Before Us (Kelly Severide Love Story)

I Walk Away

"WHY DON'T YOU RECOGNISE I'M SO RARE?"

"You have a second?" Severide comes over to me as soon as I finish getting changed into my uniform.

I want to tell him to go to hell but I can't show I'm upset because I have absolutely zero reason to be annoyed with him.

He hasn't done anything wrong.

It's all my fault for over-thinking and misreading all the signs.

"Yeah sure" I turn to him, smiling my fakest smile so he can believe that I am so over what happened last shift.

Or should I say what almost happened.

"What about?" I ask, the lack of bitterness throwing Severide off.

"You said you wanted to talk about what happened" he reminds me, "okay we can talk about it" I give him my undivided attention.

"I personally want to forget it ever happened and we can go back to hating each other"
I comment, because it's a lot easier to hate him then play around with the ideas of what ifs.

"I like the sound of that" he agrees.

"Okay good" I smile, "now get out of my way" I push past him and make my way to the kitchen. 

"The best thing about having two candidates is we get to split the cooking" I mention when I spot Jimmy in there already cooking. 

"Or you could cook every time?" Jimmy offers.

"Yeah definitely not" I make my way to the rig outside to do the routine check and clean.

I make sure all the equipment is in the right place so we are prepared when we go on call.

Just as soon as I finish, the alarm signals that we have an emergency to attend to as we all rush to put on our gear and get moving.

Severide and I still sitting across from each other.

I couldn't have picked a worse seat.

Thankfully, due to our mutual hate agreement, he doesn't spare me any mind.

I recognise it's the same neighbourhood that we were in last time, the same neighbourhood that blocked off the street and then claimed that we slow-walked their response simply because they are a low income residence.

"No cars blocking us this time" Severide comments, noticing the same thing as me. "Maybe, they will let us do our job this time" Cruz mentions.

Hopefully.

We get out and look around for the scene of the accident.

"Over here" a woman calls us over and directs us to a man on the floor, some kind of large storage unit had landed on one of his legs, blood splattered everywhere.

Chilli and Brett take the lead, trying to stabilise the man.

"What happened?" Casey asks, "my husband was unloading the thing" his wife informs us, clearly in a mess over the situation, "and it just fell" she tells us.