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trouble's always gonna find you baby (but so will I)

Chapter 10

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Saturday, July 20, 2:48 p.m.

 

Scrambling down the rocks, Tim lands hard, his knees protesting at the strain, and eats up the distance. 

It can’t be Lucy. 

It’s not. It can’t be. 

Did he feel it before, staring down at that trunk? Does he feel it now? Despite the heat, every part of him feels ice cold. Angela is already there, grabbing handfuls of dirt and tossing them aside to exhume the body. Tim drops to his knees beside her and starts digging. He’s thrust back to the first awful day again as they clawed their way down to the barrel. 

It can’t be Lucy

After breaking enough of the dried mud away, they pull the body from the ground. 

“It’s not her,” Angela heaves out. “Thank God.” 

The body appears to be a man, his long hair tied back in a low ponytail, wearing cargo pants, boots, and a dark T-shirt. Underneath him is a backpack with a colorful assortment of park arrowhead patches. With rigor mortis fully set in, his body is stiff, his eyes and mouth wide open and clogged with dirt. 

“Looks like he got caught in the flood,” Angela says. She radios Kern County’s dispatch for an M.E. and additional units to their location. 

Tim drops back onto his heels and blows out a ragged breath. Relief is swift, but the worry remains. Someone geared up for this type of environment didn’t make it, so how much of a chance does Lucy have? 

“Were we following the wrong trail this whole fucking time?” He doesn’t bother to hide the anguish in his voice, not with Angela and not this late in the day. 

She shakes her head, reaching across the body to put a comforting hand on his arm. 

“No, think about it: if those cairns were his and the flooding was this bad, there’s no way they would’ve stayed up. They’re Lucy’s. They have to be.”

He gives a short nod of agreement and drags in a slow, calming breath. 

“You’re right.” 

“I know,” she says with a smirk. “When am I not?”  

Within fifteen minutes, two Kern County vehicles roll up to take over the scene. Knowing that they can’t make it much longer on foot, Tim and Angela commandeer one of the trucks and resume the search.  

 

Saturday, July 20, ???

 

Long ago, I reached for you ‘n there you stood. Holding you again would only do me good; how I wish I could, but you’re so far away.” 

It’s so hot. 

“If I could only work this life out m’way, I’d rather spend it bein’ close to you, but you’re so far ‘way.”

Why is it so hot? 

“Three-seventy-two. Every person… commits public nuisance.”

Don’t stop, keep going. One more step. 

“Three-one-four. Indecent exposure.”  

Keep going. 

No, no stop. Stop, think, observe, plan, says the Tim inside her head. But she has to keep going; he doesn’t know where she is, otherwise he would’ve found her by now. No one knows where she is. 

“I don’t know where I am,” she says with a strained chuckle, the memory of her first day on the job floating into her mind’s eye. What she wouldn’t give to be walking behind a shop in their beat right now. 

It’s been hours. Surely, she’ll run into something soon; a road or a town or a someone, anyone. That’s what she’s been telling herself, but her belief is running out. 

Don’t let go, Tim tells her. She tightens her grip and feels the bite of broken plastic against her skin.

“Two-oh-five. Mmm three. Mayhem.” 

She’s so thirsty. There was so much water before, but now there’s none, been none for hours and hours. Her throat feels like she swallowed glass, the lining scraped raw from breathing in dust with no reprieve. 

Something knocks against her boot. Lucy hums and looks down to see rocks tumble out of her arms and scatter across the dirt. The thought of crouching down to pick them up is too much; she leaves them behind. She tries to look up at the sky to gauge her position, but black spots swarm her vision like flies. Stumbling, she reaches out to stop her fall and cries out as something scratches at her tender skin. All the air escapes her lungs as her body hits the ground. 

Hold on, comes Tim’s voice again. I’m looking for you. Don’t let go

She smells rain. Is it raining? Rolling over onto her side to check, she blinks against the darkness encroaching her vision. Nausea swirls in her gut, so she closes her eyes for a little while. 

Got no quit in you, do you, Chen? So open your eyes. You have to stay awake.  

She will. In a minute, she promises, she’ll open her eyes. A buzzing sound fills her ears; she burrows her head into her elbow to try and escape the noise. Another storm is coming. She can smell it. She has to stay awake. 

Would be so fine to see your face at m’door. D’nt help to know you’re so…

 

Saturday, July 20, 3:06 p.m.

 

Wind batters the truck, bringing dust through the open windows as they ride along a service road. Tim and Angela pay no mind, focusing instead on the wide stretch of desert surrounding them. Off in the distance, the airship searches the channels and gullies of the El Paso Mountains, their barren slopes darkened with the shadows of passing clouds. 

After another mile of nothing, Tim tightens his grip on the steering wheel and curses. 

“She’s out here,” Angela says, keeping her gaze fixed on the passing landscape. “We’ll find her.” 

“She’s had no food or water. It’s been—”

“Then we’ll give her some when we find her.” 

Alongside the road are more creosote bushes, which seem to grow in large clusters here. Miles out the land flattens to a sharp point, broken only by the distant flicker of cars along the highway.

Tim glances back to the road for a moment to navigate around some flood debris. Out of the corner of his eye, something glints in the sunlight. He slams on the brakes, the truck fishtailing as they lose traction. Angela is asking him something, but he can’t think, he can’t breathe. All he can do is regain control of the vehicle and throw it in reverse. 

“What’d you see?” Angela repeats, stretching across the center console to see out his window.  

“I don’t know. A reflection, maybe.” 

Returning to the spot, he slowly rolls the truck forward and keeps his gaze peeled to the left. The reflection comes again from out in the brush. Beside him, Angela gasps, slapping his arm as she lifts the binoculars up. 

“There — she’s there!”

Tim yanks the wheel and guns it off the road, the sudden change in terrain jostling them around in the cab. Sand spits out from the tires as they eat up the distance. Curled up beneath the shade of a creosote bush is Lucy. Barely remembering to throw the truck in park, Tim jumps out and races over to her, yelling her name. He hears Angela radio for a medevac as he lands hard on his knees in the sand and dives under the bush to assess Lucy’s condition. 

“Lucy, it’s Tim. Can you hear me?” Pressing his fingers to her neck, he feels the rapid flutter of her pulse. This close, he sees the shallow lift of her chest as she struggles to breathe normally. Her lips are chapped and her skin is splotched with heat rash. Fresh blood seeps from under the wrapping around her arm and drips down into the dirt. His chest tightens at the sight of the rearview mirror from the car resting in her limp hand.   

Seconds behind him, Angela tosses the first aid supplies down and crouches beside him.

“Is she…?”

“Yeah,” he wheezes out around the lump in his throat and nods. “But her heart’s racing, and her breathing’s shallow. We need to get her cooled down.” 

He squeezes water onto her from their bottles as Angela digs through the first aid kit. Activating the cold packs, she tucks them against Lucy’s neck and under her arms. They spread the foil blanket out and tie it down to create a makeshift lean-to and reflect the sun’s heat. Tim unwraps the dirty jacket from her arm and cleans the wound as best he can before wrapping it with a clean gauze roll. Running his thumb back and forth across the pulse point at her wrist, he keeps up a steady stream of assurances while they wait, with Angela taking over when he radios for updates. Lucy never comes to, but her condition doesn’t worsen, so they take the small victory. 

When the medevac helicopter arrives, the paramedics bring a new flurry of activity. There are oxygen masks, saline bags, and more ice packs, along with question after question. Tim answers what he can — that she’d been missing for twenty-four hours, probably without fluids for just as long, and out in the sun for at least nine of those.  

Climbing aboard the helicopter, he gives a terse nod to Angela and settles in for the ride back to the city. Shortly after takeoff, though, Lucy comes to. Her pulse skyrockets, likely due to the disorienting feeling of being strapped down in the air.  

“Lucy,” Tim tries. He reaches for her hand but is pushed aside as the medics attempt to calm her down. 

“Sergeant, stay seated!” the first barks at him. 

“Try talking to her and see if that will—” the second tries, only to be silenced by Tim. 

“She can’t hear me over the rotors. Get the fuck out of my way,” he snarls. “She’s terrified.”  

The smarter of the two finally scoots back to give him enough space. He crawls forward and grabs Lucy’s hand, his other removing her makeshift headscarf and brushing her hair back. It’s obvious by the panicked sheen to her eyes that she’s not there with him, but back in whatever hell she’s remembering.  

“Lucy, it’s okay. It’s okay. Slow it down, okay. You’re safe with me. You’re in a helicopter. We’re taking you to the hospital.” 

He turns his hand over and slides his fingers in between hers. The reassuring edge of her moonstone ring grazes against his skin. The terror doesn’t completely fade, but relief smoothes out her features. Forgetting himself for a moment, Tim dips forward and kisses the crown of her head. “You’re safe with me. Just try to relax, okay? I’m right here, baby. I’m not going anywhere.” 

Her eyes are on his when he pulls back. She parts her lips, but nothing more than a raspy exhale passes through them. 

“I know,” Tim assures her. “I’m right here.” 

Closing her eyes, she hums and nestles her head into his touch, seeking comfort. As her heart rate calms, joy and guilt and concern and a thousand other emotions cause his own to race. The walls around his heart start to crack and tremble — the ones he built up due to a dead-beat dad and a ghost of a mother, the ones he bolstered during two tours of a literal war zone, the ones Isabel chipped away at but ended up patching as her addiction worsened. The ones that Lucy worked her way past and painstakingly dismantled over the years. He’d spent all these months repairing and rebuilding them, and here came Lucy, demolishing them again. 

Wasn’t he tired of building them back up? This time, maybe, he would embrace their destruction. 

 

Sunday, July 21, 7:57 p.m.

 

“Ouch.”

Tim’s head snaps up from his latest distraction, a dog-eared paperback crime novel that Tamara forced into his hands a few hours ago. 

“Yeah, no kidding. Take it easy.”

Lucy shifts in the hospital bed, grimacing when the motion seems to irritate her sunburnt skin. Her fingers curl around nothing, and her tongue peeks out to run along her chapped lips. Before she can make the request, he’s guiding the water cup and straw to her mouth. She sips greedily, her hand coming up to rest on top of his. 

“You should’ve gone home,” she tells him when she’s done. He’s relieved that her voice doesn’t sound as awful as it did before, but he’ll keep that to himself. “That chair can’t be comfortable to sleep in.”

“It’s not. I don’t care.” 

She rolls her eyes and scoffs at his unwavering expression. Waiting patiently for the questions to come, Tim drags the chair closer to the bed. 

“How long was I asleep?”

“You managed about eighteen hours after they got you settled in here. You’ve been in and out since three.” Glancing out the window at the setting sun, he’s equally surprised at the time. “Looks like you slept past dinner. You hungry?”  

She shakes her head. “Did we catch her?” 

“Yeah, Nolan and Juarez did. She’s in custody.” 

To that, she has no follow-up. Tim lets the room soak in silence, content with watching the gears turn behind her dark eyes. 

“She shouldn’t have gotten the jump on me,” Lucy says after some time. “I was… I was distracted. I think Lopez texted me an update, and I was too busy with my phone.”

“I saw the footage. I disagree.” He tips his chin down to catch her troubled gaze. “You looked up right before she came at you.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I do. You did.” 

Something in her seems to settle at his steady reassurance; the rigid set of her shoulders softens. Her eyes, though, come ablaze when they lift to meet his.  

“She really thought she was doing something by putting me in the trunk. Said that I should’ve thanked her since it would be faster than the barrel.” 

Rage carves at him like a sharpened blade, hot and quick. He hadn’t known the two of them spoke at all. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though,” Lucy continues. “Why me? I had nothing to do with the trafficking case.”

“But I did.” At her furrowed mouth and brow, he looks away. “I was the one who killed Ames during his arrest. Since I took away her chance at revenge with him, Kipling wanted me to pay instead. It’s my fault.”

“No, Tim, that’s not—”

“No, it is,” he bowls right over her, clenching his fists atop the blanket. “If I’d gone farther back through her location history, I would’ve seen where she visited your apartment multiple times. I never should’ve let you walk out of the station alone. She came after you because of me.” He pauses, gathering courage.

This time, though, Lucy crosses the finish line first. 

“Because she went after the people they love, just like we thought.”

He nods his head; she draws in a breath and holds it. His gaze stays locked to the tile floor beneath his feet, then lifts to meet hers. He wouldn’t lie to her. After all these months, despite the distance he purposefully created between them, he still loves her. He loves her enough for some psycho hellbent on revenge to take notice and try to take her away.  

“I’m so sorry,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat. “We aren’t even— you didn’t—”

“How’d you find me this time?” she interrupts. 

“You saved yourself, yet again.” Tim lets out a soft huff and shakes his head. “Taking that mirror with you saved your life.”

“Figured you would need something bigger than my ring this time,” she says with a small grin. 

He doesn’t want to think about how easily he could have missed her, if it weren’t for the mirror. 

“You were less than two miles from the highway. You nearly made it.” 

“Yeah, but I didn’t,” she counters. “At first, I had to get out of all that water. But by morning I had no idea where I was. I kept walking because I thought I would run into something eventually. Near the end, though, I was… out of it. I kept hold of that mirror because I knew that if I couldn’t make it out of there that you would find me.”

“I always will,” he promises. “No matter what. You might not like it, but.” He stops there, ending his sentence with a helpless sort of shrug. 

“I never said I didn’t.” 

They share a weighted look and if it were another time, another place, he knows she would bring the moment out into the light and study it with him. But now isn’t the time. That could come later, after. 

“You should go home.” She gently squeezes his hand. “Get some rest.” 

“Are you— will you be okay? Do you want me to—”

“You have more than cashed in the small doses you owe me. I think I might owe you some now.”

He squirms at the gratitude. She’s joking, of course, and smiling up at him, and god how he’s missed that, but some part of him wants to assure her that it wasn’t like that.

“That’s not why—”

“No, no, I know.” Her thumb skims back and forth across his knuckles. “All I’m saying is that I’ll be okay. Really. Thanks, Tim.”

“Okay, then.” He gets to his feet and hopes the smile on his face is convincing. “Goodnight.” 

He wants to stay, like he did years ago, to make sure she would be okay. He wants to never let her out of his sight again — but he no longer has that right. And the last thing he wants is to make her uncomfortable. Or even more so, considering she’s only lying in this bed and not her own after another brush with death because he can’t stop loving her. 

“Hey,” Lucy beckons. “C’mere.” 

She raises her arms and he bends down. All Tim can see are the lines and wires attached to her as she pulls him into a hug. Curling her good arm up and around him, she squeezes the base of his neck; his vision clouds with tears as he tightens his hold around her. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs against his shoulder. 

Trying to push down the overwhelming relief at having her in his arms again is futile; it wells inside of him until the pressure becomes too much. He drops a kiss to the crown of her head and she softly hums. He would hike eleven more miles through the desert just to hear it again.

“Everybody else was looking for you, too. It wasn’t just me.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says, leaning back to catch his gaze. “But none of them are here, are they?”

Avoiding her observation, Tim busies himself with ensuring her comfort before he takes his leave. He returns her phone, drapes another blanket across her legs, and sets her up with the television remote. 

Once out in the hallway, he watches through the window as she closes her eyes and curls up, all alone in the fading daylight. After dropping by the nurses’ station to let them know Lucy is awake and cognizant — though for how long, he isn’t sure — Tim steps into the elevator and sends a text to Tamara. 

Do you have time to bring Lucy something to eat tonight? 

sure thing

I’m finishing a project and then I’ll be there

Visiting hours end at 9 

no sweat

former criminal remember?? Sneaking into a hospital is child’s play

Thank you. Also I’m going to act like I didn’t see that last text.

 

Tamara sends a string of laughing and food-related emojis. He rolls his eyes and pockets his phone. 

 

Sunday, July 21, 9:17 p.m.

 

Tim makes it as far as his entryway before he’s bowled over by eighty pounds of dog. 

“Yeah, I know, I know. I missed you, too, you fiend.” Crouching down, Tim caves to Kojo’s request for belly rubs. “Did you have a good time at Genny’s? Did her kids wear you out so you’ll actually sleep through the night?” 

Kojo lets out a dramatic huff as if his weekend away was a chore. Before he can interrogate the dog further, Tim’s phone dings. It’s a photo message from Lucy, of to-go containers spread across the tray table and the TV frozen on people lounging in a hot tub, with Tamara’s shoulder in frame. 

Did she remember to ask for extra pickles? 

The diner was closed, so she brought me Thai instead 

I can bring you a veggie burger tomorrow if you’d like

Wouldn’t say no to that

He watches the three dots appear and disappear. Deciding to take pity on her and the late hour, he tucks his phone away, giving her an out from whatever she wanted but couldn’t say. He understands the feeling all too well. 

Which is why it’s surprising when his phone trills with an incoming call two minutes later. 

“Just so you know,” Lucy starts off with as soon as he answers, “I’m still taking you out to dinner. It’s the least I can do for saving my life.”

In the background, Tamara groans and heckles whatever show they’re watching. The two women have a rapid, whispered conversation about Nurse Trunchbull and not getting tossed out by the pigtails. 

“By that logic,” Tim finally says once the fight has settled, “I should have bought you dinner when you saved mine last year.”

Lucy hums low in her throat. “Sounds like we have two dinners to schedule, then.”

“Yeah, sounds like.”

“We can discuss it when you stop by tomorrow.”

“Okay, sounds good.” He’s unable to hide the grin that spreads across his face. “See you tomorrow, Lucy.”

“See you tomorrow, Tim.” 

Notes:

Hi, hello, here starts my long-winded author’s note at the end. It has been so long since I’ve written anything with more than three to four characters in a scene. This was a fun exercise in appropriate dialogue tagging. It’s also the closest I’ve ever come to writing a post-breakup fic (I’m a serial established / in-progress relationship girlie). I don’t know how some of y’all do it because I was dying to have these two get back together in this, but the timing just didn’t feel right. Hence the hopeful, open ending. I mean let’s be real, they definitely get back together (fingers crossed it’s the same for the tail end of season 7).
The song Lucy sings to herself in this chapter is "So Far Away" by Carole King. I cycled through quite a few songs (You Belong to Me by Patsy Cline, Someone to Watch Over Me by Ella Fitzgerald, All of Me by Billie Holiday) until I landed on King’s. I’ll just pretend Lucy sang the rest to herself off-screen during her impromptu hike.
I did have an alternate take on the rescue scene, but this show loves its parallels (and I love that it loves them) so I couldn’t resist a do-over of the ‘sparkle of light in the desert’ scene. If you’ve seen the season 8 premiere of CSI, you’ll notice the several parallels there too.

 

tldr: hope you enjoyed, thanks for reading!