Chapter Text
Whenever Lucy starts to think about it, her ability to breathe quits on her.
In this moment specifically, what little air she manages to get is promptly stolen by her desperate attempts to shove the bile back down her throat.
This is what happens when she thinks about Martin Carpio.
Every hair on her body stands on edge, and the gooseflesh is unbearable. She shakes, too— uncontrollable shudders that make her feel as though the world is crumbling beneath her.
She fancies herself in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit. She remembers looking it up years ago; the horrors being essentially naked in space would wreak on the human body.
There is much debate amongst experts as to what would kill you first and why, plus there's no way Lucy's information is completely aligned with what science says; but it in her mind, it would look something like this:
First, the complete and utter lack of air would obviously be deadly. From what Lucy remembers of that one For All Mankind episode, she'd have to exhale completely before being exposed to space. Granted, in this scenario, there would be no warning. Her lungs would explode (or implode?) from the dramatic shift in pressure. Even if that weren't deadly, the cessation of oxygenated blood to the brain would be.
Next is the pressure, again. Lucy's boiling point would drop significantly, and all of the fluid in her body would vaporize, causing her to explode— What would an explosion in space would look like? In a vacuum, where would her flesh go? Would it shoot out into space, flying perpetually towards uninhabited worlds? Without gravity to do whatever it is gravity does, would her cells disintegrate?
Ultimately, it does not matter; because when Lucy Chen thinks about Martin Carpio, every single one of those things occurs simultaneously. Her body boils and swells and freezes and implodes and burns and explodes and she cannot fucking breathe.
"Something on your mind?"
Unbidden, her train of thought leads her to a seven-year-old conversation in a dark place—a cold, wet sewer—not unlike the tunnel in which she'd killed Martin.
"No, ma'am."
It is one hour after midnight in the Chen-Bradford household.
"Yeah, that's what I thought."
Yesterday morning, Sergeant Chen woke from the bed she shared with Tim Bradford and went to work as Mid-WIlshire's roving supervisor.
"You're wrong about me."
Many years later, a killer walked in through the front door and fell apart on the couch.
"Uh, no, I'm not."
Lucy pulls herself up into a sitting position, pushing the hair gathered around her face to her back.
Looking to her right, she can see that Tim is still fast asleep.
Good.
He's usually a light sleeper, but the stress of having his girlfriend become a murderer coupled with the effects of said murder in their shared professional workspace—will it continue to be theirs? Lucy could still potentially lose her job—has taken its toll on his routine, broken down aspects of his psyche. He didn’t talk about it, despite her prompting. Tim knows her well, and he is familiar enough with her methods to know that she will shut down any assay at a real conversation without a moment's hesitation. She almost feels guilty for the events that are about to take place.
"I can do so much more than just community meetings!"
It is dark outside. Peaceful, too— the city is asleep.
"You're right, you're probably really good at paperwork— but you can't fight."
Slowly, so as not to wake her boyfriend, Lucy slides her legs off the bed and curls her toes, anchoring herself in the rug she'd chosen when she first moved in.
"I can fight! I've gone toe-to-toe with plenty of suspects and won!"
She recalls how it felt, the absolute terror as he straddled her and bore down with inhuman force; eyes empty of sanity as he fought with every ounce of strength he had to pierce her chest with his knife.
"Not that one."
"He's huge!"
"And yet, I took him and his buddy."
Lucy's vision blurs as she picks through the basket of dirty laundry in the corner for the dark blue hoodie and its matching sweats.
"You want to hit me right now, don't you?"
She holds her breath as she dresses, praying she doesn't wake Tim.
"Yeah, I see it in your eyes… someone a little more your size?"
Creeping out of the bedroom and squatting by the dog bed to scratch Kojo behind his ears, her unbound hair tickling his back.
"Well, come on."
In the front entrance, sliding on a pair of sandals because she forgot to find socks while she was dressing.
"Hit me, that is an order!"
It might make less noise if she takes the entire key-chain off the hook instead of removing just one key from the ring…
"Come for me like that tweaker came for you!"
But there's an AirTag nestled on the chain, between her keys. She's always losing them, so it had been a wise investment.
"Stay down, and get used to that position."
Lucy can't remember if she'd invited Tim to track the AirTag on his phone. Better not to risk it. She left her phone in the bedroom; she will not need it.
"Because in case you didn't know, you are not a six-foot-two, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound man."
Through a series of painfully slow maneuvers, she slides the key she wants off her keyring. With everything that key represents, she feels that it should have rust on it. It doesn't, of course, because it is made of brass. She puts the key in her left pocket.
"He can't teach you how to fight like a girl."
Punches in the code to disarm the home security system and turn off the motion-detection lights with numb hands.
"We get a higher show of force, especially from men."
Lucy's fingers wrap around the chilled metal of the doorknob.
"So guess what, sweetheart, you are always going to be tested."
She applies just enough of her waning energy to twist it— and the door opens.
Stay down, and get used to that position.
Lucy crosses the threshold and lets her head fall back as she breathes in the late-night air.
Get used to that position.
As she reaches behind her to close the door, her eyes catch on the camera tucked in the corner above the doorway. There's another one set to watch the door, too. Shit. She had forgotten that the cameras would catch her, even if the security system won't alert her boyfriend to her departure.
Get used to that position. Stay down. Get used to staying down.
She lifts her right hand to her lips and then drops it.
Walking is a toilsome affair, but she survives it. Human bodies are already imbalanced; Lucy just needs to (quite literally) lean into it. With great patience and effort, she coaxes her vestibular organs into cooperating.
Get used to the ground.
As she walks away, she pulls her hood up over her head.
Get used to it.
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Later, with the help of footage from Lucy's body camera, they will find that Martin Carpio's estimated time of death was 3:16 p.m.; fifteen hours, sixteen minutes, and ten seconds after midnight on the ninth day of March, 2026.
A Monday.
On January 29, 1979—also a Monday—16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot up a bunch of kids in the playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California; all from the comfort of her bedroom window. After a cop blocked her line of fire with a garbage truck, she relented. She left her house several hours later of her own volition after being promised a meal from Burger King by the police negotiators.
When asked the simple question why, Brenda's reasoning was, "I don't like Mondays."
Her unprecedented act of mass violence had her credited by some as the "mother" of multiple infamous school shootings in the years following, evidenced by its status as the first modern high-profile school shooting in the United States.
The event would later be immortalized in a song—aptly named "I Don't Like Mondays"—by the Boomtown Rats; several documentaries, and a Lifetime movie.
Lucy was not yet born when the shooting happened, but she has distinct memories of belting out the lyrics to "I Don't Like Mondays" with her friends in someone's backyard on a Saturday. None of them knew, at the time, what the song signified; but Lucy plays it every now and then when she hears about another particularly disturbing act of violence. Given her occupation, one likely wouldn't imagine this to be a regular occurrence, but Lucy has always held on to her empathy for others; certain the day she loses that empathy to be the day she has failed as a human.
The latter half of the previous sentence is part of the reason she has been unable to forgive herself thus far, weighed down by the guilt of having been the subhuman filth to steal the life of Martin Carpio.
Lucy has always loved Mondays. As a child, Saturday was her family's day to sit at home and relax—her parents believed firmly that a person should have one day of rest each week in order to maintain a healthy mental state—and Sunday was house-cleaning day, grocery-shopping-day, laundry-day, et cetera. She enjoyed the rest; it gave her time to decompress from the week past and prepare for the week to come. On Mondays, she would wake up raring to go, eager to seize the day— carpe diem. She followed this routine as best she could throughout college and the years beyond, all the way up until she joined the Los Angeles Police Department. For cops, work-life balance is a fairytale concept.
Lucy Chen will always hate Mondays now.
Get used to it, she tells herself.
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Lucy walks. For a long time.
At some point, making her way into the downtown, bars start to close and she feels like a bowling ball as she tries her best to avoid physically bumping into swathes of drunk people, an antipodes to the crowd.
Dimly, she wonders if she should turn back. If she is being unsafe.
Perhaps, she ponders, I should not have left my phone behind.
It is too late to allow error to distemper her progress. Lucy will simply have to travesty confidence throughout the rest of her journey.
"Something on your mind?"
"No, ma'am."
"That's what I thought."
She arrives at her intended location some period of time later: a wall of book-sized lockboxes tucked neatly in an unassuming alcove. Hidden in a nondescript alley, deep in a Los-Angeleno urban blight.
"You can't fight."
With quivering fingers, Lucy reaches her left hand into its correlative pocket in her sweatpants and retrieves the brass key.
"Yeah, I can see it in your eyes."
She lifts her eyes to search for its conjunctive lockbox.
"Someone a little more your size."
Her vision clouds, tunnels. Her pulse races; she sweats.
"You want to hit me right now, don't you…"
Lucy puts a hand on the wall parallel her body as she grounds herself.
"Come for me like that tweaker came for you!"
She locates the correct lock,
"Do it for real!"
Inserts brass into die-cast steel,
Get down and stay used to it.
And turns the key.
Get used to it.
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Tim Bradford wakes up at quarter to five.
Usually, he just wakes up at five, but living and sharing a bed with Lucy has resulted in her internal alarm clock waking her up at five as well. Tim knows his girlfriend: she is struggling right now. That would be obvious even to the person he was before she changed him. Aside from the cuts and bruises peppered across her body—represented en masse on her face—Lucy's entire way of presenting herself to the world has shifted, possibly in a way that is irreversible. One would not even have to have met her before to see the darkness and grief permeating the air around her, so painfully evident in her body language and manner of speaking.
Tim Bradford wakes up at quarter to five, because if recent events have taught him anything, it's that it is better to be early and stop nothing than it is to be late and unable to stop anything. He wakes at quarter to five because if Lucy wakes up at five from a nightmare and he is still asleep, he will not be available to comfort her. Whenever she goes through low points in her mental health, she tends to withdraw to lick her wounds alone. Tim refuses to let her do that this time.
Which is why, when he looks to his left to see that Lucy's half of the bed is empty, he immediately goes to check the bathroom. He doesn't hear any retching or vomiting noises, so he isn't shocked when he finds the space empty and absent of life. It is mildly concerning though, so his next spot on the checklist is the garage. He doesn't think she would be in there, but it is on the way to the rest of the house and he wants to cover all his bases. Tim opens the door and flicks on the light, but the garage is cold and lonely, just as he had suspected.
The rest of their home is fairly open; a few seconds of looking around their front foyer, kitchen, dining room, and living room is all it takes for him to clear the space and find no detectable trace of his girlfriend.
Tim wants to be worried; even so, he rejects the impulse. Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is also the most likely one.
A soft whine and the touch of a wet nose to his right hand reminds him to check the other spot post-nightmare Lucy likes to frequent.
He calls Kojo over and opens the door to the backyard, allowing the dog to dart out from under his arm before taking the step outside himself.
The wet grass sliding beneath his toes reminds him that he is still dressed in sleep clothing—sweatpants and a ratty old tee-shirt—but that is not his current concern. A preliminary visual sweep of the area does not reward him with any germane espials, so he utilizes the time it takes Kojo to amble around the backyard and do his business to check every spot within the yard where a person could potentially hide.
Tim comes up empty. He feels nauseous.
He heads back inside, checks every inch of the house thoroughly.
His final stop is the bedroom, where it all began. The first pertinent detail his brain catalogues is Lucy's phone, still on her bedside table, resting on its wireless charger. Two large steps have him reaching down, picking it up, and putting in the passcode to unlock it—Kojo's birthday—in the hopes he can find even the tiniest crumb of information to give him some idea as to where his girlfriend might be. A part of Tim feels bad, but he and Lucy have the passwords to each other's phones for a reason: they live incredibly unpredictable lives. This absolutely counts as an emergent situation.
Once again, he comes up empty.
Tim wracks his mind, anxiously trying to invent a solution.
Her keys show on his phone as still being in the house, and a look out the bedroom door at the key hook in the foyer verifies their location.
The front door is unlocked and the security system has been disarmed.
A quick look at their driveway cam through the app on his phone shows him that her car hasn't moved.
How long ago did she leave?
How long has he been dead to the world, how long has he failed her?
He's back in a glass cage, forced to listen as everything goes wrong.
"Hey, look out!"
Tim sees it happen the same way a bird might watch a lion tear a gazelle into pieces.
"Stay right there, sir."
The distant sound of a dog barking, the far-off screech of rubber on asphalt, and the omnipresent ringing building in his ears.
"Just stay where you are."
The glass bars on the glass cage in the glass room shift and slide and slice and they steal his last breath, his next, too—
"Hey, sir—"
Tim has been allowing himself to relive the fear because he feels guilty; but in this moment, his guilt serves no purpose. It cannot pick up the phone, it cannot keep watch. It cannot search for Lucy, and it cannot stay focused.
But Tim can do all that, and he can smash glass.
"I am responsible for a life that is in jeopardy, and I will do whatever I have to to save her, do you understand?"
He is not helpless here.
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It takes more energy than Lucy's willing to admit, even with the lockbox's dilapidation, but eventually she manages to get the little door open.
The inert state of its packed interior bites deeper than any wild animal's teeth ever could.
It's feels like it's been forever since she's visited, which is likely why it took more effort to open this time around.
The last time was… it had to have been after she and Tim got back together, right?
They aren't organized by topic, but she knows it'll be somewhere near the bottom. She had come close to taking it out and reading it after what happened with the Pentagram Killer case and Jeff Budny, but thankfully hadn't ended up needing to.
She stuffs the brass key back in her left pocket and reaches in cautiously to pull out the stack of letters. Already, she can see his looping scrawl on the cheap dollar-store envelopes, an imperfect hand-script she only ever saw him use with his friends. Lucy had asked him why, once. He only looked at her sadly and said something she can't remember now.
She leafs through the pile with desperation. The one she is looking for— it will be here. It must be.
Then the familiar sight of something so him, so very him, sparks a stinging heat in the corners of her eyes.
FOR LUCY: IF YOU EVER TAKE A LIFE.
A choked sob leaves her and the tears stream down her cheeks.
Oh, oh Jackson. Oh, Jackson.
Oh.
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Within fifteen minutes of him calling, Angela has made the twenty-five minute drive over to Tim and Lucy's place.
She's only known him to be this distressed six times in their nearly two decades of knowing each other— The night Isabel left, the night Isabel got shot in the head, the day Lucy was kidnapped (technically, she coached him through eleven panic attacks in the twenty-four hours between the discovery of Lucy's disappearance and Lucy waking up in the hospital, but she counts the entire day as a whole), the night he broke up with Lucy, the day Lucy killed a man in self-defense, and tonight.
It's not a coincidence more than half that list is about Lucy. In the aforementioned (nearly) two decades of knowing each other, she has also never known him to have this much light in his eyes.
The detective remembers clearly what it was like to see that that light disappear.
According to a quick "he's out" text Angela received from Lucy, Tim finished up with IA and Sergeant Grey around forty-five minutes ago.
Despite her texting and calling, there is no response from Tim; just radio silence. It doesn't make any sense.
Not even a minute after her ninth call to his cell, Angela's holding Tim together on her doorstep while his tears soak her lounge-wear.
Directly after breaking up with Lucy, Tim had driven to Angela and Wesley's home, knocked on their door and collapsed—body shaking with silent sobs—into her arms.
It's a bittersweet kind of parallel when she walks through Tim and Lucy's darkened front door to find her friend hyperventilating on the couch, head bowed and hands held out in front of him like he's praying.
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The day Lucy Chen killed Martin Carpio made the world go quiet.
A code alpha call over the radio is not by itself a necessarily troubling occurrence— they can be called for multiple reasons. For the officers at Mid-Wilshire, Sergeant Chen will often call a code alpha at end of shift to either the room where roll call is held, the bullpen, holding, or even the parking lot; just so that all the shift's officers have a chance to debrief and so Sergeant Chen has a better idea of what she needs to brief the incoming field supervisor before handing off command. Essentially, a code alpha is just a call for units to meet somewhere specific for a meeting or debrief.
Which is why when a code alpha is repeat-called mid-afternoon to Westview Hospital of all places, and by Sergeant Bradford instead of Sergeant Chen, someone informs the Captain while all available units follow their watch commander's orders with unprecedented speed.
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Nyla Harper has never been so grateful for the existence of other human beings as she is when all of a sudden, a dozen approaching sirens can be heard screaming somewhere nearby.
"Thank the Lord Almighty," Penn mutters as he makes the sign of the cross.
Nyla scoffs. "Sure, or thank the idiots we work with for following protocol when we never checked in."
"It doesn't matter," John is still catching his breath, so the words come slowly. "I'd worship Smitty if he was the one who sounded the alarm." The man stands and wipes his brow, turning away from the group and muttering a quiet "fuck" as he cracks his neck.
Nyla overcomes her dislike of Nolan's weird-ass ride-along kid just long enough to trade dubious looks with him and Penn.
The first shop pulls up—quickly followed by two others—and one of the day-shift beat cops whose name she can't remember gets out, already yelling something.
"Pardon?" Penn yells back. At least the kid has manners.
"Where are the others?" The female officer—whose nametag Nyla can now see reads "FEHR"— calls out, enunciating this time.
"Uh, we kind of trapped them all inside," The scientist they picked up earlier tells Fehr with a wobbling voice. "They're… they've been exposed to something."
"I-when you guys didn't check in, Sergeant Chen and Officer Juarez came after you." Officer Fehr shakes her head. "Last we heard from them on the radio, they, uh, they found a dead body and there were a bunch of people screaming, so where are they? Sergeant Bradford called a code alpha. More people will be here any minute."
Nyla feels her blood go cold.
"We… I had no idea they were here." She splutters. "We only just managed to find each other and get somewhere safe."
As if on cue, Nyla sees Juarez tear out of a door about forty yards down the building, looking around frantically.
"Celina?" John says loudly, already jogging over to her. "You alright?" He puts an arm around his former rookie, who Nyla can now see is covered in dust and shaking like a leaf.
Juarez shakes her head, breath rattling.
"Celina?" Penn prompts gently. "Do you know where Sergeant Chen is?"
Juarez's head shoots up, gaze shifting rapidly between everyone present as even more officers approach the group.
"You don't… we got separated." The younger woman clears her throat, voice steadier now. "You don't know where she is?"
Nyla's heart races as she too takes a moment to look everyone present in the eye. All faces are grim, heads shaking. Celina hurries off to vomit in a bush.
The rabid sanitation workers finally manage to bust down the door she and the others had just gotten closed, forcing the people gathered on the pavement to make a run for the grass on the other side of the roadway while the newly-arrived officers pick off the would-be attackers with beanbag bullets. Celina is still emptying her stomach into a patch of dead foliage.
Once settled; Nyla, John, and Penn stuff the civilians present into shops and pass around beanbag guns to help pick off the quasi-zombies still running around.
They're just getting the stragglers when the watch commander's shop comes screeching to a halt in the roadway before them.
Bradford's eyes are crazed as he visually assesses the officers present, so focused that he doesn't even flinch when Nyla shoots a hazmat worker next to him, doesn't avert his gaze for a moment even as his officers tackle people a left and right.
When Bradford speaks—shouts, really—it's fear as authority manifest. Nyla would laugh, were she not also full of dread.
"Where's Lucy?" He demands, saying nothing else. Tim is the one present, then— not Bradford.
John looks at Nyla, mouth shut as he swallows nervously.
She'll have to be the one to break it to the terrified boyfriend, then.
"We don't know."
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