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apparitionism · 25 days ago

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Bonus 4

First, a PSA: If you are eligible to vote in next week’s US election, please VOTE FOR HARRIS as well as every other Democratic candidate on the ballot, and do what you can to persuade as many other people as you can to do the same. I assume anyone who bothers to read my writing is smart enough to understand why that’s necessary—and why engaging in any sort of protest-vote or sit-this-one-out charade is counter to the interests of most living breathing people at this point in history.

Anyway. Here I offer the final part of last year’s Christmas story... again and as usual, where were we? I recommend the intro to part 1 for where we are, canon-wise (S4, essentially, but diverging); beyond that, Myka has just returned to the Warehouse after a holiday retrieval in Cleveland (Pete, in town visiting his family, was tangentially involved), where Helena, whom Myka hadn’t seen since the Warehouse didn’t explode, served as her backup—a situation facilitated by Claudia as something of a Christmas bonus. Post-retrieval, Helena and Myka shared a meal at a restaurant; this was a new experience that went quite well until, alas, Helena was instructed (by powers higher than Claudia) to leave. Thus Myka returned home, both buoyed and bereft... and here the tale resumes. I mentioned part 1, but for the full scraping of Myka’s soul, see part 2 and part 3 as well.

Bonus 4

Late on Christmas Day, Myka is heading to the kitchen for a warm and, preferably, spiked beverage, intending to curl up with that and a book—well, maybe a book; a restless scanning of her shelves had left her drained and decisionless, hence the need for a resetting, and settling, beverage—and to convince herself to appreciate the peace of these waning Christmas hours. She peeks into the living room, just to assess the wider situation, and regards a sofa-draped Pete. He returned from Ohio barely an hour ago, which Myka knows because she had heard Claudia exclaim over his arrival. Then things had gone quiet.

Now, he appears to be napping.

Myka tries to slink away.

“Claud mentioned about your backup,” he says as soon as her back is turned, startling her and proving she’s a terrible slinker. Small favors, though: at least she hadn’t already had her beverage in hand and so isn’t wearing it now. “That had to be weird,” he goes on, sitting up.

She’s been wondering whether the topic would come up, whenever they happened to get beyond how-was-your-trip pleasantries... she entertains herself for a moment with the idea of referring to Helena, specifically with Pete, as “the topic.” So she tries it: “‘Weird’ does not begin to describe the topic.” It is entertaining, as a little secret-layers-of-meaning sneak. But there’s yet more entertainment in the offing, with its own secret layers: “Incidentally, speaking of weird—which I’m sure was also mentioned—I met your cousin. Thanks for giving her an artifact. Very Christmas of you.”

He rounds his spine into the sofa like he’s trying to back his way through the upholstery and escape. “Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it was an artifact.”

Myka is tempted to keep him guessing about her feelings, but she doesn’t really have the energy; she gives up on entertainment and tells the truth: “I’m not mad. I’m serious: thank you.”

“I think you’re trying to trick me,” he skeptics. “Soften me up for something. But if that’s for real, then you should thank my mom more than me.”

Pete’s mother. The extent of Jane Lattimer’s role in Myka’s life is... surprising. Then again the extent of her role in Pete’s life has turned out to be surprising too, and that’s probably a bigger deal, all things considered.

Pete goes on, “Because I was gonna blame her, but should I give her props instead? It was her idea to give the little feather guy to Nancy, because of how after I got it I saw that it’d probably PTSD you.”

“I appreciate the seeing, but... wait. After you got it. How’d you get it in the first place?”

“I was in this antique store,” Pete says.

As if that explains everything—when in fact it explains nothing. In further fact, it unexplains. “Why were you in an antique store? According to you, you hated those even before the Warehouse turned them into artifact arcades.”

“Mom was picking something up there, and this guy showed it to me.”

“Your mom, this guy...” Myka is now beyond suspicious. “What did this guy look like?” A pointless question. As if knowing that could help her... as if anything could really help her. This is madness. “Fine. It doesn’t matter what he looked like, because I’m stopping here. I can’t keep doing this. For my sanity, I can’t.”

“Keep doing what?”

“Tracing it back. You win. You all win.”

“Do we? Doesn’t feel like it. And that doesn’t seem like a reason you’d be thanking me.”

“No. That isn’t. But as of now I’m trying to keep myself from focusing on... let’s call it the causal chain.”

“I’d rather focus on the popcorn chain.” He points to the strands that loop the Christmas tree.

They are the tree’s only adornment. Every prior holiday season of Myka’s Warehouse association, Leena has decorated the B&B unto a traditional-Christmas Platonic ideal; this year, in her absence, Myka, Steve, and Claudia, trying to replicate that, had purchased a tree. And transported it home. And situated it near to plumb in the tree stand, which was an exhausting exercise in what they earnestly assured each other was complicated physics but was really just physical incompetence.

They had then settled in to do the actual decorating, starting with popcorn strings... but once they’d finished those, they were indeed finished, pathetically drained of holiday effort. And they’d succeeded in that initial (and sadly final) project only because, as they’d all agreed once they’d strung the popcorn, Pete hadn’t been there to shovel the bulk of their also-pathetic popping efforts into his mouth.

“Take them down, slurp them up like spaghetti if you want,” Myka says now. “Christmas is pretty much over.” The statement—its truth—makes her stew. At Pete? But the situation isn’t ultimately his fault, no matter what part he played. And why is she so set on assigning, or marinating in, this vague blame anyway? She got something she wanted: time with Helena. It didn’t work out as perfectly as she’d wished it would, but she got it.

She tries to resettle: her heart to remembrance, her brain to appreciation.

The doorbell rings, its old-fashioned rounded bing-bong resounding from foyer to living room and beyond, bouncing heavily against every surface. Myka lets the vibrations push her toward the kitchen; she’s had enough of interaction for now. Her beverage and book, whichever one will provide some right refuge, await. As do remembrance and appreciation.

She hears Pete sigh and the sofa creak; he must have shoved himself from it in order to lurch to the foyer. A minute later, he yells, “Guess what! Christmas might not be over!”

Still kitchen-focused, Myka yells back, “If that’s not Santa himself, you’re wrong!”

“Never heard of that being one of her things!” Pete shouts, even louder.

“Quit shouting!” Myka bellows, so loud that she drowns out her own initial registering of what he’s said, which then starts to resonate in her head, a stimulating hum that resolves into meaning... her things? Her things... Myka’s torso initiates a turn; her body knows what’s happening, even if her brain—

“Hey, H.G.,” Pete says, and now every part of Myka knows.

Except her eyes, but once she moves to the foyer to stand behind Pete, they know too: There Helena is. Her body. Embodied. The illumination of her, in the foyer semi-dark... her bright eyes catching Myka’s, warming to the catch... oh, this.

Seeing the sight—greeting, once again, her perfect match—she is struck dumb.

There’s movement behind her, though, and she turns to see Steve and Claudia poking their heads into the space like meerkats—well, no, in South Dakota she should think prairie dogs... but they’re both built more like meerkats than prairie dogs, so she should probably keep thinking meerkats out of... respect? Whatever: they’re animal-alert, heads aswivel, faces alight. It surely signifies something.

Turning back to Helena, trying to get a voice in her mouth, she coughs out, “You’re back? Now? I mean, already? How did you—”

“To quote myself: ‘when I can, I will,’” Helena says, as matter-of-factly as anyone could possibly speak while maintaining intense eye contact with one person, and Myka thanks all gods and firefighters above that she is herself that person. “Now, not forty-eight hours later, I could. Thus I did. I should note that I’m unsure as to why I could, but perhaps it’s a gift horse?” Her focus on Myka does not waver. Pete and the meerkats might as well not exist, and Myka in turn is mesmerized.

“Maybe that’s the horse you rode in on,” Claudia says. Is she trying to break the spell? Myka wishes she wouldn’t... she ideates shushing her, even as Claudia goes on, “But better late than never, Christmas-wise, right?”

“Did you enjoy your additional portion of squash?” Helena asks Myka, ignoring Claudia’s interjection. Her tone is formal, presenting public, but her question is for Myka alone.

“It was very good for my heart,” Myka says. She doesn’t add, though she could, And so was that question.

Helena smiles like she heard both good-fors—like she’s grateful for both—and Myka thinks, for the first time out loud in her head, She feels the same way I do.

It’s... new. Different. Perfect? Not yet, the out-loud-in-her-head voice instructs.

But she can make a move in that direction. “Please put your suitcase in my room,” she says. Out loud, outside her head. Realing it.

“I will,” Helena says. She takes up her case and moves toward the stairs, presumably to real that too.

It renders Myka once again enraptured. She is taking her suitcase to my room. My room. She is.

The first stair-creaks that Helena’s ascent occasions sound, to Myka’s eagerly interpretive ears, approving.

Claudia and Steve don’t even blink. Pete does—well, more the opposite; he widens his eyes in the cartoony way.

But then he turns on his heel, Marine-brusque and not at all cartoony, and exits the space. Myka doesn’t know what to make of that. She’ll most likely have to address the topic—in fact, “the topic”—with him later. Fortunately, later isn’t now.

She does know, however, what to make of Steve and Claudia’s aspect: “I’m sensing some ‘aren’t we clever’ preening,” she accuses.

“We are clever,” Claudia says, dusting off her shoulder. “More Fred. Don’t sweat it.”

Exasperating. “Don’t sweat it? As I understood the situation, Fred was a retrieval and an insanely expensive dinner. Are we doing that again, or is she back for good?”

“She’s back for nice,” Claudia says.

Steve jumps in with, “To answer your question: we’re not a hundred percent sure.”

“See, we made a deal,” Claudia says.

“With whom?” Myka asks.

“Santa?” Claudia says, but without commitment. Myka’s response of an oh-come-on face causes her to huff, “Fine. Pete’s mom and company. And Mrs. F. And even Artie, in absentia.”

“What kind of deal?” Myka asks, because while she can’t dispute the indisputably positive fact that Helena is here, she mistrusts any deal involving Regents. Pete’s mom aside. Or Pete’s mom included: She can’t stop her brain from stirring, stirring once again to life those causal-chain questions: What’s being put in motion this time?

“A kind of deal about which things they’re willing to let us—well, technically Steve—say are nice,” Claudia pronounces, as if that explains everything.

Myka is very tired of proffered explanations that actually unexplain.

Steve says, “Claudia finally found the file on the pen. Seems that Santa’s list, once made, is kind of ridiculously powerful. And it turns out you can put a situation on the list.”

“For example,” Claudia supplies, “H.G. and you. Getting to be in each other’s... proximity.”

Steve adds, “And yours isn’t the only one I put there. That was part of the deal.”

“So you’re letting the pen reward nice situations with... existing,” Myka says. “And are you storing it on some new ‘Don’t Neutralize’ shelf? So nobody accidentally bags the existence out of them?”

Claudia says, “Kinda. At least for a while.”

This all seems deceptively, not to mention dangerously, easy. “But: personal gain, not for,” Myka points out.

“Right,” Steve says. “So here’s a question: what does ‘personal gain’ actually mean? The manual doesn’t have a glossary. So we’re trying to work it out. Let’s say Claud uses an artifact and then makes this utterance: ‘My use of this artifact was not for personal gain.’ And let’s say I assess that utterance as not a lie. The question remains, are the Warehouse and Claud and I agreeing on the definition of ‘personal gain’?”

“The question remains,” Myka echoes, fretting. “And the answer?”

“We’ll see,” Steve says.

It’s destabilizing, but that’s the Warehouse’s fault, not Steve’s. “I just hope the artifact won’t downside you for any disagreement. Because you’re remarkably nonjudgmental, and—”

“With a Liam exception,” Steve notes. “Or several. Ideally, though, the Warehouse and I can work through these things like adults. Unlike me and Liam.”

Myka respects his honesty. And yet: “I’m having a seriously hard time ideating the Warehouse as an adult.”

“We’re working through that too,” Steve concedes.

“You clearly have the patience of a saint.”

Steve chuckles. “Pete’s your partner, right? And in another sense, H.G. might be too?” Myka waves her hands, no-no-too-soon, because suitcases notwithstanding, she has certainly in the past thought she was making a safe all-in bet, only to lose every last copper-coated-zinc penny of her metaphorical money. “No matter what we call anybody,” he continues, “I think you get a lot more patience practice than I do. I’m just dealing with one little Warehouse and its feelings.”

“Aren’t its feelings... unassimilable?” she asks. “Or at least, shouldn’t they be?” It’s a building. Whatever its feelings, they should be talking about it like it’s an alien, not somebody who’s in therapy. Or somebody who should be in therapy.

“Maybe,” Steve says. “Or maybe not. That was part of the deal too, that I would test out how it feels. About personal gain specifically here, eventually maybe more. But if it has a meltdown...”

“Ah. We cancel the test, neutralize the pen, and face the consequences.”

Steve nods. “But ideally, if that happens, we will have leapfrogged whatever the looming Artie-and-Leena crises are. The two of them coming back here safely are the other situations we niced, as part of the deal.”

Claudia adds, “My big fingers-crossed leapfrog is over their stupid administrative ‘keep H.G. away from Myka and everybody else who loves her’ dealy-thingy. We’re hoping they’ll just forget about whatever their dumbass reasons for that were when they see how great it is for her to be back.”

“Dealy-thingy? Have you been talking to Pete?” Myka asks, trying for silly, for light—so as to deflect that “love her” arrow.

“Not about that. But wait, are you saying he loves her too? I mean I figured he was okay with her after the whole Mom-still-alive thing, but his Houdini out of here just now makes me think he’s not quite all the way to—”

“Never mind,” Myka says, as a command.

Claudia squints like she wants to pursue it. Myka crosses her arms against any such idea, in response to which Claudia says, “Fine. Here’s some funsies you’ll like better. Making that list, you’ve gotta have balance. Naughty against the nice.”

“And you think I’ll like that because?”

“I talked to Pete’s cousin, a little pretty-sure-we-don’t-have-to-tesla-you-but-let’s-make-super-sure exit interview. Heard some things about a guy. Bob? Seemed like a good candidate.”

Well. Pete had been right on several levels about Christmas not being over yet. “That’s the best news I’ve had in the past... I don’t know. Five minutes?” Other than the Pete-vs.-“the topic” question, it’s been an absurdly good-news-y several minutes.

Claudia goes on, “Personal gain, what is it? There’s also a warden from that place I don’t like to remember being committed to who’s about to have a Boxing Day that’ll haunt him longer than he’s been haunting me.”

That definitely raises questions—flags, even—about “personal gain” in a definitional sense, but letting all that lie seems the better part of valor, so Myka asks Steve, “Any Liam on there?”

“Too personal to let the Warehouse anywhere near,” he says, but with a smile.

Myka smiles too. “Would that I could say the same about my situation.”

Claudia snickers. “Your situation is Warehouse-dependent. Warehouse-designed. Warehouse-destined.”

“All the more reason said Warehouse shouldn’t object to easing the pressure,” Steve says.

“Are you kidding?” Claudia says. “Its birth certificate reads ‘Ware Stress-Test House.’”

Myka appreciates their positions—Steve’s in particular, even as she internally allows that Claudia’s is probably more accurate—but she would appreciate even more their ceasing to talk about her situation like they’re the ones whose philosophy will determine how, and whether, it succeeds. Or even proceeds.

And she would most appreciate their ceasing to talk about her situation entirely. So that she can go upstairs and be in her situation, because Helena hasn’t come back downstairs, a fact for which Myka’s rapidly overheating libido has provided a similarly overheated reason: she is waiting, up there in the bedroom, for Myka.

Which thought is of course followed by Helena’s preemption of same: she descends the stairs and presents herself in the foyer.

Damn it, Myka’s disappointed libido fumes.

Sacrilege! an overriding executive self chastises, and it isn’t wrong, for again, here Helena is. To fail to appreciate that—ever—is an error of, indeed, biblical, or anti-biblical, proportions.

In any case, now four people are just standing here, awkwardness personified.

Helena flicks her eyes briefly toward Myka—it seems a little offer of “hold on”—then turns to Steve and Claudia. “I didn’t greet either of you directly when I arrived. I apologize. Claudia darling, it warms my heart to see you... and this is of course the famous Steve, whose acquaintance I’m delighted to make at last.”

Striking to witness: Helena has essentially absorbed the awkward into her very body and transmogrified it into formality.

Myka loves her.

“Famous?” Steve echoes, like she’s said “Martian.”

“I’ve heard much of you,” Helena says, with an emphasizing finger-point on “much.”

Steve smiles his I’m-astonished-you’re-not-lying smile, through which he articulates, “Likewise? I mean, likewise, but with more. Obviously.”

Yes, Myka loves her: for her charming self alone, but also for how that charm extends; her sweet attention to Steve has him immediately smitten. Myka’s the one to catch Helena’s gaze now, intending merely to convey gratitude, but to her gratification it stops Helena, causing her to abandon her engagement with Steve.

Maybe she and Myka can stand here and gaze at each other forever. It wouldn’t be everything, but it would be something. Second on second, it is something. It is something.

Claudia interrupts it all, saying to Helena, “Can I hug you?”

Myka doesn’t begrudge the breaking of this spell, particularly not with that; she had been selfish, before, greedy to keep Helena and her eyes all to herself. She also doesn’t begrudge the ease of the hug in which Claudia and Helena engage; getting a hug right is simpler when its purpose is clear. And clearly joyful.

Over Claudia’s shoulder, Myka’s and Helena’s gazes lock yet again, and it’s spectacular.

However: it also seems to introduce a foreign element into the hug, some friction that Claudia must sense, for she disengages and says, “So. I have to go. I just remembered I have an appointment to not be here.”

Steve says, “I feel like I was supposed to remember to meet you there, wasn’t I,” Steve says, and Myka has never been able to predict when he’ll be able to play along instead of blurting “lie” (even if he does often follow such blurts with some version of an apologetic “but I see the social purpose”).

“I don’t think you were,” Claudia says, “because I’m revising the gag; it makes more sense if I just now made an appointment to not be here. So you couldn’t be remembering some nonexistent-before-now appointment.”

“But I still think the appointment ought to be with me, gag-wise and otherwise,” Steve says, doggedly, still playing. “In the first and second place.”

“Is this the first place?” Claudia muses, faux-serious, now rewarding his doggedness. “Is the appointment in the second place?”

They could who’s-in-the-first-place this for days, so Myka intervenes, “In the first place, if this is a gag, it desperately needs workshopping. But in the second place: Scram!”

“You mean to the second place,” Claudia sasses.

Myka scowls, wishing she could growl proficiently.

Claudia’s eyes widen. “Scramming. Best scrammer,” she says, sans sass, proving the actual growl unnecessary. Interesting.

“Except that’s about to be me with the gold-medal scram,” Steve objects and concurs.

Myka pronounces, “I’ll be the judge of who’s what. Once you actually do it.”

“You’ll award the medals later though, right?” asks Claudia. Her words are jokey, yet her tone is weirdly sincere, as if Myka might forget they had scrammed on her behalf, and that such amnesia would be hurtful.

“Participation trophies,” Myka semi-affirms, “in the form of a healthy breakfast.” She adds, internally, Take the damn hint.

After much winking and nudging, the comedians at last absent themselves, and Myka and Helena are alone.

Unfortunately that doesn’t immediately yield the perfected situation Myka seeks, first and foremost because she doesn’t know what comes next. Take your own damn hint, she tells herself, but... how? They need privacy, and the only reasonable place for that is where Helena’s suitcase rests: upstairs. Myka can’t magic them there, so what incremental movement will be recognizable as an appropriate beginning?

She casts a wish for Helena to ease it all, as she had with Claudia and Steve, but Helena is stock-still, offering no increment. For both of them, upstairs seems to have become a different place... the promised land?

Nothing is promised, she reminds herself. Some things are newly possible, but nothing is promised. Certainly not when the Warehouse is involved.

So maybe the point, probably the point, is that it’s incumbent on Myka and Helena to realize the possibility.

Nevertheless, here they stick.

After a time—most likely shorter than Myka feels it to be—Helena announces, “Pete and I have had a chat.” Her articulation of “chat” shapes it into a synonym for “fight.” “Who won?” Myka asks.

“I believe it was a draw. He opened by saying he ‘didn’t get how far along this thing had got.’” Hearing Pete’s diction in Helena’s mouth is disorienting. “He then said he wants to protect you.”

That’s so Pete. “I don’t need protecting.”

Eyebrow. “I noted that I want to protect you too.”

That thrills Myka. At the same time, she wants to object to it nearly as much as to Pete’s assertion... internal contradictions, what are they? She lands weakly on, “I hope that persuaded him.”

“Pete finds deeds more persuasive than words,” Helena says. “Thus I’m ‘on probation where Myka’s concerned,’ until he determines I won’t damage you.”

That’s so Pete too. But. “That is my determination.”

“I expressed a similar sentiment. He responded, ‘And how’d that go last time?’” Helena’s wince after she says this is awful, and Myka dares to assuage it, stepping toward Helena with open arms, drawing her into an embrace.

This time, their hug—simpler because its purpose is clear—works, bodies soft-querying at the start, then firm, intentional. Not quite catching fire, but this is a palpable first cut into whatever membrane of uncertainty is obstructing their movement.

Slow, slow, they move apart. Yet they stay close, the embrace’s softness lingering as Helena says, “Selfishly, I didn’t concede his point, which is in any case indeed down to your determination. But I did note that circumstances have changed since then. And to be fair I must report that he allowed they have.”

“You’re both right,” Myka says. But: “Was this Cleveland mission contrived to... further change the circumstances?”

“I didn’t contrive it,” Helena says, fast. “I would have, if I could, but I didn’t.”

“I’m not saying you did. I’m saying I always wonder, because I can’t help it, how much, or how little, of what happens just happens.”

“And the rest—or if I’m understanding your implication, the bulk—would be...?”

“Some sort of social engineering.”

“On whose part?” Helena asks.

That’s disingenuous. “Your engineers of choice. Regents. Mrs. Frederic. Mr. Kosan. Ententes thereof.”

Helena runs a hand through her hair—frustration at the thought of those entities? Or just showing off? Then she shrugs, as if to dismiss both possibilities. “I favor any engineering that places me in private proximity to you.”

The words are beyond welcome. And yet. “I’m not objecting to it. I’m just...”

“Objecting to it.”

“No. Questioning its provenance.”

“Why?”

That brings Myka up short. “What?”

“If it produces an outcome you desire, what does the provenance matter? In this case, at the very least.”

It’s a reasonable question, and Myka’s most-honest answer would have something to do with the ethical acceptability of poisonous-tree fruits. For now, though, she goes with, “Because I don’t like being manipulated.”

“Don’t you?” That’s flirty, a near-whisper, compelling Myka to lean even closer. Helena knows—she’s always known—the power she has over Myka. And she’s always known how—and when—to wield that power.

“The manipulator matters,” Myka says, responding to the flirt, accepting the push away from ethics.

“Then would that I could in truth say I contrived that relatively banal retrieval. And sabotaged the elevator, so as to draw our attention to... that to which it was drawn.”

“I can’t say I was displeased with the drawing,” Myka allows. “So if you had...”

Helena moves her lips, a sly hint of curve, and says, “Oh, but perhaps I’ve manipulated you into that sentiment.” Again, an ostentatious flirt.

Myka’s knowing that flirt-show for what it is? That’s Helena-specific. In the past Myka has always had to be told when she was being flirted with: “He was interested in you,” an exasperated friend would explain of an interaction Myka found incomprehensible, and she would cringe internally at her inability to recognize such an apparently basic, obvious display. But with Helena she’s never needed a flirt translator. From the first lock of gaze, unto this night’s myriad connections; from that first brush of finger, unto the way Helena has just allowed their hug to linger; from the first just-for-you conspiratorial grin, unto this very moment’s slip of smile—all the advances, heavy and light, have been legible to Myka.

And based on what she is now reading, she has no ground left. “Fine. I like being manipulated if it means.” She clears her throat. “If it means I get closer to you. You win.”

“Do I?” Here’s the disingenuity again, but now Myka understands its intentional irony. Helena follows up with, “This establishment has no elevator,” Helena says, like it’s nothing more than a structural observation that checks a box on a form, a minor note in an overall architectural assessment.

“No,” Myka agrees.

“How fortunate,” Helena says.

Myka waits for the conclusion, the help... but it’s not forthcoming, probably in a that’s-down-to-your-determination-as-well sense. The next cut is clearly Myka’s responsibility too. So: “It has stairs though,” she offers. “That go. Up. Well, both down and up. Of course. As stairs do.” Stop talking, she tells herself, but her nerves don’t heed the advice. “As they have to? I don’t know; do they? Escher?”

“Ess-sherr,” Helena echoes, clearly uncomprehending. That she lets Myka hear her knowledge gap is a gift. For Christmas?

“He’s an artist. I promise I’ll explain later. Eventually. Anyway the stairs. I think you just used them? Without incident?”

Myka expects a comeback. She gets none, which leaves her in some non-place, absent as it is of Helena-attitude... but what form had she expected such attitude to take? Aggression? Naughtiness? Or “naughtiness”... does the lack of all that mean Helena is offering a self more authentic than the one who charms and flirts? But that doesn’t seem quite right, for the charms and the flirts have always seemed clearly intrinsic Helena-talents. Deployed, yes, but not inauthentic. So if this Helena is deploying fewer such talents, maybe it’s that she’s... less?

Ironically—of course ironically, because all of this is so, so layered like that—a reduced Helena is an even greater bonus.

All of this, which Myka had better figure out, fast, how to appreciate and accommodate. “Of course that’s no guarantee that travel will go well,” she begins. “So we should try not to trip on the stairs... wait, no, that would make it our problem, which I don’t think this ever was. Maybe better: we shouldn’t let the stairs trip us.” She considers. “But no again: what I really mean is, we shouldn’t give the stairs a reason to trip us. Right?”

Helena looks at her and blinks, charmingly blank. “I have no idea. Are you through?”

“I have no idea either,” Myka admits, still directionless without Helena’s attitudinal lead. Is this, like the semi-botched hug of two days ago, a seemingly terrible sign?

“Merely delay.” A little head-shake follows. Signifying disappointment? Making light of Myka’s inability to get through? Then Helena says, “And yet I don’t know how much more delay I can withstand.”

Those raw words are mediated by nothing more than molecules—the nitrogen-oxygen-argon-et-cetera invisibilities conveying waves to Myka’s ossicles—and for the second time, Myka ideates, in full awe, She feels the same way I do.

“Me either,” she says, literally heartfelt, sending the words back, a final push through everything, molecules and otherwise, that has stood between them.

Testing, she offers Helena her hand. Helena takes it.

These hands together: not a first. Not even a second. In the present circumstance, that translates to something very like “comfortingly familiar.”

Under the aegis of that comfort, they ascend the stairs, Myka leading the way, marveling that she can. Against her pulling hand, Helena offers what seems a single erg of resistance, a display, an I-am-letting-you affirmation.

They cross the threshold of Myka’s room, and then. Then, after Myka makes one turn and twist, a closed non-elevator door stands, for once and at last, between them and the rest of the world.

Closed, the door is, but not locked. In the door-closing instant, turning the lock—adding its presumptive click—had struck Myka’s hand as overly brazen: that’s a frustrating flinch her hand will have to work out with whatever part of her brain-body complex was certain enough to start this, start it by saying what she did about the suitcase... the same part that keeps telling her that Helena’s feelings match hers.

As Myka turns her back on the now-closed door, she sees her bed. She sees her bed. Disconcerting, in this new now, how large a percentage of the room’s space this one piece of furniture seems to be occupying...

But she’s self-aware enough to know that she’s overlaying the bed’s current brain space, the desires it signifies, on the physical. Whatever’s going to happen—or not—will happen, she tries to force into that space in her brain, pushing it down... for desire, sometimes indistinguishable from expectation, has devastated her before. But she tries too hard: missing the mark, she slips and falls into some past-obsessed cerebral fold, once again lost, quietly but deeply, in that devastation.

“Here we are,” Helena remarks into the silence. “Or, harking back to engineering: Here we are? I continue to be unsure as to why. I can accept unclear provenance, but I’d prefer more explication regarding my allowable movements.”

That’s help. That’s rescue. But oh: movements. The word nearly derails Myka in a different direction, but she gathers herself, resetting to reply, “It’s explicable, but I honestly don’t have the energy to explicate even my minimal knowledge of the mechanism. The most basic base is, Claudia and Steve worked out a deal to use that pen, and there’s a list that you and I are on. As a ‘nice’ situation. Anyway if you want real details, you probably should sit down with Steve.”

A mind’s-eye image comes to her, of Helena and Steve leaning toward each other, bringing complementary concentration to bear on some topic large or small... and then an incipient sound strikes her: the chime of their voices together, both seriously and lightheartedly, ringing notes she hadn’t before this new instant thought to anticipate. “Actually I think you and Steve sitting down would be really pleasant. Even productive. Given that you’ll be sticking around. I mean, if you’re willing, and if, or at least until, some definitional issues get worked out. As I understand it.” As I devoutly hope, she doesn’t quite utter.

“That addresses... some issues, I suppose. Yet a question remains.”

This is a bonus of a day: Helena turning into the queen of understatement? It’s freeing; Myka laughs and says, “Tons of questions remain. Which one’s on your mind?”

Head-tilt. “You said you didn’t have the energy... to explain the mechanism,” Helena says.

More delay, Myka knee-jerks... but she knows the reflex immediately as wrongheaded, for this is conversation, the value of which she should have learned by now not to discount. “Right. Sorry, I’ll try: so the pen, and honestly speaking of questions and provenance, I still have some questions about provenance, which I’m trying to ignore, but anyway, Claudia found the file, and—”

“That is not the issue I had in mind.”

“Sorry. I’m not getting anything right, am I?” Because of course she isn’t getting anything right.

“We’ll see,” Helena says.

“So what did I jump the gun on?”

“You don’t have the energy to explain.”

This muddles Myka; it will probably require another reset. “I did say that, but I can try to—”

“Myka,” Helena says, and her name in that mouth will never cease to be a singular wonder. “What do you have the energy for?”

Here again is the difference between the attitude that Myka, in her more cynical moments, might have thought Helena would maintain, and the reality she is instead offering: the question is suggestive, but guilelessly, graciously so; its import is genuine, not manipulative. “How do you do that?” Myka asks.

“Do what?” This question, too, is guileless, gracious.

“Stop me.” It’s the best definition Myka can produce of what Helena has in fact done, what she seems consistently able to do.

Helena breathes several breaths, like she’s waiting for the right words to arrive... no, more like they’ve already arrived, but she’s preparing herself, gearing up to deliver them. “I don’t want to stop you,” she eventually says, and Myka should have used that windup to prepare herself: for the admission this is, for how this don’t-want utterance nevertheless is want.

They are the most vulnerable words Myka has ever heard.

New, new, new... the fact is that historically, people have tended to twist and shy from revealing weakness to Myka. Fallout from her tendency to judge, no doubt, but it means that this, too, is new: here is Helena, and maybe in some other world someone else might have made such a mattering move but here in this best one it’s Helena, Helena ignoring that character defect, Helena blowing past it for a chance to change everything.

Everything. “It’s Christmas,” Myka says, because it is. And because now it is.

“So give me this gift,” Helena rejoins.

“You too,” Myka says.

For the space of one breath, they both wait—bracing for whatever fate intends to use to stop them this time.

But this time nothing stops them, for in the ensuing instant, they both give that gift, blowing fast past everything that, slow, might stop them, grasping at this chance to change.

The jolt of their contact reminds Myka of—no: the shock of it strikes her as—artifact activation, that calling of vested power into being, that enabling of such longed-for release. Before the Warehouse taught her to recognize this transubstantiating, she would not have understood this moment’s raw unleashing, its summoning and compelling of stored potential to manifest as what it has lain in wait, in desperate wish, to become.

But also: all the blood in her body knows she has never felt such power released nonartifactually before now, before this.

Before this world-encompassing, world-creating first kiss.

“You’re thinking,” Helena murmurs into the space of a pause for breath. “I can taste it.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Myka scrambles, kicking herself for not staying in the unprecedented moment, for letting thought intrude, as she always does, and it’s always bad, and Helena is now rightfully offended and disenchanted and—

“It’s delicious,” Helena says, punctuating—proving—by meeting Myka’s lips again, again again again, as if determined to never stop.

Myka would be perfectly happy, oh so perfectly happy, with that forever-continuation, but something in her brain has begun gesturing wildly, demanding her attention... something about her hand... brazen... she rips her lips away and yelps, “Wait! I have to lock the door!”

“The thinking continues,” Helena says, stepping back, freeing Myka, and spreading her arms in a ta-da endorsement. “You’re brilliant.”

A memory: “Bunny, you think too much.” No I don’t, she can now answer. Not for her. In time, given time, she’ll tell Helena how much this matters, but now is not that time. Not when Helena is saying, “However, as we’re behind a locked door, I’ll wager I can make you stop thinking... for at least one consequential moment...”

To Myka’s extremely consequential—and utterly, blissfully unthinking—delight, Helena wins that bet.

****

Later. Lazily, later: “I genuinely cannot believe we were stuck in an elevator,” Myka says. A thing to say, said. “As the prelude to all this.” Which is what she really means.

Against Myka’s neck, newly and blessedly intimate, Helena says, “Your limited capacity for belief is noted. Are you equally incapable of believing that we had the apparently obligatory, if not preordained, chat?”

“Obligatory... preordained...” Myka is still so lazy, she’s practically drawling, and the out-of-character surprise of it pricks at the edge of her ability to stay in such a state. Stay, stay, stay... “Honestly... just clichéd.”

“And yet I was able to add a reference to my Myka-index. Entry: Mirrors, your artifact-related discomfort with.”

Myka’s heart seizes: Helena has a Myka-index. That, plus their proximity now, surely requires her to do better than the little falsehood she’d rested on with regard to the mirror-discomfort. Pushing laziness aside, with something too much like relief, she acknowledges, “I misled you. There was an artifact, but that isn’t what bothers me. The real thing is that mirrors make me observe myself too closely. Too much. Which I do all the time anyway.”

“I wish you’d delegate that observational task to me.” Sweet. Helena sounds so sweet. And not just sounds: Myka can tell (hopes she can tell) Helena means it. Which is even sweeter.

And which in turn entails a need for Myka to think seriously about being observed. Being protected. Being willing—but more important, able—to delegate in the correct spirit, even minimally. “I can try.”

“I can accept that,” Helena says, and the approval is better than sweet: it’s buy-all-the-books-you-want indulgent. “But I must ask: do you honestly think any part of the Cleveland interregnum was the elevator’s doing?”

The true answer references Myka’s entire Warehouse experience, from day one: “Yes and no.”

Helena nods, her hair sliding mink-soft on Myka. “I can accept that as well.”

“And whoever’s at fault, our chat was interrupted,” Myka says.

“As it was poised to progress beyond ‘chat’... but in truth I would rather this happened here than in an elevator. Better environs for still further progress. Don’t you agree?” Helena moves her unclad limbs against Myka’s, in transcendent emphasis.

Of course Myka agrees. Which leads her to a painful realization: “So maybe the elevator wasn’t as judgmental as I... judged it to be.”

Helena bestows a kiss to Myka’s shoulder—small, intimate—bringing Myka’s mind back, sharp, to what those bestowing lips have so recently accomplished, which threatens to render her again overcome. She shudders, which reduces her to embarrassment instead, but Helena is kind enough to feign obliviousness as she says, “You did note your own judgmental nature.”

Myka’s soul twinges in genuine regret, collapsing her lip-recall. She regrets that too. “Do you think I need to go back and apologize? I feel all guilty now.”

“The elevator has most likely moved on,” Helena says, quite dry.

“You’re saying it doesn’t have my memory.”

“I’m saying that even if it does—an open question, though the lack of elevator memoirs argues in the negative—it’s unlikely to care as much as you do about what it does remember.”

“Story of my life,” Myka sighs out. Now she’s really saying it, because memory, and caring too much about it, is that story.

“For the best, I suspect. Your life story and an elevator’s shouldn’t be entirely congruent, should they?” Helena questions, and that makes Myka laugh and want to read an entire library shelf’s worth of elevators’ memoirs. Feigning seriousness, Helena continues, “Although we might revisit so as to investigate whether its conveyance of Bob proceeded properly after our visit. That could be revealing.”

“Speaking of Bob, I feel bad for Nancy. Because of course he’ll blame her.”

“For elevator mischief?”

Ah. Helena doesn’t know. “For naughty.”

“Naughty what?”

“The list. He’s back on it, thanks to Steve and Claudia.”

“Is he.” Her satisfaction is evident, and for a moment she and Myka are one in their schadenfreude. That, too, is delicious. “Better they punish him than we do,” Helena then says.

This sends Myka back to guilt. “It feels like cheating. We didn’t use the artifact, but we get the personal gain.”

Myka’s shoulder now receives an indignant exhale. In its wake, Myka is dwelling on how she would have preferred another kiss, but Helena says, “I was speaking of soul-consequences, not this personal-gain fetish you all seem to embrace. Or perhaps it’s an anti-fetish, but in any case was no hard-and-fast dictum in my day.”

“I’ll reiterate that you should sit down with Steve,” Myka tells her, and Helena accedes with a nestle that erases the exhale.

Are words about such things—ambiguously motivated elevators, deserved punishments, fetishes of undetermined valence—a waste of time? No... for again, they are conversation... the value of which, Myka has lately learned, is even greater when the words it comprises land as soft breath on skin.

In fact Myka has learned a great many things in this locked-door recent while. There is, for one, the gratifying fact that she and Helena are physically compatible, at least as evidenced by this first performance, in terms both of wants and of abilities to satisfy them. But nearly as important, particularly in its physical component but not only that, is her new understanding that while her life has offered her several circumstances with which she’s been reasonably satisfied—that she hasn’t minded—this right-now is orders of magnitude above such contentment. She must have in some soul-stratum known this would prove true, or she would not have been panting in its pursuit so seemingly hopelessly, with such dogged desperation.

She says, with gratitude, “This is what I wanted.”

Getting what she wants: that, too, is new. And very. very nice.

“I would hope so,” Helena says. As if she had some genuine doubt about Myka’s motivation? “No, that’s rhetorical; rather, I did hope so. You’ve realized that hope, and... well. I should be clear: this is more than I dared to want.”

Myka, endeavoring to bring everything together, says, “So what you’re saying, want-wise, is that it’s a bonus. A nice one.”

“I’m saying, want-wise, that my wildest hopes have been exceeded. Surpassed. Transcended.”

It’s something, that reply. Also more than a little over the top, rhetorically, which Helena obviously knows. “Pleonast,” Myka accuses.

Helena laughs. “Not inaccurate. I suppose your ‘nice bonus’ translation is technically correct, if a bit... with apologies, pedestrian?”

“It’s less pedestrian than ‘Fred,’” Myka says. A “hm?” from Helena reminds Myka that she hasn’t yet made that translation evident. “I guess ‘Fred’ counts as esoteric instead, so never mind. You’re right, ‘bonus’ is pedestrian. So is ‘nice.’ But maybe it’s a good idea to call our whatever-it-is something pedestrian. I don’t want to scare it away.”

“And what precisely do you think would ‘scare it away’?”

“Bigness,” Myka offers, weakly. It’s what she means, but—

“‘Bigness?’” Helena says, quotes evident. “From the woman who so recently deployed ‘pleonast’? Should I fear that you’ll regularly revert without warning to Pete-reminiscent locutions?”

Myka chuckles. “Spend enough time with him, it’ll probably happen to you too.” The laziness is back. Earned back?

After a time—or perhaps Myka only after a time processes the sound—Helena says, “God forbid.”

A further lag ensues before Myka manages to respond, with a drowsy “I agree.”

Sleep follows. That is certainly earned.

****

Consciousness resumes for Myka with a banging on her door and a shout from Pete: “It’ s really not Christmas anymore, because Artie’s back!”

“Being Artie about it!” Claudia shouts in addition. “He says get to work!”

“I’m awake,” Myka says as she becomes more fully so. This is a Warehouse morning, and Warehouse alarms ring as they do.

Then: I’m not awake; I’m dreaming, because the back of Helena’s head and her naked shoulders greet Myka’s opening eyes. That’s a bracingly new alarm.

Helena’s voice comes next. “He says get to work,” she quotes, playfully, and Myka would be willing to wake to such an alarm with joy for the rest of her life.

But assuredly, if the content of that alarm is the dictate, then no one is dreaming. There’s really nothing for Myka to say except, “Sorry, but one more time: Story of my life.”

“Now? Our life,” Helena corrects.

That is a literally life-story-altering assertion, and a self-deprecating impulse tempts Myka to scoff it away. Behind that impulse, however, lies a clear-eyed recognition that she must meet what Helena has said. How, how, how...

...and then her mind starts fully working. She begins to formulate a plan. One that will, if possible, manifest her gratitude, but also, display her difference from the Myka she used to be, that one from so few hours ago, who had not yet known the dream-surprise of this awakening’s sight.

“I’m going to tell them I can’t get the door unlocked,” she says. Steve isn’t there. She can get away with it. She sits up, ready to head for the door and tell that story.

Helena touches Myka’s shoulder. “Would it lend credibility for me to suggest out loud that I genuinely can’t believe we’re stuck in your bedroom?” More play, but the touch is becoming a don’t-leave-this-bed grasp.

Myka leans to kiss the restraining hand. “I think that would make them think you planned it. And were being nefarious about it. Shocked incredulity isn’t really your strong suit.”

“It’s true that my capacity for belief outstrips yours.” She pulls down on the sheet, exposing both her body and Myka’s.

Talk about overdetermined. Or is it, in this as-yet-unmapped terrain, underdetermined? To be determined later, if at all... Myka somehow marshals sufficient will to rise from the bed, while telling herself that she is not, conceptually at least, actually leaving it. At the door, she fiddles with the lock, expressing frustration to support her claim, after which Pete and Claudia make noises about toolboxes and battering rams, respectively, and then mercifully depart.

“They’re going to try to get us out,” Myka reports as she returns to bed. “Maybe violently?”

“Let them,” Helena murmurs. “That elevator and its manifestation of mischief... comparatively amateur. You’ve bested it handily.”

That jolts Myka out of a back-of-mind consideration of whether she might be able to jam the bedroom door’s lock with something easily to hand, or perhaps whether her dresser might be pushed across the room to block the door entirely. She then considers, front of mind, the possibility that Helena—her physical presence, her physical provocation—is a bad influence... or at the very least a naughty one... for these thoughts are so, so out of character.

“That, on the other hand, is not the story of my life,” Myka says, and the fact of it does make her more than a little nervous.

“A new chapter,” Helena counters, reading Myka’s mind and setting it right—in three words. Such economy.

****

Myka and Helena are engaged in adding to that new chapter (or at the very least, drafting a steamy interlude of same, even if it isn’t essential to the plot) when a banging on the door interrupts them yet again. As does shouting: “We’re back!” yells Pete, unnecessarily.

“Hey, Myka, what’s going on?” That’s Steve. Far more quiet.

“I brought Steve,” Pete says, also unnecessarily.

“I gathered that from his voice,” Myka notes.

“But!” Pete says, in aha-I-got-you mode, “what if it turns out all I brought was his voice?”

“Then I guess he’d still be here in some sense?” she says; she’s thinking on the Helena-hologram, on what a lack of visual might have meant, on how a more ontologically disembodied voice would have made her believe Helena was there, there but standing on the other side of a door. How she would have wanted to take her own battering ram to that door. The hologram’s present non-presence had stranded her, stranded them, in a strange shared space, offering no barrier Myka could use her body to break violently through.

“But!” Claudia exclaims, jokey, fighting with Myka’s ache of reminiscence, “what if it’s just me, doing my Steve impression?”

“That’d be a different thing,” Myka concedes.

“You do a me impression?” Steve asks Claudia.

Who exhales so dramatically, Myka’s surprised the door doesn’t just blow open. “You have stood next to me while I did it.”

“I have?” Puzzled-Steve is honestly Myka’s favorite Steve.

“Are we not a team?” Claudia demands. “Myka does a Pete. Pete does a Myka. Naturally they both suck, but the point is, why don’t you do a me?”

“Because you’d kill me?”

“Guys,” Pete says, “this isn’t getting Myka and H.G. out of the bedroom.”

Claudia says, “But let me just. Myka, H.G., you guys do impressions of each other, right?”

Helena raises her arms, a gesture of observe-this!—or maybe it’s at-last!—and exclaims, “I feel compelled to express disbelief about this circumstance!”

It takes Myka a second to get it, but once she does, she shouts, “I love blooming onions!”

For quite some time, there’s silence from the other side of the door.

Then Steve says, “Am I the only one who’s extremely confused?”

“Usually, yes,” Claudia says. “Except now, no. I’m with you. Pete?”

“Myka loves blooming onions,” Pete says, slow; he’s the one having trouble now with belief. Myka can picture his gobsmacked face. “There’s my endless wonder for the day. Also, I gotta rethink a whole lot of stuff she said about what she was willing to eat.”

Myka presses an apologetic kiss to Helena’s lips (and how nearly unbelievable it is to feel comfortable with such a touch being swift, to not need to hoard, to believe there will be more), then extricates herself yet again from the sheets, the bed. She heads for the door: to make a show of unlocking it, to send them away temporarily so she and Helena can reassemble themselves to rejoin the world—but. Problem. Big problem. “Guys. I really can’t get the door unlocked now.”

“‘Now’?” Pete echoes.

“You mean you actually could before?” Claudia asks.

Moment of truth. So, fine, truth: “I didn’t actually try before.”

“Ha!” Claudia barks. “Are we still on impressions? That might’ve been a decent one, for real, because the attitude? Way H.G.”

“Thank you so much!” Helena chirps.

“H.G.,” says Claudia, with a whiff of pedantry—and that she feels free to express such an attitude toward Helena is most likely because she’s on the safe side of a closed door—“I was complimenting Myka’s impression.”

“But in it, you recognized my attitude.” Helena’s words are a full preen, and as she speaks, she’s rising from the bed, approaching Myka, slipping arms around her, such that Myka loses her ability to track what’s happening on the other side of the door, even as splinters of sound catch in her ears—“hinges inside,” “lock plate solid,” and finally, “break it down”—whereupon she realizes anew that neither she nor Helena is clothed, and that being caught and seen in that state will constitute a disaster that outstrips a great many of the others in her experience.

“We have to get dressed,” she breathes at Helena.

“Wait,�� Helena says. “I suspect a realization is about to occur.”

At times, Helena can be eerily prescient. But what is it this time?

As if in answer, Claudia says, “I have a really depressing theory. Myka, can you get the window open?”, whereupon Myka understands Helena’s deduction: this isn’t mechanical; it’s artifactual. More specifically, list-artifactual.

She cannot open the window.

“Yeah,” Claudia says, a defeated I-knew-it. “I’d be all ‘try to smash it!’, but since I can’t see you try it and, like, bounce off the glass, what’s the point? I mean, go for it if H.G. wants the lulz.”

“I don’t know what that means!” Helena informs her. That too is a chirp, and Myka’s pleased to note it’ll probably head off the slapstick.

“Kind of a shame,” Claudia says, but with a drag, like she’s picturing it, and Myka is less pleased to have to devoutly hope that picturing involves everybody fully clothed. “Anyway I hate to say it, but it’s pretty clear this is on us, the list-makers.”

Pete groans. “You were supposed to check it twice! It’s right there in the song!”

“Listen, we seriously argued about the wording,” Steve says.

“And oh guess what!” Claudia says, defeat apparently tabled for the moment. “Everybody in the world is going on about their day as usual due to the unshocking news that I was right.”

“No, I was right. I was the one who said ‘proximity’ was likely to be too vague,” Steve says.

Myka’s inclined to agree with him.

“Bro, I was,” Claudia says, “because I said it was likely to be not vague enough.”

Well. Now Myka’s inclined to agree with Claudia.

She sees the conundrum. “I appreciate it either way,” she says, and that quiets the combatants.

“Regardless, we obviously need different wording,” Steve diplomats.

“I think our first mistake was thinking an artifact would word like we thought it should. You need to get more into its head than you did before.”

“I was in a hurry before,” Steve says, a little less diplomatically. “Because you were yelling at me.”

“I am so so so so glad,” Pete hosannas, “that none of this is on me.”

Myka cannot let that stand. “Who gave his cousin a thing?”

A pause. Then, “Whoops,” Pete says, very sad-clown.

Later, she’ll thank him again, but for now, she doesn’t mind having wielded this little shiv, inflicting this little nick, so he’ll remember that there is, or should be, always a downside.

“How fortunate they’re not asking for our help,” Helena says, bringing her back to the upside.

“Who’s better with words though? You certainly are,” Myka says.

“You hold your own, Ms. ‘Pleonast.’ But ssssh. Don’t remind them.”

“We’ll fix it, we promise!” Claudia says.

“Don’t feel compelled to hurry!” Helena directs, cheerily.

Steve says, “I think she means ‘Don’t yell at Steve this time.’” His hopefulness is clear.

“He isn’t wrong,” Helena notes into Myka’s ear.

Pete announces, “I think she means bow chicka wow wow.”

“He isn’t either,” Myka notes back. “Even less so?”

Helena answers by kissing her with intent.

Claudia snorts. “I think no matter what she means, Artie’s gonna kill us.”

“Alas, the least wrong of all,” Helena grants with a sigh.

The wrecking crew’s voices fade, and they may still be making non-wrong statements, but for Myka and Helena there is at last, again, peace. And once Myka pulls Helena back to bed—a delectable spin she is now bold enough to put on their dynamic—there is at last again not-peace.

Lazily later—and these lazy laters are vying to be Myka’s favorite at-last—she says, “Not to overinterpret the artifact’s thinking, but this feels very nice. As an in-proximity situation.”

“This particular proximity seems more than a bit naughty, however,” Helena says, incongruously matter-of-fact. She isn’t wrong. “Pete obviously made an inference to that effect. Perhaps if Steve and Claudia can use that as a way of writing us out of the current situation.”

“I’m sure that’s for the best,” Myka says, with no small amount of regret, first attached to her embarrassment at Pete, Steve, and Claudia’s involvement in that inference, but even more due to the sad fact that this beginning must come to an end.

“Are you...” Helena’s words are a smile.

“No. I’d much rather stay here forever with you.” Her practical side then takes over, as even Helena’s body twined around hers can’t prevent. “But if they don’t fix it we’ll die—pretty soon, unless they can figure out how to get food in.”

“Would the artifact allow us to starve? That seem the antithesis of a situation that might be termed ‘nice.’”

“‘Termed’? Isn’t problematic terminology why we’re still here?”

“Granted. But of course we’ll die regardless.”

The casual, literal fatalism trips Myka up. She temporizes, “The artifact might have something to say about that,” placeholding, as she finds her way to a real response: “But artifact aside... will you though?” It’s a question about... well, about whether Helena is, for want of a better word, real. Speaking of terminology. “Die,” she adds, not as a word she must expel, for its terrible taste, but one she feels a need to place. As a marker.

Helena takes a moment. Before, Myka would have read that pause as censure; it would have pushed her overboard into I-have-overstepped agony. But the plates have shifted, and her footing feels—strange but nice (oh, nice!)—sure.

The answer, when it comes: “Here with you, I don’t want to be bronzed again. So yes.”

That leaves Myka warm, yet shaking her head. “I honestly don’t know a lot about romance.”

“Don’t you?” Helena asks, all of her limbs beginning to move again against all of Myka’s.

Which, for the moment, Myka resists: “So I’m not sure if it’s weird that I find it incredibly romantic for you to have said yes to dying.”

Now Helena’s smile is a smile; she rears away, back and up, showing Myka her face’s full measure of delight. “Weird or no, whatever you find romantic, I’m inclined to approve. If that’s acceptable to you.” Helena bows her head, as if to formally request Myka’s benediction.

The very idea of such an ask floods her with happy tenderness. “Is it okay for me to find that romantic too?”

“‘Okay’ seems a sadly weak word to convey the extent of my approval,” Helena says. “Further, I find it romantic for you to ask my permission to find any thing romantic. Unnecessary, yet romantic. Is that ‘okay’ as well?”

“It’s a relief,” Myka understates. “Can I call it a romantic relief?”

“I don’t see why not. However, to what extent is it romantic, or non-, that we seem to be finding—or placing—ourselves in recursive loops of romantic-allowable querying?” Helena accompanies this academically focused, seemingly serious question with yet more limb movement.

Myka is actively in bed with someone who’s questioning the romantic quotient of recursive loops of romantic-allowable querying. It is a level of “nice” that she could never ever have ideated on her own. “I genuinely cannot believe any of this,” she says.

“I can assure you that I will be taking some time—if allowed, and thus perhaps only in an ideal world, some great length of time—to determine whether your incredulity will ever cease to be tedious and elevate itself to ‘romantic.’ Some great length of time,” she repeats, playfully.

Myka knows Helena’s appreciation for time’s length is far greater than any ordinary individual’s... so this smacks of a promise. Myka’s gratitude rises, as does her willingness to pursue any and all romantic activity, despite her apparently romance-dampening incredulity... but then the limbs pause. “However,” Helena says.

“What’s this ‘however’?” Myka asks, now selfishly impatient.

Helena has, obviously and of course, heard and felt the impatience. Myka’s neck receives a press of lips, a curve of smile. “However: fortunately, at this juncture, belief isn’t required. Participation, on the other hand, is. So?” This is something Myka has always suspected was a Helena tactic, but here in intimacy she recognizes as true: challenge not for its own sake, but as an attitude in which to wrap something different, deeper, some authenticity Helena isn’t fully willing, or doesn’t quite yet know how, to express.

Myka moves her own limbs, her limbs that are even longer than, and just as flexible as, Helena’s. She moves them against Helena’s. She cannot believe she is doing so; nevertheless, she is. She is participating.

She places a chock under this particular incredulity, for unlike facts, the quality of emotions can escape her if she doesn’t consciously tie them down. She paints the word “bonus” on the emotion-wheel as she secures it, to ensure she elevates that felt quality too. Then she eases herself back to the full experience of the physical, this smooth beauty—and that is the word for every touch-heat-rise their bodies execute—that she and Helena together are creating... are enjoying.

She sighs soft against Helena’s neck; in return, Helena offers again her lips-on-skin smile.

They are participating. In this. Together. Lips on skin.

“So,” Myka agrees.

END

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #holiday (but not Gift Exchange)#Bonus #part 4 #Pete and the Meerkats is probably a stupid band name #but it works for a Hanna-Barbera animated show #in which they play concerts and solve crimes #anyway yes I did go back to a particular stuck-in-a-location well here #but it certainly beats an elevator #anyway the story didn’t fully adhere (to itself) as I intended #but I hope there were a couple moments #coming next will be another Christmas story #because god forbid I get to anything other than Gift Exchange and Christmas #which I have to hope is better than nothing #PS if you don't vote if you're eligible and physically can #then guess who's fixing to use that pen to write your name on the wrong side of the list #ME #which may not sound sufficiently scary but there you have it

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b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange · 1 year ago

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Hello everyone!

It's American Thanksgiving, which means sign-ups for the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange are officially open!

Here's how this event works:

Send a message or ask to this blog (@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange) or directly to me (K, your host, @kla1991) stating that you would like to participate. Sign-ups begin today and close on the Winter Solstice, December 21st.

If you sign up, you'll receive the name of your giftee on Christmas, December 25th. You will then have one week to *anonymously* contact your giftee to tell them what kind of fan works you make (art, fic, gifs, etc.) and ask for ideas or requests.

Between New Years', January 1st, and Valentine's Day, February 14th, you'll work on your gifts, and on the 14th we'll all post what we've created for our giftees and enjoy all the gifts!

If you have questions of any kind, feel free to reach out to this blog or to @kla1991 to ask. And even if you don't plan to sign up, please reblog this post to spread the word!

Happy American Thanksgiving, and happy Bering and Wells Gift Exchange Season!

#bering and wells #b&w holiday gift exchange #warehouse 13

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deathtodickens · 2 years ago

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A Bering & Wells Gift Exchange comic story for @lady-adventuress. Happy Palentines Day, friend! There are typos and drawos, even after my very extensive, not-at-all rushed, proof-reading, so, many advance apologies. Thank you for the ideas, I tried to stay in line with mistaken identity/long lost theme. Hope it is enjoyable!

Myka was seventeen when Emily Lake, her best friend, disappeared. Whisked away into the night by Mrs. Frederic, crying and inconsolable, cursing her father’s name. It was unreal, all of it, from first kiss to final goodbye. But whatever disbelief Myka had held onto, wide awake in her bed most of that night, shattered entirely on her walk to school the next morning.

She remembers hearing the sirens as she’d finally drifted into sleep but there were always sirens. Sirens were never unusual.

She should have known. She should have known.

Emily Lake’s house was burned to the ground. A smoldering pile of charred rubble, surrounded by crime scene tape, police vehicles, and a white Coroner's Office van.

She could only get so close but she could see all she needed to see.

She doesn't remember losing consciousness, though she supposes no one does when they come to. She remembers the spinning. She remembers the falling.

And she remembers waking up in the back of an ambulance with Mrs. Frederic by her side.

Myka sees Mrs. Frederic a lot over the years. Not by choice or chance. Not by want for that woman to be in her life. Just by the mere fact that she loves a ghost. A girl that's supposed to be dead.

Burned up in a house fire.

Buried in the ground.

They'd pulled two bodies from the rubble of Emily Lake's house, too badly burned for an open casket. Too unknown and unrelated to anyone of means to have a proper burial.

Myka went to Emily's memorial at the high school. She listened as others spoke about a girl they knew nothing about. And while she grew angry at their forced tears and fabricated associations to a dead girl they never knew, she, herself, had absolutely nothing to say about it.

Her best friend, Emily Lake, had died in a fire.

Some girl she loves, called Helena, arose from her ashes.

Myka sees Mrs. Frederic once when she's nineteen. This time she hasn't passed out. She's at a cafe on her college campus, listening to music through a set of headphones, and drawing in her sketchbook.

Mrs. Frederic sets a flyer down on the table in front of Myka and takes a seat in the chair across from her.

She doesn't wait for Myka to remove her headphones or even acknowledge her presence.

"This is not cute," the older woman tells her while gesturing down at the paper. "This is too close."

Myka eyes the flyer. It isn't hers per se but she'd been hired by someone on campus to draw it for an upcoming event. It's a very simple drawing of two women holding hands, but one of those women looks a lot like herself and the other looks a lot like someone she used to know.

"You don't like my art?" Myka sighs, turning her attention back to her sketchbook.

"She's dead," Mrs. Frederic recites, not at all for the first time.

Myka puffs out a soft laugh, glances up at Mrs. Frederic, and says, "And yet here you are. Again."

"It isn't safe yet, Myka."

Myka drops her pencil. "When will it be?"

Mrs. Frederic looks away from Myka, over her shoulder, out of a window. She says, without ever turning back, "I told you to forget her. She told you to forget her. You know the consequences of not doing that. You've seen what they're capable of."

"I don't know anything. I certainly don't know the consequences or who they are."

"And believe me when I tell you that you do not want to."

"Is it witness protection?"

"Do I look like I work for the Marshal's office, Ms. Bering? Do our interactions scream Federal Government to you?"

Myka eyes Mrs. Frederic up and down but says nothing at all. In response, she receives a huff of annoyance from the older woman across from her.

"The amount of time I have spent running interference between you and that girl is both baffling and exhausting."

That makes Myka smile. Just a little.

"Finish school, Ms. Bering. Keep your head down. Stop this," Mrs. Frederic taps the paper on the table, "and forget her." She stands and turns then adds, just over her shoulder, "I won't be repeating myself."

Myka sits back in her chair, smiles softly up at the other woman, and says, "Let's do this again sometime, hm?"

Mrs. Frederic rolls her eyes up and sighs. Then turns and walks away.

When Myka graduates college at twenty-two, she catches a glimpse of Mrs. Frederic in the hallway of the auditorium where her commencement ceremony is to take place. She is mentally and emotionally preparing herself to fend off all of that woman's criticisms, about what she should and shouldn't be drawing, about how she should and should not be living her life, about who she should and should not be remembering.

But Mrs. Frederic never approaches her. She disappears into the crowd.

Myka has always just assumed that she is being watched, that Mrs. Frederic is watching her. But Mrs. Frederic has never, before now, allowed herself to be seen in return.

Myka starts dating a boy named Sam when she is twenty-five years old. Sam doesn't remind her of Helena and it's the thing she likes most about him. It's easy. He's nice. They have fun together.

Myka doesn't see Mrs. Frederic the entire two years they are dating. And somehow, somewhere inside of her, she's a little sad about that.

Sam is killed in an accident when Myka is twenty-eight.

They had been broken up for a year at that point but they were still close. Still really good friends with a shared love of art and creating, still collaborating to make what dreams they may have into reality.

A lot of Myka's art shifts back into dark places and in those dark places comes reminders of dark histories. Of grief and sadness. Of love and loss. Of all the pain suffered and endured and, mostly, overcome when the perfect person comes along and holds your hand through it all.

For years, that had been Emily.

Helena.

They'd suffered and endured. They'd held hands through it all. Comforted each other, whenever the other needed it most. Together, they'd imagine themselves on fantastic journeys. The innumerable marks on their skin, souvenirs from their mishaps and adventures.

Myka hasn't cried in so long but she cries the night Sam dies. She cries hard and long, for hours and hours. And when she's all cried out over Sam, she starts crying all over again for Emily Lake.

For the girl named Helena whose last name she doesn't even know. She cries until she falls asleep, then wakes up and does it all over again the next day. She does this for a whole week until the day of Sam's funeral and she doesn't know who she cries for more, Sam, Helena, or herself.

It's been nearly four years since their last encounter but Myka isn't surprised when Mrs. Frederic appears. After the casket is lowered and the crowd dispersed, she steps to Myka's side and stands there just beside her for several moments in silence.

And when Mrs. Frederic has decided she's had enough of the quiet, she says, "You did try. I'll give you that."

Myka doesn't know why but this comment, a simple and useless recognition from the woman who gives almost nothing at all, makes her full belly laugh, crying tears of laughter until she can cry no more.

Myka is almost thirty when she almost dies of a heart attack. And then, immediately after that, almost dies by large-toe bludgeoning.

"I'm glad to see you attempting to move on with your life."

"Oh, fuck!" Myka drops a mixing bowl of cooke dough and the very thin, suddenly sharp lip of that bowl lands square on her big toe. When she turns to Mrs. Frederic, in her kitchen somehow, she swears that woman is smiling.

Even if just barely.

"That's a new trick." Myka growls, calming her racing heart.

"New to whom? You seem to be an expert in the field of accidental self-inflicted wounds."

"I mean you. In my kitchen. Inside of my apartment." Myka sighs. "How did you get in here?"

"Certainly not by working at the Marshal's office." Mrs. Frederic quirks a singular brow in Myka's direction.

"Certainly not." Myka mimics, lowering herself to the ground, to clean the cookie dough from tile floor. "What have I done now?"

"I've seen the draft of your very telling graphic memoir. I thought we were clear on the lines that should not be crossed."

Myka stops cleaning. "Speaking of lines that should not be crossed, I won't bother asking how you've seen something that exists solely on my computer." She stands and crosses her arms and tells Mrs. Frederic, "It doesn't mean anything to anyone except me. Nobody else would know it's her and it's not like it's going to bring her back."

"Myka."

Myka laughs softly, "Wow. First name basis? I have definitely crossed a line."

"The problem is, that is exactly what could happen. It could bring her back. Give her no choice but to return."

"She has a choice now? Because that's not what it looked like when you dragged her away."

"I did not drag her. I simply urged her to move forward, faster. You saw, with your own eyes, what the result would have been had she lingered with you. Two homes might have burned that night and your family--"

"I have a lot of respect for you, Mrs. Frederic, despite your constant intrusions. But please, do not talk about my family."

"Fair enough," Mrs. Frederic concedes after a sigh.

"You know, I thought I'd have more hope over time. That she was alive. That she'd one day come back. That I could go to her. Or that holding on to her the way I do would eventually mean something. Anything.

"But after all this time, I find myself more often grieving Emily's death. Because it's the only thing that's real in my mind, it's the only thing that happened.

"Helena is just... she's an old memory that I struggle to keep alive. Ten minutes in one night in the entirety of my life. And I don't even know if anything about those ten minutes is real. If it even means anything. If it's worth holding on to."

Mrs. Frederic watches Myka in thoughtful silence.

"I do know that I never want to forget the way she makes me feel. They way she always made me feel. As Emily, before Helena. She taught me so much. She helped me open up. She opened up to me.

"If I can't talk about her, in a book about my life, there is no book.

"She was my best friend and I loved her. I do what I love because of her and having known her and loved her, for the little time that I was able to, still impacts my life today. Every single day."

Myka gestures to Mrs. Frederic and smiles.

"You, Mrs. Frederic, are living proof of that." She pauses to laugh and adds, "Or the most prolific stalker the world has ever seen."

The older woman remains quiet, pensive. And for a second, one tiny fraction of a second, Myka thinks she's going to show some kind of emotion. Sympathy. Sadness. Contentedness. Amusement? At this point, Myka would even take her usual dose of exhaustion. But Mrs. Frederic's face remains a facade of unconvinced underwhelm and boredom.

Her words, however, belie genuine emotion.

"I have a story for you."

Myka arches a brow. "How suspicious."

"Two little girls grew up together, lived similar lives with similar fathers, who mistreated them in very similar ways. In a single night, they had the nerve to fall in love, right in front of my eyes. A youthful, foolish love that should have ended a decade ago. And yet, here I stand, an intermediary between two foolish girls who refuse to let each other go. Even as they risk their very ends.

"One of those girls is the daughter of a dangerous man who once had the power to demand ungodly things be done to the families of even more dangerous people.

"And the other girl, Ms. Bering, is you."

Myka breathes in slowly. Breathes out one long steady breath.

"I have... so much work to do. And yet, for some reason, I spend, have spent, most of my time intervening in various shenanigans between the two of you."

"Me, living my life like a normal human being, not constantly under threat by some faceless boogie man, is not shenanigans."

Mrs. Frederic ignores Myka's interjection and goes on.

"Intercepting every little whim of the heart you two decide to try and throw out into the world, in order to find each other without blatantly finding each other, when you both know, very well, that is the last thing you should be doing."

"She's... she's trying to find me?"

"Not the point," Mrs. Frederic cuts in. "The point is that she should not be. She knows that. Nor should you be and you know that. Because they could leverage you to get to her to get to her father. They have tried and they will continue to try. And I will continue exhausting myself to keep you two safe because that is what I am, unfortunately, obligated to do.

"No matter how hard you make the task. No matter how many times you want to laugh in the face of it, believe me when I say that he is not worth either of you dying."

Myka remains quiet. She stills. When Mrs. Frederic says no more, Myka takes in another steadying breath and says, "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you actually care about me."

"I care to keep you alive. And her. Until such a time that I no longer have to care about keeping either of you anything for the foreseeable future."

"I do appreciate what you supposedly do, Mrs. Frederic, but in all of our time together, I have never, at any point, felt unsafe or watched by anyone but you."

"And you are welcome for that."

That, to Myka, is the most unnerving thing she has ever heard Mrs. Frederic say to her. In all of their time.

"So what, her dad was some sort of mob boss's hit man?"

"That's a close enough analogy."

"Why didn't you just tell me all of that from the beginning?"

"You were a child. You're no longer a child. I've seen what you've survived. Even if I myself don't find it amusing, I do understand why you laugh when threatened. Now, do you understand the gravity of this ongoing situation?"

Myka nods, "I do."

"I don't believe you."

Myka rolls her eyes. "I understand that I'm supposed to stop doing what I love to do most, drawing and telling stories about my own life, because you want this to end, sooner rather than later."

"No," Mrs. Frederic corrects, "because your life could end, sooner rather than later. You would not have a life to draw or tell stories about."

Myka breathes in deep.

"I am not asking you to give up your passion, Myka, I'm simply reminding you to be mindful, as your passion influences art that grows in popularity, about how much personal information you impress upon it.

"Or one day you'll turn around and it won't be me standing behind you."

Myka is thirty-two years old when Mrs. Frederic appears in a bookstore for one of Myka's book signings and, for whatever reason, that woman chooses to stand in line. Myka catches sight of her when she's at least eight people back, and after three more signings, she motions for Mrs. Frederic to come forward.

To Myka's surprise, the woman does.

Nothing about the way she looks has changed, except that she seems a little less baffled, a little less exhausted. Her visits had slowed, once more, as Myka's preoccupation with Helena's absence continued to wane over time.

"I could have waited," the woman tells Myka.

"The looming anticipation of your next threat was too much for me to handle." Myka smiles. "How is our girl?"

The older woman sighs heavily. All of that exhaustion and bafflement returning to her expression. But Myka is surprised, more than that, when Mrs. Frederic answers her genuinely.

"Insistent. Stubborn."

Myka smiles at the thought of Emily/Helena interacting with Mrs. Frederic in these little ways she occasionally interacts with Mrs. Frederic. A thing she used to think about often but doesn't think about so much anymore.

"Thank you," Myka says softly, lowering her head to face the table below and wiping away a stray tear. When she looks back up to Mrs. Frederic, she adds, "I appreciate knowing she hasn't changed one bit."

Mrs. Frederic reaches into her purse and pulls out a copy of Myka's book. She sets it on the table in front of Myka, who smiles wide.

"You bought my book."

"A birthday gift," Mrs. Frederic says, "for our very insistent friend."

Myka is thirty-four when Mrs. Frederic unexpectedly sits beside her on a park bench then holds an envelope out in front of her. And for the first time, in a long time, Myka isn't startled. She almost expects that other woman's arrival.

She says to the older woman, without ever looking at her, "I don't know what they're paying you but I'm sure it's not enough."

Myka doesn't immediately take that envelope but she can see that her name is on the front. She can see that the handwriting is Emily's. Recognizable in comparison to all of the old notes she has stashed away from high school.

Still, she straightens in her seat and asks, "We're on writing terms now?"

"Proof of life."

"Seventeen years ago, you told me she died." Myka cautiously takes the envelope. "You told me to forget about her."

"And nearly two decades later, look where that has gotten us."

"You've suggested on several occasions that I'd be murdered."

"I resisted the urge myself on many of those occasions."

"A joke?"

Mrs. Frederic arches a brow. The playfulness of that expression, Myka finds, is unnerving at best.

"You said they are dangerous people."

"They were."

"They were?"

"We're on the cusp of a resolution."

"A resolution? With very dangerous people? More dangerous than the man who committed heinous crimes against them?"

Mrs. Frederic nods and simply says, "Even dangerous people grow old."

"Then I guess I feel comforted that you haven't aged a day since we met."

Myka can see Mrs. Frederic suppressing a smile.

"You know, in all these years that I've come to know you, Mrs. Frederic, you don't strike me as the type to negotiate with, much less protect, a man who has done ungodly things to anyone. Dangerous people included."

"You refer to her father as a man, which is something I haven't done in over three decades." A pause follows a thoughtful sigh as Mrs. Frederic turns away from Myka and says. "Still, I find even calling him the monster that he is to be too generous."

Myka gives a subtle, understanding nod.

"The thing you may or may not have come to understand, without the proper context, is that some very terrible people are more valuable to when they are alive, worthless when they are dead, when the survival of many more good people depends on what they know. My employers find value in his living, so he remains alive and, by default, protected."

"And Helena? Where does she come into all of this talk of value and worth?"

"She is her father's collateral damage." Mrs. Frederic turns to Myka. "From the moment she was born, he has been using her existence to further his malintent. Without her, he would already be dead."

Myka can feel her blood rising.

"He had money. He had custody. He had power. He doesn't have any of those things now and I promise you, Myka Bering, that he is not worth the energy you will burn being angry at him."

Myka doesn't quite let the anger go. But she breathes a little steadier now.

Weeks later, Myka finds a Post-It note on her refrigerator door that she didn't place there and doesn't recall seeing the night before.

It reads: Answer the call. - F

Within the hour, Myka's cell phone rings. No name or number appears on the screen. And when she answers, it's with a tease. She says, "It only took you twenty years to realize you could threaten me over the phone instead of constantly sneaking up on me in public?"

"I told Irene," a soft, distantly familiar voice starts, "you'd tire of her appearing act sooner than most."

The voice hits her hard. Harder than the combined weight of every moment in her past that she has felt sorrow or grief or loneliness beyond measure. She has to steady her hands to not drop the phone. She has to steady her breathing to not fall to the floor.

"Helena?"

Soft breathing turns to soft laughter which turns to soft crying, on both ends of that line.

"Is that really you?"

"It really is."

Myka sits before she falls, carefully lowering herself to the kitchen floor. Clutching that phone in her hands. Her back to the cabinet doors. Her legs folded up before her.

She decides to start off small and easy.

"Hi."

And is rewarded beyond measure.

"Hello again, my love."

#bering and wells #b&w holiday gift exchange #lady-adventuress #dickens draws #sorry this is so late #i usually draw and post and then write when i post #and this writing took on a mind of its own #i wasn't even done i just cut myself off lol

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barbarawar · 9 months ago

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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 :)

#bering and wells #warehouse 13 #b&w holiday gift exchange

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lilolilyr · 2 years ago

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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

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kla1991 · 2 years ago

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Happy B&W Gift Exchange @madronash!

(Virtual) Reality: Helena gives a virtual reality headset from FarGames a try, and Myka watches fondly. Set post-series, in a better version of the series where the silly bullshit didn't happen.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/45041281

@madronash

#B&W Holiday Gift Exchange #@madronash #ao3 #bering and wells #warehouse 13

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purlturtle · 9 months ago

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Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Additional Tags: Post S4, Truth Artifact, because what else would get these two idiots to sit down and talk, also featuring a potentially familiar tortoise, Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024 Summary:

Helena shrugged. “I figured I would make use of this so very handy closure which, I assume now, you arranged? Then the case got a little… urgent, for me, yesterday.”

Claudia was the first to get it. She groaned, and caught her forehead in her palm. “You got whammied too.”

Helena nodded. “In much the same situation as you,” she told Myka, whose only reaction was another glare.

“How long?” Pete asked with a frown. “How much time you got?”

Helena checked her watch. She did not swear, she did not purse her lips, she did not give any sign of how her pulse had just jumped. “Eight hours and twenty-two minutes.”

for @madronash - Happy Gift Exchange Day!

#bering and wells #warehouse 13 #my fic #The Mouth of Truth #bering and wells holiday gift exchange 2024

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righty-ho-then · 2 years ago

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Hello it's your gift exchange gifter! Let's say your story has hypothetically expanded to cover four or five short chapters. Would you like your story all at once, or in installments?

well firstly you’re amazing thank you!!! i think id like them in installments please! to stretch out the wondrousness of the exchange :D

thanks again and cant wait for tomorrow!

#bering and wells holiday gift exchange #bering and wells

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anandabrat · 2 years ago

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Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells, Claudia Donovan Additional Tags: Gift Exchange, uh I can't write short things anymore, so this is just the first chapter of... some chapters, you know how it goes, Established Relationship Summary:

Myka and Helena are in Paris on a retrieval - which is already complicated enough for these two - when something even more complicated is put in their path.

For @mfangeleeta - happy gift exchange!

#bering and wells #myka bering #helena wells #b&w holiday gift exchange #my fic #warehouse 13

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lady-adventuress · 2 years ago

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A @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange gift for @sharkbatez . Happy Bering and Wells Day!

#warehouse 13 #helena wells #myka bering #bering and wells #b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange #sharkbatez #bering and wells exchange

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apparitionism · 5 months ago

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Bonus 3

I so frequently have to start these intros with “where were we?”, because I so frequently confuse even myself with regard to where any given in-progress story left off... typically it’s a cliffhanger of some sort, but off of, or onto, which specific cliff were we hanging? Well. Here in this continuation of a Christmas tale, we—or rather, Myka and Helena—were suspended in a broken-down elevator in an accounting firm’s office building in Cleveland. Something might’ve been juuuuust about to happen (see part 2 for what that something probably was, and part 1 for the causal chain that got them there), but a voice interrupted, seemingly from on high.

Bonus 3

“Is everybody okay in there?” the voice from heavenward repeats.

Myka looks up, this time confronting not her own reflection but a dark emptiness, one that is partially filled by... a firefighter?

She is sorely tempted, in the moment, to proclaim that everybody in here is most certainly not okay, given that she herself is among that “everybody” and is ready to spit nails at the timing of this supposed rescue... she talks herself down, though, because the firefighter certain doesn’t need to be informed about the grinding frustration of unrealized near-certainty.

The firefighter, most likely concerned about the lack of response, goes on, “If you’re in distress, we can hoist you up through here, get you faster help. If you’re okay, you can wait till we let the car down to the next level and get the doors open. Then you’ll be able to walk out.”

Myka looks at Helena, and they are on the same page regarding being hoisted. “Walk,” they both say.

“Good choice,” the firefighter tells them. “Easier on everybody. Never know when you’ll run into injuries, though... or sometimes worse, claustrophobics, so we gotta check.”

“Among our many problems, claustrophobia is not,” Helena says. She smiles up at the firefighter.

Who smiles back. She’s good-looking, this firefighter.

Not jealousy, Myka admonishes herself. Not now.

“Good for you,” the firefighter tells Helena. Maybe a little jealousy. Then: “I’ll put the lid back on; you two sit tight.”

She disappears; the mirror reappears. Magic-esque.

“Well, this is overdetermined,” Myka mutters.

With a head-cock, Helena says, “I believe I know what that word means, but I’m not certain I know what it means. In context.”

Is she serious? Might as well assume so... “It’s kind of like if you actually had remarked on naughtiness,” Myka says. “But maybe all I really mean, in context, is ‘story of my life.’”

Now a squint. “I know what those words mean as well, but again I must ask—”

“Never mind. I had this wild hope that maybe one thing might go right. But here we are.”

“Being rescued doesn’t fall into the ‘go right’ category?” Helena asks. And now she blinks ostentatiously, combining innocence with a sparkle of eye.

You’ve been teasing me, Myka now suspects, and she wants to say it—to accuse it!—but the interruption stole her boldness. Instead she sighs out “of course it does” and resigns herself to contemplating the complications that have, over the span of time during which she and Helena have been hamhandedly dealing with their destiny, sat themselves down solid-awkward between possibility and realization.

And anyway, if Helena is teasing, does that mean she fails to feel the same urgency Myka does about what might, in the absence of intervention, have been... realized?

Myka has made so many miscalculations with regard to what Helena does, might, could feel. Could the tease, if that’s what it is, have a different significance? Maybe. But Myka is tired. Of miscalculating, yes, but also of hoping. Of wishing. Of hanging on a knife-edge of believing in something that fate keeps deciding should not happen...

Okay, deep breath. Maybe it isn’t fate this time. Maybe in this case it’s nothing more—or less?—than a disapproving elevator.

As they at last exit those hypercritical confines, Myka leans into that latter interpretation, saying back in the car’s direction, “You were pretending to be Jesus-birth-focused, whereas I think in actual fact you’re harking your way around the Old Testament, but as said testament gets cherry-picked by fundamentalist New-Testamenters who don’t know Hebrew. So congratulations on your historically insupportable theology.” She’s pretty sure the unnecessarily extended creak she hears from the mechanism is its version of a crude gesture.

Their firefighter, who had been the one to pry the doors open inch by inch and set them free, now says to Helena, “Did she maybe hit her head when the car stopped?”

“No, she’s merely imaginative,” Helena rejoins, cheerily.

“I’m imaginative?” Myka demands. “Says the father of something.”

The firefighter touches Myka’s arm as if it’s the next step toward physically restraining her, a clear indication of how unhinged her last statements must have sounded. Further indication: the firefighter says, “The whole elevator system’s shut down till they figure out what happened. Can you get down a lot of stairs okay, or do you need assistance?”

“Oh, I definitely need assistance, but not with stairs,” Myka tells her.

Helena steps smooth between the firefighter and Myka, taking Myka’s arm herself instead. “She’ll be fine, I believe. But thank you.”

She’s very gracious. The firefighter is very attractive. Did Helena move to break the firefighter’s hold on Myka... or to place herself closer to the firefighter?

Not jealousy, Myka reminds herself. Not now.

Particularly not now that they’re embarking on a stair-descent and leaving the firefighter behind, one step at a time. It’s an endless-seeming series—“a lot of stairs” indeed—on which they expend no small amount of time. And no small amount of energy.

As they near what seems, blessedly, to be the end, Myka huffs out, “If I ever start thinking I want to live in a high-rise, just say ‘elevator dealy-thingy’ to me to make sure I understand how much I’ll end up regretting it if there’s ever an emergency.” It’s the kind of thing she would say to Pete, so she backtracks: “Sorry. Never mind that. I’m tired.”

Helena’s breathing isn’t exactly unlabored as she says, “No, no. Object lessons. I might take one as well: feign injury so firefighters will convey us via stretcher down accursed emergency stairs.”

“Brilliant idea,” Myka says, though she does spare a “glad we didn’t put you through that” thought for their firefighter.

“Thank you. Coming from, as quite recently noted, such an imaginative individual, that’s a great compliment.”

“Sorry for that outburst too. I was just so ticked at the elevator for how it clearly intended to put a stop to—”

Fortunately/unfortunately, Myka doesn’t manage to finish the utterance, because fortunately/unfortunately, they’re at last pushing through the first-floor fire door.

In a perverse twist, which Myka suspects the elevator of somehow contriving, that door releases them into the cubicle farm. Very near Bob’s location. Where he is now enthusiastically, rather than resentfully, stationed.

“Ladies!” he greets them. Did the elevator text him to lie in wait? “I finally got paid! I’m flush!”

Helena nods in satirical approval. “And we were rescued from the elevator at an overdetermined moment. Such good news all around.” The verbal irony chokes Myka, for it confirms—entirely—that Helena had indeed been teasing.

“Good thing I was here to light a fire under you,” Bob swaggers, clearly oblivious to Helena’s sarcasm, and it’s for once a good thing that he’s paying most of his attention to Helena anyway, because Myka is utterly failing to keep her eyes from widening, her jaw from slackening, into the very dictionary illustration of incredulity. “So what are your plans, now that you’ve put the fear of god into Nancy and made her give me what I deserve?”

Fear of god... now Myka’s certain he and the elevator are in cahoots.

“We have business to attend to,” Helena tells him.

“IRS business?”

Helena smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “Not at all,” she says, and Myka recognizes that tone as “continue at your peril.”

So of course Bob continues. “Oh, that kind of business,” he smarms, like the two of them are speaking in some super-secret, super-specific, only-we-know-what-the-word-“business”- means code. Infuriating in itself, but he goes on, “If you’re not on the clock, maybe you’d enjoy an evening out.” The “enjoy” is slimy, and the “maybe” is smug, as if he has no doubt the answer will be yes.

“Oh yes,” Helena says, bringing Myka up short, and “very much so,” she continues. What performance is this? “But not with you.” Myka exhales in relief. Helena then turns to her and says, “I believe you promised me an evening that would make up for our having been trapped?”

Myka nearly chokes again, now at the way “an evening” and “make up for” absolutely roil with salacious intent.

Bob yelps, “I knew it!” which Helena skewers with a completely, and completely transparently, fake-dense, “Knew what?”

He is sufficiently cowed to refrain from responding with anything involving the word “naughty.”

When they finally escape the building, Myka fumes, “Nancy Sullivan did not in any way go far enough with that guy. I don’t know what this pen would let me smite him with, but I’m extremely tempted to take it out of the bag and make a list of my own.”

“Despite the downside?” Helena asks. She’s dialed back the punish-the-offender spice; now she sounds her baseline undercurrent-of-amusement self.

Myka envies her ability to change registers so seemingly effortlessly. “I’m already off the charts, judgment-wise,” she admits, “so I honestly wonder how much downside I’d really feel.” It’s more than she would have been inclined to say, pre-elevator. But something has surely shifted.

“Hm,” Helena noises, a not-quite-poke of an answer. But she then asks, “Would I be on this list?”

Whiplash: back to an unassimilable suggestiveness. That’s better, though, than Helena making and conveying a guilt-ridden assumption, as she most likely would have done in the past, that Myka would pass judgment on her for her misdeeds.

“And if so, in which column?” Helena muses on.

Again Myka would love to have panache, to be able to play into the overdetermined idea of “naughty” or at least counter it with a clever turn on “nice.” Instead she offers something in hope, which she hopes is most immediately legible as practical and not too hopeful: “Since you implied I’m taking you out, I think I’d better do that. Or some other mechanism might decide to get all... judgy. Disapprovey? Obviously from a different theological perspective than the elevator, but even so.”

“Such other mechanism sounds strangely chivalrous. Holding you to account on my behalf? I confess I’m curious as to the form that chivalry might take.”

It’s a perfect opening to probe Helena’s true interpretation of the overdetermined interruption. “But the consequence of said chivalry,” Myka says. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“Any such consequence would be, at this point, merely delay,” Helena says.

Delay... the interruption was merely delay... which means Helena thought that not-quite realization of all their pent-up possibility was—thinks it is!—as inevitable as Myka had. As Myka does. Does now again. Okay, the tenses may be hard to render sensically, but Myka knows what it all means.

Alas, despite the change in their together-weather, she can’t quite see her way clear to realizing that inevitability on a sidewalk... to move in that direction, though, she undertakes to demonstrate that she can be the chivalrous actor, no disapproving mechanism required. Object lessons. “I know you haven’t had any food since this morning,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

Helena’s eyebrows rise. “Oh,” she says, as if only just remembering that her body has physical requirements. Could her time as a hologram have affected—dampened—her awareness of such necessities? Even thinking the question jabs Myka with want, to be the one to bring her back to the body. Its needs. “Yes, I am.”

“What do you like? What’s a favorite?” Please don’t let her say tacos from a truck, Myka begs the universe, because she would really rather not have to explain her lingering shivers around taco trucks as yet another dealy-thingy.

“Preferences are still in process.”

It isn’t “tacos from a truck,” so hallelujah. But it’s inscrutable. “Are they?”

“I’ve traveled through America and elsewhere, over the weeks I’ve been away.” Helena pauses, giving Myka time to appreciate this window, however minimal, onto an answer to the “where were you” question... sadly, “America and elsewhere” gives precious little insight into the reason for all this travel. Helena continues, “What I’ve found is that contemporary cuisine bears little resemblance to what I knew. Some is strange and off-putting; some is strange but surpassingly delicious. Have you experienced a ‘blooming onion’?”

Is that intended to occupy the former or the latter category? “Pete loves those,” Myka says. That should fit as a response to either one.

“They represent what I cannot help but imagine is a foretaste of paradise,” Helena says.

She sounds rapturous.

Thus Myka has a new goal: to inspire a tone in Helena’s voice even approximating the one with which she’s just expressed this unexpected adoration.

However, Myka also has a new frustration: that not one but two of the people who occupy essential positions in her life venerate blooming onions. Which she herself cannot stomach. How to process this? Maybe she could do it by simply watching Helena eat one of the vile things... that really might be worth doing, if only as a stick against which to measure Pete’s gusto...

Sadly, that’s not going to happen today, for a frantic search on her phone yields zero restaurants in the vicinity offering even an approximation.

Onions aside, however, the number of restaurants near to them is, in positive news, nonzero. Myka reads her list of results to Helena as suggestions, and she is genuinely entertained, as well as informed, by the vehemence with which Helena vetoes every option that isn’t aggressively carnivorous.

Twenty minutes later they’re seated at Marble Room, which billed itself on its website as featuring “Steaks and Raw Bar”: Helena had turned up her nose at “raw bar” but landed with claws on “steaks.”

Watching Helena leaf through a menu—sitting across from her at an intimate table for two and doing the same—is even more astonishingly normal than any of the other normal things Myka has seen Helena do, and has done together with her, today. “Have we ever been to a restaurant? Just you and me, being seated? Getting menus and looking at them?” She would of course remember it, if they had, but she asks so as to press on the newness of it.

Bonus: Her asking the question prompts Helena to propose they conduct an inventory, limited though they both know it is, of shared non-B&B meals. It seems a gentle tiptoe through the past, one that might help rather than hurt, so Myka agrees.

“We didn’t share any table in Tamalpais,” Helena begins.

“Too busy saving Claudia from combusting,” Myka concurs.

“And removing you, vertically, from the path of marauding vehicles,” Helena concurs back. She smiles at Myka with a spark, one that is neither naughty nor nice, but rather alchemizes both into a gift of energetic attention that should be impossible.

Oh, this... this is what Myka has found irresistible from the start, for the full alchemy is in fact not only Helena’s impossibly true spark, but how Myka herself responds to it: with an internal melt, the “oh, this” that always hits new, each time she feels it. They say the body doesn’t remember pain; apparently it also doesn’t remember, from one moment of recognition to the next, how it greets its perfect match.

Another of those irresistible moments—actually a cascade of them—had occurred on a plane, as they traveled to Pittsburgh to probe what had happened to the students in Egypt, about which Helena was of course hiding her full knowledge. Myka tries not to push too hard on how significant that episode had been to her, given all the internecine baggage, as she says, “Sitting on a 737 in row 32, me in E and you in F, choosing between the market snack box or the chicken-salad-sandwich plate... that doesn’t count, I’m pretty sure.”

“Alas, no. I did, however, appreciate your willingness to share your sandwich with me.”

“You said it was one of the worst things you’d ever tasted in your life.” In the sandwich-share’s wake, Helena’s face had presented an astonishingly unnuanced canvas of disgust, and Myka had despaired at having caused such a reaction, even as she had reveled in having taken the unprecedented opportunity to do so: “Want a bite?” she’d asked, desperately casual, and Helena had accepted the invitation, biting, all teeth and lips and... and then, sadly, the reaction.

“It was,” Helena says. “Nevertheless I appreciated your willingness—but aha!” she pounces, “sandwiches! We ate ful sandwiches together from that cart in Alexandria.”

“No seating there,” Myka reminds her. “Also no menus.”

“Disqualifying,” Helena concedes. She falls quiet.

They both know Egypt is the end; what follows is adversarial. And then incorporeal.

But today—this collaborative, embodied day—is a beginning. “So we should mark this as a first,” Myka says.

“Celebrate this as a first,” Helena responds... corrects? She looks down at her menu and doesn’t look up as she says, “Of many. If I may dare to hope.”

Myka waits to answer until the look-back-up has occurred. “Only if I may too,” she says, meeting and holding Helena’s eyes.

Which roll, those eyes, and Myka panics. “You may and I may, but such mutual hope will likely have no earthly effect,” Helena says, providing relief: the scoff was directed not at Myka, but at... everything.

Hoping to unscoff her back to celebrating, Myka tries, “Can’t we mutually hope for it to have that effect though? In addition to that underlying mutual hope, for this being the first of many?”

“We can,” Helena says, her brow skeptical, “but would that be sufficient? I suspect the overall situation is likely to require several recursive applications of hope.”

“I can’t dispute your suspicion,” Myka concedes. Is hope a finite resource? That feels like a philosophical dead-ender, or at the very least the beginning of a descent, so she tamps down her impulse to voice the question. They’re here now, a circumstance on which Myka certainly, and Helen probably too, would never have thought to expend any hope at all.

She gives her own look at the menu and, without thinking, blurts, “This meal’s going to cost me several recursive applications of my credit card.” Immediately she wants to swallow back those words; they’re yet another instance of something she’d say to Pete, and anyway mentioning money is so picayune, here in the midst of an historic first. And yet... it never ends well when she tries to pretend to sophistication, moneyed or otherwise, that she doesn’t have, so she gives up and goes all in. “I don’t even know what a ‘duroc pork chop’ is, much less why it would cost more than a coffee-table book. And my dad’s brain would break at the thought of adding a lobster tail to a meal. At the price of it too, but the very idea.”

“I can’t dispute your father’s position,” Helena says, and Myka loves the echo—loves that Helena bothered with the echo. “My mother would most likely respond the same. She was a servant, you know.”

Myka could assure her that she does know; she’s done enough research on the historical H.G. Wells to produce a double-doorstop of a family biography. But she is over-the-top eager to know what Helena might be willing to say, so she goes with what she hopes is an appropriate please-inform-me prompt, sugared with just enough eagerness: “Was she?”

Helena nods. “It trained her to be exceptionally practical, but she became even more so after the failure of my father’s shop compelled her to return to service. That was difficult for her—for all of us. Charles and I were both desperate to rise above that station... insofar as one could, we did a reasonable job of it, and what I’ve learned of Charles’s later life suggests he went even further. A century later, I have as well. So I’ll pay for the meal.”

“But disapprovey mechanisms!” Myka protests, realizing she’s piled error on error: first, she’s supposed to be taking Helena out; second, she’s implying that she can’t pay; and—

“For good or ill, money is no longer my limiting factor,” Helena says, halting Myka’s thought-careering.

She seems genuinely indifferent to the financial consequences, so Myka sets herself to try, against every fiber of her frugal and responsible being, to pretend like that’s okay. Besides, there’s another issue to pursue. “If not that... what is your limiting factor?”

“Ironically, time,” Helena responds instantly. Acerbically.

“That’s everyone’s,” Myka says, but just as instantly she understands it’s another utterance she should have censored, because she knows what the response will be.

“Unless one is bronzed.”

Expectation fulfilled. And yet: “You aren’t bronzed anymore,” Myka says. To emphasize that—or rather, to emphasize its implications—she extends her right hand across the table. Maybe Helena will take it... she is more hopeful about such a possibility than she has ever been.

“Or unless one is a hologram. Or, now that I think of it, unless one is a vampire.” Helena says this musingly, but she offers her left hand, and now they are touching, and Myka is regretting her vamp somewhat less. “Does that support your earlier postulate?”

Myka can muster few words with their fingers atangle. “Doesn’t matter,” she manages. “You aren’t those either.” So as to put all time-suspending states away, as the past or impossibilities. Or both.

“You are correct. I am none of those.” Helena’s grip on Myka’s hand tightens.

They are holding hands. And if it’s overly adolescent of Myka to find this barely precedented joining significant? So be it.

Together they sit, not letting go. Accustoming themselves, even, to skin on skin. Learning it.

A throat-clear invades Myka’s ears from some unclear direction; she raises her eyes to regard a server.

But those joined hands, hers and Helena’s, don’t immediately disengage. Helena doesn’t let go, and Myka doesn’t either. This has meaning, here among the bonuses: the waiter seeing is okay, and that okay-ness is a continuation. Nancy Sullivan saw. Bob saw—differently, but still. This server, different yet again, but even so: seeing.

“I’m Frank,” that server says. “Really pleased to be here for you tonight. First I need to explain not checking in earlier: you were in conversation, and we try not to let service intrude on your privacy. If that’s an error, it’s on me.” His voice is sleek, as is his physical presentation: he wears a spectacularly well-fitted all-black uniform, as every server here does, but he’s also beautiful, with Roman-ideal bone structure and perfect raw-umber skin. His teeth are perfect too.

Gazing upon him makes Myka regret even more her jump to jealousy with the firefighter—for it now seems more likely that Cleveland has simply been doing its best to show its loveliest helpers to her and Helena.

Bonus.

“No error whatsoever, darling,” Helena says, her sincerity evident via the endearment. From anyone else, it might seem dismissive, even infantilizing, but from Helena, as Myka knows thanks to Claudia’s reactions to being on the receiving end, it’s a notice-signifying prize. If an occasionally unnerving one.

Frank, however, is not unnerved. He visibly warms, turning toward Helena, drawing his hands apart, opening his shoulders—expanding his physical presence, like a peacock, but one whose display is appreciation. When he speaks, however, he shifts to include Myka in his openness. “Like to start with drinks? And I can clarify anything on the menu, if you’ve had time to look.”

“I can clarify that she wants a steak,” Myka says, to speed the process along, given how long it’s been since they both ate.

“The Delmonico,” Helena clarifies further.

“That’s a standout cut. Preparation?” Frank asks.

“Bloody.”

Myka laughs. “Saw that coming. Rethinking the vampire thing a little by the way.”

This makes Helena smile—not naughty, but rather, again, with attention. As if she and Myka really do know things about each other... under a tragic knife, they’d said words about knowing, knowing better than anyone, but Myka is aware, and she presumes Helena is too, that those words weren’t true; they were nothing more (or less) than wishes, postulates about a better world than the too-real one that seemed inescapable.

But now they might be inching closer to that better world.

Helena says to Myka, “In deference to our parents’ sensibilities, I won’t add a lobster tail, but perhaps Crab Oscar? For the resonance?”

“I have to admit, that’s like the pork chop: I don’t know what it is,” Myka says. “Except for the resonance.”

“Is resonance like instagramming?” Frank asks. “Unless it’s just for that, I’d go elsewhere.”

Helena glances kitchenward, then looks back at Frank. “So. A specialty, but not of this house,” she says, voice lowered, almost-but-not-quite comically cloak-and-dagger.

“Few blocks west for cooked seafood. Blue star on the door; can’t miss it,” Frank says, lowering his voice too.

They are beautiful co-conspirators.

“Oh, Oscar would have liked you.” Helena now sounds silky. Fey and silky, and Myka wants to wrap herself in that magicky silk.

“The Grouch?” Frank tries, a little flippant—but only a little. He’s keying on Helena’s every word.

“He certainly was,” Helena says, with approval, as if Frank has passed an exceptionally exacting test.

“Okay,” Frank says. His I-don’t-know-what-just-happened-but-I-think-I-liked-it tone is painfully familiar. “And for you?” he asks Myka.

“The beets and blue cheese salad, please.”

“A salad?” Helena gasps, clutching at her chest.

Could that level of indignation possibly be real? Myka ignores the histrionics for the moment and tells Frank, “A couple of vegetable sides too: the blackened carrots and also the steamed asparagus.” She then says to Helena, “They sound subtle.” Real reaction or no, Myka might as well start defending her choices.

“You vegetarian?” Frank asks. “Vegan? Kitchen can modify whatever you—”

“Not as such. I’m just not as carnivorous as she is.”

“Mm,” Helena noises, and Myka can already hear the “Aren’t you?” that will follow... she tries to shape a riposte, and she is so preoccupied with that impossible task that she nearly misses what Helena actually says: “I’m sorry. You should of course have what you want.”

Her contrition seems genuine. But in the end it doesn’t matter, for the reason Myka now articulates. “I do. This minute, I do.”

Which... flusters Helena? She looks down at the menu again, down then up at Myka, blinking, then turns her attention to Frank, as if he might save her. From an overload of honesty? Of resultant expectation?

Frank doesn’t seem inclined to offer any lifeline. Instead, he says to Myka, “Listen. If you’re into subtle vegetables. It’s not on the menu, but chef’s serving a really special kabocha squash with some of the meat dishes. I could bring you some of that too? If it doesn’t hit you right, no harm no foul.”

“That would be great,” Myka says. She doesn’t know what kabocha squash is, but she’s copped to enough unsophistication already; she and her phone can figure this one out, and anyway, squash is pretty much squash. It’s not some coffee-table-book pork chop.

“Thinking about those drinks?” Frank then asks. “I’ll tell the kitchen to expedite that steak though.”

The idea of making yet another decision is too much pressure; Myka declines. Helena declines too, in a way that suggests she is deferring to Myka, conforming to her wishes. It’s another bonus: not only does Myka not have to defend her choices, but she can in fact shape choices for both of them.

It’s as intoxicating as any cocktail.

Frank adds, “But with the meal? Maybe? I can bring out the full wine list.”

More pressure, and Myka, despite the fact that the thought of drinking wine with Helena is lovely, opens her mouth to say no. But then: “Do you have a recommendation?” Helena asks Frank. It’s defusing. As if she knows that’s how it hit Myka, as pressure but also as potentially lovely. And as if she wants to resolve “pressure.” So as to reach “lovely.”

“To stand up to that Delmonico, it’s definitely a cab. Sommelier likes to pair the Hall Coeur 2013. Young, but deep. Takes that journey, you know? It’s a Napa, from St. Helena.”

Helena raises an eyebrow at Myka. “A signal of approval for once?” Her voice rises, up up and away from cynicism.

The last thing Myka would ever do is quash that rise. Hearing it—knowing it applies to the two of them together—is another bonus. “Saint Helena,” she agrees, without irony.

As the meal proceeds, the bonuses multiply: Helena’s face lights up when the steak arrives, and that is of course a gift, as is the voracity with which she attacks it. But watching her begin to cut and consume the stark slab has a further effect on Myka, in that it puts her in mind of Helena’s basic personhood. Or, no: her animalhood. An animal, here a human one, eats a piece of meat. Throughout prehistory, recorded history, all the history, this throughline. “Let me try a bite,” Myka says, and Helena obliges, slicing, transferring across the table, connecting each of them, as a consuming animal, to the other, the two of them, as animals, to all others. There’s both thrill and comfort in that.

The service, too, is a plus: Frank attends to them with delicate discretion, never interrupting conversation, yet always appearing when a dish should be cleared, when the wine should be poured. Sleek. Smooth. In addition, this serves for Myka, surprisingly, as a sotto voce contrast to Helena’s aspect, revealing her as a bit less sleek and smooth than Myka always ideates her as being... why does the difference, if that’s what it is, seem so striking? Well, Frank is clearly practiced at his tasks. Experienced. Does that mean Helena, here being with Myka in this way, sitting and sharing, is in fact doing something... new?

Myka knows her preferred answer to that.

Also rewarding, completely unexpectedly: the kabocha, presented as thick slices that are charred but not smoky, seasoned but not overspiced, sweet but not cloying, creamy but not clottingly so. It’s unlike any squash Myka has ever eaten... thus squash is not pretty much squash. “I could have this squash every meal,” Myka says as she finishes the not insubstantial portion, literally licking her lips. She suspects her voice is betraying something very like rapture, and could this possibly be how Helena and Pete feel about those execrable onions? “Every single meal. For a week. A month.”

“I could do the same with this steak,” Helena says.

She’s managed to down an impressive percentage of its sixteen ounces, which prompts Myka to say, not entirely jokingly, “We may need to talk about heart-healthiness at some point.”

Helena takes a moment. Then she says, “Healthiness of heart... mine? Yours? Or both?”

It’s a bit sardonic, involving an eyebrow, and Myka berates herself for not having preconsidered, and consequently rejected, bringing up hearts, because they could not possibly be ready to speak directly about—

—but then Helena is extending her left hand, and Myka is meeting it with her right, and just like that, they are rejoined.

With her right hand, Helena raises her glass. “How did we fail to toast when the wine first arrived?” she asks.

“You were too focused on the steak.” Myka says this with affection. With familiarity. She can imagine—and wishes she could confidently predict—saying these same words to Helena again at some future celebratory meal. She can imagine—and wishes she could confidently predict—their hearts being made healthy by such continued affection and familiarity.

“That was certainly an error, and as our charming Frank would say, it’s on me. So I’ll toast now as I should have done then: To you.” Helena’s salute is candid. Open. As warm as her hand on Myka’s.

“To you too.” Myka has to raise with her left hand—it feels a little weird, but isn’t that appropriate for a first toast with Helena? “And to us,” she adds, a dare that Helena reward by not withdrawing her warmth or her hand.

Their hands are still joined when Helena’s phone announces its presence. The intrusion breaks their hold. Myka’s heart, just now so high, sinks, for such interruptions—of chats, of meals, of anything consequential—are so rarely good.

She braces herself for an adverse outcome.

She tries to hide the bracing by directing her attention to her remaining stalks of asparagus, slicing them into bite-sized pieces, then slicing them again, halves halved, quarters quartered, sixteenths sixteenthed, practically baby-fooding them as she aggressively pretends to ignore the words Helena is saying.

Not that those words are revealing: “yes,” and “all right,” and “I understand.” Repeated with slight variations.

Upon disconnecting, Helena says to Myka, “Apparently my reprieve has come to an end. I’ve been instructed to go to the airport.” Her voice is calm but somewhere sharp, a blanket smoothed over blades.

“A reprieve? That’s what this was for you?” Bracing had been the right instinct, but Myka had not expected that to be the body blow. “For me, it’s been a bonus.”

Helena inclines her head. “A bonus, certainly. If you prefer.” Smoothing, smoothing.

Myka does prefer, but she pushes back. Back to punishment, hoping to expose the blades. “What you prefer—what you called it, even if you don’t prefer it—matters more. If this was a reprieve, what was the sentence?”

“It wasn’t pronounced in any court, but from my perspective? To keep my distance from the Warehouse,” Helena snaps, then winces. “And the obvious corollary.”

Myka has hit her mark. And now, saying it out loud... that will make it real. So: “From me,” Myka says.

“From you,” Helena says back. Her saying it, realing it too: it’s gratifying.

“You can’t even stay for dessert.” It’s an absurd heaviness to put on such a silly thing, and it’s not like Myka would have eaten any dessert herself. But she would avidly have watched Helena do so... “I’m questioning the Fredness of it all,” she laments.

Helena turns quizzical, but there’s no way Myka can explain. Well, no: there’s no way Myka can imagine wasting time by explaining.

“My flight isn’t till tomorrow,” she says instead, plaintive. She’s seized by an impulse to—what is it?—go with Helena to the airport? Yes, of course she wants to do that, but there’s more—again, what is it?—to figure out a way to fly with Helena wherever she’s being sent, damn the consequences? Yes, that’s closer. But Myka can’t gift herself such a wildness. Not even for Christmas. Not even if she put herself on her own “nice” list.

Should’ve taken this to a hotel room, her body berates. Should’ve skipped to that. All this time wasted in a restaurant. Sitting. Menus. Should have pursued the satisfaction of what you’ve always known, from the marrow of your bones all the way out to your skin, is a greater hunger.

But. Even as her body tries to persuade her of its primacy, she thinks back over their interactions of the past hours. Would she trade them for that satisfaction? Would she really? Perhaps, in a different world—a more desperate one. But in this hopefully better world, this time was not wasted. All these bonuses... they were, they are, important. Conversation has been essential to each incremental increase of their intimacy. She shouldn’t discount it. She should celebrate it.

“I went to a wrong place just now,” she tells Helena, whose face is on pause—she must have been waiting for Myka to make even the slightest bit of sense. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to go with you? At least in the taxi?”

Helena’s post-pause expression is deeply indulgent. “I think you should stay and enjoy dessert. Let me imagine you seeing this unprecedented meal to a sweet completion.”

“I’m not really a dessert person,” Myka says, not wanting to be indulged quite like this, and additionally not wanting to misrepresent. “And anyway I don’t see how I could enjoy it with you gone. Could you maybe imagine something else?”

Helena softens; clearly, that was a good response. “What if I simply think of you. You eating your salad, your vegetables,” she says, then, “and one bite of bloody steak.” That’s another of those transcendent attentional gifts. One bite of bloody steak. Myka files that away for future comfort, even as Helena continues, “While I watched you do those things. Reveling in the fact that, as established, such a thing has never happened before.”

“I like that,” Myka says. “I know I’ll be thinking of you eating your steak, how I watched you. Which also, as established, never happened before.” She is compelled, however, to add, “But you’re leaving again. Which has.” She checks the time, and now it is Christmas Eve. She tries not to draw inferences from that.

“But I will come back.”

“When?”

“When I can.”

“Why did we get stuck in that elevator?” Myka asks.

“Because the mechanism malfunctioned. With intent?” Helena says that last playfully.

Myka doesn’t, here at the end, want to play. Play along. “I repeat, more existentially: why did we get stuck in that elevator? Bearing in mind that the elevator itself may not appreciate its role in the... grand design.”

Helena takes a moment. Then she says, “So that we might have this goodbye rather than, as before, none at all?” The words are a softness.

Myka wants to respond in kind. “Or—and?” Fighting against fearful reticence, trying to be truthful, she says, “So I could work my way up to saying this out loud: please come back. To me.”

Helena breathes. “And so I could say this to you: when I can, I will.”

They’re in public. How different might this have been if Myka had pushed them toward a hotel room? But she can’t help checking herself: it’s not like things couldn’t have gone spectacularly wrong in such a space. Plus an elevator would most likely have been involved, so...

In the space they are actually inhabiting, Helena now rises from the table. Myka does the same, moving to meet her.

They share a hug, one that terrifies Myka—because they’ve never touched like this before; because it feels awkward rather than natural as their bodies surge, press, warm; because if they can’t even hug right then what does that bode for anything else—but as they emerge from this confusion of arms and torsos, Helena says again, “I will.” Her assurance reshapes the ungraceful embrace into a profound affirmation.

The certainty heats into Myka: any goodbye, even a clumsy one, is a bonus compared to no goodbye at all.

But then Helena is gone.

And Myka is not at all surprised—yet still devastated—to be sitting alone at a table for two in a steakhouse in Cleveland on just-turned Christmas Eve.

“I’m sorry your lady had to leave.” Frank has materialized next to her, like he’s the Ghost of Christmas Bonus. Or, no: the Ghost of Christmas Bonus Rescinded.

“Story of my life,” Myka says, trying for a jest, fearing it’s a sob.

Frank juts his perfectly sharp chin like he’s considering a similarly perfectly sharp comment... but then his face gentles. “She paid the check and then some, so you can sit here forever if you need to.”

“I should probably go,” she says. Sad but true.

“Wait a second though. She said to bring you this, because she wants to make sure your heart stays healthy.” He places a small plate of kabocha squash before her. “She seems for real,” he concludes. But then, “Is she?” he asks.

Yet another gut-familiar reaction to the Helena of it all: not-quite-belief. “She is,” Myka testifies, again fighting that sob. Because before tonight, before today and tonight, her response would more likely have been “I hope so.”

As she eats an additional portion of absurdly delicious squash on Christmas Eve in Cleveland by herself, Myka considers calling Pete. He would at least rescue her from this sudden crush of loneliness...

... but on second thought, would he? Or would his presence make it worse, as it sometimes has before? Myka knows she’s at fault for that; she’s never really explained to him, out loud in words he would understand and accept, what Helena is to her. How entirely she matters.

Which in turn brings her to the keynote, which is that she should feel the loneliness. She owes it to Helena, for this is one of the visceral testaments to Helena’s significance: because her absence matters just as much as her presence.

****

When Myka gets back to the B&B the next day—after having been offered on both of her flights the opportunity to purchase a chicken salad sandwich, each time rendering her nostalgic and frustrated in equal measure—Steve is waiting for her.

“How was it?” he asks as he relieves her weary hands of the pen-bearing static bag.

“Really, really nice,” she says. For the resonance.

Steve smiles a smile Myka doesn’t understand.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #holiday (but not Gift Exchange)#Bonus #part 3 #what’s a bonus?#which mechanisms judge you negatively and which judge positively?#you never know #and speaking of elevators #I cannot recommend highly enough Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist #because it commits to the bit #to the nth degree #and it object-lessons you #also to the nth degree #about what a narrative can actually *do*#in terms of excavating and linking #and oh yeah resonating

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