Proximal

Author: Kloperslegend
Pairing: Myka Bering & HG Wells
Rating: M
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, but some days I sure do wish I did.

A/N: This is a sequel to "And it's Funny Because It's True," written by the fabulous kleptosrbetterlovers. Written with permission.

Here is the link, to the best of my ability (ff has a tendency to kill all my links. Le sigh). I apologize for the inconvenient formatting.

kleptosrbetterlovers

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—

"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 29

—

Helena doesn't bother to look up from her desk when the soft click of the door hints at company. Her students know they may come and go as they please, and there have always been a few stragglers who come in heinously early simply to drop off their books before grabbing a school-provided breakfast.

"Miss Wells?" The voice doesn't immediately register – hearing her name scores of times in a single day has done that to her – and she pops her lips as she records a final check in her grade-book.

"Yes?" She finally looks up, and immediately wishes she had called in sick.

Her biggest regret stood in the middle of the room, gripping a manila envelope and swaying lightly. Myka Bering hadn't changed, and yet everything about her was different; the final vestiges of ungainly youth dispersed.

It never failed to amaze her what five years could do to the face of a former student.

—

It was just once.

It was just once and it was everything – no, more – than she could have ever imagined, in every way, even in the bad ways. Even in the way she felt betrayed by her body, even the way she tasted her student's lips on hers for days afterwards, even when they weren't there; even in the way she curled her fingers tightly around her pillow every night, feeling like some uncontrollable whore.

It was Myka (who tasted like regret, and, oddly enough, artificial sweetener), she told herself, who was irreprehensible.

It was for Myka (who smelled of gardenias), Myka and her future, she told herself, that she would end these senseless passions.

So, she did. She ended it before, she hoped, any lasting attachment could be made. When Myka graduated, it was as if someone had lifted a hand from her throat. So why was she still having trouble breathing?

Helena Wells always makes the mistake of assuming passion to be senseless, and breath being solely for the sake of air.

—

Staring up at her, her old teacher – her first lover – sits quietly, flattened. She is silent and introspective and all Myka wants to do is throttle the boiling words from her lips the same way you would tiny beads from a tiny jar. She knows they're there. Helena's eyes let her know the words are still there, despite the years. But Helena is soundless, so instead she pulls the nearest student desk next to Helena's, and says, as if admitting some great guilt, "I'm your new TA."

Despite objections of inexperience and unease, her administrators insisted Helena take a teaching assistant after an older colleague passed away. In her faux disdain, Helena Wells didn't bother to look at the name on the packet sent from the university.

Oh, how she wishes she had.

Miss Wells taps her red pen on the desk, face perfectly unemotional, until she gives a sigh. "You aren't supposed to arrive until after lunch."

"Yes, well," The other stammers, "I wanted to drop in to say 'hi' before we actually got to business." Myka flits her hand about. "All the other students have never met their faculty mentor before. We're supposed to use this time to get acquainted." The young woman smiles, and Helena can't help but notice the way her curls have darkened over time to match the shade of gloss adorning those quirked lips. "After all," she continues, and Helena can't ignore the softer tone of voice. "We already know each other."

You know nothing of me, Helena wants to spat, but she doesn't, because it's a lie.

"Indeed."

Myka knows everything of Helena.

—

The sentiment that her 'heartbeat was deafening' was only something she used to tell herself to drown out the sound of Myka's sighs.

She thought she was too good for love, that she had escaped its pawing clutches. That is, until Myka snuck under her skin and set a fire there, cutting her down like the falling of some great Yggdrasil, some vast worldly hubris; discarding her moral roots – lines, really – as if they were papyrus.

It was wrong. It still was wrong. She never lived it down. She put up so many new lines, borders, that the Helena everyone knew was obscured by unending tangles of moral thread. She deleted every email Miss Bering – and that's who she was now, never the name that fell from her lips during their lovemaking, never the name pinned and plastered to the peeling heart attack in her chest – ever sent her. Wiped her from every face of every existence possible.

You can kill the axmen but never the axe.

… And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

—

Myka corners her in the faculty room during a break, and this time avoiding the conversation is, well, unavoidable.

"So tell me, Helena," the brunette muses as she taps directions into the copying machine, "why our conversations these days only concern lesson plans and the fine balance of classroom discipline?"

Helena. It sounds so wrong coming from the mouth of her former student, indiscretions aside. So Helena takes a breath, opening her mouth, and then closing it, slipping one hand into the back pocket of her slacks. She's sure she looks like an idiotic gaping fish.

Helena takes a breath and tries again. "I'm merely trying to avoid the ruin that occurred the last time we…" She pauses, trying to find an elegant way to phrase their relationship. "… were in close proximity." It's a meek finish, a cop out, and they both know it.

Myka takes a breath, her chest visibly rising and falling with the artificial motion. "You didn't ruin me." The words are painfully casual. "See?" She raises her eyebrow and gestures to herself as copies are spit out the other end of the machine. "I'm so un-ruined, I came back." Myka smiles. Helena sees, and Helena knows more than anything her return is proof she's ruined her. It makes her sick.

"And anyway," Myka continues casually, grabbing the copies and shuffling them as a means of order. "I've been waiting five years for this."

"For what?" Helena, practically spits the words, they're so bitter. Eyes previously glued to the floor, drag upward at the sound of Myka's casual approach.

Helena knows it's coming. Helena knows, because secretly, inside, she'd been replaying this moment over in her head in a thousand different places in a thousand different ways. The younger woman moves forward steadily, placing one foot in front of the other with a walk of fluid, and a stance unyielding.

"Why are you doing this?" Helena's whisper darts through the lessening space between them to rest on Myka's lips. For once, Helena seems to have knocked her from her high perch of confidence. She gives a soft sigh, and her head turns to the side, thinking. Her face twists into some cohort of confusion.

"Because." She answers, and the slow stalk forward begins again, an inevitable drop sliding down a window fogged with something like affection. She reaches Helena, the only sign of her nervousness a slight tremble in her wrist.

"We can't do this," It's more to herself than to Myka.

"But Helena…" And for one moment Helena realizes that she's the older one, the responsible one, because Myka is here and in front of her and trembling and her words are so, so small. "… I can't imagine doing anything else."

It isn't sudden when Myka leans forward. That on its own is jolting enough for Helena to attempt make one last escape, and she tries to dart left, avoiding the kiss. A firm hand presses against her chest, pinning Helena while she's accosted by a soft pair of lips. It sends a wicked pleasure down them both, and Helena can't help but rest her hands possessively on the hips in front of her…

…But it ends quickly and unexpectedly, a foil to how it began, the booming of the principal's voice in the hallway cutting them off like some plug jacked from a socket.

When Helena opens her eyes, Myka's are directly in front of her, two forests of Oberon, and just as rich and intricate. "I'm just trying to be brave. For the both of us."

—

Perhaps it is the way the rounded syllables drawl from her mentor's mouth to curl easily in the ears, falling into the air like shavings of the most pleasant of woods.

Perhaps it is the way her eyes lingered, still, far too long on the pages before she turned them, rolling the words with the tongue of her mind like some wine critic connoisseur.

Perhaps it is the way Myka has never met anyone else like her, then or now. A great marker in her life, the kind you define yourself by when you say before orafter.

Perhaps.

But Myka knows in her gut that it is all of these reasons and none, and that she and Helena – because that's who she was, her Helena, who, in all her wisdom, has never been able to see what was directly in front of her – were like cats and curiosity; some wicked proximal inevitability forever coupled together in the world they lived in.

"All things have a second coming, Miss Bering." Miss Wells had been speaking of literary movements, but when Myka thinks of the axiom now, there is nothingliterary about the movements she envisions.

—

Helena Wells wants to ignore the woman teaching her class, but, as the presiding professional, has an obligation to pay her every attention. So she does. She watches the easy way Myka strides amongst the aisles, checking in on her students, making herself a presence in a world where it is so easy to be ignored.

Helena has moved her desk to the back of the classroom so it was easier for shy Myka to "take the stage." And take the stage she does, no longer the shy individual Helena knew.

Excusing herself from the classroom momentarily, Helena slides quietly outside, mechanically moving to the break room. Inside, she avoids that corner with the copier like a plague now, making sure any copying was done by Myka and Myka alone. She turns instead to the counter across the room, which houses the typical appliances of a kitchenette.

It was habit she sought after now, and she pulls the little-used electric kettle from behind the coffee maker. She fills it with water. Plugs the electric base into the wall. Presses the 'start' button on the kettle. Waits. Revels in a set of motions so void of Myka, it was freeing.

She presses her palms against the cold lacquered wood of the counter before tearing her hair from its ponytail and letting it cascade forward. She closes her eyes, reveling in the silence.

"I hope you plan on putting your hair back up, Hel." She jumps at the sound of another voice, tucking her hair quickly behind her ear and composing herself. It was for naught, though; It just William.

"Oh. Wolley. Just, ah… "

"Letting your hair down? Are you trying to give your students a heart attack?" He chuckles.

She snorts, but it doesn't reach her eyes, and she knew it.

He eyes her calmly, sticking his leftover lasagna into the microwave next to the two of them. She runs her hands through her hair before tying it up again. She picks absently at a fuzzy on her sweater.

"Your hot water's ready." She glances at her close friend and fellow teacher before looking over at the kettle, whose light, sure enough, is blinking green. She could practically hear his eyebrow arching as he adds, "It's been that way since I put my lasagna in the microwave."

"A bit tired, I guess." She plucks her mug from the faculty shelf and fills it with hot water.

"I'd say." He hands her a teabag – Irish Breakfast – before turning to address the wailing microwave. She gently bobs the teabag in the steaming water. "But Ithink," he grabbed a fork from the drawer, "That there's something more."

Helena leans against the counter, scooting closer to her friend. She dips her head gently without saying anything.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Helena takes a deep breath and lets it out, raising her eyebrows at the incredulity of it all. "Nothing I can't handle, my good friend."

Wolley pauses, chewing his early lunch in contemplative silence. "If you insist. But you've been distant. Distracted. You're not taking joy from all this, as you usually do."

Helena sips her tea, which is not quite as strong as she usually likes it. "Is my personal discord so obvious?"

"Nah." He takes another bite of lasagna. "But it's been a while since you've kept something from me. Five years, in fact." He stands from leaning against the counter, closing the unfinished Tupperware of lasagna and depositing his fork in the sink. Before leaving, he pauses at the door. "I can tell when something's happening in the life of my closest friend, Helena. I can tell when she's conflicted. When she's hurting."

Helena doesn't look when he leaves. She drinks her tea. Breathes deeply. Tries to find a patch of clarity in the muddy water that has become her life.

—

They fall into bed the third week after their reunion, as if they never left.

Helena pumps roughly into Myka, and underneath the physical admission of feelings that never left, this is, more than anything, an act of accusation; a wicked sort of punishment for every feeling Myka caused in her, and Helena sees the flinching on Myka's face, and that hurts, too, and more than anything, more than anything, Helena revels in how good this feels; Myka feels so, so,good under her fingers.

When Myka looks into the two dark mirrors above her, she knows. She readily takes the blame.

And after each has crumbled pleasurably to pieces under the other, exposing simultaneously far too much and not enough, Helena sits on the side of the disheveled bed and weeps.

She can feel the movement of Myka behind her, pulling up the sheets to cover the blossoming evidence of their affections.

Myka stops just before touching Helena, and trusting in the art of insecure sincerities, says, "I'll be around, when you're ready," as if this is some unavoidable circumstance.

Helena swallows, fisting her hair in her hands, because she knows it is.

… Myka barely leaves the house before Helena barrels after her.

—

Why can't we tumble in and out of love

like we do the sheets and covers?

Each touch a draft of our confession

Terrible transgressions

We linger on the other's skin

like the taste of sour milk

So inevitable,

we have to happen sometime.

Like a sigh

we're in a gilded sort of happiness,

the kind we wear on our lips

when we are not alone

—

Helena doesn't look Myka in the eye for days after their second first kiss, and can barely tolerate herself after they start sleeping together again.

She felt like letting go. She felt like letting go, exactly like she did five years ago, but that would be wrong.

It was like that lonely night in college where she had lain in the middle of the street, just living, her existence a wave crashing against her skin; a pulsing torrent of fire crawling up her throat, engaged in some perverted sort of passive thrashing just to get out.

She had let go, then.

Existence, she learned, then, was really just a beast that lived inside everyone.

Only this time she didn't just want to exist. Existence wasn't enough for Helena anymore.

—

"Are you happy I came back?" Myka asked, draped naked over Helena's body like some maladroit tattoo.

Helena wants to say no, but she has long since given up on lying to Myka Bering. And even if she did say no, Myka would raise her eyebrow, give Helena a questioning glare, and Helena would look down, bite the inside of her lip (as she was wont to do whenever Myka made her comfortable, which was nearly always), and admit the contrary.

That eyebrow. A vice never to be refused.

Wells prided herself on being a master of self-control, or she had, before.

Before.

Helena knows the quip about the unstoppable force and the immovable object. Really, everyone does. Helena had long since admitted – Deep within herself, like a secret nobody knows; nobody, but really, everyone does – what she was feeling now was an unstoppable force. A hushed relativity.

And she had no choice but to get out of the way or be consumed.

So she says yes, and chooses to be consumed this time, and she swears Myka's green eyes sparkle in the dim light like rays of sunshine cutting through a verdant canopy.

Instead of any more words, Myka brings their lips together, and Helena flushes at the feel of Myka's conspiratorially victorious grin.