Author's note: Hey everyone!
I know an update has been long awaited for and I am sorry about it!
Just so you know, all my fics are up on AO3, and Wattpad.
I hope you enjoy this chapter, and leave me a comment with your thoughts if you feel like it.
"This is really good." Vic says as she chews, pointing with her fork down towards her plate. "Did you say you made it?"
"Sure…" Andy tries to lie, but she can't sell it, not when both Vic and Maya know her well enough to remember the time she tried to crack an egg, and ended up spilling the entire thing straight on the floor.
"No way." Maya catches her in her lie and shoves the last piece of dumpling into her mouth with her bare hands.
"You are so classy, Maya." Vic teases her fellow firefighter, who licks every one of her fingers clean.
"OK fine, it wasn't me. Liv made it." Andy breaks under the pressure. "But I helped!"
"By saying that you helped you mean she did the entire thing, because you burned your first attempt at sauteing the vegetables." Maya points out. "I was around, I saw you struggling. It was hilarious, by the way."
"Thank you, Maya." Andy rolls her eyes. "I am trying to learn, I really do. But it is just so hard." She breathes out loudly and slides further down the chair she is sitting in.
"I really don't care who made them." Vic admits, picking crumbs off of her plate with her fork, making sure she didn't miss a spot. "Just tell your new best friend she has to cook for us more often. I mean, if she is always around anyway, she can at least feed us all."
"Or maybe she should just feed the three of us." Maya suggests, clearing their empty dishes into the sink. "If the boys learn how good of a cook she is, they are just going to inhale everything and we will be left with nothing."
Maya turns on the tap as Andy protests. "She is not my best friend. She is sixteen. And we have a deal."
"To be best friends forever and share all of your deepest secrets with each other?" Vic laughs.
Andy pouts at their remarks. "You can laugh all you want, but she is really mature for her age. Sometimes when I look at her, I can't believe she was actually raised by the same man who is our captain. She is so smart, she understands this life and her father in a way I never did when I was in high school. And she says she is here because she never sees her dad back at home."
"Makes sense." Maya yells over the sound of the running water and clattering dishes. "We have barely seen her father, and we have been working with him for a few weeks now. He is locked in his office, unless there is a call or he wants to inspect our uniform."
"I think she is just lonely." Andy shrugs. "It is not easy, you know. Transferring to a new school, a new city, in the middle of the school year, where everyone around her all knows each other, and she is the new girl."
"Yeah Yeah Yeah, high school sucks, she is poor little Caidy Heron and everyone around her are mean girls." Vic dismisses. "So are you going to ask her to cook for us or not?"
"She doesn't work for you, Vic. And besides, her dream is to become a firefighter, so I am mentoring her." Andy puffs up her chest proudly, as if she is the reason Liv dreamt about becoming a firefighter in the first place.
Both Vic and Maya don't say a word, just glare at her in a way that makes her squirm. "What?" She asks. "Do I still have some sauce on my face?" She picks up a napkin and rubs her lips, trying to wipe off every last trail of the sticky substance.
"Do you really think it is a good idea?" Maya turns the tap close and looks at her best friend pointedly.
"Well, yeah." And why shouldn't she? "We always talk about how training is so much harder on us women, and how we wish more women would choose this line of work. Liv wants to follow her father's footsteps, just like I did. And if she starts training at this age, maybe she will have an advantage once her actual tests begin. I know it sounds weird, but I truly believe in her. She just needs a good role model, and if I can be that for her, then why not?"
"That is all good and well, but did you ask Sullivan what he thinks about the idea?" Vic questions, and Andy feels like she doesn't follow where this conversation is headed exactly. Like they are both thinking the same thing, while Andy still hasn't quite got a grasp on what they are talking about.
"Why do I have to care what he thinks? She came to me, said she wanted to learn from me. All I did was agree to teach her."
"I am just saying, you and Sullivan act like a cat chasing down a mouse pretty much since the moment he got here. Whatever you do, he is not happy about it. Whatever you and his daughter do, you should consult him, or keep it under the radar. You know, in order not to ruin things for her, or for yourself." Maya slides back to her chair.
They have so many things that still have to get done between one call and another. Sullivan flooded them with tasks, cleaning and counting supplies and checking equipment. Yet even as the list of endless chores is running around each of their minds, it seems like they can't move, glued to their seats by an invisible force holding them tight, reluctant to let go.
This makes everything so much worse when the alarm goes off, calling them to handle a fire not far away from the station.
"Come on!" Maya grants as she picks herself up from the stool, unwillingly running down the stairs.
"Hey Maya," Andy calls as they both enter the aid car together, slamming the door as Bishop starts the engine of the car. "Can I borrow your practice gear later? Olivia is supposed to come by tomorrow afternoon, and I want her to practice running around with everything on top of her, get a sense of the weight she would have to carry around."
"Yeah, fine." Maya agrees. "Just tell you new bestie that if she ruins things that belong to me, I will make her pay for that."
"One more time." Andy calls down the stairs in the general direction where Liv is. Andy checks her watch, counting the second for the sixteen years old, too exhausted to even run up the staircase one more time.
A sweaty and tired Liv runs past her, reaching the small gym of the station completely out of breath, pieces of dark hair falling loose on her red face.
"Good." Andy calls. "You are down ten seconds from your results last week. Now give me ten push ups and twenty crunches and you are done."
Liv rolls her eyes, still struggling to catch her breath and lower her pulse back to a normal rhythm. "Remind me again why are we doing this?" The sixteen years old calls, and she settles herself on the floor to do exactly as she was asked.
"We have gone through this already so many times."
"Yeah, I need to hear this once more, you know, as a reminder." Liv breaths out and she lowers herself into her first push up.
"You are doing this because you have to be at a peak level of fitness in order to have any chance to make it through the academy at all. Other than affecting your physical strength and being good over all to your body, it builds mental strength, which is very important when you are surrounded by men who seem like their entire job in life is to bring you down. The sooner you will get to the absolute best fitness level you can be at, the better."
Liv turns around and lies on her back, Andy applying pressure on her feet, as she starts to count down the crunches she has to perform. "I just wasn't aware that becoming a firefighter will include doing so many workouts."
"Give me five more." Andy pushes Liv to her limit. The girl can barely get them done, every fiber of a muscle in her body aching and burning. As she is finally done, she exhales loudly and lies on her back, sprawling her limbs everywhere.
"Well, you should have asked before you got yourself into this deal." Andy smiles, picking the weights and equipment that were used during their session off of the floor and stores them away in their right places.
"Is it too late to call it quits?" Liv asks seriously, and Andy can see she is covered in a thin layer of sweat all over her face, neck and tank top.
"Yes it is." Andy confirms. The last thing she wants is for this young girl to give up on herself just because she had done one too many squats. "Do you want to come and make dinner?"
Andy's stomach is growling, and she hopes and prays that the girl will agree, and that she will make her something that is both quick and easy.
To her misfortune, Liv keeps lying on the floor, unable to do as much as blink. "Give me a second." She pleads. "My dad is out anyway, he has some kind of a meeting that he couldn't miss."
"I didn't know that." Andy trails off. "Why didn't I know this?"
"He said he left Gibson in charge while he is gone."
Of course he did. Of course he wouldn't even bother to tell her such a thing, even as Jack and her share the exact same ranking. It makes her blood boil in her veins, and if his daughter wasn't present, she would have let out a steam of curses in Spanish that would have made her father tell her to go wash her mouth with soap.
The only thing she can do is swallow the feelings back where they came from.
"Can I ask you a couple of questions, since I don't think I will be able to drag myself up from this exact spot for the next day or so?" Liv says.
"Sure." The firefighter answers.
"What was it like for you, growing up only with your father?"
Andy thinks about it for a long while. There are many parts of her late childhood and early adolescents that are a blur, so vague she can't recall them. "I had my mom around for the first ten years of my life. She taught me everything I know. She raised me to be who I am, alongside my father, so I can safely say that my personality was as equally affected by her as it did by him." She takes a seat on the training bicycle, having a feeling this is going to be a long conversation. "I don't remember much from the time right after she passed away, but I do remember being your age. And believe me when I say, I was a walking nightmare."
"For some reason, I can't believe it." Liv shakes her head. "You seem so responsible, and everyone in this station obviously looks up to you. I just can't believe you were one of those trouble making horror teens."
"Then you better start believing. Or you can ask my dad. He comes by often. He has a mustache and station 19 hat, you can't miss him even if you want to, believe me. What about you?"
"It was always just my dad and I, since I can remember myself. I guess I don't have anything to compare it to, but I try to stay off of trouble as much as I can. I think it still pains him sometimes, you know. The memory of my mom. I try to bring it up as rarely as possible, but even so, it seems like every once in a while there is something that just reminds him of her."
"You know, he is very lucky to have you as his daughter." Andy states, and she believes in it wholeheartedly.
She is not sure if Olivia blushes or if the red on her face is still an outcome of the intense physical activity, but she calls "My turn." nevertheless, trying to change the subject. "What did you do when you got your first period?"
"You know, back in Montana, I did have some friends who happened to be girls, and they had moms or older sisters around to walk them through the steps. I got my period later than most girls, so it wasn't really an issue. And besides, there is this magnificent thing called Youtube. It will teach you everything you possibly need to know about any subject in the world, and much, much more than that."
"Well, for me." Andy starts, then hides her face between her hands in mortification. "I didn't have any of that when I first got my period. The friends who were females or Youtube. The only constant people I had around me while I was growing up were Ryan and my father, who I obviously could not ask for advice in that particular area. So I went to a drugstore, picked up a box of tampons and asked the first woman I saw who worked there what I was supposed to do with them. I will let you imagine the rest."
Liv laughs, a big sound coming from deep inside her stomach. When her fit of giggles finally subsides and she manages to calm herself down, she says "My turn again. Are you currently seeing someone?"
Andy hesitates, before answering slowly. "Not anymore. Why are you asking?"
Liv sits upright and pulls her shoulders up. "No reason. So by not anymore you mean you used to date someone." Liv's words leave her mouth as a statement more than as a question.
In the couple of weeks Andy has known the teenage girl, she has learnt quite a lot about her. One of those things was she never gives up until she gets what she wishes for, not unlike Andy herself.
"Jack and I used to… I don't even know how to call it. I mean, in order to date someone you actually have to go on a date, which we never did."
"And you and Ryan." Liv states again.
"How did you know?"
"You talk about him way more than a girl speaks of a man who is only her friend. And besides, from what I gathered from your stories, you have known each other for years on end. There is no way nothing has ever happened between the two of you." Andy is once again at owe by how observant the sixteen years old is, at how fast she picks up on the small details.
"Ryan and I… It is complicated." Andy admits. Her stomach growls again, makes noises that even Liv can hear, sitting a few feet away from her.
"How come you are always so hungry?" The teenagers ask.
"I just use a lot of energy in my line of work. So you know, I have to get it back in somehow. Do your stretches and let's go, before I decide to eat you for dinner."
Liv stays rooted in her place, and it seems like she is thinking about something, ignoring completely the last part of Andy's sentence. "Did you hear what I have said, anything at all?"
"You know, my dad and I have a taco Tuesday dinner every time he is off from work that particular day of the week. You should join us. I even make the taco shells from scratch."
Of course she does. Andy hesitates, tries to figure out the best way to turn the girl down without hurting her. "I don't know. Last time we ate dinner together, it almost ended in a disaster."
"Come on, Andy." Liv is relentless. "Just give him a chance. I swear, outside of work, he is not half as bad as you and your friends like to believe."
And somehow, Andy can believe it. He raised a girl to become this amazing young woman, and he did it all on his own. It must count for something.
"Fine." Andy gives in. "But only if you make that ramen for dinner, and you do it right now. And you do the stretch routine I have taught you. They are important!"
Liv gives her a big, self satisfied smile, and Andy knows she has once again fallen a victim to the charms of the sixteen years old daughter.