Last Flight Home [completed]

✈ xxviii.

[ +15 MINUTES ]

Making a decision is like driving in circles for hours, and I've lived in this city far too long to call it "getting lost" in the blatant city atmosphere. As I pass the different avenues and one-way streets that I've called home most of my life, I pick out the memories that should've made me stay here when I was so eager to go all those years ago. Back then, I would've taken any reason to book the next flight anywhere else, but now that I'm here in this raw, broken-down form of myself, I search for any reason to tell me what to do next.

Seeing Sabrina's plane leave the airport left me with an emptiness inside of my soul that I didn't know how to fill, at least not until I retraced my steps back to my brother's Jeep in the back of the parking garage at the airport. That's when it all clicked for me. The only thing I could imagine myself doing next was to avenge my brother's death in the most honorable way possible, and that somehow lead me in circles around the city until I found myself putting the Jeep in park at Fire Station 12 in downtown Boston and actually getting out of the car.

I lock the Jeep behind me and slowly stumble towards the garage door, where a bunch of guys in shorts and fire t-shirts wash one of the engines out on the exterior pavement. I wave, recognizing them all of them by name with how much my brother used to talk about them in great detail. While our parents were splitting up all those years ago, he always used to tell me that besides me, these guys would always be his family.

Maybe I wanted that. Maybe I needed that crutch that was kicked out from under me. Maybe I needed a home - a place to run to when the world was crumbling down around me.

"Hey!" One of the guys - Jerry, I think - starts as he cuts the hose of it's water supply. "Evan's little brother?"

I make out a small smile and go through with the fist bump that is offered on my behalf. After all of the guys pull me into a hug (probably from the events that unfolded this morning), I somehow blurt out that I want to be a firefighter and somehow find myself sitting inside filling out paperwork.

"I know this is against the rules, but if you're interested I can probably let you ride along with us today to see if you really like it," Jerry suggests, sitting across the table from me as he signs all of my completed paperwork.

"Yeah, that would be great," I mumble as I sign the last form in the large stack.

What better way to spend Christmas Day then with the people that knew my brother best? I mean, all I've wished for was to bring him back, and maybe this is the way to revive his soul into something tangible I could hold onto.

Just as Jerry stacks up the paperwork that I have signed and slips it into a folder, the station vibrates as if an earthquake took over the building and shook it as hard as physically possible.

"Those are just our tones," He starts, waving me down the hallway towards the firetruck. "We have a call if you're up for it."

As soon as I nod my head to agree, one of the guys tosses me a headset and I find myself sitting in the back of the cab. In my ears, I hear all of the guys talking as well as the occasional radio announcement from dispatch. From the sound of it, they have no idea what they're sending us on other than the fact that it was massive and out towards the bay.

Station 12 - Engine 12, please respond to the Bay area for a possible commercial airplane crash. No further.

10-4

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