#dead probie saga

[setmeatopthepyre]

Flame

[@118dailydrabble day 1] [part of my tommy begins snippets]

Tommy Kinard does not keep skeletons in closets, but he does keep their ghosts in the back of his sock drawer: his dog tags, a house key, an engraved lighter.

To this day, he doesn't know how Eli had managed it. Only remembers how he'd pressed its familiar weight into Tommy's hand as they'd stood side by side in their dress blues. How tracing the words had kept his hands from shaking.

B.E. to bad habits T.K.

He'd found the probie smoking on the roof after his first bad call. It became their thing for each one after.

Now, Tommy tries to remember only the friendly flame that lit their shared cigarettes, and not the inferno that had followed.

[betterthedevilyouknowuk]

“Michelle Remembers”: The story of the literary hoax that started a tragic moral panic

Written by Sean Munger 

If you were a child in America in the 80s, especially the early 80s, you probably remember Satanic Ritual Abuse. This was a fear, especially prevalent among white middle-class suburbanites, that groups of Satanic cultists were going around kidnapping children for the purpose of abusing them in the course of bizarre and evil rituals. It sounds incredibly far-fetched–and it is–but millions of otherwise rational parents were terrified that their kids might be targeted by pedophilic Satan worshipers who supposedly had some kind of organized network in North America.

SRA fears were so prevalent that they were the subject of various mainstream media reports on shows like 20/20 and Oprah Winfrey. There are few starker examples of a “moral panic” in modern history.

The entire SRA scare can be traced to a single source: a book called Michelle Remembers, written by Lawrence Pazder and published in November 1980, billed as a true story. In the book, Pazder, a psychiatrist from Victoria, BC, Canada, documented his therapy with an adult patient named Michelle Smith, who while under his care recovered repressed memories of horrifying sexual abuse in her childhood in Victoria in the 1950s. Under hypnosis Michelle recalled strange rituals, many occurring in a basement room and in a cemetery, involving knives, masochism, rape and murder. At one point Michelle said she was bundled into a car with the corpse of a dead victim of the Satanists, and the car was purposely crashed. She also claimed she endured 81 straight days of abuse in a marathon mega-ritual in which the cultists summoned Satan himself. Michelle fingered her mother as one of the instigators of this abuse. The mother, Victoria Proby, died in 1964.

Michelle Remembers made a huge splash when it appeared on the literary scene in 1980. By now Pazder was married to Michelle Smith, and the husband-and-wife team went on a publicity tour to promote the book which was very successful, garnering articles in mass media publications like the National Enquirer. The allegations of an organized network of Satanists throughout North America, who abducted kids and did these horrible things to them, were too explosive to tamp down. Pazder began consulting on other cases where people came forward and claimed to remember sex abuse from their childhoods. Suddenly it seemed there was a wealth of corroborating evidence to prove that indeed organized rings of Satanists had been running around the U.S. and Canada for decades and committing horrible acts with children.

Ross Bay Cemetery, in Victoria, BC, was identified in Michelle Remembers as one of the places where the abuse took place. However, the descriptions of what happened there make no sense in light of the real place, which is shown here on Google Earth.

At the same time, however, a second story was developing. Even before the book came out an investigative reporter in Canada went to Victoria to interview Michelle’s surviving family and friends and investigate the now 25-year-old allegations. Michelle’s father, who was still alive, refuted every allegation made against his late wife. Curiously the book contained no reference to Michelle’s siblings; why weren’t they also targets of the cult? There was very little corroborating evidence for the abuse and no witnesses directly supported her story. Some news outfits were squeamish at reporting the Michelle Remembers claims as truth.

Many, however, did–and with tragic consequences. By 1983 the country was awash in SRA allegations. The most awful of them came from a preschool in southern California, the family-run McMartin Preschool. One woman claimed, upon pretty flimsy evidence, that her young son was abused by the woman’s ex-husband, a teacher at McMartin. The woman was later found to have been insane at the time she made the allegation. Authorities investigated and called in social workers to interview the school’s students. Ultimately 360 of them claimed they had been abused. However, the investigators’ methods were quite sketchy; the claims seem to have been coaxed out of very young children through extremely leading questions and spurious interpretations of sometimes incoherent testimony. One child identified a photograph of actor Chuck Norris as one of his abusers; Norris never had any conceivable connection with the case. Other children talked about underground tunnels under the school and watching the teachers fly around the room–obviously impossible. Clearly something was wrong, but the prosecution forged ahead anyway.

Seven people associated with McMartin Preschool were charged with child abuse. An excruciatingly long investigation period led up to the trial; during this period one district attorney called the state’s case “incredibly weak” and dropped charges against five of the seven defendants. The case against the remaining two went ahead. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith were consultants to the accusing children’s parents. By the time the incredibly long and expensive trial ended in 1990 the number of victims whose claims were asserted had dwindled to only 48. The jury acquitted one of the defendants, Peggy McMartin Buckey, and was unable to reach a verdict regarding the other, Ray Buckey; eleven of thirteen jurors voted to acquit him but two were intransigent. The media focused on these two jurors. Eventually the state gave up trying to convict Buckey who had already spent five years in prison despite not being convicted of anything. The trial cost $15 million–still the most expensive state criminal trial ever–and ruined countless lives. In the years after the trial, the children accusers grew up and many stated plainly that their testimony had been coerced, that they knew it was wrong at the time but wanted to please their parents and the investigators.

Shockingly, even as the trial was nearing its end, the news media was still treating Michelle Remembers as fact. Oprah Winfrey had Pazder and Smith on her show in 1989 and repeated the allegations uncritically. (Oprah would later get burned by another fake memoir, James Frey’s infamous A Million Little Pieces). In 1990, as the McMartin disaster was ending, another round of press investigations probed into the book, demolishing its claims. The car crash Michelle claimed to have been involved in was never recorded by the papers or the police of Victoria. Furthermore, someone pulled Michelle’s school records from 1955 and found she was attending school during the period of the alleged 81-day ritual marathon. No evidence has ever come to light suggesting the existence of a vast Satanic conspiracy to abuse children. Lawrence Pazder responded to these revelations by saying that whatever really happened was less important than what Michelle Smith believedhappened–not a very ringing defense of what was supposed to be a memoir. He died in 2004.

Some incidents of mass hysteria, such as the great windshield-pitting epidemic of Seattle in 1954, are relatively harmless, even amusing. Satanic Ritual Abuse, by contrast, is an episode of mass hysteria that was horribly damaging. A few people out there still believe in SRA, though their numbers are small; most of the world recognizes it as having been discredited long ago. But the whole sad saga of Michelle Remembers demonstrates the old adage that a lie can circle the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Abandon

[@118dailydrabble day 3] [part of my tommy begins snippets]

[follows closely after this]

Tommy finds him on the roof, cigarette in his mouth, shaking hands trying to work the lighter. “You abandoning us already, probie?”

Fuck. Too dark.

“No one teach you not to play with fire?” he tries again, offers a smile.

Emmerson lowers the lighter, cigarette still dangling from his lip, mumbles, “After that? I think I'm allowed one bad habit.”

Tommy can only watch him fumble with the lighter for so long. He motions for him to hand it over, lights his cigarette for him, keeps his hands steady.

Emmerson exhales his thanks. Is silent a moment. Asks, “How do you ... deal?”

Tommy steals the cigarette from his lips, takes a long drag. Exhales. Shrugs.

“Bad habits.”

[setmeatopthepyre]

Locker

[@118dailydrabble day 5] [part of my tommy begins snippets] [follows directly after this]

They trade the cigarette back and forth in silence. The tension in Emmerson's shoulders never eases, but his hands stop shaking quite so much. His thousand-yard stare inches closer to home.

Tommy tries not to watch him too obviously. Doesn't want the kid to feel judged.

Speaking of.

Emmerson grinds out the butt and seems to consider lighting up another. Tommy gives a quick shake of his head, moves back towards the staircase. “One's enough. Put that in your locker before Gerrard finds it. C'mon.”

The probie eyes him warily, but follows. His voice, behind Tommy, sounds a little lost still when he asks, “And then?”

“Then you shower. You eat lunch. And then you go save people.”

[setmeatopthepyre]

Wind

[@118dailydrabble day 22] [follows directly after this] [part of the dead probie saga / tommy begins snippets] [cw: involves a bad call]

They find their caller unconscious in the upstairs hallway, phone on the floor. The door he's collapsed against looks like it's taken a beating. Bloody smears adorn the door frame. The handle glows red-hot.

The smell of cooked flesh is overpowering.

The probie shouldn't be here for this, Tommy thinks. Not yet.

It's when Emmerson is checking their patient's ABCs that he stirs, slowly blinking awake. There is a moment, a breath.

Then, the man's on his feet, knocking the wind out of Emmerson, scrambling for the still-closed door, hands blistering as he tries the handle over and over and over again. A broken, animal sound escapes from his throat.

Tommy watches Emmerson's expression turn to horrified realization.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Trigger

[@118dailydrabble day 25] [part of the dead probie saga / tommy begins snippets]

Ultimately, it's grief that finally triggers the lightning-strike, icewater realization; the bone-deep point-of-no-return knowing. It's Emmerson's lighter in the pocket of his dress blues. It's Victor's red-rimmed eyes meeting his as they both linger after the funeral.

All that's left is family, and they're not, but they both have grief too big to carry home and Tommy, suddenly, wants nothing more than to bury his face in the place where Victor's dark hair brushes the collar of his badly fitting suit. To drag him close, breathe him in, to consume and be consumed until they form a closed circuit that grief can't touch.

That night, he has sex with Abby for the first time. He thinks of Victor.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Jumpstart

[@118dailydrabble day 21] [set earlier than the most recent two] [part of the dead probie saga / tommy begins snippets]

Tommy was lacing up his boots, listening to Eli patiently answer Emmerson's questions about being a paramedic, when Mills poked his head back into the locker room.

“Thought you left ages ago,” Tommy said. What's up?”

Mills groaned, wiping a hand down his exhausted face. “Car broke down. Pat tried to jumpstart it, but no dice. I was hoping someone from B-shift was still in to give me a ride.”

Tommy checked his watch. Yeah, definitely not enough time for anyone from A-shift to get him home and be back in time.

That's when Emmerson stood up. “I could check out your car,” he offered. “Auto repairs is the family business.”

Mills looked about ready to kiss him.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Choice

[@118dailydrabble day 20] [same scene as this] [part of the dead probie saga / tommy begins snippets]

“Go. Now.” Captain's orders. Tommy doesn't have a choice but to obey.

His gaze darts to Emmerson, who meets it head on. His eyes are clear, focused, determined. The kid's got a good head on his shoulders. Tommy hopes it's enough.

“One hand on the line at all times,” he tells the probie as they prepare to enter the house. “You let go, you're dead.” He's pretty sure he's completely failing at finding the balance between radiating calm confidence and trying to convey the extreme importance of what he's saying. “You understand me?”

“Copy that,” Emmerson answers and squares his shoulders, made even stockier by heavy turnouts.

When the door is breached, the smoke smells like someone's cooking.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Probie

[@118dailydrabble day 19] [part of the dead probie saga / tommy begins snippets]

Gerrard should not have sent the probie in. They'd all heard dispatch; they knew how bad it was. So when they'd arrived on scene and he barked out,“Kinard, extraction. Take the probie,” Tommy couldn't help the shocked “Captain--” that escaped from his mouth.

“This is the goddamn job,” Gerrard had spat back against the startled chorus of complaints from his men. He stared them down before directing his bristling mustache towards Tommy again. “Better hope your little student has been paying attention. Go. Now.”

-

Now, Tommy's struggling to keep his grip on the man fighting him. “Emmerson,” he bites out. When that doesn't work: “Brian!”

The probie's hazel eyes, shocked wide with terror, finally meet his.

[setmeatopthepyre]

Defend

[@118dailydrabble day 15] [part of dead probie saga (set shortly after the monster truck rally) | 118 words]

The next time they're on shift, Emmerson finds him alone in the kitchen. He looks... determined? Like he's steeling himself for something.

“Hey, Tommy. Can we talk for a sec?”

Tommy can't shake the feeling that he's being cornered, but he nods. Keeps his shoulders relaxed.

“It's about the rally.” The probie seems to hesitate. “About Victor.”

There's no reason for that to make panic claw at his chest. It still does.

“Look,” Emmerson continues. “He doesn't need me to defend him, and I'd like us to be friends. But Vic's my friend first, so if you have a problem with him being... you know. Then that can't happen.”

Tommy can't quite explain his sudden urge to laugh.

[setmeatopthepyre]

🚬🚬

pretty please with a cherry on top🥺

wellllll since you asked so nicely <3 here's another daily drabble combo!

[ @118dailydrabble day 8] [118 words] [part of my tommy begins snippets] [follows after this]

🚬 - bad habits aka the dead probie saga

-

Passenger

They decide to carpool, and to Tommy's surprise, there's already another passenger in Emmerson's beat-up pick-up when it rolls to a stop in front of him.

Shaggy black hair. Sunglasses. One arm, sleeveless, muscled, tan, dangling out the window. Tommy doesn't stare.

“Bri, what the fuck?” The passenger says, and it takes a second for Tommy to realize he means Emmerson. “Are you seriously the only short firefighter in LA?”

“Hey, fuck off,” Emmerson laughs and shoves at him. “Make some space, asshole.”

Somehow, the passenger manages to fold himself into the back, and Tommy takes his now vacated seat, grateful for the legroom.

“Tommy, this is my buddy, Victor. He got us the tickets. Vic, meet Tommy.”

-

[make me write]

[setmeatopthepyre]

🚬🚬🚬

[doing another 2-for-1 and combining this with @118dailydrabble day 7] [part of my tommy begins snippets] [set somewhere before Chimney joins the 118]

🚬 - bad habits aka the dead probie saga

-

Spirit

“Hey, Kinard.”

“Hey, Emmerson.”

“You're a real guy's guy, right?”

Tommy paused his polishing of the engine's bumper. Felt his heart rate tick up a little, which was ridiculous. Raised his eyebrows, sent the probie a look. “We're in a firehouse.”

Emmerson whipped a towel at him. “You know your way around an engine, you like beer, that sort of thing.”

“Again, we're in a firehouse.” He seemed to be dancing around something, though, so Tommy offered him a grin. Reassuring-like.

The probie rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Look, I've got tickets to that monster truck rally thing next week. You in?”

That surprised him. “Uh, I--Yeah. Sure.”

Emmerson beamed at him. “That's the spirit.”

-

thank you aaaand sorry about the delay! [make me write]

[setmeatopthepyre]

Hi! For the make me write tag game: 🚬

Thank you! Hope you have a good day!

you're so kind, thank you. and you too! we're going right to the start for this one:

-

🚬 - bad habits aka the dead probie saga

Tommy's life at the 118 becomes incrementally easier with one single big change: a new hire.

His name is Brian Emmerson, he's fresh out of the academy, and Tommy suspects the kid was built in a lab to be some sort of blue collar wet dream.

Of course, Tommy doesn't meet him until his second day, having traded shifts a few days prior so that Mills could make it to some extended family member's kid's christening. "You know how it is with family," Mills had said with a what-can-you-do shrug, and Tommy had made a face and tilted his head in a way that he hoped conveyed he was familiar with the struggles of having lots of family that wanted him around.

Still, he can't complain. The change in shifts had meant his free day matched up with Abby's, and they'd spent all day watching the cheesiest romcoms they could find. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed until he'd cried like that.

-

[make me write]

[setmeatopthepyre]

Countdown

[@118dailydrabble day 4] [part of my tommy begins snippets]

“Alright, ladies. One hour, then we're back online. Countdown starts now,” Gerrard barks, missing a little of his usual gusto. “Cobb, you're on lunch orders.”

A full hour to shake off the last call. It's almost enough to make Tommy think the man might have a heart behind all that mustache. For all his flaws, at least Gerrard knows better than to think his men can just walk a call like this off. Not while the smell of burnt flesh still clings to them.

That's a smell Tommy can't wait to shower off.

But first.

He scans the weary backs of his retreating colleagues. Frowns.

Catches up to the paramedic, keeps his voice low.

“Eli. You seen Emmerson?”

[setmeatopthepyre]

Foster

[@118dailydrabble day 9] [part of my tommy begins snippets] [follows directly after this]

“So, uh.” Tommy turns in his seat the best he can. Feels awkward doing it. He doesn't really hang out with the other guys outside of work much, besides the occasional bar night. They're mostly fine, but Gerrard doesn't exactly foster a social environment. So this is... different. It feels different. “How did you get your hands on those tickets? Do you work at the stadium?”

Victor leans forward conspiratorially, sunglasses pushed up onto his head. “No, I know a guy.”

Emmerson rolls his eyes. “Vic's uncle is one of the drivers.”

“Way to ruin my air of mystery, asshole.”

Tommy can't help but huff a laugh. “Don't worry, you're still mysterious.”

Victor's eyes sparkle mischievously. “Thank you.”

[setmeatopthepyre]

🚬 for make me write!

[doing a 2-for-1 and combining this with @118dailydrabble day 6] [part of my tommy begins snippets] [follows directly after this]

🚬 - bad habits aka the dead probie saga

-

Grievance

The first thing Tommy notices after his traded day off is that nobody calls him 'new guy' anymore. It's beyond time – he's been at the 118 for over a year and a half now – but the sudden change still makes him suspicious.

As soon as he's changed out of his civvies and into his uniform, he seeks out Eli, because Eli is the one guy he can trust not to throw him to the sharks for being out of the loop.

“What's going on?”

Eli grins at him. “You didn't hear? We got ourselves a probie yesterday.”

Tommy can feel his eyebrows shoot up. “Really? How'd that go?”

Eli shrugs. “Well, he hasn't filed a grievance complaint yet.”

-

thank you! [make me write]