It was so easy that night
Should have been strong, yet I lied
Nobody gets me, like you
I know everything changes, all the cities and faces
But I know how I feel about you.
Can we bring yesterday back around?
'Cause I know how I feel about you now
I was young, I was wrong, I let you down
But I know how I feel about you now.
- About You Now, Skippinish
Lucy watched Flynn making tea over the top of her book, fingers tapping on the worn arm of the sofa. She waited patiently for the last dregs of people to leave, and, when Wyatt at last retired to his room, placed it down carefully and made her way over.
She slid her arms around his chest, leaning up to whisper in his ear.
"Hi," she pressed a kiss to his neck.
His eyes darted around the bunker. "Hello."
Flynn groaned lightly as she kept at his neck, making her way up to his jaw. He turned around, hands on her waist.
"Someone might see us."
A poor excuse.
"No one's here."
Everyone else was off winding down for bed, as per usual. He considered.
"Mm, in that case..."
Lucy grinned, stretching on to her tiptoes to kiss him. She relished in the freedom of the free space and wished every day could be like this, with Flynn's hands sweetly curling in her hair, without having to care about everything crashing down around their ears for just a moment...
Or, she ammended, tongue dancing around her mouth, maybe a nice, long moment. Her silky robe fell open, leaving his cool hands space between the waistband of his stolen pyjama bottoms and her t-shirt to tease the sensitive skin on the sides of her waist.
Lucy gasped a laugh when she found herself atop the counter and pulled him in closer.
But then, a clatter on the other side of the room made her yelp. Quickly, Flynn twirled to lean on the counter and Lucy jumped down beside him, looking busy with the first thing she could pick up, which turned out to be a roll of paper towel.
Oh, phew - it was just Jiya. Lucy relaxed, but reddened, realising she must have been sitting on that chair the whole time blocked from her view.
Lucy took a few steps to speak to her, but now her line of sight was clear, she saw the headphones covering Jiya's ears and put a relieved hand on her chest. Her heartbeat calmed, and Lucy and Flynn exchanged a sheepish look.
He slurped calmly on his tea.
"Maybe sometime when we don't have an audience?"
---
Jiya
Jiya did the best impression of sleep she could. It didn't help that she'd bumped into a chair having hidden from Lucy so fast, but it was a whole lot easier to feign tiredness than explain oh, by the way, I'm trying to time travel in my head because some crazy guy I met at a hospital told me to, and yes, I have been having visions of my boyfriend dying, but you have a good night, now.
They'd get it, sure, but all it would be is an extra weight on their conscience. So she stole Rufus' noise-cancelling headphones and slumped down out of sight. Rufus was the only person she would tell any of this to, at least for now.
Besides, Lucy and Flynn would understand. They relied on eachother just as much as she and Rufus, that much was clear. More, even, maybe that Jiya didn't comprehend, because of what they had both lost so recently.
She was glad when they left her alone. She knew was safe in the bunker, all she needed was perfect peace and stillness.
She had sometime to be.
Jiya then felt the familiar tug of the vision skulking around the edge of her mind and closed her eyes, focusing only on the void that was left.
When it submerged her, she didn't fight. Her stomach swooped just like she were riding the Lifeboat.
When her vision went pure white, Jiya saw her chance to let her grip go completely and tumbled into the rabbit hole,
down
down
down
Until she disappeared.
She didn't even feel the hands that roughly took her by the shoulders until she was too far gone to fight back.
---
Lucy
Safely hidden away in their room again - it still made her perk up to think about 'their room' - Lucy sat curled up on Flynn's lap, legs hanging off the edge of the chair, the last crossword puzzle book she'd yet to finish in her hand.
"Bugger," she mumbled to herself, rubbing out the last word she'd pencilled in. Flynn watched her in amusement. "What's an eight letter word for nautical that isn't maritime but has an 'i' in it? Might start with an S."
He paused to think. Crosswords were no joke here. "Nautical? Um... Seagoing?"
She examined it, tongue stuck out. "Nope."
"Sailor... Sailorly."
"That's not a word."
"Sailorly is a word-"
"You just made that up!"
He jabbed the paper defensively. "Look - sailorly! It fits!"
She scrutinised the crossword with narrowed eyes and, realising it did indeed fit, slowly penciled it in. "This changes nothing," she muttered.
He laughed easily, breath hitting her ear and, much less coincidentally, teeth nipping it.
Lucy bit her lip, grinning.
"I thought you said later?"
"There's no one here..."
Her mouth twisted into a smile. "That's true."
Flynn worked his way lazily around her ear and her neck, pausing only to whisper something in her ear that was somewhere along the lines of her moaning underneath him. Her skin flushed burning hot, and she left the crossword, forgotten, splayed across her lap.
His fingers grazed her abdomen, and she tried, oh, she really did try, not to arch her back to his touch.
Garbled yells outside the door made her frown and pull away slightly so she could better hear. "What's that?"
"Nothing, probably?" He suggested hopefully.
Lucy struggled her way upright and went to the door to investigate, making him sigh.
"Where's the Lifeboat?"
She heard Connor say, crystal clear, through the crack. Lucy frowned, assuming it was a joke, and went to close the door again.
But-
"Where's Jiya?" She heard next. She turned to Flynn, face pale, and pushed open the door.
"What happened?" She demanded, the both of them jogging down the hall behind everyone else.
Wyatt was on the floor. Why the hell was Wyatt on the floor? "Wyatt!"
He looked up, face flushed and eyes wide. Immediately, her heart started thumping unpleasantly, a far cry from the rush of chemicals that had been busy working her brain up into a flurry. Something was terribly out of place.
"It's Jessica, she - she got my gun. Kidnapped Jiya. Took the Lifeboat."
Lucy blinked, lagging behind. Gun. Jiya. Lifeboat.
"She what?"
She'd seen Jiya. She'd seen her barely twenty minutes ago and... Oh, God, she was going to be sick.
"Wait, wait, wait, hold on. So - so Jessica is Rittenhouse?"
Flynn's face went slack. "Rittenhouse has the Lifeboat?"
A scuffle made them turn, and her heart swooped even lower to see Rufus staring at where the Lifeboat had been with dead eyes. "What did she do with Jiya?"
He ran to the computers, the rest of them following like a swarm.
"Anything?" Connor asked desperately, leaning over Rufus. He shook his head, growing increasingly frantic.
"No, nothing. I can't find them. They might've disabled the tracker."
"Is there another way to locate the Lifeboat?"
"The whole system is down. There's nothing!" He slammed his hands to the desk.
"Hey, hey, we will find her. Alright?"
Then he looked back at Wyatt, eyes sparking.
"We asked you," he charged at him, seething. "I asked you to tell us if she said or did anything to make you think she was Rittenhouse!"
Lucy stepped between them, mediating the situation as best she could. "He didn't do anything wrong! He - he didn't he didn't suspect anything."
"I did," Wyatt said in a quiet voice, and everyone swivelled to look at him in disbelief.
"What?"
"Her brother..."
Agent Christopher crumpled her forehead. "He's a mechanic in Hayward. We did a background check on him. It came out clean."
"Yes, but in our original timeline, he died of leukemia when they were kids."
Lucy felt that sick feeling crawl its way back up her throat. She'd trusted him unquestioningly, because surely, even Wyatt...
"But here, Jessica said that he was saved by some sort of stem cell therapy, which... I assume was not around in the 1980s."
She recoiled. Not even a little bit.
"So what? You just lied?" Flynn asked incredulously.
She backed him up, standing between Flynn and Rufus. Tensions ran dangerously high. "Why didn't you tell us?"
"Because... I wanted to figure it out first. I told her she had to leave the bunker. I was trying to do the right thing. Look, Lucy, if your sister came back, would you assume that she was your sister, or would you think she's some sort of a traitor? I'm sorry."
"It's a little late for that," Rufus spat, anger quickly fading away to plain panic. "Geez, we-we had those Rittenhouse photos and we did jack squat, and now Jiya's gone!"
"There's photos?" Flynn growled. "No one told me about that."
Wyatt clenched his jaw. "'Cause no one trusted that you wouldn't try to kill her."
Lucy shifted guiltily under the glance Flynn shot her then. She should've told him.
"Well, in hindsight, would that have been so bad?"
"Call off your guard dog," he snarled at Lucy, who stepped in as calmly as she could.
"Okay, we're just trying to figure out what happened, Wyatt."
"Let me just sum this up," Flynn said, advancing on him. "Jessica was screwing you, she lied about who she was, and then she wrapped you around her finger just long enough so she could screw us too!"
Wyatt exploded.
He dove for Flynn's neck, hands finding their mark on his windpipe. Flynn struggled backwards and Lucy watched, horrified, as they swung at eachother.
"Wyatt, stand down!" Agent Christopher barked from the sidelines, but he took no heed.
Fears of Flynn being injured hijacked her muscles and, unable to watch it any longer, Lucy grabbed Wyatt and tugged.
She just didn't see his fist in time.
Lucy stumbled backwards in shock, still processing the pain that cracked through her mouth.
Wyatt stared in horror at what he'd done.
"Lucy-"
"No," she got out, checking her fingers for smears of blood. It felt like there should be blood. "No."
She turned on her heel and left, and, when that didn't feel fast enough, ran down the corridor in only her socks.
Lucy couldn't breathe.
She ducked into the next door, which was an awful idea, because it was Jiya's room, and God, she didn't need this right now, but she stayed. Her back slipped down the door until she was curled up in a ball and Lucy went still.
She didn't know how long she sat there for.
Lucy was only aware of herself and her surroundings when a knock from behind startled her and the door opened into her back.
"Lucy?"
Flynn. She scooched forward just enough for the door to open. He edged in and bent down beside her, looking her over with a desperate expression.
"Are you okay?"
She barely nodded and sagged right into his arms.
"I'm so sorry," he murmured.
She sniffed, determined to maintain her composure. "It wasn't your fault."
"Still."
Lucy searched within herself for anger against Wyatt, but found only emptiness as far as her fingertips could reach.
"Jiya's all alone there," Lucy rasped instead. "I still remember every day how awful that was. And I had my mother keeping me alive, and we still had the Lifeboat. She has no one. Nothing."
"Hey. We'll get her back if it kills me, alright?"
Her chin wobbled dangerously, and Flynn took to slowly stroking her hair.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you - about the photos," she got out. The pain in her mouth was a dull throb now.
"It's fine. I get it."
"It's not. I thought there was something off but I ignored it and now-" Lucy shook her head. "I should have told you."
He didn't have an answer, and Lucy didn't know if him knowing would have changed anything, but she was still wracked with guilt and panicked over Jiya - not to mention the fact that Rittenhouse now had both of the time machines.
"I don't know what they're going to do to her, but you know what they're like, Garcia. They'll use the people they love against you, break you."
Flynn's hand momentarily stopped. Emma's use of the Titanic loomed over them like a shadow.
"I mean it's not -" she cleared her throat, trying to communicate through her hands - "you know. With us. Right?"
"Right."
"Right," she repeated again.
He shifted uncomfortably. "... Right."
Lucy stared at him for a few seconds. "I'm, um, going to see if I can do anything to help."
"Are you sure?"
No. She pulled on a squint sort of smile. "Uh-huh."
He helped her up, and she momentarily forgot all about Jiya and Wyatt as she hastily retreated out of the door and took a moment to gather herself behind it before she took careful steps back towards the Lifeboat - or where it used to be, anyway.
It's going to be fine, she convinced herself, because it has to be. Her eyes flicked back to the door.
Right?