No Tears For The Dead

by AHumblePen

When a rescue goes awry, a paramedic must deal with the loss of a close friend. (This is huge because I didn't split it into chapters, sorry!)

This is my general disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, or a paramedic (yet) so I may have made mistakes in my writing about the medical procedures. I tried to do my homework, and if it's wrong, I sincerely apologize.

For Audra, so you'll have something to read when you're bored and there's nothing else on.

No Tears For The Dead



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And wherever you've gone...and wherever we might go...
It don't seem fair...today just disappeared.
Your light's reflected now...reflected from afar...
We were but stones...your light made us stars
-- "Light Years", Pearl Jam
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"Come on, Roy!" Firefighter and paramedic John Gage called from the table that graced the day room of LA County Fire Department's Station 51. "I'm hungry and we're waiting on you!" He smacked his hands down on the tabletop only partially gently, and leaned forward in order to see more completely into the doorway that led to the bay.

His partner, Roy DeSoto, entered the kitchen-slash-recreation room at a lazy stroll, and smiled amicably at Johnny. "Oh, come on, its not like you're going to waste away or something."

Johnny looked almost indignant. "I..I am! I'm starved. We've been on five runs in a row...!"

"Hey, you're preachin' to the choir, now, Johnny." Roy said, raising his hands a little. Much to the relief of both paramedics, Marco Lopez chose that moment to serve the sloppy joes. With a grin, Roy slid into one of the empty seats that had a plate set before it. "Looks good, Marco."

"Of course it looks good. It's food! At this point, I think even Chet's cooking would look good." Johnny bit greedily into the sandwich, forcing the meat and sauce mixture to spill out of the other side of the bun. 'Thank you' Marco mouthed to Roy behind Johnny's back.

Chet Kelly, a stocky fireman of Irish decent, made a face at the paramedic before attending to his own lunch. "That's just disgusting, Gage. Besides, what's wrong with my cooking?"

"Inedible." Johnny answered simply, around a mouthful of food.

Chet's blue eyes flashed angrily, and Roy held out a hand to stifle the accompanying comment that he knew was coming. "I'm sure Johnny just meant that sometimes it can be a little...overcooked." Somehow Roy also managed to silence John before he responded with 'No, I meant inedible.'

"Right." Chet mumbled, and returned to his sandwich. "I see how good cuisine is appreciated around here."

The Captain, Hank Stanley, spoke up in hopes of squelching the conversation-turned-argument further. "Come now, Kelly, we all appreciate good food at this station. You should know that."

Chet set his sloppy joe down on the plate this time, and leveled a sarcastic gaze at his superior officer. "Are you implying that my food isn't good?"

"I never said that!" Hank defended himself. Then his eyes narrowed. "Eat your lunch, Kelly."

"Look, look, I can read between the lines!" Chet waved his hands in front of himself a little, speaking quietly of an imagined hurt. "I see that you guys just don't know anything about food. It's not like I expected you all to be gourmets. I guess I can forgive you all."

"Full of ourselves, aren't we?" The engineer of 51s A-shift had a reputation for silence, but the long-limbed Mike Stoker did sound his tenor voice from time to time. This particular incident, quietly spoken from behind a messy sandwich, bought him a withering glare from the curly-haired man beside him. "Aren't you supposed to be on my side?" Chet hissed a little, eyes heavy-lidded in irritated expectation.

Mike shook his head slowly. "I totally and completely abstain from this conversation."

"Coward." Roy hissed good-naturedly to Mike.

The engineer smiled subtly and whispered back. "No, I'm just smart. It's not my job to keep those two in line."

Roy's eyebrows wobbled in skepticism. "And it's mine?"

"I don't know, Roy, I never read your job description. For all I know it could be in the fine print right under 'must be willing to be puked on'." Mike grinned and then cut himself off from the conversation entirely by taking a large bite of his own sandwich.

Meanwhile, Chet had gotten himself quite worked up over the idea that the rest of the station believed that he couldn't cook. "You know, I'm gonna show you guys!" He burst out suddenly. "I'm gonna cook you guys the best food you've ever had. You'll see."

Johnny rolled his eyes, but Marco stepped into the gap in conversation before John could get the words formulated. "Now hold on, Chet. Don't rush into this- you don't want to embarrass yourself."

"Thanks for the support, Marco." Chet glared at the Latino man in his own turn. "No, I'm serious. I'm going to do this."

Captain Stanley sighed for a second time. "And how do you expect to pull this off, Kelly? You aren't under the impression that I'll assign you cook duty until you've proved your point, are you?" The older man's heavy eyebrow rose slowly in question of his underling's sanity and reasoning levels.

"The cook doesn't have a monopoly on the kitchen does he?" Chet asked defensively. "I have as much free time as anybody else around here. I'll just spend it in the kitchen."

"We're doomed." Johnny muttered into the remains of his sandwich. The words no more out of his mouth when the klaxons sounded. "See?" The lanky paramedic continued, gesturing with his glass of milk as he stood. "They're tolling our death bells already."

"Very clever, Gage, very clever." Chet groused as he left the dayroom and his lunch in favor of the engine and an empty stomach.

"Thank you, Chet, I thought it was."

* * *

Chet Kelly stood in the kitchen part of his station's day room, only illuminated by the small fluorescent lamp over the stove. The harsh artificial light gave his somber features a sharper look than was natural, and it appeared for all the world that he was a twisted and insane scientist bent over his latest formula. In a way, he was.

Chet frowned, the ends of his heavy mustache pulling downward, and squinted at the recipe he'd selected. "A cup of salt? That's an awful lot..." The man just shrugged, however, and added it to the rest of his concoction.

If everything went as planned, the brown goo that now spread itself across the inside of the mixing bowl and the outside of the stove would be turned into brownies before morning. And the Irishman knew well that not one of the other five men in the station could resist the smell of freshly baked brownies. Particularly Gage. And when they tried them, Chet was sure they'd all be convinced of how well he really could cook. Doubting Thomases.

With a grin the size of California herself, Chet smacked his hands together in a puff of flour. "There! Done." Still grinning, the man slid the brownies into the oven and set the egg timer for thirty minutes. Then, he took a seat at the table with the previous day's newspaper and made a valiant attempt to read in the dim light. Chet only hoped that the klaxons wouldn't go off.

* * *

He awoke with his nose filled with the smell of fresh-baked brownies. For a moment, Hank was confused. He was sure he'd gone to sleep at the station. So how did that get him back home? Confusion battered against the sides of his head like a hummingbird in a white-washed garage.

But a few seconds later the wake up tones sounded and Hank realized that he was, indeed, still in his station. That didn't erase the confusion- it simply transferred it from where he was to what the heck the station was doing smelling like brownies.

With a groan, the captain rolled out of his bed and staggered to the phone on the desk. Groggily, he lifted the receiver and dutifully said "Station 51, KMG 365." He didn't hold on to the phone long enough to hear LA's '10-4'. Instead, he hobbled back to his bed, and managed to get his boots and turnout pants on as his men rolled out of their own beds. 'Hmmm' He thought to himself slowly. 'There's one missing. And it's Chet. Great.'

"Kelly...?" Hank called through the station with a vaguely irritated tone, rubbing at one eye with the back of his hand. Moving from the dorm to the day room, the older man found his underling.

Chet was sitting, looking a little haggard and sleep deprived, staring at a cake-pan full of brownies. From the massive mess that the kitchen had been christened with, Hank could tell that Chet had made the confections during the night while the other five men slept. Hank sighed heavily, and resisted the temptation to roll his eyes only by putting his hands on his hips. "Why on earth did you do that, Kelly?" He gestured to the mess, feeling distinctively like a father scolding a four year old. The others of the shift wandered into the day room as well, looking very confused.

"To prove to you all I could cook." Chet slurred, and reached out to dig a brownie out of the pan and offer it to Hank. "Here, have one."

The captain took the brownie cautiously between two fingers, one heavy eyebrow raised at it
suspiciously. Johnny, having seen what appeared to be not only food but chocolate food, darted to the side of the table and plucked one out of the pan himself. With a shrug, the men bit into their brownies as one.

And as one gagged on the single bite. Cap managed to swallow his mouthful with a grimace and a strangled noise, but Johnny, who lacked the sense of decorum that Hank seemed to have been born with, spat the bite back out, rubbing at his tongue with his free hand. "Is this some kind of joke, Kelly?" Hank snapped, eyes flat in irritation.

"What?" Chet asked in confusion, tilting his head to one side. "No, it's not a joke...? Cap?"

Johnny answered before Hank ever could. "They're terrible, Chet! Have you actually tried one yet? It's all....salt!"

Chet raised a single eyebrow at the paramedic, doubtful. "Come on, Gage, give me some credit."

"I'm serious, Chet!" Johnny stammered, dropping the rest of the offending brownie into the sink as if it were about to sprout arms and begin to try and choke him to death.

A little peeved now, Chet dug his own brownie out. "Jeez, they can't be that bad. I followed the recipe.." To show his confidence in his cooking, Chet shoved the entire brownie into his mouth at once.

The men of Station 51's a-shift had never seen Chet's face go through such a contorted and rapid series of emotions before. Within a few seconds, however, Chet had made a decision and rushed to the sink. He leaned over the edge and unceremoniously spit the entire contents of his mouth into the metal basin. Then he turned the faucet on, leaned in further, and drank directly from the tap in a hasty attempt to get his mouth washed out. "Ugh! Gawd...!"

With a frown, Hank moved to the unholy mess that Fireman Kelly had made of the stove and picked up the recipe out of the goop. "How much salt did you put in the brownies, Chet?"

Chet lifted his curly head from the flow of water just long enough to answer his captain. "I dunno, a cup or so. It's what the recipe said."

"A cup?!" Johnny squealed, turning back to stare at the brownies. "Man, at that saturation, you could probably melt them down and use them as a salt lick!"

Cap sighed and threw the slip of paper back down on the counter. "Kelly, you twit, you got the sugar and salt mixed up! It calls for a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of salt!"

Chet surfaced from the faucet, slapping off the water flow. He ran a hand over his dripping face, mouthing the word 'oh'.

Each of the other five men in the station had a comment waiting for Chet's casual acceptance of his mistake, but none of them got to use it. The klaxons sounded loudly, ringing in the still groggy heads of the firemen. The brownies temporarily forgotten, the men scrambled to get the rest of their turnout and dash to the vehicles waiting in the bay.

* * *

Johnny wiped the sweat back away from his brow with the back of a hand, his helmet hanging from his neck by its chin strap. Lifting his upper lip a little and breathing through his teeth in distant concentration, the man reached back and replaced the helmet loosely on his head. "Man, I hope everybody got out okay." He commented to his partner, who'd just come around the nose of the squad, as he continued to watch the vast apartment complex burn for a few more seconds.

Roy looked over his shoulder grimly, and nodded. "Yeah, but the doorman says everyone's out and accounted for. Annd..." Roy turned back to Johnny from the fire, and clapped his friend on the shoulder. "Since we've done such a good job of patching up all those minor injuries, Cap thinks we oughtta return to our roots and pull another line on that fire."

"Oh really?" Johnny's dark eyebrows vanished beneath the battered dark plastic of his helmet. "Well, if duty calls..."

"GAGE, DESOTO, GET OVER HERE!"

"Bellows, more like it." Roy supplied as the two paramedics broke into a jog. They circled the engine in a ragged tandem, and pulled up to a halt in front of their captain. "Yeah, Cap?" The senior paramedic asked, although he already knew what the other man wanted.

Stanley stretched his long neck a little against the weight of his helmet and pointed to the engine. "Pull that last inch and a half in and help us contain this blaze, why don'tcha?" Hank's gloved hand jerked sharply, thumb first, back towards the fire that flickered through the nearest doorway of the building. "See if you can't get up to the second floor safely. And get your tanks on."

"Right, Cap." The two men chorused, and returned to the squad only long enough to get the unwieldy yellow oxygen tanks strapped on. Johnny reached the engine before Roy when they went to get the hose, and stuck his arm through the hole in the loose coil of heavy fabric. He heaved the mass onto his shoulder, and again broke into a ground-eating jog towards the building, the hose flapping out onto the ground behind him. Roy followed a half-second's worth later, ensuring the hose didn't snag on anything as the firemen took it into the involved structure.

Johnny blinked a little behind the thick plastic of his SCBA gear mask as he entered the building, and surveyed the area quickly. The door they'd used hadn't actually been involved in the fire yet, although the blaze was a few yards off of it to the left, through the threshold to a different room. To their left was a staircase that had itself been untouched by the fire, although there were flames dancing on the landing at its top. "Well, Cap told us to go up to the second floor.." Johnny motioned to Roy with one hand, and started up the staircase.

It was about then that Mike decided it would be a good idea to charge the hose. Johnny wasn't ready for it, and had been in the middle of moving up another step when it happened. The cloth-covered rubber bucked in his hands under the water pressure, catching Johnny off guard. It knocked him off-balance and sent him tumbling down the stairs, just barely missing Roy on the way. He landed at the bottom badly on his right knee. "Argghh!"

"Are you okay?" Roy turned and called down to his partner. He was about a third of the way up the staircase, but Roy could see that he'd have to move soon. The fire had reached the top of the staircase, and if they were going to hose the second floor they'd need a different way up.

"No..." Johnny whimpered loudly from the foot of the stairs. "My knee....it's all...messed up."

"Oh, for God's sake, Johnny..." Roy sighed a little, tromping down the stairs. Johnny hadn't fallen all that far, but the man had still managed to injure himself. Why did Roy even find himself surprised?

Johnny tried to roll over to face Roy while still cradling his right knee to his body. "It's not like I try to get hurt..."

Shaking his head slowly, Roy picked Johnny roughly in a rather unglamorous but classic 'fireman's carry'. The younger paramedic protested loudly, kicking both legs, but mostly the left one, in the air in an attempt to get Roy to carry him in a different fashion. It didn't work. Roy carried Johnny completely out of the building and flopped him down next to the squad. "Stay there."

"Roy, I...!" Johnny started, but Roy was already gone. With a grimace, the young paramedic reached down and put his hands on either side of his right knee. Hissing a little in pain, he forced the kneecap back into its rightful spot.

Roy returned from around the squad with the drug box. He crouched next to his partner, and rolled the broad turnout pants' leg up to Johnny's thigh. His knee didn't appear very abnormal, and Roy rose an eyebrow at Johnny skeptically. "Are you sure you landed on this knee?"

"Yes, Roy!" Johnny hissed again, scowling at the other man. "And it hurts! I think I might even have hurt it bad enough to go to Rampart!"

Surprise flickered across Roy's face shortly, giving way to suspicion. "Is there a new nurse working there I haven't met yet?"

"What?" Johnny asked sharply, frozen in reaching for his knee again.

"This is just a ploy to go see some nurse at Rampart, isn't it? And have her all gushy over your noble injury?" Roy closed the drug box with a frown. Even the click of the lid sounded irritated.

"No!" Johnny rolled his turnout leg back down, glancing to one side as his comrades cleaned up from the fire and his captain called the fire in 'controlled.' "I really fell on that knee and it really hurts and I really think I really messed it up!"

"Really? Well, I think you're overreacting." Roy muttered, standing with one quick motion and a grunt.

Johnny lurched to his feet, as well, hissing in pain and almost growling at Roy. "Overreacting! It hurts, Roy!"

With a sigh and rolled eyes, the light-haired man turned to put the drug box back into its compartment in the squad. "You fell four feet down a flight of stairs, Johnny."

"And landed, painfully, on my right knee!" Johnny finished, motioning to the knee with both hands. He was favoring the leg a bit, but Roy couldn't tell whether the affliction was real or just for show. "You know, it if goes all out of whack at the next run it's gonna all be your fault."

"Look, fine!" Roy said, accenting the last word of his sentence with the closure of the squad's compartment door. "I'll take a look at it when we get back to the station, okay? Maybe we'll ace bandage it there or something."

"Fine!" Johnny called back, turning and limping to the passenger's side of the squad. He shut the door hard, loudly, drawing the attention of Captain Stanley.

Hank looped the strap for the handie-talkie over his wrist and wandered over to Roy, motioning to the sullen figure inside of the red rescue truck with his chin. "What's wrong with him?"

Roy sighed, and rubbed his forehead just above the left eyebrow. "Oh, he fell down half a flight of stairs and landed on his knee. He says he messed it up badly, but I can't see anything wrong with it and it's bearing his weight..."

Cap frowned a little. "Don't you think you should take him to Rampart anyway?"

"Nah." Roy shook his head, turning to look at Johnny for a moment. "Nothing's going to manifest until we get back to the station. I figured I'd look at it there and maybe put an ace on it for his peace of mind or something. I, personally, think he's both overreacting and trying to see some nurse at Rampart."

Stanley laughed. "Alright, then, you two go back to quarters while we finish up here, okay? But this means more chores for you."

"Yes, Cap, Right, Cap." Roy smiled and turned to get into the squad's driver side door.

* * *

Roy DeSoto sat forward in his seat as he backed the squad into the apparatus bay, watching carefully so he wouldn't catch the side of the truck on the walls of the station. Once the squad was safely in the confines of its parking area, Roy turned and looked at his partner.

Johnny was curled against the side of the truck, his right knee pulled in close to his body. He looked rather sullen, not just in his face but in his body language. Roy paused for a moment, frowning, and wondered if he'd made the right decision. "How's that knee?"

"It still hurts, Roy." Johnny replied. Definitely sulking.

"Here.." Roy said, quietly and more gently. "Why don't you let me take a look at it again and I'll at least bandage it for a sprain, okay?"

"Yeah." Johnny muttered, but made no move to get out of the squad.

"I can't really do it here, you know.."

"Yeah." Johnny repeated, and this time he opened the door. He slid out of the passenger's seat slowly, taking care to land on his left leg. The movement was encouraging- at least Johnny wasn't giving Roy the silent 'I'm gonna pretend you don't exist for the rest of the shift' treatment. "Come on, I haven't got all day and this knee really hurts. I suppose the dorm's as good a place as any."

Roy smirked a little to himself, but purely to himself. He didn't want to deal with the heck he'd catch if he let Johnny see the smirk. "Okay, lemme get the bandage out of the drug box, I'll be there in a sec." The darker-haired man gave Roy another decidedly dirty glare before hobbling off towards the dorm room.

A few minutes later, Roy had retrieved the bandage in question and entered the dorm. Johnny was standing by his bed in his uniform shirt and boxers, looking distinctly uncomfortable. "Come on, hurry it up, Roy, I'm cold and I just know we're gonna get a run now."

Roy laughed. "Here- you sit down on the bed and put your legs out, and I'll wrap your knee, okay?"

"Fine, whatever." Normally, Johnny would have flopped down on the bed, but this time he eased himself down slowly. The paramedic was so tedious and meticulous about the motion that Roy was fairly convinced it was mostly for show.

Roy set about bracing Johnny's knee with the ace bandage as if John were any other patient. "You know, you are kind of a klutz. Maybe if you try being more careful- you won't get hurt as much."

"More careful?" Johnny would have leaned forward if he could have. As it was, his eyebrows shot up and he managed to put a hand, fingers splayed, against his chest. "Me? I'm just about as careful as careful gets, Roy! It's not my fault I get hurt all the time, you know it wouldn't happen as much if you did more of the dangerous stuff!"

Roy paused in tying off the bandage to give Johnny a look. "And carrying a hose up stairs is dangerous?"

"Okay, so today was a freak accident." Johnny waved the hand he'd previously put to his chest flippantly. "But usually it's all stuff that happens in little holes or up high or something, and- Hey, watch it, Roy, your fingers are cold!- if you were doing that stuff I wouldn't get hurt!"

"I think you're just clumsy. And overreacting."

"Yeah, you would think that."

"I'd ask you what that was supposed to mean, but I really don't want to know." Roy released Johnny's knee, and backed up a pace. "There, you're all patched up. Now put your pants on."

Johnny's eyes narrowed a little as he reached for the dark blue uniform piece. "Roy...? Just....shut up."

Roy actually laughed as he left the dorm room. He covered his mouth with one hand and mimicked the sound of the klaxons, grinning as he saw Johnny hustle to get his pants on out of the corner of his eye.

* * *

There were few things about his job that frustrated John Gage. He liked what he did for a living, and wouldn't change it for the world. He liked the thrill of going out onto crumbling precipices, rappelling down buildings, standing defiant in the face of a raging inferno. He liked being able to drag someone from the jaws of death and patch them back together with his partner, his supplies, his own hands. His job was great, except for a few small things.

"How's it coming, Gimpy?" Chet Kelly's voice echoed through the apparatus bay to almost physically smack John on the back of the head. Chet was one of those 'few small things' Johnny found irritating about his job. But the dark haired man had a feeling he'd have found Chet irritating no matter where they'd met. He didn't dignify the holler with an answer.

Unfortunately for the paramedic, Kelly seemed intent on seeking him out today. The stockier man crossed the bay with obvious purpose, clapping Johnny on the shoulder as he reached where John was diligently polishing the squad. "Good thing for you I'm gonna make up the best meal you've ever had and take your mind off all that pain in your fubar'd knee."

Johnny's eyebrows rose, and he paused for a second in the circle motions with the polish rag. "You're still hung up on that?"

"What, your knee? Of course, how could I miss an oppertun-"

"Not my knee, you idiot!" Johnny pursed his lips slightly in frustrated irritation. "The whole 'cooking well' bit. You know it's never going to work."

Chet's blue eyes flashed a little as he realized that he wasn't on as superior 'harassing grounds' as he'd thought he'd been. "Yeah, I'm still hung up on it because I can cook and I will show you guys."

"Unh-hunh." Johnny said doubtfully, refocusing his attention on the squad.

"I can!" Chet said, smacking his hand down on the squad's freshly polished hood for emphasis. He blinked for a moment, then lifted his heavy hand up again, leaving a clear, sharp handprint in the polish. "Oh, sorry.."

"Kelly!" Johnny growled, making the shorter man step back a few steps. Then Johnny called out back over his shoulder. "Cap! Chet's picking on me and leaving marks on the squad and I just got done polishin' it!"

"Deal with it yourself, Gage." Echoed back Hank's disembodied voice. "I'm not any of you guys's mother, contrary to the popular belief of the men of this station."

Johnny gave the direction of his captain's office an ugly glare. Turning back to his work, he found Chet still standing next to him, laughing in that stupid Muttley laugh of his. "Oh, shut up, Chet." Johnny said, exasperated, and threw the polish rag in Chet's face. He could only limp slightly from the squad with some facsimile of dignity.

"Johnny...!" Chet sputtered, clawing at the rag. "Hey! Gage! Get back here!"

In the hope of solace, Johnny continued to hobble towards the dayroom. "Rooyy!"

His partner heard him coming, however, and the deadpanned voice reached Johnny before he made it to the place of TV and coffee. "Don't even bother, John, I'm not in the mood to deal with you two right now."

Halfway between the squad and the hallway, Johnny looked back to the now angry looking and still approaching Chet. Looking up to the sky he knew was beyond the apparatus bay ceiling, Johnny spread his arms out and called plaintively. "Is there no relief?"

The answer, in a multitude of voices, was resounding. "No!"

* * *

Roy was starting to get nervous. They'd gone on an entire run, and except for the communication that the job had required, Johnny hadn't said a word. And generally, when the darker haired man didn't talk, it meant something was bothering him. And when something bothered John, he brooded and brooded over it until it finally got the best of him, and then he nagged Roy to no end about it. DeSoto decided that this time he was going to cut the nagging off at the pass.

"Alright, Johnny, I give up, what's wrong with you?" Roy glanced over to the passenger's side as he drove the squad back from Rampart to the station.

Johnny started a little when his partner spoke, and turned from the window. "Hunh? Oh, I was just thinkin' that it's Chet's turn to cook today. I'm worried that I won't make it past lunch."

And suddenly Roy understood. He grinned a little at the road. "I think Chet'll do just fine at lunch."

"Oh?" Johnny half-coughed the word, alerting Roy to the fact that he was back in the land of the living and well on his way to his next rant. "What makes you say that?"

Roy shrugged a little. "Oh, I gave him an old recipe of Joanne's, one of her ne'er fails, and measured it all out for him. I can't see how he could screw it up."

"It's Chet." Johnny pointed out. He shook his head slightly, and looked out the window briefly before turning back to Roy. "What did you give him, anyways?"

"Chicken a la king." Roy answered smugly.

"Chicken a la what...?"

Roy blinked at Johnny briefly as they approached the station. "Chicken a la king. Don't you know what that is?"

"No." Johnny said, raising an eyebrow at his partner. "Should I? I mean, it kind of sounds like a misnamed boxer...."

"It's a food." Roy said, exasperated, as he swung the squad back around to back it into the bay. "It's bits of chicken in a cream sauce with noodles. My kids love it, it is pretty good. You should give it a chance. Even if it is Chet who's cooking it."

"I don't like to play games with my life, Roy..." Johnny muttered. "Eating Chet's cooking is an unnecessary risk that I would like to take as little as possible."

"Come on, junior, let's go get lunch, it can't be that bad. How's that knee doing anyways?" Roy tried to switch subjects gracefully as he got out of the squad and went over to close the bay doors.

Johnny fell for it hook, line, and sinker. "Oh, it's gettin' there. It doesn't hurt near as bad as it used to. I think I may be able to unwrap it tonight and it'll be okay. Man, did that hurt when I landed on it, though." Johnny's face contorted oddly at the memory.

The pair's amicable banter froze in the air, however, as they entered the day room. The place had been transformed from a nice, mostly clean place of feeding and leisure to something akin to a Saturday night fire at bad club. There was an ominous cloud of heavy smoke that pervaded the room, nebulously centered around the range stove. Three of the four other firemen who worked the A-shift were scrambling about the room in what almost seemed a state of panic, while one, dazed and charred, sat on the couch next to a very unfazed Henry.

It took Johnny a couple seconds' worth of blinking to take this all, added to the distinct smell of burnt something, in. "What the devil happened?"

Captain Stanley's head swiveled quickly to snap into focus on the paramedics standing befuddled in the doorway. "John! Good, you guys are back. Can you check out Gourmet Kelly back there and make sure he's okay...?" Hank spared Roy one good glare before going back to whatever it was he had been doing with Marco and Mike's help.

"Geez..." Johnny blinked, and said to Roy as they started back for their drugbox and the biophone. "What'd you do to piss off Cap?"

Roy shook his head, blue eyes a bit wide in worry. "I don't know..."

Returning to Chet, they found him covered from the chest up with various kinds of food, and blinking blankly at a spot on the floor before him. Roy squatted on the floor beside the couch. "Hey, Chet, are you still in there, can you tell me what happened?"

Chet turned, looked at Roy, and scooted away from him on the couch. "You stay away from me, you're trying to kill me!"

"What?" The senior paramedic was now thoroughly confused.

Stoker swung by to stop behind Roy, shaking his head with a secretive, amused smile on his face. Johnny looked up from the batter-smeared Chet, and raised his chin and an eyebrow at the engineer in unison. "What happened, Mike?"

"Well..." Mike started slowly, reaching around behind himself to grab a chair from the kitchen table and sit down on it. "You know that sherry in your recipe, Roy?"

"Yeah..." Roy said slowly, suspiciously. "Jo puts it in the white sauce for flavor..."

Mike's smirk grew. "Well, Chet forgot it. So he tried to put it in while he was cooking whatever it was..."

"Chicken a la king!"

"And he missed." Mike's hands mimicked a fire. "He hit the burner flame. When it flared up, he jumped, and sprayed flaming chicken goo everywhere. Mostly on himself, fortunately, but it's all over that half of the day room now."

Johnny looked from Mike to Chet, and burst out loudly in laughter. "That's hilarious!"

"Shut up, Gage." Chet mumbled.

"No, seriously!" Johnny continued, trying to calm his laughter down enough to allow him to talk. "You're a fireman and you poured alcohol on an open flame?"

Chet frowned, glancing sourly at Johnny. "Hey, how was I supposed to know I'd miss...?"

Johnny shook his head slowly. "Chet, it's just dumb!"

"SHUT UP, GAGE!"

"Geeeezus, no reason to get all testy!" Johnny waved his hands in front of him in a shushing motion, irritating the already aggravated Chet further. He choked back another round of laughter, and tried to fall back into business. "Alright, Chet, where are ya hurt?"

"My arms." Chet replied sullenly, eyeing both paramedics with varying degrees of suspicion. "I think I mighta burned 'em. But be CAREFUL."

Johnny gently took Chet's left arm in his hands, turning it over and examining the skin. "Hey, Roy, I think we should pack this just in case and take him into Rampart just to make sure he isn't more damaged than he already is." Johnny gestured to Chet's head briefly. "These burns don't look to bad, but there's a lot of chicken prince..."

"Chicken a la king!!"

"...everywhere and I'm afraid I'll hurt something if I clean him up real good."

Roy smiled a little, and moved for the sauce-splattered phone. "Alright, I'll call in the still alarm then." As he dialed the phone, he faced Chet, and shook his head a little, slowly. "They're never going to believe this one."

* * *

"I have to say, Mr. Kelly, this is certainly one of the most....interesting...injuries I've ever treated a fireman for." Doctor Joe Early's voice was almost completely level, and did a good job of masking the amusement the gray-haired doctor was deriving from his patient's condition.

Chet's eyes narrowed, and he looked away, pulling at his arm until Early let go of it. "Yeah, everyone's a comic, aren't they?"

"Hardly, Chet, my friend," Early bantered back, his blue eyes wrinkling at the corners as he smiled. "I've had many people tell me I make a better neurosurgeon than comedian."

Chet's face mirrored continued frustration. "Will you just treat me already and get it over with?"

"Actually, I think I've just about done everything for you that I really can." Although he was still warm and smiling, it was obvious that this comment was Joe's professional opinion and not just idle chatter.

"Really?" Chet's eyebrows raised, all traces of irritation vanished.

The silver-haired nodded, and began to explain, pointing to the appropriate parts of Chet's hands and arms. "These burns really aren't all that bad, just like Johnny said. They just looked a whole lot worse with all that food on them, and like a good paramedic he didn't want to aggravate any possible injuries. I'd suggest you take it as easy as you can, don't be the first to run in at the fires, take cold showers and use Neosporin. It should clear up by itself in about two weeks or so."

Kelly grinned as he slid off the treatment table, grabbing his coat with one hand. "Hey, thanks Doc, I 'preciate it."

Early smiled warmly again. "It's my job, Chet, and no problem. Now if you need some help in cooking..."

"Aw, don't you start, too..."

"...I'd suggest you look elsewhere, because my skills pretty much start and end at medicine, with a small detour for some dabbling in music."

Chet waved with the hand holding his jacket, moving to the door and opening it with his back as he spoke to the doctor. "Thanks again, and you know I think I may stay away from the stove for a while."

"That might be the smartest idea you've ever had, Kelly." The voice rang out behind him.

Chet froze against the door, wincing visibly, and for a moment considered fleeing back into the treatment room and begging Dr. Early to hide him from the voice's owner. Unfortunately, that just didn't work against this particular person. With a inverted sigh, Chet steeled himself and turned around. "Smartest idea I've ever shared with a dim light like you, Gage."

Half of his station's friendly resident paramedic team leveled a flat gaze at him. Over the years, Chet had almost made an art out of the ability to push Johnny's buttons. Not that said ability was a hard one to stumble across or subsequently master. "Yeah, right, like your ideas would even make sense to anyone but you." Johnny muttered, his eyes narrowed.

Roy stepped up from his position at the Nurse's station, interjecting into the conversation before it escalated further. "Hey, Chet, we stuck around 'cause we needed supplies anyways and figured you'd need a ride back to the station."

Chet rose an eyebrow at Johnny and then looked past him to Roy. "Yeah, thanks. The Doc said I'm not too burnt, just gotta take it easy..." He thumbed over his shoulder and rose his eyebrow in a silent question. Roy nodded, and all three started moving to where the squad was parked outside without a word concerning leaving actually spoken.

Johnny's mouth twitched up in a crooked smile, and he glanced over at Chet slyly. "Hey, I heard you say you were gonna steer clear of the stove for a while."

"That doesn't mean I can't cook, Gage." Chet shot back, smugly.

"Well you can't cook ever, but I really want to know how you expect to do it without a stove..." Johnny was confused now, and his expression lost its slyness to reflect that.

"Easy." Chet was grinning outright now, and obviously just warming up. "Salads, sandwiches, anything I have to bake instead of cook."

"Wasn't your last baking adventure a failure, too?" Roy added, quietly. He hated throwing more wood on the fire of either Johnny or Chet when they got going, but he'd seen his captain's face when the man bit into that brownie. He'd risk his neck not to see that expression again.

"It was a minor tactical error." Chet stated, nodding slightly. "It won't happen again."

"Suuuure." Johnny supplied. At that, the shorter fireman didn't speak, but he did afford Johnny with a nasty glare.

"Well, Chet, can you do me one favor?" Roy asked as they reached the squad.

Kelly paused before he climbed into the middle through the passenger's side door. "What's that?"

"Save the rest of your experimenting for another shift? I think I've about had all I can take of it today." Roy's smile was subtle as he climbed in, but not unnoticeable. He had his own ways of picking on his co-workers, his own strategies for getting them back for all the headaches they gave him.

"Harrumph." Was all Chet had to say.

* * *

The trio had no more pulled into the station and started to pour themselves coffee when the klaxons rang. Johnny shot the ever-present box an evil glare as he gulped hot java quickly and waited for Sam Lanier's voice to come through after the long chain of tone sounds. And, faithful as always, it did.

Station 51, Station 28, Station 36, Station 110, Battalion 18, Truck 42, Truck 12, structure fire, 1726 Old Deer Road, one-seven-two-six Old Deer, cross street Temple, time out 14:47.

"Come on, Junior, let's go, you can have more coffee when we get back." Roy said patiently, motioning towards the apparatus bay with one hand. Chet had already left for the engine, and the other men hadn't been in the dayroom when the bells rang.

"Alright, I'm going Roy, geez, and didn't I tell you I didn't like being called Junior?" Johnny's irritated look turned to Roy as he set the mug down. By the time he hit the bay, however, his one-track mind had jumped lines entirely. "That was a whole bunch of 'quipment gettin' called out. What do you suppose is down on Old Deer that lit up?"

Roy shrugged. "I know there's an old apartment complex down there. Maybe some sicko decided it would be fun to set it on fire."

"Man, I hate firebugs." Johnny complained as he remembered to reach behind him and grab his helmet. As always, it settled oddly on Johnny's skull and made him appear to have a head that was twice normal head size.

Roy nodded, his own helmet already firmly in place. "Don't we all?"

"Well," Johnny picked at errant dirt beneath his fingernails. "Whatever it is, somebody torched it good."

* * *

As things were, both John and Roy had been right. The building that had been set on fire, for it was an intentional blaze, was an apartment building. And somebody had 'torched it good.'

The building was five stories high and fully involved when the crew from Station 51 rolled on scene, but luckily for the tenants of the ramshackle apartments, they weren't the first to arrive. Battalion 18's big snorkel and their tanker both, as well 42's foam truck, were already earning their paychecks fighting the blaze. As the squad and the engine thundered to a halt, Battalion Chief McConnikee looked up and looked very relieved at seeing them.

Roy and Johnny jumped out of the squad simultaneously, and Roy jogged up to McConnikee with Captain Stanley, who'd jumped out of the nearby engine, while Johnny busied himself getting essential gear out of the squad's compartments.

"Alright, where do you need us?" Hank asked his boss, clapping his gloved hands in front of him. McConnikee and Stanley had a long, interesting history which usually resulted in the Captain getting hysterically nervous when McConnikee was around. Luckily, such fears vanished from the lanky man while he was on the job.

"Everywhere." The shorter man answered tersely, and turned to look at the blazing complex. "Why don't you get your engine crew on the north side of the building and work on containment, and send your paramedics in to check for victims..." McConnikee turned back to face Hank, and almost as immediately focused on something behind his subordinate. Seconds later, 28's ground to a halt among the scattered emergency vehicles already there. "...They can get 28's paramedics to help them."

"Right." Hank said, and spun on a heel. He pointed Roy and Johnny towards the building, and then motioned for his crew. "Alright guys, this is what's going to happen..."

Roy himself made a rotating motion with a finger. "We're gonna need our SCBA gear, Johnny, Chief wants us to make sweeps."

"Again?" Johnny made a face. "Seems like that's all we do anymore, and no paramedic work."

"Hey, they still pay us." Roy shrugged, and reached for the heavy black harness that would hold the forty pound tank of oxygen to his back.

"But it's not fun anymore."

Roy rolled his eyes melodramatically. "You're the only guy I know who is in this business for fun. Come on, let's just go find some people to save."

* * *

Justin Mojowski wasn't exactly a man who possessed what most people would call were show-stopping looks. He was of purely Polish decent, a second-generation American, and he looked it. He was built like an oddly round square, with stringy-straight brown hair and stormy grey eyes. He had a wicked sense of humor, a volatile temper, and a heart bigger than the 40-acre farm he'd grown up on.

Still, there was something about the twenty-seven-year-old's personality and nearly straight smile that drew women to him at an incredible rate, despite the fact he had a reputation as a ladies' man that rivaled that 51's well-known Casanova, and tended to go through girlfriends like underwear. This penchant for endearing himself to people through some unknown force possibly akin to osmosis, plus his last name, earned him the nickname Mojo, and it was by this nickname that he was known throughout the LA County Fire Department. And he, along with his partner Brian O'Conner, made up the paramedic team from Station 28.

O'Conner was about as opposite to Mojowski as two close friends could be. At thirty, he had a shock of goldish-red hair, clear blue eyes, and faint freckles across his face and on his forearms. He was a slighter man than Mojo, quiet, reserved and serious. He rarely smiled, but did his job very well and somehow always seemed to be warm and welcoming without being social.

Mojo shaded his eyes with one thick hand through the mask of his SCBA gear, and frowned as the action didn't produce the result he intended. Giving up with his hand, he simply squinted at the flames before him. From behind, Brian moved forward, tilted his head to one side as he looked and thought.

The two turned to each other at about the same time, and the fact made Justin smirk. People worked together too long, and they got so used to each other that timings tended to get eerie. Neither of them made any effort to talk, for they'd never be able to hear each other over the noise of the fire and their own breathing, but through hand gestures managed to decide that they couldn't press further into the room without support from men on a hose. It was also decided they should go back out of the building for a few minutes because Brian's air tank was low and they'd been in the building for almost forty-five minutes now.

Mojo stripped himself of the face mask as they broke from the building, shaking his head in the fresher air. "Oh, boy, does that feel good." He mumbled to himself, running a hand through his hair and leaving soot streaks on his scalp. As the pair approached the red squad they were privileged to drive, their captain moved from the engine towards them.

Andrew Sheraton was a tall black man, built like the engine of the station he captained. Despite his formidable physical presence, Sheraton was known as one of the best captains in the Fire Department, gruff and regulatory at times, but on the whole understanding, honestly caring about his men and the people of the area they served. "Find anything?" He also had a heavy southern drawl- he'd been born and raised in Alabama before moving to California shortly after he was married.

"No." Brian answered, shaking his head. "Honestly, I hope we don't."

Sheraton smiled grimly. "Yeah, I'd hate to see anybody who'd still stuck in there."

Mojo shrugged a little, and turned to survey the building from the exterior angle. "I don't know, it wasn't so bad were 51's was. At least it wasn't when I last saw it, but that was almost an hour ago."

Andrew shook his head, and ran a hand over his close-shorn head. "None of it's lookin' anythin' but bad, now, Mojo."

* * *

"Please, help me!" The woman pushed her way past the police line to latch herself onto the arm of John Gage. She was in her mid-thirties, and her already pudgy face was swollen and streaked with tears. She gasped for air between long sobs like a beached fish, trembling slightly and managing small and pathetic whimpers when she couldn't either speak or sob. "Please...! My son's...he's still in there! Please! You have to help!"

Johnny gently pried the woman from his arm, and glanced to his partner. "It's okay, ma'am, I'll see what I can do. What's your son's name...?"

"George!" The woman gurgled, and turned to entreat Roy. She pointed to the burning building as if it had reached out and snatched her boy from her arms. "He's in there still! It's...burning! Please help me!"

Roy had been in the middle of changing his air tank when the woman had run up. Johnny almost half-grinned at him. "Are you almost ready or am I gonna have to go in there without you?"

It didn't take Roy long at all to finish getting the fresh tank on. "Don't go doing something stupid, Johnny. I'm ready. I'll take the right, and you take the left, okay?"

"Right." Johnny acknowledged, jogging into the building a step and a half behind his partner.

Neither of them realized that John hadn't bothered to change to a fresh SCBA tank.

* * *

The fire was thick, heavy, and vicious. Its heat cut straight through John's turnout coat to his skin below, and made him shy away from the walls. His facemask was obscured by smoke, but he knew if he took it off his vision would only be worse. The warning bell on his air tank, telling him that he only had five minutes' worth of air left in his tank, rang in his ears irritatingly. Johnny just tuned it out- he needed to find that child.

"George!" He called again, and was rewarded this time by the faint sound of a young boy calling back. Johnny honed in on that sound like a targeted missile. As he entered the room, he could hear the cackle of fire above him. Looking up, he saw the snake-tongue flames crawl across the ceiling to lick at the top of the walls. 'It's in the walls. In the ceiling. Great.' The boy was in the far side of the room, pinned beneath what might have been someone's kitchen table before the fire started. As he spotted the fireman, his calls became louder, punctuated by an occasional spasm of coughs.

"I'm right here, take it easy." He said to the boy, reaching the child's side in moments. "My name's Johnny, and I'm gonna get you out of here, okay? It's gonna be just fine, you'll be with your mama soon." The boy nodded wildly, silent now that Gage had reached him. The paramedic's trained eyes looked over George's predicament quickly, and saw that it was only that the falling table had caught his leg and he hadn't been strong enough to lift it himself. The leg probably wasn't even broken. Johnny looked around the room just as quickly, and found what he was looking for.

"See that window over there, George?" Johnny pointed to the window a few feet from their position.

"Yeah.." George replied tremulously.

"I'm gonna take you over and put you out the window, okay? When you hit the ground, just roll up like a ball. Then you should be outside and can go see your Mom and get checked out by one of the nice paramedics outside, okay?" Johnny'd already lifted the table and scooted George's leg out of the way.

George nodded silently in agreement. Johnny grinned lopsidedly at the boy as his SCBA gear's bell rang the second time- one minute of air left. Then he picked the child up and dashed from the broken remains of the table to the window. The ceiling cracked above them.

The paramedic lifted the boy up a bit, and had him halfway through the window when the beams of the ceiling finally succumbed to the fire that had been eating at them. The falling timber caught Johnny across the back and waist, knocking him to the ground and ripping him away from the child.

The world spun, and pain shot in lances and great tears from his hips and spine up. Groggy and dazed, Johnny looked up to see the boy's feet kicking frantically in the air. Through the ringing and roar of his own blood in his ears, he thought he heard the boy crying. "GO!" Johnny screamed with all the strength he had left. "Fall forward! GO OUT!" He was granted the vision of George's bottom half vanishing out the window before the second beam glanced him along the temple and rendered him unconscious.

* * *

Roy broke from the smoke and flames just time to see the small boy run from the building into his mother's waiting arms. He waited for his partner to follow, but frowned as Johnny didn't show. Worried, he half-jogged up to his captain and tapped the man on the shoulder. Hank turned with a mildly raised eyebrow.

"Cap, where's Johnny?" Roy shouted over the noise of the fire and the people tending to it.

Concern flickered across the other man's rugged face. "I thought he was already out..."

"Unh-unh." Roy shook his head 'no', and gestured to the woman who was now burbling over her only sooty son. "He went in with me after the boy.."

'Shit' Cap mouthed, but didn't actually voice it. "You got a fresh tank on, Roy?" The paramedic nodded, and Cap pursed his lips a little in response. "Kelly! Lopez!" The two names came from the man with an explosive quality to them. "Cover DeSoto, he's got to go back in after Gage. Go, Roy!"

Roy got the mask for his air tank back on over his face, forcing himself to take slow, deep breaths and not to panic. His first tank had run out some time ago, forcing him to switch to a new one. If Roy remembered correctly, Johnny's hadn't been much higher when they hit the fire scene. Which meant that if John was still in the building, he was either breathing in smoke or dead air. Either one would do plenty of damage to the man's lungs.

Roy was halfway into the building before he finally got his helmet reseated on his head. He screamed Johnny's name through the mask, knowing full well that the sound didn't travel far, and that if Johnny was trapped somewhere, he was probably unconscious and wouldn't be able to respond anyway. It was hard for Roy not to simply go tearing through the flames looking for his partner- he had to do this logically or John would never be found.

And then, there he was, a prone figure lying among the flames, his image distorted by their hungry advance. He was sprawled beneath a window, half-buried and motionless. "Johnny!" Roy shouted again, and ran heedlessly across the room to his partners' side. The blue-eyed man traced over the wreckage of the ceiling with his fingers, through thick gloves, trying to decide what had happened and how to free his friend.

Spinal damage was the first thing that sprung to Roy's mind, and for a moment he jerked his hands away from John in fear of hurting him further. But as he looked around slowly, he realized that he didn't have enough time to go back out and get the equipment he'd need. He didn't have time to call out and wait for the rest of the crew to find him. He only had what he had with him and maybe a minute's worth of time left in the burning room.

He could check John's air tank, and did. As he'd suspected, he found it completely devoid of oxygen. Roy grimaced, and took his friend's mask from his face. He then took his own off of his face, and was heartened to see Johnny breathe in the fresh oxygen with, admittedly, difficulty.

"I'm right here, Johnny, I'm gonna get you out in a sec, okay?" Roy said slowly, and began to move some of the larger and outer most pieces of plaster from his friend carefully. He dug with a tedious slowness, but every movement was tinged with a sort of fearful panic. He had to get Johnny and get out soon, because this room was quite literally toast. Johnny did not respond to Roy's words.

Once he finally had the lankier man dug out from under the ceiling, Roy wasted no time. He strapped the SCBA mask tightly around Johnny's head, and ducked down to grab Johnny's wrists, one in each hand. Facing away from his partner, Roy lurched to his feet, taking Johnny up with him and wrapping Johnny's arms around his neck. Supporting the junior paramedic's weight like he would a child being given a piggyback ride, Roy dashed for the door. All the time, he prayed and hoped against hope that he wasn't aggravating a back injury Johnny'd received in the roof collapse.

By the time Roy burst again from the building, the smoke had gotten well into his lungs and he was being wracked with coughs even as he walked. Marco and Chet dropped the hose they'd been backing him with, and accompanied by their captain, they gently took Johnny from Roy's shoulders. As soon as the additional weight of his partner was lifted, Roy doubled over and dropped to his knees in a fit of uncontrolled coughs. He was vaguely aware of someone taking off his air tank and forcing him out of his turnout as he struggled for air- when his lungs finally stopped spasming he realized that the paramedic team from 28s had come over to tend to him.

"Johnny!" He said the moment he could make his raspy voice work, fighting against a fellow paramedic to try and lurch to his feet and see his partner.

"Settle down, DeSoto." Justin Mojowski put his hands on Roy's shoulders and pushed down a bit to keep the smoke-soaked firefighter from moving while he forced the O2 mask over Roy's face. "You're just fine, and so's your partner. Brian's got him over there."

Roy reached up to try and move the mask off of his face only to have Mojo slap his hand away again, gently. "Johnny needs this more than I do! He was in there breathin' on a dry tank."

"So?" The squarely built man winked. "You were in there breathin' thick smoke. If it makes you feel any better, Roy, he's on the O2 from your gear, and he's got top transport priority."

Roy relaxed a little, but still couldn't help trying to glance over at where Brian was working furiously on Johnny, almost constantly on the biophone. Again Mojo's thick hand flashed before his face. "Hey! You wanna pay attention here, or what? How am I supposed to check your pupils if you won't look at me?"

"Sorry." Roy muttered, and concentrated on the number on Mojo's helmet without being asked to. A few irritating flicks of light in his eyes, and the other paramedic had put his pen light away.

"Honestly," Mojo started again, his grey eyes flickering to the pair beside them for a moment. "I don't see what's up with you and Gage." The paramedic's heavy eyebrows rose as he lifted Roy's wrist for a pulse.

"What?" Roy rasped, leaning forward a little only to once again encounter the omnipresent restraining hand. "What is that supposed to mean?"

The broad Polish 'medic grinned almost devilishly at his comrade, and dropped Roy's arm to scribble quickly on his notepad. He'd obviously gotten his intended response. "You two seem to chase danger- or get chased by it, anyway. If I hear one of us is in the hospital-" Mojo circled a hand vaguely to indicate all of the paramedics present. "-I can make good money most of the time by betting on it being Gage who was admitted."

"Johnny's the disaster magnet. It's only started to rub off on m-" Roy was cut off by another set of coughs, and Mojo rolled him onto his side as a precaution. The man shook his head slowly, clucking like a mother hen. He didn't even flinch as the ambulance whined to a halt behind them.

"Roy, you've got to settle down. This is Johnny's ambulance, yours'll be right along in a moment, okay? Now I know you're jealous, your partner gets to come first again, but you've really got to put it all in perspective. He's got VIP status at Rampart." Justin grinned insolently, but watched as Roy's porcelain blue eyes traced back to were his still unconscious partner was being loaded onto a gurney. Mojo's expression softened, and he spoke again in a more reserved tone. "You know Brian's going to take the best care of Johnny as possible."

"Yeah." Roy whispered hoarsely, still watching the activity around Johnny. "He'd better."

* * *

Dixie McCall had been enjoying a hot cup of what the staff of Rampart Emergency liked to call coffee when the crowd of people burst through the ambulance entrance. Paramedic Brian O'Conner of 28's team ran alongside the gurney as the ambulance attendants pushed it, adjusting the IV bag tucked under the patient's shoulder and pumping the 02 mask rhythmically with one hand. As the group neared, Dixie caught sight of the familiar thick black hair spilled across the stiff pillow of the gurney. 'Johnny Gage.' She thought, shaking her head.

Dixie was on her feet, and met the gurney at the corner the two hallways made. "Here, Treatment Four's open. What's wrong with him this time?"

Brian's dark blue eyes flickered up to Dixie's lighter ones only momentarily. "He looks pretty bad, Dix. He was in the building looking after this kid when the ceiling fell in on him. Caught him across the back and on the temple." O'Conner motioned to the corresponding wounds with his hands. "His head looks fine, no sign of a concussion or anything, but he's got at least four broken ribs, and I'm afraid some of his internal organs could have been damaged." Brian swallowed thickly and paused outside the treatment room just long enough to push sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand. "I couldn't find evidence of spinal injury, but he hasn't regained consciousness since he was found at the scene."

"Right." Dixie said grimly, and pointed into the treatment room. "You see if you can't do anything more for him. I'll go find Drs. Brackett and Early right now."

Brian nodded, and then reverted his attention to the gurney as his patient started to roll back into the waking world. "Hey, Gage, take it easy, no, no, don't sit up. You're really banged up this time, you'd better stay laying down."

Johnny blinked back awake with a series of coughs, finally making it over to his side with Brian's help in order to prevent aspiration. With each cough, Johnny's dark brown eyes widened in sudden pain and he gasped for air, aggravating the situation. It took several minutes for the young paramedic to get his body under some facsimile of control, in which time Dixie returned with Brackett and Early.

"Hey, John, you're not looking so hot." Kelly Brackett's face was touched with a rather weak smile. He'd snapped into 'official' mode three steps from the door, and was already assessing the damage to Johnny's body.

"I don't feel so...hot...either, doc...heh.." Johnny managed, his voice a distorted and raspy whisper from the abuse his throat had suffered at the fire. "I have a.... horrible headache...and my back....ribs...they're all...ouch..."

"Yeah, no kidding." Brackett's smile only touched at a bit larger. "I wouldn't see why. Lay still, there, Johnny, and let me take a look at you."

Johnny surrendered to the doctor's request without a fight, which told Brackett directly that Johnny was not under any conditions feeling well. Brian's initial assessment hadn't been off-base. With gently and unobtrusively probing fingers, Brackett could tell Johnny had broken at least the bottom two ribs on both sides. And from the way the paramedic shied away from even the lightest touch, the doctor was worried about excessive trauma and injury to the underlying organs. "Joe...?" Brackett looked up from Johnny with his steel-colored eyes, searching briefly for his friend and co-worker.

The silver-haired man was almost a foot away from Dr. Brackett, watching the examination and nodding slowly. "I think we're gonna have to take him up for exploratory. I'll call the OR."

Johnny's brown eyes opened a bit, and flickered between the two other men. "Aww, man....er....doc...surgery...?" His face, already wracked with pain, seemed to contort further at the thought.

Kel nodded grimly. "I'm afraid so, John. We need to see what kind of damage you've done to your back, ribs, all the good stuff back there. And we'll probably have to do some stitching up while we're in there too."

"More scars." Johnny rasped glumly. "Great."

"Hey." Brackett shrugged with the same half-smile he'd displayed the whole time. "Think of it as battle-scars. The ladies really go for that sort of thing."

Johnny's eyes just rolled slowly in their sockets. "Riight. Let's just get this over with."

Brackett nodded for the nurses to take Johnny up to the OR with an odd sense of foreboding. 'I just hope you get a chance to show off those scars, Johnny..'

* * *

Surgical scrubs made Kelly Brackett look like a pale green crayon with eyes and sideburns, effectively smothering the rest of his body with the same obnoxious shade. He looked up as the orderlies wheeled John Gage in, and smiled without humor behind his mask. The anesthesiologist, Steve Jacobson, followed the gurney in.

"Are you ready, Johnny?" Brackett asked, leaning a bit over the groggy paramedic.

"No, but let's do this now. I hurt and I hate surgery." Johnny said, struggling to hide his pain behind a mask of general irritation.

Kel stepped aside for a moment, and finished his last-minute prepping as he let Dr. Jacobson work his magic. Shortly thereafter, Johnny was completely unconscious, and would remain that way for as long as the surgery needed to take. Steve would stay by Johnny's head the entire time, making all the adjustments needed to keep the paramedic under.

Both Doctors Early and Morton, and Dixie, were in the OR with Brackett, and with their help he turned Johnny over onto his stomach. It would be easier for Brackett to put the screws in the ribs from this position, since they'd been broken in the back, and it was the back organs he was worried were damaged.

Slowly, methodically, they draped Johnny's back with surgical cloths the same annoying color as their scrubs, and rubbed the spot intended for incision with iodine and antiseptic. When he finally picked up the scalpel and began to cut, Brackett tried to forget it was one of his good friends that was laying under his knife.

Almost immediately, Kel found five broken ribs, but he had known he'd find them. The bottom four had been broken badly, completely, while the fifth one, which was one of Johnny's left ribs, was only a hairline fracture. Repairing those ribs and putting screws in to help them heal would be one of the last things Kel did before sewing Johnny back up.

He was worried, however, of what lay beneath ribs. He needed Early and Morton's help to get access to the organs beneath. Between the three of them, it took very little time to carefully move all of the muscle, bone, and blood vessels out of the way.

At first, things looked fairly good, although the doctors were finding a significant amount of trauma. That was to be expected, because you simply didn't have a ceiling fall on you and get away without any sort of trauma. When they uncovered John's kidneys, however, they found something totally unexpected.

Both kidneys were damaged, and badly. The left one showed heavy bruising, while the right one had actually been lacerated by fragments of rib bone and was bleeding out into Johnny's abdominal cavity. "Shit." Brackett hissed. His head snapped up, and intense eyes focused on Dixie. "We're going to need at least two more units of blood up here, and fast, no, better make it three, and I need it yesterday, Dix." Kel glanced up at the monitors and displays of all the equipment Johnny was rigged to, and winced inwardly. With this amount of internal bleeding, he was surprised that Johnny's blood pressure wasn't even worse off than it already was. Not that it was exactly stellar.

The three doctors and the surgical team worked for a very long time in silence. It was much later, after the most immediate crisis was over and Brackett was stitching the long gash running down Johnny's back closed that anyone spoke a phrase longer than a single word. And the person who spoke was Joe Early. "You know what that kind of kidney damage means, don't you, Kel?"

"Yeah," Brackett acknowledged, his voice a bit rough with exhaustion and emotion. Looking up briefly, he spoke further: "Dixie, as soon as you can, I need you to get Johnny on the waiting list for donated kidneys. Get him on as high as you can."

Dixie only nodded, and Kel could have sworn he saw tears well in her eyes before she turned away.

* * *

Johnny awoke from the surgery groggy, tired, and in pain. Somehow, none of those surprised him any, either. He had learned, certainly the hard way, that surgery was never painless, despite what any doctor might say, and in fact it tended to hurt like hell. And hell was about the only way to describe what he felt like.

They'd put him in a room, but he noticed with a vague sense of foreboding that it wasn't the type he was accustomed to. It was the same color tan, but instead it only had one bed and a lot of medical equipment in the area that would have been taken up by the other bed. With dull alarm, Johnny realized he was hooked up to most of this equipment. 'What is going on?'

He was still trying to sort it all out when Dr. Brackett stepped into the room. Johnny looked up, still looking a bit baffled, and saw the expression on the doctor's face. No matter how many times he'd seen it, he'd never forget it, that expression. Particularly not since he'd had it turned on himself. Whatever Kel was about to say, it was bad news.

"Johnny." Brackett started, and broke off to look at the pile of papers he held in his hands. The man was actually fidgeting.

"Just say it, Doc, tell me what's up."

Brackett sighed and looked back up. "Both of your kidneys are badly damaged Johnny."

The young paramedic blanched. He found himself asking a question he knew the answer for already. "And that means?"

"Complete renal failure." Brackett's voice was hushed, gravelly. "We'll put you on dialysis right away, and you're on the donor list."

"The prognosis?" Johnny's own voice shook.

"With the dialysis? A few months. Without it? Outside of a week. You need that transplant."

Johnny swallowed, heavily, and wasn't able to speak for a long while. "How long will it be until we know whether or not we'll get the transplant?"

Brackett shook his head slowly. "I don't know. We'll ask everyone we know for tissue samples, to see if any match with you. If they do, we can do a live-donor transplant. If not..." Brackett trailed off, shrugged, and spread his hands. "We wait for a cadaverous, healthy kidney."

Johnny nodded slowly, knowing that it hadn't sunk in yet. He hoped that the doctor wasn't in the room when it did. "So....what happens with this dialysis stuff?"

Brackett's lips pressed together, and Gage could actually see Kel force himself into a more professional mode. "We'll have to put a permanent catheter here in the hollow of your neck," The doctor gestured to the corresponding spot on his own neck. "And then we'll have to hook you up to a dialysis machine every so often. The machine will basically systematically do the cleaning of your blood that your kidneys are no longer doing. The frequency of the treatments will depend on how fast the failure is, and could be anywhere between once a week to daily."

"Right." Johnny said, find he was fast losing the will to talk.

Brackett nodded, himself, and shuffled through the papers for a moment. "Uhmm....I have to go make rounds...I'll come back and check in on you later..."

"Yeah." Said the newly self-discovered invalid, and he turned to face the window as Dr. Brackett left. It was going to be one hell of a long road.

* * *

Dixie McCall pushed the door to Johnny's room in the Critical Care wing gently, tilting her head to one side as she entered. The sole occupant of the room was laying on the bed with his back to the door, burrowed in the sheets and pillows. "Johnny...?"

"Go 'way!" A sullen voice said, muffled by the pillows around his face.

"Aw, now, Johnny, that wasn't a very nice thing to say to your favorite Head Nurse." Dixie chided amicably, setting down the food tray she had brought in with her on the small rolling table by his bed.

"You're the only Head Nurse, Dix." There was still no humor in his voice, but in all honesty, Dix didn't expect much life out of a man who was just told he would probably die.

Still, the older woman smiled at Johnny's back. "All the easier for me to be your favorite. Here, I brought you some food..." She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

"I said leave me alone." He snapped, and wrenched his shoulder forward, away from her, violently. She could hear him hiss with pain as the sudden motion aggravated his broken ribs and the scars from his surgery.

"Johnny, you still need to eat." She was a bit sterner this time, and her neatly plucked eyebrows furrowed together.

"I don' wanna."

"Well you have to, come on...." Again she reached out and this time she tried to turn him over.

He moved amazingly quickly for a man with five broken ribs. With that amazing quickness, he grabbed the pillow nearest to his left hand and winged it at her. Only Dixie's long experience with violent patients saved her from getting a face full of pillow. As it was, the thing still knocked off her nurses' cap before it skidded across the floor to slump in a corner.

Johnny was half-turned over now, of his own accord, and staring blankly at the pillow as if he wasn't the one who threw it.

Dixie felt betrayed somehow. She knew that John hated hospitals, and was probably having a hard time dealing with what Kel had told him not too long ago, but she still had never expected something like that from him. "Well, if that's how you feel about it, Mr. Gage.." Her voice was clipped, trite, as she reached for the tray.

"No, Dix, leave it."

Dixie turned, and could see in his eyes that he was really sorry. With a thin smile, she sat on the edge of his bed, and gently, mock-punched his shoulder. "How're you holding up?"

That was all it took. Johnny's emotions had been fighting with him for the past few hours, and with Dixie's rather mundane show of affection, one of them finally won. He pitched forward, suddenly a ball of nerves and tears. Dixie seemed to be ready for it, and caught the young man in mid-fall. There, Johnny just began to cry. Loudly, wordlessly, clinging to the nurse like a small child. And he stayed that way until he almost as abruptly fell asleep, still terrified of the turn his life was taking.

* * *

Joanne DeSoto watched her husband pace across their living room for maybe the fortieth time before she finally gave up on reading her book. As soon as Roy had gotten home, he'd almost literally fallen into her, explaining everything that had happened to Johnny in that sort of calmly panicked way he had. And now, hours upon hours later he'd been nervously wandering the room waiting for a phone call from Rampart with any news. Dog-earing her page, she smiled docilely up at Roy. "Why don't you try calling them?"

"Hmm?" Roy said, turning to face her, and snapped out of his own jittery thoughts at the sound of her voice.

"I said," Joanne repeated gently, "Why don't you try calling Rampart? They may be done with the surgery and just haven't had time to call you about Johnny."

Roy sighed, and moved over to sit on the arm of Jo's favorite overstuffed easy chair. "Yeah...the problem is that I'm not sure I want the answer. I mean...I saw him, Jo, he was beat up badly. I think this is one of those times when no news is good news."

"But whatever they have to say can't be any worse that what you're going through in your head, Roy. Honey, I know you. You'll going to dwell on it and blow it all out of proportion until you get the actual, cold hard data." She put one hand over his, and smoothed the back of his knuckles slowly. "You should call and settle your nerves."

"But I don't want..." He was cut off by the sound of the phone ringing. For all his lack of a desire to know an answer, Roy sure managed to bolt across the room quickly. "Hello?"

Joanne watched carefully as Roy talked, listing to only one-half of the conversation.

"Uhn-hunh, yes, this is Roy, hello Dr. Brackett."

"No, we hadn't gotten any news yet..." Nervous glance to Jo. She nodded him on.

"Well, I expected his ribs would be broken.." Hesitant smile. Nodding.

And then the man blanched, and it appeared to Joanne for a moment that he was about to drop the phone receiver. The usually sturdy man swayed on his feet, and reached out to steady himself on the wall. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"

Shallow breathing this time, and a sweat breaking out on his forehead. More nodding. "Yes, I understand....I'll...I'll tell the station....th..thank you, Dr. Brackett."

Joanne's eyebrows furrowed deeply as he hung up. "Roy...?" She asked quietly.

Roy swallowed heavily again, and looked at his wife with impossibly distant blue eyes. "Johnny....both his kidneys....failed, totally....he's...without a transplant, he.."

Finally the paramedic got control of his breathing.

"He's got a few months to live."

* * *

Captain Stanley usually got to the station a half-hour before his men. It gave him a chance to catch up on him endless paperwork without being interrupted by pesky firemen or pesky runs. and as much as he loved both his family at home and the one at the station, sometimes he simply needed his time alone.

This reason was why Hank was thoroughly puzzled when he pulled into the station's parking lot only to find that Roy's truck was already parked there.

When the lanky man stepped through the back door, he found the paramedic seated at the day room table. His hands were wrapped around a mug of coffee, and he stared straight ahead with an unnerving sort of unblinking steadiness. Hank would have guessed that Roy had been there for from anywhere from twenty minutes to hours, plural. Immediately, his thoughts flew to the other half of his paramedic team, and he realized that all he knew was that Johnny wouldn't be coming back to work this shift. He reached out and lay a heavy hand on the other man's back. "Roy?"

DeSoto jumped a little, spilling coffee that was obviously cold over his fingers. He blinked a few moments, then visibly shook himself and turned. "Oh, hello, Cap."

"What's wrong?" The taller man asked. "Do you have any more news on Johnny?"

"Yeah." Roy's voice broke. "I...I have to wait until everyone is here. I can't do it twice."

And Hank knew that whatever Roy knew about Johnny was so bad that it was traumatic. He nodded slowly, exhaling with a grim evenness. At a loss for what to do, he finally rose from his seat to head to the locker room and change.

Mike was the next to arrive, then Mojowski, Marco, and finally Chet. Every one of them asked Roy the same question the captain had asked, and each got the same answer.

But eventually there came a time when every fireman was in uniform and seated in silence around the day room table. Hank hadn't taken the roll call yet, and Roy could tell that the man was waiting for the news before he did. Slowly, the paramedic stood, feeling as if he had a lead heart trying to nail him to the chair he'd been in all morning. He put both hands on the table before him, for support, and closed his eyes. And then he relayed the entire conversation he'd had with Doctor Brackett to the five men around the table.

When Roy opened his eyes again, he could see the varying levels of shock on his friends' faces. Even dark-Marco was ashen, pale, with the weight of the news, and Chet honestly looked like someone had just hit him with a small truck. Of all the people in the room, Mojo was the one who looked the least pained, which of course wasn't to say that he didn't looked pained. But somehow the Polish man's outward appearance of calm irritated Roy.

Hank nodded slowly, and finally was the one to spoke. "I..uhm....I'll let the Station chores slide this shift."

* * *

Justin Mojowski wasn't quite sure why he'd been temporarily reassigned to 51s A-shift. His confusion didn't lie in the reason for the need for a fill-in paramedic, he had been there when Johnny was hurt. His bafflement was why he'd been chosen to go there. He had a perfectly good partner over at 28s, who also worked the A-shift schedule. The only reason Mojo could think of was that Johnny was going to be out a good, long while, and they wanted to put someone with a little experience in with the paramedic program's 'legendary' veteran.

Which led to some heartache in its own right. Mojo had about three and a half years on the job, which was one-and-a-half less than DeSoto's five, but still nothing to shake a stick at. Yet, particularly in moments when both men were very busy or stressed, DeSoto tended to treat Mojo like some dumb rookie, like he couldn't trust Justin enough to turn around.

Now, Mojo could understand it was hard for the longer-established paramedic to get used to the idiosyncrasies of someone else when he'd been working with Gage for so long, but he really didn't appreciate being treated like he had just fallen off the turnip truck. He treated Roy himself at the fire that had injured Johnny, for goodness' sake! That, if nothing else, should have been an indicator of his ability. Still, there were the times....

They did get the job done, eventually, and so far the new-forged pair of Mojowski and DeSoto hadn't lost any patients, but they certainly didn't operate with the same fluid mechanism that both men were used to. And of course, that unnerved them both further.

"Are you in here, Justin?" The sound of Mike Stoker's voice intruding on the solace of the dorm room and his thoughts made him jump slightly. He hadn't really been expecting company, least of all from the notoriously solitary engineer.

"Yeah, I'm in here on my bed..." He answered, not bothering to sit up. He noticed that while Mike had nodded his acknowledgement of the fact, he hadn't left. Mojo wondered what the taller man had in mind. He didn't have to wait too long to find out.

After a few heartbeats of waiting, Mike moved from the doorframe to sit on Roy's bed. He tilted his head to one side, and gestured to Justin. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah." The stocky Polish man repeated himself, and sat up in the bed this time. "It's just...I can't help think that DeSoto's comparing me to Gage and being disappointed at every turn."

"Roy and Johnny are very close." Mike nodded, and trailed off for a moment. Mojo would have spoken, but Mike's face bore an expression similar to one Brian displayed when he intended to continue the thought. Sure enough, it wasn't too long before Mike was talking again. "I think that Roy is trying, honestly, but it's very hard for him. I think that, for him, you serve as a constant reminder of how hurt Johnny is. And Roy's a person who keeps his emotions inside, so he can't really deal with all his hurt. I think this is how he does it."

It occurred to Mojo that Mike would say at lot more if the rest of the men in this station would stop yapping. He ran his hand through his hair, and sighed. "I wish he wouldn't take it out on me."

Mike smiled sadly. "I know, but I don't think he knows any better."

Mojo was about to reply, but the Captain's voice echoed through the station. "Mike! Justin! Come on, get your gear, we're 10-8ing to Rampart!"

Smiling in thanks, the paramedic jumped up from the bed to obey Captain Stanley.

* * *

When the small herd of firefighters entered his ER looking sheepish and clean, without any sort of forewarning, Mike Morton knew exactly what they were there for. He turned to go find Dr. Brackett, only to come face-to-face with the man. The intern-doctor thumbed over his shoulder to indicate the firemen. "The crew from 51s is here."

Kel frowned a little, and followed Mike's finger to look at the men in the waiting area. "I take it there hasn't been some sort of disaster that they happen to be the first wave of?"

"I don't think so. They're too nervous and clean for that." The black man shrugged as he returned his gaze to the charts in his hand.

Brackett laughed a little. "Yeah, I guess so." He patted Mike amicably on the shoulder as he walked by towards the out-of-place men. "Thanks."

"No problem." Morton called after Kel as he went to finish his rounds.

Brackett approached Hank Stanley with his hands clasped, an unknowing similarity to one of the Captain's habitual gestures. "I take it you're all here to see your fallen comrade?"

The group of men didn't really speak. They simply all nodded in various stages of commitment to the motion, all obviously concerned and jittery.

"Okay, then, we'll have to take the elevators over there to the Critical Care wing." Brackett pointed down the hall, herding the jumpy people in turnout in the right direction.

As they waited for the elevator to make the one-floor climb, Chet touched Brackett's arm lightly, getting the doctor's attention. "How bad is he, doc?"

Brackett smiled a little grimly. "In all honesty, pretty bad. But it doesn't look that bad. Which reminds me..." He rose his voice so it was clear he was speaking to the entire elevator. "While you're all here, if you have time, I'd like to start getting blood and maybe tissue samples so see if any of you match as donors."

Mojo was a bit perplexed. "What about Johnny's family, wouldn't they be better for this than us?"

"Johnny's the last of his breed."

"Oh." The stocky paramedic said quietly, mollified. Then the elevator doors dinged open, and they were in the Critical Care Wing. Standing at the nurse's station was a small, mousey looking nurse of perhaps thirty, with dull brown hair and matching eyes. But for all her plainness in appearance, her fingers flew through her work, and as she looked up she rewarded them with a stellar smile. "Well, hello, Dr. Brackett."

Kel smiled thinly again. "Jessie, these are the guys from station 51, Johnny Gage's station? Guys, this is Jessie Bowers. She's the top nurse up here."

"Oh I don't know about that." She brushed off the compliment amidst the flurry of hellos from the six firemen. "So, I'll assume you're all here to actually visit Mr. Gage. He's in room 220, that's the third door on the right down that hallway right there." Jessie smiled, and pointed down the appropriate corridor.

As a sort of baffled herd, they all made their way down to Johnny's room. No one noticed Mojo give the nurse one last glance before he disappeared into the small hospital room.

* * *

Dr. Erick Mojowski was as renowned in his chosen branch of the medical profession as his brother Justin was, but for altogether different reasons. The elder of the two brothers, Erick was in his mid-thirties, having reached his notoriety fairly early in his career. He was the married one, with three cheerful children and one gloomy teenager to call his own. He looked much like his brother, light brown hair and grey eyes, a sort of square build, but also had a much calmer, mature air about his than the rambunctious paramedic. He was efficient, very good at what he did, and an invaluable member of Rampart General Hospital's staff.

He was a certified lab technician, as well as a full-fledged MD, but most of the time he worked in the Critical Care Unit. He hadn't really been up for the non-stop life style his brother and the people a floor below 'enjoyed' through emergency medicine, but critical care made him feel as if he was doing something vital, immediate.

The man stood now, however, in the lab another floor up from where he usually worked, frowning at a small collection of cultures. "This isn't going to work at all. Dammit."

The case of one John Gage had given Erick a lot of trouble. The man had been perfectly healthy until a freak accident at a rescue, and now he had no operating kidneys. The doctor found this more frustrating than a biological case just because it seemed to have happened for no reason. There was no predisposition that Johnny should have had towards renal failure.

It also meant that his kidneys weren't going to be coaxed back into functioning order again. They'd been completely squashed, and the only thing that would save John now was a transplant. Which was why Erick was so frustrated here. Johnny had no living family, no one that would be an obvious tissue match. The hospital had gotten every one Johnny knew with a kidney to spare to donate tissue samples, to see if a live transplant could be made, but the tests that lay before Erick right now told him it wasn't going to work. Johnny's body would reject any of his friends' kidneys no matter how much his heart and mind wanted it.

So they'd have to keep Johnny on dialysis and wait for a donated kidney from a cadaver somewhere. Unfortunately, Erick was pretty sure they'd have to wait for someone with a better racial match, which meant waiting for a Native American who donated his body to science, who also incidentally had good kidneys, to kick the bucket.

Somehow Erick didn't see that happening too soon. Sighing, he crossed the lab to the phone that hung on the wall and lifted the receiver, dialing the extension for Dr. Brackett's office. "Kel? Yeah, it's Erick. Listen, I was just doing some lab work, and I don't like what I found..."

* * *

The Phantom had decided that this lull in business had gone on long enough. He didn't like the tension that was around the station, that had descended ever since Johnny had been hurt. Tense stations made for tense firefighting, and that led to even more accidents. And as much of a prankster as the Phantom was, he hated hospitals and hated to see people in them.

The pranks began gradually, and the spread equitably over the entire crew. Not engineer nor newbie was safe, and occasionally even the usually-exempt Captain was caught by the tail-end of the Phantom's plans. Of course, things backfired, too, but the guys seeing the good-natured 'villain' getting his only served to release more of the tension.

But this time, the Phantom had ensured a backfire free plan. It was all fairly simple, and the prank only involved a rubber band and the sink, which meant no incriminating evidence. Well, other than his reputation, that was. He was seated at the end of the table as far from the sink as possible, drinking coffee and reading the paper in the mild-mannered guise of Chet Kelly. All he needed was the mark.

And, as if his thoughts of it brought it to him, the mark walked in, in the not-so-mild-mannered guise of Justin Mojowski. If Chet remembered correctly, Mojo and Roy were assigned KP duty for this shift. Which meant, of course, that it being about noon and all, Mojo was probably getting ready to fix lunch. And that meant using the sink. Chet leaned further into his paper to hide his smile.

As if he'd gone to the John Gage School for Pigeons, Mojo turned the tap on right on cue. The water, instead of flowing passively from the faucet like the paramedic expected, shot aggressively from the spray nozzle used to clean the sink. The nozzle, of course, had been modified with a little judicious wrapping of a rubber band.

"Haarrgghh!" Mojo jumped back, slapping the faucet off, but it was too late. He was soaked from his collarbone to his belt. He whirled just as Roy and Marco dashed in, alerted by his scream. "CHET!!!"

Chet simply shook his head. "Nope, I had nothing to do with it."

Mojo growled and went for Chet, despite the table, and Roy was there to intervine. "Hey, hey, easy, Justin, he was only kidding around!"

"Yeah, well this is the third time this week he got me!" The stocky Pole argued.

Roy smirked a little, and spoke before he realized what he was saying. "You should have seen how many times he's gotten Johnny!" At that, he froze. Roy hadn't forgotten his partner since the accident, in fact he was there practically every day. But he did speak much about Johnny. It was as if Roy didn't want to bring the pain to the surface. The room was filled with an awkward silence.

It was about then that the phone rang. The three men already standing seemed oddly plastered to their spots, so Chet rose from the table to answer it himself. "Hello?"

"This is Dr. Brackett, from Rampart, is this Chet?"

"Oh, hello, Dr. Brackett, yeah it's Chet." He could feel the eyes of the other men as they turned to face him.

"I called to give you an update on Johnny's situation."

"Okay, good, go ahead."

"Well, Chet, it doesn't look too good. None of us match for donors, and we don't know how long it'll take until we can get a kidney that will work. Until then, he'll have to hold out on dialysis."

"Okay." Chet felt his voice threaten to break. "Well, thank you, Doctor."

"Certainly. Goodbye."

He sighed heavily as he hung up the phone, and turned to the other three men in the room. "Johnny...he has no donor matches." Chet say Roy go pale first, and fully expected the next sentence.

"I want to go see him."

* * *

Jessie Bowers looked up from her desk in Rampart General's Critical Care wing and the paperwork spread across it as the elevator dinged open. The man who stepped out had become a familiar face around the wing during the past two weeks, and the young nurse's heart went out to him. He smiled at her as he approached the counter, but the genial expression never reached his glittering blue eyes. Jessie wondered if his eyes shone that much when he wasn't trying to hold back tears. "Hi, Jessie, I'm here to see..."

"Mr. Gage." She finished for him, smiling back and trying to give the poor man a bright spot in a life that she could see had become pretty dark of late. "Certainly, Mr. DeSoto, you know where the room is."

"Roy." He corrected quietly.

"Pardon?" The auburn-haired woman tilted her head to one side, a bit confused. "We don't have a patient in this wing named..."

"No, no, that's my name. Roy. Don't call me 'Mr. DeSoto'...it seems awfully...stiff." The paramedic's eyes shifted from Jessie down the hall, belying the fact that their owner was not giving the conversation his full, or even most of his attention.

Jessie shrugged. "All right, then, Roy, you're still clear to go in and see him. And see if you can't get him to eat more of his Jell-O while you're in there, okay?"

Roy nodded silently, and wandered down the hall towards Johnny's room. 'I'm really starting to get tired of this scenery.' The door to Johnny's room was open, so Roy let himself in, rapping a knuckle on the frame as he entered. "Hey."

Johnny looked up from the comic book he held in his lap and smiled. "Hey yourself." The darker-haired man put the small collection of paper to one side and sat a little straighter in the bed. "How're things on the outside?"

"Gray." Roy said simply, paused to think, and then nodded. "And that about sums it up. How about things in here?"

Johnny gestured to the walls with a crooked grin. "Beige."

"Smartass."

Johnny grinned more broadly. "And things at the Station...?"

"Well..." Roy started, crossing his arms and shifting his weight to one foot. "As well as can be expected, I guess. All the guys are still a little jumpy, particularly at the big fires, and your replacement....well, he just doesn't really fit in." Roy's mouth twitched at the hint of a smile. "The Phantom's really been layin' it on lately, though, and since you aren't there we've all been feeling his 'wrath'."

"Jeez." The deep brown eyes rolled in their sockets. "That's one thing I'm glad I don't have to deal with any more."

"Well, you're gonna have to deal with it when you get back to work, won't you?" Roy asked with a smirk.

Johnny just stared at his partner dully for a long moment, and then he ducked his head to stare at the blanket splayed across his legs. His voice was low and it cracked as he spoke. "Roy...I'm not coming back to work. Don't...don't let yourself think that I will."

Roy's face fell, and as he looked up Johnny could see the mask of denial slide firmly into place over Roy's features. "John! Don't be such a pessimist. You'll get better- you always do. It's just a bad phase." Roy's voice may have even been tinged with panic as he scolded Johnny.

"No, Roy, it's not gonna work that way this time. Look at me. Look." Johnny paused as his partner really looked at him for the first time in a long time since his accident. "You see, Roy, I'm dying. I'm going to die this time. I'm slowly poisoning myself to death."

"But...?"

Johnny's eyebrows spiked in growing irritation. "But nothing, Roy! There is no way I'm gonna get a donated cadaverous kidney in time, and none of you guys match for a live donor. The dialysis won't work forever! If I eat, I poison myself. If I don't eat, I starve to death and I'm still poisoning myself! There's no way out, Roy. Don't deceive yourself and make it harder. I'm going to die."

Roy's eyes narrowed a little, and he put on hand on the corresponding hip. "Johnny, you're..."

"I'm what, Roy?" The dark-haired man cut his partner off. "I'm overreacting? Is that what you're going to tell me this time? I'm overreacting? I have no working kidneys, Roy! How do you want me to react? Happy? I'm not overreacting, Roy. You're underreacting. You'll see- in a few weeks you'll be standing at that damn marble stone that reads 'John Gage, RIP', and then you'll see how much I overreacted." Johnny had reached a screaming level by the time he finished his rant. Setting his jaw in a sullen, and somewhat guilty, expression, he flopped back into the bed and turned on his side, burying himself in the stiff hospital blankets.

"I'll....I'll be back later, Johnny." Roy said quietly, and left the room with equal silence.

As soon as Roy was out of the room, he was overcome by a sudden and unequivocal rage. Johnny was right. There wasn't going to be any rebound from this one. There his partner was, slowly dying simply because he was, dying in a sullen silence because Roy wouldn't listen to the man. Roy's fingers tightened into a fist slowly. There wasn't anything he could do to remedy that, either. The doctors had tried everything they could. Now it was just a matter of letting Johnny waste away with as little pain as possible. The only thing Roy could have done about this was something he could have never foreseen. The only way to have prevented this whole mess was to have kept that section of ceiling from falling on Johnny. And even Roy's guilty mind couldn't devise a way that he could have done that.

"Dammit!" Roy exploded suddenly, and laid into the nearest stationary object with his fist. Luckily that object was only the supply cart and not the orderly who stood behind it. "Sorry." He muttered, and hurried down the hall before the confused man could say anything. He slid into the elevator at the end of the hall, and pressed the button for the main floor. He sighed heavily in frustration, exasperation, anger, and leaned against the elevator wall with his face in one hand. This was going to be so hard.

* * *

Erick was certainly seeing a lot of the lab these days- much more than he'd seen of it in a while. This time, he was standing next to Kelly Brackett, and the two of them were examining blood samples, taken from the same patient over a period of a few days, which had all been tested in the same fashion.

"Look, Kel," Erick said, holding up one sample's report. "It's obvious. The dialysis is becoming less and less effective. Soon enough, it won't be working at all."

Brackett shook his head. "I don't understand. Why would it happen so fast? He's so young, he was otherwise very healthy." It had only been, barely been, three weeks since Johnny's accident. The man had gone downhill, fairly fast.

Erick shrugged, and laid the report down with its fellows. "I don't have an explanation for you, Kel, except that trauma never acts like sickness does. But it's right there, in the blood and on the paper. He's getting steadily sicker."

"Dammit!" Kel burst suddenly, smacking his open palm against the wall next to him. "He's a damn good paramedic, Mojowski, we can't afford to lose him!"

Erick sighed. "I know, Kel."

Then, the other doctor spoke softly, more subdued and personally. "He's my friend. I don't want to lose him."

"I know."

Kel turned for a moment, paced away from the table and crossed his arms over his torso in an almost defensive gesture. "Are you sure there aren't any donors? There isn't anything else we can do?"

Erick looked over the reports, desperately. He had never been as close to Gage as Kel obvious was, but he damn sure wanted to do everything in his power to save the paramedic. But everything he knew, everything he felt about this case, it told him there wasn't anything left to be done. He sighed heavily, his own voice soft and distant. "No, Kel, there isn't. Except make him as comfortable as possible and respect his descisions."

There was a long period of silence. Then: "I should go tell him." And Kel was out of the room.

* * *
John Gage had been staring out the window when the door opened. Seeing it was Dr. Brackett, he felt encouraged enough to muster a half-smile. The good doctor tried to make a point of visiting Johnny daily, even if for only a few minutes, despite the fact that Johnny wasn't housed on Brackett's floor. "Hiya, Doc." He said in an attempt at light-heartedness as Brackett entered.

"Hello, Johnny." Kel said, heavily, and right away Johnny knew something was wrong. Propping himself up further in the bed, he tilted his head minutely to one side, and clasped his hands in front of him. "What's wrong now?" Johnny had gotten used to steady doses of bad news over these weeks. He knew none of his friends could donate a kidney. He knew it wasn't like another one would come soon. And the knowledge had practically made a new man out him.

Brackett sighed, and cut straight to the core of the story. "It's the dialysis. Dr. Mojowski and I have been monitoring your blood gases, and they're going up. It's not working well anymore, and we don't know how much longer it will work at all."

Johnny swallowed. "So we're getting close to the end, then, are we?" His voice was full of the hushed, grim tones of certainty.

"Yes." Was all Kel could answer him with.

The man in the bed took a deep breath. "Then can you just take me off the dialysis?"

"What?" Brackett did a mental double take, leaning his head out and down as he looked at Johnny with disbelief. "You want me to do what?"

"Take me off of the dialysis. It isn't working and I'm getting tired of dragging this thing out longer than I really need to. I'm in pain. I want it to stop." Johnny explained, simply.

"Don't you want to talk this over with someone?"

Johnny shook his head. "Who's there to talk it over with? I have no family left but the guys at the station, and if I talk it over with them, they're just talk me out of it and I'll linger maybe a few more days. I don't want to do any lingering." Johnny tried partially successfully to grin again. "You know me, Doc, always impatient."

It seemed to Kel that Johnny had made up his mind, and he wondered how much of this he'd decided before he came in. "All right, then, John. I'll have them stop treatments immediately."

"Thank you, Doc." Johnny said, with a lot of vigor for a dying man.

Brackett nodded, and stood there for a few minutes in silence before returning to his job with a heavy heart.

* * *

Roy DeSoto had always disliked melodrama. He liked the classic plays, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but he always found a reason to leave the room when Joanne turned on the soap operas. Often times he even found reason to leave the house. He didn't like the over acting, the outrageous situations, or the miraculous recoveries that the soaps offered. He'd take a hardcore science fiction novel or even a soft western TV show over the soap operas every time, hands down.

It was this general irritated hatred for the aspect of movies and TV that made Roy all the more angry at the fact that it had so recently inveighed quite rudely on his life. Roy had, before now, lived a normal fireman's life, with a nice cozy family in an equally cozy house. He'd had close working relationships with the men on the a-shift at his station, and he'd been extremely attached to his partner, the slightly accident-prone but otherwise none the worse for wear John Gage.

But then everything had gotten shaken up and dumped unceremoniously on its head.

It wasn't that Roy's sentiments had changed, because they hadn't. Things simply weren't right, they weren't the way they should have and had always been. And that, above all else, angered Roy.

The light-haired paramedic pushed the door to the hospital room open with the knuckles of one hand, ducking his head as he entered. The lights had been dimmed, filling the room with a hundred flickers from different colored bulbs on the machines in the room. And the machines' omnipresent hum. 'Too many of these damn things, can hardly walk in here anymore.' Roy thought darkly.

"Johnny?"

The figure tangled in the bedsheets stirred, and with the motion Roy felt his chest constrict. The body laying on that modified gurney did not belong to his partner. The course of the kidney failure had turned Johnny from a sort of toasted brown color to cyanotic and ashen-pale. The half light in the room shone off the sweat that seemed to perpetually cover Johnny any more and made the man almost glow with the unnatural blue-gray color. His face, arms, legs, hands, everything seemed a bit chubbier of late from all the fluids he was retaining. The presence of IV tubes in John's arms and a permanent catheter in the base of his neck for the dialysis interrupted the outline of the paramedic's body. He looked like a freakish experiment in modern medicine, and his best friend found it difficult to look on. "Roy?" The man managed, his voice thick and hoarse from strain, speech slurred by the morphine. He turned towards the door, hollow brown eyes squinting to see, and his entire body seemed to balance precariously on the edge of the bed.

"Yeah, it's me, Johnny." Roy said softly, moving from the threshold of the door to the chair that never left Johnny's bedside as gently as possible. It was an irrational fear, and part of Roy knew it, but the other part of him worried that, somehow, if Johnny were to fall off the edge of the bed, he would die instantly and it would all be Roy's fault. With trained hands, Roy helped his partner scoot back towards the middle of the bed. "There, that's probably more comfortable..."

Johnny smiled wanly. "Comfortable's a relative term, Roy."

Roy tried to smile back, but his face didn't quite cooperate. "In your...condition...I think you ought to be as relatively comfortable as possible..." He couldn't quite bring himself to look at Johnny's face, so he found himself staring at Johnny's hands. The junior paramedic had his hands above the sheets, clasped together and resting in his lap. He was holding his hands together to tightly that the knuckles where white, a stark and odd contrast to the almost steely color his skin had taken on.

Johnny, too, found himself staring at his hands. They had changed so much since he'd had that accident. John knew he was rushing downhill in a big hurry, and he knew there was no way he could turn around and go back up. The futility of his fight suddenly hit him all at once, and the dark-haired man felt a load of depression and hopelessness descend upon his shoulders. He blinked slowly, and spoke as he sighed. "Roy, I'm so tired."

"I know, Johnny, but you've got to keep on fighting..."

"Why?" Johnny cut Roy off, looking up sharply. The quick motion made Roy look up, too, and what Roy saw in Johnny's eyes chilled him to the bone. Amidst the tears and the pain, there was true and complete despair. John was giving up, he'd abruptly and totally lost the will to fight back anymore. And as a seasoned paramedic, Roy knew that a patient's will was sometimes, often times, eight-tenths of the battle. Johnny continued in his drug-heavy voice. "Why should I keep this up, Roy? All this pain- and not just mine, but yours and Jenny's and Chris's and Joanne's and everyone else who has to watch me be like this, where's the point in it? We know this is a losing battle."

Roy ducked his head a little, unable to say anything. He wanted desperately to be able to turn this around somehow. He wanted to be able to pull out the magic IV and just squirt it in Johnny and have his partner back with him the next shift, on duty. He was tired of this room, the noises of the machines, and honestly, he was getting tired of Rampart in general. But there wasn't a damn thing he could do. So DeSoto just sat beside his friend in silence. What were you supposed to say to something like that in any case?

The two sat for some time, no words carried between them. Then, finally, Johnny shifted subtly, and cleared his throat to try to talk again. The words still came out throaty and blurred. "I asked Doctor Brackett to take me off of dialysis today." He paused, rubbing one thumb over the bone of the other. Roy didn't speak, but John really hadn't expected him to. "He says without the filtering I'll probably last a couple weeks, at absolute best. More likely a few days." Another pause. "He says I'll probably slip into a coma before I go." Johnny pushed his hair away from his forehead slowly.

"So that's it?" Roy's voice was also heavy, but it wasn't because of any drugs.

"Yeah." Johnny muttered, unfolding his hands and laying them out against his blanketed thighs. "Yeah, that's it." The two friends sat together like lawn ornaments in the partially dark room, the knowledge and reality of the situation hanging between them like a storm-cloud. The room stayed that way for a long time, and then, finally, Johnny broke the silence once more. "Roy?"

"Yes, Johnny?"

"Could you do me a favor, Pally? When it's, uhm, when it's all over, couldja...couldja make sure Chris gets my medicine wheel? And Jenny...I want Jenny to have my helmet....if you could do that...please...? I know it's not much, but.." There, Johnny's voice failed him. He looked up from his hands, across the small space between the bed and the chair, and saw the tears glittering against his partner's round face. "Roy?" He managed out of a tight throat.

Roy reached over and grabbed Johnny's nearest hand tightly, choking back his own emotions to speak in a soft, intense whisper. "Yeah, Junior, yeah. I'll make damn sure."

* * *

It was four weeks since Johnny's accident. Dixie McCall found that she'd settled into an odd, depressing sort of pattern. After every shift, infallibly, she would ride the elevator up to the second floor, the Critical Care Wing. And then, with equal invariability, she would spend another three or so hours being with John Gage.

Dixie had decided that Johnny needed someone other than Kel, who tended to be awkward and sterile about his emotions, to see him every day. Roy came as often as he could, but the poor man also had obligations to his family and his own job. Dix worried about him, too, however, because he looked even more haggard every time he came to visit John via the Emergency Room.

The blond nurse smiled as the elevator doors slid open and she caught sight of Jessie Bowers. "How are you this morning, Jessie?" She asked brightly as she moved over to the Nurses' station.

"Just fine." Jessie smiled back. "I take it you're here to see Mr. Popular again?"

Dixie grinned. Jessie had taken to calling Johnny that simply because he received more visitors than many of her other patients. "Sure am. Do you know how he's doing?"

Jessie shrugged. "I haven't been in there in a few hours. Give him a once over for me, would you?"

"No problem." Dixie called as she started down the hall. At Johnny's door, she knocked lightly. "Johnny?" She got no response, but the door swung in a bit at her touch, so she pushed it all the way open. "Johnny?"

To an untrained eye, it would have appeared that the paramedic was sleeping. But Dixie, unfortunately, knew better. His breath was shallow- unnaturally so- and she could see even from the door that his eyes were shut and not moving. In fact, nothing at all was moving except the minute rise and fall of his chest. And having been his nurse so many times, Dixie knew that Johnny wasn't a sound sleeper. And even on the off chance he did have a still night, it was never without his arm across his eyes.

She took a step back, gasping involuntarily. From the nurses' station, Jessie called out. "Dixie? What's wrong?"

Dixie took her hands away from her mouth in order to talk. "Get Dr. Brackett, Dr Mojowski, someone, and a ventilator. He's fallen in."

And Jessie needed no more explanation. She knew from Dixie's few words that Johnny had finally slipped into the fatal coma.

* * *

Joanne probably thought he was insane. His eyes trailed to the clock on the wall, and in all honesty, part of him could see were she would be coming from. In five minutes, he would have been in this same hospital room for twenty-four hours straight. The only problem was, he wasn't the patient.

Roy glanced to the bed placed next to his molded plastic chair, and to the bed's occupant, and winced to himself. 'Oh, Johnny, what went wrong this time?' He leaned forward in his seat, ran his hands through his hair quickly, and brought them down over his face as he thought. 'Where did we go wrong? When did you take that wrong turn? I wasn't I there with you, I could have done something...maybe....if I'd been lucky...'

His eyes flickered back to the bed, traced over the tubes, the blankets, the ever-shallower breaths, and he felt as if a giant hand were pressing him into the chair. 'Who am I kidding? There isn't a damn thing I could or can do about this. Here I am, a paramedic, a lifesaver, and I can't do anything.' His gaze returned to the floor. 'I feel so damn useless.'

That was probably the worst part of this whole sick and twisted scenario. It was as if Fate had decided to play one big, nasty trick on Roy DeSoto, and instead of taking Johnny in some normal, quick and painless way, she was forcing him to linger in agony, mocking Roy every minute that, as a professional healer, he couldn't heal his best friend.

The sound of the bell cut through Roy's quiet consciousness viciously, and it took him a few precious heartbeats to identify it. The respirator alarm- Johnny'd stopped breathing!

"Shit!" Roy actually voiced the word, and turned the chair over in his effort to get to the bedside. His fingers automatically connected with Johnny's carotid artery. No pulse. With a professional air about him, and yet still a sense of desperate panic, Roy began CPR, standing on the bed's frame to get a better position.

Jessie came running into the room a few seconds later, closely followed by Dr. Brackett, and the wing's own Dr. Erick Mojowski. Between the three of them was a crash cart.

The doctors took no time in assessing the situation. Brackett, being the head of the emergency department, took charge immediately. "Erick, I need a 2 mg atropine push, piggyback it right on that IV there if you can. Jessie, get that defib ready, 400 watt-seconds, please..."

And so it went. Three times they shocked the sick paramedic, in vain. Atropine, epinephrine, and sodium bicarbonate dripped uselessly into his veins. And in between each administration, Roy dutifully pumped his friend's emaciated chest, tried to stir life within it. He didn't notice when Brackett touched his arm. "Roy, you can stop the CPR."

Something inside the blue-eyed paramedic had snapped. This was Roy's last chance- the final test in a series of failures. He was being given one last time to succeed, and if somehow he saved Johnny's life right now, the sickness would reverse itself, everything would be like it had been before, Johnny would be well again. All he had to do was restart that heart...

"Roy." Brackett said, firmly.

No response.

Both doctors could see Roy was fighting a battle that had already been lost. Finally, with one on each side, they drug him away from his partner's body. Brackett's voice was so firm it rang with pained harshness. "Roy, it's no use. The man is dead."

Roy froze, staring at the still form on the bed. He watched as the young nurse, sadly, walked to the bedside and pulled the sheet over Johnny's head. That action, so simple and so common, had yet seemed so terminal. He took a step forward, head tilted oddly to one side, and then, with only a whispered sound, he crumpled to the floor. "No..!"

* * *

It was nine weeks since 'The Accident'. The day was clear, sunny, if a bit dry and hazy. LA County was like that in early fall- not nearly as hot as it had been in July, but not quite cool like it would become in November and December. Of course, 'cool' for Southern California was in the mid-to-upper sixties, but that didn't change the fact that it was cooler than it was the rest of the year.

But Roy DeSoto wasn't really noticing the temperature in particular, or the weather in general. It could have been hailing golf balls and he would not have turned back from his mission. He sat in the driver's seat of his beat up blue truck, knowing he had the resolve not to go back, but working up the courage to go forward. This was the first time he'd been back here, and although it had been quite a while, he'd come alone. Glancing over at the passenger's seat of his car, he smiled bittersweetly at the hodge-podge of items there.

With a sudden wash of bravery, he collected the things and got out of the truck. He wanted to do this, he had to do this. It was going to be done.

The cemetery was like some sort garden for nicely carved stones. Some of the head stones were very ornate, and some only bore a name. The one Roy ended his walk before was fairly simple- flat, with a short epitaph carved in its face, beside the image of the Star of Life. The epitaph read:

He was a hero, a 'medic, a friend
Gave up himself so a boy would not end
Tragic, it seemed, that his life should cease
Here lies John R. Gage, may he rest in peace.

Roy smiled grimly, and choked back the tears that already stung at the back of his cloudy blue eyes. "Heya, partner." It seemed a little awkward, talking to a slab of granite, but at the same time it seemed perfectly natural. "I..I, uh, gave Jenny your helmet. And Chris has your medicine wheel. They drew these for you..." Roy leaned down and placed the pictures gently on the headstone. "I brought a few flowers....I know it isn't much..." Soon, those stood proudly in the earth beside the grave.

"Look, Junior, I'm...really sorry about everything that happened. You know, all the little spats we had. How I let you go off on your own that day. I'm sorry about all of it, Johnny. I'm...." He stopped, abruptly, as a memory came to him just as suddenly.

It was something Johnny had said to him once, a long, long time ago, when Roy had lost his mother. He could still hear Johnny saying it as clearly as if the man was still there. 'You know I don't talk about 'my people' much, but I think this is a time where it applies. So here goes my Tonto imitation: There is a saying among my people, shed no tears for the Dead, for Death is not Death, but Life somewhere else. I know, it doesn't make much sense, but the point is that the Dead are generally much less upset at their passing than the Living are. When a loved on dies, try to remember. Somewhere else, maybe even as someone else, they just want you to get on living your life and get over it. Just be happy, and never let them leave your heart.'

Roy smirked a little, and knelt down to pat the graphite gently. "Yeah, you're right. Just mind you, I won't forget you, so when I get to see you again, you'd better not have forgotten." He started back to the truck in silence, trying still, valiantly, to hold back the tears. You shed no tears for the dead.

He'd almost made it back to the truck when his path was cut off by a small black-and-tan puppy. The poor thing was very young, probably a month old at best. It stumbled as much as it ran, and flipped head-over-tail to land at Roy's feet. When the tiny dog looked up, puzzled, it presented Roy with deep chocolate brown eyes and kind of a lopsided, open mouth.

Normally, Roy would have just brushed the dog away, but something about this one made him stop. It looked quite pathetic, sitting there whining at his feet, and he could count its ribs from his vantage high above it. It was obviously homeless. On a sudden impulse, he bent down and scooped the puppy up, rewarded immediately for the action by a hand, an arm, a face full of dog-style kisses. He laughed outloud. "The kids'll like you just fine, pup."

Roy gently tossed the small dog into the passenger seat as he slid into the drivers' himself, and on another odd whim, rolled the window down just enough that the little dog could stick his little head out the crack. The entire way home, Roy mulled over what Joanne would think of him just picking up a stray dog off the cuff, and the puppy stuck his head out the crack of the window, tail wagging furiously. In the end, Roy decided, somehow, that Jo would love the dog. They all would.

They would call him Johnny.

The End



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