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Before anyone asks, yes, I am obsessed with the Five. *grins sheepishly* It's the Victorian thing, I think. Or just the 'awesome characters with lots of intriguing backstory' thing. Also, I seem to be developing a thing for Nikola and James interacting ...
Title: Perception
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, John, Helen, Nigel. James POV. Some background Helen/John
Summary: Trying to explain the changes the Source Blood wrought within them. Set very soon after the experiment
Wordcount: 1947
Notes: I'm assuming the others injected the Blood relatively quickly after Helen.
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Perception
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, John, Helen, Nigel. James POV. Some background Helen/John
Summary: Trying to explain the changes the Source Blood wrought within them. Set very soon after the experiment
Wordcount: 1947
Notes: I'm assuming the others injected the Blood relatively quickly after Helen.
Disclaimer: Not mine
Perception
It had been Nikola who first understood the changes the Source Blood had wrought within James. He hadn't expected it to be, hadn't expected that the vampire, clawing his way to sanity through the first terrible pangs of a hunger none of them had ever expected, would listen to James' first faltering attempts at explanation, and understand. He'd wanted it to be John, perhaps, or Helen. Wanted them to see him first as he now was.
He'd tried to explain. They all had, in the beginning. Well, save Nikola, whose condition was blatantly obvious to all of them, and who was too wracked by hunger and the struggle for sanity to do more than snarl gutturally that what he felt was pain, thank you, and also hunger, and would they hurry up and fix it before he was tempted to make a snack of Nigel?
That had put something of a damper on their initial forays into understanding their new conditions, as they struggled to get his under control. Though they had each experimented to a degree on their own, they hadn't really had time to discuss it properly, in between watching Nikola and struggling to create something to help him.
But later, that first evening when they thought they'd managed it, when there was nothing to do but wait for the medication to take effect, when there was nothing to do but watch Nikola curl on his side on the settee and breathe through the ebbing of his hunger pangs ... then, James had tried to explain. Then they all had.
The demonstrations had come first. Nigel and John the most impressive, the most immediate, after Nikola. John, exuberant and delighted, testing the range of his talent, cautious enough to go only to places he knew, but daring enough to test the distance, to grin in delight as he handed Helen a flower from Camden market. Nigel, more subdued, more cautious, but James was sure he wasn't the only one who caught the contemplative gleam in their friend's eye as he watched his reflection fade to nothing, the slow consideration as he learned to control it at will. James resolved to keep an eye on that. He rather thought Helen did too.
Helen. Her talent ... they had not seen it, then. Not yet. Her condition had been so subtle, so profound, that it wasn't until years later that any of them understood the full impact of it. At the time, in their first rush of discovery, James had seen the quiet disappointment in her, the quiet fear that perhaps there had been no effect at all. Even, perhaps, a hint of envy, that her experiment should bring them all such gifts, and leave her so relatively untouched.
Later, as he himself started to fail, James would think that mildly ironic.
Then James himself. His turn to explain, his turn to demonstrate. And perhaps the latter had been easy enough, to show them how he could jump from clue to clue and dazzle them with the speed of his mind, his perception, to point out some small sample of the myriad details that struck at him, and reveal how his mind spun out the stories from even the smallest. To show them, that had been easy. But that wasn't what James wanted.
He'd wanted them to understand, had wanted to articulate the blinding clarity of it, the dense, staggering, all-pervasive layers of perception that suddenly saturated the world around him. That made everything ... made everything so unbearably dense, so unbearably clear, that he almost couldn't stand it at first. Almost couldn't bear the way every stray thread would snatch at his eyes, the way every passing glance told him so many stories, too many.
He'd tried to explain. But the words simply wouldn't come, the language too flat to show the desperate nuances of his new perception, too simple to relay the dizzying complexity of it. He could show them the results, could demonstrate time and again what he was now capable of seeing, but to explain the sensation of it, to explain the almost-pain of his mind's leaping, the press of detail against his senses ...
He couldn't. He couldn't articulate it, any more than Nigel could explain what it felt like to slip beyond the plane of sight, or John how it felt to fracture into a billion pieces and rebuild. The English language was not built for what they were, the words meaningless next to the raw sensation of what they had become. Explanation was impossible.
But he had wanted to try, wanted to spin the details inside his own perception into as coherent a story as they made of everything else. He'd had to try, with growing frustration, while John and Helen glanced at each other as if asking the other to calm him down, and Nigel suddenly watched him as warily as he'd watched Nikola.
And then, to the shock of everyone who'd almost forgotten he was there, who had presumed him lost in the relief of pain's passing, Nikola had spoken up. Soft and rasping, his native accent thicker through the strain, Nikola had looked up at James and spoke.
"Like a vision," he'd said softly, without his usual biting humour, without the snap of sarcasm such a phrase would usually warrant from him. "A moment of inspiration so profound, it demands all your senses, drives away all else. So strong that you may think of nothing else. An understanding, whole and complete." He paused, with a strange little smile, and a flash of something almost youthful in his eyes. "Something like that?"
James had stared at him. So, for that matter, had everyone else, but not, he thought, for the same reason. The others were shocked, perhaps, that Nikola had spoken at all, that he was sentient enough to speak once more, even, perhaps, that he should have been gentle, for him. But James ... James had been stunned simply by the accuracy of what he'd said. Simply by the fact that Nikola, of all people, seemed to genuinely understand.
"How ...?" he managed, turning in his seat to stare, to meet Nikola's wry gaze in stunned amazement. The scientist-become-vampire smiled at him, pale and drawn.
"The ... the things I build," Nikola had explained softly, with a strange flinch that James would not have seen before, as if he expected some violence for it. "Sometimes I see them so. Sometimes they come to me like that. From a thought, a word, the smallest thing, and then ... then they are there, complete in every detail. So real I may almost touch them." He stopped, watching James, that odd little smile lingering in the corner of his mouth, something curiously open in his eyes. "Is that what you see, James? To touch every little detail, and suddenly, from it, a thing complete?"
"... yes," James whispered, softly. Feeling his eyes skip across Nikola's features, feeling them catalogue every line and stray hair that marked his illness, every twitch that marked his struggle for self-control, every crease in his shirt that marked a sweat-soaked body's tossing. Seeing the story, whole and complete, and screaming in every detail. Skipping beyond, to the stories written into stains on the floor, scuffs on the doors, the flecks of mud clinging to John's shoes. Feeling the world press in dizzying completeness against his mind. "Yes," he'd said, very quietly, and knew that Nikola saw the pain in it.
Nikola tilted his head, watching him with that strange, faint smile, with cool, scientist's eyes and an odd little warmth, the faintest touch of fellow-feeling that many would say should be impossible, from him.
"I cannot decide if that should be a wonder, or a horror," the vampire mused softly, looking at him, ignoring the others as they looked between them. "To have that in every moment ... On the one hand, think what you'd get done. On the other ..." He shook his head, waved the thought away, and looked back up with a dazzling grin. "You must tell me, James, when you decide. So I can decide if I should be jealous of you ..."
James had smiled despite himself, had laughed a little. "The great Nikola Tesla is jealous of no-one," he reminded lightly, and was rewarded by the widening of that strained grin. But then he'd paused. He'd paused, and looked over them.
Looked at Nigel, who despite his fascination with the potential applications of his talent, had confessed to creeping fears that he should disappear and never come back. Looked to John, who had not said but surely thought what might happen were he to go too far or to the wrong place. To Helen, the first of them to try it, who feared she had been passed over altogether, who feared what she had caused them to become. To Nikola, whose change had come at so dramatic and terrible a cost. And to himself, to the lure of knowledge weighed against the pressure of perception.
"I think we all must decide," he'd said quietly, as he measured them, as they looked back and measured him in turn. These people, with whom he had quested to find the boundaries of the world. "I think we must all decide what we have become. And if it has been worth it ..."
"It has," John said immediately, smiling down at Helen in reassurance, with all the confident surety James had so long admired in him. John, to whom all the world was now open, and there was laughter in his eyes as he looked to James. There was joy.
Years later, perhaps more than anything else, that look would haunt James. That moment of joy, with all that had come later ...
"Indeed," Nikola murmured, steepling his fingers thoughtfully over his chest, laughing up at them when they looked at him in shock. Nikola, who had almost torn himself apart in the throes of craving, who had only just pulled himself back to sanity. That he of all of them ... But he smiled at them, and spread his hands, and said: "It's only a matter of control, after all. Once we have that ... think what we could do, with all we know now. With all we're capable of. Think what we could do ..."
"Yes," Helen said, crisp and confident, though neither James nor John had missed the relief in her eyes, that they did not think her terrible for what she had made them, that they did not hate what they had done. "All the world is before us, gentlemen. We should make the most of it."
Nigel snorted, the humour light over the traces of fear still in his eyes. "Well, I'm still in," he said, looking between Helen and Nikola in particular, smiling faintly as he caught James' eye. "You'll only get yourselves into trouble if I leave you alone. Right, James?"
"Oh, undoubtedly," he drawled, grinning at the narrow look Helen shot him, at the challenging eyebrow Nikola raised. "Undoubtedly ..."
And put that way, weighing the press of the world against his senses against what their changes had cost them, against what mischief they might get into in the future without him ... Well, at the very least his gift might let him catch some of their more dangerous schemes before they started. At least his new perception might let him guard them better ...
Later, James would think that even Nikola, had he heard that thought, would have realised the sheer arrogance of what they'd been, those first few years. Even Nikola would have admitted how deluded.
No perception, after all, no matter how powerful, no matter the source, would ever match the perfect clarity of hindsight.
A/N: Reading up on Tesla, I was sort of fascinated by his descriptions of those flashes of inspiration. It seemed to make sense, that he'd get James?
It had been Nikola who first understood the changes the Source Blood had wrought within James. He hadn't expected it to be, hadn't expected that the vampire, clawing his way to sanity through the first terrible pangs of a hunger none of them had ever expected, would listen to James' first faltering attempts at explanation, and understand. He'd wanted it to be John, perhaps, or Helen. Wanted them to see him first as he now was.
He'd tried to explain. They all had, in the beginning. Well, save Nikola, whose condition was blatantly obvious to all of them, and who was too wracked by hunger and the struggle for sanity to do more than snarl gutturally that what he felt was pain, thank you, and also hunger, and would they hurry up and fix it before he was tempted to make a snack of Nigel?
That had put something of a damper on their initial forays into understanding their new conditions, as they struggled to get his under control. Though they had each experimented to a degree on their own, they hadn't really had time to discuss it properly, in between watching Nikola and struggling to create something to help him.
But later, that first evening when they thought they'd managed it, when there was nothing to do but wait for the medication to take effect, when there was nothing to do but watch Nikola curl on his side on the settee and breathe through the ebbing of his hunger pangs ... then, James had tried to explain. Then they all had.
The demonstrations had come first. Nigel and John the most impressive, the most immediate, after Nikola. John, exuberant and delighted, testing the range of his talent, cautious enough to go only to places he knew, but daring enough to test the distance, to grin in delight as he handed Helen a flower from Camden market. Nigel, more subdued, more cautious, but James was sure he wasn't the only one who caught the contemplative gleam in their friend's eye as he watched his reflection fade to nothing, the slow consideration as he learned to control it at will. James resolved to keep an eye on that. He rather thought Helen did too.
Helen. Her talent ... they had not seen it, then. Not yet. Her condition had been so subtle, so profound, that it wasn't until years later that any of them understood the full impact of it. At the time, in their first rush of discovery, James had seen the quiet disappointment in her, the quiet fear that perhaps there had been no effect at all. Even, perhaps, a hint of envy, that her experiment should bring them all such gifts, and leave her so relatively untouched.
Later, as he himself started to fail, James would think that mildly ironic.
Then James himself. His turn to explain, his turn to demonstrate. And perhaps the latter had been easy enough, to show them how he could jump from clue to clue and dazzle them with the speed of his mind, his perception, to point out some small sample of the myriad details that struck at him, and reveal how his mind spun out the stories from even the smallest. To show them, that had been easy. But that wasn't what James wanted.
He'd wanted them to understand, had wanted to articulate the blinding clarity of it, the dense, staggering, all-pervasive layers of perception that suddenly saturated the world around him. That made everything ... made everything so unbearably dense, so unbearably clear, that he almost couldn't stand it at first. Almost couldn't bear the way every stray thread would snatch at his eyes, the way every passing glance told him so many stories, too many.
He'd tried to explain. But the words simply wouldn't come, the language too flat to show the desperate nuances of his new perception, too simple to relay the dizzying complexity of it. He could show them the results, could demonstrate time and again what he was now capable of seeing, but to explain the sensation of it, to explain the almost-pain of his mind's leaping, the press of detail against his senses ...
He couldn't. He couldn't articulate it, any more than Nigel could explain what it felt like to slip beyond the plane of sight, or John how it felt to fracture into a billion pieces and rebuild. The English language was not built for what they were, the words meaningless next to the raw sensation of what they had become. Explanation was impossible.
But he had wanted to try, wanted to spin the details inside his own perception into as coherent a story as they made of everything else. He'd had to try, with growing frustration, while John and Helen glanced at each other as if asking the other to calm him down, and Nigel suddenly watched him as warily as he'd watched Nikola.
And then, to the shock of everyone who'd almost forgotten he was there, who had presumed him lost in the relief of pain's passing, Nikola had spoken up. Soft and rasping, his native accent thicker through the strain, Nikola had looked up at James and spoke.
"Like a vision," he'd said softly, without his usual biting humour, without the snap of sarcasm such a phrase would usually warrant from him. "A moment of inspiration so profound, it demands all your senses, drives away all else. So strong that you may think of nothing else. An understanding, whole and complete." He paused, with a strange little smile, and a flash of something almost youthful in his eyes. "Something like that?"
James had stared at him. So, for that matter, had everyone else, but not, he thought, for the same reason. The others were shocked, perhaps, that Nikola had spoken at all, that he was sentient enough to speak once more, even, perhaps, that he should have been gentle, for him. But James ... James had been stunned simply by the accuracy of what he'd said. Simply by the fact that Nikola, of all people, seemed to genuinely understand.
"How ...?" he managed, turning in his seat to stare, to meet Nikola's wry gaze in stunned amazement. The scientist-become-vampire smiled at him, pale and drawn.
"The ... the things I build," Nikola had explained softly, with a strange flinch that James would not have seen before, as if he expected some violence for it. "Sometimes I see them so. Sometimes they come to me like that. From a thought, a word, the smallest thing, and then ... then they are there, complete in every detail. So real I may almost touch them." He stopped, watching James, that odd little smile lingering in the corner of his mouth, something curiously open in his eyes. "Is that what you see, James? To touch every little detail, and suddenly, from it, a thing complete?"
"... yes," James whispered, softly. Feeling his eyes skip across Nikola's features, feeling them catalogue every line and stray hair that marked his illness, every twitch that marked his struggle for self-control, every crease in his shirt that marked a sweat-soaked body's tossing. Seeing the story, whole and complete, and screaming in every detail. Skipping beyond, to the stories written into stains on the floor, scuffs on the doors, the flecks of mud clinging to John's shoes. Feeling the world press in dizzying completeness against his mind. "Yes," he'd said, very quietly, and knew that Nikola saw the pain in it.
Nikola tilted his head, watching him with that strange, faint smile, with cool, scientist's eyes and an odd little warmth, the faintest touch of fellow-feeling that many would say should be impossible, from him.
"I cannot decide if that should be a wonder, or a horror," the vampire mused softly, looking at him, ignoring the others as they looked between them. "To have that in every moment ... On the one hand, think what you'd get done. On the other ..." He shook his head, waved the thought away, and looked back up with a dazzling grin. "You must tell me, James, when you decide. So I can decide if I should be jealous of you ..."
James had smiled despite himself, had laughed a little. "The great Nikola Tesla is jealous of no-one," he reminded lightly, and was rewarded by the widening of that strained grin. But then he'd paused. He'd paused, and looked over them.
Looked at Nigel, who despite his fascination with the potential applications of his talent, had confessed to creeping fears that he should disappear and never come back. Looked to John, who had not said but surely thought what might happen were he to go too far or to the wrong place. To Helen, the first of them to try it, who feared she had been passed over altogether, who feared what she had caused them to become. To Nikola, whose change had come at so dramatic and terrible a cost. And to himself, to the lure of knowledge weighed against the pressure of perception.
"I think we all must decide," he'd said quietly, as he measured them, as they looked back and measured him in turn. These people, with whom he had quested to find the boundaries of the world. "I think we must all decide what we have become. And if it has been worth it ..."
"It has," John said immediately, smiling down at Helen in reassurance, with all the confident surety James had so long admired in him. John, to whom all the world was now open, and there was laughter in his eyes as he looked to James. There was joy.
Years later, perhaps more than anything else, that look would haunt James. That moment of joy, with all that had come later ...
"Indeed," Nikola murmured, steepling his fingers thoughtfully over his chest, laughing up at them when they looked at him in shock. Nikola, who had almost torn himself apart in the throes of craving, who had only just pulled himself back to sanity. That he of all of them ... But he smiled at them, and spread his hands, and said: "It's only a matter of control, after all. Once we have that ... think what we could do, with all we know now. With all we're capable of. Think what we could do ..."
"Yes," Helen said, crisp and confident, though neither James nor John had missed the relief in her eyes, that they did not think her terrible for what she had made them, that they did not hate what they had done. "All the world is before us, gentlemen. We should make the most of it."
Nigel snorted, the humour light over the traces of fear still in his eyes. "Well, I'm still in," he said, looking between Helen and Nikola in particular, smiling faintly as he caught James' eye. "You'll only get yourselves into trouble if I leave you alone. Right, James?"
"Oh, undoubtedly," he drawled, grinning at the narrow look Helen shot him, at the challenging eyebrow Nikola raised. "Undoubtedly ..."
And put that way, weighing the press of the world against his senses against what their changes had cost them, against what mischief they might get into in the future without him ... Well, at the very least his gift might let him catch some of their more dangerous schemes before they started. At least his new perception might let him guard them better ...
Later, James would think that even Nikola, had he heard that thought, would have realised the sheer arrogance of what they'd been, those first few years. Even Nikola would have admitted how deluded.
No perception, after all, no matter how powerful, no matter the source, would ever match the perfect clarity of hindsight.
A/N: Reading up on Tesla, I was sort of fascinated by his descriptions of those flashes of inspiration. It seemed to make sense, that he'd get James?
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