I'm calling this crack chapter because I wrote it so long ago...just, take it for what it is. You're only seeing this because of a dedicated group of Twitter trolls who caught wind of it. Specifically, courjenna, angellwings and awrighterinbriz so...thank them.
Chapter Two: Dark Matter
"This isn't your present, it's 2025."
Jiya's words detonate like a grenade, shattering every confidence he has in his conception of reality.
Six months of intensive training, of marksmanship, demolitions, breaching, combined skills, tradecraft and executive protection…and yet nothing prepares Wyatt for this ambush. It all culminates into an explosive "fuck" as he launches himself from the table and finds himself pacing frantically, while Lucy and Rufus sit motionless in their seats. The adrenaline response runs right through him, forcing him into a state of hyper-alertness as his body responds to the shock.
He only has one mantra - get over the hump, or crack up.
Two options.
He really feels like cracking up.
"It's not possible," Rufus finally comes to his senses and wakens from the trance that the shock has plunged him into, eyes wide and mind whirring, "there's no forward loop or momentum, we've been studying it for decades. Decades. Unless we're in some eighties sci-fi trope, it's not possible."
There's his left hand, Wyatt thinks. Speaking sense through science. The amount of times he's had the wool pulled over his eyes by the various levels of command on these missions is incalculable. They think he's nothing but brawn with a yes sir, no sir mentality. Coupled with Rufus and Lucy he's one third of a formidable triangle, and where he falls in understanding, they pick up the slack. Not to mention, he's Delta Force.
Who're they kidding?
But Jiya stands behind her claim, unmoved by the challenge, "not in your present, but in ours, it's definitively possible."
He volleys his gaze back to Rufus, noting the way he straightens in his chair, ready to battle the notion. Brain against brain, half of which will go right over his and Lucy's heads and end up with Rufus in a round of hot seat when they're alone.
"The infrastructure was never built for forward momentum, even if I believed you in any timeline or universe, it'd be impossible to navigate the Lifeboat outside of its navigational belt. The technology couldn't even synchronize with your software, it'd be… prehistoric in comparison."
"The Apollo Guidance Computer was more basic than my toaster, but it still put man on the moon, Rufus. You of all people should know that," Jiya rebuts, and Wyatt can sense the determination radiating off of her. This was someone they'd trusted with their lives, a person they'd exalted back in the lounge for saving their asses, but that all fizzles when they're faced with the churning news of having taken the wrong direction home.
The room remains quiet as Jiya drops a computer tablet onto the table, offering up an open web-page and a search engine.
"The BBC, CNN, Washington Post -take your pick of news outlets, they're all still up and running, search it if you can't take my word for it," she offers, "you'll be hard-pressed to find a printed newspaper in Silicone Valley in this day and age."
No one takes the bait and he's unsure whether that's because they're not being bought, or whether they're too fearful of what they'll find. It's a thought that he's stolen from when he's distracted by the glint of Lucy's locket that she's clinging to as she fingers it absently.
She hasn't said a word, but she doesn't need to. Lucy wears her heart on her sleeve and Wyatt knows that underneath all of that deep-breathing and locket meditation, that her mind is running a mile a seriously wonders whether she'll crack up this time. It's a toss-up on any given day about which one of them has had the last straw, but she's had a lot thrown onto her plate, what with the fiancé, the missing sister and the diary. All of that hiding and silent suffering she'd been doing holding onto that journal will all seem moot now that they're supposedly ahead of it. He realizes he owes her some kind of apology for icing her out back on the mission because if the feeling in his gut is anything to go by, he understands now why she was so close-lipped about Flynn.
"Aren't we supposed to combust, or lose a limb or something?" Lucy finds her voice, though Wyatt is struck by the raspiness of her tone and he realizes it's probably been a while since she's seen a doctor when she pinches the bridge of her nose, "we can't go to a timeline where we exist. Is this why it feels like someone's splitting my skull?"
All eyes lead to Jiya after that, it's a question he's not even dared to think in the time the bombshell has been dropped. Who knows what rules there are for forward travel, or what laws come into play when they go forwards instead of backwards…it makes him second guess that nosebleed he had after waking.
"All three of you suffered major concussions, any discomfort you feel will be a direct result of your landing," Jiya keeps to a vague line of answering, which does nothing to stamp out his growing impatience with the person who's supposed to be working with them.
Wyatt can't hold it back much longer, he has a respect for Jiya, for what she did for them, but it's getting beyond the point that he can take what she's giving without losing patience, "that doesn't answer her question though, does it?" he replies, curtly.
Though Rufus' back is to him he can tell he's ruffling some feathers, making the guy uncomfortable, but no one is telling him to back off so he translates that as permission to go down the hard-line of questioning.
"What happened to that pilot who went back to a timeline where he existed, Rufus?" he takes the lead; if Jiya's going to hold back, he'll find a route to the truth, whether they're ready for it or not.
"He died."
"How long did that take? Rough estimate?" he feigns curiosity, throws out an inviting hand as a gesture for Rufus to answer. It's cocky and self-assured, but it's the only way he knows how to get through the ordeal without becoming the aggressive soldier he left behind in Syria.
"Thirty-two minutes," Rufus confirms, his shoulders dropping, it's more than clear where he's taking this and it pains him to be the harbinger of bad news, but they're going to find out sooner or later. It'll be the last detonation of their futuristic Blitz.
The atmosphere in the room shifts.
"We've been here three days," Wyatt turns to Jiya, arms folded as he delivers the checkmate, "we left 1754 thinking we'd scraped through, saved our asses…but we didn't even make it to 2025. Joke's on us, I guess."
"Someone erased our existence?" Lucy breathes out shakily, fingers trembling now as she twists the gold chain of her locket in an anxious vice grip.
Jiya looks at him imploringly, silently begging for him to derail the situation, but it's an inevitability and she's finally forced to play her hand, "that's a… sugar-coated way of putting it."
It's a revelation that makes him feel like he's been slugged with a baseball bat. There are suspicions and then there are downright nasty truths, and it doesn't sound like it's gone down well for them in the future. If he hasn't earned enough of a punch from that, watching Lucy silently scrub away tears rockets him back to the number one asshole position. Guilt is a feeling he's not dealt well with in a long time and there's an urge to leave, remove himself from the whole thing for the sake of Lucy and Rufus because his temper is volatile, but he knows he needs them now as much as he needs to soldier them through it.
Even Rufus is starting to lose his cool, "why would you bring us here?" the coder's tone is confused and laced with hurt, "it's not scientifically possible in our timeline but it is in yours, so the only way is to bring us in from this side...now we don't just have Flynn dragging us back to the past, but you're pulling us into the future! What the hell, Jiya?" he exasperates, "who knows what damage you're doing."
Jiya doesn't have a chance to respond, because Lucy is suddenly complaining about feeling nauseous and wobbling in her seat, spurning Wyatt into motion. Whatever fight Rufus and Jiya have is lost on him when he kneels at her feet. The pad of his thumb settles on the soft skin of her chin as he tilts it upwards, urging her to take deep breaths and breathe. The rest of the room is white noise as she becomes his operation, to pull her from that brink and get her over the hump like she'd done for him at The Alamo. Her eyes don't meet his instantly, but when she anchors herself they come to land on his, thanks emanating the moment she graces him with the ghost of a smile. It makes him feel like less of an asshole.
"We'll get back there," he promises her with words he has no way of knowing if they'll hold true, but ones that he vows to fight for, "we'll get back to our timeline and we'll beat whatever this is."
She nods, blinking away the salty welling of tears with a deep breath at his encouragement. She's always been a good soldier - at least when she's not being blackmailed for his release- and it bolsters the smile that he puts on for her.
"Guys," Jiya drops the formality, sounding a lot more like the Jiya they knew of the past and it draws his attention back to the table, "I can't even imagine what any of this feels like, to come here and find out what your fate is before you've even lived it? But I'm not your enemy, before all of this…we were good friends, all of us…you trusted me."
"We just don't know what to believe anymore, Jiya," Wyatt comes to stand behind Lucy's chair, "one day we're being sequestered from Pendleton and lecture halls and then we're jumping through time in every direction, and paying with our lives, it's goddamn bull!"
It's a mixed bag of reactions around the table and Jiya's trying her best to hold it all together. Wyatt knows he could ease off a little more, but it's easier said than done when he's the one on the outside being asked to take a leap of faith. Future him may be tight with Jiya, but he's from a present where they're nothing but a quick "hey" crossing each other in the halls. It's a long leap to take on just faith.
Jiya pushes through, "I understand this is completely unprecedented. You're gonna have a lot of questions and we'll try our best to answer them for you, but this isn't Mason Industries pulling the strings, we can't give an authorization for a jump to the present...these were the orders left by you two," she looks over at him and Lucy, and his stomach flips.
There's something ominous in that disclosure.
"Us?" Lucy questions, "what about…"
There's no more probing when Lucy trails off, all too clear what that choice of words allude to.
"I died before them didn't I?" Rufus asks, but it's clear he's asking rhetorically. Wyatt's aware that Lucy's sucked in another gasp of shock and it fells them all for the moment.
The silence only serves to validate his question.
"And this is where it get's heartbreakingly difficult, for all of you, and we grappled with telling you, despite all of your wishes, because the future is malleable, but you made me swear on everything that was holy that I'd follow through. You're going to need a lot of time to process and adjust, and we agreed that I wouldn't be the one to tell you, which is why I have these."
She produces three envelopes from a folder on her lap under the table, one addressed for the three. Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus, and hands them over one by one. There's a pregnant pause as they all take a moment to inspect the letters, barely daring to hold them in their hands as though they burn red hot.
As he feels himself spiral, he hopes it's all one goddamn dream. A whack to the head that needed a few days to settle.
"It's my handwriting," Lucy chokes.
And he recognizes his.
Wyatt.
Wyatt…don't take it out on Lucy.
They're the words assaulting his brain like an axe to the head as he holds the letter crumpled in his fist; he'd been wrong back in the debriefing room, the last and final detonation would come from his own hand. A blast radius of eight years, the shrapnel thrown in his face with no time for cover.
It's an affront to every effort he claims to have made for Jess. A stinging, red-hot poker to his gut. It begs him to see the light in the dark, beyond the present and into a world that wasn't his yet, but all that does is throw him back to the car that night on February 11th.
His life wasn't supposed to go like this.
He hadn't given Lucy or Rufus any time for conference and found himself storming off with an unopened letter shoved into his back pocket the moment Jiya gives them privacy. The only time he's ever allowed someone to see the devastation wrought into him by coming home to a world without Jess is the day the telegram fails to materialize, and he's been damn careful never to let someone that close again. He stands by an eternal vow to devote every resource he has to finding her killer, and now that he's in bed with Mason, into bringing her back.
The weight of eight years burns hot in his palm, taunting him.
But I love her. You will love her.
He feels like an adulterer.
Lucy is not supposed to be his wife.
He doesn't expect to be ambushed in the men's changing room after running himself ragged on the treadmill. In fact, it's the one place he thinks he'll be left alone. It instantly puts him on guard when the door inches open at two am, the creak of a hinge that desperately needs to be oiled signaling Lucy's presence.
She peeks around the frame, a mess of puffy, red-rimmed eyes and tousled hair from where she's run her hands through it in that anchoring way she does to busy trembling hands. She's such a miserable sight that he can't even find it in himself to tell her he doesn't want to talk. So, with every twist to the new thorn in his side, he lets her join him on the bench and listens to the evening of her breaths as she gathers herself.
Wyatt…don't take it out on Lucy.
"I'm glad you're dressed," she says, gently, raising the sleeve of her sleep shirt to dab under her eyes. Her joke falls a little flat because he's being stubborn, refusing to give himself any slither of happiness or reprisal in Jess' honor.
Instead, he diverts the conversation, "Are you okay?"
"No."
"Then that makes two of us," his words come out hollow.
It's not that he's cold, or that he blames her for what they've been thrown into, but he can't hold her hand through this mess. Just sitting side-by-side while his adulterous words replay in his mind feels like a sin to him in that moment. It's how he found himself on the bench in the middle of the morning after running the distance it takes him to drive home.
Lucy respects that he's not there to be a crutch and keeps to herself, taking in nothing but his presence as they sit in muted silence. The letter is shoved in his pocket again in some vain attempt to keep it buried, he doesn't want anyone to witness his failure or his betrayal. A marriage to Lucy, no matter if it's eight or eighty years from now, validates the possibility that he'll never save Jess. That'll he'll stop fighting the fight at some point, because who can really find love and search for one lost?
Something has to give.
It irritates him on so many levels to come to a future like this. Not only for Jess who deserved better from him but for his friendship with Lucy. Outside of Pendleton where trust is an occupational requirement, she's the first person to truly see something beyond the solider; the person who is more than just the bastard who left his wife on the side of the road to die. Rufus is his brother in arms, but he has something deeper with Lucy, someone he can confide in when he's feeling the strain or needing a boot in the right direction.
In some ways, he does blame being a believer in him, for trusting in him and letting him into those vulnerable moments. The little things that seem so innocuous and innocent to him now could be any one of the catalysts for the place they find themselves in eight years from their present. The way he calls her M'am even though he knows it annoys her, something that's slowly becoming more of an intimate joke the more he repeats it. The overruling need to buckle her in even though she probably knows how to by now, because the thought of being responsible for letting her come to harm eats away at him.
Things that he shouldn't blame her for because they're his gestures.
That lump is hard to swallow.
"She never says your name," Lucy's voice pierces the silence, as they sit, staring at the row of lockers lined up in front of them, somberly, "so, for a moment," she shrugs, trying to find the right words with her bottom lip trapped under her front teeth, "I thought, maybe, it wasn't you. Maybe it was still Noah, maybe someone else…that you avoiding me was because it was my fault you don't exist here anymore, but then she says something, insults you, actually," her voice breaks to smile, "and then everything else just seemed crazy in comparison."
"What'd she called me?" he hangs up the quiet for a minute, tamping down the sting at finding interest.
"A reckless hot-head."
"You got me from that?" he snorts.
"Well, yeah…because I call you that in my head, all the time."
"Ouch."
"Hey, I'm sure you have worse for me; I saw your face the moment after I fell out of the window in DC," her voice is coaxing, encouraging him back into that teasing space.
He calls her a lot of things in his head, half of them in the spur of the moment when she's leaving him tied up on a wooden chair in the seventies, or meeting with Flynn behind his back, but there is one he uses even when she's not being a pain in the ass.
"Bossy know-it-all," he admits.
"Nothing I haven't heard before," she plays it off cool, "second graders had worse ones."
He can't tell if that's another insult or just commentary, but she doesn't seem to be looking for a reaction so he lets it slip. The two am talk is going further than he imagined he was ready for, but it's nice, even if it's painful, to have someone there to take his mind off the crazy train. It feels more like them than the image of the unwanted marriage he'd been envisioning since opening his letter. It's almost as if he expected her to turn up in a white dress with a bridal bouquet, not the just-friends Lucy he knew a few hours before.
"I just…" she's struggling for words again, "I guess I came here to say sorry. I know you're only really in this for Jessica, like how I'm here for Amy…I can't imagine what it feels like to have all of this dropped into your lap, to have to deal with the idea of an us when a few days ago it was a case of working out a deal with Agent Christopher. I don't want you to think that I expect anything from you, that you have to see them or play up to any of this…I can deal with it by myself."
He looks straight at her then, surprised.
"You're going to see them?"
She nods, eyes welling, "she, um… said a lot of things, begged me. I feel like I owe it to her."
"You're a better person than me," he responds, which is enough of an answer to her olive branch. The slump of her shoulders isn't the worst response she could have, but it's enough to stir up the guilt in him again as he goes back to being the bitter jerk. He just can't commit to things like that when it's like Jiya said: the future is malleable. What they have here might not even be their future now that they've been exposed to it, so he doesn't feel awful for having the opinion he does. Their realities are always changing and he expects them to keep changing, especially in the favor of an event that transpired all those years ago in 2012.
"Like I said, do what you have to for Jessica. She's what you know," Lucy reaffirms her stance with some resolution, standing up from the bench, "they're fixing the Lifeboat as we speak, engineers say it'll probably be a week or two until we can travel back, but it's salvageable."
That's news he's actually glad to hear.
The plan he has for Jess' investigation will only take a small hit.
"That's good," he nods.
"Right, well…um, I'm gonna go, get some sleep, but can you do me a favor tomorrow?" she asks, like he isn't asking her to take a hit for him in what she'll be getting up to, "can you talk to Rufus? He's, um…mad at me too. Turns out I wrote his letter."
"He's probably not mad at you, Luce."
She has a strange reaction to that, flinching. He's observant enough to know it's not the first time, marking that as his last attempt to get away with dropping the extra syllable.
She collects herself after a few seconds.
"Well, whatever he is, he's not communicating with me and I know he needs a friend right now, could you just do that? For me?"
It's the least he can do, "sure."
She turns from him, ready to leave the way she came, the weight of the world saddled on her shoulders as she folds into herself and walks away. He's honestly ashamed that he can't offer her anything else, something to get her over the hump that in any other timeline he'd be more than willing to give, but he's just not there yet and he doesn't know if he ever will be now. Knowing what he knows puts every interaction with her under a microscope and he can't live like that, scrutinizing every kindness as some detonation that'll kickstart something to match the timeline he's in.
But it seems like he's a masochist after all because he can't help throwing her one last life-line.
"He mentions you by name, just so you know," he offers, "so, whatever you're doing for her, I guess you're doing it for him too."
She's half out of the door, but a quiet "thanks" lets him know she heard it, followed by a final "night, Hot-head."
Night, Hot-head.
He has no idea where he's heard that before.
The next day, after little to no sleep, they're dragged into the briefing room with Jiya again. Wyatt is powering on fumes by this point and he's only half-listening as Jiya explains the engineering work being done on the Lifeboat. He knows cars, not giant eye-balls of space-like technology, so he attempts to get away with little to no attention paid, eyes drooping against the blanketing exhaustion.
"You're WHAT?"
Rufus' outburst slams him back to reality a few minutes later and he catches himself from falling out of his chair, not realizing he'd even closed his eyes. He blinks wildly, attempting to rid the sleep-blur from his eyes in order to reintegrate into the conversation and find out why Rufus is suddenly looking at him like he has three heads.
"Married, supposedly," Lucy's answer brings him back up to speed, and he suddenly wishes he was back to being half-unconscious. They've all been avoiding each other since the night before and it's no surprise Rufus is thrown in the deep end when someone makes mention of his apparent future marriage to their team member.
"There's no supposedly about it, you guys just celebrated your sixth anniversary, Rufus was your best man," Jiya informs them, a smile curling at the corner of her mouth, making no effort to make space for their discomfort this time, "surprised the whole team when you came back from 1967 as husband and wife."
Six years. Wyatt can't even fathom that. He was married to Jessica for less, barely made it past their second anniversary when he took her to the Pelican Lounge to celebrate his graduation. Those thoughts just add more salt to his wounds. Every little extra detail only serves to undermine what he holds dear about Jess.
"Now that you've all had some time to process this timeline, I thought I'd bring you back for a full debrief. We, uh, left a lot of questions unanswered, mainly your purpose here and why we decided on this protocol," she passes over three identical manila folders, one for each of them, "these contain almost everything you need to know, events you vetted for approval, other events have been redacted. There are things your future selves deemed too variable to leave to chance, so please, understand when I say I can't give those answers."
"You're gonna Memento us?" Rufus snorts.
Jiya ignores him and a projector screen whirrs to life behind her, "1754, this was the agreed extraction date on the timeline. While it's clear you all had some friction on the mission, you were an established team and the timeline hadn't been altered extensively -"
"Amy disappearing is pretty extensive, and I came home to a fiancée I've never met," Lucy rebuts, looking up from her folder, "surely I would have wanted a redo of the Hindenburg? Seems like an easy fix to a major problem if we're fixing a broken future. No one else's timelines were affected, it'd be an easy place to start."
Wyatt thinks that's a fair point.
"Easy for you, Lucy," Jiya points out, almost expecting the argument, "but we all agreed, you were too green. It was your first mission, that and the fact that despite the Amy factor, we still have a stolen Mothership and no guarantee that we'd be able to retcon the Lifeboat from Mason. While our technology has advanced, we don't have the ability to pull the Lifeboat from its navigational belt, just like you said, Rufus."
"Then how…" Rufus looks meditative, mind whirring through the possibilities, "unless you needed Flynn to take out the Lifeboat so I'd cannibalize the nav system…I would, or, uh, future me would know that's what I'd do."
Lucy glances over at Wyatt, she looks as confused as he feels and it reminds him to take mental notes of what to hot-chair Rufus on after the brief, he gives her a shrug - I don't know - and returns back to the folder, staring down at a picture of a C4'd Lifeboat.
"We needed the Lifeboat at a more basic, or a weakened level so I could override the system and pull it into a forward momentum. Taking you guys from a past to present direction, to a closed time-like curve that bent forwards in time, instead of back on itself. Luckily, we have all of the mission data stored so I could cinch the Lifeboat before 2016 Jiya navigated you home by the protocol."
"So you needed the Lifeboat to go kaboom, got it," Wyatt tries to hurry it along and he receives a warning glare from Lucy, "but if we're supposed to die, why are we here? Playing god? We've let other people die for less. Are we really that essential? Last I heard you had replacements for anyone who went against the grain."
"There's a partial redaction in that answer, but mainly, it's as simple as Mason Industries trusts you. There are a lot of factors that play into the future, but the fact of the matter is that this is something bigger than history and you three proved yourselves to be above the cause. Fighting a fight even the CIA, NSA and FBI couldn't control. You three hold a lot of credence in this place."
"Hard to believe considering we've not preserved history as it was at any point yet," Lucy huffs, "we barely made it out of 1754, almost died at The Alamo -"
"History will never be one hundred percent untainted when you throw a domestic terrorist into the mix and show up behind him, none of you should be in those timelines, so, really, you'll never be able to preserve it as it was. You make best with what you have."
"So how did we end up here, eight years in the future? Dead? Or is that redacted?" Wyatt pushes for answers.
"Someone betrayed you."
The room falls silent. Wyatt has experienced this before in Syria.
"Unfortunately, you chose to redact who," Jiya tells them, though Wyatt can read that it's not a decision she agrees with, "though I can tell you it was related to Rufus being…taken out…" she pauses for a breath, clearly disturbed by the surfacing memories, "you weren't supposed to be there and you weren't supposed to die," she turns to Rufus, "that wasn't supposed to be your destiny."
It's clearly an emotionally charged moment for Jiya and Rufus, prompting Wyatt to keep his head down and focus on the folder. They've had their fights, and he and Rufus have had their beef over the recordings for Rittenhouse, but there's never a moment he wants to hear about their failure to protect him. It's another slug in the gut.
Lucy dropping her head to her hands is a distraction, drawing him from the folder as he takes in the sight of her hidden in her palms. She's being as quiet as she can but he knows her well enough to know she's barely keeping it together.
"Those events spur a chain reaction of events that prompt you two," Jiya regains some composure and addresses them both, "to destroy the Mothership two months later. After a lot of debate, the consensus is to destroy the Lifeboat and close the time-travel loop, along with all of the plans and blueprints. But National security steps in and takes it to Area 51. Or so we assume, MI disbands for a year and then selectively rehire, you two are let loose and we all reset. A few years go by, they promote me within, MI focuses on other technology until the cycle repeats…with my new position comes a million dollar contract and an NDA to reboot Mason's Mothership. They wanted me to pilot it."
"Rittenhouse," Lucy breathes, "we didn't kill the source."
"Why didn't they kill us?" Wyatt asks her, "of all the people, we just destroyed the Mothership, we were out there for years after…"
"It's complicated, and you redacted part of the reasoning, but you were brought back in. Like I said, there was a certain credence around you. We optimized that, used it to follow Rittenhouse covertly, and then, one day, something changed…you guys came in with this," she motioned to the table, "whatever happened spooked you two so badly you wrote the letters, developed the 1754 protocol and made me promise to do everything in my power to bring you back if something ever happened to you. A week later you were also taken out."
"Jesus," Wyatt swallows, "how long have we been dead?"
"Four days. The protocol called for immediate retrieval."
"So we were taken out three days ago and asked to be retrieved immediately? Isn't that insane? This place has to be crawling with Rittenhouse spies!" Wyatt feels his anger burning.
"I've done the best I can with the time I had, we landed the Lifeboat off-base, with the nav system dismantled you came in incognito…I'm trying here, to do what you wanted."
"It just seems hasty, Jiya, they've gotta be vetting this place like the Pentagon after action like that, we couldn't have waited a week?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because every day we wait, Lottie and Teddy spend it as orphans."
There's that red-hot poker again.
"Lottie and Teddy?" Rufus asks, brows furrowed in confusion.
It's the one factor he can't think about in all of this, the one that wrings him from stem to stern.
Lucy's voice cracks, "our children."
He thinks he should be used to the silence by now. The past couple of days it's felt like a growing cancer, dividing them and holding them hostage. The new development is that no one particularly wants to be left alone, and they've all gravitated to one another, finding themselves planted on the couch, and in Rufus' case, lying on the floor staring at the ceiling.
It's been a heavy day.
The shrapnel of their future blitz is sprawled across the lounge coffee table, painstakingly trawled over by Lucy armed with a highlighter, in some manic rush to find sense in what they'd been told to re-alter. He suspects it was a way for her to feel in control and out of her sinking car, while also giving her the opportunity to avoid talking about whatever it is that they're in; he'd been unable to get word in edgeways while she was in historian mode, relegating himself to theorizing with Rufus, who was only half-listening and communicating in short, effortless grunts. Thus, silence. It's almost two hours later when Lucy throws her highlighter across the room and silently flops onto the couch, frustrated.
"Nine concrete alterations to nine separate jumps, and ten indeterminate. Places we haven't even been to yet, and that's if we go. None of them make sense, all non-chronological. No pattern. It's a blind wild goose chase," she reels off, flustered.
"Lucy," Rufus calls from the floor.
"What?"
"Do you ever just…shut off?"
Wyatt accidentally laughs out loud and he's punished with a disapproving glare from Lucy, but sometimes it's good to hear Rufus be a little franker. He patches up his mistake by passing Lucy a beer - a pity case from Jiya - and clinks her bottle with his.
"Here's to surviving to at least 2025."
"Here, here!" Rufus snags his bottle from the table and sits up to drink, "let's pretend like you're not snuffed out and married with two ankle-biters."
It's supposed to roll off the tongue as a joke, Wyatt gets that, but Lucy doesn't seem to appreciate the sentiment and she drops her bottle onto the table, falling back into a state of silent detachment. They have moments like these, where their futures are forgotten and they can be themselves, untethered, but then something like that throws them back under and the moment is fractured.
"Man," Rufus seems not to have noticed the tone change, "I had my suspicions about you two, but married with kids? Wasn't even on my radar, isn't that weird? I mean, we're all dead so it's weird, but you guys made people. You're parents."
"What suspicions?" Wyatt demands, a little harsher than he intended, but Rufus knew full well that he was only tied to these missions for Jess.
Rufus looks a bit sheepish, realizing his mistake, "you know what, doesn't even matter."
"No, go on, Rufus, tell me why you -"
"Wyatt, leave him alone," Lucy breaks them off, tired.
"No, I want to know what he sees that makes him think I come onto you?" he snaps at her.
He's pushing it.
"I didn't say it like that," Rufus defends his words, putting his own bottle of beer down now for good measure, "I'm sorry if I offended you."
"Well, maybe you should think before opening your mouth, Rufus. For the record, we don't have kids," he gestures between himself and Lucy, "they exist in whatever ass-backwards timeline this is, but we're not parents. We're just ghosts of who their parents used to be."
He doesn't have to look at Lucy to know he's hurt her, because he can feel it from where he's sat, but he's not apologizing. He shouldn't have to apologize for a timeline he was snatched into, one that's he's not a word in.
"That's a very…detached way of looking at it," Rufus dares to press on, glancing at Lucy and softening his expression, "I mean, I know my degree is in physics, not metaphysics, but scientifically they'd register as yours - doesn't that bother you?"
"Being dead bothers me," he deflects.
"Lucy?" Rufus engages her next, and he's seconds away from asking him to quit it.
She's quiet for a beat, thinking, but Wyatt knows Lucy and if he's right, he knows she's been internalizing it since she got her letter.
"All I know is that someone who sounds like me, who worries like me, who is everything that is me but this one aspect made a life that's half me. How can it not bother me?" she admits, pensively.
"In two weeks we could be back and take one trip that flips this timeline on a dime," Wyatt finds himself digging a hole.
"Don't you think I know that?" Lucy snaps at him, fed up, "but right now they're here and they exist, so it's not a hypothetical. It's a reality, and in this reality they're alone."
Jiya's knock on the door comes at the worst possible time.
"Lucy? The car's ready."
Lucy gathers her belongings faster than he can protest.
"You're actually doing this?"
"I told you yesterday, you made it clear where you stand," she answers, avoiding looking at him while she snatches a pair of MI-loaned shoes from under the table.
"Why are you doing this to yourself?"
"Because it's what she wanted," Lucy pauses, and looks right at him, determination written all over her face, "she's just asking what I'd want someone to do for Amy, for any of you. I'm sorry if that's hard for you to hear, but you and I are different. I couldn't live with myself if I left this timeline without honoring her."
She doesn't wait for his rebuttal.
They exit without so much as a goodbye and he's left to pick up the pieces.
"Wow," Rufus sighs, "maybe I should be grateful I died first."
"Not funny," Wyatt snaps.
None of it is funny at all.
He waits it out for Lucy, an apology ready on his lips for the moment she walks through the door. Time crawls by, leaving him to sit and stew until he's forced to concede to the fact that she's not coming back. Being on the precipice of an unfinished fight always grates at him and tanks his mood, it's how it all ended with Jess - unfinished.
He doesn't know how to process any of this. He thought he could, thought he had the tools handed to him to overcome even the worst of outcomes…but it all feels lacking. He doesn't know how Lucy has the capacity to deal with it all, what she sees in herself to be as selfless as she's being.
His head is pounding from the strain and he throws back some pain relief and a sleeping pill provided to him by Noah, a thought that makes him snort when he thinks about the toes he's stepped on there.
Married.
To Lucy.
With kids.
It's a life he never envisioned after Jess, whether Mason interfered with the time-travel incentive or not. It's surreal as it is painful all in one go.
And the only person who truly understands it is eight years removed. Dead.
The only tangible evidence he was there at all is crumpled in his back pocket, like a discarded receipt.
He'll pull it out later, when he's sure the halls are empty, and give it another go. Do the Lucy thing and give it a second chance, try and understand the person he supposedly turned into. If not for him, for Lucy, who doesn't deserve his anger in something even she has no control over.
He'll try and see his perspective.
He'll try.
Wyatt,
I'm keeping this short; Lucy's already written out something that makes more sense and puts everything into perspective. I just did this for you, because you know how you can be. You're a hot-head, man.
Don't take it out on Lucy. I know what headspace you were in back then and I know this isn't something you needed on your plate, but she's going to be there for you and if you're not careful, you're going to hurt her in ways you'll regret. It's hard to hear, hell, Jessica was everything, man, you know that, but so is Lucy. I know where you're at, with the ma'ams and the belts, the way you think about her or try your damnedest not to.
But I love her. You will love her. As your wife, the mother of your kids, she's the best thing to have ever come of this whole goddamn mess. You got a family. If there's one thing I need you to understand it's that this is something you wanted for the rest of your life. You were wasting away after Jess, living a life she'd give you hell for. I tried everything, don't you think Lucy would have let you get away with anything less? Sometimes that's still not enough, even time-machines have their limits.
I need you to consider this. The whole picture. Even if nothing alters for you and Jess, you'd be saving lives beyond hers. Rufus. Lucy. Your own. It'll sound damn selfish to consider saving yourself, but in doing that you secure a future for Lottie & Teddy. Grandpa Sherwin was there for you in ways that asshole wasn't, and you were lucky to have him, but they don't have a Grandpa Sherwin.
All I ask is that you think about it.
Give these people a chance.
Wyatt.
Told you. I was ridiculous writing this story.
