Chapter Text
Helena Wells has not woken up to the sounds of a crying child in over one hundred years. She does so begrudgingly and sleepily, watching as Myka shifts in the bed beside her and turns onto her back. Her skin is pale and beautiful in the moonlight. Helena can feel her breath catch as she pauses to stare at the woman she’s come to love despite all the odds and improbabilities of her very existence.
She’s never really truly felt love before, she knows this. Myka Bering is the one person she thinks she could truly ever love.
It is mid-summer, but the nights in South Dakota are still cool. The sounds of peeping frogs and of crickets fill the silent Bed and Breakfast and Helena finds her quarry sitting on the couch in the living room looking scared and alone. She’s shivering, naked as the day she was born.
“You’re a bit out of time,” she says with a smile - knowing that this will not be the last time she meets this girl, nor is it the first.
The girl looks up at her with tear-stained cheeks that remind Helena far too much of Christina for a moment. She bites at her lips and gathers the child up, holding her close, covering her nakedness and her fear with a love that she can never quite put into words.
“When…” the girl asks, and Helena knows that this is not her first trip. That’s good. She’s met this girl once before, when they were both far younger and she remembers how scared that little girl was, displacing for the first time in her life. Out of time and far too young to understand what that even meant.
“You are thirty-one,” Helena whispers as the girl stares up at her. Her eyes are wide and curious and Helena wants to tell her all about the adventures of the day, but holds her tongue. Some things have to be discovered in due course. “And dead tired because you worked hard all day.”
“What do I do?” She’s tried this tactic before, and Helena knows better. Myka’s told her what to say; but Helena’s always known. She can spurn the advances of a teenager after all, and a twenty-something, and an innocent nine-year-old’s kiss. She likes to boast that out of the two of them, she is the more mature.
“You are a very brave woman who saves the day and solves puzzles,” Helena whispers, pulling a blanket around the pair of them. “I know that this probably won’t be a long trip, so why don’t you stay with me and get some rest.”
“It’s the middle of the day,” the girl protests. “I was in science class.”
But then, just as suddenly as Helena opens her mouth to respond with a wise retort of her own, the girl is gone.
Helena sits for a while in the moonlight, blanket still slung over her shoulders, a hollow void where the girl once was. She’s lost in thought, in memory. This girl has appeared across the span of her waking memories in this century, and in a few that she probably should not remember from her time in the Bronze.
“How old was I?” Myka’s leaning against the door frame, her hair a curly riot and her lips just barely hinting at a smile.
“No more than eight.” Helena runs a hand through her hair and stands, folding the blanket as she does so. She lays it back over the arm of the couch and turns, “You mentioned something about science class.”
Myka’s face turns and she grimaces, “Ugh, that one was awful. I missed the baby squid dissection and my father was furious with me for it.”
“You can’t help your mutation,” Helena supplies.
Myka grins.
“Funny,” she laughs, “You always say that.”