#this Helena wold have hated them with a purple passion

[apparitionism]

Run 9b

This story is nominally about how advances in running-shoe technology affect athletic competition. (It’s of course really about a Bering and a Wells.) Anyway, near the beginning—which was written in early 2020—I had a character speculate that the shoe companies putting all this new distance-running technology in place would eventually get to developing “skinny little cheat spikes” for shorter distances... and what a surprise, they did. Springy plates. Fancy foam. Super spikes. Et cetera. There’s been a spate of sub-four miles in the past year, and while a causal connection between such times and these new spikes hasn’t been definitively established, the correlation’s pretty strong. But who cares, right? Particularly since things might start happening on the Myka-and-Helena-begin-to-mend-fences front... that is, if Myka can nimbly navigate a minefield of a conversation with Dan Badger... and truly make up her mind about a few things... anyway none of this makes sense without the context of part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7a, part 7b, part 8, and part 9a.

Run 9b

“I’m grateful to you,” Badger said to Myka as she stood once again in his office.

“I’m glad I was able to help,” Myka said. “Glad to have had the opportunity. To have been in a position to do it. To...” She felt herself begin to slide into babbling, and she stopped. Stopped—surprised and pleased that she was able to do so—and waited. If gratitude was the extent of it, he could have sent an email. So what was this really about?

He obliged. “Additionally, I have a question for you, if you don’t find it an intrusion.”

She gave her best noncommittal nod, but she thought, Is it about who’s important to me? Because I have had it with that for today.

He shook his gray mane away from his face, rearranging its waves every so slightly. It made him seem more committed to perfection but also, paradoxically, more... a person. Someone whose hair could displease him, if only in the smallest of ways. Fixing his gaze again upon Myka, he said, “Why don’t you run?”

“I do run.”

“I know you exercise,” he said. That word. Hearing it from him was infinitely worse than it had ever been, coming from anyone else. From everyone else. But then he surprised her: “My question is, why don’t you—why didn’t you—run. Your height-to-leg ratio is ideal; you’d have had an enviable stride. Everyone knows how you can work. Why didn’t you run?”

All she could think was, Because my father didn’t. Had he done that—rather than exercise—she might have thought to do it too. But running (exercising) alongside him, she’d had no way to think it. Apples don’t fall far from trees.

She said that out loud to Badger, who responded with a quizzical lift of eyebrow. “All I know is the Deceits made it clear,” she added.

Yet another quizzical lift.

“Did you run in them?” she asked, feeling the question a real risk.

The eyebrow lowered. His entire forehead lowered. “Yes...” he said. He obviously did not enjoy being unable to immediately discern her intent.

“How did they make you feel?” A further risk.

That got her a turn of head. Had she asked the right question at last? “Like myself,” he said.

“That’s the difference.”

“They made you feel...” he prompted.

“Like an athlete. Like one of you.”

“Oh I see. That’s why you don’t want the public to have them? Because you find this club so offensive?”

“Your club is exclusive,” Myka said. “Rightfully so.”

“And yet you could have been a member,” Badger said.

He seemed to want to wound, at least a pinprick’s worth, and that want gave Myka a slight upper hand. For once. It enabled her to say a placid, “But I’m not.” She was proud of that. She was proud also of being able to follow it with a similarly calm, “So here we are.” Had she been a member of his club, she would have appended a casual “Badge.”

“Indeed, here we are.” As if he wondered why they were still there. Given that he had expressed his gratitude and received an answer—although perhaps not the one he would have preferred—to his question.

But Myka knew she had a task before her; she heard Giselle in her head, saying She lost her job, followed by What are you going to do about that?

Badger would soon lose his patience with her presence. What was she going to do about that? Myka determined to... bring it up.

“Zelus fired Helena Wells,” Myka said, tossing it into what might have been a void.

“I’m aware,” Badger said. And then a void did loom: he made her wait, and she counted the seconds, reaching ten before he said, “She was, alas, shown to be not quite so ‘good at what she does’ as I recall you postulating.” His eyes narrowed again, and Myka felt the pressure of predation. “I witnessed your exchange at the elevators the other night, you know.”

“You know”... what a strange thing to say. Myka didn’t know. How could she have known? The puzzlement of it distracted her, such that it took a beat for her to feel the jolt of the much more disturbing—yet not in the end surprising—fact of his witnessing.

How to respond to that fact? Was this her opportunity to introduce the idea that Helena had made the deal possible? Could she say that Helena had been giving her Ingenumedix? Myka wished she’d come into this with a better plan... with any plan. But Badger interrupted her futile wishing with, “Was she indeed entreating you as she seemed? Rather desperately, and for information, I thought. In light of recent developments, that seems correct. Is it?”

“Entreating?” Myka echoed. That made no sense as a description of any part of what had happened. She could have recounted their conversation word for word, but she would never have thought to read any sort of pleading as a component of anything Helena had said.

What had Badger seen, to attribute to Helena that penitent role? He had to be wrong... as proof, he clearly hadn’t perceived Myka’s own desperate want. Because she would have entreated. If she could have found a way to let herself, oh, how she would have entreated. “I can’t speak to that. But. But.” Don’t spin your wheels, she told herself. Tell the truth. As much of it as won’t do undue damage. To anyone. “You said, before, that you suspected I wasn’t telling you the story in full.”

“I did.”

He didn’t follow that with a question. She gathered herself and went on, “You were right. Some information found its way to me. I think it came from Helena.”

“You ‘think.’” Languid disbelief.

Myka doubled down, with as much force as she could muster: “And I think Zelus fired her for that. Not because she didn’t make the deal they wanted.”

“And precisely why would she want such information—the Ingenumedix wrinkle, I presume—to find its way to you?”

“I think she’s interested in competition being fair,” Myka said, telling the truth. Sideways, but the truth. Was that a precise enough why?

To Myka’s surprise, Badger snorted. “Doesn’t take after Wells, then. Thank god that young man competed before the era of performance-enhancing drugs.”

“I’m not saying she’s a saint,” Myka said, in... well, what was it? Clarification? Or was she trying to push aside the possibility that, in this instance, such a label could apply?

Badger snorted again. “Thank you for that.”

Myka castigated herself for not immediately recalling “Saint Dan,” and she hurried to add, “But I think she wanted to bring about an equitable outcome.”

“Interesting motivation. Given her position.”

“Which she doesn’t have anymore,” Myka said. “Because of that motivation. I think.”

“You ‘think,’” Badger said again, again conveying his clear doubt that Myka’s thoughts could be taken as in any way definitive.

It was true that she’d qualified everything she’d said about Helena as being what she thought. As opposed to what she knew.

What are you going to do about that? she heard again in her head. “Bring it up” was by every measure not enough. What was she really going to do about that? Giselle had been implying pretty heavily what she should do... but Myka couldn’t yet manage to go all the way there under her own power. Thinking, knowing. She said, “I think also that Giselle thinks you could use Helena here.”

“Well, Giselle.” His tossed-off tell me something I don’t know aspect, the sense that he was so very familiar with Giselle’s proclivities and what they prompted, annoyed Myka. She barely quelled an impulse to counter with Giselle says she’s out of that side of this game as Badger went on, “Her, I can understand, and yet Pete Lattimer, of all people, made a similar case to me not half an hour ago. Wells’s daughter has a strikingly diverse array of champions.” He stopped—not long enough to provoke a count—then sprang. “You sound as if you might be among them. Are you?”

“If she really helped make this deal happen? Yes.” Easy to say, for it followed, logically. She wasn’t going to think, not just yet, about what else might follow, logically or otherwise.

Now he contemplated—or feigned contemplation. For fifteen seconds. “Do you have any reason to believe she won’t betray us similarly, given an attractive opportunity?”

Was hope a reason? “I think this situation was singular.” There she went with “think” again... but she was trying to be truthful, and all she had were her thoughts. And hope.

Badger contemplated her for twenty seconds this time. These lengthening pauses, these turnings of pressure-screws... they were exhausting. Clearly, the reason the athletes were able to deal so well with Badger was that they had stamina. When he relented, all he said was, “Singular.” This time he waited just long enough to make her question her choice of word. Then: “Why was she in fact entreating you?” As if he knew exactly how “singular” and “entreating” were related.

“I honestly can’t say.” She understood, now, that she was formulating hopes about reasons. But she could not say with any honesty that she knew anything about Helena’s part of that exchange, other than the words she had said.

“I won’t guess,” he said, as if he were doing her a favor, as if his guess would be so revealingly accurate that she’d be unable to bear its articulation. “I’ll observe, however, that when I asked her that question, she wouldn’t answer. At the time, I thought I knew why. In light of recent developments, I’m revising my opinion.”

His guess might have been accurate in just that terrifying way. Myka determined to create some distance—to suggest, however misleadingly, that any connection he might be inferring would be off the mark. “I’ve been reading up on her father,” she said, in defensive deflection: I had to read; I have no personal knowledge. Differentiating herself from Giselle, at least. “Took him more than one try to get it right.”

“As I understand her professional reputation, prior to now, she’s been very like him. Once he did get it right, that is. Enjoying the challenge. That ruthless glint.”

Are you talking only about the Wells family? About yourself as well? About all athletes? This, too, is why I didn’t run. I don’t want to be ruthless.

Not like Helena.

And yet... she had been ruthless. Not like Helena, but with Helena. “Please, Myka” had never ceased to echo in her head. She thought again of what her father did not bequeath her.

“Don’t you want someone like that?” she asked. “Someone who enjoys a challenge? Particularly as set by you.”

“Well.” His pause now returned to the ten-count, an unreadable changeup. “She was a fussy infant, however. Have you seen the photograph?

Helena was a fussy infant, and... there was a photograph of that? But no, not a photograph, the photograph. “The photograph?” she echoed, weak with ignorance.

Badger breathed out audibly through his nose, the impatient exhale suggesting that her lack of knowledge was an insult. “Wells, myself, the infant. Taken for the papers, prior to his initial disaster. It’s quite well known.”

Well known? Myka added “the photograph” to her increasingly long list of what she hadn’t known at all. What she never would have known, had Helena not come to AAI. All she wanted to do now was find “the photograph”... but Badger kept talking: “Quieting that child required what seemed hours of cossetting. I won’t deny it’s colored how I think of her—for good and ill. There’s residual annoyance in the memory of her incessant wailing, yet a real relief in not needing to introduce over and over a silver rattle into her small chub of a fist in order to achieve an outcome.”

That made Myka laugh. “That’s what the past does?” He made as if to answer, with no pause this time, but Myka preempted him, saying, “No, I know.” The saying of it, and the way she’d said it—both were far too familiar for her to have used with him. And yet it didn’t seem inappropriate, because she was again telling the truth: she did know. She saw her own similar culpability. What the past does... what it should do... what it should not do.

How could her attitude have shifted so fast? So fast and so sure? For she was sure. Like a time-lapse video of a bloom opening: she’d gone from not knowing what would happen to knowing exactly what had to happen, here in this office, in this conversation. And beyond.

As the force of had to took over, it kicked a memory of her first instinctive response to Helena’s reappearance in her life: You belong right here.

And then another kick, back to the very beginning, reminding her of her own self-possession. Her power. Her knowledge of what she could have, if she wanted it. What she could have because she wanted it.

Her lizard brain had retained that knowledge, but she had buried it, along with her hunger for excuses, her craving for reasons. She hadn’t expected Helena—via Giselle, and in unknowing collusion with her father—to provide what she needed.

Now Helena was someone to thank. And more, and greater: someone to persuade. You belong right here. Frightening, but... true?

Badger interrupted her lizard-thinking with, “Fortunately, that former infant has no commensurate memory of me.” He quirked a smile. “As far as I’m aware.” It was true, native charm, without any undertone of need, of attempt. His “Saint Dan” sobriquet in that moment made perfect sense: the charm, married to his basic decency, did confer a saintly aspect, certainly as compared to the vast majority of mortals.

Myka felt sure now that Helena, similarly charming in that unforced way, had that bedrock of decency as well. She had disallowed herself any knowledge of it in the past, and she’d let the past stand in the way of her knowing it now... up until perhaps this very minute.

“I’ll ring her in the morning,” Badger said, again followed by a pause, and Myka predicted ten seconds. He averted her count at five, with a wry and impossibly knowing, “I suppose you might do the same. If we’re to obtain the outcome Pete, and Giselle, and you, and a no doubt infinite number of additional champions desire.”

He thought a call from Myka could affect the outcome. His inferences had to be closing in on the contours of the situation—Myka shared a past with Helena, one that was extraordinarily personal—if not how it had affected, or would affect, the present.

Myka herself didn’t in all honesty know anything about how that past would affect the present. She didn’t feel she knew much about the present at all... except, all right, for a couple of very distinct things: one, that Helena was leaving tonight. Two, that she did not want Helena to do that.

So what hope did Myka, motivated by thing two, have of averting thing one?

She was sure that no phone call from Badger, even one placed this very minute, would be enough. For Myka did know some things about the past, or knew some things based on the past, and one of those things—very salient here—was that Helena believed, with near religious conviction, in the persuasive value of presence.

A small conversation from one of their nights together had led Myka to this knowledge.

“But I don’t see why you couldn’t do what you do from elsewhere,” Myka had said. “From anywhere. It’s just meetings.”

“‘Just’ meetings?” Helena had disputed. “No meeting is merely itself. So many observations to be made... you yourself brought up peacocking. Such displays require proximity.” She’d turned a bit pedantic then, saying, “Never underestimate the importance of what takes place when parties to any negotiation are face-to-face.” Helena twisted her mouth into a little cringe then, clearly regretting her unsolicited advice, and Myka had to resist mightily the urge to tell her that even her didactic streak was irresistible. She felt herself starting to say it anyway, but Helena preempted her with the shrug of a naked shoulder, saying, “All that aside, I’ll note that you and I wouldn’t be here now if not for that importance.”

At the time, Myka had worshipped that importance. In the aftermath, she had taken it as punishment.

Now, she was sure it was a lesson.

Maybe Badger’s call would work if AAI were the only entity with an interest in the negotiation, but Myka was—needed to be—a party to it as well. Let me go, she began pleading silently. Let me go. She had time, but not forever; the details Giselle had texted her had included Helena’s flight time. She needed to get to the airport, needed to stop Helena there, needed enough time to plead a case... enough time to show Helena that her own conversion, however rapid, was genuine. She knew that would never work if they were not face-to-face.

“I will,” Myka said. “Absolutely.” Trying to overassure so he would let her go.

“Then you might have a new colleague soon.”

“Sounds great.” Let. Me. Go.

“Not competitive?” Badger asked. He was the picture of innocence.

“That is not part of my motivation or mindset or philosophy,” Myka overemphasized, “at this point. Really not.” She bounced a bit, just a bit, on her toes, a muted version of what she would have done prior to a run. No, an exercise. Whatever—it felt like four in the morning, like the dark early start of a day, that every-morning If I don’t get moving now, I won’t move at all fear of failure.

“You seem anxious,” he observed, in a way that made Myka want to jump out of her skin.

Which would prove him right. “Not at all. I am calm. Placid, even. Not to mention, ready to move forward. In productive ways.” He didn’t need to know what kind of productive—

“Involving portable MRIs?” This he said with a completely annoying—completely charming—twinkle.

“Yes. That is exactly what I’m talking about.” Helena had managed to get her way with Badger when she was an infant, so Myka surely could now. As an adult. Though Badger was making it difficult for her to remember that she was one. Nevertheless: If you don’t let me go I will lose my mind.

The release did come at last, with a still-twinkling “Then I suppose we’re in accord.”

He gave a final nod, as if to express satisfaction both with how he’d toyed with her—batting her this way and that, befitting his apex-predator status—and with how she’d responded. She would have resented that satisfaction, yet all of his questioning and probing and inferring had revealed her to herself, crystallizing her purposes, her aims. Her wants. Their justifications.

She had, she realized, experienced an epiphany. Was he in fact a saint?

****

As she was trying to squeeze into a down elevator so she could finally get on her way, Pete grabbed her; all she could think was Why. Will. Nobody. Let. Me. Leave.

He said, “Hey, I had a really brilliant idea here at the elevators a while ago, and it was—”

“That Helena should work here. And you told it to Dan Badger,” she finished for him.

He gave her the cartoon bug-eyes. “Are you psychic?”

“Yes. Also, my side hustle is running the world.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know. Anyway you have to help get your ex to work here, because it would be awesome, because she seems so totally nuts. Also, is she really that nuts?”

“No,” Myka said, because there were a lot of words that could reasonably be applied to Helena, but “nuts” wasn’t—

“She thinks we’re together.”

“Right. I forgot about that, so I’ll rephrase: yes.”

Pete giggled. “I can’t wait.”

“Look. If you want this to happen, you need to shut up and let me get on the elevator so I can get to the airport and try to talk her into it.”

Now he gasped. “Can I go with you?”

“Oh my actual god no. Also someone has to be here to at least pretend we’re a department that does real work.”

“I think that means I should go to the airport, not you.”

“Which one of us do you think can talk her into even considering staying?”

“Depends. Are you really as good in bed as that nostalgia eyesex made it seem like?”

“I’m leaving for the airport now,” Myka said, and she was, miraculously, able to step into an elevator as she did so.

“That means yes!” Pete called after her, as Myka thought, I am so glad we did this at the elevators. I am so glad approximately the entirety of AAI will have heard some version of this before I even get to the airport. She fully expected Giselle to text her about it while she was still in the elevator. Probably somewhere near the inauspicious thirteenth floor, given everything.

****

En route, in a cab, Myka called Helena: no answer. She didn’t leave a message.

Once at the airport, she tried a text. I’m outside security. Where are you?

To her outsize relief, she got dots in response, and then Helena responded, with one blessed word: Why.

Because I want to talk to you.

Dots, dots dots dots, for an absurd length of time. Myka might as well have been back in Badger’s office, counting Mississippis.

Then: I’m in the bar at the airport Hilton.

Myka launched herself into action, pushing through throng after throng of people—she had never said “excuse me” so many times, worming and threading and carving her way along, panic beating in her head, which way is the Hilton which way which way where are the signs an airport should have signs—holding her phone before her as she hurtled, the device and her hands forming the knife with which she cut her way through.

Breaking free from crowds for a moment, she stopped and texted, Don’t move.

She received dots in response, so she resumed her sprint, wishing—traitorously, but wishing all the same—that she were wearing Deceits.

The minute Myka entered the bar, her eyes were drawn to Helena, and her body served up a similar surge of desire and pull—the first she’d been able to let herself experience without immediately having to feel guilty and despise herself for it.

Helena’s expression at her approach was noncommittal, but not aggressively so. It beat three blinking dots. Or maybe it was intended to be the equivalent of three blinking dots...

Myka took the barstool next to Helena—for thank god she had no company—and calmly ordered a scotch, on the theory that Giselle wasn’t the only one who could drink amber alcohols. She congratulated herself on her self-possession. She congratulated herself also on her lung capacity; she’d managed to say “scotch” without showing any effects of her mad dash. Hopefully.

Her additional justification for her drink: Even though I’ve just run a series of time trials through an airport for you, Helena, I’m not ready to drink wine in your presence. Not yet. She heard the “yet” in her head. Hearing that, feeling its implications—letting herself feel its implications—mattered far more than the ridiculous airport steeplechase.

She began. “I heard you had a talk with Pete.”

Helena’s dry response: “News travels rapidly at AAI.”

Myka waited to say more until she received her drink. Was she trying to make Helena anticipate, raise the stakes as to what was coming next? Yes... and trying to keep Helena’s interest piqued: that felt like before. But should now be like before? Myka had no idea. She could prolong the anticipation by lifting her glass, by sipping and savoring... but now wasn’t then. Instead, she stared at her scotch while saying, “I heard you said I deserve to be treated well.”

Helena then made Myka wait, but not long; she responded, even more dry, “Extremely detailed news travels rapidly at AAI.”

“No... news travels at AAI like carrier pigeons chirping through tin cans.” Myka raised her eyes. She needed to see Helena’s reaction to what she intended to say next. “For example, I also heard that you heard that Pete and I are together.”

Helena deflected. She looked deep into her own drink, a voluminous glass of a leggy red. “In the interest of accuracy, that is not what I heard. I heard—or rather, I was told—that you have a boyfriend. I inferred for myself that that boyfriend is Pete.”

In that instant, Myka saw herself putting a stop to everything, regardless of new wishes and old wants. She could say “It is,” and that would truly be that.

Instead, after a breathing decision, she said, “It isn’t.”

“I need you to tell me it isn’t anyone else either,” Helena said.

Myka was pretty sure that was about Giselle, and again, she could put a stop to everything...

“It isn’t,” she repeated, for all the truth.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Run #part 9b #AU week #while some other versions of Helena might have been fine with pandemic lockdowns #this Helena wold have hated them with a purple passion #(unless perhaps she got to spend that time with this Myka) #I haven't really addressed our years-long disease-ridden environment in a Bering and Wells context #and I honestly don't know if I will #I was going to do a thing with the Travel versions of them #but that was very early in the pandemic #and I was (correctly) advised that it would be too depressing #to put them through even minimal strife #(nobody was going to get sick) #(but still)