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apparitionism · 2 years ago

Text

Tabled

Hi @barbarawar , and happy Gift Exchange to you! Here’s what you said to anonymous-me: “Okay, so we know up until Instinct HG wasn’t in contact with Myka, but after it seems maybe they were from Myka’s reference to HG’s girlfriend in the finale for example. Did they ever get that coffee? Do they talk regularly? If you could do something with that that’d be awesome!”

First, I should say that from Instinct onward, the show seemed committed to forcing its characters into shapes that fit (or “fit”) an apparently predetermined, clichéd outcome, and I share the resentment that many feel about how awful that was. However! For the purposes of your gift, it’s that sense of “fit,” in quotes, that I’ve set out to push at in this piece. When people (well, characters) are forced—or feel themselves forced—to “fit” into particular narratives, what damage is done? How much of that damage is irreparable? And what does it mean for damage to be irreparable, anyway? This story offers some maybe-answers.

(P.S. This is going to be two parts, both because I’m incapable of being succinct and because I would like to get it right. Right-ish. Second part will appear in due time, with apologies for making you wait.) (P.P.S. The book referenced herein is real, which I hope comes as no surprise.) (P.P.P.S. Much gratitude, as always, to @kla1991 for the @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange management!)

Tabled

Myka sits at tables and tells lies.

She wouldn’t have imagined she’d take up these conjoined activities—an irrational hobby if ever there was one—but: here she is.

At times, this joint doing is an obstacle course, but today it’s simple. Artie, stationed across from her, asks, “Are you making unauthorized use of an artifact?”

He’s asking everybody, one on one; Claudia had been the first interrogatee, and she’d told Myka to brace herself, with a groan of “Why does he have to turn into Torquemartie like this? ‘Oh, the ping’s coming from inside the Warehouse!’ Dude. Artifacts get weird. They make pingy noises. Doesn’t mean we’re running around punching our downside cards.”

In the past, Myka wouldn’t have needed the heads-up, for she would have been innocent and indignant. And in fact she doesn’t need it now, for now she’s a practiced liar, so: “No,” she says (innocent), and “of course not,” she adds (indignant).

“If you run across anything that... strikes you,” Artie says.

“I’ll tell you.” Also a lie. Things that strike her, she keeps to herself.

Unlike her table-set lying, that’s not new.

“I think I might be a writer,” she’d said to her father, before she was old enough to have learned better. Eight. She’d been eight, and in school she’d written a story about a girl who tamed a lion. Her teacher had asked her to read it aloud to the class.

“You know nothing about that,” he’d snapped back, and the sting of it taught her: if you love something, if it sets you on fire, that’s wrong. Kill it.

And if you can’t? Then hide it.

Myka, having discovered after much effort that she had no talent for killing her love for anything, had become adept at hiding it, particularly from her family: she’d hidden her love of writing, after that first young cut; later, she’d hidden her affinity for law enforcement, every scrap of satisfaction she took in the accolades she received for valor, dedication, marksmanship, all of it; she’d even hidden the perverse pride she took in her adept ability to hide.

She hid everything, from her family and then from everyone, and she was adept at the hiding. That didn’t keep her clandestine investments from going south—witness Sam—but she was adept.

Until Helena.

Helena short-circuited Myka’s hiding mechanism. So much fire, so uncontainable, and it all spilled out, so loud, so open. So... unhidden.

So Myka has reasserted her old ability, augmented as it has had to be, here where she dwells in so many layered aftermaths. She’s hiding—which, fine, maybe that’s passive lying, but at least it’s a sin of omission. And she’s uttering (but not only uttering) untruths: this new, committed sin.

If she were paid by the lie, she could retire. Oh, and if she retired now, how about this: evil, crazy, dead; she’s got the trifecta too. Evil because she tells lies, which is no good in any cosmos; crazy because that’s what those lies render her in her head; and dead... well.

She could lie to herself and chalk that, too, up to those table-lies, but what would be the point? She wouldn’t believe herself. She remembers too much about what being alive felt like. She can’t fail to understand the contrast now.

****

“Just coffee next time,” Helena had said, and while Myka had counterproposed “save the world,” she hadn’t explicitly turned down the coffee proffer, and that had resulted, via a weird press of obligation in her head that hurt like hope, in her having to accept it when it was in fact proposed.

When Helena had contacted her—by text, and the Helena of before (before, oh, before) would never have begun “R u available,” so the texter seemed from the start a stranger—Myka had thought, Sure, I can do this, only to think, T–minus five minutes, I can’t do this.

Because she’d compartmentalized, until that zero-nigh moment, the implications of what had brought Helena near: a forensics conference in Nebraska, which had to mean Helena was still working that... Myka tried to say “job” in her head. Instead it came out “con.”

Thinking that word, doing the work of thinking it further into a sneer, helped paper over at least enough of her panic to allow her to walk into the designated coffee shop, a walk she tried to take with no expectations or intentions. I will see Helena. That was all. I will see Helena.

And see her Myka did, her face in profile against a window that offered, in stark contrast, a plain gray Nebraska sky. Its neutrality set Helena’s beauty in high relief. She was striking enough, as always, to instantly take a heart and break it, and yet to Myka’s gaze, this first sight after a length of time, she struck uncanny, like a painting of herself. Or not even that: instead some inartistic facsimile, an AI-generated irreality unworthy of her name.

Even so... even so, Myka could have regarded Helena forever—show me her, any version, and I will hungrily look—but looking, now, seemed an endpoint, not at enticement. Before (before, oh, before), Helena had been a magnet, aligning Myka’s entire compass of being to her true-north pull.

Now, with Helena dead metal, Myka had no way to orient herself.

She stood in the coffee shop’s entryway, trying to decide, and I can’t do this echoed in her head. Doing this, making it real, would put this fake-Helena in place of the ideal-Helena to whom Myka still, even after the Boone-crash, clung. I shouldn’t do this.

Her body gathered itself to leave, so as to not do this, but Helena—as if she sensed both Myka’s presence and her ambivalence—moved her even-now-so-beautiful head, turned to catch Myka’s gaze, and there was no escape.

So Myka sat at a table across from Helena. Having coffee. What wouldn’t she have given for this chance, this quiet chance, at so many hinge points of their history?

“Are you well?” Helena asked. Her voice was as uncanny as her face, emanating from an elsewhere that admitted none of that history.

There Myka sat, at a table across from Helena, hating the chance, hating that she now hated the chance. And from the depth of that hate, she told a lie: “Yes,” she said. She did not know—could not have known—that it was the first of many.

She had tried to logic herself out of culpability, there in that first lying moment, away from what exams and scans seemed to be revealing. What does “well” really mean, anyway? She’d driven a car to get here, and she hadn’t committed any moving violations while doing so; she was drinking coffee (terrible coffee that tasted of slag) without spilling it on herself; words emerged from her mouth in a language she spoke with reasonable fluency. She was functioning, and any reasonable person might consider the ability to function a measure of wellness, so, “Yes, I’m well,” she reiterated. Re-lied.

As their conversation, if that was the word for it, continued, Myka’s first impressions were borne out: Helena’s aspect was wrong, as in the lab in Boone, when she and Pete had witnessed her strange matter-of-fact performance of something that didn’t quite rise to the level of amnesia: rather than lacking her memory, as in the first Emily Lake disaster, in that lab she’d had no depth. H.G. Wells with no depth! The first of so many Boone sacrileges...

And there in Nebraska, the sacrileges had continued. “Home” was a word Helena used, over and over, and Myka experienced each utterance as an accusatory taunt, as if Helena were saying, with emphasis: You told me to do this, so I did.

Had Helena made the accusation aloud, it would of course have been no lie. Myka had said the words; the responsibility was hers. She deserved this punishment. Because that, some snake agreed in a whisper, was when your lies truly began.

Once their conversation (that was not the word for it) had petered out—leaving Myka mourning their ability to talk for hours before (before, oh, before)—the goodbye was awkward: in its too-formal words, for they clanged against the intimacies of the past, but also in its estranging absence of physicality. The latter was Myka’s doing, as she made sure to keep the table between their bodies. She’d made the mistake of touching Helena in Boone, there at that bitter end. She was certainly not going to do that again. Those burns on her body had not healed.

Driving back to the Warehouse, she tried initially to keep her composure, but it was no use; she gave up and yelled at the Helena in her head: Why couldn’t you be yourself! Make sense! Break through! (She aggressively refused to understand that she was yelling just as loudly at whatever lying version of “Myka Bering” she’d been performing, there during “coffee.”) She told herself the car-yelling was perfectly normal, or at least—in keeping with her justificatory theme—perfectly functional: she was getting Helena out of her system, so she could fit herself back into her nothing-is-the-matter Warehouse suit.

As if she were ever going to get Helena out of her system.

“How was your... coffee?” Steve had asked her, back at the B&B.

Myka hadn’t confided in him, not fully, but he had a tendency to ask discerning questions, and she had a corresponding tendency to answer. Sometimes, it was a relief.

This time it was not. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she had said.

He whistled, a muted but sharp little inhale. “Ain’t that the truth,” was his verdict.

Myka laughed. It hurt.

****

Artie’s concern about unauthorized artifact use is surprising to Myka only in that he took as long as he did to realize it was occurring: for personal enlightenment (if not gain, but really, what was “gain”?) Myka has twice consulted a book. Its title is The Fortune-Teller; or, Peeps into Futurity, and its publication date is 1861, but neither that title nor that date is its salient feature. No, its salience lies in the artifactual ability of one part of it—known as “The Ladies’ Oracle”—to predict the future.

These consultations had begun as a result of that initial “coffee,” which had rendered Myka bereft, even more so than Boone had (as if her bereavements were rankable). In its wake she’d needed something, anything, to grasp and hold. She knew she couldn’t find comfort in the past, that treacherous country, and the present was merely something through which she was struggling to swim. That left the future.

So she had researched, furtive but diligent, until she found her little candidate.

You’re doing this because turning back time didn’t do what you wanted it to, did it, some truth-insistent fold of her cerebral cortex had jeered when she’d first considered using the book. You’re praying this direction will be different.

The accusation was fair. Reasonable. Thus, standing before the book, considering its perils, its unknown downside, she’d tried to resist: Don’t, she told herself. She’s alive and in the world. That has to be enough.

But it isn’t, said the lizard at the bottom of her brain.

It sounded like Steve.

The book’s divination process was elaborate and, in its way, entertaining, entertainment being what the book was initially intended to provide: Myka read that she was first to choose a numbered question from the list of sixty in the book, then close her eyes and touch a pencil to a chart on the following page. From that chart, her blindly directed point of lead would select a symbol, one of twelve, each comprising small circles in a distinct mantic-pebble pattern. Her next series of tasks: look up the page associated with her question’s number that corresponded to that symbol, turn to that page, and discover her pebble-pattern-designated answer.

At first she thought to be clever, to game the outcome, working backward from desired answer to symbol to question, so as to contrive a prediction that would yield some light. The book resented this idea enormously. In the wake of her considered (not even attempted!) subversion, it refused to open to “The Ladies’ Oracle,” instead offering her pages related first to the reading of cards, then to the interpretation of dreams. She knew from her research that these pages had no artifactual significance. These seem more suited for a charlatan such as yourself, the book was conveying, with what Myka took to be great disdain. You don’t deserve the access I afford.

“I’m sorry,” she told it, and that was entirely true. “I really want to know.” That was true too—or true-ish. She wanted to know... but only if the knowledge would help.

Beggars can’t be choosers, said another lizard. This one sounded like her father.

The book took its time deciding whether to believe her... no doubt sensing some residue of her dishonesty, adding that to her offense against its power. But rule in her favor it did, riffling to its oracular pages with a sigh of surrender. Or was it triumph?

She chose her question, that first question, based on her overall disquiet.

The question was numbered twenty-five. It read, “Shall I long remain as I now am?”

Pencil in hand, Myka closed her eyes. She moved the lead until it encountered bookish resistance... the symbol on which it rested, when she opened her eyes, resembled a little pebble cairn, upright, proud. She consulted the page-map and learned her destination: page thirty-seven.

The book, unmoved by her anxiety about what she would discover, allowed her to turn only a single leaf at a time.

Show-off.

On page thirty-seven, the pebble cairn nestled at its very bottom.

Its prediction—Myka’s future—her fate.

“That is impossible; so much the worse.”

****

For some time, Myka had thought the book must have been wrong—maybe it had decided in the end to withhold true knowledge of her future out of spite?—for her status remained quo. Artifacts. Retrievals. Warehouse business, world-shaking in the strangely run-of-the-mill ways it tended to be.

The looming presence of cancer as a possibility had kept her tensed for “the worse” to emerge from that quarter... and she did on some level find it hilarious that the likelihood of having some you’ll-probably-die-soon disease hadn’t been enough to push her to seek an oracle, but an emptied-out Helena had.

But then, abruptly, cancer had been removed from the table.

Myka had tried not to dwell on how wrong that removal could have gone, given what Pete had done. She had tried to be content that the most significant upshot of that entire series of episodes seemed to be the adding of a benign category to her catalog of untruths: she sat not at but rather on a table and told a lie. “I guess I’m just lucky,” she had said when her oncologist’s PA expressed the team’s surprise at having found no malignancy.

But then Helena had texted again. “I’ll be in South Dakota soon, relatively near Univille. Can you believe it?”

As if belief had any right to be any part of anything anymore... but Myka should have believed the book. The second coffee (“coffee”) had not allowed her to remain as she was. It was, truly, so much the worse.

This one happened to happen on Valentine’s Day, a fact on which neither Myka nor Helena remarked, despite what Myka couldn’t help but read as its bracing irony.

And speaking of bracing. Myka had braced herself for more extollings of “home,” its charms, its warm certainties...

...but: “Oh, that ended,” Helena said. Dismissive. Breezy.

Myka had put so much anguish into making Helena’s “home” in Boone make whatever tortured sense it could... justifying it as Helena needing to make her own choices about what she could face and what she couldn’t, what she could wake up to every day and what she couldn’t, what she could bring herself to need every day and what she couldn’t... and Myka had further worked very hard to keep all of that torturesome rationalization from spiraling into “why not face me, why not wake up to me, why not need me.” Her hard work there had failed to hold, so: Because you are not Nate, she told herself, again and again, in cut after cut. And because you don’t have a daughter. Cut. Cut. You. Don’t. Have.

Yet here, now, Helena had simply waved her hand at the entire chapter. It unmoored Myka—was this a weight lifted? or was it yet another burdening betrayal?—such that she for a moment couldn’t speak, and for that moment, she didn’t understand that Helena was waiting for her to speak. Eventually: “Ended,” she managed to echo, and she did not recognize the sharp breath she then took.

“Yes. Because there’s someone else.” As Helena said that, she was not performing the uncanny copy of herself—instead, she sparked.

The spark smashed Myka with the realization that her breath had signaled hope. Stupid, naïve hope. And she was defeated, bitterly, both by that hope’s instant dashing and by the knowledge that it still could spring. Would spring. Would, apparently, always spring.

“Is there,” Myka said, as blankly as she could.

“A woman,” Helena said.

She might as well have pulled out an actual knife, but Myka was ferally not going to let that show. “That’s great,” she said, reaching for something beyond blank, something even more resistantly telling, trying to channel Steve at his most calm, like water unsubject to weather.

To that, Helena’s reaction was to sit back and say, as if she resented the idea, “Yes, it is.” Then she said, “Shall I tell you about her?” Still sparking. A challenge.

I don’t need any more challenges. But: “Sure. Why not,” she said. At this point, Myka was certain she could sit through anything. “What’s her name.”

“Her name...” and Helena tightened her jaw, making Myka think she was trying not to unleash an incongruously outsize grin, “is Giselle.”

And Myka said Sure; why not again, but under her breath.

Helena had then begun to relate seemingly endless anecdotes conveying the attributes of this apparent wonder of the world named—sure, why not—Giselle.

You should be enjoying this, Myka told herself as the accolades unfurled. The one and only H.G. Wells is deigning to tell you stories, but here you sit, getting picky about content, all surly and—

“You know what? I’m happy for you,” she interrupted, because she could not, in fact, sit through anything. She could not suffer more, from herself or from Helena. Steve would have clutched his head and screamed at what she’d said, but at this point, what did lies matter?

Driving home this time, she did not yell. Instead, she practiced. “Helena is with a woman named Giselle.” Over and over she said it, to make sure she understood it, and to make sure her mouth knew how to repeat it, because someone, Steve or Claudia or even Pete, would ask, and she would need to say. Out loud, she would need to say these words that told the harshest of truths (though she wished she could sit, at or on a table, and lie that truth away): Helena wants a woman, and that woman is not Myka Bering.

So much the worse.

****

“Well, book,” Myka had said late that night, facing it, facing up to it, “you were right.”

Did the acknowledgement prompt it to offer a self-satisfied ruffle?

She had then asked, “Where do we go from here?” She wished she could have asked it of Helena...

This occasioned something legible as a sort of shoulder-shrug: the book opened to the first of its question-pages.

“You think I want to know more?”

Provocatively, the page turned, as if catching the waft of some future-breeze.

Scanning that next of the list, Myka’s eyes—and her mind—were drawn to, were powerless but to settle on, question 37: “Is a certain person thinking of me?”

That was about the present, not the future. The book wouldn’t really know. Would it?

But Myka was powerless to resist divining the answer. This one corresponded to a pebble nabla (Myka could not help but think of slopes and slipping): “Some one is thinking, dreaming, and talking unceasingly about you.”

Upon receiving that statement, she had suffered another of those stupid hope-leaps... “some one”! Never mind the future; if it could be true in the now: “some one!”

She had soon been forced to realize, however, which “some one” the book must have meant. That was made painfully clear by the events of the most improbable, yet to date consequential, table: that voracious, hateful Round Table. It had brought Myka’s lies home. Literally.

Sitting at that table, Myka had prepped for more lies, these to sell a supposedly “defining” story, for she of course could not allow her definitional truth to be seen. Worse, extracted. She had tried to maintain confidence about being able to exert her will: My brain might not be as big as some brains but it’s big enough to beat you, table, she sneered. But then she admonished, Don’t sneer. No attitude. Because who does attitude make you think of?

She felt herself almost almost almost picture, almost almost almost name, her attitude-ideal...

And so Myka had redoubled her thought-efforts, thrusting every shred of attitude, every shard of emotion, every bit of real definition, from her mind, forcing it to produce for consumption the most anodyne memory possible: something she’d come as close to forgetting as she ever could, some ridiculous ninja-something that wasn’t worth the neurons firing to deliver it to the table’s dumb demands.

But then... everything had gone wrong. Not in the way she’d feared, but in a way that, given the book’s answer, she should have thought to fear. Her imagination had failed her, for the taking of cancer off the table had been the salient change after all: not what Pete had done, but instead, why he’d done it.

Sitting at that selfish table, Myka had at last come to understand the expectations surrounding her response to that why. With Mrs. Frederic and Steve both looking like examiners at the worst imaginable viva voce, she knew what she—she who had never failed a test in her life—had to say in order to pass.

So she’d said it.

The roiling in her gut had come as a surprise, for shouldn’t her soul have been resigned by now to endless perjury? She resented this unwelcome vagus-nerve stimulation of her earlier, righteous self.

In the immediate aftermath she’d stumbled away, trying to find a space to breathe, to assess, to plan how she would act a convincing version of the play she had stupidly—or, no, functionally; she needed to know it that way—let begin. The aisle in which she stopped was dim, its shelves full of metal, pieces of things, things she wished she could herself wright into a bunker of such artifactual strength that no one would dare approach her. Ever. No one.

She hadn’t realized Steve had followed her until she heard his voice. “Are you okay?” he asked, quiet behind her.

So much for her wish: his question, and his solicitude, were absurd. He’d seen her state; he’d encouraged her state. “Obviously not,” she snapped. He had the grace to wince. But because it had all gone so wrong, because she was still so angry that he had helped all that wrong along, she said, harsh, “What was with that ‘hello’? Why did you start that business about my face?”

His face spoke of pain. “I had to. I had to. Because today, honestly: today Mrs. Frederic had to hear what she wanted to hear. From all of us.” His desperate sincerity rang very true.

Myka breathed. Metal coated her throat; further hard words would snag and twist on it, wounding her more than Steve ever could. “I’m pretty sure she’s been wanting me to say that for a while,” she conceded.

Steve winced again. “You looked like you might throw up, and I felt like I would, hearing you... saying what you said. I wish I could’ve given you an out.”

Myka didn’t, now, doubt him. “Me too. And I wish I could’ve taken it.” She meant it, but that was all it was: a wish. For a different world. A different timeline? She said, with a wince of her own, “But I think I have to play along.”

“I see that, from the Mrs. Frederic angle. But you sound like... like there might be something in it for you. Not what I said there was—and I’m sorry I had to say it, or felt like I had to, or couldn’t figure out how not to—but something.”

“Backup,” Myka said immediately. It was the only answer.

“Backup,” Steve echoed, and “backup?” he said again, as if it were a word from a language in which he was not fully fluent.

“I need something—I need something—reliable.” Another hurt: that that was what she needed. So short a time ago, she would have claimed a different need. Such a crashingly different need.

“Need,” Steve said. “Not ‘want’?”

“No.” And Myka admitted: “That’s too dangerous.”

“I have to ask you about it though. Want.”

Myka braced herself. She braced herself, even as she thought on how tired she was of having to brace herself.

“Do you want me to keep protecting you? Primarily from Mrs. Frederic, but...”

It was a less dangerous ask, about a less dangerous want, than she’d feared. Or maybe it was the same want, the same danger, but more gently expressed. “Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Frederic aside, the problem is that if you do play along, I don’t know what ‘protect’ means. Should I keep covering your lie or tell Pete the truth?”

“I don’t know either.” Another admission. She wasn’t proud of it. “For now, just let it... lie. Sorry.”

At that, he didn’t wince. “Tell me when things change. In whatever way they do.”

“If they do.”

“They always do,” he said.

“So I guess I’ll be telling you.” But she believed neither him nor herself.

Steve said, “If you could be happy.” Helpless.

Sweet Steve. Helpful, helpless. Myka gestured into the air. Conjuring speech took her a minute, and even then, all she managed was, “If I could.” Steve just kept looking like he looked, with his base of sympathy (and she had never so appreciated, or so responded to, sympathy), so she asked, because she didn’t know, “Why don’t you want to protect him?”

He offered her an exhausted smile. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but: you said ‘need.’ Who needs protecting? I like Pete, but if it comes down to it, it’s you.”

Leave me alone! she wanted to yell. But she also wanted to curl up in Steve’s protection. Backup. Backup.

****

Even as Myka found Artie’s interrogation easy to lie through, she knows that her lying footing as a whole is becoming unsteady, even vertiginous. If she could have restricted her lies to those sitting utterances... but the expansions are depleting her, and she is trying to resign herself to what she sees as her only realistic option for narrowing her scope. As for any objections her heart might be raising? She is shutting those lights out, one by one.

****

“I think I have to play along,” Myka had told Steve, and she had continued to convince herself of that necessity. So she had taken the initiative and done it, in at least the first of the ways she knew she would have to, in order to act her role.

To act your role? Really? No. To sell your con. Was that a lizard or a snake?

No matter. She sold it. She was not sitting at a table, but a kiss was a lie that was worse.

So much the worse.

After that—that demonstration, that acted untruth—she could not reach her lifeline fast enough. After that, she ran.

“Book,” she said, facing it. “Book.”

Her third try was not the charm; rather, it was the compulsion: Tell me something, anything, that I can’t already see about what’s next. Because an oracle must know more than I do, must know different. If not... Myka had not been ready, not then, not yet, to think on any consequences.

Some days—certainly that day, but not only that day—what she wanted more than life (literally, more than life) was to go back to protecting the president. If a bullet, then I take it. Simple. Clean.

She hated how resentfully, brokenly beholden she had become to people for saving her life. They set her up with the saving, but they didn’t bother with the consequences: with the fact that she had to keep on living. And nobody seemed to be interested in saving her from that.

So: “Book,” she said again, and if that word had never before meant “save me clean,” it did that day.

But struggle as she might, with increasingly desperate fingers into which she tried to wish and pray prying strength, the book refused to open.

Was this the downside? No response in one’s hour of true need?

“What am I doing wrong?” she begged.

But if that was her question, then of course the book was right: it could reveal nothing to her. She knew the answer.

Everything.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tabled #B&W holiday gift exchange #barbarawar #as noted in the intro #this is a fraught topic #and I hope I haven't taken this tale too far off the rails #and additionally I hope you’ll be kind enough to hang on a little longer #because you know when it's supposedly darkest #and I do have a persistent belief in a dawn #difficult as it may be to dream into existence sometimes

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julieverne · 2 years ago

Text

HG watches Myka sometimes.

Not from very far away, although it always feels further. From a nearby rooftop, from behind the tinted window of an SUV, from the tree outside Myka's room in the bed and breakfast.

It's just to make sure she's safe. The cancer scare had her worried, but not as worried as the fact that Myka had deliberately kept it from her. That Myka hadn't wanted her to know. Myka was always calling Helena noble, and yet there she was,trying to spare Helena any pain.

Myka threw the window open. "You might as well come in," she called, sounding irritated. Sheepishly HG slid through the window.

"I, uh. I heard."

"I'm ok," Myka said, her face closing sharply.

"I know. Claudia told me, although I did wonder why I had to hear it from her." Myka looked away, and HG dug in a pocket. "It's. It's not much." HG held out a small contraption, and Myka took it, eyeing HG warily. "It's yours, if you want it."

Myka examined it; a small pretty thing. There had been no spark when either of them had touched it.

"What is it?" Myka asked finally.

"It's, uh," HG stepped forward, putting her hand over Myka's, stepping into her and bringing their hands close to their faces, Myka eyeing HG suspiciously. "It's, um." HG turned slowly and let her hand drop from Myka's, letting it land on her hip as she tilted her head. When realisation dawned on Myka she nodded, almost imperceptibly, and HG closed the gap between them.

---

Later, running her fingers over the bare skin of HG's back, Myka found the lost curiousity in the sheets and examined it again.

"You have me stumped. What does it do?"

"Well, it's only done it once, but it gives me an excuse to kiss you," HG said, stretching luxuriously and pulling Myka closer.

#warehouse 13 #bering & wells #otp: bering and wells #myka bering #helena g wells #helena x myka

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horizonirenemackenzie · 2 years ago

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“Hey Horizon, you got a sec?”

She turned to see Myka leaning against the library doorway with a smile.

“Sure? Is something wrong?”

“Nope, just wanted to give you a heads up about tomorrow.” Myka walked over and sat on the couch across from her. “It’s June 1st, which means it’s the beginning of pride month, which means things get a little crazy.”

“Crazy how?” Horizon put her book on the table and crossed her legs on the chair.

“Claudia crazy. Ever since Steve joined the team she goes all out. She will come downstairs tomorrow dressed head to toe in rainbows, and she will give us all pride pins, despite the fact that we all still have ours from the last several years, and we will be wearing them all month.” Myka paused and rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “At some point during the month we will all be going to some kind of pride event in whatever big city Claudia can convince Artie to get us plane tickets to. If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to, but it’s always a lot of fun and it means a lot to Claudia. Steve too, but he’s less vocal about it.”

“Everybody goes?”

“Yup. Well, Artie doesn’t, but only because someone has to stay at the Warehouse and his knees can’t take all the walking. He does wear his pin though. It’s really a fun time, but it can be a little overwhelming if you aren’t invested or expecting it, so I wanted to let you know ahead of time. Besides, Helena tells me you’re the reason we get to spend pride together, so I wanted to thank you, and maybe invite you personally?”

“That sounds... lovely, honestly. And I didn’t do that much for you guys, just provided a bit of an outside perspective. But thank you, I’ll look forward to it.” Horizon smiled, then picked her book back up.

“I’ll leave you to it then, see you tomorrow.”

“See you then.”

Horizon sat there staring at her book for a moment as Myka left the room, then set it back to the side. She’d know what tomorrow was, of course, but she hadn’t expected to be doing anything about it apart from texting her brother. And Artie participating was a surprise, if a welcome one. Of course Claudia would go all out, her best friend is gay and that’s exactly the kind of thing she would do. Myka and Helena participating wasn’t terribly surprising, given their new relationship. Pete was neither here nor there as a cishet, white, but surprising decent dude. Steve might well be getting into it for Claudia’s sake, honestly, but it could be for himself. Leena actually going was surprising, but being supportive was not. But Artie? She’d expected at best an annoyed scoff and at worst a rant about the celebration being a waste of his agent’s time. She’d doubted he’d be outright homophobic, given how open the others were, but surely not supportive. She was broken from her thoughts by a knock on the door frame. She looked up to see Leena smiling gently.

“Myka tell you about pride?”

Horizon nodded, then raised an eyebrow in question.

“I overheard her telling HG that someone needed to warn you, and your aura tells me you’re doing some pretty heavy thinking. Surprised?”

Horizon paused a moment before saying anything. From what she’d gleaned of Leena’s aura-reading abilities, she wouldn’t be surprised if she already had a clue about what was causing Horizon’s inner turmoil.

“A little. Not by Claudia though, her excitement doesn’t surprise me at all. And with HG and Myka so open about their relationship I guess I shouldn’t be, but...”

“There’s a difference between acknowledging the likelihood and having it confirmed?”

“Yeah. And Artie’s... well, not exactly warm and fuzzy. So I wasn’t sure where he stood.”

“He’s definitely rough around the edges, but he means well. It doesn’t excuse him, but he’s trying. He’ll get there eventually. And he supports all of pride, not just Claudia’s excitement. He’ll definitely gripe, but it’s a front.”

“Yeah, well...” Horizon shrugged and gestured vaguely.

“You’ll believe it when you see it?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m sorry about Artie, but I promise you’re safe here. Nothing’s going to change that, alright?”

Leena gave her a significant look.

“Thanks.”

Yup, she definitely had a clue.

“Of course. You really should get to bed though, June 1st is the only day other than Christmas where Claudia gets up early voluntarily.”

Horizon laughed, but didn’t move. Leena just smiled and left the room, leaving Horizon to her thoughts.

Just maybe, this month would be fun.

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notallwonder · 4 years ago

Photo

[Image Description: A picture of an old sepia-toned photograph in an antique frame. The photograph depicts Helena Wells in typical Victorian men’s clothing including a frock coat, waistcoat, and tie. She is sitting in a chair with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, to the left of a small table with a chess board and pieces on it. She is resting her head on her hand and looking at the chess board in front of her as though contemplating her next move. Sitting in a chair to the right of the table is Caturanga, also in typical men’s Victorian fashion and resting his right arm on the table as he looks at the board.]

Hello @ivi-under-the-stars! Happy Bering-and-Wells-mas!

I had a lot of fun researching chess and its history, which I knew little about (thank you!). And I thought about what chess might mean to Helena. She's a brilliant mind of course, an adept solver of puzzles. And chess is often spoken of in terms of strategy, tactics, battle, war. But the more I thought about chess and its place in Helena's life, the more I gravitated toward a perhaps less obvious aspect of chess - that it can be, like many games, a way to connect with other people. (Maybe I also went this direction because of the stresses of the past year).

The Helena we see in the show is often isolated, set apart from those around her by her nefarious plans, or the fact of her existence far outside her original time, or being trapped in the Regents’ Poké ball. She has been running up against (and finding ways around) social barriers her whole life. So I wanted to show her at rest, enjoying a moment with a mentor and friend. This type of photograph would most likely have been staged in a studio of some kind - it's not quite a candid shot. I, too, am weak for the dapper HG look.

Now, I know there's no apparent Bering in this Bering and Wells gift. I envisioned Myka finding this photograph while doing inventory in the HG Wells aisle and taking it to Helena to get the full story - only to find Helena concentrating at another game of chess, making her move on Artie's board while he's off on a retrieval. I can see Myka pausing to enjoy the sight, a soft smile gracing her features, before she interrupts Helena with her find.

I hope you are having an enjoyable Valentine's Day and that this year brings you lots of good things and connection with good people.

#bering and wells gift exchange #2020 Bering & Wells Gift Exchange #helena g wells #caturanga #I made a thing!

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clarafordahwin · 3 years ago

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HG from Warehouse 13 and Helena Peabody from The L Word are the same person. It might have something to do with the fact that I haven't seen an episode of wh13 in 6 years, but they're literally both pretty British lesbians with curly hair, a mean streak, and a redemption arc. They're the same Helena.

#i have checked imdb at least 3 times i will concead they have different actresses #the l word #warehouse 13

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attilarrific · 5 years ago

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bering & wells, #7

#7, to shut them up

“Darling,” HG says evenly, “I don’t believe that goes there.”

Myka snatches her hands back out of the circuitry, hissing in frustration. “Would you like to do this?” she snaps before she thinks better of it, and then she freezes in mortification.

“Yes,” HG says. “Rather desperately, in fact. Unfortunately...”

Myka half turns around, wiping sweat off of her face when it threatens to drip into her eyes. She tells herself that’s all that’s making them sting like that, that there’s nothing else to wipe away. HG, awkwardly sprawled in the other shuttle chair, gives her a weak smile. Myka tries to smile back, but her gaze drifts lower before she can stop herself, to HG’s fingers, red and purple and at angles that are sickeningly wrong. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she blurts. “If you hadn’t, you’d be fine, and you’d be able to do this, and we wouldn’t be---”

“Sitting here waiting to die? Mm, yes, I did think of that. Unfortunately, darling, that would be because you’d already died, and I’d gotten myself killed in revenge-murder-suicide spree, so really, aren’t we doing rather well for ourselves? Under the circumstances. Waiting to die together is really much---”

“Helena, shut up,” Myka yells. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! I’m going to hotwire this shuttle, and we’re going to get off of this space station before it blows up, and neither of us is going to die! You are not going to die! I’m going to get you back to the Warehouse, and Vanessa is going to fix you up, and we are going to be fine!”

HG doesn’t say anything for a long moment. She looks sad. Worse than sad: pitying. She really is waiting to die, and for a moment Myka hates her completely. Her and her stupid self-sacrificing tendencies and her complete refusal to see her own life as worth anything. Her and the fact that when she loves, she does it with such fervor that she’s willing to risk so much. Myka hates herself, too, for making it necessary.

“Darling,” HG says very, very gently. “It’s all right. If it isn’t. I want you to get out of here, but if you don’t make it before I bleed out or before the---the damage becomes irreparable---” Her voice breaks on the words, and Myka knows that’s what HG’s most frightened of. Not that she’ll die. That she’ll lose her hands. Still, HG smiles, and Myka seriously considers punching her in the face. “I want you to know that it’s all right. I’m quite content with my life. I---”

Myka hisses several words that Pete would pretend to be surprised she knows, and then she leans forward, braces herself on HG’s chair, and kisses the words right out of her mouth. The day has been awful, start to finish, and she feels sensitive and scraped raw and sandpapered down, but there’s still satisfaction in the surprised gasp she gets. There’s still pleasure in the way HG tilts her head into it and kisses back fiercely.

“Helena,” Myka says when she finally pulls away, not feeling sated, but feeling settled somehow. “Shut up. Shut up. You really think I’m going to let you die while I owe you one? We’re evening the score. I’m going to save you. Everything is going to be fine, because I’m going to save you. Understood?”

HG stares at her with searching eyes, and then she smiles. “Yes,” she says, and it sounds real. “Understood. I don’t know why I was worried, with Agent Bering at the helm.”

“Just so long as we’ve got that cleared up,” Myka mutters, turning back to the console to hide her blush. “Now, if that doesn’t go there---”

“Two up, one to the right,” HG says promptly. “Hook it up to the impulse cannons.”

Myka does, and another few lights come on. “See? We make a great team.”

“Indeed we do,” HG murmurs. “We’ll have to revisit that, after we don’t die.”

Oh, we can revisit that all night long, Myka just barely restrains herself from saying. “First thing on my list,” she says instead. “Now, for this next wire...”

#warehouse 13 #bering and wells #revisiting my roots!#which was fun #anyway hope you enjoyed this random space au #no i don't know what they're doing or why they're on an exploding space station or what happened to hg's hands #it's a ~mystery for all of us #things i write #tidelinear #attila replies to things

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lancedinah · 5 years ago

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alias: ava!

age: 26

pronouns: she/they

favorite comic characters: dinah lance, barbara gordon, helena bertinelli, zinda blake, kara kent/danvers, jean grey, emma frost, cassandra cain, more that i won’t bore anyone with but honestly everyone.

what are you looking to get out of hg? the reason i (and your other staff) made hallowed ground was to create an lgbt friendly environment where we could bring our favorite characters to the table, and hope to extend that freedom and comfort to others. also because we all need a little distraction that we intend to carry out until the wheels fall off, and then some.

what dc/marvel organization would you be most inclined to join? it might be a little obvious but, the birds of prey!

other fun facts about you, or memes! i’m a notorious hyperfixate-r with a love of women, graphics, animals, and constant critic of my own work. i would express my humor through a tiktok but instead have this very fashionable depiction of esmé squalor

#groundrp

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sistersin7 · 6 years ago

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Whose Sister are You?

Merry Bering and Wellsmass, @lady-adventuress!

I hope the festive season is treating you well!

You asked for family stuff in a Warehouse AU, exploring B&W with Claudia, maybe bringing in Christina and possibly a crossover.

So… I hope this ticks the boxes. The AU below upholds the show’s canon till Where and When (towards the end of seasons 2), where it diverges at the end of that episode because of something Claudia does. Christina is in there, too, but in a different guise than you might expect. And the crossover… I have to apologise about this. The only fictional show I watched in 2018 was The Good Place and couldn’t figure out how to cross that over with what I’ve started. The only other shows I watched this past year were news-related… so the crossover is subtle and potentially disappointing… (sorry).

Anyway – I hope you like and/or enjoy! Here’s to a fantastic, B&W 2019.

(And thanks again to @bering-and-wells-exchange for facilitating endless wonder!)

* * *

“I don't know, Claud,” Myka said, semi-defeated. “it's not something I've ever wanted to do and it’s not something I ever thought I'd be good at,” she pulled the brake on the hand truck at the entrance to Barbour 118. “But thank you for the vote of confidence”.

Claudia was three paces behind, seemingly absorbed in a clipboard, mumbling to herself words that Myka could barely discern. She did manage to get ‘GPS’ and ‘upgrade’ and ‘stupid Artie’.

Myka narrowed her eyes as she watched Claudia walk by and wondered if she'd even listened to anything Myka said in the past three minutes.

For a while, it seemed Claudia didn't. Mostly because she stepped into Barbour 118 and stood very still and very quiet for about 20 seconds before abruptly turning around, exclaiming a loud and decisive “Nope,” and turned to her left, to carry on walking in the same direction they were headed before they stopped.

“I get it, Myka,” Claudia started suddenly, while marching down the Warehouse corridor, “because your entire life your brain and your work were what defined you and gave you purpose and meaning,” Claudia declared to the dark walkway, Myka trailing behind, pushing the artefact-laden trolley. She then turned on her heels to look at Myka, a piercing look, the kind that startled Myka because Claudia meant business when she looked at anyone like that, and added “People never defined you let alone children. Relationships never defined you. And kids are the sorts of people and relationships that not only define you, but you define them. For a lifetime,” she enunciated the end of her argument, then turned around again and continued walking. “Their lifetime, you know, not just yours,” she all but shouted, to make sure Myka heard her.

Myka did, and didn’t need the added volume. Shocked by the accuracy and depth of insight, Myka stood still, frozen, as if a tonne of metaphorical bricks landed on her where she stood, and kept her from moving.

Another minute had gone by before Claudia turned around to check on her new friend, to find her a good 100 yards behind her. “You okay there, Bucko? We better hustle if we intend to make it back in time so there are enough of Leena's cookies left for us.”

And Myka had to dig herself out of the pile of said bricks and follow her young friend, who she was still getting to know, and wondered how could anyone so young have so much wisdom.

* * *

Claudia was lining up the panels of the crate to HG Wells’ Time Machine while Helena sat quietly in one of the armchairs, elbows on her knees, rolling a screwdriver between her fingers.

She watched the inventor, her eyes cradled in tears, bloodshot, glassy, unfocused. It looked to Claudia like HG was settling into a place in her mind that didn't feel particularly safe. Claudia knew that look from her sister, way back when. And her brother too, more recently.

So she coughed lightly and paced across the panel to stand next to HG Wells, who a couple of hours ago revealed to Claudia just how dark past was.

“Uhm, HG?” she near as dammit whispered, “Did you disable the circuits, like Artie asked?” she raised her voice only ever so slightly, so it was just about barely audible. She didn’t want HG to hear her, really, she just wanted to nudge her back to the here and now.

That did the trick. Helena blinked slowly, took a sharp breath and straightened in the chair. “Not yet,” she answered, her voice hollow and her face blank.

“Do you want me to?” Claudia asked and extended her hand towards the screwdriver in HG’s hands.

Helena blinked again, sighed, examined Claudia’s palm, then traced the extremity all the way up to its owner’s face, and placed the screwdriver in Claudia’s hand, gently.

As Claudia closed her fist around the tool, Helena wrapped her palm around Claudia’s fist. Helena looked into Claudia’s eyes, and Claudia looked into Helena’s. It was an intense moment, but not due to tension between them. It was tense due to tension between Helena and someone else. Someone who wasn’t there.

Someone who hadn’t been there in over one hundred years.

Claudia felt the ghostly presence of that person, too, and suddenly she had all sorts of odd comments to make and worse questions to ask, like “but even if she had lived she’d be dead now”, and “even if she had lived, you might have still ended up in Bronze, which would mean that…”, and “would you have ended up in Bronze?”, and “did they bronze you because of Christina?” and “how bad was it, really, how you tortured those guys?”

And because these were all terrible, terrible things to say, Claudia kept quiet and let whatever was about to unfold between her and HG unfold without interruption.

Whatever it’s going to be, she knew it wouldn’t be bad. She knew HG won’t hurt her. She didn’t know why, though.

“I had always imagined her to grow up to be a young woman a lot like yourself,” Helena said, her voice cracking and hoarse.

That’s why.

“Do you want to tell me?” Claudia knelt so she was level with HG.

Helena’s face brightened suddenly, a deep, affectionate smile tore through the dark storm clouds that surrounded her. Her body relaxed and every aspect of her seemed to have warmed up instantly. “Oh, darling,” she breathed and tightened her grip on Claudia’s fist. “We’d be here all day if I did.”

“I’ve got time,” Claudia made herself comfortable on the floor next to Helena - she was definitely Helena now, and no longer HG. No longer former resident of the Bronze sector, no longer someone that Myka suspected and Artie detested, no longer a hero to worship for saving her life.

Helena Wells looked like a person in distress, a person who was facing a life and death decision.

Claudia knew what facing death was like, far too well for a person of her age. She knew how important it was to have someone believe in her, someone to help. She felt it her duty to repay a favour for all the times she was pulled away from the brink, for all the times someone believed in her, for all the times someone helped.

So she listened.

* * *

“Did you, then?” Claudia cut into Myka’s long and, frankly, rather dull story about the latest retrieval she went on with HG.

Myka sighed heavily and looked away. “This isn’t helping,” she said, borderline whined, after a few seconds.

“Holy bananas, the never-ending story,” Claudia rumbled and turned back to her desk, where umpteen Warehouse systems were waiting for her say so, testing a new sensor network to replace the ridiculously old and mostly faulty disturbance notification system.

Myka grumped quietly and scanned through her mission report. She noticed how her heart fluttered every time she read ‘Agent Wells’ and fought a compulsion to touch her fingers to the letters on the screen. She recalled moments throughout the missions when they bantered, collaborated, brainstormed. She remembered how alive she felt in those moments.

But she couldn’t. She knew she couldn’t act on any of it.

Myka knew why Claudia was pushing her to make a move with Helena, and Claudia was nothing if not insistent, but the assertive persistence of the young agent made Myka deeply uncomfortable. Not because of the gay. She didn’t care an ounce about the gay. She did care about the hero worship (a little), and she cared about how vulnerable it made her (a lot), and she cared about how something like this would completely wreck the equilibrium the Warehouse team settled into.

It was matter of empirical fact that when two people in a group started dating, the whole group dynamic got shot to hell, and Myka knew right there and then she was getting ahead of herself, because she was assuming that Helena would actually date her and-----

“You know I won’t stop,” Claudia leaning over Myka’s shoulder, all of a sudden. “You know that I can’t stop,” she stated, matter of fact, like she often did when she had these kinds of conversations with Myka, “because right about now you’re getting into some bizzaro circular reference in your brain,” she looped her right index finger in the air, “and you think that dating HG is a bad idea for a million and thirty eight reasons, none of which have anything to do with your wellbeing, or hers, for that matter,” she turned her head to look at Myka, to sprinkle the telling off with a hint of gravitas. “There are endings other than crazy, evil or dead, you know, you just need to make them happen.”

Myka looked at Claudia, dumbfounded by the depth of insight, again, and not for the last time, either.

“But---” Myka started.

Claudia shook her head curtly to halt Myka as soon as she started. “You think you are bad with people and you think you are bad at relationships,” Claudia said, “but that’s the kind of bull that’s left at the end of a week-long rodeo,” she sat down next to Myka. “You’re not bad at either. You’re just better at other things.”

Myka stared back at Claudia.

“But HG is exactly the same as you,” Claudia upped the ante, “it looks like she’s crap at relationships because she’s so brainy, and good looking and con-artist-y, with the hair and the eyes…” she cleared her throat having noticed her mind wandered. “And you know it better than anyone. Just put you two in the same room together for thirty seconds, and ugh,” she pulled a face of mock disgust, “everyone is all ‘get a room already’.”

Myka tilted her head to the left and gave Claudia a distinct side eye.

“What? You think I’m the only one who’s picking up on this barely latent attraction?”

Myka blinked.

“Fire up your boosters and set the clock for t-minus-ten, sister, because I’m happy to report that you can actually see it from space,” Claudia huffed, mirroring Myka’s body language.

They stared at each other for a few minutes, until Claudia began to feel her resolve cracking under Myka’s scrutiny.

“Just do it,” she said as she got up and walked back to doing whatever it was she was doing, that Artie would hate but the Warehouse would love, and the Warehouse always wins.

* * *

On the second Friday of every month Claudia, Leena and Pete played Call of Duty online. It was a known fixture in the B&B’s calendar, because if one wanted to get any form of internet during those nights, they’d better go elsewhere, because the bandwidth was spoken for. They each sat in their own rooms to maximise screen capacities. They ran kickass missions and were virtually unstoppable.

“I’m taking ten,” Pete announced on through to his team, “I call the bathroom on the top floor.”

“Don’t forget to open the window,” Leena reminded him. “I call the basement.”

“Lightweights,” Claudia retorted.

“Yeah, well, I’ll see what your kidneys are like at 37,” Pete shouted as he rushed past Claudia’s room, and up the stairs to his favourite bathroom.

Claudia chuckled and logged into her private training server, to practice some sharp shooting, only to be joined by someone - much to her surprise.

“Knock, knock,” a familiar, surly British tone greeted her through the headset.

“HG?”

“Good evening, darling,” Helena spoke and materialised on screen as the generic, stock male character.

“You can hack my private training server, but you can’t customise your avatar?”

“I’m not here to play, Claudia, I’m in need of urgent advice, and this is the only way I could get a hold of you tonight.”

Claudia straightened in her beanbag. “What’s up?”

“I require access to your subject matter expertise, as well as some insight as to common and appropriate practices.”

“Shoot,” Claudia fired, and corrected quickly, “as in, the breeze. As in, go for it.”

“I’m at a loss as to what I should do with Myka.”

Claudia blushed slightly. She wasn’t sure where HG was headed with her need for advice. She knew Myka and Helena were dating, she knew that things were going well. Myka had shared with her (not without due pressure and coaxing on Claudia’s part) that Helena and her were physically compatible, they talked about emotional compatibility too… So which part was Helena having issues with? “Uhm…” Claudia muttered, thinking how to best phrase her question. “Which… uhm… specifically…” she stuttered.

“Oh, apologies, darling,” Helena chuckled, “it is a matter of twenty first century dating decorum. More specifically, the celebration of the monthly denominations of the commencement of our romantic involvement,” Helena smoothed the definition like butter on freshly baked bread. “The remaining aspects of romance and relationships have changed little in a hundred odd years, not least my familiarity with the female---”

“You mean monthiversaries?” Claudia jumped in. She did not care to have that mental image stay with her for the rest of the evening. She had a mission to win.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Monthiversaries, like anniversaries, but - as you pointed out - the denomination is monthly.”

“These exist, now, do they?”

“Yeah,” Claudia nodded and shoved some pretzels in her mouth, “they’re a thing,” she crunched loudly. “But I’m probably not the best person to ask about this, you know. I don’t exactly hold an exceptional dating record,” and almost so she could feel better about her lack of dating credentials, she brought up her achievements list on screen.

“To be fair, Claudia, dear, you’re probably as good as any of the options at hand.”

Claudia contemplated HG’s statement. While Pete had more experience dating, he wasn’t exactly a source for romantic inspiration. Heaven only knew what Leena was doing and who she was seeing and how (even though Leena had always been Claudia’s go-to for advice concerning humans), and Artie was… well… Artie. Appeased, and feeling a bit better about herself and the situation, “So what’s the issue with monthiversaries?” she asked.

“How would one celebrate them?”

“I hear dinner and dancing are all the rage these days,” Claudia answered with a smirk.

HG was silent.

“Wow, tough crowd,” she whispered. “Why is this coming around now? This isn’t your first one, HG, you guys have been going out… what? Six months?”

“Precisely.”

“Precisely what?”

“I was given to understand that six months are a ‘big deal’, as you say,” Claudia could hear the veritable struggle HG had using a 20th century colloquialism.

“I understand why they’re a big deal,” Claudia rationalised, “I mean, I get the logic of it for being half a year and all, but I really wouldn’t know the specifics. My longest relationship lasted four months and three and a half weeks.”

“And did you celebrate each of the months as it concluded?” Helena pressed.

“Errr,” Claudia raked through her memories, “yeah, I think.”

“Sounds like they were memorable events,” sarcasm dripped through the headset.

“We were kids, HG, our resources were limited.”

“We haven’t celebrated any thus far,” Helena admitted.

“You haven’t?”

“‘Fraid not.”

“I see your predicament,” Claudia sank back into her seat, contemplating HG’s stakes and position. Would six months follow the rule or set the exception.

So she reverted to a WWMD – What Would Myka Do: whenever she talked to Myka about Helena and about dating, Myka would get a little coy and a little dopey. She would get a stupid smile plastered on her face and a dreamy look in her eyes, all of which were rather endearing. It was incredibly sweet to see Myka so shamelessly in love.

While she knew Myka was smitten, she didn’t know how soppy she was. Scratch that. Claudia knew exactly how soppy Myka was, and that was nil. What she didn’t know was if Myka’s infatuated state altered her default setting of utter non-sop.

Myka was so non-sop that she could just about tolerate annual cycles when it came to celebrations of any sort. She got even worse when it came to celebrating her, and she would attempt to extend the cycle for as long as she possibly could, or avoid it altogether. For that reason, Myka’s birthdays were forkin’ painful, and Claudia didn’t envy HG in the slightest for having to deal with that.

So given her defaults, it stood to reason that Myka wouldn’t be one to celebrate monthiversaries, but six months… Would that be big enough a deal for her?

And then the penny dropped. The subject of which Claudia was an expert wasn’t dating. It was Myka.

“Look, if Myka didn’t fuss about monthiversaries until now, I don’t think she’ll fuss about this one,” Claudia went straight to the point, now she knew what it was.

Helena was silent once more.

Claudia sensed there was more to that silence. “Do you want to celebrate it?” Claudia asked slowly, trying best to mask her disbelief that Helena was the sentimental sop-ball.

Silence.

“Well, if you want to, then you go for it, HG,” Claudia took a sip of soda. “You mark the occasion the way you want to mark it. Dinner or dancing or your extensive knowledge of the female anatomy…” she trailed off.

Still - silence.

Claudia waited for a minute or two for a response of some description. When none came, she checked whether Helena was still there. “Hello?”

“Many thanks, darling,” Helena answered. “I’d appreciate it if you breathed not a word of this conversation to anyone.”

“Scouts honour,” Claudia vowed, even though she was never a scout.

“Especially not to Myka.”

“My lips are sealed.”

* * *

On her birthday, Claudia’s Warehouse family took her out to a club in Featherhead where they arranged an open stage for her favourite local indie artists.

Steve got her a signed Siouxie Sioux vinyl. Pete got her a lifetime subscription to Spotify. Leena got her vintage sheet music of Blues and Gospel standards. HG got her steampunk tool belt. Artie got her a second-hand Honda. Mrs. Frederick got her a blank acceptance letter to any government agency of her choosing. Myka got her nothing to open at the club.

When they got back to the B&B, well after 2am, Claudia, drunk on endorphins and happiness and possibly alcohol, too, gave everyone one last hug and headed up the stairs.

“Wait a sec,” Myka called after her.

Claudia turned her head towards the door, where Myka kissed Helena and whispered something in her ear, then walked towards Claudia. “Not quite over yet,” Myka smiled at the young caretaker and walked past her and up the stairs.

“Why are you not tired or drunk?” Claudia asked sort of quietly, as the adrenalin of the evening faded, and tiredness began to take hold.

“Because,” Myka answered sweetly and waited for Claudia to walk past her and to into her room, on the second floor of the B&B.

Myka leaned against the doorframe without walking in. Without looking in, even. She waited patiently for the excitement she knew would come.

And it did, with a loud “Squee!”, followed by an “Oh my god, it ISN’T…” followed by a shriek of “IT IS!” and the soft sound of bouncing that got closer to where Myka was standing, until arms were flung around the tall agent, who was all too quick and eager to hug Claudia back, and share with her a delighted giggle.

Claudia rocked them in the excited embrace. “I can’t believe you found a Gretsch Electromatic Pro Jet in silver!” she sang to the rhythm of the to and fro of the hug.

“Anything for you, Claud,” was all Myka said.

But then Claudia stopped abruptly and squeezed Myka tightly before running back into the room to look at her new bit of kit more closely. She found what she was looking for behind the headstock – the serial number of the guitar. She then placed it carefully back in its flight case and looked at Myka with a dropped jaw. “You didn’t find it, you naughty vixen,” Claudia gaped. “You commissioned it.”

Myka smiled a small, shy smile and nodded. “Anything,” she said.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Anything, Claudia,” Myka asserted quietly.

“This is stupid expensive, I can’t keep it.”

“You can and you will,” Myka pushed herself off the door frame and walked in. “Seriously.”

“But Myka---”

“I know it’s expensive, and I get the reluctance,” Myka rationalised. “But it’s not every birthday of yours that I know just what to get you to celebrate the amazing person that you are, and the amazing person you are becoming.”

Claudia’s shoulders slumped. The alcohol and the happy and the tired were translating into tears and joy and love for the family she found and the life she had made for herself.

“I couldn’t possibly wish for a better bestie and colleague, and partner and sort-of sister, Claud. Every single day you do something that makes me proud to know you, that amazes me. Every day you do something that makes me want to be a better person, that helps me be that better person - even if I’m the one doing the helping.”

Claudia bit her lips together to stop the tears. She hated it when Myka got emotional, because Myka’s emotional was like super fine wine, or aged whiskey. Myka would only crack the bottle open when it really mattered, and by god, that stuff was strong and extremely effective.

“This is just me saying thank you,” Myka continued. “For everything.”

Lip biting was of absolutely no use and the tears came rushing down Claudia’s cheeks, washing away remains of sweat and mascara and eyeliner and blush.

“Damn you,” she spat as she walked towards Myka stiffly, then into her, and Myka wrapped her arms around her, and took the act for what it was - a declaration of love and friendship and sisterhood and their unique bond, the likes of which they shared with no one else.

* * *

“It saddens me a great deal once in a while,” Helena said while revising the connections on the exposed circuit board of a WiFi hub.

Claudia examined the artificer’s work. “That diode, HG, always look for the diode.”

“Ah! Thank you,” Helena exclaimed and leaned in to achieve the desired effect, expanding the range of the device and extending the number of transmission bands. “I’m simply overwhelmed by her love, by our love, and I think to myself how wonderful it might have been if we accidentally fell pregnant, the way heterosexual couples do.”

Claudia looked up at her trainee and sighed.

“It’s when I see our merry band of misfits and the lives we’ve built in this world of endless wonder that I want to share this love with a child,” Helena continued, her voice ringing with hope and happiness. “With our child.”

Claudia pursed her lips. This wasn’t the first time she and Helena had a conversation like this. This was the third time, to be exact. It came once every two years or so, after a week or two of relative calm in the Warehouse, when HG had a lot more down time with Myka and a lot more time to watch the people around her.

“Not sad enough to do anything untoward about it, of course,” Helena looked back at Claudia, “after all, and irrespective of the myriad of artefacts one might use to overcome the biological limitations, Myka had made it abundantly clear that she didn’t wish to conceive and I daren’t try given we know so little of the effect of the bronzing process on one’s reproductive system.”

“But also…” Claudia coaxed gently.

“You’re right, of course,” Helena sat back and her smile fell from her lips with a sad sigh and she reached for the locket at her chest. “Christina is still very much alive within me. I don’t believe I would cope with a pregnancy even had I been able to safely carry a child.”

Claudia walked around the table she and Helena was hunched over and wrapped Helena with a hug.

For a while, they shared an occasional sigh amidst the silence.

“You could always adopt,” Claudia said, eventually.

* * *

Myka and Helena’s adopted daughter was just two years old when her mother handed her to the son of a neighbour, a 15 year old boy who was brave and fit enough to walk from Venezuela to the United States of America.

By the time they crossed the border in Mexicali, the son was 16 and child was 3 and 3 months. He stayed in Arizona with his mother’s family and the child was put up for adoption.

The agencies assumed it will be hard to find parents for a child who lost their mother, who spent a third of their lifetime on the road, with a boy they barely knew as their only family, only to lose him as well. It turned out to be the opposite.

It may have been because Myka was a government employee that her name popped up at the top of potential parents upon the first search. That, and the preferences Myka and her partner marked on their form: age: preferably under 10; gender: unspecified; physical features: unspecified; ethnic origin: unspecified; spoken language: unspecified.

The recommendation letters could have also helped. Specifically, one from a Claudia Donovan, which detailed the practical, financial, physical, mental, spiritual and emotional support she had received from Myka and her partner over the 10 years she had known Myka and the 8 years she had known them as a couple. It was a letter that spoke of the love and devotion Myka and her partner shared, not only in their relationship, but with their family at large.

Claudia was in the room when Myka and Helena received the pack with the child’s details, and she witnessed how joy and pain were two sides of the same coin. How palpable was the excitement when the pictures of the little girl fell out of the envelope. But then, how the energy changed, expressions shifted, after Myka pulled out the paperwork, almost in an instance. How smiles vanished and voices hushed as they read through the documentation.

And Myka, so gentle and careful, swept Helena’s locks from her cheek to cradle it. And Helena held Myka’s hand to her while reached with her other to her locket, until Myka let the papers drop to the coffee table to hold Helena to her and whisper a declaration of devotion to Helena, to her past and her present and future, all in one. “We don’t have to, Helena, we don’t need to. I love you. All of you. Who you were, who you loved, who you are and everyone you carry with you. And that’s more than I could ever hope for, that’s more than I could ever want.”

It was then that Claudia could see the papers, that she could see that it was beyond oddly and unintentionally accidental that the child Myka and Helena were presented with was named Christina.

* * *

The B&B was always immaculately dressed at Christmas, almost as if it was built and decorated to celebrate the winter holidays in an impossibly safe and warm place, while the unforgiving North Dakota tundra raged outside.

It was a particularly merry time of year over the past few years, when their family ballooned over the holidays, with Joshua and his wife and kids, Myka’s parents and her sister’s family, with Pete’s mom and sister and kids.

And like any large family gathering, it was loud and drunken and overfed and filled with laughter and drama.

And like any large family gathering, birds of a feather would flock together, in quiet, unassuming corners, to collect their wits and strength whenever they could. And these two birds, most definitely of a feather, even though there were almost three decades between them.

And yet, they were the ones sat by the banister on the first-floor mezzanine, eating M&Ms and drinking milk, away from the proper adults of the household, who were still at the dining room table, having two loud conversations at once - one about taxes and one about cars. Neither conversation held particular appeal to either Claudia or Christina, now nearly 8 years old.

“Grandad and Grannie are Mom’s parents, right?” Christina asked Claudia.

Claudia nodded slowly as she munched on a green peanut M&M.

“And I know Mummy’s parents are dead,” the child continued with their enquiry. “And I know that Aunt Tracey is Mom’s sister.”

Claudia’s nod slowed. “Where are you going with this, Mini C?”

Christina looked up at her other auntie, auntie Claudia, otherwise known as Auntie C. “So if you’re also my auntie, whose sister are you?”

* * *

#Bering and Wells #bering and wells gift exchange #b&w holiday gift exchange #lady-adventuress

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apparitionism · 6 years ago

Text

Mercury 9

Apparently it’s old-school week around here… this is the penultimate part of Mercury, which I started forever and a day ago (2014!) and have failed to update for almost as long. But as I’ve noted, I finish what I start, so here continues a tale concerning, among other things, Myka and Helena and some existential and ethical questions raised by the whole Janus coin/Emily Lake situation. It takes place at a county fair in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which might seem a trivial (or random) detail but in fact is not. We’ll see if I can pull the pins on my plot-grenades… what’s here will make no sense at all without what came before, and it’s honestly a bit much for a brief recap. I tried to link to the other parts, but I didn’t show up in search, so here’s another try without... [ETA: Whatever, Tumblr; I give up. Here are the links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, and part 8.]

Mercury 9

“It’s a real tossup,” Pete remarked as he walked between Myka and Helena, “whether it’s worse when you’re all over each other or when you’re on the outs.”

Their arrival at the fair that morning couldn’t have presented a clearer contrast to that of the day before: The distinct lack of rocking and rolling all night, as well as the sad absence of partying every day, made sure of that. The drive from the hotel had featured only functional words, mostly between Pete and Helena, and Myka found herself yearning for Helena’s floridly non-silent silent treatment instead. She could have used the low-stakes exasperation she felt when confronted with it to begin to grope her way into feeling that this problem, too, could be set back onto an established track, so an eventual reconciliation would be inevitable.

But a disagreement over Helena’s displeasure with Jules Verne, and with Myka regarding words said about Jules Verne? That was barely skin-deep. This went all the way through, like a bullet, one with both their names on it. A really big bullet… Myka struggled to keep herself from believing that this one was also of Helena’s invention. What goes up—into the stratosphere, into something like happiness—

No, Myka had told herself firmly, halting that line of thought just as Pete was looking at his phone and reporting, “Ida texted. She’s at the barn. Says to meet her, but that there’s no new intel on the Lelands.”

“Still at square one,” Myka grumbled. “Great.”

Pete rubbed his hands together. “It is great. We have to go right by the Pizza Pagoda on the way.”

As they’d walked (and walked and walked), Myka stewed at the fair both in its particulars—had these people never seen an actual pagoda? couldn’t they correctly identify the structure in which money was being exchanged for pizza?—and in its entirety. People were happy. Having a good time. Eating pizza. Wearing smiles.

She didn’t want to kick a rock; she wanted to hide under one. Or send all of those pizza-eating smilers to hide under one so she wouldn’t have to see how unaffected by this situation they all were. How dare they be so unscathed.

Helena had a unique ability to push her to this kind of resentment. After Yellowstone, Myka could hardly bear to look other people in the eyes, in their unknowing, unaffected faces; after Pittsburgh, the same. After, after, after. After Kenosha?

Then again maybe they would never get to the after; maybe they were doomed to trudge through this fair forever with Pete, who was now shaking his head and repeating, “Real tossup.”

Helena, walking on his right side, radiated nonresponse. He looked expectantly to the left, at Myka.

“I’m pretty sure it’s worse right now,” she said. She considered kicking him under a rock.

“Well, for you,” he fake-pouted. “You never think about me.”

“Right. Never. Who just bought you that slice of pizza at that Quonset hut they didn’t even bother putting in a pagoda costume?”

“The pizza fairy. Hey, you could be her twin!”

And that, surprisingly, made Myka smile and shake her head. She twitched an involuntary glance rightward and realized that Helena was having the same response.

Helena looked up and leftward, met Myka’s eyes, and clearly came to the reciprocal realization.

The atmosphere shifted.

One look didn’t reverse the effects of the past twenty-four hours, not nearly. But Myka was self-aware enough both to understand how that one look softened the air between them, and to resent how smoothly and easily it had done such work.

How dare you, she said to herself. How dare you knuckle under. If you’re going to be angry and jealous and unreasonable, you could at least have the rank obstinacy to stay that way.

And Helena had this unique ability too: to make everything Myka did, everything she felt, seem right and wrong at the same time.

This nonsense at a fair might have been a particularly egregious example of Myka tripping over Helena and stumbling into that state, but it wasn’t the only one.

She remembered, as a paradigmatic case, a time when she had been trying to hide an injury. “I’m on the way!” she’d yelled from the bedroom as she quickly dealt with changing the dressing on her wound. Just a flesh wound, nothing serious, certainly not life-threatening, and barely even blood-supply-threatening: a cut on her abdomen. Nobody reasonable would have called it a gash or a slice or anything like that. She’d made Pete promise not to tell anyone about it, post-retrieval, because sure, it hurt, but it didn’t matter.

Judging from the horror on Helena’s face when she barged in and realized what Myka was doing, though? It mattered to her. And the potential for that horror was a large part of why Myka had tried to hide it—but Helena’s face was now shouting that Myka had failed. She’d made Helena feel the horror, and maybe worse, she’d rendered Helena unable to hide that she was feeling it.

“Don’t get like this,” Myka said. (Because warning Helena off always went so very well.)

“I am not getting like anything.”

“Okay, okay,” Myka then said. (Because placating Helena also always went so very well.)

“I am reacting, as a human does, to another human’s injury.”

“And don’t play it off either! You wouldn’t be getting like this over Pete.” The latter, Myka said because it was true, but even as she said it, she saw that pointing it out wasn’t going to be any sort of positive contribution to the situation.

“You want my reaction to be entirely because of you, yet you also want me not to have it at all.”

Under other circumstances, Helena might have smiled as she said something like that, and Myka, with an admittedly unreasonable hope that the smile might still be forthcoming, said, “Yes.”

It wasn’t. “But you knew I would have it,” Helena said, unsmiling and prosecutorial. “You were trying to hide this from me.”

When Helena got prosecutorial, Myka got defensive. “Okay, yes. I didn’t say it made sense.”

“Good, because it doesn’t.” Stubborn.

Which Myka could match: “I know that. I just said that.”

“I want to care for you.”

Helena didn’t mean “take over a mundane first aid task,” and Myka knew that too. Yet she snapped, “I can take care of myself.” Even as another part of her was prodding her with You want her to care for you and How long did you really think you could hide the need for this mundane first aid task from her anyway.

“I’m certain you can.”

That was raw hurt, shivering under an inadequate coat of dispassion—and Myka responded wrong to both: “Right. Just like I assume you can.” And that was out-and-out perjury. Helena’s fragile body, so tenuously and lately re-housing the soul it should… Myka was absurdly protective of that body, but Helena shouldn’t have felt the same way about Myka. Shouldn’t have had to feel the same way, and certainly shouldn’t have been boxed into showing that she felt that way.

They’d papered over that confrontation somehow, but Myka couldn’t remember the resolution, which had to mean that it had been something as simple as what had happened just now, on a graveled pathway at a fair in Kenosha with Pete standing between them talking about a pizza fairy: mutual recognition of a shared response. Some reminder of commonality of feeling, of purpose. Surely that was the wrong way to handle conflicts in a relationship… but just as surely, it was right, too.

However: They still hadn’t said a meaningful word to each other by the time they reached the barn. Myka was still perversely attempting to work her resentment back up, and Helena was clearly avoiding looking at her, maybe just as perversely, maybe to avoid creating another moment of fellow-feeling, and Myka tried selling herself an even more unreasonable story about that: It’s because she knows she’ll bust out laughing when she sees my face working to stay surly, and—

“I realize I’m being a busybody,” Ida said, first thing, “but I’m sensing some tension between my leading ladies. And not the kind that keeps people tuning in.”

Pete said to Myka, “She means UST.” To Helena, he said, “They tune in for UST.” Both of them must have looked baffled, for he gave up on them and said to Ida, “It was like that with them, for basically ever. Before they R’ed the ST. But you can keep that going only so long, you know?”

Ida nodded. “So many shows get it wrong.”

“For what it’s worth,” Pete said, his voice conspiratorially low, “I think Myka and H.G. got it right.”

Mere moments before, Myka would have had to struggle to keep from saying, irritably and out loud, that Pete should shut up. But the shift—it kept happening, Pete’s words helping it along, despite Myka’s attempts to wrestle herself angry. She and Helena had certainly not apologized, or compromised, or exchanged more than that single glance, but between them there was a tuning, like the manipulation of a radio dial: static, then the beginning of decodable sound, the tiny twist calling music, voices, a signal more and more clearly into the receiver from the ether. Any errant twitch of fingers on the dial might cause the transmission to be lost again.

Myka didn’t want it lost. She looked, with purpose, at Helena, and Helena looked back. Still no apologies, no compromise… but the signal strengthened.

“You’re very sweet to them,” Ida told Pete.

Now Myka rolled her eyes, but she tried to keep the motion as small as possible.

“I know, right? You’d think they’d appreciate me more.”

“You need a love interest,” Ida said.

“I double-know that. But the fans, I think they’d still be all about Bering and Wells.”

Ida looked at Myka, then Helena, then back and forth again. “Which one is which?”

Pete put on a boxing-announcer voice: “In this corner, you got your tall, dark, and broody: that’s Bering. Across the ring from her, there’s Wells: not quite so tall, also dark, also broody, but with epic, extra fallout.”

“Isn’t that funny,” Ida said to Helena.

Helena crossed her arms in defense. “What? ‘Epic, extra fallout’? That is not funny.”

Might not be funny, but it isn’t wrong, Myka thought. Then Helena turned a quick, overbright glare on Pete with a mutter of “and I know what ‘fallout’ means now, thank you very much,” which made Myka think, But maybe also a little funny…

“It’s funny that you’d show up here,” Ida said.

“Here?” Pete asked, and Helena echoed, “Here?”

Before Myka could do the same—because that didn’t seem funny at all—Ida followed up with, “And I just now worked it out: H.G.! I see why that’s your nickname.”

“It’s not my nickname,” Helena said. She’d uncrossed her arms, but now she crossed them again, and Myka wondered whether any photographs existed of Helena as the sulky, impossible child she must have been, when she wasn’t otherwise occupied with charming everyone into treating her as the miniature adult she no doubt considered herself to be.

Pete gave Helena a quizzical look. “But it kind of is your nickname. I mean, those are your initials, so… wait. Here. Ida, you are brilliant and so am I, because I know exactly what you’re thinking. And now I got it: I also know exactly what we’re looking for.” He looked at Myka, then at Helena. “Because who’s from Kenosha?” To Ida, he said, “Don’t give it away; they think they’re so smart, but we’ll see.”

“Who’s from Kenosha?” Myka repeated. “Probably almost everybody at this fair. Except us.”

“But who else is from Kenosha?”

“Probably almost all the other people who live in Kenosha?” Myka looked to Helena for help, but Helena shrugged.

Her own look, followed by Helena’s shrug, and immediately it struck Myka: that was their first real, intentional communication since the morning’s argument, and it did figure that it was about not knowing what Pete was getting at. Myka wasn’t yet ready to admit to anyone, including herself, that Pete was actually being very helpful today.

“Plus?” Pete pushed.

Myka tried, “Plus people who moved away?”

“Exactly. And who moved away?”

“A lot of people. Probably.” Myka knew she was being uncharitable, but small towns really weren’t her favorite. She figured living in Univille was most likely a karmic punishment… for what, she wasn’t quite sure, but she certainly hadn’t spent this life, or probably any other, being as perfect as she’d intended to be, and small-town-South-Dakota purgatory was undoubtedly the result. “Maybe,” she softened, ideally defraying some of the spiritual cost.

Pete snickered. “Not a lot who used a microphone and people believed it.” He stopped and waited, mouth a bit expectantly open, like a dog waiting to be rewarded for chasing a ball. “Really? No ideas? How about you, supergenius? Kinda up your alley, there, Agent Wells.”

Then Myka got it, and so did Helena, for they said in unison, “War of the Worlds?”

Pete exhaled an at-last noise. “That’s right: Orson Welles, Kenosha boy. Hated the place, but still.”

War of the Worlds. Of course. Myka sighed, because it really had to have happened sooner or later. “You’re saying you think this is the microphone from the War of the Worlds radio broadcast?”

“I’m saying it loud, and also proud, because I’m the one who thought of it, with the fabulous assist from my best friend Ida. I could say it through the thing, so you’d believe me like all those radio listeners believed Martians were attacking, but I don’t think I’m gonna have to.” He fiddled with his phone and turned the screen to Ida. “It looked pretty much like that, right?”

“Just like that. And that’s funny too: I’d forgotten it said ‘CBS’ on it, but it did. What a terrible witness I’d make in a courtroom drama.” She looked at all three of them in turn. “This TV show I’m running around like I’m on, it isn’t a CBS one, is it?”

Pete shook his head. “Not so much. Maybe Fox? Lower budget, though, so probably Syfy; FX if you’re lucky. But don’t tell.”

Myka couldn’t find it in her to be angry at him for saying too much, particularly not when Ida said, with real regret, “No one would believe me anyway.”

“Well, no,” Pete said, but he put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “On account of you don’t have the microphone.” He held a sssshhh finger to his lips.

“But that leaves us still at square one,” Myka pointed out.

Pete frowned. “And not on the way past pizza this time either.”

“I have an idea,” Ida said.

Pete now flung his arm around her fully. “Like I said, you’re brilliant. From the start I knew I liked you. This idea, is it about pizza?”

“It’s about knowing, not pizza. Knowing, and believing. Ginny knows she’s going to lose the pie contest, because of Agnes and key lime. But what if she happened to win instead?”

He wrinkled his brow. “What if she… oh, I get it. She’d be very into being there. You think that’d override their supervillain plot, whatever it is?”

“I think it would override her grandchildren. And the fact is, she does believe in herself—she always holds out a little hope in these key lime years. Dreams the impossible dream.”

“So we flush her out, assuming she’s lurking, by making sure she wins? But how do we do that?” Pete asked.

Ida smiled. She looked very proud of herself. “I’m going to make Agnes’s pie disappear.”

“Poetic,” Myka said, and she couldn’t help herself; as she said it, she looked at Helena.

“Ironic,” Helena countered, directly at Myka..

Poetic, ironic… and then this struck Myka: those were the first real, intentional words they’d said to each other since the morning’s argument.

An ironic, or possibly poetic, twist of lip from Helena acknowledged that she, too, knew the exchange for what it was.

Pete said, “I personally am an expert in making pies disappear, so maybe I should be the one who sticks his neck out on this one.”

“You’re so sweet,” Ida told him, and Myka had to concede that it was actually true. (Except when it wasn’t.) Ida went on, “But if I’m going to be on a show, no matter what network carries it or who I can tell about it, I’m certainly going to see it through. Plus, in a very CBS way, I’d like everything back to normal.”

Myka thought, Sing it, sister. Not that I know what normal is, but I know what it isn’t.

Yet she and Helena walked side by side as their little team crossed the fairgrounds, the air between them unheavy. It wasn’t a normal walk by any means… but it wasn’t a march to be endured, as she’d begun the day thinking all their walks would be. She might have turned to Helena and said normal words. She didn’t, but she might have—and that was progress. Reparative progress.

The pie-judging location was not, Myka was pleased to find, a named pagoda, pavilion, patio, or promenade, but rather a large and simple tent, with no sign designating it the Pie Tent, probably because it was also the bread, pickles, and jam tent. She could feel Pete’s mouth watering as they entered the space.

Ida lasered in on the pies, which were clearly the main attraction, displayed like crown jewels on inky-velvet–clad shelving. “I’ve never tried such skullduggery before,” she confided. She looked at the pies, then looked at Myka and Helena in a way that Myka found immediately disconcerting. “I’ll need a distraction. Leading ladies, would you oblige?”

Pete snickered, but he applauded as he did so. “Oh, you’re good. You definitely watch a lot of the right kind of TV. My hat’s off to you, ma’am.”

“No,” Myka said. “Just no.” As if things weren’t bad enough, now she was supposed to put on some show for—

“Now wait,” Helena said, and her tone was her most “reasonable,” which at no time did Myka ever find to be actually appeasing, “Mrs. Thatcher has a plan, one that may very well succeed. Shouldn’t we contribute to that potential success? Agents don’t simply stand around and watch while other people make and implement plans to help them.”

“I really don’t see why not,” Myka said, deploying her own version of “reasonable.” “Or maybe Pete could stuff all the bread in his mouth. That’d be distracting.”

“Maybe I could,” Pete said, appraising the bread entries.

Helena did that little ironic, or poetic, twist of lip again, and now Myka knew perfectly well that she was being dared to think about Helena’s lips. The twist became a full smile as Helena said, “Won’t you kiss me passionately before the good people of Kenosha?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with pie,” Myka said, knowing it was a nonsensical objection, not fully knowing why she was making it, because she did want to kiss Helena. But ideally someplace where they could work things out—which was emphatically not before the good people of Kenosha.

“That’s why it’s a distraction,” Pete explained, with seriousness. “Or you could have a slap fight. Your choice I guess; they’ve both got about as much to do with pie.”

Ida shook her head. “I’ve seen slap fights over everything in this tent, pie included. That wouldn’t even register.”

Myka raised eyes and palms heavenward in capitulation, because what choice did she really have, and Helena took that as her cue: “At long last,” she declaimed, “I declare publicly my love for you. Good people of Kenosha, you are my witnesses.” She gestured floridly to those witnesses, obviously to ensure that she had attracted, and would attract still more, attention. Then she turned back to Myka, displaying an impish facsimile of ardent sincerity. “Tell me that you reciprocate my ardor, so that I may live out my remaining days a happy woman.”

Myka began, “You are just too—” and she would have ended with “much,” but Helena took advantage of her mouth saying “too” to bestow one kiss, then another, and Myka had no choice but to play along.

“I know you don’t like to kiss me in front of other people, most days, and today perhaps not at all,” Helena murmured as they kissed and stopped, kissed and stopped. “I know it’s a hardship for you.”

“Hardship,” Myka sighed out. Why did Helena have to dig at her like this? “Are people watching?” she asked as they continued these strange, designed-to-be-seen kisses.

Helena smiled through one kiss, then another. “As if they were judging our worthiness for a ribbon in an osculation contest.”

“This is ridiculous,” Myka muttered.

“More so if you don’t participate. I myself want to win, not merely place.”

So Myka participated, to the extent that she could, given the still-unreconciled business of the day before, and the night, and this morning. She felt herself make a face as they broke apart minimally again—and then she made the break definitive, for she saw Pete give her a thumbs-up. “Pie achieved,” she informed Helena. “Thank god.”

“Myka,” said Helena, in mild rebuke.

“Helena,” Myka sighed in response. “Why do we do this?”

“Because we prefer it to the alternative,” Helena said. “At least, I do.”

And the challenge made Myka kiss her one more time, kiss her right. “I do too,” she said, making no face this time.

Helena shrugged her slim shoulders and said, with a tiny smile, “More than earlier today?”

“Exactly the same,” Myka told her, because it was true: she preferred every aspect of their relationship, even its most difficult terrain, to any alternative she could imagine… and for that response she was rewarded, because there was the smile, the precious one that graced Helena’s face at the best of times, the one that made Myka wonder how she had made it through decades of her life before this maddening presence swept in and made herself at home.

Myka hoped, given that the kissing seemed to have facilitated the pie-stealing as intended, that the proceedings would hustle their way to a conclusion… but no. The actual pie-judging was an elaborate affair, even unto the deployment of ceremonial utensils: knives of various sizes and sharpenings, serving implements with ornately sculpted handles, forks featuring equally silvered intricacy. Slicing, lifting, raising morsels with surprising elegance to judgmental mouths.

And speaking of judgmental mouths—and eyes, and pointing fingers—several of those continued to be directed at Myka and Helena. Helena, of course, settled into a showy preen, as if the attention obviously was entirely congratulatory, and Myka was as hard put as ever to understand how a literal Victorian could be more openly defiant of any given situation’s norms than someone who’d learned the world a century later.

But the century-later-learner in question was Myka, who labored to find and abide by every nuance of the norms governing any situation. And the literal Victorian in question was Helena, who would have defied norms regardless of when, regardless of whose. Regardless, Helena would have flown a flag that said Yes you should be looking, and you should be applauding my audacity, and as for anyone who fails to do so? I will spare no time or thought for those unfortunate fools.

But also: Look at me for my audacity. Not for the feral, fearful animal it hides.

And what about Myka, drawn to both those things?

Every nuance of the norms: of course, at the worst of times, she clung ever more tightly to those norms, begrudging Helena both the audacity and what it hid, condemning herself for finding all of it irresistible.

How handy, in those worst times, to have Emily Lake to wield as a cudgel. Or a scalpel.

Right, Myka thought, help them punish Helena, you and Helena, more: No, Regents, don’t trouble yourselves, no no no; I, Myka Bering, will take it from here. Because I am exactly the sort of dutiful idiot who would do that.

She didn’t want to be that sort of dutiful idiot.

So don’t, she told herself. Don’t do their dirty, punitive work. Make things better, not worse.

Myka deliberately caught the eye of a younger woman, one glaring a disapproval that belied the idea that that that demographic was wholeheartedly embracing change… Myka raised her eyebrows at her—not quite Helena’s flag-flying, but a challenge all the same. Then she moved so that her shoulder rested against Helena’s. Helena looked up in surprise, then let her own body lean, with the most gentle of pressure, on Myka. A whisper of relief. And all that mattered, in this moment, was Helena’s body, this long-lived body that had borne, and was still bearing, so much more than it was ever meant to. Myka was embarrassed by her own tendency to stagger under the weight, when what she should have been saying, and enacting, was I’ll carry you.

One clasp of Helena’s body, one breath into her hair; Helena turned once into the curve of Myka’s neck. These soft things didn’t reverse the past twenty-four hours either. But they allowed Myka, at least, to begin to pay productive attention to more-mundane problems.

Like a case to be brought to a conclusion. Slowly.

“What are those judges even doing?” Pete was asking Ida, and that earned him a tsk-tsk. They tasted the pies one more time, she told him, to make sure. “Even though they already basically know who won?” he complained.

“Without the second tasting, this plan wouldn’t work,” Ida reminded him, “because Agnes would already have won. Besides, you seem like the kind of man who’d feel a kinship with people who like having lots of opportunities to eat pie.”

“Yeah, but it’s taking them forever,” he groaned, and Myka was inclined to echo him.

“It’s important,” Ida told him.

To Myka’s surprise, Helena said, “She’s right.”

“Pardon?” Myka said.

“This… deliberation. Over something so seemingly small as the taste of a pie—it reminds me of the past. Not the harsh past, which I extolled to you, but its softer, slower aspect.” As Helena said this, her eyes weren’t misty, exactly, but they were looking at some fair that wasn’t this one. “I was wrong to maintain that the difference runs in only one direction. Forgive me?”

Myka’s impulse was to say “There’s nothing to forgive”—but they both had a lot to forgive. It also seemed to slight Helena’s… nostalgia? And her sincerity about that nostalgia. So Myka hesitated.

Helena then said, “From time to time I fail to acknowledge that a position should have nuance.”

As if Myka’s pause had meant she needed Helena to offer still more words of expiation. As if only then might Myka say “yes” in answer to a question about forgiveness.

It made Myka want to cuddle her. And shake a fist at her… but then again, she knew that she herself inspired the exact same push-pull in Helena.

So: “Me too,” Myka said.

And she was glad she’d got that out when she did, for then everything started happening: Ginny Leland’s peach/apple pie was announced the first-place winner “due to an unfortunate last-minute withdrawal,” and suddenly Ida was pointing, saying “There it is!” and Pete was rushing up to an ecstatic woman and a startled man, the latter indeed in possession of a microphone.

“I don’t understand,” said Paul Leland.

“I don’t care!” his wife declared. “I won!”

She rushed away to claim her ribbon. Her husband took a step as if to follow her, but Pete tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, but would you mind letting me have a closer look at that vintage sound equipment you’ve got there? It’s from about 1938, if I’m not mistaken, which I’m not. Right?”

“You can see me,” said Paul Leland.

“Yes I can,” Pete said. “And just to make sure that keeps being true, why don’t you pass the mic to this nice lady in the fancy purple gloves… ha! For a fistful of truth!”

“I don’t understand,” he said again, and he did look utterly baffled. He didn’t resist when Myka took the piece of history from him.

“Beastie Boys,” Pete informed him.

Myka muttered a cautionary “Pete…”

“Yeah, sorry. I actually don’t understand either, because I’m sort of getting a vibe that you’re not a supervillain. But you know what I’m also sort of getting a vibe about? This maybe has something to do with how you don’t watch radio.”

“I didn’t want anyone to see me…” Paul Leland said slowly. “I didn’t want anyone to see me, and then they didn’t. Why didn’t I want anyone to see me? Ginny!” he called to his wife, then headed in her direction. Myka didn’t see any need to stop him; they had the artifact, and Pete was most likely right: he wasn’t a supervillain.

“Maybe that’s the downside?” she wondered to Helena. “Wanting to be invisible?”

“Then why his wife as well?” Helena wondered back. “If it’s simply a consequence of using the microphone, wouldn’t it adhere only to him?”

“You don’t know the Lelands,” Ida said. “How could anything happen to one of them and not the other? They’re inseparable. Adhering’s a good word for it… look!” She gestured toward the now-reunited couple, and indeed, as Ginny Leland glowed with pride over the blue ribbon she held, Paul seemed to shine too.

Pete said, “So we’re thinking that on account of him not wanting to be seen, they weren’t, then on account of her really really wanting to, they were? That’s… some kind of teamwork.”

And Ida mused, “It’s like that sometimes.” She looked, with intent, at Myka and Helena. “Isn’t it.”

“Isn’t it,” Helena echoed. She leaned once again on Myka.

Myka was still gloved, still holding the artifact, so she unfortunately couldn’t take much enjoyment from that lean, or do more than vaguely return it. “Let’s go behind the tent,” she suggested, and Pete whistled. “To bag the microphone,” she said, but her withering tone never had any effect on him.

Ida followed them behind the tent, and once again, Myka couldn’t see her way to objecting.

Pete had a static bag in hand; Myka tried to slip the microphone into it, but he insisted on putting on gloves himself and taking the artifact from Myka, and then he insisted on Farnsworthing Claudia before he did anything else. Myka didn’t understand why until he said, “And now here we go. All you lovely ladies are witnessing my very first literal mic-drop.” Myka heard this “literal” as a minor, if most likely accidental, miracle, while Claudia said an extremely dry “waited a lifetime for this” and “imagine my delight.”

“I’m starting to develop a theory about why you people bring up mushrooms,” Ida said, gazing at the Farnsworth.

“In my day we often suggested it was laudanum,” Helena told her.

Ida made a noise of speculation. “And I’m starting to develop a theory about why you said ‘H.G.’ isn’t your nickname.”

Pete held the microphone up and waved it. “Show’s happening right here right now! Come one come all to the center ring!” Before Myka could object that this was a fair and not a circus, he dropped it in.

Nothing happened.

“Here in Kenosha,” Ida said—gently, as if Pete’s feelings might be hurt—“we wouldn’t really call that a ‘show.’”

Pete shook the bag, seemingly encouraging it to work harder. “Claud, could we be in a defective static situation?”

“If so,” Claudia told him, “It’s one of those really random black-swan thingies. Not impossible, but—”

“I’ll try another one,” he assured her.

Nothing happened.

“I see what you mean about the low budget,” Ida told him.

Pete looked mournfully into the bag. “So I was wrong? Not an artifact after all… hey, waitaminute,” he said. He shed a glove, fished the microphone out, held it up, and said through it, “Sugar is nutritious.” His voice boomed even more than usual.

That’s a funny thing for him to have said, Myka thought, because of course—

“Hey, Mykes, how do you feel about eating sugar?” he asked.

And that was a funny thing for him to have asked. She gave him her best Pete you are insane look and said, “Well, it’s nutritious, so of course I feel pretty good about it.”

Did he look… horrified? “This is bad,” he said, and through the Farnsworth she heard Claudia shriek, “You broke Myka! You bet it’s bad!”

Myka tried to reassure them both: “No, sugar’s good.”

“Oh my lord,” Helena said, and Myka couldn’t understand why her voice clutched in a way that nearly matched Pete and Claudia…

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Mercury #part 9 #I'm assuming that those of you who know the referenced history now get why the story's name is what it is #(if you hadn't guessed already)#it's also a callback of sorts to my own 'Quicksilver' story #and to the fact that Helena is HG #which I continue to find massively appropriate #anyway everything always connects up #or maybe it's that we humans can't resist ferreting out ways in which things connect up #it's like our desperate drive to infer causality where none exists #everyone loves the word 'because'

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fandom-star · 6 years ago

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30 Day LGBT Challenge - Day 20

What is your favourite LGBTQ or queer positive show?

I, sadly, don't watch many of these. But I do watch some. Out of those, I would have to say either Star Trek: Discount and Warehouse 13.

Discovery portrays Star Trek's first, proper, canon, gay relationship. This relationship is between the genius behind the new jump technology, Paul Stamets, (also my favourite character) and the ship's chief medical officer, Hugh Culbers. Their relationship is very downplayed before its verbal confirmation, which I like, and is not made a big thing of until the show gets past mid-season. Even then, it is not the show. Also, Paul and Hugh are amazing, both as a couple and as individual characters.

Warehouse 13 actually has two canonically queer characters. First of all, we have one of the main characters, Steve Jinks. He is gay. From what I remember, he was revealed to be gay about two seasons after his introduction. After that, I can't remember any references to it, but it must have been brought up again. Steve is an amazing guy! He's best friends with Claudia Donovan (💜) and Pete often groans about the fact that they have someone on the team whose name is literally 'jinx'.

The second character is Helena "HG" Wells (yes, that HG Wells). She is bisexual. She casually states that she has had relationships with both men and women. She, also, is amazing. I can't really put how amazing she is into words!

#pride month #30 Day LGBT Challenge #representation #warehouse 13 #star trek discovery #culmets #hugh culber #paul stamets #steve jinks #hg wells #helena wells #gay #bisexual

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mfangeleeta · 7 years ago

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Last Call for Vodka (update)

Another installment in the Altered Carbon AU. You can find the previous chapters under the vodka hashtag or here. Thanks for reading!

Take me out tonight, because I want to see people and I want to see life

There was something that HG always found soothing about a train ride. The steady hum and rumble as the cars made their way over the tracks. The time spent with strangers who were as varied and interesting as the curiosities she hunted. The simple elegance of what had been cutting edge technology at the time.

Trains, as it seemed, still were in common use for travelers whose means were meager at best. And in an attempt to keep their cover, the Warehouse had purchased them tickets from where ever they had been to Bay City the current home of the missing building. When she had last worked, the country once known as the United States was on its last legs with a new global government known as the Protectorate poised to take over. She had spent some time in Bay City handling official business before she had cast off world for an assignment of her own making.

Myka looked up from the data pad she was reading, casting a glance at the woman across from her. The Warehouse had been cheap but not so much so that they didn’t share a private car. Despite all she had been through during the past centuries, she was a creature of habit and information was the lifeblood of any mission. What was known about the Warehouse’s disappearance was a quick read. Finding out what had happened to Helena Wells since they last saw each other was a little more difficult.

The only thing that they had in common during their various forms since the originals was visits to San Francisco, now Bay City. In fact they had both been sent there around the same time for different missions. The timing was so close that from what Myka could decipher, there had even been a few over lapping days. But in a city of millions there was no way for them to know.

“You are wondering if it is more than a mere coincidence,” Helena’s voice startled Myka from her thoughts.

“What is a coincidence?”

“That you and I were both in what is now Bay City at the same time two centuries ago.”

Myka stopped herself from asking. Of course Helena would have been studying. They were still alike in that way.

“The timing is surprising. Did you get your artifact?”

“Of course, did you?”

“I wasn’t there for just retrieval.”

“Official Warehouse business then?”

“Or something like that.”

They sat in silence for a moment, neither willing to share more at that moment.

The garbled announcement that the train was arriving broke the tension.

Myka pulled the collar up on her heavy brown pea coat. The climate and the coast had shifted, making this area rainier and far cooler than it had once been. Her hair would be a disaster but at least it was her own.

HG wore a similar jacket in black, leaving the top 2 buttons open she pushed her way out of the station and into the crowded streets. She didn’t need to look to know that the other woman was trailing behind her, taking in the sights. It wouldn’t take long for her to notice.

“Where are we going,” Myka asked, sliding next to HG. “This isn’t the way to the hotel.”

“Not the one the Warehouse would like us to stay at, no. “HG replied. “I have some suspicions that we were not given the full picture.”

“Because we’re being followed?”

Helena smiled. Of course she would know.

“Come. I have made alternative arrangements.”

It was long before the buildings became more run down and the area less populated. It was clearly one of the older sections of the city that had one time been one of its hotspots.

“The Time Traveler,” Myka stopped in front of the old hotel.

“A bit on the nose but it will do.” Helena pulled open the door.

“I didn’t realize these AI hotels were still around,” Myka murmured, taking in the empty Victorian styled lobby.

At the desk stood their host in a full 19th century suit and tie, complete with pocket watch.

“Welcome to the Time Traveler,” a crisp English accent boomed in the empty room. “My name is HG Wells. How many I serve you today?”

Myka couldn’t help but bark out a laugh.

“Two adjacent rooms please,” HG replied formally. The AI’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise.

“It has been far too long since I’ve heard my native tongue,” he smiled. “What level stay will you be needing?”

Before she could reply the doors behind them opened with a bang. Several men rushed in, weapons drawn.

“More guests?” the host asked.

“Not quite.” HG replied.

Myka had spun around, weapon drawn. She ground down on her teeth seeing they were out gunned.

“Bering, Wells,” the group’s leader lowered his gun slightly. “You best come with us. Or boss would like a word with ya.”

“Would he now?” Myka tightened the grip on her gun. “And who would he be?”

“You’ll see.”

“Miss,” the AI’s voice whispered to HG who still hadn’t turned. “What level of stay would you like?” His eyes looked down to the counter where her finger print would register payment. She had managed her assets well and in secret for centuries so money would never be an issue.

“Top shelf,” she smiled, slapping one hand down on the counter as the other reached for her weapon.

“Only the best for my sister,” the AI replied as a shot gun appeared in his hands.

#bering and wells #last call for vodka series #altered carbon au #a little bit of a cliffhanger in this one #warehouse 13

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ifourmindbeso · 7 years ago

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A very, very Merry Christmas

Anonymous asked: Dear Bering and Wellser, I am your secret Santa. What is your dearest wish for this lovely season? I can provide fic of a fluffy or angsty flavour, and will endeavour to write to any prompt you might like to give. Ho, ho, and additionally, ho. Santa ;)

Hey there, Santa — Every year I keep hoping I won’t need to say “please, no angst; the world’s angsty enough as it is”… but every year, here we are again, surrounded by upheaval and uncertainty. As for a prompt, then, what I’ll tell you is that the brilliant poet Mary Ruefle once titled an essay “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World.” Interpret that idea, or whatever constellation of ideas it represents, as you prefer… or ignore it completely and go with mistletoe! Menorahs! Mangers! It doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s Bering and Wells. And anyway, I’m already grateful to you, whichever nerdsbian you are, for being a part of this tenacious little fandom. This little fandom that is so big-hearted: it’s a gift in itself.

Merry Christmas, Bering and Wellsers, and to you, the lovely @apparitionism. This piece starts with the prompt above, but quickly goes off in a direction of hopelessly ridiculous. I don’t know where the inspiration for this came from, but part of it was definitely an illustration from the lovely @foxfire141 on tumblr. I asked if she would consider drawing something for this piece, and she provided the delightful illustration that, if I have done this right, should appear in the appropriate spot in the story. I have to thank her for her incredible work on this, and for her incredible talent. It has added to this piece in a way that I couldn't have imagined.

This is a sort-of sequel to my previous fic, ‘Aye, Zombie’. If you haven’t read it, you probably need to know that the Myka in this fic (and Claudia, Pete and Artie) grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Myka is somewhat foul-mouthed but has a good heart, despite her somewhat questionable past. Helena is the HG Wells, who came forward in time because Mrs Frederic told her that Christina would die if she didn’t. Christina consequently lived to old age. I think that’s all you need to know, but you could always go back and read Aye,Zombie, if you fancy some unintelligible Irish-isms and questionable humour.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race. HG Wells

“Now, you see, love. That’s what I don’t get. You wrote that thing about the bicycles, not Charlie, right?”

“Yes,” she said, patiently.

“So your great words to the world are that when you see someone on a bicycle, that gives you hope for the future of the human race? What about seeing someone with a book? Surely that is the thing that makes you think that, all right, maybe we aren’t going to explode in a nuclear apocalypse or die from extreme weather caused by global warming. Because people read, and they learn.”

“Well, I suppose I see what you mean,” she said, thoughtfully, looking far too fucking adorable in my opinion, “but a bicycle is a statement all of its own. It means that the person riding it prefers to travel under their own steam. Whether it’s for personal fitness, for the feel of the wind in their face, for the sake of the planet – it’s usually a good reason. A book – well, it can mean a multitude of things. If the book is the bible, well, I’m sorry to say it, but the person reading it could be wonderful, or they could be terrible. Christians come in all sorts of flavours. Evil being the one we’ve seen the most of throughout history. The book could be Mein Kampf. And again, the person reading it could be studying it, to learn about history so as not to repeat it, or they could be reading it to repeat history. Do you see what I mean?”

I looked at her, and I think my jaw fell open a little. After years of marriage – an idea I would have laughed about only a few years back – she still managed to surprise me.

“Do close your mouth dear, you look like a frog that someone’s trodden on,” she said, fondly.

I rolled my eyes. We might be in the 21st century, but my Helena was one of a kind. Victorian to the core. I expected her to say ‘spit spot’ and ‘chop chop’ at times, and then remembered that was just one of my fantasies. (I mean, Julie Andrews is hot, whether she’s in her twenties or her seventies.)

“Are you ready?” Helena asked, as we got onto the plane.

“I’m fine,” I said, scowling slightly. I hated travelling at the best of times, but flights like this – commercial flights – were the worst. You had no control, you were corralled like animals, you were shot if you moved an inch out of place… okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly felt that way. I could feel the watchful eyes of the air marshal on me and the other passengers. Thank Christ we were in First Class. At least that gave me enough room to stretch out and the attendants tended to be a bit more polite. Mrs Frederic had agreed to ship me first class after the first flight when things had gone a bit… haywire because of PTSD. But sure I’m fine now. Honest.

I drained a glass of Bushmills before we even took off our coats.

The retrieval we were going on was a simple one. People in Flippin, Arkansas were turning into their favourite foods. Like walking, talking muppet puppets in the shape of fries or a bowl of their favourite soup or a walking burger. Pete and I had arm-wrestled for this retrieval. I won, but I promised I’d take lots of pictures.

Sometimes life in the Warehouse made sense. Sometimes it really didn’t, and you had to take advantage of those times, I thought, because otherwise you would take it all too seriously and go batshit crazy.

I drank a few more shots of Bushmills, studiously ignoring Helena dropping a sleeping pill into one of them. She seemed to think that the ‘B A Baracus’ approach was the best way to get me from A to B safely. She might have been right. I had dreams about dancing ice cream cones and that time we all burst into song because of an artefact. It was not pleasant, I can assure you. Helena Wells, despite her many fine qualities, is entirely tone deaf, and Pete sounds like a bullfrog when he tries to sing. Thankfully the rest of us managed to drown them out in the ensemble pieces, but their solo pieces were… ugh.

I woke to Helena gently shaking me awake, touching my left shoulder. We had come up with a code after a few too many attempted punches of her poor face. She had great reflexes, though, and I’d never actually landed a punch on her. Left shoulder meant everything’s fine. Right shoulder meant there was trouble and to grab weapons. Anywhere else on my body – that meant it wasn’t her, or anyone else I trusted.

I wiped my face with a wet wipe before retrieving my bag from the locker and I filed out dutifully with the rest of the cattle. Our Secret Service badges got us past the security on the other end quickly, a fact for which I was grateful. Who wants to be stuck in an airport a few days before Christmas with the entire human race crowded around you? Nobody, that’s who. The entire place smelled like feet.

“Shall we check in first before we go to find our walking foodstuffs, darling?” she asked, and I was once again struck by her other-ness. She was a part of this century now, but a walking anachronism at the same time. When I met her she did a great impersonation of a human from this century, but since we became a partnership, she didn’t seem to want to hide her true self as much. I liked that, a lot.

“We should check in,” I said, wearily. “I hate travelling love, why can’t you invent a transporter? You said you made a shrink ray, didn’t you?”

“I did, but making a teleportation device is somewhat of a challenge, even for someone with my intellect. If you do as they do in your Star Wars, you disperse someone’s molecules and send them somewhere else with the aid of some unknown force. But are those people still themselves when they come out the other end? One misplaced atom could turn you into a yeti, darling, and I really don’t think our wedding vows would cover that sort of mishap. I can handle a certain amount of body hair, but that’s just a little too much for my tastes.”

I made a harrumphing noise at her, and we made our way by cab to the hotel, which was the usual Warehouse style – small but clean, close to town but not in the centre. The check-in took approximately a week and a half, or so it seemed to my somewhat grumpy self, but as soon as we had keys, we dumped our bags off, showered quickly and changed, and went to find our victims. I brought my digital camera - for purely professional reasons.

“Agent Bering, Agent Wells. It’s a pleasure to have you here in our little corner of the world.” It was the Sheriff, the fella who’d called for help with this bizarre phenomenon. He got us, ‘Secret Service’ agents.

“I didn’t like that Flippin airport much,” I said, in my best vaguely-American accent. He laughed loudly.

“You got a great sense of humour, Agent,” he said, thumbs tucked into his belt-loops, his impressive belly jiggling as he laughed. He looked a bit like Santa Claus, but without the beard.

“So, this is the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen, even in a town with a name like Flippin,” he said, scratching his head under his Sheriff hat thingie. “The weirdest thing that’s happened here is when Jerry Dorsey married his future mother-in-law instead of his bride-to-be, and that was like, thirty years ago.

“When did it start, Sheriff?” Helena asked smoothly, not bothering to try to disguise her accent. Her American accent was terrible, so I was relieved.

“You aren’t from the States?” he asked, frowning. “I thought Secret Service had to be ‘Murican.”

“I’m a special liaison from Scotland Yard,” Helena said, lying through her teeth. “Emily Lake, at your service.”

He smiled at that, tipping his hat.

“A pleasure, Ma’am. We don’t get many of the President’s people down here, so I’ll admit to a little scepticism when I saw you were coming. As to when it started, well, Billy McIntyre turned into a doughnut about… 3 days ago. Every day since, we’ve had three or four people try to come into the station. As if we can help them. I mean, how am I supposed to turn a doughnut into a human?”

“They tried to get into the station?” I asked, intrigued.

“You ever seen a six-foot wide doughnut try to walk through an ordinary doorway? Funniest damn thing I ever saw,” he said, letting out a high-pitched giggle that startled me so much I almost shot him. As it was, I stared at him, trying to work out what the fuck the noise was.

“It does sound very amusing,” Helena said, in her rich voice, touching his arm to distract him from my confused, startled face. “Now, Sheriff… Adams, was it? Could you take us to the victims, please? And then we’ll visit the local eateries to see what each person ate in the days before their… um, metamorphosis.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling at her. She was always a charmer, my Helena. I don’t know how she did it, but she charmed the knickers off anyone who looked at her for more than a few minutes. The only person I’d ever met who was even a little bit immune was Mrs Frederic, and even she had a soft spot for Helena, though she wouldn’t admit it.

I had to seriously get a hold of myself when we stepped into the sheriff’s station. We stepped into a back room, where I assumed they did their morning briefings. There were a variety of people there, all looking like they were wearing costumes of their favourite foods. Unfortunately, those people were the costumes. There was a man in the corner who was the 6ft-wide doughnut, and a woman in front of me (I assumed, because the muppet was wearing lipstick) who was a box of fries from a burger restaurant. And a dude who was a large bowl of phō, which I found even more hilarious than the others, because every time he moved, he spilled the contents of the ‘bowl’ everywhere.

We had chicken and waffles, an egg salad sandwich (and Jesus, that fucker must have been the dullest) and a tall man who looked like chunks of tofu with sesame seeds on it. It seemed even the vegans weren’t immune to the effects.

I kept what I thought was an admirably straight face as we questioned the food-people. No-one had been to the same place – that would have been too easy – but they had all eaten at various restaurants and fast-food haunts during the past week, so we made a list and split up, checking each one with artefact spray to see if anything reacted. I got strange looks from people at the diner and the Vietnamese place, and I’m sure Helena did at the burger restaurant and the large dining section at the mall. But when we met later that afternoon, we had nothing. Nada. Niente. Bubkiss. Or as we say in Belfast, fuck all.

“For the love of Christ,” I sighed. “How long are we going to be doing this? I’m fucking starving, and I don’t want to eat anything in case I turn into a giant Chicken parm sub.”

Believe me, I have no desire to become a walking kale salad,” Helena said, sighing in that long-suffering way of hers. “But we have to get to the bottom of this. It hasn’t had any negative effects as such, or at least not yet, but it could. What if one of them gets too hungry and tries to eat another? What if they really taste of the food they’re… sporting?”

“That could get a bit… unfortunate,” I said, my mind drifting back to when Helena and I met, against the background of a civil war and a zombie invasion. Sure it sounds romantic now, but when you watch your neighbours eating each other’s children, it’s… not so much.

“To say the very least,” Helena said.

We went back to the sheriff’s station and talked to the people some more, jotting down dozens of different locations, places they’d visited, people they’d seen. It was a small place, Flippin, with less than 2000 residents, so those places overlapped. A lot.

“We should go to each location and rule them out one by one,” Helena said, studiously arranging them in geographical order.

“Should we split up, or go together?” I asked.

“Together is safer, but apart means we cover more ground. My thought is that we do it apart, because things aren’t exactly dangerous. Or at least not yet.”

I nodded. We took each other’s hands for a moment, squeezing, just for comfort, and then we split up.

I went to visit the local DMV office, the postal office, a home depot-type store, and a general store. There was no dice. Nothing unusual, other than that the town was still called Flippin. Oh, and they reckoned they were a city. There were 17 thousand people in the tiny section of Belfast that I lived in when I was younger. That was a real city, and not even a big one. Flippin was not a city. Americans, am I right?

I got back to the sheriff’s station and was informed that two more people had shown up. One was a man who had turned into a roast chicken. His face was on the breast side, startled eyes with giant muppet eyelashes fluttering in confusion. He must have been balding in his human guise, because there was a ratty crown of hair that went slightly more than halfway around the body of the chicken. I took down the details of where he’d been, doing my best not to laugh, and then interviewed the other person, a woman who had become a hamburger. It was hard as fuck not to laugh at that poor girl, because her top lip was a slice of cheese, and her bottom lip was a burger. Both of which had lipstick on them, in case we should accidentally mistake the walking burger for a male walking burger. She was trying not to panic, and every little breath made her cheese lip flutter in the wind, and made me have to fake a coughing fit because I was dying.

I took some photographs, for want of something better to do, and married up each food-person with their human photographs, sending it all back to Claudia. For professional reasons only, I assure you. And then I started to worry, because Helena had less ground to cover than I did, and she was nowhere to be seen.

I called her phone, but there was no answer. I did start to get a bit worried, then, so I called Claudia on my Farnsworth.

“Hey, Sir Mykes-a-lot. How’s it going there in crazytown?” It was nice to hear another Irish accent, I will admit. The Warehouse has four of us, but it’s rare to meet the Irish while out and about in the field. I mean, I’ve met those who claim to be Irish, but 23 generations back doesn’t count. Especially not if you can’t pronounce your own name. (I’m talking to you, Ni-am.)

“I’m grand, darling,” I said, rubbing the spot between my eyebrows. “My fair lady has disappeared though, and you know it’s not like her to not answer when I call.”

Claudia’s eyes narrowed. She did indeed know that Helena wouldn’t make me worry unnecessarily.

“Let me track her,” she said, already typing away furiously.

There was a silence, and I got a little alarmed, I will admit. But then she spoke, her forehead all crinkled up.

“She’s in town. Heading your way, actually. But the signal… it’s like it’s there, but it’s not? It’s almost transparent. There’s no setting in my system for something to show up transparent. I call magical hijinks, Mykster. She’s heading up main street now; should be with you in a minute.”

I nodded.

“Thanks, kiddo. See you soon,” I said. I made a mental note to buy her something tasteless before I left town. I was pretty sure somewhere like Flippin would have some really tasteless tourist shite. My favourite thing Claudka had bought me was a Hillary Clinton lighter, where Hill’s head flipped back and flames came out of her neck. I had managed to get her a Pope Pez dispenser in a little Catholic shop in a town near the border, and was still trying to top it.

I went to the door of the station, peering out into the dark. There was a figure approaching, but it didn’t look like Helena. It didn’t look human. I took a deep breath, my heart thundering in my ears. It stepped closer, and then into the light of a streetlamp. It was… a hot dog. A walking, presumably talking, hot dog. Another unfortunate victim, I assumed, looking around behind it for Helena.

As it put its weird muppet feet on the first step up to the station, I noticed that it was a girl. Due to the ketchup in the shape of a mouth. And the long hair that covered about a third of the length of the dog. The poor girl had huge brown eyes, and dark eyebrows drawn into a scowl, and then she stepped closer.

“I swear to all that’s holy, if you laugh at me, we are getting a divorce,” my wife said, muppet eyelashes fluttering in annoyance.

I am not proud to say that I immediately laughed.

I had to be lifted from the floor by two burly sheriff’s deputies, who kindly carried me to the bathroom. I was laughing so hard that I was close to losing control of my bladder. Even as I was sitting on the loo, I was still laughing so hard that I pulled two muscles, one on my back and the other on my abdomen. Tears streamed down my face and I howled with pain, but still I laughed. It took me forty-five minutes to stop myself from laughing, and even then, I started again each time I saw my own face in the mirror. Eventually I was calm enough to send a message to Claudia.

“SOS. Helena is hot-dog. Helena pretended her favourite food was kale salad. I may need an artefact to be sent that takes away my ability to laugh. Divorce proceedings imminent.”

I made my way out of the bathroom a little while later, finding the muppet version of my wife talking to Sheriff Adams. She was trying to coax him into doing something, I thought, because her stubby little muppet hand was on his arm and her giant muppet eyelashes were all a-flutter.

I beat a hasty retreat into a nearby office until I calmed my hysterics.

The second attempt was no more successful. I thought of the saddest things I’d ever seen, tried to turn myself into a PTSD-haunted robot by thinking about things I’d done in my past, but still… muppet Helena took me down effortlessly.

Eventually I was able to speak to her without laughing (much) and we determined that there were two places where she might have been caught up in the artefact’s effects. I continued to say ‘artefact’s effects’ after that because each time I said the words ‘food muppets’ she glared, and she looked even funnier than she already did.

Hot-dog Helena had onions and mustard down one side of the sausage. I don’t know why that made me laugh harder, but it did.

I fled the station, delighted beyond measure to be able to leave my wife’s side. I could not control myself, and I knew that I was skating close to the edge of divorce and/or death by muppet smothering. I kept breaking out in hysterical little bouts of giggling, and I knew I must have looked a sight, the tall Secret Service agent who occasionally starting cry-laughing over her muppet wife.

I visited the seedy side of Flippin, finding a small illegal casino-type operation that Helena had visited, and used the artefact spray to douse everything that didn’t move. And some that did. Nothing sparked. The next stop was the town hall, where a number of people on the list seemed to have been. I visited the mayor, a young attractive redhead, who urged me to leave a Christmas wish in the jar on her desk. Something tugged at me, then, because one thing I have learned as a Warehouse agent is that wishes have power. I sprayed the jar with the goo-spray, and it sparked. It sparked a lot. I grabbed the thing, relieved, and thanked the Mayor, who looked at me in confusion when I told her I needed to take it away, for National Security reasons. I swear, you could poke someone in the eye in this country and say it was for National Security, and they’d ask you to do it again.

I brought the jar back to the station, walking along absently, giggling occasionally to myself, when I suddenly realised that I was… different. My arms seemed shorter, and… yes. There was something dripping from behind me.

Now before you get all gross, there was a trail of marinara sauce behind me, mixed with cheese. Mozzarella, a little cheddar, and parmesan. When I tried to look down, I couldn’t. My eyes were widely spaced, I’d realised, and my mouth was way further from my eyes than it used to be.

So, I was a walking chicken parmigiana sub. Because unlike some alleged kale-lovers, I told the truth about my favourite food.

I sighed, trying to take my phone from my pocket, but my pocket was gone, under a pile of bread, I had to assume. I had an urge to try and pull some of the bread off and eat it, because I smelled really nice. But then I thought… there’s always a downside. And how do you explain that you’re missing a limb or a rib because you ate part of yourself when you were a sandwich?

I knocked on the door of the station, and a startled deputy let me in. He managed to keep his face straight, to his credit.

“Can you grab me my kit from the other room, son?” I asked him, vaguely aware that I had a bouncing crown of curls that had just drifted into my eyeline as I moved. I wondered exactly how ridiculous I looked, and stood there, waiting. The young man came back, his face purple, and I asked if he would take out the goo cannister.

Before I dunked the jar, I asked him to take a picture of me. I’d taken approximately 43 thousand of Helena, already, and turnabout was fair play. He did so, still managing not to laugh in my face, and then I dunked the thing. It hissed and it sparked, and still… marinara sauce dripped onto the floor.

“Shite.”

The fella ran off, howling, as the giant chicken sub swore. I didn’t blame him.

I went into the room where the rest of the food-afflicted were, finding Helena reading a book, holding the pages down with her muppet-fingers. I waved at her with my muppet fingers, and she laughed, and she laughed.

And she laughed.

It was possibly the stupidest thing that had ever happened in my life, and that included fighting with a group of inter-dimensional crime lords who started a zombie outbreak. It was hard to be professional about it, I had to be honest. I knew that, because there’s always a downside, it was potentially much more serious than it appeared – which was, of course, not remotely serious. I challenge you, however, to do any better, when faced with a roomful of muppet foodstuffs.

Having tried the obvious solution, to neutralise the artefact, I knew I had to contact the team. But my cellphone was somewhere in the in-between, I supposed, along with my Farnsworth. I grabbed Helena, and we made our way ponderously into the other part of the station, searching out the Sheriff. Sauce and cheese sloshed behind me as I walked.

Once Sheriff Adams stopped laughing, he set up a video conference with the Warehouse. I would have done it myself, but my arms were too short to go around my giant chicken sub body, and I couldn’t reach the keyboard.

Helena laughed about that until she wept ketchup.

We got no sense out of Claudia, none at all, and the poor girl’s mascara was everywhere, so I yelled for Arthur, and he, thankfully, just scowled at us.

“You both got whammied?”

I tried to shrug. It did not work, given that I appeared not to have shoulders.

“I found the artefact and neutralised it. I was wearing gloves, Arthur. But you know how these wishing artefacts are.”

He scowled harder, his eyebrows scrunching up like scary caterpillars, and he said nothing for a moment.

“Go sleep. Get some food. It can’t get much worse, I wouldn’t think. So eat something and sleep, and we’ll research tonight, and we’ll come back to it tomorrow.”

“All right then,” I said, rolling my eyes. Or trying to. I dread to think how it actually looked. Could my eyes even move? I wasn’t really sure; the perspective made everything look weird.

We went back to the room where the other foods were hiding out, and the Sheriff agreed that he’d get us some food, since we had neutralised the problem but were still stuck. It couldn’t hurt, right? We had pizza, all of us, and it was amusing to watch an eight-foot-wide pizza eating a pizza. The sheriff got us a load of yoga mats and big blankets, and we all settled down to sleep in our various food guises. When I lay down, my sauce stopped dripping everywhere, but the poor dude who turned into phō had to sit upright so he didn’t drown us all.

When I woke the next morning, I tried to jump up, and ended up just flailing like a turtle on its back. I had no idea where I was, I was trapped and I was ready for murder. Thankfully, I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was Helena’s muppet-self. That brought me from murderous to hysterical in seconds, and I lay there, helpless, legs and arms flapping as I tried to flip my sandwich-self up off the yoga mat.

“I’m normal again!” someone shouted, and I redoubled my efforts. One of the burgers helped me to my feet, and then I helped Helena, who was not exactly talking to me, to her feet. We turned and found that Steve, the giant pizza, was now just Steve again.

“We have to eat the food we’re craving!” Helena and I said in unison, and then we tried to high-five, missing spectacularly and ending up on the floor in a mess of mustard, onion and marinara sauce. It took the phō guy, Mr Egg Salad, and Doug the Cheeto to get us up off the floor, by which stage we were covered in various sauces, but triumphant.

The sheriff sent out a bunch of his deputies to fetch the requisite foodstuffs, and we took a sly picture of ourselves and the other victims to hang up at the Warehouse. One delicious sandwich (or hot dog, or potato snack, or burger) later, we all sat against the walls of the huge rooms, waiting for the magic to happen.

It took a few hours, and we were all terribly bored, but keeping ourselves going by chatting about Christmas and going home for the holidays, when there was a popping noise from Doug’s corner, and he turned from Cheeto to human. A few seconds later Phō turned to Phil, and I turned back into me. Helena, who’d eaten her hot dog slowly while pretending to hate it, was one of the last to turn back. Finally, there were a roomful of sheepish people staring at each other and wondering what to do next.

Helena, thankfully, got her human brain back quicker than I did. I was thinking about going to find another chicken parm sub, to be honest, because it had been delicious. But she stood, waved her badge around, told them all we’d been exposed to toxic gas that caused hallucinations, and one by one, our former foodstuffs made their way back to their families.

“All’s well that ends well, I suppose,” she said, sniffing, pointedly not looking at me.

“I suppose. It’s a terrible shame we have to get divorced, though. I was just getting used to being married to a Brit.”

“Hmmph,” was all she said, her arms folded, but I could see from the set of her shoulders that she was relaxing. I realised I might get out of this flippin’ town with my marriage intact, and I grinned.

We gave the Sheriff and his staff a non-disclosure agreement to sign, and gave them the usual rubbish about hallucinations and toxic gas, and they all nodded, shaking their heads. We went back to our hotel and tossed a coin for who got the shower first. Helena won, and I sat on the edge of the bed on top of a towel, so as to not get marinara sauce all over the bedding.

I sat there, glad to be human, flipping idly through channels on the television until she came out of the bathroom, naked in all her glory. I grinned at the sight, and she glared at me.

I wasn’t entirely forgiven, it appeared. I took myself into the bathroom, washed up, called the concierge to have our clothes cleaned, and then sat at the small desk to write my report on the incident. I studiously added all the pictures I’d taken, except the ones of Helena. I finished it up, scanning and sending it to the Warehouse, and then I packed up the wish jar - still inside the containment cannister – and the rest of my clothes. Then I gathered up my courage and asked my taciturn wife if she was hungry.

She glared at me as if I was taking the mickey, but I wasn’t, for a change, so she told me stiffly that she would like a salad. I am human, so I was tempted, but I ordered only a salad and did not at any point mention the words ‘hot dog’. I ordered myself a burger and fries and all the fixings, and when it arrived I scarfed it down. When dinner (which was technically lunch, given the time) was done I changed into my usual sleepwear, loose cotton tshirt and shorts, and got into bed. I pulled down the sheets on the other side in clear invitation, and Helena huffed at me, going to the bathroom again, where I heard her brush her teeth. She switched off the light and got into bed with me, and I could feel her begrudging it as she did so.

“There’s another bed, darling. If you’re really that mad,” I said, quietly.

“It’s fine,” she said, back stiff.

I ran my finger down her spine, just once. She made a huffing noise and then turned, putting her head under my chin, her arm around my waist. She was lying on my left arm, so I curled it a little, wrapping it around her body, and she sighed.

“You’re a complete arse, you know,” she said.

“I am,” I agreed. “But I’m your complete arse.”

“Hmm. What a catch.”

“Indeed I am. Catch of the century.”

“You’re a fucking pain, Myka Bering.”

“That’s Myka Bering-Wells, darling,” I said, lazily. “And I love you too.”

It was all right again after that, though she became somewhat frosty when she called the Warehouse the following morning and was greeted only by Claudia’s feet, Claudia herself having tipped her chair back so far that she’d fallen over. (I might have just sent our food-group selfie to her.)

On the flight back to South Dakota, she took my hand, both of us comforting each other as the plane took off.

“I love you, you complete arse,” she said, after a glass or two of red wine.

“I love you too, you gorgeous creature,” I said grandly, after three generous measures of Bushmills.

She sighed, took my hand, and fell asleep.

When we eventually got to the B&B after dropping off the artefact at the Warehouse, we were greeted at the door by Leena, dressed in her usual Mrs Santa costume. She looked spectacular, and Helena looked at me, amused, as I tried not to gawk. I mean, I’m married, not a nun.

Leena gestured at us both to leave our bags, handing us hot chocolate topped with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.

“You are a sight for sore eyes, sweet lady,” I said, with a sweeping bow.

“And you are a flirt, Mrs Bering-Wells,” Leena said, winking at Helena. We made our way to the living room, finding Claudia spread out on the sofa, her head in Steve’s lap, and Pete scarfing down a plate of Leena’s chocolate Christmas logs.

“Mykes!” Pete bellowed, jumping up and throwing himself at me. I hastily divested myself of my hot chocolate and accepted his sweaty embrace.

“Bout ye, Pete,” I said, grinning as he lifted me off my feet. He put me down, none too gently, and went to give Helena the same treatment. The look she gave him would have scoured the hide off a pig.

“Hello, Pete. If you put your sweaty hands on me, I will not be held responsible for my actions, do you understand?”

Pete backed away, mumbling about crazy Brits, and I hid my smile behind my hand.

“Hey, girls! We have some lovely pictures of you,” Claudia said, grinning up at us.

“Iks-nay on the ictures-pay,” I said, behind my hand.

“Don’t worry about it, darling. I did in fact grow a sense of humour about all this, eventually. As it turns out, this century has indeed influenced my Victorian sensibilities somewhat. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that, yes, hot dogs are my favourite food, much as I wish they weren’t. That does not mean I will be indulging in them, however. I will continue to eat a healthy balanced diet, unlike my unfairly slim wife, who seems to subsist on all manner of appalling foods,” Helena said, looking at me disapprovingly.

“They’re only appalling to you, darling. I enjoy them, and so does everyone else here. And you know that Leena makes sure we get a balanced diet. It’s just when we’re out in the field that I indulge.”

She shook her head, rolled her eyes – all the usual. I just ignored her and sat down with my hot chocolate. Leena appeared again a few minutes later with some churros which I happily dipped in my hot chocolate. I noticed that my lovely wife did the same, surreptitiously of course.

Claudia, Steve and Pete were talking quietly while a horrifically bad Christmas movie played on the television. I watched Helena quietly. She was beautiful, sitting there with the light of the fire flickering in her eyes. She took the occasional sip of hot chocolate but mostly she was sitting there, looking at the fire, her eyes far away. She was exceptionally beautiful, like a marble statue of a greek goddess.

I heard the piano start up from the other room. Arthur, despite his Jewish roots, has always loved Christmas music. Claudia jumped up. She has always had a passion for music, and this was part of Christmas for her. She wandered off to find him, Steve following close behind.

“Mykissimo,” Pete said, jumping to his feet. “You can’t miss out on the yearly sing-song.”

“I suppose not,” I said, polishing off my hot chocolate. “You coming, love?”

She looked up at me.

“Just a minute, darling. I’ll be right there.”

I smiled at her and left her to it. Christmas was a difficult time for her, I knew. Her little girl had always loved Christmas time. Sometimes she needed a minute, to think about her daughter and how she’d lived to be a grand old age. How she wouldn’t have done, if Helena had stayed in her own time.

Arthur was playing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” and Steve was singing along in a pleasant baritone. He had a nice voice, and I loved listening to him. Claudia came to stand in front of me, pulling my arms around her neck, and I smiled down at her. She was like my wee sister.

When we were done with that song, Arthur started playing “O Holy Night.” It was my favourite Christmas song of all time, and I knew that he knew that. He turned and winked at me, and I smiled back. When I was at a Catholic school in Northern Ireland, there was a lot of emphasis on music, and the harmonies in this song and the way it all blended together had enthralled me then. It still does now.

Claudia started to sing, her sweet, light little voice singing the melody. When the chorus came along, we all started to sing our parts, Steve, Claudia, Artie and me – Pete can’t sing for toffee. The chorus swelled and then it pulled back before the next verse. Claudia’s sweet voice made me smile. We reached the second chorus and I realised that I had goosebumps. I turned, finding Helena leaning against the doorjamb, watching us all fondly. The thought of her in her Muppet body did cross my mind, and I smiled to myself. That image wouldn’t be leaving me anytime soon. But the way she looked standing there in her blue shirt and jeans and bare feet, her hair loose around her shoulders, it just made something in me still for a moment. The combination of the perfect music and the perfect woman in front of me made me feel calm and relaxed for once, and if I’d been the praying type, I might have said a thank you to the baby Jesus or whatever right then. As it was, I just thanked anyone who was listening for giving me these people and this place, and letting me live in endless wonder.

Merry Christmas, everyone !

#Helena HG Wells #Myka Bering #Bering and Wells #Christmas fic #Warehouse 13

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