Chapter One.        Who Lives, Who Dies

[ Season One, Episode One ]

        Ezra lays down on the couch, open newspaper covering his face as he crosses his arms over his chest, trying to tune out the idle chatter and clanging of pots and pans. Those quiet moments between calls where he and the rest of his team gather in the loft to trade stories and eat around the table are the times where Ezra takes what the rest of the 118 likes to call his 'cat naps'. Ezra has always had a knack for falling asleep at any given moment that he isn't actively doing anything no matter where he is; throughout the years, the team has caught him in more awkward sleeping positions than he can count—Hen even made a calendar for the firehouse, featuring only the pictures that they had taken of Ezra sleeping one year. There's a certain solitude that comes with sleeping that he tends to seek out—he can withdraw from everyone else without really withdrawing and without raising any questions of concern. He sleeps more at the firehouse than he does in his own home because there's always been this kind of safety tied to the firehouse that he was never able to find in any of the other places that he's lived.

The rest of the team is scattered around the kitchen; Bobby as usual is cooking, Hen is setting the plates, and Chimney is in the midst of yet another tangent regarding his relationship with Tatiana—a relationship that is currently being held together by a web of lies. Buck—the final member of the team—to the surprise of nobody, is once again missing—along with one of the ladder trucks from the garage.

Ezra tries not to dwell on that too much.

"I know exactly what the polite, distant smile means: she's bored," Chimney is saying. "One foot out the door. This woman's so far out of my league, but she's just once in a lifetime. I can't let her go."

"Lots of fish in the sea," Bobby responds.

"Not with the bait he's using," Hen quips.

"Cruel, but true," Chimney agrees. There's a small moment of silence and Ezra thinks the might have found his reprieve, and then Chimney picks it back up again. "I met her on this new dating site just for cops and firefighters, RomancingTheUniform.com. She's an adrenaline junkie, so her foreplay is me telling her stories about running into burning buildings and jumping into icy lakes and..."

"I'm sorry wait," Ezra hears Hen interject. "Remind me, when was the last time you ran into or jumped over anything?"

"I'm embellish a little."

"Oh. Noted."

"I'm telling you, the uniform is a major aphrodisiac," Chimney adds.

"Clearly," Hen says. There's a scoff as somebody approaches Ezra, and the next thing he knows, the newspaper is being taken off of his face. "Rise and shine, Parekh."

"Five more minutes," Ezra replies, keeping his eyes closed and turning so that his back faces Hen.

"Time to return to the land of the living, Ez," Chimney calls.

"Do you even sleep when you're home?" Hen asks with a chuckle.

"Sal probably keeps him up all night," Chimney says with a shrug.

Hen whirls around and gives Chimney a scathing look as Ezra pulls his phone out of his pocket to see a few texts from Sal in question that he'd received during his nap.

SAL (32 minutes ago): What are you up to??

SAL (28 minutes ago): Hello????

SAL (27 minutes ago): Ezra?

SAL (25 minutes ago): Okay. Fine. Ignore me, then.

SAL (10 minutes ago): Sorry. I just thought we promised to keep each other updated.

SAL (8 minutes ago): Just please respond, I need to know that you're okay.

"Okay, Chim. Ew," Ezra says he pushes himself into a sitting position on the couch and he types his response to Sal.

Salvador Reyes is Ezra's boyfriend of almost one year and Ezra still isn't entirely sure how they'd ended up together—well, he knows how and when, but the everything that had led up to that just kind of feels like a whirlwind to him now. They'd met by chance—the right place at the right time—and the dominoes had cascaded in a line after that. It all happened so fast—Sal tells him that's just what falling in love feels like. What started as polite nods of acknowledgement as Ezra passed the gurney onto the doctors at the ER turned into meeting for coffee in the early mornings before their respective jobs, and then late nights after long shifts watching movies and eating popcorn on Sal's couch, and before Ezra really knew what was happening, they were holding hands and kissing in the kitchen and the next thing he knew, Ezra was moving out of his own apartment and into Sal's. Sal likes to say that there was an invisible string that led Ezra straight to him and that now that they've found each other, they're bound for eternity. Bound to fall in love. Most days, Sal doesn't have enough time to text Ezra, but there are the occasions when the ER is quiet and Ezra will be taking a nap only wake up to a flood of concerned messages from him.

EZRA (Just now): I was taking a nap, I'm sorry

EZRA (Just now): I'm okay

"Hey, you made it weird," Chimney says, throwing his hands up in mock surrender. "Because that is so not what I meant."

SAL (Just now): You and your naps

EZRA (Just now): I'll talk to you in a bit. Need to eat.

SAL (Just now): Okay.

SAL (Just now): Love you

EZRA (Just now): Love you too :)

Hen sends Chimney another warning glance as an oblivious Ezra pulls out his chair and settles in the seat across from Chimney. He laces his fingers together and rests his arms on the table, leaning forward with raised eyebrows and a slightly amused expression on his face. "What exactly did you mean, then, Chimney?"

"Um, well what I meant was—" Panic flashes briefly behind Chimney's eyes— "that—"

Before Chimney can finish his sentence, he's interrupted by the missing ladder truck pulling into the garage with the blaring of the alarms and flashing lights. Ezra tears his gaze away from Chimney to watch, though he didn't need to know who was behind the wheel. Buck had disappeared somewhere just before Ezra had settled down to take his nap with some off-handed comment about how he was taking the firetruck to be cleaned—never mind the fact that it had been his same excuse two days before. The truck pulls to a stop with a screech as the breaks hiss. Buck jumps out of the truck and practically skips up the steps to the loft despite the fact that the entirety of the 118 has its eyes pinned on him.

"Hey!" Hen exclaims as Buck swoops down to snag a piece of spaghetti from the bowl that she holds in her hands. She swats Buck away with her free hand as he drops the spaghetti into his mouth. "Wash your hands. We don't know where they've been."

"Gross," Ezra mutters, turning his attention to the spread of food across the table in front of him.

"What if we had a call?" Bobby questions as he walks over to the table with another pot of food and a plate of steamed broccoli.

Ezra takes the bowl of spaghetti from Hen, piling the noodles onto his plate and making a point of staring at the spot on the table just above the rim of his plate. He hates being stuck in the middle of the conflicts that arise between the team members and hates the idea of having to choose sides even more. It's how he tried to survive when he was younger—if he stayed on the sidelines, then maybe he wouldn't get hurt. Ever since Bobby had become their captain, conflicts between the members of the 118 were few and far between and Ezra finally felt safe enough to use his voice, but ever since Buck had joined their ranks, those small conflicts have been starting to resurface more frequently. But the thing is, Buck is a good firefighter. He's good at what he does and he cares so much about the people that he saves that it would be endearing to Ezra if it weren't for...well, everything else. Buck cares so much, but he's reckless and he's stupid and he tends to act before he thinks and it's something that Bobby has pointed out time and time again. It's like a small fire that no matter what Bobby does, he can't seem to put out. Ezra just hopes that it won't get them all killed one day.

"I was in the neighborhood," Buck replies with a shrug, taking the plate of steamed broccoli from Bobby. "I was just, uh, getting it washed."

"They charge you extra for the full detail?" Chimney asks.

Buck nods enthusiastically. "Yeah. Yeah."

Ezra only lets out a sigh and shakes his head.

"Listen, I like you," Bobby says. "You're a good firefighter. I know we got this thing—you call me "Pops," and I give you a hard time for being a dumbass kid, we went to a Springsteen concert together. But this is not a family. It's not a clubhouse. So I'm writing you up."

Buck lets out a dejected sigh and hangs his head before looking back up at Bobby with the kind of expression a child wears when asking for a second cookie. "Come on, Bobby. See the fire, put out the fire. The rest is blah-blah."

Ezra raises an eyebrow at this and exchanges a glance with Hen and Chimney. After almost eight years of working together, the three of them have developed this sort of silent communication with one another. Hen and Chimney probably know Ezra better than he knows himself.

"No," Bobby replies. "The system and the rules are not arbitrary. First infraction. Two more and you're out. Wash your hands."

Buck shakes his head and lets out a frustrated sigh before making his way over to the sink.

Bobby sinks into his chair with a sigh of his own.

Chimney leans closer to him. "You know you're not helping him by going easy on him."

"He just needs a little direction," Bobby replies.

"I'll remind you of that when he gets you killed."

Bobby only offers Chimney a tight-lipped smile in response—though it looks more like a grimace to Ezra—as Chimney passes him the salad bowl. "Anyone want to pass me a spoon, so I can serve myself some salad?"

Chimney reaches over to pass Bobby a utensil, but just as Bobby wraps his hand around the hilt of the fork, the alarm rings through the firehouse, bathing them in a red light. Ezra lets out a defeated sigh and quickly shoves a piece of garlic bread into his mouth before rising from his seat and sending a quick text to Sal. Looks like he won't be texting his boyfriend when he was done eating after all. At least he took that nap.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

In all the eight years that Ezra has been a firefighter, he can't count on his fingers the amount of strange calls they have received—from the hundreds of people stuck in palm trees to the man who had been stabbed by a chicken in a fight ring—but this has to be the strangest call that Ezra had been on by far. Ezra leans against the wall of the apartment in silence, staring at the spot on the carpet between his feet as Bobby stands in the bathroom waiting to hear the supposed crying of the baby that was the tenant had reported hearing. Ezra was skeptical when they arrived on the scene and the bong that Ezra had seen sitting on the kitchen counter when they'd entered the apartment does not help to convince him of the baby in the drainpipe. The notion was far too ridiculous to be true—he hopes that it isn't because he doesn't want to think about the circumstances that would force somebody to flush a baby down a toilet.

"I don't hear anything," Bobby says as he walks out of the bathroom.

"Look, I'm telling you," the tenant says from where he sits on the couch with his elbows resting on his knees, "I heard a baby crying. Someone flushed a baby down the toilet."

Ezra raises an eyebrow. "And who would do that?"

"Listen, I don't know," the tenant replies. "All I know is that I definitely heard a baby in the drainpipe." He catches sight of Hen holding up the bong on the counter with a skeptical expression on his face. "Oh, I'm not high. Okay, I-I'm pretty high, but it's a sativa. You know? I-it makes you happy. I-it doesn't make you hallucinate."

"It could've been a cat," Chimney suggests. "Sometimes rats get stuck in walls."

"Shhh," Bobby says suddenly, holding out a hand. "Did you hear that?"

Ezra feels something drop in his chest. Quietly, he follows Bobby into the bathroom and watches as the man presses his ear against the wall. Hen hands Bobby a stethoscope. The rest of the team watches silently with bated breath as Bobby raises a hand and begins to knock on the wall. "Give me a pen. Give me a sharpie." Chim tosses him the pen and Bobby knocks along the wall again before drawing a big 'X' eliciting a weak "Hey!" from the tennant. Bobby turns back to the team. "We need to open up this wall."

"No, no. We're being punked," Chimney interjects. "It's a tape recorder or something, right Spicoli?"

"Mm-mm, maybe he's right," Hen replies. "Maybe a mother gives birth on the toilet and flushes it."

"Okay, first of all, that's awful," Chimney says.

"Yeah, that's terrible," Ezra agrees.

"Besides, do you not know how a drainpipe works?" Chimney continues as he gestures to Ezra in acknowledgement. "There's this piece of serpentine pipe that takes the waste from the toilet to—"

"If this is a premature baby," Bobby interrupts, "its bones could bend and decompress like sponges. Okay? We need to go in there."

"Stand back." With an axe in his hands, Buck springs forward, preparing to drive the end of the axe into the apartment wall. "I got this."

Immediately, shouts of protest erupt from Ezra, Chimney, and Hen as Bobby leaps forward to catch Buck around the waist before the man can do any damage to the wall or the baby inside. And there it is again—that endearing sense of caring combated by that insufferable impulsivity.

"Did you even stop to consider that you might hit a baby?" Bobby demands, wrapping his hands around the hilt of the axe. "Yeah, I didn't think so. Go get the saw."

"Try to find some common sense while you're down there," Chimney calls after Buck as he leaves the bathroom.

Ezra stands with Hen just outside the bathroom, watching as Bobby, Chimney, and Buck cut into the wall, tearing apart the plaster and drywall to reveal the drainpipe just behind it. Ezra glances over at the tenant to find that he's leaning in the doorway with a bowl of granola in his hands, watching with rapt interest. He lets out an amused chuckle despite everything else before he turns his attention back to the wall in front of them. Hen's eyes flit over the drainpipe for a moment before some sort of dawning realization crosses over her face.

"Guys, that-that pipe services a quarter of the toilets above us; that's gonna be messy," Hen tells them. Another dawning realization spreads across her face as the pieces click into place faster for her than the rest of them. "Ohhh, shoot. Which means, even with the water off, if somebody flushes a toilet above us, it could drown the baby."

Before Ezra can process Hen's words, the woman is grabbing him by the wrist and tugging him out into the hallway with her. Hen sets off down the hallway at an alarming pace that leaves Ezra—a former varsity cross-country athlete in high school—struggling to keep up with as he follows after her, taking two steps at a time up the nearest staircase.

"LAFD. Nobody flush your toilets!" Hen hollers as she continues to run up the staircase. Her voice bounces off the walls around them. Ezra only hopes that her commands to not fall on deaf ears. He isn't quite sure why Hen decided to bring him along with her; he'd never been particularly loud. After seventeen years of living in a house where his voice didn't matter, he'd learned to keep his head down and bite his tongue—staying silent hurt less than fighting back—and he was still struggling with trying to find his voice it eleven years later. "No one flush your toilets! Do not flush your toilet! This is LAFD! Again, no one flush your toilet!"

Just as Hen and Ezra crest the staircase, Sargent Athena Grant rounds the corner and greets them with a nod of her head and a warm smile. Ezra returns it with a wave. Athena was one of the only people to give Ezra even a modicum of respect when he had first started at the fire department and she'd taken him beneath her wing; she'd set him up with a therapist and listened to his stories, cooked him dinner on long nights and let him sleep on her couch on more than one occasion when he couldn't face the notion of returning to an empty apartment. When Ezra met Athena, he was freshly eighteen and sharing a two bedroom apartment with three other people—he barely had anything besides the clothes on his back. She helped him onto his feet and stayed by his side for the years that followed. Ezra got to know her husband and her children—who have over the years started to feel like they were his siblings. They would invite him over for Christmas and Thanksgiving because she knew that he didn't have any other family to spend it with. Athena was more of a mother to him than his own mother had ever been.

Athena was one of the three people who knew the whole of it—who knew about the house he grew up in and where the scars came from and why whenever someone yelled at him, he was seven years old again and folding in on himself—the other two being Bobby and his therapist. Ezra only tells people what they ask him; it six months of dating before the 118 even found out about Sal and he's pretty sure that most of them still don't know what his middle name is or what his parents' names are or where he grew up—not that he really has a problem with it. And even when he was asked questions, he usually responds to personal questions with two-word sentences. For some reason, the thought of letting too many people in and seeing all the ugliness and horrors that he had to endure as a child was something that made his skin crawl and his head spin; there was a part of him that was ashamed of what had happened to him; how he let it happen to him. He could've run away long before he did, but instead, he chose to stay. And there was a small part of him blamed himself, that told him that he deserved it and he was scared that everybody else would say the same once they heard the whole of it.

"Hey, Hen, Ezra," Athena greets. "How's your day going?"

"Athena. Peachy!" Hen greets, though the sarcasm is evident through her words.

"Believe it or not, I've been worse," Ezra answers.

Ever since he'd finally fought his way out of the house, Ezra had made a pledge to himself to make sure that no day would ever be as bad as the years that he spent trapped inside that house. He likes to pretend that the day he left that house was the day that he was born again so that he could experience everything about the world all over again. The notion is what keeps him floating on the days where he feels like drowning; it's what helps to remind him of everything that he has to live for when he starts getting those thoughts about dying again. He'd tried his best to shed the old skin when he left his house, but there would always be remnants of his childhood buried within him. He can run, but he'll never really be able to hide from what happened in that house. Ezra knows that he will never fully be able to leave that house behind, but he can make the most of what he has now. Because now, he has people who love him. He never really had that before. And that's enough for him.

"Do not flush your toilet!" Hen repeats as Athena slips away.

Hen and Ezra continue through the hallways, shouting their message before they return to the apartment. Bobby, Buck, and Chimney have extracted the pipe by the time that they return and it sits on the coffee table. Bobby is rubbing the lube from the defibrillator into the pipe.

"Wow, wow, wow," Hen says from beside Ezra.

"This is gonna be a scoop and run," Chimney says.

Bobby looks up at Hen. "Hen, get the ambulance ready."

Ezra presses his cupped hands to his face and watches as the rest of the team huddles around the drainpipe, slowly, painstakingly pulling the baby out of the pipe. As soon as they've extracted the baby, Ezra is swooping in with a towel from the bathroom, wiping the lubricant off of its small body. Ezra's stomach drops upon closer inspection. The baby's eyes are closed and it doesn't seem to be moving. Something inside of Ezra feels for this baby; she was unfortunate enough to have been dealt a bad hand this soon—at least by the time it was over, she wouldn't remember any of it.

"All right, she's not breathing," Bobby says. "Start CPR."

He uses his two fingers to push tiny compressions into the already tiny body of the baby. "Come on."

"Maybe her airway's blocked," Chimney suggests as Bobby turns the baby over and taps on her back.

"I'll-I'll get the suction," Buck says, rising shakily to his feat.

"Get the pump," Bobby calls.

"Buck, come on!" Chimney calls.

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" Buck exclaims, falling to his knees beside the baby and inserting the small pump into her small mouth. "Bobby, it's not working."

The next few minutes are tense and filled with quiet urges to the baby to start breathing again—to fight for a life that hadn't even properly started for her yet. And then, by some miracle, the apartment is filled with the soft wailing of a newborn baby. Ezra lets out an amazed laugh and swoops in with the towel, swaddling the small baby.

"You got her, Bobby?" Ezra asks, handing the baby off to the captain.

Bobby nods and takes the baby in his arms. "Alright, let's go! Down to the lobby."

The captain is the first out of the apartment and the rest pile out after him, following him down the long hallway. The baby has quieted down now, but Ezra knows that she's still alive. Nobody fights that hard only to give up a few seconds later. She would make it. He knows it.

"Nobody held the elevator?" Bobby asks.

"Guess not," Chimney answers rushing ahead of Bobby to press the call button on the elevator. "Sorry, Cap."

"Yo, give her to me," Buck says. "Yo, come on, I'm twice as fast. Come on."

"Alright," Bobby concedes, passing the baby to Buck and giving the man a pat on the shoulder. "You go."

Buck holds the baby close to his chest, going down the stairs two at a time, speaking assurances to her the whole way down. Ezra, Bobby, and Chimney lean over the banister to watch the man descend the stairs. The elevator dings behind them and the three pile in the moment that the doors open. By the time they step outside of the apartment building, Buck is already climbing into the back of the ambulance with the baby in his arms.

"Hold up! Hold up!" Athena's voice calls, followed by a short many carrying a teenage girl in his arms. "I got another one coming!"

"Yo, is that the mother?" Buck shouts from the back of the ambulance. "Screw her!"

"She's a child!" Athena shouts back.

"Hey, hey, hey!" Bobby calls as the three approach. "What are you waiting for? Let's go!"

"He is refusing to take her!"

Bobby stays silent and instead takes the girl in his arms, clambering into the back of the ambulance. Chimney and Ezra hop in after him, helping Bobby to ease the girl into the gurney.

Buck makes direct eye contact with Athena. "Yo, if this baby dies, it's on you."

And then the doors of the ambulance slam shut.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Ezra holds the mother's hand the whole way through the drive and up to the glass doors of the ER. This is the part of his job that he's always been the best at; those moments between the accident site and the hospital where everything seems to be up in the air because he'd learned that so much can go wrong in so little time. He cannot count the number of people on both hands who had died on the way to the hospital—because they had no choice but to put their lives in the hands of fate. Ezra had always had a knack for encouraging the victims to keep fighting through all the pain because he is living proof that even though it had hurt, he had fought and pushed his way through the pain, stumbled his way out of the fire that his childhood house always seemed to be on and survived.

The ER nurses are ready for then when they pull in. Ezra frowns slightly when he sees that Sal is not among them. He stands back and lets the nurses do their job, watching as Buck follows the baby all the way to the glass doors as he leans against the side of the ambulance, crossing his arms over his chest. He glances back at Bobby and says something unintelligible from where Ezra stands and watches as the man places a hand on Buck's shoulder, holding him back from the doors.

"Looking for your lost love?" Chimney teases.

"He's not lost," Ezra replies with a scoff and a shake of his head. "But, speaking of which, what did you mean earlier?"

"Oh," Chimney says. "I was just joking that Sal probably doesn't let you sleep because he doesn't see you all day."

"Mm," Ezra nods.

"He doesn't though, right?" Chimney asks, suddenly.

Ezra arches an eyebrow. "Does Tatiana?"

"In more ways than one," Chimney replies.

"Okay, ew. I did not want to know that."

Athena's police cruiser pulls up and stops behind the firetruck with a screech of the tires and the woman climbs out. Ezra flinches. He can feel the anger rolling off of her in waves. The thing about Athena Grant is that her words shoot to kill when she's angry; she weaponizes herself with words that sink into skin like barbed wire. Ezra has been fortunate enough to never been on the receiving end of his sharp tongue—though he knows that he's toed the line quite a few times—but he's watched others get lashed with the tail end of her sentences and it's enough to cut them up for a few days.

"Yikes," Chimney whispers.

"Yeah," Ezra agrees.

"Hey!" Athena exclaims as she approaches Buck and Bobby. "You do not get to choose who lives and dies."

"Really?" Buck replies, standing his ground. Ezra had learned very early on that Evan Buckley has the tendency to view the rest of the world that he imagines himself standing on; it explained the recklessness and self-righteousness—people tend to do rash things when they think that they're invincible. "'Cause I was under the impression that kind of was my job."

"That mother was no less of a child than her baby," Athena asserts, jabbing her finger with each word. "You're going to get someone killed."

"Well, maybe, but not today," Buck replies with a self-satisfied smirk. The smugness is so thick that it manages to overpower the anger that radiates from Athena. Ezra internally flinches again. Buck made a habit of talking back to authority figures—he can't count the number of hushed conversations that had occurred between Bobby on the sidelines after a call—but talking back to Athena Grant was on a whole new level.

"Yeah, you keep making jokes," Athena replies. "I promise you the next time you screw up, it'll be your last."

She glares pointedly at Bobby at her last sentence before she turns on her heel and strides back to her cruiser. Her words hang in the air long after she leaves.

Buck pulls a face and looks to Bobby who only stares at him with a deadpan expression. Buck makes another face. "What?"

"Get in the truck."

Author's Note: chapter one!!! i love ezra with all my heart and his relationship with athena is so important to me. i didn't do an act divider because i was stuck on the title + the format, but i will come back later and do it because i do want this fic to be more organized in that manner.