Disclaimer: Warehouse 13 was Created by Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote and was Produced by Universal Cable Productions.
I make no money from this story and all Rights are retained by the original Persons and Companies.
This story takes place a month after the events depicted in "Endless", the final episode of the series.
Rated: PG-(WH) 13

Come Forth
A Warehouse 13 Adventure
By JMK758
Chapter One
Perpetual Wonder

It has been a month, a month of high but declining tension since the Warehouse 14 nightmare; a month since they'd fought to prevent the theft, or usurping, of their home by the alternate Time Line Benedict Valda; a month since Artie, Pete, Myka, Steve, Mrs. Frederic and she had sat around the inspiration for King Arthur's Round Table, a.k.a. the Warehouse's Time Capsule, contributing memories of their defining moments before the Warehouse would move to its new home country; a month since it had not.

The Mason's Compasses had gone dark, the Square sits secure in its vault, the two segments of Hiram Abiff's Setting Maul have been returned to their secure places and days of high drama have quieted to the Warehouse's normality, whatever that word means here.

x

Claudia Donovan is back at 'Leena's Bed and Breakfast', seven miles from the Warehouse and on the border of Univille, South Dakota, on a late afternoon break from her duties. The Rest Stop, nestled in the front of a woodland that follows the highway on each side, serves as the Warehouse agents' home and headquarters. It's an unofficial break, for none of them punch a clock; for which Pete Lattimer has expressed relief, fearing the possibility that it might punch back.

She sits on a couch before the B&B's new owner, Abigail Cho. The woman had come here some weeks ago at the behest of that mysterious group of diverse men and women known as the Regents. She'd joined the agents under the simple cover as the Inn's new owner following the murder of Leena Frederic, who is herself no relation to the other Frederic of formidable fame.

She has two purposes; a true one and a hidden one:

Her true purpose had been as a Psychologist, hired by the Regents, to help Arthur Nielsen deal with having been compelled to murder Leena, his longest and dearest friend.

By extension, she is also to assist the other four men and women in dealing with the drama, chaos and the occasional traumas that are part of the daily life of Warehouse Agents.

The hidden purpose is that she hides in plain sight, for she is the Keeper of the Knowledge of the Warehouse. Once in a generation a Regent is selected to be the person who carries the total wisdom of all of the Warehouses, so that if the written records are ever damaged, or even destroyed, they will not be lost.

As such, only she and her fellow Regents know about her. It is only recently that Irene Frederick became the first Caretaker in the long history of the Warehouses to be granted that knowledge.

This is why she pretends ignorance of her fellow Regents, even to the point of referring to the Council in the third person.

x

This afternoon Claudia Donovan, the youngest of the team, has come in need of talking out stresses that are not experienced in any other job on the face of the Earth.

This young woman is so like her friends and yet vastly unlike. Anyone seeing her would take in short, flame red hair softened by honey brown eyes and, quite frankly, a face and figure to assure that if she lived in Univille instead of miles outside town, she would be unlikely to ever want for companionship.

But in the past few weeks she's come to see much more in her young charge, including a stunningly fast wit, a competence possessed by people half her age and joie de vivre equally captivating and formidable.

x

Claudia struggles to find words to explain, terms to convey her heartache and fears, and still no words come.

She keeps her eyes closed, not so much so she won't look at the Asian woman seated in the chair opposite her but so she may see in the darkness her own thoughts, that she may put into order inchoate thoughts and elusive, chaotic feelings.

At least, that had been the plan.

x

She'd sat down over three minutes ago; she has so many thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, hopes, fears, griefs that she'd wanted to pour out in a deluge of words, and found only a desert, a wide and long expanse of dry silence.

She knows the psychologist will not interrupt the silence, but will wait until that silence forces her to break it.

So many minutes, so many unendurable minutes, so much she can no longer stand and cannot escape.

"Please," she whispers when tears batter at her closed eyes, "tell me what to say."

But Abigail doesn't.

x

Breath that had been slow, calm, steady shatters, her chest shakes in its forced gasps and chaos. A tear slips out below her right eyelid, trickles down her cheek. She tries to keep her face still, serene, placid and her breath is in chaos, comes faster; gasps and fractured exhalations. Tears slip out, slide down her cheeks and she can't bring herself to wipe them.

The more she fights for calm, the more forcefully her breath rips at her, making her gasps chaotic and the tears come faster.

She hasn't cried in so long. Always she's the strong one, always the chipper one, always the one who holds together.

That's who she is. It's not who she's expected or desired to be; it's who she wants to be.

It's who today she cannot be.

x

"Please." She scrubs at her eyes; more tears come, burn her eyes, wet the cheeks she'd forced dry. "Help me!"

"I want to help you."

"I can't stop it!" The tears win, wrack her body. "I Can't STOP It!" She covers her face with her hands, elbows propped on thighs and tears wet her palms as she shatters; grief ripping loud cries from her, trembling so hard with her sobs that she must gasp at air. Grief, rage, torrents of tears rip her and she screams out agony that will not be contained.

Over and over she screams, feeling her hands must be dripping; breath chaotic as her sobs rip her body.

Abigail doesn't move, has tissues ready when Claudia can use them, but for a long time she waits behind a wall against her own empathy.

It's several minutes, longer than she'd expected, before the younger woman's tears stop; for she passes the point where she's exhausted the torrent.

Claudia collapses back into the couch, her arms drop to her sides and she lays, head back, staring at the ceiling, panting.

When her breath slows, Abigail stands, crosses the space between them, puts the clump of tissues into her hand and resumes her seat and her silence.

x

Claudia wipes her face, blows her nose, accepts another set of tissues and scrubs her eyes again. She continues collapsed on the cushions, face upward, and ultimately her breath slows.

"Who were you crying for?"

Claudia is shaking, her emotions start to well up and Abigail prepares to wait out another bout, but whether it's grief exhausted - for now - or control reestablished, or both, the woman doesn't break. She instead picks up her head, opens her eyes, rubs them dry.

"I see her, all the time."

x

At least now Abigail has her first clue; it's a woman. "Your sister?"

They've spoken several times about her older sister; thirty years old, fifteen years in an 'artifact-induced' coma, freed a little over a month ago from having been 'whammied' by an artifact that gave her fury-fueled telekinesis with which she'd killed their parents, then she was recently kidnapped by a self-serving monster from an alternate time-line, the perverted image of a good man, who'd used yet another artifact to force Claire to try to kill again and again.

The elder sister has been freed now of several artifacts, restored to such a life as she may make for herself, and lives with their elder brother in Menlo Park.

The brother, Joshua, had had his own bout of artifact-caused chaos, which had begun with being trapped for years in his own version of alternate dimension hell.

Altogether, it's a wonder how the Donovan family has endured as well as they have.

But everybody has that Breaking Point.

"No, Claire is fine. She and Josh are great. I saw them this weekend. They're having a ball together."

"Then who do you keep seeing?"

"Leena."

x

Leena Frederic, no relation to the Warehouse Caretaker and which name few use for that reason - she's simply Leena to everybody - is the former proprietress of this 'Bed and Breakfast'. She'd been murdered some two months ago by Artie Nielsen during a psychotic break - again artifact induced.

That death, and the emotional and psychological suffering the Senior Warehouse Agent had endured, had led to her being pulled out of retirement by the Regents, that mysterious and undefined organization that oversees the Warehouse in the same way that their predecessors had for two millennia, since the Ptolemaic Dynasty had established Warehouse 2 in 323BC after the death of the founder of Warehouse 1, Alexander the Great.

x

The ownership of the B&B had been more a cover; she'd been set here to help not just Arthur but the family of agents who'd had to face the sudden, senseless murder of one of their own by one of their own.

That murder, and many other stresses with which her lesser informed colleagues would be unable to cope, is not something that will be dealt with either quickly or easily. In fact, she looks to the treating of these five disparate individuals as defining the rest of her career.

x

"What would you like to tell me?"

"It started –" once again she fights for still tenuous control. "It started the day she was killed. Pete was the first one to see her; in fact, he saw her several times before any of us did." She dries her eyes again. "We thought it was wishful thinking, that he couldn't deal with her death and had been 'seeing' her, but it turned out she was helping him find clues to have us help Artie. Did he tell you about that?"

"Claudia, you know I'm not allowed to tell you anything I'm told in Session, just as I can't tell anyone what you say."

"Yeah, that's right. I know."

x

Abigail knows the woman hadn't forgotten, that restriction is something Psychotherapists and the Clergy share in common; except when under extraordinary circumstances, nothing shared in confidence can be revealed to any third party.

"And now others have seen her?"

"All of us have. Me plenty of times."

x

There are many reasons why someone experiences some version of this, and under normal circumstances and situations there is a vast store of therapeutic information to draw from, but it is exceedingly rare for the phenomenon to have an objective reality – except where the Warehouse and its agents are concerned.

"Tell me about it."

"She's just - well, it's her, except you can see … she's translucent, you can see things through her. And she never speaks. Well, she doesn't have lungs, or a tongue – except she does. I mean she looks normal, just like she did the day she – well, like the day before she died."

"Does she communicate with you?"

"Not… exactly. Like the second time Pete saw her she pointed to a cabinet, kept pointing to it until he examined it, then kept doing it until he examined it right and he found papers hidden in a false drawer top, exactly the papers we needed to figure out what Artie was doing."

"And since then?"

"She's appeared to Myka four times in the past month, to Artie eleven times, to Steve twice, to Pete three more… and me … thirty-seven times."

"That's a lot."

"Tell me about it. I can't get through a day without her appearing somewhere. Nineteen times here, eighteen times at the Warehouse."

"Do you think that might be because of your special connection to the Warehouse?" She'd been introduced to that 'special connection' during a dramatic incident involving a railroad spike, locked expansion joints, an electrical maelstrom and a goo rocket launcher.

"As the 'Caretaker-to-be'? I'm sure of it."

"Is there something she wants you to do?"

"I'm sure of that too."

"What?"

Abigail is grateful she isn't holding anything fragile; it would have shattered on the floor.