Fic: a cup of kindness yet
Rating: PG-13 - reference to canonical use of a mind-control artifact
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Characters/Pairing: Leena & team.
Warnings: References to canonical death and use of mind-control, non-specific violence
Disclaimer: I'm only playing with the setting, I have no rights to it.
Prompt: #83 on the 100_women chart, "Here"
a cup of kindness yet
Leena’s memories of her mother are vague and ill-defined: a lullaby just below the edge of hearing, fresh bread, and eyes as soft and huge as a cloud-covered sky. There was a photograph in her father’s house, a baby girl nestled between her parents, and Leena had once spent a whole summer curled up beneath Daddy’s desk, trying to burn the lines of her Mommy’s face into her memory. My little mouse, Daddy used to call her; when Leena thinks of her mother now, she thinks she can almost remember Mommy’s arms around her waist, Mommy’s fingers squidging Leena’s little-girl toes. This is not a real memory but the shadow of one. Too many hours staring at a photograph and her mind makes up sensation, a memory out of light falling onto paper, a darkroom miracle.
She doesn’t think about the day her mother died. This isn’t a deliberate choice, or an inability to face those memories, but the day Mommy died means green fire and the man who wasn’t there, and later, after Mrs. Frederic brings her home, means artifact. It does not mean Mommy. Mommy was already gone, long before the thing inside her body died.
When she first comes to the Warehouse, Mrs. Frederic walks her down the stairs, past the terracotta sentinels, and turns left at the shepherd.
“Your mother’s china is in the next aisle,” she says.
“Oh,” Leena says, and returns Mrs. Frederic’s gaze evenly. After a long while, Mrs. Frederic smiles – as though Leena has passed some sort of test – and vanishes. Leena takes the long way back to the office and her hands stay fists the whole way there. Then she makes herself a cup of tea, drinks it slowly, before heading back home and making meatloaf for dinner.
Mommy had been a strict vegetarian. No matter what her therapist would say, meatloaf is not a means of sublimating her grief over her mother’s death and anger at Mrs. Frederic’s insensitivity into a manageable task with passive-aggressive undertones that her emotionally repressed father would have understood and punished her for, had she expressed them in his presence. It’s just meatloaf. People need to eat.
Her elbows do ache after scrubbing all the surfaces in the B&B, though, and that might be indicative of her tendency towards homemaking as a means of working through her inner conflict but the place needed cleaning anyway, so who the hell cares?
Leena’s mother is a name in a case file; Leena’s mother is a report and in incident number, and Leena’s mother is the grieving next of kin. She supposes that she must be in the file, too – only witness, empath, possible artifact interaction – but she never asks to make sure.
Leena is just Leena, now. Nobody asks for anything more; as long as there is food on the table and clean sheets on the bed, nobody asks anything from her at all. She thinks that she might tell them if ever they asked, but as asking would require an almighty effort to remove their heads from their asses or else a major invasion of her privacy, she’s grateful that she doesn’t have to bother.
She’s an adult but when the house is quiet and her head is stuffed with sleep, she feels like her mother’s daughter.
Mrs Frederic never apologizes for anything. Artie and Nikolai do, and then carry on doing exactly what it is they’re sorry for all over again. James doesn’t either.
“Would it matter, if I were sorry? Would it erase whatever I had done?” He scoffs at the idea. “Hardly. We do what we must. You know that.”
What she knows is that James is an asshole, and a very good liar. His aura flickers, all deceit and self-pity, and for a moment Leena wants to smack him upside the head and say that she thinks he’s missing the point. But Leena’s pretty much irrelevant here; James is only talking because he wants to hear these thoughts said out loud and knows that nobody else is stupid enough to agree with them. Some people would follow that thought process through and realize that what they are thinking is therefore probably wrong and stupid. James just figures he needs to talk louder.
Leena likes him for that, though. She’s always had a soft spot for the stubborn ones.
“Some people – like Arthur, and don’t deny it, you’ve seen him – make such a game out of mercy. Wailing, tearing their hair out, begging for forgiveness-“
Artie has done exactly zero of those things in all the years she has known him but, again, she’s irrelevant here, so she just nods as though James might have a point there. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“-And what does it manage to achieve? Nothing. It just transplants their pain over injuring another back into the center of their little universes, so they never have to step outside themselves…”
Leena tunes out. She can pretty much follow this story anyway: he’s frustrated by the world, so he’s going to talk at her and explain why this is frustrating to him, and why all the other straight white guys should carry around their internal burdens of suffering as marks of their superiority and never express it by admitting fault but instead by talking about it when all Leena really wants to do is go check on the casserole in the oven. Her chicken casserole, incidentally, happens to be Artie’s favorite, which is probably not the reason why she’s being treated this lecture in ‘Reasons Why James Should Never Be Asked To Say Sorry, Ever’, but then again, you can never really tell with James.
She makes noises at all the appropriate places. When he’s done with her, he lets her get back to the kitchen – the chicken is dried out, starting to burn, and so she rolls her eyes and shoves some burgers under the grill instead. She’s late putting dinner on the table that night; Nikolai drifts through to help out and creates a salad, garnish and all, while she scrubs the dishes.
Basically, the game that James doesn’t quite understand is that everyone is about as much of a jerk as one another, so he isn’t actually that special for saying that he’s a jerk and is therefore better than people who try to be nice or whatever. This, she figures, must suck for him. Again, though: true of everyone. Not special.
Sometimes it feels like she’s the only one who understands anything at all.
Nikolai dies.
James turns his back on everything they stand for.
Artie stays, and he looks so old when he stares at her.
“You don’t have to stay,” he tells her. “I know the Regents hunt out people with your gifts, but if you wanted to run- There are ways I can keep you hidden from them, if you want.”
Leena just puts on her best ‘Bitch, please’ face - she used to practice it in the mirror, the way Mrs. Frederic looked at their stupidest questions - and says, “I know.”
Out of all of them, Artie’s betrayal hurts the most. And then she gets over it, because he comes to her all furrowed-brow with deep lines in his face and says nothing for a very long time. If she wants any longer for the ‘sorry’ swirling around them both he might just explode, so she smiles at him and says, softer this time, “I know, Artie.”
The thing is, one time Leena tried explaining that it was OK Mommy had died because she wasn’t really Mommy anymore and her father called her a vile little brat who was probably going to hell for speaking that way about her mother, and she still calls him Dad and phones him every other Sunday. Artie hasn’t spoken to his family in years and spends most of his evenings now looking like a sad panda and eating her lemon biscuits. Some people would see a moral there. Leena just thinks that there are too many battles she’s asked to fight and not enough energy to win them all, and also, her biscuits are delicious, thank you very much.
So: Leena gets hurt. She moves on, which is only mostly because she doesn’t really have a choice.
She cooks dinner for the two of them every night. Artie doesn’t always come home, stays at the Warehouse and grabs his later, so some nights she sits alone in her kitchen with too much food on her plate because she isn’t used to cooking for one. It isn’t as lonely as eating with Artie, but those are the saddest meals she’s ever had.
She buys all her bread from the store, these days.
Files to be considered, more people like Leena whom the Regents have tracked since birth, sit on the kitchen table for months before Artie finally consents to reading them. Leena dusts around them each day, always wondering whether she might be brave enough to peep – if she does find out, if there is any indication that the Regents might use an artifact to draw someone in, or as an excuse to get close to them, or anything like that, she doesn’t know what she’ll do.
Well, she does: be hurt and then move on, because there’s only so much time she can devote to feeling sorry for herself before she actually needs to go take out the trash or make the animated swords pipe down.
If it’s true, then sure, it’s not fair – but come on, what is she, five?
Anyway, it turns out she isn’t brave enough after all.
It takes Myka all of about six minutes to make it crystal clear that what she wants out of the Warehouse is:
- A job which is interesting enough to make up for the fact that she now lives in South Dakota,
- A job which is interesting enough to make up for the fact she now lives in Univille,
- A job which will come with all the prestige and recognition to make up for the fact she had to leave an extremely promising career to come work with a bunch of people she finds stupid, and will make it clear that this wasn’t a demotion or any kind of slight against her competence.
When Leena came to the Warehouse, she wanted to get paid and not have the Regents take her away in the night, so she’s not exactly overflowing with sympathy for Agent Bering.
Pete mainly wants cookies. He can stay.
(It isn’t that Myka is completely obnoxious – that is, she is, but if obnoxious were reason enough for Leena to roll her eyes and walk away then she would probably spend a lot less time drinking tea with Artie and trying to engineer a circumstance in which he says “Get off my lawn!” unironically. Pete is also obnoxious and the fact that he’s also sort of cute does not do as much to make up for it as he thinks.
The difference, really, is that Myka thinks she’s better than all of them, and that doesn’t really go away. She’s polite enough, and friendly in an abrasive sort of way, but she doesn’t ever let them forget that she’s The Smart One, the one who reads books instead of comics and gossip magazines. And sometimes, yes, there’s the subtext there – that Leena’s just the girl who cleans their plates and makes their breakfasts, that Leena never went to college and wasn’t valedictorian and doesn’t quote Flaubert over Monopoly. That Myka’s the career woman who saves the day, the hero with the sword and library card, and Leena is the one who scrubs her bathroom sink, so really, who is more important to who, here?
It’s not an attitude she likes to be confronted with at her breakfast table is all Leena’s saying.
Pete doesn’t share it. Sure, he manages to do even less to tidy up than Myka does, but he also joins Leena in front of the TV to binge on shitty action movies and Angel re-runs, and he doesn’t press for details when she tells him that the picture in the front room used to be her mother’s. So that is why Pete continues to get mints on his pillow for a full month after she stops putting them on Myka’s.
If Myka ever asked, which she doesn’t, Leena would probably just apologize for the misunderstanding and say that she thought Myka didn’t eat sugar, which is true.)
Mrs. Frederic asks for Leena’s opinion on their latest addition. They’re sitting at the breakfast table with a basket of homemade pastries between them – Leena’s mother never had the patience for croissants herself, all the fiddling with the pastry and the freezing, but Leena finds the repetition relaxing. It’s about making something, and it’s about making something delicious. Mrs. Frederic seems to agree; she breaks off the corner of one of Leena’s strawberry almond scones, chews it, and then gives her a proper smile.
“Very nice,” she says and Leena tries very hard not to look too pleased. “Well?”
The thing is: people die, a lot, because of the Warehouse. Nikolai was one of them and so was her mother, sort of. Other people don’t die but do stuff which ends with Leena getting hurt, and pretty much everyone else ends up in this category. Pete and Myka are good, but they’re also agents. Good doesn’t last long enough. It always runs out, one way or the other.
But Mrs. Frederic isn’t stupid. She’s been with the Warehouse a long time, and the Caretaker has always been someone a bit not-like an agent, anyway. It isn’t like saying so would be giving her any new information.
“I’m not sure,” Leena says, and then thinks of Artie baking peanut butter cookies and the sound of Pete’s music and Myka brewing an extra cup of coffee for her some mornings. “But I think it might work.”
“Mm. Perhaps a little more sugar, next time.”
Claudia’s arrival is at least 60% disaster, but Leena knows how to handle those. She stays the hell out of the way and cleans up the mess when it’s done. Normally, that involves a dustpan, a mop and several buckets of neutralizer solution – with Claudia, it’s, well, a dustpan, a mop, several buckets of neutralizer solution, a whole lot of arguing and some hot chocolate, and even then it isn’t really settled.
Leena doesn’t mean to fight, but she’s so irritable these days. She feels permanently tired and always a little on edge, dreaming of Bad Things and always waking up to find that she’s the adult who has to take care of those things alone, now.
She does. Obviously.
But it’s so tempting just to get the next plane back to Chicago and curl up in her Daddy’s lap, just for a little while, just until she can get some sleep and get back to normal. Her father’s home is far from here, though, and Leena has things to do here. She has responsibilities, and she can’t just walk away from that.
The hot chocolate begins as a result of her sleeping worries. Claudia is almost always still awake – Leena knows better than to ask, but she knows the contents of Claudia’s folder, she knows just what happened to her and what Claudia chose to do and that scares her more than she cares to admit – and comes through, cautious as a cat, always ready to scratch. Leena pours her an extra mug and leaves it on the side, fully expecting Claudia to take it upstairs. Then she sits down and rests her head on the table.
God, she’s tired.
There’s the sound of the chair next to her being pulled out, a rustle of fabric, and a clink as a second mug is set down.
“Well, hey there, Little Miss Sunshine,” Claudia says, and slurps. “Did someone switch your coffee for Nyquil?”
Leena grins a bit but doesn’t raise her head. “Feels more like the other way ‘round.”
“Ah, hence the pajama party. Nice.”
This is about the time when Leena realizes that her pajamas are covered with baby ducks and then decides that she doesn’t care, because baby ducks are adorable.
“I don’t think two makes a party.”
“Bull- poop,” Claudia amends quickly, as Leena looks up just so she can pull her Mrs. Frederic smile. “Bullpoop. If we tried to make an Applebee’s reservation now, they’d totally ask us how many people are in our party.”
“You make reservations at Applebee’s?”
Claudia is quiet for a while, and then she gives a slow, sleepy smile. It looks about as genuine as the vicious little smirk she has when she’s all wide-awake and hard edges, but it’s maybe a bit softer. Leena isn’t silly enough to think that’s the same thing as it being happier.
“Shut up and drink,” Claudia says, and they do just that.
Claudia settles in and Leena finds that she quite likes the company – it makes her late nights seem a little less morose, if they’re also bonding or at least, trying to find something like common ground. It isn’t as easy as it was with Artie, with Pete, or even with James; it is, though, kind of fun just the way it is.
Unless maybe that’s just Claudia.
Leena finds herself, for the first time, with an email address and a Tumblr and a Facebook. She promptly accepts Claudia’s friend request – “Don’t get mushy about this,” Claudia warns her, “This is just so I can spy on you even more. I don’t believe in other people’s privacy.”
Her dad is also on Facebook. Claudia seems to find this both hilarious and sweet, especially when Leena sends him a friend request immediately.
She’s a whizz at Farmville, even if she doesn’t really see the point, and now she has something to do when she can’t seem to doze off: the lights of her computer monitor, her father’s holiday pictures, proof of her connection to something outside the B&B. More and more, she wakes up only to find that she must have fallen asleep while at the computer. Sometimes her neck aches. Sometimes she has bruises.
But, really, a little sleep is better than none, and Leena thinks that she likes her life like this.
Yeah.
Turns out she’s wrong.
It isn’t that she hasn’t been sleeping well.
It isn’t that she’s been having nightmares.
It has nothing to do with her mother’s death, or her time of the month – which, thanks, Pete, that’s something she wants to talk about with you – or any other explanation which would have made sense.
There is something inside her. James put something inside her, to make her do things, and all the holes in her memory-
Oh god, oh god, I can’t do this-
What did he do to me?
What did he do?
And Leena just…
Well.
She carries on.
The place is even cleaner than it normally is, and she gets even less sleep than she did before James. Artie grieves him, and Leena hates him for it and hates herself for hating him (and hates herself, yes, for grieving too – because that was James but she never, never once thought…)
She calls her dad every night for a week and takes the handset to bed with her. Tucked up beneath the covers, with the sound of Daddy breathing in her ear, it’s almost like she’s safe.
But she isn’t. James made sure of that. She’ll never be safe again, even with the Pearl gone – because he’d managed to do it, he’d managed to violate her and she’d never even guessed, and-
Oh, and Claudia’s angry with her.
Which is sort of reasonable, Leena thinks, because this was somewhere Claudia was starting to feel safe and Leena – no, James, she has to remind herself with a little flinch – took that away from her. And Claudia, for all her ferocity, is still just a kid; Leena can’t really blame her, can she?
The first month, all the bathrooms are pretty much immaculate.
Nobody seems to notice. Myka’s interest in HG Wells is sudden and intense, as though she’s taking Wells’ escape personally. Artie has found a way to make his sad panda face even sadder. Claudia is still hurting, still angry – and Pete? Pete just misses that sort of thing a lot.
He is the one who catches her downstairs with a mug of hot chocolate one night and says nothing, though, just tucks himself around her into a big old bear hug. She sniffles a bit.
“None of it was your fault,” he says. “Which is a thing you should know, what with all the artifacty knowledge you have. And it’s a thing everyone else knows, too.”
“He- he was in my head.” Leena’s a little broken now, a little too tired to tell anything but the truth. “He was in my head and I never knew-“
She should have seen- something. His aura, maybe. Felt the Pearl beneath her skin. Something. Leena might not be an agent but she has a knack for that sort of thing, feeling out the way artifacts slide through the world, and to have had one pushed inside her, influencing her, for so long-
Yeah, when they do catch Wells, Leena might have to shake her hand a bit first. Sneakily, because it’s a bit insensitive when James was their friend – except, yeah, violated her in a way that still makes her go still and catch her breath.
Artifacts can be harmful. Leena’s known this ever since she was four, even if she didn’t know all the words to describe it. Until now, though, that harm has always been something direct, physical: fire, a shriveled old woman, a chopper to chase them to bed. All the other effects – visions, floating, that one time she accidentally grabbed Captain America’s shield and spent three days singing patriotic anthems and denouncing HYDRA and bad manners – were harmless, sometimes even funny.
This one really wasn’t.
She’s dealing. She’s just not dealing well. So if she leans her head against Pete’s shoulder and makes him watch old cartoons until they fall both crash out on the couch, that’s really nobody else’s business.
(And Pete doesn’t say anything after that, but he makes a point of waiting up until she’s going to bed every night until her guilt about keeping him awake jogs her sleeping pattern back to normal.
Which is nice.)
Claudia tries to make her hot chocolate and gets it all wrong – it tastes too much of hot water, almost burned, and Leena drinks it slowly. They don’t talk much.
The problem with having a dad on Facebook, incidentally, is that it means her dad is on Facebook. Everything he writes – whether he’s talking with his friends about football or working on his car or cleaning the garage that Leena knows hasn’t been properly cleaned out in at least twenty years – is about the real world, and in the real world, people don’t have magic jewelry controlling their minds.
Well, they do, but nobody is supposed to know about it. It’s not the kind of thing Leena can mention.
Daddy writes a message on her wall, calling her little mouse and asking whether she wants to come home for Thanksgiving this year. Her aunt Judy likes it.
Myka surprises her. She doesn’t expect anything from Myka, not when she has an author to catch, but when Leena wanders downstairs early one morning, Myka’s already there, flipping through Mommy’s recipe book.
“I didn’t know you could cook.”
Myka scrunches up her nose as though the idea of cooking hurts her on some fundamental level. It probably does; she’s more one of the guys, all boots and fencing lessons, and probably the sort of career feminist who finds traditional displays of femininity a patriarchal construct which further demeans the lives of women and undervalues the contribution women make in the workplace.
(Leena has lived in Univille ever since she left Chicago at eighteen. Tumblr has been eye-opening, and not all in a good way.)
Myka just flips the book back towards Leena, points towards Mommy’s notes. For one awful second, Leena thinks she’s about to be treated to a lecture about the evils of writing inside books but no; Myka just taps her finger over Mommy’s words and says, “This isn’t your handwriting.”
Leena waits to see where she’s going with this. Apparently, it’s nowhere as Myka pushes her chin forward and tries really hard not to look awkward.
“My mother,” she offers, when Myka starts to fold her arms, realizes that could be seen as defensive and immediately tries to push her hands into the pockets of her yoga pants. Pockets which, Leena sees do not actually exist. “It used to be hers.”
And Mommy had adapted the recipes around Daddy’s nut allergy, scribbled comments about what worked well down the side, splashed jams and sauces over half the page numbers. There are purple crayon scribbles all over the index and that’s not a memory either, another imagined one: baby Leena with her Crayola crayons and Mommy next to her, stirring up cakes out of their component parts. Letting Leena lick the spoon.
For some reason, whenever she imagines this, it’s always early morning, sunshine-bright.
“It’s called a palimpsest. A manuscript written over another. They’re much more common in medieval Europe-“
“And don’t use as much chocolate sauce?”
Myka rolls her eyes and then smiles. “You know, I thought that looked more like soy sauce?”
“Remind me never to eat anything you bake.” After a moment, Leena slides the book back towards Myka. “See anything you like?”
“I was just looking,” says Myka, and then takes that as an invitation to start telling Leena about the records from Warehouse Twelve. What Leena learns from this is that their filing system made even less sense than Artie’s, and also that Myka isn’t happy about Wells escaping but is all kinds of delighted to discover one of her literary heroes was secretly a woman and then gets all disappointed as soon as she remembers that Helena Wells is technically a bit on the evil side. She hides her excitement from showing in her face – but yellow sparks, intrigue, excitement, come up in a flurry every time she makes an allusion to the author and then just as soon give way to irritation and self-recrimination.
Basically, Myka needs to let this one go – she can’t catch every bad guy, and Leena has a little bit of sympathy for Helena, the other woman caught up in James’ game. Not enough sympathy to say so, but it’s there.
The next morning, Leena wakes up after a full night’s sleep. She can hear voices from downstairs already: Artie is starting to groan and rub his gut, pink swirls which mean liar liar, and she knows exactly where that’s going to go. Claudia is taking advantage of his feigned illness to plead with him a little more about getting field agent training, it sounds as though Myka is backing her up and – yes, that loud crash probably means Pete is trying to cook for them all.
She pulls herself out of bed and goes to clean up. If Artie’s going through with the surgery again, then he shouldn’t eat or drink anything, and Pete never remembers where the dustpan lives. Claudia can handle herself in an argument but sometimes needs a gentle reminder not to be too harsh, and Myka- well, Myka can look after herself, but Leena still owes her a thank you. Things to be doing, no time to be lying around, and Leena has a grin on her face as she goes.
Later, she thinks, she’ll make bread.
The others are the heroes who go off and save the world and Leena’s just the woman who makes their breakfast and cleans up after them.
The difference is, she knows that’s not an insult. Leave the saving of the world to the agent-types, Leena thinks; it’s up to the ones like her to change it.