Chapter Text
01. Batter Up
The night Lucy Chen breaks up with Chris, finds Tim, and with three little words (...'Yeah, I do'...) tips her entire heart upside down--tonight--she misses Jackson something fierce.
The grief is always there, tucked away, and when she doesn't have enough to occupy her mind in the present invariably her thoughts curve back to her friend.
Sometimes she imagines what he'd say about whatever thing she's currently fretting over, and other times she pictures what kind of cop he'd be if life hadn't been such a fucking monster.
It's those thoughts that hurt the most. The abstract ones about how he had been the best of them. What a difference he made...and could have done so much more. How brave he'd been all the way to the last moments of his life.
Those thoughts are like a scalpel to the underside of Lucy's heart. She has to find a bathroom or empty shop to let the tears slide down her cheeks. It feels less like crying and more like wringing the grief out.
Grief. Check. Accomplished. She splashes cold water on her eyes and plaster son a smile. It's a mechanism, but she's coping and that's the important bit.
But then one day Tim noticed because of course he did. He didn't drop it until she made up a story about the death of a pug she follows on Cliptok. There were enough words in her story that he knew but didn't understand that he yielded. And for that she is glad because she couldn't keep up the pretense under his gaze. This is why Lucy carries eye drops, the fancy French kind that come in the blue bottle.
Like her feelings about Jackson, her feelings about Tim--albeit in a completely different category--feel just as overwhelming.
Tim grounds her. He makes her feel safe because she knows he is honest. He pushes and protects in equal measure. There is so much heart there, and Lucy wants to peel away the faded scars like wall paper. It's not to fix him, but to witness his loyalty and his kindness. Like sunsets--brilliant, blinding, breath taking--she wants all of them, all of him.
That's how she feels about Tim Bradford's presence in her life. So that's a lot.
Occasionally crying about Jackson's absence in her life feels less complicated. She's the daughter of two psychologists. She has a college degree in the field. Grief doesn't feel easier than everything-that-is-Tim-Bradford related, but it does feel more text book. The illogic path of grief almost feels logical to Lucy. Her friend, colleague, and roommate was murdered. No one would begrudge her the tears even after all this time.
Having less-than-platonic-but-definitely-not-in-love feelings for first her TO and then her ad hoc partner is not in any text book. Well, it's in a rules and regulations book kept somewhere in the HR department. Lucy knows what it says without ever pulling it off the shelf. No. It says no. Lucy tells herself that a thousand times in a thousand ways.
It's a lot.
So much so that Lucy gave up trying to analyze it. Wouldn't let herself linger on any lingering he might have done over her. Refused to take the bait when Jackson or Nolan commented. Checked herself from mentioning Tim too much to outside-work-people in her life. Entered Bradford as his first name in her contacts. Kept score of the number of times her hand reached for his arm to get his attention. (If she kept it under five, she treated herself to a pedicure.) And most of all: she wouldn't let herself travel down the avenue of what if?
All of it was a mechanism, Lucy knew, but she was coping.
It was foggy and the ground uneven, but in the metaphorical place in her heart where she tucked Tim, him and her, them, Lucy built a lean-to. She strung up Christmas lights. She made peace with how he never fit neatly into any category in her life. No matter how much she wished he would. No matter how glad she secretly was that he didn't.
Then, as Tamara succinctly put it, 'make out, stop crime' happened.
Then 'do you want to come in?' and Rosalind.
And then a bunch more stuff happened that led her to now. To this night. A night unique in Lucy's life because her brain and heart and body are losing their collective shit over three men: an ex, a possible (hopeful) last first of her life, and Jackson.
The guilt she feels over Chris is real, but minor. The grief, familiar, a comfort even. So she cries on the way home because she knew exactly how their conversation would go if Jackson was alive and waiting for her at the apartment.
"It's happening." She'd say, quiet, as she let herself in.
"LUCY!" Jackson would scream and she'd let out a laugh to match his pitch. Then he'd hug her, spin them both in half a circle, and abandon the twirl to say, "I told you so."
She'd laugh more because for once she's glad to lose this one.
Jackson would insist on ice cream and tequila. He'd over analyze her and Tim's history, and make her promise to not give details about their sex life (!) because he did still have to work 12 hour shifts with the guy.
Then at some point, Jackson would sit up a little straighter. His face would soften, and he'd smile a quiet smile, the kind Lucy's only seen on him a handful of times.
"I'm proud of you Luce," he'd say.
"For what?"
"Taking a chance. Stepping up even when you're scared."
That's what he'd say.
Lucy knows it and she almost misses the turn into her apartment parking lot. The tears tonight are hot and her entire face feels like she's drowning. She chooses the parking spot furthest from her building, turns off the car, and holds her palms to her cheeks.
Is 'the-most-important-relationship-in-my-life' scary? Is 'unless it is' terrifying?
Yes. That's easy. Yes, it's hard.
But Jackson had stepped up there at the end. She watched the video too many times when it first happened. Grey made her promise to stop. Courage looks like those last few frames of Jackson West's life. Fear is knowing you are going to die. It's not nerves about a guy.
Lucy tells herself this, and after a few moments the tears ease. She has a lot of practice at both feeling big emotions--the ones that feel like hooves trampling her heart--and then corralling said emotions because pragmatism.
She knows she looks a mess, and Lucy wonders if she can make it into her room before Tamara witnesses her red rimmed eyes. The fancy French eye drops are in her locker at work. Dammit. She really needs to put a back up bottle in her purse.
Chen: You home?
Tamara: Nope. At the library. Won't be home until after you're in bed. Grandma.
Lucy rolls her eyes, but for once she's glad to have her apartment to herself. She sends Tamara a Golden Girls meme, to which the girl just replies a string of question marks. The exchange is enough to distract Lucy just enough for her to stop sitting in her car, alone.
She lets herself into the apartment quietly, just like she imagined with Jackson. It's dark. The only light is from the city skyline. She knows people look up at the stars when missing the dead, but in L.A. there aren't any. Or barely any. Instead, Lucy soaks in the city Jackson loved, the lights he served all the way to the end.
"It happened," she says, quiet, to the dark, to the light, but most definitely to him. The silence that follows, the lack of him, wrings more tears out of Lucy. She drops her purse and then follows it down. She sinks to her knees and bends over at the waist. Curled into herself, she lets herself cry.
Sometimes the feelings are too wild to be penned in. Sometimes they don't fit neatly into a single category in your life. Sometimes, it's messier than that and you end up crying over a Venn diagram: Jackson, friend and brother, dead on one side, and Tim Bradford, TO and partner and possibly the last first of her life, on the other. The overlap? Two men with whom she can always talk.
That's what gets her off the floor. This time she doesn't try to just cope.
After she's changed into pajamas, brushed her teeth, chosen an essential oil for the diffuser on her nightstand, after all of that, Lucy pulls Tim's number up on her phone. It isn't until she's tucked herself into bed and turned off all the lights that Lucy feels daring enough to call him. The weight of the blankets and inky darkness make her feel safe all the way down to her heart.
"Lucy?"
His voice is gravely with sleep and Lucy almost hangs up. The only thing that keeps her from doing so is knowing Tim would never let her live it down.
"Hi," she says, quiet.
"What's going on?"
There is a rustle of sheets and she imagines him sitting up in bed. Her traitorous memory dredges up the night Jackson died. Tim had gone to bed in plaid pajama pants and a long sleeve shirt. She imagines him now, those pants loose on his waist, without the shirt. His hair askew. His bare arms silhouetted by a street light somewhere outside his house.
"You okay?"
He's asked her that question a thousand times, at least, and she knows that because one of her coping mechanisms had been to stop counting his concern. Training herself to dial down her awareness of Tim Bradford had been how she sured up her lean-to whenever he made her heart race.
"I'm scared," she confesses.
"Lucy, where are you? I want you to call it in and then hide--,"
"I'm okay," she says quickly. A small huff of air even escapes. "Tim, I'm okay. I'm safe."
"Oh. Good. That's good."
She hears him sink back down onto his bed, and Lucy has the most fleeting thought about whether he prefers a firm mattress or sink-into-a-cloud one. She makes a face in the dark. Firm, of course. It's Tim Bradford. They'll have to negotiate that one. She thinks it all so quickly that it takes the rest of her to catch up.
"I'm scared," she says again.
"Of me?"
"No, of me. Of us. How much I want this."
"I'm not."
His voice is soft, like the skin on the inside of your wrist, and Lucy pulls the blankets up higher on her chest.
She says it quickly. "I keep eye drops in my war bag. The expensive French blue bottle kind. Cause they work the best."
"Ok-ay."
Lucy giggles because goodness she is a mess, and he's going with it. It takes another beat for Lucy to say the next bit out loud and Tim waits. He knows her too well.
"I use them to hide it when I cry," she says. "It started after Caleb. When things got slow on a shift. I'd make up an excuse, usually that I had to pee, and I would let enough of the tears out so I could go back to work. So I had my head in the game. I was terrified I wouldn't and you'd get hurt. Because I was a mess.
"Then Jackson died, and I'd gotten really good at it, you know, the being scared and the eye drop schtick. It was how I got through every shift, every milestone he and I were supposed to experience together, you know?"
"I didn't know the brand of eye drops mattered," Tim says.
"What?"
"The brand. I didn't know the expensive French blue bottle kind made a difference."
Lucy sits up, "I don't understand."
"There's been a bottle of eye drops in every war bag you've checked out since you stopped being my goffer," Tim exhales. "Before then I just kept them in mine."
"Wait--you knew?"
"A pug you follow on Cliptok?" Tim scoffs. "Lucy, you like big dogs."
There...there aren't words. Tears brim and as they fall Lucy thinks it's a different kind of crying. It's not being wrung out by grief or drowning in fear. It's a spilling over of feelings too big to keep corralled. They're wild and terrifying, but exhilarating too.
"Luce," Tim groans, "don't cry."
"You knew," she says, "you knew."
"Of course I did."
"And still...you said unless it is?"
Tim waits. He waits for her to be brave.
"Even though I'm scared and am clearly a mess and have never made a relationship work more than a few months and have no contact with my parents and have my date of death tattooed on me by a sadist and really love undercover work and adopt Kojo's and Tamara's without forethought and-,"
"Yes." Tim says in rush, "Except not even though. Because of. Yes."
Lucy licks her lips, "Can I borrow a little of that yes when I get scared?"
Through the line, Lucy hears him shift. She imagines he's lying down on his too firm mattress. She smiles and can taste the salty tang of tears on her tongue.
"Whenever you need it. You are worth, so worth, the effort Luce."
Lucy wrinkles her nose. "I really like you," she laughs.
"Good," Tim's voice deepens, "I really like you too."
Lucy's stomach flips. She bites her lip. "It's late. I should go."
"Probably." Tim swallows. "Thank you for calling me, Lucy. For choosing to let me know."
'Thank you for being you,' she thinks, but she doesn't feel the need to voice it in the moment. She'll tell him eventually. She'll find a hundred ways to do it because she's ready to move past coping.
They say goodnight and after the click cutting off their call, Lucy looks toward the light from the L.A. skyline.
"Thank you, Jackson," she whispers, "for being brave."