Work Text:
Johnny was exhausted. They’d been working this wildfire pretty much since the start of their shift, nearly nonstop, and he wasn’t really expecting to get off work on time either. The sun was setting somewhere behind the hills by now, though it was hard to truly tell through the vegetation and the slopes and the smoke.
They were on their way back to base, Roy ‘n him, after helping to free a lineman from underneath a fallen tree. The man had been unharmed, nearly miraculously so, and relief lightened their hearts and their steps as they trekked back to the dirt road where they’d left the squad, despite their exhaustion. It also, apparently, made them careless.
Ridiculous as it sounded, they just didn’t notice the cliff edge.
It was overgrown and the visibility was terrible anyway and, yes, maybe they just hadn’t been paying as much attention as the situation demanded. Either way, Roy had been walking ahead, carrying the biophone, and then, suddenly, he… wasn’t. He simply vanished, with barely more than a loud, shocked intake of breath. It took Johnny about half a second to realize what had happened - but when he finally did, it took every ounce of restraint he possessed to calmly, safely, get down low and creep towards the edge and peer over it, even as every single one of his instincts screamed at him to hurry, get to Roy, faster, NOW.
The actual cliff turned out to be only a couple of feet high before it transitioned into a steep slope, but it was certainly high and steep enough to do a great deal of harm to anyone falling off it. Johnny was painfully aware of that, he’d splinted far too many arms and legs (and backs and necks) after falls like this.
And at the bottom of the cliff, completely motionless, lay Roy. Johnny was down there next to him in the blink of an eye, probably faster than would’ve been safe, strictly speaking, but Johnny didn’t give a rat’s ass about safe because this was Roy, damn it, and he wasn’t moving, still wasn’t moving at all by the time Johnny slid to a halt next to him, and Johnny knew what that could mean, but he needed-
He fell to his knees next to Roy, pleading with every higher power there might’ve been as he reached out and touched his shoulder because he couldn’t lose Roy, damn it, not this soon, not like this.
“... Johnny?”
Johnny stopped short, hand awkwardly hovering halfway to Roy’s shoulder.
“Roy?” he croaked out.
“Yeah.” A short pause. “Just… give me a moment, yeah? I- I think I’m alright? It doesn’t hurt.”
‘That, or you broke something important. Like your spine,’ was something Johnny wisely didn’t say, but couldn’t help thinking anyway, and he just couldn’t help that queasy feeling that overcame him.
“Just… just lie still, yeah? Don’t try to move. I’m gonna check you over-”
“Yeah, alright.”
Johnny’s hands were shaking as he felt for breaks, tested Roy’s reflexes and pupillary response, counted pulse and respirations. They didn’t even stop when everything seemed perfectly alright, and Johnny’s heart kept hammering in his chest like it was trying to escape, and he still just couldn’t be sure that Roy was going to be alright - there were too many clothes and too little light to really tell and, going by the steadily increasing amounts of smoke and embers, way too little time to do anything about either.
“Hey, Roy,” Johnny finally said, “looks like everything’s checking out alright, but I still wanna take a closer look at ya back at base, alright? We have to get out of here first.”
“Johnny, I’m fine,” Roy said, before throwing Johnny an odd little look and sighing. “Yeah,” he amended. “Alright.”
He got to his feet with ease and grabbed the biophone, clapping his free hand on Johnny’s shoulder when he noticed him staring.
“Let’s go, Junior,” he said, probably in an effort to dispel the weird mood hanging over the both of them - unsuccessfully - and started walking in the direction of the squad.
Johnny stood frozen for another long moment before he gave himself a little push and snapped out of it.
“Alright, Pally.”
The walk back was short but grueling, and it didn’t help that Johnny’s heart skipped a beat whenever Roy stumbled, convinced that he’d fall over unconscious or dead from some injury Johnny had overlooked.
If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have realized that he himself was stumbling just as frequently, the path uneven and the turnouts heavy as lead after one of the hardest shifts he could recall.
But Johnny wasn’t thinking straight.
Johnny was scared out of his wits - and he was used to that, used to being afraid, and he was even used to fearing for his partners’ lives, but this? This was worse. It was always so much worse when Roy was involved.
Back in the day, he’d been pretty good at not getting attached - to his partners, to his shiftmates, to anyone. He’d known that, no matter what happened, as long as he was still alive himself, life would go on. Losing someone, especially a partner, was shocking and traumatizing and awful and not something he’d get over easily, but still, life would go on, somehow. He’d made it through worse. And on some level, he knew life would go on if something were to happen to Roy, too - but he couldn’t imagine it. Heck, he could barely imagine not having Roy for a partner; a life without Roy in it at all was utterly unthinkable.
His grim thoughts were finally interrupted when they reached the squad.
“I’ll drive,” Johnny decided as they were putting away their equipment.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Roy, damn it, you fell off a cliff. I’ll drive.”
Johnny could see Roy roll his eyes as he climbed into the passenger seat, but he really couldn’t care less.
The drive back to base went by eerily quiet - somehow, neither of them seemed to be in the mood for words. Johnny would’ve loved to hear Roy’s voice, to make sure he was still coherent, that he was really as alright as he seemed, but he himself was way too busy just keeping the squad on the narrow path to even think about starting a conversation. Maybe Roy had been right to be sceptical about letting him drive - Johnny was tired and distracted, and his damned hands still wouldn’t stop shaking.
He did get them back to base, though. Safe and sound, and with Roy none the wiser.
Roy turned to walk into the station they’d set up in as soon as he got out of the squad, but Johnny stopped him with a hand on his arm and gently led him to the back of the squad instead. Even he himself wasn’t entirely sure why - he could’ve just as well taken a closer look at Roy inside, but there was something comfortable and familiar about the footboard of the squad and besides, he really needed another minute away from the bustle of a wildfire response being organized.
Roy sat down on the footboard and gave Johnny a long, long look.
“You know I’m fine, right?” he asked. And yeah, Johnny had more or less come to the same conclusion on the way back, but still…
“Roy, you weren’t moving until after I got to you.”
Roy’s expression was indecipherable.
“It took me a while to piece together what had happened - I mean, I didn’t exactly expect to fall off a cliff, I just suddenly lost my footing and couldn’t tell which way was up with all the rolling I did. Didn’t wanna move until I knew for sure it was safe.”
And sure, that made sense, but Johnny remained sceptical. It probably showed on his face, because Roy shook his head and made an amused noise.
“What do I have to do to prove that I’m not fatally injured? Touch my own toes? Do jumping jacks?” he asked, with that fondly annoyed tone Johnny’d grown so accustomed to, the one that said ‘you’re being ridiculous but I’ll indulge you anyway’. Normally it’d have been reassuring, but too much had happened, and Johnny was still too on edge.
“You’re welcome to try and see if it works,” he finally just said, his face carefully neutral.
Roy’s lips twitched into a wry smile.
“Maybe later,” he said. “Let’s go, Johnny - I’m starving. Let’s find somebody who knows where to get some food around here.”
Johnny hesitated, but finally sighed and nodded.
“Yeah, sound-” he started, and then paused abruptly when he noticed a scuff on Roy’s cheekbone, darker than all the other smudges of dirt. “Wait, shit, is that soot or is that a cut?”
“Is what-?”
Johnny shushed him and turned his face a bit further to the side with a hand against Roy’s jaw, gently prodding at the dark spot.
“Just soot,” he finally concluded after a very close inspection, and he knew his shaky voice betrayed his fierce worry about what would’ve been a bad scrape at worst, but he was too exhausted to hide it. He gently wiped at the spot while Roy stood still and silent, and finally felt himself calm down as the soot slowly gave way to unblemished skin, relaxing muscles he hadn’t even noticed he’d tensed, surprised to find that even his jaw was sore. He let his other hand, the one that wasn’t wiping at the soot, slip from Roy’s face to his shoulder, resting it there until he’d managed to wipe the offending spot off his partner’s cheek - or at least smudge it into invisibility.
“Okay,” he said quietly, “I think I got it all.”
Roy turned his head and looked at him, and suddenly their faces were entirely too close together, and Johnny could basically count his eyelashes and everything that’d happened just kind of came crashing down on him all at once in that second of silence - that terrifying moment in which Johnny’d been convinced he’d lost Roy forever, the frantic rush to get down to him, the mixture of elation and worry that came after, the realization - though it wasn’t really a new one - that he couldn’t lose him… Johnny had stopped trying to convince himself that he wasn’t in love with Roy a while ago - he might’ve been painfully lacking in self-awareness sometimes, but even he wasn’t dense enough to miss something that monumental forever - but not even that prepared him for the sheer rush of emotions that hit him out of the blue.
He really didn’t think as he leaned forward, closed that tiny gap between them before he could stop himself, before he fully realized just what the hell he was doing, and brought their lips together
The kiss only lasted a moment before Johnny fully grasped the implications of what he was doing and pulled away like he’d been burned, but that moment was seared into his memory like he’d looked into the sun, a glowing afterimage of something that should never have happened and that Johnny selfishly longed for to happen again - despite everything, it’d felt so right, so natural, even though it absolutely shouldn’t have, and Johnny yearned for more of it, would’ve been happy to kiss Roy for hours and hours - but that had never been an option, had it? And it never would be. This was all he was ever going to get, this tiny moment that never should’ve existed, so brief and unexpected that Roy didn’t even have the time to pull away before Johnny did.
Slowly, the weight of what he’d done truly started to sink in, and Johnny could feel himself beginning to panic - god, Roy would hate him for that, and rightfully so. Johnny abruptly turned around and walked away, barely even aware of where he was going, just away, as far as he could. At least he didn’t run - or at least he thought he didn’t, thinking back. He’d been beyond truly noticing then.
Maybe he could try to play it off as some kind of momentary insanity, he thought, brought on by exhaustion and stress, if he just didn’t give Roy any reason to doubt his words, if he could just pretend he didn’t need Roy right next to him to be truly content, if he just managed to cram himself back into that little box of indifference and detachment he’d been so comfortable in before Roy and him had become partners, that little safe cage of social acceptability he never ever should’ve let himself peek out of in the first place. It would hurt. He’d never truly realized how vulnerable he’d become lately, and, worst of all, how much he’d come to like it - but if that was what it took to not lose Roy completely, it was a sacrifice he was all too willing to make.
By the time Johnny was done panicking - for the moment, anyway - he found himself in some dark corner of the engine bay, pretending to mess with the cots they’d put up to treat victims, not really recalling how he got there. A moment later, he heard footsteps behind him - he didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to turn around to know who was standing there.
“Johnny?” Roy asked, sounding confused and out of his depth
“Yeah,” Johnny replied, wracking his brain for an acceptable reaction and coming up empty. “I just. I just remembered I wanted to check the equipment,” he finally said, terrified of acknowledging what had transpired between them.
He hadn’t really expected it to work, hadn’t expected Roy to let this go so easily - but it did work, and Roy didn’t say a thing.
Right then, this seemed like the greatest stroke of luck he could’ve imagined.
By the next time he almost lost Roy - to a goddamn basement - he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t died and ended up in some fucked-up purgatory.