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Garcia Flynn hasn’t prayed - really prayed - in years. Sometimes he thinks he never truly has.
His mother was raised Catholic, but as she grew older, studied science, became an engineer at Lockman Aerospace, the church and her faith became less and less important. After the older brother he never met died of something so small, random, pointless as a bee sting, she lost faith entirely.
He wonders, sometimes, what changed after he saved his brother in 1969, if a mysterious stranger saving her little boy might have brought her faith back. Maybe the little Garcia she raised went to church every single Sunday, dutifully and eagerly attended his First Communion and Confirmation, went to confession every time he returned from an NSA mission. Maybe if Lorena came back to him now, she would remember a man who happily knelt with her for communion every week, instead of this man who had to be dragged out of bed just once a month like clockwork for Mass. Maybe she wouldn’t even recognize this man, the one with so little faith he barely even knew how to pray.
He actually asked their priest how to pray, once, when Lorena was having trouble with her pregnancy and the doctors thought she might lose the baby. He didn’t know how, not really. During Mass he never managed to do anything more than think very intensely. The priest tried his best to explain - “Just imagine the Lord is a person, sitting next to you in the pew, and tell him what you’re thinking, just like you’re talking to me” - but it still didn’t quite work.
He didn’t pray when his wife and child were murdered - what good would it have done? Not when he heard the two muffled gunshots in the silence of the night, not when he ran, not when he stopped running. Not when a stranger walked up to him in a bar and told him he could take down the people who stole his family from him. Not the first time he stepped into the time machine, not the first time he set foot in the past. Not when he was trying to screw up the nerve to kill a child, shoot a little boy the same way some nameless killer shot his little girl. Not even weeks later, lying in bed, when he finally admitted to himself that he was grateful to Lucy for stopping him.
When he sat in a random, nameless church for two hours before going to meet Al Capone in 1931, he still didn’t know how. He just sat there, mulling everything over in his head, and hoping to hear a faint whisper of God’s voice in the back of his mind. He prayed as best he could, as well as he ever did, and all he was left with at the end was a vague urge to continue down the path he was already traveling.
No, he never knew how to pray, didn’t even think it worked half the time. Yet for so long, he kept trying. He still doesn’t know if it was just habit or foolishness or a secret hope, somewhere deep down, that he would hear something back. But he never did, not once in his whole life.
But down in the basement of the Rittenhouse summit in 1954, he pointed a gun directly at Lucy Preston, and she never flinched once. She stood her ground, planted herself like a tree, calm and serene and determined, and stared him down like a warrior angel in blue. “I prayed to God for answers, and He led me here to this!”
“What if He led you to me?” Her words stopped him cold. It was a question, a hypothetical, something neither of them, no mere mortal could ever truly answer. But there was an unwavering surety behind the words. It wasn’t a question, not really, not to her. It was like something - someone - whispered in her ear and gave power to her words.
He never heard God’s voice. But maybe, just maybe, God could hear him. And maybe, just maybe, He would listen.
“What if He led you to me?”
She lies in his arms, limp and broken and sobbing. He wants to do more, tries to think of anything he can do to stop her heart from breaking, stop her very soul from shattering, but even as he tries he knows there is nothing. He can’t save Rufus. He can’t save her mother, or pull her away from Rittenhouse. He can’t bring her sister back. These aren’t wounds he can heal, there is no adversary he can fight off. There is just him, and Lucy, and grief and pain and loss so intense they linger in the air around them like smoke.
All he can do is hold her. He leans down, presses his forehead against hers.
He doesn’t try to pray, he still doesn’t know how. When the words flow through his mind, it takes a moment before he even recognizes them for what they are.
Please, God, please, don’t let her break. Please, take away her pain, heal her soul. She doesn’t deserve this, she’s too good, too kind, she doesn't deserve this pain and suffering. Give her strength.
He rocks her slowly, gently. He can feel the heat of her tears against his own skin. She leans into him, her hands clutching at his sleeve. The bullet wound burns in his shoulder, but it grounds him, keeps him here in the moment with her.
You sent me to her for a reason. You can’t just mean for me to use her to destroy Rittenhouse, you can’t mean for me to let someone so kind and good suffer like this. She doesn’t deserve this, please, please dear God, don’t let her suffer like this. Please, give me the strength to keep her whole.
Gradually, her sobs grow quiet, and she sits up. She curls into him, hugging him tight around his waist and pressing her face into his uninjured shoulder. Eventually she stands, sniffling every few breaths and wiping tears away from her red eyes. She helps him stand, and holds his arm to ease the weight on his injured shoulder. They start the long trek back to Wyatt and Jiya and the Lifeboat, their sides pressed together, leaning on each other for support.
“What if He led you to me?”
I led you to her.