Whew, got it done, and a little faster than I expected. Yesssss.
This chapter includes a pretty unorthodox pairing. The idea never occurred to me until I read "Pastimes More Suited To The Dark" by PhoenixFalls on AO3, and now I kind of love it in a "Screw you, canon!" kind of way.
I also forgot to mention last chapter that the idea of a Wolly/Steve pairing has been done before by Hermitstull in her WIP "Degenerate Into Fables," also on AO3, which you MUST read if you like Warehouse 13 sci-fi AUs.
Thank you so much to everyone who's read and enjoyed this and taken a few minutes to comment on it. Your thoughts and your notes have totally made my week.
The timing of Myka's promotion could not possibly be more perfect, because it forces her not to dwell, at least not during her working hours. She is still sad for a very long time. Months. Pete eventually finds a gentle way to suggest that maybe she should see some kind of therapist about it, and if Pete is suggesting therapy, that means there's really a problem, Myka knows. She gets a recommendation from Sam, who is the Archivist for Medicine now, for a Dr. Sinclair. She goes once a week for two months, and it helps.
Given enough time, healthy hearts do heal.
Pete is expecting his Archivist to retire within a couple of years, and Amanda is optimistic that hers will a few years after that, but they bite the bullet anyway and move out of the cubes and into a small house near Pete's mother's place. Myka's promotion brings her a better paycheck, but she stays in the cubes anyway, to save up enough to try to actually buy a place instead of renting one. She gets into her old habits of dating around, occasional flings, and short-lived relationships. She's not averse to the idea of something more serious, of course, but she isn't exactly looking for it, either.
But then, two and a half years after Helena left, Myka meets Leena.
Archivists are a notoriously incestuous bunch, figuratively speaking, dating and partnering with other Archivists and then having children who grow up to be Archivists as well. Myka's parents were a perfect example, though Tracy grew up to want absolutely nothing to do with the Archives, and instead trained and became a teacher. It's a joke on Terra that Archivists meet Archivists and beget more Archivists.
Leena is not an Archivist, she is a horticulturalist, and Myka wonders whether that's part of the reason that things are so much easier for them than they have ever been in any of Myka's attempts at relationships. Pete's mother, the Archivist for Agriculture, hosts a party, and Myka meets Leena there. Leena works closely with Mrs. Lattimer to apply the new science brought in by the Starlings, and to archive the new research that she conducts so that it can be given to the Starlings to share with other planets.
Myka meets Leena because they both go to the fridge at the same time for another bottle of chicha. Myka pulls two from the crate but she can't help eyeing a strange-looking yellowish fruit on the shelf below.
"What in the seven worlds is that?" Myka wonders. It's not an unusual thing, in the Lattimer house, for there to be strange foods in the fridge. Perk of the Agriculture gig, she supposes.
"Pomellon," Leena says. "They grow it in hydroponics on Essess, so we've just started to see if it will work here, too."
Myka palms the back of her neck and laughs. "Well, it looks like it's working!"
"It sure is," Leena smiles. She cocks an eyebrow gamely at Myka. "I grew that one."
"Really?" Myka's eyes widen in surprise.
Leena nods. "Really."
As Myka gets to know Leena better, she loses all surprise that Leena coaxed a plant to life on Terra that has only ever grown on a space station before. Leena could grow anything, Myka thinks, with those calm, warm hands and that patient demeanor. The plants would want to grow for her, for her easy laugh and even easier smiles. Leena invites Myka to see where she works, one day. As Myka follows her through the terrarium, as Myka watches those slender brown hands, smaller than her own, with gentle surety testing soil moisture and bark texture and leaf thickness and fruit ripeness, she is overwhelmed with the urge to touch, to hold, to run her own fingers over those hands which are surely callused on the pads and soft down the backs.
She tucks her hands into her pockets instead.
At the end of the row, Leena stops and turns around. "I guess it's less glamorous than an Archivist's life, but I love it."
Myka smiles. She looks up, through the glass, at the pink sky, and inhales deeply the rich air from all of these trees and plants. "It's easy to see why you love it so much," she says. "It's easy to see why it's the perfect place for you."
Leena tucks her chin down and looks up at Myka through her lashes, smiling, and Myka can't help but smile back. And then Leena rests her fingertips at the base of Myka's neck and lifts herself up on her toes and presses her lips against Myka's, and Myka is completely lost.
Myka and Leena fall into the kind of love that makes all their friends roll their eyes and make gagging noises at them. They can't be near each other without touching. Let them walk together into the kitchen to get a drink at a party and they'll disappear for fifteen minutes, but nobody will go to look for them because everyone knows perfectly well they'll find them making out against the edge of the sink.
Myka looks at Leena and her heart feels too big for her chest, and then Leena looks back and smiles at her and Myka turns giddy, almost overwhelmed by how lucky she feels to have this incredible woman all to herself.
Myka's mother and sister think Leena is undoubtedly the best thing ever to happen to Myka.
Pete just rolls his eyes at her, two weeks into the whole affair, and says, "Just figures that the hottest Starling in the history of Starlings didn't work out for you, so you went for the second-hottest woman in the history of Terra instead."
Myka punches him in the shoulder and arches an eyebrow at him. "Second-hottest?"
"Oh, come on, Mykes. Amanda's my girlfriend. Also, she hits harder than you do."
Myka and Leena have been together nine months when they agree to move into a house together. The place they choose is a five-minute walk from the bakery, and Myka brings stacks of novels and language texts and Leena fills it with potted plants and it becomes, very quickly, the happiest, the warmest, the most lovely place that Myka has ever lived. Leena can cook, which Myka appreciates because she never really got the hang of it, and Myka tidies, which Leena appreciates because it's easy for her to forget to put things away.
It takes about a year for the giddiness of the newly-in-love to begin to subside. But even once that passes they remain happy and good for each other. They bicker, sometimes, but they rarely truly argue. When they do, they do it poorly: Leena hates confrontation and will do whatever she can to defuse the situation, which frustrates Myka who feels like that will never resolve anything. But resolve things they do, eventually, every time.
Myka becomes so wrapped up in Leena that when Pete shows up on her doorstep, drunk and in tears, she is completely flabbergasted to learn that Amanda left him.
"We've been having issues for awhile," he says, and for the millionth time in her life, Myka berates herself for having been less a friend to him than he has been to her. She brings him into the house, and Leena brings him a glass of water and a plate of leftover dinner dumplings, and Myka rubs his back and lets him cry for as long as he needs to.
He falls asleep on the couch, his head on a throw pillow. Myka pulls a blanket over him and then goes to Leena in the kitchen, who is filling a canister to water her plants before bed. Myka comes up behind her, slips her arms around her waist, presses her body into that warmth and says, quietly, into the curls of Leena's hair: "Don't ever leave me."
Leena ducks her head to the side and then swivels it around, her lips reaching up for Myka's kiss.
"That's the plan," she says, smiling, after she pulls back.
Pete stays on their couch for a couple of weeks until he finds a small apartment he can afford to rent on his own.
"I just can't stand the idea of going back to a cube," he says. "Especially without you as my neighbor, Mykes."
Days blur into one another. Myka's mother is getting older, and thinking of retiring. Tracy marries the owner of the bakery and together they have a child.
Myka loves her job. She's good at it. She has a Junior Archivist of her own to oversee, now: a nineteen-year-old named Luke whom she hand-picked out of the local school, and they get along famously. Leena is full of new projects, new seeds to try to sprout at her terrarium. Myka begins to work on a novel in her spare time.
Myka blinks, it seems, and six years have passed since the last time Helena was on Terra, and for three of those years, Myka can honestly say she hasn't thought of her much.
(There have been moments. Manna-fruit twists always remind Myka of Helena. And after one awkward walk through the trees with Leena, Myka learns that she shouldn't go there anymore.)
But now there is only one year left before Helena and Will are scheduled to return. Myka laughs to herself to think about Will: he'll be younger than her, this trip, and she looks forward to ruffling his hair and calling him "pop" and teasing him about the whole thing.
A year out from the ship's return, Myka needs to begin to weed through the crates of material from the last time that ship visited. Working in an Archive is a Sisyphean task: there are always more crates to be logged and sorted than there is time to log and sort them. But the work needs to be done before the ship comes back, so she and Luke pull out the documents and the recordings and diligently settle in to sort them.
Myka is unprepared for how viscerally the sounds of these recordings throw her back in time. She hears the crackly Domish discs and remembers how, back then, she couldn't understand Domish, and she had though about how Christina could probably speak it. She hears an Illyrian speaking and thinks of Helena's joined hatred and need for that planet.
She is working through this endeavor for only a few weeks before she must admit to herself: she is thinking about Helena again.
She feels herself becoming quieter and more withdrawn when she is at home.
"You seem down," Leena notices. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Myka says, with false cheer, "I'm just… you know. Work."
Leena looks at her with skepticism.
After a month of this, Myka confides in Pete, who does a series of things.
First, he hugs her.
Then, he asks whether maybe she should schedule a couple more appointments with that shrink, to nip this thing in the bud before it starts to ruin her life.
Finally, he cautions: "If you let yourself get sucked in by her again, Mykes, I don't know how much patience I'm going to have. I know the heart wants what it wants, I get that, but at this point I've already picked you up twice after she's dropped you. You know what to expect from that woman."
Myka sighs. "I know."
"And you don't want to jeopardize this thing with Leena. She's so great for you."
"I know," Myka says.
Myka does make an appointment with Dr. Sinclair, and then another. They do a lot of talking about what she wants and what would make her happy.
It helped, five years ago. It's not helping so much now. Myka lies awake at night, thinking, and the only explanation she can come up with is that last time, she had been trying to move beyond the lingering effects of an event that was in her past, no matter how wondrous it had been at the time.
Now, she's trying to stop herself from wondering about the future, and it's so hard to convince oneself to ignore the fledgling pieces of, well, hope.
Because that's it, she realizes, with a burst of clarity. In less than a year, Helena will be back. And Helena will be 37 and Myka will be 34 and this is as close as they will come to meeting in the middle of their respective timelines.
Myka experiments: she lies flat on her back and stops fighting it. Eyes closed, lips slightly parted, she calls up memories of Helena's face, of her skin, of her laugh, of the way their bodies felt together. She calls up memories of the way Helena gasped when they climbed to the top of the hillcrest out past the Archives. She calls up memories of the way the bark grazed her cheek when she leaned forward to press a kiss to Helena's lips.
She thinks of all these things and is overwhelmed with a longing so powerful that it bubbles out of her in tears. She rolls over onto her side and curls herself around Leena's back, nuzzling into the hair at her nape. She feels Leena shift, and then roll back toward her: "Myka? Baby, what's wrong?"
Myka can only shake her head.
Leena rolls onto her back , half-tucked under Myka, and reaches up to touch her face. She says, "You haven't been yourself lately."
"I know," Myka admits.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Myka shakes her head.
A few weeks after that, Myka is home, dicing vegetables for dinner, when Leena lets herself in—a little behind schedule.
"I figured it out," Leena says to Myka's back.
"Hmm?"
"How weird you've been lately."
Myka sets the knife down on the cutting board and drops her head forward. "There's nothing weird about me," she says.
"Come on, Myka, denial doesn't suit you."
Without turning around, Myka can hear Leena going to the table and sitting at one of the chairs there.
"Leena—"
"It's been over a month since we last had sex," Leena says. "You rush off to work every morning instead of leaving with me like you used to. We don't go out. When you've got a free evening it seems like you come up with excuses to spend it with somebody else."
Myka palms the back of her neck. There's not much she can say to that. It's all true. It's all true.
"It's that Starling, isn't it. Your ex who wasn't really an ex, or whatever. She's coming back in a few months."
There's not much Myka can say to that, either.
Leena sighs. Myka can imagine the way she presses her fingers to her brow. "You're not denying it," Leena says. "I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing."
"I've been seeing a shrink," Myka says. Finally, now, she turns around and dares to look Leena in the eye. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry. But I know that what I have, for this woman, is a fatal attraction. That's it. Nothing more." Myka fists her fingers in her own hair and pulls. "But I can't figure out how to shake it. I'm trying so hard, but I can't."
Leena's gaze softens. She stands up and steps closer to Myka, and brings her fingers to Myka's cheek. "Thank you for telling me," she says. "I can't be here for you if I don't know what's going on."
Myka crumbles forward into Leena's arms. "I don't deserve you."
She feels Leena chuckle against the side of her head. "We'll see how things go on that one."
But despite Myka's efforts, despite Leena's patience, things don't improve. They come to a head when Myka forgets their four-year anniversary: she comes home, the next evening, to find Leena, in tears, moving potted plants into boxes.
"Wait, no," Myka says. "No no no. Please no."
"You knew this was coming, Myka," Leena says. "Don't pretend you didn't know."
Myka holds her hands out like she's trying to push back the wind. "I'll try harder. Give me another chance and I'll try harder."
"I think we've run out of chances." Leena straightens and walks across the room to stand in front of Myka, who is framed by the still-open front door. "You deserve to have someone you want more than anyone else," Leena says. "And I deserve not to be the second-best anyone settles for."
Myka is crying now, too, and shaking her head as though rattling her brain will somehow jolt this moment out of existence. "You're perfect for me, Leena," she says.
Leena nods. "We're perfect for each other. But that doesn't make us right for each other."
Six months before Helena's ship is due to return, Myka finds herself drunk on Pete's sofa, because she can't bear the thought of sleeping in her own bed knowing that Leena is staying at her mother's.
"I'm gonna get her back," Myka slurs. She rarely drinks and never to excess, but those carefully-crafted rules are gone out the window now.
Pete leans over and trades the bottle of chichia in Myka's hand for a glass of water. "Drink up," he says.
"I'm gonna get through Hel-Helena's next visit and I'm not gonna do anything stupid and when I've proved to ever'one I can do that, then I'm gonna find Leena and I'm gonna get her back," Myka pronounces, gesturing loosely at the empty air before her.
"Okay, buddy," Pete says, "But for now, I think we need you to get some sleep."
Leena contacts Myka a week later to ask about selling their house. Myka agrees, because when they fix things, they'll want a fresh start, she thinks. Somewhere without all that baggage. It sells easily, and Pete agrees to move out of his shoebox into a bigger place they can share as roommates.
Myka continues to see her therapist weekly.
"I have a thought," Dr. Sinclair, says, one day.
"Please," Myka says.
"You've been coming to me for months at this point. And you told me it's because you want to be better for Leena."
Myka palms the back of her neck and nods.
"But you don't talk about Leena. You talk about Helena. All the time."
"I know!" Myka groans. "I know. And that's the problem. Helena, she's got me in this grip. She never wanted to trap me there. I never wanted to be in this place. We both want each other to be happy."
"I'm going to put something out there, Myka, and feel free to tell me if it's inappropriate."
Myka tugs at her hair in frustration and nods.
"What if Leena's the one who's in the wrong?" Dr. Sinclair asks.
Myka does bristle at the suggestion. She has felt even more protective of Leena since Leena left her than she did when they were together. Which, she notes, seems to be something of a trend in the way she gives her love.
"We've all got the one who got away," Dr. Sinclair continues. "You were never unfaithful to Leena, were you? Or dishonest with her?"
Myka swallows and feels something thick in her throat, like mango juice. "I never cheated. I never even wanted to. And, I mean, I held things back a few times, about the way I was feeling, but—but I was scared, that's all."
Dr. Sinclair sits forward and puts her stylus and pad on the low table between them, and then bends forward, elbows on her knees, fingers steepled. "Committing to monogamy doesn't preclude a person from having feelings for other people, Myka. If you're being honest with me—and I've got a pretty good read that you are—you worked tirelessly to protect your commitment to Leena despite that pull. Had Leena stayed, she, too, would have experienced that at some point—feelings for someone different, someone new, and she would have had to grapple with them to honor her commitment to you."
Myka sags against the arm of her chair, grief and relief and anger and elation tugging her diaphragm in different directions. She breathes carefully through her nose for a long moment because she isn't sure what will come out—words, a sob, a laugh, a scream—if she opens her mouth.
Carefully, she says, "But—but—with Helena, it's not just feelings. It's so much bigger than that."
Dr. Sinclair sits up and tips her head to one side. "So you're in love," she says.
Myka's head drops into her hands as she feels a thousand different emotions coursing through her body in tremors.
"I can't be in love with her," Myka says. "I can't."
Dr. Sinclair smiles knowingly. "Believe me, I know a few things about loving someone you really wish you could just get over. But the heart doesn't work that way. You might as well look at a rock and yell at it because it isn't made of choco."
Myka is crying. Myka is so, so tired of crying over this.
"You can't convince yourself not to love her, Myka," Dr. Sinclair says gently. "What you can do is figure out how to live with that love."
Step one, Myka decides, is not to watch Helena's ship land. Fewer and fewer people go, these days, especially if they're not Archivists. Myka will be missed, and Artie will yell at her and probably issue demerits. But she'll deal with that when the time comes, she thinks. She'll tell him she got food poisoning or something.
She's confident: the key is to just… not see Helena.
It's only a month. She can avoid somebody for a month. She'll need to avoid the Starling housing, and choose her routes carefully through the Archives, but she can do it.
She goes to Agriculture, that first day, to find Will, and she's not quite prepared for how young he looks. His grin, when he sees her, is almost child-like.
"Let me take you for dinner?" she asks him.
He smiles. "Your Claudia has already commandeered my Steve's time, so yes, I am free tonight."
"So," he says, as they scan their menus, "How is my dearest darling baby girl doing?"
Myka chuckles. "Keep that up and you can pay for your own dinner."
It's good to catch up. Will and Steve are blissfully happy, it seems. Myka gives a brief outline of what's happened, for her, in the previous seven years; she mentions Leena but doesn't go into details, and talks about how she and Pete are roommates now, in an apartment not far away.
She doesn't mention Helena, and hopes he'll take the hint.
He does, but not in the direction she'd hoped he would.
"She's desperate to see you, you know."
"Will—"
"She'll understand if you don't want to see her. She told me so herself. She's been miserable, these past months, and given how much longer you've lived with that she expects you to be angry—"
"Will," Myka says, louder now, and his jaw snaps shut. "I'm not angry with her. I'm… frustrated with the situation, and with everything I've lost because of it. It's nobody's fault." She sighs, pushes her hair back from her face. "I've had to work really hard to get to be as close to okay as I am right now, and I can't upset that."
The waiter arrives then to take their orders, and they talk about other things: developments in languages, new fruits that may be coming to Terra from other worlds, and the like. When the check comes, Myka provides her credentials.
"Thanks, kiddo," Will says with a laugh.
He holds the door for her as they step out into the road. As they turn to begin their walk back to the Archives, Will says: "Okay, listen, I'm going to bring this up one more time, and I want to ask you to please just hear me out and then we never need to speak of it again, okay?"
Myka groans and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Fine. Okay."
She feels him swallow and square his shoulders beside her. "This may seem strange for me to say, but in all of the seven worlds, the only person as important to me as you is Steve."
Myka feels her throat thicken. They don't talk this way. It's an admission she's never asked for, from him, but she is surprised at how good it is to hear.
"I regret every day that I was never a father to you," he says, "even though you've so very clearly done well for yourself without me. I'm still not sure that my decision to listen to you was the right one, when you were thirteen and asked me to leave—"
Myka opens her mouth to respond, but Will charges through: "—and perhaps, one day soon, we can have an adult conversation about that but my concern for the moment is a different one."
Trying to follow this conversation feels a little like having a rope tied to her wrist, tugging in every direction, Myka thinks. She crosses her arms in front of her, tucking her hands in against her sides. "All right," she says.
Will pushes his fists into his pockets and shrugs his coat a little higher on his shoulders. "You and Steve are tied for number one for me, which means that H.G. can't possibly be higher than number three. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
It's a little juvenile, the way he's assigning numbers to people, but she understands the purpose behind it. "Yeah."
"I was furious with her when she took up with you. I don't know if you new that."
Now it's Myka's turn to laugh, and to nudge him with her elbow. "I heard you two arguing when I came to your place for dinner that time," she says.
Will groans. "I'm sorry. Our timing for that conversation definitely wasn't ideal. But at least you know, then, that your happiness is what I held dearest, even then."
This kind of familial sentimentalism is foreign, to Myka. Myka and her mother are close, Myka and her sister are even closer, but they don't talk like this, about priorities and happiness.
Beside her, Will swallows hard, again. "I ask you to keep that in mind when you hear what I'm about to say next."
Myka's smile falters.
"Please see her," Will says.
Now Myka's smile is gone.
"Just once. You needn't do it more than once if it goes badly. But you mean more to her than I knew when we were here before."
Their footsteps, falling in rhythm along the road, beat a steady passage of time. Myka and Will are silent until they reach the gate of the Archives.
"I won't be upset if you refuse," Will says. "But please, think about it, at least?"
Myka has no intention of doing any such thing, but Will is a good man, and she can tell his request comes from a good place, so she says, "I'll think about it."
Myka is at home, the following evening, when there's a knock on her door. The curtain is drawn across the window and she peeks past it and sure enough it's Helena. Everything in Myka's body reaches out to her; it's all she can do not to throw the door open and press her mouth to Helena's without even a greeting.
Pete emerges from the kitchen, eyebrows raised to see the door still closed.
Myka points to herself, raises her eyebrows and shakes her head, mouthing I'm not here.
Pete's eyes widen and he nods. He opens the door, smiles at Helena, shrugs, and says, "No, she's not home. I'm not sure where she is."
In the gap in the curtain, Myka watches Helena disappear down the walk, shoulders slouched.
Two days after that, karma catches up: they bump into each other, literally, at the lavatory in the Archives, Myka on her way out as Helena is on her way in. They collide forcefully, foreheads bouncing back, and both stand there, dazed, clutching at their skulls.
It's not lost on Myka that there are at least two lavatories closer to Engineering than this one.
"Myka," Helena says, and it's almost enough to turn Myka's knees to liquid. She looks down, and to the side.
"You've become a difficult person to track down," Helena says. "One would think—one would think you didn't want to be found."
Myka lets out a dry laugh. "One would think correctly," she says.
Helena drops her head. "I understand," she says, with a nod. "Well—" she steps back, holding the door open, and waves Myka through with a flourish.
As she steps by, Myka is struck, suddenly, by the fact that Helena, who looks almost the same as she has always looked, truly looks like a peer. She's no longer older than Myka is.
Myka tries to imagine what it would feel like to be her own age and have already raised, and lost, a child.
She lets out a shuddering breath and turns down the hallway—
"Myka!"
-and spins on her heel.
Helena is still standing there, door propped open against her foot, wringing her hands between one another. She is still thin, Myka thinks; she never recovered fully from the weight she lost when Christina died. Which, she reasons, was only a little over two years ago, for her. Myka waits.
"I know you've had many years to move past me," Helena says, "so perhaps this is an inappropriate request from someone who is still—still working on that."
Myka can't hold Helena's gaze any longer. She looks down and palms the back of her neck.
"Would you join me for a walk this evening?" Helena asks. Her voice makes a creaking sound, like the branch of a tree under the weight of a person's body, and she has never heard Helena sound vulnerable before. Helena is always so neatly-assembled, so assertive and powerful. When Myka looks up again, Helena looks a hair's breadth from dropping to her knees and begging.
Spending time with Helena will hurt, Myka knows, but watching her beg would hurt more.
"A walk," Myka echoes. She takes a deep breath and releases it through pursed lips. "Sure."
A warm, if tentative, grin pulls across Helena's lips. "Aces," she says. "Shall we meet at the gates at the end of the workday?"
Myka nods.
Helena is waiting when Myka emerges. She's got a bag slung over her shoulder. Myka can feel it already: the impulse to touch, to hold. She drives her fists deep into her pocket.
They stroll aimlessly in silence for some time.
"Tell me about yourself," Helena says. "What's new, these past few years?"
Myka shrugs. "Not much."
"Your living situation has changed."
"Yeah." Myka doesn't want to deliver a baldfaced lie, so she says, "I know you stopped by."
Helena nods. "Are you and Pete…?"
Myka can't help but laugh, louder than she intends to. "No, no. We're just a couple of bachelors sharing a pad," she says.
They walk in silence a little while longer. When Helena speaks again, it's tentative: "Have you… anyone… in your life, then, these days?"
"That's a bit of a loaded question, isn't it?"
Helena shifts her bag higher on her shoulder. "I don't mean it to be."
But maybe this is the way to end this awkwardness. Perhaps this is the opening. So Myka says, "I was with someone for a few years. She left me because I couldn't get over you."
"Myka—"
"I'm working on it," Myka says. "I'm still hoping to patch things up with her."
In her peripheral vision, Myka sees Helena tug her jacket collar closer to her neck. Abruptly, she grabs Myka by the sleeve and makes a sharp u-turn.
"H.G.?"
"Humor me, darling, please?" Again, that faint note of desperation that Myka can tell she's working hard to subdue. They aren't strolling anymore: Helena walks with such determination that Myka struggles a little to keep up, despite her longer legs. They turn one corner, and then another, and quickly Myka comes to realize that they're headed for the trees.
The tree that had been theirs, and that had been Myka's and Christina's before that, is enormous, now. Myka's arms will not reach around it.
"I'm really not up for a climb today, Helena," Myka says, as they stop before it.
"That's fine," Helena says. She sets her bag carefully on the floor, and then lowers herself to the ground beside it. "Sit with me."
All Myka wants is for Helena to make sense, for once: to be direct and purposeful and just say what she's thinking, without games or intrigue or poorly-made assumptions. A growl of frustration tears out of her throat and she steps back, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"What is this, Helena?" she asks, and now she's the one who's begging. "I am so, so tired of feeling like a drifting ship in space when it comes to you."
Helena leaps to her feet and reaches for Myka, pulling her hands back just before she would touch Myka's arms. "All right. I'm sorry. All right," she says.
She bends down and opens the drawstring of her bag. She pulls out another, smaller, decorative bag, and then opens the tie on that. The object she pulls out is cylindrical and ornate, fitting easily in Helena's two hands.
"I fell in love with an Earthling, once, ten years ago," Helena says, clutching the object to her chest. "But it wasn't until after I had left the planet that I discovered I was pregnant. Christina was born on our ship, between planets. I was so excited to bring her back to Earth, and I was prepared, so fully prepared, to stay there with him, to have a family with him."
Myka inhales deeply, shakily, and wraps her arms around herself.
"But when I returned," Helena continues, "He had a wife. A wife. Earth clung to that strange tradition of 'marriage' so much longer than anyone else." She swallows. "And they had two children, two and four years old. And Christina, conceived before either of them, was only an infant.
"I was heartbroken, but I decided to leave him to his happiness, and to make my own with my daughter. I never told him that he was her father," she says.
"What happened to him?" Myka asks.
"He lived out his life happily, as far as I know. He's long gone, now. His children have great-grandchildren." Helena tips her head back, looks at the pink sky. "I lived for Christina. She was greater to me than all of the seven worlds and any future worlds still to discover. My entire universe."
She is turning the cylinder in her hands, against her chest, the slow movement polishing it against her shirt front.
"She always hated to travel," Helena says, looking down again. "That was the only thing. Most of our children are happy with our nomadic life, because it's all they've ever known. But Christina wanted to stop. She loved Earth, and Domus, and Chthon, and here, and every time we'd stop at those planets she would ask me if we could stay. And if I'd listened—stars, if I'd only given her what she asked, I might," her voice breaks, "I might still have her."
"Let's sit, Helena," Myka says softly.
Helena nods and gropes behind herself for the tree trunk, bracing her hand against it as she lowers herself to the ground. Myka sits leaning against the next tree, facing Helena.
"After—after she died, I knew I didn't want her to have to travel with me forever. I knew I needed to let her rest somewhere, as she had always wanted to do. I wasn't in my right mind, when I let them entomb her on Illyria. I couldn't think, couldn't process. I couldn't make decisions. You can't imagine how I was, Myka. I hope to the seven worlds that I am never like that again, and that you need never experience anything like it yourself."
She bends down, now, and presses her lips to the cylinder, and suddenly, with a catch of breath Myka understands what Helena is holding.
"I didn't want to leave her on Illyria but I was afraid to take her with me, even as far as Domus, the next planet on the cycle. I would have—I would have inhaled her ashes, or eaten them, or something, so sick was I with grief. I would have harmed what little I had left of her."
Myka can see the tears rising, again, in Helena's eyes. Her hands twitch against her knees and they want to reach out, to reach across to her. She clenches them into fists and grinds them down into her trousers.
"Wolly arranged for her to be entombed there, alongside the Archivist who died with her," Helena continues. "That Archivist's companion promised that she would see to it that their crypts were well-maintained, and that her daughter would maintain them after she, herself, had passed. It seemed as good a plan as any. At least there, she would be cared for by someone who understood the horror of her death, and I thought, perhaps, her presence there might inspire some recognition that the endemic hatred of Agents there needed to be rectified.
"More recently, though, Wolly explained that he arranged for her to be entombed there because Illyrians keep the ashes of their dead in crypts above the ground, so he knew that if I needed to move her, I could retrieve her."
Helena's eyes lift from the ground, finally, to meet Myka's, and then she holds her hands out, the cylinder clutched between them. Myka reaches out and takes it with both of her hands, reverent.
"Be careful with her," Helena says. "I know you will, but I'd be remiss not to ask."
Myka nods. She takes the cylinder and looks at it, traces her fingers over the abstract shapes and lines etched into the clay.
"I've little that's nice to say about Illyria," Helena says, with a wet, sad laugh, "but they do craft a beautiful urn."
Myka nods once, wordlessly, and then clutches the urn to her own chest, eyes downcast in reverence.
"You've had time," Helena says. "You've had so much time to move on from me, but it's been barely a year, for me, since we were together, since you made me feel so full of love I thought I might burst from it."
Myka's eyes are closed, and she will not open them, she will not open them for fear of what that might unleash.
Helena takes another shaky breath. "After my first week with you, that last visit, I knew what I would do. I knew I would go to Illyria, retrieve Christina's ashes, and bring her back here."
Myka's eyes are still closed, but she roughly scrubs across them with the back of her wrist, her sleeve coming away wet.
"I thought she'd forgive me one last trip, if it meant she could rest on Terra forever," Helena says quietly.
Myka's eyes open and she looks up, tilts her head back as though she can keep the tears from overflowing. "Why didn't you tell me?" she asks wetly. "Why didn't you tell me before you left?"
"Because it would be seven years for you, Myka. There was nothing I could do to change that. I couldn't ask you to sit and wait for me, thumbs idly crossed before you like some storybook maiden, through those prime years of your life. It wouldn't have been fair. You would have grown to resent me."
An incredulous, tearful laugh pushes out from Myka's throat. "I grew to resent you a little anyway."
"I can see that," Helena smiles sadly. She holds her hands out toward Myka and Myka carefully gives her the urn. Their fingers brush in the transfer, shooting electricity up Myka's arms. Helena twists her torso and gently lays the urn on the soil beside her hip.
"I knew it was a risk. I assumed that you would have found someone else, by the time I came back. And I fear I've handled so much of this very poorly," Helena says. She takes a deep breath, her gaze still fixed on the ornate urn beside her. "But I thought—I thought Christina would be very happy to stay here, in the ground beneath her favorite tree." She looks up at Myka, who is swallowing and swallowing and swallowing against the lump in her throat. "And if you'll have me, Myka, I think I would be very happy to stay here, on this planet, with her, and with you."
This is the thing Myka has spent seven years refusing to let herself want, refusing to let herself think she could want, because it never seemed a realistic possibility.
She looks across at Helena, in the darkening evening shade, looking back at her with glistening eyes. She is ancient, alive for centuries, but it suddenly strikes Myka that she is not old. She is young. She has most of her life still ahead of her.
So, too, does Myka.
Myka opens her arms, reaches them out toward Helena. "Come here," she says. Helena's face breaks into a relieved smile and she gets up just enough to pitch forward and land with a soft thud against Myka's chest, her head tucked under Myka's chin, and they clutch at each other and they are both crying, and they are both laughing, and when they kiss it feels, to Myka, like coming home.
"Of course I'll have you," Myka breathes into Helena's mouth. "Of course I'll have you."
They come back the next day with a shovel and lay Christina's ashes a few feet deep in the ground beneath her tree. Myka finds a rock—black and shiny, like Helena's hair, and reflecting the pink of the sky through the branches—and uses it to mark the site.
There are other things to be arranged. Claudia, who had grown so intensely bonded to Steve, had in the previous cycle secretly approached Caturanga and asked him what would be involved in becoming a Starling. She had been so young, at the time, that Caturanga had been fearful to agree. But when he, along with Helena, approaches her now, seven years after that first conversation, and asks if she might be interested in becoming the new Agent for Engineering, the grin that shoots across her face—combined with the hand-clapping and the foot-stomping—convince them that this is more than a passing interest or childhood fantasy.
Before the ship launches, Myka spends as much time as she can with Claudia and their mutual friends, as Helena spends hers with Will and Caturanga and her other ship-mates. Helena and Claudia spend a few hours together, too, the afternoon before the launch.
"She's nervous," Helena says to Myka, that evening. Then she laughs. "So am I."
On the day of their departure, Myka pulls Will into a hug.
"You take care of her," she says to him.
"You take care of her," he replies.
Myka and Helena hold hands as ground trembles and the ship lifts off.
"Funny," Helena says, as her eyes follow the ship into the sky.
Myka leans closer and wraps her arm around Helena's shoulders. "What?"
"It never occurred to me to wonder what a launch looked like from the ground. It's louder than I expected, and less majestic, somehow."
Myka hums. "Town will be different, too. It's less crowded without all the Starlings. Quieter."
Helena turns minutely in Myka's arms and tips her head up for a kiss, which Myka gladly grants. "I think I shall enjoy a quiet life with you, darling."
"Yeah," Myka replies, with a smile. "Me too."