A/N The big Helen/Nikola chapter, hopefully reaching some emotional resolution...and maybe even a kiss...

(but not to worry, things are never that easy with them) Thanks for all the feedback and all my reviewers!

THIRTEEN

New York, 1904.

"I've never seen you look so worried, Nikola."

He wiped his hands with a cloth square from his pocket, and then attended to the faint sheen of sweat on his brow. Helen packed away her medical tools into her black kit bag.

"She'll be fine. The worst of the fever is over. You know, the physicians here in New York are more than capable of looking after her."

"Yes, well, you're the best physician I know." He spoke without a trace of irony or teasing, and she looked at him worriedly.

"She must be very important to you."

He didn't respond, sitting down shakily into a chair. His hair was disheveled and it looked as if he hadn't slept or eaten in a week. She cast a cursory glance over his workstation – it held the clutter of a distracted mind. Projects half-finished and tinkered on without any specific goal in mind, which was unlike him.

"You aren't … oh, Nikola, you can't have been that foolish."

He looked sharply at her. "Helen, don't be so beastly. You have no right to question someone's integrity like that."

She snapped her bag shut loudly. "I know you better than anyone on this earth, and I know when something's going on."

"Not as well as you'd think! Just because you aren't the only woman I call my friend…" He stopped, swallowing his words, and then sneered, "Jealousy is an unattractive colour on you."

"Jealous?" Helen looked at him agape, clenching her fist so she wouldn't slap him. "She's a married woman, Nikola! This is very foolish of you."

He lifted his head from his hands, sadness and anger strangling his voice. "As foolish as giving your affections to a man with a predilection for carving up whores?"

Helen slapped him then, her chest heaving and her hand hot as she saw him topple back in his chair. She hadn't even realized she had struck him, but he lifted himself from the floor, a cut open on his cheek from one of her rings.

Trembling with rage, she spun on her heel and left the room determined never to speak to him again.

She forgave him since; they had known each other for too long to let harsh words completely ruin their friendship. When Katherine Johnson died she knew he needed a friend that dark day more than anything, but she stayed in London hidden away in her lab where she wouldn't be able to betray herself.

Helen pressed an ear to the bathroom door, heard nothing outside, and cautiously slipped off her shirt. She had locked the door more for her peace of mind – he could easily pop the lock with just a pointed look if he wanted to, but he had never purposefully walked in on her showering before.

There had only been the once, but he was just as shocked as she was (even before she shot him in the chest) and that was Nigel's idea of an April Fool's trick. He'd hung from the roof by his underpants when Nikola finally caught up to him.

Helen showered quickly, grateful to be out of her wet clothes, and changed into a clean, if somewhat loose, pair of slacks and blouse. He wasn't in the hotel suite when she left the bathroom, and she found him in the hotel bar.

He passed her a glass of wine as she sat down beside him. "So, what do you propose to do with a malevolent, angry elemental if we can actually contain it?"

She sipped at the wine, finally feeling her body relax. The rain poured relentlessly outside, drumming down on the glass panes. "Better we have it then it land in the hands of a madman. We'd effectively neutralize whatever they're trying to blackmail the United Nations with. And it would give us leverage to get back John."

He snorted, fiddling with the stem of his wineglass. "I was with you until the last point." He saw her disgusted glare, and backpedalled. "When you and James got rid of the Tunisian fire elemental during the war, it created a fissure in the earth that contributed to Carentan. And Johnny's little parasite makes the fire elemental look like a kitten. Maybe it's a bad idea for us to try and put a leash on it."

Helen chewed her lower lip, she had turned that thought over and over in her mind a thousand times already. "No, we can't just chase it off somewhere else, we will have to make sure it can be contained indefinitely. That's where you would come in. We need a trap … and we need a cage. And I think you're the only person who could design it. It's a being of energy, it's right up your alley."

Nikola considered this, his lips twisting in a reticent frown. "If the energy cage they have for John is as effective as you say it is, I might be able to modify the design … but I highly doubt it will be sufficient." He tapped a finger to his lips. "And that's running before we can walk. How do we find it? It could be anywhere in the world."

She chose her next words carefully. "You have managed to access every network of energy world-wide simultaneously."

Nikola stiffened, but his tone remained dismissive. "We could just wave Johnny in the air and see if his little friend wants to go back home."

Helen glared at him overtop the rim of her glass. "You can't be serious." She saw him try to hide back into his wine again and reached out for his arm. His eyes were stormy and she lifted them up to meet hers with a delicate finger under his chin. "Would you really have that thing go back into John?"

She saw a hint of the young man who had shook her hand at Oxford many decades ago. He blinked, and it was gone. "I'm not sure, to be quite honest."

Helen drew her hand away from him and looked out the window. A streak of lightning flashed through the sky. She remembered hearing the eerie strains of an old Billie Holiday song, her favourite, rising up from the streets of Old City and serenading her. The lightning streaked across the sky that day as well, brilliant as Zeus' wrath.

"When's the last time we walked through a thunderstorm together?"

Nikola blinked in surprise, but automatically answered, "Berlin. August eleventh in nineteen thirty-two."

She got up and held out her hand to his. "Far too long."

They walked in the rain, hand in hand, Helen uncaring that the heaven's pour had soaked her a second time that day. Thunder rumbled in the sky, he could feel its vibration in his very bones, and lightning – magnificent lightning ripped the clouds apart.

Nine times … it was nine times now they'd held hands. His heart beat so hard against his chest he was sure his ribcage would break. Three by three. Three to three. Three of three. Where would this lead him? What black magic was this going to unlock?

She brought them to a bridge overlooking the Thames, churning and spitting below them. She let go of his hand and leant against the side, looking down into the water.

Her hair, wet and slicked by the rain, looked like a swirl of black oil against her blouse. He was recalling that day, the expedition they had taken to Central America. Lightning struck a tree beside them, flames helplessly licking up its trunk before being extinguished. He promised her they would be safe, but she protested that he'd act as a lightning rod and she was in no mood for being electrocuted. They found a rocky overhang, and huddled together, holding each other for warmth.

His hands shook as they undressed. He never meant to close his eyes the few times they slipped shut, hoping to commit every second in his memory. They laughed about it afterward and it somehow remained unspoken between them years since. And, surprising even to him, he felt no bitterness, no resentment … not for it having happened, and not for it never having repeated itself.

"Remember what you promised," she said, almost to herself and he felt like one of the lightning bolts struck him where he stood. If his feet weren't rooted in the ground he would have staggered back from the shock. She looked at him, caught his surprise, and he knew he was trapped.

"What does that mean, Nikola? What does any of it mean? You've run away, hidden yourself, pretended to die again and I have no idea why."

"It's nothing to concern yourself with," he whispered, screaming at his body to back away from her.

"Oh?" She pinned him to the spot with the inexplicable look in her eyes. "My lights show? My funeral? …that's nothing to concern myself with?"

He thought desperately of throwing himself into the Thames to escape her, but she suddenly reached over and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him towards her. "You never do anything without a reason to … and somehow your agenda is written all over whatever it is that is happening to me, to my Sanctuary."

He growled back, "I'm sorry to have disturbed you so." He grasped her hands, trying to pull them off but she tightened her grip and shook him.

"How long have I known you?"

"A hundred and thirty-four years," he stammered. The anger melted from her face and she looked rather heartbroken.

"And do you really think after all that time I don't know there were only two women you were ever in love with?" He was too stunned, frozen, to know what to think or say. She pressed a cool, light kiss to his lips, the rain mingling on their faces. She whispered into his ear, "I've just lived too long for it to have had a sweet end. I'm too old not to know our friendship will last longer and mean more than any fairytale."

He gazed wistfully at her, a tremulous smile on his lips. "Maybe another century or two and you'll stop being so pragmatic."

His hands lighted on her face, and he gently pulled her to him. She offered no resistance, and they kissed on the bridge as if right out of a storybook. Small sparks of electricity shot from his lips to hers, illuminating the small spaces between their two worlds colliding and he closed his eyes this time.

Breathless, they finally pulled apart, and he rested his forehead against hers. The rain rushed by his ears and he felt like he was underwater, drowning. "I know … sometimes even I know. I let you go the night I died." He drew away from her, a more familiar smirk on his face as he pretended to rub a pain from his chest. "But resurrection hurts more than you'd think. Trust me, I've done it twice now."

"I'll take your word for it," she said with a smile, and reached for his hand again, clasping it tightly in hers as she looked up to the heavens and marveled at the rain.

Ten times now she'd held his hand. Damn the woman! Could she never keep the pattern right?

John lifted his face up from his knees, a deep laugh rumbling in his chest.

He was suspended in a globe made of crackling blue light. It was a prison made of energy. He couldn't teleport away from it. He couldn't break through the barrier, the recoil of power would kill him instantly.

He hung in the globe, this contained pocket of the world, as they waited for the elemental to be attracted to the fuel source around it, reach out an exploratory branch, and be sucked into the prison. Either that, or for him to die.

He laughed at them, telling them to get it over with and just shoot him. But they were being cautious. The elemental was still something no one knew much about. They felt traumatizing the body of the host could harm the elemental or cause it to react unpredictably.

Instead, his prison was also his electric chair. The slow, gradual and constant dose of radiation emitting from the energy cage would shut down his vital organs eventually, coaxing the elemental away from its favourite harbour of the last century. They monitored his condition, played cards in the observation deck, and sometimes made shadowy threats. He laughed at them all.

He was John Druitt, the hollow man. There was nothing inside of him worth stealing, and he would hang there, curled into a ball, laughing, knowing that his best secret was that he had none at all.

Helen … his only regret was that there would be one less friend to help her celebrate the anniversary of the Five.