InsaneJournal

WHO: Nikola Tesla & Zoe Tesla
WHAT: Zoe goes a canon update, and it's not at all pleasant. Nikola comforts as a good dad should.
WHEN: November 4th; Middle of the Night
WHERE: The Sanctuary
RATING: PG
STATUS: In Progress

Nikola hadn’t even bothered to turn on the lights. Stumbling around in the dark as he grabbed his PDA off the nightstand and rushed out the door to his room and down the hall, Nikola was saying as much reassuring stuff as he could manage, but his mind was a hiss of white noise that was screaming that Zoe was in danger from something or someone, and he was too far away from her for his comfort right now. For the first time, Nikola was mentally cursing the size of the Sanctuary and more so, as he ran up against a door with an irritatingly outmoded crossbred lock of high tech and Victorian tech that was standing in his way, mentally added to his to-do list a complete overhaul of the Sanctuary’s network systems. Helen liked things traditional? Well, Helen wasn’t here, and Nikola doubted she would be showing up anytime soon to complain if he made a few adjustments for the better.

Finally making it through the door, Nikola took the last few steps to the room that had been Zoe’s for as long as she had been here, slipping his PDA into his robe pocket as he crossed over to the bed and gathered his adoptive daughter into his arms. “I’m here, kiddo. I’m here,” He whispered, running his fingers lightly through her curls as he tried to calm her down or at least offer some comfort over whatever it was that had frightened her so much. As much as Nikola was tempted to soothe her, to say that it was only a dream, he knew well enough to know that Colligo didn’t always work like that.

It might have been a dream, but it might have also been something a lot worse.

“What was it, Zoe?” Nikola asked, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “You’re safe now. I promise. You can tell me.”

Zoe had been dreaming. It hadn't been a very nice dream. Well. Parts of it had been nice. Spending time with her mommy. One of them, anyway. Watching new stuff get built. Getting popsicles. Orange even, her favorite. But then things had turned bad. There was lots of wind and yelling. She'd been afraid, and crying, and she'd wanted her mommy, but it didn't matter. Things were just bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

She'd woken up screaming, thrashing about in her covers and wanting desperately to escape all of the scary memories that were new and yet not, floating around in her head. They were having trouble fitting in with everything else, even surpassing the terror she'd felt when she'd been kidnapped and taken away from the city of Colligo for a little while. About the time she felt her daddy's arms wrap around her was about the time the tears began to fall, and she crumpled inward on herself as she collapsed into his arms, sobbing brokenly and rocking ever so slightly back and forth.

"V-Vincent was mean," she whispered only at Nikola's urging, burying her face in his chest and shivering at the memories. "He made bad things happen. And the place I was sleeping in was gross." That part seemed worse, somehow, even if she couldn't quite explain why. With a tear-stained face, she sat back and peered upward at her father. "A man asked mommy to work for him. She said..." Zoe trailed off, sniffled, then continued. "She said no, and then we were someplace else.." She stopped then, hiccupped once, then rubbed at her eyes.

"I wish I didn't remember," she admitted quietly.

It was worse, well worse than a dream, and Nikola had been afraid of that. It had been quite awhile since he had gotten one of the “updates” from home, but he remembered how disorienting it had been waking up with new memories that weren’t strictly his but weren’t strictly not either. And his hadn’t been particularly nasty or negative in the whole of things. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for Zoe to have her entire existence disrupted so harshly by memories from a scarring home experience that she would have been more than fine without knowing had happened.

“We can’t take the memories away, kiddo,” Nikola said, not really one for false platitudes when they would do absolutely nothing to help. The memories were hers now, and she would have to figure out how to live with them in the best way that she could. Maybe, maybe if he had tried, he could think of a way to remove them, but at the end of the day, that would only be a stopgap, a temporary block to whatever this place tried to do to all of them. And Zoe was a big girl. She was his big, strong, brilliant girl, and he had absolutely no doubt that she could live with what she had seen. “But if either of these men come to the city, if either of them end up here, I promise you, I will do everything in my power to stop them well before they hurt you, your Mommy, or anyone else ever again.”

That wasn’t a false platitude. This was a promise.

Rubbing her back in slow circles as he held her, Nikola’s gaze was soft and pained as he peered down at his daughter, “Is there anything I can do now?”

Still sniffling quietly, Zoe snuggled back up against Nikola. Idly she picked at a loose thread on her pajama pants, eyes staring at her lap as she worried her lower lip with her teeth for a moment. Clearly, there was something she wanted to say but wasn’t quite sure if she should. However, after a moment, she finally replied, “One of them’s already here, daddy.” Trying to blink away the last of her tears, she peered up at him. “His name’s Stanton Parish. I remember his his name, back home.”

Shivering again, the little girl’s lower little trembled. “He seemed real nice,” she admitted quietly. “He said he liked my drawing. Why’d he do that?” It didn’t make any sense to her, being nice to someone only to turn mean when you didn’t get your way. People weren’t supposed to act like that. Especially grown-ups.

“Can I sleep with you and mommy tonight?” The question was asked without any preamble, Zoe raising a hopeful gaze to Nikola as she waited for him to answer.

Stanton Parish. Nikola recalled glimpsing that name on one of the network posts, a response to one of the newest panicky arrivals. He hadn’t paid it too much mind to the message in the course of his browsing, but the man hadn’t seemed...particularly dangerous. Of course, Nikola knew all too well that appearances could be deceiving. He was one of those deceiving individuals more often than not. Running a hand through her hair, Nikola shook his head with a slow, thoughtful frown spreading across his face, “I don’t know, kiddo. But I can find out,” He said, a hint of an edge in his voice that made it clear that if he didn’t like the answer, this Parish wasn’t going to be someone that they would have to deal with for long.

Gathering Zoe up in his arms, Nikola was already standing with her before he replied, “Of course you can,” He said, pressing a kiss lightly to her forehead before turning towards the halls and heading back to his and Kate’s room, less franticness in his step now that he knew that Zoe wasn’t harmed in any way. At least, not physically. “I keep thinking I need to go over this place,” Nikola said with a bit of a smile. “Get it in better working over not so in line with the 1800s standard. What do you think, kiddo? Want to help me work up some specs in the morning?”

Because, really, Nikola couldn’t think of a much better way to try and get Zoe into a happy space to get back to sleep than offering her something to look forward to.

Yawning widely, Zoe nodded at his question and gave Nikola a sleepy, not quite as watery as before, smile. “Mmhmm,” she responded softly as she wrapped her arms around his neck and peered around the Sanctuary while they headed toward his room. “Miss Helen won’t like it if she comes back,” she tacked on thoughtfully. “But it could use some stuff so it’s easier to get around. ‘Specially with Mister John and Miss Ashley gone now.”

Stifling another yawn, Zoe rested her head on Nikola’s shoulder and was silent for a moment before speaking again. When she did, her tone was already getting a bit thicker sounding as sleep slowly began to creep back over her. “You should talk to my mommy too,” she suggested. Pausing, she clarified, “My other mommy. The one who had me. ‘Cause she can make anything.” There was absolute certainty in Zoe’s voice as she spoke of Skylar. Although, after a heartbeat, she did mention, “Just don’t tell her ‘bout my dream, ok? Cause if she doesn’t remember herself, I don’t want to upset her.”

Because that really was the crux of it, wasn’t it? While the Sanctuary was fine enough to get around without there being an emergency impending, in crisis situations, they had almost always fallen back on the fact that John and Ashley could easily transport things, people, abnormals, whatever, quickly and efficiently between floors without having to worry with all of the lag time of normal travel. With the two of them gone, though, it was up to the rest of them to figure out ways to adapt. And to be quite honest, Nikola had never been very good at not pushing forward with progress. His friends, as brilliant as they were, always seemed more comfortable rooted within the traditional, but Nikola, never. He’d always imagined he’d been born in the wrong century, and having lived through one and into the next, he could say with absolute certainty that he was right. This era was where he belonged, and this era was where the Sanctuary needed to be as well.

“I will definitely do that,” Nikola said, a soft smile crossing his face as he rubbed Zoe’s back as he held her, working to ease her back into sleep. “It’ll give us a leg up, and it may help her feel even more at home here,” He said, really liking the idea of having the assistance in getting this place back into working order. Not to say that he wasn’t well equipped to do this on his own if he needed to, but he’d found since being here, oddly enough, that it was actually a lot more enjoyable working with others than it was working by yourself.

It was nice having a team that spoke the same language.

“And I promise I won’t say a thing about your dream,” Nikola whispered as reassuringly as he could. “It’s bad enough having you in this state. I don’t want her there, either. Not if we can help it.”

Zoe smiled sleepily up at him as they finally reached the bedroom. Once she was in the bed, she scooted toward the middle, the warmth of Kate’s sleeping form helping to calm her a little more. “‘Kay,” she agreed with a yawn, making sure to keep her voice quiet. “And I think she’ll like, getting to help. She does good when she’s building stuff.” There was a bit of wisdom there, an acknowledgment from the child that she knew how much her mother struggled with simply just being a mother, sometimes, and how much she worried her mom was giving up too much of herself while trying.

“G’night, daddy,” she tacked on after a heartbeat or two, eyelids already fluttering shut once more. “I love you and we can talk in the morning.” Then she reached out, one hand resting on his chest while she turned her head toward Kate. Within moments, she was asleep again, with the memories from back home shoved away inside her mind and not bothering her in the least, anymore.

As tired as Nikola might have been when he was woken up, now, there was little true desire to go immediately back to sleep. Tucked in next to his two favorite girls, Nikola was just content to watch them sleep as he formulated plans in his head for the next day. It was going to be a massive project, but he was sure that they could tackle it. Together, there wasn’t much of anything they couldn’t do.