Chapter Text
Ravi doesn’t have a problem. It’s been two months since the pier rescue, and his shoulder has just gotten out of the sling. The pain is still there but he takes care of that with a pill or two a day.
It’s not a problem, despite what it sounds like.
Despite Bobby’s worried looks when he shows up at a 118 barbecue after an invite from Buck or Hen (as an afterthought because Ravi isn’t really one of them.) He’s fine. Ravi is completely in control of how he’s using his painkillers. The opioids, or whatever they were called got him through the day, and that was it.
He wasn’t using them to forget about the pain of a child dying in his arms while he tried to desperately perform CPR with a shoulder injury so bad it still hurt to move months later or to forget about how he rescued the father, who did that to those poor innocent children.
Ravi doesn’t have a problem.
He goes to therapy once a week, he takes his pills when he needs them, and he hangs out with the 118 every so often (not so much anymore as the weeks go on, Ravi can’t bring himself to answer their texts much anymore), and he tries to spend time with May too, though with her finally going to college, Ravi’s kind of dropped the ball on that.
The microwave beeps and Ravi sighs under his breath, grabbing the steaming microwave meal and putting it on the counter half-heartedly. He’s not hungry, but he hasn’t eaten since this morning when he went out for pancakes with his older sister Anaya to try and get her to see he was fine. Just so she would stop calling him every other day to check up on him with that worried older sister tone that had a hint of resentment in it because once again he was taking up all of his parent’s attention. They call him more than his sister does, feeling more like every hour than every day.
His shoulder twinges in pain and Ravi is debating grabbing another one of his painkillers when there's a knock on his door. He furrows his brow, sparing a glance at the clock, and no, it is 10 PM, which is a little late for someone to be popping over unannounced.
Ravi suddenly wishes he didn’t look so rough, with his hair falling over his forehead (in desperate need of a haircut that he can’t quite make himself get yet), and his face not as clean-shaven as he prefers. Leaving his microwave meal that’s now gone cold on the counter, Ravi wanders over to his door, absentmindedly rubbing at the scratchy stubble on his face as he pulls the door open.
It’s Bobby.
His eyebrows raise in surprise. “Cap?” Except he’s not his Cap anymore. At least not right now, while he’s in recovery.
(Recovery feels more like deteriorating from who he was more and more every day.)
“Hey, Ravi.” Bobby gave an awkward smile, standing outside his apartment. His apartment.
Ravi kind of just stares at Bobby for a second, before he remembers it’s polite to let someone in. “Uh, please, come in. Ignore– ignore the mess, please.” He stutters awkwardly, sidestepping and letting Bobby step into his apartment. That looks pretty rough, honestly. Ravi doesn’t have much energy to clean when he just tries to get through the day.
What is Bobby doing here? I still have time off, for quite a few months. Ravi closes the door, slowly turns around, and watches Bobby take in his apartment.
Empty cups are sitting on his coffee table and counters (he can’t take pills dry, always needing water to down them), his laundry is dumped on his sofa to be dealt with some other day, and the sink has miles upon miles of dirty dishes that did make it in the sink stacked up on top of each other. Embarrassment fills his body, and Ravi clears his throat.
“So, uh, what’s– what are you doing here so late, Bobby?”
“If this is a bad time–” It is kind of a bad time because Ravi’s shoulder hurts more now that Bobby’s here like it’s reminding him what he failed to do, how he failed Bobby as a firefighter. And as a human, because he wishes so much that he left the father to drown and suffer.
Despite this, Ravi gives a weak smile, shaking his head. “No, no, it’s fine. I was just…making some dinner before getting ready to do some laundry.” A complete lie, Ravi was just going to take two bites of his dinner, take a pill, and try to fall asleep without nightmares for one night. But he wants Bobby to think he’s not so far gone.
Bobby nodded, hesitantly standing by Ravi’s counter, and he quickly moved to the other side of the counter. Trying to use it as a barrier between them, so whatever is coming doesn’t hurt so much. Or make him feel better, because Ravi doesn’t feel like he deserves to be better right now.
“How’s recovery going?” Bobby asked after a second and Ravi wondered how to answer him.
“It’s… it's going?” His voice came out more unsure than he intended, and Ravi hurried to correct himself. Because despite how much he doesn’t deserve it, he wants Bobby to be proud of him about something. “I mean, I’m going to PT, doing my mandatory therapy sessions…” Ravi trails off because that’s all he’s done. He hasn’t faced the beach ever since the accident, too scared.
“That’s good. Those are important.” Bobby stares at him, and Ravi feels like he has to get Bobby out of there right now before he says something he regrets. Like about how he thinks that he's starting to become an academy flier for how to fall into an addiction.
Ravi might have lied. He might have a problem.
“You know, in Minnesota, I injured my back.” Bobby began. “It hurt for a long time. I told myself I could handle it. Take on the weight of getting back to work, pushing through PT…I would take a lot of painkillers. More and more every day.”
Suddenly, Ravi’s countertop is the most interesting colored marble he’s ever seen.
“It made the pain stop hurting. Inside my head and in my body.”
He can’t do this. Ravi interrupts whatever Bobby’s about to say next, “I’m fine Bobby. I don’t have a problem.”
Bobby stared silently at him.
“I swear it.”
(Ravi is getting better and better at lying every day.)
Four months later, Ravi isn’t doing much better. His doctor has stopped prescribing the painkillers. And really, the pain has stopped. He can lift, and throw now without even a twinge of pain. Except he’s still hurting.
Inside.
Maybe Bobby had a point about using painkillers to feel better emotionally.
Even if that’s what therapy was supposed to be for.
(He can only handle his therapist saying it gets better so many times before he starts to cancel his sessions that aren't mandatory.)
It didn’t feel like it was getting better, it was just getting worse.
Ravi couldn’t sleep. There were so many nightmares, one after the other, that he’s starting to make excuses not to have May sleepover, so she doesn’t discover how broken he really is. How far gone he is. He can see how much it hurts May every time he pulls away, but what is the alternative?
Keeping her up all night with his screams ripping from his throat, his limbs flailing in the sheets, so tangled up he dreams of seaweed trying to drag him back down to the ocean floor, a dead kid cradled in his arms?
No thanks. Ravi’s too selfish to let May slip out of his fingers because he’s broken.
In some aspects though, he was doing better. His apartment was cleaner now. He had a job at the academy, not yet ready to face the 118.
He hadn’t even gone to visit Buck after hearing he was struck by lightning.
(Ravi can’t help but notice no one reached out to him about it anyway though.)
The pills still help.
A lot.
Ravi thinks he is a lot more dependent on them now. But he wasn’t hurting anyone but himself now, so what did it matter?
He wasn’t that important anyway.
He was a weak firefighter, a killer who saved the father instead of the kids.
So what if he uses pills, selfishly, to feel better about himself?
He could only hurt himself.
(He doesn’t see the concerned glances May shoots at him when he isn’t looking. The tiny ways Bobby tries to get him to open up again after that night when he’d shown up at his apartment, or how Anaya keeps reaching out, trying to get him to spend time with his niece, Izzy.)
Ravi looks up from where his hands grip the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. He looks better. He doesn’t feel better, but he looks better. Ravi finally got that haircut, letting it shape his face nicely, less curly.
He looks more serious than when he first started at the 118, but really, isn’t that a good thing? No one wants to stay the oblivious probie forever.
It’s good. It really is.
Ravi tries to ignore how his cheeks look sunken in, and his eyebags grow more purple by the day.
He grabs the pill bottle on the edge of the sink, staring at the orange container. It had six pills in it, his last prescription left from the doctor for the pain. Because it was supposed to be getting better?
Why wasn’t it getting better?
In a move that’s so sudden, that he halfway startles himself, Ravi tips the bottle back into his mouth, swallowing them dry with a pained grimace.
It hurts, going down, and Ravi almost throws up but it works. Surprisingly without having to chug a glass of water.
The pain in his shoulder barely even registers anymore, his head pounding with screams of children, the echoing splashing of waves, the news cameras flashing and clicking in his face as ambulance sirens blare around him.
He slides down the wall, feeling slow motion in a world full of spinning. He’s so tired.
He just wants it to be over.
Somewhere, deep inside, he knows what he’s doing. He’s overdosing.
He took six pills, and he’s overdosing. But he’s so tired.
He’s so tired of the nightmares. Tired of the pain. Of his news story popping up on his television every so often, everyone is still in awe of the heroic off-duty firefighter.
(Ravi wonders if this is what May meant when she explained how she took a bunch of her mother’s pills once, and how she just wanted it all to stop.)
Ravi finally admits to himself, as he feels the world blur around him and his stomach twists viciously that maybe he has a real problem.
And that he isn’t only hurting himself anymore.
Bobby stands at the hospital’s ER front desk, signing off a few more papers as Buck and Eddie help Hen and Chimney stock back up on all the supplies they need from the hospital.
He doesn’t even expect what happens next.
May’s bursting into the ER beside a gurney, Ravi who is as pale as death laying on it, a paramedic bagging him.
Hen and Chimney’s playful bantering comes to a stuttering halt as they all see Ravi. Ravi, their probie on the brink of death, paramedics shouting about overdoses and painkillers.
Painkillers. It’s a cruel slap to Bobby’s face. Painkillers ruined his life. Killed his family. And he lost the fight against them again.
Because he didn’t help Ravi fight it too.
He thought Ravi was okay. That he was getting better, after their talk in the kitchen, where Ravi had sworn up and down he didn’t have a problem.
He’d ignored every flashing light of red. How Ravi still hid at the academy, how May kept talking to him about how to help someone struggling, lying about wanting to help a roommate.
May has to stop at the doors as they wheel Ravi away behind the doors– the doors they can’t cross.
Tears flood down May’s face, and Bobby can barely make himself move over to her.
How could he let this happen? He was Ravi’s captain. How could he let this happen?
“Bobby, he– he didn’t…there wasn’t, there wasn’t, isn’t…he doesn’t have a pulse.” May stutteringly cries out. “I found…found him in the bathroom on the floor and he doesn’t have a pulse.”
Bobby feels his eyes widen, because Ravi doesn’t have a pulse, and Ravi has overdosed.
And it feels like it’s all his fault.
Bobby wishes he was never sober all over again.