Hello everyone :D. I'm crossing my toes hoping the update will work just fine now. I've spent the whole day trying to access the internet but it seems that my Wifi is having some sort of trouble... *sigh* the perks of living in a remote village on the mountain side where thunderstorms hit everyday.
I'm excited as this chapter is one of the last coming before a series of chapters I'm thrilled about (not yet written, but the ideas have been there for SO long now!).
As always: thank you so much for the reviews. So long as this fandom lives, SANCTUARY IS NOT DEAD (I'm in denial, alright?).
"First, I've got to say you're brilliant. Not that I had any doubt about that. That being said – I'm offended." Nikola declared, holding the door for Helen to emerge out on the roof.
She threw him a questioning look while passing him, and he grinned at her.
"When did we stop sharing our toys?" He asked, raising an eyebrow, with that canine-showing smile Helen found ridiculously – and in those circumstances, annoyingly – appealing.
He was not in the least surprised that she had taken advantage of her little trip in the past to research a way of saving her daughter. He had found it somewhat odd, upon his arrival, not to find that young reminder of John and Helen's past history sauntering about the new sanctuary and threatening every living thing with guns twice her size – such a perfect mix of her parents, really. And out of sympathy, he had not broached the subject.
Had he ever imagined she would hijack one of the hard-drives the Praxian senate used to store the consciousness of all those they killed before they could be tried? Or that she would hack into her past self's electromagnetic shield to derive her daughter's energy and store it inside the said hard-drive? No. It was insane. Genius, but insane. Both qualities he admired in a woman.
If anything, it explained the weird energetic signatures he had found while checking the EM shield on that fateful night Ashley had teleported herself and her little mutant friends directly against the shield after almost killing her mother. It also could kind of explain that strange vision he had shared with Helen not two nights before. Although he failed to see where Ashley fitted in that event.
"It's all yours to study when we have recovered it." Helen promised.
"Wait, we ? Shouldn't you take it easy?" Will worried, gesturing at her stomach to remind her she was not in the best condition to fight an abnormal.
Helen looked daggers at her protégé.
"I'm pregnant, not impotent." She chided.
A look at Tesla sufficed to see the scientist would not even try to side with him on this one, so the young man gave up, looking towards Henry, whose expression seemed to say "Sorry dude, she never listens to me either.".
It forced Nikola's admiration that she was ready for some action while he would have gladly lain down somewhere and prayed for death to deliver him from his physical sufferings. Being 'pregnant' was making him love his own mother more for having gone through so much pain to bring him into this world.
Still, there were two things he couldn't resist – Helen, and the prospect of toying with a piece of advanced technology.
"Let's get moving. I'm afraid we don't have much time." Helen reminded them.
Henry gazed at his tablet, checking that the abnormal was still being held back by the door, and judging that said-door was not going to hold long, he pointed to the material he had brought with him.
"Your headphones are connected on a different channel than Declan's, so that you won't interfere. We'll be the only ones able to hear you. And I also brought stunners."
Helen nodded, taking the headset he was handing her with a grateful look.
"Good thinking. I hope we won't have to use them."
Nikola was not elated by having to wear one of those stupid items on his poor, sensitive ears, but he reluctantly took his headset, which he placed on his head, making a mental note that Helen would owe him one. Although, she might argue he owed her. Really, it all depended on whether they counted from 1871, 1943, her rudely interrupted conference in Rome, or the day she had decided to blow herself off the surface of the planet.
"Nikola?" Helen's voice came through his ear-bud when they were both equipped.
"All set." He confirmed. "These aren't so bad after all. I swear I can't even hear Bert and Ernie, which is nice for a change." He added, somewhat impressed.
He grinned when two exasperated looks turned to him to remind him that they could hear whatever disagreeable comment came out of his mouth.
"How do you plan on breaking through the window?" He inquired, remembering what he had heard about the bay windows being as good as unbreakable. He had given to the urge of checking that affirmation for himself, of course, being a man of science.
Helen reached for her gun, which she usually wore – out of habit more than necessity – on her thigh. When her fingers met with its solid absence, she cursed under her breath.
Of course, Nikola had surprised her before she could get settled at her desk that morning. She had not taken her Glock out of its locker.
It dawned on her that she would never have time to run to grab a weapon before the cassowary had quite destroyed her bedroom door, and possibly what was left of her daughter. However, a gun appeared in her visual field before she could think of anything crazy, and she stared at Will, incredulous.
He shrugged.
"I learned from the best." He mouthed, knowing his friend would have no problem reading on his lips.
Helen had a small, shaky laugh at that, taking the gun that felt warm to the touch after its sojourn under Will's shirt.
There was not a second to be lost, and she ran to the very edge of the roof, not stopping when that delirious feeling of being a step away from death seized her. She knew the building's every nook and cranny, and when she was confident she was right above her quarters, she aligned her side to the edge of the roof and crouched so that her right hand could reach down to approximate same level as the window of her room. She made sure her angle was right and fired once, twice, and a third time, aiming at the exact same point, hoping that her bullets would alter the solidity of the material.
By the third shot, Nikola had joined her, stretching his neck to watch the effectiveness of her technique.
"I bet you never thought you'd ever need to break in your own house when you chose the windows" he remarked when it was clear that the window was not giving in. "Let me?"
He asked, his palm turned upwards in that usual affected way he assumed when he had an idea.
Helen weighed the pros and cons of leaving the last three bullets to him, but she didn't have a choice, and she safely deposited the gun in his hand, praying he knew what he was doing.
Fast as lightning, Nikola emptied the magazine, with a precision that amazed him considering he had never been a good shot. As he had calculated, the window pane broke, leaving a triangle shaped opening that he supposed would be large enough to let them in, although not without a few cuts.
Helen bobbed her head at him, impressed.
"Maths, Helen. And some physics." He bragged. "But you're admittedly better with breathing targets." He conceded.
She smiled.
"Not that you'd know what you're talking about." She joked.
"Of course not" he cringed.
"Henry, I'll trust you'll hand us the stunners when we're down there." Helen instructed, turning to her youngest technician.
Henry nodded, bracing himself for the next part of the plan. He had seen her do some freaking dangerous things in the last twenty years he had spent with her, but he couldn't get used to seeing her dangling from the top of a five story building without feeling dizzy and sweating with fear.
Helen gripped the low wall, facing away from the emptiness waiting to swallow her, and hauled herself up, slowly coming to a halt, head down, straight as a T, her knuckles white. She took a big breath in, looking at the upside down landscape, and balanced her legs down, parallel to the ground far below her. She then pushed herself off the wall, hoping her legs would get enough energy to reach inside her room.
She landed barely a floor lower, crouching closer to the edge of her windowsill than she would have liked. Feeling pulled back into the nothingness, she gripped whatever she could, slashing her palm open on the broken window pane, and jumped to the floor, her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest and the pain coursing through her nerves.
Nikola followed, all vamped-out, and found her already emptying the content of her wooden chest to fish some kind of iron cube which was flashing a soft, baby blue light. He felt a rush of excitement at seeing the thing, but was distracted by vibrations coming from his right. He turned his head and had to fight a wave of panic. The door had just given in, and giant and very angry looking turkey stormed in. It looked as if it had not anticipated finding anyone there and for a few seconds, it stopped, looking as if it were thinking about what to do.
"Helen... We've got company." Nikola whispered, careful not to make any move that could be interpreted as a threat to the animal.
Helen retreated towards the window, walking backwards painstakingly slowly, holding her precious belonging against her stomach, not breaking eye-contact with her resident.
"Get out. I'm covering you." The physicist told her, claws ready to slash the cassowary into fillets for dinner.
His friend was opening her mouth to protest, saying that if he so much as scratched any one of the residents under her roof, she would personally take him to the SHU and lock him there. But she was cut by the cassowary's sudden move. It lowered its head to its chest, in what the cryptozoologist recognized to be the first step of a rumble that would shake them hard.
"Quick, behind the bed." She ordered, taking his upper arm to guide him to the ground, not caring about the shooting pain of contracting her injured limb nor about the awful blood stain she'd leave on Nikola's blazer.
They were half-way down to the floor when the cassowary was shaken by an electric current and fell down unconscious at their feet, revealing a boyish-looking woman of about thirty, standing in the doorway, stunner in hand.
"Just in the nick of time." She exclaimed with a proudish smile taking her headphones off to comb her fingers through her electric-blue hair.
"Jess! Perfect timing as always." Helen agreed, throwing her own material on her bed to kneel next to the cassowary and check its pulse.
"Magnus?! What the Hell were you doing here?" Came Declan's voice from the doorway.
She chose to ignore the question to focus on their next issue : what would they do with the abnormal? They had up to thirty minutes before it came back to its senses. They had no sound-proof habitat on hand and no way to turn the Praxian hard-drive off, or stop it from doing whatever it was doing to the cassowary.
"It's waking up already." She stated, testing the animal's reflexes gently.
Jeremiah, a tall, black man in his twenties stepped into the room, handing her an hypodermic gun.
She nodded her thanks and inserted the needle in the cassowary's flank without delaying.
"The sedative should give us an hour or two. Which is hardly enough to find a long-term solution to our problem." She explained, caressing the bird's feathers.
"Does it mean you've found the cause of this shenanigan?" Declan asked, uncrossing his arms.
"The only explanation I can find is that this device", she began, pointing to the hard-drive Nikola had picked up from her, "is emitting some sort of infra-sound. And I have no
idea how to stop it."
"I'm gonna go ahead and guess destroying it is not an option." Jess intervened, with what seemed to be a hint of disappointment hidden behind her thick Northern Irish accent.
"Wanna go ahead and try?" Nikola growled cynically.
If risking their lives to save that device was not enough of an indication that it had a strong value, Tesla's fierce protection of it added a special touch to the matter, and Jess had a side smile.
"Not that it would entirely erase the issue. We are bound to work with an increasing amount of Praxian technologies. And we have no way of checking each piece of equipment for infra or ultra sound emissions." Helen argued.
When she got back on her feet, she saw that Will and Henry had joined them, and were following the conversation from the hallway.
"We've got to find a solution." She ended.
Declan placed a hand on her shoulder, reassuringly.
"You won't. You need to get that hand stitched up. And you've done quite enough already – for someone who's taken a day off.
She would have protested, hadn't she seen Will's threatening stare.
After all, she had chosen to move three sanctuaries in one building precisely so that these kinds of crisis could be dealt with efficiently and with less stress. Enabling everyone to get more free time had also been one of the aims. Not that she felt less guilty about enjoying some "me" time.
"Are you absolutely sure?" She asked, not wishing to leave a friend to deal with such a matter on his own.
"You don't have the monopoly of making miracles happen." He confirmed with a hint of amusement. "I'll get a team to clean the mess, but I'm afraid you'll have to find another room for a couple of nights." He added, grimacing.
She turned to survey the state of the room. The door was shattered on the ground, splinters of wood mingling with shards of glass and spilled blood, and she wondered why she had even gone for the good old wooden double-door in the first place when designing her room. She winced when her eyes fell on the canopy bed. Two of the bullets she or
Nikola had fired had grazed the beautiful carvings of the mahogany bed posts. She guessed it would become a good story some day...
Oh, this? That's from the day your father and I decided to break into my bedroom through the window.
Later, in the infirmary
Nikola was torn between the urge to run to his lab and lock himself there to study the artifact that was still providing them with a blue light, and staying right where he was till Helen was stitched up, sure that no nerve or tendon was badly damaged, and ready to tell him everything about her little treasure.
So he was sitting on one of the available stools, turning the thing in his hands, Henry staring over his shoulder while Helen was examining her hand under a magnifying lamp light, her tools ready at hand.
The genius had to swat his apprentice's hand as it reached the hard-drive.
"Look but don't touch." He chided.
Henry's face darkened with hurt and his jaw contracted. He didn't open his mouth to protest, but he didn't have to. His eyes said everything there was to know. His sister was supposedly trapped in that, Nikola remembered. The vampire considered the artifact as a wonderful piece of engineering, something to be understood and mastered for the sake of knowledge and research. For Henry, it was all that, but it was also the materialization of something far more sentimental and gripping. And so he reverently gave it to him, nodding his defeat, and rose, sighing faintly before getting closer to Helen. He leaned on the desk, facing her above the metallic surface and looked at her hand through the magnifying glass that hanged between them.
"I thought the wound was deeper." He mused.
Helen nodded. That's what she had been thinking about too. She flexed her fingers again, carefully. It cost her no pain or difficulty, whereas she had felt herself on the verge of fainting when she had done that same move a mere half an hour before.
"Our fights are going to get way more interesting." He pointed out with a smirk.
She looked at him, amused, and contemplated what to do. She could stitch it. But if their supposition was right, her palm would heal on its own in no time.
"Don't get too excited, Nikola. It's likely that this accelerated healing process gets back to normal once the child is born." She explained.
She highly doubted that she was turning full sanguine vampiris. Not that she really had any wish to anyway.
Nikola pouted.
"And then what? You're back to being a mere mortal? Making a fuss about your hair getting whiter and finding a new line on your face?"
Henry's attention was snapped away from the device he was trying to decode, and he turned to look at where Helen and Nikola were facing each other, only to see his mother's face and her sorry smile as she caressed the genius' cheek as she had so often done to him when he was a small boy in need of reassurance.
"Doc? What is this about?" He asked, feeling his life was about to change more drastically than he had thought that morning upon waking up.
He was glad that the baby's father was Tesla. He had grown to appreciate the man, and had seen past his defenses and affected looks. He was an arguably good man. One who didn't need to kill people to feel at peace, and who wouldn't crush Helen's heart repeatedly. They would be the most atypical parents ever, but that could only be funny to see.
Too many cats out of the bag for one day, Nikola realized when Helen's peaceful traits were disturbed by a worried frown and the warmth of her hand had left his face.
He turned halfway to include Henry in the conversation.
"Our child is the vampire equivalent of AIDS. And I'm responsible for contaminating Helen." Nikola confessed.
Helen shook her head in exasperation, sighing.
"Nikola!" She reprimanded. "Will you once in your life stop chastising yourself? It takes two to conceive a child."
Henry waved.
"Hey-oh!" He intervened, not in the least interested in the details of the conception.
Helen shot him an apologizing look.
"The sanguine vampiris' population was regulated by their unique biology. Every pregnancy would take out on the child's same-sex parent's lifespan. My pregnancy is accelerating my aging process. That's how I'm sure the child is a girl." She explained softly.
Henry's face darkened with dread. She had to live. She had succeeded in creating the perfect place to go on with her mission of sheltering and studying abnormals, the perfect place to live and start a family. She had to watch his great-great-great-grand children play in the river, a fond smile and amused look plastered on her face, whispering to the memory of Henry Foss.
"I'm nearly two hundred and seventy five years old, and I look no more than ten years older than I was when we injected ourselves with the source blood." She reminded them both.
At that, Nikola's eyes roamed over her.
"Not even five." He corrected.
She raised an eyebrow.
"Flatterer. Anyway, I don't think having one child will rob my life of a thousand years. So I would appreciate it if you could forget about this, Henry, and keep it to yourself. Nikola and I are the only ones concerned with this change. No need to worry everyone."
Truly, Nikola would be the only one to deny her the right to die. Not that she would blame him. He would end up walking alone, the last of the Five, carrying his cross on frail shoulders.
She was really sorry for him. The curse was the worst thing she had had to live with. But knowing she was rid of it? That she would die some day, even though it would take her yet a few centuries to get there? She was grateful. She had lived her life to the fullest extent. She could die now and leave a newly up and running Sanctuary between good hands. Of course, she wasn't quite ready to die yet – She was curious to see Henry become a father, she was still trying to find a way to get Ashley back, and... Yes, she was starting to look forward to meeting Ashley's little sister. She had tons of questions begging to be answered – What would she look like? Would she look like her? Have blond curls and these Magnus-blue eyes? Or would she be more like Nikola? A full vampire, tall and lean with uncontrollable brown hair? Would she grow up to be mommy's or daddy's girl? Or totally independent? Would she be drawn to biology? Or physics? Electricity and magnetism? Sporty or totally bookish – and spending whole days with Archibald in the library? Or something else entirely? What kind of trouble would she and Henry's child brew up? How would Ashley react to meeting her? To not being the spoiled lone child any longer? Would the youngest look up to her sister? What kind of parent would Nikola be? She could imagine him well enough, but having a child had changed her so much that she knew it was useless to speculate.
Henry nodded, not completely comforted by Helen's apparent peace of mind.
She stared at him, as if trying to infuse him with her own state of mind, until she felt a cold finger reverently caress her injured palm, still lying open on the table. She turned her gaze to see Nikola lightly tracing the cut she had set up to stitch, and raised an eyebrow. Her hand was as good as new. There was no sign that she had indeed cut herself.
"Seems like I've got no excuse not to cook lunch." She commented, impressed by this new physical ability.
Henry bumped his fists against his forehead, suddenly remembering something.
"About lunch – Kate is coming by. And she's bringing cake."
Turns out I can't answer guests' reviews directly... So I'll do it here and now. To answer the last review I got :
"Isn't it HGH - human growth hormone?" - No, HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) is different from HGH. It is produced by the placenta, and therefore is the one we check in case of pregnancy. It's level gets quite high in the first 3 months.
"People can be pregnant the entire time without knowing" -... Yes, I know (I don't really know if that was a question or not? I'm confused)
"The fetus can't think for itself yet. It ain't hiding anything" -... Of course it isn't doing it consciously. Just like you don't have to focus about making your heart beat ;). Still, your body does things on its own.