Chapter Text
Lucy meets the biggest jerk in all of Los Angeles on the same day that she finally finds her soulmate.
She’s trying to forget the fact that they’re one in the same.
On the morning that her life irreversibly changes, she wakes up with no idea of what’s to come. If Lucy had known, she would have stayed home. Avoided the station at all costs. Found a new career, even.
Unfortunately, seeing the future is not something soulmates can do, so she gets out of bed with significantly less dread than the day calls for.
The drive to her very first shift is already eventful enough in that her car breaks down before she can even reach the station. Pushing it out of the flow of traffic turns into arresting her very first suspect, which turns into the watch commander giving her the nickname hotshot in front of the entire patrol.
That nickname, in hindsight, probably makes her training officer even less welcoming than he would have been otherwise. Although Lucy’s not even sure he knows what the word welcoming means in the first place. Or if he’s ever heard it in his life. So, who can tell for sure.
What Lucy does know, though, is that it all really starts at roll call.
“Officer Bradford, you get our hotshot,” Sergeant Gray says from up at the podium, and Lucy turns around in her seat to see if she can spot who Bradford is.
She immediately locks eyes with the officer already staring right at her.
The intensity of his gaze is the first thing she notes. He doesn’t avert his eyes, or soften his frown, or do anything else that someone might do when they care about making a good first impression. He just stares.
Close-cropped hair. Eyes so blue she can see the color from the other side of the room, and a frown so solid it makes her think she’s already failed her first evaluation as a rookie. His crossed arms and twitching jaw tell her she’s not going to out-glare him, no matter how much her instincts demand she rise to the challenge, so she turns back around to face the front.
That must be Tim Bradford.
Lucy can still feel his eyes on the back of her head. His presence burns a hole in her consciousness so white-hot that it makes her shy away.
She couldn’t forget where he is if she tried.
She wonders what the odds are that he only looks intimidating on the outside, and that he’ll actually turn out to be a kind, warm-hearted, gooey marshmallow teddy bear on the inside. Suppressing her amused huff, Lucy keeps her eyes glued to Sergeant Gray until he dismisses everyone.
“That’s it. Be safe out there,” he says. Lucy stands alongside Jackson and Nolan, that officer with the scorching gaze remaining solidly at the edge of her awareness.
Grey calls for Nolan to stay behind. Both Jackson and Lucy toss him worried looks but proceed to file out of the glass room without him. They pause just outside the doors, where her suspicions are confirmed--Officer Unfriendly comes to a stop in front of her, and a woman who must be Officer Lopez stands beside him to face Jackson.
Jackson jumps to greet her. “Ma’am, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Jackson West.”
“West,” Lopez says thoughtfully. “Any relation to Commander West?”
Jackson straightens up, shoulders back and chest proud. “Yes ma’am. I’m his son. I just wanted to say that I can’t wait to get started with you today. My father always told me that a rookie is only--”
She waves her hand to cut him off. Her smile never reaches her eyes, but neither does it waver as she says, “That’s great. Forget everything you thought you knew. The only thing that matters today is finding out what kind of person you turn into when you hit the streets and things get real.”
Taken aback, Jackson fumbles for words. Lucy takes pity on him and redirects the conversation by offering her hand out for Officer Bradford to shake.
She looks up, even more up, and then up some more to make eye contact with him. “Hi, I’m Lucy Chen. I look forward to working together.”
“You shouldn’t,” Bradford says, crossing his arms and planting his feet. “I’m going to make the next year of your life a nightmare.”
Lucy retracts her hand. If not for the disdain all over his face then she might have been able to convince herself she didn’t hear him correctly. Grasping for words and failing to find any, the most she can do is hold eye contact with him as she searches his face for even a hint of humor. She finds absolutely none. All she sees is sincerity so aggressive it feels like a shot of adrenaline directly to the heart.
“Okay,” she says as calmly as she can manage. Being in the habit of practicing compassion and empathy for all, Lucy truly believes some people were put on this planet to test that. Looks like she’s just met another one.
Not even closing her eyes and spinning in circles would prevent her from being able to point to exactly where this man is standing, she thinks. That’s how intense he is. No other person she’s ever met has pulled at the fabric of gravity with so much weight.
Raging assholes will do that sometimes, Lucy figures.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jackson and Lopez looking between the two of them, but Lucy refuses to back down from the challenge in his gaze this time. If there’s one thing she’s not, it’s a pushover. It seems like she needs to make Bradford clear on that sooner rather than later.
“Go get our gear and pull out the shop,” Bradford eventually snaps. “If you can’t even do that properly, ask for directions to the front door and see yourself out. I don’t put incompetent cops out on the street.”
He stalks away. The harshness of his tone dims her triumph at technically winning their stare-down.
In his wake, they look at Lopez.
“What he said,” she tells Jackson cheerily, then follows after Bradford.
Jackson claps Lucy on the shoulder and shakes her encouragingly. “Well, it was really nice knowing you. That guy is going to eat you alive.”
“Why are we mourning Lucy?” Nolan’s voice comes from behind them. “And also can you put me in your will for those really nice wine glasses you have?”
Rolling her eyes, Lucy playfully shoves Jackson off her and heads towards the equipment window. She can hear the other two rookies hurrying to catch up from somewhere behind.
“Wait, what I meant to say is I believe in you,” Jackson calls after her. “You totally got this.”
She gives him an unamused look. Eager to change the subject, she asks Nolan, “What did the watch commander want?”
“Oh, you know, just to say how much he believes in me,” Nolan says lightheartedly. “They’re really going overboard with the support this morning.”
Lucy snorts. Yeah, when she’d realized in the academy that she had finally found her purpose, this is not at all what she pictured it would be like. But regardless of the man who can make or break her success, she holds tight to the determination that a fulfilling career is finally on the horizon.
She can’t tell just from their introduction if Bradford thinks that putting rookies through fire is the only way to make them come out the other side strong enough to survive, or if he just takes pleasure in being a jerk.
But she guesses she’ll have the opportunity to find out.
Silence rushes by the open windows of the shop, thick and suffocating.
Just how Tim likes it.
The start of a new rookie class is always the most rewarding part of the cycle for him. He likes rotating his passenger every year, never getting too comfortable or attached to his vehicle the way some officers do when they have partners and routines and familiarity--where being comfortable in their shop means letting their guard down. Tim finds it impossible to forget that he can’t trust any of these rookies with his life.
It’s all on his shoulders to keep the both of them alive.
Tim has to admit, he’s never had a passenger like Chen before. That he can already tell within three minutes on their patrol route. He’s had rookies who could fake being calm despite the anxiety every officer feels on their first day, and rookies whose fidgeting reveals how hopped up they are on panicked adrenaline. Chen is the strangest mixture of both he’s ever come across.
Her steady body language, slow breathing, and alert eyes would make him think she’s entirely at ease and in control of herself, if not for the small tells that betray her. Her fingers rub together. Her lips tighten every now and then. The strange part of it is that Chen’s tells are barely perceptible, and yet at the same time so loud to him that he thinks he would still notice it all even if he weren’t looking.
Tim wants to find out what it’ll take to throw her off balance for real.
Setting her up for his favorite part of rookie day comes all too easy. “So, why do you want to be a cop?”
Chen pauses. “Is this a trick question?”
“You want me to train you, I need to know why you’re in this car,” he says, making an attempt to take some of the bite out of his voice so she’ll lower her guard.
Sure enough, she starts talking. “Okay. Um, my parents are both therapists, so I spent my childhood talking about my feelings--”
The perfect place to interrupt her. It’s like she’s asking him to slam on the brakes. Tim glances in the rearview mirror to make sure no civilians are behind them before ramming his foot all the way down to the floor.
Tires squeal. He braces back against his seat, and the seatbelt catches her as she lurches forward. “I’ve been shot!”
“What?” Chen asks, utterly baffled.
“Where are you, boot?” He demands.
She shakes her head like it’ll knock some understanding in her. “What?”
“I’m bleeding to death. You have to call for help. Where are you?” He demands.
To his great pleasure, she starts scrambling to search for a street sign. Good. At least he’s already taught her one thing she’ll never forget.
“Now I’m dead. It’s your fault,” he says calmly. “Get out.”
Chen’s brown doe eyes stare at him from across the console of the shop. One of Tim’s favorite intimidation tactics is eye contact, but right now he’s not sure he could look away from hers even if he tried. He feels more than sees the incredulity growing on her face when she asks, “What?”
What about him looks like he’s joking? “Get out and walk. You can get back in when you know where you are.”
Shaking her head in a mixture of disbelief and confusion so potent it might as well be his own, Chen opens the passenger door and steps out into the sun. It closes behind her with much less force than he expected. Tim is forced to admire the obvious restraint in her face as she starts to walk, holding back any emotion that’s not determination as she continues to search for a street sign.
No one thinks they pass this test. He’s okay with that. Tim won’t share with any rookie, current or former, that the real test is how they handle themselves after they fail it--whether they get angry at him or if they take responsibility for how little they actually know about real police work.
Ready to find out how much her control can polish under rough sandpaper, he pushes her even further. “Finish your story. Why you became a cop.”
Chen opens her mouth and then closes it, clearly doubting whether he’s actually asking or just setting her up for another test.
“Here, I’ll do it for you,” he says, searching for the most insensitive way to phrase his guess. “You wanted to piss off your parents for making you an emotional science experiment.”
Before she can inevitably protest, a horn honks from behind them. He slams on the brakes once more and glances in the mirror to see a yellow pickup truck right on their tail. Not one to let an opportunity pass by, he releases his seatbelt and pops open the door to the shop. Here’s Chen’s second test of the morning.
These men are just convenient props for her next lesson. Her training--evaluating her behavior and the decisions she makes--is the only thing on his mind as he walks towards the civilian truck.
Nothing and no one else exists to him other than the woman he can sense paralleling his approach on the opposite side of the vehicle.
“Gentlemen, I have an honest question for you,” he begins unassumingly, and chalks it up to over a decade of experience on the force when he doesn’t even have to keep Chen in the corner of his eye to stay aware of her reactions. “Were you grown in a petri dish of stupid?”
The question isn’t just for the benefit of Chen’s clear horror, which, congratulations to her for having the basic human decency required to be a good cop. He’s about to find out how committed she is to that horror.
But Tim does actually mean what he asks the men in the truck. He’s seen questionable, trigger-happy cops find probable cause for less than honking.
His test turns interesting when Chen starts mistranslating for him.
Tim watches carefully for signs of cracking under pressure as she attempts to handle the problems he creates. Some of the most important instincts are already there, he notes in vague approval; Chen treats the men in the truck kindly but firmly, and she doesn’t seem jumpy, as far as he can tell. Nor does she let the intense dislike for Tim that must be starting to grow affect her actions or demeanor in front of the civilians.
It’s still too early to say definitively, but she might not be completely hopeless. She does, however, have a long way to go.
What the rookie has to learn is that out on patrol, no matter who’s in front of her or by her side or has her back, the most important weapon she can have is herself. There’s no relying on anyone else or trusting other people to act honorably. The only thing she can count on is her own actions; civilians and suspects and other officers alike are completely and utterly unpredictable. Chen needs to understand that she can’t trust everyone. Not even him.
She can’t trust anyone, actually, except herself.
So he pulls her aside to speak privately, then asks, “Do I strike you as a man who means what he says?”
“Yes, sir,” Chen answers firmly.
“Do I seem laid-back to you? Wishy-washy in any way?”
“No, sir.”
“In that case, why would you change the words that come out of my mouth?” He asks in Spanish, and watches her deflate.
He can see her getting frustrated, exactly like he planned.
“Everything is a test, Officer Chen,” Tim says. “And you just got another F.”
Let her be angry. Let her feel mad.
Tim learned early on in childhood that the only way to really know someone is to see what they do when they’re enraged. And if she can’t hold her feelings out on the streets--if she lets the negative emotions get the best of her and allows that compassion to overwhelm her--well.
Better to wash her out today and be done with it.
“Damn, Tim,” Angela says a few hours later at lunch, once he finishes recounting his morning. “Maybe ease up on the asshole stuff. That girl is going to hate you forever.”
Tim squints at her. “What do I care if she likes me? The only thing that matters is if she becomes a good cop. And if she can’t do that, then I’ll make sure she won’t become one at all.”
Talia leans back in her chair. “I agree that rookies sometimes need a cold shock on day one, but wow. You take cynicism to a whole other level.”
“I, for one, am on the edge of my seat to find out if you’ll run this one off,” Angela says, popping a fry into her mouth.
Tim scowls at her. “I don’t run them off. They quit because they can’t handle the realities of working in the LAPD.”
The radio laying beside Bishop's lunch chirps. “7-Adam-15, return to 1401 West Sycamore. Situation has escalated.”
Snatching it up, Talia says, “Responding.”
“What’s that about?” Angela asks.
“Domestic disturbance from this morning.” Talia stands and flags down her boot from the rookie table across the square. “I will never understand why abusers get to have soulmates too. People who can twist the bond like that--it's one of the world’s biggest tragedies.”
The food in Tim’s mouth tastes like ash.
Shoving down the memories of the mother he should call and the father he doesn’t speak to anymore, he swallows roughly before turning his head to find Chen. Tim doesn’t even need to search for her. He finds her like she’s a magnet that’s been tugging on him, and she almost immediately looks up to meet his eyes.
“Let’s go, boot,” he calls.
Angela gets up with a sigh. “Guess lunch is over.”
---
The more the afternoon passes them by, the more Tim looks forward to pushing Chen.
Despite how much he can see his tests are throwing her, she takes them in stride, adapting with a determination he approves of. He wants to find out if she’ll break on her first day or make it through in one piece.
Tim is starting to bet on the latter.
Early evening hits as Tim is contemplating which low-level drug dealer he can reliably pick a fight with on Chen’s behalf. Just as he settles on a choice, Talia’s voice calls for backup over the radio.
“7-Adam-15, requesting additional unit to meet us at 1350 Bellview Street, possible location of BOLO suspect. We are en route.”
Tim picks up the transmitter. “7-Adam-19. Show us responding.”
Nodding to the box with his head, he instructs Chen to find and read out the BOLO that dispatch forwards to them.
“Lance Selby,” she says, scrolling through the page. He glances over to take a look at the mugshot. “Male, caucasian, brown eyes and hair. Five-foot-eleven and two hundred pounds. Attempted murder with a hammer. Parole violation… Extremely dangerous to the public.”
“Look up the address Bishop called us to,” Tim instructs.
After a moment of scanning the screen, she says, “Owned by a Darius Nguyen. Armed robbery, assault. So, neither of these guys seem like the kind of people to hold out their hands so we can cuff them.”
Tim grins smugly. "Perfect. I was trying to decide on which dirtbag I should make you fight. Looks like I won’t have to anymore.”
She looks at him in surprise. “What?”
“7-Adam-19, be advised we are approximately five minutes away,” Bishop says over the receiver.
He ignores Chen in favor of slowing the car and looking over at the white brick apartment building on their left. “We’ll set up in the alley behind, in case Selby rabbits when Bishop and Nolan come calling,” Tim explains. They turn the corner to enter a narrow street full of trash bins.
A man opens the door to a car parked haphazardly against the curb just ahead of them. When he notices the shop, he slowly starts backing away without taking his eyes off of it.
They drive a little closer, and Chen says, “That’s Selby.”
“Call it in,” Tim tells her. “Backup and airship.”
Chen calls in a code 6 on the suspect, her voice calm and controlled. He pops open the driver’s side door and she follows suit.
“No.” Tim rushes to stop her when she starts to move out from behind her door. “You stay here until we clear them from that car.”
She nods and steps back into position.
“There a problem, officer?” Selby calls out to them. A second man exits Selby's car to stand beside him, hands hidden behind the vehicle.
Tim unholsters his gun. The frame of the shop blocks his view of Chen’s hands, but he can tell somehow that she’s got hers on her gun and is ready to draw it as well. Her eyes burn into him hotter than the sun on his side as he calls back, “There will be if you don’t step away from the car and show me your hands.”
It happens in an instant. Selby pulls out a gun from the backseat of his car and aims right at him.
The window to the driver’s side door shatters, and he feels a crushing blow to his stomach. The force of the bullet blows him backwards.
Gunfire echoes in his head like it's underwater. Tim can hear his heartbeat crashing in his ears.
The bullet must have caught his vest, though, because the impact site feels muffled, so he grabs ahold of the door with one hand and drags himself back up. Dulled sensation that’s not pleasant but not quite painful blooms when he straightens.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Chen glance at him over the roof of the shop. It's difficult to make out her expression through all the dust being kicked up.
Tim raises his gun and shouts a command at her over the sound of return fire. “I'm fine. Shoot back!”
Satisfaction twinges in his gut when she reengages without a moment of hesitation.
Sirens approach from the far side of the alley as backup appears over the hill. Selby’s friend scrambles backwards into a car further down the road and rushes the new shop, crashing into a fence at the last second to avoid head-on impact. Bishop and her rookie exit their vehicle with their firearms raised and approach the suspect now unconscious in his car.
Tim has to take his peripheral attention off of them when one of Selby’s bullets catches the engine of his and Chen’s shop. Fire ignites in front of their eyes. The suspect uses the distraction to scramble out of the alley as Tim and Chen holster their weapons in tandem and back away from the shop just in time for the front of it to go up in flames.
Ripping his radio off its clip to call out Selby's direction of escape, the vest’s impact site digs into his stomach and pulls at what must be a nasty bruise developing.
He’s just moving to chase after Selby when his rookie’s voice stops him cold.
“Tim.”
It’s not the use of his first name that gets his attention. It’s the way Chen says it.
Not once in his entire life has anyone ever said his name like that.
She calls out to him in a jarring combination of urgency, horror, and something so completely undefinable to Tim that he immediately feels off-center and lightheaded. He compensates by turning to her and snapping, “What, boot?”
Chen's eyes widen even more, and the deepest brown eyes he’s ever seen somehow get deeper.
Maybe it’s the way they almost completely absorb the sun that’s hitting her face with just enough warmth to make them shine. Maybe it’s because of how wide they are right now, so wide and centered on his stomach that he wonders if he’s missing something huge. Tim follows her gaze.
Oh.
Maybe it’s the blood loss.
The sight feels like an out of body experience. That bullet hole just below the edge of the vest isn’t in Tim’s body. The blood dripping down from it, red and shiny and gushing past the ragged edges of an entry wound to steadily soak the entire lower half of his uniform shirt--that’s someone else’s.
It has to be, because he can’t feel it at all.
Tim whips his head back up to look at Chen.
It’s just the two of them alone in an alley that rings with the absence of gunfire, the crackle of the burning shop engine, and the crashing pulse in his ears. It feels like he’s only seeing her now for the first time.
Dark, dark hair pulled back and away from a heart-shaped face. Dark, dark eyes overflowing with emotion. He thinks that if he’s not careful, she could easily pull him off balance with her black hole gravity.
Frozen in shock, lips parted in surprise, Chen has clearly arrived at the same conclusion he has. The only possible explanation for why he clearly can’t feel even a hint of pain despite the burning agony he knows from experience is meant to be tearing through him right now.
Black creeps in on the edge of his vision. Tim can’t tell if it’s from the apparent gunshot wound to his abdomen, or from the realization that after all these decades of waiting--
His soulmate is standing in front of him.
She’s been sitting right next to him in his own shop for the entire day.
The fogginess in his head and the numbness spreading from his stomach win a battle he didn’t even know he was waging. Blood loss makes him stumble back, reaching around him for something steady to break his fall.
His palm strikes the fence behind him. He can’t seem to find the strength in his hand to brace against it, and he hits the pavement hard.
“Tim!”
That’s also a new one. No one’s ever said his name like panic and despair are the only things that can save him.
He blinks, and Chen is kneeling by his side on the harsh ground, reaching for the wound.
“Gloves,” he has the presence of mind to snap through the black spots in his vision. “Gloves if you’re touching blood that’s not yours.”
Chen’s words are steadier than he would have thought to give her credit for. “They’ll get in the way.”
Soft palms press hard on the entry site as she applies pressure with her bare hands. If it were anyone else, Tim would be yelling out in pain. He knows how much this is supposed to hurt.
But this isn’t anyone else. This is Chen, it seems, and that’s enough for the hole in his abdomen to start knitting itself together. Blood stops dripping through her fingers. His skin begins to sting around the entry wound, and he thinks it should feel uncomfortable, but under her touch it just feels.
His mind jumps backwards and then forwards. Resentment against the world floods Tim as he remembers being a lonely teenager longing for his soulmate to heal the bruises littering his body with one gentle touch of her fingers. That resentment grows into sorrow at the thought that he can’t have that even now that she’s found him, because he has Isabel.
It wouldn’t be fair to any of them to use Chen for her soulmate touch when he has no intention of giving her anything in return.
Pieces of Chen expose themselves to him as her touch opens a direct connection between them. Arguments with her parents. Feeling lost and searching for purpose. The shock and dismay coursing through her right now in this very moment.
The longer her hands are on Tim, the more her soul lays bare in front of him.
Eyes almost black with intensity lock onto his wound as she presses harder yet. Her focus is so single-minded that she doesn’t even react to the sirens approaching in the distance as more backup arrives, and Tim thinks, he won’t even have her as a friend. That gravity is too dangerous.
The only way he can have her is as his rookie, and that’s about to get taken from him, too, if they don’t hide this.
Nothing can change.
He shoves her hands away more roughly than he actually means to. “Call me an RA and go after Selby.”
“What? Are you crazy?” She asks in disbelief. The wound starts bleeding once more without Chen's touch, and she reaches for it again. “You were moving around way too much. You lost so much blood already that I don’t know if you have time to wait for one. Just let me help you.”
Tim pushes her away once more, palms brushing against the rough wool of her long sleeves. He only now notices that her hands are covered in his blood. He thinks the sight would make him nauseous if one could feel nausea around their soulmate.
If only this were a test he'd made up for her. Unfortunately, he thinks the one who’s being tested right now is him, and there's only one way to pass.
“Go.” The word rips from him harsh and unyielding enough to make Chen flinch.
She stands her ground, even as her hands hover uncertainly over his body without making contact again. “No,” she says.
A frustrated noise rips itself from the back of his throat. He can’t deal with this. “Go get him, boot!”
Something in the command--or maybe in the word boot--unlocks an emotion in her face that he’s not sure he likes. She says, flat and monotone, “You’re about to be in an incredible amount of pain. You might bleed out. You’d pick that over this.”
He shoves her away for a final time, this time without even touching her. “No one can know about this. Go!”
That blow lands. He sees it in her eyes.
She stands up from the asphalt and takes a few steps backwards. Logically, he knows that she’s still too close for him to start feeling pain again, but something in his stomach tenses and coils uncomfortably. She thinks he’s ashamed of their connection.
Tim’s not. He just won’t do anything about it.
Chen risks returning to the burning shop to open the trunk and retrieve one of the towels from their emergency first aid equipment. Jaw tense, she focuses on somewhere just beside his head instead of making eye contact as she thrusts it at him. His brain is so fogged up by the blood loss that it takes him a moment to reach for the towel and use it to apply pressure to the wound on his own.
Using her bloody hands to raise her radio, she says, “Seven-Adam-Nineteen, officer down. I repeat, officer down. We need an RA in the alley of Bellview and Clinton. Suspect fled northbound on foot.” Her voice wavers on the words officer down. He notes somewhere in the back of his head with faint approval that she’s been paying attention to street signs. Chen learns quick.
With one last glance to the gunshot wound in his abdomen, she backs up and then runs in the direction Selby went. Her footsteps echo back to him even over the sound of the shop on fire and the sirens that are almost right on him.
Tim is alone for approximately a minute and a half after his soulmate leaves. With every second that passes, he can feel her retreating, and pain begins to bloom in his stomach until it grows so strong that it overwhelms him.
He’s barely hanging onto consciousness with a thread by the time the paramedics arrive.
The more distance Chen puts between them, the stronger the agony becomes. A cry thrashes somewhere deep in the back of his mind and tries to break free through the haze of the bullet in his stomach.
Hasn’t Tim been waiting his entire life not to feel pain anymore?