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Fire spares no gift, no grief, no grace.
Over the years, Grey’s learned that the hard way. His long era on patrol, the amount of times he’s come across burning bodies isn’t something he’d wish on anyone. Even if there’d be ages between each incident, the ghost stench of a embering corpse would randomly hit him—still does. It never goes away, not really.
He’s also lost friends to fire. He’d been close to Captain Delgado when he’d rushed in to pull a fellow fireman out from the rubble, never to be seen again. Time and time again, he’s seen other firemen who he’d once interacted with lose their lives, just like he’s lost some of his officers. First responders stick together, despite their petty rivalries, because of how tough the reality of their jobs can be.
But, despite that, Grey doesn’t think he’s ever felt as crushed as today.
“I'll get someone to you,” he had promised.
It had been a promise he couldn’t fulfill. Not in time.
When Grey arrives on the scene, he’s well aware by now it’s a recovery mission, and not a rescue one.
The shop’s there first, the black-and-white now turned into a burnt grey. The driver’s door is open, mic cord dangling, fused to the floor mat. The fire has moved on—no flame in sight now, only that hissing whisper of things cooling and the hush of rotors far off, cutting air for somebody else’s emergency.
A fire captain meets him at the police tape. There’s that firefighter look he knows too well. His stomach falls.
“Lieutenant,” the captain says, solemn. “We found them together. We haven’t... We haven’t moved them.”
Grey nods once. He thanks the man.
He walks the last twenty yards alone.
He finds them in a dip below the road, black ash swallowing the ground around them. It isn’t how television makes it look—no peace, no untouched faces—but the shapes are still there, unmistakable. Two officers who refused to let go, even when the air turned against them. Grey’s chest tightens as if the smoke has circled back hours later just to sit heavy inside his lungs. He crouches, boots crunching, and it feels like he’s intruding on a private moment, even though it’s already ended.
Even in death, they still tried to protect each other. Love each other. Hold each other.
Grey lets a tear fall.
He kneels, because standing feels wrong. Tim’s body angles around Lucy’s, as if his last thought was geometry—how to put the broadest part of himself between her and a force you can’t bargain with. Lucy’s hand is framed at his chest, fingers curled into the fabric where his radio mic would be, as if she’d been about to key up and he’d reached to stop her, or she’d been about to steady herself and he’d offered himself as the thing to hold. Their badges rest where CSU has placed them for him to see, cleaned of ash, numbers bright as if it matters.
He clears his throat and says their names into the air, a rite nobody taught him but one he’s never stopped doing. He tells them he’s here now. He tells them he’s sorry it took so long.
After, Grey stands with the coroner and fire department and makes slow, practical decisions. He signs what needs signing. He radios in what has to be said on a channel full of people who go quiet for a full beat when they hear his voice. He picks up Tim’s watch, and a piece of metal that seemingly lived in fire. He inspects it.
A moonstone ring.
This time, it hadn’t been enough to save her.
After informing their families, he tells Juarez first. She’s living with one of them—there’s bound to be some affairs to settle. She’s rifled with disbelief and upset, before tears overcome her, and no one knows exactly what to do. Then, he tells Lopez. She and Tim were close, she deserves to know. She handles the news better, her jaw setting in a quiet anger as she nods curtly and accepts the news, but Grey later sees her crying in Wesley’s arms, in the quiet corner of the hospital.
Telling Nolan is, surprisingly, the hardest of the bunch. Informing him that he’s the only one left of his rookie class.
He finds John in the locker room, hands braced on the sink like the porcelain is the last true thing in the world. Soot fingerprints track along his cheekbones where he’s wiped sweat and ash into his skin. Grey says their names and then he says the words that make them past tense and Nolan shakes his head once, once, like the movement could knock time back into place.
“No,” Nolan says, in that calm way he has, as if reason could negotiate with the universe. “No. They were on their way to help us with Glasser. They... They didn’t show up. Something else must’ve come up.”
He keeps talking like there’s a version of the story that ends with a different verb. Grey lets him run it until the words turn thick, until his mouth makes that half-open shape people wear when they’ve misplaced their breath. Then, Grey puts a hand on his shoulder, the same way he did when John was brand new and too brave for his own bones, and Nolan had also been struck by the shock of a life ending.
“You’re not alone,” Grey tells him. “I know it feels like it, but you aren’t. Not today.”
Nolan nods into the sink. Water runs. It doesn’t do a damn thing for either of them.
Later, when Grey steps into his own house, Luna is at the kitchen table. He doesn’t even need to speak—the weight is written all over him. She sets down her glass, her face folding before he can form the words. “Who?” she whispers, as if the answer could change depending on how quiet she is.
“Tim and Lucy are dead,” he says hollowly.
“—What?” she stutters, her eyes widening, as if she’s misheard. “What?”
Then, he breaks down.
Over the years and the many losses he’s suffered, he’s certainly cried. He’s let the tears fall openly, at Jackson West’s funeral when the honor guard folded a flag too slowly, at a closed-casket service for a kid he’d supervised for sixty days who never even got his stripes, at his partner’s wake, after giving his wife and children his condolences, with the guilt gnawing at him that he survived and his partner didn’t.
But he doesn’t think he’s ever sobbed like a baby. Not like this.
Luna clings to him, crying too, rubbing his back as she clutches him tightly.
She pulls him down to the couch because his knees don’t feel like they know how to lock. She tucks his head under her chin the way she did after Dennis Rowland, after that bullet struck the both of them, and only one came home. She says his name the way she did before they had rings, before they learned to share breath. “Wade,” she says, and it’s both a plea and a promise. He shakes, and his shoulders ache, and some sound comes out of him that he doesn’t associate with adulthood at all. She doesn’t flinch. Her fingers work the tight muscles along his spine, counting him back into himself.
He’s seen how Tim and Lucy look at each other, not unlike how he and Luna do.
He had pretended not to see it, when pretending gave them space to figure things out. He pretended when Lucy’s eyes found Tim’s on instinct. He pretended when he signed off on shift changes that made no bureaucratic sense and every emotional one. He pretended when they broke up and he had to keep being their boss, instead of shaking them by the shoulders and telling them to get over themselves, because they clearly love each other. He pretended, and then he stopped pretending, and he blessed them quietly because love like that—love that steadies—is rare, and he’s old enough to be greedy for the rare things that keep his people alive.
Maybe, at least, dying together had been a mercy. They never had to learn how to live without each other.
They pull the footage the next day. IT scrubs, copies, converts. Body cam files in a folder labeled with numbers that once meant “routine” and now feel like coordinates on a map to a place no one should have to go. Grey sits in the watch commander’s office with Lopez and Nolan and Harper, the blinds half-closed, the air staler than usual. He tells himself he can walk out if it starts to feel like exploiting the dead. He doesn’t walk out.
They see the final moments—laughter cut short, the sound of running boots, the world collapsing into smoke, their final confessions.
“Of course I still love you!” Tim shouts out. “Do you?”
For a while, it doesn’t seem like Lucy’s going to say it back. There’s some bickering, and then there’s silence, and then when the fire roars so loud that almost nothing else can be heard, she finally speaks.
“I love you,” Lucy cries out. “I’m sorry. I do love you.”
“I know,” Tim responds, and it’s the last words either of them ever says.
There’s a second where the camera catches their faces—Lucy’s eyes are bright and wet, with ashy freckles across her cheek; Tim’s mouth presses thin, a line of soot at his hairline. They are young and not young at all. They are stupidly brave, and not stupid, and Grey’s heart hurts with it.
The wind roars. They hold on. Static eats the rest. The video stops because it has to.
Grey doesn’t move until the screen goes black. He realizes his nails have dug into his palms. He doesn’t open his hands until Harper touches his shoulder.
IT sends him another file an hour later, a recovered email draft from Lucy’s departmental account, autosaved, but never sent at 06:12 the morning of the fire.
Lieutenant Grey:
I would like to formally put forth my interest in taking the Sergeant’s exam in May. I know it’s rare for an officer to jump right into the exam right after hitting the requirements, but I believe this is the right path for me.
I’m ready to lead. I’ve learned more standing next to Sergeant Bradford than I can probably put in a memo, and more sitting across from you in your office when you asked harder questions than anyone else. I have work to do, but I think I can do that work in stripes, for our people, for our city. If you think I’m not there yet, I’ll take that on the chin and ask for a roadmap.
Thank you for considering this. I hope I can make you proud.
Respectfully,
Officer Lucy Chen
Grey reads it twice, then a third time, because reading it feels like opening a window in a room that’s been shut all day. He can hear her voice in every sentence, the way she makes certainty sound like humility and the way she never pretends work isn’t work. He can see her trying to walk that line between asking and deserving, and he wants to tell her she didn’t have to be so gentle with it. She’d already done the thing half the sergeants he’s known never quite pull off: she made the people around her braver.
Grey knows she would’ve made an excellent sergeant.
He knows the department will want a statement. He gives them one, and keeps the important parts for his people.
He calls a special roll call two days later. Half the division looks like they’ve slept in their uniforms. The other half didn’t pretend. He puts two boxes on the table, small enough to hide under a palm. He tells them about valor and duty and love in the same sentence because today those words don’t feel like they contradict.
“Sergeants Bradford and Chen,” he announces.
It’s quiet after, that thick quiet that is not silence but an agreement to honor it. He hands the bars to Lopez and Nolan to pin to black ribbon on two framed photos. The applause when it comes is soft. He talks to the families about the memorial. He talks to HR about benefits no one should ever have to say out loud. He talks to the Captain about updating Chen’s title, and she agrees.
They are buried side by side. The honor guard folds two flags instead of one, movements mirrored, precision aching in its symmetry. The Mid-Wilshire family stands shoulder to shoulder, united by grief that will never truly leave them. Officers from every division line the path, saluting as the caskets pass, the weight of respect heavy in the air. Grey stands with his people, back straight, but inside he feels hollowed, scorched in ways the fire never touched.
Lucy’s parents had objected to the funeral style, but the will had made it clear, and they hadn’t fought it. They showed up, tears in their eyes, and paid their respects without complaint. Tamara and Genny had sobbed together, clinging on to each other tightly, next to them.
When the crowd disperses, Grey lingers. He places the moonstone ring back into the earth between them, a small thing against such finality. “You held each other,” he says quietly. “Now, we’ll hold the rest.”
That night, Luna finds him in the garage.
“We’re going to be okay,” she says.
He wants to say that “okay” is a word for people who didn’t just send two of their best into the ground. He wants to say there are days when the job feels like a room with too few exits. Instead, he nods, because she is right in the only way that matters: they will keep going. And keeping going is not disrespect. It’s the only salute that counts.
The next morning, he’s back early. He writes their names on the board one more time. He leaves space. He tells his officers to drink water, to take the extra second at the red, to call for backup sooner than pride tells them. He thinks, not for the first time, that this job is about who you pick up after you fall.
Before he leaves his office, he opens Lucy’s email again. He replies to a message that will never land, because ritual is a thing that keeps his hands from shaking.
Take the exam. You were ready.
He hits send.
The auto-reply bounces back.
Fire spares no gift, no grief, no grace. But Grey has learned another truth the hard way, too: Love, if done right, leaves a discipline behind. A way of working. A way of holding on. He will train that into the next class and the ones after. He will write their names less often, and then not at all, and they will still be there, a quiet insistence in how his people move through the world.
On his way out, he stops by the memorial wall. He presses his palm to the cool metal and anchors himself to it, to them, to this city that takes and gives and takes again.
Then, Grey walks to his car, the wind soft for once, and he drives home through streets that still remember the smoke, but refuse to stay in it.