Summary: "I never understood why they told me not to travel to any time where I already existed until I killed Wyatt Logan." Speculation fic. First person Flynn POV.
Rating: T (for a tiny bit of language)
Words: 1,300
Spoilers: Up to 1.16.
Warnings: Minor language.
Disclaimer: Everything is owned by someone else.
A/N: Wow, two fics in one week! Timeless owns me. This is a bit of future speculation that popped into my head whilst discussing how Flynn got his hands on Lucy's journal and why time travel to anywhere you've previously been is considered bad in the Timeless universe.
WITH AND WITHOUT YOU
I never understood why they told me not to travel to any time where I already existed until I killed Wyatt Logan.
Not that I remember killing him.
But Lucy does.
Of all people, I know what grief can do to a person.
It happened to me.
It happened to Wyatt.
Look what we've become.
I'm sitting here looking at the same walls he was looking at after he stole the Lifeboat to try and save his Jessica.
He failed, just as I've failed to save my family.
But Lucy? Lucy succeeded where neither myself nor Wyatt could.
But at what cost?
There's a reason they tell you not to travel anywhere you already exist.
It's nothing to do with physics or temporal mechanics or paradoxes.
It's to do with madness.
I told Wyatt once that parts of Lucy's journal sound like they were written by a different person. A different Lucy.
A crazy Lucy.
It's taken me this long to realize why.
Sometimes I feel like I'm going to go insane if I can't find a way to save my family.
Just go back to that time, fix that event, pull at that thread.
Tinker with this, toy with that.
Something has to bring them back.
Nothing has.
I didn't lie to Wyatt when I gave him the name of his wife's killer.
Wes Gillman murdered Jessica Logan. I had proof.
But stopping him being born? Didn't prevent her death.
I know this because Lucy told me, even though I don't remember. I don't remember Wes Gillman. I don't remember giving Wyatt his name. Because for me, that never happened. In the timeline where I currently exist, there never was a Wes Gillman because he was never born.
And yet Wyatt's Jessica is still dead.
He thinks it's Fate.
I think that's bullshit.
And Lucy?
It depends on the day and the person.
She accepts Jessica's death. She accepts the death of my family.
In some ways, she's even come to accept the loss of her sister.
Fate.
But Wyatt?
Not Wyatt.
Never Wyatt.
Wyatt wasn't fated to die.
I don't know how many years she spent trying to bring him back.
From what she told me, he jumped in front of a bullet to save her.
I didn't intend to kill him.
I didn't intend to kill her.
I didn't intend to kill anybody.
But look what I've become.
Grief and a time machine.
Grief and a time machine and Lucy.
Years and years, backwards and forwards, over and over and over again.
The same events.
The same Lucy.
Picking at this, pulling at that. Stop this happening, make this happen. This time it will work.
For years and years and years she tried.
She was an old woman when I met her for the first time.
An old woman in a black dress who came up to me as I stood on Golden Gate Bridge considering jumping into the water.
"I have a proposition for you," she'd said.
I asked her who she was. How she knew me. How she knew to find me there.
She knew the future, she said.
She knew how to fix the future, she said.
My family.
Her family.
The one person she couldn't allow to die.
She told me a story of a time machine.
Of a young woman so distraught with grief, she stole it.
Rufus helped her initially. But eventually she figured out how to pilot the thing herself and left him to get on with his life.
The way she could never get on with her own.
Years.
She spent years trying to bring him back.
She was an old woman.
But then she had an idea.
Came up with a plan.
And there she was.
"Help me save him and I'll help you save your family," she'd said.
I didn't believe her.
But I listened.
I was about to end it all anyway.
Time travel?
Why not.
"We can help each other," she'd said, and if she sounded crazy I was too polite to point that out to her.
And she made me make her a promise.
In a year's time, she told me I would shoot and kill a man named Wyatt Logan.
Except we would be in 1934 and they would be attempting to escape from a shootout outside a bank.
I wasn't aiming for Lucy or Wyatt.
I was aiming for Clyde Barrow.
That Clyde Barrow.
Lucy got in the way.
Wyatt got in front of her.
He died instantly.
Lucy said it was in that second she realized the mistake she'd made.
Not in running across the street when he'd told her to stay down behind the car.
But in not having told Wyatt she loved him.
He'd died in her arms never knowing.
Still in love with his dead wife.
He needs to let her go, she'd written in her journal.
But she could never do the same for him.
So when that moment came for me, when I was standing outside that bank in 1934 with a gun in my hand and Clyde Barrow in my sights, I'd remembered.
"Promise me you won't shoot Wyatt and I'll give you this."
Out of my peripheral vision I'd seen Lucy run into the street.
"Lucy, no!" Wyatt had yelled at her, and against his better judgement, I'd seen him run out into the street after her.
I could have shot Clyde Barrow.
But I didn't.
Because Lucy would have gotten in the way.
And Wyatt would have died saving her.
So I didn't shoot.
And Wyatt lived.
She'd put a journal into my hand.
"Promise me," she'd said.
And I did.
Maybe it's remembering so many different versions of your life that drives a time traveler insane. So many different timelines. So many different realities.
When I read Lucy's journal, it soon became apparent that sometimes she sounded completely lucid, while others...she did not.
Because even after she returned to her own time and found not only Wyatt Logan alive and well and waiting for her with their grandkids, but also her own memory suddenly full of images of a life spent with him, she still remembered the life she spent without him.
How is someone supposed to process that and remain sane?
She wrote about it.
At great length.
Her fortieth birthday spent alone at his grave.
Her fortieth birthday spent with him and their little boy at Walt Disney World.
Christmas with Rufus and Jiya and their children.
The same Christmas with Wyatt and their own.
Too much to remember and too much to forget.
But she saved him.
Unlike me, unlike Wyatt, she saved the person she loved.
With my help and a time machine.
He lived and he died.
I killed him. I didn't kill him.
Because of a time machine.
She told me that once she had him back she would never use the Lifeboat again.
Unless he disappeared.
She said she'd know.
Somehow, she would know.
And if anything ever happened to him, she would complete the one mission she refused to complete previously.
To kill my mother before I was born.
If anything happened to Wyatt?
Lucy said she would go back in time and kill my mother.
And I believed her.
So I could never risk it.
Kill Wyatt, erase myself.
Don't kill Wyatt, I get to live.
And with a journal that could show me how to save my wife and daughter.
It was an easy bargain to make.
I could live with that.
And despite everything, I wouldn't give up on pulling that one thread that would give me back my family.
So when Wyatt Logan broke into my cell with a gun in his hand and a stony expression on his face and told me, "Come with me. Lucy's waiting," I followed him.
Fate and time makes friends and enemies of us all.
The end