#early days - still secretly villianous Helena

[birdofdawning]

Sleepovers

“Here are two more,” said Myka, watching a well-dressed couple approach the tall, Second Empire-style house. The street lamps shone on the New England mist, and with the full moon out everything looked like an Atkinson Grimshaw painting. (Briefly she wondered if Helena had ever met John Atkinson Grimshaw but she quickly repressed the impulse to ask; Pete would make fun of her interest, and she didn’t feel like being made fun of tonight. She refocused on the investigation.)

The man (approximately 5’11”, medium build, receding dark hair, well dressed) was looking about nervously while trying not to appear like it, as the woman (5’5”, early forties, blonde, evening wear) preceded him up the steps and knocked at the ornate front door. A moment later they were inside.

“That’s thirteen people so far, all affluent-looking. Just the sort I’d expect to see at a private auction. But far be it for us to actually go in and stop them,” said Helena’s voice from the back seat of the SUV where she had constructed a sort of nest from travel blankets and her woollen coat. She sounded irritable.

“We don’t actually know that this is the site of the auction, or even that there definitely is an artifact auction happening,” said Myka carefully, “We only know that Tourtellotte is a collector, has had a previous connection with an artifact, and that he owns this house. We need more data — you of all people should understand that. They could be doing anything in there.”

“Yeah they could!” said Pete, lighting up, “Maybe it’s a—” Myka gave him a narrow glare. “—a sleepover! Just a fun Thursday-night sleepover, like when we were kids. You remember sleepovers, right Mykes?”

Myka glanced back up the street to track a passing car. “Not really. I never went to a sleepover when I was a kid,” she said absently.

Pete turned to stare at her. “What, like, not ever? Really?”

Myka silently cursed herself. “No. And can we not turn this—”

“So what was the problem? Oo, I know, you could never decide which books to bring! No, you needed to vet the rating of every scary movie! No, the houses were never up to fire code and you—”

“I was never invited, okay? Can we get back to this now? Our job?”

Pete subsided immediately. “Well, that sucks. Hey,” he nudged her with his elbow, “I would have totally invited you to a sleepover. If I had been allowed girls over. (I wasn’t.)”

“And if you weren’t ten years older than me. Creepy.” Myka elbowed him back.

“I take it,” said Helena’s voice from the back, “that a ‘sleepover’ isn’t some form of overnight transport?”

Pete turned around in his seat, excited again. “Oh man, H.G. doesn’t even know what a sleepover is! I’ve got two sleepover virgins here! Looks like we’re gonna have to do something about that when we get home.”

“Pete,” began Myka, rubbing her temples, “I am thirty-one. I don’t feel a tremendous urge to—”

“We’ll get some movies and some snacks, and stay up all night,” Pete carried on, “We can finally have that Aliens marathon! I’ll text Claud.” He pulled out his phone.

“Ah, so it’s similar to your movie nights. But with… sleeping?”

Myka twisted around to face Helena. “A sleepover is for children. Or teens, I guess. You spend the night at your friend’s house and do fun stuff.”

“And you sleep there? Or you don’t sleep?”

Myka thought back to the Baby-sitter’s Club books she had read. “You probably do fall asleep eventually, but there’s lots of talking and maybe watching movies like Pete says.”

Helena considered this. “When I was fifteen,” she said, “I was apprenticed to a dressmaker and shared a bed in an attic room with two other apprentices. We would talk for a time each night, if we weren’t too tired. I suppose this is similar, though I would have hesitated to refer to us as ‘friends’.”

Myka was very still. Helena rarely shared personal information unprompted, and what she did reveal was always cheerfully vague. “You were a dressmaker?” she probed tentatively.

“Not for very long,” said Helena, “thankfully. I was a terrible dressmaker. I was far more interested in the sewing machines themselves. Eventually I was dismissed for taking them all apart despite the fact,” she huffed, suddenly furious, “that I had improved the design and doubled their efficiency! But no, that irksome woman Mrs Moffet wouldn’t hear it. I was ‘a troublesome, wicked child’ and had to return home to my father in disgrace.” She muttered something else to herself and stared out the window.

“What happened then?” asked Myka, hardly daring to breath.

Helena gave her a quick glance. “Nothing very interesting.”

“Oh,” said Myka, disappointed.

Helena snorted, and then smiled at her. “Poor Myka! Alright. I was sent off to my mother. She was housekeeper for a very grand lady (new money though, and she had married into it), and I was a downstairs housemaid for a summer. And I was an even worse downstairs housemaid than I was a dressmaker’s apprentice, if such a thing were possible.”

“At Uppark?”

Helena was startled. “Yes. At Uppark. How on earth did you know that? Oh, Charles, of course. Yes I see.”

Pete put his phone away. “Okay, Claud’s up for Aliens next weekend, if we can wrap this up early enough. And then you two get to braid each other’s hair and tell scary stories all night!”

“Yes, that’s what it was like as an apprentice,” said Helena, losing interest. “Well, I would tell queer stories of time come adrift and de-evolved men and so-on, and they would tell me to shut my head and go to sleep because we had to get at four to light the stove. But there was certainly a lot of hair-braiding. Here come two more worthies trying to look innocuous. The one on the left is armed, I think.”

She and Pete carried on, focusing on the case again. But Myka’s mind was elsewhere, imagining herself and Helena at fifteen years old, sharing a bed. She thought she would have happily lain there for hours listening to that low, velvet voice talk of travellers from other times and blue bacilli and sinister orchids and enormous terrifying birds . Until sleep took Helena, and then, warm beside her, Myka would have listened to her slow breathing and inhaled the scent of her hair and—

Myka mentally shook herself. Obviously they could never have really been friends, not as teenagers in the ‘90s. Helena was so pretty, she surely would have been popular and have had no time for weird, awkward Myka Bering. But perhaps now they could be grown-up friends, who shared books and… and had coffee dates. Good friends.

Myka decided that she wanted to be good friends with Helena very much.

#bering and wells #early days - still secretly villianous Helena #myka bering #helena wells #pete lattimer #bering & wells #Warehouse 13 #Ficlet