There are enough long-smoldering wars on the planet that Kix isn’t surprised at all to have finally ended up in an EMT squad where every one of them, including himself, is a veteran.
It’s not something they need to discuss all that often, and in the aggregate, it actually helps a fair bit to already have the necessary experience to figure out exactly how each of them moves, how they think, how to plug directly into each other’s routines. We are one well-oiled fucking war machine, Fives likes to crow, and he’s usually right. They’re fast, and they’re efficient, and there’s no shame between any of them that Kix is medically their superior, or that Jesse and Echo have had the time to take a few steps ahead of Fives in their training.
It seems important to acknowledge sometimes, though, that they’re also exactly the sort of people who know how to keep their breakdowns at bay until after the patient is safely delivered. It’s important that Kix carefully takes note, in their first six months of working together as a squad, of just how much alcohol each of them usually takes in at after-shift drinks before, and what, therefore, is abnormal.
He has his own limits - usually ones which have to do with viscera. Jesse will run gurney duty, or just get up front in the ambulance and take over driving, if the injury or disease they’re treating has anything to do with their patient’s eyes. Fives, being the cheek he is, is pushing resolutely forward in his training program despite knowing he’s completely petrified of death, the entire hovering, inevitable spectre of it.
And Echo - well, Kix had witnessed one of his nightmares about dismemberment once, by accident, and it hadn’t been pretty.
Kix knows himself well enough to know that he’d been a total asshole, and insubordinate with it, in the field. He’d been proud of it, though, at the time, because he justified it to himself at the time by confirming, again and again, that he was good at this, that his insistence was necessary, and that he’d fucking saved lives. Driving the bus isn’t all that different, he’s found - in fact, it might be even better, because that little space in the back is all his own. He makes the decisions on the ground, he gets his patient stable; and if he loses them before he gets them to Rex, and he’s left with Fives staring wordlessly back at him from the driver’s seat, well - you can’t win them all, and he knows that he’s fucking tried.
The trying he does now is different, though, because he knows just how far he shouldn’t push. Those things he knows about Echo, about Jesse and Fives and every patient, too, that he comes across who has the same telltale scars they do - he knows about them, and they know about him, and he doesn’t need to know why.
Treat the symptoms, he thinks, and it becomes a mantra which overtakes his entire life.
Stabilize.
Get them home.
“Call-out, boss,” Jesse says; he’s already half-into the back of the bus, and Fives is revving up the engine, as Kix rouses himself from his reverie in the hospital’s wide garage. “Teenager collapsed at a local Academy.”
“Copy.”
“You good?” Echo says to him, quietly, when they’re strapped into the back and on their way and Fives is gleefully screeching through a series of tire-bending turns, blasting their siren all the way.
“Yeah, I am,” Kix says, and knows he’ll be believed - and that’s enough.