a/n: finalllly. Someone needed to shut this chapter down, because I was literally incapable of sticking to my plan of 2-3K to wrap-up this thing... oops. Overshot that goal by a smidge. But this is it - last chapter! Thanks to all who have supported & encouraged me along the way! I know it wasn't everyone's cup of tea at the start, so the continued interest from those of you who stuck with it has meant so, so much to me!

And if you haven't dropped a line in that review box yet, this chapter would be a really excellent opportunity to do so :)

The first stir of awareness dawned with an idling sigh. Wyatt was somehow the bed beneath her and the quilt around her, fencing her in from all sides. If there was a better feeling out there, Lucy was certain she hadn't experienced it.

A sleep-speckled grin unraveled over her face as she raised her head to seek some touchstone of time, of dappling daylight or flitting dusk, because her internal clock had become as slippery as satin, unfathomable after a constant whirlwind of decades and hemispheres. Her first view was of little more than Wyatt's shoulder and the upholstered leather seat that supported them both, so she pressed herself higher, reaching for the frame of the vehicle and arching her neck until she could find a spill of golden rays crawling lazily over the cement floor.

The sudden clamp of a hand around her wrist almost sent her sprawling for the floorboard, her startled gasp slicing through the silence as she reclaimed a safe spot against him.

"Sorry, I wasn't trying to..."

Wyatt didn't finish. His ocean eyes cut away from her, lips pursed and throat bobbing, but no other explanation rose to the surface. It was a rueful stubbornness that warped his brow, like he...like he thought history was repeating itself and he'd be damned if he let her slip out on him twice.

Lucy peered down at him with the beginnings of a crinkled frown. "Did you sleep at all, or was that just me?"

"I slept some," he answered gruffly.

"Oh really?"

His gaze snapped back up to her, turning petulant before he wrangled his features back into submission. "Yes, really. I just woke up a couple of times, and then maybe stayed awake once you got in the habit of stretching and re-situating yourself on top of me every thirty seconds."

"You thought I'd leave." It wasn't so much an accusation as it was a crushing blow to her own heart. He didn't trust her. Of course he didn't trust her. Why should he, right?

The hand on her wrist smoothed over hers, easing against her palm and working through the spaces between her fingers. "A reflex, Lucy. It's nothing but a reflex, one I'm sure will ease with time. Quit worrying about it."

"I'm not - "

"You are," he broke in gently. "And I love you for it, but it's not necessary. I'll get past it. We'll get past it."

"How are you always so sure of the things you're always so sure of?" she asked with a quirk of an eyebrow.

Humor may have colored her voice, but just as he'd done a million times before, Wyatt saw right past it. His other hand slid beneath the makeshift sheet of a shirt he'd draped around her, not stopping till his open palm was splayed across her heart. "Because I'm sure of this."

"Even...even now," came her scratchy response, laden with a monstrous stockpile of regret. "Even after - "

"Yes."

She angled her head higher, making sure to catch his crisp blue gaze before she challenged him again. "You'd really let go of - of everything I've put you through? You can't just...just forgive all of that, the leaving, the way I've treated you since - "

"I can," he said with a tearful smile reflecting up at her. "I already have. We've been over this before, haven't we? The slate is clean."

She hid her own build of tears against his shoulder, feeling as if the anchor of his solid form might be her only reliable link to the reality of this place, the car, the stable, Italy, him. "I might need to hear it a few more times if that's okay with you."

"I'll repeat it till you're sick of my damn voice," he answered with a rumbling chuckle.

Lucy shook her head from where it was still burrowed into him. Impossible. That day would never come.

He cinched an arm around her waist, his other hand moving to comb through the dark hair that fanned over her shoulder and across his chest. "I love you, Lucy. Scars and all."

Her response was so instinctive, so instantaneous, that it couldn't be questioned. She wasn't sure when exactly she had come to terms with it, but the insistent prodding in her heart had been present for quite some time, towering higher and louder every time he was near. Maybe it hadn't ever really taken leave - not when Jessica appeared, not when the mission ended, not when she booked a ticket and cut all ties. Not when Wyatt stood at the edge of the Mothership and told her it was now or never. Definitely not when he was lying beneath her, fingers imprinting her skin, chasing his release as earnestly as he'd chased her across an ocean.

With all the heart she had left to give, Lucy lifted her head and gave breath to the inerrant truth that bound them together. "I...I love you too, Wyatt. Even when I thought I couldn't - couldn't love anyone, not anymore, but I… Well, I think I've known I was in over my head from the moment you said it after Providence, and you were right. It scared the hell out of me, to be confronted with it right then and there when I - when I - "

"When you weren't ready," he provided with a gravelly rut of his rapidly crumbling voice. "A shitty sense of timing is one of the Logan family trademarks."

"How about an endless reserve of patience and compassion and bullheaded confidence? Does that all come from the Logans too, or is that just you?"

She saw the quick flicker of surprise that he so hastily covered with a self-effacing smirk, but Lucy didn't let the impending brush-off take wing. Her hand raked up the nape of his neck and into his hair, drawing him in for a kiss that obliterated whatever half-assed reply he'd been primed to deliver.

Hell, her own reply was almost obliterated too when his tongue slid over hers and the hand at her waist snuck lower.

"Thank you, Wyatt," she whispered raggedly against the shuddering friction of his lips. "Thank you for not giving up on me."

"You - you say that like I had any option."

But he did. No matter what he said now, there had always been a choice. The fact that his heart kept pointing her direction through any of this was a marvel he'd never willingly acknowledge, a series of hurtful setbacks he'd graciously dismiss for her sake. He'd chosen her and kept on choosing her, even when she'd mercilessly rejected him several times over.

New tears sprang to Lucy's eyes, the rigid casing of all those months spent apart - layers of grief, the cage of her deep-rooted loneliness, every fragmented patch of her soul - falling away bit by bit. He hadn't wanted to weigh another option aside from this one. It was that simple for him. It was that simple for them.

His face nuzzled into her hair, fingertips sketching a meandering line down her side. He cleared his throat as he wilted back against the seat once more, eyes glistening tenderly despite the way his mouth pulled to one side. "So what do you say - how about we get some more of that bread from this morning, maybe a little pasta - since obviously that's a nonnegotiable given the current locale - and we carb load for an entire day of nothing but this..."

The this he had in mind was made crystal clear with a firm swipe of his thumb on the outer curve of her breast.

"Carb loading, huh?"

"Mmhmm. We're gonna need to keep our energy levels up if there's any hope of continuing at a sustainable pace."

Bread and pasta and Wyatt Logan? That was all the incentive her body needed to justify the otherwise unappealing task of leaving their indolent little cocoon.

They dressed each other about as effectively as if they'd been blindfolded, far too preoccupied with the intermittent distraction of touching and kissing to be anything but negligent in the goal of actually making themselves presentable. And when they came streaming into the sun glazed kitchen some time later, a few dallying pit stops made along the way, their laughter-steeped raid was barely underway when they were busted by a pair of unamused faces looming in the archway.

"Where the hell have you two been?"

With Jiya's scowling bad cop impression out of the way, Rufus took up his role as the obligatory good cop, backpedaling meekly. "What she means is we were starting to get worried. Not that we need to - "

Jiya cut him off, arms swinging as she gestured for him to give her the floor again. "What I mean, Rufus, was about as straightforward as it sounded - where the hell have you two been? It's a real pain in the ass to sit on good news for as long as you guys have been gone. And spare me the details please, but oh my god, what could possibly keep you from answering your phone or showing your damn faces for half a day?"

Lucy abandoned her post at the bread box, an anxious tremor dashing down her spine. "You did say good news, right?"

She felt the soothing caress of Wyatt's hand on her back, a tether that promised to hold steady despite the violence of the storm.

"Definitely good," Jiya confirmed with a corner of her mouth flagging upwards. "Emma was spotted this morning trying to duck out of an Intensive Care Unit in stolen scrubs. She's officially in government custody with several departments jockeying for who gets the first stab at locking her away for life."

There was a fumbling question that didn't quite come out clearly - an appeal of you're sure? or are you serious? - but it was all Lucy could do to keep her feet beneath her. An actual arrangement of lucid consonants and vowels just wasn't in the cards. Wyatt crept closer, arms now wound fully around her from behind, his chin tucked into her shoulder as his broad frame encompassed her much smaller one. He was batting the specifics around with Rufus and Jiya, a swift exchange of words that twirled all around the kitchen without ever finding a secure foothold between Lucy's ears.

Government custody. She'd gotten stuck in her own head somewhere after that phrase. Emma was in government custody.

"It's over."

That was her voice, high and reedy, laced with an unlikely throb of hope as the conversation continued to spin its web around her.

But Wyatt heard. He stopped, maybe mid-sentence, and turned Lucy from inside his embrace until their eyes connected. Surreal blue in a grayscale universe, a point of reference when all else failed her.

"It's over," he agreed, sotto-toned and unswerving. "But it doesn't have to be as final as it sounds, you know...not anymore."

With the buzz of so many competing emotions charging every atom she possessed - racing to the tips of her fingers, sizzling across her chest, thudding against her skull - she needed him to be a hell of a lot clearer than that. There was no room for guesswork, not now.

The resonant electricity in his gaze intensified. "We still have a time machine, Luce, and very little supervision to go with it."

"We have a time machine for now. No telling when they'll come swipe it out from under us, is there? We - we tried before. We tried and - "

"And now we try again," he affirmed calmly. "Jiya's one of them now, remember? She's our in for keeping it for as long as we need it. And look, I respect the hell out of Agent Christopher, but she preferred to play inside the lines as much as her conscious would allow. Jiya, though? She - "

"Doesn't give a single fuck about the lines."

Lucy's eyes skated across the room, shell-shocked in the presence of a winning smile that overtook Jiya's face. Rufus stood right behind her, sporting a lively smile of his own, rock solid in his support.

"If I can put Emma off for a few weeks with some BS answers about time machine maintenance, you really think Homeland stands a chance at outmaneuvering the pair of us?"

"The four of us," Wyatt breathed against Lucy's cheek, delicately amending the words Rufus had chosen. "We do this together, all four of us. There's more than enough brain power in this room to figure it out, I'm sure of it. We just didn't have enough time before."

Lucy's attention was back on him, the muscles of her mouth too rubbery to do anything but let it hang open, each patternless inhale and exhale feeling even more unbelievable than the last. And a single name, one she'd spoken so rarely in months - in actual years, now - beat loudly in the forefront of her mind.

Amy. Amy, Amy, Amy.

Wyatt gripped Lucy's arms in both of his hands, forehead listing against hers. "You in? Because I'm still waiting to see what all the fuss is about, ma'am."

Six times. Six awful, gut-wrenching, torturous times. Six of the worst nights of his life, if only because he had nothing to give her, no solution, no consolation, no words of substance.

Wyatt stayed awake through most of night one and two, held her as tightly as he could, collected her tears of frustration in his shirt, all while repeating a chorus of meaningless encouragements. And in true Lucy Preston fashion, she'd forced a stiff upper lip by morning, soldiering on better than most of the sorry bastards he'd served with, a fact he'd gladly tell them to their faces if given the chance.

Their third failure hadn't garnered the same reaction. They landed at the villa in strained silence with Jiya doing the honors, clicking through a quick internet search that yielded the same answer as before - many Amy Prestons existed in the world, but none of them were the Amy Preston. Lucy's face remained blank. There was no sign of disappointment, no tears, not even when they were alone that night. She nestled in, closed her eyes, and to his unending surprise, her breathing leveled off without any event.

But when Wyatt woke up in the near-black room somewhere south of midnight, she was no longer hidden beneath the fold of soft sheets. Her back was to him, ramrod straight, fists curled in defiance next to her.

"Luce?"

She shook her head, raven locks of hair cascading over her shoulders.

That had him blinking past the drag of sleepiness at his eyelids. Adrenaline coursed through him as he eased his hands over her arms and slipped around her. "Lucy? Look, I know this has been hard, but it's going to be - "

"No," she cut in scratchily. "Not that. Don't say…"

He waited as she collected a long, unchecked breath.

"I need you to talk about something else," she said at last. "Anything else."

Every recent conversation had revolved around the puzzle of saving her sister - what had changed and what was the same, what they knew and what they'd carefully pieced together, the vaguely drawn sketch of when and where Emma had probably been. Maps, timelines, family trees. He didn't just think of it, he dreamt of it, memorized each theory till it was all embedded in his memory. To actively not talk about Amy…? He wasn't prepared for that, which left him frozen for just a moment, incapable of grasping a single thread that wasn't an offering of sympathy or a restructured game plan.

And then a memory that felt buried beneath a thousand years of rubble broke through to the surface; one he linked with Lucy and impending panic, a story he'd stored away with the image of trembling hands and faraway eyes.

"Tell me about the band."

"What?"

"The band," he tried again, pressing his thumbs against her shoulders and rolling through the taught chord of her muscles. "Now that I've heard you belt out a hell of a tune, I know there's no way you should've ever given up on music. What was it like? What were you like?"

She didn't answer right away, and the longer the silence built between them, the less confident he felt about his choice of diversion. What was he thinking, bringing that up tonight? Because surely the band reminded her of the car accident, and sinking into a river was probably the last thing she needed to envision at the moment, not when...not when she'd probably felt like she'd been sinking again right before he found her sitting up on the edge of the bed.

But something had come loose. He could feel it in the framework of her slim shoulders. Another stroke of his fingers and thumbs was all it took.

"We were folk before folk was cool again."

"Is that right?"

She hummed a yes, head tilting sideways. "I was a total ball of stress the first time I sang live. Almost got sick in the bathrooms before we went on. I can barely remember the whole first set. It's like I blacked out from the minute I got shoved on stage and only came back when it was time to break."

"Really? But you're amazing. How could you be that nervous?"

"You do remember the start of that performance in Hollywood, don't you?"

Wyatt swept her hair away from her neck and let his mouth touch down at the base of her cool white skin. "The ending was far more memorable."

"The one on stage, or…"

"Both." His hands worked down her back, not slowing until he was wrapped around her waist. "The song was pretty damn mind-blowing, but Jesus, Lucy...that was just the beginning."

"Yeah, well...it's not - I don't think I could have…"

He guided her with him, lounging backwards into her pillow until she was cuddled into his chest and her eyes were within view. "Don't think you could have done what?

"Sang. Let my guard down. Given into what I really wanted as we stood next to each other in front of that pool." She blinked quickly, mouth twisting with a poignant smile. "Any of it. If not for you - and really, just you - I couldn't have done any of it."

"I know the feeling," he murmured into her hair. "I've said it before - you get under my skin, Preston."

"Like a virus, right?"

"More like an antidote."

Shiny tears crystallized in her lashes then. Good tears. Purging tears. She closed her eyes and let them fall, her cheek shifting to find rest against him.

And she slept. Not right away, but it came eventually, and when it did, Wyatt found his heart unclenching for the first time since he'd woken up.

But another few days and they were in the same place. A fourth attempt had become a fourth failure. Lucy was already tucked in up to her chin, eyes sealed shut by the time he'd finished in the bathroom. There wasn't so much as a twitch of movement as he settled in next to her on the bed.

He didn't sleep deeply that night. He couldn't. So when she sat up shortly after three, hands yanking clumps of hair away from her face, he was ready. This time he peppered her with questions about her career at Stanford, forging ahead until he knew her favorite topic to lecture on, the names of her best students, the biggest headaches that came with dumbass department politics. He didn't let up until she was too tired to talk, so bombarded with a full-on blitz of yawns that she couldn't get another word out.

With two of those middle-of-the-night incidents under his belt, he thought he had it under control.

Then failure number five knocked him straight on his ass.

Lucy had submitted herself to another round of muffled tears that night, a reaction so similar to one and two that he'd been lulled into believing the worst of it was out by the time he hit the lights. She let him hold her. Let him tell her they would keep trying. She wasn't numbing herself against what she felt, so he thought...no, he assumed, and assuming never got him anywhere good.

She wasn't there. That realization came smacking against his brain before he even had his eyes open. The bed was empty on her side, sheets agonizingly cold. She'd been gone.

He was flying through the door in nothing but underwear, barely suppressing his need to start shouting her name loud enough to wake the whole house, the whole village, the whole damn continent.

She wasn't there. Not holed up in the bathroom, not parked in front of the TV, not sitting at the shadowed kitchen bar. It the took three meticulous scans of the countertop to establish that she hadn't left him a note this time. Too bad he had no idea if that should be taken as a good omen or a bad one.

He was outside then, but from there he didn't have the slightest inclination on where to go, what to do. The train? Had she finally decided to cash in on that ticket he'd purchased? Did trains even run this late? If so, it might be faster for him to grab a cab and head her off in Milan before she could switch lines, but that meant finding a cab at -

A glance down at his wrist reminded him that he was practically naked in the middle of the night, no watch, no shirt or pants, no phone, nothing.

"Wyatt?"

Lucy.

She squinted at him through the darkness, perched on a low wall several yards away, a crumbling remnant of the original architecture that served no purpose beyond simple aesthetic appeal at this point. Except now it was upholding his entire future, of course.

His desire to hurl a few feverish obscenities in her direction dissipated with each footstep. Not to say that the message of you gave me a fucking heart attack had quite faded away by the time he reached her, but he'd at least stifled the urge to actually say it aloud.

She knew, though. Her eyes swam with repentance, so big and glossy in the pale mirror of moonlight. His ass was barely making contact with the stone barrier before remorse came pouring out of her. "I'm sorry. Wyatt, I - I'm sorry, okay?"

His voice was a brittle crack of anguish. "Why?"

"It just - it felt too small in there. I needed...I don't know, fresh air or - or… I wasn't actually leaving, okay? I never even - "

"I know all of that," he said with a sag of his shoulders. "And I understand. What I'm asking is why didn't you wake me up? For the love of God, Lucy, please just wake me up, okay?"

"You - you looked so…" she exhaled unevenly, looking down at her hands. "I thought it would pass before you'd notice. I'd come back and everything would be fine and you'd actually get a full night of sleep for once."

"I don't need sleep. I need to know you're here."

He sounded pathetic even to himself, so it was no surprise that his confession brought her closer, arms slinking up to his shoulders as her head bundled into the crook of his neck. "I'm here. I'm still here. I'm not leaving."

"No leaving," he mumbled against the top of her head.

"It's a ground rule. We have to listen to those."

Wyatt nodded weakly. The delirium of blood pumping too quickly through his veins had subsided, leaving him zapped, passive.

"Let's go back to bed, alright?"

"I'm - don't rush yourself. I'm fine."

"Wyatt," she breathed quietly into the night, her hand in his hair coaxing a soft grunt out of him. "C'mon. It's too cold for you to be sitting around in boxer briefs. Let's go in."

That was how the fifth setback ended, with Lucy leading him by the hand, nudging him into bed, reconciling her body to his until they were one entwined orchestra of limbs. There was a tiny protest in his head, an assertion that he was supposed to be the one who was taking care of her, but that notion had gone too far out the damn window to have any significance now. Five failures, and she was still hanging on. Five rounds of miscalculation, five shots that had come up short, but she was there nonetheless, pushing through the fear in the only way she knew how. If she wasn't quitting, neither was he.

Or at least that was the story Wyatt told himself. Because deep down, he was sure that neither one of them could handle many more of these crippling disappointments, and then jump number six happened. Their sixth flop, a jump to the '50s that ended no differently than the others. But Lucy was itching with determination after they'd landed, huddling over the tablet with Jiya, pointing, muttering, scheming. They were close. That was what she told him as she sat up next to the sink an hour or so later, still fiddling with the tablet as he brushed his teeth. They were so damn close.

Wyatt had no idea why they were any closer this time than they had been before, but he didn't get an opportunity to press for details. She sought out a minty kiss as soon as he'd finished, not letting up or letting go for anything in the world. He was inside of her long before he had any chance of staggering down the hallway and making use of their perfectly capable bed.

Not that he was complaining.

The day of the seventh jump dawned so brightly that he found it damn near disconcerting, too eerily ironic for his liking. And then Rufus added a cheery declaration of "lucky number seven" to the mix right before takeoff, adding more pitted dread to Wyatt's gut feeling that this would be no different than the six that preceded it.

He was wrong. Thank God and fate and everything else, because he was absolutely, unequivocally wrong, wrong, wrong.

And even as Jiya and Rufus whooped through the victory, shoving various illuminated proofs of Amy's existence into Lucy's line of sight, she couldn't cast off the desensitized look of confusion that clung to her face. Not until Jiya dropped them in California, opened the hatch to a lush park just blocks from where Lucy had once lived, and Wyatt endured the mangling grip of her hand as she navigated the quiet streets from memory. Not until she had her sister back in her arms, barely biting back sobs, did the white fog of a doubt finally evaporate.

The screeching laughter that took its place would be a sound he happily carried to his grave.

He wasn't sure exactly what Lucy and Amy had discussed late into the night - or the morning, actually - of that first day in a newly restored universe. He'd gone to bed hours ahead of feeling the mattress dip next to him, allowing them the privacy they deserved. He didn't give a damn about how much of the truth Lucy had admitted to her sister. After what they'd gone through, non-disclosure could kiss both of their asses. What he did know for certain was that Lucy had definitely shared some abridged version of their personal chaos, because in a matter of days they were packing up what Lucy wanted from the house that could no longer be a home to her, the same refrain falling from her lips as often as she could bear the vulnerability - "I can't be here. I'm sorry, I just - I cannot be here."

"It's okay, Lucy," her sister - the sister, he kept thinking with a wildfire grin - reassured over and over again. "You need to do what's best for you. And you know I'll come see you anywhere, but if we're legit talking Italy - c'mon, Italy - you know I'm in."

Wyatt added a raving enthusiasm for the entire country of Italy to his growing mental tally of things the Preston sisters seemed to have in common. So far, he'd branded them both as whip-smart, tall and slender, full of contagious laughter, religious tea drinkers, motormouths who talked over each other at warp speed, and now this - they were prone to eagerly repeating the word 'Italy' with various levels of emphasis.

"You'll really come?"

"It's you and Christmas and Italy," Amy buzzed back with a blinding smile. "Of course I'll come."

He added blinding smiles to his Preston sister list. And then he tacked on airtight hugs too, because they exchanged another one - probably their twentieth breathless embrace in less than three days - once Lucy finally let that promise flourish to life inside of her head. In another few weeks, Amy was joining them for the holidays. He could see it every time it struck her anew - Amy, real and alive and full of energy, was as accessible as a plane ticket, a phone call, a text message. No matter how many demons Lucy still battled, that grounding truth never failed to reignite her fledgling grasp on the hope that was slowly being mended from within.

And just when Wyatt thought there were no major hurdles left to cross, no obligations or commitments or regressions in sight, Lucy threw a total wrench in the works. As if he should have expected anything less from her.

She'd gotten an email from an old colleague, one who was teaching at a school in Vienna. He needed someone to come cover his last week before the end of the term, and he couldn't think of a better guest lecturer than her.

Wyatt agreed on that count - no one spun a relatable version of history like Lucy did. Letting her go, however, was the most disagreeable idea he could imagine.

But she wanted to, he could see it welling up in her eyes, this clawing need to go test her limits, to find her place again in a world she'd once loved. And he knew without making her say it - this had to be just her. She'd never be sure she was back on her feet again if he didn't let her go alone.

So he did it. He watched her go. He was misty-eyed in the same damn train station as before, watching her dark head disappear into the train car, the worst case scenario from not so long ago now materializing in real time. Gone, but not for long. Not for fourteen months, not for four hundred and twenty-four days. It seemed he was always counting something when it came to her, but now he was only counting eight days. Eight days. Five spent in a lecture hall, sandwiched by the requisite travel time on either end. He could handle eight days, right?

Wrong. He was a fucking basket case who scheduled his whole existence around her nightly phone calls and the occasional blip of a text message.

But that was over as of right this second, because he was standing on the train platform again. Heart in his throat again, waiting on Lucy Preston to come and deliver her usual emotional barrage to his senses. And then that spectacular airtight hug - the one that was as much hers as it was Amy's - thundered right into him, her blurry vortex of limbs sucking him in before he even got a decent glimpse of her face.

"Hi."

"Hi to you too," he returned, his tone far less chirping than her own greeting. "How was it?"

"Incredible. Really, Wyatt, so good."

"And you were…"

"Surprisingly okay. Not - you know, not without my moments, but - " she stopped and pulled back to frame his face in her hands, an ivory grin caught beneath the dull ebb of overhead lights. "We did talk about this, didn't we? I distinctly remember giving updates to someone every night. Could've sworn it was you."

She was kissing him before he could volley back an answer, not that he was sure he could adequately express himself. She was right - they had gone over this exact line of questioning every day since their last hug, last kiss, last face-to-face point of contact. To have her in front of him, though...that was a whole different story. He knew too well how brave she could be over the phone, after all. But her eyes…?

Her eyes were capable of transmitting an entirely different frequency than any voice on earth.

"Did Amy make it okay?" she asked from against his mouth, hands still tangled with his jacket.

"Yep. Got in last night just fine."

"And she likes it? Her room? The villa? Is it feeling too crowded with - "

"Lucy."

She snickered with sudden self-awareness, knocking her forehead gently to his. "Right. Sorry."

Wyatt leaned into another kiss, a small sampling of everything he really wanted, before taking her bag in one hand and weaving her narrow fingers through the other. "No sorry needed. Just thought you might as well ask her these things yourself, right?"

Her face lifted into a cloudless smile, one that lingered the whole way to the villa. That same smile damn near erupted when Amy flew at her from across the kitchen.

He almost couldn't recognize it for what it was. All of them - Lucy, Amy, Rufus, and Jiya - under one roof for tonight and the night after that and so many more to come, laughing and cooking and making a damn mess...it was family. It was his family. The first one he'd had in - in God, who knew how long. They just clicked, this strange mosaic of people, and the intensity of that feeling almost had Wyatt lurching off his feet.

It was something he almost needed to observe from a distance to understand. And besides that, he made a cognizant effort to fade into the background so Lucy could fully bask in every moment she had with Amy. His eight days were nothing in comparison to the amount of time she'd lost with her sister.

But it wasn't long before he began to notice that Lucy was actively repelling his attempt to be selfless. She gravitated to his side again and again, some unwritten instinct bringing her closer every time he'd moved away. The gesture itself would have been unbelievably endearing if not for the twinge of anxiousness in her gaze that he'd recognize anywhere.

Too small. She kept glancing at him like the room was getting too small.

"Everything okay?" he asked against the shell of her ear as soon as he was sure no one else was listening. "Because if something's - "

"Nothing's wrong." She bit her lip for a moment, little flecks of amber catching light in her eyes. "It's better than okay. It's...shockingly perfect, actually."

"But you keep coming over here like you need - I don't know, need something or want - "

"You don't get it." Her smile was soft, almost pitying at his apparent obliviousness. She pulled him through an arching doorway, boxing out the image of Jiya and Rufus competitively flicking popcorn at each other while Amy offered various critiques based on precision and style.

From the dimness of the hallway, where it was just the pull of her magnetic eyes on him, Wyatt struggled to stay focused on the cause for their seclusion. "I don't get what, exactly?"

She drew a long breath, one that doubled his concern in an instant. "When you found me in France, I was - I was a shadow, Wyatt. Hell, I was a shadow afraid of my own shadow. And while there's definitely been a lot of progress since then, I - I guess it's something I'm still having to work at. And you - you're the one who's been there, who's seen the worst of it, and never once made me feel like I was being stupid, or - or selfish - "

"Lucy, you never - "

"I know," she intervened with a grin. "Trust me, I already know. And it's that - that constant need you have to tell me how you see me...that's what made it so...so hard, being apart this time. Even for eight days, which I know isn't that long, but - "

"Me too," he said, involuntarily shuffling closer. "I didn't want to sound - I didn't want you to feel like - "

"Like I was being smothered?" she asked knowingly. "So now I'm the one who's smothering you, simply because you're too worried about smothering me?"

Wyatt drew her in with a hand on her hip, fixing his best leering smirk into place. "You can smother me whenever you'd like, Luce."

The distasteful wrinkle of her nose couldn't distract him from the laugh that escaped her mouth. "Oh my god, you're such a - "

"Get a room already," Rufus called out abruptly, his head stuck obtrusively through the opening to the kitchen. "This is a public hallway, dammit."

Popcorn sailed over his shoulder unannounced, kernels pelting all three of them as Amy and Jiya launched a coordinated attack. Lucy batted at the onslaught with a squawk of delight, and something about her then - crinkling eyes, popcorn in her hair, surrounded by everyone she loved - had him bold and uninhibited in his affection for her. Here she was, a completely different woman than the one who'd fought herself at every turn, now brimming with more luminous happiness than she'd ever thought she could know again.

Wyatt dipped her there, his arms firm around her, popping off with a kiss that garnered a boom of fanfare from their audience. Lucy fumbled for a point of balance, but she gave it up within seconds in favor of the kiss itself, her hands on his neck, in his hair, a daring hint of her tongue peeking out to taste his lip.

He righted her in another moment, voice rough as he spoke against her mouth. "How's that for public hallway, Rufus?"

More popcorn rained down around them, but whatever goading responses were sent their way, Wyatt heard none of it.

Inevitable. That's what he saw as he fell headfirst into her grinning, satisfied expression. If she'd ever thought once, for even a split-second, that he could forget her, move on, go elsewhere or choose another future… God, no. There was no distance, no ocean, no amount of loss or suffering that could remedy the ache he felt for her. They weren't broken or ruined. They weren't out of chances. They would build and rebuild and then build again if that was what it took.

And eight days might not be so long to spend apart from the one person who understood you better than anyone, but watching her now, right there inside of his arms...

Dammit, was she ever still a sight for some very sore eyes.