Station Seventeen

You pull up to Station Seventeen at 0547 hours on a Tuesday morning. It smells like burnt rubber and industrial exhaust. Somehow you feel like that's pretty much just the baseline scent of this part of the city. The station itself looks like it was designed by someone who watched too many dystopian films and thought the aesthetic was fitting. It wasn't. At all.

The building is tucked in the heart of the industrial district. It was comprised of three stories of weathered brick, shitty reinforced garage doors, and narrow windows. There’s graffiti on the east wall that someone half-heartedly painted over. It looks atrocious.

You kill the engine.

Sit there for a second. You feel like you're holding your breath.

This is fine. This is totally fine. You’ve done this before. Every single time you've done it and it's been just fine.

Except you haven’t. Not really. Not like this. Not with a fucking symbiote living in your chest cavity like some kind of sick parasitic roommate you never asked for and now can’t evict.

You grab your duffel from the passenger seat—everything you own that matters fits into the one bag, which is either entirely depressing or efficient depending on how you want to frame it—and head toward the side entrance. There’s a badge reader mounted next to a reinforced door. It's the kind of security you’d expect at a military installation, not a fire station. But then again, this isn’t exactly what you'd call your standard firehouse.

"Holy fucking shit." You mumble, highly unimpressed.

The interior is somehow worse than the exterior. Which is saying a lot.

The fluorescent lights flicker overhead. The hallway is narrow and painted in a horrendous shade of industrial corporate beige. The floor is polished concrete and it's scuffed and stained from decades of boots and equipment.

You follow the signs toward the main bay. Your boots are echoing too loud in the empty corridor. Somewhere deeper in the building, you can hear voices, the clatter of equipment, and the familiar hiss of an espresso machine.

The apparatus bay opens up in front of you like the mouth of an industrial cathedral. There are two engines, one ladder truck, and an ambulance. The vehicles are parked with military precision, and there’s a smell of diesel and oil and something else—ozone, maybe, or just the particular scent of a place where people regularly run toward danger instead of away from it.

“You must be Fletcher.”

You turn.

The guy standing there is maybe in his late twenties, early thirties, with the kind of build that suggests he spends his off-duty hours in a gym. He has dark curly tangles of hair, darker eyes, and a smile that’s just a little too friendly for 0600 hours.

“That’s me,” you say, adjusting the duffel on your shoulder. “And you are?”

“Pierce. Firefighter. Been here about two years.” He extends a hand, and you shake it. His grip is firm but not aggressive, and he holds eye contact for just a beat too long that it becomes unsettling in a way you can't touch. “Welcome to Station Seventeen. Or as we like to call it, the asshole of the city’s fire service.”

You can’t tell if he’s joking. You choke back the laugh you want to force out anyway.

“Yeah, sounds real charming,” you say.

“Oh, it’s a fucking delight.” He grins wider. “Come on, I’ll show you around. Captain’s not in yet, but he’ll want to meet you when he gets here. You’re the new paramedic, right?”

“Paramedic-slash-firefighter technically,” you barely correct. “I’ve got both certs.”

“Overachiever. I like it.” Pierce starts walking, and you follow him deeper into the station. Your stomach twists in a coil of hard knots. You want to puke. “We’ve been short-staffed for months. Last guy quit after—well, let’s just say the job got to him. Happens a lot here.”

“Reassuring.” You mutter, keeping your eyes down on the floor.

“I’m a giver.” He leads you past the apparatus bay into a corridor that branches off in three directions. “Okay, quick tour. Bunk room’s upstairs, you'll find it on the second floor. Lockers are down here. Kitchen and common area are through there.” He points. “Gym’s in the basement, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re up to date on your tetanus shots. Showers are functional but haunted. Very haunted, dude.”

You blink, your facial expression remaining neutral. “Mmm. Haunted.”

“Probably not literally, but the water pressure is demonic, so that's basically the same thing, you know?” He shrugs. “Briefing room’s on the third floor, but we mostly just use it for storage now. Captain’s office is next to the watch desk. Speaking of which—”

He pushes open a door, and you step into what must be the common area. You'd like to walk the fuck back out, but you don't. Instead you just let your shoulders go rigid.

It’s exactly what you’d expect: industrial kitchen on one side, mismatched furniture that looks like it was salvaged from a dozen different yard sales, a TV mounted on the wall playing the news with the sound off. There’s a long table in the center of the room. It's scarred and stained and surrounded by chairs that don’t match. The whole space has that lived-in quality of a place where people spend too much time together and have also stopped pretending to be polite about it. It's home in a wrong way.

There are three people in the room.

The first is a guy who looks like he's barely old enough to drink, sprawled in a chair with his boots up on the table. He’s got the kind of face that suggests he’s never had a hard day in his damn life, all sharp angles and confidence that hasn’t been earned yet. When he sees you, he doesn’t bother sitting up. That's it's own sign. You file it for later.

“New guy?” he says. Gruff.

“Martinez,” Pierce says, his tone shifting just slightly. “This is Fletcher. Try not to be a dick for at least the first hour.”

Martinez grins. “No promises.” He finally swings his legs down and stands, extending a hand. “Welcome to the circus. My family’s been on this department for three generations, so if you need to know anything about how shit actually works around here, I’m your guy.”

You shake his hand. His grip is too firm. It's the kind of handshake that’s trying to prove something. You're familiar with those.

“Good to know,” you say, noncommittal.

The second person is a woman, she's older, maybe mid-forties, with gray streaking through her dark hair and the kind of face that suggests she’s seen some shit and lived to tell about it. She’s sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a tablet, and she looks up when Pierce says her name.

“Gloria. She’s our senior paramedic. You’ll be working with her most shifts.”

Gloria nods. “Fletcher. Heard you transferred in from Metro. Is that true?”

“Yeah, I had a transfer request from Metro.”

“Why?”

It’s a fair question, you can't argue. Metro is the flagship station, the one with the fancy new equipment and the better funding and the calls that don’t involve quite as much industrial nightmare fuel.

“Needed a change,” you say, which is technically true and also completely inadequate. But it's the best you're willing to give them right now.

Gloria studies you for a second, then simply nods. “Fair enough. We all got our reasons.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “You’ll be riding the rig with me today. Hope you’re ready to work.”

“Always am.”

The third person hasn’t said anything yet.

He’s standing near the coffee maker, pouring himself a cup with the kind of deliberate focus that suggests he’s either very tired or very aware of everything happening in the room. He's tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a jawline that could cut fucking glass. He’s wearing the same station uniform as everyone else, but somehow he makes it look like it was tailored specifically for him.

When he turns, his eyes meet yours, and something in your chest shifts.

Not the symbiote. Not exactly. But something adjacent to it, like a frequency you can almost hear but not quite. It makes you feel fucking nauseated to your bones. Your teeth ache, the throbbing sharp and deep painfully deep.

“Maddox,” Pierce says. “He’s one of our other paramedic-firefighter hybrids. You two will probably end up working together a lot.”

Maddox nods. Doesn’t smile. Doesn’t extend a hand.

“Fletcher,” he says, and his voice is low, controlled. “Welcome to Seventeen.”

“Thanks,” you say, and you’re not sure why your pulse just kicked up a notch.

He holds your gaze for a second longer than necessary, and you get the distinct impression that he’s cataloging something about you. Taking inventory. Making assessments.

Then he turns back to his coffee, and the moment breaks.

“Anyway,” Pierce says, oblivious or pretending to be. “That’s the crew for this shift. There’s a few others you’ll meet later—Captain Reyes, Lieutenant Diaz, couple of other firefighters. But this is the core group.”

“Got it.”

“Lockers are this way. I’ll show you where you can stash your stuff.”

The locker room is exactly as grim as you had expected it to be. Rows of dented metal lockers, a bench that’s seen better a better century, and that same fluorescent lighting that makes everything start crawling. Including your skin. Your locker is near the end of the row, and someone’s helpfully labeled it with a piece of masking tape that says NEW GUY in Sharpie.

“Charming,” you mutter.

Pierce laughs. “Martinez’s handiwork. He thinks he’s funny.”

“Is he?”

“Not even a little bit.” Pierce leans against the lockers while you start unpacking your duffel. “So, Metro, huh? That’s a pretty big step down, coming here.”

“I’ve heard.”

“You in some kind of trouble?”

You pause, a spare uniform shirt in your hands. “Why would you think that?”

“Because nobody transfers to Seventeen unless they’re running from something or they’ve got a death wish.” He says it casually, like he’s commenting on the weather. “No judgment either way. Half the crew’s got skeletons. The other half’s got whole fucking graveyards.”

You shove the shirt into the locker. “I’m not in trouble.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t sound convinced, but he doesn’t push it either. “Well, if you need anything, just ask. We’re a weird bunch, but we look out for each other. Just remember that.”

“Appreciate it.”

He leaves you to finish unpacking, and you take a second to just breathe.

The locker smells like metal and old sweat and something else you can’t quite identify. You hang up your spare uniforms, stash your boots on the bottom shelf, and shove your duffel into the back corner. There’s not much else—a few personal items, a phone charger, a book you’ve been meaning to read for six months and probably never will.

You catch sight of yourself in the small mirror mounted inside the locker door.

You look like shit.

Dark circles have moved in under your eyes that no amount of sleep seems to fix. Skin that’s too pale, like you haven’t seen the sun in months, which is probably pretty accurate. There’s a tightness around your mouth that wasn’t there a year ago, and your eyes have this hollow quality that makes you look older than you are.

And then there’s the rest of it.

The thing living inside you that you can feel even when it’s dormant. The weight of it, the presence, like having a second heartbeat that doesn’t quite sync with your own. It’s been quiet since you woke up this morning, but you know it’s there. Always there.

You close the locker door harder than necessary.