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...
Lucy doesn't know it, but Tim has never quite got out of the habit of watching her out of the corner of his eye.
It's not like he doesn't trust her to handle herself; she's proven herself capable of that a thousand times over. It's just a kind of instinct he has, as if he needs to know that she's okay. Mostly, he looks away, once he's established she's fine.
But lately, he's had reason to keep looking.
She's walking and talking like Lucy, most of the time. She's laughing and joking. But then, somehow there's an odd energy to her he doesn't think was there before.
An almost frantic undercut to the way she suddenly seems a little too much herself for it to be real these days. And he of all people knows enough about putting on masks to realise when someone else is doing it.
He's just not sure why she is. He feels like it's something he should know about, but he also doesn't really have the right to pry. Not when she's tuning up to work, sitting next to him, talking about ordinary things and never pissing him off that much.
She's not getting into trouble, and she isn't doing anything wrong.
(Until, of course, she is.)
...
"What the hell was that?" he all but yells at her, in a way he never has before, his voice all fury and shock and sheer fucking terror for what he's just seen her almost do.
His heart is pounding to the rhythm of youcouldhavedied, youcouldhavedied, over and over again.
She tries to turn away but his hand finds her shoulder so she's forced to look him in the eye, but he's taken aback by the defiance he finds there, the hostility in her expression.
He tries again.
"Are you trying to get yourself killed? You keep this up and you won't make it to another year on the job, Lucy."
Lucy's expression catches somewhere between guilt, anger and defensiveness, shuttering over like a sheet of ice in front of his eyes.
"Right, because you've never made any mistakes before? Do you even remember my first month with you?"
He is struck then by her callousness as he looks down at her, waves of tension rolling off them both. In all the time he's known her, she has never once used that time in his life against him. Has never turned on him like this, like she thinks he's been the enemy all along.
He tries for cool-headedness in the face of her unexpected venom.
"What the hell is going on with you lately? You've been acting like this job is a joke," he says, as icy-cool as he can, but his patience is wearing thin. He feels like he wants to shake her shoulders, as if that'll somehow wake her up, but he stays where he is and keeps his arms rigid at his sides.
And she just keeps looking at him, with that strange, cold anger that looks so out of place on her usually open face.
"You mean where did perfect, obedient Lucy go?" she says, her face contorting in a smile that's all bitterness and nothing underneath. "I don't know, Tim. Maybe I'm tired of fixing everything for the whole world. Maybe I'm tired of caring about people and losing them. Maybe it's easier to laugh everything off and accept it just doesn't matter. That's what most people do, isn't it?"
Tim stares at her.
"Okay. You need to start talking," he says, his voice low and tight. "Because I don't know where this is coming from, but I sure as hell know it's not you."
Something seems to die off in her then, suddenly and without warning. The fierce bravado wilts before his very eyes and she looks off to the side; when she looks back at him there's the telltale glint of tears in her eyes, blinked back rapidly but it's too late.
He takes a step towards her; she takes one back.
"I'm glad you know that," she says, and her voice is on a knife's edge to breaking. "Because I don't know who the hell I am anymore."
He opens his mouth to reply, falters, then rallies. He takes a breath.
"Chen," he says. "We're going somewhere and we're going to talk about this until it makes sense."
...
Tim waits for her outside the locker room after they've clocked off.
She comes out, catches sight of him and rolls her eyes, though the hostility from earlier has faded. There's a kind of wearily resignation in its place, like all the fight's already drained from her.
"What, are you keeping tabs on me? Did you think I was going to sneak off?"
"Yes," he answers, shortly. He fixes her with a long, appraising look. "Come on. I'll drive."
She sighs but doesn't protest as he leads the way to his truck and gets in. They don't talk as he drives, and he's fine with that, because he feels like this is his one shot to figure out what the hell is going on and he doesn't want to blow it by not getting his thoughts in order.
"Seriously?" she says, with a short, disbelieving laugh when she sees where he's parked up.
It's a tiny, quirky, distinctly un-Tim café she used to go on about while she was sat in the shop next to him in the early days. Best proper green tea in LA, she used to say. He always rolled his eyes, but never forgot.
"You're welcome," he says sarcastically, jumping out of the truck. He holds open the door for her, gesturing for her to go in first.
Lucy shakes her head and complies, picking her way to a small table out back. Everything here is wooden and brown and there's a goddamn water feature against the back wall, tinkling like there's no tomorrow. Typical.
Tim compresses himself into one of the small wooden chairs and watches her mess around with the menu for a bit, asking what he wants. He shrugs and tells her to get him whatever she's having.
It's not like he's really here for the green tea.
When she sits back down after ordering she looks at him warily, like she knows what's coming is about to get ugly and she wants to put it off. But he just takes a deep breath and digs in.
"I'm sorry if I haven't been- you know," he says, frowning, because shit, he's not built for this but he knows he has to try. He grimaces and tries again. "I should have been looking out for you. Since. You know."
Lucy gives a short laugh.
"It's not in the job description," she says, sardonically, but he doesn't find it funny.
"Whether either of us likes it or not, I care what happens to you," he says, and Lucy tenses slightly, like it's somehow painful to hear him be this serious about her.
That's damning in itself, he thinks. He should have been there sooner. Should have seen the things she wasn't saying.
Tim looks at her steadily while she's silent and eventually she sighs, raising her shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
"Fine. What do you want to know?"
"What did you mean when when you said you didn't know who you were?"
She glances down, wrapping her hands around her teacup, and it's a long moment before she finally answers.
"When I joined the force, I felt like I finally had clarity on I was and who I wanted to be," she begins slowly. "It made sense, at last. And then. The last year happened, and I just- it's gone. All of that is gone. I thought I just got done putting myself back together after Caleb, and then-" she breaks off.
"Jackson is gone. My parents don't speak to me. I'm almost thirty and I'm completely on my own. What the hell do I do with that?"
He digests this with his eyes locked on hers, turning it over in his mind.
"What happened with your parents?" He asks. He's dimly aware it seems like he's ignoring the rest of what she's just unloaded but it's the only unknown in that list, and he's the kind of guy who likes to know about all the pieces in play before he moves.
Lucy looks reluctant to expand but she knows him well enough to realise that she's not going anywhere until they've thrashed this out, bottom to top and inside out.
"They just hate that I'm a cop. They won't be a part of my life until I'm not one. Remember that dinner I was supposed to have, after we finished our last day of training?"
He inclines his head. There was something about lotus soup, he thinks. But there was a lot going on that day, and he's not even sure that's a real thing.
"They never showed. Well, my mom did. To tell me to quit."
"That's ridiculous," he says, bluntly. It doesn't phase him, because he's seen it all when it comes to terrible parenting, but he does understand that particular puncture wound.
"Yeah. Well, Jackson and his family pretty much took me in after that," she says, and she's staring resolutely at her hands now. He doesn't try to make her look up.
"And now that's gone too."
"I haven't been able to look his parents in the eye since he died."
It starts to stack up to a picture that's achingly familiar to him.
It looks like his life, just after Isabel left.
She looks like he did, when she first met him.
Everything suddenly makes sense. The danger seeking. The frantic commitment to levity to cover over the grief. The directionlessness.
"Shit," he says, inadvertently, and she does look up then, almost amused in the way she raises her eyebrows. He runs his hand over his forehead.
"We have work to do, Chen," he informs her.
"To do what?"
"To get you out of your own head."
...
It transpires, over a series of conversations they share in the shop and otherwise that Lucy never actually took the grief counselling each of them was offered after Jackson died.
"I literally could not make myself go and get shrinked again," she says, and there's a thin note of despair to her tone. "I know that sounds hypocritical, coming from me. But I felt like I was going to come out of it even more of a basket case if I had to break it all down in my head all over again. I just needed to not think about any of it."
Tim glances at her, silent for a moment as he cruises them down the mostly quiet freeway.
"I wasn't exactly good at getting therapy after I left the army," he says, suddenly. "I went, for a while, but. I never really took to it. You can imagine."
There's a faint ghost of a smile when he glances at her.
"Kind of feel sorry for whichever therapist got you," she says, and he raises his eyebrows in mock offence but takes it as a good sign that she's not shying away.
"There may have been some name calling," he admits, and that earns a small laugh. "But that was the first time around. I didn't go, at all, after Isabel. Lopez and Bishop, they kept trying to get me to get help, told me I needed it, and instead-" he breaks off, his mind's eye traveling over that dark stretch in his history, the times when he honestly thought he might just give it all up. "I cut myself off. Took stupid risks at work. Started screwing up."
He says it bluntly and Lucy is quiet.
"When we met?"
"Wasn't even the half of it," he says, his voice carefully neutral. He remembers with some shame now those early days with her. Doesn't really know how he could ever have watched someone taking a swing at her and stood off to one side.
"I'm sorry. It must have been awful."
She sounds so sincere, so incorrigibly sympathetic, it makes him glance at her with a touch of amusement, because just like that it's like he's seeing a flash of her from when she was all brand-new again.
"We're talking about you here," he says, wryly. "A sad story about my past really is your kryptonite, isn't it?"
She scoffs, rolling her eyes, but she's relaxed and not annoyed; he knows her well enough to read her, even off the basis of a glance here and there while he drives.
"You understand what I'm trying to say," he says, after a moment. He hears her sigh.
"You think I'm going off the rails, too."
"I think you're making the same mistakes I did, and since it seems to be my life's mission to teach you to be better than me, it only seems right that I catch you before you're beating up bikers outside a bar."
"I'm not really the wall-punching type," she says, and he shrugs.
"Doesn't matter. The end result's the same." He looks at her. "Point is, you need to start dealing with what's happened to you. With what you've lost. Or it's only going to get worse, every single day you try not to look at it. And then there may come a day where you're at your rock bottom, and you might not have a Lucy Chen showing up out of nowhere to stop you making the biggest mistake of your life in the middle of the night."
There's the longest pause, where the full impact of what he's said settles between them like gravity.
They've never spoken of that night, of what she did in sticking her neck out for him. He's never even told her thank you for it. But even though the moment for that's passed he's certainly never forgotten it, not for a second. Has never failed to realise that that was the night when he realised the difference between choosing be alone and letting someone in.
"No," she says, after a second, voice carefully neutral. "But I do have you."
"Yeah," he says, and it's the most resolute thing he's said all day. "You do."
...
Tim starts to spend time with Lucy outside work regularly for the first time since they've known each other.
This is not in and of itself a development that phases him; he has been not-just-work-friends with colleagues several times before and contrary to popular belief, isn't entirely against having something resembling a personal life.
The part that does unnerve him is the extent to which he actually likes spending time with Lucy outside work.
And the fact that it's not really surprising he does.
Because he's maybe always had a suspicion that somewhere within him lay at least the potential for something a little bit nebulous in its intentions when it comes to Lucy Chen. Something that goes back further than his hardcore sense of professional ethics could possibly allow. And something that means he certainly can't now describe their newfound closeness as some kind of pure-hearted Yoda-like arrangement.
It's not like he's never thought about it, after all.
He just assumed it was a dead end, no-go, big red tape and flashing lights kind of situation. Not least after what she's said to him, joked about, in the past.
(Maybe it's a moment that still weighs on his mind; though she did so unwittingly Lucy ripped open something far too early that day, and it's been knocking him off balance ever since.)
"You look miles away," comes a gentle voice, cutting through his reverie and making him start.
Tim looks up.
Ashley's smiling across the table at him, serene and amiable. She looks beautiful tonight, wearing rose pink with her hair in soft blonde curls. She's probably everything he would once have written down if he were making a list to describe his ideal woman.
And yet.
"Sorry," he says, attempting to smile in a way that doesn't convey his sense of discomfort and guilt. "It's a busy time at work. Hard to switch off," he lies, and then he feels another wave of guilt, because what does it say that they're only a few weeks in and he's already coming up with cover stories to hide from this woman?
"Hey. I get it. My dad found it hard to leave it all behind at the end of the day too. I mean, I guess that's why he stayed so long, right?"
Tim smiles, a little regretfully at the mention of Jerry. He thinks the sudden combination of him and Ashley entering into his life at that specific moment in time is probably the only reason he's even ended up here, if he's honest about things.
Because back then, just for a moment, he'd been part of something so achingly and seductively normal, so peaceful and lacking in violent complications, it had seemed like everything he'd been missing.
And yet.
Sometimes when he closes his eyes too long he can see brown eyes, a hesitating smile.
Cut it out, Bradford, he thinks, as he shakes himself mentally and refocuses his attention on Ashley, trying for one last push at the sensible, safe thing.
"What were you saying?" Tim asks, reaching across the table to take her hand, but it feels oddly forced, even when she turns her hand and links her fingers with his.
Ashley restarts her story, about a kid and his dad and the near capsize of a ten million dollar yacht during her shift that day.
Tim nods along and this time pays enough attention to laugh in all the right places, but the entire time he's sat there, listening to the woman he's purporting to be dating, he realises that at the end of the day, all he really feels is bored.
And there's no way in hell she doesn't deserve better than that.
He thinks he probably makes his decision sometime between eating their mains and choosing dessert, but the exact moment remains unclear.
All he knows is, when he walks Ashley to her door that night and she asks him if he wants to come in, he looks steadily back at her into her earnest, uncomplicated, not-brown eyes and thinks, in another life, maybe, before he tells her softly that he just doesn't think they're going to work out.
That it's not her, it's him, even though it's the biggest cliché in the book because this time it just so happens to be true.
His ideal woman came along and all she did was make him realise that there was a time and a place for ideal and now there's a time and place for real.
"Your heart was never really in this," Ashley says, her smile steady and uncompromised, though her expression is one of someone trying to stand tall through the hurt. "I guess I hoped you just needed time."
And it's funny, but he respects the way she's never once shown a hint of fire or retribution only as much as he thinks he might have felt something more if she had.
"I'm sorry," he tells her, sincerely, and she just smiles, getting ready to close the door.
"I hope you figure out whatever it is that's stopping you. Or whoever," she adds, and he thinks maybe there's a tiny flicker of resentment there that time, the one and only time he's ever seen the like in her eyes, but it's gone so fast he wonders if it was only ever a trick of the light.
...
Lucy's been talking to someone, on a Wednesday's afternoon, right after shift. It's been a few weeks now.
Tim doesn't pry, because those sorts of conversations are heavy going at the best of times, and if she's anything like him she's not going to want to hash it all out after she's already done just that.
And she is like him, in some ways. In the way that grief and pain and loss have carved away little pieces of who they originally were and left something different to the person they thought they'd be.
God knows he picked up some sharp edges along the way.
But Lucy's also nothing like him. For one thing, she's a hell of a lot braver than him, when it comes to facing her demons.
She proves that with the way she sticks to her programme, the changes they have slowly worked into her life together, as if by some unspoken agreement that this is the way forward for her now.
He never tells her what she should or shouldn't do.
It's just that somehow they seem to have gravitated towards the same kind of rhythm, the same kind of state of being, and it means that they're together almost all the time these days, both on shift and after.
Not in a clingy kind of way. More of a let's hit the gym and not talk but know each other's there kind of way. It suits him just fine.
And not that they don't also talk. They do that too, sharing meals and rides and weird little moments where she tells him something about herself that he never knew before.
Like exactly how much shit her parents have been dumping on her, all her life, and how long it took her to sleep through the night after Jackson died, and how she's not been on a second date in months because she feels like she's just leading everybody on when she has no interest in any of them.
The extent to which he relates is painful, especially on that last one.
"These things take time, Chen," he says, sticking his hands firmly in his pockets.
They're walking down the boardwalk at the beach, at night, and Lucy is eating some horrible concoction of vegetarian meat masquerading as a hotdog because she skipped dinner on shift. She picked it up at one of the market stalls as it was closing and he told her it looked borderline radioactive. She bought one anyway.
"I know. But it also takes the right person, and I look at all these guys and I just think. It's not you. Do you know what I mean?"
He glances at her, his expression flitting between cautious and ironic and resigned all at once.
"I've some idea," he replies, and he feels lucky Lucy's busy concentrating on her stupid tofu dog because if she asks, he has the feeling things are going to come out that he doesn't really want to explain.
"At least you've got someone," she says, her mouth full, and Tim stiffens. Not distracted enough, it seems. "Ashley just landed in your lap. You didn't even have to go on any horrible blind dates."
"I'm not seeing her anymore," he says, abruptly, before this can get out of hand.
Lucy stops walking, her eyes flicking up to his. She seems to have frozen on the way to taking another bite and he rolls his eyes at her inability to ever be graceful in situations like this.
"What? Since when?'
"Few weeks. Maybe a month."
"A month- oh my God, I thought we'd got past the stage where you don't tell me anything," Lucy exclaims, and Tim rolls his eyes, carrying on walking.
"Not a big deal, Lucy," he says, and he can feel her giant eyes boring into the side of his head as she jogs to catch him up.
"Yes it is, Tim. Why do you just let me go on and on about my problems and never tell me yours?"
"It's not a problem, it's just something that didn't work out. We all moved past it. End of story."
"But why? I thought she was exactly your type," Lucy says. She tosses the last piece of her hotdog and wipes her hands, returning to his side so she can seize his elbow to pull him up and face her. He rolls his eyes.
"When did I ever say that?"
"You didn't, but." Lucy makes some indecipherable hand gesture and Tim raises his eyebrows. "I'm just saying. She was gorgeous and athletic and smart. I almost wanted to ask her out. And, you know. You and blondes-"
"Okay, that is definitely enough," Tim cuts in curtly. "I do not have a thing for blondes."
Lucy gives him a cynical look and he narrows his eyes; he doesn't like her implication at all, but the problem is, he can't exactly tell her that he knows for a fact he doesn't have a thing for blondes, because of late all he's really been able to think about is unruly waves of dark brown.
"If you're done making incorrect assumptions about my personal life, you want to get out of here?"
Lucy sighs. "Okay," she says. "But if you want to talk about it, I'm-"
"Lucy."
"I'm just saying."
"I got it," he says, in a tone that brokers no continuation of this conversation. But then, after a second, he adds "thanks."
She lets it go, and their elbows brush as they walk back up the boardwalk, each little touch something he notices and thinks about slightly more than he should.
With Lucy's meandering chatter melodic in his ears and the night sky with its pale half-moon overhead, he looks down at her and feels the undeniable shifting of things in motion, of powers that rise and fall so very far outside his control.
...
Lucy is doing better.
He still does that thing where he watches her out of the corner of his eye, but that starts to seem like it's less because he's worried and more because he just likes watching her do her job.
Because it starts to feel like she's back on track, the edge of wildness and unpredictability gone from the way she is on patrol. She's maybe even more focused than she ever was, because now there's a kind of maturity about her too that could only ever come with time.
And experience.
And heartbreak.
He's no more sharply reminded of that than when the end of the year rolls around and brings with it a date that he thinks they'll both struggle ever to forget.
December is mild this year, but he still feels a bitter chill when he thinks about the events of a year ago.
He's not exactly sure how to bring it up. Or even if he should. He starts watching her again, more closely than he probably should, and she definitely starts to notice.
"Will you just come out with it?" she says, fixing him with an exasperated look across the shop console. He keeps his eyes on the road.
"Come out with what?"
"You're acting like I'm a bomb that's about to go off. Is this about the-" she pauses, frowning, like she's looking for the right word. "Anniversary."
He doesn't reply for a second, just focuses on driving.
"You doing okay?" he asks, eventually, and she looks off to the side.
"Probably about as well as it's possible to do when you pretty much have to think about the day you were supposed to die because it's tattooed onto your skin."
He frowns.
"You kept it," he remarks. He never actually found out for sure what she decided, because they never spoke about it again. He thinks now maybe it was remiss of him, to allow her, even encourage her, to withhold so many things from him, but all he can do is make up the lost ground.
"Why are you surprised? I thought you wanted me to."
He looks at her in alarm, distinctly disturbed by the thought that he might have inadvertently put pressure on her to keep it against her will.
"I didn't- I wanted you to do whatever brought you closure over it. I never meant to influence you one way or the other-"
He's surprised to hear her laugh a little, cutting him off.
"I know. Don't worry, that wasn't why I did. What you said did matter to me and I thought about it a lot, but... I mean, I was still going to get it removed. I went to the clinic twice and backed out both times. It felt like letting him mark me again, or something."
"Hm," he says slowly. "Removing it is as permanent as getting a tattoo, I guess."
"Right," Lucy says. "But I'm not scared of permanence. I mean-" she gestures vaguely at her other tattoos, the ones he can see, and he's struck by the sudden intrusive thought, how many more are there that he can't see? but he shuts it down as quickly as it appears.
"It's just. That date will always be a tattoo for me, you know? Whether I have it on my body or not. At least this way I have the scar to prove it's not just in my head."
Tim looks at her, appreciating in a fresh light the scale of what she's been through, the horrors that must live within the confines of her mind.
Would he have come out of it with as much of his sanity intact as she has? He thinks, probably not.
Not many people are made of the things Lucy Chen is made of.
Tim stays silent, thinking for a long moment before he speaks again. "What are you going to do on the day?"
"I'm guessing you won't approve of heavy drinking, dancing on tables or taking up a recreational drug habit?"
He gives her a look, a reminder that he has always seen through joking as her number one defence mechanism.
"I was planning on hiding away and waiting for it to be December tenth," she finally admits. "Why? What do you think I should do?"
"Come over. We'll watch the game and I'll let you pass out on my couch after you've eaten too much pizza."
Lucy opens her mouth as if to protest against such an inelegant assessment of her; she quickly seems to recalculate and gives him a half-smile instead.
"Okay."
...
On December ninth, Tim spends thirty-six hours straight with Lucy Chen.
He gets in early and waits for her before roll call, puts a coffee in her hands and doesn't say anything, but he meets her eye and watches as the hesitation fades and she nods at him, just once. They don't need any more than that.
He gives her the faintest smile before he walks up to the front of the room.
That day, they have a bumpy shift, and for once he's grateful for all the nonsense they have to deal with, because he's pretty sure the last thing Lucy needs is a lot of time to brood.
Instead she has to flying tackle a suspect onto raw asphalt, handcuff a guy with one arm, and then later dodge an entire plate of spaghetti puttanesca launched during a very out of hand domestic disturbance.
Tim does less well at dodging it.
He was trying to pin the three hundred pound husband at the time, and it results in Lucy laughing for ten minutes straight once they've finally got control of the situation.
Because and only because it's the anniversary of the worst day of her life, he lets her.
He considers it a victory that she finishes shift looking alert, even cheerful, and not lost in thought.
"Tonight still good for you?" he asks, as they're locking up for the day. Lucy shoots him a look. "Okay, bad phrasing. Are you still coming over?"
"Are you still buying me pizza? Because I'm not there for the game."
"Weak answer, Chen," he says, eyeing her with disapproval. "There'll be pizza. You cannot complain if there's only meat on mine."
"Are you literally allergic to plant based foods?" He glares at her. "Okay, fine. Deal."
He's not sure it's strictly okay that, later, he likes the way her car looks parked up on his drive that evening, thinks about how it would be if it stayed that way always, but that's the way it seems things have landed.
And he's planning to sit on that particular complication for a while.
It's not as if he thinks that anything could realistically happen. Or as if he thinks it should, because Lucy's been through so much and maybe what she needs is everybody around her making her life simpler, not ten times more complex.
Coming to that conclusion doesn't make it easier, though, when he turns to look at her after the pizza is eaten and the game is over and finds her curled up, head on her arm with her hair falling over her eyes. Sound asleep next to him on the sofa like she has nothing to be afraid of here.
He doesn't really have a word for the emotion it provokes in him, something caught between rolling his eyes at something he considers to be classic Chen and a rush of unbearably soft affection towards her.
He deliberates for a moment, then leans over, carefully brushing the errant strands of hair away from her eyes so he can see her face.
(It's not because he wants to brush her cheek with his hand; if that happens he never meant it to, and if he wishes he could do it again that's nobody's business but his.)
"Lucy," he says, softly, but she remains dead to the world.
Tim smiles in spite of himself, shaking his head, because how else was the evening ever likely to end? He reaches over pull a blanket from the back of the couch and cautiously, he lays it over her, trying not to cause her to stir.
She doesn't, but she makes some small, humming sound before turning her head more comfortably against the back of the sofa.
Lucy sleeps on like this a while, and he wonders briefly whether she's been sleeping much lately. Or if this is the inevitable outcome of fighting so many battles inside her head.
The latter seems more likely.
He clears up the living room around her, taking pizza boxes and bottles out to the trash and washing up dishes before he wanders back out, contemplating what to do with her in the meantime. He doesn't mind her staying where she is, but also doesn't want her waking up uncomfortable. He doesn't want to move her, in case that makes things weird, but he would rather she slept in a bed.
In the end, she resolves the dilemma for him by jolting awake with a sudden inhale, giving them both a shock.
"Hey," he says, automatically, moving around the coffee table to crouch in front of her as she sits up. "You okay?"
"No," she says, running her hand over her face. "My neck kills. How long was I sleeping like that? And why is football so boring?"
He raises an eyebrow, seeing through the deflection from her nightmare, and Lucy shrugs.
"I'm sure you can guess what it was about," she says, digging her thumb into her sore neck. "I guess I've been thinking about it so much lately, it's not surprising I'm dreaming about it too."
"Hm," Tim says, distractedly. He watches her fingers press against her skin and in a moment of madness, thinks about replacing them with his own, before he drags his eyes back to her face and forces himself back in check. He frowns.
"Stay here tonight," he says, before he can really weigh it up. She's about to protest, he can tell, so he holds up a hand and shakes his head. "Humour me. I don't want you on your own tonight."
Lucy hesitates, but then shrugs, pushing the blanket off her lap and standing up. She rolls her shoulder and he watches the motion, the slight rise of her shirt hem, standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets.
He suddenly feels all too vulnerable about it, and turns around.
"I'll get you something to sleep in. You gonna take the bed?"
"Nope," Lucy answers, and Tim rolls his eyes as he heads into his bedroom, sifting through his clothes until he finds something bland enough not to cause either of them any awkwardness.
Lucy pads right in after him and he glances up, surprised; he soon realises from the way she's peering around the room without attempting to hide it that she's literally just being nosy, right in front of him, so he chucks a t-shirt at her head.
"Hey!"
"You always go snooping around people's houses when they're kind enough to take you in?"
"Pretty much," Lucy replies. "Why don't you have any pictures of- oh," she says, snorting as she points at the photo of Kojo on his bedside table. A mostly-joke present from Rachel not long before they parted ways, which in the absence of anything better to put up, has remained in place, alone. "Seriously? The only one who made the cut was Kojo?"
"I don't know what to tell you. He took his training way more seriously than anyone else," Tim answers, deadpan, as he shuts his closet and lobs a pair of sweats at her. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as she catches them, before she heads to the bathroom to change.
He takes the opportunity of her being gone to sit down on his bed, let out a shaky breath and wonder how the hell he got himself in this deep.
...
Christmas rolls around, and Lucy gets into it. Really into it.
It's not surprising given the person he knows her to be, but it's also the first time he's been able to see it, in full force.
Last year's Christmas was one to forget, after all. There were celebrations, sure, but he spent the entire season worrying himself half to death about Lucy while she was off work, in a state of trauma and sleeping for half the day at times, and not at all at others, only just starting the long battle through therapy and rehab.
It was January before anyone knew it. Then February and March.
Now, though. Now she's making up for all that lost time.
"Put. The Santa. Down." He says it slowly, dangerously, but she's dangling the ornament off one finger and threatening to hang it on their bumper.
"Don't be a Grinch," she says, grinning as she pockets the stupid red monstrosity and climbs in the passenger seat. "Are you going to the Christmas party?"
"Why are you asking me that when you know for a fact that I'll be strongarmed into it by every single officer who outranks me, and if they fail, by Lopez?"
"Just checking," Lucy says, rolling her eyes.
The Mid Wilshire Christmas party is an annual debacle he has to go through with on pain of death. He goes grudgingly for a maximum of three hours, and passes the time standing somewhere off to one side drinking, and judging the idiotic misbehaviour of his colleagues.
His current record for shortest attendance is seven minutes and forty-nine seconds.
He bumps into Harper in the station late that afternoon, and stops for a chat. It's been a while, he thinks, since he caught up with her. He sort of misses the easy camaraderie of being with other TOs.
"How's Chen doing?" Harper asks, after the cursory hellos, and Tim looks at her warily.
"Fine," he replies. "Why?"
Harper shrugs. "I got wind of a job she might be good for. But only if she's in the right headspace. It's not been that long since she lost West."
Tim immediately feels that icy wind of a fate that carries with it the threat of everything he's been holding onto unravelling before his very eyes.
"Not this side of new year," he says, his voice tight, desperate not to give anything away. "If it's after that, you should speak with her."
He turns on his heel and tries to remind himself, he has no stake here. Her life was only ever something he got to play a supporting role in, and that's how things have to stay.
Whether he wishes it could be otherwise is irrelevant.
Which is why, he thinks, it feels like some kind of gut punch to see her on the evening of the Christmas party, wearing festive red with sleek dark waves framing her face. Because she's already rewritten all the rules for what takes his breath away, and captured parts of him he honestly never knew still existed somewhere deep inside.
And all the while, she has no fucking clue what she's doing to him.
He can see the way her dark eyes scan the whole room, flicking from face to face as if she's searching for something in particular, until eventually she searches far enough to find the dark corner he's picked out as his designated spot for the next three hours.
Her expression brightens like a clear day when she sees him, her red lips curving into a smile as she beelines for him.
"Don't tell me, this is where you're going to sit and complain about the party all night?"
"Not all night. I plan to be out of here by eleven."
"Er, I don't think so," she says, giving him that smile that makes him sure that something he definitely won't like is about to happen, but that at the same time, he won't do a single thing to stop it.
For the most part, he ducks all the inevitable awkwardness and the undignified behaviour all around him, while Lucy throws herself right in the middle of it.
But it doesn't escape his notice that even when when she wanders off to talk to someone else, to say hello to some random officer he has no idea how she even knows, she seems to circle right back again, that she almost seems to be hovering as if she's waiting for something.
At half past eleven the music is going strong, and Tim is still at the party.
Lucy walks back over to him, and he looks her up and down, his eyes on her unashamed and slow. Maybe it's the atmosphere, or the couple of drinks he's had, but he wants to let himself look at her as if he has a right to, just this once.
And her smile only deepens when he does.
"One dance?" she asks, standing so close to him he can smell her perfume and see the brush of her eyelashes on her cheeks. Her voice is husky and sweet and Jesus, she could have asked for the world from him and he'd have handed it over on a gilded plate.
"One," he manages to reply, his own voice sounding uneven and heavy with the effort it's taking to keep up his charade, but it doesn't matter.
She smiles like she knows all his secrets anyway, and puts her hand in his.
...
On Christmas Day, there's a parcel shoved through his letterbox, which he opens only after checking it's not some kind of explosive.
What it actually is has a similar effect, though. It turns out to be a framed photo of him and Lucy, at the station but off-duty, Lucy laughing up at him like she hasn't a care in the world.
He's looking back at her like she's the only care he has, and maybe that's a little bit true.
The scribbled note underneath says "Don't I make the top two? Merry Christmas. Lx"
He has no idea who took this photo or why, but as he sets it up on the other bedside table, the one he sleeps beside, he's pretty glad they did.
...
In the new year, Tim forgets about his conversation with Harper until he sees her talking with Lucy, a conversation which has her brows furrowed like she's deep in thought.
She glances up and catches his eye, and gives him a small smile. Harper turns, sees him standing there and there's a lengthy moment of calculation there, like she's trying to put the last few pieces of a puzzle together.
Tim finds he doesn't even care anymore if she does.
"Harper, Chen," he says, briskly, as he walks up to the front of the room.
When he gets in the shop beside Lucy, though, it takes no effort to get the answers out of her. She's pretty much vibrating with the urge to tell him.
"Harper told me about another job for Nova," she says. "If I want it."
She's tense, he can tell, her hands rigid on the steering wheel. She doesn't drive that often because once he stopped making it something she wasn't allowed to do, it apparently lost all its appeal. So now, ironically, he has to make her do it, whenever he feels like a break.
"What did you tell her?" he asks, as neutrally as he can. He has a view on this of course, but his place is no longer to tell her what to do.
"I said I'd think about it," Lucy says, but she sounds full of doubt. "I'm just not sure I want to go back into something that could put me right back in..." she tails off. "Maybe I'm being a coward."
Tim looks at her sharply.
"It is not cowardice to not want to throw yourself back into a shark tank you just got done climbing out of," he snaps, before he can get a handle on himself.
He shifts in his seat.
"Sorry. I'm not- it's your decision. I just don't want you thinking you have anything left to prove. Because you've already proved it all, okay. Twice over."
She gives him an odd, long look, sort of smiling, sort of not.
"Thanks," she says softly, and he just nods once.
If she goes, he'll have to find a way to make peace with that, too.
...
He finds out later from Harper that Lucy's asked to stay on patrol, with him, and it's a conversation he didn't think he'd end up having. Definitely not with Harper.
"Something going on there, Bradford?" she asks, bluntly, and Tim goes still.
"Excuse me?" he says, his voice sharp and to anyone else dangerous, but this is Harper and she doesn't scare easily.
"Look, I can understand why Lucy would say no to the op. There are a ton of reasons not to do it. But the thing is, all the reasons she actually gave me seemed to circle right back to you."
"I have literally no idea what you're talking about," Tim says, and it's completely the truth, because if Lucy's said anything about him to Harper, it's news to him as well.
"I'm just saying. You'd better not be messing her around with this. She obviously cares about you, God knows why, since you're a cranky bastard at the best of times, but she doesn't deserve to be screwed over."
He looks at her in shock and growing anger.
"I'm not even going to respond to that, Harper," he says coldly. "Lucy's welfare has always been my priority."
Harper's hard expression softens slightly.
"I don't disagree on that," she says. "But this is different. You both need to be careful."
And he's speechless as he watches her leave after one last, grim look, has no idea where this has even come from but the first thought on his mind is that he really, really needs to talk to Lucy.
As soon as shift is over, he thinks. He will straighten this out once and for all.
But as fate would have it, he's riding with Nolan today, and when he's making plans for after shift he fails to take into account the extent to which Nolan capable of running headlong into the most outlandish and inexplicable situations.
It's not even his fault, it just seems like he's a complete magnet for disaster, and the result of their day's work?
Tim winds up locked in a building with a gunman and three hostages while Nolan's nowhere to be seen.
...
Tim comes around slowly.
He's dimly aware of a throbbing in the back of his skull, and puts two and two together enough to assume someone hit him over the back of the head with something blunt and heavy.
"You're awake," says a reedy, unfamiliar voice, and Tim blinks as he hauls himself into a sitting position, only to find himself staring down the barrel of an automatic rifle.
Oh, great.
There are two women and a child pinned against the back wall of whatever dingy room they're in, cowering in fear. Tim stares up blearily at the gunman, masked and wearing all black.
"Okay, I don't know what's going on, but I'm assuming it's got nothing to do with that kid over there. Why don't you let her go?"
He's rewarded with another blow to the side of the head, and it's a struggle to hold onto consciousness, but he grits his teeth and hangs on.
His hands are tied behind his back, just like the others, and he has no idea where his weapons are. No radio either. The only hope here is Nolan, and God knows if he's even alive.
"Don't worry," the gunman says, kicking one of Tim's boots. "I need you alive, for now. You're going to make a call to your little cop buddies."
...
Tim is put through to Grey at the station, presumably through some untraceable line, unless this guy's an idiot as well as unhinged.
"He wants his brother released, or he'll shoot one of the hostages every half hour," he says, his jaw tensing at the way one of the women cries out. "There are four of us here. One child. He's got an automatic rifle and I don't know if he has-"
The gunman strikes him with the barrel of the gun and he struggles to contain his sharp grunt of pain.
"What was that? Is he okay?"
It's Lucy. She's obviously in the room with Grey; her voice is low and stricken. It sends a flash of despair into his stomach, because if he dies here then he'll be just another fracture she has to heal, another gravestone she has to visit on her own-
"If he doesn't have proof of his brother's release within two hours we're all dead," Tim says, hoarsely, as the line is cut off.
...
It's funny the things he ends up thinking of, while possibly waiting to die.
He thinks of how he didn't even notice it was his and Isabel's anniversary a few weeks ago, and wonders if it was bad form of him not to text her.
He remembers how Wesley loaned him a book a month ago that he hasn't even opened yet.
He thinks about all the times he wasted when he was with Lucy, and never quite told her how much she meant to him, like just last week when he sat on her couch with her and watched an entire film in French because she wanted to, but didn't take in half of it because he couldn't stop watching her instead.
(He can only hope she already knows.)
...
Nolan turns out not to be dead, in the end. That's a nice bonus in itself, but in this moment, it's pretty much an answered prayer.
He does almost get himself, and all four other people in the room, shot, though, with his very daring, very questionable rescue effort.
In the minute or so before the gunman's lining up his first victim against the wall, Nolan drops from the rafters and tackles the gunman. He doesn't take out the gun.
In the ensuing struggle, the gun fires several rounds and Tim, standing in front of the others, throws the kid to the floor, out of the way.
He's dimly aware of the way it hurts, then.
Of the explosion of pain in his side as he suddenly, absurdly, thinks of nothing except I've been shot there before, it's probably fine, but then as he watches Nolan succeed in dragging the guy to the floor, he drops to his knees and then to his side, finding himself staring up at the ceiling as panicked voices surge all around him.
...
Tim wakes up in the back of an ambulance, an EMT staring at him far more closely than he would have liked.
"The hell are you doing?" he mutters, feeling simultaneously too hot and too cold and overcome with pain absolutely everywhere.
"Try to stay still, Sergeant," the EMT says, shining a light in his eyes. The ambulance is moving, and every single jolt fucking kills him.
"You've got a nasty GSW and a concussion," she says, scribbling something on some paperwork. "We're on our way to the hospital now."
Tim closes his eyes.
"Fine," he grates out, and he frankly wishes he hadn't woken up this soon.
"Anyone we should call?" the EMT asks, and Tim cracks an eyelid.
He thinks about it for half a second, but it's not like it's complicated.
"She already knows," he mutters, and passes out again.
...
Tim comes round yet again somewhere different to where he last remembered being awake.
He's lying in a bed now, some kind of IV in the back of his hand. It itches.
"And here I thought you'd stopped getting in trouble in your old age, Timothy," says a rich, warm voice he recognises.
Tim opens his eyes slowly and sees an older woman with sparkling brown eyes.
"Estelle," he mutters. Of course.
He'd never admit it but she's his favourite nurse. She's been there for all his gunshot wound related hospital stays, and she's also the only person in this hospital whose forceful bark and no-nonsense attitude makes him seem like a children's entertainer.
"Tch. I haven't had to clean up your messes for a while. I was enjoying the peace and quiet."
"Lucky streak had to end sometime, Estelle," he mumbles, attempting to push himself up slightly in bed and grimacing when it feels like his entire body has been dragged under a bus. She smacks his foot and fixes him with a warning look, and he stops trying to move. "You know me."
"Some things never change. Well, one thing has," Estelle says, peering over at his vitals and rearranging the sheet at the bottom of the bed with a self-satisfied smirk.
"What?"
"Pretty young lady outside waiting to see you," she says, patting his ankle over the covers. "You didn't have that last time. Too pretty for you, maybe."
She shoots Tim a look of pure mischief, and he just glares at her in a mix of annoyance and embarrassment.
"You want me to send her in or not?" Estelle demands, grinning like a Cheshire cat as she walks back to the door.
"Yes," Tim grits his teeth, watching warily as she beckons someone over.
Someone, of course, being the face he's been dying to see all day, even if it is pale and tense and red-eyed.
Lucy takes him in with a look of sheer relief and also some amount of horror when she sees him, and he figures he must look a sight to produce that reaction. She never was good at hiding anything from him.
"Hey," he says, his voice rough and scratchy. Lucy smiles a bit tremulously
"Hi, Tim," she says, softly, as she sits down in the chair beside the bed and drops her bag carelessly beside it. Above her head, he can see Estelle waggling her eyebrows suggestively through the window, and he resists the urge to ask Lucy to draw the blinds.
Lucy opens her mouth as if to stay something, then falters, shaking her head slightly, and she looks down at his hand for half a second before she puts hers in it, quickly and determinedly as if she's afraid she'll lose her nerve
He glances down at their hands, and squeezes gently, cocking an eyebrow at her.
"Be honest," he says, his words a little thready. "Has this ruined my good looks?"
She lets out a short laugh, her eyes flying to his face and he can see she's already fighting back tears, wiping at them with the back of her free hand.
"Of course not," she replies, and her fingertips find the side of his head that's taken a beating, feather-light. "But this looks sore."
"I'd say the hole in my side is worse," he remarks, and Lucy stiffens.
"God, I'm so sorry." She looks like she's tempted to yank the sheet back so she can see for herself, but she holds herself back. It's probably for the best, since he's not actually sure what state of undress he's currently in.
"It's not that bad," he mutters. "You doing okay?"
"Me? I'm fine. Why?"
"Can't have been fun," he says, and her expression is uneasy. "I know how I felt when you were missing."
"I was going out of my mind," she admits. "Grey said I shouldn't be involved. Said I was too close."
Tim nods, slowly, his conversation with Harper coming back to haunt him.
"You might be," he says, as she grips his hand. "I talked to Harper."
Lucy freezes, confusion giving way to a certain guardedness.
"Okay. That is so not a thing that matters right now. We can talk about it when you get better."
"Lucy."
"It's not a big deal," she says. "I just like what we have, okay? And now I definitely know that you should not be riding with Nolan, so you and me? A team."
Tim raises his eyebrows, then regrets it when it makes his head throb like hell. "I want you to do what's right for you," he mutters, and she smiles.
"I am."
She puts both hands over his, then, and if he were braver, if he knew more of how she felt and what she was thinking, he'd have asked her to lie there beside him and soothe away the shadows with the warmth of her body, alive and safe and strong pressed against his, no matter how many protocols it would be breaking.
But for now, her hands tight around his have to be enough for him.
...
Tim's out of action for weeks, reluctantly forced to admit even he can't walk this one off.
It's been a while since the last time he was shot, and it turns out, it's definitely not something that becomes easier the more times it happens. In fact, this time, he really starts to feel his age.
"This hurts like hell," he says, bad-temperedly, as Lucy helps him limp from her car to his house.
She's so small he's basically using her as a human crutch under his arm, but she's also the only thing keeping him from falling flat on his face.
"I know," she says, sympathetically, although now he thinks about it, she doesn't, because thank God she's still never actually been shot. And don't get him wrong, he sure as hell hopes it stays that way forever.
"Okay, do you want anything? Food? Drink? Are you cold?"
He's sprawled out on his bed, the covers hastily shoved aside by Lucy before he collapsed onto them. The short walk from the car into the house has been enough to floor him, and he hates the feeling of helplessness.
"No," he replies, his voice tetchy and rough.
Lucy pads over and perches on the very edge of the bed, avoiding jostling him. She reaches for the hem of his shirt and lifts without so much as asking so that she can check the dressing, and he's so inexplicably used to her now he doesn't even protest, just lets her do anything she wants to him without so much as an eye roll.
Nobody else alive, except perhaps Estelle in the hospital, would get this much compliance from him.
Lucy shifts a little so she's less on the edge of the bed, her thigh tucked up so it's brushing against his side.
"You're good," she informs him, tugging his shirt back into place, and he gives her a vague nod, peering up at her from under his eyelashes to avoid having to lift his head. Lucy presses the back of her hand to his forehead, and the short-lived flash of irritation he feels at being invaded like this gives way to a kind of guilty pleasure at the way her cool skin feels on his.
"Enjoying playing nursemaid?" he asks, a little bit acerbic, just because he can't quite get used to the way he feels so vulnerable around her. Lucy just rolls her eyes.
"The words you're looking for are 'thank you, Lucy,'" she says, and he shoots her a look with grudging acceptance underneath.
"Thank you," he says, eventually, and Lucy smiles a bit, like she wasn't actually expecting him to say it.
"You're welcome," she says, and she makes to get up, but he catches her wrist and she looks back at him in surprise.
"Stay until those meds knock me out?" he asks, aware he's already sounding drowsy and probably needier than he'd ever usually allow, but he figures just this once he's allowed to let it be.
Lucy pauses, a small smile her only answer as she walks around the bed and carefully climbs on the other side. She reaches down to pull the covers up over him and he turns his head, forcing his eyes to focus on her face as she rests her head on her arm, lying on her side over the covers so she can watch him, her hand resting near his shoulder.
"Sleep, Tim," she murmurs, when he keeps watching her, and she moves her hand down to brush the back of her fingers against his bare arm, down and then back up again. "I'm not going anywhere."
...
During his recovery, Tim realises something.
He's maybe missed having someone around more than he cares to admit.
He's stretched out on the sofa and Lucy's handing him a cup of tea and climbing over his legs to get to her spot next to him, burrowing under the blanket she drapes half over him as well. It's nice. Familiar.
"What are we watching?" she asks, shifting to get comfortable. He just watches her like it's the first time he's seeing her, startled by the way it suddenly feels like they've been doing this a thousand years.
The thing with him is, he's spent most of his life at sea, one way or the other. The pockets of calm in his personal life have been outweighed heavily by the long stretches of chaos and disarray, ever since he was small and well into adulthood.
Isabel was his first experience of a domestic home life.
And even then, it's not like she was ever much of a homebody. They spent most of their marriage being police officers with mismatching shifts, and then everything blew up just when they were getting to the point where settling down might have been the next step.
He's been so out of practice he doesn't really know where to put this feeling, this sense that Lucy parked on his couch with her thigh pressed against his is somehow a synonym for home.
"You pick," he says, absently, and Lucy glances at him.
"You okay?" she asks, and he looks at her, a brief smile crossing his face.
"Just," he says, struggling for the words. "Getting used to you."
She half-laughs. "What does that mean?" she asks, putting her tea down and turning to face him.
He shakes his head, suddenly unable to look at her, because for all he feels like they've been walking the same path for weeks he doesn't know how he can confess that for all those weeks he's been longing for something more.
"Nothing," he says finally. "Just, some guy's going to be lucky someday," he mutters, and he feels Lucy tense next to him.
He thinks for a second she'll chase him up on that, will drill down to what he's even talking about, but at the last second she gives a tiny shake of her head and picks up the remote.
"Nothing that's all guns. You get too much of that in real life," she says, and just like that the moment slips by.
...
Tim gets back on the job as soon as possible; this time, he grudgingly agrees that light duties are warranted and leaves beating up felons to Harper and her new kid.
Lucy goes out on patrol with Webb, mostly because Tim doesn't want Nolan getting her shot at too.
It means he spends a startling amount of time at his desk, though, which he hates. It also means that, when he gets a surprise visitor at the front desk first thing one morning, there's nowhere for him to hide and so he has to go down, grudgingly, to see who's wasting his time now.
And then he gets a shock.
"Genny," he says, a confusing mix of surprise, wariness and long-buried affection surging up at the sight of the sister with whom he was once so close a lifetime ago.
He's now not seen her for over two years.
"Timmy," Genny grins, and Tim immediately glares, because nobody has called him that since childhood and that's the way he wants to keep it.
"You get arrested or something? What are you doing here?" he asks, snidely, and Genny raises her eyebrows.
"What, not even a 'nice to see you'? You haven't got any less rude, then," she says, tugging the edges of her smart navy blazer together as she stands up and looks him up and down. She's so small, these days. Sometimes he still assumes she's taller than him.
"Little brother," Genny says teasingly, and Tim keeps up his hard stare for a moment longer before he rolls his eyes, and opens his arms to embrace her.
"It's nice to see you," he says, grudgingly, and she laughs. "But seriously. Why are you here?"
"I have news," Genny says, as she steps back. "But... now that I am here, I kind of want to see what all this hardass cop stuff is about," she says, a dangerous glint in her eye.
Tim immediately tries to shut the notion down, reeling off eleven different reasons as to why that would be a Very Bad Idea.
Naturally, half an hour later he's grudgingly introducing Genny to the other officers, avoiding Lucy's delighted gleam as she shakes Genny's hand.
"This is going to be so great," Lucy says, smiling like she's won the lottery, and Tim shoots her a distinctly unimpressed look.
"Go get the gear, Chen," he snaps, and Lucy raises her eyebrows.
"Aren't you meant to be off patrol?"
"It's not like I'll be running into gunfights with my sister in the back. We'll be fine."
Lucy just shrugs and complies, and he has the distinct impression she's only letting it slide because she just wants to get in the same car as Genny so the digging up dirt on his past can begin.
That suspicion is confirmed by the time he gets to the shop, where Lucy and Genny are already looking as thick as thieves, laughing furtively about something he doesn't want to know about.
He glares at the both of them before he gets in the passenger seat.
"Do not flip this shop," he says, and Lucy rolls her eyes before she starts up the engine.
...
After the excruciatingly drawn out ride along, Genny finally delivers her news.
She wants to renovate their father's house in order to sell it, and she wants his help. Tim immediately recoils.
"Absolutely not," he says, when she proposes going there to do the place up together at the weekend.
"Tim, come on, we need to get that place sold quickly and I can't do it all on my own."
"I walked out of that place twenty years ago and there's no way in hell I'm going back now," Tim snaps.
They're in the corridor after shift, and he can feel Lucy hovering. She has the warbags slung over her shoulders and she's looking at him with a kind of panic on her face, which probably would have been funny to him under normal circumstances.
"I'm gonna..." Lucy says, gesturing at the equipment dropoff before she hurries off, leaving him and Genny squaring off against each other.
"I know things were difficult for you there," Genny tries again, her hand held up placatingly. "But isn't that all the more reason to see the back of the place? He won't be there, you don't have to see him."
"Where is he?"
Genny looks evasive for a second, then shrugs one shoulder. "He moved someplace smaller. Said it was too big for just him. That's why we need to sell it."
Tim takes a deep breath. If the old man isn't there, then. Maybe it won't be so bad.
"I'll think about it," he mutters, and Genny nods.
"Okay. Look, I'm staying uptown for the time being. Just call me about this weekend."
Tim nods once, and watches as Genny walks away, blowing out his cheeks in frustration.
"Are you okay?"
He turns around at the tentative voice, the temptation to say something dismissive and shut this whole thing down warring with his impulse to lay everything out on the table for Lucy to somehow make better, in the way that she almost certainly will.
"Yeah," he says, moving over to stand beside her, and they fall into step together. "I just want to forget that house ever existed."
"Your dad?" she asks, and Tim shrugs.
"He wasn't a good dad to either of us. But he mostly ignored Genny. Never laid into to her like he did me. I'm not sure she understands what she's asking."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah."
Lucy hesitates for a moment, tipping one shoulder a little self-consciously.
"We can go together, if you want. Take a hammer to the place. Might be kind of satisfying."
Tim gives her the barest of smiles.
"You don't have to. It's up to you," she says, her hand brushing his elbow briefly. "But... someone who turned out to be right about a lot of things once told me that in the end, you have to face up to things you don't want to look at."
He eyes her suspiciously.
"You using my own advice against me?"
"Pretty much."
There's a long pause while he deliberates, a moment where he doubts. But then he looks into her patient, steady eyes, and some of the weight seems to lift, even if just a little.
"I'll pick you up on Saturday. We can go check it out."
...
Tim thinks he probably wouldn't have gone through with it in the end had Lucy not been there.
He's tempted, even with her sitting there in the passenger seat, to call the whole thing off and turn the truck around.
"It's going to be fine," she says, absently, as if she can hear his thoughts, and he glances at her like he's suddenly worried she can. But she's not even looking at him, her elbow propped on the door and her expression faraway, and he doesn't really know how she knew he needed the reassurance.
But that's Lucy.
"Hm," he says, and it's enough to keep him from making a sharp turn off the freeway.
There's another hairy moment when he sets foot on the driveway and stares right at the front door, still the same shade of burnt brown though the hinges look rusted all over now.
Silently, Lucy walks up beside him, and her fingers trail down over his wrist until she slips her hand into his.
It's a shock, in a way, this touch. Because they don't do this, have never done this, hospital bedsides and pulling one another off their asses aside. This, this is intimate, and it's something totally different, and as he looks down at their joined hands all he really thinks is, why haven't we done this before?
They stay that way until they get to the door, mutually pulling apart before Genny opens it and sees them, looking between the both of them with bright and interested eyes.
"Lucy, I'm so glad you could come," she says, reaching out for a one-armed hug.
"Which one of us are you actually related to again?" Tim mutters bad-temperedly, and Genny pulls a face at him before he she hugs him too.
"I know coming here isn't exactly what you wanted," Genny says. She's wearing old overalls with a pair of workmen gloves sticking out of the side. "Which is why I brought you this."
She bends to a large zipbag of tools, and hands Tim a heavy duty sledgehammer, which he takes with a raised eyebrow.
"Just don't end up in the hospital again."
"You heard about him getting shot?" Lucy asks, poking through the bag of tools with some curiosity.
"No, but let's talk about that later. I was talking about the time he was twelve and he thought he could drive the family truck and he crashed it into the neighbour's garage," Genny says, laughing lightly, but her words drag Tim right back into his own past like a sucker punch.
He closes his eyes.
The memory is visceral; he remembers the bravado, the commotion, the fear, the losing control of the truck. He remembers even more his father's shouting, the way his belt felt, when he got home and his father found out what he'd done.
(There's a particular noise, of leather and metal and flesh. Even the memory of the sound of bombs dropping in the distance in Afghanistan won't make him shiver the same way. He's not sure what that says about him.)
Genny's smile fades when Tim stays silent, when she and Lucy both realise that this is not a story that makes him laugh the way it obviously does for Genny, who never saw the repercussions of that day because he always made sure that she didn't.
"Okay. Why don't Tim and I start upstairs," Lucy says, swiftly changing the subject with her usual sensitivity for a difficult situation.
Genny looks at her gratefully, hands her a set of gloves and the bag of tools, and Tim's still just silent, still wrestling with all the ghosts that seem to lurk in every single corner of this fucking house.
Lucy's hand finds his belt loop, tugging softly. He glances down at her.
"We've got this," she says, softly, and Tim responds with a faint nod, not entirely convinced that he does but willing at least to see whether she's right.
And maybe it's a little better, then, when Genny's not in the room and there's only empty corridors and nobody is reminding him of the thousands of things he's spent twenty years running from.
Maybe he even takes a perverse kind of pleasure in breaking down the crumbling, rotting wall that divides his and Genny's childhood bedrooms, of shoving all the pieces into a heap and wiping away the dust.
There is so much in this house that's broken down and festering, not fit for purpose. So much that needs to be torn to the ground and built back up, and maybe, maybe Lucy was right to think that there would be some catharsis in the sight of this place, ripped right back to the bones.
She's usually right about more than he is.
Near the end of the day she brushes past him, her fingers trailing over his back as she steps across the room. He turns, sees her warm, gentle gaze and tosses his gloves, watching as her expression turns curious when he steps up to her, taking in every inch of her familiar, beautiful face.
"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you," he says, a quiet confession breathed across the dusty room, afternoon sunlight just breaking through the misted window pane.
Lucy smiles, warm and honest and open, eyes sparkling as she looks up at him.
"After everything you've been there for?" she says, sliding her eyes down his body before looking to one side, as if suddenly bashful. "Kind of the least I could do."
He shakes his head then, and she looks back at him, because God, she owes him nothing, never has, and he wants to tell her that but somehow the moment elongates like it's frozen in time, like they're suspended in a web of something golden and beautiful that he can't quite bring himself to break.
They both move closer, in equal measure, like a pair of magnets drawn across a narrow distance. He finds himself close enough for him to see her swallow, to follow the tiny motion as her lips part and her eyes drag down to his mouth, chin tilted up like the only thing that can conceivably happen in the next moment is-
"TIMMY," Genny yells, and yes. Of course Genny Bradford breaks the moment for him, gets in the way of him and the girl he desperately wants to be with, because she's been doing the same damn thing since 1996.
He and Lucy spring apart guiltily, a blush immediately rising on Lucy's cheeks. He stares at her, somehow unable to speak, and she just waves a hand at him.
"No, it's fine, just- you go see what she needs. I'm going to, uh, clean up here."
She's looking anywhere but him and her discomfort is evident; he backs out of the room quickly and stands in the hall a second, wondering whether he somehow dreamed the last five minutes of his life.
...
Tim's not alone with Lucy again for some time. Not until it's dark outside and Genny finally lets him call it a night on the old place.
They say their goodbyes and Genny gets into her car and then it's just Tim and Lucy, standing by the side of his truck, unsure what the hell their next move is meant to be.
"Look, about earlier-"
"I just wanted to-"
They both speak at the same time, break off and laugh nervously. Tim gives her a sheepish smile, and she returns it, tentative and a little shy.
"You go," he says, and Lucy sighs.
"I wanted to make sure we were okay," she says, her voice quiet. "I never meant... I mean, this was always going to be an emotional experience, and I didn't mean to, you know."
He looks at her for a long moment, confused.
"Are you worried you were taking advantage of me?" he asks, finally, the slightest trace of a laugh in his voice. Lucy gives a helpless shrug.
"I- didn't know if it was just, you know. A heat of the moment thing."
The next look between them has no amusement; it is instead long and slow. It's questions, and bemusement, and you can do better than that, Chen.
"It wasn't, was it?"
Tim steps up closer to her and shakes his head as he meets her eye, willing her to understand, and as the tension between them picks up exactly where it left off hours before, his longing for her grows to a fever pitch. His hands find her hipbones and she grips a fistful of his shirt before he ducks his head and catches her lips, kissing her right there on the driveway he once swore never to set foot on again.
After everything, it's just him and Lucy, and suddenly the world and everything he knows it to be shines in a different light.
...
The drive back to reality is a little surreal.
It's not like they can just kiss and launch into a happily ever after. They are complicated people in complicated lives, and the one thing he's vowed not to be, after all, is someone who holds her back.
"When did things change?" Lucy suddenly asks, turning her head while leaning it to rest on her hand.
"For me?" He glances at her, shifting slightly uncomfortably in his seat. "I don't know," he says, because he doesn't. He was all mixed up in the middle of it before he knew it had even begun.
"What do you mean you don't know? Isn't this the kind of thing you notice?"
"It was- it's not like you get a letter in the mail announcing it, is it?"
Lucy sighs, unimpressed, and he rolls his eyes.
"It was a while," he admits, reluctantly. "Maybe even when I was seeing Ashley."
"That long?" Lucy says, sounding vaguely appalled. Tim shoots her a dry look.
"Whereas you hadn't thought about it before today?"
Lucy looks away, flushing. "Of course I thought about it. How could I not?" she admits, and he will never admit the way her confession makes his uncontrollable heart beat just a little bit more wildly. "I mean. It's you."
He can't stop the slight smile from spreading across his face.
"I just put this in the never going to happen box," Lucy adds. She tucks one leg up under her on the seat, turning her body to face him better. "I thought, maybe. At Christmas. But then nothing happened, so I assumed-"
"I thought you were nowhere near ready to even think about- that-"
"Well, I did," she takes a deep breath. "Then you got shot. Again."
"Okay, that was Nolan's fault."
She flashes a small smile, and he glances at her once before his hand creeps its way across the console, finding her knee, just gently, and in that touch is all the things he's not the the kind of person to ever say. An apology for making her wait, a vow to see this through.
An admission that, the longer he spends in the presence of Lucy Chen, the more he realises there are literally no other conclusions to be found besides him being completely and unerringly in love with her.
...
"You remember when there was all that gossip about Smitty dating that twenty-five year old from North Hollywood a few years back?"
"Yeah?"
"This is way juicier than that "
Tim pauses in his efforts to bounce Jack on his shoulder, shooting Angela a glare. She's got her feet up on her coffee table, an annoying shit-eating grin on her face as she watches him.
"I told you this in confidence, Lopez," Tim says tersely. "You breathe one word of this and you can forget me ever babysitting this fountain of drool again. I know you started the Smitty gossip."
"Please, I'm a different person now. I'm a mom. It's in the vault. As long as you tell me everything. Are you official? Have you slept together?"
"In what world do you think I'd ever answer that?" Tim replies, his expression disdainful. He crosses the room and dangles Jack out in front of him for Angela to take back before he winds up getting his good shirt entirely covered in dribble.
"It was worth a try. Look, even though it would make amazing salacious gossip, your secret is safe with me. And I'm happy for you," Angela says, rocking Jack slowly. "But does it even have to be a secret? Nothing says you can't date her."
"It's not a great look," he mutters. "I don't want her to suffer because of it."
"She probably will anyway," Angela says, bluntly, and Tim winces, because ultimately this he already knows. "But I think she's decided it's worth it. And I think she's right."
"She often is," Tim says dryly, and Angela smiles, genuinely this time and without any of the mirth.
"It's nice to see you like this," she says. Tim raises an eyebrow.
"Like what?"
"Happy."
...
Domesticity.
He never thought he was good at it. Actually, he just wasn't. He was an up at the crack of dawn, cold shower, regimented breakfast and straight out the door kind of guy. Long shifts, time at the gym, not much by way of personal possessions.
Isabel back then was basically his mirror, and she never seemed to mind that he was always working, always on the go, always doing something else. Not that, he thinks, that turned out particularly well for them. His fault in part, too, he knows now, but ultimately their undoing was a demon far greater than himself.
Rachel wasn't anything like him, and she did seem to mind. He tried to change, a bit, but somehow it never quite seemed to stick. In the end was the one who had to accept he wasn't the kind of person who could be contained or kept in check. It wasn't enough.
Now, though. Now he's older and a little wiser and things are just plain different.
Now it's almost noon, and the last thing he thinks he ever wants to do is get out of this bed. His routine, as of four weeks and one day ago, is all over the place and he doesn't even care; his jaw is covered in stubble but there's no reason to worry about that when he's recently discovered it only makes Lucy sigh and hold onto him tighter when she feels it scraping over her skin.
Lucy is like him and not like him, and this relationship is give and take. The same way it always has been, right from the first hello.
(Incidentally, did he ever even say hello to her when they met? Probably not, he thinks. But he's making up for it now.)
"Tim," Lucy mumbles, eyes squeezed shut because she's not a morning person and never has been, and he's known that since long before he started being the person who wakes her up with the sun.
He rests his hand on her bare hip, under the covers, and moves up against her back until she's warm against his front.
"Mm?"
"I really think this is going to work," she says, and he laughs softly against her ear.
"You might be onto something there, Chen," he says, amused, as he uses the hand on her hip to roll her gently onto her back before he puts one of his thighs between hers and lifts himself over her.
Her eyes drift open, sleepy and satisfied, locking onto his as a lazy smile spreads across her face.
And there are still a thousand things that need resolving, don't get him wrong. There's work and her parents and also his dad, who's not just in a smaller place, he's dying, and once again he's throwing Tim's world into disarray simply by being in it.
But it doesn't matter.
All of that is somehow just a gale in the distance while he is safe as houses, here with Lucy, her soft thighs bracketing his as she readily opens her arms to embrace him.
Because that's the thing about him and Lucy.
He spent years offering up pieces of himself to the world, compartmentalising, never letting it all show. But she showed up and cut through the bullshit like a hot knife in butter, and saw every single part of him that he never meant to show. And she opened her arms to all of it.
Same way he did for her, slowly and as if by accident, yet somehow feeling that it was always supposed to end this way.
With her hair fanned out his pillow, her arms around his shoulders, with a promise that this day and every other day she'll be as much his as he's undoubtedly been hers for longer than he can even know.
"You love me," she murmurs, as he presses his lips to her throat and applies just enough pressure to make her hum in pleasure.
He smiles against her skin, running a hand over her thigh.
"I know."
"I love you," she sighs, when his hand rides higher, and he lifts his head.
"I know that, too."
.