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1.
He remembers that it was raining and that the soft glow of the gaslights wasn’t enough to highlight the inconsistencies with the cobblestones. More than once he’d almost been sent sprawling to his face because he hadn’t caught the divot that a missing stone had left. He was surprised that Doctor Magnus didn’t get more calls to set broken bones than he did.
Mostly those broken bones were James’ or more often Nigel’s, but that was only because they were the clumsiest people that he had ever met.
The rain was heavy, as it normally was in November, and he had offered to walk Helen home from James’ because John was up at Oxford or Cambridge or some other academic place – Nikola didn’t really care; all he knew was that John was gone and he got to spend time with Helen.
Alone.
He had been so consumed with adoration for her in those early years that he didn’t even really notice when the love started to sneak in. But it was moot now.
He had been alone with Helen, walking along the sidewalk when her heel had caught in one of the aforementioned holes. She’d almost been sent sprawling herself when Nikola’s quick reflexes had snagged her around the waist and with her momentum carried her into his chest.
Her breath had rushed out, feathering across his cheek as her hands flew to his shoulders in surprise. When she realized that she wasn’t on the ground, she released a startled little laugh. Nikola hadn’t been able to bring himself to let her go, captivated by the sight of droplets of rain skidding down her cheeks. His lips tingled at the thought of her being only a breath away, and his fingers flexed into the unforgiving back of her gown. She stood watching him, her eyes wide with surprise.
It was the surprise that told him to push her away, to keep walking. If anything, when Nikola Tesla kissed Helen Magnus, she was going to want it as much as he did.
2.
He’d been working in her basement lab for almost a week and she was starting to get scared. The only other time that Nikola had secluded himself away with such secrecy had resulted in a rather disturbing explosion that had to be sold to the newspapers as a gas leak – though the resulting fumes and colours of flames were nothing remotely what could have been associated to a gas fire.
Staring at her computer screen, she tried to force herself to get up and go and check on him.
He was after all, mortal now.
Sighing, she took a last cold swallow of tea and grimaced as she left her office. She hoped that the enthusiasm he had shown for his new magnetic powers hadn’t worn off; that his self-induced seclusion within the Sanctuary was his experimenting and exploring the ability.
She hoped.
But she knew Nikola’s manic attitude toward the abnormal side of himself. Most of the time it was the most amazing thing in the history of man, then, suddenly, he was lower than pond scum – a vile being with no purpose.
When she cracked the door to the lab that she was sure that he had been using, the lights were off. In the light from the doorway, she could see that the bottle of wine that was a staple on his work bench was knocked over and that the light was highlighting the $500 a bottle wine slowly dripping on to the floor.
For a flash, intense annoyance ripped through her. She expected him to drink her wine when he visited, but he was supposed to *drink* it. She was about to slam the door in irritation when he mumble something from the other side of the bench.
She rounded the table to find him lying sprawled on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes and the other was resting slack around the stem of an empty wine glass. It didn’t take her long to realize that Nikola Tesla was stone drunk for the first time in over a hundred years.
“Oh, this is good,” she murmured to herself, even as she bent down beside him and began to tug him to his feet. “Come on Nikola, you need to sleep this off in a bed.”
A rich throaty chuckle rumbled through him as he slipped a heavy arm around her shoulders. “Will you be joining me?” he asked, sleepily, his thick accent seeming to make an appearance under the influence.
“Not with you like this,” she said, turning him out of the lab and through the hallways. “You’ll need to get used to the fact that you can get drunk now.”
But he stubbornly clung to the first part of her statement and with a sultry, lopsided smile asked, “Does that mean...” he paused as she led them on to an elevator and groaned in pain as the doors opened and closed. “Does that mean that if I were sober, I could ask you to join me?”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and smiled out of his eyesight. “You can always ask, Nikola. It’s always polite to ask.”
Either he didn’t catch it or he was too drunk to care, but they made the rest of their stumbling journey in silence. She cracked his door and used him to lever it open the rest of the way, guiding him in the darkness to where she knew his bed was.
As she was lowering him to the bed, one of his hands caught on her shoulder and held her there, mere inches from his own. She could smell the cabernet on his breath – with little surprise – but what he said, did come as one. “May I kiss you?”
She blinked and frowned, caught by the tone of his voice and the pressure of his hand. She watched him for a moment, completely, drunkenly unguarded. There was truth to the idea of Dutch courage, where alcohol lowered inhibitions and allowed a release of things that one normally wouldn’t let see the light of day.
This was something that Nikola would never have let her see if he’d been sober and for that reason alone, she was tempted to grant his request.
She looked back into his eyes just as his hand slipped off of her shoulder and his head fell back as he passed out.
They’re just back from Colombia; him with ringing ears and her with wringing tears.
He’d killed a little part of her down in the lab, he can see that now. As she methodically checks him over for wounds that weren’t readily apparent or internal problems that he couldn’t even feel, she’s clinical and remorseless. Oh, she’s thorough and deft – he’d never trust anyone to make sure that there was nothing wrong with him like he would Helen Magnus, even if he knows that the last thing she wants to see of him is his back through the Sanctuary gates.
She won’t meet his eyes and that is the real kicker. Normally, when Helen was pissed she was unafraid to look you in the eyes and tell you to fuck off. Now, though, she’s clinical and unemotional and it’s ripping his heart apart a little bit with every touch.
“I’m sorry,” he tries softly, but he knows that it’s not enough. She continues to check him over without so much as a sigh or grunt in acknowledgement.
His lips twitch and for a long moment he’s irrational with the need for her forgiveness. His hand rises and clasps her chin, forcing her eyes to meet him. He’s scared by the cold, detached emotion behind them, but he tries anyways.
“I’m sorry.” It’s as sincere as he can make it, with all the pent up pain and mistrust and personal emotion that he can muster. She tries to break his grasp, but even mortal, his wiry fingers are strong and he keeps her eyes on his.
They are close, their rough breaths fluttering ragged across each other’s cheeks. He’s torn between kissing her into forgiveness and wrenching it out of her just to get her to talk to him.
“I’m sorry, Helen.” He doesn’t want to make it worse by listing all of the faults of his trip, he just wants it to as all-encompassing as possible. For a split second he’s about to seal his apology with a kiss, but then, sighing, he drops his hand and his eyes and let’s her probe his bruises in silence.
She’s finally gotten used to the sometimes-healthy glow of his cheeks, and the warmth of his touch – for how seldom he bestows it. But thinking on it, she misses the paleness of his vampirism.
It reminded her of his immortality and tonight, maybe she can be there again.
Maybe she isn’t going to lose him in 50 years.
Maybe he can stay here forever.
It isn’t that she’d loved him since the beginning. Far from it. What she had told him in Rome was not that far from the truth. But he had always challenged her, forced her and expected the best from her. He had, he did and he always would treat her as an equal, not a just a smart woman. She knows that he’s not going to change the way that he treats her. She knows that for all the times that he flirts with her, flatters her and pushes the boundaries of their friendship, he respects her more than anything else in the world.
And suddenly, more than anything in the world, she wants to thank him for all the times that she wasn’t just another woman, when she was something unique and special and he had seen her as such.
She’s never had the impulse before, but right now, Helen Magnus wants to kiss the living daylights out of Nikola Tesla.
She pads softly across the plush rug in the center of the room and stands a few feet behind him. He hasn’t seen her yet, his loss of heightened senses has actually made him more numb to everyday sounds. She finds now that she misses the fact that he had been able to smell her in a room full of people, that he could hear her coming from over a floor away.
He sighs heavily in the next instant and she stops in her tracks. Maybe he needs this time; maybe she shouldn’t bother him anymore tonight. He seems to be looking at the moon with such intensity that there is nothing else in his world.
She doesn’t want to disturb him.
She’ll talk to him in the morning, over her tea and his coffee, and nothing will be different.
The last time that he was this hungry, he’d almost killed a girl. He’d hated himself after that. Hated what he’d become; what he needed that everyone else on the planet had.
And the only person within hunting distance is Helen.
He swallows thickly. “Maybe you should take the truck and find something for me to eat; bring it back here for me.”
He may be the only living (unliving?) vampire in existence, but he’s not going to become the only homicidal one too. He might be hungry, but he’s not hungry enough to kill.
Yet.
She shakes her head. “We can’t stay – not even you. They’re going to have seen that from somewhere and people are going to come. We need to be away from here.”
He stares at her blankly for a long moment and hesitantly tries to persuade her away from him. “Helen, I don’t know if you remember what I was like when I first...”
“I do, quite clearly. That is exactly why I think it would be better to take you back somewhere that we can get you something to eat.” She looks at him sympathetically. “I know that you don’t want that to happen again. Maybe you’ll find something to eat on the way back?”
Frankly, she looks scared of something, but she’s practically forcing him in to the truck with her, so she’s not afraid of him. Nikola watches her for a long moment as she levers herself on to her feet and then looks down on him in the lowering sunset. She offers him a long, slender hand to help him to his feet and all that he can do is fight with himself not to bite into her wrist.
“I’m pretty bad, Helen. I don’t trust...”
“I do. You won’t hurt me, Nikola.”
He takes her hand and stands up, his wiry body next to hers and their noses almost touching. He can smell the blood through her skin, it’s tinged with all the elements and nutrients stirred together and he feels his cheeks water and his teeth start to lengthen. But under the hunger and need to take something from her that she’s not offering, is the scent of her, something he’d learn to discern from a crowded room after she’d helped him to curb his initial thirst.
He suddenly wants to lean forward and take something else from her; like in Rome, when he had stolen her kiss. He thinks, quite positively that if only he can take a kiss from her, he might be able to make it all the way back to civilization without killing her.
Only, it would kill something of her. Inwardly he flinches and he thinks of how his life has shifted since only a few years ago. It had only been him and himself and anything that he had made. Now it’s him and her and all the kiddies back at the ranch and it’s so different to think of life with a little bit of her dead inside because of him.
He drops his eyes and frowns.
“Fine. But I’m driving and you’re sitting in the back with a gun.”
He doesn’t know if she’s alive, though he likes to think that some part of him would know if she was no longer breathing. He’d always fancied himself able to hear her breath, even in their sixty years of separation; he’d awoken at nights to the sound of her breathing in his mind.
And if it’ll help the wine go down easier as he tries to clean his mouth, all the better.
But two days pass with nothing. He hasn’t slept – not that he would have if he had to – and he thanks the fates that be that he has rapid healing because otherwise he’d have worked the first several layers of skin from his hands lifting and shifting rubble in the ruins. Will is exhausted and Henry needs to sleep too, but he keeps digging. Kate won’t leave the Big Guy’s side while he’s healing in the safe house. He hasn’t even woken up, which may be beneficial to his healing process.
Nikola doesn’t really pay attention to that now and he keeps digging.
A week passes. Ten days.
He’s drinking wine that he now has to buy himself because he’s still trying to dig out the wine cellar. He can’t drink a French wine without wondering what she was thinking that time in 1946 right before he’d left again and he had caught her staring at him in the setting sun of the Rhone Valley, south of Lyons. The heavy German wines and delicate Italians all evoke separate images that make him wish for his ability to get drunk hadn’t been overwritten by his vampire DNA.
Finally they dig out the main lab under everything else, and she’s not there.
“Where the hell is she?” he yells to the sky.
Suddenly his vivid imagination creates horror stories of body snatching and cloning and zombies and he flinches when he sees Henry’s eyes widen in his own creation of events. He shakes his head because he can’t seem to think of himself falling victim to the hysterics of a man torn in unrequited love.
Even though, technically, he is.
He leaves the safe house that night, nothing in his hands but his coat and a hidden bottle of wine. He finds a hotel in New City and, unapologetically, uses one of Helen’s credit cards.
The lights are out and instead of drinking the whole bottle without a glass, he lies spread eagle on the bed and allows the bottle to roll off the edge and thud heavily on the plush carpet. He idly wonders if his depression will last as long as he had loved her, cause that would be a bitch.
He doesn’t know how long he stares at the stucco ceiling, but his vision is a little bit blurry because his eyes are dry and the dots are all a mass of texture. Suddenly he can hear her breathing and he rolls over, trying to bury the dream with the wine that he didn’t drink earlier. If he’s lucky, he can allow the wine to at least soothe him into slumber again.
He can still hear her though; he can even imagine the faint beat of her heart. That, he thinks, starting to gain mental clarity, is different than before.
He looks over his shoulder and startles at the sight of Helen, standing in his doorway. He blinks stupidly and twitches his lips.
“How’d you get in here?”
She closes the door behind her and smiles in the darkness. “It’s funny, really. When I showed them my ID, and that the name on the card used to pay for the room, they gave me another key.”
Nikola is finally grateful for his vampirism because it means that he doesn’t have to blush in shame. Instead he covers up by rolling to the edge of the bed and swinging his feet to the floor. He stands up and makes his way to the mini bar. He grabs a Glenlivet for himself and vaguely gestures for her to help herself. He moves to one of the couches and gracefully folds himself onto it.
She watches him with sharp eyes and doesn’t move a muscle.
“Well, I’m glad that you’re all right,” he mutters even though his heart is in his throat and he’s fighting the threat of tears.
“Nikola.” Her voice is heavy with regret and something that he doesn’t want to name without some sort of failsafe, like drunkenness or near death experiences.
“Look, you’ll have to forgive me, Helen. But I’m still not entirely sure that you’re not some hallucination. So if you would be so kind as to save your recriminations and condescension for another time, it would be greatly appreciated.” He snaps the lid off of the bottle and snaps his head back. He allows the rich flavour to sit on his tongue for a long moment and, though oblivion will not be provided by the malt, it’ll still taste good trying to get there.
When he’s done draining the bottle, he sighs and lets himself relax only to find that she’s manoeuvred herself so that she’s kneeling between his legs with her palms resting on either thigh.
He doesn’t think, doesn’t breathe and he certainly doesn’t hesitate to grasp her neck, curl his fingers into the hair at the back of her head and kiss her before he can stop himself.
For all the wine and alcohol that he’s consume in the last few days, he’s sensitive to the aroma of black tea and cream that sits on her tongue. He swallows it, lives it for a long, shallow moments before he suddenly realizes that she’s curled her own hands into the lapels of his waistcoat and is holding on to him just as desperately as he is to her.
He’s incredibly grateful that he doesn’t need to breathe with any regularity as it allows him to kiss her until she snaps her head back in defeat and gasps in fresh air. With her head tilted back, Nikola takes advantage of the long stretch of neck that she exposes and tastes the skin that has captivated him since his first week as a vampire.
Her hands migrate to the back of his head, her fingers gripping his short hair and then tugging him to heaven against her lips again.
This isn’t a one sided kiss, it hasn’t been since its inception; but Nikola never thought that her participation in their first mutual kiss would be this enthusiastic. He had never been given so much as a wink from her up until twelve days ago when she’d kissed him before pretending to blow herself up.
He’s not sure how he feels about that. If she had been as indifferent to him as she had always said she was, why would she have offered him that olive branch? Why wouldn’t she have just left well enough alone?
Unless, it wasn’t for his benefit but hers.
He grins smugly at the thought of his own apparent genius.
“You know, I’m not too sure that I like the goodbye kiss that you gave me in the lab, Helen. If you didn’t think you weren’t going to make it, you could have at least seduced me the night before.”
Her eyes narrow and he can’t think of anything more exceptional in the world than the thought of trying to convince the woman in love with you that she is in fact, in love with you.