Crimson: Southampton County, Virginia. 1831.
The first thing she saw was the blood on his face, a dark crimson streak racing from his temple to his ear. She moved toward it like a moth drawn to light, but Wyatt instantly snapped to attention, clamping her arm back down to her side before she could lift more than just a finger.
"Lucy," he whispered roughly, mouth hanging ajar for several seconds after her name had squeezed past his cracked lips. "God, hold still, okay? Don't try to move."
"You - " she wheezed unevenly and fought against the bruising weight in her eyelids. "You're...bleeding."
He somehow seemed to scowl and smirk all at once, but the outright terror in his eyes was much louder than anything else in his expression. "Hate to be the one to tell you, but you aren't looking too hot yourself, slugger."
She tried to argue, but the sandpaper in her throat wouldn't budge. It came to her in pieces - the taste of copper on her tongue, a spiritless hum droning on and on inside of her head, and a strange fiery pain in her shoulder.
"Am - am I dying?"
"No, hell no," he breathed out emphatically. "Not on my watch, ma'am."
Lucy attempted a nod, but she was pretty sure her head hadn't moved at all. She indulged in the exhausting pressure behind her eyes and invited the darkness of oblivion. Wyatt was okay, and that was the only thing that seemed to permeate her cobwebbed brain. Wyatt was okay. She could rest now.
Unfortunately for her, he didn't seem to agree with that logic. "No, Lucy, stay with me a little longer, alright?"
Her arm shook with his pesky insistence. She didn't have the energy to protest, settling for an unwilling groan when she couldn't make herself say the actual word no.
"Lucy!" Wyatt's voice rose and cracked, dissipating furiously like a wave coming ashore. "I mean it, you need to open your eyes. C'mon, Luce."
When she finally mustered the strength to peer up at him again, there were two parallel tracks of tears skating down his face. "Wy-Wyatt...?"
"Hey," he answered in a husky timbre. "Listen, you've got to help me out here. We're not...we aren't getting anywhere fast, so you've got to fight through the pain and shock for a long as you can manage. Can you do that for me?"
She blinked heavily, but it did nothing to eradicate those strange fuzzy spots dancing at the edges of her vision. "Mmm. Yeah, I...I'll try."
"Okay, let me - " he broke off for a moment, cursed under his breath as he awkwardly dragged himself sideways, then gently rearranged her head to rest in his lap. "Does that feel any better?"
Lucy waited a moment to let the raging heat in her skin simmer down ever so slightly, then forced a purging cough with some difficulty. Her head cleared a little and then she could finally focus on his face for more than just a few seconds at a time. "Yes. Less woozy."
That produced a tiny light in his clouded eyes. "Good. Let me know if there's anything else I can do, okay? Not that I...I'm sorry, Lucy..."
She had no idea what he was apologizing for, but she was pretty sure this was a definite example of blissful ignorance, so she decided to ask the question that mattered more to her anyhow. "Are you...badly hurt? Your head?"
That inquiry seemed to frustrate him, but he answered it nonetheless. "My head is fine"
"Doesn't look fine."
"Trust me, it could be worse," he mumbled with a grim look.
"Wyatt," she exhaled with some effort. "I don't like it when you get hurt."
"I'm supposed to be the one who gets hurt. That's why I'm here, right? To get the ugly stuff done. You - you're not supposed to...you're the historian, Luce. I'm the soldier." His voice grew thin, but he echoed his words once more in a strained whisper, practically pleading with her, "I'm the soldier."
He wasn't making any sense to her, and his expression was faraway and frantic. She felt his hand in her hair, combing softly through the curls that had apparently tumbled out of her era-appropriate updo.
"Are you mad at me? I - I feel like I did something wrong but can't remember it."
His gaped down at her like she'd just kicked a kitten. "Mad at you? No, Lucy, God no."
"Okay," she murmured. Her lashes wavered, slipped downward, begging for a break from the burdensome task of remaining open.
"Hey, none of that," he said quietly, his hand falling over her cheek and stroking slowly. "Let's talk, okay? Tell me something. Anything you want - a story, a memory from when you were a kid, a history lesson, whatever."
"Mmm, I'm too tired. You talk instead."
"Yeah, great idea," he smirked down at her, and that lively look was almost enough to erase the gruesome edge of blood mingling into his hairline, "except I don't know any good stories, all my childhood memories are shitty, and my best attempt at a history lesson would just be regurgitating information that I learned from you. That doesn't leave us much to go on, now does it?"
Her mouth lifted into a weary half-smile. "You...you sell yourself too short. I like your stories."
His thumb froze on the crest of her cheekbone. "Okay, here goes nothing. Not so much a story, but a little secret I've been meaning to let you in on."
"That sounds good," she returned as firmly as she could.
"Alright, so here it is...I can't stop thinking about what you told me back in 1965, and I'm thinking we ended that whole discussion on the wrong note."
She tried to frown, wanted to reach for his hand but couldn't make her body comply, so she just coughed out a jumble of confused words instead. "That...that was weeks ago."
"Yeah well, there's no statute of limitations on grief, right?" He gave her a sheepish look at the use of her own words from that night in Alabama, his blue gaze shimmering in the low light. "You wanted me to promise you that we're friends before we're anything else, and I get that, but I - I've been going over what you said every damn day since then, and it's no good, Lucy."
"No good being my friend?" she slurred with her closest approximation of a teasing tone.
"No good being just your friend," he answered immediately, not an ounce of jest reflected in his somber expression. "I had an awful dream the night that we got home from that jump, but much to my surprise, it had nothing to do with losing Jess. It was about losing you."
Lucy took a stuttering breath and tilted her head against his leg as she waited for him to go on. He cleared his throat with a weak rumble, looking somewhere far above her head as he forced himself to keep talking with obvious unease.
"That wreck on the side of the road after Viola Liuzzo had been shot...her car smoking in the ditch, the skid lines from the breaks, all of it...that had to take you to a bad place too, didn't it? You - you told me that you almost died in a car accident when you were in college, Lucy, but you didn't so much as flinch while we were dealing with the wreckage in '65. You were too busy taking care of Rufus, taking care of me...but God, can you honestly tell me you didn't have nightmares after that jump?"
She sighed, but it did nothing other than create a horrible tension somewhere in her chest and it was all she could do not to scream out in pain. "I - I did, but they...they weren't so bad."
Wyatt's face was twisted with sadness, but his voice carried a contrasting note of levity. "Sorry babydoll, but I'm calling bullshit on that one."
"Your bullshit meter is too damn good," she muttered indifferently, allowing herself to succumb to the bliss that came with momentarily closing her eyes again.
"Lucy," he appealed from seemingly miles away, "Lucy, don't..."
She couldn't hear him anymore. She was swept off to a quieter place, a far more comfortable place, a place where she didn't hear the sound of Wyatt's words shattering with tears as she went limp in his embrace. Couldn't discern the sound of Rufus breaking through the door a moment later, didn't hear his courageous whoop as he charged in armed with a gun in either hand and a take-no-prisoners glare on his face. She didn't get to see the unmistakable relief on Wyatt's blood-streaked face nor feel his injured leg begin to spasm from beneath her as his thinly held control finally wavered. It was all lost on her, the entire world consumed by a blanket of rapturous ignorance.
And then she was blinking against a harsh white light, a steel table beneath her and a familiar swipe of nagging crimson shoved so close to her face that she couldn't see anything beyond it. She tried to sit up for a better look at whatever it was that was crumpled up next to her, but even the slightest movement left her gasping with a stiff and searing pain.
The red blur moved immediately, and then a bleary-eyed Wyatt lifted his head from the edge of the table, a butterfly bandage stretched over his forehead and his voice as rusted as his sleeve once he tried to speak. "Hey, easy there. You need to stay where you're at."
"Are...are we home?"
He nodded with a thin smile. "Welcome to 2017, Luce. Glad to have you back."
She didn't return his expression. "What happened to your arm?"
"My arm?" Wyatt glanced downward and understanding lit his features as he took note of his stained sleeve, and then his eyes were back on hers with a crestfallen grimace. "Nothing happened to my arm. That's from what happened to your shoulder."
"Oh." She squinted down at what she could see of her body, and was met with the sight of a thick white bandage just where he'd suggested it should be. "I...I don't really remember getting hurt."
"It happened so fast," he answered in a tone that was both contrite and pensive, "I chased Emma from one farm to the next barn over. She was warning the family about the coming rebellion when I found her, and she didn't appreciate the interruption. Turns out they were second-generation charter members of Rittenhouse, and it didn't take much convincing from Emma to get the farmer to pull a knife on me."
"You had just been stabbed when I got there," she inhaled slowly. "Your leg..."
Wyatt looked away, but not before she saw the thunderclouds of torment gathering in his gaze. "Yeah. Then you went a bit ballistic and tried to get between us, which prompted little Farmer Rittenhouse Junior to shoot you with his dad's rifle. And shockingly enough, that caused Emma to go a bit ballistic too."
"Really? She did? I definitely don't remember that."
"Oh yeah," he muttered with a raised brow. "She was super pissed, but I think it was mostly from fear of what would happen to her if you didn't make it out of 1831 alive. She was rambling about how your mom would react and that this somehow negated the entire mission, going on and on like a crazy person until she hightailed it out of there."
"So they aren't currently planning my ultimate demise? What a relief," Lucy mumbled caustically.
Wyatt gave her a sluggish grin. "It actually turned out to be pretty helpful. She inadvertently cleared a few things up for me in her panicked state. Seems like they're trying to make up for the hits they took with your Ethan Cahill plan...they're rallying more Rittenhouse families from the past who either died out prematurely or fled from their responsibilities and never came back into the fold. This jump was about rescuing certain people from the slave uprising. She was there to minimize the casualties that affected the organization."
"They're rebuilding?" she asked with a scrunched brow. "By resurrecting lost recruits?"
"I'm almost positive. Rufus and I did a little digging while you were in surgery. Obviously there's no way to know the exact results of her meddling in 1831 unless you somehow memorized the names of all the causalities from our original timeline..."
She scoffed at him with narrowed eyes. "I'm not that good, Wyatt."
"Didn't think so," he said with a hint of laughter. "But I'm betting you can at least give me a ballpark estimate of how many people it should have been."
"Somewhere around 60, I believe."
He sighed, mouth bending downward. "Just as I expected. The current estimate for lives lost during Nat Turner's slave rebellion is down to 40. She saved several families from their imminent deaths."
Lucy tried to keep the panic from reaching her voice, her mind grappling with the booming effects of what Emma had accomplished. "You really did your homework while I was out of commission, didn't you?"
"Had to do something productive," he retorted with a grunt. "I was ready to start climbing the walls once they kicked me out of here, so yeah...I decided to make myself useful in the meantime."
She glanced warily over the rim of the medical table, noticing for the first time that his bandaged leg was propped up in a second chair beside her, the trousers he'd donned for the trip to the 1800s cut off in a jagged rip above his knee. "Shouldn't you have been relegated to the infirmary too?"
"Eh, I'll live. It's clean and covered. I'll be good as new before too long, and so will you."
No matter how casually - flippantly, even - he tried to brush off the whole incident, Lucy saw the grisly shadows that lined his face. She reached for his hand, a tiny tremor running through her fingers as she felt the instant assurance of his responding grasp. With her hand enclosed in his, she could finally breathe a little easier, almost forgetting the twinges of discomfort in her chest.
"I..." he sighed and visibly collected himself for a long moment. "I said a lot of things in that barn. I don't know if you were really with it at that point, but - "
"I heard every word," she whispered, eyes filling with unanticipated tears.
He smiled softly and brought her hand up to his whiskery cheek. "Well that wasn't just the stress talking. I meant it, all of it, okay? I - I don't want to be so afraid of losing someone else that I cheat myself out of the best thing in my life. The best person in my life. I want to be with you, Lucy. Friendship isn't cutting it anymore."
"Are you..." she looked away, her eyes falling to his injured leg as she tried to force the question past her reluctant lips, "...are you really sure that it's not too soon for you?"
His other hand came up to capture her chin, tilting it until she was looking at him again, and his watery smile had her heart lurching inside of her chest. "Yes, ma'am. Couldn't be more sure if I tried."
There was nothing glamorous about their first real kiss. Lucy could barely lift her head from the table, Wyatt wasn't much better off as he gracelessly shuffled his chair nearer to her, and it only lasted for a few exhilarating seconds. His mouth flitted lightly over hers, a sweet and reverent pressure that left her longing for more before it was even over.
He leaned back with an impish grin, but the words that followed were nothing but sincere. "Thank you for saving my life out there, Luce, but how about you never pull a stunt like that again?"
"And leave all the heroics to you?" she asked dully, the pull of medicated sleep beginning to wash over even as she fought to stay alert for just a little while longer. "We'll see about that."
Wyatt shook his head and released a weighty sigh. "Heaven forbid you just cooperate with an order for once in your life."
She closed her eyes with a sleepy smile. "Someone's gotta keep you on your toes, Master Sergeant Logan."
His lips dusted over her forehead, lulling her into a mesmerizing trance with his deep voice so near to her ear. "You're definitely the woman for that job."
Then she was off again, drifting away into a blissful dreamland where she and Wyatt were finally pursuing those ambiguous possibilities. And just when Lucy thought nothing could be better than the vivid fantasies that swept across her sleep-addled imagination, she woke up hours later to the incredible realization that it was no dream at all; Wyatt was still there, ready to kiss her again and again until real life became far more appealing than anything she could have ever conjured up in her head.