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She has no intention of helping MacPherson with whatever his bigger plan may be. Once she’s finally able to make the Imperceptor Vest work, thanks to the power source he’s procured, she retrieves her belongings from the Escher Vault and leaves the Warehouse without ceremony, before MacPherson can even blink. Idly, she wonders if he really expected anything else when he freed her from the bronze and sent her to London, warning her of bright sunlight and fast cars almost as an afterthought. MacPherson lacks all of Caturanga’s warmth, and that certain something that made her trust her mentor, both with the responsibility of overseeing the Warehouse, and with her own life. No, MacPherson will not be her way back into the Warehouse. But she must return, in order to enact her final plan.
This world is as dead as her Christina. It will scarcely make a difference if she begins to bury it.
She works quickly, days blurring together in much the same way they have ever since Christina’s death, first from her grief, then from the frantic pace she set herself at work in an attempt to keep busy. Sandra and Raymond, the agents under MacPherson at the Warehouse, appear incorruptible. Helena’s sole attempt to reach out to them very nearly ends in her capture, in spite of her best efforts to appeal to their sympathy. She even tries relating to Sandra as another woman struggling in a man’s world, to no avail. She searches for information on Arthur Nielsen then, MacPherson’s former partner. This leads to her discovery of one Claudia Donovan, a young girl who’s been digging for intel in all the same places she has. A visit to the institution where she resides (putting into use the conning techniques Helena picked up from one of her less scrupulous lovers in her youth) sheds light on both the details of Agent Nielsen’s career at the Warehouse, and the artifact that ultimately led to Miss Donovan’s stay in this place. She pushes aside the pangs of sympathy she feels for the girl, and the dangerous thoughts of how Christina would surely have been just as brilliant by her age. Christina. She is the reason for all of this. The rage boiling deep inside of her is the only thing left on this Earth that makes sense.
A few days later, she finds herself stepping out of the cold and into a bar around the corner from the Secret Service office in Washington, D.C. Were it not for Caturanga encouraging her to embrace her instincts, rather than relying solely on tangible facts, she might not have followed her information to this bar where Agent Myka Bering sits alone, nursing a beer as she frowns down at her paperwork. Helena sits two seats over from her as Agent Bering takes a long swig of her beer, pauses to contemplate the empty bottle, and decides to give in, asking the bartender for another.
“I’ll have the same,” says Helena, earning only a cursory glance from Agent Bering. The bartender hands them their drinks, and Myka takes another large sip.
“Long day?” asks Helena, her voice landing somewhere between casual friendliness and the silken tone she she reserves for other kinds of conversations that often occur in places like this.
Agent Bering looks thrown by this, a way Helena suspects she doesn’t often look (or feel). “Uhh, yeah,” she stammers out, caught off guard. “Something like that.”
“Mine, too,” says Helena, sipping her own beer. In truth, she hasn’t been up to much yet today. But it has been an awfully long century.
Myka answers with a polite half-smile and a nod, and turns back to her paperwork. “You know,” Helena continues, “it’s customary to allow yourself a break during the winter holiday.”
When Agent Bering looks back up at her, her face has softened slightly. “I like being busy,” she says, just a tad defensive. She’s had this conversation before.
Helena stares down into her beer, smiling almost sadly. “I worked all the way through Christmas, once,” she confides, fighting to control her expression. The first winter after Christina died, she told her family she’d be spending the holiday away with a man. Instead, she holed up alone in Wooly’s vacation home (with his permission), frantically writing and scribbling out designs for new inventions until after New Year’s.
There’s a flash of something like regret and longing in Myka’s eyes. A quick search into Agent Bering’s background uncovered the death of her father two years prior, and that of her professional partner the year before that. The passing of a century has not changed how the pain of old losses creeps back up on people in the light of these winter festivities.
Myka seems to see it in Helena’s eyes, too, even recognizing, in one glance, how her own pain differs - how Helena’s consumes her. (Agent Bering has buried her guilt beneath the cold, hard earth, always nearby, but packed firmly into place; Helena keeps hers in a small box in her bedroom, which she opens and peers into at length, night after night.) Her face crumples in sympathy that quickly morphs into confusion. “I’m sorry, do you...work around here?” The question feels all wrong to both of them, in a way neither would be able to articulate. Myka frowns at this, but waits for an answer, anyway.
“I’m just passing through,” says Helena, not untruthfully. The wheels are turning in Agent Bering’s head, as if she’s running through every option she can think of - businesswoman? Bounty hunter? CIA? - and dismissing each of them in turn. Everything, from how she’s turned up in this bar and struck up a conversation, to how different she clearly is from everyone else in this city, is a shock to Myka’s system. Helena can tell she takes both pride and comfort in being able to catalogue everything and everyone around her, understand them. Helena’s a wildcard, and though Myka can read her on some level, she cannot categorize what she finds.
But something keeps her where she is, trying to figure Helena out rather than running from her. The same thing, Helena suspects, that led her to this bar, to this woman’s side, forgetting all her questions about Agent Nielsen, the reason she came here in the first place.
And it’s that moment, the bar seeming to grow dimmer around them as Agent Bering’s eyes shine, when something clicks into place in Helena’s head - the fact that things are out of place. Something’s felt off ever since she walked into the bar...before that, even. Since she came out of the bronze. A period of adjustment was to be expected, but this is something more than that, and she somehow knows that it’s more than just a feeling. Perhaps being a time traveller has altered her perspective, her ability to process and understand the passage and the orientation of time. However she knows it, she knows that something is wrong with time. This timeline simply is not right. She’s stuck in the wrong one, even as it feels like it’s converging with every other timeline, every other life she’s lived. She’s meeting Myka Bering in a bar, and in her house in England, and in the Warehouse, and she isn’t meeting her at all, Myka standing over her grave nearly a century after her death. A million first meetings take place all at once, and Helena’s head is spinning. And though Myka Bering may not be a time traveller, Helena can tell she feels it, too.
They’ve known each other for a long, long time.
Then just like the brand new hat she vividly remembers losing to a gust of wind as a girl, the memories are swept away from her before she can take hold of them. Myka’s eyes shine brighter than ever, and Helena feels she’s been let in on a secret, though she can’t quite put it into words. But things are clear, now, and somehow she knows she’s found the answers she was looking for without even asking about Agent Nielsen. She feels as exposed as Myka’s expression looks, but neither seems to mind.
Helena lifts her bottle, holds it out to Myka. “To a happy holiday,” she murmurs, and Myka clinks their bottles together.
~
“H.G. Wells is a woman,” says Pete, as if this should be obvious. “You guys are best pals. She gave you a grappler.” It makes about as much sense as anything else he’s said in the hours since he first materialized in Myka’s office, but she’s getting used to it by now, and they’re outside in the snow in the South Dakota badlands about to break into a warehouse supposedly home to items with “unusual” properties, so Myka decides they have bigger fish to fry, for the time being.
But a strange feeling comes over her at his words. It’s gone in seconds, as they try to find a way through the huge wall of stone and into this Warehouse, but it’s something like recognition. The ghost of an image flashes across her mind’s eye, a face she can’t quite bring into focus, before it vanishes just as quickly.
Soon after, Pete is jumping to catch the brush, and Myka is screaming. He’s falling right into the centre of the Earth...and then there’s a flash of blinding white light, and Myka feels herself suspended in a moment outside of time. It’s all wrong, she can feel it. She shouldn’t be here at all, shouldn’t be able to see or smell or hear it. Shapes move in her peripheral vision, but she can’t seem to look at anything directly.
She gave you a grappler, comes Pete’s voice again, from no discernible physical point around her.
And then that image from earlier snaps into focus: it’s the woman she met at the bar two days ago. Pete’s words keep echoing around her, and somehow she knows. The woman Pete was referring to and the woman from the bar are one and the same.
It shouldn’t make any sense, but in the swirling, endless light, Myka’s world has narrowed to this one, solitary fact, the only thing that remains true.
Then her world goes dark.
~
Pete doesn’t stop acting weird the whole night, but a private look she shares with Leena confirms they both find his affectionate mood kind of sweet, so Myka lets him be.
“You touched an artifact, didn’t you?” she states more than asks before they head up to bed, narrowing her eyes at him where he’s stopped a few steps above her on the stairs. He’s had that look on his face all night, that combination of guilt and relief that just screams “I got into a mishap at the Warehouse and just barely managed to fix it before anyone could notice.” He gets that look a lot.
“Who, me?” says Pete, feigning innocence. “I would never.” He stoops to grip her by the shoulders and kiss her quickly on the forehead. “‘Night, Mykes,” he says, scampering up the stairs and off to his room before she can say another word.
The schnapps made Myka sleepy enough she nearly dozed off partway through the movie, but as soon as she gets into bed, she’s wide awake. Myka doesn’t do “restless” much, mostly because she usually keeps too busy with work to get bored, so it’s an odd feeling for her. She tries to brush it off as a natural reaction to being snowed in, and focuses on planning out her schedule for the next few weeks while she waits for sleep to come. When it does eventually find her, it’s only for a few short minutes before she’s jerked awake by the sensation of falling.
Suddenly, she’s fully awake again, frozen in place, hazy splotches of colour floating past her eyes. She feels as though she’s been yanked away from someplace bright.
And then it all comes back to her, as pieces of dreams do in that place between asleep and awake - only she’s perfectly lucid, and they’re memories, not dreams. Memories she shouldn’t have, of places she hasn’t been. Pete jumping into the fiery pit that powers the Warehouse. Claudia in the institution. Artie sitting across the table from her at a prison in Maryland. Helena sitting two seats over at the bar down the street from her old office in D.C., eyes sparkling as they meet Myka’s for the first time.
She sleeps in fits and starts all night, images of a life she hasn’t lived swimming through her head.
In the morning light they’ll slip away, out of her reach once more.
~
Helena glances over the top of the wine glass she’s just drained to look at Myka, impossibly pretty in the firelight of the hotel bar. Myka, she knows, is replaying their retrieval a few hours earlier in her mind, thinking about where best to shelve the artifact, as she stares down absently into her own nearly empty glass. Helena never misses an opportunity to drink her in whenever Myka gets wrapped up in thought like this. From the hint of rosiness the wine has brought to her cheeks to the slightly frizzier than usual curl of her hair after being outside in the snow, she’s a picture of perfection, and Helena is drunk on love and lust and something bigger than any single word can encompass.
The way Myka scrunches her nose when she looks back up at Helena is worth getting caught staring every time.
Had they retrieved the artifact an hour or two sooner, they might have been halfway back to South Dakota by now, but the snow had other plans for them, and now they’re spending Christmas Eve stranded in a hotel in Albany. But Helena certainly doesn’t mind the company. Truth be told, she might even prefer it this way. She’s never been one for big holiday celebrations, except when she was planning them for Christina. Fond as she is of the others back in Univille, Christmas at Leena’s still sounds almost overwhelming. Knowing she has a quiet night alone with Myka to look forward to, something tense inside of her that she hadn’t quite noticed begins to unwind, letting her melt in Myka’s eyes and into the cushiony chair by the fire.
The Berings are spending Christmas with Tracy and her family this year, but there was talk of Myka going home around New Year’s. Helena inquires about this as they make their way out of the bar and through the hotel lobby after paying their bill, but Myka only says she’s thinking, now, of visiting later in January. Helena knows Myka’s made a point of going home for the holidays ever since she and her father reconciled, and she worries, momentarily, that something is wrong. But Myka responds with a look that stops her in her tracks, as the realization sets in that it’s for her. Because it’s their first Christmas together.
She’s watching Myka’s back as she walks ahead of her, pressing the button for the elevator, when she has something akin to a vision of Myka sitting alone in a bar, hair pulled into a tight bun and a scarf around her neck, hunched over some kind of paperwork, frowning in concentration. Helena racks her brain, but cannot place the memory.
After Christina, she theorized at length about parallel universes, alternate timelines. But Helena tries not to ask those questions anymore - to wonder if Christina is still out there, somewhere. Helena now focuses on the structure of time, the physics of space. They have brought her here, and this is her reality.
But the images keep coming to her, now, and all at once she is hyperaware of time and its infinite possibilities. She can feel Christina’s hand in hers in some of those versions of her life; in others, there is only Myka; in others still, both, or neither. Sometimes she never meets Christina at all, and dies years before Myka is even born. There are times when she brings the world to its knees, and times when Myka is only able to stop her with a bullet. Helena feels like a black hole, as every millisecond of time is pulled into her mind.
Then the elevator arrives with a ding, and when Myka turns to her, that life-saving smile on her face, the images whoosh away again. She walks forward and takes Myka’s hand, the phantom feeling of Christina grasping her other one the only trace left of what she’s just experienced. And it grounds her, calms her, just as much as Myka’s solid presence on her other side.
The elevator door slides shut, and with Myka’s cheek pressed to hers, hand in her hair, Helena is not a black hole, but a star. Should’ve flickered out lifetimes ago, but here she is, still, burning bright.