š°anctuary epilogue
Jud Duplenticy x Wick'sNiece!Reader Sanctuary Masterlist | Taglist Form | Previous | The end. | word count: 2k warnings: none, for once. just the emotional damage that comes with saying goodbye to one of my favorite stories iāve ever written. a/n: thank you, thank you, thank you for coming along on this journey with me. i love these two and their little world so much, and iām so grateful that so many of you chose to love them too. here is your ending š„š¤ and maybe, if youād like, share in the comments what you think Jud and readerās life looks like after that year. iād love for you to make the story your own and imagine all the little moments they get after we leave them. i love you guys dowwwwnnn šš«¶
"Wait!"
Jud's voice tears across the rain as he pedals harder than he probably has in years, the bike rattling beneath him like it too understands the urgency. He nearly loses control rounding the bend to your house, tires skidding over wet gravel, but then he sees you.
The trunk of your car is open. Bags already inside. Your front door standing wide like the house itself is helping you leave him.
And it is raining, of course it is ā as if the sky has decided this deserves more drama.
Your letter is still clenched in his hand, soaked through, the ink beginning to run at the edges. He brakes too hard, the bike fishtailing before it jerks to a stop.
"Please." He half-falls off it trying to get to you faster. "Just hold on. Please. I'm begging you."
You turn at the sound of him, startled, rain sliding down your face and catching in your lashes. "Jud, whatā"
"Don't do this."
He says it before he's even fully reached you.
He leaves the bike where it falls and closes the distance between you with no caution left in him, no priestly composure, no effort to seem measured or calm. He is soaked through, breathless, hair dripping, the letter crushed in his fist like it personally offended him.
"I told you not toā"
"Not to come after you," he cuts in, still catching his breath. "Did you really think I'd accept this?"
He lifts the letter between you.
The pages are damp and wrinkled, your words half-blurring into the rain, but he is looking at you. Not at them.
"You don't get to write something like this and disappear before I answer it."
Your face shifts, hurt and hope colliding so fast it almost looks like fear. "Judā¦"
"No." He shakes his head, rain flying from the ends of his hair. "No, I'm not letting this happen again. We've done this ā walked away, decided for each other, chosen the noble exit ā and I am done."
He's shaking. Not from cold. Not entirely.
He opens the letter with both hands, careful despite the rain trying to dissolve it, and glances down at the page.
"'How can I stand there while you trade away your calling piece by piece just to keep me nearby.'" His voice roughens on your own words. Then he looks up. "You don't get to decide that for me."
Your throat tightens.
"I am so tired," he says, quieter now, "of everyone in this town deciding what my life ought to cost me."
That takes the air right out of you.
He drops the letter to his side and steps close enough that the rain no longer feels like it's falling between you.
"Langstrom offered me a year. A leave. Time to think ā to figure this out without any commitments to the church bearing down on me, without fully breaking my vows. Time to follow my gut for once in my life."
You blink. "You can do that?"
"I can do that." Something in his face breaks open slowly, like a man who has finally stopped bracing for the next blow. "I want to do that."
"I can't, Jud." You wrap your arms around yourself against the cold. "I can't spend another year doing this. Waiting for what my gut tells me will inevitably come."
"And what does your gut tell you?"
The question is so quiet it nearly gets swallowed by the rain.
You open your mouth. Close it.
"That you'll realize this was grief and pain and proximity and a very strange couple of months, and you'llā"
"Stop it," he shakes his head.
"It's all in the letter. I won't repeat it. You mean too much to me toā"
"Please." He steps toward you.
"I just need to go." You shift toward the car.
"Damn it. I love you!"
The words land without warning, without preamble, without any of the careful architecture he usually builds around hard things.
Just that.
The rain keeps falling. Somewhere down the road, a branch snaps in the wind.
You stare at him.
His jaw is set, eyes firmly set on yours, and he looks terrified ā the way a man looks when he has finally said the true thing and has no idea what comes next.
"I love you," he repeats, slower this time, like he wants you to hear every syllable. "Not because of what happened or by accident. I loved you before I had the courage to name it, and I will still love you at the end of that year, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise so you can leave quietly and call it mercy."
Your chin trembles. You press your lips together hard.
"You said I was your saving grace." He shakes his head, wet and wrecked and incandescently earnest in a way that breaks something open in your chest. "You have been mine since the day you walked up to the churchyard with your bike, in that beautiful yellow dress, and made me feel seen for the first time since moving hereā¦maybe ever." His voice drops. "I have not spent one second since then not thinking about you. Not wanting you. Not needing you in a way I couldn't pray away no matter how hard I tried."
You look at him. At the soaked hair and the ruined letter and the bike lying on its side in the gravel. At the expression on his face that has nothing of the priest left in it and everything of the man.
"Jud." Your voice comes out smaller than you intend. "I am so afraid of wanting this."
"I know." He takes one more step, careful enough to give you room to decide. "So am I. But I am so tired of living in fear."
You close the distance he left you.
His arms come around you before you're fully there, pulling you against him like the last month has been one long held breath he can finally let go. One hand cradles the back of your head. His cheek presses to your temple.
You cry into his shoulder.
"Please," he whispers into your hair, and it comes out like a prayer ā a little desperate and entirely without shame. "Please put me out of my misery and tell me you feel the same. I think you do. I pray you do. But I am willing to beg. I'm already out here drenched, I biked through a storm, I would have run if I had to. Justā" His arms tighten around you. "Please love me back."
You pull back just enough to look at him, hands coming up to hold his face the way he always holds yours ā like something precious, like something you're not willing to drop. Rain runs between your fingers.
His eyes close for one brief, undone second, like the words have gone somewhere deep and he needs a moment before he can look at you again.
When he opens them, they're wet in a way that isn't just the weather.
"Jud." Your thumbs brush his cheeks. "I love you so much that I have been in complete agony trying to protect you from it. I wrote that letter because I love you. Because I couldn't watch you spend one more day choosing guilt over yourself and think I didn't notice. Because the cruelest thing I could imagine was becoming one more person in your life who cost you something."
"You are not a cost," he assured you, and the certainty in it is devastating. "You have added more value to my life than you could ever know."
You make a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob.
He kisses you in the rain, which is exactly as ridiculous and inevitable as everything else between you has been ā both of your hands still cradling each others faces, the trunk of your car still open behind you with bags that are no longer going anywhere.
When he pulls back, he's smiling. The full version. Unguarded, unashamed, a little undone.
"I'm going to need you to unpack those bags," he says.
You laugh ā properly this time, wet and exhausted and lighter than you've felt in years. "I know."
He kisses you again, and you run your fingers through his wet hair and he sighs into you like a man setting something down he's been carrying too long.
"How," he murmurs against your lips, "was I ever supposed to recover after knowing what it felt like to kiss you?"
You smile against his mouth. "That was all part of my evil plan."
"It worked." He pulls back just enough to look at you, eyes bright, the smile still there. Then he takes your hand from his face and holds it in both of his, turning it over slowly ā like he's reading something written in your palm, like he's making sure this is real before he lets himself believe it.
You watch him do it.
And then, because he has earned every word of it, you give him the only thing left to give.
"One year," you say.
He looks up at you.
"And then whatever comes after."
His whole face changes ā the last of the fear going out of it, replaced by something quieter and more permanent. He brings your hand to his mouth and presses his lips to your knuckles, eyes closed, like a man at the end of a very long road who has finally, finally stopped walking.
"Yeah," he breathes, the smile breaking wide and helpless across his face. "I have a feeling it's going to be a lot longer than a year."
The rain softens around you.
Not to nothing ā just to the kind that doesn't demand anything. The kind you can stand in without bracing.
Behind you, the trunk of your car stays open. The house door is still ajar, letting the warm light spill out across the wet gravel like it's been waiting for you both to come back inside.
You look at the man in front of you ā soaked through, laughing quietly, still holding your hand like he has no plans to stop ā and you think about yellow dresses and storms and letters written out of love and bicycles and prayers that got answered sideways, in the last way you ever expected, by exactly the right person at exactly the wrong time.
You think: I would do all of it again.
Every storm. Every wound. Every impossible, necessary, ruinous, beautiful step of it.
If it ended here.
With him.
In the rain.
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FUCCCCCK YEAH AFTER 2 14 hours days THIS IS A TREAT
Canāt wait to read when my day is over šš
