Angels

A/N: Of all places, this story was inspired by one of Bobcat Goldthwait's standup routines, which can be seen on Youtube under the title 'Crash Landing in Cleveland'. This story has been half finished and in limbo for close to two years, finally got it finished, all standard disclaimers in place, hope you enjoy it, thanks in advance for reading!

The call was over, officially. Everybody who had been involved in the multi-vehichle accident had been removed from the vehicles and sent to the hospital. Police had taken statements, the show was all over. Now the members of the Truck and Squad companies were just standing around in various parts of the street, looking at some debris leftover from the overhaul when the wreckers took away the smashed up vehicles, the only remainder of the accident they'd responded to, and looked around at each other as they very slowly went to work gathering up their equipment and tools and putting everything back in its place to head back to 51. Nobody spoke as they worked, but every so often, each firefighter would turn and look at another, and everybody would look from one to the other as they remembered the events of the call.

It was the middle of the afternoon on a sunny spring day, even by their standards it had been a 'routine' day, and when the call came in, they thought this would be just a 'routine' traffic accident, but in fact there had been nothing routine about it. Routine went out the window as soon as they pulled up on this scene.

As they worked, everyone looked at the person next to them, Otis looked at Cruz, Herrmann looked at Mouch, Severide looked at Tony, and finally he turned and looked over at Casey, who returned the look, but still said nothing.

Then, it started.

The sound was so random, so sudden, and so quiet that everybody almost missed it. Then, they heard it again. And everybody was looking around again, this time to see where it was coming from, who made the sound.

It was Casey.

The Truck lieutenant stood a couple feet from the rig and looked like he wasn't even aware of the sound escaping him. It sounded like a short half-laugh, it just shot out in one syllable, and sounded like it died before it fully got out, then a few seconds passed, and there was another, and a silence, and then another. Finally the blonde man fully broke out laughing, and his reaction spread like a wildfire. Suddenly all the men from 51 were busted out laughing, nobody could talk, words were beyond all of them, but they collectively dropped their tools and fell against the sides of the trucks as they laughed with every breath in them.

Mouch laughed so hard his eyes squeezed themselves almost shut. Herrmann fell on his knees and pounded the asphalt with his gloved fist. Cruz and Otis fell against each other and each was the only thing holding the other up. Capp clamped one hand over his mouth and kicked one booted foot against the pavement. Kelly was laughing so hard he felt like he was going to throw up. Casey made several vain attempts to try and visibly compose himself, and after the last attempt failed, he made one last ditch effort to save face by ducking behind the rig before he broke out in a high pitched laughing fit that sounded as if every breath in his body was being forcefully heaved out of him. After a few seconds he could be seen collapsing flat on the ground behind the truck.

Five minutes later everybody was still going as strong as when they first started, some of them could barely breathe, some of them couldn't even audibly laugh anymore, but they were all either rolling around on the ground or just barely standing erect as they laughed themselves sick. Tony had slid down against the Squad rig and was well past hoarse as tears rolled down the sides of his face. Kelly finally forced himself to stand straight and stagger over behind 81 where he found Casey laying face down on the pavement, rapidly raising his arms at the elbows just to slap his hands against the ground, with one leg kicking in accompaniment, still laughing so hard he sounded like he was crying.

Kelly moved less than steadily over to the Truck lieutenant and crouched down to grab one of Casey's hands and using both of his to maintain a solid grip, he tried to pull Matt to his feet. He only got Casey raised up to his knees before the blonde man fell back down against the street, Kelly let go before the momentum pulled him down too.

This time Severide got a double handed grip around Casey's arm and tried again, he managed to pull Casey up but he wasn't sure Matt would stay there, the man was still laughing like a rabid hyena and showed no sign of letting up anytime soon.

"You gonna make it?" Kelly finally managed to form actual words, surprising even himself.

Casey got out a few more high pitched laughs and gestured as he tried to pull himself together, every attempt an automatic failure. As he tried, he lost his footing and fell against Severide.

Finally Matt took in a long high pitched inhale as he seemed to calm down, though he grabbed two handfuls of Severide's shirt to keep himself balanced as he breathed out and managed to say, "Oh that was good."

"Yeah."

"We needed that," Casey said as he lost any energy he had and his head collapsed on Kelly's shoulder.

"Yup," Kelly nodded as he forced Casey to walk with him to head back around to the other side of the rig. He leaned over to say into Casey's ear, "If I were you I'd watch out for Herrmann and Mouch, at their age they probably wet themselves."

Casey bonelessly fell against Severide again as he erupted in a whole new fit of laughter at that comment. Kelly jerked him up to stand steady on his feet.

All dispatch had said was that there was a multi-vehicle accident, and the location. There was never any telling how these kinds of calls would go. Somebody or several somebodies could already be dead, or dying, and maybe they wouldn't be able to get them out and transferred to the Ambo in time, or maybe they would die en route to the hospital. Kids were always the worst, no matter how many horrible things you saw, this fact never changed, kids were always the worst. They'd seen it all: thrown through the windshield, dragged under a car, trapped in a burning heap, sometimes half their face would be gone, or a limb partially severed and barely dangling by a few strands of skin. It was hard enough to deal with the ones dead on impact, the ones still alive to scream and cry in pain and fear were worse. You carried both with you, their terrified screams, and the silence of the dead. The silence was deafening enough, but you learned to deal with the cases you couldn't help. If they were still alive, you had a chance to help them, and if they still died, you spent every minute of the day trying to figure out what you should've done differently, desperately clinging to the belief it would've made a difference. If you didn't save them, you failed, and firefighters weren't supposed to fail.

They pulled up on the scene, right away they could see a pickup truck and an SUV smashed into each other and two cars that weren't able to turn in time subsequently crashed into them though with less obvious damage, plastic from the side mirrors crumpled and littered all over the street. A few feet away from them, a bus was half in the street and half up on the sidewalk, apparently the driver had swerved to miss the collision, and whoever was inside the bus was screaming, but the windows were tinted and nobody could see the passengers.

"What's going on?" Casey asked as everybody got their gear and walked into the scene to see who had to be extricated first.

A woman who'd been standing near the curb explained in a shaky voice that the SUV had turned in the wrong lane and smashed into the truck, then the other cars hit them. The drivers of the first two vehicles had both gotten out and didn't appear to be seriously hurt and were now giving their statements to the police. The people in the Taurus and the Saturn however, hadn't gotten out yet.

At that time a woman stepped off the bus and came over and told Casey, "We need someone to check over the passengers to make sure they're alright."

"Is anybody seriously hurt?" Casey asked.

"I don't think so, but we told them not to move until somebody looks at them," the woman said.

Casey glanced over at the bus and asked, "How many people are on there?"

"About 20, I know we need to keep them still incase they have any spinal injuries, but we're not having much luck getting them to sit still."

Casey didn't see anything on the bus to indicate what the passengers were made up of and he asked the woman, "Exactly what are we looking at, kids?"

"No, they're adults," the woman answered, "We run a group home for people with Down Syndrome."

Casey nodded understandingly, "One of our medics will be over to check on them soon."

That idea however was shot to hell when he heard the screams from the bus get exceedingly louder and heard people pounding on the windows. Casey looked back and saw the paramedics were collaring people who'd been removed from the crashed cars, and for the most part it looked like there had actually been very little for the firefighters to do to get everybody out. Casey turned back to the woman and said, "I'll take a quick look and see what's going on."

"Thank you," the woman said.

Casey followed her onto the bus and got a disorienting look at 20 people ranging from their 20s to their 40s, who were all jumping up and down and bouncing in their seats with looks of sheer excitement on their faces, as several of them screamed at the top of their lungs, "Firetwuck! Firetwuck! Firetwuck!"

Though it should probably have been a more constant feeling in his career as a firefighter, Casey felt overwhelmed, in a way he couldn't ever remember being.

The woman who'd gotten back on the bus raised her hands to get everybody's attention and told them, "I need all of you to sit still and calm down. This fireman is going to see if it's safe for you to get up and walk off the bus."

A few at a time, they started to sit down and for the most part they quieted down though several of them chatted excitedly with one another, though about what Casey couldn't hear. He looked at the two rows of people and told them, "My name's Matt-"

"HI MATT!"

The sudden explosion of sound echoing on the bus of hearing his name coming from 20 people at the same time took him by surprise, he paused, and couldn't help smiling.

"I'm going to talk to each one of you for a few minutes, okay?" he made his way to the first passenger, a young black man in his 20s who was wearing thick glasses and asked him, "What's your name?"

"Danny."

"Danny, I want you to tell me if you're in any pain."

He pursed his lips together in a pucker and shook his head, "Nope."

"Nothing hurts? No back pain?"

He shook his head again, "Nope."

Matt moved over to a woman in her 30s with long red hair who twisted and turned in her seat and asked her, "What's your name, miss?"

She turned to one side and wouldn't look at him.

"Her name's Jean," a brunette woman in the seat behind her stood up, who looked to be late 20 and wore jean shorts, a burgundy baseball shirt and a purple tennis visor, and told Casey, "she's shy."

Matt nodded in understanding. "That's alright...will she talk to you?"

"Oh sure," she said as she got up and moved into the next seat with the redhead, "Jean likes me. My name's Daisy."

"Nice to meet you, Daisy. Are you feeling any pain?"

"I pulled a muscle in my back playing tennis yesterday," she answered, and reached around behind her ribs, "right here."

"Nothing else?"

"No, just that."

Casey raised his voice and addressed the whole bus, "Is anybody's back hurting?"

Most answered no, a few said yes, Casey made his way to them first and asked them when it started, how bad it was, and also asked them one by one to squeeze his hand. They all did, some with a great amount of strength. He then asked them to wiggle their fingers, then their toes. Some of them were wearing sandals, others had on shoes they were able to slip off and show him their toes wiggling, all of them happy to do so. One by one he had them close their eyes and he lightly touched them in different places, on the arm, on the shoulder, and asked them to tell him where he was touching them. He ran his finger from the base of their skull down between their shoulder blades and found no point tenderness. He asked if they felt one finger touching them or two, and in what direction they could feel it moving. Everybody passed, though it took longer than he'd planned because while he tried to get them to answer him, they asked him a bunch of questions about being a fireman. Casey couldn't help smiling.

By that time he heard voices and a few seconds later the paramedics came onto the bus to take over, and Casey also saw Severide and the others stepping onto the bus to see what was going on and if they needed to assist. Of the few who reported back pain, the paramedics deemed it safe for all of them to get up and walk over to the additional ambulances that had been called in to assist, strictly as protocol they'd all be taken to the hospital for a doctor to check them over, but it didn't appear any of them had any genuine injuries to worry about.

Between the paramedics, the firemen and the people who ran the group home, they were able to get everybody to step off the bus in almost an orderly fashion. But once they did, several gasped and squealed in delight and started chanting again when they saw the rigs, "Firetwuck! Firetwuck! Firetwuck!"

Actually getting them over to the waiting ambulances was the hard part, they all wanted to see the trucks and what they could do. It took a lot of patience and coaxing on the parts of all the first responders and the people from the school, but they finally got everybody to the hospital to make sure everyone was okay.

And now all that was left of the whole experience was an empty street, a few small pieces of debris missed by the clean-up, and eight firefighters who felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off of them. They all returned from that call feeling better than they had in a long time.

1 week later-

"Hey guys," Otis said as he entered the common room, "We got some visitors here."

"Who?" Casey asked.

Otis just looked at them and didn't answer. Soon the echos of several friendly voices chattering bounced off the walls enough for them to hear, and everybody got up to see what was going on.

They found Boden on the apparatus floor surrounded by the people from the bus, both the people living at the group home and the people who ran it. As the other firefighters got closer, they were spotted.

"HI MATT!" several of them waved cheerfully.

"Hello," he replied, surprised to say the least, "what's this?"

An older woman who was with the group explained, "Everybody wanted to come by and say thank you for helping them."

It was now that the smoke eaters saw several of them were holding a huge piece of poster board that had a bunch of things drawn and pasted on it bordering the words THANK YOU! written in very large and colorful letters.

"We made it for you," Jean, the shy redhead said, looking down towards her shoes and twisting the braids her hair was done up in as she spoke, "It's a college."

"Collage, Jean," Daisy gently corrected her, "not college."

"We all made part of it," Danny added proudly.

Casey took the collage from them and all the guys from 51 looked it over, and looked at one another.

"This..." Casey truly felt at a loss for words, "this is awesome...thank you all very much."

"YOU'RE WELCOME!" they replied in unison, drawing a small laugh out of the firemen.

Since no calls had come in for a while, Boden decided it was okay for the firemen to give their visitors a tour of and inside the rigs, which very clearly made each and every one of their days. While that went on, Casey managed to speak with the owner and director of the group home, a tall, graying haired woman in her 50s, Mrs. Edna Pierson, who told him, "I really can't thank you enough for what you did."

Casey shrugged and responded, "We were just doing our job."

"I'm not talking about that," she said. "I'm talking about how you all treated them like they're people, instead of a sideshow." She shook her head grimly, "We do everything we can to teach them, prepare them how to function out in the world...but you can't prepare them for the people who stare...and they're the least of the problem. Staring's one thing, the people who can't keep their thoughts to themselves...and some of them genuinely don't mean any harm, anybody who has never known a person with Down Syndrome doesn't always know what to say, but the ones who are deliberately cruel, they're the worst, and we encounter them frequently. I've been doing this work for over 20 years, and somehow it just never seems to get better, the more people learn about Down Syndrome, it doesn't seem to make much difference, people still look for any difference, any excuse, to be cruel to someone else, someone who's so pure-hearted they can't even grasp such a concept."

Casey chewed on his bottom lip momentarily as he took this in and told the woman, "I'm sorry."

She looked at him and told him, "Lieutenant Casey, I'll always been grateful for what you did for them."

"Oh, it's really just the opposite, Mrs. Pierson," Casey told her, "I happen to know for a fact that all of us will be eternally grateful for them."

She looked at him curiously, "I'm afraid I don't understand."

"When we respond to a call, we tend to meet people during the worst time of their lives," Casey explained, "their home's on fire, they lose everything they own, they lose loved ones, we try to save everybody, but a lot of times despite everything we do, we can't, and we carry them with us for the rest of our lives, especially children. Firefighters have a very high suicide rate, a lot of it's from all the memories, all the guilt. It's not all that often we answer a call that has a genuinely happy ending, we usually have to settle for 'minimal damage'. The last few weeks everybody in this House has seen so much death and despair...I truly believe meeting the people from your home may have saved some lives in this firehouse, they made a horrible week a lot easier for every firefighter here to get through. They're..." Casey shook his head as the words escaped him, "they're miracles, they really are."

"That's what I said when I started the home," she responded. "Back then a lot of people didn't have any real concept of what Down Syndrome was, the stigma was much worse than it is today. I spent a lot of time trying to get it through people's heads that every single one of them had a purpose for being here and wasn't some mistake, either from nature or from God."

"I can't imagine it was easy," Casey said.

"Some families were embarrassed, ashamed of their children, and gave up custody of them to us," Mrs. Pierson explained, "some of them were young, first time parents, completely overwhelmed by this diagnosis, thought it meant something was wrong with their child, and didn't think they could give their kids the proper care they needed." She looked Matt in the eyes and said poignantly, "a lot of them could've, but they thought their children were born that way because of something they did wrong, that it was some kind of punishment, and they were terrified of doing anything else that might harm them. It's a bad situation any way you look at it because the kids didn't understand why they couldn't stay with their parents, even the ones who came to us when they were older, but not all of them were just dumped on us because their families didn't want them, some just truly believed their kids would be better off with trained experts...and for some that's been true. Others...I think they could be reunited with their families and they could learn to live together again happily, but until that time comes, they're our responsibility...and our angels, and I know each and every one of them had brought purpose to my life."

Casey smiled at the woman and told her, "I can tell you've done a great job with them."

She smiled in return and said, "Thank you, we do our best, Mr. Casey." She sighed and added, "Sometimes it doesn't feel like enough, but at the end of the day, it's all we can do."

"Amen."