chenford + candles
bonus song lyric: you said you’d keep me honest / but i won’t call you on it
[*]
lucy has a brush with disaster during tim’s malibu division sergeant training. she doesn’t exactly get to schedule taking a shot to the abdomen that, annoyingly, misses her vest but, thankfully, skips over the important organs in that area. if she had gotten any kind of input, she’d have exed out today about twenty-five times on her calendar.
“you shouldn’t be here.” she’s still sort of in an anesthesia fog but, if there’s one piece of information she can recite besides her name right now, this is it. tim belongs at his new precinct for orientation, not here in a hospital, waiting for her to rejoin the land of the living.
‘pushed my start date back two weeks, told the higher-ups the truth: i had a family emergency.” releasing her hand, tim brings a cupcake out of a container lucy can’t see, and lights the candle buried in the frosting.
‘scars make life sweeter? is that the symbolism here? or: yay, you’re still alive!’ she laughs, amazed by how tim still embodies the almost universally-envied bradford work ethic while also sporting a lightness that embeds further with each passing year.
‘more like: we absolutely have to commemorate you actually finding a way to get me to play hooky.’
a nurse chooses that moment to come in and take vitals, giving tim an earful about the flammability of undiluted oxygen and how close the candle is to lucy’s face.
levering herself slowly up onto her elbows, lucy puffs out the flame. the nurse makes note of her numbers, finally leaving but never losing her disapproving frown.
‘what?’ tim chuckles, topping her delightedly tired beam with a grin of his own.
‘i made you break another rule! what do i win now?’
