Chapter Text
There’s a ringing in Maya’s ears.
A breathless sensation that makes her all dizzy and light-headed, even when she isn’t standing, even the floor is solid concrete beneath her.
There’s a ringing in Maya’s ears and all she can smell is blood.
It’s heavy on her tongue, intermingles sharply with the bitterness of gasoline and the burnt ozone and the stale, manufactured oxygen from her very own SCUBA; and when Maya swallows the copper of it burns at her throat and simmers there.
Refusing to release its hold.
“I need a medevac! Now!”
Maya barely recognizes her own voice as her fingers slip and slide in wetness over the relay of the radio; nearly suffocated by the roiling heat as warped, molting metal groans and whines and twists into the darkness behind her. Like a child having a tantrum, it spits beady sparks of dark amber into the clouds of settling, toasted dust; onto chunks of plaster, onto concrete wedges, onto the kevlar of their turnouts, but still all she can focus on is the… the blood.
Wet and glimmering, when it catches against the occasional remnants of a flickering flame.
Metallic and heavy and thick and she nearly gags.
Andy’s response crackles over the frequency half a beat later, laced with more than a hint of panic shoved under tight, forced calmness from somewhere up above them and the newly minted captain is asking her for details, a sitrep, an anything, but the rest of what Herrera is asking fuzzes together underneath the ringing pressure and the blonde could give her nothing.
“It’s- It’s… Andy… A-Andy…”
She stutters and starts and can’t find the words because there were no words for what this was.
She fights to remember what happened. She tries to walk step by step through her memories and find any sort of clue to what went wrong, if they did something wrong, but comes up blank because Nineteen had followed protocol. They had established a safe perimeter, they had shut off the gas main, they had been in the process of evacuating civilians but gas leaks…
A perfect storm of methane mixed with air and exposed to an ignition source.
Disaster waiting to happen.
She didn’t even remember the blast.
“Andy, we… w-we just need a medevac! Please!”
She’s begging, she knows she is, and a part of her wants to say that it was bad. Horrible. Horrific.
But Hughes is looking up at her.
Hughes is looking up at her and her scarlet stained teeth chatter and her thin fingers glisten with crimson as they hover in the air, trembling like she’s unsure of what to do with them and her abdomen… her abdomen is a sopping mess of shredded fabric and bright, fresh, red blood.
And Maya couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
Pressure begets pressure.
And it was pressure that had forced a sliver of metal rebar through cloth, and skin, and fat, and muscle to the loops of gray rope above them, then through to the other side and now Hughes’s turnouts and Maya’s grip and the fucking rebar itself is all that is preventing the absolute worse case scenario.
She curls over her friend in the rubble and her chest swells with anger and fear and guilt because she had let Vic walk into the basement first and now the entrance they’d come through had disappeared in the wreckage and now Vic is looking up at her.
Eyes all wide and glossy and dilated somewhere past oblivion and Maya still couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
Because what good would it do… to let Vic know how bad it was.
She cobbles for the part of her that was methodical and clinical in situations like this, fumbles for the forced calm that Andy exudes, and tries to say it without saying it. She describes Hughes’s injuries accurately, mechanically- “a deep penetrating wound to the lower torso”, thinks Andy says something about getting Ben, thinks Andy affirms the call for evac assistance, then thinks she asks her if she’s okay, if she’s hurt, but it doesn’t matter.
Her head hurts and her ribs were shot, that much was clear from the very beginning, and she’s also pretty sure her left shoulder took the brunt of landing when she’d gone airborne and is no longer operating as a shoulder really should.
But still, none of it matters.
It doesn’t matter because Maya’s hands are warm and sticky with Vic’s blood.
Vic’s blood, not hers.
In the darkness, it eats away at her skin. It gnaws at muscle and bone and veins until she feels empty.
She wishes it were her. It should have been her.
Underneath the blonde's hands, Hughes twitches in a jerky, stunted movement, huffing out a copper-mist breath that sways the bloodied ropes of saliva stuck against her chattering teeth as her hands move for the rebar again.
“No. No, it’s okay. Don’t touch that. You don’t wanna touch that.”
Maya mumbles hoarsely because even when she isn't a doctor, even when she isn’t Ben, a part of her knows that if the metal loosens further, it risked more injury, it risked d-death and… and… and that’s a possibility that the blonde won’t even let herself think of.
Vic’s eyelids flutter mechanically and she scrunches her brow for a second or several in a way that should be comical but absolutely isn’t, and Maya knows before her friend even says it, that she doesn't understand.
“It… It…” the other firefighter stumbles and starts and gasps out a protest, “It h-hurts.”
It comes off into the air like a question, the lurch of confusion hitting Maya like a physical blow and her eyes burn as she releases the radio to nudge Vic’s hands away.
Calm. Calm. Calm.
She has to be calm.
She can't cry, she can’t cry in front of Vic.
“I can’t—” Vic breathes, struggles against her and the same broken sound catches on the bubbling blood that froths now at the corners of her lips— “I c-can’t… h-hurts… S’all m-messed up n’side.”
There’s wetness, tears running down the sides of Vic’s face, her expression twisted not with pain really, but confusion, shock probably. Hughes's chest rises. Sharp. Shallow. Another shaky breath. Exhaled. Staccato. And she’s still looking at her, but not, looking at her, and the blonde has to use more force than necessary to move her hands away.
“Hughes, Hughes look… l-look at me, Hughes. Vic! Victoria!”
Vic makes another sound, something awful and wet in her throat, and her eyes squeeze shut for a moment before looking back up at the blonde, like she’s scared to look away from her, like Maya isn’t who should have gone in first-
“I’m sorry, Vic. I know… I know… But we have Andy coming and Ben coming. And- and Travis is on aid car duty. And they’re gonna fix you up. Make it stop hurting okay? But, you have to stop grabbing at it.”
She settles for something reassuring, injects it with hope and pretense, and tries to convince herself it’s reality, that it’s something that they can both believe in even then it only sort of matters because there is s-so much blood.
Jesus Christ.
“M’all m-messed up. M-maya. M’messed up in-in inside…”
Vic utters again, a choked, gurgling sound that only solidifies the point, even if the pressure in her chest was all the worse for it.
It’s bad.
This is bad and tears that Maya wants nothing more to burn to extinction stab at her vision because she doesn’t have a medpack, she doesn’t have gauze, she has nothing more than the platitudes and the dark.
Fuck, she couldn't even sit Hughes up.
“P-put your hands here, okay. Here. Hold pressure here and just breathe, okay? Breathe. I just want you to focus on breathing.”
Maya’s chest burns and bile presses up against her tongue as she drags Vic’s hands back toward the base of the rebar, covering them with her own, but even with the added pressure the wound continues to bubble up, warm and viscous, past their fingers.
Fuck. Fuck!
“You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine. J-just breathe. Breathe.”
She needs to find something else. Vic is… She’s going to lose too much blood. The blonde shouldn’t move her hands. But something else. She needs something else to stop the bleeding.
It isn’t complicated, it shouldn’t be complicated, but panic sledges through her and what is there in the claustrophobic smoldering remains of sprawling concrete floors and plywood walls and an entire house that had collapsed down on top of them.
What else is there? What else is there?
“In… Out… In… Out...”
Vic is trying, Maya can see that she is, but another cough dribbles crimson down the corners of her mouth, and it rolls into small rivulets down past her ears to the length of her neck where the muscles constrict and strain.
“I… W-we sood… we sood… g-go….”
Hughes chokes and slurs and Maya doesn’t understand as the darkness claws at her ankles and her palms are laced with sweat and even pressed against Vic’s torso they wouldn't stop, God, would she ever stop shaking?
She… all firefighters had certifications in basic life support, they were all certified, all trained for this, and it’s not like the blonde hasn’t seen shit. She shouldn’t be shaking. She shouldn’t. She shouldn’t.
What else is there?
Maya glances at her turnouts as Vic continues to mumble deliriously and thinks of her Class Bs underneath and wonders if she can risk precious seconds to tear a strip off.
Fuck it.
She presses against Vic’s hands firmly, then releases her grip and when her friend doesn’t move, she fumbles in the darkness for the appropriate pocket.
The utility scissors come easy, the buckle of her SCBA not so much and the pull at her turnout jacket shoots a flash of pain through her arm, and fuck, she’d forgotten about it, and the resulting wave of dizziness almost made her stop. Almost. When her radio crackles to life.
“Bishop, Bishop can you hear me?”
Ben.
Ben.
He sounds exhausted, strained even, and a sliver of her knows that the chaos above them must be traveling on the same wavelength but the relief that comes hearing him now leaves her almost inarticulate as she pulls hard with her teeth, using her body weight as leverage, to get the rest of her tank off.
It echoes against the concrete with a clang.
“Ben! Ben, I can't stop the… she’s bleeding. Vic is bleeding. I’m gonna use my shirt, b-but…” she forces off the outer coat of her turnouts and the buffeting heat comes at her full blast, “But she’s bleeding a lot. She’s bleeding a lot, Ben. Tell me what I can do.”
Andy must have given him something of a run down, provided he already seems to have the most of the details, and he is calm and methodical and patient over the cacophony of frantic voices water hissing sirens whirling debris scrambling for purchase over noise noise noise. And still he walks her through.
He walks her through tearing strips of cloth and cutting away the straps of Vic’s SCBA until she’s actually completely supine. Tells her to pop Vic’s knees up until they’re cocked and not pulling any additional strain against her abdomen. Tells her to check her radial pulse.
Thready and too fast for comfort.
Then tells her to cut around the kevlar Vic’s turnouts where the rebar is. The backwards pressure that releases the build up of crimson gathered underneath catches her off guard, because… because kevlar is more than just fireproof it’s fucking waterpoof and more of it comes sloshing warm and thick and struggling to clot and it spills on to floor and seeps and spreads and seeps and spreads until it’s staining her knees and some of her gear.
But he talks her through it. He talks and talks and talks Maya through the most fucked up occlusive dressing she’s ever made and talks so she can distract herself from how Hughes barely even fights her on it.
“Jesus, keep your hands there, Vic! Keep em’ there, you have to keep pressure on it!”
Maya hisses forcefully, tries to make her understand when Hughes's hands loosen and slip from where they’re supposed to be.
Vic nods, eventually, a small little thing; the reaction so delayed that the blonde isn’t even sure it was a response to what she said.
It’s the quietest, the blonde thinks, Vic has ever been and her normally caramel skin is clammy, almost cold to the touch when she has to move the brunette’s hands for her to secure the makeshift bandage even when the heat is buffeting. Suffocating. Even when all Maya does is sweat, sweat, sweat.
And Maya almost falls into the cacophony of it all.
Broken only by a wet wheeze, chased by a whimper.
“What else, Ben? What else?”
“Give us fifteen minutes, okay? Max. We have the whole team working on it. Clearing an exfil. Station 81 is coming too. Give us time.”
That isn’t an answer.
That isn’t an answer and she doesn’t understand.
She looks away. Away from Vic.
“No, No, Ben… what else-,” she starts and then swallows. She presses her lips together until they go white, and then tries again, “What else can I do?”
The words hang in the air after she says them, knuckles white against the handheld of her radio, and the beat of silence stretches too long before the frequency crackles again.
“We’ve got everyone working on it. Just… Just keep pressure on it and keep her talking, okay?”
Ben is saying it, but not saying it at the same time.
That there is nothing else to do.
She opens her mouth but can’t speak around the way her lungs clench in her chest. She wanted a solution more than anything. She needed it. Vic needed it. But Ben is saying there is nothing else to do because there is nothing else to do.
Not until Nineteen can carve out an entrance to the house that had basically imploded.
It means every pained noise from the other woman’s throat is a stab into Maya’s stuttering chest, and each lasting tremble pulled from her exhausted limbs is a dagger to the heart.
It’s fucked.
She screams then; inside her head.
Frustration and fear and a bone-deep sense of foreboding settling heavy in her chest.
This whole situation is fucked.
“The aid car needs to be ready, Ben. It needs too.``
Her heart thrums in her ears when she drops the radio.
In… out… In… out…
It’s a strange feeling to breathe and have the air move right through her, like she hadn’t even inhaled at all.
Maya wills her fingers to stop trembling as she brushes them gently across Vic’s forehead, pushing away the curls clinging to her skin from the sweat and exertion of the heat and simply being conscious. Yet, even that is debatable though because Vic’s eyes are closed now and Maya can’t remember how long they’ve been closed for and for a spastic moment all she can think about how Hughes has leftover red velvet cake in the Beanery fridge.
“Hey! Hey! Look at me, Vic! Right here.”
It’s swallowing thorns, to focus on the effort it takes to put her hand back across Vic’s own.
“You heard what he said. You gotta keep talking, okay?”
There’s a new glassiness to Vic’s eyes that wasn’t there before and Maya helplessly watches her struggle to focus, fade in and out, then in again, and suddenly she looks so, so small.
“I… W-we sood… we sood… g-go…”
The blonde has to lean close to hear her. Lean close to understand.
“I know, I know. We’re going to go,” she soothes over the squawk of the frequencies, “We’re going to get out of here, in a few minutes when they clear the path, okay?”
A few minutes.
A few minutes is all they need.
But below her, Vic won't settle.
“I… I… I-I …”
Hughes sputters and chokes and loses track of what she tries to say as more coppery liquid spills from azure lips, and Maya wants to eat her own heart so that she feels something—anything—other than the drowning feeling eating up her chest.
It’s going to be okay, she wants to say, she thinks about saying, she tries to say, but is it? It should have been her. It should have been her. It should have been— “M... M… aya… M’scared.”
The words melt off of Vic’s tongue with so little force, so little of Vic herself, that at first Maya isn’t sure if she said anything at all.
Don't be scared. She almost says.
A lie.
It would be a lie.
Lies were safe.
Lies hid from reality, prevented the truth from being exposed in the ugliest and grisliest of ways.
And selfishly, Maya doesn’t want to affirm that Vic should be scared.
Because the ugly, grisly truth of the matter was that this was more than bad, and a few minutes might as well be a few hours because this was a serious, horrific injury and Vic is losing too much blood than Maya knew what to do with.
Too much-
This was…
She was…. Vic was going to…
She couldn’t say it. Maya couldn’t make herself say it.
She manages to stop herself mid-slide down to complete panic. Knows it won't do anyone any good, so she tries to slow her breathing, but her chest remains tight, constricted with guilt. It feels like she isn't getting enough air. It feels impossible and even though Maya’s also terrified, even though she’s so fucking scared too, she says, with a voice as steady and even and serene as she can muster, “Don't think about that. T-think about… about…” Maya swallows thickly, flips through the rolodex of memories for the name of the rhyme, “the Little Teapot song, yeah?”
Vic lets out a choking sound that could’ve been a laugh and Maya can't remember how to breathe when she sees the thin, wavering gaiety stray across the cloudy distance of darkening eyes and the blonde latches onto it like a greenlight. As if it were permission.
“I’m… I’m a little teapot, short and stout. A little teapot, here is my spout.”
Vic’s head lifts a little, the monumental effort required obvious in the trembling spasms her muscles make as she stiffens, like whatever Maya just said was some cardinal sin.
“Das… d-dass… n’how it goes.”
She rasps, wet and gurgling, in protest, and Maya wants to laugh at that— or scream, or cry, or break something, anything. Everything— at how serious, how earnest, and genuine Vic was over some misspoken lyrics like she isn’t drowning in her own blood and it’s too much, too much blood.
“M’handle…” Vic’s fingers twitch weakly, head lolling back to the concrete ground as she tries to mimic the movement. “-here’s… m-m’spout.”
“Right. Right.” Maya corrects hoarsely, coughing over a wrecked, throaty thing that bubbles up in her chest and almost spills over and the tears blur her vision and make Hughes look like a painting, all soft, hazy lines. “Here is my handle, here is my spout.”
Vic hums her approval and the younger woman’s eyes slip to half-mast, drifting drifting drifting as Maya fumbles through the rest of a nursery rhyme she hadn’t thought about in years.
“They’re on their way, they’re on their way, it’s alright. You hear me?”
Maya whispers when she reaches the end, leaning low to squint and reassess the bandages in the darkness.
“You hear me?”
Red is dotting through on the wadded nylon and the silence that follows Maya’s question is heavy and suffocating, drawn out until she feels like she might snap and the blonde’s hands twitch back over the wound, over the small, cold hands underneath hers.
“Vic?”
Vic’s mouth opens, then closes, then opens again, and there is no reply, only air as the younger woman trembles, glazed eyes blinking slow and heavy, somewhere past her and Maya sets her jaw and tries again.
“They’ll be here in just a minute, and- and we’ll get you all patched up. We just. I just j-just just… need you to focus on staying awake.”
There is a scrabbling sound as the foundation shifts somewhere up above them and Vic shows zero indication she’d even heard as her eyes slip closed and pebbles of plaster break loose to shower down, stinging wherever they hit.
“Vic, C’mon… Open your eyes.”
Nothing.
Vic is limp.
Boneless. Motionless
“Vic?”
Lifeless.
No.
Nononononono…
“No! Vic come on! Open your eyes!”
Maya leans forward, presses her whole weight against the blood soaking through the fabric and
she can’t - Vic can’t- and Maya hardly recognizes the breath of cooler air penetrating the closed-in space that hadn't been there before as she stares and stares until her eyes burn, raw and watering, waiting for Vic to claw at her or fight her or anything, but the movement never comes.
Your fault your fault your fault-
She spares a hand covered in coagulating blood to shove them up against Vic’s neck, and chokes on air and light explodes into the decomposed basement and there are voices in the distance, then closer, closer still. Movement maybe. But Maya’s fingers slip and slide, trying to find the steady badum, badum badum-
She’s cold. Coldcoldcold-
Maya ignores it all. Ignores it until there’s pressure against her shoulders, trying to urge her backwards and Maya can’t swallow can’t breathe can’t think and she rocks on her heels and holds her breath until her lungs burn and her head pounds and her heartbeat pulses behind her eyes and the blonde puts more pressure against the mass that is Vic’s abdomen, thrashing with her body against the opposing force.
“No, no!”
She shouts against more pressure and there’s more pressure, the same hands moving upwards, but Maya can’t let go of Vic, can’t leave her, she has to protect her until help came- and tired fingers dig into the curve of the blonde’s jaw, hooked underneath her chin, and- “Maya, look at me.”
Andy is suddenly here from nowhere, not on the radio, not in the dark and her hazel eyes are fully blown and terrified.
“I need you to let go of Vic. She needs help and we have to move her, we can’t do that with you holding on.”
Herrera’s voice is deceptively steady and clipped, calm even, and they’re face to face, nearly forehead-to-forehead, and Maya starts and tries to flinch away only to be forced back by her friend..
“She’s gonna die,” Maya croaks, near wheezing. “She- we need to get her out of here, Andy, s-she she-”
She wants to fight them, she does, but a part of her understands that this was the help she'd asked for.
She swallows, recognizes more than just Andy.
There is Ben. Sullivan. Travis with a LifePak, but she can’t focus on any of them, not enough to know what they’re doing, anyways.
Someone else is on Vic’s other side, swimming through her vision, and the next time she blinks, she thinks they’re talking, saying something, but the words slip away from her like sand between her fingers. The only solid, tangible thing around her is Vic. Vic and Andy’s hands framing her face, telling her to…
She lets go.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” is Herra’s litany when Maya goes boneless, and pushes back, scrambling back over broken concrete, leaving bloody handprints on the ground,“It’s okay, Maya. Vic is gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
“I-I can’t. I can't… I can’t leave her.”
“Don’t have too. You don’t have to, I’m going to check you out right here.”
The words wash over her, Andy’s genuine, raw concern radiating off her in waves and Maya makes herself nod, make herself agree under the mixture of shock, and confusion, and fear that twists up her stomach, makes her sick.
She nods, and then she’s pressed up against a wall, Andy supporting her, palming up and down her legs for injuries that weren’t there, because she hadn’t walked down first- she hadn’t walked down first-
“Hey, Maya, breathe,” Andy says from somewhere next to her, palms moving up one arm, then the other, “Just breathe. Come on. Deep breaths. One, two…”
She wishes the sliver of pain that wriggles up her nerves was more grounding, but instead her next exhale comes out just as stilted and watery, the blur of tears making it hard to see.
“One…two…”
Andy continues, steady meaningless nonsense that Maya nonetheless desperately tries to latch too because it’s coming from Andy. Her friend. Her friend who is still alive. Who isn’t going to die because of her failures, because she couldn’t figure out what was happening quickly enough.
Fear – fear bites at the edges of her mind as Andy secures her shoulder, fear makes her breathing ragged and shallow as the sparks of a multitool fly up in the distance, fear stops the very beating of her heart and she can’t – she can’t – the world blurs and warps in front of her and her head is spinning and there’s blood, blood everywhere, blood on her sleeves, blood in her hair, blood between her fingers –
She was supposed to be first and now it’s Vic’s blood, Vic’s blood and she can’t even see if Vic is breathing if she was alive-
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Maya mutters and the bile she’s been swallowing down rises up her throat like a tidal wave and her tongue burns as she leans to the side and brings up the coffee she had for breakfast and and- this was all her fault.
“Breathe Maya breathe.”
All she can smell is blood.