Timeless: Through Time - Garcy

The Halfway to Hell Club (2)

Come to me now. Drive off this brutal
Distress. Accomplish what my pride
Demands. Come, please, and in this battle
Stand at my side.

-Sappho

The worst part of dying was the waiting around for it to happen.
This is what Flynn didn't say, being constructive and all that. There was hope left, he supposed, somewhere. Probably in Lucy's mildly terrifying expression as she glared at those burnished orange towers rising above the fog which hugged the Golden Gate.
They were so pretty in tragedy, Lucy and Flynn. The vision of the pair lay somewhere between a doomed courtly love and a painfully self aware Bonnie and Clyde. They faced ahead with hands determinedly rooted together. The wind curled Lucy's hair so lovingly against the sharpness of her cheek. The skirt of her blood-coloured dress fluttered and dribbled sinisterly over her thigh wound.

Against Jiya's morose advice, the entire city of San Francisco had been interrogated for the whereabouts of those forty odd men Emma had brought, Benjamin Cahill in particular. As Jiya said and as Flynn, regretfully, believed, there was nowhere left but that intimidating bridge.
They were there,
Waiting.
They all knew it.

"Big net," Rufus broke the silence. Popped from their own tense bubbles pacing around, everyone looked at him. If they looked closely, strings of rope were visible stretching and disappearing through the fog. However, this was not really a time for looking closely.

"Big net," Lucy repeated in disbelief.

"What else are you meant to say?"

She considered.

"... Big net."
A beat passed.
"It saved quite a few people. Only eleven workers died, the entire construction."
Another beat.
"They called the workers who fell from the bridge but got caught the Halfway to Hell Club. Cause... You get it."

The last of the scouts to return emerged from behind the blocky Fort Point, saving them from any of Lucy's further attempts to assuage the silence.
"One problem with your little peace envoy," Emma called, detaching herself a cold distance from the tightly knit team, "we can't get past. We tried."

"We did," Jessica supplied. Jiya nodded with them. "Everything."

"Find another way," Christopher ordered. "We're not letting them take a pilot."

"Too bad."

It was brutal, but it was truth. There was one way to jump over all obstacles, and one pilot capable of such a precise landing who wouldn't accidentally send them drowning in the strait with no computers, no map, no reference. Expectation set on Emma.

"No," she shut it down unequivocally.

"Don't you think you owe us?" Lucy bit over him. She shifted weight across her cane. By her sides, Flynn and Jiya glowered with near paternal similarity.

"I owe you? I owe you?" She wound herself up to hurl something back at them. "Go f-"

"Emma," Amy swung in to guide her out of earshot, saving a fight from breaking out. Emma was entirely rigid, shaking with quick-fire rage. She ripped her arm free.

"I'm not doing it. You want to be superheroes so badly, you can damn well do it yourself." She turned her back, arms folded. Amy guffawed at her audacity.

"Ok. Be a child."

"You're the one who drinks hot milk."

She spluttered. The biggest, most decisive moment of their lives, and Emma was stomping her foot and turning her nose up.
"We're gonna do this now? Hot chocolate is not the same as - Ok. It doesn't matter. I - Emma... Please. Can you even... Comprehend how much I put on the line to help you?"