She didn't always understand why it happened, only that it did. She was a traveler across the span of a lifetime that was probably not her own.
“Why are you crying?”
She’s crying because everything hurts. Everything is complicated and she can’t stand herself for caving the way that she did. She had honestly wanted to die. Had wanted Helena to pull that trigger. She’s never seen the future this clearly, and she knew that it would not be the same without Helena there right beside her.
Her jaw is set into a hard line, eyes narrowed in a pain that comes not from external wound, but rather internal. Helena…
She carries the act so convincingly
The fact is sometimes she believes it
She can be happy with the way things are
Be happy with the things she’s done
“You’d think that I’d get over meeting you at all ages when you come here,” Helena comments dryly to Myka as she sits her younger self down on the couch in Leena’s living room. It’s still so strange, so completely and utterly jarring. Helena had never even heard tell of temporal displacement before she met Myka, and she certainly had never thought that such a genetic mutation would ever come to exist within the human species.
She’s glad that this trip takes place in the middle of the night; or at least begins there. She has felt it coming all day. It’s a kind of nervous energy that makes her leg twitch and drives Myka to spend hours practicing her fencing footwork. Back and forth she moves, across the narrow space between the bookstore and the building next to it. She doesn’t even have her foil, no need for it. She is a bundle of energy that cannot be tamed and she’s struggling to keep herself anchored in the here and the now.
At first, when Myka Bering comes to work at the Warehouse, they tell her that her mutation is treatable. Dr. Calder is there with pills and a syringe every month and Myka experiences more freedom than she’s ever had in her life up to this point. It’s freeing, liberating, she could maybe pretend that she’s just a little bit normal.
When it first happens, Myka is five years old. She is sitting on the edge of her bed, reading Dr. Seuss out loud to herself when she finds herself suddenly a million miles away and in a room full of statues. Normally, she’d chalk this up to a daydream (as her father calls them), but she wasn’t reading about Zeus or Odysseus so she’s not entirely sure what’s happened.
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.
