First 12 Hours
Chapter 1: First 12 hours
There aren’t any clouds to look at. That’s what Maya’s mind notices first about the room after Carina left and Teddy gave her a sedative. It didn’t put her to sleep, but rather left her curled up on her side, gazing emptily out the window. A window that, despite showing the sky, only provided a clear night. So there were no clouds to get lost in.
And so Maya made up her own.
Clouds and all they stood for, all their gravity, were always a constant for Maya. But they shifted at some point. Day to day life doesn’t grant access to life in the clouds. There’s no use spending that much time and money on airplane rides to look at the clouds, when clouds can be made on the ground. Despite what she’ll tell you, she thinks that the raging clouds of poisonous smoke are what drew her to firefighting. Maya gets to walk through the clouds, closer to them than she ever was in those airplanes all those years ago. And, if she’s lucky, someday those clouds will take her, and she can lie in them forever.
So when Andy enters the room hours later, and sits down right in front of the window, it doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would. Maya doesn’t know when the clouds of smoke overtook her clouds of youth. She thinks perhaps it was when anger overtook her calm 6 months ago.
Perhaps if Maya wasn’t sedated she would care more about the fact that she has been here for hours, and Andy is just now here. That only Andy has come. How could she care when she knows that it’s what she deserves? She’s pushed her own wife away, she shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done the same with the rest of her family.
Family.
Yeah. Sure.
Maya’s not sure if she was ever included in the station family. Captain Pruitt had tried, but he had too much on his plate to really do anything towards the end. Even before Maya became captain, she knew what the others thought of her. No emotions, eyes forward, be the best. And it hurts to know they were right all along.
God, it took her decades to realize her own dad was abusive, no wonder she never saw the truth about herself until now. How could she think she was worth it all? Carina deserves love and happiness, and not a broken person to fix. She deserves a life free of chaos, loving a child of her own and not with that. Maya is holding her brilliant wife back from every dream, and is now here taking up precious hospital resources. Someone else needs this bed more than her.This is all just a misunderstanding, she’s fine.
Maya fades slightly back into reality to see Andy is getting up, saying something about going home but that she called Diane. And God, Maya is seething with anger just as quickly. She knows her body is still catatonic, but the anger starts swirling within her mind and it’s just getting started.
Why does everyone think that talking will make Maya better? Why now? Maya waited a year to talk. She sat quiet, and built up her argument over and over again in her head. And then the big dramatic talk fizzled down to 2 minutes while she was distracted from cleaning the engine.
Maya wanted to talk about children with Carina. But there was no talking unless it was the 4 words, “I want a baby”. Maya likes to plan everything to the finest of details, and all of a sudden children weren’t allowed to be planned for. They had to happen, and they needed to happen right now. And so Maya bit her tongue again. Talking only leads to problems, right? She wanted kids, and that had to be enough no matter how much more planning she had wanted. She was trying to plan and talk too much.
Too much. Too much. Too Much.
When she became captain, it took months for the station to listen to her talking. Lane didn’t like it very much when Maya would talk. He preferred her to shut up, listen to him, eyes forward at all times. And then Maya tried to confront Chief Ross and Sullivan, and instead a blackmail tumbled out of her mouth. The one time she needed to talk, to make everything right, and she messed it up.
And now tonight. When those hateful, angry words were directed at Carina, Maya knew it was wrong. It was like she could no longer control her words. She spent her entire life stopping herself from saying too much, and in the past 6 months she has lost the ability. Instead she’s bringing down the world around herself with her own escaped words.
So yeah, Maya is done talking. Talking only leads to pain for others. She knows Teddy wanted her to say something after Carina left. Maya could hear the uneasy noise of Andy trying to fill the silence, ending up awkward and empty from months, maybe years, of distance between them.
Sometime, as the morning sun begins to rise, a nurse comes in to replace the IV bags. Maya remains still, her eyes still fixed on the window. She can’t see the nurse’s face, but just knows she’s being given a look of pity and disappointment. Good, Maya thinks. I’m disappointed in myself too. Too much.
Some clouds have begun to form with the morning dew, and Maya feels the angry smoke-clouds fade away. Not all clouds are the same after all, and with these she can finally fall into a dreamless sleep.