#Bering and Wells Gift Exchange

[anandabrat]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells, Claudia Donovan, Steve Jinks Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Post-Canon, Humor, poking holes in tiny moments of canon is my favorite sport, Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024 Summary:

Post series, Myka contends with a problem that really shouldn't be such a big deal, in the scheme of things.

Written for @lady-adventuress for the Bering and Wells gift exchange 2024. Hope it pleases you even if I took exactly zero of your fantastic prompts because I had an idea that wouldn't quite let me go...

Yay! Y’all this is like my favorite day, so many stories and so much fandom love. Thanks for hanging out with me for another year everyone!

[lilolilyr]

of purple goo and other surprises

My @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange fic for @deathtodickens, I hope you'll like it!

3.6k T, no warnings, canon-divergence

setting: Helena is a Warehouse agent along with Myka. They are close friends, but Myka wishes for more... Can an overnight stay during a retrieval mission reveal her feelings?

Beta read by @wellsbering, thanks for the help <3

[mfangeleeta]

Last Call for Vodka

Sorry for the late update for the Bering and Wells gift exchange! I hope you like it @anandabrat!

Find the rest of my madness here: Last Call for Vodka  

The Cat Network

When he was little, he overheard his mom and Auntie Smarty talking about extra lives. He knew that he only had nine so what were they talking about?

By the time he remembered to ask, he and his cousins were running the streets of Marrakesh. No time for discussion about the existential crisis they all went through at some point.

They had food to hunt and humans to avoid. No times to sort out their lives, past or future.

He didn’t think about it much until he met the human time traveler during his time as a mouser in the Warehouse. Not the famous one who wrote books with her brother, she would come later, but the one who met the people from the future.

Technically she didn’t travel through herself but the impression she got was a good one. His species and his family were still around. Even if they had those extra lives his aunties had warned about.

From what he, well now she, could remember is that humans moving through time could be real. And at this Warehouse, someone was actually trying to make it happen. Her(his) family had somehow been coopeted to be a part of this totally human system, which was better that the streets, of collecting objects that meant something to them. Or could be dangerous. These Agents, as they called themselves, would take care of the family line. No tossing in the river. No bait for dog fights. Consistent food, a comfortable bed, and a head scratch or two. Not a bad life.

But this time traveler was in trouble. She knew the grief of lost young and even though this human didn’t want to talk about it, a mother knew. This human was doing too much and it was dangerous for all of them. But grief had made many an agent crazy. And as she died during an experiment gone wrong all she could do was forgive and hope for another life to see what happened next.

Dickens remembered it all. Marrakesh. His Auntie Smarty. The Warehouses. His painful death along with a human or two.  He and his family had been through a lot since the Caretaker of Warehouse 3 had scooped up an ancestor or two as a pet. He didn’t need a magical item to know that humans were fickle and volatile creatures. And that this century had been one of the worst.

A distant memory told him that his human Emily, really wasn’t her true self. A past self-remembered this woman and time travel not ending well for anyone. But the Warehouse wants what it wants. so here his was. She was nice and he could tell that she did care for him, but there was so much turmoil it was hard. Humans never did get the reincarnation thing like cats did so he could sympathize. She did do a good job of keeping the box clean and the water bowl full.

Dickens actually enjoyed his foster after Emily left. He met up with his cousins Buddy and Petey who were a hoot in their squabbing ways. It had been some time since he’d seen his liter mates and the jovial senior boys made his time entertaining. He could sense though that his time traveler was drifting and that she would need help finding her way home.

His cousins were well versed in the network and had helped their owner in several occasions. They were ready to help unrequited love see a happy ending. And it took all of his skills and their network to make it happen. Burr and Hamilton first got a lead on his former owner. Tinsel was able to find her love. Goal Kitty tracked down the time traveler when she was using a fake name in California and dating the wrong person. Frank and his brother Stein were able to get the intel to get them both together in the same city, with Potato making sure they met up with a wobbly assist from Phin.

And Fishtopeher, the genius that he was, helped them make the final connection.

Dickens curled up on the comfy reading chair to keep an eye of his humans, Myka and Helena. He’d put a lot of work, and lives, into making sure they found each other. A soul mate is nothing to snooze at.  His aunties had said that if his family or the cat network make the extraordinary happen that they might get a reprieve but he had grown to love the Warehouse and it’s ways.

He was down for another life or two.

[mykashg]

Hi your Bering and Wells exchange partner here. I think tumblr must have eaten my last message. I have now started your drawing properly. Very nervous but hopeful. I have been unwell and it’s scary how the month is disappearing but there is still time. Hope you had a good weekend! :)

Ah, very exciting. Please take care of yourself and I can assure you that I will be endlessly impressed with any try of drawing. Have fun and enjoy yourself. The time is going very quickly, I completely get you!

[sharkbatez]

Hello, Bering and Wells gift giver here. Is there anything in particular you’d like to see for your gift?

Hi! Not quite sure what your area of expertise is, but I have prepared prompts for a fanfic and art and can be a manip?

Fanfic: Could be canon-compliant. Helena keeps secrets again and Myka, still a little traumatized by Helena living double lives, struggles to trust her. Helena's secret: she's writing again. 200 years being consumed by anger and grief, setting her entire life aside, she finds joy in writing again. I'm not too particular about it. It's just a random excuse to show an exploration of their relationship after the series.

Art prompt: Book cuddles. They're reading different books, existing in the same space and have at least a single limb touching the other person.

Lol. Go ham with it. You could completely just ignore the prompt or take whatever idea you prefer. Whichever works best for you.

[lady-adventuress]

Happy Bering and Wells Day! This year, @apparitionism gave me a wild set of prompts to play with, so here's what I ended up with.

@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange

[b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange]

IT'S BERING AND WELLS HOLIDAY GIFT EXCHANGE TIME!

Happy American Thanksgiving, and happy Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange sign-up opening day!

The gift exchange is open to anyone who wants to make a fic, art piece, gif, or any other fandom-related gift and exchange it with a fellow Bering and Wells fan. Here's the schedule:

Message or ask me via this blog or my personal account (@kla1991) anytime between now and the winter solstice, December 21st, and say you'd like to participate. Also say whether you're willing to open your askbox to anonymous messages or if you'd prefer courrier service to speak to your secret gifter.

On December 25th, you'll receive the username of someone else who signed up; this is your giftee! You should also double-check that your inbox is open and accepting anonymous messages on this day if you're participating that way.

Between December 25th and New Years, January 1st, you will anonymously communicate with your giftee to receive prompts about what type of fandom stuff you make and what type of gift they might like to receive. You'll also give prompts, if you have any, to your gifter! If at any point you have questions about how to do this, reach out to me.

You will then have from January 1st until Valentine's Day, February 14th, to create a gift, and they'll all be posted on tumblr on the 14th!

Feel free to message me with any questions, and please spread the word!

[apparitionism]

Real

Can’t believe tomorrow is a particular Wednesday already; this season has rushed in like the most foolish of fools, and as a result I’m rushing to push out this new holiday story... because I too am a fool. This is set post-series (including the nonexistent season), though not by much, as the first little bit will make clear. It’s kind of all about fallout. And who wants what, and why, and whether they’re willing to work, wait, and do other things that probably start with “w” to get it. Anyway, season’s greetings to all—and to all (including, eventually, Myka and Helena, I promise) a good night.

Real

“She’s back,” Artie announces one autumn night, and before anyone (Myka) can fully register what that might mean...

...she is.

Is, is, is... a distillation of so much of what Myka instantaneously knows again as possibility, as hopes and wishes jolting back to life, as again (still) the only presence that instantly makes Myka aware of herself as a body, one that responds with barely controllable fervor to that presence—that other body.

Artie goes on saying words, “reinstated” and “agent” among them, but the roaring of Myka’s blood drowns them out.

She fears she will spontaneously combust. She would rather spontaneously combust. That would be better than having to consciously keep from spontaneously combusting, in response to Helena existing, to her moving and speaking, in a proximity that Myka should prize but that her body, fervently responding, informs her is completely insufficient.

Myka escapes as soon as she can, to sit in the dark of her room, to sit and process, but her usual, reliable processing processes fail her.

They always have, where Helena is concerned.

All she does is sit, empty but for the replaying of Helena’s entry into the dining room, her stride so sure, her aspect so unlike the dismissive, shrinking shrugs of Boone... that had sent Myka’s soul soaring.

Helena had greeted them all with good humor, her manner and words to everyone so convivial. So convivial, but also: to everyone, and that is what finds clawed purchase in Myka’s heart, here in the dark.

Here in the dark, Myka viciously tells herself that she deserves no special acknowledgment. Why would you?

She also tells herself, This will get easier.

****

In some ways it does. For example, Myka’s shock at, and subsequent need to recover from, each new sight of Helena lessens somewhat. Or maybe it’s that her body becomes accustomed to absorbing the impact.

In others, it profoundly doesn’t.

Case in painful point: one evening when they’re all cleaning up after dinner, Claudia says to Helena, “So can I ask you something?”

“Clearly you can. You just did,” Helena bats back, in play, and envy stabs Myka.

“You’re as bad as Artie,” Claudia groans. “But here goes: are you still seeing that lady?”

Terror appropriates envy’s knife, gashing anew. Myka has not let herself begin to imagine how to get such a question answered, and here Claudia just says it while lowering a stack of dirty plates into the sink.

Helena’s airy reply: “Still the case. Obviously we’re long-distance at the moment.”

Something previously un-knifed in Myka collapses at that “obviously.” Obviously. Obviously. Obviously, the Warehouse return had not entailed a renouncing of Helena’s non-Warehouse connections. As Myka had obviously, she now sees, believed—hoped!—it would.

The depth and breadth of her error sends her to her room again, lightless, wounded, empty, waiting for time to pass until she once again has something to do.

Such as a retrieval with Pete.

The next one of which proceeds well—it’s not a big, dangerous deal, but rather a matter of a sad, not villainous, loner seeking connection via an artifact-compromised comic-book message board. Pete’s his enthusiastic self about the comics of it all, and Myka lets it lull her into a near-trance of this is how it used to be, before everything.

Until they’re on the plane home, when Pete says, “So H.G.’s back.”

“Thanks for the update,” she says, bracing herself, because of course that won’t be all, because that would be too easy.

“And what about that girlfriend?”

“What about her?” Well, that was stupid: asking some reflex question she doesn’t want answered. She braces herself again.

“You think she’s her one?”

That’s worse than she’d imagined. Myka doesn’t want to go anywhere near that Schrödinger-box, for fear that peeking inside would reveal a very dead cat. Would in fact be the deciding factor in that cat’s demise.

After a stretch of silence, Pete says, “Bet she’s not. So what are you gonna do about it?”

What does he mean? Do about the girlfriend not being, or being, Helena’s one? Do about Helena being back in the first place? She would rather avoid nailing that down—another let’s-not-look Schrödinger box.

“I’m going to ignore it,” she says.

“That’s not healthy. I mean, I get it, but it’s not healthy.”

He coughs ostentatiously. Meaningfully? Myka doesn’t know. Can’t tell. Won’t ask. She hates how she feels compelled to leave this cat in limbo too, just so she can shift away from any potential situational consequences.

If only she had resisted the pressure to shift her definition of love.

She tries for resistance now, even though it’s too late: “I’m not going to try to keep her from doing what she wants to do.”

He cocks his head in that exaggerated what-are-you-saying way. “I thought you might though. Try.”

Myka is tempted to demand, “Why would you think that,” but she knows why he would think it, and revisiting that fight is an impossibility. Especially now.

“But you’re not trying,” he says. His tone, though, ratchets down the danger. It’s a relief. “So why not?”

Now Myka’s tempted to give some indignant “I don’t have to justify my behavior to you” answer... and yet. She does owe him more than that. Especially now, having misled him so severely before, she owes him some decent measure of honesty. So she says it as plain as she can: “Because people should do what they want to do.”

“Huh.” He puts on his “thinking” face—the real one, not the cartoon. “But you’re not doing what you want to do.”

“What?” Myka says, playing dismissively dumb. Hoping he’ll give some dumb response.

“You want to stop her doing what she’s doing.” Myka shakes her head at that, trying to pretend it’s dumb, but Pete rolls his eyes. He sees the weakness. How can he be getting her so right in this when he got her so so so wrong before? But then again she’d got herself wrong... “So why wouldn’t you do what you want to do?” he finishes.

Want, want, want. Myka wishes he would quit using the word.

Yes it’s her fault for using it first. Yes she should have shut him down forcefully to begin with. Yes that applies to situations preceding this one.

In any case, wanting is pointless. It literally does not matter: its only product is empty space, a horrific gaping sink, a vacuum as vast as space itself.

So she says, as pedantically as she can, “Because if one person’s wants affect another person’s wants, that’s a different category of... you know what? Never mind.”

“You only ever say ‘never mind’ when you know I’m right.”

“What? I say ‘never mind’ a lot.”

“Which means...” He taps his temple.

“No. No it does not.” But she does smile.

Pete bobs his head as if she’s actually agreed with him, and so they end on a familiar, jokey note. It’s far better than they could have managed some months ago, in the immediate aftermath of their... mistake? Misunderstanding? Mismanagement? Misadventure? Misapprehension?

Stop dictionarying, she tells herself. Despite its being one of her default ways of trying to process confusion, it rarely delivers the clarity she seeks. At any rate, their short-lived whatever-it-was was a mis-everything.

She takes out the book she’s brought with her, H Is for Hawk, so as to fill her head with Heather MacDonald’s solitude rather than her own. She has lately found that overlaying her own thoughts with someone else’s ruminations is quieting, so she’s reading even more than usual... it beats sitting in darkness, waiting. Which she supposes means she should thank Helena (thank her) for her extensive new knowledge: of, here, grief and falconry, but also, the Wright brothers, Joan of Arc, India’s partition, séances in the 1920s, Salem’s witch hunts, various aspects of the Supreme Court...

Erudition must surely outweigh emotionalism Extremity. Enthrallment? Embitterment.

Stop dictionarying.

****

Relentlessly, the holidays approach. Myka tries to ignore them too, particularly their invitation to soften. Unhealthy, Pete’s accusation echoes.

But in speaking to Pete, Myka had lied: she isn’t really ignoring anything Helena-related. In a folder of significant size in her mind, she stores a cascade of spreadsheets in which she tallies and tracks as many of Helena’s movements, statements, interactions as she can, in as much detail as possible: e.g., it wasn’t enough for Myka to get Steve to tell her about his retrievals with Helena—those accounts, while captivating, were incomplete, secondhand—so she has made perverse use of her hard-earned Warehouse database access to read Helena’s actual mission reports, like some pathetic online stalker. They’re literarily significant, she tries to use as additional justification, ignoring the fact that no one other than Warehousers will ever know how or why.

It’s not that she’s hoping to gain insight from any of this; the activity is simply itself. A flat gather of data. For those spreadsheets.

Which she uses, of course, to torture herself, not least for her damning inability to gain insight. Thus proving Pete wrong: it isn’t ignoring things that’s unhealthy. No, it’s paying them attention—stupid, pointless attention—that causes disease.

That’s true, but Myka genuinely does not know how much longer she can suffer making herself sick.

Lovesick, she sometimes thinks... but that makes “love” too prominent in the mix. No, the “sick” is what matters, and it is chronic, not acute. Which means it must be managed rather than cured, and she will manage it, because she has to: because she is an agent and Helena is an agent and they live in the same house and say the same mutually polite “good morning” to each other each day.

Sometimes Myka wisps a wish, in the wake of one of those morningtides whose undertow she cannot reveal, that she could begin to shift her thinking, to try floating above rather than falling under, the better work her way to commencing the actual ignoring.

But then Helena will talk to Steve about the particulars of his Buddhist practice, or to Claudia about a joint invention project’s feasibility, or to Artie about a disputed wrinkle of history, or even to Pete about, bizarrely yet bizarrely frequently, which menu items should be avoided at fast-food chains... and Myka enters each new datum into the spreadsheets out of avid habit, all while ferally wishing everything different—even, some days, heretically, Helena gone. And while castigating herself for having wished, before, so stupidly inchoately, pleading with the universe to let Helena come back. More: to send Helena back.

How very monkey’s-paw of you, she jeers, to leave out specifics. In particular, to leave out “to me.” Send Helena back to me.

Before Helena came back, Myka was lost; now she’s still lost, but differently. And if there is one thing Myka has never liked—in fact, has always feared—it’s change.

So in truth she can probably suffer making herself sick for quite some time. As long as nothing about the making—or the sickness—changes.

****

The days leading up to Christmas itself are blessedly busy. On the 22nd, Myka and Steve head to West Virginia to bag a problematic coal-miner’s lamp; the work keeps them away until Christmas Eve, and if Myka happens to linger a bit longer at the Warehouse after Steve goes back to the B&B once they’ve deposited the artifact... well, that’s because she’s very conscientious about filing reports in a timely fashion.

In fact, she lingers a lot longer, and she’s happy to arrive home to a mostly silent B&B... however, she is instantly deposited into precisely the sort of situation she’d hoped to avoid: she must walk past Helena, who is in the living room, alone, with the television on. Impossible to slink past undetected, and thus rude to try—particularly once Helena says, “Welcome home.”

How disorienting, for Helena to be here and to say that. Worse, the articulation seems to ring of... before. When Myka was special.

But she is imagining that. She must be.

“What are you watching?” she asks, though she doesn’t need to. Helena is watching the Yule Log.

You strike me. Myka’s thought stops there, true as can be. Aloud, she says, “You know what it is, right?”

“A strangely mesmerizing facsimile of a fire,” Helena says, without looking up. “Do I strike you as hypnotized?”

Now Helena looks up. She blinks at Myka and nods, oddly soft, childlike. “I consulted Google.”

Helena is absurdly fond of Google. Myka struggles to keep from finding this absurdly charming. She struggles similarly with the way in which Helena articulates the word itself—every witnessed occurrence of which is represented in the spreadsheets. so Myka is painfully aware of the way Helena puts a slight formal emphasis on both syllables, such that it sounds, in a capping absurdity, as if she’s saying she consulted Gogol.

Not that acquiring input from a dead Russian writer would necessarily be all that different, absurdity-wise, from having instant access to a towering percentage of the world’s collective knowledge. And Helena probably understands that congruence, if that’s what it is, better than Myka ever could.

Myka knows she’s thinking herself down treacherous paths; she should say goodnight and walk away. But it’s Christmas Eve, and she gives herself a present she shouldn’t want but feels she has earned, earned by ignoring—or, to the contrary, recording—so strenuously. She has done such hard work. So she lets herself ask, “Why are you so focused?”

“Pete gave me a choice: watch the Yule Log or talk to Myka. I believe he thought I would reject the former as unworthy of my attention. Yet here I watch, mesmerized.”

“Since when do you do what Pete tells you?” But thanks, I guess, for letting me know where I stand. She can’t then hold back a jab: “Anyway, shouldn’t you be spending the holiday with the famous Giselle?”

Helena blinks again. This time it’s not at all childlike. “That’s why he wanted me to talk to you. But to answer your previous question: since he told me he’s in love with you.”

He... what? “What?”

“You asked me since when do I do what Pete tells me. I’m answering.”

Keep up, Myka; keep up. “When did he tell you that?”

“This evening. As part of what I fear—or hope?—was intended as a Christmas gift.”

“For you?” That’s not keeping up.

“No.”

“Then for who?” That’s not either.

“Whom.”

“Well, excuse my grammar, but I’m a little weirded out.” This is the most extended conversation she and Helena have had since... before. That’s destabilizing enough to her ability to concentrate on words. but what, exactly, is she supposed to do with these words?

“Weirded out,” Helena says, an unexpected affirmation. “As was I. I wasn’t aware.” She makes a small “huh” noise, as if she has to bridge her way to what’s next. “That the two of you had been involved.”

Oh. Hence the bridge—but this is a shifting surprise. “I thought someone—Claudia—would have told you. Must have told you.” Must have, and that in turn must have contributed, Myka had been sure, to Helena’s lack of engagement. She’s always known your judgment was abysmal, she’d lashed herself, based on those must haves, and this is certainly fuel for that fire.

“Our discussions have been more focused on her future. And my past. And technology, of course.”

“Of course,” Myka says. And then, quick, before she loses her nerve: “It didn’t take.”

“Technology?”

“The involvement.”

“I gathered that from its current status.”

“Right.” The conversation, such as it is, should probably end here... but something is off. “Wait. You said he said he is in love with me.”

“Yes.”

Myka had believed it was over. All over. The idea of having to deal with it, with any aspect of it, in perpetuity, or at least with no clear sundown, preemptively exhausts her. And it rekindles her anger at the entire situation, at its utter pointlessness. “I don’t know what to do with that,” she says. She immediately regrets the admission.

“He said he’ll get over it.”

“Well, that’s something. I guess.” It comes out grudging, and that’s another admission Helena shouldn’t be privy to.

“He said you won’t.”

“What? Get over it? No, the problem was that I wasn’t ever in love. With him.” She’s saying far too much. She supposes it’s fortunate that she’s looking at this repetitively flickery video loop, rather than into Helena’s eyes. She supposes also that said loop is a reasonable metaphor for how her life has been proceeding. Lately. Before, and lately.

“He said that too.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re losing me.”

“Interestingly, he said a version of that as well.”

“That you were losing him?” Not hard to believe; sometimes Pete can barely follow a laser pointer.

Helena focuses her gaze on Myka again, adamantine. “That I was losing you.”

And just like that, Myka is through the looking glass. Trapped like Alice, trying to get out. “Why would you care?” she chokes.

Helena lowers her brow, a stern schoolmarm confronting an intransigent pupil. “Because as I mentioned, he said—and seemed quite certain—that you won’t get over being in love.”

Myka knows now what’s next. Helena is about to say, “With me.” Because once again: that fight.

Oh yes I will. That’s what the ignoring is for. When I work my way around to it, that’s what it’s for.

“I didn’t know,” is what Helena actually says, clearly taking Myka’s silence as affirmation of those unuttered words.

“Oh please. Like I could have been any more obvious.” Obviously. She says it with contempt at herself, past and present: what a pathetic moonstruck puppy.

“At which point?” Helena asks.

That’s a surprisingly troubling question. Timelines. Decisions. What did you know and when did you know it? What did you show and when did you show it?

“All I knew was how you responded. Not how you felt.”

Of course the former was all Myka herself had known, certainly at first, and their consonance surprises her. If only she could share that consonance, and her surprise in it, with Helena... but that seems too much like a reward, one that neither she nor Helena deserves. Again exhaustion: at their lack of merit. “I don’t want to play these games,” she says.

“Then don’t.” Was that a shrug? Did Helena really shrug?

“Fine. I won’t.” It’s childish, yet it feels like the best end she can manage tonight. You didn’t seek this out, she assures herself as she takes a first step away.

Before she can seal the escape with her second step, Helena says, “You might at least release me from this view.”

“You talked to me,” Myka says, doing her best to make it all go away. “You’re free.”

Helena turns from the flames too quickly for Myka to dodge being caught by the look. “I am in no way free.”

That is not my problem, Myka would like to maintain, but Helena’s gaze and tone are implicating, which is entirely unfair but still needs to be dealt with. She sits down next to Helena on the sofa. At a judicious distance.

Now they are both watching the Yule Log, which, indifferent to them both, continues its facsimile flicker. “I guess it is kind of mesmerizing,” Myka says after some time.

“We haven’t spoken much,” Helena rejoins.

“There hasn’t been much to speak about.” Without peril, Myka adds, internally, and by that she means, peril to me.

“On the contrary. But I’ve tried to ignore it.”

“So have I. I hear it’s unhealthy.”

“Perhaps. It’s Pete’s strategy as well, according to him,” Helena says. Then, following a throat-clear, “With regard to his feelings for you.”

Myka doesn’t need to clear her throat. “He’s the one who told me it was unhealthy.” Which puts her in mind of his ostentatious cough: it’s meaningful now. Ridiculous, but meaningful.

“Then I suppose we’re ailing, all of us.”

“I suppose we are. An epidemic of ignorance.”

Helena smiles a little at that. Myka can’t help but smile back, and she maintains it as Helena asks, light, “What is the prognosis?”

“Depends on the ignoring’s end result,” Myka temporizes.

“Pete maintains that ignoring something long enough makes it go away.”

Or it kills you, Myka might say, like cancer. But instead she stays light. As light as she can. “Maybe he’s right. No, probably he’s right.” She owes him that.

Now a pause. A wait. What’s next? “So is that where we leave it?” Helena asks.

Maybe it goes away. Maybe that’s what’s next.

Myka can see it, now: see the spreadsheets dissolving into unnecessarity, see herself not responding physically to Helena, see Helena becoming, in essence, like Pete: someone with a past version of whom a past version of herself made a mistake.

She hadn’t imagined, not before this minute, that it was possible. But now a road leads there.

Can she take that road? She looks again into the fire. The not-fire. It mocks her: Everything you really want turns out to be unreal. On the other side of some facsimilating screen. A mirage. She turns away from it, ashamed. She looks at Helena... for the moment, Helena is still real. Still able to render Myka’s resistance from her body, here in this moment by sitting quietly and watching fake flames, in the next by doing nothing more than breathing out, breathing in.

Myka has not yet taken that awful road. Not yet. One more try, she tells herself. But no, that’s not right. She’s never really tried. Never really. She’s waited—longer than she thought she should—and she’s hoped—harder than she thought she could—but that wasn’t trying.

So: one try.

It can’t be the try she might have made in the past, a desperate just-please-touch-me push. Under the circumstances, that’s impossible. So, what?

An olive branch? No, peace isn’t the right aim, even now.

Better, perhaps: something she wouldn’t have said before tonight’s... encounter. Something related to tonight’s encounter, something more real than she’s offered so far: “We fought. Pete and I.”

TBC

[deathtodickens]

Stenography 101

My court reporting professor is actually very amazing. All of my classes are live, over Zoom, so I’ve not actually met her - or any of my classmates, even though three of them live in town and three of us have a text group - but the impact of her amazing support and personality has been very obvious on us, as a class. We have a group chat on WhatsApp where 20+ of us commiserate over every new concept in the theory we’re learning.

That said, she experienced a terrible loss last week and canceled one class but promised to be back the next day. (We meet three times a week.) Her returning so soon after is, of course, an absurd thought but I understand that people just want to maintain some sort of normalcy while grieving.

But as we all saw this notification over Canvas, and felt the impact of her news almost at once, my class hustled, collected donations, and sent this woman a giant flower arrangement with all of the add-ons we could find and afford. There was money left over from later donations for a second gift basket with care items, like gift cards for food delivery, so she wouldn’t have to worry about remembering to eat.

I offered to draw the card for that and already had this image in my mind. Took a photo of my machine and outlined it, then dove in to drawing these flowers from a reference bouquet. Which, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever done before and wasn’t sure I could actually do.

(And y’all now that realistic stuff isn’t really my thing. But every now and then I have the patience for detail.)

I should say that I was greatly inspired by our professor fully committing to joining our class the day after her loss. Tears and all. She’d received her flowers and thanked us all, then wiped her eyes and moved forward with dictations for our final quiz of the semester.

This is just a drawing that I didn’t want to add words to, but I hope it brings some additional comfort and I hope she sees that it’s meant to relay our gratitude to her dedication to our success.

Court reporting schools and programs have something hovering around a 95% fail rate. I am only in my first semester of theory but we will have the same professor for all three theory semesters. Then off to speed building (the hounds), up to 225 wpm, where most people tend to give up.

I love the machine and learning a very detailed, even if a bit stroke intensive, theory that makes sense to my puzzle-loving brain, but at some point in the future, I know we will all just be hanging on for dear life.

Til then, I will be sprinkling this new love of mine into my little collection of sporadic thoughts here.

[kla1991]

For @galactic-pirates, happy Gift Exchange! Not sure it's exactly what you were looking for, I wandered a fair bit from the prompt, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.

"The old house is rotting when she comes home, not neatly preserved like Atlas House and all the pretty places that were dear to Charles. The roof is leaking and the mortar is crumbling and the steps are cracked and filled with moss...

The lights don’t come on like they used to, but the stone steps, untouched by the animals and elements that have rotted the house above, descend into the darkness of Warehouse 12."

@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange

[fuckyeah-beringandwellsfics]

The 2024 Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange!

May I, for your pleasure of perusal, direct you this weekend to the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange blog,

@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange

where all the gifts that have been created this year - art, fics, a new gifset - have been reblogged all in one place, so you can browse them and share them to your heart's desire!

[anandabrat]

Hi, it’s your Bering and Wells gift exchange gifter! Do you have any prompts/ideas/requests and/or squicks you want to tell me about? (Pls pin or tag the reply Bering and Wells so I can find it!)

Happy Xmas!

Hi! Let's see... I love history/pop culture AUs, and I'm always up for a good artifact retrieval fic as well. But of course make what calls to you - if none of those feel right, I'm sure I'll love whatever does feel right! I can't wait to see what you do. Thank you so much!

[lilolilyr]

Hi, it’s your Bering & Wells holiday gift exchange gifter— just checking to see if my original message sent (no pressure if you’re busy or still thinking it over or anything like that)! If you didn’t receive it, then: Hello! I’m your Bering & Wells holiday gift exchange gifter! I come offering fic, gifs, or drawing (no notable limits on content/rating). Let me know what you’re thinking, or we can chat parameters! Happy holidays!

Hi! So sorry that I’m only replying now, I’m traveling at the moment and didn’t get around to really thinking about what to request or suggest yet! I’ll write a proper reply to your first ask tomorrow or Saturday, just wanted to let you know already that yes your ask got through, I’m just a bit busy right now :)

[mfangeleeta]

Hiya! I'm your B&W Gift Exchange gifter! I'm a writer, I've done some AUs and some more canon-compliant/side quest type things... Please let me know if you'd like anything in particular for your story, what elements you do or don't want me to include! I can't wait to get started!

Hello!

I am always a fan of a good AU or a warehouse caper that has the team working together. Since there was no season 5, no need for a fix it or anything like that. I'm also good with a little angst and pain since that's what our ladies are know for.

Looking forward to reading your story!

[barbarawar]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells Additional Tags: Fluff, Established Relationship, Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024 Summary:

Myka can't wait for winter to be over. On the first day it feels like spring has finally arrived, her and Helena have a picnic.

This was written for @purlturtle as part of the 2024 Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange, who gave me the following prompt:

"how about something spring-themed (since the gifts will be exchanged for Valentine's, IIRC)? Like, being at the tail end of winter and longing for spring, or experiencing the first day when it really feels like spring is in the air, that kind of thing?

Alternately, maybe something to do with chocolate? (I love chocolate)"

I had a lot of fun with the prompt (started writing it pretty much as soon as I got it) and I tried to include everything. Hopefully you enjoy it :)

[righty-ho-then]

Happy gift exchange @apparitionism !!

inspired by your fanfic Confection (if myka was a little bit braver and quicker)