#Darby Conley | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

apparitionism · 3 years ago

Text

Tome

This is a semi-lengthy one-shot. Not even AU! Vaguely canon-compliant! (Except for Pete and Myka temporarily forgot they were siblings due to some malign outside influence; there are only so many times I’m willing to force myself to think otherwise.) It takes place post-show; Helena came back to the Warehouse and is once again an agent. Anyway, this came about because I ran across some new information that gave me an idea... so I wrote it down. It’s a little clunky—still trying to find my feet after and amidst various trials and tribs—but it exists. And eventually everything else will too.

Tome

“What does this one do?” The agent asked the question eagerly, as new recruits, particularly young ones, were apt to do.

Younger and younger they seemed to the Caretaker, as her years of taking care extended, multiplied. “If you need to find out, you will,” she told the impatient young woman.

That impatience came close to getting the better of the rookie: she reached a hand out as if to pick up the book she’d asked about but corrected her motion just in time, putting her hands behind her back instead. She said, “I assumed an H.G. Wells artifact would have to do with one of his actual books. Not letters.”

The Caretaker shrugged, an exaggerated action that persisted from her long-ago youth. “Assumptions like that? The Warehouse comes at those super hot. Believe me, you don’t know anything about H.G. Wells. Speaking of super hot.”

This young, young agent hadn’t yet had to confront any such reorientations. She proved that with a frustrated, “I don’t know anything, and I don’t understand anything. Will I ever get anywhere with this place, Ms. Donovan?”

This one had real potential; the frustration itself was proof. It was reminiscent of the attitude of an extremely pragmatic, occasionally very frustrated agent from long ago. So Claudia Donovan, who had recently—or not so recently? memory was a freaky thing—become the longest-tenured Caretaker of the Warehouse’s lengthy, many-numbered existence, started a historically instructive lecture: “I think it’s time to tell you the origin story of legendary agents Myka Bering and...”

****

“I am about to convey to you information that you will find unbelievable,” Helena announced as she strode with seemingly ominous purpose into the B&B’s sitting room.

Myka, who had in fact been about to use the room for sitting—so as to then open one of the three books she was carrying and sink into the lucky winner that struck her as correct for that moment—saw that any such immersion would have to wait. She swallowed a sigh and said, “Is this like when you found out about quantum entanglement and got overexcited and just had to explain it to somebody so you could show you understood it and so you pretended you thought I wouldn’t have heard of it?”

“How was I to know you’d heard of it?” Helena said, beginning a pout.

It was a fake pout. The fakest of fake. “You read about it in a book that belongs to me.”

“You might not have read that book.”

“Really?”

“You might not have retained what you read in that book.”

That was a pathetic last gasp of a try. Myka said, desert-dry, “You know how my mind works.”

At that, Helena shook her head, a dramatic rendition of regret. “Alas, no. I haven’t yet mastered neuroscience.”

She chose to be literal at the most ridiculous, and/or self-serving, and/or frustrating times. Myka had once whispered “What do you want” in an extremely heated moment, to which Helena had replied, after a pause, “A meaningful existence, I suppose. Isn’t that what most thinking individuals want?”

Myka let her teeth graze the lobe of the ear into which she had just whispered, the small, sharp touch standing in for a hard, exasperated bite. “What do you want me to do to your body, right now, as we are being intimate with each other, you literal tease.”

Helena smiled, just a little; Myka could feel the curve move up through the temple her own cheek rested against. “I appreciate your precision,” Helena said. Clearly, she’d intended the frustration.

Despite being aggravated by the intention, Myka in turn appreciated Helena’s precision in the response she eventually provided to the “what do you want me to do right now” question, and Helena seemed to then appreciate very much how Myka responded to the response. So Myka supposed there was at least a little something to be said for intentional frustration. Sometimes.

But this didn’t really feel like one of those times. Myka said, “Maybe that neuroscience illiteracy is why you have so much trouble with what people—and when I say ‘people’ I mean me—can and can’t believe. So it this a quantum entanglement believability question where I’m supposed to respond with ‘I can’t believe it! Tell me more!’? Or is it one of those ‘Myka, I was dismantling the air conditioner simply to investigate whether it might be made to perform more efficiently and you will most likely find this unbelievable but now I’m afraid we need to obtain a large quantity a type of refrigerant that the internet informs me ceased to be manufactured in 1994’ situations? Because I’m probably going to believe both those kinds of ‘you will find this unbelievable’ scenarios from now on, even though I really did have trouble with the AC one at first. Given that you did it in August. During a heatwave.”

Helena blinked. It was one of her “I am attempting to distract you from what you have just said” blinks. She said, “You are very attractive when you’re overheated.”

“When it’s because the AC’s out, particularly when it’s your fault, I’m also very unreceptive to your advances.”

“I do seem to recall several variations on a theme of ‘Don’t even think about touching me.’” Now she offered an “I am completely charming and you know it” blink. “I confess I did continue to think about it.”

“I know,” Myka said, about the charm and the “confession.” “Given that I had to compose those variations. Anyway I’m really hoping this unbelievability doesn’t end up with no touching.”

“As do I. What I can tell you with certainty is that it represents an entirely new category.”

“Exciting news. But as a general rule, maybe stop saying things are unbelievable?”

“I didn’t say any of those things were objectively unbelievable. I said you would find them so.”

“You think I’m uniquely incredulous? Or is it just that you think I won’t believe you when you say things?”

“Well,” Helena said. That was clearly a placeholder, and after a pause, she followed it with a self-abnegating head-shake with which Myka wished she wasn’t familiar. “We’ve seen that circumstances can develop poorly when you do.”

Myka always hoped—or rather imagined, in an obviously fantastical sense—that they would one day get past all of that. Egypt, Yellowstone, the aftermath. So many years had passed, and so many amends had been made since that injury; Myka had told Helena she didn’t even blame her with any fullness for what had happened, and certainly no more than she blamed herself. But Helena often seemed determined, and determined to remain determined, to shoulder culpability one remark at a time: guilt by a thousand word-cuts.

“What have I said about that?” Myka now prompted, trying for gentle.

Helena said, “To think it through differently.”

That was indeed what Myka had said. Repeatedly. “Could you maybe actually do that?” Still as gentle as she could.

“I’m trying. But I’ll point out that you haven’t yet been able to return the favor with regard to the Boone interregnum.”

To that, Myka could only echo, “I’m trying.” That, too, was tied up with culpability. That, too, was for Myka a “blame Helena, but also blame yourself” circumstance. But no, worse, it was a “blame yourself even more” circumstance: in the aftermath of Emily Lake and Hong Kong and Sykes, when Helena had gone wherever she’d gone, Myka hadn’t fought hard enough to find her, instead giving in to exhaustion and shame. If she had found more strength, brought it to bear, done the work, then Helena might not—no, would not—have settled for that place she didn’t belong, settled because she could see no path to belonging anywhere with Myka. Helena had said it just that way, later, when they were both explaining, justifying: “I could see no path.”

Particularly after Myka told her to stay there.

Maybe there could be no thinking it through differently. Maybe they each would always have parallel tracks: Helena guilty over Yellowstone and Boone, yet doing ridiculously lovable things like bringing supposedly unbelievable news to Myka of (mostly) entirely believable things; Myka guilty over the same episodes, yet happily mock-jousting with Helena over such expansive-yet-believable pronouncements. And maybe parallel tracks were, in the end, all right. They would inevitably meet—neither her nor Helena’s dual tracks lay in the same plane—and that made for problems. But only occasionally.

Helena said, softly, “Let me have this unbelievability, please.”

“Okay,” Myka said, because it was. “Ready set go.”

“It is unconscionable,” Helena pronounced. She didn’t quite reach full dudgeon.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Myka told her.

“I am outraged.” That was better.

Myka said, truthfully, “That, I have no trouble believing.”

“Look at this.” Helena thrust her phone at Myka. Such an action was never a harbinger of good, and even though they were both performing, Myka took the phone from her with a slight Pavlovian cringe.

The current non-good was a page from a publisher’s website noting a recent issuance: a first edition of a single-volume version of four previously published books.

Myka did find the idea of two thousand three hundred twenty pages of correspondence to be... a strikingly large amount.

Well, all right, that correspondence had taken place over sixty-six years. She supposed a person could write a lot of letters in sixty-six years.

“Well,” she said out loud, articulating a placeholder of her own as noncommittally as she could, bracing herself for whatever storm was about to break.

Helena obligingly exploded, “Two thousand three hundred twenty pages!” Like she’d been waiting forever to shout the number. That didn’t seem performative.

“I see that,” Myka said.

Another detonation: “Six hundred twenty dollars!” That one was likely a sincere “at last” exclamation as well.

“I see that too.”

“For letters. Written by Charles.”

Myka was legitimately unsure where in Charles-land they were. “Isn’t that... good?” she asked, because anything attesting to the historical H.G. Wells being held in high esteem was usually an occasion for Helena to—

“I myself have received letters from Charles,” Helena snapped.

Sometimes Charles was the good guy, sometimes the bad. Of course Myka was the last person who had any right to make noise about touch-and-go sibling relationships, but trying to predict whether good- or bad-Charles would be the brother at issue—and particularly, in the moment, trying to discern which one in fact was the brother at issue—was epically challenging.

“Not worthy of collection,” Helena continued.

Ah. This was Charles-as-mustache: the writer who couldn’t, in Helena’s eyes, actually write. Or who shouldn’t ever have been lauded for having written. Or should have, but only for writings that were tied so tightly to Helena’s research as to be indistinguishable from it. Overall, Helena characterized her brother as a necessary not-quite-evil. And a large part of the problem, as far as Myka could see, was that Helena would never have the chance to confront either the good or the bad version in order to make any of her cases with regard to writing and credit and history.

“Don’t you figure it’s just meant to be comprehensive?” Myka tried. “Not discriminating, quality-wise? Just all the words a historical figure put down on paper and sent to other people?” That seemed to soothe the beast a little: a wiggle of Helena’s lip that bespoke an incipient sneer calmed. Encouraged, Myka went on, “And besides, how many people are going to buy this book anyway?”

But that was the wrong thing to have said. Maybe the wrongest thing, as indicated by Helena’s sharp inhale and hardened jaw; evidently, running it down was just as bad as building it up. Good Charles, bad Charles. No solid ground. “I mean, I might have bought it, once upon a time, because I thought I loved that H.G. Wells. But don’t you know I love you more?” Myka asked, trying for distraction with a nearly non-sequitur Hail Mary. Helena loved to hear Myka speak of love, so it had a good chance of working—only in the short term, but any term was a term.

“I believe you do,” Helena said. She kissed Myka once, then again, and the sweet of that nearly made Myka forget why they were talking in the first place. Then Helena said, “But where are the letters that would attest?”

So Myka concluded: documentation. That’s what Charles had managed, so inappropriately in Helena’s eyes, to achieve. Printed and bound. Documentation.

****

A few days later, Pete handed Myka a large box. “Package for you. It was on the porch,” he said, “and it’s the heaviest thing I ever lifted. I think I hurt myself.”

“Technically I think Helena’s brother hurt you,” she told him. The book, according to its specs, weighed eleven pounds. Not exactly an elephant. But not a feather either, so of course Pete would complain.

“No trouble believing that. Ever since you told her about our stupid non-romance, I feel like she’s plotting revenge. Working her time-travel mojo to rope her brother in, though? That’s next-level.”

“Next-level” was always true of Helena. “Anyway it’s a book I bought,” Myka said, to get away from the idea of revenge.

“Wow. You bought a book. It’s a whole new world. Not.”

“With this book, it might be. Or, right: maybe not. Who knows about worlds. It’s letters.”

“Well, yeah. Of course it’s letters.”

What? Myka had thought this blast was contained—thought that she herself had managed to contain it. “You know about it?”

“Why do you always think I’m stupid? It’s a book. It’s writing, and hey guess what, I know how that works. Starts with letters: they make the words. Words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs.”

“And those make the letters,” Myka said, with relief.

“Wait, what?”

“I’m assuming he wrote them in paragraphs. But I haven’t read them yet. I could be wrong.”

He shook his head, hard enough to make his jowls wag. “Just take your heavy box that H.G. somehow got her brother to send from the olden days to hurt me. And quit confusing me.”

“I can do the former. The latter, history says no.”

“Take your freakish talking history too.” He faked tossing the box at her, then set it down carefully on the floor. As if a book could break—as if he genuinely cared about not breaking a book Myka had bought.

She really did appreciate him. Most of the time. Stupid non-romance notwithstanding... and Myka wished she hadn’t had to tell Helena about that disturbing episode, but somebody would have brought it up at some point, and better that she frame the whole thing as “here’s a funny and unfortunate thing that happened” than, say, have Claudia drop into a conversation some random comment about “that creepy time when Myka and Pete made out.” Helena hadn’t reacted well—obviously—but it could have been a whole lot worse.

Contextualize everything: a crucial concept when it came to communicating with Helena.

So Myka tried to do that with the volume of collected correspondence. She called Helena into the sitting room to confront the physical object. “Here it is,” she said, hefting the book up from where it had made a good start on pressing a permanent indentation in the upholstery of the sofa. She didn’t hurt herself, but just as when she’d first picked up the box, she had to concede that Pete wasn’t entirely wrong. Maybe Charles was coming after her, too.

Helena didn’t reach for the book. Instead, she took a step back. “You spent six hundred twenty dollars,” she said.

“Plus expedited shipping. For several reasons. Do you want me to explain?”

“No.”

That was pretty bald, but Myka pushed on. “Let me rephrase: I’m about to explain.”

“If you must.” But before Myka could say anything more, Helena remarked, “It appears... weighty.”

“Pete complained about that. Said Charles was out to get him.”

A nod, accompanied by quirks of lip and eyebrow. “Well done Charles.”

“See,” Myka said, “his correspondence was good for something after all.” Helena offered nothing concessionary to that, not even a nod of her head. Against that wall, Myka asked, “Was he like this?”

“Was he like what?”

Was he this deliberately obtuse, Myka wanted to ask but didn’t. Instead she said, “So my point is that I don’t know. And I’d like to know a little bit more about him. In his own words, as himself.” Now Helena made a minimal facial movement of acknowledgement, so Myka went on, “And I thought maybe you might want to see what he said. How he said it.”

That got only a sniff in response. “As mentioned, I’m well-acquainted with his rhetorical style.”

“To people who aren’t you, I mean. The how of his saying. To them. Which could be different. Or could have... evolved? Over sixty-six years?”

“You may rest assured that Charles is among the creatures least likely to have evolved.”

Myka quirked a lip of her own. “Are you calling your brother a dinosaur?”

Helena turned her head. As a velociraptor might have done. “If the claws and plumage fit,” she said.

Claws and plumage... Myka didn’t say out loud that Helena had handily described her own attributes. What she did say, trying to keep her tone neutral, was, “I’m sorry to have thought wrongly.”

“I forgive you,” Helena said, grandly. Too grandly. It gave Myka a powerful sense that she hadn’t thought wrongly at all.

For that sense to be borne out, however, took quite some time, because Helena seemed to be treating the book’s presence as some sort of test of will: she flamboyantly refrained from touching it, even when Myka intentionally placed the volume such that moving it would make Helena’s life easier. She did nothing so aggressive as, say, leaving it smack in the middle of Helena’s side of the bed, but: in the spot on the dresser where Helena tended to place her hairbrush. In the space on the bench at the foot of the bed where Helena would sit to pull her shoes on or off. On the kitchen counter, right at the spot Helena liked to open a book of her own and read while heating water for tea.

In response to these provocations, Helena altered her habits—finding a new home for her hairbrush (more than once), sitting instead on the edge of the bed while attending to her shoes, aggressively watching the kettle rather than reading. None of it was quite as flamboyant as she could get, but it sent a strong signal.

Myka was nevertheless tempted to dust the book’s cover for fingerprints every time she returned from a retrieval during which Helena was left to inhabit their bedroom alone.

While she waited, she read the correspondence herself. At first, she worked through one day of letters at a time, thinking to align herself with how they would have been written... but she could never have maintained that tiptoe, literally quotidian pace. So she dove in, swimming several successive marathons that left her blurry-eyed and blurry-minded, her own head-voice inflected with Charles’s writerly—and dispositional—tics: Silly nicknames for friends. Familiarity underlain with an odd formality, even when addressing those closest to him. Thoughts on politics, society, the world at large, all directed at anyone he thought needed enlightenment. Ardent philosophizing focused on women he was in the process of seducing; careless disregard for the feelings of women he succeeded in seducing and of whom he then tired.

Through it all, however, wove an intermittently recognizable thread. Myka could hear, could feel, how her intimate partner and this relative stranger had been similarly (yet of course oh so differently) shaped. A woman’s experience; a man’s. One life disrupted, torn apart by violence, then paused, adding torture upon trauma; the other allowed to spool its natural, logical length with minimal friction. The commonality between them, though, was a bedrock commitment to functionality, regardless of circumstance. It was the aspect Myka felt must have sustained Helena through the years in bronze, among all her other trials, and it seemed to be, in an obviously less desperately necessary sense, what pushed her brother along as well.

All of what she read was interesting, even captivating. At no point did reading the letters bore her. Yet there was one strange, even estranging, element of each one: the complimentary close. She could think of the letter-writer as “Charles” most of the time, but seeing “H.G. Wells” follow each “Sincerely” or “Bless you” or “Good wishes” put Helena there on the page, a little unreal cameo. A tiny revenge.

“Yours, H.G. Wells.” To which Myka thought in response: Yours? No, mine.

****

Myka had hoped that eventually Helena would reward her with something like “You win.” What she got instead was a completely uncontextualized, “I wish I could have lectured him on his incompetent communications with women.”

They were in bed. Myka had been just-just-just on the verge of sleep, thankful to be so; after several delayed flights, she and Pete had finally made it home after a trying retrieval, and all she wanted was oblivion. She was pleased, of course, that her primary reason for purchasing Charles’s letters had at last been realized... but she would, in this moment, have traded that for sleep. She glanced at the clock. “You two aren’t entirely dissimilar,” she said, trying not to calculate how many minutes of rest she was losing as she did. “But I don’t mean you communicate incompetently,” she added, because that implication would of course have had repercussions. “And none of it told me what he was like to be around.” That admission would no doubt compound her losses, sleep-wise, but she accepted it as a consequence of being the idiot who bought the thing in the first place.

Helena said, “To be around? He was...” She moved her mouth as if tonguing through potential words. Then she grimaced. “He was my brother.”

“Is he your brother in the letters? Is he... himself?” The correspondence still felt like her one real chance to get to know Helena’s brother—this obviously essential relation (not Christina, but essential all the same)—in a way that wasn’t filtered through Helena or connected directly to her, as the books were. If he wasn’t himself, what was she really learning about him? Other than how much he sometimes sounded like his sister.

“You may have been slightly”— the room was dark, but Myka could hear Helena’s eyeroll—“correct about evolution, over so many years. But not with regard to women.” The eyeroll had disappeared. “I wish I were surprised.”

“You,” Myka said, the word dragging slow, her exhaustion getting the better of her, “...beat him.” A span of time that felt short but could have been long passed before she managed to finish her sentence with “...handily.”

She expected Helena to say something in response to that, something appreciative or snide or something, but the next thing she knew, she was opening her eyes to the sunrise. And to Helena, elbow-propped next to her, now taking Myka’s eye-opening as permission to touch: just her shoulder, a little slide of fingertips. “You let me go to sleep,” Myka said, her mouth not quite awake.

“You were exhausted,” Helena said, pushing those fingers now against Myka’s temple, then up through her hair. “I apologize for not realizing that sooner.”

“Were we done though?”

“I suppose. You were right; Charles and I are similar, and I reacted badly to the entire constellation. Of history. As represented by the object. As is my wont.”

Myka didn’t admonish her for that slight gloom. “If Tracy got all the historic credit for an enterprise that was just as much mine, if not more, I’d get upset about her letters being collected. It’d be a slim volume, at least; Tracy doesn’t really write letters.”

“As I understand it, no one writes letters anymore. It’s a shame the art is in such decline... though Charles’s correspondence is no argument for revival.”

“It’s definitely a shame,” Myka said, her heart quickening; Helena had provided her with an opportunity, one she’d been hoping would arise. Was this the truly ideal moment? Or had that come the night before? Had she been too tired to take advantage? Was it too late? She edged her way in: “Isn’t that in itself the argument for revival?” When Helena didn’t react, she went on, “Besides, ‘no one’ seems a little broad. Some people still write them. And anyone can write letters if they want to.” Then she sprung what she hoped was the trap. “For example, you could.”

Helena’s response was no help. “Could I,” she said, her tone indecipherable. She moved a bit away from Myka and leaned back against her pillow. All she did, until Myka gave up waiting and got out of bed, was breathe.

****

Helena hadn’t given Myka anything to work with, yet she nevertheless held out hope that Helena might be about to embark on a project. Myka thus embarked on a reciprocal project of her own, approaching each Warehouse denizen in turn and articulating a variation on a plea: “If Helena writes letters to you, save them.”

Claudia responded with, “Letters from H.G.? Sounds like gold. Weird, old-fashioned gold, but still.”

“Let her know you think so.”

“What’s really going on?”

“I’ll tell you someday,” Myka assured her.

Steve’s reply was similar to Claudia’s: “My cool new partner writing me letters? I’ll look forward to it, if she does.”

“With you, I’m sure it’s when, not if. Tell her you like it. Please?”

“Positive reinforcement?” Steve asked.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“It’s not a favor. Of course I’ll reinforce it. Pretty special to get a letter from H.G. Wells.”

“This one, definitely,” Myka said. “And please, please save it. Them. Whatever she writes you. If you would.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Not right now. It’s a long-term thing, and I’m not sure how it’s going to play out.”

“That sounds like most long-term things.”

“Also I might chicken out,” she confessed. Steve had that effect on her.

“Then you should write yourself a letter. About the long-term thing. From future-you who’s glad you did whatever the thing is.”

“Concrete,” Myka said. “I like it.”

In the end, she didn’t write that letter. She didn’t have to: Steve’s putting her glad future-self into words worked exactly the same way. And of course she would need nothing, over time, to aid her memory of that putting-into-words.

Abigail answered the “save them” request with, “I’m not much of a saver of things.”

“If you could make an exception,” Myka begged.

“How about I just hand them over to you.”

That caught Myka flat-footed. “Oh. Well. That wasn’t... I mean...”

Abigail gave Myka her “you must be joking” face. Myka saw that face less often than, say, Pete did, but it was still pretty familiar. “I know about that huge book,” Abigail said. “Letters written by one H.G. Wells... and now we’re talking about letters written by the other one? I’d say I can draw a line between those two things, but I can’t really draw at all.”

“You draw conclusions pretty well.”

“My only conundrum is whether I need to tell Helena what I’m doing with her letters. If she writes them to me.”

“That’s up to you,” Myka said, meaning it, but hoping her next words would be the right nudge: “What I’ll say is I think that if they’re written, it’ll be with an eye to the future.” She added, “And I won’t read them in the present.”

“That last thing,” Abigail said. “Okay.”

Artie’s response to Myka was a startled “Why would H.G. do that?”; her response, in turn, was “Does it matter why?”

“She has a reason for every single thing she does,” he maintained. “And most of her reasons and things don’t involve me.”

“Documentation,” Myka said.

“Is that the reason or the thing?”

“Both.”

“I still don’t see why it—they—would have anything to do with me.”

Myka had in fact been thinking about that. Artie and Helena weren’t quite friends, weren’t quite equals (each was pretty sure of being the superior), but their relationship had mellowed into an occasionally touchy collegiality: a recognition of veteran status, of experience brought to the table. And Myka thought that if Helena were engaged in a project of putting words on paper, she would probably set down reflections intended to be useful in just that collegial, experienced way.

To Artie, she indicated none of this, offering only a shrug. “I guess we’ll see. But if I’m right?”

“Fine,” was Artie’s dismissal. “If you are.”

That left only Pete. Myka implored him, “If Helena writes letters to you, don’t make fun of her.”

He was, improbably or (really) entirely predictably, chewing bubble gum. He blew and popped a bubble. “Won’t need to. I got plenty other material for that.”

“Also, save them.”

“Why? I bet she’ll just write down as many jokes as she can think of. She loves jokes.”

“Does she?” This was... somewhat new information.

“You weren’t here when she found my book of shark jokes from, like, fourth grade. She cracked herself up over and over. You want to know what her favorite was?”

In that moment, confronted with this absolutely new information, Myka would have given just about anything to know, but she said—calmly, so as to forestall extortion—“Yes.”

“Pretend you’re on a boat surrounded by sharks. How do you survive?”

“I give up. How?”

“You stop pretending! Anyway she said she ‘hadn’t expected to encounter commentary about ontology.’” He said that in his terrible Helena-esque accent. “She liked the dumb ones too though.”

Myka was somewhat surprised at two things: that Helena hadn’t brandished the book at her and exclaimed on its unbelievability, and that Pete knew the word “ontology.” What she told him was, “I don’t care if all she does is copy shark jokes out by hand. Save every word.”

****

When Myka received her own first letter from Helena, she was perversely tempted not to open it—to save it for history, as she was, as promised, saving the two Helena had already sent to Abigail. After some days of resistance, though, it occurred to her that because she’d never received a letter from Helena before, she had no idea what such a letter might contain. There might be action items that Helena, having conveyed them in this letter, wouldn’t mention out loud, something like “Please add raspberry jam to the grocery list,” and then she’d wonder why the jam never materialized.

It was a ridiculous reason to open a letter, but it got the job done.

Helena didn’t, in that first letter, include any action items. At least, not about jam.

Over time, Myka received several letters—some dashed off during retrievals, some carefully composed for literary effect. Helena cycled through favorites with regard to paper and pens, so the stack of letter-filled archival sheet protectors that grew in a box in Myka’s closet was by no means uniform. It was a chronicle of purchases and preferences as much as it was about the content—scratched out in ink that was blue, black, once purple, occasionally green, on paper unlined, lined, thick parchment, ghostly onionskin. There was also a great deal of hotel stationery, testament to where she and Steve had been sent, place upon place, each backgrounded with, but the content of its letter not determined by, some artifact.

Some artifact. Which everything, Myka couldn’t help but think/know/regret, in the end came down to.

****

Not sixty-six years later but several, when Myka initiated the next phase of her project, she expected to receive pushback: rethinkings, claims of privacy. But everyone was blessedly willing to give Myka their own caches of paper. Steve extracted his, loosely rubber-banded and still in their envelopes, from the back of a drawer. Artie handed his over in a leather hatbox that looked like it might have come from Helena’s original era. It was large, the hatbox; surely he could have found a correctly sized container? Instead, as Myka peeked in to find it full, Artie told her, “You were right.”

In Claudia’s case, the receptacle was a vintage Trapper Keeper, one featuring... “Kittens?” Myka asked.

“Because she hates cats,” Claudia said. “Bought it special.”

Pete gave her his in a football helmet. “I need the helmet back,” he said.

“Why are they in there in the first place?”

“It’s my autographed Ozzie Newsome from the ’89 AFC Championship. I’d never let anything happen to it. Safest place to put anything valuable.”

She looked into the helmet. “What’s valuable about this pair of socks?”

“Oh, whoops, nothing,” Pete said, pulling them out. “I just forgot they were there.”

Myka thanked all the gods she could think of that the socks seemed to be clean.

****

It wasn’t going to be anywhere near eleven published pounds. But Myka went to work anyway.

****

On the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary, late on that night, after all other celebrations were complete and they were alone, she said to Helena, “You corresponded a lot over the past several years. I thought—no, I knew—you would.”

“Did you.” As if she’d known all along what Myka had planned? No, more as if she’d hoped all along but hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe it.

“So I collected it.” And Myka produced from under her pillow on their bed a bound hardback volume, adorned with a dust jacket. “It isn’t over two thousand pages, and it doesn’t cost over six hundred dollars. It’s just a print-on-demand thing.”

“On demand? I would demand it.” Helena extended greedy hands, and Myka obliged. Turning it over and over in those hands, Helena said, “I can’t imagine how you did this.”

“The how? Honestly your handwriting’s kind of a next-level nightmare, so typing it all out, that was the most work. But also I did have to learn to use some design apps to put it all together. So it would... you know, look like a book. I mean the cover and all of it.”

“The cover is ravishingly beautiful.”

Myka was proud of that, in a sheepish sort of “a person who has artistic talent and training would have made something truly good to look at but this is what I could do and it’s better than I expected” way. Diligence, coupled with viewing an absurd number of tutorials on photo manipulation software, had enabled her to create a multilayered collage in which images bled into each other, overlaying and underlying: a pocket watch, chess pieces, apples. Helena’s lockets—both of them. As many things as she could think of that tied Helena to the Warehouse, to her, to all of them, over these many, many years. Every tether: a gun, a grappler. Books and more books. Behind it all, she’d ghosted a photo of Helena herself, wearing an expression that made clear that whatever she had just said was not to be challenged. (What she’d just said was in fact “I do.”)

Helena squinted at the collage, looking closer. “Is that a shark?”

“It is.” In one early letter to Pete, Helena had indeed quoted a shark joke. Years ago—but nostalgia mattered. “See page 17.”

Helena turned to the page in question. Her face softened into a smile, and she snorted a small laugh. “I haven’t thought of those jokes in years.”

“I’m still upset you never told any of them to me.”

Lifting a I doubt it eyebrow, Helena nevertheless asked, “Why are sharks hard to believe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because they tell great white lies.”

Myka laughed—not because the joke was funny, but to reward Helena for telling it. “That’s painfully terrible. But I guess the pain’s my own fault.”

“Both our faults,” Helena offered. Her smile was gone.

“Lots of things,” Myka said, and Helena nodded. Ten years had got them both closer to a full understanding... or, no, those years had got them closer to being able to understand what needed to be understood, allowing them to let the rest alone. “But the book,” Myka said. “I’m sorry it won’t be... you know, widely distributed.”

“As you pointed out so many years ago, few would have bought Charles’s overstuffed volume either.”

“I made Claudia buy a copy of this one though, for the Warehouse. Because you never know.”

Helena performed her act-out facial version of severity: narrowed lips, skewed brows. “Don’t be silly. It won’t be an artifact.”

“Don’t be presumptuous. You don’t know that.”

Which made Helena smile. “I will be presumptuous.”

“You’re the one who’s silly. How long have we been married?”

That got Myka a deeper, realer smile. “Ten years. A lovely round number.”

“Actually closer to ten-point-zero-zero-zero-six-one-three years, given that it’s thirty-four minutes after eleven at night and we got married at twelve minutes after six. On that night.”

Helena’s deep and real smile deepened further. “I appreciate your precision.”

It had over the years become a refrain. Myka remembered its origin, of course, but she was reasonably sure Helena didn’t. She was more than reasonably sure that if she asked Helena about it, Helena would front an “of course I remember” splutter, then try to distract Myka from the topic entirely. Myka considered testing that theory now... but they would get to that sort of distraction soon enough, on this anniversary night. So Myka said, “I appreciate that you were competitive with your brother. And I’m pretty sure Claudia, Pete, Steve, Abigail, everybody—over these years, they’ve appreciated it too.”

“I did suspect their appreciation, which even Artie gratifyingly did perform, might have been your doing.”

“The only thing I really did was make them preserve it all. And then hand it over.”

“It’s no rival to Charles’s accumulation,” Helena noted.

Was that meant to be a challenge? All right, challenge accepted. “That’s for history to judge,” Myka told her. “Not you.”

“History judges many things. Including artifacts.”

“It does. So we’ll see.”

“We might not,” Helena said.

“Then it won’t matter at all that I did what I did, will it.”

Helena smiled differently now: an intimate, soft curve, one she bestowed only on Myka. “Must I say out loud that it does matter?”

“Of course not,” Myka replied to that smile. “Kiss me, and then kiss me again—that’s what you have to do out loud.”

Ten years of marriage was certainly not something that Myka, so many years ago, had expected to decorate her life. But here she was, loving her wife of that long time, loving her as a miracle. That miracle had everything to do with the Warehouse, yet it had far more to do with Myka Bering and Helena Wells. Which meant, maybe, that everything didn’t come down to some artifact after all.

“I’ll put together a second volume ten years from now, how’s that?” Myka asked, when her mouth was next free.

“I’ll thank you just as fervently,” Helena said.

“Now who’s presumptuous?” Myka managed to ask, though only a word at a time, for her mouth was now only intermittently free—at her instigation as well as Helena’s. “That’s a bold prediction from an old lady who’ll be even older then.”

The newly wicked smile Helena gifted her with sealed the prediction with a promise.

Myka believed it.

****

The young agent’s furrowed brow was pretty much what the Caretaker had expected to see at the end of her tale. And then that young agent voiced the same disbelief expressed by so many of her predecessors: “You’re really saying H.G. Wells was a woman.”

“Yes I am,” affirmed the Caretaker.

“And she was an agent at Warehouse 12 and she was bronzed and then unbronzed a hundred years later and became an agent again at Warehouse 13.”

“Good listening comprehension.”

“And she tried to end the world, but this Agent Bering was the one who made it all work out. And she and H.G. Wells fell in love and got married?”

The Caretaker nodded. “And lived relatively happily ever after. I mean, neither of them was a total picnic to live with, so there was serious noise around the B&B sometimes, but what you really had to look out for was when it’d get real quiet, because that usually meant somebody was plotting about something, and when I say ‘somebody,’ I mean—”

“But Ms. Donovan,” the agent interrupted, once again sounding frustrated, “this huge collection of the... uh... other H.G. Wells’s letters—how did that become an artifact?”

“Oh, that’s a totally different story,” Claudia said. Then she pulled a Mrs. Frederic, the agent’s groan of “not again” fading against her ears as she did.

It was good to be the Caretaker. But every now and then, when she thought back on those days of serious noise, she got a little... well, the Warehouse was a dusty place. Obviously what happened was she got a little dust, or something, in her eyes.

END

Note:

Here’s the confounding thing: I’m genuinely unsure if Routledge actually has bound the four volumes together into a single one or simply reissued all four individual volumes as an “edition,” and I’m not willing to pony up the dough to find out. (Their service department, interestingly, has no idea—or at least, the nice lady I spoke to didn’t, and she wasn’t inclined to pursue the issue up or across any chains. She thought it would be great if I did buy it in order to see for myself, though.) So anyway, if it turns out it’s available only as four separate books—and you can certainly buy them that way; the nice Routledge lady would also have been happy to sell me one or more—let’s just call this whole thing a pointless exercise. Or artistic license, but I honestly hate having to fall back on that lazy defense when there’s such a thing as objective reality.

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tome #surprisingly not AU (mostly)#I’ve stolen jokes from a lot of good folks in this piece #including Paula Poundstone #Darby Conley #and some anonymous internetters #anyway I will tag another designer of a beautiful object #grandhike #to whom I owe a whole lot #because without that object definitely nothing #but with it... who knows?

57 notes · View notes