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One autumn morning, Roy arrived to his shift to no Johnny in the locker room and weird, muffled noises coming from the squad.
He wasn’t overly surprised when he went to check, just in case they really were currently being robbed by the single most incompetent car thief in the history of automobiles, and found his partner awkwardly crammed in the bottom of the squad’s cab, right leg sticking out at an angle and hovering a solid few inches above the ground. The muffled noises turned out to be quiet but fervent cursing - barely even sentence fragments that did nothing to help Roy find out what was going on.
He watched for a while, waiting to see if Johnny would notice him on his own, before he announced his presence with a mildly entertained “hey there, Junior,” which - rather predictably - got him a startled yelp as Johnny shot upright, barely clearing the steering wheel with the back of his head.
“Oh jeez, Roy,” he gasped, awkwardly twisting to get a look at the other man, “ever considered not scaring your partner to death first thing in the morning?” A short pause. “Wait, is our shift already starting?”
“Yeah - or, well, it will be in about five minutes, anyway. You were here early, did anything happen?”
“You bet it did - I lost my pen!” Johnny exclaimed, sounding sincerely distressed. He untangled himself from the upholstery and stiffly slid out of the squad, looking disheveled and tired as he wiped his dusty fingers on his pants legs, leaving light grey stripes along his thighs. Roy would have to remind him to dust himself off or Cap would take the opportunity to be witty about it again, but right now he had other priorities.
“You… lost your pen?” Roy asked, confusion audible in his voice, before it finally clicked. “Wait. That green plastic one you’ve had since we transferred here?”
“Yeah, that one,” Johnny replied. “I was working an overtime shift yesterday, covering for Dwyer because he’s off on that Paramedics Convention, and I thought I’d just dropped it in the squad somewhere, but it’s just… gone! Vanished! Dropped off the face of the earth!”
Roy sighed. “If I tell you that you can use my pen, would that help at all?”
Johnny hesitated for just a moment, and Roy almost thought that he was honestly considering it, but then he just shook his head.
“Nope.”
“And if we find you a new green pen?”
“Definitely not.”
Roy propped an arm against the squad and leaned on it. “And what do you want to do now?”
Johnny threw him a long-suffering look. “Find it.”
Roy figured he really should’ve expected that reply.
“Fine,” he said. “What do you plan on doing?”
Johnny sighed deeply, slumping a little in a way that Roy considered just a little overly dramatic given the situation, but what did he know.
“Man,” his partner finally muttered, “if only I knew… If I could, I’d seriously go and check out all of yesterday’s victims, ask ‘em if they’ve found it, but I really can’t turn up in some random Rover and civilian clothing and expect them to talk to me at all. D’ya think Cap would allow us to take the squad between runs?”
The honest answer was a pretty clear “no”, but Roy didn’t want to dash Johnny’s hopes like that. He absolutely didn’t understand why, but this whole thing seemed pretty important to his partner.
“I think you should ask him,” he said with a smile that he hoped was encouraging and not patronizing. “Don’t get your hopes up, but you just might get lucky.”
Johnny perked up a little at that, and Roy wondered if he’d heard the second part of his reply at all, but couldn’t help smirking anyway. He’d always marveled at Johnny’s ability to cycle through emotions at the blink of an eye, and besides, hopeful Johnny was a lot easier to deal with than antsy, sullen Johnny.
“Hey, Johnny,” Roy asked, more as an afterthought, “do I get to know what’s so special about that pen of yours, now that I’ll probably get to run around looking for it all day long?”
Johnny gave him a sideways glance, one quirked eyebrow and all.
“Only if I absolutely can’t avoid it,” he said, and Roy could tell that he really meant it by the set of his jaw and the tilt of his head, and decided he didn’t want to pry. Well, that wasn’t quite right - he very much wanted to, but he figured that some topics were probably best left untouched. He almost considered reminding Johnny that Cap might be a bit more inclined to help if Johnny told him, at least, but then again there was a pretty decent chance that the importance of the pen would make sense to nobody but Johnny, so he wisely decided to keep quiet and let his partner make his own choices.
In the end, Johnny went to the captain alone, so it wouldn’t have made a difference to Roy anyway - this came as a surprise; usually the younger paramedic dragged Roy with him whenever Cap (or any other person outranking them, for that matter) wanted a word with him, for a sort of moral support they’d never actually call that - and strode into the rec room about five minutes later with a relieved grin on his face.
“I did it, Roy,” he exclaimed, eyes sparkling, and for a moment Roy wasn’t entirely sure if Johnny meant getting permission, or asking Cap in the first place. Probably both.
“Did what?” Roy asked back and took another sip of coffee.
“We’re allowed to go looking as long as we don’t go too far and stay available. Cap said we should log it as ‘recovering vital equipment’.”
Roy gracelessly snorted into his mug.
He croaked out a “vital equipment?” while simultaneously trying not to choke on his coffee, before recovering. “I mean, I guess that’s one way to put it… what’d you tell him to make him go along with this?”
“The truth, of course,” Johnny replied as if nothing else had even occurred to him. “I wouldn’t lie to Cap about something like that.”
Roy nodded. He really would have been more than surprised if Johnny had fibbed, at least about something like this.
About half an hour later, they were rolling up to their first address - a nice older lady who’d slipped on her stepladder the day before and had gotten stuck in the rungs. Johnny had extracted her with no worse damage than a few light bruises and some scrapes, so he didn’t feel too bad about bothering her - unsuccessfully, as it turned out: they spent about half an hour looking, but there wasn’t a single green ballpoint pen to be found on the premises, Johnny’s or otherwise.
Johnny was slightly disappointed, of course, but still in a fairly good mood as he left - partially because he was probably still riding that high from convincing Cap to go along with their pen hunt, and partially because the nice older lady had offered them some excellent homemade cookies, which Johnny had, of course, entirely-too-eagerly accepted.
Johnny’s good mood and boundless optimism waned somewhat several unsuccessful visits later, however, when the pen was still nowhere to be found, and both the opportunity to keep looking and the places to look in were growing steadily more scarce.
Finally, Johnny sighed.
“That was it, Roy,” he said.
“It?” Roy asked. “What do you mean?”
“All the victims we could have visited,” Johnny clarified, his expression utterly heartbroken.
“Really?” Roy looked at him in surprise. “I thought the log looked a lot fuller than that.”
“Yeah, uh,” Johnny replied, subdued, “The other runs were… well, they weren’t great. Some very serious ones, and a few where nobody involved was terribly happy to see us. I really want that pen back, yes, but I do have my limits.”
“Oh, I see…” Roy fought the urge to reach over and pat Johnny’s back comfortingly - not because it would’ve crossed a boundary, more because there would’ve been barely enough room to put his arm around Johnny’s shoulders, much less perform any sort of patting motion. He quietly resolved to catch up on that if they really did end up not finding that pen.
Another half-hour and one run later, Roy climbed out of the squad at Rampart and found Johnny trying very hard to crawl into the crevices under the benches of the ambulance he’d come in on, and cramming his slender hands into all sorts of odd places they were definitely not supposed to fit into.
“What on earth are you doing?” he asked, before figuring out the answer himself before Johnny had a chance to say even a single word. “Looking for that pen again, right?”
“Yeah,” Johnny piped up from his little corner, head to the floor, left hand crammed into some obscure slit somewhere at the side of the ambulance, butt almost comically sticking up into the air, “I was in this one yesterday, too, and I know I still had the pen at that point, so if I dropped it in here…” he stopped suddenly, the sentence trailing off. Then: “Aha!”
“Did you find it?” Roy asked.
Johnny didn’t answer, but a few moments later a dusty old comb came flying out the back of the ambulance and clattered to the floor at Roy’s feet. It wasn’t green, and it certainly wasn’t a pen, but it still seemed vaguely familiar.
“Oh hey, didn’t you lose one just like this a couple of years ago?” Roy asked. “Is that why you always look like you haven’t seen a comb in your life these days, because you dropped your only one under the floor of an ambulance? You know, you coulda borrowed one of mine if you were that short on combs…”
“Jerk,” Johnny muttered, but there was no heat in it - if anything, Johnny sounded like he was trying hard not to laugh. Until, that is, he suddenly yelped and came scrambling out of the corner he’d stuck himself into, clutching his hand, and Roy couldn’t quite tell what was wrong, but going by Johnny’s ragged breathing and the way he’d suddenly gone pale, it was probably painful.
Roy was by his side in an instant, helping him down from the back of the ambulance and onto solid ground before he carefully tugged his partner’s arm away from where he’d held it cradled against his chest, uncovering a nasty scrape across the back of his hand and across his wrist, blood slowly collecting along it and starting to drip. It didn’t look like anything vital had been damaged, but the cut was still long and probably fairly deep and could definitely do with a thorough cleaning and maybe some stitches, and Roy was really eager to get that checked out - heck, they were right in front of Rampart anyway.
Johnny, for all his bravery and occasional foolhardiness, didn’t actually have a particularly high pain tolerance and didn’t deal well with unexpected injuries at the best of times. In the field, on a run, when he was always prepared to get injured, he was usually pretty good at pushing through the pain because it didn’t matter then, because he didn’t have _time _to suffer as long as someone still needed him (which never failed to scare the hell out of Roy - he still could never quite tell if Johnny’s yelp of pain and prompt assurance that he was okay would turn out to be a minor laceration or if he’d be quietly falling behind with a badly sprained ankle or a twisted knee), but right now his partner was stunned, staring at his hand like he was still trying to figure out where all the pain and the blood was coming from all of a sudden, eyes wide as he looked at Roy like he was hoping for an explanation or a plan or anything, and Roy knew that, if he acted quickly enough, he’d be able to hand Johnny off to Morton or Brackett or Joe Early before he’d gathered his wits enough to fight back.
He looped one arm around Johnny’s slender shoulders, grabbed his partner’s uninjured elbow with his other hand, and then gently but firmly led him towards the automatic doors of the ER entrance. Johnny followed along without resistance; so far, anyway.
The first person they came across in there was Doctor Early, and Roy could see Johnny perking up a bit, but then the man brushed past them, clearly in a hurry, and his partner slumped again, sighing when he noticed Kel Brackett walking up to them instead, a look of concern on his face.
“Hey Roy,” he said as soon as he’d reached them, “what’s wrong?”
“Johnny’s cut his hand,” Roy replied with a practiced calm, like he’d dragged his partner into the ER at least a hundred times before. Thinking about it, he actually might have.
Brackett, didn’t seem very surprised either - he just turned to Johnny, and asked: “Can you show me?”
Johnny wordlessly held out his arm, and Doctor Brackett grimaced at the cut and the small but prominent fresh blood stain on the paramedic’s light blue shirt.
“How long ago did this happen?” he asked.
“Oh, about two minutes ago,” Roy replied in Johnny’s stead, “we were right outside the entrance.”
Brackett simply nodded. He gave them a little smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring, and shuffled them into the nearest free treatment room, where he got to work stopping the bleeding and cleaning the wound.
“D’you think that’ll need stitches?” Roy asked after a while.
“It would definitely help it heal faster,” Brackett replied, “but the cut’s not terribly deep, so it’d probably heal just fine on its own. Johnny, what would you prefer?”
Silence.
Roy looked over to Johnny, who was… staring intently at Doctor Brackett’s chest? Not quite the reaction Roy had expected.
Slowly, the younger paramedic raised his head, looked the doctor in the eyes.
“Doctor Brackett,” he said, and his voice sounded strangely hollow, “where’d you find that pen?”
Pen? Roy took a closer look, and indeed: There, nestled into the good doctor’s shirt pocket, was a familiar-looking, scuffed green plastic pen.
“Huh?” Brackett asked and patted his shirt pocket, before pulling the pen from it and giving it a good once-over.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “I must’ve borrowed it from someone yesterday and then forgotten to give it back. Why, is it yours?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said, suddenly sounding very, very tired, “yeah, you could say that. I spent all day searching for it. May I have it back, please?”
“Of course,” Brackett replied and held the pen out to Johnny with an unusually sheepish expression. Johnny took the pen carefully, like some kind of hallowed ancient artifact, and slid it back into his own shirt pocket, right next to the blood stain, before giving it a last, gentle pat. He took a deep breath and smiled, and to Roy it seemed like the weight of the world had just slouched off of Johnny’s shoulders - and all that over a ratty old pen.
A few minutes later, they were climbing back into the squad - Roy with a deep sense of relief, Johnny looking slightly bedraggled and with a freshly-bandaged hand. He’d agreed to the stitches in the end, reluctantly, and was now trying very hard not to pick at the dressing.
“Hey, Johnny,” Roy said as he started the motor, “do I get to know what was so important about getting that pen back, now?”
Johnny’s look turned utterly sheepish.
“Well, you see,” he started, before trailing off and starting again: “Do you remember the day I signed my application for the paramedics program?”
“Sure,” Roy replied, “you asked to borrow my-” and then it clicked. “No way.”
“Yeah. I’d accidentally pocketed it in my excitement and only noticed a while later when I finally got around to tossing that shirt in the laundry, so I took the pen with me to give it back, but I kept forgetting about it, and eventually I…” Johnny paused, picked at his bandaged hand, flinched guiltily when Roy gave him a stern pat on his fingers to make him stop. “Well, I just got used to having it there, and it kinda sorta came to… to mean something, I guess? Dunno. Kinda a reminder of what could have been and what actually was, kinda.”
He looked at Roy, brow creased with worry, and Roy half knew what Johnny was going to ask before he’d even opened his mouth.
“Do you… do you want it back?” he asked.
Roy chuckled, mostly to cover that weird fluttery feeling he got when he thought about Johnny placing that much importance on something that had been his once, no matter how silly that thought was.
“No way, Junior,” he said. “Keep it. It means a heckuva lot more to you than it ever did to me.”