a/n: is anyone else still crying over the beautiful disaster of a man that is wyatt logan? ever since 2x02 came out and dropped his origin story on us, I've been playing around with this and I don't know if it does him justice but I've just got way too many feelings about him.
there is obviously lyatt in this fic, even tho they aren't central components here. because I'm never passing up an opportunity to write them who do you think I am.
content warning: there are mentions of child abuse in this, and the whole fic is heavily focused on physical scarring (no matter how vague I might write it), so if that isn't your thing, I'd suggest skipping over this one.
and if you're going for it, comments are always and forever appreciated.
The moon
doesn't care about its own
craters and bruises. Only we can regret
the perishing of the burned place.
Only we could call it a wound.
— Margaret Atwood, "A Fire Place"
Wyatt stops counting his scars when he turns thirteen. It feels like a chore — like, cleaning something up only to have it get dirty again in front of your eyes. Like, he could be counting for years and it would only keep multiplying in twos, in fours, in tens.
And they do multiply. He may not be counting but he isn't stupid. The bruises come and go, and come again. There are some that he can see with all the lights off, burrowed into sheets of his small bed that doesn't feel so small compared to the trunk of his dad's car. And there are some that he feels, more than anything else, the ones that don't even touch his skin.
(It'll be a few more years before he joins the army, before he learns of the existence of phantom pains, of panic attacks, of PTSD. Before he starts connecting the dots backwards and unraveling parts of himself that seemed much simpler at the time.)
There are pieces of himself he doesn't show anyone. Grandpa Sherwin never asks about the growing marks on his skin, and he never tells, keeps careful to not show 'em. Boys like him get what they deserve in these parts of the world, especially if they've got a dad like his.
Except, he deserves better.
It isn't until the funeral — until he's loosened his tie so it stops being a choke-hold, only to find that the real reason he feels like he's suffocating isn't because of who he is. It's because of who the man in the house tells him he is.
It takes him a few days to completely understand that Grandpa's gone, and that he's taken home with him.
Wyatt's already got the backbone, the mouth that gets him into too much trouble, the fire that starts in his chest that he's never quite known what to do with. He steals the car, scratches the skin of his forearms in a few places when he's being jostled on the dirt road while running shit across the border, sprains a few muscles driving too quick and sleeping in the backseat — but even then, it's much better than it was.
He scratches the scabs unconsciously, needs to keep his hands busy while he watches the nights turn to days. The fucked up thing is that he misses his dad. Wyatt knows enough about scars to know that picking at them usually leaves marks behind, but so does not picking at them. Even though he's stopped counting, they still remain.
-/-
The army teaches him a damn lot, but the most important thing he learns in the first few weeks is that he isn't the only one.
They don't share their stories during Basic Training, but he can see it in their eyes, in the way they clench their jaws, tighten their fingers around the guns. He's never seen so many haunted men in his life and he finds his isn't the only skin that's mismatched in its colours.
It's the day that the letters come that he mentions it, eighteen and thinking too hard about his grandpa. He has a recurring dream where Grandpa Sherwin pulls him out of the sea with his bare hands, and Wyatt often wakes up gasping for air in the dark, hands shaking until he balls them into fists. His dad wasn't stupid enough to get close to him when his grandpa was around, otherwise Wyatt is sure he would've felt the water leave his lungs much sooner.
The letters come and Wyatt sits on his bunk, staring at the torn skin of his knuckles.
"Got mail, Logan?" Robbie leans against the ladder of the bed. He's got an envelope in his hand that he raises when he says, "It's my ma. Haven't read it yet but I'm sure she must've started crying halfway through."
Wyatt grins. "Nah. Got no family to send me letters. My dad, he doesn't know I'm here and I want to keep it that way. He's a world class son of a bitch," he says.
"Join the club."
And it feels like a damn relief getting to say it out loud to someone else, someone who gets it. It's like pulling apart a sour memory only to toss it into the dirt, pressing his boot in it for good measure when he and Robbie share knowing chuckles.
And it's a good thing he isn't keeping track because it's too hard to count scars on the battlefield anyway. He adds bullet wounds and stitches and burn marks on to his body. The metal of the pistol leaves calluses on his hands, and he hears the echo of the gunshot long after he's already squeezed the trigger between breaths.
He breaks a rib on his first mission. When the x-rays come back, they say nothing about how his heart aches for a smile from his grandpa, how his Goddamn mind pulls him back to seven years old like it's no big deal. It takes a while to heal, and he picks at the bandages in a calculated habit he's never quite learned how to ditch.
Dirt's been slowly gathering underneath his nails, and some nights he swears he hears his father's voice when he's falling asleep. It's a sensation he can't quite describe; the pull of familiarity, the push of will. Of strength. Of forward. Every time he wakes to face another day, another one of his muscles groaning even more so than the last, there's that fire again. And anyway, he learnt young that the hits don't mean anything, that it's the fight that counts.
Which means he gets up every morning, wills his knees not to give way at the sight of danger, follows his orders. His unit becomes his family and the shitty bunks become more of a home to him than that little brick house next to the woods on the outskirts of West Texas. Wyatt finds his reason to keep fighting and feels, for the first time in his life, the glory of it all, when all of them come back with their limbs intact and the adrenaline refusing to stop pumping through them.
After months of fighting, they're all safe, for now. Despite it all, he never really learns how to sleep without his guard up. That sharp, instinctual reaction to a sound that isn't his own breathing is one he doesn't know how to reprogram. But he does learn how to stop blaming himself for mistakes that weren't — aren't — his own.
So it takes him a deployment and nights of staring at the ceiling, and some nights of staying up poking at bits of a past he doesn't care for, but he gets over the hump.
-/-
There are parts of his body that Wyatt doesn't touch.
Like, the spot right above his heart where they pinned a medal on him and wrongfully called him a hero, or his left ring finger, that still held his wedding ring for months after he was labelled a widower.
These are parts he doesn't allow himself to touch, ones that he isn't deserving of touching. It becomes a topic of discussion he continuously holds with himself, and there were times in Iraq when his whole unit joked about talking to themselves like a bunch of crazy people, but—
He turns into a bumbling mess, more so when there's a cupboard overflowing with alcohol in his apartment. Wyatt stares at his fingers clutching the tumbler until his vision starts to blur, and then he's pulling up pictures and articles he's collected, hunting for tape and tacks and in desperate movements, pinning up any connections he can find straight on to his bedroom wall.
The first time Jessica had held his hand, she'd told him he had the hands of a man who worked hard.
When he thinks of moments like those, he wishes he could unscrew them and take them off, like one of those action figures he had with the wrist pegs. Pop them right out because they are useless, unneeded, can't warrant for anything if they couldn't even keep the people he loved alive.
-/-
He's at home when he gets the call, limbs aching from the training session at the start of the day. There's a woman at the other end with a voice that means business.
"Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan?"
It's a fucking joke that the promotion of rank came after the medal, that two prefixes attached to his name feel like a hit to the gut. He tries not to wince. "Yes, ma'am."
They're calling him in — into what, he doesn't know. It's a tight covert operation they're running, and no matter how skillfully he asks, the woman at the other end of the line doesn't budge. He has to say he's impressed.
"Why me?" He's doing fine here, as fine as he can be, at least.
The woman on the phone doesn't hesitate when she says, "We need a soldier, for protection."
There are certain implications attached to a mission that's a secret. For one, it's life threatening. Wyatt doesn't even get to the second one before he's saying yes over the phone. Because she might have said soldier , but Wyatt knows a part of her means martyr . And he doesn't have much he cares to live for, might as well get another name to be called out of it.
-/-
He's still trying to wrap his mind around time travel when his shoulders decide to take on the permanent stretch marks from the seatbelts of the Lifeboat.
They tighten around him when the machine shakes, and he grips on to the straps when Lucy squeezes her eyes shut. It takes a few trips, a few quips from Rufus about them making it out alive every time, and the constant grinding of his teeth when he's standing in front of men and women whom he's only ever heard about in documentaries and from his grade school teacher in history class, for it to become his normal.
Which doesn't really make it any easier to understand.
But he is what he is, and that means he waits for Agent Christopher to give him their mission brief, until something shifts and he's waiting for Lucy's lead so he can follow it. Until he's relying on Rufus — who is, by all accounts, a civilian — to match his stepping and have his back as they execute their plans. He starts to trust them, starts to think of them as more than just the people he's meant to protect.
When Amy is all Lucy talks about, all she thinks about, he doesn't stop her. Everyone is entitled to their own ghosts, after all. He can't pretend he hasn't been plotting ways to get Jess back ever since the words time machine were said to him. It's those festering wounds that catch hold of them and refuse to let go.
(It will be a few more weeks until it's aggressively proven that he cannot get Jess back.)
(It will almost destroy him.)
(He will try with all his Goddamn will to not think of Lucy's conviction, and her hands on his face holding him so hard that he's sure it turned red under the pressure, when he convinces himself to go back.)
-/-
There is never any quick-fix solution for wounds.
There is only acceptance. There is only healing.
-/-
When the building blows, all he thinks about is making sure Rufus is okay.
He wakes up in a bed, covered in bandages, and with his back aching. He doesn't ask how many stitches they needed to cover it all up, isn't even able to see the whole damage in the mirror because of the places it's hit. Wyatt supposes it doesn't make much of a difference that they're in his blind spot — he stopped examining his marks in mirrors years ago.
When the bandages come off, Rufus makes a face that's half fear and half worry. Wyatt knows it well, feels that exact mixture of emotions somewhere in his gut, pushing at his insides uncomfortably. Or maybe it's the painkillers. He doesn't want to think about it too much.
"They look like claw marks."
"I've had worse," Wyatt says. "Any word on Lucy?"
Rufus shakes his head somberly and Wyatt's stomach clenches.
The bruises come and go, he knows. But he doesn't want to give names to places on his body that will haunt him later. He already has his fair share of ghosts that he's been collecting for some time now, and he doesn't know what he'd do with himself if that list kept growing. If that list had Lucy's name on it.
-/-
He refuses to accept anything besides that she is alive.
And then she's sitting right next to him, and the relief he feels makes him forget, for a second, that full recovery isn't a possibility. In that moment, there is no need for the arduous process of healing. He holds her, and it just is — no matter how short lived.
-/-
When Lucy kisses him in 1941, in a dimly lit room, looking like a damn vision in that dress and her perfectly coiffed hair, he doesn't care about anything else.
She crashes into him and there's a fierceness there as she kisses him hard, pushes up against him until his back is to the wall. He didn't notice it at the time, but the few nights after the Alamo, he'd felt Lucy's body against his, her arms around him, her fitting effortlessly into his side. Every time he'd hugged her, it had felt familiar. Comforting. When he squeezes her waist now, that feeling amplifies into something heady and addictive.
Lucy lets out a soft noise into his mouth and fists her fingers into his side. There's a sharp, stinging pain that starts under her hand and goes up till his neck. He pulls back and shakes his head. He's so used to his hits, he forgets he takes them. Forgets the kick in the side of his stomach that one of the guards landed on him.
It begins to fade almost immediately, but Lucy's already staring at him with furrowed brows, her hands sliding off him slowly. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he says quickly, turning the last letters into nothing but an exhale. He doesn't want to talk, especially not now, when he could be doing better things with his mouth. He pulls at Lucy before she can get any further away from him and kisses her, a hand in her hair and his own moans swallowing hers.
Of course he's okay. He has never been better.
-/-
Lucy counts them.
Lucy stays up in the middle of the night and runs her small, soft hands over his skin. It's hardly the first time they've slept together, but maybe it's because of just that. She's eased into it, coaxed out a silent permission from him.
She ghosts her fingers over the gashes on his back and he doesn't know why, but he sighs.
"Sorry, does that hurt?"
"No, ma'am," he mumbles sleepily into the place under her jaw.
She takes it as an invitation to trace the ridges of the battered skin. She moves like she's looking for something, like the angle at which the glass and shrapnel hit him would tell her stories that she'd never know otherwise.
Her hands move from his back and under his arm, gliding over skin, until they reach the side of his stomach. She strokes the wounds, there from a fall that healed badly and left small dips that he's sure feel rough to the touch. Her hands move to his abdomen, and he can tell she's following her sense of touch to navigate in this darkness. He can't see her eyes but he thinks they must hold that look of concentration she gets sometimes.
There's raised skin under her hand — a knife wound from maybe two years ago — and she trails over the diagonal, crooked line. Wyatt presses his lips to her neck gently. He wonders if maybe one day they'll go back in time, and when he comes back he'll have scars in places he doesn't remember getting hurt. If he'd have any at all. Wyatt doesn't know what it means to have a body that isn't a shield.
Lucy lets her fingers dip into every dent; there's something about her movements that tell him it's fiercely important to her that she doesn't leave anything untouched. Then again, everything important to Lucy is fiercely important.
It's in between his haze that he realizes she's mumbling numbers under her breath, so very quietly. He only catches every other one, the count ticking up, up, up. Multiplying in twos, in fours, in tens.
"Luce?"
"Hm?"
"What are you doing?"
There is a long stretch of silence, and her hand comes to rest on his bare chest, fingertips curling over his heart.
"Getting to know you," she answers.
"You're gonna be counting for days," he says with an amused laugh.
"I intend to," she promises, the quiet of her voice doing nothing to hide the certainty in it. "You good with that?"
There are scars he cannot see, and then there is healing, which feels a lot like water leaving his lungs, like Lucy pulling him closer, like every number that comes out of her mouth reminding him that he has survived through countless wars. He smiles in to her smooth, untouched skin that is all the same colour. "Yeah, I am."