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"It has been nearly one hundred and fifteen years since I last observed the stars above my home."
Timid as though it was, Helena's voice still carried through the crisp silence of the autumn night. Myka looked askance at the woman leaning heavily on the balcony rail next to her, the shadowed profile exhibiting none of its usual bravado as she gazed up at the sky. Helena was standing outside her childhood home, having cheated time and apocalypse and her own death to be there. She should be owning this moment, and instead she appeared... small.
Troubling.
Myka inched closer, letting her fingers brush against Helena's where they hung off the edge of the railing. "What about when you were on the run after being debronzed?"
"There was never enough time to come here. I had artifacts to track, plans to carry out." Moonlight danced in Helena's eyes as they briefly flicked over to Myka with a small smile. "Intriguing young agents to stalk."
The air fell silent again as they returned their attention to the sky, an occasional passing car or distant siren punctuating the otherwise perfect serenity of their sanctuary in the city. It was always jarring to Myka, leaving the clear skies of South Dakota where visible stars nearly outnumbered the population of the entire state and coming to the heart of a bustling metropolis where the dull orange glow of civilization overwhelmed all but the brightest of them. She wondered if Helena felt the loss as keenly as she did.
"It must be nice to see a familiar sky," Myka offered. "I mean, the lights do sort of kill the mood, but at least the stars are where they should be."
"They're not."
Myka started at Helena's terse reply and glanced uncertainly between the woman and the sky she was currently giving a very pointed glare to. "They're not?"
A rueful smile graced Helena's lips as she rocked back on her heels. "I've been gone for more than a century, Myka. Univille's sky is too different from London's for me to have noticed before, but standing here now... The precession of Earth's axis is difficult to ignore."
Her brow furrowed briefly as she tried to place the term. Precession... A gradual shift in the orientation of a planet's axis of rotation. Twenty-six thousand year cycle, causes stars to appear to shift westward - oh.
"Helena..."
The muscle of Helena's jaw twitched. "It's only a little more than a degree, I can't even really be sure I can tell the difference. But Myka..." The glistening of unshed tears startled Myka as Helena turned to her and ran a hand through her hair. "I've been gone for so long the stars have moved."
Myka found her arms wrapped around Helena's shuddering body before she had fully realized the other woman was looking at her desperately, appearing more distraught than Myka could recall having seen her before. She turned her head slightly to rest her cheek against Helena's curtained hair as her forehead pressed into her shoulder, a strangled sob escaping her throat. As strong as the compulsion to comfort her was, the idea of whispering meaningless platitudes into her ear was absurd - Myka couldn't simply tell her everything would be okay like she would a child. Not this woman. Not about this.
She tightened her hold on Helena, biting her lip as she tried to think of what she could possibly say to make things right.
"I shouldn't be here, Myka." The helplessness of Helena's tone sent a chill coursing through Myka's blood, her eyes wrenching shut as she blindly pressed a kiss to the hair against her lips. "I should be dead several times over. I did die, to save you, and I had thought that at last I had accomplished all the world could ask of me but now I'm back and I don't know why."
The exposed skin of her shoulder was becoming damp. "Helena, you're scaring me. What's going on?"
Helena tore away from her, wiping angrily at her eyes. "Nothing is as it should be! Everyone I knew is gone. Everywhere I've ever been is so changed as to be nearly unrecognizable. I'm surrounded by technology I never could have conceived of, and everyone around me takes it for granted. Man has stepped foot on the Moon, for God's sake."
A hand gestured wildly over her head, her voice becoming increasingly agitated. "And the night sky, the one thing - the only thing that should be the same, that everyone knows will always be there, has changed. I don't belong here, Myka. I'm a century out of time and half a step out of sync and I don't know if I can ever fit back in."
Myka watched for a moment as the ferocity seemed to visibly drain away from Helena, her arms wrapping around herself as she drew in a shuddering breath. She reached a hand out to touch Helena's elbow, letting her fingers trail along her skin briefly before the hand dropped back to her side.
"Don't do that. I can't even begin to imagine what this must feel like for you right now, but you're H.G. Wells. You invented a freaking time machine, I think you're smart enough to adjust to living in the twenty-first century."
"Myka-"
"No," she said firmly, tipping Helena's chin up to look into her eyes. "You were bronzed for a hundred years, Helena, but I don't think you've really given yourself a chance to live at all since then. Or before. Your life for the past hundred and fifteen years has always been so far beyond anything anyone should have to deal with, I'm surprised you've gone this long without completely losing it again."
Helena laughed in spite of herself, and Myka gave her a small smile in return, running her hands lightly over her shoulders.
"Look, after Christina died, all you focused on was getting her back. Then you were bronzed, and you had to spend a century with nothing but your guilt and your grief for company. And when you were brought back it was only because a psychopath thought he could use you and you spent most of your time trying to get back into the Warehouse, and yes, you did eventually lose it a little but my god, who wouldn't?"
"I don't believe you would have," Helena muttered under her breath. Myka jabbed her in the arm with her index finger.
"And then," she continued pointedly, "your consciousness was stuck on the Janus coin and your only contact with anyone, your only proof that you were even still alive, came at the whim of the Regents, and just when we got you back you went all noble and self-sacrificing on us and got yourself killed. And since you've come back it's been nothing but debriefings and reconstruction and missions to cities with too many memories to stop teenagers from blowing each other up with action figures. You haven't had a single second to breathe, let alone get used to the idea of the night sky being a little to the left of where it used to be. I'd be worried if you weren't feeling disconnected."
Helena flicked her eyes downward as she tangled her fingers into Myka's belt. Her eyebrows rose, a wry smile playing about her features. "Are you telling me how much of my life truly sucked? Because I did rather notice."
"I'm telling you that you need a vacation, Helena Wells. And that now you have someone who loves you to be with you when you need it." Helena's eyes shone as Myka leaned in to kiss her briefly, her lips pleasantly warm in the slight chill of the night air. "Also, you need to stop picking up American slang. Saying things suck doesn't suit you."
The teasing smile that Helena gave her then was bright and full of mirth and Myka felt her pulse race at the sight of it. "Claudia is a strong influence, darling. I can't be blamed if I - "
The rest of her sentence was abruptly cut off as Myka found herself compelled to bodily push her against the railing with a hand at her neck. Helena responded to the kiss with enthusiasm, and when they finally parted, breathless, neither felt much inclined to disengage from their tangle of limbs. The light fog of warmed air danced about them as they rested against each other, Helena's hands tracing patterns across the small of Myka's back.
"I'll call Artie and tell him we both need some time off," Myka murmured. She took a step backwards, catching Helena's hands in her own as they fell, and guided her toward the balcony door. A playful smirk crossed her lips as she spoke into Helena's ear.
"And if he doesn't want to give it then tough shit, because we both have more than enough experience in hiding from the Warehouse to make it pointless for him to try to stop us."