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James-and-Nikola mad science that turned into something altogether different on me -_-;
Title: Nets We Weave
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, mention of the Five
Summary: Forty years of correspondence, WWII, and what technology can and will not do
Wordcount: 1891
Warnings/Notes: SPOILERS for 3x17, Normandy. Went bloody melancholy on me, too
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Nets We Weave
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sanctuary
Characters/Pairings: James, Nikola, mention of the Five
Summary: Forty years of correspondence, WWII, and what technology can and will not do
Wordcount: 1891
Warnings/Notes: SPOILERS for 3x17, Normandy. Went bloody melancholy on me, too
Disclaimer: Not mine
Nets We Weave
There are times when James considers that they may not be entirely sane. An assessment he knows Nigel, at least, has moments of wholehearted agreement with. There are also times when he considers that entering a correspondence with Nikola Tesla is not really conducive to regaining sanity, and also has a marked tendency to make one seriously consider some truly grandiose flights of fancy. If only because the man has an alarming tendency to make them work, and in his company, for some reason, even the sturdiest and humblest of egos begins to believe they can do likewise.
Rather like Helen, in fact, though that's neither here nor there.
Nikola. Would appreciate a review of enclosed plan soonest. Motive power no object. Have found organic source capable of channelling consistent geothermal power.
He checks the coding on the note, makes sure it's one of their personal codes. With Nikola working on the Enigma machine, and all the wartime paranoia floating around, it's sometimes easy to forget and slip into an open code, something he's seen on this or that piece of correspondence, something that the wrong person might all too easily pick up on. Working on their respective, dare he say it, doomsday devices, they really cannot afford to let slip the details. Ever.
Thankfully, given their capabilities, communication between the two of them is capable of being several degrees more secure than between more or less anyone else. Nikola's ability to visualise an entire machine, complete in every detail, from a fragment of a sketch or even a bare description of purpose, motive force, and materials, makes sending actual plans between bases unnecessary, and James doesn't think he flatters himself in his ability to keep up. Not since the Source Blood. And yes, mechanical devices have always been Nikola's speciality, but neither James' intelligence, nor his deductive skills, have failed him yet.
James. Helen been helping you, has she? That might be considered cheating, you know. Regardless, unless you've managed to rewrite the laws of physics in the interim, your flow-control system is wholly insufficient for the amount of current you seem to intend to put through it. Presuming, of course, that you're not actually intending for things to explode rather spectacularly.
It is, in fact, a longstanding custom of theirs, to exchange correspondence on their respective quests into the technological realm. Some four decades of a tradition, in point of fact, stretching back far beyond the current war and their respective projects to end it. Forty years, in which Nikola had encouraged him in ventures from the mundane to the fanciful to the life-saving, and James, he's somewhat ashamed to say, despite his efforts to be the more level-headed of the two, had encouraged the temperamental genius right on back. Forty years. And all of it the result of an accident.
Nikola. Lets leave the explosions to you, shall we? I can only assume that the coding was that little too advanced for you, and you failed to notice the notation on conductors. Place the valve control bank mid-way along the central line, under those conditions. Review?
Forty years of correspondence (heckling, mockery, shared genius, euphoria, madness), and all because once, in the early years of the 20th century, James had accidentally included a fragment of a design for a pump for one of the new tanks for the nascent Sanctuary (housing naiads on the fly was no endeavour for the faint-hearted) into a package for Nikola, then in America. So small a piece was it, he hadn't even noticed its absence. Until twenty days later, when Nikola mailed it back to him, with a little note at the bottom pointing out that unless he wished to boil someone alive, he might want to either move the through-pipe, or do something about the heat-energy expenditure. Only a thought, of course.
James had telegrammed him back a very politely-worded suggestion for what he could do with his 'just a thought', and sent him the redraft of the design 'for your approval, from your humble colleague'. Nikola's response had introduced him to a charming Hungarian phrase that greatly impressed his contacts in diplomatic circles, and congratulated him on only mostly killing anyone looking to use the thing, and, well, neither of them had looked back since.
James. To use that wonderful British phrase, stick your notations where the sun does not shine. You'll still need a current regulator. Also, please include diagram of cone alignment for the pulse generator? Suddenly I worry about your ability to point the thing in the right direction.
The fragments and queries have varied over the years. Truly, everything from the relentlessly mundane to the world-shaking, from the personal to things meant (rather optimistically, James still thinks - Nikola always was both idealist and hopeless optimist) to be spread to the whole world.
Even the device currently keeping James in the land of the living had once, in the earliest stages, when James was only beginning to grasp that his flirtations with narcotics may have complicated his reaction to the Source Blood, been passed in a bundle package across the Atlantic, and come back with what was quite possibly the most gently worded criticism Nikola had ever given, and not a single word on why James might need it, or choose to use it. To this day, James has never managed to adequately thank the man for that.
Nikola. To quote you: [Brief tour around the more colourful Serbian phrases James has been introduced to over the past forty years, with some Czech and Hungarian to garnish]. When you work out how to put a nozzle on that Death Ray of yours, THEN you can talk to me about pointing things in the right direction! Diagram, nonetheless, included.
Neither of them credit the other for their contributions, of course. It isn't necessary, for one thing, not after the first few years when both of them realised that the other could, in fact, keep up, no matter what the provocation. Nikola never told his investors about James' involvement in the disaster that was Wardenclyffe, and James, in turn, never told Helen just how much of her Sanctuaries were actually built on the interjections of Nikola's extensive disparaging vocabulary.
These days, of course, they can't afford to let anyone know. Nikola is, as always, regarded as suspicious at best, given his nationality and vampirism and very vocal views on certain things, and anything with his involvement is looked on with a rather insulting degree of suspicion. They both recognised that a degree of apparent separation between their various projects would be best. Though Nikola hadn't take it very well, and to be perfectly frank, James couldn't blame him in the slightest. His own reputation is considerably (and carefully) more robust, but paranoia is rather rife at the minute.
James. Congratulations. Your vocabulary has improved immensely. Your spelling, on the other hand ... Incidentally, you have, in fact, put things the right way up. Imagine my relief.
Besides which, James doesn't think any of their current sponsors would be too happy with the idea of them sharing information on not one but two devices that could comfortably classed as 'doomsday weapons'. The Five have come along somewhat in reputation since those early days under the British Government, when blackmail and force were the names of the game, but even still. No-one, James thinks, is really comfortable with the idea that, should they so choose, any two of them could be more trouble than most of the Third Reich put together.
Nikola. So happy to have validated your confidence in me. Have reviewed the finalised autotype design, by the way. Prototype by Monday?
They may even have a point. James remembers, sometimes, when he can't help but wonder at what remains of their sanity, those moments when Nikola, only half-jokingly, would turn to James and ask: "Want to take over the world with me?" With a laugh, and a sloppily raised toast from a glass of wine, and he doesn't mean it, he doesn't ever mean it, except for the part where he does. The small, secret part where Nikola Tesla is tired, tired of fighting all his life to change a world that doesn't want to be changed, tired of fighting wars that mean nothing and never end, and could be stopped, if only someone would listen.
Sometimes, sometimes, Nikola looks at James, and James can see the desperation in his eyes, underneath the humour. Can see the way the man is worn to the bone by failure after failure, by the suspicion pointed his way. James looks at Nikola, and thinks of notes in his office, fragments of machines that could destroy the world or save it, coded words that hold the fate of nations in the spaces between their lines.
James. Don't be ridiculous. Prototype whenever you see fit to collect it. A small thing, by comparison, yes? But useful.
He remembers the man who, hidden over decades of letters and sarcastic critiques, described the passionate hope that communication, energy, technology, would bring people together, wipe out wars, bind the world together. The man who, even now, works on codes to break open communications once more, to end a war, the man who designed a way of sending messages that no-one can intercept. The man who still believes, still tries to believe, that technology can save the world. The man who works with him, through spidered, secret words, to try and let it.
Nikola. Useful, yes. But never small, I think. Never that.
They send each other coded snippets, fragments of machines that can make or break a world. Nikola sends him snatches of a genuine, honest-to-god Death Ray, firm in the hopes that it will stop a war. Nikola reviews a machine James fully intends to be capable of wreathing the entire Channel in storms should it be needed, trusting that James will use it for the best. With the scraps of paper just on James' desk today, they could make themselves more of a threat than anyone, literally anyone else. Even now. Even in this war.
"Want to take over the world with me?" Nikola asks sometimes, tired and laughing and never quite meaning it. He never means it, or he would have done it already. He could have done it already. Black ink beneath James' fingertips, typed fragments, and he knows he could do it. They could do it. But they never will.
James. Want to take over the world with me?
Nikola has no idea, no way of knowing, in the dark moments where James wonders at his own sanity, when he's tired of the wars and the killing, and the ghosts that hound him at every step, and the cost of maintaining a reputation, and the weight of being the man who isn't sneered at, when Helen's gone and he's tired, and feeling the spidered words beneath his hands ... When he feels the weight at his chest, the reminder of old mistakes, and the technology that fixes them ... Nikola has no idea, how close James sometimes comes to saying "Yes."
Nikola. Not yet. Let's save it first, hmm?
Not yet. Not ever. Not really. That's not what they've spent forty years of correspondence trying to do. That's not what they've spent decades of inventions trying to build.
That's not what their machines are for.
But oh, but oh, sometimes, he wishes it was.
There are times when James considers that they may not be entirely sane. An assessment he knows Nigel, at least, has moments of wholehearted agreement with. There are also times when he considers that entering a correspondence with Nikola Tesla is not really conducive to regaining sanity, and also has a marked tendency to make one seriously consider some truly grandiose flights of fancy. If only because the man has an alarming tendency to make them work, and in his company, for some reason, even the sturdiest and humblest of egos begins to believe they can do likewise.
Rather like Helen, in fact, though that's neither here nor there.
Nikola. Would appreciate a review of enclosed plan soonest. Motive power no object. Have found organic source capable of channelling consistent geothermal power.
He checks the coding on the note, makes sure it's one of their personal codes. With Nikola working on the Enigma machine, and all the wartime paranoia floating around, it's sometimes easy to forget and slip into an open code, something he's seen on this or that piece of correspondence, something that the wrong person might all too easily pick up on. Working on their respective, dare he say it, doomsday devices, they really cannot afford to let slip the details. Ever.
Thankfully, given their capabilities, communication between the two of them is capable of being several degrees more secure than between more or less anyone else. Nikola's ability to visualise an entire machine, complete in every detail, from a fragment of a sketch or even a bare description of purpose, motive force, and materials, makes sending actual plans between bases unnecessary, and James doesn't think he flatters himself in his ability to keep up. Not since the Source Blood. And yes, mechanical devices have always been Nikola's speciality, but neither James' intelligence, nor his deductive skills, have failed him yet.
James. Helen been helping you, has she? That might be considered cheating, you know. Regardless, unless you've managed to rewrite the laws of physics in the interim, your flow-control system is wholly insufficient for the amount of current you seem to intend to put through it. Presuming, of course, that you're not actually intending for things to explode rather spectacularly.
It is, in fact, a longstanding custom of theirs, to exchange correspondence on their respective quests into the technological realm. Some four decades of a tradition, in point of fact, stretching back far beyond the current war and their respective projects to end it. Forty years, in which Nikola had encouraged him in ventures from the mundane to the fanciful to the life-saving, and James, he's somewhat ashamed to say, despite his efforts to be the more level-headed of the two, had encouraged the temperamental genius right on back. Forty years. And all of it the result of an accident.
Nikola. Lets leave the explosions to you, shall we? I can only assume that the coding was that little too advanced for you, and you failed to notice the notation on conductors. Place the valve control bank mid-way along the central line, under those conditions. Review?
Forty years of correspondence (heckling, mockery, shared genius, euphoria, madness), and all because once, in the early years of the 20th century, James had accidentally included a fragment of a design for a pump for one of the new tanks for the nascent Sanctuary (housing naiads on the fly was no endeavour for the faint-hearted) into a package for Nikola, then in America. So small a piece was it, he hadn't even noticed its absence. Until twenty days later, when Nikola mailed it back to him, with a little note at the bottom pointing out that unless he wished to boil someone alive, he might want to either move the through-pipe, or do something about the heat-energy expenditure. Only a thought, of course.
James had telegrammed him back a very politely-worded suggestion for what he could do with his 'just a thought', and sent him the redraft of the design 'for your approval, from your humble colleague'. Nikola's response had introduced him to a charming Hungarian phrase that greatly impressed his contacts in diplomatic circles, and congratulated him on only mostly killing anyone looking to use the thing, and, well, neither of them had looked back since.
James. To use that wonderful British phrase, stick your notations where the sun does not shine. You'll still need a current regulator. Also, please include diagram of cone alignment for the pulse generator? Suddenly I worry about your ability to point the thing in the right direction.
The fragments and queries have varied over the years. Truly, everything from the relentlessly mundane to the world-shaking, from the personal to things meant (rather optimistically, James still thinks - Nikola always was both idealist and hopeless optimist) to be spread to the whole world.
Even the device currently keeping James in the land of the living had once, in the earliest stages, when James was only beginning to grasp that his flirtations with narcotics may have complicated his reaction to the Source Blood, been passed in a bundle package across the Atlantic, and come back with what was quite possibly the most gently worded criticism Nikola had ever given, and not a single word on why James might need it, or choose to use it. To this day, James has never managed to adequately thank the man for that.
Nikola. To quote you: [Brief tour around the more colourful Serbian phrases James has been introduced to over the past forty years, with some Czech and Hungarian to garnish]. When you work out how to put a nozzle on that Death Ray of yours, THEN you can talk to me about pointing things in the right direction! Diagram, nonetheless, included.
Neither of them credit the other for their contributions, of course. It isn't necessary, for one thing, not after the first few years when both of them realised that the other could, in fact, keep up, no matter what the provocation. Nikola never told his investors about James' involvement in the disaster that was Wardenclyffe, and James, in turn, never told Helen just how much of her Sanctuaries were actually built on the interjections of Nikola's extensive disparaging vocabulary.
These days, of course, they can't afford to let anyone know. Nikola is, as always, regarded as suspicious at best, given his nationality and vampirism and very vocal views on certain things, and anything with his involvement is looked on with a rather insulting degree of suspicion. They both recognised that a degree of apparent separation between their various projects would be best. Though Nikola hadn't take it very well, and to be perfectly frank, James couldn't blame him in the slightest. His own reputation is considerably (and carefully) more robust, but paranoia is rather rife at the minute.
James. Congratulations. Your vocabulary has improved immensely. Your spelling, on the other hand ... Incidentally, you have, in fact, put things the right way up. Imagine my relief.
Besides which, James doesn't think any of their current sponsors would be too happy with the idea of them sharing information on not one but two devices that could comfortably classed as 'doomsday weapons'. The Five have come along somewhat in reputation since those early days under the British Government, when blackmail and force were the names of the game, but even still. No-one, James thinks, is really comfortable with the idea that, should they so choose, any two of them could be more trouble than most of the Third Reich put together.
Nikola. So happy to have validated your confidence in me. Have reviewed the finalised autotype design, by the way. Prototype by Monday?
They may even have a point. James remembers, sometimes, when he can't help but wonder at what remains of their sanity, those moments when Nikola, only half-jokingly, would turn to James and ask: "Want to take over the world with me?" With a laugh, and a sloppily raised toast from a glass of wine, and he doesn't mean it, he doesn't ever mean it, except for the part where he does. The small, secret part where Nikola Tesla is tired, tired of fighting all his life to change a world that doesn't want to be changed, tired of fighting wars that mean nothing and never end, and could be stopped, if only someone would listen.
Sometimes, sometimes, Nikola looks at James, and James can see the desperation in his eyes, underneath the humour. Can see the way the man is worn to the bone by failure after failure, by the suspicion pointed his way. James looks at Nikola, and thinks of notes in his office, fragments of machines that could destroy the world or save it, coded words that hold the fate of nations in the spaces between their lines.
James. Don't be ridiculous. Prototype whenever you see fit to collect it. A small thing, by comparison, yes? But useful.
He remembers the man who, hidden over decades of letters and sarcastic critiques, described the passionate hope that communication, energy, technology, would bring people together, wipe out wars, bind the world together. The man who, even now, works on codes to break open communications once more, to end a war, the man who designed a way of sending messages that no-one can intercept. The man who still believes, still tries to believe, that technology can save the world. The man who works with him, through spidered, secret words, to try and let it.
Nikola. Useful, yes. But never small, I think. Never that.
They send each other coded snippets, fragments of machines that can make or break a world. Nikola sends him snatches of a genuine, honest-to-god Death Ray, firm in the hopes that it will stop a war. Nikola reviews a machine James fully intends to be capable of wreathing the entire Channel in storms should it be needed, trusting that James will use it for the best. With the scraps of paper just on James' desk today, they could make themselves more of a threat than anyone, literally anyone else. Even now. Even in this war.
"Want to take over the world with me?" Nikola asks sometimes, tired and laughing and never quite meaning it. He never means it, or he would have done it already. He could have done it already. Black ink beneath James' fingertips, typed fragments, and he knows he could do it. They could do it. But they never will.
James. Want to take over the world with me?
Nikola has no idea, no way of knowing, in the dark moments where James wonders at his own sanity, when he's tired of the wars and the killing, and the ghosts that hound him at every step, and the cost of maintaining a reputation, and the weight of being the man who isn't sneered at, when Helen's gone and he's tired, and feeling the spidered words beneath his hands ... When he feels the weight at his chest, the reminder of old mistakes, and the technology that fixes them ... Nikola has no idea, how close James sometimes comes to saying "Yes."
Nikola. Not yet. Let's save it first, hmm?
Not yet. Not ever. Not really. That's not what they've spent forty years of correspondence trying to do. That's not what they've spent decades of inventions trying to build.
That's not what their machines are for.
But oh, but oh, sometimes, he wishes it was.
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