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tawaifeddiediaz · 2 years

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the beginnings of a dream

For Ravi Panikkar Appreciation Week 2022 — day 3: life before the 118

TW: mentions of childhood cancer, general mention of death by childhood cancer, mild language

[AO3 Link]

Word Count: 4223 words

The academy isn’t easy.

It’s not meant to be. Ravi knows that.

It takes a special kind of person to willingly run back into fires, knowing that each time could be a time that they don’t come back. It takes a different kind of person to need to put some good into the universe. It takes another kind of person to watch horrible, unnatural loss and still believe in life and power of saving.

Ravi thinks that maybe, he’s all these people, and some. Or he could be, anyway.

It had been one of the first things Captain Janus had said at the pre-training orientation — that they had to be sure that this is what they wanted, because there was no going back.

Ravi knows that there’s no going back, but he’s excited anyway.

He’d stepped foot into college with every intention of becoming a nurse. Too many hospital visits with only the nurses to help him through the rancid possibilities of childhood cancer had clued him in pretty quick that without nurses, the operation didn’t run.

Ravi still meets with one of those nurses once a month — she’s retired now, but Arabelle always welcomes him into her home as if he’s still that young kid with eyes too big for his face, and gaunt cheeks like he knows what’s going to happen to him.

Evidently, that Ravi — the younger version of him with nothing outside of chemotherapy ports and his parents’ worry and his sister’s fear and the bitter medicine rushing through his veins — knew absolutely nothing.

Nursing didn’t work out for him, but something in Ravi had shifted as soon as he laid eyes on the firefighter recruitment flier hastily discarded in one of the study rooms. A vision that had knocked him back on his heels, of him in the turnout coat helping people through the worst days of their lives — a pull towards the firefighter life, he’d tried to explain to his sister in the week after.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that the study room Ravi had reserved three weeks in advance had had that flier.

As far as he was concerned, that was some divine intervention.

There were lots of ways to help people, Ravi had mused to himself. Lots of ways to repay the favors that had kept him alive still, and in all the search for his purpose and for the reasons why, Ravi had never felt the conviction he had when he’d finally picked up the glossy flier.

He hadn’t remembered ever feeling so sure about anything in his life.

He still doesn’t, despite the nervous tremors that shudder through him as he prepares for his very first day at the LAFD academy.

Ravi stands in front of his locker at the academy, fiddling with his phone. Annu’s sent a string of emojis that Ravi takes to mean good luck, and he’s gotten at least five different firefighter greeting card pictures from his parents on WhatsApp. He’d told maybe two cousins about switching to the firefighter academy, and both of them have sent cheesy selfies with Good Luck! written in neon-green chicken scratch above their heads.

He replies quickly to them and sets his phone down, pulling out the photo he keeps in his backpack.

As he stares at the photo of a teenage him with Arabelle, he thinks that she’ll be proud of who he’s trying to be. That he’s found an answer to the why and what for that have plagued him for years, secret venomous bites that burrowed into his mind as he watched his friends die but he kept living.

He hasn’t told her yet, but he’ll do it soon — just as soon as he gets through this first day.

“Hey man, Ravi, right?” A voice pipes up from behind him.

Ravi turns to see a tall man, around the same age as him, with light brown skin and a bright smile. His hand extends towards him, and Ravi manages to snap out of his thoughts enough to shake it.

“Yeah, hi. Uh, Jay, right?” He remembers seeing this guy at the orientation, a hulking man sitting towards the back with keen eyes and a handsome face.

They had been paired up for one of the team-building activities, and Ravi had spent the whole time desperately trying to keep his eyes on his paper and not on the stupidly handsome man whose smile lit up his whole fucking face.

The only solace he has is that Jay had looked just as nervous as Ravi had felt, though Jay had definitely done a better job at hiding it.

Ravi thinks his palms are still sweating.

“Yup.” He pops a bubble with his gum just as ostensibly as he pops the ‘p’ on the word, still grinning widely.

“Nice to meet you, Jay. I’m Ravi,” he says — stupidly because Jay already knows his name, and because this isn’t the first time they’re meeting.

Ravi thinks, out of all the things he’s missed out on as a kid, the ability to form quick friendships is one of them. It’s easier to fall into place as a temporary team towards a common goal for a set amount of time, but to actually open up and share pieces of himself…

It’s something he’s always struggled with, but he doesn’t want that following him into the LAFD. That’s one weight he doesn’t need on top of the gear.

The other man doesn’t seem to mind Ravi’s nervous floundering, because he simply flashes a crooked smile at Ravi, cranks open the locker next to him and throws his bag in. “There’s a couple other people I met, they seem nice. Should make getting through the academy easy.”

And that’s the thing that’s sticking him in place, right?

He knows he can do this. He passed all the tests the LAFD wanted him too, did well in the interview, got himself into this class, does all the exercises in the pre-training brochure on a regular basis — point is, he knows he can.

It’s just that he’s nervous about potentially doing it alone. Because no one in his family quite understands this as a career path, even though it was Ravi’s dad who helped him study for the tests, and his mom who quizzed him on all the answers, and his sister who paced him on his runs.

For all their support, Ravi needs to branch out to other people who get what it’s like to be in his position. Jay picks up on this, clearly, because he shuts his locker with a soft click and turns to face Ravi with concern furrowing his brow.

“Hey. It’ll be okay, come on,” Jay says, thumping Ravi on the back with a big palm.

He’s already clad in his department-issued training shorts and shirt, so he carefully tucks his photo away, and grabs his water bottle, turning to follow Jay out.

Jay can’t seem to stop talking, but Ravi finds it weirdly endearing. He’s not a big talker himself, finds himself fumbling more than stringing along actual sentences, but he’s not put off by Jay filling the silence.

Even if he fills it with academy gossip.

The man knows all the dirt on everyone. He talks about who’s having an affair with who, which poor sucker is standing on the training mats after an all-nighter with his newborn, which trainee just flipped a man onto his back after he tried to flirt with her, which recruits are new out of college and which barely scraped high school.

“How do you know all of this? You’ve met everyone already?” Ravi asks as they take their places.

A girl in front of them turns to grin, adjusting her hijab. “Nah, Jay will try to say that he’s a good observer but if you ask me, he has a penchant for leaning into the rumor mill. I’m Aya.”

“Hey. Ravi,” he introduces himself, sneaking a look at Jay who’s busy rolling his eyes.

“Sisters,” he mutters under his breath. Ravi’s head whips around between them at that, before realizing that Jay and Aya share the same nose and eyes, and standing together, it’s hard to think of them as anything other than siblings.

“You both applied to the academy together?”

“Nah, she applied first, but we both wanted to become firefighters. Pure luck to end up at the same drill tower.”

“We’re twins,” Aya offers helpfully.

It doesn’t clear up anything, but one instructor lets out a sharp whistle for their attention, and all thoughts of Arabelle, siblings and careers disappear from Ravi’s head.

The instructors are brutal in the drills they have them run through, and even though Ravi religiously exercises according to that damn brochure, he’s winded by the time he completes his last high knee run. And he feels like he might die if he has to do it again.

The whistle being blown for a twenty minute break feels like God’s gift to Earth, and Ravi watches as most of the students flatten themselves out on the mats, dropping like flies.

Ravi can’t bring himself to lie in the sweat of thirty other people, but he does knock into the wall and stays there until he can feel less of the blood in his throat.

“It’s all about endurance,” Aya gasps out next to him, collapsing on the wall to guzzle down her water.

“You’ll throw up if you drink too fast,” Ravi cautions her.

She smiles sheepishly and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, before turning to Ravi with the same keen eyes that, on her brother, had caught Ravi’s gaze even from rows away. “So...how’d you meet Jay?”

“I didn’t,” he says honestly. “We were paired up during orientation, but I didn’t catch anything but his name, so I really met him today. He came up to me in the locker room. I’ve known him for maybe…ten minutes longer than I’ve known you.”

Aya laughs at that. Ravi looks away as she tucks a loose strand of her hair back into her hijab. “Well, I think you and him are going to be really good friends. It’s good to have people around you to count on.”

And…

After everything Ravi’s been thinking about this career swap and having to go through it alone, finding not one, but two people who get it feels like a blessing — and that too, on his very first day.

He sucks in a breath, looking over to where Jay’s talking with one of the other trainees — someone who wanted to know something about a protein shake or something. As if he can sense Ravi looking, he lifts his head, his smile changing.

Ravi’s heart gives a pathetic, confusing lurch in his chest, but he manages to choke out an answer to Aya. “Include yourself as part of the package, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

----

Training gets worse, to the point where Ravi’s convinced that their instructors have a sadistic streak miles wide and they’re all bound to die by firefighter training.

Even on their days off.

Is that a thing? Ravi thinks it should be a thing.

He definitely feels like it’s a thing.

“Losers,” Aya says, peering over them with her hands propped on her waist. Jay and Ravi lay spread out like starfish across the grass, with their arms flopped over each other’s, sucking oxygen in like they’ll never get it again.

“I remember you were like this three months ago, too,” Ravi wheezes out.

“Three months ago. Three months of constant training. You’re supposed to get better at it. Build endurance.”

“I think my endurance took a day off,” Jay mutters, sucking in a breath and holding it. His cheeks, blown up with air, look like a chipmunk’s. “You know, like we’re supposed to be doing?”

Sundays mean no academy, but Ravi keeps up with his routine, occasionally mixing it up so he doesn’t get bored. Aya and Jay, who live two streets down from him, ironically enough, usually join him.

He’s made other friends at the academy, but these two have quickly moved up the ranks to become his best friends.

(And in Jay’s case, maybe something more, too.

Because if Jay smiles like that one more time, Ravi swears to the sun he’s going to do something stupid and kiss it off his face.)

“You know, maybe it’s you that has the sadistic streak,” Ravi muses, squinting to see Aya’s face clearly in the sun.

“Probably.” She shrugs, completely unruffled as she drags their bag of food over.

Ravi snags his wrap of spiced potato and cheese and hauls himself into a sitting position. Jay groans and uses Ravi’s knee to pull himself up and closer, accepting a foil-wrapped sandwich from his sister.

“Where do you think you guys will be assigned?” Jay asks, not even bothering to swallow the bite in his mouth as he talks.

Aya tosses a napkin at him for the gross visual, but shrugs again. “I don’t know. The 136’s captain talked to me the other day. I liked him, liked that he looked past my hijab and talked to me. Three others just stared at me like I was insane for wanting to be here.”

“Captain Mehta?” Ravi asked, crumpling his foil around the base of his wrap.

“Yeah. I’m probably going to accept his offer.”

Jay bumps his shoulder into Ravi’s. “Saw Captain Nash talking to you. What’s that all about?”

Ravi hadn’t told them, because he wasn’t sure yet. He’d been approached by a few captains, but none of them had given him the steady feel that Bobby Nash seemed to exude in spades.

Bobby had clearly done his homework, because he’d walked into the gym and beelined straight to where Ravi was. After extending the offer to him, he’d walked to a select few others before Ravi saw him slip out.

He liked that the guy came prepared, but he knew the 118. Everyone knew the 118. That firehouse was kind of a legend around the academy, and on the news, and literally everywhere else.

Every firefighter on that team was probably more famous than superheroes in LA, and the idea of his plain self fitting into a team with a house like that made Ravi nervous.

More than anything, he was nervous at how right it felt, and confused as to why — and, if by some miracle he did agree to join, what it would mean to live up to the standards of the 118.

“I’m thinking about them,” he admitted, leaning back on his palms. “Captain Nash is…calm, I guess. Sees you for what you are, but also somehow makes you believe in yourself, even when you’re not ready to.”

Jay nods, scratching at the stubble on his jaw. “Then why do you sound nervous? We already know he’s a great captain, and it sounds like he really wants you on his team. That’s what it looked like, anyway.”

Ravi turns his words around his mind, studying his expression.

For a second, an irrational bolt of fear strikes him, that maybe this could be what drives a wedge between them — the fame of the 118 was something he’d heard some of the other students talk about, and he knew that anyone who had been approached by any of the 118’s captains was envied.

Ravi had kept his head down and mouth shut about it, not wanting to draw attention to himself.

But there’s none of the envy Ravi’s been hearing about on Jay’s face — just plain, simple curiosity. Same with Aya, though she looks at him like she sees right through him.

“It makes me anxious to think about joining a house with standards that are sky high. Like, you know, every time the 118 are on the news or something, they’re a well-oiled team. I don’t know–”

“He’d be lucky to have you. They all would,” Jay cuts him off before Ravi can spiral too far.

“No team is perfect without a little practice,” Aya adds, chucking her trash into their bag. “They didn’t fall into place overnight. I say you should take it. You clearly want to.”

“Don’t be your worst enemy,” Jay says quietly. “We all need people at our back to get us home at the end of the day, and if your gut steers you towards the 118, then follow it.”

Aya sighs, but her eyes shine bright. “My brother could stand to take his own advice, but he’s right, Ravi.”

Ravi nods and turns to Jay. “What about you?”

“The 152,” Jay says confidently, miming tossing a basketball with his foil ball. “The captain’s cool, she knew exactly what she was looking for. I like that in a leader. Plus, Dakota got approached by her, too, and they were telling me that they want to join the 152, too.”

Ravi doesn’t know anyone else who’s thinking about joining the 118, but he doesn’t think he wants to know, either. Not unless he absolutely has to.

The realization makes the last piece of the complicated puzzle Ravi had been working through in his head slip right into place. With Jay and Aya’s words easing some of the ache, he’s left with just nervousness rather than the bone-deep anxiety that had wrapped around his ribs ever since he’d watched Bobby approach him.

“Then I guess we’re ready,” Ravi whooshes out a breath, sitting straighter as he thinks about it.

It’s quiet for a while as the conversation puts a finality to their time at the academy.

“You guys don’t think we should all go to the same firehouse? I know we got asked by at least the 147,” Aya asks randomly. The silence snaps like a rubber hand with the question, but her tone is serious, like she’s given it a lot of thought.

“Absolutely not,” Jay immediately says, his voice sharp as he shakes his head.

“Why not? We’re a great team,” Aya says, cocking an eyebrow.

Ravi knows why not, because he agrees with Jay here.

“Because we can’t be objective,” he answers quietly. There’s nothing but the stillness of the trees around them, but Ravi’s words seem to echo. “We’d just be distracted all the time, because…because we’re people we know.”

“I don’t think I can watch you two go into a burning building every day,” Jay confesses, his tone gentling from the sharp ricochet it was. “I don’t ever want to be in the position where I have to choose between you guys or...”

It’s probably not what he should’ve said, but all three of them know it’s true. It’s weird how quickly they’d clicked, but Ravi knows where he stands with them, and it’s exactly in this fold that he knows that there would be no chance of him being normal about actually having to see Aya or Jay risk their lives on the daily.

Aya hums, like she’d gotten the answer she wanted as she stares across the lake. “Like it or not, that’s our lives after the security of the academy.”

“Yeah but we don’t have to be our own enemies about it,” Ravi repeats, cracking a smile. “And you’d hate it if we were at the same house.”

There would be no independent life for either sibling, for one. Both of them could be incredibly protective of each other, and for a job like this, Ravi couldn’t see a plus side of that. For two, Aya was huge on team dynamics, and three people who practically hung out all the time would only alienate them from everyone else.

“Yeah I would,” Aya laughs, standing up and dusting her pants off. “I gotta go, but I’ll catch you guys later.”

Ravi and Jay wave at her, watching as she jogs down the trail, disappearing down a turn.

“You know I mean it, right? The 118 would be privileged to get you as a firefighter,” Jay says, apropos of nothing.

Ravi’s skillset was more about quick thinking and easy memorization. He’d been the quickest to memorize most of the information from the LAFD manual in their batch, Jay a close second behind him.

“Yeah, I guess. Won’t know if I don’t try.” Ravi exhaled, suddenly not really wanting to talk about this anymore. “152’s lucky to have you, too.”

“Are you nervous?” Jay asks, suddenly sounding very close.

“Probably more than I was on the first day of the academy,” Ravi admits absently, turning his head and freezing.

Most of their time alone ended like this, on the precipice of something more. The familiar tug of free-fall anchors itself in Ravi’s gut now, the line in Jay’s hands.

Jay’s close enough that Ravi can pick out every shade in his eyes — the flickering brown, the flecks of gold and green and hazel and even a little bit of blue. In the late day sun, his eyes are more beautiful than anything has any right to be.

As soon as the sappy thought occurs to him, he mentally smacks himself over the head.

Jay’s lips quirk up like he can read Ravi’s mind but he leans back a little — much to Ravi’s dismay.

The space between them feels hollow, like they’d had a moment and it slipped away from them, again.

All these thoughts must show on his face, because Jay’s expression turns determined just before he tugs him into a searing kiss, clearly done waiting.

And it’s…everything Ravi’s been waiting for, but he still falls stock-still.

“Ravi,” Jay whispers, pulling back just enough that Ravi can taste the reverence in his voice. “This is real. We’re going to do this.”

“Yeah,” Ravi says, tipping his chin to press their lips together again. “Yeah, it is, and yeah, we are.”

First kisses might be all that and some, but for a second kiss like this, Ravi would give up a thousand first kisses. Jay’s mouth fits perfectly against his with a tremor of nerves, and while it should probably make the kiss worse, Ravi thinks it makes it better that he isn’t the only one shaking.

Ravi swipes along Jay’s bottom lip, sucks on his tongue, and feels his shirt stick to him with the heat that gathers under his skin. It takes next to nothing for Jay to haul Ravi onto his lap, and the show of strength only fuels the fire.

But Jay forces them to slow down, with one deep kiss before they pull apart.

Ravi studies his best friend. The light sprinkling of freckles across his nose, the flush, the spit-slick mouth.

And those fucking eyes.

Months of sneaking glances, of Ravi carefully curling his finger around Jay’s every time he sensed his best friend spiraling down a thought tunnel, of sharing moments that could’ve tipped them into a forever weeks ago if they’d just let it. Despite knowing all of this, Ravi can’t bring himself to curse the “lost” time, knowing that the moment couldn’t get more perfect than it is now.

“Fuck, this is scary to do right now, but I don’t want to stop,” Jay blurts out in the space between them, the earlier bravado seemingly evaporating as he stares back at Ravi with those wide eyes.

He knows what he means.

Ravi’s read the horror stories, seen the videos of people losing their partners on the job, and has listened to their instructors talk endlessly about it. In the academy, everything is controlled to the point where if things went south, there is an option of turning things off.

But there are no mats in a real fire, and that possibility is so real sometimes that Ravi doesn’t know what to do with himself. All he knows is that they’re going to be okay, because not taking this chance is going to be infinitely worse.

Regret is something Ravi doesn’t want from Jay.

“We’re going to be great firefighters, but we’re going to be careful on the job so we can come back home to this,” Ravi says, cupping the back of Jay’s head as he tilts their foreheads together. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Jay whispers softly, his fingers knotted in Ravi’s running shirt right where it falls at his lips. Ravi’s not a small man, but he feels it when Jay's palms resting over the logo on the thigh of his sweatpants. “You at the 118, Aya at the 136 and me at the 152.”

Ravi…likes the way that sounds. Him at the 118, wearing one of their helmets with Panikkar scrawled across the bottom of his turnout coat. Him walking out of the 118 to see Jay waiting for him in the parking lot. Him standing in the lot of the 152, them waiting at the 136 for Aya.

It’s a life. A stable one where Ravi knows what he wants, and how he’s going to get it, and he’s made of nothing but the dreams that collect in his version of a dreamcatcher.

He’s probably getting ahead of himself, but for now, at least he gets to sit here with his best friend while both of them tip over into all the unknowns together.

The academy wasn’t easy, but this is, and it’s something Ravi will always be able to do.

No matter what happens next.

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