Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The ambulance comes and takes Chris away, and Tim and Lucy are left in her apartment, Lucy’s hands covered in blood, shaking, as she collapses to the floor. She’s crying, tears rolling down her cheeks as she stares at the blood on her couch and her floor and her hands. 

Tim stands beside her. 

He doesn’t know what to do. 

What to say. 

Lucy doesn’t move, but Tim does. 

He walks on shaking feet toward the kitchen, stepping over the bloody gauze, needle caps, and other various medical waste littering Lucy’s floor where the paramedics had thrown it in their haste while trying to stabilize Chris. 

He walks into the kitchen, wets a rag, and then joins Lucy on the floor. 

He reaches for her hand, and she pulls away from him. 

Something inside of Tim breaks, but he pushes past it because this isn’t about him. 

“The blood, Lucy,” he murmurs, and Lucy chokes on a sob but nods. She allows Tim to take her hand this time, and he carefully cleans the warm, sticky mess from her fingers. He cleans it from under her nails and from between her knuckles, and then he gently lays her hand on her lap before reaching for the other. 

“W-we need to go to the hospital,” Lucy finally stutters, and Tim nods. 

“I know. We will. Angela is on the way to the hospital, too. She texted me and said she’d keep me updated. Let’s get the rest of the blood off of your hands and then we can go.”

Tim is speaking softly, quietly, afraid to spook her. 

Lucy isn’t spooked, though. 

She’s spiraling. 

She’d been about to cheat on Chris, and he’d been dying on her couch. What if they couldn’t save him, and the seconds she’d spent flirting with Tim outside of her apartment were the precious seconds he’d needed to survive? What if he died, and she was the reason?

Rosalind. 

Rosalind had killed —

She’d tried to kill Chris, because he was close to her. 

Lucy’s chest feels tight and her throat swells, and she knows she’s panicking but she doesn’t know how to stop it. She can feel the rag dragging gently over her fingers as Tim cleans the blood from them (Chris’s blood from them), and the feeling of the rough material and Tim’s hands on hers are the only things keeping her from completely breaking down. 

“It’s not your fault,” Tim whispers, and Lucy sobs, the noise loud and guttural as it breaks free from her chest. 

“Yes it is,” she argues, but Tim is shaking his head as he drops the rag and reaches for her. 

Lucy should pull away. 

She should want to pull away. 

She’d been about to cheat on Chris with Tim, and he’d been dying. She shouldn’t want Tim to comfort her. 

She doesn’t deserve for Tim to comfort her. 

Tim’s hand touches her shoulder, and she knows he’s about to pull her in for a hug but she doesn’t deserve his comfort. 

She jerks away, wiping at her eyes, and then stands shakily. Tim is left on the floor, his arms empty and his expression vulnerable, and Lucy glances down at him and wishes with her whole heart that they could go back to when they were outside of the door. 

She wishes she could go back to I kind of like yours, and what happens undercover stays undercover. She wishes she could go back to smiles and the fire burning in her belly as she invited Tim in. 

She wishes she could go back to before Chris was dying on her couch while she invited Tim inside for what they both knew was going to be a night of passionate sex. 

“We should go,” she stutters, and Tim nods, standing to his feet and taking a step toward her. 

She takes a step away, and then heads for the door. 

___________________

Angela is already in the emergency room when they arrive at the hospital. She wraps Lucy into her arms and then glances up at Tim, and she feels her heart break because what she’d hoped would turn into something real between her two friends has been sullied, ruined, tarnished by what had happened. 

They’d come in together. 

They’d still been together, at Lucy’s apartment, when they’d found Chris. 

Angela is a fucking good detective, and she can see the situation for what is is. 

Tim and Lucy had been about to take a step toward something new when they’d found Chris, and Angela knows it’ll never be the same again. 

They’ll never be the same again. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and Lucy nods and sniffles against her shoulder. She pulls back and wipes at her eyes, and Angela notices that she doesn’t glance back at Tim once. She almost does, several times, but she forces herself to keep her eyes forward. 

Tim watches from a few feet away, his hands in his pockets and his eyes downcast. 

Angela hasn’t seen him this stiff, this guarded, since Isabel. 

“How is he?” Tim asks, and Lucy finally turns toward him. Her eyes catch his, and her chest hurts as he stares at her with a blank, closed off expression. 

He’d smiled earlier.

He’d grinned and joked and he’d come inside of her apartment with her, and now he’s staring at her like he did the first day she was his rookie. 

Her heart thunders in her chest. It feels like it’s swollen, too big for her rib cage, and it aches. She feels like she’s being split open, like her heart has been shattered and stomped on. 

She gasps for a breath, and she wishes desperately that Tim would reach out to take her hand the way he did when they got the news of Rosalind. 

“He’s not out of the woods, but the doctors seem optimistic. He may need surgery, they’re not sure yet, but they have the bleeding under control. Right now they’re getting him settled with several units of blood and admitting him.”

“Can I see him?” Lucy asks, and Angela nods. 

“They’re only letting one person back into the ER at a time. I checked in earlier, when he first got here. Go one back and ask the receptionist; they’ll help you find him.”

Lucy nods, and then hugs Angela again before taking a shaky step toward the double doors leading into the emergency room. 

She doesn’t look back as she pushes through them, and Tim has to press the heel of his hand against his chest as she walks toward Chris. 

Her boyfriend. 

It doesn’t mean anything, she’d said, and he sees it now. 

He’d hoped, but he’d been wrong. 

Tim collapses onto a chair, drops his head in his hands, and settles in to wait. 

Rosalind is still out there. 

He’s not going anywhere, despite how much it hurts to stay here, because Rosalind is still out there and he’s not taking any fucking chances with Lucy’s life. 

Angela sits next to him and takes his hand, and Tim wishes desperately that he could go back to uh oh and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. He wishes desperately that he could go back to when he was outside of Lucy’s door. 

He wishes, and he waits. 

Chapter Text

By the time Chris wakes up, he’s been moved to a room on the third floor and Tim has planted himself right outside of it. 

He’s fucking terrified that Rosalind will come after Lucy, since she was probably the one she’d been after in the first place. Tim thinks that maybe Rosalind had been looking for Lucy, and then when she couldn’t find her, she’d thrown a tantrum and made a spectacle of Chris. 

He doesn’t know for sure,  of course, but he’s not willing to take any chances. 

“Chris?”

He hears her soft voice from the hallway, and the stab of pain that goes through his chest takes his breath away. 

“Hey, baby,” she murmurs, and Tim remembers when she’d called him baby. 

Well… when she’d called Jake baby.

At the time, it had seemed like one and the same. He and Jake had felt like the same person, and it felt like Lucy had been talking to him.

They’d been undercover, he reminds himself. 

It didn’t mean anything. 

It doesn’t mean anything.

“Lucy?” Chris croaks, and Tim sucks in a breath at the noise that Lucy makes. It’s half sob, half gasp of relief, and all emotion, and Tim wonders if he’d been wrong about how much she cares about Chris. She’s often aloof, brushing off their interactions and his advances to take their relationship further, but listening to the absolute anguish in her voice makes him think maybe she’d just been playing it safe. 

Maybe she is in love with Chris, and seeing him almost die had made her realize it. 

Tim hears the noise of Lucy’s chair scraping across the floor as she stands, and he hears the noise of her kissing Chris before pulling back and whispering, “Thank god.”

He doesn’t want to be here. 

But he can’t be anywhere but here. If he leaves because, what, his feelings are hurt? And then Rosalind comes after Lucy?

He’d never forgive himself. 

He’d never come back from that, he doesn’t think. 

Tim listens to the soft cadence of their voices, but after a while the actual words fade into the background. He leans back in his chair, one arm thrown over his eyes while the other rests on his lap, and lets the noise fade into the background. 

She’d invited him in. 

And Tim knows, without a doubt, what would have happened if they’d not found Chris. 

He’d been ready to cheat on Ashley, because even though Lucy had said that the kisses didn’t mean anything, that it was just basic biology, he’d convinced himself that it was something more. He’d convinced himself that the longing looks, the touches, the way she’d accidentally curled to him in that night and wrapped herself around him… he’d convinced himself that it meant something. 

That he meant something to her. 

He’d followed her inside of her apartment because he’d convinced himself that he felt something, too. He’d managed to make himself think that he cares for her  like that, but obviously he doesn’t. 

He can’t. 

Because caring about her would be too painful. 

He doesn’t know if he’d survive that kind of pain again, not after Isabel. 

“Tim?”

Tim drops his arm from his eyes and blinks in the sudden brightness to see Lucy standing before him. She’s biting her lip, her arms crossed over her chest as she hugs herself. 

“Hey,” he says. 

There’s so much more he wants to say, but he can’t make his lips form the words. 

“Visiting hours are over. I have to go home.”

And… well, no matter how fucking confused he is… not matter how hurt he is, he won’t make her go back there tonight. 

“You shouldn’t be alone right now,” he murmurs, and the pain in his chest spreads to every extremity as he echoes the same words he’d said after Jackson had died. 

He’d thought then, too… maybe. 

He’d thought maybe, but then he hadn’t allowed himself to go there when she’d demanded she be his aide. 

Lucy shrugs and bites her lip, and Tim notices as she picks at the soft cotton of her yellow crop top that she’s still dressed like Sava. 

“Come home with me,” he says, and he hears her sharp intake of breath when he finishes speaking. 

Do you want to come in?

Fuck, but he wishes he could go back to that moment. 

To the moment when  Lucy had asked him to come inside, opened her door, and then stared at him like that. 

“Rosalind is still out there,” he whispers when she doesn’t answer for several moments. “It’s not safe. I’ll take the couch, you can have the bed. You should shower and get some rest so that you can come back in the morning,” Tim says, and it’s all very logical. He knows it’s logical. Lucy will want to be back at the hospital first thing in the morning, he’d driven her here, and she won’t be safe in her own apartment. 

“Tamara can stay with Angela and Wes,” Tim adds, because he knows she’s worried about her teenage charge, too. “Come home with me, Lucy.”

After a moment that seems like a lifetime, Lucy nods slowly. 

“Okay,” she whispers, and Tim deflates, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. 

“Okay,” he agrees.

He stands in the hallway, his hands in his pockets, while Lucy says goodbye to Chris. 

He ignores the way his chest aches, and when Lucy comes out of Chris’s room, he puts his hand on the small of her back to lead her to the elevators. 

She pulls away from his touch, her eyes flickering to his and then away again, and puts a foot of space between them as they walk. 

Tim tries not to let it hurt.

(It hurts anyway). 

_______________

Tim wins the argument to sleep on the couch this time, and after Lucy is showered, all traces of Sava washed away, and dressed in his sweats and t-shirt, he shows her into his room and pulls back the covers before walking to his dresser. He grabs a pair of pajama bottoms, a henley, and a pair of boxer briefs, and then turns and walks out so that he doesn’t have to see Lucy settling into his bed. Curling up under his quilt with his dog settling in over her feet.  

He wants to join her.

Do you want to come in?

He takes a cold shower and wraps himself up on the blanket he’d laid out on the couch instead. 

He can hear her tossing and turning, and he wants to go to her. He wants to offer her comfort. 

But she doesn’t want his comfort. 

She’d pulled away from him not once, but twice, and Tim doesn’t know what he did but he knows she doesn’t want him touching her. 

He closes his eyes, swallows down the emotion that threatens to drown him, and tries to sleep. 

_________________

Lucy lays awake in Tim’s bed, surrounded by his scent, and she cries. 

She cries for Chris, of course, because coming home and finding him like that had been fucking terrifying. He’d nearly bled out in her apartment, his wrists slit by Rosalind. 

He’d nearly died, and Lucy’s chest feels hot and tight as she remembers that he’d nearly died because of her. He  had been bleeding out on her couch while she invited Tim inside. 

She’d been ready to cheat on him, to disregard their entire relationship, while he’d been fading away just feet from her. 

She cries for herself, because the single worst thing to ever happen to her is happening again. Caleb is dead, but Rosalind is not. 

She’s out. 

She’s free. 

She’s continuing her reign of terror unchecked, hunting and hurting the people Lucy cares about most, and all she can think of about is who’s next?

Who will Rosalind come after next? Nolan? She’s obsessed with Nolan. Maybe Bailey? Tamara?

Tim?

Would she come after Tim?

Lucy bites back a wail of anguish as she imagines Tim on her couch, his wrists slit and his blood staining her floor. She imagines his eyes, blank and open but unseeing in death. 

“Tim,” she whimpers, and then she shoves her face into his pillow because he cannot hear her calling for him. If he comes to her right now to offer comfort like he had earlier, she won’t be strong enough to resist him. 

She won’t be able to pull away. 

She wants more than anything for Tim to come in and wrap his arms around her. She wants him to hold her, to let her cry, to whisper words of comfort to her. 

But she knows she doesn’t deserve it. 

It’s her fault —

The door creaks open and Lucy realizes that the noises she’s making are loud. She’d thought she was being quiet, but as the door opens and the light from the living room lamp floods in, she hears herself. 

She’s panicking, she realizes. She’s gasping, sobbing, her breaths loud in the soft, silent night. 

“Lucy,” Tim murmurs, and Lucy gives in. 

“Tim,” she gasps, and then he’s there, his arms sliding around her and his chest solid against her back as he climbs into the bed behind her. 

“Breathe,” he says, and Lucy tries. She tries, but she only manages a quick gasp of air. Her arms and legs are tingling, her vision is beginning to black out, and she hasn’t had a panic attack like this since Caleb. “Breathe, Lucy,” Tim murmurs, and then he’s placing a hand on her belly and telling her to breathe with him. He inhales, counting the seconds, and Lucy can feel his stomach expand against her back. She tries to imitate him, and the breath she takes is infestimately longer than the one she’d taken before, but it still isn’t enough to clear her vision. 

“T-Tim,” she stutters, and he makes a noise as he buries his head in her hair. 

“Breathe,” he coaches her. “Follow me. Breathe in… and then breathe out…”

She isn’t sure how long it takes for her to calm down, but by the time she’s able to breathe in for four seconds, hold for four, and breathe out for four, her whole body aches. It feels like she’s been hit by a truck. Her hands are shaking and she feels sick to her stomach. 

She’s been stuttering, gasping, words tumbling from her lips as she’d fought to calm down, and she continues, unable to stop, even now. 

“My fault,” she whispers, and Tim makes a noise as he pulls her back to his chest when she tries to move away. “She went after him because of me.”

“It was not your fault,” Tim says sternly, but Lucy shakes her head. 

If it weren’t for her, Chris would have been safe. Rosalind wouldn’t have given a single shit about him, except he was connected to her. 

Lucy thinks she should probably break up with him, never see him or speak to him again, so that he’s safe. She should get as far away from everyone who she cares about as possible, because any one of them could be next. 

Nolan. 

Nyla. 

Angela. 

Tamara. 

Tim. 

Rosalind could go after any of them. She could slit their wrists or their necks, laugh gleefully as they bleed out.

“C-can I be alone?” she stutters, and she feels Tim stiffen against her back. He moves quickly, though, and Lucy almost reaches for him to pull him back. She immediately misses his warmth and his calm, steadying presence. She misses his strong arms around her, his warm hand on her belly. 

She misses him. 

Do you want to come in?

She watches him walk out of the door, closing it gently behind him, and then curls herself into his blankets once more. She buries her head in his pillow, breathing in his scent in desperate gulps, and spirals further and further into guilt and self hatred. 

She doesn’t sleep for a single minute that night. 

Chapter Text

Lucy doesn’t so much wake up in the morning as she gets up, because she hadn’t slept very much or very deeply, and she feels like a zombie as she ambles out of Tim’s bedroom, barely catching herself on the door jam when she trips over the too-long legs of Tim’s sweatpants. 

“Good morning,” Tim greets. His voice is quiet, subdued and tired, and Lucy bites her lip as she glances to where he’s sitting on the couch, eyeing her warily. 

She knows she’s not being fair. 

She had been the one to invite him in. 

She had invited him into her house, her intentions clear, and she knows it isn’t fair to Tim that she’s pushing him away and being, if she’s honest, a little bit of a bitch to him. 

It’s easier, in the light of day after having all night to process, to see how fucked up the situation is. 

She feels guilty for so many things. 

It’s her fault that Chris is hurt, because Rosalind was trying to get back at her. 

It’s her fault that she and Tim had almost cheated on their significant others.

It’s her fault Tim is staring at her now with pain and confusion in his eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and Tim gives her a curious look as he pats the couch next to where he’s sitting. The blankets he’d used the previous night are bunched up on the middle cushion, and as Lucy sits down on the other side, the mountain of blankets between them feels like a physical representation of how far away she feels from him in that moment. 

Everything had been so different only 24 hours ago and Lucy wishes, not for the first time, that she could go back to when things were easier. 

“What are you sorry for, Lucy?” Tim asks, and his voice is unfairly soft. 

He shouldn’t be soft with her. 

She’s fucked up so much. 

“I’m sorry for pushing you away,” she whispers, because as much as she thinks she should be, she’s not sorry that she had invited him into her apartment. She’s not sorry that she had been about to grab his hand and haul him into her bedroom. She’s not sorry that they were about to have sex, because she had wanted it (and still wants it, if she’s being honest) so much. 

“It’s fine,” Tim says, but Lucy shakes her head. Her chest hurts again, and all of the words she needs to say are stuck inside, burning her throat and causing her eyes to sting as she tries to find a way to force them out. 

“No, it’s not,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t know how to make it better. 

She doesn’t know how to fix things. 

Her boyfriend is in the hospital, in the Intensive Care Unit, and she’s sitting across the couch from the man she’s desperately in love with. 

She wants Tim and not Chris, but how can she leave Chris now?

Tim nods, but he doesn’t say anything else, and Lucy wonders how close she is to losing him. 

How close is she to pushing him away forever?

Maybe it would be a good thing, though, she thinks, because then Rosalind wouldn’t go after him.

He wouldn’t be in danger. 

He’d be safe. 

“I know that… everything is a shit show right now,” he finally whispers, breaking the silence after several long moments. “And … and I’m not asking for anything. I won’t make you talk about it... about what happened. But Lucy… I’m here for you. I care about you, and… and that hasn’t changed.”

Lucy nods, and then sniffles as she tries desperately to hold back tears. A single one escapes and slowly trails down her cheek, anyway, and once the first falls Lucy loses the battle. She begins sobbing, her chest heaving, and she wants more than anything for Tim to hold her. 

She wants the wall, both the figurative one she’d put up and the literal pile of blankets between them, gone. 

She wants …

“Tim,” she gasps, and Tim moves toward her as if on instinct. He looks cautious, unsure, and Lucy can’t blame him because she’s pushed him away so many times already. She knows she shouldn’t, but she craves the comfort of his arms, the warmth of his body against hers, and she collapses against him, burying her head in his chest as he pulls her close. 

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, and Lucy knows she doesn’t deserve his comfort but she’s just greedy enough to take it, anyway. 

__________________

Later that morning, after regretfully peeling herself out of Tim’s arms, Lucy gathers her things and heads back to the hospital. Tim drives her, and Lucy thinks that he’ll drop her off and then head to the station, but he plants himself outside of Chris’s room and refuses to leave. 

“You can go,” Lucy says, but Tim shakes his head. He leans back against the wall, closing his eyes and crossing his arms over his chest, and Lucy sighs. She lays her hand on his arm for a long moment, drawing strength from him, and then pushes open the door to Chris’s room and walks inside. 

“Hey, baby,” Chris murmurs when he sees her, and Lucy swallows thickly as she moves toward his bed. His arms are wrapped tightly in sterile, white dressings from his palms to his elbows, and he still has an IV but he’s no longer receiving blood transfusions. His color looks better and he’s sitting up, sipping water from a Styrofoam cup through a striped bendy straw. He smiles, and Lucy smiles back as she sits down in the chair beside his bed. 

“How are you feeling?” she asks, and Chris shrugs as he sets his water down with shaking hands. 

“They’ve got me on the good drugs, so it doesn’t hurt too much. I’ve got about a hundred stitches between my two arms, though,” he says, and Lucy has to fight herself not to make a noise when he reaches out and takes her hand into his. He entwines their fingers, and she can feel the gauze scraping against her palm. She runs her fingers over the soft dressings, blinking to hold back tears as she remembers the long, deep cuts on his forearms. 

The blood. 

The way his heart had barely been beating when she’d pressed her fingers to his wrist. 

“Lucy,” Chris whispers, and she looks up to see him blinking sleepily at her. 

She’s been on the good drugs before, and she knows how tired they make you. She’s honestly shocked he’s even awake, and hopes he can rest more soon. 

“Yeah?” she asks, and Chris blows out a breath as Lucy lays her free hand on his thigh. She rubs it through the thin hospital blanket, and Chris shuffles around to get comfortable as he lays back down. 

“I love you.”

Lucy’s eyes widen as his words wash over her, and her chest hurts for an entirely new reason as she tries to decide how to respond. 

I love you. 

They’ve never said it before. She’s never even thought about saying it to Chris before, because their relationship isn’t… that. They aren't that serious. 

“I…” she whispers, but she can’t force the words out. 

She wants to, to comfort him. 

She wishes she could tell him she loves him, because she wants to be his anchor as he heals. 

But she doesn’t.

“Get some rest,” she whispers instead, and Chris’s smile fades as he takes his hand from hers and tucks it back under his blanket. 

Lucy curls up in the chair beside his bed, wrapping her arms around her knees and hugging them to her chest as she settles in for a long morning.

__________________

After visiting hours end Tim drives her home and walks her to her door, and Lucy is reminded so viscerally of the last time they’d been standing outside of her door that she feels sick. 

“Angela came over and cleaned,” Tim is saying. His hands are in his pockets and he’s standing across the hall from Lucy, at least three feet between them. It’s not like last time. He’s not smiling. He’s not standing close to her. He’s keeping his distance, and Lucy can see from his body language that he won’t be coming inside this time. “She got rid of the couch and the rug, and… it should be clean.”

Lucy nods and unlocks her door. 

“Tamara is staying with Patrice and their police escort for the weekend,” she says, and Tim nods and swallows but doesn’t make a move to leave. “I didn’t… want her here. I thought I’d have to clean everything up, and I didn’t want her to see it.”

“Okay,” Tim says, and Lucy opens the door and steps inside. “Lock your door, Lucy,” he adds, and Lucy nods. 

“Good night, Tim.”

“Night.”

Tim turns and walks back down the hallway. 

He doesn’t look back. 

Lucy closes her door, locks it, and then turns, her eyes closed, toward the living room. 

It looks different, empty, without her couch. The rug is gone, too, just like Tim had said, and the emptiness is disconcerting but it’s better than the pools of blood that had been there before. Angela had also cleaned up the mess from the paramedics, the rag Tim had used to clean Lucy’s hands, and had taken out the trash. 

Lucy reaches for her phone and sends a quick text to thank her. 

Thanks for cleaning everything. I’m sorry you had to do that. 

Angela has responded by the time Lucy kicks her shoes off and walks into her bedroom. 

It was no problem. Please let me know if you need anything. We’re all here for you.

Lucy smiles softly at the message, and then locks her phone and sets it on the nightstand before moving into her bathroom. 

She showers and changes into pajamas, and then walks into the living room, drying her curls with one of her large, fluffy white towels as she walks aimlessly around the space where the couch had been. She pauses by the windows, standing directly across from where Chris had been laying, bleeding out, his arms slit open by Rosalind. 

She’s just about to begin spiraling again, her thoughts consumed with blood and Chris and Tim and everything she’d been about to do before her world had been thrown into chaos, but the sight of a familiar truck in the parking lot below her window causes her to pause. 

She looks closer, and then has to fight a little smile as she walks into her room, grabs her phone, and then returns to the window as she dials. 

“Lucy.”

“Tim,” Lucy says, and the panic clawing up her throat calms and dissipates as his voice washes over her. “Where exactly are you right now?”

Tim is silent for a moment. 

“Right where I need to be,” he says diplomatically, and Lucy huffs as she catches the light of his cell phone in the window of his truck below her window. 

“Tim, I’m fine. I’m safe. I have locks on my doors and windows and I have my weapon. I know how to take care of myself.”

“I know you do. I trained you.”

“Then why are you still here?”

Tim is silent for a long moment, and Lucy has to glance down at her phone to make sure he hasn’t hung up on her. The call is still connected, the seconds slowly ticking by on the display, and they’ve been on the phone for three minutes and twenty seven seconds by the time he finally responds. 

“Because you may not need me, but I need you. I… I need to make sure you’re safe, that is.”

“You could have come in. I don’t have a couch for you to sleep on anymore, but Tamara’s room isn’t in use for the weekend,” Lucy says, and she bites her lip as she remembers the last time she’d invited him inside. 

Do you want to come in?

She wishes, for the millionth time, that she could go back to that moment. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tim says, his voice soft and quiet, and Lucy nods to herself even though she knows he can’t see her. 

“You’re probably right. But… really, Tim. You can go home. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

“I know you can take care of yourself,” Tim says, and Lucy sighs because she knows from his tone that he isn’t going anywhere. “But, respectfully, no. I’m not leaving, Lucy.”

“Okay,” she says, because she knows that this isn’t a battle she’s going to win. “But if the cab of your truck gets uncomfortable, the offer is open.”

“Thanks,” Tim says, and Lucy knows he won’t take her up on it but she feels slightly better having at least offered. “Get some sleep, Lucy.”

“You, too,” Lucy says, and then Tim hangs up. 

She sleeps much better that night, and while she wants to convince herself that it’s simply because she’s so exhausted, she knows it has more to do with the man camped out in his truck below her window than anything. 

Chapter Text

Two Weeks Later

Lucy waves to her constant shadow, a rotating cast of patrol officers, as she heads to her car. The LAPD officer had been her and Tim’s compromise after the third night he’d spend camped out in front of her building, and while Lucy hates the idea of someone spending all of their time following her when they could be helping other people in the community, she hates the idea of Tim being sleep deprived and off of his game more. 

After all, Rosalind is much more likely to hurt the people Lucy cares about than she is to come after Lucy herself. 

Lucy climbs into her car, plugs her phone in, and dials Chris as she backs out of her parking spot. 

“Good morning, Lucy,” Chris greets, and Lucy manages a small smile as she flicks on her blinker and merges into the street. 

“Hey, Chris. How are you feeling?”

Things between her and Chris have been a little strained since he’d told her he loved her and she hadn’t responded, but she’s happy that he’s starting to sound more like himself. He’s healing slowly, and of course the mental toll is far worse than the physical toll. 

He’d been kidnapped by Rosalind, taken to Lucy’s apartment, and then carved up and left on her couch as a message. 

Lucy can’t blame him for withdrawing from everyone a little bit. 

“A little better every day. I’m going to try and go back to work tomorrow.”

Lucy bites her lip, and she wishes she could see Chris’s face.

She remembers being kidnapped by Caleb, and she hadn’t been anywhere near ready to go back to work after only two weeks. 

“Are you sure?” she asks, and she hears Chris’s annoyed sigh on the other end of the phone. 

“I’m sure, Lucy. What, you don’t think I can handle it?”

“That’s not what I said, Chris.”

Chris sighs again and Lucy feels her stomach clench. 

She knows she should probably just end things with him. She should definitely end things with him, actually, and not only because she doesn’t feel as strongly for him as he apparently feels for her. She should end things because as long as he’s important to her in any way, he’s at risk. 

Rosalind could come back and finish the job, and the fact that Chris also has an LAPD escort only reassures her a little bit. 

“Let’s not fight this morning,” Chris says, and Lucy swallows thickly as she nods. 

“Okay.”

There’s silence on the phone for a long moment, and when Chris finally speaks Lucy feels the tight sensation in her stomach increase. 

“I’ll see you after work, okay? I may be in the station a bit today to fill out some paperwork, but I know you’re busy.”

“Okay,” Lucy says again, her voice quiet. 

She hates that she’s drawing this out, but as much as she knows she needs to end things with Chris, she also hates to, because he’s already had enough shit happen to him, and her breaking up with him would only be icing on the cake. 

“See you later.”

Chris whispers I love you, and, after Lucy doesn’t respond for a few seconds, hangs up. 

Lucy shakes her head to try and clear it some. 

She has a job to do today. She’s riding with Tim and she knows she needs to get her head in the game because making it through the day while trapped in a small shop with the man she almost cheated on her boyfriend with is going to take all of her concentration. 

She pushes the conversation with Chris out of her mind, and tries to focus on the day ahead. 

________________

“Oh, before you go,” Sergeant Grey says, and Lucy pauses just as she’s about to stand from her chair in the roll call room. “I have one more bit of information to share.”

Lucy sits back down and tries not to shift uncomfortably in her seat when Grey’s eyes turn to her. The rest of the officers follow his gaze, and she slumps in her chair, her eyes landing on the table as he begins to talk.

“Officer Chen, due to your exemplary work while undercover, I’ve been asked to offer you the opportunity to receive specialized training in Sacramento starting a week from today. While we would hate to lose you on patrol, it’s becoming increasingly more apparent that your skills are highly coveted in other departments as well. Even if you do choose to remain on patrol, this training is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Think about it and get back to me by the end of day. That’s all. Be safe out there.”

Lucy smiles and nods at Grey, and then practically runs out of the roll call room before Nolan or Angela or anyone can stop and congratulate her or ask her what she’s going to do. 

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, although the idea of running away to Sacramento sounds pretty good right now.

She has their shop set up and ready to go by the time Tim saunters in ten minutes later. His eyes are hard and his lips are set in a straight line, and she can tell that today is going to be a long fucking day. 

_________________

“Tim.”

Tim sighs as he pulls their shop to a stop outside of Nevin’s. He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes, because he knows that he and Lucy need to talk, okay, but he hasn’t been able to force himself to start the conversation. 

They haven’t talked about that night. 

They’ve barely talked in the past two weeks at all, actually, because Lucy had been given a week off of work to help Chris when he was released from the hospital, and then the next two shifts he’d ridden with Webb. Lucy had been borrowed by Caradine for help with a particularly difficult case involving puzzles, which Lucy was known around the station for being exceptionally good at solving. 

Yesterday had been their first day back in the shop together, and it had been the longest shift of his life. 

“Yeah?” he asks, and Lucy sighs as she turns toward him in her sesat. 

“We need to talk.”

Tim nods. 

They do. 

But he’s afraid that talking about what happened will ruin their friendship, their partnership. He’s afraid that Lucy will decide everything she did was a huge mistake, and that she doesn’t want to be around him anymore. 

“I invited you into my apartment for more than just a drink that night,” she whispers, and Tim bites the inside of his cheek in surprise at her forwardness. 

Well, they’re getting straight to the good stuff, then. 

“I know,” he admits, because he had known, and he’d walked inside anyway. 

Lucy blows out a breath and throws her hands up.

“I just… where do we go from here, Tim? Did I fuck everything up?”

Tim shakes his head and turns to Lucy so fast that he gets whiplash. 

“No, Lucy. No, you didn’t fuck anything up.”

Lucy looks relieved for a brief second, but then her walls are back up. Her gaze is downcast and she’s biting her lip as she squirms in her seat. 

“Then… what? Because I think that I made my feelings pretty clear, but neither of us has said anything about it, so-”

Tim holds up a hand, because what the fuck? 

Feelings? 

“Hold on,” he says, and he has to take a deep breath to calm himself down because yeah, he’d hoped, but neither of them had said anything and he hadn’t wanted to assume. 

Less than 12 hours before she’d invited him inside of her apartment, she’d told him that their reactions were just ‘basic biology,’ so he’d assumed that she had been inviting him in for sex, for a release of the tension that had been building between them since the start of the undercover mission.

And now she’s talking about feelings? 

“Feelings?” he asks, and he sees a brief flash of hurt in Lucy’s eyes before he continues. “Because you told me it wasn’t real. You told me it was just biology. I asked… I asked, Lucy,” he says, and his chest aches as he continues. “I asked if was all just pretend, and you said it was, so I’m really fucking confused right now.”

Lucy bristles and then frowns. She leans forward in her seat, her body angling toward Tim’s, and what he really wants to do is reach out, grab her, and haul her to him. 

He wants to kiss her, to devour her mouth and splay his hand over her neck. He wants to feel the way she gasps into his mouth and he wants the heat of her tongue against his. 

He wants to own her. 

He wants to, but he doesn’t. 

“You didn’t ask, Tim,” she snaps, and Tim opens his mouth to argue but she doesn’t give him a chance before barreling on. “You accused me. You told me it didn’t feel like I was pretending, and-and maybe I wasn’t completely pretending, but you were upset and I … I pushed things too far. I shouldn’t have kissed you in the airplane and I know you were upset about it, so-”

This time Tim cuts Lucy off. He’s shaking his head as he interrupts her, his heart pounding so hard that he can hear the blood rushing in his ears. 

“Wait. Just fucking… wait a second.”

Lucy waits, and Tim takes a deep breath as he tries to untangle his own thoughts. 

He’s just about calm enough to speak when Lucy interrupts him.

(He wishes, every single day afterward, that he’d spoken faster, that he’d been able to work up the courage to admit his feelings more quickly). 

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she says, and she’s opening her door as she speaks. “I’m with Chris and you’re with Ashley. It was a mistake and it’s probably a good thing that nothing came of it.”

Lucy walks out of the shop, closes the door behind her, and heads toward Nevin’s. 

Tim watches her, his entire heart aching, and when she’s far enough away that she won’t see or hear him, he screams and hits the wheel of the shop repeatedly. 

Fuck.

Damn it! 

He should chase after her, spin her around, and tell her how much he cares about her. He should be brave, and take the leap. He should … he should do a lot of things. 

He doesn’t. 

Instead he waits for her to come back, their pre-ordered coffee and pastries in her hands. He waits until she’s in the shop, handing him his coffee and taking a sip of her own. 

He waits, and when she’s settled in, he whispers, “You should go to Sacramento. For the training.”

Lucy nods and looks straight ahead out of the window. 

She doesn’t respond. 

Chapter Text

The day is long and awkward and by the time it’s over, all Lucy wants to do is to go home and get some rest. The second she turns in their gear she all but runs to the women’s locker rooms, desperate to get away from the heavy feeling that’s plagued her all day. 

Tim had been about to speak, but she hadn’t been able to bear the silence. 

She hadn’t been able to wait any longer for him to reject her. 

It was a mistake, she’d said, but she knows it was anything but. 

She sighs and slams her locker after grabbing her civilian clothes. She strips and changes in the middle of the locker room, and as she discards her uniform and pulls on her black leggings and the flowing, green top she’d worn to work that morning, she feels the weight on her shoulders slowly loosen and then ease away.

Maybe going to Sacramento would be a good thing. 

Maybe she needs the break. And, more than that, the training would be amazing for her career, especially if she decides to pursue undercover work. 

She should go. 

She knows she should go. 

The only thing holding her back, really, is the knowledge that Rosalind is still out there. 

She’s been silent since calling Nolan; no one has heard from her or seen her or anything, and it makes Lucy nervous. 

She’s still out there. 

Biding her time. 

Deciding when, and who, to strike next. 

“You seem deep in thought.”

Lucy startles and then relaxes almost as quickly, because Angela’s voice is familiar and comfortable to her. 

“Thinking about what Grey said this morning,” Lucy admits, and then sighs as Angela nods and falls into step beside her. They walk out of the locker room and into the hallway leading to the bullpen, and Lucy is so involved in what she’s saying that she doesn’t notice anyone else around them. “I think I should go. I mean, Sacramento isn’t that far away, so I could visit or come back if… if I needed to, if anything happens with Rosalind.”

Angela is nodding, a small smile stretching her lips as they walk together. 

“You should go,” Angela encourages her, and Lucy smiles at her friend. “It’s an amazing opportunity. Even if you don’t pursue undercover work as a career track, this training… very few people are invited to attend. It’s a small group, only the best of the best, and if they’re asking for you… you should do it, Lucy. It would be a mistake to pass it up.”

“Do what?”

Lucy and Angela both stop in their tracks as a third voice joins the conversation. Lucy swallows thickly, and then winces as she glances up to see Chris in front of them. She can still see the white of his bandages poking out from beneath the sleeves of his long shirt, and she feels the uncertainty and confusion building in her chest again as she stares at him. 

She cares about him, of course. She’s spent months with him, laughing and having fun and hanging out. 

But she doesn’t think she cares about him like that. 

(She knows she doesn’t care about him like that). 

“Lucy was offered a spot at a highly coveted undercover training in Sacramento next week,” Angela gushes, and Lucy can hear the pride in her voice. She smiles, and basks in the knowledge that her friends care about her so much and are so proud of her accomplishments.

“Oh, wow,” Chris says, and Lucy lets her gaze snap to his when she hears the hesitation in his voice. “That’s kind of far away, Lucy. How long is the training for?”

Lucy stiffens and frowns. “It’s only about six hours away. And it’s not forever. The training will only take about a month. It’s a really good opportunity for me and my career, Chris.”

Chris makes a face, his lips turning down in a frown, and Lucy feels Angela step closer to her as he opens his mouth to speak again. 

“And you’re going to do it? Without even talking to me about it?”

Angela stiffens next to her, but it’s not the detective that comes to Lucy’s aide. 

“She can do whatever the hell she wants, and she sure as shit doesn’t need your permission, Sanford,” Tim snaps, and Lucy whirls around to see him stalking up to them. He’s dressed down in jeans and a light blue henley, and Lucy lets her eyes linger on his form as he walks up right behind her. He’s a steady heat along her left side, and Lucy takes strength in his presence as she turns back to Chris. 

“It’s an amazing opportunity, and whether or not I decide to do undercover work long term, it will make me stand out come time for promotions. I really shouldn’t pass this up, Chris.”

Chris’s frown deepens, and Lucy sighs. 

“I haven’t made a decision yet,” she mutters, and Chris deflates a little bit. 

“We can talk over dinner, then. I don’t think now is the time to go running off for an entire month, Lucy. There’s too much going on here, and this training can wait.”

Tim takes another step forward, and now he’s pressed along Lucy’s side. She can feel his warmth and his strong chest at her back, and she takes in a steadying breath as he turns to glare at Chris. Before he can speak, though, Chris continues, and each word that falls from his lips causes Tim to tense even more behind her. 

“And besides, undercover is not the path you want to take, Lucy. You’d never be home. You’d be gone all the time, which would be terrible for our relationship and our family. Do you really want to end up like Tim’s ex, strung out and doing whatever it takes for your next fix?”

Heat boils over in Lucy’s stomach, and she’s opening her mouth to yell at Chris when Tim beats her to the punch. 

He steps forward, brushing past Lucy, and pushes into Chris’s space. 

“Say that again, I fucking dare you,” he whispers, his voice low and dangerous, and Lucy reaches out without thinking to put a hand on his arm. 

Chris snorts and rolls his eyes. “I said what I said, man. It’s true. Lucy shouldn’t go undercover and you know it.”

Lucy expects Tim to lay into Chris about his comments on Isabel, but he doesn’t. 

Instead, he starts yelling to defend her. 

“Lucy can do whatever the fuck she wants, and she doesn’t need your approval to do it. If she wants to do this training and go undercover, then she will. I think it’s a great opportunity for her.”

“You’re not her boyfriend, Bradford! I am!”

“It doesn’t fucking matter!” Tim roars, and Lucy steps closer to him, trying to tug him away from Chris. 

They’re making a scene, and while the bullpen is mostly empty at shift change, she wants to stop what’s happening. 

She appreciates that Tim wants to stand up for her, but she can stand up for herself. 

“It doesn’t fucking matter, Chris, because what Lucy does with her life doesn’t concern you, or me, or anyone else! She is her own fucking person and can do whatever she wants! She should do this, because it’s a great opportunity! She’s one of the best officers I have ever seen. This won’t be the last time she’s offered something like this because she’s fucking amazing, and if you think she should give up these opportunities because, what, you don’t want her to go? Fuck you, man.”

Lucy digs her fingers into Tim’s arm and he finally seems to sense that she’s trying to get his attention. 

“Sorry,” he says, and he deflates as he turns back to her. The fight bleeds out of him, and he’s left looking tired and worn in front of her. “I know you can fight your own battles, Lucy.”

Lucy nods, because she can. 

But still…

“Thank you,” she whispers, because his support of her means a lot, considering everything he’d been through with Isabel. Especially considering that, actually, because she knows he still has huge hangups with undercover work. 

Tim nods and then clenches his jaw when Chris finally recovers from the shock of being yelled at and huffs in annoyance. 

“Whatever. I don’t have to stand here and take this from you, Bradford. Lucy, we can talk about it tonight.”

It’s clear that Chris thinks this is the end of the conversation, and Lucy might have been willing to let it slide a few minutes ago. She’s been overly concerned for him and his mental health, so she’s been gentle and accommodating for him. 

But this… she won’t compromise on this. 

It’s her life. 

“No,” she whispers, and as Chris turns around to stare at her, she feels Angela and Tim step closer to her, flanking her on each side as she faces Chris. “No, we won’t talk about it, because I’ve made a decision, Chris. I’m going. And if you don’t like that… well.”

Chris stares at her for a long moment, a million emotions flickering across his face. He finally settles on a blank stare, his lips in a thin line as he steps back and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“I thought you cared more about our relationship than that, Lucy. I guess I was wrong.”

He doesn’t give her a chance to respond before he’s turning and leaving, and Lcy is left speechless, anger and frustration and hurt churning in her stomach as Chris stomps out of the station. 

“That motherfucker,” Angela whispers, and Lucy laughs, a little hysterically, as she watches Chris walk out the door and into the parking lot. “Please tell me you’re going to dump his dumb ass.”

Lucy sighs and leans into her friend. 

She forgets for a moment that Tim is still there, and that they’d had a charged, emotional conversation in the shop earlier. 

“Yeah, I think this is the last straw. I think it’s over,” she admits, and Tim makes a noise beside her. Lucy turns to stare at him, and her breath catches when she sees the way he’s looking at her. His eyes are wide and his lips are parted as he breathes heavily. His gaze flickers between her lips and her eyes, and Lucy feels a familiar heat building in her stomach as he stares. 

“Good riddance,” Angela  says, and then she bumps her hip into Lucy’s, her eyes flickering between her two friends for a moment. “So, you’re going?”

Lucy nods, finally managing to tear her gaze from Tim’s after several long moments. She can still feel his eyes on her, and a thrill runs through her entire body as she tries to string together enough words to respond to Angela. 

“Yeah. I think I am. It’s… it’s a good opportunity, and while I’m still worried about Rosalind… I don’t think I can pass this up because of her. If something happens, I can be back here in a matter of hours.”

Tim nods and adds, “Don’t think your escort won’t be following you to Sacramento, though. You’re sure as shit not going alone.”

Lucy rolls her eyes, and the quip is enough to lighten the mood a little. Her stomach is still full of butterflies, though, because what had that look meant? Why was Tim staring at her like that if he didn’t feel something for her?

Maybe she’d been too rash in shutting him down. 

Maybe he hadn’t been about to reject her. 

She sighs, and walks into the cool night air. Angela bids them both goodnight and says they’ll talk more in the morning, and then Lucy and Tim are left alone, the night air quiet and calm around them as they stand in the few feet between her car and his truck.

“It’s a good opportunity,” Tim murmurs, and Lucy nods, licking her suddenly dry lips as she catches Tim’s gaze again. 

“I know,” she says, and she tries not to notice how Tim’s gaze follows her pink tongue as it wets her lips. 

“You’re going to be exceptional, no matter what you choose to do,” he adds, and Lucy feels like she might explode from all the praise he’s given her tonight. 

One of the best officers I’ve ever seen. 

Because she’s amazing.

You’re going to be exceptional. 

She feels warm all the way to her fingertips, and she thinks that this moment could be something, if she let it be.

If she hadn’t already messed things up. 

“Thanks,” she whispers, and Tim nods, sliding his hands into his pockets as he rocks back and forth on his heels. 

“I don’t say things that aren’t true. You know that,” he says, and Lucy laughs and nods. 

She does know that. She’s had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of praise she’s ever earned from him. 

“I know.”

They stand there in the darkness for several long minutes, and just as Lucy is about to walk away, to climb into her car and drive home with her LAPD shadow following her, Tim speaks. 

“We’re… we’re OK, right, Lu?” he asks, and Lucy lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. 

“Yeah, Tim,” she says quickly, softly, smiling as she glances up at him. “We’re OK.”

Tim nods, offers her a small smile, and then turns toward his truck. 

Lucy walks toward her car. She waves at Tim through the window, and then drives home alone, all of the words she wants to say but can’t stuck inside of her throat. 

Chapter Text

Lucy rolls over in bed and her breath catches when she feels the warm body next to her. 

Chris is still sleeping, and she holds her breath as she inches away. She doesn’t want to wake him. They’d gone to bed mad last night, as much space between them as possible, and the fact that she didn’t curl up to him unconsciously in the night is surprising (and probably a little bit telling, as well). 

She’s a huge cuddler.

She likes being held.

But she hadn’t moved into Chris’s arms last night, and the thick feeling in her throat and the aching in her chest are clear indicators that there was a reason. 

Chris had come over for dinner, and they hadn’t even made it to the table before things had started going downhill, and then Chris had suggested they just go to bed and Lucy had agreed, but while he had clearly been hoping that going to bed would be something more, Lucy had laid on the very edge of her side and tucked in the blanket around the left side of her body so that she wouldn’t accidentally touch Chris in the night.

He’d huffed and pouted for a while, but Lucy had been too tired, both physically and emotionally, to deal with it. 

She’d rolled over and gone to sleep, and now in the morning things are just as confusing and clouded as ever, and she has to swallow down the panic rising in her throat as she sits on the edge of the bed. She drops her head into her hands, her elbows on her knees. 

She needs to end things with Chris. 

She knows she needs to, but… 

God, how much more can she hurt the man?

She’d almost cheated on him. 

He’d almost been killed because of her. 

And now, what? 

She’s going to break his heart? 

(Because she knows it will break his heart. He’s always been more into their relationship than she has, and she feels like shit for drawing this out as long as she has without clarifying what she is in it for). 

“Mmm. Good morning, Lucy,” Chris murmurs, and Lucy closes her eyes for a long moment before swallowing thickly and turning around. 

“Hey,” she says, and she tries to force a smile but she knows she falls miles short when she sees Chris’s face drop. He flops back on the bed, his hair a mess as he runs his fingers through it. Lucy lays back down next to him, reaching up to put a hand over her face as she closes her eyes. 

“You’re leaving me, aren’t you,” Chris says, and Lucy makes a sad noise but doesn’t contradict him. 

Chris sighs, and Lucy risks a glance over at him. 

He looks resigned, and sad, and maybe even a little bit angry. 

“You only stayed this long because you felt guilty,” he continues, and Lucy’s chest aches as he talks, his voice quiet and full of emotion. “You shouldn’t have done that, Lucy, because it hurts more now. I mean… fuck, how long have you been stringing me along?”

Lucy makes a noise and shakes her head, rolling over and propping herself up on one elbow as she stares at Chris. 

He doesn’t look back at her, and Lucy can’t really blame him.

“I care about you, Chris. I do. And I had fun. What we had… it was fun, and I needed something fun.”

“I didn’t just want fun, Lucy, and you had to have known that,” Chris says, and Lucy has to fight tears as she nods. 

“I did,” she admits, and Chris sighs as he moves to sit on the end of the bed. He’s only wearing a grey tank top and his boxer shorts, and Lucy sits up with him, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them as she watches him search her bedroom for his jeans and button down. 

Neither of them speak until he’s dressed, standing in the middle of her room and running his fingers through his hair. 

“Was any of it real?” he asks, and Lucy nods as her eyes land on the raised, red scars on his arms. They run from his palms almost all the way to his elbows, and they’re a stark reminder of what had happened to him because of her. 

“Yes,” she says, and a single tear slips down her cheek as she watches him move toward the door of her bedroom. “I like you, Chris.”

“But you don’t love me,” he accuses, and Lucy shakes her head as she reaches up to wipe away the tears.

“No,” she whispers, and Chris sighs. 

“Then this is it, Lucy. I … I can’t be the second choice. I don’t want to just have fun. I want more with you, and if you don’t want it with me, then…”

Lucy nods, because she understands. She understands, and honestly this is probably the best she could have hoped for in this situation. It still hurts, despite everything, and she hates herself a little bit for stringing Chris along. 

She’d tried. She really had, after he’d been released from the hospital, because she owed him at least that much. 

But she doesn’t think she can ever give him what he wants, and so this is for the best. 

“Bye,” she whispers, and Chris pauses, his hand on the door knob. He smiles sadly and then he walks out, closing the door behind him and leaving Lucy alone in a bed that still smells like them. 

She flops back and lets herself grieve, because even if she doesn’t think she ever could have loved Chris, she liked him and they’d had fun. He’d made her smile. He’d been thick sometimes, and unsupportive of her career occasionally, but it still hurt. 

She lets herself cry for a few minutes, and then pulls herself together. 

She showers, dresses, and then heads into work. 

The world doesn’t stop spinning just because she’s fucked her own life up, unfortunately, and she has a job to do. 

____________________

Climbing into the shop beside Tim is a whole new kind of torture, and Lucy sighs as she settles in. She checks their shop computer, pulls her seatbelt on, and then stares straight ahead because she doesn’t know what to say or do. 

Tim pulls the shop onto the street, and neither of them talk for a long time. 

Tim is, shockingly, the one to break the silence. 

“I’m sorry about what I said and did yesterday,” he says, and Lucy turns to him in surprise, her eyes wide and her lips parting. 

Tim continues before she can ask him what he’s apologizing for. 

“I know you can fight your own battles, and I shouldn’t have stepped in. I shouldn’t have yelled at Chris. That should have been a private conversation between the two of you, and I inserted myself into a situation where I didn’t belong.”

Lucy is shaking her head before Tim even finishes speaking, because yes, she’d been a little irritated at first when he’d cut her off and started yelling at Chris, but she knows he had done it out of care and concern for her, and not because he thought she was weak. 

“No, Tim, don’t apologize,” she says, and she reaches out, placing her hand on his arm as she talks. She watches as his adam’s apple bobs, and he turns and glances at her briefly before his eyes flicker down to her hand, and then back toward the road. “You weren’t… it didn’t feel like you were fighting my battles for me. Because I know that you know I can fight them by myself. It felt like you were standing beside me, supporting me, as I fought my own battle. You weren’t taking over, you were supporting me, and that’s different, okay? I don’t know how to explain it, but it was different, and I’m not mad.”

Tim nods, but it’s several seconds before he speaks again. 

“You know I support whatever decision you make, right?”

Lucy nods slowly. She bites her lip, forcing herself to wait, because it doesn’t sound like Tim is finished talking. 

He’s not. 

“I … haven’t been as supportive about you going Undercover as I could have been, and… well, you probably know why. I lost Isabel to undercover work. But I know… I know you’re not her. You’re strong, and smart, and you’re good at it. You’re going to kick ass, and you’re going to make a difference.”

“Thank you,” Lucy whispers, and she swallows as she turns in her seat to face Tim more fully. “That means a lot to me.”

Tim nods, and then silence falls over the shop. They ride along, waiting for a call or for someone to break the law, but the morning is quiet. Slow. They give out a few tickets, but nothing more, and by the time Tim is slowing down in front of the food trucks for lunch, Lucy feels more calm than she had when she’d woken up. 

Spending time with Tim in their shared shop is… comfortable.

It’s routine, and easy, and it settles something inside of her. 

“I broke up with Chris,” she whispers, and Tim’s eyes snap to hers as he pulls into a parking space. “He… um. He came over last night, and… it was my fault, really, because he’s always been more invested than I was. I think… the time in Sacramento will be good for me. To get away. To clear my head, and think about what I really want.”

Tim nods, and leans back in his seat. 

“What… do you really want?” he asks, and he knows it’s a dangerous question. 

He knows that he’s skirting the line again, asking questions they may not be ready for. 

Lucy bites her lip and slowly raises her eyes to meet Tim’s gaze. 

She wants him. 

She wants them. 

But she knows neither of them are ready, and she’s not sure they ever will be. She’s not sure if they’ll ever be able to untaint everything that they’d done wrong, or out of order. She’s not sure they’ll ever be able to clear the mud and the confusion from her inviting him into her apartment and him following while they were still in relationships with other people. 

They need time apart, to muddle through. 

She wants time apart, to come to terms with her feelings 

“I—”

She’s about to try and find the words to explain this all to Tim when there’s a knock on his window. They both turn, surprised by the sudden noise, and Lucy feels her heart plummet all the way into her stomach when she sees blonde hair and bright pink, smiling lips on the other side of the glass. 

“Tim!” Ashley calls, and Tim turns to Lucy, his eyes wide, before rolling down his window. 

“Ash. What are you doing here?”

Ashley shrugs and repositions the strap of her purse on her shoulder while smiling at Tim from under her lashes.

“I came to have lunch with you. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to spend time together, so I thought I’d surprise you.”

Tim nods numbly and then glances back at Lucy. 

Except she’s no longer looking at him. 

She’s reaching for the handle on her door, opening it and climbing out. 

“I’ll see you later, then,” she says, and Tim has to bite back a scream of frustration as she walks away from him. 

He grips the wheel tightly and takes a few seconds to breathe before turning toward Ashley. 

“Are you OK, baby?” she asks, and Tim nods but then frowns and shakes his head. 

“Can we talk?”

Chapter Text

Lucy watches as Tim walks off with Ashley, and then sighs deeply as she turns and heads toward the food trucks. 

What do you really want?

Tim’s words bounce around uncomfortably in her head as she watches him pull out a chair for Ashley at one of the little tables across the lot. They both sit down and Ashley leans towards Tim while he leans backwards in his chair, smiling as he crosses his arms over his chest.

Lucy sighs again and turns away, because it’s not really her business. 

She decides to skip the food trucks and heads inside the station.

Vending machine snacks will do. 

She’s just frustrated, because they’d been so close. They’d been so close to admitting that they had feelings for each other, that what was happening was more than just physical. Tim had admitted that he wished they had spent the night together, but in the shop it had felt like they were getting ready to talk about more. 

About feelings. 

Lucy groans in frustration as she walks into the break room. She buys a bag of chips and drops into a chair at one of the tables and munches on them grumpily before reaching for her phone. She scrolls through Facebook and TikTok aimlessly, looking at pictures of cute puppies and funny cats, and by the time she finishes her chips she feels marginally better. 

Tim is probably talking to Ashley to end things with her. Or at least she hopes that’s what’s happening, because surely she and Tim haven’t been dancing around whatever is happening between them for nothing. She’d broken up with Chris, and though she’d done that for herself more than she’d done it for her and Tim, the unspoken realization was there. 

With Chris out of the picture, they could be together. 

Lucy sighs and munches on another chip. She finishes the bag, throws it away, and then takes a deep breath as she stands up. She’s just about to put on a brave face, act like she’s not at all affected, and head back to sit in the shop with Tim for 6 more hours when Angela rounds the corner, her lips pressed into a thin line. 

“Text Tim and let him know I’m stealing you for the rest of the day. That case you helped us on? We have a new victim.”

“Oh, shit,” Lucy murmurs, and she’s reaching for her phone, trying to push the events of the morning to the back of her mind as she fires off a quick text to Tim. 

Angela is stealing me for the day. A new victim in that case I’m helping with.

She receives a reply as she’s crowding around Angela’s desk, the evidence and crime scene photos already spread out, a new riddle written in the blood of their deranged killer’s newest victim. 

You’re off tomorrow. 

Lucy swallows thickly. 

She is off tomorrow, and then she leaves for Sacramento the next day. 

She stares at her phone for a long moment, biting her lip, and then quickly fires off a noncommittal response. 

She doesn’t know what happened with Tim and Ashley. She doesn’t know if they’re still together or not, and she doesn’t know what Tim wants. She doesn’t want to seem needy or pushy, and she definitely doesn’t want to ask what happened over text. 

If he wants to tell her, he will. 

I know, she says, and then she silences her phone, shoves it in her pocket, and tries to ignore it as it vibrates repeatedly. 

She throws herself into the case, and tries not to think about what she’d been about to admit to Tim before they’d been interrupted by Ashley. 

___________________

I know. 

Tim stops at a red light and stares down at his phone, at the last message Lucy had sent him and the several replies he’d fired off immediately after. They’re still unread, and he sighs as he tosses his phone on the empty passenger seat and merges into traffic once the light is green. 

Can we talk?

I don’t want you to go to Sacramento before we talk. 

Lucy?

She hadn’t responded to any of his messages, and Tim knows she’s busy but he can’t help but think it’s on purpose. 

“Damn it!” he screams, and he slams the palm of his hand into the steering wheel repeatedly. 

They’d been so close.

They’ve been dancing around each other for weeks at this point, and they’d finally been close to something when they’d been interrupted. 

What’s worse is that he knows that Lucy is hurt because she had disappeared and isn’t responding to him, and all he wants is to talk to her, to tell her what happened, and to send her off to Sacramento knowing how he feels. He wants her to have time to process and think, and when she comes back… 

Well. 

Tim sighs and tries to focus on the job. 

____________________

By the time Lucy makes it home she’s been working for a solid 15 hours and she’s exhausted. They’re no closer to catching the serial killer that’s been haunting Angela's team for weeks, and she hadn’t even been able to decipher the newest riddle. She’d wanted to stay longer, but Angela had pushed her out of the station, telling her that she needed to go home and rest. 

It’s after 9pm, and she knows she needs to start packing but she doesn’t have the energy. All she wants to do is curl up on the couch (her new couch, the one that doesn’t remind her of everything that had happened with Chris) and watch trashy reality TV. 

She’s barely made it off of the elevator before she sees Tim, though, and suddenly she can’t breathe. 

He’s sitting on the floor of her apartment hallway, his back against her door. His phone is hanging loosely from his hands, and Lucy’s heart thunders in her chest as she stares at him. 

“Hey,” he whispers, and Lucy swallows thickly as she forces her feet to move forward. Tim clambers to his feet, and by the time she’s standing by her apartment door he has his hands in his pockets and he’s rocking back and forth on his heels nervously. 

“Hi.”

She unlocks her door and walks inside, and Tim follows her. 

It’s reminiscent of that night, and Lucy finds herself scanning her kitchen and living room to make sure they’re alone before she turns to Tim. 

She should probably move. 

This apartment holds too many memories. 

Lucy sighs and lays her bag down on the kitchen island and turns to face Tim. He’s closed her door and is just standing there, his hands in his pockets and his eyes downcast. 

“You’re leaving for Sacramento soon.”

Lucy nods despite the fact that it wasn’t a question. 

“I think… I want to clear the air before you leave,” Tim continues, and Lucy reaches for the fridge handle with shaking hands. 

He’s either going to tell her he broke up with Ashley and that she should use the time in Sacramento to think about what she wants, or… 

Well, the or is simply too painful to consider. 

“OK,” she says, and she grabs two beers before closing the fridge and handing one to Tim. He takes it with a nod of thanks, and then sits down at the kitchen island. Lucy notices that his gaze flickers toward the couch and then back, and she doesn’t know if he’s purposely sitting at the island because he doesn’t want to associate what’s about to happen with what they did last time they were sitting on the couch, or if he simply thinks it’s safer, more professional. 

She sits down beside, twists off the cap of her beer, and takes a long pull from the glass bottle. 

“I broke up with Ashley.”

Lucy simply nods in response, trying to play it cool, but something unknots itself in her stomach and she’s able to relax a little bit as Tim continues to talk. 

“It wasn’t fair of me to string her along when I have feelings for someone else.”

Lucy swallows her mouthful of beer, wincing as it burns on the way down, and then turns to Tim, her eyes wide and her lips parted. 

Tim smiles softly at her, but keeps a careful foot of space between them as he angles his body her way. He meets her gaze, and there’s something in his eyes that Lucy wants to explore more but she knows now is not the time. 

“Are we gonna talk about it?” Lucy asks, because she knows they should especially since she’s getting ready to leave for six weeks. 

“I think we should,” Tim says, and Lucy nods. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth to start, but then she chickens out. She climbs off of the stool and waves her half finished beer around in the air as she takes a step back from Tim. 

Dancing around their feelings had been safe. 

Chris and Ashley had been safe. 

This doesn’t feel safe in the slightest, and it’s a heady, exciting feeling, but it’s also terrifying. 

“Want to watch a movie?” 

Tim raises an eyebrow, clearly amused by her nervousness, but he nods slowly. 

“Sure, Lu. Whatever you want.”

Lucy nods and walks into the living room, setting her beer down on the coffee table before moving toward the TV. She grabs the remote and then settles into one corner of the couch, grabbing a blanket and settling it over her legs as Tim joins her. He sits across the couch from her, enough space in between them that Lucy knows she won’t do anything stupid like crawl into his lap and kiss him senseless, and then just stares as she picks the first movie on her Netflix watch-list. It’s some mindless rom com, and she blushes when she realizes what she’s picked but there’s no going back now, she supposes. 

“I’ll go first,” Tim says, sensing her nervousness, and Lucy nods. 

She wishes she could be the brave one here, but she’s not. 

Not with Tim. 

Not with something this important. 

She thinks he could be her entire future if she let him, and she can’t force herself to begin talking until she knows he feels the same way. 

“The only reason I hesitated to come inside that night was because I was worried that it would be just sex for you. I don’t want just sex, Lucy. I want… I want everything. I want all of you. But I thought that maybe that one night was all I would ever get, and I wanted it, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted, you know? So I came inside, and I was going to show you the best night of your life.”

“Oh,” Lucy says, and then she’s sitting up on her knees, the blanket falling from her lap as she leans toward Tim. He smiles at her and holds out one hand, and Lucy breathes out a huge sigh of relief as she crawls across the couch and settles herself in the crook of his arm. 

“I think… I think you’re it for me, Lucy,” Tim murmurs, and Lucy nods into his side as he rakes his fingers through her hair. 

Neither one of them are paying any attention to the movie as Lucy curls herself as close to Tim as she possibly can. 

She’s going to be away from him for six long weeks, and while she wants to haul him into her bedroom and give him something to look forward to when he comes back, she knows they’re not ready. 

“We both just got out of relationships,” she whispers, and Tim nods. He presses a soft kiss to her hair, and Lucy melts a little bit. “I think… these weeks away will be good for us. To think… to think about what we really want.”

“OK,” Tim says slowly, and Lucy can feel him stiffening under her as he processes her words. 

“Not like that, Tim,” she says, and she pulls back just far enough to press her lips to the underside of Tim’s chin. “I’m not… I’m not going to decide I don’t want you, because god I want you so much. But… we need some time to just be with ourselves, if that makes sense.”

Tim nods slowly, and then he wraps his arm around her and holds her closer. “When you come back… I’m going to ask you on a date.”

Lucy smiles and hides her blush in Tim’s chest. 

“When I come back, I’ll say yes.”

Lucy can hear Tim’s heart beating rapidly in his chest as he holds her, but she doesn’t comment on it.

What they’re doing already feels dangerous enough. 

Instead she lets him hold her throughout the rest of the movie, and when he leaves later that night, he kisses her on the cheek and smiles. 

“I’ll see you when I see you,” he whispers, and Lucy smiles as she holds up one hand and gives him a tiny, dorky wave goodbye. 

“See you soon, Tim.”

She watches him walk all the way down the hallway, and then closes the door, unable to fight the smile stretching across her lips. 

See you soon. 

Chapter Text

Tim and Lucy text almost every day that she’s gone. 

It starts simply. 

A single message from Tim after she’s been gone for a week and a half opens the floodgates, and Lucy finds that it’s easier to talk openly over text message with four hours of distance between them than it was when he was sitting on her couch.

Bradford:
[Image]
Kojo misses you. 

Lucy smiles dopily at the picture of Kojo and Tim. They’re both laying in bed, Kojo’s face on Tim’s chest, and it’s one of the cutest things she’s ever seen in her entire life. She bites her lip, and then quickly changes Tim’s name in her contacts. 

Lucy:
I miss ‘Kojo’ too, actually. 

Tim:
How is UC school? 

Lucy stares at the message for several long minutes. 

Because the thing is… the thing is… 

It hadn’t taken her long to realize that she doesn’t want to do this, at least not long term. The shorter operations, going undercover with Tim… that had been different. She’d known, of course, that a lot of undercover operations were long term and deep cover, but some of the lectures she’s sat in over the last week have really opened her eyes to the fact that she doesn’t want to put her entire life on hold to do Undercover work long term. 

She doesn’t want to disappear one day without any warning, without being able to tell her friends goodbye, and then not reappear again for six months. 

She doesn’t want to ruin her friendships, her tenuous relationship with Tim, because of the job. 

She doesn’t want to constantly be looking over her shoulder, worried that the bad guys will recognize her from her True Crime episodes. 

It’s fun, and she’s really fucking good at it, but… 

She’s good at other things, too. 

Lucy:
It’s good. I’m learning a lot. 

Tim:
Wow, try not to sound so excited, Lucy. 

Lucy chuckles, because he’s always been able to read her so easily. 

Lucy:
It’s just… I don’t know if this is what I want to do, Tim. I don’t know why I’m here. 

Tim is silent for a long time, and Lucy is about to put her phone away and try and get some sleep when it starts ringing in her hands. She hits the green button with shaking fingers and then presses the phone to her ear.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

Lucy swallows and tries to relax back into the pillows of her bed. 

“What do you mean, Lu?” Tim asks, and Lucy swallows as she shrugs, even though she knows he can’t see her. 

“I mean… undercover is great, okay, and I’m really, really good at it. I know that.”

“You are,” Tim agrees, and Lucy flushes with the praise as she continues to talk. 

“But…”

Tim waits patiently while Lucy thinks. 

She doesn’t quite know how to sum up her feelings and thoughts. It’s been bugging her for days, a constant itch in the back of her brain as she’d participated in workshops and listened to lectures. 

“I don’t think I want to do undercover long term.”

Tim is silent for a long moment, and Lucy wishes she could see his expression. 

Maybe talking on the phone isn’t easier, after all. 

“What changed? You were pretty set on it for a while there. You didn’t talk about it again for a while, but then we did this thing with Hajek, and you were amazing. You were astounding, Lucy.”

Lucy nods to herself and sighs as she waves her hand around in the air, trying to encompass all that she’s feeling. 

“Right. But I feel like if I pursue undercover as a long term option, then I’m … I’m giving up…”

She trails off, and she wonders if she should even be telling Tim this. 

They’re not even dating. 

They're friends, at best, with a tentative promise of something more. 

And the thing is, she doesn’t want to lose that. Even if it’s just a chance. Even if nothing is set in stone, she doesn’t want to lose the possible future she could have with Tim. 

“If I do this I’m giving up us,” she finally settles on, because she would be. 

“Lucy,” Tim murmurs, and his voice is laced with pain because Lucy knows that he supports her in whatever she chooses. She knows he’s one of her biggest advocates and that he would never, ever tell her not to do something. 

But she also knows that he went through hell with Isabel, and while he would never tell her or even ask her not to go after undercover work if it was what she truly wanted, she knows it would hurt him regardless. 

She knows that he’ll worry about her all the times she’s gone. 

So she knows that Tim won’t  give up on them if she chooses undercover work…

… but she will.

She won’t hurt him like that. 

“I support you, no matter what you choose,” Tim says softly, just like Lucy knew he would. She smiles sadly and blinks to fight back tears. “You shouldn’t give up on this just because of us, or because of me. You need to see this through, and when you come home, we can talk.”

“Okay,” Lucy says, and then she covers the phone speaker so Tim won’t hear her sniffling. 

“Give it a fair chance, Lucy. I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

“Okay,” Lucy whispers again. 

There’s silence on the other end of the phone for a long time, and after what seems like forever, Tim sighs and Lucy can hear him shuffling around on the other end. She knows he’s in bed with Kojo, thanks to the picture he’d sent her that may or may not be her phone background already, and she finds herself wishing desperately that she could be in bed with them, wrapped in the quilt and curled up to Tim’s warmth with Kojo by their feet. 

“You should get some sleep,” he says.

“You, too, Tim. Can’t go chasing down the bad guys without proper rest.”

Tim chuckles and Lucy luxuriates in the sound. 

“Good night, then, Lucy.”

Lucy sniffles and curls into her blankets and closes her eyes, letting Tim’s voice and words wash over her as she imagines herself in bed next to him.

“Good night.”

___________________

Tim doesn’t text for several days after that. 

Lucy knows he’s busy, but a small part of her worries that he’s trying to pull back, to remove himself from the equation so that she can make a choice for her without worrying about him or them. 

She texts him after five days of silence, because they’ve done enough miscommunicating for a lifetime. 

Lucy:
I need Kojo pictures. I'm in withdrawal. 

Tim responds suspiciously quickly, as if he’s been waiting by his phone, and Lucy has to fight a smile because he can try and pull away if he wants to, but it’s not going to work. 

Tim:
[image]
For someone who once destroyed your entire apartment, he’s kind of a lazy dog. 

Lucy seriously considers changing her phone background again because this time Tim is shirtless in the picture and she can see his face. He’s grinning sleepily at the camera, Kojo sprawled out on his chest, and Lucy finds herself aching to be back home in LA. 

Back home with her boys. 

She changes her phone background without thinking about it too hard. 

Lucy:
Looks like he’s not the only lazy one. 

Tim:
I earned this day off. Actually, I think it’s three days off. I can’t remember the exact number of days required after a concussion. 

Lucy nearly throws her phone across the room in her haste to call Tim. 

“What? What happened? Are you okay?”

Tim chuckles sleepily, and Lucy feels her heart rate slow a little when she hears his voice. 

“I’m fine. I just hit my head a little bit when taking down this idiot drug dealer. Thorsen took me to the hospital and then drove me home. He’s a bit of a mother hen, actually.”

“What did the doctor say?” Lucy demands, because she knows Tim has a hard head and all but her chest aches because he’d gotten hurt and she wasn’t there. 

She’s not his aide anymore, and probably never will be again. 

It’s shockingly difficult to let someone else be in charge of taking care of Tim, of watching his back and making sure he makes it out of each shift in one piece. 

“Just a minor concussion, didn’t even make me stay overnight,” Tim murmurs, and his voice is sickeningly sweet. His deep, rich baritone floats gently through the phone, and Lucy lets it wash over her as he speaks. “I’m fine, baby, I promise.”

Lucy nods to herself, but she feels almost sick with the emotions warring inside of her because Tim had been hurt but also he’d called her baby. 

She wants to jump on a plane or in a car and head back to LA and bully Tim into taking medicine and naps and cuddling with her and Kojo. She wants to see with her own two eyes that he’s in one piece and that he’s okay. 

“Don’t even think about it,” Tim warns, and Lucy chuckles, her voice thick with emotion. 

“Think about what?” she asks, and Tim scoffs. 

“About coming back to LA. I’m fine. Thorsen and Angela have made it their life’s goal to call me every two hours to make sure I’m alive. I swear I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Lucy whispers, though the urge to leave UC school and go back home still hasn’t passed. 

She waits for Tim to say something, but all she can hear is the rustling noise of him moving around in bed and the way Kojo pants happily as Tim scratches that spot behind his ear that he loves so much. 

“You should have called me,” she finally says when he doesn’t speak. Her voice breaks a little bit in the middle, and she hates how vulnerable she sounds. 

“I didn’t want you to worry. And there was nothing you could have done, anyway.”

“I know,” Lucy whispers, and Tim hums softly on the other end. “Can you call me next time, anyway?”

“I will,” Tim promises, and Lucy feels something loosen in her chest. She’s able to take a deep, much needed breath, and as she lets it out slowly, she relaxes back into the bed. 

They talk until she falls asleep.

When her alarm goes off she opens a message from Tim telling her to have a good day, and the smile his message brings to her lips lingers all morning.

__________________

Lucy:
I know you said I needed to see this through, but I think I’ve made a decision. Can we talk when I come home?

Lucy watches nervously as the ellipses pop up on Tim’s end and then just as quickly disappear. They pop up again, and then again, and then there's nothing for several long minutes.

Tim:
Yeah. We can talk when you get back. 

Lucy stares at Tim’s message, the one it had taken him five minutes to send, and her chest aches. 

She’s made a decision, and while she’s firm in that decision, she can’t help but feel a little heartbroken for what she’s giving up. 

__________________

Lucy texts Tim on the drive home.

Lucy: 
2 hours and I'll be back in LA! 

She glances down at her phone while at a stoplight, but Tim hasn't responded or even read her message. 

Lucy:
I should be back by noon. I was thinking about taking a nap and then making dinner. Want to come over? We can talk.

Tim still doesn't answer, and Lucy drives the final hour home with her heart in her throat. 

Lucy:
I'm home. If you don't want to come over, it's okay, Tim. Just let me know either way. 

Instead of napping like she'd planned, she waits.

She unpacks, starts laundry, and tidies the apartment...

... but Tim never responds. 

Chapter Text

For the first few hours of silence, Lucy finds herself wondering if Tim is pulling back from her, if he’s decided that she’s going to pursue undercover work and is trying to spare himself the inevitable pain. 

Which is stupid, she fumes, because she’s decided on the opposite. The possibility of a future with Tim is simply more important than undercover. She has so many other options that it’s just not worth the sacrifice. After her training, Grey had said she would have her pick of departments, and she’s spent the past week researching all of the possibilities. 

There are a lot of possibilities. 

Tim pulling back before they even talk is a cowardly move, and Lucy knows that Tim Bradford is no coward. 

After taking a shower and having a snack, though, the anger fades and the worry begins to set in as Lucy checks her messages for the hundredth time. 

Lucy:
2 hours and I'll be back in LA! 

Lucy:
I should be back by noon. I was thinking about taking a nap and then making dinner. Want to come over? We can talk.

Lucy:
I'm home. If you don't want to come over, it's okay, Tim. Just let me know either way.

Her messages are all still on delivered. None of them have even been read, which causes Lucy to bite her lip because Tim is a lot of things, but he’s not cruel. He wouldn’t leave her hanging, at least not for this long. If he’d decided against pursuing anything between them, he would tell her. She’s gone a few hours without replies before because Tim is on shift or busy or sleeping, but never this long. 

Five hours after she sent the first message, Lucy reaches for her phone and dials Angela as she paces abc and forth along her kitchen floor. 

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ang,” Lucy says, and she pauses in her pacing as she speaks. “Have you heard from Tim recently? Or-or seen him? Is he on shift today?”

Lucy can hear Angela shuffling around on the other end of the phone. There’s the crinkle of a chip bag, and then the sound of someone laughing in the background, and Lucy realizes that she’s at the station.

“No, I haven’t seen him since yesterday. He came to see me before he went home after shift, and he’s off today. He was a little twitchy, and concerningly smiley when we talked. I think it had something to do with you coming home today. When will you be home, by the way?”

Lucy feels her unease grow as she heads toward her door.  

“Uh, I’ve already been home for three hours. I texted him and he’s not responding, which… which is why I’m calling you. He always responds.”

“OK, well, that’s definitely weird. He was excited, Lucy. Tim doesn’t get excited easily, but he was basically vibrating out of his skin yesterday. He didn’t tell me what was happening between the two of you, but I got the feeling that … that it was something good. He was happy, if maybe a little nervous.”

“We were going to talk when I got home,” Lucy whispers, and she’s reaching for her shoes and purse even as she talks. 

Something is wrong. 

“Have you tried to call him?” Angela asks, and Lucy can hear a hint of worry in her voice as well. 

“No. I texted him three times, but he hasn’t read any of them.”

She feels stupid as she grabs her keys and opens her door. She locks it behind her, tucking her phone into the crook of her ear as she tosses her purse over her shoulder and bolts down the hallway. Her heart is pounding in her chest because something is wrong, and she should have realized it hours ago. 

What if something terrible has happened to Tim, and her waiting around for him to text her back was the time he desperately needed to—

No, Lucy tells herself. 

She can’t think like that. 

“Hang up, Lucy. Call him and then call me back. I’ll send a unit to his house, too, to check up on him.”

Lucy nods and moves to hang up the phone as she climbs into her car, but she pauses with her finger hovering over the red end call button for several long seconds as she stares straight ahead. 

“What… what if Rosalind…”

Angela cuts her off before she can finish her sentence, though. 

“We don’t know anything for sure, Lucy. Rosalind flew out of the country. We haven’t heard a peep from her in over seven weeks. Just… don’t jump to conclusions, okay? Take a deep breath, hang up, and call him.”

Lucy nods to herself and then hangs up the phone, immediately moving to her contacts and clicking on Tim’s name. 

The phone rings and rings and rings, and by the time she gets Tim’s voicemail she’s started the car and is backing out of her apartment parking lot. 

“Hey, Tim. It’s Lucy. Please just… call me back, okay? Please.”

She hangs up and then immediately tries calling again. 

And again. 

And again. 

By the time she’s pulling up outside of Tim’s house, her heart is in her throat and she’s tried to call him twelve times. After the third call, his phone had stopped ringing. She’d been sent straight to voicemail the last nine times she’d attempted to call him, and Lucy now knows that he’s either in serious trouble, or he blocked her or turned off his phone. 

Or, she tries to convince herself, his phone is just dead.

She doesn’t believe it, though, and as much as it hurts, she desperately hopes that he’s just ignoring her because the alternative is unthinkable. 

Lucy pulls into Tim’s driveway and throws her car into park. She opens the door with shaking fingers and runs to Tim’s door, banging on the wood as she tries to glimpse into the window of his living room.

“Tim!” she calls, but there’s a weight in the pit of her stomach and she knows he won’t answer. 

She knows. 

Something is wrong.

Desperately, horribly wrong. 

“Tim,” she says again, but the house is silent. She tries his doorknob, and her worry grows as she finds it unlocked. 

Tim would never, ever leave his door unlocked, even if he was home. Lucy has spent more than enough hours in the shop with him to know that he’s careful, and he would never do something as reckless as leaving his door unlocked. 

“Tim,” she whispers, and her hands are shaking as she pushes his door open. It creaks as it opens slowly, and Lucy has to swallow a wave of panic as she takes a step inside of Tim’s door. 

She knows she shouldn’t, because the unit Angela had sent isn’t here yet and she doesn’t have her off duty weapon. She’d left in such a hurry that she’d forgotten it, so she’s unarmed and she has no idea what awaits her inside, but she isn’t willing to waste precious minutes waiting on the police to arrive. 

Tim’s house is silent and dark. She can’t see or hear Kojo, and the absence of the dog only makes Lucy’s worry grow. 

“Tim,” she says again, and this time she can’t keep the panic out of her voice. 

She inches slowly through the entryway and into the living room, and she blows out a breath of relief when she sees Tim’s familiar, brown hair sticking up over the edge of the couch. He’s sitting in the left corner, his arm over the back of the couch, and Lucy wants to run to him but everything inside of her is screaming wrong and trap and, most importantly, Tim. 

“Tim, please,” she says, and she can feel tears trailing down her cheeks because she’s experiencing the most horrifying sense of deja vu as she stumbles toward the couch. 

He’s not moving. 

The TV is off. 

The lights are off. 

Everything feels wrong, because the house is dark in the middle of the day, and it’s completely and utterly silent. 

Tim is here, but he hadn’t responded when she’d knocked or when she came in, and he hasn’t responded to his name even once. 

He’s gone, her brain whispers, and the thought, the mere idea of Tim being gone is simply too much to bear. She can’t imagine a world without Tim in it, her world without Tim in it, and she almost can’t bring herself to walk forward. 

She does, anyway, and the noise she makes when she walks around the side of the couch to see Tim’s neck sliced open, the skin cut from ear to ear in the mockery of a smile, is unearthly. 

She screams, and sobs, and her hands shake as she drops down next to the couch. 

He’s covered in blood. 

It’s like a curtain of red is covering his neck and his naked chest. His hands are displayed as if he’s watching the game comfortably, one draped over the back of the couch while the other lays on his knee. His eyes are closed, and Lucy can’t see the rise and fall of his chest. 

She reaches for his hand, her fingers pressing against the skin of his wrist, and she nearly collapses in relief when she feels his pulse, weak and thready but there. 

“Tim, please hold on,” she begs, though Tim doesn’t respond. He lays there, motionless, his breathing shallow and weak as Lucy fumbles for her phone. She’s just barely dialed 911 when she hears someone at the door, and she remembers with relief that Angela had sent a unit to the house. 

“In here! We’re in here! We need help, please! ” she screams, and then she turns her attention to the 911 operator just as Tim’s pulse flutters and then stops beneath her fingers. 

Chapter Text

Lucy just about sobs in relief when she sees that it’s Nolan and Jaurez that Angela had sent. They rush into the room, and Nolan carefully maneuvers Tim off of the couch and onto the floor as he assesses his vitals. 

“T-Tim!” Lucy cries, and she knows that she’s been trained for this. She’s been trained how to handle a situation like this, and freaking out is definitely not what she’s supposed to do. She’s supposed to relay all  of the information she knows and then supply first aid. But all she can do is sob as she tries to communicate to Nolan how desperate the situation is. “Tim is… Tim is…”

She trails off, her throat clogged with emotion and her eyes clouded with tears. She’s holding her hands to Tim’s throat, a sickening sort of reprisal to when she’d held her hands to Chris’s wrists, and though her fingers are pressed right against his carotid artery, she can’t feel his pulse. 

“He’s not breathing. No heartbeat,” Nolan says, and he immediately begins CPR as he turns toward his rookie. “Get the AED and the trauma kit from the shop. Now!”

Juarez turns and runs from the house, and Lucy suddenly remembers that she’s on the phone with 911. 

“We have an ambulance on route to your location,” the tech reassures her, and Lucy nods and sobs but leaves the line open as she takes the shirt Nolan has just stripped off. 

“Hold it to the wound,” he says, and Lucy nods again, using shaking fingers to press the cloth against Tim’s neck. She uses both hands to press the fabric to the long, deep cut, but her panic only grows when she realizes that her hands aren’t big enough to  cover the entirety of the wound. Tim is cut from ear to ear, absolutely soaked in blood, and Lucy knows that there’s no way he’s going to make it out of this alive. 

She knows. 

“Tim,” she sobs, and as Nolan continues to administer CPR, Lucy drops her forehead to Tim’s. She doesn’t care that she’s covered in his blood. All she cares about is being close to him for one final moment. “I love you, Tim. Please. Please, Tim, don’t do t-this. Please, baby. Don’t leave me.”

“I have the AED,” Jaurez says, and Nolan nods, pausing chest compressions to tear Tim’s shirt open. He takes the pads that his rookie hands him, placing one over Tim’s heart and the other under his breastbone. 

“Lucy,” he says, and Lucy chokes on a sob because she knows she has to back up. She has to take her hands off of Tim, but it’s unthinkable and she doesn’t know if she can. 

“Tim,” she whispers, and then suddenly Nolan is there, grasping her shoulders gently as he tugs her away.

“Lucy, let him go,” he says, urgency in his voice, and though Lucy knows he means let him go so we can administer the AED, all she hears is let him go. 

She doesn’t want to let him go. 

She doesn’t know if she can let him go.

“I c-can’t,” she sobs, and she wants to scream because she can’t lose Tim. 

She can’t. 

She doesn’t know how she’ll be able to move on if she loses him. 

Nolan gently but quickly pulls her away from Tim’s body, and then Juarez is administering the shock. Tim’s back arches off of the ground, and Nolan moves in quickly to assess his vitals. 

“No pulse. Again.”

Lucy watches, her cheeks soaked with tears, as Nolan and Jaurez continue to administer CPR and shock his heart. She hears the telltale noise of Tim’s ribs cracking as Nolan gives compressions, and she reaches out to take Tim’s hand for a brief second before Nolan pulls it away. 

It’s not until Lucy hears the sirens coming down the road that Nolan finally cries, “I have a pulse!” and she feels hope bloom in her chest for the first time since she’d first seen Tim’s neck sliced open. “He has a pulse, but it’s weak. He needs blood now.”

Paramedics rush through the door then, and Lucy deflates in relief, collapsing to the floor as Tim is surrounded and someone takes over applying pressure to Tim’s wound. 

“His veins are collapsed, I can’t get a line!” one of the paramedics shouts. “We need intraosseous access!”

Lucy watches in horror as Tim’s shoulder is drilled into, but she calms some when the paramedics are able to insert a large needle that they connect to tubing and then fluids. 

“He needs blood,” Nolan tells the paramedics urgently. “He’s lost too much blood.”

“Is anyone here O negative?” the paramedic asks, and Lucy raises her hand shakily. She crawls back over to Tim and sits down heavily beside him as one of the paramedics takes her arm none-too-gently and scrubs it down with iodine. 

“This might hurt,” he says, but Lucy barely even feels it when the needle goes in. She watches in fascination as the needle in her arm is connected to a mess of tubing and wires, but her heart rate begins to slow as she watches her blood begin to flow into Tim’s arm. 

“Is he …. Is he gonna be okay?” she asks in a whisper, and the paramedic glances at her as he removes the blood soaked gauze from Tim’s neck before applying new dressings. 

“I don’t know. We need to get him into surgery immediately. From the looks of it no major arteries were cut, which is a miracle in and of itself. But because of that… he has a chance.”

Not a miracle, Lucy thinks. 

Rosalind. 

She’d done this on purpose. 

She’d cut Tim just right, just enough to make him bleed out but not too quickly. 

She’d wanted Lucy to find him. 

She’d wanted Lucy to have to watch as he died. 

She hadn’t succeeded with Chris, so she had tried again to make Lucy pay for not playing her little game. She’d refused to testify, and Rosalind was going to make her suffer for that decision. 

The paramedics move Tim onto a gurney then, and Lucy is herded along with them, the tube connecting her to  Tim held carefully in her hands as she climbs into the ambulance with the paramedics. She’s settled on a bench, told not to move an inch, and then they’re off, lights and sirens blaring. 

Lucy holds Tim’s hand, and even though she can’t remember the last time she’d done so, she prays. She begs whatever God is up there and listening to spare Tim’s life, because she doesn’t know how she’ll live without him. 

__________________

Tim codes twice more on the way to the hospital, but they’re able to revive him each time. As soon as they arrive, Lucy is disconnected from the tube giving Tim blood and he’s raced away from her, doctors and nurses yelling instructions and pressing more sterile gauze to his wounds.

Lucy is left sitting in the ambulance, tears pouring down her face and a needle still in her arm. 

“Let me get that,” a young man says, and Lucy sniffles and looks up just as the EMT scoots closer to her. He presses gauze over the needle and then pulls it out, and Lucy watches numbly as he applies a bandaid and a pressure dressing. “There you go, Ma’am.”

“T-thanks,” Lucy stutters, and she’s just about to ask where Tim is and if she can go to him when Nolan’s shop pulls up outside of the hospital. A second shop and then Angela’s unmarked Detective’s car pull up beside it, and then Lucy is suddenly enveloped in Angela’s arms, Nolan surrounding both women as they hug her. 

Lucy loses whatever control she’d had left and begins sobbing. 

The sounds that come out of her are inhuman, loud and broken, and it’s only Angela and Nolan’s arms around her that keep her from collapsing entirely. 

___________________

In the women’s restroom, Angela helps Lucy strip her blood soaked clothes off and scrubs at her skin until it’s pink and shiny and all traces of  Tim’s blood are gone. She helps Lucy dress in a pair of scrubs the nurses had provided, and then she rakes her fingers through Lucy’s hair and murmurs comforting words as she makes sure there’s no blood in the long, curly strands. 

“You got to him in time,” she whispers, and Lucy hiccups but nods slowly. 

“I hope so,” she says quietly, and Angela makes a soft noise as she wipes the tears from Lucy’s cheek. 

They’re silent for a long moment, and then Lucy whispers, “I never told him that I love him.”

“He knows,” Angela murmurs, and then she sighs as she pulls Lucy into her arms again. “He knows, sweetie. And when he makes it through this… when,” she emphasizes when Lucy makes a worried noise. “When he makes it through this, you can tell him. As soon as he opens those baby blue eyes, you’ll be right next to him and you can tell him that you love him and want to marry him and have all of his babies.”

Lucy laughs wetly and then nods again, wiping at her tears. She splashes water on her face, takes a deep breath, and lets Angela lead her out of the bathroom. 

They join Nolan and Juarez in the waiting room in the surgical wing of St. Steven’s hospital, and soon others begin pouring in, all concerned and worried for Tim. 

Lucy looks around, and her heart is full. 

All of these people care about Tim so much.

They love him so much, and she knows that if he doesn’t make it, she won’t be the only one mourning.

Grey and Nyla are the first to arrive, followed by Smitty and Sergeant Jan and then Genny. After that comes Wesley with baby Jack, Patrice, Tamara, and then James with Lyla and baby Leah. Soon the waiting room is filled to capacity, and Lucy doesn’t go more than a single minute without someone’s arms around her. She’s passed from Angela's embrace to Nolan’s, and then she plays with and holds first Jack and then baby Leah. She lets Wesley hug her, and then Nyla squeezes her so tightly that she can’t breathe. 

“He’ll be fine,” she promises fiercely. “He doesn’t have any quit in him. Plus, he wouldn’t leave you, Lucy. That man loves you more than the sun and the moon combined. He’ll fight. He’ll come back to you.”

Lucy nods and sniffles, and when Nyla pulls away after several long seconds, she feels marginally better. 

Tim will fight. 

He’ll be fine. 

(He has to be, because she doesn’t know how she’ll live without him). 

Genny takes Lucy into her arms then, and Lucy lets a few more tears fall as she holds Tim’s sister. 

She doesn’t know her very well, only what she’d learned while helping Genny and Tim renovate their childhood home, but she knows Genny loves her big brother fiercely. She knows Tim was Genny’s protector throughout childhood, and that their bond runs deep. 

“He’ll be okay,” Lucy whispers, and it feels different, being the one to console rather than being consoled. 

She’s just managed to sit down and take a few deep breaths when the swinging doors leading to the operating theaters open and a serious looking doctor steps out. His lips are pressed into a thin line, though they twitch into a small smile when he sees the veritable army of people waiting. 

“Family of Timothy Bradford?”

Lucy jumps to her feet and walks over to greet the doctor, forgetting for a second that she’s not Tim’s family. Genny takes her hand, though, and holds on tightly as she faces the doctor. 

“How is he?” she asks.

“He pulled through surgery,” the surgeon says, and Lucy’s legs almost give out in relief as she sags against Genny. Tim’s sister wraps her arms around Lucy and sobs into her shoulder, and it takes them both a few moments to gather themselves enough to turn back toward the doctor. 

“Is he going to be okay, then?” Genny asks, and Lucy bites her lip, her heart pounding as she waits for the surgeon’s answer. 

“It’s touch and go right now,” he admits truthfully. “The next 24 hours are going to be critical.”

“Can we see him?” Lucy asks, and the surgeon smiles as he nods. 

“As soon as we have him set up in recovery. He’s going to be in the ICU for a while, though, so he’s limited to one visitor at a time.”

Lucy swallows and nods jerkily as she takes a step back. 

Genny is his sister. 

She deserves to see him first. 

But Genny, sensing what Lucy is doing, reaches out and grabs her hand. 

“Go, Lucy,” she whispers, though Lucy can see the tears in her eyes. She starts to shake her head. Genny is Tim’s family. She should be the first one to see him, the one to be by his side when he wakes up. 

“I can’t… you should…” she starts, but Genny cuts her off and Lucy can see that Angela, standing at Genny’s elbow, is backing her up. 

“Tim would want you there,” Genny whispers. “You’ve always been there for him. Be there for him now, too.”

“She’s right,” Angela agrees. “Go, Lucy.”

Lucy glances at the faces of everyone waiting for news about Tim. The waiting room is packed with people who care about and love him, and Lucy feels like she shouldn’t necessarily be the one who goes to Tim first, but she wants to be, so she finds herself giving in easily. 

“Okay,” she whispers, and then she hugs Angela and Genny once more before turning back to the surgeon.

He leads her through the double doors, and Lucy glances back to see her friends watching as she walks down the hallway. 

The doors swing closed with a whoosh, and then Lucy is left alone with the doctor as he walks her to Tim’s room. 

Chapter Text

Lucy loses the battle with her tears the second she walks into Tim’s ICU room. She reaches for him with shaking fingers, and the doctor smiles sympathetically at her as she takes Tim’s cold, limp hand in her own.

“He’s stable,” he promises. Lucy nods, entwines her fingers with Tim’s, and then collapses into the chair next to his bed.

She has a million questions, but she doesn’t know how to ask them or even where to start. All she can do is stare at Tim and the tube in his throat and the various monitors and IVs he’s hooked up to. There’s less of them than she imagined, but it’s still terrifying. He’s intubated, a ventilator breathing for him, and he has an IV in each arm. One is delivering liquids while the other slowly diffuses blood, and there are machines monitoring his heart rate, oxygen, and respiration rate. 

The doctor stands on the other side of Tim’s bed and glances at the iPad in his hands. 

“He’s receiving a final unit of blood right now, but after this one we’re hoping that liquids will suffice. He lost… a lot of blood, which was the main concern. We were able to repair most of the damage while he was in surgery. The jugular and carotid were both spared, and as far as we can tell, his vocal cords and esophagus were unharmed. We debrided and flushed the incision to decrease the chance of infection and did the best we could to repair the damaged cartilage. Our main concern right now is infection due to the size and location of the wound. Any infection could be deadly. But… Mr. Bradford was extremely lucky. The cut was just deep enough to bleed dangerously, but there was virtually no damage beyond the mutilation of the skin. Once he’s on room air, we’ll move him out of the ICU.”

Lucy nods and glances at Tim’s monitors (blood pressure 107/69, pulse 63, oxygen saturation 95%), and then turns to the doctor, glancing briefly at his nametag before meeting his gaze. 

“He wasn’t lucky, Dr. Payne. This was done on purpose. She cut him like this… on purpose.”

To get back at me, she doesn’t add, but the words and the resounding guilt nearly crush her under their weight.

Dr. Payne frowns and sighs as he turns the iPad off and tucks it under his arm. 

“Regardless of why this was done to him, he is lucky, Ms. Chen. If the cut had been even a fraction of an inch deeper, he wouldn’t be alive. As it stands he has 67 stitches a long road to recovery ahead of him, but he will recover, barring infection or unforeseen complications. He’ll live a normal life.”

Lucy nods and then turns her attention fully to Tim. She sniffles and wipes tears from her eyes, and then rests her forehead on her and Tim’s entwined hands as she listens to Dr. Payne exiting the room. 

She knows that she should allow the others to visit. She’s seen Tim with her own eyes and she knows that he’s okay (or, at least he will be), so she should leave and let Genny and Angela and all of the others take a turn. 

She knows she should, but the thought of getting up and leaving Tim, of letting go of his hand, is simply unfathomable. 

She reaches for her phone and FaceTimes Angela, sniffling as the call connects. 

“Hey, Lucy,” comes Angela’s soft voice, and Lucy tries to smile as she takes in the mostly empty waiting room. 

“Hey. Uh… where is everyone?”

Angela rotates her phone around and Lucy can see that Genny, Grey, and Nolan are the only remaining visitors. “We sent them home. They all have shift tomorrow and need sleep, and Nyla and Wes have the babies to take care of. Genny, Grey, and I will be here all night. Nolan wanted to wait until he’d heard from you.”

Lucy nods and then turns her phone camera around so that Angela can see Tim in the hospital bed. “I… I’ll come out and give everyone else a turn. I just… I need a minute.”

Genny comes into the picture then, and Lucy can tell that she’s been crying but she looks much more hopeful than before. Her eyes are red and wet, but she’s smiling softly as she looks at her brother in the hospital bed, and then Lucy when she turns the phone back around. 

“I have to get home to the boys soon,” she says, and Lucy nods, standing from her chair and then pausing when she realizes that she’ll have to let go of Tim’s hand. “I want to see him before I go, but I promise I’ll be quick. While you have time, you should grab coffee and something to eat, Lu. It’s going to be a long night.”

Lucy sniffles and nods, and then lets Tim’s hand drop from her own. Her heart nearly breaks when she has to step back, and she briefly wonders if she’ll make it out of Tim’s hospital room without having a panic attack. 

She does, in the end, but just barely, and as soon as she’s in the waiting room and Genny is headed to visit her brother before going home, she collapses into Angela’s arms and sobs. 

Angela just holds her and rocks her back and forth, murmuring comforting words as she tucks Lucy’s head under her chin. Lucy thinks she’s sobbing something about how terrifying it had been to find Tim, and how she thought she was going to lose him, but she can’t be sure. Her thoughts are all jumbled, and the words spilling past her lips inbetween sobs are almost incomprehensible.

Nolan joins them and wraps his arms around both of them, and Lucy feels supported enough, safe enough, that she gives up any pretense of control. She lets go of the carefully constructed facade that she’s been fighting to maintain, and simply collapses. 

Nolan and Angela hold her up, offering their strength when she has none of her own. 

Lucy cries, in relief and terror, and lets them hold her. 

___________________

Later that night, after everyone has had a chance to visit Tim, Lucy walks quietly back into his room. He’s still lying in the same position, though the IV diffusing blood has been removed. His monitors are all beeping reassuringly, and Lucy lets out a breath of relief as she collapses back into the chair beside his bed. She scoots it as close to him as she possibly can, and then curls her legs under her and reaches for his hand. 

She’s not going anywhere until he wakes up. 

Hell, who is she kidding. 

She’s not going anywhere until he’s released and she can take him home with her. 

She slips in and out of consciousness, napping with her head against Tim’s hip, and every time she wakes up there’s a brief flash of panic as she struggles to remember that Tim is alive and that he’s going to be okay. 

(He has to be okay).

The fourth and final time Lucy wakes up, the sun is peeking up over the horizon and there’s a nurse standing by Tim’s bedside. She’s checking his IVs and his vitals, a small smile on her lips, and Lucy blinks several times as she tries to bring the room back into focus. 

She’s exhausted.

“How is he doing?” she slurs, and the nurse makes a surprised noise as she turns around to see Lucy awake. 

“Hey, darlin’,” she drawls, and Lucy smiles at the southern accent as the nurse scribbles something on Tim’s chart. “He’s doing about as well as can be expected. His latest blood counts look much better. His hemoglobin and hematocrit are up, which is good news, and there’s no markers for infection yet. We have him on antibiotics as a preventative measure, and they seem to be working. We’re going to clean and rebandage his wounds right before shift change, though, hon, and you probably don’t want to be here for that.”

Lucy shakes her head and holds onto Tim’s hand tighter. 

She’d been there when Chris’s wounds had been cleaned. 

She can do this, too. 

“No, I’ll stay,” she murmurs, and the nurse looks wary but nods. 

“If you need to step out at any time…” she says, but Lucy shakes her head again. 

She’ll be fine.

After all, seeing what had happened to Tim is the least she can do. He’s now the second person close to her who has been hurt because of Rosalind; this is, at least in part, her fault, though she doesn’t feel quite as guilty as she had when Chris had been the injured one. She thinks, looking back, that some of her guilt (most of it, honestly) had stemmed from what she and Tim had been about to do while Chris was bleeding out on her couch. 

She knows that she’s not responsible for Rosalind’s actions, even if it feels a little bit like she is, but the oppressing sense of guilt isn’t surrounding her now the way it had before. 

It’s just as terrible, but in a different way. 

Chris had been hurt because he was important to Lucy, but what Rosalind hadn’t known was how close Lucy had been to breaking up with him, anyway. 

Tim had been hurt because Lucy was in love with him, and she has a sneaking suspicion that he’d been hurt worse because Rosalind was mad that she’d gotten the wrong person before. 

She’s petty like that; she doesn’t like to make mistakes, and if she’d been more observant, she would have known that going after Tim was always going to be the thing that hurt Lucy the absolute worst. 

__________________

Shift change comes all too soon, and Lucy tears up when the nurses slowly pull the bandages from around Tim’s throat. 

It’s gruesome. 

She honestly can’t think of another word for it. His skin is swollen and bruised, bits of blood still clinging to the ragged edges of skin where the surgeons had stitched him back together. The line of raised, red skin trails from one ear to the other, and Lucy puts a shaking hand over her mouth, a sob of horror escaping past her lips as one of the nurses begins to gently rub betadine around the stitches while the other nurses gather clean gauze, tape, and some kind of ointment. 

“It looks bad, honey,” the nurse murmurs as she carefully cleans specks of blood from around the stitches. “I know it looks real bad. But I promise that it looks worse than it is. It’s mostly a flesh wound, for all that it bled. He’ll have a scar, a nasty one at that, but he’ll heal. He’ll be able to talk and swallow and everything. He’s gonna be okay; you have to trust the healing process. It gets worse before it gets better. The swelling will peak in about 24 hours, but after that, it’ll start lookin’ better every day.”

Lucy nods and wipes at her tears with a shaking hand as she watches the nurses carefully redress the wound. 

“When will he wake up?” she asks, and the nurse shrugs as she checks Tim’s vitals. 

“Whenever he wants to. The anesthetic we gave him for surgery has worn off. He’s just bein’ lazy now.”

Lucy chuckles wetly and then curls back into the chair at Tim’s side as most of the nurses leave. 

“Your day nurse is Amanda, though I doubt you’ll be in the ICU much longer. He’s fightin’ his ventilator, so the doc will probably take it out when he rounds. Once he’s on room air, we’re springing you and setting you up in a room on the main floor.”

“Thank you,” Lucy whispers, and the nurse nods before adjusting Tim’s IV lines and then patting him on the hand. 

“Just keep talkin’ to him and being here for him. He’ll come around soon.”

Lucy nods and sighs as she rests her chin on her and Tim’s clasped hands. 

She’ll wait as long as it takes. 

Chapter Text

Lucy spends the night in the hospital again, and she’s just barely blinking the sleep from her eyes when Angela walks in bright and early the next morning with a large coffee in each hand. The room Tim had been moved to when his ventilator had been removed is much more comfortable, however, and the chair beside his bed reclines. It’s big enough for Lucy to stretch out in, so at least she had slept some, which was an improvement over the night before. 

“Good morning,” Angela whispers, handing her one of the coffees. Lucy makes a noise and takes it gratefully, sipping the hot liquid with a sigh. 

Tim is still unconscious, though the doctor had assured her that the fact that he is off of the ventilator is a good sign, despite the fact that he hasn’t woken up. 

“Any change?” 

“Not since I last texted you,” Lucy says, and Angela nods as she pulls over a second chair and drops down into it. Lucy bites her lip and asks, “Any news on Rosalind?”

She knows it’s a long shot. 

Rosalind slinks out of the shadows, reigns down chaos, and then disappears. Lucy knows that catching her won’t be easy, and that Tim likely won’t be the last one hurt. She also knows that the best thing she can do is to distance herself from everyone she loves and cares about, but she’s just selfish enough that she doesn’t know if she can make herself leave Tim’s side. 

“No,” Angela whispers regretfully. “No evidence at the scene. No witnesses. Nothing. We have a team on it, but…”

Lucy sighs and nods her head.

She’d been expecting as much. 

Angela lets her sentence trail off, and silence falls over the hospital room. The sound of Tim’s monitors beeping rhythmically and the murmur of activity outside of his room are the only noises for a long time, and just as Lucy is about to try and fill the silence, Angela speaks up again.

“He’s gonna wake up soon, you know,” she promises, and Lucy tries to feel optimistic but she doesn’t quite manage it. 

It’s been almost 24 hours since Tim was brought in for surgery, and she hasn’t seen so much as a spike in his heart rate since then. He’s sleeping deeply, and she worries that he may never wake up. 

She worries that she won’t see his beautiful, blue eyes ever again. 

She’s worried that they’ll never be able to have that talk they’d been meaning to have. 

Most of all, though, she worries that she’ll never get the chance to tell him she loves him.

She should have told him a long time ago. 

“He’s not done with you yet, Chen,” Angela adds, and Lucy chuckles softly as she sips her coffee. She reaches out with her free hand and entwines her fingers with Tim’s, holding onto the fact that his skin is warm under hers. Her heart beats to the tune of his monitors, and she thinks that if he doesn’t wake up, then she’ll never be the same again. 

“But what if he doesn’t?” she asks, because the thought has been bouncing around in her head for hours. She’s been alone with her thoughts for hours, and as the minutes had ticked and Tim hadn’t woken up, she’d allowed herself to imagine the worst case scenario. 

She’d allowed herself to wallow and worry the way she hadn’t allowed herself to when Chris had been in the hospital. 

“He will,” Angela says with conviction, and Lucy wishes that she could be that sure. “He will, Lucy, because he loves you and Tim Bradford finishes what he starts. He’ll wake up and sweep you off your feet and give you the happily ever after you deserve. You both… you both deserve to be so happy.”

Lucy swallows around the sudden lump in her throat. 

She wants to respond to Angela, but she doesn’t know how. 

Because what if Tim doesn’t wake up? 

What will she do then? 

She holds Tim’s hand tighter, and tries not to worry.

________________________

Angela leaves soon after that to get to the station, and Lucy watches as Tim’s heart monitor beeps and his chest rises and falls with each breath. He’s had most of his tubes and wires removed and he looks so peaceful, but Lucy has seen what’s under the bandages on his neck and she knows that there’s nothing peaceful about what had happened to him.

“Tim,” she whispers, and then sighs as he remains motionless. His heart rate remains steady and his hand remains still even as she grasps it tightly in her own. 

“Hop on up there, hon,” comes a voice, and Lucy gasps in surprise as Amanda, the day nurse, saunters into the room. She walks right up to Tim’s IV and flushes the line with water before hanging a new baggie of antibiotics. 

“Um,” Lucy says, and Amanda chuckles as she checks the diffusing rate of the medicine. 

“Lay with him. He may be unconscious, but he could use a little cuddling, I bet. You could, too.”

“Won’t that hurt him?” Lucy asks, but Amanda shakes her head as she rearranges all of Tim’s wires so that his left side is clear. Lucy eyes the space on the bed longingly, and stands to her feet as the nurse continues to talk. 

“You won’t hurt him, sweetheart. He’s on some pretty powerful pain medicine, and as long as you’re not touching his neck it should be fine. Plus, I bet he’d be pretty stoked to wake up with such a beautiful woman in his arms.”

Lucy chuckles, and then reaches with shaking hands to take her shoes off. She lines them up on the floor under Tim’s bed, and then sits cautiously on the edge of his mattress. Tim continues to sleep even as she carefully lays down beside him, and while he doesn’t seem to notice that anything has changed, Lucy feels all of the tension bleed out of her body as she lays her head on Tim’s chest and wraps her arm around his stomach. 

“That’s much better,” Amanda says softly, and Lucy chuckles as she reaches up to wipe tears from her eyes before snuggling closer to Tim. 

She can hear his heart beating in his chest, and feeling the proof of life beneath her ear is somehow so much more reassuring than simply watching Tim’s monitors. 

“Get some rest,” Amanda murmurs, and Lucy nods as the nurse grasps Tim’s blanket and then rearranges it over the both of them. She tucks Lucy in, and then dims the lights on her way out of the room.

Lucy lets out a shaky breath and holds onto Tim more tightly. 

______________________

The next time Lucy wakes up she feels fingers in her hair and hears a hoarse, rumbling voice in her ear. She’s warm and content, snuggled up tight to a strong body, and she moans a little as she rearranges her head and presses her ear right over the heart beating frantically beneath her. 

“I was so fucking scared,” the voice murmurs, and Lucy wholeheartedly agrees. She had been terrified, too. She’s still a little terrified, if she’s being honest with herself. Seeing Tim covered in so much blood, feeling his heart stop beneath her fingers… she’s not sure she’s ever been so scared in her entire life. 

The voice continues, and Lucy lets it wash over her, calming her even as she floats somewhere between being asleep and partially awake. 

“I was terrified I’d never see you again. I was terrified I’d never be able to tell you how I feel, or hold you in my arms, or kiss you again.”

Lucy makes a noise and holds on tighter as she slowly begins to emerge from the fog of sleep. She’s exhausted, her whole body heavy and her brain slow and syrupy. 

“She held me captive for hours, and all I could think about was you,” the voice continues, and Lucy frowns and struggles to open her eyes when she hears the emotion in the words being spoken. 

The voice is crying, she realizes. 

Tim is crying. 

“Tim?” she groans, and the arms around her tighten as she comes fully awake, her brain clearing enough to remember where she is and who she’s laying on top of. 

She gasps and sits up suddenly, her eyes flying open as she takes in the vision of Tim’s blue eyes and his lips stretched into a tiny smile beneath her. His skin is pale and she can see the exhaustion lingering in his gaze, but he’s awake. 

Tim is awake! 

“Tim!” she sobs, and then she’s cupping his cheeks in her hands, leaning down and pressing her lips to his even as tears pour from her eyes and splash onto his cheeks. He kisses her back, one hand trailing up her side and then digging into her hair. He holds on tightly, his fingers tangling in the curly strands, and when Lucy pulls back and rests her forehead on his, she can see that he’s sobbing, too. 

“Hey,” Tim whispers, his voice hoarse and choked with tears. 

“Hey,” Lucy breathes. 

She brushes tears off of his cheeks and swallows compulsively as she cries, trying to clear the lump from her throat so that she can speak again. 

She has so much she wants to say. So much she wants to tell him. 

But, most importantly… 

“I love you,” she whispers, and she can hear Tim’s breath catch as his eyes flutter closed. 

Lucy doesn’t even worry about the weight of her words. She doesn’t worry about Tim not feeling the same, because it doesn’t matter. She loves him, and she needs to tell him. 

She almost lost him, and she simply can’t live in a world where Tim is alive and with her, speaking and breathing and holding her, and not tell him that she loves him fiercely, desperately, with her entire heart and soul.

“I love you, Tim Bradford,” she repeats, and she stares into his baby blue eyes as the words fall past her lips. She has no hope of stopping them or the tears that cascade down her cheeks. “I almost didn’t get a chance to tell you and I can’t live for another second in a world where you don’t know how much you mean to me. I know I fucked everything up, and I made you think that you weren’t the most important person to me and I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for the pain and indecision and uncertainty because I love you, Tim. Desperately.”

Tim nods as he brushes his thumb over Lucy’s cheek. His eyes never leave hers, and Lucy waits, strangely calm, as he stares at her. She can feel his heart beating under her palm where it’s still resting on his chest, and she feels at peace because even if he doesn’t feel the same way, he knows. Her feelings are out there in the universe, for better or worse, and she’ll never regret telling him because he’d almost died without knowing how utterly and completely he was loved. 

“I love you, too, Lucy. I have loved you and I will love you, for the rest of my life,” he finally whispers, and Lucy has to fight a fresh wave of sobs as his words wash over her. 

She leans down and kisses him, and while she knows that they have a lot more to talk about, a lot to figure out and process, she takes comfort in the fact that Tim is awake and she loves him and somehow he loves her, too. 

She whispers her feelings into his lips, and then into his cheeks and his eyelids and his temples as she kisses him everywhere she can reach without putting any pressure on his wounds. 

She whispers her love into his chest, her words settling the pounding of his heart as she holds him tightly. 

He falls asleep after that, the pain medication and the exhaustion taking their toll, but this time, Lucy doesn’t worry. 

He’ll wake up soon, and she’ll be here when he does. 

Chapter Text

“And you know you can call me or come over to Tim’s house at any time,” Lucy says, and she reaches behind her to gently slap Tim’s chest as he laughs at her from his hospital bed. 

“Yes, Lucy,” Tamara says patiently from the other end of the phone. “I am a fully grown adult, you know. I’m a big girl. I can even cook my own vegetables and everything.”

Lucy smiles fondly as she turns around to face Tim. He’s sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, a fresh, sterile dressing around his neck. He’s holding his backpack on his lap, and his leg is twitching as he waits for her to end her phone call. They’d just finished signing the release paperwork, and he’s practically chomping at the bit to get out of the hospital. 

“I know, Tam. I just worry. Don’t throw any ragers while I’m gone or anything. And if you have anyone over, for the love of god use protection please.”

Tamara makes a noise on the other end and Lucy’s smile widens as the woman she’s come to think of as a little sister gags dramatically. 

“Oh my god, go away. Nurse Officer Zaddy back to health. And, you know, if you decide that you want to live with him forever or something, just let me know. There’s this girl at community college and we’ve become really close. I’m sure she’d love to be roommates if you elope before Tim’s ready to be on his own.”

“I’m staying with him for a week,” Lucy deadpans, and Tamara chuckles. 

“Yes. And?”

Lucy rolls her eyes. 

“Whatever. Just… call me if you need me. I have to go; Tim is about to climb the walls.”

“I’m sure you’d rather he climb you.”

“Goodbye, Tamara,” Lucy says, biting the inside of her cheek and trying desperately to keep her cheeks from turning bright red. She waits for Tamara to say goodbye and then hangs up, tucking her phone into her pocket before walking toward Tim. He smiles and drops his hands to her hips, pulling her forward until she’s standing between his parted legs. 

“Ready to go home?” Lucy asks, and she feels her heart thump heavily in her chest as she whispers the word home. She knows it’s not her home, but she is going to be spending the next week in it with Tim, helping him around the house as he heals both physically and mentally. 

“So ready,” he says, and though he looks ready and eager and about to crawl out of his skin with impatience, Lucy can see a teeny, tiny bit of hesitation lingering around his eyes. 

It doesn’t take a genius to realize what’s bothering him.

“Ang cleaned everything up,” she murmurs, reaching up to brush her thumb across Tim’s jawline. She swallows thickly as she remembers Tim telling her the same thing when she’d been nervous to go back to her apartment after what had happened to Chris, and she realizes now how little it means that the blood is gone because the memories remain. 

Tim nods but he suddenly doesn’t seem as eager to leave the hospital as he had before. His leg stops twitching and his hands tighten where they’re still resting on Lucy’s hips. He licks his lips, and then his eyes drop from Lucy’s, settling somewhere around her belly as his thumbs absently caress her hip bones. 

“Are you okay?” she asks, though she knows it’s a stupid question. 

Tim shakes his head and then drops his head to her chest. Lucy holds him close, running her fingers through his hair as he breathes her in, and she knows that what she’d helped Chris through doesn’t hold a candle to what had happened to Tim. 

She doesn’t know how to help him through this. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and Tim makes a noise as he tugs her closer. She staggers forward until they’re pressed together, Lucy’s stomach and chest pressed to Tim’s and her hips flush against his. The hands on her hips snake around her back, and Tim makes a soft, vulnerable noise as she holds his head to her chest. “I’m sorry she went after you because of me, Tim.”

Lucy feels the familiar weight of guilt begin to settle back on her shoulders, and as much as she fights it, she feels responsible. She feels responsible for what had happened to first Chris and now Tim, and she knows that if she weren’t in the picture then they would have been fine. 

“Not your fault,” Tim murmurs, and Lucy smiles despite everything because he always could read her like an open book. “This is no one’s fault but hers, Lucy. You made the very brave decision to not testify at her trial, and she’s throwing a tantrum like a toddler that didn’t get what they wanted. You are not responsible for her actions.”

Lucy nods and holds Tim tighter. 

She wants to believe him. 

She desperately wants that. 

“Okay,” she whispers, but as much as she wants to believe that she’s not responsible for what had happened to Tim, she knows she is, at least a little bit. “But maybe… maybe I shouldn’t stay with you,” she continues, and she can feel Tim stiffen in her arms. 

He begins to pull away, and Lucy hastens to explain herself. “I want to, Tim. I do, I desperately want to. But… what if she comes after you again? What if she comes back because I’m there?”

Tim shakes his head, and while Lucy had worried that Tim was pulling away because of what she said, he proves her wrong when he stands to her feet and holds her even closer.

“Fuck that,” he says, and Lucy chuckles wetly as he cups the back of her head in his large palm. He presses her head to his shoulder and Lucy has to fight tears when she feels the edge of the bandage around his neck against her forehead. “It doesn’t matter, Lucy,” he says, and she’s just opening her mouth to argue because of course it matters, but Tim shakes his head as he continues. “It doesn’t matter,” he stresses, and Lucy feels his fingers tighten in her hair as his heart thunders beneath where her ear is pressed to his chest. 

“It does,” she argues, but Tim shakes his head and pulls back. The hand in her hair slides down until he’s cupping her cheek and her jaw, his long fingers dwarfing her features. 

“No, it doesn’t. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re home with me, or at your apartment, or across the fucking world. I will love you no matter where you are, and Rosalind knows that. She knows that I love you and that you love me, and she knew that hurting me would hurt you. So, no, Lucy. It doesn’t matter.”

Lucy feels tears in the corners of her eyes as Tim stares at her, his gaze steely and unwavering as his thumb gently caresses the line of her jaw. 

“It doesn’t matter where you are, because neither distance nor time will dull my feelings for you. So… come home with me, Lucy. Please.”

Lucy loses the battle with her tears and draws in a shaky breath as they trail slowly down her cheeks. 

“I love you,” she whispers, and Tim’s intense expression melts into something softer. 

“I love you, too,” he murmurs, and then he’s leaning forward and kissing her softly. Lucy melts into it, pressing her palm over Tim’s chest as his lips, wet and soft, slide against hers. 

They kiss slowly and softly, chastely, and despite the intensity of the desperation building inside of her, she doesn’t feel the need to deepen the kiss yet. 

She’s content to stand in Tim’s arms, to hold him and be held, for now. 

After what seems like forever, Tim pulls back and rests his chin on Lucy’s head as he rocks them back and forth. 

“Let’s go home.”

____________________

Tim grips tightly to Lucy’s hand as he opens the door of his house and walks inside, and though he envisions a blood bath, his house looks almost normal. Kojo’s leash is hanging beside his jacket in the entryway, though the lack of skittering paws and Kojo’s deep woofs make him frown as he remembers when he’d walked into a silent house less than a week before, just moments before Rosalind had greeted him with a knife to the throat. 

“Where’s our boy?” he whispers, and Lucy glances at Kojo’s leash and then back at Tim. 

“He’s with Angela and Wes,” she says, and Tim feels himself deflate in relief because he hadn’t thought to ask about Kojo even once while he was in the hospital. 

“She drugged him,” he says quietly, and Lucy nods because she remembers Angela calling to tell her when she found him. Kojo had been drugged and locked in the spare bedroom, which was both shocking and relieving because she hadn’t thought that Rosalind had enough of a heart to care about the dog. Tim continues, his voice low, “I should have known something was wrong, because I came home from taking a run and Kojo didn’t greet me like he always does. I didn’t… I should have realized something was off.”

Lucy makes a noise and closes the door behind them before taking Tim’s hand and hauling him toward the bedroom. She tries to lead him through the living room quickly enough that he won’t notice the lack of a couch or the rearranged furniture where they’d had to move it to scrub the blood away, but she notices the way his eyes linger on the sparkling clean hardwood.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, and Tim nods even as Lucy pushes him into the bedroom and then closes the door behind them. 

He knows what she’s doing, of course.

He knows she doesn’t want him lingering in the room he’d nearly died in, but more than that… he knows that she doesn’t want to be in the room where he’d nearly died. 

Where she’d held the ragged edges of his neck together while waiting for the EMTs. 

Where she’d felt his heart stop beating. 

Tim licks his lips and realizes with a start that this, being in his house so close to where he’d nearly died, is just as hard for her (or maybe even a little bit harder). 

He can’t imagine how she’d felt in that moment. He can’t imagine what he would have done if their roles had been reversed, because he thinks that if he were holding Lucy and she were bleeding out and he felt her heart stop beneath his fingers… well. 

He’s not sure that he’d ever be able to come back from that. 

He swallows hard and fights the fear and terror that’s slowly clawing its way up his throat. 

He just wants to hold her and be held with no wires or IVs or doctors or nurses between them.

He wants it to be just them.

“Can we rest?” he asks, and Lucy nods as he reaches for her and slowly pushes her sweater off of her shoulders. She raises her eyebrow and he chuckles softly. “I’m not trying to start anything, I swear,” he says, and Lucy feigns disappointment as she toes her shoes off. “But I run warm, and I want… I want to hold you, if that’s okay.”

Lucy nods and then reaches for the button on Tim’s jeans. He grunts and bites his lip, trying to calm the sudden racing of his heart as her fingers push his pants down. 

“No jeans then,” she says, turning her hands on her own skinny jeans. “Jeans are not allowed when cuddling.”

Tim chuckles and helps her, shoving the fabric down before pulling her to him and tugging on his quilt. 

The urge to hold her, to wrap them both up beneath the blankets and ignore the world, is suddenly overwhelming. He’s sure that if he had a single shit to give that he would probably be a little embarrassed by his needy noises and his shaking, desperate hands as he pushes Lucy into the bed and then follows her. It’s something about being in the place where he’d nearly died, he thinks, that’s causing the sudden, aching need to have her in his arms, to convince himself that they’re both alive and alive together. 

“I’m here,” Lucy murmurs, and Tim realizes with a start that he’s shaking as she wraps her arms around him, curling her body around his until they’re laying in the middle of the bed like a pair of parentheses. Tim is on the inside, surrounded by Lucy with her heart beating against his back and her breath caressing his neck. Her knees are tucked into his, and Tim feels small as she holds him tightly. “I’m here, Tim. You’re here. You’re here and I’ve got you, baby.”

Tim shudders and relaxes back into Lucy, and as she holds him and whispers comforting nonsense into his ear, he feels himself beginning to relax. 

The bed is warm (and Lucy is even warmer), and before he knows what’s happening, he’s slipping into a deep, dreamless sleep, content in the knowledge that Lucy will be there when he wakes up. 

Chapter Text

Tim and Lucy sleep through the entire night, waking only a few times for water or snacks or to kiss until they fall back to sleep from sheer exhaustion. Hospitals are not conducive to real sleep, and Tim finds that once he lays down, he’s weary to the bone. He sleeps more deeply than he’s slept in years, and each time he wakes from a nightmare, Lucy is there to lull him back to sleep. 

They rest until the sun comes up the next day, and Tim groans and rolls over as a sliver of light peeks through the window to warm his face. 

“Mmm. Morning,” Lucy rumbles, and Tim smiles as he burrows further into her. She’s warm and she smells good, and Tim sucks in lungfuls of her scent as he tangles their legs together and pulls her against him. She’d tossed her pants and bra at some point in the night. She’s now wearing only one of his t-shirts and her panties, and Tim presses as much of their bare skin together as he can. He’s in only his boxer briefs, and he feels warm and comfortable and safe nestled with her in his bed.

“Morning,” he says, and he makes a low, whining noise when Lucy rolls over in the bed and away from him. “Come baaaaaack.”

Lucy laughs and then she’s back. She has a bottle of water and a bottle of pills in her hand, and Tim sighs as he flops on his back and throws his arm over his face. 

He’d forgotten for a moment about his neck, but now that he sees the pain pills that Lucy is holding, he feels a low throb from the stitches and the newly healing skin. He remembers the way the knife had cut into his neck, the way Rosalind had smiled in glee as she’d run it carefully across his skin, and he feels sick. 

Lucy kisses his cheek and presses a pill to his lips, and Tim opens them to swallow it. He chases it with a few gulps of water, and then Lucy is returning the bottle and pills to the bedside table and then flopping back on top of Tim. She lays her head on his chest, kissing the warm skin, and Tim sighs as he helps her arrange their limbs until they’re tangled together again. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, and Tim sighs as he realizes that she’s brushing away tears from the corners of his eyes that he hadn’t known were there. 

He doesn’t, but he knows he needs to. 

“I want to forget it ever happened,” he admits, his voice hoarse, and Lucy makes a distraught noise as she crawls up his body and kisses the still irritated skin of his neck. 

“I know, Tim. I … I wanted to forget, too, when Caleb took me. But … trying to forget doesn’t help. It just makes it worse. It makes it… simmer. The only thing that helps is talking about it, processing it, and living through it. It never goes away, but it does get easier.”

Tim nods and then removes his hand from his face. He tangles his fingers in Lucy’s hair and stares at the ceiling. 

He hates that thinking about what had happened has ruined their relaxing morning, but he also knows that he does need to talk about what happened. 

“You don’t have to talk to me, though,” Lucy assures him, and Tim snorts because who else is he going to talk to? He sure as fuck isn’t going to talk to a therapist or anything.

“I want to tell you,” he says, but then he pauses, because what if she doesn’t want to hear it? “If… if you want to listen, that is.”

Lucy kisses his chest again and then his chin and his lips. 

“I’m here, Tim,” she whispers. “For anything. I might get upset, but I want to know so that I can help you. We’re in this together, baby.”

Tim nods and just breathes for a while. He holds Lucy and breathes in and out slowly as he stares at the ceiling, and he appreciates that Lucy doesn’t try to force him to begin. 

It takes him a long time to find the words he wants, and when he does he speaks softly in the still, silent room. 

“I came back from a run,” he says, and Lucy runs her hand comfortingly up and down his chest as he speaks. She already knows this part, but it helps, he thinks, to start from the beginning. “I was excited for you to get back from Sacramento because we were going to talk. I was excited and nervous and twitchy, so I went for a run to burn off some energy. I came back and the house was quiet, and I … I should have known something was wrong, because Kojo didn’t come and great me. But I was distracted.”

Lucy’s heart thumps painfully in her chest. 

He was distracted because of her. 

“I didn’t notice her. The door was still locked and everything, so it wasn’t… anyway. I walked in, and she hit me with something. I went down immediately. When I woke up I was on the couch and I couldn’t move.”

Lucy holds Tim tighter and wishes more than anything that she had a time machine. 

“She told me that we were waiting for you. She said she didn’t want it to be over too quickly, and that we had to wait. I was terrified, Lucy. I thought… I thought she was going to hurt you. She didn’t say much. She just sat there and stared at me. She ran the knife over my skin. When she did talk, she talked about all of the people I love. She talked about Tamara and Angela and Genny and you. I didn’t know who she was going to hurt… and it fucking terrified me. I was so scared.”

“I know,” Lucy whispers. She doesn’t know exactly what he’d gone through, but she knows fear. She’d never felt fear like she’d felt when she’d seen Tim on the couch, blood running down his neck and into his shirt. She’d been terrified for Chris, and she’d been terrified for herself when Caleb had taken her, but somehow none of it could compare to the terror she’d felt when Tim’s heart had stopped under her hands. 

“She somehow knew when you were on your way over here,” Tim continues, and Lucy has to bite back a sob because this isn’t about her. 

But she knows what’s coming. 

“It happened so slowly. She ran the knife along my skin so slowly. She kept saying that she needed to be careful or she’d hurt me more than she wanted to. She told me to hold still, as if I could move, because if her plan worked I would survive. I was so scared, but I wanted to survive. I didn’t want you to find me, Lucy, because I knew…” Tim pauses and takes a deep breath, because the moments between when Rosalind had kissed him on the head and when he’d passed out were some of the longest, most terrible of his life. “I didn’t want you to find me because I knew how much it would hurt you, but at the same time I did want you to find me, because I wanted to live. I wanted to live because I love you and I wanted to be with you.”

Lucy can’t stop the sob that breaks free from her chest then. She shuffles up Tim’s body until her cheek is pressed against his and they’re sharing breath. “I’m so glad I did, Tim,” she whispers, and she kisses him slowly. Their lips taste of salt and tears, but she kisses him anyway because she wants to be as close to him as she can possibly be. “I’m so glad I did. I was so scared, but if I hadn’t found you, you wouldn’t have survived. You wouldn’t be here, and I’m so glad that you are.”

Tim kisses Lucy back, and despite the way they’re both still crying, shaking in each others arms, the need to be close to each other is too strong to ignore. 

“Tim,” Lucy gasps, and he nods, sliding his hands under her shirt until he’s cupping her breasts, He runs his hot palms all over her skin, and then breaks their kiss just long enough to pull her shirt over her head. He tosses it to the side and then rolls them over until Lucy is straddling him. Her cheeks and chest are flushed, and Tim can’t breathe for a second because she’s so beautiful. 

“Can I…?”

Lucy nods and then reaches for Tim’s boxer briefs. She pushes them down and then rids herself of her own panties, and when Tim pushes inside of her, their bodies touching as much as they possibly can, a fresh wave of tears cascades down her cheeks. 

Tim can barely thrust they’re so close, but it doesn’t matter. They’re both on edge in seconds, holding onto each other as tight as they possibly can. Tim whispers his love into Lucy’s ear as they come, and then buries his face in her hair in the aftermath, unwilling and unable to let her go. 

“I love you,” he says again, and Lucy grips his hair so tightly that it hurts. 

“I love you, too. I’m so glad you’re here with me,” she whispers. 

They hold each other for a long time after that. 

____________________

Angela calls and asks them to come to the station that afternoon, and despite Lucy’s protests that Tim is resting and recuperating, she insists that it will only take a few minutes. 

“We have no leads on Rosalind,” she says once they’re all in Grey’s office, and Lucy sighs as she sits heavily in one of the chairs in front of Grey’s desk. Tim takes the chair beside her, and they both turn to stare at where Angela is standing behind Grey with a frown on her face. “We checked doorbell cameras in the neighborhood, stoplight cameras… everything we could think of. We pulled satellite footage, and we can see a car coming and going, but beyond that… nothing.”

Tim’s frown deepens as he thinks. He runs his fingers over the healing skin of his neck, and sucks in a breath as he thinks.

“What if… well, what if we use me as bait? She obviously knows I’m important to Lucy, and she wants to hurt Lucy, right? So we put me out in the open and wait. We can run news articles about how I survived, about… fuck, whatever, whatever we need to do to draw her into the open.”

Tim’s words hang in the air between them for a long moment, and while Grey simply frowns, Lucy is adamantly and immediately against the idea.  

She shoots to her feet and Tim follows her, reaching out to take her hand into his as she shakes her head. 

“No, Tim, there is no fucking way,” she says, and there’s a desperate glint in her eyes as her fingers dig into the skin of Tim’s hand. He glances down at her, and he knows that she’s gone through hell with Rosalind, but he also knows that this might be the only way that they can take her down. 

“Lucy,” he murmurs, but she shakes her head. She takes a step closer, her hand brushing Tim’s arm, and she knows that she should cool it with the public touching but Tim is suggesting that he use himself as bait to catch Rosalind and she can’t stand idly by and do nothing. 

“No, Tim. No. I can’t lose you. I can’t… I can’t fucking do that again.”

Tim sighs and glances over Lucy’s head to see Angela and Grey both watching them with varying degrees of concern and worry. He knows that they don’t like the idea, either, and the fact that he’s not wearing a dressing on his wound and that the red, barely healed skin is on full display does not help matters. 

“Tim,” Lucy begs, and he can see tears shimmering in the corners of her eyes. 

“Okay,” he whispers after a long moment, and Lucy deflates, melting against him. Tim wraps his arms around her, and he feels like a horrible person when he realizes that she’s trembling in his arms. “Okay, Lucy. Okay, baby.”

Lucy nods and Tim sighs as he tucks her head under his chin and rocks them back and forth. 

He knows that the conversation isn’t over; they’re going to come back to it at some point. But for now… for now, he can reassure Lucy that he won’t put himself in harm's way. 

For now. 

Chapter Text

Tim walks up behind Lucy as she paces nervously around his kitchen, biting her lip as she tucks her phone between her shoulder and ear. She glances back at him and Tim can see the worry exuding from every pore; her eyes are wide and haunted, and he wishes more than anything that he could take this fear and pain away from her. 

He wishes that Rosalind hadn’t been, at least in part, responsible for almost killing Lucy. 

He wishes that she hadn’t already hurt two people that Lucy cares about, and he wishes, more than anything, that he could wrap his arms around Lucy and tell her that everything will be fine. 

But he can’t. 

Instead he walks up behind her and slides one hand around her stomach while the other presses over her heart. He drops his head to her hair, breathing in her scent as he sways them back and forth in the dimly lit kitchen. He can hear a voice on the other end of the phone, garbled and faint, but he doesn’t pay attention to it as he holds his whole life in his hands.

“I know, mom,” Lucy whispers, and Tim’s heart aches for her because she still loves her parents despite their treatment of her, and he knows that she would be devastated if anything happened to them because of her job (the job they hate so fiercely). “I know that… and you have every right to be mad that my job has put you in danger, but I still believe that I’m doing good, and I wish you could see that.”

The incomprehensible noise on the other end of the phone becomes more agitated, and Tim makes a distraught noise as he drops his lips to Lucy’s shoulder. He kisses her warm skin and pulls her even closer, and she melts into him as her mother continues to shout. 

“I was just calling to let you know that there will be a car parked outside of the house. It’s for your safety—no, I know you don’t want cops outside of your home, but they’re not going anywhere. No, mom—”

Lucy sighs as her mother cuts her off again, and Tim reaches for the phone, an inquiring noise passing his lips as his long fingers wrap around it. Lucy nods, too tired to continue fighting, and Tim kisses her temple as he takes the phone and presses it to his own ear. 

“Mrs. Chen, this is Sergeant Tim Bradford,” he says, and he sighs as Vanessa launches into a whole new rant once she hears his name. 

“And you! You’re the one who corrupted my daughter. She would have listened to me and gone back to school if it weren’t for you,” she growls, and Tim raises an eyebrow, curious. Had Lucy considered leaving at one point because of the pressure from her parents? He finds that he wants to know (he wants to know everything about Lucy), but he knows now is not the time. 

He summons his most terrifying TO voice and takes over the conversation firmly but politely. 

“Ma’am, we were just calling as a courtesy. The officers aren’t going anywhere; they’re tasked with protecting you. Now, you can either continue to curse the police for all of their perceived wrongdoings, or you can thank them for putting their lives on the line for you and your husband even as you spit vitriol about their chosen profession, but you may not continue to harass and belittle Lucy about something she has made clear is her calling. We’ll check on you daily, Mrs. Chen. I hope you have a wonderful night.”

Vanessa growls something about don’t bother, and then adds on an insult for Tim personally, but he takes no heed of her angry words. Instead he hangs up the phone, lays it gently on the counter, and then turns Lucy around in his arms before hugging her against her chest. She sighs and lets him support her weight as she wraps her arms around his back and lays her head on his chest, mindful and careful of his healing wound as she nuzzles into his warm skin. 

“Thank you,” she whispers, and Tim makes a noise of acknowledgement as he begins walking them toward the living room. 

“You’ve called Tam, your parents, and your aunt. They all have protective details,” he murmurs, and Lucy nods as he guides her to the couch. He sits down and then holds out his arms, and Lucy makes a desperate noise as she crawls into his lap. She lets him wrap the blanket from the back of the couch around her as she presses her forehead to his, her knees slipping until she’s straddling his lap. “They’re all safe for the moment. We are safe for the moment. There’s a protective detail on everyone you love, Lu, so take a moment. Breathe.”

Lucy breathes. 

She lets out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, and then lets her eyes flutter closed as Tim presses kisses all over her face. One hand comes up to cup his cheek while the other, gently, carefully, traces the line of healing skin on his neck. She traces the skin from one ear to the other, her fingers shaking as she follows the path of the red skin. 

“She almost killed you,” she whispers, and Tim nods in agreement as he raises his hand to join hers. He entwines their fingers, and then places their clasped hands over his throat, right below where Rosalind had slowly cut him open. 

“But she didn’t,” he says, and Lucy nods as he holds her hand more tightly. “I’m healing, baby. The stitches come out next week. I feel okay most of the time; it doesn’t hurt that bad anymore,” he adds, though he doesn’t mention that the only reason it doesn’t is because of the pain medication. He will heal, he knows. He’ll have an ugly scar, but other than the physical reminder, there will be no lasting effects. “I’m alive and I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, Lu.”

Lucy nods again and then drops her lips to Tim’s. 

Her kiss is a little bit desperate, but Tim can feel the same desperation building in his own chest as she coaxes her lips open. He moves one hand to the small of her back, holding her against him as she cups both of his cheeks. She holds his face gently, reverently, as she kisses him, and Tim groans into her mouth as she begins to rock in his lap. 

“I’m here,” he whispers, and he can feel the way her hands tremble on his face as she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him. 

He knows she needs the reassurance, and fuck, he does, too.

“Tim,” she gasps, and he nods, his free hand tangling in her hair to cup the back of her head. 

“I know, baby,” he murmurs, and then he pulls her lips back to his as the hand on the small of her back trails under her shirt. “I know. Let me make you feel good, baby. Let me distract you. Let me show you I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

Lucy nods desperately, and their hands shake as they work together to rid themselves of their clothes. Tim is only wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, and Lucy makes quick work of them both as Tim pushes her sweater off over her head. He unclasps her bra and takes one of her taut, brown nipples into his mouth as she kicks off her leggings and panties and then settles back in his lap. They both groan as Lucy presses her breasts to his naked chest and her center to his length. 

“I’m here, and I love you,” Tim whispers, and Lucy nods as he reaches between them to press himself against her entrance. They both cry out when he enters her, and Lucy loses the battle with her tears as Tim begins to rock slowly in and out of her body. He kisses her everywhere he can reach; her cheeks and her chin, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. He whispers his love into her skin, and reassures her that he’s here and that he’s alive. 

Lucy comes first, her body trembling in Tim’s lap as he holds her tightly. He groans as he feels her walls tighten around him, and all it takes is a few more thrusts before he’s following her over the edge. hb

“I love you,” Lucy whispers, and Tim kisses her as he rearranges their bodies until he’s laying on the couch, his back against the cushions, with Lucy wrapped in his arms. He’s still inside her, softening as he kisses her endlessly, but he makes no move to pull out as he grabs the blanket they’d abandoned earlier and wraps it around both of them. 

Lucy closes her eyes and melts into him, the stress and tension slowly leaching from her body, and Tim holds her, secure in the knowledge that there’s a unit outside keeping watch over them. 

He allows his eyes to flutter shut as his heart rate returns to normal, and he sighs as he feels Lucy tangle their feet together. 

He’s asleep within seconds. 

_____________________

Lucy allows herself to drift off for a few moments, but eventually she slips out of Tim’s arms and gathers their clothes, tossing them in the hamper in the corner of the bathroom before sitting heavily on the toilet. She pees and cleans up the mess Tim had made of her thighs, and then washes her hands before peeking out into the living room again. 

Tim is fast asleep, one arm under his head and the other low on his belly, and Lucy finds herself smiling softly as he lets out a snore and then dips his hand under the blanket. 

Incorrigible, she thinks, and then she shakes her head fondly before ducking into the bedroom. She grabs a pair of Tim’s sweatpants and rolls them up several times so she won’t trip over them, and then throws on one of his worn Academy t-shirts. She runs her fingers through her hair and then glances at the clock to see that it’s almost dinnertime. She smiles and decides that she’ll surprise Tim with dinner when he wakes up, and then walks back into the kitchen, intent on surveying the contents of his fridge to see what she can throw together without having to go to the store. 

She’s distracted, though, by a pile of mail laying haphazardly on the entryway table, and she sighs as she walks toward the door and reaches for it. 

It’s probably mostly junk mail. She can weed out the credit card offers and catalogs that Tim will never even look through and just leave the important things. She knows Tim still tires easily, and the more she can do to help out, the better. 

She drops the mail on the counter and then heads to the fridge, surveying the contents for a long moment before reaching for the colander of fresh green beans and the saran wrapped steaks on the top shelf. She can cook a mean steak, she knows, and she smiles softly to herself as she lays out the meat and then opens the cabinet to find the spices she’ll need. 

She’s just rinsing the green beans under cold water when an orange manila envelope at the bottom of the pile of mail catches her eye. 

“Weird,” she murmurs, because the envelope isn’t addressed to Tim. 

It’s addressed to her. 

Her name is written on the front in beautiful, flowing calligraphy. 

Her name, and nothing else, which means it had been hand delivered. 

She reaches for it with shaking hands before slowly tearing open the seal, and a cry of terror catches in her throat as the contents of the envelope spill out all over the counter. 

A pool of smooth, slippery photographs spill across Tim’s counter, and Lucy presses a shaking hand to her mouth as the faces of everyone she love stare back at her. 

Her mother and father at the supermarket. 

Tamara walking down the sidewalk, a smile on her lips as she talks into her phone. 

Angela and Wes pushing baby Jack in a stroller through the park. 

Nolan and Bailey having lunch at an outdoor cafe. 

Nyla and Lylah and Leah and James, playing in the yard at their house. 

Lucy reaches for them with shaking hands, moving the ones on top to see the ones underneath, and as each photo is revealed, the terror clogging her throat and causing her heart to race only grows. 

Tamara. 

Angela. 

Nyla. 

Nolan. 

And then, at the bottom of the pile, one final photo that nearly causes her heart to stop beating all together. 

It’s her and Tim, standing outside his door as he unlocks it. 

She stares at the clothes they’re wearing in the photograph, the ones she’d just thrown into the hamper in the bathroom, and then she turns the photo around, tears springing to her eyes as she reads the words written in thick, red sharpie. 

See you soon. 

She cries out and then falls to the ground as her knees buckle, and she’s barely aware of the arms wrapping around her as she collapses.

She’s barely aware of anything except the blind panic coursing through her body as soft, cool lips press against her ear. 

“Hello, Lucy.”

Chapter Text

Tim wakes up to an empty, silent house, and he immediately knows that something is wrong. 

Something is terribly, horribly wrong. 

He tries to stand from the couch but falls back down, his entire world spinning, and he knows he’s not just tired or affected by the pain medication. He’s drugged, and through the haze he knows that he was drugged for a reason. 

“Lucy,” he croaks, but he doesn’t get a response. He doesn’t feel Lucy’s warmth next to him. He doesn’t hear her voice as she sings in the kitchen, and he doesn’t hear the hum of motion that fills the background as Lucy dances through his house, cleaning, organizing, and making herself at home in his space. 

Lucy. 

Kojo continues to snore in his doggie bed in the corner while Tim grasps onto the arm of the couch. He nearly vomits as he stands, and the whole world is spinning as he reaches around, his hand heavy and uncoordinated, for his phone. 

Lucy. 

He dials Angela and nearly sobs in relief when she answers.

“Tim?”

“Lucy,” he groans, and he knows that Angela must hear the terror in his voice because her chair scrapes across the concrete floor in the station just before he hears her feet pounding across the floor. “ ‘s gone.”

“Gone where? Tim, what’s happening? Are you okay?”

Tim shakes his head, because he doesn’t matter. 

He’s fine. 

But Lucy… 

“She took Lucy,” he manages, and his whole body aches as the words pass his lips.

He knows he’s right. He doesn’t know how, but he knows.

Lucy is gone, and Rosalind has her. 

Tim manages to somehow stumble toward the kitchen while still clutching his phone, and though he knows Angela is trying to talk to him, to tell him something, he can’t quite make out the words. He drops heavily onto the kitchen counter, the phone falling from his hands, and Angela’s urgent voice fades into the background as his fingers slip against the smooth surface of the photos covering the counter. 

He blinks rapidly, trying to clear the fog from his vision, and then picks up one of the photos with shaking hands. His breath catches and his chest tightens as he sees his own face staring back at him, and he drops the photo to pick up another and another and another.

Tamara. 

Angela. 

Nyla. 

Nolan. 

Lucy. 

Then, across a photo of Tim holding Lucy in his arms, of her smiling and him laughing, the words see you soon written in thick, red marker. 

He imagines Lucy holding the photo right before she’d been taken, and his heart absolutely fucking shatters, because she must be so scared. She must be fucking terrified, though of course he knows that she’s too strong to do anything but fight her way through it. He knows that, no matter where Rosalind has her or what she’s doing, that his Lucy has no quit in her. 

“Tim!”

Tim drops the photo and turns back to the phone, and it’s only then that he realizes that he’s been muttering to himself, a string of words that he can’t remember but that have clearly scared Angela.

“Rosalind has her,” he whispers, and his voice is more steady now, his vision less blurry and his stomach more settled. “She has her, Ang.”

“I’m on my way over, Tim. Just… hang on, okay? I’m almost there. We have the whole station en route; we’re going to find her. We’re not… nothing is going to happen to her.”

Tim swallows and nods, and he drops his head into his hands as he tries to focus on anything except the fact that he’s still drugged and Lucy is still gone and fucking Rosalind… 

“Talk to me, Tim,” Angela murmurs, and Tim realizes that he’s panicking. His breath is coming in short gasps and his vision blurring again, though this time it’s not because of the drugs. 

“About what?” he asks, and he can hear when Angela flips on the sirens of her shop. 

“Anything. Just talk, hon. I’m only three minutes out.”

Tim nods and slides to the floor, taking the phone with him. He presses the heel of his hand into his eyes, fighting tears, and breathes shakily as his mind whirs. He’s still drugged, and he’s sluggish and emotional. He’s not able to compartmentalize as well as he normally does. Normally he’d already be on Rosalind’s trail, hunting her down, ready to destroy her, but now? Now he can’t move. He can barely breathe. He —

“Talk,” Angela insists, and Tim nods. 

“L-Lucy made me watch this stupid show yesterday,” he begins, because everything seems to come back to Lucy now. “It was about cooking stupidly fancy food out of a basket of really … horrible ingredients. Dried fermented scallops, Angela… and somehow these people turned them into edible food. It was… so dumb, but I was right. I called it — I knew who was going to win. But Lucy loved the show and she smiled at me and her eyes were sparkling, Ang. She’s so fucking beautiful and I love her so much, and … and…”

Tim hears the sound of his front door opening over the phone and in person, and he drops his cell to the floor as he loses the battle against his tears. 

“Hey,” Angela murmurs, and Tim lets his head fall to her chest as she wraps her arms around him. He chokes on a sob and lets his best friend comfort him even as officers and crime scene techs swarm his kitchen, and he doesn’t even care that he’s making a scene because Lucy is gone. 

“We’re going to find her,” she murmurs, and Tim nods as he pulls back. 

“I know,” he says, and he takes a deep stuttering breath. “I just can’t… I can’t…”

“It’s the drugs, Tim,” Angela says, and Tim nods as he drops his head back against the kitchen island. He can still feel them in his body. He’s sluggish and dizzy and he still wants to vomit, and he knows that though he’s reasonably fine sitting on the floor that he’ll fall if he tries to get up again. “You’re drugged.”

Tim kicks his foot out and cusses loudly. The agents surrounding him raise their eyebrows but wisely back off as Angela glares at them. She sits next to Tim, her arm around his shoulder, and does her best to comfort him as his house is turned inside out for evidence that they all know won’t be found. 

Rosalind had gotten in and out clean, just like she always does. 

They’ll have no leads, just like always. 

Lucy is gone, and there’s nothing they can do. 

“FUCK!” Tim roars, and he slams the back of his head into the kitchen island so hard that he sees stars. He punches the floor and then drops his head between his knees as the world begins spinning again. 

Angela holds him and tries to comfort him, and Tim sobs. 

His kitchen is cleared, all the photos taken and every surface wiped for prints and his neighborhood canvased for anyone who saw anything, but in the end they come up empty. 

Just like Tim had known they would. 

_________________

Tim is hauled to the hospital against his will, and then taken back to the station so that Angela can keep an eye on him while she starts running down all known associates, acolytes, and minions of Rosalind. 

The drugs are mostly flushed from his system, and Tim takes up pacing back and forth as Angela and Nyla crowd around the computer, their eyebrows scrunched together and their lips turned down in frowns as they scour the internet and their files for any lead, any clue, anything. 

“Tim,” Angela snaps, and he sighs as he pauses where he’s tapping his foot impatiently on the floor. 

“Put me to work. I can’t just fucking sit here,” he growls, and Angela sighs, viscerally remind of the last time this had happened. 

“Tim…”

“Use me as bait. My plan? Let’s do it.”

“Lucy would never forgive you, and you know that,” Angela murmurs, but Tim shakes his head as he spins on his heel and begins walking back toward the far wall, his fingers in his hair and his eyes wild as he paces. 

“She would be alive to be pissed at me, so I don’t fucking care,” he growls, and Nyla sighs as she leans back in her chair, her eyes following Tim’s frantic movements. 

“It won’t work anyway,” she says, and Tim’s gaze flickers to her as he tugs on the longer strands of his hair. 

“Why the fuck not? She knows I’m important to Lucy.”

“She has Lucy,” Nyla says, and Tim shakes his head because no. 

“She already has who she wants,” Angela adds, and Tim deflates before their eyes, his shoulders slumping and his legs trembling, barely holding him up as he staggers over to their desk and falls into the chair beside it. 

“Then what?” he asks, and Angela bites her lips as she remembers how he’d reacted the last time this had happened. 

“We need more people on tip lines.”

Tim, predictably, scoffs, but he doesn’t put up a fight. He sighs and slumps further in his chair, and after several long, tense seconds, he nods. 

“Okay,” he whispers, and Angela almost hates that he’s given in so quickly. She doesn’t like to think about what it means that he’s given in. 

How little hope he has. 

How few leads they have. 

She nods and takes Tim over to where they’ve set up the tip lines, and he falls into a new chair, his face drawn with exhaustion and defeat as he reaches for the nearest ringing phone. He presses it to his ear and drops his head into his hands, and Angela hopes, for both Lucy’s sake and Tim’s, that they find her. 

She doesn’t know if he can come back from this a second time. 

She hopes, desperately, that they don’t have to find out. 

_______________

When Lucy comes to, everything hurts. 

Her body aches and her head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. Her throat is scratchy and her eyes feel like they’re glued shut. She feels like she’s been drugged. 

She feels like she did when… 

Caleb.

“No,” she groans, and she hears a soft, airy laugh float over her as she realizes the reality of her situation. Her eyes aren’t even open, but she knows in her bones. 

She’s no longer at home, with Tim. She’s not in his house, in his bed or on his couch. She’s not waking up after a nap or after a night of deep, restful sleep. 

She’s with Rosalind, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to get out of this one. She can feel plastic around her wrists and blood dripping down her forehead. She can feel the hard wood of the chair she’s tied to, and the way that the zip ties dig into her ankles. She can’t move more than a single inch, and she swallows thickly, trying to contain the panic, as she slowly, slowly pries her eyes open.

“Hello, Lucy,” comes the soft, melodic voice that haunts her nightmares. “I’m so glad you’re awake.”

Lucy whimpers and turns, and the room spins but she doesn’t black out or throw up so she knows that whatever Rosalind had used on her must have been less intense than what she’d been drugged with the last time she was kidnapped. 

“Rosalind,” she groans, and the redhead laughs as she saunters closer. She leans over, her face mere inches from Lucy's, and her long, red hair tickles Lucy’s cheeks and throat. 

“Hello, Lucy,” she whispers, and Lucy whimpers again as the other woman’s fingernails dig into her skin. “I have so many plans for you. We’re going to have such fun together!”

Chapter Text

Rosalind caresses Lucy’s cheek as she circles around the chair, the fingernails of her free hand scratching against Lucy’s arm. Her fingers on Lucy’s face are gentle, her voice soft and sickly sweet, and Lucy feels sick to her stomach as she tries to jerk away from the touch. 

“What do you want?” she asks, because Rosalind has been suspiciously close lipped since she came to. 

“I want you, Lucy,” Rosalind murmurs, and Lucy swallows thickly as she tries to quell the building panic. 

Rosalind wants her, and she has her. 

Which, at the very least, means that her friends, her family, Tim…

... everyone else is safe. 

For now.

“What… why do you want me?” she asks, and she licks her lips nervously as Rosalind’s fingers trail through her hair. She caresses the strands in the same way Tim does, and Lucy aches for him in a way she hadn’t known possible. 

It’s not fair, she thinks. 

It’s not fucking fair that she and Tim had just found each other and now she’s going to die. It's not fair that she’s not able to tell him that she loves him just one more time, or hold him in her arms. She’s not going to be there to comfort him when he gets the news that she’s gone, and just the thought of his face falling, of the pain and despair returning to his eyes the way it had been when she’d first met him… 

“Please,” she whispers, because she’s not above begging. She’s not above doing anything that will stall for time, because she knows… she just fucking knows that Tim is looking for her. The second he woke up and found her missing, when he found those photos on the counter, she knows he would have called in every available officer in the entire Los Angeles Police Department.

She knows he’ll find her, just like he did last time. 

"Please," she tries again, but Rosalind just laughs at the way she begs. She drops her hand from Lucy's cheek and reaches onto the table behind her to wrap her slim fingers around the handle of a knife. She replaces the fingers on Lucy’s cheek with the cool, smooth metal, and Lucy whimpers as she draws it across her skin, not cutting yet but with enough pressure to make her feel the bite nonetheless. 

The only question is if Tim will be able to find her in time.  

_________________

“Then don’t bother fucking calling, you moron! Her life is in danger, and you want to tell me… did you seriously fucking hang up on me?! FUCK!”

Angela sprints over to where Tim is sitting just as he slams the phone down with enough force to make everyone on tip lines stare at him warily. She places a hand over his and slides it off of the phone, and then sits down on the desk as she leans toward him. 

“Ang,” he whispers, and then, despite the fact that he’s in full view of the entire station, he drops his head to her chest and takes in a deep, ragged breath. 

“Hey, Tim,” she murmurs, and she sighs as she tangles her fingers in his hair for a brief moment before nudging him to lean back. “Let’s go… let’s go somewhere more private, okay? Let’s go talk.”

Tim nods and then stands, clearing his throat and throwing a glare in the direction of anyone who so much as looks at him. Angela follows until he walks into one of the conference rooms, and the second the door is closed he turns around and collapses into her. He drops his face to her shoulder, his arms come up around her back, and he breaks. 

“Oh, Tim,” Angela whispers, and she holds him tightly as he sobs. The noise is muffled in her blazer, but the grief and despair come through loud and clear. His hands tangle in the back of her shirt, and Angela feels her heart breaking for her friend. 

“W-we just… god, I just got her, you know? I waited too fucking long. Too fucking long, Ang. I wasted so much time, and now she’s gone. She’s gone, again, and I don’t know how I’m going to live without her.”

Angela makes a noise and holds Tim closer, her hands in motion as she tries to soothe the normally stoic man. He’s falling to pieces in her arms, sobbing and shaking, and Angela knows that he’s survived a lot in his life. He survived his father and the army and Isabel, but she doesn’t think that he’ll survive this.

“A-and if we do get her back,” Tim continues. “Will she … will she be okay? How many shitty things can one person go through and still come out unscathed? Will she… will we ever be the same again?”

“Timothy Bradford,” Angela snaps, and Tim chuckles quietly at the use of his full name. He sniffles and pulls back, and Angela feels her heart shatter all over again when she sees the way his eyes are swollen, how his cheeks are still red and coated in tears. She sees the haunted emptiness in his eyes, and she knows that they have to find Lucy. 

They have to, or she’ll lose more than just one friend today.

“Lucy Chen has no quit in her,” she says, and Tim laughs again as he nods. He wipes at his eyes with a shaking hand and takes a deep, stuttering breath in as Angela continues. “She has no quit in her, so you can’t give up on her, either? Okay?”

“I’m not giving up on her,” Tim says. “I’m just… I’m scared, Ang. I’m so fucking terrified that Rosalind is going to hurt her. I’m terrified that she’s going through this, again. She survived, okay? She survived, and she shouldn’t… it’s not fair. It’s just not fucking fair.”

“It’s not,” Angela agrees easily. She reaches out and drops her hand to Tim’s forearm, holding tightly to help ground him in the moment. “It’s not fair. But we’re going to find her and we’re going to help her through this, okay, Tim? We’re going to find her. We are.”

Tim nods and takes another deep breath, centering himself and trying to focus. 

“All right. All right. Yes, we’re going to find her. We are. But I can’t… I need to do more, Ang. I need to do more.”

Angela nods, and she’s just opening her mouth to tell Tim that the second they have something she’ll come get him when the door to the conference room flies open and Nyla pokes her head in, a smile stretching across her lips. 

“We have a lead.”

Tim is nearly ready to climb the walls by the time that Nyla leads them to her desk, a video already pulled up on her computer. She clicks on the play button, and Tim watches with bated breath as the security footage begins playing. 

“What… what is this?” he asks, and Nyla makes a noise as she speeds the video up and skips to the two minute mark. 

“We put a BOLO out on Rosalind’s car. Or, the one she was last seen driving. We got a hit from a gas station owner on West Andover. He says he remembers the car because the woman driving it was, and I quote, hotter than the fucking sun. A comment that we won’t touch with a ten foot pole.”

Tim taps his food impatiently and Nyla nods as she fast forwards another minute. 

“She sped through his parking lot and nearly hit his air pump. He said he came out to yell at her but then got distracted and just watched her drive off. He saw the BOLO and remembered the encounter and sent us the security footage immediately. We know she was in the area less than two hours ago, which narrows the search parameters significantly. All units are canvassing, but we know she would want to be somewhere that she wouldn’t be heard or interrupted, and that narrows it down as well.”

“Okay,” Tim says, and both detectives turn to watch as he crosses his arms over his chest, his fingers digging tightly into his own skin to distract himself. “So, where is she?”

Nyla sighs and shrugs. “You know how these things go, Tim. We canvas. We look for anything suspicious. We don’t have an exact location yet, but we have more than we did ten minutes ago.”

“We’re going to go help with the search,” Angela says, and Tim shoots her a surprised look but Nyla just nods. “Call me if you find anything else out.”

Nyla nods and takes a seat at her computer, intent and focused, as Angela grabs Tim’s arm and leads him away.

“We can help. You wanted something more to do? This is it.”

Tim nods and swallows thickly. 

It’s not enough. 

Canvassing is not nearly enough. 

 But other than wishing and hoping and praying that they find Lucy alive, there’s not much else he can do. 

“Let’s go.”

_____________________

“Why are you doing this?”

Lucy’s voice comes out high and desperate, and she cuts herself off with a wince of pain as Rosalind runs the knife over her inner arm again. Blood blooms in droplets across the length of the cut, and Lucy feels panic building in her chest because Rosalind is cutting her the same way she cut Chris. Both of her arms have several marks, some only red indents, others scratches, and the newest ones just barely deep enough to draw several dots of blood to the surface. 

“Why am I doing this?” Rosalind parrots, and Lucy bites the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming as the knife bites into her skin again, deeper this time but still not deep enough to cause major damage. 

“Why… me?” she tries, when Rosalind doesn't speak again.

Why Chris? 

Why Tim?

“Why you?” Rosalind murmurs, and she presses her face into Lucy’s hair and breathes in as she slowly, methodically runs the knife from Lucy’s wrist to her inner elbow. It’s the deepest of the cuts yet, and Lucy whimpers as she tries not to scream. Blood wells up over the cut and then begins sliding sluggishly down her arm, and Lucy has to close her eyes against the sight. 

“Yes. Why me? You… you never wanted me,” Lucy says, and she finds that talking distracts Rosalind a little. It slows the speed at which she deepens the cuts she’s making, which slows the speed at which Lucy will bleed out. “You were always after Nolan. He was the one you wanted.”

“I did love playing with him,” Rosalind murmurs as she walks around to the front of the chair Lucy is tied to. She drops to her knees in front of Lucy, smiling as she eyes the way the blood pools in Lucy’s palm before dripping slowly to the floor. “He was so much fun to fuck with. But you? Lucy, you are the only person who has ever… ever refused to play my game. You told me no.”

The knife digs into Lucy’s wrist, the blade splitting her skin open, the cut even deeper than before, and Lucy loses the battle and cries out as Rosalind digs it in and then draws it up her arm, the blood spilling much faster now. It soaks her arm and pools on the floor as Rosalind cuts and cuts and cuts. 

“You told me no, Lucy,” Rosalind whispers, her lips against Lucy’s ear as she pulls the knife away, finally, once the cut runs from Lucy’s palm to her elbow. 

Lucy licks her lips and tastes the salt of her tears as she tries to look anywhere but at the blood soaking the concrete floor below her. 

“I don’t like being told no,” Rosalind murmurs again, and then her lips press to Lucy’s cheek as she draws the knife through the already split skin of her arm again. 

And again. 

And again. 

Lucy’s vision whites out with the pain, and she screams. 

Chapter Text

“I’m going in with you.”

Angela sighs and turns toward where Tim is sitting next to her in the shop, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to tell him ‘no’ but she knows that she should. She really, really should, because she remembers the way he’d been when Caleb had taken Lucy and she knows that the stakes are much higher now. Tim is too close, he’s a liability—

“Don’t even think about trying to keep me away,” he growls, and Angela gives in before she even begins to argue. 

“Okay,” she whispers, and Tim deflates suddenly as if he’d been expecting a fight and doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he doesn’t have one. “But Tim…”

Tim reaches for the door handle, his fingers shaking, and Angela knows that they’re wasting precious seconds but she also knows that neither of them have any fucking clue what they’re going to find when they walk inside of the warehouse. They don’t even know if Rosalind and Lucy are still there, though the abandoned car parked outside of the old, decrepit building seems to suggest that they are. 

“You need to prepare yourself for what we might find,” she whispers, and Tim clenches his jaw so tightly that it hurts. 

“No,” he says, and Angela sighs. “No, I won’t be preparing for that, Ang, because I can’t prepare for that. There’s no way to prepare for that because… Ang, if she’s dead, then I am, too.”

Tim opens his door and climbs out, leaving Angela behind in the shop with the weight of his words. She sighs and slams her hand on the steering wheel, because it’s just not fucking fair. It’s not fair that Tim is facing losing the woman who means so much to him. She’d seen him when he’d nearly lost Lucy before — before they’d become whatever they are now, before Tim had fallen in love, before he’d admitted his love, and she knows that if they don’t find Lucy alive and whole on the other side of the warehouse door, then Tim will never be the same again. 

“Angela!” Tim yells, and she sighs as she climbs out of the shop, slamming the door behind her and hoping with every fiber of her being that they find Lucy alive. 

“Hold on, Lucy,” she murmurs. "Just a little bit longer. Please.”

__________________

When Lucy comes to again, her arm aches, her head is pounding, and she wishes very briefly that she’d just never woken up. 

It would be easier if she’d never woken up. 

She wouldn’t already be moaning from the pain in her arm, the deep, stabbing, white-hot ache from where Rosalind had dug her knife in over and over again. She wouldn’t be sick from the sight of her own blood soaking the floor beneath her chair, and she wouldn’t be staring down her own death, again, at the hands of a psychopath. 

“Ahhhh. You’re awake,” Rosalind murmurs, and Lucy loses the battle with her tears as she walks back over, the knife in her hand still covered in blood. 

“Please,” she sobs, and she hates that she’s begging but she’s just not strong enough to stay silent in the face of the worst pain she’s ever felt. “Please.”

“Please… what?” Rosalind asks, and the way her eyes sparkle makes Lucy’s stomach turn. “Please stop hurting you? Or… please just kill you? Which is it, Officer Chen?”

Please just kill me, Lucy thinks, but then she thinks about Tim, who she knows is trying desperately to find her at this very moment. 

“Please s-stop,” she stutters, and then she sobs, trying to jerk away as Rosalind drags the knife along her arm, through the blood but not quite digging into the raw wounds she’s already created. 

“Mmmm…. No, I don’t think I will,” she says, and Lucy swallows and clenches her eyes shut as Rosalind drags the knife over her palm and then takes it away, flicking the blood from the tip before moving to press it against Lucy’s other, uninjured arm. “See, I don’t play games that I can’t win.”

Lucy can’t help the involuntary chuckle that startles out of her.

“I beat you,” she says, and the fiery anger in Rosalind’s eyes ignites a bravery in Lucy that she didn’t know she still possessed. She’s still terrified, still aching and wishing for the sweet release of either death or unconsciousness, but she feels triumphant in that moment because Rosalind had tried, several times, but she’d never been able to keep Lucy down. "I won."

Rosalind roars and kicks at Lucy’s chair, and the screeching of the wood against the concrete floors is deafening in the empty warehouse. 

“I won,” Lucy says again when she comes to a stop, her head hanging weakly as she watches a new pool of blood beginning to form on the floor beneath her. She licks her lips and then forces her head up, forces herself to meet Rosalind’s eyes, and with each word she speaks, she feels more and more brave, more powerful. “I saved myself from Caleb when he took me. You thought you’d won when I stopped breathing in that barrel, but you didn’t. I came back to life, Caleb died, and you were put in prison. And then I won again, when I saved Chris. I won again when I saved Tim. I won again when I chose not to testify against you. I just keep winning, Rosalind.”

“You’re not going to win this one,” Rosalind sneers, and Lucy braces herself for the pain she knows is coming.

Oh, fuck, this is going to hurt, she thinks, because she’s gone and pissed Rosalind off. 

She expects to feel Rosalind’s knife dig into the skin of her uninjured arm, but when it digs, instead, into the muscle and flesh of the arm Rosalind has already ruined, it’s somehow worse. 

She screams, and Rosalind chuckles darkly as she draws the sharp blade through skin until it hits bone.

“I’m going to win, and there’s nothing that you can do to save yourself this time. I’m going to cut you to pieces, Lucy. I’m going to bestow on you every single cut that should have killed your lovers. I’m going to open you up like I did Chris, like I did your precious Timothy, and then I’m going to watch you bleed to death the way they should have.”

Lucy bites her lip until blood blooms in her mouth, trying desperately to keep from giving Rosalind the satisfaction that she so clearly wants. 

“It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” she snaps. Her voice is weak, though, and she knows that she doesn’t have long left. 

She doesn’t need much longer, though, because she knows Tim is close. 

He has to be. 

She knows he’s coming for her. He’s always saved her before, and she knows (hopes, prays) that this time won’t be any different. 

“Tim will find me,” she threatens, and Rosalind laughs as if the notion of Tim saving her again is absurd. 

“He will find you,” she agrees, and Lucy sucks in a breath as the knife moves from her arm to the soft, unblemished skin of her throat. She can feel the blade pressing against her jugular, not hard enough to cut yet, but enough that the anticipation of what’s to come makes her vision blur.  “He’ll find all of the pieces of you that I leave for him. A puzzle to put back together; my final masterpiece. Say goodbye now, Lucy.”

Lucy takes in a shallow, shuddering breath, and while she won’t give Rosalind the satisfaction of begging anymore, or of doing what she asks, she does close her eyes and think of Tim. 

She remembers making love to him on the couch. 

She remembers the way he’d held her, the way he’d whispered I love you into her ear. 

She remembers, and she lets a final tear slip down her cheek as the knife bites into her skin.

I love you, Tim, she thinks. 

Goodbye. 

___________________

Tim presses his back against the door of the warehouse, his heart thundering in his chest as Angela grabs her radio and speaks into it as softly as she can. 

“7-Adam-100, requesting backup, airship, RA, and supervisor to my location. We have a possible location on missing officer Lucy Chen. We don’t have a line of sight but we have a confirmed visual of Rosalind’s car and noises coming from inside the warehouse—”

She’s cut off before she can finish her sentence by a deep, guttural scream.

“Lucy,” Tim whispers, his voice broken, and before Angela can even think to try and stop him, he’s breaking down the door of the warehouse and charging inside. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck,” Angela chants. She grabs her radio and speaks into it even as she follows Tim inside. “I need backup right the fuck now. We’re moving in.”

She drops the radio to her waist, ignoring the immediate request to stay put until backup arrives, and then draws her gun as she charges after Tim. He’s already inside, clearing room after room, his face drawn in horror and despair each time he comes up empty. 

“Where the fuck is she?” he whispers, but Angela just shakes her head because she doesn’t know. 

They clear two more rooms before they hear the next scream, and then Tim is taking off again, running through a doorway at the end of the hall with little to no regard for his own safety. Angela groans and follows him, covering his back as he barges in and then stops dead at the sight before him.

“Lucy…” he whispers, his voice broken, and Angela feels her own breath catch as she takes in the sight before her. 

Lucy is tied to a chair, her left arm cut to the bone with blood pouring from the wound. She’s pale, sweating and shaking, her eyes just barely open as she stares Rosalind down in what she probably imagines are going to be her last moments. Rosalind’s knife is pressed to her throat, not cutting yet but pressing hard enough that there’s a single drop of blood hanging from the tip of the blade. 

Angela observes everything in the span of a few fractions of a second, and before she knows what’s happening, Rosalind is turning her head, a grin stretching across her face as she runs her eyes up and down Tim’s form. 

“Ahhhh. The fierce protector,” she murmurs. 

“Let her go,” Tim growls, but Rosalind doesn’t seem fazed by his anger or by the way he raises his gun, flicking the safety off and pressing his finger to the trigger.

“I don’t think so,” Rosalind sings, her voice light and airy as if they’re playing a delightful game.

“I will shoot you,” Tim growls, and Angela glances back at him before turning toward Lucy. She’s barely conscious, not even really registering what’s happening, and Angela knows that they need to end this soon, now, if they’re going to take her out of this warehouse alive. 

“No… I don’t think you will,” Rosalind says, and then she’s slinking around the back of Lucy’s chair, burying her face in her hair and breathing in as she presses the knife back against Lucy’s throat. “I don't think you will, Tim, because that's not who you are."

“Watch me,” Tim growls, and then, before Angela knows what’s happening, he’s pulling the trigger and the sound of a gunshot is echoing throughout the warehouse. 

Chapter Text

The moment between Tim’s gun going off and the sound of Rosalind’s body hitting the floor seems to stretch on into eternity. 

Tim watches as her knife slips across Lucy’s neck, and his heart completely stops beating when he sees a thin line of blood blossom across her soft, caramel skin. He watches in horror as Rosalind’s fingers loosen their grip on the handle of the blade, and he swears he can’t breathe again until she’s on the ground, his bullet lodged firmly between her open, unseeing eyes. 

“Tim,” Angela whispers, but he pays her no mind. He knows there will be questions and even an investigation with Internal Affairs, but he also knows that once they watch his body camera footage there will be no doubt that he’d made the right choice. 

He could have tried to negotiate, sure, but anyone who knows Rosalind knows that there’s no winning. She would have managed to drag things out, twist words, and skillfully manipulate the situation until Lucy had died in front of them. The only way to win was the element of surprise, and as Tim’s gaze flickers to Rosalind’s prone body on the floor, he can practically see the surprise etched permanently on her features. 

She hadn’t expected him to shoot her, but Tim simply hadn’t been willing to even risk the chance of losing Lucy. 

Every second counts, he knows, especially now as she bleeds out slowly onto the concrete floor.

“Lucy,” he gasps, and then he’s running across the room, falling to his knees beside her chair and wrapping his long fingers around the wound in her arm. He wishes more than anything that he could collect her blood, that he could pour it back into her body, but he knows he can’t. 

The only thing he can do is do his best to slow the bleeding until the ambulance arrives. 

“-im,” Lucy murmurs, and the noise Tim makes as he reaches up with his free hand to cup her chin and help guide her gaze to his is almost inhuman. 

“Hey, baby,” he sobs, and he wipes his face on the shoulder of his jacket so that he can see her without tears clouding his vision. “Hey, Lucy. Help is on the way. You’re going to be okay, baby. We found you. We’ve got you.”

“We…” Lucy whispers, and Tim almost tells her to save her strength but a small part of him is terrified that these might be her last words.

“What, Lu?” he encourages her, and his heart leaps when he sees the corner of her lips stretch into a tiny smile. 

“We have to stop… meeting like this.”

Tim snorts, the noise surprised out of him by her cavalier words, and then leans forward to press a kiss against her cold lips. 

“We do,” he agrees, and he sniffles as he watches Angela drop to the floor beside him. She begins working on the zip ties holding Lucy’s arms to the chair, and once she’s free, her legs and arms no longer held captive, Tim takes her slowly, gently, into his arms. “We really, really have to stop meeting like this. I’m too old for this, baby; each time you’re in danger I lose another year of my life. Do you see these grey hairs? They’re easily 50% your fault.”

Lucy laughs softly but doesn’t respond. Tim doesn’t mind, though, because now that she’s in his arms he can feel her heart beating against his own rib cage and it reassures him more than even her voice can. 

As long as her heart is beating against his, she’s alive, and right now that’s the only thing that matters.

“How’s her neck?” Angela asks, and Tim shakes his head as he brushes hair out of Lucy’s face to check on the wound.

“It’s just a shallow scrape. The knife didn’t do too much damage, thank god.”

Angela nods and strips off her bulletproof vest and then her blouse, leaving her in only a black tank top. She wraps the material around Lucy’s arm, tying it as tightly as she can, and then she reaches for Tim’s hand, pressing it back over the wound to continue applying pressure. 

“That should help slow the bleeding, and the ambulance should be here any second.”

Tim nods and then begins slowly rocking Lucy back and forth on the blood soaked, concrete floor. He brushes hair out of her eyes and scrubs gently at the blood on her cheek all while keeping continuous pressure on her forearm to hold the ragged skin together. Lucy’s eyes slip closed as Tim holds her, and by the time that the sound of ambulance sirens can be heard outside her body is lax against his. 

Tim knows that he needs to hand her over to the EMTs, but as they surround him and begin gently prying Lucy from his grasp, he finds that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t get his hands to release their grip on her body.

“I can’t…”

“We need to take her, sir,” one of the men says, firmly but kindly, and Tim nods as he tries to hold back a fresh wave of tears. 

“I know you do. I know, I just… you’re going to have to take her from me. You’re going to have to take her,” he sobs, because as hard as he tries, he can’t make his fingers loosen. He can’t force his body to cooperate, to hand her off to the strangers who are trying to save her life. 

The EMT nods and then gently pries Tim’s fingers open before a second and third EMT lift Lucy from his arms. For a moment Tim thinks he might lunge forward and snatch her back; his heart is racing and he feels sick at the thought of being away from her. 

He doesn’t, though. 

Instead he watches as they carry her away from him, shouting about blood transfusions and IVs and calling ahead to prep an operating room. 

He watches as they lay her on a stretcher, as they tear the sleeve of her shirt off to get a closer look at her wound. He watches as they load her into the ambulance, and he watches, his heart in his throat, as the doors close and the ambulance begins speeding away from him. 

His entire world is in the back of that ambulance, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if she doesn’t make it out of this alive. 

____________________

By the time Angela is able to coax Tim into the car and drive to the hospital, Lucy has already been taken back for surgery. 

“She’s mostly stable,” the doctor promises when he comes out to update them a few hours later. By the time the door had opened and they’d called for the family of Lucy Chen, Tim had been quite literally tearing his hair out. He’d run his fingers through it and pulled on it in worry so many times that stray hairs had been coming free with every motion. 

“Mostly?” Tim asks, because mostly fucking stable isn’t stable enough. 

“Other than the wound on her arm and the scrape on her neck, she’s uninjured. No head trauma, no internal bleeding, and no other wounds. The main concern now is the loss of blood, which we’re slowly replacing. Surgery is going well, and we’re hopeful that with an extensive therapy program Ms. Chen will regain full use of her arm and hand.”

“That’s… good,” Tim says, and he sighs as he runs his hand through his hair again. 

It’s more than good, he knows, because he’s not sure what Lucy would do if she were unable to be a police officer. Rosalind had already taken so much from them — he’s glad that she hadn’t been able to take this, too. 

“We’ll keep her for at least 24 hours after surgery for observation, but as long as her hematocrit and hemoglobin levels are in range I don’t see any reason we’d need to keep her.”

Tim nods and then sits heavily in one of the chairs lining the waiting room wall. He drops his head into his hands and lets himself relax in a way that he hasn’t been able to since he’d woken up and Lucy had been gone. 

“So she’s going to be okay?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically small. 

The doctor smiles softly and places a hand on Tim’s shoulder. 

“She’s going to be okay,” he whispers, and if the breath of air that Tim lets out sounds more like a sob than anything else, then no one mentions it. 

___________________

Tim plants his ass right at Lucy’s side as soon as she’s out of surgery, and he refuses to leave for even a second until she wakes up. He falls asleep in the uncomfortable hospital chair and then nearly loses his shit on the nurse that tells him he can’t stay the night because visiting hours are over.

(She, wisely, leaves him alone after that). 

He sits and he watches and he waits, but it’s not until the next morning that Lucy finally comes around, her eyes slowly fluttering open just as the sun is beginning to peek over the horizon.

“Tim?” she whispers, her voice hoarse and scratchy, and Tim has so much he wants to say but in that moment all he can do is cry. 

“Hey, baby,” he murmurs, and he stands to his feet, tears coursing down his cheeks. He leans over the bed and cups Lucy’s cheek in his large palm before dropping his head to her chest. He smushes his face against her and sobs until his head aches and his nose is stuffed and he can barely breathe, but it doesn’t matter because she’s here and she’s alive. 

“Come here,” Lucy murmurs, and Tim sniffles as she helps guide him into the bed with her good arm. She shifts around until Tim can curl up behind her and then sighs as she melts back into him. Her arm aches and her head hurts, but everything seems to hurt just a little bit less when he’s there. 

“I thought I was going to lose you,” he whispers, his voice soft and quiet in the stillness of the hospital room. 

“I know,” Lucy says, because she does. She understands his fear in a way that no one else does, because it hadn’t been that long ago that she’d been the one sitting beside his hospital bed. She knows that if she were to turn around and face Tim that she would still be able to see the red line of healing skin on his throat even know. “I know, Tim. But I’m here and I’m okay.”

“I shot her,” Tim whispers, and Lucy makes an inquiring noise as Tim buries his nose in her neck. He breathes her in and then tightens the arm he has around her waist. “She was threatening to hurt you more, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t take that chance, so I shot her. She’s dead.”

Lucy breathes out a sigh of relief, her eyes slipping closed as she tries to imagine moving forward now. They’ve lived under Rosalind’s shadow for so long it almost seems impossible that she’s gone. That they don’t have to live in fear, glancing over their shoulders everywhere they go. 

“She’s gone,” Lucy breathes, and Tim makes a noise of affirmation. 

“She’s gone. Forever.”

Lucy doesn’t know when exactly she starts crying, tears of relief and exhaustion running down her cheeks. All she knows is Tim’s strong arms around her, holding her tight and whispering comforting words to her. 

We’re safe. 

She’s gone.

It’s just you and me now. 

She falls back to sleep eventually, the soft cadence of Tim’s voice murmuring in her ear, and it’s the most restful sleep she’s had in a while. 

__________________

After Lucy is released from the hospital, Tim takes her home, feeds her soup and a pain pill, and then tucks her into bed. He curls his body around hers and pulls the blankets over them, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to go back to work in a week when his leave is over because he can’t imagine doing anything but this for the rest of eternity. 

“I love you,” he whispers, and he’s expecting to hear Lucy say the words back to him, but instead she turns around in his arms, wincing when she accidentally puts pressure on her stitches, and the look on her face makes Tim’s heart race. 

“Tim,” she whispers, and he knows she loves him, too, but he also knows sometimes love isn’t enough. 

“Lucy,” he breathes, and she must sense the panic building in his chest because she presses her hand right over his pounding heart and then leans forward to kiss him softly.

“I love you, too, Tim. I should have led with that,” she says, and while the panic slows it doesn’t retreat. 

“But?” he asks, because he knows there’s a but coming. 

Lucy bites her lip and glances up to meet Tim’s gaze for a long second before dropping it again. He reaches up to entwine their fingers, resting their clasped hands over his heart, and he tries desperately to give her time to think but he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin if she doesn’t speak soon. 

“Are we gonna be okay?” she finally whispers, and Tim makes a soft, confused noise before she continues. “I just… god, Tim, we’ve been through so much. We both need therapy. We both need therapy,” she repeats when she feels his body tense. “We need therapy separately and probably together, and that’s… it feels like it’s almost too much to put on a relationship that’s only a few weeks old. I just wonder… how much we can handle, you know. How much trauma can we handle before we break apart.”

Tim shakes his head and then reaches down with his free hand to cup Lucy’s cheek and angle her head until she meets his gaze. 

“We can handle anything, baby,” he breathes, and Lucy whimpers softly as he stares at her with such certainty in his eyes that it takes her breath away. “I know I’ve been against therapy in the past, but I will do anything… fucking anything, to be the best man I can be for you. I will even go to therapy for you, Lucy.”

Lucy shakes her head, though, and then bites her lip to try and hold in the emotion that’s threatening to overwhelm her. 

“You can’t for it just for me, Tim. You have to do it for you, too.”

“I know,” Tim acknowledges. “It’s for me, too, I promise, Lucy. It’s just… if you weren’t in my life, if I didn’t have you, I’d probably be perfectly happy carrying on as the shell of a man I once was. But you are here, and you make me want to be better. I guess… I should have said I’ll go because of you, not for you. Because if I’d never met you, I probably never would have cared enough to want to be the best man I can be.”

“Oh,” Lucy whispers, and then she smiles softly, her lips stretched until her cheeks dimple. “Okay.”

Tim laughs and kisses her head and holds her closer. 

“I had the same thoughts, you know, while you were missing,” he admits, and Lucy hums in acknowledgement but doesn’t speak. “I was worried about how much we could survive, as a couple. But I really think we can do anything we put our minds to, and this… this is worth it. You and me… we’re worth it. We’re worth the hard work and the even the fucking therapy.”

Lucy laughs and then surges forward and kisses Tim, her lips soft and sweet against his. 

“We are worth it, huh?” she asks, and Tim chuckles as he tucks her head into his neck and pulls the quilt up until they’re cocooned in the warmth and comfort of each other. 

“We’re worth everything, baby,” he whispers, and then he kisses Lucy’s head and closes his eyes. 

fin.