AN: This basically attacked my brain after getting so far into the show I started Season 3 and then had to stop because damn that sucked. This fic is basically the start of an alternate universe Season 3. Short chapter to start off.
Survivor's guilt: a mental condition that occurs when a person believes they have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not. It has been re-classified as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.
It started with getting into his car and saying take me anywhere. He gave her a lopsided smile and turned the key, turned the car south then west past everything they knew and more she didn't, his face a perfect mask of indifference. Dawson assumed it was his own private passage through grief. To be silent and steady while she alternated between gasping sobs and singing along to the classic rock station Severide found so unerringly through farmland and country towns. She assumed he had a destination. She really did mean anywhere. Chicago was both too large and too small with memories. Their loss a tiny part of the all encompassing rush a city becomes: an oiled machine that doesn't pause to see what's crushed beneath its gears.
For his part, Severide just didn't want to be alone. After the funeral, the final salute, the quiet platitudes and her grieving hollowed out parents: the apartment was too quiet. He could not, would not, pack the mementos her parents didn't take back to the suburbs. The kitchen was never clean. There was no more yogurt to steal and Severide felt more isolated than he had in years. It was an ugly feeling. A feeling that he was existing in the shadow of a great and beautiful thing now long past its expiration. And he was intimately aware of how it died.
He turned to look at Dawson, who was falling apart in his passenger seat, her fingers gesticulating while she sang along with Bob Dylan: any day now, any day now I shall be released. Tears slipping down her face. He spared a thought for the fact that she knew all the words, figured maybe it was Shay's fault and she'd lost one half of the only equation that had always made sense.
Halfway through the following evening, Dawson smelled the ocean long before she could see it. Severide was driving slowly through the evergreen forests of either Oregon or Washington. She really wasn't paying attention but the stars looked beautiful peeking here and there through the pitch black and darker green fading by her window. It was enough of a reprieve being in the car, the sensation of forward momentum without using her agency. There were enough people suggesting she had to move on eventually. She didn't disagree really, the question was how. Dawson literally had no idea of how to push through to that next step. It seemed pointless and fake and doing something for the sake of progress when the end result was the same for each and every single person regardless. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt this fatalistic about anything.
The moon was rising when Severide pulled to a stop on a bluff overlooking the ocean. You could see how long the beach stretched north to south and far out of sight, merging with the rocks and in some places the trees, only their shadows visible in the pale illumination of a half moon. Dawson watched him get out of the car first. Watched him light up a cigar from his jacket pocket. It made her smile that little bit of consistency in a world gone increasingly off tilt. Severide was always going to be a man with a smoke because it can't kill me any faster than a fire will. He wasn't wrong. Stupid, always, but in this at least he wasn't inaccurate so she propped her arm on the windowsill and just kept looking out. Let the ocean breeze float over and through her. She closed her eyes briefly. It seemed like he'd been here before. Like he knew exactly where he was and her anywhere was an actual escape hatch for him. She envied him that ability to pick up and go. It was probably genetic when she thought of his father. How he lived in the woods far and away from anything approaching a town even. If he lived long enough would Kelly do the same?
He ground the butt out under his heel and turned back to her, a small sad smile leaking across his face.
"Come on" he opened her door and Dawson stared up at him, twisting in their shared misery, in his need to leave the echo chamber of all that they remembered and could not take with them into a future without the one person who kept them both so very sane. Dawson took his calloused hand and followed him into the woods, and waited for anywhere to arrive.