AN: My biggest thank you to those who've reviewed! You guys are awesome! Also, this would be a nice moment to point out that ARE SPOILERS for the show in this story, if you are not up to date on the aired episodes. Keep on having fun!

DOWN

Dawson looked at her cell phone for the fifth time in as many minutes. Matt was running late.

She pulled down -again- the edge of her short, black dress before wrapping her hands around her cold drink. Bar stools were definitely not tiny-dresses friendly, but when Matt had told her where they were having dinner, Gabby figured it was a great excuse to dress up.

Beyond the brightly lit bar, the restaurant was slowly filling up. Backlit by the lights of Chicago, the view was simply amazing. It felt like she was standing on a little cloud, watching the city below. She had never been there before, but it was already one of her favorite places.

Gabby looked at the phone again. Fifteen minutes late.

They had left their shift at the same time that morning, but by the time she had gotten out of bed, Matt had already gone out. He'd told her that he had a construction job to deal with but that he would be at the restaurant on time.

And now he was running late.

Dawson twirled the ice in her drink before taking a sip. Maybe she should call him, find out how long he would take to get there. Maybe they should've just stayed home that night, have a nice lazy evening, just the two of them.

Ever since Matt's... 'episode' at that restaurant with all the baby animals' food, Gabby couldn't help but feel a little bit nervous whenever they went out. Granted, Casey seemed to be back to his sweet old self, but once she had seen that green jealousy –or whatever the hell that was- monster emerge its ugly head, there was no unseeing it.

The loud sound of the fire alarm going off broke her out of her reverie, bringing her thoughts crashing back to Earth. "What the hell..."

Alarm sounds had an implicit tendency to push people into motion, more often than not, in a panic. It was what they were designed to do, it was their purpose.

Working in a Firehouse had somewhat skewed that primal response for Dawson and her colleagues. Hearing an alarm, for them, had the effect of sharpening their senses and set them into professional mode. It was a conditioned response, and one that Gabby found no reason to complain about.

Maybe this was nothing but some prank, some smartass who found it amusing to pull the fire alarm for no other reason other than to see people running around like headless chickens.

That up high in a skyscraper, Dawson really hoped that that was the case.

Either way, she knew that she had to treat this as a real situation and do her best to get all of those people to safety. She might have flunked her firefighter's test, but that didn't mean that she wasn't better prepared to deal with this scenario than most of the people in there.

"Hey! Everyone!" She called out, catching the attention of those who were still trying to decide whether to fight or flee. "Stairway is this way!"

"It's 95 floors to the bottom!" A woman let out, the indignation in her voice making it appear as if someone had just suggested that they'd jump off an airplane without a parachute. "I'm taking the damn lift!"

Dawson walked into her path, acutely aware of the number of followers that the woman's idea had rapidly gained. After all, 95 floors was a bitch, no arguing that point. "I wouldn't do that if I were you, ma'm," she said, as calmly as her low tolerance for stupid people allowed. "Even if this is a false alarm, elevators are programmed to stop functioning minutes after the fire alarm goes off," she explained. "Do you really wanna spend your night stuck inside one?"

-o-

"Are you sure about this?" Andy asked, for what felt like the hundredth time. He shifted his feet a bit, trying to compensate for the current extra weight on his shoulders. "This doesn't feel like a great idea... at all," he added, looking up.

Sitting on his shoulders, Matt was currently fiddling with the elevator's roof access panels, something that Andy had been pretty sure wasn't even there until the false ceiling had been pulled off to reveal them. The thing, however, seemed to be bolted shut.

"Look," Matt said in between grunts. He was trying to unscrew the access panel using his house keys and every time they slipped, his fingers would scrape against the bolt. It was slow going and painful. "The lift should've taken us to the ground floor by now. It's what they are programmed to do."

Andy frowned. "So, why didn't it?"

"The only situation when an elevator will fail to do that is when..." Matt stopped, giving a small whoop of victory as one more of the bolts fell to the floor. "Is when the fire is at the ground floor."

Despite the heat inside the metal box where they currently were stuck in, Andy could feel his blood run cold. "Could you try not to say that like it's a good thing?"

"It is a good thing," Matt went on. Two more bolts and they were out of there. "We're stuck between floors 60 and 61. If the fire started on the ground floor, that means we still have some time to get out of here and reach safety."

An awful amount of time seemed to have passed since Matt had asked him to be a human ladder and the third bolt hitting the floor. The guy was kind of heavy and Andy was pretty sure he was starting to loose all feeling in his arms. "How much longer?"

The metallic growl that followed Andy's words was the scariest thing he had ever heard. And so not the answer he was looking for. "What was that?"

Matt had stopped for a second, only to resume his actions with more fervor than before. "Not good."

The sound came again, like a big wild cat waiting to pounce. Like a giant beast's stomach, aching to eat them. "Hurry up!"

The elevator movement was so sudden and brutal that Andy almost felt his feet leave the floor. It lurched down, unbalanced, one side of the ground seemingly sliding faster than the other.

Andy screamed, his hands flying sideways in some vague hope to find some point of stability. Unfortunately, the second his fingers stopped grabbing onto Matt's legs, the other man came crashing down.

Three things happened exactly at the same time, or so it sounded to Andy ears, as he refused to open his eyes.

The last bolt on the ceiling panel that Matt had been working on, fell down with a loud metallic bang, like a bullet bouncing off walls.

The elevator stopped moving with a loud metallic screech, like nails on a chalkboard.

Matt's head hit the side panels with a loud metallic crack, like... nothing he could compare it to. It was truly the worst sound Andy had ever heard.