#or: garcia flynn is an absolute disaster of a human being

[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.”

[squidproquoclarice]

Fine, now that you mention it I do want commentary on ch3 of MAWAMS, you absolute menace. Also, this is hella good imagery even though it hurt me emotionally so props on that: “Suddenly the whole thing seemed to turn as one single nightmare, like a thaumatrope, that 19th century child’s toy, the disk with a bird on one side and a cage on the other. Spin it fast enough and the two pictures combined, the bird suddenly trapped in the cage.”

I…have only myself to blame for this.  Though oh shit, where do I even start.  Buckle your seatbelt because this will take a while.Since you mentioned it specifically: the thaumatrope image seemed too on the nose to not use at this point.  Lorena and Lucy, watching them die, watching them happy in love with someone else.  There’s no way it ever ends well for him with either of them, because he’ll only fail them, and he doesn’t deserve to be happy anyway.  It’s all just one big blur of pain, the bird captured and stuck in its cage.I debated skipping the scene where Denise and Garcia go see Lorena.  But it’s an important thing for him.  He’s waited for four years to see her alive again and he deserved that moment, painful as it is.  I deliberately wrote it as somewhat spare in some ways–he’s not focusing on how beautiful she is to him, or looking for too long at her kids to see how much they may resemble Iris, for example.  He’s doing his best to keep the emotions in the box and lock everything down tight.I had Lorena come over because Lorena Valaitis is tough and nobody’s damn fool and seeing this strange car and people staring at her house, she’s gonna take notice and confront them.  And honestly, because Flynn sort of needed more than to just spy on her walking her kids to the car.  This hurts like hell, but it also helps him make more peace with her situation.  And on a meta level, Lorena deserves some Goddamn screen time and a voice of her own rather than being simply a concept inspiring  Garcia’s emotions, because she’s a really great character to write.As to the house, it made sense for Lorena to live there now.  I’d written it as an inheritance from her grandparents that the Flynns used when they were stateside with Lorena’s family.  They lived primarily in Croatia, in Split, due to Garcia’s work as an Eastern Europe NSA asset, but as I wrote in the vodka confessions, they were planning to move to Baltimore permanently in the future.  So it’s a house Lorena loved.  Of course this Lorena whose life centers even more tightly around her hometown will still live there.I had the murders happen in Baltimore because it makes more sense for him to get to Brazil, especially with virtually no money and no resources, if he’s on the proper side of the Atlantic already, and from the look of the cemetery and some the names on other headstones in 1x06, they’re seemingly buried in America, not Croatia, which is what originally made me go for Lorena likely being American.  (I think the “wife” on Lorena’s headstone is an angry accusation by the Valaitises of oh look, it’s a wife and daughter taken too soon as more domestic violence statistics!)And it’s another good and bad thing for Garcia.  Seeing the house again for the first time since he ran from Rittenhouse is not easy.  But seeing it as a place where this didn’t happen, where Lorena’s family lives and it’s peaceful and good, will actually do him some good in the end.  But for now the cognitive dissonance is most definitely a mindfuck.  The fact Lorena  doesn’t seem to have even that “huh, do I know you?” moment both helps and hurts.  This is when he knows it’s truly over between them, because it never was, and he’s glad because it means she’s safe.  He probably figures Emma will never go after her because this is more or less a punitive peace treaty forced upon him on the Lorena and Iris issue.  Rittenhouse kills this Lorena, it’s game on again for him to change history to get both Iris and his Lorena back. Garcia being Garcia, he sees how happy and safe she seems and thinks about how she’s so much better off, how this is the life she should have had and he couldn’t fully give her.  At this point he’s basically Pushkin’s Ya vas lyubil as a giant sad Croatian and saying his goodbye to her, and it hurts but he’s OK with it because he’s convinced she’s better off than she ever was with him.  Because yes, Flynn has a few self-respect issues.Denise, in that moment, probably is concerned for him as a friend but seriously in awe of how he can control himself in this situation and flawlessly bluff his way through it without even a flicker of the devastation showing.  Because Garcia Flynn, albeit a Human Disaster, is also a Very Good Agent.  Seeing how the two of them readily play off each other shows Garcia a lot about the teamwork they have in this timeline where they don’t have all the bitterness and mistrust that they do in the original.  It’s weird, yes, but he’s grateful for it anyway.It would have been way too easy for Tim to be an asshole, or for them both to be Rittenhouse, and then Garcia has quote unquote the “right” to try to rescue Lorena from this, blah blah.  I didn’t want to go that route. Tim’s a good man, a good husband, and a good father.  They literally have never heard the name Rittenhouse, except maybe there’s some place in Philly named that?He’s seen Lorena and he knows he has to accept this.  But Lorena’s the easy part.  Iris is the hard one.  Denise drags him to her favorite cop bar in the ‘burbs between DC and Baltimore where she used to live, and given they’re now on the wrong side of town to easily head back to Gettysburg, and it was probably at least a half hour or forty-five minute drive to go specifically to that bar, she’s clearly spending some time and effort on this.  And he notices that.   It’s what you do with someone who’s been a partner on this years-long mission, who’s become a close friend.  You drag them to your favorite bar, buy them a beer, and just sit with them.  If they want to talk, they talk.  If they don’t, you just silently support.Side note: in this timeline, I do think Denise and Garcia have also bonded over her being a lesbian WOC born of immigrant parents and him being an immigrant, bi, and demi (though I don’t think he has the word to describe the latter–it’s maybe Lucy or maybe even Jiya that defines it eventually) and being in a profession that’s not always exactly the most friendly to non-white, non-straight, and non-native born.  And prior to noticing him pining for Lucy, she really was trying to think of a nice woman or man to set him up with.  ;) He’s trying to make peace with it so he can carry on, but he’s also kicking his own ass that he handed Emma that information because he so desperately needed an ally.  Though notice it doesn’t turn into paranoia: he doesn’t start to regard Denise with suspicion.So: Lorena is fine, but Iris is forever out of his reach.  He realizes his mother was wrong–you do have to find a way to let go, somehow, eventually.  There’s no hope for Iris.  The best he can do is not make himself a worse man trying to bring her back. But he’s struggling really hard to let go, and not feel like he’s failed her as a father. He’s got a clean slate, and Lorena’s happy, but he’ll have to live knowing he owes that to Emma.  Fine.  Rittenhouse is going to burn for this, and Emma especially, because as angry as he was in 2x07 at her betrayal, it is now 100% personal between them.  But Garcia being Garcia, and still so used to being alone and without support, he starts wandering back towards the Dark Side. That sort of cold steely rage we saw from him in season 1: Only the mission matters.  You don’t.  He’s good for killing things. All right then.  Bring it on.  He pushes himself through range clearance, and then when they get back to Gettysburg, he goes right to the punching bag to go push the injured shoulder exactly like Abby Kovac told him not to do.  Because he can’t be weak when the next mission happens.  And yeah, he’s got a few frustrations to work through right then and punches and kicks sound like a great idea.He couldn’t save Lorena or Iris.  Rufus died right in front of him.  He almost got killed himself, and he’s seeing that it was a very severe injury and he’s not 18 and able to just bounce right back from it.  And emotionally off balance as he is then, he stumbles onto the next part of it: he can’t be less than back to normal on the next mission, because he absolutely, positively, 100%, cannot fail Lucy.  He can’t lose her.  Can’t watch her die.  Realizes he almost did in Chinatown.He’s not quite at Sao Paulo levels of emotional breakdown, or season 1 levels of closed-off rage, but he’s definitely Not In A Good Place.  And he’s pushed himself so hard he’s exhausted and can’t even punch anymore.  And it’s then that Lucy shows up.  (Actually, she’d been standing there for a few minutes already trying to figure out how to handle this, and him backing off gave her the opening she needed.) And dammit, Lucy, your timing is impeccable because you’re just what’s needed here.  She came, because as much of a screwup as he thinks he is, somehow she does care.  He manages to calm down a little, enough to say he’ll go get cleaned up.  They’ll talk, and he’s hoping that somehow, she’ll say the right thing as she usually does, and show him a different way.  Denise tried, Jiya was sympathetic, but as usual, it’s really only Lucy who has that deep enough bond to get through to him when he’s on the edge of the void.

ANYWAY.  Anyone else want to join the Denny’s parking lot fight?

[qqueenofhades]

There it is! I've been trying to figure out what Gabriel is being jealous about since c.11/12. If he's jealous of Flynn because Gabriel's also falling for Lucy; or if he's jealous of Flynn for having someone who adores him in spite of everything; or if he's jealous of Lucy because she has Flynn's love & devotion. I feel like it's a tumultuous mix of everything. But if I were Gabriel, estranged from my brother and denying missing him for centuries, I'd be incensed if some newbie shows up in my

my ancestral domain, and effortlessly commandeers my brother’s attention and loyalties. Yeah, that’ll definitely cause some existential crisis, wrestling with multipronged jealousy! Hope we’ll get to see a Gabriel POV somehow. Why are you making these trashy vampires so relatable?! I feel their pain! And that goodbye hug he gave Flynn?! Oh, Gabriel, Flynn misses you, too! I can’t wait to see how you’re going to fix things between the brothers! Thanks for gifting the fandom with this gem!

Ahahaha. So, uh, who wants a shit ton of Gabriel meta, because I have Many Feelings about this trash man and his Feelings and his general Mess-ness? Which we could probably have seen coming, but anyway?

So…. yes. We learned more about Gabriel’s human life this past chapter, which was that he had a wife, but he was a really crappy husband and wasn’t there for her when their children died and only cared that she hadn’t given him an heir and (like most Roman aristocratic men) was not in the least faithful to her. And he now realizes just how lonely she was and what he put her through, and still feels guilty about that, because he himself is so lonely that he can’t stand it and has been that way since 1762 (when his son was murdered and the Matej disaster happened and he was permanently estranged from Flynn). Gabriel clings to his mask and persona of being super successful and rich and cultured and living in Paris and working as an art dealer with billionaires and museums and so on, and he speaks tons of languages and does charity work and makes everyone else feel inadequate about themselves. So to the outside, everyone thinks he’s perfect and successful and great, but…. this man has been a solitary, heartbroken, bereaved mess who barely speaks to his family for 250+ years, lost his son, lost his brother, lost his father, and is completely unable to fix that and just isolates more. His only real company has been Houdini, who lives with him in Paris and works as his butler, and he’s had… half a relationship with his niece Jiya, which is fraught for various reasons (I wrote them in this fic prompt). But really. That’s it. He’s very, very alone despite the glitz and glamour and money.

Then he goes to Sept-Tours because Garcia has brought a goddamn witch home, because Maria called him in a panic, since the family blames witches for preventing them from rescuing Asher from the Nazis, and it’s just this…. mess of things that have never been resolved and which brings out the most painful parts of their pasts. Because we’ve also learned that turning his son Christian in the 9th century was a) when Gabriel finally understood the loss of Iris and the pain that was driving Flynn to get revenge, and b) when Flynn himself became human again and stopped being this violent bloodthirsty out-of-control force of chaos, who until that point had required all of Asher and Gabriel’s efforts to hold back. So Christian was this thing that healed their family and he was in some ways Flynn’s son too, even if he couldn’t face up to actually being a father right thing or really having it or anything else after losing Iris. And that was when Gabriel saw something different in him and they bonded very quickly and it was literally almost overnight after centuries of Flynn being, well, the height of Garbage Flynn and acting like a wrecking ball.

And after that came Gabriel and Garcia’s medieval knight days, where they were super close and together all the time and fighting together and having adventures and whatever else and… they loved each other so much and Garcia gave up his chance of finishing Michael Temple in 1307, after they killed Gerbert of Aurillac, in order to save Gabriel’s life. Even if Garcia never agreed to Gabriel’s threesome shenanigan suggestions (except for a memorable few times) because he is a turtle allergic to getting laid, they were each other’s everything – as Gabriel calls him, “my companion and my soul.” They resented Wyatt joining the family in 1179 because they felt that they were fine as they were, they didn’t need anyone else, and Wyatt never really felt accepted by them or included in their activities (which was why he became bros with Christian instead). That of course still plays out now when they’re all estranged from each other, because they never made a proper effort to include Wyatt or tell him anything, and it’s biting them in the butt.

Then of course came the eighteenth century, and the Matej tragedy, which Gabriel blames himself viciously because he chose Garcia and Garcia’s lover and committing active treason for seven years, over the entire rest of the family, and it got his son killed as a result. There are just so many layers to that betrayal and to that heartbreak and the way he feels it can’t ever be mended. Because Garcia still tried to save Matej after he was shot, and turned him into a monster because the siring went wrong, and Gabriel had to kill him as a result. After that, Gabriel and Garcia had an almighty battle where they almost killed each other for real (it’s noted that they both still have scars from that fight) and their relationship just… absolutely never recovered. They went from being together every waking moment to barely seeing each other for decades at a time, because they couldn’t face or come to terms with the scale of the emotional and physical damage. Then Flynn turned Jiya in 1888, and Gabriel is like “well that’s nice you get to have a child again when you’re the reason I lost mine,” and then Asher gets murdered by the Nazis in 1944, which is the last straw for this poor family since Asher held them together through most of this, and….yeah.

So by the time Lucy gets there, Gabriel is being forced to face his darkest deja-vu (because the last time Garcia brought a lover to Sept-Tours, obviously everything went to hell) and is exasperated with Flynn for doing it again and afraid that it’s going to be a repeat of last time.  But then, because he is a Trash Tragedy Boy and they have a type, he can’t help falling for Lucy too, and yet she has marched into their house and effortlessly wrapped Flynn around her finger, and he has resentful feelings about that. Like, why does she get to have that when I can’t? Why does this outsider, this witch, get this and bring this danger and we’re still going along with it? Because Gabriel misses Flynn until he can’t stand it, but he also just can’t forgive everything that happened with Matej, and they’re both so terrible at talking about their feelings and they are both so hurt that they just can’t fix these cumulative decades/centuries of estrangement and solitude and pain. Gabriel loves Flynn to distraction and he has for 1100+ years, but that’s also why he can’t just handwave away the consequences of what happened – even while realizing that he’s about to do it again, he’s about to pick Flynn’s side and Flynn’s war over all the more sensible options, even after what it cost him last time. And he just… can’t deal with that. And he’s been hurt by Temple, and he’s bitterly jealous of Flynn and Lucy getting together, and… yeah.

So the answer to your question is definitely “all of the above.” He’s jealous of Flynn and he’s jealous of Lucy and he’s jealous of them together and he’s heartbroken over what he’s lost and the way he feels he’s the biggest failure in the whole family, because he’s the oldest son and the head of the family and the grandmaster of the Knights of Lazarus and he has so many talents and so much money and yet…. he has still let this happen. He has no one to turn to, he can’t fix things with his brother who he loves more than anyone in the world, he is exasperated at said bonehead brother for starting this mess with the witch, he has feelings for the witch that he did not expect at all, he just lost it when she was kidnapped and was willing to do anything to save her, he’s been badly hurt by Temple, and it is just So Many Degrees of Nuclear Mess. So Many.

…anyway. Yes. My Gabriel Feelings are legion, and he has acquired quite a fan club, which pleases me. We will have to see what the hell these idiots do now.

[qqueenofhades]

TAW c.7 is my new all-time fave! I think it surpassed my 12hour re-read record in just half the time! (Record formerly held by your own work: S&SM c.17) If TAW was an album, I’ll have c.7 on repeat! Each paragraph is a gem! I certainly couldn’t get over the fact that trash vampire Flynn gave himself a pat on the back and convinced himself that he’s “doing rather well” on that flight over to Poitiers! But he’s been a relatable garbage fire here. I felt for him when the rest of the fam was being..

..hard on him for managing to out-Wyatt Wyatt (gosh, so many brilliant little things!). Having almost the entire clan show up for his latest misadventure & treating it as the family emergency of the century was hilarious & scary, because I already love the de Clermonts & all their adopted creatures - but again, I feel bad for Flynn, history suggests his good intentions didn’t always pan out for the better. I am relating to your garbage-fire-vampire!Does that make me flaming nuclear trash,too?LOL

I am delighted to hear this. Especially since I feel like maybe four people are reading that fic, two of whom are Christine and Mads, but oh well. I’m having far too much fun anyway.

Poor Flynn. He…. he is really trying hard, I’ll say that much for him. Yet he has the utterly wrong idea about the situation/what is going on/what Lucy wants, and as such, is industriously digging himself into as big a hole as humanely (vampirically) possible. He also has some painful backstory (because it’s Flynn, and he is a Tragedy Boy) which involves the family and the last person he loved, and yes, it is a mess (as you say, his good intentions have super backfired on them in the past). But I am enjoying the absolute hell out of getting to write him as part of a Disaster supernatural family, with mother and brother(s) and so forth. And all the gratuitous medieval nerdery and historical magic.

Anyway, I have started chapter 8, whereupon we will see more of a) Wyatt back in Venice being like Oh God What Did He Do Now, Temple being the Worst, and possibly also more Anton Sokolov, b) the de Clermont clan trying to figure out what the hell to do with this witch in their midst, c) Houdini flirting with Lucy at least 50% to give Flynn internal crises, and d) Garcia/Gabriel brother feelings. So yes.