24-Jan-2002
My apoplogies for the cross post.
To everyone who has grown weary of stories and thoughts of September 11th, then this is perhaps not the story for you. I apologize. However, there are things within the human heart, tales to be told, feelings to experience, pains and joys to choke the life from dreams, that simply cannot remain silent.
This piece is a side story, part of the Inferno's Touch world that may, or may not, end up eventually being connected to it. Perhaps it is merely a 'what if'. Perhaps it is a reflection of that which will come. Perhaps it is even a glimpse into another incarnation of that world, like the facet of a prism, reflecting something set at odd angles to the light.
Perhaps it is simply the hearts of hope.
This piece was begun on September 12th, for the events of the day previous were too raw, and held too firm a hold on my attention to allow me to write until the following morning. It was begun on the 12th, and then set aside on the 16th, when the tears ran too thick for my eyes to focus on the computer screen, and I simply needed a hiatus from the sorrow.
Time has passed, and while I no longer feel the immediacy of that rawness, I still feel its ache. To those who are tired of the stories and tales that stemmed from September 11th, then this is perhaps not the fic for you. Pass it up, and seek your solace elsewhere.
Title: Grit
Author: RavynFyre (ravynfyre@hotmail.com)
Category: catharsis
Pairing: not really applicable, but 1+2, 3+4, 5+6
Rating: PG, maybe PG-13 because it's a little gory in spots
Warning: graphic descriptions of firefighter stuff
Notes: Dedicated to my Brothers on the Fire Department of New York, setting the standard for us all, and especially to the 342 who made the ultimate sacrifice, alongside the additional 100+ members of the NYPD, and the 50+ EMTs and Paramedics of New York.
Most of that morning is still a little fuzzy. I remember something about both of us having the day off, no worries, no responsibilities, no duties. I think I'd planned something about trying to convince Heero to spend the day in bed with me, but honestly, like I said, most of that morning is fuzzy.
It didn't leap into focus until the news during breakfast.
We were curled up together on my couch. He was combing his fingers through my hair and making these little purring noises that no one else would believe me if I told them about them. I mean, think about it: Heero Yuy, purring. The image just doesn't want to compute in most people's heads.
TV these days, is pretty violent and graphic. We're raised under its influence for most of our lives, and it kinda desensitizes a person to it. When you do the kind of work he and I do, you get that much more desensitized to it. Just the day before that morning, we spent more than an hour trying to cut this teen aged kid out of his car. He'd gone out after some high school party, gotten drunk with some friends, and then drove himself, his girlfriend, and a couple of other kids home. On the way, he wrapped his car around a tree at about ninety miles an hour.
His girlfriend got catapulted through the windshield. We scraped her off the highway about seventy feet down the road. There wasn't much left of her, and I still remember Hilde making some crack about hamburger helper at the time. I also remembered laughing. You have to learn to laugh at shit like that. Otherwise it rises up from the darkness and swallows you whole. You can't do your job if you get swallowed, and if you can't do your job, then how's the kid gonna get cut out of his car?
He had half the steering wheel impacted into his chest. The other half was somewhere in the engine block. Of course, by that time, the engine block was sitting in his lap, and the kid had no legs left, but I remember that half the steering wheel was gone. His seat had buckled under the impact, the airbags deployed front and side, and half-assed cushioned him just enough that when Heero reached through the tiny gap between front and rear door posts, and felt that kid's neck, he still had a pulse.
His other two friends were a lot luckier; one got ejected about sixty feet out into a field and died of massive head trauma before we ever arrived, while the other was a gooey red smear in the back passenger seat. There wasn't even enough of that kid left to tell what part was what. We couldn't even decide where to start checking for a pulse.
Pretty sad when the three dead kids were the lucky ones.
We spent an hour cutting that car apart, trying to get to that kid to pull him out and ship him off to the hospital so they could try to put him back together. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
I remember hearing him moan every once in a while, and in this really small voice that still gives me shivers, begging for his mother to come chase the boogey man away. An hour we cut that car apart. Snip here, saw there, pry and shimmy and shake and scream and bend and beg God to just this once cut us a break.
And then silence.
There was no pulse by the time we got him loaded onto the backboard. Well, by the time we got his top half loaded onto the backboard. His bottom half stayed in the car. His legs had been amputated by the engine block when it was violently relocated to his lap.
Trowa worked the back that call. I think it was too raw for Quatre. Heero and I, I mean. Not the kid. The kid was long past being raw. At least emotionally.
Heero busted his ass on that kid. I could see it in his eyes, that dark, almost glazed 'mission' look he gets when he's determined not to let the devil win one. There's no reasoning with him like that, and no backing down. He kinda carries you along with him when he gets like that, and you find yourself busting just as much ass, even though you know it's a hopeless cause, because maybe, just maybe, we might be able to storm the gates of hell, ford the river Styx, and drag one back with us, no matter how hopeless it looks.
I remember seeing blood and saline just flushing out the stumps of that kid's legs with every compression Heero did, and Hilde's sick little hamburger helper joke kept running through my mind like a gerbil on a wheel. I was doing the ventilations, keeping time for the compressions of the ambu bag by saying it over and over in my head. Hamburger Helper, squeeze. Hamburger Helper, squeeze. Hamburger Helper, squeeze. Hamburger Helper, squeeze. Hamburger Helper, squeeze.
You get desensitized to the blood. Otherwise you go nuts. You like to think you get desensitized to the death. But you never really do.
The other three kids were the lucky ones, because they didn't have to sit around waiting for an hour for us to cut the car up enough for Death to squeeze in and take them away. They got their tickets punched right away, no pain, no soft whimpering cries, no. waiting.
Part of your soul prays that the desensitization happens fast, that you get used to the blood and gore quick, so you can just get on with your job. If you don't do it, who will? The rest of your soul mourns for the loss of that little something within you. Don't get me wrong, life is sacred. There's nothing that has more sanctity to us than life, but. sometimes you just show up and hope that they die, so their suffering can end. Sometimes it's not quite such a bad thing to lose to Death, even though it still hurts like a bitch.
You bust your ass and pour out your heart for them, and She still takes them away, as if all you were doing was pissing in the wind. The only thing worse would be not trying at all.
So you let yourself get a little numb to it. The blood doesn't seem quite so red, so bright. The lights don't seem to flash so intently. The brain matter doesn't seem quite so grey. It all kinda fuzzes out just a little to save what's left of your own humanity.
Maybe that's why when the first plane hit, I didn't react immediately.
Sitting there on the couch with Heero, curled in his arms, it seemed like a really good, albeit cheesy, movie special effect. Nice flames, but didn't they overdo it just a tad? I mean, everyone knows that jet fuel doesn't burn like that in real life. They made it less flammable for stuff like that, right? And, come on. The World Trade Center Towers? How overdone is that? Everyone always nails the WTC Towers. Let's try being a *little* original now and then. How about hitting Big Ben once in a while?
And then it hits me. We're watching CNN, not Cinemax.
oh shit.
I didn't even look at Heero for most of the morning. I was too riveted to the TV screen. The second plane hit, and then they started talking about how the Pentagon was hit, and how another plane was down and how there might be other planes missing, and how America was struck that day and I just remember that I had to remind myself to breathe every now and then, because it just felt like I was sitting at the bottom of a murky pool, and if I just closed my eyes, I'd drown. I'd drown.
God, I'm drowning now. Grit. Dust. The smell of smoke and. you can smell burning flesh under it all. I know I'm not imagining it, because even Heero commented on it this morning.
See, when the first tower fell, we knew our Brothers were there. He reached for the phone first, but only because his other arm was wrapped so tightly around my arms that it took more than ten minutes to get the feeling back. I'd been so caught up in the news that I hadn't even noticed his stranglehold.
Within twenty minutes, we were packed, and Wufei, Zechs, Quatre, and Trowa were all on their way over. Zechs had pulled some strings with our Battalion Chief, and gotten us all a few days of vacation. We'd road trip out to New York. Our Brothers needed us.
By the time they got there, the other tower had come down, and the whole world. it crumbled. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
I remember that we actually had a state trooper escort through one state. He ran lights down the interstate from border to border, leading the way for us. We crossed that state in record time. Everywhere we went, we were joined by other Brothers, other law enforcement who watched us speed past, no tickets, sometimes even clearing the road for us along the way. Like something out of the Bible, there was an Exodus. Or should that be Endodus? We were all flooding into New York.
Quatre had something of a personal impetus; his sister Iria is a trauma surgeon right there in Manhattan. Some of her co-workers said she took off for the Towers when the first plane struck.
We're still waiting to hear from her.
But we all had personal reasons to be there; our Brothers needed us.
The first thing that struck me was the grit. It was everywhere. In the air, dust on the sidewalks, clogging the masks, choking the sun. Smoke filling your lungs, burning your eyes, making the search dogs sneeze and cough, but they kept right on searching.
There was other grit, too. The guys who worked more than seventy hours straight, never resting, never stopping, not even for sleep, before they had to be dragged from the pile.
The Pile. Ground Zero. The Pit. The Site.
There's a lot of quaint names for it. A lot of labels to remove it just that one step from the public. Desensitize them. Make the hurt seem a little less raw, but fuel the hate so we can go 'kick their asses and make them pay for what they've done to us'.
They're just names. This is real. This rock in my hand, this sheaf of papers in Heero's gloved fist, that steel girder Wufei and Zechs are pulling out of the way, that human hand Trowa just bagged, that family snapshot Quatre just unearthed. These things are real.
Wufei doesn't have any jokes now about not standing on the bodies. It's not possible. Everywhere you step, there's a life underfoot. Faded or fading, you know they're there, and you can't miss them. There's a fresh ghost for every square inch of this land, this rubble, and you can't help but feel their outrage. Not for getting stepped on, though. They understand that, I think. Outrage for being dead. Yeah, what ghost really wants to be dead, but these spirits are even more restless than others. Our Brothers, angry for the lives they couldn't save. The victims, crying for the sun they'll never see again. The mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, weeping for the loss of America's freedom.
And three of our Brothers, proving them wrong by raising Old Glory atop the Pile.
Everywhere you look is grey. Dust and smoke and ash, faces just a little dull around the edges as the days wear on and the hope of finding live bodies fades a little more each second.
Media and the job, they desensitize you to the horror of it all, so that some sick fuck like me can time ventilation compressions to a mental mantra of Hamburger Helper. But nothing can desensitize you enough for this. Humpty Dumpty got fucked on September 11th.
These guys here in New York, they're the real deal. They're the real heroes. Us? We get to go home sometime. We have lives and the job to return to, and an unbroken skyline that won't be marred by smoke and ash for months to come. We get to crawl back into our safe little hovels, retreat to our unblemished city, and go back to watching the news.
People will come by and drop off cakes and cookies, baked goods and cards, little kids will scream and wave and beg to come shake our hands for a while. Out and about, people will wave, and for a time, they'll be more conscientious about getting out of our way when we run lights and sirens to a call. They'll be a little bit more conscious of the way we put our lives on the line every day, and maybe some will even come up to give us a pat on the back and an 'atta boy'.
It's not why we do it, mind you. We're in it for the lives. To every once in a great while, actually be able to beat Death at Her own game, and snatch one back from the river Styx. But we are human, and that rare 'atta boy' brightens our day like it would for any other person.
But people will forget. Time will march on. The scowls will return and people will be grumpy at having to get out of our way while we race to save a life. They'll start to wonder again why they pay us so much to sit around waiting for disaster, and bitch about how much time off we get.
But we still get to come home to our unbroken skyline. Those guys in New York, they'll have to face all that crap, and more. Because their world will never be whole again. But they'll be there.
That's real grit.
Not like this shit in the air that's making me choke. That's just God crying. Dust and smoke and ash. Grey everywhere, like a wasteland. I'll never watch Mad Max and his adventures in a post-apocalyptic world in quite the same light. Not after being here and living it.
But these New York guys, they'll be living it for the rest of their lives. Grit. Suddenly, the standard seems a hell of a lot higher than it ever did before.
And oddly enough, I'm hungry for Hamburger Helper.
-owari-
RavynFyre
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