Chapter Text
Drowning feels a lot like burning.
At first, when her back hit the ice-cold water, drowning felt nothing like fire. She remembers seeing blue—the pale sky above, and then the deep, cerulean water that submerges her entire body. Pain shot through her body like an electric shock, weaving through her bones until stars danced in her vision. She couldn't see anything beyond the blue and the bubbles foaming around her skin like tiny barriers, useless against the torrent forcing its way in.
The shock paralyzes her muscles, or perhaps it's just her fragile mind, struggling to grasp the gravity of her predicament. This is it—this is how it ends.
She's still reeling from the blood spattered on her face. She remembers the little girl, with wide doe eyes and twin braids hanging down her back. She wore a yellow plaid sundress with a ruffled hem that brushed just below her knees. The girl pulled at her braids nervously, blue eyes darting between the adults and the exit at the very back of the room. She didn't seem afraid, just confused.
Lucy remembers the dread that dropped like a stone in her stomach, the new sheen of sweat covering her neck. One of the men dragged the girl by the arm, ignoring her cries of pain. They wrenched her into a wooden chair placed in the middle of the deck, not even bothering to tie her wrists down.
There was a horrifying self-assurance in his gaze, a crazed fire blazing in his wild brown eyes. Lucy resisted the urge to look away.
Then someone put a knife in Lucy's hand, forcing her fingers onto the biting surface of the metal. She gulped, mind whirling as she considered her options: refuse and blow her cover, or forever destroy her soul by intentionally harming an innocent bystander. The choice wasn't hard. The aftermath, however, was.
Lucy jerked her hand away, refusing to hold the knife in her fingers.
The man just laughed. A deep, grating sound, sending shivers running down her spine.
She swallowed hard, scanning the deck for something she could use as a weapon. All she saw were more and more men, weapons clutched in their hands, feet inching forward ever so slightly. No one smiled anymore.
"I thought we had bigger problems than throwing around a seven-year-old," she voiced coldly, struggling to keep her face impassive.
The man—the one who had dragged the little girl onto the deck—sneered. "We did," he agreed. "But then we found out that there's a traitor on this boat."
Lucy willed herself not to stiffen. "I don't see what that has to do with the girl."
He stalked closer, fingers tracing along the metallic edge of the blade. "The girl's irrelevant. But you, dear—you are a puzzle yet to be solved."
She kept her eyes trained forward as he dragged the knife along the edge of her face. He didn't press down hard enough to draw blood; just firm enough to make her heart race in her ribcage.
"I'm not your fucking traitor," she hissed, swatting his knife away. "What the hell would I gain from that?"
The man shrugged, tucking the knife back into the sheath strapped to his belt. "Nothing," he said. "Or maybe you've got an agreement with the cops. Some immunity deal. Or maybe I just don't care about your fucking motive. Maybe I just don't like little girls lying to my face."
"I told you that I would do anything to see this through," she said. "I wasn't lying."
He regarded her, sizing up the amount of truth she allowed herself to display. Then his hand shot out, and Lucy felt drops of warm liquid spray onto her cheeks.
Instinctively, she whipped her head to the side—a costly mistake. Now she was submerged in water, rapidly running out of air.
Then there's the bullet lodged in her side, and the anticipatory pain that comes before the actual pain kicks in. She tensed once she saw the finger held over the trigger, but the actual bullet discharged so fast that she doesn't have time to think before the blood starts pouring.
She doesn't think about protocol; she doesn't even think about wounds and infections. She doesn't think about dying, or all the dreams she could have achieved, because the only thing she can think about is the fact that she's been shot.
The words echo in her head over and over again. She doesn't quite know what to do with them.
She knows she should be taking note of her surroundings, thinking about how to pull herself to safety. But before she can form a coherent thought, the words echo once more, painting those three words across her brain in red paint and interrupting any semblance of a plan.
Maybe she could have eventually pulled herself together into some state of rationality if she hadn't started falling.
She'd already been struggling to maintain her footing. The salty breeze whipped her hair into her face, sending surges of water crashing against the shore. The small yacht rocked back and forth, throwing off her center of balance with each wave. Nyla had warned her before to be careful of the wind.
The bullet hit the moment a large wave knocked into the boat. She doesn't know which one sent her over the edge, but she supposes it doesn't really matter anymore.
The rapidity of it all makes her mind reel. She doesn't know what to solve first. Does she need to stem the bleeding? Or should she conserve her energy? Her mind fractures, trying to chase every possibility, and she ends up chasing nothing at all.
Her muscles are too frozen to react quickly enough. She tries to take a breath, but finds that there's no air. Water surrounds her, pricking her eyes, gradually choking the oxygen from her lungs, and her mouth fills with salt when she lets out an instinctive cry for help.
Angela and Nyla are monitoring in the distance. They must have seen her fall. Still, Lucy doesn't know how far away they are, and if they'll face any gunfire on their way.
Her mother taught her to be certain of nothing but herself. She rarely abides by her mother's truisms; a stupid part of her always gravitates towards resisting any authority figure's lecture, even if her brain can see reason in the lessons.
Trust and empathy define her. She can't just stop seeing the good in people, though the recent string of setbacks in her life has been a painful reminder of the cost of disobedience. A devilish part of her likes to pipe up in the middle of conversations, sowing skepticism that only grows into scorching shame in her throat.
Vanessa isn't exactly wrong. Here, under the depths of the ocean, self-sufficiency and distrust don't necessarily go hand in hand. It's just a tool for survival, and doesn't she desperately want to break through the surface of the water?
The lack of oxygen grows more and more painful, a squeezing sensation not only in her lungs, but also deep in her throat. She thrashes, panic rising in her chest. She tries kicking her feet, pushing her palms against walls of viscous liquid. A spasm of pain spiderwebs through her core, and she draws blood in her mouth as a result of trying to bite back a whimper.
She can already hear his voice in her head. Not yelling at her, or hissing a 'I told you so'. No. Instead, he's grounding her, keeping her sane as the water pushes and pushes her under.
She clings to her memories of him—the smell of his cologne when she presses a kiss to his lips; the light stubble on his chin when he forgets to shave after a long shift; the raspy inflection in his voice when he greets her in the morning; the giddiness bursting in her chest whenever she looks at their home and realizes that they made it. They really made it.
It still feels surreal to wake up in his arms and know that he's hers. Not just physically, but emotionally. She loves those early mornings in bed because the sliver of sunlight pouring through the curtains wraps them in a little bubble, and while she's in that bubble, nothing can possibly go wrong.
Sometimes, when she wakes up with his arm draped over her, she thinks about how far they've come. He was her training officer, after all. Before, she wouldn't condone this behavior; she would probably consider it horribly unprofessional. But their relationship transcends the concrete boundaries dictated by their jobs, and she can't quite describe how their love is just different.
She swears she didn't feel anything for him during her training period. He was struggling through a waning marriage, and she was, well, his rookie. Or maybe she's still lying to herself, and the countless hours stuck in the shop with him were the seeds of affection that their love grew from. She supposes she will never know the answer.
She remembers the day she was supposed to take her six-month exam, the plans derailed by the emergence of a dangerous biological weapon. She remembers Tim, sitting on the other side of the door, head probably swimming with images of the infected victim's bloody death. He'd said: When the time comes I'm going out on my own terms.
She hadn't really understood it then. He'd shunned her out after his recovery for not reporting his behavior to internal affairs, to which she responded that he'd never actually been suicidal.
The signs of suicide have been ingrained in her since childhood, thanks to her parents. She knew, deep in her gut, that there were more to his words than she discerned, but she didn't know exactly what she was missing.
Lucy smiles. She supposes struggling against the current will get her nowhere, and she doesn't really want to die choking for air. She's always imagined two scenarios for her death—one where she dies fighting, hope clenched tightly in her fists, and one where she dies peacefully, perhaps surrounded by her loved ones, in the comfort of her own home.
She's never imagined drowning before. She's never even remotely thought about what it might feel like.
It feels a lot like burning, your chest screaming for air, panic raging so hot through your veins that you almost choke on it. Water rushes in, fills your nose and your mouth and your lungs, but it's not the water that gets you—it's the voice in your head, the one already planning your funeral, the one cowering as the flames lick up your skin.
Aimlessly swimming only heightens the panic, because the current will always push you down if you never try breaking the surface in the right way. But you interpret the failure as hopelessness; you think the hopelessness is finality, and so the ocean claims you as another victim.
She's also damning herself by not swimming, and the wound in her abdomen screams with pain whenever she tries to move.
She's always imagined her death as content. But she's trying so hard to lift her head above the water, and instead of all the good memories, she's thinking about all the things she should've said when her life was guaranteed.
Black spots start to cover her vision. Each blink seems to last longer and longer. She swears she can almost see the surface, where the light penetrates the water, and she chokes back tears at how beautiful the mirage appears.
The wound at her side throbs harder and harder. Her muscles scream at her to stop. She doesn't. She has so much more to live for, so many more places to see, so much more love to give.
She doesn't know what gives out first: her lungs, her body, or her mind. Her movements become more and more sluggish, and as she falls, all she can think about is Tim and those grandchildren she would never get to see.
The little pocket of light fades into the distance. Vaguely, she hears a rumbling sound, like some kind of signal trying to pierce the layers of cotton stuffed in her ears.
She feels like she's forgetting something, though she's not sure what. She finds herself falling back into an old habit, fingers tracing along the permanent ink etched into her skin, the date she'll never be able to erase from her mind.
As her trembling fingers press against her skin, a film flickers on in her mind; blurred at the edges, with muted colors and dusty audio. She sees herself, sweat slick on her forehead, wavy hair thrown into a high ponytail. She misses those waves sometimes, plagued with frizz, but natural, like a truer representation of herself.
Tim stands at her side, facing her. She'd almost forgotten about the buzz cut he'd sported in her rookie year. He looks younger, obviously, but also more severe and rough around the edges in a way she can't quite describe.
He opens his mouth, and she knows what he's about to say, but nothing can prepare her for the whiplash of hearing him say those words out loud.
You can choose to see that tattoo as your greatest failure.
She flinches in sync with her previous self. Not necessarily because she still views it as such, but because the phrase invokes a wave of buried emotion she'd rather keep hidden. She feels the familiar sharp pain in her chest, that pang of embarrassment she used to get whenever she messed up in front of him.
But I see it as proof that you're a survivor. It wasn't your day of death, Officer Chen. It was the first day, of the rest of your life. And no one can take that away from you.
The lump in her throat tightens. She sees the conviction in her eyes, as well as the admiration. A little bit of pride flares in her chest.
You're a survivor.
She survived being buried alive. She survived being drugged and kidnapped, tattooed by a sadist. She survived her parents' disappointment and her own shame. She survived the worst breakup of her life.
Throughout it all, he'd believed in her. She clings to it, his unrelenting faith in her, and lets her eyes flutter shut, shrouding the world in pitch black silence. A little voice persists through, whispering to her, but she still feels herself slipping away, the golden thread tethering her to reality slowly unraveling in her fingers.
A part of her had wished the pain would stop if she accepted it with open arms. If she just let the water wash over her, the world might have some clemency, and even if she dies she'll go with the benign warmth of love in her heart.
The universe cares little for acceptance. Death is death, marching on in a relentless cycle of slaughter, and pain never transcends consciousness.
She tries to blare his voice in her head to drown out the pain, lungs thrashing for air she'll never breathe again.
You're a survivor.
You're a survivor.
You're a survivor.
So what? In the end, she's just as desperate as before, and she can't stop her pathetic exigency for oxygen. She's not surviving; she's just existing, waiting for the water to pull her beyond the point of saving. She can't move her body, can't open her mouth to scream. She just jerks in the water and hopes her mind will be wiped blank, senses numbed by the blissful taste of death.
Drowning is not graceful. It feels a lot like burning, your chest begging for reprieve from the onslaught of fire-tipped daggers flying into your heart. It feels like it will never end, and maybe, in some way, it never does.
Angela picks at the blood lodged beneath her nails with a disinfectant wipe. The backs of her hands are covered in tiny, grainy bumps, and her palms are flush with red. She doesn't know how long she spent in the empty bathroom, trying not to stare at her reflection in the mirror, scrubbing her hands raw under searing hot water.
For some reason, the hotter the water gets, the colder her fingers feel. By the end, she's almost clawing the red off the crevices of her skin, tears prickling her eyes.
She can blink the tears away, but not the image of Lucy sprawled on the boat deck, thick crimson blood pouring from a wound in her abdomen. The memory of blood-slicked hands is seared into her memory. The metallic sting on her tongue. The warmth in the pads of her fingers—not from life, but from the drainage of it.
After she emerged from the bathroom, trying to hide her shaking hands behind her back, she settled in the reception area and numbly waited for news.
Waiting at the hospital is unlike anything in the world. Occasionally, a flurry of voices might rouse your senses, until they fade into the monotonous blur of everything labeled as background noise in the back of your mind.
Time doesn't exist. Time dictates your entire existence. The clock moves too slow, every second lasting a minute. There's a strange indecisiveness between wishing the seconds didn't stretch so far and wishing they would stretch forever, for at least no bad news can come if you're waiting an eternity.
Part of her wishes she could stay in the bubble forever, picking at the blood, watching the clock, drowning out all the smells and noises and sights presented in front of her.
Instead, she's interrupted by a grim tap on her shoulder. Angela looks up, crumpling the wipe into a wrinkled ball in her fist.
"Hey," she croaks. She sounds awful. "How's Lucy?"
Nyla collapses on the adjacent chair. "She's still in surgery. It's too early to tell if—"
She doesn't finish the sentence, though Angela wishes she hadn't let those morbid words hang in the air.
"We should probably tell him," Nyla says.
Angela tenses. In her haze, she'd nearly forgotten. "Yeah," she agrees noncommittally. "Probably."
They sit in the reception area for a few minutes. Angela doesn't know what she's internally preparing herself for. She just can't get her legs to move.
Finally, her brain circles back to the task at hand, and the abruptness sends her into a panic. She jumps up, chair scraping the floor under her.
"I'm gonna call Tim," she mutters, before half-sprinting away.
She finds a vacant hallway and pulls out her phone. She clicks on his contact, finger hovering over the call button. Fuck it, she thinks, and presses down.
The phone rings. Once. Twice. Then: "Hello?"
He sounds fine. A little suspicious, but not upset, and not at all angry.
Angela sucks in a breath. He's a bomb, poised to explode, and she's about to press the fucking trigger.
Her silence must have unnerved him, because she hears him moving on the other line. He must have just grabbed his keys, judging by the rustle of metal coming from the phone. "Did something happen to Lucy?"
And there it was. The concern in his voice. The anger, already building inside his chest, and once the match was struck, nothing could be done to extinguish it. Angela closes her eyes. Her stomach is still churning. She feels like she's sitting on the shore after a rocky boat trip, waiting and waiting for the nausea to ease and wondering if it ever will. She doesn't know if she can handle his grief and her own.
There isn't a good way to break bad news. She can bury the truth in euphemisms, but the pain will always be there, underlying and sharp and irrepressible. Still, Angela searches for something to say other than your girlfriend just got shot and almost drowned.
She opts for a succinct response, vague enough to not send him immediately crashing into a tree. "How quickly can you get to Shaw Memorial?"
He hangs up before she can say anything else.
Her name loops in his head like the recording of a broken record player, notes distorted, melody more warped every time the vinyl completes another cycle.
On the drive to the hospital, his heart pounded so fast he feared it might fall out of his chest. The knot in his stomach twisted until it felt like an inextricable tangle of yarn, fingers shaking as he gripped the steering wheel. Angela called him again and again, but the ringtone was like white noise to his ears.
Her name became a mantra, and then a prayer, and then a plea. Traffic lights became blurs of yellow and red and green, barely distinguishable to his eyes. Every second seemed to stretch longer than a minute.
The hospital complex loomed in the distance, a formidable building of doctors and patients and death. He walked in an almost zombie-like trance, joints stiff and brain empty, through the main lobby and into the suffocating elevator.
He knows the hospital layout like the back of his hand, more for the practicality's sake than the fact that he's probably been here hundreds of times. When the elevator lurches to a stop, he's already standing right by the doors, waiting for them to slide open.
When they do, an avalanche of buried emotion is unleashed with it. All the fear and anger he's barely kept in check on the drive over pours out of his mouth.
"Where is she? Where is my—"
He trails off, because girlfriend fails to encapsulate everything she means to him, but he can't call her his wife because he hasn't put a ring on her finger yet.
Angela and Nyla stand by the front desk, chatting in hushed voices. Their heads jerk up at the sound of his voice.
"Where's Lucy?" he demands, storming into the reception area. His hands hang at his sides, curled into tight fists. He's sure he looks like a mess—he feels like a mess. He probably has that look in his eyes again, the one Lucy deems as his death glare.
"She's still in surgery," Nyla says, her face oddly sympathetic. She usually ranges from cold to impassive with him. Today, her lips are pursed, and she looks like she's barely holding herself together.
"What happened?" he chokes out, though he's not sure if he wants to know the answer.
"Her cover was blown," Nyla says. She doesn't bother with euphemisms. "She was shot in the abdomen and fell off the yacht."
Tim's blood goes cold. Her words are like a flurry of bullets to his gut, shrapnel plunging deep into his skin. His mind swims with words, so many words, but he can't untangle the mess of jumbled thoughts.
Lucy. Shot. Cover blown. Fell. Surgery.
"How long was she in the water?" he asks, voice hoarse and desperate. He surprised the words even make it out of his mouth. He can hear his blood pounding in his ears, a rhythmic thumping sound, and all he can think about is the fact that blood is a liquid and so is water.
He doesn't know how long it takes for someone to drown. Vaguely, he remembers reading in an article that drowning is a quick way to die.
"Nine minutes," Nyla informs him. She's wearing a set of dry, clean clothes, but her hair is dripping wet. "We got to her as fast as we could. She lost consciousness, but she was still breathing."
Nine minutes. Still breathing. Nine minutes seems so short, leaving so little time for rescue. He wants to ask them when fatalities begin to occur for drowning accidents, but this time, he really doesn't want to know the answer, because he doesn't want to know just how close he came to losing the love of his life. Again.
His face feels warm, tears burning in his throat. Against his will, the memory of the article pushes its way to the front of his mind, blasting him with information about fight-or-flight responses and airways closing up and hypoxic convulsion.
The human body can only endure up to two minutes of oxygen deprivation without losing consciousness. Two minutes of struggling to breathe, of choking, of trying to think back on every moment of your life before it all fades to black.
"Two minutes," Tim mumbles, shaking his head. After unconsciousness comes hypoxic convulsion, seizure-like and supposedly terrifying to see in real time. Then, of course, comes death, when revival becomes obsolete, and the hourglass officially runs out of sand.
He stumbles backwards, shoes squeaking against the linoleum floor.
Lucy's not dead. Yet. But she could have been, if she had been in the water for a few seconds longer.
A thick layer of fog clouds his mind. It should feel numbing and exuberant, a pleasant detachment from reality. Instead, it's sharp and biting, obscuring his judgment while preserving every ounce of the pain.
Angela pulls him into a tight hug. She smells like coffee and gunpowder and safety. Tim chokes back tears.
"She'll survive," Angela mutters. "Lucy is strong. She's a survivor."
He doesn't doubt that. Regardless, he wonders if that kind of luck ever runs out.
The clock in Lucy's hospital room is broken. The hour hand is stuck at 11 o'clock, while the minute hand continues to revolve as if it still serves a purpose.
Weak sunlight spills through the little window on the adjacent wall, casting tiny black shadows across the tiled floor. Tim thinks his shadow must loom the heaviest of all.
He had pulled a chair to her bedside, one with a cushioned bottom and armrests, but his back still throbs with a dull pain that won't subside, and his neck aches for something to rest against.
The overwhelming wave of relief that washed over him once he heard Lucy had survived surgery is now replaced with a quieter, poisonous fear. The doctors tell him about how lucky she was. How the bullet missed all vital organs, how she probably would have died if she'd been in the water for a minute longer.
At that, he flinches. It's a horror story he's heard before—seen before.
What would have happened if Angela and Nyla had arrived a few seconds later? What would have happened if he convinced Lucy not to go on the operation in the first place?
The questions haunt him, like his implication in Lucy's kidnapping loomed over him for months as he slept like a dark storm cloud with a jeering yet indistinguishable face.
He tries to recall the coping strategies his therapist taught him, but he can't sift through the mess of thoughts occupying his mind. He can only remind himself to breathe, and to wait, because Lucy will know what to do. Even if she doesn't, he needs her. He doesn't just need her to be his sunshine, his oxygen—he needs her to be his catalyst.
"Lucy," he mutters, as if the name might slip from his mind if he doesn't utter it aloud. He's always loved the way it rolls off his tongue—short and sweet. A thread that draws him closer, since on the job he isn't allowed to use it as much.
Her eyelashes flutter. His heart skips a beat, hope springing to life in his chest.
For a second, he sees nothing. She doesn't so much as twitch. The little spark of hope threatens to go out, his heart threatening to stumble over the edge.
Then: "Tim?"
He lets out a strangled sob, burying his face in her hair. She no longer smells like her lemon shortcake shampoo, the one she insists on buying because she says it reminds her of her childhood. Instead, her hair smells vaguely like ash.
"Luce," he breathes, clinging to her like a lifeline, afraid she'll slip through his fingers like medicine spilling out of a shattered bottle.
Her arms snake around his torso, but her grip is concernedly weak. She rests her chin in the crook of his neck, fingers grasping at his shirt, and he can feel the sharpness of her nails digging into his skin. He feels little droplets of water fall onto his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she says, and even though her mouth is right next to his ear, he can barely make out her words. He tells her not to worry, that she has no reason to apologize. She just shakes her head and apologizes over and over again, trembling in his arms.
He holds her, strokes her hair, presses kisses to her sweat-soaked forehead. Her skin is so cold against his lips. She's alive and awake, but there's a distance in her eyes, something holding her in the precarious state between coma and lucidity. Her voice dies down eventually, and after a while, her eyes flutter back shut.
Tim eases her back into her lying position on the bed and resumes his position at her side. His fingers stay firmly intertwined with hers, and as the sun rises in the east, his shadow shrinks, and the sunlight filters through the window in elegant bursts of yellow.
The next day, Angela knocks on the door. "You need to eat," she says, shoving a plastic bag carrying a container of takeout sushi into his hands. The plastic rustles as he nudges the handles away to reveal seaweed-wrapped rolls of fresh tuna and avocado, and vibrant orange slices of salmon sitting on delicately shaped rectangles of rice.
Tim's stomach churns. He almost hands the bag to Lucy, until he remembers that she's fast asleep. Lucy loved—loves—sushi. She loves stealing his nigiri when he's not looking and kissing the pout off his face when he notices.
"I'm not hungry," he mutters, dropping the bag on the nearby table.
Angela crosses her arms. "You haven't eaten since yesterday. Lucy wouldn't want you to stay here all day, not eating and not walking. You've basically turned into a giant rock."
"That's a terrible analogy," he comments dryly. Angela's not wrong, though. Lucy will be pissed.
"Fine," he relents, pushing himself up from the chair. His knees buckle and he sets a hand on the armrest to keep his legs from falling out from under him. He glances at Angela, who, to his surprise, is not laughing at his predicament.
"Take a walk around the floor," she suggests. "I'll walk with you."
He opens his mouth to object, but she silences him with a withering glare.
The hallways are drab and smell like medicine. He's hated the almost bitter smell ever since his dad brought him and Genny to the hospital to visit their ailing grandfather. He doesn't remember much about his grandfather, other than the stench of beer that permeated through the house whenever he came over and the coarseness of his voice. Grandpa didn't visit often, and when he did, he spent most of the time on the decade-old armchair in the living room, smoking a cigarette and staring at the framed picture of his dead wife hanging above the sofa. Tim can see bits of Grandpa in his father, and sometimes, he wishes he knew his grandfather better so he could know how much of his father's behavior stems from his childhood and how much grew from his rotten black heart.
His mother escaped the house by working. She worked the worst shifts, the shifts most people avoided because they wanted to be home with their families. Still, her arms were almost always covered in bruises she tried to cover with concealer and foundation. The problem was, with bruises that big, concealer and foundation did her little good when the bruises boasted colors of blue and purple and black.
Lucy once asked him if he resented his mother for staying. In high school, he had hated her to the point of replying to every good-natured inquiry with a snarky rejoinder. Her face would fall and her lips would purse, and he swore tears glistened in the corners of her eyes, but she never let them fall. He doesn't remember having many real conversations with her; after high school, he tried to get as far away from that house as possible and he's never really looked back.
If he sees her again, he's not really sure what he would say. He wants to tell her he's sorry for being so difficult, but he also wants to ask her why she stayed for over two decades. Still, he doesn't see the point in it. Those questions will only force old wounds to reopen, and he's sure no answer will truly placate the bitter rage of his teenage heart.
He's older now, and his job lets him see so many ugly situations where no decision is easy and no decision comes without pain. Genny always tells him he's too stubborn for his own good. He can't really let go of old grudges; circumstances change and people change, but the resentment never goes away.
He expected Lucy to reiterate Genny's lectures. Instead, she acknowledged the way bitterness festers in the heart, and even when the wound heals, the scar is still there under all those layers of bandages.
Life is rarely simple, and neither are the people living in it. Love is always so convoluted; understanding it is like trying to square a circle. He can love his mother and resent her at the same time. Still, he can't fully comprehend how love works like that—poison can spew from his mouth, uglier than any monster in children's fairy tales, and yet tears still burn in his eyes whenever he saw the red blooming across her cheek and the way her light seemed to dim every year.
He hasn't seen his mother in years. He knows Genny's kept in touch, but it's different for her. It always has been. She believes their father has the capacity for change—Tim doesn't know if she's too forgiving, or too isolated from the true weight of Tom's abuse.
Tim's in a better place now. Lucy's Post-it notes cover every inch of their home, love letters scrawled in her rushed handwriting. He still goes to therapy every week, and he finally feels like the lump in his throat obstructing his fears from pouring out is smaller now. If he swallows a few times, the lump will disappear, and he'll spill about his week and his job and his relationships without the guilt squeezing his chest.
The hospital provokes many dark and confusing memories. He hates the smell of medicine and he hates the prying gaze of doctors, who had prodded him with endless questions and concerned glances after he ended up in the hospital when he passed out during calculus. He told them the bruises were from football, and they checked his sports record.
The world was different back then; they let him walk out of the hospital with a halfhearted promise to send social services to his address, just in case. Social services never showed up. At the time, Tim was grateful for that, because his father would have gone on another rampage if the police ever appeared at their door. Now, he's conflicted, because moving children to foster care is the origin of many horror stories, but he'd already been in high school by then.
He only knows one thing: he despises hospitals. He hates the smell of death lingering in the doorway, the grief that chokes him even when he disliked the person lying limp on the hospital bed. Hospitals only bring out the worst in people.
As he and Angela walk, he hears the constant shuffling of feet and the faint beeping of heart rate monitors, his own heart unable to calm down in his chest.
He can't stop thinking about her, about Lucy, all alone in the hospital room.
"Maybe we should go back," he suggests weakly as they turn another corner.
Angela tugs him along. "Just another lap and we'll head back. Trust me on this—it will help clear your head a bit."
It doesn't. He sees the front desk and remembers all the times he came here with Lucy. The first time, she'd been his rookie. He sees a woman humming in a waiting area and is reminded of the way Lucy likes to hum tunes on their drive to the station.
Their mornings are always quieter. He always wakes up first; sometimes, Lucy presses snooze so many times that he carries her out of bed. They pick up coffee on their way to the station. He's still not completely over the fact that he gets to walk into the station with her without trying to keep their relationship under wraps.
Their nights have more variety. On the good days, she sings Sabrina Carpenter in the car and tries to tease him into joining in. He chides her to turn the music down, and she sticks out her tongue at him and reminds him that she's no longer his rookie. On the hard days, they drive home in silence, his thumb stroking her thigh reassuringly. He'll pull her into a hug as he flicks the lights open, careful to cup his hand around the place where her neck and head meet in the way he knows makes her feel safer. She'll curl up at his side as they put on a rom-com, pulling a velvet blanket over their bodies. Kojo rests his head on her lap and she scratches him behind the ears, a soft but enervated smile on her face.
He doesn't want to lose those days. He doesn't want to give up waking up to her warm body pressed to his side, or the kiss she presses to his lips every morning.
By the time he and Angela loop around the floor, his head doesn't feel any quieter. The smell of alcohol, the type found in lemon-scented disinfectant wipes, clings to his nose, and the acid of the lemons seems to make his stomach churn even harder.
Angela turns back and glances at him, brow furrowed. "You feeling okay?"
He nods and bites down on his tongue.
They near Lucy's room. The door is slightly ajar, and when he peeks inside, he sees Lucy with her eyes wide open. She rocks back and forth in the hospital bed, knees tucked against her chest. Her cheeks glisten with tears, like delicate shards of glass, crystalline and beautiful but too brittle to last the winter.
"Lucy!" he calls out, but she doesn't hear him. By the time he reaches her bed, she's already out cold.
The patient monitor by Lucy's bedside beeps all day and night. The screen has four sets of graphs and four sets of numbers, though he only really recognizes the one representing her heart rate. Sometimes, he stares at the screen for hours at a time, heart spiking with anxiety whenever one of the numbers dips too low or too high.
Angela brings him food and forces him to change and shower. He hates his dependency on her. His chest flares with something red and hot whenever she walks in with a plastic bag of sandwiches, though he's not sure if it's anger, embarrassment, or both.
Mostly, she leaves him alone. She still tries to make him stand up and walk around, but whenever she tries to ask him simple questions, his throat locks up and he feels himself shutting down even further.
He's thankful they whisper about him outside of Lucy's hospital room, so he doesn't have to hear them agonizing over his perpetual numbness and misery. If they're all dark clouds in the sky, he's the violet shadow single-handedly blocking out the sun and soaking the people below in a torrent of unrelenting rain.
Lucy goes in and out of consciousness. The doctors say the wound in her abdomen is infected. She's riddled with fever, sweat clinging to her hairline, and she's only ever awake for a few minutes. Her eyes search the room aimlessly, and no matter what Tim says, she can only glance at him with a detached curiosity and fall back asleep.
Tim sifts through a magazine Angela threw at him a few hours ago, mindlessly glazing over the black and white letters accompanied by too-vibrant pictures. His eyes keep straying from the paper. Once he forces his focus back, he can't remember where he left off on.
Eventually, he gives up and tosses the magazine onto the small table at Lucy's bedside.
His head throbs with a headache that feels like it will never end. He rubs his temples, staring blankly at the broken clock on the wall.
Lucy's necklace, the gold one he gave her for their first Valentine's day as a couple, sits heavy in his pocket. He had grabbed it from the dresser on his way out the door, though he's not sure why. Lucy hasn't really worn it for months.
He asked her about it once. Admittedly, he chose a bad time, when they were both exhausted from working overtime. Or maybe the exhaustion was the only thing making him stupid enough—or brave enough—to voice the question aloud.
She was sprawled on their bed, head buried in the pile of floral blankets she'd insisted on buying. She gave a small grunt at first, before she forced her eyes open and squinted at him through the dim lighting.
"I don't know," she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. "Do you want me to?"
Yes, his brain thought. Unfortunately, his brain wasn't quite linked up to his mouth. "I don't know," he said. "If you want to."
Lucy gave a noncommittal shrug and closed her eyes again, effectively ending the conversation. Tim never brought it up again, nor did Lucy ever mention remembering the exchange.
Now, he tries to push down the urge to take the necklace out of his pocket. He's sure it means something to Lucy, he's just not sure what. She wore it for the past Valentine's Day, even though they were broken up. After moving in, the piece of jewelry has only been collecting dust.
His fingers loop around the metal chain. Mid-afternoon sunlight streams into the room, and when he holds the necklace up to the light, flecks of gold are reflected across the room like a monochromatic rainbow. Some of the light falls upon his face, so half of his features are shrouded in shadow, while the other half are covered in the yellow glow.
The room is quiet. Too quiet. He's always been fine with silence, often preferring it to unnecessary conversation, but hospital silence is different. It's pervasive, almost toxic, the way it festers in the air and in the heart. It seems to go hand-in-hand with fear, like a pair of bleak peas in a pod.
The room is too quiet, but at least there's a lasting sense of nothingness, a dragging state between life and death.
At least, until a high-pitched, incessant beep begins to echo through the room.
Tim's head jerks up, alarm burning through his haze. Lucy's necklace clatters to the floor. "What the—"
His gaze snaps to Lucy, searching for reassurance, any sign that says that this is a mistake, that the monitor is just glitching, that she's fine and about to wake up at any second.
She gives him none. Instead, her head has lolled slightly to the side, as if her muscles gave up entirely, and when he grabs her hand, her fingers are as limp as a ragdoll.
Something is wrong.
He can't tell what—can't think past the blaring sound that drowns out every rational thought, past the panic blooming hot in his chest.
Silence and nothingness might be pervasive, but at least they are, in the end, nothing. Once the silence is broken by an unceasing commotion, the trance of nothingness fades into childhood naivety. There's something now, something he can't ignore, no matter how much he wishes for the comfort of silence.
His eyes flick back at the monitor, and his heart plummets. "No," he whispers, blood draining from his face. Raw desperation clogs his throat. "No, no, no, no."
He stares at the screen in disbelief, cold fear paralyzing his fingertips.
A trailing line without a single jump in its pattern stares back at him.
Flat.