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Maybe Abby is the one. But Helen Magnus is definitely the one that got away.
It’s almost a ridiculous thought; Physically, she hasn't left him for any significant period since their meeting four years ago.
From her perspective, he may have been absent for a 113-year interim but, to him, her longest absence had been the weeks she had let him think her dead. Gone, apparently, with the Old City Sanctuary that had brought them together not once, but twice.
Those had been tough weeks.
He had felt entirely disconnected from the body that continued to breathe, and move, and act, to live on after his life – the one that he'd built over four years, which made everything before seem so mundane and meaningless – had been obliterated.
SCIU certainly hadn’t been the place for him then. He’d had little enough interest in the place as it was, and sticking around as he mourned everything the institution stood in direct opposition to was an additional emotional burden he hadn't been willing to bear.
But beyond that decision, he'd been lost as to what to do next.
Returning to his life before – before Magnus and the Sanctuary, and all the wonder they had brought – had held little appeal. Yet, even if he possessed some way besides SCIU of staying on top of all things abnormal, well...his desire to stay grounded in that world had been lost along with Magnus.
It was his past that first tied him to the abnormal – a brief but life-changing experience he had been unable and unwilling to forget. And then there had been that very first case that enticed him into the Sanctuary fold. But she had been why he stayed. For the opportunity to see a world that was new, and strange, and fascinating, through a lens filtered by the immortal woman’s seemingly boundless ability to marvel at it. For the chance to be the one at her side as she forged on, endlessly learning and protecting. The righthand to an extraordinary, enigmatic, powerful, beautiful creature.
He’d urged her, not long before she was gone, to understand the depths of his commitment to her. High on water, it was the closest he’d ever come to telling her how he felt.
He wonders if she’d ever dared – bothered – to accept the thinly veiled confession for what it was.
Perhaps it was better if she didn’t.
Better that than to be informed kindly, but definitively, that his feelings were silly and juvenile, and certainly not returned. Better that, than to be treated like Tesla, having his affections dismissed openly and nonchalantly at every opportunity.
He wondered how many other victims she must have collected in her 270 years. Fools that had made the understandable and inevitable, but pitiable mistake of wanting a woman so far out of their reach. Magnus the sun, and they all distant moons, desperate to be granted more than the barest warmth and glow that was permitted by being within her orbit.
It was a torturous fate to accept, yet he knew now it was preferable to being robbed of her brilliant light entirely.
So there was no answer to give but yes, standing at the edge of another new adventure, when she once more offered him the chance to explore a world he'd been trying to see since he was a child.
Of course he'd take it, if that meant he'd be able to resume his position as her right hand, her mentee, her partner, friend, occasional emotional baggage handler or punching bag. Whatever she needed him to be.
Because, in the end, it may be that Abby is the one he will spend his life with, but Magnus had long ago become the one he would devote his life to.