If I were a boy
I think I could understand
How it feels to love a girl
I swear I'd be a better man.

Beyonce

I still did it.

Listened to her sleep, that is.

I felt guilty about it. Wrong. Dirty.

But the clocktower had been so... empty... without it being flooded with Helena's usual voluminous presence. Ever since Casey had moved in with her, the brunette had been spending less and less time harassing my television and raiding my kitchen and more with... her.

I needed the noise. I needed the sense of closeness I had lost.

They went grocery shopping together. They looked at furniture together. They went to clubs together. And maybe Helena didn't see it quite yet, but I was positive Casey had a crush on my best friend and was terribly, terrifyingly close to pursuing it.

It wouldn't have been so terrifying if I didn't think Helena likely of responding to Casey's advances. The brunette's life up until that point had been one long series of one-night encounters, but the truth was I had never seen Helena click with anyone as well as she did with Casey, male or female - and it was no secret that Helena was open to relationships of a more effeminate nature.

Had Helena ever even been on a date? I honestly couldn't recall a one.

I had never so much as considered the possibility of Helena settling down into a relationship before now. Not even when Reese was in the picture – the idea of it had just never seemed feasible.

The mere thought of losing her brought on the silly urge to hug myself.

This urge came often, so instead of embracing myself (which would have been truly pathetic, but perhaps slightly more healthy), I listened.

Every night was the night I told myself I would get to sleep on my own. Every night I proved weak, crawling out of bed and fetching the wireless headset, remotely activating the brunette's comms set and raising the sensitivity so that if it was late enough, Helena would be in bed and breathing softly. Calmly. Comfortingly.

I had fallen asleep with her, in her bed, listening to her sounds for a week while the clocktower was being swept for bugs and bombs. I had made breakfast, lunch and dinner with her, shared meals together, not to mention gone through every single Peter Jackson movie made within the past ten years together. I had almost forgotten how much I had loved spending time with her.

I couldn't quantify it as exactly quality time, however. It was more than that.

What the definition of 'more' was, I couldn't quite say.

It didn't matter. That time was over. I had to move on.

That evening I had snapped the headset in two and thrown the pieces into opposite corners of the Delphi platform.

That was how I ended up finding the device.

A tiny square of silver gleamed from between the pages of an old quantum physics textbook that had been gathering dust holding up one wobbly corner of the Delphi's backup server where the wheel had broken off some years ago.

At first glance I took it to be an iPod, perhaps belonging to Dinah, but in a millisecond I had dismissed the idea. What would something like that be doing back here? It must have been something placed by our messy intruder. Too thin to be a bomb. It bore no peripheral attachments, so it couldn't be collecting from Delphi. It had to be a bug.

A blazing, towering pyre of frustration lit inside my lungs as I sat scrutinizing the foreign object. It was too far down for me to reach in my chair, and the weight of the server would have made it impossible for me to gain proper leverage even if I did deign to lower myself to the dust-bunny ridden floor in an attempt to lift the heavy corner off of the textbook enough to slip the device from its pages.

I needed help.

Swallowing my pride I contacted Huntress over comms, feeling slightly guilty for waking her up from – based on her disoriented mumbles - what sounded like a deep sleep. Nevertheless, it didn't take more than a few minutes to plead Helena into wakefulness and have her on her way.

I reached to flick off the comm when I caught – Casey? – murmuring in the background.

*...Helena...?*

*Go back to sleep,* Helena told her.

I switched off the comm before I could hear any more.

I would ignore everything I just heard.

Helena wouldn't have expected me to hear that.

Normally I had it on normal volume, but I had pitched the microphone's sensitivity up ever since I had started relying on Helena's breathing to reach the elusive state of sleep.

Well that was that then, wasn't it?

Helena and Casey. Casey and Helena.

Good. Excellent.

If Helena had something steady, meaningful, promising then... well, good for her.

I was happy for her. Hadn't I always encouraged Helena to venture out into the dating world? To seek meaningful relationships?

"Barbara?"

"Dinah." I jerked my chair back from the dusty server. "I thought you were staying at Gabby's tonight, sweetheart."

Light blue eyes eyeballed me cautiously. "Are you okay, Barbara?"

"I, ah..." I had no idea of the answer to her question. "I'm okay. I was waiting for Helena to come help me with something – maybe something the intruder left behind. It would be safer for you to leave the clocktower before we decide to try and touch it."

Her eyes darted to where I was pointing.

"What? Barbara – I mean, uh maybe we should both leave," Dinah suggested hurriedly, eyes bugging. "We can let Helena check it out and if it looks like bad news she can make a jump for it. Okay? C'mon, let's -"

"I don't think it's a bomb, Dinah." Well, I hoped it wasn't in any case. "If the intruder wanted us dead he could have killed me and rigged the whole clock tower to blow as soon as the two of you had returned. If I had to guess I'd say it's some type of monitoring device."

Dinah stared at me, apparently contemplating my visage at length. "Should we, uh, be talking about the monitoring device if there's a monitoring device, Barbara?"

"What're they going to do, charge in here and take it back? We're in control Dinah." I swiveled my gaze back to the Delphi. "We're in complete control."

"Barbara..." Dinah edged closer into my peripheral vision, a small frown on her young face. "What's up? You look like someone just ran over your puppy."

Never try to fool a telepath.

"When I contacted Huntress about this," I admitted, struggling to keep myself from blushing, "I might have, ah... overheard something I shouldn't have on comms."

She nudged me encouragingly. "Like...?"

I looked away, scowling. "Like Helena and Casey..."

"Helena and Casey what?"

The word tasted rank in my mouth. "...together."

Her face scrunched perplexedly. "What do you mean together - oh. Together." Dinah's reaction was perhaps even more unexpected to me then my own. "No way – oh my god, like together together?" She pumped a fist. "Yes! I won. What exactly did you hear? No wait don't tell me, maybe I don't want to know," she said, looking suddenly bashful.

"Won? Won what?" I raised an eyebrow, instantly suspicious of the teenager.

Dinah winced, staring at me like she'd been caught doing something naughty. "Uh... nothing?"

"Dinah."

"Uh... a bet?"

Yes, the teenage suspicion meter was rating off the charts.

"Was that a statement or a question?"

"Uh... a statement?"

I removed my reading glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose exasperatedly. "What bet, Dinah, or do I even want to know?"

"Well..." the blonde hesitated, but as was her wont it was only for a moment before unleashing a missile silo of information. "Okay, me and Gabby sort of had this bet about who Helena was going to end up with, and of course I was totally like Casey, because I mean have you seen them together? They like already live together, and I could already sort of tell from visiting Hel at work that Casey soooo had a crush on her..."

Curiosity. I'd always known it would be my downfall one day.

"...Cause that one time, remember she was all like 'no I'm sort of a fan of Disturbed,' and then Casey was all..."

I deliberately threatened to castrate myself when I opened my mouth to beg the obvious question, how did Dinah get into a bar? My mouth promptly closed after that internal mental threat. There was no reason to make this experience any worse than it already was, after all.

"...So Gabby was all like 'put your money where your mouth is,' and so obviously I said 'you're on,' and she put fifty dollars down that Hel would end up with – er, someone else. So yeah."

A curse upon my inquiring mind, but the compulsion to investigate further was indomitable, especially where Helena was concerned. "Gabby thought Helena would end up with who? Reese?"

No, that didn't make any sense. Gabby had never even met Reese, much less knew Helena had any contact with the NGPD.

An awkward, strangled laugh emitted from the girl. "Funny you should ask..."

"Ugh," I made a small disgusted noise, jumping to the wrong conclusion. "Dick? No. Hel hates Dick." I paused, considering. "...Viscerally."

"Gabby bet on you."

"Well that's not -" I stopped. "That's – that's..."

That... no. Just... no. Right? No.

Helena... and me? Me and Helena?

"I know, right?" The blonde rushed out relievedly, apparently appeased by my obvious 'does not compute' expression. "Like where did she get that?"

Barbara and Helena. The names didn't even sound good together.

Helena and Barbara. That sounded even worse.

Dinah was rolling her eyes exaggeratedly. "Gabby has this insane conspiracy theory that you – ha! – you're secretly madly in love with Hel. Like, who could ever be in love with Helena? Well I guess now Casey," the teenager made a face and so did I, "but hey, maybe she'll change her mind after she see's Helena's stuffed animal graveyard – which you have to admit is pretty creepy. I mean, who gets that attached to -"

A long shadow flitted across the teenager's suddenly bright red face.

"Uh, Helena, hey!"

Helena – mysteriously materializing from around a large data bank – spared me a weary nod of acknowledgment before frowning at the blonde suspiciously. "One, hi. Two, there are only two stuffed animals buried there, and they were better friends to me than you are. They never returned my clothes with bullet holes in them or for that matter borrowed my clothes at all. Three, who would change their mind about what? And four, you two are acting awfully fucking calm standing around chatting right next to a bomb."

Dinah smirked at her smugly in response. "Logic, Huntress. Look it up in the dictionary, take notes, use it, live it. It's not a bomb. It's a monitoring device."

Helena stared at her, then me. "Uh... should we be talking about the monitoring device in front of the monitoring device?"

Dinah snorted as I rolled my eyes.

Me and... her... definitely not.

I felt the sudden urge to hug myself. As per usual, I did not.

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh,' he whispered. 'Yes, Piglet?' 'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw, 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'