Chapter Text
He sees her for the first time.
Not as the Lucy Preston he fell in love with, but as the young woman untouched by the consequences of time travel. It’s almost eleven o’clock at night, and in true Lucy Preston style, she’s gone out to watch an Alfred Hitchcock double feature – The Birds, and Rear Window – alone, at the downtown Stanford Theatre, in Palo Alto. A theatre well-known for giving its audiences an authentic movie-going experience of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It’s pouring rain, and she has no umbrella. Her hair is loose, falling down around her shoulders. She stops suddenly, and places her hand to her chest. She looks around her feet frantically. She stumbles forward, still bent over, moving quickly towards the storm drain at the side of the road, and lowers to her knees.
Garcia Flynn watches her from across the street. A sad smile is on his face as he thinks back on his first date with Lucy. She had asked him out on a movie date, meaning for them to stay up all night in the bunker, watching old movies as they had always done. But he suggested that they sneak out, to go see a movie at a real movie theatre. Her eyes lit up, and she told him all about her favourite movie theatre from her college days, The Stanford Theatre. A theatre that exclusively played old movies. It was while they were watching the classic Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film, Top Hat, that Lucy leaned over to him in the darkened theatre, and kissed him for the first time.
He shakes his head to bring himself out of his memory. The rain pelts hard on the car roof above his head. He looks down at a necklace which he holds in his hand. His finger caresses over its locket. Lucy wore this necklace the day the Rittenhouse sniper killed her. It’s the same necklace and locket that the Lucy outside, on her knees, trying to reach into the storm drain, thinks she has just lost. The truth is that the necklace will sit on the floor of her car – where it actually fell off – for another week until she decides to clean.
The decision to bring the necklace back with him from the future wasn’t easy, but it might help convince her of why he’s here. He takes a deep breath, and exits the car.
It’s 2008, and he’s a stranger to her. He approaches slowly, and keeps his distance so that she isn’t startled or afraid. He clears his throat so she knows she’s not alone. “Did you lose something?” His voice breaks as he speaks to Lucy for the first time since he lost her. He thought years of time travel had prepared him to face lost loved ones in the past, but it hasn’t.
Lucy stands up straight, and runs her hand through her wet hair as she looks at him. He’s tall, and silhouetted against the street light behind him. Her gut instinct is to run because when has it ever been safe to be alone, and approached by a silhouetted man on a stormy night? But there’s something different about him. He’s tall, with broad shoulders, and despite the coat he wears it’s obvious that he’s more muscle than not. But he doesn’t give off a threatening vibe, instead, somehow… he seems familiar. She keeps her distance, and asks, “Do I know you?”
His chest tightens upon hearing her voice again. It’s sweet, and soft, and it rips and tears at his heart as he hears the echo of her last breath in his memory. And yet, he can’t stop a smile from forming on his face. She’s here, and she’s alive. She’s standing in front of him, and looking at him with her soft brown eyes. “It’s complicated,” he answers. He holds out his hand and lets the locket dangle from his fingers. “I believe this is yours.”
Her head flinches slightly back, and she blinks. She recognizes the locket as her own. But… how is it possible that he has it in his hand? Only a minute ago she realized that it was missing from her neck, and she assumes that it fell off, and has been swept away with the rain water down the storm drain. Her eyebrows raise, and she steps towards him. “How did you-”
“You gave it to me, Lucy.” He swallows, remembering how she asked him to give the necklace and its locket to their daughter as he held her in his arms as death consumed her.
Lucy takes the necklace from his hand, and opens the locket. She sees the familiar photograph of herself and her sister, Amy. But on the other side is a photo she’s never seen before. She’s in the photo, and… she squints her eyes to study the photo in the dim light. In the photo, her arms are wrapped around the waist of a man she doesn’t know, and he’s holding a little girl in his arms. They’re smiling, and happy. She looks up at the man in front of her, and steps to his side so he turns into the street light. She looks at his face – the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, his long nose, and the five o’clock shadow on his face. She looks at the photo again. The man in the photo next to her is the man standing in front of her now.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“My name is Garcia Flynn. I’m from the year 2028. I’m your husband, and we have a little girl named Lily.”
Lucy blinks, and her mouth moves as she tries to form more questions, but she has no idea what to say. She clutches the necklace in her hand. It’s hers. She has no doubt of that. She looks back up at him, and asks, “Why are you here? How are you here?”
“In eight years…” He takes a deep breath. “In eight years, you’ll be asked to preserve history when my 2016 counterpart steals a time machine-”
Lucy laughs as she shakes her head. “Time travel doesn’t exist.”
“Not now, it doesn’t,” he says. “But it will. I could tell you that I know your sister’s name is Amy, your mother is Carol, and your father is…” He hesitates because this Lucy has never heard of Benjamin Cahill, so he goes with the name of the man who raised her. “Your father’s name is Henry. I could tell you that you love history, or that once you thought about joining a band, but you’d shoot back that I could find that information on the internet, so…”
“So, what? You’re going to tell me something about myself that only I know?”
He nods his head, and hopes this doesn’t anger her. “I know that you tell your friends that you lost your virginity when you were seventeen, but that’s a lie.” He pauses as Lucy steps back and tilts her head to the side. “But a year after we got together, you admitted that you lied to your friends to fit in, and that you… well, your first time was with your boyfriend Jake, at age twenty, the night before your car accident.” He pauses, then adds, “And even Jake had no idea that it was your first time.”
Lucy’s heart is racing.
There’s no way anyone could know that. She never even wrote it in her diary for fear that her little sister might read it, or her mother. She shakes her head. The only way he could know that is if she had told him. She steps towards him, her brow furrowed. “Why are you here?”
“I came here to do what I can to try to save your life,” he says, taking a leather-bound journal out of his coat pocket. “You gave this to me, and now I’m giving it to you to read.” Lucy takes the journal from his hand, and flips through it, shocked to see her handwriting as rain drops fall onto its pages. He wets his lips. “In 2008, I’m living in San Diego with my wife and daughter, and I just started my own private, military-sanctioned firm with my brother-in-law, Stiv Casey.”
“Wife and daughter?” Lucy asks, looking back down at the photograph of her with him, and the little girl. “Are you saying that I’m… that I’m a homewrecker?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “They um… they get murdered a few years from now. In fact, my little girl, Iris, she isn’t even born yet.”
“Why not go back and save them?” she asks.
“We tried, but it never works.” He looks down. “I guess I just got to a point where I was forced to accept that they were always meant to be taken from me.” He swallows hard, and looks into Lucy’s eyes. If this younger version of her is anything like the Lucy he married, she’ll argue with him that he has to keep trying.
“Well…” she says. “What if I can do something different to save them?”
Garcia smiles. There’s the Lucy Preston he knows, and loves. He steps towards her, and places his hand on her shoulder. “If you can save them, Lucy…”
“If?” She shakes her head. “I can warn them. I can warn you.” She laughs, but not at what they’re discussing, but at the fact that she’s actually taking ‘time travel’ seriously. She lowers her head. “This sounds so ridiculous,” she says. “But you know what you know about me, and then there’s the locket, and…” She takes a deep breath, and asks seriously, “Do you know who killed them?”
His heart pounds in his chest. In the future from which he’s come, they tried multiple times to change the course of history to save Lorena and Iris, but they not once thought to come back to ask a younger Lucy Preston to help. And here she is now, standing in front of him, wanting to help. He knows if she succeeds that he’ll return to 2028, and while he’ll remember being married to Lucy, and he’ll remember their daughter Lily, that… He huffs, and shakes his head. He could even return to 2028, and Lucy could be alive again, but he wouldn’t be married to her, and their little girl won’t have been born. He’d lose them, but he’d get back Lorena and Iris. And the situation wouldn’t be fair to them because he loves Lucy. It is an impossible situation, and one he’s not sure he wants to face. “Lucy…” He takes hold of her hand. “Draga…” He is at a loss for words. He wants Lorena and Iris alive again, just as he doesn’t want to lose Lucy and Lily. Lily, who is at the bunker in 2028, waiting for him to return home so he can tuck her in with a bedtime story.
Lucy looks at the man in front of her. His eyes are closed, and he’s rubbing his forehead. She reaches out and wipes away raindrops from his cheek, or maybe they’re tears. She can’t tell for certain. He opens his eyes, and looks into hers, and there’s no doubt that this man loves her, and that he doesn’t want to lose her. She trembles as she takes a deep breath, and exhales. She’s twenty-five years old, and just starting her teaching career at Stanford. She has her whole life planned out, and it doesn’t include the antics of time travel. But… she feels drawn to him, and wants to help him. “What’s your name again?” she asks.
“Garcia,” he swallows. “Garcia Flynn.”
“Ok, um… Garcia…” She gives his hand a gentle squeeze. “I-I think I can help you.” He looks into her eyes, and listens. He listens because his Lucy always knew what to do when he was at a loss. “Do you know where my apartment is?” she asks.
“No.”
“I’ll give you the address,” she says, opening the journal to find a blank page. She tears it out, digs into her purse for a pen, and she writes down an address. “Take this with you, and go back to 2028.”
“Lucy?”
“I’ll go home, and I’ll… I’ll break up with Jake. Things aren’t going well anyway, and breaking up with him has been on my mind for months already. Then, this weekend, you bring your – our daughter here… to me, and I’ll take care of her, and I will go to you in San Diego, and… and I’ll do what I can to make sure you don’t lose your wife and daughter. That way you won’t lose any of us.”
He closes his eyes. “No.”
“No?”
“This was a mistake,” he says, taking the journal out of her hand. “I shouldn’t have come here.” He tucks the journal back into his coat pocket, and hurries back to his car. He needs to leave before the side-effects kick in. He needs to get back to their daughter.
“A mistake?”
He hears her chasing after him, so he turns to face her. “It was a mistake asking you to find me here in 2008. And you wanting me to bring Lily here so you can raise her? It’s too complicated, Lucy. It would change everything that has happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rittenhouse.” He looks away from her, regretting that he said their name aloud.
“Rittenhouse?”
“Forget I said it,” he says. “Forget tonight even happened, Lucy.”
She huffs. “How? I get visited by someone from the future, who shows me a photograph of a little girl who is going to be my daughter, who says that he’s my husband who’s come back to try to save my life? I’m not going to forget this.”
Garcia places his hands on her shoulders. “I can’t tell you what to do after I leave, so when you have the choice to go to either November 1938, or to March 1889…” He knows what he says next, if she listens to him – if she remembers what he says – can save her life. “Go to 1938.”
“November 1938?” Lucy scans her memory for the date’s historical significance. “Do you mean Germany? Kristallnacht?”
With a gleam in his eye, he smiles affectionately. Of course, she would figure out the historical event on her first try.
“Is Nazi Germany really the safer option?” she asks.
“You died on the March 1889 mission, Lucy.”
“The inauguration of President Benjamin Harrison was more dangerous than Kristallnacht?”
“It wasn’t that inauguration,” he says. She looks at him, wanting to know, and he never could resist that look in her eye, or the way her hand lingers against his arm. “March 31st, 1889… the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.”
“You’re bleeding,” she says, reaching into her purse. She takes out a tissue, and wipes underneath his nose.
“I have to go, Lucy.” He looks at her for what could be the last time. He wants more than anything to pull her into his arms, and kiss her, but he won’t. This Lucy doesn’t know him. She doesn’t love him. “I have to get back to our daughter.” He looks into her eyes, then turns his back to her.
He grips the doorhandle of his car, and feels Lucy’s hand on his back.
“Wait,” she says quietly.
He turns to face her again. “Lucy, I can’t-”
Then her arms are around his neck, she rises on her toes, and her lips press against his. The kiss is familiar, but still new and different – coming from a young woman who is meant to be his wife. He cups her face in his hands, and whimpers as she opens her mouth to him. His lips part, and he kisses her lower lip tenderly. “I miss you so much, Lucy,” he cries, and rests his forehead against hers as she wraps her arms tightly around him.
“What should I do?” she asks as she trails her fingertips from his jaw down his neck.
“Live your life, and uh… whatever is meant to be, will be.” He runs his hand over the top of her head, smoothing her wet hair. “I love you so much, Lucy.” He kisses her cheek. He looks into her eyes one last time, gets into his car, and drives away.
Lucy watches as his car disappears down the dark road, and suddenly she’s very aware that it is still raining. She looks at the necklace in her hand. He may have taken back that journal, but she still has this photograph of herself with him, and their daughter. She closes her eyes. Garcia Flynn, she says to herself, committing his name to memory.
She has to do whatever she can to help him.
To save his wife and daughter.
To save herself.
And to make sure that they don't lose their daughter, Lily.