Work Text:
Privacy is a rare thing at the bunker, where everyone is all elbows and sharp eyes and too-tight smiles. The heavy metal halls do more to carry sound than swallow it, and she knows they all care, knows the sideways glances are out of worry and friendship not distrust or pity, but between her mother and Jessica and the ever-looming mess of Rittenhouse always a step ahead of them she feels stretched thin. Too many eyes, too many tight quarters, too many bodies moving around each other like planets, and she is no astronomer but surely so many orbits cannot exist in one space without colliding.
It was only ever a matter of time before she snaps.
It’s a tiny thing that sets her off––a stubbed toe, of all things, coming out of the narrow berth of the kitchen––and then she is swearing, and then there are tears in her eyes, and then she cannot stop. The smallest mercy of it all is the hour; this late the lovers have happily paired off in their respective bunks, and Mason has squirreled himself away to drink, or brood, or whatever it is he does when not poking around the cobbled-together hazard of the Lifeboat, and Denise has gone home to her own family and the comfort they bring.
Which is fine, it is. Better to fall to pieces where none of them will see her, where they will not watch her with those soft-sad eyes as though she is some unfixable thing. Better to escape that, at least. For all their well-meaning, none of them quite seem to understand that she can be both shattered and striving. She doesn’t fault them that, but. Well. She would rather avoid their eyes, if only for a night.
She sinks down against the wall, hand pressed against her mouth to muffle her sobs as she folds in around herself. Her toe throbs, but that is nothing compared to all the hurt caught in her chest. She presses her other hand there, as though she could force the ache out, could push hard enough to take the tangled ball of pain and betrayal and loneliness and leave it a wet-ragged mess on the cold concrete floor of the bunker. Maybe then she could leave the weight behind, could face Rittenhouse and Wyatt and her own mother without the suffocating pressure of it all.
In that moment, she misses her sister like a limb. It is a terrible thought, that she would trade her own mother’s good health for her sister back, but she has had her share of terrible thoughts these past few months, and this one in particular is not quite new enough to sting like it once did.
Still. She presses her hand tighter across her mouth and screws her eyes shut as the tears come. No matter how tight she pulls herself, knees at her chin and head ducked low, she cannot keep her hurt from spilling beyond the bounds of herself, and she cannot stop crying.
She doesn’t hear him arrive; between her own muffled sobs and the near-silent whisper of his feet against the floor he may well be a ghost appearing in the middle of the empty hall.
“Lucy?”
She jerks her head up quickly enough that she nearly smacks it against the wall, already trying to scrub the tears off her face. Flynn kneels next to her in a moment, dressed down in socks and loose sweats and a well-worn t-shirt, almost comfortable, almost at ease.
“Are you alright?” He hovers right next to her, uncharacteristically uncertain. His hands hang in the air, as thought not quite sure where to put them. “What happened?”
“I’m fine,” she sniffs out, giving up on hiding her tears. She pushes her hair back out of her face and does her best to wipe her nose. “I just. Stubbed my toe.”
His mouth pulls down in a frown even as his eyebrows rise, settling on an expression that is both disbelief and amusement. Odd, she has always thought, how he can be both so closed and open at once.
“Must be quite the injury,” he says, light and easy, and then he sobers slightly. “Do you need anything?”
“No, I––” She is halfway ready to send him along, then rethinks it. “Some ice?”
He gets up without another word and disappears into the kitchen as she sniffles, and reappears moments later with what looks like a bag of peas wrapped in a paper towel. He makes an apologetic face as he passes it off to her.
“It was all I could find.”
“It’s fine,” she says, settling it on her throbbing foot. “Thank you.” The cold seeps through to her fingers, and she can feel the moisture forming. He hangs there a moment, filling the hall and almost weightless at the same time, waiting. His mouth opens and closes again before he speaks, and now his face has gone all inscrutable.
“Do you... are you alright?”
Lucy sniffles again, feels the tears forming in her eyes, and cannot scrape together the effort it takes to lie. She shakes her head. “No,” she says, and it comes out weaker than she means it to. He moves with careful, easy grace, kneeling next to her and then sitting at her side, slow enough that she could change her mind if she wished, but she doesn’t. He radiates warmth, a comforting contrast to the seeping cold of the concrete-and-metal of the bunker around her; she leans into it without thinking.
“So what was it?” he asks, conversational and quiet. “Chair? Door?”
“The table,” she says, voice thick, and he hums in sympathy.
“Shall we get rid of it?” he asks. “It is pretty ugly.”
She laughs at that, a little watery, and finds herself suddenly sobbing again without meaning to. Flynn at her side makes a small shushing noise, and she doesn’t protest when he wraps an arm around her shoulders, or when he presses his forehead against her temple. It is nice to have something to lean against, something to hold her together. For a long moment they sit like that, pressed together, him quietly murmuring nothing at her ear as she cries.
“How do you do it?” she asks him when she feels whole enough to speak again. “How do you keep going?”
Pressed so close she can feel his sigh, the whole of him shifting at her side. He pulls away slightly to better reply. “I found something to make the fight worth it.”
“What?” she asks, unwanted note of desperation seeping into her voice. “Rittenhouse is always a step ahead of us. All we’re doing is not losing. How is that––?” How is it enough she wants to ask. How can this messy, dragging fight be worth all the near misses and the loss. How can it be worth giving up everything, family and hope and heart and self?
How is she supposed to keep going in the face of all that?
“Lucy, Lucy,” he murmurs, and she thinks distantly she should be afraid to fall to pieces in front of him, their one-time enemy and not-quite friend, but she cannot bring herself to care. She was not lying when she told him he was easiest to talk to. “It’s not that.” He hesitates. “Not only that.”
“What, then?”
“You gave it to me, Lucy.”
She pulls back to look at him in confusion a moment, and then the pieces click into place and she is sharply furious. “That damned journal––”
“Not the journal,” he says, and there’s a smile at the corner of his mouth, of all things. Then he glances away mouth pulling into a crooked line as he reconsiders. “Well, not quite.”
“Then what?” Does he understand how desperately she wants this shadow of a lifeline, even from him, who has torn himself to pieces trying to drive forward with the weight of everything pulling him back? Doesn’t he know how much she needs it to keep her head above the water?
“Hope, Lucy,” he says; breathes it quiet as a prayer, as a secret, as a kiss. His eyes are endlessly deep, and deeply honest. “You came to me and you offered me hope.”
She does not quite think he mean whatever impossible visit it was three years ago that set him down this path, and skirts around what else it could be with the ease of long practice. He smiles a little then, eyes soft, expression saying a hundred things at once that leave her hollowed out and filled to the brim. She has, she realizes distantly, stopped crying, anger and heartache both fizzling.
“You will get through it,” he continues, voice quiet and measured. “You, and me, and Rufus and Mason and Agent Christopher, and Jiya, and even, yes, alright, Wyatt. We will get through.”
It’s her turn to sigh then, big and heavy. Her foot has finally stopped throbbing, and she sets the ice aside, sock soaked through.
“I’m sorry,” she says, voice small, and he waves a hand.
“No, no, no. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
She thinks maybe there is, really––keeping him up, if nothing else––but he seems wholly unwilling to hear it, so instead she just begins to push herself upright. He lets her go without a word, levering himself to his feet too.
“Thank you, then,” she settles on, and he smiles fully at that. The crinkling lines at the corner of his eyes make him look softer, happier. It’s a good look for him.
“I was wrong, earlier,” he says, standing there in the middle of the hall with her. “When I said we were both alone. We are not. You are not.”
“I know,” she says, because she does, even if she doesn’t yet feel it. “You aren’t either.”
He doesn’t reply to that, only inclines his head ever so slightly, as though she has scored a point in a game she didn’t know she was playing. She stands there a moment longer, not entirely certain what to do with herself, with her hands.
“I should get some sleep,” she settles on with a certainty she doesn’t feel. “So, um. Goodnight, Flynn.”
“Goodnight, Lucy,” he replies, still soft, voice and face and eyes especially. She does not quite want to leave him like this, and so they hang there a moment longer, two people caught in orbit, planetary bodies in too little space and destined to crash.
But–– not tonight.
Lucy is the first to turn away. She makes it a handful of steps before she stutters, considers asking him not to speak of this to anyone else. But something tells her she need not ask him to keep this between them; she trusts him to keep her secrets. She smiles ever so slightly and keeps walking.
She doesn’t hear him retreat, but by the time she dares glance behind her, he is gone.
And somehow, despite everything, all the unanswered questions and danger and heartache––she feels lighter.