Her hands tremble once at my collar, then flatten like she’s palming down a panic attack on my chest. I cover them with mine, glove over glove, so she can feel what steady feels like.
Behind us, the mare bursts past, skittering for the fence, steam blowing off her flanks. Captain wrangles the stream and the next engine cries up the road. The farmer collapses against the woman by the well; she hits him with a towel and tears.
“Brooks,” Torres calls, and Savannah tears her eyes off me with the kind of discipline only trauma buys. She checks the farmer with practiced hands—airway, burns, soot rings. She glances at me once more, fierce and quick, and then her gaze goes clinical. She’s all action and order, barking requests, slinging oxygen, taking the shape of the job like she was made for it.
I lower my mask and grab the line again because the barn’s not done. Captain and I work the eaves to keep the flame from jumping to the dry stack by the fence. The wind tries to help the fire like an old friend; we cut it off with angles and swears.
When the roof finally loses and slumps inward, it does it with the exhausted sound of a giant sitting down. Everything flares once, then dimmer, then sanity. The smoke lifts a shade; the sky looks less like a fight.
The smell shifts from panic to aftermath. I can taste the metallic tang of adrenaline in my mouth—old and familiar—and feel every place I’ll bruise later.
Savannah gets the farmer loaded for transport, hand movements quick while she works. She shuts the rig door and turns, and for a second the world drifts into a softer focus, like someone took their finger off the pressure valve.
She crosses the gravel fast. No one speaks to her; no one in our line of work interrupts momentum like this. I start to say her name and that’s all I get time for because she is on me. Not polite. Not careful. All of it—fury, relief, tears—slamming my body back against the side of the engine hard enough to shake a panel.
Her hands claw the front of my coat, curl, and drag me down. She buries her face where my neck meets the edge of my collar and pulls a sound out of me I don’t ever make in public. I wrap her up without thinking—forearm around her shoulders, palm atthe back of her head, the other hand pressing her lower back into me.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur, over and over. My body hums like a generator. I feel her shake against me; I feel her wrestle it down because she hates giving ground to anything, even relief.
“I said I wouldn’t interrogate it,” she says into my gear, voice raw with smoke and feeling. “Consider this cross-examination.”
“Question away.”
“Why did you turn?” She lifts her face enough for me to see it—fierce and wet and destroyingly alive. “You heard me and you turned.”
“Because I would walk into that sound,” I say simply, like a confession I’m not ashamed of. “Every time.”
“That was stupid,” she says, but there’s no bite in it, only terror turned to love.
“Probably.”
“You could’ve—” She breaks, shakes her head once, hard. “I can’t do that again.”
“You won’t. Not if I can help it.”
She presses her forehead to my jaw. “Don’t make me a widow before I get a wedding.”
The sentence is a landmine. I close my eyes and let it go off under my ribs. When I open them, the world looks different again—not red and black, just… more true.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say softly, because there are a dozen ways to answer and only that one gets anywhere near right.
Her laugh chokes and turns into something that makes my knees think about quitting a second time. She pulls in air like she’s mad at it, then steps back an inch, then another, unpeels herself with visible reluctance. Her hands stay at my coat until the last possible second and then fall, fingers flexing as if the ache needs somewhere to go.
We exist in the after for a minute. Snow collects in her lashes. Heat waves wobble off the engine. The barn hisses behind us.
“You hit your bottle,” she says, clinical again, because she trusts me with two things at once—her panic and her training.
“Yeah.” I roll my shoulder. “It’ll have a bruise. So will the floor.”
“Come by the medic bay. I want eyes on it after we clear scene.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say again.
We move back into the work like the people we’re paid to be. We finish the mop, cut the smolder out of the rafters, soak the hay. The farmer’s wife thanks us with hands that miss and land and miss again, too much weather for a sentence. Savannah talks to her the way she talks to kids—calm, steady, eyes level.
When we roll hose, she’s beside me, coiling in rhythm, shoulders brushing mine with every pass. The crew sees it and gives us the grace of not noticing out loud. Captain hums a scrap of something that might be a hymn or a bar song. The engine ticks itself cooler.
On the road back, she rides in the passenger seat of the ambulance, profile cut sharp against a sky that can’t decide if it’s done with snow. I follow in the engine and fight the urge to tailgate like a teenager who needs to see brake lights to breathe. At a stop sign she glances in the side mirror and finds me. Her mouth curves, small and real. It lands like a hand to the chest.
