Tim Bradford, Lucy Chen: S4 Moments

Moment 2

Lucy POV

There was something nearly harrowing as she entered the apartment she and Jackson had shared for eternity. His room was the first thing she could see into when she walked in the door. She braced herself against the frame, not quite ready to cross the threshold of a dead man's abode. He was coming back, clearly. His bed was messy. He was coming back to make it up. The phone rang. Snap out of, she commanded herself.

Shit. They were going to Plan B. She cringed as her voice quivered and wavered through each sentence she spoke. "I don't like Plan B." Well, no one did. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Tim? Please be careful." She couldn't say why she singled him out. Maybe because she knew that he was always first through the door, ready to take the hits so that no one else got hurt. Definitely, because he was so much more than her old T.O. Definitely because he was all she had left. Was that fair to say? She still had John, Nyla, Grey... it was a thin list. One that could easily get thinner if Plan B didn't go, well, according to plan. But it was Tim.

"Always am," was his reply. He was trying to make light of it, trying to make her worry less. She appreciated that. But even he couldn't disguise how uncertain he was about this.

Tim POV

He called her. He could hear the conflict of overwhelming emotion in her tone. Yeah, yeah. Plan B sucked. But it was either Plan B or nothing. That would never fly. In the end, when it worked out, (yeah, he was trying to be optimistic in his head), they would all be grateful for Plan B. She nearly threw him off his guard, the very guard that so many lives were literally depending on when she said the damn words. "Tim?" She singled him out. "Please be careful." Basically, the evasive way of saying, don't die. Don't screw up. Don't come back in a body bag. She could have just said, "you guys be careful," but no. She went and said something that made him do a slight double-take before he brushed it off and replied, "Always am." It was the shortest response he could think of that would somehow make things easier on her end. Chen, she would always be hit hard by the hard, emotion-riddled situations. Could he blame her? No, never. Should he have trained it out of her? No, never. L.A. needed cops, not robots. Her empathy was beneficial in some scenarios, and she could control it when it needed to be. He could think about all of that later. Right now they needed to execute the dreaded Plan B successfully and get them all home in one living piece. One, because there was no way in hell he or anyone else was dying today. Two, because he promised Lucy he would.