Work Text:
He can’t go home. He’s talked to Lucy, debriefed Sergeant Grey, moved his things back to his own desk, and now he’s sitting in his truck in the department garage, realizing the idea of home right now makes him antsy.
Tim (11:06pm): You up?
He sits and stares at the screen, waiting, but when the phone buzzes to life, he startles and drops the damn thing. He scrounges blindly by his feet, cursing under his breath against the steering wheel until his fingers close around the phone.
“Timothy, if this is a booty call, you know I need seven to ten business days,” Angela teases and he huffs out a laugh, settled nearly instantly by her voice. Tim is a problem solver, and he handles himself just fine, but Angela’s the only one who has ever taken care of him. Or she was, until…
“I have a date. With Lucy.”
He expects some over the top, dramatic reaction from her, after all the times she’s subtly goaded him on the subject. Instead, she just says,
“Yeah?” quiet and happy.
“Yeah,” he says. “Saturday.”
“Oof, that’s a lot of thinking time,” Angela says. “Come over, huh? I’ve got a beer with your name on it.”
She stays on the phone with him as he weaves his way across town to her place, talking over work things, not because there’s really anything specific to discuss, but because it’s a subject she knows his brain will engage in without any emotional input. It’s exactly what he would do, too. And he has, dozens of times with her.
When Tim pulls into the driveway, the house is mostly dark. She’s waiting for him at the door in her pajamas, a beer in hand.
“The boys are sleeping,” she murmurs, leading him into the kitchen. “Sit. Eat. I know you haven’t bothered. And tell me everything.”
So he does. Everything about going undercover, about going back to her place. About almost crossing the line.
She’d been there for the after part, obviously, but he tells her a little about that, too. And then about today.
“I never thought she’d say yes,” Tim admits. He’s replayed her telling him he’s the most important relationship in her life, over and over and over. It fills him with a kind of warmth he’s never felt.
Lucy wants him. Lucy chose him.
“You deserve that, you know,” Angela says. “It’s what I’ve been telling you for years, but you get it now, huh?”
She rubs his shoulders and he thinks about that. Deserving to be chosen and wanted. Deserving to be loved.
The concept had been there for a while now, something his therapist had unrelentingly drummed into him. And he believed it, logically, but today, sitting outside the precinct with her, he’d felt it.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Thank you.”
“But that’s not what had you texting me in the middle of the night,” Angela says, slipping from behind him to sit on the barstool next to him, sipping her own beer.
“No. I’m…antsy.” The admission makes him vulnerable but he’s okay with being vulnerable here.
“And you want to know why?” she guesses.
“I want to know how to…not,” he says. Because he can settle his mind under literal gunfire but not this and it makes him feel weak. Makes him feel like there’s a target on his back. Easy pickings for predators, for the invisible, imaginary enemy.
“Okay.” Angela nods, her jaw working and he can tell she’s mulling it over. “Anxiety and excitement…they operate the same way, mostly. And you’ve had a lot of practice with work anxiety…But not so much with personal. I think that’s the issue. Your brain can’t process that excitement is different from anxiety.”
“So, in other words, I just have to live with it,” Tim sighs.
“Yeah, I think so,” Angela says with a sympathetic smile. “But you did it.”
“I did it.” Tim smiles and thinks about Lucy’s brightness, about her standing in the office, glowing, telling him to ask her again.
“And it’s all going to be okay,” Angela whispers, a promise he tucks away for later, when the warmth of Lucy fades a bit, overshadowed by a lifetime of trauma that, no matter how much he tries, he can never quite seem to get out from under. But there’s a little more light, today, and that’s worth celebrating, or, at the very least, acknowledging.
“Come on.” She stands and takes his hand, leading him into the living room. She pulls up a host of recorded football games on the DVR and hands him the remote. “Pick one.”
She disappears and returns with another beer, pressing it into his hands.
“Last one.”
“Yeah,” Tim murmurs. He doesn’t need to drink. He knows, now that he understands the feeling in him, that sitting with it is the easiest way to quiet it. It won’t consume him, it won’t hurt him. He just needs to sit and watch a game he already knows the outcome of with his best friend at his side.
He gets home much too late, but he’s settled. He crawls into bed and thinks about the future, and when he dreams, he doesn’t feel anxious at all.