Work Text:
It started with her outfit.
She pulled the top she’d been excited to wear all week out of her wardrobe. It was a green long sleeve, and it hugged her body tightly (thankfully, because she absolutely could not deal with loose tops, and she loved compression tops).
She put it on.
It was…
Wrong.
Just wrong.
She tugged at the hem.
Then the collar.
She couldn’t…no. Just wrong.
She tugged it off, tossing it to the floor.
Okay. Recalculate.
She tried the other shirt she’d been thinking about a lot. A yellow t-shirt that stretched over her chest and across her torso perfectly. It looked really good with the blue jeans she was wearing.
Could’ve. If the shirt wasn’t wrong.
But it was.
Ugh.
By the time she’d tugged off her fifth shirt of the morning (her pants had been a relatively easy choice that morning, thankfully), Tim had appeared in the doorway, nursing a cup of black coffee.
He glanced from the floor, which was now scattered with her shirts, up to her and the murderous expression on her face.
“…hi.”
She rolled her eyes, and he waited a beat.
“You okay?” he asked gently.
She glared at him, and he held his hands up in surrender.
She only sustained the glare for a few seconds before her shoulders dropped, and her face crumpled in exasperation.
She looked at the shirts on the floor like they’d personally attacked her.
“They’re all…they’re all wrong.”
Tim nodded knowingly, and crossed the room in two strides so he was opposite her.
“Can I touch you?” he asked gently. She nodded, reaching up to rub her face, frustrated.
He pulled her in gently for a hug, gently rubbing circles on her back.
She didn’t even realise her breathing had sped up until his arms were around her. She relaxed against his chest, his fingers gently settling gently against her hair. He was careful not to touch her face or her neck too much, because on the days when her nervous system was overloaded, those were usually the first two triggers.
“I don’t even know what’s wrong with them,” she said quietly after she’d relaxed a little. “I just…they’re just wrong.”
Tim kissed the top of her head, slowly, deliberately, gently - giving her time to move away from him.
“I wanted to wear the green one,” she whined. “But, it’s just—“
“Wrong,” Tim nodded, giving her a small smile. “I know. I know.”
She turned her face into his chest, groaning.
“Okay, okay,” he gently rubbed her back. He released her, despite her whining, and reached for the green top she’d dropped on the floor.
He spotted the issue immediately. The tag was coming apart, and the fibres would’ve been more than enough to irritate Lucy’s neck.
He held it up to her.
“This?”
She paused. “Yeah.”
He nodded. “I think your brain processed it before you did.”
“Two options,” he pulled her back into his side, his arm firmly around her waist. “I cut the tag off this for you, and you try it and see how it feels.”
She gave him a half-smile.
“Or, you wear that shirt of mine that you always wear when your brain decides everything is too much.”
She glanced up to meet his eyes, not saying anything.
He nodded once, understanding her without either of them saying a word. “Let’s try this first, otherwise, you can wear my shirt.”
A grin spread across her face, and she tugged his head down to kiss her. “Thank you, baby.”
Sure enough, twenty minutes later, Lucy walked out of the house in the green top, hers and Tim’s work bags in her arms as he followed her out with two mugs of coffee, the breakfast she hadn’t been able to eat in time (mostly because he’d waited until after she was changed to offer her options and then make it) and her makeup bag.
As Tim pulled the car out of the driveway, Lucy was almost back to her usual bubbly demeanour, her phone connected to the Bluetooth (Tim had completely given up on his phone being connected to his own car) and her drive-to-work playlist blasting, her hand in his over the console.
He smiled as she continued to chatter on about whatever new crystal Celina had bought.
Crisis averted.
The day did not get better.
If anything, it actually got much, much worse.
For Lucy, at least.
She and Tim had talked through her day on the way to the station. Today was meant to be a fairly okay day.
Roll call at 8.
Paperwork until 10, when she and Tim had to attend a Special Ops briefing they’d been asked to assist with.
Briefing will be done by 12. She can get lunch with Tim then.
Then go out on patrol with Celina until 5.
Paperwork until 6.
Drive home.
Dinner was leftovers from last night. Easy to heat up. Nothing texturally offensive for either of them.
Unfortunately, today had other plans. Plans that did not involve Lucy’s strictly timed schedule.
Roll call was a disaster. The captain decided today was the day he was going to say hi to the patrol officers, and gave Tim zero notice of such.
So, roll call had gone ten minutes over time because the captain was busy yapping about something Lucy had no space in her brain to take in.
(Naturally, Tim gave her CliffNotes afterwards. Although, they weren’t quite complete, because while he’d lasted longer than her, he still hadn’t been able to keep the thread of what the captain was talking about for longer than the first four minutes.)
Then, Lucy’s pen was broken.
The old faithful pen she’d had since she was a rookie. She had changed the ink canister more times than she could count. The pen was literally moulded to her hand. But now it was broken, broken. The ink canister had somehow managed to melt all over the inside of the pen, jamming all the mechanisms with ink and rendering it unusable.
(Tim gave her another pen after she went into his office with tears nearly in her eyes. But it wasn’t the same.)
The briefing lasted much longer than two hours.
(She made a mental note to call Tim a lying liar who lies when she clocked off.)
She knew, when it was eleven fifty-five and the head of Special Ops had just launched into another spiel about respecting protocol, that there was no chance anything was going right today.
The minute the clock ticked past twelve, she felt Tim’s hand on her lower back and instinctively relaxed.
Turns out she’d been really tense.
At one thirteen, when they finally let them out of the briefing, Tim had to run to another meeting, and she couldn’t have lunch with him.
Which was really annoying, because she’d been really excited about lunch.
So, naturally, she completely forgot to eat, and was rudely reminded by her internal organs somewhere around three pm, while she was on patrol with Celina. But if she had lunch then, she wouldn’t be hungry for dinner.
Celina had also been extremely excited that day. Which meant that Celina was talking a mile a minute for approximately three hours and Lucy’s brain was overloaded somewhere around four words in.
And she when they came back to the station six separate times to book criminals, she saw Tim exactly zero times.
Which never helped anything.
(Why was every criminal in LA deciding that today was their day?)
(And why did the captain decide that today was the day that he needed her husband, for like, the whole day?)
So by the time she’d finished her paperwork, it was six seventeen and Timothy Alexander Bradford-Chen, police sergeant and more importantly, her husband, was exactly nowhere to be seen.
She sighed and went to get changed, closing her eyes for a moment after she pulled her bag onto her shoulder to try and combat the tiredness sitting just behind her eyes.
When she came out, he was standing there, fully changed (she had really dragged her feet getting changed out), his backpack sitting on his shoulder. He smiled when she came out of the change rooms.
She launched herself into his arms at the first available opportunity, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face in his chest as his hands settled on her lower back, and he kissed her head gently.
Because Lucy Bradford-Chen didn’t launch herself at him in the station unless something was wrong or she was very, very happy.
And this wasn’t happy.
“You okay?” he murmured into her.
She grunted.
“Good talk,” he chuckled, squeezing her a little tighter.
She looked up to meet his eyes so she could glare at him, before burrowing back into his chest.
“Missed you,” she mumbled.
He just closed his eyes and settled his chin on her head. Of course.
They stayed like that for another three minutes, both of them ignoring everyone who walked past them. Neither wanted to be the first to let go.
When Lucy did eventually release Tim, he grabbed her hand and squeezed it reassuringly, giving her a sympathetic smile. She stood up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to his lips.
When she pulled back, he looked at her with an eyebrow quirked.
“What?” she groaned, leaning her head into his bicep.
“Nothing,” he said gently. “You just never kiss me at the station unless you’re really not okay.”
Her eyes flicked up to him, exhaustion and increasing irritation very evident.
He held up the hand that wasn’t joined to hers. “Sorry, sorry. I forgot to mention that time we were broken up and you dragged me to the metro office to make out.”
She slapped his chest, smiling, but it didn’t meet her eyes. “I’m leaving without you if you’re not careful.”
His face softened, and he tipped his head to the door. “Let’s go, Luce.”
She nodded, resting her head against his shoulder, her eyes practically closed, as he guided them out of the building.
Lucy fell asleep in the car on the way home, her head resting against the headrest. Tim kept his hand on hers, even when she was asleep.
She woke up hours later, in their bed.
Her eyes blinked open, slowly.
Her brain felt…quieter. Less heavy.
She could take a breath without feeling like she was on a rollercoaster.
She looked over to Tim’s side of the bed.
Her breathing sped up a little, and it wasn’t so quiet in her head anymore.
It had barely been a year since they’d been rescued, and little more than ten months since they’d gotten married. They’d both come to the conclusion that they didn’t want to spend any longer without being married to each other, and fast tracked the wedding planning thanks to Angela’s help.
But the scars still lingered. They hadn’t spent a night apart since the kidnapping. They physically couldn’t. They’d tried - the night of the wedding, because Angela had insisted, but Lucy had had a panic attack about eight minutes after she attempted to go to sleep, and Celina gave in and called Angela, who had simultaneously been trying to calm down an extremely anxious Tim. He’d driven like a madman on the way to their house, he’d later admitted, barely remembering to move the truck into park before clambering out and climbing into bed beside her. She had sobbed against his chest and said that this wasn’t how they were meant to be spending the night before their wedding.
He’d just kissed her head, murmuring that he was here, that it was okay, and that no matter where he was, as long as he was with her, it wouldn’t matter.
(He did see her in her dress before the wedding. But that’s because she was desperate and he was surprisingly good at doing up tiny buttons.)
She glanced over at the clock. Nine forty-two.
Ah. He’s not dead. Probably just sitting on the couch, right?
He was, in fact, sitting on the couch. A grin spread across his face when he saw her, and she gave a half-smile, clearly embarrassed.
“Hi,” she murmured, her voice small.
“Hi, baby,” he said, turning off the TV and standing up to meet her halfway between the couch and their bedroom, stopping just in front of her. He knew better than to try and touch her without asking when she was this overwhelmed.
“Still want a hug?” he asked gently.
She nodded, and he let her step forward and wrap her arms around him before he reciprocated.
It was when he did that that she realised she was dressed in the shirt he’d asked her if she wanted to wear this morning. The shirt that made everything in her brain go a little quieter. (Though whether that was because it smelled like him or because it wasn’t irritating was a different question.) His track pants were also triple knotted around her waist.
She pulled back a little bit to look at him. “You changed my clothes,” she murmured.
He nodded once. “I knew you’d be really irritated if you slept in your clothes. And you were out. You barely stirred at all.”
She chuckled. “I was wearing a sports bra that didn’t clip up. How did you get that off me without waking me up?”
His eyes flicked over to the left. “Very carefully. I did not appreciate that gesture very much, thank you,” he replied, with mock annoyance.
She smiled, and shook her head, laughing, leaning into him.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
His eyebrows creased together. “For what? Doing my job?”
She laughed wetly as she rubbed at her eyes, and he carefully placed a hand at the back of her head as she rested her head on his chest.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you too, Luce.”