#and Tommy's enthusiasm about Bobby's family dinners at the firehouse. and his tendency towards food in social situations.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Since the show has well established that a firefighter getting injured on the job pretty much guarantees a bunch of homecooked meals being dropped off by other firefighters & their families, consider this:

Tommy, newly a firefighter, estranged from his own family, a little lonelier than he'd like to admit, getting injured on the job and coming home from the hospital to a pile of well-wishes and home cooked meals. The first home cooked meals that someone else made for him in.. years? A decade? More? And sure, the food's in tupperware containers, and he knows it's not so much that the people who dropped it off care about him personally, and more that he's a firefighter and that's just what firefighters do when one of their own goes down...

But all the different containers on his counter, in his fridge, are all reminders of the various (he likes to imagine) loving households the food came from, and when he eats their contents and maybe closes his eyes he can almost feel like he's a part of something bigger than himself, something sort of nebulous that, if he tries, could feel like a family where people care about him enough to cook for him.

And after that, he doesn't mind getting injured so much. Maybe, even, in a probably not so healthy way, perhaps, even looks forward to it just a little bit.

(Just as long as they don't keep him in the hospital too long, because fuck hospital food.)