a/n: I did not want to write a multi-chap story. Here I am, totally writing a multi-chap story. I will be side-eyeing myself for this forever and ever.

So ironic coincidences aside, I promise that a lot of this fic was written/mentally outlined prior to the S2 finale. You may see some unintended parallels (ahem - THE BEARD & #SaveRufus), so maybe I'm starting to develop Jiya-esque super powers here..? But the flip side is that it doesn't follow anything that happened in 2x09 or 2x10, so consider this story to be a canon-divergent time leap from 2x08 onward.

I owe most of my inspiration to the legendary Celine Dion. No joke. That woman knows her drama. Title & inspo are taken from the lyrics of It's All Coming Back to Me Now. Lastly, thanks are due to the saltmates who were forced to continually reassure me that this premise wasn't total crap. Hopefully they weren't lying ;)

If this was it - if this was really the place he'd be taking her away from - then maybe he was making a monumental mistake.

There was a gurgle of water running up and over a giant wooden wheel, stone walkways stretching in all directions, the scent of freshly baked bread wafting out to greet him from one doorway to the next, and so many vibrant flowers arranged in tidy window boxes on just about every building in sight. Wyatt had seen his fair share of the world thanks to the ever-unraveling course charted for him through the U.S. Army, but this was different. This was a frickin' fairy tale.

Bayeux, France. A hamlet of a town near the coast of Normandy. Just a small blip on the map, but if he'd done his job well, it was the most important small blip in the whole damn world - the blip that Lucy Preston called home these days.

She hadn't made it easy for him. His last trace of her given name had gotten him to Amsterdam, but she'd disappeared from there, not a single swipe of a credit card, no texts or calls - sent or received - since her plane had landed at Schiphol fourteen months ago. She'd ditched the phone, ditched her bank account, ditched him.

Not that he blamed her for that last one. Not for the ditching part, anyway. The ditching without a goodbye, though? The leaving in the middle of the night with nothing but a hastily scrawled note - I need more time, see you soon - flung across his kitchen counter? Yeah, he did sorta blame her for that one, especially once it became clear that her definition of 'soon' had outlasted his by a country mile.

He was surprised to feel a quick bubble of anger when he caught his first glimpse of her.

There she sat, three different books huddled around the table, a fourth billowing open in front of her as she tried her damnedest to keep the pages from flipping ahead with the breeze. There was a white mug to one side, a plate of nothing but crumbs discarded beyond her wall of books, and a clear tumbler of juice close to her elbow...close enough that he was surprised the tumbler hadn't met pavement yet. She had sunglasses perched high on her head, a windblown bun perched even higher. Simple clothing, muted colors, cleanly tailored lines showcasing the slim contours of her body. She looked as natural to the climate as a native born citizen.

He'd expected to feel a lot of things, nothing short of an emotional barrage - relief, anticipation, joy, fascination, uncertainty. Probably a healthy dose of shock, too. He may have known exactly why he'd flown across the ocean long before he'd boarded a 747 to foreign soil, but that didn't mean he was prepared for the actual event in question. It had been four hundred and twenty-four days since he fell asleep with his arms around her. Four hundred and twenty-four days since he'd looked into those endless smoky quartz eyes. Four hundred and twenty-four days without her voice. She was bound to knock him off his guard even if he was the one in pursuit. Four hundred and twenty-four days was a damn long time to spend apart from the one person who understood you better than anyone.

But anger...anger was what unexpectedly rose from his stomach to his throat, from his throat to his red-tipped ears. Wyatt was well aware that he resented the manner in which she'd made her exit, but he thought he was far beyond resenting the exit itself.

And God, he was an idiot for thinking she'd ever choose to leave any of this behind. He was an even bigger idiot for thinking he could handle this situation with anything resembling neutral objectivity. Even from a distance, she was able to mow him down at warp speed, sending the reordered fragments of his life into disarray all over again.

And apparently he wasn't the only one experiencing those massive shifts in the fabric of his existence.

Lucy's shoulders stiffened first. She marked her spot in the book and closed it, clutching tightly at the binding as she breathed deeply. He watched her shake the tension from her body once, then twice. She reached for the glass and - as he'd pretty much foretold - almost knocked it over with the fickle stutter of her hand.

If she already felt his eyes on her, then he might as well go rip off the band-aid, right? It took two false starts to make his way to her table, absently wondering if outdoor cafes in provincial France were known for stocking hard liquor as he ambled across the street. He had a feeling this conversation would require vast quantities of liquid courage, and bad habits die hard...or in his case, they never really died at all.

If this was it - if this was really the day they'd be taking her away from here - then maybe she'd finally slipped up and made the monumental mistake that was bound to give her up eventually.

All good things came to an end, right? She'd braced herself for this haven of solitude to all come crashing down at any given moment. The pinprick sensation of being watched everywhere she went, the quick glances over her shoulder, the shuffle of four or five different aliases, her new habit of never looking anyone in the eye for longer than necessary - nothing about the life she'd left behind had actually been left behind. There was no such thing as a security blanket for her, not a single night she'd slept easily, not a day passing her by without experiencing some flare of panic from deep within. Lucy was under no illusions about her ultimate fate. Rittenhouse had been down when she'd booked a one-way passage to Europe, but she never once assumed they were out of the game for good. They would rebuild from the shadows. They would find her as soon as they had the resources to do so. They would come, either to kill her or brainwash her, and that would be the end of it. Fate wouldn't pass her over another time.

Unless he came first, but she'd stopped fantasizing about that impossibility somewhere in the middle of a bitterly frigid winter. She'd ruthlessly abandoned the man who'd already chalked up far too many ruthless abandonments. She'd slid her traitorous hand over his cheek as he stirred from sleep on the night they'd finally fallen back into bed together; she'd eased Wyatt back into dreamland with a softly spoken lie, a deceitfully reassuring touch. He'd actually smiled at her - eyes not really open, his voice sluggishly forming shapeless grunts instead of actual words, boyish features idling loosely as he tried to understand why she was separating herself from him. And then he'd smiled right as he gave up and faded away once more, not waking again until she was long gone.

After that mutinous performance, not even Wyatt could be foolish enough to look for her now. And maybe she'd ripped his heart out when he realized she wasn't actually coming back, but if it was any consolation, she'd sure as hell ripped out her own too.

Knowing him, that probably wouldn't be any consolation at all.

Would he even know what happened to her? Would they make it a point to flaunt her capture - or her assassination - as one final point of ridicule to fling back in his face? Or would it be quiet, unnoticeable, a candle snuffed out in the dead of night? He'd already lived without her for more than a year. What difference would it make if she was existing in relative silence here or not existing in actual silence for the rest of his days? He wouldn't know any better. Gone was just gone.

Lucy kept her eyes low as the chair across from her scraped dissentingly over the sidewalk. This was better than a gun to the ribs or a knife to the throat. At least they were going to pretend it was a casual meeting among acquaintances and not a hostile takeover.

"Well you're a sight for some very sore eyes, ma'am."

For the first time in fourteen months, her paranoia was not unfounded. Someone who knew her - the real her - had been silently inspecting her every move from across the street. Her mistake was in assuming which party would be the first to hunt her down. What did it say about her to admit that she'd been far more prepared to deal with that gun or knife than she was to deal with him? Wyatt was a threatening weapon in his own right, a sharper blade to her insides than anything Rittenhouse could have wagered against her.

His greeting may have sounded light and familiar, charming even, but by the time Lucy could reluctantly lift her gaze to meet his, there was no fond reception reflected back at her. He was uncharacteristically poker-faced as he regarded her from his side of the table; or maybe that wasn't so uncharacteristic for Wyatt Logan on a mission, which was clearly what this was to him. She couldn't remember a time when he'd been so devoid of emotion - good or bad - as he scanned her face.

But his eyes - even when they held nothing but granite stoicism - were still an astonishing phenomenon to behold. They were the same glorious blue that she saw every time she stared out over the English Channel, the color that dazzled between a blurred horizon of sky and water as she stood on the whipping coastline of Omaha Beach. Even on another continent, with more than 5,000 miles between them, she had no hope of removing him from her memory. She saw him in everything. He was everywhere she went.

"Nice to see you too, Lucy," he said with the smallest shake of his head, a hard smirk forming slowly at her dumbfounded silence.

Hearing her real name spoken out loud for the first time in ages was just one more setback to her short-circuiting brain. Hearing it from his smooth, cavernous rumble of a voice was only adding to the chaos in her head.

She parted her lips, sighed when words continued to fail her, and leaned back in her chair to study him further. To absorb the fact that his perpetual dash of stubble was now a thick, fully-formed beard. To take note of the deep tan that clung to his forearms and dappled over his nose. To appreciate the sturdy outline of what appeared to be broadened shoulders, as if his shoulders had not already been broad enough to keep her adequately impressed.

Wyatt angled himself over the table, his expression varying ever so slightly, a minuscule crack in an otherwise indestructible surface. "It seems I'm not the only one with sore eyes."

"I was just trying to find you beneath that shrub on your face."

"Ah, she speaks," he boasted with a grin, long fingers ruffling through his facial hair in what seemed to be a new preoccupied gesture of his. "I almost lost the beard before my little excursion across the pond, but then I thought - hey, maybe she'll like it. Worth a shot, right?"

Lucy wrinkled her nose with manufactured distaste. "There's scruff and then there's bush country mountain man. Sorry to inform you, but your shot missed the target."

On most men, that statement would have been true. On Wyatt, bush country mountain man looked like a fantasy ripped straight out of a trashy romance novel.

His grin grew despite her disapproval. "I'm just glad to hear that my five month stint in the Franklins wasn't a total sham. Looking like a washed-up city boy that whole time would've brought unimaginable shame to the memory of Grandpa Sherwin."

"The Franklins?" she was asking with genuine interest before she could stop herself.

"Mountain range just north of El Paso. We have an old family cabin tucked up between Fort Bliss and North Franklin Mountain. The only piece of property worth inheriting on either side of the gene pool, if you ask me."

The last bit of his stiff indifference had evaporated into a melodic self-possession that she'd never really seen on him until now. Not only was that glow of his as mysterious as it was attractive, but it was actually grating a quickly frazzling nerve somewhere inside of her. He'd achieved what she hadn't; he'd found a way to be at peace with himself, an elusive shred of contentment that she'd chased and chased but still couldn't grasp.

Something cold stabbed against her heart. She dropped her gaze to the tabletop and began to pick at the hardened droplet of coffee that stained the side of her mug. "What are you doing here, Wyatt?"

"I heard France is lovely this time of year."

Her eyes clicked back up to his with a scoff. "Try again."

His elbows came to rest over the table, hands folding beneath his chin, blue eyes gleaming bright in the sunshine. "Rittenhouse has Rufus."

That stabbing sensation burned deeper as she choked out a litany of half-formed questions. "What? Why? Why him? How did they - "

"Breathe," he instructed calmly, fingers tightening together at his jaw. "And lower your voice while you're at it."

Lucy was barely able to refrain from flipping the table over onto his lap. She was all but seething as she fired back again. "How, Wyatt? Tell me what happened."

And he did. He told her everything.

The truth did nothing to alleviate her need to flip that damn table and watch everything - the books, the dishes, all of it - go rolling through the streets of an otherwise idyllic Bayeux.

To be continued! And in case you were wondering, I live & breathe reviews. That's all for now.