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They’d both agreed to not watch the clock tick down, opting instead to spend what could be their last moments drinking in comfortable, if a little weighted, silence. Lucy’s taken a seat on the countertop, while Tim leans beside her.
They’re a few swigs deep into their spirits of choice by the time Grey’s voice comes through their radios.
“Attention, all units. Missile alert is a false alarm, I repeat—the alert is a false alarm.”
Lucy exhales a relieved sigh, her shoulders slumping. “Thank God.”
“I told you,” Tim says, kicking away from the counter. “False alarm.” Her look of disdain winds up aimed at the back of his head as he continues. “We should get back to the station. It’s still going to be chaos over there for a while.”
But when Lucy hops down from the counter, her landing is strange, her feet feeling way too heavy beneath her. Confused, she reaches a hand out to steady herself—and immediately remembers what she’s holding.
Oh, no.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she says, the words not quite fitting right around her tongue. The tequila bottle makes a heavy sound as she sets it down on the counter, and Tim turns back to her.
“Hm?” The questions in his eyes are answered immediately as his gaze flits from the tequila down to the whiskey in his grip. “Oh.”
Their bottles are both, what, two or three shots down?
Oh, God, they’re about to be tipsy on the job.
“This was not a good idea.”
Tim huffs a low laugh that lands somewhere between exasperation and mirth. “Well, you did think the world was about to end.”
Her mouth falls agape.
“Me?” The exclamation cuts through the store a little louder than she intends. “It was your idea to start drinking.” She begins to pace, every footstep feeling strange, and her panic ratchets up surprisingly fast. “How do we get back to the station? We can’t drive, and we can’t exactly get our co-workers to come pick us up.”
“Definitely not,” Tim agrees, setting his bottle next to hers. “We’d get fired on the spot.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Uh…” He glances out the window like the world outside has any answers. “I guess we walk.”
Lucy blinks at him. “Walk?”
“Yeah, walk. We have legs.”
“And what’s Grey going to say when we turn up at the station without our shop?”
Tim huffs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “You got any better ideas?” She doesn’t, panic and tequila dulling her thoughts at the edges. “It’s fine, we’ll figure it out on the way; we’ll have time.”
Lucy can’t even think of how far the station is from here. A couple miles, maybe? “How much time, exactly?”
Tim thinks on it. “About an hour. Maybe less, if you step on it.”
Enough time for the worst of the alcohol to ease off, she hopes.
But when she starts heading for the door, Tim backtracks, and leans over the top of the counter.
“What are you—?” She cuts herself off when he pulls his money clip from behind his belt.
He’s paying for the alcohol. Right.
She notices he also leaves a little extra cash, and she’s about to ask if he’s leaving a tip or something, but he picks up two bottles of water from the fridge and tosses one her way as he pushes the door open.
She just barely manages to catch it, her fingertips a little numb. She didn’t think she’d had that much, but…
“Let’s go,” Tim says, motioning for her to get moving.
The walk starts out relatively silent, the world still shifting slightly. But Lucy’s never liked silence—two-shots-of-tequila-Lucy likes it even less—, and Tim should know that by now.
“You didn’t seem all that scared by the missile threat,” she says, glancing both ways before crossing the barren street.
Tim scoffs. “There was no missile. I knew it was fake.”
Lucy gives him a side-eye. “Did you? Completely?”
“Obviously.”
She makes a point of looking at him, looking at their surroundings, looking at what they’re doing, but Tim doesn’t clock on. She lets out a laugh.
“Then why did you go for the whiskey if you knew we’d be back on the job?”
Tim doesn’t have a response for that, squinting up at the cloudless sky like he didn’t hear her.
“You’re telling me Tim Bradford, Super Cop, was happy going back to work under the influence?”
“No,” he insists. “I…”
He cuts himself off, clearly having no argument, and Lucy uses the gap to keep pushing.
“Part of you believed it.”
He sighs, exasperated, giving in surprisingly fast. “A very—”
“I knew it!”
“—very, very small part of me, maybe believed that it could be a possibility.” He shoots her a glare as he says it, and Lucy grins.
“You’re just like the rest of us, after all.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “God forbid.”
She chooses to ignore that. “So, I ask again: you weren’t scared?”
He frowns, like fear never even crossed his mind. “No.”
“How?”
He looks over at her. “Are you scared of dying?”
Jesus.
“I mean… a little, yeah,” she admits.
In the Academy, they’d talked about the very real possibility of dying young in their line of work, and Lucy has known since she signed up that it was something that could happen. If she’d had any doubt, her TO getting shot during her second day on the job would’ve eradicated it.
In any case, being aware of the possibility has never stopped her from being just a little apprehensive at the thought.
“Like, I know it’s never out of the question with what we do, but—it’s not even the dying part, per se, it’s…” She trails off, shaking her head. Her thoughts aren’t stringing into anything coherent with the tequila softening every edge. “I mean it is, somewhat, but, you know—there’s a difference between getting shot in a firefight and a freak missile hitting our city.”
In a manner that’s far too blasé for the topic at hand, Tim shrugs. “Fair enough.”
This man never ceases to baffle her.
“You seriously weren’t even the smallest bit afraid of what could happen?” she pushes.
With a sigh, Tim twists open the lid of his water. “Look, you can’t let fear weigh you down, Chen. That’s how people get hurt,” he says, taking a sip. “I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and it’s the same in the Army as it is in this job, the same way it is with everything: there are only so many things you can control. After a few years, you’ll get used to the idea that your mortality isn’t one of those things.”
God, she needs to be a lot more sober for this kind of conversation, or a lot more drunk. This awkward middle ground isn’t doing her any favours.
“Cheerful.”
“You asked.”
He’s got her there.
Their light, casual conversation comes to its end when they reach an intersection.
“It’s left here,” Tim says.
With a frown, Lucy points in the direction they were already heading. “I thought it was that way.”
“I mean, it can be, if you want it to take an extra twenty minutes.”
A small part of her is tempted to take her route—she’d just run it to make sure she gets back to the station first. But the sun is beating down on them, its heat relentless, and running isn’t quite topping the list of things she’s willing to do right now.
Conceding, she just rolls her eyes at his snark and turns onto the residential street.
“God, it’s hot out,” she says, wishing their uniform was made of anything except wool. “This heatwave picked its moment.”
“It’d be a lot worse if a nuke had hit the city.”
Lucy throws Tim another side-eye, her words filtering through an unintentional giggle. “You and your astute observations.”
“What, you think I’m wrong?”
She huffs, exasperated. “Obviously not, I—”
The rest of Lucy’s sentence is lost when a woman bursts through her front door and barrels towards them. Lucy startles, the tequila still wreaking havoc on her reflexes.
“Is it safe? Was it really fake?” The poor woman’s voice is quivering, and it breaks Lucy’s heart.
“Yes, ma’am,” she says. “The alert was a false alarm—it’s completely safe, there’s no missile.”
“Oh, thank God,” she practically sobs, running back into her home.
Lucy blows out a sigh as they keep walking. “People are still terrified, even though it’s over.”
“Most of them don’t experience emergencies on a daily basis,” Tim says. “Things like this take them a while to shake; it feels like the end of the world to them.”
Lucy’s face scrunches, and Tim seems to realise what he’s said a beat later, the alcohol clearly still muddling his brain a little, too.
“Poor choice of words.”
She snorts. “No kidding.”
The interruption makes Lucy look around, though, noting how eerily quiet it still is, the streets barren despite the threat being over. A few people are beginning to pull open their shutters, but many still have them sealed shut, no sign of life in their homes. It makes sense—for half an hour, people were convinced they were about to die, and the effects of that threat on their lives are lingering.
To Lucy’s surprise, Tim’s the one to break the silence this time.
“Come up with any more wedding revenge ideas?”
She laughs. “What? The world isn’t ending anymore, I don’t need distracting.”
It might be a lie. He doesn’t need to know that.
Tim throws his hands up in a loose shrug. “Look, it’s hot out, I’m just trying to make this go by a little faster. I’m serious about my buddy with the roaches; I know he’s willing to lend them out.”
Lucy shoots him a horrified look, eyes widening. “And how exactly do you know that?”
As his lips part, Tim hesitates, like he’s debating how much to tell. “There might have been an… incident at a bachelor party,” he eventually says, before hurrying to clarify, “I wasn’t involved.”
Despite the curiosity gnawing at her, Lucy decides she’d rather not know the details right this second, the possibilities sending her skin crawling. Instead, she focuses on the part that helps her: “So what I’m hearing is, he does wedding-adjacent events.”
“He sure does.”
Lucy doesn’t love that she’s seriously considering it. She’ll need to give it some more thought once the tequila wears off. “We’ll see.”
Tim shrugs. “Just let me know.”
“Thanks.”
She can’t believe he’s serious—she’d think it was the whiskey if he hadn’t suggested it earlier, while they were still on patrol. Surely there must be a law buried somewhere in there about releasing cockroaches at a wedding—maybe not that specific, but something that’d be enough for Tim to stop her, or to not even suggest it in the first place.
It’s kind of touching that he cares so much. He didn’t have to take it easy on her today, even if his girlfriend suggested it, but he did, because, what? Because deep down, Tim Bradford actually cares about her emotional wellbeing?
It’s sweet. She doesn’t know how to read into it, or if she’s supposed to.
“Are you coming with Rachel to the wedding?” she asks, trying to shift her train of thought away from… that.
His response is immediate. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t do weddings.”
Lucy frowns. “What does that even mean?”
“Sitting through a ceremony for people I don’t know, surrounded by people I don’t know, eating mediocre food, before being dragged onto a crowded dancefloor surrounded the aforementioned people I don’t know after they’ve drank too much? No thanks,” he says. “And even if they weren’t all strangers, it wouldn’t be much better. Hell, the last wedding I went to was mine, and that was…”
Tim trails off with a heavy exhale, shaking his head.
“A disaster?” Lucy fills in.
He barks out a laugh. “Let’s just say I probably should’ve realised our marriage was doomed from the beginning.”
Yikes.
“So, not a huge fan,” he concludes. “I don’t think Rachel got a plus-one, anyway.”
She finds it hard to picture Tim surrounded by all her old college friends. It’s probably best he isn’t there—it might be a little too weird.
“Speaking of Rachel,” she says, “I can’t believe you actually listened to her when she told you to take it easy on me today.”
“Neither can I,” Tim admits. “I was just grateful you clocked on—I spent the morning wondering if you were going to flip the shop again.”
She swats at his arm. “Big talk from the guy currently walking an hour back to the station because he can’t drive.”
He waves his hand like he’s physically dismissing her observation. “We thought the world might end. You wanted to spend your last moments doing what, working?”
Lucy laughs as he takes another sip from his water.
“How are you feeling, anyway?” he asks.
She takes a second to check herself, twisting the cap on her water and following Tim’s lead. “World’s stopped spinning,” she notes. He hums. “You?”
“Same. You were right.”
Maybe the alcohol hasn’t worn off as much as she thought. “I was? About what?”
“This was not a smart idea.” She snorts, because no shit, but then he keeps talking. “Unfortunately, looks like you’ve failed this Tim Test.”
She stops in her tracks, almost tripping over a loose paving slab. “I what?”
Tim stops too, turning to face her. “You should know better than drinking on the job, even if your fellow officer is,” he deadpans. “Peer pressure is dangerous, Officer Chen.”
She’s about to be offended that he’d do this for a fucking Tim Test—until she spots the twitch at the corner of his mouth where he’s barely containing his grin.
“Shut up.” She shoves her shoulder into his arm as they keep walking, and Tim’s responding chuckle sends an inexplicable burst of sunlight through her veins.
“You’re not going to write me up, because then you’d have to explain what you were doing,” she argues.
“True.”
As they keep walking, neither of them move to restore the space between them. Tim’s arm is solid and steady against her shoulder, and it’s just… comfortable. He’s comfortable.
It must be the tequila.
They hadn’t managed to get lunch before the world burst into metaphorical, almost literal, flames, and so Lucy’s bad judgement is lasting a little longer than it normally would. But Tim is her training officer, for God’s sake, and she can’t be thinking about him like this.
She can’t bring herself to move away, though.
“This is definitely one of the crazier days I’ve had on the job,” she says, stating the obvious just to force her train of thought onto a different track.
Tim pulls a face, contemplating it. “It’s in the top 25, for sure.”
She snorts. “Do you have an actual list?”
“I have lists for everything.”
Figures. The man lives on acronyms and mnemonics. Lists slot right into Lucy’s mental puzzle of him, the one she adds new pieces to every damn day.
She finds herself leaning in, leaning a little heavier on his arm. “A list of rookies?”
He nods. “Of course.”
“And, uh… where am I on there?”
Turning his head to squint across the street nonchalantly, he catches her eye after a moment. “In terms of annoyance? Right at the top.”
She swats at him again, but there’s no gap to bridge this time, and instead of his arm, her hand lands solid on Tim’s chest. She drops the contact immediately, settling her hand back on her duty belt before she can think too hard about it.
“In terms of best to worst,” she clarifies.
Tim hums thoughtfully. “Too soon to tell.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yep.”
He offers no more than that. Lucy figures it was worth a shot.
Something warm blooms in her chest at the familiarity of their banter, how comfortable it feels, how she wants more of it. It’s still the alcohol, she knows, so she doesn’t look too closely at it.
When they’re about ten minutes out, Grey’s voice comes over the radio, requesting more units back to the station so they can start restoring some order in the wake of today’s chaos.
Lucy swears the clock is just getting slower, the sun making every step feel like a monumental effort.
The tequila is definitely wearing off now, though. Thank God.
“So, what are we telling Grey about our shop?” Lucy asks.
Tim’s brows draw together. “What?”
“Well, we have to tell him something. You were the one who said we’d ‘figure it out on the way’.” She lowers her voice several octaves for what she thinks is a perfect impression of her TO, but Tim doesn’t look too impressed. “We’re almost there.”
Tim’s expression remains blank. “Uh…”
“Yeah.”
They both take a minute to think about it.
“We could say it broke down,” she suggests.
Tim shakes his head. “No. He’d ask why we didn’t radio it in and ask for a ride.”
“Uh… we could say we were helping Amari get back to his family, and amidst the chaos we… forgot about it?”
He doesn’t even dignify that one with a response, and he’s right. They’d look irresponsible for entirely different reasons than the truth.
“We parked up and had to help civilians run for cover, just in case,” he suggests. “Ended up sheltering far enough out that it was quicker to walk back.”
Lucy chews at her lip, shaking her head.
“Are we overthinking it?” she asks after a moment.
Tim blows out a sigh. “You’re right. He probably won’t even ask.”
“He’ll be too swamped to notice.”
“Exactly.”
Feeling somewhat better about their situation, Lucy relaxes again, and looks over at Tim. They’ve drifted apart as they’ve walked, but they’re still close enough that their arms brush together on occasion. As she eyes the stripes on his sleeve, she remembers something.
“How is preparation for the sergeants’ exam going?”
“Pretty good,” Tim nods. “I feel ready.”
Lucy pulls her lip between her teeth. “Are—are the audiobooks helping?”
She thinks about them a lot, wonders if they were worth it, but she’s always avoided asking in case Tim thinks she did it for the recognition. Recognition is nice, sure, but that’s not why she did it. She did it to help him—Tim’s a good cop, and he deserves to move up. Even if the thought of having someone else as her TO aches a little.
As much as he’s tormented her this year, Tim is… familiar now. They have a good rapport, they understand each other in a way Lucy swears she’s never had with anyone. They just got tipsy together in a corner store in what they thought could be their last moments, for crying out loud. That’s a bridge they can’t uncross.
So, yeah... when Tim gets promoted, it’ll feel weird, even if he deserves it more than anyone she knows.
“They are,” he nods. “I… I really do appreciate you doing that for me, Chen.”
She smiles—the gratitude in his voice is as soft as it had been when she’d handed the tapes over in the station gym.
“Of course.”
“I mean it.”
Her smile stretches into a full-on grin. “It’s fine; you can repay the favour someday.”
She regrets the words as soon as they come out, grin slipping from her face in a blink. What the hell is wrong with her? What is that even supposed to mean?
Despite her internal spiral, Tim laughs. “Sure.”
Okay. If she doesn’t know what she means, then what the fuck does he mean?
Lucy spirals over it in silence as they reach the end of the block. Her pre-occupied, panicked overthinking means she’s not exactly paying attention to where she’s stepping, and her thoughts are interrupted when her foot catches on a paving stone.
“Shit—”
She’s throwing out her hands to try and cushion her fall when one of Tim’s hands grasps her arm, the other wrapping around the front of her waist.
As she tries to regain her footing, she grips on to Tim’s arm for balance, and he lets out a low chuckle.
“You should have some more water,” he half-jokes, lowering his arms back to his sides once she’s righted herself. She ignores the way the loss of contact feels like a loss. “You trip over in the station parking lot, you’ll give the game away.”
Even as she rolls her eyes at him with a tut, she takes a swig from her bottle. It’s definitely easiest if she blames her misstep on the alcohol lingering in her blood.
She’s the first one to keep walking, more than willing to act like nothing happened, because it didn’t, and she’s beyond relieved when they turn the corner a minute later, the station coming into view.
Tim exhales with a smile as they enter the station parking lot. “Well, we made it.”
“Finally,” Lucy says, keeping out of the way of officers driving back out on patrol. “This has been fun, though.”
“An experience, for sure.”
She huffs. “‘An experience’? What does that mean? Good? Bad?”
Tim curls his lips slightly, searching for the right word. “…Unique.”
“I can’t stand you.”
He just smiles at her, blue eyes sparkling in the sunlight, and anything else Lucy was going to say is interrupted when a familiar voice comes from across the parking lot.
“Bradford, Chen,” Grey calls out. “You guys alright?”
Tim nods. “Yes, sir.”
The Watch Commander’s shoulders lower a little as he exhales.
“Good,” he says. “Then where the hell is your shop?”