We swim in different oceans, but land on the same shore.
DYAD -1962
Rachel stared through the glass.
Helena, head tilted, stared back at her.
The glass was one way. Rachel had checked. Helena couldn’t see her, she couldn’t. But every time Rachel moved, Helena’s eyes followed her. Those eyes. Since Sarah had disappeared - had abandoned them - Helena's eyes hadn’t been ebbing and flowing with the glow as before, but had been steadily gleaming gold. She was looking less and less human all the time, Rachel thought.
She had overheard her mother and Suchong discussing Helena, how her extreme emotional state had been feeding into the effect of the ADAM on her system, and now, with having reached an age, hormones were reacting with both aspects and she was - changing. The first Little Sister to reach puberty was a valuable source of data for DYAD. Rachel counted herself lucky that it wasn’t having the same effect on her. Or I’d be locked in there with her. The next thought came unbidden - maybe then they’d pay attention to me again
Helena had moved closer to the glass and stretched her fingers out, tracing a pattern on the window. Rachel frowned, trying to decipher it. Her own hand reached out and she followed Helena’s fingers with her own. Until she realised that the other girl was tracing stick figures on the glass, stick figures of two little girls, over and over. Rachel’s hand faltered.
Helena stopped when Rachel did, moved even closer and spoke. What Suchong referred to as ‘the cage’ was soundproof but naturally, there was a security camera and Rachel could hear her via intercom.
Sestra ?
Rachel pushed the button and spoke.
“No, Helena. It’s me. Sarah is gone. You know she is.”
Біль. потрібна моя сестра. потрібно знайти її. випусти мене.* Now.
Rachel’s brow furrowed slightly. She had picked up a little Ukranian from the twins and Dr Tenenbaum, and recognized the word for ‘sister’ and ‘hurt’, and the phrase ‘let me out’ had been repeated so often now by Helena that the entire staff they had left here knew it. She had screamed it at them for weeks.
‘Helena. You know I can’t let you out. If mother even knew I was speaking to you…”
The golden eyes looked at her unblinkingly. Helena's lips curled downwards, then she suddenly slammed her hand against the glass, making Rachel flinch. She stalked away from the window, her hair lit up by the fluorescent lights. It was almost completely white-blond now. And she was - was it possible? - taller than she was a week ago, when Rachel had last visited.
Sneaking down here in the middle of the night, just to - what? Look at Helena? See that she wasn’t Sarah and be heartbroken and furious all over again? Rachel sighed and put her hand to her face.
Stupid, stupid she sighed at herself, icy cold fingers scoring faint lines down her cheek. All she managed to accomplish was Helena’s anger, and the waste of her own time. It had been over a year since Dr Tenenbaum had disappeared with a group of Little Sisters, and Helena still expected Sarah to just appear one day and save her. Stupid thought Rachel bitterly, burying the same hope deep down in the pit of her stomach, underneath the fire and the ice and the lightning. All she wanted to hold onto was the anger.
She should just leave Helena down here in the cage for the doctors to prod and measure and take samples from. Why should she care about her? She wasn’t Sarah. She wasn’t Sarah. To her horror, Rachel felt tears pricking at her eyes.
She gently slapped her own face, her hand like a block of ice.
Sestra. Sestra-Rachel.
Helena’s voice was quiet. She had come back to the window and splayed both her hands on it.
I know you miss her too. Let me out, and we can go and find her, together. Our сім'я. *
Rachel hesitated.
Then she pressed her finger down on the intercom button.
“ Your family.” she snapped. “I already have a family.”
She heard Helena scoff with laughter, as if she knew exactly how Rachel felt about her parents. Oh. Of course, she did. Of course she would share Sarah’s ability to sense her emotions. Was there nothing Rachel had that was hers alone? She was so sick of being stuck here in DYAD, while splicers roamed free around Rapture, tearing the city apart. She looked through the glass at Helena again. Now she was kneeling on the floor in the middle of the room, her back to the window. If Rachel had ever heard of prayer, that’s what she would have thought Helena was doing.
⇌ ⇌ ⇌
Helena knelt on the padded floor. The bad man called it the cage. There were no bars, but it was a cage nethertheless. The walls were thickly padded, but with - she closed her eyes - solid brick and iron underneath, as was the door, barred and locked and sealed with a password. The mirrored window was the weak point but that too was thick with layers of glass and wire. She didn’t quite understand what was happening to her body, but she could feel herself growing stronger every day. And she knew to hide the extent of it from her captors.
Her senses too had...expanded? Helena could now not only read Rachel’s emotions - and that had grown exponentially easier in the last year, (That strange underlay of fear, deep down under a heavy layer of anger and disdain and wrapped around a very small core of...loneliness?) - but she could sense everyone else's. It wasn’t like reading thoughts, not like with Sarah, but she could read their intentions.
None of them were good.
Rachel was a puzzle. Helena knew the other girl loved her sister, she could feel that pouring off Rachel in waves, it hurt, because now it was all twisted up with betrayal and abandonment and hatred and a continually simmering rage. And she hated Helena for not being Sarah, but kept coming back down here to see her. Like she was expecting to find Helena gone and Sarah in her place.
If Rachel would only let her out and help her find Sarah...but she wouldn’t.
She wouldn’t use her powers against the people that were keeping them both here and Helena couldn’t quite grasp why. If she could do what Rachel could do, DYAD would have burnt to the ground already. She rolled her shoulders back in a kind of shrug. No matter. Soon, she would be strong enough to get out of the cage on her own, and then she would rip this place apart to find Sarah. And if she had really left Rapture, as Rachel had told her, then Helena would find a way to leave too.
It was almost unfathomable that Sarah had left without her. Something terrible must have happened thought Helena. And now she was so far away, too far, to hook into. The severing of their ADAM-driven psychic connection had been almost unbearable - she had been in a daze for weeks afterwards - but she still knew that her sister was alive. The knowledge sat in her, like a tiny clenched fist in her heart, holding a grain of hope.
She could feel Rachel still standing there, behind the mirror. They were going to catch her down here, one of these nights. Then she will wish she she had let me out. Helena smiled, in a grim sort of way, then started humming Sarah’s favourite song. She could feel Rachel’s anger ebb, a kind of bitter sadness flowing into its place.
She heard Rachel whisper
you’re a monster
Her voice was thin and tremulous, as if trying to convince herself.
Then she was gone.