Chapter Text
Tyler is no longer new to this world, but he’s learned enough by now to recognize that he doesn’t actually know anything.
Another thing he’s learned: he never wants to be out chasing alone and unprepared again.
The dark stain that still covers a large portion of the passenger seat has faded with time, but he hasn’t made an attempt to remove it, much to Dani’s dismay. He feels strangely attached to it, nearly five years later, not that he would ever admit that to anyone. It serves as a sobering reminder for why he keeps chasing: to save lives.
He’d been gutted to discover, while reading an online article about the overpass incident, that there had also been three fatalities that day. At no point during his encounter with Kate did he make any attempt to look for additional survivors, and a part of him still thinks that perhaps there might have been fewer fatalities if he’d done more than sit dumbstruck in his truck after…everything. (A much smaller part of him likes to think that there was one less fatality because he’d been there.)
Kate—he would learn her name in the same article—had been leading a chase team associated with the graduate department at Muskogee State when they’d been caught unprepared for the EF5. The weight of what she lost that day still sits heavy in his stomach. It's taken him and Boone a long time to build up their team (hell at this point they might just be family), and it’s almost unthinkable to consider losing them in the way Kate lost hers.
He knows he’ll never forget the lost and helpless look in her eye, and the matching powerlessness he felt. He never wants to feel so vulnerable or ill-equipped again.
So, it didn’t take him long after the incident to start formulating a plan.
First, he and Boone needed to find a way to monetize their work. Neither of them had the kind of access to financial resources necessary to accomplish the truck upgrades they planned. That offseason, they had attempted the usual route of looking for grant funding, only to learn that unless Tyler was associated with some kind of research institution, their chances of actually landing one were slim to none.
It was Tyler’s aunt who reminded him that there was work in the private sector, and in the first tornado season after the overpass incident, in addition to chasing tornadoes, Tyler and Boone spent a summer collecting the biggest hailstones they could find. Boeing had contracted with them to collect hail samples for the development of new materials that could make airplanes more resistant to encounters with severe thunderstorms.
It was incredibly rewarding work, especially since he’d been able to “hire” Boone on to help. Boone had immediately gone out and purchased a green army helmet at the local surplus store, and Tyler had loved watching his friend run out into open fields with a lunch cooler under his arm, trying to find the biggest samples. Occasionally he’d see Boone leap up from where he was crouching, with his prize clutched in his gloved hand, to shout “GRAPEFRUIT!” with pure, unadulterated glee.
That same summer, he’d been able to afford to install a custom hail cage to shield the truck’s delicate windshield from such large hail events they were chasing. It turns out buying a half dozen new windshields would quickly chew into Tyler’s credit score.
He really wishes Safelight offered some kind of punch-card discount.
He’d also made it a point to stock the cab of the truck as full as he could pack it with water, food, emergency blankets, and a first aid kit that was way more advanced than even Boone could use. It didn’t take long before he had met Dani in the middle of searching another damage path.
Dani, a certified paramedic, was spending their time volunteering with search and rescue teams for several small counties in Oklahoma. As soon as Tyler explained what he was criss-crossing the country doing, Dani was quick to agree to come on board.
At first, Dani had ridden in the backseat of the truck, pressed tight against their duffle bags and pile of supplies, but close to the end of the summer, they’d met Dexter. (Where else: a motel parking lot.) As soon as Dexter had agreed to come on board with his Lazy Daze RV, Dani quickly jumped ship and started riding shotgun with Dex. This meant they could stock the RV with even more of the supplies they needed to respond to destructive severe weather incidents.
In addition to his RV, Dexter also brought with him a decades-long and well-respected expertise in meteorology that far exceeded Tyler’s own. It brought Tyler immense comfort to have both a medic and another meteorologist on the team. Moving forward, they would make calls as a group, rather than Tyler trying to make them on his own.
When their Boeing contract wasn’t renewed for the following summer, Boone was the first to point out that they would urgently need to find a new way to pay their new “employees.” The two of them had both paid Dani and Dex out of their own share of the Boeing money, the remainder of which had nearly run out in the off-season while Tyler continued to make upgrades to the truck.
It wasn’t until they had acquired Lily, in the second season after the overpass incident, that they realized they could stream their chases and monetize them on YouTube. She, too, was quick to join the team once she realized what they were doing. She even wired up the truck for satellite internet and built Boone a rig he could stream their chases from.
They’d poached her from a rival chase team where she had worked hard to develop her own custom drone that could fly in severe weather conditions. They had spotted her in a crowded gravel parking lot bordering a truck stop somewhere in rural Nebraska. She had been standing off to the side of a large group crowded around another chaser’s well-known, custom-built, red tornado intercept vehicle, while her boss took credit for the design and build of her drone.
She never said much about the team she came from, only that they had threatened her with legal action for dipping out in the middle of the season. (She had also barred the use of the word “Dominate” during their streams, for reasons Tyler could wholeheartedly agree with.)
Their third tornado season was a rough one, trying to get all of the new equipment integrated with their chase setup was…challenging to say the least. They were plagued with feed drops and unreliable equipment all season. Not to mention, in just a little over two years, their team had grown from just Tyler, and occasionally Boone, to a five-person team. They’d gone from only needing one motel room each night to needing to scrounge up two, while Dexter graciously slept in the RV.
Their YouTube following was slow to grow at first but really began to pick up momentum by the start of the fourth summer following the overpass incident. It helped that there were two distinct multi-day tornado outbreaks in highly populated areas in April and May, and the traction of people tuning into their stream looking for information about their homes and loved ones had been huge.
Now, in the early part of their fifth season, they are a well-oiled machine. They even had just enough money leftover after Tyler’s latest round of truck upgrades to purchase a third (used, of course) vehicle to add to the convoy.
Their relief efforts are now well coordinated, as Dani and Dex spend much of the offseason designing and ordering “Tornadeo” merch that would underwrite the cost of all the food and supplies they give away.
He’s immensely proud of what he and Boone have built together: a team of experts who know far more than Tyler could ever dream and share the same all-consuming drive to help and protect people. They have become incredibly close over the years, each of them bringing something to the team that the others lacked, rounding out their strengths and weaknesses quite effectively.
This also has the secondary effect of allowing him to transition to being more of the “face” of the team, even if all the attention still makes him a little uneasy. He is all too aware of just how much of their brand is leveraged on his Wrangler Persona.
He’s equally, if not more so, proud of the truck these days. This season, he’s sporting a roll cage, hydraulic anchoring augers, passenger harnesses, shatter-resistant windows, a rebuilt solid steel chassis, and a specialized compressed air suspension that can be lowered at will to prevent the tornadic wind from getting up under the truck. Because, sometimes, in the middle of the night, he still wakes up in a cold sweat dreaming of a silver lump of metal out in a muddy field. And he dreams of Kate.
He wonders, from time to time, if she still chases. He knows he should be respectful; she doesn’t owe him any answers. The only reason he even has her name is because what happened to her was so unthinkably awful that it made the damn news. Despite knowing this, occasionally when he wakes up after one of these nightmares, he’s hardly awake before he’s reaching for his phone to search her name on the internet. He never learns anything, of course, but it’s happened so many times over the last few years that it’s almost ritualistic at this point.
He can still so clearly see the shock in her eyes, hear the way she struggled to breathe, feel the damp sweat cooling on the back of her knee. He wonders if she remembers him, or if the trauma of that day has entirely wiped him from her memory.
Sometimes in these dreams it’s not Kate, it’s Boone he’s pulling from the wreckage. Or it’s Lily. Hell, five years in, he’s seen every member of his team with those haunted, searching eyes at one point in his dreams.
On this particular morning, he’d been dreaming that he hadn’t been fast enough to find Kate, that it took longer for the authorities to arrive, that he’d let her bleed out in his truck. When he wakes, his hands are sweaty and he has to get up out of bed to wash the imaginary blood from them.
Curiously, on mornings like this one, when he’s had a particularly rough night, he finds it easier to slip into his Wrangler Persona. He’s sure if he told a professional they would tell him it’s a response to his own trauma, but he struggles to understand what was so traumatic to him when Kate had been the one to lose everything that day.
He’s out of bed early, chasing the image of his own bloody hands from his mind. He makes it a point to dress in his favorite shirt, the one with the pearl button snaps, and when he finally heads down stairs to the truck, he grabs his cowboy hat from where it hangs in the back of the cab and moves it to the dashboard. He’s going full Wrangler today.
Once the convoy is moving, it’s quiet in the truck until Boone spots the grain silos that signal they’re closing in on a staging area that’s a known chaser favorite.
“You ready, T?” Boone asks. They’d shared a motel room last night, so Tyler is sure Boone knows just how restless his sleep had been, and not just because of the ongoing tornado outbreak.
Tyler takes a deep breath, nodding wordlessly. He pulls his phone out and hits play on their channel’s unofficial theme song. He’s got it cranking loud enough to rattle things in the truck as they splash through the muddy gravel into the crowd of chasers and tourists gathered at the Lone Ranger truck stop.
He tries to fix his face, but it isn’t until he hears someone shout “Blow me, Boone” that a genuine grin splits his features. He knows they’ve upset the balance of the chaser world today, and he’d be lying if he said he doesn’t enjoy it just a little.
As the convoy comes to a stop, he steps out onto the truck’s running boards and turns the charm up to 11 with his “feel it, chase it” catchphrase. Lost in the now familiar routine, he is not even a little bit prepared when he spots Javi across the parking lot chatting with someone new. Her face is the picture of confusion—mouth open, eyebrows scrunched together—as she takes in his act.
Tyler’s suddenly extremely grateful for his oversized sunglasses as he fights to stay in the present.
His first thought: of course it’s not Kate.
But his next thought is how similar her slightly open mouth and confused eyes look. He’s seen this face before. Shit, he had even dreamt about her last night.
This is Kate.
Even though she’s not covered in mud and grime, or bleeding from the length of her thigh, or damn near infant-like in her complete and total shock, there is no doubt in Tyler’s mind that this is the same woman he had gently plucked out of unimaginable devastation.
He feels a sudden and unexpected warm flush pass over him, and he’d like very much to pretend that it’s the summer humidity. He’s profoundly pleased to see her alive, standing under her own power, head cocked to the side and eyes bright with a look he can’t quite identify.
He never would have expected her to show up with Javi and StormPAR of all people.
Suddenly he’s reminded that he’s standing in the middle of a knot of excited people. Taking a deep and unsteady breath, he tips his hat in the direction he’d been staring. Turning away, he pulls his trusty Sharpie from his pocket and starts to sign whatever is put in front of him.
There are so many things he wants to ask her:
Are you okay? Where have you been? What have you been up to? What does it feel like to be chasing? Did your leg heal? Did you heal?
Do you remember me?
He forces himself to wait until she detangles herself from the StormDORKS to stand in a grassy patch by herself. He doesn’t want to startle her.
His mind races with how to approach this exceedingly complex interaction.
Instead, as he nears her at the finish line, he falls back on his Wrangler Persona and he says something stupid and indirectly flirty. He’s not even sure he’s conscious of speaking. He's lost in wonder at the woman standing before him, alive and whole, gazing up at the sky like it hadn’t violently upended her life the last time he saw her.
There’s a resilience in the way she holds herself that makes a familiar and uncomfortable lump form in his throat.
“So where you comin’ in from?” he drawls, using the exaggerated version of his accent to cover any betrayals of how unsteady his voice is. She doesn’t need to know that he desperately wants to know the answer to this question, to fill some of the gaps in time from when he last saw her to the version of her standing before him currently.
She barely looks at him.
“New York.”
Huh.
He hadn’t expected New York. He’s burning with desire to follow up with a million more questions. He knows from the various articles that were written after the incident that she’s an Oklahoma local, so he wonders if she’s intentionally lying or if New York is where she’s been all this time.
Without warning, Ben is there shaking her hand, and Tyler has to blink to clear his head before he turns the charm up even higher. In a flush of unexpected emotion, he suddenly feels protective of his “City Girl.” He’s all too aware that he knows far more of Kate's story than he should because of journalists who had uncovered her past and printed it. It’s not that he carries any animosity towards Ben; he knows Ben’s coverage will ultimately help their mission. But the last thing he wants is for his having brought a reporter with him to bring unwanted attention to the worst day of her life. Especially if she’s going so far as to tell people she’s from New York.
He resolves to sustain her City Girl identity, if that’s what she wants.
He’s not exactly aware of all the things he says after Ben arrives; he’s too lost in his head trying to figure out if she remembers him. It isn’t until she’s backing away from him with a daring, sarcastic look on her face that he realizes she’s given him the exact opposite chasing advice than he would have given her, a trick he’s no stranger to. (He’s not above sending some of the more inexperienced teams in the wrong direction for their own safety, and if that just so happens to keep them out of their stream, then who is he to complain?)
He grins as he sees the StormPAR team pull out of the lot to the west in a cloud of red dust.
So this is how you want to play it, City Girl.
In a moment he’ll round up the wagons, but for now he enjoys watching the matching white vehicles of their Auto Club pull away from the staging area like they’ll see better action than his team will.
Fat chance.