a/n : hello all :) This story is a submission to the Timeless Fanfic Contest hosted by timeless-fanfic-prompts on tumblr! This is prompt #1 for the month of June. In case you're curious, the challenge was to somehow incorporate the below quote by Azra T., either directly or used as inspiration. Hope you enjoy it! Feedback is welcomed, encouraged, coveted, etc.

"Not all love is gentle. Sometimes it's gritty and dirty and possessive, sometimes it's not supposed to be careful or soft at all. Sometimes it feels like teeth."
- Azra T.

She could still feel him there, lurking like an imprint on her skin, for hours after he'd left.

Not for the first time, Lucy wondered if she'd made a massive mistake somewhere along the way without even realizing it. They were co-workers, after all, teammates to the bitter end. And they were good at being teammates. Sure, they'd had their differences along the way, but she counted on him more than she was willing to admit to even herself most of the time. She'd meant every word that day at the Alamo when she'd coaxed him back to reality, she's sure that she did, but it was almost laughable in hindsight. She'd barely even known him back then, right?

The thought that she had already trusted him then - already needed him - still held up now, though. So many crucial pieces of her life have fallen out of place in the meantime, but not him. Wyatt was a consistently necessary part of her very existence. She wasn't sure that her heart's desperate bid for the greediness of more was worth the risk of what could be lost.

But they'd kissed tonight. More than kissed, really. His mouth on hers, hot and open and insistent, had been everything she expected it to be and a hell of a lot more. It had been their first real step out of the strange middle ground they'd been occupying for the last few weeks, their deliverance from an unspoken purgatory.

What she hadn't bargained for, however, was the way he'd laid her out beneath him and pressed himself against her, urging every inch of his body to tumble into hers through the barrier of their clothing. She'd nearly combusted into flames right then and there.

Unfortunately, she also had not bargained for the abruptness of his exit mere moments later.

His glassy eyes as he pulled away. The bumbling apology, a rapid retreat. It was over before it could even begin.

Lucy's new apartment - a sad excuse for a tiny duplex with round-the-clock surveillance courtesy of Homeland Security - was approximately 32 steps away from Wyatt's front door. They'd planted her in the same development as him out of sheer convenience. His government contract included living quarters, so this was where he'd been living since the beginning of the assignment, but he might as well be in Antarctica for the amount of distance that seemed to expand between them tonight.

She hadn't moved from the sofa since he'd vanished, unable to part with the spot where she'd last felt him on top of her, and from this vantage point she could clearly see the untouched bottle of Scotch on the kitchen counter. She'd lost a bet with him over the weekend, some silly joke they'd made at Rufus' expense when they'd left for the 1700s, and that had been Wyatt's request when he'd won their wager - buy me a bottle of the good stuff, ma'am.

And that - the echoing recollection of his low voice when he'd laid claim to his prize - was what it took to break her out of her melancholy trance. Lucy stood up, stuffed the Scotch into the furthest reachable corner of her half-empty cabinets, and shuffled off to bed with an unflinching resolution that she would not cry over him.

He'd been the one to tell her that he wasn't ready to say goodbye when it seemed like separation was imminent. He was the one who'd come over tonight, unannounced and strutting around like he owned the place with that dumb smug grin of his. He'd kissed her first, not the other way around. It had been his choice to topple horizontally across the couch with her pinned below him. She had nothing to feel bad about, so that was just it - she wouldn't feel bad.

And yet that pesky sense of guilt still hung like a noose around her neck even as she pulled her bedspread all the way up to her chin, unable to eradicate the vision of his piercing blue eyes as he'd hovered over her just a handful of hours ago.

Lucy was the last to show up at Mason Industries once the call from Christopher had come in. Wyatt felt like a caged tiger as he and Rufus waited for her to join them, infuriatingly at war with himself for how much he simultaneously did and did not want to see her after too many days spent apart.

He'd promised himself that he would text her the day after his absurd exodus from her apartment, but somehow couldn't bring himself to do it. Couldn't find the right words to express just how sorry he was for abandoning her like that without explanation.

So one day of silence had turned into two, and then two became three. He couldn't blame her for keeping her distance. It was his mess to clean up, but now it's been four dismal days and they're on a crash for each other, because duty had finally come calling. There was no chance of dodging the fallout at this point. Emma was out there doing God knows what and it was their obligation to follow after her.

But for all of his mental preparation, there was no accounting for just how out of his depth he was once she arrived. His jaw went slack from the instant she rounded the corner, all clicking heels and velvety contours and dark lipstick.

Rufus nudged him with a sharp elbow, prompting Wyatt to shut his mouth before he could catch a fly or two, but he still wasn't able to bring his covetous eyes into submission.

"Damn, girl," Jiya called out from behind her computer. "Looking good tonight, Lucy. Hot date?"

His blood was pounding against his eardrums as he awaited the answer to that torturous question.

She smiled tentatively at Jiya's catcall, smoothing down the distractingly short hemline of her black dress with just a trace of self-consciousness. "Award ceremony, actually. I was asked to present something on behalf of the San Francisco History Association."

Wyatt felt his brow quirking upward, but he stubbornly resisted the urge to press for more details.

Jiya, may God bless her, did all the hard work for him.

"Wow, really? Sounds important."

"Not that big of a deal," Lucy laughed, tucking a stray curl back into her twisting updo. "I attend it almost every year, but it was fun to actually present one of the awards this time around."

Jiya leaned forward with an eager smile. "Please tell me that you ran into a hot professor ex, or at the very least there was someone under the age of sixty who saw you at this thing, because you are a total babe in that dress. This look shouldn't go to waste."

Was it just his imagination, or did Jiya send a scathing glare in Wyatt's direction when she made that last statement?

"Well, uh..." Lucy frowned for a second before her expression shifted into something unrecognizable. "You know what? I am kinda glad I ran into my old boss, the department chair from Stanford. We...well, it - "

"Oh my god," Jiya's eyes widened as she hopped up from her chair, "you had a thing with your boss!? Did you guys go out?"

Lucy just shrugged and glanced away, but the skittish look in her eyes told Wyatt everything he hadn't wanted to know.

"Not exactly," he heard her answer as they huddled together like two schoolgirls, taking off down the corridor as if he and Rufus hadn't been there at all, "but there may have been a thing..."

"Dude," Rufus muttered lowly, "that was..."

Wyatt turned away and strode off in the opposite direction, not in the mood to discuss this development with Rufus or anyone else. Why hadn't he known that Lucy was presenting at a special event? Had she mentioned it in passing and he didn't pick up on the cue? And who was this department chair guy at Stanford? The most he'd ever heard about the inner workings of her teaching job was that some prick in the department had blocked her from earning tenure, so surely that wasn't the same one who -

And as luck would have it, Wyatt barged into the wardrobe bay just as Lucy entered from the other end of the room, forcing him to promptly shut off his internal rant midstream. They were headed straight for each other, eye contact unavoidable as they both startled at the same time.

She stopped short, frozen in the arc of an overhead light. "So...we're off to the summer of 1812, huh? Not hard to figure out what we're facing this time."

He blinked, eyes straying downward to memorize the way that damn dress clung to each subtle nuance of her slender body.

But then Jiya came striding in after Lucy, a wicked grin still in place as she spoke.

"Okay, so you were saying that you and the guy from - oh, Wyatt, hey..." Jiya halted, took a step backwards with an odd look, then preceded to make herself scarce. "Never mind, I should get back to calculating that flight trajectory...thing...anyway. We'll catch up later."

He wasn't sure if it was a genuine hunch or just plain paranoia, but Wyatt was slammed with the irrepressible feeling that all of this was more for his benefit than anything else.

"Did you tell her?"

The question escaped his mouth before he could effectively smooth down his irritation, and judging by Lucy's corresponding scowl, he wasn't the only one who'd caught the vicious undertone packed into those four words.

"Tell her what, exactly?"

"About..." Wyatt swallowed dryly, knowing he was already sunk before he even started, "uh, about the other night."

Lucy stalked forward, her eyes nearly level with his thanks to those stilt-like shoes. "No, of course I didn't. And why the hell would I? 'Oh Jiya, by the way, do you wanna hear about how Wyatt and I didn't have sex the other night?' What kind of story would that be?"

He was suddenly reminded of how much he'd dreaded this topic, yet he was the blockhead who'd dragged it out for her to poke at, and damn it if he hadn't just doomed himself to this little slice of hell.

"Okay, so how about this thing you went to tonight?" he growled in return, scraping his way into a piss-poor segue. "Did you figure that was also the kind of information no one else - including me - should know about? Because I think my invitation got lost in the mail."

"Don't play games with me, Wyatt."

She spun away and marched off toward the row of clothing marked as 1800s, supposedly dismissing him and his questions all at once.

"Who's really playing around here, Lucy, you or me?" he called out accusingly.

She pivoted on one heel for just a second, glaring at him like he'd lost all sanity as she gestured stiffly around the room to inform him that three of Mason's employees had just stopped whatever it was they'd been doing to stare at the pair of them.

Shit, shit, shit.

Lucy was in his face again a split-second later, her familiar brown eyes alight with something fierce and remote. "This isn't a game to me, okay? Far from it, in fact. I'm the last person to judge you for feeling...whatever it is that you're feeling. But don't do this...don't treat me like I'm somehow violating the terms of an agreement that we never made. That's not fair."

His resentment shattered to pieces at the wounded inflection in her voice, but she cut him off just as he opened his mouth to apologize.

"I gave you space when you wanted it, didn't I? So do me a favor and don't be an ass when my plans don't revolve around you."

And then she was off again, plucking a series of garments off the first rack of era-appropriate costumes without even stopping to examine what she'd chosen.

Wyatt's teeth ground together painfully as he was forced to sort through the tumult of his confusion, frustration - and most annoyingly - his attraction, without another word from her.

Hopefully he'd get to blast his way through an entire brigade of Redcoats in 1812, because he really needed to blow off some steam as soon as possible.

"It's not supposed to happen like this."

"So you've said," Rufus acknowledged gently, "but there's nothing we can really do now, Lucy."

She shook her head, numb to the resounding clap of artillery emanating from just inside the wall of Fort Detroit. "But...but it's too many people, Rufus. None of them are meant to - meant to..."

"I know." He grasped her hand in his and gave it a quick squeeze. He allowed her several quiet seconds to compose herself before she heard him summoning a bolstering breath. "We're also not meant to go down here, though."

Lucy nodded, instantly understanding what he was asking her to do.

They were going home.

She had to suppress the bitter sob that threatened to spill out of her, because there was really no telling what home might look like this time. Emma had somehow convinced General William Hull to fight for the fort instead of surrendering as he'd been meant to do, setting the entire course of the war off track from the very start. The War of 1812 had been changed irrevocably, which also implied that their entire timeline was now off track as well.

"Did - did I tell you that Hull's daughter is in there with her children? It was one of the reasons he - he..."

But whatever she thought she knew about General Hull was gone forever. In this new timeline, he'd gone toe-to-toe with Britain's General Isaac Brock, living up to the reputation of valor he'd earned when he'd fought in the American Revolution.

Lucy dropped her eyes to the ground beneath her feet, wondering if the spindly line between Canada and America would realign itself somewhere between this moment and the one where they landed back at Mason Industries in 2017.

"I'll get Wyatt," she said in a voice that was just short of devastated. "Meet you back at the Lifeboat?"

"I don't think that's such a great idea."

She looked up at him pleadingly. "All the fighting is inside the fort at this point. I just...I need a minute alone."

Rufus sighed, shrugging after a beat. "Okay. Be careful, alright?"

It didn't take her long to trudge back through the plummeting twilight to the last spot she'd seen him, even though she had to charge through hordes of women, children, and defectors who were all rushing against her, fleeing to safety as their lives crumbled to pieces around them.

On that note, she could certainly relate.

But in all the grimy, soot-streaked faces that passed by her, Wyatt's ice blue eyes were not among them. She told herself not to panic, that it was too soon to assume the worst. There were tons of people milling around out here. She'd probably overlooked him somewhere in the mass hysteria of the crowd.

Deep down, however, she knew that there was no chance she could miss him regardless of how many people were swarming around her.

"Wyatt? Wyatt!? Are you - "

Her voice snapped like a scrawny twig when her eyes honed in on his slumped form from a few yards away. She shoved her way through the tunnel of surrounding exiles, stumbling and catching herself as many times as it took to get to him.

"Wyatt," she exhaled thinly, crashing to her knees and cradling his head in both of her hands. "Can you hear me? Wyatt, please..."

After several catastrophic seconds passed without a single sign of life, he finally stirred in her arms, moaning heavily with eyelids still weighted down by the pull of gravity.

"Oh, God, I - I need you to say something, okay? Do you hear me?"

"Mmmm. Yes, ma'am."

It was weaker than she would have liked, but it stole her breath all the same. Her forehead dipped against his neck and she let a few tears escape from her stinging eyes before she rallied once more.

"I'll go get Rufus to help, okay? Just - "

"No," he coughed, eyes watery as he forced himself up on one elbow. "You can't. Too dangerous."

Her mouth bent downward with a grim frown. "But - "

"Get down," he bellowed suddenly, yanking on her arm with one hand while drawing his gun in the other.

Lucy collapsed into him as her ears rang with the roar of gunfire. She felt the reverberation of every shot he took, the recoil of it shuddering through her as she held onto him. When the noise finally died down, she began to straighten up and pry herself off of him, but he didn't loosen his grip on her.

"Wait...not yet."

But she'd already risen just enough to peer over his shoulder, and she was sure that there was a glint of something - a musket? a bayonet? - moving stealthily toward them from the opposite side.

"Wyatt," she whispered as calmly as she could manage, "behind us."

He pivoted immediately, spinning her with him and firing off another shot just as a flash of red rustled closer. The soldier went down with a muffled cry, his weapon clattering with him into the darkness.

"Good eye, Lucy. Could have used you out here a minute ago when I got clocked in the head," Wyatt murmured with his cheek pressed soundly to the side of her head.

And just like that, with his warm breath teasing through her hair, she was tormented with the all too recent memory of his mouth conquering hers with single-minded intent.

She pulled away slowly, her eyes locking with that unreal shade of blue that once again left her feeling unbalanced and scattered. "We - we need to get back to the Lifeboat."

He nodded reluctantly. "I tried, Lucy...I tried to help them get out."

"I know," she smiled sadly, allowing her thumb to brush against the scratchy stubble on his jaw. "Where are you hurt? How bad is it?"

"I'm not hurt," he groused back with a raised brow. "It's just a bump on the head."

"So a concussion? You lost consciousness, Wyatt."

His lips lifted at the corner. "No, a bump on the head. I've had my fair share of concussions, ma'am. This isn't one."

The use of that customary ma'am - along with an indecent smirk from the side of his mouth - was like a bucket of ice water to the heart. Lucy wouldn't let him do that, wouldn't let him flirt his way back into her good graces. That might have worked at one point, but not anymore. She was determined to avoid the sticky pattern of this foolish little dance they'd been doing around each other.

Wyatt must have felt her self-imposed wall sliding into place between them, because he reached out to grasp her hand right as she'd made up her mind to push him away. "I'm sorry about earlier, Lucy. I was jealous and stupid."

Jealous and stupid. Jealous and stupid.

If someone had once told her that she had the ability to make a man like Wyatt Logan jealous, she probably would have laughed until she cried. As it stood now, the admission just fell flat and left her wanting to skip right past the laughter and go straight for crying.

"Not now, okay? Rufus is waiting for us."

He gave in to her request without argument but held onto her arm the whole way back to the Lifeboat, his fingers imprinting her skin once more.

Their mission to 1812 had lasted for eleven long hours, and yet somehow the time that Wyatt had just spent waiting for Lucy to emerge from the women's locker room felt twice as long in comparison.

It was jarring to see her back in that slinky black dress after she'd been covered up for an entire day in ruffled sleeves and an unwieldy skirt. Now she stood before him in what was easily the sexiest thing he'd ever seen her in, barefooted with her spiky heels swinging blithely from the tips of her fingers. Her hair was still damp from the shower and the beguiling makeup from her evening out had long ago been erased, but there was no denying what that dress still did to him. The transformation almost knocked the well-rehearsed words right out of his head.

"Hey," he said quietly, not wanting to give her too much of a fright if she hadn't yet noticed his presence.

"Hi," she returned vacantly. "How's the concussion?"

"Really good, seeing as it's not a concussion. Went to the doc and got it confirmed, so if you need proof - "

"I believe you. See ya around." Lucy acknowledged him with a curt nod before attempting to make her exit.

"Wait," he breathed out, stepping into her path before he could lose his nerve. "We need to talk."

She shook her head with an unexpected wildness brimming in her dark gaze. "I - I don't think that would go over well right now."

He paused and looked at her - really looked at her - for as many excruciating moments as it took to identify the cryptic emotion that was painted across the canvas of her face.

"You blame yourself."

She stepped back briskly like he'd struck her physically. "I - I..."

Wyatt filled the gap without hesitation, automatically pressing into the spot that she'd just vacated. "C'mon, Lucy, you know better than that. We're only doing the best that we can. It's impossible to win them all. You tell me that all the time."

"Are we, though? You and I - are we really doing the best that we can?"

He wasn't thrilled with the blurred transition from their professional lives to the far more personal aspect of things, but that was the topic that he'd stuck around to discuss anyway, so he'd have to work with whatever it was she gave him.

"No," he confessed dejectedly after a beat, "we're not. Or at least I'm not, that's for sure."

"So what are you going to do about that?"

His eyes went wide as he struggled to fight off the upshot of hunger that her raspy tone had created inside of him. "Lucy..."

She dropped her shoes to the floor and took a bold step forward, obliterating any sense of personal space as her nose brushed against his cheek. "I don't want to talk, Wyatt."

He drew a quick breath to gain some semblance of stability, but the effort backfired when her vivid scent invaded his senses. "You - You're tired and upset. You don't want this, not like - "

Her lips taunted their way across his mouth. The front of her body drifted into him and his hands instinctively braced her on either side, keeping her right where he wanted her most.

"A lot of people died today...people who weren't supposed to, which means that somewhere out there, more loved ones were erased. Sisters. Husbands and wives. Friends."

"Lucy, I'm sorry - "

She kissed him more directly that time, rising on her toes to gain better leverage until she was coming away to whisper against his skin. "I want to feel alive."

Her teeth grazed his lip possessively and that was the end of him. Wyatt dragged her backwards to the door of the locker room, shoving it open and whirling her around to trap her against the nearest wall. She had fistfuls of his shirt in her hands as she bit and licked her way into his mouth with unimaginable fervor, practically mewling in his ear when he lifted her legs up around his hips. He was lost in her orbit, hers for the taking, involuntarily obliging her as she pulled the shirt over his head and kissed his neck.

"Are you - " she panted aimlessly for a moment, fingernails sinking into his shoulders " - gonna disappear on me now?"

His mouth latched onto hers, tongues meshing together as Lucy's hips rolled forward into him.

"No disappearing," he groaned between heavy breaths, "I promise."

What Lucy had failed to remember when she'd shamelessly thrown herself at Wyatt like a lowbrow floozy - right in the hallway of Mason Industries, her workplace, no less - was that it was barely eight in the morning in their real time. An entire night had come and gone while they'd been traipsing through the 19th century war zone of what was now present-day Michigan, and after immersing herself in two rounds of dizzying, uninhibited sex with a man who was quite obviously supposed to be off-limits for more than one reason, they currently had nothing left to do but go out and face the cruel light of a brand new day.

Since round two had quite strategically occurred inside of the shower stall that she'd so recently deserted beforehand, there was no need to wash off the last traces of what they'd done before they went their separate ways. Lucy was completely spent, both emotionally and physically, and for all of that, she was still sure of one thing - Wyatt was a consistently necessary part of her very existence.

There was no taking this back now. She had taken the risk, gambled big time with the full knowledge that she'd just freely given him the power to destroy her.

"Ready to go?" he asked in a husky voice that almost had her wishing for a round three.

She fidgeted with the side seams of her dress but couldn't get it to lay straight for the life of her. "Uh...yeah. Maybe I should go first to...ya know, scout it out?"

He nodded with an easy grin, causing her stomach to flutter disloyally as she brushed past him for the door. She craned her head out into the hall, waited for several nerve-racking seconds, then decided to make a break for it.

"All good, let's go," she announced hastily before whisking her discarded shoes up into her hand and dashing through the corridor as fast as she could.

Wyatt caught up in a flash, his hand wrapping around her elbow to slow her pace. "Cool it, Luce. You're making us look suspicious."

"We are suspicious, and since when do you call me 'Luce?'"

"Since about twenty minutes ago. You didn't seem to mind it too much when you were repeatedly screaming my name for all of headquarters to hear."

She swung around to face him with narrowed eyes. "You think this is funny, don't you?"

"In case you haven't noticed, I think most things are funny when you're involved...ma'am."

He actually had the audacity to polish that statement off with an irksome little wink.

"Wyatt? Lucy?" Agent Christopher's voice rang out inquisitively from behind them, "I thought you two had left already."

"On our way out now," Lucy answered, her words squeaking out in an embarrassingly high and unnatural pitch.

Wyatt waved a hand in Denise's direction, then snagged Lucy's fingers between his own and steered her to the exit with a quiet chuckle. "Perfect timing. So, what now? Breakfast?"

She quirked a brow at him. "Breakfast?"

"Yeah, maybe you've heard of it," he said, blinking innocently in the stream of sunlight that greeted them as they stepped out into the parking lot. "There's waffles, eggs, bacon, coffee, pancakes, orange juice, and if we're lucky, more bacon. They say it's the most important meal of the day."

"I don't know, Wyatt..." She didn't have to fake the yawn that appeared just in time, proving her point with irrefutable evidence when she needed it most. "Aren't you tired?"

"Exhausted," he agreed with a smirk, "but I'm also starving, so I say food first, then sleep."

Lucy faltered at the brink of the lot, uncertainty clouding her every move. "Do you really think this is a good idea?"

"Breakfast is always a good idea, Lucy."

"Wyatt. You know what I mean."

His smile shrank, becoming tainted with something vaguely uneven when he turned to look at her properly. "Look, I'm not proud of how I've handled this situation, okay? I might be reckless with a lot of things, but I don't ever want to be reckless with your feelings."

She bit her lip at that, redoubling her grip on the pair of heels in her hand.

"This," he gestured dimly between them, "hardly qualifies as the beginning of a healthy, functional relationship, and I really am sorry that I haven't gone about this in the right way. I've talked myself in and out of what we're doing - or not doing - a million times over. But I always come back to one conclusion."

"And what's that?" she asked before she could convince herself not to.

"You're the only one I've ever wanted to try for...the only one who's ever been able to snap me out of my isolation for long enough to realize what I've been missing out on. And you deserve a hell of a lot more than I've given you so far, so can we start over with some breakfast on me?" He raked a nervous hand through his hair, dislodging a renegade droplet of water that had been leftover from their shower. "I owe it to you, Luce."

She felt a creeping grin blossoming across her face in spite of her conflicting reservations. "Really sticking with 'Luce', huh? Interesting."

Wyatt lowered his head to hers, their foreheads meeting in the middle. "Help me out here. Is that a yes?"

"I do like coffee. And bacon for that matter, but I'm getting the vibe that you really like bacon a lot."

"Smart woman," he murmured with a kiss to her cheek, "and an insatiable one, by the way. Although I sort of expected as much from you..."

She pushed a hand against his chest to squint at him. "Wait, what?"

"You know what they say about the bookish types, right? A historian in the streets, a - "

"Don't you dare finish that sentence."

"Got it," he said with a laugh. "Let's go already, before my stomach starts eating itself."

Wyatt could still feel the imprint of her nails against his shoulders hours later, and the captivating reminder of their illicit tryst back at Mason had him grinning in spite of himself. He could have never predicted that his day would end - or morning begin, as it were - with Lucy snoring contentedly in his arms, but it seemed like destiny hadn't quit on him yet.

He knew they still had a long road ahead of them. He hadn't forgotten the uphill battle that had brought him to this point, but he also knew that the impulse to flee, to surrender to the dissonance in his head and blockade himself against his demands of his heart, was gradually fading away with each second he spent in Lucy's presence.

She sighed, nearly kneed him in the crotch as she stretched in her sleep, and then indistinctly hummed his name with the wafting scent of syrup on her breath before taking hold of his wrist in an unwitting death grip.

Oh yeah, it was going to be a long road indeed.

He tucked the bedspread higher around her shoulders and closed his eyes, slipping away into a dreamless oblivion as Lucy's room grew lighter with the rise of the mid-morning sun. It might not be happily ever after, but it was theirs.