Chapter Text
“Did you know a group of crows is called a murder?”
“I did not.”
The train doors open. Lucy and Iris step onto the open air platform which leads to the local park, the one with nice trees, plenty of space, and purportedly a large bird population.
“Some people don’t like it though,” Iris continues. “They say it gives them a bad reputation, that they’re really a family oriented species and they don’t deserve it, but I think it’s cool.” Iris grins and Lucy smiles too, more to herself then to Iris. Family, murder; the baby bird didn’t fall far from the nest. She even has her father’s smile, and her mother’s expressiveness.
They reach the sidewalk and Iris quickens her pace, half a bag of almonds clutched in her fist. “Just stay where I can see you!”
“I will!”
Iris slows in front of a cluster of trees. Lucy finds a bench, close enough to watch, far enough to not disrupt her, and sits down.
Over the three months Lucy has known her, Iris has adopted interests in wolves, emus, pufferfish, and axolotls. This week it’s crows, and at some point between dinner and breakfast, she came up with the idea of befriending a murder.
With her parents back at work full time, Lucy watches her after she gets home from school. Though, she mostly watches herself. So far that hasn’t meant anymore attempted visits to friends in different towns. Crucially, she hadn’t gotten the idea that independence will get her killed either, like Lucy feared.
She reminds her to do her homework or escorts her to the park. She doesn’t mind it, although the background noise that is a bullet aching her leg has gotten a little louder since they left the house. It is what it is.
How did her life get like this? She’s something worse then a ghost and she’s watching Garcia Flynn’s kid try to tame crows.
It’s October and she wants burgundy leaves pooled at her feet. She wants the rasp under her shoes from the year she spent in Chicago or from that day in Salem when she wasn’t hanged. No dice, autumn color won’t show itself in the Bay Area for at least another month.
Sometimes it does help to remind herself how she got here.
She takes her blank notebook out of her borrowed bag, one of two Flynn gave her when she first moved in, opens it, closes it. Something so perfect doesn’t deserve to be ruined with her ramblings, not today. She looks at Iris standing patient. She looks past her into the gray horizon.
To summarize is to put it in it’s place, to make it history, which is something she can understand. Again she tries to explain herself to herself.
October, two years ago, almost to the day, a homeland security agent rang her doorbell. She was recruited— no, recruitment implies she wasn’t whisked off in a car with tinted windows that same night. She wasn’t forced; she wasn’t drafted. Really, she could have said no, couldn’t she? What would’ve happened if she’d planted her feet, stood her ground, sensed she was on the brink?
So a terrorist had stolen a time machine. What an evening! And she was meant to act as the guide, to decipher him, to save history by helping Wyatt kill him (kill the man whose spare room she now sleeps in, what a thought).
Except he was right. Rittenhouse was America and America was Rittenhouse. They found their ways to the same side, the right side eventually, and— and Rufus was murdered, then he was alive. Her mother was dead, then she wasn’t. Things were looking up. One day in 1726 a 20 year old David Rittenhouse caught a stray bullet and when they got back that day in late June, their farm house was gone.
(She stared until Flynn touched her arm. Slack-jawed, eyes wide, skin blotchy, she didn’t recognize him. But she remembers feeling nothing; in retrospect a hint to his character, perhaps. At the time she thought something was wrong with herself, that’s what monsters do, they don’t care. The pressure of Flynn’s fingers curled on her bicep.)
They didn’t panic at first. They didn’t panic at all, because it was a good thing, because while it was weird their safehouse was gone all they had to do was call Wyatt or Denise or Mason and get the new address. They kept a phone in the Lifeboat in case of something this odd. Or if they had panicked, it was after that burning shot through Lucy and before she woke up on the ground with Flynn’s jacket balled up under her head.
They’d gotten too comfortable, Rufus said later. They’d all heard of the butterfly effect, they’d just gotten lucky before. Mostly lucky, he clarified with an apologetic look towards Lucy. His words rang hollow in the motel room.
Then—
Lorena Flynn found them in the park the morning after. Lucy and Flynn were talking about all the ways life could go and she just... appeared, like an angel, or a reaper (by his eyes Flynn thought she was holy, anyway). Because she’s the sort of person who finds her husband when he goes missing. Said husband wasted no time and explained everything so badly that Lucy is shaking her head from October, not without fondness.
In the motel room they all pitched in and did their best to convince Lorena her husband wasn’t crazy. She listened politely and gently denied all of it. Lucy assured Rufus he did a better job then Mason. In the end it took Flynn pulling his shirt off to reveal unknown scars for the unease of belief to settle behind her features.
All in all, she took it surprisingly well.
It was as good a time as any to go their separate ways.
Flynn withdrew $500 from an ATM and placed it into Lucy’s hand with the promise of helping her craft a new identity whenever she was ready. Whatever she needed, he said, and they hugged, and she half expected to never see him again.
Rufus and Jiya went home, and after a few days of searching, so did Lucy.
She found the house she grew up in. It hadn’t been easy, the street has a different name and the house is a pale blue now, but it’s there. It exists. Through the internet, she found out her dad, Henry Wallace, lived a decade longer in this timeline then the last one, eight years longer then in hers. She found his grave, picked dandelions and left them atop the marbled stone. She felt silly doing it but the days were long, are long.
It took Jiya’s hacking to find anything recent on Wyatt. He’s alive, deployed on some top secret operation. Maybe it’s for the best Lucy can’t go and see him, but she’ll never know.
Jessica is dead in this timeline. Emma isn’t, or at least none of them could find a record of it. But they hadn’t seen her or Jessica or the goons for at least two hours before David died. Rufus and Jiya can’t find any signal for the Mothership despite persistent investigation. Nothing in Jiya’s visions either. She said it was like all the strings had been cut then thrown away. They should be as safe as anyone else. Still, they’ve been wrong before.
Iris tosses an almond into the air. It lands at her feat and a particularly daring squirrel gets it’s payoff.
When Lucy remembers the past two years, it’s a series of dark rooms, streetlamps, the smell of burnt gunpowder and horse shit. It had the most fulfilling work of her life and a whole lot of nothingness. The word blood raises to the surface, as blood aims to do.
She is a living history. She is a relic that will be destroyed, sooner or later, regardless of what she does or does not preserve.
There is comfort in that.
Iris walks towards Lucy, a skip in her step, almond bag crumpled in her hand.
“Did you make any new friends?”
She crinkles her nose bridge, looking seriously unimpressed. “It takes more then a day.”
“Of course.”
Iris frowns at her, then peers upwards. “Is it going to rain?”
The sky is textured gray with chasms of gold. “Either way, we need to head home.”
They walk together and Iris cocks her head at little brown birds in trees above their heads. What fuels her many short-lived passions Lucy doesn’t know, but Iris sees the world differently then she did yesterday, like stumbling out of the Lifeboat for the first time.
“Can we come back tomorrow?”
Lucy bites her lip. She can bring a book or something, one with words. “Probably.”
Raindrops tap their skin. In front of them, the train screeches to a halt.
This rail system didn’t exist in the old timeline. She’s grateful it exists now, but every time she boards it, every time she sits on the worn burgundy seats as she does now, she thinks of how Rittenhouse dug their fingers into everything.
She knew they had people in the auto industry, but she’d never considered how it shaped the infrastructure of the city she grew up in.
That’s what gets her: the unknowability. She knows why Amy disappeared, and she knows why, in a completely different way, she also stopped existing. But she’ll never see the wings that flapped this world into being. She’ll never know exactly what Rittenhouse held between it’s teeth.
Thunder rumbles. The downpour’s become vicious, like rocks pelting the windows. She texts Flynn to pick them up at the station on his way home from work. He replies with a golden thumbs up.
Over the loudspeaker, a barely comprehensible voice declares a stop that isn’t theirs, and Lucy smiles. It’s more nostalgic then it has any right to be.
Iris taps the window, imitating the droplets. She’s been awfully quiet since they got on the train.
“Can you teach me the differences between crows and ravens?” Lucy has to speak up over the rain, which earns her a few blunt looks from the other passengers. “I can never tell them apart.”
“Well ravens are bigger, for one thing.” Iris shifts in her seat and stares at the carpet, her face contorting in thought. “Crows have funerals.” At first Lucy thinks she mishears. “Do you think they have, like, wars?”
“I can’t imagine they’d have anything worth that much death.”
She tilts her head back and forth, mulling it over. She leans forwards, her hands on her knees, with much heaver burdens then someone her age should bare and Lucy knows she’s messed up. “What’s worth it then?”
“Iris—”
“Would they kill each other for stealing from each other’s caches if they had guns?”
Iris looks at her like she expects an answer, like she hangs the moon. Lucy wants to scream, just a little. She needs to choose her next words very carefully.
“Iris I don’t know; you know more about crows then I do.” It’s a liberating phrase: ‘I don’t know;’ when not knowing isn’t going to get anyone killed. “But I don’t think you’re only thinking of crows.” She says it as gently as she can bare. “I think you’re thinking of what happened right after we met, am I right?”
“Not just crows,” Iris admits, tears threating their way out of her eyes.
“Do you want me to hug you now?”
She nods and Lucy pulls her in. They’ve hugged before, during happier circumstances, but the last time Lucy held her this tight was when a man pulled out a gun and shot the owner of the restaurant they were eating lunch in.
“Why would a person kill another person like that?”
“He was scared.” Lucy squeezes her shoulders and holds her even closer. That’s all she can do.
“He wasn’t scared.” There’s a bite to her voice, even muffled in Lucy’s shirt. “Why would he be scared?”
“Because it didn’t go the way he thought it would. He didn’t plan on doing what he did.” Lucy needs her to believe the man who murdered someone in front of her wasn’t a monster and that’s not an easy thing to convince a child of. But while she’s here she wants to install radical empathy in her, because one day she might ask what exactly those bad things her father did in order to bring her back to life were, and Lucy won’t be around to act as a witness.
Iris pulls away and gives her a hard look. “How do you know?”
“Because I talked to him.”
That gives her pause. “Before my dad found you?”
Lucy nods. “I tried to talk him into giving himself up.”
That lasted approximately two minutes after Iris ran out the door, but Lucy sees no need to share the timeline. After the restaurant owner’s heart stopped, neither of them saw a point in surrender. One murder sentence isn’t much better then two. Instead, she tried to convince him he could get away if he ran immediately, before the police cars multiplied, and before they could organize to force the entrance. He didn’t listen. He flailed his gun in her direction while he barricaded the back door, as if she could get up and throw herself at him again, as if she could even walk.
“They knew each other, him and the restaurant owner. I’m not sure how, but he said he was sorry, that it wasn’t meant to happen.” But it was meant to happen, wasn’t it? People are fated to die at certain times, although death need not always be permanent. If Lorena and Iris don’t prove that, Rufus does.
That night in the motel room Flynn found a photo of Iris on social media. His fingers caressed her digital face.
Less then an hour before the shooting, Lucy saw that girl alone on a train platform. She was so annoyed. What were the chances? Turns out Iris is, or at least was, the kind of kid who keeps plans with her best friend regardless of the distance or whether there’s an adult available to take her where she wants to be. But she chose that specific wrong stop to get off at, the one where Lucy was. If fate is real like she still believes it is, and if the universe hasn’t annulled her like she thought, what then?
“Why would he rob someone he knew?”
“I think he was owed money, or he thought his friend wouldn’t turn him in, but I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer for you.” She wishes she had an answer for herself, too, and she wishes Flynn had tried something else before shooting him. It’s all speculation now. She’ll die with question marks floating above her head.
“The gun was to scare him,” she continues, “but the restaurant owner— his name was Alex, did you know that?” Iris shakes her head. “He was scared too, and he pulled out his own gun. Sometimes people make bad choices when they’re scared.”
Iris is quiet, her eyes still pick and puffy. Lucy has no idea if she’s said any of the right things. She doesn’t know how to talk to children. Before Iris, the last nine year old she knew was Amy. “Were you scared?”
Lucy blinks.
“You seemed scared but also like you knew what to do.”
“Thank you.” She can’t say throwing herself at the guy and clawing his face was just a distraction so Iris could get out, that she’d been ready to die. “And you’re night I was scared. Don’t ever do what I did.”
Iris stares at her, tries to understand her. She isn’t the only one. Lucy gives a man in a business suit an irritated look. She doesn’t feel remotely sorry he finds a child’s trauma inconvenient.
The train slows and Flynn texts her that he’s waiting. She suppresses a smile. As always, he has impeccable timing.
Train’s pulling up, she replies, and puts her phone away.
“So, a group of crows is called a murder. Do you know any other fun animal group names?”
Her eyes light up. “A group of owls is called a parliament.”
“That’s wonderful.” It really is.
They exit the train. Lucy clutches her bag in one hand and Iris in the other. The rain hurts their faces and soaks their clothes, but at least it’s not cold out.
They make it to Flynn’s idling car. Lucy drops into the front seat and silently laments getting it wet.
“Hey.”
Instead of a simple hello, Flynn raises his eyebrows and glances between her and Iris in the backseat. He has a water proof jacket on, the bastard. “Did you have fun?”
“There were a lot of crows at the park.”
Flynn has this easy smile on his face. He tries to catch Lucy’s eye, but she looks straight ahead. Things are different now. He’s married to someone else. To his credit, he gives her space, it isn’t like with Wyatt. Still, old habits die a slow and miserable death.
One of these days silence will become awkward for them. But not today, because Iris fills it with crow facts, mostly recycled ones. Lucy does learn that crows’ territories can span up to 32 square miles which is why she chose the park instead of staying closer to home, since that park appears to be a core piece of their territory.
Flynn parks in the driveway and Iris opens her door, slams it shut. “Be careful!”
But she’s already half way to the front door. Kids. Lucy probably couldn’t run like that again if her life depended on it. Hopefully those days are over.
Flynn puts his hood up, looks at her, opens his mouth and decides better of it.
She opens her door. The rain is as violent as ever. He saunters. She’s stiff as train tracks.
Not for the first time, she’s thankful for the first floor guest bedroom and bathroom, and the shower chair inside it. She melts into the hot water. This place has a seemingly unlimited supply of it.
Once upon a time, she’d taken that for granted.
It’s better this way, she used to tell herself. She became the person she needed to be for the missions to succeed. But why her? Why not someone better, more qualified?
It’s the blood in her veins, comes her answer. In the end it was a sleeper agent’s bullet and she did about as much as a houseplant. If someone, anyone, had to stand where she stood. Well, she deserves this more then someone better, someone who had nothing to do with any of it.
Lucy washes her legs, really scrubs at them, even the scar tissue on the outside of her thigh. It doesn’t help. She wants Amy back. She wants the beauty of a home that never existed.
Why is she still alive?
She flinches. Someone pounds at the door.
“Dinner’s ready.” She’d locked the bedroom door too, so Lorena’s voice has to really fight to make it through to her. “Do you want us to wait for you?”
“No.” Normal volume, too quiet.
“No! I’m not really...” ready to see people. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” It’s not even that she wants to be alone. If these were the days of the bunker or the farmhouse, she’d make her way to Flynn’s room and she’d drink or else she’d lay her head on his chest, over his heartbeat. “Thank you though.”
“We’ll save you a plate.”
It’s not her, either. Lorena’s amazing. She’s been far more accommodating then her supposed debt would require. And that is what it is, an obligation paired with kindness.
She knows that.
Her first night, she needed help covering her bandages so she could shower. Lorena helped her. She sealed Lucy’s thigh in plastic wrap and Lucy told her she didn’t have to do this, any of this. Gently, with a tight-lipped smile, Lorena said she did.
No, if anything Lucy likes her a little too much. It’s not her or Flynn or Iris. It’s the pressure of a table, the way she keeps intruding on their lives, a constant reminder of what happened.
Lucy cups her knotted skin. Her scar is rigid.
She draws out every part of the bathing process, mostly air dries siting on the bathmat. She pulls on her clothes and collapses into bed, checking her phone.
A text from Jiya, two minutes ago: I have an interview.
That’s great!!
Reading it back, it feels disingenuous, but she already hit send. I’m happy for you, she adds.
She is happy for Jiya. Working for Mason— the old Mason who’s kind of a dick— like nothing changed, has been, at best, bizarre for her and Rufus.
Lucy’s phone vibrates and Jiya’s name flashes on screen.
She’d tell her the details of the job, then she’d ask Lucy what’s new, and Lucy would tell her absolutely nothing is new. She still plans on moving out of the Flynn household. She’s still made no progress on that goal whatsoever since they last talked about it, after she obtained the real-fake documents which prove she is in fact a person born on January 24th, 1983 in the state of California, who was given a PhD and the license to drive a car.
Lucy declines the call, then texts her. I’m really tired. Can we talk tomorrow?
Sure.
Her stomach growls.
No talking, no footsteps, no plates being stacked. Just rain slapping against the house. To be sure, she listens by the door. Silence.
It’s not a guarantee, although to her knowledge Flynn hasn’t spent the night on the couch in several weeks.
The space is empty. She makes her way to the fridge, where she finds a container of pasta with meat sauce. There’s a burgundy post-it note attached. She wants to cry.
It’s her name in Lorena’s hand writing, with a heart for the U.