Artie: After Leena

[moonshadows]

The instant he stepped into the bed and breakfast, Artie knew it was a mistake. He’d come because he’d promised Pete and Myka that he would, but the building which had been so full of her energy for so long…it hurt, being there, feeling as if Leena would walk through the doorway and smile at him any moment now, knowing she never would because he…

Artie sat in one of the chairs in the entryway, bag clutched on his lap like a lifeline, trying not to cry. After three decades of loss, this combined with the damage from the astrolabe…he couldn’t do it. He’d fled here initially after waking up, trying to soothe himself by being where she was strongest, trying to lose himself in his memories again, but it hadn’t worked. The tiny corner of the world which had been a sunny refuge from the darkness inside himself would never be warm again. He should leave, before any of them realized he was here.

Naturally, that was the moment that Myka came in the front door juggling three 2-liter bottles of soda and Pete followed bearing a small stack of pizzas. She saw him first and smiled tentatively as she held the door for her partner, who stopped in his tracks and somehow managed to radiate relief.

“We forgot none of us could cook,” Pete said carelessly, hefting the pizzas.

Myka chin-gestured Pete towards the dining room. “It’s good to see you,” she said quietly before following.

Myka, being hauled away by four officers, mouthing at them to go as she was pushed into a police car. Myka, trying not to show her pain as the words he knew would hurt most poured out of his mouth. Myka, as the gun in his hand pointed at her partner’s head.

The tiny shard of welcome shriveled, leaving him feeling like a wound somewhere had opened up. Artie stood, reaching for the door, when voices called out from the dining room. Then footsteps, and then Claudia was standing there uncertainly, looking at him with wounded hope, and he remembered her pushing him out the door and into the waking world. Her, plunging the dagger into his chest while the orchid’s blossom fell to the floor. Her, crawling into the narrow tunnel that would be her tomb, muttering ‘silly old bear’. Her, watching him fiddle conspicuously with the Warehouse’s systems and failing to realize that the enemy was already inside.

Something dark and broken shifted. Leena was dead by his hand, but he didn’t carry responsibility for that alone. Claudia, and Pete, and Myka, and even Steve to a lesser extent – all of them shared the guilt for not seeing that something was wrong and stopping him.

Anger that normally would be kept under tight rein surged within him, freed by the damage the astrolabe had left him with, and he was helpless to control it. Before he did anything else to regret, he was outside with the door rattling in its frame behind him. Quickly, he hurried back to his car before any of the others could come and try to talk to him, but only make him angrier at them for enabling Leena’s murder.

 

The Warehouse was quiet and somehow welcoming, like being hugged by something insubstantial, and he felt the anger being soothed away. Here, he was forgiven. Here, he was absolved from all blame. His raw and bleeding psyche was swaddled in cool silk, making him sigh with relief. Later, he would be hungry and he would take a slice or three from the original Original Ray’s pizza when no one would be around for him to kneecap if he couldn’t control the downside. Or perhaps he would find that toasting fork and the painting of the banquet. But for now, Artie climbed the stairs to his room and sat at Glucky. This was effectively his long-delayed honeymoon with the Warehouse, and he serenaded her with all the things Leena had loved to hear him play. Maybe her spirit still lingered here; if that was the case, then surely it hovered behind him, listening, smiling, ready to vanish the moment he turned around.

He didn’t turn around. Just in case.

 

 

He’d forgotten what it was to be at the whims of his emotions, just like everyone else. It was a horrible feeling, like incontinence of the heart, and he spent as little time as possible around the others and especially in the B&B, although accosting them with pings at breakfast and then storming off was a good way to keep them from prolonging the social contact. When they returned, he was brusque to the point of rudeness, often leaving the room to deal with the artifact they’d brought back and losing them in the stacks when they tried to follow. The ability to slip between her shelves came in handy there, a gift bestowed by the apple and one he’d spent most of an afternoon learning how to control. If he returned to his office and found Myka, or Claudia, or Steve waiting to ambush him with conversation, he ignored them and went to his room to play loudly until they left. Pete never accosted him that way, however. More than likely that his vibes were telling him more than he was saying anywhere Artie could hear.

The journal he was keeping for Vanessa filled up rapidly, a concise record of every time he failed to control his emotions and each action or impulse that led to the feeling of broken bones in his intangible hands. When he wasn’t attending to his duties, he was playing either on Glucky or on his keyboard, performing the exercises he’d worked out over the years to put himself to emotional rights.

It was as effective as building a castle with water balloons.

Saturday dawned clear and beautiful, the sort of day he would normally spend in the sunroom or on the patio at Leena's. Artie left the Warehouse early and had breakfast in Univille, did a little shopping at the tiny grocery store, and descended like a thundercloud in human form upon the lazy morning his agents were enjoying. He brandished case files - nothing urgent or dangerous, at least so far - and shooed them out, waiting until they were gone before standing in the kitchen and bleeding despair all over the tiled floor. Leena was gone.

He sat on the patio in the sun, antiquated laptop open, doing his job as he had done so often in the past. The difference this time was that the lemonade and cookies were store-bought. He tried not to think about it, failed, entered it in the journal. Vanessa would arrive tonight, which cheered him. Luckily, the artifact he planned to use was one he'd rehabilitated more than a decade ago and broken hands or not, he would be able to use it to make the crepes he'd promised.

Lunch was a sandwich scavenged from the kitchen while he pretended Leena was out doing her shopping. Three leftover biscuits in a sandwich bag tucked into the back of the meat drawer caught his attention and he was halfway through the last one before he remembered there would never be any more, and unshed tears closed his throat. He crumbled the rest for the birds.

Tracking his agents (Claudia wasn't the only one who could do that, and he was through pretending for her benefit that he was not as good with technology as he actually was) showed them planning to return as a group. That fit with his plans, and he deliberately positioned himself in the living room to meet them.

"Artie!" exclaimed Myka as they piled in, silvery bags in hand.

Whatever was going to follow that, he neither knew nor cared and he verbally trampled her. "Good, you're all here. I won't have to say this twice." They flinched away from his cold tone, and guilt spiked at the realization that he sounded like he had when the astrolabe was possessing him. Then the guilt curdled into anger as it flowed through broken pathways. "The Warehouse is off-limits until Monday morning, and I will be out of contact until that same time. Let me be clear," he growled, doing his best to impress the severity on them. "I am not to be contacted for any reason. It is worth your life to ignore this warning. I don't care if Leena rises from the dead, the Regents are roasting Mrs. Frederic alive, or Walter Sykes has returned with an army of zombies armed with artifact weapons, I AM NOT AVAILABLE. Is that understood?"

Vibrating with rage, he glared them all down until each one murmured agreement and dropped their eyes. Then he stalked out, slamming the door behind him.

The rest of the afternoon was spent straightening the office, the loft, and the bedroom. The groceries he'd purchased went into the small fridge and the cupboard, and then with nothing else to do, he showered and changed. When the umbilicus door hissed open, he stood and leaned over the loft railing to confirm it was Vanessa. The prickling irritation he'd been documenting evaporated in the rush of love seeing her brought, and he scribbled as much as he hurried down the stairs to hug her.

"Are you happy to see me, or the food?" she joked when the hug went on longer than a moment or two.

Artie chuckled briefly as he let go. "Both. It's been a long week."

Vanessa set the bag of take-out on the small table and kissed him. "Have you been..." She trailed off as she noticed the half-filled notebook still in one hand. "That's the journal I asked you to keep?" At his nod, her lips pressed into a grim line. "It has been a long week. Well, have a seat and we'll talk over dinner." Almost shyly, she smiled at him. "Business before pleasure, right?"

 

"I had no idea you were so structured," she said in a tone of awe and a little disbelief as she flipped through page after page of notations. "But as you said, artifacts are machines controlled by emotion, and you have survived an awfully long time at this job. I've always been a little amazed at how well you've held up, but I never suspected this level of effort was involved."

"And now I can't even look at Claudia without being furious with her for not stopping me," sighed Artie. "Everything's just...broken. And the techniques I use to fix things aren't working because it's too broken. Whatever I feel is just...magnified."

Vanessa reached the last entry, squinted to detangle the messier writing, and blushed slightly. "And that includes positive emotions, I see."

"I never really built structures to control those," Artie said softly. "There weren't enough of them to be a danger. And this week...seeing you come in is the only thing that's really made me happy."

Putting the journal down, she stood and pulled Artie gently to his feet. "Let's change that," she said, and kissed him.

Hope and joy swirled almost painfully around the twin surges of love and, yes, arousal. When her lips retreated, he found himself leaning forward to follow. "If you're sure," he murmured unsteadily.

Vanessa laughed in quiet delight. "Doctor's orders," she said firmly. "I expect you to be an obedient patient tonight. I'm prescribing a treatment of this-" she fished a DVD out of her overnight bag. "Followed by two of these," she continued, flipping it over and hiding her grin at his flustered reaction to the box of condoms taped lightly to the back, "and a good night's sleep."

"No arguments here," he protested, feeling excitement and anticipation heat his blood as she picked up her bag and began leading him to the stairs. "Just one thing..." he dashed to his desk and picked up the Farnsworth.

Vanessa shot him an irritated look. "Artie!"

"It's not what you think," he protested, following her up. "It's just in case someone doesn't realize I meant it when I said I was unavailable until Monday morning. Better to head things off with this than to ignore it and have them barge in."

Her dry chuckle drifted down around him. "Better for us, or for them?"

Artie thought of the original Original Ray's pizza, whispering that he should totally smash someone's knees in. "Them," he answered fervently.

He'd been a little nervous, at first, doing what they were doing inside the Warehouse. But his architectural spouse seemed happy with him having a human mistress. The sense of silk swaddling his raw psyche went from cool to delightfully warm, and even Vanessa commented that his room felt almost personally welcoming. He made sure to open the Farnsworth and position it where he could reach it easily without either of them being visible to the other side, not trusting that his warnings would have convinced everyone to leave him alone.

Sure enough, at a point where neither of them wanted to be interrupted, the Farnsworth buzzed. Black fury boiled up and without breaking rhythm, he smacked the device on. "If this isn’t a life-threatening emergency," he growled, not even looking at the screen, "it will be when I'm done with you."

Vanessa, who had been enjoying what they were doing, laughed. "Artie!" she chided, more amused that he was still going than unhappy at the interruption.

The connection closed.

“I told them not to interrupt me,” he said, unrepentant and grimly satisfied. Those sensations faded under other, more physical sensations, and with a small corner of his mind he wondered if this was so good because his emotional barriers had been shattered, or if it was Vanessa he was doing it with. Then he decided he didn’t care.

“Well,” she said while they were cuddling afterward, “you certainly have good stamina and a healthy heart. “And now that I’ve got you undressed and lying down, maybe you’ll hold still for once when I give you the rest of your physical.”

“I thought I just gave you my physical,” he joked, but she pulled away to fish a stethoscope out of her overnight bag. “Oh, you were being serious. Okay, just this once.” His smile faded from fond to teasing as he suffered her listening to various parts of his body, and he only suffered a ticklish fit once. The absurdity of a post-coital examination kept him too amused for his good mood to fracture, and when she reached the male portion of the exam, she got results that probably could have been predicted.

She sat back on her heels, stethoscope tossed in the direction of her bag, and gave him a look of incredulity somewhat at odds with her unclothed state. Then she sighed and smiled. “I did say take two, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he confirmed, not the feeling slightest bit of shame for having recovered so quickly. It had been a very long week, and this had been – no pun intended – a long time coming.

“I would be setting a bad example if I disregarded doctor’s orders,” she deadpanned. “Toss me one?”

Lazily, he tore one from the strip and flung it in her direction, not bothering to keep his appreciation quiet as she took a turn putting it on. Then she did something completely unexpected and began an oral examination. The tiny fragment of consciousness not focused on the sensation of her tongue gloated that Hugo wasn’t experiencing this, then hoped he hadn’t been the one she’d honed those skills on. Then he decided it didn’t matter, and that he would be magnanimous and not rub it in that she’d chosen him and he was still virile enough to enjoy being the recipient. Then he stopped thinking for a while.

 

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning,” the more serious one of the two said thoughtfully, noose around his neck, “where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.”

“Til then,” answered The Player.

Artie smiled in satisfaction as the last lines were uttered, Vanessa snuggled comfortably against him. When the credits rolled, she hit the power button and braced herself minutely.

“Go ahead and ask,” he said, cheek pressed against her hair.

She hesitated before asking quietly, “Did you use an artifact?”

“No, it used me. For seven months.” Funny, that he should feel at peace with that lingering effect. “The Rod of Dionysus. It makes the male holder the embodiment of the god, perpetually drunk yet still able to perform flawlessly. It’s also a bifurcated artifact, and by the time James brought me the Cup to drink from, it had…carved its shape into my psyche. The slightest amount of alcohol will get me roaring drunk. I didn’t realize until tonight that the slightest amount of female attention will…”

Vanessa chuckled. “I think we know what it does.” They cuddled in comfortable silence for a few minutes before she said, “I’m meeting Adwin Kosan tomorrow afternoon as your doctor to discuss your condition. There will be a formal hearing on Wednesday, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

He licked his lips, trying to not let foreboding run rampant. “How is my condition?”

“Physically, you’re fine.” She hesitated before saying, “I’m recommending a psychotherapist. The things you’re suffering as an aftereffect of the astrolabe are well outside the range of what I’m qualified to deal with, either personally or professionally, and that’s not taking into account the ‘broken bones’ aspect.”

“I’ll keep writing in the journal,” he said quietly. “I’ll also prepare a file on myself. Yes, I know I’m being well-behaved. Claudia may have been the one to keep me from dying, but you’re the reason I’m still alive. You and…” The hand not on her waist gestured at the walls. “But she’s not as eloquent as you are, so you’re the boss because I still don’t trust my own judgment.” After a moment, he chuckled with dry resignation. “And to be honest, I probably could have used a psychotherapist about thirty years ago.”

“Well, I’m proud of you anyway,” Vanessa murmured. “I’m also falling asleep. Remember, you owe me a very nice breakfast.”

Artie smiled as he kissed her temple. “I’m looking forward to it.”

 

 

“Thank you, Agent Lattimer, but we’d already come to the same conclusion.”

That was it? No…discussion, no conditions, no…anything? He was too important to be replaced, no matter what he’d done? Against his will – not that what he wanted had had much of an impact on what he did the last two weeks – Artie’s head came up and he muttered, “You’ve what?”

“We see no need for punishment at this juncture,” Mr. Kosan affirmed, and the Regents on both sides nodded and murmured agreement.

“You can’t be serious,” he said in a low voice, anger simmering beneath his skin, as the Regent on the far right stood to leave.

The head of the Regents looked at him in compassion that turned his stomach, brought memories of things he’d be using Stalin’s sleep mask to avoid later. “Leena was a valued member of the team. And a friend.”

That’s why-! Artie gritted his teeth, keeping himself from protesting through physical restraint.

“But she knew the risks,” Mr. Kosan continued, impersonal, like it was some stranger they were discussing and not the girl Artie had watched grow into a woman, who had- “and accepted them.”

The risks of being around artifacts already snagged and bagged, the risks of getting close to agents who would likely die within a few years, not the risks of someone who was supposed to be safe going around hallucinating with a gun!

Mr. Keeler laid a manila envelope in front of him. “This is her video signature statement. We thought seeing it might give you some…closure.” He walked away while Artie went from acknowledging he’d said ‘closure’ instead of ‘comfort’ to struggling to not yell that he’d spent hours with Leena poring over books, searching for an artifact that would stop the bomb, how could he be so calm about this? But no, that day had been erased, and Mr. Keeler had never done more than nod at Leena in passing.

He was still reeling from that when Adwin Kosan continued, “Her death was a tragic, yet…unavoidable casualty of our ongoing mission.”

No! It was avoidable! Artie opened his mouth to shout that, but never got a chance because Mr. Kosan’s next words derailed him completely.

“We’re reinstating you as soon as possible.”

“I killed her!” he accused the room in general, the only coherent protest that formed from the maelstrom of fragmented thoughts and emotions at the realization that for everything he’d done, he was still being entrusted with a position of great power and responsibility without even thinking about if he was stable enough to be trusted in it.

“Did you?” Mr. Kosan countered coolly, leaning forward to answer that unspoken challenge. “Did Arthur Nielsen kill Leena?” He was invoking the fact that he had not, in fact, been in control of his own body when he happened. Artie leaned back slightly, the only admission of the point. “Would you have willingly taken her life – any life – if not under the thrall of the astrolabe?”

So, he understood Artie well enough to know that he wouldn’t kill. But then again, saving H. G.’s life would have been more than enough demonstration there. So, he understood…but he wasn’t thinking about the repercussions of having remembered that act. “No,” he said quietly. “But it doesn’t change the fact that…she died by my hand.”

“And you will have to live with that,” was Adwin Kosan’s reply, genuine sympathy bleeding from his eyes. “I fear that sentence is far more severe than any this tribunal could mete out.”

That was it, then. Despite everything he knew, despite anything Vanessa had told him, Adwin Kosan was throwing him to the metaphoric wolves. An evil that will live with you the rest of your days, he’d been told, but he was already living with this evil, had been living with it since he’d changed his name and left his family behind. There would be no help from this quarter; either the Regents did not know how badly he’d been damaged or they didn’t care. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had no one to rely on but himself, the same as the last thirty-some years. Vanessa couldn’t help him past being there; she’d said as much over the weekend. He was alone. There would be no help from anyone else. Either he found a way to put himself back together, or the Warehouse would have to suffer a shattered husband for the rest of eternity. Maybe he would live like a vagabond in her far corners, a rumor to be spread by agents in decades yet to come, their very own urban legend: the Jew who went crazy and killed the innkeeper and then ran off into the stacks and hasn’t been seen since.

Vaguely, he was aware that the Regents had left and he was being herded gently, cautiously, into Pete’s overgrown car. It wasn’t hard to keep himself focused inwards and withdrawn for the ride back; no one seemed to want to break the silence. Unfortunately, that blessed silence ended the instant the umbilicus door clattered shut and locked behind them.

“Artie, maybe we should talk about what happened back there.”

Myka. Of course it was. But she hadn’t spoken up to point out that he hadn’t been himself the last week, that maybe he needed help working through his grief. “No, we probably shouldn’t,” he said almost before she’d stopped speaking.

Without another word, he left for his room. A nice, icy shower followed by hours of piano in a bathrobe sounded good and numbing. Maybe he could freeze everything enough to start rebuilding the walls inside his mind.

 

There was a ping from Oregon. He left the relevant printouts on his desk and took Leena’s handwritten list of Artifact Appeasement chores from the drawer. There was no way he’d be able to do any actual rehabilitation in his condition, but these were tasks that he’d long since delegated to her because they didn’t require his gifts. It would be a good place to start getting a thorough understanding of exactly how badly he was broken, and more importantly, it would keep him away from and mostly unfindable by his agents for the better part of the day.

The Segway had been in the Warehouse for close to a decade, tucked into a stall next to Edison’s Hand Car, quietly absorbing ambient energy until such time as the Warehouse was accustomed enough to it that it would work properly. As he stepped off the metal staircase, list in hand, he felt a frisson of delighted anticipation sweep through him and realized that day had finally come. It took an hour or two to become proficient with steering the thing, but once he had gotten the knack, he found it…soothing to glide along the shelves.

The artifacts to be appeased were approaching irritable at the worst, and each of them behaved perfectly as he performed their appeasements. No intangible grinding of metaphoric broken bones, no disruptions, nothing but him and the artifacts and the one entity who loved him unconditionally. He’d just moved into the second half of the list and was feeling out the flow of energy in the tanto sword when suddenly, Myka and Steve were yelling at him. Alarm flowed through him, pooled in the tip which dipped and bisected a lit display screen rather neatly. He jumped, avoiding the falling halves, and felt the sword’s satisfaction at a clean slice as he looked up to see what the emergency was, but there wasn’t anything. Just two agents in casual clothes radiating concern.

“What is wrong with you?” The words billowed out of him on clouds of adrenaline.

“Us?” Steve countered in incredulity bordering on affront. “You! With the…the, the blade…” He mimed aiming an invisible sword at his own bowels. “No?”

“No what?” Right, suicide. Well, even if that weren’t an option, that wasn’t the artifact he would have chosen, not by a long shot. “I was redistributing its energy weight, it has to be done every ninety days-” Artie broke off as he realized both that the weight was balanced again, and that Myka was with Steve. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were…on a ping with Pete in Oregon…?”

That was an awful lot that just came out of his mouth quickly and smoothly. He was going to have to watch what he was thinking and maybe…not say it.

“I sent Claudia with Pete,” she clarified boldly.

Irritation flooded him at having his orders challenged. “You sent?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Since when do you-” No, no, brain-to mouth filter, shut it down. “You know what? It’s fine. It’s fine with me.” Shut it down. Keep it silent. Shut it down. “Whatever.”

“No!” Myka protested as he turned to re-shelve the blade. “Artie! Yell at me, please!”

So she realized he was pulling back. Good for her. “I said it was fine.”

“No, I should have consulted you, I should have…”

“Myka?” She looked at him, uncertain and concerned, two things that weren’t helping his mental state. “Stop,” he commanded, and for a wonder, she did.

“What’s this?” Steve had picked the list up from the Segway. Great.

“That’s nothing. Give it- give- give that to me.”

Naturally, he just gave Artie the I know you’re lying look and passed it to Myka. Now he was going to have to give an explanation and they were going to try to help.

Myka murmured, “What is this?” and read the title. “Leena’s list?”

He sighed. “Yes. It’s, uh, things that…” His mouth shied away from her name. “She…did to keep certain artifacts…in balance. Somebody…” She let him snatch the paper from her. “Somebody has to keep doing it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Just leave it. Leave me alone.” Filter still not working. Oh, goody.

“Artie,” Steve piped up. “Let…us help you.”

“Yeah,” chimed Myka.

And he’d been doing so good at being stable today. He had enough time to sigh in one corner of his mind as the irritation boiled up and then he heard himself say, “Help…me? I’ve been doing this job alone for thirty-five years, thank you very much.” At least he hadn’t said the other thing he’d been thinking, which was ‘If you wanted to help me then you should have stopped me or at least spoken up at my trial.’

“You know what?” snapped Myka. “Fine! Fine, Artie. You just…go do everything by yourself and we’ll just follow you around and watch you.”

“Fine. Good luck with that,” he snapped darkly back, balancing on the Segway and weaving past them. “Clean up that mess you made!” he tossed over his shoulder as he zipped into the stacks again.

 

Artie stood just outside the spiral, porthole from the airship Norge held in both hands, trying to focus and center and pull his emotions in so that the spiral wouldn’t read him. They slipped between his mental fingers like fish, flowed and darted and got roiled up by irritation at his inability to keep them in check. The realization that the tanto had overpowered him so completely that he hadn’t even noticed at the time didn’t help at all. He had no idea how long he’d been standing there before footsteps sounded quietly against the polished floor, making him jump.

“I’ve never been in here before,” Steve said in quiet awe.

He sighed loudly as irritation that he’d been found scattered the emotion-fish, wondered how they’d managed it, then realized that Myka with her photographic memory would have been able to deduce that he’d go to the next item on the list.

“Artie,” she asked just as softly as Steve had, “What is this?”

“It’s where she w…” His voice faded as pain blossomed, and he focused on it, cutting himself with her memory to drive out all other thoughts. “It’s where Leena worked.” Deep breath. Nothing but pain, just one fish to wrestle into stillness.

“It’s very peaceful,” offered Myka tentatively.

“Yes.” Mindful of where he was putting his feet, he stepped into the spiral. “It is.” The energy of the spiral reached out to him, smooth and cool.

Steve took another shot at getting him to talk. “What is this…circle?”

Right, because calling it a spiral would reveal that they’d found him by the entry on the list. Cool and smooth. He clung to that as he said, “It’s a feng shui spiral that originated in Warehouse Six. It…reads our more difficult artifacts, determines the overpowering emotion behind their creation.”

“So we can shelve them properly!” Myka sounded delighted by that revelation.

Artie prepared to sit on the stool, all his little emotion-fish deep beneath the surface of his mind-lake. “Yes. It’s how Leena interpreted an artifact’s energy.” Steve asked about the porthole. Artie let Myka do the talking, wishing they would both go away and let him do his job in peace, until Myka deliberately pulled him back into the conversation. “Yes,” he sighed, “it’s been in the Ovoid Quarantine ever since. It’s time we gave it a home.”

Before they could open their mouths again, he sat and tried not to think. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate them recognizing that a lack of wordy, rambling explanations meant something was wrong, but he did wish they’d realized something was wrong before…it was too late. The shimmering energy swirled around him, testing, tasting, and stopped. The other two came over to peer at the shining symbols with him.

“I think you should buy a vowel,” quipped Steve.

Nope, he was done with this. “I would imagine…?”

“It means great sorrow,” Myka supplied helpfully.

“Thank you…” Not that he couldn’t have figured it out, but it had been several years since he’d had to use the spiral and with how jumbled his mind was at the moment it was easier to ask than to try to dig up the memory of their meanings. It only took a few tries to find the correct page in the book. “Alright. Aisle…Toledo, eighty-one-K.” He turned to the still-quiet agents. “Satisfied I’m not going to beat myself to death with this porthole?” No answer. “Fine. Goodbye now.”

As soon as he was away from them and the spiral, the irritation faded somewhat. Shelving the porthole didn’t take long, and then it was just him and the Warehouse and the fleeting impression of synchronized ice skating as he returned to the office.

 

“Well, maybe there’s something wrong with the spiral,” Steve countered.

Great. That’s just what he needed. Without bothering to comment, he began walking back towards the spiral, not caring in the slightest if they followed or not.

 

“That’s…a different symbol. Again.”

Myka stepped forward to translate. “It…means…misplaced anger.”

“Five readings, five different results.” That didn’t make any sense; he wasn’t feeling anything like that from the artifact. “There’s something wrong with the spiral,” he said, shaking his head at the impossibility of troubleshooting something as massive as that while as broken as he was.

“Artie, this doesn’t make any sense,” Myka protested. “The airship Norge was the first to cross the North Pole. Anger, sorrow…those emotions have no connection to that at all.”

Well, at least they agreed. “I’m gonna put this back in the Ovoid,” he said, mentally throwing his hands up in defeat. “Let it be a problem for Warehouse Fourteen.” Which reminded him, he really ought to learn Chinese before that happened.

Myka called his name as he passed them. “What if it isn’t the spiral?”

He turned back to them.

“That’s not working,” she continued. “What if it’s…” One hand gestured to him while Steve carefully kept his eyes down. “You know…perhaps…” She looked to Steve for support and apparently got it. “…the person who’s using the… spiral. Maybe.”

Great, they were both doing the glance-at-and-away thing. He would feel more self-conscious if her words hadn’t just sunk in. The person using the spiral. It was him, it had been reading him, he was too broken to keep his emotions tame for ten fucking seconds to let the spiral read the artifact. That hadn’t happened in…in…

“I mean, look at this place. It’s so…serene. M-Maybe…maybe the spiral worked for- for Leena because she was so…calm and centered.”

“That makes sense,” Steve added. “It’s the only way it could get an accurate reading.”

So good of them to tell him how the spiral that he’d been using for two decades worked. “But the spiral…read me.” A whisper of encouragement from the Warehouse slid into his brain, loosened his tongue. “Anger. Sorrow. Fear.” The filter on his mouth was gone again, and he half-whimpered, “How the hell am I supposed to do this?”

“With us,” Myka said, and he realized that all hope was not lost. “Artie…you don’t have to do this by yourself. We can figure all of this out, everything on Leena’s list. We’ll…we’ll do it together. All of us.”

Oh, and she’d gotten so close to mentioning the real problem. While he was sighing in disappointment, Steve spoke up.

“You know, Buddha says peace comes from within. Just…might…take a few lifetimes.”

“Very comforting,” he grumbled. But still, all was not lost, maybe if they saw how badly damaged he was they could convince the Regents that he was not fit to just return to his duties like nothing had happened. “Here.” He held the porthole out to Steve. “You might be a lifetime or two ahead of me.” Or at the least, not suffering from the after-effects of artifact possession and trauma.

“Save you a seat in Nirvana,” the younger man offered tentatively.

Artie reined in his smirk. Not that he’d tell them anytime soon, but he’d already found his Nirvana, and they were standing in it. This time, the spiral read and answered with ‘indescribable beauty’. “Well,” he said, trying to throttle back smug pleasure at his new plan. “That’s more like it.”

 

Claudia was sitting at the keyboard when he stepped into the office, but as soon as he crossed the threshold she leaped up and then stared at him in fear and uncertainty.

“Oh.” This wasn’t really what he wanted at the moment, but looking at her only made him hurt for what their relationship could have been. For once. “H-Hi. Um…heard you got the snag in…” Where had that ping been for? “…Oregon. That’s, uh, good. Nice job.” Still no response. He started sidling for the stairs. “Uh…if you’re looking for Steve or Myka, uh, they’re cleaning up in aisle…”

And then she was hugging him. “I-I did what I…had to do,” she said shakily.

What- she didn’t – the dagger? Had she been tying herself up in knots about that? About hauling him out of his own mind, making him face- oh. Well, he guessed that was something worth a week and a half of curdling guilt. “I know you did,” he choked out, remembering that perfect moment fading out as reality intruded. As much as he’d suffered since she’d dragged him back from the brink of death, the Warehouse would have suffered for more and for much longer if he’d died.

She pulled away, still looking awkward and uncomfortable. “That’s it.”

His own curdled guilt crawled up his throat, out of his mouth. “Not quite.” Claudia looked about ready to cry and he wished, oh how he wished he could trust her, let her into his heart and soothe that anguish. “Thank you,” he sighed in resignation, and watched relief bloom in her eyes, on her lips. “That’s it,” he said in something more like his usual grumpy tone, and she turned away with a laugh.

Once she was gone, he pulled the unassuming USB drive out of the envelope and loaded Leena’s video signature statement. Not for closure, or to reassure himself that she understood the risks that she was never supposed to have been exposed to, but to hear her voice, see her smile. Tears came and he let them, removing his glasses before they got splattered, half-sobbing an apology he knew she would have waved away with a hug.

The plan crystalized in his mind as he looked at her frozen image on the screen. He would embrace his pain, wallow in it, shove it in their faces. Rebellion through inaction. Civil disobedience. Claudia would recognize the music, but she didn’t know its meaning. He would make what progress he could towards picking up the pieces while seeming to fall apart.

Let the Regents deal with that and see if they still felt he could be reinstated so easily.

 

 

There was only one ping by the next morning. Artie printed out the necessary information, made the arrangements, and slid everything into a mission briefing folder. “I’m going out for a while,” he said to the empty office as he gathered his bag and triggered the umbilicus door. “Be good. I’ll be back late.”

The umbilicus seemed far more comforting than it should ever have. The Warehouse was wishing him well. Silently, he thanked her; he would take all the good wishes he could get.

Pete and Myka were dressed and ready to go by the time he arrived, sitting at the table and chatting with Steve and Claudia. Artie let himself remember Leena’s frozen smile and felt his throat get tight.

“You have a ping,” he said half-heartedly, offering the folder to whoever would take it. “Go. I’ll just be…” Vaguely, he gestured in the direction of the piano and followed his gesture out of the room.

He’d bought a pair of scones from the bakery in town. One of them hadn’t survived the quick trip from there to here. The other, now missing a bite, sat on its paper tissue within easy reach of his playing. The first notes knocked him back into the memory, and he closed his eyes to better see Leena’s teasing smile. “Circumstantial,” he muttered, knowing no one would know what it meant. Then he focused on those frayed, disordered emotions and tried to soothe them with music. That’s what he’d been doing, that day. That’s what he’d been doing after he’d woken up, when he had been trying to lose himself again. That’s what he’d tied this music to. But he was too broken, too frayed. Instead of the disordered feathers this exercise was meant to set to rights, he had broken quills and loose vanes. The piece ended and he began again. It wouldn’t be able to straighten out his broken and disordered emotions, but maybe he could tease the shards back together. It would take hours – but that’s what he’d planned to do. He would slowly try to repair himself while looking like he was falling apart.

Now focused entirely inwards, the music lending a sense of order he would not be able to maintain without it, Artie played. He was not aware of anything past the piano; if his agents discussed him in whispers and significant looks, he neither heard nor saw. Pete and Myka would have to walk past him to leave, but if they did, he didn’t notice. Time passed, or so he assumed, but there was only the music and the sense of fitting tiny bits of feather to one another and gently smoothing them into place.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so given what Steve had witnessed, neither he nor Claudia bothered him. He stopped somewhere in the afternoon to eat his now-stale scone and stare disconsolately into the distance, all his attention on not riling up the emotions knitted so carefully together and held there by close to nothing.

“Artie…”

Whatever Claudia intended to say got drowned out as he resumed playing. Some of the pieced-together vanes shredded as he listened to her walk away, and he quickly tuned out the world again and concentrated on repairing that damage. By the time Pete and Myka returned, he’d reconstructed just about everything with as much structural integrity as a soap bubble or a house of cards.

“Leave it on my desk,” he told them in a distant voice as soon as he was aware of them hovering.

They left, no doubt to confer with Claudia and Steve.

The next time he stopped playing, it was because his fingers ached and his stomach could no longer be ignored. The sun had set at some point, and he’d managed to be unaware of a pizza run to judge by the three cool slices on a paper plate with a cup of barely-cold soda on a coaster next to it on the top of the piano. He ate, drank, and left without a word. The artifact, and a completed mission report, were on his desk when he returned to the comfort of his office.

“I’m not sure I made any progress,” he warned his architectural spouse as he climbed the stairs, leaving artifact and report right where they were. Everything was holding for the moment, at least. “I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.”

He dreamed he’d fallen asleep on the couch and Leena had spread a blanket over him.

He dreamed Leena had made pork chops and potatoes and was chiding him over bending the rules purely to wind him up and get him explaining that the end was more important than the means and that by the reasoning behind the rule, USDA grain-fed pork was perfectly acceptable.

He dreamed that Claudia was stabbing him with the dagger, only it was Leena and there was no dagger and she was clinging to him, weeping, far more concerned with the fact that he was a stained-glass window than the fact that she was dead.

Artie woke up and cried until his eyes were red and sore and he felt like he would be sick, like he had already vomited up the grief that he had been holding down since that horrible, horrible day. Emotionally exhausted and not doing so well physically, he listened to the grating buzz of his alarm clock for a full five minutes before slapping it off. It was a good thing his plan was to be pathetic and play the piano all day, because he sure as hell wasn’t up for anything else.

Clothes were almost too much effort. Food was out of the question. He stared at his journal for a long time before scrawling Tried to fix things by playing piano. Took hours. Went to bed. Had happy dreams, then dreamed Leena was crying because I was stained glass. Woke up, cried. Feel hollow and sick. Going to try piano again because music-fugue is better than having to think and feel.

 

He was back at the piano almost before his agents were awake. One by one they meandered downstairs in sleep clothes, mostly t-shirts and sweats. He could almost feel their concerned looks, like sandbags settling onto his shoulders, making him hunch over and focus more on the music, on the shreds of sanity he was gently petting in the vain hope that some good would come of it. None of them spoke, which he took as a blessing.

A paper plate slid into his peripheral vision, and the next time the piece ended, he stopped to stare blankly until it resolved into a toasted bagel spread with cream cheese. He had no idea who had brought it, or what time it was.

It was still warm.

Piecing his sanity back together was slightly easier than it had been the day before. Once he achieved the soap-bubble state where everything was in place but could not endure pressure greater than a sigh, he kept his mind blank but began listening. He was being watched; quiet voices from the far side of the room informed one another that he'd eaten and debated a sandwich and some lemonade. Eagerly, his mind flooded with memories of Leena's lemonade, and the soap bubble popped. His fingers stumbled to a halt, wounded music echoing in the sudden silence, and his next breath threatened to be a sob. One set of footsteps fled; the other came closer and he closed his eyes, not wanting to see who it was. A hand brushed his, lightly, there if he wanted it, and he knew it was Myka. In silence, Artie sat there clinging to her hand as if it would anchor him against the turbulent sea of his own emotions.

I don’t ask for help because for too long, there hasn’t been anyone I could rely on.

A tiny spark of warm hope, fearful and wary, flickered inside him and he clung to it as desperately as he was clutching Myka's hand. She'd put the pieces together. She knew he was crying out for help. She'd had the strength to walk away and, greater still, the strength to come back. Surely...surely she would face the Regents with that strength and tell them he needed more help than she could give. Maybe she was regretting, even now, her silence at his tribunal.

The other set of footsteps returned. He found a sandwich in his hand, a cold glass in the other, and then hands gripped his wrist and shoulder reassuringly and both sets of footsteps retreated.

He ate and drank, not tasting any of it, and tried to lose himself in the music. When he'd managed to rebuild himself again, the sun was setting and three wrapped tacos were stacked neatly on the corner of the piano. He took them and fled, eating - carefully! - in his car as he returned to the Warehouse. Vanessa would be arriving soon for his weekly check-up, and the soap bubble trembled as he almost thought about talking to her. Being inside the Warehouse gave him...not strength, but immediacy. A narrowing of focus. Nothing existed except the present and the near future, a future in which Vanessa would be there and he would look and smell like a man who had been wallowing in his own misery for the greater part of two days.

Twenty-five minutes later, clean and damp and dressed, he met Vanessa at the door and clung to her the way he'd clung to Myka's hand. She hugged him tightly for a long minute before murmuring, "Couch," and leading him to the loft.

He told her about the tribunal, about being trusted to return to work without a single question raised about his emotional state. He told her how he'd been unable to use the spiral, something that hadn't happened since the week after James's banishment. He told her about the piano, the dreams, the very tame artifact which had effortlessly suplexed him, and the fact that he was now less stable than he'd been when he'd eaten the apple. She murmured reassurance and approval for his plan, and then she asked if he wanted a distraction.

"I just want to turn my brain off," he moaned, hands over his eyes, glasses shoved unceremoniously into his hair. "I'm tired and thinking makes my everything hurt."

"Can you use something to sleep?"

"Stalin's sleep mask. We're old friends."

She sounded amused at his dry delivery. "How old, exactly?"

Artie sighed and let his hands drop. "It used to induce drunkenness. James used it enough on me while he was looking for the Cup that it stopped bothering. Now it just makes you want vodka for thirty seconds when you wake up. Since I can't drink to numb or blur anything, we're very familiar with each other."

She took his hands gently in her own. "Then how about I tuck you into bed with your old friend so you don't hear me yelling at the head of the Regents?"

"You don't want me to hear that?" he asked in a tone of blatantly false injury.

"I don't want you hurting yourself," she corrected. "Besides, an audience hampers my ability to perform and what you don't overhear, the Regents can't hold against you. Have you been remembering to eat?"

He gave her a self-depreciating smile. "Uh, somewhat unsurprisingly given my current situation, I...don't really have much of an appetite. They keep leaving food for me, though, and I eat it...eventually. That must be driving them crazy with worry - that I'm not paying attention to food even when it's right there."

"It's worrying me." Vanessa frowned at him. "Come on. Let's get you into bed so I can ask Adwin Kosan what the hell he was thinking disregarding my professional advice."

Artie let himself be herded into his room. Stalin's sleep mask was sitting by his alarm clock, ready for him, and Vanessa frowned sternly until he changed into pajamas and lay down. Then she tucked him in and slipped the mask into place, and there was nothing but silence and darkness.

 

The note propped against his alarm clock read Keep following the plan and hang in there. I love you. –V

The emotional blinders were still firmly in place, something Artie felt distantly grateful for as he dressed and choked down a dry bagel. He left both his bag and his Farnsworth in the office. It would not only underscore that he needed help, but he really didn’t think he was up to being contacted by anyone who couldn’t take the time to confront him in person.

Naturally, the blinders faded once he left the Warehouse, but he did a passable job of not thinking as he slipped into the B&B and began playing. He was left with nothing but vanes stripped from their quills, which had gone from broken to missing. The walls and structures he’d painstakingly built and maintained over the last few decades had been reduced to rubble and he was starting from scratch. That would have depressed him if he weren’t already hip-deep in despair.

Pete was the first one downstairs. He hesitated in the doorway, no doubt internally debating the wisdom of interrupting Artie’s playing, then left without a word. When he returned, it was with donuts and he set two Boston Crème and a coffee on the corner of the piano before vanishing with the rest. Myka descended shortly after and also watched him playing, but did not speak. Pete went upstairs; Pete and Steve came back down. No doubt a whispered conversation was being held about him, but he firmly tuned the world out.

Some indeterminate time later, Claudia said, “Your coffee’s cold.”

Carefully sorting mental pebbles to clear out the rubble was easier to maintain some shred of stability on than preening dismembered bits of feather. He didn’t answer, though.

“I’m gonna eat one of your donuts,” she tried again.

In a distant voice, he told her, “Go for it.”

She didn’t go for it.

Once all the rubble had been cleared, Artie felt significantly less like he was standing on an emotional pile of shale chips that threatened to knock him on his ass with every errant gust of thought. Granted, that left him in a very dark and bitter place, but at least it was a stable dark and bitter place. He ate the donuts while the others were eating lunch, but didn’t touch the coffee. Like he needed caffeine right now. Myka slipped back into the room as he resumed playing, no doubt tipped off by that brief silence and hoping to catch him while he was still acknowledging the world.

“What if there’s a ping?” she asked quietly.

He paused and sighed. “Someone else can deal with it,” he told her tiredly, and resumed playing.

It was like scrubbing with pumice, he thought as the music enfolded him again. He was scrubbing himself clean, but with nothing left to clean off it was abrading his psyche. Or maybe he’d just gotten down to the dank and festering sores left by all the deaths he hadn’t let himself mourn, and he was scrubbing away dead and rotting flesh. That brought him black satisfaction, and for a while he reveled in the dichotomy of the delicate tune his fingers were coaxing from the keys and the bloody, painful memories he was scouring himself with.

When he surfaced, feeling grimly pleased with his progress, there was a cold burger and lukewarm soda waiting for him. There may have been fries, but he assumed – hoped, really – that either someone else had claimed them before they got cold and gross, or they hadn’t bothered trying to tempt him. The B&B was quiet, and the sun had set. Time to make his escape.

There were two scones in a paper bag on his front seat, and Claudia’s Prius was the only vehicle keeping his car company. He drove warily to the Warehouse, feeling like his mind was covered in scrapes and cuts but no longer in danger of shattering, but no one was waiting for him. He took the scones in with him and left them in the kitchen area on his way upstairs, not even bothering to check the computer. That would alarm Claudia, if she were keeping digital tabs on things, which she better be doing because if she wasn’t going to pick up his slack then oh, was he going to hold that against her if she didn’t improve by the time she became Caretaker. He would not suffer his architectural wife to have a deadbeat advocate.

The twin fires of resentment and pain kept him pleasantly warm as he changed into soft pajamas and snuggled under the covers. “Good night,” he murmured lovingly to the darkened room, and let himself drift off into nothingness.

 

Someone was in the office when he woke up. What had tipped him off, he couldn’t say – unless it was the Warehouse – but he came awake all at once and silently turned the alarm off before it could alert the intruder. Unfortunately for whoever it was, he’d installed a discreet security camera unconnected to Warehouse systems years ago. Now he crept to where he had the monitor hidden and turned the camera on, peering at the slightly-grainy image before smiling in vengeful satisfaction. Clauda. Now, if he knew the devil-child as well as she didn’t think he knew her, she was going behind his back and would hide rather than confront him. If that was the case, then she was very likely looking for a ping that she could use to get him away from the piano. For her own sanity, if not his. In the event that he’d read her right so far, how should he react? Sullen reluctance sounded good, not to mention easy to pull off and accurate. Maybe some uncharacteristic outbursts. He’d probably have the urge to anyway, may as well go with it.

Now that he was actually looking forward to the evolution of his plan, he crept back over to his alarm clock and set it off. He could just make out the tiny form of Claudia darkening the monitor and dashing for the records room. Good, very good. He turned the clock off and set about getting dressed, not bothering to hurry. She was still cowering off-camera when he was ready to leave, and he hid the monitor before doing just that. The metal stairs rattled under his deliberately heavy tread, and the office seemed to be empty. He grabbed his bag from the desk, his scones from the counter, and marched almost cheerfully through the umbilicus. His mind felt scabbed over, and he caressed the walls with absent-minded affection as he closed the outside door behind him. Sure enough, Claudia’s Prius was there, hidden around the corner where he wouldn’t notice it if he were as out of it as he had been pretending to be.

The drive to the B&B was leisurely, cool morning air ruffling his hair as he drove at just over an idle, one hand on the wheel and the other holding the scone he was eating. The urge to just park somewhere quiet and enjoy the morning was nearly overpowering, and he felt a surge of wild glee bubble up at the thought of being drug out into public to misbehave. The hard part would be feigning indifference until he had been “lured” out, but the music would help that.

At least two people were in the sunroom when he let himself in and sat at the piano. The music swirled around him, reflecting gently off the hard scabs of his psyche and leaving him perfectly aware of the world around him. Thus, close to two hours later, he heard Steve’s phone go off and a set of footsteps pass behind him on the way to the front door. Minutes later, two sets of footsteps crept in and he heard Claudia reassuring her partner before the door closed and they started whatever plan she’d concocted.

“I’m telling you,” Steve said unconvincingly, “it’s a ping.”

“And I’m telling you,” Claudia replied even less convincingly, “it’s a burglary.”

Oh, God, they were going to pretend to argue until he broke it up. Artie turned his attention to the music and tried to ignore both of them, but his psyche was still scabbed and he couldn’t manage it.

“Classic cars are vanishing from locked garages without a trace.”

“Buuur-glar-yyy,” sang Claudia. It took an effort to keep playing.

Steve wasn’t giving up. “This one guy had a ’52 DeSoto on display in his living room like a trophy. Now, a burglar would have had to take it apart piece by piece to get it out.”

Ah, dramatic readings of ping reports. Artie kept playing.

“If something was hinky,” Claudia said in a challenging, somehow mocking tone, “I’m sure Artie would know. He’s the Ping King.”

Did they expect him to believe they were coincidentally arguing right where he could hear them? Bickering like a pair of children begging for Daddy to tell them who was right? He sighed in impatient irritation, fingers stilling on the keys.

“Isn’t that right, your Majesty?”

God, would she never let up? “It’s probably worth checking out,” he said in as bored a tone as he could manage. “Don’t forget your neutralizer.” Hah, spoked your wheel. What are you going to do now to convince me to come with you?

As he resumed playing, Claudia protested loudly, “Meh, sounds like a waste of time.”

When he made no reaction, Steve leaped to fill the silence like an actor who’d missed his cue. “Yeah, I mean, the car was found with clean VIN numbers, uh, at a dealer in Sioux Falls.”

“There’s lots of ’52 DeSotos.” Jeez, Claudia, over-act much?

“Yeah, but this one had a ’53 hood emblem. Makes it one of a kind.”

Well, at least there was something solid to go on. That, and the urge to snap at them was too strong to fight. He stopped playing. “It’s not one of a kind, it’s flawed. If the cars are literally vanishing, it is an artifact. File,” he demanded, snapping his fingers and holding one hand out imperiously. Steve complied.

“Clearly, I stand corrected,” Claudia snarked.

Artie snarked back, “Oh, mark the date.” Now to throw them a curve ball. “Keep your Farnsworth handy, in case I need research when I’m in the field.”

The smugness evaporated out of her, and she scrambled to reach his bag before he could as he stood up. “What? Wait, wait, wait, you’re going without us?”

“I can handle a simple snag and bag.”

“Yes, of course you can, but…”

Oh, this ought to be good.

“We should…go with you,” Claudia said with false nonchalance as she returned to her partner’s side. With his bag.

“Why?” Artie asked in a parentally warning tone.

They scrambled for a moment; Steve recovered first. “We’d…miss you?”

“We’d miss…a chance to learn from the master!” Claudia babbled.

“The Ping King,” chimed in Steve.

“Also…safety in numbers. D-doesn’t he always say safety first?”

This was getting annoying.

“I-yeah, I, I-I’ve heard him say that, yes.”

Artie leaned in, fixing both of them with his best ‘I smell bullshit’ scowl.

Claudia went for puppy eyes. “We wanna see the cool hot rods.”

Okay, even if his plan weren’t to misbehave where they could see it, he’d buy that line of flimsy reasoning. He fought back most of a laugh at the hoops they’d just jumped through in attempt to convince him to let them go. “Yeah. Ah-ah-all right,” he conceded, “we’ll take Scarlet.”

Claudia scoffed. “What, you named your car?”

Did she- she had no- he’d had that car longer than she’d been alive! “You wear torn clothing,” he snapped as he reclaimed his bag. “We all have our quirks.”

This was going to be a long drive.

 

After four hours on the road – because like hell was Artie going to obey the speed limit in his condition – looking at more cars was close to the bottom of his list, but that’s what they were doing. Checking off the makes and models of cars on the dealer’s floor against a list of cars reported “vanished”.

“Hi,” purred the tall, dark, and plum-suited commission-chaser. “I’m Amy. So I see you’re looking at the Mustang, here. You’ve got a good eye. Well, it is a V8-”

“We’re not here to buy,” Steve interrupted before she could do more than blatantly give them a view of cleavage none of them were interested in. “Sorry.”

Amy straightened back up, a hint of hostility in her carriage now. “Well, then you want to sell a car. Excellent, because we are always looking-”

“No, we’re not…selling…either.”

“Ohhh.” A generous pinch of derision dripped into Amy’s tone. “Window shoppers. You know, I always say, if you’re looking-”

The last shred of patience Artie had left snapped. “Just…take us to the owner?” She stared at him as though astounded that the middle-aged Jew was, in fact, the ringleader. “Please?”

 

The owner didn’t want to hear it when they insinuated. He didn’t want to hear it when Artie, frustrated and impatient, listed charges.

“Of course,” he sneered. “And you could cooperate by showing me your warrant.”

Thirty years of being discreet and subtle screamed for release. “That’s really how you want to play this?” Artie challenged him, hoping, praying, knowing that he’d say yes.

“It really is,” the slimebag said in a low, threatening tone.

Perfect.

“Fine.” A moment later, he turned and fired his tesla at an inoffensive water cooler, shattering the neck of the bottle and sending it tumbling in an explosion of electricity and water while Claudia shouted futilely.

“What the hell is that thing?” the dealer demanded, panicked, his sleazy accent gone along with his composure.

Artie turned back around, in no mood for games and giddy from the release of actually using intimidation instead of letting himself be walked on. “Does your insurance cover act of ray gun? ‘Cuz I’m gonna shoot every car in here.”

“He’s not lying,” Steve affirmed, in the rare position of genuinely trying to play Good Cop where the Bad Cop wasn’t an act.

It worked. Sadly, the best plan was to use his car as bait.

 

As the thief skulked towards his car and Claudia rolled into the trunk, one thought occupied Artie’s mind and thrust everything else out of it. The thief had an artifact that let car and driver pass through walls, but what about Claudia? Visions of the devil-child splattered against the wall plastered themselves across his field of vision, interspersed with the memory of Leena’s blood on the Warehouse floor.

“Look, Artie, she has a plan. You’ve been overreacting all day!” Steve added as Artie went past him, breaking cover and moving towards his car.

Nice of Steve to notice, but he wasn’t about to stop anytime soon. The thief got behind the wheel and started the engine – easy enough to do, he’d left the key in it to prevent hotwiring – and the telltale artifact glow flared from the thief’s yellow gloves to disperse into the body of the car. Artie braced himself and lunged into the car’s path before the thief could get any appreciable speed.

Car, driver, and Claudia all phased safely through him, and then through the wall. Good to know his fears were groundless.

“We’ll use Claudia’s computer and hack into the traffic cams and follow the car. Hurry!” He rushed to their rental car, Steve hot on his heels.

“Artie, your car drove through you.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine!

“Good!”

“But we gotta-”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was trying to save Claudia.”

“How- how are you going to save Claudia by jumping in front of a moving car?”

The door was locked. That was enough of a spark that the words “No one else is dying on my watch!” exploded out of him, and Steve stared in horrified comprehension. Self-conscious now that the immediate emotional pressure had been released, Artie let his gaze drop and was relieved to hear a beep from his pocket. “Okay, she fixed the tracker; let’s go,” he said in a calmer tone. The door was still locked. “Do you mind opening the door?”

Steve unlocked the door and didn’t protest Artie getting behind the wheel. He wasn’t sure if this made him feel vindicated or uncomfortable.

 

“Snagged one during the fight because I’m awesome,” Claudia sang, one yellow glove held triumphantly up.

Artie reached up to take it and she let him, not knowing that he was already caught in the twin grip of his own volatile state and the reckless impulsiveness the gloved invoked. “Okay, now…she could…you know what?” He was thinking out loud, but that was perfectly fine because his mouth never could keep up with his brain anyway. “She could make one glove work,” he said by way of half-assed explanation, already behind the wheel of the only other car in the garage. “I wanna see…if this is safe.”

The artifact leaped eagerly to fulfill its purpose.

“Artie? What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer. The car’s engine revved and memories flooded back.

He drove straight through the wall.

It wasn’t hard to find Amy. For the most part, he ignored Claudia and Steve talking at him through the Farnsworth, explaining to him what he already knew from the glove, all his attention on working with the split artifact since he didn’t have anything even resembling the ability to fight the downside. Maybe…by flinging his will into what the gloves wanted, he could drag Amy along…

Drag.

She drove through a barricade, crashing rather than phasing. She didn’t have complete control over the artifact. She thought that with only one glove, the phasing would only work once. He had her.

He pulled up alongside as they turned onto a long, straight stretch, challenging her wordlessly. Even if she’d never seen his expression, the glove would know what he wanted. She was afraid, she was desperate, she was vulnerable to the downside.

She braked.

He sped on by and pulled a bootlegger’s turn.

For a moment, Amy wrested control back from the glove and tried to reverse away from him, but a convenient tractor trailer trapped her neatly in a mental corner and she revved her engine.

Adrenaline surged through his veins, sang in his ears over the squeal of burning rubber, and then they were racing at each other, alone on a stretch of road.

“Artie, what are you doing?”

“I’m charging her!” God, wasn’t that obvious? “She’ll get scared, she’ll brake.” Because she wasn’t him, at the mercy of the gloves and unflinching in the face of reckless danger. Plus, the gloves thought it would be an amazing stunt for the cars to phase through each other, so they would. Or at least, his would.

“Yeah, what if she doesn’t?” That was Claudia, underestimating him yet again. “Artie, what if she doesn’t sto- Artie!”

Amy didn’t know the thrill of the drag race. She’d never played chicken. She’d turn first. She held out until the last second, he’d give her that. As he swung through another bootlegger’s turn, he saw her pop her tires on a railroad track and roll to a floppy stop.

“Yeah,” he breathed in satisfaction. “See, this wasn’t my first drag race.”

The connection closed. Artie burst into inappropriate laughter, imagining the look on Claudia’s face, and was still chuckling when he strode up to Amy and pulled the other glove off her hand. He stuck them in a bag before he got behind the wheel again, though. As exciting as that had been, he was driving a stolen car and really didn’t need to get pulled over on the way back to retrieving Scarlet and getting exclaimed at over today’s events.

 

He didn’t go back to the B&B. Steve and Claudia had the rented Prius and a hotel room; he drove straight back to the Warehouse. The gloves in their bag got tossed onto his desk and he flopped into bed without even bothering to undress.

Of course, that meant he slept until close to noon, and by the time he’d dragged himself through a cold shower and into clean clothes his agents had sent themselves out on pings and someone had left him a hoagie and a can of soda. In the fridge. They were learning. As he ate, he contemplated his next step. Maybe returning to his duties but remaining volatile, with a side of avoidance? Well, if he were being honest with himself, not performing his duties was making him itch like he hadn’t showered in a week. His eyes fell on the gloves, still bagged, and he smiled with sadistic glee. Maybe he’d start with writing up that mission report…and then being conveniently out of the office when Pete and Myka got back.

He’d get the help he needed if he had to hold himself hostage to do it, and by God, if that’s what it took then that’s what he’d do.

 

Surprisingly, it only took two days of being conveniently unavailable with other tasks before Mrs. Frederic informed him at an ungodly hour via Farnsworth that he was expected to be in his office at three o’clock on the dot to discuss something the Regents deemed urgent. That boded either very well or very ill, and he absolutely wanted no one else there. And that meant the ping in England went to his very own scourge and her lie-detecting partner; Pete and Myka could deal with doing inventory unless another ping came up. Shamelessly, he woke Claudia as he was finishing the case file and informed her that he was on his way and to get herself and her partner presentable as soon as possible. Pete and Myka were finishing breakfast; they scattered obediently when he told them to go do inventory and handed them lists. That left him killing time, and that’s when he noticed no one had been watering Leena’s plants.

She’d loved those plants. She’d spritzed them and fussed over them and now they were looking listless and depressed and actually, they looked about how he felt.

The sudden sense of kinship with Leena’s plants overwhelmed Artie, and he found himself watering and spritzing and trying to fuss. “Please live,” he told a bushy fernlike something, the plea somewhat ruined by the knowledge that while Leena would have had a fit at the state her green babies were in, she never would because she was gone. “I know, I’m not her. Okay? I’m not.” Maybe talking to plants was a sign of insanity, but look what he’d been through lately. “Just…try not to die.” Maybe if he could keep them going, it would be like her spirit had never left…but grief overwhelmed him and he reached for the grumpiness that had protected him in so many vulnerable moments. “Okay, you know what? Go ahead. Wilt. See if I care.”

“Artie?”

The unexpected use of his name made him jump and whirl around to find…Steve and Claudia looking at him in pity and somber concern. Where had that concern been when he needed them to stop him, to speak out? They hadn’t even noticed he was broken until he’d taken it upon himself to show them. “You ever hear of knocking?” he snapped.

Claudia reached out without missing a beat and rapped on the sunroom’s windowed door. Then, as though they’d rehearsed it, they both gestured as if to say, Well? Your turn.

“Come in,” he said dryly.

“Thank you,” Claudia replied with a healthy dose of sarcasm. “You rang?”

He felt almost like himself as he told them about the ping and shooed them away, but then Steve latched onto the phrase “Regent issue” like Claudia discovering an encrypted file. He tried to cover it, but exactly no one was fooled. Including, interestingly enough, the devil-child herself. Maybe his plan was bearing fruit after all. To cover the surge of actual, painful hope, Artie closed the distance to them. “All right, here’s the dirt,” he said in a tone that promised juicy secrets. They leaned in. “I’m not gonna tell you! So go, ta-ta, goodbye, cheerio, so long. Be gone.”

They went.

The other ping came in about an hour later; some unfortunate soul dropped out of the Las Vegas sky to land on a golf cart. When he tracked Pete down, he had the lei on, the hammock strung up, and Myka was already there. It took about thirty seconds to send them on their way. Then, giving in to the whisper of sullen mischief that slid through his mind, he took the lei and the hammock to a significantly distant and desolate corner of the Warehouse where he stashed them for his own use.

 

He was in the middle of preening the card catalogue – damn thing was incredibly useful but so particular about its drawers and cards – when he felt a sort of ripple and when he turned around, Mr. Frederic was standing there with an Asian woman in a loose, flowing purple top.

“Hello, Arthur,” she said in her usual iron tone. “This is Abigail Cho.”

“Hi,” Ms. Regent Issue said warmly.

He ignored it. “Yeah. I’m just reorganizing here. What, are we having an open house?” That came out more irritated and hostile than he’d intended. Clearly, the brain-to-mouth filter was still down.

“Miss Cho is the new owner of the bed and breakfast,” announced the Caretaker with just a hint of challenge and an even fainter hint of smugness.

The B&B? She wasn’t- the Regents hadn’t, his agents hadn’t- he was still on his own? “New owner?” he repeated, his brain thankfully going too fast for his mouth. “H-how did that-” become a priority over his mental health? “Was…was she-” another sensitive, like Leena, drawn to the position?

“She has been briefed by the Regents, and there has been a request made that you show her around.” Mrs. Frederic managed to deflect everything without answering any of it.

“Around? Around the Warehouse?” Yeah, he sure was giving a bang-up first impression, but if she was neither sensitive nor therapist, then what the hell were the Regents thinking bringing her in? He didn’t even know they’d put Leena’s up for sale!

“Well, just enough to get her feet wet.” He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Frederic was mocking or agreeing. “No need to frighten her off,” she added as though she could read his intent to do just that.

“I don’t frighten easily,” Miss Cho assured him warmly. “Arthur, is it?”

No, no it wasn’t. She had neither the history nor the authority to call him that. “Artie,” he corrected in a hard tone.

“So nice to meet you,” she said as though she hadn’t picked up on his hostility. That ripple happened again. “Mrs. Frederic has told me so much about…”

Of course, when she turned, the Caretaker had vanished. Interesting to know that that’s what the ripple was. “Yeah,” he sighed. Then he warned her in a jaded voice, “You’ll grow to hate that.”

She looked as if she wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. Part of him was going to love this, shaking her safe little worldview, but the rest of him was already feeling the weight of another innocent to keep out of harm’s way settle on his shoulders.

 

The tour was…disgruntling. Half the time she wasn’t really listening to what he said, and the other half of the time, she just accepted it without being thrown in the slightest. It was like watching M&Ms sink into a bowl of marshmallow syrup; they didn’t even disturb the surface as they disappeared and his warnings may as well have been given in interpretive dance for all the attention she was paying to them. Either she was too stupid to be allowed in the Warehouse without supervision, or-

 “Are we allowed to check things out? Like a…library?”

Before the words even registered he was striking her reaching hand away. “No, no! No! No! Agh…” The fact that he’d just slapped her sank in, swamping him with guilt for the impulsive act or trying to keep her from getting her hand cut off. Then the guilt transmuted into irritation at himself and he muttered, “God,” as he covered his face briefly with the offending hand. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, averting his eyes from her shocked and hurt expression. “It’s just that- it’s just that this place can…” Nope, smaller words, get the message out and worry about the explanation later. “People can get hurt!” he practically shouted. “Okay? And-and it takes a while for people to really grasp just how dangerous these things…can be. So…I’m sorry, but…” Artie gave up. Her expression hadn’t changed, she was still looking at him like a child whose parent had just yelled for the first time.

“I…apologize,” she said shakily, still clutching the slapped hand to her chest. “I-it must be a terrible burden to be…responsible for…all of these things.”

Not nearly as much as it was being responsible for the agents. But what he said was, “Well, it can be, yes.”

“So…how do you…deal with it?”

The absurdity of that question, given everything he’d been going through, flashed through his mind and he dismissed the idea of even telling her a fraction of the truth. “Apparently, by slapping perfect strangers,” he said honestly. “Ah…it’s been a…very tough year.”

“Well, we all have them.” Apparently, she wasn’t going to take offense.

“Well, in my case, it’s…all my fault, so…” A dry laugh escaped at the blatant lie.

“Look, if you ever want…” Abigail broke off as he turned like a hound scenting a fox, something in her tone scraping across his psyche. “Never mind,” she said, shaking her head briefly.

“What?”

“It’s just if you…ever wanna…” She braced herself before continuing. “…talk about it…”

“Oh, well, it’s a rather long story with a very bad ending.” One he was not inclined to tell to a perfect stranger who happened to purchase the B&B.

“Well, I like long stories.” She sounded like she wanted to be friends, like he would tell her a tale of madcap adventure instead of something traumatic.

“I dunno,” he demurred, scratching one cheek. Then he glanced back up at her. Miss Regent Issue liked long stories and wanted him to talk to her. Her expression shifted from open friendliness to wary concern as suspicion coiled around his thoughts. “What exactly did you do before you bought the B&B?” he asked, feeling like a snake ready to strike.

“A lot of things,” she answered vaguely. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh.” He tried to make it sound casual. “Anything in the field of…psychotherapy?”

She weighed her options for a long moment before saying, “Yes.”

Artie’s thoughts ignited into incoherent fury, destroying the small amount of control he’d won back over the last week. “You have got to be kidding me! And Mrs. Frederic tells me that you are…an innkeeper! What a great joke that is! You know how humiliating it is to be-”

Understandably, she tried to explain. “The Regents just simply-”

It was like she’d thrown water on a grease fire. “Oh, the Regents! The Regents are a part of this? BRILLIANT! Of course they’re a part of this,” he said in an angry exhalation his mouth for once keeping pace with his mind, “otherwise they wouldn’t have come up with such a stupid plan. You all have nothing better to do than to sit around and discuss my mental health. You know what you can do? You can run back to them and tell them you failed. Maybe they can come up with somebody to help you…work through your disappointments.” Utterly and completely done with this humiliating farce, he turned and began walking away. “See if you can psychoanalyze your way out of the stacks,” he shot over his shoulder as he went, leaving her standing there uselessly.

 

Sorting out the card catalogue preened him as much as it did the artifact itself, and a distant ripple suggested that the Caretaker was herding Ms. Cho, but that thought threatened to wake the fury he’d just soothed so he put the whole thing out of his mind.

At least, he put it out of his mind until Ms. Regent Issue walked into his office while he was checking on Cupertino’s medallion for Myka and laid a pair of boots on his desk. Twenty seconds later, he got Myka off the Farnsworth and could turn his attention to the thorn in his psyche.

“Pancho Villa’s boots,” he announced with false cheer, feeling the fires of indignant rage start to flare again. “You’re here to check them out, like this is a library?”

“You’re hilarious,” she shot back, ignoring that he’d just thrown her own words back at her. “Mr. Villa committed unconscionable acts in these boots, and yet he was never bothered by them. It imbued them with-”

“The power to numb any grief,” Artie interrupted, proving that she wasn’t the only one who knew what it said on the card, “or guilt caused by one’s own actions. I am not the one that is new here.” He turned away, struggling to keep himself under control and not think about the unconscionable acts that would seem like good ideas were he to even touch the boots in his current state.

Abigail strode around the front of the desk, determined to face him again. “I know about this, Artie. A man who insists on fighting his battle alone.”

Yeah, well, maybe if he had someone he could actually trust and depend on, he’d let them help him fight his battle.

“Who shuts everyone out until his grief consumes him, and there’s nothing left but fury and sadness and self-loathing!” The words trembled with the force of her emotions, but all Artie felt was the bite of disappointment that the Regents still hadn’t grasped the real problem.

“I’m glad I’m so easy to categorize,” he said bitterly.

She wasn’t backing down. “Why don’t you just save everyone the torment of watching you self-destruct, and put on the boots?”

Because if he was going to self-destruct, he was going to rub it in the faces of everyone around him so that they’d suffer with him and maybe, just maybe, they’d actually lift a finger to help him instead of just milling around like uncertain children.

“So the Regents briefed you on exactly what happened,” he said, challenging her with the statement, because of course they hadn’t told her anything important. “That does not mean you know me.”

“I don’t know you.” At least she was willing to admit it. “Only your struggle. I know this because I have seen it.”

Hah. Whatever she’d seen, it sure as hell wasn’t his struggle.

“I’ve lived it.”

He was sorry for her loss, or he would be if he could think clearly.

“And I promised myself I would never put myself in the position to live through it again, and yet here I am, trying to save the life of yet another man-”

“No, no, no, no.” She thought she could just walk in and save him, like he was dangling from a cliff and all she had to do was pull him to safety? “No need to save me, I’m fine.” He turned away, again but again she followed.

“Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what he said, and then I lost him!”

This time, the emotion vibrating behind the words cut through the tangle of anger. She cared. She’d just walked in and already she was emotionally invested and trying, bless her heart, trying despite a lack of knowledge or understanding, to help him.

She was a psychotherapist.

“A patient?” he asked as gently as he could.

Abigail took a moment to compose herself before speaking. “Grief, Agent Nielsen. Real, gut-wrenching grief is not something you can power through or ignore.”

Thirty years of walling it away said differently, but he was only able to do that because of his gift. At this point, he needed whatever help she could give.

“There’s no detours, no shortcuts. You look it in the eye, and you do battle. And you keep doing battle until you are finished with it and it is finished with you. And if you’re not willing to accept that, then…it will eat you alive.”

She was a psychotherapist. He needed whatever help she could give, and that help would be more effective if she knew the real issues. Artie said nothing as she turned to leave.

Halfway to the umbilicus, she stopped and turned back to him. “And yes,” she said, “he was a patient.”

It took until past midnight to confirm that both his teams were safe and the artifacts bagged, and that neither of them would be back until mid-afternoon. He tried to sleep, but it eluded him and instead of reaching for his old friend, he turned on his bedroom terminal and printed out the file he’d written on himself. It went into a case folder with the journal he’d been keeping, and the folder went onto the pile of clothes he intended to wear the next day. As soon as that was done, a soft heaviness filled his mind. Artie lay back down, and the heaviness pushed him down into a dreamless slumber.

 

Breakfast didn’t sound appealing when he woke up, so he went straight to Leena’s. Abigail was in the sunroom, spritzing the same fern thing he’d tried to tend the day before. Then she sighed. “What am I doing here?” she wondered to herself, and guilt gnawed on him again. A moment later, she turned around and stopped dead at the sight of him in the doorway.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said quietly, folder clutched in both hands. “I didn’t- I wasn’t angry at you. I’m glad to see you, actually, because I know I need help. I was angry at the Regents for not telling me, for not telling you, for thinking they could just…sneak a therapist in and I wouldn’t notice.”

She smiled a little at that. “I wasn’t happy about that, either. All they told me was that Leena had been killed, and you needed help.”

That made him laugh. “Boy do I need help, and um…I’m sorry if it’s a bit much to lay on your shoulders, but there’s more than just the grief and…I’m not sure where to start.”

Abigail gestured to the table. “Start at the beginning?”

“The beginning,” he murmured as he entered the room and sat down. “That might work. Oh, uh…” Artie opened the folder and slid it over to her. He’d added a pad of white lined paper and a ballpoint pen on his way through the office, and they sat on top of the printout and the journal.  “I came prepared. Told you I knew I needed help.”

She chuckled, but all she said as she uncapped the pen was, “So. The beginning?”

“The NSA recruited me almost before I finished high school,” he began. “My father wasn’t happy that I wasn’t going into music. My mother had histrionics and alternated between weeping like I was on my deathbed and declaring that I was dead. Jewish,” he clarified. “No siblings. Family came from Russia, so they had me intercepting and translating, and one day my Russian contact asked me if I could get my hands on something for him. In exchange, his handlers would release one of my relatives – we had refusniks in the family. I found the item he wanted, and the next one, and many more after that. But eventually I learned that the seemingly useless antiques all had…powers.”

“Artifacts,” she said.

“Yeah. I’d been able to find them relatively easily because they…I don’t have a word for it. It’s like explaining sound to a deaf person, or light to a blind person. They had an extra something that let me pick them out. But when I found out that I’d been trading weapons for human lives…” Artie trailed off for a moment. “I turned myself in. Officially, I was arrested for treason because no one knew what to make of my claim that I’d given magic weapons to the Soviets. Mrs. Frederic offered me a position at the Warehouse, got my record expunged. I changed my name and settled in to a life of finding artifacts and locking them away. To help me settle in, I was partnered with James MacPherson…”

He skipped over the deaths he’d seen and suffered during his time as an agent, pointing out that he’d summarized them on the print-out. Instead, he explained his gift and the major artifact interactions: the Rod of Dionysus, Schrodinger’s Box, how Stalin’s sleep mask had been made safe and what that meant for the potential of his gift. Then he sketched out the events leading to Leena’s death, pointing out known incidents of the astrolabe using his body.

“…and when I woke up, it was like every bone in those intangible hands was broken,” he finished heavily. “I kept a journal at Dr. Calder’s request; it’s in the file. I’ve been doing what I can to minimize or repair the damage, but…”

Abigail flipped briefly through the mostly-full journal, eyebrows going up. “No wonder you were so angry,” she said in a tone of quiet awe. “I’m a little disappointed in the Regents for not finding me – or someone like me – sooner. Mostly on your behalf, but I’m sure Agent Jinks in particular could have used some therapy after his...um…death.”

“Yeah, I did what I could but self-taught methods only go so far.” Artie scratched absently at one cheek. “It’s close to lunch and I’ve got agents coming back soon. I’ll just…leave you with the file, and we’ll pick back up with this tomorrow?”

She didn’t answer at first, staring blankly at her notes. “I apologize for the way I handled you in your office,” she said quietly. “Poncho Villa’s boots were not the answer. It’s not grief that’s your biggest issue right now, it’s a lack of healthy coping and healing mechanisms and I encourage you to talk to anyone you feel comfortable discussing this with. You’ve clearly been holding everything in for a long time, but all that does is delay when you have to face it.”

“I figured that out,” he replied dryly. “I’ll…do what I can.”

“Good. And I’ll read through this and try to understand the kind of damage we’re dealing with.” Decisively, she closed the folder and took his hand in both of hers. “You’re not fighting this alone, Artie. Remember that: you’re not alone.”

Artie swallowed, remembering the palladium diamond that contained James’s energy. “I will,” he promised. “I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow.”

She smiled at him. “You better.”