Caisleán Caladh, Two Years Later…

The thin sliver of sunlight that came in between the window draperies was enough to drag Helena from her slumber, mentally kicking and screaming. For some reason, that sliver peeked through directly to her eyes, precluding any attempt to fall back asleep. The night had been a restless one, full of tosses and turns.

Today was the day. Adulthood.

It was a day she had looked toward with both fear and anticipation. Helena relished the freedom that came with adulthood, the control. No longer would she be subject to the rule of her mother and father, at least not any more so than the rest of the citizens of the Kingdom. Her life choices would be her own, even those that went against the wishes and advice of her parents. It was a heady feeling.

The flip side to that was the responsibility that came with adulthood. True, she could do as she pleased, but she was also responsible for the consequences of her choices. There would be no one else to point to when things didn't go as planned. It was all on her. And it was a crossroads that everyone came to eventually, part of the natural order of things.

Most Othánas her age were already laying out the plans for their adult life, and Helena was no exception. From an early age, she had understood that the circumstances and privileges of her birth did not exempt her from doing something constructive with her life. Most fairy tales painted a picture of pampered, sheltered princesses, girls that sat in a tower and waited for their shining knight to rescue them. Here in Tír Ceilte, that was far from the case.

Her older sister had taken her love of children and their mother's gift of storytelling and made it into a fulfilling career. Karina enjoyed teaching young children of all species, and she had a gift for introducing reading in such a fun, easy way that her students became enamored with it. This gave them a solid foundation for the more focused subjects they would study in their adolescence, as well as expanding their minds with new concepts, new worlds.

She had done the same for Helena as well, while they were growing up. Karina had supplemented the learning Helena was already doing in the Creche and instilled a passionate love for the written word within her younger sister. She recalled many a night of sneaking into Karina's room, long after bedtime, the two sisters huddled with their heads under the blankets to read a book, illuminated by the softly glowing stone that was routinely used in the castle as a night-light.

It was perhaps no surprise that for the bulk of her childhood, Helena's favorite pastime was to grab a book from the Library and ensconce herself atop the Observation Tower, there to pass a few wondrous hours while her mind explored and expanded. Life seemed filled with possibilities, so many paths laying before her that Helena could hardly decide which direction her life should take.

It was pure happenstance that led to Helena finding her calling. She'd managed to give herself a nasty scrape while tumbling out of a tree she was climbing. Not wanting anyone to know of her folly, she pressed a towel over the wound and took herself over to Melina's chamber. Melina was the castle Healer, the one that everyone turned to when they were ill or hurt. Indeed, she had delivered all three of the Royal children, as well as most of the children in the castle itself. She also worked with Dad when it came to the wished-aways, although Helena wasn't exactly sure of the details of that partnership.

For someone who was older than Helena's father, Melina looked surprisingly young, an image somewhat at odds with her venerable status. She had golden hair that she kept rather short… just falling under her shoulders, and usually tied back. Sparkling blue eyes, a pert nose and a charming grin completed the picture, and her utter friendliness and warmth shined out from her the moment you laid eyes on her. Even if you'd never met her before, you instantly got the feeling that this was a person who cared about you… that shelter could be found in her presence, and that there was nothing so bad that Melina couldn't make it better. It was very similar to the feeling Helena got when in the presence of her parents, and it had the effect of putting her patients at ease, even when they were ill or in pain.

It was here that Melina had cleaned Helena's scrape, not with magic, but with warm water and a stinging antiseptic. Helena had been fascinated when Melina explained how Healing worked, and while yes, she could use her power to Heal the scrape, that power would come from within her, thus making it unavailable if the next patient had an emergency that required the use of it. She had to budget her powers carefully, itself almost as mentally exhausting as Healing was.

She had just finished wrapping up Helena's arm when two Ughlánas 'popped' in, carrying an Othánas man. There had been some sort of accident, the details of which Helena had never learned, but he was critically wounded, covered in blood. For a moment, Helena had frozen, bolts of shock going through her body as she beheld the horrific sight. Then she watched as Melina, with an utter calm and coolness that Helena could hardly credit, immediately took charge of the situation, laying her fingers on the man's temple and stabilizing him. Without missing a beat, she glanced up at Helena, issuing crisp orders to fetch items from around her office, calmly directing her to where they were stored. Helena complied smartly, bustling around and bringing the suture kit and painkillers to the area of the floor where Melina was kneeling. With a steady voice, Melina directed Helena to keep pressure on some of the wounds, staunching the flow of blood, and giving her the extra time needed to mend the tears in the man's arteries. It wasn't until much later that Helena realized just how close the man had come to dying, and her admiration for Melina, already at dizzying heights, soared even higher.

From that moment, she had been drawn to Melina's chambers, in almost the same way that metal was drawn to a magnet. And Melina, who admitted that being a Healer could be equal parts boring and chaotic, indulged Helena's curiosity and welcomed her company. It might have seemed incongruous, that such a respected Elder of the Goblin Kingdom should strike up a friendship with a young Princess, but that's exactly what happened. Helena spent many a happy hour in Melina's chambers, discussing everything from medical innovations to the meaning of life.

It was here that she learned that Melina had gone Above to obtain a medical degree from the humans, something she repeated every fifty years or so. She would go through their 'medical school', usually at an accelerated pace, given her prior knowledge, then do an internship at one of the hospitals connected to the university she attended. After her internship was complete, she was 'hired' by the conglomerate owned by Helena's parents as a consultant, which allowed her to keep the connections she'd forged while Above without the humans being any the wiser.

This all made perfect sense to Helena. The humans were known to make miraculous innovations in any field they turned their attention to, and while some of the things they used could not be replicated Below, the advances in medicine and technique certainly could be. By going Above so regularly, Melina was able to bring many procedures and formulas to the Underground that would supplement her Healing power.

It wasn't just human medicine that Melina was so knowledgeable in. Most Othánas women would pour their Healing magic into a person without much thought as to its direction. Melina, with her medical knowledge, was able to target her powers in such a way that made its use utterly efficient, with not one iota of power going to waste. This concept started circling in Helena's head, and the idea that women could be taught to use their powers so much more efficiently, along with the innovations gleaned from the humans, grew to the point that Helena could no longer contain it.

She'd shared her ideas with Melina and found an eager ear to her musings. Between the two of them, they'd come up with something of a curriculum, something to teach women how to direct their powers and how to use human innovations in place of that magic. This led to Helena speculating that a learning center might be useful… a place where people could go to learn such techniques in a more concentrated setting. Helena also speculated that such learning could be given to any who had an interest in it. After all, humans had no Healing power, yet they learned to save lives without it. Why not Elves? Dwarves?

Her life path was now taking shape. She had a clear plan, although it might take almost a century to complete. Helena couldn't explain why she felt as strongly as she did, but in her heart, she knew that if even one life could be saved by making this knowledge available… it would be worth it.

But nothing in life was without its complications, and Helena had a complication of her own. A big one.

Tremane.

Born two hours after Helena, Tremane Miriso had been a ubiquitous part of her life from the moment he entered the world. Their mothers were as close as sisters, the fact that they had two children of an age with each other just seemed to sweeten the deal. Helena was thrown in with Tremane from the time she could crawl, whether she actually wanted his company or not.

And most times… it was not.

While his personality wasn't unpleasant, exactly, he was persistently annoying. It was during one of their little spats as children that he'd called her 'Hellcat', after a mythological demon in a story they'd been told. The nickname stuck, to the point that he hardly called her anything else, even to this day.

He seemed unable to let Helena do as she willed, at least not if it didn't include him in some way. It was extremely irritating, to the point that she'd welcomed going to the Creche, if only to get a break from him. He didn't take well to this at first, but after a while, he'd drifted away from her, choosing to direct his attention to the other children in their cohort. It wasn't until she was about a hundred years old that it started to bother her that he no longer pestered her the way he used to.

Whether it was growing older or the exposure to other children that facilitated it, Helena didn't know, but Tremane had undergone something of a change while they attended the Creche. Where before, he would tease her to the point that she was ready to clobber him, his teasing became less abrasive. He seemed to know how to blunt his sallies so that they elicited a laugh instead of a frown. The obnoxiousness that had so plagued her when they were very young was now an affable, merry humor, one that attracted positive attention from everyone around him. Especially the girls.

If she'd been asked as a child, Helena would have said that she was more likely to walk on the moon than to develop any sort of romantic feelings for Tremane. This turned out to be woefully untrue. She found her gaze drawn to him more often than not, caught herself straining her ears to hear his voice as he held forth to his friends. While he no longer suffocated her, he still treated her with an off-handed gallantry that amused rather than abraded. It wasn't until one day at the Creche, when Tremane was telling the story of how his father had fallen into the Bog of Eternal Stench and leaving everyone in stitches, that Helena realized the truth. Her heart had been teetering on the brink for some time, and watching the way he recounted the story with his brand of ironic humor had just knocked it firmly into his hands.

He didn't notice it at first, which in a way was a bit insulting. He'd spent so much of their early childhood trying to get her attention that it rankled when he would ignore her. She chalked her feelings up to simple possessiveness over someone she'd counted as a friend, at least until the girls of the Creche started to really take notice of him. This caused Helena no small portion of jealousy, to the point that she almost instinctively began to reassert her presence in his life. It didn't occur to her until later that it wasn't him who had pushed her away, but Helena herself.

She'd always known that he was something of a scholar, their mutual presence in the Creche gave her the opportunity to see just how gifted he really was. One day, she had broached a particular subject she had heard him expounding upon, and after a three-hour long discussion, she realized that this was not the same boy she'd once tried to avoid. This was someone who could hold his own against her intellectually, someone who could knock the wind right out of her sails but do it in such a way that it was almost a pleasure. She found herself drawn to him more and more, eventually to the point of confiding her future plans to him.

She'd been over the moon when he'd not only approved of her plans but had ideas of his own on how to implement them. He also broadened her thinking to include learning from other disciplines besides medicine, changing the end goal from a simple, clinic-type learning center to a full-blown university. They spent many hours honing their ideas, and as they did so, the years seemed to fly by.

Now, here they were. Adults as of today. And this was a problem.

Helena had never questioned the obsession that every Othánas seemed to have with the idea of family. She'd seen how the young men and women in her cohort were starting to look at each other differently. Where before, they'd viewed each other with an eye toward friendship, now they viewed each other with an eye toward children. Future children.

Helena wanted children eventually, but she had no interest in having them right now. She couldn't imagine where she'd find the time, between attending an Aboveground university, serving an internship and establishing what she and Tremane had dubbed 'the Collegium'. It wouldn't be fair to a child to have so much of her time wrapped up elsewhere, no matter that so many Othánas parents managed to balance work and parenthood so satisfactorily. Helena simply couldn't see how to do this without severely curtailing her plans, and if she were honest with herself… curtailing her plans was not on the table, at all.

But where did that leave her and Tremane? Was it fair to him to keep her hooks in him when she had no intention of bonding? He'd fallen in with her plans seamlessly, that was true, but… what about when the reality of it all came crashing down? How would he feel when his friends married and became fathers, only for him to remain unbonded and childless? He had assured her in a roundabout way that it didn't matter to him, but somehow, Helena doubted that.

And what about her family? They already assumed that she and Tremane would marry, probably right at their majority. She tried to tell them subtly that this wasn't in the cards for her, but it seemed that they didn't hear what she was trying to say. The last thing she wanted to do was disappoint anyone, and she could only imagine what they'd say if she told them flat out that she wasn't going to marry. At least not for a long time. How to explain to people who were so family-oriented that she didn't want a family right away? That to her, there were some things that were going to take precedence.

How to explain it to Tremane?

Tremane watched as Gloog took the bouquet of birthday flowers with a grin and scampered off. Chuckling to himself, he hoped that Gloog would give Helena the flowers without nibbling on them first. With the way his luck had been going, she'd get a bouquet of gnawed stems.

Better than giving her a carnivorous plant, he thought to himself. Anduin still hasn't lived that one down.

At this point, he wasn't sure it would even matter if the bouquet was of stems or of blooms. Helena didn't pay much attention to such things, and it was well within the realm of possibility for her to absently place the stems in a vase without realizing that there were no flowers attached. Especially now.

His Hellcat was a driven woman, that was certain. Even as a child, when she focused her attention on something, she was absolutely relentless in achieving it. Tremane recalled the time when she'd decided to learn how to ice skate. Over and over, she fell on her ass… sometimes bruising herself right royally, and each time, she'd get up, dust herself off and try again. It frustrated her, to a level that would send most children into a tantrum, but not Helena. Oh, no. The more frustrated she got, the more determined she became. She went at it for an entire Winter, without pause, until she'd reached a level of mastery that satisfied her.

Her single-minded determination could be a bit off-putting if one didn't know how very kind and loving she really was. It was a contradiction, that someone with so tender a heart could also be so utterly relentless… perhaps even ruthless… when the circumstances dictated. It also didn't help that she kept her emotions on such a short leash. She never realized that half of the reason he teased her so unmercifully was to get her to loosen up a bit. She was so tightly wound that he sometimes thought she was going to just explode if she didn't find an outlet for her emotions. Thus, he made of himself a convenient target for her to verbally snipe at. When they were very young, she'd been mostly annoyed with him, and while she could still get annoyed with him, she was much more open to his jesting with her, allowing herself to laugh more and even be silly now and then.

She never knew just how much attention he paid to the things she said and did. Understanding that she kept things firmly locked behind a wall of her own making, he had to piece together a lot of what she was showing him, in order to get the proper picture. It still surprised her sometimes, that he could intuitively know what she was thinking or feeling, never realizing that he'd made a study of it… all their lives. After all, they had been born within hours of each other.

From babyhood, they were thrown together, their mothers so close as to be practically sisters. It was a given that they would spend a lot of time in each other's company. For the most part, she tolerated him during this time but preferred to do her own thing while they were 'playing together'. This bothered him when he was little, to the point that he would irritate her by trying to get her attention. By the time they started going to the Creche, Helena was actively avoiding him. She was never rude, and she never gave away her antipathy toward him when around their parents, but it was quite clear to him that he was going to have to change his tactics if he wanted any kind of relationship with her.

And he did want a relationship with her. He'd always had something of a 'crush' on her, even from early childhood. As they grew older, his attempts to get her attention were having the opposite effect, and there was a very real possibility that he would lose any chance of winning her over by the time they became old enough to start courting.

When they were about 90 years old, he'd taken a long, hard look at the situation, to try and decide what his course of action should be. The first thing he examined was whether his feelings for her were from his own heart or their parents' expectations. Was he pursuing her because those around him thought it was a given that he would? Were they thrown together by their parents so much during their youngest years out of an unconscious desire to see them bonded?

The only way to find out was to withdraw from her.

This was relatively easy in the Creche, out from under the eyes of their families. He stopped hovering near her, instead forming his own group of companions who shared many of his interests. He made it a point to only interact with her when the situation required it, and while he was always pleasant, he no longer expended the effort to be in her presence. He stopped pestering her, instead treating her with a kind but impersonal politeness. Between the Creche, combat lessons and magic lessons, he was able to stay out of her way for a good chunk of the day, only being in each other's company during the dinner hour or when their families planned a joint activity together. Even then, he tried to keep himself more with Anduin, Toby and Jacen as opposed to orbiting Helena. Surprisingly, this was seen as natural by the members of his family, and he quickly realized that while they certainly wouldn't object to his developing a relationship with Helena, they didn't expect it of him.

This gave him the freedom to look at his feelings for her more closely. She was pretty, and would someday be quite beautiful, but then… many girls were. Helena's beauty wasn't the main attraction, at least as far as he was concerned. He admired her tenacity, her resourceful mind, and her strength of character. She had a tender heart which sometimes warred with her head, and while it was even odds which side would win in any given situation, the personality traits that might have been abrasive and irritating to others were tempered by her basic kindness and empathy.

During his withdrawal, he realized that it was his own heart that reached out to her… the void within becoming more acute the longer he stayed away from her. It manifested as almost a physical pain, and it became quite clear to him that she was indeed his heart-mate… even if she didn't know it yet. But, how to win her over?

He didn't spare himself in the least, examining his previous behavior toward her, and he understood that he needed to change the way he interacted with her if she was ever going to feel the same way he did. Already he could tell that she'd noticed his withdrawal from her, and while at first, she greeted this with a bit of relief, he knew that it was beginning to bother her. He could see it in the way her eyes would follow him, the way they'd narrow when another girl would speak to him, the flashes of hurt in them when he'd pass her over in favor of one of the many girls in the Creche.

She didn't know it, but he'd started observing her more closely during this time, paying particular attention to what interested her, what angered her and what pleased her. After a while, he learned that the quickest way to her heart was actually through humor… although not the obnoxious humor he had been taunting her with. Slowly, he started displaying a more gentle merriment, using humor in a more charming way than he'd previously done. This had the effect of deepening her interest in him, to the point that she started actively seeking him out instead of avoiding him.

From there, the relationship progressed on a more equal footing. He would still tease her sometimes but always in a way that got her to laugh too. He asked questions about her interests, finding them genuinely intriguing, and her happiness in sharing her plans had spilled over into a camaraderie between them. She shared his love of learning, and soon she started to show curiosity about his interests, not just her own. They could spend hours debating the finer points of history, philosophy or science, and while sometimes they disagreed on those points, they both walked away from the conversations with a wider knowledge and acceptance of each other's point of view.

Her attitude towards him had undergone a complete change. If she had some news, a thought or an idea, she tended to bring it to him first, even before her own family. She confided in him her hopes, her plans and her dreams. She was utterly delighted to find that he had similar ideas of establishing a learning center where scholars could congregate and exchange knowledge. She was enthusiastic about tailoring both of their dreams into a mutual, realistic plan.

There was just one problem. The Collegium was the only plan… the only dream.

Helena didn't make much room in her life for personal relationships. She loved her family, liked spending time with them, certainly, but it was almost as if they were on the periphery of her life. Once her gaze became focused on something, all else seemed to fade into the background. And while he could admire her single-minded determination to make her goals a reality, it also worried him on some level. She felt as if she were a lone warrior… facing the horde in solitude, when the reality was that so many people loved and supported her that she need not be alone. She thought her family would be disappointed if she didn't follow what the majority of Othánas did with regards to marriage and children, when in fact the opposite was true. Her mother certainly understood. But rather than take advantage of the very real support her loved ones would give her, she was determined to face every challenge alone.

This might have been the death knell of any romantic aspirations he'd had in regard to her, except for the fact that she had clearly developed feelings for him that transcended friendship. She likely had no idea that they had already heart-bonded… that he could pick up her emotional scent and had been able to see her aura for years. She didn't know that sometimes he could see the way she'd look at him, the unconscious love shining in her eyes, only for her to shake herself as if such feelings were a detriment to her. Oh, yes… he knew that she loved him, but whether she would ever give in to those emotions was the real question.

Things seemed to be coming to a head in the more recent months, and Tremane had a pretty good idea as to why. Their majority was at hand, that crossroads between youth and adulthood. Most people their age were thinking about bonding and family, and while on some level she wanted this too, she wanted to attain her goals first. He understood this, even agreed with it, but he also knew that it wasn't a matter of either/or. She could have a fulfilling, loving relationship at the same time as she was pursuing her dream. He just had to convince her of it.

He looked down at the courting token in his hands. A symbol of commitment. To her, and to their shared goals, now and in the future.

Would she accept it, though?

Author's Notes:

Helena's ambitiousness is very much like her grandfather's, Robert Williams. The same drive that propelled him through law school to land a job in one of the top firms in the U.S. has been passed down to her.

Is there some societal pressure on Helena to life-bond right away? Yes and no. Yes, it's almost a given that women tend to find life-mates pretty quickly after they attain adulthood. But it should be remembered that the girls who do so… they WANT to. If Helena wants something different, all she needs to do is demonstrate that and not just assume people know it.

As for Tremane, while he did quite coolly plot his way into Helena's heart, we should view this as him doing a lot of introspection, and seeing where he went wrong, his flaws, and how to correct them. It was done in the sense of self-improvement, to go from the nerdy, pesky little creep (that we all knew in school, I'm sure) to a genuinely nice, funny and charming young man. He was open to the possibility that Helena was not the one for him, and accepted it if that was the case, but his own instincts were proven right in the end. Now, he just has to convince her of it, knowing that she's very skittish about the whole thing.

I mentioned in previous stories that Sarah was not my self-insert. Helena is. And while her chosen field was medicine (mine was law), her determination to pursue her career before starting a family is a mirror of my own experience.

Tremane is based on my husband, someone I actually disliked (and was annoyed by, constantly) because he was such a jokester. We worked together (that's how we met) and one day, I heard him telling our coworkers a really funny story that got me to laughing uncontrollably. That was the moment that my feelings for him shifted from bare tolerance to a deep interest. I had no idea that he had been interested in me from the first and had been trying to get my attention all along. Tremane's point of view in this chapter is based on things my husband told me about what he did to win me over.

Healer Melina is based upon a very, very dear friend of mine. Almost twenty years ago, she was my boss, a voice of care and reason in an extremely chaotic environment. We developed a friendship that survived job changes and out-of-state relocations, to the point that... if I could choose a sister, she'd be my choice, hands down.

Looking at you, Kimmie.