Notes: I wrote this in response to gwennieliz' tumblr GIF set for Garcia and Lucy's goodbye scene in D.C. in 1x16: The Red Scare.
Summary: Garcia's thoughts during his goodbye scene with Lucy in D.C. in 1x16: The Red Scare.
Louder than sirens (louder than bells)
"I don't want anything from you," Garcia says, and the words scald like acid as they tumble from his mouth. As if denial and a scowl are enough to fool the formidable woman standing front of him. Liar, he thinks. He wants everything from Lucy: her body; her soul; an alternate path to destroying Rittenhouse, one that won't mean erasing her existence. If he can't have any of those things, he'll settle for absolution.
"You don't want anything from me?" Lucy asks. "Because I think you do. I think deep down there's some part... Some human part of you that wants me to stop you. God, I swear, this game that we keep playing... Nobody wins; nobody loses. People keep dying. What's the body count so far? And for what?"
"Okay, now's the time where you tell me what a monster I am?" He congratulates himself on the edge of bitterness in his voice.
"I don't think you're a monster anymore. I used to. But now I just think that you're sad, and you're lonely," she says, and it takes all the strength he has to keep from flinching at her unwanted insight.
He can barely meet her eyes as she continues. "I think you're a broken person... Who misses the people that they love. Just like me. Just like Wyatt."
All this time, as they've chased each other through history, he's reminded Lucy, taunted Lucy, with how well he knows her because of her journal.
I know everything about you.
The irony here, in this moment in 1954 Washington D.C., is that she holds no such journal of his thoughts in her hands, and yet...
And yet, she doesn't need it.
The compassion, the knowledge of him burning in her brown eyes cuts him with the precision of a scalpel, and he bleeds. He is bleeding out in front of Lucy, and he knows she sees it. So he fights back, teeth bared like a cornered animal. "Don't talk about my family like you know them."
"You want to stop Rittenhouse, we'll help you. But not like this."
"How?" He yearns to believe there is another way. But he lost what few illusions he still had about the world on the day Rittenhouse murdered his wife and daughter. "You don't know. Because there is no other way."
Hidden inside his pockets, Garcia's hands tremble with need. Need to rip the proper pearl necklace draped around the pale column of Lucy's throat. Need to unpin her hair and watch it uncoil on her shoulders. Need to rend the buttons from the smart, powder-blue dress covering her body.
Against his will, his gaze drops to her mouth. Slick with pink lipstick, his eyes are drawn to them. He hates it. He wants to sweep his mouth over hers, again and again, until the waxy pigment smears away, leaving only the clean softness of her naked mouth. If this is to be her end, their end, and everything in him rebels against that notion, then that is how he wants to remember her.
When he bends toward her, it's an involuntary movement. Helpless, he breathes in the faded spice of her perfume and watches her pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. He does not kiss her. "Goodbye, Lucy."