Some Days Are Diamonds, (Some Days Are Stone)
When you asked how I've been here without you
I'd like to say I've been fine and I do
But we both know the truth is hard to come by
And if I told the truth that's not quite true
- John Denver
There's a perpetual hum in the bunker.
The whirr and reverberation mainly comes from the charging Lifeboat and the gyrating fans that keep the command station from overheating. It drives the best of us crazy, you'll hear it in your sleep. We all pooled for earplugs a few weeks ago and I think Jiya has some spare,Rufus had offered with a sympathetic shrug. While she means it literally on her first night in the Silo, it comes to shift into a figurative sense that lingers in every interaction she has with the team.
A hum of things left unsaid.
Wyatt is the Delta Force soldier, but she's the scrappy, street-smart kind of gal who can read a scene with an objectivity he's always battled to find. Where he's rough and reckless, she's stealthy and patient, probably to a fault - which is how they come to blows in the bunker bathroom, fighting again for another chance she promised never to give.
She's observant by nature, moulded by years of having to read the temperament of a volatile alcoholic mother and a militantly rigid father. A rough background and a few spins around the block birth a sixth sense for half-truths and evasion. She sees it in the twitch of Connor's upper lip when Wyatt demands to know who ate the last of his Chex Mix, or in the way Jiya gnaws at her cheek when Rufus blames Flynn for blunting his hacksaw in an attempt to make a weapon.
They're innocuous enough, camaraderies and behaviors that six people trapped in an underground sardine tin fall into naturally. After two weeks she even has her own bunch of white lies and pretenses (especially regarding Lucy's moisturizer) that she catches herself putting out to the inhabitants of the bunker.
But there are a few uncomfortable moments outside of the sandbox territory, where those half-truths bleed into a painful reminder that the people she makes tacos and chicken parm with, live slivers of lives and innumerable altered realities that will remain forever closed to her.
The foremost being the timeline in which she died.
It's a world she's rarely let into, guarded carefully by the quartet of time-travelers who are the sole proprietors of the past. They divulge what is needed, the ins and outs of altered history to appease the scrupulous government agent and her lackeys. But her gut knows best, simmering with question and instinct. Threads and intangible ghosts lingering from long-gone eras and shifting centuries haunt the bunker in ways they probably don't even realize, formed into habits that no longer seem suspicious or telling.
It's taken a lot of meditation and breathing frustration out of her nose to keep as sane as she has.
Of all observation, the most painful inferences she makes are borne from the connection Wyatt has with Lucy. Neither slip from whatever unconscious pact they've made to avoid each others' spheres, but there's something to be said for the way Wyatt silently protects her after Salem, in ways that Jessica notices aren't comparable with the brotherly rapport he has with Rufus.
They're all poker faces and agents of disguise, barely allusive to anything other than a tight-knit friendship built through incredible circumstance. But when Wyatt walks away from the medical unit they've made in the old pantry, palms fisted and budding with fury, she's reminded of the day they walked into The Pelican Lounge and straight into Andrew.
They'd been at their absolute lowest in their marriage, but even amongst that jealous pain and their tanking relationship, it was an internal war for her. It's nothing she'd put in wedding vows or recite to the grandchildren, but Wyatt's heart would never be more vocal than when he was aching for someone he loved.
She spends that night staring up at the ceiling, mind ablaze with unverified conjecture. He lays beside her after hours of exhaustive information overload that contradicts everything she knows about him, six of their ten years lost to the winds.
It occurs to her that marriage counseling would never be a salve for this new gaping wound.
Only time.
She's savaged by sleeplessness the morning Kennedy is attacked, a bone-deep exhaustion she's not felt since she scoured news outlets for Syria coverage the weeks after Wyatt was first deployed overseas. They wake with a promise to honor those four years despite the six, a surprisingly uncomfortable wading through new territory with each other in the face of two fractured timelines. Is that what they were now? An accident of time?
There's a total disconnect when Wyatt's bathroom breakdown divulges more than she wants to know about her other reality. His bleeding soul is more than enough of an indication that whatever fragment she's missing is one that she ever wants to imagine for herself. Every step she takes with Wyatt feels like a series of exploding landmines, good, bad and unfathomable. She doesn't know how she agrees to try for a second chance, which after these shifts might be a third, fourth or an endless cycle they've lost count of in unending alters.
But Jessica is anything but a pacifist in her marriage.
They muddle through the awkwardness of reallocating themselves a shared space, set boundaries and lines. There are six years lost on him, of pain and joy nestled in her mind and heart, moments that turn him from a complicated husband into a near enough stranger. He's still Wyatt in looks and temperament, a little softer around the edges than he had been with her, quieter and more meditative than the brawny idiot who'd broken the screen door in their last fight.
Separate bunks. Shared space.
It's a beginning from the end.
The bunker still reels from Salem (a fact she still can't bring herself to believe) and it shows in the tensions that break out over breakfast. The Wyatt temper she knows like the back of her hand flares when Flynn gets underfoot, and it's a newly-slinged Lucy who wedges herself between the two puffed-out chests before she can even think to drag Wyatt from the fray.
"Must you antagonize each other before I've even had coffee?" she hisses at them, fierce in her five-foot-something stature against their looming heights. She knows very little about the historian, other than her role in the team and the few, bare-boned utterances Wyatt had made of her during their late-night debrief. She resolves to like Lucy after she tanks herself between the two brutes and forces them to scurry to opposite ends of the room, victorious in her peacekeeping. Jiya and Rufus visibly relax once the tension is diffused and it leads her to believe that altercations like these are a dime a dozen.
God help the bunker.
"What was that about?" she hedges, as Wyatt settles beside her.
He doesn't miss a beat, gritting out that answer as though it's plain as day, "Four centuries worth of bad news."
Any explanation she sets out to pry from the soldier is put on the back-burner when Agent Christopher whisks her away for an induction. The government agent has made it abundantly clear that her presence poses a security threat and there's no beating around the bush when she stops them out of earshot of the team.
"You're on probation; one misstep and you're out on your ass. Logan's sway only goes so far in the fight against domestic terrorism."
So that's that.
The morning drags by lazily, a wave of domestic chore interspersed by games of checkers and briefings that she's not got the security clearance for. She's left to twiddle her thumbs while the rest of the silo huddle in the pantry, and the sudden reality of the cold ancient relic they're cohabiting in dawns on her. Wyatt had been so adamant about proving something to her that it had completely slipped his mind that she would be torn from her own life, forced into an underground box and trapped by the government who view her as nothing more than a calculated risk.
It's so Wyatt. Act now, think later. To the wind with what was best for her.
She's a storm of ire when they clear out from their makeshift debriefing room, ready to lay into him again for being so damn thoughtless when she catches herself behind the corner of the corridor. The biting anger nipping at her heels lulls momentarily as Lucy splinters off and Wyatt paces after her, shoulders rigid and set in that way that tells her he's been nettled by something.
It's not an intimate moment, but it feels like one as Lucy responds with a defeated shrug at something he says, which only deepens that crevasse of tension in his back. It's over in seconds, barely a moment at all, and though Wyatt doesn't bring it to their glueing marriage, she feels it set like concrete when a stray hand finds its way up his spine a few hours later.
Chaos rains down sometime around seven, the whole bunker jumping to it's feet when an alarm ricochets through the halls.
"What's happening?" she peers at Wyatt blearily, pulled from a deadening nap far too soon.
"Someone's out there fucking with history."
He's pulling on socks and snatching up supplies, "you're leaving?"
"It's the job, Jess."
It's not the time for busting a fuse, but his flippancy so close after promising change stows away for later, when she'll throw it back in his face and deliver the ultimatum of truth or signed papers. There's no future in this for her if things slip back into old habits. How can she live a half-life in the eye of the storm?
Nothing goes to plan and they rope her into the JFK mess.
The side-eyes and suspicion Wyatt mentioned that surrounded her reappearance in their timeline is pushed to the wayside when Lucy and Wyatt break her out of the bunker. She has half a mind to run when they reach civilization, throw it all away and gain the freedom she'd come to love in Wyatt's absence. She'd do all the things she'd dreamed of. Bartend in Sedona. Drive the Sunshine Coast. Anything to get out of what this was.
But the man dragging her onto a cable-car has a magnetizing will of his own. One she's oscillated between push and pull for close to a decade.
And so the desire fades as his fingers encircle her wrist and thumb over her pulse.
A furtive glance at their joining isn't missed by Jessica as Lucy clings to her pole, the tepid curl of the corner of her mouth not enough to mask the pinch in her brow or her general sense of discomfort. She makes note to find some common ground with her once the Kennedy debacle is over, settle the Rittenhouse mistrust that hovers like a dark cloud over their heads.
"Don't worry, she's got this," Wyatt murmurs to her when Lucy sets off to gain access to the third floor of the hospital, her clumsy trip into a medical cart not the most convincing of actions. But Wyatt merely laughs it off.
She sees it in Wyatt then. The complete and utter faith he has in her.
It grows and spurns in her when Lucy appears a few minutes later with a patient lanyard dangling from her fingers.
"Being Stonewall Jackson has some perks."
It's a wild goose chase through the medical facility, robbing her of breath and burning her hamstrings when the red-headed target makes quick, calculated moves that stonewall their efforts.
After a brief separation with Lucy, Wyatt acts like a one-handed tray to the face is the greatest thing he's seen since sliced bread. There's a lump in her throat at the sight of gun on gun when Wyatt draws to match the one pointed at Lucy.
"So you got my little present. This really isn't the best way to say thank you," the red-head jeers as an angry red welt blisters across her jaw, turning her attention to her,"how're you doing, wifey?"
A nurse rounding on patients breaks the standoff.
Emma is lost before they have a chance to make a choice and they scupper through an apology and bolt before the nurse can call security.
There's no game-plan, no retcon or any special codes they use in the movies. Everything she sees between the two are instinctual, innate decisions that are met without the need for words. Bound by intangible threads and an unwavering trust.
Where she leads he follows.
"This way."
"Yes M'am."
"Oh, Wyatt's favorite movie!" Lucy shouts.
It's an easy point, she's known this since their second date, "Serpico!"
"Weapon of Choice!" Rufus bellows.
She loses the point.
Her own timeline shifts minutely, from jump to jump. Fractions of change that she's not made aware of until Wyatt returns and asks why her hair is a a few inches shorter, or what happened to his brand of toothpaste. They're little things that don't affect their dynamic in explosive ways, but they seed enough to keep her up at night worrying about the next change to ripple through her life. Worry worms itself into his world too, she doesn't miss the frantic sweep of the bunker for her presence the moment the Lifeboat lands. To make sure she's still in his timeline. Alive.
She makes him promise he'll never hold back.
If he comes back and she's living a newly moulded life she wants to know. She needs to know. Her life suddenly feels a whole lot less hers and she can't wade through the rest of her future being a pawn that can be lifted or removed without a fight. It makes her envy Lucy and Rufus, for getting to come back to a present where Wyatt is steadfastly Wyatt, and a chipped, tainted version to her. It makes it tougher to enjoy the smaller moments, like their intrinsic knowledge of each other in the middle of a game of Taboo when she loses the easiest point in the game. Wyatt braces a comforting hand on her knee when she can't play off being put out, the wrongness of her memories versus his a little too strong that day.
"You know that."
"No I don't."
Stumbling blocks appear in the form of old habits, like their tendency for heated conflict, and new moments that throw her for a loop, like the day Wyatt comes home from 1919 New York and barely registers she's there, in his timeline, alive. A guilty looking Lucy trips down the Lifeboat steps and pads after him in her suffragette uniform, all fluster and clumsy footing towards the bathroom. The debrief is sidelined for whatever it is that burns between the two, culminating into an awkward shuffling of gazes between the silo as she stands at the sidelines, whirring with question.
If they're fighting they make no show of it. Not like the grenades she and Wyatt throw at each other down the hall, resulting in more than a few awkward reintegrations and side-eyes from the team. It seems that no matter the timeline Wyatt ends up with her, their fights remain ones for the ages, fated to spar like fire against fire.
In the beginning she'd called that passion. Ten years later it seems so far from the word.
At what point does a marriage become about listening?
When Lucy passes by again she's quiet and hurried, on a mission to cross the silo in the quickest time known to man. Her lips are pressed thin and the blotchy red hue around her eyes earn her a free pass from Denise.
"Is she going to be alright?" she overhears Jiya murmur to Rufus, "she's not been sleeping. I'll check on her in a bit, but maybe you could talk to her?"
"I'm looking out for her," he assures, "she's just processing, it's a lot to take in."
Wyatt exiles himself to the bedroom for most of that night, claiming exhaustion. They'd been gone for almost twenty hours so she believes him when he curls up on his cot and turns away from her, rigid with that invisible tension knotted in his back. His breaths even out eventually while she sits and meditates, too tired from her own day spent waiting in the shadows.
She mirrors him and crawls in between her own sheets, willing all of her wandering thoughts to burn away when she settles against the pillow.
Calloused hands roughen against her skin much later as Wyatt slips in behind her, a rare moment of unsolicited intimacy that lifts her sunken mood and has her fall into him instinctively. They have their bad days, ones that feel like a dumpster fire without a hose, and other days they quietly muddle through, then there are these moments that completely cut through all of the tension, detonate the fracturing wall between them and remind her of how and why they fell in love in the first place. Those moments are rosy and golden in a dank underworld of by-the-day living and Rittenhouse ploys.
He's trying harder than any time in their history. To be present. To be honest.
But there's one truth that lingers in the hairline crack between them, one she senses has been lodged in his throat. It would always have been a mere assumption, a fraction of her penchant for reading between the lines of Wyatt's actions and words, even in the face of being wrong on multiple occasions.
But the assumption finds some concrete grounding during that night, when Wyatt's arm pulls her in closer and his sleep-dense whisper falls into her temple with a reverence that grabs her by the throat.
"Lucy."
The first time he doesn't immediately look for her is the day he comes home from the Rittenhouse raid.
"Where is she?!"
There's something predatory in the way he stalks into the bunker, heckles raised and a frantic Denise on his tail. Whatever pretense he's built goes soaring out of the window because the she he's looking for isn't her. It's a state of grief and stress she hasn't seen him in since his operation with Zach, steely-eyed and outright destructive in nature as he barges into the rec room and missiles straight for Lucy.
The whole bunker is all eyes when he seizes the book in her hands and tosses it across the room, jerking Lucy into wide-eyed disorientation.
Whether it's his sudden dawning of his stormy behavior, or her instinct, both wordlessly share a moment of intensity that draws her out of her chair, a gentle hand coming to settle on his forearm in concern. It's as tender as anything she's experienced with Wyatt in the privacy of their room, except the world falls away for the two and the spectacle it creates for the inhabitants of the silo is lost on them. His chest heaves while discerning brown eyes search his, coming to an unspoken understanding that sparks her to navigate him to the safe privacy of the bathroom.
Denise's voice calls out in the aftermath.
"There will be a debrief in an hour, but for now mind your own business."
The hum of things left unsaid buzzes louder than any other moment she lets burn her wick. She does everything and anything to avoid the concept of Lucy and Wyatt locked in the bathroom and the chair shoved outside for emphasis. Jiya invites her to help prep dinner with Rufus, a kind-hearted attempt at distracting her from the obvious unease blanketing the bunker after Wyatt's explosion. She doesn't have much in common with the techies, but they're good people who make her feel less of a jilted wife as their discount-brand meatloaf comes together.
If anyone needs the bathroom they remain silent sufferers.
By the time the second hour rolls through she's got no energy left to focus on the Hitchcock movie playing to a full-bellied group. Her patience is wearing thin and the constant state of anxiety she's embedded in does nothing to alleviate the churning in her gut. She wants to be that thoughtful wife. She wants to be the woman who means her vows and finds it within herself not to see two co-workers of different genders as anything but the platonic friends they've remained in sight.
But out of sight she has deep-rooted every day comes a warring between mind and heart over Wyatt's connection with Lucy.
She's a moth to a flame when the bathroom door finally creaks open.
But her feet remain rooted when the sight she envisions blossoms into something else entirely.
If their earlier moment had been tender, the sight of Wyatt carrying a sleeping Lucy to bed decimates that summation.
That path to the bedroom feels like the gallows walk later that night. There's no reasonable, escapable reality that makes her seem like anything but the fool as she slides around the door to their room and finds her husband perched on the edge of his cot, broken and weary as the day she walked the entire twenty miles from The Pelican Lounge and found him blitzed out of his mind.
Shared space. Separate beds.
The end of the beginning.
They sit north to south, a distance so small she can reach out and touch him. Where there's usually fire and brimstone lays a wet blanket of dejection, smothering any grenades she has to throw over his trench. Here he is, a man she knows better than anyone. There's no malice in it. In him. She feels that deep in her core, underneath all of the layers of resentment and jealousy that she can barely to admit to herself.
The only time he'd ever betrayed her was in sleep.
Her words are thick with hurt when they pierce the void, "Why didn't you tell me, Wyatt?"
She believed him when he told her about time travel. She believed him when the dagger of her death immersed itself in her gut. What was one more twist of the knife?
"How, Jess?" he grits out, "how do I tell you all of that if it ever meant losing you again?"
She doesn't know the answer to that. To any of it. It's one giant tsunami crashing over them and wreaking havoc on anything that isn't pinned down. It's laughable, really, even in a world of second chances and resurrection they find themselves fighting the fight against separation. Time and time again she'd counseled barflies and told them all to cut it loose. You putting each other on a pedestal? Third time around the separation block? Are you stupid or just blind?
But there's no lack of love here.
It's just…fated for something else.
"But you did, Wyatt…you let me go."
He does what he knows best and defends it all.
"We weren't - that - until the day you came back," he swallows, scrubbing a hand over tired, bleary eyes, "for two years I tried to find a way back to you. I stole the mothership, went back to the eighties and tried to stop your killer from ever being born. I said goodbye to the potential of ever knowing her so I could get to you. I telegrammed you in 1962, told you not to get out of the car. And you just…never came back. I did everything, Jess."
Oh, does she believe him. Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan, father of self-punishment.
"Do you think we ever put each other on a pedestal?" she asks, biting her lip in some wishful hope it'd stem the pain, "chased an ideal we were never fated for?"
It's something alongside the shifts that keeps her up at night. In her world and his they'd battled insurmountable odds like some cyclical cosmic joke. In his it had gotten her killed. In hers they'd reached the end of the road, papers drawn up and ready to sign. Two out of three timelines etched into the failure bracket.
And now this.
"We're not the same people, Wyatt. Literally."
It's a realization that only really strikes the depths of her understanding the moment it leaves her mouth.
And she can't go back.
As if lightning to a tree in a storm the bough breaks.
She knows it. He knows it.
There's a need to know that this is different, so far from what they'd become.
"Tell me about her, Wyatt."
For the first time in their marriage, they listen.
They make no declaration of their decision.
It's seven days before they say it out loud to each other, those words that had seemed fated since they were brought back together, this is it. They need to be sure, ten years for her, four for him, so they wean each other slowly like an addiction.
Coffee for two becomes one.
Laundry day turns into Monday night for him and Thursday afternoon for her.
She takes her ring off on the 3rd and he relents on the 5th.
Ironically, Denise begins to trust her more once they announce their split to her. Her probation is lifted and after three successful missions she's granted the security clearance for briefings. Her purpose shifts and she becomes more than a cook and a cleaner trapped in a tin-can.
She even finds some common ground with the techies. They've binge-watched three seasons of Masterchef already.
Though, the dinner roster has become a pissing match.
And Wyatt?
He begins making coffee for two.
Three times in two weeks she walks in on Lucy doing laundry and three times she notices Wyatt's shirts sorted into her colors.
In debriefs their covers and aliases form a pattern of husband and wife.
The day they take down Emma he dips her in front of the entire silo and makes it known.
Across the room their eyes meet, a confirmation. Their love was fated for something else.
Fin
This is my Jessica heartbreak vinyl (aka my one-shot plan):
Something There
Where she leads he follows
Lucy
He loves her
She loves him ft acceptance
It was as simple as that.
I am the Celine Dion to this ship and I will steer it in some sort of forward direction, even if it drags and cracks along the way.
I hope there's some sense of maturity in this. Wyatt doesn't just wake up and fall out of love with Jessica. Jessica doesn't just see Lucy as some sort of love rival from the offset and put two and two together. In fact, I didn't want them to be rivals at all. That was my overarching aim throughout this. I think people idealize. In reality, are they really the same people? They come from different worlds. The only constant in Wyatt's life at the moment is Lucy. Doesn't Jess deserve a constant? Someone she doesn't have to wait and pine for, hoping that one day the shifts won't be as chasmic as the one thrown in her face at the end of 2x04? 'Cause I do. Rant over. (I also do not apologize for Jyatt intimacy, I don't believe a writer who refuses to see otherwise)
Also, I'm really not down with Jess is RH. So. That's me.