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grav_ityMeta and Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Whispers on the Edge of Dark
Chapter 3
James stares at her like she has gone mad, but when she hands over the handkerchief, his face closes completely and he looks all at once impossibly old. She cannot bear his sense of sorrow and betrayal on top of her own, and finds herself weeping again, this time with his arms firmly around her as though he needs grounding as much as she does.
Helen comes to her senses to find James’s landlady on the scene looking absolutely terrified.
“Mr. Watson, Miss Magnus,” she gasps. “Has someone died?”
“No,” James chokes out, much to Helen’s relief because she’s not sure she could speak if commanded by the Queen herself. “Just some terrible news. Could you fetch some tea, perhaps? And if your nephew is available, I should like to send some messages.”
“Of course.” The poor woman quits the room as speedily as possible, and Helen can hear her yelling for the boy on her way down the stairs.
James holds her hands, taking her pulse quite unsubtly as he does so, and then pulls her to her feet and leads her to the one chair that is not completely covered by his paraphernalia. He kneels before her, as unwilling to let her go as she is to be released, and breathes so calmingly that before long she finds herself matching him. She would curse him for treating her like some hysterical patient, except at the moment that’s exactly what she is, and she needs whatever coolness he can provide.
“Mr. Watson?” The boy is not much older than the girl who delivered Mary’s message earlier in the afternoon, and unlike the landlady he does not enter the room.
“Go at once to Messers Nigel Griffin and Nikola Tesla, and inform them that I require their attendance immediately, no matter what else they are doing. Tell them,” James hesitates. “Tell them that I said I don’t care what else they’re doing. Just to make it here with all speed.”
The boy gives a quick nod to James and a slightly deeper one to Helen before he leaves, and then the tea tray is brought in. Helen is reluctant to relinquish James’s hand, even for tea, but once he passes her the cup she feels better immediately. He rises and crosses to the liquor table, where he prepares four glasses and a bottle of whiskey.
“Do you want to tell me and have me inform the others, or would you rather wait and tell us all at once,” he says, carefully unfastening the lid of the bottle. She thinks she might scream if he treats her any more delicately. She’s not sure she won’t scream anyway.
She finds herself telling the story, the whole story, right from her acquaintance with Mary Kelly to the horrific events of this evening. James says nothing while she speaks, only takes the cup away from her when it begins to look like she might shatter it and lets her grasp his hands instead. When she finishes, he says nothing for a moment and when he meets her eyes, she is surprised to see tears glistening there.
“Helen, I am sorry,” he says with so much emotion in his voice she’s afraid they might both drown in it. “I’m sorry I withdrew so callously because I was ashamed at my own failure, leaving you alone with this work all these weeks. And I’m sorry that it’s John. From this day on, I swear it, we will work together, as physicians, as friends, and, if you will permit me, at the Sanctuary itself.”
Helen is spared having to marshal her thoughts to formulate an adequately heartfelt reply to James’s emphatic statement by the noisy arrival of Tesla.
“James?” he calls out before he’s even come through the door, and when he sees them, he stops cold in his tracks. The vampire’s eyes are black, though neither his face nor his nails are elongated, and Helen deduces that he has forgone a cab altogether and simply run here as fast as he could. “Helen? What – ”
“Wait, please,” Helen says, once again appalled at her own weakness. “Please, wait for Nigel. I cannot bear it more than once again tonight.”
Tesla has never taken to waiting very well, and helps himself to the whiskey without asking. James gestures for him to pour it out for all of them, and even though Helen never drinks spirits straight, she accepts the glass with gratitude. She sits as though made of stone while Tesla paces and James berates him for fidgeting. Just when she’s ready to admonish them both to stop acting like children, Nigel arrives, out of breath and red in the face, and James finally begins to talk.
Helen watches them react as though she is viewing the scene from outside her own body. Nigel deflates, like all the air is being let out of him in a slow leak that leaves him slumped and boneless in his chair, until he’s broken and cradling his head in his hands. Nikola’s face twists in a kind of pain she wasn’t aware he could feel, and a desperate longing that she can’t identify settles over his countenance until she realizes he’s looking at her as James talks, and his hands twitch as though he wishes he had the right to hold her and hates himself for wishing it.
“What are we going to do?” Nigel asks in a dead voice when James is done. “The Vigilance chaps haven’t a hope of catching him, or of keeping him on the chance that they do.”
“Nigel,” James reproves him, but Helen has had enough. She shakes her head and straightens, willing herself to be strong in the face of this, whatever it is.
“No,” she says sharply, and they all look to her. “No, Nigel is right. We know that John has not been well, and I thought my treatments had cured him of his ailment, but clearly there is some deeper malady or perversion that none of us noticed. We must apprehend him, and determine a method by which he may be held.”
“Helen,” James says softly, and it very nearly breaks her again.
“We must catch him,” she repeats. “James, you promised.”
She can see he is unhappy, but he relents
“I can hold him, for however long,” Nikola says. “If only his teleportation could be prevented. My strength is more than a match for his.”
“How far do you expect we shall have to take this?” Nigel asks.
Only this morning, Helen had been lamenting losing the close-knit circle of companionship the Five provided. And though one of them was gone, those remaining seemed ready to follow her lead once more, as they had when she proposed her experiment in the first place. She would give anything to be lonely again.
“As far as needed,” is all she says. “He must be stopped.”
They turn to planning then, dividing Whitechapel into quadrants for the four of them to patrol. It is well past the dinner hour before Helen remembers not only that she hasn’t eaten, but that John might very well be sitting in her parlour as she plots his capture. She is about to tell James as much when there is a knock at the door, and the landlady’s nephew appears once more.
“A message, Miss,” he says. “From a Mr. Druitt.”
The temperature in the room drops by several degrees, but the lad does not seem to notice. Helen holds out her hand for the card, and sees James fetch a coin for the messenger. She waits until the door is shut before she starts opening the envelope, but cannot read further than My Dearest Helen before she has to stop and pass the paper over to Nigel.
“He regrets that he is unable to call on you tonight, as promised,” Nigel says after a few moments. “His business in Southampton will require one more day as he ties up loose ends.”
“He’s not in Southampton,” James says. “He’s here, in the city, tonight.”
“James, we’re not ready,” Tesla says. “I need at least a day to build something with enough power to stop him from jumping, and that’s only if you’re willing to go out with untested model. If we go tonight, we’ll have to kill him.”
“Then we’ll kill him,” Helen says, before anyone can berate Nikola on his abrupt wording. She does not quite manage to say it without her voice breaking.
It comes to nothing, however, though they spend most of the night in the streets watching from the shadows, alert for the telltale sights and sounds of John’s movements. When Nikola brings Helen home, scarcely two hours before dawn, he brings her straight to the door with no thought of what anyone watching might think. The housekeeper is beyond scandalized when she opens the door, but one look at Helen’s face silences her.
“You must leave,” Helen tells her, too exhausted to be graceful about it. “You and everyone else.”
“But Miss Magnus,” the housekeeper begins.
“Please,” Helen says. “Please just go. It is not safe for you here right now. I will send for you when it is.”
The housekeeper does not know what goes on in the basement of Gregory Magnus’s house, but she has more than a few suspicions about it, and is a wise enough woman to take Helen at her word. Once she has retreated to the kitchen to make one last breakfast, Helen stands in the hall with Nikola, so tired she cannot think of anything but her bed.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asks, far more gently than he might have under different circumstances. It breaks her heart.
“No,” she says. “I want to be alone. He hasn’t hurt me all this time. He won’t for one more day.”
She twists the ring off her finger and places it on the table where John’s card from the previous morning still sits. Nikola takes his leave and she bolts the door behind him. She can hear the housekeeper locking everything else, for all the good it will do, and retreats to her bedroom feeling as safe as she can under the circumstances.
It is late in the afternoon when she wakes, and for a moment she thinks it was all some horrible dream. But the sun is too high, and her stomach too unsettled and her finger too bare for it to be anything but the truth. She dresses for the evening, measuring her wardrobe against practicality and function. She is nearly finished when she hears a noise downstairs in the front hallway and starts abruptly as she recognizes what it is. He is in the house, and James is not to call until after dinner.
She barely dares to breathe, waiting for him to appear at the foot of her bed and wondering what she will do when he does. How can she face him and play the loving fiancée when she knows what he has done? Downstairs, something smashes, and following the sound of the break comes the sound of John disappearing from her house. She grabs the pistol and runs down the stairs to see what has happened, and finds the hall mirror broken to shards and her ring lying on the floor amidst the wreckage.
He knows, she thinks. And yet…
Helen clamps down on any feelings that his sparing her might stir with an iron will.
+++
In the evening post, she reads of Mary Kelly’s death. The Ripper followed her home, it reports, and the scene is too graphic for even print to describe. And no one could hear her scream, even when she read his thoughts and realized who he was. When the night comes, Helen packs the pistol and shot into her bag and leaves for Whitechapel. Her world is already broken, and if only she can hold on to those edges of anger and betrayal, it will take little effort on her part to bring it fully to its end.
+++
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, January 16, 2011
Thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oparu and eldanna who betaed, and to everyone who helped me hammer out the timeline as I was writing.
NOTES: Yes, I know that James talks about discussing the 7th victim with John over brandies at the club. Since the date he gives is in April, I am choosing to ignore it. ;) There have been several wonderful meta pieces posted lately, but the Ripper story is full of holes, so poking at it is, I think, allowable.
Admittedly, my reasons for wanting the Ripper timeline to be as compressed as possible (Aug. 31, 1888 to mid November 1888) are personal and have little to do with the show itself, but I think there is a valid reason in the canon as well as in my own story. Mary Kelly comes very close to catching him, and once Helen and James get on the case, there’s really not a lot John could do to avoid them. By limiting John to “the canonical five” and then adding two more before Molly, the only canon that doesn’t fit is James’s remark about April (which doesn’t make sense anyway), and the part where “John Druitt”’s body was found in the Thames on November 10, 1888.
(You'll also note that I neglected to mention Ashley. I suppose that I am hoping Helen got pregnant on August 30th or just before, that she's about 10 weeks along at the end of the story, and that she hasn't noticed yet because she's been busy and stressed. Which is a stretch, I'll admit, but workable.)
Between the complex unknowns of the actual histories and the spotty dates we have in the canon itself, I think there’s plenty of space for this story, and the idea of Mary Kelly being the first source of the Sanctuary’s funds (before the government got involved) was just too good to pass up.
Links:
My Sanctuary Timeline
LadyGJ's Whitechapel Timeling
a_loquita's Sanctuary Timeline
Chapter 2
Whispers on the Edge of Dark
Chapter 3
James stares at her like she has gone mad, but when she hands over the handkerchief, his face closes completely and he looks all at once impossibly old. She cannot bear his sense of sorrow and betrayal on top of her own, and finds herself weeping again, this time with his arms firmly around her as though he needs grounding as much as she does.
Helen comes to her senses to find James’s landlady on the scene looking absolutely terrified.
“Mr. Watson, Miss Magnus,” she gasps. “Has someone died?”
“No,” James chokes out, much to Helen’s relief because she’s not sure she could speak if commanded by the Queen herself. “Just some terrible news. Could you fetch some tea, perhaps? And if your nephew is available, I should like to send some messages.”
“Of course.” The poor woman quits the room as speedily as possible, and Helen can hear her yelling for the boy on her way down the stairs.
James holds her hands, taking her pulse quite unsubtly as he does so, and then pulls her to her feet and leads her to the one chair that is not completely covered by his paraphernalia. He kneels before her, as unwilling to let her go as she is to be released, and breathes so calmingly that before long she finds herself matching him. She would curse him for treating her like some hysterical patient, except at the moment that’s exactly what she is, and she needs whatever coolness he can provide.
“Mr. Watson?” The boy is not much older than the girl who delivered Mary’s message earlier in the afternoon, and unlike the landlady he does not enter the room.
“Go at once to Messers Nigel Griffin and Nikola Tesla, and inform them that I require their attendance immediately, no matter what else they are doing. Tell them,” James hesitates. “Tell them that I said I don’t care what else they’re doing. Just to make it here with all speed.”
The boy gives a quick nod to James and a slightly deeper one to Helen before he leaves, and then the tea tray is brought in. Helen is reluctant to relinquish James’s hand, even for tea, but once he passes her the cup she feels better immediately. He rises and crosses to the liquor table, where he prepares four glasses and a bottle of whiskey.
“Do you want to tell me and have me inform the others, or would you rather wait and tell us all at once,” he says, carefully unfastening the lid of the bottle. She thinks she might scream if he treats her any more delicately. She’s not sure she won’t scream anyway.
She finds herself telling the story, the whole story, right from her acquaintance with Mary Kelly to the horrific events of this evening. James says nothing while she speaks, only takes the cup away from her when it begins to look like she might shatter it and lets her grasp his hands instead. When she finishes, he says nothing for a moment and when he meets her eyes, she is surprised to see tears glistening there.
“Helen, I am sorry,” he says with so much emotion in his voice she’s afraid they might both drown in it. “I’m sorry I withdrew so callously because I was ashamed at my own failure, leaving you alone with this work all these weeks. And I’m sorry that it’s John. From this day on, I swear it, we will work together, as physicians, as friends, and, if you will permit me, at the Sanctuary itself.”
Helen is spared having to marshal her thoughts to formulate an adequately heartfelt reply to James’s emphatic statement by the noisy arrival of Tesla.
“James?” he calls out before he’s even come through the door, and when he sees them, he stops cold in his tracks. The vampire’s eyes are black, though neither his face nor his nails are elongated, and Helen deduces that he has forgone a cab altogether and simply run here as fast as he could. “Helen? What – ”
“Wait, please,” Helen says, once again appalled at her own weakness. “Please, wait for Nigel. I cannot bear it more than once again tonight.”
Tesla has never taken to waiting very well, and helps himself to the whiskey without asking. James gestures for him to pour it out for all of them, and even though Helen never drinks spirits straight, she accepts the glass with gratitude. She sits as though made of stone while Tesla paces and James berates him for fidgeting. Just when she’s ready to admonish them both to stop acting like children, Nigel arrives, out of breath and red in the face, and James finally begins to talk.
Helen watches them react as though she is viewing the scene from outside her own body. Nigel deflates, like all the air is being let out of him in a slow leak that leaves him slumped and boneless in his chair, until he’s broken and cradling his head in his hands. Nikola’s face twists in a kind of pain she wasn’t aware he could feel, and a desperate longing that she can’t identify settles over his countenance until she realizes he’s looking at her as James talks, and his hands twitch as though he wishes he had the right to hold her and hates himself for wishing it.
“What are we going to do?” Nigel asks in a dead voice when James is done. “The Vigilance chaps haven’t a hope of catching him, or of keeping him on the chance that they do.”
“Nigel,” James reproves him, but Helen has had enough. She shakes her head and straightens, willing herself to be strong in the face of this, whatever it is.
“No,” she says sharply, and they all look to her. “No, Nigel is right. We know that John has not been well, and I thought my treatments had cured him of his ailment, but clearly there is some deeper malady or perversion that none of us noticed. We must apprehend him, and determine a method by which he may be held.”
“Helen,” James says softly, and it very nearly breaks her again.
“We must catch him,” she repeats. “James, you promised.”
She can see he is unhappy, but he relents
“I can hold him, for however long,” Nikola says. “If only his teleportation could be prevented. My strength is more than a match for his.”
“How far do you expect we shall have to take this?” Nigel asks.
Only this morning, Helen had been lamenting losing the close-knit circle of companionship the Five provided. And though one of them was gone, those remaining seemed ready to follow her lead once more, as they had when she proposed her experiment in the first place. She would give anything to be lonely again.
“As far as needed,” is all she says. “He must be stopped.”
They turn to planning then, dividing Whitechapel into quadrants for the four of them to patrol. It is well past the dinner hour before Helen remembers not only that she hasn’t eaten, but that John might very well be sitting in her parlour as she plots his capture. She is about to tell James as much when there is a knock at the door, and the landlady’s nephew appears once more.
“A message, Miss,” he says. “From a Mr. Druitt.”
The temperature in the room drops by several degrees, but the lad does not seem to notice. Helen holds out her hand for the card, and sees James fetch a coin for the messenger. She waits until the door is shut before she starts opening the envelope, but cannot read further than My Dearest Helen before she has to stop and pass the paper over to Nigel.
“He regrets that he is unable to call on you tonight, as promised,” Nigel says after a few moments. “His business in Southampton will require one more day as he ties up loose ends.”
“He’s not in Southampton,” James says. “He’s here, in the city, tonight.”
“James, we’re not ready,” Tesla says. “I need at least a day to build something with enough power to stop him from jumping, and that’s only if you’re willing to go out with untested model. If we go tonight, we’ll have to kill him.”
“Then we’ll kill him,” Helen says, before anyone can berate Nikola on his abrupt wording. She does not quite manage to say it without her voice breaking.
It comes to nothing, however, though they spend most of the night in the streets watching from the shadows, alert for the telltale sights and sounds of John’s movements. When Nikola brings Helen home, scarcely two hours before dawn, he brings her straight to the door with no thought of what anyone watching might think. The housekeeper is beyond scandalized when she opens the door, but one look at Helen’s face silences her.
“You must leave,” Helen tells her, too exhausted to be graceful about it. “You and everyone else.”
“But Miss Magnus,” the housekeeper begins.
“Please,” Helen says. “Please just go. It is not safe for you here right now. I will send for you when it is.”
The housekeeper does not know what goes on in the basement of Gregory Magnus’s house, but she has more than a few suspicions about it, and is a wise enough woman to take Helen at her word. Once she has retreated to the kitchen to make one last breakfast, Helen stands in the hall with Nikola, so tired she cannot think of anything but her bed.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asks, far more gently than he might have under different circumstances. It breaks her heart.
“No,” she says. “I want to be alone. He hasn’t hurt me all this time. He won’t for one more day.”
She twists the ring off her finger and places it on the table where John’s card from the previous morning still sits. Nikola takes his leave and she bolts the door behind him. She can hear the housekeeper locking everything else, for all the good it will do, and retreats to her bedroom feeling as safe as she can under the circumstances.
It is late in the afternoon when she wakes, and for a moment she thinks it was all some horrible dream. But the sun is too high, and her stomach too unsettled and her finger too bare for it to be anything but the truth. She dresses for the evening, measuring her wardrobe against practicality and function. She is nearly finished when she hears a noise downstairs in the front hallway and starts abruptly as she recognizes what it is. He is in the house, and James is not to call until after dinner.
She barely dares to breathe, waiting for him to appear at the foot of her bed and wondering what she will do when he does. How can she face him and play the loving fiancée when she knows what he has done? Downstairs, something smashes, and following the sound of the break comes the sound of John disappearing from her house. She grabs the pistol and runs down the stairs to see what has happened, and finds the hall mirror broken to shards and her ring lying on the floor amidst the wreckage.
He knows, she thinks. And yet…
Helen clamps down on any feelings that his sparing her might stir with an iron will.
+++
In the evening post, she reads of Mary Kelly’s death. The Ripper followed her home, it reports, and the scene is too graphic for even print to describe. And no one could hear her scream, even when she read his thoughts and realized who he was. When the night comes, Helen packs the pistol and shot into her bag and leaves for Whitechapel. Her world is already broken, and if only she can hold on to those edges of anger and betrayal, it will take little effort on her part to bring it fully to its end.
+++
fin
Gravity_Not_Included, January 16, 2011
Thank you to
oparu and eldanna who betaed, and to everyone who helped me hammer out the timeline as I was writing.NOTES: Yes, I know that James talks about discussing the 7th victim with John over brandies at the club. Since the date he gives is in April, I am choosing to ignore it. ;) There have been several wonderful meta pieces posted lately, but the Ripper story is full of holes, so poking at it is, I think, allowable.
Admittedly, my reasons for wanting the Ripper timeline to be as compressed as possible (Aug. 31, 1888 to mid November 1888) are personal and have little to do with the show itself, but I think there is a valid reason in the canon as well as in my own story. Mary Kelly comes very close to catching him, and once Helen and James get on the case, there’s really not a lot John could do to avoid them. By limiting John to “the canonical five” and then adding two more before Molly, the only canon that doesn’t fit is James’s remark about April (which doesn’t make sense anyway), and the part where “John Druitt”’s body was found in the Thames on November 10, 1888.
(You'll also note that I neglected to mention Ashley. I suppose that I am hoping Helen got pregnant on August 30th or just before, that she's about 10 weeks along at the end of the story, and that she hasn't noticed yet because she's been busy and stressed. Which is a stretch, I'll admit, but workable.)
Between the complex unknowns of the actual histories and the spotty dates we have in the canon itself, I think there’s plenty of space for this story, and the idea of Mary Kelly being the first source of the Sanctuary’s funds (before the government got involved) was just too good to pass up.
Links:
My Sanctuary Timeline
LadyGJ's Whitechapel Timeling
a_loquita's Sanctuary Timeline
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 05:21 pm (UTC)I was in London a few years ago (I think it might have been early 2008), and all of this makes me wish desperately that I'd been into Sanctuary at the time so I could have paid more attention to the "Ripper Walk" we went on! Though it's all very unreal to listen to, since obviously nothing looks the way it did a century and a quarter/half ago.
(You'll also note that I neglected to mention Ashley. I suppose that I am hoping Helen got pregnant on August 30th or just before, that she's about 10 weeks along at the end of the story, and that she hasn't noticed yet because she's been busy and stressed. Which is a stretch, I'll admit, but workable.)
Helen Magnus is also a very/rather tall lady, and might not show as much as a woman of standard height for the time would (iirc, they were even shorter than the average female is now).
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 06:22 pm (UTC)I also appreciate your help with my rationalization of Helen's pregnancy. The more the merrier, if you will. ;)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 06:23 pm (UTC)This story's an excellent lead up to John and Helen's confrontation in Whitechapel! I love how you brought Mary Kelly to life, and connected her to the Sanctuary. I also love how you have Helen slowly beginning to develop the Sancutary network, making contacts among the more humanoid Abnormals and setting up safehouses and the like. Brilliant!
Oh, the revelation! I love how all four of them were devastated in their own way. Tesla may be a brat, but these are his friends, and he cares for them in his own way. Now to know that one of them is really a ruthless killer? :'(
Excellent story!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 06:27 pm (UTC)I KNOW! I wrote it and was all "...I need a hug!"
Mary Kelly is very much the reason this story got written at all (and she'll probably figure in, in flash backs, the the story I am setting in 1892), and it was interesting to make her into a "real" person within the scope of the story.
Thanks for the review!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 08:59 pm (UTC)[I am watching Two Towers so this next thought will make sense]
OMG HALDIR! I may have to go and watch Seeker all over again. Bugger.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 10:39 pm (UTC)