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tropes-and-tales · 2 months ago

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Firewatch

(Alex Keller x F!Reader)

CW: Slight angst; healing from trauma; mild danger

Word Count: 6210

AN: This was inspired by the video game "Firewatch."

Alex Keller takes the job as a lookout at a fire tower because he needs time away.

He needs time to heal.

He carries too many ghosts with him. Ghosts from his time in special ops, then in the CIA. Ghosts from his time with Farrah in Urzikstan. His third act with Farrah was supposed to help exorcise the ghosts from his time under the dubious command of the U.S. Yet here he is, in his pitiful fourth act, with just as many ghosts. And one less leg.

It’s a buddy of a buddy who manages to hook him up with the job. The national service eyes his prosthetic leg with skepticism, but if he can fight on it, he reasons, he can serve as a lookout. The national service isn’t exactly overrun by applicants—it is lonely, isolated work for half of the year, so they hire him.

The swath of wilderness has four fire towers, each miles apart and separately staffed. Each can see so far across the mountain range and can radio to the national service in the event of smoke. Each person has rudimentary EMT skills, survivalist skills, and can be pressed into service in case a hiker or camper needs aid. Each person gets a weekly supply drop. The towers have solar panels for some creature comforts. Each has three radios so that two can always be fully charged while the other is in use.

Alex is assigned to the fourth tower, the one with the flattest terrain in a nod to his prosthetic leg. It’s called the Delta tower, and he snorts at the symmetry in his life. From Delta Force to Delta tower.

He takes the job because he needs time to heal. He needs quiet and solitude.

Ironic, then, that his first night, his radio crackles to life with a hail from the Charlie tower, and when he answers, he hears your bright voice introducing yourself, welcoming him to the summer.

“I was in Delta for the last three years,” you explain. “I only moved to Charlie this year.”

Alex feels a sting of guilt. He likely pushed you out because of his leg. “I’m sorry,” he replies. “I think they moved you because I’m missing the lower half of my left leg.”

“Oh, no worries. Charlie tower is nice, and it’s new terrain for me to explore. I just wanted to welcome you.”

“Thank you.”

You sign off, and Alex sighs, makes his way back to his cot. Your cot, until now. He stares up at the ceiling and waits for sleep to come. It takes a long time: after an entire lifetime of the noise of war and tragedy, the near-silence of his tower is as loud as a bomb.

-----

Alex can see how this would be a tough gig for most people. The average well-adjusted person would struggle with the solitude. His days are long, and with no smoke on any horizon, he is in charge of filling his hours.

He acclimates to the terrain. He hikes his territory in wider arcs. Part of his job’s secondary tasks include checking the blazes on the trails, clearing any debris, and making sure the emergency supply caches are stocked. He takes to it like a fish to water: all those years of precise military training, put to use making sure everything is neat and orderly.

His evenings are spent sitting on his tower, the wide windows open to allow the breeze in. This high up, every direction is picture perfect. If he turns to the left, he can see the sun setting in all its technicolor glory, and he swears there are colors that have no name—the thin bands of melding between purple and orange, orange and fiery red. If he turns to the right, it’s already dark, and the sky is a velvety blackness.

His first few weeks, the only person he speaks to is you: a daily and nightly hailing that goes from tower to tower to base camp, so that everyone is accounted for.

“Charlie to Delta,” you call each night. “Here to tuck you into bed.”

Alex smiles at it each time. “Delta accounted for.”

“Excellent. Sweet dreams, Delta.”

-----

It’s the teenagers that put you and Alex on chattier terms: a foursome of nineteen year-old girls, a troublesome age where they are technically adults but unable to legally drink. They are camping in the area between Alex’s tower and yours, and they spend their first night setting off fireworks.

“You’re seeing this, right?” you crackle through his radio.

“Affirmative.”

“Bravo tower called them in to base. They have permits to camp, so we’ll have to keep an eye on them. Still….shitheads, setting off fireworks during fire season. Do you think you can make your way down to them tomorrow and give them a lecture?”

Alex grins, then presses the button on his radio. “You don’t want to do the honors? I feel like you have a ready-made lecture.”

“Well, for one, I’d hate for you to not have any fun during your first summer.”

“And two?”

“Two is, I have to hike through and resupply my caches. One needs repaired.”

Alex considers it. He’s used to… less than kind ways of convincing people to bend to his will. But idiot teenagers?

“Any suggestions?” he asks.

He hears your laugh over the radio and it makes him smile. “Whatever you do, don’t try to meet ‘em on their level. Teenagers are assholes. Give them the straight facts about forest fires, and be prepared for them to call you a vulgar iteration of ‘Smokey the Bear.’”

“You speaking from experience?”

“I repress it each year, Delta.”

-----

You hail him a little earlier that night.

“Charlie to Delta. How’d it go?”

Alex makes sure to press the button so you can hear the massive sigh he heaves. He only got back to his tower half an hour earlier, just before the sun fully sank in the western sky. He was so tired he didn’t bother to cook a proper meal — he smeared a bunch of peanut butter on bread, made a couple of sandwiches that he bolted down in a handful of wolfish bites. Now he’s in the process of removing his prosthetic leg when he hears you calling on the radio.

“I’m back. I survived.” He sets his prosthetic on the bed beside him and groans as he kneads at his thigh. His muscles are tight and knotted, and he’s sore, but it’s a good sore from putting in a lot of hiking.

“You put the fear of god in them?”

“I tried.” He leans back against his pillow and feels the muscles in his back relax one by one. “They didn’t seem to care about the forest or the loss of human life if they start a fire. I had to frame it as all the cute lil bunnies that would die.”

“So long as they stop setting off fireworks.” You pause, then ask, more playfully, “they verbally abuse you?”

He laughs, but it trails off into a wide yawn. “Yeah, but standard stuff. ‘Peg Leg.’”

“Boo.”

“Right? I thought kids were more clever nowadays.”

“Two summers ago, I had to break up a campsite of teenaged boys,” you tell him. “Same deal, fire conditions were high. One called me ‘Smokey the Bear,’ but another looked me over and said, ‘I wouldn’t mind climbing up on Ol’ Smokey.’”

Alex laughs again. Yawns again. “Youths,” he chuckles over the radio.

“Youth is wasted on them.” A beat of static as you hold the line. “Well, I appreciate you handling it. You’re a seasoned pro now.”

He tries not to note the warm flush of feeling at this tamest, faintest overture of belonging. He tries not to let his mind immediately go to where it goes: that with everywhere else he’s belonged, he had to kill for the right. He had to do nefarious things. Evil things. Here, on the fire tower? All he had to do was hike down to the lake and give a stern talk to a foursome of giggling, slightly drunk young women.

“Anytime.” His voice has an edge of roughness to it, but you must just chalk it up to tiredness.

“Alright, I’ve kept you on too long. Go to bed and sleep well, Delta.”

“You too, Charlie.”

-----

From there, you talk more. Not just in the mornings or evenings for check-in, but at random intervals throughout the day. You both drop a lot of the formalities on the radio too.

You break in one afternoon, your voice startling him as he works his way along a bit of trail that needs cleared.

“What do you look like, Delta?”

As always, your non-sequiturs make him smile. “I’m hideous.”

“Liar!”

“I wasn’t born so much as created in a lab,” he teases. “And it didn’t go well. Just really disgusting looking.”

“So you’re one of a kind, then?”

He draws his arm across his forehead to wipe away the sweat beading there. He’s been hacking away at encroaching undergrowth with a machete, and you calling is a welcome break.

“Is this a prelude to something saucy?” he asks. “Like, are you gonna ask what I’m wearing next?”

“Oh, Delta. I imagine you’re wearing a white t-shirt, cargo shorts, and a red baseball cap.”

Maybe it’s a good sign that he startles now. That he had no idea someone was watching him. He’s been swinging his machete and feeling good to use his body for good work, and he never even noticed that he was being observed.

Still, he freezes like his training taught him. He scans the landscape, quick but thorough—

Your laughter bursts out of his radio. “I’m on my high-powered binoculars. I can see you, but you can’t see me.”

“Then why are you asking what I look like.” He does a slow turn with his arms out. “Here I am.”

“I can’t make out your face that well. But from the blur I can make out, you look disappointingly human. No lab experiment at all.”

-----

The next day brings much-needed rain, and Alex lounges in his tower. There’s a dog-eared copy of “War and Peace” (yours? He doesn’t know) that he is trying to work through just so he can be one of those impressive, kinda irritating people who can say they’ve read “War and Peace.” But the rain drums on the roof, and the words—all those confusing Russian names that he can’t keep straight—swim together in front of him.

He reaches for the radio. “Delta to Charlie. How’s the weather over there?”

It takes you a moment to answer, and your voice is husky when you do. “Sheets of rain here.”

“Did I wake you up? Sorry.”

“Just dozing. Can’t pass up on a good doze when the weather obliges.” A beat. “What’s up, Delta?”

“Trying to read ‘War and Peace’ and getting nowhere.”

“Oh, fatal mistake. Summer in the tower calls for Jack London, Larry McMurty, Louis L’Amour. The Russians are strictly for winter.”

“Duly noted.” He pauses and turns his head to look out one of the wide windows. Water streaks down, and the horizon shows nothing but thick black clouds. “I was curious what you looked like.”

Your laughter carries over the radio and makes him smile. “Well….I wasn’t formed in a lab. In fact, I was, you know, in my mom with my twin. But I partially absorbed my twin, so I have three eyes, four ears—”

“That’s wild.” He laughs. “What else?”

“Only one mouth, normal sized, but like, twice as many teeth. I look like some fucked-up fish that you’d find in the Mariana Trench.”

“You speak really well for someone with a mouthful of teeth.”

“Thanks.”

“So you’re one of a kind too?”

He can’t account for why your voice turns sad and sighs as you reply, “just a lonely whale operating on a frequency no one else can hear.”

-----

And that—the rainy day where the two of you check in with each other, leisurely, comfortably—is what leads your chats into deeper waters.

“Why are you out here?” you ask him one day.

How to answer it? The easy but still-true answer is that he needed the job. Not because of money—he’s set up well enough for the rest of his life, so long as he doesn’t acquire any expensive habits between now and old age. It’s more an inability to not work. He’s had a job since he was twelve when he worked on a farm down the road from his house during the summer. From farmhand to bus boy to lifeguard to soldier to undercover agent to freedom fighter to… what? This, for now.

The tougher, more-true answer is that he needed to feel useful in a way that didn’t involve death. He needed a place to heal the sore spots in his soul, the places that burn because they’ve been grated raw by the world.

Instead of answering, he volleys a question back to you. “Why are you asking?”

“Everyone comes here for a reason. We have to, because no one without a reason would just take this job. Why else would we sign up for so much seclusion?”

“Maybe I just needed the stipend a lot.”

You laugh. “You’d make the same basic amount at McDonald’s, and you’d get to go home to a larger bed and hot shower each night.”

“But here, I don’t stink like fry oil.”

Another laugh, and it never fails to make Alex smile—the warm merriment traveling through the airwaves over the miles that separate you.

“So Alpha has been here the longest, and he’s here because he’s just your standard loner. Nice guy. He just kinda hates society and likes to spend his time in the mountains. A real Thoreau-type,” you say.

“You’re sure he’s not working on any manifestos in his spare time?”

“Nah. He actually spends a lot of his evenings whittling these really lovely little wooden animals, right? He gives everyone one at the end of each season. Last year he whittled foxes.”

Alex wonders if you have similar conversations with the other towers about him, and he finds the thought doesn’t bother him. You seem kind; most of your humor is gently teasing, if that. He imagines you hailing Bravo tower and saying something like, “Delta had his first teenager encounter. He’s one of us now.”

You continue over the radio. “Bravo is a woman too. She’s a writer, and she has this sturdy, bare bones laptop that she can charge with the solars. She basically bangs out two, three really rough drafts here, then goes home after fire season to polish ‘em up.”

“Yeah?” He glances at the dog-eared copy of “War and Peace” that he’s pretty much given up on. “Anything I might’ve heard of?”

“Probably not, unless you are into shifter smut.”

He knows he’s missed a lot, being out of step with the mainstream, but his mind boggles. “What’s that?”

“Like….” You trail off, and he hears you clicking your tongue as you think. “Shifter is shape-shifter. Werewolves, humans turning into other creatures. And smut is….you know.”

“Like two werewolves are in a romance?”

“Oh, Delta.” Your laughter is more of a giggle over the line, a he-he-he that might seem flirty except for the tendril of nervousness threaded through it. “It’s, uh, usually a human and a shifter.”

“Seriously? Doesn’t that make it bestiality?”

“Well, the shifter isn’t a beast. It’s a fully consensual being, just not a human.”

He’s completely confused. “And people read these books?”

“Bravo does really well. She goes to all sorts of romance conventions and has a robust fanbase.”

“For werewolf and human smut?” He can’t hide the way his voice pitches up in incredulity.

“Different strokes for different folks.”

“Well, shit. I guess,” he replies, still baffled, and it makes you laugh again.

A moment later, though, you sign off—it’s supply drop day, and you have the furthest to go for yours. Alex looks thoughtfully at the radio in his hand, realizes that you never circled back to your original question to him, and that you never said why you’re on a tower either.

-----

You don’t ask the question again over the next few weeks, so Alex asks it.

“Why are you out here?” he asks one evening. There are thunderheads in the west, but the weather service says they should spend themselves before they get close enough to do any damage from lightning strikes.

You’re a long time in answering him. You go so long that the line seems dead, and he adds, more playfully, “you some sort of smut writer too? Alien smut, maybe?”

It draws a laugh out of you, but it lacks the usual bright merriment. “I’m not that creative, unfortunately.”

“C’mon,” he wheedles. “You gotta give me something, boss.”

“Boss?”

Alex shuts his eyes, winces. It just slipped out, his weird little term of affection. His nickname for people he feels comfortable with. Women he feels comfortable with. He hasn’t said it since Farrah, since their time together in Urzikstan, him at her right hand, helping rebuild until—

“Did I lose you there, Delta?”

“Still here.”

“Why are you here, then? Turnabout is fair play, and you never told me.”

He doesn’t bother to point out that you never told him why you were on a tower. That you’re similarly withholding from him. He wonders if you’re hiding similar hurt, or if you need a similar sort of healing that can only come from being away from other people.

“I just needed time away,” he tells you.

The line is silent for a long stretch again, and then your voice comes across, smaller than he’s ever heard it before.

“Me too.”

-----

A grey day weeks later when low clouds obscure the sun and cast the landscape in a weird, muted light: you hail Alex late morning when he’s fiddling around with a loose wire on one of his solar panels.

“Quid pro quo, Delta. I’ll tell you my tale of woe if you tell me yours.”

He sets down the channel locks he’s been using and makes his way over to the steps. He settles down, then answers you.

“Who says I have a tale of woe?”

“Because you never answered me the way I never answered you. If you’re here because you love the wilderness, you would have just said so.”

“Fair.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then you add, “and because everyone here has a tale of woe, including Alpha and Bravo. But it’s not my place to tell their stories.”

Alex turns his head and gazes off across the slope to the west, the gentle valley that leads down to the lake that separates his area from yours. He has no idea what you look like or what you’re even doing right now. Are you on a trail, resupplying a cache, and did the spirit move you to call him? Are you in your tower, peering in his direction with your binoculars?

He knows part of his reintroduction to the world will have to involve letting people in. Extending trust even if it isn’t earned yet. Why not start with a person he hasn’t seen? Why not start with telling his story into a radio, when he doesn’t have to look you in the eye and see your reactions?

“Well,” he starts. “There was a woman. But really, before that, I had this job, and I did a lot of bad things that seemed like the right thing at the time…”

-----

He talks so long his radio dies. He talks so long, the light grows dimmer—sunset is close—and he has to pause, clean up his abandoned project, and head up into the tower. You’ve been silent for most of his story, only offering little one-word encouragements to continue, or keep going, or little noises of sympathy. Or at least they sound sympathetic.

And it’s a revelation how it all just pours out of him, every wretched moment: the shit he saw and did on Delta Force, the worse shit he saw and did in the CIA. The moment he tried to turn it around, sacrifice himself for a noble cause, and how he woke up in a clinic in the most agonizing pain of his life. How he was airlifted to Turkey, how they amputated his leg there. Then the long road to recovery and back to Farrah, happy to serve at her right hand as she rebuilt her country to be a beacon to the region.

How he fell in love—how could he not? How that love was gently rebuffed, and how there was no great falling out or massive argument.

How ordinary it was, when he realized he couldn’t live with Farrah and not have his love reciprocated. How Farrah couldn’t love him the way he needed.

All the drama and chaos of his life, and going out like that: a love-sick boy on a plane back to the United States, sulking and hurt. And that sulking and hurt nothing but a veneer over the deeper pain.

Then his radio gives its warning beep, and he has to sign off before you can reply. As he heads in for the evening, he grows more and more horrified at what he’s done. Oversharing to the nth degree. His face flames hot; the tips of his ears burn so much he’s sure he looks like a beacon in the growing darkness.

-----

You call him back a few hours later.

“Are you free?” you ask. “I wanted to give you time to eat, relax, unwind…”

“Yeah. I’m free.” His voice comes out rough, craggy around the edges of his words. He shuts his eyes tight and lays back in his cot. He waits for you to give him hell or worse, give him a gentle brush-off. Something like maybe we should just stick to the nightly check-in.

“I appreciate you sharing all of that with me.” A beat. “I realize it must have been hard, trusting a stranger with your story.”

He snorts. “You hardly seem like a stranger anymore.”

“Someone you haven’t formally met yet, then.”

“It was easier, I think. Talking to someone I hadn’t met yet. I could have never said any of that to my sisters or cousins or friends back home.”

He hears the sympathetic cluck of your tongue. “I get it. Sometimes it’s harder to share the dark stuff with the people closest to us.”

He feels a curious sensation in his chest at this exchange; a weird snagging against the back of his breastbone, like something barbed loosening there. He hears no judgement in your voice. No horror at the things he’s done in the name of freedom and country. Maybe it will come later, but right now, he only hears sympathy and understanding.

“Quid pro quo,” he reminds you.

He hears the sigh, and he hears a rustling over the radio. Like you’re leaning back in your bed too, getting comfortable.

“Well, there was a man,” you start. “Isn’t there always? A man or a woman or some goddamned person that throws you off the trajectory of your life and leaves you spinning.”

You talk so long your radio dies.

-----

Alex wonders sometimes if you talk with the other towers like you talk with him. He wonders if you and Bravo, say, chat about your various traumas. Maybe Bravo was cheated on too, and the two of you spend radio-draining hours commiserating.

He doesn’t think so, though. The two of you fall into a rhythm: you spend your evenings and well into the night talking—deep shit, embarrassing shit, the shit neither of you would probably tell anyone else. The mornings and daylight hours bring a sheepishness to your back-and-forth, a sort of “can’t believe I admitted that last night, so now I have to soften it with goofy teasing and joking around.”

But then the sun sets, and you’re back to baring your souls to each other.

The fire season is halfway over when you tell him one night that you appreciate him more than he knows. That excising all of the bad feelings has led you to sleep better than you have in years.

“I don’t know how it happened, but you’ve become my closest confidant,” you admit.

He doesn’t tell you then, but he considers it after you both sign off for the night: how he’s sleeping better than he has in years too. And how he’s confided in you more than anyone else, even Farrah.

And then he considers how the thought of Farrah doesn’t raise the sharp ache of loss it used to.

He considers how this may be him healing.

-----

“What are your plans after the season ends?” he asks. He’s been mulling that question over for himself. He has no plans at all. He could always crash at his cousin’s place for a few months—he’s got a rambling old farmhouse in Michigan, and he’s invited Alex more than once to join him.

“I got a place in Colorado,” you reply. “I have a seasonal job at a winter resort.”

“What do you do there?”

It’s daytime, so the jokes are in full force. “I’m a caretaker. Also working on my novel. It’s just me and a bunch of ghosts and also the specter of my own alcoholism.”

Alex laughs. “There was alcoholism in ‘the Shining’?”

“In the book, yeah.” You pause, and Alex hears you give a little grunt of effort. He knows you’re on a trail, clearing out a downed tree. “Anyway, I do a little bit of everything at the resort. Mostly I give out skiing lessons and man the medic hut.”

“Sounds like a good gig.”

“It is.” Another beat, another huff as you move a heavy section of tree. Alex hears the thud as it lands on the soft ground. “What about you?”

“Not sure yet. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

You heave a sigh, and he imagines you sitting down or leaning against a tree to rest. “There’s a whole swath of society that does this sort of seasonal work as a living. I could give you some sites to look at. Ideas of what to do during the winter. If you plan on doing this again next year, I mean.”

He chuckles again. “I definitely haven’t thought that far ahead.”

“C’mon. You don’t want to do another summer on the tower?”

He isn’t against the idea, exactly. The summer has turned out to be exactly what he’s needed: time and space away from others, time to be alone with himself. And a friend on the radio, which he hadn’t counted on.

But this was only ever meant to be a stop-gap. He never intended to become a lifer on the fire tower, because he has always imagined a life more ordinary. A regular job and a home and partner to come home to every night.

He tells you as much now, and asks, “do you want to do this forever?”

“I never planned on it.” Your voice sounds thoughtful, maybe a little sad. “I guess it was supposed to be a stop-gap for me too, and now here I am…”

He knows now how you’ve been hurt. The story of a husband who used you, then cheated, then left you with less than nothing. How it launched you out of the trajectory of your own life, as you said, and how you find yourself drifting now.

“You could go anywhere,” he tells you. “Anywhere at all. And you could do anything.”

“You want me to put down some roots, Delta?” You sound playful now, and he smiles to hear it.

“Wouldn’t be the worst thing, right?”

“It’d be tough to start over in a place where I didn’t know anyone,” you admit. “It’s tough to make friends as an adult. Starting over, all that shit.”

Alex shakes his head, rueful. “Don’t sell yourself short. You made a friend in me in a matter of months.”

You laugh over the radio, your usual merry sound that makes that barbed pain behind his chest wall unfurl a bit. “How about you get settled somewhere, and I’ll come glom off of you until I put down some roots of my own.”

“That’s a deal,” he replies, quick, and you laugh over the radio again, but Alex spends the rest of the golden afternoon imagining an entire future that looks a lot like the present: him in his own place somewhere undefined, and you nearby, just a phone call away to chat or listen or vent.

-----

The season is a month away from ending when the fire starts.

It’s two fires, actually: one sighted early by Alpha tower, and the second sighted by you in Charlie.

“The Service is keeping an eye on them,” you tell him one evening. Your voice has a taut quality that Alex realizes is fear. He’s never heard you afraid before.

“They are sending in a team to strip out a fire line,” you continue. “Hopefully it will keep them from merging.”

Alex eyes the smoke on the horizon. The wind has been carrying the acrid scent of burning to him all day. “Have you been in a fire situation before?” he asks.

“Once, but it was small. It was handled before it became a big thing.”

“You able to move out quick if you have to?” He thinks of his years of training and experience. He can light out in less than a minute if he has to.

Your scoff over the radio tells him all he needs to know, but you kindly answer with your words anyway. “Of course I can move quick, Delta.”

-----

The weather is against you: high winds and no rain. The wind takes the fires and pushes them to ungodly heights, and no rain ever comes. Alex can’t tell what is a genuine cloud and what is smoke now—everything is hazy, and his eyes feel like they are laden with grit.

The fires merge within a couple of days, and the situation changes from concerning to dangerous.

“I need you to look at the map on the wall,” you tell him without preamble. The taut quality of your voice is gone, and now it shakes with fear.

He takes the three steps over to the wall where it’s tacked up, the corners curling and yellowed with age. There are notations on it in neat printing, some of them humorous. He’s looked at it all summer and always assumed it was you who named some of the local features, like Twisted Knee Trail and Drunken Fratboy Pond.

“I’m looking at it,” he tells you.

“You see where you are in Delta tower.”

“Affirmative.”

“Look northwest. Do you see Wapiti Meadow? It’s on the other side of the canyon.”

He leans closer and studies it. Does the quick math.

“Looks like it’s about five or six clicks from me.”

“Correct. There’s a research station there so it’s the best place the helicopter can set down to get us. Alpha hiked out two days ago, and Bravo caught a ride with the fire fighters who were cutting the line. It’s just us now.”

Alex’s stomach sinks, and he turns to look out the window. The fire churns thick plumes of black smoke in the air. It’s like a beast, ravenous for more acreage. “We’re evacuating.” The thought occurs to him then, and he returns to the map. Wapiti Meadow will be a hike but he should be fine. You?

“The northern edge of the fire is between the rendezvous spot and you,” he says, and now his voice is laced with fear too.

“I’m leaving now,” you reply. “I have to flank it. Take only what you absolutely need. Wet a cloth and tie it over your mouth and nose. And take some water. Not enough to weigh you down but enough to hydrate you. Don’t underestimate the smoke in the air.”

He makes his way over to his cot and sits down, pulls out his pack and starts to check its contents. He’s always ready to go in a moment. He’ll be fine.

A not-tiny sting of guilt lances through him: this was your tower, and the service gave it to him because of his leg. Now you have to make your way through dangerous terrain around a wild fire because of him.

“I’m sorry,” he tells you.

“None of that shit,” you snap over the radio. “Don’t you dare apologize. Get moving, and I’ll see you at Wapiti Meadow.

“Please be careful, Boss.”

“I’ll see you there, Alex.”

It’s the first time you’ve called him by his first name all summer, and it’s the jolt he needs to finish his preparations and launch him out the door of his tower.

He gives it a backwards glance, realizes it will be gone within a day or two. At the last minute, he turns back and pulls the map from the wall. He has his smaller one in his pocket that he can consult with his compass, but he has the idea to save the tower map with your notations. A memento from your home for so many summers, your refuge from the wider world while you healed.

He folds it and puts it in his pack, then leaves.

-----

He makes it to Wapiti Meadow okay. He underestimated the haze from the smoke, and how quickly it would make his vision blurry with tears. Near the end of his journey to the rendezvous, he has to stop every few hundreds of yards to wash out his eyes and blink his vision clear again.

By the time he gets there, the helicopter is already in the clearing. A grim-faced ranger offers his hand and helps haul Alex up into the helicopter, and he does a quick scan of the others there. The ranger, the helicopter pilot, and a man that he later learns is a research scientist at the Wapiti station.

No you.

For the majority of Alex’s professional life, he’s only been a member of teams where everyone was expendable. He himself had been left behind for dead more often than he wants to count. It’s that history that makes him stand up as much as he can in the tight quarters of the helicopter, makes him loom over the ranger, and growl, “we aren’t leaving her behind.”

The ranger, who perhaps has some understanding of the lookouts on the towers, only looks back at him and mildly replies, “we weren’t planning on it, buddy.”

Over the headset, the pilot adds, “she’s only a click or two away now. She’s been radioing in every thirty minutes.”

It would be more dramatic to say that there is a frenzy at the end, that the helicopter’s blades start to turn, that it starts to rise from the flattened grass of the meadow just as you break through the treeline and make a run for them. It’d be more dramatic to say that Alex reaches out a hand as you reach out a hand, and that your fingertips brush, and that you either lose your grip on him and fall, then die in the fire, or that he hauls you into the helicopter just as it’s lifting off.

In the end, neither happens. Alex is all turned around from the smoke and the adrenaline, so he’s looking in the wrong direction when you break through the treeline. The pilot says, “there she is,” and Alex has to look to see where everyone is looking before he finally sees you for the first time.

The pilot hits the controls and starts the rotors, but the helicopter is firmly on the ground when the ranger—not Alex—extends his hand and hauls you in. The lower half of your face is covered with a damp cloth, but the top part of your face is black with smoke. Tear tracks cut clean lines from the corners of your eyes, and you’re coughing and sputtering as the ranger hands you a bottle of water. Alex watches as you pour half of it over your face, then drink the other half, and it isn’t until the helicopter is a few feet in the air that your eyes find his and light up.

That barbed, snagged feeling in his chest unfurls completely when he finally lays eyes on you. Even sweaty and smoke-stained, tears leaking from red-rimmed eyes, a skinned knee oozing blood… you’re absolutely gorgeous to him. The voice on his radio, helping him heal. The voice hailing him each night, tucking him into bed, wishing him sweet dreams.

“Delta,” you say, and your voice sounds brighter in person than it did over the radio, even roughened up by the smoke. “Alex. Good to finally meet you.”

You hold out your hand and he takes it eagerly, and he cannot stop the smile that breaks across his face as the helicopter takes to the air.

“Good to finally meet you, Boss.”

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