#*queues a single post at 3 am and then skitters away*

[my-shields-are-down]

Chenford + Emmett

REMINDER: I asked for one word prompts to trigger a fan fiction one shot. This one technically is not because there is more than a single word in the request, but I am going with it.

I’ve got 6-8 one word prompts in various stages of progress left in my queue. Keep them coming - they are busting through my writer’s block and I am having a lot of fUn writing them.

I will be posting all of these on AO3 as a collection when this batch is done.

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Tim laughs every time one of his basketball buddies calls him “Jimmy.” He knows they are calling him a ringer like Jimmy from the movie “Hoosiers” - the guy who can make a shot from anywhere.

Yes, Tim is an excellent shot, be it for 3-pointers at or behind the tape, or the free throws that everyone else hates. Tim excels at those too.

Looking at Tim, you’d think with his height, wing-span and large hands, that he’d be a natural basketball player.

You’d be wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

While Tim is fantastic at the “glamour shots” of the game, he is not so great at running and dribbling, blocking, lay-ups, or defense. His dad had entered him in an Elk’s Club Free throw class, then competition when he was in middle school to keep Tim out of his hair while he drank excessively and fucked his way through the club waitresses out back by the dumpsters. Tim saw one poor girl pressed up against a smelly green bin one afternoon and then promptly signed up for anything and everything so he never would have to see that again. He became the reigning Elks Club “Hoop Shoot Free Throw” Champ for 5 years and “Hoop Shoot Wide Out” Champ for 4 years running. He was a master at making those far away shots, he just never learned to how to play the game to set up those shots.

Fast-forward 35 years and now he gets together with his former sergeants (Webb, Jansen, Hendricks and Gibbs) twice a week to play rec ball in the LA County First Responders League. He does a lot of running up and down the court until someone throws him the ball on the 3-point line and he scores.

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Tim can feel his retro high-top Air Jordans (white with MJ inspired Carolina blue swooshes) loosening up on his left foot. Sure enough, with 3:36 minutes left in the second half of the game they are currently losing, his shoe lace comes untied. That plus the forward momentum from yet another run up the court shoots his wedding band skittering across the court. He always ties the ring to his left shoelace for safe keeping.

When the “object on the court” time out is called, Tim jogs over to group of guys standing around waiting to play to grab his ring from….Emmett. His wife’s one-time ex-boyfriend. The fire fighter whose “hunkiness” they once debated..

Emmett and Tim lock eyes and smile - they were pretty good friends at one point. Emmett pulls his own gold wedding band out from his Kobe jersey on a utilitarian dog tag chain to show Tim the proper way to store his ring during a game.

Tim smiles and says thank you when Emmett hands him his platinum one and is asked, “Who is the lucky girl? Anyone I know?” To which Tim kisses his ring and looks at Lucy’s heartbeat recorded when thinking about Tim (when she’s experiencing butterflies) engraved inside, before bending down and retying his laces, securing the ring with a double knot this time.

Finally, Tim stands back up and smiles his biggest, “I’m so in love” grin and says to Emmett as the referee calls him back to the court, “I never did thank you for breaking up with her. By text message no less. I’ll tell Lucy you said hi.”

———-end———-