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apparitionism · 2 years ago

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Tabled 4

And on we go, @barbarawar , as I continue to try your patience with this incremental approach to telling a @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story about coffees and consequences. Where we last left our duo: Helena had proposed adjourning to a hotel room so as to avoid continuing to attract attention for disorderly behavior (i.e., launching coffees at each other, followed by raised voices) at O’Hare Airport—that transitory place where Myka had intended to have a final coffee with Helena before telling her goodbye and returning to the Warehouse to face a future she doesn’t really want. Part 1, part 2, and part 3 explained the tables, books, beverages, and lies that led to this point.

Tabled 4

The trek to the hotel is arduous. No conversation. Myka appreciates the tacit agreement she and Helena seem to have made to wait for the space, but she’s bowed by what it’s added: multiple steamer trunks of existential weight, all of them balanced on her head, her shoulders, such that it’s labor for her even to turn her head in Helena’s direction.

Nevertheless they navigate, side by side, destination mutual. That’s weight too.

All Myka is physically carrying is her laptop case; she’d told herself, “I can work on reports on the plane. Or prepare remarks.” Instead she’d sat on the plane. It might as well have crashed; she was already braced for impact. Braced, yet again. For all the impacts.

Helena is similarly unencumbered, but without even a work-pretense: only a slim little bag, its strap a delicate suggestion of metallic braid that adorns her shoulder. She offers the sleekest of presentations, with even her stained sweater somehow managing to speak to her apparent surety that whatever the thoughts of those regarding her might be, they’ll redound to her benefit.

Myka, on the other hand, wants to hold her case to her sullied chest, or better yet fold herself entirely over, to hide this... evidence. She hates giving anyone grounds for a negative inference, and the uncomplimentary list of things any given observer might take the smirch as evidence of is infinite.

She herself has felt that “redound to my benefit” certainty only in the rarest of circumstances. Once or twice, though, it’s happened when Helena was the one regarding her, giving Myka a fully confident sense of I know you like everything you see, and even better, you like it just the way I want it to be liked. Transporting, when it happened.

Helena chooses that moment to turn ever so slightly, meeting Myka’s eyes ever so briefly... as if in appreciative echo of the past.

It prompts Myka to think on a different kind of evidence: what she and Helena provide, as they pace beside each other through the airport. It could oh so easily support the idea that they’re traveling together, which in turn leads to the infinitely better idea that they might be traveling together.

Indulge, she tells herself, and the granting of permission... it shifts the weight.

Who are we, this me, this Helena, traveling together... traveling together. She starts simple: We’re Warehouse agents on a retrieval. But of course that’s too easy. Okay, instead, we’re... dealers in rare books? Better... And we’re heading to an auction... wait, no, we’re heading home (home together), home from an auction, one that yielded a rare first edition of... oh, let’s say The Invisible Man... and the auctioneer unfortunately made a slightly incorrect statement about its original serialization... one that Helena felt she had to counter emphatically... leading to the first fistfight ever seen at that auction house...

Myka can easily picture the self-satisfied snarl-smile Helena would have worn as she decked the ill-informed auctioneer. The ease with which she can conjure such a moment... that, paradoxically, is yet more weight.

Even so, she warms further to the story, folding in their coffee stains: On this first leg of our trip home (home together), there was dramatic, beverage-service-disrupting turbulence... but we got through it with only wardrobe-related disasters... which is to say, we protected the first edition...

The fantasy looms real enough for Myka to put her hand against her case, casting an impossible wish for confirmation that it holds a precious book.

When her wish isn’t granted, she’s nonsensically crestfallen. Her indulgence now seems yet another blunder, as foretold by that other... book. (She can’t get all the way to “precious,” not this minute, an aspersion of omission for which she’s pretty sure she’ll be expected to apologize.)

Remember that future, Myka tells herself. She pronounces those words in her head, and she’s half tempted to say them to Helena, too, despite the fact that she’d have no idea what it’s about. Though she might ask what it’s about... and Myka can’t land on whether she would hate or thrill to offering an explanation. I used an artifact, she might begin. Because of you. She might go on: And I lied about it. Also because of you.

That might get her a snarl-smile of her own. Maybe even a fistfight.

In the end she stays silent; it’s the theme of this hotel-destined journey. She should rather have focused on Helena, with no imaginings; should rather have just looked, no matter how great the weight. What would observers have concluded then?

You just told yourself a story about that.

As they near the hotel desk, Helena says, “Allow me,” and Myka... does. Because, for good or ill, Helena is the driver. If she were not, Myka would be at a gate, sitting and waiting for a flight, her mission nearing completion. Instead, she’s standing a good distance away from Helena in a hotel lobby, calling Steve, saying, “I’m pretty sure I’m missing my plane.”

The response in her ear: “Because...?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Really? No.”

“Good. But if anybody else asks—”

“And when you say ‘anybody else.’”

Myka sighs. “I mean protect me.”

“By saying what?”

“I’m stuck in an airport.”

“You believe that,” Steve says, with a little wondering hitch.

“Oh how I do.” She laughs, just a half-huff. “Oh how I’d prefer not to.”

She hears, “Is that Myka? Where is she?” It’s Claudia (not Pete, thank god), in the background.

“Stuck in an airport,” Steve says.

“Weather?” Claudia asks, now close to the phone.

“Storms,” Myka tells her.

“That sucks,” Claudia pronounces. “See you when the climate gods dispensate some dispensation.”

After a pause—presumably waiting till Claudia leaves earshot—Steve says, “You’re getting really good at this.”

“This?”

“Letting language slip. To do the dirty work.”

“Good at this,” Myka echoes, belatedly. She knows it now as cause for despair. She’s painfully aware that the work is dirty, but... she’s developing a facility. That’s what’s wrong. “I’ll try to get worse.”

“After the storms?”

“During,” she says, because speaking in private should—at the very least and very last, it should—entail saying what she really means. Not letting anything slip.

Should. Which doesn’t, dirty or otherwise, mean “will.”

“Take care,” Steve says.

“I don’t know how,” Myka concludes. It’s a weird way to end a phone call, but Steve seems to know it’s right.

Helena has decorously waited to approach, but now her seemingly eager “Shall we?”, key card in hand, is a painful parody of the invitation Myka has dreamed of for years. If it had happened in those earlier years, it could have been an invitation to everything. Now it’s just an invitation to... blunders. And their contribution to an end.

The existential weight lowers again onto Myka—countdown-tragic now—as she waits out the rise of the elevator (its mirrored walls too harsh) and the walk through the corridor (its canned lights too artificial). It freights even the too-sunny chirp of the key card’s success, as Helena inserts it into the door.

As Helena pushes the door’s handle down in further proof of that success, she looks over her shoulder at Myka with something like delight—but is it delight at this circumstance, this promise of new privacy? Or is it another instance of her generalized thrill at an encounter with technology? That she might not yet be so familiar with as to be jaded by this aspect of modernity is... something very like heartwarming. But also painful, because how many Helena-delighted-by-the-new episodes has Myka been deprived of witnessing? How many episodes of anything and everything Helena-related has Myka been deprived of witnessing?

And what is the consequence of letting herself know that as deprivation? And, more, feeling that deprivation as pain?

Helena pushes the door open and strides across the threshold, but Myka hesitates, hoping for... something. Purpose? All that comes to her is a maxim: never go in without knowing how you’ll get out.

Where Helena is concerned, Myka has never known how she’ll get out. Ridiculous to think she could start now.

She goes in.

The quiet: that’s what strikes her first. The closing of the door behind her is a muted snick; after it, there is no noise at all.

Then she apprehends scent: antiseptic overlain with some ruse of spice, as if “clean” couldn’t possibly be enough to justify the undoubtedly absurdly high price of the room. Of course it probably couldn’t; nevertheless Helena had paid it. Myka wants to resent that, but she’s the one who acquiesced to that “allow me.”

The scrimmed light from the window allows her eyes to discern only the barest detail, but they’re drawn immediately to... of course. A table. Metallically, shinily, obviously, a table. It’s small and round, seemingly innocuous (too low to sit at), but Myka skirts it. She sets her laptop case on the less-threatening desk.

Helena lays her own bag on the bed. The bed, which Myka had intended to ignore. Then she turns, eyes still eagerly alight, to face deskside-anchored Myka.

The look sends Myka back to ideas of I can’t do this, or maybe what she means is I can’t feel this, but that isn’t right either, for what she feels isn’t singular; instead it’s I can’t feel these, these battering, battling threads of sensation she can’t untangle. “Why are we here,” she says, groping, suddenly dull, feeling the air numb around her.

“For speaking,” Helena says. Over there. By the bed. “Freely. As you agreed we should.”

But where is the freedom? The table reminds Myka of constraint, and even the room’s privacy—this new, behind-a-locked-door privacy—chains her, making her question every movement, lest it speak as she doesn’t intend. Or does intend but shouldn’t intend. Paralysis. “What do you want to say?” she asks.

Whatever Helena wants to say, she wants to accompany it with a head-toss, followed by a contemptuous exhale. Quite a performance, at the conclusion of which she snorts and juts her hands at Myka. “At the very least, more words about the unbelievability of your putative romantic choices.” Contempt coats it all.

“You don’t know what’s in my heart,” Myka says. She means it as a dismissive judgment—of Helena’s continuing to insist that she knows how Myka feels or doesn’t feel about Pete (although of course, Myka has to concede privately, she does know)—but, more broadly, of Helena’s not bothering herself to know how Myka has felt about anything. Not for a very long time.

“I’m aware,” Helena says, and then, as if she’s heard Myka’s more-broad thoughts, she says, “I’m very aware.” Then she stops—another of those curiosity-piquing pauses—leaving Myka to wonder what’s next. What is: “So tell me,” she says. Soft. Sincere.

“Why?” Myka asks. “What will it change?”

“For one thing, you will have said it. Rather than simply felt it.”

“Said it to you, you mean,” she accuses. Right: something might change for Helena.

“Ah. You’ve spoken of this to others. Perhaps your sister? And have you found that unburdening to be helpful?”

That’s soft and sincere too, but internally, Myka snarls, with no smile, You can keep your therapy questions. I have all the Abigail I can handle on that front. She wouldn’t answer such a question no matter who asked it, and she is neither ready nor willing to explain Steve—Steve and what he’s meant. Instead, she says, “This room has a coffeemaker,” despite not knowing that for sure. But it must. “I’m going to find it and... use it.” A neutral action, that’s what she needs.

“I’ll watch you,” Helena says.

So much for neutral.

But turning her back on Helena... surprisingly, it loosens her. The gaze is on her, and she feels it, but she doesn’t have to meet it. She finds the coffeemaker on the bureau and begins the process: water, cups, coffee packets, filter basket. Of course it isn’t neutral, would never have been, but being occupied, putting something in that space between—standing and looking was never going to get them anywhere, given that it never did in the past—it lightens the atmosphere. It’s a purpose. It’s a purpose against which Myka can, and thus determines to, slide a question of her own.

“So you had this realization that there was ‘someone else’,” Myka says, making the quotation marks as clear as she vocally can, “and you broke up with him?”

“Essentially,” Helena says.

To her... credit?... it’s not an objection to the topic shift. Or to the quotation marks. But it’s also profoundly not informative. “What, seriously”—Myka had nearly made the mistake of saying “honestly”—“is that supposed to mean?” She turns around, away from her coffee task; the machine’s begun to noise, anyway, so it doesn’t need her.

Helena’s aspect doesn’t indicate that the renewed eye contact is meaningful. She says, “That is supposed to mean you have identified the essence of what occurred.”

More details are clearly not forthcoming. Back up. Ask something else. “Why did you go to that place at all? Why go there and make yourself so... small?”

The very idea is tragic—even worse, pathetic. Helena’s slight dip of head, signaling at least partial agreement, offers pathos too. “Safety,” she says. “Mrs. Frederic said I’d be safe there.”

“I could have kept you safe. Why didn’t she say that?” Myka hears herself getting louder now, angry at all the conversations, decisions, interactions that were kept from her, that she had a right to be part of, all these clandestine resolutions to problems that she and Helena deserved to solve together.

“She had other plans for you,” is the reason Helena gives. Pathos there too. It’s awful.

“What about my plans for me?” Myka cries, and it must have been audible all over the hotel, this nearest she’s ever come to a barbaric yawp, and it’s about all of it: Mrs. Frederic and Pete and expectations and everyone thinking they know and no one knowing, not even Helena, who might have been the only one who could have really known but went away, was taken away, and now Myka is going to have to push her away and this is exactly why she turned to the book: to steal back the tatters of her own capacity, one small bit of augury at a time.

“You work for the Warehouse,” Helena says.

It’s a bald truth. It’s why little auguries are all Myka has. But it splits her open, too, for it tells nothing at all about why Helena did what she did, and she shouts a new accusation into the yawning gap: “You don’t!” And another: “Since when do you bend the knee to authority?”

Helena straightens her spine. “Since authority rendered me incorporeal and suggested I would be returned to that state if I didn’t do as I was told.” She lowers her chin, giving that spine one more bit of extension. “I was disinclined to stop living.”

It breaks Myka. No, it re-breaks her. She knows she should say things, including “but you redeemed yourself” and “so what’s different now,” but all she can in fact do is reach out a hand and touch Helena.

Maybe that’s what Helena intended, but even if it is...

Between any two people, it might be nothing: a simple right hand resting upon a left shoulder, followed by a run down that left arm, to the left elbow, then wrist, brushing against a left hand’s fingers, falling away.

But it’s Myka’s right hand. It’s Helena’s left shoulder. Helena’s arm. Helena’s elbow, wrist, fingers.

They’re behind a locked door.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tabled #B&W holiday gift exchange #part 4 #barbarawar #I have to confess:#I love the word 'fistfight'#but don't worry #Myka and Helena won't resort to physical violence #other than the coffee-weaponization kind #because even if you remove bodies from the equation #they have no trouble doing violence to each other #or maybe it's that they do have trouble #and removing bodies from the equation makes it worse #which is not to say that adding bodies back in necessarily makes it better

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