Thank you so so so much HoneyGoddess for the review! It honestly makes my day every time!

I actually wrote all 7 of the chapters for this a week or two ago. But I've been um-ing and ah-ing about some of them. I think I sometimes deviate a long way from canon in how I see some of the characters, and it's very easy to second guess myself on how I've written them 10 years later. So I've been editing my chapters pretty heavily, and coming back to them over and over again. It's weird... I never used to put pressure on myself like this. I suppose they're just close to my heart...

But it's been fun, returning to this little world. It's been a good reprieve from my own experience of being in your twenties and beginning to enter the real world. What can I say? Sometimes it's nice to project onto fictional characters ;)


Jay

Friday nights were known as the dog shift for good reason. It was nearly 2am on the city street, and Jay was huffing and heaving as he held the man down.

"You did good, tackling him like that. Where'd you learn that kind of stuff? Surely they don't teach it in paramedic school." The policeman asked him as he stood next to Jay, one ear listening to his walkie talkie.

Jay shrugged. "Did some wrestling classes in high school."

"Must have been pretty good at it too." The policeman said pointedly. "I don't think I could take someone down that easily, and we're meant to be trained for it."

Jay shook his head. If Herry had been here, the takedown would have been much smoother. Jay's wrestling abilities, or hand to hand combat in general, just didn't measure up with Herry around. For that matter, nor did they measure up to Theresa's, back in the day.

Not that this was the kind of thing Jay told policemen: oh yeah, if only my ex was here, she could have taken this guy down in seconds. Drunk guys would have been a piece of cake for her, given she was a black belt and also happened to be trained by greek gods as a teenager.

It still twinged, seared like swallowing needles, to think of the heroes. Not that they'd ended on bad terms; they still had a group chat, and Jay was aware that many of the heroes were still in contact with each other. Sometimes he saw them in one another's photos on facebook or instagram, or making sassy comments on each other's posts. Atlanta and Archie were the worst for it. Closely followed was the amount of heckling posted on Neil's various model shots on instagram, mainly led by Herry. At one point, in a fit of rage, Neil had even banned the heroes from commenting. However, Neil gave up on keeping the heroes away once they'd all made separate accounts and lurked Neil's old posts for revenge.

But despite their residual camaraderie, Jay's life had dissociated from the rest of the heroes. He wasn't sure when it began, this process of slowly unravelling from them until they were connected by something smaller than a single thread. Breaking up with Theresa - years ago now - had perhaps been simply among the last fraying strands. If anything, life itself had wrapped her long fingers between Jay and the rest of the heroes; as he pursued new interests and trained as a paramedic, moving cities for his studies and then for work, he had simply detached, thread by thread, from his high school self and everyone who knew him. Unlike Atlanta, who had happily chased her sporting dreams, or Odie, who strode on scholarship to some high flying university, Jay had wandered.

Perhaps it was the demands of his work. Shift work kept Jay busy - being a paramedic was unpredictable at best, and catastrophic to one's sleep and general life schedule at worst. But other paramedics seemed to balance it better; they still partied, dated people, competed in sport, even started families.

The man under Jay wrestled and wriggled, breaking Jay out of his train of thought. When Jay didn't ease off on him, the man spat a few choice words in Jay's direction.

Just what I want to hear on a Friday night, Jay thought. Not that he had a lot else to do on Fridays, of course. Since he and Theresa had ended things five years ago, Jay's night life, or dating life, had become scarcely more interesting than watching paint dry.

That was until the message he had received earlier tonight. Jay and his work partner had been whizzing through the streets on the way to a stabbing scene when her message had arrived, and Jay had to pocket his phone without more than a glance. But it had nagged at him. Hopefully - perhaps after this last call out - Jay would have a chance to process her message properly. Not that he hadn't memorised every word of it already.

The words of Theresa's message had been echoing in his mind ever since he'd glanced at them; while Jay fiddled with needles, trying to find the veins on a man who was heaving for breath after being stabbed, he thought of them. Her words nagged at him as he handed patients over to emergency doctors, as he strode into a house with a suspected heart attack, as he asked a patient to smile and then crinkle their eyes as he assessed them for stroke. Even when Jay had his arm deep in someone's chest to clamp shut their abdominal aorta after a steering wheel went through it, his mind was still lost to Theresa, reciting the words she'd sent.

"We can take him from here." The police officers offered, gesturing towards Jay. Took you long enough, Jay wanted to snap back. As a paramedic, his job was to save people. He had no interest in wrestling drunk guys. He'd wrestled enough people in his time as a teenager saving the world.


Later, Jay sat in the hospital's lobby with Mariam, the emergency doctor in training. They'd just handed a patient over to the surgeons.

"Home stretch, surely." Mariam said tiredly, "This is rough, even for Friday."

"Must be a full moon." Jay answered. They'd had the most ridiculous array of issues today, from the earlier stabbing to the severe car crash where a steering wheel went through the driver's chest. Mariam was the junior doctor on call tonight; she and Jay often handed patients over to one another. Both being fairly junior in their respective fields, they seemed to attract the rough shifts.

"Makes you want to quit sometimes, hey." Mariam said.

Jay nodded grimly. It wasn't what he'd call an easy job. He wasn't even sure why he'd originally been drawn to paramedics. Perhaps he missed the thrill that went along with fighting giants and greek gods, and had sought to replace it with a new challenge. That, or, Jay thought glumly, perhaps he just liked making his life difficult.

Jay had found his way into his work almost immediately after leaving high school. When he'd announced it, there were plenty of jokes about the whole astronaut business from the other heroes. Truthfully, Jay had a difficult time undoing Hermes' rather impressive job of convincing Jay's parents that he had left school to become an astronaut. It was more difficult again when Jay had returned from said astronaut pursuit with only a high school diploma. In the end, Jay had asked Theresa to employ a little of her psychic abilities to bend his truth. This was when they were still together, of course.

"Man, Tyson is gonna be so mad if I wake him up again when I get home." Mariam complained. "He's never had to do shift work, so he just doesn't get it."

"Lucky guy." Jay said. Mariam shrugged.

"He's a high school teacher, so I don't know how lucky he is. Some kid threw a chair at him last week."

"Did he catch it?"

Mariam laughed. "Probably. He used to play baseball."

"Good skill for the classroom." Jay commented.

"I've never asked," Mariam began, "But who do you go home to?"

The corners of Jay's mouth twitched. "No one, really. I like my own company."

But even as Jay spoke, Theresa's message was still burning a hole in his pocket.

Mariam looked him up and down with a gentle gaze. "Fair. Dating is over rated, anyway. Too much heartbreak involved."

"My thoughts exactly." Jay answered.

Mariam glanced at the clock. "Jay, it's well past 3am. Aren't you meant to clock off now?"

"Yeah."

Mariam gave Jay a shove off the bench. "Get going, then. Get some sleep."

Truthfully, Jay had been wasting time at the hospital. Now that all the distractions were over, he'd realised he had to actually confront the message. Her message. Talking to Mariam had been procrastination.

"No, it's okay, I don't mind keeping you company…"

Mariam cut him off. "Take a break. I'll be busy again soon, anyway."

"Good luck, then." Jay offered as he left.

"I'll need it." Mariam answered grumpily.


Finally, as Jay stood in his kitchen nearly an hour later, Jay opened the message that had been gnawing at him ever since it first arrived. Even after all these years, he read them in her voice. And as Jay sat there in those early, drained hours of the morning, Jay experienced something he had not felt in years: a tiny twinge of hope, of excitement, reaching around and bubbling up from deep within him.