#DOES THE THOUGHT THAT STANFORD MIGHT HAVE NEVER GOTTEN THE CHANCE TO VISIT HER AT HER DEATHBED OR HER FUNERAL SINCE HE WAS STUCK ELSEWHERE??

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

My Great Grandma who loved her babies very much

Reference that I used for the face!

[imnotdoneyet-forreal]

Deals with the Devil- 11

Author: Amanda Preston

Summary: A need to fill a void and an encounter to start something new, Elijah and Katya never knew that a simple one night stand would wind up into a love affair filled with family drama and side deals gone wrong.

Deals with the Devil Masterlist        

        “Where’s the fire and how do I put it out?” Marcel greets as he enters the conference room. He was dressed as handsomely as ever and caught a few admiring looks from a few editors as he walked by the cubicles.         

       Katya couldn’t help but laugh at him having grown accustomed to his dramatic entrances and the lingering stares in his wake. 

        “I really need to destroy that knight-in-shining-armor mentality you have when it comes to me,” Katya responds. “I think it’s going to your head.” 

        Marcel just shrugs as he settles down into his seat. 

        “Where’s D?” he asks as he looks around the vacant room. “Thought she’ll be here.” 

        “She’s getting her sketchbook,” Katya answers. “I told her she’ll need it.” 

        “You’re finally getting her off the bench,” Marcel notes with a grin. “That’s good.” 

        “The girl deserves it,” Katya tells him. “Plan on hiring her the moment she graduates.” 

        The conversation comes to stop as Davina enters the conference with her tablet and sketchpad. The excitement of the unknown task ahead very evident on her face. 

        “Ok let’s get started,” Katya states as Davina takes the seat next to Marcel. “I’ve gathered all of you here today because Vikings Co. has decided to dump a very big and important project on MoonStone: Online Publishing.” 

        “Understood,” Marcel responds. “But why am I here for it?” 

        “Because I need your networking skills to get me the best of the best when it comes to Web Design,” Katya answers. “I need a web guy.” 

        “You already have one of those.” 

        “I have an IT guy which is a completely different playing field,” Katya clarifies. “I need a web expert that has experience from design to coding.” 

        “Alright,” Marcel acknowledges as he pulls out his blackberry and starts to scroll through it. “I can put out some feelers and see who reaches back.” 

        “Oh, I… I think I know of someone,” Davina speaks up. 

        “Who?” Katya asks. 

        “He’s a friend,” Davina answers gaining a bit more confidence. “His name is Josh and he used to be the TA in one of my classes.” 

        “Used to be?” 

        Davina’s nerves come back at the question and shrugs. 

        “I mean… he hacked into our school system and got asked to depart on his own account,” Davina explains. “But I swear, it was for a good reason.” 

        Katya couldn’t help but share a look with Marcel who just shared her amusement. 

        “And what was this reason?” 

        “A student identified as non-binary but the school refused to change the gender specification on their transcript. Josh did so easily but he got caught.” 

        “And what is this Josh up to right now?” 

        “He’s bartending,” Davina states. “But he was just shy away from graduating, at the top of his class too, and I promise he’ll be on his best behavior. That is… if you give him a chance.” 

        Katya can’t help but share a look with Marcel again. They were both enamored with the headstrong girl and it was hard to resist her request. 

        “Alright,” Katya gives in. “Let me meet him for myself and if he fits the MoonStone mentality then we’ll go on a week trial to see if he can keep up to our standards.” 

        Davina tries to calm her excitement but it was evident through her smile. 

        “Ok, I’ll reach out to him,” Davina answers. “I promise he won’t let you down.” 

        Katya chuckles at the girl’s promise and nods. 

        “Onto the next order of business,” Katya states. “I have no idea what the next step for this is so I was hoping someone might clue me in?” 

        Marcel chuckles and nods. 

        “I can do some research on the legal side of online publishing but that’s about it,” Marcel offers. “I could probably start on some patents for the name MoonStone and it’s affiliation with Viking Co. but it seems to me that as long as you don’t have your web engineer, then you’re stuck.” 

        Katya sighs and nods. 

        “Yeah… that was what I was afraid of.” 

        “I can start making some mock-up designs for the website?” Davina offers up. “I just need some insight as to what direction you want me to take.” 

        Katya nods at Davina’s offer as her drive returns once more. 

        “Alright, well… I was thinking we keep to our origins,” Katya states. “Our colors, our logos, our language. This is still MoonStone so we have to represent ourselves online as we are in person.” 

        Davina takes in the notes and is quick to start sketching out ideas. Katya’s mind roams free as her creativity flows endlessly. Marcel remained silent as he watched two of his close friends glow beautifully as their passions took over them. 

*

        The business day was already done but Elijah remained in his office working. Gia had bid him goodbye a while ago but he couldn’t recall how long ago that was. Elijah ignored the glaring clock on his desk and continued to read through his paperwork allowing that to fill up his time and mind. 

        A soft knock breaks him from his concentration and he looks up to find an unexpected guest. 

        “Mother?” 

        “Hello, son,” she answers as she steps into his office. She looks around the space analyzing the decor and ambiance before her focus returns to Elijah. “Like what you’ve done with the office.” 

        Elijah finds himself fixing his tie as his mother’s stare landed upon him. 

        “Thank you,” he answers. “How did you find me here?” 

        “Oh, I called your assistant,” she states as she takes her seat across from him. “She told me you were still at the office.” 

        Esther removes her gloves and tucks them into her designer purse. She doesn’t smile nor does she frown as she picks her next words. 

        “Nice girl, your assistant,” she comments. “Wonder why such a thing would put me on hold all day when I’ve been trying to reach you?” 

        Elijah refrains from sighing knowing the hidden accusation from his mother’s words. 

        “Mother, I…” 

        “No, need to explain,” Esther cuts him off. “Children grow up. They don’t need their mother’s looking over them.” 

        Elijah knew there was no excuse he could use to appease her. She would hold this betrayal over his head before she found another source of power. 

        “What can I do for you?” 

        Esther takes her time to respond even though Elijah already knew what she was here for. Her eyes stray to the window behind Elijah that illuminated the other buildings around Viking Co. She hums pensively before looking back at him. 

        Even though they were both seated at equal height, Elijah couldn’t help but feel like he was being looked down upon. 

        “I assume Niklaus came to speak to you on my behalf,” Esther states. “He came by the house for a quick moment before disappearing again.” 

        “Yes,” Elijah answers. “He paid me a visit. Told me that something was going on with Kol.” 

        “That boy,” Esther sighs out. “I’ve done everything I can for him and he remains ungrateful. He’s gotten kicked out of Stanford for selling answer sheets. He did the same thing at UCLA and now he refuses to go to Yale after I made a very impressive donation. I told him I could get him into whatever school he wants but he refuses to go back. I’m at my last wits which is why I need your help.” 

        “I can try to speak to him…” Elijah starts to offer but his mother is quick to interrupt him. 

        “Oh, dear, noble Elijah,” his mother responds. “Speaking to him won’t help him much. Kol needs structure. The kind of structure you gained when you came to work with your father when he ran the company. I need you to give him that and perhaps that will stick.” 

        Elijah was at a loss of words. 

        Kol was a hurricane of a person. He created disorder wherever he went. There was no stopping him. 

        A characteristic that came from their very stubborn mother. 

        “He needs this, Elijah,” his mother pleads. 

        Those words were the final nails to his coffin as Elijah had no other choice but to agree. 

        “I’ll take him under my wing,” Elijah reluctantly states. 

        “Good, I thought you would,” Esther praises as she starts to pick up her things to depart. Now that she had achieved her goal there was no reason for her to stay any longer. She slides her gloves back on and stares down at her son as she rises from her seat. 

        He looked tired. A little worn out. Too much work and not enough life could do that to you. 

        A soft gaze crosses her face at the thought but she’s quick to diminish it. 

        “You work too much,” she comments with a scowl. “Perhaps that’s why Katerina left you. Such a good girl, that one. Very well connected, good genes… Should have tied her down when you had the chance.” 

        Elijah doesn’t respond not knowing that the truth would only serve as ammunition to his mother to shift or change him into what she wants him to be. 

        “We weren’t a good match.” 

        “Hmm,” Esther hums as she turns to leave. She stops by the door and lets out a sigh. “Gia, your assistant, she’s a pretty one. It’s cliche to marry the secretary, I know, but the girl’s got potential.”

        “Mother…” Elijah sighs out. 

        “Alright,” she mutters. “I’ll stop… for now.” 

        The threat lingered in the air as she left leaving Elijah drained at the potential future meddling fro his mother. It didn’t help that his mind was soon occupied to the incoming presence of his brother Kol. 

        The workday had certainly grown longer in the span of five minutes.

[qqueenofhades]

the tangled web of fate we weave: ii

Well, in no time flat, this turned into a fic. I... should have seen that coming. I blame @extasiswings, as usual.

Part one here. AO3 here.

Garcia Flynn is woken the next morning by sunlight in his eyes, banging in the hallway – he tenses, but it sounds like the usual stampede of students out for weekend jollity – and a killer cramp in his back, which has come of sleeping mostly upright on an ancient, sagging sofa that will probably never recover from the experience. He stands up slowly, muttering under his breath and rubbing both hands over his face. Lucy probably doesn’t have any male toiletries, unless he wants to try shaving with a Dove disposable razor. Which likely neither she nor he would appreciate, and besides, he shouldn’t even be here. Should be back at his hotel, and he can’t repress a sudden stab of fear that Rittenhouse drove directly there and tore the room apart. He didn’t realize they knew quite so much about him just yet, and he came here. Now it’s his fault that Lucy’s in trouble, and he has no idea what to do next.

Flynn goes to the apartment’s small bathroom and washes up awkwardly with Lucy’s lavender-scented hand soap, gargling with the half-inch of Listerine left in the bottle, and digging without success under the sink for anything a former (or current, an unhelpful voice whispers) boyfriend might have left there. Makeshift ablutions concluded, he steps out and shoots a look at her bedroom door; she’s still asleep. Probably a good thing. Maybe it will give him some time to work out what the hell he appears to have gotten himself into.

The kitchen isn’t much bigger than the rest of this shoebox, and Flynn bangs his head on the door when he steps in. A cursory rummage of the fridge reveals almost no food; what does this woman live on, devoted zeal to academia and Red Bull? Then again, she is right in the final stages of trying to finish her dissertation, and did not need him crashing into her life like a… well. Bull.

She didn’t mind it last night, that unhelpful voice notes. Neither did you.

Flynn banishes it. He finally locates eggs, bread, and jam, makes toast and scrambled eggs, and after unearthing a canister of instant coffee, boils water and pours it into Lucy’s well-worn Stanford University mug. He’s almost finished, carrying it to the card table and setting it down, when he hears the bedroom door open. Drawn by the scent of food, Lucy comes shuffling in, hair tousled and loose, wearing pajamas and fuzzy socks, and her bleary eyes widen at the sight. “You made breakfast?”

“Least I could do, eh?” Flynn passes the plate over, and returns to the counter to whip up a second portion for himself. Lucy hesitates briefly, but accepts it. Sits down and starts to eat, as Flynn racks his brains for any light, ordinary conversation. Nothing occurs to him. Public relations and interpersonal skills have never been his forte; that’s why they send him on missions into hellhole war zones, where he can just shoot first and leave the talking for never. But the NSA is redistributing its assets these days, wants him on a few more domestic postings, dealing with industrial espionage, intelligence warfare and infrastructure sabotage, that kind of thing. It was in this capacity that Flynn came across the name Rittenhouse for the first time. His follow-up investigations have been very, very off the record.

“You don’t have any food,” he says, after he’s managed to scrape up some for himself. “Sofa’s on its way out too.”

“I’m sorry my crappy student apartment isn’t the Hilton.” Lucy gives him a cool look. “Anything else you’d like to complain to the front desk about?”

Flynn snaps his mouth shut, which he uses to chew the slightly blackened toast. They eat in silence after that, the air too tense in a way that means both of them are trying to pretend nothing out of the ordinary happened last night – which is difficult, given the sheer amount of weird shit. (That is indeed the technical term, Flynn would have her know.) Then Lucy wipes her mouth and stands up. “I need to go shopping, as you point out, and do some chores. So, for the rest of the day, are you…?”

There’s a clear question in her voice – how long is he planning to stay here, exactly? It’s valid, but he has no idea. He isn’t sure he shouldn’t already be gone. But if Rittenhouse drops by for a return visit, he knows he’d never shake that guilt. He doesn’t think they’d hurt her, even if Lucy clearly has no idea who she is. But he isn’t willing to take that risk.

Lucy vanishes to shower and get dressed, and Flynn, who has had quite enough of the sofa for forever, paces back and forth in the living room instead. God, this is surreal. He pulled her out of San Francisco Bay seven years ago, and she’s never entirely gone out of his thoughts since. He’s been a lot of places – Iraq, the Balkans, Switzerland, Egypt, and finally back home to Croatia for thirteen months before HQ directed him to the new post in the States – and yet somehow he’s ended up exactly back here. The jolt when he read Lucy Preston in the case file (he’s investigating Benjamin Cahill, a wealthy Silicon Valley businessman who plays all kinds of dirty pool, and Lucy… well, if she’d picked up that paper last night, she’d know) is one he won’t soon forget. It feels like… something. He doesn’t want to say fate, but he’s thought it more than once.

Lorena’s voice echoes in his head. For God’s sake, Garcia. Just go talk to the woman.

Flynn grimaces again. He’s known Lorena Kovac for a few years, in the rare interludes he’s been in Dubrovnik between assignments. They get on well – in fact, she’s about his only friend, as he has never been in either the right line of work or frame of mind to make them easily. He can sense that the feelings might be a little more than friendship on her part, and to be honest, if he’d met her sometime else, it would be easy for him to feel the same. Lorena is one of the only people he is comfortable with, lets down his guard, as if he can rest and enjoy himself. But with the ghost of Lucy Preston so stubbornly stuck in his head, he thinks it would be unfair to Lorena to try for anything else. Besides, ever since he started on this Rittenhouse manhunt, he’s had to cut off contact with her for her own safety. He has come across enough unexplained deaths, enough whistleblowers found hanged in their closets in apparent suicides, enough straight-out disappearances, to know what he is dealing with here. And might be the only man in the world who does.

Flynn paces a few more fruitless circuits until Lucy reappears, hair dark and damp, wearing her university sweatshirt and leggings. She grabs her car keys off the bookshelf and slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’m off to the grocery store,” she says. “See you later?”

Flynn grunts, opens the front door for her, and scans both ways before they step out into the hallway. They descend the stairs, whereupon they come across the three individuals he had a small chat with last night in re: their blatant idiocy and/or discourtesy in blasting rap music in a shared block of flats with thin walls. They all go white-faced, hasten to apologize to Lucy, and promise they will be quieter, as long as she doesn’t send her boyfriend over again.

Both Flynn and Lucy choke slightly at that, but manage not to say anything as they head out into the parking lot. As she reaches her beater of a Honda, Lucy looks up at him. “What exactly did you say to them?”

Flynn shrugs. “A word or two.”

Lucy eyes him for a moment, then unlocks her car and gets behind the wheel. Flynn thinks too late that he should have checked for a bomb underneath it before she started the engine, but she does not implode in a glorious fireball. She reverses out, not without a final glance over her shoulder, and he stands there a moment longer before going over to his own car, an unremarkable rental coupe with Washington plates. He does check for the bomb this time, earning himself a funny look from a passing power-walker, but he has more important things on his mind than whether a lot of grass-eating hipsters think he’s weird. Still, it’s clear. He gets in, turns on the radio, and drives exactly the speed limit, helped by the inevitable morning gridlock, back to his hotel in Palo Alto.

Flynn pulls in, steps out, and heads up to his room, which appears to be unmolested. He swipes in with his key card, goes to the safe, and spins in the combination, pulling out his Glock and stowing it back in his shoulder holster. He checked in here under a false name – John Thompkins – and paid in cash, but Rittenhouse knows something. Unless they were after Lucy for totally unrelated reasons last night, which is stretching coincidence but still possible. Still, Flynn doesn’t feel like taking chances. He unzips his suitcase, pulls out a pack of sterile wipes, and scrubs his fingerprints off everything he touched in the room, strips the sheets off the bed, and runs hot water over them in the shower. Housekeeping will think he’s just a nightmare guest. He is probably being paranoid.

Blanking of the room complete, Flynn goes down, checks out, and gets into the car again. Lucy has probably gone to the Safeway in Menlo Park, just a few minutes from campus, and after he fails to talk himself out of it, he heads in that direction. Turns into the shopping center parking lot, trawls up and down looking for a spot in the Saturday morning rush, and finally just manages to eke in between a giant Chevy Suburban on one side and a giant jacked-up pickup truck on the other. Fucking America. Everything has to be sprawling and enormous, arrogant and excess. Flynn works for it, and has dual citizenship thanks to his mother, but he’s spent too much time in the weeds and trenches of its imperial projects, seeing the grisly results of its policies and everything it spits out and leaves behind, to love it. He was born in former Yugoslavia in the seventies, his childhood was never what you would call luxurious, so perhaps there’s some ancestral Soviet premier inside him haranguing about the decadence of the West. Not that Flynn likes the fucking Russians any more, though he has family ancestry there too. Sired out of mortal enemies and belonging to neither. It makes a poignant kind of sense when you look at his life.

Flynn goes into the busy grocery store and gets a basket, buys a few essentials – if he is in for some sort of extended stay, he might as well provide for himself. He catches a glimpse of Lucy in the produce section, reassuring him that she has not yet been bundled off in an unmarked car, and makes sure she doesn’t see him. He hangs back until she’s bought her groceries and left the store, then pays for his and follows a few minutes later. Heads out, makes another stop at Target for a sleeping bag and air mattress, then drives back to campus and pulls in. Lucy’s car is there. He wonders if the rest of his life, or at least the foreseeable future, is going to be dedicated to checking off her whereabouts every five minutes.

Having locked the car and hoisted his bags, Flynn goes up to the residence hall, presses the buzzer to be admitted, and climbs the stairs to Lucy’s apartment. He knocks and so as not to startle her, calls, “Lucy, it’s me.”

After a pause, she opens the door and lets him in, somewhat surprised to see his purchases. Her eyebrows raise the most at the camping gear. “So you are staying?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not sleeping on that piece of shit couch again.” Flynn puts his bags down. “I could probably make do under a bridge, if I had to.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lucy says. “I’m not making you sleep under a bridge.”

They glance at each other again, eyes lingering just that beat too long, and Lucy coughs and turns away quickly, as if to disguise the color of her cheeks. She allows Flynn to store his perishables in the fridge, his toiletries in the bathroom, and sets about her chores with an air of determined normality, scrubbing and sweeping and vacuuming. Flynn feels like a bum sitting there and doing nothing, so he pitches in. It’s pleasingly and absurdly domestic. His jacket clanks as he hangs it on the hook, and Lucy’s eyes flicker to it. “You… got your gun?”

“Yes.” Flynn double-checks the safety is on, which it is, because he’s not an idiot. Not that he thinks Lucy is going to go play with it, but it makes him feel marginally better. Trying to be comforting, if perhaps not altogether truthful, he adds, “I don’t think you’re in any danger, but better than leaving it in the hotel room, either way.”

Lucy continues to look at him. Anyone could imagine that she must still have a thousand questions about the whirlwind with which he enters her life periodically, this de facto cohabitation situation, or anything else. Finally she says, “Is Garcia Flynn your real name?”

Flynn supposes this is a warranted question given what he does for a living, some of which at least she must have guessed. “Yes.”

“And you work for the U.S. government, but you’re originally from…” Lucy tilts her head, trying to guess. “Serbia?”

“Close. Croatia. My mother was American, though.” Flynn is impressed; people usually think either Russia or Hungary, though the more geographically challenged have come up with anything from Spain to Sweden. He doesn’t look Scandinavian, but Americans are idiots. He could return the favor with some getting-to-know-you questions, but frankly, he’s already read most of the information in the public domain about her. Not because he’s a stalker (he isn’t, right?) but because this woman has no idea who she really is, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s going to have to be the one to tell her. He hopes not, but the world has tended not to care a whole hell of a lot about Garcia Flynn’s hopes.

Lucy takes that in with a brief little nod, then bends down to pull the kitchen trash out and tie it off, put in a new bag, and haul the old one to the door to be taken out. Seeing that the chores are mostly done, she wipes her hands on her jeans. “I should go to campus, at least for a few hours. I could probably finish the section.”

“On Saturday?” Flynn is no stranger to working ridiculous hours himself, but even he thinks Lucy could benefit from a chill pill. “Nothing else to do?”

Lucy gives him another look, as if she can’t see him letting her loose to wander blithely around farmer’s markets or seaside promenades or what have you, and also suggests he is woefully underestimating her present stress level (for which, admittedly, he has done no favors). “Weekends aren’t really a thing for me right now.”

“Are they ever?” Flynn, again, is not one to talk. “What’s this dissertation about, anyway?”

“History and anthropology of American political movements.” Lucy winds up the vacuum cord and shoves it back in the closet. “Studying their developments from circa 1776 to the present day. My argument is that the country’s political philosophy, and a lot of its more troubling elements – racism, slavery, economic inequality, sexism, isolationism, etc – are much less driven by common populist ‘ignorance’ than people think, but have been deliberately constructed by long-term and elite schools of thought that are very solidly in the mainstream. I mostly focus on the nineteenth century, when these narratives got established, but I work both forward and back as well. I swear, it feels like I’ve read every obscure state paper or moral essay that’s ever been printed.”

In someone else’s mouth, this might have sounded like a brag, but Lucy says it almost apologetically, as if she knows her interest and obsession is unusual and wants to reassure him that he doesn’t have to share it. Flynn, however, feels quite the opposite. There’s a certain amount of irony in the fact that Lucy Preston of all people is arguing for the conscious creation of America’s dark side – if only she knew how much, and if only she knew from (not only, but certainly more than their fair share) who. “So what?” Flynn asks. “What do you conclude from it? Do you point out all the ways in which this asshole world has screwed the vast majority of everyone who’s ever lived on it? Or just sit back and say that’s not your job?”

“It isn’t my job.” Lucy looks at him strangely. “I’m a historian, I have an obligation to create a fair and accurate reflection of the past, to de-mythologize a lot of stuff that gets conveniently glossed over or ignored, but I can’t change it. The present isn’t perfect, but it’s ours. For good or bad, this is what we’ve come to, and if I can teach people to recognize the processes that created it, we can be more proactive about what we do in the future.”

“Can we?” Flynn stares at her incredulously. Smart as she is, this seems, from his point of view, intolerably naïve. “So you’re one of the historians who thinks we have to ‘let the past speak for itself,’ as it were? The past doesn’t speak. Historians are its ventriloquists. Refrain from moral judgment in the name of some pseudoscientific objectivity, and actually think that we can teach people not to be selfish and greedy and interested only in their own enrichment? I’ve worked – well, where I do for over a decade now. I’ve seen how the world gets made. We’re scared animals making stupid choices. History is the name that’s given to our ancestors’ stupid choices once they’re far enough removed. We’re never going to remember them accurately or honestly. So if that’s all you want to do, Lucy, you’re doomed.”

Lucy’s eyes flash back at him. “What? I shouldn’t even try, because the world is terrible and God is dead? Just throw up our hands and go home and embrace the void?”

“I didn’t say that.” Flynn takes a step. “But there’s no moral impartiality in what you do. This ‘we should hear both sides’, or ‘we can’t judge’ or ‘parts of it are unfortunate, but we shouldn’t wish it was different’ – it’s bullshit. Bullshit. You’re giving it a meaning and a justification it doesn’t deserve. Just another privileged wealthy white girl sailing through on Mommy’s coattails, are you?”

This sounds even nastier out loud than it did in his head, and the instant it’s out, he wishes he hadn’t said it. Lucy goes ice-white, jerking back as if he slapped her, and he can tell it’s a sore spot. Still, much as he wants to apologize, he barrels on like a juggernaut. “Tell me. Who’s your favorite president, Lucy? Who do you think has done the most for this country?”

Lucy chews her lip. She’s clearly considering ordering him to get the hell out, and she’ll take her damn chances with Rittenhouse. Instead she spits, “Lincoln.”

“Predictable.” Flynn sneers. “He was shot, of course, yes? So if we were there, somehow, and he was alive, he was in front of you, and then I shot him – you wouldn’t care at all, would you? It was supposed to happen. You wouldn’t lift a finger.”

“Why would – ” Lucy throws her hands in the air. “Why would you shoot Lincoln?!”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? John Wilkes Booth did it. It could be him, if you want. He comes in, you’re there, you see it happening. You could change it. But apparently, you wouldn’t.”

“You asked about my dissertation!” Lucy shouts. “So I told you, and all of a sudden I’m getting a lecture on moral relativism? What am I supposed to do? I’m one twenty-something graduate student, and you come after me as if all the terrible things that have happened in history are my fault? I don’t agree with them, I don’t like that they happened, but I can’t change that they did! So yes, I try to make better sense of them, and explain how they work together, and hope that the next time can go a little better, despite all the awful stuff humanity has ever done. I’m sorry if that’s not nihilistic or cynical enough for you, but you were the one who told me to carry on with history, remember? What did you think it would be, picket lines and pipe bombs? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the library.”

With that, she grabs her bag, keys, shoes, and sunglasses, throwing them on and storming past him to the door. Flynn is already feeling like a massive idiot by the time the door snaps shut behind her, and half-turns as if to follow and apologize, but his own pride has been stung and he doubts she wants to see him right now. Well, this is just wonderful. Finally return to the woman you’ve been thinking about for seven years, put her in danger, insult her intelligence and her morals, insinuate she’s a nepotistic freeloader, and make sure to remind her that her apartment is barely a step up from the Bates Motel. There may have been worse first impressions, but Flynn is having trouble coming up with any.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he kicks the doorstop, stubs his toe, figures he probably deserves that, and is just wondering if Lucy is expecting him to have cleared out by the time she gets back when, in his pocket, his phone buzzes. When he pulls it out, he sees to no surprise that it’s a restricted number, as are most of those that call him. He swipes to answer it and grunts, “Yes?”

“Morning to you too.” The voice on the other end belongs to a man known as Karl, but this is almost certainly not his real name. Flynn has never met him face to face, only over the phone, but Karl is his NSA handler, the shadowy source from whence Flynn’s assignments and transfers and periodic progress reports originate. The closest thing he has to a boss, in other words, and him calling out of the blue is never a good sign. “What the hell did you do last night?”

“I’m working on Cahill,” Flynn says shortly. “I’m fairly sure this doesn’t warrant a – ”

“Cahill? Benjamin Cahill? Jesus, Garcia. No. Drop that one, you hear me? Drop it.”

“Excuse me?” This puts Flynn’s hackles up. The NSA has always operated in, to put it charitably, a grey area of legality, and sometimes their targets deserve investigation and sometimes they don’t, but he can’t recall ever being ordered point-blank to close a case. There is obviously no organizational transparency, but things just go into the maw and stay milling around in there for months or years, to be pulled out again when Uncle Sam thinks they’re useful. Hell, the NSA has always thought that as much information as possible is better than too little, and Flynn definitely has a lot of nerve yelling at Lucy for compliance with the system, when this is what pays his bills. “Did you say drop it?”

“Yes. Cahill or anyone associated with him, you’re off rota.”

“Is he cleared now?” Flynn doubts it, given as he is (to the best of his knowledge) the only agent assigned to this, and he has barely started to tug at Cahill’s spiderwebs. “Or is this something else?”

“Garcia, I gave you a goddamn order. Drop the case. Destroy your phone and hard drive and anything else you have with information on it, then get a flight to LAX. Go to the Burberry store in the Tom Bradley International Terminal and ask for Winston. They’ll give you a briefcase, your new assignment will be in it. Is that clear?”

Flynn doesn’t answer. He should be welcoming this, perhaps, but every inch of him is resisting. “What new assignment?”

“I don’t think that’s important at this stage.”

“Why are you pulling the plug on Cahill?”

“Also not important.”

“I think it is.”

“Fine,” Karl says. “You wanna know? Because last night, whatever fucking idiotic thing you did lit up about a dozen Batsignals, and let’s just say, things started happening fast. Wherever you are, pal, you’re blown. I’m trying to save your ass. Get out of there.”

“If a little water on the anthill sets things in motion, that’s not bad, is it?” Flynn is not about to deny that he definitely did several fucking idiotic things last night, but the NSA does not usually react to interesting developments in its investigations by yanking its agents out of tender concern for their personal safety. Something is off about this. “It’s these Rittenhouse people, isn’t it? They’ve asked someone to make the heat die down. I didn’t know that the United States government was in the habit of taking those orders.”

In fact, Flynn knows perfectly well that the U.S. government will listen to anyone if enough money is involved, and he’s seen enough eye-popping figures to know that there are almost certainly more. If Lucy actually knew this – knew that Benjamin Cahill was her biological father, and there is an entire world that is being hidden from her – then maybe they would be getting somewhere. Not that Flynn has really done a bang-up job at presenting himself as a trusted confidante. “Who told you to do this?”

“Garcia, I’m not here to shoot shit. The briefcase will be in LAX in four hours. Text when you’ve gotten a flight.” With that, and leaving him no more time to get in a word in edgewise, Karl hangs up.

Flynn stares at the ceiling for a long moment. Then he says, “Fuck.”

Lucy has a harder time than she would like to admit getting focused enough to work. She’s opened her laptop and her notebook and taken down the books she was using yesterday, everything set up and ready to go, but she can’t type more than a few words before her concentration slips again and she finds herself reliving that stupid argument with Flynn. She is not a bad person. She’s not a bad historian. What did he expect her to do, embark on a single-handed crusade to miraculously correct all of humanity’s evil? She can’t do that, for obvious reasons. Yes, it sometimes seems trite and stupid to think that anything anyone does matters in the least, but Lucy has fought hard to hang onto the idea that it still does. She takes pride in teaching her students, in her own work, in what she is able to do. Flynn has no right to bomb back into her life and tell her she’s doing it wrong. No right.

It’s made even worse by the fact that while she was at the store earlier, she super-casually tossed the most discreet box of condoms she could find into her basket, then quickly grabbed several more toiletries she didn’t need so it didn’t look like it was the only extra thing she was buying. If she has been half-toying with the idea that there is something fated, destined, about his reappearance in her life, that romantic illusion has been swiftly disabused. He is dangerous, abrasive, elusive, obnoxious, and obsessive, and those are his good qualities. If she was going to keep him as a special memory, she shouldn’t have met him face to face.

After several minutes of staring at the screen have only made her more irritated, Lucy stands up with a huff and heads out of the library, down to the café, with her phone. She pulls it out and dials, then listens to it ring, waiting for it to be picked up. Then she says, “Hi, Mom.”

“Sweetie?” Carol Preston sounds surprised. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, fine. I just… I could use a little encouragement. This dissertation is kicking my ass, and – ” Lucy stops. It has actually occurred to her to ask if her mother has been lying to her for her whole life about her father. Just for a moment, and then it goes away. “I just feel like we haven’t talked very much lately.”

“You’ve been so busy, I haven’t wanted to bother you.” Carol pauses to cough. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to submit this semester?”

“Yeah. It’s really not that much left to do. I have to reference the last chapter, and finish it, and write a conclusion, but I can do it.” As ever when speaking to her mother, Lucy feels that she has to prove she’s doing enough work, she’s not slacking off, she really is trying her best. “Dr. Underwood thinks I’m on schedule, she’s going to be in touch with my exam date on Monday.”

“I just worry about you, Lucy.” Carol coughs again. “But if you’re sure…”

“Have you gotten that checked out yet?” Her mother has had a smoker’s hack for several years, but it seems to have gotten worse recently. “Mom, I keep telling you to go to the doctor, remember?”

“Lucy, now, don’t go fretting over me. I’m sure it’s just stress. Your sister really seems determined to stick to the sociology thing.” Amy Preston’s choice of major (and college – rather than following her mother and sister to Stanford, she’s part-timing at San Francisco State) has been a permanent source of contention with Carol. She insists that Amy will never get a job with a sociology degree, that it’s a soft option and not academically rigorous, and she just doesn’t understand where she went wrong with her. Why can’t she be more like Lucy? Lucy has had no problem being a good and dutiful Preston daughter.

“You know Amy is… Amy,” Lucy says, after a pause. No, if her mom has enough on her plate to boot, the last thing she’s going to do is add to it with Flynn’s ranting and raving. “My life isn’t really a lot to envy, and she’s always liked to do her own thing. Don’t be too hard on her, okay?”

Carol sighs. Then she says, “Is everything else all right?”

Lucy considers the answer to that question. There are a lot of things she could say to that. The one that comes out, of course, is, “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

Once she’s hung up, feeling shittier than ever for lying to her mom, she decides to grab some sustenance before heading up for another bash at her paper. She’s just collected her small latte and Boston cream donut when two men in ties and trench coats enter the café and glance around. This isn’t that unusual – Stanford is a professional workplace, after all, people come from all over the world and any number of backgrounds – but then they see Lucy. One of them strolls up to order a casual coffee, and the other drifts in her direction. “Miss Preston?”

Lucy goes tense. She can’t tell if it’s the same voice as whoever knocked on her door last night, claiming to be from FedEx, but she doesn’t like it. She offers a demure, close-mouthed smile. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

“Not personally. I apologize for the intrusion.” Without asking permission, Agent Smith seats himself across from her. “My name’s Jake Neville. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“What’s this about?”

“I’m from Homeland Security. We believe you may have recently encountered someone that could pose a public threat.” Neville reaches into his pocket. “Have you seen this man?”

Lucy has half-expected whose face will be on the photograph that is produced, but it still jolts her. “I – I’m sorry?”

“Garcia Flynn,” Neville says. “He’s worked for us for a while, but we have reason to believe he’s no longer listening to orders from high command, and may be increasingly turning rogue. He may also recently have approached you. This is a dangerous individual, Miss Preston, I very much need to emphasize that. Think Edward Snowden, but with extensive military training and a lone-wolf nature. If he’s slipped the leash, well…”

Jake Neville is, admittedly, not wrong, but Lucy’s hackles are up anyway. “So he works for Homeland Security?”

“Something in that area,” Neville says. “You understand the need for discretion.”

Lucy doesn’t answer. After their fight earlier, it’s certainly plenty tempting to turn Flynn over to whoever is looking for him – it doesn’t seem terribly surprising that he’s made enemies within his own department. She can’t even say what’s holding her back. But she smiles again and says, “I can’t help you. I haven’t seen him.”

Neville continues to eye her. Then he reaches into his pocket, takes out a plain white business card, and slides it across the table to her. “I’d be very interested to hear if you do.”

“What’s he supposed to have done, exactly?” God knows Flynn isn’t telling her, and Lucy isn’t above digging for a few answers, regardless of whether or not he wants to give them. Not that she’s expecting a real response, as it’ll probably be some mumbo-jumbo spook jargon. She smiles as guilelessly as possible. “Just so I know?”

“Don’t worry about that, Miss Preston.” Neville smiles patronizingly, in a way that makes her want to remind him she’s less than six months from being Dr. Preston. “Just call us. We’ll be around. All right then? We’ll see you soon.”

Lucy doesn’t know what else to say, and sits there like a lump as he gets up, rejoins his colleague in the coffee pickup area, and they roll out. The business card doesn’t have a name on it, just a number. She hesitates, then slides it into her pocket.

She scoffs down her latte and donut without tasting them, and is just about to venture once more into the breach when the library doors open again, and – she’s getting tired of this – a sleek, silver-haired man, also in a suit and cashmere scarf, walks in, looks around, and spots her. He smiles a square-toothed, white smile that probably made a cosmetic dentist in Monterey very rich and hurries over. Harassed final-year doctoral students are suddenly Stanford’s hottest commodity. “Lucy Preston?”

“Yes.” Lucy doesn’t offer her hand. “And you are?”

“My name is Benjamin Cahill.” He looks like the father in a stock photo, like a smiling middle-aged man in a prostate-medicine or erectile-dysfunction ad, explaining how Prozavaldiagra changed his life. He beckons to the black car that has just pulled up in the rotunda outside. “I was hoping we could talk.”

Wyatt Logan has now been standing an unsuspicious distance from the Burberry store in the Tom Bradley International Terminal for three goddamn hours, and something – call it his keen intuition from years of special forces training – is telling him that his target is not coming. Hell if he knows what’s going on. The brass has been even more close-mouthed than usual. Wyatt got a call this morning telling him to haul his ass up from Pendleton to LAX and be ready to capture a certain high-value mark. Said mark is dark-haired, male, about thirty-five years of age, tall, and speaks with an Eastern European accent. He is supposed to go into the Burberry store and get a briefcase, and then Wyatt is supposed to… arrest him without causing a scene and causing the terminal to go into lockdown, apparently. This is what you need Delta Force for. When he returned from Afghanistan, he didn’t think he was going to be busting small-time drug kingpins in LAX toilets. That’s gotta be what this guy is. Drugs, or illegal Russian cash, or something like that.

Wyatt shifts his weight. He has a bag and backpack, posing as a traveler whose flight has been delayed, but the departure boards are otherwise green and it’s going to look weird if he keeps hanging around. He’s made a few circuits so he’s not in the same place forever, but he doesn’t want to be out of sight of the store for more than a few minutes. He checks his phone and sees that Jessica has sent him a text of the perfect San Diego beach weather (which, to be fair, is most days of the year) that this last-minute assignment dragged him away from. They are still feeling out actually living together. They got married young like soldiers tend to do, and he’s been out of the country for most of it. This weekend was supposed to focus on reconnecting as a couple. Now he’s in frigging Los Angeles waiting for some dick who hasn’t even had the decency to turn up to be arrested, and it’s fair to say his patience is waning.

Just to be thorough, Wyatt waits another thirty minutes. One of the airport guys on golf carts drives past a few times; Wyatt hopes it is his imagination that he’s giving him the fish-eye. On the fourth round, though, it’s not. The hardworking employee of the American aviation system pulls over and says, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’m… waiting for a buddy to get in. We were on separate flights, he was supposed to be coming from San Francisco, but I don’t know what’s going on with him. Sorry I’m holding this pillar up, but it’s cool.” Wyatt flashes a rueful smile and pulls out his military ID, which tends to work wonders. “We’re in the service.”

The employee hastens to thank him, apologize for the trouble, and motor away, which buys Wyatt another half-hour. At the end of it, however, he’s officially calling it a wash. He walks out toward the bus stop, pulls out his phone, and hits speed dial number three.

“Yeah,” Wyatt says, when it’s answered. “He didn’t show. Something’s up.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Logan.” The man’s from Homeland Security. Wyatt thinks his name is Neville. “We’ll be expediting our arrangements.”

[thisiswhereidraw]

people dont know this but grace loves to leave gifts and positive notes in peoples lockers

she notices when people are feeling down or have seen them in a bad situation in school, like a confrontation with a bully or an embarrassing moment in class

sometimes she asks around what those specific people like or enjoy so she knows what gift to get them. when they ask she says “dont ask questions you dont want to know the answer to” better to give them an intimidating vibe than a suspicious one just to avoid further questions

she stays anonymous so people dont go asking questions because she likes to keep a low profile

one boy in her science class accidentally tripped and spilled (non-chemical) liquid over the teacher and he became a laughing stock. people called him H2 Dope for days

later on that week he found a cassette of his favourite band and a note that says how admiring his skills in science are

a girl got cheated on by her boyfriend and the blame was pitted on her

she arrived to school in fear of her locker being trashed but found it to be neat and tidy as it was yesterday with a choc chip cupcake and a note that reads how wonderful and powerful she is on her own and that she was more worthy than some dumb boy that cant appreciate a great girlfriend when he has one

another girl didnt get into the schools play and was so upset she lashed out onto her friends

the next week she found a list in her locker of local theatres holding auditions and a note that teaches her about how anger can blind you to hurt the ones you love. that girl started crying as she let the note fall to the floor

the students in her year level dont know how this even happened but it just….appeared one day. they dont know who it is or why its happening

some notes make people laugh. some make them cry. some make them reconsider themselves. sometimes it works. other times it doesnt. for these people it takes them time to realise and grace knows this

grace does this for her friends too. since she knows them personally, the researching part is a lot easier and she can give them a bit of extra treatment with her gifts and speaks more from the heart with her notes

they go around telling people what happened and when they come running to grace she keeps a straight face and smiles and nods politely “good for you, man!” good thing shes a great actress

there are times when its hard to write something down, either she doesnt know what to say, or the topic is so familiar and personal to her she cant stop shaking the pen in her hand and her eyes are being blurred as they sting with tears

everytime grace sees someone or hears a story or a rumour, she keeps note of them and remembers them for her next plan.

however grace knows that she cant keep track of everyone’s problems. sometimes she walks past a group of people without knowing that theyre getting into a brawl. sometimes shes not present for an argument between friends or she doesnt share the same class with someone who was getting yelled at by a cruel teacher. grace knows theres more problems that keep occurring at glass shard beach high, heck, she knows people could be dealing with things at home. shes cant be there for them and sometimes she feels this pain in her chest because once she realises how much of an impact she has been on her peers she wants to reach out to them but she cant and it hurts her and she needs to get a grip because shes been staring at her cereal for 10 minutes now and her dad is staring at her and shouldnt she be getting ready for school?

she sits in class thinking about her next plan, the teacher calls on her for not paying attention and she claims she was daydreaming again

if you ever see grace anywhere, chances are you catch her in the midst of her inner thoughts, eyes staring out into space and fingers tapping on whatever surface shes on subconsciously

grace can’t even remember how or when she even started. shes done it for so long she just accepted it as part of her agenda at school

eventually almost everyone in her year level has been visited by her act of kindness, and sometimes students in the year levels below grace have been visited by her

they share stories with each other, finding common ground in getting visits from this mysterious do-gooder, shes like the schools local cryptid

her friends get suspicious of her and wonder why she hadnt gotten any gifts or notes yet

she dismisses them and claims that she hasnt been in any bad situation yet. maybe she doesnt share any classes with them. and thats the end of the conversation

the stan twins hear these stories and at first stan makes an off-hand comment about them and ford just laughs with him but silently wonders when it could happen to him

its been two weeks since stanford got into a particularly brutal meeting with crampelter and his goons,  (if it wasnt for stan he would have ended up in hospital) and he begins to lose hope that this kind anonymous will ever visit him.

he gasps audibly when he finds tickets to the planetarium in his locker, and a note that reads his best qualities and states how hes not a freak and hes more than just his fingers and that he has no idea how loved and cared for he is (grace might have accidentally poured her heart out a bit too much in his note)

stan fails another test and gets a lecture and a few choice words from his father. stan and grace are outside waiting for ford to finish his chess club meeting and he casually mentions it to grace like its no big deal and stan was probably imagining things but he could of sworn he saw a glint in her eye when he finished talking. he had never seen that from her before but brushed it off when ford stepped out of the school building. then later out of the blue grace asks stan what comics he enjoyed

a few days later stan comes to school bummed out because how could he forget to buy his favourite comic?? he rushed to the store last night but the last copy was already sold. if the lecture he got from his father three days ago wasnt bad enough he was expecting most of his peers to be talking about the latest issue at school so he was already dreading the oncoming spoilers. what he was not expecting was to find a copy of “The Caper Boys” issue #18 along with a note that read how smart he is and that his talents lie more in areas that arent academic. that hes strong both physically and mentally and that hes definitely not a waste of space and hes absolutely worth it and hes enough hes enough hes enough (once again grace spills her heart onto the page)

the twins show each other what they found in their lockers and begin to realise that the author of these notes sound very familiar and only one person they know of speaks of them like that

they confront grace once day and tell her they know. they know about the gifts and the notes and how she stares off into space all the time and how shes always watching and listening and only she could afford things like tickets to the planetarium and that only she writes notes as genuine and kind as that and seriously who else would have told stanley and stanford pines that they were loved and cared for in this school did you really think we wouldnt catch on grace?

she stares at them for a moment and then the poker face she keeps putting on finally breaks as she lets out a small smile

“i knew you two were too smart for your own good”

they laugh with her as she talks about her little quests and how she got into so much trouble to get most of the gifts she had given

she continues her secret quests in cheering up the school. the twins are the only ones that know about this and sometimes they help her out. one day ford asks her if she had any reason to do all this. why go through the hassle? most of these people are assholes.

“dont question kindness” she responds

what did she mean by that? ford doesnt know but it sticks with him for longer than he can admit

no one else knows that grace is responsible. not the students not the teachers, no one, but you know what they dont mind because they like the mystery, the school is crummy enough as it is and everyone knows that anyone physically showing this much compassion will be the bullies next big target so maybe they should let it be a secret just to protect this person, whoever they are because damn if it isnt delightful to be surprised by the smell of that rose perfume that lingers after she visits and the sight of a folded up sheet of lilac paper, and theyll be damned if it stops all of a sudden

[qqueenofhades]

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.

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.”