Your friendly neighborhood story spark. Send me your wild plots, aching hearts, unhinged characters, and half-baked ideas — I’ll write, ramble, or give you the prompt that unsticks your brain. Ask box always open.
Hey there! I’m wordwoven — a trans gay writer, adult, and professional daydreamer. I run this blog to answer writing asks, spin little stories, and share some creative chaos with you all.
Here’s what you can expect:
✔️ Any sort of fanfiction you ask for (within the fandoms below)
✔️ x male reader only (at a push GN, but has to be leaning masc)
✔️ Angst, hurt/comfort, emotional messes
✔️ Fluffy, soft moments — I love them
✔️ Heavy foreplay / tension scenes
✔️ Male!Dom!Reader for smut
✔️ No complete 'won't write' list, kink wise or other, ask and if I can do it, I will
✔️ Anything so long as I'm in the mood for it, and it's respectful
What I don’t write:
🚫 x fem reader
🚫 x sub reader / x bottom reader
🚫 Mpreg
🚫 Anything smut for a canonically underage character (I will do tension scenes, but no further)
🚫 Anything completely non-consensual (cnc, dubious consent, free use - that line of thinking is okay)
🚫 Abusive relationships
If you’re unsure, feel free to ask! I’m always happy to clarify.
✍️ Fandoms I write for:
(A star means I'm especially hyped to write for this one!)
⭐️ 9-1-1
⭐️ Arcane
⭐️ Resident Evil (2, 4, 7, 8)
Harry Potter (and Marauders era)
⭐️ Doctor Who
Avatar: The Last Airbender
My Hero Academia
Once Upon a Time
Attack on Titan
Criminal Minds
Fear Street
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
How to Train Your Dragon
Omari
MCU
The Amazing Spider-Man
Pokémon (only fluff — no weirdness!)
Stardew Valley
✨ Drop your requests anytime! My inbox is open, and I’m always up for building new stories.
Oh, this is going to be a rant, so buckle the hell in.
Season 8 of 9-1-1 will go down in history not as a season of triumph or transformation—but as a cautionary tale. A chaotic, gaslit, emotionally unfulfilling mess that tried to dress up as prestige TV with plane crashes and viruses while completely abandoning the heart of the show. It wasn’t just disappointing. It was offensive to long-time viewers who actually give a damn about these characters. Every week was like watching a beloved friend get slowly dismantled by people who don’t understand who they used to be. Every episode clawed further away from the soul of the show—character, connection, and emotional continuity—in favour of empty spectacle, soulless pacing, and trauma porn with the emotional resonance of a wet paper towel.
Let's get the good out of the way first—because yeah, despite everything, some moments did hit. Madney having another baby? Loved. HenRen adopting Mara? Gorgeous. Eddie dancing in his underwear? Iconic. The Buckley-Diaz reunion? A serotonin shot straight to the brain. Bathena being front and centre for the season premiere trilogy? That was chef’s kiss. And hell, as much as it stunned the hell out of me to say this—Gerrard getting development?? That man is a certified asshole and yet, through Bobby’s legacy, he grew. He changed. That wasn’t just fan service—that was one of the only times this season dared to say, “Hey, people can become more than what they were.” And it was damn effective. You know what that was? That was what this show used to be about.
But that’s where the praise stops. Because the rest of this season? An outright insult.
From the moment we left Season 7, there was hope. Genuine, raw hope. We thought we were about to get some real character follow-through—Eddie rebuilding his relationship with Christopher, Buck exploring who he is beyond other people, HenRen navigating parenthood, and the team coping with their traumas like actual human beings. But instead? We got Brad. We got the goddamn Hotshots. We got Abigail Spencer's character chewing up screen time for an arc no one asked for while our mains were reduced to background noise in their own damn show.
Eddie—my beautiful, broken, complex Eddie—started the season without his son. There was so much potential in watching him fight for that connection again, to see the guilt, the growth, the heart. But no. We got FaceTime. We got off-screen moving decisions. We got absolutely nothing of substance until—bam! Finale time! Chris is back, Buck’s magically moved out, and no one talks about anything. It’s like the writers took a scalpel to every meaningful emotional thread and said, “Hmm, this seems important. Let’s cut it.”
Buck? Look, I’m thrilled he’s finally moving out. But the way they wrote him in 8B? He was just there. A placeholder. A warm body in Eddie’s kitchen. And his entire arc with Tommy? Blink and you missed it. It began, ended, and got deleted faster than a Tumblr post with the wrong tags. Like—why even bother?
Hen and Karen got one episode. One. And Mara? This beautiful girl who represents hope, healing, and a second chance? Ten seconds in the finale. Ten. Whole. Seconds.
And Bobby—Jesus Christ. They killed the emotional foundation of this show, the man who held this chaotic crew together like duct tape and prayers. And then they treated his death like a random Tuesday emergency. Oh, he’s dead? Too bad. Let’s rush to closure in three episodes and toss his legacy into a montage and a baby name. Robert Nash is now a baby. Are you kidding me?
The finale tried, I’ll give it that. The rescue case was actually well-executed, and there were some good character beats. But let’s be real—the last five minutes felt like someone sprinted through a checklist. Buck out? Check. Eddie smiling? Check. Chim possibly the new captain? Sure, why not. Athena smiling? Done. Let’s wrap this bitch up like it’s a series finale—because for a second there, it damn well felt like one. And not in a good way.
There was no closure between Chim and Athena. That storyline deserved a conversation—a reckoning. But no, Chim saves a guy and boom! Everything's chill again. Like Bobby didn’t just die. Like the team hasn’t just lost the only man who ever anchored them. No grief. No real emotional fallout. Just a weirdly cheerful goodbye.
And listen—if Buddie is ever going to actually happen (and God, I hope it does because it’s the only storyline that has ever had consistent emotional stakes), they can’t keep doing Eddie like this. He needs development. He needs depth. He needs a storyline that isn’t just orbiting around Buck like a moon with daddy issues. And Buck? He needs to choose himself, not just exist to fix other people.
This season was overstuffed and undercooked. Too many two-parters. Too many side characters. Too many fucking emergencies and not nearly enough heart. And don’t get me wrong—I love a good adrenaline-packed disaster. But when every episode is a chaotic barrage of flashing lights and screaming victims with zero downtime for our mains to process anything, it becomes numb. You lose the emotional contrast. It’s just noise.
And I haven’t even touched on the godawful pacing. The constant tonal whiplash. The dangling plotlines. The blatant disregard for what the fans have connected to for eight fucking years. This isn’t just about one bad episode. This is about an entire season that failed to deliver any of the promises it started with. It baited Buddie, buried Bobby, and benched everyone else.
This show used to make me feel things. Joy. Grief. Pride. Anger. Hope.
Now? It just makes me tired.
I’m not even mad at this finale specifically—it had potential. But it came too little, too late, dragged down by a season that forgot what made 9-1-1 worth watching. I’ll probably lurk for spoilers next season, maybe check in on YouTube. But I’m not holding my breath. Because unless they burn it all down and start again—really start again—I don’t think I have the energy to care anymore.
And to the showrunner? Good riddance, you absolute disaster of a man. You treated your cast, your crew, and your audience like afterthoughts. You mangled beloved characters, spat on emotional arcs, and turned something deeply loved into a lifeless mess.
Here’s hoping the next era remembers that 911 is about people first. Not just the fires they run into, but the ones they carry inside.
P.S.
And no, before anyone tries to twist it—I wasn’t expecting a kiss. I wasn’t demanding some big dramatic love confession or a sunset handhold with violins in the background. I know pacing. I know slow burn. I respect the slow burn. What I don’t respect is the way they keep sprinkling crumbs like we're pigeons and they’re doing us a favour.
They know what they’re doing. They know the Buddie fandom is massive. They know we’ll show up, week after week, desperate for anything. So they keep baiting us—eye contact here, emotional scene there, co-parenting moments that look suspiciously like, oh I don’t know, a relationship—just enough to keep us hanging on. Just enough to say, “See? We’re giving you what you want. Kind of. Almost. Not really.”
Meanwhile, Buck’s development gets shelved unless it’s in service of someone else, and Eddie—Eddie’s just been frozen in time. Like his entire emotional landscape has been put on mute. Nothing real, nothing solid, just buried. Just like Bobby. (Yes, I said it. Yes, I’m crying about it.)
It’s exhausting. And insulting. And we deserve better than this bullshit.
Stop dancing around it. Either commit to Buddie or let them grow independently and give them storylines that don’t rely on queer-coded winks and cohabitation tension. But dragging us along for years just because you know we’ll keep watching? That’s not storytelling. That’s manipulation.
After surviving the worst days of his life, Ethan Winters finds quiet solace in the arms of someone who sees him for more than what he’s lost—someone who holds him like he still belongs to the world.
I just think Ethan deserves to be kissed stupid, held like a lifeline, and railed lovingly by a very patient man, okay? I don’t make the rules—I just write the smut
You met Ethan in the kind of silence that followed horror. Not the peaceful kind. The ringing kind—the kind that lives in your bones long after the screaming stops.
He was already back from Louisiana when you found him, if “back” was even the right word. He looked like he’d crawled out of hell on his hands and knees and didn’t trust the light anymore.
And who could blame him?
He didn’t talk about what happened at first. You knew the headlines. You knew what wasn’t in the reports too—the rumors, the whispers about a girl and a swamp and something that shouldn’t have existed. The mold. The Baker family. His wife. All dead, except her.
You never asked.
At first, you just fixed his injuries. Cleaned up the places no one else would. The scar across his hand that never quite healed, even with REACT tech. The jagged shrapnel wound near his ribs. The nightmares he tried to pretend didn’t happen.
“I’m fine,” he’d say, voice hoarse.
“You’re not,” you’d reply.
But you never pushed harder than that.
You learned to recognise the signs—when he needed space, when he needed silence, when he needed you to sit on the floor beside him and just be there. Sometimes he’d press the heel of his palm to his eye like he was trying to wipe something out from behind it. Sometimes he’d flinch at the creak of a floorboard, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there anymore.
He moved in with you after two months. Said it was temporary. Said he couldn’t be in that empty apartment. Too clean. Too sterile.
He slept on the couch. Then on your bed. Then beside you.
Neither of you talked about that either.
Until the night you found him on the bathroom floor, his back against the tub, sweat-soaked and shaking. Eyes blown wide. Breathing like the air was drowning him.
He didn’t say your name. Just, “She was there.”
You crouched beside him. Pressed a hand to his chest, over his racing heart. “Who?”
“Eveline. The girl.” His voice cracked. “But not really. I know she’s dead. I know she’s—I know—” His hands curled into his hair. “But it’s like I feel her sometimes. Like she’s still in my goddamn head.”
You didn’t say it would be okay. You knew better. Instead, you leaned forward, resting your forehead to his. “You’re not alone.”
He started crying.
He didn’t sob. Just went so quiet that you almost missed it—the way his breath hitched, the tears falling soundlessly onto your collarbone as you pulled him into your arms. He clung like a man broken open, like your touch was the only thing keeping him from dissolving back into the mold.
“I’m so tired,” he whispered, and it gutted you. “I don’t know how to be human anymore.”
“You don’t have to be,” you told him, voice low and fierce. “You just have to be. And I’ll be here.”
That was the first time he kissed you.
It was clumsy. Desperate. Teeth clacking and fingers trembling. But it was real. You kissed him back with everything you had—because he needed it, and because you wanted it. Wanted him. Not as a broken man or a haunted survivor, but as Ethan. The man who still carried groceries with both hands even if one of them ached. The man who told awful jokes at 3am and cooked breakfast like it was the only sacred act left in the world.
The man who finally let himself live.
That night, you didn’t fuck. You just held each other. You undressed slowly, reverently—like every scar he’d earned was holy, like every piece of him was something to worship. You kissed his wrists. His stomach. His throat. You laid him out across the sheets and laid your hands across his heart like a benediction.
“Do you want this?” you asked him, breath shaking.
He nodded. “More than anything.”
And so you gave him everything.
He moaned under your touch—soft, needy, unguarded. Every sound he made was real. No performance. No walls. Just Ethan, raw and open, letting himself feel. You took your time. You didn’t rush. You ran your tongue along the curve of his hip and watched him fall apart, whispering your name like it was the only thing grounding him.
When you were finally inside him—slow, deep, tender—he clung to you like you were salvation. His legs wrapped around your waist. His arms wound around your shoulders. His mouth on yours, again and again, as if kissing you could save him.
And maybe it did. A little.
After, he cried again. Quieter this time. You kissed the tears from his cheeks and held him until he fell asleep, his head over your heart.
In the morning, he reached for your hand under the covers and laced your fingers together.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay,” he said.
You pressed a kiss to his temple. “That’s fine. You don’t have to be okay. You just have to be here.”
He turned to face you. Eyes red. Voice steady. “Then I’ll stay.”
So I did a thing
I made this into a very long, very soft, very horny, very emotionally devastating fic :D
Here you go!
✨ It’s got:
— Ethan winters being soft and broken and so loved
— A reader who is a gentle giant with terrifying protective rage when necessary
— Slow burn healing through tea, hoodie stealing, and forehead kisses
— Smut so reverent it might make you cry (and also like. filthy)
— Trauma recovery that actually breathes
— The phrase “I love you” used like a balm and a blade
— One (1) very bad breakfast
— And Ethan calling you daddy with a full heart and zero shame
🖤 Reblogs appreciated like warm tea on a cold floor
Go read it so I can scream into your inbox about how much Ethan Winters deserves a nap and unconditional affection ty
After surviving the worst days of his life, Ethan Winters finds quiet solace in the arms of someone who sees him for more than what he’s lost—someone who holds him like he still belongs to the world.
I just think Ethan deserves to be kissed stupid, held like a lifeline, and railed lovingly by a very patient man, okay? I don’t make the rules—I just write the smut
You met Ethan in the kind of silence that followed horror. Not the peaceful kind. The ringing kind—the kind that lives in your bones long after the screaming stops.
He was already back from Louisiana when you found him, if “back” was even the right word. He looked like he’d crawled out of hell on his hands and knees and didn’t trust the light anymore.
And who could blame him?
He didn’t talk about what happened at first. You knew the headlines. You knew what wasn’t in the reports too—the rumors, the whispers about a girl and a swamp and something that shouldn’t have existed. The mold. The Baker family. His wife. All dead, except her.
You never asked.
At first, you just fixed his injuries. Cleaned up the places no one else would. The scar across his hand that never quite healed, even with REACT tech. The jagged shrapnel wound near his ribs. The nightmares he tried to pretend didn’t happen.
“I’m fine,” he’d say, voice hoarse.
“You’re not,” you’d reply.
But you never pushed harder than that.
You learned to recognise the signs—when he needed space, when he needed silence, when he needed you to sit on the floor beside him and just be there. Sometimes he’d press the heel of his palm to his eye like he was trying to wipe something out from behind it. Sometimes he’d flinch at the creak of a floorboard, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there anymore.
He moved in with you after two months. Said it was temporary. Said he couldn’t be in that empty apartment. Too clean. Too sterile.
He slept on the couch. Then on your bed. Then beside you.
Neither of you talked about that either.
Until the night you found him on the bathroom floor, his back against the tub, sweat-soaked and shaking. Eyes blown wide. Breathing like the air was drowning him.
He didn’t say your name. Just, “She was there.”
You crouched beside him. Pressed a hand to his chest, over his racing heart. “Who?”
“Eveline. The girl.” His voice cracked. “But not really. I know she’s dead. I know she’s—I know—” His hands curled into his hair. “But it’s like I feel her sometimes. Like she’s still in my goddamn head.”
You didn’t say it would be okay. You knew better. Instead, you leaned forward, resting your forehead to his. “You’re not alone.”
He started crying.
He didn’t sob. Just went so quiet that you almost missed it—the way his breath hitched, the tears falling soundlessly onto your collarbone as you pulled him into your arms. He clung like a man broken open, like your touch was the only thing keeping him from dissolving back into the mold.
“I’m so tired,” he whispered, and it gutted you. “I don’t know how to be human anymore.”
“You don’t have to be,” you told him, voice low and fierce. “You just have to be. And I’ll be here.”
That was the first time he kissed you.
It was clumsy. Desperate. Teeth clacking and fingers trembling. But it was real. You kissed him back with everything you had—because he needed it, and because you wanted it. Wanted him. Not as a broken man or a haunted survivor, but as Ethan. The man who still carried groceries with both hands even if one of them ached. The man who told awful jokes at 3am and cooked breakfast like it was the only sacred act left in the world.
The man who finally let himself live.
That night, you didn’t fuck. You just held each other. You undressed slowly, reverently—like every scar he’d earned was holy, like every piece of him was something to worship. You kissed his wrists. His stomach. His throat. You laid him out across the sheets and laid your hands across his heart like a benediction.
“Do you want this?” you asked him, breath shaking.
He nodded. “More than anything.”
And so you gave him everything.
He moaned under your touch—soft, needy, unguarded. Every sound he made was real. No performance. No walls. Just Ethan, raw and open, letting himself feel. You took your time. You didn’t rush. You ran your tongue along the curve of his hip and watched him fall apart, whispering your name like it was the only thing grounding him.
When you were finally inside him—slow, deep, tender—he clung to you like you were salvation. His legs wrapped around your waist. His arms wound around your shoulders. His mouth on yours, again and again, as if kissing you could save him.
And maybe it did. A little.
After, he cried again. Quieter this time. You kissed the tears from his cheeks and held him until he fell asleep, his head over your heart.
In the morning, he reached for your hand under the covers and laced your fingers together.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay,” he said.
You pressed a kiss to his temple. “That’s fine. You don’t have to be okay. You just have to be here.”
He turned to face you. Eyes red. Voice steady. “Then I’ll stay.”
I don’t miss the us that kissed through screens—
not really.
Not the typed hearts,
the emojis with shy meanings,
not the late-night declarations bathed in blue light
from places neither of us could touch.
No.
It’s stranger than that.
Softer.
I miss the way time used to bend for us,
how four a.m. didn’t feel lonely
if your name was blinking at the top of my screen.
How silence between messages
felt like a held breath—
never heavy,
just waiting.
I miss the moments
where the world was narrowed to one glowing box,
and your laughter made it feel like
maybe the distance didn’t matter.
When I said something dumb,
and you typed "omg" but I could hear your grin.
When the lag in the call
couldn’t quite hide how we talked over each other,
both rushing to tell a story—
both giving in and laughing
because it happened again.
I miss the stupid things,
like sharing songs and pretending
they were just cool tracks—
not confessionals in melody.
Or sending memes we’d seen three times
just for an excuse to talk again.
I don’t miss your hand in mine.
I never had that.
What I had was the knowing—
that somewhere,
someone understood the pause before my jokes,
the shape of my silence,
the strange language of my moods
when I couldn’t even name them myself.
You still message me.
We still talk.
I still care.
But I miss what we were
when it was all we had—
when your name lighting up my phone
meant the day was about to get better.
Now we send updates.
We check in.
It’s kind.
It’s warm.
But it’s not that same
breathless, bursting feeling—
that secret companionship
held in invisible threads across a continent.
You were a constellation
I memorized through glass.
Now you’re just a star
I wave at across the sky.
Still bright.
Still dear.
But no longer mine to map
from dusk to dawn.
And I don’t want that back.
I don’t want us back.
But sometimes, when I can’t sleep—
I miss
the light
between
the pixels.
i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom
as well as the three laws of fandom:
Don't Like, Don't Read (DL;DR), Your Kink is not My Kink And That's OK (YKINMKATO) and Ship and Let Ship
NO ONE LIVING hasn't been squicked out by something. There's over 7 billion of us, my delights and disgusts aren't universal. So I move on. Don't like the ship? Move on. Don't like____? Move on.
I am not an exception. Neither are you. I don't like it I move on and shut my gob about it because everyone everywhere is squicked out by something and they need to put the thing down and just…motor.
He stands at the edge of the service,
back straight, jaw locked,
like the casket might shatter
if he doesn’t hold the world together.
They all look at him—
Hen, Chim, Athena, May—
like he’s the steady one now.
The strong one.
The one Bobby asked to stay standing.
And so he does.
But inside?
He’s already collapsed.
They buried Bobby today.
Under a sky that didn’t know
how to be solemn,
under the indifferent warmth of a sun
that had no right to shine.
They buried his father.
And Buck didn’t cry.
Because Bobby’s last words
—spoken in breathless panic,
blood painting his lips like a blessing—
were:
“You’ve got to be there. For them.”
So Buck is.
He’s there.
He helps Athena to her seat,
his hand gentle on her back
even though his fingers still tremble
with the phantom weight of Bobby’s body.
He hugs May with a smile
that cracks at the edges
like porcelain.
He thanks the priest.
He signs the guest book.
He listens.
But he doesn’t speak.
Because if he speaks,
he might scream.
And no one wants that.
No one wants to see
that he’s drowning.
No one knows
that every second he’s not sobbing
is a second spent biting it back.
Because he saw Bobby’s last look.
And it haunts him.
That flicker of terror.
That guilt—like Bobby knew
he was leaving too much behind.
That love,
radiant and aching,
shoved into a single second
as if he could give Buck
everything he ever meant
with one look.
He can’t stop seeing it.
Not even when he closes his eyes.
Especially not then.
They buried Bobby far from here.
With his first wife.
His first children.
The ones he lost in fire and smoke
and years of mourning.
And Buck understands.
He does.
But God, he’s angry.
So angry.
Because it feels like they took Bobby
from them—
from the family he chose,
from the people still breathing.
They put him in the ground
hours away,
beneath a stone carved with names
Buck never got to speak aloud.
And now, when he wants to visit,
he has to ask for time off.
He has to drive there like a stranger.
He has to sit at a grave
that doesn’t say Dad.
And that feels like
another kind of loss.
The kind that doesn’t
make it into the eulogies.
The kind no one gives him
permission to grieve.
So Buck is strong.
He jokes at the wake.
He passes the drinks.
He tells Chim it’s okay to cry.
He hugs Hen like it’s all he has.
But at night?
At night he is nothing but broken.
He goes home,
sits on the edge of his bed,
and pulls off his shoes
with shaking hands
like they weigh a thousand pounds.
And then?
Then he breaks.
Not a gentle, poetic breaking.
Not pretty.
Not quiet.
He breaks like glass hitting pavement.
Like bone through skin.
Like fire through wood.
He sobs so hard his chest cramps,
so hard his voice gives out,
so hard he claws at his sheets
because it hurts too much to stay still.
He wants to scream.
But all that comes out
is Bobby’s name.
And no one hears it.
Because Buck makes sure of that.
He breaks in private.
Because he has to be strong in public.
He is the strong one.
The steady one.
The one left behind
to carry the weight
of someone else’s legacy.
But every night,
he spills into pieces so sharp
he isn’t sure he’ll ever
fit back together again.
And in the dark,
when the tears finally stop,
and there’s nothing left but the hollow—
he whispers:
“You said I had to be there for everyone…
but who’s here for me?”
And silence answers.
The kind of silence
that used to be filled
with a voice that grounded him.
A hand on his shoulder.
A second chance.
And now there’s nothing.
Just a bed.
A body.
A boy pretending to be a man
because his father
asked him to be.
SPOILERS FOR 9-1-1 SEASON 8 EPISODE 14 / 15
Read Part One Here
✖️ TRIGGER WARNINGS
Graphic depictions of injury and medical trauma
Implied character death
Grief and mourning
Panic attacks / emotional breakdowns
Hospital / emergency room imagery
Please be careful while reading.
This half of the story is heavy with emotional devastation, character suffering, and intense themes of loss. Take breaks. Protect your heart.
You matter more than the words.
The pounding had stopped hours ago, but the echo lived in his bones.
Evan Buckley didn’t know when his fists had gone numb. Somewhere between the first scream and the twentieth plea for a door that wouldn’t open. Between the blood-slicked cracks in his knuckles and the metallic smear he’d left on steel that didn’t budge—somewhere in that cruel middle ground between desperation and surrender, he’d stopped expecting it to matter. His breath came in short, raw pulls through his teeth, not because he was winded but because there was no room in his chest for air—not when it was filled with helpless rage and horror and grief that hadn’t yet found shape.
The door stared back at him. Silent. Unmoving.
Outside, the world might have been chaos. Sirens wailing, Maddie screaming into radios, Bobby trying to coordinate hazmat evac on a crumbling timeline—but in here, it was only the sound of failing lungs. The faint, erratic rasp of blood in someone’s throat.
Buck leaned his forehead against the reinforced blast doors, the cool metal a brutal contrast to the feverish heat rolling off Chimney’s body just feet away. He could still hear the wet hitch in every breath Chim took, each one pulled like thread unraveling from an already tattered cloth. His hand twitched, wanting to reach again for the panel, to punch it, rip it open, tear through it with nothing but fury and a promise he couldn’t keep—but he didn’t move. He didn’t turn.
Because he didn’t want to see Chim again. Not like that. Not yet.
The pain in his knuckles was dull now, background noise behind the high-pitched keening in his head. He tasted metal—his own blood from split lips, or maybe it was just memory. The blast door. The lockdown. Hen's gasp. Chim's cough. The moment the lab sealed like a tomb, it stole something from him.
Behind him, Hen made no sound.
She was still.
Too still.
Buck turned, slow and heavy, as if his own body resented the weight of what he had to face. The room was sterile in the cruelest way. Bright, too bright—overhead fluorescents illuminating every detail with the sharpness of a blade. The gleam of metal carts. The crusted smear of red on gloves. The makeshift thoracostomy tube leading from Hen’s chest to a cracked specimen vial filled with blood-tinged air.
She was pale. But her chest rose and fell, even if shallow. Even if slow. Alive.
And Chim—
God.
Chim was dying.
Buck crossed to him on instinct, dropping to his knees like prayer had never been enough but proximity might be. He didn’t speak—words felt like betrayals in this place. Instead, he reached for the cloth tucked beneath Chim’s head, soaked through now with sweat and blood. Chim’s face was flushed too red, fever rising fast, eyes unfocused beneath fluttering lids. His body shook in bursts, sudden spasms like something inside him was trying to claw its way out.
“Stay with me,” Buck whispered, fingers trembling as he adjusted the oxygen mask over Chim’s face. The straps were too loose. The flow too low. Everything was wrong.
He reached for Chim’s hand. It was limp. God, it was limp. The heat radiating from his skin was terrifying, like touching open flame.
There was nothing left in the med kits. No antivirals. No cooling packs. The IV line he’d rigged hours ago was slow-dripping into Chim’s arm, but even Buck knew it wasn’t enough. They’d already used what little sterile water they had trying to flush Hen’s wound. There was nothing but hope now, and that had never been enough to stop a system from shutting down.
And then there was Ravi.
Buck didn’t have to look to feel him breaking. The sound of shallow, rapid breaths. The soft, repeating patter of shoes as Ravi paced—no, not paced. Traced the same four steps over and over like he was trying to walk back through time. His back was to them, arms wrapped around himself, fingers clawing at his sleeves. His lips were moving but no sound came out.
Until it did.
“I shouldn’t have gone,” Ravi whispered, voice barely more than air. “I should’ve let you—”
Buck’s head whipped toward him.
He stood in a single breath, in a heartbeat, in a furious surge of adrenaline that refused to die. He crossed the room and reached out, grabbing Ravi’s shoulders—too tight, probably, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. Not now. Not with Chim slipping. Not with Hen unconscious. Not with the clock screaming in his ear.
“Not today, Ravi.”
His voice was hoarse. Broken. But steady. Steady the way you have to be when the world is coming apart and you’re the only thing holding it together. Ravi’s eyes were wide, haunted, rimmed in red. His jaw trembled.
Buck shook him once—not hard, just enough to jar something loose.
“You hear me?” he said, eyes burning into him. “Not finding the antiviral isn’t because of you. You heard Maddie—it wasn’t here. It wasn’t in the lab. We stepped into this death trap without a way out because we had to. Because no one else could. You didn’t fail anyone. You fought.”
Ravi’s mouth opened. Closed. His voice caught.
Buck leaned in, voice low, every word sharp and certain.
“We don’t fall apart,” he said. “Not until they’re safe. We hold. The damn. Line.”
Ravi’s shoulders stiffened. His spine straightened. Not much. Not a miracle. But enough. Enough to stay on his feet. Enough to breathe.
Buck let go, stepping back with a swallow so thick it burned. His hands were shaking now. He could feel the adrenaline crashing in his veins like a rogue wave. He dragged his palms over his face, smearing drying blood down his cheeks, and forced himself to look back toward the middle of the room.
Hen hadn’t moved.
Chim’s breathing was worse.
He turned back to the door.
Pressed his hands to it. Rested his forehead against it like he could will it to understand, like pleading would ever mean anything to metal. His breath fogged against it in small, hopeless puffs.
Open. Just open. Just once. Let me out. Let them live.
His knees ached. His ribs throbbed. His skin itched with blood and sweat and soot and failure. But he didn’t sit. He couldn’t.
Buck was the last wall between them and the dark.
And walls don’t get to collapse.
Outside, the world had shifted into something cruel. Not loud, not bright, not frenetic—but slow. The kind of slow that feels deliberate. Agonizing. The kind of slow that turns urgency into helplessness, makes minutes feel like hours, seconds like a blade dragged across skin. Time had started bleeding, and every drop cost lives.
The wind tore through the barren edge of the facility, kicking up dust that clung to tents and boots and uniforms. The sky was gray, choked in smoke trails and military drones, but even that seemed to blur, smudged at the corners like the world itself was struggling to focus. Chaos didn’t roar here.
It crept.
And somewhere in the middle of it, a woman moved like a ghost.
Dr. Moira Blake—formerly chief virologist, now federal fugitive—walked with the kind of dissonant calm that screamed louder than any alarm. Her white coat was gone, traded for a faded sweatshirt and black jeans too casual for a crime scene, too purposeful for coincidence. Her once-meticulously tied hair now hung loose and wind-tossed, face bare, no trace of the clinical distance she’d always worn like armor. Her eyes—hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses—revealed nothing.
In her left hand, she clutched a sparkling water tumbler. Covered in pink rhinestones, some chipped at the edges. Innocuous. Almost ridiculous.
Except it wasn’t a tumbler.
Not really.
The core was insulated. Lined with medical-grade coolant. Hidden deep inside the double walls: a single glass vial. One of one. The vial. The last antiviral.
She wasn’t running fast. Not yet. She didn’t need to. No one knew what she carried. No one knew what she had done.
Not yet.
But she moved with urgency threaded beneath her skin. The kind of tension that promised the run was coming. Just… not yet.
Back at the command post, the world was anything but slow.
The tent felt too small for the number of bodies it held—officers and analysts shouting across tables, staring at maps, tapping earpieces. Screens flickered with heat signatures and security footage, windows into a building sealed like a sarcophagus. Everything stank of sweat and ozone. Somewhere, a fan buzzed against the back wall, but it did nothing to cool the rising tension inside.
Bobby Nash stood in the center like a hurricane in human form.
His face was red. His hands clenched. Every movement was sharp, his voice a weapon that hadn’t dulled despite the number of times he’d shouted the same damn words.
“Override it!”
Hartman didn’t even flinch. The colonel was composed. Bored, even. One gloved hand adjusted the tablet on the command table. His jaw moved slightly as if he was chewing invisible gum. Or grinding his teeth.
“Facility is sealed,” he said again, tone neutral. “Protocol 6-C mandates containment over—”
“Don’t you dare throw protocol at me while my people are dying!” Bobby’s voice cracked on the last word. Not from weakness. From fury.
Athena moved to his side instantly. Not restraining him. She never had. She didn’t need to. She just put her hand on his chest, grounding. A tether in the middle of a storm.
“Steady,” she murmured, low enough for only him. “Save the explosion for the part where we blow a hole through this mess.”
Bobby exhaled through his nose. Once. Twice. His gaze didn’t leave Hartman’s.
“You’re condemning them,” he said, voice quieter now but cutting. “That’s not containment. That’s execution.”
Hartman didn’t answer.
Because he didn’t have to.
He turned away, already tapping on another screen.
And that’s when it hit Bobby—they’d already decided. The government. The generals. The brass with no names and no loved ones on the other side of that steel. The moment the blast doors sealed, the rescue plans stopped being drafted. This was a containment mission now. It had always been.
And his team? His kids?
Collateral.
He didn’t feel the tears burning behind his eyes until Athena’s hand shifted slightly, fingers pressing once against his sternum, the silent reminder still clear: We’re not done yet.
Then, the radio crackled.
Static. A hiss. Then—
“Station 118, do you read?”
The voice was unrecognizable at first. Guttural. Sandpaper and blood. But it pierced through the noise like lightning.
Buck.
Bobby turned like a man struck.
“This is Captain Nash,” he barked, snatching the radio. “We read. We’re here.”
More static. A cough. Then Buck’s voice, louder now, trembling with effort but steadier than it had any right to be.
“Tell him to open the damn door!”
Hartman didn’t move. No one responded.
Buck tried again, the edge of desperation peeking through his grit.
“I know you can hear me. I know you’re watching. Just open it. Chim—Chim needs a hospital, and we’re out of time.”
There was silence. The kind that swallowed everything. Bobby could almost see the moment Buck realized the line wasn’t going to get him what he needed.
That no one was coming.
That the people outside—people with power, people with clearance—were choosing not to move.
And then Buck’s voice changed.
Not the pitch. Not the volume.
The weight.
“Tell Bobby…” he started, and then paused. A beat passed. Then: “Tell him… remember the plane crash?”
Bobby blinked. His throat tightened.
“We found the way through with force,” Buck continued. “Not smarts.”
A beat.
Then static.
Then nothing.
Athena froze. Her head turned toward Bobby, sharp and focused, eyes narrowed in a flash of understanding that struck like flint meeting steel.
“That’s not a joke,” she said.
“No,” Bobby replied, already moving.
“It’s a code.”
He didn’t have to explain it. Not to her.
Because they’d lived that day. The plane crash. The worst logistics puzzle of their lives—dozens trapped, time running out, no clear access. They’d tried brains first. Strategy. Maps. All the protocol.
It hadn’t worked.
So they’d bulldozed through instead.
Force over smarts.
Athena grabbed her phone. Already calling in favors. Already putting the right wheels in motion.
Bobby stood taller.
“Moira,” he said. “He’s saying we find her. We get the vial. We do this ourselves.”
“No more asking permission,” Athena agreed.
“No more waiting for orders,” Bobby said.
And just like that, the air shifted.
From suffocation to movement.
From panic to plan.
He turned back to the table. His voice cut through the noise like a blade.
“We need eyes on Dr. Moira Blake. She left the facility less than forty minutes ago. Check exterior cams. Civilian lots. Any heat signature carrying a cooler or tumbler.”
“Sir, we don’t have jurisdiction—” a tech stammered.
“I wasn’t asking,” Bobby snapped.
The technician swallowed and got to work.
Because it didn’t matter anymore. Not the protocol. Not the clearance. Not the rank.
Hope wasn’t sitting behind glass waiting for the system to do the right thing.
Hope was running.
Out there, somewhere, in the hands of a scientist who’d made herself judge and jury.
And it would be torn from her grip by force, if it had to be.
Because that was the plan now.
Not clever. Not clean.
But real.
And somewhere deep inside a sealed lab with the walls bleeding time and loss, Buck—covered in ash and blood, voice shaking, heart breaking—had cracked the silence with a message only Bobby would understand:
I’m still here.
But not for long.
And Bobby would burn the world before he let it be the end.
The lab groaned around them like a dying beast, metal warping ever so slightly in the silence between labored breaths and desperate prayers. Hours had passed—how many, none of them knew. Time wasn’t linear anymore. It pulsed. It swelled and shrank and twisted with every second Chimney’s lungs struggled for air, every minute that passed without help.
The air had turned thick, wet with sweat, blood, and the acidic stench of panic. Fluorescent lights buzzed above them like flies over rot. Once pristine and sterile, the lab was now a battlefield of improvised medicine and bleeding hope.
And Chimney—Chim—lay at the center of it all.
He was a shadow of himself. Pale skin flushed with fever, eyes glassy, blood clinging to his lashes like salt to a wound. His once-talkative mouth barely moved now, lips cracked, smeared red as he rasped in half-sentences that made less sense by the hour. The hemorrhaging had started with a nosebleed, but now it oozed from everywhere—mouth, eyes, even the tiny pinpricks of failed IVs.
Buck sat cross-legged beside him on the icy tile floor, bent over like a penitent at the altar, pressing gauze to Chim’s mouth with one hand while the other gripped a blood-soaked towel. His knuckles were white around the fabric. He changed the gauze every few minutes, because no matter how much pressure he applied, the blood didn’t stop. It just kept coming. Thin and bright and relentless.
The worst part wasn’t the bleeding.
It was the breathing.
Each inhale came with a rattle, each exhale a wheeze. Chim's chest barely rose now, shuddering under the weight of his own body. A film of red sweat coated his skin. His pulse was a flicker at his wrist—there, but barely.
Chim’s response was barely audible, a faint chuckle that ended in a cough and another bloom of crimson across the gauze. “You’re… clingy,” he murmured, slurred and half-gone. “Gotta let me nap…”
Hen stirred from her corner. She had propped herself against the metal cabinet hours ago, her own strength drained after the emergency thoracostomy that had saved her from bleeding out. Her breathing was shallow, chest bandaged, her brow constantly damp with exertion. But she didn’t rest. Not really.
Her eyes stayed locked on Chimney’s form. Her mind was working even when her body failed her.
“We need fluid resuscitation,” she whispered, as if saying it aloud might bend reality in their favor. “His blood pressure’s crashing. He’s heading for shock.”
Maddie, still on the radio, her voice crackling through the static-filled emergency comms, answered with cold, terrible truth wrapped in the echo of heartbreak. “Two to five liters of saline,” she said, clearly reciting from memory, but her voice trembled. “Minimum. Over twenty-four hours. Faster, if we want to stabilize him.”
Buck’s eyes closed. His forehead bowed to Chim’s side like the weight of it all was crushing him.
“We have one bag left,” he said.
The silence after that was nearly unbearable.
Hen coughed weakly, then turned her head toward them, her voice the ghost of a battle cry. “We can make it.”
Buck looked at her like she was delirious. “What?”
Hen pushed herself upright with a grunt, jaw clenched against the pain. “Sodium chloride. Lab-grade. We just need water—purified. If we can sterilize it, if we can get the balance right…”
“That’s insane,” Buck whispered.
“With lab sodium and purified water,” Maddie echoed. “It’s possible. It is. You’ll need to calculate osmolarity—Maddie’s voice picked up speed, urgency bleeding into hope—“About nine grams of NaCl per liter. The ratio has to be exact. You can do this, Buck.”
His brain stuttered under the weight of it. He wasn’t a chemist. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a firefighter. A search-and-rescue guy. A guy who ran into burning buildings and carried people out over his shoulder.
But none of that mattered now.
Because Chim was dying.
And Buck would rather kill himself with the wrong solution than sit and watch the light fade from Chim’s eyes without doing everything.
He wiped his hands—already streaked with dried blood—on his pants and stood. His legs shook. Not from exhaustion, but from adrenaline, fear, grief so thick it pooled in his gut.
“Ravi,” he called, and the kid was already moving.
Ravi hadn’t spoken in over an hour. Not since his breakdown. Not since Buck had grabbed him and reminded him that breaking wasn’t an option. But his hands still trembled, his face still ghost-white.
Still, he moved.
Together, they found the cabinet, and Buck’s fingers traced the labels on each container like he could will the right one into his grasp.
Sodium chloride. Sealed. Pure.
Check.
Then the water—distilled, triple filtered, unused.
Check.
Beakers. Glass stir rods. Bunsen burner. Thermometer. Test strips.
Check.
Buck moved like he was defusing a bomb. Because in a way, he was.
“Tell me again,” he said hoarsely, eyes not leaving the counter.
“Nine grams per liter,” Maddie whispered. “That’s 0.9% solution. Isotonic. Any more, and you’ll pull fluid from his cells. Any less, and it won’t hydrate him fast enough.”
Buck nodded once. He measured out the salt on a digital scale, his hands steady even though his heart thundered like a war drum in his chest. Each granule fell like snow into the water, and then he stirred. Slowly. Carefully.
The burner hissed to life, a blue flame flickering under the beaker as they brought the solution to a boil.
“You know,” Chimney rasped behind him, voice barely above a whisper, “when I said I wanted to die in the line of duty, this wasn’t… what I meant.”
Buck didn’t look back.
He couldn’t.
Not yet.
Because the tears were right there, waiting. And he couldn’t let them fall. Not while the burner flared, not while the solution turned clear, not while Maddie recited numbers like rosary beads, her voice shaking, her breath hitching between words.
They sterilized the tubing. Filtered the solution three times. Let it cool. Tested the pH. Tested it again.
When it was ready, Buck filled the IV bag himself. Every drop was sacred. Every drop was borrowed time.
He knelt again beside Chimney and slipped the needle into the vein that barely pulsed beneath the skin. Chim’s arm was cold, clammy, trembling. Buck held his breath as the fluid began to flow.
Clear.
Slow.
Steady.
The IV line trembled slightly as it pulsed into Chimney’s arm.
And Chim… kept breathing.
Not better.
But still.
A breath. Another.
No improvement. But no decline.
And in that stillness, something fragile bloomed in the silence.
Not hope. Not yet.
But maybe the first whisper of it.
Buck exhaled, eyes falling shut for just a second.
“We’re not done,” he said, half to himself, half to Chim. “You’re not allowed to go out like this, okay?”
Chimney didn’t answer.
But his chest kept moving.
And for now, that was enough.
It didn’t make a sound.
Not at first.
One second, Ravi was there—right there—standing beside Buck, handing over a pipette, fingers trembling, but precise. His lips were pale, the sweat on his forehead reflecting the sickly overhead lights. He looked tired. Shaky. But they all did. And there were more important things to focus on. Chimney. Hen. The IV. The saline drip still ticking down like the beat of a war drum measuring seconds in borrowed time.
Then Ravi’s knees buckled.
There was no warning, no shout, no cry of alarm—just the sudden and sickening thud of a body hitting the floor.
Buck spun at the noise, something primal snapping through his spine, a bolt of electricity jolting him forward.
“Ravi?”
The kid didn’t answer.
Buck was already at his side, skidding on knees that bruised instantly against the unforgiving tile. Ravi lay on his side, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath him, the other twitching slightly as if trying to reach for something that wasn’t there.
“Ravi!” Buck barked, louder this time, louder than anything in the lab had been since the doors sealed shut. He grabbed his shoulders, rolled him gently onto his back, eyes scanning his face, then dropping to his chest.
He wasn’t breathing right.
No blood.
No visible trauma.
Just… no air.
“Ravi, come on, look at me, stay with me—Ravi!”
Nothing.
Not even a flinch.
Hen groaned from her corner, dragging herself up with one hand against the cabinet like her bones were filled with glass. “Is it the virus?” she rasped, fear lancing through her voice like shrapnel.
Buck’s hands faltered.
Because of course it could be.
It had to be.
Another symptom, another stage—whatever this thing was, it didn’t follow the rules. And Ravi had been right there with them. Exposed. Vulnerable. Alive, and now—
“Check his oxygen tank!” Maddie’s voice sliced through the chaos like a siren, sharp and immediate and laced with a kind of desperation Buck wasn’t used to hearing from her. “Check it now, Buck!”
He spun, eyes latching onto the tank Ravi had slung over his shoulder for hours, just like the rest of them. He reached for it with trembling hands, fingers fumbling over the gauge—
Red.
Not low.
Empty.
“Shit,” Buck gasped, and the word cracked open something in the room. It echoed off the walls, bounced off the steel tables, rang out over the hiss of the IV and the endless pounding of his heart.
“He’s not infected,” Maddie said quickly, her voice closer to breath than speech now. “It’s hypoxia. Oxygen deprivation. Buck, he’s been breathing thin air for hours. That tank’s dry—he’s suffocating.”
Buck’s hands were already moving. He turned Ravi’s head, opened his airway, tilted his chin. But Ravi was deadweight. Pale. His lips tinged with cyanosis. His body limp as cloth.
“Dammit, dammit—come on!”
Panic pressed in on Buck’s chest like a lead weight, but he shoved it down. Locked it up. Buried it beneath the only thing he had left: purpose. A decade of emergencies compressed into a single instinct.
He looked up. Scanned the lab like it was burning and the only way out was through.
Broken pipes. Detached tubing. Bent metal grates. The wall unit—a backup air source for hazmat suits. He remembered it from the intake orientation. Constant stream. Filtered. Clean. Not much pressure, but it was something. Something.
“Maddie,” he said, breathless and frantic, “the lab’s air line system—those backup feeds. They run filtered air to the pressure suits, right?”
“Yes!” she said without hesitation. “Yes, exactly! If the valves aren’t broken, you can reroute one—jerry-rig it to mimic tank flow—”
Buck didn’t wait for the rest.
He ran.
Across the lab, grabbing tools as he moved—an abandoned screwdriver, a piece of wire, a length of plastic tubing coiled in a drawer. The emergency air valve was behind a locked panel, but Buck had long since run out of patience for locks. He stabbed the crowbar into the seam, wrenched, screamed as the metal refused to yield—and then screamed louder as it did, the panel crashing open with a howl of protest and a spray of sparks.
The valve hissed at him, half-detached, rusted from disuse.
“Don’t care,” Buck muttered through clenched teeth, wrenching at the coupling with both hands. He tore the tubing free, ripped the housing open, exposed the filter. Everything was covered in dust and grit, but he blew it clear, shoved the tubing into Ravi’s empty tank like a soldier stuffing gauze into a wound.
It didn’t fit.
Of course it didn’t.
Buck growled—animal and furious—and jammed it in, twisting, bending, cracking the metal until he could tape it closed with trembling hands. Duct tape. Always duct tape. The edges leaked air. The seal wasn’t perfect.
But the tank hissed.
The valve hissed.
And Ravi—
Ravi breathed.
His chest stuttered once, shallow and sharp, but it moved. Then again. A gasp. A twitch.
Buck’s head dropped forward in a rush of motion, forehead pressing to Ravi’s shoulder as his entire body sagged with relief that threatened to drown him. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t even hold the screwdriver anymore. It clattered to the floor beside him like a gun dropped after battle.
Across the lab, Hen closed her eyes in exhausted, broken relief. Her hand fell back to her lap, breath catching in her throat.
Maddie’s voice, crackling softly in Buck’s ear, was thick with tears. “MacGyver… indeed.”
No one laughed.
Not really.
But for the first time in hours, they all breathed.
Buck sank fully to the floor, his hands bloody, his arms aching, his mind running on fumes. His eyes burned. His whole body ached in a way that wasn’t physical—wasn’t tangible—but deep. Hollow. Like something had been scooped out of him and replaced with fire and steel and raw instinct.
He looked at Ravi’s face—pale, yes, still worn and wrung dry—but alive. Breathing.
And that was enough.
In this place filled with sickness and silence and slow, bleeding deaths, Evan Buckley had reached into nothing and pulled life out with his bare hands.
Not magic.
Not miracles.
Just him.
And what they had.
And what they used.
And now, one more heartbeat echoed in the dark.
The lab didn’t hum anymore. The machines had quieted. The air vents had gone still. Even the faint hiss of oxygen through the makeshift rigs Buck had built had dulled to a background murmur—white noise in a room now painted in the aftershock of survival. And that was the problem. The silence wasn’t peace. It wasn’t safety. It was heavy, suffocating, the kind of silence that dragged your own heartbeat to the front of your ears and made your thoughts spiral until they weren’t thoughts anymore—just echoes of every fear, every doubt, every moment of failure you couldn’t take back.
Ravi sat beneath that weight like it was a punishment. A sentence. Not on trial—convicted.
His legs were pulled halfway toward his chest, the fabric of his bunker gear torn and stained with soot and blood that wasn’t his. He held his elbows tightly against his ribs, his chest rising and falling in measured rhythm beneath the steady stream of air now feeding through his reworked oxygen mask. The tank sat beside him like a ghost that hadn’t been there when he needed it—like a reminder that he’d almost died without it. That it might’ve been the difference between waking and… not.
But Ravi was awake.
And alive.
And he couldn’t lift his eyes.
Buck had just finished adjusting the last oxygen rig, hands raw from gripping twisted metal and duct tape, shoulders aching from bending over too many times, too fast, too hard. His own tank was working, sealed just tightly enough to give him the air he needed, but not enough to keep the pounding headache at bay. The kind of headache born from too much adrenaline crashing into too much grief.
He turned and saw Ravi, curled small, shoulders caved inward like a building too long under siege.
Buck sat down without a word. Across from him. Not too close. Not too far. Arms resting on his knees. He didn’t speak—not yet. He just let the quiet settle between them, let the ghosts scream and fall silent, let the air run out of the panic.
It was Ravi who broke it. Voice low, so soft it barely cleared the distance.
“I thought I was dying.”
The words didn’t ripple through the room—they cut. Sharp. Bare. Honest in a way most people didn’t know how to be, not even here, not even now.
Buck didn’t speak. He didn’t comfort. He just listened.
“And when I passed out,” Ravi continued, “when I felt my lungs stop working, when I was too far away to say anything… I didn’t just think I was dying—I knew I was.” His throat worked around the next words like they tasted like rust and fear. “And I thought… if there’d only been one dose of that antiviral. If there’d only been one cure. I wouldn’t have gotten it.”
His fingers curled into the fabric at his knees. “I knew that.”
Buck’s breath caught, just for a moment.
“I wouldn’t have deserved it. I haven’t been here as long. I’m not the one with kids, or—Hen’s a doctor. Chim’s a father. You’re—” Ravi stopped, swallowed hard, didn’t finish.
“I get it,” he whispered. “And I don’t think I could’ve blamed anyone.”
The silence that followed was deeper than before. Because now it wasn’t empty. It was full. With grief. With guilt. With the kind of self-loathing that didn’t shout but whispered—you are the expendable one.
Buck closed his eyes.
Just for a second.
Just long enough to inhale.
Long enough to choose how he was going to answer.
When he opened them again, he leaned forward slowly, like the floor beneath them could break if he moved too fast. Until he was closer. Until Ravi couldn’t pretend he hadn’t been heard.
Then Buck spoke, steady and clear, the weight of steel in his voice.
“Stop.”
It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t harsh.
It was solid.
A wall. A shield. A line drawn between Ravi and the abyss.
“You don’t get to decide who’s worth saving,” Buck said, locking eyes with him now. “That’s not your job. That’s never been your job.”
Ravi blinked, startled—not by the words, but by how steady Buck sounded. How certain.
“That’s mine. That’s Bobby’s. That’s all of ours. You don’t get to choose to step out of the line because you think someone else is more worthy. You don’t get to make yourself the one left behind.”
Ravi’s jaw trembled.
“But—”
“No,” Buck said, voice firmer now. “You listen to me.”
He scooted closer. Not to intimidate. To ground. To anchor.
“You think this team is just about years of service? Or skills on paper? You think family’s about who’s earned the most stripes? We don’t measure each other like that, Ravi.”
Buck’s hand landed gently on his shoulder. Strong. Not shaking.
“You’ve been beside me in fire. In collapse. In scenes where we thought no one would walk away. You’ve pulled people out of cars with your bare hands. You’ve run toward explosions when everyone else was running away. You’ve been here.”
Ravi’s eyes were wide now. Wet.
“And you don’t see it, but we do. Every time you showed up. Every time you stood next to us and didn’t run. That’s worth. That’s all the damn worth I need.”
Ravi’s breath hitched.
“But if I wasn’t enough—if I wasn’t the one people fought for—what does that say about me?”
Buck didn’t hesitate.
“It says you’re human. It says you’re scared. And it says that you’ve been taught to believe you have to earn being saved.”
He leaned in closer.
“But you don’t. You already are.”
There was a beat—one second, then two—where neither of them moved.
Then Ravi broke.
Not in a collapse. Not in a scream.
Just a single, quiet sob, escaping from his throat like he hadn’t let himself feel it until now. His shoulders curled forward. His hands came up, covering his face. And the silence that followed wasn’t empty this time.
It was safe.
It held him.
Buck didn’t pull away. Didn’t let go. He stayed right there, grounded against the floor, hand still resting on Ravi’s shoulder, the two of them breathing in tandem. Alive. Together.
After a long while, Ravi sniffed, instinctively went to wipe his eyes with the back of a soot-smeared glove causing a broken laugh from both of them when he just hit his hand on his mask, and leaned his head against the cold metal wall behind him. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
Buck leaned back again, his limbs dragging with exhaustion. The pain in his ribs flared. His eyes burned. But something inside him—a pressure, a guilt, a weight he hadn’t known he was carrying—had eased.
They sat in that silence for a long time.
Because in a place where every second had been a battle, this—this quiet, this unspoken truth, this fragile, shared moment of survival—felt like a kind of victory.
Not the kind you cheered for.
The kind you held.
Because sometimes, survival wasn’t just about staying alive.
Sometimes, it was about reminding someone they deserved to.
The low, relentless beep of the heart monitor filled the lab like a ticking clock, counting down to something Buck refused to name. The light was dim, fluorescent bulbs buzzing in the ceiling, and every surface seemed smudged with fingerprints, blood, or the desperate grime of too many long hours spent clawing against inevitability. The air was heavy—too heavy—even with the duct-taped oxygen lines. A cloying, metallic weight that sat on Buck’s tongue, made every breath feel like breathing through mud.
He was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, hunched forward as he worked with trembling fingers to change Chimney’s IV bag. The clear fluid inside was the only thing keeping Chim tethered to this side of the line, and even that was slipping away like sand between grasping hands. Buck’s hands, stained and cracked, never stopped moving—checking Chim’s pulse, adjusting the flow rate, brushing sweat-drenched hair from his burning forehead. It was a frantic, trembling ballet of denial. Of defiance.
Chimney’s breathing had grown weaker. Shallow, reedy pulls of air that rattled inside his chest like a broken engine stuttering toward its final breath. Every now and then, a wet, brutal cough would wrack his body, and more blood would bubble up at the corners of his mouth, staining his lips and chin, dark and angry against his fever-flushed skin.
Buck’s heart broke a little more each time.
He whispered encouragements—nonsense words, half-prayers, half-pleas—under his breath. "Hang on, Chim. Just a little longer. Just keep breathing. Just one more minute, one more second—hold on, hold on."
The words felt hollow in the growing weight of the room.
Hen had fallen into a shallow, uneasy sleep propped against the cabinet, her face pinched in pain even in unconsciousness. Ravi busied himself in the far corner, double-checking oxygen levels, repositioning gear that didn't need repositioning—anything to stay moving, to not have to look too closely at the reality bleeding out in front of them.
And then, without warning, a hand—cold, trembling—latched onto Buck’s wrist.
Buck jerked in surprise, eyes snapping down to Chimney’s pale, sweat-slicked face. Chim’s grip was weak, but determined, his knuckles ghost-white with the effort of holding on.
Buck bent low immediately, instinct overriding thought. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m here. You’re okay. Just breathe, Chim, just—”
But Chim shook his head minutely, his dry, cracked lips parting with agonizing slowness.
“If I don’t make it…”
The words were more air than sound, but they hit Buck like a hammer to the chest.
"No." Buck’s voice broke on the word, sharp and desperate. His free hand came up automatically, covering Chim’s hand, trying to still it, trying to anchor them both. "No, don't. Don’t talk like that. You're gonna make it, you hear me? You're—"
Chim tightened his grip, surprising in its sudden ferocity. His dark eyes pinned Buck in place, all the softness, all the kindness burned away by the clarity of a man who knew. Knew the shape of death. Knew the taste of goodbye.
"Promise me," Chim rasped.
Buck shook his head wildly, eyes stinging. "No, Chim, no, no—"
"Promise me," Chim repeated, more forceful now, each syllable dragged from his lungs like a knife slicing through him.
Buck froze. His body, his soul, froze. Because there was something final in Chimney’s gaze. Not panic. Not despair.
Acceptance.
And worse—trust.
“Maddie,” Chim whispered, barely clinging to the edge of consciousness now. “Jee-Yun. They need someone who knows. Who won't leave. Who understands what this life costs.”
He swallowed, the motion jagged and painful. His hand was still clamped around Buck’s wrist, as if he could force the promise into him through sheer will.
“Someone who loves them like I do,” Chim continued, breath hitching, eyes bright with a grief deeper than the sickness devouring him, “but who isn’t me.”
Buck felt something deep inside himself tear.
He wanted to argue. To refuse. To promise that Chimney would be there to see Jee-Yun’s first day of school, to dance with Maddie at Jee’s wedding, to grow old and ornery and stubborn with them. He wanted to fight it with everything in him.
But Chim deserved better than lies.
Buck blinked hard, his vision blurring.
"You..." he started, voice cracking into broken pieces. "You're the one who—who keeps me grounded, Chim."
Chim managed a faint, exhausted smile. That familiar, lopsided grin that had always been more home than any building Buck had ever lived in.
"I've done enough rescues," Chim murmured, the barest shadow of humor and regret in his voice, "to know when the timer’s up."
The monitor beside them beeped steadily, pitilessly, indifferent to the devastation it was witnessing.
Buck bowed his head. His chest heaved with the effort to hold everything in—grief, rage, love—battling like storm waves against his ribs.
He wanted to scream. To tear down the lab with his bare hands. To break the world apart until it gave Chim back.
Instead, with fingers that barely stopped shaking, Buck gripped Chim's hand in both of his.
He squeezed back.
He looked into Chim’s fever-bright eyes.
And he nodded.
Just once.
A silent vow. A blood-deep promise. An impossible burden he would carry until his body broke under the weight of it.
Chim's hand relaxed a little at that.
And Buck, shaking, bleeding, choking on the bitterness of it, sat there on the cold, dirty floor, holding onto his brother, and to the last promise he never wanted to have to make.
The silence settled around them again—not empty, not lonely.
Sacred.
Because some promises weren't made in churches or before crowds.
Some promises were made in broken labs, between brothers, in the final beats of a heart that refused to stop loving even as it prepared to let go.
And Buck carried it—carries it still.
Because that's what love demands.
That's what family demands.
That's what Chimney had asked for, with the last of his strength.
And what Buck had promised, with all of his.
Buck didn’t hesitate. His hands, still trembling with adrenaline and exhaustion, moved with a kind of reckless precision born only of desperation. He grabbed the tablet off the counter where it had been abandoned earlier—streaked with blood, dust, fingerprints—and initiated the call before his mind could catch up with his body. His fingers fumbled across the cracked glass, leaving smudges where the cuts on his knuckles bled freely.
It rang once.
Twice.
And then Maddie’s face filled the screen.
She looked wrecked. Her hair was pulled back hastily, wisps sticking to her tearstreaked cheeks. Her eyes, rimmed raw and red, widened when she saw Buck’s face, the grim set of his jaw, the devastation in his gaze.
And then she saw Chimney.
The sound she made wasn’t a word. It was a gasp punched straight from the hollow of her chest, a raw, instinctive sound that hurt to hear.
“Howard…”
Buck shifted quickly, moving to kneel by Chim’s head, angling the tablet so Chimney could see her. So he could hear her. So he could stay.
Chim’s eyes fluttered open at the sound of her voice. Even now, even here—on the edge of everything—the mention of her name, the sight of her face, summoned him back from whatever brink he hovered on. His dry, cracked lips twitched upward in a smile so faint it might have been a hallucination if Buck hadn’t seen it himself.
Maddie started talking immediately. It didn’t matter what—memories, jokes, a silly story about Jee-Yun refusing to wear matching socks because "Dada doesn’t either." She talked and talked, voice wobbling but determined, as if her words alone could spin a rope strong enough to pull Chimney back from the darkness clawing at his heels.
And Chim listened. God, he listened—his fingers twitching slightly against the cold, dirty floor, like he was reaching through the glass to touch her. To anchor himself.
Buck held the tablet steady with both hands, willing Chim to hold on. To keep breathing. To keep fighting.
And for a moment, it felt like it might be enough.
Until Chim started to bleed.
It began with a thin trickle from his nose, sliding unnoticed at first down his cheek. Then a slow, ugly seep from the corners of his mouth.
Then—suddenly—everything.
A gush of blood, violent and unstoppable, spilling from his nose, his mouth, dribbling down his chin, soaking his shirt, pooling onto the floor in thick, sickening rivulets.
Maddie screamed.
The tablet slipped from Buck’s hands, clattering to the floor with a sharp crack. Maddie’s voice, frantic and broken, continued to shout from where it lay—"BUCK—BUCK DO SOMETHING—"
But Buck was already moving, catching Chim’s head with blood-slick hands, tipping it gently to the side so he wouldn’t choke. His heart was a thunderous roar in his ears, drowning out everything except the frantic, primal need to save him.
He grabbed gauze—what little clean gauze they had left—and pressed it to Chim’s face. Blood soaked through it instantly, seeping between his fingers. He ripped it away, replaced it with another piece. Again. And again. And again.
Nothing stemmed the flow.
The blood was everywhere now. Staining Buck’s arms, his chest, his knees where he knelt in it. Chim’s body jerked weakly beneath his touch, wracked with desperate, rattling coughs that only forced more blood from his ravaged lungs.
"Come on, Chim, stay with me, please," Buck begged, voice hoarse and breaking.
He needed help. He needed—
“Flush it!” Hen’s voice cut through the chaos, slurred but fierce. Her head lifted weakly from where she slumped against the cabinet. “Cold water—flush the vessels. Slow the bleeding—”
Buck snapped to attention, his mind latching onto the words like a drowning man to a rope.
No sterile tubing. No medical-grade tools.
Just what they had.
What we have, we use.
He tore through the supplies, grabbing a cracked beaker, a half-melted bottle from the emergency kit, duct tape. His hands worked frantically, assembling a crude irrigation system—the kind you’d use to rinse out chemical burns or contaminated wounds, but warped, bastardized into something to save Chimney’s life.
He jammed the cracked nozzle against the sterile water reservoir they’d used earlier, jerry-rigging it together with tape and sheer force of will. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even good.
But it was something.
He positioned it carefully, his fingers slippery and shaking, and started the flow.
A cold, steady stream of water coursed over Chim’s face, washing the blood away in rivulets. It was crude, harsh, but the cold shocked Chim’s battered blood vessels, constricting them, slowing the bleeding by degrees.
Buck worked with ruthless focus, adjusting the angle, the pressure, murmuring broken reassurances to Chimney even as tears streaked his own blood-smeared face.
"It’s okay, Chim. I’ve got you. I’ve got you."
Maddie’s voice continued to sob and plead from the tablet, Ravi hovered frozen in the background, pale and trembling, his hands flexing helplessly at his sides.
Buck didn’t look away. Didn’t let himself falter.
The blood began to slow.
First a torrent.
Then a river.
Then a trickle.
The water ran clearer, the color leeching from crimson to pink to almost nothing at all.
Chimney’s gasps eased, rattling less with every precious, grueling second.
Buck didn’t move until he was sure—absolutely sure—that Chim was still breathing, still clinging to life.
Only then did he slump backwards, crashing against the lab wall in a boneless heap, his arms falling to his sides like dead weight. His entire body was coated in blood and water, the chill of it sinking into his clothes, his skin, his very bones.
His head tipped back against the wall, eyes sliding shut for a moment as he simply breathed.
And then he whispered, so softly he wasn’t sure anyone else would even hear:
"You’re still here."
The words cracked in his throat, raw with gratitude and terror and exhaustion so profound it hollowed him out from the inside.
"You’re still here."
Not triumph.
Not victory.
Just the truth.
The only truth that mattered.
In a world that had been reduced to blood and steel and fear, in a moment where every heartbeat was a miracle—
They were still here.
And Buck held onto that with everything he had left.
The air inside the military command tent was thick enough to choke on. Not with smoke or dust—but with something more suffocating: frustration. Rage. Helplessness.
Athena Grant-Nash stood ramrod straight beside Bobby, her fists curled so tight at her sides that her fingernails dug painful half-moons into her palms. Bobby was pacing again, the worn soles of his boots scuffing against the industrial carpeting, the movement twitchy and restless like a panther caged too long.
Across from them stood Colonel Hartman, cool and unyielding in his pressed uniform, his arms crossed as if to physically block any more conversation. His words were razor-sharp but dull with repetition, the same lifeless refrain they had heard a dozen times already.
“There are protocols, Captain. Civilian rescue is secondary to containment.”
Bobby stopped pacing. His head turned slowly, his face set in something far more terrifying than open fury—a cold, calculating stillness. The kind that spoke of something older than anger. Deeper than grief.
“There are lives,” Bobby said, his voice a low rumble of thunder before a storm. “And if you think I’m going to stand here while my kid dies behind glass—then you don’t know me at all.”
The tent seemed to still around him, the radio static, the low murmur of tactical operators, all fading into background noise.
Athena caught his eye, and in that look—a heartbeat of connection, of shared resolve—they spoke a thousand words without saying anything at all.
Enough.
Enough sitting on their hands.
Enough waiting for permission that was never going to come.
They moved as one.
Without ceremony. Without speeches.
They slipped from the command zone with practiced ease, their departure disguised as necessity—just two more exhausted first responders stepping out for air. No one stopped them. No one dared.
They didn’t speak until they were well away from the tent, the cool night air slicing sharp against their overheated skin.
Athena pulled out her phone. Bobby already had the truck keys in his hand. They didn’t need a plan laid out in steps. They only needed momentum. Urgency. Fire in their veins.
First stop: Moria Blake’s house.
It was almost laughable, how easily Athena maneuvered through the loose perimeter. A badge still opened doors, after all, and a calm, authoritative voice could do the rest. She slid up beside the crime scene techs like she belonged there—because she did—and began asking the right questions, nodding at the right times, offering the right words to lower their guard.
In a matter of minutes, while the techs were distracted cataloging broken vials and scattered research notes, Athena deftly palmed the SD card from one of their cameras—the one holding the freshest batch of photos.
She tucked it into her jacket without a flicker of hesitation.
Outside, Bobby waited behind the wheel of the truck, engine idling. His leg bounced anxiously as he watched the house through the windshield, hands gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled force.
Athena climbed in, slammed the door shut, and said only, “Drive.”
And he did.
They cut across the city in silence, tension strung tight between them. Not anger at each other—never that—but the shared fury at a world where doing the right thing had become an act of rebellion.
They pulled up in front of Hen and Karen’s house, the porch light a small, defiant beacon in the darkness.
Karen answered the door in her robe, her hair piled in a messy bun, a look of surprise quickly smothered by sharp focus when she saw the expression on their faces.
No explanation was needed.
They crowded into the dining room, Karen’s laptop booting up in seconds. Athena slid the stolen SD card across the table with a flick of her wrist.
Karen, to her credit, didn’t even ask. She simply popped it into the reader, pulling up the high-resolution crime scene photos.
The images bloomed on the screen: Moria’s house, sterile and cold, the signs of a rushed departure evident even to an untrained eye. Toppled chairs. Papers still fluttering where they'd been scattered. A suitcase half-packed and abandoned.
Karen leaned closer, clicking through the images with quick, efficient movements.
“She didn’t live here,” Karen said after a moment, almost to herself. “I mean—physically, yes. But not really. There’s no life here. No clutter. No mess. Everything’s curated. Even the food in the fridge is staged. Like she wanted it to look lived-in.”
Athena frowned, arms crossed. “She knew she was going to run.”
Karen nodded. “And she wasn’t worried about what she left behind. She didn’t think she’d need it.”
They stared at the screen a moment longer, absorbing the shape of Moria’s life—or the lack of it.
Then Karen paused on a wall of photos.
Dozens of them.
Selfies, magazine covers, staged awards ceremonies. All of them the same theme: scientists, doctors, pioneers of biotech. The “rockstars of modern medicine.”
Bobby leaned in, his brow furrowing.
“She idolized them,” Karen said quietly. “Worshipped them. Wanted to be one of them.”
Athena’s stomach twisted as the realization slid into place, slick and ugly.
“She didn’t want to cure anything,” Athena said, voice low. “She wanted to be the hero. To be the one who saved everyone.”
Karen’s mouth tightened. “And to do that... she needed a disaster.”
It hit them all at once, the monstrous scope of it.
Moria hadn’t just been negligent.
She’d wanted someone to get infected. To spark a new crisis. To make herself the savior standing tall over the ashes.
Athena’s phone buzzed sharply in her pocket, cutting through the horror of the moment.
She snatched it up, listening intently to the voice on the other end—one of the beat cops she trusted, a good kid who still believed in doing the job right.
The APB Athena had put out earlier—quietly, unofficially—had landed.
Moria’s known associate’s car had been spotted, parked outside a nondescript building downtown.
Not a house. Not a hideout.
Martel-Harvey Pharmaceuticals.
Private. Powerful. State-of-the-art.
Exactly the kind of place someone like Moria would run to when the walls closed in.
Athena ended the call and met Bobby’s eyes.
“They found her,” she said, her voice deadly calm.
Bobby nodded once, his hand tightening around the steering wheel like he could already feel the fight ahead of them.
Karen caught Athena’s arm before they left.
“Be careful,” she said, fierce and aching. “Come home.”
Athena squeezed her hand once, a promise etched in her touch.
And then they were moving again—faster now, the city blurring around them.
They weren’t agents of the law anymore. Not tonight.
They were something older. Something harder.
Family, fighting for family.
Rules be damned.
The building loomed in front of them, all gleaming glass and steel under the dying light of evening, the polished face of corporate ambition masking the frantic desperation inside. Athena and Bobby approached with careful strides, blending into the night shadows, their hearts pounding in rhythm with every step. They moved low, keeping close to the side entrance, knowing that every second they delayed could be the difference between salvation and too late. The army wasn’t far behind them. The FBI, hungrier for jurisdiction than justice, would come slamming through the front doors any moment now. They had minutes—if that.
Above them, lights gleamed on the third floor. Through the paneled windows of a conference room, Athena spotted her—a spectral figure made flesh.
Moira Blake.
Hair scraped back into a tight knot, her lab coat long gone, businesslike in a crisp blouse. She stood poised in front of a biotech executive, her face a portrait of false sincerity, but her posture was wired with tension. In one hand, she cradled it—a tumbler that glittered under the fluorescent lights, ordinary at a glance, but so precious that the very air seemed to bend around it.
“One dose,” Moira said, her voice carrying just faintly through the walls, filtered through Athena’s radio. “The only one. You want the patent? Pay me first.”
Her voice was bright. Eager. A child dangling candy just beyond reach.
The executive, a silver-haired man in an expensive tailored suit, smiled thinly. He was older, shrewder. His eyes flicked to the tumbler once—sharp, calculating. Then he nodded slowly and murmured something they couldn’t catch.
A moment later, he excused himself with all the calm of a man stepping out for coffee.
As soon as he left the room, Athena and Bobby exchanged a look.
It was time.
They pressed inside through an auxiliary staircase, bypassing the elevators and silent alarms. As they moved, Athena’s radio crackled in her ear—the dispatcher’s voice, urgent.
“Be advised, suspect spotted at Martel-Harvey Pharmaceuticals. Backup en route.”
Too slow. Too late.
They were already here.
The biotech executive met them at the landing outside Conference Room B, his face pale under the artificial light. He didn’t ask questions. He just pointed.
“She’s locked inside,” he whispered hoarsely. “I called 911. I didn’t know who else—”
“You did the right thing,” Athena said sharply, already moving.
Bobby didn’t hesitate. He shouldered the door with the full force of a firefighter built by two decades of throwing himself through walls.
The door cracked open violently, slamming into the opposite wall with a crash.
Inside, Moira was halfway across the room, a cup of coffee in one hand, a half-eaten bagel in the other, startled eyes whipping toward them.
She reacted fast—too fast.
The coffee and bagel clattered to the table as she spun, reaching instinctively toward the sleek, silver water cooler stationed against the far wall.
Bobby was faster.
He lunged forward, a wall of momentum, aiming to tackle her—but Athena was already there, gun drawn in a split-second motion, her voice slicing through the room like a blade.
“Don’t move!”
Moira froze, her hand trembling inches from the cooler.
Bobby didn’t wait. He dropped to his knees, yanking open the lower cabinet of the cooler, heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his fingertips.
Plastic insulation. Layers of packaging. And buried beneath it all—he found it.
The tumbler. Sealed. Untouched.
He pulled it free, cradling it like a relic, barely daring to breathe.
“Got it,” Bobby whispered, awe and grim triumph tangled in his voice.
Athena exhaled slowly, gun still trained steady on Moira.
For a heartbeat, a rare, precious moment of stillness stretched between them.
A second to believe maybe—just maybe—they’d won.
Then came the sound.
Footsteps. Heavy. Rushing. Ascending the stairwell fast.
Bobby stiffened instinctively. Athena shifted her stance.
Agent Santos was close.
They weren’t alone anymore.
Athena flicked her eyes to Bobby, her unspoken question filling the space between them like an electric charge. Was this it? Was this where they made their stand? Where they handed over the vial, let the system play God with their family’s lives?
Bobby didn’t even look up from where he was zip-tying Moira’s wrists behind her back with harsh, practiced efficiency.
“They can arrest me after I save my team,” he said, his voice a promise carved in stone.
That was all Athena needed.
“Rooftop,” she hissed, already moving.
The building’s internal alarms howled to life, shrill and echoing down the sterile corridors. Red emergency lights began to strobe, turning the white walls into a blood-colored kaleidoscope. Security protocols triggered—the hiss of magnetic locks, the slam of reinforced doors.
Santos’ furious voice echoed behind them, distorted over the intercoms.
“All units—seal the exits! Stop them at all costs!”
But Athena and Bobby didn’t head for the exits.
They went up.
The stairwell was a blur of concrete and metal, the hiss of their breath loud in their own ears. Bobby half-dragged, half-propelled Moira up the stairs, the woman stumbling and cursing but never truly fighting—too much a coward at heart to risk her life for her pride.
Flight after flight, step after step, until the rooftop door loomed ahead, battered steel lit in flickering crimson.
Athena shouldered it open.
The night swallowed them whole.
The rooftop was a windswept plain, empty save for the mechanical hum of HVAC units and the yawning open sky. And from that sky—it came.
The roar of helicopter blades.
The chopper dipped low, fighting the turbulent currents, spotlights swinging wildly across the rooftop. Dust and debris kicked up in choking clouds.
At the helm—Tommy Kinard.
His face appeared behind the glass, grinning with a weariness that somehow still managed to look fond.
"I always knew you’d get me fired someday!" he shouted down over the roar, a laugh in his voice even as he shook his head at Bobby.
"By your hand or not, Cap!"
Athena wasted no time.
Tommy swung the helicopter in closer.
A rope ladder unraveled from the open side door, snaking down like a lifeline from the heavens.
Bobby shoved Moira toward the ladder first, rough but not cruel, a man doing what he had to do. She scrambled up, cursing and trembling, but she climbed.
And then—one by one—they climbed.
Bobby was the last.
He looked back once—just once—at the rooftop, the flashing lights below, the gathering soldiers pouring from the building like ants.
And then he climbed, gripping the rope with hands bloodied by sacrifice and grit and something stronger than all the rules that had tried to chain him.
Family.
Hope.
Defiance.
And as the helicopter lifted into the night, carrying them toward the uncertain, desperate future waiting beyond the city skyline. Only one thought crossed his mind.
Rules be damned.
They were still fighting.
And they weren't finished yet.
The rotors screamed above the Los Angeles skyline, tearing through the honeyed dusk like blades cleaving through silk. The city beneath them was a smear of gold and fire, distant sirens echoing off endless miles of concrete. Tommy Kinard gripped the flight controls tighter than he had in years, every muscle in his body vibrating with tension, with defiance, with sheer bloody-minded willpower to get this bird and these people exactly where they needed to be.
Behind him, the cabin was a storm barely contained.
Bobby Nash sat planted firmly on the floor, knees braced wide, one hand locked around the antiviral as if it were a living thing trying to escape him. His other hand was clenched in a fist so tight his knuckles had turned a startling shade of bone-white. Blood still marred the sleeves of his jacket, dried in streaks from earlier, from the battles fought to get this far. His jaw was set in stone, eyes unflinching as he stared out the window at the flashing lights beginning to converge below them like vultures scenting a kill.
In the far corner, Moira Blake sat seething. Her wrists were bound, but her mouth was free, and though she hadn't spoken a word since the rooftop, the venom leaking from her glare was palpable. She sat like a dethroned monarch, like a woman who had gambled everything and lost it all in the final hand. Her lips pressed into a thin line; her shoulders rolled back in a posture that screamed defiance even in defeat. She didn’t tremble. She didn’t cry. She burned, quiet and vengeful.
The radio sputtered to life again, crackling through the tension like a whip across raw skin.
“LAFD helicopter #12, this is U.S. Army Command. You are ordered to divert and land immediately. Repeat—immediate compliance required or you will be grounded.”
Tommy didn’t bother replying. He simply thumbed the volume down and shot Bobby a sardonic, world-weary look. A soldier’s look. A brother’s look.
“We’ve got company.”
Over Bobby’s shoulder, through the thick, trembling air, shapes began to coalesce against the darkening sky—hulking black helicopters cutting through the heavens with military precision, their lights brutal and merciless. The kind of pursuit you don’t outrun. The kind that doesn’t stop until there’s wreckage on the ground and blood on the tarmac.
Tommy sucked in a slow, shallow breath.
Above them, the army closed in. Below them, Los Angeles stretched wide and wild.
And somewhere, buried deep in Tommy’s gut, a stubborn flame flared to life.
Screw the rules.
Screw the command structure.
Screw the orders barked by men who hadn’t seen the inside of a burning building, hadn’t held someone’s life between bloody, shaking hands.
They didn’t get to decide who lived and who died today.
“Hold tight,” Tommy muttered, voice low and hard.
He yanked the helicopter into a brutal dive.
The world snapped sideways.
Bobby’s grip tightened instinctively around the vial, shielding it with his body as centrifugal force shoved them toward the floor. Moira cried out, her body slamming against the seatbelt harness with a jolt. The rotor blades howled, the metal frame of the helicopter groaning in protest as Tommy threaded them between high-rises, each building flashing by in a blur of steel and glass and neon.
A spotlight caught them—an unrelenting white spear aimed at their heart—but Tommy was faster. He banked hard left, ducking under an overpass so low Bobby felt his stomach lurch violently upward, like the earth itself was trying to reject them.
Behind them, angry voices exploded over the radio, orders shouted and curses thrown like stones into a well.
It didn’t matter.
They weren’t listening.
The city roared beneath them, a mosaic of lives unaware of the desperate race playing out above their heads.
And then—there.
The Coliseum.
An ancient, gaping wound in the flesh of the city. A place born of blood and glory, standing stubborn against the passage of time.
Tommy didn’t slow down.
He dropped the helicopter onto the cracked asphalt outside the stadium with a force that rattled bones and sent a cloud of dust exploding into the air. The skids slammed into the ground, shuddering with the impact. Bobby was already moving before they fully touched down, adrenaline shoving him upright, dragging Moira bodily from the helicopter cabin.
Everywhere, chaos erupted.
Military trucks skidded into position, men in fatigues leaping from the beds with weapons raised. FBI agents poured from side streets, their faces tight with urgency and anger, guns and handcuffs gleaming under the harsh stadium lights. Tactical teams swarmed the perimeter like a flood, locking down every exit, every inch of available ground.
Bobby didn’t flinch.
He walked forward with steady, measured steps, holding the vial cradled against his chest like a soldier carrying a wounded comrade from the battlefield. Moira stumbled beside him, her head held high despite the zip ties cutting into her wrists.
The shouting began immediately.
"Drop your weapon!"
"Hands where we can see them!"
"On your knees!"
Bobby complied.
He set the vial down carefully, reverently, on the cracked asphalt. Raised his hands. Let the tactical teams swarm him, heavy hands wrenching his arms behind his back, zip-ties biting into raw skin.
Moira was hauled away, snarling, spitting curses that turned the air acrid around her.
Cameras flashed.
Reporters shouted questions.
The narrative was already being written in real time: Rogue firefighter apprehended after unauthorized operation. Dangerous vigilante tactics. Reckless endangerment.
They thought they had won.
They thought it was over.
They thought they had everything under control.
But when the agents stormed the helicopter—when they yanked open the cabin doors and scoured every inch—when they called out for Athena and received no reply—when they realized the antiviral while thought to be here, really wasn’t at a closer look and not only that but the second critical player was missing—only then did the truth begin to dawn.
Athena was never in the helicopter.
She was never on board.
Bobby, still on his knees, zip-tied and bruised, lifted his head and smiled at them. A slow, deliberate smile that spoke louder than any words.
Unapologetic.
Unrepentant.
Unbreakable.
The agents turned on each other, barking orders, frantic now, realizing that the battle they thought they had ended was still raging just beyond their reach.
And in the skies of Los Angeles, somewhere between the golden skyline and the rising dark—
The real rescue was just beginning.
The road unspooled before them like a long-held breath finally let go, dusk painting the world in deep, bruised shades of violet and gray. The city’s sirens were distant here, muffled by distance, by the heavy blanket of smog and sorrow that had fallen over the day. Yet inside the car, the tension was tangible, a living thing that pulsed between them.
Karen Wilson’s hands stayed steady on the wheel, knuckles pale only because of the pressure she kept so carefully controlled. She didn’t weave through traffic like a madwoman. She didn’t race through red lights or barrel down side streets. She drove with the solemnity of a funeral procession, precise and unshakable, as if every inch they traveled was stitched together by the sheer force of her will alone. Her fingers drummed a faint, steady rhythm on the steering wheel—tap, tap, tap—like a heartbeat she couldn't afford to lose.
Beside her, Athena Grant-Nash sat unmoving, her back straight against the seat, her gaze locked forward with the full, terrible weight of her resolve. Her badge was tucked away, her gun hidden, her usual aura of righteous fury replaced with something colder, sharper, honed to a singular point.
She wasn’t a cop right now.
She wasn’t even a soldier.
She was a vessel carrying salvation.
The tumbler—glinting faintly even through the layers of towel and ice pack—rested on her lap like a sacred object. One hand was pressed against it, firm and unyielding, as if the touch alone was enough to anchor it to the earth. She never loosened her grip. Not for the turns. Not for the stops. Not even when Karen caught her gaze in the mirror for a fleeting second, offering a silent question.
Are you ready?
Athena’s fingers tightened just slightly.
Always.
The service road appeared ahead, carved into the landscape like a forgotten artery. No flashing lights. No crowds. Just the dry rattle of wind through skeletal weeds and the distant hum of barricades and quarantine zones manned by soldiers who didn’t know what was coming.
Karen pulled over without a word. Her foot lifted from the brake. The car settled into silence, engine ticking faintly.
And there—waiting in the lee of a battered white van—stood Roz.
Half-suited in containment gear, helmet tucked under one arm, she looked small against the vast emptiness of the moment. But her spine was straight, her chin lifted high, and her hands only trembled because her body hadn't yet caught up to her spirit.
Athena stepped out into the gathering gloom.
The air was thick with dust and exhaustion, the sky a low ceiling pressing down upon them all. Her boots crunched on the gravel as she crossed to Roz in four measured strides.
Roz’s eyes widened as Athena approached, zeroing in on the towel-wrapped bundle like it was a torch carried across a battlefield.
"You got it?" Roz asked, voice raw, breathless.
Athena didn't waste a syllable.
She nodded.
And Roz moved.
The van’s back door swung open with a shriek of metal. Inside, sealed away from curious eyes, was the rest of the suit—fresh, waiting, sterile. Roz yanked out the pieces with quick, practiced hands, and Athena climbed inside without hesitation, without ceremony, as if she were slipping into armor crafted from sheer necessity.
The suit was cold against her skin, clinical in its perfection. Roz zipped her in, her hands shaking so badly on the final seam that Athena had to steady her with a glance—a silent, burning promise.
I’ve got this.
The helmet came down over her head with a final, irrevocable snap. The world narrowed instantly. Sound dulled to a faint, underwater roar. The sterile, filtered air hissed in through the respirator, filling Athena’s lungs with every slow, mechanical breath.
The last thing she heard—faint, thin, a memory more than a sound—was Karen whispering from the car window:
"Bring them home."
Athena didn’t look back.
She sealed the vial inside the containment box—a sleek, steel case engineered to withstand the very worst science could conjure—and cradled it against her chest.
And she walked.
Down the cracked, forgotten service road. Past the silent security fencing, past the temporary checkpoints guarded by soldiers more concerned with paperwork than with shadows.
The makeshift lab perimeter loomed ahead, monstrous and surreal against the dying light. It wasn’t a place anymore. It was a wound in the landscape, raw and aching.
The outer airlock doors recognized the emergency override she carried, hissing open with a grudging sigh of hydraulics. Inside, the lights were cold and pitiless, casting long, distorted shadows that danced and flickered along the corridor walls.
Her boots struck the ground with hollow echoes.
Each step was a drumbeat against the silence.
Each breath a declaration of war against death itself.
She moved through the transfer chamber like a ghost, the blue shadows sliding across the gleaming surfaces of steel and glass. The world inside the suit was muffled and slow, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears, tethering her to the thin thread of humanity she carried with her.
Athena reached the sealed pass-through slot and placed the containment box inside. Her gloved hands lingered for a heartbeat longer, as if offering a prayer through the barrier. Then, with a final push, she slid it forward.
A mechanical click. The hiss of pressurization. A cold, clinical finality.
Inside the lab, on the other side of reinforced glass and layers of decontamination, Buck lifted his head.
His face—God, his face.
Hope carved into every exhausted line. Blood and sweat staining his clothes, his skin, his very soul. His hands trembling as he lurched forward, disbelief and desperate gratitude etched into every inch of him.
Athena could only see the outline of him, blurred and distorted by the glass and the fog inside her helmet, but it was enough.
It was everything.
The box sealed itself into the chamber, systems whirring to life as decontamination protocols began. Red lights flashed. Pressure equalized. And then—slow, deliberate—an inner door slid open, and Buck snatched the box with the kind of reverence usually reserved for miracles.
Athena watched, heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
She watched as he sprinted across the lab, as Ravi surged up to help him, as Hen struggled to sit straighter, her battered body rallied by the electric jolt of hope.
The world outside her helmet was chaos.
Sirens. Shouts. The mechanical whir of machines scrambling to adjust to the unexpected arrival.
But inside her suit—
There was only her breath.
Only her heartbeat.
Only the knowledge that, for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, they had a chance.
She turned away from the glass, shoulders trembling with something too big to name. Relief. Fury. Love.
Whatever it was—it carried her forward as she retraced her steps down the long, hollow corridors, moving through the world like a soldier returning from war, every inch of her suit coated in the weight of what they’d survived to bring home.
And in her chest, steady and fierce and unbreakable, was the knowledge that this nightmare—this long, relentless nightmare—
Was almost, almost over.
The lab was quieter than it had been in hours—so quiet it was almost a living thing, a vast, suffocating presence pressing down from the corners of the room. The silence wasn't peace. It wasn't even stillness. It was waiting. A taut, breathless kind of anticipation that prickled along Buck’s skin, sank into his bones, and made every heartbeat feel thunderous in his chest.
The air smelled of blood and metal and cold, burnt ozone from the overloaded systems. The flicker of dying fluorescent lights cast long, warped shadows across the floor, and every broken piece of equipment—every overturned chair and scorched cabinet—felt like a witness to everything that had come before.
Buck knelt by Chimney’s side, his knees bruised from hours on the unforgiving floor, his palms torn from climbing, building, fighting. His fingers hovered just above Chim’s neck, two fingertips pressed delicately to the fragile thread of a pulse that stuttered and slipped like a bird fighting against a storm. Chim was so hot to the touch it was like feeling the fever with his own skin, a wildfire burning its way toward collapse.
Hen watched from her corner, propped weakly against the cabinet, her hands pressed to her side to slow the bleeding beneath her bandages. Ravi sat nearby, oxygen mask tilted slightly from exhaustion, his eyes never leaving Chim’s face, as if willing him to stay tethered to life through sheer desperation.
In Buck’s lap, nestled in a sterile container lined with emergency insulation, lay the antiviral.
One vial.
Small enough to be cradled in a child’s hand, delicate enough to shatter with a careless breath. The vial’s contents shimmered faintly in the flickering light—a ghost of salvation trapped inside fragile glass.
Buck's bloodied fingers moved without hesitation.
He worked with the kind of precision that didn’t come from calm but from the sheer necessity of survival. His hands trembled—but it didn’t matter. His jaw locked. His breath came slow and hard. His whole body aligned itself to the task at hand, pushing down the chaos, the panic, the exhaustion that gnawed at him like a living thing.
Maddie’s voice crackled over the comms, shaky, tear-soaked: "You can do this, Buck."
He didn't answer. He didn’t dare. Speaking felt like it might shatter the last thin thread he was walking.
He drew the antiviral into the syringe. Carefully. Painstakingly. One tiny drop at a time until the precious liquid gleamed against the glass barrel, trembling with possibility.
"Hold on, Chim," Buck whispered, his voice breaking over the words. He didn’t know if Chim could hear him. It didn’t matter. "Come back to her. Come back to us."
The needle found its mark. Buck injected the antiviral into Chim’s IV port with a slow, steady push, whispering a prayer into the space between them. A desperate promise that he would not let this be the end.
The moment after the injection stretched out forever.
Nothing happened.
Chimney lay still—too still. The only sound was the faint rasp of the oxygen tank, the low beeping of monitors that barely registered a life worth measuring.
Buck’s hands stayed pressed to Chim’s wrist, his head bowed, breath held as if he could will the medicine to work faster just by refusing to breathe until it did.
A beat.
Another.
And then—Chim coughed.
Buck’s head snapped up, eyes wide, mouth falling open in a gasp of stunned relief. Chim coughed again—harder this time. And when he did, it wasn’t the wet, drowning sound from before. It was sharp. Clearing. His chest hitched as if dragging breath back into lungs that had forgotten how to work.
Hen’s gasp tore through the room like a firecracker.
Ravi made a broken sound that was half-sob, half-laughter.
Even Maddie, through the comms, cried openly now, her voice shaking apart at the seams.
Buck didn’t move. He didn’t trust his body to hold him upright anymore. He just slumped back against the wall, the empty syringe still clenched in his fingers, staring at the ceiling as tears slid silently down his face.
Relief wasn’t a gentle thing.
It hit like a train, slamming into his chest so hard that it drove all the air from his lungs and left him gasping, trembling, drowning on dry ground.
They had won this round.
But only barely.
Across the room, Ravi pushed himself shakily to his feet, stumbling once before catching the wall. He moved toward Buck with slow, reverent steps, as if approaching something sacred.
"You did it, Buck," he said, voice hoarse.
There was awe there—but more than that, there was something quieter, deeper. Reverence. Gratitude. The kind of bone-deep belief that was built not from miracles, but from watching someone refuse to break when the world demanded it.
Buck didn’t smile.
Didn’t even lift his head fully.
He turned his eyes toward Ravi, red-rimmed and glassy but burning with the same fire that had kept them all breathing.
"No," Buck rasped. "Not yet."
He shoved himself upright with a groan, forcing battered muscles to obey him one more time. His body felt broken, hollowed out, but his soul—his soul was iron.
He staggered to the nearest wall, where the security camera blinked its lifeless red light overhead. He stared into the lens with a look that would have turned lesser men to ash.
In the command tent, Colonel Hartman leaned forward, staring at the feed as if it might bite him.
Buck lifted a battered clipboard, the back of it scrawled in thick, heavy black marker.
“ANTIVIRAL ADMINISTERED. CHIM STABILIZED. BEGIN EXTRACTION NOW.”
The words glared back at them like a battle standard hoisted above the ruins of a siege.
No begging.
No pleading.
No mercy.
Buck’s eyes burned into the camera, his jaw tight, his stance daring anyone to tell him no. He didn’t look like a man asking for permission.
He looked like a man daring the world to stop him.
Athena stood beside Hartman in the tent, arms crossed over her chest, a cold smirk playing at the corner of her mouth.
“Your move,” she said, voice like sharpened glass.
Hartman hesitated.
The command tent buzzed with frantic voices, radio calls, soldiers scrambling, plans collapsing like dominoes. The machine of bureaucracy had spun itself into chaos—and standing at the heart of it was one blood-soaked, furious firefighter who had held the line long enough for hope to claw its way back from the brink.
Outside the lab, the generators rumbled to life.
Systems shifted.
Airlocks hissed.
Inside, Buck stayed standing, never looking away from the camera.
Hen struggled to sit taller.
Ravi leaned heavily against the wall, but he smiled—just a little.
Chim coughed again, but it was stronger now. Anchored. Real.
Buck exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment, just long enough to feel the tremor of life vibrating through the walls, through the floors, through the very air itself.
Not yet.
But almost.
And for the first time in too many hours to count, Buck didn’t feel like he was clawing his way out of hell alone.
Because this time—finally—they had something the virus, the isolation, the fear couldn’t take away.
They had time.
The extraction began the way a wound is stitched closed—delicate, deliberate, every motion weighed against the desperate rush of survival.
Hen was first.
Her body was too weak to carry her anymore, but her spirit clung on, stubborn and unyielding. She barely stirred as they lifted her onto the gurney, but her hand twitched, once, when the cool air of the transfer lock hit her fevered skin. Medics surrounded her like a shield, oxygen lines and monitors a makeshift armor, and then—slowly, carefully—she disappeared into the decontamination unit, swallowed by sterilized light and pressurized mist.
Chimney was next.
The antiviral fought inside him now, a battle waged at the cellular level, but his body—depleted, battered—could barely respond. His head lolled against the gurney pillow, eyes fluttering half-shut, lashes clumped together with sweat. As he passed the others, he lifted his hand—an agonizing, trembling motion—as if searching for an anchor in the storm, needing to see them one last time. Buck caught that hand midair, squeezing it fiercely before letting go.
Then Ravi.
Stumbling, half-held up by sheer willpower and the exhausted support of two paramedics. His breathing was rough, but it was breathing. His fingers clutched the front of his jacket, knuckles white with tension, as he forced himself through the open blast doors—step by painful step—toward salvation.
And behind them—Bobby.
Captain Nash moved with a soldier’s precision, sweeping the room one last time, head on a swivel, making sure no one was left behind.
But when he turned—when he reached back toward the last man standing—
The corridor was empty.
Bobby’s gut twisted as he spun, heart pounding, a roar rising in his ears.
“Buck!”
But Buck wasn’t moving forward.
He was moving back.
Two steps, slow and certain, carrying him away from the open doorway—away from life. His eyes found Bobby’s across the distance, burning with something quiet, something immovable. There was no fear there. Only acceptance.
And then—without hesitation—Buck reached for the interior control panel.
Bobby lunged.
Too late.
The blast doors slammed shut with a pneumatic hiss, the locks engaging with a thunderous, mechanical groan that echoed through the sterile hallways like a death knell.
Bobby crashed into the reinforced glass, palms slamming so hard against it that the shock rattled up his arms. He shouted Buck’s name again and again, fists pounding, voice cracking open on each syllable.
Inside, Buck stood still.
Red emergency lights spun overhead, catching in the blood smeared across his face, his torn uniform, the fatigue etched into every line of his body. He peeled off his helmet with slow, deliberate fingers, letting it drop to the floor with a hollow, final clang.
And then Bobby saw it.
The blood.
A thin, dark smear beneath Buck’s nose.
Not much.
But enough.
Enough to mean everything.
Bobby froze, breath catching like a blade in his chest, comprehension slamming into him with merciless force.
Buck pressed a shaking hand to the glass, palm flat against the cold surface.
Bobby mirrored the motion instinctively, hands trembling now, his face pressed to the barrier like he could somehow reach through it—drag Buck back to him through sheer force of will.
Buck’s voice crackled to life over the internal comms, heartbreakingly calm.
“I had a tear in my hose line during the explosion,” he said, and though his voice was soft, it carried like a funeral bell. “I felt it. I’ve been exposed. There’s only one dose.”
Bobby recoiled, shaking his head furiously.
“You don’t get to make that decision!” he shouted, slamming his fists against the glass. “You don’t—Buck, listen to me—”
But Buck smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile.
It was the kind of smile you make when you’ve already laid your life down long before anyone else even knew there was a choice to make.
“I already did,” Buck said, voice rough but sure. “When I ran back into that car. When I carried that baby out of the wreck. When I crawled through that shaft for Roz. This is who I am, Cap.”
His breath hitched—but he pushed through it.
“I burn bright. That’s always been the risk.”
Behind him, the emergency lights pulsed, painting the world in harsh beats of red and white.
The comms crackled with static, and Buck knew—knew without needing to be told—that they would save the recording. That what he said now wouldn’t vanish into the void. It would be heard. Remembered.
And so he spoke.
To Maddie:
"Tell Chim I kept my promise. Tell Jee I loved her the moment I saw her. And tell you—I never wanted to leave you. But if I have to, I’m glad it’s after I saw him safe."
His voice cracked—but he didn’t stop.
To Hen:
"Don’t let them forget me. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. You’ve always been the heart of this family. I’m just glad I got to beat beside you."
To Ravi:
"You’re ready. You always were. Don’t ever doubt that again. You’ve got their backs now. They’ll need you."
To Tommy:
"Thank you for loving me. For showing me that it was okay to be me. That I didn’t have to be anyone other than myself."
The silence that followed was thick and aching.
And then—Buck lifted his eyes.
Two figures stood pressed against the glass, unmoving, unyielding even in the face of impossible loss.
Athena.
Bobby.
His voice softened, frayed at the edges but warm.
To Athena:
"Thanks for being the one to believe in me. Even when I didn’t. You saw something in me I couldn’t name. Thank you for being my mother when I needed one most."
Athena’s hands curled into fists, tears slipping down her cheeks unchecked.
And then—Bobby.
The man who had found a reckless, grieving boy all those years ago and built him into something stronger, fiercer. Into family.
Buck’s eyes locked onto his with staggering intensity.
"They’re going to need you."
Bobby shook his head, wordless, broken.
"Don’t you dare fall apart on them," Buck whispered. "Don’t let this break you. They need you, Dad."
And then—barely a breath, barely a beat.
"I love you."
The comm went dead.
The last words hung suspended in the air, vibrating with grief and love and everything Buck hadn’t said but didn’t have to.
Inside the lab, Buck stood tall beneath the emergency lights, battered but unbowed.
Outside the glass, Bobby slumped against the wall, sliding down until he sat crumpled on the floor, hands trembling uselessly in his lap.
Athena crouched beside him, one hand on his shoulder, her own heart shattering into a thousand pieces she wasn’t sure she could ever put back together.
Buck didn’t fall.
He didn’t collapse.
He simply stayed there, head bowed, as if waiting for the final light to fade.
The brightest stars, they say, burn the fastest.
But what they never tell you is how much colder the world feels when they’re gone.
The world held its breath.
The sterile white lights flickered overhead, casting long, thin shadows against the walls of the decontamination corridor, against the glass that divided life from death, hope from heartbreak. Time stuttered. Stalled. Bent under the weight of what it refused to carry forward.
On one side of the blast doors—Buck.
He was a picture of devastation and defiance, even now. Blood painted the edges of his mouth in dark, drying streaks. His skin was pale, almost translucent under the harsh lights, a map of every brutal hour he had fought to stay upright, to stay present, to stay theirs. His breaths came in shallow, broken pulls, as if his lungs were struggling to remember how.
And on the other side—Athena and Bobby.
Still. Silent. Witnesses to a moment too cruel for words. Guardians of the boy they had sworn to protect in all the ways that mattered, standing powerless as he slipped beyond their reach.
Athena moved first.
Her hand lifted, slow and shaking, until her palm pressed flat against the cold glass, right where Buck’s shoulder leaned against it, the barrier separating her from the son she had never borne but had loved no less fiercely.
Her voice—when it came—was raw, fractured, the sound of a soul tearing at the seams.
“I’m here for all the parts that we have left.”
The words weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be. They seeped through the air like a vow, a promise etched in something far deeper than language. She would not let him be alone. She would hold onto whatever pieces of him she could, fiercely, forever.
Bobby came next.
He moved like a man underwater, each step slow, deliberate, every inch of him vibrating with grief and helplessness he refused to surrender to. He placed his hand over Athena’s on the glass, the two of them side by side, holding Buck up in the only way left to them.
His voice cracked open like a breaking dam.
“I’ve got you, son. I’m right here.”
Buck’s eyes fluttered open at the sound, heavy-lidded and full of a devastating tenderness. They found Bobby’s face first—then Athena’s—and something in them shifted. Softer. Relieved. Like a man lost in the dark who had finally seen the beacon he had been searching for.
He lifted his hand, trembling so badly it barely stayed aloft, and pressed his palm to the glass opposite theirs. His fingers splayed out, a silent plea, a final tether.
The blood on his lip told them what he wouldn’t. Couldn't.
It was happening.
Now.
But there was no fear in his eyes. Not anymore. Only something quieter. Something sacred. Acceptance. Peace.
He smiled—a fragile, broken thing—but real. Real enough that Athena felt her heart split right down the middle, no longer able to contain the sheer force of love and anguish inside it.
Buck’s knees buckled, and he slid down the wall, his back pressed flush against the glass like he could still find warmth from their touch, even through steel and regret.
He tilted his head to the side, resting it against the barrier, and when he spoke again, it was barely louder than a breath, but they heard every word.
“Tell Eddie… he doesn’t have to feel bad about not being here.”
A pause. A shudder that rocked through his whole frame.
“Tell Chris… he made me better.”
The tears came then, unbidden and unstoppable.
Bobby bowed his head, his forehead thudding lightly against the glass, hand never moving from its place. Athena straightened her spine, holding herself upright by sheer force of will, because Buck deserved to be seen. Deserved to be honored.
They didn't look away.
Not when his chest shuddered. Not when his body sagged heavier against the wall.
Not even when he closed his eyes, lashes dark against too-pale skin, his breath slowing to a stuttering, uneven pattern that hurt to listen to.
And when the final breath came—soft as a whispered goodbye—they stayed.
When his head drooped forward, and the light behind his eyelids finally flickered out, they stayed.
When the corridor filled with silence, thick and absolute, they stayed.
Because love wasn’t about saving someone from death. It was about refusing to leave them in it.
Athena slid down the glass, knees hitting the ground hard enough to bruise, but she didn’t feel it. Her forehead rested against the barrier, tears soaking into the fabric of her suit, every exhale a prayer for a miracle that would never come.
Bobby crouched beside her, one arm wrapping around her shoulders, their grief fusing together, anchoring them to the moment, refusing to let Buck’s passing be anything less than sacred.
There were no words left.
Just the ache of what could never be undone.
And the promise that even in the wreckage, even in the ruin of it all—they would carry him.
Every laugh. Every stubborn, reckless, shining piece of him.
All the parts that remained.
The world didn’t end with a bang.
There was no violent explosion. No final, dramatic cry to the heavens. No sirens wailing in anguished chorus.
The world ended quietly. In the hollow space Buck left behind.
Inside his quarantine bubble, Chimney sat, upright but hollow, his body still fighting to recover even as his soul seemed to crumple in on itself. The antiseptic smell of the plastic walls around him couldn’t scrub away the metallic taste of grief bleeding into the air. His fingers trembled where they curled around the hospital-issued blanket draped over his lap, knuckles white, nails digging in like he could anchor himself back to a world that had suddenly tilted off its axis.
He didn’t understand at first.
He thought maybe they were mistaken. Maybe it was a glitch. Maybe Buck would barrel through those doors with that wide, stupid grin and an apology about being late.
But then someone—a nurse, a doctor, he didn’t know who—stepped forward, their face shielded by a mask, but the devastation bleeding from their eyes unmistakable. Their hands moved slow, careful, as if afraid to shatter him further. They spoke.
And Chim heard the words. Every one of them.
Buck is gone.
And the dam inside him broke.
The sound that tore from his throat wasn’t a scream. It was deeper than that—ripped from some place inside him he hadn’t even known existed. A raw, primal sob, the kind that left him clawing at the blanket, at his own skin, desperate for something to hold onto as the world slipped away.
They offered to call Maddie for him.
He refused.
This was his burden to carry. His weight to bear.
His fingers fumbled over the controls of the quarantine call system, the interface blurring through his tears. It rang once. Twice.
Then Maddie’s face appeared on the screen.
Hope. Relief. Love.
And he destroyed it.
He didn’t even get the words out. He opened his mouth, tried to be strong, tried to shape the truth into something gentle, something survivable.
But all that came was—
“He knew, Maddie. When he saved my life… he knew.”
Her face froze. Crumpled.
And then shattered.
A scream exploded from her, uncontained and feral, the sound of a woman losing the last piece of her world. She dropped out of frame, the phone clattering against something hard, her cries spilling into the sterile room like smoke, filling every inch of Chim’s lungs until he couldn’t breathe.
He pressed his forehead to the wall of his bubble, hand splayed helplessly against the plastic, wishing he could cross the distance, wishing he could hold her, wishing he could take it back, take it all back.
But Buck had made his choice.
And they had to live with it.
Across the quarantine wing, Hen sat upright on her cot, knees drawn up, arms wrapped tight around herself. Her face was a mask of rage and sorrow, tears streaking her cheeks in silent rivers. She clenched her jaw so hard her teeth ached, shaking from the effort of not letting the scream inside her escape.
She didn’t move.
Didn’t speak.
Didn’t blink.
Just stared at the floor like it held the only reality she could stand to face.
Outside, Ravi stumbled. His knees hit the concrete with a painful crack, but he barely noticed. His hands clutched at his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, his forehead pressed to the cold ground, the sobs wracking his body without shame or hesitation.
Karen found him there, a broken figure folded in on himself, and when she knelt beside him, he didn’t push her away. He let her put a hand on his back, steady and sure, as he wept for the man who had believed in him when no one else had.
Because Buck wouldn’t have wanted him to hide it. Not this time.
Inside the command tent, Tommy Kinard sat frozen before the blank monitor. He had watched the vitals flatline. Watched the video feed flicker and die. Watched the heart of their team—the heart of his family—go still.
He inhaled once.
And it sounded like grief itself.
He stood without a word, stepping outside, letting the sharp bite of the wind slice across his face. The sky above was the same endless, brutal blue it had always been.
But somehow, it looked different now.
Dimmer.
Less infinite.
Because the brightest thing it had ever reflected was gone.
Back inside the decontamination corridor, Athena and Bobby stayed exactly where they had fallen, wrapped around each other like a pair of broken wings, each holding the other upright by sheer force of will.
They didn’t speak.
There was nothing left to say.
Buck was gone.
And the world kept turning anyway.
The final image burned itself into memory, too sharp, too cruel to be anything but real.
A gurney.
A black body bag, sealed tight, carried reverently by men and women who moved like mourners in a funeral procession.
On top of it, resting heavy like a crown of ash—Buck’s helmet. The edges scorched, melted where fire and heat had kissed it too long.
And beside it, small and heartbreakingly final, his name badge.
Evans Buckley.
A name now folded into memory, into legend, into grief too vast to name.
The 118 gathered in the parking lot.
No one spoke.
No one could.
Their heads bowed low, shoulders trembling, hearts splintered beyond repair. Bobby and Athena stood with them, their presence a shield against the world trying to move on too fast.
They left together, a broken unit still held by invisible threads of love and loss, by the memory of the one who had bound them tighter than blood.
They carried him with them.
In every silent breath.
In every shuddering heartbeat.
In every step they took without him.
But this time—
They walked out of the fire without their brightest spark.
And the world was colder for it.
The sun had dipped low over the Texas horizon, the sky a tapestry of molten gold and bruised purple, stretching wide and endless in every direction. The air was warm, clinging to the skin with the sleepy hum of crickets and the distant growl of trucks on old country roads. Eddie drove one of those roads now, hand loose on the steering wheel, glancing over every few minutes to the passenger seat where Christopher sat, tapping out something on his phone, his foot occasionally bouncing to the beat of the music humming low through the car speakers.
It was a rare quiet moment between them—no therapy appointments, no school meetings, no frantic calls pulling Eddie back into duty. Just them. Just breathing. Just a moment where it felt like maybe—just maybe—they could have something like peace.
The call came through the truck’s Bluetooth with a chime that cut through the music.
Bobby Nash.
Eddie smiled instinctively, reaching to tap the steering wheel button. “Hey, Cap,” he said, voice warm, easy. "Chris and I were just—"
But he didn’t get to finish.
Because Bobby’s voice broke through, and it wasn’t the voice Eddie was expecting. Not the calm, commanding, steady captain that had steadied Eddie’s world more times than he could count. No, this voice was cracked at the edges, ragged and fraying, stretched taut like a man trying to hold the heavens together with bloody hands.
“Eddie—” Bobby breathed. “It’s Buck.”
Eddie’s blood froze. His hands clamped tighter around the wheel before he could stop himself, knuckles whitening against the worn leather. He opened his mouth—tried to ask, tried to hope, tried to plead—but nothing came out.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Christopher’s head snap up, phone forgotten, gaze wide and fixed on him.
Bobby’s voice kept going, every word another nail driven straight through Eddie’s heart.
“There was an explosion. A contamination. Buck—he got exposed. There was only one dose of the antiviral. He gave it to Chimney. He saved Chim’s life.”
Eddie slammed his foot against the brake, pulling the truck to the shoulder with a screech of gravel and dust. He didn’t even feel the jolt of the stop. He didn’t even notice the seatbelt tightening against his chest. All he heard—over and over, like an avalanche he couldn’t stop—was Bobby’s voice.
“Buck didn’t make it.”
The silence that followed was massive. Smothering. A chasm that opened wide in Eddie’s chest and swallowed him whole.
In the passenger seat, Chris was shaking his head. Like he could rewind time. Like he could erase the words.
“No,” Christopher whispered, voice cracking so painfully it made Eddie want to tear his own skin off. “No, no, Dad, no—”
Eddie sucked in a breath that felt like it might tear his lungs apart. His hands were shaking where they gripped the steering wheel. His heart was hammering so loud he could barely hear anything else.
“Chris—” he croaked. “Chris, it’s—”
But there was no 'it's okay.' Because it wasn’t.
It would never be again.
Christopher was crying now, silent, shattered sobs that shook his whole body. Eddie fumbled, ripping off his seatbelt, reaching across the cab to gather his son into his arms. Chris clung to him immediately, fists bunching up Eddie’s shirt, face pressed against his chest, the way he had when he was little and scared of thunderstorms.
Except this storm wasn’t going to pass.
Eddie pressed his face into Christopher’s hair, squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that finally broke free, hot and bitter, carving burning tracks down his cheeks.
He wanted to say something. Anything. He wanted to tell Bobby he heard him. He wanted to thank him. He wanted to scream at him, rage at him, beg him to tell him it was a lie.
But he couldn’t.
Because his world—the world Buck had helped rebuild, had held steady with laughter and loyalty and hands that never let him fall—was gone.
“Bobby,” he managed finally, his voice broken and raw and barely human. “I—”
He couldn’t finish.
He didn’t have to.
Bobby’s voice, thick with grief, came through one last time.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie.”
And then the line went dead.
Eddie sat there for a long time, in the cab of his truck on the side of a dusty Texas road, with his son sobbing in his arms and the sky bleeding out above them.
There were no words big enough to hold the weight of what they had lost.
There was just this:
Two broken hearts.
One gaping hole where the brightest light had burned.
And the unbearable, unthinkable knowledge that the world had to keep turning without him.
Buck was gone.
And Eddie didn’t know how to breathe without him anymore.
Please practice self-care while reading. This fic is emotionally intense and contains vivid depictions of emergency trauma and firefighter distress. (10K Word Count)
The sirens screamed long before they arrived.
They tore through the early morning silence like blades, sharp and shrill, echoing against the skeletal grey of the city’s concrete bones. The sun had barely begun to rise, still lost behind a veil of fog and smoke, painting the sky in streaks of ash-lavender and dull gold. It was the kind of light that made the world feel distant—softened and surreal—until you hit the scene and everything slammed into focus like a fist to the chest.
The pileup was a monster.
Twisted metal, burnt rubber, entire cars sheared in half like paper, some still smouldering, others already reduced to hollowed-out cages of steel. The scent of fuel hung in the air—thick, oily, invasive—and underneath it, more haunting: the copper tang of blood, the sour sting of panic, the sickening sweetness of scorched plastic. Smoke coiled upward like dying breaths, curling and writhing above the wreckage, as if the road itself were exhaling in agony.
People were screaming. Sirens howled from all directions. Horns blared from crushed cars still mid-symphony of catastrophe. Someone nearby was sobbing. Another was shouting for help, throat raw and desperate.
The 118 moved like muscle memory, like instinct—trained to carve order from chaos, to find breath in brokenness.
Hen was already crouched by a man whose leg was pinned beneath a jackknifed motorcycle, her hands firm and sure. Chimney sprinted toward a flaming sedan, radio in hand, voice barking clear commands even as debris crunched underfoot.
And Ravi, in his yellow turnout, moved with a rookie’s urgency—heart pounding loud enough to hear in his ears, adrenaline pulsing with every breath as he cleared car after car, his voice shaking over the comms. “SUV at the centre—cleared. Looks like it’s empty.”
He barely had time to breathe before a voice pierced through the din.
It wasn’t a shout. It was a scream. Raw. Human. Utterly, impossibly terrified.
“MY BABY—!” A woman sprinted past the police barrier, hair wild, hands reaching, eyes wide with a kind of fear that didn’t need words. She collided into Hen, gripping her arms, shaking with sobs that cracked her open.
“That one!” she cried, pointing with a shaking hand toward the twisted, blackened SUV at the heart of the wreckage. “She was in the car—my baby girl—that one!”
Hen froze.
Ravi turned.
And Buck moved.
No hesitation.
Not a flicker.
He didn’t wait to be asked. Didn’t ask if it was safe. He saw the mother’s eyes, saw the way her body convulsed with grief before it even had a name, and that was all it took.
He ran.
The world blurred around him—smoke and sirens and motion fading into the steady thrum of his own heartbeat.
The SUV was barely standing. Its roof had caved in, windshield shattered, the interior a chaos of suitcases and smouldering debris. One of the tires had melted down to a molten puddle on the pavement. Flames licked hungrily at the edges of the frame, dancing up the side like they were eager to consume what was left.
Buck didn’t stop.
He plunged into the wreckage, arms raised to shield his face, coughing against the smoke. His gloves scraped against jagged metal, catching on twisted wires. Shards of glass bit into his palms, slicing through fabric, drawing blood that he didn’t feel.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he whispered under his breath, a mantra against the crackle of fire and the roar in his ears. “Where are you, baby girl…”
He tossed aside a scorched duffel bag. Shoved aside a collapsed seat.
A whimper.
Not loud. Not sharp.
But real.
It stopped him cold.
Then he saw her—wedged beneath an overturned car seat, shielded by a flurry of fallen boxes and crumpled blankets. Her tiny face was smeared with soot, her chest hitching with each shallow breath. And then she wailed—loud, defiant, alive.
His heart stopped.
Then surged.
“Got you,” Buck breathed, reaching in, bloodied hands moving like they’d never moved before. He lifted the boxes, tugged the tangled seatbelt, yanked the wreckage away with strength he didn’t know he had.
He pulled her out.
She was small—so impossibly small, her fists clenched, her cheeks streaked with ash. But her heart was beating. Her lungs worked. She was real and breathing and his for just one moment longer.
Then the world exploded.
BOOM.
The SUV behind him ignited in a blossom of flame.
The blast sent a wave of heat that singed the hairs on his arms, threw sparks into the sky, lit the world in searing orange.
Buck turned, instinct slamming into motion.
He shielded the baby with his body, curling around her as he ran, flames snapping at his heels, his jacket catching at the edges, the heat biting into his back like it was trying to drag him down. The scream of the explosion roared in his ears, louder than anything else.
But he kept running.
Kept moving.
Because that’s what he does.
He runs toward the fire. Not away.
Not ever.
Each step was agony. Each breath a battle. His chest was tight. His legs burned. But the baby was tucked close to him, crying into his neck, and she was safe. That was all that mattered.
And in that moment—blinded by smoke, heart hammering, jacket scorched and torn—he saw Christopher.
Not really. Not here. But in his mind.
Sitting in his chair, watching cartoons. Laughing on the beach. Telling Buck he was his hero.
He saw Abby. The pain she left behind.
He saw himself, pinned beneath a fire truck, gasping as everything in him shattered.
He saw every failure. Every name he couldn’t save. Every time he’d come close and still lost someone.
Not this time.
He wouldn’t let her be another ghost in his gallery.
He burst through the smoke like a man reborn.
The mother was still there, on her knees. When she saw him, she screamed again—but this time it wasn’t grief.
It was hope.
Buck reached her and dropped to his knees, carefully handing over the baby, cradling the small bundle in her arms like something holy. The woman sobbed. Buck couldn’t hear the words she said—something about angels, something about thank you—but he didn’t need to.
He saw it in her face.
Her world had been saved.
She didn’t know his name.
But she’d remember him forever.
Buck rose slowly, muscles screaming in protest, blood still dripping from his hands. The smoke stained his face, streaked in wild lines like warpaint, and behind him the SUV burned, flames clawing into the morning sky.
His chest rose and fell in shallow, painful rhythm.
And he smiled.
Just once.
A tremble in his jaw. Not from pain. But from the weight of what he’d done. Of who he still was.
Because in a world built on loss and chaos and ashes—
He saved someone.
And he would never forget her.
The bar was the kind of place that didn’t ask questions. It was tucked between two brick buildings on a quieter street, the kind of spot you only found if someone told you about it—or if you wandered in after a long shift chasing ghosts you couldn’t save.
It was dim, but not dark. The overhead lights were gold-toned and warm, hanging low from their cords like softened halos. The walls were lined with photographs—black and white snapshots of firefighters, construction workers, men and women with worn smiles and tired eyes. The kind of people who knew what it was to break and still show up the next day.
A lazy jazz track played overhead, low and meandering, the trumpet like a sigh against the quiet murmur of conversation and the occasional clink of ice settling in a glass. It was early enough that the regulars hadn’t trickled in yet. Just a few scattered patrons. The bartender polishing glasses. A couple sharing fries at the far end of the room.
And Buck.
He sat in a booth near the back, jacket shrugged off, sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table. The collar of his shirt was damp with sweat and soot that hadn’t quite been washed out, the fabric creased from hours in gear. In front of him were three bottles—two empty, one half-finished.
Across from him sat Ravi.
The younger man had barely touched his drink. It sat untouched, the condensation pooling beneath it like a quiet apology. He wasn’t slouched or curled in on himself, but something in his posture said he wasn’t really here. His eyes were locked on the glass, but they weren’t seeing it. He was somewhere back on that freeway. Somewhere between the melted metal and the flames, in the shadow of a mother’s scream.
He hadn’t spoken since they’d walked in.
Buck had let the silence breathe. He didn’t fill it with noise or cheap words. He just let Ravi sit there with the weight of it, knowing exactly what that kind of silence felt like. Heavy. Suffocating. Real.
Finally, Ravi’s fingers curled tighter around his glass. His voice, when it came, was a quiet rasp—barely more than breath.
“I should’ve checked better,” he muttered. “I said it was clear. I almost…”
The words dried up. His throat closed around them.
Buck didn’t flinch.
He waited. Then leaned forward slightly, folding his hands on the table. His voice came slow and even, like someone recalling a story he hadn’t told in years.
“First fire I ever fought,” he began, his eyes distant but not unfocused. “It was a garage blaze. Old wiring, bad insulation, whole place went up like it had been waiting for it. Smoke so thick you couldn’t see your own hands. I was still green, barely out of the academy. I’d memorized every step, every protocol, every drill. I thought I was ready.”
A beat. He let the moment stretch.
“Then I stepped inside,” Buck said, eyes on Ravi. “And I froze.”
Ravi blinked, startled out of his daze.
“I just stood there,” Buck said, lips twisting into something that might have been a smile if it didn’t look so tired. “Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Cap had to shove me forward, yell in my ear to get me to take a step. I’d like to say I found my courage or kicked into gear… but the truth is, I was terrified.”
He took a sip of his beer. Let it settle.
“I’ve messed up,” Buck continued, softer now. “More than I can count. There was this woman—Abby. When she left… I spiraled. Thought I had it under control, but I didn’t. Got reckless. Detached. Then the ladder truck—”
He paused.
The memory sat between them, unspoken but loud.
Ravi had heard about it. Everyone had.
“I almost died,” Buck said. “Physically, emotionally, everything. I spent weeks in recovery, and when I came back? I didn’t feel like I belonged anymore. I second-guessed every call, every instinct. I felt like a liability, not a firefighter.”
Ravi looked at him then. Really looked.
Because this wasn’t the Buck he knew—the invincible, grinning adrenaline-junkie who could throw himself off rooftops and come up laughing. This was something quieter. More human.
“But I came back,” Buck said, steady. “Because this job isn’t about being perfect. It’s about showing up.”
The words landed like anchors.
“We show up,” Buck said again, voice stronger now. “Even when we’re scared. Even when we mess up. We keep learning. We keep trying. And we don’t walk away from the people who need us.”
Ravi’s throat worked. He blinked hard, the tears fighting their way up, but not winning.
He nodded. Just once. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t dramatic.
But it was enough.
The silence that followed wasn’t heavy anymore. It didn’t suffocate. It settled around them like a blanket—worn, but warm. A quiet understanding that needed no explanation.
Ravi finally picked up his drink. Took a sip. Set it down.
Buck didn’t need thanks. He didn’t need words.
He could feel it in the way Ravi’s shoulders eased. In the way he met Buck’s eyes without flinching. In the way his breath didn’t shake so much anymore.
Buck wasn’t just the rookie anymore. Wasn’t the hotshot or the screw-up or the kid trying to prove something.
He was a brother. A lifeline. The kind of man who’d walked through the fire and found his footing again—not because he was unscathed, but because he’d earned every scar.
And tonight, in a dim booth in a quiet bar, he wasn’t leading with a badge or a rank.
He was leading with something stronger.
Heart.
The biohazard lab existed beneath the surface of the city, buried like a secret no one wanted to admit existed. No windows. No natural light. Just sterile fluorescence that never dimmed, never flickered, humming ceaselessly like a mechanical heart. The walls were a cold, surgical white, and the gleaming metal counters stretched out in silent rows, all angles and gleam and sterilized perfection. It smelled like antiseptic and the faint coppery trace of old experiments—like knowledge scorched into steel.
Everything was silent but alive, humming with the tension of something just waiting to go wrong.
Allen arrived first. Tall, pale, hair thinning at the crown. He moved like someone who had long since made peace with routine—resigned but methodical, loyal only to data and caffeine. His coffee steamed in one hand, lab coat slung over his arm. Behind him came Roz, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, her strides brisk and exact, as if she could intimidate bacteria into submission by posture alone. She was clutching a second coffee—black, no sugar, because sweetness had no place here anymore.
The door whooshed shut behind them, hissing as it sealed, and the world narrowed into filtered air and quiet dread.
They said nothing at first.
Roz glanced at the logs. Her brow furrowed.
“She was here,” she muttered, already scowling.
Allen didn’t need to ask who.
Moira.
The name alone was enough to conjure a headache. Moira Blake—brilliant, infuriating, endlessly reckless. She had a mind that crackled like live wires and a disdain for boundaries that made her simultaneously impossible to work with and impossible to ignore.
Allen sighed. “How early?”
“Three hours,” Roz said grimly, tapping through the security feed. “Again.”
They exchanged a look. One of those silent conversations born from long years of shared misery.
They suited up in silence—step by sterile step. Hazmat over clothes. Gloves over hands. Seals checked and double-checked. They didn’t speak as they entered the core of the lab, but the tension followed them like a shadow.
Inside, the lab was pristine. Too pristine. Cleaned obsessively, no clutter, every sample perfectly aligned.
But the heart of the unease wasn’t the order.
It was the rat.
In a cage near the central counter, the small creature trembled. Its fur was soaked with sweat, eyes wide and glassy, blood crusted near its nose and mouth. Its breaths came in short, choked gasps. There was a tremor in its limbs. And worst of all—it was still alive.
Moira was standing in front of it, writing notes in a smooth, elegant scrawl. Her posture was relaxed, almost bored, like she was chronicling the behavior of a caged bird, not a creature on the verge of hemorrhagic collapse.
Roz’s voice cut through the air, brittle and sharp. “What the hell is that?”
Moira didn’t look up.
“CCHF,” she said simply.
Allen blinked. “Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever? We weren’t due to begin exposure trials until—”
“Next month,” Moira said, turning to face them. Her eyes sparkled with something wild. Not joy. Not pride. Something more volatile. “But I’ve made a breakthrough.”
Roz stepped forward, her jaw clenched. “You went into human-grade trials?”
“Not humans,” Moira said, motioning toward the rat. “Not yet. But I engineered a mutation. Adjusted the incubation timeline. The original strain took three to seven days to present. Mine shows systemic response within six hours.”
Allen’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Roz moved toward the nearest monitor, fingers flying across the keyboard. Data filled the screen—accelerated timelines, bloodwork, viral load graphs that spiked like heart attacks. There it was. Proof of the impossible.
“What did you do?” Roz breathed. “You sped it up. This—this spreads faster than we can track.”
“I controlled the spread,” Moira said. “Designed it to move with precision. I didn’t just mutate it—I shaped it. And I created a counter-agent.”
She lifted a small vial from a refrigerated unit with gloved fingers. It was clear. Innocuous. Utterly unremarkable in its physicality—and world-shattering in its implication.
“This,” she said softly, “is the antiviral.”
Roz stared. Allen swore under his breath and slammed a palm on the counter, the sound sharp enough to make the rat squeal.
“You can’t do this,” he growled. “You didn’t go through the board. The ethics committee. You bypassed every security protocol we have.”
Moira looked at him like he’d missed the point entirely.
“I just saved us decades of research. This is a breakthrough that changes the game.”
“You’ve turned CCHF into a weapon,” Roz said, her voice low, horrified. “You didn’t cure anything—you made a virus that spreads before anyone knows they’re sick. You’ve made us vulnerable. You’ve made this lab a target.”
The silence that followed wasn’t just silence.
It was the moment a pendulum stopped swinging, the space between inhale and scream.
Roz didn’t need to say anything more. She stepped away from the monitor and reached for her comm.
“I’m calling Banting.”
Moira didn’t try to stop her.
Director Francis Banting arrived thirteen minutes later, all tailored lines and clipped authority. He smelled faintly of expensive cologne and detachment. His footsteps were loud on the tile, echoing off the walls like gunshots.
Moira waited for him in the upper-level conference room. The door clicked shut behind him.
They didn’t shake hands.
He didn’t sit.
Roz and Allen watched from the feed room, the surveillance camera displaying the silent confrontation in grainy grayscale.
Moira was poised. Straight-backed. Not defensive. She didn’t need to be. In her mind, she’d already won.
Banting, however, was furious.
His gestures were sharp. His mouth moved quickly, eyebrows furrowed in a scowl that deepened with every passing second. He pointed to the monitor. Then at the file. Then at her.
Moira’s mouth quirked into a half-smile.
She said one thing. Just one. And Roz couldn’t hear it—but she saw the moment Banting’s expression changed.
From fury to cold rage.
He stood. He leaned in. And he fired her.
No ceremony. No argument.
He stripped her clearance, deactivated her badge.
But he didn’t escort her out.
Because even now—even after everything—he assumed that she would follow the rules.
She did not.
Twenty-two minutes later, Allen returned to the locker room, pulling off his gloves with practiced precision. He was muttering under his breath about protocols and lawsuits when he heard the sound.
A hiss. A failed scan.
Then silence.
He turned the corner—and saw her.
Moira. In front of the exit scanner, swiping her badge again and again. Each time, the red light blinked.
Denied.
“Moira,” he said carefully. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
She didn’t turn.
Allen took a step forward.
“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to leave before—”
She moved fast.
Not clumsily. Not with panic.
But with surgical precision.
She spun, elbow striking his temple. His head cracked against the edge of the locker. The world reeled. His vision blurred. He stumbled backward, blood running down the side of his face.
Moira caught him as he fell.
He didn’t scream.
She took his badge from his lab coat, her movements brisk, impersonal.
Allen saw the look in her eyes before he lost consciousness.
It wasn’t anger.
It was betrayal. Cold and clinical.
He didn’t remember hitting the floor.
Moira walked into the lab fifteen minutes later.
The door hissed open with Allen’s badge.
She stood in the entryway for a moment, breathing in the chill. The overhead lights buzzed softly.
She didn’t look at the rat.
She didn’t look at the mess.
She looked at the vial.
And smiled.
The first sound was the alarm.
Not just a siren—a scream. It tore through the subterranean corridors of the facility like something feral, piercing and relentless, shrill enough to rattle bones. It wasn’t meant to warn. It was meant to shake people awake with fear. It did. The overhead lights shifted instantly from the cold fluorescents of the sterile lab environment to pulsing, frantic red. A warning, a demand, a heartbeat made of color.
Smoke began to seep into the hallways like it was breathing through the walls, curling up from beneath doors and slipping from ventilation grates in slow, snaking tendrils. It wasn’t fire smoke—at least not entirely. It smelled wrong. Not the earthy, burning wood smell of a house fire, but something acrid and chemical. Something man-made. Something angry.
On the lowest level—sublevel four—a burst pipe hissed steam into a hallway, and behind a set of warped steel doors, flames licked the air in hungry bursts. Something had gone very, very wrong.
The lab was burning.
Not just any lab.
A biohazard containment unit.
The call came through dispatch like a heartbeat skipping a beat. The alert was fast-tracked, red-priority, the kind of call that bypassed protocol and landed like a thunderclap in the 118’s bay.
Buck had been half out of his jacket when the tones hit. Hen was reviewing oxygen logs. Chimney had just taken a bite of a protein bar. Ravi was mid-laugh at something Bobby said—something stupid and quick, gone the moment the call hit.
Everything else stopped.
They loaded up fast. Lights flashing. Sirens alive. The truck roared through Los Angeles like it was cutting the city in half, each intersection parting before them in waves of startled drivers and flashing hazard lights. The sun was low, casting a red-gold hue across the city. It looked beautiful. Indifferent.
But as they neared the lab’s coordinates, something felt wrong.
The outside of the building looked calm.
No smoke. No visible fire. No structural damage.
Just people—dozens of them—running. Scientists in half-zipped hazmat suits, others in business casual stained with soot, sprinting from the building like it might bite. They screamed into phones, shouted names, staggered with wild eyes through the parking lot like survivors of something no one else could see.
Bobby stepped out of the truck first, scanning the scene with narrowed eyes. His hand went to his radio. “Let’s go. Keep gear tight, but stay sharp. This doesn’t feel right.”
They were met at the doors by Director Francis Banting, his tie loose, his lab coat torn at the hem. His skin was ashen. Sweat poured down his temple, eyes wild with the kind of fear that didn’t come from explosions—but from secrets.
“There’s been an incident,” he started, voice trembling. “An explosion on sublevel four. The fire’s… it’s inside one of the labs. Biohazard containment unit.”
Bobby’s jaw tightened. “What lab?”
Banting hesitated. That was all it took.
Hen’s voice was quiet, but sharp: “What was stored down there?”
He looked at them, his eyes darting, then finally said it.
“CCHF.”
Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever.
The words hit like a punch. Hen’s hand twitched toward her med bag. Buck stepped forward instinctively, shoulders tightening. Chimney’s mouth opened, but no words came.
Banting raised both hands. “You don’t understand—we don’t know what was released. Your suits—your standard turnout gear—it might not be enough. If that strain gets airborne—”
Bobby cut him off. “How many people are unaccounted for?”
Banting blinked. “What?”
“How many?” Bobby repeated, his voice like steel wrapped in fire.
Banting faltered. “Two. Allen and Roz. But we… we think—”
“Think later,” Bobby said. He turned to his crew. Looked each of them in the eyes. “Suit up.”
Hen blinked. “Bobby—”
“We don’t leave people behind.”
His voice was unwavering. Grounded.
Hen nodded. So did Chimney.
Ravi looked pale, but he swallowed and straightened.
Buck pulled on his helmet.
They moved.
The front doors opened for them with a hiss of hydraulic breath, sealing behind them as the locks clicked into place. Inside, the air was wrong—thick, warm, chemical. The smoke drifted like slow-moving ghosts, hugging the floor in low, rolling waves. The emergency lights pulsed red, then red again. No white. No safety. Just red. Like the lab was bleeding.
Their boots echoed as they made their way through the lobby and down the stairwell. The elevator had gone dark, safety locked during the alarm. Pipes overhead hissed with pressure. One light flickered constantly above them—buzzing like an insect trapped in its own skin.
The sublevel corridor was half-collapsed near the north side, melted concrete fusing into itself. Parts of the wall had burst outward, signs of an internal explosion, something wrong with the containment systems. The lab doors—reinforced steel—were warped inward.
Whatever had happened in there hadn’t stayed inside.
Buck moved toward the heat first, axe in hand, his boots crunching glass as he stepped over shattered monitor screens. He could hear something faint under the sirens.
A voice.
A moan.
He shouted. “Victim found! South hallway, six meters from lab entrance!”
Hen and Chim were already moving, Ravi at their backs.
Allen was collapsed near the far wall, his legs twisted awkwardly beneath him. His head was split above the temple, blood staining the collar of his lab coat. His badge was gone.
Hen dropped to her knees beside him, fingers moving over his pulse. “Alive. Faint. Pupils responsive. We need evac.”
Buck crouched. “Allen—can you hear me?”
Allen’s lips moved, dry and barely parted. He was whispering something.
Hen leaned in. “What is it? Allen, talk to us.”
He coughed—blood at the corner of his mouth—and whispered again.
Buck heard it this time.
“Moira.”
He froze. Glanced at Hen.
They’d been told only two were missing—Allen and Roz.
But Allen was right here.
So where the hell were Roz and Moira?
Buck looked toward the sealed lab doors, where flames pulsed like breath through a crack in the frame.
The air felt tighter.
Not just hot.
Toxic.
Bobby’s voice crackled through the comms.
“Get him out. Now. If Moira’s inside, we’re not done.”
And suddenly the fire didn’t feel like the worst danger anymore.
The walls breathe with heat. Not literal movement, but something just beneath the skin of the building, something pulsing—throbbing like a fever inside concrete and steel. Every step they take deeper into the sublevels feels like a descent into a body that's burning from the inside out. The air isn’t just hot. It’s heavy. Saturated with smoke and tension. The kind of smoke that clings—not just to clothes, but to memory.
Buck feels it in his teeth. In his lungs. In the pressure behind his eyes.
Every corridor is an echo chamber, the sound of boots striking scorched tile bouncing back like a whisper. The kind of whisper that knows your name. The kind that sounds a little like dread.
They descend in pairs, headlights slicing through the dark in narrow beams. Their suits crinkle with every motion, plastic and Kevlar hissing like ghost skin. It smells of sweat and ash inside the masks. The firelight licks at the walls around them. Pipes overhead groan. Something drips from the ceiling—slow, steady plinks like a heartbeat counting down.
Then Maddie’s voice crackles over the comms.
“Roz Morris is still inside. Last badge ping put her on sublevel two—containment corridor D.”
Hen’s response is immediate. “Copy that.”
No one questions it. They just move.
Bobby gestures them forward, splitting them in twos. Buck follows Hen down a side corridor that once might’ve been pristine, glass-walled and gleaming, built for sterile minds and genius hands. Now it’s a tomb. The ceiling has buckled in places. Fluorescent lights hang from frayed cords, flickering like lightning bugs dying slowly in the dark. The fire hasn’t reached here yet, not fully—but the heat has. It warps the air. Smears vision. The temperature gauge on Buck’s chest reads dangerous, then worse.
They round a corner—and Hen shouts.
“Light!”
There, behind a thick pane of warped Lexan glass, something flickers—a faint glow, blinking from the wall, weak and intermittent. Like a dying star.
Buck rushes forward, squinting.
It’s her.
Roz.
She’s inside the lab, pressed up against the inner glass of a sealed clean room. Her hands slam against it again and again, mouth moving without sound. Her eyes are wide, her body trembling. Behind her, the lab is a ruin—smoke curling from the corners, glass shattered across the floor like frozen spiderwebs. An oxygen tank hisses beside her, connected to a wall feed. It’s the only thing keeping her alive.
Buck lifts his axe before Hen stops him.
“Lexan,” she says, breathless. “It’s a step above bulletproof. Even if we had time, we wouldn’t break through.”
Buck lowers the axe. He stares at Roz, who stares back, her face now streaked with fresh tears. She can see them. She knows they’re here. But she can’t hear. Can’t open the door. Can’t move.
Maddie’s voice cuts in again, urgent.
“Scanner’s fused from the heat—door won’t open. But—wait, wait. I’ve got something. There’s a maintenance shaft. Leads into the lab. Ventilation, maybe… old schematic. It’s small. Narrow. But it’s your only option.”
Buck is already moving.
“Send me the route.”
“Buck—” Bobby’s voice warns through the comm.
“I’ve done worse in tighter spaces,” Buck says, slinging off his tank. He forces a grin that doesn't reach his eyes, and it’s clear he’s not bluffing. He doesn’t have time to be afraid.
The shaft is narrow—claustrophobically so. He has to wedge himself in sideways, one shoulder pressed to hot metal, the other scraping insulation that’s already melting. His breathing slows to a rhythm—inhale, move. Exhale, pull. His gloves squeak against the metal, slipping in soot. The deeper he goes, the darker it gets. His headlamp flickers once. Twice. He curses.
Smoke curls in around him. His mask begins to fog.
It’s like crawling through the throat of a dying beast—tight, hot, collapsing in on itself.
But he keeps going.
Because someone is waiting.
He drops down into the lab hard, landing on one knee with a grunt. His boots crunch shattered glass. The second Roz sees him, she chokes on a sob. Her eyes fill, and she half-collapses against the nearest table. She’s shaking. Exhausted. But alive.
“Roz,” Buck says, low and steady, holding out a hand. “We’ve got to go.”
She shakes her head violently, gesturing to the oxygen line.
“I can’t,” she rasps. Her voice is barely there. “If I disconnect, I won’t make it through the shaft. There’s not enough air. I can’t—Buck, I can’t.”
Buck doesn’t argue. Doesn’t panic.
He kneels in front of her, hand still out.
“You can hold your breath,” he says gently. “Just for a little while. Just long enough.”
She looks at him like he’s asking her to breathe underwater. Her chest heaves. Panic rises like a wave.
Buck inches closer. His voice softens, threads through the smoke like a lifeline.
“Roz. You’ll follow my voice. You’ll keep your hand on me. I’ll be right there the whole way. I’ll take you home.”
Her face crumples.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
“So am I,” Buck says. “But we’re not gonna let that stop us, right?”
He holds her gaze.
And then he says it—soft and steady, the way only Buck can when the world is ending.
“You’re not gonna die today.”
Her breath hitches.
“I’ve got you.”
And something in her stills.
She nods.
They move.
He helps her up. Disconnects the oxygen. Her hands tremble as she pulls the mask back on. Buck climbs into the shaft first, guiding her in after. She fits barely, her hands clawing at the edges. But she doesn’t let go. Her fingers stay wrapped around the fabric at his waist, knuckles white through the gloves.
They crawl.
Inch by agonizing inch.
The smoke presses against them. The heat pulses through the vents. Roz’s breath comes in short, terrified gasps. Buck keeps talking—soft, constant, steady.
“Almost there… just a little more…”
He can feel her faltering. Her grip slips once. He stops. Reaches back. Takes her hand.
“Hey,” he says. “Stay with me.”
She nods. Barely.
Then—light.
The vent ahead is open, flooding the narrow space with a cold, blessed glow. Hen’s voice calls through the fog—“We see them!”
Buck shoves the panel aside and drops down, catching Roz beneath the arms, half-pulling, half-carrying her as they stumble into the decontamination chamber. Bobby and Hen are there instantly—Hen rushing to Roz’s side, checking vitals, calling for medics.
Roz collapses into Bobby’s arms. She’s sobbing again, but this time it’s the relief kind—the kind that sounds like gratitude and grief tangled into one.
Buck should be still. He should breathe.
But instead, he stands. Turns.
And without a word, runs back into the corridor.
Bobby shouts after him. “Buck—where are you going?!”
“There’s still someone else,” Buck yells, disappearing into the smoke. “We haven’t found Moira.”
The walls groaned around them like something ancient and wounded, a low, almost organic sound that vibrated through the foundation of the building. Concrete creaked like bone under pressure, and the air itself pulsed with residual heat. Even the smoke moved differently now—heavier, more reluctant, as if the building knew it was nearing the edge of its endurance.
Buck, Hen, Chimney, and Ravi moved deeper into the belly of the lab, shadows swallowed by a labyrinth of twisted steel and flickering emergency lights. Their boots crunched glass that had once been pristine lab equipment—millions of dollars of research shattered under the weight of chaos. What was once a gleaming monument to science was now a tomb of melted wire and scorched ambition.
They hadn’t spoken much since Roz had been pulled from the cleanroom. There wasn’t time. There wasn’t breath. Only the rhythmic sounds of their own footfalls, the wheeze of their air tanks, and the mechanical whine of the fire alarm still screaming somewhere far above, distorted by layers of steel and smoke.
Buck kept to the front, his flashlight cutting a narrow tunnel through the gloom. His breath fogged the inside of his mask. His heart thudded in his ears. Everything felt precarious now—like one wrong move would tip the world sideways. He could feel the pressure building, the air charged with something more dangerous than just smoke. Instinct was a loud drumbeat in his skull.
Behind him, Hen checked Chimney’s side—he was walking slower, favoring his left leg from the hard landing after Roz’s extraction. Ravi brought up the rear, scanning their flanks with wide eyes, his voice caught somewhere in his throat. The rookie was scared. Buck could feel it in his breathing.
They pushed forward into the next corridor—a long, narrow stretch lined with shattered panels and mangled pipework. Buck slowed.
Then he heard it.
At first, he thought it was just the low hissing of the fire, a sound that had become constant. But this was sharper. More insistent. A leak.
He turned his head, flashlight flicking toward the far wall.
There—barely visible through the haze—was a half-toppled metal tank, the label partially melted but still legible.
ISOBUTANE.
His body locked up. The flame was inches away.
“EVERYONE BACK!” Buck roared. “We’ve got an imminent—”
BOOM.
The world detonated.
It was not a sound so much as an experience—a roar of fire and pressure and obliteration, the kind of moment that rewires the senses. The air was swallowed by a thunderous shockwave, the heat rising in a single, furious burst that bloomed like a sun inside the room.
Buck flew backward, hit the ground so hard the impact jarred every bone in his spine. His helmet cracked slightly on one side. The floor bucked beneath him like a living thing. The walls screamed.
Chimney slammed into a metal cabinet with a sickening thud and crumpled. Hen hit the ground on her side, arms wrapped protectively around her head, her air tank skidding across the floor underneath her. Ravi cried out, a strangled sound that was lost under the roaring fire and shattering glass as ceiling tiles collapsed.
Outside the corridor, Bobby turned at the exact moment the explosion hit.
He saw it. He felt it—the violent bloom of fire as it slammed against the reinforced observation glass in front of him. The flames ate the air in a flash, licking against the seal just feet from where he stood.
A breath later—
SLAM.
The blast doors dropped.
Heavy steel descended like judgment, crashing down with a finality that echoed across the floor. Automated lockdown. No override. No entry.
Bobby flung himself at the barrier, palms slamming against it so hard they bruised instantly. “BUCK! HEN! CHIM! RAVI!” he shouted, his voice hoarse and raw.
Nothing.
Just static on the radio. Just the hum of a system that had been triggered not by choice, but by survival instinct. The lab was sealed. The building's software had made the call before a human could. Containment over compassion.
His hands fumbled at the comm. “Maddie—Maddie, are you getting anything?!”
She didn’t answer at first. The line hissed.
Roz, sitting just feet away on the floor, clutched the edges of a thermal blanket, oxygen mask pressed to her face, eyes wide with horror as she stared at the now-sealed door. The woman who had, just minutes ago, been the last saved—watched as the rest were left behind.
Bobby pressed his forehead to the steel, one hand on the comms, the other shaking where it hovered over the keypad.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, talk to me…”
A flicker of static.
Then Maddie’s voice broke through, tremulous and trembling.
“The building’s in full lockdown,” she said. “Air filtration’s already initiated. The lab won’t reopen until the system confirms full decontamination. It’s… it’s designed to take twelve to twenty-four hours. Maybe more.”
Bobby went quiet.
His breath fogged against the door.
Roz whimpered behind him.
Beneath his boots, the floor still trembled with aftershocks. The lab was still bleeding heat and smoke and silence. And somewhere on the other side of the wall—
His people.
His team.
No confirmation. No heartbeat. Just silence. And the last thing he had seen was the flash of Buck’s back disappearing into flame.
Bobby didn’t cry.
He didn’t scream again.
He leaned into the steel, forehead pressed there like he was praying. Like the door might give if it felt how hard he was willing to beg.
And Buck, Chimney, Hen, and Ravi were somewhere in the heart of it.
Still breathing.
Still fighting.
Still trapped.
Bobby’s fists slammed against the sealed blast door with a fury that cracked his gloves and rattled his bones. He shouted names—Buck, Hen, Chimney, Ravi—until his voice dissolved into hoarse silence. Until his lungs begged for breath through the rebreather. Until his body shook with the helplessness he had spent years learning how to overcome.
But protocol was absolute.
A pair of hands gripped his shoulders from behind—white suits, decon team members, faceless behind their sealed masks. They tried to pull him back, but Bobby twisted, resisting. Shoved them off. Tried to return to the door like he could pry it open with rage alone. But the suits moved fast. Trained. Coordinated.
It took three of them to drag him away.
“No! I’m not leaving them—they’re still in there!”
They didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. The protocol was louder than any human voice. Their grip didn’t loosen. They wrestled him out of the corridor, into the steel-walled decontamination chamber where the world turned to antiseptic mist and harsh white light.
Bobby barely registered the hiss of the seal locking behind him. He pounded against that door too, even as gloved hands stripped off his jacket, ripped away his outer gear, began the chemical sprays.
The cold hit him like a slap—icy blasts from nozzles overhead and below, soaking him through. His eyes stung. His skin burned. He stood still because he had to, because the protocol was absolute. But his mind didn’t move. It stayed behind those doors, where his people—his family—were trapped in heat and fire and silence.
He saw Buck’s back disappearing into the smoke, just as the blast doors dropped.
He hadn’t seen them since.
His arms trembled as the final stage of decon blasted across his chest and down his spine. He grit his teeth. Not from the cold—but from the weight.
Then, it was over.
The outer door hissed open, and Bobby staggered into sunlight.
The light was blinding. Harsh. Clinical. It felt obscene. The sky shouldn’t still be blue. The breeze shouldn’t smell clean. There should be smoke out here, too. Ash. Blood. Something real.
He blinked hard, vision swimming.
And then she was there.
Athena.
She moved across the parking lot like a storm wrapped in silk. Her uniform was immaculate, a dark silhouette against the bright morning, but her eyes were weapons. Scanning the facility. Reading the chaos. Absorbing every emergency vehicle, every fleeing lab technician, every scrap of perimeter tape.
She reached him without a word. Bobby stood still, stripped down and dripping, staring past her. His eyes locked on the building like it might whisper the names back to him.
Athena didn’t touch him.
She didn’t need to.
“Where are they?” she asked, her voice low and steady.
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. But he didn’t have to. She saw it in the slump of his shoulders. In the twitch of his jaw. In the thousand-yard stare that screamed all the things he couldn’t say aloud.
She looked past him—toward the door he’d just been dragged from. Her throat worked once. Then she turned as a new voice intruded.
Francis Banting, the director of the lab, stepped forward like he thought authority meant something here. His shirt was wrinkled. His tie was askew. Sweat slicked his hairline. He carried a clipboard, of all things, as though facts and charts could hold the weight of what had just happened.
“We’re stabilizing the perimeter,” he said. “The fire’s contained to the sublevel. No surface breach. No external exposure. The strain in question is Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever—deadly, but the current mutation has a three to seven day incubation window. We believe containment has held, but the lab—”
Athena cut him off.
Her voice didn’t rise. It narrowed. Sharpened.
“I don’t care about your statistics.”
Banting blinked.
“I care about the people inside,” she said.
Her eyes burned through him.
Banting swallowed. “They’re inside a Level Four facility. The doors sealed after the explosion. Full lockdown. No override. It’s designed to protect the city. If we force the doors, we risk a breach.”
Athena stepped closer.
“So you’re saying we let them die?”
“I’m saying,” Banting replied stiffly, “the system chooses the many over the few. That’s how containment works.”
Maddie’s voice broke over the comms.
Athena turned toward the portable rig. Her voice was tight. “Maddie?”
“There’s… there’s no override,” Maddie said, her tone breaking. “I checked everything. Once the system seals, it’s hardwired to hold until the air inside passes a filtration threshold. And that process—it’s long. Designed for worst-case scenarios. No human intervention.”
Bobby’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
The air around them held its breath.
That’s when the first convoy arrived.
Engines rumbled as matte black trucks rolled up to the outer perimeter. Soldiers stepped out in perfect formation, heavy boots landing with practiced ease. Biohazard symbols adorned their sleeves, their helmets. They moved quickly, erecting a pop-up command tent, pulling portable equipment cases, setting up satellite feeds.
The last to exit was a man in a plain black uniform, sleeves rolled, chest marked with insignia.
Colonel John Hartman.
He looked every inch the soldier. Sharp. Weathered. Eyes like stone under steel-gray brows. He didn’t look like a man unfamiliar with loss. He looked like a man who had seen death make choices—and survived to carry the guilt.
He approached Bobby and Athena directly, flipping through a digital tablet.
“I read your reports,” he said. “You’ve got four trapped inside. Possibly exposed. Possibly injured. Possibly dead.”
Bobby flinched, just once.
Hartman looked up.
“I’ve handled outbreaks in Kandahar, Sierra Leone, and the Congo. The worst mistake you can make is acting fast without a plan. The second worst is acting slow with one.”
Athena folded her arms. “What’s your proposal?”
Hartman turned the tablet around.
A schematic blinked into place—a tunnel.
“A sealed conduit. Airlocked. Negative pressure. We build it from the lab’s emergency port—still intact—and run it through an extraction tunnel to a decon pod. We filter them as they move.”
Athena studied the diagram.
“How long?”
“Twelve to sixteen hours.”
Bobby’s breath caught. “If they’re still alive by then.”
Hartman didn’t offer comfort. Only fact.
“If they’re still alive.”
The breeze picked up. Distant sirens wailed across the city.
The sun kept rising, oblivious.
Inside that lab, four firefighters waited—or suffered. Or worse.
And none of them—none of them—could break the wall that now stood between them and the people they loved.
Darkness was the first thing Buck knew.
Not just the absence of light, but the kind of darkness that feels like pressure—like the air is thicker somehow, laden with weight and smoke and silence. It filled his lungs, tasted like scorched plastic and chemical ash, a choking, bitter thing that refused to let go. The emergency lights above flickered in and out, casting the wreckage around him in jarring flashes of red. Then black. Then red again. The world blinked like a heartbeat struggling to find rhythm.
He tried to move.
Pain flared in his skull, white-hot and sharp. The right side of his face was wet, sticky. Blood. A gash along his hairline, probably from where he hit the ground. His ears rang with a high-pitched whine that refused to fade.
“Chim…?” he rasped, barely able to hear himself.
There was a low groan beside him.
Chimney.
Buck turned toward the sound, blinking through smoke and haze and pulsing red light until he found him. Chim was sitting up, coughing hard, one hand pressed to his ribs. His facemask—what was left of it—lay in fragments across the floor. The plastic was spider-webbed with cracks, the filter torn open, the rubber straps melted in places.
And Chimney’s face—
It was exposed.
No protection.
Buck’s stomach dropped through the floor.
“You took it off,” he whispered, voice dry with smoke and fear.
Chim leaned his head back against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, and gave a short, bitter laugh. “No,” he said. “I think it took me off.”
Buck blinked hard. “Jesus, Chim…”
“Could’ve been the blast. Could’ve been when I hit the cabinet. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, right?”
The words echoed.
Doesn’t matter.
Because it was already done. Chim had been exposed—face uncovered in the middle of a sealed biolab filled with god-knew-what. Buck didn’t know how long Chim had been without protection. Could’ve been seconds. Could’ve been minutes. And the virus didn’t need long.
A pathogen like CCHF could bloom in silence. Invisible. Unforgiving.
Buck’s throat tightened.
A cough echoed behind them—smaller, sharper. He turned fast.
Ravi.
Still alive. Thank God. Buck crawled over, glass crunching under his knees, and found the rookie pressed against a wall, blinking through soot. His mask was still intact, if dented. His suit was scraped but sealed.
“You good?” Buck asked, gripping his arm.
Ravi nodded quickly, but his eyes were wide. Too wide. Pupils blown from adrenaline. His hand shook when Buck touched him.
“Yeah,” he croaked. “I think. Head hurts. Ribs maybe. But I—I’m breathing. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Buck didn’t know who he was trying to convince. Maybe both of them.
And then—
A sound.
Not a cough. Not a groan.
A wheeze.
Buck turned and his heart stopped.
Hen.
She was collapsed under what looked like half a desk, her torso twisted awkwardly, limbs slack. Smoke curled around her like a shroud. Her eyes were open, but distant—flickering. Her breaths were shallow. Wrong. Wet.
He was moving before he could think, scrambling across the ruined floor, shoving aside debris, his gloves scraping against melted plastic and sharp metal. The desk was heavy, warped, fused in places to the floor tiles. He braced one foot against the base and heaved.
The desk shifted with a screech.
Buck reached under, wrapped both arms around Hen, and dragged her clear.
She didn’t respond.
“Hen,” he said, tapping her helmet. “Hen, hey—look at me. Look at me.”
She blinked once, her eyes fluttering. Her chest rose—then stuttered. The next breath caught in her throat. Her fingers twitched but didn’t close.
Chim was there suddenly, crawling toward them despite the way he winced with every movement. He knelt beside her, hands flying over her chest, pressing down, checking ribs.
Buck caught the way Chim paused.
And then Chim’s voice, low and grim: “Collapsed lung.”
Buck felt the world tilt.
“She’s drowning in her own air,” Chim said, eyes darting to the gear they had. “We need to decompress. If we don’t—”
He stopped himself.
But Buck already knew what he wasn’t saying.
If they didn’t, she would die.
Buck felt his hands curl into fists against his knees. The smoke was heavier now, pressing in like it knew what was happening. The flickering red light threw their faces into shadows, made everything look worse. Ravi hovered just a few feet back, his breath audible in the quiet, trembling through his mask.
Buck didn’t move.
Didn’t speak.
Just felt something crack wide open inside his chest.
He could still see Roz’s face, pale and afraid, trapped behind that Lexan glass. The way she shook when he reached for her. The way her voice trembled when she said she couldn’t leave the oxygen line.
“I can’t,” she’d said.
And Buck had answered, “You’re not gonna die today. I’ve got you.”
Now—
It was Hen.
His sister. His friend. His family. Lying on the floor, lips blue, lungs filling with air that couldn’t escape. Chim exposed. Ravi rattled. Buck’s hands—shaking now—pressed to his thighs like if he just held still, the world might slow down.
But it wouldn’t.
Because this was the moment.
His moment.
No captain. No backup. No one coming.
Just him.
He looked at Hen again.
She needed him.
And the weight of that—the sheer, paralyzing enormity of it—crushed him.
His chest heaved.
He couldn’t breathe.
He tried to suck in air through the filter, but it felt like drowning. Like being seventeen again, trapped under debris, choking on dust and the sounds of people screaming. He pressed his forehead to his gloves.
For one second.
Just one.
He let himself feel the panic.
Then he forced it down.
Because they didn’t need him to panic.
They needed him to lead.
The silence in the lab is not peaceful. It is a predator. Coiled. Waiting.
The smoke has thinned, but the damage it left behind is painted across every surface, in the melted ceiling tiles, the scorched metal of overturned carts, the puddles of coolant and chemicals gleaming under the red stutter of emergency lights. There’s no fire now, but the destruction has teeth—and the silence gnaws at the edges of sanity. The air tastes of scorched plastic and burnt copper, and every breath is a prayer that the next won’t be your last.
Buck kneels beside Hen, his knees wet from the coolant pooling beneath them. Her body lies too still, too pale. Her chest rises in fragile stutters, and with every exhale comes a faint whistle, high and unnatural. Her lips are tinged with blue now—cyanosis, Buck remembers vaguely, the color of drowning from the inside out.
Chimney is already at her side, his movements frantic, scraping together whatever’s left of the emergency medical kit that somehow survived the blast. Everything around them is either ruined or rapidly becoming useless. A few gauze rolls, a small blade, some gloves, a plastic chest tube that’s seen better days.
He finds a surgical mask—a simple, disposable cloth one. The kind you’d wear in a public waiting room, not a biohazard lab. Chimney stares at it for a moment, hand frozen.
Then Maddie’s voice crackles over the comms, quiet and trembling. “Howard. Please. Just put it on.”
He does. Slowly. Fingers tugging the thin mask over his face like it’s made of tissue paper. It won’t help. They all know that. But he wears it anyway.
Chim’s voice is low, but filled with urgency. “She needs a thoracostomy. Now. Her lung’s collapsed—her chest cavity’s filling with air. If we don’t relieve the pressure—”
He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. They all know what comes next.
He’s reaching for the blade, prepping the few supplies they have, when he stops.
Just... stops.
The silence that follows is deafening.
Buck’s eyes flick to him. Chimney is staring at Hen. His hand trembles. His breath hitches under the useless mask.
“If I touch her…” he whispers, voice breaking. “If I cut into her, if I slip—if even a drop—”
He looks up, eyes shining with something Buck doesn’t often see in Chim: helplessness.
“I’ll give her the virus,” Chim says. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”
The words drop like stones in water. Every ripple echoes through the silence.
For a second—just a second—no one speaks.
Then Buck says, simply, “I’ll do it.”
Chimney stares at him. “You’ve never—Buck, this isn’t like pulling someone out of a car wreck. This is surgery.”
“Then talk me through it.”
Buck is already stripping off his gloves. His hands shake as they emerge, bare and clean in the low light. He doesn’t look away. Doesn’t flinch.
Ravi scrambles forward, startled but driven by the same desperation. He begins pulling supplies, setting them at Buck’s side, trying not to let the sweat sting his eyes. He doesn’t know what to do, not really—but he follows instinct. Support. Be ready. Don’t fall apart.
Chim stumbles to his feet and retreats, moving into the next chamber. He seals the door behind him, leaving Buck and Hen alone in the surgical field they’ve made from wreckage and broken hope. He presses his gloved palm to the window that divides them, and he watches.
Everyone is watching.
The security camera feed flickers in the command center, the image jittering with static—but it holds.
Bobby and Athena lean forward, standing shoulder to shoulder, breath held in unison. Their eyes never leave the screen.
Maddie sits in the call center, headset on, hands gripping the desk so tightly her knuckles have gone white. Her lips move silently. Buck’s name. Over and over.
Inside the lab, Buck kneels beside Hen.
Chim’s voice comes through the intercom, tinny and small but steady.
“Lift up her arm,” he says. “You’re going to need to cut her shirt open—side of her chest.”
Buck nods. His hands work quickly. The fabric parts with a hiss, the blade slicing clean. Hen’s skin is clammy, her ribs faintly visible under the shallow movement of her chest.
Chim waits for him.
“Now you’re going to count her ribs,” he continues. “Use your fingers. Start at the top. You’re going to stop between the fourth and fifth.”
Buck presses his hand to Hen’s side, counting. “Okay,” he says, voice low. “I have it.”
“You’ll make your incision there,” Chim says. “Clean. Steady. It’s got to be wide enough for the tube, but no more than that. Too big, and we risk contamination. You’re going to feel resistance, but you can’t hesitate.”
Buck swallows. His heart is hammering in his chest. Every inch of his skin feels electric. His fingers are slick with sweat.
He nods again. And then—he slices.
The blade is small, the motion short, deliberate. The skin parts. Not blood—yet—but muscle. Ravi hands him gauze without being asked, his face pale, eyes fixed on the scene like a student learning from a masterclass in courage and terror.
Hen doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react.
She’s too far gone.
Chim’s voice is softer now. Calmer. “Now’s the hard part. You’re going to stick your finger in. You’ll need to break through the muscle wall.”
Buck’s breath catches.
“Go ahead.”
He pushes his finger in.
The pressure is awful. The resistance is worse. It feels unnatural, invasive, wrong—like crossing a line Buck was never supposed to touch. But then it gives way. A pop. A space. A cavity.
Chim’s voice picks up again.
“Ravi, clamp the tube and hand it to Buck. Buck—you’re going to feed it into the incision. Aim down and toward her shoulder. Follow the line of her rib.”
Ravi’s hands fumble only once. Buck takes the tube. It slides in slower than he wants. But it’s steady. He secures it with one hand while pressing gauze with the other.
“Okay,” Buck says, breathless. “It’s in.”
Chim doesn’t let him stop. “Secure the tube with tape. Silk, if you’ve got it. It doesn’t have to be pretty. Just airtight. Then unclamp it.”
Buck’s fingers work fast, wrapping the tape tight, hands moving on instinct and terror and trust.
“We got blood,” Buck says, voice cracking.
Chimney’s voice, now hoarse, almost relieved: “Put the other end into the beaker. Seal it fast.”
Buck jams the end of the tube into the make-shift seal, a beaker rigged from the emergency kit and whatever tubing Ravi could find. He clamps it shut—
—and then it happens.
A rush of air.
A sputter.
A ragged, gasping wheeze.
Hen inhales.
Her chest expands. Stutters. But it moves.
Buck freezes. Then, slowly, like a building collapsing in reverse, he slumps beside her. His hands fall into his lap. His whole body shakes. And the breath that leaves him—it might be a sob.
Across the glass, Chimney’s eyes are closed. A single tear slides down the side of his mask.
Hen breathes.
And for now—they all do.
The silence after Hen breathes is loud with relief. Buck sits slumped beside her, the adrenaline still pumping but nowhere to go. Chimney stands just on the other side of the glass wall, watching, a thin layer of fog on the pane separating him from the team he should be tending to. He doesn't blink. He just watches Hen’s chest rise and fall like it’s the only thing anchoring him to the moment.
But even that fragile peace doesn’t last.
It begins with a cough.
A small one. Barely more than a dry scratch from the back of Chim’s throat, the kind you might dismiss on any normal day. But there’s nothing normal about the silence inside this lab, or the way every sound now echoes like a siren. Buck turns toward him instantly, eyes narrowing.
Chim clears his throat. Mutters something under his breath. Another cough follows, this one deeper, hoarser. He presses a hand to his chest, shakes his head as if to shrug it off.
Then he coughs again—and this time he stumbles.
Buck is already moving, rising fast despite the burn in his knees from crouching so long, the tension still twisting his spine from Hen’s procedure.
“Chim…?” Buck’s voice is quiet, unsure. A question wrapped in fear.
Chimney raises a hand, palm out like he’s fine. Just give him a second.
And then Buck sees it.
The red.
A smear of blood across Chimney’s hand. Bright. Wet. Unmistakable.
Time slows.
“Chim,” Buck says again, and this time it’s not a question. It’s a whisper. A plea. A tremor.
Chim looks down at his own palm like he can’t quite believe it’s real. He wipes it on his leg, but it smears. Another cough wracks his body, harder this time. He doubles over, and when he straightens, blood trickles from one nostril. Another thin thread slides from the corner of his mouth.
“No,” Buck whispers. “No, no—”
“I’m fine,” Chim says, but his voice is hoarse, and his pupils are glassy. He’s breathing fast. Shallow.
“You’re not,” Buck snaps, louder now, because panic is curling in the corners of his voice. “You’re bleeding. From your face, Chim. That’s not a scratch. That’s not nothing.”
“I know,” Chim says, softer now. More honest. “I know what it is.”
He doesn’t say the name, but it hangs in the air between them.
CCHF.
It’s happening.
Not tomorrow. Not tonight.
Now.
Outside, the world is shifting in ways the team inside can’t feel—but Athena does.
She’s standing near the command tent, eyes tracking every word that’s shouted between scientists, soldiers, engineers. The wind pulls at her jacket, and her hands are clenched at her sides.
Roz is arguing with Francis Banting, and it’s not the hushed sort of professional disagreement that can be ignored. It’s escalating. Fast.
Roz’s voice cracks as she pleads. Banting is cold, deflecting. He keeps using phrases like “minimizing exposure,” “awaiting federal confirmation,” and “chain of command.”
Athena walks straight toward them. She doesn’t slow. Doesn’t flinch.
“What aren’t you telling us?” she asks, voice low, controlled. Dangerous.
Banting opens his mouth to deliver a polished lie—but Roz, trembling and tired and pale under the weight of what she knows, cuts in.
“Moira changed it,” she says, her voice like glass. “The virus. She… she accelerated the mutation.”
Athena’s brow furrows. “What does that mean?”
“It means—” Roz swallows, breath shuddering. “It’s not a three-to-seven-day incubation period anymore. It’s hours. Three hours. Maybe less.”
Athena stares at her. The words hit like a fist to the chest.
They’ve been racing a clock they didn’t know existed.
They’ve already lost so much time.
Athena steps back from them, one hand covering her mouth as she turns away. Her other hand clenches into a fist. She lets out a sound, short and tight, like she’s trying to force the scream back down her throat.
Inside the tent, Colonel Hartman hears everything.
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t curse. Doesn’t panic.
He simply gives orders.
“Evacuate an eight-mile radius. Full quarantine lockdown. No civilian movement without military clearance.”
His soldiers move at once, no hesitation.
But Bobby, standing on the edge of the tent, watches the Colonel in silence. Reads between the lines.
Hartman hasn’t once mentioned building the tunnel again. He hasn’t asked for status updates on the lab’s internal air system. He hasn’t asked if the 118 is alive.
Because, in his eyes, they don’t matter.
They’re exposed. Infected. Already lost.
And Bobby sees it in the man’s eyes—the decision already made, cold and pragmatic.
The 118 are no longer people.
They are liabilities.
Bobby steps back from the tent, breath ragged. The air tastes wrong out here, too. Bitter. Like betrayal.
He turns to look at the sealed building.
Somewhere inside, Buck is watching blood bloom across Chimney’s lips, is holding Hen’s hand while her breathing rattles, is watching Ravi’s courage buckle beneath the weight of not knowing what comes next.
And the clock is already counting down.
Not hours.
Minutes.
Outside the sealed building, time has begun to feel less like a measure and more like a weapon. The sun sinks lower, bleeding out the last of the daylight in bruised streaks of violet and gray across the sky. The air smells of oil and ozone, heavy with the low, ceaseless hum of generators and the distant thunder of military-grade engines. The perimeter is a blur of motion—soldiers tightening their lines, engineers raising temporary barriers, a city trying to hold its breath against the threat it doesn’t even know is coming.
And in the eye of the storm, Bobby Nash sits in silence.
He’s in a folding chair beside one of the outer medical tents, elbows on his knees, head bowed—not in defeat, but in that brittle, breathless state between stillness and fury. His gear has long since been stripped away. His hands are raw from pounding on steel. His voice is gone. But his heart is still pounding like a war drum inside his chest, refusing to let this end in silence.
Across from him, Roz sits with her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Her lab coat is gone. Her eyes are hollow. Her guilt is bone-deep, soaked into the marrow.
“There is a cure,” she says suddenly. The words are so soft, so barely spoken, that Bobby thinks at first he imagined them.
He lifts his head slowly. “What?”
Roz doesn’t look at him. She stares at the ground, as if it might swallow her whole.
“There’s a prototype antiviral,” she says. “Moira made it. Synthesized it herself after accelerating the virus. It’s not FDA approved. It’s not even registered. But she said it worked. She said she had proof.”
Bobby’s spine straightens like a man struck by lightning.
“Where?” he asks. “Where is it?”
Roz hesitates. “I—I don’t know. I just… I know she had it. She kept it close. But there was only one dose.”
That doesn’t matter. Bobby is already moving, up and off the chair before she finishes the sentence. His voice is back, hoarse but alive with purpose.
“Athena!”
He doesn’t yell it—he summons her.
She appears less than a minute later, striding across the concrete lot like a blade sheathed in uniform blue. Her hair is pulled back, and her expression is the kind that would make generals flinch. She’s been running this command post like a field commander, juggling officials and bureaucrats with the precision of a surgeon. But now, her attention zeroes in on Bobby.
The moment she sees his face, she knows. “What is it?”
He doesn’t answer. He just gestures to Roz.
Roz speaks again, louder this time, repeating everything. The antiviral. The prototype. The single fragile miracle.
Athena’s jaw tightens. “Tell the Colonel.”
She doesn’t wait for backup.
She turns on her heel and makes her way straight into the heart of the command tent, the flap snapping closed behind her like a verdict.
Colonel Hartman is there, standing over a monitor, barking orders. Soldiers scatter at her arrival. She doesn’t wait for permission.
“We have a prototype cure,” she says. “Synthesized by Dr. Moira Blake. Roz confirmed it. One dose. She had it. And there’s still a chance it’s somewhere in that facility.”
Hartman looks up slowly. His face doesn’t change. Not even a flicker.
“We’re aware,” he says flatly. “We reviewed her notes.”
Athena’s eyes narrow. “Then why aren’t we moving to retrieve it?”
Hartman sets down the tablet in his hands and folds his arms across his chest. “Because if that antiviral is used on a single individual now, we lose the only live sample we have to synthesize a vaccine for mass production. If containment fails—if this virus spreads—that one dose could be the difference between thousands of deaths and millions.”
Her voice drops an octave, sharp and low and deadly. “It doesn’t get loose if we kill it now.”
Hartman doesn’t flinch. “Or let it die.”
There it is.
The truth behind the calm.
Athena takes a step closer, eyes burning.
“You mean let them die,” she says.
The words land like gunfire—quiet, and devastating.
The tent is still for a heartbeat. Two.
Then a flicker on the monitor behind them catches Athena’s eye. A figure on-screen. Moving fast through one of the ruined hallways inside the lab.
“Who is that?” Hartman barks.
Athena knows before anyone answers.
“That’s Ravi,” she says, one eyebrow lifting. “You didn’t think I came in here to ask for permission, did you?”
Inside the lab, everything is falling apart.
The red lights have begun to dim, flickering lower as the backup generators wear thin. The air is humid with breath and heat and desperation.
Chimney lies on a makeshift cot made from shattered lab benches and torn plastic sheets. His skin is flushed. Fever radiates from him in waves. His lips are split. His eyes half-lidded. He coughs again—wet and sharp—and blood seeps from the corner of his mouth. His hand trembles as he wipes it away.
Buck sits beside him, pale, covered in dried sweat and ash, watching helplessly.
Hen is unconscious again.
Ravi, still trembling from the weight of what they’ve all endured, hears Roz’s voice crackle through the emergency comms.
“There’s a lab room,” she says. “East wing. Second storage bay. If anything was left behind—it would be there. I’ll walk you through the access codes.”
Ravi doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t even respond.
He just moves.
“Wait—Ravi!” Buck calls after him. “I’ll go. I’ll do it. You don’t have to—”
But Ravi doesn’t stop. Doesn’t turn. Just throws a look over his shoulder that silences everything.
“We don’t have time to debate.”
His voice is stronger than it’s been in hours. Maybe ever.
He reaches the door. Sweat pours down his temple as he stares at the keypad. Roz feeds him the access codes, her voice breaking with every number.
Bobby reads them off beside her, eyes fixed on the screen. Watching. Hoping.
One code. Two. The third beeps red. Incorrect.
“Try again,” Roz whispers.
Ravi’s hands shake as he punches it in again.
And then—green.
The door hisses open.
Ravi steps inside.
And then he stops.
Buck’s voice crackles over the comm, breathless. “Ravi?”
Ravi doesn’t answer at first. Just stands there.
Bobby leans forward. “What do you see?”
Ravi finally breathes.
“Nothing.”
The room is empty. Shelves clean. Cabinets pristine. Counters wiped down. The light above the center table flickers gently, illuminating a space untouched by chaos.
No vial.
No miracle.
No cure.
Bobby’s voice falters. Roz goes utterly silent.
Then, Maddie’s voice enters, brittle and trembling.
“I checked the security logs,” she says. “Motion sensors recorded movement on the sublevel… two hours before the explosion.”
Athena stares at the screen, brow furrowing.
“She wasn’t in the lab?” Bobby asks.
Maddie doesn’t answer immediately.
Then, softly—like a confession:
“She left the building. She wasn’t there when the team went in.”
The world stills.
Athena takes one slow, deliberate step forward, her eyes narrowing to slits. “Where is she now?”
A pause.
Then Maddie whispers, “She took the only dose with her.”
No one speaks.
No one moves.
Because that’s it.
The awful, unbearable truth.
Moira never meant to be saved.
She didn’t stay behind to be a hero. Didn’t leave the dose to save a team she’d endangered. She left because the lab was her test—and the 118 were her subjects.
In her grief, Athena dreams. But it doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels like Bobby — one last time, standing at the edge of goodbye.
🕯 Read Part 1: The Silence That Follows
The night after the funeral, sleep came for Athena not like a gentle hand, but like a wave dragging her under.
The world had gone quiet in the days since Bobby died — too quiet. The 118 moved like ghosts themselves. Karen had brought food. Chim cried openly. Buck hadn't spoken much. Hen tried to smile, but her eyes were always swollen.
But Athena… she just wasn't.
She did the things. Answered the phone. Hugged May. Let Michael bring her coffee and tried not to see the pain mirrored in her children’s faces. But she didn’t feel like herself. Like anything. Just a wind-up shell of who she used to be.
And then — in sleep — it happened.
She opened her eyes in a dream that didn't feel like a dream.
Their house. The lights warm and golden. The smell of something cooking drifting in from the kitchen.
She walked through the hallway barefoot.
And there he was.
Bobby.
Sitting at the kitchen table like he'd never left it, sleeves rolled up, reading glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose as he looked up at her.
And smiled.
"Hey, babe."
The sound hit her like a bullet through glass.
She didn’t run — she couldn’t. Her knees gave out halfway across the room.
He was already there, catching her before she fell, wrapping her up in those strong, steady arms. The ones she’d memorized. The ones she’d sobbed for.
"Bobby—" Her voice cracked, pain clawing its way up her throat. "Bobby, I—God, I thought I’d never see you again—"
“I know.” He stroked her back, slow and steady. “I’m here.”
“I don’t want a dream,” she whispered. “I want you. I want time. I want all the years we were supposed to have.”
He held her tighter.
"You still have time," he murmured. "That’s why I’m here. To tell you that. You have to live it, Athena. Not just survive. Live."
“How?” she broke. “How do I do that, Bobby? When everything in me still loves you? When I don’t know how to be without you? When every second feels like I’m suffocating—”
She pulled back, tears streaming down her face, trembling as she pressed her forehead to his.
“There’s still so much left we never said,” she choked out. “Still so many dinners to make. Still so many mornings. You weren’t supposed to go first. You weren’t supposed to leave me behind.”
“I didn’t want to,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head. “But if I had to choose between dying with you… or letting you live… I would make that choice again. Every time.”
She collapsed into him again, sobbing — the kind of grief that only comes when love has nowhere left to go. He didn’t hush her. He just held her. Like he always had. Like he always would have, if the world had been fair.
And then—
Over his shoulder—
A presence.
No, four.
A young man standing tall and solemn — Emmett. The badge gleamed at his hip, pride and pain in his eyes.
Next to him, a girl with gentle eyes and a warm smile — Marcy. Her hand was looped through Emmett’s like they belonged together.
Beside them, a boy who looked just like Bobby once had, right down to the guarded kindness in his expression — Robert Jr.
And in front of them all, tiny and radiant, with a laugh that echoed like windchimes — Brook. She waved.
Athena gasped.
Bobby felt her freeze, and turned.
His face softened.
“They’ve been waiting,” he said quietly. “For me.”
“But they’re not ready for you,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”
He turned back to her, thumb brushing a tear from her cheek.
“I know, baby. And that’s okay.”
He stepped back — and it felt like the world cracked a little with each inch of distance.
But his hand remained in hers, fingers linked.
“I’m not saying goodbye,” Bobby said, voice thick with everything they’d ever shared. “I’m just saying… wait for me on the other side. When it’s your time.”
“I don’t want it to be,” she said brokenly.
He smiled, and even now, it was the safest place she'd ever known.
“I want it to take forever,” he said. “You better make me wait so long I start complaining.”
He leaned in. One last time. Pressed a kiss to her lips — soft, eternal, a promise etched in dream and soul.
Then one final kiss to her forehead.
“We’ll be waiting,” he whispered. “But live, Athena. Live like I loved you. Like I still do.”
And then—
The warmth faded.
The dream dissolved.
She woke up, crying into her pillow.
But this time, it didn’t feel like grief was all that was left.
After the lab… the grief stays. Bobby watches it all, caught between memory and mourning, unseen by the ones he gave everything to save.
He stood in the middle of chaos, and no one looked at him.
Not Hen, whose hands trembled as she braced herself against a stretcher, blood on her sleeves and pain etched in the lines around her eyes.
Not Chimney, who had just been stabilized and was now whispering something to Maddie through cracked lips and tearful eyes, as she sobbed on the other side of the quarantine line.
Not Buck, who had his fists clenched so tightly that the knuckles were white, his shoulders shaking beneath a soiled turnout jacket, his eyes fixed on the now-vacant airlock with a thousand-yard stare.
And not Athena.
Especially not Athena.
She was kneeling by the glass, her fingers still pressed against it even though the hand she’d touched — his hand — was no longer there.
“Hey,” Bobby said, stepping forward, the word catching in his throat. “Athena?”
She didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even flinch.
His heart kicked against his ribs.
“Athena.” He raised his voice. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m right here—”
Still, nothing.
He turned to Buck. “Kid. Buck. Say something, will you? Look at me. I need you to tell me what’s happening.”
Buck didn’t hear him. He was pacing now, talking to someone — Karen, maybe, or Santos — Bobby couldn’t tell. The words were a muffled hum, drowned beneath the static in his ears.
The silence wasn’t real silence. It was loud. Too loud. It was memories bleeding into the moment — the hiss of ruptured air hoses, the gurgle of Chim’s breathing, the ringing in his ears after the explosion. It was Athena crying his name from the other side of the lab’s glass. It was the sound of his own voice whispering I’m not choosing to leave you.
Except he had.
And now no one would look at him.
No one could.
At first, he thought it was shock. The way trauma locks the body into stillness. How grief freezes time. Maybe they were just too overwhelmed. Maybe they couldn’t hear him yet.
Maybe he just needed to wait.
But then the hours passed.
They were outside the lab now. The 118, gathered in silence. Their truck idled behind them, its lights flashing in a soft, mournful rhythm. A military transport sat nearby, ready to take them away. A clean-up crew in hazmat suits sealed the entrance to the airlock, taping the doorway shut like it was just another crime scene, just another statistic.
And he still stood there.
Unnoticed.
Unfelt.
Unreal.
He followed Athena to the house. Their house. His house. The one they built together, brick by brick, memory by memory.
She didn’t turn on the lights. Just walked into the living room, sat down on the edge of the couch like her body might shatter if she moved too quickly.
He stood in the doorway, watching her.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please say something. I’m right here.”
But she was already speaking — to herself.
“Why didn’t I stop him?” Her voice cracked. “Why didn’t I pull him out, even if he fought me?”
She covered her face with her hands, her wedding ring catching the moonlight.
“I should have known he’d do something like this. Dammit, Bobby—” Her voice cracked. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn't done loving you.”
Bobby stumbled backward like her words had struck him.
His knees buckled.
He sat on the floor.
And the world started making sense in the worst possible way.
He went to the firehouse next. It was always his second home. Always.
The kitchen was quiet. A plate of uneaten cookies sat on the table — Hen must’ve baked them for Chim to celebrate getting out. Bobby had taught her the recipe. She got it wrong every time. It made him smile.
Or it used to.
Hen sat at the counter now, alone, turning her wedding band over and over in her fingers. Her eyes were red.
Chim entered slowly, leaning on a cane.
He said nothing at first.
Then: “He knew.”
Hen looked up, startled.
Chim’s voice was raspier than usual. “He knew. When he gave me the antiviral, when he saved Ravi… he’d already been exposed. He must’ve known.”
Hen’s breath caught. “But he… he didn’t say anything.”
“He didn’t have to,” Chim whispered. “He never says it. But he always meant it. He would’ve chosen us every single time.”
Hen let out a shaky exhale. “And we let him.”
“No,” Chim said. “He saved us.”
“Yeah. But who saves him?”
The silence between them was thunderous.
Bobby backed away, trembling.
He found Buck last.
On the roof of the station.
Just like Bobby had done, so many times — seeking space, quiet, clarity. Buck sat there with a beer unopened in his hand, staring up at the stars like maybe Bobby’s soul had been sucked into the sky.
“You weren’t supposed to go first,” Buck whispered.
Bobby walked closer.
“You were the one thing I thought was unshakable,” Buck said, the words slurring slightly with grief. “You were the one who held us all together. And now you’re just… gone.”
“I’m not gone,” Bobby insisted. “I’m right here. You have to see me, Buck. You always did before.”
But Buck just shook his head.
“I don’t know how to be me without you. I don’t know how to lead them. I don’t know if I’m enough.”
“You are,” Bobby whispered. “You always were. I told you that. I meant it.”
But the boy — the man — who had once clung to Bobby’s every word, every direction, every lesson… sat in silence.
A single tear slipped down Buck’s cheek.
“I hope you knew,” he said softly. “I hope you knew how much you meant to me. I never said it right. But I hope you knew.”
Bobby felt something fracture in his chest — the ghost of a heart shattering in a body that no longer existed.
He fell to his knees.
Hands that could no longer hold, arms that could no longer embrace, fingers that could no longer wipe away the tears of the people he loved… reached for nothing.
And found nothing.
The wind howled.
Or maybe it was just the sound of being forgotten by the world.
Bobby stayed like that — not for minutes, but for hours. Days. Maybe longer.
Time didn’t mean anything anymore.
He watched them move on — slowly, painfully — dragging their grief behind them like anchors. He watched Athena sleep in their bed alone, Buck give orders with red-rimmed eyes, Hen stiffen every time she passed the captain’s office, Chim hesitate every time he laughed.
He watched his chair at the dinner table remain empty.
And every time, it dug the knife deeper.
This was the price of love. Of sacrifice.
And he would pay it a thousand times over.
Because they lived.
They survived.
Even if he didn’t.
Even if they couldn’t see him now, maybe… just maybe… one day they’d feel him. In the warmth of the sun on their backs. In the way the team still worked as one. In the voice in their head that said, You can do this.
Because loving Jinx was always going to hurt — and you never once tried to stop her chaos.
Here’s a chaotic hurt/comfort Jinx x male reader one-shot for my mutuals and anyone who craves a little gunpowder and tenderness. Full of angst, grit, and messy affection. Hope you enjoy!
Gunpowder Hearts & Shrapnel Promises
Pairing: Jinx x Male!Reader
Rating: T (canon-typical violence, blood, swearing, angst, hurt/comfort, emotional intensity)
Summary:
Loving Jinx was like holding fire in your hands. Tonight, you both get burned.
The night smelled like gunpowder and rain.
A sickly perfume that curled in your lungs as you stumbled through the alleyways of Zaun, one hand clamped over a bleeding gash in your side, the other clutching tight to the weight of your pistol. Not that it would do you much good now. Too many enforcers. Too many blue flashes in the distance. Too much noise in your skull.
You could still hear the echoes of her laugh — manic, sharp as a blade being pulled from its sheath.
“Boom, baby!”
The explosion had taken out half the building, but you’d been a beat too slow getting clear of the blast radius. Typical. She never warned you, never spared you from her chaos. But you were addicted to it anyway.
"Hey, hey, hey—"
Her voice snapped into your awareness like lightning splitting the sky. Jinx dropped down from somewhere above, boots skidding on wet metal as she landed hard in front of you. Her bright blue hair swung over her shoulder, sticking to her cheek in soaked strands, eyes wide and wild in the dim light. She was breathing hard, chest heaving, sparks from the wreckage flickering behind her like stars.
"You’re bleedin’," she said, way too loud. There was a grin on her lips, but her eyes — her eyes betrayed her. They darted over your wound, panic swimming just beneath the surface of her usual mania. "You’re really bleedin’. Like, wow. Impressive, but not in the fun way."
"Jinx," you rasped, vision swimming. Your knees buckled, but before you could crash to the ground, she caught you — surprisingly strong arms wrapping around your waist, hauling you close like you weighed nothing at all. You felt the tremor in her fingers.
"Don’t you dare die on me," she growled, and it wasn’t playful. Not this time. Her smile faltered, peeling back to reveal the raw fear gnawing at the edges of her bravado. "No. Nope. I refuse. Not tonight."
Her gaze flicked left, then right — calculating. The scatterbrained mess of thoughts in her head momentarily sharpened into razor focus, and it was both terrifying and beautiful to watch. She hoisted you over her shoulder like a ragdoll, ignoring your groan of pain.
"Okay, okay, okay," she muttered under her breath like a mantra, carrying you through the labyrinth of scrap and smoke. "Just you wait, sugarplum. Gonna patch you up good as new. Maybe add some cool scars. Chicks love scars, right? Wait—I love scars." A nervous, jittery laugh punched out of her chest.
"Doll," you rasped, your voice rough like torn sandpaper. "You’ve done worse to me on date night."
That earned you a sharp, breathless laugh that cracked like glass. "Shut up, you idiot," she choked out, but her fingers were already moving with frantic precision, grabbing bandages, grabbing wire, grabbing anything.
"You’re not allowed to die," she whispered hoarsely, her voice raw like she'd swallowed ash. "You’re mine. Mine. And I don’t break my toys until I’m good and ready."
You managed the ghost of a smile. Reached up, shaky fingers brushing over her cheek, feeling the dampness there even though she’d pretended it wasn’t real.
"I’m not a toy," you murmured, the words weak but laced with fondness. "I’m your partner in crime, remember?"
Her lips trembled. Her grin crumbled entirely. In that moment, beneath all the gunpowder smoke and splintered steel, she wasn’t the infamous Jinx. She wasn’t the terrorist of Zaun. She wasn’t the powder keg waiting to blow.
She was just a girl — a girl afraid of losing the one person crazy enough to love her as she was.
"Yeah," she whispered, her forehead pressing against yours, her breath warm and ragged. "Yeah, you are. My partner. My idiot."
And then, quieter:
"Please. Stay."
Your eyes fluttered closed, but not from the pull of unconsciousness this time — from the fragile comfort of her plea. You forced your lips to curve, just for her.
"Always, Jinx. Always."
She exhaled like she'd been holding her breath for hours, and for the first time all night, you felt her steady.
Maybe you were both broken things — twisted metal and frayed wires. But in this moment, tangled in chaos and soot, she held you together like she was the only thing keeping you from shattering.
And maybe she was.
If you liked this one, reblogs are super appreciated! It helps me keep sharing chaos and comfort
Requests are open for more Arcane x Reader if you’re feeling dangerous
Stay wild, stay wicked
— WordWoven
“Boom, baby!” — Jinx
