This was meant to be a tag to Hollywoodland and I meant to update this sooner, i.e. before 2x08 and the double episode season finale, but RL had other ideas. So this is now a S2 tag.
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1 if you are desperately curious to find out if I own Timeless or not. Or be reckless and take a wild guess.
He never realized how often he touches her. How often she hugs him.
Not until they don't anymore.
The first time they don't he's only a few metal steps away from reaching her, seconds away from cradling her as carefully as she cradles her arm. Her gaze moving from his to the person behind him stops him. Jessica.
When the doctor Agent Christopher finds somewhere, Flynn and everyone else and their grandmother have taken their turn at her bedside and left he keeps watch, soothing her through feverish dreams. Sometime in the night he falls asleep, his head resting on the mattress almost as close to hers as it did 77 years ago. Her breath mingling with his the way it did then.
It's Jiya who walks in on them this time. Unlike Rufus she doesn't turn around and leave. She is one of Lucy's team members and that is what he is again too.
He slips. He forgets.
Lucy is so much better at remembering than he is.
His life is two timelines that have collided.
What he loved and what he loves.
He tries to make the past, Jessica, his present again.
It happened. All he ever thought he wanted. Jessica is alive.
Lucy reminds him of this miracle when he acts like he has forgotten.
When he doesn't remember and lets his instinct lead. When his focus narrows to Emma holding a knife against Lucy's throat.
It is almost a relief to put on the kind of armor he used to wear. Deployment and raids always were easier in a way. Life with all its problems disappears, if only for a while. He has to let it not to be distracted.
And then Carol is in his aim. It's like a parody of his training days with human targets popping up and having to make split second decisions on who is good and who is bad. Part of him wishes he was a younger version of himself, inexperienced enough to pull the trigger on reflex, seeing the world in black and white instead of in gray scales. Only seeing a Rittenhouse leader looking back at him, not Lucy's mother.
A Master Sergeant and a History Professor walk into a room ninety-nine years ago and a woman they have never met knows by just looking at them.
Lucy calls them a one night relationship.
And he can't really say anything to that. He has lost the right to do that.
She does slip and forget when Alice Paul has been killed. She leans against him briefly
But when she asks him "How do I look?" he doesn't say "Beautiful." That would have been them in another conversation in another time.
"Your hair, you might wanna..." His fingers brush the air over her left ear instead of stroking back the strands of hair that have come loose.
This is them now.
"She's not here," Jessica says when he walks into the kitchen area and continues to lounge area.
"I wasn't looking for her."
"I'm a bartender. It's my job to read people. You two are an open book."
"I... we..."
"Look, nobody wants their husband to have the kind of connection with another woman that you two seem have. I'm not saying I like it, but I'm trying my best to make allowances for how this time travel thing have made you close. And even if I can't wrap my head around me being dead I kind of get that too."
"Jess, I'm trying."
"The thing is, you shouldn't have to try."
"And one more thing," she adds when Wyatt is scoping coffee into the coffee maker. "When I said she wasn't here you just assumed I meant Lucy. Why didn't you think I meant Agent Christopher or Jiya?"
"Who made this coffee? It's like tar!" Flynn says to everyone and no one when he empties his mug down the drain. "The catering in this place is every bit as delightful as the furniture."
Their history and the history they travel to begin to echo with memories. They arrive at another long ago war Wyatt would probably have fought in had he been born at another time. But this time Lucy declines his help before she rides off without him. They are no longer the close knit unit of three they used to be.
Lucy ends up at her mother's side as she takes her last breaths after all. Not in the way she first imagined, by a hospital bed with Amy next to her. But the death that follows she could never have imagined, never have prepared for no matter how many times Jiya talked about her vision.
She would never have imagined that she would damn a gun for not not firing when she holds it to someone's head.
That this would be her life now.
That the drunk Master Sergeant dozing in the waiting room at Mason's would one day tell her he loves her when they sit on a concrete floor in a forgotten bunker reeling from the loss of their third team member and friend.
That only moments later she would meet her future self, an amazon offering them another miracle.
Lucy meets herself in the kitchen early in the morning.
"Do you want some scrambled eggs?"
"Have I learned how to cook?"
"No. But Wyatt is a real sleepy head so I'd starve if I'd wait for him to make breakfast. Sometimes I threaten to make pancakes. That gets him out of bed faster than when the alarm for the Rittenhouse time travel machine goes off. Can't do it too often though, or he'd see through my bluff."
"Any more advice?"
"You know I can't."
It's a surreal experience to see yourself struggle with your convictions.
"Just... just don't be too hard on yourself. Or him. You'll have enough battles to fight as it is."
Where do they begin again and when? In the wake of a dead mother and a wife who returned from the dead only to disappear again?
Just because they have met their future selves, and as Jessica said, they are an open book, it doesn't make the present any easier. There is a gap between their now and the snatches of tenderness and love they see between the persons they will become. Time travel will not bridge that gap, only they can.
"Are we really that obvious?" Wyatt asks her.
Flynn's snort can (almost) be heard across the bunker.
They are something that had barely began.
Lucy begins again by wearing the dress she stole on a sunny morning 77 years ago in Hollywood. It is a celebration after all. They all have a few more bruises but Rufus is back.
Wyatt won't let her near the barbecue. He doesn't even let Rufus help, no matter how happy they all are to have him back.
For some reason Flynn's comment to Lucy and Rufus "You do realize this is a barbecue and not a Viking funeral?" qualifies him to help.
"Stop moping people and help mix the salad and set the table," Agent Christopher tells them. "You too Connor, no excuses."
It's only in the movies that people know what to say. Someone has already written the lines for you. They hesitate, say the wrong thing or nothing at all, but it's a start. The fire from the barbecue went out a long time ago and the lumpy scarves Agent Christopher gave them before she went in don't do much to keep them warm but they are both reluctant to leave the makeshift bench and each other. After an awkward version of musical chairs Jiya and Rufus are now in what was Wyatt's and Jessica's room, Lucy is in their room, leaving Wyatt on the couch and Flynn where he was.
"This is just because I'm cold," she says when she leans into him.
"Okay." She feels him shift to put his arm around her.
"Careful, I'll give it ten seconds before someone will come our here," he says when she lets her palm rest against his jaw.
"I'll risk it. You're not the only one who can be reckless you know."
Lucy yawns. "You need to shave. If you stop shaving I won't be able to tell you apart if we run into future Wyatt again."
Stars become visible as the sky darkens.
"Are you asleep."
"No, ma'am."
They are not fate or something prewritten but a choice. The result of the small, stupid, courageous and monumental choices they've made. Of choosing the possibility of something.
FIN