Work Text:
6, 7, 8 Helena thought to herself, before she crashed to the ground.
“Shit!” Helena said.
“What?” Dinah asked. Helena could her her footsteps as she ran towards the crashing noise.
“My pull-up bar fell out of the doorway again! I’m fine.” She quickly amended, because she hated to see Dinah look so worried.
“You sure about that?” Dinah offered a hand to help Helena up. Helena took it and she felt a little smile spread across her face. The one thing that had broken through years of stoicism was the feeling of contact with Dinah, skin-on-skin. It just made Helena happy.
“I’m sure.” Helena said, even as she quickly checked herself for injuries. She’d landed pretty hard on one knee, but it wasn’t bad. She could walk it off.
“Your pull-up bar sure isn’t, though.”
Helena looked. She’d picked up the bar for about five bucks at one of those flea markets Dinah loved. The bar was cracked in the middle, and when Helena bent down to pick it up, it snapped completely, leaving her with two pieces of plastic and no pull-up bar.
Dinah laughed.
“It’s not funny.” Helena said, but she could tell she was about to laugh, too. “Here.” She thrust one of the pieces at Dinah with a twinkle in her eye. When Dinah took it, Helena swung at he gently with her piece.
Dinah caught it with her piece, and they had a little plastic sword fight.
“I don’t think it’s quite as good a sword as a wrapping paper tube,” Helena said, as they advanced down the hallway, until Dinah was backed into a corner.
“Really? Because I think it’s more about technique.” Dinah dropped her piece of Helena’s pull-up bar and switch into a volley of kicks, elegant, but telegraphed enough the Helena could avoid taking a actual hit.
This time it was Helena being forced down the hall. She ducked and spun away from Dinah as though they were dancing. This was natural to Helena; more than anything else, this violent dance was her speciality.
She’d always enjoyed shadowboxing around Dinah. That was Helena’s way of expressing herself. She couldn’t always make words work for her, but if she could write a sonnet in martial arts moves, she’d be the next Shakespeare.
The two of them were evenly matched, standing in the middle of the hallway, falling into a rhythm of attacking and defending, gentle shots taken at one another, love in the guise of violence.
Helena swept Dinah’s legs and caught her on the way down, her calloused fingers against the soft, thick knit of Dinah’s oversized sweater, and for a moment time slowed. Just the two of them, in a controlled fall. Helena landed gently on the floor with Dinah on top of her.
Helena may have got them into that position, but it was Dinah who leaned in for a kiss.
This was one of those sun soaked moments that Helena hid away in her mind to remind her that, for all she’d seen, sometimes she got to hold heaven in her hands.
Dinah climbed to her feet and then helped Helena up, but a bitter note had clouded Helena’s joy. She’d put something of herself out there, but it was just fighting. Both her and Dinah had to fight, but fighting was just one angle of Dinah; she was like a sphere, with so many nuances and sides that they all gelled into one cohesive, complex person. Helena, on the other hand, was just fighting. Her whole self was just fighting and Dinah.
Say what you will about revenge missions, but they sure give you a sense of purpose. She thought.
That was the trouble with Helena. She was only fluent in fighting.
—
Helena was in the kitchen doing dishes.
She heard Dinah holler something to her from the other room.
“What?” She yelled back.
“I said ‘what kind of pull-up bar do you want?’”
Helena shut the water off and caught a giddy little smile on her face. These tiny moments made her ecstatic for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain.
Helena grabbed a towel to dry her hands and went into the living room to find Dinah curled up on the sofa with her tablet.
“I’m making an Amazon order. You want a new pull-up bar?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Helena tacked on. “I thought you hated Amazon.”
“I do.” Dinah sighed and looked a bit like a guilty child. “Sometimes I just need something and—“
“It’s fine. You don’t have to defend yourself.” Helena said as she sat down next to Dinah and wrapped an arm around her.
“Here. Do you want to research them yourself?”
“Sure.” Helena took the tablet. She wasn’t a huge technology person, and the tablet was unwieldy compared to her phone. Dinah got up and went into the kitchen. Helena could hear her filling up a teapot.
She wound up on a website called Wirecutter, which was a good thing because typing in “pull up bar” yielded so many results that she didn’t even know where to start. Even Wirecutter’s “Best Pull-Up Bars” article got a little intimidating, but she forced herself to read through the entire article before picking one.
Dinah brought her a mug—it was a emblazoned with a bow and arrows, and Dinah had crossed out the picture with a permanent marker and written “It’s a crossbow. I’m not twelve.” It had been Dinah’s first anniversary gift to her.
“Thank you.” Helena took a sip. “I think I got my pull-up bar.”
“Cool. If there’s anything else you want, you can add it to the cart.”
Helena wracked her brain for things she wanted. She wanted a way to communicate. Unfortunately, communication skills are one of the few things that amazon doesn’t sell.
On a whim, she added some art supplies. Art was communication, right?
—
Helena had tried, in the past, to write love letters.
It didn’t work.
There weren’t words for what Dinah and her had. Every time she tried to pin down the thread between them, it floated away. She couldn’t quite seem to hold on to it. That didn’t stop her from trying.
Whenever she felt it, when her and Dinah were tangled together in bed, or eating ice cream together, she tried to copy and paste the moment into her memories.
Helena laughed at odd times, too. Sometimes when her and all the birds were out and she felt that thing that might be called camaraderie, she would laugh because she couldn’t help herself. That was a feeling that defied words, too.
Helena had seen a lot of art in Italy.
“Can you see the love in that one?” Her surrogate assassin father had asked. He’d wanted her to be a bit cultured, too, not just a killer. At the time, she hadn’t seen the point; now she wished she’d payed more attention.
At the time she’d looked and looked for the love, and she hadn’t been able to see it. Now, a quick google search could bring up the paintings she’d seen in person. She could see the love, now that she knew what she was looking for.
Her art supplies arrived in a different box than her pull-up bar. She was able to grab the package before Dinah saw it.
She stuck it in her closet, under a box of flea market tchotchkes that Dinah had yet to find a space for. (Dinah liked to keep stuff around and was prone to slowly redecorating by swapping out pieces for new ones to suit her moods. Her moods were, coincidentally, an incredibly good predictor of what interior design trends were going to be in the coming months.)
Dinah went out to the grocery story that Tuesday. Once she was gone, Helena rushed into their shared room and grabbed her art stuff.
She didn’t want to get paint on the bed, so she sat on the floor. She’d gotten a few tiny tubes—purple, gold, blue, black, white. Her and Dinah’s colors. She’d also gotten a few small canvasses and a set of paintbrushes.
She grabbed a paper plate from the kitchen, and squirted a tiny dot of each color onto it, before getting back up to grab a cup of water to wet the brush.
Helena just sat for a moment, brush poised over the palette. She didn’t even know which color to start with.
She decided to do one half of the small canvas in her colors and one half in Dinah’s. It was a simple idea, bordering on juvenile, but it was a place to start.
—
Helena was snapped out of her painting frenzy by Dinah’s knock on the door.
Shit.
She didn’t want Dinah to find her doing this. Helena was painting as much for herself as she was for Dinah, and she wasn’t quite ready to share yet. Besides, her masterpiece was looking more like an amateurpiece.
It was just two sections, one dark and purple-y, the other shades of gold and blue. The colors were pretty, but there was no spark. She couldn’t see the love.
“Hey, Hel!” She heard Dinah call. “Can you help me bring the groceries in?”
“I’ll be there in a sec!”
She tossed all her painting supplies and her still wet canvas back next to the box where she’d stashed them earlier and went to go help Dinah.
—
Her pull-up bar showed up the next day. She stuck it in the doorway leading into her and Dinah's bedroom, and Helena once spent an hour hanging on to the bar, just to see if she could. This had the unintended side effect of blocking Dinah out of the bedroom for an hour because she didn't want to bother Helena.
"Ah, it's the human door." Dinah said when a sweaty Helena wandered into the kitchen to get some water.
Helena gave her a thumbs up while chugging her water.
—
Almost a month later, Helena came back home from a solo trip to buy crossbow bolts. She’d ran out during a recent fight and she was always touchy when she didn’t have enough spare bolts.
As she came in the door, bag of bolts in hand, she froze.
Dinah had done some decorating. She’d changed out the lamp next to the couch, and removed the mirror above the dining table.
That wasn’t the surprising part.
She’d replaced the mirror with a small canvas. It was Helena’s painting, but it wasn’t. The colors had run before they’d dried; the purple reached curling fingers into the blue and there were gold threads twisting down into the depth of the black section.
“Hey, Hel.” Dinah said, before she saw Helena’s face. “What is it?”
“That.” Helena pointed at the painting.
“I can take it down if you don’t like it.”
“No, no, I just…wasn’t expecting to see that.”
“You’ve seen it before? I was actually gonna ask if you could remember where I got it. I don’t remember it, but I found it next to one of the boxes of stuff in the closet.”
Helena finally set down her bag and shut the door behind her. She could feel a smile spreading across her face.
“I really like it.” Helena said. She leaned in closer to Dinah. “Can I kiss you?” She whispered.
“Yes.”
She did. They were like the colors melting into one another, brushing up against each other, not quite one yet, but getting there.
“Can I go a little further?” Dinah asked.
“Yes.” Helena said, pulling off her jacket and starting on Dinah’s shirt.
When they were done, they stayed tangled together, Helena’s fair skin against Dinah’s golden brown and Dinah’s gold hair against Helena’s dark brown.
“Hel,” Dinah said. “I’m not sure I can keep that painting up if you’re gonna want to hook up every time you see it.” Humor colored her voice.
“Nah. Just this time.” Helena responded. “But I’m open to more.”
“That sounds good.”
“Also, Dinah. You should know that I…um, it’s my painting. I left it when it was still wet and the paint moved around.”
“It’s us, isn’t it?” Dinah whispered to her.
Helena nodded.
She let the image of the painting fill her mind.
Can you see the love in it?
Yes.