continuing on with the fic
Prompt from reveritas: zumaya during the socal fires. gen is fine or if you want to add a partner, your pick (although there's only one that i ever consider canon). themes: panic and helplessness.
Joel Zumaya, gen. PG. It's more 'helplessness' than it is 'panic', but there you have it. I just finished writing a siege fic, I'm in the helplessness mood.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
smoke and gin
Stepping out of the airport, the first thing he notices is the smell in the air. It's kind of like smoke and gin, like California has been turned into the world's biggest barroom. The smoke he understands; he can see it bruising the horizon, heavy and gray. The gin he doesn't get, but he just mentally shrugs it off as one of those weird Californian things.
Maybe he's getting soft, spending all that time in the Midwest. The Midwest is a logical, commonsense place. Weird shit happens in California. You have to just kind of let it be, because if you spend too much time trying to think about it, you'll lose your mind.
At first he's busy calling all his old high school friends, making sure they're still OK. He wonders if this is what living near a war zone is like, never knowing who's alive and well and who's maybe lost everything. Most of his friends are fine, but a few aren't. Mikey's parents' house burned to the ground;
Jerry's living with his grandmother because his apartment building lost its roof and most of its upper story; Jessica's house was almost entirely destroyed, and she's got two little kids, now.
He wishes there was more that he could do-- he's a professional baseball player, he feels like he should be able to do something, but no matter how good he is, how famous, he's still only been drawing big league pay for two seasons, and he's nowhere near to making millions yet. It's not like he can afford to buy or build new houses for everyone who's been burned out. He can only do what everyone else is doing: pick up the phone, listen for familiar voices, offer the same reassurances, the same platitudes.
No one's died, yet, and they all cling to that, but Joel's not stupid. He knows that of course everyone is happy that their families are alive, but it's not possible to say that and make the loss of a house OK. Some of them worked their entire lives, for generations to be able to afford their own homes.
Still, he keeps making calls. It's better than nothing.
----
After dinner, they sit in the living room and watch the fire reports on the evening news. The news stations mark mandatory evacuation zones in red, voluntary evacuation zones in yellow. Every night the red and yellow creep across the map, unintended flat abstracted flame.
The smell of smoke and gin has been getting stronger for weeks. It seems like there's always a haze hanging in the air, these days. Joel goes outside with his little brother Ricky to toss a baseball around, and after a couple of hours they're both coughing, gloves over their mouths. Their mother makes them both sit in a room with a humidifer going full blast for the rest of the afternoon ("Mom," Ricky says, infuriated, but Joel just rolls his eyes and coughs into a tissue while his mother's watching).
Before dinner, after they've both stopped coughing, Joel takes the big black family SUV out for a drive. Ricky comes along at the last minute; he had plans with some of his friends, but two of them have to go help their uncle evacuate. Ricky's uncharacteristically subdued. Usually he can't sit in the car without changing the radio channel a hundred times, powering the windows up and down, but today he just slouches down in his seat and watches the landscape flit by as Joel drives aimlessly.
They pull over by the side of the road and watch the sun set. It's spectacular with all the smoke in the air-- all pinks and purples and oranges, colors as vivid as Joel's ever seen them. It should be beautiful, but Joel finds it kind of ominous, like the brilliant colors of a poisonous snake.
"Mom's making that casserole shit you like," Ricky says, smearing a greasy line along the bottom of the passenger side window with his thumb. "We should get back."
Joel looks out at the dazzling sunset again. "Yeah, OK. And cut that out, willya? It's fucking hard to clean that shit off." He leans across the gear shift and swats Ricky, who swats sulkily back.
They drive home faster than they drove out. Joel hates being late for dinner on casserole night.
----
Joel's been watching the news religiously, but he's still somehow surprised when they sit down one night and their county is blocked out in caution yellow. His parents, who had been discussing the latest neighborhood news, fall silent. They all listen to the newscaster say reassuring things, advocating calm, telling them the addresses of state websites where they can find everything they need to know about evacuation procedure.
"Yellow don't mean we gotta evacuate right now, right?" Ricky asks, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.
Their parents look at one another. "No," their father says. "We only need to think about it."
"Well." Ricky's fidgeting even more. "We gonna?"
Their parents look at one another again.
----
The next day, Joel starts getting phone calls. Old friends, mostly, wanting to see if he's OK.
----
Ricky's the one who came to pick him up at the airport, because their father has a broken leg and their mother hates driving unless she has to do so. Joel won't let him drive home, though; Ricky isn't a bad driver, per se, but he's always reacted to Joel's daredevil personality by trying to one-up him, and this translates poorly to the road. Traffic is light and they make good time (Ricky demanding that Joel step on the gas, Joel ignoring him, because there are probably cops out here somewhere, and 80 mph is plenty fast enough) until they come to a place where the highway has been bottlenecked, everyone shunted into a single lane, because a large pine tree has fallen into the road.
As they drive past Joel can see the place where the pine broke in half. Resinous sap bleeds from the splintered wood, dark and sticky. The smell of pine, of gin, is almost overwhelming.
Joel edges the car around the tree and traffic lightens again. Smoke, and gin-- he's smelling California's trees burning and bleeding, all at once.
Joel Zumaya, gen. PG. It's more 'helplessness' than it is 'panic', but there you have it. I just finished writing a siege fic, I'm in the helplessness mood.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
smoke and gin
Stepping out of the airport, the first thing he notices is the smell in the air. It's kind of like smoke and gin, like California has been turned into the world's biggest barroom. The smoke he understands; he can see it bruising the horizon, heavy and gray. The gin he doesn't get, but he just mentally shrugs it off as one of those weird Californian things.
Maybe he's getting soft, spending all that time in the Midwest. The Midwest is a logical, commonsense place. Weird shit happens in California. You have to just kind of let it be, because if you spend too much time trying to think about it, you'll lose your mind.
At first he's busy calling all his old high school friends, making sure they're still OK. He wonders if this is what living near a war zone is like, never knowing who's alive and well and who's maybe lost everything. Most of his friends are fine, but a few aren't. Mikey's parents' house burned to the ground;
Jerry's living with his grandmother because his apartment building lost its roof and most of its upper story; Jessica's house was almost entirely destroyed, and she's got two little kids, now.
He wishes there was more that he could do-- he's a professional baseball player, he feels like he should be able to do something, but no matter how good he is, how famous, he's still only been drawing big league pay for two seasons, and he's nowhere near to making millions yet. It's not like he can afford to buy or build new houses for everyone who's been burned out. He can only do what everyone else is doing: pick up the phone, listen for familiar voices, offer the same reassurances, the same platitudes.
No one's died, yet, and they all cling to that, but Joel's not stupid. He knows that of course everyone is happy that their families are alive, but it's not possible to say that and make the loss of a house OK. Some of them worked their entire lives, for generations to be able to afford their own homes.
Still, he keeps making calls. It's better than nothing.
----
After dinner, they sit in the living room and watch the fire reports on the evening news. The news stations mark mandatory evacuation zones in red, voluntary evacuation zones in yellow. Every night the red and yellow creep across the map, unintended flat abstracted flame.
The smell of smoke and gin has been getting stronger for weeks. It seems like there's always a haze hanging in the air, these days. Joel goes outside with his little brother Ricky to toss a baseball around, and after a couple of hours they're both coughing, gloves over their mouths. Their mother makes them both sit in a room with a humidifer going full blast for the rest of the afternoon ("Mom," Ricky says, infuriated, but Joel just rolls his eyes and coughs into a tissue while his mother's watching).
Before dinner, after they've both stopped coughing, Joel takes the big black family SUV out for a drive. Ricky comes along at the last minute; he had plans with some of his friends, but two of them have to go help their uncle evacuate. Ricky's uncharacteristically subdued. Usually he can't sit in the car without changing the radio channel a hundred times, powering the windows up and down, but today he just slouches down in his seat and watches the landscape flit by as Joel drives aimlessly.
They pull over by the side of the road and watch the sun set. It's spectacular with all the smoke in the air-- all pinks and purples and oranges, colors as vivid as Joel's ever seen them. It should be beautiful, but Joel finds it kind of ominous, like the brilliant colors of a poisonous snake.
"Mom's making that casserole shit you like," Ricky says, smearing a greasy line along the bottom of the passenger side window with his thumb. "We should get back."
Joel looks out at the dazzling sunset again. "Yeah, OK. And cut that out, willya? It's fucking hard to clean that shit off." He leans across the gear shift and swats Ricky, who swats sulkily back.
They drive home faster than they drove out. Joel hates being late for dinner on casserole night.
----
Joel's been watching the news religiously, but he's still somehow surprised when they sit down one night and their county is blocked out in caution yellow. His parents, who had been discussing the latest neighborhood news, fall silent. They all listen to the newscaster say reassuring things, advocating calm, telling them the addresses of state websites where they can find everything they need to know about evacuation procedure.
"Yellow don't mean we gotta evacuate right now, right?" Ricky asks, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.
Their parents look at one another. "No," their father says. "We only need to think about it."
"Well." Ricky's fidgeting even more. "We gonna?"
Their parents look at one another again.
----
The next day, Joel starts getting phone calls. Old friends, mostly, wanting to see if he's OK.
----
Ricky's the one who came to pick him up at the airport, because their father has a broken leg and their mother hates driving unless she has to do so. Joel won't let him drive home, though; Ricky isn't a bad driver, per se, but he's always reacted to Joel's daredevil personality by trying to one-up him, and this translates poorly to the road. Traffic is light and they make good time (Ricky demanding that Joel step on the gas, Joel ignoring him, because there are probably cops out here somewhere, and 80 mph is plenty fast enough) until they come to a place where the highway has been bottlenecked, everyone shunted into a single lane, because a large pine tree has fallen into the road.
As they drive past Joel can see the place where the pine broke in half. Resinous sap bleeds from the splintered wood, dark and sticky. The smell of pine, of gin, is almost overwhelming.
Joel edges the car around the tree and traffic lightens again. Smoke, and gin-- he's smelling California's trees burning and bleeding, all at once.