Chapter Text
“Today was day one of stage two of your training.” Tim’s eyes are sharp, glaring at Lucy as he folds his arms.
“So, what? Does that mean I’ve lost all the respect that I’ve earned?” She doesn’t mean to bite back, but it’s hard not to let the irritation bleed into her voice. Here, she’d thought they were getting somewhere, that the last six months had been enough for them to forge at least a little bit of a personal bond. But today? Today had felt like her first day all over again. Only worse, because now she knows that Tim is capable of compassion, and just actively choosing to walk all over her.
“You lost that when you lied on a report.”
He’s so matter of fact about it that Lucy believes him for a second. But then she starts thinking about it, and she can’t come up with any reports she’s lied on. They’d really only worked one call with any paperwork today, and he was acting cold and stony before that. Everything else had been Tim Tests, and him rolling his eyes when he had to take her back to the station for a clean uniform, even though it was his fault she needed to change in the first place. All day, the only thing she didn’t put in a report when her first reaction was to empathize with the missing woman’s husband, and he hadn’t even turned out to be involved once they’d investigated.
“What?”
“I read your account of what happened at the quarantine house.”
“O-OK?” That had been two weeks ago; she’d filed the paperwork as soon as she was cleared from the scene, wanting to get it over with and put it out of her mind, hopefully forever. Lucy hates thinking about that day, can hear her voice wavering now, as she tries to shake the memories flooding her consciousness. There’s Tim, closing the door in her face, quite literally shutting her out. Tim, having to watch Pete die a painful, violent death and wondering if he might face the same thing, but still doing the job. Tim, seizing in the ambulance, scaring her more in that moment than any gunshot she’d ever faced.
She doesn’t want to think about it, because she doesn’t want to think about losing him. Not yet, not when he hasn’t even finished training her yet. She’s not ready to face that, not ready to think about doing her job without him backing her up.
Maybe in another six months, but even then, he’ll still be around to support her. Unless the unthinkable happens, which is exactly why she’s not thinking about it.
“When I thought I was infected.” Tim’s voice is harsh and even, not betraying even an ounce of any emotion other than his frustration with Lucy. She has no idea how he’s able to face it so dryly, when it had been his life on the line. “I told you I’d rather take my own life than bleed out. You failed to report it.”
Lucy’s stomach twists as she thinks about that moment for the first time since they’d been in it. She’s not going to throw up. Not here, not over this. He can’t have the satisfaction of that.
She remembers it like not an hour has passed, sitting there, on the other side of the door, wondering every second if she’d hear the loud echo of a gunshot. Every time Tim stopped talking, she was afraid he’d said his last words.
She doesn’t know how she’d have handled it, if she’d had to listen to him die. But she thinks it would have been worse if he’d asked her to leave, made her walk away and leave him there alone, in pain and suffering.
But it hadn’t come to that, and soon as Tim was out of the woods, the second the CDC official had injected him with the antidote, Lucy had crammed it to the back of her mind, behind all of her deepest secrets.
Of course she hadn’t reported it; she won’t even think about it.
“That’s what this is about?” She wants to be angry, wants to yell at him and throw it in his face and make him understand how terrified she’d been, even if it’s nothing compared to how he’d felt. Surely he knows she was only trying to help him.
“Suicidal ideations by a law enforcement officer are extremely serious and should have been reported immediately.”
“I was trying to protect you,” she says, emotion building up around the lump in her throat. She’d just been trying to look out for him, and protect herself from having to think about how it felt to be so helpless in that moment. “They would have put you on leave, required therapy. You weren’t even actually suicidal.”
Was he? Surely he hadn’t been. Keeping her mouth shut was supposed to help him, right? She … she’d made the right call, hadn’t she?
“Not your call!” Like he’s reading her mind, Tim shouts an almost perfect response to the barrage of thoughts. But they’re still in the division, so he looks around and lowers his volume before he continues, even if the sharp edge is still in his voice. “You should have detailed everything, regardless of the consequences.”
“Oh, yeah?” There’s the anger she’d been looking for. “Like I should have filed a report detailing everting you’ve done to protect Isabel?” She pauses, and Tim’s face falls for a second, the impact of her words hitting him just as she’d hoped they would before he schools his features again. And she regrets it immediately, hates herself a little bit for putting that look on his face, needs to back out of this argument before she says something she can’t walk back. “You know what? You want to rake me over the coals for the next six months, you go ahead.” She takes a deep breath and twists the knife. “But don’t pretend it’s because you’ve got some moral code about it.”
With that, she storms out of the sally port, back toward the lockers. Angela jumps out of her way when she shoves her way into the room.
“Chen?” But the door is slamming before Lucy can respond. She drops onto the bench and waits for Angela to come in after her. The door stays closed, though, and after a few minutes, she gives up and heads for the parking lot.
Lucy spends all night thinking about her argument with Tim, and it’s still running through her mind the next day, as she jumps over the side of a parking garage and winds up in a dumpster. She’s vaguely aware of Tim climbing up the side to help pull her out, Grey rolling up to take senior command of the scene.
“You went right over after him?” His words are distant to her ears, but mercifully Tim appears behind her, half-smiling.
“Course she did. I trained her.” There’s pride shining in his eyes, the way it does any time Lucy does something to earn his approval. Usually, she relishes in the expression, in knowing that she’s proved herself as a cop yet again. Especially when he’s made himself so difficult to impress.
But today, she’s too wrapped up in everything he’d said last night. Should she have put his comments in her report? What if he was serious? What if this was a cry for help, and she’d ignored it because she’d assumed that he was OK because he looks OK?
She should know better. Her parents are psychologists, she should have known better than to assume that everything is fine, especially when Tim jumped down that path before he even knew if he was infected.
It’s all she can think about for the rest of the shift, sitting three feet away from Tim in the shop, trying to figure out if he’d been serious that day in the quarantine house.
He doesn’t look suicidal. Or, she doesn’t think he does, anyway. But she also knows well enough to know that you can’t always tell just from looking at someone.
That doesn’t stop her from eyeing him all day, though, glancing over at every red light, trying to figure out if he looks any different now than he had three weeks ago. She studies his features, trying to pick up on any subtle changes, anything that might suggest that he’s struggling more than he’s letting on.
Nothing is different, not that she can tell. He still looks stubborn, and focused, and intense, and everything else he always does. But he doesn’t look troubled. Which might mean that she’s overthinking it, that he’s right as rain and she was right about keeping his comment to herself.
If she’s wrong, though? If there is something she’s missing?
She’d never forgive herself. Not after he told her, in so many words, and she ignored him.
Lucy is still dazed when the shift ends, when they drop the gear bags and shop keys back at the armory. She manages to find her way to the locker room, strips her uniform off, pulls stretchy leggings and a soft tank top onto her body before she sinks onto the bench again and stares at her lightweight boots.
They’re the last thing standing between her and the end of her day; she shouldn’t have any problem putting them on and walking out of the station. But for some reason, Lucy can’t get her limbs to cooperate, can’t focus her thoughts on anything other than Tim’s cry for help, even something as simple as a couple of zippers.
The door swings open and she jumps, instincts kicking in just enough that she turns to look. Angela is standing there, barely far enough in the room for the door to close behind her. She’s staring at Lucy, at her phone hanging limply in one hand.
Lucy has no idea what her face looks like right now, but Angela must see something there, because she pockets her phone and takes a careful step forward.
“Hey, everything OK, Boot?” Her tone is gentle, soft, so unlike the way she’s grown used to hearing the moniker from Tim. It’s jarring enough to shake Lucy from her thoughts, but she still pauses a moment before she responds.
“Yeah …" She’s hesitant, and even she can hear the way her voice is wavering.
“You sure?” Angela sits beside her, folding her hands loosely between her knees.
“Yeah,” Lucy takes a deep breath and turns to look at her. “Just … hypothetically, how bad is it if you leave something out of a report? Like, say another officer makes an offhand comment during an intense situation, that could potentially cause a lot of trouble for that officer, probably totally unnecessarily because it was a stressful moment and he wasn’t thinking straight?”
Angela studies her for a moment before she responds.
“Depends on what the comment was.”
Lucy turns her head forward again, but stares at Angela out the corner of her eye. She looks the training officer up and down subtly, trying to remember if they said anything in academy about mandated reporting, if Angela will have any obligation to take this conversation to the brass if Lucy opens up.
She doesn’t think Angela would say anything; she seems like the kind of friend who could take a secret to the grave. But Lucy doesn’t want to dig her hole any deeper, ask Angela to put herself on the line for something Lucy should have reported in the first place.
But now she’s waited too long to answer, and Angela is raising her eyebrows. She’s waiting patiently for Lucy's response, but it’s easy to see that she’s starting to worry a little bit.
“I … don’t know if I should …" she trails off, but Angela still picks up on what she’s trying to say.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she assures, shifting to sit sideways and face Lucy, one leg folded up onto the bench between them. “But I can’t tell you how bad it is if I don’t know what it was.”
Lucy lets out a long breath, reassured to know that Angela isn’t going to throw Tim under the bus, Or throw her under the bus, but that occurs as an afterthought. She's a rookie; rookies make mistakes. She could withstand the slap on the wrist, still keep her position with the LAPD. But Tim is a veteran officer; they won’t be so forgiving of his faults.
This time, when she stammers around the beginning of her sentence, it’s because she’s collecting her thoughts.
“You and … you and Officer Bradford are close, right?”
“Eh, when he’s not being a dick.” Angela shrugs with one shoulder and chuckles. “Why? What’s up?”
Lucy runs a hand through her hair, scratching at her scalp as she bites her lip. She’s still eyeing Angela, trying to decide how to proceed, when the older officer speaks again.
“He’s my best friend, Lucy. What’s going on?” There’s not an ounce of humor in her voice now, calm and serious as she waits for Lucy’s response.
Lucy takes a moment to gather her thoughts, but before she’s even consciously decided how to begin, everything comes tumbling out at once. She’s worried Angela enough; the least she can do is start providing some actual information.
“You know he was exposed, right? To the virus? And he … he wouldn’t let me in there. Uh, he was protecting me from it. And … I think from seeing what it did.” Lucy shakes her head, trying to clear the image from her mind, Tim disappearing as the door slammed in her face, locking himself in the room with Pete, watching him die and knowing he could be doomed to the same fate. Even now, the thought makes her breathe a little faster and start bouncing one foot up and down. “But then he … he said that if he got stick, h-he would … he’d …"
She trails off, feeling her stomach flip and her throat go tight. Her vision blurs at the edges, tears collecting in her eyes as she tries to find the words to continue. She can’t bring herself to say it, though, can’t face the reality of what Tim had implied. So she squeezes her eyes shut, then takes a deep breath and opens them to look at Angela.
“He’d rather … he wanted to out go out on his own terms. To, uh, you … you know.”
“Yeah.” Angela’s brows are furrowed, her expression riddled with concern. Whether she’s worried about Tim or Lucy, Lucy can’t be sure, until Angela reaches over and squeezes her arm comfortingly. “And you didn’t say anything in your report.”
There’s no accusation in the words, just the confirmation that she knows what Lucy is trying to say. She nods.
“He’s not … I mean, I don’t think he’s … it was just … I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Because he wouldn’t have said it if he weren’t exposed, and he didn’t get sick, so I didn’t think it mattered that much, because it was a moot point.” Lucy can feel herself rambling, but she only stops long enough to suck in another breath and keep going. “But then he yelled at me for it, and I started to wonder if maybe he was trying to … say something. I dunno.”
Lucy runs out of steam as quickly as she’d amped up, wringing her hands while she waits for Angela to reply. She can’t stand to watch her friend trying to ingest everything she’d said, instead staring at her feet and wiggling her toes back and forth in her socks, in an effort to think about anything other than what Angela might be getting ready to say.
“He … yelled at you?” Lucy nods, but doesn’t look up until Angela nudges her arm. She’s not sure what, exactly, she’d expected, but Lucy is surprised when Angela rolls her eyes. “Only that idiot would yell at you for trying not to lose him his job.”
“How bad is it?” Lucy winces, well aware that Angela hasn’t actually answered the question from the beginning of all this.
“Not as bad as he made it sound. He still sent your report upstairs, didn’t he?” Lucy nods again, and tries to take a deep breath, but the knot in her stomach is weighing her down; as much as she’s still worried about the repercussions of her report, she’s that much more worried about Tim. “There you go. If he makes a thing out of if now, then he looks like a bad TO for training a rookie who lies on her paperwork.”
“I guess,” Lucy whispers, and looks down again.
“You don’t feel better.” Angela pulls the ponytail holder from her own hair and runs her fingers through her curls, sweeping them over one shoulder and leaning forward to prop her elbows on her knees.
She doesn’t; Angela is right. Because now Tim can’t say anything, can’t reach out again without getting the both of them in hot water. All she’d wanted to do was help him, and now she’s backed him into a corner instead.
“It’s just … what if I was wrong?” Lucy sighs. “Maybe I should have said something about it. At least to Tim, even if I didn't put it in my report. I-I should have talked to him. I mean, what if it was some weird, roundabout Tim way of asking for help? And not only did I personally brush him off, but now he can’t say anything about it, and I didn’t bring it to anyone’s attention or check in to make sure he isn’t -”
“Lucy.” Angela cuts her off firmly, bending down far enough to look up at Lucy’s face. “He’s not. He’s fine, trust me.”
“What if he’s -”
“He isn’t. He’s alright. He’s got people – good people, including you – looking out for him.” Lucy sits up a little bit, trying to let herself believe what Angela is saying. “I’ve seen the guy through a lot of crap over the years, and he knows where to go. He’s alright. He’s OK. He’ll be good.”
Lucy’s shoulders relax a little bit with every sentence. Angela is right, she knows; Tim has a good support system, and he’s made it through things so much worse than potentially being exposed to a deadly virus, then ultimately emerging unscathed. Literally, she remembers, chuckling softly at the memory of his flying leap out of the ambulance.
“Yeah … you’re probably right.”
“I’m right.” Angela sounds sure enough that Lucy believes her, but her next breath is still ragged. She tries again, and again, slowly calming herself down from the emotional overdrive of putting everything out there like that. Angela stays, sits quietly beside Lucy until the last of the tension sags out of her body. Only then does she reach between them and drop her hand to rub gentle circles across Lucy’s knee.
“You good?” Lucy nods again, but she can feel her jaw clenching with the effort it takes not to tremble. “Lucy, listen to me. You didn't screw up, OK? Tim only yelled at you because he likes to forget that people give a shit about him. Deep down, he knows it, but there’s a lot of idiocy on top of that. You analyzed the context of the situation and correctly determined that his comment didn’t warrant follow-up because the situation changed. That’s what you’re trained to do. It’s what Tim trained you to do. He’s just mad that you made him eat his words. Alright?”
Lucy nods again, confidently this time. Angela is right; she just did what she was trained for. She finally bends over to pull her boots on, and when she looks up again, Angela is offering a hand to pull her to her feet.
As soon as she’s standing, Angela is pulling her in for a tight hug.
“Thanks,” Lucy whispers as Angela’s hair tickles against her face.
“Anytime.” Angela pulls back, but doesn’t let go of Lucy’s shoulders. “I mean that. You need to hear it again, you call me.”
Lucy smiles at her, nodding as she steps away and picks up her bag.
“I will.”
“You’d better.”