a/n: Sooo this is a somewhat constructive channeling all my heartsick angst (lyatt angst, timeless renewal angst, just ALL the angst). It's canon through the end of 2x07 with some light Jess speculation here based on that ending, but she's really not the focus bc BUMP THAT. With that said, the setting of this fic is somewhere in the future BEYOND 2x07 when there's some sort of resolution (or something?) on the Jess story. No spoilers, just me :)

Once again, I'm working off of a tumblr prompt list sent my direction from Katertots, but this time I decided to cram 3 of them in for the price of 1. And also once again, the prompts themselves were probably supposed to be way frickin' fluffier, but I PROMISE there will be fluffy payoff in the end :) No jelly jars shall be harmed in this fic. The prompt lines are listed below:

"Don't give me that puppy dog face. How am I supposed to say no to that?"

"You smell nice."

"You look so comfy, and cuddle-able."

Lastly, the fic title is lifted off the below quote. If "The Beautiful and Damned" isn't a suitable book choice to describe this frickin' ship lately, I don't know what is. Thanks, Scotty Fitz.

"The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned ~

She's not answering that knock.

Flynn doesn't come to her. It's always the other way around.

Jiya disappeared more than hour ago, ducking into the room that is once again home to Wyatt and Rufus. She won't be back until morning, Lucy's sure of it.

It goes without saying that Jiya's absence offers a reasonable explanation for why Rufus won't be the one standing on the other side of her door either.

Agent Christopher is long gone, home with her family for the evening, sheltered in the soft glow of a place that isn't covered in the accumulation of decades-old dust and a far more recent collection of fractured hearts. Lucy would be envious if she thought there was anything left for her in the world that supposedly still exists outside of this shell of a fallout shelter, but sadly enough, this is the only place she can call home anymore.

And Mason? Mason's never stepped foot near this room, and Lucy has no idea why that would be changing now, yet even his unlikely company would somehow be preferred to the alternative.

More knocking. Patternless, sloppy knocking, sounding absolutely nothing like the person it must belong to…

She really should not answer that knock.

The pounding picks up speed. The door rattles on its frame and now she has to answer it, because otherwise he's going to have everyone else spilling out into the hallway to gawk at this spectacle, and that's the last thing she needs. She's tired of feeling like a damn fly under the lens of too many microscopes. Her dignity can't take another excruciating hit.

So she answers his stupid knock.

"What do you - "

"You're here!" He shouts with an exuberance she's never seen on him before. He shoves himself through the barely cracked door and wraps an arm around her shoulders. "Oh thank God, I was beginning to - beginning to worry about you."

He reeks. That's the second assault to her senses, though, because first in line is the unparalleled shockwave that comes with the heavy one-armed hug that slingshots her body so firmly against his.

"Wyatt? Did you..." she tries to shift out from beneath his embrace, but dammit is he ever persistent. "Seriously, did you fall into a vat of alcohol? Because you smell like the inside of a whiskey barrel."

He swings his other arm around in the air and Lucy can only assume that he's waving a bottle in that hand, because her face is crushed too far into his shoulder to really see what he's doing with the other half of himself. "Everyone else seems to…to be hellbent on drinking themselves into an early grave here. Present company included. And why not, right? When in Rome, Lucy."

"This garbage dump we live in is a long way off from Rome," she grumbles with another prying nudge to his chest, finally sparing herself a sliver of personal space that doesn't involve his shirt getting shoved against her nostrils. Somewhere in there she's found a smell that's familiar, a comforting one that isn't soaked in booze, and she knows her judgement will take a sharp veering turn if she doesn't get away from him as quickly as she can.

He lets her wriggle away this time, but his arm - the one that isn't keeping a tight grip on his precious bottle - stays in place over her shoulder, not allowing her more than a ruler's length of distance. "Rome burned, right? You would know, Lucy. Tell me about when Rome burned, because if Rome can burn, so can this shit hole bunker. I want to see it burn to the ground. Don't you?"

"All we need is for someone to light a match near your mouth and I'm pretty sure we could accomplish that goal in no time at all."

Wyatt tilts his head sideways, squints down at her for a moment, and then lets out a long whooping laugh, one that threatens to topple him over in his current state of uncharacteristic gracelessness. She takes the opportunity to extricate herself completely, caring more about getting her door shut and minimizing the racket than she does about whether or not he lands himself on his ass. Let me be a drunken fool if that's what he wants. He's only done it to himself.

But when she turns toward him, he's nowhere near landing on his ass. He's right there behind her, lurching with the momentum of his liquored inertia and trapping her against the door with a grin. "You're funny. I feel like you don't get enough credit for being so funny. Rufus is funny too, but I like you better. And you're much nicer to look at."

She sweeps her wary gaze from one of his arms to the other, noting that his stance mostly seems to be for the sake of his balance and doesn't carry any sort of predatory disposition, but that's not to say that he isn't motivated by a little bit of both. "You know what's not so funny, Wyatt?"

"What?" he asks with that same grin fixed across his stupidly beautiful mouth.

"You right now. I'm really not in the mood to babysit an alcoholic tonight."

Watching his face gradually deflate brings her far less satisfaction than she'd anticipated. He backs away in small increments, taking care to measure his steps with caution. "That's the Logan way. Topnotch alcoholics, the whole lot of us."

Now she's deflating a little bit too. "Wyatt - "

"This was bad, right? Me coming in here? You - " he brings his brilliant blue eyes into focus and regards her with all the heartbreak that one man could ever fit into a single devastating facial expression, " - you're right. You have better things to do than deal with this."

"You sure about that?" She gestures around the pathetic room with a half-hearted smile. "I'm not so busy, not really. Maybe I could spare a little time for one miserable down-on-his-luck drunk who's just having a bad night and is not an actual alcoholic."

He blinks slowly. "I think I was one here. An alcoholic bastard, I mean. In this timeline. With...with her. That's what she told me anyway. Sounded just like the old man."

Lucy inhales deeply. She's never been one to walk on eggshells with him before, but it's been hard to do anything the normal way ever since she got that heart-stopping, breath-stealing, axis-tilting phone call. The Jessica-is-alive phone call. And the line she has to walk now is doubly fraught with uncertainty, because what she's about to say is bound to be salt on a very fresh, very raw wound. The very wound that's surely acted as the catalyst for his heedless swan dive into the bottle tonight.

She forges ahead anyhow, because she doesn't know how to do anything less than tell him the truth. She's been swallowing back honesty for weeks, but not...not when he's like this. Not when he needs to hear it. "You...you can't really know that, though, can you? If she was being honest about what you were like in this timeline. Or if she was - if she was really here this whole time at all..."

He closes his eyes and stays very still - unnaturally still - for what feels like forever. And then, with eyes still shut, his lips quirk up into a strikingly abrupt smirk. "I really need to stop falling for these Rittenhouse broads. The secrets, the disappearances, the betrayals...it's exhausting."

Lucy's heart thuds furiously against her ribs. She cannot - oh, God help her - cannot be in the same category as Jessica right now. She's spent so much time schooling herself with continual reminders that Wyatt couldn't ever love her like that to begin with, and even now - when the comparison is far from flattering - she still can't control her reaction to the suggestion that she's been wrong all along.

She hates herself for clinging to the idea that any part of her own Rittenhouse melodrama could have hurt him the way Jess has. It isn't the type of power she should want to possess. The thought of it comes with its own brand of intoxication. She can't imagine having that much of a hold over him.

Has she mentioned that she hates herself? Yeah, well she hates Jessica Logan a hell of a lot more, so she simultaneously feels sick to her stomach for burdening him with the chaos of her life when there's already so much chaos in his own.

Wyatt startles her with a hand to her cheek. "Hey. That was a joke. Stop looking at me like that."

She sidesteps his touch with a pang of despair.

"Wasn't funny," she says shakily.

"Don't I know it, ma'am."

"I - I don't think you should call me that right now."

He arches a swaggering brow. "Right now? Last I checked, you never wanted me to call you that. Are you finally admitting that it's grown on you...ma'am?"

She wants to scream at him for daring to flirt with her at a time like this. She wants to scream at him for a lot of things, actually. But from the moment his wife slid away from the bunker without a word of explanation - and consequently bringing down many horrifying words of explanation from Denise Christopher, as well as a booming eruption of expletives from Wyatt - she's felt like her screaming rights have been stripped away indefinitely.

"I'm sorry," he says after she's faltered in silence for too long. "You really don't need this. I get it. I'm an ass for bugging you about any of it, especially after…"

He stops. Shrugs with self-reproach. Turns up the saddest eyes she's ever seen in thirty-some years of existence.

"Wyatt…"

"It was asking too much to - to think I could just come in here and all would be forgiven, right? I mean...you're a goddamn saint, Lucy, but even saints have their limits. I think. I'm not very Catholic."

She shakes her head in resignation and tries not to laugh in the face of his wide-eyed sincerity, not at all surprised that he's somehow conjured a smile out of her in spite of all the wreckage that surrounds them...in spite the way they seem doomed to shred each other to pieces over and over again.

That thought snatches the smile from her face pretty damn quickly.

"What do you want from me, Wyatt? How am I supposed to make this better for you?"

He shuffles closer, burrowing himself deeper still into her heart - as if he isn't already a permanent fixture there - by offering an open portal to all of his most vulnerable emotions. "Just...let me stay in here for a little while? I'll be quiet if that's what you want. I just want to be here. Right here. Near you."

His words twist through her with a hiss of serpent-like persuasion, but even then, she fears for how this ends for her. When he's gone tomorrow morning. When he retreats into a pain that isn't hers to soothe. When he decides he can't have anyone if he can't have Jessica.

"Lucy?" he asks softly, breaking her apart with a watery gaze that seems to hold her against her will.

Her decision is made. It was probably made before he'd even put his request into words, but she pretends otherwise for just another few seconds. "Don't give me that puppy dog face. How am I supposed to say no to that?"

"You're not." He takes one last uneven step, and now all it would take is one cosmic breeze to move them into kissing range. He levels those eyes at her once more and she wonders if he's secretly some kind of a mythological creature, the type that can lure mere mortals in with nothing more than a silent song. "That's the point. Don't say no."

"Damn you, Wyatt Logan."

It's supposed to come out flippantly, but she feels like crying - for him, for herself, for every team member who's been relegated to this life underground that's made shadows of them all - and he sees it, hears it, immediately. From day one, he's read her like a book. And even on day one, he's never shied away from letting her know when he doesn't like what he's reading.

Tonight, he makes an exception. His forehead ruffles but he doesn't comment on the crack in her voice. He extends his bottle with a look of understanding, holding it out for the taking. "Care to drink to that?"

She reflects on the nights she's spent tucked away with her own stash of vodka. Thinks of how Garcia Flynn became her unlikely listening ear when the vodka stopped doing the trick. Asks herself if that's all she'll be to Wyatt now - a shoulder to lean on, a friend when he has no one else to turn to, a landing place at night when the worst of his doubts are howling too loudly to be subdued in any other way.

But then those rounded puppy eyes lose their innocence. They shimmy down to her mouth and linger there as he swallows loudly.

If she drinks tonight, she'll let it happen. She will absolutely let him use her body to drown out the noise. Every last bit of self-respect that she's scraped together over these last few weeks will be flung to the wind and she'll lose herself in him as surely as he longs to lose himself in her.

"No," she whispers scratchily. "Better just...toast on my behalf, okay?"

The corners of his lips flicker darkly before he raises the bottle and does as asked. He nods at her after several long gulps. "To you, ma'am."

His voice does unimaginable things to her. It isn't natural, not on someone who's already too wickedly handsome for his own good.

Dear God, this isn't going to end well. No matter what she tells herself, drinking or no drinking, this situation is a disaster in the making.

"You sit on Jiya's bed," she says quietly, eyes to the floor. "You don't come any closer to me than that. If I tell you to leave, you leave."

"Should we shake on it?"

Lucy thinks of his hand grasping hers, the length of his fingers devouring hers in a grip she knows too well, and she's shaking her head a little feverishly. "No. I just need your word."

"You have it," he says automatically.

He backs away to his designated side of the room. She sinks against her own bed with a sigh. Only then can she look at him again, and he's already staring right back at her. Expectant. Obedient, even. As if he's a student dutifully awaiting an assignment from the teacher. This defenselessness of his is so pitifully endearing that it might just eat a real hole right through her stomach.

"There's a chance this is one big misunderstanding, right?" she asks quietly.

She doesn't know why she's doing this, why she's choosing to bring Jessica back up when he seems content to let it drop, but that's the source of his misery and it feels irresponsible to leave him hanging when there's still hope. "You haven't heard her side of things yet. Maybe there's an explanation for - "

"She left," he cuts in dryly. "She bounced because she knew Agent Christopher was catching on to her. Innocent people don't run."

"You could have assumed the same about me, right? That I ran after the explosion at Mason Industries...when I never turned up and you knew - well, you knew at least half of my family was Rittenhouse back then. It could have looked like I - "

"No. I know you better than that."

Lucy feels a shiver that has nothing to do with the temperature of the bunker. He...he knows her better than…?

"You heard me," he affirms with a lopsided tip of his head. "I know you. She...she's different. Of course she's different. I'm different too. Jess and I were playing a whole lotta catch up to try to figure out these versions of ourselves. But you, Lucy? There's no figurin' involved. You're no mystery and you're no double crosser."

The 'no mystery' part almost sounds like a diss, but the way he's looking at her refutes any doubt she may have. It's too much to process. He may be several feet away, but she still feels dangerously unbalanced by that gaze. The one that can comprehend all that's inside of her in one clean sweep.

"I still think that you - that you shouldn't make up your mind about her until you - "

"Nope." Wyatt leans down to set his bottle on the ground. Or so she thinks until he's clanking it against the cement floor like it's a warning bell, pointedly drowning out her words. "You're not defending her tonight. I don't want to listen to you paint some happy shiny picture of my bogus marriage. Quit the bullshit, Lucy. You don't know what you're talking about."

She recoils. It's an involuntary reaction, one that shows her hand, letting him know that he's gotten under her skin with that, but there's plenty of time for him to take it back and he stays silent. She isn't sure what's worse, the anger she feels toward him or the sadness she feels for him, but either way, she's hit her limit. He can sit there for as long as he wants, he can drink himself blind, fester until he's rotten through and through, but she's out.

He doesn't say anything as she turns her back to him and slides down into her fortress of blankets. She's fully settled in and ready to wait him out for as long as it takes. Sooner or later, he'll get the message and go. Or sleep will just steal her away in the meantime. Either option works for her.

"I'm sorry," he says hoarsely, "but...do you - do you know how many times you've told me that?"

She tries to ignore him. The effort lasts all of three seconds. "Told you what?"

"That I needed to be with her. That she was the one who would make me happy."

"Wyatt, I - "

He scoffs harshly, and she can imagine the exact set of lines that are working their way across his forehead as he interrupts her. "Simple yes or no, Lucy. Do you know the number or don't you?"

She's rolling her eyes even if no one's seeing it but her pillow. "No. Can't say that I do."

The slosh of the bottle precedes his low crackling laugh. "Me neither. Lost count after too many damn times hearing it."

Her annoyance skyrockets, but she channels some crazy level of icy calm. She won't grant him the satisfaction of a blow up. "Sorry to burden you with my well-wishes, Wyatt. Won't let it happen again."

"Lucy - "

"That's enough. If you want to stay, no more talking. You know where the door is if that doesn't work for you. That was our deal."

He doesn't fight her on it. She closes her eyes and waits for the sound of his stumbling, off-center exit.

She drifts off several minutes later, still waiting for a departure that doesn't come.

There's a clink. A loud one. It's followed by a hastily whispered, "shit, shit, shit."

And then there's a hiccup that could probably be heard from outer space.

Lucy cracks an eye open to find Wyatt scrubbing furiously at the top of Jiya's bedspread. Her first instinct is to pretend she's seen nothing, to turn over again and make herself face the wall until she can fall back asleep. She'll just deal with whatever mess he's made in the morning.

But then she catches sight of the clear bottle in his hand - one that does not match up with the darker one he'd been working on earlier - and her mind is sputtering into partial alertness. "What - what are you doing?"

He whirls to face her, almost tipping the bottle as he goes, blinking owlishly back at her. "Lucy?"

"Is that - " she narrows her gaze and squints through the shadows, "- tell me that's not a new bottle, Wyatt."

He shrugs, glassy-eyed and undisturbed. "The last one was empty."

She props herself up on one arm to scowl at him. "Didn't look empty last time I saw it. Not even close."

"You were sleeping," he slurs back. "I was bored."

A second glance at the bottle in his hand reveals that this one is already at least a quarter of the way down. Lucy presses a hand to her forehead and clenches her teeth together. "You should be sleeping too. That's what normal people do in the middle of the night, you know."

Another careless shrug. "Don't wanna."

"You need to stop, Wyatt. This is getting bad, like landing yourself in the ER to get your stomach pumped bad, and she - she isn't worth it, okay?"

"Is that what you think? That this is just about Jessica?" He laughs and she hates the bitter, hollow sound of it. "I started drinking tonight to keep myself from coming in here to you, and then I drank so much that of course I couldn't resist doing it anyway. Staying away from you has been hell, Lucy. Hell, hell, hell. Absolute fucking hell. And now I don't have to do it anymore, right? She's gone. I don't have to force myself to try to hide how I feel about you. But the funny thing is that it's probably too late and I still have to stay away from you, don't I? Because I hurt you too much. I ruined what we had. I let you believe she was my first choice. I didn't know how to let it go...I - I..."

She closes her eyes as he trails off emptily. "Wyatt, please - please just stop. It's okay."

"How can you say it's okay? Don't you understand? I'm the fool who has to get permission to sit across from you and watch you sleep when I - I could have been the lucky bastard who sleeps in that bed with you. If that's not enough to make a man drink himself to death, I don't know what is."

Her eyes find his on a goddamn reflex and the pain she sees there slams against her like a tractor-trailer plowing over a guard rail. There are tears collecting in his lashes as he angles the bottle back again, and she's across the room before she knows what she's doing, snatching it away from him in a heartbeat. "I'm serious, Wyatt. You've been cut off."

He doesn't reach for the bottle. He reaches for her. His hand wraps around her wrist, and the jolting touch of his palm is hot against her skin. "You…you're pretty damn good at cutting me off, aren't ya, babydoll?"

She wants to push back against that. To tell him she's been doing the right thing, the necessary thing, the only thing she knew how to do. What choice did she have? How could he have ever expected that they could still be a they when his wife was back in the picture?

But instead her voice drops about twelve octaves and she confesses something that hits a lot closer to the heart of the matter.

"Not as good as you might think."

His expression is distressingly soft as he peers up at her. His thumb strokes over her pulse point in time to the hammering throb of life beneath her skin. "Is that true?"

Lucy sets the bottle down as far from him as she can reach, then lets herself do the unthinkable. She sits next to him, arranges her arms around his shoulders, and pulls him against her until his face has come to rest against her neck. "Truer than you can ever know."

He shudders a little, and that makes her shudder too. His hands roam up her back, stopping intermittently to fist her shirt, and the staggering sigh he releases into her hair has him shuddering again. "Am I dreaming right now?"

"If you are, then so am I."

"I doubt that you dream of creepy douchebags getting drunk off their asses and watching you for half the night while you sleep, so this must be real."

She chuckles against the side of his head and wraps him up a little tighter. "Well, when you put it like that…"

"You smell nice," he murmurs absently. "You always smell nice."

There's an intense fluttering in her stomach, one that swiftly erases all the tension she's been carrying there until now. "That's a lie, Wyatt. 1754 ring any bells? I think I smelled about as nice as a sewage line by day two of that jump."

"Whatever. That doesn't count. Betcha' still smelled good anyway."

She just shakes her head with a meager laugh. Being this close to him after keeping herself boxed in for so long is beginning to scramble her thoughts, and the sudden uncaged freedom startles her into silence. She's flown too high with him before, felt the flames of a crash that's left her with too much scar tissue. It might not be a mistake that's worth repeating.

As if he's caught the fraying thread of the exact realization, Wyatt tugs her even closer, his arms cinching around her until they're seamlessly sealed together. "This is all I've wanted, Lucy. To hold you again. To be close to you."

"I'm scared that this still isn't...isn't such a good idea."

"It is," he answers without a breath of indecision. "Avoiding each other was bad. Being close is good. I'm happier with you."

Lucy has to clamp her eyes shut to withhold a flood of tears. "That - that can't..."

"You're my miracle, Lucy Preston. I'm glad she's alive, but you're my miracle."

"You're drunk," she whispers through the sob that's building in her throat.

His hand slides up and down her neck, fingers and thumbs molding into her like she's a lump of yielding clay. "Drinking makes me more honest, not less."

"Wyatt…"

She says nothing else, because even his name sounds like a cry ripped from her most hurting parts. He starts to drag her down across the bed, but she shakes her head, sniffling and pulling him in the opposite direction.

"Mine," she murmurs, nodding toward her bed before he can misunderstand her reluctance. "You spilled whiskey on this one."

"Right. Good point. Tell Jiya m'sorry?"

Lucy hauls him up to his feet, keeping a watchful eye on him until he's safely flopping down atop her comforter. "You can tell her yourself while you're doing laundry for her tomorrow."

"Such a ball-buster, Preston," he retorts with a crooked grin. His hand cups her face reverently as soon as she's seated next to him. "I love that about you."

"Oh really? Try to remember that when you're annoyed with me for - "

He cuts her off with his lips on hers. Well, sort of on hers. He slides a little too far off target and tries to fix it by moving her whole head with his hands, but he overcorrects and barely gets the corner of her mouth. And she can't help it...some beyond-hysterical piece of her exhausted brain goes off the tracks and she laughs. Quite inexplicably, she actually laughs against him, halfway pissed off that he thinks this is the right time to make a move, but ultimately incapable of harnessing any of that anger, because what else is new? What the hell has gone right for her lately?

"Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for," he grumbles with his mouth still hovering over hers.

"Yeah well, you're a little off your game, sweetheart."

Before he can protest - which the adorable little wrinkle between his eyes promises that he will - Lucy inches forward and soothes him with a gentle grazing kiss. The solid wallop of liquor on his breath can't extinguish the soul-stirring charge of their mouths reconnecting after what feels like lifetimes spent apart. Lips fitted together, faces aligned, arms wound close; he's the one who's three sheets to the wind, but damn is that fizzy, lightheaded sensation ever feeling contagious right about now.

"There," she exhales slowly, savoring the awestruck look that's lighting up his eyes in an unearthly shade of crystalline blue. "That's all you're getting tonight. We're sleeping now, no funny business."

His hand settles low over her hip as his lips stretch wider. "Not even a little funny business?"

She nudges her nose against his, her grin mirroring the one that reflects across his face. "Boundaries, Wyatt. Respect them."

"Yes, ma'am."

Lucy scoots backwards and he follows after her immediately, clumsily arranging himself in the narrow space with all the eagerness of a drugged-up golden retriever. She reaches out, stills his blundering movements, and pushes his shoulders back against the sheets until he's gazing up at her in a way that's as open-hearted as she's ever seen him.

She loves him. She knows that like she knows that John Wilkes Booth was supposed to be the one who shot President Lincoln. Knows it like she'd known that she had to stop Jesse James before he could take more lives, even if that meant firing the bullet herself. Knows it like she'd known that Hedy Lamarr was as brilliant as she was beautiful. Knows it like Grace Humiston had known of their romantic dispute without hearing a word of it from either one of them.

What she doesn't know - what she's been too terrified to ask herself - is if they have any hope of surviving the seismic reverberations of Rittenhouse callously toying with their lives as if they're nothing but plastic tokens on a child's game board.

As she eases herself against him and feels his body automatically relaxing beneath hers, she thinks she might not have to look too far for that answer.

With a few long-withheld tears seeping past her eyelashes, Lucy wonders if maybe this is when she finally gets to be the one who believes in fate and destiny even when it comes to love. Especially when it comes to love. Maybe she won't spend the rest of her life without anyone else. Maybe...maybe she does still need to be open to the possibilities.