Work Text:
Helena likes:
- Calling him Valentine
- Juggling
- Laughing at jokes only she understands (this is one of her less attractive habits, in Valentine’s opinion. It annoys him almost as much as her habit of crossing her eyes at him whenever she thinks he is being unreasonable.)
Valentine spends his first fortnight believing that being renamed is a ritual that everyone goes through when they join the circus. Helena had refused to call him anything but Valentine from the moment they met, and when she introduced him to everyone as Valentine he'd decided to just go along with it. She seemed determined, and he didn’t want to make a bad first impression. It isn't until he asks the circus strongman, Ernest, what his name used to be that Valentine realises it’s not actually a circus tradition at all.
Ernest looks puzzled. “Ernest? I’ve always been called Ernest. My mother named me after my grandfather, may he rest in peace.”
“So, not a special circus name, then?” Valentine presses.
“What? No, no, of course not,” Ernest says.
“Because Helena gave me this name, and I thought -”
“It’s not actually your name?” Ernest looks surprised.
“Well, I used to have another one.”
“She must like you then.”
“Do you think? I’m not sure, she’s difficult to get a handle on. Sometimes she seems a bit annoyed with me.”
“She’s just a bit unsettled at the moment, with what happened to her mother, and the circus nearly breaking up. It will pass,” Ernest tells him, trying to comfort him. Valentine is surprised to find that the thought of Helena ignoring him is not at all comforting. Distracted, he says “I knew someone who was sick recently, it caused everyone a lot of trouble,” and then wonders why he’d said it.
Over the next few days he wonders if he should confront Helena about his name. He tries, once, when they are having lunch together.
“About my name,” he begins.
“Hmm?” Helena says, occupied with trying to get the last few olives out of the bottom of the jar.
“Well – and not that I’m complaining, I mean, it’s very nice – nicer than my old name, anyway – and it’s always nice to get a gift – but, I mean, it wasn’t actually my birthday and – that is, I mean, it’s just, um, well –”
“What is it, Valentine?” she says. Her hair has fallen into her face during the fight with the olive jar, and he feels the urge to reach over and tuck it behind her ears. He tries to gather his thoughts.
“Why Valentine?” he says.
Helena smiles. “It’s a very distinguished name,” she says. “I think it suits you. Want an olive?”
“Thank you,” he says, and although he isn’t talking about the olives he takes one anyway.
Besides, it’s a comfortable kind of name, and he finds himself answering to it easily.
*****
So Valentine can start performing as soon as possible, he spends his first few weeks working intensively with Helena to learn their routines. He is delighted to find that he picks up the new routines quickly. He and Helena have an easy familiarity from the start and they find their styles meshing without too much modification.
Despite the intense work of learning all the new routines, Valentine loves his new job. Helena is a good juggler, but what makes it even better is that she's good company as well. They spend several hours a day throwing balls and clubs in increasingly complicated patterns, talking about whatever takes their fancy while they practice. Once they spend half an hour talking about things that start with ‘B’ and can fly (birds and balloons and bees and bugs and bats and butterflies, and then they get stuck; Helena’s father contributes biplanes to the list and then tells them to concentrate on their work).
Their progress is so good that they move his debut in the ring eariler than planned, and it is only a month before he steps out into the ring for the first time. Their cue is a bright fanfare of brass and a flourish of drums as the acrobats finish their routine, and as they leave the ring Valentine follows Helena out onto the sawdust and into the bright lights. He gets six feet out before he looks up and sees the wall of people. He can feel the weight of the audience pressing down on him, and his pace slows.
Helena somehow realises that he is lagging, and she turns around to give him a quick smile and half waves one of her clubs at him. He smiles back, shaky but real, and follows her further out, staring only at the now familiar lines of her back. When the reach their marks she turns to face him, and with a bow they begin. As the clubs whirl through their hands and they fall into the now familiar patterns he feels his smile growing broader. He is almost surprised when he finds himself at the end of their act and he manages to run back out of the ring without tripping and landing on his face, so all in all he feels it's a tremendous success.
Backstage, Helena beams at him. "Wasn't that brilliant?"
"Brilliant," Valentine echoes, and beams back at her.
*****
Helena dislikes:
- Drawing
- Dancing
- Violin music (Valentine cannot fault her for this. His previous roommate had been an aspiring musician, prone to practicing his violin whenever the muses inspired. Being frequently woken early in the morning by a violin being played with loud exuberance has killed his love for the instrument, although it has given him an appreciation for sharing a caravan with a mime.)
Valentine has been recruited to design a poster for their latest show, and he's failing miserably. Everything he’s tried so far is either boring, or interesting but without enough room for all the writing. Poster designing is hard work, and he wonders if he can get whoever had made their previous posters to do this one as well. Whoever it was had been far more talented than Valentine.
“Morris, who designed the old posters?” he asks. Morris looks up from where he and Joanne are doing the accounts.
“Oh, that was Helena,” Morris says. He looks proud, but a little sad as well.
“She’s very talented,” Valentine says.
“She is, isn’t she? That’s what makes it such a pity, her giving it up like she has.”
“Giving it up?
“Yes, she stopped drawing shortly after her mother got better. She drew a lot at the time, so we think it must remind her of it all, but she refuses to talk about it. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just – I’m trying to do this poster, and it’s not going all that well.”
“Would you like me to have a look?” Joanne gets up from the desk and comes over to him. “You’re doing alright – although maybe you should get rid of the elephant, people will get the wrong idea about what kind of circus this is.”
“Elephant? What elephant?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Joanne says. She looks a little embarrassed, but also a little like she is trying not to laugh. “I thought there was one on the poster – there, on the left.”
“That’s a butterfly!” Valentine says, a little outraged.
“Oh dear,” Joanne murmurs. “I do apologise.” Despite her words, she is definetly smiling now.
“Perhaps you should give Valentine a hand, my dear,” Morris says.
At their juggling practice that day, Valentine tells Helena about his troubles with the poster. She laughs about the elephant, but not unkindly.
“At least your mother agreed to help,” he says.
“Oh, she’s a good artist,” Helena says. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” he says, and they lapse into silence for a moment. Helena throws Valentine a left-to-left double, but his attention isn’t really on the clubs and he almost drops it.
“Valentine!” Helena says. “Are you paying attention?” She passes him another club before he can answer, but he catches it easily.
“Your mother said you used to draw a lot too,” he says, and returns the club.
She almost fumbles the catch, and does a couple of self throws to make up for it.
“I used to,” she says. “But I stopped.” She throws him the club again. “I think we need to practice this more, it’s not really working.”
“I really liked some of the drawings you did,” Valentine presses.
“Thanks,” Helena says, but she looks upset and he has the feeling that whatever the problem was, he’d only made it worse.
“Sorry,” he tells her.
“Nothing to apologise for,” Helena says. “It’s my fault, really. We’ll get it with some more practice,” and Valentine decides to drop the subject. He’s sure she’ll tell him when she’s ready.
*****
Helena’s mother and father celebrate their wedding anniversary that June. Everyone is still relieved that Joanne is well again, so the party is full of people giddy with enthusiasm and perhaps a little bit of spiked punch. They’ve strung lights up everywhere and pushed back all the tables in the dinning room to make room, and when the band starts playing something lively it’s not long before people get up to dance.
Joanne tries to get Helena to go and join them, but Helena shakes her head. Valentine can’t say exactly what it is in her expression that makes her seem nervous – Helena never likes to show any uncertainty – but he knows that the thought of dancing makes her uneasy.
“Come on,” Valentine says. “You can’t be nervous about dancing in front of your friends when you’re quite happy to stand in front of hundreds of paying customers!”
“It’s more the dancing than the people,” she says, and bites her lip.
“You don't have to know all the steps to have fun, you know.”
“It's not that, I just don’t really like dancing,” she says. He can see that he’s losing her, and without really stopping to think he bows to her and holds out his hand.
"Would you honor me with a dance?" he asks.
"I'm not really-"
"Please?"
Helena stares at him for a moment, and he holds her gaze. "I suppose it will be alright this time," she says, and takes his hand.
Helena is warm pressed against him and she grips his hand and his shoulder tightly.
“At least I’m not wearing black,” she says as they start to move.
“You look lovely,” Valentine tells her, before he has a chance to think.
“And I’m sure I’m perfectly safe with you, Valentine,” Helena adds, and he feels a little disappointed. Something must show on his face – he never had quite got the hang of masking his expressions – because she bites her lip and frowns.
“I mean – you’ll help me if anything goes wrong, won’t you?”
Valentine looks down at her for a moment, and then nods. “Of course. Not that anything will go wrong, Helena.”
She relaxes against him. “We make a good team.”
“We do,” he agrees, and swings them into a turn.
*****
Helena may or may not like:
- Black clothing
- Valentine
- Cats (he thought he heard her muttering about being afraid of them, or not being afraid of them, or something like that. But then later he’d seen her sitting on the ground, scratching a neighbourhood cat under the chin and laughing. When he asked her about it, she told him that she kept confusing them with something else.)
Five weeks before Helena’s 17th birthday, she goes out and buys an armful of magazines and then disappears into her caravan for the rest of the afternoon. Although he sees her across the room at breakfast the next day, Valentine doesn’t see her at lunch, and misses her again at dinner. It’s unusual enough that a couple of people ask him if they’ve had a fight. Valentine tries to think of something, but apart from Helena seeming slightly more distracted than usual everything has been perfectly normal. They'd had a disagreement on Tuesday about whether the jam on scones should go on top of the cream or underneath it, but it wasn’t the kind of argument where you stopped talking to people afterwards. He's baffled, and a little hurt.
In the end, he decides to go and confront Helena about it. He finds her in her caravan, with the curtains drawn and only her bedside lamp on, although she is still dressed in her clothes from the day when she lets him in. In the gloom, he can see the wreckage of all the magazines she had bought littering the floor, with shreds of paper where she has cut out photos of models wearing black dresses. She has assembled her collection on a large sheet of paper, embellished with abstract swirls and flourishes.
“Is something wrong, Helena?” he asks.
She pads back over from the door to sit on her bed, and shrugs. “I suppose you could say that I’m wishing that I was someone I’m not.”
“But you wouldn’t say that.”
She smiles at him, but it’s a rueful smile. “You know me too well, Valentine.”
“I don’t know you well enough,” he responds. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
“I suppose I would say that I’m thinking about someone I could be.”
“I like you the way you are,” he tells her, “although I’m sure I’d still like you if you wanted to do something new.”
Helena glances at him, then stares at the floor again. “Yeah, but I don’t really want to be her anyway. I just wish I could do some of the things she got to do.”
“Couldn’t you just do those things, then? What’s stopping you?”
“It’s complicated," she tells him. "Maybe I can. I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been wondering.”
“I’m sure you can,” Valentine says. “You can do almost anything, if you put your mind to it.”
*****
The circus throws Helena a party for her 17th birthday. She is banned from doing any of the work to get the party ready and forbidden to set foot in the kitchen. Valentine gets caught up in the bustle of preparation immediately after lunch, and barely has enough time to get changed before the party is due to start.
By the time he arrives the room is already getting full. There is a woman in a deep red cocktail dress at standing in the centre of the gathering, her hair swept up on top of her head, but he can’t spot Helena. It isn't until the woman in the red cocktail dress turns around that he realises that she's Helena. She smiles when she sees him looking and immediately comes over to him, and he struggles to get his reaction under control before she arrives.
“Valentine! You made it. Do you like my new dress?”
“You look wonderful,” he tells her, pleased that he manages to keep his voice steady. “I love the colour. You decided not to get a black one?”
“I decided I could do this on my own terms,” she says, and grabs his hand to pull him into the gathering. He is uncomfortably aware of how damp his palm is, and hopes she puts it down to the summer heat.
By midnight the party shows no signs of slowing down. The laugher is broad, gestures expansive and the noise of everyone talking is almost louder than the music.
“Quick, now’s our chance,” Helena says into Valentine’s ear. She is closer than strictly necessary, and he can feel the heat from her pressed along his side. Her lips brush his ear slightly when she leans a little too far forward.
“Our chance for what?” he asks, a trifle breathlessly.
“To get away somewhere quieter. It would be nice to go somewhere we can talk without shouting and being interrupted every five minutes,” she says. “Unless you’d rather stay here?”
She pulls away from him slightly, and he unconsciously narrows the gap again. Although she is trying to look unconcerned, he can see by the way she is fiddling with her fingers that she is nervous.
“I would love to go with you,” he tells her, and hopes she can see the sincerity in his eyes. He wonders why she wants to talk to him, and tries to suppress the hope gathering inside. He wonders if she's noticed him staring at her, and then wonders if she's going to ask him to stop, to leave her alone. He feels the nervousness settle in his stomach.
It is darker away from the party, but the glow coming from the celebrations and the other lights around camp make it easy to navigate. They wind up at one of the picnic tables in the field near the caravans, and after a moment's hesitation Valentine wraps his arm around Helena to protect her from the slight cold of the early morning. She leans against him with a sigh.
He is aware of his heart racing in his chest.
“Helena,” he begins, but she rests her fingers against his mouth and he stops.
“Valentine,” she says, and leans over to kiss him. Her mouth is warm against his and the air smells like dirt and rain and it's absolutely perfect.
*****
Helena loves:
- The noise of the crowd as she steps into the ring
- Staircases in libraries
- Seeing her mother smile
- Wednesday night currys
- Monkeys
"Valentine, what are you doing?" she asks. He jumps, and looks sheepish. She leans over his shoulder to see the paper and laughs.
"Here," she says. "Give me that." She tugs the pen off him and leans over to add something to the list.
- Valentine ♥
"There," she says, and pulls him around for a kiss.