Chapter Text
“Help!” Lucy shouted as the Lifeboat door cycled open. At least she hoped she shouted. It could have been a low groan for all she knew. The vice inside her head squeezed all coherent thought out, only leaving room for the pain. Endless waves of pain.
There was movement and noise, so loud it made her sick, but she held onto it. Sick meant alive. You couldn’t be sick if you were dead.
“Flynn.” She tried, her tongue weighing more than her whole head and impossible to wield. Her eye lids weighed just about the same but through sheer force of will she managed to crack them open. Scorching white light exploded around her before everything went dark.
***
“I’d like to propose a toast. To Flynn.” From Connor.
“He had our backs. He sacrificed himself so we could defeat Rittenhouse together. Let’s not let him down. We owe him that.” From Wyatt.
“To Garcia.” Connor again.
***
Her brain was being crushed from the inside out but she could hear noises around her. Beeps, bleeps, some sort of hissing. Utter gibberish but actual, distinct sounds. She tried to focus but the effort nearly sent her under again. Beep, bleep. Beep, bleep. Long hiss. In a steady pattern. Over and over again.
Lucy wasn’t sure she dared to attempt opening her eyes but she needed to know. Fluorescent lights confronted her, stark and excruciating. No help at all.
She tried to speak but there was something in her mouth. She couldn’t swallow it, or move around it, couldn’t move at all.
Her hands didn’t rise, her body like lead. The noises got faster. Her head began to spin. She was stuck. Paralysed. Trapped.
A sharp pain pierced her for a second before everything stopped again.
***
They didn’t clink their glasses in their toast. Instead they nodded towards the action, half-hearted and awkward. There should have been tears, at the very least sincerity, but its absence walked amongst them like the ghost of the man to whom they paid tribute.
She tried to be fair. Lucy Preston was always fair. At least to others. Half of the room was from a different timeline. The other half had their own issues. Everyone had baggage. So much damn baggage.
Jiya - kidnapped, stuck in the 1880’s, Rufus. Lord. She’d suffered so much it was a miracle she could raise her glass at all.
Connor – inventor of a time machine that was being systematically used to amend history in Rittenhouse’s favour. He’d lost everything. Then he’d lost Rufus too.
Denise - working outside of her remit, hiding the team from her bosses, aiding in the escape of a wanted terrorist. The potential disaster she lived with, daily, was extreme.
Wyatt – who’d lost his wife. Twice. He’d killed for her, betrayed everyone for her, defended her until it was impossible to do otherwise. Then he’d concluded that she had to die again.
Rufus – dear God, Rufus. Back from the dead with no memories of the past six months. Holding a glass to toast the man who’d had him shot, who’d ultimately saved him and Jiya.
The paper in Lucy’s hand rustled. It was all that was left. Ink and two pieces of paper. The man who had written them was just … gone.
***
“Lucy?” She recognised the voice but couldn’t place it. “Lucy? Can you hear me?”
There was still the background noise, although the hissing seemed to be gone. And the man speaking to her.
“Come on, Luce, open your eyes.”
She didn’t really want to but she wanted him to stop speaking. The ricochet in her brain was nauseating.
“There you are.” A brown haired, blue eyed, boyish man leaned over her, a smile lighting up his features.
She knew the face but his name eluded her.
“The Doc said you’d come too quickly. You scared the hell out of us.”
“You are one crazy lady.” Said another voice. She couldn’t find the energy to turn her head but relief flared at the sound, a half-forgotten fear evaporating. “Next time let me do the piloting, ok? That scratch on the Lifeboat is never going to smooth out.”
“Do you want to get Rufus back, or what?”
Echo’s from another time.
Rufus.
Rufus was alive. Wyatt was there too.
Her mouth felt like she’d been chewing on cotton but, “Flynn?”
Wyatt’s eyes hardened, his face taking on that bull headed look he got.
“Flynn.” She tried again, ignoring all the warning signals her body was giving and attempting to sit up.
The room swung at a breakneck speed, causing her to retch on an empty stomach. Concerned noises ensued but they didn’t matter because everything was getting darker, until she sank into the blissfully quiet depths.
***
She’d spent more time over-analysing her response to a first year students essay then she did researching her destination. There’d only been three choices anyway. The logical one was the closest to his point of arrival, with less margin for error.
The hard part had been waiting, hoping that Rittenhouse didn’t launch before she could act.
It had been easy to move through the bunker unnoticed. After all, she’d been doing it for months. With everyone asleep it had been a simple matter of disconnecting the power cable and programming in the auto-piolet co-ordinates. The riskiest moment was when she engaged the launch sequence. All that noise in the quiet alerted everyone, but by the time they reached the hanger it was too late.
Time travel was always awful. A little metal box distorting its-self and its occupants out of the natural course of things. Time travel into your own timeline was a whole other nightmare, the normal nausea ramped up exponentially, that feeling of not belonging to your own body so intense it took a good minute for her to work out how to use her hands again.
San Diego’s cold air felt more like a slap than a relief, the ground beneath her feet undulating as the sand moved beneath her weight. The stars hovered in the cloudless sky, never quite still as she tried to get her bearings.
With the aim of being as unobtrusive as possible, Lucy had chosen to land a half mile or so from the site of Jessica’s demise. There was no point in alerting everyone to her presence. It did, however, mean she needed to navigate her way to the road and then further, to Flynn. Not exactly an easy feat when the whole world was spinning in the wrong direction.
She’d crawl if she had to.
Every scratch from the scrubby brush of half dead plants felt like a miniature flaying. Even holding her head still the edges of her vision swam. A jack hammer had taken residence somewhere in her frontal lobe.
Lucy tried hard not to remember what Connor had said happened to people stupid enough to attempt this type of time travel.
Suck it up. If Future Lucy had done it, so then could she. One foot in front of the other. Remember why you’re doing this. What you are fighting for.
***
She was alone when she opened her eyes this time, the machines from before blissfully absent. Maybe in a week or so she’d be happy to take the world off mute, but for now the silence was everything. And very short lived.
“You’re awake.” Denise stood in the doorway, arms crossed over her conservative navy suit.
Lucy dared a glance around but they were alone.
“I should have you court marshalled, or arrested or…” the bluster didn’t hide the concern in the older woman’s eyes. “Stealing the Lifeboat. Lucy! What were you thinking? And travelling into your own timeline!” Fine hands rubbed at her brow, smoothing the worry lines that were taking up permanent residence. “Did he coerce you in some way?”
It took a minute before Lucy caught the gist of Denise’s thought. “No.”
“You are lucky to be alive.” The young lady was implied.
“Flynn?”
“That’s all you have to say? You’ve been in the hospital for three days, risked exposing us all to Rittenhouse and who knows who else?” Lazer-like eyes targeted her, care of the NSA handbook recommendations and probably a lot of motherly experience.
It should have caused guilt, maybe forced a stuttering rebuttal. Instead, like a stuck tape unable to skip forward, she asked again, “Where’s Flynn?”
Denise all but threw up her hands in despair.
***
“Lucy?” He looked for all the world as though he didn’t believe his own eyes. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe hallucination was how the brain began turning to mush when you crossed your own timeline. She’d find out soon enough. “What the hell are you doing?” His accent was thick, harsh with emotion.
“I could ask you the same question.” The six feet between them seemed more like an ocean.
Doubt skittered through him, making him swallow before asking, “Is Rufus..?”
“He’s alive.”
His shoulders straightened, a weight lifted. “So it all worked out.”
Empty toasts. False regrets. Platitudes that lacked emotion. “Depends how you look at it.”
If she hadn’t been completely frozen inside the look he gave her would have brought her to her knees. Compassion, resignation, and that unholy streak that was just Flynn. “It’s better this way.”
Her fingers curled into a fist.
“Why?” She glared. “Because of something I write in a journal? Tell you what, I’ll hop back to 2018, write the damm thing and make sure to include that if you’re stupid enough to believe in a ‘noble suicide’ option I will personally shoot you in the kneecaps. How does that sound?”
His eyes shifted sideways. “This isn’t suicide.”
He really believed that?
“What would you call deliberately staying in a place where you knew you were going to die when you had the option of leaving?”
He had the gall to look as though she was the one losing her mind. “The things I’ve done…”
“Aren’t exactly exclusive to you.”
He shrugged, regrouped, tried again. “You know that I …”
“Stole a time machine? Wyatt did that too. So have I. Killed people? That would be everyone but Connor I think. Been a dramatic, sarcastic ass? That one’s definitely on you. Get over it.”
He went to take a step forward but swayed before he could, his face contorting for a moment. He had to shake his head before he managed, “I wanted to put things right.”
“So you said.”
That stopped him. He raised soulful green brown eyes to hers before looking away. “You read the letter.”
She waited.
“Then why..?” There was no expectation in the question, merely curiosity, as though his letter had explained everything and her failure to follow its somewhat simplistic instructions – be happy, have a family, forgive – was somehow inconceivable.
Better not to think of the letter.
Instead she went with, “You told me we’d make quite the team someday.”
His dark brow lowered.
“You said we can save the people we love.” At least he looked a little thrown. “How’s that’s working out for you because Amy’s still gone?”
Regret twisted his features, “Lucy, I…”
Even heartfelt apologies were, ultimately, just words. Another time she’d dwell on them, but right now she had bigger fish to fry.
“They found your body in the dunes about four miles from here.” In the sand. A soulless shell. “I don’t know how you managed it but they didn’t identify you in the autopsy.” Her turn to swallow. “There are photographs.”
“It’s…”
“If you say ‘for the best’ I swear I’ll shoot you.” She levelled the gun he had, ironically, taught her to fire, working hard to control the fine tremor in her hands. “It’s time to go home now.”
The word ‘home’ gripped him, his eyes growing round, intention plain. “My girls.” A wobble in his voice. “They’re only a couple of miles from here.”
She wanted to feel sympathy, empathy, anything, but the ice in her veins was absolute. “And in two years Rittenhouse will break into your home and murder them. Again.” Something had to get through to him. “You can’t save them like this.”
His face cracked, all the loss he’d bottled up inside raged, finally free. Almost in slow motion, his whole mountainous frame fell forwards, his knees hitting the floor, sheer instinct stopping him from lying down in the dirt. His voice was a broken howl to the moon, “I can’t save them at all.”
Tears pooled in Flynn’s eyes before sliding down his cheeks and through to the cold that lived inside of her. Their salt resisted the freeze that sought to consume them and instead tried valiantly to melt through to anything left behind.
Once, several timelines ago, she had been terrified of this creature before her. With his dramatic disregard for everything she held precious, slicing his way through history, burning down anything and everything to achieve his goal. They’d both changed since then – who hadn’t – but never in her wildest imaginings could she have believed that they would meet here. As equals.
Carefully kneeling beside him, gun lowered but not discarded, she placed a hand beneath his chin, waiting until he looked at her.
“I can’t promise you we’ll get them back.” Their breath mixed, his fire and her ice melding together. “But I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to help you bring them back.” Her eyes held his, willing him to believe her. “I won’t leave you here to die alone, Flynn. If you can’t, or won’t come with me, fine. But either we both go or we both stay. Your choice.”
***
The bunker was exactly as she remembered it. Surely the least the new timeline could have done is given them a place with better heating or, you know, somewhere that looked less like a concrete tomb? But no. Even the god awful couch was the same.
At the sound of the outside door opening everyone had rushed to greet her. Rufus and Jiya, joined at the hip, swallowed her in a bear hug. Connor had folded her in next. Wyatt brought up the rear, his hands lingering, remaining close even after they separated. She tolerated it all, her eyes scanning the room until she saw him.
He needed the wall for support. It was written in the angles of his face, in the careful way he held himself. His eyes were careful too. Careful to observe the reunion, careful to note the soldier by her side, careful in watchfulness. Waiting. Assessing.
“Could he be more creepy?” Wyatt spoke the words loud enough to be heard two states over, looking at Lucy with that puppy dog expression, certain of her agreement. “He’s got to go, Luce. I mean, I know you said we needed him but after everything that’s happened...” He paused, shrugged, “I’m not living with Jess’ killer.” As though he hadn’t suggested it. As if he hadn’t been relieved it wasn’t him.
Lucy’s eyes never left Flynn. She saw his chest rise and fall, reaffirming that he was alive. Felt again that thing, so fragile and fine but unbreakable, which had caught her off guard at the Hindenburg. That tether which, no matter what she’d tried, had made her confront him despite her instincts to flee, had made her defy the beast that raged before her until finally fragments of the man began to emerge. She understood now. The darkness. The hollow void where even anger burned to ash.
“You didn’t tell them?” Her words were to him. For him. The first proper sentence she’d spoken this lifetime.
His sardonic, sarcastic lip quirk said it all.
The room was hers, all eyes swivelling her way. “Flynn didn’t kill Jess.” The collective gasp as they all jumped over the same cliff, judging her but trying not to, until her words halted the twist of emotions.
“He let her go.”