taxonomites | 006. [ voice & location: sanctuary for all ] and you give yourself away, with or without you.

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006. [ voice & location: sanctuary for all ] and you give yourself away, with or without you.

It was rare for Helen Magnus to actually fall asleep. As Will had so brilliantly put it: she kept an eye on the ranch. Fatigue did catch up to the Victorian woman eventually. It led her falling asleep on the couch in her office. Merely a cat nap. Perhaps it would have been longer if it the dreams she had were truly happy ones.

They were back home. The Cabal had struck the Abnormal population and were creating an invisible pathogen to start a war between Humans and Abnormals. The only way to stop it was to find the Source Blood, the very thing that caused the Abnormality of the Five to happen. They had found where Nigel Griffin's blood relatives were and were set to retrieve the Blood from Bahalasamm in the Indian Himalayas. Thanks to John, Sir James Watson, the apparently not dead Nikola Tesla, and Clara Griffin, they were able to succeed in retrieving it. They could fight the Cabal and stop the war. James had been too old. He forced himself to live too long. And he died. They had played right into their enemies hands. The Cabal had taken Ashley. Her daughter, and did something to her mind. They made her their slave. They unlocked the dormant Abnormality within her: teleportation. She was like John. And had given the Cabal the Source Blood.

Time had no limit in dreams. Six weeks had gone by, scouring the face of the planet with John to find any leads to Ashley. Only to learn the Cabal were after the Montana Project subjects. Six people with pure DNA, no Abnormalities or defects. Perfect DNA. The Cabal could insert any genetic code they wanted into them. And they wanted to insert the altered DNA of Ashley into them. When they had finally found Ashley, she wasn't the Ashley that Helen had watched grown up from a small girl. She was a being with the powers of the extinct Sanguine Vampiris. Healing, super speed and strength, her teleportation, telepathy between her and the other Mantana Project subjects. Helen had to save her daughter. She was her only daughter. The only thing that remained of her days in Oxford.

They had attacked her Sanctuaries around the globe. Tokyo fell. Moscow. New Deli. They held the line at the U.K. Sanctuary. It was a war. Except then they came to her Sanctuary in the United States. She begged Ashley to listen to her. She was so afraid. She had to reach out to her daughter, to save her, to bring her back. And as the EM shield returned, she finally had. Ashley - altered but still in front of her - had come back. After six weeks of finding her she had finally found her. Except she knew her daughter. She knew what Ashley was planning. Ashley was going to throw herself into the EM shield to stop the last of the Montana Subjects. Ashley was going to kill herself. To sacrifice herself to save the rest of the Sanctuaries. To save her.

"Ashley, please!"

"...Mom."

Helen wanted to scream as Ashley teleported into the shield. Instead she woke herself up from the pure shock. Panting, Helen knew they weren't dreams. They were memories. What Claire had asked about had suddenly happened to her. She didn't register the wounds on her arm, caused by the altered Ashley, and how they had suddenly appeared. Helen was in Taxon. She wasn't home. Ashley was here. Ashley was still alive. The distraught woman pushed herself up from the couch and began running through the Sanctuary to find her daughter. Her only daughter.

She checked Ashley's room, not finding her. Her bike was gone. The gym and shooting range were empty as well. Helen paid no attention to the confused residents she surely passed as she tore through the massive building. Helen couldn't remember running so fast in her life. Ashley wasn't in the kitchen or her office. Eventually she finally came to a stop in her lab, panting and trying so hard not to cry. Ashley wasn't in the Sanctuary.

"...Mom."

The echo from the memory stabbed her heart. Ashley was gone. Her only daughter was dead. The daughter she had finally brought into the world after being alone for a century wasn't there. She was alone again. She pulled the tablet off her bracelet in desperation, hoping that Ashley had left a message. Something to tell her that she was still there. That she wasn't gone. But the only thing was the message from the day before when she had returned to normal. There was nothing from her.

In frustration and fear she threw the tablet across the room. She wanted to see it break. If something else broke, then she couldn't. She could still hold herself together despite the most important person to her being gone. The tablet hit the wall of her lab and simply fell to the floor unharmed. Completely perfect. Like nothing was wrong. Like everything was going to be fine. It wasn't fine. Ashley was dead. And it was her fault. She allowed Ashley to go to the Cabal to try and stop them from the inside. Ashley was dead because of her.

Letting out a sob, Helen finally crumbled. She went down to her knees and leaned backwards, feeling the last of her grips on her emotions break. In that moment the strong woman that so many people knew and admired was no longer there. Just the broken woman who had lived far too long. And completely unaware her sobs could be vaguely heard over the tablet across the room.

[ooc; canon bump ]

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Nightmares were nothing new for John. He had been having them for the better part of a century, and even in his recovered healthy, they plagued him. They had subsided drastically since Helen had allowed him residence in her Sanctuary. The accommodations were still on shaky terms, at best, but he was simply lingering on the edge of what Helen felt comfortable with.

When he woke, though, he knew immediately that something was wrong. He remembered. He remembered it all. John wondered where the memories had come from, but they felt so real that he could not deny them. Ashley had been mutated by the Cabal, had been turned into a weapon. They had fought her, and... He felt a lump form in his throat, which he quickly swallowed as he realized in a panic that if Helen recalled this, if it was true...

He was moving before the thought could complete itself. His room, by her arrangement, was incredibly far from hers. He had refused to teleport within her home, unless specifically asked in order to complete a task. John was a model guest. Even as the house slumbered, he obeyed his unspoken rules. He made good time reaching her quarters, though, and with shaking hands, he reached up to knock.

The sob barely reached his ears, but the slightest chance of it gave him more than enough reason to open the door. He stood in the doorway, the light from the hall pouring in around his frame. He was silent, looking at her. He knew that pain from his memories.

"Helen..." He closed his eyes and balled his fists slowly. "We must find her. There has to be, has to be something that can be done." He knew he sounded so desperate. "This cannot be the end of it."

Helen looked up at John. She was clearly trying to stop sobbing now. Hold it all in, bottle it up. She had done so with James's death. When she thought her father had died. She could do the same about Ashley. Couldn't she?

Except both James and Ashley were dead because of her mistakes. And the head of the Tokyo Sanctuary. And New Deli. And Moscow. And Clara Griffin.

"John." She let out a sob as she said his name. "Ashley... she..."

He entered her room slowly. For as much as he wanted to comfort her, John was still unsure about what his place was in this home. He reached her side just as she let out his name.

"I know." He said, knowing that the words would be too much. "I know, Helen. I don't know what this place is or what it does to people, but could it be a lie?" He could feel it in his bones. It was as much the truth as anything else unbelievable in their lives. He was grasping at straws, trying to give Helen hope.

One hand tentatively moved to rest on her back. There was an awkwardness in his show of comfort. To part of him, this was second nature, but he wasn't ever sure when he had overstep his boundaries.

"She's dead!" Helen yelled at the top of her lungs. She needed to express it. To let it all out. "She's dead because I failed! I failed to protect her, for God sakes, John! I can ... I can protect every Abnormal in the world but not my daughter!"

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "Sense, woman!" John had not raised his voice to this point since he'd entered Taxon. "If she was meant to be dead, do you think she'd exist at all here?" It made enough sense to him. Maybe that was why they were here, to change the wrongs in their lives, to save her.

"In all your years, are you so blind to the possibility of more than your mind gives you?" He released her and turned his back, walking around the room. "Damnit, Helen, I've seen it to. That world is not one I'd wish to return to, but here, here we have a chance. We can make the difference."

"And what if she's no longer here?!" Helen countered, the anger quickly raising in her own voice. "What if our conditions here are related to those back home?! Ashley could be dead here and no one would ever know it except us!"

At the moment she wasn't thinking sense or even logic. That base had crumbled when Ashley threw herself onto the EM shield. Her world wasn't the same knowing her daughter was dead.

"If the case proves to be dire, then we find a solution." John's voice had lowered, though the firmness remained. "Death is not the end. Not for you, for me, so who's to say it would be for her, hmm?" John refused to think that there was a final answer to any problem, especially when it came to the few people in this world that he cared about.

He stepped closer to her. "You aren't thinking clearly, and you shouldn't. This is your daughter." He swallowed the offending possessive word our and continued, "But I will not let you give up."

Bruce really spent too much time in the hallways of the Sanctuary. But really, it was better than staying holed up in his room, so it was some kind of progress. Small progress, but you take what you can get.

But when Helen ran past him, the look on her face floored him. From everything he'd seen of the woman, this set every alarm ringing and he went after her. If it wasn't for the random Extra-residents and regular residents just getting in the way (the hallways being too narrow for fruit carts, something had to get in the way), he would have caught up to her faster.

By the time he'd gotten to the lab, there was a low beeping from his wrist, but Bruce was in decent enough shape to brush it off with a glance. Especially as Helen was collapsing in front of him. "Dr. Magnus...!"

Her gaze lifted slightly to see Bruce enter the room. It just dawned on her now that most likely several inhabitants of the Sanctuary had seen her running at an alarming rate. But, she was glad they just let her run. Run until she couldn't and collapsed. She couldn't run away from it anymore. Ashley was gone.

Helen tried to speak but it came out more of a chocked sob. "Mr. Harrison."

A corner of his mind, the one always counting heartbeats per second and checking for possible exits, noted the monitor had silenced itself. But the rest of Bruce's brain was on the woman on the floor.

He stepped gingerly into the lab and bent down in front of her. Shaking his head at the formality, he asked, "What happened?" Maybe if he knew what was wrong, he could try and fix it, or help somehow.

Then he ignored the other corner of his mind that whispered he'd only make it worse, just like always.

What happened? Helen didn't think she could retell it all. There was so much to tell, so much she would have to explain. Admitting to herself and to someone else that Ashley's death was her fault. She couldn't do it. Instead her body shook slightly as she tried to hold back another sob. It physically hurt.

"Ashley's gone."

It was the only thing she could manage to say.

"Gone?" Even as he said it, Bruce realized how stupid people sounded when they just repeated something. But gone was one of those token vague words that could mean a lot of things, and judging from the way the doctor was right now, it was nothing good. His voice was low, trying to be calming and comforting, but urgent all the same. "Gone, like. From the Sanctuary or...?"

If Helen had been in her proper mind set, she would have rationally explained the situation. Except she wasn't. Instead she grabbed onto his shirt and tried her hardest not to shake him. Helen knew she couldn't take it out on 'David.' It wasn't his fault. It was her own fault.

"For God sakes, she's dead!" Despite the crack in her voice and the sobs she managed to yell it. Not at him, but just yelling. "She's dead - she's gone - and if I ... if I ever leave Taxon she won't be there!"

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