Chapter Text
1.
Lucy isn’t expecting it, is the thing.
She’s ready for it to be a bad day. At some point in the very near future, she’s going to dump her boyfriend for another man, and – despite all the questionably-helpful practice runs with Aaron – there’s no way either of them makes it through that without it hurting, especially since Chris has no idea it’s coming. He loves her. He’s so excited for them to be buying a house together, blind to Lucy’s reluctance. He thinks they’re happy, thinks they’re working together to take the next step even as Lucy’s got one foot out the door, already halfway gone on her sergeant and most of the way to a place where that doesn’t terrify her.
Telling Chris that last part isn’t in the plan, but even without that detail, the break-up is going to crush him.
So today was always gonna suck, even before the addition of a missing baby at Hep-C Central. Lucy’s ready for today to suck.
She’s less ready for the bullets.
She should know better, as an honour-roll graduate from the Tim Bradford School of Constant-Vigilance-Keep-Your-Head-On-A-Swivel-And-Your-Gun-Hand-Free, but in practice, very little of the violence they encounter is truly random. There’s almost always some build-up – a warning from Dispatch about what they’re walking into, the shift of a suspect about to go for a weapon, the pressure in the air as a domestic is about to go sideways.
This call has none of that, other than the vague sense that they’re being watched – unsurprising, given the nature of the no-tell-motel they’re searching – and they’re looking for an abandoned baby, not a hardened felon.
So Lucy isn’t expecting it, isn’t expecting her day to get any worse than the possibility they’re about to find a dying infant and the looming prospect of breaking up with her boyfriend.
She and Aaron are both on edge as they follow the housekeeper’s directions to the second level of the motel – the way they’d cleared out the carpark with their mere presence was a clear indicator that they were effectively in enemy territory, but most criminals are pragmatic enough to err on the side of flight when they get the chance.
Usually.
Lucy’s counting doors along the balcony when she registers one of them swinging open just ahead of her, then the increase in volume of the music from inside, then the figure emerging from the room. She scans him automatically, a rote sweep of her eyes from his head on down, and he sees them at the same time she spots the weapon at his hip.
After that, instinct takes over.
“Gun!” The call is automatic, as is the muscle memory that has her hands pulling her weapon from its holster and her feet backing away before her brain has fully registered what’s happening.
The suspect starts shooting the moment his gun clears his waistband, though the way he’s holding it – cocked sideways, gangsta-style – means his aim is atrocious, and he does far more damage to the housekeeping cart next to them and the railing behind it than either of the two officers he’s firing at. Lucy reflexively squeezes off two quick shots in the time it takes him to empty his clip, but they’re rushed and poorly aimed, one missing entirely and one skimming along the suspect’s shoulder before ricochetting off the metal railing and through the window of a room further along the balcony.
‘Sloppy, boot,’ the Tim-voice in her head barks, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on it before she’s charging forward, grabbing the suspect by his empty gun, the barrel hot against her palm, and curling herself under his guard. Aaron is right behind her – not shot, not dead, thank god – and between them they manage to force him back into his room, away from any bystanders that might decide to intervene on his behalf.
The fight is quick and messy, and by the time they’ve got him subdued, Lucy’s got an adrenaline stitch throbbing along her side and a sick feeling curdling in her stomach at the thought of a lone infant in this cesspit of a motel.
“You got him?” she asks Aaron, already halfway to the door of the room they’d crashed into.
“Huh?”
“Do you got him?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to 263!”
“We weren’t even here for you, you moron,” she hears Aaron say as she bolts from the room, pulling her gun and squeezing her hands around the grip to ease the way the adrenaline is making them shake.
The wail of approaching sirens heralds the arrival of a cavalcade of back-up as she moves quickly along the balcony – even here, someone will have reported the shots fired, and neither she nor Aaron have responded to their radios. Lucy gives it maybe five minutes before half the division shows up, but that’s a distant concern. She’s more worried about the neat bullet hole punched through the window of room 263, likely the result of her hasty ricochet.
The door is – predictably – locked, and there’s no response when Lucy calls a challenge.
“Police, I’m coming in!” she warns, before rearing back and kicking the door in. The movement aggravates the stitch in her side, lancing a bolt of pain from hip to clavicle, but Lucy ignores it as she clears the room, breathing an internal sigh of relief when she spots her misaimed bullet embedded harmlessly in the wall just above the bed. No harm done.
There’s no evidence of a baby in the room, but the box Ryan’s girlfriend described is nestled next to the mini fridge. Lucy clears the bathroom quickly before sinking down beside it, briefly steeling herself for the worst before she pries the lid open.
She needn’t have worried. Inside, cocooned in a nest of blankets and apparently no worse for wear, the baby blinks up at her with huge blue eyes and coos softly as Lucy reaches for her.
“Hi, baby, hi,” Lucy murmurs, lifting the infant to cradle against her side.
“She okay?” Aaron asks from the doorway. Behind him, the first of their back-up has arrived and is wrestling their gunslinger away as he curses and strains against the cuffs.
“Yeah, not a scratch. Call it in,” Lucy says, shifting her hold on the baby so she can stand.
The adrenaline rush from the unexpected gunfight is fading, slowing her pulse and evening out her breathing. The stitch in her side persists, though, throbbing in time with her heartbeat, but Lucy ignores it as Aaron reports the code-4 into his radio. The baby coos in her arms and reaches to wrap chubby little fingers around Lucy’s badge, drawn by the shine of light on metal.
Lucy’s first real warning that something’s seriously wrong comes when she makes it to her feet and has to lock her knees to get her trembling legs to take her weight.
Her second is the way her vision swims when she glances down, then goes grey and fuzzy around the edges.
Her third is the dark stain on the carpet where she’d been kneeling.
Oh. That’s blood.
She’s bleeding.
Badly.
The pain in her side is not a stitch.
“Aaron, take the baby.” Her voice sounds distant to her own ears, muffled under the growing roar in her head, and it takes her a moment to realise Aaron’s talking rather than following her order.
“Oh, nah, I shouldn’t. Babies don’t like me. My charm doesn’t work until they can talk, you know?”
On any other day, she’d be amused by that, would find a way to tease him about it. Today, she can feel her legs buckling underneath her. “Aaron, take the baby.”
“What’s wro—oh shit, Lucy, you’re bleeding.”
Aaron lunges for her at the same moment she loses the fight to stay standing, catching her and the baby both just as her legs fold under her. The baby squawks at the sudden movement, but doesn’t cry as they sink to the floor in an uncoordinated heap.
“You’re a quiet girl, aren’t you?” Lucy hears herself ask, an errant thought that escapes out from under the increasingly thick fog behind her eyes as Aaron tries to prop her up without letting the baby slip from between them.
“Lucy, where? Where are you hit?” Aaron demands, cradling the baby with one arm and trying to yank her shirt up with the other. It takes more effort than it should to help him, to force her fingers between the buttons and pull, dislodging her bodycam and revealing a vest slicked with blood, her once-white undershirt dyed red, spreading outward from a neat little hole punched right behind her gun.
If she’d kept it holstered, Lucy thinks, it likely would’ve deflected the bullet.
The irony is not lost on her.
“Press, Luce. Harder,” Aaron says, just as a sharp bolt of pain yanks her out of her musing. He’s taken charge of one of her hands, pressing it hard against the wound with his own, pulling a cry from her throat and sharpening her wandering focus. “Sorry, sorry, you gotta press so I can…”
“Hey, don’t get blood on her,” Lucy mumbles as Aaron switches the baby from one arm to the other so he can reach his radio. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds slurred, but the way Aaron’s eyes go round with panic suggests it might be even worse than she thinks. He’s talking into his radio – Lucy can hear the words but can’t make sense of them, can’t make the sounds line up into recognisable patterns.
The baby is watching Lucy with her fingers pressed into her mouth, seemingly unconcerned with the crisis unfolding around her. Her eyes are huge and guileless and almost the exact same shade of blue as Tim’s had been in the parking lot when Lucy had let the thing in her heart slip out through her mouth, had admitted aloud that he was the most important person she had. When he’d reciprocated by yanking them both past the careful lines they’d drawn, crashing gracelessly through years of built-up, mutual denial to ask her, point blank, to choose him.
Tim, who’s waiting for her at the station, who’d been stressed enough about playing Watch Commander even before the death in custody, who’d been dealing with a riot in holding and a missing baby and Lucy’s boyfriend questioning his every move because Celina might have killed someone.
Who she’d wanted desperately to hug before she and Aaron got sent out on their tour of the worst motels in LA, but hadn’t because they’d been at work and she’s still in a relationship that hadn’t been working even before she’d kissed her sergeant in an airplane bathroom.
“Chen, stay awake.” Aaron’s face fills her vision, swimming in and out of focus. She’d slumped sideways at some point, lying on the floor now instead of propped against the baby box, and he’s got both hands pressed against her waist, leaning over her with what feels like most of his weight holding pressure against the wound.
It hurts, but only in an abstract, distant kind of way. Lucy suspects that’s a bad sign.
“Where’s the baby?” she asks, because Aaron has both of his hands on her and she’s not sure when that happened.
“Smitty’s got her,” Aaron said, and over his shoulder Lucy can see he’s right – Smitty is hovering near the door with the baby cradled to his chest, swaying slightly from the hips and carefully angled so the infant can’t see Lucy bleeding out on the floor of a seedy motel room. In any other context the sight would be hilarious, and Lucy desperately wishes she could film it because Tim and Tamara would both get a kick out of it.
Tim.
Tamara.
Lucy wishes they were here, wishes that she could talk to them, because she’s terrified that she’s about to be another thing that happens to each of them, another person who leaves, and they’re both going to have to deal with it without her.
Tim will shut down, she thinks. Tamara will run.
“Aaron,” she starts, reaching for him with a leaden hand that won’t go where she wants it to, leaving smudges of blood on his sleeve, “make sure…Tamara gets to stay in the apartm—”
“No, no, c’mon Luce, Bradford will kill me if you die. Keep your eyes open.” There are more bodies moving behind Aaron and someone is crouched near her head with a gentle hand stroking her hair, but Lucy’s focus is waning again, her vision filled with dancing points of light and black around the edges, and she can’t tell who is it.
It’s nice, though. Comforting.
“Tim. Tell Tim…” She’s slurring badly now, she can tell, each word exponentially harder to say than the last.
“No, Lucy, we're not doing that, you gotta tell him yourself. Stay awake for me, Luce, c’mon.”
“Tell Tim…”
What? That she’s sorry? That she thinks she might be in love with him? That it’s not his fault?
Lucy can’t think of an end to that sentence that doesn’t just feel unfair, and before she can unearth one from beneath the fog in her head, the darkness claws across her vision and she falls away.