Punch-Drunk
A gift fic for the-galaxy-collector
The days they don't have a mission are the worst. Lucy can handle gunmen, gangsters, witch trials, and rampant misogyny—dear God, history hates women so much—but an empty afternoon with nothing to fill it but halfhearted board games or leafing through dog-eared, broken-spined history texts?
She'd take the barrel of a gun any day.
Which was disheartening in a way she didn't want to contemplate.
Distractions were hard to come by in the bunker, and everyone had already found their own. Conner tinkered. Agent Christopher caught up on paperwork. Rufus and Jiya giggled over some esoteric component of the Lifeboat, the private language that flowed between them English only in the most nominal sense.
Hardest to bear—and Lucy had tried to bear it so patiently—was thinking of Wyatt and Jessica. Holed up in their bedroom, lying side-by-side on her bed, murmuring over plans and dreams for their baby.
Everyone had something to do. Everyone had someone to do it with. It was only Lucy who couldn't seem to get her feet underneath her when there was no mission.
Well. That wasn't strictly true.
Flynn always had something to do, it was true. She'd never seen someone who could busy himself so constantly, so single-mindedly. From the way he cleaned his guns, narrowed eyes peering down a disassembled slide, to the way he worked the heavy bag in the rec room, blow after blow landing with clockwork precision, there was nothing Flynn did that left any space in his mind for brooding.
But it was just so much busywork. The difference between Flynn and Lucy was that he could actually be absorbed in it. No matter how much Lucy tried to focus on her research, memorizing facts and figures that might assist them in their next mission, she just couldn't seem to stop her brain from endlessly chewing over her fears, her worries, her sadness. Amy. Her mother. Rittenhouse. Her whole life being an engineered lie that she wasn't ready to move past.
She was disappointed that Flynn didn't have the same problem. Before the weird twist of fate that left them living together, Lucy assumed he would be a world-class brooder, but it just wasn't true. Maybe Flynn feared the depths he could reach if he let himself dwell for too long over what he'd lost, what had been taken from him. It was only at night, when all his self-imposed tasks had been done, that he let himself breathe a little with her.
But Lucy knew that she wouldn't make it through till night. She'd break down into a screaming mess first.
No one noticed when she left the Lifeboat dock, but she made a show of it regardless. Went to the bathroom. Washed her hands a bit too long. Lingered with the door open, drying her hands, staring at her dry lips and red eyes in the mirror. She hadn't bothered with makeup that day, and though she hated the thought, it dawned on her that she looked faded and worn without it.
No wonder—
No, she cut the thought off with a butcher knife. She wouldn't start thinking like that.
What she needed was to stop thinking altogether.
No one noticed when she turned the other way down the hall and stole into the rec room, where dull, heavy thuds echoed into the deserted air. One, two, one-two-three, heavy then light, then landing with bruising intensity.
He noticed her immediately. But his rhythm didn't falter. If anything, it sped up.
For such a tall man, he moved with shocking lightness and speed. She'd always noticed it. At first, his strength and endurance had terrified her. Now...
Now it did something else. Something she couldn't allow herself to even consider exploring, because she didn't have her own damn bedroom, and even if she did, the walls were very thin.
"You know," her voice emerged high and strained, "you can solve your problems without violence."
He chuckled, landing an uppercut that makes the bag sway, "Okay," he shook sweat from his hair and winked at her, "But consider: I'm really, really good at violence."
Their first mission together, working together at his prediction, he'd caged his violence at her whim. Lucy can't help but remember how he'd unleashed it the moment she gave the word. She hadn't watched, but she heard Flynn bodily lift a man up and slam him to the floor.
"Could you teach me?"
That stilled him, at last. He caught the bag between his hands and considered it, not her.
"You don't really want to, Lucy."
"Don't I?" the challenge fired her blood, raised her hackles, and before she could consider her next step, she was already standing toe-to-toe with Flynn, jabbing a finger in his chest.
"Listen up," she hissed, "I am sick of everyone making decisions for me. Now, if you don't want to teach me for whatever reason, that's fine. But when I say I want something, or want to do something—whatever you think about it—I want to be believed. Understand? I deserve that much."
If Flynn noticed that her voice broke on the word deserve—because she wanted so much, deserved so much and it just wasn't fair, all that she'd lost, all that she personally had lost—he paid her the courtesy of ignoring it. He stared at her with those dark eyes of his, those dark eyes that still somehow seemed to know more about her than she did, and nodded.
Her victory took her aback.
"Okay then," she cleared her throat, embarrassed to find tears in her eyes, "where do we start?"
"Here," he said, taking her hand in his. She flinched. His smile was a grimace. "You have to tape your fingers, Lucy. Or you'll hurt yourself."
"Right," she swallowed her heart back down from where it had leaped up into her mouth, "Yeah. Of course."
He showed her how to do it, crossing the wrap over her palm, winding it between her fingers up and over the first knuckle. He squared her shoulders, nudged at her feet until she took the proper stance.
"Make a fist," he said.
"Um," now Lucy was getting out of her depth. Wanting to hit something was entirely different from actually being able to. "How?"
He didn't laugh, but his lips twitched. "Thumb curled under your knuckles. Tight but not too tight."
She did her best. He rearranged her fingers, pulled until her front knuckles were aligned with her wrist, reinforced by the long bones of her forearm.
"Aim to hit with these two," he touched her first and middle fingers. "Impact with the others and you might break them."
"Okay," she said, swallowing again. Despite how close they stood, Lucy wasn't thinking of him. She was staring at the gray grain of the heavy bag, at a three-inch patch of it just over where her fist would land. Her body was wound tight, a coiled spring, its energy waiting to explode outwards.
Flynn took a position on the other side of the bag. "Go ahead."
"Wait, that's it?" her fist dropped. "You're not going to tell me anything else?"
He shrugged. "There's not much more to tell you than this. It's throwing a punch, not rocket science. You have to learn by doing. Two minutes. Go."
Her first blow was timid, but it shocked her. She couldn't remember the last time—if ever—she'd used her body in a conscious attempt to cause damage. There was something about the act that made her a little bit sick, as though she could feel her mother's disapproving frown crossing miles (and who knows, centuries) to shame her.
Lucy squared up and drove her fist forward. Then the other. Back. Again.
She quickly lost count in the flurry that followed. Her arms grew sore, her knuckles felt scraped raw, but Flynn didn't call time. Was two minutes so long? Long enough to swallow her whole, long enough to exhaust her?
Her breathing came rough, ragged. She landed punches with audible grunts, pulled back to hit again by inhaling on a gasp indistinguishable from a sob. The patch of gray on the bag swelled until it blotted out everything, from Flynn's dark, searching eyes to Wyatt's soft, pleading face, to the bunker, to the world outside, to the whole of history itself. She was unraveling. Everything was coming unmoored.
A hot tear flashed down her cheek and Lucy stumbled back from the bag.
"Thanks," she said, trying to wipe her face down, pretending it was all just sweat, bluffing that she'd just had enough, "I think that's all I can manage; I've got these chicken arms, and—"
"Lucy."
"No, really Flynn, thanks," sweat stung her eyes and that was why she was crying, it wasn't her whole life having no meaning, no real meaning, not any of it, "I guess it's just not for me."
"Lucy," his arms fastened on her shoulders, the weight of them bringing her down to earth. His rough palms chafed through her thin tee-shirt. "I'm here. It's all right."
A beat. Two. Lucy could feel her heart breaking through her sternum.
"It's not," she whispered. "It's not, though, is it?"
"No," he didn't lie to her, not then, not ever, "No, it's not. You don't deserve this. I wish," he broke off, shaking his head, frustrated by his own incompetence here, despite all his skill elsewhere, "I wish there was something I could do that would help you."
"You do," she told him, because it was true, and because she was tired of lies, even the half-lies of prevarication, of omission. "You do help me. I don't know what I would have done, that night, if you hadn't talked to me. Hadn't been there for me."
Flynn looked abashed, as he always did when the subject touched on her heartbreak. "I always will be," he muttered.
Suddenly Lucy felt her fingers tangled in the front of his shirt, where she'd gripped him for balance as her world spun apart. There was barely six inches between them; she could feel his heat as he could feel hers. The sluggish blood in her head churned slowly, dizzying her with vertigo. Everything swirled, turned upside-down.
"You promise?"
"Yes," it was a vow, a vow of a knight to his lady. "I swear."
"Good," she leaned closer, pausing for a moment as his body stiffened. "Flynn," she spoke against his lips, "If you don't want to kiss me, don't kiss me. But don't tell me I don't want to do this. I do."
"You do?"
"Yes," her own promise was just as sacred.
She didn't know who moved first. Perhaps they just met in the middle.