Warehouse 12, 1905

[this_isaturn]

“Helena?”

It takes David a moment to get his bearings; he’s still in the Warehouse, still right where he was a moment ago, but Helena’s gone. Clearly, she tested whatever it was she’d been planning to try after all.

“Helena? Anyone?”

“Oh, David.”

He startles when Josephine appears – and then realises she looks as surprised to see him as he is to see her, for once. “Josephine, I – where’s Helena? I came to talk to her, and...”

“And she seems to have thrown you forward.”

David frowns. “Forward? I don’t follow.”

“It’s been four years. She thought she’d killed you.”

“Oh, Helena, no.” Her grief must be compounded now, and she’d been doing so poorly before. “Where is she? Did she – harm herself?”

Josephine sighs. “Not as such, no. She asked the Regents to – well, you’ll find her in the bronze sector.”

“What?” David’s running in that direction with hardly a second thought, but then, he doubts the Warehouse’s layout has changed that much in four years, and he does indeed find the bronze sector right where he’d last seen it.

oh bollocks. that’s my mind going, then. Never thought a statue could hallucinate, but I never thought a statue could think either.

He skids to a stop in front of Helena, and doesn’t even try to fight back tears when he takes in her face. She looks – broken. Like she just gave up.

“You didn’t deserve this.”

of course I did. I killed you, and now you are haunting me. Probably the best for all, when it comes down to it.

He doesn’t know what else to say, and part of him feels like he should wait for a response that can’t come, as she’s by way of being a statue at the moment. After a while, he puts a hand on her shoulder (she’s warm to the touch, which surprises him).

“You didn’t deserve this,” he says again. “I – there must have been something I could have done to help. If I’d known. If you’d let me.”

There was nothing, dear man. Nothing you could have done. I was the one who ruined everything. For you, for everything. It is better this way.

He stays there until Josephine comes to fetch him for dinner, and to get him up to speed.