a/n: For starters - TIMELESS IS FILMING & I AM ON TOP OF THE WORLD. I had so much untameable energy this week that demanded to be channeled into fic, but I also had zero ideas on where to get started, so I turned to tumblr for some October-themed prompts (credit to splattermemes for a few helpful starters) & this random drabbling thing was born. And trust me, it's not at all original and probably rehashes dozens of other fics which are already out there, but ehhh why not just roll with it, right?! BECAUSE THE MOVIE IS COMING and LYATT WILL RISE. (still really giddy here)
As far as canon goes, I expect this story will totally be in no-man's land once the finale airs, but for now it's set somewhere after 2x10. Rufus has been saved, the Time Team is still fighting RH, and you can just use your imagination beyond that :) Happy reading!
"There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious."
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt -
Do you believe in ghosts?
He's had his eyes closed for mere seconds when the text comes through, a pinging alert that seizes his heart in ways no simple text message should. Sometimes he wonders if anything with that damn phone will ever be commonplace again.
He has nothing to worry about this time, though. His heart continues to beat too fast, but for reasons that are lighter and richer, reasons that threaten to break over his face in something as impossible as a smile.
Although another review of her message does make him squint at the too-bright screen in confusion.
His thumbs start tapping at the keys before his eyes have quite adjusted, because if she wants to talk, he's not stalling for a second more than necessary.
Ghosts? Interesting question, all things considered.
She clarifies without hesitation. Actual ghosts. Not ones resurrected through time travel. That's cheating.
Her next one pops up less than a second later, miles ahead of any response he could have assembled. Sorry. I shouldn't have said that.
Wyatt types her name, nothing more. He doesn't want her to apologize, but he also doesn't know what else to say.
She bounces back with a single question mark.
He stares at it, feeling stupidly paralyzed by that particular symbol. He has plenty of questions himself, like why is she awake and why is she asking about ghosts and why has he been chosen to field this odd curiosity of hers.
He deletes several drafts of a reply before settling on something he's able to stomach. Sorry is a word I really can't accept from you these days.
He wants to take it back as soon as he hits send. Not the sentiment itself, not really, because it's packed to the hilt with sincerity. Lucy has no business apologizing to him for at least the next million years.
But it's too serious. Too intense. Too on-the-nose of every thought that enters his head when he's confronted with her unfathomable brown eyes. And to add to his needling anxiety, the phone stays mockingly quiet for far too long.
When she does finally respond, he's squinting again, but only in an attempt to make sense of her reply.
So you do believe in ghosts then?
How— in what he said, where does she—
He ignores her lack of transition because it's late and his brain is apparently a big bowl of useless mush. Why the sudden interest in ghosts, Lucy?
I may have told Rufus I'd watch anything he wanted on Netflix tonight.
Wyatt easily fills in the rest of the story. Rufus has admitted on more than one occasion that he's scared shitless by those dumbass paranormal documentaries that claim to be the real deal, but he also has an insatiable need to reluctantly watch every damn paranormal documentary in existence. These madcap viewing parties require pillows to grab and mutilate, enough snack food to supply a small third world country, and a sidekick— someone who will subject themselves to his rambling nervous chatter and commiserate with his self-inflicted terror.
The thing is, Jiya doesn't remember that Rufus was ever really gone. She knows it, but she doesn't feel it. So when it comes to his whining and cajoling routine— because God forbid he just watch that shit on his own— she has no guilt, no remorse, no hesitation. She shuts him down flat, reminding him that the one time he actually talked her into joining in on the lunacy, her rib cage took the brunt of all his spastic flailing. She won't make that mistake twice.
But Lucy— a vessel diminished by nothing but guilt, remorse, and hesitation— has fallen prey to a different kind of ghost. It's the type that lives inside of her own conscience.
Wyatt doesn't know what to tell her. That she's wrong to feel obligated? That it won't make any difference to Rufus if she sidesteps his begging, because he's not shackled to the same dogging feeling of loss that Lucy and Wyatt have solely been left to muddle through?
The phone is still cradled uselessly in his palm when it goes off again.
You're judging me.
For that, his answer comes in an instant. No. I'm judging Rufus.
He gets a laughing emoji in two seconds flat. That stupid yellow face somehow makes him laugh for real, a sleepy grunting chuckle that warms him from the center of his chest and radiates out to his fingertips.
His next text…? If he thought he could get away with it, his next text would be the lamest pick-up line imaginable. A promise that he'll gladly chase the ghosts away. An offer to return the favor and scare the hell out of Rufus for making her miserable. An invitation for Lucy to come haunt his bed.
Thank God she interrupts him before that last thought can cause too much damage.
Wyatt?
Yeah?
I think this place is haunted.
He glances around his room, considering her suspicion with a halfhearted smirk. It's a minor step up from the bunker they'd occupied before his own personal ghost took a stick of dynamite to every sense of security that Agent Christopher had provided, thus forcing a relocation to a new off-the-grid facility.
This is a lot less creepy than our old place, dontcha think?
Yes. But also no. Don't you hear that?
He obliges, pausing to allow several moments of silence. I don't hear anything.
Really? There's a weird scraping noise down here and it's creeping me out.
Her room in this base of operations is about as far from his as possible, which honestly bugs the hell out of him since he's clearly crossed over into the realm of paranoid and irrational. There's an ex-NSA agent between the two of them, Agent Christopher's room is even closer to Lucy when she stays the night, and there's a constant Homeland presence patrolling the outside perimeter. She's safe. He knows she's safe.
Other than from the ghosts, of course.
His real annoyance with the physical distance between them comes down to one actual root issue— it makes him unendingly conscious of the metaphorical distance that's so much more impenetrable.
Except she's texting him. She's telling him she's creeped out. Lucy's there, down an obnoxiously long hallway, listening to everything that goes bump in the night, and his number is the one she's chosen as an outlet for her jangled nerves.
His next message is automatic. Want me to come check it out?
I'm sure it's probably nothing. Just an overreaction.
He almost sighs her name out loud. He's not letting her downplay things, not anymore. I'm coming.
His legs swing over the edge of the mattress, a pair of balled-up sweats pulled on haphazardly as he's padding toward the door, not risking another glance at the phone that's intentionally been left behind. She might be telling him to forget it, and he's not bothering with the back-and-forth war of wills that's bound to crop up if he keeps texting her.
And sure enough, about halfway from his end of the floor plan to hers, there's a bizarre grating noise that grows louder and louder with each step he takes toward her room. It stops right as he's passing Jiya's door, although it's safe to assume that Jiya isn't alone in there if the sudden blast of snoring tells him anything.
Wyatt stands firm, blocking out the rattle of Rufus undoubtedly lying flat on his back and releasing a sound that should never come out of a normal human being. He waits, focused and ready, gauging the long shadows that sprawl over the floor.
The noise picks up again. It's a high-pitched nails on a chalkboard type noise, dulled by the thick pane of glass that separates their fortress from the rest of the world.
A tree branch. It's a damn tree branch, raking its spindly fingers over a high window again and again thanks to the frigid gust of wind blasting through the neighboring forrest. It tears at the few remaining leaves who stubbornly resist surrender, twisting and shuddering but never yielding.
"You heard it too, right?"
His pulse rips up his throat as he suppresses the flinch that would give him away. How the hell does she do that, sneaking up on him when he's been straining all his senses for anything that isn't quite right? And with the background he has, how is clumsy, gangly-limbed Lucy Preston managing to send his adrenaline skittering out of whack with the stealthy entrance of a first-class assassin?
He turns to find her peeking through a tiny crack of thin light, barely more than a single bewitching eye and four fingernails curled around the barrier of her door.
Wyatt gestures her forward with a crook of his index finger, only to find out that she's not done surprising him yet.
"What?" she hisses into the hallway, making uneasy progress toward him with one inching— and jaw-dropping— step at a time. "Did you figure out what it was?"
He doesn't answer. It's hard to make words happen when there's nothing but white noise zapping from neuron to neuron in his head.
Lucy whips her eyes around, subdued horror contorting her face as she makes a wary scan of their silhouetted surroundings. "Wyatt? Did you find something or not?"
"That's my shirt."
Now she's just as frozen as him, adrift in a sea of plaid that's much too large for her slight build.
They stare at each other like two foreign entities on the front lines of a war without cause, the landscape of everything they know shifting precariously beneath their feet.
She blinks those crazy long lashes and finds her voice, though her gaze remains speckled with uncertainty. "It is."
She's verging on smart ass territory with that inflection, but smart ass is his native language, so Wyatt finds a foothold there and begins his ascent. "I let you borrow it once, didn't I? Only to find it back in my room without a word of explanation. Washed, dried, folded...returned by a very polite intruder."
"Yep."
That one word pops deliciously off her lips, appealing to a part of himself that he tries like hell to keep in check every time she's within reach. The part that's currently spiking wildly with each glimpse of her never-ending legs showcased far too well in nothing but that button-down shirt.
"I don't remember offering it to you a second time."
She smiles slyly. He feels that smile. Wants it against his mouth.
He sidles a little closer. Lucy doesn't match the movement, but she also does nothing to counteract it. "And yet here it is. On you again. Never took you for a klepto, ma'am."
She opens her mouth with barefaced reluctance, shame blooming in her expression even though her lips still tilt skyward.
Whatever she intends to say gets throttled with a startled squeak, her hand shooting out to smack him squarely in the solar plexus with enough speed and force to extract a gasp of air out of him. Not for the first time, he's marveling at the ferocity of her swing. Too bad she's struck so much faster than his reflexes tonight.
"There," she pants, oblivious to his pathetic wheeze as she searches for the source of the noise that's been taunting her. "You heard that, right?"
"Look up, Lucy."
The scrunch of skin between her eyebrows doesn't speak of much confidence, so he jerks his head sideways and makes a silent plea with his eyes.
She does as asked, following the invisible path he's provided toward the skinny transom window above them. That menace of nature picks up right on cue, a tattered trio of wind and branches and scrape scrape scrape.
Lucy's shoulders sag at the sight. "You're kidding me."
"I bet the cameramen on Paranormal Survivor never show that particular angle, do they?"
"If they do, it definitely gets edited out." She drops the deadpan tone, rolling her eyes with a sheepish exhale. "God, I told you I was overreacting, didn't I? I shouldn't have— "
"I don't mind."
She examines him carefully, her rounded gaze so large and looming that it feels otherworldly. "It's late. You were probably asleep."
"I wasn't."
"Oh."
That same slinking awkwardness is back, the one that consumes so many of their interactions lately, but this time it's...a little easier. More comfortable.
She shifts slightly and clears her throat. "We, um...we're mismatched halves, you know?"
He digests that statement— posed like a question, but definitely not one— in one avid swallow, his mind making unreasonable leaps at the suggestion of being anything that resembles her half. "What?"
"Your plaid shirt," she explains with a nervous touch to her collar. Her forehead dips, words coming with more difficulty now. "And...your pants."
He follows the delicate point of her fingertip until he's looking down at the gray joggers barely clinging to the V of his hips. Wyatt adjusts his waistband, strangely self-conscious of his uncovered chest and narrowly clad ass. It's not anything new to her, but…
But nothing. The tension is there, clattering to life and taking possession of the air between them. No point in pretending otherwise.
"One set of my clothing between the two of us, huh?"
She nods slowly, one part amused, another part terrified.
His heart is thumping with the undeniable conclusion that any unbiased witness would naturally draw if faced with this scene. They look like they came staggering out of the same bed, pulling on the first rumpled piece of clothing they encountered, a couple in every sense of the word.
Mismatched halves. That phrase is going to spin around his brain indefinitely.
Lucy may very well be more spooked now than she was by the specter of a phantom branch, so it's up to him to bridge the conversational gap.
"You gonna fill me in on how my clothing found its way back into your wardrobe, or is that another paranormal mystery I have to solve on my own?"
"It's not so paranormal," she says with a flutter of a grin.
"Oh?"
Her hand finds his, molding against his palm and lifting it up to eye-level. "This hand has been empty for a while. I may have noticed when a certain ring came off...and stayed off."
That admission— a picture of Lucy silently watching his left hand like it's an artifact worthy of anthropological study— has his undivided attention, creating a flurrying stir in his chest, bringing weeks of longing to a sudden jolting standstill.
She continues after a weighty pause, her fingers now snaking through his own. "I thought maybe you wouldn't notice if I changed my mind about the shirt. Since you changed your mind about the ring."
God, if it could really just boil down to a logic as simple as that. In reality, it's only infinitely more complicated and painful than what she's just said. There's an internal voice he's gotten a little too used to that screams in protest. It isn't fair to her. She shouldn't have to seek such trivial tokens of progress from him. The fact that she talks to him, texts him, sits next to him as she drinks her tea or lets him give her a hand up into the time machine— none of it makes sense. He's been itching in his own skin, waiting for the moment where she rears back and lets him have it, but time— their time, and that of eras gone by— continues to stack up all around them, hours to days to weeks, and an honest confrontation still hasn't come.
If their roles were reversed, Wyatt would have been gone ages ago. Off the team, off the mission, just off.
He clasps his hand more firmly around hers, voice as raw as sandpaper as he blinks down at her. "Lucy...you shouldn't... "
"Shouldn't have stolen your property?" she prompts with a thinly arranged smile.
"Shouldn't want it in the first place. Or me. Because you— you deserve…"
He's going to cry. He desperately wants to stop it, wants to cap anything that exaggerates his cause, because that's just as bad as Rufus swaying her to watch ghost documentaries. Except Wyatt knows it. He knows exactly how fragile she feels with all of them. It's a fragility that stabs at his insides with every breath he draws.
The whole team has nearly been washed away to nothing. He's lost his wife for a second time. Lucy's watched her mother die a much different death than the one she used to see happening before her eyes. They've both grieved for Rufus.
He shutters his gaze, withholding the river that builds beneath his eyelids.
Her other hand flits across his cheek, the touch of her skin holding him steady. "I deserve to decide that for myself."
Wyatt weakens with the slow stroke of her thumb through his stubble. It's happened again— clumsy, gangly-limbed Lucy Preston is sending his adrenaline skittering out of whack, this time with the subtle reminder of what they almost had. Who he almost got to be. The short-lived privilege of holding onto her for as long as she chose to hold onto him.
Maybe it's time he reconciled the innate power behind all that jittery, encyclopedia-brained energy to the woman in front of him, because he's beginning to suspect that she's never been quite as hopelessly uncoordinated as she pretends to be.
He opens his eyes again as her hand slides away, making it as far as his neck before she chickens out and wrangles it back to her side.
"I'm probably just going to stay up all night so the ghosts don't kill me," she whispers, her breath fanning warmly over his chin. "Care to join me as I find the fluffiest toothache-inducing excuse for a show that Netflix can offer? I need a purifying binge before I can even think about trying to sleep again."
All of that— implications about wedding rings and shirt stealing and the massive, life-altering decisions she's supposedly making…
And now she's back to goddamn Netflix. Just like that.
"Sure," he manages through an unwilling block in his throat. "I'm game."
She waves a hand at her bare legs, releasing a contrived laugh as she backs away from him. "Let me just…you know. Pants. It's cold out here."
He nods mutely, not letting go of her hand until the gap between them stretches out of range. Lucy doesn't break eye contact, her mouth pursed like there's something more she wants to say, and he's all ears, so engrossed in her fixed gaze that he fails to notice the impending collision until it's too late.
Lucy curses as she bangs her heel against the corner of the doorway, hopping up on one foot and nearly tumbling backwards when she meets nothing but open space behind her. He catches her by the elbow to keep her upright, every muscle tensed at full attention until she starts to chuckle through her pain. He laughs too, a little tightly at first, then it's all he can do to stop, because holy hell was he ever wrong— she is definitely just as uncoordinated as first impressions implied. Her moments of brilliant finesse are transient flashes, bright lightning in a black sky, appearing only when he least expects it.
"Thanks," she whispers breathlessly, still racked with bashful amusement. "Good save."
The answer that falls from his mouth speaks to how unsettled he really is. "No problem, babydoll."
The laughter dies down between them until Lucy's watching him like he's got the whole world painted in his eyes. She has both feet planted on the floor again, allowing her to rise up on her toes and surprise him with a brisk, dizzy, shock of a kiss. A white explosion goes off with a bang beneath his wavering eyelids, and then she's slipping away into the inky darkness of her room before he can even grapple with the reality of what's hit him.
Another transient flash of brilliance.
He braces himself on the door frame for several seconds before deciding he needs to go get more clothing too. A shirt, maybe some socks. A full suit of armor to keep himself off of her. Whatever.
They reconvene in the common area, Lucy already cuing up the television when he arrives, a pair of snug black leggings now spilling out from beneath the hem of his shirt. Less tempting than before, if only by the smallest of degrees.
"I don't, by the way."
She looks up, clearly intrigued. "Don't what?"
Wyatt flops down on the couch, unsure of why this is resurfacing now, but also incapable of reining it back in. "Believe in ghosts. Used to be that I couldn't figure out why anyone's spirit would willingly hang around here a minute longer than they had to. Didn't see the point in that, not when earth is such a crummy place to haunt."
She slips onto the couch next to him, folding one long leg beneath her. "That's what you used to think…?"
"Now it's…" he pauses, exhaling softly. "It's more like we carry all of it ourselves, right? We hold on to what hurts us until...until we use it to give meaning to every tree branch on a window pane, to the shadows we see in dark corners, to all the half-baked superstitions. The ghost stories, the black cats or Ouija boards or whatever— it's the shit we can't let go of that translates into all of those things. It's easier to make up all these symbols for our fear instead of facing it head on."
Lucy chews at her bottom lip, deep chocolate eyes narrowed in thought. "That is…"
"A load of bullshit?"
"Incredibly wise."
He curls a hand around her knee, quirking a teasing brow at her choice of tone. "Surprised, Professor?"
He sees her first instinct— to defend, to restore, to deny that she could ever think poorly of him in any regard. But he squeezes her knee and summons a challenging smirk for her benefit.
As predicted, she's not resisting a contest of rapid-fire wits.
"Yeah, because a guy who can happily watch cars drive in circles for hours— and call it a sport, no less— may not be my top pick when it comes to philosophical insight."
"Says the woman who could marathon Real Housewives all damn day and still not get enough."
The grin that flares over her face is as rewarding as it is charming. "Touché."
"But that, umm...that's not what we're gonna watch, right?"
She shuffles closer, head embedding itself against his shoulder, her knee propped over his thigh. "I think we can find a better compromise than that. Unless you wanted to watch— "
"Compromise sounds good to me."
Her knowing snort gets lost in the fabric of his t-shirt.
They're well into a ridiculous episode of Friends— since when was there a monkey on this show? — when he hears her voice, fuzzy with drowsing contemplation. "Wyatt?"
"Yeah, Lucy?"
"I think you're right about ghosts. I don't want to hold onto mine."
He takes a measured breath, afraid that his chest may actually crack open if he botches this. "It's not...not always that easy though, is it? I've never really wanted mine either, but— "
"But what? Look how all of that got to you, Wyatt. The way they got to you."
How she manages to lay the blame anywhere other than at his feet, he'll never know. Not now, not on his dying day, never.
"I'm sorry," she whispers into his chest, her brief skewer of intensity draining away again. "I didn't mean to— "
"What did I say about that? No apologies, Lucy. Not from you." He stares blankly into the glow of the TV, his mind a world away from the snappy dialogue and droning laugh track. "And you're right. The door was left wide open for— for everything that happened. To me, to the team...to us. I should have seen it coming, the liability of my past being used against me, but I...well, easier said than done, right?"
His words seem to simmer inside of her, slackening the rigid pull of her jaw as she considers something important. "You...you can wake me up too, okay? If— if something is ever bothering you, even if it's as dumb as a tree hitting the window— "
"It wasn't dumb. And you didn't wake me up."
"Wyatt."
She can pack so much into those two short syllables. Annoyance, redirection, authority. A humble cry for help. A vivid spark of intimacy. An entire convoy of emotions, strained and sore, but never depleted. Love. How many times has she spoken his name with enough love to render him speechless? She's never said it plainly— those exact three words in just the right order— and yet he's somehow heard that very declaration woven into every letter of his name a thousand times over.
"Okay," he agrees with a double-barreled smile. "I'll wake you up."
Her finger pokes sharply against his sternum. "You mean it? Because I'm not living in a haunted house. Not anymore."
He's given himself to her once before, not even considering the truth of what he'd offered — a crumbling facade, cobwebbed and cracked, skeletons in every damn closet, a rundown eyesore of a man in need of major renovations. And he's wasted so much of his life chasing after trouble. It's high time he start chasing it away instead.
"I mean it," he promises wholeheartedly. "And if...if I'm owning up to what's really bothering me, I have to admit that this— " he tightens the arm that circles her shoulders, nodding down at her contritely, "— feels more than a little...unearned. There's still so much we haven't talked about, not really."
"You don't like talking."
Wyatt slouches lower until he's got a direct line to the portal of her eyes. "I'm not over this hump."
Her lips come unglued, eyes hazing just slightly. "Oh, uh...okay. Then we'll talk. But— "
"But tonight we just watch Friends for a little while longer?" he suggests quietly, easily reading the exhaustion that persists no matter how she tries to cover it up. "We did already vanquish at least one ghost, after all."
Her head drops to his shoulder again with a wisp of a sigh. "I'd say more than one. You have no idea how long it took me to hit send on that first text, Wyatt. Like...embarrassingly long."
His lungs constrict in a full panorama of sorrow. "Lucy—"
"I know," she murmurs, bittersweet resilience coating her voice. "Consider that ghost taken care of."
He forces a lighthearted signal of acceptance, even if his joke is lazy and not even in the ballpark of humorous. "We're like the damn Ghostbusters up in here."
But Lucy— his mismatched half, God help her— wrinkles her brow and breaks into a fluid stanza of disbelieving laughter. "That's bad, even for you."
"Even for..? What do you mean, even for me?"
"Ross's pet monkey is funnier than you, Wyatt."
"Talk about setting the bar as low as it'll go," he grumbles into her hair.
"Hold on, I can find a better episode. I wasn't paying attention when I picked this one."
"I'm less concerned about the episode and more concerned with the part where you said the monkey was funnier than me."
She's already stretching for the remote control, casting a provoking grin over her shoulder. "Who do you think you're talking to? I'm the worst parts of Ross and Monica— know-it-all academic meets high-strung type A freak. Talk about an unfunny combo."
Wyatt tugs her back into his arms as soon as she has the remote in hand, burying his face into her hair again with an overwhelming torrent of happiness. "I happen to like that combo."
She fits perfectly against him, curving along the length of his body like a second skin. "Well, as long as I have one fan…"
His mouth brushes her temple, uttering a truth so fundamentally embedded inside of him, it's been impossible to deny it even when everything else had been in shambles. "You do, Lucy. I might be an asshole of a fan at times, but a devoted one nonetheless."
"I prefer the label of reckless hothead."
He indulges her revision with an idle half-smile. "Fine. A reckless hothead of a fan. How's that?"
"Better," she says on the end of a drifting sigh. "Much better."
She's more right than she knows. Everything is so much better. He is so much better, because she's the best thing for him. If he didn't realize it before, he sure as hell knows it now.
A different episode starts. One without the damn monkey.
It's also one without any ghosts.
a/n: My apologies to anyone who really adores Marcel (the monkey from Friends, lol). I don't hate him as much as the fic may imply, but I also didn't miss him when he went bye-bye.