AN: This was probably inevitable.

Spoilers: Into the Black

Disclaimer: Not mine! And, again, I’m okay with that.

Rating: Teen

Character: Helen Magnus

Summary: It was easier the first time.

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Long Road Home

It was easier the first time.

That’s not entirely true. Some things were more difficult. She spent so much time railing against the system, trying to break in, trying to make it work for her, and she’s glad she knows how it ends this time. But this time, this time she has nothing to do, and the whole point of not even being tempted (not really being tempted...maybe being just a little bit tempted) by John’s insanity was that she likes who she is and has no desire to go through it all again. But John’s way, she wouldn’t have the Source Blood. Adam’s way, she does. And all her memories. That makes this round more palatable, at least.

Second chances have their obvious upsides, of course. And the third time is the charm, it turns out, because she tracks down Adam with relatively little effort and kills him without a second thought, managing to end him before he can do anything to upset the timeline. She’s only a little bit tempted to kill them both, Adam and Jekyll and Hyde, but frankly three personalities split between two people is more than she can deal with while she’s still trying to figure out how she got here in the first place, so she settles for killing the correct version of Adam Worth and then making off with whatever ill-gotten wealth he’d managed to purloin for himself and setting up shop in a cottage far, far away from London and its myriad of temptations.

She finds it very hard to stay out of trouble for the first decade. She knows where John is, of course, and it would be easy to end it now. But World War II was bad enough with Hitler dead, and she’s not really sure she wants to go through the final days of battle with the Third Reich entirely intact. And there is that whole bit with Nikola in the catacombs she’d rather leave as is. Not to mention needing everyone intact for when the Lazarus virus rears its ugly head. So she waits, and while she waits she writes down everything that happened to her from 1908 until the day she went back in time, as many details as she can manage, until she has the most complete chronicle of her life that she can get. Then she reads it, pouring over details, searching for any signs that she’s interfered in her own life.

She can’t wait for quantum mechanics to be invented again, so she calls up every memory of every conversation she’s ever had with Albert, and decides that so long as she doesn’t do anything she knows to be wrong, she might not actually be able to screw up. There’s a list of things she can’t do, because she knows she never did them: save John, kill John, stop Adam, track down Nikola, talk with Nigel, save Ashley; but the things that aren’t on that list are probably all right.

She moves to Scotland, just outside of Inverness, and finds a cothold for sale, just as she knew it would be. It’s close to the city, will be closer as time goes by, but isolated enough that she can eschew the corset a couple decades early and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. There’s a barn on the property, and she amuses herself for a while with washing scorch marks off the walls, leaving black marks in artistic designs that mean nothing to anyone. The dragon is long gone, moved to Oban, but she knew the day the cothold was sold, so when she buys it with what’s left of her money, she can assume she’s not messing anything up. She finds a letter in the barn, addressed from James, but she knows he never gets it. She’ll send it when it’s time.

And then she waits, which has never been her strong suit. Moments come and go, presenting themselves to her for a second perusal or a preemptive strike. She’s always been lucky, for all she’s never really believed in luck, but she supposes that if life hands a person the opportunity to be one’s own guardian angel, it would be stupid not to take it. She swoops, or perhaps slides, back into events and sets them on the course she already knew they’d take, and it’s 1934 before she really looks in a mirror and realizes that nothing has changed. She’s always planned long term, it’s true, but this is something else beyond, and sometimes when she thinks about it, it makes her head hurt.

She waits out the war, facing down temptation every day but finding more than enough work to do in keeping those who don’t leave to join the fighting from starving to death. She’d known about the Women’s Land Army, of course, but had never really appreciated them until now. She looks twice the age of most of the girls who break their backs for a shilling a week in the fields, and is much, much older than she appears to be, but she learns almost as much from them as she did from a century running the Sanctuary Network and half a century of doing it again.

After the war, she moves to North America, like she did the first time. There are still things she can do. She can go to church, though she hasn’t been in a long time, and certainly never to a Catholic service, and whisper to the priest about a place where those who are different can find Sanctuary. By 1951, her reputation is secure, and events happen exactly as they should.

There are computers now, sort of, and she cobbles together what she managed to learn about the Hollow Earth abnormals before she followed Adam back in time. She sees a pattern she doesn’t like, one that leads to invasion, and she can only assume Will and Henry saw the same thing. They’ll react quickly in her absence, but she won’t be gone for long, and she spends years at a time strategizing and preparing for every possible outcome she can conceive of.

She paints. She always meant to paint. And since she can’t spend all her time planning a war it’s as good a hobby as any. It also earns her a modest income, and she spends happy hours in galleries and coffeehouses and small shops in quiet towns that only have customers in the summer talking about colours and themes and the many ways in which a person can see the world.

The small towns, she thinks, will take to abnormals faster than the cities, which is not something she expected. She cultivates it, though, where ever she goes, pressing and pushing and suggesting, carefully arranging for a day she knows is coming, even though she’s not sure exactly what form it will take. She’s surprised that it’s not impossible. It gives her hope.

She doesn’t watch Will, because she did that the first time, and she can’t watch Henry and Ashley, but she can watch Clara and Kate, and help both of them out, so long as they never see her. She makes sure Clara doesn’t starve to death and it’s possible that she helps Kate evade arrest on more than three occasions, but honestly both of them are capable even as teenagers and it’s more for something to keep her mind off the fact that Ashley is the one she can’t save.

The last years are the worst. She can’t even watch, much, as events unfold. She clings to the life she built, the second century of time spent perfecting everything she already was and learning her faults anew. She moves to Old City and buys a white car she can’t help drive past the Sanctuary two or three times a week. She’s just making sure that nothing has changed.

When the day comes, the day she told John she was done, the day she left, the day she started again, she waits outside the gate until four hours after the EM shield has gone back up. She’s gone now, underground and back in time, and John is dying or killing or anything, and she’s stopped caring one way or the other, except it’s been another hundred years and if there’s one thing she hasn’t managed to do, it’s stop caring. It’s chaos inside, she can tell from the way the psychic bees are terrorizing the flowers in the garden, their out of season buzzing so loud that she can hear it with the windows rolled up against the autumn chill. It’s finally, finally time.

The day that Hollow Earth abnormals invade, Helen Magnus walks through the front door of her Sanctuary like no time has passed at all.

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finis

Notes: Thanks to samjohnsson, who pointed out that Helen does have way home...it's just going to take a while.

Gravity_Not_Included, June 21, 2011