![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grav_ityAN: Written for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
femgenficathon. For posterity, this was also the first fic I wrote with GoogleDocs.
Spoilers: Awakenings
Disclaimer: Not mine, donate to S4K.
Rating: Teen
Character/Pairing: Helen Magnus, Kate Freelander
Summary: After "Awakenings", Helen and Kate have a talk about what it means to be the best at what they do.
++
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. - Margaret Mitchell (1900 - 1949), Pulitzer Prize-winning American author.
"You don't seem surprised," Magnus said once Will had drifted out of her office, projecting his disapproval for all to see even though he'd managed not to voice too many of his opinions. He would be back, Kate suspected, and he'd have questions Magnus probably couldn't answer, but at least by then she'd be able to pretend she could.
"You're Helen Magnus," Kate replied. She slumped on the sofa, too tired to sit politely. "I already helped you bring Jack the Ripper back to life, and that was after he sort of tried to kill me. I think that means I don't get to criticize you for revamping Nikola Tesla. He's annoying, but at least he's useful."
"I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear you say it," Magnus said. "But he won't hear it from me."
"Thanks, boss," Kate said. She knew she should go to bed. She really didn't want to stay here if they were going to talk about Druitt and Tesla. It was water under the bridge as far as she was concerned, deals done and paid for, at least where her own personal safety was concerned. But that didn't mean she liked to sit around and tell Magnus that her unilateral decisions were acceptable. Will hadn't even bothered with pretense, and God only knew what Henry would say when he got back. Kate was just tired of it, the push and pull of Magnus's mad science and its terrible fallout, inescapable across three centuries.
She didn't move, though, stayed slumped on the couch even though she didn't know what she was waiting for.
"I'm told you had an adventure of your own while I was gone," Magnus said. She left the folders on her desk and came over to sit across from Kate. Even jetlagged and worn out by fighting vampires in the desert, she still sat perfectly straight, with knees crossed, balanced enough for a tea-cup, though her tea was long drunk and the tray taken back to the kitchen.
It must have been the Big Guy that sold her out, Kate realized. Will was too angry about what had happened to think about anything so close to home as an abnormal smuggling ring, but those kinds of things were as close to the Big Guy's heart as they were to Kate's, albeit for slightly different reasons.
"Just some old friends," Kate said. "I imagine you know how that goes."
She wasn't trying to end the conversation, not really, but she was trying to make it clear that she wasn't really in the mood for Magnus to quibble about her tactics, and if throwing Druitt in her face wasn't the most subtle way of doing it, it was the surest and most effective.
"Oh, I do," Magnus said. "I shot a man I attended Oxford with, after all, for the good of the country and the world, but also because it was convenient to my own ends."
Kate looked up sharply. She hadn't meant to go down that road, not tonight, not ever, actually, because thinking about Worth and how he'd died (or not) tended to make her think things she wasn't supposed to, and she did want to still have her job in the morning.
"I hired Will because I needed a psychiatrist, did you know that?" Magnus said, absently pulling the blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around her shoulders. It was cold in the desert at night, Kate remembered, and it was usually cold on the plane too. "Not just for my patients, though that was the largest part of it. I knew that someday I would need him for myself. It's his job to try to talk me out of doing things like turning my friends into vampires. So if he views tonight as a personal failure, I can't really hold it against him."
"So why did you hire me?" The question had been pulling at her for a while now, even though she was pretty sure she wouldn't like the answer. At first she'd thought her job was to fill a gap, but lately she had been starting to wonder if it might be something else entirely.
"I hired you to kill the things I can't."
And that was the answer Kate had been afraid of. She had her job not in spite of her past, but because of it. She wasn't on some road to redemption, not here. She was a gun and a smuggler still, she just had a better pay check and a place to call home.
"It isn't like that," Magnus said, reading her reaction in her face. "Well, perhaps a bit, but there's more as well."
"Lay it on me," Kate said, because she thought at least it couldn't get worse.
"I've always been terrible at killing things." Magnus said it like it was a character flaw, and even though Kate wasn't sure what was going on, she knew better than to interrupt. "I catch them and cage them and study them, which I'll admit is probably hell for some. But I have never been good at killing them, or even letting them die."
Kate thought of Adam Worth, made immortal underground; of John Druitt, at large in the world and still killing a hundred years on; of Nikola Tesla, once more loose to wreak havoc on science and wine cellars alike.
"Ashley was an excellent hunter," Magnus went on. "John thought she was a killer, but he was wrong. She could be, in self-defence or if something went wrong, but her first instinct was to trap, to catch them for me. We were quite a team."
Having spent quite a bit of time doing her level best to avoid the Sanctuary Network in general and both Magnuses in particular, Kate didn't argue.
"You're different, of course," Magnus said. "And, God, what a team you and Ashley would have made! With the three of us, we probably could have taken over the world."
"I don't doubt it," Kate snorted. "Except I was working for the other guys at the time."
"Only because you thought you didn't have anywhere else to go," Magnus said. "Do you think you're the first to come here in desperation, as a last resort, and purely for self-preservation? Half the creatures inside these walls are just like you. Sanctuary for All."
"Yeah, but they probably didn't traffick in humans before they got here," Kate said. "I trafficked in them."
"And then you stopped," Magnus said. Kate wondered if it really was that simple.
"Do you think that's enough?" she said.
"What was the first thing you did?" Magnus asked.
"I shot Ashley with a rocket launcher," Kate said, saying the words as flatly as she could and stumbling on them anyway. It hadn't exactly been the best job interview. "And then I imprinted on a baby steno trying to steal its parents."
"That's not what I meant," Magnus said. "That was before I accepted you, really. I wasn't sure what to make of you, and I thought you'd run. But you didn't, and my old friend spoke very highly of you afterward. That's when I started paying you."
"I - " Kate did not know what to do with that. The first time she saw the Big Guy, she contemplated his net worth, and he had to know that, yet all it took was one baby steno for him to forgive her. Looking back, he had hit her quite hard on the head after that adventure, and Henry had pointed out that it was a sign of affection.
"The first thing you did," Magnus went on, "was to arrange for the death of a particularly troublesome mobster, whose ventures into the abnormal world were starting to become problematic for me, but who hadn't yet crossed over any line I could punish him for."
"I did that for my brother," Kate said.
"You did," Magnus admitted. "But you saved Steve in the process, not to mention you terrified that gang so badly they haven't made a peep since. You refused to compromise the Sanctuary when it was quite vulnerable. You could have brought me down, with very little effort had you chosen to, but you didn't."
That meant a lot, that acknowledgement of the power she had. Kate was a pawn no longer, it seemed, and Magnus was glad of it, in spite of the danger she might once have posed. It hung there for a moment, hovering unasked between them, and then Kate felt the oncoming flood.
"It was someone I used to run for," she said, looking straight into Magnus's eyes. "He emailed me the details, and I pretended I was going to make the drop. I brought Will, the Big Guy and a tac team with me, but I would have gone in by myself if they hadn't kept up."
"They're getting better at keeping up," Magnus said. "It helps to hold back as many details as possible. That way, Will will follow you just to figure out what you're up to."
"He wasn't there, my contact, but I didn't expect him to be," Kate said. "I met him on Dead Bridge by myself later."
"A bold move," Magnus said.
"I had a gun," Kate said, as though that would have been enough. "And I had you."
"I was being held captive by a Vampire Queen in tomb in East Africa," Magnus pointed out.
"They didn't know that," Kate said. "Well, they knew you were out of town. But I told them I worked for you, for the Sanctuary, and then I threatened them. And then I walked away."
Again, Kate felt that sense of hovering, but this time it was Magnus who stood on the edge.
"Both James and Nikola told me afterward they weren't surprised that it was me who fired on Adam in the end," Magnus said.
Kate waited for the rest. Magnus was not entirely comfortable with confession, at least not her own. Patience would probably pay off.
"But I was," Magnus said. "I was surprised at how easy it had been to pull that trigger, how little it cost me to do it. It wasn't until then that I realized my reputation, all that I had been trying to build, was set on the woman who fired the gun, not the scientist or the scholar or even the doctor, and all of those were harder things to achieve. My reputation was gone, changed, and I never even noticed. But when I finally did, I was free."
"I was free on the bridge," Kate said. "I think."
"We'll meet in the middle, then, shall we?" Magnus offered, her tone deceptively light.
"I'll be your killer and you'll be my conscience?" Kate said. She wasn't sure that was a bargain she wanted to take.
"I was thinking more the other way around," Magnus said.
"How would that even work?" Kate asked, too tired to play verbal chess anymore.
"I have no idea," Magnus admitted. "But Nikola's bound to try for world domination again some day, and we should probably have a plan in place when he does."
"Maybe we should just do it first," Kate suggested. She was only half kidding, but she was pretty sure Magnus was at least half in jest anyway. In any case, it would probably be less stressful in the long run, to make a preemptive strike, particularly if Will was around to take care of the paperwork.
"I'll add it to my list," Magnus said, with a look at her desk that indicated she was itching to see if Will had made any promises in her absence she had no intention of keeping.
Kate heaved herself gracelessly off the sofa and rolled her neck. She should have stretched more after that workout instead of stopping half way through to talk to Will. It was definitely time for bed, in any case, and if she still felt stiff in the morning, she could always go for a run or try to wrestle the popobawa into a cage small enough to prevent it from shapeshifting into anything particularly destructive. But those were thoughts for another day. When she reached the door, she turned. Magnus was already at her desk, sifting through the files again with an abstract look of concentration on her face.
"I'm glad you're back, doc," Kate said. "Things make less sense with you around, but they seem to work out better."
"Keep that in mind the next time one of your old friends comes calling," Magnus said without looking up. "I'll do the same for you with mine."
That was a bargain Kate was more than willing to take.
++
finis
Gravity_Not_Included, June 2011
femgenficathon. For posterity, this was also the first fic I wrote with GoogleDocs.Spoilers: Awakenings
Disclaimer: Not mine, donate to S4K.
Rating: Teen
Character/Pairing: Helen Magnus, Kate Freelander
Summary: After "Awakenings", Helen and Kate have a talk about what it means to be the best at what they do.
++
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. - Margaret Mitchell (1900 - 1949), Pulitzer Prize-winning American author.
"You don't seem surprised," Magnus said once Will had drifted out of her office, projecting his disapproval for all to see even though he'd managed not to voice too many of his opinions. He would be back, Kate suspected, and he'd have questions Magnus probably couldn't answer, but at least by then she'd be able to pretend she could.
"You're Helen Magnus," Kate replied. She slumped on the sofa, too tired to sit politely. "I already helped you bring Jack the Ripper back to life, and that was after he sort of tried to kill me. I think that means I don't get to criticize you for revamping Nikola Tesla. He's annoying, but at least he's useful."
"I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear you say it," Magnus said. "But he won't hear it from me."
"Thanks, boss," Kate said. She knew she should go to bed. She really didn't want to stay here if they were going to talk about Druitt and Tesla. It was water under the bridge as far as she was concerned, deals done and paid for, at least where her own personal safety was concerned. But that didn't mean she liked to sit around and tell Magnus that her unilateral decisions were acceptable. Will hadn't even bothered with pretense, and God only knew what Henry would say when he got back. Kate was just tired of it, the push and pull of Magnus's mad science and its terrible fallout, inescapable across three centuries.
She didn't move, though, stayed slumped on the couch even though she didn't know what she was waiting for.
"I'm told you had an adventure of your own while I was gone," Magnus said. She left the folders on her desk and came over to sit across from Kate. Even jetlagged and worn out by fighting vampires in the desert, she still sat perfectly straight, with knees crossed, balanced enough for a tea-cup, though her tea was long drunk and the tray taken back to the kitchen.
It must have been the Big Guy that sold her out, Kate realized. Will was too angry about what had happened to think about anything so close to home as an abnormal smuggling ring, but those kinds of things were as close to the Big Guy's heart as they were to Kate's, albeit for slightly different reasons.
"Just some old friends," Kate said. "I imagine you know how that goes."
She wasn't trying to end the conversation, not really, but she was trying to make it clear that she wasn't really in the mood for Magnus to quibble about her tactics, and if throwing Druitt in her face wasn't the most subtle way of doing it, it was the surest and most effective.
"Oh, I do," Magnus said. "I shot a man I attended Oxford with, after all, for the good of the country and the world, but also because it was convenient to my own ends."
Kate looked up sharply. She hadn't meant to go down that road, not tonight, not ever, actually, because thinking about Worth and how he'd died (or not) tended to make her think things she wasn't supposed to, and she did want to still have her job in the morning.
"I hired Will because I needed a psychiatrist, did you know that?" Magnus said, absently pulling the blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around her shoulders. It was cold in the desert at night, Kate remembered, and it was usually cold on the plane too. "Not just for my patients, though that was the largest part of it. I knew that someday I would need him for myself. It's his job to try to talk me out of doing things like turning my friends into vampires. So if he views tonight as a personal failure, I can't really hold it against him."
"So why did you hire me?" The question had been pulling at her for a while now, even though she was pretty sure she wouldn't like the answer. At first she'd thought her job was to fill a gap, but lately she had been starting to wonder if it might be something else entirely.
"I hired you to kill the things I can't."
And that was the answer Kate had been afraid of. She had her job not in spite of her past, but because of it. She wasn't on some road to redemption, not here. She was a gun and a smuggler still, she just had a better pay check and a place to call home.
"It isn't like that," Magnus said, reading her reaction in her face. "Well, perhaps a bit, but there's more as well."
"Lay it on me," Kate said, because she thought at least it couldn't get worse.
"I've always been terrible at killing things." Magnus said it like it was a character flaw, and even though Kate wasn't sure what was going on, she knew better than to interrupt. "I catch them and cage them and study them, which I'll admit is probably hell for some. But I have never been good at killing them, or even letting them die."
Kate thought of Adam Worth, made immortal underground; of John Druitt, at large in the world and still killing a hundred years on; of Nikola Tesla, once more loose to wreak havoc on science and wine cellars alike.
"Ashley was an excellent hunter," Magnus went on. "John thought she was a killer, but he was wrong. She could be, in self-defence or if something went wrong, but her first instinct was to trap, to catch them for me. We were quite a team."
Having spent quite a bit of time doing her level best to avoid the Sanctuary Network in general and both Magnuses in particular, Kate didn't argue.
"You're different, of course," Magnus said. "And, God, what a team you and Ashley would have made! With the three of us, we probably could have taken over the world."
"I don't doubt it," Kate snorted. "Except I was working for the other guys at the time."
"Only because you thought you didn't have anywhere else to go," Magnus said. "Do you think you're the first to come here in desperation, as a last resort, and purely for self-preservation? Half the creatures inside these walls are just like you. Sanctuary for All."
"Yeah, but they probably didn't traffick in humans before they got here," Kate said. "I trafficked in them."
"And then you stopped," Magnus said. Kate wondered if it really was that simple.
"Do you think that's enough?" she said.
"What was the first thing you did?" Magnus asked.
"I shot Ashley with a rocket launcher," Kate said, saying the words as flatly as she could and stumbling on them anyway. It hadn't exactly been the best job interview. "And then I imprinted on a baby steno trying to steal its parents."
"That's not what I meant," Magnus said. "That was before I accepted you, really. I wasn't sure what to make of you, and I thought you'd run. But you didn't, and my old friend spoke very highly of you afterward. That's when I started paying you."
"I - " Kate did not know what to do with that. The first time she saw the Big Guy, she contemplated his net worth, and he had to know that, yet all it took was one baby steno for him to forgive her. Looking back, he had hit her quite hard on the head after that adventure, and Henry had pointed out that it was a sign of affection.
"The first thing you did," Magnus went on, "was to arrange for the death of a particularly troublesome mobster, whose ventures into the abnormal world were starting to become problematic for me, but who hadn't yet crossed over any line I could punish him for."
"I did that for my brother," Kate said.
"You did," Magnus admitted. "But you saved Steve in the process, not to mention you terrified that gang so badly they haven't made a peep since. You refused to compromise the Sanctuary when it was quite vulnerable. You could have brought me down, with very little effort had you chosen to, but you didn't."
That meant a lot, that acknowledgement of the power she had. Kate was a pawn no longer, it seemed, and Magnus was glad of it, in spite of the danger she might once have posed. It hung there for a moment, hovering unasked between them, and then Kate felt the oncoming flood.
"It was someone I used to run for," she said, looking straight into Magnus's eyes. "He emailed me the details, and I pretended I was going to make the drop. I brought Will, the Big Guy and a tac team with me, but I would have gone in by myself if they hadn't kept up."
"They're getting better at keeping up," Magnus said. "It helps to hold back as many details as possible. That way, Will will follow you just to figure out what you're up to."
"He wasn't there, my contact, but I didn't expect him to be," Kate said. "I met him on Dead Bridge by myself later."
"A bold move," Magnus said.
"I had a gun," Kate said, as though that would have been enough. "And I had you."
"I was being held captive by a Vampire Queen in tomb in East Africa," Magnus pointed out.
"They didn't know that," Kate said. "Well, they knew you were out of town. But I told them I worked for you, for the Sanctuary, and then I threatened them. And then I walked away."
Again, Kate felt that sense of hovering, but this time it was Magnus who stood on the edge.
"Both James and Nikola told me afterward they weren't surprised that it was me who fired on Adam in the end," Magnus said.
Kate waited for the rest. Magnus was not entirely comfortable with confession, at least not her own. Patience would probably pay off.
"But I was," Magnus said. "I was surprised at how easy it had been to pull that trigger, how little it cost me to do it. It wasn't until then that I realized my reputation, all that I had been trying to build, was set on the woman who fired the gun, not the scientist or the scholar or even the doctor, and all of those were harder things to achieve. My reputation was gone, changed, and I never even noticed. But when I finally did, I was free."
"I was free on the bridge," Kate said. "I think."
"We'll meet in the middle, then, shall we?" Magnus offered, her tone deceptively light.
"I'll be your killer and you'll be my conscience?" Kate said. She wasn't sure that was a bargain she wanted to take.
"I was thinking more the other way around," Magnus said.
"How would that even work?" Kate asked, too tired to play verbal chess anymore.
"I have no idea," Magnus admitted. "But Nikola's bound to try for world domination again some day, and we should probably have a plan in place when he does."
"Maybe we should just do it first," Kate suggested. She was only half kidding, but she was pretty sure Magnus was at least half in jest anyway. In any case, it would probably be less stressful in the long run, to make a preemptive strike, particularly if Will was around to take care of the paperwork.
"I'll add it to my list," Magnus said, with a look at her desk that indicated she was itching to see if Will had made any promises in her absence she had no intention of keeping.
Kate heaved herself gracelessly off the sofa and rolled her neck. She should have stretched more after that workout instead of stopping half way through to talk to Will. It was definitely time for bed, in any case, and if she still felt stiff in the morning, she could always go for a run or try to wrestle the popobawa into a cage small enough to prevent it from shapeshifting into anything particularly destructive. But those were thoughts for another day. When she reached the door, she turned. Magnus was already at her desk, sifting through the files again with an abstract look of concentration on her face.
"I'm glad you're back, doc," Kate said. "Things make less sense with you around, but they seem to work out better."
"Keep that in mind the next time one of your old friends comes calling," Magnus said without looking up. "I'll do the same for you with mine."
That was a bargain Kate was more than willing to take.
++
finis
Gravity_Not_Included, June 2011
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 08:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 10:51 pm (UTC)I love it - the blurred lines, the similarities and differences, the boundaries, the histories - really nicely done!
Oh, and this:
"But Nikola's bound to try for world domination again some day, and we should probably have a plan in place when he does."
Oh yeah, I'd love to read this one sometime. Nikola vs Helen&Kate.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-18 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 06:31 pm (UTC)And this is awesome. I love their relationship--so respectful of each other, and so guarded at the same time. Love!
no subject
Date: 2011-08-24 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-04 11:10 pm (UTC)And ...ooh. You aren't the person who wrote HG/Helen Magnus/Druit fic are you? Because if that's you, your'e my freaking hero and I need to go find that
no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 03:13 pm (UTC)I really, really with that Kate and Helen got more awesome time on screen together. I love their scene at the end of "Hero", and I think a bottle episode for the two of them would not go amiss. Glad you liked!