Tristan | Stationhouse Fun [Henry/Mackenzie]

The Chicago Fire Department’s 57th Engine house is located on a less-than-busy street in the city’s Near North Side. Three stories tall, with three bay doors for the fire trucks and two more bay doors for the ambulances, it is built from red brick and bustling at this time of the day–the 0800-1600 crew is coming back from being out on the streets all day, the 1600-2400 crew is strolling in, the chief is trying to wrangle people for roll call and debriefings, and through it all, the men’s colorful characters are ringing out inside the concrete-and-metal layout of the place.

Anyone walking by will hear the sounds of men and women at work within: equipment being hauled and put away, vehicles being hosed down, singing. One man’s heavy baritone voice is singing about building this city on rock and roll, with a few other voices groaning and begging him to stop.

Henry Allard is upstairs on the first story landing, still in his navy blue uniform with his name tag and the smell of nitrile gloves and ashes and blood on him, talking to the chief with his hands on his hips and a small frown on his face. No one is paying much attention to their conversation: ever since Allard was put on administrative leave after a righteous argument with McMahon two Octobers ago and yet somehow managed to be allowed to return to duty, people have stopped worrying that the tall, goofy-looking bastard is going to be canned.

They look out for each other here.

It was this instantaneous beginning for the newest associate that caused her problems, for while she was new to the job; the cases were not and had in fact been waiting for a new bottom-feeder to arrive and attend to them.

The McAllister file was one such case.

The woman who even now was fast approaching the 57th Engine house was holding that manila folder pressed against her chest, her shirt and jacket were both varying shades of blue and did little to disguise her boyish figure. She had small hips, small rounded shoulders and a heart-shaped face framed with straight brown hair, tied from her face in some kind of elaborate knot.

Her appearance was corporate, there was little doubt about that and she and those who employed her where not an altogether unusual sight at the fire station. More often that either would like, their professions became intertwined when things turned criminal, legal. It is perhaps for that reason above all others that the appearance of a pretty, if slightly forgettable woman at their door did not bring with it shouts of pleasure.

“Excuse me,” she greets whoever first passes her. “I’m looking for a Mister Henry Allard.”

The tall, skinny paramedic on the landing looks down, raising his eyebrows in question but not shouting back.

“Someone here to see you!”
“Who?” he asks, face displaying confusion.
“The hell should I know?”

Henry glances around the floor to try and gauge where his friend and coworker had been standing moments before, and his lichen-colored eyes find the woman in the skirt and jacket without much trouble. He digests her presence, says something to the man he’s talking to, and then hurries his bird legs down the stairs.

“Thanks, Richard,” he says as he passes, and the other man elbows him in the side as he walks away, resulting in a grunt and a grimace but no retaliation. He has his shoulders back, his height hovering around 6’4″ in his boots, and gives the unidentified woman a winsome enough smile. His pianist hands go into his pockets and he says, in a voice that smacks of working-class Chicago to a degree that is almost painful, “Hey there, I’m Henry. Can I help you, Miss…?”

She supplies as his impressive height comes to reside beside her own far less imposing 5’3 form, her hands still clasped before her, a soft looking leather case hanging from one shoulder instead of the expected handbag and curved to the shape of her hips by a solid strap. It was certainly a lawyer’s bag, that much could be said about the plain black bag. It was serviceable, durable, but not exactly a fashion statement.

The face that greets him is pleasant enough, and while she does not openly smile at him there is a warmth to the dark eyes as she speaks that instinctively sets against unease. That, or she is, whoever she may be, quite a talented actress. “I’m here from Fetman Garland & Associates,” she goes on with, and it seems as though she is inclined to feel a pinch of embarrassment for it, knowing as she does the likely reputation her new employers have as ruthless persecutors of insurance companies and businesses alike. Not to mention their inclination toward divorce settlements.

“I wondered if there was somewhere we could speak.” She looks at the bustling figures working around them. “In private.”

He considers this for a moment, chewing on the inside of his full lower lip as he contemplates this as an option. It’s shift change, so there will be hardly anyone in there if anyone is in there at all, and the only other place they could go to get out of the way is the bunk room on the third floor.

Henry isn’t taking a lawyer into the bunk room. He hasn’t even taken his husband up there.

The man whose name tag proclaims ALLARD could be attractive if the onlooker in question has a thing for pale men with non-classical facial features and hair that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. He isn’t in a job that requires him to be attractive, however; just thorough and attentive, with something remotely resembling a brain, and he wouldn’t have made it as a paramedic for five years if he didn’t fulfill all of those qualifications.

Judging by the myriad scars on his upper arm and forearm, even this man has his off days.

“Yeah,” he decides after his internal debate is over, “let’s go upstairs.”

He turns without waiting for her to offer up an alternative, this sharply- yet functionally-dressed woman being assumed to have little knowledge of the layout of this place. He’s seen people like her before, lawyers coming in to discuss deaths after the arrival of personnel and personnel injuries; hell, one showed up after his arm was snapped so hard the bone went through the skin, wanting to make sure he wasn’t going to sue the city. Around here, lawyers aren’t looked on too kindly, but Henry isn’t treating her with any great judgment or mistrust. He just leads her up the metal stairs where the chief no longer stands, and into the first room on the right.

It reeks of cigarette smoke, and all the appliances are yellowed and antiquated, but there is a long table for her to sit at and a busted blue couch to choose, also.

“I just need to ask you a few questions about the McAllisters.”

She didn’t hesitate after taking a seat at the long table, setting her bag by the legs of the chair and flipping open the manila folder with its neatly labelled tag. Inside were photographs tacked against sheets of paper; police reports, pictures taken at the scene. The topmost photo showed the swollen and badly deformed face of Sarah McAllister, the client that her law-firm had been trying to convince into filing for divorce against her husband for the past two years.

There had been seven beatings, every charge dropped by Mrs McAllister after a few days at hospital with a repentant husband and now, a new accident with the woman who was several weeks into a pregnancy — she had already miscarried three.

“I understand you were called out for this most recent incident.”

There is no delicate way to phrase it, so she doesn’t try.

Why he would suddenly need to shift in a stationary building where there is no one but acquaintances and friends, people he trusts, is anybody’s guess. There is tension in this man’s body even as he’s standing in a relatively relaxed position, and Mackenzie can’t see him popping the knuckles of his left hand with his thumb as he waits for her to get the paperwork ready for presentation.

And then there she is. The most recent spousal assault that Ambulance 44 responded to, the young wife of a man who has attacked ambulance crew and caused several of his unborn children to die in the womb. Henry’s strong jaw tenses, the tendons popping beneath the skin as he grinds his teeth, and he raises his left fist to cough, to compose himself before responding to the question.

She understands.
He takes her word for it.

“Yeah,” he says, walking around the table to stand beside her. “About two-three weeks ago. It was around noontime, I think. The neighbor called.”

She does not seem perturbed by the momentary reveal, she carefully pries her sleeve loose and nods her head once, in agreement with his response. It appears she had expected it. “I’ll be frank with you,” she says levelly, sliding the collection of photographs out so that they resemble a lurid fan of patchwork bruising.

“The chances are slim that she’s going to file for divorce. I believe we have a small window to convince her, if the life of her unborn child isn’t enough. I just need you to go over what you saw.” She doesn’t grimace, the calm young woman with the dark eyes and foreigner’s accent, but there is sincerity in her words that cannot be denied, a demand for Henry’s assistance that she clearly doesn’t expect him to refuse.

“Anything you can remember.”

There are some cases Henry doesn’t want to remember. It’s not about the level of gore, or the fact that he himself was injured while trying to save someone’s life and it ultimately failed altogether; it’s about the level of human suffering that he can absorb in a single day, and most days he has reached his capacity by the time 1600 hours rolls around. Thinking back on the days of twelve-hour shifts when they would be going from 0800 hours until well after sundown, he can’t understand how they had survived on that system for so long.

They see a lot of suffering in a single day. But life has been easier to tolerate now that he’s admitted he needs help coping.

Henry reaches up his left hand, a brief and easily-missed flash of gold coming along for the ride, and runs it down his face as if to cajole sensation to the nerve endings, to wake himself up. His easily-bruised flesh flushes easily, as well. The skin is momentarily red.

“Um,” he starts out. “Like I said, it was around noon, and, ah, the call came from a neighbor, said she’d heard screaming and glass breaking. So we show up, and there’s no answer at the door, so you know, to follow protocol we go around back and try that door, and it opens. Suspect charges us as soon as we make it through the kitchen, so my partner and I vacate the premises and call for police backup.”

He hadn’t told his real partner, his domestic partner, this story.

“Police arrive on scene about five minutes later, and they secure the scene so we can get back in there and it’s… it looked like a war zone, to be totally honest. Furniture was knocked over, there was blood everywhere, and in the middle of it all the patient’s lying there unconscious and unresponsive. We examined her and determined that she was late in the first trimester of her pregnancy, had a collapsed lung with several broken ribs determined by palpation of crepitation, and she had a deviated trachea, all likely sustained from blunt force trauma. If there was any tenderness in her abdomen none was noted because the, ah… the patient did not regain consciousness during field examination. So we packaged her and took her to Northwestern, and, ah… that’s it.”

Ninety per cent of the time, it’s never the guilty who do the bleeding.

Henry talks and the brunette uncaps a pen from her inner jacket pocket and takes notes in rapid, crisp movements of her hand across a page, open across the scene photos, the hospital records detailing broken bones in clinical, unattached medical jargon. When Henry pauses, Mackenzie does and lifts her head to wait – she at no point rushes his recollection, or asks anything other than the occasional repetition of key facts.

When he finishes, she underlines something final and sets her pen down, casting him a brief smile. “Thanks, that’s really all I needed.” She re-caps the pen and begins to tidy her notes together while downstairs the change-over rush continues.

“Tell me,” she says in a different sort of tone, easier, somehow. As if unperturbed by what sort of answer it might bring. She reaches for her bag and flips over a flap to secure documents into it. “Where are the best places in the city to hear live music?” It is the curse and kindness of her work-life that she can slip easily from business discussion of bashing and bloodshed to lighter questions without it appearing a cruelty or lack of care about Sarah McAllister’s fate.

And then he lifts his voice toward the open bay doors and bellows. BERENGER! Grubs on! And then he’s laughing at the reaction that gets – namely, several heads popping up and a general excited call of ‘Stern’s brought FOOD!’

He’s a very popular guy when it’s ‘bring leftovers to the Station House’ night. Well, he’s popular anyway, but with food – its more obvious. He directs the guys to grab the foil leftover trays, filled with food that’s still hot, steaming, and smelling delicious -a veritible buffet for the hard working guys of Station 57, and they move inside, the noise somewhat deafening all the sudden as a table is unearthed and the trays set up, and guys running to the kitchen for plates and serving utensils and the like. And one curly haired pretty boy simply joins the fray…

Women and children are the hardest ones to deal with, and pregnancy is a taboo joking subject. Even the likes of Richard Berenger do not laugh at dead baby jokes because he has seen enough dead babies in the last year, let alone his entire career, to last him the rest of his life.

It’s guys like Henry who are simultaneously the best at their jobs and the most likely to burn out and wind up working as janitors because no other occupation is suited for men who wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Henry’s nightmares don’t wake him up, though.

Mackenzie concludes the interview–interrogation? confessional?–by putting away her pen and asking the lanky paramedic where a good place to listen to live music is. His eyebrows raise quickly, briefly, and he looses a dry, monosyllabic laugh as he considers the question.

The door bursts open as Fitzhugh from the evening shift comes in to collect plates and utensils for some reason that Henry doesn’t question, and he turns to the stocky Irishman to ask, “Hey, man, where’s that place we go Wednesday nights sometimes?”

“You mean Reggie’s?”
“Is that the place with the hippie chick always goes down front and dances for like three hours straight?”
“Yeah, man,” Fitzhugh laughs, loading up on paper and plastic. “Why, you taking Tris there?”
“What?” Henry asks, confused. A beat, then, “No. Just wondering.”
“Alright,” Fitzhugh says, nearly running in to the door as it opens to allow another firefighter in.

Henry clears his throat, then looks down at Mackenzie and says, “I was just gonna say ‘Go to the House of Blues,’ but Reggie’s isn’t bad either. Their happy hour lasts until nine o’clock on Fridays.”

Apparently, she’d said something kind of funny without intending to. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d asked a question lately and received laughter and/or a remark about the way she pronounced certain things. It was the curse of living in a country so alike and yet so dissimilar to your own of birth. The petite brunette gets to her feet, her hands on top of her bag as the door is thrust open and another firefighter bustles in, collecting dinner-ware.

The Black Fury watches all of this occur with only the smallest quiver of a smile, turning her eyes back on Henry as his co-worker departs and is replaced by yet another figure. “I’ll take both as recommendations if you don’t mind, dancing hippie chicks not-withstanding.”

Putting her strap over her head, she adjusts the collar of her jacket and tenders away loose strands of dark, dark hair. “I apologize if I cut into your dinnertime.” She notes, looking after the rapidly departing figure of another fireman with plate in tow.

Fitzhugh comes back with plates and utensils, and the crowing delight ‘Henry’s up there with a TOTAL HOTTY, man, you should go mark your territory’ for Tristan, and receives an expressive roll of the eyes for his trouble. Like anyone in that room believes Henry or Tristan have eyes for anyone but each other.

Soon the banter is replaced partially by happy murmurings around mouthfuls of food, the clatter of silverware on plates, and exclamations that Tristan is something of a god. Tristan, for his part, settles into a chair, and sprawls comfortably. The boy’s tired. A big catering job is no joke, and when the groom leaves the bride standing at the alter, it sometimes seems pointless. Until now, until the joy such a simple gift brings to the boys.

And, ya know, it might get him laid tonight. Even if it’s Wednesday.

“You didn’t cut into anything, ma’am,” he finally comes up with, smiling quickly before stepping back to give her room to vacate the chair. These chairs are worn in and comfortable, although there’s no telling what these guys have done to the fabric. “Is there anything else I can do for you, or would you like me to walk you out?”

She may very well need an escort given the assholes and numbskulls who inhabit this territory.

But she loved the car for all its outlandish qualities and would not have traded it for any number of newer designs.

“Thank you,” she accepts, by way a response to his offer to escort her to her car. She follows the lanky paramedic through the door and stops only at the sight of the gathering below them; like hyenas devouring a wildebeest is the ravenous assault of hungry fire-fighters on leftover food.

Which hasn’t gone unnoticed, as someone points and says something about his providing some mood music, and gets a smirk in reply. A bunch of uncultured swine, they are, but the teasing is taken in stride. Even Richard snorts, though he points out that they better quit laughing as every damn one of them had tears in their eyes on the last Memorial Day Picnic at Richards place when Tris played an achingly beautiful rendition of Taps. Then he shoves his mouth full of food and pretends he didn’t defend his friend in front of his buddies.

They all know better.

But when several others ask, he rolls his eyes. “The things I do for you shitheads. Food AND entertainment? Some day ya’ll will have to feed me, you know…” but it’s all in good fun, and he’s already opened the case and taken out his beloved baby, the one material item he loves more than any other. and has tightened the strings, checked the tone, and lifted the gleaming instrument to place it under his chin.

Soon, the music starts and even though he’s still sprawled lazily, there is nothing lazy about the way he pulls the bow across the strings. He’s good. Crazy good. And soon the upbeat fast fingered delight of violin music fills the bay, much to the foot stomping delight of some of the firefighters and EMTs.

He knows Tristan’s company had to cater a wedding today, but he wasn’t expecting the younger man home for another several hours. Now isn’t the time for him to cut short the festivities for the purposes of asking him what had happened, even if the first thing that springs to mind is that his husband has somehow managed to get himself fired.

If Tristan had come in at any other time of the day the captain wouldn’t have a problem giving him a good verbal kick in the ass. McMahon, for his part, just conducts roll call over the sound of the music, and as Henry walks alongside Mackenzie to see her safely out of the ambulance bay and onto the sidewalk he makes eye contact with the lazily sprawling Gnawer kinsman and raises a hand to wave.

He’ll be right back.

Out on the sidewalk, away from the music and the dancing, Henry pushes his hands back into his pockets and asks, “I don’t know what sort of confidentiality agreements you guys have, but, um… can you let me know if she decides to go through with the divorce settlement or not? Even just give me a hint?”

He doesn’t say so, but Mackenzie can tell from the expression on his face and the tension in his voice that this particular case bothers him. One doesn’t have to stop and think too hard to figure out why.

But she is here on business — or at least the conclusion of it and that is brought back to the fore when they drift away from the violin and voices to the slightly quieter street. Henry pushes his hands into his pockets, Mackenzie’s are relaxed at her sides, her face politely turned toward the speaker.

Her eyes look over his face as he voices his request and whatever she sees must be enough for her, because she nods, once. “I can do that.” She half turns, a foot of the pavement and then twists back.

“Oh, and tell your friend, he’s good.”

A smile, and she starts across the street toward the Cadillac.

He doesn’t stop playing though, just does so softer as his gifts and music continue to disrupt the flow of the day. Henry meets his gaze, and the brilliant smile he gets in return should shelve any worries that Tristan had lost his job – he wouldn’t be that content and happy if he had. And he wouldn’t be here, worrying his husband.

He does make an effort to quiet down so that the business can be conducted relatively easy without any more of a disturbance than he’s already caused. But he just grins and keeps playing.

“Thank you,” he says.

A request for him to tell his ‘friend’ that he’s good, and Henry nods his head, once, before informing her that he will. She starts across the scarcely populated road, and Henry watches until she makes it to her blue Cadillac before he turns around and walks the short distance between where he left her and the ambulance bay doors. There, he leans on the exposed frame, both hands still in his pocket and one ankle crossing over the other, to watch his husband play.

He’s exhausted, but anyone can tell from looking at the frazzled bundle of nerves that Henry Allard is happy.

As he does so, he waves Henry over with a grin, before he licks some bit of sauce off his fingers, then wipes his hands across his thigh. When his husband comes near enough to take the plate, only then does Tris murmur an explanation. “Cancellation.”

And dinner for all.