Work Text:
She wakes up the day after it happens at 6:00 just like normal. There’s a moment, just after she slaps the top of the alarm clock sitting on her bedside table, that she forgets. It’s a regular Wednesday again, she’ll go to work, it’s another “12 hours on” after a “12 hours off”. She’ll shower and get dressed and drink her coffee after she brushes her teeth even though she sort of feels like that defeats the purpose. Maybe she’d argue her point with Tim again today on their way out on a call. He’ll be driving and she’ll be in the passenger seat. Tommy will let them have the front this time around.
He’s alive still, for her anyway, in that brief moment.
Then she remembers the too-bright glow of the lava, all the color draining from his face, the ghost of promises to somebody’s son still falling from his lips. He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.
She doesn’t get out of bed after all. She has the day off and nobody is expecting her anywhere. There’s nobody to call, Tommy said she’d do it and she takes her word for it. It feels like a cop out, but she’d only met his mother once when she came to visit for a birthday, a graduation, something - she couldn’t remember. It felt like cheating but she let it slide. The only thing worse than not being the one to tell her would be to be the one that had to.
Her phone buzzes, she ignores it. The vibration becomes so constant that it fades into the ambient soundtrack of the day, blending with the cars that occasionally pass down her street and the few remaining birds that whistle arias to the smoke that still clings to the air. It happens on and off all day, but she barely even looks at the screen. She splits the time up between staring blankly at the ceiling and closing her eyes as tight as she can, trying her best to block out the memory of him. It doesn’t work. She’s drowning in it.
There’s a knock at the door, she doesn’t get up. She isn’t expecting anybody, there’s nobody around anymore to expect. Michelle is gone and Tim is-
The knocking doesn’t go away, though, it gets more and more persistent, louder and louder and stronger and stronger until she slides out of bed just to make the noise stop. She’s in her uniform pants still, the shirt had gotten something on it. Blood maybe? Ashes? She can’t remember and that’s probably for the best. She pulls the cuffs of the long sleeve AFD shirt over her hands and uses one to wipe at her face, as though it could do anything to combat the puffy redness in her cheeks. In any case, she shuffles her socked feet down her hallway to her front door looking like she forgot to wash up and then fell asleep at the station. She looks as tired as she feels and she feels a little like she’s dying.
She shoves her body against the door so she can unlock it, the way you do when you live in a house where the front door is kind of broken but not enough to have to fix it, and turns the lock above the knob. She steels herself with a deep breath in, holding it for a second with her eyes closed, and then she pulls open the door.
She’s not sure who she expects it to be on the threshold, but the answer is not Carlos Reyes.
They’d grown up together but only kind of. They’d known of each other for a long time. Nancy had moved to Austin with her dad when she was in high school, a scrawny 14 year old with an attitude problem and a penchant for skipping class and getting good grades anyway. She’d been a year ahead of him in school, so they didn’t spend much time around each other, but they were familiar, enough to wave when they saw each other at the store, but not enough to stop and chat.
He’s got a soft frown on his face, his eyebrows pinched together and so much concern in his eyes that it makes her look down at her own feet. She wants to tease him for stalking her, for finding her address. She wants to joke about it, anything to steer his gaze off her tear stained face and bitten and bloody cuticles. She wants to, but the words die out before they’re even in her mouth. If he speaks, she thinks it might break her down and she’s not sure she’ll be able to pick up the pieces if she does.
“Nancy,”
He says it softly and she wishes he hadn’t. She’s bottling it up as best she can but she’s cracking at the edges and he can tell.
The sun is too bright and it’s shining in her eyes and her head hurts, she’s not sure when that started.
“You, uh” She starts, her voice thick and ugly, she hates it, this isn’t how she’s supposed to sound “You want to come in?”
She stands back in the doorway, holding the door open with one arm while swinging the other one out in what she wants to be an overly grandiose gesture of welcome. It falls flat and she knows it.
He steps inside and toes off his shoes on the mat by the door. His socks are gray with a red line that cuts across where his toes start. She focuses on it for a second while trying to avoid his gaze. She takes a second to wonder if he buys them in a pack like that. Just something else to think about. Just anything else to think about. He sets his car keys down on the little half wall that marks the entry way into her home and they look like they belong there. She’s not sure how he did that.
“Don’t tell my mom I forgot to offer you a drink,” she says, scrunching up her nose and shaking her head like an etch-a-sketch erasing a child’s drawing. Then she’s shuffling to the kitchen and pulling a glass out of the cabinet before Carlos can even blink. This is something she can do. Serving a house guest is a procedure. It’s a checklist. It’s simple and straightforward and her mother had it drilled into her head before she was tall enough to reach the doorknob to let someone inside. She can get him his water, she can offer him a seat in her living room, can make polite conversation. She can do all that.
As she turns, glass in hand, to retrieve the pitcher of water from the refrigerator, she falters. In her sink are two mugs, red wine pooled in their bases, pulling up the sides in places where it had sloshed around on the walk to the kitchen from the living room.
“I’m telling you Nance, she’s got a thing for you!” Tim laughed, leaning toward the coffee table to grab another fist full of popcorn.
“She does NOT. have a thing for me. I’m pretty sure she’s engaged- and BEfore you interrupt, I am PRETTY sure she is engaged to a whole ass MAN. A man. A big ol’ manly man with a real life Y chromosome and ALL the audacity.” Nancy joked back, sitting criss crossed on the other end of the sofa. “Plus even if she did, it’s not like I could do anything about it.”
“What do you MEAN? DO anything about it? Why’d you say it like- like it's a PROBLEM?”
“Timothy I cannot date a CO-WORKER,”
“TIM, and she’s not a CO-WORKER, she’s fire, you’re EMS. That’s different enough. I think you should go for it.”
They were watching some stupid rom-com or TV show with the volume turned most of the way down and the closed captioning on, this week’s bottle of cheap red wine divided into two mismatched thrift shop novelty mugs. It was a regular occurrence, a time to rehash the shit that made them mad at work, a chance to retell every stupid inside joke until they were both in stiches. It was more often her place than it was his, one too many times complaining about the lack of quality snack foods was enough to have Tim insisting he would just bring the wine to her’s.
They’d sat there that night for three and a half episodes of Gilmore Girls, which Tim had seen every episode of and which he was trying valiantly to get Nancy into for what felt like eons. It was easy, it always is when you’re with your family.
She was so entranced by the dirty dishes in the sink that she didn’t hear Carlos walk up from behind her to stand at her side next to the counter. She certainly was not prepared for him to say her name again, just like he’d done when she’d opened the door. She wasn’t expecting his gentle, feather light touch across the fingers she hadn’t realized had been gripping the edge of the gray and white faux-granite. She wasn’t expecting any of it, which is why, when he said her name again, she startled and dropped the glass she was holding onto the floor, the sound of it shattering the loudest thing she’d ever heard.
She was crouched and picking up the pieces in seconds, piling up the larger chunks in her hand and scraping them away from Carlos’s feet. This is stupid. This is so stupid. This is the stupidest thing that has ever happened, she thinks as she tries to slow down her pounding heart. She can hear the beating of it in her ears, the pounding of it making her vision bounce in a way that makes her vaguely nauseated. It was a lot. It was too much. The panic swirled around her and dragged her down, she was a boat being pulled out to sea.
Carlos was talking to her then, but she couldn’t have repeated what he’d said if she’d wanted to. She probably didn’t want to, either, he was probably being comforting and soft and kind. That kind of thing had always made her feel sticky in a way she couldn’t explain. He probably wanted her to calm down. He probably wanted her to take a deep breath– or worse, count 5 things she could see, four she could feel, three she could smell? Or was it taste? It wouldn’t have mattered, the only things she could see with her eyes squeezed shut was the unnaturally pale and mottled hand of her best friend, where she had smashed their fingers together, forcing his rapidly cooling ones to intertwine with her own. The only thing she could feel was the sickening, suffocating heat that poured over her in waves from the lava that still rushed behind them. The only thing she could smell was–
Bile rose in her throat and before she knew it, a big plastic bowl was shoved under her chin.
“ Jesus Nance, I fuckin’ told you you were gonna make yourself sick, would you please try to take a breath”
The way he spoke startled her and before she could even think about anything, she let out a strangled laugh. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny, Nancy, get a grip.
The two of them were a sight to see, that’s for sure. Nancy, with strings of spit and bile clinging to her lip, tears running down her cheeks, blood dripping from her fingertips, barking out hyena-like laughter. Carlos, sat back on his haunches, holding a mixing bowl of vomit, looking on with a mixture of concern and disgust painted across his face. It could’ve been a renaissance painting if the lighting had been a bit more dramatic.
“Nancy,” He tried again, earnestly trying to get her to respond to anything he said with actual words. She looked up at him, really looked, for a minute, before she took a shuddering breath in. It was like someone had pulled the plug– just like that, her shoulders sunk down again and she wrapped shaking fingers around the edge of the bowl. She winced as she did it, suddenly reminded of the broken glass as bits of it dug deeper into her palm.
“I got it, I got it,” Carlos says gently, tugging the bowl away before she can protest. He pauses a moment before deciding to rinse it out in the kitchen sink. His mother would be appalled, but then again she wasn’t watching. She couldn’t see the way that Nancy stared blankly in front of her, paying no mind to the cuts that marred her hands, making no effort to stand up, to clean up, to do anything. She couldn’t see the way she’d gone from complete silence to horrific and haunting laughter back to complete silence. She couldn’t see any of that, so Carlos decides it didn’t much matter that you should try and keep bodily fluids away from your dishes, and he swirls the water around gently before pouring all of it down the drain.
He grabs a handful of paper towels from the roll, running half of them under the faucet before he starts on his next order of business. He crouches across from her again, trying to meet her eyes. She won’t look at him, though, even when he tries to talk to her again, so he just uses some of the paper towels to wipe at her chin. The whole set of actions prompts her to pull the sleeve of her shirt down over her thumb, which she drags across her lip, never blinking, never moving her gaze from her chosen point of fixation.
“Why don’t we get these cleaned up?” He says, gently holding her fingertips against the side of his index fingers. He doesn’t wait for her to respond, which is good because if he had, the odds are pretty high that they’d be there all day. Instead, he slowly drags his fingers all the way down her arms to her elbows and puts just the slightest pressure there.
“We’re gonna stand up on three, okay?”
It’s a technique he uses with TK when he’s had a panic attack, or a migraine, or really anything for that matter. You give them enough time to acknowledge that they’ve been asked to do something, but not enough time to decide they aren’t going to do it.
He counts aloud and when he reaches three, the two of them rise on shaky legs up to full height again. They shuffle out of the kitchen, he doesn’ let go of her elbows that whole time. She doesn’t have to do much, just hold up some of her own weight and keep moving forward. Carlos has the rest under control. She’s exhausted by the time they reach the couch anyway.
She only knows to sit down because the backs of her knees are touching the cushions. Carlos perches on the coffee table across from her, paper towels in hand. He fishes a stack of bandages out of his pocket. She wants to ask where he’d found the time to gather all of that. She hadn’t even seen him do it. The first thoughts that come to mind are to tease him about digging through her stuff, but those thoughts only leads to the ones where Tim forces her to put a first aid kit in the kitchen following the eight billionth time she’s cut herself trying to chop a vegetable and she doesn’t care where he got them anymore.
He’s talking to her as he carefully dabs at the specks of blood that splash across her skin. It doesn't hurt, not really, until he has to use tweezers to pull out a particularly jagged shard from between her ring and middle fingers. Where did he get tweezers? She hisses as he does it, prompting him to look up at her while holding a little 2x2 square of loosely woven gauze over the bleeding wound.
“I know it hurts, Nance, I’m sorry.”
He’s right, it does hurt. Worse than he could ever know, though.
Before long, she’s all cleaned up and there's a little stack of crumpled pink tinged towels next to the box that holds her coasters. She doesn’t wait any length of time to start picking at the edges of the bandages that decorate her fingertips.
“Can I get you something to eat? Or do you want to start with water?” He asks it in the same low tone. He’s done trying to get her attention now. If she hears him, understands him, answers him, great. If she doesn’t, he’ll just give it his best guess.
To his surprise, though, she looks up at him under eyelashes that have clumped together and says “not hungry” like a little kid. Her bottom lip is trembling. It takes all of his willpower to pretend not to notice. Instead, he sighs and sets his palms against her knees, rubbing at them lightly with his thumb.
“How can I help?”
She shrugs her shoulders at that one, and then her face crumples again and she’s sobbing. Great big heaving sobs that have her whole body shaking. He stands up, wordlessly, and moves to sit beside her on the couch. She has her head resting on his knees before she can think better of it, get embarrassed by it, and she lets him rub gentle patterns against her bicep in an effort to coax her into tranquility.
He grabs the remote from where it’s sitting on the couch beside him and flips the channel until the Food Network comes up. It’s some stupid contest show where the people are mean to each other and somehow none of the judges are put off by eating various foods that western standards have pushed off as unsavory. Her breaths even out to the tune of pans clashing together and the ice cream machine breaking down.
The goal wasn’t necessarily to fall asleep, but it’s not like it hurt. It was easier than being awake for sure. Carlos stays, though, and he orders them takeout on his phone. He’ll wake her when the doorbell rings, try to get her to eat something maybe, drink something at least. She’s smart. She’s rational. But those things go out the window when it hurts this bad just to breathe, just to be.
He’ll have to leave after he does the dishes, after he walks her back to her bedroom, after he borrows her set of spare keys so he can lock the door from the outside on his way home. She’ll lay there for a while and try not to let this bury her.
She won’t think about the last thing she’d said to him. She won’t try to remember the last time she’d told him she’d loved him, she’d loved him, she’d loved him. He probably knew.
His memory won’t stay this heavy forever, and she knows that, but it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you have your head under your blanket and your pillow held tight to your face to catch every sob as it rips from your chest like the head of an arrow. She’ll get there, though.
She’ll hear his laugh in the grocery store when she goes to buy the cheapest red they have in stock and she’ll see his look of disapproval over Tommy’s shoulder when she stops following in Michelle’s footsteps. There will be pieces of him in everything, everywhere, for as long as she’s breathing. But after a while, that old familiar ghost will be more a friend than a fright and she will find peace.
She’ll get there. She’ll get there. She’ll get there.