***A/N***
This is my first published story (on this site anyway), so it was pretty short. Hopefully got a lot coming in the future though. This one took about half an hour.
There are some things the water just can't wash off.
There are some things it can.
It runs out of the faucet, cold and clear and promising, and waits for the smoky hands to fall beneath it and let it drape over them in a thin sheet of clean. Sometimes it's dark when the calloused palms reach for the knob, maybe a little shaky, when the night coats the station in a curtain of snoring silence and he doesn't want to wake anyone up. Not even the one fireman that pulled three pranks on him that day.
No, not even Chet.
A lot of times he lets it spring out for longer than necessary, until it numbs his skin and perhaps a little bit of his soul with it. His soul that really hurts, more than the burns he found ranging across his back or the split above his eyebrow that's still trickling blood.
Sometimes the water looks like blood, and when that happens he turns it off and doesn't punch the mirror because that would make everyone mad. And awake. He can't wake anyone up.
And it may seem like a terrible thing, to see crimson instead of clarity and nothing but emptiness when he meets brown eyes in the reflection of the glass. But he doesn't sleep at home for the fever dreams, and the water always runs red there, and the sounds in the black hours of the morning might not be his partner getting up to use the bathroom or the claxons wailing.
But he can sleep there, can sleep in the hard mattress that Marco complains about and stare at the walls that need to be repainted and watch his shift drift off one by one until he's the only one left. Sometimes he'll smile then- not his showy crooked grin that he flashes on and off during the day, but something genuine with dimples and a sad sigh that comes after. Those real smiles don't feel good, almost feel alien on his mouth, even more than the ones he plasters on, but some nights his face just breaks like that and he can't do anything about it.
And sometimes his partner watches him, when he thinks everyone is already unconscious, and smiles a little, too. Only a little, though, because any more than that would make him think he was happy when he really wasn't. Watching Johnny's spark leave his eyes is something that he hates to see, and many nights he tries and goes to sleep quickly so he isn't a witness.
Johnny doesn't know, and he doesn't need to.
But sometimes when he hears the water running he'll get up and walk over the tile when it's cold and stand in the doorway so Johnny's not alone while he sits on the bench in the dark and stares at the floor. He asked if he was okay the first couple of times, but he never got an answer, eventually figuring out that just being there seemed to help a bit. In the morning he didn't mention it, and Johnny was happy to leave it at that.
They work that way, kind of like the water that fuels a fireman's life. Johnny burns himself alive and Roy puts out the flames. No words need to be spoken. They wouldn't be enough anyway.