Hi again! First things first, this fic broke my heart while writing it, so I hope it has the same effect on you.

I'm currently binge-watching Station 19, and I just finished the episode where they mention the term Sempre Paratus, which they portrayed so well. While rewatching the beginning of season 3 of CF, just for laughs and to torture myself because why not, I noticed that after about four episodes, they seemed to forget about Gabby's grief process and only focus on Severide's. So, I took it into my own hands, did a little research about Sempre Paratus, and out came this. There's nothing much else to say, so without further ado.

Happy reading!

It was a quiet night, the people of the Windy City curled up in their beds as they protected themselves from the below-freezing temperatures. She should be thankful for the nights like these when she had the chance to close her eyes for more than five minutes and not hear the blaring sounds of the bells, alerting them to another helpless citizen of Chicago, but sleep didn't come easy for her anymore if it ever came at all.

Instead, she lied in the darkness of Firehouse 51, begging her body to succumb to the exhaustion. The soft snoring of her bunkmates used to hum into her ears like a lullaby, but now, it just annoyed her.

Realizing that getting any rest was a lost cause, she threw her blanket off her body and slipped into her boots at the foot of her bed. She crept away from the sleeping quarters and out the doors that led to the apparatus floor, goosebumps arising on her caramel skin as the cold hit her with a powerful force.

She wasn't an idiot - she knew they were worried about her. They noticed the dark circles, and how her clothes hung from her frail body, and they watched her push her food around on her plate at every meal and waited for her to join in on their conversations, but all that came was a hollow silence. When she did speak, it was a robotic response, the emotion to her voice blown away with the wind.

The weight of her guilt was crushing her slowly and painfully. Every step forward she took was a struggle and every step came with a cost. The darkness had begun to consume her and nothing was going to stop it from swallowing her whole. She was a shell of herself, her soul trapped inside with no way out. She was crumbling at the hand of her grief, a ticking time bomb, and it was only a matter of time before there was nothing left of her but the dust of her ashes.

Her barren fingers grazed the driver side door of ambo 61, the gold letters being all that was left of Leslie Shay. She recalled the words that she spoke at her fallen friend's memorial with a bitter taste in her mouth.

...and a dream of mine came true.

Yeah, a dream that cost her everything.

If she could turn back time, she would let it die if it meant Shay got to live.

Counseling lasted all of about three weeks. She was tired of being told the same bullshit that everyone else was telling her - that it wasn't her fault. Like hell, it wasn't. The beam was meant to hit her, it was meant to kill her. It was her last shift as PIC and she should've finished it as the PIC. She should've died as the PIC.

Sempre Paratus is a Latin phrase, the official motto of the United States Coast Guard, meaning always ready, always prepared. The real meaning is that you always have to be ready to lose a member of your family.

Yet, when it's time to face the emptiness, and you realize you will never see their face again, or feel their warmth, or listen to their heartbeat, are you ever really ready?

She trained for it, she trained day and night for the situation when she would have to bury someone she loved, but she soon realized that she was never truly prepared. She wasn't prepared to watch them carry her limp body out of the warehouse, or lower her into the ground three days later, or raise the flag with the trumpets sounding to let the world know that they lost a good one.

All that crap that people say amid their sorrow about feeling the presence of the one they love next to them was a load of horseshit. There were no goosebumps from the wind, or a rainbow cast out of the clouds. The world was a dull place without Leslie Shay and everyone knew it.

She punched in the code to the turnout gear storage room and stepped inside, pulling the door quietly behind her, careful not to wake anyone. She knelt down and reached under the bench, feeling for the hollow square in the wall. Almost immediately finding what she was looking for, she pulled it out and stood from the floor, brushing her legs free from dirt.

One of the things Shay loved to do was take pictures of any moment she felt was better remembered in physical form.

"Think of these as rewind buttons. When you're in the middle of that black abyss with no way out, you can look back and feel the happiness you felt in that moment, even if for a split second."

Eventually, she joined in, too. She wasn't nearly as quick as Shay to whip out the camera on her phone, but every once in a while, whether it was Mouch and Herrmann attempting the newest dance trend, or Cruz trying his best not to give everyone food poisoning, she caught a glimpse of the peace that lurked amidst the chaos in Chicago.

During one of the very few quiet shifts, she caught Shay in the turnout gear closet down on the floor with Severide's toolbox by her feet along with a piece of the wall.

"Nothing! I'm not doing anything!" Shay screeched as she stood up quickly, hiding the handsaw behind her back.

She sighed in relief as her friend stifled a laugh behind her fist, "What are you doing in here?"

Shay dropped back down to her knees and reached into her backpack, pulling out three bulky photo albums and shoving them into the hole in the wall, then securing the white piece of drywall back into place.

"I put all the photos we took into these scrapbooks and I'm putting them here for safekeeping. Mainly because I know the guys would kill us if they saw how many embarrassing photos we got of them and would try to destroy them, but I was also thinking it could be a time capsule."

"How so?"

Shay shrugged her shoulders, "We're getting older and changes in our lives happen all the time, and one day, we're all going to be at different chapters of our books, and eventually, there will be a new gang to take our place. Someone is bound to catch on to my geniusness," She swatted her hand next to her face as if to flip her hair like a celebrity on the red carpet, "and find these. Hopefully, it will be like a refuge for them. They can see that despite all the sadness and heartbreak, there is still goodness left in the world."

She traced over the letters scribbled across the front of the first album, smearing the dust away. This was the first time she'd looked through these pictures since Shay died, not knowing what good would come from it.

Her breath caught in her throat at the faces smiling back at her. The contentment in their grins reiterated Shay's words.

"...you can look back and feel the happiness you felt at that moment..."

Droplets of water began to crash against the glossy images as her sobs echoed through the room, her chest pleading for air. She hadn't cried a single tear since those moments in the warehouse, the numbness flowing through her bloodstream from that day forward.

She wasn't sure if they were angry tears or sad ones, but it almost felt good. It pissed her off. She had no reason to cry or feel anything at all when her best friend was lying six feet under the earth.

Her sleeve brushed against her face with harshness, the vexation boiling deep within her. Before she could stop herself, she grabbed the photo albums, hurling them as hard as she could and watched as the memories of the goodness left in the world fluttered through the air. She dropped to her knees, not caring for the rapid pain that shot through her thighs. The affliction surged with every expelled breath, never sufficiently soothed by her long intakes of the damp spring air.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Shay should be there with her, rolling on the floor in a fit of laughter after another one of their pranks against the guys. She should be gawking and flirting with the waitress during their daily coffee run. She should be rolling her eyes at Capp's hilarious attempt at Scrabble. She should be there, spreading the love that could only be found in the kindest of hearts.

Now, there was just a headstone that bore her name and her cold bones beneath the soil.

She wasn't sure how long she had been on the floor, her elbows against the concrete and her face pressed into her hands, but a burly, yet comforting, pair of arms wrapped around her torso, pulling her up from the chilled ground.

Her fingers pressed against his chest, trying to push him away and telling him to just let her be, but it was no use. He was too strong, his chin resting atop of her head, the smell of her strawberry shampoo filling his lungs.

"Ssh, it's okay. You're okay," His palm brushed against her hair soothingly, "I've got you."

She howled into his chest unceasingly, hands clutching at the puffer jacket that sheltered him from the cold. He held her, rocking her slowly as his shirt became soaked rather quickly, her sobs of misery worsening with every breath, only broken apart by short pauses for recovering breaths.

They sat for what felt like hours until her weeping had turned to hushed sniffling and her arms secured rigidly around his waist as he mumbled reassurances against her hair.

He wasn't blind to this newfound behavior that she exhibited, but he seemed to have been blind to the extremity of it. His grief had all but consumed him, and his only focus lately was making sure he didn't drink himself to death. He was selfish in that sense - he acted as if he was the only one affected by Shay's passing, his judgment clouding the simple fact that she was the heart of Chicago and her light touched every single person in it.

"It wasn't your fault, Gabs."

She drew in a sharp breath and shoved herself away from him, scrambling to her feet as her shoes left skid marks on the floor, "Don't start, Severide. You have no idea what you're talking about."

He stood slowly as if rising any faster would spook her like a wild animal, unconsciously pulling his jacket tighter around him.

"Yes, I do. I was there, remember? She was dead before she hit the floor." The words tasted like vinegar on his tongue, but he knew if he stopped, he wouldn't ever be able to get the words out.

"Please, stop." She linked her fingers together behind her neck as her chin dropped to her chest, "Just leave."

He took a step towards her and continued to speak, "Talk to me, Gabby. Let me help you."

"I don't need your fucking help! Just leave me alone."

The harder she tried to control the tremble of her voice, the more it beat against the walls of the cage it was trapped in. Her mind continued to race along with the beat of her heart, the words of comfort from him falling on deaf ears.

"Gabby, I'm sorry I haven't been there for you. None of us have, but I'm here now. Just talk to me."

If her eyes could shoot bullets, he would've been in a shallow grave at that very moment.

"You want me to talk to you?" Gabby slammed her hands against her hips, "Fine. Let me tell you how I killed Shay."

He could practically feel the knuckles on the hands of her words strike him in the chest. No one knew what actually happened inside that warehouse, except for Gabby and she dared to never tell a soul.

"Let me tell you how I was selfish. Let me tell you how I put my dreams before everything and everyone in my life, including my best friend. Let me tell you how we traded places ten seconds before the beam hit her. Is that enough for you, Kelly? Are you happy now?"

Her words were meant to be angry, but her voice betrayed her.

"It was supposed to be me."

At that moment, the sure knowledge that life was still going on, that time had only stopped for her, undid her completely. All pretense of her quiet coping was lost as she sank onto the bench lining the wall, pulling the turnout jacket with 'Shay' emblazoned across the back down from its hook. She breathed in the scent of the lavender shampoo that still lingered along the neck, just as she had done every night with the sweatshirt Shay left at her apartment after one of their many movie marathons.

She never got to tell her how much she loved her, or hold her close, before she slipped away. Shay had been her anchor when she started to drift away into the sea of nothingness, bringing her back to the surface wrapped in a tight hug. She was her friend when she had no one else, the one who knew her better than she knew herself.

Like a ship straining to see the light in a storm, she tried to imagine Shay before the accident, but no other images except those of that day came to her. All she had left of her was now a fading image in her mind and it scared the shit out of her.

The creak of the bench startled her as Kelly sat down, forgetting for a moment that she wasn't alone. He didn't move or try to reach for her; he just stared at the photos scattered on the floor. He had no clue what to say to her, or how to comfort her, so he just sat listening to her labored breathing. He didn't know what to feel, or how to put it in words. He thought if he knew what happened that fateful day, it would somehow give him closure, but if anything, he was more confused than ever.

He remembered holding Shay's lifeless hand in the ambulance on the way to Med where he later would cry into the tiles of the hospital floor when they declared her official time of death.

He remembered Gabby pulling him up after a few minutes, holding him to her chest, despite her wishing someone would hold her the same way.

He remembered her peeling him away from the bartop every night after one too many, and dragging his almost limp body into his bed.

The one thing he didn't recall was her putting herself before everyone else.

She'd been the rock, the solid ground when they were trying to make sense of the hand they'd been dealt. She'd finished reading Shay's eulogy at her funeral when he choked on his words against the podium next to her casket. She'd put her dream of starting her candidacy on hold and stayed on the ambo, so the house wouldn't have to go through another change so soon. She'd picked up some of Otis and Herrmann's shifts at Molly's so that they didn't have to focus on their dead co-owner.

They'd all had their time to process the hell of losing a member of their family, and now it was her turn.

"I'm happy it wasn't you."

To say she hadn't expected those words would be the understatement of the year. Gabby shook her head as she held Shay's jacket tighter in her fingers, "How can you say that?"

"Because I know if the tables were turned, she'd die of heartache before they ever had a chance to put you in the ground."

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her facade begin to crumble as he continued to speak, the wall she'd built around her falling brick by brick, "She loved you so much. There wasn't a single day that she didn't talk about being an aunt to your future kids, or dancing on tables to the Spice Girls at your wedding."

For the first time in almost a year, a laugh fell from her lips, "I can already see the horror on my mother's face."

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer to him and pressing a kiss to her temple, letting the silence and the sniffles every few seconds coming from her fill the room.

Minutes passed as they sat in each other's comfort before she spoke softly, "Thank you, Kelly."

"Anything for you, Gabs."

He reached down by his feet and tugged a picture out from under his boot, a smile instantly stretching across his jaw. It was his favorite of his two best girls, the paramedics caught in a fit of belly-clutching laughter. He handed the picture to Gabby and rubbed her knee as she traced the outline of Shay's face with her finger.

"And don't think for a second that she isn't always with you."