Title: The Long Winter
Warnings: This is an Emergency AU. The racial prejudice written about in this story is not.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything belonging to Emergency! I will put the characters back when I am done with them.
Rating: Teen just to be safe
Young Johnny Gage woke up from his pallet with a shout. The just turned eighteen year old Lakota boy lived deep in the heart of one of the largest American Indian reservations. His grandfather, the tribe's shaman, knelt beside him and merely looked at him. The spirits had marked the boy years ago as a budding shaman and so he had been teaching the boy for years. He knew this was no ordinary dream. It was the same vision dream that had been plaguing him for over a month now but he didn't know what to do about it. "What did you see?" he asked quietly as soon as Johnny's gasps had faded somewhat.
"Father Sky was bleeding. Mother Earth was sleeping under snow. But Grandfather, there was too much snow! It drowned everything in the world!" Johnny didn't want that to be what he thought it was. Like all of the children of the tribe he had been forced to go to the white man's school as a child and he knew enough about the modern world to know what a nuclear winter was. Fortunately for him and the other children of their small tribe there was no Catholic boarding school nearby. He had heard the horror stories that came out of those schools from other Lakota children who weren't so lucky. As it was the education at the tribal school was at best, incomplete and at worst, nonexistent. In spite of that Johnny spoke and wrote two languages, Lakota and English. At his grandfather's insistence he had taught himself as much as he could about the white man's world. If it hadn't been for the fact that it was his grandfather who insisted, he would have been jeered and ridiculed for wanting to know so much about the enemy of their people. For that was still how many of their nation still saw the white man even after more than a hundred years. The treatment they received from the American government didn't help change matters any.
"The long winter is coming Johnny," the old shaman said sadly. "The white man has refused to listen to Mother Earth and Father Sky for more years than I or any one else can remember. Someone somewhere is calling the winter to Mother Earth. What else did you see?" His grandson was wise in many ways in spite of his youth. If the spirits had shown him something, it would be of great importance to the tribe. Even as a youngster the spirits had dealt more directly with Johnny than any shaman in living memory.
"I saw myself in a white man's city. It was huge, all concrete and steel! How can they live in those places, Grandfather? I saw myself riding a fire truck and fighting fires, rescuing people. Why would I see that? Why would the spirits want me to go there?" The boy looked bewildered. All of his life he had followed where the spirits led him as he had been taught. He knew it was a bad idea to argue with the spirits, but still, a white man's city? And worse yet, one that was so very far away?
The old man sighed. "I had hoped that you wouldn't see that. I had hoped that it was only an old man's fears and not the direction of the spirits. So be it. The tribe will send you where the spirits wish you to go, but I will miss you Johnny. You had better write; do you hear me? It doesn't take that much to write a letter young man!" he gently admonished.
Johnny grinned. There was no question that he was going, but he was always going to question why as he did so. So, the spirits wanted him to become a fireman in LA did they? Well then he was going to become the best firefighter ever! Little did the young man know that it wouldn't be for his firefighting skills that he would become known in LA