A/N: What do you do when you have planned to catch-up on reading Timeless fic but your internet connection is down? You write it instead.
This is a short one. Starting to write longer fics when S2 is almost here (FINALLY!) could prove complicated...
Disclaimer: I do not own Timeless or any of the characters, I'm only borrowing them.
There are all these wise words (or should that be clichés?) about love. How there are two things you can't hide, cough and love. How you can't decide who you love. How love appears at the most unexpected, sometimes inconvenient, times.
But there are no words of wisdom for when the man you love can't let go of his dead wife because the thing that brought the two of you together is the very thing that could bring her back.
No one ever came up with any wise words for love and time travel complications.
She used to ask her younger sister for advice when it comes to matters of the heart. (Should that last part be in quotation marks?)
She tries to work out if it is time travel that complicates love or love that complicates time travel.
For Amy it would be simple. "Do you love him? Does he love you?"
When Lucy had answered truthfully Amy would have asked "Why then?"
Why are you holding out, stopping yourselves because of a maybe? Take what you can get. Have faith in possibilities. Hold on to what is the present.
("What is" because their present shifts. From when she saves him and Rufus from H.H. Holmes' hidden room in 1893 to eight decades ago when he kisses her to his talk about possibilities.)
It is the most inconvenient of times but she takes courage from his recent words about possibilities. Recent but a lifetime away. You do not need a time travel machine to end up in a different world in only a few moments.
In a strange place of loss and emotional roller coaster rides where time can move backwards. Where a sister can disappear. Where her father is not her father. Where a mother can stop dying only to turn out to be the very thing she spends her days fighting against.
In this strange place the days take on a new shine. Morning coffee is new, pouring two cups instead of one and drink it opposite him and reach out and smooth down his sleep mussed hair.
Time travel and everyday life are difficult enough when you live on your own. If you live with someone it becomes chaotic.
"No, I don't mind that you drank the last of the coffee/milk/orange juice before we jumped to the 1900s - but you still need to add it to the shopping list on the fridge!" Or "Yes, the Revolution interfered with our laundry plans, but guess what, no revolutionaries picked up your socks from the floor so you still have to."
Days that are more real than perfect. But despite Emma and Rittenhouse and everything else they hold on to what they have and all those shiny moments in-between.
She does something crazy. She checks and the hotel is still there. Third time's a charm, right? He doesn't think so.
"Really? You do know this is the exact same room where Rufus did amateur surgery on me and Flynn kept me tied to a chair?"
She says she will ask Rufus to come over with the actual board game Operation if he doesn't get with the program. Does he realize how difficult it is to plan a romantic weekend away between jumps to witch trials and muddy trenches?!
"And if I don't, will you grab a lamp again? Smash it over my head?" he asks and smiles that smile she can never resist (and by now he knows it.)
They think no one else knows. But they do not fool anyone. The ease of their limbs when they stand close (did they ever stand this close before?) He brushes a crumb from her face and she drinks from his water bottle in the middle of a working lunch. There is a new familiarity between them as obvious as a neon sign.
FIN