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they get there slowly. in moments. most of them painful. they don’t figure it out right away, because how could they? but they love him, so they keep trying. for Rufus. for the future. and, after a while, for each other too.
they get there in moments.
**
first they go through the stages of grief.
denial.
“I’ll fly the thing myself.”
“You don’t know how.”
“I know enough to take my chances.”
the words reverberate through the bunker, and yet Mason makes no move towards the lifeboat. it’s certain death and he knows it about as well as Jiya does.
anger.
first it’s the door. it’s a good choice, because it’s unlikely to break, or at least, unlikely to do it before Wyatt’s hand does.
no one stops him. no one says anything as he takes his anger out on inanimate objects. it’s not till the sobs makes it impossible for him to even continue the motion that Denise comes to lead him away.
bargaining.
“I’ll do anything. I’ll go back to the past. I’ll stay there. I won’t ever make contact again, I don’t care. I’ll do anything, just bring him back to me. Pleaseeee….” Jiya pleads, but there’s nothing Denise can do other than hold her.
there’s nothing any of them can do.
depression
Lucy barely remembers to eat. she’s still very good at reminding others what to do, but she seems to constantly forget she’s required to take care of herself as well. on the third week Denise has to physically drag her to the bathroom and shut the door, while stating she’s only allowed to come out after she’s taken a shower.
Wyatt cooks for her. he cooks for everyone.
no one eats. not even Wyatt.
acceptance.
Denise hates telling people what to do, but she’s a mother, she’s used to it. so when the alarm sounds, she’s the one to push them towards the lifeboat, the one to remind them that Rittenhouse is still out there and they still have a job to do.
she’s also the one who collapses to the floor in tears as soon as they’re gone.
**
it takes Jiya months to look them in the face again. Flynn doesn’t care, because Flynn’s life wasn’t forever altered, not now, that happened too long ago for this to leave a scar. but Lucy takes it hard, and she follows Jiya around like a lost puppy begging for forgiveness. Wyatt, however, just broods.
that’s all he does anymore. that, hit things, and, occasionally cook.
**
he breaks first. no one’s surprised. Lucy has always been the strongest of them all. he’s a ball of rage and guilt and hate, and everyone knows it’s a matter of time till he explodes, just as everyone knows that the only one who can truly reach him, the only one who should try, is Lucy.
there’s very little privacy to be had in the bunker, but they all try.
“Wyatt, you can’t keep doing this. This is not what Rufus would want.” she says and she knows she’s said the wrong thing before he even responds.
“You don’t know what Rufus would want,” he grits out, as he once again takes his anger out on the heavy metal door. “No one does. He’s not here to tell us. He’s not here to joke or roll his eyes or pour cereal in a box and call it cooking. He. Is. Not. Here.”
“I know that, but that doesn’t mean he’s truly gone. You know what he would have said, because he was your friend. You knew him. You loved him.”
“And yet here I am, doing nothing! We’ve got a time machine and we’re sitting here feeling sorry for ourselves instead of out there, doing something to save him.”
“There’s nothing we can do. It’s suicide, Wyatt!”
“I don’t care. I let him down. I’m the reason he’s dead! Why should I be alive when he isn’t?”
it hits Lucy like a punch to the gut, the idea of losing him too. they’ve exchanged only a few words since his confession, but all the anger she felt at him has dissipated. all she feels now is pain at Rufus’s absence and a great big void in her chest she isn’t sure she can ever fill.
“Don’t you dare say that.”
he looks at her for the first time in weeks, dead on, and she can see everything in his eyes. love. pain. anger.
“I’ve lost everything.” he whispers, brokenly, and she doesn’t think he realizes he’s echoing her words from what feels like centuries ago.
but she knows what her answer is. despite everything, she’s always known.
“You haven’t lost me.”
**
it doesn’t get better. it doesn’t get easier. but at least Wyatt’s skin muffles the sound of her tears and when he feels them he usually burrows into her until they’re so close that they’re almost one entity.
the void doesn’t disappear. it doesn’t lessen. but it becomes easier to breathe.
**
later she’ll be ashamed that it takes her so long to put two and two together, but when they return from their latest mission, bloodied and battered and so very tired of this world without Rufus, she takes a look at Flynn and it all clicks.
“You said I gave you the diary,” her realization isn’t a private one. everyone deserves to hear this.
after all, if she’s right, they’re all going to need to work together.
“No, I said future you gave me the diary.”
“Exactly. That means at some point, we’ll be able to travel back in time to a place where we already exist”
Jiya lets out a strangled noise from behind her, but Lucy only has eyes for Wyatt.
he looks like someone just handed him a reason for living.
“And that means we can get Rufus back.”
she nods through her tears.
**
she thinks she and Wyatt would have found a way to move on even without this hope, but the hope helps. It makes it easier to get up in the mornings, to go on missions where crazy-ex-wife from hell is shooting at them all while pretending she still cares about Wyatt.
Lucy wants to throw the divorce papers Wyatt signed and Denise filed in her face, but she finds that, when Wyatt’s arms are wrapped around her and his stubble is tickling her neck, she doesn’t care so much.
**
Jiya is, of course, the one who figures it out, though Mason helps, and Wyatt and Lucy and even Flynn devote themselves to research in a way neither of them had thought possible.
the moment where she gets it isn’t triumphant, though. it’s not a quick and easy fix. it’ll take months, maybe even years, to develop the technology and to test it out. they only get one shot at saving Rufus, and they’re not taking any chances.
but Lucy’s arms around Jiya and then Wyatt’s and Denise’s and Mason’s and even Flynn’s awkward pat in the head all equal the same thing.
they’ll be here. they’re a team. and they’ll try.
**
the issue of Wyatt’s unborn child becomes a moot point a few months later, when Jessica tries to throw Lucy off a cliff, of all things, and Wyatt reaches out for Lucy.
neither of them look down at the corpse.
“I’m sorry,” she says later, in the quiet of their room, as he cries in her arms, a muffled kinda cry, as if he feels he’s got no right to these tears but he can’t help them.
“It’s been …months. I think…I’m pretty sure she was lying. About being pregnant. And she wasn’t the Jessica I knew. I just …”
“You can cry. She was still a Jessica, and she still meant something to you.” she pauses, but then continues on, because they’re way past keeping things from each other.
“I’m sorry it all turned out the way it did. I’m sorry you had to decide.”
his breath is hot against her shoulder blades as he replies. “I lost her once, and I …I thought I couldn’t survive it. But I did. I couldn’t have lost you.”
she understands the meaning, but she still feels like she has to retort.
“You would have. You will, if you have to. Promise me, Wyatt.”
his watery laugh is strained. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Lucy.”
neither of them says anything for a very long time.
**
“That future” he says to her in the darkness, weeks and weeks after, when she’s already forgotten that conversation and they’re deep into the actual boring part of waiting for Jiya and Mason to actually do the things they need to do for them to have a chance to save Rufus, “the one that Jessica was offering me, the one she thought I wanted,” he continues in a rushed whisper, like he wants to get it out before he loses his nerve.
“Yes?”
“I wanted it with you. Only with you.”
there’s so much Lucy could say to that. she could call him an idiot, she could chide him for not actually saying things in the moment. but she has him now and he’s saying the things and she never wants to imagine a life without him, without this, and so she hugs him hard and kisses the place above his heart and says nothing.
he understands.
**
inevitably, Jiya snaps at them one day, for nothing, for everything, for daring to have found comfort in each other during the worst time in their lives. it’s the pain speaking, Lucy understands, but it cuts her to the core that her friend expects her to give up the one thing that actually makes every day bearable just because she can’t have what she wants.
Wyatt doesn’t seem at all bothered, though. he understands grief better than she ever will.
“Maybe we should, you know, just pretend in front of her.”
“That’s not what she wants,” he responds, enfolding her in his arms there, in the middle of the bunker, in plain sight of anyone who might pass by.
“But …that’s what she said. She said we should stop flaunting our relationship.”
“Yeah, but what she really means is don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Don’t let go.”
ah, Lucy says, but she still doesn’t understand.
**
she spends two days being weird until Wyatt finally tells her to go talk to Jiya, and she doesn’t really want to, but what other choice does she have, mope forever and ever and avoid Wyatt until she’s a miserable shell of herself just to make Jiya feel marginally less awful?
when she finally approaches Jiya, the other woman just stares at her strangely before launching herself into her arms, the one thing Lucy was not expecting to happen, and it takes a couple of minutes of flailing arms and hot tears before they can finally get to words.
“Don’t let him go again,” Jiya tells her, and Lucy finally gets it, the thing her friend was trying to say, the thing Lucy has been trying to ignore for days and weeks and months.
yes, Wyatt screwed everything up, but she, Lucy, let him do it.
“I won’t” she promises Jiya, and in a way, herself. “I’ll fight this time. I promise.”
“What would he have said?” Jiya’s half smile is a balm on Lucy’s soul.
“He would have said it’s about damn time, Lucy. That’s what he would have said.”
and when they hug this time, when they cry, there’s a little bit of joy in it.
**
they start with the diary, because that seems to be where they would have started, or where the other them would have started, or this is an infinite loop without end, but either way, the diary is the only concrete thing they have, so they start there.
it isn’t that hard for Lucy to pour her thoughts down, even when she knows Flynn will one day reading them.
there is, however, a moment when Wyatt leans into check how it's going, kisses her shoulder and then adds: “Don’t forget to add about me being obsessed with my dead wife. Wouldn’t want to miss that lovely conversation with Flynn.”
and then they’re both laughing, and kissing, and it’s not even shocking to Lucy how they’ve now come to a point where the past doesn’t hurt, where she’s finally stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.
she loves this man. he loves her. they’ve both messed up along the way. she’s done keeping track of who messed up the most, though. she’s only got eyes for the future.
**
incredibly, it takes Lucy about eight months to get to a place where she can finally let herself grieve.
she doesn’t make a decision, she doesn’t even realize it’s happening till she’s clutching one of Rufus’ old shirts that Wyatt keeps in the corner of their room, as a reminder, or as a memento, she’s not sure, and the tears are coming hard and fast, the sobs wrecking her body.
no one’s there to witness her breakdown and in a way, she’s glad. this is private. it’s about her and Rufus.
her eyes are puffy for days afterwards. no one says a thing.
**
Jiya approaches them one day, bloodshot eyes and a crazy glint in her eyes. “I think you should both learn how to pilot the Lifeboat,” she says, like Lucy’s background is not in history, like Wyatt is any better equipped than her to actually do this.
“It would give us so many more options when we finally get to a place where we can go back for Rufus. And it’s not like you can help any other way.”
“I’m in,” she says, like it isn’t totally impossible, and when she turns to look at Wyatt his eyes are glassy as he nods.
they said to hell with common sense a while ago, after all. why not try this?
**
Lucy feels like she’s on the middle of a nervous breakdown every second since they start training to the day she finally manages to pilot the Lifeboat.
it feels like the weight of the world is on her shoulders.
the weight of saving Rufus.
logically, she knows it’s not so. Jiya and Mason are doing the hard part, and Wyatt trains every day as well, with the machine.
it’s just that she’s better. she picks it up more easily. and that means it’s on her.
**
“Not everything is on you,” Denise surprises her with a couple days after that, as she hands her a cup of tea. Lucy has the impression she drew the short end of the stick as to who got to have this conversation with her.
“I know that.”
“No, you don’t. So let me tell you again. Not everything is on you. We’re a team. The only way we figure this out is together.”
though maybe, it wasn’t that, she thinks as she leans into the woman’s embrace. Maybe they just knew what she needed right now wasn’t a friend, or a lover. it was a mother.
she closes her eyes and nods.
**
“Do you think we’d still be here, if Rufus was still alive?” she asks Wyatt, a few days later, as they lay together in bed, not touching.
“I think we were always going to end up here.”
she narrows her eyes at him. “I thought you didn’t believe in fate.”
“I don’t,” he responds, as he turned to the side and cards his fingers through her hair. “But I believe in us.”
**
Eventually, Wyatt gets there too. however, they always take Jiya and Flynn to any and all missions, or sometimes Connor or even Denise. there’s never three people in the Lifeboat.
they won’t accept that, not unless the third person is Rufus.
**
it takes years. Lucy starts counting the days since he’s been gone, like a litany in her mind, a way to remind herself what they’re fighting for. Wyatt and Jiya, meanwhile, hoard Rufus’ stuff like being able to touch something that once belonged to him gives them strength.
Mason, however, just works. he doesn’t drink anymore. Lucy isn’t sure he regularly sleeps. he just works and works and works.
Lucy has never been particularly close to him, but on the days when he stays up late, she usually brings him breakfast in the morning, and a hot cup of coffee.
they’re fighting for the same thing, after all.
**
she likes to think Flynn and her are still friends, still vaguely joined together by the same purpose: stopping Rittenhouse. but she feels his frustration every time she comes near him, his impotence at being unable to do the one thing he always wanted, bring his family back.
in a way, she thinks he blamed her for dedicating herself fully to Rufus.
other times, however, he nods and gets on the Lifeboat without question and he saves her life and Wyatt’s and even Jiya’s and then retreats to his room as soon as they get back to the bunker and it’s in those times where she tells herself he’s just broken in different ways than she is, and the pieces were never meant to fit together.
**
a couple of weeks after that she wakes up groggy after a nap and overhears Wyatt and Flynn’s voice coming from the hallway. they’re not yelling, but they never seem to modulate their voice around each other and Lucy’s tired of always, always been in the middle
but someone’s gotta do it.
turns out she doesn’t need to, though, not this time. Because Wyatt’s holding a picture and he’s pointing at something and Flynn’s smiling softly and there’s no edge to their voices as they discuss Flynn’s family.
she’s not sure how long she stands there, watching them talk, but she knows it’s long enough to hear Wyatt say:
“Even if I hated you, I’d still do my best to get them back.”
**
she trains in other ways, too. she trains in actual, physical combat. she learns to shoot. She gets her own gun, and carries it around to missions sometimes, because she can’t rely on Wyatt or Flynn to save her all the time.
they make it so she almost never has to use it. it still feels good to know that, if faced with another chance at Emma, she could pull the trigger again.
**
they fail more than they win. the world becomes something very similar to what she’d read about in books where teenagers saved the world, except it’s up to them to save it this time, no one else.
Denise moves her family to the bunker. the place feels cramped and they bump into each other at every turn. but they’re family, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
**
“It’s almost ready,” she tells Wyatt a few months later, because she’s already taken a trip back to give Flynn the diary and Jiya and Mason are getting increasingly more confident that they’ve got it all figured out. “Any day now, we’re gonna get into the Lifeboat and go save Rufus.”
he nods but says nothing, because he’s gotten very used to the way her mind works, understands that she’s nowhere near done.
“What if we change that and by doing that change …well, everything.” she says, but she means so much more.
he gets it. he always does.
“We’re gonna change the world. Not us.”
“How can you be sure?” she asks, because it’s always seemed absurd to her, the way he wears his love for her like a badge of honor, the way he doesn’t seem to fear the past, especially when all those years ago, he was the one who almost broke them.
“In all this time we’ve been together, all this time we’ve known each other, the only thing that has ever managed to separate us is …”
“Our choices,” she finishes.
he nods. “I was always going to choose you. You were always it for me. Even when I was an idiot. Especially, when I was an idiot.”
“But we’re going back to that moment, to when you were being an idiot. What if you continue to be one? What if, by going back, we lose this?
he smiles, like he’s never heard anything more absurd. “The way I love you, that’s no longer just a thing I feel. It’s a part of me. I knew it even then.”
“Do you promise?”
he never makes promises he can’t keep.
“Yes.”
**
when the day finally arrives, it happens too fast for Lucy to even worry about. they just nod at each other and say their goodbyes as she and Wyatt board the Lifeboat, as discussed.
this is the best way. the only way. and they’re gonna make it work.
before they finally leave, she takes one last look at him, the man she loves, and her hand grabs his without second thought.
“I believe you,” she tells him and she doesn’t add anything else, doesn’t kiss him goodbye, doesn’t let herself even entertain the possibility that they won’t be here again, together.
he winks and says “Here’s to the future, ma’am.”
**
they save Rufus.
they change the future.
they don’t lose each other.
she’d say it was the perfect ending, except she knows better.
it’s just the beginning.