Work Text:
Lucy dies.
Lucy dies, and Tim breaks.
He doesn’t remember the time between 'she's gone, Tim' and when he finds himself in his house, laying numbly in his bed.
(His bed that still smells like her).
He doesn’t know who feeds him or makes him drink water and take showers, but he knows someone must, because when he finally comes out of the daze of pain and despair, he’s still mostly alive and he doesn’t smell too bad.
He considers getting up and finding whoever has been taking care of him to say thank you, but then he remembers that Lucy is dead and he blacks out again.
Later, after, he realizes that it’s his mind's way of coping.
He just completely and utterly shuts down.
He doesn’t say a word for two weeks.
He doesn’t cry.
He doesn’t hurt too much, because he’s not aware enough to hurt.
But slowly he comes back to himself, and with the awareness comes the all consuming, gut-wrenching, horrifying reality that Lucy is gone.
She’s gone.
Dead.
He’ll never see her again.
He’ll never hold her in his arms again, or feel her soft, warm body against his. He’ll never hear her delighted little giggle, and he’ll never again see her eyes light up with excitement when he brings her breakfast in bed or watches her silly True Crime shows with her.
He’ll never kiss her again.
He’ll never make love to her again.
He’ll never again hear her whisper I love you softly into his ear the way she always did, excited and rushed like it was some big secret that she just couldn’t wait to share with him.
He won’t see her become a detective.
He’ll never share the excitement of a positive pregnancy test with her (because they’d started talking about a family in a way that was more of a plan and less of a dream).
He’ll never touch her growing belly, or hold her hand while she gives birth.
He’ll never hold their babies.
He won’t watch their family grow, go to their children’s baseball games, or cry at their graduation with her.
He’ll grow old without her, and it’s somehow the thought that he’ll continue to age and live while she’s in the ground, forever 30, that sends him into his first panic attack.
It’s the first, but it’s not the last, because with the awareness comes the pain. The absolute agony of knowing that he has to live without her.
“Lucy!” he cries, and he’s aware enough to know that someone is holding him but not enough to know who. He feels arms wrap strong and tight around his torso as he falls to the floor, his chest aching, throbbing with each beat of his heart. His whole body feels like one giant bruise, the pain in his heart so overwhelming that every touch, every breath against his skin hurts.
“She’s gone, Tim,” a voice whispers, and he thinks it might be Angela but he’s not sure. “She’s gone. I’m so sorry, Tim. I’m so sorry.”
“Lucy,” he whimpers, and he knows he’s making a mess of himself but he can’t find it in himself to care. He can feel the tears rolling down his cheeks and the snot trailing from his nose until he can taste it when he licks his dry lips. His cheeks are burning, red and hot from the way he’s sobbing, and his hands shake as he reaches them up and tangles them in his hair. “Lucy.”
He’s rocking back and forth, his breath coming in short, painful gasps as the hands around him keep him tethered to the earth.
He wonders if they let him go, if he would fly away into nothingness to join Lucy.
He wants to find out, and so he pushes away from them, but instead of dissolving into oblivion he just stands there, his chest heaving and his legs trembling until he falls.
He can’t do this without her.
He can’t live without her.
He can’t.
But somehow…
Somehow, he does.
Nine days after Lucy dies, he lets Angela stuff him into a suit.
He goes to Lucy’s funeral.
He sobs silently while they lower her coffin into the ground, and as each shovelful of dirt hits the top of her closed coffin, he feels the walls he’d built up around his heart after Isabel double in size.
Triple, even.
They’re a fucking fortress, and Tim knows that he’ll never let anyone inside them ever again.
He’ll never love again, the way he had loved Lucy.
The way he loves her, because even though she’s gone, he will love her until his last breath.
He watches until they fill in her grave, until the dirt is packed and the sun is low in the sky, and then he leaves. He leaves his truck in the parking lot and he walks all thirteen and a half miles home, and by the time he’s crawling through his front door, his muscles aching and his face sticky with dried tears, he’s managed to push down and lock away the pain.
He boxes up all of Lucy’s things, because he can’t stand to look at them (though he doesn’t throw anything out).
He washes his bedding, because the way her scent clings to his blankets makes him blind with the pain.
He erases every single memory of her from his house, from his truck, from his office.
He shoves the pictures of them into his closet, along with the t-shirt she always slept in and the sweater she stole that dwarfed her tiny frame.
He loved her in that sweater.
When he’s done, his house is nearly empty.
Sterile.
But that’s okay, because if he doesn’t think of her, it doesn’t hurt as much.
(He never stops thinking about her, even when he doesn’t have any physical memories of her left, and despite what he’s manages to convince himself of, her absence will hurt until the day he dies).
Life moves on.
He doesn’t heal (he doesn’t think he’ll ever heal from her loss).
Instead, he exists.
He goes to work.
He comes home.
He works out, watches TV, and goes to bed.
He ignores calls from his friends and family.
He ignores the knocks on his door, and when Angela finally has enough and breaks into his house, he ignores her too.
Lucy is dead, and nothing else matters.
____________________________
63 days after Lucy dies, she walks back into his house like nothing had happened.
Her smile is strained as she tries to explain how there hadn’t been time, how she’d had to go undercover without warning.
Tim listens, but when she reaches out to touch him, he pulls away from her.
“You left me,” he whispers, and he’s glad she’s alive, of course he is, but he thinks that if she touches him he’ll shatter and he’s just barely managed to glue his pieces together enough to be able to exist.
He doesn’t think he’ll survive, if he lets her touch him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and Tim knows she is.
He knows she’s sorry, and he wants to be able to tell her that he forgives her.
He wants to take her into his arms and feel her warm, soft skin on his. He wants to hold her close and kiss her and take her into his bedroom and make love to her. He wants to let himself forget that the last 63 days had ever happened and continue right where they left off with I love yous and lazy mornings spent in bed and talks about moving in together and babies.
But he doesn’t.
“You left me,” he says again, and he sees the moment realization dawns in Lucy’s eyes. The realization that whatever reunion she’d imagined isn’t going to happen. “You left me without saying goodbye, or telling me what was going on, or anything. You let me think you were dead for sixty. three. fucking. days.”
“Tim,” she whispers, and she reaches for him again but he backs up so quickly that he almost trips over his own feet.
He remembers her saying I’ll get out long before it ever gets that bad and the promises she’d made to him that night. He remembers her saying I’m not Isabel, and he knows she isn’t, but what she had done is somehow even worse.
“I told you that I couldn’t lose you like I lost her. I told you. And then less than a week later… less than a fucking week, Lucy. You let me believe that you were dead.”
Lucy is crying now, and Tim fucking hates himself as he watches first one and then a second tear slide down her cheek.
But he’s not ready to forgive her.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready to forgive her.
“Please leave,” he whispers, and he hears the little gasp, her shocked intake of breath, but he ignores it. “I can’t right now, Lucy. I can’t. Please just… go.”
“I love you,” Lucy whispers, and Tim laughs a little hysterically as he rubs a hand over his own face, wincing when he feels the wetness of his own tears coat his palm.
“I know. I love you, too. But I can’t … I cannot do this right now.”
“Can we talk later?” she asks, and Tim wants to nod and say yes but he doesn’t know if he can do that, either.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, and as he watches her walk toward his door, a part of him is screaming, crying out for him to tell her he’s sorry, to take her into his arms and whisper his love into her ear over and over and over because she’s alive and she’s here.
But the other part of him doesn’t know if he can ever trust her with his heart again, not after she’d broken it into a million tiny pieces.
She reaches the door, her fingers wrapping around the knob, and as he watches her chest heave with the sobs she’s trying to hold back, he remembers the days, the weeks that he’d spent on his bedroom floor, alternating between screaming, crying, and throwing up in agony.
He remembers Angela holding him and crying with him.
He remembers wanting to unlock his gun safe and end it all.
He remembers thinking he’d give anything to see her just one more time.
He remembers, and then he remembers that she’d done this on purpose.
She’d left, and she hadn’t told him. Not a call, not a note, not even a fucking carrier pigeon.
The walls around his heart double in size, and he feels numb as he watches her open the door and take a step outside.
“I love you, Tim,” she whispers, and he nods, swallowing thickly, because he knows.
He knows, and he loves her too.
But sometimes… love isn’t enough.
“Goodbye,” he whispers.
Lucy leaves, and he’s alone.