Work Text:
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but you sure as shit know me
better than anybody else
and for that in my heart I am hopeful
-kathleen edwards
i.
Will Zimmerman has been working for Helen Magnus for nearly three years now, and in that time he has had far more abnormal experiences than normal ones. Most of them star Helen Magnus performing various tasks that everyone present will recall and embellish later at dinner parties after four or five drinks.
There was this one time, right, when they were breaking into a sixteenth story apartment building to recover some sort of Iranian encyclopedia of gnostic abnormal knowledge and Magnus literally flew from the balcony back to ground level (leaving Will and Henry to find their own way past the angry Bechet waiting for them in the foyer). Like she didn’t sprout wings or anything but she definitely flew, somehow, someway, probably with the aid of one of Henry’s go-go gadget gravity defiers.
There was this other time, okay, that Will witnessed his boss incapacitate fourteen thugs with a can of hairspray and a safety pin and this other time where she seduced one (or possibly both, he can’t remember at this point) of the US Senate Majority Whips for blacklisted information by reciting one of her grandmother’s cucumber sandwich recipes in German. Yeah. It happened, it totally happened, and like, who even was this woman? he used to ask himself, and still asks himself, albeit more rarely now because he’s never actually gotten a straight answer.
Helen Magnus is a woman who name-drops revolutionaries and poets and presidents on a regular basis and wears seventeen decades and counting without any of the pretentiousness you might expect, who secretly owns a long lost piece of the UK Crown Jewels (she says it is because they possess a powerful and dangerous curse put there by a group of country-dwelling abnormals after a 1497 uprising, but Will knows for a fact that she keeps them in her bedroom closet next to her beige Manolos, and he finds this suspicious).
Sometimes, Will has doubts as to whether Helen Magnus is even human at all. How can she possibly still be human, after so many decades safeguarding such a mystical, surreal world?
Sometimes, her face is so inscrutable he thinks she must be made of something tougher than skin and blood and bone, something celestial, something she might have received as a gift as she was passing through Mount Olympus on the way to Neverland, or whatever. He doesn’t know how she keeps going, how she survives everything that she’s survived, how she holds her whole wide world so tightly inside herself. She cannot allow herself the fallacies of being human, he thinks. It would be far too risky for a person in her lofty position.
Other times, mostly when she thinks no one is looking (when no one is looking, except for Will), she really does do normal things like blow her nose or let her smile reach all the way to the tips of her ears. Sometimes, she laughs at the stupid puns Will makes and often, he thinks she means it.
So Magnus is still a woman, even if she is a super woman, and there is a Wednesday in August that will remind Will of this fact for as long as he lives. It was almost lunchtime and he’d walked into her office to make sure she was going to actually eat something today, and she was crying. Devastated, lost-look-in-her-eyes sort of crying. He was immediately concerned, obviously, kneeling beside her to ask what sort of global catastrophe they should be expecting, what incomprehensibly horrible news did she have to share (it definitely wasn’t Ashley’s birthday again, not until next year), or maybe…was she dying? Was she dying, had the radiation poisoning come back? He was going to kill Worth. He was going to kill Ranna.
“He—he died, Will,” she’d stammered softly. “He just killed him and—I can’t—I can’t even imagine the betrayal--“
“Whoa whoa whoa, who died? Magnus, who died?”
Magnus sniffed irritably and shook her head, two quick jerks in one direction, toward a carelessly discarded hardback on her desk. “Dumbledore! The bloody book, Will, the bloody, bloody book…I usually never have time for this nonsense…”
Realization hit him square in the face and Will managed not to laugh, but only just. Still, she saw his lips purse instantly and started to cry again. “Oh god,” he’d said, unable to contain the mirth in his voice. “Oh Magnus, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” He paused, and then continued awkwardly, “For my inappropriate behavior just now and also for the loss of your beloved Headmaster.”
She peered over at him beneath wet eyelashes, and he took her hand, rubbed circles into her knuckles comfortingly. “Hey, you know, I went through this a few months ago, Magnus. I feel you. I was right there. Like, I’m a Hufflepuff but I’m also Hogwarts, you know? Dumbledore was the man. I was wailing like a banshee over that book, I kid you not.”
Magnus scoffed. “Please. Banshees emit at such high-decibel supersonic frequencies you couldn’t even begin to—“
“—it makes you human,” Will told her. “It’s…terribly endearing, actually.”
Magnus attempted a smile, but then her face fell again. “Snape, Will. I can’t believe it. And he was one of my favorites, as well. This is irreparable. This is absolutely devastating.”
Will glanced into her eyes and the urge to hug her was well nigh uncontrollable, to just wrap his arms around her and squeeze her and never let go. Magnus had lived nearly two centuries on this crazy planet, had been engaged to Jack the Ripper, had lost her only daughter, and she was currently crying in her office over a Harry Potter book on a Wednesday afternoon in August. This was one of those revelatory life lessons in perspective that people make movies about.
“Just…keep reading, I guess, Magnus,” he’d told her. “Keep reading.”
ii.
Will knows that a part of Helen Magnus died with Ashley. He also knows that a part of her dies every single day because of John. He doesn’t even know these parts of her, but he’d like to try. He’d like to try to revive them, even if it’s just for a few brief moments.
She wouldn’t let him, not at first. She’d gathered winter around her such a long time ago, and he had spent so long wishing that he had a meadow of all the right phrases that would unlock her to him, where he could bend and pick one at random like a wildflower. He never knew what to say (but if you asked her, he always knew exactly what to say).
For a while, she was just his boss. For another while, she was something slightly, maybe more. After that, he wasn’t sure anymore. When she invited him into her world, he slowly began to understand that she needed him to help her as much as he needed her to help him, and this was the part that he thought maybe she didn’t even understand yet. Maybe this was the part that was his destiny. He is the only one who can check and balance her in the way she needs, in a way she will acknowledge.
Still, Will isn’t sure when exactly he became the sunshine that melted all the winter away. He just knows that these days, even though he will never understand her, never understand why, she looks at him like he’s all she has left in the world.
iii.
Will’s shed his scales completely now, though his skin is still so pink in places it looks like he has a patchwork sunburn. He’s been off the magic injections for two days and is well on his way to making a full recovery (not that existing as a giant Hollow Earth-dwelling lizard for the rest of his life didn’t have its allure, but Praxis really isn’t his kind of town).
Sometimes he forgets to announce himself before he breezes right into the lab and this is one of those times. He feels a little apologetic when he rounds the corner and starts talking about how annoyed he is that the Big Guy won’t trade him feeding shifts so he can go out with Abby, and she wipes quickly at her eyes and cheeks before acknowledging him.
“You okay?” he asks carefully, to which she gives that non-committal jerk of the head that means she’s going to outright ignore the question and there’s nothing he can do about it.
“How are you feeling, Will?”
He gazes evenly at her, gives his hand an idle scratch. He shrugs and makes his way over to the desk.
By the time he perches on the edge of it, next to her chair, she’s looking at him with her jaw set and jutted out slightly and she’s got another familiar look on her face: she knows she’s been figured out. She knows he’s not going to let this drop, not until she concedes something.
“Magnus,” he says, and his voice is gentle and understanding, but maybe the private moment he’d interrupted was further in progress than he’d originally thought because he can already tell she hasn’t had enough time to put the wall back up properly. His voice slashes through some sort of barrier he can’t see and she closes her eyes and bows her head. It takes him a moment to realize her whole body is shaking, even though she’s not crying anymore.
They’ve never really communicated emotion very well through words. They’re great with words when it comes to things like abnormals and Sanctuaries and saving the world, but at times like these, words can’t really be their thing. Words leave room for miscommunication and misunderstanding. Words don’t encompass the full spectrum of emotion they’re dealing with, whether they acknowledge that spectrum or not.
With words come vulnerability and honesty and, god forbid, an actual conversation about anything other than abnormals and Sanctuaries and saving the world.
So instead of asking her to spill it he reaches out to touch her shoulder and she looks up at him, and it’s like something has shifted tangibly between them, because when she finally lays her hand against his and tilts her face to press her forehead against his knuckles in a way that’s not supposed to mean as much as it does, they both suddenly know what this is really about.
And maybe they’ll just sit like this, with their fingers slowly beginning to entwine and her eyes the clearest blue, gleaming and wet, when she glances back up to look at him.
He knows it’s because she almost lost him. Because she was angry at herself for not conceding sooner, for not being strong enough to realize that the game was up, for taking so many liberties and ignoring so much protocol that it had begun to feel like she was making things up, desperate, buying time, in denial, and everything else Helen Magnus would (should) never do or be. And Will knows she was angry for even thinking about giving up, too, because he’s more than her protégé and he’s more than her friend and they’re both scared and reluctant to follow that line of thought any further.
She closes her eyes again but she tightens her grip and he swallows, hard, watching her.
A moment later he looks away and she releases his hand and together, they don’t go any further.
A year later, down in the caves, coming off a serious magic water high and scared shitless that he’s going to die, Magnus doesn’t even think twice about acting stupid to save him. She has to. And for once, Will understands, even if he can’t put it to words. It doesn’t matter why. He would do anything to save her, too.
iv.
Will is just about to pull on a clean shirt when there’s a knock at the cracked door and Magnus’ voice calling his name, but she doesn’t really wait for a reply. She’s inside the room before he can say anything at all.
His state of undress earns him a brow quirk.
“Timing,” he mumbles.
“Impeccable timing,” she agrees, and he feels like he walked right into that one.
“I’ll be down in a minute, I was just changing.” Captain obvious, he berates to himself.
“I’ll wait,” she tells him. The smile is only in her eyes.
Will has known that Magnus finds him attractive for far, far longer than he’s known that she possibly…maybe….probably…actually…loves him.
She’s never told him in words, but the small details and moments of their lives add up and up and up to something he is certain is love. The only sort of love that Helen Magnus can give to him, or to anyone, which is not anything less than he’s ever wanted. It’s just different. There are so many different kinds, anyway.
It’s the way one morning, when they are out shopping for fresh produce in the garden district, they pass a vendor selling calla lilies.
Magnus eyes the long green stems and delicate white petals with a fond longing as they walk on by. “My mother’s favorite,” she says, so that only he can hear.
He backtracks while she and Kate are admiring some handspun jewelry and buys one, just one, which he then hides inside his jacket and sets into a vase on her desk when they get back to the Sanctuary. She never says anything to him, but the flower stays right where he sets it for weeks and for months, long after it has drooped and wilted.
v.
Sometimes, Will Zimmerman has to be the one to talk Helen Magnus off a metaphorical ledge. Well, it’s usually not even a ledge that she herself is threatening to fall from, it’s that she’s about to push everyone else on Earth off of it. Will has known her for what, about a hundred less years than the Big Guy has? And yet Magnus chose Will, and so the rest of the team defer to him. Will definitely knows most of the small things about Helen Magnus, like the way she takes her tea, her favorite color (rose), the way her hair often smells of bergamot. How she can't stand sitting still long enough to watch a movie with the team on Saturdays unless Will offers to rub her shoulders (an offer she never actually takes). It's harder for him to say he knows the things about her that actually matter, because nobody does. But he feels her and nine times out of ten, it's as good as knowing her.
After Ashley, Helen had asked Will to be her emotional compass. Will is all heart, the way Helen used to be. Nobody else can do what Will does. He brings her back to herself, back to the ground she's spent so long defying. He's beginning to understand that now.
The best advice he has for Magnus is always breathe, and the second best is always a gentle hand on her shoulder. No matter what's happening in their lives, they can always take a moment to stop and start again.
Even when the world is falling apart and the abnormals are fleeing from Hollow Earth and Magnus has some sort of crazy clandestine plan that confuses the hell out of him, that angers him, that makes him want to walk away, they can always start over.
She's Helen and he's Will, and because of that, they can always start over.
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