Work Text:
1.
Sometimes, life is so busy that Tim forgets he misses working with Lucy. He forgets what it felt like to sit next to her for twelve hours a day, to learn something new about her each shift, collecting all of the little pieces which make her up - her lunch order, the downturn of her mouth when she’s confused, the look in her eyes when she’s upset and doesn’t want to talk about it, the way her fingertips taps out melodies on the shop door to fill the quiet.
Tonight, the precinct is quiet, the day’s been way too long, and Tim’s completing a stack of paperwork three desks down from Lucy. Tonight, he does not forget he misses her, feels it instead like a physical pull. She’s not looking at him, though he knows she knows he’s there, because she looked up when he came in fifteen minutes ago and asked in a sleep heavy voice what he was still doing here. He’d shaken the stack of paperwork at her, and she’d nodded in solidarity. They’ve been quiet since.
He wants to get home at some point tonight, ideally before he has to get up for his next shift, so he knows what he should really be doing is focusing on getting the paperwork done.
It’s not his fault that his eyes aren’t obeying.
They keep drifting, looking down the line of computers, landing on Lucy.
There’s something oddly intimate about seeing her like this, and it's not that he hasn’t been with her this late before, not like he hasn’t seen her exhausted or exhilarated or every emotion in between, but tonight she feels far away. Like her mind is elsewhere, like he’s watching her in a moment she was only ever supposed to be alone in.
He can’t pinpoint why this seems different. Maybe because she’s pulled her hair loose of its braids and let it fall around her shoulders in soft waves, or because she’s frowning at the computer monitor like it’s personally wronged her, or because she looks like she’s about to fall asleep any second.
He wonders if she’s been sleeping enough. They find time to catch up here and there, but these days, it’s mostly surface level. He wants to know the real stuff.
But it’s not his business anymore.
Tim forces his eyes down, wondering if he can maybe make it out of here within the hour, wondering if he should ask Lucy if she wants to do something at the weekend, casual, as friends, of course. Maybe that’s what she needs right now - someone to talk to. He has no doubt that Jackson’s great for that, but he knows he’s been spending more and more time at Isaac’s lately, so maybe Lucy needs someone else, too. Maybe that someone else could be him.
Tim reads the same sentence three times before he takes any of it in. He’s starting on the next when he hears it.
Music. So soft that he half thinks he’s imagining it, until he’s looking left and realising it’s singing. It’s Lucy singing, something soft which reminds him acutely of his childhood, of summers sitting on the back porch of his grandparents’ house in the country and looking up at the stars, unfamiliar pinpricks in the darkness which the light pollution chased out of the city. Tim doesn’t think Lucy realises she’s doing it, and it's so quiet that he’s pretty sure he’s the only person in the room who can hear it.
He watches her, an ordinary moment, a snippet of stillness in a hectic schedule. And something seems to click into place in his mind.
She’s fiddling with her pen and trailing smudges of ink along the back of her hand, and her singing is kind of making it feel like time has stopped, just briefly, like the universe is giving him this space to realise something, uninterrupted. And Tim doesn’t believe in Gods or fates or signs, but this right here feels significant.
He’s realising, though he thinks he’s probably known it subconsciously for a long time, that he can’t imagine his life without her. He doesn’t want to have to, though it feels like every week they drift further apart, a natural consequence of the unrelenting march of time, of being busy people in busy jobs.
But life is short. He doesn’t want to lose her. So, in the low light of an unextraordinary evening in a place he spends every day in, he makes a decision. He’s going to try his hardest to keep her as a permanent presence in his life.
2.
Tim wakes to the sound of running water and Lucy’s voice, travelling through the door of the en-suite, singing something he thinks might be from a musical, swears he heard his niece singing it off key that year she went through her musical theatre phase. It sounded kind of terrible then. Now, in the place halfway between wake and sleep, sunlight casting long bars of yellow light on the ground through the crack between the curtains, listening to Lucy singing it in his shower?
Now it’s the best song he knows.
It takes him five minutes and a nudge from Kojo for Tim to fully realise the magnitude of what’s happening. That Lucy had stayed over. That’s what fully wakes him up, as it dawns on him that this is his life right now, and he’s smiling into his pillow.
They’re not even really a thing yet, and he already feels the luckiest he’s felt in a really long time. He doesn’t know what to call them, even in his own head, but after a disastrous first date and an accidental second, after the stress of yesterday, after he’d asked her if she wanted to come over because Jackson was staying at Isaac’s and Tim didn’t want her to have to be alone, after she’d kissed him like that, after he’d lost himself in her...he thinks they have to be Something .
He thinks that whatever it is they have has been building for a long time. There’s been a spark there, almost since they first met, and though he didn’t see it coming then, looking back this feels inevitable. Like it was always going to end like this, him listening to her singing in his shower on his day off.
Only...he doesn’t want this to be an ending, a conclusion to the story of them. He wants it to be a beginning.
The shower shuts off, her singing dies to a quiet hum, and Tim closes his eyes for a second and tries his best to commit the way he feels right now to memory, to bottle the moment as best he can.
Kojo, seemingly able to sense that Lucy is almost done, bounds to the bathroom door and sits in front of it expectantly, so that when she comes out wearing yesterday’s clothes she almost trips over him, catching herself and laughing instead. Tim watches them, watches her scratching Kojo’s chest and sweet talking him until his tail is reduced to a blur, wagging dangerously fast.
“He’ll take your eye out.”
Lucy looks up, expression softening, smile contagious. “You’re finally awake, huh? I thought you were a morning person?” She stands and walks towards him, and Tim reaches for her like a reflex, tugging her down with him, pulling her close. Like now he knows that touching her is a thing he can do, he never wants to stop.
“Not today,” he says into the soft skin of her neck, peppering it with kisses. Her hair is wet, pooling dark circles on the pale blue of the pillowcase.
She giggles and slides down the bed a little, catches his lips with her own, one hand cupping his face and the other on his back, and it’s better than he ever could have imagined, kissing Lucy. He deepens the kiss, pulls her closer with a hand on her hip. She tastes like toothpaste, smells like his shower gel. It’s a little intoxicating.
She pulls away a moment later, and he chases her for one more kiss, soft and sweet. He never wants to stop.
“I have to go to work,” she whispers, and he’s forgotten they’re not on the same schedule anymore.
“Crime can wait,” he’s only half joking.
Lucy blinks at him, wearing a look of mock outrage. “Wow. Who are you, and what did you do with Officer Bradford?”
“He’s dead,” Tim jokes, “you killed him.”
Lucy’s looking at him with an oddly smug expression, so he kisses it away. “Ok, ok,” she’s giggling again, pulling away. “I need to get ready. But, um…” she pauses, looking a little hesitant.
“What is it?”
“I could...I could come back later? If you’d want me to.”
Tim smiles, moving to catch her hand and tangling their fingers up. Of course he wants her to come back after work. They kissed for the first time less than twelve hours ago, and he’s already addicted to this. He wants her to come over after work every day, wants to entangle their lives together in a way that should be terrifying, especially since they haven’t even talked about what this all means yet, but is far from it.
But this is new. And he needs to play it at least a little cool.
“Sure. We can get sushi.”
She kisses him again and his stomach flips like he’s sixteen years old. When she leaves the room to get ready to go, he hears her humming again, the same melody as before. It’s going to be stuck in his head all day, but he’s ok with that. He thinks he could get used to his life having a soundtrack, if it’s Lucy singing the songs.
3.
If anyone had asked Tim, before he started dating Lucy, whether he knew her, he’d have confidently said yes. It’s only now, after having lived together for five months, that he realises there’s lots of things it was impossible to know about her before, that he needed to share a life with her to learn. The main thing he learns is how much music is a part of her life. And once she’s comfortable around someone, singing comes as automatically to her as breathing.
She queues up songs on her phone to sing along to while she’s cooking, turns their grocery lists into verses so she doesn’t forget anything, sings good morning to Kojo and recites showtunes while she’s folding laundry.
The old, pre-Lucy, Tim would have thought it would be annoying, to have all of his silences filled up with melodies. He was wrong.
He’s figured out, sometime over the past year, that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, and leaning against the kitchen island, watching her making cups of coffee, wearing his t-shirt and not much else, he’s never been more certain. She’s singing something sad today, haunting and melodic, and she keeps stopping to speak to him or Kojo or curse at the toaster.
There’s a ring burning a hole in his pocket. It’s been there for a week, just waiting for the right moment to ask, but nothing ever seems special enough for her. He thinks today’s the day though. They’ve taken two personal days from work to spend time purposefully doing absolutely nothing, and the ring’s getting heavier every day. Tim keeps locking himself in the bathroom to hold it up to the light and look at it, the simple gold band with the pretty rose stone Jackson had caught Lucy looking at when they attended a break-in at a tiny boutique over a week ago. Jackson had texted Tim a photo with a winking emoji. Tim had replied with the eye roll emoji, but he’d gone to find the store to buy it the next day.
In some ways, he knows it’s never going to be as special as the ring he tossed back to her, years ago, after she used it to save her own life. He looks at it on her finger now, light glinting off of it as she spreads butter over her toast, the same way it did sitting atop the dirt in the middle of nowhere. The ring’s meaning changed that day, to be a symbol of the day she defied the odds and lived. Sometimes they both still wake up from nightmares about it. He dreams that he’s losing her all over again, that he finds the ring and digs until his fingers are raw but still, he can’t find her. He wakes up unable to breathe properly until his hands find her on the other side of the bed, holds her close ‘til morning.
Tim has to actively stop himself from thinking about what would have happened if he hadn’t been able to find her. It would be way too easy to fall into a rabbit hole of despair and horrifying possibilities. His life is good now, and he doesn’t need to waste time on those.
“Can you pass the creamer, babe?” Lucy asks, gesturing at the carton on the counter beside her.
“If you can catch it,” he tosses it across the four feet between them. She fumbles it a little, but manages to catch it.
“Great catch,” she commends herself.
“It was my great throw,” he counters, “I have excellent hand-eye coordination.” She tosses the little plastic lid from the coffee jar at him, and he misses, scrambling to pick it up off the ground before Kojo tries to eat it.
“Sure you do,” she winks at him, before starting her song up again from the beginning.
“What are you singing, anyway?” He asks, returning the lid to the coffee jar and then slipping his arms around her waist to pull her back against his chest.
She pauses, tilts her head back to kiss the underside of his jaw.
“Uh, ‘she used to be mine’. From Waitress.”
“That a movie?”
“Is that a movie ? Pssh! Have I taught you nothing?” She twists and pulls herself up to sit on the counter, looping her arms around his neck while he plants his hands on her waist. “Ok, actually it is technically a movie.”
“Ha!”
“But that’s not what I’m singing, because it’s also a super famous musical.”
“But I wasn’t wrong.”
She laughs softly, “shut up!”
He leans up to kiss her, and she smiles into it, only pulling away when the next batch of toast springs up from the toaster.
“Want to take Kojo on a hike this morning?” Lucy asks, as Tim moves to pick up his coffee.
He nods, “sounds good.”
There’s a spot they frequent, away from the main thoroughfare, where in amongst the russets and yellows of the Los Angeles terrain, wildflowers spring up alongside the trail, so tightly packed together it's like a collage of bold yellows and pale pinks and rich purples. They visited it on one of their first dates. They visited it the first time he told her he loved her. It seems like as perfect a spot as any to put the ring in his pocket to good use.
4.
Planning a wedding with Isabel was a lot more stressful than planning a wedding with Lucy. Tim doesn’t think it has anything to do with the women in question, just the places he’s in when he’s planning the weddings. The type of couple he and Lucy are is different to the type of couple he was with Isabel. They had both wanted a big, traditional wedding. He and Lucy are happy with a little ceremony on the beach.
They get married earlier than expected, plans for a slightly larger September ceremony with family members and fireworks scrapped in exchange for an impromptu June wedding with the family they found for themselves.
Lucy wears a pretty white sundress and Angela weaves flowers into her hair for her. They mark out an aisle out of flat beach rocks and dried petals and she walks down it with bare feet, beaming at him until the tears in his eyes turn her blurry.
The day goes too fast, finished up with drinks at a beach bar and too many rambling, alcohol-fuelled speeches, until finally they’re standing on the deck of the expensive sea view hotel they’d booked for the night. They’re both tired and wine drunk, and they look out over the waves and sway to the sound of them, arms around each other.
“Are you sad?” he asks, “that your parents weren’t there?”
“No,” she says, without hesitation. “It was kind of perfect, actually. I can’t believe we pulled it off.”
“We’re just that good.”
“We are,” she says quietly. She's barefoot again, and looking up at him like he hung the moon. He doesn’t need to ask her to know his expression is mirroring hers. “Hey, does this count as our first dance?”
“Uh. I guess so.”
Like clockwork, Lucy fills the momentary silence with music notes. The song sounds a little sappy, a little familiar, but sweet enough. Until Tim recognises it.
“Is that…” he stops swaying, “Lucy, are you singing Shania Twain? Are you making us have our first dance to still the one?”
She gasps, “oh, so you know who Shania Twain is?”
“My sister used to listen to her! Not my fault.”
Lucy bites back a smile, “what do you have against Shania?”
“I just don’t want my first dance with my wife to be to Shania Twain!”
Lucy stops, getting a soft look on her face. “Aww, Tim. Wife! I’m your wife! You’re my husband!”
He laughs, pressing a kiss to her temple, and when he pulls back, there are tears shining in her eyes again.
“I know, baby,” he swipes a thumb under her left eye to catch a tear, “I was there when we said the vows.”
“Oh, that was you?” Lucy asks, tears turning to giggles. Her cheeks are a little flushed from the wine. Tim doesn’t think he’s ever loved her more than in this moment.
“I hope so. I don’t really want you to marry anyone else.”
“If I married someone else, maybe they’d let me have our first dance to Shania.”
He rolls his eyes. “Ok, ok. We can dance to Shania. If it’s that important to you.”
“It is,” she deadpans.
She sings, and they sway until they’re laughing too much for her to keep it up. They pop the complimentary bottle of champagne the hotel staff had left in an ice bucket in their room, talk about everything and nothing on the deck until the sun starts to pale the horizon, and then fall asleep on top of the bed covers.
Just like that, Tim’s married again. It’s funny how life works.
5.
Their daughter is one week old, and Tim’s pretty sure she’s allergic to sleep. Evie was born on a November morning at 4 a.m, crashing so traumatically into the world that Tim was left standing outside an operating room for thirty-seven minutes and eight seconds wondering if he’d lost both of them. He felt every second ticking over in agonising clarity, was joined by Angela and Jackson for the final half of it, the three of them lining the hallway in a silent vigil, hands clasped tight.
And then the nurses were wheeling out a tiny crib with a red-faced, angry baby inside, and Tim laid eyes on his daughter for the very first time and the world seemed to stand still. He’s not ashamed to admit that he cried. When they let him see Lucy again, an hour later, and he could speak to her and hold her and confirm with his own two eyes that she was ok, he cried all over again.
“She’s definitely your daughter,” Lucy had said, cradling her in the hospital bed as they both looked down into her big dark eyes. “Flair for the dramatic.”
Tim had scoffed, “I’m pretty sure she gets that from you.”
“No, no, no. This whole birth was just her giving us an elaborate one of your Tim tests...an Evie evaluation.”
The term had stuck. Evie had continued to give them evaluations. Tim feels like the last seven days have been one big, long evaluation for Evie to gain an answer to the question: ‘how long can my parents possibly stay awake?’
They’re getting kind of desperate at this point. Angela suggests a different method of swaddling the baby, Nyla suggests a white noise machine, John suggests a car ride, Jackson texts them twenty different links to web pages on ‘how to get your newborn to sleep’.
Evie resists every single method.
“Are we doing something wrong?” Lucy asks, eyes a little wild, pacing the length of their bedroom at two a.m and rocking a grumbling Evie. “Are we broken? Did we break her? Should we call the doctor’s office?”
“She’s not sick, Lucy, she’s just...mad? I don’t know,” Tim rubs the sleep from his eyes. It feels a little like they’re full of sand.
Kojo’s sitting next to the bed, his eyes following Lucy, looking as concerned as it’s possible for a dog to look. Tim reaches over to pet him. This family started with the two of them. They’re in this together
“What if I’m screwing her up? What if she- she talks about this in therapy in twenty years?” Her voice breaks like she’s about to start crying. Tim’s heart breaks a little, and he stands up quickly to wrap his arms around her and the baby.
“You’re doing a great job. Evie’s…”
“Evaluating us,” Lucy sniffs.
“Yeah,” Tim laughs softly. “You want me to get you a drink?”
She nods, “herbal tea please?”
“Ok,” he kisses Evie, and then Lucy, and then makes his way downstairs.
It still hasn’t fully sunk in, that he’s a dad. That Evie is going to be his daughter for the rest of her life, no matter what happens. He spent most of Lucy’s pregnancy worrying, at least in the background, that he’d be a terrible father. He was excited, of course, but through all of the preparations - through doctors visits and fighting with flat pack furniture and Lamaze classes and laying his hand flat on Lucy’s belly to feel the tiny kicks through her skin - there had been an undercurrent of anxiety.
Tim didn’t have much of an example, his own father the exact opposite of the kind of dad he had wanted to be. Lucy had promised him he’d be wonderful, that he’d carve his own path. He’d tried his best to take her words to heart.
He’s still terrified, each day throwing something new at him, but from the first time he held Evie, he understood in sharp clarity that he’d always give her his best. He had waited hours to hold her, too afraid he’d break her, until Lucy was sleeping and Evie had started to fuss in her hospital crib. He’d picked her up and taken her to watch the world waking up out of the window. He’d shown her the sky. He’d promised to fight her corner, every time. He’d promised to always love her. He’s hoping it’s enough.
Tim climbs the stairs with a mug of tea for Lucy, pausing outside the bedroom door for a second and listening.
It’s quiet. Almost too quiet. It’s only when he pushes the pale wood door open that he hears it, and for once, Evie's not crying.
It’s a song about stars. A song Tim hasn’t heard in a very long time.
The last time he heard it was inside a prison, from the mocking lips of a serial killer. Back then, it had terrified Lucy, and he’d only found out later that it was the song she sang in the moments before she had been certain she was going to die. The song was the last thing she thought she would ever hear.
It had broken his heart. And Lucy hasn’t sung the song since. He doesn’t think she’s even listened to it. It had come on the radio once in the car and she’d switched the station.
But now...now, a whole lifetime removed from the last time Tim heard it, Lucy’s perched on the edge of the bed, singing it under her breath to their little girl.
Instead of it breaking this time, Tim swears, he feels his heart melting in his chest.
“She’s sleeping ,” Lucy whispers, when she notices Tim watching her. “Can you believe it?”
“Quickly,” Tim puts the tea down on the dresser, gestures to the bassinet beside their bed, holding it steady so Lucy can gently place Evie inside. It’s more nerve wracking than handling live explosives, he’s sure.
“Do you think we passed her evaluation?” Lucy asks, standing back carefully.
“I think so,” Tim puts an arm around her shoulders. “I think she’s happy to let us be her parents.”
“Finally,” Lucy sighs. “She’s a tough grader.”
“Mmhmm,” he kisses the top of her head. “Want to redeem our reward?”
“What is it?”
“Sleep. It’s sleep.”
“Oh thank God.”
They climb beneath the covers and within five minutes, Lucy’s sleeping, head on Tim’s chest, body curled into him. As exhausted as he is, he’s a little too wired to fall right asleep.
Nolan and Harper had warned him, at the bar, three months ago, that babies grow up so much quicker than you think. They’d told him to appreciate the little moments it would be all too easy to take for granted.
But he thinks the little moments have been his favourite all along. Pockets of quiet when he can appreciate the life he’s built, still has to pinch himself sometimes as a reminder it’s real. There have been so many times in his life when he thought it was ending, one way or another. Moments when he was ready for it to. Moments he’s had to claw his way out of. Moments where he wondered what the point of it all was.
He knows now. Knows it’s not for the big achievements, the celebrations, the parties. It’s for the peace he feels in the quiet ones like this, laying in the dark with his wife and daughter and dog. And sure, having Evie means the end of another chapter of his life. But it means the beginning of something brand new. Tim can’t wait to get started.