A/N: Introspection. Set somewhere around the time that Lucy and Wyatt are sitting on the floor, before the future arrives, and a bit after too.
Spoilers: For everything so far, meaning season 1 and 2.
Disclaimer: There's so many things that I would like to change if I could turn back time, however being the owner of the rights to Timeless isn't one of them, also you always have to consider the consequences first, and if I owned them that would just end badly.
She'd lost something. That glow in her eyes that were so distinctively hers. The childlike wonder that used to fill up her whole spirit whenever they travelled through time and she met a historical figure in person or saw a historical place firsthand. It was all gone. Erased, but hopefully not eradicated. He wasn't sure he could live in a world that had crushed the heart and soul of Lucy Preston. Although he was well aware of the part he himself had played in the soul crushing. He was as much responsible for it as the rest of this horrible world, maybe even more so. Thus, guilt wrecked his entire body.
What he wouldn't give to go back to that very first night, when they'd first met. And make sure she stayed the hell away from everything that even came close to resembling time travel. He could have done the same missions with some other professor right? Any old, spectacled, bearded know-it-all would do. If you'd seen one historian, you'd seen them all, right? ... Wrong! Of course, it was wrong, Wyatt knew that. They couldn't replace Lucy any more than they could replace Rufus. Well technically they could. They had even tried to replace him once, so why not Lucy. But just the thought seemed outrageous. How would that have worked? Of course, if they'd done it from the start, Wyatt would have been none the wiser; that was just how things were. That was the job, and you didn't questioned orders. No reason to do so. And right now, though it seemed insane for him to wish they had never met, that was exactly what he did.
She would have been happier. Gone on doing what she loved; teaching history. And she'd still have her sister. Or if Amy had disappeared, Lucy wouldn't have even known she'd ever had a sister in the first place, and therefore wouldn't have been torn apart by that. Perhaps her mother's Rittenhouse ties, or the fact that her dad wasn't her father wouldn't have been divulged either. Of all the timeline changes she was the one that had taken the most hits. Curve balls had just seemed to be lining up whenever they returned home from yet another mission. And on top of that he had broken her heart. She wasn't fragile, didn't break easily by any means, but shit kept compiling on her, and it was enough to push anyone of the deep end. If he was her, he would probably have caved long before she did, and he was a bloody soldier for God's sake, one who was supposed to be used to stressful situations. And how had he been handling and dealing with everything... not good. Her kindness, empathy, patience and resilience were saint like. Never had he met anyone like her. She was the reason he was still there, alive and kicking and essentially a new man. She had saved him, and he had changed in the process. And yet here he was willing to give all that up.
If he had the power to go back into his own timeline, only once, he would use it to do this. He wouldn't use it to bring his wife back that had already turned out to be nothing but a major disaster, start to finish. No, he would make sure that Lucy never knew about time travel. This would be the one thing he would change, if he could, and then hopefully Jiya wouldn't have been kidnapped and Rufus wouldn't have died either. The ripple effects were always unpredictable, but he was allowed to dream, wasn't he? Really anything would be better than this dead vacuum that was left behind in Lucy's eyes. Like someone had switched off the lights and also cut the electricity, so turning them back on seemed like an impossible task or at the very least a long process to obtain said task.
He'd seen a million different emotions in her eyes over the past two years – fear, of enclosed spaces, Nazis or whoever played the bad guy that day, joy, laughter, anger, sadness, happiness, even love; it all reached her eyes with such ease – but he wasn't sure that any number of apologies he could make would help bring that same liveliness back into her beautiful, brown eyes. Only once before had he seen this kind of hopelessness and despair in her eyes, though not to this degree; that was when they'd rescued her from her Rittenhouse captivity. It had taken some time, but she had gotten through it; been practically glowing right up until the moment Jessica came back, and crashed practically everyone's existence. And from that point on everything had gone one way, downhill and all the way to Hell.
Lucy having watched her mother and Rufus die went on to recklessly running after Emma without a care in the world for her own safety, and that had frightened him more than anything. But seeing her upon her return beaten up and leaning against Flynn had scared him even more; because with merely one look in to her eyes, he could see that she had been broken beyond repair, defeated, crushed, all signs of her having given up were written on her face. And if she had given up, there was no hope for the rest of them!
All these thoughts swirled around in his head as they were sitting side by side on the cold, hard, floor. She hadn't even bothered to find a chair, probably thought there was no point in doing so anyway, or she'd been too exhausted and just collapsed at the nearest wall. He understood that kind of draining depression. But amidst their shared misery, between all the apologies and the guilt that he had unloaded on her – he couldn't help it – there was a shimmer of hope. She might not alleviate him of all his sins, but she did her best to make sure to release him from the guilt of Rufus' death. For her to have that kind of excess energy after their world had basically just fallen apart, gave him hope that she could recover from this also, given enough time.
xXx
Never had he finished his thoughts and incoherent ramblings before something equally amazing and terrifying happened. Another Lifeboat showed up. An upgraded one. A lifeboat from the future. From their future. Carrying none other than themselves, or versions of themselves. The them that they'd be if nothing changed in this timeline, if no one altered their fates. If they themselves didn't meddle with things, which seemed kind of redundant at this point, seeing that this; them travelling back into their own timeline – which shouldn't be possible in the first place – and meeting themselves, with the agenda to save Rufus, meant that they in effect had already changed things. Their future selves wouldn't exist once they'd altered the timeline. It already looked like they'd both been through a lot. What would happen to them now? Would they simply just vanish? Go back to where they came from, a future where Rufus didn't exist? Was this trip they'd made all in vain? Seeing that them changing things meant that they wouldn't exist and therefore wouldn't have been able to come back in the first place to help their past selves get Rufus back? Wyatt's brain was short-circuiting, all this metaphysics and time travel stuff gave him a headache.
He understood the desire to want to get Rufus back. He wanted that too. Especially because he was stilled weighed down by the guilt despite Lucy's attempt at easing it. The feeling of being the root and center for all the misery and loss around here. But one thing he didn't understand, this future Wyatt apparently knew both how to pilot the Lifeboat and how to travel into his own timeline, so why the hell hadn't he changed it so that Lucy wasn't a part of this anymore. Wasn't he supposed him? The same person, the same man, with the same hopes and dreams. The same losses and regrets. And the same undying love for Lucy. Why was she standing there beside him; both looking like they'd just stepped out of a warzone? How had he ever allowed himself to let her become this person? One he barely recognized if not for her appearance. Sure, she looked a lot stronger, and she seemed to have it all together, but that light, that glint in her eyes, the one he was so desperately missing, where still nowhere to be found.
Had he, or this version of him, been such a coward, that he hadn't followed through on what was essentially his biggest wish right now? He had the means in the future that much was clear. So, what had stopped him? Had he simply forgotten among the chaos of their lives? Did his priorities shift, and if so, why? Why hadn't he just taken the Lifeboat out and changed Lucy's life for the better. What had he been afraid of? Losing her? True she wouldn't remember him, but he would still have all his memories of her. And though it might hurt it was the right thing to do; wasn't it?
Maybe he had just been selfish, and couldn't bear to part from her. Seeing Lucy each day, while being with Jessica had been hell; but this would be different, he would never see her again. Maybe that was the problem. Could he live without ever seeing Lucy again? Six weeks of separation had damn near killed him. But that was different also, because then he didn't know what had happened to her, if she was dead or alive. At least this time he would know she was safe, alive and well, and blissfully unaware of the effects that time travel had had on her life once. He could even check up on her, without her knowing of course, maybe attend a lecture or two, just to make sure that Rittenhouse or anyone else didn't bother her. Or maybe seeing her like that, happy without him, would be too much for him, would crush his already fragile heart.
Had Lucy found out somehow what his plan was and stopped him? Had he been so stupid to tell her himself? That would have been bad. He knew how opposed Lucy had been to changing history, and then having him messing with hers. That would probably feel like a betrayal of sorts. He hoped that that wasn't what had happened. But at the same time, he felt guilty for wanting to keep this a secret from her. Weren't secrets and lies what had gotten them here in the first place?
Maybe this future Wyatt had done the deed, had changed things already, but something equally or even more horrible had happened to the team, and he'd have had to change things back again. How many of these second changes was he allowed? How did travelling into your own timeline even work? Was there a limit on trips, on places, or on how many times you could meet the same people? Were there side effects? Like what happened to Jiya. And if so, how severe would they be? Did they even know?
He needed to have a talk with this Wyatt, needed to figure out what made him tick, what had made him not do this. When all his cells were screaming for him to do this. And he needed to know how all this worked. He needed to have the opportunity to do this, to change history. Even if he didn't do it, he wanted to know that he could if need be; it was kind of like having an escape plan or a safety net. Of course, he wouldn't reset anything if he didn't have to. But if these two future incarnations of him and Lucy vanished, and their timeline vanished with them, there was a good chance that he would never know what this Wyatt knew; he would never pilot the Lifeboat, and he would never be able to travel back and change Lucy's past.
This was his opportune moment. Once he obtained the knowledge he needed, what would he then choose to do? Rewrite history or keep living in this timeline? Rewriting history would make him no better than Rittenhouse, though their scale was a little higher than just changing the life of one person; but even by doing only that, you would still change all the lives that that person had affected. There were consequences and ripple effects, and they'd already seen the aftermath of that a million different times. In fact, their timeline had already changed so much that they practically weren't living in the "original" one anymore. In a way they were the anomalies here. Any chance of correcting all that had gone wrong seemed like a long shot, near impossible actually.
Was there really a choice here at all? How did it go with the fate vs. free will again? It seemed like some things were meant to be; like President Kennedy's death or the death of Kate Drummond, and yet some things were changeable like Jessica's death and Rufus's too hopefully, at least their future selves seemed to think so. And thank God for that positivity, because the Bunker weren't exactly brimming with that kind of feel good vibes. All in all, there was a lot of death involved in this whole thing. But who decided which death was meant to be and which could be changed? Wyatt didn't know, probably never would, and that was ok. Events in history didn't seem as set in stone though, they'd changed a few of them, none seemed to have changed back, sure they appeared to have corrected themselves along the way, like Charles Lindbergh that had crashed – by Flynn's hands – and who had decided to run away from it all; from the fame and the glory, and his Rittenhouse legacy, and yet he had turned up a few years later, and did exactly as he'd done in the original timeline.
As long as the events Wyatt wanted to change were changeable without time trying to correct its "mistake" and somehow make Lucy discover time travel or the Lifeboat again, but only later somehow, that would be fine. Maybe there wouldn't even be a need for time travel if Lucy never learned about the possibility of it to start with. Then she would never write the journal, and therefore she would never give it to Flynn, meaning he would never steal the Mothership to begin with, to chase down and destroy Rittenhouse (and history) and so there would never be a need to take out the Lifeboat in the first place or make a time team. Even Rittenhouse would be better off, they would just keep controlling things from the shadows. Of course, that was the worst thing about this; there would be no one to take them down, to defeat them. But they'd been doing this for more than 200 years, how bad could it be if they went on with their evil agendas unchecked?
Rittenhouse where the ones that had commissioned a time machine in the first place. They had funded Connor Mason, and he and his brilliant team had delivered, first with the Lifeboat, then along came the Mothership. If there had been no interference from Flynn, would that then mean that Rittenhouse had complete control over these two vessels? That they could go back and pick up Nicholas Keynes earlier, that they could plant sleeper agents throughout time who would then do their jobs perfectly, because the time team wasn't there to stop them. Would they alter history and no one would be the wiser? How would the world look? Surely everything would be different, and that was most likely not for the better. Could he live with that on his conscience?
It all began and ended with Lucy. She was the key. And not only to unlocking him, but to saving the world it seemed. But at the expense of her own happiness. So really this was a philosophical dilemma; would you sacrifice the one for the many or the many for the one? One person's happiness or the greater good. Wyatt liked to think that he would choose Lucy over the world, but he'd already had a choice between her and something else, and she hadn't won that fight. But now he knew better, he would choose her now over any- and everything. But Wyatt also knew that if Lucy knew all of this; his plan, she would also figure out all of this other stuff, weigh the pros and the cons, and as soon as she'd reached the conclusion that Wyatt just had, she would sacrifice herself in a heartbeat, that was just the kind of person that Lucy Preston was. And he loved that about her, and yet the realization filled him with despair, because she would be so disappointed in him if he didn't choose like that too, if he didn't fight for the good in the world. If it had just been his own life on the line then sure, he'd trade it for everyone else's, he wasn't worth the dirt the Bunker was built on, but with Lucy's life it was different, she meant everything to him. And so, he found himself at a standstill, between what he wanted to do and what he was willing to do, which would ultimately go against her wishes. Who ever said decisions like this were easy?
Could you gain what you'd once lost? Maybe you could get back some semblance of it, but getting that exact spark back was probably impossible. And then there were all the risks to take into consideration. When it came down to it, would changing things at this point really be worth it? Apparently, it hadn't been for future Wyatt. Would he walk down the other Wyatt's path, follow in his footsteps or would he choose another one that was completely different?
To be or not to be. That was the question. Was he him, or was he himself? Were they the same person or two different ones? Did future him know what he had been thinking; had the same thoughts crossed his mind at this point in his time, or not? This future manifestation of him had been looking at him knowingly a few times since their arrival, which was a bit spooky, to say the least. But even identical twins with so much in common were different on some points. So why not them? Hell, this timeline's Lucy – or maybe that was actually a few timelines back – had been engaged to Noah. And he was sure his Lucy would have never picked that guy to spend the rest of her life with. Ergo he and this future Wyatt had to be different. And right now, he was kind of regretting ever having wished for the possibilities to go back into his own timeline and change things, because here they were, the possibilities, and they were staring him right in the face. Challenging him to play chicken.
So, what did all that mean? What would he end up doing?
Only time would tell!
A/N: This thing went in a whole other direction than where I was going, I swear sometimes my writings have a life of their own.
We're less than one month away, peeps! And now we're getting epi photos too, oh joy, the world just became a little bit brighter. Plus, the Times Square Clockblocker billboards looks awesome, you guys rock, too bad I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, I would have loved to see them in person.