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Tim was offered the position at Mission two weeks after his father’s death.
It was the same job in a different place, really, but there were far more opportunities for upward advancement. For that reason alone, most people would have considered it more of a promotion than a lateral move. It would also give him the opportunity to see how the LAPD worked outside of Mid-Wilshire, where he’d been assigned for the entirety of his career. Anybody else probably would’ve jumped at the opportunity.
Tim didn’t. Tim very nearly turned it down, until he realized he didn’t have actually have a good enough reason to.
All those months earlier, he’d had a reason to reject the promotion. He hadn’t wanted to leave in the middle of Lucy’s training, to add something more to the pile of issues she was already in the process of dealing with. And nobody had questioned that, really, not after all she’d gone through.
They wouldn’t be so understanding a second time around. Tim knew that without asking.
There were already plenty of rumors about the nature of his relationship with Lucy, murmurings that always seemed to fall silent the moment either of them walked into a room. He knew that it seemed odd, to a lot of people, that they were so close, that he’d made her his aide. His warnings a few months earlier hadn’t come out of nowhere. There were people who believed they were too close.
Maybe they were. In fact, they probably were. That didn’t mean Tim wanted anything between them to change, though.
It had to, though. For the sake of her career and her reputation, he couldn’t keep turning down every offer he received in the name of staying indefinitely by her side. That wouldn’t be what was best for either of them.
Explaining that to Lucy posed even more of a challenge than he had originally anticipated. It was such a challenge, in fact, that a week before his transfer, she still had no idea he was leaving.
To be fair, not many other people knew, either. Aside from Grey, who was a locked vault if Tim had ever known one, the only person he’d told about the transfer was Angela.
She wasn’t going to tell anyone, either. What she was going to do, it seemed, was mock him incessantly over the fact that Lucy still didn’t know.
“How?” was all she asked him that Monday, sounding as incredulous as he’d ever heard her.
He scratched nervously behind his left ear, steadfastly avoiding her all-too-knowing gaze. “I didn’t have a chance to.”
They were sitting in the middle of her living room, baby Jack sprawled out on a playmat between them. Though Tim was refusing to look over at her, he could feel Angela’s gaze burning into the side of his face, and he was at least 95% certain she was looking at him like he was an idiot. She looked at him like that a lot, those days.
“You spend twelve hours a day with her, five days a week,” his friend reminded him, sounding very unimpressed with him. “That’s 120 hours you’ve known you were going to leave and didn’t manage to tell her. That’s a little pathetic, even for you.”
He didn’t bother remarking on the even for you part of her statement, assuming that would just lead to an even longer lecture about his own hopelessness. “There hasn’t been a good time for it,” he defended, knowing even as he spoke that the argument was a weak one.
Angela scoffed at him. “Tim, you’ve been a constant in her life for the better part of two years, and now you’re leaving. There isn’t going to be a good time to break news like that to her. I can promise you, though, she’ll be more hurt by the idea that you’re keeping this from her. What, do you want her to find out in roll call next week, when she walks in and you’re not there?”
He grimaced at the very idea. “Of course not. It’s just… hard.” He picked up a rattle that was just a little out of Jack’s reach, handing it to the baby and smiling when his godson cooed his thanks. “I don’t want her to feel abandoned.”
“Tim,” Angela said, very slowly, almost as though speaking to a child about something you very much wanted them to understand, “you have keys to each other’s places.”
“For emergencies,” he cut in, knowing before he even spoke that she wasn’t going to pay him any mind.
As expected, she entirely ignored him. “You share custody of a dog, which we’re all still having to pretend we don’t find weird. You helped her kid study for her finals, Tim.”
“Tamara’s not technically her kid,” he pointed out.
Again, he was ignored. “You’re in each other’s lives outside the job. That isn’t going to change just because you work a little further away from her.”
“I know,” he admitted, because he did. He’d told himself the same things, after agreeing to the transfer. They weren’t any more convincing coming from somebody else, it turned out. “I don’t want to make her feel like she’s alone, that’s all. She’s…” He trailed off, well aware that he was revealing far more of himself than he’d like to in that moment. “She’s dealt with that enough, in her life. I don’t want to be just another person who made her feel that way.”
Angela’s face softened, her gaze turning sympathetic. “Tim, if that’s the way you feel, then why did you agree to the transfer in the first place? You know Grey would have let you stay at Mid-Wilshire, no questions asked.”
He absolutely would have, and Tim did know that. Grey wasn’t one of the ones Tim was worried about, though.
“Objectively, there was no reason to turn it down.” At her incredulous expression, Tim sighed and explained. “The reason I turned down the transfer to North Hollywood was because Lucy’s training wasn’t finished, and I wanted to stick around until it was. That was understandable. But she’s done, now. She’s a P2, and she’s shown how well she can handle herself. She doesn’t need me to keep her safe, anymore.”
“She never did,” Angela pointed out bluntly, and Tim couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Lucy hadn’t needed him to keep her safe, even back at the very start. She had walked through the door exactly as she was. “And she’s a good cop, Tim. She always has been. It’s not like you’re exactly throwing her to the wolves, either. We’ll look out for her. We’re not going to let anything happen to her.”
“I know,” Tim nodded, because again, he did. He knew Angela counted Lucy as a friend – she’d made the other woman Jack’s godmother, even – and would do anything for her. For a reason he couldn’t entirely explain, though, knowing Angela was watching Lucy’s back wasn’t the same as watching it himself.
“But you want to do it yourself.”
“Maybe,” Tim admitted, very begrudgingly. “But I can’t. People have already gotten the wrong idea, and I don’t want to give them any more ammunition.”
Angela laughed incredulously. "The wrong idea? Tim, since when do you care what people think of you?"
"I don't care what people think of me," Tim said honestly. If this was about him alone, he wouldn’t be struggling at all. He would’ve turned the post down without a second thought. But he wasn’t the only one rumors like that impacted.
Angela’s expression turned knowing. Tim didn’t like it in the slightest. "But you care what they think of Lucy?" Her tone suggested she’d just figured something out. Tim wasn’t going to ask her what it was. He didn’t think he was ready to hear it.
"They'll make things a lot more difficult for her than they will for me if they read it wrong, so yeah, I care what they think of Lucy."
Angela smirked humorlessly. "It's very sweet of you to try to protect her from that, Tim, but no amount of effort from you is going to stop certain people from talking about her in a certain way. She's a woman of color working in a field that's been dominated by white men for centuries. The kind of people that would hold her friendship with you against her are the kind of people that are going to hold everything against her. The Old Guard would gladly try and take issue with the way she sneezes, if they thought they could get away with it. That is just the way people like that are. If you really want to help Lucy, you should tell them to go screw themselves, not make decisions for yourself and her based on what they might think."
"Old Guard or not, some of those people are in charge of making decisions about her career," Tim said firmly. "I'm trying not to make things any harder on her, Lopez."
Angela studied him shrewdly for a moment, and then her eyes widened, the look on her face in that moment suggesting she’d just realized something she’d previously never considered. “Tim.”
“What?” he said, defensive even though she’d really said nothing at all.
“Is the reason you’re so scared of people getting the wrong idea about your feelings for Lucy because they wouldn’t have the wrong idea at all?” She said it so gently, but they both knew the weight such a question actually carried.
He stared at her for several seconds, then shook his head slowly. “That’s got nothing to do with this, Lopez.”
She arched a challenging brow. “Doesn’t it? Because you’re not just leaving her, you know. You are leaving all of us. Some of us have known you a lot longer than she has, and yet she’s the only one you’re worried about hurting with this decision. There’s a deeper reason for that, Tim. There has to be.”
“The reasons don’t matter,” he tried to insist yet again.
She smiled sadly. “Yeah, they do. Because you don’t lie to the people you love, Tim. It never gets you to the places you want to be. You need to tell her,” she said seriously, “before she finds out from somebody else. I promise you, that would hurt her more than you leaving ever could.”
Knowing she was right didn’t make it any easier.
Lucy was thrilled for him.
He shouldn’t have expected any less from her. She never allowed her personal feelings to impact the way she reacted to happy news, and that time was no different.
He told her he’d be leaving the next week, leaving out the part where he’d known that for the past two. Lopez hadn’t clarified about lies of omission in her spiel the previous night, and until she did, he was going to avoid causing additional pain wherever he could.
“Are you going to have an office?” she asked curiously, twisting in her seat to look over at him as they stopped at a red light.
He shrugged. “I think so. Why?”
She grinned. “I’m going to come and visit all the time, then. You’ll be tired of me in no time.”
“I could always give them your picture at the front desk, tell them not to let you in,” Tim said in response. It wasn’t what he wanted to say, which was I don’t think that’s possible.
She simply shrugged. “You could, but we both know you never would.”
“No,” he agreed, because there was no point denying the truthfulness of her statement. “I never would.”
She waited until the light had turned green and they were once again on the road before looking over at him, an almost shy smile on her face. “Hey, Tim?” she said softly.
“Yeah?” he replied, glancing over at her quickly.
“I’m proud of you.”
He couldn’t express how grateful he was to hear those words from her, and so he simply nodded and murmured a “thanks,” hoping it was enough to tell her what he couldn’t.
The look on her face suggested the message had gotten across loud and clear.
He cleared his throat, then redirected his gaze to the road. “If you’re going to come and visit me in my office all the time, you’re going to have to bring food sometimes.”
She smirked. “I’ll bring sushi, then.”
“I won’t let you in,” he said, slightly more serious than before.
“Yes, you will,” she said.
“Yes,” he admitted begrudgingly, looking over at her. “I will.”
She smiled.