Yellow: Highway 80, Alabama. 1965.
Twin lines ran on endlessly in either direction, the incessant stripes of yellow seeming unnaturally vivid to her in the dusky aftermath of such a senseless tragedy.
"Go talk to him, Lucy."
She peered up at Rufus with a frown, unable to fake a lack of comprehension once she laid weary eyes upon the grim creases marring his face. "Are you sure you aren't the one who needs someone to talk to right now?"
He shook his head but the gesture was anemic at best. "I'll make it. I've never had any choice, you know? There's no avoiding it for me. This shit is the same old, same old...bigots haven't changed too much in fifty years. Wyatt, on the other hand? He does a damn good job of hiding out from his demons. This has to be opening a giant can of worms for him."
Lucy nodded, volleyed an insufficient prayer up to the evening sky, and tried to numb herself against the speckles of blood that decorated the lonely stretch of road as she crossed to him. Wyatt sat stiffly on the edge of a dented guardrail, eyes turned downward to the sullied pavement beneath his feet. He was examining it from every angle - the angry tire marks, rapidly drying blood, an assortment of shattered wreckage and debris. The end of a life summarized so brazenly, so cruelly.
He didn't immediately acknowledge her as she lowered herself onto the ledge of warped steel, but she wasn't discouraged by his lacking reaction. They'd gotten close enough to know that words could come and go between them without the need for a manufactured effort. Several minutes passed in silence before he finally spoke, and when he did, it was in a voice far rockier than she'd heard from him in quite some time.
"How old was she?"
Lucy inhaled carefully, racking her brain for the details on an incident that she only knew with some degree of peripheral knowledge. She'd studied the full spectrum of the Civil Rights movement before of course, but she couldn't call it a point of expertise on her part. That didn't matter, though. With that ragged tone of his reverberating in her ear, she was determined to deliver an answer as best as she could. "Late thirties...forty at the oldest."
His fists clenched around scathing metal. "Too goddamn young."
She nodded, feeling an irrepressible helplessness deep down in her gut as she observed the hard set of his jaw.
"Who...who did she leave behind?"
This fact comes to her faster than the last, but she's far more reluctant to answer him this time. "She was survived by a husband - her second husband actually - and five kids. Two of them were from her previous marriage."
Wyatt breathed out an ugly barrage of curse words, his head hanging even lower as anger spiraled through him. "And this was the right thing for us? To let her die even when - "
"She died for something she believed in, Wyatt," she broke in calmly. "She was driving a teenage boy home because she knew it was the right thing to do no matter what society said about his skin color."
"And now her family has to go on without her," he said with unmasked bitterness.
Lucy put her hand over his, relieved when he made no move to brush her off. "She knew the risks. She turned on the news one night last week and saw these same Civil Rights protesters being assaulted on this exact highway. Viola Liuzzo traveled to Alabama for one reason, and that was because she knew she couldn't sit safely at home and stay on the sidelines of an important cause. She chose to help."
A muscle in his jaw ticked once, then twice. He turned slowly, eyes screaming out to her with a pain that nearly knocked her sideways. "Rittenhouse...they were going to rescue her? Why, because she was white? If anything, I would have thought they'd be on the side of the Klan. Why wouldn't' they want her to die tonight?"
"I don't know...I don't know much of anything anymore, do I?" She tried to laugh it off, but the sound was filled with defeat. "They certainly made their best effort to get in the middle of it, but I can't understand their motives any better than you can."
"That's a scary thought," he returned dully. "My understanding goes about as far as my shoelaces. It's no good if we're both that lost."
Lucy swept her fingers over the back of his hand, measuring the potential disaster of what she was about to say and diving in even as she feared the worst. "Wyatt...I-I know that this has got to be stirring up a lot of bad memories for you..."
He arched away from her, letting her hand fall flat against the guardrail. "I'll be fine."
"Bullshit," she murmured affectionately. "No lies, remember?"
It was his own rule, the motto he'd drilled into her head ever since she'd come to him in tears over the discovery of her Rittenhouse heritage several weeks ago. He'd promised that he'd do everything he could to help her through it as long as she was always honest about the reality of what she was facing - honest with him, honest with herself.
He bent over his knees now, the impact of those words echoing back to him with some discomfort now that he was the one on the honesty hot seat. "I don't want to talk about it, okay? Not now, not with you..."
For all of the ways he could have tried to squirm his way out of this conversation, it had never occurred to Lucy that he could inflict so much damage to her own emotions in the process. She couldn't hide the catch in her throat, couldn't withhold the miserable sound that erupted from deep inside her with the backlash of his dismissal.
Wyatt swung toward her in a panicked millisecond, his eyes distraught as he cupped her face and made her look at him. "That came out way wrong, Lucy. Way wrong. I meant - "
"It's alright," she cut in bleakly, "you don't have to - "
"Bullshit. No lies, Luce. It is not alright." There were actual tears in his blue eyes now, and the shimmering effect of it was more catastrophically beautiful than she could ever put into words. "What I meant is...is that you're the last person who needs to hear about this. It's not fair to put this on you. We - we're supposed to be moving forward, aren't we? What can I offer you if I'm still hung up on Jessica's death?"
She shook her head gently, tears now crowding their way into her vision too. "I don't want you to worry about what you can offer me. I want you to take as much time as you need."
"But I told you that I was ready to leave the past behind, and yet here I am doing the exact opposite." His thumbs swept over her cheekbones as he watched her with raw desperation. "I...I'll deal with it, I promise."
"You want to promise me something?" she asked quietly. "Promise me to take care of yourself. Promise me that you'll always be honest about how you're feeling. Promise me that we're friends before we're anything else, because I want you to be in my life no matter what possibilities may or may not work out between us in the future."
Wyatt leaned in closer, pressing a docile kiss to her forehead before draping an arm around her shoulders and drawing her into his side. "You're getting really good at these pep talks, Preston. Pretty soon you're going to be taking over for me entirely."
She sank against his shirtfront with a melancholy smile. "Hardly. I take all of my cues from you."
"Oh please, don't go and get all maudlin on me now," he scoffed impassively. "You're amazing all on your own. You don't need my help."
Lucy sat up with a stern look, both hands grasping at his shoulders. "Uh uh, none of that. You're the only thing that's been keeping my head above water these last few months, and that's been true even before my mom dropped the Rittenhouse bomb, Wyatt. You always have my back. You tried to defend me when Bass Reeves - the Bass Reeves - was livid with my actions. You've fought for my chance to bring Amy home over and over again. You drove me to see my grandfather when I got back from '54, knowing that I wanted you to go with me without having to ask. You've told me a million times that there's nothing wrong with still feeling conflicted about protecting my mom even when she's at the top level of all this shit we've been forced to deal with. You're - you're like this unbelievable rock in my life, and I know that's insanely cheesy, but my God, don't ever doubt how much I need you."
He stared at her, astonished and slack-jawed, practically gaping like a fish at her rambling revelation.
Her cheeks started to burn with the embarrassment of how much she'd just unloaded on him without any real preamble, but every word of it had been inescapably true. She took a breath, inclining just a little closer so that she was sure she still had his attention. "There's no statute of limitations on grief, Wyatt. You have all the space you need, okay? I'm not going anywhere. You know where to find me if and when you're ready."
Lucy stood then, forcing a smile to her face before she moved to rejoin Rufus on the other side of the road. She only took a half-step before Wyatt's hand cinched firmly around her wrist.
"You - you know you've been a rock for me too, right?" he asked in a scratchy baritone. "I would have given up a hundred years ago if you hadn't been there to get me through it, Lucy."
A real grin fluttered to the surface as she tugged on his arm, urging him to his feet. She was far too exhausted to figure out if he'd been using that hundred year milestone in a literal or figurative sense, because in the complicated mess of their lives, she figured either could be true. They've charted out a bewildering course through time, the blur of backwards and forwards motion becoming too difficult for even Lucy to comprehend at this point. The ticking momentum of time had become a relative matter, but her feelings for him were set in stone.
They passed back over the remains of the car crash - those same tire marks, the rapidly drying blood, an assortment of shattered wreckage and debris - and Lucy tasted acid all over again when faced with the devastation of Viola Gregg Liuzzo's murder at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Selfishly, she knew she was also tasting acid over the fact that she'd more or less released Wyatt of any obligation to those possibilities that they'd been tiptoeing around in the weeks following that conversation back at Mason Industries.
Something inside of her snapped in half as she let that last glimmer of hope fade away. As much as he deserved a fresh start - hell, even as much as he might actually want it for himself - there was no way around the fact that he still saw Jessica Logan reflected in the face of every woman who died on their watch. Whether it was a reporter in 1937 or a Civil Rights activist in 1965, he saw the same ghost, relived the same guilt-ridden heartache, mourned the same loss anew.
But Lucy swore that to her dying day, she would uphold her end of the bargain - she wasn't going anywhere, wouldn't desert him in his grief, not even if staying by his side under these terms would eventually shred her to pieces.
a/n : please review!
Also, as of the moment I published this fic, I officially have one story per every letter of the alphabet (not all Timeless stories, but still true nonetheless). I've told a few of you about this nerdy ambition of mine & now it has been accomplished :) YAY. (i'm weird and I know it)