emergency blanket
prompt: emergency blanket (alt no.14)
whumpee: sakari nurmi
fandom: karppi/deadwind
hi this fic is a little different from other stuff in an undefined kinda way...it's set pre-series by a few years at a time in which i imagine sakari has recently moved to helsinki and doesn't work with the police. i enjoyed messing around with this but it is a bit different to my usual stuff idk. hope you like it anyway!
He’s ripped violently out of a deep sleep by the sound of an explosion. The building shakes. Things rattle. Plaster is falling from the ceiling. He knows this because it’s falling on him.
He leaps out of bed, heart pounding. He knows perfectly well what to do in the event of an explosion, but he’s never actually had to act before - it was always just drills and being ready, but he’d escaped any actual explosions.
Until now. Plaster is still raining down from the ceiling, which means he should get under a table, but he lives on the third floor. If the floor collapses, the table isn’t going to do him much good.
He needs to get out.
He slowly walks across the room and to the door. The floor creaks underneath him but holds steady. The fire alarms - those that work, anyway - are ringing. People are screaming. He feels the door, which isn’t hot, then opens it.
He’s met with chaos. People are pushing down the hallway towards the stairs and only one of the lightbulbs in the ceiling is working so it’s sort of dark but the fire alarm is flashing and there’s debris scattered over the floor and at the other end of the hall there’s just a hole where there should be a floor.
He joins his neighbors in the journey to the stairwell and has the brief thought that he should have put on shoes, or a jacket. Once he gets outside, he’s going to be freezing.
At least you’ll be alive, he reminds himself. This thought is punctuated by a loud crashing noise behind him. Everyone collectively turns around. Something unidentifiable but very much on fire has fallen through the ceiling. People start screaming again, assuming they ever stopped. He nearly gets knocked to the ground as everyone suddenly starts shoving wildly in a now truly desperate attempt to get to the stairs.
The heat of the fire is steadily growing, though it’s still a good distance away down the hall. Eventually, Sakari makes it into the stairwell. It’s crowded with people coming down from higher floors, but someone grabs his arm and pulls him into the throng and then he’s moving down, down, down, surrounded by people in various states of undress. Some of them are bleeding, burned. He guesses the explosion happened on an upper floor.
The procession downwards is slow-going, but it is going. He makes it to the second floor, where a few more people push into the group. He supposes most of the people from this floor have already made it down.
Finally, the exit is in sight. It’s a door marked ‘fire exit, use only in case of emergency.’ It’s been propped open and there’s a blinking light above it. Outside he can hear sirens mixing with the echo of the fire alarm.
He steps outside. The sidewalk is cold beneath his bare feet, but at least it isn’t snowing. He moves along with a crowd of people. He has no idea where they’re going besides away, which is more than good enough for him.
He turns back briefly and looks at the building. Part of it, starting on the fifth floor and extending down through the third, is simply gone. Flames lick out of the gaping hole where this part of the building used to be. Here and there he can see fires behind windows, smoke rising into the dark sky. As he looks, part of the fourth floor breaks free from the building and crashes to the ground. People scream. Someone runs into him from behind and he nearly loses his balance.
“Hey, keep moving!”
He turns away from the horrible scene and keeps walking. At last he figures out what everyone has been walking towards: there’s a barrier being set up by police, who are shouting for people to get behind it. He passes the barrier, at which point the people around him begin to disperse. Some of those who are bleeding are being treated by paramedics. Groups of people huddle together, calling out for people they’ve gotten separated from. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t have anyone here to join, doesn’t really know his neighbors. He’s not hurt, either, so he can’t go to the medics. Can he just leave? He feels like he can’t. And anyway, where would he go? His car’s broken. He doesn’t have shoes on. He’s kind of trapped.
He briefly wonders whether any of his things will be salvageable. Whether the firefighters will extinguish the flames before they reach his apartment. He hopes so. He doesn’t have a lot of stuff, and what little he does have is all in there.
But there’s nothing he can do about that. He forces his thoughts away from his apartment and decides to just walk around. After a few minutes of this aimless walking, he comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is to simply sit down.
He finds an empty section of the curb that has a view of the activity and sinks down. On his right is a mailbox, and on his left is a family with two small children. Neither one of them is crying, but their mother is. Something twists inside him. He stands back up, not willing to intrude.
He walks around a bit more. Tents are being set up next to ambulances, and people are gathering under them, he supposes for medical treatment. There is one tent that has sides as well as a roof. He stares at it and wonders how many people have died. Wonders what exactly had happened.
He finds himself walking over towards the tents without really thinking about it. He looks in on the scenes beneath them, half imagining that he’ll see someone he knows, but everyone is a stranger.
“Hey!” someone shouts. He’s been hearing people shout “hey!” for however long it’s been (and really, he realizes, he has absolutely no idea whether it’s been seconds or hours), and only one of those shouts had been directed at him. He isn’t doing anything wrong, to his knowledge, so he figures whoever’s shouting isn’t shouting at him.
“Hey, come here!” the person shouts again. He looks around, curious to see what’s happening, and makes eye contact with a paramedic. He figures she’ll just wave him along, but instead she nods and calls, “come here!”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
He looks down at himself, suddenly wondering whether he’s somehow been bleeding this whole time and had failed to notice. But he’s fine, he thinks.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, approaching the paramedic.
“You’re shaking.”
He is? He hadn’t noticed. Now, though, he does. He’s cold. Really cold. And afraid, he realizes, even though the most imminent danger has already passed.
He exhales sharply. His chest feels tight. He wraps his arms around himself as this whole barrage of previously-unrecognized sensations suddenly hits him all at once.
Something touches him. He jolts in surprise, and the paramedic gently puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s only a blanket.”
It is a blanket. One of those silvery, reflective ones. He’s seen them a few times before, though he’s never actually had one to himself. He had always assumed that people had been stretching the truth, calling the things thermal blankets when to him they had resembled nothing so much as sheets of tinfoil.
To his surprise, however, the blanket really is quite warm. He pulls it tightly around himself, tucking his arms in underneath it and holding onto it as though it might be taken away from him at any second.
And then the paramedic gives him another blanket. This one is more normal. It’s thick and not terribly soft but it’s warm, too, and actually feels like a blanket. He draws this one tightly around his body as well, burrowing into the warmth of the layered blankets as much as possible.
“Please come find me or someone else if you don’t stop shivering soon,” the paramedic tells him, and he nods and watches her hurry off to help another paramedic with a man whose whole torso is covered in blood.
Still shivering and overwhelmed, Sakari again finds himself a place to sit, this time beneath the tent, near the back of an open ambulance.
The ground is frigid beneath him, and even when he adjusts the blankets so he can sit on them, he can still feel it. He tucks himself into as tight a ball as he can manage and wraps the blankets around himself again, trying especially hard to cover both his feet and his arms. Again he wishes that he had brought his shoes, or that at least he had gone to bed wearing socks.
But he hadn’t, and now he’s here, sitting on the freezing, hard ground and shaking so hard he almost feels sick. He tries to focus on getting warm, tries not to think about the explosion. Tries not to imagine getting caught in the flames, trapped by the rubble. He’s lucky, he supposes. Bad things always seem to happen to the people around him, and not to him.
It doesn’t feel like luck. It feels like a horrible mixture of fear and guilt squeezing him from the inside out. He pulls the blankets still tighter around his body and wonders if the shaking will ever stop.
thanks for reading! i hope you enjoyed this even though it was a bit weird. i just love exploring his backstory and making shit up :) see you tomorrow!!
