𝓡𝓔𝓒𝓞𝓡𝓓 𝓞𝓕 𝓡𝓐𝓖𝓝𝓐𝓡𝓞𝓚 × 𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓𝓔𝓡 𝓞𝓝𝓔𝓢𝓗𝓞𝓣𝓢

A SPARK WITHOUT FIRE - Second part

Nikola × Reader

The laboratory had never felt so empty.

The coils still fired. The notes still sprawled across his desk. But without her, everything was... mechanical. Functional. Lifeless.

Nikola Tesla sat at the same workbench where she had once leaned close, pen in hand, eyes alight with wonder. He remembered the way her lips curled when she caught his mistakes before he did. How her handwriting straightened his chaos. How her voice always seemed to arrive just before he drifted too far into obsession.

He had trained himself not to need anyone.

And yet, she had been there. Quietly. Always. Until she wasn’t.

____________________

It had started subtly.

The silence.

He’d speak a thought aloud, half expecting her to answer. He’d reach for a tool and realize she wasn’t there to hand it to him without a word. The crackle of the Tesla coil had never sounded lonelier.

He found himself standing by the window, staring into the city as though it could return her to him.

But the city had already given her to someone else.

____________________

Her engagement to Edison had sparked more than rumors. It had ignited something Tesla wasn’t prepared to feel: loss. Real, irreversible loss.

He'd always dismissed love as a distraction, a sentimental illusion. Something for poets and fools.

But what he’d failed to understand—until now—was that love wasn’t just poetry or romance. It was resonance.

That thing he had theorized about so long ago.

He remembered her standing beside him when he spoke of emotional frequency. The way she had asked, so quietly:
“Wouldn’t that be... love?”

At the time, he had brushed it off. Relegated her heart to a footnote in the margins of his ambition.

But now?

Now he heard her voice in everything. Now he realized—she had been the hum in his chest, the grounding wire in his storm of static.

It had always been her.

Not as an assistant. Not as a shadow.

As a partner.

As a woman.

As the one he should have chosen.

____________________

He opened an old drawer late one night and found her notebook. The one she always carried—pages full of scribbled equations, sketches, fragments of unfinished thoughts.

And beneath one page, folded and nearly forgotten, a loose scrap of paper. A letter she had never given him.

 
Nikola,
I don’t know if you’ll ever feel the same.
But I want you to know that when I look at you, I see something more than brilliance.
I see a man who could be loved deeply—if only he would allow himself to be.
And maybe, if I’m brave enough, I’ll give you this one day.
But for now, I’ll wait.
– {Name}

He read it again.

And again.

Until the ink blurred with the sting in his eyes.

She had waited.

And he had wasted every second.

____________________

The world outside moved on. Edison paraded her beside him at conferences. She smiled for the cameras, wore the ring, gave speeches. And yet, Tesla knew—somewhere beneath her polished calm, the girl with the scribbled notes still existed.

But she no longer belonged to his world.

Because he had made her feel small when he should have made her feel central.

Because he had thought of her as essential—but not irreplaceable.

Because he had confused devotion with dependency. And when she asked for more, he had offered less.

Now, he saw her.

Clearer than ever before.

He saw the way she stood taller beside Edison—not because Edison was better, but because he chose her. Because he had seen her not just as an asset, but as a force.

A woman worth walking beside.

Tesla returned to his machine, heart thudding painfully.

He picked up her unfinished design—a resonance amplifier she’d started sketching but abandoned when she left—and began to work on it again.

Not to prove anything.

Not to win her back.

But because it was hers.

Because some things deserved to be finished, even if he no longer had a place in the ending.

And as the machine buzzed to life, emitting a soft, harmonic pulse...

He whispered her name into the current.

And for a split second, he swore it pulsed back.

Don't and DON'T ever ask me for updates, I'll update this oneshot if I want to. Keep in mind that I have a life too, just like you. Writing stories are simply a hobby of mine and I appreciate if you'll wait until I update again.

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