do for our light pistols?" Helena says, enthusiastically, and Vincent says "Indeed," even though he hasn't the foggiest.
Tesla invites them both back to his temporary workshop that evening, after dinner, and Vincent, feeling more than slightly territorial, agrees. He gazes on, dreadfully bored, as the other two pore over the inner workings of a light pistol, gibbering on in nonsense words about electricity.
He snaps to attention when Tesla snips one of the inner wires of the device. "What the devil!" he exclaims. "Helena! We've only one of those, and it must be saved for an emergency!"
"Oh, don't be such a philistine, Vincent," Helena scoffs, "We shall improve upon the model."
Tesla digs in a drawer beneath the table and emerges with a soldering iron, then digs back down and emerges with a mask, and then another. "I've another pair of goggles somewhere, I think," he says, diving back into the box.
"Never mind," Vincent says, waving his hands dismissively. "I want no more part of this. I shall see you at the hotel, Helena?"
But his last few words are lost beneath the growl of the soldering iron, and Helena has already disappeared beneath her mask.
He doesn't see her that night at the hotel, nor the following day, nor the following night. The day after that, he finds himself sprinting through a Chicago alley after a bandit clutching what is clearly a pair of artifactual opera glasses when, out of nowhere, there is a flash of light and the fugitive falls to the ground.
"Hello, Vincent," Helena says, tucking her pistol back into her pocket.
Vincent pinches the bridge of his nose. "We've no way to re-charge that light pistol now, Helena, without Franklin's key. You'd best hope we don't need it."
"Vincent," Helena laughs, "Will you never learn? I've improved it." She pulls the device back out of her pocket and it looks similar to their pistol—but not the same. Its wiring is different, its metal components insulated differently. "I believe I shall call this version the Tesla, after the man who will recharge it for us in his workshop tonight."
Crowley is bending down to retrieve the opera glasses from the pocket of the unconscious man below them. Both cower from the sparks it emits as he neutralizes it. He squints at her as he slips the device into his own pocket. "You're jeopardizing our cover with every night you spend with him."
Helena laughs, haughtily. "Would you begrudge me this pleasure, Vincent? Would your wife begrudge me the company of an unmarried man?"
With no further words, she spins on her heel and walks away.
/
Crowley is near-infuriated when, two months later, he arrives at the Warehouse one morning to encounter Nicola Tesla chatting jovially with Caturanga and McGivens.
"Do we have a new Agent?" he asks, without greeting.
"No, no, not an agent," McGivens says boisterously, "A consultant, as it were. Mr. Tesla will be helping us to upgrade our pistols and will be installing one of his electrical recharge stations on the Warehouse floor. Now, where in heaven's name is-"
"Hello, gentlemen," Helena emerges from the door to the Warehouse stacks. "Nicola," she says, grinning, grasping his outstretched hand with both of hers.
Crowley can feel himself seething beneath the skin.
"You're off on a retrieval with Kipling today, Crowley," Caturanga says. "Agent Wells will be needed here, to work with Mr. Tesla."
Crowley snatches the file from Caturanga's outstretched hand and marches toward the door to the stacks. "Tell him to find me in the library," he says, without turning his head.
/
When Christina is old enough, she has lessons every day with her Uncle Charles.
"I will not subject my daughter to the schoolhouse," Helena says. "And you've nothing to do most days, anyway."
Charles can't quite argue with that.
Still, he resents it, just a little, when Christina, aged seven, bolts to the door the moment her mother returns from work and hollers, "Uncle Charles wants me to solve a problem that can't be solved."
Helena looks up at him as she unwinds her scarf, eyebrow cocked. "He does, does he?
"He wants me to subtract seven from five," Christina scowls, with a theatrical stamp of the foot.
Helena smiles at Charles knowingly before crouching down to the girl's level. "I think if it couldn't be solved, he wouldn't have asked you to solve it, now would he?"
"But you can't take seven from five when five is smaller than seven, Mumma. You can't."
Helena is level, today. She is calm, and in moments like this, Charles feels a great swell of pride for the odd little family they have built. She looks up at him and smiles, and then looks back at Christina. She pokes her daughter affectionately on the nose. "Every problem can be solved, darling," she says. "If you think you can't solve it, you must think about it differently. Now," she stands, hand outstretched to her daughter, "Come. Let's go help Sophie with supper."
/
"What do you think of summering in Paris this year, Sophie?"
Sophie furrows her eyebrow back at Helena. "Paris?"
"Oscar has a summer house where he likes to go with Bosey," Helena explains. "But his play is opening in June, and Bosey's away in July, so he's suggested we take a vacation."
Sophie settles a lid over the stew she's preparing and turns away from the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. "Will you take leave from the Warehouse?" she asks.
"I may be called away on occasional missions, but Caturanga agreed to relieve me of my in-house duties for a month's time." She grins. "I believe he may have been influenced by the fact that you, too, would be benefitting from this vacation?'
Sophie does not dignify this with a response. Instead, she says: "I think that Paris sounds lovely."
/
They have been in Paris only a week when a telegram arrives from Caturanga:
RETRIEVAL IN MARSEILLES STOP WELLS NEEDED STOP CROWLEY EN ROUTE
"We could all go to Marseilles," Helena says despondently to Sophie and Charles. "I hear it's lovely. You could take Christina to the beach!"
And that, at first, is the plan they make, but that very night, Christina takes ill with a fever. In the morning, Helena perches at the side of her bed, pressing her palm to her daughter's flushed forehead.
"We shall stay," Charles says, from the doorway. "You must go. Sophie will care for her and I'll be in touch with you via telegram and we can all rendez-vous in Marseilles as soon as she's recovered."
"Mumma," Christina whimpers, curling herself against Helena's thigh, "Mumma, don't go."
"I must, darling," Helena says, even as she bends to press her lips to Christina's crown. "And you must get better, and I shall see you in just a few days' time."
/
When Helena carries her valise to the door, she is burgundy with guilt and concern.
"It's but a child's fever," Sophie says. "She'll be mended in no time."
Helena nods, warily, before stepping down to the curb where her hansom awaits.
/
It's strange to be sick in a foreign place, Christina thinks. Sometimes she thinks she hears things, or sees things, that aren't there, just because her eyes are hot and dry and tired and this is not her bedroom from home.
But some things aren't strange. Sophie makes soup for her and tells her stories, like she always does when Christina is sick. And Uncle Charles comes in and makes her doll and her bear talk to one another in funny voices so that Christina always laughs.
Uncle Charles kisses her on the forehead and says, "I'm going to speak to the bookseller down the road. Would you like a new story to read, Poppet?"
"Yes!" Christina exclaims, because she always wants a new story, always.
After he leaves, Christina falls asleep again, curled around the doll her mother brought her from America last year.
She wakes up because there are strange noises. Strange, loud voices, men's voices, that are not Uncle Charles, coming from downstairs, and at first she thinks it's the same kind of strange noise she hears, sometimes, when she's ill.
But then there is the sound of feet on the stairs, of lots of feet on the stairs, and a voice, Sophie's voice, yells "Christina! Christina, darling!" and it's strange, it's so very very queer, because only Mumma calls her darling, and sometimes Uncle Charles, but never Sophie. So Christina stumbles out of bed and to the door of her bedroom, doll clutched tight to her chest, and she opens the door and sees Sophie and a man just there in the hall at the top of the stairs, and Sophie is fighting the man, she is fighting him and Christina is sad and amazed because Sophie never said, she never ever said she knew how to fight, but she is striking that man over and over with her hands and her feet and the man is ducking down, he's got his arms up like Sophie is really going to hurt him.
But then there's another man and he's got something in his hand—it's a poker, from the fireplace downstairs, and he lifts it and he swings it down and it hits Sophie in the back of the head all at once and Sophie stops fighting, she stops moving at all, she crumples to the floor like she might be dead.
And that's all Christina can handle. She can't stop herself. She is eight years old and Mumma is gone and Uncle Charles is away and Sophie isn't moving on the floor and Christina screams, she screams and sobs and that's when one of the men turns to her, turns with his big hands and his red, sweaty face and says, "Be quiet."
He's got a strange accent, because they're here in France and that only scares Christina more and she cries louder, harder.
"I said be quiet!" the man yells again, and they are walking toward her, the big man and the smaller one, behind, with the poker, and Sophie isn't moving.
Christina puts up her hand, like Sophie showed her, and says, as loud as she can, just like Sophie taught her when she was little: "I'm not afraid!"
"Stop shouting!" yells the man with the poker, pushing past the bigger one.
"I'm not afraid!" Christina says again, louder, her hand up, even though she is, she is so very, very afraid.
The man with the poker lifts it up above his head. "I said stop shouting!" he shouts.
"I'm not afraid!" Christina yells, as loud as she can, her voice breaking with the sobs she tries to push down.
The poker comes down.
/
It took four days for Helena and Vincent to find and retrieve Napoleon's stirrup. Tomorrow morning, they will board their train to Paris, where Helena will rejoin her family and Crowley will continue his trip home to London. Tonight, they take advantage of this rare time together, devoid of other responsibilities.
When, in the darkest hours of the night, there is a knock on their hotel room door, Vincent, highly occupied in other ways—the most pleasant of occupations, indeed—is disinclined to respond. He ignores it and leans down to kiss Helena again.
But the knock on the door comes again, louder.
"For heaven's sake, not now," Vincent bellows, because Helena is grinning up at him, trailing her fingertips down his chest, down his stomach—
The knock comes louder still. "Mr. Crowley," says a voice on the other side.
"Ignore it," Helena murmurs against the side of Vincent's neck, her leg coming up to hook over his hip.
But the infernal, incessant knocking is getting louder, and "Mr. Crowley!" the voice repeats, and with a groan of impatience and frustration Vincent heaves himself away from Helena, up to his feet, and reaches for his dressing gown.
"I'm coming!" he throws at the door as he tugs at his belt.
Helena has propped herself up on her side, blankets pulled just high enough for decency, and she pushes her hair behind her shoulder as she looks at him with sparkling eyes. "Do hurry up, Vincent," she says, in that delightfully throaty voice of hers, "I can barely stand to wait."
Vincent turns to her with the best glare he can muster before wheeling on his heel and marching to the door.
"What in heaven's name is the problem?" he growls, even before the door is fully open, before he can see the nervous, trembling uniformed boy standing with a telegram on a brass plate.
"Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, mais vous avez recu un message urgent,'" the boy says.
Vincent has a hard time imagining what message could possibly be more urgent than the woman lying in the bed not fifteen feet behind him, but he nods curtly fumbles in his dressing gown pocket for a few sous to place on the boy's tray as he picks up the card.
"Merci," he says.
"Leave it," Helena says, rolling toward him just so, so the duvet slides down her back. "It can wait."
He doesn't intend to look at it. He intends to thrust the note aside and ignore it until morning, but some sense of propriety, of professional responsibility, overtakes him—because what if there's an artifact, somewhere, hurting innocents?
He looks down at the words, and suddenly his feet are lead, his gut loaded with rocks, the floor falling out from under him. He freezes in the middle of the room.
"Come back, Vincent," Helena laughs.
But she can't laugh. She mustn't laugh. It's not funny. Nothing is funny.
Vincent swallows. He swallows again.
"Helena," he says. He takes one soft, quiet step toward her. "Helena, my love."
The smile on her face drops instantly, and he knows what he's done. "Love" is not a word he has used for her, with her, not ever.
"Vincent," she says, sitting up, the sheet held over her breasts as though she knows, she knows, that this is not what they should be doing right now. "Vincent. What's happened."
He walks to her. Sits beside her on the bed, close, but not so close that they touch, the telegram between his fingers, face-down on his knee.
"Helena—"
"You're frightening me, Vincent, what's wrong?"
She reaches for the telegram. He does not offer it, but nor does he resist her attempts to pull it from beneath his hand. He shifts closer to her, though, puts his arm around her waist, then shifts himself up and crooks his knee and tucks it behind her, braces her body as she reads the words that he will never un-see, addressed to him, not her, that shout in a mockery of capital letters and punctuation-less phrases:
BURGLARS AT HOUSE STOP SOPHIE IN HOSPITAL STOP CHRISTINA KILLED STOP PLEASE TELL HG COME AT ONCE
He holds her while she breathes, and breathes, and shakes. He holds her when she leans forward and vomits on the floor.
Things between Myka and Helena change after the trip to Maine.
They spend more time together, Myka and Helena.
They don't seek each other out. Not exactly. Myka never knocks on Helena's door, nor Helena on Myka's. But Myka will linger longer than is strictly necessary in the library, flipping through a book, until Helena wanders through and asks about it. And Myka begins to find that she more often runs into Helena in the hallway of the B & B, and that when it happens Helena is usually on her way to the kitchen to make tea and invites Myka to join her.
They talk about literature. They talk about science. Myka is especially fond of the days when Helena wants to reminisce; she tells stories of comparing tastes in men with Oscar Wilde, of bickering over editorial decisions with Charles, of learning chess and strategy from Caturanga, of learning parenting from Sophie.
She tells stories of taking Christina to the zoo, of making paper kites and flying them in Regent's Park, of playing with dolls and learning that Christina had developed some rather unorthodox understandings of what a family should look like.
Helena's tone drops, then. "I wasn't a good parent, Myka. I wasn't… I wasn't there."
That sentence, that idea, tweaks a nerve in Myka, who barks out, "Did you love her?"
They are sitting on the sofa, side-by-side, in the living room, and Helena is leaning forward with her elbows on her knees but she turns, now, to look at Myka, wide-eyed and more than a little defensive. "More than anything in the world. More than the world in its entirety."
Myka leans forward. "And did you tell her that?"
Helena blinks, her eybrows furrow, and she nods. "Whenever I could find an excuse to utter the words."
"And she knew it? She believed you."
Helena nods dumbly.
Myka shakes her head. "Then you weren't a bad parent."
"But Myka—"
And Myka is angry, almost inexplicably angry at what Helena's saying, what she's implying, because Myka knows a thing or two about really lousy parenting, and, god—
"Parents work, Helena," she growls. "Mothers work. Fathers work. Sometimes they can't be home as much as they'd like, but if your daughter knew you loved her, if she knew you would always love her, then you did something right. Very, very right."
And Helena is blinking widely back at her, now, fingers tight around her teacup, and she says, "This is about more than just my daughter."
Myka deflates like a pricked balloon and sags back against the sofa. "It's about you," she says quietly.
Helena leans forward and rests her fingertips lightly against Myka's knee. "And more than that, I suspect," she says.
The entire story comes pouring free: of a father who never laid a hand on her, in affection or in wrath, but would punish her for mistakes in alphabetizing books by dumping his rolodex onto the floor and telling Myka she couldn't eat dinner until the cards were back in perfect order. Who would insult her if he could hear the slightest sound of her footsteps climbing the stairs. Who mocked her for needing to keep her closet light on the night after she saw Arachnophobia for the first and only time at a friend's house. Who refused to let anybody help her—not her mother, not Tracy—when she was ten and sick with a bad flu and threw up in her bed in the middle of the night, because she's got to learn to make it to the toilet. And she's not sure why she's saying this, she's not sure why it's pouring out of her like lava, this story she's never even told Pete. She watches Helena's eyes grow closer and closer to black, watches her knuckles whiten against her knees.
Helena's mouth works soundlessly for a moment. Her eyes draw to Myka's as though a line connects them, an electrical wire sending pulses from one to the other. She says, "When my daughter was frightened of the nighttime creaking in our old house, she would crawl into bed with me. I never turned her away. Not once."
Myka swallows. "You were not a bad parent."
Helena tears her gaze away and draws it down to the pattern of the denim stretched over Myka's knees. Her mouth opens to speak but—
The front door crashes open and Pete comes in, stomping his feet on the mat in the entryway. "Man, oh man," he says, louder than is strictly necessary, "it is pouring out there, seriously, the driveway to the Warehouse is totally going to wash out tonight and we won't be able to get to work tomorrow."
Myka jolts, as if pulled from a dream, and calls back, "Wishful thinking, Lattimer."
But that night, Helena comes to Myka's door, and she knocks. And Myka lets her in.
"I fell in love with a girl," Helena blurts. "I fell in love with a girl and my father had me locked away for it."
It takes a moment for Helena's words to settle, to find their proper places in Myka's mind. But then Myka points to the armchair and the window seat and says, "Want to sit?"
Helena does.
Myka learns all about the Bethlem hospital, that night. About a woman named Christina Taylor and a doctor named Austin and about Charles Wells, whose name Helena caresses with her voice in a manner entirely different from the scornful way she spat it that time in London ("I was unfair to him," she says quietly. "He was wonderful and I was not.")
Later, when they are both exhausted, Myka stands first from where she's been perched in the window seat and she offers Helena a hand out of the armchair.
Those hands are still loosely connected when they have crossed the room and are standing near Myka's bedroom door.
"Myka," Helena breathes, her fingers squeezing just a little.
Her name breaks the spell. Myka drops Helena's fingers and steps back, coughing a little.
"Goodnight, H.G.," Myka says, with a slight, awkward bow, as she reaches for the doorknob.
Helena's eyes are dark and deep and open. Myka can see this even as she refuses to make eye contact.
"Goodnight," Helena says.
In bed, Myka will chastise herself for letting this happen (You held her hand, Bering?!) and for making it stop (You let it go, Bering?!) and she's worried she's made their friendship awkward but more than that she's worried that she may never hold that hand again.
But in the morning Helena is smiling and happy and hands Myka her coffee in the kitchen as though nothing happened.
They are assigned, along with Pete and Claudia, to filing duty, and Pete starts talking about moving in with Kelly.
"Many of my lovers were men," H.G. says, and the looks on both Pete's and Claudia's faces are priceless.
Sam used to tease Myka for being "hardwired to love being the only person in the room to know something before anybody else finds out." His teasing embarrassed her at the time but she has to admit, can't avoid admitting, that it's true—especially in moments like this.
"Way to make a scene, Helena," she teases, later.
But then Mrs. Frederic collapses, and starts speaking dead languages, and Myka, Pete, and Helena find themselves on a flight to Cairo.
They get three seats across on the leg from Rapid City to JFK and they spend it going over what they know about the case, about Warehouse 2, about their cover.
On the next leg, JFK-Cairo, they're on a bigger plane with two aisles and they're assigned two seats in one row, along the window, and one seat behind. Pete plops into the solo seat and promptly dozes off, sprawled across the empty seat beside him, because even he is smart enough to know that he's going to need to sleep before tackling the vast—and, if she's honest, terrifying—unknown that is Warehouse 2.
Myka is still breathing evenly, in and out. She swallows without choking, sits without fidgeting, but she's terrified.
Helena's hands fist the knees of her pants when the plane hits turbulence, her shoulders tightening like the string of a kite caught in a strong wind, and in some corner of Myka's mind it seems strangely backward, because, really, what's the point of being nervous about air turbulence when you're about to quite literally walk into the unknown?
While she's thinking about this, she's clearly not thinking about her actions, because when she glances down again she has reached over and tucked the tips of her fingers between Helena's curled thumb and her palm.
Helena looks at their touching hands, then up at Myka, and Myka swallows without choking, she breathes evenly, and she smiles.
Helena's fist loosens, and Myka's hand slips inside.
That's all Myka remembers before she falls asleep.
She's awoken by a gentle squeeze around those fingers, clammy now.
"Look, Myka," Helena says, gazing out the window.
Myka ducks her head and leans forward, leans into Helena's space and toward the plastic window and can't stop the gasp that emerges because it's the pyramids, the three pyramids of Giza but the sun is rising and cuts a diagonal slash of light across their surface, the pinkish-orange almost unearthly in its glow.
"Incredible," she breathes, and Myka nods. Helena's fingers are still wrapped around Myka's. Myka doesn't remove them.
/
Pete is frickin' exhausted.
He shut his eyes on the plane and tried to sleep, tried so hard to sleep. Really, like, Myka would have been proud if she could've seen that he never turned the in-seat entertainment unit on, not even once. He put his chair back and closed his eyes and tried so, so hard to sleep, but the best he managed to do was doze, sliding in and out for hours and hours and only really waking up when there was food or he needed to pee. But the vibes on the plane pulled him in so many different directions that he was convinced at least, like, four different times that the dropping feeling in his gut was the plane about to go down, and, really, who could sleep through that?
They are in a taxi, now, on the way to the hotel where they're going to drop their stuff before they head to the meeting site. He's in the front seat and the girls are in the back together and it doesn't exactly make him feel like a gentleman to keep putting them in the back of cars like this but somehow it makes things feel calmer, the nausea of vibes settles down.
He tilts his head a little to the right and he can see H.G. in the seat behind him, staring far out the window, and feels something pull in his diaphragm, like pulling back the band on a slingshot.
He turns his head the other way and sees Myka in the rearview mirror—not all of her, just half of her in the edge—and he can see her left eye (or, uh, her right, or whatever, because, you know, mirrors) angled toward H.G. for a fraction of a second before she notices him looking at her and meets his gaze in the reflection. She raises her eyebrows and inhales deeply and shrugs, like, whatcha gonna do, but also like, here we go, and the whole thing is very, very un-Myka-like. She settles back against her chair and turns to look out her own window, but Pete can read it in everything in her posture, her tension, that all she really wants to do is to turn her body to look back at H.G.
He drops his eyes back to the road in front of them. He should be surprised. He really should. It's not like Myka ever said anything about being into girls. She never said anything about into anyone other than Sam. And he's all for it, in general. If she ever said anything to him about it, he'd crack a joke about how hot they'd be together, because that's what he does. But underneath that, underneath all of that, he'd be really, really glad to see her open herself up to someone, to the possibility of something, again.
He just wishes—he really, really wishes—that H.G. didn't give him the heebie-jeebies every time she was within a thirty-foot radius of him and not within a ten-foot radius of Myka.
Which is why he tries to make sure she's within a ten-foot radius of Myka whenever possible, right now, because he doesn't need that kind of crap as he prepares to step into what sounds like basically an alternate dimension.
And now he thinks about Kelly. And how she's the first person he's opened himself up to since the divorce, since the sobriety, for anything beyond one-nighters or the occasional multi-night fling.
It took a long time to get to where he could trust himself not to fuck something up, and he knows Myka isn't there yet.
He glances back at the rearview and there's Myka's eye, angled toward H.G. again.
She doesn't trust herself yet.
He looks back to the sideview mirror to see H.G. still staring out her window.
Don't fuck this up, he thinks at her. Don't you dare fuck this up for her.
/
They're given side-by-side rooms on the third floor of a mid-range Cairo hotel.
Myka uses the key-card to open the lock and holds the door for Helena, who smiles and dips her head in a bow of thanks as she brushes past into the room. Myka follows her and the door clicks closed and there's something final about it, like the door made a decision.
Helena is crouched over her overnight bag at the foot of one of the beds and is digging through it with an energy that seems overwrought for the occasion, hands burrowing like a squirrel's paws, the skin of her face pulled tight across her bones and teeth.
Myka wants to go to her. Wants to put her hands on those hands, and say, stop. Run her fingers along that jaw, over that brow, and say, easy. Breathe. We're going to be okay. This is terrifying, what we're about to do, but we're going to survive it.
Instead, those fingers tighten around the handle of her suitcase, her index and middle fingers brushing the pad of her thumb.
She swallows hard and purposefully hoists her bag onto the luggage rack near the dresser. Her fingers, the same ones that had been touching Helena's hand on the plane, wrap around the zipper and draw it back. The "archaeologist's" clothes she'd packed—the boots, the cargo pants, the t-shirt—are all there on the top, and she bundles them into her arms and says "I'll take the bathroom" and then disappears behind the closed door.
Where she promptly collapses back against it. Damn it, Bering. She and Helena have changed in the same room at least a dozen times before, turning their backs on one another like teenagers in a locker room. She's even turned around a little too quickly, once or twice, and seen Helena's breast before Helena's fingers could fasten her shirt over it.
And now she's hiding in the bathroom.
She drops her clothes on the floor, including the heavy Frye boots, and resists the urge to kick them before putting them on. She almost allows herself the indulgence of fastidiously folding her clothing before exiting the bathroom, but Mrs. Frederic is in trouble, Mrs. Frederic is in mortal danger, and Myka needs to get ahold of herself and this middle-school crush before somebody gets hurt.
She stuffs her clothes from the plane under one arm and opens the door with the other, stepping blindly out—
-and into the wide-eyed, tensed-up body of Helena G. Wells.
Helena G. Wells who is still wearing her clothes from the flight, who is tugging nervously at her collar and her sleeves and smoothing the front of her pants, who is staring, mouth slightly agape, at Myka, with eyes that seem to have forgotten how to blink, who is breathing just slightly too fast—
"Myka," she says, beneath her breath. She twitches like a body electrified. Her arms cross over her torso, her hands fluttering down the opposite biceps, her fingers coming to dance against each other, then up, running through her hair, pushing it back. "Myka," she says, louder now, but thin, strained. "Myka, we mustn't go—I can't, Myka—dangerous, it's—Myka, you mustn't, this is terrible, it's—"
"Helena," Myka says. She brings her hands to Helena's shoulders, cups those shoulders in her palms and squeezes, a little, pressing down, pressing Helena's feet into the ground, the solid ground. "It's okay. This is terrifying. I know it's terrifying, but this is why you came back, right? To save the world?"
Helena has tugged the cuffs of her sleeves over the heels of her hands, crushing them into her palms with her fingers.
"And Mrs. Frederic," Myka continues, "We have to save Mrs. Frederic."
Helena's eyes flit from Myka's lips, as though she'd been reading them, to her eyes. "God, Irene," Helena says.
Myka smiles as gently as she can, loosening her grip on Helena's shoulders and sliding them down to rub her upper arms. "Yeah… Irene." It's weird to refer to her by her first name. "So we have to get going. Are you – will you be all right?"
Helena blinks at her once, twice. And the moment that follows is one that will follow Myka back to Colorado Springs, will haunt her for weeks, months.
Swiftly, too swiftly for Myka to process, Helena's hands move. One of her thumbs tucks into Myka's waistband at her hip, the other flies up to curl around the back of Myka's neck, and she steps forward and rises up onto her toes and presses her mouth to Myka's. It's a hard kiss at first, so that their lips are pressed together by their teeth, and then it softens and their heads both tip a little to the side, and their mouths open just enough and fire shoots through Myka when their tongues touch. And then Myka is backed against the counter inside the bathroom, and Helena has interwoven their legs and pressed their hips together and presses and devours hungrily at Myka's mouth and her hands flutter everywhere, her nails trail up Myka's arms and she squeezes Myka's shoulders and claws at her back and she feels frantic, too frantic, against Myka's body, but Myka—in what, she will later think, should have been the first sign that this thing with Helena was turning her into a different kind of person—Myka is too fully seduced, too fully confronted with what she had not known she wanted, her insides too tightly-wound, to act on the knowledge that even if this were a good time and place, Helena is not thinking clearly, and this should not be happening.
But when Helena's hand pulls from her spine, across her ribs and up to close possessively over Myka's breast—that, feeling, that delicious dropping sensation, is finally enough to jolt Myka to attention. She snakes her hands up between their bodies, lays her palms against Helena's chest, and pushes.
"No," she says, but it comes out like a gasp. She clears her throat and says it again more clearly: "No."
Helena licks her lips and blinks at her, her palms having slipped down Myka's arms to cup her elbows.
"Myka—" she says.
"Look at you," Myka rushes, "You're amped up and you're not thinking clearly and you don't know what you're—this isn't—" she swallows and steps back, dropping her hands to her sides and watching Helena's drop to her thighs, where they scrape along the fabric before coming to join one another by the buckle of her belt, fingers tangling and twisting.
"This wouldn't be right," Myka says. "We're both scared and high on adrenaline, and Mrs. Frederic is—" She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. "This—I need to go downstairs and meet Pete in the lobby. Get—get changed and we can—we'll talk about this after we get through today, okay?"
She drops her hands and looks down and turns on her heel and walks out.
She doesn't see Helena's eyes blacken, her jaw set, her face harden.
All she sees is the hotel room door. And then all she hears is that door closing behind her.
/
Pete is sipping coffee in the lobby when Myka approaches, wrapping her hair tie around the bottom of her braid while she walks.
"Where's H.G.? he asks.
"She's coming," Myka says, but she sounds a little too breathless for the question he just asked. "She's just changing her clothes."
He cocks an eyebrow at her. "Everything okay?"
"What? Yeah." She rolls her neck. "Yeah. I'm just—I'm a little nervous about this snag. Aren't you?"
Pete downs the dregs of his coffee like a liquor shot and sets the cup down on the counter beside him. Wordlessly, he holds his hand up between them and watches it shake with adrenaline.
"Come now, Pete, surely an old stack of Egyptian ruins isn't so frightening as to warrant a reaction like that?"
Pete hadn't heard hear her sneak up behind them and apparently Myka didn't, either, because they both wheel around like a ghost just tapped them on the shoulder. But it's only H.G., wearing some weird beige trenchcoat thing, smiling at them like they're about to head off to summer camp instead of almost-certain death.
He can feel Myka swallow beside him. She takes a step forward but it's slow, more tentative than Myka usually is when they're on a mission like this.
"Helena—are you—"
"Fine, Darling! Let's be off, shall we?" She spins on her heel and stomps off toward the door without waiting for an answer, and on cue the ground drops, shifts, tilts, and Pete's stomach twists itself tight as a wrung-out rag. He clutches at his gut before he can stop himself.
"Pete?"
Myka's hand on his shoulder gives him something to reach for, a way to ground himself, and he pries open his clenched-shut eyes to look over at her eyes, which are looking at him, concerned.
"I've had nothing but bad vibes since we got on the plane, Mykes," he says.
Myka swallows. "This whole mission is terrifying. I think I've had bad vibes."
Pete looks at her, really looks at her, the way she looks at him sometimes, like he can see more than what he's showing. And he sees there's more going on than she's saying, but he can't figure out what it is."
"Myka—"
"Are you coming?" Helena calls from the doorway.
Pete looks over at her, then back at Myka.
"Yeah," Myka calls back, but she's still looking at him, eyebrows pulled in toward each other. "Let's go?" she says, more quietly, to him.
Pete nods, and they follow H.G. out the door.
/
The right eye of Horus is the Eye of Ra, god of the sun, whose symbol brings protection and good health.
The left eye of Horus is the Eye of Thoth, god of the moon, who lords over the realms of knowledge and mediates the worlds of good and evil.
Warehouse 2 remembers: the Eye of Thoth is the most dangerous artifact within its walls.
To stare into the Eye of Thoth is to be confronted, at great force, with all that is good and evil in one's nature: the altruism and the selfishness, the euphoria and the grief, the peace and the rage. To stare into the Eye of Thoth is to suffer the brutal, powerful strength of one's most visceral impulses.
The Eye does not distinguish good people from bad. It may inspire good people to do bad things, or evil people to repent, but the Eye does not compel action. The Eye compels emotion, and that emotion compels action.
Some who stare into the Eye are overwhelmed with the desire to cling to their loved ones, to worship their deities, to apologize for their mistakes.
But some who stare into the Eye murder their neighbours or their relatives, set fire to their crops, slaughter their slaves, start devastating wars.
When Warehouse 2 shut itself down, buried itself within the earth, it sought to protect the world from the power of the Eye of Thoth.
Three visitors brought it back.
The Eye confronted Pete Lattimer with the depth of his fear of mortality and the extent of his capacity for love.
The Eye confronted Myka Bering with the depth of her own self-doubt and her desire to be accepted and respected.
The Eye confronted Helena Wells with the power of her unresolved grief, and the overwhelming weight of the idea that the world is unjust.
Helena Wells intended to use the Minoan Trident when she went into the bronze, unable to rescue her daughter.
She did not intend to use it when she befriended Myka Bering.
She intended to use it when she worked with James MacPherson.
She did not intend to use it when she saved the life of Claudia Donovan.
She intended to use it when she witnessed the plight of teenage prostitutes and addicts in Queens.
She did not intend to use it when she rescued Artie Nielsen from imprisonment in Russia.
She intended to use it when she was imprisoned in a doorless, windowless room by the Regents.
She did not intend to use it when she was reinstated as a Warehouse agent.
She intended to use it when she faced the repeated judgment and wrath of Artie, whose life she had saved.
She did not intend to use it when she laughed with Myka over lobster dinner in Maine.
She intended to use it when she learned of the mistreatment Myka had suffered at the hands of her own father.
When she pressed herself against Myka, pressed her lips against Myka's in a Cairo hotel room, she desperately hoped not to use it.
When Myka pushed her away, she feared she might not be able to stop herself.
When she illuminates the Eye of Thoth and stares into its blue, fiery depths, all hope is lost.
/
When Pete emerges from Warehouse 2, he is driven to, above all else, call Kelly, tell her he's okay, tell her how much she means to him.
When Myka emerges from Warehouse 2, she can think of almost nothing but the need to assuage her guilt, her sense of inadequacy
(the questions of how many things, how many hundreds of things, she could have done differently to have seen Helena, to have stopped her, before this could have happened).
/
There is no glee, no perverse joy, in causing destruction.
What there is is a profound sense of satisfaction.
A maniacal compact bent on destruction, delivered to a warm veterinarian who works toward healing, carries a satisfying sense of symmetry, nothing more.
There is something clean, concise, pearlescent about the complete destruction of the world.
/
The Eye of Ra is sometimes called Wadjet, which translates, literally, to "the green one," who rises like a cobra in protection of her people of the lower delta of the Nile.
The teachings of the Eye of Thoth reverberate through a woman in the Yellowstone caldera, who holds a trident in one hand and a gun in the other.
Perhaps the Eye of Thoth recognizes Wadjet in the green of the eyes that stare back from either side of the barrel of that gun. Perhaps it recognizes the Eye of Ra in the woman that rises up in protection of the people she serves.
Perhaps the Eye of Thoth and the Eye of Ra remember that they are both the eyes of Horus, two halves of the face of a single sky god.
Perhaps this is why a proud and devastated woman drops her weapons and collapses, sobbing, to the mud of the floor of a barely-dormant volcano.
Perhaps this is why a proud and devastated woman seizes those weapons and stumbles back, scarcely able to breathe, scarcely able to believe what she has done, as though she is the one responsible for the near-destruction of the earth.