Archive of Our Own

The first time Tommy gets a look at his phone is seven, maybe eight hours after he left the bachelor party with no bachelor.

The night’s been a blur of urgent motion — the drive to the hangar, running checks and loading up, flying east of the city lights, and then dumping hundreds of gallons of water on the growing fire roaring through the trees below, refueling and going again and again. More than six hours of flying, pushing the limits of what Air Ops allows, fighting the southwest winds and a wild nail-biter of a fire all the way, before finally swapping out with fresh pilots to take his mandated four hours of rest. He can still see the dancing flames, stark against the near-total darkness of the night sky out here, when he shuts his eyes.

Honestly he can almost see them when his eyes are open, too, thanks to the golden-orange glow in the sky. They’re hot-fueling the choppers tonight, filling up without even powering the birds down in order to get them back up again as fast as possible, and the helispot is miles from the front — as it should be, considering how much fucking jet fuel is here like a sitting duck — but the wildfire’s big enough that if Tommy didn’t know any better, he’d think those were the distant lights of a big city on the horizon.

The smell gives it away, though. And the papery ash motes slowly drifting through the beams of the bright lights. Sunrise isn’t far off but for now, the helispot is still an island in the darkness.

Tommy kicks back in the cab of the 90 engine. It was a nice surprise, Harbor’s sister station being on scene. On a mutual aid call like this, there are so many agencies involved that he’d figured the engine at the helispot would be from LA County Fire Department. Maybe the Forest Service. But instead, the first time he laid eyes on the helispot in its circle of bright lights, Tommy had grinned with pleasure at the helicopter controls to see the familiar LAFD numbers painted on top of the parked engine below.

“Fancy seeing them here,” his copilot Erik had said, grin audible in his voice too.

The 90 are old friends. On long campaigns where pilots and air medics from Harbor have to drop firefighters at brush fires or refuel the helicopters and keep going up, those personnel don’t come from Harbor — they get pulled off shift at the 90 station a half a mile down the road. On LAFD operations where choppers are being hot-fueled, the 90 is almost always the engine assigned to sit at the helispot with hoses at the ready to make sure nothing blows up. Tommy knows them; he trusts them. He’s flown with their whole A shift at one point or another, and most of the B shift too.

They’ve all been on scene for hours now but this is the first chance Tommy has had to talk to any of them. Refueling a bird while she’s running isn’t exactly time for a social call. When he and Erik finally landed for good — for now — and handed off the controls to Pease and Juan from Harbor, Tommy had bumped fists with Tav and Sully from the 90’s B shift and climbed into the back of their engine for a break from the buffeting winds of the rotors while the fuel tender did its job and the crew refilled the helicopter’s water tank.

There are shouts outside — nothing with the timbre of alarm or fear, just raised voices over the sound of the helicopter. Erik had yelled something about going to take a piss. Tommy has the back of the engine to himself, sprawled in a jump seat. He knuckles his tired eyes, flexing the hand that’s been clenching the stick for hours, and pulls his phone out of his flightsuit pocket.

He has eight texts from Evan. The first one was sent right after Tommy left the karaoke bar.

He included a link to a News 8 article about the fire.

Warmth trickles down Tommy’s spine; floods up into his face. He smiles — and then he starts reading what Evan said a few hours after that, and he immediately laughs.

Evan sent that with a picture of him and Eddie squeezed in together, and that’s a drunk selfie if Tommy’s ever seen one. Eddie’s eyes are barely open and he’s drinking from a beer tipped up at almost a 90-degree angle to his mouth, clearly not prepared to be dragged into a picture. Evan is grinning enormously at the camera, flushed and loose and goofy, both of them significantly more disheveled than when Tommy left. There’s some kind of crowd behind them.

“I know,” Tommy says to Evan-from-five-hours-ago, who’s sweet even while tipsy, and he keeps scrolling down.

Two hours ago, he got:

Then Evan sent an animated gif of a cat wearing a crown with a lightning bolt flashing in front of its face — Tommy squints at it. He has no idea what the gif means, and it fills him with fondness anyway.

But Evan and Eddie were still at it at 3am, and going hard enough for spell check to do Evan that dirty? Jesus.

There’s one final text, sent 15 minutes later — a 10-second video. Tommy opens it. It takes his phone a long couple of seconds to render it, but once it starts playing he doesn’t think the incomprehensibility is because of the poor video quality caused by the bad cell service out here. The camera swings wildly; there’s loud music pumping; multiple voices are shouting happily in the background and all Tommy sees of Evan is his feet. It’s hard to say for sure but the lighting doesn’t look like the karaoke bar anymore; where are they? And who the hell are all those people?

Something crashes; a voice close to the phone, that has to be Evan, whoops with abandon. Is he dancing?

“LET’S GOO—” Eddie’s voice yells nearby, to mass cheers, and the video ends.

Jesus. Tommy shakes his head, laughing. The wedding is in, what, six hours? The two of them are gonna be hurting.

“What’s so funny, Kinard?” says Tav from the 90, climbing into the cab, and Tommy glances up and finally realizes that the helicopter is gone. Pease and Juan must have finished their refuel and taken off while Tommy was checking his phone, and nobody new has landed yet. If Tav is hopping in here, with Sully behind her, they must not be expecting another helicopter for at least a few minutes.

“I got called in from a bachelor party and they’ve been sending updates,” Tommy says, and he flashes a quick view of his phone with the chaotic video paused.

Tommy still doesn’t know what the hell that gif was supposed to signify but he thinks Evan was almost definitely asking his thoughts on fucking after three dates. But that part’s for Tommy’s eyes only.

Sully whistles as he flops into the jump seat across from Tommy. Tav takes the seat next to Tommy, and Tommy’s copilot Erik reappears, leaning in the open door. “To think I was pissed about having to quit a Scrabble game,” says Sully. Tommy doesn’t know him well, but he’s a small — well, small for a fire department — white guy with a prominent burn scar on his forehead and apparently he’s a Scrabble enthusiast.

“You were losing,” Tav says to Sully. She’s tall and broad-shouldered with gray-streaked black hair always scraped back off her brown face, and mobile, expressive eyebrows. Out of uniform, Tommy knows, she has killer sneaker game.

“I was making a comeback!”

Erik ignores both of them as they squabble. “Who’s getting hitched?”

“Old buddy from the 118,” Tommy says. “He actually didn’t show up for the party but they were still raging like an hour ago, so he probably had the right idea.”

As he's talking, Tommy texts Evan.

Tav stops trying to kick Sully. “The guy skipped his own bachelor party?”

“In his defense, the wedding’s this morning,” Tommy says, and all three of them immediately react; Erik groans, Tav sucks her teeth loudly and crosses herself, Sully hisses like a cat.

“I retract my judgment, your friend’s the only one with a brain,” Tav says. “Christ, who thought that was a good idea?”

Evan, Tommy thinks, and he has to swallow a laugh. Evan, who’s so funny; Evan, who was such a control freak at the party, which Tommy found absurdly charming — which only made the embers in Tommy’s chest glow brighter once he clocked just how hard Evan had tried to make this an event that Howie would actually enjoy, and how disappointed he was that Howie didn’t show.

“His brother-in-law,” Tommy says, and knows his smile is escaping containment.

“Godspeed,” says Erik, heartfelt. “You said the 118, right? That house is nuts. I can’t believe half the shit they get into.”

“Pretty sure it’s only their A shift. B shift is chill, we were on a structure fire with them last month,” Sully says.

“The superior shift,” B-shifter Tav proclaims, lofty, and Tommy genially says, “Hey now” as he’s writing another text to Evan, because defending A shift’s honor is what’s expected of him. Tommy hits send.

Hopefully the fact that Evan hasn’t answered Tommy's first text yet means he popped a couple prophylactic ibuprofen and went to bed — and not that he and Eddie are still partying now.

“Are we boring you, Kinard?” Erik drawls, and Tommy looks up from his phone and glances over. Erik’s leaning on the door, swaying back and forth with it, eyebrows raised; Tav and Sully are looking at Tommy with clear amusement too.

Tommy sets his phone down on his thigh and spreads out. “Just making sure nobody’s drowned himself in champagne yet,” he says in amiable self-defense. “Pretty sure I got a video butt-dial.”

Maybe he doesn’t sound as unaffected as he thinks, because Tav — Tav, who co-chairs the LAFD LGBTQ employee affinity group, aka cat-herds people and orders pitchers of beer at the sporadic bar meet-ups that Tommy has dropped by a couple times — is starting to smile even wider. “Was it at least a good butt?” she asks.

All of Evan’s body is good. That’s a hell of a man. “No butts were harmed in the making of this video,” says Tommy, and she laughs.

“I dunno if you’re gonna make that wedding, Tommy,” Erik says.

Tommy knows. They’re almost definitely going back up after their four hours off are over, and that’ll put him in the air when the ceremony is happening. Depending on how long it takes to get the fire more contained, maybe Tommy can make the tail end of the reception, but it’s not exactly what he and Evan planned on. He feels bad — he really wants to be there, for Howie, and with Evan. Evan, who he didn’t want to leave last night; who didn’t want him to leave either. Evan, who he promised a dance.

“Probably not,” says Tommy, to friendly, sympathetic grimaces, and then the 90 B-shift captain is bellowing for them outside and they all hear the distant whud-whud-whud of approaching rotors on the wind.

“Duty calls!” chirps Sully, and he swings out of the cab and back out into the clearing.

“Too bad about that wedding,” Tav says, following.

Once the two of them are out, Erik hops up and takes Sully’s old seat, companionably slapping Tommy’s knee as he passes. He props his boots up on the seat next to Tommy and folds his arms over his chest. He’s a good guy — he came on at Harbor a year or two after Tommy did. His wife is very pregnant and he mentioned earlier he was supposed to be working on the nursery this weekend.

Tommy glances at him. “How’d Kathryn feel about the call-out?”

“Doghouse for me,” Erik says easily, clearly settling down for a nap.

Left to his own devices again, Tommy picks his phone back up. Still no texts from Evan, which is fair. Tommy leaves it with:

Then he puts his phone on vibrate, leans back in the jump seat, and shuts his eyes.

Tommy wakes to the sun barely risen through the thick smog of a wildfire and to the news that he’s going back up. He nods his thanks to Tav for shaking him and lightly kicks Erik awake. With the other pilots already bringing the LAFD helicopter in for a landing, he gets a quick text off.

And then he sets aside all thoughts of Evan’s smile, the way he’d lit up when Tommy came in the room and turned those big blue eyes on him when Tommy had to leave, and he goes back up above the fire.

Tommy’s texts, the next time he can look at them, are absolutely fucking batshit.

“What?” Tommy says, flabbergasted, out loud, where he’s perched on the back tailgate of the 90 engine, and Tav looks up from coiling hose and cuts herself off mid-tirade about the Dodgers’ playoff chances.

Tommy’s eyebrows are actively trying to shoot off his face. The grittiness of his eyes, the acrid taste of black smoke on the wind, are afterthoughts now. What the fuck?

“Howie’s missing,” Tommy says incredulously, scanning Evan’s texts as fast as he can. “The groom. He’s not answering his phone, no one can find him—” Even as he’s saying the words, he’s hitting call and putting the phone to his ear.

“The fuck?” says Tav, taking the words right out of Tommy’s mouth, and Tommy steps off the engine and turns away when Evan picks up and says, “Hey Tommy.”

Evan sounds harried and breathless, as well he might.

“What the hell is going on over there?”

“I wish I had any clue,” he says, forceful. “Chim never made it to his hotel last night; Maddie and some of the others went to dispatch to start pulling security footage, Athena’s got the cops looking for his phone—”

‘What the fuck’ was right.

“Where are you?”

“I,” says Evan, and he’s definitely out of breath, in the middle of doing something, “am at the wedding; we sent everybody home, my parents are dealing with the venue, I’m grabbing food and stuff for Maddie — some clothes that aren’t her wedding dress.”

God, his poor sister.

Howie’s missing?

“Evan,” Tommy says, and all the busy rustling on the other end of the line stops for a second. Tommy hears him breathing.

“I know,” Evan says, finally. “We’ll- we’ll find him, we’ll figure it out; we have to.”

“Do you think he got cold feet?” It doesn’t sound like what Tommy knows about Howie’s relationship with Evan’s sister and it definitely doesn’t seem like the guy Tommy has known for almost 20 years, but maybe—

“No,” Evan says immediately, strongly. “No way. He wouldn’t. And he’d never leave Maddie like that. It’s — something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” says Tommy. There’s a long beat of silence between them. “Well, shit.”

A couple breaths of a laugh explode out of Evan, more like a release of tension than an expression of amusement. “Yeah.” He starts rustling around again. “Are you okay?”

Is Tommy okay? Tommy’s fine. The first couple hours were a little wild, the change of the wind driving the fire harder and faster than anyone was prepared for, and dumping water on night flights isn’t easy, but he’s good.

“Yeah, things are fine here; just hectic. There’s a chance they start winding down air support this afternoon, at least from LAFD, but I've got to stay til they decide for sure. They don’t have enough pilots.”

Tommy can’t speak to what LA County or the Forest Service have on offer for air support, but LAFD Air Ops is stretched thin this week — Gonsales is out with a broken wrist and half the C shift at Harbor gave each other COVID last week. Three medium-duty choppers and their crews had to stay in LA to remain available for LAFD operations. The remaining two AW-139s, with enough pilots to fly them and to back each other up, are here on loan to the cross-agency alliance trying to contain this fire. Tommy can’t leave.

“It’s, uh, 54% contained now, right?” Evan asks. “I checked a while ago.”

Is he for real? He’s keeping an eye on the state of the brushfire Tommy’s working, while he’s in the middle of trying to shut down his sister’s wedding and find Howie?

“We’re at 62, I think,” Tommy says, distracted; it’s not where his mind is at. “Evan, I’m sorry. I wish I could be there.”

“You can’t, I know. I get it.”

The thing is, Evan does get it — of course he does. Tommy briefly dated a cop once and that guy understood the shift work, the hours, better than the civilians Tommy has generally gone out with, but this is the first time Tommy’s ever dated someone who does exactly what he does, or at least what he used to, and the shorthand of not having to explain is kind of incredible. Evan’s kind of incredible.

“How’s your head?” Tommy asks him, softer.

“Haven’t been this hungover in, like, five years, but I’m hangin’ in there.”

“Only five years?”

Evan laughs a little. It’s good to hear it. “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you about my early twenties some other time,” he says — so sure of the promise that there’ll be another time.

“I’ll hold you to it,” Tommy says, warm. “Did Eddie make it too?”

“Yeah, he’s right here.” There’s the buzz of a voice in the background. “He says he’s never drinking again.”

“Give him a couple hours,” Tommy says, and Evan huffs an amused breath. “Listen, I’m on the ground for a minute here if there’s anything I can do.”

“You’re already doing it,” Evan says. It’s not a dismissive answer; he sounds serious. Like these words, passed across 20 miles through the thin tether of two shitty bars of cell service, mean something to him.

“Keep me posted.”

“I will. Be safe.”

“Of course,” Tommy promises. “You too.”

When he hangs up the call, Tommy lets himself lean against the back of the engine. “Fuck,” he mutters, to himself. Howie, man, he thinks. What the hell happened?

When he turns around, Tav and Erik — wherever the hell he came from, standing at her shoulder now — are both openly staring at him.

“–Seriously?” Tommy asks them, judgmental.

“Listen bud, I have to be here,” Tav says, illustratively hefting the hose in her hands. “You’re the one who chose to take a phone call right on top of me.”

“Feel like doing me a solid and pretending you didn’t eavesdrop on that entire conversation?”

“You turning around didn’t turn off my ears,” Tav says without any heat. That’s a no, then.

“I was eavesdropping,” Erik offers cheerfully.

Tav glances over her shoulder at a shout from over by the fuel truck, but nobody’s calling out to them here. “No word on your friend?”

Tommy shakes his head. “Sounds like half of LA’s emergency services are on it,” he says.

“I’m sure they’ll find him,” Tav says. It’s kindly meant, Tommy knows, and he nods in acknowledgment. It’s also as honest as Taverley always is — no assurances about what kind of state Howie may be in when they find him. Both of them know all too well what the causes of a sudden disappearance can look like. Tommy’s not generally a guy to dwell on the could-haves or the maybes; he’s much more in the here and now. And he’s sticking to that, right now, because starting to think about where Howie might be… Not a good idea.

Tav’s eyes flick to Erik, who’s tall and blond and very straight, currently checking his phone, and back to Tommy. Tommy’s got an idea of what she’s asking him, given the twist of her mobile mouth and how warmly he knows he talked to Evan, and Tommy shrugs easily at her. He doesn’t advertise that he’s gay but he’s not in the closet. It comes up in conversation around Harbor or in the air, sometimes; he’s sure the whole station knows. Erik’s been on the crew long enough that he was around when Tommy had that ill-advised fling with a hot cop two years ago, which Tommy was teased about for weeks afterward. Erik’s fine to say stuff in front of.

Sure enough, Tav asks, “New boyfriend?”

“New something,” Tommy allows, and he laughs as the broad grin spreads across Tav’s face.

Erik glances up from his phone. “What? I thought the guy was getting married.”

“The brother-in-law,” Tav says shrewdly, and her grin only sharpens at whatever Tommy’s face does. “Keep up, Kaminski.”

“We were supposed to go to the wedding together, but—” Tommy lets his what can you do gesture encompass the fuel tender and its crew, the 90 engine and its crew, the helispot, the trees surrounding, the flakes of ash still falling.

“Man, and I thought I was in the doghouse,” says Erik.

“I think the runaway groom might be the bigger problem,” Tav says. She has thick, dark eyebrows, and they’re fully deployed at Tommy right now. “Brother-in-law, huh?”

She’s not asking about Evan’s connection to the groom. No, this is an invitation — a request, bordering on a demand — for more information. Tommy and Erik have been out here more than 13 hours at this point, and the 90 can’t be far behind. Tommy’s been up and down in the helicopter but the 90’s main job here is making sure the helicopters get off the ground without turning themselves or the fuel tender into a fiery ball. It’s no job at all, as long as everything goes the way it’s supposed to; a lot of waiting, then standing by with hoses at the ready, then waiting again. They’re bored out of their minds and Tav scents blood in the water.

Tommy doesn’t mind that. He likes Tav and the rest of the 90; he likes Erik. He’s met Tav’s partner a couple times. And he doesn’t exactly mind talking about Evan, as much as he’s not about to identify him as Buckley from the 118 until that’s something Evan has explicitly okayed.

“It’s new,” Tommy tells her. “He’s new; baby bi.”

Tav crows a laugh. “And he was taking you to his brother’s wedding?”

Tommy tilts his head back and forth, not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing. You could call Howie Evan’s brother, in a sense, even if that’s not what Tav means. You’d have to have very intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the 118 to piece this all together — know that Han is getting married, know that it’s to Buckley’s sister, know that Howie doesn't have any married siblings and that Maddie Buckley doesn’t have any other brothers. Incredibly, almost astronomically unlikely. But Tommy’s not going to make the puzzle any easier.

Tav apparently takes that for confirmation. “Damn, Kinard, you work fast,” she laughs.

“I like him,” he says, and he steps forward and offers her his hands. She immediately dumps a length of hose on him, and he starts helping her coil it. “I felt bad about ditching him even before Howie apparently went missing; I promised I’d be there.”

“You aren’t personally responsible for 50 mile-per-hour southwest winds,” Erik says sourly, with enough force that Tommy suspects it’s something that’s been said to his wife. Doghouse is right, and he probably deserves it.

Tav rolls her eyes, apparently reaching the same conclusion. “Maybe you could make the reception, if they find the groom,” she says to Tommy. “From what Cap said, sounds like we might finally be getting relieved here soon.”

“Maybe,” Tommy says, though it’s hard to believe it, standing under an apocalyptic black sky.

It’s a relief to get the call they’re not going back up again. Tommy loves his work but it’s been 15 fucking hours of up and down. His neck’s killing him from the on-again off-again weight of his helmet; there’s a dull throb starting behind his left temple after hours of constant, split-second decisions and sharp-eyed vigilance. He’s bone-deep tired, and not just from the handful of hours of fitful sleep snatched in the back of a fire engine.

But there’s no immediate ride back down to LA — Pease and Juan are still up in the chopper — and with a full ride of water at the ready, other than what little was used to take the pressure off the hydrants while refilling the helicopter tanks, the 90’s getting pressed into service on the fire line.

Tommy doesn’t know the laconic B-shift captain well but as long as Air Ops okays it, the man’s happy enough to accept the offer of a spare set of hands. Two, it turns out, when Erik volunteers himself too.

Walking back to the 90 engine, Tommy shoots Erik a sidelong look.

Erik shrugs. “They could use the help, and I’m already a dead man.”

Tommy barks a laugh and says, “Your funeral,” and the two of them go to scrounge spare turnout gear from the 90 and the LA County engine arriving to relieve them.

Tommy’s not often face-to-face with fire, these days; not like this anymore. But you don’t forget it. He takes in the scene — the thick tongues of flames ripping through the undergrowth a few hundred yards off the road, the grimy firefighters appearing here and there like ghosts out of the smoke. Engines from at least four different departments and agencies lined up along the access road.

The 90’s captain, Whitman, shouts his orders — a couple of people staying with the engine to douse the vegetation along the road, the rest of them trekking into the woods to join the line of yellow-suited firefighters building the fire break. Tommy tosses a shovel to Tav and grabs one for himself. Even at this distance, you can already feel the ambient heat. He underhands his phone back into the cab; best place for it.

Tav watches him do it, shovel slung over her shoulder, and then falls in at Tommy’s side as they troop into the woods. “No updates, huh?”

“Last one was: spotted on some traffic cameras, getting on a bus headed downtown,” Tommy says. That came from Eddie’s phone — Tommy thinks he and Evan are still together, and he’s mostly taking texts from one of them as being from both. Honestly, he appreciates like hell that either of them is thinking to keep him updated at all when they’ve got their hands full.

“What’s your boy doing?”

“Wish I knew,” Tommy says. “It’s not like him.” That’s the understatement of the century. Howie’s wit is occasionally a little sharp, maybe, but that’s the worst you can say about him, and in Tommy’s mind — maybe biased, sure, as somebody who’s been known to tell a dark joke or two himself, but still — that’s not a bad thing at all. Howie’s thoughtful, responsible, irrepressibly kind. By all accounts, madly in love with Evan’s sister. It doesn’t make any sense.

Tav starts to say something, but a pair of firefighters materializes out of the smoke. One is working on the trench that’s being dug here; the other’s taking a break, leaning on his shovel. “You our relief?” asks the one with the shovel, hopefully.

“Sorry; we’re adding, not subtracting,” says Tav.

“I hate math,” says the firefighter, morose.

Tommy hops into the trench with a nod to the other guy. From a helicopter, a wildfire front curves and undulates like a snake. Down here, it’s impossible to say where it begins and where it ends. It's been a minute since Tommy's been on the ground with a brushfire, but you don’t forget the crackling roar up close; the way it sounds like a living, breathing thing. The sound of trees snapping and crashing. You have to stay alert, but you’re reliant on good intel and good orders, because it’s impossible to get the lay of the land when you’re in the middle of it. And so the job’s pretty simple: you knock down anything that might fuel the fire, and you dig.

Tommy’s still not doing the could-haves. In addition to being productive, to helping build a break that the fire can’t jump if it makes it here, getting down to work has the bonus of avoiding the maybes.

He digs.

When they finally get pulled off the line, it’s easy enough to hitch a ride with the 90 engine. The cab is quiet. Tommy and Erik’s final count on the fire was almost 17 hours, and this crew arrived barely an hour behind them. The whole engine’s wiped and the addition of Tommy and Erik in the back makes things a tight squeeze; Tommy’s legs are tangled with somebody’s and he’s too fatigued to care whose. The cab reeks of smoke and sweat and burned rubber. At least a couple people are already asleep, swaying with the motion of the truck.

Pulling his borrowed gloves off, Tommy retrieves his phone as he tries to boot his tired brain out of mechanical-digging mode and back into active thought. Station 90 is barely a half-mile down the road from Harbor; they’ll drop Tommy and Erik in the Harbor parking lot. There’s a shower and a fresh change of clothes in Tommy’s locker with his name on it. And then he figures out where the hell the 118 is in their search across Los Angeles, and goes to—

Tommy has nine texts from Evan and two from Eddie, spread across the last couple hours.

“Well?” says Tav, and Tommy glances up for a second and finds every exhausted, soot-streaked face in the back of the cab looking at him expectantly.

Firefighter-groom-missing-from-own-wedding has definitely become the story of choice for the entire shift.

“Jesus, let a guy read,” Tommy says to all of them, judgmental, and he ignores the burst of laughter and voices so he can do just that.

He follows the disjointed sequence of texts — Hen apparently diagnosing Howie with viral encephalitis (what the hell); sightings in Koreatown; possible memory loss.

“Encephalitis?” Tommy says to the engine at large, still reading, and someone says, “Like meningitis?” as someone else says, “Holy shit, wait, my cousin’s roommate had that, that’s no fucking joke.”

And then, two and a half hours ago:

And, well after that:

Thank fuck.

“He’s okay,” Tommy says to his audience, still reading, and the cab erupts with ‘heyyyyy’s and well wishes, and a few scattered bursts of applause. Tommy glances up; Captain Whitman’s looking into the back. It’s the first time Tommy has ever seen the man smile.

“They found him in time?” asks the firefighter whose cousin’s roommate apparently had encephalitis.

“Sounds like it. How nasty is this?” Tommy has a vague idea of brain swelling, confusion. He did the EMT training required to be an LAFD firefighter but he’s not a paramedic. He knows just enough to know encephalitis isn’t common.

“Bro,” says the guy from the 90, heartfelt, “so nasty.”

Sully has his phone out, presumably googling it. “You gotta catch it early; seizures, paralysis, permanent brain damage. Your buddy from the 118 must’ve been lucky as hell, if they think he’s gonna be okay.” He glances up. “Fifteen-percent mortality rate.”

Christ alive, Howie. Tommy exhales and sags into his seat. Tav claps his shoulder, and whoever’s sitting on his other side does, too.

“The 118 is fucking cursed,” says someone Tommy doesn’t know, to an immediate chorus of agreement.

As they all start discussing, Tommy’s eyes flick back down to his phone again. There are two more texts from Evan, and— what the actual hell? Tommy checks what time it currently is.

“–They’re getting married in five minutes?” he reports, with some incredulity, to a fresh round of reactions from the packed cab. They’re all loud enough that Erik, who’s been sacked out with his head lolling against the side of the cab, jerks and snorts awake.

Tav is roaring with laughter. “Goddamn, Han doesn’t waste any time either!”

“In the hospital?”

“Hey, when you know, you know!”

Tommy’s ignoring them all and doing math in his head. “Hey Cap,” he calls, and when he glances up, he finds Captain Whitman already looking back at him. “You think you could make a pit stop?”

Tommy’s done plenty of things in his life but there’s still a first time for everything, and this is the first time he’s ever been dropped in an ER parking lot, fresh from a fire, while being heckled out every open window of an LAFD engine.

Word got around that he had a date waiting for him and the entire cab was merciless for the last chunk of the drive. Tommy doesn’t know what his throat hurts from more, the smoke or his laughing. It was a good distraction, anyway, from the unavoidable fact that traffic bogged them down more and more, the farther into the city they got, and now he’s very, very late.

Tav and Erik are making kissy noises out the window. Multiple people are catcalling. “Fuck off,” calls Tommy, phone in hand, and the driver taps the horn at him in a deep, cheerful toot-toot as the engine motors off.

Tommy is so fucking late, by any measure of it. Eighteen hours late for the rest of the bachelor party, seven hours late for the wedding that never was. At least 10 minutes too late for the wedding that actually happened, here, in this building. He jogs through the parking lot and slows to a long stride, out of breath, as he crosses the ambulance drop-off drive. He’s pushed beyond the point of tired now; he’s in that wired-ass place where you can see fucking forever. His whole body hurts. And he really, really wanted to be here.

The hospital doors slide open and there’s Evan pushing open the double doors inside, a beacon in bright blue. Tommy spreads his hands wide as they close the distance between them. “Sorry I’m late,” he calls, harried, but Evan’s smile only grows.

Tommy stopped the clock when he went through the hospital doors, and if he hadn’t already stopped it, Evan’s mouth and hands definitely would have done the job. He has no idea how long it’s been when he jerks awake to the sound of voices and the touch of a hand on his knee.

It’s Hen’s wife, Karen, who’s leaning over him. Tommy met her a handful of times back in the day. Karen smiles at him as his eyes slowly focus on her.

The inside of Tommy’s mouth is a desert. “Shit,” he says, and then he glances from side to side, guiltily, to see if any of the kids present heard that. Howie’s daughter is curled up in the hospital bed with him, Howie talking to Hen and Bobby and Sergeant Grant over her head. Christopher is busy having an animated discussion with Eddie and with a couple of the 911 dispatchers Tommy met earlier. Safe. “How long was I out?”

“Not too long,” says Karen. Tommy glances down. There’s still a paper plate of cake on his thigh; at least he didn’t punt that. He was talking to someone earlier, in this chair tucked against the wall — Eddie’s grandmother, maybe? He must have fallen asleep. What’s Tommy’s life. She’s gone now; across the hospital room, speaking to the couple who Tommy is almost sure are Evan and Maddie’s parents.

“I think your chauffeur’s leaving,” Karen tells Tommy, pointing backward over her own shoulder, and then Evan’s there.

“Hey, you’re awake,” Evan says, all fond, all warm, a little mocking, and Tommy’s about to apologize for falling asleep but he sees Evan’s soot-smeared chin and cheeks, like a kid who went mouth-first into a pint of ice cream, and he hiccups an involuntary laugh all over again. Someone clearly tried to clean Evan up while Tommy was out cold with his head against the wall, and just as clearly didn’t do any better of a job of it than Tommy did when he first saw Evan’s face in the lobby. He’s even streakier now.

Evan clearly knows exactly what he’s laughing at. “You think you look any better?” he challenges, playing at being affronted, as Karen relieves Tommy of his half-eaten slice of cake. “Come on.” He takes Tommy’s arm and hauls him up. Tommy lets him take a fair amount of his weight to do it, and Evan shows absolutely no sign of effort.

“Thanks,” Tommy says once he’s up, half to Evan and half to Karen. Fully to Evan: “Sorry; didn't mean to pass out on you.” Evan doesn’t move away from standing at his elbow, or let go of him. Instead he slides his hand down Tommy’s forearm until he can wrap his hand around Tommy’s palm.

Tommy very nearly glances down to look at their joined hands. It’s not like it’s a surprise at this point that Evan’s happy for everyone in this room to potentially see him holding Tommy’s hand, but it’s still got Tommy feeling like somebody nailed him right between the eyes with the flat end of a Halligan.

“It was good to see you,” Tommy manages to say to Karen, sincerely.

That’s an amused look that Karen is passing between Tommy and Evan, but not in a bad way; it’s unspeakably warm, like every look Tommy has gotten since walking into this room full of people who love Howie and Maddie, at Evan’s side. “You too,” Karen says. She glances between the two of them again before her eyes settle on Tommy. Her mouth sets in an irrepressible curve. “I think we’ll see you again soon, maybe.”

Evan answers for him. “Yeah,” he says to Karen easily, and this is all Tommy could’ve wanted for Evan — how light and unburdened, and happy, he obviously feels. “You will, definitely.” His big hand squeezes Tommy’s.

Tommy thought he knew what this was, originally. And then Evan surprised him. And then he did it again, and again, and by this point, maybe Tommy should know better than to assume anything at all, because Evan keeps proving him wrong.

Evan glances at Tommy. “You want to say bye to anybody else?” He has obviously decided that they’re leaving and already said his own goodbyes, and Tommy’s happy to be pulled along. Tommy has decided he’s generally pretty happy to be pulled along with Evan — he can still feel the aftershocks of that first spectacular kiss from earlier, and all the others that followed it — and he’s especially happy for it while he’s so sapped that he fell asleep mid-sentence. If Evan wants to make decisions for Tommy right now, that’s fine. That’s great.

Tommy looks over to the hospital bed again. “Howie,” he calls, and Howie glances up and spots him and Evan poised hand-in-hand near the door.

Howie’s face has always been expressive. That is absolutely a renewed what the fuck look of surprised hilarity, combined with an equally fervent happiness. Joy. And the guy’s got plenty to be joyful about, most notably the beautiful woman in a wedding dress at his side — who’s also now smiling at Tommy and Evan, who Tommy got introduced to earlier, and Tommy’s too damn tired to have this many feelings — and the little girl half-asleep in his lap, and the fact that he’s alive and on the mend, but Tommy thinks some of that joy is specifically for him, too, and for Evan. Howie’s always been good people.

“Congratulations,” Tommy says again, to both Howie and Maddie.

Maddie Buckley hasn’t stopped smiling the entire time Tommy has set eyes on her. She and Evan don’t look much alike but there’s just something in the sheer wattage of that smile, turned on him now. “Thanks for coming, Tommy,” she says.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he tells her, and she grins so broadly that her eyes scrunch up. Definitely Evan’s sister.

“Uh huh,” says Howie to Tommy, knowing. “Night night, Tommy.” He raises his voice, verging on a sing-song: “Bye Buck.”

Tommy laughs, maybe kind of giddily, and makes eye contact with a few people as Evan tows him out of the room and people chorus goodbyes — Eddie, laughing at them; Hen, smirking at him; Bobby Nash, eyes bright with obvious amusement and warmth.

Howie is good people, yes. They all are.

Evan slows down in the hallway, once he’s tugged them both out of that packed little room. He looks at Tommy. Tommy has genuinely no idea what he’s about to say or do; Evan is a constant surprise on two long legs. Tommy waits.

“My place,” Evan declares, like he’s putting an end to an ongoing argument.

“Okay,” says Tommy easily.

“It’s closer.”

“Okay,” he says again, warmer. “You’ve convinced me.”

From the way that Evan scrunches his face at him, he (1) knows he’s being teased and (2) doesn’t mind.

Tommy waits, and then finally says, “Evan, I don’t know where your car is,” and Evan says all at once, “–Oh, shit, yeah,” and pulls him out into the evening.

“Are you,” says Evan, skeptically, just inside his own front door, immediately following the cascading sound of his keys hitting the floor, “gonna drown if I let you shower.”

Tommy looks up from pulling his boots off. “You offering to be my lifeguard?” he asks, and then he laughs so hard he wheezes at the look Evan shoots him — half recriminating, because Evan’s clearly trying to be responsible here, and half very, very tempted.

“I can shower without supervision,” Tommy finally manages to tell Evan. He tosses him a heavy-eyed, appreciative look as he peels off his turnout coat. “This time.”

If Evan gets in that shower with him, Tommy’s never gonna want to get out and then he probably will drown. What a way to go, though.

He thinks Evan sees the indecision in his eyes, because Evan snorts and then bodily turns him toward the bathroom and gives him a shove.

The hot water does wonders, pounding between Tommy’s shoulderblades and loosening the sore muscles of his neck. Unsurprisingly, Evan’s fancy apartment has fantastic water pressure. Tommy uses the shampoo and bodywash he finds in the shower; scrubs until the water finally stops running brown, and knows he’s going to smell like Evan. His dick is interested in the thought, in all of this, but he is so fucking spent his whole body’s turning to liquid.

Apparently Evan feels similarly, because when Tommy opens the bathroom door, Evan jerks upright from a slump over the kitchen island. “–’m up!” He can't have been dozing the whole time Tommy was in the shower; his face is pink, scrubbed clean.

“I can’t believe you asked if I was going to drown in the shower,” Tommy says, amused, holding the towel pinched closed at his waist, and he sees the exact moment when Evan wakes up enough to get a look at him standing damp and shirtless in the cloud of steam pouring out of the bathroom. His focus visibly narrows.

“Bed,” Tommy says, warning. “And maybe pants, if you can spare some.”

“I really don’t know if I can,” says Evan, sidling across the room, and then he’s pressing into Tommy’s space and Tommy reels him in with a hand on his hip and — sleep. They’re sleeping.

Well, they’re making out, but they’re going to sleep; they both need to sleep.

Tommy reminds himself of that fact, at length, while Evan holds his face between his hands and kisses him like he wants to crawl inside of him. Fucking hell.

They’re both panting when they break apart. “Tell me you don’t have anywhere to be in the morning,” says Evan intently, still cradling Tommy’s face.

“You’re gonna have to pry me out of that bed with a crowbar,” Tommy says, deadpan and dead serious, and Evan’s still laughing as he kisses him again — soft and much shorter, this time, though no less heated for it. He rests a hand on Tommy’s chest.

“Evan,” Tommy groans. “You’re killing me.” He squeezes in his death-grip on Evan’s waist. “The spirit is ready but the body’s about to pass the hell out. The day you’ve had, I don’t know how you’re still conscious.”

Evan tilts his head back and forth, equivocating. “I might’ve had, like, six coffees,” he allows, and Tommy barks a laugh. Evan immediately smiles with him, grinning (handsome, so damn handsome), and he doesn’t argue with Tommy herding them up the stairs.

Tommy hasn’t been upstairs in the loft before. The bed looks big and comfortable, which is really all he’s got eyes for at the moment, but there’s a half-open closet, a low shelving unit with some pictures and books on it, a couple other pieces of furniture, and two doors leading to what have to be ... a second bathroom and a second balcony? Evan’s place really is wild.

Tommy likes seeing people’s bookshelves, their art, the kinds of things they pick out to fill space; he’s always liked it, and then he especially got an affection for it after he bought his own place and slowly made it his. But that’s got to be another activity for the morning, because right now every one of his limbs feels like it’s been encased in concrete. His eyelids, too. The fatigue is a physical weight.

Evan goes to the closet, and Tommy clocks him realizing he’s got to figure out if he’s offering Tommy a pair of his underwear or offering him the opportunity to free-ball it in his sweats. He’s paused there, hand inside the closet, and Tommy takes pity on him.

“Shorts are fine,” Tommy suggests, and he catches the pair of loose athletic shorts Evan tosses to him. He pulls them up under the towel and then drops it; he underhands the towel back to Evan when Evan extends a hand for it.

Tommy passed the point of being precious about waiting for permission to get in a guy’s bed at least five years ago. And he’s been ready to climb into some bed, any bed, for easily ten hours now. While Evan’s hanging the wet towel over the loft railing, Tommy makes himself at home under cool sheets that smell like Evan.

“You care which side?” Tommy asks, before he can lay his wet hair on a pillow he’s not actually going to sleep on, and he looks up just in time to see Evan see him in his bed.

Evan’s jaw works silently. “Uh, nah, nope,” he finally says, and Tommy’s a chivalrous guy — he leaves the side that’s closer to Evan open for him.

Evan doesn’t take his eyes off Tommy the whole time he’s stripping off his hoodie and jeans and turning off the lights and then getting into bed with him. It’s very flattering. Being with Evan is going to do incredible things for Tommy’s already-healthy ego.

“Hi,” says Evan once he’s settled on his side, the two of them facing each other. He drapes an arm over Tommy’s side.

“Hi,” Tommy says back, quiet and amused; already clean and comfortable and now warm, too, with a muscled arm around him. Eyes heavy-lidded, he watches Evan settle down.

“Thanks,” Evan says, into that sacred space that only exists when you’re exhausted and on the way to sleep with someone. Where Tommy always wanted to tell other kids unguarded, vulnerable stuff at childhood sleepovers, and then found himself doing it again with partners as an adult. Evan hooks a leg through one of Tommy’s; his leg hair scratches softly. “For being here.”

All night and all day long, Tommy wanted to be there for Evan, and when he finally made it, Evan just— Well, first he smirked at Tommy and kissed him like he wanted to fuck him in the First Presbyterian lobby, but then he led Tommy into a room full of every single person who mattered in his life and he made him feel like he belonged there. He introduced Tommy around, he got him a water and a plate of wedding cake, he let him sleep in the corner, he took him home.

'Leave him better than you found him' has been an easy mantra to keep in the back of Tommy’s mind. It’s what he would’ve wanted someone to have done for him, once upon a time. But over and over again, Evan has reached out for him, and it’s like he’s silently asking: why leave at all?

Thanks for being here, Evan said, heavy with meaning. That searing earnesty, again and again.

Tommy touches Evan’s chin and kisses his mouth. “I want to be,” he tells him honestly, and he watches the words — rawer than Tommy meant for them to come out — roll over Evan’s face. Tommy kisses him about it; holds the back of his neck and lets his thumb stroke along his hairline, feeling Evan splay his hand open between Tommy’s bare shoulderblades.

If Tommy’s honest with himself, he wants to be with Evan a lot. He wants to stay. And it’s been a long time, if ever, since someone reached back for him the way Evan does.

Tommy still doesn’t do maybes or could-bes, but he feels the weight of them hovering as Evan slowly blinks his eyes open, eyelashes flicking, and looks at him.

“See you in the morning,” Evan says, husky, and it’s a hot, heavy promise, definitely; one that settles low in the pit of Tommy’s stomach. But it’s also a careful question, Tommy thinks, even without the pitched upswing at the end of the sentence. Evan. Of course. Like Tommy would be anywhere else.

“Crowbar,” Tommy reminds him warmly, right up against his mouth, “or maybe – other tools,” and Evan rumbles a laugh and pulls him closer, and Tommy lets himself be pulled.