The angst is real with this one, guys. I know that the whole Jessica thing isn't going to go down like this, but tbh I like the idea of her reappearance being a part of some sort of greater plan than just be like a random coincidence. Still cannot believe that the writers gave us that episode and ended it like that. When will they stop hurting Lucy Preston aka my role model aka the love of my life?

Later, when she thinks about that day, it feels like a dream, a carefully constructed mirage. Everything in her memories is so sharp and hyper-focused, it seems more likely that she conjured it up in her head, wanted it so badly that she dreamed it into existence. There are a thousand different memories that her brain latches onto, three hundred different details that come to her every so often. How was it possible that she couldn't remember what she had eaten for breakfast, but she could still feel the rough prickle of his stubble against her fingertips?

Then there was the way he had looked at her. God, the whole night, there were so many looks that were now branded into her brain, imprinted across the back on her eyelids, sewn in tiny stitches across the entire surface of her heart. The way he looked down at her when his body had moved over her own, made her fall even more in love with him through the passion in his gaze; and before that, when they had both come up for air after their first kiss, the absolute surety and softness and want in his eyes; and before that, before their lips had met, he had looked at her like she was the only thing in the world, like there was only them and the soft glow of the room, illuminating them into hazy focus.

When they had stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the pool, he had side-eyed her, the air a lovely, heady mixture of newness, and possibilities and a flirty kind of awkwardness; when she had confessed her love for him on stage, his gaze has pierced into her even from across the distance, the emotions in his eyes unconcealed, his feelings for her unhidden. And before that, there were a thousand other moments, a thousand other glances, a thousand memories that her brain had unconsciously collected, neatly labeled, lovingly held on to.

How was she supposed to forget this?

The real tragedy of it was that she had given up everything to him that night. There had been so much hesitation before, moments where she had held back, moments interrupted. But that night, she had let all of it go. The only thing she had known was that she had almost lost him for good, had spent weeks thinking she would never get to see him again, and then she was up on that stage, the words of the song spilling out of her throat like a memory unforgotten. Swept up in the glamour of it all, high of the thrill of performance, she had looked up at him, her anchor, her lifeboat, and she had taken a chance.

It had paid off. God, how well had it paid off.

And now that fate had once again come knocking at her door with the tact of a sledgehammer, she supposed only a thing that had made her this happy could have the power to completely crush her. One moment, she was smiling up at him, mirroring the giddy smile she could see lighting up his eyes –his hands settled on her waist like they belonged there, the almost uncontrolled kind of laughter bubbling in her throat- and then suddenly everything was crashing down, sliding back into place in the burning picture of her life.

As pissed as she was with the twisted turn of fate, she was almost angrier at herself. How had she let this happen to her? As absurd at it seemed, she felt like she should've known, should've seen this coming. With all the curveballs her life seemed insistent on throwing her way, how could she let herself believe that she could have had this?

He still wasn't back when the alarm for the Mothership echoed through the silo and then she was buckling herself into her seat in the Lifeboat across from Flynn, a familiar numbness slipping back into her bloodstream, like a drug she hadn't realized she was addicted to. They had figured out where Wyatt had disappeared to, had easily tracked his phone, and now she was here, and he was not. It didn't seem real then that yesterday, she had woken up in his arms, had had the luxury of sweeping her hand across his face, through his hair, along his bare chest. That only hours ago, she had stood in front of him, and had expected him to share her world.

She closed her eyes. She needed to stop thinking about this. She needed to focus on the mission.

If only her heart didn't feel like it was already breaking off into a thousand different pieces.

When he arrived back at the silo, the Lifeboat was already gone, along with three of the residents of the bunker. He ran a frustrated hand through his hair, spinning on his spot and rounding on Agent Cristopher, "You let Flynn get into the Lifeboat, really? After everything he has done?"

Cristopher stared back at him coolly, "You really don't have the luxury of pointing fingers here, Wyatt. May I remind you the reason we had to resort to sending him in the first place?"

Wyatt could feel the beginnings of a pounding headache building against the temples of his forehead. Everything inside him was a hurricane, slowly wrecking him from inside out. He took a stuttering breath, trying to control the urgency and anger and guilt building up inside his stomach, "He kidnapped Lucy; he shot Rufus. Bringing him here was one thing but trusting him with their lives-"

"Wyatt," It was Jiya who interrupted him this time. But she wasn't looking at him with the cool disdain Agent Cristopher was displaying, instead she looked sympathetic, almost worried. "What-" she started, carefully, "What happened?"

He looked away briefly but still caught the three of them gazing at him with curious eyes. He took a seat in the nearest chair, bowing his head between his knees. And then he inhaled a deep breath and told them everything.

The text he had gotten wasn't from a number that he recognized. But the message was clear. It was just a picture of his previously deceased wife, titled with the words 'I found her' and the address to a bar almost an hour away. And he had ran. Of course he had ran.

But when he had arrived at the bar in which Jessica was apparently working, she didn't seem as happy to see him as he was her. For the first few seconds, she looked like she had seen a ghost, and then her shock had quickly transformed into panic. She had pulled him out of the bar, into a back alley, and her face was pinched with an almost frantic worry.

But he just stood there and looked at her. The majority of him still believed that if he reached forwards and touched her, she would vanish like vapors into thin air. It had been five years since he had last seen her face, and even though she looked older, she was still Jessica, his wife, the first love of his life. His mind was still with shock, numb with confusion and emotions and feelings so long suppressed. Everything he was feeling at that moment was too much, too big for his body to hold.

"You're not supposed to be here," were the first words she said to him. And even though she looked at him like she was scanning every line on his face, there was still that palpable fear in her eyes, "God, I did everything to make sure-"

"Jess," he interrupted, voice coarse, "What's going on?"

She shifted on her feet, bit her lip in worried deliberation. "You shouldn't have come here," she said again and then looked at him, really looked at him, and something in her face softened. "But you don't know how to give up, do you?"

"Never," he whispered.

"Okay," she conceded. "Okay. I'll explain everything to you. But not now, okay? Not here."

She gave him a time and address for tomorrow morning. And then she ran back inside the bar as if staying one more minute in his company would cost her her life. He didn't know how long he stood there after she had disappeared, trying and failing to process. What had she been talking about? How was she alive? What was going on?

It took everything inside of him to not sprint back into the bar, but the soldier in him had heeded her warning. Of the years they had been together, he had never seen her act this way, and now he could tell, just from the look in her eyes, that something was terribly wrong.

It was then that he took out his phone from his pocket and saw his team's many calls and texts. Cursing lowly, he rushed to make it back to the bunker as quickly as he could. But by the time he had gotten back, it was already too late.

"Do you know who sent you Jessica's photo and location?" Agent Cristopher asked, understandably alert after Wyatt had finished recounting his tale.

Wyatt shook his head. "I have no idea. I don't understand. You're telling me she died in this timeline too, right? Then how is she here?"

"They never found her body," Jiya said quietly.

Wyatt's head snapped up. "What?"

Jiya shared an apprehensive glance with Cristopher before she continued, "In this timeline, they never found her body but there was… a crime scene. There was so much blood –the medical examiner said that she had bled out before the body was moved. They…they ruled her dead officially."

Wyatt swallowed the bile building up in his throat as the whole scene vividly flashed behind his eyelids. But it didn't make sense. None of it made sense. He suddenly desperately wished that Lucy and Rufus were here or he was with them. They always steered him in the right direction. The three of them always figured out what to do.

But Lucy. Oh God, Lucy. What was he going to say to her?

Their night… thinking about it sent a sharp pang straight through his heart. He'd been so blind before, trying to convince himself that his feelings for her were nothing more than platonic. But two nights ago, he had finally let all pretenses fall away. Slowly, she had chipped away at his defenses, and when he had stood beside her in front of the pool, there was nothing left of them but the barest framework, hardly holding on. As she bumped her shoulder with his, smiling and flirty and oh-so-gorgeous, the last wall had finally collapsed, blown away with the low gust of the sharp night. And he had never been happier to be rid of it.

But now, none of it mattered. He couldn't let it matter. Because Jessica was back. Because Jessica was alive. And this was his second chance.

He would get it right this time.

It was sometime in the night that he heard the Lifeboat crash back into the bunker and he was up and out of bed in seconds because it wasn't like he was sleeping anyway. He was already standing in front of the stairs, moving them into place before the door to the Lifeboat opened. And when it did, Lucy was the first one to step out. When he saw her, his heart contracted painfully in his chest, panic filling up readily in his throat.

She looked almost the worst he had ever seen her. Her body curling in on herself in some sort of protective stance, hair hanging limply around her head, face terribly vacant. She was leaning on her left side, a hand pressing into an injury in the right side of her abdomen. Even the clothes of the fifteenth century seemed to suck the life out of her, long and stuffy and shapeless. His eyes catalogued every inch of her appearance, every scuff mark on her dress, every scratch on her pale skin. When she locked eyes with him, a flash of something intolerably vulnerable crossed through her eyes, and then her face was carefully blank.

It was this that scared him the most.

And then Flynn was stepping out behind her, helping her descend the stairs, her gait an ill-concealed limp, and everything inside of him was still and yet in uproar. A petty, angry part of him wanted to tell Flynn to keep his hands away from her, to not even look in her direction after everything he had done to them. But Wyatt knew that after he had ran off so unceremoniously, he had lost the privilege of complaining.

He kept his eyes on Lucy until she had descended the last stair, and then he unconsciously reached for her, finally finding his voice, a frantic edge to his tone, "What happened; are you okay, are you hurt?"

She opened her mouth to say something, a reassurance or an accusation, he didn't know what, but the words seemed to catch in her throat, as if she couldn't physically get them out. She shook her head once and then finally said without meeting his eyes, "I'm fine."

Her voice was low and brisk but there was a tremor hidden in its depth that she couldn't hide. The panic in chest was only expanding, pushing against his organs. She looked at Agent Cristopher, nodded back to the dining table where they had conducted their after-mission briefings the past two times, "Let's get this over with."

Wyatt grabbed Rufus' arm as his friend made his way down the stairs. "What happened?" he asked, lowly. He looked Rufus up and down, but other than a few scratches and tears, nothing seemed visibly wrong, "Are you okay?"

Rufus's face seeped with concern, lines drawn out with worry and exhaustion. He shook his head, "It wasn't good, man," he said. And then he spoke the magic words that made everything a thousand times worse, "We needed you there."

He walked past Wyatt towards the table where everyone was convening, and Wyatt could do nothing but follow.

Slowly, Lucy started to recount everything that happened in the fifteenth century, gaze trained at the table between them. She told them about landing in Salem, about finding the tavern from one of the clues Flynn had picked up during his trips, about Benjamin Franklin's mother. And then she told them about Carol framing her own daughter, about being carried away against her will, about the jail cell and the chanting crowds. At the last moment when they could've been headed nowhere but the place of execution, she stopped, flinched, pressed a hand to her abdomen.

Simultaneously, he and Rufus rose from their seats, but she stopped them with a shake of her head. She tugged at the collar of her dress, pressed her hand deeper against her wound, "I'm fine; I just need to get out of this thing-"

But Agent Cristopher was having none of it. She stood too, ushered Lucy towards the small medical bay that she had set up for emergencies, "Come with me."

And then Lucy was walking away, leaving Rufus to fill up the rest of the story, since Flynn was less than obliged to assist. When he was finished, there was only the silence in the room and the quiet horror welling like a tide in Wyatt's gut.

How could it have all gone so wrong?

Suddenly, their time in 1941 seemed centuries away, like it had happened to some other version of him who had gotten to experience that temporary bolt of all-consuming happiness. The memories rose in him unbidden, the feel of her endless skin underneath his palms, the soft tingle of her hair brushing against his face, the feeling in his chest like she was plucking at his very heartstrings. And then came the immediate guilt, unwanted but like a punch to his gut. Because all of that was gone now. All of that could never happen again.

Because even if Jessica wasn't back, there was still this feeling, like he had broken some kind of indescribable thing between them when he had so callously run away. Like he had betrayed her, abandoned her to everything that she had gone through in 1692.

He stood up from the table, stalked off to three pairs of eyes looking at him with varying sentiments.

More than anything, more than any other moment, he remembered the way she had smiled at him that morning, like he was something that made her so immeasurably happy, like he deserved to be looked at like he had strung the stars in her sky.

He hadn't realized it, but even in the week she had been back with them, she had started to regain color, come back into focus. And now whatever had happened in Salem seemed to have undone any progress that she had made -she had pulled her walls back up like a smokescreen, and barely from in between the cracks, he could see the same grief and desperation in her eyes that she had held back in 1918.

He wondered how much of a part he had played in putting it there. He wondered whether he even wanted to find out.

After she had pushed the chair in front of the bathroom door, she stopped for a moment and looked at herself in the mirror. The person looking back didn't feel like her -not because they didn't look alike, but because some part of her was already disassociating herself with everything of the corporeal world. She just needed a break. She just needed to stop. She just needed to sit down and think, or sit down and not think at all. She just needed-

With a sudden, almost frantic fervor, she pulled open all the strings of that stupid godforsaken dress, tugging and tearing, and then just hauling the thing straight off her body. She pulled out the pins from her hair, the stockings from her feet, threw the corset that had been constraining her breathing all day somewhere on the wet floor. Then she looked at the mirror again, the only garb on her body: the dirt, the scratches, the multicolored bruising that covered the entire right side of her abdomen.

And the small mark on the base of her neck, a speckled bruise, where his teeth had so lovingly dug into her skin two nights ago.

She walked to the shower, stood beneath the heavy spray. Tipping her head upwards, she closed her eyes, and scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin was raw, until she had washed all those hands, all those ugly words, the memory of her mother's betrayal, off her body.

There had been a brief moment before Flynn and Rufus had come for her. There was a noose around her neck, a crowd awaiting a spectacle, and she thought, this is how I die, and she thought, I don't want to die like this.

When she had closed her eyes, she had thought of Amy. And then, she had thought of him.

When Wyatt stepped into the room, she had just returned from the shower. It was a weird déjà vu of her first night in the bunker, when she had broken down in his arms and he had reassured her that she hadn't lost him. Now, she sat on almost the same spot on the bed that she occupied that day, and just like that day, when he came inside, he took a seat on Jiya's bed, a few feet of distance between them. It felt like miles.

"I'm sorry," was the first thing he said, "I shouldn't have run out without telling anyone. It's just-" he inhaled quietly, and she could see the quiet torment in the slump of his shoulders, in the lines in his face that seemed to have aged in days. Her heart ached in tandem with his.

"Jessica-" Lucy started hesitantly, "-she's alive?"

He nodded, clasped his hands in front of him, forced himself to meet her gaze, "I – I saw her. But something is wrong, Lucy. She was scared, panicked. She gave me a time and place to meet and then she ran off. It doesn't make sense."

Lucy considered him. She hadn't deluded herself into thinking that any of this was easier on him. But it was different thinking it than seeing his conflict projected so plainly across his face. Suddenly, her heart hurt more for him than it did for their short-lasting relationship. Just when he had started to come to terms with Jessica's death, fate had dealt him this.

"We'll figure it out, Wyatt, whatever it is," she said. But there was still something that sat on the edge of her throat that needed to be said. "But don't-" she started, paused, tried to control the tremor that threatened to break her voice, "-don't ever run off like that again."

His eyes blazed with guilt and he ducked his head. "I won't," he said resolutely. "I promise."

She nodded and they lapsed into a few moments of silence. Everything that still needed to be said floated in the air, so thick and heavy that she could almost feel it against her skin.

"Lucy..." he started again, looking at her like he didn't know what to say, "...what happened in Salem-"

She cut him off with a shake of her head, "It's okay; I'm okay," she gave him a half-hearted smile, "It's in the past right?"

Just from his face, she knew that he didn't believe her for a second. And because he had an uncanny ability to always bring emotions out of her that she didn't even know how to comprehend, she found herself elaborating, "I just...it's one thing to know that your mother is fighting for the other side. It's stupid -but I never even considered that she would be willing to do anything to physically hurt me-" She paused, swallowing the sudden tightness in her throat, "-let alone actively try to kill me."

"It's not stupid," he said immediately. "It's messed up. But-"

"Now I know, right?" she said light-heartedly, referencing to their conversation in the trunk, which now seemed eons away.

He nodded darkly, looking as pleased about the revelation as she felt, "Now you know."

There was another moment of silence and still, there was more to be addressed.

This time, when he said her name, his face was pressed with guilt and heartache and she already knew what he was going to say. She wanted to get this conversation over with. She wanted to forget entirety of the past two jumps; she wanted to move past, move on.

"Lucy," he whispered, and there seemed to a thousand emotions in the way he said her name. Want, and guilt, and remorse, and the barest plea for redemption.

"It's okay, Wyatt," she said, trying to muster up a strength in her voice that she didn't feel. She was just tired -god, she was so tired. "We were friends first, right? Teammates, partners. We'll always be partners."

They had never just been partners, not really. But still, he grasped onto the out that she had provided him. Because they had both known, the moment that they had found out, that there was no other way.

"Partners," he echoed the term, as if it sounded foreign on his tongue. But then, he held onto it, repeated it with a smile that was somewhere between relieved and heartbroken, "We'll always be partners."

They locked eyes and a thousand things seemed to pass between a single glance. Really, she couldn't even be mad at him, because more than anything, she understood him. Understood what he had lost, who he had become, what he fought for. And that was why this conversation had been so easy and yet so hard. They understood each other too well and that was their tragedy.

He got up, stepped towards her, and pressed a hand to her shoulder, squeezing briefly. And then he was ducking out of the room, and she was alone once again.

That night, when she lay awake staring at the ceiling, Lucy knew more than ever that she was in love with Wyatt Logan. And because she loved him, she let him go.

Come yell with me in the reviews.