#and not just take the word of random internet strangers as objective truth without further investigation

[cemeterything]

okay fine i'll read homestuck. whatever. i've cracked i can't take it anymore i need to fuck around and find out.

[qqueenofhades]

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

please at least try to look surprised: this is now a multi-chapter. find part one here, find it on AO3 here.

“Yeah, no,” Noah says. “That doesn’t sound slightly weird, Lucy. That sounds full-on, balls-out insane.”

Lucy doesn’t answer immediately, concentrating on chopping the carrot and not her finger. They’re making dinner together, as Monday is the only night of the week that their schedules coincide long enough to let them both out at the same semi-reasonable hour, and she tries to comfort herself with the familiar routine, the savory smell in the kitchen (it’s barely two-butt-sized, but they make do) and Noah’s obviously very logical contention that the whole thing was either a bad-taste joke, some actor doing an ambush-unsuspecting-people-and-film-their-reactions piece of performance art, or a sicko trying to scout her out to get close, judge the possibility of gaslighting her into thinking they know each other. All of this, and anything else, is about a hundred times more likely than whatever Garcia Flynn was trying to claim. Anything.

“Honestly,” Noah goes on, scraping the diced leeks off the cutting board and into the pot, “I think we should call the cops. The guy talked about killing people? Thinks you gave him information for it? He’s not stable. I want to know right away if he comes back, okay?”

“He said he wasn’t going to.” Lucy finishes the carrots, then ducks down to check how the bread is doing. “I don’t know why, but I. . . kind of believed him.”

“Why?” Noah gives her a funny look. “You don’t actually know this guy, do you?”

“Of course not! What, you think that I’ve known this random crazy man all along and haven’t said anything about it, and am conspiring with him in whatever he’s up to?” Lucy is hurt. “Thanks!”

“Honey, no, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just worried for your safety. Are you sure we shouldn’t file a restraining order?”

“Like I said. I got the feeling he meant it. That he was going to leave and not come back.” Why this still should hurt at all, hours after her brief, silent breakdown in her office, Lucy doesn’t know, and decides not to think about. “Anyway, how was your day? Anything thrilling happen on the orthopedic surgery floor?”

Noah gives her a slightly odd look, as this determined change of subject clearly isn’t doing anything to disabuse his notion that she’s repressing her feelings again (she’s not repressing, she’s just dealing with things, things she can handle, what’s in front of her). But he doesn’t push it, they stir the stew and set the table, pull the bread out of the oven, and break open a bottle of whatever is next up the wine scale from Two-Buck Chuck (Five-Buck Clive?) They chat more or less as normal, but Lucy doesn’t tell him about the flash drive that Flynn gave her. She knows she should, so he can suggest that she do the right thing and either destroy it, or hand it over to the cops as evidence when Flynn inevitably turns up in the news for doing something stupid and/or dangerous. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even know why.

While Noah is taking a shower, Lucy opens her laptop and Googles “Garcia Flynn.” She doesn’t get much; nothing, in fact. Right, because it’s probably an assumed name, something he’s picked to cover his tracks. But just to be thorough, and on a whim, she Googles “Lorena Flynn,” as she recalls him mentioning that name. This does turn something up. A Facebook page, that while it is set to private and she can’t get all the details, at least gives a location: Dubrovnik, Croatia. Croatia – she supposes that could explain the accent. And it’s a bit surprising that even this much proof of his story exists, when she was prepared for it all to be fictional. But then, all the best lies have a kernel of truth at the center, that bit to give them their veneer of plausibility. He could have done his research, borrowed real people to support his story. What that is, and why that is, Lucy still has no idea. She stares at Lorena’s picture. An elegant, classically attractive woman, looks like an old Hollywood film star a bit, dark waves of hair and designer sunglasses. She doesn’t look like the kind of woman who’d marry a lunatic. But then, of course, that is hardly the wisest metric to go by. The best ones can bury it the deepest inside.

There’s a sound in the hall as Noah gets out of the shower, and Lucy jumps and quickly closes the window, like a kid looking at Those Pictures on the internet while their parents’ backs are turned. She’s not doing anything wrong, objectively speaking. She’s just covering her bases, performing due diligence. The sort of things historians do, when faced with a mysterious individual who needs identifying before the paper can proceed. Ordinary.

“Hey.” Noah sticks his head into the living room, towel around his waist, wet and shirtless. “You still working? Come on, it’s only Monday. You gotta pace yourself.”

“I – yeah, just checking something.” Lucy shuts the laptop and smiles. “Sorry.”

“You wanna join me for, you know?” Noah waggles an eyebrow. “A little night music?”

“I – ” The words I have a headache actually almost pass her lips. “I’ll just be a minute, Noah, okay? Go on, get into bed, I know you’ve had a long day too.”

He gives her a second, slower look, as this answer, while objectively ordinary and acceptable, is – when considered with the rest of the day’s events – decidedly evasive. But he pauses, then nods and withdraws, heading back into the bathroom to get dried off and changed into his pajamas. Lucy waits until she hears the bedroom door shut and the TV click on, then puts down the computer and clenches her fists, furious at herself. Whatever this is, whatever effect it’s had on her, she has let it go on more than long enough. She can write it off as anything she wants, any angle she wants to put on it about sick mom or work stress or wedding planning headaches, but she’s completely thrown, off-balance, and has no idea how to regain it. Unless she does something, well, incredibly stupid, and anything further with Garcia Flynn whatsoever is going to fit that description to a tee.

She fishes in her pocket and pulls out the flash drive. Opens the computer back up and plugs it in, wondering too late if it’s going to download some kind of virus, hold her hard drive for ransom, something like that. The only file on it is a Word document. For Lucy.

Lucy hesitates. She distinctly remembers him saying something about it not being easy to look at the answers, and that she had better be sure she wants them. You’d think, if he was trying to recruit her into whatever con he’s playing, that he would insist she read it. Unless this is some sort of reverse-psychology trick designed to fake her into it. That’s it, isn’t it? So it looks as if she decided to do it on her own?

Good god, is she ever overthinking this.

Lucy stares at the document for a frustrated moment longer. Then she can’t bring herself to click on it, closes it, and ejects the drive, getting up to hide it in her purse. If he turns up in the news for unsavory reasons in the next few days, she’ll hand it over to the police. Otherwise, that is the end of this.

That is the end of this.

Lucy doesn’t sleep terribly well that night, and by the time she wakes up, Noah is already gone; he works the buttcrack-of-dawn shift on Tuesdays. She groans, silences her alarm, and rolls out of bed to get ready, remembering to make breakfast this time since she doesn’t want to rely on the charity of crazy strangers for Starbucks. It’s as she’s standing in stocking feet, gulping down toast and checking her phone, that she glances out and sees a black car parked outside the house.

She thinks nothing of it, at first. It’s a public street, after all. But after she’s brushed her teeth and has put on her jacket, double-checking she has her papers and her notes, she heads out to her car and gets in, determined not to act as if she has anything to hide. She pulls out without incident, and has almost made it to the end of the block when, in her rearview mirror, she catches sight of the car backing out as well and rolling casually down the road after her.

Lucy’s hands tighten on the wheel. They are not, she reminds herself, following her. This is still within the realm of allowable coincidence. And if they are on a stakeout looking for people that, say, their crazy suspect might have recently made contact with, she could, again, just hand them the flash drive and probably do everyone a favor. She merges into morning traffic on the Bayshore Freeway and determinedly puts it out of her mind.

The rest of the day is more or less normal. She’s still a bit distracted at her lecture, but manages to bull through it. She spends the afternoon battling through her inbox and doing admin; there is a history department meeting later, but she can probably skip it. They email the minutes around anyway, and she wants to talk to her sister.

Lucy heads out just in time to catch the evening rush, sits drumming her fingers on the wheel for some interminably long interval, and finally makes it to her mom’s house in Mountain View. This is Google/Facebook/Silicon Valley Nerd HQ, so if the family hadn’t owned the house for a few generations already, they definitely would have been far outpriced by now, and as Lucy pulls into the driveway, she notices that the in-home nurse’s car is parked by the detached garage. She isn’t going to be able to just drop in and talk to Amy without getting the report on her mom as well, so she should probably brace herself for that. Okay.

Lucy parks and gets out, heading up the walk and knocking. Amy opens the door with her headphones still around her neck; she does a weekly podcast on politics and feminism and liberal activism, that kind of thing. She has a few regular listeners and even some advertisers, though she hasn’t figured out how to monetize it consistently, hence why (among other reasons) she’s still stuck at home as the primary caregiver for their mom.  Lucy would invite her to move in with her and Noah, but their apartment is small enough as it is, and however close she and Amy are, it is still awkward to third-wheel with your big sister and her fiancé. She knows it’s hard on Amy, though, that this has fallen so disproportionately on her. Mom used to nag her to get a real job, do something with her life, not just dink around on the internet. Follow Lucy’s example. Be more like Lucy. Study hard, like Lucy. Amy’s been half in her shadow most of her life, seven years younger. Always encouraged Lucy to do her own thing more, to take that job at Kenyon College, rather than staying beholden to Stanford and Mom’s legacy there. But just as Amy can’t quite leave, uncomfortable as the fit may be, Lucy can’t either.

“Hey, you.” Lucy hugs her sister and follows her inside to the kitchen. “How’s – how’s Mom?”

“Same. As usual.” Amy attempts a shrug. It sounds horrendously callous to say that you wish something would happen, something would change, when that means your mother is going to die – as domineering and inescapable as Carol Preston could be, her daughters do love her. “Aren’t you usually busy later on Tuesdays?”

“Yeah. I needed to. . . to ask you about something, actually.” Lucy sits down at the table as Amy makes them hot chocolate. With that, not knowing how to do this except straight out, she launches into the strange story of Garcia Flynn and his visit yesterday, the flash drive he gave her, his insistence that they used to know each other, and the rest. Even the car this morning, and her brief and doubtless mistaken insistence that it was following her. It spills out of her, all of it.

Amy listens impassively, though her fingers tap on her mug. She doesn’t tell Lucy that she’s crazy, which would be the obvious solution. Then she says, “So what do you want to do?”

“I have no idea.” Lucy rubs her temples with her cold fingers. “I can’t deny that what he said kind of. . . I don’t know what it was, just that it almost felt like it might explain something. But, well, obviously he was a few branches short of a tree. I have enough crap going on in my life right now. I don’t need to get involved in this.”

“But,” Amy says, with her usual knack of cutting through Lucy’s evasions and rationalizations and getting to the heart of a situation. “You want to.”

Lucy looks up with a wry, faint smile. “It’s a mystery. You know how I am about those.”

“Yeah, but you usually work on historical ones, stuff that took place years ago and can’t turn up or develop in unexpected ways now. Live mysteries are a little more dangerous, Lucy. Especially, by the sound of things, this one.”

“Pretty much.” Lucy sighs. “I’m not going to do anything dumb. I just. . . he seemed really convinced that it was something to do with me, and I. . .”

“You like to help people,” Amy says. “Even crazy ones who turn up out of the blue at your office one day. Did you read whatever it was he gave you? His Zodiac Killer letters, or whatever?”

“No. I’m. . .” Lucy hesitates. “I’ll do it later this evening,” she says, unsure if that is a lie or not. “I should get going if I don’t want to sit on 280 all night. Love you, Pooh Bear, thanks for letting me vent.”

“You’re welcome, Piglet.” Amy manages a grin. “Hey, it’s a lot more interesting than anything going on in my life right now.”

Lucy nuzzles her sister’s head affectionately – what would she do without her? – grabs her purse, and heads out of the house, oddly relieved to escape without being required to pay court on her mother. She opens her purse, fishes for her keys, and –

“Miss Preston?”

She looks up with a considerable start, almost dropping them. It’s a guy in a black suit and tie – not Flynn, though – who couldn’t look more government-agent if he tried. “Can I ask you a few questions? Briefly, I promise.”

“Excuse me? No, you can’t. This is private property, by the way. So you are here. . . why?”

He smiles. “I’m sure your mother wouldn’t mind.”

This is an odd enough statement that it catches at Lucy briefly, but does not engender in her any further desire to cooperate with him. She turns her back and starts to get into her car, only to discover that there’s another one of them leaning against it. “Just a minute, Miss Preston, that’s all we ask. We can make this quick, you’re not in any trouble. So if you’d – ”

“No, I’m not interested in it, and I’d like to be on my way please.”

“Miss Preston – ”

“Hey,” a voice says from the sidewalk. “There a problem here, gentlemen?”

The agents (since that is clearly what they are) glance up with a start, to see some guy out for an evening stroll unwisely deciding to insert himself into their business. He’s cute in a boy-next-door kind of way, clean-cut, blue-eyed, though the faint whiff of Budweiser is just enough to make Lucy wonder if he’s located his courage recently and in liquid form and has no idea what he’s walking into. He has a certain way of standing, however, a cool and careless ease, that makes her think that she wouldn’t want to pick a fight with him. As the agents stare at him, he repeats, “Problem?”

“No, sir. None. You step along and enjoy your evening.”

He grins. A bit sardonically. Looks at Lucy. “Ma’am?”

Lucy gives him the please-make-these-assholes-leave look that every woman has had to perfect, and he picks up on it right away. He steps forward, pulls something out of his pocket – a badge or something, she doesn’t see what exactly it’s supposed to be, but either way, it makes the agents scowl at him, but decide not to push their luck. They slope off into their unmarked car – though Lucy wishes that she could be sure that’s the last time she’ll see them – and she glances at her unexpected rescuer. “I – well, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.”

“Again? Ma’am? Really?”

“Sorry.” He shrugs, holds out a hand. “Wyatt Logan.”

“Lucy Preston. Nice to meet you.”

They shake. She’s tempted to ask him what exactly he showed the Bad News Bears to make them leave, but it’s also not something she’s liable to get a straight answer for. “So what, you just take nighttime walks in case you need to swoop in and make some creeps clear out?”

He shrugs. “No. That was by accident. Better than sitting at home by myself, though. I – ” He pauses as if about to say something, and stops. “You have a nice night, m – Lucy.”

“Thanks.” She smiles at him quickly, as he continues on his way, she glances after him for a moment with a strange, fleeting sense of déjà-vu, and then gets into the car. It strikes her that he has the same sort of lingering sadness around him as Flynn, a ghost that walks quietly next to him and breathes his air and colors all his shadows, a man who has been sitting and drinking in an empty house, not to feel good or to enjoy himself or share the burden, but simply to forget about it just for a little while, to breathe without the ironclad ache in his chest that is there the rest of the time. She wonders suddenly if he’s lost a wife too. No reason. Just occurred to her.

She gets into the car, not without a final look around. As if she’s expecting something, somewhere, someone, anyone to be waiting to stop her.

They’re not. She drives home. Checks around before she gets out. No one there.

No one there.

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

Garcia Flynn has done a stupid fucking thing.

(Rather, he thinks bitterly, like the rest of his stupid fucking life.)

He didn’t even realize how much until last night, when he’s sitting in some dim-lit, no-account bar in Las Vegas (looks slightly different from ’62, though the showgirls and the bright lights and the bad decisions never change – seems like a good place for him) drinking as much as the bartender would serve him, and someone slides onto the creaky chrome stool next to him. “Excuse me. Mr. Leslie?”

Flynn starts slightly, as that was the name he used to use for his intelligence work – Leslie was Errol Flynn’s middle name, and he used to wish so hard to be that Flynn when he grew up, the cowboy and swashbuckler and adventurer, and not this one, this. . . God, whatever it is, he doesn’t know. Still, though, he’s not in the mood to play. In Croatian, just to be an ass, he says, “I don’t speak English. Go away.”

“I think you do.” The man answers him in the same language, making Flynn’s head spin sharply, and gives half a shrug, as if to say that this didn’t have to be hard. He is clearly unaware that he is dealing with the master of doing things the hard way. “Can we talk?”

“I can’t stop you.” Flynn throws back another shot, which burns all the way down. He won plenty of drinking contests against Russians, which is no mean feat, but he feels almost light-headed, whether from a combination of drinking on an empty stomach or – fuck, he knows well enough, now that he’s a vagrant who remembers a world that nobody else does, who has saved his family and lost his soul, and has nothing and no one else to live for. “Or at least, it would be messy if I did. Do you really want to make them stay late mopping you off the floor?”

“Funny. Still a funny man. Not that I’d think you have any reason to be.” His interrogator is a completely ordinary-looking sort (but then, they all are). Looks vaguely Slavic, though if that’s the reason for the Croatian, which they are still speaking, who knows. “We know what you did.”

“Congratulations.” Flynn wonders if the bartender will give him another. “What did I do?”

“You stopped the hit on your family. Destroyed the Mothership. Altered the timeline back to its original format – almost.” The man – no, the Rittenhouse agent – looks at him with calm, cool eyes. “Left a few snags here and there. But for the most part, yes.  Nobody remembers, because technically, none of your adventures ever happened. You never stole the machine, and they never followed you. So as a result, nothing you did to us in the past ever happened. We’re still here, just as we always were. We’re still angry, and stronger than ever. And you just destroyed our time machine.”

At that, Flynn almost does go for his gun, stopped barely in time by the knowledge that if he opens fire even in a dive like this, he will spend at least the next night in jail, and it’s going to be difficult to get out even without quite all of his previous criminal record. Stealing the Mothership wasn’t the only thing he’s done on the wrong side of the law, just the most spectacular, though it’s true he’s mostly broken said law with government immunity. He wonders if the NSA will object to one of their assets being swept up like this, or even if he still works for them. Nothing makes sense. But he is now sitting here being blackmailed by fucking Rittenhouse, and if they think he’ll take that lying down –

“Did you,” he growls, this time in English, “have a point to make?”

His interrogator shrugs. “Did I? You know, we might have let it slide if you’d just gone back and saved your family. Even thanked you. After all, without that, you never steal the Mothership, those three never get involved or find out about us, we’re able to complete our launch and acquisition at Mason Industries, no mess, no foul. But then you had to both destroy the Mothership, in which we had invested a great deal of time and capital, and you had to give Lucy Preston information about the old timeline, as well as the role that she and her. . . friends played in it. If she gains knowledge about it, she’ll become a threat. All of them will.”

Flynn has been about to rage, but at that, he freezes. Thinks abruptly that indeed, in his hunger to see Lucy one more time, to tell her that it was done, he’s inadvertently caused the opposite to happen. Forgot that Rittenhouse was anything but defanged – that indeed, by saving his wife and daughter, he has erased all of his own efforts to remove them from history. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter – but now they’re stronger than ever, angrier than ever, and he has supplied them with a wealth of targets on which to punish him for his presumption. Lorena and Iris themselves, back in Dubrovnik, convinced that he just walked out on them without a word for three years, far longer than he’d ever been afield on any mission. Had an explosive argument about it, everything he tried to explain obviously sounding like utter delusional nonsense, until Lorena ordered him to get his head straight and not come back until it was. That may take, at a minimum, until the heat death of the universe. Iris staring at him and seeing a stranger, exactly as he feared. Five seconds of the happy reunion, and then it all fell to pieces.

And now, he has painted a target on Lucy’s back for a resurgent and very much alive Rittenhouse. Given her everything, the whole story, out of whatever stupidly noble, misguided impulse he had to fill her in on what she’d forgotten. If she reads it, if she remembers, if she believes even a fraction of it, if she starts looking, asking questions –

He’s saved his family, yes.

Saved his family, and destroyed everything else.

Flynn feels as if there is an angry rhinoceros in his chest struggling to get out. He grips the scarred edge of the bar, struggling to absorb the magnitude of his mistake, which is impressive even by his standards. He can’t protect Lorena and Iris and Lucy, and everyone else who Rittenhouse is going to hurt in retaliation for his attempts to take them down. Indeed, nobody has seen anything yet, in terms of their possible destructive power. All stops out. No holds barred.

Jesus.

Jesus.

“We’re watching her, you know,” the agent goes on. “We know you visited her. You better hope you live up to your promise to stay away. From all of them. If you contact your wife and daughter again, if you contact Lucy again, if you thought you’d be clever and send something to Logan or Carlin as well, if you so much as glance at a picture of them online, we’ll know. And then we’ll kill all of them, and this time, there will be no Mothership for you to fix it. You’ll just get to live with that. Forever. You disappear, cause no more trouble for us, and they live happily ever after. Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?” He grins. “Huh, Garcia?”

Flynn remains completely motionless. He is plunging through endless, icy, dark water, curling and cutting in his chest. He has never been so afraid – and so angry – in his entire life.

The Rittenhouse agent waits for his answer. When it doesn’t come, he shrugs, finishes his drink, and stands up. “Have a nice night,” he says. Puts on his hat. The bar door opens and shuts.

He’s gone.