#unless idk

Being pregnant is rough enough in the usual course of things. Being pregnant after a trip to the better part of a decade ago, to visit your now-dead lover and give him a journal containing the key to saving the world from the Darkest Timeline it’s now ended up in, when you don’t know if Time Travel, Take a Shot! will permit anything to change at all, or shift, or erase, is –

Sucks pretty much wins the understatement of the century award. This, or any century. Lucy didn’t know it was going to happen and it wasn’t planned, but she cannot remotely bring herself to get rid of this last vestige of Flynn. She gives birth in an out-of-the-way hospital under a fake name with Denise holding her hand, while Wyatt, Rufus, and Jiya stand guard at all the exits and Connor idles in the getaway car. They check out six hours later and go back underground. Their war against Rittenhouse is different, localized, guerrilla, and Lucy went on missions until her sixth month, but it’s more difficult to do active fieldwork now. She takes on different responsibilities. Of course she doesn’t stop.

(The baby is a girl, and Lucy names her Amy Maria Preston-Flynn. She couldn’t stand to call her just Amy Preston alone, and maybe later, if there is a later, if there is a future, she will explain to Amy how she was born years after her father died, and everything it has cost. But no child should have to bear that.)

And then. Things change.

The team has known that yes, Flynn got the journal, and yes, events have started to unfold, but happening not quite as Lucy wrote down. There’s another branch of reality, a version of themselves, and long and confusing story short, Rufus dies in Chinatown in 1888, which is a crippling blow. Without him, they won’t invent the new tech, they won’t get back to Flynn, they won’t have any of the limited and fading chance they do have, and after a lot of talking, it’s decided to risk Wyatt and Lucy traveling back again to the bunker. They have to bring the tech to these other selves that are almost them, that could still be them if timelines re-converge, and take the risk to save Rufus. They haven’t lived this loss, but they remember well enough what it’s like.

(And Flynn. Flynn is going to be there. He will not know that he has a two-year-old daughter, who has been raised by the whole team and whose eyes look just like his when she’s angry, and sometimes they make jokes about her shooting Lincoln too, because it’s easier to laugh rather than lie down in the dark, alone, and shake with the silent sobs.)

So Wyatt and Lucy go. Meet the very stunned younger versions of themselves, and she sees Flynn with his arm in a sling, standing there and staring at her like he can’t believe his eyes, and she is two seconds from telling him –

But still, she doesn’t. Talks to her younger self instead, this Lucy that is almost her, and warns her quietly about Hiroshima. That maybe she can stop Flynn from going, that it’s possible he survives, but in that case, it’s very complicated, not to mention dangerous. After all, if he isn’t there, if he doesn’t sacrifice himself in a literal heroic blaze of glory, maybe Rittenhouse sets off those nukes. Maybe that’s it, right there, curtains. And if he doesn’t die, maybe Lucy doesn’t travel back to São Paulo in an attempt to save him, and all this doesn’t happen, is rolled up out of existence altogether. It’s a horrible choice to put on this younger Lucy’s shoulders, especially when she remembers having lost Rufus because of the same kind of time travel paradox. She looks like she wants to throttle her older self, which future Lucy (well, she supposes she’s future Lucy, but this to her is past Lucy, so who gets dibs?) doesn’t blame her for. And yet – 

“So what?” Lucy bursts out, at her older self’s back. “Sacrifice Flynn and save the world, or save Flynn and sacrifice the world? Am I – am I really going to have to do that? Am I going to care that – that much?”

It’s not anger, or disbelief that she could come to love Garcia Flynn enough to make it so terrible to give up his life for many. It sounds almost like terror, as if she knows she’s getting too far down that path and might almost back out if she could. “What is it with us? What didn’t he tell me? What are you two to each other? Are you even me?”

“I don’t know.” Lucy feels the weight of all the questions she has kept from Flynn, from this Lucy, from everyone, and wonders if she can ever be forgiven. “But you will care. That’s all I can say. And because of Amy– ”

Lucy Two stares at her, face white. “My sister? I get her back?”

There’s a very long pause. Lucy One doesn’t have any idea how to respond. She feels some helpless impulse to tell her about something, since she has no idea how their timelines are going to tangle again, if at all. But she can’t tell Flynn, and one of them deserves to know. Maybe this is the tipping point. Maybe it’s not. She is so tired of being the one asked to judge. She never asked to be God. She never asked to hold the scales of life and death, time and space – and yet, she does. She is not quite human, she thinks. No longer mortal. There is no way to prepare yourself for that, but still.

“No,” Lucy says quietly, looking into her younger self’s eyes. “Your daughter.”

After their future selves leave, after they rescue Rufus, after it seems like a miracle and a fresh start and everyone else is excited, Lucy has a timer in her head that is counting down to when the Mothership is going to jump to August 8, 1945. That’s what her future self said. Two days after Hiroshima, one before Nagasaki. That’s where Flynn dies. That is where, according to how things have already gone, he has to die, in order to save the world. But that course of action leads to Rittenhouse winning anyway, doesn’t it? Nukes or no nukes? So if he doesn’t go, things change, they don’t end up in the future that her older self prophesied. There’s no way to tell if it’s for better or for much, much worse. That’s the risk you take. They’ve spent so long trying to change the past, or not change it, but can they change the future? At least history gives you a rough guide, a cheat code. The unmanifest, the un-happened, is entirely without space or form. Darkness moving over the face of the deep. It is Genesis.

You’d think the future would be the easiest to change, if it hasn’t happened. But time is a funny thing, and somewhere, it has already gone by, and Lucy doesn’t know. Doesn’t know. Doesn’t know.

Flynn can sense her disquiet. Of course he can. They’re ever more rarely apart, day or night, and Lucy is breaking down with the stress of keeping it from him. At last, she finally tells him. Whenever the Mothership jumps to 1945, they have to decide if he goes or stays. If he goes, he dies, and Rittenhouse could win anyway. If he stays, he will probably survive, but it also might not matter if they set off huge nuclear explosions and God knows whatever else. He could be living in a fallout shelter when they return, or he could have never been born, his ancestors eradicated before they ever got around to him. It could be so much worse. (Or better, but that seems naive to the point of suicide.)

“She told you,” Flynn says at last. It’s not hard to guess where else Lucy might have come by the information. “Didn’t she?”

Lucy hesitates, then nods.

“She never told me.” It’s unclear if Flynn feels betrayed by this or not, but thinking back, certain things might make more sense. “Did she say anything else? About what has happened after I met – well, you?”

Lucy almost can’t bear to tell him. She can’t be sure that her future self’s daughter is also Flynn’s daughter. But she knows in an unshakable way that it is for damn sure not anyone else’s, and it makes the final, terrible piece of the puzzle fall into place. As carefully and neutrally as possible, she does.

Flynn doesn’t say anything for the longest time. He’s clearly reeling. His face has momentarily lit up in wild, desperate joy – that somewhere in the universe, even if in a place he may never see, he has a daughter, a living daughter. She is probably three by now, or four. She is a little person, not a baby. She is out there, she is breathing on her own, she doesn’t exist now (Time Travel, Take a Shot!) but she will. The promise he’s been fighting for all along, even if for another daughter. She is there. She will be. And all he has to do for it is –

(Die.)

“I couldn’t make you lose another Amy,” he says at last, quietly. “I couldn’t do that to you, Lucy.”

This may be so. This may be true. But this Lucy has never met this Amy, and she very much has met Flynn. And between the two, right now, there’s only one loss that sounds, to her, as if it would be utterly unbearable.

The alarm sounds three weeks later.

August 8, 1945.

The blood drains out of the team’s faces as they stare at it. The word has gotten around, they know something terrible and fundamental happens on this mission, and that they aren’t going to get a takie-backsie to save Flynn the way they did with Rufus. Whatever goes down this time, it’s how it goes down, and even Wyatt has gotten fond enough of Flynn that he strenuously objects to the idea of sending him there knowing that he’s going to die. But Flynn argues that they’ve already changed quite a bit from the journal, how Future Lucy remembers it happening. The future is not set in stone. By now, he says, he trusts that Lucy will go back to São Paulo anyway, whether to save him or not. It will happen somehow, even if he has to die. And besides, if he does, it will save his daughter. He can’t regret that.

There’s some confused looks at that, as they think he must mean Iris, and neither Lucy nor Flynn can quite stand to explain otherwise. As Lucy looks at him, she realizes that his mind is made up. He is going on this mission, and he is not going to hear otherwise. Perhaps there is another path that leads him away from the guns, away from the death that still haunts her future self, that was the reason she’s tried to find some way, some fork in the path where he lives. It’s about stopping Rittenhouse too, of course. But it’s more.

(Does their daughter still exist if he survives this mission? It’s the biggest, most impossible paradox imaginable, and Lucy doesn’t know if it makes her a horrible person to almost be willing to make this gamble. If she goes to São Paulo anyway, but in different circumstances, does it still happen? Does it matter?)

She looks back at Flynn. Realizes that he’s entirely at peace with dying, if it means that somewhere, his daughter is going to live. Any daughter, any time. If he’s walking away for good – he always said he would with Lorena and Iris, after all. In a way, this is no different, even though he has never met her and very well never might. This is a Flynn who knows what is worth dying for.

His eyes meet hers, and he turns toward the Lifeboat. A wry smile crosses his lips, as if he’s almost going to miss the old bucket of bolts, knows he very well might not be coming back. Then he takes a deep breath, and manages a grin.