He wasn't Luke. He wasn't anybody she'd known or came close to loving. She didn't offer her heart without much thought and reticence. Her past had taken care of that. An absent father, troubled mother, and a dependent sister. Then she was all alone fending for herself and getting stuck in all kinds of trouble because what else was there to do. Corbin tried to teach her differently. He was the father she had always wished she'd had. He'd lived up to every ideal she had thought a dad should be. Abbie didn't ask for anyone other than the sheriff. She didn't need her real father or the drama his new family could bring. She didn't want anyone that didn't want her.
Yes, Abbie was an iron vault. Her life and her love was hers to guard because she couldn't trust anyone to do it for her. Maybe too much had happened to her during her formative years that caused her to fear letting anyone in. It had been just as hard for her with her adoptive father. No less difficult with the only blood related family she could tolerate. It took multiple death scares and more than a few screaming matches and minor scuffles before she and Jenny had come to share their hearts with one another. There wasn't a chance she would fall in love as easily as the princesses in fairy tales. Love hurt. Love was hard. Love could kill. Abbie would rather remain as whole as she'd managed than allow some man to come and take a piece of the person she'd cultivated only to discard it when he found out how damaged she truly was inside.
Then Crane came from a bygone era and stumbled into her heart, most definitely against her wishes. She wasn't blind, and despite her affinity toward the more stout muscular type, the almost frail gentleman was beautiful in a way she hadn't noticed in a man before. It wasn't just his looks but his chivalry, the way words slid off his tongue and slipped from his lips in a stream of colorful, fragrant language. His passion set a fire wherever he went even sinking into her armored heart melting the hardened walls as easily as the first spring warmth to a frozen pond. Ichabod protected her as much as he relied on her. Something no one she'd ever been with had ever done. He saw her as much as he'd missed the tiny clues his wife had littered in her wake. The wife he'd loved without dissimulation and blindly. And yet, with all of his attachments and utter foolishness, Abbie thought he'd fallen into a crack in her heart that had been forged by her growing relationship with her sister and his surprisingly resourceful manner of getting her to drop her guard. To be herself even when doing so meant facing truths she'd rather not.
It'd happened slower than it'd ever – it had never happened before. Before Crane, Abbie had never had a love or been so fully submerged in her feelings for someone else to submit to the idea of love or even experienced that unmistakable symptom of caring for some other's wellbeing over all else. She'd been close to love, it had certainly touched the surface of her heart but not allowed to enter. Love made you vulnerable and blind. Love could hurt you, and it wasn't any differently loving Crane.
Her relationship with him seemed to be evolving. They seemed to be moving closer to each other mutually, but there came a prophesy and Crane allowing her to sacrifice herself for the wife that was revealed to be a dimwit with a weakness for evil, unredeemable children.
That hurt.
He left her and it hurt. When she returned it was to deal with As the Crane's Turned and an ungrateful Katrina. She, Abigail Mills, who supplied the witch with everything she needed and a home. Katrina was living on the labor of Abbie's back and to watch Crane – her fellow witness, her only friend – not check his wife stung. Standing on the sidelines while he abandoned her to fix his marriage – choosing his family over their bond, hurt.
It hurt.
She loved him, but Abbie would not be a fool for love.
After Katrina and during their time apart without the threat of Moloch, Henry, or the apocalypse, she lived. Abbie became an FBI agent, and Daniel. She let someone in that was available, handsome and worth the effort. It was never going to be a love story standing the test of time or anything she wrote home about, but she'd tried. She missed Crane and fighting the big bad a little, but she had tried.
Yet somehow as she marked another tick on the wall of the cave she couldn't for the life of her remember Daniel's face, the sound of his voice, or how she felt in his arms or their nights spent together. It was only Crane, her partner. The feel of his feathery touches at her elbow guiding her across the street. The timbre of his hearty laughter and his piercing stare. The smell of sandalwood and mahogany. 10 months trapped in the catacombs in another plane of existence and she'd come to terms with her feeling for her best friend 3 months ago. When she wasn't searching for a way home she thought of Ichabod, talked to Ichabod, played chess with Ichabod, strategized escape routes with Ichabod.
She loved him and being stranded in some other dimension made it all the more obvious to her.
Abbie was an observant woman and a more than competent officer of the law. She was aware of the tension strung tight between her and Crane. Only he wasn't or didn't want to acknowledge it himself. She wasn't good with rejection, so; Abbie didn't bother acting on the stolen glances and the inquisitive expressions. Playing the unrequited damsel in this story wasn't something the agent knew how to do. Neither was she skilled in seduction nor did she know how to sway the outcome in her favor. Crane had a type and she didn't fit it. So, she kept quiet and encouraged him toward Zoe and a happy life without his wife, even if it didn't include her the way she thought it should.
She was going crazy. She knew it. Could feel the prickly fingers of lunacy scraping at her mind. Abbie blamed Crane, if he wasn't on her mind she could focus more on finding her way out of wherever the heck she was instead of fantasizing about ways to tell him how much she loved him. She had worked through every permutation of her saying "I love you" and all the possible outcomes. Did it make her legitimately beyond her mind that in most Crane actually reciprocated her feelings? She thought so.
The sound of sand sifting into the metal pan she'd found reverberated off the walls of her mind. She could hear each individual granule make its mark. The silence she wanted to endure lost to her only means of keeping time. It was funny, all she had was time. Time that she was so short on all the way up until the end. Never enough time for work and missions. Not enough time for herself, to find someone that could help her forget about Crane and fall in love with. And yet, she had found the time to believe that in time she and Crane would meet in the middle and finally be on the same side of right. Thought she had enough time to tell Crane she loved him.
Now she didn't know if her silence was worth the protection it gave her from certain heartache. Now it didn't seem to matter. She wished that she had told him because she may never get the chance. Abbie could very well have missed her opportunity to try. To be a fool for love even if it didn't have a chance of working out.
She would do it. She would tell him the moment she clawed her way out of this new purgatory. Abbie would fling her arms around his neck and she'd would shout out how much she loved her fellow witness, her friend Crane.
Abbie would do it.