The Reunion

Disclaimer: I do not own Alcatraz.

Lucille rang the doorbell to the strange house in the strange neighborhood in the alien world. It had taken her some time to find a phonebook but thankfully locating Emerson was easy enough after that. She had no modern money and so was forced to walk but that gave her time to think of what she'd say to him.

It was apparently, impossibly, 2012 and she had not expected to close her eyes and wake up 49 years into the future any more than anyone else would have. It was like Rip Van Winkle. What had happened to her? And why? Had anybody else had this happen to them? Did it have anything to do with all of that blood?

She wasn't sure what Emerson knew or what he thought happened to her but she knew that there was no one else she trusted to help her figure this out.

The door slowly opened and Lucille lamented her failure to think of a good opening. But given the situation, she doubted she'd be able to think of something suitable no matter how much time she spent on it.

The man who opened the door appeared to be in his sixties. Emerson would be in his seventies but this man had Emerson's eyes (eyes much wearier and colder than she remembered but Emerson's nonetheless) and so it simply must be him. He had aged well, then, but he'd still aged.

"E-Emerson?" she stammered, sounding a little foolish but still silently congratulating herself for not blurting out 'You're really old!'

Emerson stopped breathing. "Lucy?"

Lucille raised an eyebrow. " 'Lucy'?"

Emerson coughed. "Yes, well, I've been thinking of you as 'Lucy' for some years now. The name 'Lucille' has fallen out of favor and been largely replaced by the nickname 'Lucy.'"

"Lucy," Lucille repeated slowly. "I can work with it. Whatever would help me blend in."

Emerson couldn't take his eyes off of her. "You look exactly the same."

He sounded so awed and it discomforted Lucy a bit. It really wasn't anything remarkable to her, not the way that everything else had changed was.

"I am the same," she said seriously. "But everything else has changed."

"Things do that after fifty years," Emerson said dryly. "Lucy…"

"What happened, Emerson?" Lucy asked desperately. Maybe knowing wouldn't fix this…whatever this was but it was better than wondering why. "Why did I get left behind?"

Emerson's face fell. "I was hoping that you would be able to tell me that."

"How could I possibly be able to tell you anything?" Lucy asked, surprised at even being asked. "I went to sleep in 1963 just like normal and when I woke up, well, things weren't the same."

"We didn't know what had happened or how," Emerson explained. "We just went to Alcatraz and found it absolutely deserted. No one was left behind to explain it and no one had left anything to make sense of it, either. We went through everything but none of it was of any use."

Lucy's breath caught. "So I wasn't the only one."

Was that a relief? She couldn't quite decide. She didn't want to be going through this alone but she also wouldn't wish this on anybody. And aside from her, most of the people at Alcatraz were…well, not very nice, to put it mildly. Vicious murderers and the scum of society if you asked certain quarters.

Emerson shook his head. "No, you weren't. It was everybody that disappeared and I've spent quite a long time waiting for you to come back. Them. Waiting for them to come back. You and them."

Lucy smiled at the first real glimpse of her Emerson she'd seen. Intellectually, she knew that this was the same man she had fallen in love with not long ago. He looked just like the Emerson she remembered, just older, and he had recognized her as well. She wondered about that, a little, because it had been so long for him since they had last met. But it was just like how she intellectually knew that forty-nine years had passed and so Emerson wasn't the only thing that had changed. She knew it but it was hard to accept it. Looking at him felt…wrong, almost. Maybe Emerson felt the same way but at least he had had plenty of time to get used to it. She hoped that her uncertainty wasn't clear because Emerson didn't deserve that.

"What made you realize that we'd be back?" she asked curiously.

"Well…we didn't know, exactly," Emerson admitted. "But I knew that you would. You had to. Alcatraz is an island that could only be accessed by ferry and someone would have seen something if you had all left that way. And there were too many gone to fit in a single ferry anyway. You can't just disappear into thin air forever; we're a long way from Roanoke."

"You've been looking all this time," Lucy said softly, her eyes shining. She couldn't even begin to wrap her mind around that kind of loyalty and commitment.

A younger Emerson would have blushed but this Emerson met her gaze unflinchingly. "The others returning are some of the most dangerous criminals this country has ever seen."

"You sound like Tiller," Lucy said, frowning.

"He had a point," Emerson replied. "And being two of the only people to know that the prison wasn't shut down for monetary reasons and all the prisoners transferred and dying off as the decades passed meant that we've spent quite a bit of time together over the years."

"I understand," Lucy said even though she didn't, really. How could she possibly? "What happened to you, Emerson? Fifty years is an awfully long time."

Emerson shrugged. "I joined the FBI. I've done their work and I've been waiting."

"Ever had a family?" Lucy asked, hoping that she sounded casual but knowing that Emerson would see right through her. He wouldn't say anything about it, though. Or at least he wouldn't have back then.

She was in a relationship with Emerson Hauser just yesterday but it wasn't fair to demand that he wait half a century for her when – despite what he said – he couldn't be sure that she'd return at all or, if she did, when.

Emerson shook his head. "Having children was always your dream, not mine."

It was true. They had talked about it more than once and Lucy had always gotten the impression that he would have been content either way. She had never gotten a chance to have children before…this but perhaps it was a blessing. She didn't have to leave a baby motherless and come back to find out that he or she was old enough to not only have babies of their own but grandbabies.

She supposed this also at least partially answered her question about Emerson moving on. On the one hand, she was glad to know that she had at least one person still in her life but on the other…forty-nine years spent alone. Poor Emerson.

"What's going to happen to me?" Lucy asked him abruptly as the thought occurred to her. "I'm not a criminal but would the government really just let someone from 1963 run around in the open?"

"Probably not but I've thought of that," Emerson told her, a little pride creeping into his voice. "I'm going to set you up with a fake identity. Your employment at Alcatraz wasn't well-known or even on record, I've found, so it shouldn't be a problem."

Lucy inclined her head in thanks. "What will I do? Am I the first to return?"

"As far as we know, yes," Emerson confirmed. "But it's hard to tell. Unless we happen to run across one of them or they start committing crimes again – which they will, I guarantee it – then we have no way of knowing. You could…you could join the task force and help catch them."

"I probably know more about them than most people," Lucy mused, pleased that he had been able to give her a direction because she honestly hadn't had any idea of where to start. "And that would give me an excellent opportunity to learn more about this world while still being able to feed myself."

" 'This world'?" Emerson echoed. "You make it sound like a different planet."

"It might as well be," Lucy said honestly.

Emerson winced. "Well, we'll have to see what we can do about that. I know it seems like everything's changed but it hasn't, not really. Society never really changes all that much."

He was still staring at her, looking like he wanted to touch her, to make sure that she was really there but he didn't dare to.

Lucy hadn't quite accustomed herself to this much older version of the boyfriend that had been younger than she was but she knew that she had to make the first move. Smiling bravely, she placed her hand on his arm and felt him relax under her.

"Thank you," she told him sincerely. "For everything. I don't know what I'd do without you."

"I'm sure you'd manage," Emerson said, his conviction touching her. "But I'm going to make sure that you don't have to. I missed you, Lucy."

"I missed you, too," she replied. The words weren't perfunctory. She had just seen him yesterday and yet she had somehow missed him every day for the last forty-nine years of his life and there was no taking that back.

She didn't know how much time she had left with him or if it would be at all possible to stay but she was determined to try.

Somehow, she had been robbed of half a century's worth of time and she was determined that she wasn't going to lose anything more than she had to.

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