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apparitionism · 4 months

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Asleep

Happy @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange to @kla1991 , our fearless leader, who of course knew I was their gifter, and who requested “a bed-sharing scenario that doesn't immediately turn sexy,” one that might involve tensions and/or physical discomfort. I’ve tried to approach that assignment in the appropriate spirit, with a bit of spin, although I suppose it all really depends on what any given person considers “sexy”... anyway, I’m pretty sure there are two sides to every story. Two sides to every bed, too. Here’s the first side. (This takes place in a post-season-five world, because why not raise the difficulty level?)

Asleep

My arm is asleep.

Normally, a person would, upon realizing this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.

Normally.

But very little is normal about the situation in which Myka’s arm is asleep.

She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the extremely limited “normal” portion of the situation.

Here begins the rest: she absolutely must not move. This is because she can hear, and can as a molecular disturbance feel, the steady push-pull of Helena’s breathing, near her neck, so near. She feels also the unfamiliar proximity of Helena’s body, offering heat across what must be only nanometers separating her from Myka’s back. And then there is Helena’s hand, what must be her right hand, resting in sleep, what must be unconscious sleep, on Myka’s hip.

They have never been in a bed together before tonight—but also, sadly also, they are not in a bed together now. They are simply two people in a bed in a hotel room, one of them obviously sleeping, obviously fulfilling her role in the “two agents are sharing a hotel room and getting some rest” play they are performing.

Myka, however, is not asleep. No: instead she is on fire because of Helena’s breath and heat and hand but unable to do anything about any of that, and thus desperate to escape and suffer her mortification in private but unable to do anything about any of that either—a terrible combination.

And now her arm, as if in intentional mockery, is asleep.

She has arrived at this pretty pass due to a series of events that had seemed, in their unfolding, to be at the very least manageable...

... starting with Helena’s return to the Warehouse.

That return had at first struck Myka as a beautiful dream—and, equally, a reward for awakening from a nightmare.

The particular nightmare from which Myka had awakened was the fugue in which she’d imagined she might have romantic feelings for Pete. How perfect it had seemed, then, for Helena to present herself to resume agent duties at the Warehouse, so soon after that enormous error had been rectified. “A reboot, I believe it’s called,” Helena had said of her change of heart, and Claudia had laughed uproariously at that, shouted “Turn it off and turn it on again!”, and hugged the obviously befuddled, but just as obviously pleased, rebooted agent.

Myka had not hugged Helena, not then. She’d thought to save such an action, such an aggressively bodily action, for an even more meaningful time, progress toward which would, at long last, begin.

But progress had not begun. In the reboot, Helena was a collegial colleague to Myka.... and that was all.

Helena did not, as she had in old times (old shows?), make comments that even usually-oblivious Myka could read as flirtatious. She did not step close, too close, as she had in old times, waking Myka’s body to possibility and want. She did not, in fact, mention old times at all. No words about “Wells and Bering”—as Myka had hoped to one day again correct, however incorrect Helena found the correction, to “Bering and Wells”—having ever done anything together.

And Myka of course could not assault such a collegial colleague with an anguished Why? She could do nothing but wish for a reboot of her own, or at least a do-over, one in which the minute Helena stepped from Claudia’s embrace, Myka herself initiated one that made her hopes clear.

But no such reboot was forthcoming.

That disappointment was, Myka found, manageable. Crushing, but manageable. It was made more so by the fact that Artie sent Helena on retrievals with Steve, sometimes with Claudia as adjunct; thus her collegial interactions with Myka did not have particularly meaningful stakes. At least, none that were Warehouse-specific, and that was what counted. That had to be what counted.

Until one morning at breakfast, when Artie tossed a folder at Myka and said, “Tomorrow you’re going to San Antonio to bag a camera.”

Then he pointed at Helena. “And you’re going with her.”

“Am I?” Helena asked, even as Myka voiced, “She is?

“She’s the one who stole it from Warehouse 12,” Artie told Myka. To Helena, he said, “So I assume you’ll know it when you see it.”

Well, that tone in Artie’s voice was like old times—old shows. But Helena did not respond with her back-then defiant chirp. She said a simple “oh,” a chastened wince that seemed pulled from a different show entirely.

Artie should not be inflicting this on her, Myka thought. After a moment, she revised that to, Artie should not be inflicting this on her or on me. Her first counter: “Maybe Helena could just tell me what it looks like.”

“If that would be easier,” Helena said, with a quickness suggesting she agreed that something was indeed being inflicted on somebody, “I certainly—”

“Did I stutter?” Artie demanded.

He didn’t. But after a bit of time, Myka thought she could, just maybe, manage the situation, both because of Helena’s apparent trepidations and as a way of sidestepping her own feelings. “I’m not sure this mission with Helena is a good idea,” she tried saying to Pete later that morning.

“How many times do I have to tell you the vibes aren’t bad anymore?” he asked, annoyed, as if she’d been making a habit of hitting him with this concern whenever he was trying to get comfortable with a comic book.

In fact, he’d told her that once since Helena came back. Once. It had happened when Myka had said, in a moment of exhaustion that had allowed her management to slip, “I miss how Helena used to be,” and he’d rolled his eyes and told her, “That’s dumb. The vibes aren’t bad anymore.”

Now Myka said—because why fight about it?—“Obviously more than once. But I just don’t think it’s a good idea. For her, I mean. Artie said that thing about the stealing and she... I don’t know. Wilted.”

“Okay, so tell that to Artie.”

Was that vaguely reasonable advice? “I guess I could give that a—”

“Like that’d work! Ha!”

“You’re very unhelpful,” Myka informed him.

“Keeping it on brand.” He flexed his biceps. “Just like these big boys.”

To which Myka could say only, “I am so devoutly grateful we aren’t together.”

“Me too. Different reasons though.”

“I’m devoutly grateful for that too,” she said.

She was grateful also, when it came down to it, for his total lack of interest in parsing the differences between their reasons.

Pete’s unhelpfulness aside, she still had the greater part of a day before her scheduled departure on this Helena-accompanied retrieval, and she hoped it might still be possible to extricate herself, Helena, or both of them from it.

Who would be more helpful in such an endeavor: Claudia or Steve? Claudia, who might be more sympathetic to the overall difficulty... or Steve, who would probably be more persuasive in helping to take a plan to Artie...

She went with Steve.

She opened with, “I need to talk to you. No, wait, before you wince: I need to talk to someone, and I think you’re my best bet.”

“I’m not overly flattered, but my prefrontal cortex appreciates the revision. Also my sinuses.”

“I have a problem.”

“My prefrontal appreciates that too: direct, no nuance. And I know we haven’t talked about this out loud, but if your problem’s with me? Totally justified. I got the you-and-Pete thing wrong.”

“No, my problem’s with Helena.” That was probably too revealing. “But the other thing, he and I got it wrong. You were just a witness. Regrettably.”

“But I... pushed?”

“Probably it was a thing he and I had to test to know for sure. And we did, so now we do. I like to think I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

That got her a twist of a smile. “You like to think, but this H.G. thing. I know you two have history, so is this that?”

Myka would have preferred to say “no,” but she figured she should continue giving his sinuses a break. So instead she said, “See, you’re discerning. This is why you’re my best bet.”

“What’s the problem then? You both seemed less than thrilled at breakfast, but—”

Now Myka could tell a truth. “Exactly. She clearly doesn’t feel okay about this artifact, and she shouldn’t have to deal with anything that would make her regret having come back. Right?” Before he could agree or disagree, she presented her plan: “You should do the retrieval with me instead. And I’ll need help selling this to Artie, so if you could gently ask her about the camera and then tell him you’re just as likely to recognize it when you—”

“Wanting to spare her discomfort is admirable. Really. But that wasn’t your issue, not at first. The very instant Artie said H.G. was going too, you tensed up.”

He is your best bet, Myka reminded herself. She sighed and said, “Fine. I’m not sure I can go on a mission with her.”

He winced and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Okay, yes,” she acknowledged. “I’m sure I can. I’m just not sure I want to.”

He didn’t release the pinch. “Unfortunately for both of us, that’s also a lie.”

That one, she resented. “Maybe you’re too discerning.”

“And yet I’ve heard I’m your best bet.”

“Right. Maybe I do want to. But the problem is, everything’s different now.”

“Also, I’m sorry, a lie. That last part. Everything isn’t different. What’s the same?”

Far, far too discerning. “I don’t want to say.”

He smiled. “Aaaaah. Very truthful.”

“Here’s something I do want to say: would you take my place instead?”

“Either way,” he said, his smile morphing into an apologetic grimace, “I don’t think that’s how this works.”

“We just have to make a case to Artie, which I know is a heavy lift, but something like how much easier it would be for Helena to go with you since you’re her wrangler now, so—”

“No, I mean logistically. I’m not her wrangler at all, by the way, but also the plane tickets are already in your names, right?”

Well, that was annoyingly true. “Fine. I hate it, but fine. And even if I could find an artifact that would change names on plane reservations, I couldn’t use it because that would really be personal gain.”

“Would it though?” Steve asked, lightly, but with an undercurrent.

Myka did not want to answer that question.

So she and Helena went.

On the plane, Helena said to Myka, “I’m sure you’re wondering about Artie’s statement.”

Accurate, but: “Not if you don’t want to talk about it,” Myka said. “In that case, any and all wondering canceled. Canceled like... an underappreciated cult TV show.” That was something a colleague would say, wasn’t it? A particularly collegial one, such as, for example, Claudia, from whom Myka had copied and pasted the words about television.

This wasn’t the first time she’d plucked words like this; articulations of her own, she feared—even more so now than in the past—were likely to reveal too much.

Helena raised an eyebrow. “You sound like Claudia.”

Mission accomplished, if a bit too well, so Myka shrugged and said, “I’ve heard characterization can get weird in a reboot.” That was also from Claudia, who had asked Myka, not long ago, “Do you think H.G.’s okay? I know characterization can get weird in a reboot, but she seems a little off,” and Myka had pleaded ignorance as to the entire concept, despite her wish to opine at length on how Helena seemed definitely, from Myka’s perspective, not okay. Definitely off. More than a little.

“I did use that word,” Helena said.

“You did.”

“I did also steal the artifact in question.”

“Napoleon Sarony’s camera.”

“Yes. I gave it to Oscar Wilde.”

“You did?” Oscar Wilde. Okay.

“I told him to have someone use it to take his photograph.”

Obviously this has something to do with its effect, but Myka has no idea what. Helena clearly wants to be drawn out on the point, so Myka probes, using what she knows, “Because it was what Sarony used to take those photos of Wilde when he was on his big star-making tour in the U.S.? Or because of the Supreme Court copyright case about that one Wilde photo he took? Oh, that case, I bet it’s why the camera’s an artifact, but—”

“You’re correct on the why of the artifact. But do you know its effect?”

“I didn’t have time to look it up before we left. And it’s not in the file.”

“Artie left it out, I suspect.”

“Because it’s exculpatory?”

“Because it’s explanatory. As far as anything could be, given that time. Obviously nothing is exculpatory.”

Isn’t it? “Do you want to explain?”

“Want,” Helena said, and oh god if Myka could have given herself leave to understand that word said differently. But this was not that reboot. After a throat-clear, Helena went on, “It was... post.”

Myka didn’t need to ask post-what.

“So many artifacts there were,” Helena continued, “so many unhelpful to me in my extremity. Nevertheless I thought to help. To make some difference. Where I could, as opposed to where I could not.”

In old times, Helena had not said this much about her mental state... post. Fleshy, this admission was, and Myka did not know what to make of it. Was it a step closer, akin to the old sort of physical proximity? Or was it just... explanatory? “The effect?” she prompted, gently, hoping for clarification.

“Artistic enhancement of the subject photographed. Oscar too was... post. Imprisonment had diminished him so terribly. I thought an artifactual photograph might help restore his writerly prowess.”

“Did it work?” Myka asked.

“I can’t prove causation,” Helena said. “Nevertheless, post-photo, he did write ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’”

That was one of those utterances Myka would be processing for quite some time. Separate and apart from her outsize feelings for Helena as Helena—as a physical body to which Myka’s own body has for years now compulsively responded—there was the ongoing absurdity, the near high comedy, of Helena speaking factually about events of such cultural-historical import. “I can’t think that was a bad outcome,” Myka eventually managed to say.

“I can’t either.”

They had not had so genuine, so genuinely substantive, a conversation since Helena’s return.

However, their renewed familiarity, if that’s what it was, did not outlast the plane.

They found the camera, and they neutralized it with minimal difficulty—if a bit more consternation on the part of the gentleman who believed he had the right to possess the piece.

That was all very... collegial.

And—but—they then tried to check in at their hotel. Or rather, Myka did. Helena was occupying herself with the snacks on offer in the lobby. “Steve usually checks in,” she’d said. “Do you mind?”

How could Myka have been less accommodating than Steve? Also she was—she had to concede—more than a little charmed by Helena’s seeming admission of... well, not incompetence. Just a slight slink away from responsibility.

Please, a more cynical part of her said with a snort of derision, you’re charmed by the way she does everything. Walking, talking, existing. Inspecting potato-chip bags across the lobby in a hotel’s snack pantry.

“Bering and Wells,” the desk clerk said in confirmation of the reservation, and Myka wanted to thank him for that ordering of names. He followed up with, “One king.”

She didn’t want to thank him for that. “No,” she told him, and it was good that Helena was out of earshot. “Two. Kings, queens, doubles, twins, I don’t care. But two.”

“Sorry,” said the clerk. “Full up.”

So one king it had been.

And now, in that one king, Myka’s arm is asleep.

“Are you asleep?” she wants to ask of Helena, aloud, to ascertain the true contours of the situation, but the very asking might—would?—change the contours, and Myka isn’t sure she’s in any kind of state to handle any certainty or any change. So she thinks the question at Helena instead, thinks it over her shoulder at that warm body over and over, Are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, until she’s estranged from the question as anything but words, until “asleep” in particular begins to strike her as bizarrely archaic, its construction completely uncontemporary, and she interrupts her telepathy to think, It is archaic; we don’t ask “Are you abed” or anything like that anymore—

—but she interrupts herself again, for that doesn’t ring quite right. So she calls up the dictionary, the A’s, riffling her way through, and the exercise offers her all sorts of examples that show how very unarchaic indeed it is to say “asleep”: ablaze, abuzz, aground, ajar, alight, aloud, amid...

The list goes on. It’s far longer than she expected, but she continues, doggedly, to the end of the A’s, through “astray,” “aswoon” (she doesn’t linger on that one), on to “atingle” (that one either), on and on, ending with “awhirl.” She’d been by then vaguely looking forward to something like “azoom,” but alas.

Such a lengthy jaunt through the initial chapter of the dictionary surely must have eaten up significant time, perhaps even more than she imagined; perhaps morning is at last approaching, and the alarm will ring, and all this physical consternation can be resolved by sudden wakefulness on everybody’s part.

The clock on the nightstand tells her the journey took three minutes.

Spectacular.

Well, fine. If the A’s were three minutes, the rest of the dictionary should offer her at least an hour of distraction—both from her arm’s discomfort and from the physical, emotional, and existential discomfort created by the presence at her neck, back, and hip.

She starts in on the B’s. First comes “b,” defined, in entry 1a, as “the 2d letter of the English alphabet.” No doubt it’s important to periodically refresh one’s memory of such things.

The B’s proceed, slow and thorough; after “b” comes “baa,” and on and on... “bedlam” catches her attention, in a Warehouse-y way; “bed of roses” does too, as it’s “a place or situation of agreeable ease,” which this certainly is not—

—in sudden, striking emphasis, Helena’s hand on Myka’s hip moves, a minimal slide-glide toward thigh, and oversensitized Myka can’t control a too-violent twitch in response, one that jolts her toward the bed’s edge, which was nearer than she realized, for now its surface is an abrupt absence, and a crash to the floor is imminent, and instinct, instinct: her brain shouts for an arm to break her fall, but the volunteering limb is the stupid somnolent one, and OH GOD she has never known pain to manifest like this—she’s taken a bullet but this is more, for “seeing stars” is no mere metaphor, as she’d always imagined; her vision is literally stellating, even as she hears herself yelp in prelinguistic anguish.

The horrific fullness of the situation settles on her as she additionally hears, directed at her from some angel perspective, the voice of her dreams but now this nightmare saying “Myka? What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” Myka moans at the unforgivingly injurious floor, and then the stars win.

TBC

#bering and wells #warehouse 13 #fanfic #Asleep #B&W holiday gift exchange #kla1991 #endured bodily discomfort can lead to terrible outcomes #or maybe eventually to nonterrible ones?#we'll see #all definitions quoted from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate 10th Ed #(it's nearest to me on the bookshelf)#(and maybe was once nearest Myka too)

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apparitionism · 11 months

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Tabled 6

“Change the vocabulary!” Myka has just exclaimed in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, in a full-throated effort to bring Helena around to her newly realized way of thinking, here in this story occasioned by @barbarawar ’s months-ago @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange request regarding what would have happened if Myka and Helena had had their Boone-proposed coffee. Much has ensued since then: meetings poor and poorer, rendering hopes faint and fainter, leaving potentials squandered and... squandereder? Seeing to it that emotional moves make sense is always challenging, I find. People want to make sense to themselves, want to make sense of themselves, and someone as thinky as Myka would, I imagine, double-want that. But while we all contain multitudes, we tend to bumble through situations as unfull representations of those multitudes: weird gotta-keep-moving sharks desperate to present consistency. I too keep moving: trying to land this thing, even as it fights against the stick, remaining *this far* above ground. Apologies as always, my strung-along giftee. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 for the convoluted way we got here.

Tabled 6

“What?” Helena says, but it’s not her usual “what”; she’s obviously flummoxed, and her echo of Myka’s characteristic bafflement is precious. Preposterous, but precious.

Myka had hoped for some spark of recognition at her transformation of “change the rules,” but the confusion... it might be better. Sweeter. She tries not to make too much meaning out of this chime of similarity, even as she wants to pull that soft, bewildered “what” from the air and cradle it.

“I was trying to be clever,” she says. “Never mind that. And never mind fixing it, because we can do something else.”

“Repair it?” Helena says: a cautious, skeptical—and, yes, still baffled—synonym proffer.

Don’t laugh, Myka instructs herself, but faced with the idea that Helena really might think they’re playing a word game, it’s hard to follow her own order. “Never mind that too,” she says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat. “Because never mind. Because that’s it. Because you know what we actually can do?”

Helena raises her hands up, high, obviously in question, but really for all the world as if she were indeed being held at gunpoint.

This is not ending as it began, Myka tells the universe. Not as it began, or any other way.

She chambers the only bullet she has, aiming it right at Helena’s heart.

She pulls the trigger with a smile: “Ignore it.”

Hands still high, Helena opens her mouth slightly, and she squints, as if Myka has morphed into a dangerously unidentifiable animal.

Yes, Myka thinks, wildly, trying to live up to that wariness, I’ve been genetically engineered right here in this island of a hotel room! A Warehouse agent crossed with a yawper who has her very own plans! Amorphous ones, but! This infusion of abandon—Moreau power?—gives her the strength to hold Helena’s gaze.

The standoff lasts until Helena gets her language working again. “That recommendation is... entirely specious,” she says. “And you sound uncharacteristically overwrought.”

It’s a wobbly pair of objections. Myka draws even more strength from Helena’s lack of conviction. “What if it is? What if I am?”

“I don’t believe the slate can be wiped clean,” Helena says, a little more firmly. “Nor do you.”

So you do think we know each other. “I’m not saying it can. I’m saying I know it’s dirty, and so do you. I’m saying we ignore it.”

Helena’s face, from her “what” until now, has been a study in something Myka honestly never expected to see from her: full (fully wrong-footed) incomprehension. Myka doesn’t blame her, for she’s finding herself pretty incomprehensible, but she presses on. “You were ready to ignore my Boone-changed opinion of you. Weren’t you. When you hoped I’d know I was the someone else.”

After a pause: “That was then,” Helena says, her resentment at Myka for having worked her way to that truth—and for having articulated it—very clear.

“Oh, not anymore?” Myka pushes. “Even though now we both know I was that someone, and that there wasn’t a Giselle?”

“That was then,” Helena repeats.

Wait... “There’s a Giselle now?” Myka can’t process it, if it’s so. If it’s so, she will have to let Helena leave, then bury her face in one of the expensive pillows from this room’s unignorable bed and scream.

Another head-toss, the most dramatic one thus far, accompanies Helena’s next words. “I’m of a mind to say yes. But pursuant to my previously articulated policy, I’ll tell the truth: there isn’t, but there could be. In the future. I agreed to meet with you today to ensure you wouldn’t mistake yourself over Pete, but I have no intention of stepping into a similarly mistaken place. I’ve done my best to let this go.”

Myka can’t accept any of those words. “Ignore that too,” she says. She would like to point out that that whole litany was pretty rich, coming from Ms. To-Continue-to-Speak-Together, but instead she zeroes in on what seems the clearest contradiction. “But if you’re letting this go, why do you care about me mistaking myself over Pete?”

“Why did you care about me mistaking myself in Boone?” Helena counters, sour.

The response is uncharacteristically incompetent, particularly because Helena already knows the answer. “I could repeat something somebody once told me, about not walking away from what she called ‘your truth,’” Myka says, with what she hopes is a “that was then” fillip. “But I won’t. What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.” She allows herself a half-breath to marvel at how unusual it is for her to have this much of the upper hand.

“I could say the same thing.” Helena is visibly struggling not to acknowledge Myka’s advantage, but she collapses, saying, “The former, not the latter. I didn’t ask you first,” her devotion to accuracy (or so Myka reads it) defeating her. “Nevertheless I could repeat the something somebody once told you. As the why.”

Myka continues to press. “But isn’t repetition boring? You hate being boring.” She hopes this observation might visit upon Helena that kick of so we do know each other: “I bet you threw your coffee on me just so I wouldn’t walk away thinking how dull you’d been.”

“That was not the reason,” Helena says, but with a press of lips that suggests a ripple of otherwise.

Here, Myka shouldn’t press. “Then what was the reason.”

“You were being recalcitrant, and you know it,” Helena says.

“And what are you being now?” Myka asks, as laconically—as lean-back, as Helena-esque—as she can.

That question causes Helena to scowl and move energy into her hands, extending and then bending her fingers; though she doesn’t quite form them into fists, her intent is clear: she wants to deck Myka. It’s glorious. Please, do it, Myka urges internally, so we can get this all out in the physical open.

But Helena resets her face and waves her hands, the flutter of fingers dispelling the energy and its threat. “Realistic,” she says, prim.

Quit acting like me, Myka would tell her, but for the fallout. What she says is, “I wish I still had this coffee,” pointing at the table, the tragic cup-ceremony of which probably now deserves replaying as farce. Or was it farce the first time? No surprise, really, that they would skip-jump their way over the natural course of history.

“Yes, because stains solve problems,” Helena sarcastics.

Maybe; maybe not. Nevertheless, Myka says what’s true: “You seemed to think they would. And anyway, they redound to your benefit.” Helena greets this with a completely reasonable additional “what,” but Myka blows past it with, “Maybe because you ignore them? Anyway, this one here”—she gestures to the now-dry coffee-map on her shirt (it looks like no country, and she’s disappointed to be unable to name it as “this Brazil” or “this Azerbaijan”)—“kept me from walking away when you thought I shouldn’t.”

“A delaying tactic,” Helena says, offering only bored disdain, as if the very idea of it had been in the end inconsequential.

Keep pushing. “How long was that delay supposed to last, anyway?”

Helena doesn’t have an answer; Myka knows it because she begins to pace. She starts, of course, at the doorway, then walks past the bed, over to the window, and back again: bed then doorway, doorway then bed, bed then window, back and forth—six times, Myka counts—before she leans her back against the door, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, “Why are you tempting me this way? Why this way? What’s changed? In this room, in the few breaths since resignation and coffee, what’s changed?” It’s a fret.

“Well, what’s changed for you?” Myka asks, with no fret at all for once in her life. “More breaths since, but why did authority let you out of Boone-prison?”

Helena’s face produces an inscrutable scowl-smile hybrid. She thrusts herself away from the door, walks to the bed, rubs her hands together. Re-gathering energy? “I suppose I could offer a long-winded explanation about having been given to understand that the balance of safety and threat had shifted. But instead, to quote: ‘What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.’”

“Well played,” Myka admits. In return, she’s gifted with the little acknowledging bow of head she loves. (Loves—yes.) It draws her physically closer, that head-bow: only a few shuffling inches, but enough that she can answer, more quietly, “What’s changed is I saw a future. And I saw how much I’m willing to ignore to have it.”

“I do not understand your morality,” Helena says. This time, she sounds a note of wonder rather than censure.

So much recursion in what they say, think, feel, do—once, then back again, and then again. Maybe they’re bound to get something right, if they try everything over and over? This particular repetition-with-variation seems a little better than usual, tragedy repeated not as farce but as fairy tale... or, no: Warehouse tale. Because for better or worse, there’s no escaping the Warehouse, the curse but also blessing of wonder. She and Helena are here together today only because of the Warehouse—that necessary condition of their meeting and connection.

Myka could dilate forever upon fate and purpose, but “ignore it” must be her mantra now, her grounding principle. For better or worse... for better and worse. The true moral of any Warehouse tale.

“I don’t understand anybody’s morality,” she says, “especially not mine or yours. I’m not trying to. I’m ignoring that too.”

But what she can’t ignore—not now, not anymore—is the way in which their bodies have, so gradually, continued to near, with Helena slowly mirroring Myka’s movements, these little distance-closing developments. So small is the gap between them now, the displacement it would take to touch surely must be measured by time, not distance.

And yet she hesitates, for this raise of hand must speak correctly: not want, but offer.

Slow. Stretch that time, turn it back into space.

She does that, moving as slowly as she can. More slowly than she ever has.

Helena doesn’t retreat.

Minimalist increments... yet their yield is immense: Myka’s right hand meets Helena’s left, and their fingers link and twist, palms not pressed but near.

It is their first genuinely mutual touch since Boone.

“I will be blunt,” Helena says, soft, burred by the contact. “I need you to... just say.”

Blunt. This knife of request—indeed unsharp—meets Myka’s fears, at first bending against them, yet still bearing threat. The force of it makes her glance away, and again she’s drawn to the clock. All she can find to articulate is, “I missed my flight.”

It could have been a way of saying, but Myka didn’t mean it like that, and Helena knows it: she raises an eyebrow. The leavening takes away the knife, and it gives Myka leave to lighten too, to postulate, “Maybe we’re constitutionally incapable. Of the saying. Or maybe it’s just me? Okay, not maybe—probably. Is that a dealbreaker?”

Now Helena cocks her head, completing the gesture with a lifting twist of chin. It calls of early, early: Helena handcuffed in a chair, Myka foolishly imagining she knew how all the ensuing moments would go—then being flung up to meet the ceiling.

The book would have known that would happen, but Myka didn’t. Hasn’t. Flights, crashes. Over and over, each as unpredictable as every other. Which will Helena choose to inflict now?

“Have we agreed to a deal?” Helena asks. The question isn’t coy. “Ignoring may be a way forward, but historically, you do seem to presuppose the existence of agreements that you fail to inform me I’m a party to. That you then accuse me of violating.”

So: an objection, but one grounded in their shared history. A flight and a crash. “That is an uncomfortably accurate description of what I do,” Myka admits. “Let me start again. I missed my flight. Did you?”

“Miss your flight? Yes.” More leavening: unfunny joking, words for the sake of them. To continue to speak together... of course this has been what Myka wished too. Of course she would listen to Helena saying words about anything.

Not anything, her Boone-and-Giselle-haunted memory reminds her...

“But that was not the issue under discussion,” Helena continues. A providential interruption.

“Right. Dealbreaker. Saying. Inability.” Why are you vamping? What is the impediment? The answer is immediate: You are the impediment. “Change the vocabulary” was a nice idea, but one word was never going to be enough. “Look,” she begins, determined now to do better, “I—”

Helena tightens her fingers’ grasp against Myka’s. It’s a very different way of getting things out in the physical open. “Wanting you warps all I do,” she whispers. The words, the grasp: both are saying. Out in the open.

More even than the oh-so-welcome grasp, the words mean everything to Myka. And their meaning is itself everything—everything that matters—so she steals them and says them back: “Wanting you warps all I do.” It’s mind-clearingly correct. The relief of at last having an accurate description of the past half-decade: it hits her like that slug she’d perversely hoped Helena might deliver.

But having used Helena’s words, however perfect, while coming up with none of her own pains her, so she feels she has to modify, “Warps. And warped, but not in any of the ways that might have helped. I can’t apologize enough for how I got it all so wrong.”

Helena’s tilt of head gentles. Her chin drops. “Someone has recently recommended, rather eloquently, ignoring such things.” She smiles. “You are terrible at following your own prescription.”

Helpless to object, Myka says, “That can’t come as a surprise.”

“A surprise? No. Perhaps an obstacle.”

“Would you... surmount it?”

Helena says, “For you...”

Myka fears she hears a lift of question. “That’s what I meant. Would you?”

“As stated: for you.”

The certainty is... transporting. Nevertheless, “I don’t know how this will work,” Myka admits. “If this will work.”

“Nor do I,” Helena says, yet her admission is a balm.

So much remains to be negotiated. So fragile this semi-resolution between their hands.

Then: “I’m so tired,” Helena says, actual rather than despondent, and Myka is ready to agree that yes, she is tired too, that everything that’s taken place in this room has taxed her to her limits, but Helena follows that admission with, “Will you lie down with me?”

Myka tenses. Her immediate, insistent bodily approval of the idea jangles against her just-as-immediate worry over where such a request—and such approval—might lead.

No doubt feeling that stiffening via their still-joined hands, Helena says, “For rest. Rest, in privacy, and nothing more.”

Myka believes her. She doesn’t trust herself, for her self is a serial liar with terrible impulse control, but she believes Helena.

Who is also a serial liar, one with similarly terrible impulse control, but saying “no” to this person who has so lately spoken of want and warp, this person whose hands continue to grip hers, is not an option.

Thus in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, Myka lies down on a bed, and Helena lies beside her. They shift their bodies awkwardly, then less so, as they find a fit: Myka on her back, Helena on Myka’s left side, curled like punctuation around everything they’ve suffered.

From a position moments ago unimaginable, Myka finds room to ask, “What are you doing?”

“What? Nothing,” Helena says, as if Myka has made an accusation. She stills the slight, slight stroke her fingers have begun to apply to Myka’s hair.

More unfunny comedy. “I don’t mean with your hand. I mean, every day. In your life.”

“Oh,” Helena says. The stroke resumes. “Waiting.”

“You said you hadn’t stopped living.”

“That is not what I said.”

“If you could press pause on the semantics.” It’s true that Myka could—should—quote with greater accuracy, given that she knows exactly what Helena said. But Helena knows that Myka knows exactly what Helena said, and while continuing to speak together is the weirdly frustrating joy it is, they should really try to get somewhere.

Helena sighs; the sound contains a put-upon “fine.” She says, “I pretend to have expertise in several areas, including forensic analysis, for which pretensions I’m paid absurd amounts of money.”

“Ends before means?” Myka asks, a tiny joke.

“My own fabulism is unsurpassed.”

That’s probably a joke too, but thinking back on her own vast course of lies, Myka finds it important to counterclaim, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Does competition truly matter at this late date? A win in this category is dubious—sinful, even—but today I’m inclined to concede your victory in anything you like.”

So she understood Myka was talking about herself; is that pleasing or disturbing? In any case, Myka does know the concession as a surprise: “You are?”

“Today. For here we are, at rest. Salvaged. By you.”

“But only because you wrecked my shirt,” Myka reminds her.

They’ve been wrecked, over and over, with stained shirts only the most recent, small detritus. Yet here they are, salvaged, washed up on some unfamiliar shore... this island of a hotel room: no Moreau; instead, uncharted.

Would that it were an island, one they could make their home.

“Only because,” Helena echoes. “Only because you were being recalcitrant... but we can’t carry such recursion back ab ovo.”

“Or we can,” Myka says with a hiccupy laugh, momentarily captured by the possibility, seeing it as a burrowing-in, a we-got-here-and-this-is-how affirmation.

“This from the woman whose mantra would be ‘ignore it’?”

“Game show,” Myka goes on, the laugh persisting; there’s no escaping the beautiful fact—she might have imagined it would be true but now it’s a fact—that lying with Helena wrapped around her makes her giddy. “Whoever buzzes in with the preceding turning point the fastest gets...”

“What?”

“I was about to say ‘a point,’ but that sounds weird. A point for a point?”

Helena’s cheek flexes against Myka’s, in what Myka suspects is her I-don’t-quite-understand squint. “A point for a point... surely that should be the name of the program? But I’m not conversant with game shows.”

“You are a little. Whammies.”

Another flex of cheek. “The current argot for being affected by an artifact?”

She’s right. But. “It’s from a game show. The coinage... it’s Pete’s.” Myka wishes she could have forever avoided introducing him into the conversation, the room, the problem. But in the end this hotel room isn’t an island.

Helena nods. The movement is an acknowledgement of what Myka has done—but it’s also yet another blessed slide of her skin against Myka’s. “What will you tell him?” Helena asks, and Myka can face the question only sideways, through the warmth of the slide.

Lying in bed is unquestionably better than sitting at a table. Myka nevertheless feels an incipient lie forming, a dodge to push off difficulty: I don’t know, she could tell Helena, and maybe that lie of omission would suffice, here as they lie in a comfort Myka has already disturbed more than enough.

However. The truth is she’ll tell him whatever she has to, to get herself free. To make him let go. So that’s what she says to Helena: “Whatever it takes.”

To her shock, the out-loud saying wallops her with a vision of a still different future, one stark and Warehouse-less. The view is empty: of purpose, of feeling. A disaster. “What happens if I burn it all down?” she asks. Her heartbeat speeds; her blood floods fearful.

“As you should have in Boone?” Helena responds, with acid; then, “Sorry. Momentarily failed to follow the ‘ignore’ prescription myself.” She raises herself on an elbow and looks down at Myka. It’s a new, breathtaking view, one that Myka feels her prior lack of as acute deprivation.

Into that negative space, Helena says, “If you burn it all down, then you and I will rise from the ashes.”

Every word is clear as still water.

Purpose: Myka and Helena, rising. Not empty of feeling; rather, replete. That reward would elevate.

“Is that what you want?” Helena asks. “To burn it down?”

“Yes.” Myka can say it; it’s true, if the rise is the result. And yet she can’t uncommit her professional self so easily and entirely. “But also no. And I have to tell him something.”

“‘Ignore’ is a powerful word,” Helena observes.

“I don’t think that will work,” Myka says, for she can hear his escalating “but why” iterations as clearly as if she were herself the Ladies’ Oracle of the uncanny book. “I’ll have to explain. That I was wrong?” she tries, but that’s too small. “That I’m always wrong and he should have known that?”

“Really? Then you must be wrong about me as well.”

“Don’t use my overgeneralizing words against me,” Myka says. She touches Helena’s temple, intending it as a rebuke.

It lands instead as a caress, against which Helena leans and nestles. “Aren’t I using them against me?” she asks, low and amused.

Myka says, because she can’t not, because the words are desperate to be said, “This. I want this.” Joking, disputing, speaking, bodies together (and so much more of bodies together): all of this.

“Me using your words against myself? I see why you would.” Helena smiles against Myka’s neck, then raises herself up again, her expression changing over. “But thank you. For saying.” She follows this by reclining, nestling closer still.

The words, and the movement, are warming, but leaning all the way in would lead down a path too tantalizing. “You’re welcome,” Myka says, but she follows it with, “When we leave this room. What will you do?” she asks, because this is something she doesn’t know but might now learn, no book required. Just a Helena.

But there’s no “just” about Helena, and particularly not when she’s gazing up at Myka, sweet yet flinty, and that look tempers her answer. “Wait,” she says, differently than she said “waiting”; now the task rings of burden and freedom both. Waiting for something, rather than waiting, without predicate.

However, that predicate: Myka is the one who must act. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m accustomed.”

The little shrug of resignation that accompanies those words: Myka feels it small against her shoulder, but its implications make it seem a larger shudder. Helena has waited through so much—decades of punishments, and Myka should not make her suffer anything even vaguely similar. She’s about to say “I’ll hurry,” even with no idea of what that would look like, but she’s preempted by Helena saying, into her ear, “But please hurry.” A breath of telepathic direction.

So. Now she must.

Yet that direction requires changing not the rules, nor even the vocabulary, but the speed with which the future is ushered near. It’s a daunting prospect.

Daunting but necessary, if Myka is to blunder satisfactorily. “I will,” she says. But what is necessary isn’t sufficient, not if the goal is to bring about the truly desired future. “Once I’ve done... that. What comes next?”

Helena shifts her position again, un-nestling herself from Myka’s neck, her head still on the bed but reared back a bit, looking up, and Myka tilts her head to look down. She’s often had to angle down, just that bit, to look into Helena’s eyes, but this prone person is a dramatically differently enjoyable inflection of the standing version.

As she appreciates the view, she receives Helena’s answer: “You should text me.”

So strange to hear that voice say that sentence. But relief dizzies Myka, even as she’s reclining and looking, for she realizes it’s just strange; Helena saying it doesn’t make her seem a stranger.

“And then we should meet for coffee,” Helena adds—lightly, but not throwaway.

“Or save the world?” Myka says, trying for the besting echo. Trying to overwrite the words said in Boone.

“And save the world,” Helena says. “Our world.”

The modified callback is pointed and just right; it overrides both Boone and Myka’s attempt. Myka shakes her head and says, “I’m no match for you.”

“Counterpoint: you are the match for me.”

How can it be true that Helena is saying these words? Ever, but more so here, on this day, the one Myka intended to end with the end, this day, that is instead ending with a beginning.

Not enough of a beginning, though, and Myka wants to make that clear—that, and her regret at its clear, clear, clear, yet absolutely necessary insufficiency. She says, “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” Helena doesn’t move; she has to know what’s coming next, and Myka delivers it: “But I can’t.”

Helena sighs. “I do not understand your morality.”

Third time the charm—the Helena-knows-it charm.

She might as well know it, because who is Myka, really, to recognize and hold to some bright line? But to start now would entail a foundational lie—“I’m free”—one that would infect all that came after.

You could ignore that too...

Animals, animals. Of course they would advocate for the body getting what it wants, regardless of consequences.

But the dismissal of obligation, though it might seem easy now, can’t help but make realizing the future more strenuous. Myka should not increase the burden. Thus in the end, despite the pain of want, she has to get herself out from under the bodily lie she so desperately and foolishly told—she has to do that before she can give herself leave to know the bodily truth. It may be just as desperate and foolish, if differently so, but she wants, wants, wants to know it.

“Like I said, I don’t either,” she says, to ward off, for what she hopes will this time not seem forever, Helena’s charm. So as to think herself as far away as possible from the basic physical reality that a tiny turn of her head could “accidentally” join their lips, she turns the opposite way and tells the ceiling, “I have to rebook my flights now.”

“To set the future in motion,” Helena says. Agreement, but aggrieved.

Myka smiles at both of those, allowing herself a minimal turn back toward Helena. She’s a far better sight than the ceiling. “You do know something about that.”

Helena breathes out, probably in more-aggrieved affirmation, and she makes no move to sit up. Is it possible to be aggressively still?

Helena’s answer is an impressive yes.

Myka allows herself a dispensation, as she did when she watched Helena approach in the airport, so many hours ago: twenty more breaths before she takes the get-up initiative, as Helena very clearly intends to force her to do. So she breathes. Very. Very. Slowly. Inhale: beat... beat... for as many beats as she can manage. Hold, for the same: an the number is not small. Exhale again as many, then again, hold. That’s one. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Two.

Eighteen more of these with Helena warm against her; it isn’t how she ever imagined heaven, or its earthly approximation, but here it is.

For now.

Right as she reaches inhale thirteen: “Are you asleep?” Helena whispers.

“Sssh. I’m counting.”

Helena doesn’t ask “what.” She stays still, now solid and present only, until Myka reaches the pause after her twentieth exhale.

Disengagement is difficult.

After, they busy themselves with phones and booking. Myka situates herself at the desk, while Helena reclines on the bed: these stations they might have taken if they had done nothing but inhabit this room as travelers, travelers now bored before departing.

Helena finishes before Myka does, at which point her reclining becomes reclining, a grandiose occupying of space. A new Helena aspect, and Myka would never have seen it, never if not for salvage, wrecking, recalcitrance... back and back and back. How they got here.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells that new grandiosity.

Helena stretches, arms up then sweeping wide, as if making a snow angel. Then she props herself up on her elbows. She moves both her hands, a finger-flutter suggesting that whatever statement she about to issue is obvious. And it is: “Then we’ll stay forever.”

For a brief counterfactual burst of cosmology, Myka believes they could. But this time Helena is the one to rise and dismiss the possibility, although she does it with still more ostentation: “And yet this room is entirely inappropriate as anyone’s final resting place.”

Myka loves every muscled, meaningful emphasis. From inside that love, she pities her earlier-today self, the one who thought she could have lived without the continued possibility of this.

Well. She could have lived. But it wouldn’t have been living.

For all their need to speak together, their final minutes in the room are silent, as if refraining from using that small duration of their privacy to the purpose they set, they might be able to bank it. Against some unprivate, nonspeaking future.

As they reenter the unprivate hallway and head toward the far greater unprivate spaces of transit, Myka says, “That coffee was expensive.”

“Worth every penny.” The and you know it is inescapable.

Inescapable and true.

Helena’s flight is scheduled to leave well before (the first of) Myka’s is—New York is so much easier to reach than anyplace named Dakota.

“Not The Dakota,” Helena says when Myka shares this gloomy observation with her, as they wait for the tram to the terminals.

Myka doesn’t know whether to groan or congratulate her on the reference. She settles for a sincere “Touché,” then asks, “Should I come to your gate with you? To... sit?” She’s thinking on sitting together. Sitting together. What people see when they look.

“Should you?” Helena asks back, with an eyebrow.

“No,” Myka has to concede. “I’d want to kiss you goodbye.”

“Anyone looking would expect you to kiss me, and/or me to kiss you. Goodbye or otherwise. But you’ve made it clear that isn’t in the offing until we can fulfill everyone’s expectations.”

“Everyone’s?”

“Ours and those of fortunate observers.”

“Of course you’d think they’re fortunate,” Myka says; she hears and feels affection—distinct from want—in her voice. Affection has been gone for so long between them... she welcomes its old-friend tenderness, gently yet insistently shouldering its way through all that must be ignored.

More eyebrow, differently inflected. “Of course they are fortunate. You underestimate our beauty but, more significantly, your own.”

Such a compliment is unassimilable right now, so Myka counters with, “But not yours. I don’t underestimate yours.”

Helena leans backward. “Your saying such things is why you should not come with me to my gate,” she says, and Myka reads the lean as speaking commensurately about what is unassimilable. “Because I want you to come with me,” Helena goes on, to Myka’s delight, “and then to board the flight with me.”

“Burning it all down,” Myka notes.

“Which you don’t want to do,” Helena notes back.

“But I will if I have to.”

Helena now offers a wrinkle of brow. “There is almost always a better way. You showed me that.”

The wrinkle doesn’t belong, so Myka tries to smooth it by saying, with a lightness, “You were going to freeze it all down. Totally different.”

“In any event the way found then was better... and, I must say, better than shooting you in the head.” Helena says this dry, joking back, yet also a little stunned, probably at the idea that Myka would joke in the first place.

Myka answers that surprise with, “I’m pretty happy you thought so.”

Helena doesn’t move, but she says—tight, as if dampening some vibration—“Your understatement is rhetorically effective. In that I now want to kiss you more than I ever thought I could again be capable of wanting.”

This should be simple. Grab her right now and never let her go. But nothing is as simple as it should be, so Myka says, “I’ll bear that understatement thing in mind.”

“I suspect I’m weak for a wide array of rhetorical techniques. When deployed by you.”

The bubbling of possibility is... irresistible. “I’ll make a study,” Myka says, exerting great effort to keep herself under control. “Maybe litotes next.”

“Not ineffective, you may find.”

They are tuned tight to each other now. In public, but speaking privately. If they can keep this alignment... they’ve had it before, lost it, got it back. Myka lets herself dissolve into one final dispensation: the blissful idea that they will always get it back.

Are there any words to describe what she is, other than “in love”? If so, she doesn’t want to know them.

She also doesn’t want to watch Helena walk away. She’s mourned such walks too often. So they clasp hands one more time, then let go; Helena turns away, and Myka, after enjoying the movement of Helena’s hair the turn occasions—that swirl of fluid promise—does too.

****

At the Sioux Falls airport—which Myka, hating its provincial familiarity, always greets with an internal but why do I have to know this place whine—she wants nothing more than to roll off the plane and into the car she’d parked in the absurdly small lot so many hours or days ago, thence rolling on to the B&B and into some state that might, if she’s lucky, resemble sleep.

What she wants is not what she gets.

Mrs. Frederic is standing by the security exit.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tabled #B&W holiday gift exchange #part 6 #barbarawar #I tried so hard to make it end here #but no dice #I can't apologize enough for getting tangled in the complications #(it occurs to me that maybe there's an artifact in that hotel room making it all so wordy)#(okay not really)#(but this thing might've worked better if M and H had had to deal with a coffeemaker that brewed up a djinn or something instead)#(could've sent the story into territory too unserious though)#(which seems like it would have been cheaty)

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