grav_ity | Fic: Come The Thunder (Sanctuary)

AN: Written for the

sfa_history Battle prompt Helen Magnus, James Watson. The Blitz.

Spoilers: Nothing

Disclaimer: I do not own Sanctuary. The allusions to James’s time in Berlin are taken from

dbalthasar. The title is a lyric from Dracula: A Chamber Musical.

Rating: Teen

Characters: Helen Magnus, James Watson

Summary: Helen Magnus has never in her life been afraid of the dark or the monsters that might hide beneath its skulking mantle.

+++

Come The Thunder

Helen Magnus has never in her life been afraid of the dark or the monsters that might hide beneath its skulking mantle. Not when the Ripper haunted the streets in Whitechapel, not when she discovered his identity and realized she would face a life of never knowing where John might appear. Not when her father disappeared and left her a great pile of a house with room upon room of questions he hadn’t got around to answering yet. And not when the Great War ravaged the face of map, and threatened to undo all her work before she’d really got started.

But this war is different.

Everything that could safely be moved had been evacuated from the London Sanctuary. Of course, the abnormals that could not be safely moved are also the ones most likely to do damage if they somehow get out of their enclosures. There is no place for Helen to send them. The continent is in flames, her allies are spread thin and some of them can no longer be safely called allies at all.

Worst of all, she has become something she promised herself she would never be: the woman who waits at home. Nikola is still in America, pretending to be old and designing God knows what for the war effort. Nigel has disappeared, seeking to avoid a repeat of his government appointed tasks during the Great War. Helen suspects he has enlisted under a false name, choosing to fight on his own terms this time around. James is in Berlin, frantically trying to pick up the pieces there before he’s forced back to England, though Helen doubts he could say which of those pieces he is focused on. And she waits at home, scanning the papers for news and waiting for cables and confining herself to the sublevels as soon as the sirens begin to sound.

+++

After more than a year of running what amounted to an underground railroad through the German countryside, James thought he would be relieved to be once again at home in London. But there is no peace here either, ruled by rations and limitations and fear of the sky at night. He is in and out of Whitehall on a near daily basis after he let it slip that he’s spent so much time in Berlin over the past decade. They must suspect his reasons, but they cannot confirm them and frankly, he thinks they are too desperate for intelligence to care. He will be safe until the war is over.

He has not seen Helen this anxious since Gregory’s disappearance half a century ago. He does not suggest that she leave the city, because he knows she’ll see it as being sent away for her safety, but he cannot stand to watch her pace about the house either, like one of the abnormals they keep caged in the sublevels. She is, after all, at least as dangerous, if not more so, than they are.

When the request from the American government comes, he suspects somehow at Nikola’s suggestion, he is relieved. Helen Magnus was not meant to mind the hearth fires, but he was not relishing the idea of convincing her she wasn’t abandoning him.

Any reply they might make is delayed for three days when a bomb falls into the back garden. They spend all night trying to control the fire, and still lose a portion of the East Wing. Helen says nothing, but he knows as well as she does what books and photographs have gone up in smoke.

He has been wondering for weeks now if they will be a target, if the Germans will find out what he’d done in Berlin, what Helen had done here in London, and take action in the name of purity. The Berlin Sanctuary is all but dismantled, and if there are any abnormals left in Germany, they’re either in hiding or waiting to join the resistance. He hasn’t heard from any of his own contacts since he got back to England, and he tries not to worry. He is not usually successful.

+++

There is plenty of room in the shelter Helen fashioned in the sublevels. Unlike their fellow Londoners, who cower in tin sheds half-buried in back gardens or flood into the Underground, the Sanctuary accommodates all their charges, their staff, their families and themselves with room to spare and adequate privacy besides. When the raids run long, though, they still end up in the same bed, trying to find some semblance of rest in the other’s embrace.

“Do you want to go to America?” Helen asks one night when the all clear will not sound.

“No,” James replies, and finds he means it. He had enough saving the world in Germany. All he wants now is to hold on to what he’s got.

“I might go, then,” Helen says. “I should like to do something useful.”

He can’t see her face, but he knows from the tone of her voice that she hates herself a little bit right now. She hates that they cannot take more people in from the bombs, for fear of public exposure. And she hates that she wants nothing more than to get out into the world, when her father charged her above all else with the protection of the house.

“You would do better, I think,” he says. He’s trying not to sound cold about it but he’s terrified that if he cracks he’ll beg her not to leave him alone. “The Network needs you working to maintain it in the face of attack. Plus it would give you the opportunity to make further inroads with the Americans.”

“You’ll take care of everything?” she says. “And the politics, besides?”

“I think I’ll manage,” he says. And then he does crack, a little bit anyway, and pulls her against him more tightly than he has since John left the first time.

Four days later, she’s gone. He can feel her in every corner of the house until three days before Christmas, when a second bomb falls and levels what’s left of the East Wing, the carriage house and a goodly portion of the main house as well. James moves everything into the sublevels until there’s barely room for the people who crowd there when the sirens sound, but the bed he sleeps on seems all too vast.

+++

When the bombs stop falling, it isn’t Helen’s house any more.

+++

fin

Notes: Wow, that got depressing.

Gravity_Not_Included, March 25, 2011

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

shadadukal

And she hates that she wants nothing more than to get out into the world, when her father charged her above all else with the protection of the house.

There is really something there, because yes, that's what Gregory would have wanted. And it's fitting that James ran the UK Sanctuary, as someone with whom Gregory shared a lot.

Not exactly depressing. An illustration of change, in this case cause by terrible events.

Well done!

From:

let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky

Fic: Come The Thunder (Sanctuary)

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