Summary: Written in response to following prompt from Timeless Fanfic Prompts: "Not all love is gentle. Sometimes it's gritty and dirty and possessive, sometimes it's not supposed to be careful or soft at all. Sometimes it feels like teeth." — Azra T.
Lyatt. Garcy. Yes, both. No Garcyatt.
Once upon a night in 2016 a Homeland Security agent whisked Lucy Preston away from a bitter conversation with her sister about how the university had denied her tenure, to an industrial gray and black waiting room at Mason Industries. A man, a stranger, leaned back in a chair on the other side of the room, his eyes closed as if asleep. Short, dark hair stippled his jaw. His booted feet lounged on a glass-topped table as if he was just someone relaxing at home. She envied him his obvious ease. Why had Agent Kondo brought her there? Had she done something wrong? She fingered her locket and tried to ignore the way her nerves pinged, her stomach churned, and her knee wanted to jiggle up and down. OK, so maybe she had an unpaid campus parking ticket lying in the console of her car, but— "Are you asleep?"
In her head, she'd already dubbed the man in the jeans and boots Sleepy. "No, ma'am," Sleepy said.
"Oh. Okay, good. This is Connor Mason's company? Do you know why we're here?"
"No idea, ma'am."
"You know, we're pretty much the same age, so you can just stop calling me ma'am."
Sleepy's eyes opened, beaming all their blues at her.
Lucy blinked. Oh, she thought. Maybe she'd have to reconsider that nickname.
His mouth arced in a slow, lopsided smile. Lucy inhaled sharply. Oh, she thought again.
The first time she saw him it was on a computer screen. Coal-dark hair, green eyes, and a slender, unsmiling mouth. She shivered but could not look away.
"Garcia Flynn, ex-NSA asset in Eastern Europe," Agent Christopher said.
"Ex since when?" Wyatt asked.
"Since he killed his wife and child and went off the grid. That was a year ago. We thought he was holed up in Chechnya, but apparently not."
What kind of man murdered his wife and child?
It was with the flaming skeleton of the Hindenburg dying next to them, pandemonium and screams puncturing the night air, that she stood with Garcia Flynn for the first time. He loomed out of the darkness, a tall creature wreathed in shadow.
"It's time we talked," he said, and the charcoal-smudge impression in front of Lucy resolved into a man. A tower of a man holding a gun trained in her direction. She had to tilt her chin up to meet his blistering gaze, while he tipped his down. Firelight burnished his hair red. The two-dimensional image Agent Christopher had shown her had not prepared her for the weight and vibrancy of Flynn's presence. "You need to understand who and what we're dealing with," he said. His eyes traced her face as if seeking an answer to a question she didn't know how to ask yet.
His voice, she knew it—had heard it ring out across the barren landscape of her dreams, even if she had never met its owner before. The rough timbre of his speech and the way he elongated his A's—all of that was familiar to her in a way that defied understanding. "I understand that you're a psychopath trying to burn everything to the ground," she said, ashamed at the tremor in her voice.
"Well, that depends on your point of view, Lucy." Her name slipped from his lips like a caress—the murmur of a thumb stroked over the top of her hand.
Babylon burned all around them, and this man, this stranger with the voice and the eyes she knew somehow— This man was responsible. Terrorist, they called him. Danger, her mind whispered, here there be dragons. Ignoring the klaxon that blared in her head, shoving aside all common sense and logic, Lucy stepped closer to him. "How do you know my name?"
"I know everything about you."
He held open a book, a journal, and showed her pages filled with her own handwriting. Of course she recognized her own penmanship, but how could that be, when she possessed no memory of writing the words? Impossible, and yet… Hadn't she journeyed on a ship back through time?
"Do you believe in fate?" Robert Todd Lincoln asked her at a train station in 1865. Did she?
Flynn found her there, fresh from her encounter with Lincoln. Lincoln, upright and handsome in his dress blues. Lincoln, with the soft gleam in his eyes.
In daylight Flynn was all formidable lines and stern angles, his hands folded stiffly behind his back. His nose was a touch too long; his mouth sat tense and unforgiving. Only a few feet separated them as she cursed him for being the reason for her sister's disappearance.
He didn't hold her there with a gun this time. No, this time he pinned her with only the electric flare of his eyes. He arrested her. The elegant score of his eyebrows beneath his creased forehead captivated her in a way it should not as he threw around words like Rittenhouse, war, and future.
If there was any softness in this man, her eyes could not find it.
But her ears heard it every time he uttered her name.
"Lucy, one day you are going to help me," he said and wrapped the sound of her name in that silken familiarity. A wave of warmth, wholly unwanted, cascaded over her as if Flynn had touched her.
She wanted him to touch her.
Beyond all logic and reason, in defiance of all the sense her mother had tried to instill in her, Lucy wanted to touch Flynn, this strange man with phantoms and future trajectories and vengeance in his eyes. She could cut herself on the dagger point of his lips and not care that she bled. The skin on her palms craved the harsh geometry of his face, so she argued twice as hard, her tone strident and brutal, teeth snapping, antagonizing Flynn even as she questioned the wisdom of doing so.
His large hand closed hard around the fine bones of her wrist, light catching on the gold ring that encircled his fourth finger. Thus manacled, Lucy fought back the tears of humiliation that suddenly clouded her vision.
If there was any softness in this man, her eyes could not find it.
In 1865 Lucy flirted her way into an invitation to Ford's Theater with Robert Todd Lincoln. She donned a white gown sprinkled with silvery blue flowers, and when she came out from behind the changing screen she watched Wyatt's lips echo that same half-smile from the night they met. Strands of his hair slashed down across his forehead, and her fingers twitched with the traitorous impulse to push them back.
Flynn shot Abraham Lincoln in front of her that night; his blood christened her dress in a macabre series of Rorschach blots.
Blood brutalized her dress.
Blood marked her skin.
Blood thrummed thick and fast in her ears.
"I decided I was gonna let it happen. But then I called out to warn him. It was too late. It's one thing to talk about history like this abstract thing. But when the man gets shot right in front of you… I tried," she said in an effort to convince herself she had done her utmost to save Abraham Lincoln's life. The words offered her no solace as she recounted her tale to Rufus and Wyatt in the half-dark interior of the Lifeboat. Lucy's throat closed up and she found she couldn't continue. Wordless and heavy, she floundered in a vast sea of guilt and grief.
Until Wyatt's hand curled over hers, knuckles resting on her blood-stiffened clothing.
In the welcome pressure of his hand, the steady warmth of his gaze, and the steadfast bow of his mouth, she found an anchor.
In 1962 she listened to Wyatt dictate a telegram to send his dead wife in 2012. (Time travel—its risks, its paradoxes, all of it—raked her thoughts into hopeless knots. But the human heart and its capacity to expand, to contract, to shatter, and continue beating, well, these were timeless things.) Over the irregular click clack of the typewriter keys, Wyatt's voice trudged on, its cadence shaky and tinged navy with sadness.
This moment, she hadn't meant to witness it, and the guilt of intruding on her teammate's privacy licked hot at her skin. Then he turned around and caught her watching him; he donned his armor, made a joke and strode away from her. But his eyes shone too bright; his head hung too low, and he had no other easy quip or crooked smile to offer her. All his other masks fell away while anguish sheathed his features like a second skin, and she could not let him leave.
"Wyatt."
"I know what you're going to say."
"No, you don't. Look. I understand. I would do anything to get my sister back."
"Look, I'm sorry about before. I get it's your job, keeping history the way it's meant to be. I don't believe in 'meant to be,' though, or fate, or anything like that, and if you knew how Jess died...You would know there's no such thing. It's all just dumb luck and random chance. It's just a roll of the dice."
Wyatt's voice reverberated with old pain; she recognized it. With her sister's loss still a fresh injury, she felt a certain kinship with him.
That was when Lucy began to believe in ghosts.
1836 found Lucy and her team chasing Flynn to the Alamo Mission in what was then still Mexico. Hundreds would die there. Hundreds of souls burned white-hot and true, souls just like hers or Rufus' or Wyatt's, then flickered, before they were finally snuffed out. It didn't get easier, riding a metal bucket of bolts and vibrations through history to witness life's end over and over again and knowing she shouldn't do much, if anything at all, to alter history's tragic outcomes. Contemplating these ethical dilemmas for too long would lead, she knew with a bone-deep certainty, to insanity.
There in 1836, while the dry wind flicked sandy soil into her skirts, Lucy peeled back more of the mysteries that lay behind Wyatt's blue eyes. Six men—his men—all soldiers like him, had died so he could complete his mission and carry out crucial intelligence. She overheard him confess this to Colonel Bowie. Yet another private moment she shouldn't have witnessed, though honesty made her admit, if only to herself, that she didn't regret it. Couldn't regret it. Because she wanted to know Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan, and every piece of his history she learned was a dot in the Pointillist painting that would eventually reveal his complete image.
Fine grains of soil clung to Lucy's skin as musket and rifle fire thundered around her. Until recently, war had seemed an abstract entity, a mirage shimmering hot in the distance: something fought in distant lands or at least distant times. Now, though, war was this, a man who could not forget:
"I'm not going," Wyatt said.
"What? No. What do you mean?"
"You don't need me. They're getting rid of me anyway, right?"
Lucy looked at him in horror. "You can't stay here. Everybody dies."
"No, I know. I can't leave good men like this, not again."
Wyatt Logan was a good man, too; he acted as her sword and her shield and Lucy would not leave him behind to perish with everyone else left at the Alamo Mission. "No. No, Wyatt."
"What difference does it make? Jessica, everyone I care about is gone. Let me do one good thing. Let me buy you the time to get out."
Jessica. He was so mired in his own grief and memories that he had called her by another woman's name.
"What about us? We're counting on you," Lucy said, desperate to convince him.
"The next guy's gonna handle it."
"I don't want anybody else. Look, I trust you. You are the one that I trust. Rufus needs you. I need you. Okay?" Her lips formed the words she thought would be the right ones to persuade him. Underscoring her words, she fit her hands to his face and let their warmth and pressure guide Wyatt out of the past and forward into the present. I need you.
1934 took them to Arkansas—and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Their love affair was doomed, Lucy knew, and seeing them together was... difficult. Their desire for each other was so stark, so vivid, that Lucy had to ignore the hot blood she felt flood her cheeks and force herself: to look at them when they spoke and to go through all the right motions to maintain her and Wyatt's cover. Bonnie and Clyde wanted each other, and that want was almost a tangible, visible thing, a circuit of raw hunger cycling back and forth between them.
Watching them was torture.
Wyatt spoke up in a low, gruff rumble. He spun a tale about himself kneeling on a hill in West Texas in front of the woman he loved, with a ring box in his hand and the sunset as a witness. There was a kiss, he told them, a kiss he'd never forget. Lucy knew he told the truth; this story was his story—his and Jessica's. It was— It was something about the way his eyes turned remote, suspended in memory, and his body grew still.
Finally, when Lucy was sure she could not bear it any longer, Wyatt turned to her and said, "You remember that, honey?"
It was all she could do to stutter out a "Yeah" and hope her nervous laugh didn't give them away to Bonnie and Clyde.
Then he kissed her, stealing her surprised breath into his lungs. His palm found a home on the curve of her cheek as if they had done this a thousand times before. Through the whirling chaos in her mind and her body Lucy reminded herself that this, this was pretend. She fought to remain academic. She fought to divorce herself from the intimacy of pressing her mouth to Wyatt's, especially since she couldn't even count how many months it had been since she had last shared space and breath with someone like that.
It didn't matter that Wyatt tasted faintly of hooch and of light—of sunlight filtered through a damp forest canopy of green leaves awakening in springtime. The grains of light hair on his jaw tickled her fingertips. Lucy wanted to slide her hand into his hair and curve it around his skull. I need you so much closer.
It didn't matter. Her fingers quivered on the hard line of his jaw. This was acting. Nothing more.
In 1780 Lucy, Rufus, and Wyatt teamed up, unbelievably, with Flynn. Crisp early-autumn air slid its cool fingers under Lucy's wine-dark cloak while she listened to Flynn murmur to their horses as he helped them slake their thirst. "Hey, buddy." She blinked at the gentle, slip-slide lilt in his voice. Perhaps she'd imagined it. But, no, there it was once again as he tended the animals. Those tones, overflowing with affection and warm splashes of color, were ones she had never heard from him before.
If there was any softness in this man, her eyes could not find it.
But her ears, oh her ears, they found it.
She swallowed hard and tried to shake off her desire to curl up against that kind voice like a cat dozing in a puddle of afternoon sunlight.
"I wanted to be a cowboy growing up," he said. Growing up. They'd all had to do it. She'd never considered, though, that Garcia Flynn had once been a child, too. Did he have nightmares when he was little? Who had stroked the dark hair from his forehead and soothed him back to sleep? His mother? His father? And what had he looked like as a little boy? Had those solemn green eyes always held so much torment? His face must have been fuller and held more softness back then….
Flynn continued speaking, tugging her from her musings as he told her about some comics he'd read as a child. Terms like "good guys" and "bad guys" fell from his lips, and Lucy silently asked, Which do you think you are—a good guy or a bad guy?
Lucy discovered she hungered for more knowledge of him. It wasn't fair that he knew so much about her from a journal that she, or rather some version of her, had written. It added a strange, one-sided layer of intimacy to their interactions. The imbalance troubled her. This was the most open he had ever been with her. Who knew when he would slam the door shut and bolt it from the other side? She decided to take advantage of the moment. "If we take out Rittenhouse, then what will you do?"
"Go home to my family. They'll be alive again. Let my little girl jump into my arms. Hug my wife. And then say goodbye and walk away forever."
That he had responded at all rather than shaking off her question altogether sent a surge of shock through her. "What? You would just... you would just leave them after all that we've been through?"
"Chasing Rittenhouse, I've done horrible things... become something else. How can I bring that into my home? What kind of husband or... or a father can I be after what I've done?"
Without meaning to, Flynn had even answered the question she had not dared to ask aloud: Which do you think you are—a good guy or a bad guy?
Flynn had immolated history and stood ready to throw himself on the pyre as well simply to put his family back in the world. He didn't intend to share a life with them; he only wanted to know they were alive. Without him.
A pang of melancholy sounded somewhere in the deep recesses of the small muscle that pumped blood through Lucy's body. Had anyone ever loved her as much as Flynn loved his wife and daughter? Would anyone?
Would she ever love someone that much?
Flynn pointed his gun at John Rittenhouse, a boy, a person whose only crime was being born to the wrong man.
There was no other choice: Lucy put herself between Flynn and the boy. Though she had no sword, she could be a shield; she would be a shield. "I'm not letting you kill a child," she said, and that was it: She understood now that the war she and Rufus and Wyatt fought was against Rittenhouse, not Flynn, but she could not remain a bystander in that moment. She wasn't fool enough to think she was Flynn's conscience, but she believed— She had to believe that he still had his own conscience, buried beneath layers of silt and rock and the misery of someone who had lost everything and found that yes, he could go still go on living.
She searched his face—absorbed the lines of strain around his mouth and eyes, and the unsteadiness of his shooting arm. "You have a choice right now. We all have choices… You can go back, but not if you do this."
It was finished, or nearly so: Ethan Cahill, her grandfather, had come through for her. For all of them. Because of his meticulous notes and records, the authorities had arrested 150 Rittenhouse members. She'd make one last trip on the Lifeboat and get her sister back. Soon she and Amy and their mother would be reunited. Life would go back to normal, and they'd be a real family, a whole family, once again. The thought should have filled Lucy with exhilaration and joy, and it did. But those emotions sat side by side with a sensation of dread as she remembered her final exchange with Flynn when he'd been arrested and dragged away to a military prison:
"No! No! I trusted you, Lucy. I trusted you with my family. I trusted you with my child!"
"I'm sorry!" she'd said, aware of how hollow the words rang even as she spoke them. She hadn't known that Agent Christopher had followed her to her rendezvous with Flynn, but she should have. Her naivete had cost him his chance to get his family back.
"Oh, you're sorry? You're sorry? You have no idea what you've done!"
The situation had twisted so quickly, and Lucy had no power to fix it. Only minutes before, he'd handed her the journal, her journal. His lips had curved in a smile then, a real smile that wiped the harshness and rigidity from his face and replaced it with something soft and almost...vulnerable. It was so unlike the dangerous copy of a smile he usually wielded like both a weapon and a wound that Lucy had smiled back, helpless to do anything else.
No matter what paths her future might take, that smile would haunt her.
"How do you think I met your father?" Lucy's mother said. "We both come from good, strong Rittenhouse families. And that almost makes you royalty. Sweetheart, you've made me so proud. You've made everybody so proud. You have such... such an incredible future."
Her mother was Rittenhouse. Her father was Rittenhouse. Ergo she was Rittenhouse as well.
Her mother said there was a Rittenhouse agent on the Mothership. Nothing was over. Nothing was finished.
Lucy's stomach roiled, the sour taste of bile surging inside her mouth. Her hand clapped over her mouth as she wrenched herself away from her mother and the obscene sheen of pride singing in her opaque blue gaze. She raced upstairs to her bathroom, silently cursing her clumsiness when she stumbled on a step and went down hard, her knees and shin taking the brunt of the damage.
(Everything she and her teammates had done, every life they'd either taken or been unable to save, every single principle Flynn had violated—all of it had been for naught.)
When Lucy made it to the bathroom the porcelain of the toilet was a cool benediction under her clammy fingertips, and she clung to it as she lost the fight with her stomach and everything she'd eaten that day poured out into the toilet bowl. She retched until she was sure nothing lingered in her stomach-nothing but a tangled skein of betrayal. Still, her body heaved, the floor unforgiving against her kneecaps. On shaky feet, she stood, the ground beneath her rolling like a boat on choppy waters.
Run, said a voice in her head. Just run. But where—and to whom? Flynn would understand her confusion and her anger; he would feed the latter until it sent fingers of flame reaching to the sky. Moreover, he would know what to do next. He would know best how to attack Rittenhouse.
But Flynn was no longer an option; he sat in prison, and it was her fault, at least in part. She couldn't blame him for thinking of that, even though she hadn't knowingly betrayed him. Oh god, Lucy thought. What if her parents were directly responsible for the murders of Flynn's wife and daughter? Nausea crashed over her again, so she shoved those thoughts aside and stuffed them into a box to examine later. Or maybe never.
Lucy trudged to her bedroom and yanked at various drawers until she found her journals, both the one Flynn had given her (returned to her?) and the one her mother had gifted her. She threw them in a bag and left the house, not pausing again until she sat behind the wheel of her car. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, and her blazer felt like it was strangling her. She tore it off as quickly as she could and tossed it on the passenger seat. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked and her knuckles whitened with strain.
Lies. Lies. So many lies. Her grandfather had lived a life of lies, danger, and subterfuge, all because she had asked him to. He had sacrificed his happiness. And for what?
She breathed through her nose, scrambling for calm; she didn't find it. With a sigh that ruffled the locks of hair that had fallen into her sweat-damp face, Lucy released the steering wheel and fumbled for her phone.
She sent Wyatt a text. Pls meet me at your place.
It felt like years passed while she waited for his response. What's up? You OK?
Eyes closed, she pictured Wyatt sitting in the upstairs conference room or maybe the locker room at Mason Industries, eyeing his phone with a frown creasing his forehead. Was she OK?
She typed a response before she could think better of it. No. I need you.
Her phone chimed with his reply mere seconds later. On my way.
Why bother with preamble? Lucy thought, pushing past Wyatt into the hallway of his apartment as soon as he opened the door to her rapid series of knocks. "My mother is Rittenhouse."
Wyatt blinked rapidly. "What?"
"My mother"—she shoved her hands into her hair and tugged until her scalp smarted and tears sprang to her eyes—"is Rittenhouse, Wyatt. I'm an idiot. The world's biggest moron. God, how could I not see it? She's been lying this whole time. She's been lying my whole life. " Lucy tossed the last words over her shoulder like a grenade as she stalked to his living room. She knew she was talking too fast, everything rushing out in a confusing torrent, but she couldn't stop."My mom's Rittenhouse. My fa—" Eyes screwed tight, she paused in her tirade and shook her head before continuing.
"Whoa. Take a breath. Slow down, Lucy—"
"My biological father is Rittenhouse." Her voice shook and she hated it—hated herself—for the weakness. She folded her arms in front of her chest and paced in front of Wyatt's brown leather couch. Head down she stared at the worn hardwood floor and stalked five steps one way before she spun on her heel and stalked five steps the other way. Click click click click click went the heels of her sensible, low-heeled black shoes. The floor started to blur into a golden brown streak. She inhaled an unsteady breath. "It's in my blood…And my sister is gone and my mother doesn't care. She's known all this time and it doesn't matter to her. How can her daughter not matter to her?"
A floorboard creaked. There was a shift, of energy, of presence, then Wyatt stepped up behind her. Gentle fingers curled around her biceps; warm breath stirred her hair. Wyatt turned her until she faced him. Still, her gaze remained downcast, focused on the contrast between the curved toes of her shoes and Wyatt's naked feet. They looked...oddly vulnerable, in a way that made her throat tighten. "Is my whole life just a series of false choices my parents designed for me?" Lucy asked, her voice quiet. "Have they… Has Rittenhouse been the puppeteer all this time, and I've just been the fucking puppet?" Her voice rose; Wyatt's hands tightened on her arms. "I don't know what's real and what's a lie. I don't… I don't know who I am," she said, an unwelcome catch in her voice. Her gaze finally lifted to meet Wyatt's.
His eyes were somber and calm as they watched her steadily, and she was glad she had gone there—gone to him. "We'll figure things out," he said, and she nodded, because she had faith in him, even if she couldn't quite believe his words just yet. "It's OK, Lucy. Luce," Wyatt said, moving a hand from her arm to the back of her neck, "hey, I know who you are." He pressed a kiss to her cheek. "I know who you are," he said again, his breath puffing against her skin as he tilted her chin, leaned in, and kissed her.
She made a small sound in her throat, then stumbled backward in an effort to put some distance between them. Her hand rose to her throat. "No," she said into the horrible silence, pained by the stark lines of shock and embarrassment she caught on Wyatt's face. Right before her eyes, his expression shuttered, the openness that had been there scant moments before hidden by one of his masks. She was responsible for that, and she hated herself despite the necessity. Something aching and hollow opened in her stomach. "I'm...I'm so sorry, Wyatt. I just—" It had been their first kiss or at least the first one that wasn't done for show, and she had ruined it because she had to. "It's not you. We just can't do this right now."
A few hours ago Wyatt had talked about focusing on the present and being open to possibilities. Of course she'd known what he was hinting at, and a part of her had been happy, even as Flynn's face had flashed into her mind, filling her with sadness, guilt—and something else she might never be ready to face. That was before, when they had thought their work as a team was complete. That was before she had talked to her mother. Squaring her shoulders, she looked him directly in the eyes; they owed each other that much. "My mom said she and Rittenhouse are proud of me. I don't trust myself or my actions right now. How do I know I'm not doing exactly what they want me to do?"
"Lucy why would Rittenhouse care if we...if we kiss?"
"I don't know." She rubbed at her forehead, at the tightness there. "I don't know, Wyatt. Maybe they wouldn't. But I can't… No, we can't focus on"—Lucy waved a hand between them—"this right now." She gasped and raised a hand, intending to touch his arm, but he retreated a step. Her hand dropped back to her side, heavy as a boulder. "We need to call Agent Christopher. Wyatt, my mother said someone from Rittenhouse is on the Mothership. " It should have been the first thing she'd said when Wyatt let her into his apartment, but she'd been upset and… No, there was no good excuse. She'd simply messed up.
Wyatt's phone rang. Lucy's followed a few seconds later. "Logan," Wyatt answered, rubbing the back of his neck. "Yeah. Uh huh. Got it. Lucy's… here. On our way." After he hung up, he said, "That was Agent Christopher. Your mom was telling the truth; someone does have the Mothership. Emma. Let's go." He turned and started to walk away, shoulders hunched, and every step he took seemed to take him miles from her.
"Wyatt," she said softly, and he paused, "I really am sorry. I'm not trying to hurt you. It's not the right time, and—"
"Forget it, ma'am," he said, interrupting her and waving away her apology. He smiled, but it was brittle and didn't reach those beautiful blue eyes she— "We've got a briefing to get to." With that, he disappeared into his bedroom.
Like a puppet whose strings had just been cut, Lucy collapsed onto the couch and closed her eyes, her body and spirit leaden, and waited for Wyatt to return so they could head back to Mason Industries.