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qqueenofhades · 8 years ago

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i know you [i walked with you once upon a dream]: four

Post-1x16 canon divergence. When Lucy Preston, a history professor at Stanford University, is visited by a strange man who tells her that her entire world is a lie, she is drawn into a mystery more dangerous than she could have dreamed, and a hunt for a past she can’t remember. But who, or what, is she going to find – or lose – along the way?

chapter three/AO3

Lucy spends the rest of the afternoon searching up and down for Lorena. She supposes that the thing to do would be to find the local police precinct and file a missing person report, but she can’t help but wonder if that would make it worse. It doesn’t seem at all likely that Lorena was actually intending to just pop out to the shop and has somehow forgotten to come back, but. . . Lucy doesn’t speak Croatian, would already be identified by the barista as the stranger who came in looking for Lorena, is evidently also known as the woman Lorena’s estranged husband wouldn’t shut up about, Lorena assumed she was there to flaunt their new relationship in her face, and Garcia Flynn is clearly, to say the least, a man with a checkered history. Lucy’s not a cop, but she doesn’t need to be to see how bad it looks. Like she distracted Lorena so Flynn could arrive, put a bag over her head, throw her in a car boot, and otherwise make sure the divorce was final, or that Lucy herself killed her, slipped rat poison in her tea while her back was turned and then had to scramble to hide the body, or. . . she doesn’t know. None this is of course what happened, but Lucy has heard of the Amanda Knox case. She’s not about to take chances with being a young American woman accused of murder in a foreign country, where all the evidence already helpfully points in her direction.

Finally, though, she decides that however suspicious it might look to bring this to the police’s attention, it will be several orders of magnitude worse if she doesn’t, and she didn’t come all this way just to shrug and head back to Stanford when a woman is missing. A woman who has a young daughter, and who was, if anything in Flynn’s deranged version of events is true, was at least targeted, if not killed, by a shadowy crime syndicate of some kind that clearly has no problems playing dirty. The obvious difficulty, of course, is that they might then feel perfectly entitled to do the same to Lucy, but before she left Istanbul, she sent an email to Amy explaining that she had just made a big mistake, and done exactly what she shouldn’t have. If for any reason she hasn’t gotten back or made contact in three days, Amy should call the police, the papers, and otherwise make a stink. These bastards (because Lucy at least cannot deny that there is something going on here) are not going to get away with vanishing her without a trace.

It takes her a while, but she finally finds a station and a cop who speaks English, and makes her report. The basic details are simple enough, but they quickly run into trouble with anything more. “How exactly did you know the victim, Mrs. Preston?”

“It’s Ms., just Ms. Preston.” Lucy has spent a lot of time recently correcting people on her title. She isn’t so full of herself as to insist on being addressed as Dr. Preston outside an academic setting, and she does have on an engagement ring, so it’s a logical assumption about her marital status. She almost wonders if she’s made a mistake insisting so swiftly that she’s not, if perhaps she should have thought to take it off. Lorena already thought Flynn up and ran off to randomly marry her one day, and to judge from the look on the cop’s face, at least part of that idea has also occurred to him. “And I – I didn’t really know her. Her husband came to visit me at Stanford – California, in the States, Stanford University, I’m a professor there. You can call and check if you want. Anyway, he – he wasn’t making much sense. I thought he might not be well. He mentioned Lorena’s name, so I tracked her down on Facebook and I flew, uh, I flew here.”

The cop raises an eyebrow. “That is quite a favor to do for a stranger, Mrs. Preston.”

“It’s – ” Lucy bites her tongue. The more she points that out, the more he’s going to think she’s hiding something, more than he clearly already does. This of course is the truth, but she can hear how utterly flimsy it sounds. “It was. . . it was an unusual encounter.”

The cop flips to a new page in his notepad. “Unusual how? Can you give me the details of what this man Flynn said or did to you?”

Lucy watches his face, to see if that name is any more familiar to him than he’s letting on, but she can’t tell. And there is, of course, no way to condense anything of what happened on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning into something that won’t spawn a hundred more questions with progressively more impossible answers. “He. . . wanted my help. With a research project he was doing. He had a few dates in history, places where he had dug up some interesting stuff and wanted me to take a look.”

“And you don’t know why he chose you to approach, of all the history professors in America.”

“No.”

“Which dates were these?”

“1754, colonial America, something to do with the French-Indian War.” Where that comes from, Lucy doesn’t know. It startles her. “And Houston 1969, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and – and Washington 1972. The Watergate scandal.”

“Ah,” the cop says. “So he’s a conspiracy theorist, yes? To prove the moon landing did not happen, anti-government paranoia, this kind of thing?”

“I. . . I don’t know. It was a short meeting. I didn’t think I’d be able to help him.”

“But it left enough of an impression on you that you decided to go find his wife?”

Lucy doesn’t have any idea how to answer that. Not when this makes no sense even to her. “I wanted to help them,” she repeats, steadily as she can. If she talks about secret agents and dead drops and strange phone calls and everything else, she is definitely in for an unpleasantly close-range inspection of Croatia’s formerly-Soviet justice system, which isn’t likely to be a good time. “Their daughter, is she all right? She must be home from school or wherever by now. I don’t want her sitting alone, wondering where her mother is.”

“The girl is staying with a neighbor. They phoned to report Mrs. Flynn missing shortly before you arrived.” The cop considers her again. “Are you familiar with the daughter?”

“No, I’ve never met her.” Lucy twists her fingers in her lap. For the oddest and most inexplicable moment, she had some kind of – flashback, hallucination, memory, what? Reading a file. Something about Flynn’s family. Something related to something he did in 1969 – but how does that even make sense? He’s probably in his mid-forties if she had to guess, he would either not yet be born in 1969, or only a very small child. Even more bewildering and alarming is Lucy’s momentary conviction that she was there too. In 1969, when she definitely wasn’t born. The moon landing. She just mentioned that, not knowing why. Jesus, what is happening to her?

It must show on her face somehow, and this, obviously, is not the thing to convince the cop of her status as a reliable, sane, well-balanced, and definitely not-murdery individual, and he briefly looks as if he’s thinking about keeping her for more. But it seems he can’t do that without formally arraigning her or filing a charge of some kind, and there is nothing concrete to do so with. “Very well, Mrs. Preston. While this is going on, it is a good idea that you do not try to leave Croatia. We will have to find you if we have more questions.”

“I – I have a job, I need to be back by Monday – ”

The cop gives her a look that clearly says that if she didn’t want to fuck up her life, maybe she shouldn’t have jaunted off here and whacked the wife of the man she may or may not be illicitly involved with. But after Lucy signs an affidavit (all the alarm bells going off in her head about signing documents you don’t understand without a lawyer present, but not seeing any other way she’s going to be allowed to leave tonight) she is finally released, not feeling at all better about that decision than she did at the start. She could call Noah, especially if she might be about to need bail money, see what the dollar-to-euro exchange rate is going at these days, but. . . as much as she tries to wrestle away her inexplicable reluctance to do it, she can’t. She still can’t remember when exactly they got together, or how. These gaps and flashes in her memory, as if someone has taken a pair of scissors, cut out bits, and badly stitched in others, are terrifying.

Pulling up her hood against the chilly evening wind off the water, Lucy starts to walk. She has no idea where exactly she is going. There has to be a cheap and reasonably non-skeevy guesthouse around here somewhere, and considering her current circumstances, she really does not want to be alone on the streets after dark – especially as a young woman in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language. It’s hard to feel more vulnerable, and she reaches into her purse in search of the pepper spray she usually keeps in there, in case she needs it. Then she remembers, of course, that she had to throw it away going through security at SFO, and groans out loud. Bang-up job, TSA. Really keeping America and its citizens safe.

She should at least buy a cheap phone of some sort. Is anywhere still open? She doesn’t want to get socked with international roaming charges every time she turns on her own, even just to use the wifi, and besides, it would be detrimental to her aims of avoiding contact with her worried family. This is so unlike Lucy, the girl who always asked permission to go anywhere in high school and actually worried about breaking her curfew, that she has to wonder if she has somehow had a personality transplant. All these flitting, ghostlike half-memories, the inability to remember the most intimate details of her life or Noah’s. . . like she’s changed bodies with someone, like another version of herself. Or in other words, exactly what it sounded like Flynn was talking about, and she thought he was crazy, the first time they met. And according to him, the last. Of course he’s disappeared, right when she needs to actually talk to him, right when Lorena has too, when –

Just then, headlights fall over the street, a car rattles down the cobblestones, and slows next to Lucy. The window hums down. “Dr. Preston?”

It’s a woman’s voice, American. Yes, because this has not happened nearly enough in recent days, a random stranger wants to talk to her. At least this one has gotten the title right. In the low glow of the streetlight, Lucy can see that she’s older, silver-streaked black hair tidily cut to her shoulders, dark eyes, and a commanding manner. “Dr. Preston,” she says again. “Is that you?”

Lucy debates making a run for it, not that she can outstrip a car on foot, and this is not a wise thing to do when she is already the prime suspect in a missing-person case. But she somehow trusts this newcomer more than she did the other ones, and she isn’t exactly overflowing on options to start with. After a moment, she turns. “Yes?” she says warily.

“Agent Denise Christopher.” The woman holds out a hand. “I’m with Homeland Security. You can get into the car, Lucy, it’s all right. You’ve had an eventful few days, haven’t you?”

Lucy balks. “Have you been following me?”

“We had someone keep an eye on you when you left San Francisco, yes. Why don’t you get in, and we’ll talk.”

Never get into a car with someone you don’t know, the fourth-grade “Stranger Danger” VHS tape drones unhelpfully in Lucy’s head. But Agent Christopher doesn’t look like a hitman (or rather, hitwoman) – not that that means anything, as she probably wouldn’t. And Lucy is tired, sore, shaken, very confused, and very much in need of an answer or five.

She gets into the car.

Denise – Agent Christopher, why did she seem familiar, first-name, for a moment? – smiles and swings behind the wheel, evidently pleased that Lucy decided not to make this difficult. Lucy glances into the back seat, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else there, just them. Agent Christopher shifts into gear, and they roll down the street to the main ring road, then out onto the motorway. They are clearly going somewhere, and Lucy bites back the inane impulse to object that she isn’t supposed to leave Croatia. She still somehow fears getting into more trouble, though that event horizon seems to have been passed a while ago, and all of this is so utterly, unrelentingly bizarre that she has finally given up fighting it, is just going to have to throw up her hands and go with it. Alice woke up eventually, and discovered that Wonderland was just a dream. Lucy only hopes she’ll get to do the same.

At last, when they have been driving for almost forty minutes and have left Dubrovnik well behind, Agent Christopher speaks. “Do you know Garcia Flynn?”

Lucy had a hunch that question might be coming, and she still has no idea how to answer it. She mulls her words carefully. Christopher wouldn’t be asking that unless she already knew that Lucy met and spoke to him, and denying it outright is clearly not going to work. At last she says neutrally, “He seems to think I did.”

Christopher glances at her swiftly sidelong. It’s difficult to say if this was the answer she expected or not. “Do you want to confirm that you saw him in the morning of Monday, February 20? On the Stanford University campus, I believe?”

“I. . .” Lucy is getting tired of law enforcement officers thinking she’s in cahoots with this nutjob. “Fine. Yes. He came to visit me. We spoke briefly. Then he left.”

“Did you know that Garcia Flynn is wanted by the United States government, on suspicion of unprecedented terrorist activities and connections?”

That catches Lucy like a bag of rocks across the midsection. She should have guessed, and indeed she had more than an inkling that something like this was the case, but maybe she really has had an unfathomably lucky escape. “Unprecedented?”

“Yes. This isn’t just a matter of blowing up a building or driving a truck through a crowd or gunning down some innocent people on a beach or anything like that. This man is a danger to our very existence.”

“What – what is he supposed to have done?”

“That,” says Agent Christopher, “is the difficult part.”

“I work at Stanford. I’m pretty sure I can handle difficult.”

Again, that oblique sidelong glance. “So you don’t have any idea?”

“Would I be asking if I did?” Lucy’s frustration shows in her voice. She can’t help it.

“I suppose not.” Christopher overtakes a dawdler in the fast lane. “It’s complicated, because strictly speaking, we can’t prove any of it. But in the short version, he was responsible for destroying a unique, priceless, and irreplaceable machine made by a company called Mason Industries, in – you’ve heard of them?”

“I.” Lucy swallows. “I only saw the newspaper article. He – Flynn – asked me if I know someone named Rufus Carlin. I don’t.”

One of Christopher’s dark brows arches. “Rufus Carlin, in fact, shared some very disturbing data with Connor Mason, the CEO and founder of the company, and the inventor of the machine that Flynn destroyed. As a result, this data made its way to my colleagues and myself in Homeland Security, and believe me when I say that the apprehension of Garcia Flynn is now the highest-priority case on the entire federal counter-terrorism docket. If you have any idea or lead on his whereabouts, now would be the time to share it.”

“I don’t,” Lucy insists, with something close to panic. “I don’t know where he is.”

Christopher evaluates her a moment more, finally decides that she’s telling the truth. Then she says, “Well, as it happens, we might. It seems he has an older half-brother named Gabriel Thompkins –which is strange, we went through his files several times and there was never any mention of him before. It’s like he just appeared out of thin air. At any rate, he lives in Paris. Given Flynn’s recent pattern of trying to make contact with a list of personal or family targets, we think he might next attempt to check in on Gabriel. But this man is trained and dangerous, backed into a corner, and is certainly expecting to be tailed, as well as prepared for a fight. We need an incentive for him to show himself, draw him out of cover, and put him off his guard.”

“And?” Lucy doesn’t like where this is going. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Come now, Lucy.” Agent Christopher exits the motorway onto a country road, takes a few turns. It’s only as they pass through a jungle of barbed wire onto a dark airstrip, with a private jet sitting on the tarmac, that Lucy realizes they must be at some kind of hidden black site, and that that, right there, is their ride. “Do you really think he’s going to miss the opportunity to talk to you?”

---------------------

Paris, France – City of Lights, home of poets and artists, legendary romantic destination, etc. etc. – is a fucking shithole.

To be fair, Garcia Flynn’s current low opinion of the place might directly and inversely correlate to his level of anxiety about why he’s here at all, and the unpleasant encounter he just had with so-called French customer service (he hates to stereotype, especially as someone from Eastern Europe who gets plenty of that himself, but sometimes it just fits). He has been trying for the last forty-five minutes to see if his brother is here or not, not even sure if he wants to find him, existing in a sort of terrified exhilaration and mind racing too fast to wrap around the consequences. This, he supposes, is what he gets for shooting scientists, instead of asking their advice on what destroying the Mothership might do to reality. But he remembers Anthony, at one point, describing the space-time continuum as similar to a piece of chewed gum. Pull on it from either end, and it first starts to split in the middle. That’s where reality is starting to tear back into what already happened, the changes that Flynn and the trio made, despite the attempt to reset it to the original template by saving his family. He’s been keeping an eye on history, and 1969 – that was about the middle of the expeditions that they went on, yes. That’s about where the hasty patch job would start to pull out its stitches. The official account of the moon landing has suddenly altered, explaining how there was a mysterious attack on NASA’s computers and Katherine Johnson helped save the day. And that means the other change Flynn made back then, saving his half-brother’s life, might have returned into history as well.

Flynn can’t help but think of the fact that if the rips are going to start cascading back into existence, like a chain of knocked-over dominoes, that means everyone who is alive and present right now who shouldn’t be – Lorena, Iris, Anthony, Lucy’s sister Amy, just to name a few – is going to start disappearing, depending on when the correction hits. If his half-brother is back, that means it’s happening. That means this time, there is no Mothership to fix it, and trying again might just make the temporal destabilization even worse, riddle it with holes and contradictions until the entire thing collapses, like a sand castle gutted by the waves. That means that he might lose his family again, right before his eyes, with absolutely no way to stop it.

Flynn swears, banging his fist against the wall of the telephone booth, as a few passersby give him a funny look and walk faster. It’s already bad enough that he has pissed off Rittenhouse to a degree unseen in the organization’s sordid history, that they’ve warned him to stay away from his family and Lucy and everyone else, and yet he needs to do something, he needs to warn them. He doesn’t dare go back to Dubrovnik, as the place is probably saturated with agents already, happy to shoot Lorena and Iris through a long-range sniper rifle if he so much as shows his face, but he thinks madly that if he could just kill those ones, the ones threatening them now, then they’d be safe, they’d be –

For another, oh, five minutes. Until Rittenhouse sends more. Sends their entire fucking private army.

Is he planning to shoot those too, and think there will be no retribution?

It never stops.

Fingers shaking, he dials the directory again, waiting. It takes a while, but this time he finally gets an address for a Gabriel Thompkins. It’s in a tony, upscale part of the city, second arrondissement, not far from the Louvre. He slams down the phone and pulls his jacket straight, checking that it covers his sidearm – he is really not in the mood to be dragged into the gendarmerie just now – and starts to move fast. What he’s going to say, if anything, he has no idea. I’m your half-brother, who technically you never met, because you died before I was born? Is it possible this is like a badly tuned radio, and Gabriel will flicker out of existence again before he gets there, reality caught between two competing parameters, battling to decide which one is going to take precedence? Jesus. What has he done.

Flynn makes it across the city in record time, turning into the narrow street, shoving past the inevitable brigade of Vespas, delivery vans, and sidewalk café chairs, up to the flat. He rings the bell, looks behind him shiftily, and then hammers on the door. Someone shouts something that sounds unflattering from the second-floor balcony (Flynn’s French isn’t quite as good as his Spanish, but more than sufficient in this case). “Come on,” he growls under his breath. “Don’t you need to go get your single espresso and smoke your cigarette and read Le Monde?”

His interesting ideas about what constitutes a typical Parisian’s life aside, this does in fact get a response. There are footsteps in the hall behind, and the door opens. “Oui? Puis-je vous aider?”

Flynn opens his mouth, then shuts it, because he’s momentarily spellbound. It’s looking at himself, about ten years older. Dark hair considerably shot through with silver, square glasses, smile lines, sweater and corduroys. Gabriel Thompkins looks like a retired college professor or a successful novelist, the kind of man who has spent his life creating things, not tearing them down. There is a wedding ring on his finger. He has a family. A good life. Flynn remembers jabbing a shot of epinephrine into a small boy’s arm, a muggy July day in 1969, looking into his younger mother’s face, telling her that he only ever remembered her being sad. That he wanted to fix it. It was good to see you again. He tries to answer, but he can’t. It sticks raw.

“Can I help you?” Thompkins repeats, this time in English, as if Flynn might not have understood the first time. His brow creases, as it’s not every day a shifty-eyed stranger who looks very much like you turns up in a fluster on your doorstep. “You look – sir, have we. . . have we met?”

“A long time ago,” Flynn says by reflex. He still feels punched. “I – I can’t really explain, I’m sorry. I just – I probably should not have come.” He wants to ask, wants to know what it was like to grow up with their mother, happy, but doesn’t know if Gabriel’s memory includes him or not. He doesn’t know how this works. Lorena and Iris only remembered three years of his absence. “I – I’m sorry for bothering you. If someone comes by, you – I was not here.”

With that, leaving Thompkins utterly baffled, Flynn whirls on his heel and retreats, thinking far too late that he’s likewise pointed out someone else for Rittenhouse to target, that if a team of commandos arrive tonight to drag Thompkins out of his tidy flat and shoot him in the head, there will be nobody to point the finger at but himself. He blunders down the Rue Bachaumont in complete distraction, half-seriously thinking of jumping into the Seine to put an end to this unqualified disaster, this burning dumpster fire, that is his life. They ordered him to disappear, and perhaps that is the only helpful thing left for him to do. Will that buy his family’s safety, once his corpse washes up in some river grate weeks from now and they have to identify him by his dental records? From Rittenhouse, perhaps. But if the timeline keeps buckling in under the weight of its contradictions, if people disappear and reappear, if –

Flynn turns the corner, and walks straight into Lucy Preston.

Shock is not a sufficient word for either of their reactions. They collide, start into the usual apologies for knocking heads with a stranger, then stagger backward, get a good look at each other, and blanch. Neither of them appear capable of thought or movement or speech. Then Flynn grabs her by both wrists, jerks her bodily off the sidewalk, swings her around under the cover of a low market awning, and hisses, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Belatedly, it occurs to him that if he wants to convince her of his noble intentions, this is a piss-poor way to start, and it would not be best for someone to see it and get the wrong impression (and, he supposes grimly, this isn’t the first time he’s kidnapped her). She pulls at his hands, trying to loosen his grip, and he lets her down. The two of them are still standing close together in the small space, and he feels an odd lurch in his stomach as their eyes lock. She takes a moment to catch her breath; if she was expecting to run into him here, clearly it was not nearly that dramatically. Then she says, “We need to talk.”

“Do we?” Flynn glances edgily over his shoulder again.

“Yes.” He has to give her credit, she doesn’t back down or flinch, staring him in the eye, which sometimes not even grown men have been able to manage. “And we don’t have much time. Is it true? Are you – ” She hesitates, but only briefly. “Are you a terrorist?”

That’s quite the icebreaker to go for, Flynn thinks. Though he does, by any objective metric, deserve it. He knows she doesn’t remember, but he has a brief moment of useless longing for when that meant she would touch his hand gently and tell him she was sorry for his loss, not revert to seeing him as the hulking monster determined to wreak havoc on her nice ordinary normal world. “Who have you been talking to, Lucy?”

“People.” She looks at him defiantly. “And they’re here. In Paris. Looking for you. They’re using me as bait to try to draw you out. They’ll be here soon.”

“Wh – ” Flynn’s hand goes by reflex to his gun. He grabs Lucy by the wrist again and pulls her backward into the crammed alley, her ending up almost against his chest. “Who’s looking for me?” he hisses at her. “Who?”

“Homeland Security.” She pushes herself off him and glares. “You know, I’m more than slightly tempted to let them catch you.”

“Homeland Security?” Flynn swears. “You mean Rittenhouse? They’ve infiltrated every level of that department, it’s a nightmare, it’s – ”

“What?” Lucy is exasperated. “Rittenhouse?”

“Yes, Lucy! Rittenhouse!” He almost yells it at her, the same conceit observed by someone trying to make someone else understand, as if saying it louder and louder will make a difference. Absolutely nothing about this new timeline is the way he wanted it to be, and he hates himself for almost wishing that he hadn’t done it. He can’t regret that Lorena and Iris are alive again, but otherwise, it is the very epitome of being careful what you wish for. “Do we have to go through this again? You didn’t believe me when I told you that they existed last time either!”

Lucy stares at him, lips white, and he belatedly thinks that if her interest in hearing him out, and buying them a little time, is the only thing stopping Homeland Security from moving in to nab him on the spot, it would possibly behoove him to have more tact about this than a Panzer brigade. “Rittenhouse,” he repeats, more levelly. “Ask your friends about that.”

“They’re not my friends.” Lucy is scurrying to keep up with him as he barges down the alley, hoping that this does not come to a shootout in the middle of a nice Paris neighborhood – the city has too much unfortunate recent experience with that kind of thing – but also not planning to be taken quietly. He doesn’t know why. Ten minutes ago he was prepared to drown himself in the Seine and put an end to it, but now he’s seen her again, she’s here, she doesn’t know the danger she’s in, what happened to all of them and might still, and somehow, something in him isn’t quite ready to give up the fight after all. He pushes open an unlocked back door, pulling her in after him. They appear to be in the stock room of a patisserie, which smells delicious if nothing else, and he briefly wonders that if he’s already a wanted criminal, if stealing a brioche or a pain du chocolat is really going to make that much of a difference. He reaches behind her ear, fingers brushing her hair, and finds the small crumple of a smart-foil GPS tracker, peeling it off her.

Lucy stares at him, clearly wanting to ask how he knew that was there. “How did you get to France?” she demands instead. “They have a warrant on you, they – ”

“I used to work for the NSA, do you really think I don’t know how to get out of a country with the authorities looking for me?” Flynn hisses, peering through the crates. Seems clear, but he hopes the baker does not come in unexpectedly; his trigger finger is a little itchy right now. He leads the way around, Lucy following him almost despite herself, drawn into his orbit like a star devoured by a black hole. “I don’t suppose you did anything useful, and read that file I gave you?”

“I’ve been a little busy!” Lucy remembers to keep her voice down, but that is one of the more scathing whispers Flynn has ever heard. “Your wife’s missing!”

That takes him like a skillet in the back of the head. “She – she what?”

“I went. To Dubrovnik.” Lucy’s eyes meet his, half guiltily, half defiantly. “I met your wife. She told me what you think happened. And then she. . . she vanished. I don’t know how or why.”

Garcia Flynn knows several languages. Quite a few, in fact. English, Croatian, Russian, Spanish, German, and some French and Italian. But there are not enough curses in all of them to adequately convey what flashes through his head just then. He wants to shake her, to demand what on earth made her do that, even as he is horribly aware that all of this, every bit of it, is his fault. He was the one who insisted on seeing her one last time, introducing that element of chaos and danger into what otherwise would have been her boring life with her boring fiancé and boring problems. And nor can he know if Lorena has been taken in strategically by Rittenhouse, to hold as hostage against him – which would be bad enough, but still allow for the possibility of rescuing her – or if she’s vanished more permanently, a casualty of the ripping space-time, the world remembering that she is supposed to be dead and adjusting matters accordingly. He presses a hand against the wall, struggling to control himself. He should not be surprised that by trying to save everyone, he’s losing them dramatically and spectacularly instead. And more. And worse. This is going to gain momentum. It’s not going to stop.

Just then, there’s a thump in the next room, and Flynn remembers that they’re still standing here like idiots, right next to Lucy’s tracker – even if he’s taken it off her, that does him no good unless they get away from it. He grabs her, practically tucking her under his arm like someone stealing a valuable vase from an antique bazaar, and pulls her back out the door into the alley. Just as it bursts open after them, and someone yells, “Come out with your hands up!”

Flynn responds to that by shooting, which is how Flynn tends to respond to most things in general. He doesn’t think he’s hit them, unfortunately, as there is the sound of shattering glass but no yells or cries of pain, and Lucy stares at him with her mouth open. He thinks blackly that she’s getting her answer as to whether or not he’s a terrorist, all right. Then he grabs her again, pushing her up the alley in front of him, and wheels to fire one more time from around the corner. Then he jumps onto the nearest of the ubiquitous Vespas, pulls Lucy down in front of him, and reaches around her to hotwire it, gunning it to life within thirty seconds (he might admire the efficiency, if there was time to do so). Kicks off, and races away down the street at top speed.

Lucy is too involved in clinging on for dear life to scream at him, though Flynn is sure she will get to that part soon enough. He more or less knows Paris, though it’s not the city he spent the most time in, and he also has a few tricks up his sleeve. He knows they won’t risk shooting at a moving target in the middle of boulevards and plazas packed with tourists and civilians (or hopes so, at least) and they’ll have to catch him first if they intend to take him down.

He does not intend to let them. He dodges and weaves and throttles still harder, earning more than a few French obscenities and succinct gestures thrown in his direction, but he doesn’t care. Half the other Vespas are driving at the same pace, anyway, and without the tracker, it will be difficult for their pursuers to get a bead on theirs particularly in a city packed with the stupid things. Lucy is probably sorely regretting the moment she ever thought this was a good idea, but likewise, Flynn will have to worry about that later. He wants to tell her that if she trusted him to take her home through time, this should be nothing, but – for the third time in his life – this Lucy Preston is not the Lucy he has known. You’d think he’d get used to it.

He isn’t used to it.

They zip and dart and zigzag across Paris like a demented bumblebee for God only knows how long. At last, when they have gotten far enough away that the sirens have faded, all seems more or less tranquil, and nobody appears to be looking at them, Flynn lets the stolen scooter coast to a halt in a side alley. Lucy is gasping, clinging to the handlebars, and there is an excruciatingly tense moment as they stare at each other. The silence becomes overwhelming. Then at last, eyes flat, lips set, Lucy wipes her brow with her forearm and throws her shoulders back.

“Right,” she says quietly, furiously. “Talk.”

#lucy x flynn #garcy #garcy ff #timeless ff #once upon a dream #or: garcia flynn is an absolute disaster of a human being #film at 11

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