Caliente(Dina) – 7.1: Scars

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Sara Caliente was recently promoted to lieutenant of the SVPD. She had just come in to work after months of extensive physical therapy after suffering a near fatal leg wound. Her mentor and partner officer Jesse Hoves was shot dead the same day. The perpetrator’s were never caught. Sara lives with her mother and her mother’s second wife. Recently her own fiancee moved in with them.

Sara loved watching Jerod sleep. There was something so peaceful in his face, the way his hair fell over it and the way the weak morning light made it shine. She still hand’t quite gotten used to sharing the big bed in her mother’s attic with her fiancee and waking up to him each morning so whenever she got the chance she marveled at the little things that made up her day.

It didn’t take long for the spell to break. The alarm rang and Jerod stirred before opening his eyes.

“Morning beautiful.” He murmured in his sleepy voice. Sara smiled.

“Morning to you too handsome.” She replied playfully. “A grand day for staying in bed.” Jerod smiled, his eyes still half closed.

“I wish.” He replied sadly. “Work awaits, saving lives and all that… One of my guys left and now we all have to share the load…” He sighed. “I hope your mother made something nice for breakfast, and coffee… I really hope for coffee…” He added stretching before getting out of bed.

He always slept without a shirt on, even now, so when he pulled back the covers Sara got a full view of his bare back and all the scars stretched over it. They were mostly healed by now but still it wasn’t easy to look at that constant reminder of what the man she loved went trough. She ached to touch him, to caress the wounded tissue, to make it heal, to make him heal but it didn’t work like that. Sara knew it all to well.

After all she had her own scars too, the one in her leg where she got shot being the most recent one, but she knew it often weren’t the visible scars that cause the biggest pain, but the ones hidden beneath. For her it hurt more to remember how her partner and mentor had been killed, the memory of the slow pool of blood spreading from his body as her own leg burned from the pain she could not recall anymore.

She knew it was the same for Jerod. It surely hurt more that he didn’t get to his mother in time than the memory of that flaming beam hitting his back. She tried to get him to talk about it, she knew he had mandatory counselling back when he he had just gotten back to work, when he lived at the fire station, but around most people he pretended as if he hadn’t lost his mother, an aunt and a cousin, and even his mother’s little dog that day. Not to mention landing himself in a hospital for months running into the flaming house the meteor had struck.

It worked one night, right after he had moved in. They were lying here, in this very bed the lights were off and they talked in whispers.

He told her then, in a thin and soft voice of that day, the day that would probably hunt him until the end of his life.

“When I think of it I don’t think about mum, I guess because I never got to her then… What haunts me the most is what I saw when I first got there… The house was on fire, the home I grew up in… There was a huge rock, a monstrous meteor, the scariest damn thing one could ever see, I swear it Sara, right next to it and smaller pieces all around and I was lost, completely lost you know… I never saw anything like that and as I tried to compose myself, get into full firefighter mode I saw her and it didn’t break me then but it breaks a piece of me every time I think of it now…”

He took a deep painful breath and even though she couldn’t see him in the dark Sara knew he was crying, and in all their years together she had never seen him cry, it hurt to hear it but she knew she had to let him be. “She must have fallen out of the window on impact because she was just lying there on the street all covered in cuts and shards of broken glass. She was dead or close to it I could see it from where I was standing and there was nothing I could do anyway… The paramedics were behind me and that was their job and I still had mine… But I can’t get her out of my head… She had been so young the sweet girl. She used to come to the station often, to watch me work and just talk silly things. I knew her and her friends found me attractive, they were teenage girls after all but I didn’t mind it, they were so young and silly, so full of life… And now that life is over and I can’t… I can’t get it out of my head…”

The sobs took him over and Sara didn’t know what to do, she was crying herself. She took one of his hands in hers and kissed it softly as she listened to him weep.

He never spoke of it again although sometimes she tried to ask. But it haunted her now as well. The face of the young girl that had lost her life that day and the painful scar it left on her boyfriend’s heart. She wished she could just take it all back, move time backwards to when their biggest problem was planning their wedding, when none of them had really been hurt by life. A simple time.

If only they could just go back….

/* Yet another post featuring the meteor tragedy, hope it doesn’t bore you guys too much, I thought it was necessary to touch on what happened to Jerod and how he and Sara ended up living together. The girl who died, mentioned here, is Lena Prentiss. In the very next post we dive into the actual story! */