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“Again.”
His breath stutters through him sharp, whip-like, echoes between his ears before sinking against his ribs like concrete.
“Tim. Again.”
His knuckles aren’t knuckles anymore. Three different shades of red, crusted and congealed in places and metallic and shiny in others. He used to hate blood, still does, he guesses, if the way his stomach clenches and heaves is any indication.
A hand grabs his wrist so hard the bones creak. Stale air wafts his way on a furious exhale, whiskey and cigarette ash and breath mints. “You deaf or something, kid? Put your damn hands in. I said we’re going again.”
So he does, shuts off so swiftly and automatically he can almost hear the fizz and static pop, like when they turn their big TV off for the night. Can still hear the hum and feel the residual heat subsumed slowly by the nothingness. Reminds him he’s still got homework to do. He’s failing social studies, of all fucking things. Nobody seems to think it’s a problem, though. Tim is some kind of early pubertal freak of nature. Gets it from his dad, people said, always so thrilled to comb through the family genes, highlight the exploitable parts, leave the rest. So people look at him and think sports, they think probably military bound, they think nobody cares if he turns out dumber than a sack of shit.
He shoves his hands into the tins of iron pellets, grimacing, grimacing, shaking. Another shade of crimson. Coppery, maroon, more brown than red. Fuck, he thinks, and can hear his little sister in his head, with her supersonic fucking hearing gasp out, Timmy said a bad word!
His hands shove in again. A muscle at the corner of his eye twitches.
Fuck.
In the end, it’s his own body that relents, screeches to a stop, the last fraying bit of self-preservative instinct.
“Tim.”
The wind is up, rips through the threadbare sleeves of his secondhand jacket.
“Tim.”
“I can’t do anymore today.”
His voice comes out small and stupid and pathetic. He cringes.
“Can’t or won’t?”
He hocks a glob of spit at the ground, says nothing.
“Can’t or won’t, Tim?”
“Can’t.” He spits again, runs his tongue over his front teeth. Then, “Won’t.”
The slap to the side of his face is familiar but still surprising. His cheek smarts and his ear rings.
“Raised a fucking smartass,” his father grumbles. “Try to teach your kid how to survive, how not to be worth fuck all in this world, and what do I get? Lip.” He flexes his hand, like he might go in for a hit to get his point across better, but just ends up turning with a disappointed tsk.
“World’s gonna spit you out,” his dad tells him, before stalking back inside the house. Dinner should be about ready. Genny is probably kicking her legs at the table, trying and failing to french braid one of her doll’s hair, because this week she wants to grow up to be a hair dresser.
Tim goes inside and heads straight for the bathroom, locking the door. He grabs a chipped, plastic mixing bowl he got for cheap at a yard sale and fills it with soap and water and sets his hands in it. It stings, of course it does. He looks at his reflection in the lopsided mirror, doesn’t like what he sees, so watches the water in the bowl instead turn cloudy and then pink and then red.
It all started with Sunday morning roll call and Nyla's shadowed face and the words, "Lucy missed check in."
Silence in the briefing room, and then:
"Lucy missed check in three times."
Tim hadn't been around to hear it first hand. He was at home staring at Kojo and pacing his house restless and directionless as he usully felt these days. Wonder of all wonders, spectacularly blowing up all areas of your life could leave you feeling a little off kilter without that golden moral compass around to help. Who knew. So, he took a few days off work to cope. Or so everyone would forget about his time in the IA hot seat and move onto other things.
But then Lopez texted him, "It's about Lucy," and that was all he needed before he was grabbing his coat and heading out the door.
Tim never wanted to be detective. A lot of lonely paper shuffling and pissing contests and business professional attire. No thanks. He was always more of a uniform guy. Singular part of an outfit. Little league, football, army, LAPD. So he had a lot of experience in groups, and leading groups, and analyzing groups, and he could tell when there was disarray. He could tell when there was a problem, and who the problem was.
The problem is, is that the problem is him.
But he's in a rundown shed in the middle of Who Fucking Knows, Nevada, staring at five people around a table who are armed to the teeth, and they all know he's the odd man out. They know he doesn't belong.
What Tim knows, is that Lucy is in the basement of this shed.
And he's either leaving here with her, or he's not leaving here at all.
Angela’s face appeared above him, her unimpressed smirk haloed by the fluorescent ceiling lights.
He didn't pause in his reps. “Go away.”
“No spotter?”
“Go away.”
“You’re acting like you don’t know me at all, Bradford, c’mon, be serious.” She didn't waver even a little, so he did one more rep and set the weights down, curling up to sit at the end of the bench and press a towel to his face.
“Tim.”
“Angela.”
“Stop screwing around.” She walked in front of him, badge dangling around her neck, hands on her hips. “You go radio silence for almost two days and then barrel in here like your ass is on fire, no pleasantries, no Hey Angela sorry for ignoring your well-intentioned attempts to check in on my well-being. What the hell?”
The truth was, Tim spent the twenty-four hours after her text trying to reach Lucy and then having one long panic attack that would stutter and stop like an old car and then sat on his couch and he dissociated in thought. The truth was, he couldn't remember the last time he ate something. The truth was, he hadn't slept. The truth was, he couldn't imagine ever sleeping again.
But he didn't say any of that, obviously.
What he said was, “I was busy.”
The vein in Angela’s forehead was dangerously close to bursting out and smacking him in the face. Her mouth tightened at the corners and the shade fell over her eyes. Jesus but she could be terrifying. He forgot that sometimes, now that they didn't work so close together anymore.
Angela took a step forward and latched onto his shoulder with an iron grip, a stony smile. “Hey, Tim.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not—” He threw the towel into a hamper and stood. “It’s fine. Just stupid personal stuff.”
"Stupid personal stuff."
"Yeah."
"No such thing when it comes to you."
"Well, first for everything, I guess."
Angela's phone rang before she could open her mouth to respond. She read the caller ID and then rolled her eyes, jabbing an incrimnating finger at him as she edged toward the door. "We're not finished here."
Tim held his hands up and she gave a curt nod before striding out the door with a sharp, "This is Lopez."
You are an incredible person. You deserve so much better. That's why I'm walking away.
(This is not okay.)
I'm sorry.
(What you're doing is not okay.)
I know.
He hit pushup number thirty-six when the realization washed over him.
Of course he was going to go look for her.
Kojo whined from his bed. His lust for life and lunacy had never quite rebounded since Tim broke it off with Lucy. Real perceptible for a dog who did nothing but eye Tim's couch hungrily and chew on some bones. He'd also suddenly forgotten he was supposed to shit outside. Go figure.
He finished out the set to fifty. Kojo whuffed from his bed. Tim rolled to his feet and squatted by him and rubbed his ears.
"I know buddy," he murmured. "Me, too."
At the end of the day, when it came to Lucy, there wasn't much he was too above doing. Which is how he found himself sitting across from Tamara at a coffee joint in town. She regarded him with a skeptical eyebrow, her expression a perfect marriage of guarded suspicion and sassy snark that was one hundred percent Lucy Chen.
"Thanks for meeting me," he started, fiddling with the cardboard holder around his cup.
Tamara shrugged. "Well, when the great Tim Bradford requests your presence . . ."
"Tamara."
"Just sayng," she muttered, sipping loudly at her latte.
He fought back a sigh, gazing quickly around at the other patrons. Mostly college students. He felt distinctly out of place. "You talked to Lucy lately?"
She snorted. "Oho. So that's what this is. An intel gathering mission."
Tim scowled. "No, that's—"
"You're the one—"
"Tamara, that's not—" he scratched nails through his hair. "Can you please just answer the question?"
She surveyed him again, eyes cutting, taking another sip of her drink. "Not for a couple weeks."
He nodded.
"Is . . ." Her eyes narrowed, peering straight through to him. "Is she okay?"
"Fine," he lied easily. "She's fine."
Tamara nodded.
"How are you?" he asked.
Tamara shrugged again. "I like having my own place, and . . . things are good."
"Nobody's been bothering you, right? You feel safe?"
She laughed.
"What?"
"Papa bear," she murmured, almost quiet enough that he missed it. And then, looking at him, "You sound like Lucy."
"Oh, what, I can't worry about you, too?"
"Nope, not anymore." She grabbed her cup and stood from her chair. "I got somewhere to be in a few. It was good to see you, Tim." She paused. "Don't let Lucy know I said that."
Tim played through a couple of broken ribs once in high school. It was the state championship football game. The whole town was there. He was never going to go pro but there were people on his team who definitely would. He had to do it for them. One outfit. One team.
He finished a mission overseas with a broken ankle.
He's no stranger to pain. No stranger to adrenaline. Three women and two men sit around him at the table. They all look at him like they're gauging the capabilities of a wild animal. Tim has a knife. The rest of his go-bag in the truck. No time to draw the knife before he would be shot dead. No time to run for the door before he would be shot dead. His eyes flicker slightly to he side, to the one unopened door in the room. Lucy is in the basement. Even if he could make it, there's no leaving without Lucy.
So.
No weapons.
No running.
He flexes his hands underneath the table.
World's gonna spit you out, kid.
"This is the way everything turns out, you don't get no time to prepare."
Tim stares at the still water of the lake, the moist, knobby ridges of the old pier beneath his bare feet. They're at the family camping spot, but it's just the two of them. Dad had said he was taking Tim out for his ninth birthday. Tim had just wanted to run by the arcade with some friends. Instead he's here, cold, shivering on the inside and on the outside, way too aware of the looming shadow of his father.
"You don't get no time," said man repeats, taking a long swig from a paper bag. Tim's younger sister still thought it was water. Tim knew better. Had known for a while.
"Dad, what are we doing here? I wann go play games with Archie."
"You're not with Archie, you're with me. Now, come on."
Tim blinks at the water. "I don't know how to swim."
"Not yet you don't."
"I don't—"
His father didn't wait for anymore back and forth, just lifted the bag to his mouth and shoved Tim into the middle of the lake in one smooth motion.
Tim had been in the water once before. Rare family trip to the ocean. Rare as in, happened one time and then never again. But he'd been five or six, feet in the water, looking out at the surfers and the swimmers when he made accidental eye contact with an older kid, a teenager, right before something dragged him under the water. After that it was just screaming and bloody, foamy water and chaos.
He never wanted to go near water again. And it had never been a problem. They couldn't afford to go to the pool and never made it back to the beach. So it didn't matter.
Water gushes into his mouth, his nose, stings his eyes. HIs arms flail and his legs churn and by some great miracle, his head breaks the surface.
"Dad!" he splutters, chokes, hacks. "Dad, h-help! Help me!"
His dad stands at the very edge of the pier, the toes of his boots hanging off. He drinks from the brown paper bag and stares down at him and doesn't move.
Tim sinks under again.
He fights and chokes on more water, sees the mottled kaleidoscope of lights rippling over the surface, always out of reach. He can hear his heart in his ears, feel it in his fingertips. He tries blinking but the act doesn't clear the black spots away from his vision.
And then a hand is yanking him out of the water and onto the pier. Tim crumples to the wood and pukes lake water, stomach acid, pukes until he's heaving with nothing left. Snot and tears run tracks down his face, bile clinging to his lips and chin. When he seeks his father he finds him still looming like a god about to enact his will, the Great Judgment.
Tim tries to apologize, but can't seem to catch his breath. His dad finishes the drink and then tosses it onto the pier by Tim's head. It shatters.
They lock eyes.
"Chewed up," his dad says. "Spit right out."
And he turns on his heel and staggers back to the truck.
Rules matter, boot.
Then what the hell are you doing out here?
Some things matter more.
They cornered him at his house near midnight.
Angela gave him one of her patented looks and Nyla just said, "You're an idiot."
Which. Yeah. That was never in question.
Still. He turned from the door and back to his go-bag. "You can't stop me."
"Nobody's trying to stop you, hot shot. If it was Wesley I would do the same thing. Hell, I have done the same thing. Tim." Angela pushed his shoulder to get him to look at her. "If Lucy was taken by Mona's crew, you're gonna need backup."
He considered his options. None of them were great. Mona was some new up and comer, a small fry in the grand scheme of things. Supposed to be a quick undercover intel hit, according to Nyla. The only issue was, people were only small fry until they weren't. They always escalated. Mona Garrett was a Standford drop-out with a frightening IQ who stirred up trouble because she got bored. Lucy was good, but the chances of a person like Mona seeing through the whole operation . . . well, point being, she was always going to escalate. Only a matter of time.
"Less chance of things going belly up if it's just me," he said. "She'll be jumpy, expecting the whole squad."
"Three of us in plain clothes is hardly the armada rolling in, Tim."
"No." He slammed his hand down on the table. Kojo whimpered. "It's Lucy. I'm not willing to risk that."
Angela exchanged a look with Nyla, who stepped forward. "Look, Tim, I get it, okay? We get it. But we still have to think this through like professionals, not clueless renegades."
"What is there to think through, Harper? Lucy went undercover, she was compromised. Mona isn't known for being generous and it's already been nearly a week since Lucy's last check in. We're way behind the eight ball and you know it." He yanked the zipper closed. "I'm not willing to risk another second."
Nyla huffed, jaw clenching. "Stew the dramatics, Bradford. You're being irrational."
"I'm not—" He cut himself off with a deep breath, head hanging low, one strap of the bag gripped in his fist. "We have a location. I have—I need to go. I gotta go."
"Nyla, he's not gonna bend." Angela stepped foward, offering a little shrug. "It's Lucy." As if that explained everything.
And. Of course it did.
Of course it did.
Nyla growled. "Fine. Fine. But we're tracking you. We will be your backup, Bradford. Bare bones."
He nodded, thankful beyond words, so overcome with some kind of emotion it clogged his throat. "Thank you."
"Don't thank us yet." She shook her head, texting somebody on her phone. "This goddamn team, I swear."
His mom loved birds.
She would wake him up early in the spring, a finger to her lips, robe fastened tight around her slim waist, a cup of coffee in her hand. They'd sit outside on their rickety porch and listen to the birds. She wasn't always all there, near the end, but she was most herself in the early bleed-through of the morning, a liminal space that felt all their own. Sequestered and safe from the organic passage of time.
"Listen, Tim," she'd say, face uplifted, dark blond hair cacooning her features in soft, frazzled tendrils. "Hear that? Purest thing in the world."
He didn't care much for birds, to be honest. Just wanted to be out there at a time when the world didn't exist, when his mother wasn't too afraid to touch him.
One morning she took him out, a rare moment of lucidiy in a long string of hard days, and held him close on their porch swing.
"The male birds sing to attract a mate," she told him, and rocked back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. "Or to protect their territory, make sure other birds know to stay away."
"Yeah," he'd said. She'd told him a dozen times before, the same conversation.
But then, something different: "Female birds sing too," she whispered, breath rustling the cowlick in his sleep tousled hair. "They can warn. They can threaten. A lot of birds sing, and it seems so pretty. Some things are like that, sweetie. They sound so pretty you get distracted by the sharp teeth going for your throat unti it's too late."
She'd worked herself up a little bit, the muscles in her body tight. Tim had waited for her to say something else, felt the air shift around them. But then she just turned to him with a smile and said, "Pancakes? I'm thinking pancakes."
They still went out together some mornings, after that. But she never talked about birds again.
This was the thing about Lucy.
She grew on you like a fungus. Buzzed around your head like a bumblebee. Loomed over your periphery like a shadow. Jabbed at you over and over like a thorn. Put her shields up like a fortress. Struck you like a viper. Defended you with claws and teeth. Cradled you in the palm of her hand. Held you against her chest.
This was the thing about Lucy, is that there wasn't just one thing.
It was all of it.
It was everything.
At this point, they're all just waiting for the first move.
Tim doesn't suspect they ever bought his cover story. They were toying with him. Playing with their food. But they're done now. Hungry.
Time to eat.
All of them have a gun. The woman in the middle has a knife strapped to her thigh. There's a shotgun leaning against the wall behind them. If he can avoid that he might have a chance. Odds aren't great no matter which way he shakes it but he's done more with a lot less.
He says, "You have something here I'm taking home with me."
The woman on the far left twitches, and that's all it takes.
Tim upends the table and draws his knife and doesn't think.
He just moves.
The bird flies into the window just as they're pulling into the driveway after the funeral.
Tim flings his door open and sees it flopping there on the ground, beady eyed and panicked and restless. He stoops over and cradles it in his hands. Genny is still in the back of the car, catatonic. She wouldn't say a word for the next three weeks.
His father slides out from behind the wheel with a grunt.
"What the hell are you doing."
"It's hurt," Tim says.
"It's a goddamn bird, Tim."
"It's hurt."
His father just sighs, draws a hand down his face, shakes his head as he walks into the house. Eventually Genny drags herself after him. Tim stares down at the bird in his hands and realizes he doesn't know what he'd do with it. Put it in his room? Splint its wing? Everything died eventually, anyway.
His dad would be reaching for the bottle. It was just Tim now between him and Genny.
Some things broke. Some things shattered. Not everything could be fixed.
He sets the bird back in the grass and walks away.
He gets behind the closest guy to him and rams a fist into his throat, wrenches a wrist behind him as he grabs the gun. He uses the guy as a shield and shoots two of the others, one in the stomach and one in the thigh. They drop. Tim breaks the kneecap of the person in his hold and sends him to the ground, howling in pain.
Two left.
He can do this. Shut it down, compartmentalize, tunnel vision, focus. He can do this. He's been trained for these moments since he could walk.
A bullet glances his arm but he doesn't stop. Another skitters wide left, just in time for him to bodily confront them. They go down hard in a struggle for the gun. There's one more left, he knows there's one more left reaching for her gun, training it on him, preparing to shoot any moment now . . .
There's a series of dull thuds, a crashing sound. His eyes shut as the loud pop goes off, and then another. He waits for pain that never comes. The body over him slumps, dead weight. His brains whirs and clicks back to life. What the hell?
"Shoulda known I'd . . . I'd be . . . s-saving y'r ass."
His body jolts and he rolls out from underneath the body. It's Lucy standing in the room—swaying, more like. Small pistol in her hand. Two bodies on the floor. She seems to try for a smile, but then her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses.
"Lucy . . . oh my god, oh my god. Lucy!" He scrambles over and cups either side of her face and gives it a gentle shake, and then again, harder when she doesn't respond. There's blood everywhere, all over, he can't even begin to parse if it's hers or somebody else's or both—who is he kidding—of course it's both.
"Lucy!"
She sucks in a sharp breath, eyes blinking open. Her pupils are sluggish. Head injury, most likely. There's a cut over her forehead crusted with dried blood. Her right arm is dangling and the left still has a thick rope bound around it, the rest trailing behind her in a frayed, jagged line. Her shirt is torn and her jeans are a mess of dirt and blood. She's missing a shoe. She's alive. He feels close to the edge of a nervous breakdown, but he shoves it down and soldiers through it. Lucy is here. Lucy needs him.
"Hey," he whispers, pressing his lips to the uninjured portin of her forehead. "Hey. Hey, baby. You're okay. I got you. I got you."
"Tim," she slurs. "M'arm. Broke down the door. S'dislocated."
He swallows hard. "Okay. Okay."
Her chin trembles, and he wants to take her into him, shelter her behind his ribs, wrap her around his beating heart. "Y'gotta do it."
He'd rather cut his own arm off, but he can see the pain glossing over her eyes. He can help her in this way, right now. So he moves to the side of her and braces her body against his. He doesn't even count to three. When he feels the joint grind back into place, he nearly empties his stomach.
Lucy bites back a scream. The veins in her neck bulge, tears streaking through the grime on her cheeks. She collapses against him and he buries his face in her hair, hands on her body, just breathing. Breathing. She's shuddering against him. His body is frozen, locked in time. What if he moves and she crumbles to dust. What if he moves and he opens his eyes into the dream where they never find her.
Her breath on his neck is different from those dreams, though. The weight of her body on his presses him into reality.
"We gotta get up," he murmurs, finding her injured arm and guiding it against her body. "We gotta get out of here. Can you walk?"
She doesn't respond for a moment, but she breathes, seems to be rallying herself. And then he feels her nod. "Y-yeah. Yeah. I can walk."
"I'm right here beside you. I'm not leaving you."
She nods again, exhaustion written into every line of her body. He stands and she rises along with him. She looks like she's been dragged through hell and then backed over, but god help him if she's not the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
"Ready?"
She nods and shrugs half-heartedly. Winces. He'll take what he can get.
Together they hobble toward the door. She lists against him more and more. He takes her weight. Sirens sound in the distance. They're in a shed in the middle of nowhere. He's exhausted. He hasn't slept in forty-eight hours. But Lucy is with him. He presses his cheek against her head. She's here.
He sheds his jacket and fashions a makeshift sling, just enough until the paramedics arive, enough to give her a little relief. They stand there facing each other, not a word between them. He lifts his hand to her face and brushes the pad of his thumb along her cheek. Red and blue swirl on the horizon, closing in. Her eyelashes flutter, gobbed with old mascara and dirt and tears and flecks of blood. He touches his thumb to the center of her chin, her mouth. Looking in her eyes he can almost feel his mother's hand on his back, the creak of the porch's floorboards under his feet. Lucy exhaless and the world falls out of orbit. Her lip twittches and the sky bleeds into eternal morning.
He closes his eyes and presses his forehead to hers, and he swears he can hear the birds sing.
"Grey is not happy with you."
Tim groans. "Good morning to you, too."
"He's not a fan of mine or Nyla's right now, either."
He shrugs.
"You owe us so much free babysitting, I hope you know that."
He smiles, because he does. "Thank you."
She scoffs. "Just another day on the job."
He scrapes his thumb along the lip of his coffee cup. "Yeah."
Angela hovers for a moment, assessing. Always assessing. "You haven't seen her yet, huh?"
"Can't you mind your business for like, two seconds?"
"Nope, sorry, call me chronically nosey, it's why I'm a detective." She crosses her arms. "Go and see her, Tim."
"She doesn't—" A harsh sigh escapes him. "It's complicated."
"Okay. Well, maybe it can be complicated tomorrow. Maybe today you can just be the person that loves her."
He swigs the rest of the coffee, tosses the empty container in the trash. An ambulance careens into the space in front of the ED. Angela rolls his eyes and kicks his shin lightly with her boot. "Just love her, today," she repeats, and then walks off toward a car pulling up alongside the curb. Wesley gives a meager wave from behind the wheel. Tim nods back.
He doesn't move for a good long while, until the sun starts dipping lower. And then he gets off the bench and strides through the hospital and slaps the visitor sticker onto his chest and finds the first thing in the gift shop, which is a stuffed bluejay holding a plush bouqet of flowers.
Lucy is asleep in the bed when he arrives, the bruises that are visible gone dark, sickly and yellow around the edges. He keeps moving before he has time to think, hearing Angela in his head. It can be complicated tomorrow. Today can just be this.
He sets the bluejay in her lap and levers her up just enough that he can slide into the bed behind her, maneuvering his legs uncomfortably over the guardrails. She settles back against his chest and wraps her arms around the bluejay in her sleep. He shuts his eyes and thinks, this has to be it. If there's peace to be felt and birds to hear sing, this has to be what it is.
A peace he doesn't deserve, a solace he will never earn.
But, still.
He holds her closer, tells himself he'll be gone before she wakes up.
It can be complicated tomorrow.
Today, there's only this.
Do you love me?
Yes. I love you.
Hmm —
(A smile)
— True.