Work Text:
Once upon a time, there was a little shepherd boy who would cry out "wolf!” in the dead of night, just to see what would happen. Night after night, the farmer would come to rescue him. Night after night, there was no wolf in sight.
One night, a real wolf came along while the shepherd was tending his flock. But this time, when he cried out, the farmer was nowhere to be found.
"Helen, I love you."
"I know, Nikola, you already told me. What do you want?"
"I'm being serious."
Helen Magnus looked up from her work, and finally met the vampire's gaze. "No, you're not. I'm too busy for games right now, Tesla. What are you after?"
He could see it in her eyes: the strain, the sleeplessness. Two days and nights, working against a virus that could kill them both. Would kill them both, if this last pass on a cure didn’t turn up anything promising. She was tired, and sick, and he was still a coward about the one thing that mattered.
“The ‘62 Clos Fourtet, if it made it out alive on moving day. It’s just the inspiration I need.” He slipped back on the easy grin, the vampire’s charm. “A dying man’s last request.”
“Get back to work, Nikola.”
***
“Helen, I love you.”
He tried it again in front of the mirror, two days after their latest crisis had passed. Spoke the words again and again, hoping practice could erase that subtle hint of flippancy. Some people had to work at being deceptive, but that had always come so easily to the inventor. This, this was hard.
“Helen, I want to spend the rest of my eternal life with you.” The vampire in the mirror looked like he was asking someone to take over the world with him. Again.
“Helen I’ve changed, I’m a whole new man. All philanthropy and fuzzy bunnies, you can trust me to never again try and-- dammit, this isn't even true!” He couldn’t even be honest with his own reflection, Magnus wasn’t going to buy a single word of it.
***
He tried it once with flowers, and a letter. More of a short novel, by the time he got done with it. He wrote it out by hand, with quill and ink, channeling their history with every word he put to paper. The tedium of the ancient method gave him time to think, to avoid the impulse to throw in a joke. By the end of it, he almost had hope. It sounded so clear on paper: all his past deceptions laid bare, then an account of how what had started as a convenient line became so deeply, dreadfully true. Or, rather, how it had always been true, it had just taken him nearly a century to realize it.
She avoided him for a whole week after that. Not conspicuously, just quietly, burying her head in paperwork whenever he tried to catch her for some spare moment for a reply. He saw the flowers in her office one day, but they were gone the next.
Finally, he caught her in the hallway, with no interruptions or excuses in sight.
“Did you read it, at least?”
Helen smiled, and looked back at him with sad, knowing eyes. “It was very sweet, Nikola. You should look into a publisher, you might have a future in romance novels.”
He wanted to stop, to break down into babbling and tell her just what every word had meant to him, how much his heart was breaking that they’d failed. But the strain in her eyes, her voice, wasn’t just the strain of running the Sanctuary. His words were hurting her, he could feel it, and there was one easy way to stop that pain.
He grinned at her, all teeth and charm again. “Well, you can’t blame me for trying, right? The dating pool down here doesn’t exactly have a deep end.”
She laughed, and the tension vanished. “I see six months in my new Sanctuary haven’t made you any less incorrigible.”
“My dearest Helen, I am unchangeable. The stalwart anchor in the hurricane of your life.”
“I think you’re the hurricane.”
He stepped in closer, conspiratorial. “Would you want me any other way?”
She gave him one of her looks, the kind that still made his heart stop. Not quite an answer, but not quite a refusal either. Without another word, she turned her back on him, walking down the hall with a purpose in her steps that had been missing this whole last week.
***
That night he dreamed of fire and genocide and burning flesh and one sweet, sweet kiss.
***
He tried again, and again. She’d liked the necklace more before she found out where he’d got it from. The painting had been fun, but he knew it was too over-the-top to work before he’d half finished, and only showed her the damned thing because he also knew that it would make her laugh.
The sonnet had been a mistake. He would never speak of it again.
***
She could tell what he had come for before he was halfway to her desk. It was, she had decided, his newest game. A way to keep his mind occupied as he drifted from task to task, crisis to crisis. At least it was keeping him in the Sanctuary, working diligently at every job she set and drinking her out of house and home. Or maybe it was all part of some elaborate new scheme, one that relied on having her heart as well as he trust.
It was not, she had told herself firmly, in any way sincere. It couldn’t be. It mustn’t be.
“Helen, we need to talk.”
“You love me, I know. You’ve mentioned.” She kept her head in her papers, only sparing half a glance to ensure that he had, indeed, stopped in front of her desk.
“I’m serious, I really am. I just don’t know how to prove it to you.”
She looked up, because he wasn’t going to leave until this played out. “You really want to make me believe you?”
“Just tell me how. Please.”
"Okay, then... devamp yourself." Anything to get him to stop this tirade and get back to normal.
Tesla was completely quiet for a long, terrifying moment. He had an expression on his face she'd never seen before. "I'm going to pretend you never asked me that, Helen."
"Nikola?"
"I'm not John Druitt! God, Helen, I'm not some psycho who wants to own you! I've got thoughts and feelings and plans of my own just like you do, and I'd rather spend an eternity flirting and fighting and getting nowhere than thirty years pretending not to be me just so we can have sex and I can die like everybody else. How can you not see that?"
John. God, John.
Her first love, her dearest friend. Two hundred years, and she could still remember it like it was yesterday: that quiet evening he’d proposed, when they’d shared their first kiss. The first time they’d laid together, the first time he’d laid a hand on her, every little thing she might have done differently in between. Not again. Not again. Helen Magnus did not cry, not anymore, but when she could stand to look back up again she knew that she was close, eyes pleading. “Stop it. Just, stop it. Please.”
Nikola Tesla walked around her desk, got to his knees in front of her, and took her hand from her lap. There was no flippancy in his expression, no snide glint in his eyes. Just that calm, terrifying sincerity.
“Helen, I love you. Truly, I do. And if you don’t want to hear it from me again, then you won’t.”
***
Nikola Tesla kept his word. He always did, when it really mattered. Even though the line between pissing her off and breaking her heart was razor-thin, he walked it. Reveled in it, swam laps up and down that hair’s breadth space without ever quite tipping over the edge.
He was normal for a whole week, and Magnus started to relax. While he was bemoaning the state of modern technology, or flirting, or hacking through the seventh wine cellar lock she’d tried this month, then everything was as it should be. She had her friend back, or her enemy, or whatever the two of them were to each-other. Unchanging and stable in the wildest possible way.
He’d been normal for two weeks when she started having dreams.
It was logical, really. Her waking mind didn’t have the time to contemplate the ridiculous scenario in which Nikola was being completely honest about his affections, and so her subconscious mind took over. Most nights they were rather silly: her vampire coming home to a white-picket fence, briefcase in hand, kissing her on the cheek and asking what was for dinner, or taking her out to eat and complaining endlessly about the wine selection. Some nights they were frightening, a previous near-miss remembered as a tragedy, Nikola lying dead at her feet and whispering sweet nothings with his last breath.
Some nights she dreamed of kissing him, some nights she dreamed of doing a hell of a lot more. A three-piece suit discarded on the floor, pale skin stretched taut, long, elegant hands... and then the crack of dawn and the alarm, a cold shower and a rather awkward staff meeting. She’d grit her teeth and get through the day’s tasks and ask someone to re-count the Sanctuary’s nubbin population, just in case.
Then, one night, she dreamed of herself.
She was perfectly alone, in a room with walls as grey as eternity. She sat upon an empty bed, with ashes at her feet.
“We’re afraid, aren’t we?” Dream-Magnus asked herself, looking up with hollow eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you do, we both do.” The shadow Magnus sighed, one foot dragging through the ashes on the floor. “We know he’s being sincere, but we also know what will happen if we admit it.”
“I don’t want things to change. They can’t change, not again.” Magnus tried to step back, pressing up against the cold, grey wall behind her. “What if I change him?”
“You can’t change Nikola.” Dream-Magnus rose, walking over to herself, hollow eyes full of pity and understanding.
“I changed John.”
“John changed himself. We know that, too.”
“What if it make things worse?”
“We’re so afraid of making things worse. Always stopping the next crisis, picking up the pieces, holding on to whatever we have left.” The dream of herself reached up with one hand, cupping the scientist’s face. “What if, just what if, it makes things better?”
The dream stepped back again, brushing through the ash and turning to grey herself. “You know the risks, Helen Magnus, so choose: are you going to fall in love again, or aren’t you?”
***
Tesla took his work to bed with him, since no one else was likely to accept an invitation in the foreseeable future. Wires and screens and praxian crystals and his suit jacket and vest were spread out over the bedsheets as he tried to puzzle his mind into exhaustion, which was the closest to drunk he could get with a vampire’s metabolism and Magnus’s surprisingly effective new locks.
He almost mistook the quiet knock for the house settling, until he remembered they were already underground.
“Well, you might as well come in.”
He’d expected Henry, or maybe a disgruntled Will, fresh with some new problem they’d need his brilliant intellect to solve. Instead, he found Helen Magnus in his doorway, and she’d brought him a bottle of wine.
“Helen!” He said, curling the delight in his voice around a wicked grin. She hadn’t come to see him for a chat like this since, well, since he’d started trying to confess, and he’d been starting to worry that he’d broken even that fragile equilibrium. “Helen Magnus appearing in my bedchamber in the dead of night, with libations. What sweet gods smile upon me today, and how do I make them keep doing it?”
She smiled, and he rose to greet her, expecting to be stopped halfway by a fierce look or a word or a wave of her hand. But she didn’t make a move, and then his hands were on her arms, and he wasn’t quite sure what came next.
He took the wine bottle. It seemed safest, and came with its own reward.
“Nikola,” she began as he poured them each a glass, “you know that I’m… fond of you, right?”
“It may have come up once or twice, while you were saving my life.” His heart leaped, and it was all he could do to keep from reeling. Don’t get your hopes up, Nikola. Not again. “And I was saving yours, and you were silently admiring my every step and invention.”
“I’m being serious.”
He stopped, put down the glasses, and met her eyes again.
“You’re still impossible, of course. And egotistical, and arrogant, and you never think things through. But I’m fond of you, and I don’t want that to change.”
“You almost make that sound like flattery.”
And then she sighed, and smiled, and kissed him.
A sweet kiss, like the first, but firm. She let his long fingers weave their way into her hair while her own hands found their way to the nape of his neck and the small of his back. He held her close for fear she’d change her mind the second he let go. But then he did, and she was still there, grinning like a schoolgirl.
So, he suspected, was he.
“So, what happens next?” Nikola asked, bewildered.
“You’re the one who’s been writing me bad poetry. I thought you had this all figured out.”
“Well, every time my imagination got me this far, you were already in negligee.”
She laughed at him, and he found he didn’t mind at all. “Let’s start with the wine, then, Nikola. And you can tell me how you’re in love with me, just one or two more times.”