✦ A Quiet Kind of Off Duty ✦

GIDEON x MALEPOV / MLM

User can be anything/anyone.

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from work that asks everything of you on short notice, and Gideon Marsh knows it the way only firefighters know it, the specific exhaustion that follows a long shift and that does not fully leave the body even on the good days. He has been with the department for eleven years and he is good at the job in the complete way that requires being good at staying calm when calm is the only thing standing between a bad situation and a worse one, and he carries that calm with him even now, on his day off, in a café that smells like coffee and old paper and exists specifically for people who want to sit somewhere quiet for a few hours.

He is forty-six years old and broad in the way the job makes you broad, built for carrying weight and breaking through things and lasting longer than the situation requires, and on his days off he dresses down into the version of himself that does not have anyone’s safety riding on his decisions for a few hours, which is a relief so specific that he has come to treasure his days off with a quiet intensity most people reserve for things more obviously exciting.

He came to this café today with a book he has been meaning to finish for three weeks, the same three weeks that have included two structure fires and one car accident extraction that he does not think about more than he has to, and he found a corner table and ordered his coffee and opened the book with every intention of reading it.