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Artie asked her to look up sugarless cookie recipes the day after he’d sent Pete and Myka on their first assignment. Leena could have told him: Myka might say she didn’t eat sugar, but her aura spoke a different truth. It was trademark Artie, thoughtful beneath layers of brash arrogance.
For almost an entire year, it had been just her and Artie and Warehouse 13. She had both more and less to do then. Artie was constantly in the field and needed her to provide technical support – when he came home, exhausted, it was up to Leena to scold him into resting and to store what he’d brought back with him. She was never lost when she walked up and down the Warehouse’s aisles. She always knew exactly where she was. The bed and breakfast was empty, though. It echoed, and seemed larger than even Warehouse 13’s spatially enlarged dimensions. She would have preferred to just stay at the Warehouse, but she hadn’t been allowed to do that since the last time she woke up to find artefacts dancing around her head.
In the almost-entire year they were alone together, Artie took to stress baking in the house’s kitchen. He would use his key at random times of the night to get in through the back door. There was an artefact, the Inaudible, that he would use to make himself noiseless in her home because he was courteous in that way. She felt his aura anyway. Stress showed itself in black striations, lingering around him like the afterimage of flash photography.
Artie’s aura was as familiar to Leena as Artie’s face. She spent more time studying it. Some nights she would wake up sensing him moving around downstairs, quickly scan to determine if he would welcome her company, roll over and fall back to sleep. In the morning there would be scones or cinnamon buns or muffins waiting for her. Some nights she would walk down the usually-creaking, now-silent steps and enter the kitchen and watch Artie move from counter to cupboard. If he wanted to talk, he would turn off the Inaudible, and it would be a type of permission. If he kept it on, she smiled and got out her sewing and waited for morning to come.
It was different with Pete and Myka and ferret-Pete, and later Claudia, briefly Joshua. (Joshua’s aura had been fascinating, muted and numbed. For the first time in a very long time, there was the possibility of mystery. Leena attributed this to his existing on another plane for twelve years – Claudia called Leena’s interest in her brother correctly, though that interest didn’t last for long. Joshua’s aura may have been a mystery, but his face was not. He wore honesty like a brand, and Leena had little use for truth. Lies were so much more interesting.)
Pete liked cooking for them on the weekends. He would go grocery shopping, sometimes taking Claudia with him, and come back with double armfuls of raw ingredients. He would show Claudia how to chop, dice, and carmelize. Claudia’s aura would glow brightly with contentment, tinged with vague hero worship and not so vague teenaged lust. It made her younger than the words she would sometimes say.
Myka wandered at night. She had insomniac leanings. It was worse on some nights than others. She had gotten better since the prison assignment. Her aura was jewel-toned and geometric, like a shield, unlike the perfect vibrating net of Pete’s. Her wish-ferret, the other Pete, had his own animal presence that grated on Leena’s nerves every time he got loose in the house.
Claudia was so easy to make happy. Leena could just stroke her aura and that would be enough – could just offer a kind word, and it would be done.
That was what Leena was used for, that was what they determined her purpose was, when they found her as a child wandering through Warehouse 13. She was supposed to be a mood stabilizer, a therapeutic interface. Her mother was the Mona Lisa (the original Mona Lisa), which was where she got her smile; they still argued about who her father might be. She remembered waking up. That was all she could tell Mrs. Frederic when Mrs. Frederic came for her. She opened her eyes to electricity, her back against the canvas of her mother’s breast, and she was aware, and alive, and inhuman.
There were three agents and Mrs. Frederic and Mrs. Frederic’s bodyguard then. Artie was one of the agents – the other two have been frozen outside of time, caught in a calendar and unlikely to become disentangled until a hundred years have passed. Leena missed them sometimes. She grew up in the Warehouse, surrounded by her kind, feeling their energy gently pulse against her, resonating with her own frequencies. The Warehouse was her home and would always be her home – the thought of it burning down like the first twelve filled her with an entirely human horror.
She didn’t even mind being used. It was her purpose, after all, and she loved Artie for all that she sometimes loathed how he berated her family for acting according to their natures. He couldn’t listen to the artefacts, he wasn’t in tune to them. It wasn’t his fault, and it was even pitiable, like losing a sense – but it was painful for Leena, for her to see so many beautiful things rusting unburnished, yearning for use. Warehouse 13 was her home, where she was meant to be – but it wasn’t the home for so many others. For some artefacts, it was unwilling and unfair incarceration.
It was another night where Pete and Myka were out of town on assignment – out of country, Leena mused – and she felt the edges of Artie’s aura bump up against her awareness. The lack of sound corroborated his presence, and Leena walked on silent feet down the stairs to the kitchen where he was rolling out the dough. Sugar cookies this time.
She sat at the counter and smiled at him, the smile her mother gave her, and he quirked half of his face at her in an approximation of a roguish wink. Claudia was asleep upstairs, a deep REM cycle. He kept the Inaudible on, and Leena was glad, she was relieved, she was full of human emotion at the removal of that possibility of speech: that vindication that no choice was owned by her, that she would not be tested or tempted into telling Artie all the ways she had betrayed him.
She waited, as she had waited many times before, for morning.