Summary: Sometimes we have to save ourselves from ourselves. Oneshot, Wyatt POV stream of consciousness.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1,900
Spoilers: Spoilers up to the season 2 finale.
Warnings: Very mild language.
Disclaimer: Kripke owns it all including my brain, my heart and my soul!
A/N: Written in response to the release of the deleted pool scene from 2.3 and some of the Wyatt bashing that's been going on throughout season 2, primarily because the poor guy decided maybe he ought to remain faithful to his wife.
THREE TIMES IN WATER
I wasn't kidding when I told Lucy she'd saved my life.
Standing there by the pool in Hedy Lamarr's mansion.
Hedy Lamarr.
Our lives are weird.
Before Lucy came along I guess I was lost. Felt like I was ten years old being thrown around in the dark in the back of my dad's old Chevy again.
It's funny how sometimes you don't really remember significant events in your life until a long time after they happened. That's especially true when you travel through time for a living. Sometimes we'll get back from a mission or I'll wake up in the morning and I've no idea whether my memories are the same as they were before I left or this time yesterday.
Sometimes I think we weren't meant to mess around with Time.
Most of the time, actually.
But if Connor Mason hadn't invented a time machine, I would never have met Lucy.
Fate?
Meant to be?
I never used to believe in stuff like that.
And then I was standing next to Hedy Lamarr's pool in 1941 and Lucy had on that dress and the water was making her hair look like it had strands of gold in it and I know that was just a reflection from the water and her dress, but, man, in that moment, standing there with her, I actually thought, I can do this. I'm ready. I can finally let go of Jess.
Of course, everything went to Hell only a few hours later, and I didn't know whether Lucy and I could ever get back to that moment when we were standing by Hedy Lamarr's pool in 1941 and I couldn't stop thinking about touching her hair.
But in that moment? In that moment it was just her and me, and the rest of the world, the rest of history, the rest of Time, didn't exist.
For a second I thought about picking her up and jumping in the pool with her.
I thought it would be romantic, fun, take her by surprise.
But something stopped me doing it.
A memory.
At first I wasn't sure whether it was a memory I just had or a memory I'd always had, but I remembered her telling me about the time she was driving home to tell her mom she was ditching college to join a band and her car spun off the road and into a river.
And I realized I didn't know whether she was afraid of water.
So instead we went back to the pool house and it was...it was perfect and it was different from Jess and it was...yeah. Perfect. She was perfect. We were…
Anyway.
Water under the bridge.
But I kept thinking about that story, the one Lucy told me when we were in Nazi Germany and Ian freaking Fleming was in the next room waiting to lead us into that castle.
We both have experiences with water I guess we'd rather forget.
That moment in the castle was the first time I told her a little bit about my dad. Not much. Nothing like what she overheard when I was having my fanboy bonding experience with Wendell Scott.
I never meant for her to hear that. Never meant for her to know.
Sure, I didn't mind her knowing he was a sonofabitch and all.
But that stuff about what he used to do to me when I was a kid?
No. I never meant her to hear that. I don't… I can't… It's hard to share an experience like that, even with someone you love, that makes you feel weak, helpless, the way those memories still make me feel.
Yeah, I was a kid. Yeah, my dad really was a world class sonofabitch and should never had done that stuff to me. But even now I wonder whether I could have—should have—done something sooner. Instead of waiting till I was fifteen and finally decided I'd had enough.
Sometimes these days I don't remember which memories are real, but I do remember driving his car into the lake.
I'm just not sure how long I've remembered what I now remember as having happened next.
I have a vague memory of sitting in the front seat while the water started creeping up past my ankles, my knees, my chest, just waiting and thinking.
My Grandpa Sherwin hadn't long passed at that point, gone to join my mom in Heaven, the pastor said. And I realized there was no one left on the planet I actually cared about. Who actually cared about me.
My mom passed when I was little, six years old, and I remember seeing her in the bathtub.
Just her hand hanging over the edge.
She had purple nails.
Grandpa Sherwin said her heart was broken and the angels had to take her away to Heaven.
I found out much, much later she'd had a heart attack and drowned right there in the tub.
And I remember sitting there in my dad's Chevy, the car he loved more than he ever loved me, as it filled with water, slowly, slowly, up to my neck, and I remember thinking, this is it. This is how I die.
And Lucy had said she had the exact same thought when she spun out into that river.
I remember sitting in the car as it sank.
But then I don't really remember what happened next. Not as a memory of my fifteen-year-old self looking out onto the lake and thinking about how I hoped the pastor was right and I was going to see my mom and my Grandpa Sherwin again.
But I do remember it from a different perspective.
I do remember it as an adult looking in at a car sinking in a lake with a teenage boy in the driver's seat waiting to die.
It was only a couple years later that I was standing by that river as Lucy's car spun out.
She was holding my hand as we watched it happen.
"Go get her, Wyatt," she'd said. "Me. Go get me."
And I had.
Pulled her out of the car just like I pulled out that fifteen-year-old boy waiting to drown in the lake.
Two times in water.
Sometimes I think we weren't meant to mess with Time.
Sometimes I think that's bull.
You don't build a tool just to look at it.
The third time though? The third time, I didn't even make it to the water.
Stood there looking at it for a long time.
But didn't have the guts to jump in.
My dad used to call me a little princess.
Said I was too soft and too pretty and my mom broke me before he had chance to make me into a man.
I know that's bull too, but I believed it for the longest time.
But it wasn't cowardice, exactly, that stopped me jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
And it wasn't Lucy.
Exactly.
Not that Lucy.
Not the one that walked right on up to me and told me to get my head out of my ass and stop being an idiot.
Not that Lucy.
I think if my Lucy had shown up that second, the bruises on her face and all that pain in her brown eyes, all that pain I caused even if I never, ever meant to hurt her? If that Lucy had turned up that second, I might have done it. Jumped right on in.
But the thought of thatLucy, the one back at the bunker, the one I took off and left the second we got back from 1888?
The thought of that Lucy, and the thought of Jiya, the thought of Jiya grieving a Rufus lying dead on the pavement in the past and it was all my fault, dammit. The thought of Rufus dying in our arms.
That's what stopped me.
Not the Lucy who showed up on the bridge and told me to stop being an idiot.
I never wondered how she got to the bridge so damn fast.
How she knew where I was.
Where the bruises Emma put there had gone.
And I never even noticed her hair was shorter.
But I remember that now.
I remember because I was standing a ways behind her. So he wouldn't see me.
So I wouldn't see me.
He—I—didn't jump.
I know that because I continued to exist.
Because he was there when Lucy and I climbed on down out of the Lifeboat and told him, told Lucy, told all of them, my family, told them we needed to get Rufus back.
I remember the bridge.
I remember Lucy.
But I thought it was my Lucy. Didn't realize until years later—until I was standing behind her on the bridge watching her tell my younger self to get his head out of his ass—that it was a different Lucy.
A Lucy who would be my Lucy again someday.
And I heard her say to me for the second time, "Go tell me you love me."
And I did. That me. That Wyatt Logan. The one from 2018.
I went straight back to the bunker and told her.
Like I should have told her months earlier.
Like I should have told her when she told me to go be with Jessica.
Like I should have told her when she never asked me, dammit, whether I actually wanted to be with Jessica.
Like I should have told her when she persuaded Jess to give me another chance.
Go be with your wife.
You're a happily married man.
Go be with Jessica.
Every time she said that to me I should have told her.
Always try to do the right thing, Wyatt, my Grandpa Sherwin used to say.
And I did. Always. Even when my heart told me not to but my brain told me—Hell, Lucy told me—that I should.
Go be with Jessica.
Be faithful to your wife.
Even when she wasn't really my wife at all.
So much wasted time.
Of course, I know that now.
I know what that Jessica was, who she was. I can separate her from my Jessica.
But I couldn't do it at the time.
I know how her story ended.
And I also know that if Lucy and I didn't get back in the Lifeboat, didn't save ourselves from the water, didn't save ourselves from ourselves, get our heads out of our asses and say, "I love you," then our story would have ended too.
Ended before we even made it to the bunker.
Before I made all of those stupid mistakes.
Before I ever got to tell Lucy I loved her.
Before she eventually managed to say it back.
Before we saved Rufus.
Before we stopped Rittenhouse.
I know now that Time isn't linear, that sometimes there are circles and effect can precede cause.
That sometimes Time is the only thing we have that can save the people we love.
Time is the only thing that can save us from ourselves.
And sometimes we have to save ourselves from the water.
The End