Chapter Text
Stay focused on the goal. Things always get better when you reach the goal.
Buck mentally repeats the mantra as he sits and waits with a few other hopeful returnees for the supervising Captain to arrive and for the tests to get underway. It’s the best way he knows how to swallow down his nerves.
It’s the first day of his recertification process. The next few days will determine whether or not he can return to work--whether choosing the riskier surgery options and all of the work that he’s been putting in, first in physical therapy, then in just getting himself back into shape has been worth it. If he doesn’t pass it’s not the end of the world, he won’t be forbidden from trying again in a few weeks and he’ll do it if that’s what it takes to get back to the 118, but Buck wants to get it on the first try. He wants to prove that the truck bombing and all of this has just been a blip and that he’s ready and right where he belongs.
He knows not everyone feels that way.
Maddie had flat out told him that, while his recovery was a miracle, he should be taking this all as a sign that he needs to change careers and move to something less dangerous, and she isn’t taking his insistence on returning to duty well. Things are…strained to say the least. When it became clear to Ali that he was working to come back and that she was going to have to get used to the realities of dating a first responder, she had packed up her things with barely a goodbye. And while his squadmates and Captain had been present while Buck had been recovering in the hospital, taking shifts so he was never left to wallow in his own thoughts, their presence had dropped off significantly when he had been discharged home and the real recovery began, and Buck would need to be stupid and clueless not to notice the looks of skepticism on Chim and Hen’s faces when he spoke about his return, or the outright reluctance on Bobby’s. Their absences he can chalk up to the fact that they actually have jobs to go to and families to spend time with; it doesn’t feel good to know that he is the dismissable part of their lives but he knows certain things take priority and that he can’t expect to be one of those things. Not when he’s not strong enough to pull his weight at a fire or a pileup or any other rescue and demonstrate his value.
Their lack of belief and support hurts but Buck has spent his entire life fighting for himself. One more time isn’t going to kill him.
Besides, it’s not like he’s without a personal cheerleader. Chris has not once acted like Buck wouldn’t get back to 100% fighting condition, and he’d taken it upon himself to be Buck’s physical therapy coach every time he was present and Buck was doing his strength exercises, since he has, in his own words, years of experience over Buck when it comes to strengthening muscles.
And with a cheerleader and coach in Chris comes a coach and partner in Eddie. Hen and Chim and Bobby may have been too busy to visit and work with him, but even though he’s probably the busiest out of all of them as a single father, Eddie makes the time on his days off. He came to PT appointments, and ran through exercises with Buck and Chris, and when Buck graduates from PT he takes it upon himself to act as Buck’s personal trainer, going on runs and coaching him through strength training until he’s back in shape at full strength, even spending late nights quizzing Buck from the LAFD manual so he can be sure that he’s ready for the written exam.
Buck knows he’s prepared. He knows that if he wasn’t ready, Eddie would have said something. Knows that he aced these tests the first time around and there’s no reason that he can’t do it again. But he can’t help but feel nervous anyways.
He wants this. He wants it bad.
He wants to requalify and prove Hen and Chim and Cap wrong. And once they’re proven wrong and they know that he has bounced back and can do the job, things will go back to normal.
They have to.
Stay focused on the goal. Things always get better when you reach the goal.
Buck makes it through all the tests they throw at him, and he’s fairly certain he’s done well. Technically, the instructors aren’t supposed to tell them how they’re doing (the actual discussion on whether or not they requalify to return to duty is reserved for a one on one with Chief Alonzo) but when he had run through one of the courses the instructor had been pretty excited and unable to hide the fact that Buck had broken an academy record by 1.5 seconds. So Buck is feeling pretty solidly confident that he passed the physical elements of requalification and he hadn’t felt lost at all during the written test so he doesn’t think he could have done too badly on that front either.
Today sitting in the waiting area outside the Chief’s office, Buck is fairly certain he’s going to get good news.
So much so that when Chief Alonzo’s secretary calls his name and lets him know he’s free to go into the office, Buck doesn’t even take a breath to steady himself. He knows he’s a good firefighter, and that he’s shown that this week. It would take a real curveball to keep him from returning to the 118.
“Firefighter Buckley, welcome. Have a seat.” Chief Alonzo greets, closing the door behind Buck. He returns to his desk, sitting and opening up a file folder that sits on top of a stack of paperwork. “I’ll admit, I was surprised to see you come through recertifications this soon. I know the initial prognosis for your injuries was a bit more cautious.”
“It was.” Buck admits. “But I received a second opinion that put me in a good position to recover from the injuries and rebuild my strength in what was a more challenging but still manageable timeline and I’ve always liked to push myself.”
“Yes, from your results from this week I can see that.” The Chief nods. “I won’t beat around the bush. You did very well.”
“I did?”
“You did. You improved your scores on the written test from when you first went through the academy, and as you’re already aware, you set a new course record on our victim rescue course. Your times in the smoke house and physical fitness course also exceeded requirements and expectations. You’re exactly what we like to see in an LA Firefighter.”
Buck has to resist the urge to duck his head down; he’d thought he’d done well, sure, but he didn’t expect actual praise--especially from his boss’ boss. He knows his cheeks flush regardless. “Thank you, sir.”
“With results like this, any house in the city would be happy to have you. However, I understand it’s your intention to return to Captain Nash and the 118?”
Buck can’t explain why, but his heart skips a beat at the Chief’s statement, and his stomach freezes over. He just knows at that moment that something is wrong. The meeting isn’t going to go his way at all. “Um, yes sir, it is.”
“Unfortunately, that’s where we run into some trouble. I spoke with Captain Nash yesterday to go over your successes here and while he was impressed he still expressed some… reluctance to sign off on your return.”
“Reluctance?” Buck’s mind races. Bobby doesn’t want him to come back? Sure the Captain seemed like he had some reservations about Buck making his return to the team, but Buck had thought that was just because he wasn’t sure that Buck could rebound from his injuries, and his scores on the tests and courses proved that he had. What could the problem be?
“He thinks you’re rushing your return to duty and that you’d be better served by sticking with the original recommendations from your medical team.”
Well. Buck can’t entirely say that’s a surprise. Bobby had certainly encouraged him to take the more cautious road to recovery. But he can’t believe that when faced with the facts that Buck’s way had worked, Bobby is still protesting. “My original medical team didn’t have me returning to active duty--they had me riding a desk.”
“I know. And personally I agree with you that that would be a waste of your skills and talents. You’ve proven that you took your recovery quite seriously.”
“Then with all due respect sir, why exactly are we discussing this? I’ve proven that I’m ready to come back.”
“We try to avoid going over a Captain’s head with assignments to their houses.” Chief Alonzo begins. “And Captain Nash expressed concerns that in pushing yourself so hard to be physically ready to return to duty that you ignored your mental well-being. Particularly since this injury was incurred in the line of duty.”
“He’s hardly spoken to me since I was discharged from the hospital months ago!” Buck protests; he can’t help but lose some of the control he has over his temper. How can one person, a person that he trusted and thought would be happy about his return, derail things like this? “He doesn’t know a thing about my mental state.”
“Even so, we’re reluctant to directly go against the wishes of one of our Captains.”
Buck scoffs. “So I’m supposed to, what? Sit around and wait until he thinks an acceptable amount of time has gone by?”
“Not at all.” Alonzo shakes his head. “You have a few options that will get you back to active duty. As I said at the start of the meeting, with scores like yours, any number of firehouses in the city would welcome you into their ranks. If you wanted to, we could transfer you to a new house and you’d be able to start as early as next Monday.”
And if all Buck cared about was returning to duty, that would be great. And he does want to get back to being a firefighter. But more importantly he wants to do it with his house. His family. He wants things back to normal, with Chim and Hen going back and forth with each other over the most random things and running into rescues with Eddie by his side. Sure he could be a firefighter at another house, but it wouldn’t be the same. “And if I want to push to stay at the 118?”
“I managed to get Captain Nash to agree to a compromise. If you agree to a psych evaluation with a department therapist and pass that, he’ll sign off on your return to duty.”
“Then let’s do that.” Buck doesn’t even think about it. He’s fine. He knows he’s fine. Any department therapist will see that too. “Who do I need to call to make an appointment?”
Buck is just putting the last of the chocolate chip pancakes he’d made onto a plate and setting it on his kitchen table when the lock at his front door turns and the door opens. He knows it’s just Eddie and Chris so he keeps setting up breakfast; he always makes something on the days Chris comes over.
“Morning Buck!” Chris greets at almost a shout, grinning broadly.
“Hey Superman!” Buck smiles; Chris’ enthusiasm is contagious. Even though he’s not feeling great with his return to work hitting a roadblock, it’s hard not to take a little of that energy and have it affect his mood. “Hey Eddie.”
Before his dad can offer a greeting of his own, Chris is halfway to the sofa and television. “Can I watch Ninja Turtles?”
Eddie sighs, clearly having heard the request a lot recently. “Breakfast first, bud.”
“One or two pancakes?” Buck asks, starting to get the plate together. He holds one pancake up on a fork so Chris can judge the size.
“Two please.”
“Two pancakes for the little man.” Buck serves up the pancakes, drizzling on some syrup and handing the plate over to Eddie. “Why don’t we set him up in front of the TV today?”
Eddie shakes his head, laughing softly. “You’re too easy.” But he doesn’t protest, just grabs some silverware and heads to the sofa where Chris is already starting to sit down.
“I’m the fun uncle!” Buck protests. Which is true. But he also has ulterior motives. If Chris is in front of the television, he won’t be listening to what Eddie and Buck are talking about and Buck can go over what Chief Alonzo had laid out for him the day before.
“ Easy .” Eddie repeats. But he gets Chris situated and comes back out to the kitchen, getting his own plate of pancakes together while Buck pours him a coffee. He sits down at the table. “So, how’d requals go? When do we get you back at the house?”
“Requals went great.” Buck sighs, taking his own seat. “Passed with flying colors.”
“So…. next shift?”
“Not exactly.”
“This part of the long story?”
“It’s not actually that long, just…” Buck sighs again. “Bobby is refusing to sign off on my return. He says I’m not ready.”
Eddie frowns. “But you passed all of the department requirements.”
“Which is why Chief Alonzo says I can transfer to another house if I want to. But if I want the 118, Bobby’s not going to sign off on my return until I pass a department psych eval.” Buck spears at a piece of pancake with his fork while Eddie processes the information. His best friend has been nothing but supportive throughout his recovery, and Buck is somewhat anxiously awaiting for that reassurance again. He needs to know that someone else wants him back at the 118; if he’s going to put himself through talking with a department shrink he’d like to know that it’s to get back with coworkers who, you know, actually want to work with him.
“Cap really has enough authority to force that?”
“Apparently.”
“Are you gonna do it?”
Buck nods. “Yeah. I mean…the whole point of fighting to come back was to come back to the 118, right? It’s home. You guys are family. Another house might be easier but it’s not what I want.”
“Good. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it lately, but the floaters we’ve been getting are not the finest LAFD has to offer. I need my partner back.”
“Well it’s gonna take an extra shift or two since I couldn’t get an appointment until Wednesday morning, but the Chief promised me that as soon as the therapist gives the thumbs up I’d be reinstated and put on the active roster again.”
Eddie and Buck continue to chat while they eat their pancakes, but soon after Eddie finishes his plate he checks the clock on the stove and stands. “OK. I’ve got to get going to make my shift on time. I’ll let Hen and Chim know you’ll be back soon?”
Buck shakes his head. “Better not tempt fate with Bobby. We can surprise them next week.”
“K.” Eddie crosses the room and, angling around Christopher’s syrup covered plate, pulls his son into a hug. “Keep Buck in line today, all right? I let him think he’s the babysitter to make him feel good, but you’re the one in charge, OK?”
“You got it.”
“All right, love you.”
“Love you more.”
Once Eddie leaves, and it’s just him and Chris in the apartment, Buck drops his fork and goes to the living room. He throws himself onto the couch with enough force that Chris bounces on the cushion and giggles. “All right, Superman, what do you want to do today?”
Buck has watched Chris a lot since his injury, at least once he was recuperated enough to keep up with the boy. It let Eddie give Carla and the rest of his family some time off, and it kept Buck busy and connected to someone that wasn’t looking at him any differently for being hurt. A lot of those days have been spent at Eddie’s house, since Buck was less than mobile, and they had done a lot of lego building, reading, science experiments, and more video games than Eddie had initially wanted them to play. But now that Buck is fully healed and can drive again, they have a bit more freedom and he has a feeling that Chris might request something like the zoo or the movies.
Chris thinks for a moment, making an obvious show of it, which to Buck signals that he already has an idea of what he wants to do. “Can we go to the aquarium?”
It happens in flashes.
He’s on the pier with Christopher, finding lunch after a morning at the Heal the Bay Aquarium. Chris is laughing.
But between bites of pizza Buck looks off the pier and the water is gone.
Then there’s a siren.
The pieces click together in his brain but he knows it doesn’t matter. There’s no time.
In futile hope he picks up Chris. Throws him over his shoulder. Runs. Sprints down the boardwalk with everything that he has.
Then he can hear the water roaring behind him and though he knows it won’t matter, Buck ducks behind the wall of a boardwalk game booth. He pins Chris to his chest. “Hold on tight, OK bud? No matter what happens, don't let go.”
His instructions don’t matter.
One minute there’s open air, the next minute they’re underwater, spinning and rolling with the raging current. There is no holding on. There’s holding his breath and trying for the surface but there’s no telling where the surface is. There’s burning lungs and eyes and muscles and salt water filling up his mouth and colliding harshly with a brick wall.
The force of the wave keeps him pressed against it.
Everything hurts but the wall also gives Buck hope. It doesn’t move which means he knows which way is up and with a few more kicks he reaches the surface.
Buck gasps after air, getting more seawater for his efforts, but the stinging means nothing to him. “Christopher!” He looks around frantically, searching for any sign of his young charge. “Christopher!”
All Buck hears is the water rushing around him.
“Christopher!”
He starts to try and force himself away from the wall; Christopher’s not here and he needs to find him. He can’t stay because it’s easier. There’s a thick string of lights above his head and Buck grabs onto it like a rope. He uses it to guide himself forward, following the current of the water.
“Christopher!”
“Buck!”
At first Buck thinks he’s imagining the voice. He can’t see Chris anywhere.
“Buck!”
Then he hears him again. And catches the flash of yellow pressed up against the dark surface of a lamppost. Buck zeroes in on Christopher and he could cry because the boy is alive and above water and he hasn’t failed.
“Christopher! Hang on! I’m coming to you!”
Buck has to let go of his light strand to get there. He clenches his teeth together, swimming with everything that he has to cross the water. More than once he finds himself drifting further down and has to fight to correct his course.
But he gets there.
With a stretch, Buck clamps one hand around the lamppost and pulls himself in towards Chris. He wraps his other arm around Chris pulling him as close as he can without removing him from the post. Almost immediately Chris throws his arms around Buck, burying his face in his neck.
“You’re all right, bud. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Buck does his best to soothe the boy, even though internally he’s right there with him. How do you calm down after the ocean overtakes the pier you were eating lunch on? “I’m not letting go again.”
“Buck, I’m scared.” Chris sobs, and Buck’s heart breaks.
“I know, bud. I’m scared too.” Buck looks around, trying to see if there’s anything more secure he can move them to; holding on to Chris and the lamppost will only work for so long, and he knows the water will shift again. About 20 yards ahead he spots the familiar bright red of a fire engine poking above the surface, practically unmoving amidst the rushing water. He gets an idea. “But someone once told me that to get through something that scares us, we just have to put all our focus on a goal. If we focus on the goal, we’re not thinking about being scared, and then things always get better when we reach the goal. So you and I are gonna make a goal, OK? And then we’re gonna fight to make it happen, and then things won’t be so bad. Do you think you can do that with me?”
After a moment Chris nods against his neck.
“Great. You’re doing so good, bud. So good.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“There’s a fire truck, up ahead.” Buck explains. “We’re gonna get over to it and get on top so we’re not in the water anymore. Then we’ll be safe until someone can come get us.”
“But the water’s too strong!” Chris protests. “I can’t swim in it.”
“That’s OK. I’m gonna do all the work. You just have to hang on to me. I’ll swim us over.” Looking at the way the water is flowing, Buck is pretty sure the current will do most of the work. But he’s a strong swimmer; he has the training for this. As long as they can move before the current changes, he can get them there. “What do you say?”
Chris sniffs and lifts his head away so he’s looking at Buck for the first time since they reunited. “The truck is our goal?”
“The truck is our goal. Forget everything else and focus on the truck.”
“OK.”
“OK. On the count of three, I’m gonna let go of this post and start swimming. I won’t let go of you, but I still need you to hold on to me, OK? Just hold on as tight as you can.” It will be harder to swim with one arm, but Buck can’t risk losing Chris again; he might not be able to find him a second time. And he knows Chris will be less scared if he’s being held too, and if there’s one thing he’s learned making rescues with the 118 it’s that the calmer you can keep the person you’re helping, the easier it is. Buck waits for Chris to agree to the plan before he starts to count. “1, 2, 3.”
The moment Buck releases his grip on the lamppost, the water pulls them. He clutches Chris to his chest and carves through the water with his free hand, steering them as best as he can to the truck. It takes a couple of minutes, but as he had hoped, the water does some of the work, and before long Buck is able to grab onto the lip of the top of the truck.
“I’m gonna boost you up onto the roof, OK Bud?” This time Buck doesn’t wait for a response, too worried that the currents will shift or a secondary wave will come at any time and they won’t be secure. He adjusts his grip on Chris and lets go of the truck so he can press Chris up and over the edge. Buck winces at the thud Chris makes when he lands, but bruises are better than drowning.
Buck grabs the edge of the truck again, this time with both hands. He pushes himself up and over the edge, only feeling the slightest bit relaxed when all four limbs have the solid surface of the truck roof beneath him. They’re out of the water. He can breathe again.
“OK. I went to the zoo and I saw alligators, baboons, chimpanzees, dingos, elephants, and…flamingos.”
Chris giggles, a soft vibration against Buck’s side. After getting aboard the truck, Buck had checked his charge over for injuries, relieved to find nothing of consequence. His evaluation of his own body, which feels tight and bruised, had been paused when they had heard the cries for help and spotted several survivors clinging to debris floating by. After making sure that Chris was OK and secure away from the edge of the truck, Buck had gone back into the water, using the firehose as his line to keep him safe and attached to the truck and bring the survivors back. All and all he had gathered about twenty people and gotten them safely aboard the truck before the people floating by were looking a lot less alive. Now they’re awaiting rescue, and Buck had Chris sitting next to him, tucked against his side and playing every game he can think of to keep spirits high and distract the boy from noticing the destruction and bodies.
“Well I went to the zoo and I saw alligators, baboons, chimpanzees, dingos, elephants, flamingos and…giraffes!”
The truck rocks in the water. So far it has held steady against everything else the water has thrown at them, but Buck can’t help but tighten his grip around Chris’ shoulder anyways. Chris notices.
“I’m OK, Buck.” He says.
And Buck knows he is. As scared and upset as Chris had been in the water, he’s been remarkably calm since they’d gotten atop the firetruck. He’d taken Buck’s advice well, and decided that once they had reached the truck, things really weren’t so bad. He’d asked Buck for their next goal, which was to stay safe until someone who could bring them back to Eddie came along, and had been good with that as his mission since then.
Buck, on the other hand, feels responsible for everyone on the truck, but especially Chris and he can’t stop worrying that something else is going to happen. Even while he tries to dedicate his focus to entertaining and protecting Christopher, in the back of his mind his brain is running all the scenarios of what could go wrong next, the things he needs to prepare for, all the injuries on the survivors that he couldn’t treat without supplies that he just has to hope don’t take a turn… There are too many things he needs to protect Chris from, and even with that goal to focus on Buck can barely keep a lid on top of his worries.
He has to get Chris back to Eddie safely.
“I know, bud. You’re doing great.”
“Are you OK?” Chris asks.
Buck internally winces; it was all too easy to forget how perceptive Chris can be while he was preoccupied with so many other things. Of course he would figure out that Buck was worried. “Yeah, I’m good.” He says, knowing that everyone on the truck is listening, and they’ll start to worry if they’re hero is less than perfect. “We just… need to keep each other close until help comes. That’s part of our goal, staying close.”
Chris agrees and after a moment prompts Buck to go back to the zoo game.
“I went to the zoo and I saw alligators, baboons, chimpanzeeeees!”
Water punches Buck in the back of the head and sends him flying forward. He launches over the side of the truck and pitches forward into the water. It’s all he can do to keep Chris bundled in his arms.
All at once they’re underwater. The world is spinning around them. Buck can’t breathe or fight against it, and he realizes the goal needs adjusting.
Just hang on.
Chapter Text
Buck holds Christopher close to his chest, even though he knows he’s not going anywhere. They had made it through the spin cycle of getting knocked off the truck, somehow still clinging together, but by the time they were able to surface and stay there, the safety of the vehicle was long gone and out of sight. Buck had tried to just keep them afloat, searching for a new surface that they could cling to to get out of the water, but before he could spot anything that wasn’t just as likely to fall apart with their added weight on it, a floating mass of debris had slammed into Buck’s back and pushed the pair up against a pile of semi-crushed cars.
They’re still pinned there.
Buck is fairly certain he’s not hurt, but he can’t get the leverage or positioning to push the debris away. Not without letting go of Chris, and he’s not going to let go of Chris. Not for anything.
Unfortunately they’ve been there for a long time now, a few hours at least. Buck is running out of games to distract Chris with, and Chris is running out of positive energy. The sun is setting and as the temperature in the air drops the water temperature gets less tolerable.
So he holds Chris close and keeps him as calm as he can and focuses on the goal. And right now Buck’s goal is to keep Chris alive and get him back to Eddie. Nothing else matters.
“Hey Chris, you know the starfish we saw in the touch tanks?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know that when they eat, their stomachs actually come out of their mouths and eat the food outside of their body?”
“Really? But how do they chew?”
Buck has to pause at Chris’ question. He’d never thought about that. “I don’t know.” Buck thinks about it, trying to remember more about what he’d read and if it mentioned anything about chewing.
“Buck?” Chris prompts after a moment of uncomfortable silence. “Is anyone coming for us?”
Shit.
He knew he wasn’t being reassuring enough. He’d focused hard on distractions but Chris is smart and he can tell when something’s wrong and Buck can hear the shaky edge in his voice and realizes he’s failing. His job is to keep Chris safe and secure and unworried and he’s failing.
“Of course they are, Bud.” Buck winces when he hears his own voice; it doesn’t exactly sound like his confident, on-duty voice like he’d hoped. “The thing is, what happened was really big right? So there are a lot of people that need help, and only so many people like your dad and Bobby that know how to help. So it’s gonna take a while for someone to get to us. But they’re coming.”
“Do dad and Bobby know where we are?”
Shit .
Buck doesn’t want to outright lie. At the same time, he wants to be comforting, and nothing would comfort Chris like knowing his dad was on the way, but Buck can’t make that promise.
“I don’t know. But they know that a lot of people were at the pier, so that’s where they’re gonna be looking for people to help.”
“So as long as we’re here, someone’s gonna find us?”
“Yeah, Bud. We’re right where we need to be.”
“Will they still come when it gets dark?”
Based on active disaster training, in a situation where recovery operations are outdoors and not confined to a small space, Buck knows the answer is probably not. They can’t do very effective search and rescue operations in the dark, and the longer it’s been since the initial disaster hit, the fewer survivors they expect to find anyways. Buck knows if they’re still there when the sun goes down, it’s more likely that they’ll be found tomorrow when the cleanup effort starts. But he can’t say that.
“No matter what happens, someone will be looking for us.” That’s at least true. Once Eddie gets off shift and realizes that Buck’s not home and hasn’t been in contact since this morning, he’ll definitely be looking. “It may take a while, but they’ll come for us. We just have to hang tight, right here.”
“All right, what’s your name little man?”
“Chris.”
“Hey Chris, I’m Jason.” The firefighter introduces himself. “Does anything hurt?”
Buck listens to Chris answer Jason in the negative before he chimes in. “He’s not hurt, but he has CP.”
Buck had been more than a little surprised to have the team of rescuers show up in a rubber dinghy with a spotlight mounted on the end a few minutes ago; he had been certain that with the sun down, rescue efforts would cease.
Not that he’s complaining. Jason, a firefighter in a wetsuit has already gotten into position on top of the cars they’re pinned against and he’s planning on getting Chris to the safety of the boat, so Buck is never going to complain again.
“OK, we can work with that.” Jason nods. “Here’s what’s gonna happen, Chris. I’m gonna pick you up out of the water and get you over to the boat, where my friends can check you out and make sure you’re OK. Then when you’re all cozy in the boat, I’ll come back over here with my buddy, Jack, and we’ll get your dad. How does that sound?”
Chris agrees to the plan without protest or correcting that Buck’s not his dad, and Buck starts to listen to Jason’s instructions. He waits for Jason to grab a hold of Chris under his armpits before loosening his own grip, doing his best to trust that the firefighter has the situation under control.
“All right, on three. 1, 2, 3.” Jason counts off and on the third count he lifts Chris up and out of the water. He stands on the roof of the car, adjusting his grip on Chris so he’s held against his hip. “OK, dad I’m gonna get Chris situated in the boat and come right back for you.”
Buck gives him a tired thumbs up. It’s the first time since the wave hit that he’s not responsible for Chris, and with that pressure off his shoulders, he can feel the exhaustion that he’s been ignoring. Between fighting to swim in the wildest water he can remember, rescuing the survivors back at the firetruck (and boy does he hope not all of them were knocked off by the secondary wave) and doing everything he could to keep Chris close, today is easily the hardest day he’s worked since the truck bombing, and the fatigue is settling deep into his aching muscles. He almost doesn’t notice when Jason returns alongside a second firefighter.
“All right, dad. How are you doing?” Jason asks. “Anything hurt that we should be aware of?”
Buck shakes his head. “Just some bruising I think. Nothing major.”
“Glad to hear it. I’m gonna get this webbing secured around you so you don’t go anywhere when we get this debris off of you.”
“Yeah, I know the drill.” The two firefighters share a look and then direct it towards Buck. “I’m LAFD.”
Jason starts to loop the webbing around Buck’s back and underneath his armpits. “Oh yeah, what house?”
“The 118. I’ve been rehabbing an injury so I took my partner’s kid to the aquarium while he was on shift.”
The second firefighter, Buck’s pretty sure his name is Jake or Jack or some other J name snaps his fingers. “You’re Evan Buckley. You’re the guy who got crushed under the ladder truck.”
Buck sighs. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“I knew I recognized you! Man, you must have been born under some kind of sign. First a bombing, now a tsunami? Talk about bad luck.”
“Actually I think surviving both of them is probably a sign of pretty good luck.” Jason finishes tying off the webbing. “All right, we’ll have you out of here in no time. Jack.” He prompts.They both sit, and position their feet on the debris behind Buck, on either side of him. “On my count we’re gonna push away this debris. There’s still a bit of a current so you might feel yourself drift a little bit once it’s gone, but we’re not gonna let go. Just let us do all the work.” He counts off and he and Jack push with their feet.
After a moment, Buck feels the debris move away from his back. He floats back with it but as promised, the webbing catches him before he can drift too far away. Jack and Jason pull him up and out of the water and within a minute, he’s sat next to them on the roof of the car. Relief floods his system.
Time for a new goal.
“Christopher!”
“Dad!”
As Buck steps off of the transporting ambulance at the front of the makeshift field hospital, he watches Eddie pick up his son in a tight embrace, spinning him around in relief. Buck smiles, feeling some of the tension leave his body; he did it. He got Chris back to his dad.
Hen, Chim, and Bobby are also there, clearly having been supporting Eddie once he realized that Chris hadn’t been as safe and sound as he had imagined, but they don’t approach. Buck’s not entirely surprised that they don’t want to interrupt the father and son reunion, but he feels the weight of disquiet resettle on his chest when they don’t even wave at him, let alone come over and check in.
It will be better once I’m reinstated, he reminds himself. It’s just weird because I’m not working with them all the time.
Eddie stops and lowers Chris to the ground, giving his son a more careful once over and checking for any sign of injury.
“The medics with the 178 gave him a clean bill of health.” Buck says. “More than a little tired and hungry, but no injuries to speak of.”
Eddie breathes a sigh of relief, and looks up at Buck. “What even happened? I thought you guys were going to the aquarium?” His tone isn’t accusing, which Buck can’t believe. Even without the full story he has to realize that Buck got his son caught up in a massive natural disaster. Shouldn’t he be mad at him?
“We, uh, went to the one on the pier.” Buck scratches behind his ear. “Heal the Bay.”
“So you were there when the wave hit?”
“Having lunch.”
“Buck saved me dad!” Christopher chimes in, seemingly oblivious to the growing horror on his dad’s face. “The biggest wave came and tried to take me away, but Buck caught me and saved me. He saved a bunch of people. And when we fell back in the water, he never let me go. We swam for a long time, but even when we got stuck Buck held onto me until the other firefighters came.”
Buck knows that for Eddie, the story raises more questions than it answers, and he watches his friend’s facial expression journey along various versions of horror before he realizes that Chris isn’t upset and that he doesn’t want to make something out of nothing for his son. “That…sounds like quite the adventure.”
“It was scary.” Chris admits. “But Buck taught me how to focus on the goal, and then it wasn’t so bad. And we played lots of games while we were waiting for help.”
“I’m so glad you’re OK, mijo.” Eddie pulls Chris into another tight embrace. “And I’m so happy you had Buck with you to keep you safe.”
“Buck would never let anything happen to me.”
“No.” Eddie breathes. “No he wouldn’t.” His eyes meet Buck’s and he mouths a silent ‘ Thank you ’.
Buck nods uncertainly. That can’t be the end of the conversation. Sure, he technically saved Chris. But he was the reason Chris needed saving in the first place. They’ll have to talk about that eventually. Eddie probably just wants to wait until Chris isn’t there to have that talk.
In the meantime, Bobby steps up, glancing at his watch. “Relief crews have arrived and we are well past the end of our shift. What do you say we head back to the house so we can all get home to our families? It’s been a long day.”
The crew all agrees. Eddie hoists Chris up onto his hip to carry him, and the crew of the 118 turn towards the area where all the emergency vehicles are parked. They start to walk.
Buck hesitates, unsure if he’s included in that declaration. Of the crew, only Eddie had greeted him and even that wasn’t exactly thorough or out of anything more than obligation. He should probably just borrow someone else’s phone and call Maddie and have her pick him up once her shift is over. He’s still standing there, debating his options when Eddie turns back around.
“Buck, are you coming?”
“I, uh, wasn’t sure if--,”
“Buck, you saved Chris.” Eddie cuts his hemming and hawing off. “That means you’re spending the night with us.” When Buck still doesn’t move Eddie rolls his eyes. “Preferably before the sun rises, Buckley.”
Buck jogs to catch up with him, feeling the burning stretch in his legs as he does so.
They don’t say anything else, just make their way to the 118 engine with the rest of the exhausted crew. Once they reach the truck everyone loads on; Buck waits for everyone else to get on board just in case, but as he settles into the jump seat with Chris on his lap, Eddie gives him another pointed look, and Buck hops the steps before anyone else can comment. He settles into the empty seat and out of habit grabs the nearest headset.
On the drive, Chris chatters away, recounting the day in greater detail for his dad and anyone else that will listen. From his point of view, the day mostly sounds like an adventure. It’s kind of a relief, since Buck had been worried about him being traumatized, but Buck knows it’s possible that that could still settle in. Right now Chris is relieved to be with his dad, but eventually he’ll remember being caught in that first wave.
Still, for now it’s nice to hear that his efforts were worth it.
Hen, Chim, and Bobby mostly seem amused by Chris’ story, which Buck doesn’t quite get, while Eddie seems pretty equally torn between encouraging his son’s positive attitude and putting the pieces together of what Chris is and isn’t saying and being troubled by the implications. But the story keeps everyone occupied and makes the drive pass quickly. It’s not long, or at least it doesn’t seem like it, before they’re pulling into the bay at the 118.
“Great shift everyone!” Bobby announces as they get out of the truck. “You put a lot of hard work in. Go home, hug your family and get some rest. I’ll see you next shift.”
“Give me five minutes to change and grab my things.” Eddie says. He lowers Chris down next to Buck. “Wait here with Buck, OK Chris? I’ll be right back.”
The evening keeps stretching on. First Eddie had insisted that Buck come home with him and Chris despite Buck’s arguments that they needed a night together as a family after a day like today. Then they had needed to eat since none of them had had anything since lunch which had been an aborted effort for all parties; making dinner had been quick since thankfully Eddie had a fridge full of leftovers from Abuela and Pepa to reheat, but the day was catching up to everyone and they were all so exhausted that eating itself was a slow, quiet affair. After eating, Eddie had insisted on Chris having a quick bath to wash off a tsunami’s worth of seawater and grime before finally getting settled into bed, several hours after bedtime had come and gone.
He’s tucking Chris in now and Buck is meant to be having a shower of his own to wash away the day and the chill that’s long settled into his bones, but he’s only gotten as far as standing in the bathroom and stripping off the collared shirt he’d been wearing.
Even moving his arms that much had hurt.
Buck knows that all of his adrenaline is officially gone, and with it goes his body’s ability to ignore what it had been through. Swimming against a tsunami pushed his muscles to the brink, and then getting tossed into a brick wall and pinned by a huge chunk of debris hadn’t done him any favors. He feels like one giant bruise. Too stiff to move.
Buck is trying to motivate himself to just suck it up and take his t-shirt off anyways when he hears a soft knock at the bathroom door.
“Buck?” Eddie’s voice drifts through the door. “I got some sweats and a t-shirt for you to change into.”
“Thanks. Door’s open.”
The door opens behind him and Buck uses it as his cue. All he’s done for months is suck up pain and push through it and he can certainly do it again for a few bruises. He pulls his t-shirt off, though he’s unable to contain the groan that the movement causes.
“Oh shit.” Eddie exhales, dropping the clothes he brought on the bathroom counter. “Did you get checked out? Should you be at the hospital?”
“What? No.” Buck spins around. “I mean, yeah. I mean. Yeah, I got checked out, and no I don’t need the hospital. It’s just some bruising. The wave knocked me around a bit.”
“Buck, that's more than just some bruising.” Eddie says with a frown. “Your whole back is a mess.”
Buck turns his back to the mirror and then glances over his shoulder, wincing at the pull of his muscles. Eddie’s right. His back is almost entirely a mottled bruise, such a deep purple that it appears black. “The wave threw me into a brick wall.” He admits softly. “Which sucked. But it also gave me a way to get to the surface and, you know, breathe, so I can’t be too mad.”
“Guess not.”
“Is Chris asleep?” Buck turns back to the shower, turning the water on. He’s immediately thankful that water from a shower head on tile sounds nothing like a roaring wave.
“He was out before his head hit the pillow.”
“Good. He needs it.”
“So do you.”
Buck ignores the soft comment from his friend; he doesn’t have the energy to figure out where Eddie is coming from tonight. After a moment waiting for the water to get up to temperature, where for some reason Eddie doesn’t leave, Buck sticks his hand beyond the shower curtain to test the water.
And promptly finds himself tumbling under the surface, gasping and choking on salt. There’s no way up or out and he doesn’t have Christopher. Chris! Buck is trying to swim and find his way out but he can’t find his way up and there’s no wall and--
“Buck!”
Eddie’s hand rests down onto his shoulder and suddenly Buck is back in the bathroom. Only his hand is wet, and he can breathe. He’s breathing too hard, in fact. Too hard for just standing by the shower.
“Buck, you OK?” Eddie pulls gently, turning him around.
“Yeah, I, uh…” Buck pulls his arm back out from under the water. “The water just…I wasn’t ready for it.” He realizes how stupid that sounds; he gets how the wave was scary but how does the water from a shower startle someone?
But Eddie just nods. “It took Chris a minute too. I wasn’t gonna fight him on a bath tonight but he eventually insisted that he could do it if he set a goal. Said it was something you taught him.”
“Just a trick my old CO taught me.” Buck says. It’s not a big deal, or some fancy secret, although it does do something to his heart that Chris actually remembered his advice and tried to use it. “You can’t focus on what’s scaring you if you’re putting all your focus on a goal. It really helped Chris?”
“Got him through bath time, and off to bed.” Eddie confirms. “So what do you need?”
Buck thinks, trying to come up with a goal he can focus on that can get him through the shower, but nothing he can think of will distract him from the feeling of the water pounding on his skin. He feels stupid…it’s just a little bit of water and he’s pushed through a lot worse but the idea of feeling so helpless for the fourth time that day… he can’t just put himself through that. But he also can’t not get the grime of the day off of him. For the first time today, he doesn’t know what to do.
“Would it be weird for you if I stay in here and talk?” Eddie asks.
Actually that sounds pretty good.
“Not any weirder than the locker room.”
Eddie edges past him, pulling the lid to the toilet down and taking a seat. Buck turns his attention back to the running shower, and once again forces himself to move so he can take off his pants and underwear. Before he can think about it too much, he pulls the shower curtain back and steps under the water.
“So your CO taught you that trick?” Eddie prompts, the minute Buck steps into the shower. “I didn’t realize you served.”
The question gives Buck something to think about other than the water coursing over his skin. He reaches for the soap to give his hands something to do. “Yeah, it’s uh…not something I really talk about. I spent five years in the navy. Um. As a SEAL. Bobby knows I did the training but he thinks I washed out.”
“You didn’t want to tell him?”
“I didn’t want to talk about it.” Buck shrugs, soaping up his arms. “I was struggling to adjust back then and it was pretty easy for someone to look at me and assume I couldn’t cut it. So I just…told him I didn’t.”
“I get that.” Eddie admits. “If I could have gotten away with leaving my service off of my record and avoiding all the questions I would have. People get…all kinds of weird when they know you served.”
“I didn’t want that. It’s…not like I can talk about what I did anyways. Even if I wanted to. Most of the work I did was--is--super classified.”
“But this CO, he was a good guy?”
Buck puts the soap back on its little shelf and starts rinsing off the lather. “He was the first guy who showed me that family didn’t have to be related to you by blood. That being yourself wasn’t something you have to hide or be ashamed of. Saved my life more than a few times.”
“Well if his training is what got you and Chris through today I’d sure as hell like to buy him a beer or two.”
“It…definitely helped.”
“Then let me know the next time you have a reunion. I owe him one. Can’t count how many I owe you.”
Buck looks down at his feet. “You don’t owe me anything.” He says softly.
“As a dad who could have lost his son today and didn’t because of you, I’m pretty sure I do.” Eddie counters.
“I know I got him home but…I’m also the reason he was out there, Eds. He wouldn’t have even been in any danger if it hadn’t been for me.”
“I’m sorry, did I miss the day you got the ability to control the planet? Or predict what it was gonna do? Because I gotta tell you, if you can do that and you’re wasting your time trying to be a firefighter again, I think, like, entire nations will have a bone to pick with you.”
“No, but I’m the one who picked that aquarium.” Buck ducks his head under the stream of water, doing his best to wet his hair without getting his face.
“And you had no idea that a tsunami was going to hit. Nobody did. And the way Christopher tells it, you took care of him the entire time and kept him safe. You’re the reason my son is home.”
“I hear you, I do, I just… I keep thinking of everything that could have gone wrong.”
“Buck, somehow, today, everything went right. And if you need me and Chris to keep reminding you of that, we will.”
“I might have to take you up on that.”
“Anytime, man.”
Chapter 3
Notes:
For the purposes of this story, Buck never told anyone about his experience with Dr. Wells after the roller-coaster call.
Chapter Text
Buck is riding in the captain’s seat of the ladder truck. And he knows something’s wrong. The streets are filled with water and Chris is sitting in his lap.
The truck is going lights and sirens and people are chattering in his headset but before he can check in with his team to see what kind of call they’re going on, the world flips. There’s a loud flash, and Buck is flying and rolling and he tries to hang onto Chris but the boy is ripped from his grasp.
This is wrong, Buck thinks as he flies. This isn’t how this happened.
There’s a shock of cold as Buck hits the water. He can’t breathe. The standing water cushions his body from hitting the pavement too roughly but his back is on fire anyways.
And then he hears the scream.
The blood-curdling, gut-wrenching, pain-filled scream.
But it’s not coming from him.
Buck scrambles to sit up, expecting to have to fight for every inch because of the ladder truck sitting on top of his leg but instead he moves without issue. Because the truck didn’t land on his leg. Buck searches the scene as fast as he can and he sees other fallen firefighters struggling to get their heads out of the water, but it’s at the truck where he spots the thing that makes his heart drop right out of his body.
It’s Chris.
Chris is pinned underneath the truck.
“Christopher!” He screams, scrambling to find purchase on the ground beneath the water. “Christopher!” He splashes and crawls up to Chris’ prone form.
The boy’s head is barely above water. He sobs and sobs. Both legs are trapped, crushed beneath the truck. Buck tries to evaluate what he can do but he knows it’ll take dozens of people to move the truck enough to pull Chris out and there’s no one around.
“Chris! Chris, I’m here. I’m here.” Buck supports Chris’ head with his hands, brushing the boy’s hair away from his eyes.
“Buck! Buck it hurts!” He wails.
“I know Bud, I know. But we’re gonna fix it, OK? We’re gonna fix it, I just need you to hold on.”
Chris continues to cry, all hitching breaths and pain-filled whimpers. Buck doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t have any supplies to help with Chris’ pain or even just keep him alive. Nobody’s there. It’s just him and Chris and he knows that it’s wrong. This isn’t how this went but somehow it’s going like this now and he has to fix it but there’s nothing to fix it with.
Chris is going to die and it will be Buck’s fault.
“You’re being so brave, Superman.” Buck continues to smooth at Chris’ hair, tears falling from his eyes. “Doing such a good job. Just keep talking to me, OK?”
“I want my dad!”
“I know. I know. He’ll be here soon.” Buck hopes that’s not a lie, but he doesn’t know what else to say.
“Why did this happen?” Chris bawls. “What did you do?
Buck can’t breathe. Of course it’s his fault. Chris shouldn’t be there. Chris was never supposed to be there. But somehow he is and it must have been something that Buck did, because it’s always, always something that Buck did, and Chris knows it.
“What did you do, Buck? What did you do?”
Buck is trying to breathe, trying to come up with something to say, trying to be there for Chris and find a way to make him comfortable and somehow save him, but his head just keeps spinning in circles. Chris is bleeding and hurt and there’s water everywhere and he’s alone and how is he supposed to fix any of that?
Chris is going to die and it will be Buck’s fault.
Buck searches the area frantically, looking for something, anything, that he can use to help Chris. There’s nothing. No people, no tools, no equipment…
Then he notices that the water around them is pulling back. Buck follows the water and he freezes in horror as he spots the forming wave. What is he supposed to do? He can’t leave Chris; he’s already so scared…
Chris is going to die and it will be Buck’s fault.
The water starts rushing towards them.
There’s no way around it.
Chris is going to die.
Chris is going to die.
Chris is going to--
Buck’s eyes snap open. He glances around the space,slowly realizing that he’s not on a flooded street with Chris and an overturned fire truck, but in Eddie’s bedroom. In his bed. As his chest heaves, Buck’s eyes land on Eddie’s still sleeping form.
It was a dream.
It was just a dream.
Buck sighs, and wipes a hand across his face, trying to refocus his brain. Chris is just down the hall, safe in his own bed, not crushed under the ladder truck. Chris hadn’t even been there that night. This was all just his brain giving him a cruel and twisted reminder of everything that’s gone wrong.
Buck is no stranger to nightmares. He’s had them his whole adult life. His work has given his mind plenty of scenarios to twist and replay and torment him with. They’ve been worse since the truck bombing, and if he thinks about it he’s not all that surprised that spending the day caught up in a tsunami has brought up more. All the nightmares sting, and it always takes him time to readjust to the real world and remember where he is and in a lot of cases, what actually happened.
But this dream definitely hurts. He killed Chris.
Lying there in Eddie’s bed, Buck knows that’s not what really happened. Eddie would never ask him to stay over if he had gotten Chris killed. Eddie would sooner kill him. So in all likelihood if Buck were to get up and walk down the hall, he could peek into Chris’ room and Chris would be there, asleep but alive and well. Only he doesn’t want to disturb Eddie, and he doesn’t want to disturb Chris, and even if he was OK with that, he’s not sure he can move. Buck’s breath is still hitching in his chest and all of the mental reminders he can give himself that it was a dream and that Chris is alive just down the hall are doing nothing to erase the mental image of Chris lying crushed beneath the truck.
“Mm, Buck?” Eddie murmurs; he rolls over to face Buck. “What’s wrong?”
Shit.
He somehow woke Eddie up anyway.
“N-nothing. Just a dream.”
Eddie’s sleep-bleary eyes meet his. “You OK?”
“Yeah, just need to catch my br--,”
“Buck!” A high-pitched scream cuts through the night. “Buck!”
The sleep leaves Eddie’s eyes and he throws back his blankets. Buck follows suit, his own panic switching focus; Chris is calling for him. He follows Eddie down the hall, racing to Chris’ room where Eddie shoves the door open and rushes to kneel next to Christopher’s bed.
“Chris! Chris, it’s OK, it was just a dream.” Eddie grabs on to Chris’ shoulders, pulling him up to a sitting position. “It’s just a bad dream. You’re OK.”
“Where’s Buck?” Chris asks, tears falling down his face. “I lost Buck!”
Eddie glances over his shoulder at Buck, and jerks his chin, inviting him to come in. Buck hurries to his side, falling down to his knees with a jarring impact. He immediately puts his hand on Chris’. “I’m right here, Chris. I’m right here.”
“Buck!” Chris shouts. “Buck, the water came and I couldn’t find you.”
“I know. I know, but I found you. And I’m here now. We’re OK.”
“But I was just there.”
Eddie sighs. “That was a dream, buddy. You’re at home, remember? Buck got you home to me.”
Christopher sniffs, wiping at his face. “It seemed so real.”
“I know. Dreams do that.”
The room falls into an unsteady silence, while Chris regains his composure and Eddie rubs his back. Buck reflects on his own dream and how horrible it had made him feel. How his nightmares always make him feel. Here watching Chris react to his makes Buck wish he knew how to make bad dreams feel less intimidating or real.
“What happened today was really scary, wasn’t it, Chris?” He asks softly. Chris nods. “I know I tried to make it easier for you as best as I could but there was some time there where we didn’t know what was gonna happen, and that was really hard.”
“You know, sometimes when we go through something scary our brains show it to us again while we sleep because it’s trying to make sense out of what happened.” Eddie jumps in. “But because we’re asleep and not in control, it feels just as scary as the first time it happened.”
“I don’t like that.”
“None of us do.” Another beat passes before Eddie speaks again. “How about this? Just for tonight, how about you come back and sleep with me and Buck? That way if you have any more dreams we’ll be right there to help you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You want to walk or be carried?”
“Carried.”
Buck stands while Eddie gathers Chris up in his arms. He’s a little surprised that Eddie is offering for him to stay in the bed now that Chris is coming; it was one thing for him to insist that they could share when it was just the two of them, but with Chris looking for comfort after a nightmare…that seems more like a father/son solo activity. Buck can’t help but feel like he should be moving to the couch at this point.
But Eddie is including him.
Buck follows silently, heading back into Eddie’s room. Eddie gently lays Chris down in the middle of the bed, and then waves at Buck, urging him to retake the side of the bed he’d been sleeping in. Eddie sits on the edge of the bed, swings his legs up and starts to gather the blankets.
“Just go back to sleep, Bud. Buck and I will be right here on either side of you if you need anything.”
Chris nods, energy clearly flagging again and closes his eyes. “Love you.”
“I love you too. Always.”
Chris and Eddie both start to settle back into the bed. Eddie curls onto his side facing his son and drapes an arm over him, pulling the boy just a little bit closer. Then Eddie seems to notice that Buck isn’t back in bed, but instead of saying anything he shoots him a pointed look.
Buck sighs and shoves his misgivings to the back of his head. He climbs into the bed, following Eddie’s lead and curling on his side towards Chris; it’s more comfortable than being on his back anyways. The way his hand falls, his fingertips brush against Eddie’s, and his heart stutter-steps when Eddie curls his fingers around his.
It’s small, but it feels like a safety line to pull him back to reality, and Buck feels some of his tension leave his body as he closes his eyes.
“OK, Chris is good at Abuela’s for a few more hours so if you have anything else you need to do or…” Eddie trails off, placing his phone back in the mount on his truck’s dashboard.
Buck shrugs. They’d slept in as much as Chris had allowed that morning and had breakfast with him, before dropping him off at Abuela’s to spend the day. Eddie had wanted to bring Buck to replace his phone and retrieve his car, but had worried about Chris seeing too much of the destruction the tsunami had wrought so to Abuela’s he had gone. They’d confirmed that the garage Buck had parked in had too much debris blocking the entrance so while his jeep, parked on an upper level, was probably safe, it would be quite some time before he could actually get to it. Getting a new phone, while tedious, had at least been productive. Once they finished at the store, Eddie had checked in on Chris while Buck sent out his mass text to his contacts, confirming they could reach him again.
“I don’t think there’s much else left to be done.” He says. “Just a ride back to my place.”
“Right.” Eddie takes the truck out of park and starts to maneuver out of the parking lot. “You probably want some clothes other than my old sweats.”
Buck had indeed been stuck borrowing from Eddie, his clothes from yesterday having been thoroughly wrecked. But that wasn’t what he had meant. “No. I mean…yes, I do, but I was just thinking that I should get resettled at my place.”
“Why would you need to do that?”
“Because I live there. And as much as I appreciate you giving me a little extra time to reassure myself that Chris was OK and letting me crash with you last night, I can’t get used to that.”
Eddie shakes his head as he pulls out onto the main road. “OK, first of all, is that what you think last night was? Just me letting you get a little extra Chris time?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Buck, you saved my son. You pushed yourself to exhaustion to make sure he made it home to me. You think I wouldn’t want to take care of you after that?”
Buck sighs. Eddie has this way of making things sound simple when Buck knows that they’re not. Eddie has been doing more than his fair share of taking care of him since the truck bombing and being better and getting back to work was supposed to mean that they were done with that. Buck knows nobody wants a friendship where one person is constantly doing all the work, and he can’t help but be hyper aware of the fact that for the past several months, that has been Eddie. And Buck doesn’t want to be a leech. “I think that finding out your kid was in the tsunami you spent all day rescuing people from is probably incredibly stressful and it was probably pretty hard to keep what you needed and wanted to do after that straight from what you think you should have been doing.”
“Wow.” Eddie says flatly. “You really think that little of me?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
“Then why would you think I would only want to take care of you out of some sort of obligation?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Buck protests.
“Then what did you mean?” And Buck can’t come up with a good answer, so he stays silent. “That’s what I thought.” Eddie glances up at the mirror, flipping on his blinker and pulling over to the side of the road. When the truck is stopped, he turns in his seat to face Buck directly. “Buck, you are my best friend. Do you know what that means?”
Buck thinks. It’s obvious that Eddie is going for something specific but he has no idea what it is. “That we drink a lot of beers together after Chris goes to bed and watch a lot of dumb movies?”
“Only because that’s the easiest way to spend time together.” Eddie shakes his head. “It means that after Chris, you are the most important person in my life. Whether or not you are OK matters to me. Yes, Chris was in the tsunami, but so were you. I wanted to take care of both of you. That’s why I asked you to stay. I needed to make sure you were OK.”
Oh.
Buck can understand that. Usually when he wants to do something like that he has to suck it up and let the person go because they have a family to get home to or something else on their schedule and he’s not a priority, but he’s not able to say no to Eddie and Chris on a good day and it’s not like he has other obligations… He maybe doesn’t understand how he ranks so high on Eddie’s list but he can get that if Eddie says he does then he does. At least for now.
“Well I am. OK, that is.”
“That’s great.” Eddie doesn’t look like he believes him, but also doesn’t seem interested in saying anything about that. “But you know, Chris isn’t.”
“Eddie, I tried to shield him from the chaos and--and the bodies. I did everything I could to distract him, you have to believe me.” Buck rushes to justify himself. He knows Eddie has every right to be upset that his son has been traumatized by an event that Buck exposed him to, but maybe if he can get him to see that he did do what he could to try and avoid it that might mean something.
“No, I wasn’t blaming you, I was just trying to say that you took such good care of Chris yesterday, that I think he’d maybe feel a bit more reassured and steady if you…stuck around for another day or two.”
That makes more sense. It’s about taking care of Chris. Buck can understand that. “I mean, I guess I can do that. If you think Chris needs it.”
“You heard him when he had his nightmare. All he wanted was you.”
“Well I still need to go back to my place.” Buck starts. He holds up a hand when Eddie opens his mouth to protest. “I need to pack a bag. Like you said, I can’t live in your old sweats.”
Buck isn’t thrilled to be leaving the bubble of Eddie and Chris’ home. Spending extra time with Chris after going through the tsunami is reassuring that Buck maybe didn’t do a horrible job at keeping the eight-year old safe; outside of the nightmares Chris appeared to be bouncing back fairly well, not clinging to his dad or Buck and approaching the day with as much enthusiasm as Buck is used to seeing from him.
Similarly Eddie just has a reassuring presence. He’s easy to talk to and every time that Buck starts to feel on edge or like he’s back in the water, Eddie is just there, steady and calm. He seems to know when to offer comfort and when to offer humor or a distraction. Even at night, when Buck has his own nightmares and Eddie is already tired from comforting Chris, he seems to find a way to quietly be there for Buck. He just seems to get it in a way that Buck can’t appreciate enough. Especially right now when everything feels so fresh.
So Buck hadn’t wanted to leave, but Chris had school which he was determined to go to, and Eddie had volunteered to cover a part of Jones from C-Shifts 24 hours so they wouldn’t have to put off a dentist appoint for the fourth time, and really…Buck had no reason to be avoiding his sister.
Other than not wanting a lecture.
But Buck doesn’t want to start a fight with her, which will definitely happen if he ignores her texts and doesn’t talk to her like she wants, so when Eddie and Chris leave for the day, Buck catches an uber over to Maddie’s place for breakfast as he had promised.
“Well, you don’t look like you were caught up in a massive natural disaster two days ago.” Maddie greets after opening the door. She pulls Buck into a tight hug.
“I told you I was fine.” Buck fights to keep the wince out of his voice as she presses against the bruising on his back. Time with Chris’ heating pad and Eddie massaging in some arnica gel had kept the muscles from totally seizing up on him, but he’s definitely still tender to the touch.
Maddie rolls her eyes as she pulls back and surveys him closer. “In a mass text sent to all of your contacts. That’s not exactly as reassuring as you think it is. I know you’re not telling the whole story in something that our parents could read.”
That’s not entirely true. Buck doesn’t want to deal with their parents, that’s fair enough. But if he’s learned anything over the years, it’s that his parents don’t care what’s happening with him, so he doesn’t put too much thought into hiding things from them. He still understands Maddie’s point, but he hadn’t minimized things. He’s fine. “I’m fine.” He repeats. “Just a couple bumps and bruises.”
“What were you even doing at the pier?” Maddie asks. She’s still looking him over, as though she’ll catch him out in a lie.
“Chris wanted to go to the aquarium, and Heal The Bay has some really good exhibits for kids his age.”
“And you were just…caught up in the wave?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” Buck doesn’t know what she wants him to say. He’s not interested in reliving the experience, and he doesn’t think that’s what his sister is going for but she’s not giving him a lot of clues.
Maddie sighs. “Evan, what are we going to do with you?”
The comment rankles. It makes it sound like he’s still some trouble-making, thrill-seeking kid. Like he sought out the tsunami on purpose. Buck knows he’s not that kid anymore, but every once in a while it feels like that’s still who Maddie sees when she looks at him. Like right now. “There’s nothing to be done, Mads. It was a natural disaster. A freak accident.”
“It feels like every time you’re getting settled there’s another ‘freak accident’.” Maddie comments. She finally moves, starting towards her kitchen. “Aren’t you worried?”
“About what?” Buck asks, wary of where his sister is going with this. He follows her to the kitchen, noting the tray of muffins she has set out; already he’s not feeling as hungry as he had been when he left Eddie’s.
“About running out of chances at life.”
Buck should have known. This is about him being careful. About his life choices. “I don’t think that’s really how that works.”
“Buck,” Maddie sits at the table. “You know I love you. And you know how proud I am of you that you followed through on something like firefighter training and started realizing your potential.”
Buck takes his own seat, knowing that the other shoe is about to drop. “But?” He prompts.
“But now that you know what you're capable of, don’t you think it’s time to grow up a little more and pick a safer career? One that doesn’t end in hospital visits and throws you in the path of natural disasters and fires?”
There are…so many things wrong with what Maddie has said that Buck doesn’t even know where to start. The way she’s acting like firefighting should be a stepping stone, that somehow it’s his job’s fault that he gets hurt sometimes…that the tsunami somehow wouldn’t have happened to him if he hadn’t been a firefighter? Buck can’t begin to imagine how Maddie has made that connection in her head given how many civilians got caught up in the disaster and died.
“There are so many other, safer, jobs you could be doing that still help people.” Maddie continues.
“Right, but I already have this job.” Buck finally says. “And I’m good at it. Like really good. I was running requalification drills this week and I set course records. My skills would be wasted in another job.”
“But you could learn new skills.” Maddie counters. “And be just as good at those. I know you could.”
“But I don’t want to. I love being a firefighter, Maddie. It’s everything I want out of a job, and it--,”
“And it has nearly killed you. Multiple times.”
“Once.”
“What?”
“It’s only nearly killed me once.” Buck corrects. “I’ll give you the truck bombing. Even though that kid wasn’t really after me, I wouldn’t have been where I was if I hadn’t been a firefighter. I get that. But it also wasn’t the job’s fault.”
Maddie looks stricken. “Buck, the job literally puts you in the line of fire. Every day. I don’t want to get the call one day that you’re not coming back.”
Buck sighs. It’s not that he doesn’t understand where Maddie is coming from. He does. Finding Chimney stabbed and Maddie missing and the subsequent hunt to find her again had been one of the most terrifying experiences of his life; he would never want to be on the end of a phone call that told him his sister was never coming back to him. But maybe it’s because her job is behind the scenes and not dangerous that he can’t imagine demanding that she change a fundamental part of who she is.
That’s also just never been their relationship. When they were kids and she was pretty much raising him, Maddie had been all about encouragement. Yes, there had been times when she had been disappointed by the choices he had made, but he can’t remember her ever trying to dictate what he did or demand that he do something differently. So it stings that now that he’s an adult and actually doing things right, that’s the approach she wants to take.
“Don’t you think you could get that call no matter what I’m doing for work?” He asks; he’s not going to bring up the years that a soldier could have come knocking on her door--Maddie absolutely does not know about that and he’s not going to open that can of worms now--but if he’s learned anything since becoming a firefighter it’s that natural disasters and freak accidents can happen at anytime to anyone. “If anything, my job is keeping me safer. It’s giving me the training and the equipment I need to stay safe when bad things happen.”
“Buck…”
“Maddie…I know you’re worried. And I don’t want to fight with you about this. But firefighting is my job. Yes, it can be dangerous, but I love it.”
“That’s what worries me. You love the danger.”
“I love the job.” He corrects. “Danger is a part of it, but it’s a pretty small part. If I’m doing my job right the danger is minimal. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to give up doing something I love because it scares you.”
Buck jiggles his knee as he sits in the waiting room of a department therapist. He needs to do something to release some of the nervous energy that’s nearly overwhelming him. In reality, he knows there’s not much reason to be nervous; no matter what Bobby thinks, he’s been coping with the truck bombing well and he’s fairly confident that a department therapist isn’t going to be poking any holes in his mindset. But Buck has also spent the past couple of days mostly on his own without much to do other than think about ways things can go wrong with his imminent return.
He’s mostly been spiraling on what will happen if the 118 really doesn’t want him back on the job with them, but now that he’s sitting and waiting for his psych eval it’s hard not to think about how that might go as well, and how uninterested he is in having this appointment to begin with.
It’s only the light at the end of the fifty minutes that’s keeping him in the waiting room and mostly focused. If he can get through the appointment, the therapist will sign off on him going back to work. Then Bobby can’t argue about it anymore and he’ll be back at the 118.
Buck is thumbing through his phone absentmindedly when the door to one of the offices opens and a familiar brunette pops out. “Firefighter Buckley?”
He looks up, automatically starting to tuck his phone back in his pocket as he stands. His heart does a stuttered beat when he realizes who he’s joining. “Dr. Wells.”
Well in all of his worst-case-scenario imaginings, this had never made the list, but he supposes it should have. His last name is Buckley after all.
Dr. Wells smiles, as though nothing about this scenario is off. She steps back, welcoming him into the office. “Come on in, have a seat.”
Buck doesn’t say anything as he enters. What is he supposed to say? He honestly thought that he’d never see Dr. Wells after his last (failed) therapy appointment. It wasn’t as though it had gone traditionally, and she had seemed just as eager to put the whole thing behind him as he had at the time. Regardless of how interested he had been in the moment, he knows he shouldn’t have slept with her; if he really thinks about it, he knows that she should never have initiated it, whether the interest was there or not.
He’s not interested in revisiting that moment now.
He just wants his job back. His evaluator being Dr. Wells is an unlucky coincidence, but if he acts like nothing’s wrong, surely this will just be a normal appointment. She understood it was a mistake too.
Buck takes a seat on the sofa, and waits while Dr. Wells closes the door and takes her own seat in the armchair across from him. She turns and grabs a notepad from her desk, before focusing her attention on him. She’s smiling. All Buck can notice is that there’s nothing between them, and the thought hits his lungs with a stab of something like anxiety. But it can’t be anxiety, right? Because there’s nothing to be anxious about.
There’s not.
He just needs to remember that.
“I have to say, after the way we left things last time, I was a little surprised to see your name come across my appointment calendar.” Dr. Wells comments, opening up the discussion.
Buck rubs his suddenly sweaty palms on his knees. “I didn’t make the appointment. Chief Alonzo’s office did.”
“Right.” She glances down at her notepad. “This is a return to work evaluation, following your injuries from the ladder truck bombing. Is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Great, well, let’s get started. Tell me about the bombing from your perspective. What happened?”
Oh. Buck is taken aback. They’re just diving right in. “Uh, well, one minute we were riding in the truck on the way to a call, and the next thing I knew I had a truck on top of my leg and there was no one else with me. I was just…lying there, confused and alone until Bobby subdued the bomber.”
“How long did that take?”
“I don’t really know. It felt like hours but it was probably only a few minutes.” OK. He can do this. This is basically the appointment he expected, just…with a doctor he didn’t want to see. Buck can handle that.
“And is that something you’ve been dealing with since the bombing?”
“Time?”
“Loneliness.”
Buck frowns; he hadn’t said anything about being lonely, had he? “Not that I’ve noticed.” He answers, trying to keep his uncertainty out of his voice. “I’ve really been more focused on rehabbing my leg and getting back into shape.”
Dr. Wells notes something down, and then looks up at him through her eyelashes. “I can see that you’ve worked really hard on that.”
“I, uh…I guess.”
“Don’t be modest, Buck.” His stomach flips at her playful tone. “I saw the footage from the incident. You’ve made an…impressive physical recovery.”
Buck gets the feeling that she’s not referring to his scores on the qualifying courses, and swallows thickly. “Maybe you should be calling me Firefighter Buckley.”
“Don’t be like that Buck.” Dr. Wells chides. “I thought we were old friends.”
And Buck doesn’t know what to say to that. “I, uh…”
“So other than working on your physical recovery, how have you been spending your time off?”
“I’ve been spending some time with my best friend’s son, catching up with my sister, doing some reading…”
“Reading? Interesting.”
If Buck wasn’t used to people not believing that he liked to read, Dr. Wells’ disbelief would sting more; as it is it just feels wrong. Isn’t she supposed to be being neutral? “Yeah, I’ve been reading about how--,”
“What about intimacy?” Dr. Wells cuts him off.
Buck’s breath catches in his throat. “Intimacy?”
“When we last met, you were having some self-professed issues with sex addiction. Have those continued?”
Buck shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s what we’re here to disc--,”
“On the contrary, Buck.” Dr. Wells stands, and drops her pen and notepad on her desk. “We’re evaluating your fitness to return to duty, and that encompasses any number of topics that I see fit.” She crosses the room and sits next to him on the couch, her leg pressing directly against his. “I’m sure the last thing you want is to be refused a return to duty because you were uncooperative with me.”
Buck stiffens in his seat. He tries to slide along the couch away from her, but almost the moment the thought crosses his mind, Dr. Wells’ perfectly manicured hand clamps down on his knee. He can hear the unspoken threat in her words and realizes the appointment is rapidly spinning out of his control.
“Tell me, Buck, how badly do you want to go back to work?”
Chapter Text
Buck is at the loft.
He’s sitting on the couch in front of a television that’s not even turned on and his shoes are off, which in the back of his mind doesn’t make sense because he knows he was wearing shoes when he went out this morning and he doesn’t remember taking them off.
He doesn’t remember coming home either but his brain is stuck on the shoes. Where did his shoes go? They aren’t by his feet, and when Buck scans the living room they aren’t anywhere nearby either.
Buck stands and starts to search the rest of the loft. He can’t explain it but his chest is tight at the thought of losing his shoes. It’s just a pair of sneakers, not even his favorite pair--those had been fairly well ruined in the tsunami a few days ago--but the thought of them being gone does something to his brain. It feels wrong.
Everything feels wrong.
Off.
Just to the left of center.
Why can’t he remember taking off his shoes?
Buck finds the sneakers next to the door to the loft. It should loosen something in him and be a relief. The shoes are right where they belong; he normally kicks his sneakers off at the door when he gets home. But he doesn’t remember doing it. Doesn’t remember driving home, or stopping at the store, which the bags on his kitchen counter tell him he must have done. The digital clock on the oven reads 6:35, but Buck knows that can’t be right because the last thing he remembers he was at a 1:00 appointment for his psych clearance and there’s no possible way that he’s lost five and a half hours…
Buck has lost time before. A handful of minutes here and there when something bad has happened and he goes into shock. But that was always after a bad mission or a call gone wrong, or something significant and it was never for a big chunk of time. Half an hour at most. And he’d never done anything other than sit there.
So that can’t be what this is.
But Buck has no other explanation. He remembers going to the department’s health services offices after lunch, and making his way to the third floor where the psych offices were. And then he remembers being invited into his appointment, and learning that he was meeting with Dr. Wells.
Dr. Wells.
Buck chokes on air.
Dr. Wells had wanted a repeat performance of their last appointment. And he has no idea what happened next. In Buck’s head there’s her proposition, a whole lot of nothing, and then he’s back in the loft watching a blank tv. It’s all Buck can do to keep breathing.
He goes upstairs, stripping off his clothes as he goes. If he can’t remember what happened he has to piece it together somehow, and the only thing he can think to do is to check his body. However, giving himself a once over in the bathroom mirror doesn’t tell him anything; he has the same bruises and scrapes from the tsunami that are starting to fade, but there’s nothing new. No scratches, no hickies, no flashing neon sign to tell him ‘you had sex today’.
Buck stares at the mirror for longer than he should. He doesn’t know what happened. He can sort of guess, based on the groceries and the shoes, that he went on autopilot at some point, but considering he didn’t know that he’d go and get groceries on autopilot, he doesn’t know what he would have done with Wells. Did he sleep with her? Say no? Push her off?
He knows he didn’t want to sleep with her.
But knowing that he didn’t want to and knowing what he actually did are two different things. And all Buck knows right now is that he wants to go back on autopilot and forget all about any of this.
He doesn’t need this.
He just wants to go back to work. That’s all he’s wanted this entire time.
Buck yawns and rubs his hand over his face as he answers the incoming facetime call. Sure, it’s technically well past midnight and he should be asleep, but it’s not like that had actually been working for him. Besides, he had promised Chris that he could call anytime, day or night, if he needed him. The camera frame is crowded by Chris’ teary face with Eddie curled around his son, his own features tightly drawn in the dim light of the bedside lamp.
“Superman, hey buddy.” Buck greets softly, doing his best to call up a smile for the distressed eight-year-old. “Did you have a bad dream?”
Christopher sniffs and nods.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Chris doesn’t answer, and Eddie squeezes his shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but sometimes it can make the dreams a little bit easier to deal with.”
“The wave came, and you saved me, but when we were on the truck, you couldn’t save all the other people.” Chris says, sniffling. “And instead of strangers it was people we know. Like dad, and mom, and abuela…”
“Oh, mijo.” Eddie leans down, kissing Chris’ head. “I’m sorry.”
Buck hates that Chris is having nightmares, and hates even more that they are the sort of twisted bad dreams he has where things are worse than they were in reality. “That sounds really awful and scary.”
“I don’t like dreaming.”
“I know your dreams are scary right now, but dreaming is actually really cool.” Buck begins. “Did you know that 12% of people actually dream in black and white? Usually it’s older people who used to watch their tv in black and white.”
Chris’ eyes widen. “TV wasn’t in color?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Of course that’s what you get from that, bud.”
“And,” Buck continues going through his dream facts, “you probably dreamt about your dad and abuela and everyone because you actually only ever dream about people whose faces you’ve already seen. So it’s easy for your brain to put people you know in there.”
“Brains can do that?”
“Brains can do a lot of stuff. More than we even understand yet. There are a lot of really smart people who all they do is study brains and they don’t know everything the brain can do.”
“What else?” Chris prompts.
When Eddie doesn’t shake his head or otherwise cue him to cool it, Buck spouts off a few more brain and dream facts, watching as Chris slowly disengages from the conversation and drifts back to sleep. Once Eddie notices, he puts a finger to his lips, and Buck quiets.
Eddie presses another kiss to the crown of Chris’ head and slowly disengages himself from around his son. The camera wobbles while Eddie gets off the bed and walks through the hall back to his room, settling down as he takes a seat on his own bed. “Thanks Buck. I know it’s screwing with your sleep but I think checking in with you is really helping Chris since you were there with him when it all happened.”
Buck shakes his head. “It’s no big deal. I wouldn’t have told you you could call if I minded. Besides, you caught me before I fell asleep anyways.”
“It’s 2:30 in the morning.” Eddie frowns. “You weren’t sleeping?”
“It’s been a rough night.” Buck can’t begin to explain what’s running through his mind and keeping him awake. He knows Eddie would listen and probably even try to help, but the idea of telling anyone about Dr. Wells, when he doesn’t even know what happened for certain… when the lines between them are blurred anyways because of what he did the first time around, make his stomach roll and heart clench. Besides, he doesn’t want to burden Eddie with even more of his problems. Eddie, who has been nothing but supportive even while he and Chris were trying to navigate the loss of Shannon, and is now dealing with a further traumatized son, doesn’t need to deal with more of Buck’s problems. Especially problems that he brought upon himself. He can only hope that being vague will help Eddie draw his own conclusions that keep him far away from asking him about the therapist.
“Did you have a nightmare too?”
Buck hesitates to lie outright. “Something like that.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“That’s OK. I think seeing Chris was all I needed. Thanks though.”
“Anytime.”
Buck isn’t expecting a phone call from Chief Alonzo’s office, and when he gets one in the early hours of the morning while he’s still drinking a coffee and trying to wake himself up from a night of lacking sleep, it sparks dread deep in his gut. He just doesn’t think it can be good news that gets the chief to call so early in the day. But since not answering isn’t really an option, he swipes to accept the call anyways.
“Firefighter Buckley.”
“Firefighter Buckley, please hold for Chief Alonzo.”
A few beats pass while Alonzo’s admin transfers the call. Buck stands so he can pace the apartment.
“Firefighter Buckley, good morning.” Chief Alonzo greets. “I’ve been looking forward to speaking with you.”
“You have?” It’s a slight miracle, Buck thinks, that his voice doesn’t crack when he speaks.
“We’ve received a lot of reports of your off-duty heroics during the tsunami on Saturday. You were pulling survivors onto the truck from the 136?”
This…isn’t the call that Buck was expecting. He hadn’t really put much thought into his actions on Saturday beyond doing everything he could to keep Chris safe and then help others; it was just what he knew how to do. It wasn’t anything special. “I was.” He answers slowly. “But it was really just a right place, right time, kind of thing, Sir.”
“It seems like more than that to me, Buckley. From everything we’ve gathered you did more single-handedly than a lot of the houses managed.”
“I…really didn’t do anything that any other firefighter in the situation wouldn’t have.” Buck shakes his head.
“Once you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you’ll realize that isn’t the case. But I’ll let it go for now, since that’s not why I’m calling.”
“It’s not?”
“We received Dr. Wells' report from your evaluation yesterday.”
Buck stops pacing.
“She seems confident that you are coping quite well and maturely with the bombing and your injuries.” Alonzo continues. “She recommended you return to full duty.”
Buck hears the words through a fog. He can barely comprehend what they mean. Recommending a return to full duty means he passed the evaluation, but how could he have passed anything when he can’t remember it? “What does that mean for me?”
“Based on your requalification scores and our agreement with Captain Nash, we’ll be confirming the results with him today and advising him to return you to the active duty roster of your previous shift as soon as possible.”
“That is…great news sir. Thank you.” Getting back to the 118 cuts through the fog. Because that’s been the goal. Buck is certain that once he gets back on duty at the 118, things will be better.
“Don’t thank me, Firefighter. You’re the one who put in the work.”
“I just wanted to get back to my job.”
“And you’ve done it. I’ve familiarized myself with your file, Buckley. I know you had some struggles early in your probationary year but you’ve really turned things around. You are exactly the sort of person we want in the LAFD.”
“That…that means a lot. Thank you, sir.”
“We’re looking forward to having you back on duty. You should receive a new schedule from Captain Nash within the next 48 hours or so.”
“Great, thank you.”
Chief Alonzo closes out the call, and Buck hangs up the phone, not sure what to feel. On the one hand, he’s finally getting back to work. It’s everything he’s wanted for the past several months, and there is something that feels good about knowing he achieved it. On the other hand…he didn’t really achieve anything, did he? Sure, he passed all the requalification tests, but the psych eval was also a condition for his return to duty and Buck knows he didn’t really pass that. From what he remembers, he barely talked about the bombing; if Dr. Wells passed him, it’s probably because she got what she wanted out of the encounter.
And Buck knows what she wanted.
His stomach lurches, but Buck swallows it down. He’s not going to be sick. Because if he’s sick that means something happened. And the something that would have happened…Buck’s not going to think about.
He can’t.
He has to be misinterpreting something because this isn’t the sort of thing that could have happened to him. Buck knows himself. He could have said no, or pushed her off, or done something. If anything happened, he must have been into it.
Maybe he just went into autopilot mode because it wasn’t any good.
Just because Buck’s never done that before, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, right? Buck has to believe in an explanation like that. He has to. The alternative is just…too much.
Buck is making dinner that night, more out of habit than an actual appetite, when his phone rings. He almost doesn’t check the caller ID--it’s not like that many people call him anyways--but the screen catches his attention when he grabs the phone from the kitchen counter.
Mom.
Seeing that it’s his mom, Buck knows he shouldn’t answer. It’s late back east, which means she’s probably been drinking. His mom only ever calls when she’s a little wine-drunk and in her feelings, and those calls don’t usually go well. Today, where one piece of good news has been delivered but had come in a package wrapped in total crap, isn’t really a day where he wants to or should deal with her. But if he doesn’t answer, she will keep calling. Or worse, she’ll call Maddie. Wine-drunk Margaret Buckley is like a dog with a bone.
He sighs, turns the stove down so nothing will burn, and answers the phone with a sigh. “Hi mom.”
“I suppose you think you’ve done something special.” Margaret says. Her voice drips with vitriol. “Making the news for rescuing all those people during the tsunami?”
Buck had realized his actions had made the news when his dad first texted him about their neighbors, but he hadn’t imagined his parents would actually watch any of the reports. They weren’t a news family growing up outside of whatever was covered on the financial shows his dad liked. And it wasn’t like his parents were interested in what he was doing with his life; he’s pretty sure they only know he’s a firefighter at all because Maddie had insisted on informing them after the truck bombing. Not that they had come out.
“I don’t think it’s special, mom.” Buck sighs. “I was just doing my job.”
She scoffs. “Your job was to save Daniel. And we all know you failed at that. You think saving a bunch of people now makes up for what you did?”
“I wasn’t trying to make up for any--,”
“It doesn’t.” She cuts him off. “Daniel was the best of us. The purest, kindest little boy…and you killed him.”
“Cancer killed him, mom.”
“You killed him.” She repeats. “Your only job was to give him what he needed and you failed at that. Daniel’s gone and your father and I got stuck with you. A greedy, ungrateful, exhausting child who can’t do anything right. An ugly reminder of everything we lost the night Daniel died.”
His mother’s words aren’t anything new. His whole life Buck has been invisible to his parents except for a few nights a year when his mother drinks a little too much and can’t hold back her anger anymore. It’s probably the only reason he knows about Daniel to begin with. It’s not like anybody ever talks about him. But his mom gets upset and can’t control herself, so Buck knows the dirty little secret that he wasn’t a wanted child, just a needed one, and that after a few procedures, the stop gaps stopped working and his brother died anyways.
And his parents blame him.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, mom.”
“What I want? What I want? What I want is for you to have died that night, and for Daniel to still be here. I want my baby boy back.” She starts to weep, quiet, wrenching sobs.
“Go to sleep, mom.” He advises, clenching his jaw around his own feelings. It won’t do any good to get caught up in the heartache of what his mother is saying, what she really thinks of him. It’s the sort of thing he has to live with, but Buck’s not going to make himself miserable over it or think about it too much; that doesn’t do anything but make things worse. “You’ll feel…something in the morning.”
Buck hangs up the phone before she can get going again, and swipes his phone into do-not-disturb mode. He didn’t want to deal with people before the call and he certainly doesn’t want to now. He puts the phone on the kitchen table and turns back to the stove, debating for a moment what to do.
Ultimately, he turns the stove off, and scrapes the pan out over the garbage.
He’s not hungry anyways.
Chapter 5
Notes:
You'll note I updated the tags for this fic, but one change of note is that there is a lot of internalized victim-blaming starting in this chapter. If that's something that bothers you, please exercise caution when reading.
Chapter Text
“Congratulations!”
Buck has barely set foot in the Diaz house before he’s greeted by Chris and Eddie’s enthusiastic shouting. In the moments following their greeting Chris bounds up to him; Buck catches him and lifts him up into a hug. Buck hadn’t exactly been looking forward to coming to this mini-celebration (he hasn’t been able to let go of his misgivings about everything that has happened to give in to realization that he’s reached his goal and is going back to work) but in the face of Chris’ energy and joy Buck finds himself smiling anyways. He sees that Eddie is holding what appears to be a handmade poster that reads Congratulations Buck and has a Christopher-drawn firefighter aiming a hose at a house on fire. “Aww, you guys didn’t have to throw me a party.”
“This isn’t a party!” Chris protests as Buck lowers him back to the ground. “It’s just us.”
“Sounds like a party to me.”
“I thought about inviting over Hen and Chim and some of the others,” Eddie says as he lowers the poster and steps forward, “but I know you weren’t sure about letting them know you were close to coming back so I figured it should just be us for tonight.”
A part of Buck knows he should be disappointed to not have his whole crew there, but he’s really not. He knows they’ll celebrate at his actual first shift back, and right now the idea of a bigger gathering just feels overwhelming; he doesn’t really feel up to being around people. Besides, between not really seeing them throughout his recovery, and the not-so-warm or concerned reception he had gotten from his team at the VA hospital after the tsunami, Buck really isn’t sure where he stands with everyone anymore. He’d like to think that this is just some sort of hiccup in their friendships and that everything will go back to normal once he’s on shift next week but he just doesn’t know. He’d never have thought that Bobby would have put the brakes on him coming back but Chief Alonzo had made it clear that his Captain had his misgivings, and Bobby hadn’t even called him to welcome him back to the A-Shift, just emailed him a new work schedule.
“Dinner with the Diazes sounds perfect.” Buck says.
“We ordered Thai food.” Chris informs. “Dad got you that cow salad you like. And the cat noodles.”
“Goi Moo and Kee Mao?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Your dad’s the best.”
Eddie winks at him. “It just got here so it should still be hot if you’re ready to eat now.”
They head into the kitchen, where the table is piled with paper plates, napkins, and bags of take-out. Chris immediately takes his usual seat, while Eddie goes to the fridge. “Juice or water, Bud?”
“Juice please.”
“What about you, Buck?” Eddie asks. “Water, beer…?”
“Sure, I’ll take a beer. Thanks Eds.”
While Eddie gets the drinks, Buck starts to serve up the food, knowing everyone’s usual orders. He starts with Chris’ sticky rice and tempura order, then Eddie’s spring rolls and Kra-Prao Chicken, then finally his own Goi Moo and Kee Mao. Halfway through the process Eddie puts a glass of juice in front of Chris and a beer bottle in front of the seat that Buck will take. He takes a seat himself, thanking Buck for getting the food and moving the empty bags to the kitchen counter behind him.
With food and drinks served, they quickly dig in, but it’s not long before Chris is talking around mouthfuls of chicken and rice. “Buck, dad says you had to take a lot of tests to go back to work?”
“A few, yeah.”
“Like what?”
Buck takes a moment to consider how to explain the exams the department makes returning firefighters take. “Well, first I had to take a test about the rules of being a firefighter to make sure I still know the right things to do to help people. Then I had to run through what was basically a bunch of different obstacle courses to make sure that my leg healed up right and I’m still strong enough to do the job.”
“And Dad says you’re gonna be his partner again, so you passed right?”
“Yep.” Buck very nearly sighs, lifting his beer up to take a drink to hopefully hide the expression. “I passed.” Judging from the way Eddie’s brow creases, he’s not particularly successful.
“I’m glad.” Chris says, picking up another piece of tempura. “Dad said the station wasn’t the same while you were hurt.”
Eddie hasn’t exactly been keeping his feelings on the floaters who have been filling Buck’s spot a secret, but it is nice to hear that he says the same thing around Chris when Buck isn’t there to be flattered.
“When’s your first shift back?” Eddie asks. He reaches for his own drink.
“Bobby emailed me a schedule today. I’m back with you on A-Shift starting on Sunday.”
“Next shift then. Nice.”
The trio continues to eat, although conversation shifts from Buck’s return to work to Chris’ campaign to try and convince his dad that they should get a dog. Chris tries valiantly to get Buck to argue on his side of things (dogs are fun and great and they need more fun in the house) while Eddie mostly points out the time commitment of a dog and how with shift work it’s not really fair to the animal and Buck does his very best to stay out of it. He loves dogs and would love for Chris to have one, but the arguments that Eddie is making are the exact reasons that Buck hasn’t gotten himself a pet so he can’t really argue against them. It’s a good natured argument, with Chris knowing exactly how to toe the line between pleading and obnoxious with his dad, although Eddie firmly shuts it down once Chris’ plate is clear.
“That’s enough pet talk for now, Bud. You’ve made your opinion very clear.” Eddie says. “Now clear your plate, and I’m pretty sure you have a vocab worksheet left to take care of before bed.”
“OK.” Chris sighs, sounding very put upon, but does as he’s told, tossing his paper plate in the trash and heading towards his room.
As Chris leaves, Eddie shakes his head, grinning around the mouth of his beer. “If he doesn’t give this dog thing up by Christmas I’m in trouble.”
“Eh.” Buck shrugs. “There’s a new Star Wars video game coming out in November. Plus you haven’t caved and gotten him a Nintendo yet. You can distract him.”
“Right. More screens. That’s the solution.”
“Do you want him upset about not getting a dog or do you want to be the cool dad?”
Eddie narrows his eyes. “I’m always the cool dad.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” Buck’s almost done with his meal, and turns his focus back to eating, so he’s surprised when he looks back up and Eddie is watching him. “What?”
“Are you OK?” Eddie asks.
Buck doesn’t let himself think about his answer. “Of course. I’m great.”
“Because you didn’t seem all that happy when you were talking about passing all the recertifications, or about being back on shift.”
“I’m great.” Buck repeats. This is his opportunity, he knows. His opening. He could talk to Eddie about what happened with Dr. Wells and Eddie would probably be supportive. He would at least help him figure out what he’s supposed to do now. But telling Eddie would mean talking about it, and Buck really doesn’t want to do that.
Besides, friendships are supposed to be both giving and taking, and Buck knows that with his injury and all the work they’ve been putting in to get him back to work, he’s done more taking than he’s done giving. And talking would be more taking.
He decides instead to stick with an excuse that Eddie is already aware of. “I’m just not really sure what I’m coming back to, you know? I haven’t really seen anyone besides you in weeks. And I know Bobby’s not thrilled that I’m coming back.”
“Bobby will change his mind once he actually sees that you’re fine and ready to work.” Eddie argues. “He’s got the image of you laid up in the hospital stuck in his head, and once he sees that you’re all healed up he’ll come around.”
That would be Buck’s hope. He’s just not sure how much he believes in it.
“As for Hen and Chim, I wish I could tell you what’s going on with them but they’ve been almost as distant with me. I just see them because I’m on shift.”
That’s well…it’s not good, but it’s kind of a relief. If Eddie hasn’t been dealing with them either that means it might not be an issue with Buck specifically, something he’s been trying to avoid thinking about. “You think?”
“I think the house has been different since the bombing, but you coming back is going to go a long way towards bringing things back to normal.”
In the days before his first shift back, Buck doesn’t know what to do with himself. He spends Friday night and a bit of Saturday day with Eddie and Chris, watching movies, playing video games and joining them on their errands, which is great, but he can’t just…invade their lives until he goes back to work. No matter what Eddie says, Buck is pretty sure he’d wear out his welcome eventually and he doesn’t want to do that. So eventually he begs off of their company citing his own boring errands and chores to do.
Only the downside to having been on medical leave for months is that all of his own errands and household chores have been taken care of. He doesn’t even have a grocery run to complete. And with things with Maddie being…tense, he doesn’t really have anyone else to go and visit.
Before, on a totally free day Buck would go on a hike or spend the day lounging on the beach. But the idea of the beach turns his stomach and going on a hike just doesn’t appeal to him. So he’s stuck on the couch with a depleted Netflix queue and his own thoughts.
It’s not the best combination.
At first his brain just circles around the idea that he should be doing something but when nothing comes up for him to do he just feels useless. And feeling useless and having nothing to keep his brain occupied leads to thinking. And not the fun thinking with hypothetical situations like he might get into with Chris like whether or not a dog knows it’s a dog. No. Buck gets all of the negative thinking like his parents’ greatest hits on why he’s a terrible son and generally awful human being, and every one of his own insecurities playing on a loop.
Selfish.
Ungrateful.
Needy.
Exhausting.
On a good day, Buck can shake these kinds of things off. He can point to all the things he does that prove they’re not the case and they don’t describe him, and can even transform the thoughts to something more positive.
Today is not a good day.
Buck hasn’t slept well between the tsunami and everything with Dr. Wells, so he’s exhausted. Being tired, it’s easier to feel tiring. Like he’s the source of his own problems. Like, maybe Bobby doesn’t want him back at the 118 because of something he did, or maybe Hen and Chim have pulled away and stopped visiting and dealing with him because he’s not a good friend. Maybe he takes too much and doesn’t support them enough.
Maybe he is needy and selfish and exhausting.
Maybe Maddie’s right and he shouldn’t be a firefighter.
After all, what kind of firefighter can’t handle a simple psych eval? What kind of firefighter would sleep with the doctor to make sure they were cleared?
And, maybe, maybe Buck can concede that he hadn’t set out to do that--that he had only slept with Dr. Wells out of muscle memory when his mind had tuned out of the situation--but that just leaves him with even harder questions. What kind of man doesn’t enjoy sex with an objectively beautiful woman? What kind of man sleeps with someone when he doesn’t want to? What kind of man can’t push a woman away and shut the situation down?
If he can’t take care of himself, how can Buck take care of the public when they need help?
Weak.
Loser.
Worthless.
Everything sits deep in Buck’s chest. Breathing takes work. Everything hurts. Buck feels miserable and broken and he doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting in it, but he can feel the tears he doesn’t want to cry gathering in his throat and his thoughts just continue to cycle. He needs everything to stop, but all he can focus on is what a horrible person he is; all he can feel is the pain in his chest.
The automatic menu on Netflix restarts. It startles Buck enough that he can focus on the pain, and he knows if he can shift the pain he can give himself a moment to regroup.
Buck slams his fist into the side of his thigh as hard as he can. Once, twice, three times, in quick succession. The muscle knots and aches and immediately Buck feels everything ease off of his chest.
He can breathe again.
Before anything can resettle or start again he grabs the remote and hurriedly thumbs through the Netflix menu. There’s not a season of Great British Baking Show on the streaming service that he hasn’t seen at least twice, but Buck will gratefully watch something so warm and cozy multiple times over if it keeps him out of his head. He starts the first episode that he lands on, tosses the remote onto the coffee table and scrambles to grab the fluffy blankets that are bunched together on the end of the sofa and cover himself up in them. Buck gets himself bundled and snuggled on the couch, hoping that the easy going joy of Cake Week will be enough to counteract everything in his head.
Starting back at work is both better and worse than Buck had been expecting.
Better because he had been greeted by A shift holding a tray of cupcakes. It’s not the fully decorated loft and highly personalized cake that Chim had gotten after his car accident--it’s not even his favorite flavor of cake, to be honest--but Buck hadn’t really expected that given how his recovery had gone. Maybe it’s not fair to his coworkers but he honestly wasn’t expecting even the cupcakes. So on that front, Buck is pleasantly surprised.
And Buck isn’t thrown off by Bobby declaring him man behind at the start of shift because Bobby had warned him. Buck would, of course, rather be waiting to go out on calls instead of waiting to sit around and wait some more, but he knows he has to play the game. His captain wants him to ease back into things, so he has to ease back into things.
What does throw Buck off is that the moment he has been ‘welcomed’ back and the cupcakes distributed, everyone besides Eddie disperses to different areas of the house and loft. Even Hen & Chim, who at least seemed enthusiastic to see him back in uniform, dart away, heads ducked together as they seemingly discuss something quietly.
And then Bobby turns down his offer of help as he prepares breakfast.
So Buck feels off balance. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he had misread the whole situation with his coworkers. Maybe where he saw a family they just saw him as the weird interloper who intruded on things, and they had used the months he was out as an opportunity to rebuild their routines. There’s no need to invite him back in to disrupt that. They need him as a firefighter, a body on the truck, not as a brother or cousin or whatever type of family he had been imagining.
Eddie brings him over to the sofa, drawing Buck into a conversation about Chris’ excitement for the next unit in his science class. Buck does his best to focus on that. He doesn’t need to spend time worrying over relationships with people right now; he needs to be a good firefighter again.
Maybe if he proves that he’s just as good as he was before the bombing, things will go back to normal.
With that thought in his head, Buck considers what he can do to prove himself, especially once the bell rings and the rest of the house heads out on a call. Being the man behind makes it a lot harder to prove himself as a firefighter--especially since he’s barely even on the chore rota that Bobby has drawn up for the week. Buck’s not sure what to think of that; usually someone that Bobby knows he’s going to assign as man behind gets a chore or two extra, just to balance things out and give them something to do, but Bobby had asked him to inventory the supply closet and nothing else. Not even kitchen duty. If Buck didn’t already know that Bobby was reluctant to have him back for some reason, this would be a glaring clue.
And Buck knows it’s weird of him, but not being assigned the extra chores as man behind stings even more than being the man behind. At least chores are a part of being a firefighter, and if he can do those he’s doing something that he wasn’t able to for months while he recovered. He knows that Bobby wants him to be the man behind because he thinks that he rushed his recovery. What does holding him back from chores prove?
Buck decides that he just has to do what he can. For now that means his assigned chores, and when he inevitably finishes that while the team are out on calls, he can see what else around the station he can take on.
Surely there’s a project or two that have been ignored while they’ve had floaters in covering his shifts.
Buck dives into the supply closet and loses himself in inventorying and organizing what has become a disaster zone. Keeping things neat clearly hasn’t been a priority for the 118 lately. It makes a handy first project to tackle, so much so that he doesn’t notice the time passing until his stomach rumbles, demanding lunch. A glance at his watch tells him it’s been well over four hours since the first call had taken the trucks out of the station and Buck quickly realizes that either they’re out at a massive call or they’ve had a lot of back-to-backs piling up.
Either way, they’ll appreciate having a lunch ready for them when they get back.
He gets his supply closet work to a pausing point and heads up to the kitchen, where he can survey the cupboards and fridge to see what sort of ingredients he’s working with; depending on what’s on the shelves he might have to just order takeout, but he knows that a homemade meal is much more satisfying after a busy shift. Thankfully he finds what he needs to make some trays of a simple but hearty pasta bake and some garlic bread.
Buck restarts the podcast he was listening to while working downstairs, and sets himself to cooking. With his hands and mind occupied, the work goes by smoothly, and he’s just pulling the trays out of the oven when the trucks finally pull back into the garage.
The team is incredibly subdued when they return from their afternoon call. Thanks to the texts from Eddie, Buck had known it had been a bad scene and he had done what he could to make the house a little more comfortable and welcoming for them, brewing a fresh pot of coffee and putting a kettle on for tea for those who preferred that. He’d returned to working in the supply closet, but had forgone his podcast this time around, making sure he could hear when they got back--he wanted to be there for anyone who needed it, but especially Eddie.
Watching everyone exit the vehicles, Buck notices their drawn features and the lack of chatter. When Eddie ends up standing near him, Buck nudges his shoulder with his. “What do you need?” He asks softly.
“To hug Christopher.”
Buck can’t help with that. Not immediately anyways. “Who’s he with today?”
“Pepa. It’s not worth disturbing them.” Eddie shakes his head with a sigh. He has his mouth open to say something else, but Bobby commands the attention of the room first.
“I know what we just saw at that scene was upsetting and disturbing.” He says grimly. “I want to remind everyone that my door is always open to talk, and if you don’t want to talk to me the department has a lot of resources. There’s the peer-to-peer counseling program, which is confidential, or if you’d prefer something a bit more conventional, the department has a number of talented therapists. You don’t need to keep your feelings on this bottled up.”
Buck is vaguely aware of the crew acknowledging Bobby as they split off to do their own things, but his vision had practically tunneled out when his Captain had mentioned the department therapists. His head rushes with thoughts of his teammates--his friends--sitting in front of Dr. Wells. Even though he knows she’s not the only department therapist, she’s the only one he’s seen and it’s all he can think of.
What would happen if Chimney went and saw her? What about Eddie?
If he were feeling more rational, Buck would recognize that the very idea of Eddie going to see a therapist, particularly over a call where nothing even happened to him, is verging on this side of ridiculous. Eddie doesn’t do feelings like that; he had gotten Chris to see a counselor after Shannon’s accident, and Buck knows he’s gone to a few sessions with his son, but he’s never indicated that that is the sort of thing he’d seek out for himself. From what Buck can tell, as much as Eddie encourages Chris to talk about his feelings, he’s much more of a ‘swallow everything down as much as possible and then one day I’ll die’ kind of a guy, not a therapy kind of guy.
But Buck’s not feeling particularly rational.
He has his thoughts, moving at such a breakneck speed that if Buck weren’t used to it in the first place he couldn’t keep up, spinning nightmare scenarios of Eddie going to see Dr. Wells and finding himself beneath her, unable to do anything. And Buck knows, knows, knows without question that Eddie is a better man than him--a stronger man than him-- and that he’d find a way out of that scenario before it ever even became an issue, but there’s this tiny part of his brain asking ‘yeah, but what if?’ Eddie could go to therapy, hoping to talk out a bad call, and something could happen to him.
Anyone in the department could.
Fuck.
Buck’s pulse swims in his ears.
He’s not special. He knows that. Sure, he’s good enough looking with an above-average body, but so is at least half the department; they put out an annual sexy calendar for fuck’s sake, they aren’t lacking for good looking guys on the job. If he’s hot enough for Dr. Wells to want to sleep with, so are at least some of the other patients she sees.
And…and he froze the other day so what happened was on him, but he knows it was wrong. Mostly. So if she tries to do the same thing to someone else and they don’t know what to do or they freeze and something happens…that would be on him too.
Because technically he could report her. He just hasn’t been able to bear the thought of what would come of it.
Looking at it as an outsider, it’s laughable. Who would believe that Dr. Wells, petite, delicate Dr. Wells could force herself on strong firefighter and noted man-whore Evan Buckley? He’d be humiliated, probably fired for trying to ruin her career, and nothing would come of it but more problems. Buck hasn’t been able to convince himself that taking on that kind of trouble is a good idea. Not in the days since it happened.
But that was before he remembered that other people go and see her. And if something like this happened to someone else because he couldn’t find it in himself to speak up…? Buck’s not sure if he could live with himself.
He has to say something. He’s just not sure how to do that.
Chapter Text
It’s been a month since Buck returned to work and things have found their status quo. For the most part. He’s back going out on calls anyways.
Bobby had tried to make him the man behind in the shifts following his first shift back, and Buck had been prepared to suck it up and work the chores list a little bit longer before pushing the issue but Eddie and a few other shift mates had stuck up for him, pointing out that unless someone was on light or restricted duty no one was supposed to be man behind for two shifts in a row. That’s how skills got rusty. Bobby had at that point (very obviously reluctantly) changed his orders and Buck had been put back into the proper rotation for A-Shift. Going back on calls and partnering with Eddie has been great. A definite highlight in comparison to the way everything else has been going.
There’s been a slight thaw with Chim and Hen. They’re talking to him on shift anyways and spending downtime without running in the opposite direction. Buck’s learned that Hen’s distance was likely because of the journey she had been going on with Karen to try and get pregnant, wherein the cost of more than one attempt had been prohibitive and the attempt had not gone well. Buck definitely understands isolating oneself in the face of that kind of heartache and has forgiven her for her lack of attention; all of her focus should have been on her family and marriage, not on him and his recovery. He doesn’t know exactly what had pulled Chim’s attention other than being there for Hen and perhaps loyalty to Maddie in the slight freeze between brother and sister, but if there was anything there, he also seems to be mostly past it. Things aren’t quite like before the bombing, maybe more like during his probationary year, but it’s better than it had been, and Buck will take what he can get.
What hasn’t changed at the station is Bobby. He’s still keeping his distance, barely talking to Buck unless to give orders at a scene or at the station. He’s still refusing Buck’s offers to help in the kitchen. Buck can remember his captain in the first few months he had worked at the station telling him quite clearly that house 118 was not a family and to Buck it really seems like Bobby is doubling down on that statement.
That one stings.
But Buck is trying to let it go. So what if his family is a little smaller than it used to be? At least he still has a family to speak of.
And OK, things with Maddie aren’t great. They’ve tabled the debate about whether or not Buck should even be working as a firefighter…as long as he doesn’t bring up work, or anything work adjacent. But at least his sister is still in his life. That’s the important thing.
He has Maddie…sort of, and Eddie and Chris. And when he’s at work he sort of has Hen and Chim too. Buck can work with that.
So he’s a firefighter again and he’s got his family and his friends…Buck figures he should be feeling pretty good. Should be.
But outside of work he can’t get settled. He can’t get a full night’s sleep between insomnia and nightmares (and helping Christopher with his, but those occasions are getting less and less frequent). He’s never hungry; he eats when he knows it’s meal time because he knows he’s supposed to and he can’t afford to be weak or look less than normal but the food never tastes of anything and sits heavy in his stomach. He has to focus to be the Buck that everyone knows and it leaves him empty and exhausted.
He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, just that it’s wrong and it shouldn’t be. He should be fine. He has everything he needs. For something to be wrong is just…stupid. And needy. And everything he’s trying not to be.
He’s still got the Dr. Wells thing hanging over his head. He’s still not putting the words to what happened, not thinking about it at all if he can help it, but he reported her to the department’s anonymous whistle-blowing software. He knows it probably wasn’t the best way to do it, but he still can’t imagine sitting in front of an actual person and having to explain what he’d done. Besides. The software is for all issues, whether they be HR related or safety related so Buck has to believe that reporting her that way will lead to an investigation. He just hasn’t heard anything and hasn’t found the bravery to look into it himself.
All of that goes on the backburner when he’s at a call. Mostly. Like today they’ve been out at a rural farm, trying to find a missing kid, only to find that he had fallen down a disused well shaft and Buck has been able to channel all of his focus onto what needs to be done to get the kid out and safe and back to his mom. And it goes well, even though he’s not the one going down the well, even when the storm starts and the rescue gets more perilous because this is what he’s good at. He can work the winch and have Eddie’s back.
At least until Eddie cuts his line.
After that Buck reigns in his panic, mostly because they still have more equipment. They can send someone down after him, and Bobby will never let that be him if he’s not 100% head in the game ready.
Bobby doesn’t send him anyway and Buck tries not to read into it. Tries to breathe through the worry that if he’s not the one down there that Eddie won’t come back up and to just do his job as instructed but Chim comes back up with the kid and as they’re about to send a new line for Eddie the lightning hits and the rig and the well collapse and there’s nothing.
Nothing to see but chaos, nothing in his lungs, nothing in Buck’s head but panic for Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!
Buck cries, tears melding with the raindrops so perfectly that no one will even know. He claws at the ground, knowing it’s no use but needing to do something anyways and when Bobby and Hen pull him back from that he begs and pleads to be able to do something. And the thing is they argue that they have to do this carefully, but Buck can tell the truth. They think there’s nothing left to do. They think Eddie is gone. And Buck can’t think like that. Because if Eddie is gone, that's his best friend--his family--his…everything that he doesn’t let himself think about and Buck doesn’t know how to face that reality. Doesn’t think that he can.
Buck hears Bobby talking about a reconnaissance plan, about thermal cameras and scanning the area for any signs of Eddie but he recognizes it for what it is. Bobby’s trying not to say the words and kill what little morale he’s got left from the crew, but he thinks this is a recovery operation at best.
Buck dismisses every thought that he can. He needs to focus. If he’s the only one planning on Eddie being alive when they find him he needs to be on his A-game because no one else will be. There’s finding Eddie and there’s saving Eddie. Those are the only options.
The team is breaking apart to start a grid search, everything as methodical as Bobby had ordered when Buck hears him.
“Just make sure none of you go into the pond. The water is fucking freezing.”
Buck spins on his heels and spots Eddie, filthy and soaked and scraped up to hell, but standing in front of him and breathing, and not fucking buried beneath 50 tons of mud and water. Not dead.
He bites back one last sob as he feels the air come back into his lungs.
Buck delivers Eddie to the door of his house, exhausted and a little worse for wear but most certainly alive around 7:30 the next morning. He doesn’t expect to get invited in, but when Eddie extends the offer to join him and Chris for breakfast before he crashes, Buck can’t find it in himself to say no.
“I take it it was a rough shift?” Carla asks, raising an eyebrow at their appearance when they enter. She doesn’t watch the news when watching Chris, just in case, so she wouldn’t have known something was amiss, but Buck knows they look too rode-hard now for her to assume that things were normal.
Eddie nods. “Just a close call. Is Chris still asleep?”
It’s a Saturday, so tradition would dictate that they let him sleep until he wakes naturally and although he doesn’t sleep in the way a teenager would or his dad would like on some days he’s not the naturally early riser that Buck is.
“He is. We had a quiet night, but stayed up a little later than usual so I’m not sure when he’ll be up. I prepped some pancake batter that’s in the fridge. You’ll just have to cook them up.”
“Thanks Carla. I really appreciate it.”
“Mmhmm. You two take care of each other now. Get some rest.” Carla exits the home, leaving Buck and Eddie to their own devices. Buck waits for Eddie to say something; he’s been invited here but he doesn’t know what for. After a lengthy shift all they usually want to do is crash, but he can’t imagine that Eddie asked him to stay so they could sleep.
“Let’s check in on Chris.” Eddie says softly after a moment. “I just want to see him. Then we can figure out food and everything else.”
Buck nods. He’s still not sure why he’s been asked to be there but he dutifully follows Eddie down the hall anyways, waiting a respectful distance back when he opens the door to Christopher’s room and peeks in. Buck is just able to see the boy’s curls peeking up over the top of his comforter from where he stands, and he’s a little surprised to see Chris move and turn to his dad, bleary-eyed in the dim light from the hallway. He’s normally a pretty solid sleeper.
“Dad? You’re home?”
“Yeah, Buck and I just got here.” Eddie steps into the room. He sits on the edge of Chris’ bed. “Did you have a good night with Carla?”
Chris pushes himself up on his elbows, sitting up. “Yeah, we made--,” He drops off, frowning at Eddie. “You’re hurt.”
“Just some bumps and bruises.” Eddie shakes his head.
Buck watches as Chris reaches up and brushes his fingers across Eddie’s cheek, still frowning. “What happened?”
“A little boy a few years younger than you fell into a hole in the ground, and I had to go down after him to get him out.” Eddie explains, speaking after a moment’s thought. He grabs Chris’ glasses from the bedside table and place them on his son’s face. “But the weather was really bad and our equipment had a few problems so I got stuck for a little while too.”
“You were trapped underground?”
Buck tries to ignore the flashes of lightning and rushing mud in his mind at Chris’ words. Eddie’s not underground anymore. He’s living and breathing, not five feet in front of him. He’s fine.
“For a little while yeah.” Eddie nods. “But I got out.”
“Did the team rescue you?”
Buck shakes his head at that. The team hadn’t done anything. They’d been next to useless. “No, your dad got out all on his own, Bud. He kept swimming and he found a way out.”
Eddie glances back at him, but Buck can’t read the expression on his face to know if he’s misstepped or not. Before he can think too much about it Eddie is looking at Christopher again. “I’m OK now. Both me and the boy got out, safe and sound.”
“But you got hurt.” Chris says. “And the team didn’t help?”
“They were doing everything they could to help me get home to you. I was just faster today.”
Buck’s not sure if Eddie believes that because he hadn’t been there or he’s lying to spare Chris’ feelings. He’s not sure which option makes him feel like a shittier friend.
“So you got stuck underground, and you got hurt, but it’s OK now because you found a way out.”
“Yeah. It’s like we talked about a while back. How I’ll always do everything I can to come back to you.”
Chris looks like he’s thinking things over. “But what if you can’t?”
“Can’t what?”
“Come back to me.”
Oh. Oh shit. More and more Buck feels like he’s intruding on a private father-son moment. He shouldn’t be here for this. Why did Eddie invite him in? Why did Buck have to say yes, to follow and peer in on Chris? This is a family discussion. Buck’s not family.
Eddie sighs, and his hand finds Chris’. “Chris, we both agreed when your mom had her accident that you were getting older and you deserved the truth, right?”
“Yeah.” Chris nods. “We talked about it with Dr. Carl.”
“Right.” Eddie mirrors his son. “Well, the truth is there might be a day when I can’t come back to you. I promise that I’ll always do everything I can so that’s not the case, but sometimes we can’t control these things, and you know that being a firefighter is dangerous sometimes.”
Chris’ eyes don’t flood with tears like Buck expects, like this is something he’s thought about before. “So what happens to me if you don’t come back?”
“Grown-ups like me do a lot of planning, to make sure the things and people we love are taken care of if we can’t come back.” Eddie says after a moment. “And I probably haven’t been as good at that as I should have been, but in the next couple of days I’m going to fix that. I’m gonna go meet with someone, and they’ll help me put everything together so you’ll be taken care of, as close to the way I would take care of you as we can manage. Does that make sense?”
“But who would take care of me?” Chris presses, ignoring his dad’s question.
And Buck expects the answer to be Eddie’s parents, or maybe one of his sisters. That makes the most sense. That he’d lose Eddie, and Chris would go to family and he’d lose him too. One fell swoop. But that’s not the answer that comes out of Eddie’s mouth.
“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. About who cares about you as much as I do, and would do everything they can to keep you safe and loved and give you everything you need, and there was only one person I could think of. So, if there ever comes a day when I can’t come back to you, you’d stay here with Buck.”
It’s an icy punch to the gut. Eddie wants him to take care of Chris? He loves the kid more than anything but Eddie has to know what a bad idea that is; he can barely take care of himself.
OK, Buck knows that’s more than a slight exaggeration. He’s been taking care of himself ever since Maddie left to go to college. But still. Taking care of a kid is significantly different from making sure you get yourself to school or work every day. Buck can’t imagine anyone taking a look at him and thinking that he’s the right person for that kind of job. Not in the long term. Not without Eddie to back him up.
But Buck doesn’t have time to freak out or panic or tell Eddie what a mistake that would be. Chris has a soft look on his face as he reacts to what his dad has said. “Really? I wouldn’t have to go back to Texas?”
“Not unless Buck was moving there.” Eddie shakes his head. “You’d move in with Buck and he’d do everything with you that I do with you now to make sure you’re happy and safe. How does that sound?”
Buck wants to say that it sounds crazy, but Chris is answering first. “I’d want you to come back.” He says slowly. “But if you really couldn’t, then being with Buck sounds good.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.” Eddie leans forward, pressing a kiss to the crown of Chris’ head. “Now, do you have any other questions, or are you ready for stretches and breakfast?”
“You’re really OK?”
“Today, I am 100% OK.” Eddie nods.
“Then breakfast.”
“OK, Buck and I will go to the kitchen and make it while you get ready OK?”
Chris gives his agreement, and a stunned Buck lets Eddie lead him back to the kitchen. Eddie lets his arm go and moves to pull the pancake batter Carla had prepared out of the fridge.
“You OK?” Eddie asks. “I didn’t mean to just spring that on you. I was going to talk to you about it first actually, but then Chris was asking and we have this honesty policy from his therapy…I figured it would help him not worry to know where he’s going if something were to happen to me.”
“And that’s to me?” Buck probes, feeling supremely dumb. It shouldn’t be hard to understand; he heard Eddie say it all in words meant to be for an eight-year-old to get and he’s well into his twenties so it shouldn’t be a problem for him to process but it just…doesn’t compute. Who would trust him with their kid full time?
“Well…yeah.” Eddie shrugs, like the decision is nothing big. As he talks he pulls out a frying pan, and Buck’s not sure why he’s acting like he’s going to make the pancakes when they both know that Buck is going to do the cooking. “I mean, you know things with my parents aren’t great, and that they’d never treat Chris like anything except a porcelain doll, and Abuela or Pepa can’t really take on a kid… Adriana and Sophia would work but it would be uprooting Chris again and if I were gone he’d already be upset and too much change would just make things worse.”
“Yeah, but they’re family.”
Eddie turns around and looks at Buck plainly. “So are you. I told you what you meant to us after the tsunami and I meant it.”
“But…I’m me.” Buck sighs, unable to find better words.
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“And you could ask anyone. I’m babysitter material, not parent material.”
“Buck, when I was down in the well and I realized I was stuck, a lot went through my head.” Eddie starts. “About the army, and Shannon, my parents…Chris. How I’ve been with him and where things are now and what would happen to him if I couldn’t get out. And all I could think was that I wanted him somewhere where he would be safe and loved, and the only person I know who loves that kid the same way that I do is you. The parenting stuff you can learn, and honestly? You have a handle on most of it. You’ve been helping me take care of him since we met.”
“I just don’t--,”
“If you’re really not comfortable you can say no, and I’ll talk to Adri and Sophia about one of them doing it. But honestly Buck, there is no one that I trust with Christopher more than you. I know you’d do right by him.”
And here’s the thing: Buck is weak. In the face of Eddie saying all these good things that he wants to be able to believe? Even though he knows some of it has to be wrong, he’ll believe them. And he wants to make Eddie feel comfortable and happy and Chris too, and apparently this is what will do that right now… “No! I mean yes. I mean…Of course I would take care of Chris if something happened. But…you know I have your back right? That I’m gonna make sure nothing does happen?” Last night notwithstanding. But Buck would have figured something out. He would have.
“I know. This is just an insurance policy.”
“Thanks for coming by so soon, Buck.” Maddie says, handing him a mug of tea. “I couldn’t wait to share this with you--I know how excited you’re going to be.”
They sit on Maddie’s sofa, and Buck takes a sip of the tea; it wouldn’t be his first choice, at least not this fruity blend, but it had been what Maddie had offered and he wanted something so he had said yes. “Well, you drew me in with this surprise business. What’s so exciting that you couldn’t tell me over the phone?”
“Brother/Sister business.” Maddie smiles behind her own mug of tea. “That’s why Howie’s not here. He wanted to be, but I convinced him that this was a you and me thing and that he could go and see Hen or Bobby and tell them.”
“So it’s something that affects both of you…?” Buck probes. He glances at Maddie’s left hand. “I don’t see a ring so it can’t be an engagement. Unless he didn’t get you a ring…?”
“No, we’re not getting married. That’s not gonna be in the cards for a long time.” Maddie shakes her head. She reaches behind her, pulling out a small, glossy sheet of paper. “But we are growing our family.”
Buck takes the sheet of paper, and looks it over. A fuzzy, black and white printout with barely recognizable shapes. He knows what it is though. “Is this…? You’re pregnant?”
Maddie nods, her eyes flooded with tears. “I’m pregnant!”
“That’s amazing!” Buck pulls her into a hug. “Tell me everything. I want all the details. How far along are you? How did you find out? How excited is Chim?”
“I’m just out of the first trimester.” She begins. “We wanted to wait to tell everyone just in case, but we are so excited. Chim has already started making a nursery registry--I think he’s more into it than I am. There might be a pinterest board.”
“Of course there is.” Buck laughs. He wipes away his own happy tears. “So out of the first trimester, that must mean you can find out the gender soon… What are you thinking? What are you hoping for?”
Maddie shakes her head. One hand cups her stomach, although if there is a bump it’s barely pronounced yet. “I want to be surprised. And since Howie can’t keep a secret he has to be surprised too.”
“Gender neutral gifts only. Got it.”
“Honestly though? And I will be totally happy no matter what as long as they’re healthy but I want a little girl. I can just picture a little princess with chunky cheeks and jet black hair…wrapping daddy around her little finger…”
“Oh Chim would definitely spoil a little girl rotten.” Buck agrees. “You’d have to teach him how to say no to her.”
“I also just think a girl could be nice. Different. I saw what raising a boy could be like with you, and I know we can’t just pick and choose how our kid is gonna turn out but I might like something a little…quieter.”
Buck’s stomach twists. He knows what Maddie is saying. He wasn’t an easy kid. So desperate for attention that he was loud and rambunctious and reckless and would do anything he could to get a rush; if it hurt him and someone had to pay attention to him to make sure he was OK, it was all the better. And sometimes that was his parents but more often than not it had been Maddie. At the time he had loved it, that he had a sister so great that she took care of him and taught him all sorts of cool things and gave him all the attention that his parents didn’t. As a kid he hadn’t realized how much he was burdening her and taking her away from having her own life. That was something he recognized later when he had tried talking to his mom about how much he missed Maddie and his mom had pointed out that his sister was probably relieved to be off at school because taking care of him wasn’t her job and because she was such a good person she had spent a lot of time humoring him instead of leaving him alone like she should have.
Buck had realized then that he had been too much for his sister and she had been too polite to say anything.
He realizes now that taking care of him has thrown a shadow over having a kid for her; she doesn’t want to have a boy because the baby might turn out like him.
As if he hadn’t fucked up enough in his life.
“I’m sure no matter if you have a boy or a girl, any kid of yours will be perfect.” He assures. The words turn to ash in his mouth.
Maddie smiles. “That’s what mom and dad said too.”
The knot in his stomach hardens. “You told mom and dad?”
“Of course I did.” She sounds like this should be obvious. “They’re going to be grandparents. They deserve to know. Especially with Howie’s dad in Korea and that relationship being…strained.” That’s a polite way of putting it. “Howie and I agree that we want our child to have relationships with as much of our family as possible.”
And Buck knows that Maddie’s relationship with their parents is different than his. She wasn’t the spare kid who failed at saving the golden child and couldn’t even stay quietly in his room and fade into the background right. She was the second, wanted child. The only girl. The one keeping their secrets for them. They maybe weren’t the most effusive parents with her but she knew they cared. Of course she wants her kid to have a relationship with them.
“Right. Of course.”
“Now, they aren’t thrilled that Howie and I aren’t getting married, so I’m definitely going to need you around to help, you know, deflect some of that tension, when they come to town in a few weeks to meet Howie, but--,”
“Wait. They’re coming here? To LA?”
“I mean, they’re retired so it’s easier for them to come to us than it is for us to go to them.” Maddie shrugs.
“But what does that have to do with me being there?”
Maddie rolls her eyes. “You think they’re going to come to the city where we both live and only see one of us? You’re their son.”
“And I haven’t seen them in nearly ten years. I barely talk to them.”
“So now would be a good time to reconnect.” Maddie says. “You won’t be alone or anything. Howie’ll be there. I’ll be there. They’ll be distracted by baby news. It’s perfect.”
“I don’t really think they want to see me.” Really Buck knows they don’t want to see him, but he’ll sugar coat it for Maddie’s sake. She doesn’t know how bad things really are between them.
“Of course they do! And like I said I’ll be there. It’ll be a Buckley sibling united front. Us against them.”
Buck wants to say that he knows that’s not true. Because if the Buckley siblings were really a united front, he would have heard about Daniel from Maddie, not his mother’s drunken rants supplemented by some digging in the attic. At the end of the day, as much as she’s taken care of him, Maddie has kept that secret, and he can’t help but think that by doing so she’s taking their side. But Buck can’t say that. He doesn’t want to open up that can of worms. Not when Maddie is so happy.
It’s his problem anyways. Not hers.
“Right.” He sighs, wondering if he can somehow maneuver being on shift the entire time that his parents are in town. “Us against them.”
Buck claws and claws at the earth, mud squishing up beneath his fingernails in a cold rush. He’s tired but he knows he has to keep digging. He has to. Eddie is under there. Or Chris is. He can’t remember for sure.
But he knows someone is under there and he has to save them.
And no one else is helping. Bobby and Hen and Chimney and the rest of the 118 are all standing behind him, watching, but no one moves to help. He hears them say that it’s too late. He’s already dead. Nobody could have survived that collapse.
But Buck can’t believe that. He has to keep digging. If he just keeps digging he’ll find them and if they find them they can save them. That’s how it works. That’s the job. They don’t give up.
So he claws and digs and for every handful of mud that he moves it seems like another two spawn in its place. He can’t make any progress, but he has to because if he doesn’t make progress they won’t find them and they’ll die. He can’t let them die.
Hands wrap around his shoulders and try to pull him back. Buck falls back on his heels. He tries to throw himself forward again, back to digging, but the arms are too strong.
“No, I have to dig them out!” He protests, sobbing. “I have to help them!”
“There’s no one to find.”
“We can still save them! I can still save them!”
“They’re gone, Buck. They’re dead.”
“No, no. I have to help them!”
With a bone-jarring thud, Buck crashes to the floor and jolts awake. A thin sheen of sweat coats his skin, causing his clothes to cling to him in all the wrong places. For a moment he can’t breathe, but then he realizes he’s on the floor next to his couch with a blanket tangled around his legs and that the well incident has been over for days. He hadn’t saved Eddie but Eddie had saved himself.
He was alive and Chris was alive and that was what mattered.
Buck gives himself a moment to catch his breath before he kicks off the blanket and hauls himself back onto the couch. A glance at the clock by the TV tells him the time. 4:15. A bad time for an afternoon nap anyways. It’s a good thing the nightmare woke him up. He’d never have a chance of falling asleep that night if he had stayed asleep on the couch.
He would have preferred waking up without the nightmare and the subsequent mental fog but…beggars can’t be choosers.
The echoes of the well disaster linger in his mind. He knows in the dream his brain was twisting things again; people had tried to stop him from digging but they hadn’t been so cruel as to tell him that there was no hope or that Eddie was dead, and ultimately they’d been mounting a rescue mission of sorts when Eddie had shown up, having rescued himself. But the knowledge of reality doesn’t stand a chance against the power of his brain.
Slow.
Weak.
Useless.
He hadn’t been good enough that night. Eddie had been on his own because Buck hadn’t been quick enough on his feet or strong enough to fight against the others. Eddie had almost died.
And somehow what had happened had still convinced Eddie that Buck was the best choice for a just-in-case scenario. He wanted Buck to take care of Chris if he couldn’t. In what universe did that make sense? Oh, I almost died because of you, let me give you the most precious thing in the world to me.
And OK. Buck hadn’t made the well collapse, and he wasn’t exactly the reason Eddie was down there in the first place. But he hadn’t done anything to help either. Eddie had been on his own.
But Eddie was still going to meet with his lawyer and draw up paperwork that would legally tie him and Chris together. Buck couldn’t understand that. He heard all of Eddie’s explanations and it’s not that he doesn’t trust that that’s what his best friend believes, he just…doesn’t understand how that’s what Eddie sees when he looks at him.
Buck loves Chris and would do anything for him but he’s not parent material. He’s not strong, or selfless, or smart or any of the things a parent needs to be. He’s just…Buck.
Stupid, exhausting, needy, selfish, can’t even dig a hole quick enough to get someone out, Buck.
How could anyone look at him and think he’s anything but a disaster?
He’s the one people send into risky situations because he can be a loss without affecting someone else, not the one people protect.
It should have been him down in the well, not Eddie. Eddie should have been safe on the surface, two minute conversation with the kid or not. Losing Eddie would have been an actual loss, for Chris and the rest of his family. Losing Buck would just be…necessary collateral damage.
An acceptable loss.
Buck knows he shouldn’t think like that. That some people would care. Maddie, Eddie, and Chris, even Hen and Chim in their own way. But at the end of the day he knows they could move on and that it wouldn’t be some great hardship because he’s not the kind of person that has that kind of positive impact.
He’s a drain on people. A leech. And he tries to counteract that by saving them and being happy so they don’t have to worry about him but he’s not always the best at that. He gets too caught up in his own head and his own problems and forgets that other people are dealing with things too and that their things are probably bigger and more serious than his and he needs to just forget about himself and help them.
That’s what a good person would do.
And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe he’s somehow tricked Eddie into thinking he’s a good person and everyone else has figured out the truth and that’s why they’re keeping their distance. Maybe it’s only a matter of time until Eddie figures out who the real Evan Buckley is. Maybe when he does he’ll leave too.
That’s what people do.
Chapter Text
“Wait, we’re actually going to meet the mysterious Buckley parents?” Hen asks. After everyone had thoroughly celebrated the pregnancy announcement, Chim had anxiously asked for advice on meeting the in-laws so-to-speak. So far people are more intrigued by the fact that Buck and Maddie have parents than they are interested in giving advice. “Meet them? When they didn’t show up when either of their kids were in the hospital I thought they were just…non-existent.”
Buck winces. “Yeah, they don’t really do hospitals.”
“How is that something you opt out of?” Chim frowns. “Are they like…anti-doctor?”
“No, they love modern medicine. They just refuse to set foot in hospitals unless there is absolutely no choice.” Buck says; it’s hard to explain without making them sound uncaring, so most of the time he just doesn’t bother trying to explain. People usually catch on pretty quick that his parents aren’t a good topic choice for discussion; the 118 had never touched the subject before, even when he was in the hospital, at least not in front of him, but he supposes that with the joyful news of a baby coming and the impending arrival of the senior Buckleys the moratorium on the subject was bound to be lifted.
Hen doesn’t look impressed. “And a firetruck landing on your leg or Maddie getting stabbed didn’t qualify?”
“Once we were old enough the only things that qualified were if they were the ones who needed treatment.”
No one looks particularly happy at his words which would maybe warm Buck’s heart if he weren’t having to talk about his parents. It is, after all, a sign that they still care about him on some level if they’re offended on his behalf. But Buck is more focused on how to explain Margaret and Phillip Buckley to outsiders, especially an outsider that would have to get along with them on some level than he is on the others’ reactions to what he’s said.
Bobby shakes his head. “Some people aren’t meant to be parents.”
“Yeah. I mean that’s basically it.” Buck shrugs. “Maddie always likes to say that they aren’t bad people, they’re just not great parents. They definitely weren’t…they didn’t really want to have as many kids as they did.” There. That’s close enough to the truth that he doesn’t feel like he’ll get called out for lying, without hinting anything about Daniel. The last thing he needs is for the knowledge of his dead older brother to get out, especially when as far as everyone else is concerned, he doesn’t know about him.
“So they just suck?” Chim probes. “I don’t have to worry about their visit bringing up any long-repressed traumas or anything?”
Buck doesn’t even have to consider his answer. “No, Maddie’ll be fine with them here.”
This seems to ease some of Chim’s concerns, although he still seems worried about the prospect of meeting the parents. Buck does his best to answer his questions but there’s only so many ways you can say that a couple is a pair of WASPs from Pennsylvania and are exactly as bland and stuck-up as that implies. Eventually Chim seems to realize that Buck is not going to be a fountain of information and he and Hen go to do some of the chores they’ve been neglecting on the ambulance, while Bobby moves to his office to take a phone call.
After a moment, Eddie nudges at Buck’s arm from his place next to him on the sofa. “I couldn’t help but notice you only said that Maddie would be fine.”
“Huh?”
“When Chim asked if their visit was gonna be bad, you only said that Maddie would be OK.” Eddie clarifies. “No mention of you.”
Oh. Buck is almost taken aback that Eddie is asking after him; people are usually satisfied when he gives them the runaround on his parents. “ Well, Chim was really asking about Maddie, so…”
“Yeah, but they’re your parents too.” Eddie points out. “I’m guessing you’ll have to see them.”
Buck sighs. “At some point. I haven’t seen them in a long time but Maddie is determined that I help buffer the Chim situation so…”
“How long is long?”
Buck scratches behind his ear. This is always where people get awkward. “About ten years.”
Eddie lets out a low whistle; Buck knows he has trouble with his own parents, but that there’s love there beneath it all. He probably can’t imagine not seeing family over such a length of time. “That’s…they don’t reach out to you?”
And Buck is definitely not getting into that right now. “Not often.” He keeps things vague. “Like I said, they didn’t want as many kids as they had and…I was the latecomer.”
“Well that’s bullshit.”
“Eds…”
“No, it is. There are multiple ways to not have a kid if you really don’t want another one. You don’t get to keep them and then treat them like shit because they don’t fit with your plans.”
“I never said they treated me like shit.”
“It’s implied by ten years of no contact, Buck.”
That’s fair. But Buck really doesn’t want to be getting into this. Even if Eddie is getting angry on his behalf. His relationship with his parents is something Buck likes to keep behind a closed door in his head whenever possible; if he doesn’t think about it, it’s not a problem. “Look, they’re not great people, but Maddie has a decent relationship with them that I don’t want to mess up. If that means I have to sit through an awkward dinner or two….”
“You’re nearly 28. You don’t have to do anything.”
“Well, I’m gonna do this.”
“All right, if your sandwich order isn’t in to me in twenty minutes you will be left to your own devices with the empty cupboards.” Bobby announces over the radio as the trucks pull back into the station bay. “If the afternoon goes anything like this morning we won’t have time for a grocery run.”
The crew all give their assent as they park, and they all exit their vehicles, though they quickly come to a stop when they notice the man in uniform waiting at the foot of the staircase.
“Chief Alonzo!” Bobby greets, a hop in his step as he jogs forward from the ladder truck. “Were we expecting you?”
“Not unless you have ESP, Captain Nash.” Alonzo shakes his hand. “I just had some news for one of your firefighters and I was in the neighborhood for some meetings so I thought I would deliver it in person.”
The crew, all standing close to attention in the face of their boss’ boss, look around at each other. Nobody fesses up to having done something to warrant the Chief’s attention. For a brief moment of panic, Buck thinks that something has come from his anonymous complaint about Dr. Wells and this is the moment of reckoning where he gets pulled out for not actually passing his psych eval or--even worse--fired for smearing her name, but just as quickly he remembers that that was why he had chosen the method he did; everyone swears that the anonymous whistle blowing app is truly anonymous. But still, when Chief Alonso turns his attention in his direction, Buck’s heart skips a beat or two.
“Firefighter Buckley.” Alonzo greets. He has a smile on his face, and Buck hopes that means his fears are definitely unfounded. Surely the Chief would be frowning if he were pulling him from duty or firing him. “It’s good to see you again.”
“It’s…nice to see you too.” Buck tries, and fails, to hide his confusion as the Chief approaches him. When he holds a hand out to shake, Buck does so. “Although I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say I’m not sure why we’re seeing you.”
“Well…that would be because of you and your actions.”
“My actions?” Buck frowns.
From the crowd of firefighters he hears someone mutter, “What did Buck do now?”
Chief Alonzo stands a little straighter, and he looks a little more formal. “LAFD has been conducting an inquest into the Tsunami and department response, to make sure that we made the best use of our resources given the unprecedented nature of the emergency and to better inform our procedures for the future. And I know I mentioned this when we were reinstating you, but there was a common thread in several of the accounts that we heard. And that was you.
“We understand that you were at the pier when the tsunami hit, and that in the aftermath, you rescued and secured the safety of dozens of survivors using makeshift equipment and at great risk to your own safety.”
Buck feels the heat rise to his cheeks. “Chief, I told you, that was just a right place at the right time kind of thing. Nothing special.”
“On the contrary, Firefighter Buckley.” Chief Alonzo says. “From the accounts we were given, it was someone who was already in danger, doing everything they could to prevent any more people from losing their lives. You and your young charge had found safety on the roof of the truck from the 136 and you left that to go back into the water to rescue others who were in precarious positions of their own. Several times over. You did this not only while you were off duty, but before you had even received news that you would be reinstated to the department. You were not an official LAFD representative at the time that you made those rescues, and were under no obligation to do so.
“It is our belief that your actions on the day of the tsunami went above and beyond the call of duty, and as such we are planning to award you with the Medal of Valor.”
There’s a brief moment of awkward silence, before Eddie starts a round of applause; the rest of the crew joins him and for a moment, Buck is left standing there awkwardly while people are celebrating him. If he could tunnel beneath the floor and disappear he would. He hadn’t done anything special, really, he hadn’t. He just…couldn’t stand by when he had the ability to help. That’s what being a first responder means. He shouldn’t be awarded for that, right?
“We still need to schedule the formal ceremony,” Alonzo continues once the applause dies down, “so you’ll have plenty of time to contact your family and make arrangements for any celebrations. I just wanted to come and tell you in person, since so rarely do I get to make announcements that don’t involve copious amounts of paperwork.”
Buck fumbles his way through thanking the Chief despite thinking he doesn’t deserve an award, and then the chief makes his leave, prompting the rest of the 118 to clap him on the shoulders and congratulate him before going about their business in the house. Eventually he’s left with just Eddie, Hen, Chim, and Bobby and while Buck is just trying to figure out how to make the day go back to a normal state of affairs where he will not be honored by the department for doing something as basic as his job, whether or not he had the job at the time, he’s also aware that his friends are talking about him.
“I don’t get it. You’re telling me you were actually at the pier that day?” Chim asks, looking at Buck in disbelief.
Eddie furrows his brow. “You know he was. He and Chris met us at the field hospital. The 178 rescued them from the flooding and brought them to us.”
Hen and Chimney share a look, looking a little guilty. “We thought they just…caught a ride.” Chim admits. “We didn’t think they were actually in the tsunami.”
“They were soaked and looked like they went through hell.” Eddie says, looking less confused and more frustrated. “Chris told the whole story in the back of the truck on the way back to the station. Did you think he was lying?”
“More like…exaggerating.” Hen admits. “We thought maybe they were on the edges and it just…looked bigger from Chris’ perspective. Kids think things are bigger than they are all the time.”
And then Eddie’s frustration looks a lot like anger, which Buck doesn’t quite understand. It seems like a misunderstanding to him. “So you think he was making things up and that Buck just…what? Went along with it for the glory?”
“It just seemed so unlikely--,”
“Glory that you definitely weren’t giving him, by the way.” Eddie points out, cutting Chimney off. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that none of you even asked if he was OK. You didn’t greet him at all.”
“It did make the national news a couple days later.” Bobby says, a contrite expression crossing his face. “We should have done more to reach out and make sure things were OK.”
“No, it’s fine.” Buck shakes his head. This is not what he wants. Eddie shouldn’t be spoiling for a fight, and he doesn’t really want the others feeling guilty or whatever. Of course it stings that they didn’t really believe what Chris had said, and that they thought little enough of him that he would go along with what they thought were a child’s exaggerations just for some attention; he had learned by the time he was five that lying for attention never got you what you wanted. But if he holds this against them, he has to hold a bunch of other things against them too and he doesn’t want to do that. He wants things to be happy and normal. “We were all exhausted that day and you guys went through just as much as me and Chris did.”
Eddie side-eyes him. “We really didn’t.”
“It’s fine.” Buck repeats, a little firmer this time. “Let’s just…get back to our day. If we’re not quick Bobby’s sandwich deadline is gonna pass for all of us.”
“Who’re you?” The man in the hospital bed barks when Buck raps his knuckles against the door frame.
Buck had checked in with his favorite nurse from when he had been in the hospital for the reconstructive surgeries post truck-crushing, Erin, who had sworn up and down that since she hadn’t told him the patient’s name what she was doing was technically, only minorly illegal, promised not to turn her in for said rule-bending, and headed down the hall to the ornery patient’s room. He wasn’t totally sure that he was the best person to try and connect with an old firefighter on the brink of death, but he trusted Erin and was more than willing to try and do her a favor.
“Evan Buckley, sir.” He greets with all the respect he can muster. Erin hasn’t told him a lot, but he knows this is a decorated LAFD veteran, and deserves to be treated as such. “Most people just call me Buck.”
The man eyes him with distrust. “You don’t work here.”
“No, I, uh, I’m just visiting.”
“You visit hospitals in your free time?”
Buck’s first instinct is to say that he does when his favorite nurse asks him to, but that’s a little close to outing her as the one who sent him on this adventure and he doesn’t want to do that, so he fumbles his answer for a moment and shrugs weakly. “It’s complicated…?”
The man shakes his head. “It’s a good thing you’re a firefighter and not a cop. You’ve got no poker face kid.”
Buck frowns. He’d changed out of his uniform before leaving the station. “How did you know I’m a firefighter?”
The man coughs. “I’m dying, not stupid. I must’ve seen you in the news three or four times over the past couple of years. You’re the kid who got crushed under the ladder truck, and just saved all those people when the tsunami hit.”
Right. The news.
Buck steps further into the room even though the patient isn’t inviting him; he’s also not yelling at him to get out so it feels like a fair gamble. “Yeah, that’s me. Some of the worst best luck in the world.”
“Yeah, you were born under a sign or something, kid.” He coughs again. “So what are you really doing here?”
“Like I said, visiting.”
“And LAFD’s newest golden boy just happened upon my room, is that what you’re saying?”
“You’re awfully suspicious for someone who just got someone to talk to.” Buck deflects. “Maybe you should just enjoy the company.”
“Kid, when you’re as old as I am, the circle from which you get your company shrinks. And it doesn’t get bigger unless someone wants something. So what do you want?”
Buck sighs. He didn’t really think this would be this difficult. “Maybe I just want to get to know the firefighters who came before me.”
“I don’t have any wisdom for you.”
“DIdn’t say I was looking for wisdom.” Buck looks at the man, tilting his head slightly. “I would like a name though. I can’t keep calling you ‘Crotchety Old Guy’ in my head.”
The man stares, blinks, and eventually huffs. “You can call me Red.”
“Red, huh?” Buck ambles into the room, hooking the chair near the bed with his ankle and pulling it close so he can sit. He decides a different approach is needed, and that if he can’t catch Red with honey, he might as well try matching snark for snark. “That a nickname with a story or were you just a redhead? You know…before time took over?”
Red doesn’t look amused or impressed or like he’s warming up to Buck in the slightest. “You always this friendly to the complete strangers you barge in on in the hospital?”
“Are you always so welcoming?” Buck counters.
“My social skills are out of practice.” Red admits. “What’s your excuse?”
“Me? I’m just a product of my generation.”
“Goddamn millennials.” Red grumbles, not sounding all that put out. “So which bleeding heart nurse got you in here?”
Buck knows he doesn’t keep the surprise off of his face. “What--how--I mean…”
“I told you, kid. Dying. Not stupid. Now who was it?”
Buck thinks about it. Weighs the pros and cons of telling the truth in order to build a rapport and wonders if a dying firefighter is the type to sue over HIPPAA violations. Ultimately, he’d rather keep the conversation moving forward; Red may be grumpy but he’s been interesting so far. Buck is sure if he could get him talking he’d have some great stories. “Erin.” He sighs. “She was my nurse after the truck. Thought we might get along.”
“Jeez. You tell one busybody that all your friends are dead and she starts playing matchmaker.”
“All your friends are…”
“Dead.” Red repeats. “Don’t strain yourself, kid. You said it yourself. I’m old. It happens at my age.”
“And your family?”
Red coughs and shrugs. “Never got married. Never had kids. Only child.”
Ouch. Buck can’t understand how someone can seem so…nonchalant about having no one in their life. He can’t imagine having no one. Well…he can, because that’s how he ended up in the SEALs but he had ended up in the SEALs because being alone had bothered him. With no one waiting around for him, signing up for military service that pushed you to and beyond your limits to help your country just seemed like a reasonable next step. If he had died, his death wouldn’t have hurt anyone and it would have been for a worthy cause.
Red, it seems, had just carried on living.
“I can tell it bothers you but really, you ought to get used to the idea.” Red says. “A young hotshot firefighter like you, I’m guessing the job is your life, right?” He doesn’t wait for Buck to answer. “That’s all well and good while you’re young, but before you know it you'll be thirty-five, then forty and you still won’t have anything but the job in your life. Your only friends will be your crew, but they’ll all have their own lives to go back to at the end of the day, and you’ll have some fond memories of a woman who could have been the one, but you covered shifts instead of meeting her for dates and she moved on to someone who could give her the attention she deserved. You’ll work until you can’t do the job anymore and then all you’ll be left with is reliving the glory days at badge and ladder bars until your lungs or your heart crap out on you ‘cause you lived too hard when you were young.”
Buck leans back in his seat, taking the metaphorical gut-punch of Red’s speech in. He’d like to think things are different for him, compared to what the man is describing, but how different are they really? All the people in his life do have friends and family outside of the job, and outside of him. The people he dates don’t last. Buck works and he hangs with Eddie and Chris and sometimes Maddie and…that’s it. He loves it, but it’s not the makings of some big life. It’s barely even the makings of a small one. And it could easily disappear. He knows that.
But he didn’t come here to get depressed about his life, or to let Red get depressed about his. “Glory days, huh? I bet you’ve got a few stories.”
“More than you can dream of, kid.”
From there the conversation shifts, and Buck listens with rapt attention as Red goes through the stories of how he became a firefighter, and highlights from wild rescues over the years. The pair talks throughout the morning, pausing only when nurses pop in to check on Red or give him medication. It’s a little after lunch time, the pair having eaten a mediocre hospital meal together while they chatted, that one such nurse comes in, with some medication to inject directly into his IV. Red tries to put her off from doing it, but she stands firm, giving him the medication.
“Well, kid, it’s been better than I thought it was going to be, but this shit always knocks me on my ass for a few hours so I won’t be much company. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than spend all day with me anyways.”
“I’ll let you get your rest then.” Buck says. “But I’d actually really enjoy coming back. If that’s OK with you.”
“I can’t stop you.”
“It was a good service.” Eddie says, pulling at the tie of his dress uniform to remove it as they reach Buck’s jeep. “For having to pull it all together yourself at the last minute, you really honored him, Buck.”
Buck shakes his head. “The Honor Guard did most of it. I just…tried to get people to come.” Which hadn’t exactly been successful. A funeral with an Honor Guard was an impressive ceremony, but it loses some of its luster when there aren’t any guests there to appreciate it. And the only signatures in the guest book were his and Eddie’s. No one else had come, from the 118 or anywhere else in the department.
“You’re the one who got him the Honor Guard ceremony.” Eddie claps a hand on Buck’s shoulder. “That’s no small feat. Especially on short notice. You gave Red the send-off he had earned.”
“Just not with the audience.”
“That’s not on you, man. You said it yourself, he didn’t have anyone in his life.”
Buck leans against his jeep, sighing. “I really thought some of the others would respect his story and want to honor him, you know? He kept saying that he gave everything to the job and that at the end of the day it never gave him anything back and I wanted to prove him wrong, but I couldn’t. Because he was right. The job’s just a job. The people are just coworkers.”
Eddie frowns at him. “I know you don’t really believe that.”
“Don’t I?” Before, Buck would have said of course not. That the job meant something important because they were saving lives and that the right people could become family. And maybe he still felt that way about the work, but if the past several months have proven anything it’s that he isn’t nearly as close to his coworkers as he thought he was. The 118 isn’t a family and they don’t show up just because it might be a good thing to do. Not if it will interrupt their lives.
“Buck, if people didn’t show up today it’s because they didn’t understand the significance of Red’s service, or they had prior commitments. It’s not a reflection of their relationship with you.”
“You don’t think the crowd would have looked a little different if it had been Hen asking people to show up?” Buck challenges. “Or you?”
“I think you look at someone like Red who got dealt a shit hand and it’s hard to not put yourself in his shoes and worry that that’s what things are going to look like for you.” Eddie takes the space next to Buck leaning against the jeep; he nudges his shoulder against his. “But his life is not yours. You’ve got people in your corner that care and aren’t going anywhere. Your sister, me, Christopher…You’re not alone. And you’re not gonna be alone.”
“I just…” Buck trails off and sighs. “A year ago I would have agreed with you. Everything was great and everyone was so close, but now… Things have changed so much. And I know they’re gonna keep changing.”
“That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
“It doesn’t have to be good either.”
“Look. Buck. I know you think the universe sends you messages and hints or clues as to what you should do and stuff like that but I can promise you, that even if that were a thing, the lesson here is not that your life is going to suck no matter what you do. You have people, relationships, in your life that Red didn’t have, and you have the benefit of having heard his story. You know what not to do. You can build relationships where he lost his.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Maybe you’re just…making it sound complicated.” Eddie says. "I know I've told you before that you're family. I mean that. You're not getting rid of me and Chris. So that's one thing you can count on. And you're a pretty charming guy. I'm sure the rest will...fall into place."
Chapter 8
Notes:
Tags for this fic have been updated again to reflect thoughts that could be considered suicidal. Please read with caution.
Also, I realized I haven't been thanking folks for reading, giving kudos, and commenting, which I have definitely been meaning to do. This is my first fic in a while and it really helps me to know that people are reading and enjoying it.
Chapter Text
Buck watches as Eddie pulls out several containers of leftovers from the fridge placing them on the kitchen counter. He opens the containers and pulls some plates down from the cupboard. Chris is in his room, doing some reading for his history class and it’s getting close to lunch time so the two adults had left their living room lounging to get something ready. But since it’s just reheating a bunch of different leftovers into a buffet, Buck’s not sure how much help he’s going to be. Not that Eddie had actually asked for help but it’s instinctual; if Buck is at someone else’s home for a meal, he helps them get it ready or helps with cleanup. Preferably both.
But Eddie starts making plates up and prepping them for the microwave and he doesn’t ask Buck to do anything and the words to ask what he needs are stuck in Buck’s throat.
That’s been happening a lot lately.
In the few weeks since Red’s funeral Buck has found himself second guessing, well…everything. He’s not completely stupid and he knows he’s lucky to have the relationships that he does; the last thing he wants to do is go full Buck on something and mess them up, or the job. So he thinks before he speaks, going through two or three options before he says anything, if he speaks at all, which, admittedly, isn’t the best system. He finds himself watching people’s reactions to his words with as much precision as he can manage and the smallest change in expression is enough to leave him second guessing himself and starting to spiral inwardly. A part of him recognizes the anxiety for what it is and knows it’s making him withdraw, which is the opposite of what he really wants, but he reasons that if he can’t control his brain, withdrawing and still having friendships at all is better than messing them up and being alone.
He just doesn’t want to end up alone.
Buck pinches at his wrist with his fingernails, trying to stop the internal debate about whether or not it’s rude to ask Eddie if he wants help and look like he’s assuming Eddie can’t even handle reheating leftovers or more rude to just stand there and do nothing. The sting draws him back into the room, where he sees Eddie placing one of the plates into the microwave. Buck clears his throat, and feels his cheeks flush even before he speaks. “Need help with anything?”
“I think I’ve got the food under control.” Eddie, mercifully, doesn’t sound annoyed or put upon or anything else and Buck lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “We’ve got some lemonade mix that I’ve been meaning to use up though if you want to grab a pitcher and put that together.”
A task, thank god. “Sure.” Buck goes to the cabinet and finds a suitable pitcher. “Once Chris is done with his homework what’s on the agenda?” Buck can do this. He can make small talk with Eddie while they work. It’s even a little bit easier since some of his brain has to focus on the task at hand.
“You know how he’s been obsessing over the Ninja Turtles?” Eddie asks.
“Yeah.” It’s kind of hard to miss. Chris' cartoon of choice has been the animated turtles for months now. He’s been saving up his allowance for a particular lego set of their underground sewer lair for a while now too.
“Since the weather’s not that nice out I thought we could do a movie marathon of the live action movies from when we were kids.”
“Live action…ninja turtles?” Buck furrows his brow as he pulls down the lemonade mix. “I feel like even if I missed the movie I would have heard about them training turtles to do karate.”
Eddie chuckles. “No, the turtles are puppets….or guys in suits…? It had something to do with Jim Henson.”
“Oh. Sounds…interesting.” Buck is all for practical effects over CGI but guys in suits and puppets just sound a little corny. “Chris’ll love that.”
“Yeah, I figure we’ll go to the store and load up on snacks and maybe some stuff for you to make those mini pizza pocket things he likes?”
“Of course! We can definitely make those.” Buck has his mouth open to say more, but his phone buzzes in his pocket, cutting his thought off. He pulls it out and reads the display. LAFD Headquarters. “Why is headquarters calling me on a Saturday?”
Eddie just shrugs. “Maybe they finally have a date for your ceremony.”
Buck kind of doubts they would call about that, but he doesn’t know what else it could be. There haven’t been any major calls or incidents at work lately, and even if there had been, he’s been keeping his head down, just doing the job and following orders. Taking a deep breath, he swipes to answer the call.
“Firefighter Buckley.”
“Firefighter Buckley, this is Captain Max Hinckley with LAFD Internal Affairs.”
Buck’s breath catches in his chest. This is definitely not just about his ceremony. He moves quickly to leave Eddie and the kitchen behind and ducks into the living room. Whatever this is, he doesn’t want Eddie overhearing it.
“I’m sorry to be bothering you on your day off, but the investigation I’m working on is fairly sensitive and I didn’t want to be bringing it up around your coworkers, if it could be helped.”
Not good. Not good. Not good.
Buck starts to pace in front of the couch. “What, uh, what can I help you with, Captain?”
“First I want to assure you that you are not under investigation or in any trouble. I’m calling you as a potential witness.”
Buck honestly doesn’t know if that’s better or worse. He can’t think of any incidents on the job that would have gotten the attention of internal affairs; there’s only so many things this could be about. “Ohhhkay.” He draws out, knowing the uncertainty is evident in his voice. “Witness to…witness to what?”
“Department records indicate that prior to your return to duty two months ago you underwent a psych eval with Dr. Hannah Wells.” Buck freezes. “We’re currently investigating Dr. Wells and were wondering if anything unusual or inappropriate happened when you met with her.”
Logically, Buck knows he’s breathing. If he wasn’t breathing he’d probably have fallen to the floor or something and he’s still standing so he must be breathing. He just feels frozen. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He reported her anonymously so he didn’t have to do this. It had never occurred to him that they’d reach out to him anyways because he had an on-record session with her. That he’d still have to say something.
Captain Hinckley speaks again, interrupting Buck’s panicked silence. “I do want to assure you that if something did happen, you would not be in any trouble and your status as an active firefighter would not be put into question.”
And just like that, Buck realizes that he knows. Hinckley knows. Whether or not he realizes that Buck put in the initial report, Hinckley has already put the pieces together and he knows. Buck still can’t even think about it and this total stranger knows. And expects him to talk about it.
And if Buck doesn’t talk about it, it could happen to someone else.
He can’t breathe, but he has to talk about it.
Fuck.
“I, uh…yeah.” Buck nearly chokes on the words, but he gets them out. “Something happened.”
“This isn’t a formal statement so you don’t need to give me all the details at this time, but could you elaborate on that a little?”
The unspoken words there being that he would have to give all the details eventually. Buck punches at his thigh, trying to keep himself focused. It only somewhat works. “She…Dr. Wells, that is…came on to me.” Another punch. “A-and she…made it clear that my return to work was…”
“Dependent on your response?” Hinckley prompts after a long moment where Buck can’t find the words.
“Yeah.”
Hinckley sighs. “OK. We’re gonna need you to come in for an interview and a formal statement. What’s your shift schedule like this coming week?”
Shift schedules Buck can deal with. He just has to pretend that it’s not about this. “I’m on 24s this week. Tomorrow, Tuesday, and Thursday.”
“Would you be willing to come in after your shift on Monday? Say at 9:30?”
24 hour shifts always run from eight to eight, so Hinckley is picking a good time, but it takes Buck several beats to process that. His mind is much more focused on the fact that he has to talk and people are going to know. There’s nothing anonymous about a formal statement with internal affairs. But he can’t not do it. “Yeah.” Buck says, falling back onto the couch. “Monday at 9:30.”
“Thank you Mr. Buckley. We’ll see you then. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.”
Buck lowers his phone at the dismissal. His mind races and his heart feels like it’s pounding in his throat. He’s spent so long doing his best to ignore…all of this and pretending that as long as it was just vague flashes in his nightmares that nothing really happened. But that’s not an option now. He has to do the right thing and give a statement or she could do this to other people. To his teammates.
How is he supposed to do that?
How is he, Evan Buckley, soon-to-be Medal of Valor recipient supposed to own up to the fact that Dr. Wells got the best of him? That she…assaulted him?
No one is going to believe that.
He barely believes it. And he was there.
And even if everyone does believe that they had sex, Buck knows his reputation. Knows that it goes beyond the 118. No one is going to look at him and see a victim. Would this even be worth it?
Selfish, attention-seeking, whore.
Buck wants to do the right thing and keep other people safe but if he’s the one telling the story who is going to care? Wouldn’t that just make the case worse?
Maybe if he just…removed himself from the equation that would be better.
Yeah, that could be good, Buck thinks. It would be easier on everyone else too. Less of his shit for them to deal with. It’s not like he belongs anyways.
Only…
Weak.
Useless.
Good for nothing.
He has to fix the problem. And only part of the problem is him. He can control who he’s a problem for, really he can, but he can’t control who Dr. Wells hurts unless he talks. He has to talk.
Shit, he has to talk.
“Buck?” A hand rests on Buck’s knee and Buck jumps, startled out of his thoughts. As he comes back into himself he sees Eddie crouching in front of him, a concerned frown on his face. “Sorry, I just…I said your name a couple times and you weren’t answering.”
“Sorry.” Buck apologizes. He shakes his head to try and clear his thoughts but it doesn’t work. He has to talk.
“I take it that the call wasn’t about your medal ceremony?” Eddie prompts, he draws his hand back and eases himself up and onto the couch next to Buck.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“What was it then?”
Buck taps his phone against his knee, up and down, as fast as he can manage. “Internal Affairs. They’re… they’re investigating the doc that did my psych eval to come back.” Even saying that much, his stomach lurches and clenches. But he has to talk.
“What for?”
Buck doesn’t answer.
“Buck, did something happen?”
Buck closes his eyes, breathes, opens them up again. He has to look away from Eddie’s gaze. “It’s nothing. I’ll go give a statement on Monday and it’ll be done with.”
Liar.
Useless, filthy, liar.
“People don’t usually give statements about nothing.”
The words get caught in Buck’s mouth; a part of him wants to talk, to not have this burden sitting on his shoulders for him alone to carry, to practice saying something before he has to give an actual formal statement, but he doesn’t want to do this to Eddie. To be the friend with problems again. And he doesn’t want Eddie to know and look at him differently. Because people certainly will. How could they not?
“Buck…Evan. Talk to me.”
“I had seen her once before.” Buck begins, licking at his lips. His mouth is so dry. “Back in my probie year, after my first big loss. Dr. Wells…she wanted this appointment to go the same way. She…she said if I didn’t sleep with her she wouldn’t clear me for duty.”
“Shit.”
Buck ignores Eddie’s reaction, staring resolutely at his hands in his lap. “And I’m working now, so you can guess what I did.”
It’s impossible to miss Eddie’s frown, or the anger that he’s trying to smother. “No, you didn’t do anything. She…she… Buck you know this wasn’t OK, right? She took advantage of you. She ra--,”
“No.” Buck cuts Eddie off. “No, it wasn’t like that.”
“Buck--,”
“I’d slept with her before.” Buck protests.
“When? At your first appointment?” Eddie challenges. “Did you come onto her?”
“Well…no, but--,”
“But nothing, Buck. She was your doctor. Even if you had come onto her, it’s her job to stay professional. Not sleep with you. Especially during a session.”
Buck hears what Eddie is saying. He does. It’s nothing he hasn’t thought before, in the dark recesses of his mind when he’s thinking at his most rational, but he doesn’t linger on those thoughts. Doesn’t let himself. If he thinks it, it’s reality and it can’t be. It just can’t be. Tears spring to his eyes, but he does his best to swallow them back. “No. No. I get that it’s messed up and she wasn’t right, but it’s not like I was an unwilling participant.”
“Buck, if you’re in therapy, you’re not in a position to be willing. Especially when your therapist controls whether or not you get to work. This…doctor,” Eddie practically spits out the word, “abused her power over you.”
“That’s not what anyone else is gonna see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m me, Eddie. Everyone knows what I used to be like. And no one’s gonna believe that I didn’t want it, or that I couldn’t have said no.”
“I do.” Eddie rests a hand on top of Buck’s. “I believe you.”
Buck sniffs, but it turns into a choked sob.
“Dad, I’m hungry. Is it time for lunch?” Buck and Eddie turn towards the hall that Chris is walking down. He stops at the entryway to the living room, and frowns when he sees them. “What’s wrong?”
Buck turns away just as quickly and hurries to wipe his face, leaving Eddie to answer his son.
“Someone hurt Buck a little while ago.” Eddie says after a moment. He removes his hand from Buck’s and stands, turning towards Christopher. “And he was just being really brave and telling me about it.”
“Are you OK now, Buck?” Chris asks.
Buck doesn’t have a good answer to that, but he knows what he wants everyone to think and that the truth won’t do any good at stopping this conversation or with helping Chris understand the situation. “Yeah.” He clears his throat and wipes his face one more time before turning in his seat. “Yeah, buddy. A little time with my Superman and his dad is all I needed.”
“Then we’d better spend more time with you, right dad?”
“Definitely. And we can start with lunch. Go wash up.” Eddie urges. “Food’ll be ready in a couple minutes.”
Chris agrees, turns and heads down the hall and he’s barely gone before Eddie is turning back to Buck. “Sorry.” He apologizes. “Hazards of confiding in the guy with a kid.”
“It’s fine.” Buck shakes his head. “There’s not much else to say anyways.”
Eddie doesn’t look like he believes him, but doesn’t say anything to challenge him either. “Well, when did you say you were going in to give your statement?”
“Monday after shift. Why?”
“Want a friendly face?”
“Buck! Do you have a minute?”
Buck could say no. He should say no. Technically he’s only in the hospital waiting room because the paramedics had needed an extra set of hands as they transported multiple patients to the ER and now they needed to restock the rig before returning to the scene of the train derailment, where the 118 and several other companies have been working for the past several hours. He’s trying to stay focused on the work and not on his meeting at internal affairs once the shift is over, or on Abby’s sudden reappearance in his life via text, then on scene at the train derailment, begging for help with her fiance, and he’d like to think he’s doing a pretty good job at compartmentalizing everything, but it’s particularly challenging when Abby is standing in front of him, once again demanding his attention. He wants to say no, he has no time, and to run back to the ambulance and hide out until the paramedics are ready to return to the scene.
But Abby doesn’t give him a chance to say anything, positive or negative.
“I just…I wanted to thank you for saving Sam.”
Buck presses his lips together. “I was just…doing my job.”
“I know, but it really does mean a lot.” Abby says. “And since you’re here now, I thought maybe we could talk?”
“I…have to get back to--,” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the ambulance bay, but she doesn’t take the hint.
“I know. This will just take a minute. And it’s not like you answered my texts.”
“Because I’m working.”
“I just…wanted to explain what happened when I left.”
“That’s not necess--,”
“I spent years taking care of people.” Abby cuts him off, placing a hand on his elbow. “Between work and my mom…all I was was a caretaker. And then you came along and you were this…breath of fresh air. You were young and fun and you didn’t ask anything of me that you weren’t willing to give back and it was this…wonderful distraction. Suddenly I had something that was just for me. Just for fun. And when mom died, I realized I wanted…no needed more of that.”
It takes everything Buck has not to flinch at her words. Wonderful distraction. Just for fun. What had been his most real and serious relationship was nothing but a fling for her. He can see where the conversation is going, and he doesn’t really want to hear it. But he also doesn’t know how to stop her. “So you went to Europe.”
“I went to Europe.” Abby nods. “And it was exactly what I needed. It was my first real vacation in probably a decade and it gave me the time and space to really look at who I was, and who I could be, and I realized that being a caregiver wasn’t what I wanted and I thought that if I ever came back to Los Angeles, I would go back to being a dispatcher and fall right back into that. So I decided that I wasn’t coming back. Not permanently.
“And I know that once I realized that I probably should have called or texted or done something but it just felt like… a clean break was better.”
“And not calling was cleaner.”
“For me it was.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just doesn’t say anything. It’s clear that Abby isn’t planning on apologizing, and whatever she has to say is just how she’s clearing her conscience. The impact of how she does that doesn’t seem to matter much to her.
“I know that was probably selfish of me,” Abby begins, “but I just figured that if anyone was going to understand ending a relationship a little selfishly, it was you.” Another moment of silence passes. Does she really think that? Is that what everyone thinks? “Anyway, I just wanted to catch up with you to let you know that you did mean something to me. I don’t think I would have known what I needed to do with myself without our relationship. And I wouldn’t be moving forward now without you either. So thank you.”
Buck is going to choke out some sort of acknowledgement, although he doesn’t know what it’s going to be, when a hand claps on his shoulder.
“You ready to head back to the scene, Buckley?”
“Yeah.” He quickly agrees with the paramedic. “Let’s go.” And Buck jogs off without saying another word.
“Thank you so much for your time, Firefighter Buckley.” Captain Hinckley says, closing the notebook he had been taking notes in, while his colleague, another Internal Affairs officer named Dahlberg stops the tape recorder.
“Of course.” Buck can’t say that it’s been pleasant, given the subject matter and the fact that Dahlberg had been just as skeptical and challenging as Buck had been expecting, but it is somewhat of a relief to be done with it and not have it hanging over his head. At least until there’s more he has to do. “What happens now?”
“We have enough information to provide a preliminary verdict that removes Dr. Wells from service as a department psychologist.” Captain Hinckley informs. “Now we’ll be sharing our investigation with the licensing board and the District attorney to determine if she will be professionally censured or face criminal charges. You may be contacted by members of those offices--,”
Hinckley is cut off by the loud, distinct blaring of a fire alarm. The strobes flash near the ceiling in time with the noise.
“We can finish this outside.”
Both internal affairs officers gather their materials, and they, along with Buck, leave the conference room they had been working in. In the hall, Eddie is standing in front of the chairs he had been waiting in, and several employees are making their way to the emergency stairwell to evacuate the building.
“Should we look into what caused the alarm?” Eddie asks, frowning.
“No need.” Dahlberg shakes his head as they start to walk down the hall. “It’s been going off randomly for a couple of weeks now. Something to do with the electronic reporting system and its link at dispatch. They’re supposed to be fixing it, but in the meantime we get really annoying fire drills.”
Buck and Eddie share a look, shrug, and follow the two internal affairs officers to the stairwell. They walk down two flights of stairs and out an emergency door. Outside they join the gathering employees of headquarters. “We had just finished up the interview,” Buck shares, glancing at Eddie, “so give me a couple of minutes to wrap up the logistics and we can probably head home.”
“Sure.”
But as Buck and the internal affairs officers step to the side of the crowd, Dahlberg freezes mid-step and then crumbles to the ground. Buck looks down and spots, with horror, a bloody hole in the center of his forehead.
Buck blinks, but the hole is still there and Dahlberg’s eyes are open, staring unseeingly.
He blinks again.
A spray of warm liquid arcs across his face.
Captain Hinckley starts to stumble.
A hot, burning pain spreads through Buck’s arm.
All at once it occurs to him what is happening. They’re being shot at. “Everyone take cover!”
Buck turns and tackles Eddie to the ground.
Chapter Text
Buck turns and tackles Eddie to the ground.
He lifts his head and glances around. There’s not a lot of places for actual cover in the lot near the emergency exit. A couple of cars, and off to the side a large tree. The crowd of employees is scrambling for anything they can find. At the emergency exit, people are still coming out, oblivious to the shooter.
He makes the executive decision. There isn’t actually a fire. They’re going back inside.
“Hold the door open!” He shouts. “Everyone who can, get inside!” The crowd who realize what is happening start to move. Others still stand around, looking confused. Confusion gives way to panic as more victims fall and reality sets in.
Buck looks down at Eddie. Blood is spreading from a wound on the edge of his shoulder. Shit. “Eds, on the count of three I’m pulling you up and we’re moving. You with me?”
Eddie’s stunned expression starts to fade back; Buck watches as a serious focus takes over his expression. “I’m good. On three.”
“One, two, three.” Buck slides off Eddie into a low crouch. He helps Eddie up and they move together, ducked as low as they can manage, rushing back into headquarters. They push in through a crowd of people who seem at a loss of what to do.
“What the fuck is happening?” Eddie asks in a low hiss. “A sniper? In downtown LA?”
“Targeting first responders.” Buck nods. At least, that’s what he’s pieced together. “The fire alarm was probably a ruse to get us outside. He gets a wave of us from the evacuation and a second wave when the help we call arrives.” The fire alarm is still going off, adding to the chaos.
“What do you want to do?”
“We need to call 911 and brief them so SWAT comes and no one’s at risk. And we need to get the wounded in here and start treating them.”
“We can start with you.” Eddie reaches over, trying to probe at the wound in Buck’s arm.
Buck jerks away. On the Evan Buckley pain scale, the bullet wound is barely registering, but he knows that could change with too much contact before he’s ready. “It’s a flesh wound. Through and through. I’ll be fine.”
Eddie looks like he wants to disagree, but presses his lips together.
“I’m gonna start pulling people in.” Buck says. “Call 911. Tell them we have an active sniper targeting first responders and based on the trajectory of their shots, they’re nesting…” He glances back out the door, scanning the neighborhood buildings and skyline, “in the garage on the northwest corner across the street. Then can you triage and treat in here?”
“I should go out with you. We’ll get the wounded back in in fewer trips.”
“You’re wounded too.” Buck points out. “And you’ve got Chris to think about.”
“Fewer trips means less risk for both of us.” Eddie argues.
Buck wants to fight him, but they don't have time. And the extra hands will be helpful. “Make the 911 call first.” He’ll just have to get the victims the furthest out with the least cover first to minimize Eddie’s risk.
Eddie pulls his phone out of his pocket with one hand, and holds out his other so they can tap their wrists together in their pre-call ritual. “Stay safe.”
“Back at you.”
Buck takes a deep breath, mentally counts to three, and runs back outside to start his rescue mission.
If Buck never saw the interior of a hospital room again, it would be too soon. Even now, when it’s just a small cubicle in the emergency room while he waits for his x-ray results, he’s going out of his mind. The whole day has been a mess. A 24 hour shift followed by talking to internal affairs, followed by a goddamn sniper attack. Where both he and Eddie had gotten shot, but were the only people there to keep their heads. Headquarters was home to a lot of firefighters who had been out of the game for a long time, either by choice or because of injury, and a lot of civilian employees who weren’t prepared for emergencies to begin with. No one was ready for a mass casualty event to be laid at their doorstep, which meant Buck and Eddie did the bulk of the heavy lifting, from triaging victims and getting the living into safety, to treating injuries and talking people down from their panic.
Doing it while wounded probably wasn’t the smartest choice. The bullet wound that had barely registered to Buck at the time now throbbed and ached with his pulse, even with the pain medication the ER doc had given him. But someone had had to do something, and Buck and Eddie were the only ones there keeping their heads, gunshot wounds or not.
Buck and Eddie had ridden together to the hospital but had been separated upon arrival. It’s only through text messages that Buck knows Eddie’s injury was more of a graze, taking out a chunk of flesh from his shoulder. He’ll take some stitches and some precautionary antibiotics and be good as new in a couple of weeks.
Buck was a little less fortunate.
While he had thought his wound was a simple through and through, the doctor had noticed how much difficulty he was having moving his arm--far beyond the pain level of a simple flesh wound, especially for someone as schooled in pain management as Buck. He had ordered x-rays, but the running theory was that the bullet had collided with Buck’s humerus, breaking the arm. They were just waiting on the images to confirm.
Typical Buck luck.
All he wants is to go home and catch up on his sleep--sleep that he had barely gotten on his shift, thank you very much--but instead he needs to get treated and give an official statement to the police, and then probably figure out some food since it’s been ages since he had a full meal and he has blood loss and an extra adrenaline rush to make up for. And he knows it’ll be a challenge to get comfortable, even with some good pain killers and that sleep won’t come easy. Buck’s already not looking forward to the challenge.
A knock on the door frame of the room draws Buck’s attention from his phone. He looks up and sees Athena in full uniform.
“What did you get yourself into this time, Buckaroo?”
“This one was definitely not my fault.” Buck challenges goodnaturedly. He can tell that Athena isn’t really blaming him, just marveling at his ability to find himself in the worst scenario possible. “Are you here to take my statement?”
“Not my case.” Athena shakes her head and steps into the room. “I just thought I’d check in on you and Eddie since Bobby is still asleep and hasn’t heard the news yet.”
Privately, Buck wonders if Bobby would be here if the incident hadn’t taken place after a 24 hour shift, if he’d really show up given the distance that has grown between them since the bombing, but he knows that’s not really being fair to his captain and he’d never share that thought with Athena. Bobby would certainly show up for injured team members, even if he didn’t linger the way Buck might have expected at one time or another.
“I’m alright.” Buck shrugs with one shoulder, careful to avoid moving his injured arm. “Waiting on an x-ray to see if the bullet broke my arm or not but either way I’ll live. Which is more than a few people can say today.”
Athena purses her lips. “The current count is three dead, fifteen wounded, including you and Eddie. And the rumor is that both of those numbers would have been higher if the two of you hadn’t stepped up.”
“We were just…following our training.” That it was their military training that played the biggest role goes unsaid. Especially since nobody knows that Buck has any to begin with.
“Uh-huh.” Athena doesn’t sound convinced. “That’s why it was only the two of you who stepped up.”
“Well, you know us, ‘Thena. As members of the 118 we have our own definition of duty.”
“And your own brand of crazy.” Again, it’s clear that this is said with some level of affection. “We all know you wouldn’t be Buck if you didn’t dive head first into danger to save someone else. And Eddie wouldn’t be your partner if he wasn’t willing to follow you into the fire.” Athena takes a seat next to the gurney Buck is seated on. “I just want to be sure you’re taking care of yourself in the aftermath. It’s not easy to be fired on like that. Even when you’re expecting it. A close call can hit you in ways you don’t anticipate”
Buck is torn between the rush of warmth and positivity he feels flood his chest at the idea of someone stepping up and caring about him in the aftermath of a big event (and he does not want to look at that too closely and think about why it feels surprising or rare for it to be happening) and the worry that if he needs too much it will chase Athena away as it had done everyone else. He can’t be too needy or weak or people won’t want him around. The worry wins out, and he decides that a polite deflection is his best option. Not dismissive, just…independent. “Right now I’m just trying to be glad that it wasn’t worse. I’m sure the close calls will hit me later.”
“Well you be sure to call on someone when they do.” Athena counsels. “There’s no need to face this sort of thing on your own.”
Buck doesn’t respond. He doesn’t want to lie. Not that he thinks he’d get away with it with Athena. It’s better to stay silent than get caught in a lie with her.
She regards him carefully, and for a moment Buck thinks she’s going to call him out, but before she can there’s another knock on the door frame, and when Buck glances over, Eddie is standing in the doorframe, looking a little paler than usual and with bandages poking out from the sleeve of his t-shirt. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
“Not at all.” Athena shakes her head. “I’m not here in an official capacity. Just wanted to check in on the two of you. How are you doing, Eddie?”
“I’ll be fine with a little time.” He shrugs, not even wincing even though the movement must pull at his shoulder. “Buck pulled me out of range of the shot so it only grazed me. The doctors stitched me up and just discharged me.” He enters the room and goes to the stool on the other side of Buck’s gurney. “Any word on when you’ll be sprung?”
“Still waiting on an x-ray.”
Eddie nods at Buck’s answer.
“I’d say the two of you lucked out, but I think your luck had more to do with placing you at the scene in the first place.” Athena says. “I still can’t figure out what the two of you were doing at headquarters when you’d just worked a 24 hour shift.” Buck nearly winces because Eddie looks to him and Athena obviously picks up on it. “Something to share with the class, boys?”
“I’m…assisting with an investigation.” Buck answers carefully; it’s true, just vague. “They needed me to come in and make a statement.”
“What sort of investigation? Bobby hasn’t mentioned anything.”
“Internal affairs is looking into someone that I…dealt with while I was out on leave.” Buck explains, again, being cautious to not go into too much detail but to avoid lying as well. “I’m not in any trouble so they haven’t notified Bobby.”
“I see.” Athena regards him carefully. “And would you prefer that it stays that way?”
“If it’s not too much to ask.”
“He’s obviously going to find out that you were involved in the shooting, and I’m sure he’ll ask some questions as to why,” Athena begins, “but if you’re really not in any trouble, then he’ll have to get his answers from you, not me.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, do either of you need anything? A ride home? Medications picked up?”
Eddie shakes his head. “I spoke with Tia Pepa before I came in here. She’s just waiting for a call that we’ve both been given the all clear and she’ll come and get us.”
Buck snaps his head in Eddie’s direction, unsure why he’s being included. “Eds, you should just head home now. I’m gonna be a while and you need to get some sleep before Chris gets out of school. He’s gonna be worried once he realizes you got hurt…”
“If I don’t wait we’ll just be making another trip out here when you’re discharged.” Eddie shakes his head.
“I can take an uber home.”
“You think you’re going back to your place?” Eddie asks, incredulously. “Buck, you’re only gonna have one arm to use. You’re gonna need some help. And Chris will be just as worried about you and if you think he’s gonna relax without seeing you…”
Buck counters him quickly. “I survived with one leg, I think I can manage with one arm.”
Athena snorts. “I think you’ll find living with one hand a lot more challenging than just not being able to get up the stairs for a while.”
“I don’t want to be in the way.”
“Family doesn’t get in the way.” Eddie says. “And you’re family, remember? We want you there.”
“Hey, are you finally waking up?”
Buck runs his uninjured hand through his hair as he ambles out into Eddie’s living room. “I was awake when you picked me up from the hospital.” He protests, sitting on the opposite end of the couch of Eddie.
Eddie lowers the book he’s reading. “You were…technically conscious.” He corrects. “I’m not sure you could tell me anything you talked about.”
When he had finally gotten his x-ray back, the doctor had confirmed that the bullet had hit Buck’s humerus and broken it, severely enough that it needed surgery to repair it. He had stayed overnight in the hospital and had the surgery first thing in the morning; a couple of hours later after he was post-op, Eddie had picked him up to come stay with him and Chris while he recovered.
“I wasn’t too bad, was I?” Buck asks. He feels himself blushing even though he can’t really remember the journey.
“Anesthesia hangover Buck sings along with the radio, especially when Taylor Swift is on. And he’s definitely a cuddler.”
“Oh, jeez.” Buck claps a hand to his face, his blush deepening. It’s only the fact that his injured arm is held tightly to his chest by a complicated sling that keeps him from moving that hand as well. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Eddie waves him off. “It was cute.”
“You recorded it didn’t you?”
Eddie grins. “You were singing Love Story while clutching the stuffed penguin Christopher left in the truck. Of course I recorded it.”
Buck can’t really blame him as he probably would have done the same thing had their positions been reversed, but he’s not looking forward to the teasing that will come from everyone who sees the video. On the bright side, since he’ll be out of work while he’s healing, they’ll probably get the worst of it out of their system before he even sees them.
“How are you feeling now that you’ve slept the rest of the anesthesia off?” Eddie asks.
“Still tired.” Buck admits. “But if I nap anymore I’ll never sleep tonight.”
“Any pain? You can probably take a pill by now.”
He’d been prescribed some heavy duty painkillers to deal with post-operative pain for the next few days while it would be at its worst. Buck’s arm is indeed aching, but he’s definitely not hungry and he knows he’s supposed to take those pills with food so he shakes his head. “Not right now.”
Eddie looks like he wants to argue, but stays quiet. On that subject anyways. “Buck?” He starts softly, after a long moment has passed. “If you’re feeling up to it, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Before I have to go and get Chris from school.”
That sounds…ominous. Eddie looks serious and if there’s something he doesn’t want to talk about around Chris that usually means it's a bit more adult or mature than his son can handle. Or private but Eddie’s not usually that concerned with keeping things from Chris so Buck finds himself wondering what could be on his friend’s mind. He supposes there might be something about the shooting--they haven’t really had a chance to talk about what happened, and Eddie definitely wouldn’t want to get into detail about that around Chris--or maybe he wants to follow up about the IA investigation? But Buck doesn’t know what to say about that with one investigator dead and another still in the ICU. He doesn’t know how things will proceed now.
“Uh…yeah.” Buck agrees. It’s not like he has a reason not to. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk to you because…well a lot has happened lately.” Eddie says. “A lot of…crazy stuff. And it seems like at every turn, things are getting more serious.”
Oh. Oh. Buck gets it. From the bombing to the tsunami to a shooter now, he’s been at the heart of a lot of dangerous situations. Any sane person would be concerned. “Eds, if you need me to take a step back to keep Christopher safe, I’ll do whatever you think is best. The last thing I want is for anything to--,”
“What? No. Buck, that's not what I’m getting at.” Eddie shakes his head, and adjusts his position on the couch so he’s sitting closer to Buck. “I don’t want you to go anywhere. I want the opposite.”
“The opposite…You…want me closer?”
Eddie begins again. “We’ve had a lot of close calls over the past few months. The kind of close calls that make you think about things. Things like, who’s in your life and what they mean to you.” He pauses, inhaling deeply. “I know one of the things I’ve said a lot lately is that you’re family. But I haven’t really explained how.”
“Isn’t it just…something people say?” Buck asks, still not seeing what Eddie is trying to get at. He knows that Eddie has been adamant over insisting that he’s never going to be in the way and that he’s always welcome, but he doesn’t see why that needs to be its own discussion. “Like, you’re more than just a friend, and the next biggest thing is family so you say we’re family?”
“No. I mean, maybe, but that’s not really how I meant it. At least…not entirely.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When I say that you’re family, I don’t mean you’re like my brother or an uncle to Chris or anything like that.” Eddie clarifies.
“Well I know you don’t see me like a dad…” Buck jokes. “What else is there?”
Eddie glances down at his lap, where he rubs his hands over his knees. When he looks back up at Buck, he looks considerably more nervous. “There’s a partner. I see you as a partner.”
The words hit Buck straight in the chest. It’s not that he’s never thought about Eddie in a romantic sense; hell, it’s impossible not to with how close they are and how good a person he is, and, not that looks matter, but with how good-looking he is…Buck has thought about his feelings for Eddie a lot and tucked them firmly away in the mental box of his feelings labeled ‘Do not examine under threat of painful emotional death’. But it seems like what Eddie is saying is that he has been dealing with similar feelings. Which shouldn’t be possible. “In what sense?” He asks softly.
“In the sense that we should talk about it. Because, Buck…Evan…over the past several months I’ve realized that I see you as the type of partner that I want to…spend alone time with. Go on dates with. Kiss and be closer to. The type of partner that I love.”
Buck leans forward, into the conversation, as much as his injury will allow, resting his good elbow on his knee. “And--and this isn’t some sort of joke, or--or some kind of crazy reaction to being shot at where we should have been safe?”
“Not a joke.” Eddie shakes his head. “And the feelings aren’t a reaction. They’ve been there for a long time. Longer than I’ve been willing to admit to myself. But telling you is. I can’t keep…worrying about losing you and the hole that you’d leave in mine and Chris’ lives and not be able to tell you the truth about how I feel.” He scans Buck’s face, probably looking for some sort of reaction, but Buck can tell his expression is mostly stuck on stunned. “And this doesn’t have to change anything. If you don’t feel the same way I can deal with that and we can just stay friends and partners at work, or whatever keeps things comfortable for you.”
Eddie keeps talking, rambling really and Buck doesn’t know how to stop him. How to unlock his little box of feelings and tell him that he really really feels the same way. How to be brave.
Just yesterday he ran into an open space where there was an active sniper, but this scares him.
Action. Buck thinks. I’m better at action.
So he ignores all the thoughts in his head telling him that he must still be asleep in Eddie’s bed and dreaming, or even more likely, still in the hospital under anesthesia, or, less probably, dead from the sniper attack and in some sort of bizarre afterlife scenario, and he shifts forward across the couch.
Buck cups Eddie’s face with his good hand, leans in close, and pulls him into a kiss.
Chapter 10
Notes:
Sorry about the delay in getting this chapter out! I had some school and life stuff come up but it also fought me big time. Thank you so much for your patience!
Chapter Text
You matter.
You matter, you matter, you matter.
Buck presses his fingers into his semi-healed arm wound with each passing thought. The pain that pulses forward is just barely enough to keep him from completely spiraling.
It’s the middle of the night. It’s the middle of the night and Buck can’t sleep. Buck can’t sleep because he can never sleep right away anymore and when he does sleep he has nightmares. Buck has gotten used to lying awake in bed as still as possible, just trying to be invisible; the last thing he wants to do is disturb Eddie.
Eddie who is healed enough to work. Eddie who has a son to take care of. Eddie who’s dealing with his own nightmares. Eddie, who, somehow, looks at Buck and sees a partner. Someone worth being with. And Buck doesn’t want to do anything to ruin that.
Being together is good. Really good. In all honesty not a lot has changed since they were pretty much always closer than average friends and cuddling is a little awkward and uncomfortable when you have to navigate around an arm in a sling so they haven’t really been doing that, but overall they’re closer. Things feel easier. More comfortable. He and Eddie have talked about planning a night out to take care of the ‘dating’ aspect of dating, but there’s no real rush to speak of when they already know each other so well. Dating may be technically new but they’re practically in the middle of their relationship already.
Buck doesn’t want to screw that up or lose him.
He knows that he can be too much. Too much energy or enthusiasm or emotion. When Buck feels, he feels big and most people don’t know how to or don’t want to deal with that. And Eddie has always been a good and supportive friend and has never acted like Buck is a problem but it’s different when you’re dating. Buck knows that.
So Buck keeps his problems to himself. He only talks about the shooting, or the tsunami, or anything else if Eddie or Chris bring it up first. He does everything he can to keep his nightmares from Eddie and avoid disrupting his sleep. He tries to be the easy-going, helpful partner that Eddie needs.
Buck just wants to be as unobtrusive as possible. He wants Eddie to feel that their relationship is easy and good and worth it. Buck can’t let this relationship end the way wings did with Ali or Abby. It means too much.
So Buck can’t be too much.
He can’t be just a distraction.
And if Buck has to deal with things on his own to get that, then that’s what he’s going to do.
Tonight that’s harder than usual.
He’d spent the day doing whatever chores he could manage around the house while Eddie was at work. It had worn him out, which had been great for helping him fall asleep, but sleep came with its own problems. He’d dreamt and instead of his brain running through the greatest hits of his traumas that the shooting had brought up, tonight things had been all about relationships and how easy it would be for things to fall apart and for people to let him go.
After all, Buck’s been shot and he’s off the job, which means he’s not being useful and whatever goodwill he’s built up with Bobby since his return from the bombing is probably disappearing. And things with Hen and Chim are mostly comfortable again but he’s not around so nothing is reinforcing that relationship either. Maddie may be scared that the job is going to kill him, but at some point the strain of fighting with him over the job and the energy that takes is going to get to her and she’ll cut off the relationship and leave because it won’t hurt her to lose a brother that she’s not talking to.
Relationships end all the time, and Buck knows better than most that it’s easier for feelings to fade when you’re not present.
He’s been out of work for two weeks so far and it’ll be at least another four before he can start physical therapy which means by the time he can get back to work and remind people that he’s a good firefighter and has a purpose, all they’ll remember is how much trouble he’s managed to get into and how much work he is.
Buck is trying to remind himself that that’s not the reality of the situation. That people care, and his impact is more than the problems he’s made, and that no matter what happens he’ll be fine. But his brain isn’t all that interested in that.
Buck can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to mess everything up. That everyone is going to leave and they’ll be better off without him anyways. The anxiety of being alone sits heavy on his chest, even though Eddie is just inches away from him on the bed.
You matter.
He presses into his injury again, letting the ache and burn cut through the worst of his thoughts.
You matter, you matter, you--
“Buck?”
Buck’s frenzied inner mantra is interrupted by Eddie’s sleep-laden voice. A gentle hand comes down on his elbow as Eddie turns in the bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“N-nothing.” Buck shakes his head. He runs his good hand down his face, trying to refocus. “I’m good.”
“If you were good, we’d both be asleep right now.” Eddie says.
Buck fumbles to find an excuse that won’t worry Eddie; the last thing he wants is to make himself the problem. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I didn’t say it was a problem. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Buck denies, a little more solidly this time. “I’m just…having a little trouble sleeping tonight.”
“Something on your mind?”Eddie adjusts his position, sitting up a bit against the headboard and wrapping his arm around Buck’s shoulders, gently pulling him in so he’s resting against his chest.
Buck can’t answer that. Not if he wants to keep things easy and simple. Instead he leans into Eddie’s embrace, letting the soft reassurance of his boyfriend’s heartbeat direct the pace of his breathing and keep him grounded. “No, just…sick of sleeping on my back.”
“I…can’t really help with that.” Eddie says.
“This helps.” Buck reaches up with his good hand to weave his fingers with Eddie’s; it’s an awkward position but it’s grounding. He’s not even lying to Eddie when he says it helps, even if the reasoning isn’t what he’s saying. “This always helps.”
You matter.
“Are we boring you Buck?”
Buck jolts at Hen’s question. He’s not startled, per se, but he hasn’t been paying attention either. He’s sitting with Hen, Karen, Chim, and Maddie at the patio table, but he’s been watching Chris run around with Harry and Denny. If he weren’t injured he’d probably be over there, helping enrich their game somehow, but he can’t exactly pick up the kids or run around himself, so when he and Eddie had arrived at the party, he’d grabbed a cup of lemonade and taken a seat. It had been fine enough at first but the conversation had quickly turned to his parents' impending visit and Buck just…doesn’t want to think about that. So he had tuned things out and started watching the kids.
Chim takes a swig of his beer. “He’s just bummed out that he can’t go hang with the people who match his IQ.”
The table laughs and Buck lifts his own cup. He knows it’s good-natured ribbing and how Chim shows that he cares. He’s not going to react, even if the comment does sting a little.
“How has your arm been?” Karen asks as the moment fades. “I know it can’t be easy dealing with more surgery and broken bones so soon after your leg.”
“I still can’t believe he and Eddie got shot.” Hen comments before Buck can answer. “The whole story is wild.”
“You know, Eddie still won’t tell us what you two were even doing at headquarters.” Chimney says. “He changes the subject every time someone brings it up.”
“Eddie probably just doesn’t want to talk about the shooting at all.” Maddie shrugs. “It can’t be easy for him, after going through similar attacks in Afghanistan.”
Instinctively, Buck glances across the yard to the grill, where Eddie has been wrangled into assisting by Bobby. Apparently Bobby has been taking Eddie’s injury and light duty as an opportunity to try once again and tame his cooking skills. Eddie has definitely had a negative reaction to being shot, and Buck has been doing his best to encourage his partner to open up about his nightmares and discomfort. But here at Bobby and Athena’s, Eddie is fine. He’s safe and happy, joking while working with his captain.
“That’s true.” Karen nods. “You probably shouldn’t be talking about it around him.”
A silence falls across the table, broken mostly by the shrieks and giggles of the playing kids. Then Buck feels a nudge at his leg under the table. He looks at Chim across from him and realizes he’s giving him a pointed look.
“Well…don’t leave us in suspense, Buck. Just because Eddie doesn’t want to talk about it doesn’t mean you can’t. What were you doing at headquarters? What happened?”
Buck’s mouth goes dry. He’s not sure what bothers him more. Being asked to talk about the shooting so casually or to explain why they were there and open himself up like . It was one thing with the police or with Athena; he knew she wouldn’t push and that professionalism would take priority over curiosity or commentary. But that’s not how this group works. They may be coming from a good place but they pry and offer their own perspectives and Buck doesn’t want that. He wants to leave everything behind him.
He settles on saying the bare minimum. Tries to keep his voice relaxed. “Eddie just drove me there. I was just…dealing with some paperwork when the fire alarm went off.” He has to hope that they actually don’t care about the shooting itself. Between firehouse gossip and the news reports surely they’ve gotten the after action report.
“So Eddie got shot because he was doing you a favor?” Maddie asks. “He didn’t have to be there?”
“Grazed, but…I guess.” Buck nearly winces. It’s not that he hasn’t thought that himself--he knows Eddie was only there because he was being supportive and he never would have gotten hurt or retraumatized if Buck could have just sucked it up and done things on his own. It’s not like Buck actually needed to hold his hand to give his testimony.
“What kind of paperwork?” Chimney probes.
Buck hesitates. He doesn’t want them to know. If they know it’ll just be a thing. Either they’ll think he shouldn’t really have been back and it’ll be an excuse to not let him back to duty when his arm heals or they’ll take it as a sign that Buck 1.0 is back and it’ll be open season for comments and jokes and Buck just wants to leave everything as firmly tucked away as possible. “Just some stuff left over from my return to duty.” It’s mostly the truth, just as vague as he can keep it.
“Of course you were so eager for action you forgot about the behind-the-scenes details.” Hen shakes her head.
“And it got you more action than you bargained for.”
Buck clenches his jaw. If he blinks he sees flashes--Dahlberg staring up at him lifeless, Eddie falling to the ground bleeding, Dr. Wells swinging across to straddle his lap--and it’s all he can do to stay in the moment at the patio table.
Selfish.
Stupid.
Careless.
“I’m, uh, I’m gonna go get a refill.” Buck pushes away from the table. He can’t be here right now. He knows what he did wrong well enough, he doesn’t need to hear more about it from his friends and family.
He doesn’t let himself look at the rest of the party or entertain the idea of going to Eddie. Eddie is having a good time and he doesn’t need Buck bringing him down. He doesn’t need to deal with Buck’s issues at all. Going to him for help would not be keeping things nice and easy. He keeps a laser focus on getting inside away from everyone’s eyes.
He just needs a moment alone.
Buck tries and fails not to think as he ducks to the side of the living room, out of view of the patio doors. Guilt sits heavy on his chest. This is all his fault.
He got Eddie shot. Brought back all of his painful past experiences. If he had just sucked it up and been strong enough to go and talk to internal affairs on his own, or better yet if he had done the right thing and resisted Dr. Wells and not had to make a statement in the first place none of this would have happened.
He’s just so worthless.
His mom is right. He may save lives now but that doesn’t make up for what he’s failed at. The shit that he drags people into.
Buck can’t just pretend that he doesn’t ruin peoples lives.
It’s a miracle anyone ever wants him around.
There’s a small part of Buck that knows that it’s not true. Eddie would never blame him for what had happened, the same way he doesn’t blame him for getting Chris caught up in the tsunami even though he wouldn’t have been on the pier if it weren’t for Buck. But the voice of reason is so small, and everything else just feels so loud and impressive. Buck can’t just think his way past it.
You’re a worthless burden and they’re better off without you.
Buck shakes his head as the thought passes through.
That’s not true.
He presses his fingers into his wound, digging in past the stitches as much as he can. If it bleeds, it bleeds, and he’ll deal with that in a minute but he needs everything to stop.
Eddie and Chris and Maddie and the crew are outside and he matters to them. They don’t want him gone. For some reason they care about him in their own ways and he matters to them.
“You matter.” He whispers, as the pain arcs up his arm. “You matter, you matter, you matter.”
With his wound throbbing, Buck can breathe again. He just can’t shake the feeling that everything about him is wrong. That that’s why Bobby hasn’t taken him back under his wing at work and why Chim and Hen keep their distance. They can see it. They’re just too nice to cut him out like they should.
And Buck has his part to play in that, he knows. He can’t be ruining parties by hiding away and letting his issues take over. He’s supposed to be Carefree Buck.
Lighthearted and loose.
He’s supposed to tell the stories they want to hear and laugh and smile and play whatever part they’ll let him play at the outskirts of their lives until they get too tired of him to deal with it anymore.
Buck can do that. He has to do that. He doesn’t know how to do anything else.
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, glances down at his arm to check and see if he’s bleeding (he’s not), and moves to go back outside.
He needs to rejoin the party.
“Thank god, you’re both here.” Maddie mutters, sweeping past Buck to pull Chim into a quick hug and kiss his cheek as he enters the apartment. Traffic had not cooperated, so by the time Buck’s uber had picked him up and driven across time, Chimney was off shift and reaching his apartment. “Mom, Dad,” She turns back into the apartment, keeping a hand around her partner, “this is Howard Han. Howie, these are my parents, Margaret and Phillip Buckley.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both.” Chim steps forward, extending his hand.
Philip glances down but shakes Chim’s hand without raising much of a fuss. He doesn’t acknowledge Chimney’s comment. Afterwards Buck’s mother surprises him by allowing herself to be briefly embraced and kissed on the cheek.
A beat of silence passes.
“Evan, I didn’t know we were expecting you tonight.”
The comment comes from his father, and his tone is just as awkward as Buck feels. He knows that not only did his dad not expect him there, but that he isn’t wanted; in the eyes of his parents this was meant to be a dinner with just Maddie, though they were prepared to put up with Chimney because of the baby.
The smile on Maddie’s face tightens. “Was I wrong in thinking this was a family dinner that I organized?”
“Of course not!” Margaret’s voice is just a touch too sharp to be considered at ease. Buck wonders if it’s the situation in general or just seeing him that’s the problem. “It’s just that after you told us Evan had been…injured we assumed that he wouldn’t be well enough to join us.”
“It was nearly three weeks ago and I am fine.” Buck says before anyone can continue talking like he’s not in the room; it’s bad enough that they’ll be calling him Evan all night. “Of course I was going to come to a family dinner.”
Maddie plays the perfect hostess, offering everyone another round of drinks and encouraging everyone to move to the dining table since dinner is almost ready. Buck quickly offers to help her in the kitchen (anything he can do to avoid time with their parents) but she denies him the quick exit, insisting that she can finish the preparations on her own. Chim does his best to make small talk about the Buckley’s travel and how they’re finding Los Angeles which manages to last until the group makes it to the table and gets seated. Philip takes over at that point, asking in a strained and uninterested voice how long Chimney, who he calls Howard, has been working in the fire department. Chimney’s career history sustains the conversation until Maddie delivers the food to the table and takes her own seat, at which point getting everyone served takes priority.
Buck’s not all that hungry, but he takes his portion of Tuscan chicken and assorted roasted vegetables just the same. The sooner everyone eats, the sooner the dinner is over and his obligation to be there for Maddie is over and he can leave and hopefully not see his parents for another ten or fifteen years.
A few bites into the meal, Margaret takes a sip of wine with a tight smile on her face. “You’re keeping a lovely, modest, home here. I assume you’ve already begun searching for something more suitable.”
“Suitable for what, mom?” Maddie asks, cutting her chicken.
“For raising a family, of course. You can’t honestly expect to live with the two of you and a baby in this tiny space.”
“It’ll be all right for a while.” Chimney prevaricates gently. “Babies have a lot of things but we don’t so it’ll all balance out space-wise.”
“And what about when the baby grows up? She’ll need her own bed and room eventually.”
“Mom, we’re still in the second trimester.” Maddie points out. “We have a lot of time before we need to think about moving to a bigger apartment.”
Margaret corrects her daughter as she lifts her fork. “House.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You need to think about moving to a bigger house.” Margaret explains. “A child needs to be raised in a house. With their own room and a yard. Think about it, Maddie, really. Imagine the chaos if your father and I had raised you and Evan in an apartment.”
Buck nearly snorts at the thought of his parents raising them at all. That would be a very generous term for what they had done. Then he catches Maddie’s eye and she raises her eyebrows imploringly at him. Great. He’s supposed to intervene here. “I’m sure Maddie and Chi--Howard,” He corrects himself, “are open to a house if they found one that was the right fit, but realistically with the real estate market in Los Angeles being what it is, they’re much more likely to find an appropriate apartment.”
Philip does snort into his drink. “Come on Evan. You don’t need to dance around it like that. On public servants’ salaries they can’t afford a house in this godforsaken city.”
“Actually I was just referring to the number of available houses in neighborhoods relative to where they work and would want to live.” Buck corrects. “As far as I know their financial situation is pretty solid, right Maddie?”
Margaret tuts before Maddie can say anything. “Honestly, have you forgotten everything we taught you? It’s rude to bring up finances at the table.”
“He was just correcting something that dad said, mom.” Maddie counters.
“It’s still rude.” Margaret says. “And in any case that wasn’t what your father meant. He was merely trying to suggest that you and your…growing family would be better off living in a less urban area. Your money would go further, you’d have better schooling options, your family could be closer…”
Chimney glances between the elder Buckleys. “That’s…not really what he said.”
“And us uprooting our lives and moving across the country is not on the table.” Maddie continues. “We have lives, careers and family here in LA.”
“Oh, do your parents live in Los Angeles, Howard?” Margaret asks primly. “You should have invited them. After all, this is a family dinner.”
Somehow Buck knows that is meant to be a slight at him, he just can’t quite figure out how.
“No, my father and his wife still live in Korea.” Chim answers, moving food around on his plate with his fork. Buck’s not sure he’s ever seen the man look more uncomfortable.
“Then what family are you referring to, Maddie?” Margaret probes.
Maddie casts her eyes over to him. “Well, first of all, there’s Evan. And--,”
Margaret cuts her off. “Oh, Evan doesn’t count.”
Buck drops his fork. He might not be the smartest person in the room but even he can suss out the meaning of that comment.
“What do you mean, Evan doesn’t count? He’s my brother.”
“Well, he’s not exactly the sort of family you would want around your child now, is he?” Margaret arches an eyebrow at her daughter. “He’s immature, irresponsible, reckless… He’s not a good role model and he won’t protect her properly. That’s not the sort of influence you want in her life, is it?”
Buck knows his mother has been drinking most of the afternoon. Not only because Maddie had told him but because her filter is off; if Margaret Buckley were sober she’d never be this blunt in front of Maddie, let alone a near stranger like Chimney. But a drunk Margaret is an honest Margaret, and she is making her feelings known. In her usual, brutally clear fashion.
“Mom, I don’t think you’re really being fair to Evan. He’s not exactly the same kid you raised back in--,”
“No, I am not going to let you defend him anymore, Maddie.” Margaret shakes her head. “It was one thing when you were children and you didn’t know any better but you are an adult now. Surely you can see that Evan is just not of the same stock as the rest of this family. He doesn’t belong.”
Buck looks between Maddie and Chimney, hoping one of them might speak up and counter his mother’s words but Chimney looks like he’d rather be getting a root canal without novocaine than sitting at this table and Maddie has been stunned into silence. This isn’t a version of their mother she’d be familiar with. She’d grown up with indifferent Margaret, not bitter, no-filter Margaret.
“Margaret.” Philip chides gently, putting his drink on the table. “This is not a private moment.”
“Howard will be family soon enough once he and Maddie get married. He might as well understand the family he’s joining.”
“Mom, I already told you, nobody is getting married.”
“Of course you are. Only whores and indigents don’t get married when they get pregnant.”
Buck snaps out of his stupor. “Mom!”
“Well, it’s not like I’m going to get any grandchildren from you, Evan. And Maddie’s not getting any younger. I want whatever grandchildren I’m going to get raised properly.”
“Why wouldn’t Buc--I mean Evan, give you grandchildren?” Chimney chimes in, looking confused
“I mean, putting aside his predilection for men,” and christ his mother just outed him to his sister and coworker, “he’s not exactly father material, is he? He doesn’t have the personality, the stability…and of course there are the problems with his portion of the gene pool."
Buck watches as Maddie's eyes widen; as far as she knows he doesn't know about Daniel and they are on the precipice of revealing the deep, dark family secret. But as bad as things are, he's not about to be shattered by that. He sighs and closes his eyes. "Daniel died because he had cancer, mom. Not because there was something wrong with me."
Maddie's head snaps towards him and she frowns. "You know about Daniel?"
But Buck doesn't get the chance to answer. His father glares. "Daniel died because your transplants failed. Everything was wrong with you."
Buck wants to fight back, to say that he was just a child who had no control over what happened, but his breath gets caught in his chest. Because there is a part of him that wonders what might have been, and why things didn't work out when he was a kid. And given how things have gone since then…maybe there is something wrong with him. Plenty of people have left him behind. They must be seeing something in him that turns them away.
He can’t really argue with that.
“When did you tell him about Daniel?” Maddie asks. But their parents ignore her.
“You never belonged with us. Never made the effort.” His mother scowls. “We tried our best to raise you despite your failings but you were just so…difficult. You killed our boy and acted like you had done nothing wrong.”
“I didn’t--.... That’s not--...I was just--...” Buck stammers over different things to say but nothing comes out. His mind is moving so quickly that he can’t latch onto a complete thought.
Stupid.
Inadequate.
Useless.
“You can’t defend yourself because there’s nothing to defend.” Phillip says.
“Honestly Evan, you’re exhausting. The fact that you’d even come here tonight and expect things to be alright… You know we never wanted to see you again once you left home.”
Buck shrinks back in his seat. He glances down. “Maddie asked me to be here.”
“Out of obligation.” Margaret barks. “You can’t think she’d really want you to be a part of her child’s life. You’d put the poor thing in danger just by being near her.”
Maddie says nothing to disagree with their mother.
Reckless.
Dangerous.
Burden.
“It was one thing that you were this naive when you were a child, but you’re an adult now. You need to recognize that your presence and actions have consequences, and not to come where you’re not welcome.”
“And to be clear, you’re not welcome anywhere near this family.”
“If we never saw your face again it would be too soon.”
Unwanted.
Unnecessary.
Worthless.
Buck had known there was no love lost between him and his parents but to hear it so starkly laid out, not just to him but in front of other people as well, where no one says anything to disagree… he could choke on the sudden influx of tears that he knows he can’t let fall. There’s a weight on his chest that burns and aches and makes him wish he were anywhere but the dining table of his sister’s apartment.
It takes all of his focus to push his chair away from the table.
“I’ll leave you to your meal.”
Buck stands, and with all the speed and dignity he can muster leaves the apartment. No one comes after him.
Chapter 11
Notes:
Thanks to everyone who has been commenting, kudos-ing, and bookmarking!
This chapter could definitely be triggering, please check the end note for a more detailed description of the events if you are concerned any of the themes previously tagged for might be triggering for you.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Buck!”
“Hey, Superman!” Buck pushes a smile up on his face and ruffles Christopher’s hair as he enters Eddie’s kitchen. The boy is sitting at the table with his dad, eating dinner. With Chris suitably greeted, he pulls out a chair and takes a seat next to his partner. “Hey, Eds, how was your shift?”
“Nothing exciting.” Eddie wipes his hands on a paper towel, leans over and kisses Buck’s cheek. “I thought we weren’t going to see you until late tonight… Did things with your parents go OK?”
Buck doesn’t really want to get into it; he’d just managed to push his feelings back enough that he wasn’t losing it in the back of his uber to get here, and he doesn’t want to say anything that pulls them back to the forefront--especially not in front of Chris. But he was so caught up in his own thoughts that he didn’t think about what he would say to Eddie or anyone else who knew about the dinner. He doesn’t have an easy lie at the ready and knows improvising isn’t going to fool Eddie.
He settles on meeting Eddie’s eyes and shaking his head minutely with a pointed glance in Chris’ direction. Eddie’s curious expression melts to a concern frown and he nods. He reaches over and rests a hand on Buck’s knee under the table, squeezing gently. “Well, Chris doesn’t have any homework, so we were thinking of starting to build a space colony with his lego before bedtime if you want to join us for that.”
Chris’ eyes widen with joy. “Yeah, Buck! We’re gonna build a whole city.”
“You think I can help with only one hand?”
“You can be the foreman.” Chris says earnestly. “I’m the architect.”
“What’s your dad gonna do?”
Eddie removes his hand from Buck’s knee and grabs his drink. “I’m the muscle. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Buck watches in silence as Chris and Eddie finish eating; Chris looks so content, so comfortable and at ease and it sends a pang through his chest. This is what family dinner is supposed to look like. No pressure or judgment, just love. He knows he’s only on the edges of the Diaz family, but now more than ever he feels lucky to have stumbled into that much. For some reason, despite everything, Eddie wants him here, and Buck will do everything he can to stay.
“Chris, why don’t you go get the lego out and set up?” Eddie suggests once Chris has cleared his plate. “Buck and I will clean up in here. We’ll come meet you in a few minutes.” Chris agrees to the suggestion, pushes away from the table and heads down the hallway. Eddie waits for him to be out of sight before turning his attention to Buck. “What happened?”
Buck still doesn’t want to answer. But now he doesn’t have the excuse of Chris being present to keep him from speaking. He has to tell Eddie something. He looks down at his lap, gathering his thoughts and every ounce of restraint and control he can muster to keep his emotions at bay. “My parents just…made it clear that as far as they’re concerned I’m no longer a part of the family.”
Eddie’s eyes darken. “No longer a part of the…what does that mean?”
“Their exact words were that if they never saw my face again it would be too soon.” Buck relates. Saying it now, it comes out flat. He can feel the hurt roiling beneath his skin, but places as much distance as he can between himself and the feeling. He treats it like working a house fire or an accident scene--there’s no room for emotional reactions to what’s happened, he just has to get the job done.
“Did they say why?” Eddie looks so confused, like he can’t imagine any parent disowning their child. Buck supposes it’s because his problems with his parents have always stemmed from his parents clinging too hard, not trying to put distance between them.
“That’s a long story. Longer than we have right now.” And Buck doesn’t know if he wants to share it. If Eddie knows how broken he is, he might not want him around anymore. It’s like his parents said, he’s not exactly father material.
Eddie doesn’t push. “What did Maddie say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“What?”
“I don’t know if she was just surprised, or if she agreed with them. But she didn’t fight with them.”
Eddie stands and steps behind Buck. He bends down, running his hands down Buck’s shoulders and resting his chin on top of his head. “I’m so sorry, hermoso.”
“It’s…what it is.” Buck sighs. “I’ve known I’m not the son they wanted for a long time.”
“That’s not an excuse. If you commit to having a child, you love the child you get. Full stop.”
“That’s not what the Buckleys believe.”
“They’re wrong. They don’t deserve you.”
The pair stays in silence for a moment, Buck just soaking up the comfort and support he can feel coming off of Eddie. Maybe it’s selfish of him to want to enjoy this, but after the night he’s had he can’t help but indulge himself.
“If you want, we can talk more later, after Christopher goes to bed.” Eddie offers. “But for now I think I have to go build that space colony. You don’t have to help if you don’t feel up to it. Chris’ll understand.”
“No, I want to.” Buck clears his throat, starting to stand. “I think some time with Chris will be good.”
Eddie turns him gently where he stands and presses a kiss to his lips. “Whatever you need.”
“I love you too. Stay safe.” Buck hangs up his phone and scrubs his hand over his face. A check-in with Eddie about halfway through his 24-hour-shift had been a nice distraction from his night alone, giving him something to do other than feeling guilty for not feeling hungry in spite of what he knows is a delicious soup dropped off by Eddie’s abuela when she had picked Chris up for a sleepover, but now that it’s over with and he doesn’t have Eddie’s voice in his ear, the reality of the night sets in.
He has twelve hours, closer to thirteen really, alone. He doesn’t think he could sleep for all of them, even if he tried (even though there’s an aching exhaustion deep in his bones) but other than sleep he can’t do much besides scroll on his phone, watch TV, and think.
And thinking is dangerous.
He knows his brain is a bad place to be right now and that he should stay as far from his thoughts as possible. He quickly settles on TV and heads to the living room, planting himself on the couch, remote in hand. He knows he doesn’t want the manufactured drama of totally trashy reality tv like he might watch on a wine night with Maddie, so he decides a competition show is the way to go and lands on the latest season of MasterChef Junior.
Kids making recipes he could only hope to tackle one day ought to be distracting enough. Maybe he should take notes. He can plan a nice dinner for Eddie and Chris.
Buck settles onto the couch, letting the personalities of the precocious and talented children wash over him. He zones in on the show, losing track of time while they cook complicated dishes hoping to endear themselves to the judges. Everything is fine. Until it’s not.
You should kill yourself.
The thought comes out of nowhere. The kids on the screen are rushing around making souffles. Nothing is wrong. But still he thinks it.
You should kill yourself.
The thought doesn’t go away. Buck tries to counter it, to refocus on the show, to think of literally anything else but his brain goes right back to it.
You should kill yourself.
He tries to press his fingers into his healing surgical scar, but instead of the sharp, throbbing pain he longs for the sensation is dull and muted, and it does nothing to pull him back from the edge.
You should kill yourself.
And the thing is, he knows it would be easy.
Sure there’s no guns in the house, and he’s not at his apartment so he doesn’t have a roof or a balcony to throw himself off of, but there are other methods and those ways don’t appeal to him anyways. The kitchen is full of knives that would do the trick; just take a couple of aspirin to thin out his blood and go to town on his wrists or his femoral artery and he could be dead in minutes. He just…doesn’t want to leave a mess.
But there are pills. So many pills. Painkillers leftover from surgery, sleeping pills that he didn’t want to take…
Before Buck knows it, he’s standing in the bathroom with the medicine cabinet open, staring at the little orange bottles.
It would be easy.
Just take them all. No one would miss you.
He blinks and he’s back in the living room, on the couch with the pill bottles laid out on the coffee table in front of him. He has a bottle of water. The kids on TV are still cooking away.
He could take the pills and be long gone by morning. Could type out an email to Eddie on his phone. Being at work, he wouldn’t see it until it was too late. Buck could say goodbye to him and Christopher and just…take the pills.
It would be easy.
You’d be doing everyone a favor. They don’t need a worthless, selfish piece of shit like you around.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, staring at the pills. Thinking about taking them. Circling around all of his thoughts, trying to convince himself that it’s the wrong thing to do, but always landing right back at the beginning.
You should kill yourself.
Buck’s hand shakes. He reaches for his phone.
Buck’s phone buzzes in his hand. He doesn’t have to look to know it’s Steve, his old commander, but he stares at the screen anyways. If he answers this is real. He’ll have to talk. If he ignores the call…
The pill bottles stare at him from the coffee table.
It takes him two attempts to swipe his thumb across the screen and accept the facetime call. He angles the phone to his face, but can’t choke out a greeting. Steve stares seriously back at him.
“Talk to me, Buck. What’s going on?”
Buck coughs, suddenly choked by a ball of tears clinging to the back of his throat. “I need you to talk to me. Keep me from doing something stupid.”
Steve nods. “What kind of stupid are we talking about?”
Buck opens his mouth to answer and inhales deeply to try and steady himself. But the words won’t come out. He doesn’t know how to admit to this. Steve has guided him through some of the toughest challenges of his life and was one of the first people to show him what family really means. To tell him how weak he is now…feels impossible. Eventually he turns the phone around to show Steve the bottles lined up on the table, knowing he can put the pieces together.
“OK. OK. I see where you’re at.” Steve’s voice goes a little softer. “Can you turn the phone back around so I can look at you?” Buck complies. “That’s good. Now, I’m guessing you’re alone right now?”
“My partner’s at work.” Buck blinks, trying to fight back his tears. It’s bad enough he’s doing this. He’s not going to cry.
“All right. So tell me what’s going through your head. Talk to me.”
“I just…I’m so tired.”
“TIred, tired like physically?”
“Like my brain won’t stop telling me what a fuck-up I am.”
“Well you’re gonna have to fill me in because the Buck I know is far from a fuck-up.”
And Buck doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to explain this. Not in any way that’s going to make any sense to his commander. He knows he’s never even considered…this. Would never. The words that come out of his mouth aren’t what he expects. “I-I got my partner shot.”
“The sniper wasn’t your fault, Buck.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be there. He--he just came with me because I was filing a report with internal affairs.”
“Sounds like he was backing you up. Just like my partner would back me up.”
“But I shouldn’t have needed him. I shouldn’t have needed to file the report.” Buck protests. “I was just so…pathetic and--and weak, and I didn’t save myself.”
“Hey, you know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as a one man army. We work in teams because we can’t always do it all.”
“Yeah, well, I should have been able to do this.”
A beat passes. Buck doesn’t spend much time looking because he doesn’t want to see how pathetic Steve thinks he is but he knows his commander is considering his options of what to say next.
“Buck, what are we talking about here? Did a rescue go wrong?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then what happened?”
“Af--After the truck bombing, to come back to work, my captain wanted me to get a psych eval. So I went. And the doctor she…” Even after giving his formal statement to internal affairs Buck struggles to find the words. Not that he’s trying. He’s avoided the subject with Eddie, and he hasn’t heard anything more from Captain Hinckley and the investigation, so he hasn’t had to do much with it outside of his own brain. And it’s not a subject he tries to think about. “The doctor told me that if I wanted to be cleared to work I needed to sleep with her. And--and I froze. I didn’t do anything except let her do whatever she wanted, and that--that was so stupid, and--and weak.
“And it’s just like me to fuck something so easy up.” He continues. He’s vaguely aware that tears have started falling and he sniffs, but he can’t wipe them away. His good hand is holding the phone. “It’s why everybody leaves. I’m just this…useless, piece of shit fuck-up that’s only good for work and I can’t even stay on the job because I’m always getting hurt and taking up everyone’s time and energy when they have family and lives and their own, real problems to get back to. Things go wrong around me and I-I put people in danger and if I’m not doing that I’m--There’s something wrong with me.
“I’m broken and--and too much and people don’t want that around to mess everything up. I just get in the way and make everything worse and--,”
“And you need to stop and breathe.” Steve commands. “With me. In..and out…Just like you would if we were staking out a target. In…and out…” He repeats the words a few more times and Buck’s breath hitches as he inhales but he does his best to follow along. “Good. That’s good. You can’t think clearly or listen if you’re not breathing. And I want you to listen to me. Can you do that?”
Buck nods.
“Words, Buck.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. First things first. You are not a fuck-up. Because you’re one of mine, and I don’t let fuck-ups on my team.”
“But--,”
“But nothing. Are you questioning my judgment?”
“No, but--,”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“No.”
“Then trust me when I tell you, Evan Buckley is not a fuck-up. And I don’t believe for a minute that you are broken, or useless, or weak, or anything else you’ve got spinning around in that head of yours.”
“Then why can’t I put these pills away?”
“Because you need help. And that doesn’t make you weak, or stupid. It just means you’ve been through a lot. And I think deep down you know that, or else you wouldn’t have texted me.”
“‘Cause every time one of us left you made us promise that we’d come to you if we ever needed help. And if I didn’t text you I was… I think I was gonna kill myself.” Buck chokes on a sob.
“But you didn’t. You kept your promise, and you’re talking to me now. You’re doing good, Buck.” Steve pauses. “Does your partner know what’s been going on?”
“Some of it. I don’t want to burden him. He’s got his own stuff, and his son…”
“If this guy is worth anything, he’d want to know.”
“He’s worth everything. But…I’m already staying with him while my arm’s healing, and he’s already done so much for me, and…and I don’t want to be too much.”
“I don’t know who told you that that was a possibility but they’re wrong. If people really care about you, you can’t be too much for them.”
“Then…I guess a lot of people don’t really care about me.”
“And that’s their loss. You are a good person, Buck. One of the best people I know. And if people can’t see that, they aren’t paying attention.”
“Or they see something wrong with me that you don’t.”
“So now I’m stupid? I’ve trained for years to observe people and figure out exactly who they are but you’re the exception that gets past me?”
“Well…no, but--,”
“Here’s what’s gonna happen. You and I are gonna stay on the phone. We’re gonna talk about whatever you want, anything that keeps you safe, until your partner gets home, and then you and I will talk to him, together, and we’re all gonna work together to figure out what we can do to get you through this. It’s just like we used to do. We make a goal and we fight our way through the shit until we reach it. Are you with me?”
Buck takes a deep, shuddering breath. His head is screaming at him that Steve is wrong, that talking to Eddie is going to ruin everything, and he really won’t have anything left. But he only made it to the LAFD and even having this much to lose from trusting Steve. He has to believe that Steve wouldn’t lead him wrong.
“Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
Notes:
Buck is actively suicidal in this chapter; he does not complete an attempt, but he actively considers his options in detail.
Chapter Text
“OK, I think I get it.” Steve says with a light laugh. “You weren’t sure of your place on the team and you also thought he was hot and all of that came together to make you act a little…unfriendly. What changed?”
Buck smiles just thinking about it. He and Steve have been on their video call for hours now, long through the night, talking a bit more about what’s been going on with him and when he hit his limit, switching to Steve telling some lengthy and amusing anecdotes about his work and team in Hawaii. Eventually that conversation had dwindled and Steve had started probing into Eddie, wanting to learn more about the man Buck was working and living with. Buck was happy to share something about his life that doesn’t hurt. “Well, we got this call…a military enthusiast was cleaning some of his collection and shot a grenade into his leg. We were told it was a practice round, figured that was why he hadn’t just been killed immediately, and left it in his leg to get him to the hospital for surgeons to remove it. Eddie and I were transporting him.”
Steve’s expression is deadpan. “Knowing what I do about your luck, I’m guessing it wasn’t a practice round.”
“Eddie was checking on the wound when he saw the gold cap.” Buck confirms. “We pulled over and got in touch with the bomb squad but by the time anyone official could get to us to take care of it the patient would have bled out.”
“You took it out yourselves, didn’t you?”
“Eddie was familiar with ordinance from his time in the army, and no one knew it but I wasn’t exactly inexperienced…We were the best option the guy had. And you really have no room to talk about unsanctioned work with explosives.”
“No judgment.” Steve holds his free hand up. “You did what you had to do. And there’s nothing like a high stakes mission to bring people together.”
“Yeah, that’s how it worked. After that we teamed up during this massive earthquake and we worked so well together. And then I met his son and he’s just…the greatest kid. I don’t think I’ve ever clicked with anyone the way I did with them.”
“They sound like good people.”
“The best. I don’t know how I would have handled--,” Buck drops off. He can hear a truck pulling into the driveway. His heart jumps into his throat. His reaction must show on his face because before he knows it Steve is frowning.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Eddie’s home.”
“Buck, I know you’re worried, but I promise you, I wouldn’t be helping you do this if I didn’t think it was the best course of action.” Steve says, voice steady. “And I’m not hanging up this phone until you tell me to. You’re not alone.”
Outside a car door shuts. It’s all Buck can do to hold the phone steady. “Remind me of the goal?” He hates how small his voice sounds.
“You, me, and Eddie are gonna make a plan to get you through the next couple of days so you have time to figure out what you want to try to help you get your head back on straight.”
“And if he freaks out?”
“I don’t think he will.” The front door opens. “But if he does, you will still have me, and we will figure this out. We’re gonna get you through this.”
Buck closes his eyes. Focuses on breathing. When he opens them again, Eddie is in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“Hey, how was your night? Have you had breakfast yet?”
Buck’s head snaps towards his partner. Eddie looks worn, but not exhausted--they probably didn’t have a busy night at the station, but that doesn’t make him feel any better about being about to drop a metaphorical bomb on him. “No, I’ve been, uh, a little preoccupied.”
“I could fry up some eggs and toast before I crash if you--,” Eddie cuts himself off. “Oh sorry, I didn’t realize you were on the phone.”
“No, that’s all right.” Steve says from the phone. “Buck and I were actually waiting for you.”
Eddie’s brow furrows as he crosses over to the couch. Buck can only guess at what he’s thinking, probably questioning why Buck is even on the phone with someone he doesn’t know and wondering why they’d be waiting for him. “Did I forget about something we had scheduled?” He takes a seat next to Buck, their thighs pressing together.
“No, this was just, uh…” Buck falters as he tries to explain. There’s no good way to say it. He settles for skirting around the issue. “Eds, this is Commander Steve McGarrett, my old CO.”
“Oh!” Some light finds Eddie’s eyes and he smiles as he looks at the phone. “It’s great to meet you Commander. Buck has told me a lot about you.”
“Just Steve is fine.”
“Eddie.” Eddie nods. “But I thought Buck mentioned that you live in Hawaii now. Isn’t it only…5:30 in the morning there?” Buck watches as his partner glances at him and takes in what he’s sure is his worn-down appearance. The light in his eyes fades as a concerned frown takes over. “Have you been up all night?”
Buck opens his mouth to answer but he can’t find the words. He and Steve didn’t actually plan this part. He doesn’t want to rely on Steve, wants to do what he can to mitigate the worry that he’s about to lay across Eddie’s shoulders, but he’s frozen. He might not keep breathing if not for Steve stepping up and speaking for him.
“Buck reached out to me last night while you were on shift.”
Eddie’s gaze swaps back and forth between the screen and Buck, looking for answers that Buck knows aren’t going to come unless he talks.
“I needed help.” That’s easy enough to say, as long as he doesn’t look at Eddie while he says it. “I thought I might--,” Nope. That’s not gonna work. Buck tries again. “I was going to--” Nope. That’s not it either. He shrinks back. “I needed help.”
“Help with what?” Eddie asks. And just after the question is out his eyes land on the coffee table, on the row of prescription bottles. “Buck…?”
When Buck can’t find it in himself to answer, Steve speaks up again. “Buck, do you want me to tell him?”
“Please?”
“Buck reached out to me because he was seriously considering killing himself.”
Almost instantly, Eddie’s hand is on Buck’s knee, squeezing. Buck is staring at the phone, but he feels Eddie’s eyes on him. Steve keeps talking.
“We talked through the height of that urge, but I didn’t want to leave him alone after that and Buck agreed that when you got back we would loop you in and start figuring out what kind of help makes the most sense for him.”
“Buck…Evan…” Eddie chokes out. “Are you--...Is he--...Why?”
Buck would love to have Steve keep talking, but he knows this answer has to come from him. And that if he’s really going to be getting help, he’s going to have to get used to talking about it. He doesn’t want Eddie to look at him any differently, but really, he figures that ship has sailed. He already knows how weak he is. “I just…everything about me feels wrong. Or--or broken. And everyone realizes that eventually and…it just makes sense to save everyone the trouble and take myself out of the picture.”
“No.” Eddie shakes his head. “No, are you kidding me? That does not make sense. How can you even think that?”
Buck flinches and nearly drops the phone. Eddie sounds angry. This is exactly what he was worried about. He hurries to find some way to assuage his partner. “I know, I’m stupid, and I--,”
“You’re damn right it’s stupid!”
“Eddie!” Steve commands attention from the phone. “Take a breath and think.”
The grip on Buck’s knee relaxes as Eddie complies. “I’m sorry.” He apologizes, gaze softer, but no less worried. “I know I shouldn’t get mad and I need to let you talk, but you have to know that that is not how I feel or how Chris feels, or even Abuela and Tia Pepa. We would be…devastated if anything happened to you. And it is…I can’t even explain how scared it makes me to find out that you’re feeling like this.”
Buck looks down at his lap. “It scares me too.” He admits, voice thickening with tears. “I just…don’t know what else I can do.” He starts to cry, not for the first time since he’s been on the call, far too exhausted to try and keep anything back at this point. Eddie lets go of his knee and wraps his arm around Buck’s shoulder instead, drawing him closer.
“That’s why you have us.” Steve says. “We can figure this out.” A couple beats pass, and Buck tries to reign his emotions back in. “Now, I know Buck is currently off work because of his arm. Eddie, when is your next shift?”
“Two days from now. Thursday.”
“Good. That gives me some time to get things squared away here and fly out.”
“What? No.” Buck protests. “You don’t have to do that.”
Steve just nods. “I think I do. One of my team calls me for help and I have the power to do something for them, I’m gonna do it.”
“But your task force--,”
“Can survive a case or two without me.” Steve finishes. “This is not something I’m negotiating on Buck. I’m coming back to the mainland while we get you through this.”
Buck knows the tone Steve is using and realizes he can’t argue with him. He’s going full commander on this. “OK.”
“Do you want to talk now about treatment options and what you feel up to doing or--,”
“No.” Buck shakes his head. His skin crawls at the thought. “I know we’ll have to eventually but…I can’t. Not right now.”
“That’s fine.” Steve agrees. “But since we’re not diving into treatment right away we still need a plan that supports you and keeps you safe for the next few days.”
“Buck’s already living with me.” Eddie says. “Between me and Carla and the rest of my family, we can make sure that he’s not alone. We don’t have to tell them why if you don’t want,” he adds, casting his eyes towards Buck, “we can just say that your arm isn’t healing up as fast as the doctors thought it would and you need a little extra support to navigate things.”
“Is that OK with you Buck?”
It’s a good deal. Buck realizes that. If he had called 911 and they had responded, he’d already be at a hospital, under a three-day-hold, and it would be going on his record and he’d probably never see the inside of a firehouse again. He wants to agree, but it’s not just Eddie’s house. “What about Chris? I don’t know if I can keep hiding this, and I don’t want to scare him or--or do anything that will upset or hurt him. Maybe I should move back to the loft and I can just call you and check in as much as you want me to.”
“Buck, I love that you always put Chris first, but right now I really need you to think about what would be best for you.” Eddie takes his arm from around Buck’s shoulders and gently but forcibly guides Buck so he’s angling his body, looking at him. “I know, without question, that you would never do anything to harm Christopher. He’s old enough to understand that adults get sick and sad and can’t always be at their best. We can figure out a kid-friendly way to explain this to him. Or I can talk to either Carla or Pepa a bit more in depth and I’m sure he can stay with them. But I don’t want you to leave. Especially not if you’d feel safer staying.”
Buck closes his eyes, trying his best to ignore the voice telling him how much he’s ruining things and being a burden, and to focus instead on what would actually help him. “I want to stay.”
“Then you’ll stay.” Eddie presses a kiss to his forehead.
“OK. Good. I’ll send you my flight details as soon as I get that squared away.” Steve informs. “And you’ll keep me updated until I get there.”
“Regular check-ins.” Eddie confirms.
“Then with that settled I think we all should get some rest. Buck, what’s the goal?”
“Trust you and Eddie. Get through the next few days. Make a plan with you two.”
“Good man. Call me if anything changes. Get some sleep.”
“You too.”
The call disconnects. For a moment Buck doesn’t know what to do. His whole purpose since texting Steve last night has been staying on the line with him. That had been hard enough that he hadn’t put much thought into what would come next.
Eddie reaches over and plucks the phone out of Buck’s hand, putting it down on the coffee table. It’s impossible for Buck to miss the way his eyes linger on the pill bottles, but soon enough his partner’s attention is back on him. Both arms wrap around Buck, and Eddie rests his forehead against his. “Thank you for calling Steve. For not giving up.”
“I was…so scared.” Buck admits.
“That makes two of us.”
“I…didn’t know what to do. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how worthless I am.”
“You’re not worthless. You’re so far from worthless.”
“I’m…trying to believe that.”
They sit there for a moment, breathing with each other. Buck wants to sit there and soak in the comfort; Eddie is caging him in with his arms and it goes a long way towards making him feel less alone. Eddie didn’t immediately kick him to the curb for being a complete hassle and waste of space, and that’s a good thing, but Buck’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop; if he can pretend that things are gonna be OK for a little while longer he’s going to do it.
“I, uh, don’t want to pressure you.” Eddie says, pulling back. “I know you’ve been up all night, and probably just want to crash, and that none of this is easy to talk about but…you were going to overdose, right? That’s why these pill bottles are out?”
Buck looks at the coffee table. Remembers going from the medicine cabinet to the living room without even realizing he had gathered the medication. Hating himself even more, he nods. “Yeah. It…seemed like the easiest way.”
Eddie swallows. “So, would you feel better if they were out of the house?”
“I…yeah.”
“OK. I’ll get rid of them. What about things like alcohol? Or razors and knives and stuff?”
They’re all reasonable questions, but Buck can’t help the way his heart starts to pound as he considers the answer. He doesn’t want to overturn Eddie’s life. “No. No. I’m already messing everything up to make you be my babysitter. You don’t need to turn the entire house upside down just because--,”
“Buck. Think about yourself. Please. Would you feel better if that stuff was out of the house?”
“I don’t care about the alcohol. Or the razors.” Buck answers slowly. “I know the knives are the most complicated since we need to cook, but…maybe if we could just put them away somewhere? So they aren’t out where I can see them?”
“We’ll figure it out.” Eddie confirms. “Can you think of anything else that would help?”
Buck does his best to try and think. His partner is being so nice and gentle and better than he ever would have expected anyone to be and he doesn’t want to mess that up so if Eddie is asking something of him, he needs to try and do it. If he doesn’t make the effort, why would Eddie? But he can’t think of anything else that doesn’t sound ridiculously needy or childish. “Not right now. Just sleep I think.” He watches the gears turn in Eddie’s head.
“Go get in bed and get comfortable. I’ll be in in a couple minutes. I just want to get this stuff cleaned up.”
Before Eddie can stand up, Buck leans forward and wraps his good arm around him, pulling him close. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“Everything. You just worked a 24-hour-shift and you should be getting to come home and rest, not deal with a bunch of issues in my head.”
“You don’t have to apologize for not being OK, hermoso. We’re partners right?”
“Yeah.”
“And partners take care of each other, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let me take care of you. Just like I know you would take care of me.”
Buck sighs. He doesn’t feel right about it, but he can’t argue with it. “OK. I love you.”
Eddie’s lips press gently against his. “I love you too.”
“And then she turned the lights off and used a special flashlight and the flowers glowed in the dark!” Chris crows from his place in the backseat of Eddie’s truck. They’re driving home from the school pick-up. Chris is his usual self, a ball full of excited energy that spills over as he shares all about his day. Eddie is engaged, asking all the right questions and glancing at the rear-view mirror every once in a while so his son knows that he’s paying attention; Buck on the other hand feels frozen.
Chris is happy. He has Eddie by his side, holding his hand even as he drives. Everything is good. But his brain won’t stop telling him all the ways he could ruin this.
You’re too broken for this. You’re going to hurt Chris.
“She gave us a sheet that explains how to make flowers change colors at home.” Chris continues. “I thought you and I could do it this weekend, Buck!”
Buck hears the words, knows they’re addressed to him but he can’t make himself respond.
You should kill yourself.
When he doesn’t answer right away, Eddie glances over. He squeezes his hand and directs his attention towards his son. “Buck might be a little busy this weekend, bud. He has an old friend coming to visit. But if he can’t do it, you and I will, OK?”
“OK.” Chris agrees, a little less energy in his voice.
You did that. You disappointed him. You’ll always disappoint him.
Stupid.
Selfish.
Worthless.
“What else happened today?” Eddie prompts.
Chris lights up once more, launching into a story about some game his friends from another class taught him at recess. Buck does his best to stay present and listen--he doesn’t want to disappoint Chris or let him know that something is wrong--but he barely feels rested from the nap Eddie had woken him up from to go to the school pick-up and the entire day has been unsettling.
Buck is used to dealing with these things on his own. Yes, he had made the decision to reach out to Steve and get help. Telling him the truth had been his choice. But it still feels so wrong to have people know what he is thinking and struggling with. He’s supposed to be on his own. He’s not good enough for this.
Buck barely registers the rest of the drive back to Eddie’s, and doesn’t realize how deep into his own head he’s gotten until his partner is gently shaking his knee. They’re parked in Eddie’s driveway, and a glance to the backseat shows that Chris is gone--probably already inside.
“There you are.” Eddie says softly when Buck’s eyes find his. He wraps his fingers back around Buck’s hand. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.” Buck answers quickly. And he’s not going to say anything else, because what would he say? How do you possibly tell someone that making plans with their kid, something you normally love and are excited to do, prompted you to want to kill yourself? Again. “Where’s Chris?”
“I got him set up inside and came back out for you.”
Which means Chris knows something is wrong. Eddie probably hasn’t said anything yet, but the boy is observant; he’ll have realized that Buck wasn’t all there in the car and that his dad was having to take care of both of them.
“Shit, Eddie, I’m sorry.” Buck apologizes quickly. His mind races, trying to formulate a plan to make things better. “I shouldn’t have let myself get so distracted. I knew this was a bad idea. If you can just distract him while I get my stuff together, I’ll call an Uber and get back to my place and you can get things back to normal with him. He doesn’t need me around to--,”
“Hey, no, none of that.” Eddie protests. His tone stays even and calm, though Buck has no idea how. He’s turning his entire life upside down. “Maybe I wasn’t clear when we talked about this earlier, but I am not worried about you being around Christopher, or having to explain this to him. He is smart and mature and we can find the right way to tell him so he can understand why you’re not up for the same things right now.”
“But you shouldn’t have to.”
“Spend a bit longer taking care of him with me and you’ll realize that the list of things you shouldn’t have to do as a parent is different for every kid. You are a part of mine and Christopher’s lives. That means this is an explanation he gets. Just like Athena and Michael had to explain to Harry and May the reality of traffic stops as a black person, or the conversations Hen and Karen have had to have with Denny about having two moms.”
It’s not that Buck doesn’t believe Eddie, but he can’t help but feel guilty anyways. This feels like taking something away from Chris, even though he’s not sure exactly what that is. Not to mention he can’t begin to figure out a kid-friendly way to describe how he’s feeling. He can barely find words to talk to Steve and Eddie. “I don’t…I don’t know if I’ll be much help.”
“I can take the lead.” Eddie nods. “But I think it will help Chris if you’re there and he can see you’re not going anywhere.”
“I…can go with what you think is best.” Buck finally decides, even though he’s still not sure if it’s a good idea or not. “But I need you to promise me that you’re still putting him first. If he gets upset or scared I need you to take care of him, not worry about me.”
An indiscernible expression flashes across Eddie’s face, but everything quickly returns to the soft, caring expression Buck has gotten used to from his partner. “I think you’ll find I can worry about both of you. But yes. Chris still comes first. As long as you can promise me not to run off and to talk through whatever happens with me.” Buck nods. He’s pretty sure he can do that. “OK then. Do you want another minute or do you want to head in?”
Buck knows himself well enough to know that he will continue to panic and spiral if he stays outside. “Better to pull the bandaid off.”
As they exit the truck, Eddie reminds Buck that talking to Chris is usually significantly easier than ripping off a bandaid that’s a little stuck, and before he knows it they’re joining Chris in the kitchen where the boy has his homework folder out and is waiting for an after school snack. Eddie motions for Buck to sit down with him. “Hey Chris, before you have a snack can we talk to you about something?”
Chris nods. “Are you OK, Buck?”
“I, uh…what makes you ask that, bud?” Buck’s heart leaps into his throat and his mouth goes dry, but he forces himself to answer anyways; Eddie said he would take the lead but it’s not fair to make him do everything.
“You were really quiet on the way home.” Chris says, matter-of-factly. “And dad wouldn’t stop holding your hand. He doesn’t normally do that when he’s driving.”
“You’re right, Superman. I’m not feeling all that good.”
“Because of your arm?”
“Not exactly.” Eddie shakes his head. “You know how when your mom died you were really sad? For a really long time?”
Chris’ eyes darken and he frowns. “Yeah. Did someone in your family die, Buck?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“I was just using that as an example, Chris.” Eddie says, voice soft. “Sometimes we have reasons we get sad, like a person dying, but sometimes we just feel sad. And when we feel that way it can be really hard to do the things we would normally do or feel like ourselves.”
“And Buck’s sad?”
“Yeah, Buck’s sad.” Eddie confirms. “And it’s not because of anything we did, but he might not always feel up to doing things with us, just like there were a lot of things you didn’t want to do when you were sad.” Chris pushes his chair away from the table and stands up. “Chris?”
“I have to get something from my room.” Chris answers. “I’ll be right back.”
As his son walks down the hall, Eddie looks at Buck. “I told you he’d be OK.”
“We don’t know what he’s doing right now.” Buck argues. He doesn’t really think it’s anything bad--Eddie is right that Chris doesn’t seem particularly upset, maybe just a little quiet as he tries to think everything through and process--but as with everything unknown, he finds himself doubting how positive things could possibly be.
“You heard him. He has something he needs to get.”
They don’t say anything else, just wait for a minute until Chris comes back into the kitchen. He has what looks to Buck like a fuzzy, gray ball clutched in one hand, and instead of retaking his seat, he stops in front of Buck, holding the ball out.
“This is Armando.” Chris begins, as Buck takes the item from his hand. Looking at it more carefully, Buck realizes it’s not a ball, but a worn and well-loved stuffed animal--an armadillo he thinks. There’s a bandana that looks like the Texas flag tied around its neck. “Dad got him for me when I was really little. Back when he only saw me once in a while because of the army. I always hug him when I’m feeling sad or alone and he reminds me that I’ll always have my dad.”
“That sounds like a pretty good friend to have.”
“And you live with us, so we can always hug you if you want,” Chris adds, “but I thought maybe you’d want to borrow him. That way if I’m at school and dad is at work you still have someone to hug.”
Little pinpricks of tears spring to the corners of Buck’s eyes; he loves this kid. “Are you sure, Chris?”
Chris nods. “I know you’ll take good care of him.”
“I promise.” Buck agrees. “But since I have you here, can I get one of your hugs now? Your dad has been taking care of me today and he’s really good, but I think I could use some of that Christopher Diaz magic.”
Chris launches forward, throwing his arms around Buck’s neck. “I love you, Buck.”
“I love you too, Bud."
Chapter 13
Notes:
So sorry about the delay with this chapter! My own mental health took a slight nose dive and I got very distracted by some smoke alarm malfunctions in my home. Hopefully things will be a bit smoother with the next chapter :)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Buck wakes up and his skin is crawling.
They’d had a relatively easy night, considering how hard the past 36 hours had been. Eddie had ordered pizza and once Chris had taken care of his one take-home worksheet for the night, the family had done nothing more strenuous than cuddling up on the couch and introducing the youngest to Mythbusters. Buck had been exhausted enough that falling asleep once he and Eddie went to bed was less of an effort and more of an inevitability.
But the sleep doesn’t last and Buck dreams, though he couldn’t say for sure what he dreams about. There’s a lot of flashes and pain and hands and talking.
And he wakes up in a pitch black room with Eddie’s arms around him and what should be a gesture of comfort just feels suffocating and uncomfortable.
His skin crawls and his stomach rolls and Buck scrambles along the sheets. He doesn’t want to wake Eddie but really the only thing he can think is get out, get out, get out, so his efforts to get out of bed and away from everything are less than gentle or graceful.
He fumbles and his foot gets caught between Eddie’s ankles and the duvet and Buck crashes to the floor without any time to extend his arms to catch himself. For a moment the room lights up. His vision whites out as he lands on top of his bad arm and agony shoots through it. Barely a second later his head bounces off the ground.
“Buck?”
Buck is too focused on breathing and not vomiting to answer. He rolls onto his back, clenching his jaw as the movement shifts his arm again; his lungs feel a little less compressed once they’re flat against the floor and although his heart is still racing and his head is still trying to tell him that it’s not safe and he needs to leave, he forces himself to lie still and breathe and not make things worse.
The light on the bedside table clicks on, bathing the room in a soft, warm light.
“Buck, hey, talk to me. What happened?”
The voice is soft and belongs to Eddie. Buck is staring at the ceiling, trying to ground himself in the reality of being safe in Eddie’s room and not wherever he was in the dream, but he’s not unaware, even as he struggles to do so, that his partner is coming around the bed and kneeling down next to him.
He still can’t answer.
The pain in his arm is ebbing back to the sort of throbbing ache he had felt when he had first gotten shot and broken it, and that’s manageable, but the whole experience of the dream and subsequent panic has turned his stomach. He’s swallowing around bile and saliva and trying not to think about how disgusting that is, lest he start gagging and having to try and race to the bathroom.
“Can I touch you?” Eddie’s hand hovers over his shoulder.
Buck nods. Eddie’s hand comes down gently, and to Buck’s relief this time it feels like the touch of his boyfriend. As his system recalibrates and it really registers that whatever his dream had been about it was all in his head, as he catches his breath and his heart catches up to the reality of the situation, he just feels stupid. He’d woken up Eddie, after worrying him all day, fallen out of bed--possibly reinjuring his arm--and practically had a panic attack and for what? A nightmare that he can’t even remember?
How ridiculous is he?
“OK. Just keep breathing. Did you hurt anything when you fell? It sounded rough.”
You’re not worth this.
“It was just a nightmare.” Buck chokes out. “It’s fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m fine.” He corrects. Now that the nausea is backing down, he just wants to move on and let Eddie get back to sleep. He’s already caused so much trouble.
You’re too much.
Buck tries to push himself up, and he doesn’t think. He didn’t wear his sling to bed so he uses both arms and another lightning bolt of pain shoots up the limb. He can’t catch himself and falls back to the floor. “Fuck.”
“Your arm?” Eddie asks, and Buck nods. It’s not like he can hide it now. “OK.” Eddie’s frown deepens. He gently probes at Buck’s surgical scar, and to Buck’s chagrin, the arm aches with the examination and he can’t prevent his sharp inhale. “I think you need to get this checked out. I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is a new disfiguration or just the scar tissue left over from your surgery but it’s clearly bothering you.”
“No, I just need to ice it for a bit.” Buck shakes his head. He lets Eddie help him up into a sitting position. “It’ll be fine if I put the sling back on.”
“You could have dislodged the hardware or refractured the bone when you fell on it.” Eddie counters. “You need an x-ray.”
“And you and Chris need to sleep.”
Judging by the look that flashes across Eddie’s face, this is not the compelling argument that Buck wanted to make. He sighs. “How long a debate is this gonna be if I press the issue?”
Buck doesn’t know what that means. It’s not a debate. He’s not actively dying or anything which means Chris needs to come first. He has school tomorrow, they can’t just wake him up and drag him to sit around a hospital. “Look, if I hadn’t woken you up we wouldn’t even be having this conversation--,”
“Because you have this habit of trying to handle everything yourself.” Eddie counters. “And you don’t need to do that.”
“What I don’t need to do is to completely disrupt everybody’s lives.” Buck has to look away under the scrutiny of Eddie’s gaze; he can’t read his partner’s expression and after such a vulnerable day it leaves him feeling too exposed for comfort.
Eddie sighs again. “OK. Compromise. We get you back in the sling and put some ice packs on that arm. Then we go have some tea to give your system some time to resettle from the dream, maybe get a couple more hours of sleep, and in the morning you go get an x-ray. No arguments.”
“How is you staying up with me a compromise?”
“You not going to the hospital immediately is the compromise. Me staying up with you is a given.”
With the throbbing in his arm so prevalent, Buck can’t argue with the sling or the ice. He doesn’t even really want to argue the tea; he’d prefer hot chocolate but he knows the tea will be better for his still churning stomach. He lets Eddie help him to his feet.
“Go to the kitchen. I’ll get your sling.”
Buck complies, because what else is he gonna do? He could argue with Eddie but that’s just making things harder than they have to be and he’s already putting too much on his partner. He doesn’t have to deliberately be difficult on top of that.
In the kitchen he puts the kettle on, and digs through the freezer to pull out an ice pack. He tries not to think about the burden he’s putting on Eddie. Because that’s what he’s doing. A relationship is meant to be give and take and Buck tries to be there for Eddie and support him, he does, but Eddie doesn’t open up and then Buck’s problems rear their ugly head and they’re big and he can’t keep a handle on them and they spill over and announce themselves and then suddenly their Eddie’s problems too.
And it’s not like Buck wants to deal with them on his own--knows that yesterday is proof that he can’t because dealing with them on his own would mean probably being dead--but none of the thoughts he’s having are things he wants to share. They’re things he actively avoids sharing normally. And even if sharing them is the right thing to do, doing so usually makes him feel like shit. Because sharing is putting a burden on someone else. Someone he cares about and doesn’t want to burden at all.
Eddie comes in, Buck’s sling in hand, and without words he gently maneuvers Buck’s arm, getting it into the sling and wrapped tightly against his chest; he grabs the ice pack and positions it inside the material of the sling.
“Sit.”
Buck does, taking one of the seats at the table. His eyes land on the kettle on the stove and he stares at it, barely blinking, while Eddie goes into the cupboards, pulling down a box of tea and two mugs.
“Do you need a pain pill?”
Buck can’t help but look up in shock, frowning. “I thought you got those out of the house.”
“I didn’t exactly have time to take them to a safe disposal site, Buck.” Eddie gives him a pointed look. “I made sure they were somewhere you wouldn’t find them if you were alone and looking to OD. But you obviously hurt things just now and it’s not doing you any favors to sit around in pain, so I can go get you a pill if you need it.”
Buck doesn’t know what the right answer is in this scenario, whether or not Eddie will worry about him more if he says yes or no to medication, but now that his arm is immobilized and the pain is just a throb going along with his pulse, it’s tolerable. Grounding even. He shakes his head. “No. No, I’m good.”
Eddie looks like he doesn’t believe him, but he doesn’t argue. He sets to work, removing tea bags from the box and placing one in each mug. “What was the plan?”
“What?”
“The plan.” Eddie repeats. “If I agreed with you and went back to bed or you didn’t wake me up in the first place, what were you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” And it’s not a lie. Buck’s not sure how he would have calmed himself down or how he would have managed taking care of his arm on his own or what he’d even do with going back to sleep not being an immediate option. He was more concerned with being unobtrusive than he was with figuring things out.
“But you didn’t want me to help.”
Buck doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what Eddie is hoping to hear.
The kettle starts to whistle, and Eddie turns off the burner and removes it from the stove before it can wake Chris. He pours water into each mug. “Is it because you don’t want to talk about your dream?”
“No, I don’t even really remember it.”
“Then what is it?” Eddie takes a seat, placing one of the steeping mugs in front of Buck.
Buck automatically wraps his free hand around the mug, letting the warmth seep in through his skin. He doesn’t speak. He could explain to Eddie that he doesn’t want to lay all his problems on him and be too much work, but even that feels like laying a problem on him. He has a feeling that normal people don’t think this much about what they share with their partners; they just do it. But he knows that even if his problems were minor, his personality and reactions are big and that makes things a lot to deal with. With real problems it’s even worse.
He’s needy and difficult and it’s no wonder that people don’t want to deal with him when they don’t have to.
Somehow Eddie doesn’t see that yet and selfishly Buck wants to hide it for as long as possible. Steve may think that the right people will stick around because they think he’s worth it but Buck has plenty of evidence to the contrary and he doesn’t want to risk it. Things may not be easy right now and everyone knows it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try and keep things as simple as he can.
“Buck, you know I want to be here for you, right?”
And the thing is Buck does. He really does believe Eddie when he says they’re partners both in and outside of work and that means having each other’s backs and supporting each other through all sorts of issues. But he also knows everyone has a line. There will be something that takes things a step too far and Eddie will want out.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
And if that were easy to answer Buck would do it. But it’s a double edged sword. By explaining that you don’t want to be high maintenance or too much, he knows he would, in fact, be being too much.
And he knows he doesn’t have to bring up his worries about overwhelming Eddie and he could just stick to his other feelings and problems but those feel equally trapped inside of him. Talking about being assaulted or rejected by your family and failing to save someone’s life is still laying baggage across someone’s shoulders. It’s still asking for support for something that he should be able to handle on his own. It’s opening himself up for judgment.
Because what if Eddie learns about Daniel and realizes that Buck really is just a bundle of useless parts that barely come together to get things done on a good day (and he’s not having any good days lately)?
Or maybe he somehow hasn’t put it together that the only reason he got shot and retraumatized was because Buck had dragged him to headquarters in the first place and talking more about it will get him to that realization just as it had everyone else.
There are so many things Buck could talk about that would just lead Eddie to the conclusion that he’s weak and useless and a pathetic excuse for a person that’s not worth the time or energy it takes to be around them.
How is Buck supposed to bring himself to do that?
He doesn’t realize how long he’s been silent until Eddie reaches across the table and rests his hand on his wrist.
“Buck. Evan. I can hear the gears grinding in your head. But despite what Chris thinks when I catch him trying to sneak cookies for breakfast I am not actually psychic. I can only help if you talk to me.”
Eddie looks earnest enough that Buck wants to say something. His partner is trying, and deserves his honesty. Even if it ruins things.
“I just…People don’t stay.” He sighs, staring down at his steeping tea. “I’m not someone that people stay for. Even when things are easy. And I know things aren’t easy right now. I’m not making things easy. And me talking about things is just going to make things harder and… if it’s harder to stay, you might not.”
“Buck…”
“I know. I know you’re not planning on leaving and that when you say you want to be there for me, you mean it, but people have boundaries and things that they are and aren’t willing to put up with and…it feels like everything about me is complicated and people don’t like that. People say that they don’t care but really they want something simple and…no matter what I do, I’m never that.”
Eddie blinks. He looks sad, and Buck’s not sure he understands why.
“Buck, relationships are about supporting each other. I can’t support you if I don’t know what you need. It’s not your job to make it easy.”
“I don’t want to ask too much.”
“OK. So after Shannon died and you practically had to move in to make sure that Chris and I ate and were remembering and celebrating her and not just wallowing in our grief, were we asking too much?”
“No, of course not.” Buck shakes his head. He wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else then. Eddie and Chris had needed him. He can’t imagine a scenario where he wouldn’t do everything in his power to help either of them.
“The way I see it, this is the same thing. You’re going through something, and you need someone to help you. And if you’re OK with it, I want to be that person.”
Buck picks up his tea, taking a sip to try and buy himself some time. It’s not that he doesn’t want that. Being taken care of by Eddie, getting to let his control go and be accepted anyways…it’s everything he wants. But it’s so hard to imagine it, even though Eddie is offering, because it’s just not what people do. Not with him.
“I want to trust you when you say that.” He says, setting his mug back onto the table. “And I mostly do. I know you wouldn’t lie to me. But…”
“People don’t stay.” Eddie finishes for him.
“Exactly.”
A beat passes. Then another. Buck goes for his tea again just to have something to do with his hand. He can feel his nerves creeping up his spine. He could have easily just ruined everything.
“You say you know I wouldn’t lie to you?”
Buck is so caught up in his head that Eddie’s question nearly startles him into jumping. He flushes, and nods.
“Then I need you to trust me when I tell you that I promise that if I start to feel overwhelmed or over my head or like I can’t be there for you in the way that you need that I’ll talk to you about why and we can work together to figure something else out. I’m not just gonna have you open up to me and disappear on you.”
Eddie probably wants a response, an agreement, but Buck isn’t sure he can give him that. He believes that Eddie believes in what he’s saying, that he thinks he’ll be able to handle everything or that even if he can’t, he won’t run, and he wants to believe that Eddie is right. But there’s still an echoing doubt, reminding him that he’s put his trust in people before and it’s never turned out.
Even so, this is Eddie. Buck’s put his life in his hands more times than he can count. If he can’t trust him, who can he trust?
He starts to talk.
“It really means a lot to me that Chris would let me borrow his armadillo. I, uh, didn’t have stuffed animals growing up. Not that I can really remember. Maddie says she gave me a bunny as a gift when I was born but…if she did it was gone before I was old enough for it to make an impression on me. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did but my parents took it away; they weren’t exactly big on comfort or toys. Or anything happy. And at first I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal. Not until I went to school.
“The classroom was so full of color and there were all these books and toys. And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with any of it. At home, Maddie tried but she only had her books so I could listen when she read but they were above my head, and we mostly just played outside. Imagination games. Things that kept us busy and away from our parents.”
When he pauses to take a sip of his tea and looks up, Eddie is watching him intently, an inscrutable look in his eyes. “I know when Chim was asking you said no, but you have to know what this sounds like Evan. Did they hit you?”
Buck swallows his drink. “No. They weren’t good parents but they never touched us. They just…didn’t want anything to do with me.” Eddie doesn’t respond, and Buck takes that as his cue to keep going. “Anyways, school was…jarring. I struggled to make friends because I just didn’t know about or do the same things as the rest of the kids. I was the weird kid who didn’t know what to do with a teddy bear and needed extra help reading. I asked Maddie about it and she just said I should enjoy it at school because those weren’t the things that our parents thought were important, but I just couldn’t figure any of it out.
“My teacher tried…Looking back it was probably pretty obvious that something was wrong, even if it wasn’t something that she could report. She spent a lot of extra time with me, catching me up on all of these things that the other kids just seemed to know. Not just the school stuff but the toys too. At the end of the school year she took me aside and gave me this floppy stuffed dog, and told me that every kid deserved to have a best friend that they could hug whenever they needed to, and that he could be mine, and that no matter what happened with the other kids or Maddie or my parents, he’d be there for me. I was so excited. I showed Maddie when she picked me up from the bus stop and she helped me name him. Rufus. I had him for a week.
“One afternoon, Maddie took me to the library. She wanted to get me some books so I could keep practicing what I had learned that year. When we got home, I went to put the books up in my room, and my mom was in there. She had a box and she was going through my things, picking out the things I had outgrown that we could donate. It was mostly clothes, but I watched her take Rufus off of my bed and put him right in the box. I tried to argue with her and take him back out, explained that my teacher had given him to me and I didn’t want to get rid of him, but she ripped him out of my hands and told me that toys like Rufus were for kids who didn’t let their families down, not for disappointments like me.”
“Buck…”
Buck ignores Eddie. He isn’t telling this story for sympathy; not really. It just felt like the easiest place to start. Why he is the way he is. “So that was the end of that. I figured out that for whatever reason, I wasn’t like other kids. I didn’t get to have the same things that they did, and I just had to deal with that.
“That’s why it means so much to me that Chris would be willing to share Armando with me. I know how special a toy like that is, especially when it comes from someone you love, and I…don’t really know what to think, that he trusts me enough and thinks I deserve to share something so important to him.”
“You’re his best friend. Why wouldn’t he share with you?”
“Because…” Buck trails off, unable to vocalize what he’s thinking.
Exhausting.
Disappointing.
Worthless.
“Buck, not everyone sees you the way your parents do. I don’t. I know Chris doesn’t. You are the farthest thing from a disappointment to that kid.”
Buck closes his eyes at Eddie’s words. It means something, that Eddie believes in him, and is willing to say that. He trusts him with his son, the most precious thing he has. Not a lot of people have put that kind of faith in Buck before, and he knows how valuable it is.
He wishes it were easier to accept.
“I just…don’t want that to change.”
As he did earlier, Eddie reaches forward and rests his hand on Buck’s wrist. “I don’t know why your parents treated you like that. It’s not what any kid deserves. It’s not what you deserved. I wish there was something I could do to show you the man I see when I look at you, because I can tell it’s not what you see, and I think you’re being so, so hard on yourself… I know I can’t fix things by telling you that, but does it help at all?”
“It…yeah.” Buck nods. “Having someone else’s perspective is good. Your perspective is good.”
“Then I’ll do my best to remind you. Every hour if you need it.”
That sounds like a bit much. But Buck can appreciate the intent. “Maybe we can just start with once a day?”
“Whatever you want.”
Notes:
I keep forgetting to mention but I am also imaginarybird on tumblr. Following me there will probably give you some good indicators on the sort of progress I'm making as I write and I am always happy to chat about the show or my work or anything else.
Chapter 14
Notes:
Special shoutout to my friend greenforsnow, who despite having no context for 9-1-1 except for what I've told her has talked me through so many stumbling blocks and worries these past few chapters. She is a lifesaver!
Chapter Text
“OK, so this fine line here,” the on-call orthopedist whose name Buck has already forgotten gestures at his x-ray with his pen, “is the break that you had repaired surgically a few weeks ago. This line that you see here,” he moves his pen, “is a new fracture from your fall this morning. The good news is, the hardware that you had put in for the initial repair has kept the bone from displacing to the point of requiring another surgery. It does, however, push your recovery back by several weeks.”
Buck resists the urge to sigh; it’s not unexpected news, just disappointing. “What am I looking at?” He and Eddie had gotten a couple extra hours of sleep after their midnight chat, but had had to get up early to let Carla in, who was responsible for getting Chris up, fed and off to school, and to head off to start their day. Eddie had dropped Buck off at his orthopedic clinic so he could go to their walk-in clinic once it opened so he could go on to the airport to pick up Steve.
“You’re going to have another four weeks in the sling with no use of the arm. At that point, we’ll get you in for another x-ray to evaluate how it’s healing and see if you’re ready for PT. We’ll get this updated evaluation sent into the LAFD so they can extend your medical leave.”
“Thanks.” Never mind that at this point he’ll have spent more time this year on medical leave than working. It’s certainly not this doctor’s fault that Buck has had terrible luck.
“For pain management you’ll want to stick with acetaminophen. Following the dosing instructions on the bottle should be sufficient for a break of this level. What questions do you have for me?”
“None, I don’t think.” Buck shakes his head. “Just rinse and repeat the last four weeks, right?”
“Exactly.” The doctor walks him through checking out of the clinic and sends him on his way.
Buck gathers his things and exits the clinic, sitting on a bench outside where he can wait for Steve and Eddie to arrive. He pulls out his phone and sends a quick text to let them know that he’ll be waiting out front before turning his attention to the puzzle game Chris had shown him recently; it’s just the right level of engagement to keep his mind occupied and away from worrying about the conversations that will come over breakfast and the rest of the day.
He plays for a few minutes, until his phone starts ringing and the screen changes over. It’s not a number that he has in his contacts, and he hesitates for a moment before answering.
“Hello?”
“Evan Buckley?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s me.”
“This is Assistant District Attorney Rachel Davis. I’m handling the case against Dr. Hannah Wells.”
Buck freezes and his mouth goes dry. He hadn’t realized that there was a case. Not officially. Sure, Internal Affairs had mentioned that they would be passing their investigation over to the District Attorney’s office, but that had been before the shooting, and when he hadn’t heard anything he had kind of assumed that things had been forgotten in the chaos. “Right.” He swallows. “What, uh, what can I do for you?”
“Do you have a few minutes? I had a couple of things I wanted to go over with you.”
“Yeah, sure.” This is the last thing he wants to discuss right now but there’s not much use in putting it off.
“First, I wanted to let you know that based on the evidence collected by the LAFD Internal Affairs investigation, we had Dr. Wells arrested yesterday on multiple counts of rape under California Penal Code 261. One of those counts, specifically, is her assault on you.”
“Oh.”
“Her attorney is still reviewing the case and has yet to present a defense, so at this time we are moving forward with preparing for trial. I’d like to have you come into our offices within the next week or so to talk about what it would like if you were to act as a witness and testify against her.”
“Is that… is that going to be necessary?”
“In a case such as this where we don’t have physical evidence of a violent assault, and no witnesses to testify to the dynamic between the accused and the victim, victim testimony is the most powerful tool that we have.”
“I doubt I’m your best option for that.” Buck prevaricates. He can feel his heart pounding, creeping up his chest into his throat and he’d do anything to make that feeling go away. “Didn’t the investigation include stuff about my past?”
“If you’re referring to your previous encounter with Dr. Wells in 2017, yes, that was included, but no, that doesn’t disqualify you from testimony. If anything, it establishes a pattern of behavior for her.”
“But I consented that time.”
“Mr. Buckley--,”
“Just Buck. Please.”
“Buck, regardless of your perceived consent, Dr. Wells was in a position of power over you. Legally, she was not allowed to sleep with you, and her behavior surrounding that appointment--friending you on Facebook, telling you not to discuss the encounter with anybody-- demonstrates predatory behavior and that she knew she was in the wrong.”
It’s never been laid out to Buck like that, and it’s a bit of a gut punch, but he pushes the thought to the back of his head; he can think about that later. Right now he has to focus on the conversation in front of him. “And my other relationships?”
“Are not relevant. I know this is a daunting prospect, but we will prepare you for taking the stand. I don’t leave my people hanging out to dry. I won’t lie to you and say that a defense attorney isn’t going to ask you any questions about your sex life but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’d never slept with anyone or if you had a different partner every night; when you were in your evaluation with Dr. Wells, she didn’t give you a choice. She told you that if you wanted to return to work you had to sleep with her. Those are the facts of the case, and those facts will convince a jury.”
Buck wants to argue with her; he’s watched enough true crime documentaries and listened to enough podcasts to know that that’s a very idealized picture of how a trial might go. And he doesn’t know how he’d handle all of this going public and being up for debate and discussion. He’s barely managed getting this far to where a few people he trusts know. But the part of him that made him report Dr. Wells in the first place is still there, and he can’t help but worry about what will happen if he doesn’t continue to speak up. Internal Affairs had said she was no longer working for the department, but is that really good enough? He sighs. “When did you want me to come in?”
“Are you available on Monday morning? Say…10:00?”
Buck mentally reviews what he knows of his and Eddie’s schedules. He’s pretty sure Eddie is working on Monday but that’s not actually a reason to say no. Steve might still be in town or he could maybe get a ride from Carla, or a rideshare. “Yeah, I can make that work.”
“Great. Someone from my office will send you the appointment details.” Rachel confirms. “I also wanted to inform you that Dr. Wells was granted bail in her initial hearing, but she is under a no contact order with you and her other accusers. If she contacts you at all, do what you have to do to remain safe. Document the encounter if you can. If it is an in-person encounter, notify the police. If it is by text, email, or phone call, notify my office. Any questions?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“OK. There’s one more detail I wanted to ask you about before I let you go. This wasn’t noted anywhere in your initial statement with internal affairs that I could see but it’s very important as we move forward. At your appointment on July 16, do you recall if a condom was used?”
Buck nearly drops the phone. It’s not the sort of question he was expecting. His memories of the appointment are…blurred at best. And he’s not really sure what he remembers that actually happened and what might be his mind just trying to fill in the blanks. “I…don’t know. Does that matter? I thought we were past the point of physical evidence.”
“Yes and no. We won’t be able to gather any fluids from the encounter. However, there was a revelation at the bail hearing that could impact things. Dr. Wells disclosed that she is three months pregnant.”
If Buck weren’t already sitting on a bench, he’d be worried about falling to the ground
“We can’t attest to what she might have been doing outside of her office, but in the scope of the investigation, your assault does fall in the window of conception.”
A wave of prickly heat washes over him. It feels like he has a vise clamped on either side of his chest, squeezing in.
“Because of this we would advise you to retain a lawyer that specializes in family law. As a potential father, you can legally bring a paternity action against Dr. Wells, compelling a DNA test on the fetus. Depending on the strategy she takes for her defense she may fight you on it, but at most the courts would delay the test until the baby is born. Legally establishing paternity is quite important for a number of reasons, but most importantly because if Dr. Wells is found guilty, she’ll be facing a significant amount of jail time and the child would be removed from her custody; the state would much prefer to give the child to a confirmed relative, rather than put them into the system. Once you get a lawyer, our office would be willing to coordinate with them.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say. He might as well be breathing through a coffee stirrer for all the air it feels like he’s getting.
“I know I just threw a lot of information at you. Do you have any questions for me right now?”
He just manages to choke out a “No.”
“All right then. If anything comes up, please reach out to us. Otherwise, I will see you on Monday at 10:00.”
The call disconnects and Buck lowers the phone from his ear. He blinks and the world falls out of focus. The sound of the traffic going by, distant though it may be, roars in his ears.
He floats, untethered to the moment.
His body is full of static, tingling and prickling with every breath.
The air sinks down onto him, like a coating of sticky molasses.
And then there are gentle hands on his knees, and soft words being spoken, and Buck finds himself looking into Eddie’s familiar, if concerned, eyes.
“Eds? When did you get here?”
“About five minutes ago.” His partner is crouched in front of the bench, with his truck parked in the small cul-de-sac behind him. Standing a few feet back regarding the whole scene is Steve. “Did something happen?”
Too many answers spring to the front of Buck’s mind. A lot has happened. Arrests and interviews and babies. Babies. Babies. Shit. “She’s pregnant.”
“Who’s pregnant?”
“Dr. Wells.”
If this wasn’t about him, if it wasn’t coming from this horrible moment in time, the shock that settled onto Eddie’s face would have been funny.
“Who told you that?” Steve asks.
“The district attorney.” Buck answers flatly, without looking at him. “They arrested her. Dr. Wells. And at the bail hearing she said she was pregnant, and I’m supposed to get a lawyer, and request a DNA test, and testify, and--,”
“OK, slow down.” Eddie instructs. “Take a breath. That’s a lot of news to take in, and you’re already dealing with a lot.”
Steve steps forward. “None of it’s urgent either. We have time to figure this out. Eddie’s right. You need to breathe and focus on what’s in front of you.”
Buck tries to listen to them. He knows they’re right and that trying to get things together while he’s feeling this overwhelmed and on edge isn’t going to end well. But there’s just so much…
He can’t go back to work, so he’s not contributing or doing what he’s good at.
He has to tell more people what happened with Dr. Wells. Strangers. People who are on her side. People who he might have to rescue someday and be able to look in the eye.
He might be a father. He can barely take care of himself and he’s such a big fuck-up that his own family doesn’t want him around, and he certainly hadn’t set out to have a kid, but he might be having one anyways.
“It’s too much.” He whispers.
Eddie rocks back on his heels. “We can break it up though. What about a goal like you did with Chris? You can’t focus on what’s scaring you if you’re putting all your focus on a goal, right?”
“Right.”
“And the long term goal you set with Steve was to make a plan with us, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we can fold this new stuff into making a plan, but how about for the short term, you focus on breakfast? For the next couple of hours all you have to do is catch up with Steve and eat something. Do you think you can do that?”
It’s not easy to say yes. Turning off his brain has always been one of his biggest struggles and it’s made all the harder when there’s not an emergency or something urgent to turn his attention to. But Eddie and Steve are going out of their way to be there for him and to help, even though they have no responsibility to do so. The least he can do is try and make it a little easier on them.
“Yeah.” He nods. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
“I’m telling you, we were this close to making him change his name from Buck to Doolittle.” Steve says as the trio move from Eddie’s truck to his house. Buck catching up with Steve over breakfast had largely turned into Steve and Eddie exchanging stories about Buck, sharing how good it is to have him at their backs, and occasionally how challenging it can be to rein him in. The conversation has continued throughout their drive back to Eddie’s, and, while occasionally embarrassing, it has been a good distraction overall. “It didn’t matter if we were in the sandbox or training in Coronado, if there was a stray animal wandering around, Buck would find it, feed it, and have it following him around within the hour.”
“Yeah, he still does that.” Eddie grins, unlocking the front door. “All of the employees at the shelter closest to our station know him by name.”
“It’s really too bad that a dog wouldn’t have fit in with the work our unit was doing. He would have made a great handler.”
This comment grabs Buck’s attention and he perks up. “Really?”
Steve glances over at him, a soft smile on his face. “Of course. I told you that back then, didn’t I? If our work had been different I would have put in a request in an instant. That’s the kind of duty you would have thrived with.”
Eddie leads them into the kitchen. “Do either of you want anything to drink? Water, coffee…?”
“No thanks, I’m all set.” Steve shakes his head and takes a seat at the table.
Buck doesn’t really want to sit. He knows that when he does, the relaxed conversation is going to come to an end and Steve and Eddie are going to want to talk, really talk, about what happened the other night and what they’re going to do about it. He’s not sure what they’re going to want to know or expect from him. He’s not sure what he can even offer beyond what he’s already said. He doesn’t want to change how his brother or partner sees him.
“Buck?” Eddie prompts, and Buck realizes he’s been waiting on an answer.
“Oh! Uh…no. I’m good. Thanks Eds.” Buck pulls a chair away from the table and sits, and, as he expected, a heavy silence falls over the room. Eddie joins them at the table. When he doesn’t say anything Buck looks between the two of them; he’s certainly not going to be the first one to speak.
Steve has no such reticence.
“OK, now that we’re somewhere more comfortable, I don’t think we need to beat around the bush. Buck, can we talk about what happened?”
He’s not sure why Steve is asking permission. It’s the whole reason he flew back to the mainland. The Steve he knows would never let him wiggle out of the conversation now or make excuses. With his and Eddie’s eyes on him, Buck shrinks back in his chair, despite having nowhere to go. He nods.
“You asked for help because you were thinking about killing yourself.” Steve says, very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. “Now, I can’t speak for Eddie, but that came as a shock to me. The Buck I know is confident and comfortable with himself. So the first thing I want to know is how long you’ve been feeling like this.”
Buck’s heart sinks at Steve’s words.
It’s not like he doesn’t know that people only like having him around when he makes things easy; plenty of people have made that clear over the years. But he hadn’t really considered that for the majority of time he had known Steve, he’d been on his absolute best behavior. The Navy hadn’t allowed for anything else.
Where he is now, fighting with his brain, needing help at every turn, drama following him everywhere…that’s far from easy.
His circle is small and if he keeps this up it’s going to shrink even more. He’ll drive Steve and probably even Eddie away.
Buck doesn’t realize he’s ignored Steve’s question until he’s speaking again.
“There’s not a right or wrong answer here, Buck. I just want to try and figure out what kind of problem we’re working with.”
The problem is Buck doesn’t know the answer. Not really. He can’t remember a time where there wasn’t a weight across his shoulders, and a voice in the back of his head reminding him that he’s worthless and a waste of space. Sometimes it’s just…easier to ignore than others. And lately it’s been impossible.
He doesn’t know if being honest about that is going to be better or worse for him, and not knowing is nearly paralyzing.
But Steve flew here from Hawaii for this. He owes it to him to answer.
“I…don’t know.” He finally says. “I’m not--I’m not trying to be difficult or not give you an answer, it’s just…something that’s always there.”
Eddie frowns. “You’ve never said anything.”
And Buck could cry because he sounds devastated. And he’s done that.
“It’s not like it’s something you can just bring up over drinks.” Buck looks down at the table, unable to bear the weight of Eddie’s gaze. “And it usually isn't this bad.”
“But it is bad.”
“I think what Eddie is trying to get at is that as your family, this is the sort of thing that we want to be there for you to help with, and we can’t do that if you don’t tell us about it.” Steve interjects. “So I think one of the things we need to agree to moving forward is transparency. If you’re struggling, you need to talk to someone. If keeping it to yourself was working, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Is that something you can agree to try doing?”
Buck hesitates. Opening up to people he knows and trusts shouldn’t send a bolt of fear up his spine; he knows that. But it’s never gone well in the past. “I don’t want to put too much on you guys. I don’t want to be too much.”
“Two things.” Steve says. “First, we’re gonna figure out how we can expand your support circle, so you have more options and don’t have to rely on any single person. Second, and I’m pretty sure I told you this before, but you’re not gonna be too much for the people who really care about you.”
Steve makes it sound simple. Buck can only hope that somehow, his commander is right. “OK. I’ll try.”
“Good man.” Steve nods. “Now, when it comes to getting you additional support, I’ve done some research, and there are a few options.”
“Like what?”
“There’s support groups, for one. The VA runs some, and I’m sure if we did some digging there are civilian ones too.”
Buck tries to picture it. Sitting in a room full of people that he doesn’t know and sharing. Things about rescues gone wrong, or his parents, or just his feelings… The idea of doing that with a room full of strangers turns his stomach; he’s never been shy, per se, but these would be intimate, private things… He doesn’t know that he can open himself up like that. “I’m not sure that would be a good fit.”
“We’re not gonna force you to do anything.” Eddie assures. “There are other options.”
“Right. With it being a long-term problem, I think medication is an option worth exploring. And then, of course, you could see a therapist.”
Buck pretty much knew it was coming; you can’t tell someone you want to kill yourself and have them not suggest that you go to therapy, after all. But he’s been very dutifully not thinking about it. Before Dr. Wells, his experiences with therapy had been limited to the rare mandatory session after particularly difficult missions with his unit, and those had been… bare bones at best. He hadn’t quite seen the need to be there back then and the Navy therapist they sent the unit to was probably more concerned with keeping up the appearance of mental health maintenance and getting the unit back into active duty then they were with actually winnowing out and working on problems. Then with Dr. Wells…well Buck can’t imagine many worse therapy experiences than that. And sure, in reality he knows that the majority of therapists care about their patients, and maintain appropriate boundaries, and are probably pretty helpful but he can’t help that his instinctive reaction to someone suggesting going to a therapist is an intense wave of anxiety.
The feeling must show on his face because Steve is quick to elaborate. “You would get final say in who you see. When we search for some options we could narrow it down by age, gender…I could even have my team run some background checks if it would make you feel comfortable.”
“There’s also virtual therapy.” Eddie adds. “My sister was seeing someone after her daughter was born and they needed to move for work but she stayed with the same therapist over video chat for a few months until they could get settled in Dallas so she wouldn’t be without care before she found someone local. I’m sure with the right person, they would take your history into account and be willing to do video sessions.”
Lack of appropriate experience aside, Buck knows enough to know that mental healthcare isn’t necessarily supposed to be comfortable. At least not when you’re starting out. So it wouldn’t be fair of him to say no to every option just because the thought of them is putting him on edge. And the concessions Steve and Eddie have just presented to him could make the anxiety manageable. Virtual therapy in his own space that he’s already made comfortable is at least a little more appealing. For all that his head wants to spin out, he trusts that they wouldn’t suggest something that they thought would be a bad idea or make things worse.
“I’m OK with trying meds, I guess.” He agrees after a moment. “And…I guess if we really research the options I could be OK with therapy. Especially if it was virtual.”
“That gives us a solid direction to go in.” Steve nods. “Over the next few days we can narrow down who you would feel comfortable seeing and make some appointments.”
Eddie reaches over and wraps his hand around Buck’s uninjured one, giving his fingers a brief squeeze. Buck does his best to let go of all of his discomfort and unease and give his partner an appreciative look; it’s not his fault this is hard and uncomfortable. He’s doing everything he can to make it easier, and Buck can’t thank him enough for that.
He knows that’s part of why he panicked this morning. Eddie is giving him so, so much right now and adding legal trouble might be a bridge too far. Especially legal trouble that might end up with a kid he wasn’t expecting and didn’t ask for. They haven’t been dating that long and they certainly haven’t discussed kids beyond Christopher… he has no idea how Eddie would feel about having another kid so closely intertwined in his life.
Buck definitely hasn’t wrapped his head around the possibility yet.
He loves kids, has sort of thought about having one or two in the abstract way that a lot of people think of it. It’s a someday thing. Someday he’ll settle down and have a family. He really never considered that someday could be now.
He absolutely hadn’t considered that someday could happen like this.
But suddenly it’s a very real possibility and he has to figure out what to do. Buck doesn’t have a clue.
“What about the stuff from this morning?” He asks, barely able to raise his voice above a murmur; he doesn’t really want to draw attention, he just…has to make a plan or he’ll never settle down. “With the DA’s office?”
Steve looks over. “Which part? Having to testify or Wells being pregnant?”
Buck wants to say both, but the district attorney who called had said she would work with him on how he’d testify. It’s really all the other unknowns. “The second one.”
“OK. Well, I don’t think any of us know all that much about family law here in California.” Steve glances between them, and Buck watches Eddie nod. He follows suit. “But there’s no use panicking over what we don’t know. I think what we need to do is find you a good lawyer who can go over what your options actually are and you can decide from there what you want to do. We can divvy up the research over the next couple of days. Does that sound like a plan?”
Buck nods. Research he can do. He’s a pro at research. “Yeah. I can do that.” He glances over at the clock on the stove. They aren’t even halfway through the day yet and he’s exhausted. But he can’t deny that Steve and Eddie were right; to have some plans in place, bare bones though they may be, does feel a little bit better.
There’s a lot that he’s not sure about. A lot that he’s worried about and that’s lingering in the back of his mind that he’s not sure he’s going to be able to handle. But for now those things can wait and Buck can focus on the plan laid out before him. It’s the only thing he can do.
Chapter Text
“Thrilled with the excitement of the chase, the boys clambered back onto the motorcycles and within a few moments a cloud of dust rose from the road as the Hardy Boys and Chet Morton set out in swift pursuit of the red-headed automobile thief.” Buck slides a bookmark in between the pages of The Tower Treasure and glances down at Christopher. He finds him bleary-eyed but definitely not asleep.
“One more chapter Buck?”
“I don’t think so, Superman.” Buck shakes his head and scoots off of the bed. “You already got a bonus chapter out of me and you have school tomorrow. Your adventures with the Hardy Boys will have to wait until tomorrow night.” He sets the book down on the bedside table and turns back around.
“Fine.” Chris sighs; he sounds a little put out but he’s smiling, so Buck knows he’s not actually upset. “Good night, Buck. I love you.”
“Love you too, bud.” Buck bends down to press a kiss to Chris’ curls and then exits the room, turning the lights off and pulling the door mostly closed as he goes. He heads to the living room, where Eddie is waiting on the couch, scrolling aimlessly on his phone. There, Buck sinks down onto the couch next to him. He’s exhausted.
After making their base plans he, Steve and Eddie had spent a little time starting to research their assignments, Steve taking a stab at finding a good family lawyer, while Buck and Eddie worked on narrowing down what he’d be comfortable with in a therapist. They’d done that until it was time to go and pick up Chris from school, at which point Eddie had gone to pick up his son and Buck and Steve had gone to get groceries and what they needed for Steve to stay in Buck’s loft for the duration of his visit to LA. Steve had then opted to stay at the loft for the evening, citing a need to check in with his team and the desire to let Buck, Eddie, and Chris have some uninterrupted family time. He planned on coming back over to Eddie’s the next day, some time before Eddie had to leave for his shift.
Back at Eddie’s, it had been a mostly quiet evening of dinner and puzzles with Chris, but even a basic evening after a long day had the power to drain him. And the day had definitely been long.
“Chris asleep?” Eddie asks. He puts his phone to sleep and sets it aside on the coffee table before stretching his arm across the back of the couch.
“Just about.” Buck says. He glances down at the remote resting on the coffee table. “Do you want to watch something? I think there are a couple new movies on Netflix that are supposed to be good or we could go back to--,”
“Buck, today was a lot.”
Buck’s heart sinks. This is it. This is where Eddie draws the line in the sand and tells him he’s too much.
“And you haven’t said much.” Eddie adds, sitting forward and resting his hand on Buck’s knee. “How are you doing?”
The answer comes out of his mouth automatically. “I’m fine.”
Eddie looks less than impressed. “Buck…” And Buck can hear all the words Eddie is hiding in his name. The reminder that just that morning he and Steve had made him promise to be open and honest with them about how he was feeling. The clear implication that Eddie knows he’s full of shit and far from fine.
“I want to be fine.” Buck corrects with a sigh.
“It’s OK that you’re not.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say to that. It doesn’t feel OK. He feels ridiculous and stupid and weak for being so stuck in his own head and miserable. Things aren’t that bad. He should be managing better than he is and he shouldn’t have to be relying on Steve and Eddie the way he is.
“What are you thinking?” Eddie asks after several moments pass.
And Buck promised to be honest. Even though it’s embarrassing. Even though it feels like the worst idea possible. So he talks. “I know I shouldn’t really get ahead of myself, and that maybe the DA had to tell a lot of people to get a lawyer and it all might amount to nothing, but I can’t get it out of my head that she’s pregnant. I might have a kid.”
“You think it’s a real possibility?”
Buck nods. “The DA said the timing was right. And--and when it happened…I froze completely. I didn’t fight her or--or try to leave…I just let it happen. I honestly couldn’t tell you if she used a condom or if I…finished.” He runs his hand over his hair. “I’m pretty sure it’s possible though. I’m sorry.”
Eddie frowns and scoots forward on the couch, closer to Buck. “Why are you apologizing?”
“Because…We haven’t been together that long and all I’ve done is dump my problems on you. And I know you said you’d tell me if it got to be too much, but this is…this is pretty big and I--,”
“Buck, stop. Move back a few steps and think about what you just said.”
“This is pretty big?”
“Before that.”
“All I’ve done is dump my problems on you.”
“No…” Eddie puts his hand on his knee. “I will tell you when something is too much for me. And right now I am fine. I want to be here for you. Now, why do you think that…that woman being pregnant is something you need to apologize for?”
“If--if the kid is mine, I don’t want you to feel like you’re getting trapped into something you didn’t sign up for.”
The look that crosses Eddie’s face at this tells Buck that Eddie thinks he’s said something stupid, but he can’t imagine what that might be. He’s being considerate. They’re in a relationship but they haven’t talked about the future or kids beyond Christopher or anything like that and Buck can’t just assume that Eddie wants to build a family with him.
“Buck. Evan. I get that we haven’t actually sat down to talk about where this is going but you know I wouldn’t have started anything if I wasn’t serious about you, right? When I think about my future, you’re in it. And even before we were dating, you’ve never hesitated to do anything you could to support me and Chris and my family. I never even had to ask you. Do you really think if you had your own kid, I’d have a problem with it?”
“I didn’t want to assume anything.” Buck looks down at his lap. He’d been pretty sure that things with Eddie were serious like he’d just said, but he’d thought that about Abby too and she’d more than corrected that belief by ghosting him and letting him know how she felt after the train derailment.
“OK, well, now I’m telling you.” Eddie hunches down, craning his neck to get his face in line with Buck’s gaze. They straighten and sit up together. “If your future includes a kid, I’ll support you however you want me to.”
Buck swallows around the sudden lump in his throat; that’s not the sort of thing people usually say to him. Not partners.
You don’t deserve that.
“Is that something you think you want?” Eddie asks before Buck can really wrap his head around it all and say anything. “To keep the kid if they turn out to be yours?”
That answer comes naturally to Buck. It’s something he’d known the moment his shock had given way and he’d been able to really think about the news he’d been told. And maybe it was making him panic a little bit, but he knows he won’t change his mind. “I don’t think I could let them go. I--I know it would be hard, but it’s not like it’s the kid’s fault that their mom…”He shakes his head. “I couldn’t send a kid into the system for something they had no part in. I mean, I know I’m no one’s first choice to raise a family, but I love kids. And I want kids. And if this one’s mine…Yeah, it’s a shitty way to get a kid but of course I’m gonna love them.”
“Come here.” Eddie gestures with his hand for him to come closer but quickly abandons the gesture to gently grab onto his elbow and guide him across the couch; Buck doesn’t fight his partner and soon finds himself spooned up against him, back and head against Eddie’s chest with Eddie’s arm resting across his. His fingers draw soft circles on the back of Buck’s hand. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
It’s not the first time that Buck has heard that, but it’s usually accompanied by more.
Irresponsible.
Reckless.
Immature.
“I know most of the time when you’re talking about yourself you’re saying things you’ve had other people tell you, but I want you to listen to me, and trust me when I tell you that you are 100% my first choice to raise Christopher. By my side or if I can’t.”
“Eds…”
“You’re great with kids. You respect them and put them first and I know, whether it’s this kid now, or another kid five years from now, that you’re going to be an amazing father.”
Buck wishes he could believe that. He wants to believe that. It’s just…the opposite of what he’s heard for most of his life.
He just doesn’t want you to kill yourself on his watch.
Buck closes his eyes at the thought. He knows that’s not true. Eddie wouldn’t lie to him. He trusts that. And Eddie’s a great dad, so his judgment on the subject is second to none. If he thinks Buck will make a good dad, then maybe, somehow, Buck can pull it off. He opens his eyes. “Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Buck steps to the side to let Steve into the house after greeting him. “Eddie and Chris are just finishing up their breakfast before they head out. Do you want a coffee or anything?” He’s sure his friend has already had a cup or two of coffee, given that he’s always been an early riser to get his typical workout in, but it doesn’t hurt to ask anyway.
“I don’t know. Does an army guy really make it strong enough?” Steve jokes, following him to the kitchen.
“It’s passable.” Buck shrugs. “It’s got nothing on the brews Bandsaw used to make us but…”
“Nothing’s as good as Bandsaw’s coffee.” Steve finishes for him. “Sure, I’ll take a cup.”
They enter the kitchen and Buck maneuvers around the table over to the coffee pot. “Hey Chris, this is my friend Steve.” He introduces as he grabs another mug from the cupboard. “He was my boss when I was in the Navy.”
Chris’ eyes light up and he drops his spoon. “Oh! He’s the one that taught you how to survive a tsunami.”
Buck turns in time to see the barely concealed confusion on Steve’s face. He chuckles, handing the mug of coffee out for him. “Yeah, sort of. He taught me a lot of stuff. He lives in Hawaii now but he’s visiting LA for a little while. Is it OK with you if he hangs around here sometimes?”
Steve takes the coffee and he, Buck, and Eddie all watch Chris as he contemplates the question. He looks at Steve appraisingly. “What do you know about Ninja Turtles?”
Eddie groans. “Really, mijo?”
Steve just smiles. “My partner’s daughter thinks I’m like Leonardo, because he’s the leader. But I don’t really like fighting with swords so I’m not quite sure I can measure up. What about you? You strike me as a…Donatello guy, right?”
“How’d you know?”
Steve leans in as he takes his seat. “Because Donatello is the brains of the operation, and Buck tells me you’re a pretty smart kid.”
Chris grins. “He can stay.”
“Glad I have your stamp of approval.”
Buck takes a sip of his own coffee and nudges Chris gently with his good elbow, urging him to go back to eating his cereal. He and Eddie will have to leave soon and he needs to finish his breakfast.
“Any ideas how you and Buck are gonna spend the day?” Eddie asks.
Steve shakes his head. “Usually if we were on leave at the same time we’d go for a hike or go surfing but with Buck’s arm those are out, so I think we’re just playing it by ear.”
“You should go to the zoo.” Chris suggests between mouthfuls of cereal. “Buck knows about all the animals. And he knows Miss Audrey with the reptiles. That’s how I got to feed a giant tortoise.”
“We might save the zoo for a day you can come with us, Superman.” Buck says. “I think they just got some new lemur babies and you wouldn’t want to miss those.”
Chris quickly agrees. “Probably not.”
Buck thinks about suggesting something else, since he’s sure Steve will be too restless to sit around Eddie’s house all day, but before he can formulate an idea Eddie’s phone is ringing, and after checking the screen his partner is quick to answer.
“Hola abuela.” Eddie stands and grabs his bowl, carrying it over to the sink. He places the bowl in the basin and turns the tap on, rinsing the bowl. He speaks in rapid-fire Spanish, as he usually does when Isabel calls, before turning back around and angling the phone away from his mouth and speaking softly. “Chris, finish up and get your bag, please. We need to leave in two minutes.” He goes back to his conversation with Isabel.
Buck keeps half an eye on Steve, watching his facial journey as he mentally translates Eddie’s half of the conversation with his abuela and half an eye on Chris, who eats his final spoonful of cereal and pushes away from the table. “Have a good day at school, bud.” He speaks quietly, mindful of Eddie’s phone call.
“I will. Have fun with Steve.”
Chris leaves the kitchen to get his things and get ready to leave and Eddie once again pulls his phone away from his ear, pressing it against his shoulder. “I’ve only got an eight-hour today. Want me to pick up dinner on my way home?”
“Sure.” Buck nods. He doesn’t know what he and Steve will get up to to know if they’d be able to pick something up instead, but he’s certain that they’ve depleted the freezer of all of the easy reheat meals Abuela and Pepa had given them. “Stay safe.”
“Always.” Eddie bends down, presses a quick kiss to Buck’s lips, and then exits the kitchen, waving to Steve and resuming his conversation with Isabel.
A moment after he’s gone, Steve turns to Buck, a smirk on his face. “Does he know you speak Spanish?”
“It’s never come up.” They hear the front door open and close, letting them know that Eddie and Chris are officially out of the house.
“So the party he was just planning with his abuela…?”
“Is going to be very, very surprising to me when I get there because they are being very, very sweet to organize it.”
Steve laughs, shaking his head. “What is it for, anyway? Your birthday’s not until February.”
“There’s gonna be a ceremony next week. The department is giving me the Medal of Valor for the whole tsunami thing and because Chris was with me Isabel is insisting on having the Diaz family celebrate.”
“What whole tsunami thing? The Santa Monica tsunami?” Steve’s expression turns a bit more serious. “Did your firehouse respond to that?”
“No. Well, yes, but I was still on leave from the bombing at the time.” Buck looks down at his coffee. “Chris and I were at the pier when the wave hit.”
“Chris, the little kid I just met that was asking me about ninja turtles, that Chris? Went through a tsunami?”
“Like a champ.” Buck does his best to ignore the part of his brain that loves to jump up and blame him for having Chris at the pier in the first place. Nobody else blames him. It was a freak weather event. It couldn’t have been predicted or prevented, and he got him through it. Nobody else blames him. “We got tossed by the wave, but once the water calmed down a little I was able to get him on top of an abandoned fire truck. I…kept him safe and rescued all the survivors I could and when the water shifted again and we got tossed off the truck I just…held onto Chris and swam. Eventually we got pinned by debris and were stuck until rescue came.”
“No shit.” Steve exhales. Buck thinks he probably wants to say more, but before he even opens his mouth, the doorbell rings.
Out of instinct, Buck checks his phone to see if he had somehow missed a message or a call telling him to expect someone, but there’s nothing. The doorbell rings again. “Sorry, I should see who that is.” He stands and starts to leave the room, but notices immediately that Steve is on his heels and tense.
“You’re not expecting anyone?”
“Almost everyone that knows I’m staying here is working the same shift as Eddie.” When he reaches the door, Buck glances out the side window and immediately relaxes at the petite figure on the front steps. “Except my sister, apparently.” He unlocks the door and swings it open. “Maddie. Hi. Don’t think I was expecting you.”
“I figured there wasn’t much point in checking with you since you aren’t answering my calls or messages.” Maddie pushes past him to enter the house, with just enough force to make him stutter step backwards.
Buck sighs and starts to close the door, resigning himself to having the conversation he’d been avoiding. Maybe it’s not fair to Maddie, since she had probably been quite surprised to hear their parents’ hatred of him spelled out so plainly when they had worked to hide it when they were kids, but he’s been tired and a mess and the last thing he’s wanted to do is dive into family drama. “Yeah, things here have been kind of bus--,”
“Who are you?” Maddie’s question cuts him off. She’s stopped walking, and is frowning at Steve who has his arms crossed over his chest and is looking at her with the same level of disdain that Buck imagines he looks at suspects with. Which, given that most of what he knows about Maddie comes from a time when Buck was feeling very abandoned and hurt by her, makes sense. Although it does not ease the rising tension in the house in the slightest.
“Maddie, this is Steve. He’s a…friend of mine from before I moved to LA.” He’s absolutely not going to get into the SEAL thing with her right now. “Steve, Maddie.” He gestures between them, but neither makes a move to shake the other’s hand.
“Eddie’s OK with you bringing a stranger into his home?” Maddie raises an eyebrow.
“Eddie picked me up from the airport yesterday.” Steve says pointedly. “Pretty sure he doesn’t know you’re here now, though.”
Maddie’s eyes narrow. “Buck and I need to talk.” She rests a hand on her slightly protruding stomach. “Family business.”
Buck steps between the two before the situation can escalate. Both are stubborn and unlikely to back down. “It’s fine. Maddie, we can talk in the living room. Steve, why don’t you figure out what we’re gonna do today?” He grabs Maddie’s arm and starts to guide her toward the living room before Steve can argue the point. They sit, Maddie on the sofa and Buck in the armchair with his back to the hall, and Buck expects Maddie to start talking soon after since she’s the one pressing to have this conversation but is surprised when she stays silent, eyeing the kitchen behind him. Buck glances back and sees Steve back at the table, drinking his coffee with his phone out. He turns back around, rolling his eyes. “He’s not paying attention to us. You wanted to talk, so…talk.”
“You walked out of family dinner the other night.” She huffs after a moment, turning her attention back to him. “We were supposed to be a united front.”
Buck blinks. Of everything his sister could have said to start the conversation, he hadn’t anticipated that. He swallows back his instinctive response, that she hadn’t exactly been supporting him, knowing that it wouldn’t be helpful. “Mom and Dad made it incredibly clear that they don’t consider me to be a part of the family. I tried to tell you.”
“I don’t understand though. Things weren’t that bad when I left home. What happened? What did you do?”
Because of course it must be his fault. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You must have done something.” She says. “I know mom and dad can be difficult but they aren’t monsters. Something prompted that kind of reaction.”
Buck doesn’t respond. What is he supposed to say? He’s fairly certain he wasn’t any more rebellious than any other kid. He didn’t steal or do drugs or bully anyone else. He barely even got detention. No, his parents just looked at him, remembered that he lived and Daniel died, and hated him.
“You were always trying crazy stunts on your bike and your skateboard.” Maddie prompts. “Did you take the adrenaline junkie, daredevil stuff too far?”
“No, I pretty much left that behind the third time dad sent his secretary to pick me up from the ER instead of coming to get me himself.”
Maddie frowns. “You didn’t say anything about that to him, did you? Because you know dad only worked as hard as he did to support the family and he always regretted missing out on stuff because of his job.”
Buck very much doubts that, at least in regards to him, but again doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to fight. He and Maddie had very different experiences with their parents and it’s not her fault that he couldn’t live up to their expectations. “No, I didn’t say anything. Maddie, I really never did anything. You heard what they said at dinner. They blame me because the transplants didn’t work and Daniel died anyway.”
“I don’t understand.” Maddie shakes her head. “How do you even know about Daniel? Mom and Dad made me promise never to bring him up. It was too painful for them, and they thought it would be less confusing for you, not having to grow up in the shadow of a brother you wouldn’t remember. Who told you about him?”
“Mom did. Not long after you left she got drunk one night and ranted about how much I failed him. When I asked Dad what she was talking about he just took me up to the attic, showed me the boxes of his old things, and told me never to bring him up again.”
“You must be misunderstanding something. They wouldn’t blame you for his death.” She protests. “Did you say something? Mess with his things somehow?”
“No, Maddie, you’re not listening. I never did anything. Mom and Dad look at me and see someone who couldn’t save the son they actually wanted to have.”
“They wanted you…”
“Those boxes had records from all sorts of clinics, Mads. I was a test tube baby. Engineered as much as possible to be a match for Daniel. All they wanted me for was spare parts.”
Maddie scoffs. “Do you always have to be so dramatic, Evan? Just because you weren’t conceived the old fashioned way doesn’t mean you weren’t wanted. If you talked like this around them it’s no wonder they’re upset with you.”
And the thing is, it’s easy to doubt himself. Buck is sure he never said anything accusatory or rude to his parents like his sister is insinuating, but he’s also familiar with the science and the ethics of what he’s talking about. He did plenty of research. He knows that it’s not exactly common or even something suggestable in most medical circles, to have a savior baby. His parents would have had to do a lot of work to find doctors who were willing to do what they were asking, and spend an awful lot of money. And it’s not like he had journal entries from them outlining their plans. He had vague billing statements and all the research he could manage at the town library.
Maybe it is more than just failing to save Daniel. Maybe the problem is him.
Self-centered.
Selfish.
Difficult.
“Look.” Maddie says after a moment. “I think everyone said things they didn’t mean the other night. Mom and Dad are in town for a couple more days, and I’m sure if we got everyone together and talked calmly about it we could fix this.”
“Maddie, I really don’t think--,”
“Please Buck?” She cuts him off, tears welling in her eyes. “This isn’t about you, it’s about my baby. Your future niece or nephew. Don’t you think they should get to have a family where everyone gets along?”
A part of Buck wants to say yes. He understands the urge of wanting a put together, normal family. He remembers being a kid and wishing for more than his sister. For loving parents, and aunts and uncles and cousins to go off and play with and grandparents to sneak him extra desserts. He understands what Maddie wants, and he wants to be able to give it to her.
But he also thinks she’s dreaming. Their parents aren’t going to magically change their minds about him, regardless of how they approach it. And he doesn’t want to hear all the ways they can tell him how horrible he is.
Stubborn.
Weak.
Heartless.
“Maddie, I’m not sure that I--,”
“Really Evan? Really? You can’t apologize and try to get along with them for a couple of hours? What exactly is more important than your family? Going out drinking with one of your old burnout friends?”
“OK. Time for you to go.” Buck doesn’t have time to be shocked by Maddie’s words or her incredibly poor assumption that Steve was some sort of loser, because Steve comes storming into the living room, plants himself in front of the sofa and glowers down at his sister.
“Excuse me?” Maddie glares at Steve, but does not move.
“Time for you to go.” Steve repeats. A little slowly, like she’s a child. “You have no right to come in here and make demands on Buck’s time, asking him to lick the boots of people who have treated him like shit since the day he was born for no reason beyond the fact that he stayed healthy while their other son died. Died of a disease, mind you, that he had absolutely nothing to do with.”
Maddie stands. “You have no right to say anything. This is a family matter.”
Steve doesn’t blink. “Then start acting like family and support your brother. Otherwise, get out.”
“This isn’t your house. And I’m not done talking with my brother.”
“It’s not your house either. And I’m pretty sure Eddie would back me up on this.”
“Buck!” Maddie steps around Steve to look at him imploringly. “Tell your jackass friend that we aren’t done here.”
Buck feels frozen. He doesn’t know what to do. It’s his sister, who practically raised him asking for one little thing. Maybe she’s not going about it the right way, but he gets why she feels so strongly about it. But Steve might as well be his brother. Has saved his life more than once and is just saying the things Buck wishes he could vocalize.
Ultimately, he doesn’t want to put himself through another dinner with his parents. He probably could; he’s no stranger to fighting through pain and sucking things up for the greater good. But he’s got so much going on, and he’s so tired, and there’s already so many things he has to do that he absolutely can’t avoid. He needs to pick his battles.
Buck sighs. “Mads, I’m not gonna see Mom and Dad.”
“But…you have to.”
“No. It won’t work. I don’t want to see them, and they don’t want to see me. You’ll have to figure out some other way to be the picture perfect family.”
“Buck. Evan…you can’t really be giving up on them. On our family?”
He looks down at his lap, unable to watch the tears that have started streaking down her cheeks. “I’m not changing my mind Maddie. You might as well go.”
A beat passes before she turns on her heels and exits the house, sobbing.
Horrible brother.
Awful person.
Waste of space.
Buck closes his eyes.
You should just kill yourself.
Chapter Text
“So…that was your sister.” Steve says after a moment. He had followed Maddie out of the room, presumably to lock the door after she left, but it didn’t take long for him to come back and take her place on the couch.
“That was Maddie.” Buck confirms. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do now. Saying no to Maddie was the right thing to do, at least for him as things stand right now. But he feels absolutely terrible. Like clammy hands, pit in his stomach, uncomfortable in his own skin, terrible.
His relationship with Maddie is…complicated. When they were little she was everything to him. She filled in so many gaps that their parents left behind, not just in spending time with him and playing but in teaching him things like how to ride a bike and helping him with school and taking care of him when he was sick or hurt or scared. Then she went to college and while she kept in touch and visited frequently at the beginning, by the end of her freshman year he was lucky to get a quick phone call from her every couple of weeks. And when she met Doug the distance only increased. Eventually it got to the point where all they had was the occasional letter or email, and even then she eventually stopped responding.
Learning about the secret of Daniel and his own origins and realizing that Maddie had kept that secret from him…that had hurt. And when she had distanced herself and stopped talking to him, it was hard not to feel like she had decided that their parents were right and that there was something wrong with him. Out of hurt feelings and spite he had stopped sending his own communications for a while, which is why she had no clue he’d joined the SEALS. It wasn’t until his service ended, after several years and life experiences had tempered his feelings and discussions with older members of his team had provided some insights that let him realize that maybe the distance wasn’t entirely her choice, that Buck had felt like cutting her out of his life wasn’t the right thing to do.
He started sending her postcards as he traveled the country, resettling into civilian life. He never got any response, but sending the updates had simply felt right to him. Eventually he landed in Los Angeles, joined the LAFD, and that had been that. He’d sent her the LA update and promptly forgot about it.
Until she showed up literally in his apartment. He had probably forgiven her cutting off all contact a little too easily, but he had been lonely with the long-term absence of Abby and off-kilter from the introduction of Eddie at the firehouse, and then he had learned just how big of an asshole Doug was and what Maddie had been through. Plus she had literally raised him. Holding a grudge felt kind of impossible.
Just like that, she’d been his sister again, and even though things occasionally came up that would remind him that she didn’t really know him as well as she acted like, or that there had been several years where she had just…ghosted him, Buck did his best to let those things go. It was more important to him to have his sister, and to refind the closeness they had had as kids. They’d found a good relationship, especially once things with Doug were fully resolved.
After the truck bombing though, something had shifted. Maddie started trying to convince him to change jobs, acting like she knew better than he did the risks he was taking. She stopped listening to him in favor of pushing her own agenda, and had only gotten more insistent about it since announcing her pregnancy. Buck has done his best to keep the peace and make her happy without giving in to the most egregious of her demands in an effort to maintain their closeness.
Now that he’s been forced to draw his line in the sand and really disappoint her, he can’t help but feel horrible. They’ll almost certainly be fighting, and it’s his fault.
“Makes Mary look almost well-adjusted.”
“It’s not her fault.” Buck sighs and leans back in his seat at Steve’s comment. “Not really.”
“I’m sure being raised by your parents did a number on her, but she was ready to blame you for anything and everything, Buck. If you had brought up JFK I’m pretty sure she would have asked if you had been on the grassy knoll.”
“No, I mean…at best she got half a childhood because she was picking up the slack and taking care of me. And then the guy she married, Doug…he ended up being an abusive, controlling piece of shit who followed her across the country when she finally ran away, stabbed the guy she was sort of seeing, and kidnapped her. It only ended because she was strong enough to fight back and managed to kill him. She…hasn’t had an easy life. I get why she wants things to be better for her kid.”
Steve doesn’t look very swayed. “It’s horrible that she went through that and I’m glad she got out and survived and things are better now, but her traumas don’t give her the right to demand you interact with your abusers.”
Buck nearly flinches. “My parents didn’t--,”
“They didn’t hit you.” Steve cuts him off, voice even. “But they neglected you and made you feel like you were nothing. They made sure you knew that they didn’t love you. That’s abuse.”
Buck isn’t sure he agrees (he knows even though he wasn’t a troublemaker he didn’t exactly make it easy to raise him either--even Maddie had said so) but he knows better than to argue with Steve when he gets serious like this. He won’t change his mind. “Maddie wasn’t there for most of it. She has a different relationship with them than I do. Anyways it doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head. “I said no. I’m not going to see them if I can help it.”
“You know her better than I do.” Steve comments after a moment. “Is her leaving going to be the end of it?”
“You mean will she take no for an answer?” Buck asks. Steve nods. “I don’t know. I mean…she’s my sister. I’ve never not done everything I could to make her happy before. I don’t know how she’ll react to me making the selfish choice.”
“Saying no to her isn’t being selfish.”
“She’s asking for her kid. I’m saying no because I don’t want to do it.”
“No.” Steve shakes his head, moving forward so he’s on the edge of his seat. He rests his elbows on his knees. “Even if the request were reasonable, and it’s not, this is an airplane malfunction scenario. You have to take care of your oxygen mask before you help someone else. You’re a firefighter, Buck. You know you can’t rescue someone if you’re too injured yourself.”
It’s not that Steve is wrong. The principle of protecting yourself so that you can save others is something that they go over at the academy a lot. But it’s never easy to reconcile when you actually have to make the choice, especially when your first instinct is to sacrifice yourself. Especially when it’s family that you’re trying to help. Buck’s not sure he can ever make himself feel OK for making Maddie cry.
Heartless piece of shit.
“She’s my sister.” He says softly.
“It has to go both ways, Buck. You do everything you can to understand her point of view. It’s time for her to try to understand yours.”
“So do you want to get pissed off by the mistakes in Rambo or about the bad CGI they use to make Will Smith fight himself in Gemini Man?” Buck asks as he and Steve enter the movie theater lobby.
“Split the difference and criticize the zombie apocalypse plans in the Zombieland sequel?” Steve suggests.
“Good call.” Buck agrees.
Steve’s phone starts to ring, and he pulls it out of his pocket, checking the screen. “I should take this.” He says. “You OK to grab the tickets?”
Buck nods and as Steve answers his phone and steps to the side of the lobby, he moves towards the self-service ticket kiosks. A couple are in use, and a couple have ‘Out of Order’ placards across the screen, so he takes a place a few feet behind a woman using one of the kiosks and waits. He almost pulls out his phone when more than a minute passes, but just as the thought crosses his mind, the woman turns around.
Her focus is on tucking her credit card back into her wallet and then getting her wallet back into her purse, so with her head down, she nearly walks straight into him. “Oh! Sorry.” She apologizes, looking up. Buck freezes, and her eyes widen in recognition. “Firefighter Buckley. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
Buck blinks, certain that if he does, the person in front of him will change. Because this can’t be happening. It has to be his imagination. But, no. She doesn’t disappear and her face doesn’t morph into anyone else’s. It really is Dr. Wells standing in front of him.
His mouth goes impossibly dry. “I, uh, I should go.”
“Wait! Please. Can we talk?” She pleads.
He wants to say no. He wants to say that there’s a no contact order that she’s violating. A part of him wants to call out to Steve for back-up. But his voice is caught in his throat, and all Buck can make himself do is turn to leave.
He doesn’t even make it a step before her hand wraps around his wrist, pulling him back. “Please, Buck. This has all been a misunderstanding.”
Buck can’t move. Rationally, he knows she’s not holding him tightly, and even if she were, he’s much stronger than her. He could back away or pry her hand off and get free. Only that’s just a tiny part of his brain telling him that. Part of him is terrified that if he lays hands on her in any way or jostles her that she could turn everything around and say he was harassing her (and who wouldn’t believe the pretty accomplished therapist saying a client got too attached?). Part of him is trapped on a couch with that same pretty therapist straddling his lap while she kisses him and pulls on his hair. If he’s even breathing, he doesn’t feel it.
“You and I both know that what happened between us isn’t as serious as they’re making it out to be.” She says. It sounds like she’s underwater. Or maybe Buck is. “We just…reconnected. We’d had a good time before and thought we could have a good time again. I know you had a good time, Buck. I always make sure my partners have a good time.”
A cold heat prickles down his spine. Is she saying what he thinks she’s saying? Does that mean she’s right? He didn’t fight her off or say no, and if he got off does it really matter that he didn’t want to do it in the first place?
He’s sure that if they make it to court, people will look at him and hear his history and see a guy who will sleep with anyone that offers and thank them for it. They’ll look at her and see a nice, young, professional woman. No one will believe that she could have done anything to force him. No one will believe he wasn’t interested to begin with.
“I’m sure we could come to some sort of…arrangement moving forward.” She starts to walk her fingers teasingly up his arm. “Keep having fun together?”
Buck’s stomach rolls.
“You just need to go back to the police and tell them you were wrong. That you want to drop the charges.”
If Buck thought it might actually make the problem go away he might--not because he wants the sort of relationship she’s proposing but because recounting the story over and over again to strangers and being exposed in that way is a literal nightmare--but every time he thinks like that he remembers going through the LAFD academy. And how young some of those kids are, and what would happen and how they would feel if something like this happened to them, and he thinks if he keeps quiet somehow it could and he can’t be responsible for that.
Even though he hasn’t spoken or even shaken his head, Wells seems to sense his hesitation and in a flash her expression clouds over. “Or maybe I should go to them and tell them a little story about the big, strong, mentally disturbed firefighter who threatened to follow me home and make me pay if I didn’t sleep with him at his appointment. Who do you think a jury would believe, Buck? They might not arrest you after it all goes down, but you’d be ruined. Lose your precious job. And you could say goodbye to any chance of knowing this sweet, little baby.” She pats her stomach. “I’m pretty sure it’s yours, you know.”
“You want to repeat that threat for the camera?”
Buck blinks. He’s barely processed everything that Wells said, but Steve has stepped in between them, and he can no longer see the therapist’s face.
Steve’s here. Nothing will happen.
He focuses on trying to breathe past the hot vise squeezing on his lungs.
“I was just--,”
“Violating a No Contact order?” Steve cuts her off firmly. “Intimidating a witness? Threatening to extort someone you assaulted? Take your pick.”
“It’s not that big of a deal. We were just talking.”
At the edges of his vision Buck is aware of a crowd gathering. People love a spectacle.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure the police will disagree with that assessment.” Steve brings his phone to his ear and after a moment speaks. “Yes, this is Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett of 5-0 Task Force in Hawaii. I’m at the AMC movie theater in the Grove in the lobby. I’d like to request immediate police back-up to deal with the violation of a No Contact Order. Dr. Hannah Wells has approached off-duty Firefighter Evan Buckley, initiated physical contact, and verbally threatened him. Due to an ongoing court case, she is legally prohibited from doing so.” There’s a pause. “The altercation has not been violent as of yet. I have separated Wells from Buckley and can continue to do so until officers arrive on scene.” Another pause. “No, there are no known weapons. Yes, I’ll remain on the line until the police arrive.”
The world tunnels out around Buck. It should be easier to breathe with Steve there. He should be able to calm his thoughts and refocus and just be normal again because Steve is there which means nothing can happen, and he didn’t freak out and yell at or touch Wells so she can’t turn this around on him, he did everything right, everything the district attorney told him to do but he feels so…fractured. Broken.
If he closes his eyes, her fingers are still ghosting up his arm. If he opens them he sees her, just on the other side of Steve. And Steve won’t let anything happen, and he shouldn’t be afraid anyways because he is bigger and stronger and stopping her from doing something he doesn’t want should be easy, but his hands are shaking and he’s sweating and he’s pretty sure he’s still standing up but his head is swimming and he doesn’t think he can do much of anything.
Weak.
Broken.
Useless.
Buck doesn’t know how long he stands there, just trying to breathe, until suddenly Steve is facing him. He’s frowning, his serious, on-duty, ‘no one touches my men’ face giving way to a softer, more caring expression that just cuts through the haze that’s been crowding Buck’s vision.
“Buck, hey, you with me?”
Buck nods, even though he’s still got a tingly, floaty sensation separating his head from his body. He has to get it together. He can’t keep losing it like this. He has to be better.
“The police are here, so we’re gonna move somewhere quiet so they can take your statement, OK?”
“Yeah.” He agrees. Just behind Steve he can see a uniformed officer maneuvering Dr. Wells away from the crowd, and something in him releases. That floaty feeling swells and he feels himself crash back down into his body with such a force and speed that his vision blanks and his knees buckle. It’s only Steve’s sudden grip on his arms that keeps him from crashing to the floor.
“Woah! Easy there.”
“Do I need to call for medical assistance?” A sharp, familiar voice cuts through the buzzing in his ears. As the scene comes back into focus Buck finds himself looking not only at Steve’s concerned gaze, but Athena’s.
“I’m OK.” He grinds out, putting everything he can into standing back up. He feels wobbly and unsteady when he succeeds, but he manages. It’s embarrassing enough that he’s caused a scene to begin with, that he’s been so weak that he couldn’t handle a simple conversation on his own, and as it sinks in that Athena is the officer who is going to take his statement and that she’ll be looped in on just how stupid he was the feeling of humiliation and shame only grows. The last thing he wants is for her to call an RA unit and for other LAFD members to see him like this and start the rumor mill going. “I’m good.”
“If you’re sure…” Athena casts a doubting glance his way, because, well, she knows him, but Buck holds steady and after a minute she purses her lips and nods. “The manager is letting us use the break room. Back this way.” She gestures with one arm and starts walking, her air of authority more than enough to part the crowd.
Buck follows, more than a little grateful that Steve keeps a hand on his elbow to keep him steady, even if he hates that he needs the help. They walk to a room back behind the snack counter that reminds Buck of the frat-house he lived in when he first moved to LA--cheap furniture, barely clean surfaces, and a mess of crooked posters hanging on the walls.
“So Buckaroo,” Athena begins once they’re inside, “why is this the first I’m hearing about a No Contact order? Bobby usually keeps me apprised of the station’s legal issues.”
Buck winces at the reminder. This could be more than just letting Athena in. “Bobby doesn’t know.” He takes a seat at the break room table. “It’s not really a work related issue.”
“He still usually knows what’s going on with you.” Athena points out as she grabs another chair.
Buck doesn’t know how to explain that even if he wanted to talk to Bobby about this, which he doesn’t, that Bobby has more than kept his distance ever since the truck bombing. Other than the occasional work-related text, he hasn’t even heard from his captain since he’d been put on leave by the shooting.
Thankfully, Steve speaks up before Buck has to figure out what to say. “You two know each other?”
“Right, sorry.” Buck glances between them. “Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett, this is Sergeant Athena Grant, LAPD. Athena is married to my captain at the 118.”
“Nice to meet you, Sergeant.”
“Likewise.” If Athena notices that Buck doesn’t explain how he knows Steve, and he’s almost certain that she does, she doesn’t mention it. “Commander, if you wouldn’t mind stepping out with Officer Baker to give your statement?” She gestures towards the door and Buck notices another uniformed officer standing there.
“Of course.” Steve pats Buck’s shoulder. “You good, Buck?”
“Yeah, all set.”
The room sits in silence as Steve and the officer leave. Buck’s mind races, trying to anticipate Athena’s potential responses to what he’s about to tell her, but he’s forced to refocus when the break room door closes and she turns her attention back to him.
“So…Buck. Before we go over what happened today, do you want to tell me why you have a No Contact order with that Dr. Wells?” Athena asks. She pulls out her notebook and pen, and Buck is thankful that when he looks up she has her professional face on. This is not Athena Grant, wife of Bobby and sort-of mom to the station, this is Sergeant Athena Grant, LAPD badass. That little bit of distance helps.
“Dr. Wells is--was--,” he corrects, trying to be as clinical and distant as possible, “a department therapist with the LAFD. I saw her for my psych eval to come back after the bombing. Based on complaints that I and a few other members of the department filed, she was fired and has been charged with multiple counts of…” Buck drops off. He’s talked about what happened, minimally anyways, but he’s never actually said the word. Saying it makes it real. He swallows around his suddenly dry mouth. “Multiple counts of rape.”
Athena’s expression softens. “Who else knows?”
It’s not the question Buck anticipates. He thought for sure she would probe for details as to why he thinks he could file a complaint, to try and determine what the case actually is. This is more unexpected. “Just Eddie and Steve.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it will stay that way.” She assures. “This is your business, and not something you need to tell anyone before you’re ready.”
“Thanks Athena.” The relief that floods his system at confirming that not everyone at the 118 is going to find out what happened and start judging him after the rollercoaster of a day he’s had sends tears springing to his eyes. He thumbs at them, determined not to give in and start crying.
“No need to thank me, Buckaroo. Just remember that you’ve got me on your side, all right? Whatever you need moving forward.”
Buck nods, barely trusting his voice. “Yeah.”
“Do you have a copy of the No Contact order I can look at for my report?”
“Yeah.” Buck goes for his phone in his pocket. When the DA’s office had emailed him the details for their appointment on Monday, they had included the document so he’d have it on hand, just in case. He fiddles one-handedly to find the right message and then hands the phone over to Athena.
She reviews the screen appraisingly. “I’m going to forward this to myself, if that’s all right.” Buck agrees quickly. After a few taps on the screen, she hands the phone back to him. “All right. Start from the beginning and go over what happened this afternoon. I’ll stop you if I have questions.”
“Steve and I came here to see a movie. He got a phone call and stepped away, so I went to the kiosks to buy the tickets. They were all in use so I got behind one woman to wait. She finished and turned around and was distracted by getting her wallet and purse straightened out, so she ran into me and when she took a step back and was apologizing we recognized each other.”
“Who spoke first?” Athena looks up from her notes.
“She--Dr. Wells-- did. She said my name, and I realized it was her and tried to leave. She asked if we could talk, but I know we aren’t supposed to even be seeing each other and the District Attorney I spoke with told me that if she showed up I was supposed to just do what I needed to to remain safe and I thought leaving was the best option because I didn’t want to start anything. I tried to walk away and that’s when she grabbed my arm.”
Buck goes over the rest of the encounter with as much detail as he can manage. He tells Athena how Dr. Wells started by flirting with him, trying to convince him that they could have a relationship if he dropped the charges, and when that didn’t work, how she threatened to tell everyone that he had intimidated and forced her. He goes over Steve’s arrival and confirms that he had been the one to separate them and call 9-1-1, and that nothing else had happened until the police arrived.
“OK. This seems like a pretty clear violation of the protection order and attempt at witness tampering and intimidation.” Athena says, closing her notebook. “Even if running into you here was a coincidence, she should have allowed you to leave or turned and left herself the moment she recognized you. I can’t promise she’ll face additional charges, but we’ll bring her to the station for further questioning. I’ll check your statement against your friend’s, and whatever Dr. Wells says, and send a copy of the final report to the District Attorney handling your case. I’ll also talk to the manager here about getting the security footage from the lobby; even without audio, if there’s a good visual it should back up your version of events that you tried to leave and didn’t do anything to threaten her. Do you have any questions for me?”
Buck shakes his head, too exhausted and spent to think about formulating actual words.
“All right. Wait here and I’ll see if the scene is clear for you to head out and get back to your day.”
By the time Steve pulls his jeep back into Eddie’s driveway, they’re only a little over halfway through the day and Buck is exhausted. Heavy head, hollow chest, moving in slow motion exhausted.
After the confrontation in the movie theater and subsequent dealings with the police, they had decided to forgo the movie and just go back to the house. Well, Buck had asked to go back and Steve hadn’t argued. If he was disappointed to not be doing something while he was visiting LA, Buck couldn’t actually tell, and though he felt guilty for cutting their day out short, Buck was also feeling so worn thin and exposed that he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Then in the traffic on the drive back, he’d gotten Hen’s cryptic text message. Unable to figure out what she meant, he’d texted Eddie who had reluctantly relayed the whole story. Apparently after leaving the house that morning, Maddie had gone to the station to cry on Chimney’s shoulder and in the midst of complaining about how unreasonable Buck had been and how heartbroken she was, she had mentioned, for all of the firehouse to hear, that Buck’s boyfriend had kicked her out of Eddie’s house.
And the thing is…only Chris, Steve, Abuela and Pepa know that he and Eddie are dating. They had talked about coming out but they had wanted to enjoy some time when their relationship was just for them, and they hadn’t seen much point in telling everyone else when Buck wasn’t going to be working at the firehouse for the foreseeable future due to his arm. Plus, up until the disastrous family dinner, the only people in LA who knew that Buck wasn’t straight were those in the know about his relationship with Eddie, and a few casual hookups who probably didn’t even remember his name.
He’d never come out to Maddie. She’d moved away by the time he had come into his feelings, and when his parents had walked in on him making out with his biology lab partner, Mark, their reaction had been negative and severe enough that suppressing that part of himself had felt essential for survival. Steve and a few other SEALS in his unit had realized how much of himself he had buried for his parents and slowly convinced him that it would be OK to let all of that go (stereotypes about the military be damned) but he’d never totally gotten comfortable enough to just…wear a label and his heart on his sleeve and come out to people. He’d never told the 118, and while he’d considered talking to Maddie about it once they reconnected, the timing had never been right.
But never mind how he was feeling. His parents had outed him to her and Chimney, and apparently now Maddie had turned around and outed him to the firehouse.
Eddie had said that he corrected her and told everyone that Steve was just an old friend, not a boyfriend, but apparently Chimney had followed that up with a comment that “The Buckleys wouldn’t have been so upset about him liking men if he wasn’t seeing one now since he’d obviously been happy with women before” and the damage had officially been done.
He was out.
It’s probably not the end of the world, he knows. The 118 is a very accepting house and neither Bobby or Hen would put up with anyone giving him trouble over it. But he’d honestly thought that when he got through his probationary year and the mess that was Buck 1.0 without them catching on that wasn’t straight, that he’d get to tell them on his terms.
And he’s so, so tired.
The day’s only a little over halfway done and already he’s let down his sister, been outed, and had a confrontation with his rapist. He needs a moment by himself. He needs to breathe.
Buck checks the time as he lets them into the house. They’ve got a little over an hour before Carla will arrive with Chris to drop him off after school. He tells Steve that. “Will you be OK to watch TV or something while I have a shower?” He asks. “I need a few minutes to just…let go of all that.”
“Yeah, sure.” Steve nods, a look of understanding crossing his face. “Do you need help with your sling or…?”
Buck shakes his head. “I’ll need your help to put it back on but I can get it off. Remotes are on the coffee table, we should be logged in to everything.” He doesn’t wait for a response, turning and shuffling down the hallway with as much energy as he can muster. It’s not much.
He stops in Eddie’s bedroom first, where he grabs sweatpants, a soft old t-shirt, and an oversized hoodie that he can put burrow in after he showers. Then he crosses the hall to the bathroom, closing the door and turning the shower on, cranking the water temperature up so by the time he’s got his sling and clothes off, it’ll be as hot as he can stand it. He needs to scrub the day off.
Buck carefully slips out of his sling and places it on the counter with his sweats, then strips down, tossing his clothes in the hamper as he goes. He gives the water another minute to reach temperature, but without much thought slides past the shower curtain under the steady stream of the showerhead.
The heat prickles at his skin, but he leans into the burn, closing his eyes and letting the water run over his head. In the silence of the bathroom, his thoughts echo loudly.
You’re a terrible brother.
You’re a horrible burden.
You’re a useless waste of space.
He can’t let go of the guilt of letting his sister down, no matter what Steve had said about it being the right thing to do. She had given up her own childhood to take care of him, and now is supposed to be the time that he pays her back for that. But he can’t be the brother she needs.
That pain sits on his chest, stabbing at his heart, and he leans forward, resting his forehead against the shower tile to try and work through the ache.
Only that’s not the end of it.
He’s got a weight across his shoulders, heavy with shame for being too weak to handle Dr. Wells himself. Too weak to face his own problems alone. Too weak to manage his own thoughts.
He’s got a pit in his stomach, churning at the idea that things are spiraling too far out of his control.
He’s got a fog in his head, overwhelmed at the thought of everything that’s coming to a head that he has to find a way to deal with. That he’s too weak to deal with.
Buck starts to cry. It starts with a few streaky tears that he can’t hold back, but as the water pounds across his shoulders and his mind spins, it quickly turns to gasping sobs that he can’t control. Everything feels too much. He chokes on his tears and gasps around the lump in his throat, and all the while his head is telling him that he’s ruining everything. That he’s not worth all this hassle and drama.
His legs crumple beneath him and he sinks to the floor.
Chapter 17
Notes:
Just a heads up, there's a pretty thoroughly described panic attack in this chapter, so if that's something that might trigger you, please read with caution.
Chapter Text
“Buck…Buck it’s been 45 minutes…if you don’t answer me I’m coming in…Buck…Evan…shit, OK, you’re OK…”
In the back of his mind, Buck can tell that he’s no longer alone. He hears someone talking, can even mostly make out the words being spoken but there’s a disconnect between hearing the words and understanding them. Between hearing the voice and knowing who it belongs to.
An arm sneaks into the shower from behind the curtain.
The water stops.
The shower curtain draws back and Buck wants to shrink down but he can’t move. He thinks about moving, thinks about pushing himself back against the wall because he doesn’t know who’s with him but nothing happens.
The person crouches next to him. “Buck, hey, you with me?”
Buck blinks. He knows that face. He knows he does. Why can’t he think of the name?
“I’m gonna touch your shoulder, OK?” And a calloused hand rests gently against his skin. It burns. “Jesus, you’re ice cold. Where does Eddie keep the towels?” The hand pulls back and the figure stands.
There’s some soft noise, but Buck doesn’t register what it is. He stares ahead, eyes stinging with every slight movement.
“OK, we just gotta get you dried off and then you can put some warm clothes on.” The person kneels down again, and drapes something--a towel, Buck thinks--across his body. In the following moments, he feels hands rubbing the towel up and down his arms. His injured arm twinges in protest at the pressure and the world starts to come into focus with the pain.
“Steve?” His voice comes out thick and rough.
“Yeah, I got you, Buck.” Steve continues to pat him down with the towel. The worn cotton prickles on his skin. “You know where we are?”
“Bathroom. Eddie’s house.” Buck says, vaguely aware that his words are slurring together. He’s sure that’s bad, but he can’t remember why. “Not a flashback.”
“What did happen?”
Buck can’t find his answer right away. It’s hard to find the words. His brain is still clouded over, heavy with emotion, and the whole thing is uncomfortable and embarrassing; it’s just proving his worries right. He’s too weak to do this.
“Buck, hey, stay focused on me.” Steve shakes his shoulder gently. “You can think or get some sleep or whatever you want after we warm you up but right now I need you talking to me. Tell me what happened.”
He’s worried, Buck realizes. “I’m fine.” He tries to reassure his friend. He’d pat him on the shoulder but his limbs still aren’t cooperating. His hand jerks ineffectively in his lap.
“You’re freezing, but you’re not shivering. You’re slurring and mumbling, and you’re not breathing properly. I’m willing to bet if we took your temperature you’re mildly hypothermic.” Steve lists off. He drops the towel in Buck’s lap and turns around, stretching to reach something on the bathroom counter. “And if you were fine, you probably wouldn’t have stayed once the hot water ran out. So talk to me.”
Hypothermic…He doesn’t remember the water turning cold. He probably should. “Eddie’s hot water heater is old.” That’s probably why he ran out of water. On mornings where everyone needed a shower they always ran out. Buck usually waited until the middle of the day, since he wasn’t working. “Should get him a new one. Since he’s letting me stay here.”
“Pretty sure he wants you to stay here because you’re dating. Arms up.” Steve prods at his elbow, and guides one arm up above his head. Buck just manages to hold it up, and starts to lift his other arm, the broken one, but Steve assists there as well. He stretches something soft over Buck’s hands and starts to pull it down. As it slips over his head and he plunges momentarily into darkness, Buck realizes it’s his hoodie.
“Still owe him. Don’t want to take too much.”
“Can’t be too much for someone who cares about you, remember?” Steve grips his elbows again, firmer this time, and starts to pull him up so he’s standing. Buck tries to help but his legs feel weak beneath him. “And from what I’ve seen these past couple of days, you’ve got yourself a good one.” Steve starts to maneuver him into the sweatpants.
“Don’t deserve him.”
“Of course you do, Buck.”
“No, I’m more trouble than I’m worth. Too weak to deal with my own shit.”
“Hey!” Steve says sharply. “Look at me.” He grabs Buck’s shoulders and waits for Buck’s eyes to meet his. “You are not weak. You are doing everything you can to get through a real shitstorm of a situation and that is not weak. Surviving is the strongest thing you can do right now. Do you hear me?”
Buck doesn’t answer.
Steve shakes him. Once. Not with force. Just enough to keep his attention on him. “Buck, do you understand what I’m telling you? You are not weak.”
Buck is reminded of missions and Steve giving speeches to reassure or hype up the unit. He was good at that. Never lied. Steve never lies when it matters. “Not weak.” He repeats.
“Damn straight you’re not weak.” Steve nods. “Now let's go warm you up and you can tell me what happened.”
Buck taps out a quick text message to Eddie, warning him to be quiet when he gets home. Carla had dropped Chris off a little while ago, and he had immediately joined Buck in his blanket burrito on the couch, snuggling up to his side as he talked about his day. They had talked for a little bit, Chris happy to fill in the gaps for Steve who knew nothing about the social hierarchy of the second grade classes at Durand Elementary, but it wasn’t long before the boy drifted off to sleep. While he doesn’t often take naps, and would indeed protest that he’s too old for them now, it was Thursday. And on Thursdays he had gym class. That activity on top of whatever he wanted to get up to at recess tended to wear him out.
With the house quiet, and Buck feeling a bit more settled and put together after his roller-coaster of a day, Steve had grabbed Buck’s laptop to continue his research into potential lawyers, keeping Buck updated as he worked. “This one has been practicing for 15 years and specializes in cases where determining parentage and outlining support and custody details is required.” He says, keeping his voice soft to avoid waking Chris.
“So…exactly what I need.” Buck is still wrapping his head around the idea that he might be a father, but if the encounter with Dr. Wells had solidified anything for him, it was that he needed to be doing something to protect his interests, and potentially the baby’s.
“Yeah. She has good reviews that I can see, has been recognized by the State Bar of California for her dedication to family law…Sounds like the kind of person you want to have on your side. Want me to see if I can get you an appointment?”
Buck nods. He doesn’t really know enough about lawyers to know what makes a good one, but he’ll trust Steve’s judgment. “Yeah, if you don’t--,” He cuts himself off when the front door opens. Eddie enters the house carrying two plastic bags of what smells like Indian food.
Steve stands, tapping on his phone. “I’ll just…” He waves at Eddie and walks out, exiting the house.
“Where’s he going?” Eddie asks in a low voice. He places the bags on the kitchen table, and then crosses to the living room.
“Phone call.” Buck explains. “He thinks he found a good lawyer for the paternity stuff, so he’s seeing if we can make an appointment.”
“Good, good.” Eddie leans over the back of the couch, tilting his head to kiss Buck in greeting. “How’re you doing?”
He doesn’t know how to answer that. Eddie should get the full story of everything that had gone on that day, from Maddie’s demands to the confrontation at the movie theater (and maybe his breakdown in the shower) and he still needs to actually explain about Daniel and why exactly his parents hate him, but diving into all of that feels like a lot. “It’s…been a long day. How was work?”
“A long day?” Eddie raises an eyebrow, taking a seat in the armchair. “That’s all I get?”
Buck sighs. “I’ll tell you about it, I just…want to hear about your day first. Mine wasn’t exactly fun.”
“I don’t think hearing about my day is gonna make you feel better, hermoso. The firehouse is filled with a bunch of nosy gossips. They’re worse than Abuela’s sewing circle. After Maddie showed up, whenever we weren’t on a call they were just…digging after every detail they could get.”
He can’t help but cringe at the thought. It’s bad enough that these things are coming out at all but to have pieces of his life be fodder for a group of people that he knows struggle to mind their own business...he can't help but worry about the outcome. “How bad is it?”
“Well, one positive is that Hen tore into Chim for outing you to the house. I wouldn’t be surprised if she reached out to Maddie about it too. And she shut down all the speculation about how you identify and your history and all of that and made it clear that everyone could learn more about it when you decide to share it with them and to leave it alone until then.”
That is something, Buck agrees. He doesn’t really know where he stands with Hen. At one point he probably would have considered her to be something like another older sister, considering the things they had shared together and the advice she had given him, but, as with most of the 118, they had drifted apart since the bombing. He can forgive her a lot of that--he knows that the process of trying to get Karen pregnant, it’s failure, and then deciding to undergo the process of becoming foster parents has to have been nerve-wracking and emotional and time consuming and her focus should have been on her family throughout all of that--but it’s hard to forget that when he had first gone back to work that they hadn’t exactly resumed any sort of friendship. And she hasn’t reached out to him since he’d been benched again by the shooting.
But it does feel like it means something that she’d at least stand up for his privacy. “Yeah, she texted me earlier to let me know she was on my side with that.”
“Good. And for what it’s worth, no one was being shitty about it anyways. They were surprised, but not like…rude or anything.”
“Oh.” That’s certainly a relief. Not that he really thought anyone on his crew would be particularly narrow-minded, but he’s been surprised and let down by people before. “So if they weren’t talking about me liking guys what were they talking about?”
“Well, they started by trying to suss out who Steve is to you.” Eddie says. “But when I wouldn’t cave or tell them anything it was mostly all about everything with Maddie and your parents.”
Buck closes his eyes. “I mean, I guess if I were hearing about that shitshow for the first time I’d have lots of questions and want to talk about it too.”
“The story being interesting doesn’t mean you don’t deserve privacy, Buck. Chim…wasn’t exactly sparing any details.”
“Right.”
“And this isn’t me asking you to talk about something you don’t want to talk about but you should probably know that he told the whole story. Including Daniel.”
Right. Daniel. Who Buck hadn’t told Eddie about yet. Because it’s one thing for Eddie to know that his parents hate him, but it’s a whole other thing for him to know why. “I’m not…unwilling to talk about him. If you have questions or whatever. I just didn’t bring him up because…sometimes it’s hard not to think that the people who know about him and how he died agree with my parents that there’s something wrong with me.”
“Buck, no…” Eddie leans forward, reaching a hand across to grab onto Buck’s. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your brother had a terrible disease, and the types of transplants your parents used you for…those are longshots. Anyone who is blaming you isn’t thinking clearly or being fair to you.”
“Realistically, I know that. It’s just…not how people act sometimes.”
Eddie frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Like…Bobby texted me this afternoon saying he was there if I wanted to talk.” Buck scrolls on his phone to find the message, then holds it out for Eddie to see. “And maybe I’m reading into things the wrong way or overthinking it, but the way he talks about me making sure I’m making the right choices…that sounds like he thinks I should do what Maddie wants and try and apologize. And if I need to apologize, that means I must have done something wrong.”
“I don’t know what Bobby meant by that,” Eddie hands the phone back, “but I know you didn’t do anything wrong. You were a kid. In an impossible situation. And cutting off contact with those people is the right choice for you. Bobby doesn’t know the whole story about how they’ve treated you.” He pauses. “Honestly, the fact that he’s only reaching out to you now kind of rubs me the wrong way.”
Buck waits for his partner to elaborate. He’d definitely felt weird getting Bobby’s text, beyond the feeling of hurt that came with thinking his Captain didn’t see his side of things, but he hadn’t really figured out why.
“He’s been very…out of sight, out of mind with you. Ever since the bombing. He doesn’t try to see you, doesn’t ask after you even though he knows you’re staying with me. You’re one of his firefighters, and the team has always acted like a family but he--and the rest of the team--have been ignoring you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk with him if you want to but…I don’t think it’s right that he’s messaging you and acting like he hasn’t been ghosting you just because something that you’re dealing with finally crossed into the firehouse.”
Oh. That…that makes sense. Buck has been so busy trying to just rationalize the distance that has appeared between himself and the rest of the house that he hasn’t really thought about what it means that they’re still kind of invested in what’s going on with him, despite not making the effort to just reach out and ask.
“The whole day, with everyone talking about you and your past and your choices was really uncomfortable.” Eddie says. “Even after Hen lectured them about respecting your privacy with your sexuality, it was like they didn’t see anything wrong with talking about your life like the plot of some trashy reality show.”
Right. It’s definitely a good thing he doesn’t have to show his face around the station anytime soon, and that there haven’t been many team gatherings. Hopefully by the time his arm is healed up and he’s back to work, something else interesting will have happened and this will be old news. Then people will only bring it up when they want to embarrass him, like they do with his hookup phase. Buck can’t imagine facing their questions and judgment right now.
“At least it’s over now?” Buck offers, unsure what else to say. The day being mostly over is what has allowed him to relax in spite of what he’s dealt with. “And you don’t have to see any of them tomorrow. Maybe by your next shift they’ll be better.”
“Maybe.” Eddie doesn’t look very convinced. He eyes Christopher where he’s snuggled up against Buck and smiles. “I hate to disturb him, but if we don’t wake him up soon, bedtime will be a mess.”
“Yeah, he’s been asleep for a while.” Buck agrees. He starts to adjust his positioning, so he can gently shake Chris awake. He figures the rest of the evening can be normal and calm. Chris’ll get up and they’ll have dinner with Steve, do some reading or playing with Chris, and then after he goes to bed, Buck will recap the day for Eddie. They’ll talk about it, realize they’re exhausted from their respective shitshow days, and curl up in bed, Eddie holding Buck close and letting him rest his head on his chest instead of using a pillow until they fall asleep.
Buck wishes he could fast forward life and just skip to that moment and stay there.
Buck drops his phone and it thuds dully as it hits the carpet.
No.
No no no no no no no.
“Buck?”
The sounds of Chris and Steve’s video game battle have paused. He’s aware of the eyes in the room turning to him, but he can’t get his brain to talk to his mouth to say anything to respond to them. He’s too busy trying to breathe.
His chest throbs--a stabbing pain in time with his heart. He can’t get enough air. He’s hot and cold and he’s dying and oh fuck Taylor’s gonna tell everyone.
“Chris, bud, can you do me a favor and go to my room and find where Buck left Armando?”
Buck can’t breathe. Taylor’s gonna tell everyone. She’s going to put it on the news and everyone will know how stupid he is. How weak he is. Everyone is going to know and there’s no coming back from this and he should just give in and die now because no one will ever look at him the same again.
He brings his hand up to his throat, fingers grappling with his skin. It’s too tight and maybe if he can somehow get it off he’ll be able to breathe and think again.
“Buck, you’re having a panic attack. I need you to look at me and focus on my breathing.”
Eddie is in front of him. His hands are on Buck’s knees. He’s so gentle and it feels right but Buck can’t settle and relax into it because it’s not going to last. Eddie’s not gonna want to stay with him when he’s the kind of public spectacle that comes with being the focus of a Taylor Kelly story. He hates attention. And it won’t just be attention. It will be questions and jokes and comments and judging and it will be too much. Buck will be too much.
Why is his throat still so tight? He presses his fingers harder into his neck, curving his nails into the skin and dragging down.
“No, Buck, hermoso, you’re hurting yourself.” Eddie’s hand wraps around his and pulls it gently away from his throat, down to his lap.
“She’s gonna tell everyone.” Buck wheezes between breaths.
Eddie’s frowning. Next to him Steve picks up the fallen phone. “Who’s Taylor Kelly?”
Eddie answers him with some very unflattering words in Spanish, then turns his attention back to Buck. “We can handle Taylor. But first you need to breathe.”
“Trying.”
Buck tries to focus. He knows this is a panic attack and that Eddie’s trying to help him. He tries to time his breaths with the sweeps of Eddie’s thumb on the back of his hand but the rational part of his brain won’t talk to the rest of him and he can’t slow things down.
This is so stupid.
He is so stupid.
“Hey, forget about the texts. Forget whatever you’re thinking. Forget about breathing.” Eddie instructs after a moment. “Tell me everything you can about the different classes of fire extinguisher.”
Fire extinguishers. Work. Buck can do that. He’s good at work.
“There--there are four classes of fire extinguisher.” He starts, stuttering around his catching breath. “C-class A for standard combustible materials.”
“Materials like what?” Eddie prompts.
“Wood, cloth, ru-rubber, paper, and most plastics.”
“Good. That’s good, Buck. What’s next?”
“I’ve got him dad!” Chris’ voice cuts through the room.
“Thanks mijo.” Eddie glances back. “Can you bring him here please?” He turns back to Buck. “What’s the next extinguisher?”
The ache in his chest starts to ease. “Class B. For use on flammable liquids. Grease, solvent, gasoline, alcohols, and oils. Then it’s Class C for electrical fires. Last is Class D extinguishers for flammable metallics. Potassium, sodium, magnesium.” As he finishes, he realizes that whatever Eddie’s plan was, it worked. His brain is no longer racing ahead of him, his throat isn’t closed, his fingertips are no longer tingling.
“Here you go.” Chris arrives, holding out the familiar stuffed armadillo. Eddie takes it from him, and Chris seems to take in the scene. “Are you OK Buck?”
Fuck.
Buck looks to Eddie, no idea what to say. This is exactly why he was worried about staying with them. Chris shouldn’t be seeing this.
“He’ll be fine, mijo.” Eddie says. “He just got really scared for a couple minutes.” He takes Armando the armadillo and places him in Buck’s hand. “But now he’s got you, me, Steve and Armando, so he can talk about what made him scared and we can help him.”
Chris nods and steps forward a little closer. He pats Buck gently on the cheek. “You’ve got this, Buck.”
“Thanks Superman.” Buck can’t help but smile at the gesture. “You want to sit with me for a minute? Give me one of your super awesome hugs?”
“Anything you need.”
Eddie rises to his feet and helps Christopher get up onto Buck’s lap, arranged opposite his injured arm so they can hold each other close and he can lean his head against Buck’s shoulder. Eddie and Steve then both return to their original seats.
“What scared you?” Chris asks.
Buck hesitates, trying to think of a way to explain what’s happened so Steve and Eddie will understand, without diving too deeply into the adult level details around Chris. “Well…do you remember a few weeks ago when I was upset, and told your dad about how someone had hurt me?” After a moment Chris nods. “Well, other than telling the police so that person couldn’t hurt anyone else, and a couple of close friends like your dad and Steve who can make sure that I’m OK, it’s not the sort of thing I want to talk about or have a lot of people know about. But somehow, a reporter who knows me found out about it and she wants to talk about it on the news.”
“But then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.”
“Right. And I don’t want that to happen, but there’s not a lot you can do to stop a reporter from covering a story.”
Eddie, again, mutters a comment in Spanish in language that’s more than a little colorful.
“Dad!” Christopher giggles. “Bisabuela would wash your mouth out with soap if she heard you.”
“In this particular situation she would agree with me.” Eddie says. “But I don’t want to hear you repeating any of that.”
Steve looks up from his phone. “Do you have the phone number of the District Attorney who’s handling your case?” He asks.
“Yeah. Everything’s on my phone. Why?”
“Well, for one, they’ll probably be very interested in finding out about the leak in their office. If this reporter knows your name in connection with the case or the names of the other victims, that’s protected information in the state of California. They probably can’t stop the story altogether, but they can prevent her from naming you and the others. There are victim privacy laws for this type of assault.”
Buck’s not sure where Taylor’s journalistic integrity really rests, considering she had to be strong-armed into not broadcasting the footage of Bobby on the rooftop of the firehouse after the dosed brownies, but it’s at least a glimmer of hope that he won’t be totally exposed. And if she goes through with the story then at least there might be consequences for doing it.
“If you want to give me the info, I can call and fill them in on Taylor’s plans.” Eddie offers. “They might not be in the office this late but if I leave a message I’m sure they’ll tackle it first thing in the morning.”
Buck nods, sending Eddie a grateful look. “Yes. Please. Thank you.”
“As for the reporter,” Steve starts, “I wouldn’t respond to her at all. Don’t engage, let the district attorney handle it from here. I know this was a shock to hear about at the end of a…very long day, but I think we have a good chance of stopping this problem before it starts.”
Buck can definitely be on board with that plan. The less he has to deal with Taylor, the better.
“OK, so I’ll take your phone and go make that call.” Eddie stands and picks up Buck’s phone from where Steve left it on the coffee table. He holds it in position for Buck to unlock it and open up the right contact information. “Chris, while I’m doing that, I have a really important job for you. Think you’re up for it?”
“Absolutely!” Chris nods enthusiastically in Buck’s lap.
“We are all going to be free and not working on Saturday. And there’s a lot of stuff here in LA that Steve’s never done before. I want you to start brainstorming ideas about what we can do, and you Buck and Steve are gonna make a plan, OK? You’re in charge.”
“I won’t let you down.”
As Eddie leaves to make the call somewhere where he can talk freely, Buck lets himself relax a little in his seat. He’s exhausted, more than ready to call it a night despite the early hour, but he knows that Eddie was just setting up a conversation where he can take a back seat; Chris will throw out ideas and Steve will be the adult that subtly guides the conversation towards a reasonable and doable plan. All Buck should have to do is occasionally give an opinion and give a thumbs up at the end, which feels like his maximum capacity for engagement at this point. He leans back while Chris sits up a little straighter, taking his appointed power quite seriously.
He looks across the room at Steve. “Which do you like better? Space or dinosaurs?”
Chapter 18
Notes:
Hey everyone!
Thanks for sticking with this fic, even when it takes a little bit longer for me to get a chapter out. The good news is, I just wrapped up my master's program, so now writing time is just fighting with work and my brain in general, not school. Hopefully that means I get to be a little more focused and dedicated to getting this out (and starting on some of the other ideas that I have).
I've updated the tags for some new content that may be triggering for some people--I would not say that anything is going to cross into the territory of fully disordered eating, particularly with intent, but depression comes with appetite and food issues in general for a number of people and that is being reflected starting in this chapter, so if that's something that you need to be aware of, please take caution.
Additionally, the characters go over a sort of laundry list of items that could be potentially triggering for people as part of the intake forms for starting as a patient at a new mental health clinic. I don't believe they talk about anything in depth that I haven't already tagged for, most things are just a passing mention, but just be aware that something might come up in the first scene of the chapter.
I think that's everything, so read on, and thanks for any feedback or kudos-ing you may do!
Chapter Text
If Thursday had been a shitshow, Friday has been a roaring success. Or at least exceedingly calm. Which as far as Buck is concerned is the best thing that’s happened to him since Eddie approached him about dating.
After getting Chris off to school, they--meaning Buck, Steve, and Eddie, had gone to meet with Katherine Belfort, the lawyer Steve had found and made an appointment with the day previous. The meeting had been as successful as Buck could have hoped for. Belfort reminded him a lot of Athena; she was very warm and personable, but straightforward and no-nonsense when it came to business. She’d heard his story and agreed that it was both reasonable and important to pursue a paternity action as soon as possible. They had discussed her rate, signed a contract, and given her all the information she needed to get started. She was hopeful that she would have news for them regarding whether or not Dr. Wells was contesting the paternity action or complying by the middle of the next week.
With one of the major items on their to-do list checked off, they had refocused their efforts on finding a therapist and a psychiatrist that Buck would feel comfortable seeing. It was a little challenging to narrow the field down at first. He’d never really had a positive therapy experience, and the last couple had been outright negative. His anxiety levels were high no matter who he pictured in the opposite chair, and they only marginally went down with the reminder that they would be prioritizing therapists who offered virtual sessions.
He wasn’t sure what he’d prefer from a therapist so as they started to search they left the parameters open.
Then, after Eddie noticed one or two that specifically mentioned religion and being faith-based practitioners, he’d pointed out that it wouldn’t hurt to look for someone that promoted themselves as being queer-friendly. Then Steve had said that it might be a good idea to look for someone who had done work with veterans or first responders before.
Privately, Buck thought that if they were going to try and find someone that had knowledge to tackle all of his different experiences and traumas that they might as well be looking for an actual unicorn, but Steve and Eddie were being so supportive and helpful so he kept that comment to himself.
They had conducted their searches, and found a few local options that had Buck reading further profiles and philosophies of care. Eventually, with all of his reading, one had just felt right, or, more accurately, as right as they were going to feel considering he still wasn’t sure he really wanted to do the whole therapy thing. They were accepting new clients, and they worked out of a practice that also had a psychiatrist who would be able to see to any potential medication needs, so one lengthy and nerve wracking phone call later, Buck had scheduled his first therapy appointment with Jules Porter, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor.
Their practice manager had emailed him a bunch of intake forms to fill out and return prior to his appointment next week, which is where he finds himself now.
Sitting in the living room with Eddie while playoff baseball plays on the television, staring at forms on his laptop and trying to figure out which boxes he’s supposed to check off. He’d been able to handle the basic ones. The ones that went over his health insurance info, and his basic medical history, and then the various privacy and consent forms that one has to sign when going to a new healthcare practice. He’d even felt OK, if a little vulnerable, in filling out a couple of assessments that were clearly gauging his depression and anxiety levels. But now he’s on the forms that are meant to give Jules some insight into him prior to the appointment. Forms that want him to disclose his substance use and eating habits and various feelings and experiences that he’s very used to keeping to himself.
Things that he doesn’t even like to think about. And, as he knows from talking with Steve, things that he hadn’t really considered to be a part of his life story, but that other people see when they look at him.
He doesn’t know where to begin.
Buck knows Eddie will help him if he asks. Somewhere around the top of the fourth inning after he’s been staring at a single form with uncertainty for nearly an hour he decides he’s going to do so. It takes another two innings for him to work up the courage to speak.
He knows Eddie will help.
It’s just…embarrassing. These are personal things. Vulnerable things. Things he should really know about himself, shouldn’t he? It feels like the sort of thing he shouldn’t need to ask for help with (and also maybe, just maybe, some of these things are things he doesn’t want to admit about himself, especially to others) so it takes him a moment or several to find his voice.
“Hey Eds?”
“Yeah?” Eddie looks away from…someone, running around the bases. (Buck hasn’t been paying attention to the game at all, and honestly if he’s not actually in the stadium he finds baseball pretty boring).
“I’m working on all that intake paperwork for the therapist, and there’s this one form that lists a bunch of issues and I’m supposed to check off the ones that apply to me.”
“Right.”
“And yesterday after Maddie left, Steve called how my parents treated me abuse. And I’d never…thought about it like that? Like, I pretty much always knew that they hated me, but I always had food and clothes and a place to sleep and at school they’d always told us that abuse was like…getting hit or touched inappropriately, and they never did that so I figured…they hated me but it was normal. Like maybe some kids are just born wrong so their parents can’t stand them and…that’s me.”
They’re sitting next to each other on the couch, but Eddie shifts his position, angling so he’s facing Buck directly. “Buck…” He rests a hand on Buck’s knee, unable to reach his free hand. “You know that’s not true, right? You weren’t born wrong or anything like that. How they treated you absolutely was not normal, and abuse…yes, it’s getting hit like Maddie went through with Doug, but it can also be so much more than that. What your parents did, blaming you for Daniel’s death, refusing to give you any sort of affection, criticizing and yelling at you no matter what you did…those are all abusive behaviors too.”
“So I should check off the box about child abuse.” Buck’s still not sure if it really counts, but he trusts Steve, and he trusts Eddie and they both think it was abuse… He doesn’t want to argue the point anyways. That’s not why he brought it up.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you think…” Buck stops himself, rethinking his request and his words. “I’m not sure that I have a very…clear-headed perspective on this stuff. Maybe I just wasn’t taught the right things or I’m too dumb to understand them. But if I’m putting myself through this and doing therapy, I want to do it right. So could you…maybe…go through the list with me and make sure I’m checking off everything that applies to me?”
“First of all, you’re not dumb.” Eddie says. “It’s way easier to look at someone else and see what they’re dealing with than it is to look at yourself. You don’t see things the same way when you’re the one experiencing them. Second, of course if you want my help, I’ll go through it with you. You’re not doing any of this alone.”
Something releases in Buck’s chest and he breathes a little easier. He moves himself closer to his partner and angles the laptop so they both can see the screen. “OK. So, some of this is easy. Like, I know I don’t have issues with alcohol or anger management.” He side-eyes Eddie, just to gauge his reaction, and is relieved to note that he appears to agree with his assessment. “But anxiety is a yes.”
Eddie nods.
“But this next one…body image issues. Do they mean like weight and stuff? Because I’ve never felt, like, driven to lose weight or anything like that.”
“I think they mean if you look at yourself and see parts of your body that you would want to change.”
Buck thinks. He’s been plenty unhappy with the limits of his body this year, but that was all because of injuries. He’s never looked in the mirror and felt like something was wrong. “OK. That’s a no then.” He continues to scroll. “We already went over child abuse…I’ve never had any chronic illnesses or chronic pain…Concentration issues?”
“I think that’s probably a yes.” Eddie weighs in. “You’ve talked before about having trouble focusing in school or when it’s too quiet. And we’ve all seen your attention wander during morning briefings.”
“Right.” Buck blushes. They run through several more relatively easy ones. Yes for depression, no for divorce, domestic abuse, and eating disorders. He’d never been formally diagnosed with any educational or learning disability, and he hasn’t experienced the sort of major losses that are accompanied by grief. “Hyperactivity…I think that’s a yes?”
“Yeah.” Eddie agrees.
“LGBTQ+ issues.” Buck pauses. Do they mean finding your identity? Accepting it? Does the non-acceptance of his parents count as an issue? His reluctance to come out and talk about it? It’s not as though he’s so repressed that he’s refusing to date so it can’t be that big of an issue. And he’s perfectly tolerant and accepting of everyone else’s identities and preferences so that’s not an issue.
His silence must extend a little too long because Eddie nudges his shoulder gently into his. “They mean anything that comes along with being queer. Questioning your identity. Acceptance from others, accepting yourself, dealing with all the different outside opinions and pressures…Anything.”
Buck checks off the box. Nightmares and panic are also yesses. Repetitive behaviors and repetitive thoughts are not. “Self-esteem concerns.”
“Yes.” Eddie’s answer comes quickly enough, that Buck turns and looks at him in surprise. “I don’t think you even realize that you do it, babe, but you are constantly putting yourself down. Just now when you asked for my help your first instinct was to call yourself dumb. And everyone who knows you knows that you’re far from stupid. You don’t see yourself or value yourself the way that the people who care about you do.”
“OK, it’s a yes.” Buck checks off the box, trying to let himself trust in Eddie’s evaluation. He stops short at the next item on the list. “Self harm.”
This time Eddie waits for him to speak, and it takes a moment for Buck to find the right words.
“My first instinct is to say no, since it hasn't been like, deliberate or directly on my mind since I left my parents but...I know it’s more than cutting. And I think…I know there have been times that I couldn’t stop scratching at nothing and I’ve rubbed the skin raw, or that I hit myself because I just…didn’t know what else to do. So that’s probably a yes.”
“Yeah.” Eddie squeezes his knee, a nice, warm reassurance that it’s OK.
“Sexual assault and/or sexual trauma.” Buck blinks. “I know that’s a yes because of everything with Dr. Wells, but…everyone knows my relationship with sex is kind of…complicated. How do I…how do I look at all my other relationships and encounters with people and know if anything maybe wasn’t as OK as I told myself it was at the time?”
“Well, the way I was taught about consent, and the way I’m talking about consent with Chris is that if you’re asking someone to do something, and they don’t or can’t give you an enthusiastic yes, then it should always be a no.”
Buck considers the words, and considers how that metric maybe applies to some of his other experiences when he was younger and stupider and less confident, and he tries to ignore the way that puts a rock in his stomach. “OK, yeah, that makes sense. That’s a good way of putting it. That’s also…surprisingly enlightened for Texas public school sex education. I thought that was usually along the lines of ‘sex is for when you’re married and making babies and until then don’t think about it’.”
“It was.” Eddie nods, a small smile gracing his features. “But in the Diaz family that was supplemented by a talk from Tio Rafa from New York. His information was a lot more thorough and useful.”
“Sounds like you were lucky to have a Tio Rafa.”
“Definitely. What about you?” Eddie nudges their shoulders together again. “Where did you get your talk?”
Buck reaches up, scratching behind his ear uncomfortably. “Ask Jeeves? I mean I got the basics from health class at school but then I was pretty much just…on my own to figure out the rest of it. So I tried looking things up on the internet as much as I could without actually ending up on porn sites and relied on my partners to fill in the rest of the blanks.” He can feel Eddie’s eyes on him, and knows if he looks over those eyes are probably sad because, as always, his story is just not like everyone else’s and the differences probably make it bad or wrong in some way. He turns back to the checklist and the last few remaining items.
He checks off suicidal thoughts/behaviors without confirming anything since that was what started this whole journey to begin with, skips over thoughts of hurting others as that has never been an issue, and checks off the last item on the list, traumatic events.“I think that’s it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “Thanks for not making me do that by myself.”
“Of course.” Eddie leans over and presses his lips to Buck’s cheek. “I meant what I said. You’re not doing any of this alone.”
“What do you want in your eggs?” Eddie asks, turning away from the stove to look at Buck.
Buck’s not feeling particularly hungry, but knows not eating is not an option. Not around Chris, and definitely not when they have plans for the whole day. “Just cheese and whatever green stuff you have out.” He shrugs, grabbing his coffee. He hadn’t slept well last night. Well, he’d slept. But his dreams had been weird and he woke up feeling still tired and off-center. He can’t explain it. He doesn’t feel bad. He just feels…wrong.
“You got it.”
Buck stares down at his coffee, trying to take an inventory of himself and figure out what’s not feeling right. He doesn’t have the tightness in his chest or ants crawling up his spine that he’s come to associate with his anxiety; he doesn’t feel like something is going to happen or go wrong. Physically, his broken arm is the same and his bad leg has an achy twinge because he hasn’t been working it and stretching it the way he should be, but it’s not bad. Not enough to disrupt how he feels overall.
Fatigue sits heavy across his shoulders. Almost like he hadn’t slept or like he’s coming off a 24 hour shift where the alarm rang a few times throughout the night, but that’s not what happened. Buck knows he and Eddie went to bed when the baseball game ended, and he fell asleep fairly easily, and he doesn’t remember waking up throughout the night. He shouldn’t be this tired.
You’re broken.
He’s semi-aware, as the thought cuts through the fog in his brain, that Chris and Eddie are talking about something. Halloween costumes, maybe? That would make sense. Halloween’s three weeks away so they need to be planning Chris’ costume and figuring out what they’re making and what they’re buying for it. He should be listening more closely, should probably be participating since he’s the one who isn’t working right now and will have the most opportunity to put something together for Chris, but the shoulds are where his brain stops working.
How can he listen when he’s sitting here, feeling like he’s left a part of himself back in the bed? When the only thing he feels like doing is going back to the bedroom and burrowing under the comforter and sleeping a day or two or ten?
Killing yourself would work too.
Buck shakes his head.
He can’t do that. He doesn’t want to do that.
They have plans. Plans with Chris. He can’t let Chris down.
He sips his coffee, hoping the caffeine can take the edge off his exhaustion. Maybe he can just…push it all down and ignore it until tonight. Before everything came crashing down that’s what he did with everything he was feeling and it was working fine.
Besides. For as much as he knows about depression, and as much as he’s willing to admit he’s depressed, he knows it’s better to get up and do things and see the sun and all of that.
He just needs to find a way to…feel better in the next ten minutes. Easy.
“I’m sure we can find something, bud.” Eddie is saying as he turns and places a plate loaded with scrambled eggs in front of Buck. “Buck is a Google master. If you make a list of what you think you need, I’m sure we can get it sorted out in plenty of time.”
“Really?” Chris asks. A silence follows, and it takes a long awkward moment and Eddie nudging at the back of Buck’s chair for Buck to realize that they’re waiting for him to chime in.
“Of course, Superman.” Buck meets Chris’ expectant grin and does his best to find a smile for him. “We’ll definitely figure it out.” He has no idea what he’s agreeing to, but he’s sure it’s for Chris, so that means it will be worth it.
“Awesome!”
Buck tunes back out. Step one to faking his way through the day has to be eating. Even though he’s not all that hungry. Realistically, he hasn’t eaten since dinner last night so his body is probably ready for breakfast, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And Eddie will worry if he doesn’t eat, and Buck doesn’t want to worry Eddie any more than he already has so…eating.
He grabs the fork on his plate and fills it with eggs. Feels a little bit like a robot running through the steps of human behavior as he brings it to his mouth and starts to eat. Feels more like a robot when instead of tasting the creamy cheesy egg concoction he was expecting he just tastes nothing. He’s got a mushy blob of nothing in his mouth and it takes everything in him to keep chewing and force himself to swallow. Buck does it once, twice, three more times before he realizes that the food isn’t settling calmly in his stomach so much as it is landing like a brick in a bird bath, disrupting everything and churning the previously tranquil waters.
He drops his fork and swallows around nothing to convince himself to not be sick.
Fucking freakish failure.
A hand rests on his, drawing Buck’s attention back to the room. Eddie is sitting in front of him and Chris is gone from the table, empty plate and mostly finished glass of milk left behind in his wake.
“Where’s Chris?” Buck asks.
“Just packing a bag for the day.” Eddie answers. “You know you don’t have to come today if you’re not feeling up to it.”
Buck shakes his head, ready to deny the concern. He needs to follow his plan. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve barely been tapped into what’s going on.” Eddie points out softly. “You’re lucky all you agreed to do was help Chris make a cool Poseidon costume.”
“I’m just not awake yet.” Never mind that he’s usually the only morning person by choice in the Diaz household. “I’ll be fine once we get going.”
“You’re not eating.”
Disappointing.
Burden.
Waste of space.
No. He’s not going to be any of those things. He’s going to dig deep, and find a way to go and make this a good, memorable day for Chris, who’s excited to show Steve everything there is to see about the Zoo and Griffith Park.
“I paused to take a sip of coffee.” Buck shovels another forkful of eggs into his mouth, pushing himself past the initial disgust to eat them.
“Buck…” Eddie sighs, unease slipping past his features. “I know how much you don’t want to disappoint or worry Chris. Believe me I do. When I got back from Afghanistan and was at my lowest I was the same way. I had missed so much, and the thought of missing more because of PTSD and all the exhausting…bullshit that comes with it pissed me off. Then Shannon left and things with work and my parents got worse…And I tried to grit my teeth and push through everything out of spite but spite only gets you so far. And the explosions and problems that come after it are way bigger. My sisters teamed up with Abuela and Tia Pepa and forced me to get help and took care of a lot while I did it. I was only able to move and go through the LAFD training and get the life we have now because of that break.
“Right now you’re at the point where you need to rest when you can and accept the help. And it sucks. I get it. But if you push yourself until you break, it’s that moment that’s going to scare Chris. He’ll survive you missing a trip to the zoo; he’ll be hurt if he loses you.”
Stupid.
Selfish.
You ruin everything you touch.
Buck doesn’t know what the right answer here is. Does he feel up to spending a day at the zoo and entertaining Chris? No. He’d much rather crawl back into bed, become one with the blankets, and not have to do anything that involves people. But he knows that’s not the healthy, normal option. He’s supposed to want to be around his partner and his kid and his friend, and getting up and doing something is supposed to kickstart his system into wanting to do more.
And yet…Eddie is telling him not to. That it’s OK to take a step back and rest and let today be an off day. And Buck can’t tell if he means it and really thinks it’s OK and wants Buck to agree because that’s taking care of himself, or if this is one of those times when people say one thing but they’re really testing you and they want you to do the opposite and that’s how they know you care. Or maybe it’s the third option and Eddie is just tired of putting up with his negative, exhausting attitude and anxiety and he’s saying that Buck taking a step back and resting would be a good thing because it means it gives him a break.
Buck doesn’t know what the right answer is. He doesn’t want to do the wrong thing and disappoint Eddie (Or Chris. Or even Steve). But trying to puzzle it out here at the kitchen table is making his head hurt and he can feel dizzying, wet emotion building up behind his lungs just waiting to explode out if he keeps this up.
“It really won’t be a problem if I stay here?” He feels so small asking, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
“I promise.” Eddie says. “I’ll handle Chris and the two of us will show Steve around. You can make a blanket fort on the couch and watch nature documentaries and it’ll practically be like you’re at the zoo anyway.”
“I--,” Buck cuts himself off. Nothing he can think to say will mean anything. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing, hermoso.” Eddie leans over, kissing Buck’s forehead. “ Go figure out what you need to make your home on the couch while I clean up in here.”
Buck thanks him again anyways, because it feels like the right thing to do, and leaves the kitchen. Staying in doesn’t really feel like the good option, but if he’s really being honest with himself, it feels like the only option he can manage right now. He just hopes Eddie was right, and staying in actually helps.
He can’t exist, feeling like this.
It’s not that he’s nervous to be having dinner at Hen and Karen’s. He’s not. Dinner is easy, Hen is probably the easiest of their coworkers to get along with and Karen is a gem. Buck is just…
OK, maybe he’s a little nervous.
The last time he saw them face to face was at the barbecue at Bobby and Athena’s and everyone was…well not actually blaming him for the shooting and Eddie getting shot but definitely making the connection that he was the only reason Eddie was there to begin with. Hen and Karen hadn’t really been behind the comments but they hadn’t spoken up in his defense either so as far as he knows, that’s how they see it. And since then he has been outed and the drama with his family is out there.
Buck is at least mostly confident that they won’t hold him being queer against him, Hen’s text message had assured him of that, but he doesn’t know where they’ll stand on him choosing to cut off his parents. Chimney sort of has to support Maddie’s position by default and Hen is Chimney’s best friend so it tracks that some of that might carry over.
On top of all of that he doesn’t know what Hen is referring to when she says she owes him an apology. She hasn’t done anything to him. She’s been absent, sure, but she had her own stuff going on so it’s understandable that she’s been distant. He doesn’t know what to expect when he gets inside, and that worries him.
“It’s not too late to turn around.” Eddie offers from the driver’s seat where he’s been sitting patiently since they parked in the driveway a couple of minutes ago, waiting for Buck to decide that he’s ready. “Chris is an excellent get out of jail free card.”
“Yeah?” Buck turns to him, raising an eyebrow. “How often do you play that card exactly?”
Eddie shrugs, unashamed. “Less since I moved here. He charmed the firehouse too quickly. If I told them he was sick they’d just show up with soup and medicine and stuffed animals for him.” Buck nods. That is about how it would go. Especially for him. “It was mostly to get out of nights out reliving the ‘glory days’ with friends from high school.”
“Well as tempting as it is, I think Chris was really looking forward to his night at the arcade with Steve so…” Buck reaches down and unbuckles his seatbelt. “We might as well go in and get the night started.”
“It’s Hen and Karen, not a firing squad.” Eddie leans over the center console and kisses him. “But just give me the signal if you want to leave and we’re out of there.”
“What’s the signal?”
Eddie makes a show of thinking for a moment. “Beetlejuice?”
Buck snorts. “You know that’s more of a safe word than a signal right?” He asks as he starts to get out of the truck.
“Yeah, but it got you to relax.” Eddie answers. He gets out as well, and opens up to the back seat so he can retrieve the mulled cherry pie that Buck had very patiently coached him through making so they would have something to bring. “Seriously though, just give me a look or squeeze my knee or whatever. I’ll be on the lookout.”
“Thanks.”
“Always.”
They walk up the driveway and cross to the walk that leads to the front door. On the porch, Buck rings the doorbell since Eddie is holding the pie, and it only takes a couple of moments for the door to swing open, revealing a smiling Hen. “Hey, you two! Come in, come in.”
They go through the dance of greeting each other and handing off the pie, and Buck thinks everything is a little bit awkward until Hen leads them into the kitchen where Karen is at the counter, mixing up some sort of chimichurri. She greets them warmly, and some of the tension bleeds out of the air.
“Dinner will be ready in ten or so minutes.” She offers.
“Let me get you guys something to drink.” Hen turns around after stowing the pie on a piece of empty counter. “We’ve got wine, beer…I’m happy to go behind the bar and mix up a cocktail?”
“A beer for me would be great, thanks.” Eddie says; Buck knows he’ll rarely opt for wine if given the choice and while he would occasionally take a mixed drink or even just certain liquors over ice, with Buck’s arm still out of commission, he has to be ready to drive so he’ll stick to nursing a beer or two over the course of the night.
“You got it. Buck, what about you?”
“Just water for me, thanks.”
“Of course.” Hen goes to the fridge and pulls out two bottles, one beer and one mineral water. She pops the top off the beer to give to Eddie, and then twists off the cap of the water.
“Buck, it’s been a little while since we’ve seen you.” Karen says, setting aside her cooking. “How are you doing? How’s your arm healing?”
“Well, there was a small accident this week and I fractured it again.” Buck admits. He blushes a bit at the implied clumsiness, but is relieved that Karen asked both questions and that he can avoid actually talking about he is doing. He figures it’s possible that he’ll have to open up more than he really wants to on uncomfortable subjects tonight once they dive past the small talk and Hen gets to her apology, but he really doesn’t want to get into how things have been going for him overall. “But as long as I’m in the sling it doesn’t really hurt. I just added a couple of weeks onto my recovery.”
“But no extra surgery or anything, right?” Hen checks, looking concerned.
“No, no more surgery. Just a bruised ego.”
Eddie sips his beer. “Chris was thrilled to hear that he earned a few more weeks in the sling. He loves having Buck around the house and being able to help him with things.”
“He doesn’t mind his space being invaded?” Karen is curious.
Eddie shakes his head. “Chris will share just about anything if it’s for his Buck.”
“That’s sweet.” Hen grabs a wine glass. “I know that’s a concern we have with Denny as we move forward with the foster process. He’s a great kid and he says he’ll be fine with having a new kid in the house but I have to wonder how it’ll actually go when he’s not the only kid that gets to pick the movies anymore.”
“He’s usually pretty generous around other kids.” Buck comments, thinking of all the times he’s seen the boy play with Chris and Harry. Even with their differing ages and interests, the boys always seem to have a good time. “I bet he’ll surprise you.”
The small talk continues until a timer buzzes, at which point Karen urges everyone to move to the dining table, while she turns to the oven and pulls out a large cast iron dutch oven. Buck and Eddie take their drinks and go to sit down. She follows close behind and serves up plates of well-sauced and spiced shortribs, and Hen comes behind with a dish of mashed potatoes and the chimichurri sauce Karen had been making. Once everyone is sitting with a plateful of food and has had a few bites, Buck and Eddie both taking the time to complement the chefs, Hen places her fork down gently and clears her throat.
“Not to make things awkward or lower the mood,” she begins, narrowing her focus to Buck, “but one of the reasons we invited you over is because I owe you an apology, Buck. I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately.”
With the attention on him, Buck can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable. He never feels good when his feelings and reactions are what control the mood of a room.
“Karen and I have had a lot of stuff going on, but that’s not a reason to stop checking in with you altogether. Especially once you were back at work. And you definitely didn’t deserve my assumptions about what happened with the tsunami. I know you better than that and it was really unfair of me to think that you were…letting Chris make up stories and chasing after glory. You’re not that kind of guy.”
“I--,” Buck cuts himself off, a voice that sounds an awful like Eddie in his head telling him that it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know that’s what she and Chimney were thinking. “Thank you.”
“I also should have done more the other day when Maddie came into the station.”
Here Buck shakes his head. “It’s hardly your responsibility that she wasn’t thinking.”
“No, but I could have stepped up the moment I realized what she was doing.” Hen counters. “It was obvious that she talking about private things and I could have tried to--,”
“Believe me, Hen. When Maddie wants to talk about something, not much stops her.”
“Even so. At a minimum, I shouldn’t have contributed to the conversation afterwards.”
Buck frowns, not putting together what she means. “Eddie told me that you shut down everyone talking about my sexuality.”
“I did.” Here Hen looks uncomfortable. “But then I went ahead and joined in on all the talk everyone had about your family history and what went down between you and your parents. Which was just as invasive of me and unfair to do when you had no say in that info becoming public.”
Buck can understand her wanting to apologize for that. He was extremely uncomfortable hearing that his friends and coworkers had spent a whole day examining his life story. Although a part of him wonders what made her realize that she needed to say something, if she didn’t have a problem doing it on the day. Although he supposes that doesn’t really matter.
“So I wanted to apologize for my part in keeping the conversation going when I should have shut it down,” Hen says, “and to let you know that I’m not going to bring any of it up unless you do first, but if there’s ever anything you want to talk through, I’m here.”
Buck…Buck can accept that. Hen has always been a very straightforward person with him, and he doesn’t believe that she’d change now. He figures if she went to the trouble of making dinner and getting him to come over, she really wanted to say her piece. And he likes Hen and Karen. If they still want to be his friend, he’s happy to have them in his corner. “Thanks, I… I really appreciate that.”
Karen eyes the rest of the table, waiting for someone else to say something, but when a few moments pass by and nobody speaks up she smiles. “Well, with the serious business out of the way, I think we should dive into the conversation that really matters.”
“And what conversation is that?” Eddie asks, a curious glint in his eye.
“You remember that trashy reporter that profiled your station and tried to screw Bobby over when he had the bad reaction to the LSD brownies?”
Buck stiffens at the reminder of Taylor Kelly and he knows without looking that Eddie’s own expression will have soured. He hasn’t heard anything more from her since leaving her on read, and they haven’t seen anything about a story going live yet, but he also hasn’t heard anything more from the DA’s office to know how successful trying to stop her is going to be.
“Yeah.” Eddie huffs. “We’re familiar with her.” Underneath the table he puts his hand on Buck’s knee and squeezes it reassuringly.
“Well,” Karen sips her wine, “I have a friend that works at News Eight, and according to them, the higher ups at the station are not impressed with her. Apparently if she doesn’t start pulling her weight and bringing in a big story every once in a while, they’ll be bumping her out of LA to a smaller market.”
Buck reaches for his water, hoping that the others won’t notice his hand shaking. He doesn’t know what, if anything, the DA can do to put a stop to Taylor’s story; Eddie had only been able to leave a message when he called, so whether or not they’re taking action to prevent her making her report is a mystery. He doesn’t know much about the law but he kind of thinks it’s possible they can only react after the fact. And if Taylor knows what her employers are thinking, she’ll feel desperate and backed into a corner. He has a feeling that a desperate Taylor Kelly isn’t going to care much about the ethics of her story if it means she gets to keep her job.
This could be bad.
Chapter 19
Notes:
I have done some research into the legal system of California and their penal codes and procedures but there is definitely some hand-waving happening for the sake of the plot and any scenes featuring lawyers are most definitely me living out my Law & Order fantasies.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After what was a relatively good morning, seeing Chris off to school with Carla and Eddie off to work, Steve had picked Buck up for his appointment at the District Attorney’s office and Buck’s good mood had quickly vanished. He understands the importance of meeting with the attorney handling his case; he wants Dr. Wells to face consequences for what she did--to him and to the other firefighters who had come forward--and for that to happen they have to put forward a good case in court. Which apparently means testifying, and obviously if you’re testifying, you need to prepare. He knows that. That doesn’t mean he has to like it.
He’s uncomfortable in nicer pants and a dress shirt when it feels like he’s only putting it on to make a particular impression. He’s nervous about having to retell his story, when that also means having to revisit his past and potentially face judgment for it and having to admit that his memory of the second encounter is blurry at best. As much as he appreciates Steve, he’d much rather have Eddie be at his side.
But Eddie had to work.
And Buck has to do this.
“Good morning, gentlemen.” An older woman sitting behind the central desk in the office Buck and Steve had been directed to upon entry at the offices of the LA County District Attorney greets them politely. The nameplate on her desk reads Delia Fitzpatrick.“How can we help you today?”
Buck resists the urge to rock on his heels and display his anxiety. He clears his throat. “My name is Evan Buckley. I have an appointment with ADA Davis at 10:00.”
“Of course, Mr. Buckley.” Delia types something on her computer. “Ms. Davis is expecting you. Her office is right through that door there.” She points to a door sitting partially open to the right of the office. “You can go in whenever you’re ready.”
Buck thanks her and heads across the office, Steve sticking close behind him. They’d talked about whether he would wait in the hall while Buck had his meeting or if he’d come in as support and Buck was more than willing to have the back-up, even if Steve was just sitting silently next to him. He raps his knuckles on the slightly open door, so as not to startle the office’s occupant. “Ms. Davis? I’m Evan Buckley. We spoke on the phone last week?”
“Of course.” Rachel Davis is young--possibly younger than him if he’s judging things accurately--and she has honey blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She stands behind her desk and holds her hand out to shake. She has an air of confidence about her that helps put him at ease. If she’s not worried, he shouldn’t be either, right? “You go by Buck, right?
“Yeah.” He nods, shaking her hand, and then turns to introduce Steve. “This is--,”
“Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett.” Steve jumps in, stepping forward. “I’m an old friend of Buck’s. If you don’t mind, I’m just here for moral support.”
“Of course I don’t mind.” Ms. Davis smiles. “ Please have a seat.” She gestures to the two chairs in front of her desk. “Can I get either of you some water before we get started?”
They both shake their heads, taking a seat, and she follows suit.
“First of all, I want to start this meeting by saying that I know this conversation is going to be challenging at parts and that some of things I’ll be asking you to share are very personal. If at any point you need to take a break, please let me know.”
“Thanks.” Buck nods. He wants to feel comforted by her acknowledgement because it is very kind of her, but he mostly still just…doesn’t want to be here.
“Second, we did get your partner’s message about Taylor Kelly reaching out to you because she’s preparing a story on Dr. Well’s involvement with the LAFD. While the details of what Hannah Wells has been charged with are in the public record now that she’s been through her initial arraignment and posted bail, your name and the names of the other victims are not and I want to ensure you that we are investigating to determine where she she got her information to know to contact you specifically. Unfortunately, we're in…tricky legal territory when it comes to stopping her.”
Steve frowns. “I thought California had victim privacy laws to prevent exactly this kind of scenario.”
“We do. But the way the law is written, adult victims have to assert their right to privacy when making their complaint. I know you went through your union and LAFD Internal Affairs to get the investigation started, and, because they don’t handle crimes of this nature regularly, they were not aware of the need to have that conversation with you and the others. Now that we have reached the prosecution stage, unless we have a credible reason to believe that revealing your name would put you into physical danger, we can’t order her not to do it.”
Buck grips the armrest of the chair and tries to breathe. The last thing he wants to do is have a panic attack right now. Even though the thought of Taylor making this story public does make him want to find the nearest window here on the tenth floor and fling himself out of it.
He can handle this. He can. He’s not working so he doesn’t have to see anyone he doesn’t want to. And Channel Eight is not the most watched station in LA so if she goes through with breaking the story, maybe a lot of people won’t see it.
And hey, she hasn’t gone live yet. Maybe another freak natural disaster will hit and force her to forget about it. Or, speaking of forgetting, maybe Taylor can be one of those people that spontaneously wake up with no memory of who she is and what she does for a living. That could be good.
“Unfortunately, all we can recommend is that if she reaches out again, or if any other press outlets approach you, is to refuse to comment. This case is important, but it’s not so large that it will become a media circus. Interest should die down fairly quickly if the story isn’t fed.”
“Thanks.” Buck presses his lips together. He doesn’t feel particularly grateful but he doesn’t know what else to say. He’s on the wrong side of the legal loophole. Typical Buck luck.
“Moving on…” Ms. Davis shuffles a couple papers on her desk. “I saw that you had an encounter with Dr. Wells last week, and had to report her for violating the no contact order and threatening you.”
“Uh, yeah. We were both there.” He glances at Steve.
Ms. Davis looks between them. “You handled the encounter perfectly. The LAPD report was thorough and damning. Between your testimony and the security footage from the theater lobby, we were able to levy additional charges for violating the protection order and witness tampering. It wasn’t enough to revoke her bail, but it does make things harder for her.”
“I also did what you suggested and hired a lawyer to handle the…potential paternity issue.” Buck informs.
“Good. That protects your interests and potentially strengthens our case against her.”
“How so?”
“If you are the father, that conclusively proves that she slept with you at the time that you were her patient, which, even if you had consented, is illegal under California law.”
“Oh, right.”
The lawyer makes a note on a legal pad near her computer. “Right. With all the sundry business out of the way, let me give you the rundown on what we’re expecting to happen within the next couple of weeks. Now that Dr. Wells has been arraigned for the first time. There’s a preliminary hearing with a judge on Wednesday, where we’ll be presenting our evidence to the court to confirm that there was probable cause to charge her. That is not something you need to be present for. If all goes as expected, the case will move forward to her second arraignment, where she’ll be required to enter a plea.”
“What if it doesn’t go as expected?” Buck asks.
“If for some reason the judge decides our evidence is insufficient, which I want to stress in this case is very unlikely, some or all of the charges may be dropped. And I want you to know that even if that were to happen, she is also being investigated by her licensing board and they are likely to strip her of her credentials, so she will not be able to work as a practicing therapist in the state of California afterwards.”
“OK.”
“After Dr. Wells enters her plea, we’ll enter the discovery phase of the trial. It can last 60 days, at most, before the trial begins. This is all handled by my office and her attorneys, but what it boils down to is that each side shares their evidence with each other so that both sides can prepare for trial. If any of the information shared leads to a change in the status of the case or what we require from you, you will be notified. It is also at this point that Dr. Wells and her legal team may try to bargain for a deal or a way to resolve the case without going to trial.”
Steve leans forward in his chair. “What’s the likelihood of your office offering a deal and lessening the charges?”
“Very slim.” She answers firmly. “We have a strong case, with good witnesses who are willing to testify. We also feel that a jury will not look kindly on someone who takes advantage of the first responders who help keep our city safe, and that will help us. We will be willing to accept a guilty plea from her and avoid a trial if she decides to go that route, but rest assured, that if she does plead guilty, she will still face a significant prison sentence.”
Buck tries to let all of the information sink in. On the surface it all sounds good. Ms. Davis certainly seems dedicated to the case. And confident. He’s not sure how that’s possible, considering what he knows about the situation and these types of cases, but reasons that maybe the investigation turned up a lot more things than he’s been informed about.
He’s still not sure how he feels about testifying himself; he can’t help but imagine all the ways it can go wrong and his credibility be called into question. It would be humiliating, but even worse than that, it could damage the case. He doesn’t want to hurt the chances of the other victims getting justice just because he has a promiscuous past. On their initial phone call Ms. Davis had said she’d prepare and protect him but it still seems like such a risk…
He’s taken out of his thoughts by Ms. Davis starting to speak again. “If she doesn’t plead guilty and we go to trial, that’s where you’ll be called on to testify. What I want to do this morning is go over the events you’d be talking about from start to finish, so I can start planning a strategy for how we’ll present those events to the jury. Do you need a break or anything before we start doing that?”
“No, let’s just…get it over with.”
“All right. Remember, if you need a break at any time, just say the word.” She straightens the papers on her desk and looks across at him. “When did you first meet Dr. Hannah Wells?”
Buck had known, the moment that Chris had come down the sidewalk towards the parent pick-up line, that something was wrong. He’d been walking slowly, not like he was hurting or uncomfortable, but just…lacking any of the enthusiasm he usually had. He still hugged Buck when he met him, but there was no smile or excited retelling of the day's events.
After Buck had gotten him settled in the backseat of the Jeep, gotten back into the passenger seat, and Steve had started driving, they had asked him how his day had been and gotten a morose, “fine” in return. Every subsequent question got one or two word answers, but when Buck asked if anything had happened to upset him, Chris had just shrugged.
The trio had completed the ride back to Eddie’s house in silence.
Chris had said he wasn’t hungry when offered an after school snack, even when Buck had said they could have one of their secret-from-Eddie ice cream sandwiches, and retreated to his room.
That was five minutes ago and Buck has spent all of that time debating whether he should interrupt Eddie’s shift and let him know that Chris had a bad day or if it was his place to try and talk to him and find out what happened. He knows that Chris might have told him in the car if Steve hadn’t been there; sure, Chris has been getting along with Steve great and seems to really like him but at the end of the day he hasn’t even known him for a week. Of course he wouldn’t want to be vulnerable in front of him. If it had just been Chris and Buck, Chris might have shared.
So Buck probably should go and talk with him now and try to see what’s wrong. It just feels like there’s a big difference between being in the car and being in Chris’ room. Like heart to hearts at the house should belong to Eddie, his actual dad. But Buck knows, even though he and Eddie haven’t explicitly talked about it, that he’s been taking on more of a dad-like role too. He’s definitely more than just his dad’s boyfriend to Chris. Especially when you factor in the will changes Eddie had made earlier in the year.
And Buck knows what it’s like to be hurting and wanting someone to talk to and having your parents just down the hall acting like nothing could possibly be wrong. He never wants Chris to know that feeling.
So he tells Steve that he’s going to try and get Chris to talk to him and heads down the hall. To his relief, Chris isn’t so upset that he’s closed his door, but instead of playing with some of his toys or coloring at his desk or reading or anything else he might usually do after school, he’s lying on his bed, curled on his side and facing the wall.
Buck can hear him sniffling and something in his heart breaks.
He takes a deep breath and knocks on the door frame to be sure that he doesn’t startle Chris. “Hey Superman, can I come in?”
“Just you?” He asks, voice wet.
“Just me.” Buck confirms.
It takes a moment for Chris to answer. “OK.”
Buck enters the room, trying to figure out if he should go to the edge of the bed he always takes when reading to Chris before bed at night or if he should figure out a way to set up on the other side so he could be facing him, and ultimately decides that taking a seat on the foot of the bed is best, so he can see Chris’ face at least a little bit but Chris can decide if he wants to look at him or not.
“You can decide if you want to talk or not.” He begins, resting a gentle hand on Chris’ ankle. “And if you’d rather wait for your dad that’s fine. But I can tell that something has upset you, and even if you don’t want to talk about it right now, if there’s anything I can do to help you feel better I hope you’ll at least tell me that.”
Chris wipes at his eyes beneath his glasses and doesn’t answer Buck right away. But eventually he speaks. “Last week we had to write about three things we might want to do when we grow up. I said I wanted to be a chef, a zoologist, or a doctor.”
“Those all sound like really good ideas.” Buck comments. And he really thinks that they are. Those are all areas that Chris is interested in that he soaks up any and all information he can get about them. Obviously a lot can change between eight-years-old and the time that Chris actually needs to figure out what he wants to do and what he wants could easily change, but if he wants to pursue any of those, Buck thinks they’d probably be great fits for him.
“My teacher doesn’t think so.” Chris mumbles.
Buck frowns. “What do you mean?”
“She kept me from going out to recess to talk. She said I needed to pick other things.”
And Buck really doesn’t like where he thinks this is going. “Did she tell you why?”
“Because I’m different.” Chris rolls over so he’s facing Buck, revealing tear-streaked cheeks and red-rimmed eyes. “She said a lot of stuff about…about how I walk with crutches and need help with my shoelaces and buttons and things. And that I needed to be more realistic because the things I picked were for normal people.”
Now, Buck doesn’t consider himself to be an angry person. He’s always tended more towards frustration and tears over rage. But this? This makes a red hot coil of rage spring up in his chest and it takes a lot of self control to stay on the bed instead of taking off to go back to Chris’ school and telling his teacher exactly where she can shove her ideas of what normal is. Instead he forces himself to take a deep breath and push the rage back to make room for what Chris actually needs. “Chris, buddy,--”
“I know I’m different.” Chris cuts him off. “But you and my dad are always telling me I can do anything and I thought…” He sniffs and wipes at his face again. “Is she right? Are those jobs for normal people?”
Forget yelling at the teacher. He’s going to find a way to get her fired. “First of all, normal is just a bad label that small-minded people use to make other people feel bad. There is no such thing as a normal person. Everyone has things that make them different and unique and special. Your teacher was wrong. Those jobs are for everyone.”
“Then why did she tell me I can’t do them?”
“Because…” Buck struggles to find the right way to explain ableism to an eight-year-old. “Some people see someone who’s a little different, and they stop seeing anything but the differences. And they’re not very creative or open-minded so they think there’s only one way to do things, and that because someone is different and can’t do things in that specific way that means they can’t do them at all. But that’s not true.”
“Really?”
“Really. Things might not always be super easy, and they might not look exactly the same for you, but if we get creative and work hard, most of the time we can find ways for you to do the things you want. Like your surfing lessons. There are a lot of people who would have said you wouldn’t be able to surf, but your dad found you the right teacher who understood how your body works and he found a way to show you how to do it.”
Chris seems to think about this for a few moments, and he does appear to relax and calm down, but he stays frowning. “Buck? I don’t think I like my teacher very much right now.”
“I’m not very happy with her either. She was wrong to talk to you like that and make you feel bad. But, I’m really glad you felt like you could talk to me about it.”
“You and dad always make me feel better.” Chris sits up and leans forward, wrapping his arms around Buck.
“You always make me feel better too, Superman.” Buck returns the hug as best he can with one arm in a sling, squeezing gently. “Do you want to see if your dad is free for a quick video call?”
Chris pulls back, looking hesitant. “We’re not supposed to bother him at work.”
“That’s for things like asking for more screen time. He’d definitely want to hear from you when you’ve had a bad day at school. He wants to help you feel better too. Plus there’s some things he can do to help that I can’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like talk to your school, to make sure your teacher doesn’t talk to you like that again, or to any of the other kids.”
“Is she going to be in trouble?”
“Maybe. But you’re not, OK? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Chris thinks for another moment. “OK. Let’s call dad.”
Buck pulls his phone out of his pocket and texts Eddie, asking if he’s free for a call with Chris. While he waits for a response, Buck gets them both situated at the head of the bed, so he can easily hold the phone for them both to be in frame. Just as he finishes, the phone rings in his hand.
“Hey Eds, how’s your shift going?” He greets as he answers.
“Pretty standard.” Eddie replies. It’s clear he’s sitting in the bunkroom. His smile quickly fades to a frown when he takes in Chris’ worn and weepy features. “Chris, mijo, what’s wrong?”
Chris hesitates to answer so Buck casts his gaze down at him. “Do you want to explain what happened or do you want me to?” He asks.
“You.”
Buck nods and gives Eddie the overview, starting with Chris’ assignment and going through what his teacher had told him, and, when he sees the hurt and anger building on Eddie’s face, adding on that he and Chris have already talked about exactly why what the teacher said was wrong.
“Jesus, this school was supposed to be better.” Eddie sighs, rubbing a hand across his face. “Chris, mijo, I’m so sorry. She never should have said that to you.”
“I know.” Chris says. “Buck told me.”
“Are you OK? Buck’s taking care of you?”
“Yeah. It was a bad day, but Buck’s making it better. He’s good at that.”
“Yeah, he is.” Eddie pauses. “OK. I’m gonna call the school and get a meeting with the principal. I think you’re gonna stay home from school tomorrow if that’s OK with you, buddy.”
Chris’ brow furrows. “Why?”
“Because you shouldn’t have to be around a teacher that won’t treat you the same as the rest of your classmates.”
“Oh.”
Eddie wraps up the conversation, confirming again that Chris is doing OK and that he’ll give him a hug as soon as he gets home from his shift in a few hours before he hangs up.
Buck lowers his phone and looks down at Chris. “How are you feeling now, bud?”
“Better.”
“Yeah? You think you might be up for a snack with me and Steve now?”
“Do we have any apples and peanut butter?”
“I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Eddie is just sitting down to eat a plate of reheated enchiladas, having gotten home from his shift about a half an hour ago and spending most of that time checking in with Chris and going through his bedtime routine, when there’s a knock at the door. Buck volunteers to go and see who it is so his partner can eat after what he had been told was a busy second half of his shift, but he isn’t sure who it could be.
The most likely candidate is Steve, since he had only left about ten minutes ago, but if he had left anything behind or thought of something he probably would have called or texted first. Just about everyone that they know who potentially would drop by would also call first. Especially at this hour.
Whoever it is is knocking a second time by the time Buck makes it to the door, and he opens it to find a familiar-looking young woman. With wavy dark-brown hair pulled back into a messy bun, no makeup on her face, wearing leggings with an oversized University of Texas sweatshirt, and a duffle bag slung over her shoulder, she looks like she’s spent the day traveling. He spots the car backing out of the driveway and reasons she had taken an uber to the house. Buck glances back at her and places the face from looking at photos with Chris and a couple of events earlier in the year when he’d been well on his way to high on painkillers for his leg.
“Adriana?” He asks, doing his best to make sure his surprise doesn’t manifest as a frown. “Eddie didn’t mention you were coming to town.”
“Eddie doesn’t know.” She shrugs. “Buck, right?”
He nods.
“This was a bit of a…spontaneous decision. Is he here or is he working?”
“He just got home.” Buck steps to the side so she can come into the house. “Not to pry, but is everything OK?”
“Umm…kind of?” She’s definitely uncertain when she answers and Buck can hear her upset. “I was hoping Eddie could help me figure that out.”
Buck closes the door and locks it again, then offers to take her bag. He just puts it on the floor on top of everyone’s shoes, although he’s sure if she stays the night it will be moving to the living room. The small house is rapidly running out of space for guests. “He’s pretty good at that. Come on this way. He’s just having dinner.” He leads Eddie’s youngest sister to the kitchen.
It’s only mostly amusing when Eddie drops his fork in surprise and coughs around his mouthful of enchilada, which he quickly swallows. “Adri? What are you doing here?”
Adriana promptly bursts into tears. Eddie jumps to his feet and pulls her into a hug. She tucks her head into his shoulder and he rubs her back, murmuring soothing words in Spanish as Buck has often seen him do with Chris. While Eddie comforts her, Buck steps around the pair to go into the fridge and pull out some water that he puts on the table for her. Between her upset and traveling, it’s probably safe to assume she’s at least a little dehydrated, which never helps when you’re feeling off.
Buck is debating heading to the living room or the bedroom to give the siblings their space when Adriana pulls out of the embrace, sniffling and wiping at her face with her sleeves. “Eddie, I’m in trouble.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie frowns, guiding her over to one of the vacant chairs. “Adri, what kind of trouble?”
She seems hesitant to answer. “Do you want me to give you some privacy?” Buck asks.
“No, it’s fine.” Adriana shakes her head, wiping at her face again.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”
“Buck, the way Eddie, Chris, and Abuela talk, you’re family.” Adri says. Despite her upset, a wry smile crosses her features. “And this is definitely going to be family drama, so you might as well hear it now.”
Eddie, taking his own seat again, looks even more concerned. “Adri, what’s going on? Why did you fly up here from Austin without calling?”
“Well…you know how the last couple of calls we’ve had I mentioned that I was seeing someone but it wasn’t serious?” She asks as Buck sits down. Eddie nods. “It…maybe has gotten serious. I’m pregnant.”
Notes:
I know it's popular fanon that Adriana is Eddie's older sister, but I like Eddie as the oldest and I'm pretty sure there are some canon quotes that support her actually being the youngest. And if not...it's my fic and it's an AU so...¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Chapter 20
Notes:
OK. So. This chapter got dark. And by this chapter I mean the last scene after the second text message. If you are sensitive to depictions of suicidal ideation/thoughts and/or of self-harm, you might want to take a pass on the last scene until you are sure you are in a good headspace for it and are safe. I'll put a summary of the scene in the notes at the end for those of you that feel better skipping it but want to continue with the story.
I will also say that this is the darkest it's going to get. Things are going to get better. Eventually. It's just a little rough for Buck right now.
Be safe, take care of yourselves, and enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“OK.” Eddie blanches and takes a deep breath. Buck can see his expression warring between concerned family member and focused professionalism. “How pregnant is pregnant?” It seems like an odd question to Buck, and he watches as Adriana gives her brother a pointed look, but Eddie shakes his head and holds firm. “I mean, is this a gut feeling? Have you taken a home test? Has a doctor confirmed it?”
“I got a blood test and ultrasound at the hospital last week.” Adriana bites her lip. “It confirmed that I’m eleven weeks pregnant. I heard a heartbeat and everything. So…to answer your question, very pregnant?”
Eddie nods, still seeming like he’s mostly in concentrated first responder mode; Buck has seen him do this a lot when he wants to keep his emotional responses under his belt for the time being. “And is this something that you’re happy about or are you…considering your options?”
“I’m keeping it.” She says firmly, then continues in a smaller voice. “There’s an overall feeling of happiness? It’s just also very…overwhelming. Mom and Dad are going to kill me.”
“First of all, congratulations.” Eddie says with a smile. “You’ve earned that much if you’re having a baby and happy about it. There are a lot of details to work out but you’re not in the worst place to have a kid. You’re out of school with a steady job. You’re in a way better position than I was when Shannon got pregnant so I’m pretty sure that’s something to celebrate.”
Adriana matches the wry grin. “Fair enough.”
“As for mom and dad… I mean you’re giving them another grandchild to spoil.” Eddie pauses. “They’ll invade your life with everything that they think you should be doing, but they aren’t going to kill you.”
“Even when they find out I have no plans to marry the father and he fully plans on signing away his parental rights?”
Eddie curses and his smile disappears.
Buck decides to jump in before Eddie dives straight into threatening to kill the father. “Is that a decision you’re on board with, or upset by?”
“Very on board with.” Adriana informs. “Ryan is--was--a great friend-with-benefits guy but neither of us wanted a relationship or strings. We’re going to have another conversation a bit further along in the pregnancy once I’ve got more stuff sorted out to decide if we want to build any financial support into the legal agreement when he signs away his rights, which he’s open to doing if it’s something I need. He’s not being a dick about anything, he just isn’t interested in being a dad, and I’m not interested in forcing someone to do something they don’t want to do.”
“OK. As long as it’s an arrangement you’re OK with, that’s the best we can hope for, right Eddie?” Buck prompts, hoping that her explanation has quelled the worst of his protective older brother instincts. It sounds like Adriana is making decisions that are right for her and the baby, which is what they should be focused on, rather than what’s traditional. Even though the Diaz family seems to run on tradition.
Eddie exhales heavily. “Right. Of course. You know I support you know matter how you handle this Adri, right? I just want to make sure you’re OK.”
“I knew you would. That’s why I wanted to tell you first.” Adriana reaches across the table and puts her hand on Eddie’s. “You always have my back.”
“It’s just…I don’t exactly have sway with mom and dad. I don’t know how much help I’ll be with them.” Eddie informs. “They disagree with just about every choice I make. And they tell me every chance they get how I’m messing things up for Christopher.”
“But you have stood up to them.” She points out. “You’ve set your boundaries.”
“If you call an 800 mile drive between me and them a boundary, then yes. I’ve done that. I just…my relationship with mom and dad is not what you’d call good, Adri. Even if you and the father aren’t going to get married, I don’t want you to make things harder with them than it has to be for you, and modeling your choices after mine would definitely do that.”
“OK, but relationship with them aside, are you and Christopher happy? You have a good life?”
“I--We--Yes.” Eddie sighs. “It’s been a lot of hard work, and I’ve gotten a lot of help from a lot of people but we’re happy. Overall, things are good.”
“That’s what I want. When they find out I'm not marrying Ryan, mom and dad will insist that I move back to El Paso. Probably back in with them even so they can ‘help raise the baby’.” Adriana rolls her eyes and makes finger quotes. “And I know if I give in to that, they’ll have a whole list of other things they think they know best about and I’ll end up miserable.
“I know staying in Austin and raising the baby on my own will be a lot harder and that it’s not what mom and dad want for me and dealing with that disappointment isn’t going to be fun or easy but…I think if I’m going to do this I need to at least give myself a chance to be happy.”
Eddie takes in everything his sister says, and doesn’t hesitate to respond. “Well, you’ll have me. I’ll back your play and help you figure things out and plan…whatever you need.”
A weight seems to lift off of Adriana’s shoulders. She jumps up and steps over to hug Eddie again. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me, Adri. This is what older brothers do.”
Buck can’t help but think of the fact that he’s not backing his sister’s play when it comes to her pregnancy. She wants the big happy family and he’s not exactly trying to make that happen. And he wonders if the situation were reversed and Maddie were aware of everything happening with Dr. Wells and his own potential child…what position would she be taking with him? He’s always thought that, period of distance aside when she was with Doug, that he and Maddie had the ideal sibling relationship--close and supportive, them against the world. And yet things between Eddie and Adriana look so different and, he can’t help but think, so much better.
He wishes he knew how to fix things with Maddie and get back to that.
“So what do you need?” Eddie asks as they pull apart, drawing Buck back to focus on the conversation. “You didn’t come here just to tell me in person, did you?”
“I mean…kind of?” Adri goes back to her chair. “I mean, not just to tell you. I needed a few days away to wrap my head around things, but I wanted to spend it with you and Chris and hopefully Abuela and Tia Pepa to, you know, get some good reactions before facing the firing squad in El Paso. And I figured you would be best to talk to about some of the logistics of being a single parent.”
“Well, I don’t know how much help I can be with the infancy stage since that was all Shannon, but I’ll tell you what I can.” Eddie confirms. “What about where you’re staying while you’re here? Normally I’d just give you my bed, but Buck is staying here right now and we can’t both cram ourselves onto the couch.”
Buck doesn’t want to get in between brother and sister. Especially when said sister has made a special trip to see her brother. “I can go back to my place while you’re here.” He volunteers, and when he sees Eddie open his mouth to protest, he’s quick to cut him off. “Steve is around until Sunday so he can help with my arm, and you two can get some family time in.” He can see that Eddie wants to argue but isn’t sure how, because it’s not like he wants his sister to feel unwelcome.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Adriana rolls her eyes. “I can get a hotel room for the night and then tomorrow I’ll talk to Abuela and Tia Pepa. I’m sure I can stay with one of them while I’m in town.”
“You’re not going to a hotel.” Buck and Eddie say at the same time.
“I can at least go back to my place for the night.” Buck offers. “You’re pregnant. You need to sleep in a bed.”
“You don’t need to leave my brother because I didn’t call ahead to let my family know I was coming.” Adriana counters.
Eddie looks uncomfortable. “Buck’s right Adri. You shouldn’t sleep on the couch.”
“What if…I take the couch and you two share the bed?” Buck suggests after a moment.
“Your arm--,”
“Will be fine if I sleep in the sling.” Buck cuts Eddie off. Eddie shoots him a pointed look, and Buck knows that he’s not thrilled with the proposal, but, Buck reasons, he has to accept something. And Buck will not make a pregnant woman sleep on that couch or pay for a hotel room. “Eds, you have been taking care of me non-stop for weeks. Let me set up in the living room for the night, and take some time to hang out with your sister. Please?”
Eddie still hesitates. “Only if you’re 100% sure.”
Buck pushes his chair away from the table and stands. “Positive.” He gives Adriana a brief embrace. “Congratulations. It’s really nice to see you again. Don’t let your brother hog the blankets.” And then he turns his attention to Eddie. “I’m going to get ready for bed and make up the couch. Have a good night with your sister.” He leans down and kisses his partner. “Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Buck isn’t quite sure what came over him that made him reach out to Maddie. One minute he was leaving Eddie and Adriana to finish eating whatever dinner they wanted to have and enjoy the rest of their night, gathering up a couple of blankets and the spare pillows from the linen closet to set himself up on the couch, and the next minute he was texting his sister. He and Maddie haven’t been getting along for weeks now. Even before his parents visited and everything exploded there things were strained. He can’t exactly picture a call with her going well.
But…Buck loves his sister.
Maybe she doesn’t quite understand him anymore the way that she did when they were kids, and maybe she hasn’t been the best lately but she raised him. She took care of him when no one else would, and he’ll never be able to repay her for that.
He loves her and watching Eddie and Adriana talking and teasing and so obviously caring about each other just made him miss her.
So maybe he’s stupid but he has to try.
He texts her and tries to make it clear that his choice to cut off his parents has nothing to do with her and when she asks to talk, he checks to make sure he has as much privacy as one can have in the openness of the living room (and indeed it looks like Eddie and Adri have moved from the kitchen) and he presses the button to make a video call.
“Hey, little brother.”
And when Maddie greets him with a soft smile on her face, it feels like he’s made the right decision.
“Hey Maddie.” Buck wants to wave, but his sling, as usual, is in the way so he settles for bobbing his head enthusiastically.
“I’m so glad you reached out.” She says. “I owe you an apology. I was really upset that you and mom and dad couldn’t get along because…because I can remember what things were like with them before Daniel died. They were so happy and loving and things were good, and more than anything that’s what I want for my baby. I want them to have a big family that gets along and loves them and gives them a big, important space in the world.”
Buck’s initial positivity fades at the mention of Daniel, and her explanation that things had been better before his passing. Of course that would be the case--it’s not like the death of a child has ever made anything easier--but it still jumps out as a stinging reminder that he had been born with a singular purpose that he failed at, and that had broken his family.
Nevertheless, he can hardly begrudge Maddie for wanting something like that for her child. What parent wouldn’t try to give their baby a big family so they can be surrounded by love at every turn? It’s what a parent is supposed to do. “I really want that for them too.” He says softly. “And I hope you know that even though they aren’t here yet, I already love them so much. I’m so excited to be an Uncle, and I want my niece or nephew to be so safe and loved and happy. By anyone that will be good to them. But…”
“But maybe we should try and keep events where you have to be around mom and dad to a minimum?” Maddie finishes for him.
He sighs. “Yeah.”
“I know. I mean, Howie talked some sense into me.” His sister admits, looking a little sheepish. “I think I got a little over excited in the midst of all these pregnancy hormones. I always thought it was a bit of a myth or a wives tale but they really make you emotional and want to nest and establish your family.”
Buck doesn’t comment, assuming that when it comes to most things related to the changes that pregnancy can put a person through, discretion is the better part of valor.
“But once there was a little distance from everything I realized I wasn’t being fair to you. You weren’t easy growing up but that’s so far in the past and you haven’t done anything to them to explain the way mom and dad talk to you. At first, I still wanted to find a way to make things work with everyone, but Howie pointed out how much it can hurt to have your parents disapprove and reject you like that and if anyone would know…you know the issues he has with his dad.”
“Right.” He tries to cling to the optimism he had found when Maddie had wanted to talk, but the feeling fights him. He can’t put a finger on the reason, but something about what Maddie is saying just feels off. He can’t tell if it’s because he thinks she doesn’t really mean it or because she’s making excuses for acting in a way that had hurt so badly that he can’t exactly argue with, even though everyone else he’s close with says that she was being unreasonable and in the wrong and he deserves better, or if there’s some other reason, but it feels like there’s something else behind her words. Something that she’s not saying.
“Anyway, you shouldn’t have to be around people that make you that uncomfortable, so moving forward I’ll do my best to let you know when they’re going to be here so you can avoid dealing with them if you want to, and I won’t expect you to join in on stuff where they’re there. Unless you want to.”
It’s probably the best that he can hope for. Regardless of how they had treated him, aside from a little bit of waspish judgment, Philip and Margaret have always been good to Maddie. They love her, she loves them, and he can hardly argue against her wanting them in her child’s life. He’s only ever seen them be unreasonable and uncaring when it comes to him, so it only makes sense that he’s the problem, and they’ll love and dote on Maddie’s baby when it comes. Buck presses his lips together in a thin smile. “Thanks Mads.”
“Of course.” She nods and brushes a strand of hair back away from her face. “And, in the spirit of that agreement, it’s only fair to let you know now that while they were here, they already scheduled their next couple of visits. They want to reconnect and now that I’m in a better place, it really feels like a good time. And because they have the money and the time, it looks like they’ll be coming here pretty regularly. At least until the baby comes and gets old enough to travel to them.”
“Oh. OK.” Buck swallows past the stinging feeling that his parents don’t want to reconnect with him. He doesn’t know why it hurts. He should be more than used to that rejection.
You don’t count.
You don’t belong.
Everything’s wrong with you.
“When are they coming back?” He asks. If he knows, he can prepare. If he knows, he can avoid them.
“Mom wants to do Thanksgiving with us. Which will work out really well, because that should put them in town for the baby shower.”
Buck hadn’t even known there was already a baby shower in the works. He’d sort of thought that would be something he’d be taking care of arranging. “Baby shower?”
“Yeah, Josh and Linda and a bunch of the other dispatchers have started planning it. It’s so sweet of them, isn’t it?”
“Definitely.”
If Maddie notices his lack of enthusiasm, she doesn’t say anything. “I think they’re planning on being here for two weeks then. So they’ll do a big Thanksgiving dinner, and come to the baby shower and probably a few other things.”
So Buck can either go to the baby shower, but have to deal with his parents, or he can miss out on a big milestone for his sister. Great. Plus, there’s a holiday struck off his list. If he’s back to work by then, he’ll have to see about taking a shift. Fires from deep-fryer mishaps and wounded hands from carving knife accidents will be better than the deep freeze from Philip and Margaret.
“And then they’re going to come back for Christmas. Howie’s already put in to have Christmas Eve and the Christmas off so we can revive some of the Buckley family traditions.”
What traditions? Buck wants to ask. The most he remembers from Christmas is baking sugar cookies with Maddie from store bought dough and drinking some hot chocolate while they watched the Grinch on Christmas Eve. For Christmas itself, he got some perfunctory presents from his parents--usually clothes or something else with nothing but practical use-- and Maddie would make him a stocking filled with little trinkets and candy. By the time Maddie left, he figures he was lucky that his parents even bothered putting up a tree.
“They’re planning on renting a big house so we can all stay together. We’ll make popcorn and cranberry garlands to hang on the tree and go to midnight mass and when we get home Dad will read the Night Before Christmas before everyone gets to open up their new ornament for the year…” Maddie lists off, glowing with enthusiasm. “And then on Christmas day we’ll open presents in our pajamas and have a big Christmas brunch with cinnamon rolls and french toast…I’m so excited.”
“It sounds great.” What else is Buck supposed to say? It’s not like he’ll be participating. If he shows up there will just be another fight and he’ll have sucked the holiday magic right out of the room.
“And since they’re renting the house anyways, they’re planning on staying right through till the baby is born so they can be here for the big day and a few weeks after to help us adjust.”
And that’s just…fantastic.
Buck can figure out ways around the holidays. He can volunteer to work and he won’t have to deal with that many awkward questions about why he isn’t with his family because he’ll be doing the noble thing of letting someone else who has little kids or something be with their family. It’ll suck and be lonely because holiday shifts are always cobbled together with the people from random crews who didn’t get their PTO requests in on time and are grumpy because of it or are holiday orphans like him who just want to do their job and pretend it’s any other day, but he can suck it up and get through it. He’s done it before.
But he can’t deny that it hurts that it looks like Maddie hasn’t even considered that she’s abandoning him to go back to these supposed holiday traditions.
And that hurt only gets worse when he realizes he’s essentially been given an ultimatum, intentional or not, regarding forming a place in his niece or nephew’s life. He can either show up for things like the baby shower and the birth and all the places that he’d normally be as Maddie’s brother and closest relative but face the endless judgment and ridicule of his parents and know that he doesn’t really belong there, or he can save himself the trouble and support from a distance, but wind up not being a close part of the kid’s life. Because while Maddie has put the ball in his court and said she’s telling him about their parents’ presence so he can decide to keep his distance if he thinks that will be better, Buck knows that she’ll still be hurt by his absence; she’ll be disappointed and hurt and she’ll think he’s selfish because he’s putting himself before her and the baby and if he’s that selfish, why would she want him around her kid?
You’re a terrible brother.
You hurt everyone.
You’re a stupid, self-centered, fuck-up.
Buck is never going to be the brother Maddie deserves, or the uncle her kid might need. He’s just…Buck. The perpetual failure and disappointment.
“That’s…that’s great, Mad. I’m happy they’ll do all that for you.”
Liar.
“Listen, I’ve got to…” He drops off. He can’t think of an excuse to end the call.
Thankfully, Maddie jumps in, completely unbothered. Either she doesn’t notice his discomfort, or doesn’t care, and he’s not sure which is worse. “Yeah, it’s getting late. At least for those of us growing a little human. I’ve got to start thinking about bed if I want to be ready for my shift tomorrow. But listen, I am so glad you reached out and we had this talk. I feel so much better now that we’ve worked things out.”
Buck’s not sure they’ve worked out much of anything, but as long as Maddie’s happy…he can go along with it. “Yeah. Definitely.”
“Love you, little brother.”
“Love you too.”
Maddie disconnects the call. Buck sighs, puts his phone to sleep and tosses it gently to the coffee table. That was…nothing that he wanted it to be. And it sucks. He’s surprised, even though he knows that he shouldn’t be. It’s not like he’s ever really anyone’s priority. He doesn’t do anything to deserve that kind of consideration.
You’re weak and pathetic and unlovable.
With the tacit dismissal sinking in, Buck just feels tired and heavy. It’s been a long day. And tomorrow will be long too. Eddie has an appointment in the morning with Christopher’s principal to talk about everything that happened with his teacher, and for some reason, Eddie wants him to be there. Depending on what happens there will be discussions with Chris and regardless they need to occupy him and do something of educational value since they’re keeping him out of class. Plus there’s Steve to think about, even though he can entertain himself if he really needs to (he came all this way to help Buck so he can’t just fuck off and leave him on his own), and now Adriana (although maybe she’ll be busy with Isabel?)...
And of course he can’t forget therapy. He’s supposed to have his initial appointment tomorrow afternoon. That’ll be an event all on its own.
Buck is exhausted and none of it has even begun.
He grabs a pillow and shoves it down to the end of the couch. He stands so he can get the blankets he’d gathered out from underneath him and tosses them to the opposite end, and then without much thought or care, Buck lays down on his back and stares up at the ceiling.
Maybe if he sleeps, things will feel less daunting in the morning.
Maybe if he sleeps, he’ll get lucky and he just won’t wake up.
Buck is riding in the ladder truck, in the captain’s seat. It’s nighttime and the streets of Los Angeles blur past when he looks out the window. His stomach is tight. There’s something off. He doesn’t know what but something is wrong.
He glances to the back of the truck. The first person he sees is Eddie, and that makes him feel a little better. What can go wrong if Eddie is there? But then he remembers. If he’s in the ladder truck--if it’s night time and he’s in the captain’s seat--if Eddie and Chimney and Hen are there but Bobby isn’t…
The world tilts on its axis.
Buck barely registers the sound of the explosion or the movement of flying through the air but he feels everything in his body shift harshly as he hits the ground and the pavement scrapes across his cheek. Then everything whites out around him.
Buck doesn’t know how much time passes before it feels like he can breathe again. His ears are ringing and everything feels disconnected but he can see. He can see the growing crowd of people and the spots of burning debris. His crew members are just in front of the crowd and there’s some kid, and Buck should be helping them.
He turns his attention back to himself and tries to push himself off the ground into a sitting position but a burning hot agony flares from his leg. It’s like nothing Buck has ever felt before and he loses all focus and falls back to the ground, biting back his scream. He can’t distract his crew; they’re probably helping civilians.
After a moment of just trying to breathe through the pain, which doesn’t really help with anything except maybe making him feel a little less dizzy, Buck tries to lift just his head so he can see what’s wrong and…sees the ladder truck. On its side. On top of his leg.
The ladder truck is crushing his leg.
And he’s alone.
Because there are other people to help. Or something else is happening. Buck’s not sure. Either way, he’s not the priority.
He’s being crushed, and he’s alone, and everything hurts, and he can’t really breathe so he thinks he might be dying and there’s nobody there to tell him any differently or even just to hold his hand and holy shit he’s scared. Why is he so scared? Why can’t he breathe? Why is he alone?
Buck doesn’t know how much time passes. Everything is a haze of pain and panic and dizziness but suddenly he blinks and he’s surrounded. Hen and Chimney are there and asking him questions that he doesn’t really know the right answers to but tries to answer anyways, and Eddie…god, Eddie is holding his hand and he’s not alone anymore and it shouldn’t be this much of a relief because the truck is still on his actual fucking leg, but it is.
Hen and Chimney do things to treat him that he can’t really process or feel, and everyone’s talking but he’s not hearing much of anything. All Buck can really process is that Eddie is holding his hand.
At least until the crowd around him grows and suddenly people are trying to lift the truck off his leg. And if Buck thought that things hurt before, that pain has nothing on the absolute agony stabbing through his system. This time he can’t keep from screaming.
But for the millimeters the crowd may have lifted the truck his scream makes everyone look at him and drop it and a silence falls over the group. It lingers and the air grows positively thick with tension and even though Buck is mostly still focused on trying to breathe and not give into dying even though that would surely be better than feeling whatever is happening to him now, he can’t help but wonder what is happening.
“Wait.” One of the strangers who had come forward to help says. His voice is incredulous. “He’s the one you want us to save? Evan fucking Buckley?”
Another person steps back. “Why would we want to save a useless piece of shit like him?”
As quickly as it formed the crowd dissipates until it’s just a handful of people left. Buck frantically looks at them, noting that it’s all familiar faces. OK, maybe strangers would abandon him but surely his friends and family won’t. They’ll still get him out of this, won’t they?
Bobby steps into his field of vision. “Well Buck, I knew from the day you walked into my station that you’d be nothing but a fuck-up. You managed to hold your own as another body on the truck for a while, but it was inevitable that you’d make a mess of things like this. I guess we’re just lucky that the only life you’ve ruined this time is your own.” He sighs. “I’ll radio for a field surgeon, so they can come and take off your leg.”
“Bo-Bobby no!” Buck protests. He doesn’t know what he’s done to make his Captain say these things, other than the fact that everyone realizes how awful he is eventually no matter how hard he tries, but even so… He hasn’t done anything! And if they take his leg… “I can be better. I can. I’ll put the work in, do anything you say. You can’t let them take my leg. There has to be another way. If you take my leg, I can’t be a firefighter anymore.”
Bobby’s gaze, if possible, turns even colder. “That’s the point. You don’t deserve to wear the uniform.”
Hen and Chimney stop treating him.
Eddie drops his hand.
Buck blinks and he feels a weight across his groin. Dr. Wells is straddling him, stroking his face with one hand.
“Aw, don’t look so sad, Buck.” She leans down and kisses him, biting his lower lip as she pulls away. “Everyone knows that you’re only good at one thing anyways.” She rakes her nails down his chest and then cups him roughly the material of his turnouts. “It’s not like you need both legs for this little thing to do its job.”
“I don’t--that’s not--I don’t want--,”
“Shh, shh, shh.” Wells hushes him, pressing a finger against his mouth. “You don’t need your voice for it either. It’s not like anyone’s interested in you for what you have to say.”
Buck blinks and Wells is gone, although the feeling of her touch lingers. Now in his view are his parents.
“Forget about taking the leg.” His dad barks.
Bobby doesn’t sound particularly concerned when he replies. “If we don’t amputate, we won’t be able to get him out from under the truck. He’ll go into organ failure and die.”
“It’s no less than what he deserves.” His mother counters. She glares at him so hatefully that Buck thinks if she didn’t consider it to be so uncouth that she’d spit on him. “After letting Daniel die he deserves to feel a little bit of pain and suffering.”
“No, mom! I didn’t mean for him to--I tried!” He cries. “I gave everything you wanted me to! I tried so hard!” Maddie swims into view, one arm cradling her baby bump. “Maddie, tell them!” He begs. “Tell them that it wasn’t my fault.”
Maddie rolls her eyes. “Do you really think they’d believe me? A selfish, useless, stupid fuck like you? Innocent? Please Evan. At least if you die now I won’t even have to tell my baby about you. She’ll never even have to know about her failure of an uncle.”
“Chim! Hen!” Buck turns frantically between them. “You have to do something!”
“Sorry Buck.” Chimney snaps his gum. “At this point you’re circling the drain.”
“Yeah, treating you would be a waste of supplies.” Hen agrees. “Supplies that could go to much more deserving, innocent people.”
Buck sobs and Athena appears. “‘Thena. Please. I don’t know what I did or why everyone hates me. I swear, I’m trying to be good. I’m trying to be what everyone wants. I just need someone to help me. I just need a chance.”
“Sorry Buckaroo.” Athena tuts and shakes her head. “Chances are for family. And you’re not family. You’re just a stray sack of shit that we took pity on for a while.”
Just like that, everyone is gone. Everyone but Eddie.
The hope that had flared in Buck’s chest despite everything when the crowd had been trying to lift the truck off of him is gone. In its place is a cold lump of truth; he’s going to die here. Everyone is going to let him die here because he’s not worth it. He’s a waste of space that’s run out of time.
Eddie starts to stand and Buck throws his hand out, wrapping his fingers around Eddie’s ankle to stop him. His partner freezes in a crouch. “Eddie, please. Please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t let me be alone. Just stay with me until I go. Please.”
Eddie reaches down and his hand touches Buck’s. For a moment Buck thinks that it’ll be OK. Eddie still cares. He won’t be alone.
Eddie peels Buck’s hand off of his ankle and drops it, eyes flaring with disdain. “Why would I stay for someone like you?” He spits out. “Everything you touch gets ruined. You lose victims. You killed your brother. You nearly killed my son. You deserve to rot under this truck.”
Buck’s eyes snap open and he’s aware of three things. He’s crying, he can’t breathe, and he’s going to be sick. He rolls himself off of the couch and scrambles to his feet, struggling to find purchase and his balance with only one arm. As soon as he’s upright he rushes to the kitchen. He barely makes it to the sink before his stomach clenches and heaves and overturns. His throat burns and he chokes and coughs, spitting out the bitter contents of his stomach.
Even when he finishes he stays bent over, like staring at the kitchen floor through his tears will help him calm down.
It was a dream, he sobs. It was only a dream.
He made it out from underneath the truck. People didn’t care that it was him, they saved him anyway and he made it out. He kept his leg.
It was a dream.
Only…
His parents really do hate him. He’s sure that if he died at this point they wouldn’t even blink, so that was hardly a figment of his imagination.
And he knows what Dr. Wells thinks of him and what he’s good for. What Abby and Ali and a practically endless list of other people have used him for.
That’s a reality.
It was a dream, but it wasn’t all that far from the truth either.
He fails people all the time. Gets them hurt. Gets them killed. Other people do deserve help and companionship and love more than he does. He can hardly blame people that don’t want him around--that want someone better in their lives and can offer them more than he can.
He’s a burden. A stupid, worthless, good-for-nothing fuck-up that doesn’t add anything to the world and hurts the people he loves.
He should kill himself.
Eddie’s hidden the pills or gotten rid of them or something but he couldn’t actually get rid of the knives…
Buck starts to open drawers and cupboards, searching for the knife block. For something sharper than a butter knife that will actually do the job but when all he finds are spoons and coffee mugs and tupperware lids he sobs again.
He’s the problem and if he’s going to take care of the problem he needs a knife.
Or maybe he could leave. Yeah, there’s an idea. He could just…walk out the door and walk in the road until a car hits him. It’s the middle of the night and his clothes are dark. No one will see him until it’s too late. And if that doesn’t work, as long as he keeps walking he’ll come across a bridge to jump off of or an ocean to walk into eventually and--
And Buck’s breath hitches and he freezes.
He’s spiraling. He’s not making sense. He doesn’t want to kill himself. It just feels like the only option. But that’s because he’s spiraling. He’s panicking and spiraling and he made a promise to Steve and to Eddie that he wouldn’t do this. He promised them that he’d ask for help.
Buck wipes at his face.
He doesn’t think he can face Steve when he’s this upset, which leaves Eddie, only Buck can’t bear the thought of disturbing Eddie. Eddie who worked a shift today, and had to deal with the problems with Christopher’s teacher, and whose sister is here. And pregnant. And who he will surely wake up if he goes to wake up Eddie, and not only would that not be fair to Adriana, who needs the rest, but it would be humiliating as hell.
No, Buck can’t go to Eddie either.
But it’s OK. He knows how to calm himself down. He’s been doing it for years. He forces himself to breathe, in and out, once, and then a second, slightly steadier time, and then takes a mug out of one of the still-open cupboards. He locates Eddie’s stash of tea and pulls out a bag of earl gray, tossing it into the mug to wait. The kettle is next to the sink, waiting to be filled.
Buck turns on the stove. He tells himself that he’ll fill the kettle while the burner heats and then put it on and it’ll only take a couple of minutes to boil, but he doesn’t move. He finds himself staring at the warming coil.
He knows how to calm himself down. He’s been doing it for years.
Buck reaches up to the clip of his sling and releases it so his other hand is free. He’s not as stupid as people think he is. He knows he can’t use his good hand.
He knows how to calm himself down. He knows how to stay alive.
Buck reaches out to the stove, wraps his hand around the warming coil, and squeezes.
Notes:
The third scene starts with Buck having a nightmare. He dreams of the truck bombing, but instead of the crew taking care of him and the public coming together to lift the truck off of him and save him, the crowd realizes that it's Buck and decides that he's not worth saving. What follows is pretty much all of Buck's friends and family taking turns to tear him down, voicing the worst things that he thinks about himself and thinks that other's think about him, and ultimately abandoning him to die alone pinned by the truck. When he wakes up, he's panicking, and although he recognizes that it was just a dream, he gets caught up in the things that he perceives to be true about it, and in that moment feels like suicide would be the best option. He contemplates and searches for a method he could use, before recognizing that he is panicking and spiraling and that he doesn't actually want to die. He recognizes that he should get help, but embarrassed and feeling like a burden, opts to calm himself down and handle everything by himself. His method of doing that is engaging in self-harm, which is where the chapter ends.
Chapter 21
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
There’s something about being in a principal’s office that makes Buck feel squirrely. Even at age 28, with Eddie by his side and knowing that they’re there to talk about an issue that a teacher caused, sitting across from Principal Leighton in his generic looking suit and tie, Buck can’t help but feel like he’s the one facing the firing squad.
Some of that is probably leftover from his childhood. Even when he’d never done anything his parents and all of their friends, which included several of his middle and high school teachers, had this way of looking at him that just made him feel like the mud clinging to the bottoms of their shoes. And a handful of kids who were actually troublemakers were quick to realize that for whatever reason, Evan wasn’t liked and there were teachers who would believe the worst of him no matter what the evidence said, and that they could blame him for things whenever they were at risk of getting caught. The first few times he’d tried to stand up for himself but the principal always sided with the teacher, so eventually Buck had just stopped trying and taken the punishments.
He doesn’t have good memories of sitting in the principal’s office.
Buck is also self-aware enough, even if he hasn’t started therapy yet, to know that at least some of the urge to shift in his seat and avert his gaze is because he does feel guilty. Not for anything that Principal Leighton cares about but that Eddie certainly would if he knew.
He’d had a nightmare. He’d panicked and gotten sick and wanted to kill himself--had actually searched for ways to do it until he recognized what was happening--and instead of getting his partner or anyone else for comfort and help like he’d promised to do, Buck had hurt himself.
To be fair, he hadn’t quite realized what he was doing, even when his hand was wrapped around the burner. Nothing had really registered and until he had released his grip and pulled his hand back and looked at his palm and fingers to see the swirling pattern of the heating element coils, a deep blood red with blackened and swollen edges. Even then, it took a moment for the pain to hit him, at which point he was fully in the moment and aware of the reality of the situation and also deeply, deeply ashamed.
He hadn’t done anything so desperate and unhealthy since he was a teenager, and at least then he had genuinely been without support. He doesn’t have that excuse now. Now he’d just let his emotions and thoughts get the better of him and dismissed the help he could have had and in place of doing anything rational, he’d hurt himself.
And the guilt that he’d done it, and the thought of how disappointed or even hurt Eddie would be if he found out about it was more painful than the burn itself could ever be.
So Buck had taken care of everything. He turned the stove off and ran his hand under cool water for a good long while, and while it was air drying he reset everything in the kitchen so it looked just as it had when Eddie had been eating his dinner. Then he’d gone to the bathroom and cracked open Eddie’s overly stocked first aid kit; at least burns were a thing that he knew how to take care of without any help. He slathered it in antibiotic ointment and bandaged it loosely with gauze before replacing the kit. With a little contortion he was able to get back into his sling and was pleased to note that the sling mostly blocked the gauze from view.
If he was careful, no one would ever know.
Buck had gone back to the couch at that point and eventually tricked himself into falling back asleep with a focused breathing technique. As he intended, nobody noticed anything was amiss throughout the morning, but the guilt had settled like a heavy weight across his shoulders and he couldn’t help but feel like all it would take is one wrong word and he’d be exposed.
So he’s anxious and unsettled in the principal’s office, only the meeting’s not about him. It’s about Chris. Buck does his best to focus as Principal Leighton greets them.
“Now, on the phone, Mr. Diaz, you mentioned that there had been a problem with Christopher’s primary teacher, Mrs. Baker. I’m going to call her into this meeting, but I want to hear your perspective of the incident first. Can you tell me about what happened?”
“Chris told Buck about it first, so it’s probably his perspective you want.” Eddie offers. “I was just the one to call because Buck isn’t officially on all of our paperwork here yet.”
The ‘yet’ is a bit of a surprise to Buck but he doesn’t have time to really think about it because Principal Leighton prompts him to share.
“Uh, well, I guess recently Chris’ class was assigned to write about what they wanted to be when they grow up.” Buck starts. “They were supposed to pick three things, and Chris told me he picked a chef, a zoologist, and a doctor.”
Principal Leighton smiles and nods. “Yes, those are all popular options in his age group.”
“Right. Nothing that was extreme or out of the ordinary.” Buck agrees. “And yet, Chris came home yesterday, incredibly upset. Once he stopped crying, he told me that Mrs. Baker kept him from going out to recess to tell him that she felt his career aspirations were…inappropriate.”
Hearing the story again clearly raises Eddie’s hackles because he is tense when he instructs Buck to, “Use her exact words.”
“She told him that he needed to pick other career choices because he was different. Listed some of the tasks that he still requires assistance for and is receiving occupational therapy to learn how to do himself as examples of how he was different and then told him that he needed to be more realistic because the careers he had chosen for his paper were careers for normal people.”
To his credit, Principal Leighton looks shocked and mortified. If this is a longer term problem, it hasn’t been brought to his attention. That said, he doesn’t get a chance to speak before Eddie is talking again.
“I brought Christopher here to Durand because I was assured that it was a school that saw the student, not their illnesses, conditions, or differences in ability. I believe on your website it talks about each student receiving equal opportunities and attention so that they all thrive and are given every encouragement and tool to reach their full potential. My son being told that he is different, not normal, and unable to seek careers that he certainly has the capabilities of pursuing if he really wants to is unacceptable.”
“Telling any kid in the third grade that their dreams are unrealistic is cruel, regardless of whether or not they have a condition like cerebral palsy.” Buck picks up when Eddie finishes his speech. “Kids should be able to dream about whatever they want for their future. But that she brought his CP into it is indefensible. Eddie has worked so hard to make sure that Chris is supported and has everything he needs and feels like everyone else and Mrs. Baker undid that work in five minutes.”
Principal Leighton closes his laptop. “First of all, I want to assure you that these comments do not align with the values of Durand School in the slightest. We make every effort to advocate for our students and develop the skills they need to achieve their goals, and it is not our position to ever tell a child what they cannot achieve. With your permission, I’d like to invite Mrs. Baker into this conversation to discuss what her intentions were when she spoke to Christopher. From there we can discuss why such comments were inappropriate and discuss how we can remedy the situation moving forward.”
Buck lets Eddie take the lead, and Eddie doesn’t look like he really wants to agree but because being a parent means occasionally being the mature adult and bigger person, he swallows back his objections and gives his assent.
Principal Leighton makes a call, sending one of the school secretaries to supervise Mrs. Baker’s class and while she comes to the office to join them. In the subsequent minutes while they’re waiting, the principal attempts to make small talk, but it gets increasingly awkward as time passes because while the principal seems to be well-informed about Chris, he appears to know next to nothing about Eddie and conversation topics soon dry up. It’s almost a relief when Mrs. Baker arrives and takes her seat.
“Now, we haven’t had this semester’s parent-teacher conferences yet, so I’m not sure if you’ve met each other. Rosalind Baker, this is Eddie Diaz, Christopher Diaz’s father, and his partner, Evan Buckley.” Leighton introduces once everyone is settled. “They’ve brought some concerns to my attention that I’m hoping we can discuss and resolve this morning.”
Rosalind Baker is an older woman with graying hair pulled back into a severe bun. It might be Buck’s anxiety playing up again or just his preconceived notions about her given what Christopher has told him, but even when she smiles disarmingly at Principal Leighton and by extension him and Eddie, there’s something about the woman that makes him think of the teacher that would rap his knuckles with a ruler for messing up reading a passage aloud.
“Of course,” she says, sounding relaxed enough that Buck is fairly certain she either felt confident that Chris wouldn’t have told them what she had said to him, or that there wasn’t anything wrong with what she had said to begin with. “What can I help with, Mr. Diaz? Does Christopher have needs that aren’t being met with the current accommodations we make for him?”
Eddie’s eyes flash and he opens his mouth to answer but Principal Leighton, probably used to upset parents, is quicker. “The concerns are not with Christopher’s classroom performance or needs, Rosalind.”
“Well, then I’m afraid I’m not sure what this is about.” Mrs. Baker frowns.
Eddie looks even more incensed, and Buck reaches over and grabs his hand, hoping to infuse just a little bit of calm into his partner. Buck doesn’t like the woman either, and he hopes that this meeting ends with her facing some consequences for what she’s said, but he’s learned enough conflict resolution skills from the job to know that going in with anger is rarely the way to make things go the way you want.
“Mr. Diaz and Mr. Buckley have brought to my attention some things that you told Christopher yesterday regarding his career aspirations essay.” Principal Leighton says. “Your recommendations upset Christopher, and frankly, were inappropriate.”
“I simply told Christopher that his goals were perhaps a little lofty considering his physical limitations.” She defends herself, seemingly unconcerned that a complaint has been made. “I’m sorry that he was troubled by that, but I do believe it’s important that children learn to set realistic expectations for themselves. It’s better that he comes to this realization now, while he has the resiliency of childhood behind him to help him adjust.”
“You told him that he wasn’t normal.” Eddie bites out. “What exactly was that teaching him?”
Mrs. Baker huffs. “He’s not normal. He has cerebral palsy. He simply cannot do the same things that other children can. If hearing this upset him, it’s only because you have been lying to him and filling his head with fantasies that he can be like everybody else.”
Buck throws a hand in front of Eddie’s chest to keep him in his chair. “Are you aware, Mrs. Baker, that the Irish poet, Christy Brown, had cerebral palsy? And he wasn’t just a poet, he was also a painter. And you probably have never heard the name Bonner Paddock, because his sports aren’t ones that we tend to follow on ESPN, but he has CP and he’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro without assistance and completed Ironman Triathlons. There are comedians and actors and athletes and artists and doctors…even a race car driver, all with CP. That doesn’t sound very limited to me.”
“Those are extraordinary cases, not the norm.”
“We’re getting off track.” Principal Leighton interjects with the sort of restraint that Buck is certain comes from years of experience dealing with frustrating people. “Rosalind, the point of the career aspirations essay is not to ascertain whether or not the students are planning for their best future, it is an exercise meant to strengthen their writing skills. Passing judgment and commenting on the dreams of any student was inappropriate.”
“I hardly think that--,”
“Furthermore,” Leighton cuts the teacher off, “it is the mission of Durand School to advocate for each student and provide them the support and resources they need to achieve their goals, not to increase their limitations. If you have concerns that something we are asking of a student is truly beyond their capabilities, you are meant to come to this office and build a plan with myself or one of the other administrators to bring those concerns to the parents, not discuss them with the student.”
“I didn’t tell Christopher anything that--,”
This time it’s Eddie, with a fiery glare in his eyes that interrupts Mrs. Baker. “You made him ashamed of who he is. Of things that he has no control over. He is eight. He shouldn’t have to know what that feels like. But thanks to you, he does.”
“Rosalind, I had hoped this was a misunderstanding, but it’s evident that you have some concerning opinions about how to handle our students. Given that this is a first incident, we will need to have a discussion on the best way for you to move forward here at Durand, which we will continue later this afternoon, however at a minimum you will see some supervision in your classroom for the time being until we come up with a more long-term solution.”
Mrs. Baker purses her lips, looking for all the world like someone has put an unpeeled lemon in her mouth. “If that’s all, I’ll return to my class now?”
Principal Leighton dismisses her and when the door to his office slams shut behind her, he turns back to them, expression contrite. “Mr. Diaz, Mr. Buckley, please accept my sincerest apologies. This is not something that Christopher should have heard or experienced at this school, and while this is not a fireable offense considering it is the first report of Mrs. Baker having such an attitude, I want you to be assured that we will be supervising her more closely and reminding her of the values and goals of the institution and ensuring that she can fulfill her duties in a way that meets those values, and perhaps undergoing some bias reduction training.”
“I hope that helps her, and that no other students have an experience like this.” Eddie says. “But I’m not sure, given the circumstances, that I’m comfortable with Chris returning to her class. She didn't exactly seem…receptive to what we were telling her.”
“Of course, that is a completely understandable request.” Principal Leighton nods. He turns to his computer and types for a moment. “It looks like there is space in Mr. Reilly, another of our third grade teachers’, class. The classes all follow the same curriculum, and they share recess periods so Christopher will at least be familiar with the students there. The challenges of transitioning should be fairly minimal, especially as we are still fairly early in the school year. Would that be acceptable?”
Buck is surprised when Eddie glances over at him, gauging his reaction before he nods and agrees. “Yes, we would appreciate that.”
“Then I will get the paperwork started for that transfer and everything should be all set by the time Chris is ready to rejoin us. You’ll receive e-mail confirmation of the swap once it is finalized. Is there anything else we can assist with this morning?”
“No, other than this, Chris has been very happy here.”
“And we hope that continues.”
Buck taps his fingertips against the edge of his laptop. He’s got himself situated in the bedroom, a mountain of pillows behind him to support his back, with one of their larger reusable water bottles ready for him on the nightstand, and he’s logged into the virtual therapy space he had been emailed a link to. Technically there are still three minutes until his scheduled appointment time, but his anxiety about the appointment has been building ever since he and Eddie had returned home from Chris’ school and when he’s anxious he gets paranoid about being late, even if it’s something he doesn’t want to do, so he’d logged in early.
And now he’s closed off in a silent bedroom, waiting for his therapist to log on, and it’s all he can do to keep his nervous energy in his fingers and out of his lungs. Even then it feels like his heart could break through his ribcage.
He knows nothing is going to happen. He’s in Eddie’s bedroom, and the therapist is in their office, somewhere across the city, and if things get to be too much, Eddie is right out in the living room, just a few steps away. Or a text if Buck isn’t sure he can get up.
Buck knows he’s in as safe a space as he could be.
But he’s still got this instinct now telling him that therapy is where bad things happen. And even if that weren’t the case, he’s faced with the concept of being open and vulnerable and spilling his secrets to a stranger when he doesn’t even like thinking about them with just himself. And he knows some of the things he thinks and feels are…far from normal.
It feels like there’s a lot of ways that this appointment, even though it’s virtual, can still go wrong. And in the silence, Buck’s worries are echoing in his head, making him restless and sick.
The computer chimes and the screen flashes black for a split second. When everything returns, Buck is faced with a view of someone who he would never have guessed was a therapist. They’re young, probably his age if he was forced to guess, with wavy blue hair styled in a short undercut. They have wire-framed glasses, several piercings in their ears as well as a pierced eyebrow and a ring in their nose. “Good afternoon,” they greet, pleasant but not overly cheery. “I have on your intake paperwork that you prefer to be called Buck, is that accurate?”
Buck nods, and then realizes that a verbal answer is probably better. “Uh, yeah. Buck is good.”
“I’m Jules. They/them. I’m glad to meet you, Buck.”
“Yeah, it’s good to--I mean, not good…Not that there’s anything wrong with you, it’s just that…” Buck stops talking, not sure how to finish. He’s already making an ass of himself.
Jules doesn’t seem too affected by his ramblings. “I think I understand what you mean. It’s not necessarily pleasant meeting a therapist for the first time.”
He sighs. “Yeah.”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine. And even if you weren’t, therapy isn’t graded. You’re not gonna mess it up.” They assure.
“To be honest, it feels like I can.”
“Even if that’s true, and I don’t think it is, this first hour is just for us to get to know each other. I’m going to tell you a bit about my therapy philosophies and how I run my sessions, and you’re going to tell me a bit about what brings you to therapy and what you want to get out of it. And at the end of the hour we can talk about if you feel like working with me would be a good fit for you or if you want to try to find someone else that suits your needs better. Does that sound OK?”
Buck lets them know that it does, and Jules continues.
“So, the first thing I want you to know is that there are no wrong answers. A lot of therapy is talking about what you’re feeling, and your feelings can’t be wrong. They can be confusing, scary, annoying, overwhelming, and a whole bunch of other things, but not wrong. I don’t want you to think that you’re going to be judged for being honest with me about what you’re feeling, even if what you’re feeling is that I’m not helping you.”
That…doesn’t seem like it can be true. Buck thinks back to the mandatory sessions he had gone through when he was still enlisted. He’d gone in knowing that most of the guys in his unit treated them as perfunctory obligations to keep going on missions, but he’d thought it was probably worth it to be honest. At least in the first session. He’d gone in and when the therapist had asked how he was coping with the stresses of their work, Buck had mentioned his nightmares, and that he had found it hard to turn off his feelings for the work and just disengage from the things that they did and had happen to them. That therapist had looked at his file, cited some of Buck’s accolades as part of telling him how important he was to the unit, and told him that if that was truly what he was feeling, he would have to consider putting him on restricted duty, or even leave, so Buck should think carefully about what he was experiencing. Then the therapist had asked the same question, ‘how are you coping with the stresses of your work?’ and Buck had known that the answer he had given before wasn’t the right answer, so he’d swallowed back his instinctive responses from then on and started following the therapist’s cues to figure out what he wanted to hear.
Maybe Jules really is different, but Buck can’t imagine that they don’t have expectations and ideas about what a person like him should be feeling.
“Keeping that in mind,” Jules says, “the first question I have for you is what are you feeling right now?”
Buck taps his fingers on the corner of the laptop again, only managing to stop himself when he realizes that it’s shaking the camera. He figures he can be honest at least this once, to test the waters and just because he knows he doesn’t have much of a poker face and it’s probably obvious to Jules how tense and uncomfortable he is. “Anxious.”
“Is that in regards to starting therapy and meeting me, or because of a different reason?”
“I, uh, haven’t had good experiences in therapy in the past.” He says, casting his eyes away from the camera briefly. “And I know that it was the therapist who was wrong and that what happened wasn’t how therapy is supposed to go, and that realistically, even if we were meeting in person, things aren’t going to go the same way this time, but I still just feel like…nothing about doing this is going to go right.”
Jules nods. “You’re right that no two therapy experiences are going to be the same. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had some that didn’t go well, and it’s perfectly understandable that these negative experiences would impact how you feel about trying again, even under different circumstances.”
“It feels stupid. And I know it’s wrong. I’m judging you before I know you.”
“It’s not stupid.” Jules assures. “I don’t know exactly what happened in your previous therapy attempts, and you don’t have to tell me about it now, or ever if you’re not comfortable, but I can tell you even without having details that having someone who is meant to be helping you heal violate your trust and harm you is a traumatic event. Your mind and body are trying to protect you from having it happen again, that’s what this anxiety is. With time, as you have more experiences where nothing bad happens, you’ll be able to trust that the situation is safe, but that will happen at your speed. Nobody is judging you for it.”
Buck just barely restrains himself from trying to confirm that his anxiety is normal; hadn’t he just had a conversation with Chris about how normal doesn’t really exist? He takes a breath. “OK. I’ll try to remember that.”
“With trust and boundaries in mind, there are a few other things I want to assure you of. First is confidentiality. Everything that you tell me is kept between us, even the fact that you’re seeing me. I can only disclose the information you tell me if you give me permission, unless I have definitive reason to believe that you are an imminent danger to yourself or others. This space is entirely yours. Do you have any questions about that?”
Buck clenches his burnt hand, nearly wincing at the throbbing sting the movement causes. “When you say imminent danger to myself, what exactly does that mean?” So much of what he knows he’s meant to talk about is about how he treats himself…does that mean he’s looking at having other people involved--other doctors and treatment plans--whether he wants them or not?
“Imminent danger to yourself would mean that I feel that you are not able to resist following through on suicidal urges. If we got to that point, which is rare, I would still try to involve you in the conversation and let you know that it was happening. I would never want you to feel like I went behind your back.”
That’s…better than what he was picturing. Buck can live with that. “OK.”
“Building off of this space being yours, what we discuss during your appointments is entirely up to you. I may guide the conversation, but if we ever hit on a topic that you don’t want to discuss you can tell me that and we’ll move to something else. On the flip side, I want you to feel safe to bring up anything that you do want to talk about, even if we’re in the middle of something else. Whether it’s something we’ve talked about through multiple appointments, something you maybe told me you weren’t ready to talk about before, or something that’s just coming to you for the first time, you’re in charge of our topics of conversation.”
“Don’t I have to talk about things that I don’t want to though?” He asks. He thinks back to the checklist of issues that he filled out with Eddie and can’t imagine much on that list that he actually wants to talk about, even though he knows that talking about it is the point. “I mean, I haven’t gone to school for it like you or anything but I feel like everyone says that not talking about things is what causes problems in the first place.”
“Depending on your goals, there probably will be difficult things that we need to address. But we still can do that at your pace. There’s a difference between pushing through some anxiety and discomfort when you feel ready to do so and forcing yourself to do something that you definitively don’t want to do. That can be just as upsetting as the subject matter and just make things harder on you.
“For therapy to work, it’s important that you are able to feel safe, which means that you can set boundaries that your therapist needs to respect. Hopefully as you get to know your therapist and build a relationship, you’ll find yourself adjusting those boundaries and opening up more at a pace that feels natural to you, but you are not expected to be ready to share everything, especially when you’re just starting out and building your comfort levels.”
“OK. I guess that makes sense.” Buck says, considering everything Jules has said. He notes that they’ve brought up goals a few times, and realizes he’s been accepting that without knowing what they mean. “When you say ‘depending on my goals’, what do you mean? I thought the goal of therapy was to get better…”
“But who defines what better is?” Jules asks. “Think of it in the context of the arm injury you have right now.” They gesture towards the sling. “For some people, getting better from that might just mean that the injury has healed and they no longer have to wear the sling, but I see from your paperwork that you’re a firefighter, so assuming that you are interested in returning to that role, getting better for you probably means that the injury has healed but also that you’ve rebuilt the strength and functionality of your arm so you can do the tasks you were able to do before you got hurt. Therapy is the same--the goal is entirely dependent on what the person needs to feel better.
“For some people that might mean growing to be able to talk about and disclose a past trauma to someone; for others it might mean developing strategies that help them process and manage anxiety, or being better able to practice self-compassion. What you want to get out of therapy is entirely up to you. And it’s OK if you don’t know what that is right now.”
“But what I’m hearing is I’ll set some goals and you’ll, what? Talk to me until I find my way to them?”
“There will also be homework. But yes. We’d talk a lot to help you figure out your thought patterns, why you think certain ways, and how we can adjust those patterns and train your brain to be more beneficial to you.”
Buck nearly winces. “Homework?”
“No essays or anything like that. It’s not school. But if we’ve had a discussion that involves your relationship with someone, I might challenge you to bring up your feelings with that person. Or if we were to decide that taking on a new hobby might have some benefits to your headspace, I might ask you to research and come back with two or three things you’d be willing to try. Going back to the arm metaphor, you might know that if you do physical therapy for an injury, it’s not just about going to appointments with a trainer. For the best results, that trainer will give you exercises to do at home in between appointments as well.”
“So it’s not homework so much as…stretches and strength training for my brain.”
Jules smiles. “Exactly. With all of that said, that covers the basics of what I want to share with you about how I work during these sessions. Do you have any more questions about that or about me before we dive into what brings you here?”
Buck doesn’t want to get into things about himself, that still feels pretty…exposing…but he also can’t think of any reasonable questions; everything that Jules has said has made sense and feels OK, all things considered. “Not right now, I don’t think.”
“Well, you can always ask if something does come to mind.” Jules pauses, glancing at something that’s not in line with their camera, but just as quickly, they’re centered in frame again. “Now, I have your intake paperwork and what you indicated in your initial inquiry, but I’d like to hear from you directly about what brought you to making this appointment and trying therapy.”
And how does he sum that up without sounding crazy or being too much? His whole life has been one giant mess with occasional periods of things being decent and he’s pretty sure it’s fucked him up beyond repair. But he can’t just say that. Can he?
Buck thinks and considers his options, buying himself some time by taking a drink from the water bottle on the nightstand and ultimately decides that he can be honest while still starting small. Jules had said that this whole thing was supposed to move at his pace. “A lot has happened over the past year. With work and family and…I guess life in general?” He scratches behind his ear, uncomfortable saying even this much. “And for a while I thought I was handling everything and had it under control but things kept piling on and getting bigger and it got to the point where I wasn’t thinking about handling or getting through it anymore, I was…” Buck pauses and steels himself. This feels like the make or break moment. “I found myself sitting with a bunch of pills and three-quarters of the way convinced that the best thing to do would be to take them all and stop being everyone else’s problem.”
“That sounds like a very difficult moment.” Jules’ voice is soft and warm, nothing like the therapist with the Navy, who had seemed off-put by the very implication of struggle, or the cloying nature of Dr. Wells, who had, Buck thinks when he’s being his most rational about it, been putting on the show of a caring counselor as part of her game. “Was there something in particular that stopped you from acting?”
“Whenever the men in my unit left the Navy, our commanding officer had them make a promise that they would reach out to him or someone else from the unit if they ever needed help with anything. And staring at the pills…I don’t know that I really wanted to take them as much as it felt like the best option, and I guess that doubt was enough to get me to reach out to my CO and ask to talk. He talked me through that moment and helped me tell my partner about how I’d been feeling…the two of them have been helping me figure things out since then.”
“Asking for help when you’re feeling that low takes a lot of strength and bravery. How have things felt between that moment and getting to this appointment?”
Buck goes with his first instinct. “Overwhelming.”
“That’s not surprising. Have you continued to have suicidal urges?”
Buck hesitates. This feels like the danger zone. Jules had given him a pretty definitive line as to where they would feel that he wasn’t safe, and he doesn’t really think he’s crossed it but…this isn’t something you’re supposed to talk about. People look at you differently when they find out that you’ve been thinking about killing yourself.
“Remember Buck, there isn’t a right or wrong answer, and I’m not going to judge you for what you’ve been feeling. This is just so I can gauge how to best help you.”
Even with Jules’ reassurance, it takes him a shaky breath to gather his thoughts. “Mostly just general thoughts, I guess? Like, thinking I should kill myself or that people would be better off without me, but not thinking about ways to do it.” Images of his breakdown in the kitchen from the night before flash in his head. He takes another rough breath, reasoning that if he doesn’t dive in now, he won’t do it at all. “Last night was probably the closest I came to actually considering it again.”
“Do you feel up to telling me what happened last night?”
“I had a nightmare.” Buck’s OK with admitting that much, but he doesn’t particularly want to get into the details of what happened in the dream, so he forces himself to keep talking so Jules doesn’t have time to ask questions about it. “And when I woke up, I just felt…wrong. Like, even though I knew it was a dream and it wasn’t real, everything really stuck with me and felt true. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling like killing myself would make things better for everybody else, and I started looking for something I could use.”
He realizes as he reaches the end of his thought that his voice has gone thick and he’s close to tears, and while the feeling's not totally unexpected (he had known he’d need to get vulnerable and that he’s an emotional person so getting vulnerable probably meant crying) it still makes him want to shrink back into himself. It might be perfectly reasonable to get emotional in front of your therapist but it’s not like he actually knows Jules well enough to exactly feel comfortable exposing his more personal feelings just yet.
“Was there something in particular that got you through that feeling in the moment?”
“I, uh, realized I was panicking, and that I didn’t really want to kill myself, and had promised my CO and my partner that if things got that bad again I would reach out so they could help.”
“And did you? Reach out to one or both of them?”
And the thing is, Buck knows he hasn’t talked to Jules before. He hasn’t told them this story; he couldn’t have--it had barely been twelve hours since it happened and this is definitely the first time he’s talking about it at all. But even so, it kind of feels like Jules is staring straight into his soul through the computer and that even though they’re asking, they already know the answer.
He looks down at his keyboard and shakes his head. “No, I…didn’t really feel like I could? It was the middle of the night and I was emotional and embarrassed and…and I didn’t want to disturb them or bother them or anything, so I just figured if I could calm myself down and regain control I would be fine.”
“And how did you do that?”
“I made some tea.” The lie comes out before Buck can even really think about it. He can’t just…tell a stranger that he had hurt himself. He doesn’t know them. And he doesn’t know how to explain why he did it or how it had helped, other than the fact that it did.
Not for the first time today, guilt and shame rises up in his chest.
“I think it’s very positive that you recognized that what you were thinking and what you were feeling weren’t actually in concert with each other, and that made you pause and reevaluate what you were doing. That tells me that while you are struggling and going through a very difficult time, that you are fighting to get through it, and that’s a very brave thing to be doing.”
The guilt bubble grows, making him shift uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t exactly feel brave.”
“That’s OK. It can be hard to recognize these things about ourselves. Especially when we aren’t used to thinking about ourselves in positive terms.” Jules glances at something out of frame. “OK, we are coming up towards the end of our time with this appointment. We have about five minutes left, and what I want to do with that time is evaluate how you are feeling now, first in general, and then about therapy and whether or not you think you want to keep trying things out with me. And remember, it’s OK if the answer is no, or that you’re not sure.”
“Uh…I don’t really know how I feel.” Buck admits after a moment’s consideration. “I guess I’m not as anxious as I was when we started, but I wouldn’t say I feel like…good or relaxed. It feels weird in general to be talking about this stuff.”
“That weird feeling will likely go away with time as you get used to having these types of conversations. Most experiences feel odd for a while until the newness wears off.” Jules reassures. “Do you have any thoughts about moving forward?”
Buck goes with his gut here, and doesn’t let himself think about it too much, lest he talk himself out of what he knows is probably a good decision. “I think I want to meet with you again. At least for another couple of appointments?”
“OK, we can definitely do that. Now, I know we didn’t dive too deeply into anything today and I would never diagnose you without doing some in depth work with you, but based on the evaluations our practice had you complete it seems like you’ve been experiencing some severe feelings of depression and anxiety for a while now. Taking that into account with the suicidal ideation you’ve mentioned to me, I think that while we’re getting to know each other and starting things out, you’d benefit from meeting with me twice a week. Today is Tuesday, and I have some availabilities on both Thursday and Friday. Would you be able to have another appointment on one of those days?”
Buck grabs his phone to consult the calendar app he and Eddie share, and together he and Jules work out a time for his next appointment.
“Great. I just have two things before we wrap. The first is that our practice manager is going to be sending you a link to our practice portal; from there you can make or reschedule appointments without having to call, access general references on a variety of issues, and send me direct messages.”
“Why would I be sending you DMs?”
“Sometimes patients find it helpful to be able to write things down and communicate them before an appointment to keep them accountable, or they like to send a quick message when something comes up because they want to get something off of their chest and they aren’t going to have an appointment for a few days. It’s just another way for us to communicate with each other.”
Oh. Yeah. That makes much more sense than what his brain was coming up with.
“The last thing I wanted to talk to you about is homework.”
“I have homework?” Buck feels his heart start to race and his mouth goes dry, even though he’s not sure why.
“I’ll be honest with you, Buck. It’ll be a rare appointment that you don’t.”
“Right. OK. What do you want me to do?”
“When you were telling me about your feelings from last night, you said that you didn’t reach out to the people who had offered to help you in the past because you didn’t want to disturb or bother them. I don’t know your former CO or your partner, but what you’ve mentioned about them so far tells me that they care about you, and I would argue that they wouldn’t have asked you to reach out or offered to help you if they didn’t want to, and that they made that offer without conditions. I’m also a firm believer that your support circle can only be in the best position to offer you support if you’re honest with them so they know that it’s needed. So my challenge for you, between now and our appointment on Thursday, is for you to talk to someone in your support circle--whoever you feel most comfortable going to--and tell them a little bit about your dream and how you felt when you woke up. Does that feel like something you can do?”
“I can try.” Buck agrees after a moment. He doesn’t feel great about admitting that he’s still in such a bad place to people who are doing so much work to help him not to be, but he wants to put his best foot forward with this. If Jules thinks it’s important to talk to someone, he guesses he can give it a shot.
“All right. If something comes up between now and Thursday you can always call the practice or one of the resource hotlines we have on our patient portal, but if it’s an acute emergency, the best thing you can do is call 9-1-1. Even if it’s embarrassing or scary.”
Buck gives his acknowledgement of their instructions, and they close out the call. He gets bounced out of the virtual therapy space and instead of staring at his vague reflection in the generic welcome screen, he shuts the laptop.
There. He’d done therapy, and nothing bad had happened. He doesn’t feel better, but he didn’t expect to, and more importantly he doesn’t feel worse. Continuing to try, while intimidating, feels…like a possibility.
Even with it mostly feeling like a success, Buck is wrung out and tired. He thinks about leaving his pillow nest and going to the living room where Eddie, Chris, and Adriana are hanging out, but he’s not sure he can match Chris’ energy right now, and he’d feel bad dragging him down. Instead, Buck reaches for his phone.
Buck looks over when there are two short knocks on the bedroom door. The door swings open and Eddie polks his head around looking tentative. “You wanted some company?”
“Yes. Please.” Buck moves his laptop to the bedside table and places his phone on top of it as Eddie enters the room, closing the door behind him. He feels some of the tension that’s been lingering in him post-appointment shift and dissipate as Eddie climbs onto the bed with him and wraps an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and pressing a kiss to his temple.
“I’m proud of you, hermoso.” Eddie murmurs against Buck’s skin. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know.” He admits. “It went OK. I liked Jules. They were really straightforward and open and even though we didn’t get into much it felt like they understood what I was saying.”
“Those are all positives. Did you schedule another appointment?”
Buck nods. “Thursday morning. They think we’ll meet twice a week while we’re figuring things out.”
Eddie wriggles a little, adjusting their positioning on the bed so Buck is more leaning against his chest. “That’s good. I’m really glad you think you can work with them.”
“They, uh, gave me homework.” Buck says after a moment. His stomach churns and sweat breaks out on his palms, thinking about telling Eddie how bad things had gotten last night, but he doesn’t think he can put it off. If he puts it off, he’ll find reasons not to do it, and doing it is a part of trying. He’d promised he’d try. He shouldn’t break another promise.
“Yeah?”
“I’m supposed to talk to you. To tell you…” Buck swallows around his words and tries to figure out what to say. “Last night…wasn’t a good one.”
Eddie’s hand rubs gently on Buck’s shoulder. “Does this have anything to do with the bandage on your hand that you think you’re hiding?”
There’s no real accusation or temper in Eddie’s tone, but Buck winces anyways; he’d really thought it had been hidden. “Uh, yeah.”
And Eddie just…waits for him to speak.
“I had a nightmare. About the truck bombing. Only once everyone realized it was me stuck under the truck, no one wanted to save me. All the civilians left instead of lifting it off. And I thought it might be OK, because you and Bobby and the crew were all there, but then Bobby stood over me, and said a bunch of stuff about me being a fuck-up and how he’d always expected it. He was going to call a surgeon to take off my leg and I--I begged him to find another way because if they took my leg I couldn’t be a firefighter anymore and--and he just looked at me and told me that was the point.”
“Oh, Buck…”
Buck sniffs and wipes at his face, determined to keep going. “After that, people that weren’t even there that night showed up. Dr. Wells…well she made it clear that being a firefighter wasn’t what I was good for anyways. And my parents came just to convince everyone that dying under the truck was what I deserved, for letting Daniel die. Maddie agreed with them. Said that at least if I died now she wouldn’t have to tell her kid about me. Hen and Chim said they couldn’t waste supplies on me when someone else would deserve them more.”
“Buck. Evan. You know that none of that is--,”
“Let me finish? Please?” It feels unfair of him to be cutting Eddie off, but if Buck is going to get this out he can’t stop or slow down. Behind him, Eddie agrees. “I asked Athena to just find someone to give me a chance, but according to her chances were for family, and I didn’t count. And then the only person left was you. And you said a bunch of stuff and then you left too.”
A beat passes before Eddie asks, “What did I say?”
And Buck doesn’t want to tell him. It doesn’t seem fair. Out of everyone that appeared in the dream, Buck is most confident that what dream-Eddie said was just his brain lying to him, and he doesn’t want his partner to feel guilty for something he didn’t even say or feel.
“Buck, you’ve quoted everyone else.” Eddie prompts. “I know you remember. I’m not going to be mad.”
Buck sighs. “I asked you to stay. So at least I wouldn’t…so I wouldn’t die alone under the truck. But you told me that you’d never stay for someone like me, because I ruin everything I touch. You blamed me for Daniel, and you blamed me for putting Chris in danger during the tsunami, and you said that I deserved to rot under the truck. That’s when I woke up.” He swallows around the lump in his throat. “I know it was a dream, and that’s not how you feel. You’ve never blamed me for anything like that and I know that you wouldn’t, but the rest of it…”
“Why didn’t you come and wake me up?”
“At first…I was just too upset and panicked.” Buck admits, glad that he’s not facing his partner. “I know it was just a dream and obviously that's not the way that everything happened, but…I know my parents would have said that, given the chance.”
“Buck…”
“And everything else…it may not be what the people in the dream actually think, but I know that people do think those things about me. I think those things about me, so of course other people do.”
“Buck, anyone who thinks things like that doesn’t know you.”
Buck hears him, he does, but it’s easier to ignore him and keep going. “I was too caught up in my own head to think clearly. I, uh…For a few moments there I tried to find where you had put the knives so I could…” He trails off but he feels Eddie tense behind him and tighten his grip. “But I realized what I was doing, and that I didn’t really want to do that and that I had promised you and Steve…”
“You promised that you would come to one of us.” Eddie says softly. “Did you call Steve?
“No, I was…too embarrassed and upset. I couldn’t bother him.”
“But you didn’t come wake me up either.” Eddie doesn’t sound upset, Buck doesn’t think, but he’s speaking slowly, like he’s still putting things together. A bigger reaction could come later.
“You had worked and taken care of Chris and you had Adriana with you. Who’s pregnant and needs her rest and…and I didn’t want her to see me like that. I didn’t want you to see me like that. I figured since I was thinking a little more clearly I could just calm myself down and work through it. And I did.”
“But you didn’t have to.”
A silence follows. Buck isn’t sure what to say. He can understand why Eddie is disappointed; if their positions were reversed, Buck would want to do everything he could to help and the thought of Eddie going through things on his own when he is right there is painful. It’s just… it’s one thing to know that people care and want to help, and another to actually feel like you can ask for it. Exposing yourself like that is terrifying, even when you think you can predict what will happen.
When Eddie speaks again after several long moments, his voice is rough. “What about your hand?”
“My hand?”
“The bandage that you’re hiding. What happened?”
Right. That. The thing that’s possibly more shameful than just wanting to kill himself. The thing that he hadn’t even admitted to the neutral party of his therapist. “To calm myself down and settle, I thought I would make some tea. I turned on the stove and--and you have to know that I was just going to fill up the kettle and put it on. I was. Only…the last time things were this bad, I was a kid still living with my parents and I actually was on my own and had to figure out ways to deal with everything and the way I did that…I know it wasn’t smart or healthy but it worked and kept things manageable.” A part of Buck wishes that Eddie would just fill in the blanks for himself so that he doesn’t have to say the words, but his partner remains quiet and steady behind him. “Back then, I mostly cut myself.” Buck closes his eyes as he speaks; if his eyes are closed, he’s not really there and the heartbeat pulsing against his back isn’t Eddie’s. “When I left and decided I’d try things at Coronado, I kicked the habit before I enrolled and for the most part that was it. But last night I was struggling and hurting and I couldn’t stop thinking about how it had worked when I was a kid.”
At this pause, Eddie does put the puzzle pieces together. “You burned yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see.” Eddie is soft when he speaks, but it’s clear that it’s a demand, not a gentle request.
Buck shifts to the side so he can angle himself and actually face his partner, then reaches up and unclip his sling. He holds his hand out afterwards, and with gentle hands, Eddie takes a hold and undoes the gauze Buck had wrapped the wound with. The burn looks just as angry as it did last night, etched deep into his skin with shiny raised blisters bordering the injury.
“Mierda.” Eddie curses under his breath. “Buck this is…you need to go to a doctor. This is easily a third degree burn. It needs evaluation and debridement and antibiotics…”
“I did all that. I mean…not really the debridement but I rinsed it off and made sure there wasn’t any shit stuck in it. And I put antibiotic cream on it before I wrapped it up.”
“Yeah that’s not…Buck, I know you’re not stupid. A doctor needs to look at this. If you had gotten a burn this severe at a scene Bobby would never let you take care of it yourself. He wouldn’t even let you get away with just Hen and Chim treating it.”
Buck had thought that Eddie would be upset and disappointed in him. He thought he’d probably judge him. He thought he’d lecture him and make him promise to come to him if he felt like doing it again. For whatever reason, he hadn’t anticipated the medic in him insisting on a doctor’s visit. “We know how to treat burns, Eds.”
“Not like this.”
Buck sighs. A look at Eddie’s expression tells him the man is not going to budge. He glances down at the burn again and…OK yeah. It really doesn’t look good. “OK.”
“Thank you.” Eddie leans over and kisses him briefly and Buck feels tension that he didn’t know he was holding release. He hasn’t scared Eddie off. “I’ll go get some more gauze so we can wrap it up and we can maybe let Adri and Chris do dinner with Abuela and Pepa on their own and I can bring you--,”
The noisy chirping of both of their phones cuts him off. Buck’s phone in particular goes off continuously.
He frowns and reaches for the phone. On the screen he watches as messages flood in. From Karen, Athena, Steve, Chimney, Maddie… Buck doesn’t have to open any of them. He can see in the text preview exactly what they’re texting about and his stomach drops out from under him.
Taylor’s story has gone live.
Notes:
Is Buck's therapist a little too idealized? Probably. But this is fiction and he deserves a break so he gets a therapist that will be a good fit for him on the first try.
Come chat with me about fics, 9-1-1, or anything else on my tumblr, @imaginarybird.
Chapter 22
Notes:
Thank you so much to everyone for reading and commenting, and for your patience between updates! Your responses mean the world to me.
Just as an FYI, I'm planning on answering a handful of prompts for AI-less Whumptober, all of which will be 9-1-1 fics, so keep an eye out for those throughout the month of October. To give myself some time to write those, I am putting this fic on a little mini-hiatus, but I will be back as soon as I get through the prompts I want to write for that event, because I still have a lot of story that I want to tell for this universe.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Despite the warnings from multiple people not to watch the report, the first thing Buck does when he realizes what has happened is grab his laptop from the bedside table so he can go to the channel eight website. Eddie doesn’t stop him, though he does take over so Buck can stop being tempted to use his injured hand.
They watch the report together. If looks could kill through a screen, Taylor Kelly would be well on her way to six-feet-under from the glare Eddie had leveled her with the moment she appeared. Her headline isn’t about Dr. Wells being fired and prosecuted for sexual assault. Because that would make sense. No, Taylor’s headline is that the firefighters protecting the city might not actually be mentally fit to serve the people. And the evidence she cites is that Dr. Wells, a therapist who had worked for the department for five years, had recently been fired for exchanging clearances for duty for sex from her clients. She brings up Buck, retelling the story of the bombing and tsunami, going on for a bit about how the events were traumatizing, and then pointing out that he had returned to duty after a single appointment with Dr. Wells, and that he was cited as one of the affected firefighters in her severance report. Taylor doesn’t name any of the other firefighters, just points out that there were at least seven others mentioned. There’s a throwaway line about Dr. Wells being prosecuted, but the last couple minutes of the report are Taylor fear mongering about the mental state of the first responders in the city.
The moment the video ends, Eddie slams the laptop screen shut, perhaps a little too forcefully.
Buck is stunned. Of all the ways this could have gone, he’d never imagined… The thought of the story getting out before had made him sweat and panic and he’d thought for sure that he’d have the same reaction when it actually happened but now that it has he just feels…Cold. Sick. Like he could comfortably never face another person ever again.
“She…she made it sound like I was the one who…like I wasn’t OK or didn’t try to do the appointment right and I asked Dr. Wells to clear me anyways…and just offered to sleep with her or agreed to it or something.”
“Buck…” Eddie reaches over to place his hand on his but Buck can’t stop himself from pulling away before they actually touch.
He feels tears spring to his eyes at the moment of hurt that flashes in his partner’s eyes. “I’m sorry, I just--,” Buck cuts himself off, unable to find the words to explain. He’s never had a problem with Eddie touching him before.
Stupid fucking freak.
Can’t even let your boyfriend comfort you.
“Buck, no. It’s OK. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I just don’t…I don’t understand. How could she--Why--?” Buck feels broken. He can’t get a complete thought out. His mind just keeps going over the fact that technically, nothing that Taylor said was a lie. It was just skewed to tell the story she wanted. But people will see her report and agree with what it said. Especially if they already know him and how he used to act when it came to dating and hook-ups.
Eddie mutters, soft enough that Buck almost doesn’t catch it. “Porque ella no tiene alma.” Before Buck might have argued that the reporter wasn’t really soulless, just ambitious, but he’s not feeling all that charitable anymore.
Their phones keep going off.
Buck knows he shouldn’t look. The few messages he’s already read have been a mixed bag and left him off-kilter even before knowing exactly what Taylor had said, but it’s hard not to get sucked into the movement of the notifications that light up his screen. Especially when Eddie glances at his own device.
So Buck looks down and the first thing he sees is another message from Chimney. The first set he’d read had been bad and he knows opening this one is probably a mistake, but he swipes before he can really consider the options.
This is why Buck hadn’t even wanted to tell anyone. Because Chim is just saying what most everyone else is going to be thinking. Even without knowing his reputation, he’s a big guy and if he didn’t say no or leave the office or do something to get out of there and keep Wells from having sex with him then at least some part of him must have wanted it. And then they’ll find out how he used to sleep around and they’ll be sure of it. Their thoughts will probably go a step further than even Taylor’s report had insinuated and assume that he had initiated but had done something to cover his own ass when it came out, ruining Wells’ life in the process. No one is going to look at him the same way again, no matter what they think he did.
If he had just been better, or stronger somehow, none of this would be happening.
Weak, useless loser.
He doesn’t realize that he’s squeezing his injured hand into a fist until the sharp, pulsing pain registers. A split second later he can’t prevent the muffled whine bubbling up from his throat.
Eddie’s head snaps to look at him. “Oh, Buck, hey, careful.” He sets the laptop aside and reaches for the injured hand. Buck doesn’t flinch back this time, and lets his partner uncurl his fingers and examine the damage; the wound is shiny and wet, with some of the blisters having popped. “OK, first thing’s first. We need to get this taken care of. I’m going to rewrap this so it stays clean on the way to urgent care. I just need to go get some gauze out of the first aid kit. I’ll also let the rest of the family know that you and I are probably going to miss dinner.”
“I’m sorry.” Buck’s apologizes, looking at his lap. Missing the family dinner isn’t the end of the world, and he probably doesn’t really feel up to it if he’s being honest, but he’s sure that Adriana was hoping to have her brother’s support when she talks to Abuela and Pepa about her pregnancy, and that Eddie was probably looking forward to getting more of the family than usual together. Of course Buck is the one messing that up. “You can just drop me off at urgent care and I can Uber back, or we can see if Steve can bring me or something if you’d rather go to dinner.”
Eddie, standing, turns back around and frowns down at Buck. “Would you rather Steve bring you?”
“Not really.” It’s not a lie. Even though Steve obviously knows Buck has been struggling, and he knows a lot of Buck’s family history and past, one thing he’d never shared with his commander was the self harm, and he really doesn’t want to dive into that topic with him now. “I just--I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck dealing with my fuck-ups. You should get some time with your family.”
“I don’t feel stuck dealing with you, Buck.” Eddie sits back down; Buck can tell he’s being careful to give him his space since he flinched before and he’s not quite sure why but the gesture hurts. “And you haven’t fucked up. You’re going through a really shitty time and it hurts, and you need a little help while you find a way through it. I want to be here for you.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I am.” Eddie says, voice firm. “As long as you want me here, I’m here.”
“Then I’d rather you bring me.”
“OK.” Eddie stands again. “I’ll go get that gauze and get things sorted.”
He turns to leave, and Buck’s phone chimes in his hand, another message from Maddie. He knows he doesn’t want to read it--can’t handle reading it. Not right now. But he knows that Steve had a point in his message, and that as long as the temptation is there, he probably won’t stop himself. “Eds, wait,” He calls out softly. When his partner turns back around, he holds out his phone. “Can you hold onto this for me? I don’t think I should have it right now.”
“Sure.” Eddie takes the phone from him, tucking it into the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Come find me if you need me.”
The urgent care waiting room is crowded, but after picking up the initial paperwork at the front desk Eddie somehow manages to find them two seats tucked away in the corner of the room anyways. He takes charge of filling out the paperwork for Buck, at least partially because it’s his dominant hand that’s burnt and in the sling, and Buck finds himself watching the muted television in the opposite corner of the room that is thankfully showing ESPN instead of any sort of local news option.
He doesn’t really care about the cornhole tournament, with the captions that appear to be a good twenty-thirty seconds behind the action, but he finds himself staring at it and zoning out anyways, his mind racing.
He doesn’t know everyone that’s contacted him, having not asked Eddie for his phone back yet, but he knows of the messages he’d received before asking his partner to hold it for him, only a handful had really been understanding or supportive. Everyone else seemed to have…thoughts.
And they hurt.
He’d known that not everyone would believe him; it’s why he’d worried about reporting and going through with a court case (at least…one of many reasons). But he’d at least thought that the people he was closest with, his family and friends that he’s worked with for a few years now, he’d thought that they would understand what had really happened. That they knew him well enough to see past the bullshit of people like Taylor Kelly.
He hasn’t slept around or gone out with the intention of having a one night stand since Abby. Even his hook-up with Taylor…he’d wanted to try and have a relationship, she was the one who said it would be sex only.
But Chimney still looks at him and sees the guy who would sleep with just about anyone, and somehow thinks it’s his place to correct the people who see otherwise. He thinks he’d actually put people in danger, just to get back to the job.
As though Buck had ever put anyone besides himself in danger.
“How do you want to explain how you got hurt?” Eddie’s question cuts into his thoughts.
Buck is too tired to lie. “Just tell them the truth.” He’s fairly certain that as long as he’s not actively trying to hurt or kill himself, all they can do at an urgent care like this is strongly encourage him to seek mental health care, and he’s already doing that. And he’ll never see these people again anyways.
Eddie jots it down and then folds back the papers on the clipboard. “OK. I'll turn this in and be right back.”
Buck tries to re-engage with the television while Eddie goes back to the front desk, but he’s not much for watching sports if he’s not in the arena or stadium anyways, and he’s not entirely sure that cornhole counts as a sport. When the event goes to a commercial break he gets more sucked into an ad for a dog food delivery service than he was the match.
“Hey, you’re that firefighter right?” A voice cuts into Buck’s lack of thoughts, and he looks away from the TV to see a guy sitting across from him with a bloody dish towel around his hand. “The one that was on the news?”
Buck does his best to school his expression and not cringe. There’s only so many ways this conversation can go. “Uh, maybe? I’ve been on the news a couple of times so I guess you might have seen me before…” He’s not going to fill in the blanks for the person. So far they could be talking about anything, and Buck isn’t going to mention Taylor’s report and make that the topic of conversation if that’s not what the guy is thinking of.
“You’re the one who got trapped under the truck during the bombings!” And the man says this with such enthusiasm that Buck does wince. It was one of the worst night’s of his life, and this person sounds excited. “And Taylor Kelly was talking about you tonight.”
Shit.
Buck doesn’t know what to say. Is he supposed to say anything? He knows not to comment to reporters or the media, because that could jeopardize the court case even more, but what about random guys in the urgent care waiting room?
“The stuff she says in her reports…” The guy smiles and shakes his head. “Was what she said true?”
Not knowing what to say transforms into feeling genuinely frozen. Buck doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want to be in this room, or with this person, and he doesn’t want to talk about this. His heart starts to pound against his ribs, leaping up into his throat every few beats.
“Cause like, I’m in the training academy now to be a paramedic and I love it. Can’t wait to graduate and get assigned to a station and start like…actually saving lives. But I’m not much of a therapy guy and the idea of mandatory sessions is kind of putting me off. But like…were you really able to bypass that stuff just by hooking up with your therapist? Like are they into that? Obviously someone wasn’t being discreet enough or else Taylor Kelly wouldn’t have been talking about it but if you keep it on the downlow is it really an option? Or was it just with this one therapist?”
Buck might throw up. Or cry. His body doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do and he doesn’t feel like he has much control over it either. His head feels a bit like it’s floating a few inches above the rest of him.
“If you think what she was talking about was a good idea or responsible or anything other than a heinous abuse of power on the part of the therapist then you shouldn’t be working as a first responder.”
Buck just barely registers that it’s Eddie sliding back into place next to him, voice hard and cold.
“Oh come on man.” The stranger scoffs. “Therapy isn’t for everyone and mandatory sessions are just some soft, PC bullshit the department does to seem woke or whatever. If some people found a way around it, I say more power to them.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Eddie’s hand rests gently atop Buck’s shoulder, and he softens his tone. “Come on, Ev. Let’s go see if they’ll let us wait somewhere quieter.”
Buck lets Eddie guide him to his feet and walks with his partner up to the front desk. He knows Eddie is asking the person working the desk something, but his mind is too busy cycling on what the stranger had said to really hear what Eddie is doing.
People believe what Taylor said. Like her or not, and whether or not she has an ethical bone in her body, she knows what she’s doing when she’s constructing a news report. She frames a story and people find it convincing and now her audience thinks that, at a minimum, he and the other firefighters had been willing to go along with Dr. Wells’ proposal that they have sex and she’d clear them for duty, no other questions asked. But he knows from the texts he’d gotten before handing his phone over to Eddie and the way this person in the waiting room had spoken, that it’s more accurate to say that people think the whole thing was his idea.
Even though it’s a potential reaction he had anticipated when he had decided to come forward, it still leaves him feeling dazed and hurt.
The conversation at the desk seems to wrap up and Buck finds himself following Eddie and the receptionist down a hallway and into a small exam room. The receptionist leaves them, and Eddie guides him to sit in one of the free-standing chairs, still speaking softly as he does so, though Buck isn’t registering what his partner is saying. He’s still stuck, skin crawling and stomach rolling as he imagines what people are seeing when they look at him.
It’s not until Eddie is pressing a small paper cup filled with water into his free hand that Buck mentally rejoins him in the exam room. “Take a few sips of that, OK? I’m right here with you.”
Buck does as he’s told; the water isn’t all that cold, but it doesn’t settle heavy in his gut, the way that water sometimes can when he’s not feeling well. After a couple sips, it feels more like he’s sitting in his own body again. “Sorry.” He says, voice rough. He doesn’t look up from staring at his shoes.
“What are you apologizing for?” Eddie asks.
His instinct is to answer and say that he’s sorry for zoning out and making Eddie take care of him like this, but Buck is fairly confident that his partner wouldn’t like that, so he just shrugs. A long silence passes, and Buck thinks Eddie might be waiting for him to say something, but if that’s the case, he’s going to be waiting a while; he still doesn’t know what to say.
“Well, I’m sorry I wasn’t there when that idiot started running his mouth.” Eddie comments. “I can’t believe he thought it was OK to just…say any of that out loud. Especially to you.”
“I don’t know.” Buck murmurs, unable to find the wherewithal to speak louder. “Nobody else is having a hard time saying it. Why should he?”
“What do you mean?”
“People have…thoughts. About me, about the story.” The more he explains, the more Buck finds his voice. The hurt of people he trusts believing Taylor’s framing without question, or ignoring all of his personal growth and assuming the worst of him, bleeds through and sparks something in his gut. “Chimney thinks I was desperate to come back and enough of a whore to have done what Taylor said and try to skip over the eval. And whatever he said to Maddie convinced her too. So I’m sure most everyone else I’ve worked with agrees. And these are people who know me, so if they think it, why wouldn’t the people who just have Taylor’s word to go by?”
“Buck…”
Buck takes another sip of water, like that will somehow reign the emotions that are starting to bubble over in. “No, I mean, it is what is right? It’s the reputation I made for myself. When I started with the department, having a bunch of sex was easier than dealing with everything I left behind in the Navy, and for a while there, I was out of control, so who cares if it’s been two years since I acted like that? Who cares if the last time I had what ended up being a one night stand, it was my partner’s choice that kept it from being a relationship? I’m Buck. The horny, slutty sex fiend. Who cares how many red flags a situation raises? If I was there and the girl was pretty and willing I must have wanted it. It was probably even my idea right? Because I don’t have the kind of restraint that they have. That normal guys have.”
“Ev…”
Even the single syllable is too much for Buck. He can hear the emotion in Eddie’s voice, and the barely there restraint that keeps him from reaching out--because he’s barely touched Buck since Buck flinched away after watching Taylor’s story-- and Buck could cry because this isn’t how things are supposed to be. Not with work, or his life, or his friends… Not with Eddie. And he’s mad. Because it’s not the way things are supposed to be and he can and does blame himself for a lot of that but in this moment all he can feel is anger at Taylor for being so cruel with her reporting and at Wells for her…everything.
“She raped me!” He hurls the cup of water across the room, and it splashes against the wall, falling to the floor pitifully. “Wells raped me.” He repeats with a sob. “And all everyone sees, even strangers, is the stupid fucking whore that I used to be and I know it’s my fault and that I didn’t do a thing to stop her but it’s not fair. She hurt me, and nobody cares and they think I wanted it and I’m just supposed to be OK and laugh it off and say that I was the problem and let everyone judge me and think that I’m a selfish fuckboy that cares more about getting my dick wet and playing hero than I do about the people I work with and the lives we’re responsible for and it’s not fair. It’s not fair.”
Buck crumbles forward into himself, unable to do anything more than cry.
“It’s not fair, Ev, I know.” Eddie soothes. Through his tears, Buck sees his partner move so he’s crouching in front of him, and through the pain that is tearing through every fiber of his being, something in Buck’s heart eases when Eddie takes his uninjured hand and clasps it between both of his. “I know it’s not fair.”
“She raped me.” He whispers, voice thick and wet.
“I know.” Eddie repeats. He rubs gentle circles on the back of Buck’s hand. “I know she did. And it’s not fair that it happened, and it’s not fair that Taylor talked about it the way that she did, and it’s not fair that people you know and trust aren’t seeing it for what it was, or you for who you are.”
“I just don’t--,” Buck cuts himself off in a gasping hiccup. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. I don’t understand why nobody cares when it’s me.”
“Oh, Buck, sweetheart, there is nothing wrong with you.” Eddie releases his grip with one hand, lifting it cup Buck’s head and smooth over his curls. “Nothing.” He repeats emphatically, rising on his heels and leaning his forehead against Buck’s for a moment. He speaks again as he pulls away and falls back on his heels. “There’s not a thing you could have done or a person that you could be that would make the way people are acting about this OK. And I promise you that there are people who see you and who care. I see you. And I love you so much and it kills me that you’ve been hurt and that people don’t see that for what it is or think that you don’t deserve the same care and compassion that they would give others, because you do. I promise that you do.”
Buck sniffs and swallows around his tears and tries to lean into the comfort and support that Eddie is offering. Being in his feelings and embracing his pain and anger upset…just sucks. It’s uncomfortable and makes him feel stupid and weak and it hurts.
But Eddie’s hand on his is warm and grounding and steady in ways that Buck just doesn’t feel on his own right now, and he needs more of it. He leans forward, mirroring Eddie’s earlier movements and resting their foreheads together.
“I love you.”
“Te amo, hermoso.” Eddie lets go of his hand, and Buck almost whines in protest because he feels the loss so distinctly, but it’s only a moment before Eddie’s arms are wrapping around him, enveloping him in an embrace so tender and secure that Buck even through the remnants of his tears, Buck can feel himself softening and melting against him. “Te amo.”
By the time Buck actually gets to see a doctor, has the burn on his hand properly debrided and bandaged, and is sent on his way with a prescription for antibiotics to make sure that infection doesn’t set into the damaged tissue, he and Eddie have definitely missed dinner with Isabel and the rest of the family. By the time they’ve picked up the prescription, they’ve missed dessert and it’s just about past Chris’ bedtime and if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie hadn’t sent his son with any of his school things or an overnight bag, he probably would have just let him sleep over. But with that not being an option, they pick Chris up (with Adriana staying behind to spend the rest of her visit in Abuela’s guest room) and head back to Eddie’s.
It’s not all that late by the time Eddie is parking his truck, but between starting the day negotiating the meeting with Chris’ school and teacher, anticipating therapy, actually having therapy, and then seeing Taylor’s story and dealing with the emotional fallout from that, Buck feels like he’s been through a 48-hour non-stop shift and he is exhausted.
So when he sees Bobby sitting on the front steps of the house, he doesn’t know what to think or feel.
If he hasn’t been on duty, he can count on ten fingers all the times he’s interacted with his captain since the truck bombing. Buck can’t imagine what he’s doing here now. His mind would normally jump to the worst-case scenario--that Bobby wants to reprimand him for returning to duty after the bombing when he hadn’t actually earned his mental health clearance--but when Bobby looks up as Eddie exits the truck, the older man just looks upset. Not angry or disappointed, but wrecked. And Buck can’t figure out what that means.
It takes Buck a moment to work up to unbuckling his seatbelt and stepping out of the truck; by the time he does, Eddie is helping Chris out and Bobby is getting to his feet.
The Diaz-Buckley trio approach the front door together, and it’s Chris who breaks the silence first. “Hi Bobby! Dad didn’t tell me you were coming over tonight.”
Bobby clears his throat into his hand. “Your dad didn’t know. This is a…unplanned visit.”
“I hope you weren’t waiting too long.” Eddie comments; he sounds polite, but a little confused which tells Buck that he’s not missing anything. If Eddie doesn’t know what’s going on either, this is definitely something unexpected. He doesn’t offer an explanation as to where they were, which Buck also appreciates. He can’t imagine explaining a self-inflicted burn to his captain.
“Just long enough to gather my thoughts.” Bobby says. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Buck, I was hoping we could talk.”
The request puts Buck further on edge. He can’t imagine what Bobby has to say to him at this point, that can’t be said over text or the phone. That can’t wait until normal daylight hours. He looks to Eddie for support but his partner looks just as confused, and Buck is at a loss for what to do. He doesn’t actually have a reason to say no, but he’s tired and emotional and raw and he doesn’t really want to talk to Bobby alone when he doesn’t know what to expect. But Eddie has to put Chris to bed, and they can’t just go into the living room and sit in an awkward silence until he does that so Buck can have a little extra support.
“Uh, sure.” Buck agrees, since he’s not sure he has another option. “Do you want some coffee or tea or anything?” And just because he doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t mean he can’t be a polite host. It’s not a very big leap to assume that Bobby saw Taylor’s report and his presence has something to do with that, so Buck can at least manage his impression of him now a little bit and try to show that he’s not a total wreck or mess, even if that’s not the actual reality.
“Tea would be great, thank you.”
Eddie slips past Bobby to unlock the front door and lead the way into the house; he makes a comment about helping Chris get ready for bed and starts to usher his son towards his room, though he takes the time to gently squeeze Buck’s shoulder as he passes and leaves.
Things are quiet as Buck and Bobby make their way to the kitchen; Buck starts to prep the tea kettle right away, thankful to have something to do although he does make sure to put the full kettle on the stove before he turns the burner on to be sure to avoid any glowing reminders of his problems the night before. With the water heating, he goes to find mugs and then brings the sugar bowl and a half-empty bottle of honey over to the table; Bobby doesn’t add more than a splash of milk to his coffee, but when he drinks tea he puts enough sweetening agents in it that even Chris might find it tolerable.
Buck is content to let the silence stretch on--the longer it goes, the more likely Eddie will make it back before anything challenging happens--but it seems that Bobby has reached the end of his patience, and he speaks when Buck places an empty tea mug down in front of him.
“I owe you an apology, Buck.”
And of all the things Buck was thinking might come out of Bobby’s mouth, that sentence hadn’t even made the top 100 options. He drops the box of tea bags he had been bringing out in surprise. “Uh…what do you mean?” He asks, feeling stupid as he bends over to deal with the mess. Thankfully only a couple of bags had fallen out.
But Bobby doesn’t answer until Buck is standing up again. “I haven’t been fair to you. Not since the bombing. You were hurt on the job, through no fault of your own, and I couldn’t handle it because it was supposed to be me.”
“That kid was sick, Bobby.” Buck frowns. “It wasn’t your fault.” He’s still not sure where the conversation is going or why Bobby is apologizing. Sure, things have been distant between them, but that’s just the way things go for Buck. He’s used to it, and no one has ever apologized for that before.
“I know I didn’t make Freddie Costas target anyone or do anything that wasn’t in the scope of my job but… after you got hurt under the truck when it was supposed to be me…when you could have lost your leg and everything you had worked so hard for…I got scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of losing you.” Bobby looks down at the empty mug in front of him. “When I first came to LA and the 118, I was all business. I was determined to be a good captain and a good firefighter, but I thought because of everything that happened with Marcy and the kids and the fire in Minnesota that I was supposed to be alone. I let myself be…friendly acquaintances with the people in my command, but that was it. It wasn’t until you started and things started to change around the house that I opened myself up to actually living again. And after so many years, that was a big change for me. A good one, one that I needed and I’ll be forever thankful for, but big, nonetheless. One of the things you forget about when all you’re doing is existing and drifting through life without letting people get close to you, is what it means when someone is close to you, and how much you risk.
“Even when I got together with Athena and we started turning the 118 into a family, I don’t think I truly understood that I had done it until the night of the bombing. You could have died or lost your leg--everything would have changed. And the fear that I felt when I knew it was you under the truck and that I was on the edge of losing another son…I think maybe you might understand it because of how you feel about Christopher and what happened when the tsunami hit, but there’s nothing like that kind of fear Buck.”
Buck still doesn’t get it; yes, he was terrified of losing Christopher but that fear made him want to hold the boy closer. Bobby just…hasn’t been around. “But I survived, Bobby. You guys saved me, and I made it.”
“And that should have been a relief, but instead…I worried that you would blame me.”
The tea kettle whistles. Buck turns the stove off and removes the kettle and he tries to consider what Bobby is saying while he fills their mugs with hot water, but it just doesn’t make sense to him. He can see blaming the bomber for what happened to him (although Freddie was really just a heartbroken kid who got none of the support he needed in the wake of a family tragedy), and Buck can even stretch and blame Freddie’s dad for thinking that arson and insurance fraud was a good idea and kicking off the problems that plagued his family to begin with, but he can’t see an interpretation of the scenario where the bombing was actually Bobby’s fault. He doesn’t say anything until he’s sitting down at the table across from Bobby, tea steeping.
“Why would I blame you?”
“Because it wasn’t supposed to be you in that seat, Buck. It was supposed to be me. I’m the one that earned that bombing, and it nearly destroyed you instead. You should be furious with me.”
“That…doesn’t make any sense.” Buck shakes his head. “Why would I wish getting caught up in that bombing on anyone? Let alone someone I care about? It wasn’t your fault that Freddie Costas even decided to come after you or anyone else he targeted, so why would it be your fault that I was caught in the crossfire?” He pauses, brain making a few connections. “Is that why you’ve been staying away?”
Bobby sighs. “I’ve been… horrified that I almost cost another member of my family their life.” He admits. Buck opens his mouth to argue with him, but his captain keeps talking before he can speak. “And as relieved as I was that you survived and were somehow able to make a full recovery, I couldn’t get past the fact that you never would have been in that position if I had been a better, more honest person. Every time I saw you in that hospital bed, or with your cast, or at physical therapy…I just felt so guilty. And I thought for sure that at some point you’d realize It was my fault and hate me and want to transfer so I’ve been doing everything I can to make that ‘inevitability’ hurt less. Keeping my distance and pushing you away and just…treating you like some random probie from the academy instead of the firefighter that more than earned my respect and a spot in our family.”
“Oh.” It never would have occurred to Buck that the distance between him and Bobby was because Bobby felt weird about the bombing. “I thought… Honestly I thought that while I was out you realized you didn’t want me on the crew anymore and couldn’t figure out how to tell me so you were just…freezing me out.”
And if Buck didn’t already know that Bobby was upset and feeling guilty, the swear whispered under his captain’s breath when he says this clues him in. “Buck, no. You have…more than earned your spot at the 118. I’d only want you to leave if it was something that you wanted to do. I was just…being a coward instead of facing my feelings and talking to you.”
Buck pulls the teabag out of his mug and drops it onto a napkin. He grabs the honey and squeezes a dollop into his drink. He lifts the cup in his uninjured hand, swirling it gently to mix the honey into the liquid, and after a moment, blows across the rim and takes a small sip. “OK.” He says flatly, lowering the mug back down to the table. He still doesn’t understand what Bobby is doing here now. Nothing Bobby has said explains why he’s having a sudden change of heart, and even though he had started by saying that he owed Buck an apology, he hasn’t actually said the words ‘I’m sorry.’ And Buck would love to have more of his family back but lately it seems like people come with strings and conditions and he’s not sure what Bobby’s might be. “Why did you decide to tell me this tonight?”
“Because…” Bobby trails off. He makes no move to doctor his own tea, even though it’s probably ready. He just…stares at Buck and watches him with big, sad eyes that make Buck want to squirm in his seat. “One of the ways I put distance between us was making it harder for you to come back after the bombing. I set high standards for the requalifications and added hoops for you to jump through before I would sign off on you rejoining the team. And tonight I found out that doing that just hurt you all over again.”
For a moment, Buck doesn’t get it. After the bombing he had gotten hurt in the tsunami, which probably would have happened no matter what because he wouldn’t have been back on shift yet even if Bobby had been ready to sign off after the standard requalification process, and then he’d been fine until the shooting, which had been a disgruntled cop and had next to nothing to do with anyone in the fire department except for the way his brain had twisted things. None of that had anything to do with Bobby.
“I don’t make it a habit to watch Taylor Kelly,” Bobby begins and Buck’s stomach falls through the floor as he realizes that once again, everything tonight is about that, “but headquarters contacted all of the department captains to make sure that everyone who might be approached for comment was prepared to direct the reporters to the PR department and say nothing else, and…well, I’ll admit my curiosity got the better of me and I had May find the video for me to watch.”
“Bobby, you have to know that she twisted things.” Buck rushes to get out, feeling himself stumble over the words. “It wasn’t the way Taylor said. I didn’t feel great about having a psych eval but I promise I was taking it seriously and I never would have done anything to get out of an--,”
“Buck, I know.” Bobby interrupts. And again, he looks so sad. “I remember the way Taylor operates and I know--I know that this therapist was taking advantage of vulnerable firefighters. That she abused her power and took advantage of you. And I feel horrible that I set that into motion and put you in that position.”
Oh.
Oh.
That’s why Bobby is here. He feels guilty. About the bombing, and the way he treated Buck after it, and now for what happened with Dr. Wells.
“Bobby, you didn’t do anything.” Buck says softly. The words feel like ash in his mouth, although he’s not sure why. It’s practically the same thing as the bombing--someone with their own problems wasn’t managing them properly and chose to hurt people instead of get help. Bobby couldn’t have known what Dr. Wells was doing; he couldn’t have even known when he demanded Buck get a psych eval that he would be seeing Dr. Wells. “It’s not like it was unreasonable for you to ask me to get a mental health check-in after the bombing.”
“The bombing you should never have been in.” Bobby repeats his sentiments from earlier. “None of this should have happened to you.”
Bobby’s guilt is a heavy cloud filling the room, and Buck isn’t sure what he’s meant to do to help. He still doesn’t understand why Bobby feeling responsible for all of this has brought him here now. He isn’t actually apologizing or doing anything that makes Buck feel better about any of it. If anything Buck is feeling off and strange and starting to fidget with nervous energy because he can’t figure out what he’s meant to be doing.
“Bobby, I still don’t--,” Buck cuts himself off. He doesn’t want to sound rude but he doesn’t know how else to ask. “Why are you here?”
“I need you to understand that I never meant for any of this to happen to you Buck. When I say you made yourself part of our family, I mean that. You’re important to me and the fact that my actions led to you being hurt more than once…I’ll always regret that.”
An uncomfortable itch settles underneath Buck’s skin. Bobby keeps saying that things were his fault, but none of what he’s blaming himself for are the things that he’s actually done. They aren’t the reason that Buck has felt uneasy and apprehensive every time he’s gotten a text from his captain or why he’d wanted Eddie to turn right around when they’d spotted him sitting on the steps. Bobby had explained the distance he’d put between them--sort of--but that explanation hadn’t exactly done anything to make Buck feel any less like he had done something wrong. After all, Bobby was avoiding him because he was anticipating Buck’s reaction; what had Buck done to make his captain think he’d blame him and react poorly?
Buck had been the one hurt, and he’d been the one abandoned and left to his own devices, and now he’s getting the feeling that Bobby is looking for him to be the one to offer comfort.
How is he supposed to do that?
“I’m not sure what you want me to say.” He admits, unable to stop himself from shifting uneasily in his seat. “I already told you that I don’t blame you.”
A beat passes. “I just want to make sure that we’re OK.” Bobby finally says. “The past few months have been hard. On all of us. And I know you still have a lot of work ahead of you before you can come back to work but… I guess I just want things to be back to normal between us when you do.”
Buck swallows. He’s not sure he can give Bobby what he really wants. Not when they don’t see problems in the same places or things. But if Bobby wants things to go back to the way they were, if he wants to go back to actually talking to Buck and acting like family and being more than the guy that tells Buck what chores to do around the station…how can Buck turn that down? Family and relationships are about compromise and he needs all the people on his side that he can get. At least Bobby seems to understand that he hadn’t wanted anything to happen with Dr. Wells. His own sister isn’t sure about that. If Bobby really wants to be in his life, maybe it’s better to just put the last few months behind them.
“Of course we’re fine.” Buck presses a thin smile to his face; it feels false and awkward as it stretches his features, but if Bobby notices that anything is off, he doesn’t say anything. “We’re family.”
Notes:
If you want to know more about this fic, any of my whumptober plans, or anything else about me or my writing, come find me on my tumblr, @imaginarybird <3
Chapter 23
Notes:
Well this update is a little bit later than I had planned on. Life has a way of...well, getting in the way. Hopefully, updates will come more frequently as I get back into the swing of things and things around me settle down a bit. Thank you so much for your patience and hopefully this update is an exciting one for you!
Happy New Year!
Chapter Text
“OK. Chris is in bed, Bobby’s gone…I think that means we can finally eat.” Eddie says as he reenters the kitchen, having walked their Captain out. Bobby hadn’t left directly after he had resolved things with Buck, despite the late hour and having shown up unannounced. No, he’d been content drinking his tea and making small talk with Buck, seemingly oblivious to Buck’s own fatigue and discomfort. Just before Eddie had gotten back from getting Chris through his nighttime routine, Bobby had invited Buck to join A-shift for a meal during their shift the next day.
And the thing is…Buck does not want to do that. The thought of going to the firehouse right now, while he can’t work and his private life is being broadcast on the news for everyone to have thoughts and judgments about that they think are OK to voice to him just makes his skin crawl. He feels exposed enough in his own home, and dealing with people at urgent care had been its own special kind of ordeal…he’s not all that interested in repeating it again with people he actually knows. So he tried to politely beg off by explaining that he has a friend in town and they haven’t totally made their plans yet--which isn’t even a lie so he feels like it should really be all he needs to say to get out of going--but Bobby insisted that his friend is more than welcome to come to. And that ‘in light of everything’ the team would really benefit from seeing him.
That only serves to make the prospect of visiting the firehouse even more hellish-sounding, but Buck really doesn’t have an argument against coming that he can figure out how to voice, so he just kind of avoids saying yes or no. At that point Eddie had come back into the room and Bobby seemed to suddenly realize the late hour. He stood and said he had to head home to Athena, that he was glad they had a chance to talk, and that he’d see them both tomorrow. Eddie walked him out, and with that visit and conversation done with, Buck is now more than ready to just go to bed, but he knows Eddie is not going to go for that without eating something first. They hadn’t eaten anything since lunch after all.
“Sweet or savory?” Eddie asks as he opens the freezer.
Buck’s not all that hungry--he knows that physically his stomach is pretty empty and that means he needs to eat--but the idea of food…He doesn’t really have any appetite to speak of and he can’t think of anything that won’t just sit like a rock in his gut and make him feel sick. He doesn’t think Eddie will really accept that answer, so he just shrugs. “Whatever you want is fine.”
“OK, well, if Chris asks, we definitely mixed up a quick salad and it had lots of kale and spinach in it.” Eddie says. He shifts a few packages in the freezer, and produces what looks like a cake box. Eddie sets it on the table and turns away, but instead of going to the cabinet and grabbing plates, he just opens up the cutlery drawer and pulls out two forks. When he turns back around, he hands one to Buck and then takes a seat at the table before flipping the lid of the box open, revealing a cheesecake, generously drizzled with a thick caramel sauce.
Buck can’t help but frown, confused; Eddie’s not even that much of a dessert person, and here he is, pulling out a whole cheesecake and suggesting they eat that instead of an actual meal? It doesn’t make sense. “You want to skip dinner?”
“I want to have this for dinner.” Eddie corrects. He spears his fork down the edge of the cheesecake. “My grandmother on my mom’s side, Mormor Rakel, lived in Vermont and she passed away a little before we decided to move to LA, but when we were kids, my parents would send us to visit her on school vacations since we could see my dad’s parents pretty much any time back then. And she had this thing--she tried to tells us it was a family tradition passed down for generations but my mom insists she got it from her obsession with the Golden Girls--and basically, whenever we were having a really bad day and it felt like the world was just working against us, we got to have our reaction to it during the day, and then that night she’d let us stay up late or she’d get us out of bed in the middle of the night and we’d sit in the kitchen eating something really bad for us and talking it out. And between Taylor’s report, and people’s bullshit, and Bobby just showing up here and ambushing you…I feel like you have more than earned the secret emergency cheesecake I keep in the freezer.”
When Eddie finishes, he shovels the heaping forkful of dessert that he’s gathered into his mouth.
Buck’s not sure that he feels much hungrier after the explanation, but he takes the fork Eddie handed him and goes to grab himself a small bite anyways. It’s less about the food and more about taking part in what is clearly a treasured family tradition to Eddie; it means something, that Eddie considered him worthy of sharing this with. He knows he sees much more of who Eddie is than most people, but it still always feels important when his partner decides to share another piece of himself with him.
He wants to make sure Eddie knows that hearing about these things is important to him, no matter whatever else is going on.
And OK, maybe he wasn’t totally convinced he was hungry before taking a bite, but the super smooth cake that’s creamy and tangy and coated in a rich salty caramel hits his tongue and makes Buck realize that, yeah, it really has been a while since he’s eaten anything. He quickly takes a second forkful.
“Do you do this with Chris?” Buck asks after a few moments, once they’ve both made dents in their side of the cheesecake. “Or is he still too young for midnight snacks?”
“He’s too young to do it on a school night,” Eddie says, “but I’ve done it with him a couple of times. Usually when he’s having a tough time with Shannon being gone.”
“That makes sense.” Buck nods. “Did he meet this…what did you call her?” He fumbles over the word a bit, completely unfamiliar with it. “Mormor?”
“Mormor.” Eddie confirms. “It’s the Swedish word for Grandma. And yeah. Chris met her a handful of times. He was so little though…I’m not sure how much he really remembers outside of stories and traditions like this.”
“It’s a pretty cool one to pass on. Even if she did get it from a TV show.”
“Yeah…she did that a lot. She and Morfar Boye used to host monthly poker nights for their friends just because they saw it on M*A*S*H. And a bunch of other stuff. I guess her family growing up wasn’t super close or tradition based so she just decided to find things she liked and make them happen when she started to have a family of her own.”
Buck smiles, thinking of his own childhood and the lack of time spent together as a family, let alone sharing of actual traditions. Maddie had tried, in her own way, until she had left for college but like he had mentioned to Eddie before, once he had started school, it was very clear that their family was…different. The idea of changing all of that and coming up with things to pass along to his kids anyway…he likes that. “That’s really sweet.” He says. “Not that she didn’t have those things growing up, but that she, like, found a way to make it for herself anyway.”
Eddie nods, and they each eat a few more bites. He then reaches over and grabs Buck’s mug of tea, stealing a sip. “Do you ever think about it?”
“About what?”
“The kinds of things you want to share with your kids?”
“I mean…I think I’m pretty much in the same place that your Mormor was.” Buck shrugs, trying not to get too caught up in his head about it. He doesn’t have traditions to pass on--he’s not overly attached to most of what he and Maddie used to do together since it was just little things that he thinks most everyone does, even if she was trying to make things special for him--and for the longest time he didn’t really think he’d have anyone to pass things on to anyways. Even now, as close as he is to Eddie and Chris, he knows that Chris isn’t really his and in any case he has traditions from two, if not three (if you count Shannon), families to take part in, and he’s only just starting to wrap his head around the idea that he might have a kid of his own at all, let alone that that might be happening sooner rather than later. It’s not that he doesn’t want to create these sorts of memorable family experiences, he just…has always been sure that it wasn’t something he would get to have. “I don’t know that I’ve ever considered getting to do that.”
Eddie puts his fork down and extends his hand across the table, wrapping his fingers around Buck’s. “Maybe you should.”
Buck squeezes Eddie’s fingers back. It doesn’t matter what kind of day he’s had--holding Eddie’s hand always helps make him feel just a little more grounded and loved. “What do you mean?”
“Family traditions can be for any time but especially this time of year.” Eddie says. “It’s almost Halloween and that just kicks off the holiday season… And I know we haven’t really talked about our plans yet, but I figure no matter what we do and what else is happening, Chris and I want you to be there with us. So, if there’s something that you never got to do that you want to try or you see something random that you think might be fun… It could be something the three of us do together. And if it ends up being something we want to do again, that’s even better.”
Not for the first, second, or even third time that day, Buck finds himself blinking back tears. Unlike those earlier instances however, these tears aren’t from feeling overwhelmed or frustrated or any sort of pain he’s trying to process. Well…he is overwhelmed, but only because he doesn’t quite understand what he’s done to deserve being loved by and brought into a family by someone as good and kind and caring as Eddie is, or being considered as another caregiver to a kid as amazing as Chris. People just don’t see him like that. And not only does Eddie see him like that, but he actively cares for and tries to include him in everything…Buck barely knows what to do with that. “I’m…I’m not sure I even know where to start.”
“Just think about it.” Eddie encourages. He doesn’t appear to be bothered by Buck not knowing what to say, but at the same time Buck can tell that he’s troubled and trying not to show it. He gets the same look in his eyes most of the time when Buck’s family comes up. “It doesn’t have to be anything big or crazy. Just something we can all experience or share.”
“OK, yeah. I’ll think about it.”
Eddie lifts their hands and presses a kiss to the back of Buck’s. “Good.” He lowers them back down to the table and after a moment, they let go and start to eat the cheesecake again, with conversation shifting to Adriana and how things had apparently gone at the dinner they had skipped out on. Eddie relays that according to Chris, dinner had seemed pretty normal, and nothing exciting had happened. Since Chris doesn’t seem to know that he’s going to be a cousin in several months, he figures that Adri had decided to wait to share her news with Pepa and Abuela until his son wasn’t present, just in case their reactions weren’t great.
They continue to talk, mostly nonsense. Buck reasons that even though Eddie had mentioned talking things through with his grandmother whenever they had their midnight desserts, that the day has been long enough, and things had been rough enough that maybe he just doesn’t want to do that tonight. Buck certainly doesn’t. Random conversations about things that don’t actually matter feel much more relaxing at this point.
So they talk and eat until they both can’t keep their yawns to themselves, at which point Eddie encourages Buck to go get ready for bed while he reboxes up the cheesecake and takes care of the mugs and cleaning up the kitchen. Buck puts up a token protest--he had caused much more of the kitchen mess than Eddie had--but cleaning up with one hand isn’t exactly easy and he is exhausted. Bed sounds entirely too tempting.
He goes about his night time routine as best as he can, which mostly consists of brushing his teeth, removing his sling and then stripping down to his t-shirt and underwear and pulling on a pair of sweatpants, then crawls into what has become his side of the bed, but he doesn’t make any effort to turn the lights off or really settle beneath the blankets and try to sleep until some time later when Eddie finally appears from finishing his own routine and joins him. As has become their habit, they don’t even bother trying to sleep apart in any way; they can’t really sleep on their sides and spoon the way they might if Buck wasn’t still dealing with his injured arm, but he waits for Eddie to get settled and then sidles up next to him, their bodies overlapping slightly as Buck rests his head against Eddie’s chest and Eddie wraps an arm around Buck, drawing him closer still.
Eddie turns the lights off, and with soft white noise playing from an app on his phone, they give into their exhaustion and drift off to sleep.
Buck glances down at his phone, buzzing from its place resting in the center console as Steve drives his jeep, pulling into a mostly empty parking lot. The device has been going off for most of the morning, and while Buck had attempted to check on some of his accrued messages earlier in the day when Eddie had been in the shower, he hadn’t been able to get very far before anxiety and guilt and a few dozen other feelings had sat down across his chest, rendering him unable to process much; he’d quickly decided that dealing with everything everyone wanted to say to him was going to have to wait. He can see that the messages currently coming in are from Maddie. There’s a part of him that feels like he should reach over and grab the phone, just to see what she’s saying--it’s probably more of her thoughts and questions about Taylor’s story, but what if it’s not? What if she needs help with something? Or there’s something wrong with the baby?--but before he can even really think about stretching his hand out, Steve grabs the phone, picking it up and examining the display.
“Does your sister ever stop texting you?” He asks with a raised eyebrow. He’s parked the jeep in an empty spot right near the trailhead they’ll be taking. With Chris returning to school to join his new class and Eddie working a shift, Steve and Buck have the day to themselves. To be honest, Buck would have been pretty comfortable just riding the day out on the couch at Eddie’s, but Steve had been pretty insistent (and Eddie had agreed with him) that getting out and doing something would be better for him, even if they avoided people, so even though Buck isn’t really feeling interested or up for a hike, he’d agreed to one anyways. He didn’t want to disappoint Steve and Eddie, or waste Steve’s time, considering he had dropped everything to be here in LA with him and help. So now they’re at a trail--one that won’t be nearly as intense as one that they would tackle if they were both at 100%--and they’ll be going for a hike.
Buck can only hope his phone will lose signal somewhere along the way and he can stop feeling guilty for ignoring everybody.
“What does she want now?” Buck sighs, leaning his head back against the seat.
“It looks like the same stuff she’s been sending you since last night. Mostly pressuring you to talk to her and let her be the one that fixes things for you, and judging you in the same breath.”
“Just ignore it.” Buck instructs flatly. Even though he knows it will likely only make working things out with her harder in the long run, he can’t figure out how to talk with Maddie right now. Not when she’s already made up her mind about what may have happened and his character and deciding that she needs to be the one to handle things and ‘get him out of his own mess’. “Put the phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ or something.”
Steve swaps the phone’s mode and holds it out for Buck to take back. “It doesn’t seem like she’ll take the hint.”
“She won’t.” Buck grabs the phone, and unbuckles his seatbelt. The pair exit the jeep, and once standing, he slips his phone into his pants pocket. “Once Maddie settles on doing something she’s pretty laser-focused.” It’s always been like that. From becoming a nurse, to moving to Boston despite their parents’ wishes, to running from Doug to LA and completely transforming her life, Maddie finds a goal and she makes it happen. It’s always been something he admired about his sister, but he has noticed that when she turns her focus on someone else, she can get a bit blinded to what they want or what’s actually best for them in favor of pushing her agenda. Buck is pretty sure that’s what’s happening now.
Steve pulls a backpack out of the backseat that they’d loaded with water bottles and some other basic supplies for the hike. The trail that he’d found for them isn’t very intense, but it’s long and they both have enough experiences and knowledge to know that they’d much rather be over-prepared and have nothing happen than to be surprised by something and have to improvise. They also agreed that with Buck’s injured arm, Steve would have to be the one to bear the load, and he slides the bag over his shoulders.
They finish closing up the jeep and start down the trail. For a while they walk in companionable silence, not because there’s nothing to talk about, but because the hike is meant to be a break from all of the chaos that’s going on. At least, that’s how Steve had convinced Buck to come.
It’s all well and good, and Buck is starting to feel himself relax the smallest bit as he walks, right up until the ground starts to tremble beneath his feet, almost throwing him to the ground. He throws at his arm, partly for balance, partly to catch himself on Steve. They share a look as the ground rumbles.
“Earthquake.”
Just as suddenly, the shaking stops. Buck automatically reaches for his phone in his pocket to check the alerts. It only takes a brief moment for the notifications to come through from the news and weather alerts he has programmed. “Looks like a 4.6 magnitude centered in Mar Vista.” He reads off. “Just strong enough to be a bit of a nuisance.”
Steve nods; Buck can’t remember if the SEAL has been through earthquakes before or not, but even if he hasn’t, he’s not the type of person to let something like that rattle him. Especially when it’s fairly minor. “Do we need to head back?”
Buck considers the question. If he were totally healthy and this was just a normal day off, he’d probably make his way to the station to help with the various calls they’ll be getting for the rest of the day or make the rounds checking on his neighbors. And he does want to check on things at his loft and Eddie’s house, just in case. But it’s very unlikely that anything emergent has actually happened. “I should take my phone off ‘Do Not Disturb’ in case Chris’ school lost power or something and they need someone to pick him up.” He comments, deciding that’s the most likely scenario to need his attention; Eddie will be too busy helping with the fallout and cleanup so any pickup needs would fall to him or Carla. “And we maybe shouldn’t go too deep down the trail so we can get back if they call, but we should be fine to keep going if you want to.”
“I’m down if you--,”
“Help!” A faint scream cuts through the air. “Help!”
They share another look, and have a very brief silent conversation. The voice sounds like it’s coming from further down the trail, and the pair quickly take off at a jog to find the person, Steve taking the lead in front of Buck.
Buck scans the area as he runs, but doesn’t notice anything. The shouting gets louder as they get closer, and the voice is joined by what sounds like a sobbing toddler. Eventually, several hundred yards down around the curve of the path, they come across the problem. There’s been a rockslide, several large boulders having come down a hill to land on the path, and one of them has pinned a woman to the ground. She’s on her stomach, a colossal rock crushing her legs. There’s a young boy, probably only two or three years old somewhat cradled beneath her and crying. He’s under her torso, so he thankfully doesn’t have the weight of the boulder on top of him, but he’s still quite stuck and probably scared.
For an instant, Buck freezes. He blinks and it’s nighttime. There’s a ladder truck across his leg. He blinks again and he’s back on the path, surveying the scene. He shakes his head. He can’t think about that right now.
“Steve, call 9-1-1, tell them we need a heavy rescue unit and paramedics to deal with severe crush injuries. Victims are still pinned.”
Steve nods, pulling out his own phone and stepping to the side, giving Buck full access to the victim. He drops to his knees.
“Ma’am, my name is Evan Buckley, I’m an off-duty firefighter. I’m gonna do what I can to help until a full unit gets here.”
“Oh thank god. I didn’t think there was anyone else out here and I can’t get to my phone. If it’s even still working.”
“Don’t worry, my friend Steve is calling for help now, and we’ll do everything we can until it gets here. Can you tell me what happened?”
“We were just looking at the view and taking a picture when the earthquake hit.” The woman sobs. “I picked up Bailey to make sure he didn’t fall, but I didn’t notice the rockslide until it was too late.”
“OK. Other than your legs does anything hurt?” Buck probes. “Did you hit your head or lose consciousness?”
Her breath hitches and she takes a moment to answer. Buck has responded to more than enough emergencies to know that this is probably the first time she’s actually trying to evaluate herself. There’s a lot of shock and confusion when you’re a part of an accident like this. “I--I don’t think so. But--But I can’t feel anything, really. Why can’t I feel anything? What’s happening? Am I paralyzed?”
“Don’t jump to any conclusions.” Buck does his best to soothe her, resting a hand on her shoulder. He remembers the lack of pain, and the terror over what that could mean as he realized exactly what had happened to him. “Your body is going through a really big shock right now. That messes with how you feel things. Now, I know it’s hard, but I need you to do your best to take nice, even breaths. The best thing we can do for you until help gets here and we can workshop getting this rock off of you is to stay as calm and still as possible.”
“What about Bailey?” The woman asks. “Is he OK? Can you get him out?”
Buck looks down at the small blond boy, still crying, though his sobs are slowing to sniffles as the surprise of being essentially tackled by his mother wears off. The kid doesn’t look to have many visible injuries, and he’s squirming as much as the limited space beneath his mom will allow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s OK. Kids are tricky. Especially kids who may or may not be able to communicate with the first responders. “He looks OK, as much as I can see. But moving him might not be the best idea right now.”
“What? Why not?”
“We don’t know about any internal injuries that he or you might have. To move him, we’d need to move you, and that could make things worse for both of you. It’s better to stay still until the emergency crews arrive with equipment they can stabilize you both with.” It’s probably unlikely since the boulder seems to have stopped on top of the woman’s legs, but it’s possible that one or both of them have spinal injuries and a single wrong movement, even just a twitch, could exacerbate any damage that’s there. Buck can’t risk that.
He also doesn’t want to say that and make her panic more.
“Rescue crews are seven minutes out.” Steve announces, cutting through Buck’s racing thoughts. “What do you need? How can I help?”
Buck glances back at his former commander. “Right now, there’s not a lot we can do. We can’t move the rock without a lot of help or the equipment the rescue team will have. You should run back to the start of the trail and meet them to guide them back here. Every second counts.”
“Got it.”
Steve takes off, and Buck turns his attention back to the woman. “So I never caught your name.”
She gives him a pain-filled grimace that approximates a friendly smile if they weren’t in the situation they’re in. “Kaylee.”
“Kaylee and Bailey, that’s cute!”
“My mother hates it.”
“I bet after today you won’t hear another word about it. She’ll just be happy that you’re both OK.”
“You really think we’ll be OK?”
“Do you remember the bombings at the beginning of the year?” Buck asks. “The firefighter who got caught underneath the ladder truck?”
“They survived?”
“I did.” Buck nods, even though Kaylee isn’t really looking up at him, nor can she. He knows better than to make a promise about what will happen with her or her son, but his own story is similar enough that he feels confident it will keep her calm, and give her a little bit of hope.
“That was you?”
“Yeah. So I can definitely relate to how you’re feeling right now. But they got me out, and got me to the hospital, and with a few surgeries and a lot of physical therapy, I made a full recovery. And when the rescue crew gets here they are gonna do everything they can to make sure the same thing happens for you.”
They continue to talk, Buck doing his best to keep Kaylee, and by extension Bailey, calm and to not get caught up in his own memories of being trapped beneath an immovable object while they wait for the first responders. He wishes there was more that he could do, but the rock is far too big to move without a team of people and probably some equipment, and he doesn’t have the medical training to do much. Even if he was a paramedic like Hen, or even a doctor, the only supplies he has are in the small first aid kit in his backpack, and the kind of injuries Kaylee is dealing with are not going to be fixed by a couple of aspirin and some basic band-aids. Keeping her calm and awake is the best he can do.
“All right, let’s work quick folks, I want options.” A clear voice cuts through the air. Buck doesn’t have to turn around to recognize it as Bobby. Their call caught the 118. Great. “Hen, Chim, start evaluating and treating our patients. Diaz, Bosko, figure out how we’re going to move that rock.”
“OK Kaylee, these are my friends from the 118, Hen and Chimney.” Buck says, resting his hand on her shoulder once more. “I’m going to back up to give them room to work but they’re gonna take good care of you and Bailey, OK? You’re in good hands.” He falls back on his heels and starts to stand, grateful when Steve slides into place next to him and provides a small bit of assistance; pushing yourself up with only one good arm isn’t easy.
Buck watches as his team flock to the scene. He and Eddie’s eyes briefly meet and they nod at each other before Eddie turns his focus to the boulder and starts talking with his temporary partner, Lena Bosko. With his assistance no longer needed, it’s harder to keep his focus in the present.
He’s been Kaylee. He knows almost exactly what she’s feeling right now, and that same fear and stress creeps its way across his chest, covering him in a thick coat of tension. He watches as Hen and Chim wrap c-collars around both Kaylee and Bailey, stabilizing their necks, and remembers the sensation of claustrophobia the protective measure caused him. Eddie and Bosko are standing nearby, discussing options in hushed voices and all he can think about is the great desire of wanting the ladder truck off, off, off this instant and wondering why people weren’t doing anything.
Buck doesn’t even notice that he’s digging his fingers into the thigh of his bad leg and clenching his burned fist within his sling until Steve gently bumps his elbow into his, knocking him back into the current moment. He does his best to relax his hands and let go of everything, zero-ing in on what Bobby is saying.
“You did a good job managing the scene, Buck. They’re lucky you two decided to go hiking this morning.”
Are they? Buck wonders. He hadn’t done anything really besides call for help. And if they’re being technical, Steve had done that. He shrugs off the praise. “Well, Steve insisted, so…” As he speaks he realizes that Bobby doesn’t know Steve, and he starts to introduce him. “Steve, this is Captain Bobby Nash, my boss at the 118. Bobby this is--,”
“Steve McGarrett.” Steve cuts him off and holds out his hand for Bobby to shake. He saves Buck the awkward decision of giving his full rank and having to explain why he’s friends with a Navy SEAL. At least for now. “Buck and I used to work together.” Buck knows that Steve doesn’t totally agree with his reasoning for keeping his service a secret, but he’d agreed to keep things out of the firehouse for now.
“Nice to meet you Steve.” Bobby shakes his hand. “It’s always interesting to meet a friend of Buck’s. Maybe when we wrap things up here the two of you could follow us back to the station and join us for a meal?”
Steve’s eyes angle towards Buck, and Buck tries to wordlessly convey to his former commander that just about the last thing he wants to do is join his crew for a meal, but before either of them can offer up an answer to Bobby, Eddie and Bosko are jogging back over.
“Cap, that rock is close to a ton. I don’t think we can get the lift bags under it, and we don’t have the manpower here to lift it.” Bosko informs, crossing her arms over her chest.
Bobby frowns. “I can call for additional crews to back us up and lend some strength, but with the chaos from the quake it could be a while before they can get here. Hen!” He calls and beckons for the paramedic to join them. When she stands and steps over he asks for her report.
“The kid is scared but stable. If we can get a peds board underneath him, we can pull him out and focus on mom.”
“And how is she?”
“Pretty shocky.” Hen informs. “She’s got some severe crush injuries that are impacting her whole system. We’re looking at internal bleeding, cell death, almost inevitable crush syndrome even with immediate preventative treatment…”
“How long do you think we have before her condition is critical?” Bobby asks.
Hen shakes her head. “It already is. We’re giving her fluids and doing what we can to stabilize her, but every minute she stays under that boulder is another minute her body is using up what little resources it has left to stay alive. She could crash at any time.”
Bobby looks back at Bosko and Eddie. “And you’re sure we can’t move it?”
Eddie hesitates briefly. “Not with the equipment we have on the truck. Our best chance would be to move it on our own but I don’t think we’ll manage. My deadlift maxes out at 350 pounds.”
“280.” Bosko points at herself. “Even if the rest of us can match Eddie that’s still only about 1500 pounds and that’s not enough to get the rock up. Plus it wouldn’t leave us anyone to pull her out.”
Buck looks over the scene, running the numbers in his head. Bosko’s not wrong, based on what he knows about Bobby and Chimney’s own lifting abilities, but she’s only counting the people in uniform. He shakes his head, about to speak, but Bobby beats him to it.
“Do we have time to wait for backup to get here?”
Hen hesitates. “I can’t say for sure what will happen but I really don’t think time is on our side here. The sooner we can get her out from under that rock, the better her chances of survival are.” She seems to know what Bobby is thinking, as she quickly adds on, “Even if it means losing her legs.”
Buck’s stomach plummets down to his feet.
Bobby just nods. “I’ll call for a medevac and a field surgeon. Eddie, help them get the boy out and then Hen, you should start preparing her.”
No.
Buck could throw up. This can’t happen. This woman was just trying to go for a walk with her son and now because of a fluke of nature she’s going to lose her legs? He can’t let it happen. Not when he knows there’s another way. “You forgot to count me and Steve.” He cuts in quickly. “We can both lift more than that.”
“Buck, you have a broken arm.” Eddie points out, voice soft.
“And I can’t authorize a civilian to jump in on a scene like this.”
“Forget my arm, this is about a woman’s entire life!” Buck protests, and Steve follows up immediately after.
“I’m not a civilian back home, if it makes a difference.” He offers. “I’m happy to help however I can.”
Bobby shakes his head. “We can’t. And we still wouldn’t have enough people to lift it and get her moved.”
Buck’s mind races. He wants to argue about how they let dozens of civilians come onto a scene where there had been explosives to get the ladder truck off of him, so they could easily let a single civilian with more training than most of the LAFD help now, and that they could make it work--he would find a way to make it work, but he recognizes the look on Bobby’s face well enough to know that he won’t change his mind. They need a different plan. A new idea. He can’t let them take her legs. Her life.
He flashes back to a call beside a pool, and rushing to split a cement-filled microwave. “What about breaking the rock?” He suggests, words flowing out at a rapid-fire pace. “Hammer and chisel. If we make it smaller we can move it without a problem.”
“Putting that kind of impact on the rock would exacerbate her injuries.” Hen argues. “Even with the painkillers we can offer her, it would be agony. And it would still take a lot of time and strength to break through a boulder like that.”
Bobby presses his lips together and shakes his head. “No. Our best option is to call the field surgeon.”
“There has to be another way.” Buck steps forward. “Taking her legs could ruin her life.”
“It will give her a chance to keep it.” Hen asserts.
“But--,”
“Buck, you are a civilian at this scene.” Bobby states, standing straight; he’s every inch the Captain in charge in the moment. “You need to step back and let us work.”
“Bobby, just give it a--,”
“That’s enough, Buck. Step back.”
Steve’s hand comes down gently on Buck’s shoulder and in the same moment, Eddie steps forward, ushering them back a few steps away from Bobby and further from the scene. As they move, he casts a glance back at Bosko, who nods at him and goes with Hen back to Chimney and the two victims.
“Buck, where are you right now?” He asks in a hushed, mild voice.
Buck shakes his head. He’s not crazy or having a flashback--he knows they’re on a hiking trail during the day, and not in downtown LA on a drizzly night. He knows it’s not him beneath the rock. “I know where we are.” He ducks out from Steve and Eddie’s reach. “I know what’s happening.”
“You’re telling me you’re not thinking about what happened to you?” Eddie raises an eyebrow. “About your nightmare the other night?”
Buck bites his inner lip to keep his flinch to himself. “I just don’t think we should be rushing to change this woman’s life. We have other options.”
“Her life’s already changed, Buck.” Steve says. “Whether she keeps her legs or not, things are different now. You know that.”
“Medevac and the surgeon will be here in ten to fifteen minutes.” Bobby announces.
Buck sighs and closes his eyes. That’s that then.
Fucking useless failure.
He feels a hand intertwine with his; the calluses give it away to be Eddie. “You guys don’t have to stay here and wait it out and watch.” He says. “There’s probably not a lot you can do instead of a hike because of the quake but…”
“But we don’t have to be here.” Steve finishes for him. “What do you say, Buck? Want to go check on things at the loft or head back to the house?”
No. Buck doesn’t want to do any of that. He wants to disappear. Forget about everything and just sink down into nothingness. But that’s not an option.
“Go back to the firehouse.” Bobby suggests, approaching the trio. “Like I said last night, the crew would really love to see you. And after a call like this, civilian or not, it’s good to be around family. Once we’re done here and they’re on their way to the hospital, we’ll head back and I’ll take us offline so we can all have lunch together and we can get to know your friend.”
It’s another thing Buck doesn’t want, but he sees the earnest look on Bobby’s face and he thinks that he’s let enough people down lately. His captain doesn’t need to be another one. And he’d said just last night that they were good and he probably needs to do something to prove that, so he finds himself agreeing.
Lunch at the 118 it is.
The drive to the station is pretty quiet. Steve tries to talk to him and check in, but Buck doesn’t really know what to say. He knows he wasn’t being totally rational, fighting for Kaylee to keep her legs and that he was too close to things--that Eddie was right and hearing Bobby call for a field surgeon was much too similar to his nightmare and fears for him to accept that it was the right call, even though he knows it probably was--but he can’t shake the feeling that things could have been different. If they had gotten to the scene sooner, or if he wasn’t injured or so caught up in his own feelings he could have had more ideas. Better ideas. They could have done more.
He could have done more.
Buck tries to hold onto the fact that she’s going to live. Her life will be changed but she’ll still get to see her little boy grow up. Bailey will still have his mom. He tries to focus on that, but it’s hard to just ignore the feeling that he’s failed.
Still, he does everything he can to shove it down when they arrive at the 118. The last thing he wants is to give Bobby and the team more reasons to doubt him. It’s bad enough that he’s been on medical leave more than he’s been on duty this year, and that they now know about what happened with Dr. Wells. They don’t need to see how hard things are right now. If this lunch is going to happen, he wants it-- no, needs it--to be as normal as possible.
Once they go inside, Buck introduces Steve to Tom Jenkins, the truck engineer who had drawn the straw of being the man behind for the shift, giving the same vague explanation they had given Bobby about working together in the past, and then quickly makes the excuse of giving Steve a tour of the station to put some distance between them. Jenkins is about Steve’s age, and he’s one of the last holdouts from the station’s pre-Bobby days whose name isn’t Hen or Chimney. He’s good at being perfectly civil in front of Bobby, the brass, and the public, but doesn’t make much effort to hide his real feelings when he’s alone with people. He doesn’t have as much to say to Buck as he does to some of the other folks at the station, given Buck’s privilege as a white man, but he’s never let go of Buck’s reputation from his first few months at the station, and Buck isn’t all that interested in finding out what sort of comments he feels like making today.
So Buck shows Steve around his station, taking his time even though most of the impressive equipment is out on calls and there’s not all that much to show him. But he takes him up to the roof so they can look out across the city and walks him through the locker and bunk rooms, shrugging at Steve’s confusion regarding the glass locker room walls, and he shows him the kitchen, explaining that before the bombing, Bobby had taught him the basics of cooking and reading a recipe, rounding out a lot of the ‘functioning mature adult’ lessons that Buck had gotten from Steve and the other SEALs on their team.
He can’t drag the tour out long enough for the rest of A-Shift to make it back by the time they’re finished, so Buck and Steve find themselves sitting up in the loft with Jenkins, despite Buck’s best efforts to avoid the man. And although the conversation starts with what they had been doing when the earthquake hit and what had happened out on the call, it inevitably drifts to different topics and it isn’t long before Jenkins is sending a bemused look across the loft.
“So Buckley,” he starts, leaning back in his seat, “what’s the deal with this whole therapist thing?”
Buck doesn’t have to look to know that Steve’s posture goes rigid at the question. He coughs into his good hand, and tries not to think about where he’s sure the conversation is going. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you pressing charges, man?” He asks. “Seems to me like you got a pretty sweet deal.”
“You know it’s illegal for a therapist to sleep with their patients, right?” Steve glares. Buck wants to tell him not waste his breath, that Jenkins is just one of many people who think this way and they aren’t going to change his mind, and that he’d much rather they just go back outside and wait for the rest of the crew instead of trying to have this conversation or even having to sit and listen to it, but the words are caught in his throat.
Jenkins snorts. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t want to do it. I mean, if you’ve worked with him before you have to know what he’s like. He’ll fuck any woman who shows a hint of interest. Hell, according to Chimney and his sister he’ll fuck guys too. Our Buck doesn’t discriminate.
Steve actually doesn’t know. Buck’s turn as an insatiable sex fiend had come after he’d left the Navy. It had been part of his difficulties readjusting to being a civilian and on his own again, and even though he knows he hadn’t actually done anything wrong (other than having sex while on duty) it’s not a time that he looks back on fondly or wants to think about. He’d definitely prefer that it not be a topic of conversation now. But instead of speaking up and telling Jenkins to fuck off, Buck shrinks back. Shame curdles his stomach.
“Liking sex doesn’t mean you’re into every person who comes on to you.” Steve fires back. “He went to that office for support.”
“And the mega-hot therapist supported him by offering to do him. Everyone who knows Buck knows that’s his deal. I bet you loved it, didn’t you Buck? You got a hot piece of ass and you got to come back to work. Seems like everything you would want to me. I don’t get why you’re crying rape now. Did she threaten to go back on the deal or something?”
Steve leans forward in his seat, like any moment he might launch across the room and deck Jenkins. Buck knows he should stop him, should redirect his attention and just get out of the conversation, but as confident and desperate to step up as he had been at the scene on the hiking trail, now all he feels is small and powerless and smothered in humiliation. It’s all he can do to speak at all, and even then he fumbles over his words, exposed as he is. “I’m not--I’m not crying rape.”
Jenkins scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Oh please. Like you couldn’t have said no and pushed her off if you weren’t interested.”
It’s nothing Buck hasn’t thought a hundred thousand times since it happened, but the comment still lands like a knife to his gut. Other people see it too. How fucking weak and stupid and useless he was. How he has no right to say that Wells hurt him when there are plenty of people who actually fight with every ounce of their strength to avoid encounters they don’t want and he just sat there and accepted it and let her do everything she wanted to. How he should have just let all of this go and put it behind him because it was his fault to begin with.
“You’re a real ignorant piece of shit, you know that?” Steve huffs a short laugh, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? Who you’re talking about?”
“Steve…” Buck tries to protest, but his voice is barely above a whisper and he hardly gets the name out before Jenkins and then Steve are both standing and crowding each other, posturing, inches away from an actual fight.
“I have an idea about how stupid you are, a guest in my firehouse and acting like a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch to defend a punk kid who’s such a pussy-driven fuck-up he wouldn’t even have the right to spit-shine my boots if our weak-hearted Captain hadn’t taken pity on him when he was a probie.”
“Oh, that’s how you think this is?” Steve doesn’t blink. He’s probably going to say more, but before he can the doors to the truck bay groan open and a parade of vehicles start backing in. He smirks, taking a step back. “I don’t have time to educate you on all the ways you’re wrong about Evan Buckley, but I want you to know one thing. Shitstains like you don’t deserve to have someone as good as him working on your team and at your back, and if you ever speak about him like that in my presence again you’d better hope the LAFD dental plan is comprehensive and their oral surgeons are talented because I’ll have you eating all your meals through a straw faster than you can snap your fingers.”
“Threatening a member of the LAFD is a crime.”
“That wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. And I’ve got more people in this city--in this country--that owe me favors than you can count, and they won’t even blink at letting me teach a disrespectful, misinformed asswipe such as yourself a lesson. So I’d start thinking real hard about what’s important to you.”
Buck manages to find his feet. He’s not sure what he can do, but he’s fairly sure he has to stop this before the rest of the A-Shift--before Eddie specifically--makes their way up to the loft. If Steve and Jenkins fight, he knows that Steve will kick the firefighter’s ass, and that if (when) Bobby finds out why he’ll be short another team member, he’ll blame Buck. And if (when) Eddie finds out why they’re fighting, he’ll join in on kicking Jenkins’ ass and he’ll get himself suspended or fired. Buck can’t let any of that happen.
“Steve, come on.” Buck says, voice soft. “Let it go. It’s not worth it.”
Steve doesn’t move. He doesn’t even turn around. “It is absolutely worth it.”
“No, it’s--,”
“Hey Cap!” Jenkins cuts him off, his expression sliding quickly into a smarmy smile as he directs a small wave behind Steve and Buck. “Everything go all right with the call? Buck said you had to call a medevac.”
Buck turns and finds Bobby entering the loft. He ignores his captain’s response in favor of grabbing Steve’s elbow and guiding him towards the stairs; if he can’t diffuse the situation he needs to just leave. “Come on, Steve. I’ll show you the engine.” Thankfully Steve complies and follows, although he’s not very happy about it. Buck can tell that much. Which…well, it sucks because he doesn’t want to disappoint Steve or make him mad but he also can’t let Steve go full-on scorched-earth protective older brother as he is wont to do. Steve gets to leave and go back to Hawaii when all is said and done. Buck has to be able to come back here and work with these people. If Steve rocks the boat too much that will be that much harder to do.
Downstairs on the apparatus floor, Eddie, Hen, Bosko, and Chim are standing near the engine, talking about something that Buck can’t hear, but the moment she spots them, Hen waves them over. “Hey guys, I didn’t realize you were gonna swing by for a visit.”
Buck has to resist the urge to fidget and rock back on his heels as they stop to stand with the group. All he really wants to do is nestle himself around Eddie and melt into his arms but even if they were out to the team, he can’t do that while they’re at the station.“Yeah, uh, I think you were already back with the victim when Cap invited us for lunch. Insisted on it really.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to introduce myself out in the field. I’m Hen Wilson.” Hen smiles warmly at Steve and shakes his hand.
“Steve McGarrett.”
Buck loses track of the rest of the introductions, as Eddie is looking at him pointedly, frowning. He knows something is wrong. Unwilling to get into it, especially right now, Buck shakes his head minutely, and when Eddie presses his lips together and sighs, turns his focus back to the group.
“So we know you’ve been visiting for a few days and Eddie here has already met you, but he’s been pretty tight-lipped.” Chimney smacks his gum. “So give us the scoop. Where are you from? What do you do? How do you know our little Buckaroo here?”
“I head up a special task force in Hawaii.” Steve says, and he doesn’t elaborate. Buck is well aware that keeping things vague and letting people make their own assumptions is one of his usual tactics, as people will usually say more than they mean to and give themselves away that way, but he’s a little surprised that Steve is doing that here with his coworkers. “And Buck and I go way back. We worked together for a few years.”
“I didn’t think you held down any jobs for that long before you got here, Buck.” Hen comments. “You always said you were a bit of a nomad.”
“This job involved a bit of travel.”
“Oh yeah, what were you do--,”
“Maddie, hey!” Chimney interrupts Bosko’s question with an excited shout, and he cuts his way through the group to meet Maddie in the entrance of the truck bay. He hugs her and presses a kiss to her cheek. “What are you doing here? I thought you had a doctor’s appointment and then you had to go straight to a shift?”
“The earthquake disrupted the power at my OB’s office and only appointments for high-risk pregnancies are being kept today, so I had a little extra time before work.” Maddie answers, returning his embrace.
“And you decided to come visit me?”
“Actually,” she pulls back and briefly stretches on her tiptoes, to look at everyone else gathered in the bay, “I was hoping to talk to my brother.” She walks over, making a beeline for Buck. “I think it’s time we talked, don’t you?”
Buck just barely keeps himself from frowning. Why can’t his sister just take a hint and leave things alone for a little while? And how did she know to come to the station? His first thought is that she asked Chim to let her know if he saw him, but Chimney seems just as surprised to see her as the rest of them are. “How did you even know I was here?”
“I checked that location sharing app we put on our phones.” Maddie rolls her eyes, as though the answer should be obvious. “I had to do something. You wouldn’t answer my messages or calls.”
He wants to squirm in discomfort at the thought. After the entire mess with Doug stalking and kidnapping her, he and Maddie had decided to install a location sharing app that they could turn to. It was supposed to just be for emergencies, and it feels a little…wrong that she used it for this.
“Maybe because he doesn’t want to talk to you.” Steve steps forward, crossing his arms over his chest.
Maddie shoots a withering glare in his direction. “Yeah, this still isn’t anything you get to have a say in.”
“Maddie--,”
“No, Buck.” She shakes her head. “I’m your sister. I raised you. That means you talk to me when you’re in trouble. You don’t ignore me and hide behind whatever friend you’ve convinced to do you a favor.”
Buck can feel curious eyes boring into the back of his head and he knows, just knows that they’re wondering what’s wrong with him that he can’t just talk to his sister. And they--and she--are probably right. There’s no real reason not to talk to her, except that he doesn’t want to. And why? Because it won’t be perfectly comfortable? That’s hardly a reason to blow up his relationship with his sister. Not when she’s done so much for him. And things are already so hard between them, what with him standing his ground with his job, and the problems with their parents…if he wants to stay in her life and to get to be an uncle to the little niece or nephew that’s on the way, and he does, he so badly does, he needs to do more to keep her happy.
He does his best to steel himself and stand tall. “Fine. Let’s go talk.” He starts to walk, aiming for the locker room, because even though people will still be able to see them, they at least won’t be able to listen to everything being said, but he stops after only a few steps, realizing that Maddie isn’t following behind him.
“Where are you going? You just said you’d talk.”
“If we’re going to talk, we’re doing it somewhere private.” He does his best to project that he’ll be fine at Steve and Eddie’s worried looks, because this is something he should do and he shouldn’t let them interfere, no matter how much he’d rather let them take charge and make her (and everything else) go away. Maddie eventually agrees and follows him into the locker room, but once they get there and the door closes, she doesn’t say anything, even though she was the one insisting on talking. And fine. If she wants to be like that, he can at least let her know that ambushing him here isn’t fair. “You could have come and seen me when I was at home.”
“You mean at Eddie’s?” Maddie quirks an eyebrow and crosses her arms over her chest. “Where you constantly have a guard dog keeping watch?”
“Steve is just trying to--,”
“Just trying to interfere in family business and keep us apart. No, I had to come to you here, so everyone else could help you see sense if you needed it.”
You mean where everyone else could shame me into talking to you. Buck bites back his first reply. He’s not going to argue with her. He wants to fix things, not make them worse. He tries to shift the subject instead. “Fine. You still shouldn’t have used that app to find me. We installed that for emergencies. Not so you could stalk me whenever I’m not doing what you want.”
“I’m not stalking you.” Maddie protests, hurt flashing in her eyes. “I would never! Is that what you think? That I’m some kind of monster like Doug was?”
Buck flinches. He hadn’t even thought of that. Of course that wasn’t what Maddie was doing, and he feels a little sick that she even thinks he might think that of her. “Of course not! I know you wouldn’t--I just don’t think that--,”
“I just wanted to talk to you.” Maddie softens a little. She reaches forward and rests a hand on the elbow that’s cradled in his sling. “So much has happened lately and you’re not acting like yourself. I don’t understand what’s gotten into you.”
“What do you mean, I’m not acting like myself?” Buck resists the urge to pull away from her touch; it doesn’t feel soft and comforting in the way he’s used to. There’s a tension in her hand that he can’t quite place.
“I mean ever since the truck bombing you’ve been pulling away. You never listen anymore. Not to the people who actually care about you.”
Buck frowns. Maddie’s never lied to him, as far as he knows, but he just doesn’t think that’s true. He hasn’t pulled away from anyone--they’ve been too busy for him. And he hasn’t stopped listening to what anyone says. He just doesn’t always do what they want. Because he’s an adult and he can make those kinds of decisions. But before he can say anything, his sister is speaking again.
“I just feel like I don’t know you at all. And maybe I don’t. When I saw that news story last night I thought the reporter was being a bitch and twisting things and you had been hurt, but the more I thought about it…if something like that had happened, the Evan I know would have come to me for help. And then Howie told me more about how you just went through girls like they meant nothing when you first came here. Constant hook-ups and one night stands. Even with victims. Even when you were on duty. How sex is just a game to you and he wasn’t surprised at all that you would sleep with someone to get out of doing something you didn’t want to do.”
Even though all of her texts and voicemails had indicated this was how she felt, it’s still a punch to the gut to have her say it to his face. Not only does she trust in Chimney more than she trusts in him, but she actually thinks he’s the kind of disrespectful sleazebag who would…He has to stop himself from thinking about it or he might get sick. “Mads, I swear, that’s not what--,”
“And to not own up to it when you got caught and to let them press charges against her…I mean sure, she should be fired for going along with such a stupid plan in the first place, but she doesn’t deserve to go to jail, Evan! Do you have any idea how serious those charges are? How much harder you’re going to make it for actual victims to be taken seriously when this blows up in your face?”
Buck reels backwards, too stunned to speak.
“This is why I’ve been trying to talk to you. You’ve fucked things up but it’s not too late to walk this back and make it right. If you own up to the lawyers and tell the truth before this goes to trial, most of this mess will go away. It will be better for everyone.”
“I’m not…I am telling the truth.”
“Really? You’re going with that? Lying right to my face?”
He doesn’t understand. He definitely made his mistakes when he started the job here, and apparently permanently fucked up how some people see him, but he can’t think of anything he’s done that would make Maddie think so little of him.
“God, Evan, you’re exhausting. You do everything you possibly can to get attention and if you don’t get it you go nuclear. Then when I try to help you fix things you run away like you weren’t trying to get me involved in the first place, and act like you know best when clearly, you’re being selfish and immature and afraid of facing up to the consequences of the problems you created.”
It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. Mostly.
But it hurts more coming from Maddie. Means more.
Because she actually loves him. And if she loves him and sees those things then there has to be something to it.
It feels like the air has been sucked out of the room, and Buck knows to fix it he needs to leave. He needs to get out and run and get himself anywhere that isn’t here so he can be alone and figure out what to do. Because he’s a broken fuck-up and a shitty person and exhausting and he shouldn’t keep making people put up with that.
He needs to leave, but Maddie is blocking the door.
“Move.” He chokes out.
“What?”
“Move.” Buck repeats himself, a little louder. A little firmer. “I need to go.”
Maddie shakes her head. “We’re not done here.”
“Yes, we are.” And Buck won’t raise his hands. To any woman, but especially not to his pregnant sister who has already seen too much violence from men. He won’t raise his hands, or push her, or anything else, but he needs to leave so he turns sideways and tries to slide past her anyways.
“No, we’re not!” And as she speaks Maddie’s hand closes around his arm, yanking and trying to force him back.
It’s so unexpected, so out of left field, that Buck doesn’t even have time to think about catching his balance. He stumbles, trips over his own feet and falls back. He twists in midair in the hopes of catching himself, but all he succeeds in doing is making it so that his forehead cracks harshly against the corner of the metal bench in the middle of the room instead of the back of his head, whiting out his vision and sending a bolt of agony through his skull.
The last thing he hears before everything goes dark is his sister.
“Oh shit!”
Chapter Text
Buck finds himself blinking slowly. It takes several tries for the world to come into focus, and even then he can’t shake the slight feeling of being on a rocking boat. The lights surrounding him are soft and dim. He’s sat in a hospital bed, that much is evident. His head pounds in time with his heart and there’s an IV in the back of his hand. The hand that he finds to be resting beneath Eddie’s.
He turns his head to look at his partner, which is a bit of a mistake as it sends a sharp pain from his temple right down his neck, but it lets him see Eddie, sitting at his side in his rumpled work uniform, scrolling on his phone in his free hand. He has a deep frown on his face.
“What time is it?” Buck asks, voice rough and words slurring together. If he thinks about it, he has vague flashes of memory of lying on the locker room floor with Hen hovering over him, riding in the back of an ambulance, and talking with doctors and going through a bunch of tests but it’s all very blurry. He just knows he must have been here for a while.
Eddie startles to attention, head snapping up. His eyes soften and gain a glint of a smile. “Hey, hermoso. How are you feeling?”
“Like someone is drilling a couple ice picks through my head.” He admits. The slur doesn’t go away, and he still feels unsteady despite knowing he’s solidly supported by a bed and not going anywhere. “Concussion?”
“Yeah.” Eddie nods. He releases Buck’s hand and reaches to push the call button on the side of the bed. “Let me get the nurse for you. If you manage to stay awake until she gets here this time, she’ll be able to give you some painkillers.”
It takes Buck a moment, but he eventually realizes what Eddie has said. “How many times have we had this conversation?”
“Just a couple.”
It’s not Buck’s first concussion, and the confusion and memory gaps are unfortunately familiar, but they still leave him unsettled. It’s unnerving to not be able to account for everything that’s happened to him.
“Do you remember what happened?” Eddie asks as they wait for the nurse.
Buck has to think about it, but it comes back to him.
“God, Evan you’re exhausting.”
“We’re not done here.”
“Yes, we are.”
“No we’re not!”
He immediately wishes he couldn’t remember. “Maddie…She was upset with me and I was trying to leave…”
“Mr. Buckley, it’s good to see you awake again.” A soft but cheery voice interrupts. Buck turns his attention slowly to the middle-aged nurse coming into the room. “How are you feeling?”
He tells her about the pain in his head, and then she runs down a list and he confirms his other symptoms (dizziness, light sensitivity, confusion). Afterwards she produces two pills and pours him a cup of water, assuring him that they should help with the headache.
“The doctor doesn’t think we’ll have to admit you for overnight observation as long as your symptoms don’t worsen in the next hour or so, although you will have to stay awake for that hour, just to be sure.” She informs. “Can I get you anything to make you more comfortable?”
Unless she can produce a time machine, Buck is fairly certain that isn’t possible. He just says ‘no thank you.’
“All right. I’ll leave you two be then. Use the call button if you start to feel worse or need anything, otherwise the doctor will come in about an hour to do a final check and go over your discharge instructions.”
They thank her and she leaves just as quickly as she arrived. Buck could easily close his eyes and give in to the need to rest, but since that’s not an option he looks back to Eddie. “What were we talking about?”
“You were telling me what you remembered about what happened.” Eddie prompts patiently.
“Right.” Maddie. “Maddie was upset. And I wanted to leave…and I fell.”
Eddie’s eyes darken a little. “She pulled you down.”
“What? No.” Buck frowns. “I was moving past her…and she grabbed my arm to stop me…and I lost my balance.”
“Because of the way she yanked you back.” Eddie informs. “We all saw it.”
“Maddie…she hurt me?” That doesn’t make sense. Maddie is his sister. She loves him. Why would she hurt him? But then…he knows she wasn’t exactly being caring or loving when they were talking. That’s why he was trying to leave. It doesn’t make any sense.
“I don’t know if it was an accident or not.” Eddie says carefully. Buck’s not sure he can tell if Eddie believes his own words, and he’s not sure that either option would make him feel better anyways. Accident or not, she’d lost control of herself and hurt him. “We couldn’t hear what you guys were talking about.”
“Where is she now? Is she OK?”
“Chimney got her back to their place and called her out from her shift at dispatch. Beyond that, I’ve been here with you, so I don’t know.”
“She hasn’t come here?” Buck doesn’t want to see her, knows he’s too disoriented and in his own head to navigate another conversation with her, but staying away doesn’t seem like something that Maddie would do.
“Steve and I were…pretty firm that until you asked to see her, she needed to stay away.I know she’s your sister and it’s your choice, but even not hearing her I could see she was hurting you with what she was saying.”
“I…don’t want to see her.” Buck admits softly, feeling horrible even as he says it. He should want to see his sister, but he really doesn’t.
Eddie grabs his hand again. “Then you don’t have to. We’ll run interference until you tell us not to.”
“She thinks I’m lying. About Dr. Wells.”
Eddie curses under his breath. Buck thinks he probably wasn’t meant to hear it, since almost immediately after his partner is running his thumb over the back of his hand as much as the IV will allow. “I’m sorry, Ev. You deserve so much better than how people are acting about this.”
Buck’s not sure that’s true. It’s not like he was some great person, or the perfect brother, or anything. He’s fucked up more times than he can count, and most everyone loves to remind him about it, no matter how hard he tries to be better. He’s just always…wrong. “It’s my own fault.”
“No, it’s not. Nothing you’ve done justifies the way people have been treating you. You didn’t deserve what Dr. Wells did, and you don’t deserve to have people doubting you or blaming you.”
It’s not that Buck doesn’t want to believe Eddie. It just…doesn’t match what most everyone else has done. He can’t imagine so many people being wrong. No matter how much he wishes Eddie were right. It doesn’t make sense. But he doesn’t want to fight and make things complicated between them or give Eddie any reasons to think he’s not worth all the trouble he brings. He’s already so much… “I don’t think I can talk about this right now.”
“OK, love.” Thankfully Eddie doesn’t argue with him.
Buck blinks in the ensuing silence. Even knowing what happened he has so many questions, and he’s not sure what’s most important to find out. Mostly he just wants to go home and go to bed and he really doesn’t want to get upset that that’s not an option right now. Even though thinking about it puts a lump in his throat for some reason he doesn’t understand. He just barely remembers that shaking his head to refocus would be a very bad idea in time to stop himself. Instead he looks around the room and realizes that someone is missing. “Where’s Steve?”
“He went to get some food. Something we can stick in the oven and have for a late/lunch early dinner when we get home. He’s gonna meet us back at my place.”
That makes sense. He definitely feels too sick to eat, but everyone else needs to have something. “He didn’t…punch anyone or anything did he?”
“Not for lack of wanting to. But he restrained himself. You’re the only one who ended up with any injuries.”
At the reminder, Buck dislodges his hand and reaches up to probe at his forehead, where he remembers hitting his head. He expects to find a tender lump, but is surprised when his fingers meet what’s clearly a significant bandage. “What…?”
“The bench split your forehead open. They gave you six stitches to close it back up. But you lost a bit of blood in the locker room. That’s why they’ve got you on fluids.”
“Oh.” Buck can’t remember that at all. He lowers his hand, frowning. “Did anything else happen?”
“You had a bit of a panic attack when Hen put the c-collar on you. But between the two of us we talked you through it without any meds.”
Well that’s embarrassing. It’s going to be a nightmare showing his face around the 118 when he’s finally well enough to work again. Hen will be OK, but Bobby will be weird and everyone else will probably have jokes to make. And thinking of everyone else reminds him… “And everyone else is OK?”
“Yeah, they’re all good. Finishing out their shifts.”
There’s something about the look on Eddie’s face, like he’s a little amused at the question that seems off. Then Buck remembers how he got the last time he had a concussion. “I already asked you that, didn’t I?”
Eddie nods. “Yeah. But it’s OK. They said the confusion should only last for 12-24 hours, and it’ll get better with rest.”
Buck hopes that’s true. He hates feeling this stupid. “Has anything else happened?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know…We had the earthquake and then this…don’t bad things come in threes?”
“That’s just a superstition. Everything else is fine.”
“Chris…?”
“Carla picked him up from school about half an hour ago. They’re probably getting to the house now, and settling in for a snack and homework.”
It’s nice, Buck thinks, that Eddie doesn’t seem bothered or irritated by his questions. He knows he’s being annoying. “Abuela? Pepa?”
“I checked in with them too. And Adri. Everyone is fine. I promise.”
“I’m sorry, I just…”
“It’s OK. It’s been a rough day.”
Buck finds tears in his eyes before he can think about stopping them. “It feels like all I ever have are rough days.”
“I know.” Eddie edges his chair closer to the bed and again, grabs onto Buck’s hand. Buck feels himself settle, just a little bit. “But you have me, and Steve, and Carla, and Abuela, and a bunch of other people who want to help and be there for you. And we’re going to get through it. It’ll probably suck for a while longer, but things will get better. We’ll do everything we can to make them better.”
Buck nods, wishing he could find it in him to believe that. He tries to will his emotions away, needing to think about something else before he gets too caught up in his own head again. “What were you looking at before I woke up?”
“Just some ideas for Chris’ Halloween costume. If we need to get anything for it, I’ll want to go this weekend.”
Vaguely, Buck recalls that he was supposed to be doing something for that. He is, after all, the one who isn’t working right now. Or wasting time taking care of a useless partner.
Stupid, lazy, worthless fuck-up.
He tries his best to smile anyways. “That’ll be fun.”
Buck can’t sleep. Not for a lack of wanting to--physically he’s exhausted and the concussion, though mild, has made him groggy enough that he’d decided to just go to bed at the same time Chris had--but despite lying in bed with the room dark and the white noise on and the conditions generally perfect for him to just close his eyes and drift off, sleep won’t come. Part of it is definitely the headache he has. The painkillers from the hospital have long worn off, and he knows he could, and should, take more but right now that task seems astronomically large. He remembers that there are certain medications that you aren’t supposed to take with a concussion, but not what the right one is. And even if he could remember, he doesn’t know where the pills are. The only pill bottle he’s seen lately contains the antibiotics for his burn, and he’s already taken those. He thinks.
So his head hurts--a lot--and he doesn’t know what to do about it and he can’t find a position that’s comfortable. If it doesn’t make his head worse or the vertigo return, it bothers his neck (which hadn’t been injured badly in the fall but is definitely sore and aches when he moves the wrong way) or puts too much pressure on his still healing arm.
His body is a wreck.
And worse than that he can’t stop thinking. About Kaylee losing her legs. About his failure to tell Wells ‘no’ or stop her in any way, and his inability to leave his reputation as a total slut behind him and having that bite him in the ass now. About having to switch his therapy appointment tomorrow to an in-person one because looking at a screen for more than about 30 seconds right now feels about the same as lighting the nerves behind his eyes on fire, and how he has no idea what to expect from that or how he’ll handle it. About everything his parents and his former partners and his friends and now Maddie have said about him.
Stupid, worthless, good-for-nothing, exhausting, fuck-up.
Playing in his head is a greatest hits record of every single thing he’s ever done wrong and every life he’s ever ruined, and everything everyone has told him about all of it. There’s no pause or mute button, no off switch. Just him and his endless list of failures.
And the thing is, he knows it’s not going to get better. That he’s not going to get better. He’s inching closer to thirty and even if he hasn’t always known it, the entire time he’s been broken and wrong and everything that makes other people’s lives harder. No matter what he does or how hard he tries, at the end of the day, he’s always the problem.
It kills him because in spite of it all, he’s somehow gotten Eddie and Chris in his life, and for whatever reason they haven’t noticed yet that he’s no good. It’s only a matter of time before they come to their senses and realize that he’s too much for them to deal with. That he feels too big and always says or does the wrong thing and trouble seems to follow him no matter what he does. They’ll eventually see that, and with that will come the realization that he’ll never be good enough to deserve the kind of love and care that they have to offer.
And then, they’ll leave.
Because that’s what people do.
Buck’s not sure he can survive that this time around. He knows he doesn’t want to.
A part of him feels like he should save himself the pain and leave first. Surely choosing to be alone feels better than being made to be alone by everyone rejecting you. But he doesn’t know where he would go. And he doesn’t know that he’s strong enough to go on if he has to live knowing everything good that he left behind.
There’s a feeling of helplessness that sits heavy across his chest. Like he has no good options. He can stay and keep getting hurt, or he can leave and be miserable, or he can find a way to die and just stop his problems all together, which he’s not supposed to want but it still rings in his head on a constant loop and it’s painful and tempting and he just doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with any of it.
He can’t think clearly at all and his head hurts and he doesn’t really know how long he’s been in bed trying to sleep and thinking about this instead but it feels like it’s been days and he’s exhausted.
Buck sits up and slowly swings his legs over the edge of the bed with the intent of getting up, but the movement makes him dizzy enough that he has to pause and close his eyes. He needs to do something to quiet things down and stop himself from thinking. He can’t sleep with his brain so loud. He can’t do anything like this.
He’s not entirely sure what to do or where to go. He knows he needs to do something but he doesn’t have any idea what that is and the lack of idea is just another reminder of how stupid and useless he is. He can feel tears start to pool behind his closed eyelids.
What is wrong with him? Why is he like this? Why can’t he just be better or disappear or die or anything that lets him stop being everyone else’s problem?
His head pounds as he cries and the thought of moving becomes a mountain he’s not sure he can climb.
“Buck?”
A soft voice cuts through the quiet of the room and it takes him far longer to process than he’d like to admit to realize that it’s Eddie. Which…shit. Eddie shouldn’t have to deal with him like this. Buck should have sorted things out before now.
“What are you doing up?” Eddie asks. Buck doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have a good one anyways. “Is your head bothering you?” Eddie lets a beat pass, giving Buck the space to reply, but he finds that he can’t. Even though it’s a perfectly acceptable reason for him to be awake and struggling, and even though it is part of the problem, the words are just a lump in his throat that he can’t dislodge. “Did you have a nightmare?” Buck shakes his head, even though he’s not sure that Eddie can see him, and even though it just makes his head worse. The mattress sinks down next to him and Eddie’s side nestles against his. “Talk to me, hermoso.”
“I can’t turn off my brain.” Buck finally whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“I want to sleep.” He says, because he needs Eddie to know that he’s trying. “But I can’t get comfortable because everything hurts, and it’s like… all of the reasons I’m hurt right now are because I screwed something up and because I’m exhausting and the only people who don’t see that are you and Steve and I don’t understand why and I’m---I’m terrified that you’re going to come to your senses and I can’t figure out what I need to do to be better or just…make it so it stops hurting and I know I need to do something to make all of this stop so I can get some sleep but I don’t know what that is, and I was trying to get up to figure it out and my stupid broken head made me too dizzy to move and I just…I don’t want to bother you but I don’t know what to do.” By the end of his rambling Buck knows his voice is louder and his tears have turned a bit closer to sobs and it’s pretty much everything he didn’t want to show Eddie. And it definitely is making him feel physically worse. But he doesn’t know how to stop himself either.
“Oh, Ev, you’ve been holding on to that for a while, huh?” Eddie murmurs; he wraps an arm around Buck’s shoulders, squeezing gently, and presses a kiss to his temple. For a moment he just holds him, letting Buck cry. Buck can’t understand why he’s being so nice. “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna sit right here, and I want you to try and just close your eyes and focus on your breathing, so you can slow that down and let go of some of the tension you’re holding. And while you’re doing that, I’m gonna go get you some water and some of your painkillers. I’m not leaving you. I just want to get a few things that will help make you a little more comfortable. I’ll be back in two minutes, and when I get back we can talk about everything you just told me, OK?”
Buck sniffles and nods and tries not to feel ridiculously alone when Eddie squeezes his shoulder once more and stands up. Eddie said he’s coming back and he believes him. He does. And since now he’s just dumped all of his crap onto Eddie’s lap in spite of himself, the least he can do is try and do what Eddie tells him to do and make things easier for him.
He wipes at his face awkwardly with one hand, trying to clear away the tears and the snot, but with just a hand he’s pretty sure all he really succeeds in doing is smearing everything into a further mess. So he’ll be super attractive when Eddie gets back, just to make everything worse. Not to mention it pokes at the bruising that’s blossomed across the top of his eye where he had hit his head, although that pain is fairly minimal compared to the headache he’s facing so he doesn’t notice it all that much.
Afterwards, he sniffs again and closes his eyes, because that’s what Eddie told him to do, and tries to breathe with a little more control. He knows there are techniques, ways to count and pause your inhales and exhales that do something to trick your body into relaxing and that he’s probably even looked them up before but he can’t pull the details up from memory, so he tries to narrow all his focus, limited though it may be, to the acts of inhaling and exhaling. It’s a challenge, because nearly every instinct he has is telling him that he just fucked things up by telling Eddie anything and making himself more complicated to deal with, but he tries, because this is what Eddie told him to do, and if Eddie is really going to stick by him and try to help in spite of all the reasons not to, then the least that Buck can do is be good and do what he says.
He bounces his knee to try and channel the anxiety that’s now running beneath his skin, and breathes as deliberately as he can manage. In and out. In and out.
“Buck, baby, I’m back.” Eddie announces softly, cutting through Buck’s flimsy focus. It takes most of Buck’s restraint to not snap his head in the direction of the door to look at him. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” That, at least, feels like an honest answer. “Breathing?”
“Breathing’s good. We like breathing.” Instead of sitting next to him again, Eddie steps in front of him and Buck hears him place some things on the bedside table, and the soft click of a lamp. “I’ve got the light as dim as it will go, so it should be OK for you to open your eyes now.” Buck does, and is relieved that the additional light doesn’t make his pain any worse. Eddie sits on the bed now, on the opposite side that he was before. “OK, I’ve got some of your painkillers and some water for you.” Eddie presses the pills into Buck’s good hand, and waits for him to palm them into his mouth before handing over a glass of water. Buck swallows them down dutifully.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Take a few extra sips of water, OK? The last thing you need is to get dehydrated and make your headache worse.”
Buck does this as well, staring ahead at the blank space on Eddie’s wall so he doesn’t have to look at his face and worry about what he’s thinking.
“Can I…?” Eddie holds up a wet washcloth, and Buck isn’t really sure what he wants to do with it, but he doesn’t really have a reason to stop trusting his partner now.
“Yeah.”
Eddie reaches over and in very soft, smooth motions, brushes the cool damp cloth across Buck’s face, wiping away the mess from his tears. It’s soothing in a way Buck can’t quite understand. He does the act in silence over the course of several moments, though he eventually turns and tosses the cloth back over to the nightstand. “Do you think it’ll be better to lay down or do you want to keep sitting up?”
Buck’s not proud of the way his breath catches because he doesn’t know the answer. Doing what Eddie had been telling him to do was easy, and it was working. He doesn’t want to choose something for himself and get worse again. “This is stupid, but…can you just tell me what to do?” He doesn’t dare look at Eddie after voicing his request, too afraid to find him laughing at how ridiculous he’s being; grown men--hell, even most children--don’t need every single thing broken down for them.
But Eddie doesn’t laugh. “Let’s go half and half, yeah?” He leans back a little, twisting his body so he can grab at the pillows and start arranging them differently. “OK, come back onto the bed, and you can rest against these.”
Buck lets Eddie guide him and he ends up reclined in the bed, propped up by the pillows much in the way he had been in the hospital bed.
“I also brought the weighted ice pack Chris uses when he gets migraines sometimes.” Eddie informs, grabbing what looks a bit like an eye mask from the nightstand. “Would it be uncomfortable to talk if you can’t see me?”
This, at least, Buck can answer. “Yeah, probably."
“OK. We'll save that for after the talk then." He drops it back down. "Let me just…” Eddie scoots off the edge of the bed and walks around to the other side, finding a place to sit where his hip brushes against Buck’s and they can face each other. Then his fingers are weaving with his. “So, you said a lot of things just now, and I want to try and understand a bit better what you’re thinking and why. Are you OK if I ask a couple of questions?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you mean when you said all the reasons you’re hurt right now are because you screwed something up?”
Of course he can’t start with anything easy. Not that Buck really thinks any of this will be easy at this point, but…this just seems like he’ll be giving Eddie a list of all the reasons he could do so much better than him. But he said they could talk, and Buck doesn’t want to go back on what he said. So he answers. “Well, my hand is all burnt because I got upset and panicked and did it to myself. I had other options but…I took the easy way out. And I fell and got a concussion because I couldn’t just suck things up and talk to Maddie. If I had stayed and listened to her she wouldn’t have gotten upset and--,”
“And I’m gonna stop you for a second.” Eddie rubs his thumb across the back of his hand. “Can I tell you how I think both of those things happened?”
Buck frowns, and his brow furrows, pulling at his stitches and bruises. “You don’t agree with me?”
“I don’t.” Eddie says. “Yes, you’re the one who burnt your hand. But I don’t think it was you taking the easy way out. From what you said when you were telling me about doing it, it’s just…the way you taught yourself to manage everything when it got to be too much. It’s a coping mechanism. Not a healthy one and I wish it was one you didn’t have because of how much pain you’re in, but you learned when you were a kid that in its own weird way it helped you, and you can’t just unlearn that and stop doing it. It’s gonna take time and work and finding new things that help you.”
Buck still thinks that makes it his fault that his hand is burnt and aching, but it’s not a point he really wants to argue right now.
“As for why you…fell…” And Buck would frown again if his expression had ever shifted in the first place at the tension that flows off the word as it leaves Eddie’s mouth. “No. I’m not calling it that. I told you at the hospital, and I’ll tell you again, that I saw what happened, and what happened was Maddie pulled you back with so much force that you couldn’t possibly have held yourself up.”
“But she only did it because I--,”
“Buck.” Eddie cuts him off firmly. “Evan.” His voice goes a touch softer. “You were upset and were trying to remove yourself from the situation. You didn’t push her or touch her in any way. You didn’t raise a hand to her. I doubt you even raised your voice to her. Nothing that you did justifies her using force to keep you from leaving.”
A part of him thinks that Eddie might be right. He hadn’t been trying to do anything to Maddie; he had just wanted to leave. He’s not entirely sure why his trying to leave earned such a response from her. But at the same time, he knows Maddie. He knows that at her heart, she’s a carer. That she loves just as deeply as he does, and that usually her touch is gentle and full of love. For her to have…hurt him…he had to have done something wrong. “I hear what you’re saying, I do, but…she’s my sister.”
“That doesn’t give her a free pass.”
He’s still not quite sure he believes it, but he doesn’t like talking about Maddie like this either, so he decides it’s better to move on. “What about my arm?”
Eddie blinks. “What about it?”
Buck looks away. Eddie can’t actually expect him to say it. He has to already know. Everybody else had.
But after a moment’s pause when Eddie speaks again, it’s not accusatory or with any judgment. “Buck, honey, your arm got hurt at the shooting. That happened because there was an asshole with no impulse control and a grudge against the department. You can’t think that’s your fault.”
“I was only there--we were only there--because I had to make that stupid report. If I had just let it go like I did the first time, or been strong enough to stop her, we wouldn’t have been there. You wouldn’t have gotten shot if I wasn’t so weak.”
Eddie sighs, and Buck closes his eyes, feeling tears spill down his cheeks. This is it. This is where Eddie realizes the truth.
“Evan, love, will you look at me? Please?” It takes Buck a moment to work up the courage, but he complies. When he does Eddie leans forward and thumbs gently at the tears. “You are not weak for what she did to you. And reporting her was the right thing to do. The strongest thing you could have done. There is nowhere I wanted to be at that moment other than by your side. We were at the wrong place at the wrong time, and yes, we both got hurt because of it, but that is not your fault. And good things happened because we were there too. We were two of the only people there who had the skills and experience to get the victims back inside and start treating them. People lived because we were there. And the police knew exactly where to find the sniper because of you. That saved lives too. Getting shot wasn’t fun, but it’s not your fault, and I don’t regret being there. Neither should you.”
It’s not that what Eddie is saying doesn’t make sense. Well, not all of it anyways. Buck does believe that Eddie means it when he says he wanted to be at headquarters that day, and doesn’t regret it. And they did get a lot of people to safety before the police and other first responders could arrive. Good did come out of being there.
And Buck wants the rest of it to be true, too. He’s just not sure that it is.
A few long moments pass before Eddie speaks again. “What do you mean when you say you’re exhausting?”
“I don’t know.” Buck shrugs, looking down at his lap. “It’s just… It’s what people tell me. I’m exhausting. I expect too much, and I’m too loud, and I never take the hint and shut up, and I go where I’m not wanted, and I try too hard to get attention and I create problems…I make things harder for everyone. I’m too much to deal with most of the time.”
“Yeah, but who tells you that?”
“Who doesn’t? Parents, teachers, partners, coworkers, friends…Maddie.”
Buck’s fairly sure that Eddie doesn’t even try to hide his scowl. “She said it this morning, didn’t she?”
Buck scratches absentmindedly at his knee. “She said…” He stops to correct himself. He knows Eddie will if he doesn’t. “She thinks that the whole Dr. Wells thing is just something that I’m doing to get attention. And that I’m avoiding her and doing what she thinks will fix things because I’m selfish and not willing to face the consequences of my actions.”
“Fuck that.”
In spite of his head, Buck snaps his gaze up to meet Eddie’s at his harsh tone. “Eddie,--”
“No. Fuck that. She is so…unbelievably wrong that it would be laughable if I didn’t know how much it hurt you to hear her say that. I don’t…” Eddie stops, shaking his head, and softens his tone. “I don’t understand how anyone can spend any amount of time with you and think that you’re selfish or that you try to do anything but make other people’s lives easier. They have to be willfully blind to what’s in front of them, because the Evan I know is so far from selfish…Christ, I think you’d light yourself on fire before you’d take something that you knew someone else wanted, let alone needed.”
“Maybe you just haven’t been around me long enough.”
“I know you think that because, for whatever reason, a lot of the people you’ve dealt with throughout your life don’t seem to treat you with any amount of empathy, but I am so beyond confident that that’s not true, Buck.” Eddie reaches forward and grabs his hand, pulling it away from his knee where he’s been scratching. “And I know that you can’t just stop thinking that way when that’s what you’ve been surrounded by, but I really hope that--I want you to just…try and take it in when someone says something good about you too and give us a chance to change your mind.”
Well…it’s pretty much impossible not to cry at that. He’s not sure if it’s hearing that maybe the people he’s put so much stock in aren’t really worth all that much, or being told that he’s more than the box people have shoved him in, or just being physically and emotionally exhausted and pushed to the brink, or maybe some combination thereof, but whatever it is, it hits him and it hits him hard. Right in the chest. He nods, trying, but mostly failing, to contain himself. “I’ll try.”
If people--no, forget people. If Eddie is going to keep telling him that he’s not completely awful to deal with, and that there’s something good and worthwhile about him, the least Buck can do is try to believe it.
Buck wakes up alone, carefully ensconced in blankets and propped on pillows the way Eddie does when he has to get up to take care of Chris or go to work but wants Buck to sleep in. His head hurts, and it takes him a moment to remember why, which, quite frankly, sucks and hurts more, but he doesn’t immediately feel seasick the way that he did yesterday so he counts that as a win. After a tentative moment of lying there and making sure nothing changes, and trying to stretch his hearing past the bedroom door to try and figure out if Eddie and Chris are even still there, he decides he can’t hear much of anything and can’t tell what time it is and he’ll have to just get up. He slowly untucks the blankets, sits up, and when the world still doesn’t turn on its axis (though the throbbing in his head increases a fair amount) he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, planting his feet on the floor.
He heads to the bathroom and deals with his morning necessities. From down the hall in the kitchen he can just about hear Eddie and Chris shuffling around and talking, so it can’t be too late in the morning. When he eventually makes it to the kitchen, he finds Chris seated at the table with a bowl of cereal, and Eddie sliding a bagel into the toaster.
“Morning.” He greets, voice a little rough from sleep. He thinks for a moment about going to the fridge and getting something to drink, but if he’s being honest the walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, and then from the bathroom to the kitchen, felt a little long and took him back to feeling a touch unsteady on his feet, so he sits down at the table instead.
“Morning.”
“Hey Buck.” Christopher smiles at him, dropping his spoon into his bowl with a slight clang. “Is your head feeling any better?”
“Hey Superman. No, it’ll probably be another day or two before it starts feeling much better. But the good thing is I was already off work, so I get to take it easy and rest and that will help me get better quicker.”
Eddie turns to the table while pouring a glass of juice. “As will staying hydrated.” He places the glass in front of Buck, bending over and pressing a kiss to the crown of his head.
“No coffee?” He asks with a slight pout. He knows he’ll be spending most of the day doing next to nothing and resting, but he’d like to at least feel like he got to start his day fully awake before becoming a lump on the couch, and for that he needs his usual coffee.
“The doctor said no caffeine for the first three days.” Eddie shakes his head. “And I’ve already passed that info onto Steve so you won’t get any from him either.”
“Buzzkill. Literally.”
“I love you too.”
Christopher laughs, going back to his breakfast.
“Do you need any painkillers?” Eddie asks.
Buck is about to say no, that his head does hurt but it’s not quite as bad as last night, but then the toaster pops up and the noise sends a spike of pain through his head and he decides that it’s better to get ahead of the day. “Probably a good idea.”
Eddie nods and when he doesn’t make a move to leave the room, Buck realizes that probably means he’s hidden whatever medication needs to stay in the house somewhere in the kitchen. The realization sits a little uncomfortably in his stomach, because now he’s one step closer to being able to do something stupid, but he quickly reminds himself that he doesn’t want to do that, and turns all of his focus to Christopher.
“So Chris, what’s happening at school today?”
“Mr. Reilly said that on Thursdays his class goes to the computer lab.” Chris answers around a mouthful of cereal. Eddie reminds him to chew and swallow before speaking without turning around. “They’re working on typing. I was doing that in my old class, but he says they have a game that teaches you how to type and not just copying sentences like Mrs. Baker was having us do.”
“That sounds pretty cool.” Buck has some hazy memories of Chris regaling them with stories of his new teacher yesterday, but at that point he was drifting in and out of a nap. He’s glad it sounds like Chris is settling in well and likes his new classroom and teacher. “You’ll have to tell me more about it after school.”
Eddie rounds back around, holding out a couple of painkillers for Buck to take. “Carla is picking him up and bringing him to PT after school.” He reminds them (mostly Buck). “But he can update you at dinner. And me at breakfast tomorrow.”
Chris turns in his seat to look at his dad. “You won’t be home tonight?”
“Not until after you go to bed. I’ve got a longer shift today. But Buck and Steve will be here when Carla brings you home.” Eddie, spreading cream cheese on the toasted bagel, glances at Buck. “Do you want a bagel or anything for breakfast?”
“I’ll make some toast in a little bit.”
“You should make him Abuelita’s magic toast!” Chris exclaims, a touch too loud for this early in the morning, probably even for those not dealing with a concussion.
Buck tries to hide his wince. “What’s magic toast?”
“Abuelita always makes it when someone doesn’t feel well.” Chris says. “ It's really good, and it’s one of the only things she trusted dad enough to teach him how to make.”
“It’s toast with peanut butter, honey, and cinnamon sugar.” Eddie explains. “And yes, if Buck wants some I will make some magic toast.”
“And a--,”
“And a slice for you, yes mijo.” Eddie cuts him off with a fond smile. “What do you say, Buck? Magic toast?”
It’s another Diaz tradition that they’re letting him in on, and Buck is almost certain he’s never going to say no to that. “Sounds great. Thanks Eds.”
“De nada.” If Eddie is going to say anything else as he turns back to the kitchen counter and reaches for the breadbox, he’s interrupted by the ring of the doorbell. “Do you mind getting that?”
“Sure.” Buck agrees, pushing away from the table and standing. “It’s probably Steve.” He heads out of the room, and down the hall to the door, peeking out the side window to make sure he’s correct in his guess, and he’s a little surprised to find that he’s not. Instead of Steve standing on the doorstep, it’s a delivery-person, holding what looks to be some kind of gift basket. He knows Eddie’s not expecting anything--at least, he’s pretty sure he’s not--, but he opens the door anyways figuring he’ll have to let them know they have the wrong address.
“Good morning!” The young woman chirps. Between the sharp enthusiasm in her voice and the additional light of the morning sun…it’s a lot for Buck’s head to process and deal with. “I have a delivery here for Evan Buckley?”
Oh. Huh. That’s weird. He guesses maybe someone who knows he got hurt yesterday might have sent some kind of ‘get well’ thing but he can’t really think of anyone who would do that. It’s not really the 118’s style. They’re much more likely to just show up and start cooking or otherwise taking care of someone.
“That’s, uh…that’s me.”
“Great! Here you are!” She holds the basket, the fairly large and filled to the brim basket, out for him. It takes him a moment to get a good hold on it using only his good arm (he hasn’t had the opportunity to ask Eddie to help him get his sling on yet, but using the limb for anything more strenuous than lifting a fork or brushing his teeth is still a no-go) but he manages, flashing the the woman a smile that he’s positive is more of a twisted grimace. “Have a wonderful day!”
“Uh, yeah. You too.”
Buck juggles the basket to close the door, and then brings it back to the kitchen, not entirely sure what he’s dealing with. He doesn’t really dare try to survey the contents of the basket while he walks, since that seems like a recipe for dizziness and/or tripping and hurting himself yet again, but it’s heavy. And he’s pretty sure he smells something burning. But that might just be crumbs in the bottom of the toaster that Eddie forgot to dump out.
“Woah! What’s that?” Chris asks as he makes it into the kitchen.
Buck lowers the basket to the table. Now he can see that it’s filled with various pastries and english muffins, as well as a few jars of different types of jams and spreads to put on them. And what appears to be three pounds of bacon. Through the cellophane holding it all together, he can see a card resting on top. “I’m not sure, bud.” He starts to undo the ribbon bow so he can get to the card and see who the gift is from. “It just got dropped off.”
“Did they say who it was for?” Eddie eyes the package with a fair level of suspicion. Buck figures he’s also running down the list of who would send them anything like this and coming up empty on ideas.
“Me.” The ribbon falls loose and Buck reaches into the basket, pulling out the card. It’s typed, not handwritten, so that provides no clues. He starts to read.
Buck,
After all of the chaos yesterday, I wanted to treat you to breakfast. Things got really emotional and out of control when we were talking, and I know when you get upset it’s hard for you to focus on what people are really saying, so maybe you weren’t hearing things the way I intended them, and now everything is being blown out of proportion by everyone.
You know I’d never intentionally hurt you. I just wanted you to listen, and you were moving so fast that when I tried to catch you, your momentum sent you to the ground.
You’re my little brother. It’s been us against the world for years, and I think part of the reason I’ve been so worried about you is that some of the people you’ve let into your life don’t have your best interests at heart. They don’t know you the way I do, and they don’t understand the kind of care and guidance that you need. I was only trying to help you get back to being the brother I know and love.
You get confused so easily sometimes, and I think that’s what happened yesterday. You feel a lot, but you don’t always know what it is you’re feeling, and that’s why you were fighting me so hard. You need to get your head on straight and give me another chance to talk this whole situation through with you.
You know I love you and only want what’s best for you. I’ve always helped you get out of your messes. Let me help you now.
Your sister,
Maddie
“It’s from Maddie.” He says softly. He doesn’t understand it though. Not really. It sort of feels like an apology, and breakfast has often been Maddie’s go to way of fixing things when they aren’t getting along the best, but at the same time…there’s something not right about it. For every line he read, his stomach seemed to twist and churn a little more, and he feels pretty sick now.
Eddie crosses the kitchen. “Can I…?” He asks, gesturing towards the card.
“Yeah.” Buck notices, a little outside of his own body, that his hand is shaking when Eddie takes the card out of it.
He doesn’t know what to think. A lot of what Maddie had written is true, or at least it had been before, but some of it just doesn’t make any sense. He knows that when he feels things, he tends to feel them a lot but he doesn’t think it’s ever gotten in the way of him understanding something. And he loves Maddie, he does, but both Steve and Eddie told him what they saw happen in the locker room that led to him getting hurt and he would (and does) trust them with his life. He knows without question that they wouldn’t lie to him or do things that would hurt him or put him at risk, but their version of events and Maddie’s version don’t really seem to match all that much. And she seems so sure that they aren’t good for him…
He doesn’t understand what he’s missing. Either Maddie is right and he’s been fundamentally wrong about just about everything and fucking things up potentially for years or…
Or…
Or…she’s lying to him. Or maybe not lying but…she’s trying to convince him to do things the way she wants, and not in a nice, measured, carefully thought out presentation of points and facts kind of way but in a…Doug kind of way.
This is the way Doug used to talk. Not that Buck heard him all that often because even from the beginning the man had done his very level best to pull Maddie away from everyone, but Buck had heard him. And he’d had a way of spinning sugary sweet words around a knife that he’d plunge straight into her heart. It’s one of the many ways he had broken her down.
And now--maybe, hopefully, he’s wrong but--it seems like Maddie’s doing it to him.
The churning in Buck’s stomach rises violently and he just barely makes it past Eddie to the sink before vomiting.
Chapter Text
“Chris, mijo, why don’t you go to the living room and watch TV for a few minutes?”
“Is Buck OK?”
“He will be, he just doesn’t feel well right now, and I need to take care of him.”
“What about school?”
“You might be a couple minutes late today, OK? Just go watch TV and I’ll come get you when I’ve got things sorted.”
Buck stays bent over the kitchen sink, although his stomach has ceased its heaving. The aftermath of throwing up is wreaking just as much havoc on him. His head is back to a hammering bolt of pain that works in time with his pulse, which is racing. He thinks if his hands weren’t gripping the counter tightly to help keep himself upright, they would probably be shaking. He’s honestly not sure that he’ll be able to move without falling; between his general shakiness, the throbbing pain, and the way the room is spinning, he’s feeling incredibly unsteady. He’s also not entirely sure that he won’t throw up again.
He can’t believe he just compared Maddie to Doug. Even just in thought. The very idea is just…inconceivable.
A soft hand lands on his back between his shoulder blades. “Do you feel OK to move?” Eddie asks in a hushed tone. “Just to sit back at the table.”
“I might need some help.” He admits in a whisper, closing his eyes. God, this is embarrassing.
“OK, I’ve got you.” The hand shifts from his back to one elbow, and a second hand grabs the other. Eddie holds him steady and gets him the short distance from the sink to the table, getting him seated in the chair that Chris had been occupying earlier.
Buck leans forward, resting his elbows on the table and cradling his head in his hands. He can hear Eddie moving behind him, but he’s not sure what he’s doing until a bottle of blue pedialyte (the only flavor Chris will accept when he’s sick) is placed on the table in front of him. A moment later Eddie is pulling out a chair and sitting down next to him.
“How bad is the headache now? One to ten?”
Buck has always hated grading his pain, never sure if his five is the same as other people’s fives and all of that, but he trusts Eddie to know what he needs based on his answer. “Seven. Maybe eight. Probably eight.” He amends after a particularly brutal spike of pain nearly takes his breath away.
“Do you think you’re gonna throw up again?”
“I’m dizzy, but I think my stomach is starting to settle…?” It’s more of a question than a statement. “As long as I don’t move again just yet.”
“Great, can you lift your head and look at me?”
Didn’t he just say he didn’t want to move? “Do I have to?”
“I need to check your pupils. Your concussion might be worse than the doctors thought.”
It’s a perfectly reasonable request, and he doesn’t want Eddie to worry, so Buck steels himself and complies. Thankfully, nothing gets worse. “It might not be my head.” He offers, while Eddie runs him through the most basic neurological test they do, having him follow his finger as he moves it. “I was--am--reacting to Maddie’s note. I think.”
Eddie hums noncommittally. “Maybe. But I can tell you’re feeling really unsteady and you weren’t that bad a few minutes ago, so humor me.” He runs him through a few more questions about symptoms and tests his memory and comprehension, eventually declaring that Buck is still about where he was the night before on that front, so he’s probably OK, but he needs to tell them immediately if he starts to feel worse. He then tells Buck to start drinking the pedialyte.
Buck complies, hoping the berry flavor will help get the sour taste out of his mouth until he feels well enough to go and brush his teeth again.
After another few moments, Eddie speaks again. “So, there’s some things in that note that are…concerning.”
It’s a bit of a relief to hear that Eddie thinks that. To know that Buck isn’t just imagining things or making mountains out of molehills. He still feels terrible, because he shouldn’t be thinking of Maddie like this. Not after what she’s been through and everything she’s done for him. She’s his sister, and you don’t just accuse your sister of… He can’t even bring himself to think it again. But even so, there’s something about the way she’s been acting and the things that she’s said…
He can’t make it make sense.
“I’d like to call Athena. See if she can come over and take a look at it.”
That Buck disagrees with. “I don’t…I don’t want Maddie to get in trouble.”
“I’m not talking about pressing charges or anything. I just think it might be a good idea to get a more neutral party to take a look at the situation and…give us a few options about how we can handle it.”
Buck still hesitates. Involving Athena, even as just a friend, feels too much like he’s accusing Maddie of something and he’s not. He’s uncomfortable and he’s making connections to things, but that doesn’t mean that’s what Maddie’s actually doing. He could be wrong. Or maybe she’s not doing it on purpose and she just doesn’t realize how she’s acting, or--or maybe she’s right and he is getting things confused. Not about the stuff with Dr. Wells and everything else that happened before yesterday but about their fight and the note… He has a concussion. He’s not thinking totally clearly.
“Ev, right now, the way Maddie is talking and acting is actively hurting you. Maybe she doesn’t mean to, but she is. And I’m worried that if we ignore it and do nothing, it will only get worse. For both you and her. Athena might have some ideas about how we can talk to her and resolve this in a way that keeps you safe, and maybe gives Maddie some options too.”
He can’t exactly argue with that. It’s not an unreasonable request, and Eddie is right. The things Maddie has been saying lately have hurt. A lot. “OK.” He agrees after another moment. “We can see what Athena thinks.”
Eddie thanks him and pulls out his phone, quickly finding the right contact. Instead of putting the phone to his ear, he lays it down on the table, switching it over to speaker mode as it rings, which Buck appreciates, even though it’s not really necessary.
“Good morning, Eddie.” She answers after a couple of rings.
“Morning, Athena. You’re on speaker with me and Buck.” Eddie replies. “We’re sorry to bother you so early, but we have a favor to ask.”
“It’s no bother. You boys know I’m an early riser.” She pauses briefly. “Good morning Buck.”
“Morning, ‘Thena.”
“Now, what can I do for you two this morning?”
“Did Bobby tell you about what happened at the station yesterday?” Eddie asks. “Between Buck and Maddie?”
“Just that there had been an accident and Buck had ended up with a concussion. How is your head, Buckaroo?”
Buck’s not entirely sure why, but everything goes tense when what happened gets described as an accident. It’s another thing that doesn’t make sense, since he wants it to have been an accident, and they really can’t prove that it wasn’t, but things feel off when the word is used anyways. “It’s been better.” He admits.
“I’ll bet.”
“It wasn’t an accident so much as an argument.” Eddie clarifies. “Buck was trying to leave when Maddie grabbed him and he ended up on the ground and hitting his head.”
“I see.”
Buck can hear the way Athena’s mood shifts. How the conversation is no longer a friendly, caring check-in and more of a tense and serious thing.
“It was a culmination of a few different discussions and message threads that have been going on between her and Buck; she hasn’t been particularly…supportive about everything that’s going on, and based on what Buck has explained to me, things came to a head yesterday, and he’s decided that he needs some space from her right now.”
“Sounds like a reasonable decision.”
“We thought so too. But this morning she sent what I guess is supposed to be an apology gift. But it’s less of an apology and more like…a lot of red flags. We’d really like it if you could take a look at it and help us figure out the best way to handle it.”
“Of course I can do that.” Athena agrees. “I don’t have a shift today, but May and I are going to do a little shopping after school, so I could come over some time this morning if that would work for you?”
Eddie glances over at Buck and Buck gives a careful nod. His therapy appointment isn’t until the afternoon, and he can’t imagine going out and doing things before then. To be honest, he’s hoping he’ll get to lay down again soon. “Yeah, that would be fine. Someone will be here with Buck all morning, so he can give you the rundown of what’s been going on.”
“I’ll plan on about 9:30.” She informs. “Now before I let you go, when you say red flags…Do you think anyone is in danger here?”
Buck can tell immediately that Eddie is hedging his answer. “Not physically.”
“All right. I’ll save the rest of my questions ‘til later then. You two take care and I’ll see you at 9:30.”
“Thanks Athena.”
Eddie disconnects the call and reaches over to Buck’s hand. “I know you love Maddie and that these aren’t easy conversations to have, but I do think they’re important, and I’m really proud that you’re willing to have them.”
“I just…I don’t want her to get in trouble.” He repeats his sentiment from earlier, unsure what else to say. He’s not sure this is something to be proud of. Not when it feels like he’s betraying a family member.
“That’s not what this is about. It’s about making sure she respects your boundaries.”
“OK.” Buck agrees. There’s not much else he can do. He doesn’t want to see Maddie right now, as sick as that makes him feel, and thinks Eddie is right and that even if he did want to see her, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. But none of that makes him feel any better. In the following quiet, Christopher’s laughter carries into the kitchen from the living room. “Shouldn’t you be bringing Chris to school right now?”
“I’m gonna let him be late today.” Eddie shrugs. “I don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone right now, not with your head acting up, so I’ll wait for Steve to get here. And…”
Buck waits for Eddie to keep talking, but the rest of his sentence doesn’t come. “And?” He asks.
“And I could call out from my shift.” Eddie offers. “If you want. Come back after dropping Chris off and be here for talking with Athena and your therapy appointment later.”
It’s tempting. So, so tempting. Eddie always seems to know what to say and what Buck needs--much better than Buck has been managing anyways. And it’s nice and soothing to have someone to physically lean on and hold hands with and otherwise be there. (It’s not that Buck doesn’t love and trust Steve, but their relationship is different than what he has with Eddie. They aren’t casually, physically close in a way that Buck can draw comfort and support from). But Buck is already taking so much from Eddie and disrupting his life. He already missed most of his shift yesterday to be there for Buck, and Buck can’t really justify asking him to skip out on another day, not when he already has someone that can help him with anything he needs.
“As much as I’d like that, you should go to work.”
“Are you sure?”
“Steve will be here. He knows what to look for with a concussion and he’ll be just as much of a guard dog for me as you’d be.”
Eddie still looks reluctant to agree, which has Buck on the edge of taking it all back. But he knows he shouldn’t. Realistically speaking, even though today is going to be hard, there are going to be harder ones coming up.
“Steve is going to have to go home eventually. And if the stuff with Dr. Wells really goes to trial and I have to testify…I’m gonna want you there with me then more than I need you right now. So we should save your PTO for when it’s really important.”
“You’re always gonna be important.”
“You know what I mean, Eds.”
“Yeah. I do. And you’re right. Going to work is the…responsible thing to do.” Eddie sighs. “All right. I’m gonna call Chris’ school to tell them we’ll be late. Do you need anything?”
Buck can’t think of anything that would actually help make anything better at this point. Besides maybe a functioning magic wand. But that’s not something he can say. He’s considering asking for more painkillers since he’d thrown up before the last ones he had taken could work, but the doorbell rings for the second time that morning before he can make the request.
Eddie stands. “I’ll go get the door. Hopefully it’s actually Steve this time.”
“OK.” Athena exhales heavily, dropping Maddie’s note onto the coffee table. She leans back in her chair. They’re sitting in the living room--her, Buck, and Steve--and have been going over all of the goings-on with Maddie. “Based on what you’ve told me and what I’ve just read, I think you’re right to put some distance between you and Maddie for now. She’s not respecting your boundaries and she may not have meant to hurt you yesterday, but the fact that she did and is not taking responsibility for that is…concerning.”
Buck bites at the inside of his lip, taking in Athena’s words. They aren’t exactly unexpected. It’s what both Steve and Eddie have said, and what he has been thinking. But it still hurts to be thinking of Maddie in such a way, and he can’t help but feel incredibly guilty. It feels like, as his older sister, she should have the benefit of the doubt, or a bit more leeway, or something. She knows him in ways that no one else does. Isn’t it her place to try and guide him? And yeah, he doesn’t feel good about the way that she doesn’t believe him, and the way she’s been talking to him, and how her apology wasn’t much of an apology at all, but does that really give him the right to doubt her intentions and judge her? To bring in other people and have them judge her? Shouldn’t he just be letting this go?
“I’d like to go and talk to her.” Athena continues. Buck opens his mouth to protest, but she continues to talk before he can say anything. “As a concerned friend, not as a police officer. Do you know…did she talk to anyone about everything that happened with Doug?”
“Uh…I’m not sure.” Buck frowns. “She never mentioned anything to me, but she doesn’t always tell me what’s going on with her when it’s not good news. Even when she moved to LA to get away from Doug I had to convince her to tell me anything, and she wouldn’t really let me help. Does that matter?”
Athena purses her lips and tilts her head. “I’m not a mental health expert. But from what I know about her situation, it was traumatic. Even if you take out the long term relationship, she was kidnapped and forced to kill her kidnapper. That’s not something you leave without a few mental scars.”
“But someone experiencing trauma doesn’t mean that they’ll go on to hurt someone else.” Steve says. “The things she’s been saying to Buck and the way she’s been treating him, that’s not someone lashing out because they’re hurt; that’s someone speaking like an abuser.”
“Maddie’s not an abuser.” Buck protests quickly.
“No one is saying that she is.” Athena counters, ever the face of calm. “But Commander McGarrett is correct in saying that the words she is using are very similar to ones that victims of domestic violence have reported to me. How long was she with Doug?”
“I don’t remember exactly when they started dating but it was sometime before she finished undergrad…” Buck does the mental math, even though it does his headache no favors. “By the time she came to LA it had been about fifteen years.”
“That is a long time to be with someone who is hurting you. Even if he wasn’t violent with her the entire time, he was likely being emotionally abusive, isolating her and gaslighting her. It’s a way that abusers gain control over their victims, and they do it in such a way that it can convince the victim that it’s all coming from a place of love.”
“What does that have to do with how she’s acting now?”
“Again, I’m not an expert in mental health or trauma,” Athena cautions, “but I can tell you what I’ve witnessed in similar cases in the past. Maddie could have internalized a lot of the behaviors and words that Doug exposed her to. Not just in the way that he treated her, but in how he talked about her friends, your parents, even you. It’s possible that if she hasn’t been addressing her trauma, or mental health in general, that she hasn’t fully accepted that the majority of Doug’s demeanor was unacceptable, and without realizing it, she’s taking on some of his behaviors.”
Steve nods, seemingly in agreement. “Add in the influence of your parents and the additional rush of feelings and hormones from pregnancy…”
Buck feels something akin to relief as he processes what’s being said. Maybe this isn’t really Maddie. Or at least it’s not her fault. “So she needs help.”
“Potentially.” Athena acknowledges. “But that doesn’t excuse how she’s treating you right now. If her behavior is stemming from her time with Doug and other stressors, that doesn’t mean it’s OK.”
Buck frowns. “She can’t help having trauma.”
Steve leans forward, and rests a hand on Buck’s knee to grab his attention. “No, but she is an adult. Which means how she handles that trauma is her responsibility. Not addressing it, not talking about it with anyone and unpacking how it affected her is a choice, one that she’s allowed to make, but if she then does something that hurts someone else, she’s still responsible for doing that.”
“I should be talking to her then.” In his head, it makes sense. He’s aware that when they’re talking about Maddie needing help, they’re talking about therapy. And yeah, OK, he’s still at the very beginning of his own therapy journey, so he can’t really speak to how it works. But he knows that it does work for some people. And he knows that he hadn’t really wanted to seek outside help for his own problems, having been relatively convinced that therapy and all the things that go along with it just weren’t for him based on how things had gone for him when he had tried it. Even knowing he was in a bad, low place hadn’t convinced him to seriously consider going to therapy. Not until Steve and Eddie had gotten him to see that his past experiences were the outliers, not the norm. And he’s not sure that he would have listened to anyone besides them, because he was absolutely certain of their care for him. As Maddie’s brother, he could do that for her. He should do that for her.
But he can tell from the hesitant look on Athena’s face, that this idea does not make sense to her. “I think you should leave those discussions for other people to have with her.” She says.
And Buck doesn’t like that. Maddie had done so much for him as a kid; if she needs help now, he owes it to her to provide it. “But she’s my sister. She needs to know that I’m on her side.”
“That might not be how she’s seeing things right now, Buck.” Athena’s words come soft and gentle, but they still knock the wind out of his lungs. “If I’m right and this is what’s going with her, she’s going to be defensive. And the people she’s most likely to argue with are the people that aren’t falling in line the way she wants.”
“So…me.”
“She could see you talking about getting her help as an attack, not as a caring gesture, and she might lash out more.”
“You don’t need to put yourself in a position to be hurt again.” Steve advises. “Especially when other people might be able to get through to her better.”
Buck hears them, he does, and rationally, he can see how they might be right. That doesn’t mean he has to like it. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing.”
“You saw that something wasn’t right, and reached out for my advice.” Athena says. “That’s not nothing. I’ll take some time to go and talk to her and feel out the situation. If this is a result of what she went through with Doug, she’s more likely to listen to me as a neutral party. And if this is something else, then--,”
Buck frowns and can’t stop himself from cutting Athena off. “Something else? What do you mean something else?” He runs over the conversation they’ve been having in his head, and he’s fairly certain that they’ve established that Maddie is reacting badly to what she’d experienced with Doug (as anyone would) and that she needs help. That’s the answer that feels right.
“I’m by no means an expert.” Athena repeats. “What I’ve outlined is just one possible explanation for why she’s treating you so poorly.”
“But you also think it could be something else.” Buck watches as Athena and Steve share a look. “You both do.”
Steve looks back in his direction, holding his gaze. Buck knows that look. It’s the look that says, ‘I’m not going to bullshit you, but you’re not going to like what I have to say.’ A beat passes. “I’ve only met her in person twice, and neither of those times paints her in a very good light. I know that you know her as a loving sister, but nothing I’ve seen or heard recently tells me that that’s what she is. Sometimes people don’t show their true colors right away. Sometimes they can start out caring but things build up and they reach a breaking point and they snap. We can’t always find a reason for why people do things or change, they just do. And if that’s the case, there might not be a fix for this.”
Buck was right. He doesn’t like what Steve had to say. It’s much easier to think of Maddie as someone who has gone through a lot, and maybe isn’t reacting to it in a good way, but has a chance to fix that and go back to how she was before; he doesn’t want to believe that this is just the way Maddie is now, and that he’s lost the sister who had done so much for him when they were young. But he can tell from the look on Steve’s face that he thinks it’s a very real possibility that that’s the truth, and Athena’s not exactly correcting him or arguing the fact.
Shit.
“If that’s really what you think then why are you bothering to talk to her?” If he sounds a little bit like a petulant child well…he’s going to blame that on the concussion probably, but he does think he has a right to be upset. This is Maddie that they’re talking about.
“For one,” Athena begins, more patiently than he would have thought she’d be, considering he’s sort of starting an argument with her, “because she hasn’t broken any laws yet. So if she is acting out because of trauma or just behaving this way because somehow she doesn’t know better, she deserves a chance to get help, turn things around, and make amends. And for another, if this isn’t a trauma response and she just thinks she’s right and that means she’s allowed to treat people she disagrees with like they have no value of their own without her and that she can try to manipulate and control them, then she needs to hear that that is unacceptable and that if she continues to disrespect people and their boundaries, that is one slippery as hell slope and she will eventually find herself in the wrong seat of my cruiser.”
You’re being stupid.
This is fine. You’re fine.
You’re worrying over nothing and acting like a freak.
Buck chews on the inside of his lip as he glances around the waiting room at his therapist’s office. Steve is sitting next to him, and they’re the only ones there other than the friendly-faced receptionist. The chairs are comfortable and the space is brightly lit with colorful abstract art on the walls; it’s the kind of place Buck would normally like to spend time in, maybe with a book or a computer for a good wikipedia deep dive, only the lights are too bright and hurting his head, which never really got better after the drama that morning, even with additional painkillers, and he can’t forget the reason that he’s actually there.
Therapy.
In person therapy.
Never mind that he’d only really been convinced to try therapy with the promise that he could do it virtually until he felt good about moving to an office setting. His stupidly bad luck had ensured that he couldn’t have that slight digital barrier of comfort. He probably would have just canceled the appointment if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie and Steve are around and worried and he hates the thought of disappointing them. They want him to get better and he owes it to them to try.
And logically, he knows that it will be fine. It will be a very normal, standard appointment because Jules isn’t Dr. Wells and they passed the background check that Steve had run, and even if somehow something got missed and the appointment does take a turn, Steve is here. Steve doesn’t let anything happen to his people if he can help it, and Buck is one of his people.
He doesn’t have any reason to be nervous. He knows that.
But his stomach is still churning and clenching in unpredictable waves. His heart feels like it might jump straight through his ribcage at any moment and even though he’s constantly getting up and refilling the small paper cup at the bubbler in the corner of the waiting room to have something to sip on his mouth feels impossibly dry. Energy thrums underneath his skin in such a way that it takes all of his self control to limit himself to biting the inside of his mouth and not jiggle his legs or bite at his nails and cuticles instead.
He doesn’t have any reason to be nervous. He doesn’t really want Steve to notice that he’s on the verge of panic and give him another reason to consider him a crazy, broken, freak.
So he chews on his lip, and glances around the room and tries to listen to Steve’s retelling of one of his more recent and wild cases back in Hawaii and make sure that he reacts in the right places. He’s not all that sure that he’s succeeding, and if he thinks about it too much, he knows that Steve telling the story in the first place is an effort to distract him and proof that he’s not doing a very good job at all of concealing his nerves.
“Buck?”
He’s so on edge that when the soft voice interrupts Steve’s story, he doesn’t think, he just jumps in his seat and whips his head in the direction it came from, wincing immediately when the move shoots a shock of pain down his neck.
He finds Jules standing in one of the doorways the room has, and he’s a little surprised he hadn’t noticed the door opening. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” They apologize with a brief wave. Buck notes that, now that they aren’t constrained by the framing of the webcam, it’s clear that Jules is tiny. Five foot three at the most, and if he had to guess, they probably don’t even weigh as much as the adolescent training mannequin at the academy. For whatever reason, it’s not what he expected. “We can start your appointment if you’re ready?”
“Uh, yeah.” Buck stands, probably a little too fast, and wipes his suddenly sweaty palm across the edge of his thigh. “Sure.”
“There’s a little lounge with a coffee machine and some fruit and granola bars if you need anything while you’re waiting for Buck.” Jules says, peering around him to address Steve. “Molly can show you.” The receptionist smiles. “And just so you know, I don’t have an appointment scheduled directly after this one, so we may run a few minutes over depending on how things go.”
Steve thanks them, and Buck is left to follow them back into their office, feeling no more at ease than he was before. Jules steps to the side so he can get a full view of the space.
“Take a seat wherever you’d feel most comfortable.” Jules offers.
Buck mostly manages to contain his flinch when they push the door closed, and he surveys the room to try and decide where he should go. There are several different styled, brightly colored chairs placed throughout the space. A plush looking loveseat, a papasan, a funky modern wingback…even a larger than average bean bag. All of them have fluffy pillows and soft blankets strewn about and he’s struck by how welcoming and cozy it feels. Almost the exact opposite of the clinical beige tones and minimalism of Dr. Wells’ office. He’s not sure what the right place to sit is--if Jules has a preference for themselves that he might disrupt or if one type of chair is better for therapy than another--but after a couple of moments of indecision that start to feel awkward and a bit too long, he settles on the eggplant velvet loveseat. It’s closest to the door, and the way things are positioned, there’s a small triangular coffee table that sort of cordons off the small sofa from the rest of the furniture.
Jules picks a notebook and pen off of their sleek white desk and perches themselves in the turquoise papasan chair, tucking their legs beneath them. Behind them, Buck notices a bookshelf, although there appears to be more figurines, trinkets, and plants than there are books. “OK.” They say after a moment getting settled. “Before we get started, I want to acknowledge that because of the news, I know some things about you that you didn’t decide to share with me. I want you to know that that doesn’t mean you have to talk about those things. You still get to decide when you’re ready to share, if you ever reach that point with me, and when you do share, we’re going to focus on how the events happened from your perspective, not what anyone else thinks. Does that feel OK for you?”
Buck still doesn’t really get why they’re checking in with him (as the therapist, shouldn’t they be in charge?) but he nods anyways. It’s not like he wants to dive into the Dr. Wells thing. Even if everyone else does. “Yeah. Sure.”
“And do the lights in here feel OK for your head? I can turn a few of them off if it would be more comfortable.”
“It won’t make too much of a difference, to be honest.” Buck flashes what he hopes is an appreciative smile; he’s pretty sure it comes off as more of a grimace.
“Well, let me know if you do need anything, OK? Even if it’s just a break.” With that, Jules opens up the notebook, flipping a few pages in. “So let’s start with something easy. How are you feeling today?”
That’s supposed to be easy?
Sure, Buck is feeling a lot of things, but other than an overwhelming feeling that things are bad and wrong--that he is bad and wrong--his brain won’t really settle on any one thing. Except for maybe fear. But even though he’s in therapy he doesn’t want to seem all that different from other people in therapy. He wants to be normal. And being afraid of your therapist, especially one as tiny as Jules is when you’re more than twice their size and know that they aren’t dangerous and that you have someone to back you up just outside the door…he knows that’s not normal.
Just like in the waiting room, his mouth goes dry, and he has to lick at his lips while he tries to come up with some way to answer the question that won’t get him laughed at. Then he realizes he must be taking too long when Jules speaks again.
“It’s OK if you don’t know. Or if you do and you don’t want to say. But I want you to keep in mind that this isn’t a test, and there aren’t any wrong answers. Just be honest and say what you feel you can.”
“I..don’t really know I guess.” It’s mostly true. Everything is sitting on his chest in one big tangled ball and it’s hard to make heads or tails of it overall. “Not good?”
“Can you elaborate on that at all? Not putting any sort of name on it, but maybe just describing the feeling a little? Or sharing a thought that it brings up?”
You’re a horrible person and a horrible brother and a burden and a weak, crazy, freak-of-a-fuckup and everyone would be better off if you’d suck it up and kill yourself already.
Buck swallows, trying to come up with a way to describe it that’s not saying…any of that. “I think it’s like…there’s so much happening. Pretty much all the time and it’s…really overwhelming? I guess that’s how I’d explain it. Like there’s too much going on and I’m feeling too much to get my head on straight and all that I can really pick out and make sense of is that I’m messing everything up and causing problems and being…too much to deal with.”
“Is that something that you’re thinking, or something that someone has told you?” Jules notes something down in the notebook, but barely glances down at what they’re writing.
“I mean…both, really.” Buck shrugs. He looks down at his knee, noticing that it’s bouncing rapidly; he’s not sure when he started doing that. “A lot of people have said it. Or like…something similar. I’m not an easy person to be around, I think.”
“You mentioned last session that you have a partner. Have they told you anything like that?”
“No, Eddie would never…or at least, he hasn’t yet. I guess I try a little harder to make myself easy and normal for him.”
Jules writes something else. “Is that something you feel like you have to do?”
It occurs to Buck that what he’s said doesn’t exactly frame Eddie well. At least it could be interpreted that way. “He hasn’t told me to or anything. He’s not like that.” He wants to be sure that Jules understands that Eddie is good. They aren’t barely five minutes into the appointment and he’s already fumbling and messing things up. “I just…I know I’m lucky that he wants someone like me around. And I know if I want that to last I can’t really be…my coworkers would call it ‘Full Buck’ I think.”
“And what about your former CO? The one you reached out to when you decided you needed help. Has he ever said that you’re too much?”
“No.” Chewed him out more than once for not taking his own safety into account, sure. But say that he’s too much? Or exhausting? Steve would never.
“So that’s two people who you trust and whose opinions you value that don’t view you as a problem.”
Buck blinks. He can’t figure out where Jules is going with this. He’s not sure if it’s the concussion keeping his brain cloudy or if he’s just being stupid and not seeing it.
“Would you say that they know you better than other people?”
“I guess they do. Better than most anyways.”
“So if they know you well, and you trust their opinions, why are you putting more weight on what other people are saying?”
Oh. Ok. Now he gets what Jules is saying, that he should put more stock in what the people who really know him think about him than in what strangers or acquaintances think, but they also don’t have the full picture. “It’s…I annoy everyone at some point. Or piss them off or just exhaust them. And it’s not just co-workers or classmates or something like that. It’s friends and--and family. My sister.”
“Does your sister tell you these things a lot?”
“Recently, yeah.” Buck’s not totally sure he wants to get into this, but he figures that he needs to if Jules is going to understand where he’s coming from. “We, uh, haven’t been getting along lately. She doesn’t like that I’ve stayed a firefighter even though I’ve gotten hurt on the job or that I’m not trying to get along with our parents even though they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to see me.”
Jules takes some more notes, but doesn’t ask any questions. “It can be hard, fighting with family.”
Buck shrugs. “I--it was mostly OK. We had sort of just agreed to disagree on that stuff. But…” He swallows thickly around a painful lump in his throat. “She, uh, she thinks I’m lying about what happened with my other therapist…or--or exaggerating or something like that. To get attention or get out of trouble or something. She was lecturing me about it at the station yesterday.”
“Buck, I do want to hear about this confrontation if you’re comfortable talking about it but I want to pause for a moment.” Jules lowers their pen to rest on the notebook, with a soft look in their eyes. “You mentioned in our last session that being in therapy in general was making you anxious. I know it’s too soon for that anxiety to have disappeared, but I noticed that it was particularly visible and heightened today at the start of our session. I didn’t say anything because usually as things get underway, some of those feelings will fall back and ease. But from what I’m observing, that’s not the case for you right now.”
“What you’re observing?” Buck asks; he’s not sure what that could mean. Sure, he’s a little bit fidgety, but that doesn’t have to mean anxious. Plenty of people fidget just because they have a lot of energy. And he’s answering their questions and keeping track of the conversation… And OK, he can tell that his heart is still racing and things are wrapped tightly around his chest and he knows that means he is anxious, but he also knows that Jules can’t see those things. He’s fairly certain that he’s been doing a good job at being mostly normal.
“You’re visibly tense.” Jules begins. “You haven’t stopped bouncing your leg since you sat down, and you’ve been picking at the bandage on your hand and at whatever is underneath it.”
Buck freezes suddenly all too aware that yes, there is a renewed ache coming from the burn on his hand, and when he looks down to the arm still cradled in the sling against his chest, he has in fact torn a lot of the bandage away and caused some of the blistering to pop and the wound to start weeping.
Shit.
How had he done that without noticing?
What kind of broken freak does that at all, let alone in front of--
“I’m guessing from the look on your face that you didn’t realize you were doing that.” Jules’ voice cuts off his thoughts, still incredibly gentle.
“No, I…” His voice is rough all of a sudden and he stops to clear his throat. “I didn’t.”
“Has that happened before?” Buck doesn’t answer right away and Jules takes the opportunity to clarify. “Do you find yourself scratching at or otherwise hurting yourself without realizing that you’ve started doing it?”
He takes time to think about it, even though he doesn’t really need to. He knows the answer is yes. “Sometimes.”
“OK. That’s something we can work on in the future, if you want.” Jules seems so calm and accepting, says this so easily, like it’s something as normal as a kid saying they like ice cream. Buck will admit he didn’t totally know what to expect in getting caught hurting himself by a therapist and admitting that it happens with some regularity, but he would have thought it would garner more of a reaction than this. He knows it’s not good that he does it. Especially without realizing it. “For now…” Jules sets their notebook to the side and stands; Buck catches himself shifting back further into his seat until he realizes that they’re stepping towards the bookshelf and not him. “I want you to pick one of these fidget toys.” They grab a small wicker basket, turn, place it on the coffee table, and go back to their seat. “Take whichever one you’d like and work that in your hands to channel some of the energy you’re feeling.”
Buck leans forward and looks down at the basket. It’s filled with small, colorful objects--some that he recognizes, like fidget spinners and stress balls, and some that he doesn’t. He ends up grabbing a small cube with a bunch of different switches and knobs and buttons on all of its sides. As he leans back, he starts to thumb at one of the sides, pushing at a switch. On and off, on and off.
“Now, you don’t have to answer this if it will make things worse, but do you know what’s causing you to feel anxious at the moment?”
On and off, on and off.
Buck doesn’t even really need to think about it. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Is it what we were talking about? The fight with your sister?”
It’s not not that, Buck thinks. It’s just not only that. And explaining that…they’re right back at that overwhelming feeling. “Kind of, but…”
“But?” Jules prompts when he doesn’t continue.
“It’s stupid.” He knows it is. It’s irrational and stupid and, quite frankly, it's a little horrible of him that he can’t let it go and stop anticipating something bad happening with Jules just because it happened with Dr. Wells.
“If you’re feeling it, it’s not stupid.”
Buck sighs. Jules didn’t freak out about him hurting himself right in front of them, so maybe they won’t be totally offended by this either. Hopefully. “I know you’re not like her. My other therapist.” He clarifies quickly. “Like…in my head I know that you’re not going to do anything and that I’m safe in this office and that even if I wasn’t Steve is right out there and he’d break the door down in a second if he thought I was in any kind of trouble… I know nothing is going to happen like what happened with her. But…when Steve and Eddie brought up therapy as a way to work on how I was feeling it was like this…knee-jerk reaction that it wasn’t a good idea and something would happen that I couldn’t get rid of. It was really only the idea of things being virtual and us being in separate spaces that got me on board with trying it at all.”
“None of that is stupid, Buck. Your previous therapist crossed a lot of boundaries and hurt you in a significant way. That’s traumatic and trauma leaves its marks on your system. Even with things that you think are silly or not a big deal, your body catalogs them, and files away a reaction to have if something similar comes up or you get reminded of it. I would contend that as you were assaulted by your therapist in her office, being averse to starting therapy again, especially in person, is a very rational response, even when you know it’s not likely to occur again.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s not used to people telling him that what he’s doing or feeling makes sense. He’s usually just a problem. Or wrong.
“Can I ask why you decided to switch to an in person appointment when it makes you feel so distressed?”
“I got a concussion and when I tried to look at a screen it really hurt.” Buck shrugs.
“But we could have postponed until your head was feeling better. Major injury is a valid reason to reschedule an appointment if you’re not in an acute crisis.”
Eddie had mentioned that when Buck had asked him to go onto the patient portal and change his appointment. Not in those exact words, but it had been something to that effect. And Buck had been tempted to put the appointment off and not deal with any of it while he was feeling so physically shitty. But he had quickly remembered… “Steve and Eddie are doing so much, just to help me. They’re rearranging their lives and taking time off work, and listening to all my bullshit, and all they’re asking in return is for me to try and be honest with them and do a couple things like therapy to try and get better… I know I have the concussion, but even with that it feels like canceling the appointment would be letting them down or make them regret doing all that, and--and I really want them to know that I’m trying… I’ve pushed through feelings before to do stuff so I thought I’d be able to just…get through being anxious too.”
“I can appreciate wanting to try and get past a feeling, but sometimes they’re too big or the wound is too fresh for us to be able to do that. I think this might be one of those scenarios right now.”
Considering that even with the little fidget toy in his hands that he can’t quite keep his knee still, and he still has that ball of nausea and emotions rolling around in his stomach (although, admittedly, that could be because of the concussion) he thinks that Jules is probably right, and he says so.
“With that in mind, I’d like to give you the option of stopping for the day. It wouldn’t be giving up or being weak to pause until you’re feeling better. Acknowledging and respecting what your body is telling you is a valid choice.”
Buck’s not entirely sure he believes that. “Honestly, since I’m already here, at this point I’d rather just keep going.” They’ve ripped the bandaid off, so to speak, and started talking about things he wasn’t sure he’d be willing to talk about, and he kind of thinks that if he calls it quits for the day now and forces the bandaid back on that he won’t find it in him to keep going and try again, because, really, this kind of sucks. A lot.
“OK.” Jules agrees. “But if at any time you change your mind, just say the word and we can stop.”
With that they go back to their discussion about what happened with Maddie. Buck recounts everything she said, and how the confrontation ended with him going to the hospital. He admits that he only agreed to talk to her to try and keep the peace, and furthermore that he was only at the firehouse to begin with to do the same with Bobby. Then he talks about Maddie’s gift and apology note and how guilty he feels for even thinking for a moment that she was acting on the same level as Doug and for sending Athena her way to talk to her.
Jules assures him that recognizing behaviors and making connections doesn’t make him a bad person, and neither does setting a boundary and asking for help to enforce it, but otherwise doesn’t comment much and mostly only asks prompting questions to get him to talk about how things made him feel, or why he thinks someone else might have done something. Even when they get to the end of the story.
Buck doesn’t really get it. They don’t challenge him or tell him that he should be thinking other things, or that he’s being ridiculous.
How is therapy supposed to work if they don’t tell him what he’s doing wrong?
“We’ve just about reached the end of the hour.” Jules says, glancing at their watch. “I know I mentioned that we might go over, but I think you’ve pushed yourself a lot today and we’ve covered a lot of ground, so I think for today we can wrap things up and talk about homework.”
If Buck really thinks about it, he’s exhausted, and his head is starting to swim a little for how much it hurts, so he’s not going to argue to spend more time in the office. “OK, sure.”
“At your last appointment, I asked you to talk to someone about your nightmare and how it made you feel. How did that go?”
“I talked to Eddie about it.” Buck confirms. “And it was pretty much like you said it would be. He wanted to know about it, and…I think he was upset that I hadn’t gone to him or Steve when it happened.”
“So he wasn’t just saying you could come to him because he felt like he was supposed to say it?” Jules prompts, an eyebrow raising above the frame of their glasses.
“I…guess not.”
“That sounds like a good thing to try and remember as you continue to work through things.” Jules pauses, and Buck tries to let their words sink in and take them to heart. “Now, in everything we’ve talked about today, I’ve noticed two things. The first is that you tend to speak very negatively about yourself, in just about every context.”
Huh.
“And I’m guessing from the surprised look on your face that that isn’t something you realize you do.”
“I guess…I mean I’m just saying…Just saying what I think.” Buck says. Jules looks at him, and he’s fairly certain they aren’t judging him for that but they kind of look…concerned. And if he thinks about other people he knows, maybe he can see why. It’s pretty rare for Eddie or Hen or Steve…for most people he can think of to refer to themselves in any way that could be considered harsh or judgmental.
Because they don’t do the kind of selfish, reckless, bullshit things that you do.
“Sometimes the things that we think are colored by our experiences and they aren’t necessarily what’s true.” Jules offers, putting down their pen again. “But we can’t break down and start to adjust behaviors that we aren’t aware of. So I want you to get a notebook, and every time you notice yourself thinking or saying something negative about yourself, I want you to write it down. If you feel comfortable, you can ask some of the people you spend time with to help you keep track of it. Then at our next appointment or maybe the one after, we’ll talk about everything you’ve written and start to look at why you feel that way.”
That sounds like a lot of work. And completely embarrassing. He knows he’s a piece of shit, what good does writing all the reasons that he is down in one place do? Besides re-emphasizing all of it and making it easier for other people to figure it out?
But he’s not going to argue the point with Jules or ask questions. This is only his second appointment, and he needs to try. And if this is what his therapist wants him to do, it’s what he’ll try doing, even if he doesn’t understand the point. “OK.” He agrees.
“The second thing I noticed is that you do a lot of things because you think it’s what other people want or expect of you. Even when you know it will be uncomfortable or cause you distress.”
“I guess…” Again, Buck could try to argue, but there’s really not much of a point. He knows he definitely admitted to doing as much when they were talking about him coming to this appointment.
“I know that’s not an easy thing to just stop doing. We all want to please people, and doing what they want is a fast way to do that. I want you to start thinking more about your reasons for doing things that aren’t your idea, but that’s not really your homework.”
“What is?”
“Between now and our next appointment I want you to do three things that are only because you want to do them. They can be small things, like taking an extra long shower or eating a cupcake just because you feel like it, or they can be bigger like going out to see a new movie or trying a new activity that you’ve been putting off for whatever reason. As long as you come up with the idea, and you think it’s something that will help you relax or make you happy.”
Buck doesn’t even know where to begin with that. Pleasing other people does make him happy. Sometimes at least. But he has a feeling that Jules won’t accept that as one of the things, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to think of anything else. He can’t really remember doing something and having it leave him feeling good. Not right now anyways.
But he has to try. That’s the deal.
“When is my next appointment?”
They schedule an appointment for next Monday, with the tentative provision that it will be virtual as long as his concussion symptoms ease by then, he agrees to the homework assignments and they wrap things up. When Buck tries to put the fidget cube back in the basket, Jules tells him to hold on to it, and see if it helps with things over the weekend.
He leaves the office, feeling a little shakier on his feet and a lot more exhausted than he’s really willing to admit, picking up Steve in the waiting room along the way. Steve looks at him, seemingly assessing his condition, but he doesn’t say anything until they’re in the elevator headed back down to the ground floor of the office building the therapy office is located in.
“How’d it go?”
“Fine, I guess.” As he says it, it feels a bit like a lie and Buck’s not sure why. It was fine. Nothing happened. Jules asked questions, he answered them, and he got some homework. He hadn’t lied, or even left anything out of his stories really this time. That’s progress from the first appointment, even if he’s not sure that he’s actually getting better or anything. “I don’t know.”
“Fine is good.” Steve doesn’t smile or anything, but he sounds pleased. “You like this therapist? Cause it’s OK if you don’t. I know people don’t always like the first person they try with and we can find someone else if you don’t think they’re a good fit.”
“No, they’re good.” Buck shakes his head. “I like them.” He thinks he does anyway. He doesn’t feel like they’re judging him for any of the stupid or messed up things he says or does, and even though they’re still basically strangers to each other, it does seem like they care about what he’s thinking and feeling. He doesn’t know how to explain that to Steve without opening himself up to questions about why people would be judging him and all of that though, so he leaves his answer at that.
“Good. That’s good. But if that changes you’ll tell me or Eddie right? I don’t have a ton of experience with this stuff myself but I know that it works better if you--,”
Steve is cut off when the elevator jolts violently to a stop and plunges into darkness. Buck just manages to catch himself from falling on the side railing, but the motion leaves his knees weak and stomach lurching, and for a moment he thinks the darkness might be his vision blinking out again until the dim red glow of the emergency lights come on.
“You OK?” Steve asks, grabbing onto his elbow and helping him back to a full standing position.
“Fine.” Buck nods. That sort of feels like a lie too, but again, he’s not sure why. It’s not like he just got injured again or he’s dying or anything. “You?”
“I’m good.”
They stand in silence for a good thirty seconds, waiting for a generator to kick on or the power to come back or something but nothing happens. Buck doesn’t know what made the power go out and got the elevator to stop, but he’s fairly certain that until someone fixes it, they’re stuck.
Fuck.
Chapter Text
In the end it took several hours of waiting for Buck and Steve to get out of the stalled elevator. The building that housed Buck’s therapist’s office didn’t have a backup generator, so when a nearby car accident had taken out a critical transformer, it had taken out the power to the building and stopped everything in its tracks. That same car accident had resulted in a massive pileup that, in addition to the myriad victims trapped in vehicles, had also resulted in a ruptured water main, a few buildings with compromised structures because they had been hit, and several fires. This had taken the attention of every firehouse in the response area, and a few outside of it and since Buck and Steve hadn’t acquired any new medical issues when the elevator had stopped, and their building was not on fire and hadn’t sustained any damage, they fell very low on the priority list for rescues.
They had barely sat down to wait it out when they learned that they still had a cell signal as ADA Davis called Buck to update him on the case. From her he learned that Hannah Wells was pleading not guilty, he was still expected to testify in her trial, and that, while a Buzzfeed News article telling the actual story of why Wells was being prosecuted and highlighting Taylor Kelly’s ethical missteps and personal agenda in badmouthing the LAFD was gaining a lot traction and the public was, in general supporting Buck and the other victims, there were also a number of people from his past crawling out of the woodwork to, as ADA Davis had put it, “get their ten seconds of notoriety”.
Buck hadn’t even had time to process that and ask Steve what was being said, before another call had come through, this time from the lawyer handling his paternity case. She’d informed him that because Wells was pursuing an affirmative defense in the criminal case against her, she’s not contesting any requests for paternity tests to be performed. The lawyer gave Buck the name of a clinic where they’ll expect him to stop in soon to provide his own DNA sample for the test and hung up after telling him that she’ll continue to keep him informed as things develop.
If all of this had come together to reignite every last spark of anxiety that has ever taken up home in his body and caused him to have a panic attack, well, that was between him and Steve at this point.
He and Steve had gotten home--well, back to Eddie’s house but that’s where it feels like home so he’s at least going to call it that in the privacy of his own mind--far later into the evening than they had planned. Carla had stuck around, having dinner with Christopher and helping to get his school work taken care of, but had left soon after their arrival, leaving Steve to set to work combining the leftovers from Carla and Chris’ meal with whatever else he could find in the fridge and cupboards into something that he and Buck (and Eddie when he got home) could have for their own dinner, and Buck to spend some time with Chris and hopefully decompress a little.
Chris’ exhaustion rivals Buck’s own. He’d had a long day at school followed by physical therapy and his physical therapy has started to gain in intensity as his level of activity has grown. It’s technically before Chris’ bedtime, so even though they could just go through Chris’ night time routine and get him to bed early to give him some extra sleep, he’s had a day full of suck, Chris’ doesn’t sound to have been all that much better, and his therapist had told him to try and do things that might make him happy, so Buck decides that he’ll get into some more comfortable sweats, and have Chris change into his pajamas, and then they settle on the couch together, bundled up in one of the softer and fluffier blankets in the house to watch a few episodes of Scooby Doo.
Well, Chris is watching. Buck has his eyes closed and is listening to the show, doing his best not to fall asleep by running his fingers through Chris’ curls. It’s the first real moment of peace he’s had all day, even counting the nap he’d taken after Athena had left. Then, he’d still had plenty to worry about and hadn’t really shut his mind off and relaxed so much as had a minor physical shut down.
Having Chris nearby is a balm that can’t be recreated, aside from with Eddie.
Buck is almost positive there’s something magic about the Diaz boys.
Eventually Steve brings him some food that Buck picks around and manages a few bites of. He doesn’t have much of an appetite and he doesn’t really think that forcing the issue will be a good idea for anyone but he also knows he can’t not eat so he does his best to satisfy both Steve and his stomach. Judging from the not-so-subtle looks Steve gives him, he’s not successful, but he also doesn’t actually comment, so Buck’s going to count that as a win for now.
Sometime around the third or fourth villain unmasking, Christopher, comfortably curled into Buck’s side, falls asleep. They should probably move him to his bedroom, especially since by that point his bedtime has come and gone, but Buck can’t bring himself to disrupt things, so that’s where they are when Eddie gets home from his shift at half-past nine. Steve in the armchair, reading one of Eddie’s western novels that Buck doesn’t really understand his enjoyment of, and Buck and Chris cuddled and cozy on the couch.
Eddie greets Steve with a lazy wave, and Buck with a quiet kiss, before he looks down at his son with soft fondness, though he’s not quite smiling.
At first, that’s the only thing Buck can really notice; Eddie’s not smiling. “Sorry, I know he should be in bed by now.” He apologizes in a whisper, wanting to take care not to wake Chris. “And that you don’t normally watch a ton of TV with him on school nights, but it seemed like he didn’t have the best day at school and PT was frustrating, and we were kind of late getting home because of the whole elevator thing and--and therapy was hard so I really wanted some Chris time and--,”
“Buck,” Eddie cuts him off softly, now with a smile growing on his face. “It’s fine. Really. One late night with some Scooby Doo is not gonna hurt him. Let me get him to his room and when I get back you guys can fill me in on the day.”
He pulls back the blanket so he has access to Chris, and carefully scoops him up, pulling him close. Chris’ head lolls against Eddie’s shoulder and he barely seems to register the movement. Eddie carries him from the room and down the hall and a part of Buck is tempted to follow, wanting to extend the moment of calm.
He stays put, reasoning that Eddie has worked all day and deserves some time of his own with Chris. Steve shoots him a frown over the top of his book. “Were you worried he was mad? For letting Chris fall asleep on the couch instead of his bed?”
And Buck knows it’s not rational, and that, while Eddie sets rules for Chris, he’s usually pretty flexible depending on the circumstances, but he’s just so on edge. In the moment, when he couldn’t tell immediately that Eddie was OK with it, he was worried. “He didn’t look happy.” He shrugs, not meeting Steve’s eyes. Now that Chris is gone and Buck can’t keep running his fingers through his hair, they’re itching to be doing something. He pulls out the fidget cube that Jules had given him. “I know it’s fine, and I mostly knew it would be fine, but he didn’t look happy.”
Steve doesn’t comment on that, though he takes a moment, seemingly thinking it over. After a beat he asks, “What’s that?” Buck doesn’t know what Steve’s referring to, so he doesn’t answer, and Steve gestures with a slight flick of his chin. “In your hand.” He clarifies.
“Just a stupid little toy. Something to keep my hands busy.” He tries not to track Steve’s reaction, but it’s hard not to feel his eyes raking over him in a careful appraisal.
“Is that new?”
Steve’s voice is light and curious, and it’s not really what Buck would have expected from him. He continues to thumb at the different buttons and switches on the cube. “Uh, yeah. My therapist noticed that I tend to, uh, fidget and… do things without noticing when I’m caught up in my head.”
“Is that new?” His voice is a little more serious this time, but still not quite what Buck would have thought. He knows Steve is smart enough to fill in the blanks and figure out what Buck is referring to and not really saying, and maybe it’s not giving Steve enough credit but he really would have expected more judgment from him for being so much of a broken freak that he needs a children’s toy to keep from hurting himself.
Buck forces himself to be honest, if a little vague, fairly certain that it’s the sort of thing Jules would encourage. “Not really.” Even saying that much sends his heart a little further into overdrive; has to focus that much more to keep his breathing even. “Trying to stop myself from doing it sort of is.” He admits. He can’t remember if Steve ever would have seen the scars from his youth or known what they were if he had, but he knows that he still doesn’t know about the burn from the other night, so getting anywhere close to revealing that it’s a very current, relevant problem doesn’t do anything but stoke the fires of his anxiety.
Steve still doesn’t judge and stays very casual. “Sounds like a good thing to be trying.”
“What is?” Eddie asks as he walks back into the room. He takes the spot that was Chris’, not even bothering to pretend to leave space between him and Buck.
“Just this.” Buck holds the fidget cube out for Eddie to take a look at. “My therapist gave it to me to keep my hands busy when I’m anxious or whatever.”
“Oh yeah.” Eddie nods. “Chris’ therapist has a bunch of this stuff in his office too. It’s supposed to be pretty helpful.”
“We’ll see.” Buck shrugs. “How was your shift?” He asks, eager to divert attention off of himself.
“Nothing too exciting. A dumpster fire, a curious kid who got stuck in his school’s HVAC system, and a couple of fender benders. The highlight was the chili Bobby made for lunch.”
That’s fair. Bobby’s chili is incredible. “Did…did Chimney say anything? About Maddie?”
A flash of displeasure appears on Eddie’s face, but it’s almost the sort of thing that if Buck had been blinking he would have missed it. “Just that she ‘couldn’t believe things had gotten so out of hand’. And he wanted to know if you had gotten the gift basket.”
Steve’s displeasure is a lot more apparent and lingering. “He knew about that? And didn’t stop her?”
“He seemed to think it was the perfect olive branch. I just kept my mouth shut. No use making things tenser than they are.”
Buck wants to cringe, but settles for fiddling with the buttons on the fidget cube a bit more intensely. “Things are tense?”
“It’s not bad.” Eddie assures quickly. “People are just being vocal about their opinions.”
“Opinions about me.”
“Some.” Eddie admits. “Mostly about what happened yesterday and what you should do. Bobby is shutting down any conversation about Taylor Kelly’s story and the court case.”
Buck doesn’t really think that’s all that much better. Speculating based on their judgements about his sex life isn’t fun, but a part of him would rather deal with that than have people talking about his relationship with his sister and how he’s letting her down and ruining things. He sighs heavily. “What’s the verdict?”
“Unimportant.” Steve interjects before Eddie can answer. “Their opinions don’t matter. What you want to do does.”
“I’m with Steve.” Eddie says firmly. “They aren’t saying anything worth listening to.”
“OK, but what about--,”
“But nothing. They aren’t in your shoes, they don’t know what you’re feeling, and they don’t get a say in your decisions.”
Buck stops trying to argue. He’s pretty sure that Eddie could out-stubborn a brick wall if he felt strongly enough about something, and he just doesn’t have the energy right now to try and maneuver around that.
“Enough about that stuff.” Eddie slides his arm around Buck’s shoulders. “Tell me about your day. You said something about an elevator?”
“After Buck’s appointment, we were in an elevator on our way down to the lobby when the power went out.” Steve informs. “Got stuck for a couple hours while the fire department sorted out the accident that caused the power outage.”
“Oof.” Eddie winces. “You’re both OK, though?”
Steve nods. “Yeah. The stop was a little rough when the power went but after that nothing happened. Other than a couple of phone calls. Buck got some legal updates.”
“Yeah?”
Buck and Steve give Eddie a recap of the calls from the ADA and Katherine Belfort, ending with the news that he can give a DNA sample for comparison at any time.
“We can do that tomorrow after we drop Chris off at school.” Eddie offers. “If you want.”
“Yeah, sure.” Buck nods. He’ll only stress out about it if they put it off; at least if he gets his part of the process done, he can reason that he’s done everything he can for the situation right now.
“What about therapy? Do you still like your therapist?”
“Yeah, Jules is good I think. They’re…not easy to talk to, because none of it feels all that easy or anything, but…approachable is a good word I guess.” Buck pauses, trying to figure out what he wants to say about the appointment; he and Steve hadn’t really talked about it once the elevator had stalled, their attention moving onto other things, but he’s sure his commander is curious, and furthermore that Eddie will be too. He knows he doesn’t have to tell them all the details, but it makes sense to keep them involved to some extent. It’s not like they don’t know that he’s been struggling. “The appointment was…a lot. Draining. But Jules was good. They gave me a couple things to work on between appointments.”
Eddie seems satisfied with the answer. “Is it the kind of stuff that we can help with?”
Buck is aware that it is--that Jules had even suggested looping people in if he was comfortable with it--and he doesn’t really want to keep it a secret, but it takes him a moment to work up the will to explain the assignments. He knows Eddie and Steve aren’t going to laugh or judge him, but there are people who would, and he has to bypass that insecurity to speak. “Some of it. I’m supposed to pick some things to do just because I want to do them instead of someone else wanting it or it having some other purpose. So I guess that’s kind of just a me thing. But I’m also…they want me to start keeping a notebook where I keep track of the negative things I say about myself. And I don’t always notice that I’m doing that, so if you guys could maybe…point it out to me or something if you hear it so I can write it down?” He cringes a little, but neither Steve nor Eddie seem weirded out or amused by the request.
“Of course we can.” Eddie agrees. “We can get you a notepad or something tomorrow, too.”
“Is there anything else on the docket?” Buck asks, more than willing to change the subject and get the attention off of himself.
“With your Medal of Valor ceremony on Saturday, we need to pick up your dress uniform from your place to air it out and iron it and stuff. And if you want to get a haircut or anything like that we could fit that in.”
Buck automatically reaches up to his hair, fingering at the ends. It’s definitely getting a little long, longer and curlier than he’s let it get in nearly ten years probably, but he doesn’t dislike it, he doesn’t think. A part of him wonders if Eddie is making the suggestion because he does. “Maybe a trim?” He compromises without thinking. He can try and gauge tomorrow what his partner is really thinking, and put a little more thought himself into how he feels about what his hair is looking like.
“Sure.” Eddie says easily. “Whatever you want. Other than that, if you’re feeling up for it I thought we could bring Steve to that food truck park you showed me for lunch, play the rest of the day by ear.”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Please welcome to the stage to share his experiences during the Santa Monica Tsunami, Christopher Diaz!”
Buck’s mind snaps back into focus as the ballroom politely applauds and he spots Christopher, dressed in a navy suit and patterned bow-tie, making his way up to the stage. Up until now, his medal of valor ceremony has been a mixture of overwhelming and incredibly boring. He hadn’t wanted to be there to begin with, entirely unconvinced that his actions had been anything special or beyond what any other firefighter with the department would have done had they been in his position, and feeling too self-conscious about both his current status as the star of one of the more discussed news stories of the past week and his appearance in general to want to be anywhere near the spotlight of a medal pinning. He wasn’t necessarily worried about people talking about the Dr. Wells situation with him directly--he has a feeling that the rigid pageantry of the ceremony and then having Eddie and Steve around to flank him and intimidate the worst gossips and otherwise curious people away will take care of that--but he knows that won’t stop people from staring and speculating. Especially since he will be front and center. And he knows that he doesn’t exactly look good, or even like himself.
Getting dressed into his formal uniform had been…a lot. It was the first time in a long time that he’s really had to take a look at himself in the mirror, and while Buck has never exactly been vain or overly concerned with his appearance, it’s hard not to look at himself now and cringe. He’s lost weight, enough that his uniform hangs a touch loosely off of his form and his cheekbones are a little bit sharper than he remembers. He knows he hasn’t had the best appetite lately, but he definitely hadn’t realized that it had gotten to the point where it was physically affecting him. Beyond that, he’s pale, his eyes have hollow shadows beneath them, and there’s the ugly array of bruising and stitches stretched across his forehead. Between all of that and the sling that he’s still stuck wearing, he’s fairly certain that he’s only going to be catching people’s attention in the worst way and they’ll be staring at him in pity, disgust, or morbid fascination, not just watching him because he’s being honored.
If he and Maddie were on better terms, she would have been there to help him get ready, and she probably would have used a bit of makeup to help minimize the bruising and make things look just a little bit better.
If he and Maddie were on better terms, he wouldn’t have the bruises at all.
So Buck is self-conscious about his appearance, and stressing that everyone will be judging him, chattering and wondering why someone like him deserves the award in the first place. And the anxieties only got worse when they arrived at the ceremony venue earlier that morning. He admittedly hadn’t been paying very much attention at all to most of the planning conversations he’d been included in, or even just the notifications and invitations he’d been sent, but he’d been picturing a small ceremony at a firehouse similar to the promotion ceremonies he’d attended in the past, so on arriving to the venue, he’d been surprised to learn that it was a fairly large hotel ballroom, with a stage, podium, and dozens of round tables for guests to sit and eat brunch at after the actual ceremony. He’s going to be the center of attention of a very large crowd, and it’s pretty much the last thing he wants.
At their arrival, one of the planners from the PR department had walked him and Eddie through the morning’s itinerary, which mainly consisted of them sitting (unfortunately at separate tables because as the one being honored Buck was supposed to sit with a bunch of department higher-ups and while there technically would have been a seat reserved for his spouse or partner, he and Eddie aren’t out with the department or most of their friends, so Eddie is relegated to one of the tables reserved for the 118) and listening to speeches from Chief Alonzo, as well as some other people from the department and city, before he would be invited up to the stage to actually receive the medal. After that the ceremony would conclude, and he’d go do a bunch of photo op stuff with the chiefs that he’s still trying to avoid thinking about, before he’d be released from any further obligations. At which point, he knew, Eddie was going to be bringing him to a “quiet lunch” at Abuela’s, that would, in reality, have a number of friends and family there to informally celebrate.
Between the briefing and the start of the ceremony, he had mingled with Eddie, Chris, and Steve. The rest of the 118 and their families arrived (taking up a grand total of three tables) as well as a bunch of other department and civilian guests. Buck’s anxiety and level of distraction had specifically skyrocketed when Chimney arrived with Maddie hanging off his arm, and before he’d been able to leave the ballroom for a quick break to catch his breath and try to calm his nerves, the PR planner had returned and ushered him off to his seat.
Since then, he’s been trying to focus on the ceremony and speeches but it’s been…a challenge. Between the anxiety and self-consciousness of having people’s focus on him, the worry about being around Maddie as well as Chimney and some of the other firefighters, and his general reluctance to rehash the events of a day he’d rather not think about, he’d only been able to halfway pay attention to the introductory speech from Chief Alonzo while he’d spoken about the Medal of Valor, it’s importance, and the typical extraordinary circumstances that lead to it being awarded. His nervous energy had ratcheted up when the topic had shifted to the tsunami itself and how it had swept away the Santa Monica pier--all of the destruction it caused and the lives that were lost or forever changed, and Buck had been caught up ever since in a mishmash of racing thoughts bouncing around his head from topic to topic. It's all he could do to keep his frenetic energy confined to the fidget cube he’s taken to carrying around with him instead of jiggling his leg and potentially disrupting the entire table.
He worries about being in the spotlight, especially with so much other stuff happening that has people speculating about him and not only his worthiness to receive such an award, but his worthiness to work in the department at all. More than being in the spotlight, he worries because there are people in attendance, like Chim and Maddie, who he can’t exactly say don’t have a right to be there, but that he’d prefer not to see right now. Their strong opinions and insistence on speaking them could easily cause problems. He doesn’t want any conflict or drama to happen, particularly in a public venue where there are reporters and photographers, and he really doesn’t want things to get worse between them. He’s fairly certain that if things get any worse, they might cross the point of no return.
Beyond that, he can’t help but think about the other ongoing issues he’s facing. The paternity issue with Wells in particular is now at the forefront of his thoughts. They’d gone to the recommended clinic the day before for him to provide the required DNA sample, and while he'd thought that doing the only part of the process that's in his control would settle his nerves on the subject, now that things are actually underway to find out if he is a paternal match to the baby, it feels a hell of a lot more real than the mere possibility that he’d allowed others to convince him to ignore and push to the back of his mind. Even if there will still be a big delay before the results come through, depending on when Wells goes in for her part of the process and the actual time it takes to run the tests, he’s going to be finding out whether or not he’s going to become a father, and there’s an overwhelming number of things to think about when it comes to that. Buck had meant it when he’d told Eddie that he can’t imagine not raising a kid if he knew they were his, but between the circumstances of the conception and the doubts he has about being able to take care of himself, let alone other people…there’s a lot of stress, anxiety, and pessimism he can’t let go of when it comes to the potential reality of the situation.
He’s bouncing between all of that, and the unpleasant memories of the nightmare that was the tsunami, and concerns about how he’s going to manage completing his therapy homework (he and Eddie had also stopped by the store to pick up a small leather-bound notebook for him to do his thought tracking in yesterday, and he’s been doing his best to write things down as they come up--with some prompting from Eddie and Steve--but he hasn’t been able to come up with things that he can do for himself that might make him happy) and why the facilities people at the hotel haven’t bothered to change out a light bulb in the fixture above the stage that’s flickering at a frequency that indicates it’s on its way to dying, when his mind catches on to the introduction Chief Alonzo is making.
Christopher.
It’s not something he’d been expecting at all. He’d known there were likely going to be speeches from survivors, and granted, he really hadn’t paid too close of attention whenever that subject had come up, trying to ignore the discomfort that came with being the focus of accolades he wasn’t sure he actually deserved, but he’s 99% positive that he would have noticed if anyone had mentioned Christopher being one of the ones speaking.
Buck snaps back into reality, and watches Christopher make his way up to the stage. He goes on his own, balancing on his crutches, and navigates the few steps up onto the stage, crossing to the podium. Once there, he allows Chief Alonzo to assist him in getting up onto what Buck can only assume is some kind of step stool that allows the boy the height to reach the microphone. Chris then reaches into the inner pocket of his blazer and pulls out a piece of paper that he unfolds and smooths down onto the podium surface.
“When the tsunami came, the water took me away from Buck.” Chris begins. He’s slow and deliberate with his words, but Buck can’t help but think he sounds far less nervous than Buck would be in that position, even as an adult. “I didn’t know what was happening. It was hard to swim and I was scared. But Buck saved me, and brought me to a fire truck where I could rest. We were safe. But other people weren’t, so Buck jumped back into the water and saved them too. I don’t know how many times he jumped in, but he always brought someone back, and that person was safe because of him. He took care of the people who were hurt. And he made sure I was OK.
“Another wave came and we fell back into the water, but Buck never let go. I didn’t have to be scared anymore, because Buck had me. He kept me safe until the other firefighters came, and even when everything was over, he helped me. He let me wake him up when I had bad dreams, and never made fun of me for being scared.
“Buck doesn’t think he’s a hero. But we were talking about it in school, and my teacher said that most heroes don’t. They just want to do the right thing. Buck’s like that. He does the right thing and keeps people safe. He keeps me safe, and when he’s not hurt, he keeps my dad safe too. Buck doesn’t think he’s a hero, but he’s a hero to the 22 people he saved by himself when the tsunami came. And he’s a hero to me.
“Thank you.”
Buck is well aware of the fact that he’s crying by the time Christopher finishes his speech, but he can’t really bring himself to care. As the room bursts into applause, with a few whoops and whistles coming from the direction of the tables holding the contingent from the 118, Buck jumps to his feet without much thought and hops up onto the stage. He pulls Chris up off his step-stool into a sweeping hug, which is a little challenging with one arm, although Chris’ size allows it to be manageable. “Thank you so much, Superman.” He murmurs into Chris’ ear. “That was amazing. You did a great job.”
“I love you, Buck.” Chris returns the hug with all the strength he can muster.
“I love you too, bud.”
Chief Alonzo invites him to stay on the stage, since they’re just about at the medal pinning point of the ceremony, so Buck gently lowers Chris to the ground to allow him to return to his seat, and then stands back up, feeling more than a little awkward as he wipes his face, realizing that the whole room was just witness to his emotional response. The tears were from feeling overwhelmed and happy, and he’s not ashamed of crying per se, but the response isn’t something he really would have liked to share with a bunch of colleagues and strangers. The awkward discomfort only increases as Chief Alonzo returns to his prepared remarks. He speaks specifically about Buck’s actions the day of the tsunami--the people he’d saved and how. He also, to Buck’s surprise, brings up that in addition to his rescue efforts during the tsunami, he’d also had a major impact, alongside Eddie, on the day of the sniper attacks against the LAFD. The word hero is thrown out a bit more, and it feels a lot more uncomfortable coming from one of his superior officers instead of from Chris, and the whole spectacle is awkward and hard to listen to.
Buck really didn’t think he was doing anything spectacular at the time, and none of it had been fun to do or was easy to think about now.
But eventually, the speech finally ends, and Chief Alonzo presents him with the actual Medal of Valor, pinning it to the appropriate space on his dress uniform while the crowd cheers once more. Buck isn’t expected to speak (thank god), so he just does his best to smile and wave, which is embarrassing but hardly the worst thing he’s ever had to do. The ceremony wraps up with Chief Alonzo inviting the crowd to eat, mingle, and enjoy the morning.
From there Buck joins the chiefs for the described photo ops, pictures that will be used for commemorative plaques and some of the press releases associated with the ceremony, and then finally, finally he’s released to have the rest of the morning to himself. He’s stopped a few times on his way to Eddie’s table by well-wishers, and Buck does his absolute best to be polite and gracious with them, but he’s more than relieved when he finally reaches his actual friends and family and gets to drop some of the pretense of being the ‘honored hero’.
The trio of tables commandeered by the 118 and their family members greet him with their own cheers, and it’s all Buck can do to not shrink back and find his way to a spot in Eddie’s arms where he can recharge and not be the focus. He knows he used to have a much better tolerance for being the center of attention, or at least better at pretending that he did (after a childhood of being practically invisible he can’t say that it’s actually easy to have lots of eyes on him), but he just doesn’t have it in him right now to maintain the pretense, and he wishes he could just scoop up Eddie and Chris and retreat to the quiet of their home. As it is, he reinforces his smile and greets people, going through a circle of hugs and handshakes.
There are a lot of people to get through as everyone has their partners and kids with them, plus the extra additions of Steve, Abuela, Tia Pepa, and Adriana. Even so, by the time he makes it around to where Chimney and Maddie are, Buck hasn’t figured out what to do, and they stand in front of each other awkwardly for several moments until eventually Maddie springs forward and wraps her arms around him. She doesn’t say anything, but he’s almost positive that she’s weeping into his chest, and she’s holding so tightly that he can’t return the embrace, even if he wanted to.
Buck isn’t sure what to do or what to say, and after a moment he sends Steve and Eddie a look that he hopes they’ll interpret as a call for help, but before either of them can step forward, Chimney actually puts a hand on Maddie’s shoulder and gently pulls her back.
“Congratulations, man.” He says in a soft voice with an inflection that Buck can’t interpret, and before Buck can respond, he’s stepping back, guiding Maddie away from the table as she wipes at her face.
The whole interaction leaves Buck with more questions than answers, but he decides that right now he doesn’t want to spend the time considering it, and he turns his attention back to the people whose feelings he (mostly) understands. His first stop is to go back to Christopher, pulling him into another hug.
“Thanks again for saying such nice things about me, Superman. How come I didn’t know you were going to be doing that?”
“I wanted to surprise you.” Chris grins. “Because you haven’t felt great lately. Surprises always make me feel better.”
A part of Buck worries what the others will think, or how they’ll interpret Chris’ words about him not feeling great, because he really doesn’t want anyone else to know how much he’s been struggling, but he tries to force those thoughts back and focus on what Chris was really saying, and how much he cared for him. “That is super nice of you. I do feel really good right now.”
“We’re all very proud of you, Buck.” Bobby says. Things between them are still awkward, and Buck can’t really tell where things actually stand with them, but he’s every inch the supportive Captain right now, and Buck can appreciate that. “You’ve done yourself and the station proud.”
“Thanks Bobby. I’m--,” Buck cuts himself off, not sure at all where he was planning to go with the sentence. He may have gotten himself through the ceremony, but he can’t say that he’s comfortable standing there and continuing to accept praise now. “I’m just glad I was there and able to help.”
The party at Abuela’s is (thankfully) pretty lowkey. They’ve taken over her backyard, mostly just sitting around, chatting and eating some of Buck’s favorite dishes that she and Pepa had taken the time to prepare. Harry, Denny, and Chris, have ditched their blazers and are making their parents nervous about having dress clothes ruined by engaging in some variation of tag. It’s a much better time than Buck was anticipating, considering how poorly most gatherings have gone lately. The only point of stress so far has been when Chimney and Maddie showed up. With the incident at the firehouse being so recent and having so many other things attached to it, Eddie hadn’t remembered or had a chance to communicate with Abuela about finding a way to convince them that things had been canceled or otherwise uninvite them to accommodate Buck’s wishes of not being in contact with his sister. But even that has only been a minor problem, as everyone aside from the youngest kids, Bobby, and Chimney, have been running a fairly seamless game of interference, keeping almost a full yard’s length of distance between Buck and Maddie at any given time.
At the moment, Buck is sitting at the shaded picnic table, with Abuela and Adriana representing the Diaz family, as well as Athena, Bobby, and Karen, with Steve tagging in as Buck’s (somewhat subtle) escort and support person while Eddie is helping Pepa bring out desserts. Buck is actually feeling fairly relaxed, which he hadn’t thought would be possible at the outset of the day, and even as the conversation turns to Karen and Adriana (who are getting along incredibly well for having just met that morning) prompting everyone to start talking about their bizarre work calls and experiences, Buck finds himself having a good time.
Adriana, a nurse in the maternity ward of her hospital, shares a story of a woman who had been sure she’d been going through menopause, but had come into the hospital with incredible back and stomach pain, and had been surprised to find herself delivering not just one baby, but twins, while Athena then describes a call she’d taken just out of her rookie year, when she’d been tasked as a member of a team monitoring an environmental protest and making sure that nothing got out of hand, where, several hours into the event, the protestors had decided they weren’t having the impact they’d wanted to, and decided that the best way to increase the attention they were getting was to take off their clothes and continue the protest in the nude. Even Bobby gets in on the fun, talking about some of the stranger snow and ice related mishaps he'd dealt with back in Minnesota.
Steve is jumping in, telling one of the more lighthearted exploits of his task force back in Hawaii that Buck has heard before, when Buck goes to take a sip of his lemonade and realizes his cup is empty. He glances at the pitcher on the table and finds it in a similar state. He stands, leaving his cup behind and grabbing the pitcher, giving a brief excuse that he’ll be right back.
Abuela reaches out, placing a hand on his forearm to stop him and starts to rise herself. “You relax, Evanito. You are the guest of honor today. We’ll take care of that.”
“I need to stretch my legs anyways, Abuela.” Buck doesn’t argue strongly, just smiles and shakes his head. “It won’t even take five minutes. You stay and enjoy Steve’s story. I’ll be right back.” He walks away before she can protest again. At the back door into the house, he crosses paths with Pepa and Eddie, carrying a cake and particularly gigantic tray of cookies respectively, and he quickly dismisses Eddie’s own wordless concern that he’s up taking care of something. “Just mixing more lemonade. I’ll be right back out.”
Inside the house is quiet, and Buck goes to the kitchen that’s only slightly less familiar to him than Eddie’s and his own. He’d started joining Eddie and Chris for a few family dinners and events just before the bombing, and once he’d been released from the hospital following his injuries, Isabel had mandated his presence just as she did her grandson and great-grandson’s. He and Isabel had kept each other company on some of the days during his healing when Eddie was working and no one else was free, and she’d started teaching him some of her favorite family recipes; it was time that he more than treasured, and he’s beyond grateful that meeting Eddie and Chris had brought her and Pepa into his life as well.
In the kitchen he opens up the fridge and pulls out the large container of lemon juice she would have prepared prior to the party in order to continuously make fresh lemonade throughout the day. She also has a bottle of homemade simple syrup out on the counter, and Buck sets to combining them both with some fresh cool water over ice. He’s a bit slower, doing it all one-handed, and he’s concentrating on keeping the ratios correct, so he doesn’t notice that someone has entered the kitchen behind him until they speak.
“Can we talk, Evan?”
The voice is soft, but he startles and nearly drops the spoon he’s stirring with anyways. Buck takes a breath to try and resettle his nerves and turns on his heels, finding himself face to face with his sister. She’s not in his space exactly, there’s a respectable distance between where he is at the kitchen counter and where she is standing in the door frame, but she is blocking his only exit, leaving him boxed in. He finds himself uncomfortable and teetering on the edge of anxious, even though he doesn’t want to be.
It’s just Maddie.
He’s never had problems with being around Maddie before. One incident, and one off-putting note with half of an apology doesn’t need to change that.
Even so, he hasn’t really spent a lot of time organizing his thoughts about how he feels about talking to her, and he’s just as conflicted as he had been on Thursday when he’d spoken with Athena, and then a bit more in therapy. He doesn’t want to give up on his relationship with his sister, but he doesn’t like the way she’s been treating him and talking to him, and there’s something about some of the things she’s said and done that just leave him…off-balance. He wants to feel more certain about himself and how he’s feeling before talking to her again and trying to fix things.
But he can’t really say that, and he can’t make himself say yes to talking to her either, so he finds himself just standing there while she looks at him with a look in her eyes that he recognizes, but can’t quite identify.
“The silent treatment?” She raises an eyebrow. “Really, Evan? Don’t you think this is getting a little out of hand? I’ve just been trying to look out for you. I know Eddie and this Steve guy are trying to convince you that I’m some kind of monster, but all I’ve been doing--,”
“They haven’t tried to convince me of anything, Mads.” Buck cuts her off softly. He doesn’t want to have this conversation, any part of it, but for all that Eddie and Steve have been doing for him, he can’t listen to anyone make them out to be the bad guys in all of this; they’ve been nothing but helpful and considerate of his feelings. “All they’ve done is try to make sure that my choices are being respected.”
“But you aren’t making the right choices!” Maddie takes a step into the room. “I mean, even taking the firefighting stuff out of it, you’re pulling away from your family, from me. And then there’s this stuff with the therapist. Ev, you have to realize that you are damaging a lot of lives with that, not just your own…This is the biggest mistake I’ve ever seen you make, and I’ve seen you make a lot of mistakes. You need to let me help you to take things back before it’s too late.”
Buck bites his lip and closes his eyes for a moment. He’s had a lot of doubts about coming forward about what happened with Wells, even going so far as to think that doing so was a mistake. But not for the same reasons that Maddie is thinking about, and it hurts, more than a lot of the physical pains he’s experienced across his life, that his sister doesn’t believe him, and thinks that this is just one more mess in his long line of screw-ups. Like he couldn’t possibly be telling the truth that someone had hurt him like Wells had. Like he’s not capable of thinking for himself or doing the right thing. It’s so incredibly painful and he has to fight back his reaction to crumble at the sensation, because he’s almost positive that she’ll take it the wrong way. He forces himself to think about what Eddie has said about the whole thing, and what Steve and Jules have said, and to remember that they are the ones who are supporting him, and theirs are the opinions he needs to hold onto right now. It gives him just enough strength to maintain his composure and reply to his sister. “I don’t know why you don’t believe me when I tell you that I didn’t choose to sleep with that therapist, Maddie, but I didn’t. I reported her because I didn’t want her to hurt anyone else, and when the department investigated, I was not the only person coming forward. That should be more than enough proof for you to know that she was the one in the wrong, even if all it should really take is my word. You’re my sister. You should be on my side when I tell you that someone hurt me, not accusing me of making it up for attention, and telling me how I’m ruining things for other victims.”
“That’s right, Evan. I am your sister. I know how you’ve used sex since you were a teenager as just another way to get what you want. And I know you didn’t change when you moved out here. Chimney’s told me plenty of stories, and even people at dispatch know how you slept your way through half the bars in LA. It’s embarrassing, the number of people I’ve met who can tell me about all of your exploits, and the lack of respect you have for your partners and yourself.”
Buck shrinks back, the small of his back colliding with the edge of the countertop.
Fucking desperate whore.
And Maddie continues to talk. “I also know how often you’d hurt yourself for attention when we were kids, and the stories you’d make up to get out of trouble with Mom and Dad. Do you really expect me to think you’re any different now? When you didn’t even have your own apartment when I got here and you were just mooching off of the random woman you were able to convince to take care of you for a few months until her life moved on and you couldn’t take the hint?”
Needy, clueless loser.
“And on top of all that, I know how much of an old boys’ club the LAFD is. Howie has told me all about it. Of course there are other jerks who abused the system that are jumping on the bandwagon to avoid getting in trouble now.”
In a way, that explanation at least makes a tiny bit of sense to Buck. He knows Chimney’s mistreatment and hazing when he first joined the department had colored his impression of the people who worked there and that he hasn’t let go of a lot of the stereotypes he formed because of that. So yeah, it makes sense that he might assume that the people coming forward are just trying to game the system. Even though, at the same time, he really thought Chimney knew and understood and respected him enough to not paint him with that same brush.
Then again, he’s probably just not important enough for Chimney to care.
Worthless waste of space.
“This is what I was trying to explain to you the other day, but you wouldn’t listen.” Maddie says. “None of this is some big secret that people don’t know about. It’s all going to come out, and when it does things are just going to be worse for you. If you take things back now, they’ll go easier on you.”
“There’s nothing for me to take back.” Buck protests, starting to feel a bit more uneasy. He wants to leave, but there’s no way past Maddie, and he doesn’t really want to repeat Wednesday’s events.
“Stop being stubborn, Buck.” Maddie takes another step in. “You’re listening to bad advice. It’s coming from people who don’t understand you the way I do, that are trying to tear us apart.”
“What us?” Buck exclaims, unable to contain his reaction at this particular claim. It would be one thing if Maddie were saying all of this and they were as close as they were when they were kids, or even just as close as they were before the bombing (he’s not entirely positive but he thinks if they were, she might not think so little of him, might actually see that he’s hurting, and the advice she's offering would maybe be different and helpful) but the fact is that they aren’t. If the relationship were there, he could see how she’d feel they were losing each other, and he is so, so hurt that it’s not there, but for her to blame that on him… If there’s one thing he does know, it’s that he hasn’t stopped trying to maintain their closeness. “There is no us. For months, all it’s been is you talking at me instead of talking with me, and arguing with me or freezing me out if I don’t agree with you and do what you want. You don’t care about what I want or need and you judge me and tell me how wrong and horrible I am, and I’m supposed to want to stay and listen to that? I got a concussion because of you! You threw me to the ground!”
Maddie groans with so much frustration and emotion in her voice that it sounds more to Buck like a growl. “That is exactly what I’m talking about!” She gestures widely. “That was an accident! I apologized!”
“You sent a gift basket and a note.” Buck counters. “You didn’t apologize. All you said was that I was overwhelmed and over-emotional and misinterpreting things, and that things had gotten out of hand.”
“That is an apology!”
“No, it isn’t. And even if it was, after you basically said the fight was my fault, you went right back to telling me that you were right, that everyone else was wrong, and that I needed to be listening to you.”
“Because I am and you do! I am just trying to help you, Evan. I just want you to have a good life, so you can be safe and happy and we can be a family again. But everyone has you convinced that I’m some evil witch trying to control your life. Do you know they actually convinced Athena to come and talk to me? To tell me I needed counseling? To try and lecture me and tell me that I’m crossing lines and trying to isolate and control you? As if that’s something I would ever do after what I’ve been through.”
“But it is what you’re doing.” Buck’s words come out soft. He’s not sure that he wants to be saying them, because in spite of everything he doesn’t want to hurt Maddie, but she’s been hurting him. A lot. Maybe not physically (mostly), and he doesn’t really know or understand if it’s deliberate or if she genuinely doesn’t see what she’s doing (and he’s not sure which option would be more comforting), but she is hurting him. He knows that. And for all of the circles he’s been going around thinking about it all, he knows that a lot of his discomfort with their fight on Wednesday and her “apology” note is is because it was crossing the lines he was trying to establish, and because she has been trying to drive wedges between him and Eddie and Steve. Athena had seen it too. That’s how he’s certain he isn’t overreacting or imagining it.
Buck’s head snaps to the side as Maddie’s hand sweeps across his cheek in a fierce slap. Pain drives down his still injured neck, and he stays frozen, staring unseeingly at the floor off to the side, utterly stunned.
There’s no room for interpretation this time, no way to convince himself that it was an accident. Maddie had hit him. For a moment a heavy silence hangs over the room.
“Buck, I--,”
“Don’t.” A single, firm word cuts whatever Maddie is about to say off before she can even get started. “Don’t even think about trying to say that you didn’t mean to do that or that it was an accident, or that it wouldn’t have happened if he had just been listening.”
Buck can’t bring himself to move or look, too afraid that moving makes the situation even more real. Maddie had hit him. His sister had hit him. How awful is he, that he could drive someone as gentle and caring as Maddie to violence?
Selfish, exhausting, frustrating waste of space.
Even without looking, he can tell that whoever is berating Maddie has stepped in between them, shielding him from anything else. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the vibrant floral print of a long skirt and he puts the pieces of the voice and everything else together.
Karen.
“Denny, go get Athena and Eddie please.” She says, in what might be the sternest mom-voice Buck has ever heard apart from Athena’s.
Another beat passes. Buck finally convinces himself to move and slowly turns his head back, wincing at the twinge that moves down his neck as he does. His head is starting to throb again; he won’t be surprised if some of his concussion symptoms that have been fading return. When he’s facing the room again, he confirms that it’s Karen standing in front of him and she’s a fairly imposing guard, all things considered, but because of their height difference, he can still see Maddie, wide-eyed and uneasy.
“Karen, I don’t know what you think you just saw,” she begins, and Karen, taking no prisoners, doesn’t even let her finish the sentence.
“Oh, I know what I saw, Maddie. And what I heard. I know that you were trying to convince him that there has been nothing wrong with the way you’ve been treating him lately, trying to gaslight him into thinking that he’s the problem, and that when he called you out on it, you hit him.”
“I was just trying to--,”
“Just trying to what? Give a little course correction? Show him who’s in charge?”
“I’m just trying to help him!” Maddie shrieks.
“He doesn’t need that kind of help. No one does. Now, you are going to stop giving excuses and stop trying to justify your behavior. You can either apologize or you can leave.”
Maddie tries to duck around Karen. “Buck, will you just tell her that this was an accident?” She pleads, dodging this way and that when Karen continues to step in front of her no matter which direction she goes in, blocking her path. “We’re siblings, we fight, these things happen.”
“Apologize, or leave.” Karen repeats, voice cold. From there, she and Maddie appear to enter a staredown. Buck can see the wild fight in his sister’s eyes, but the longer things go on, the more sullen her gaze gets.
For a moment, he thinks she’s going to give in, and that this will be the thing that gets through to her. She’ll apologize, and then later, when everything is calm and emotions are down again, they can have an actual talk where he explains everything that’s going on and she genuinely listens and they can start fixing things and feel like family again.
But that’s not what happens.
Maddie doesn’t say anything. She huffs, turns on her heels, and storms out of the room, ducking past Eddie and Athena as they arrive, and that’s that. Without words, he maybe can’t be sure of what her leaving really means, but the fact that she hit him--without question deliberately this time--and wouldn’t even consider offering an apology or doing anything but leave…it’s like she’s decided he’s not even worth the effort. Things are broken between them, and they’re just going to stay that way, because she doesn’t care enough to try and fix it.
Buck chokes on his breath, and feels his heart shatter.
Chapter 27
Notes:
Hey everyone, just as a heads up, some of Buck's intrusive thoughts in this chapter are a little graphic, so please read with care for yourselves.
Chapter Text
“What happened?” Eddie rushes forward, stopping just short in front of Buck. He lifts his hands to cradle Buck’s face. One thumb sweeps across his cheek and Buck can’t help but flinch. The action stings. “Ev, sweetheart, you’re bleeding.”
Buck is still too stunned by everything to answer. Maddie had hit him. Maddie had hit him and tried to convince him that it was just some little accident between siblings. Maddie had hit him and then fled rather than apologize.
“Maddie slapped him.” Karen informs. Her voice is so much softer than it had been moments before when she’d been challenging Maddie. It’s much closer to the tone Buck is used to hearing from her; he’d known she could be fierce and protective when it came to Denny and her family, but having that strength projected towards someone else in order to safeguard him, had been a bit of a shock. “She was complaining about your visit the other day,” she gestures briefly towards Athena, “and acting like everyone was acting in some kind of conspiracy to turn Buck against her. She actually had the nerve to say that she couldn’t possibly be trying to manipulate him because of what she’d been through with Doug, as though saying that itself isn’t an act of manipulation, and when Buck said it was what she was doing, she slapped him.”
“Her nails probably got you then. Maybe a ring.” Eddie frowns. “Let’s get you sitting down…”
Buck doesn’t realize that he’s being moved and maneuvered until he’s actually sitting in a chair in the dining room adjacent to Abuela’s kitchen. He knows he should say something--that he’s probably worrying Eddie--but his voice feels trapped in his throat.
“Did she apologize or say anything after she hit him?” Athena’s question is a little distant. She and Karen are still in the kitchen door frame.
“When I stepped in and stood up for Buck, she said it was an accident.” Karen answers. “And she wanted him to tell me that it was no big deal and a brother-sister thing. I told her she could apologize or leave, and that’s when you got here.”
“And she left.” Athena finishes, none-too-impressed.
Eddie huffs as he probes at Buck’s cheek again, a little more gently this time. “From what Buck’s told me about her, leaving is something she’s good at.” He glances back at Karen and Athena. “Could one of you wet a dish towel please so I can clean this up a bit? And get a glass of water?” He turns back, and Buck feels his hands clasp around his, and realizes that Eddie is crouching in front of the chair. “Buck, sweetheart, I know you’re upset and probably overwhelmed right now, but can answer a couple questions for me? Just so I can check on your head?”
Buck forces himself to take a couple of deep, grounding breaths to try and stop from sinking into the foggy drift of shock and panic, and then nods once. His voice is rough and smaller than he expects it to be when he speaks. “Yeah.”
Eddie runs him through a concussion check, less, Buck knows, to try to see if he has a concussion, and more to see if his symptoms are worse after another blow to the head. Buck confesses to the increased pain, both in his head and his neck, and that he’s having a hard time focusing and feeling present. Neither of them are sure if that’s because of his head, or because of the emotional reaction to what’s just happened, so Eddie says they’ll have to monitor things closely again for the next few hours, just in case.
Karen returns, and there’s a soft thud as she places a glass of water down on the table next to Buck. She hands Eddie a dish towel.
“OK, this may hurt a little, hermoso, but I’ll be as careful as I can.” Eddie uses the cloth, cool and damp, to dab at the cut on Buck’s cheek. It aches a little, but compared to the types of pain Buck has gotten used to over the years, it’s not so bad.
Beyond his partner, Buck sees Karen and Athena still hovering in between the dining room and the kitchen. He knows that they don’t mean anything by their staring, that they’re only there out of concern and wanting to help, and he does appreciate Karen’s intervention because he’s not sure how he would have handled things with Maddie otherwise, but he can’t help but feel exposed and vulnerable with their additional presence in the space. “You guys can go back to the party.” He offers, hoping that it doesn’t sound too much like an order, or an ungrateful complaint.
“Not just yet, Buckaroo.” Athena says. She steps into the room and grabs one of the other dining chairs, pulling it into a position so she’s adjacent to Buck and they can look at each other before sitting. “We need to talk about how you want to handle this.”
Even with a concussion, and feeling less than perfectly there, Buck knows what she means, and he feels himself stiffen in his seat. “There’s nothing to handle.”
“Buck…” Eddie and Karen speak in unison. They sound upset, and Buck doesn’t think it’s directed at him, but he’s not 100% confident in that assessment so he decides to just stay quiet.
Athena fills in the silence quickly enough anyways. “Buck, this is the second time this week that Maddie has hurt you.” She holds up one hand, cutting off any potential protests before he can even open his mouth to make them. “What happened at the station was maybe an accident. We’ll probably never know for sure. But there’s no arguing that to slap someone is a deliberate action. It’s assault.”
Assault. Such a clinical, definitive word. Buck knows assault, knows that what happened technically qualifies, but there’s something about applying it to Maddie and saying that she assaulted him that makes his stomach churn. Especially when he knows why Athena is the one to bring it up. “I’m not going to press charges against my sister.” He states, voice barely above a murmur.
“Buck, you’ve been giving her a lot of chances.” Eddie says carefully. He sets the dish towel aside. “And there’s a real pattern to what she’s doing.”
“Pattern? What pattern?”
“You have a disagreement with her.” Eddie starts, reaching behind him to grab a chair for himself. “You then try to set a boundary. Letting her know that you aren’t going to interact with your parents anymore, or that you need her to take a step back and keep her distance for a few days. It takes her, at most, a day to breeze right past that boundary, trying to make you feel guilty for setting it in the first place and acting like you’re the one who’s being irrational or inappropriate. And it keeps hurting you. Now physically.”
“She’s just not used to me saying no to her.” Even as Buck protests, he knows it’s a weak excuse and sounds pretty pathetic, but he doesn’t know how to stop himself. He doesn’t want to see Maddie or interact with her, and he doesn’t know what to feel about what just happened, but it feels like doing anything beyond asking her to give him space will be unforgivable and sever ties for good, and he’s not sure that this is worth all that. He’s not worth all that. “I always listened to her when I was growing up and…and maybe she thought things would be the same way when she moved out here and she needs to adjust.”
Athena rests a hand on his knee. “I think you know that’s not true, Buckaroo. If you thought things between you two were that simple and harmless, you wouldn’t have asked me to talk to her.”
“That doesn’t mean I should have her arrested for one slap.”
“Except it’s not just one slap, Buck.” She replies. “It’s like Eddie said, it’s a pattern of behavior. Behavior that’s out of line, and that isn’t going to change if she doesn’t face any consequences for it.”
Buck wants to shake his head, but just barely restrains himself to keep from making his headache worse. “I can’t ruin her life over something this small. She’s pregnant. If I have her arrested, she could get suspended, or even fired, and then what is she supposed to do?”
“What happens to her is not your responsibility, Buck.” Eddie says, calm and firm. “She’s an adult and she knows right from wrong. She’s making choices that are wrong, whether she wants to admit to it or not. That catches up to a person, and just because you are the one she’s hurting, doesn’t mean it’s your fault that she’s facing consequences for it.”
It’s not that Buck thinks Eddie is totally wrong--logically he knows that if you break a rule and get into trouble, it’s your fault for breaking the rule in the first place. But he can’t just ignore his role in the problem. If he had just been clearer with Maddie when she first moved to LA that he’s not the little kid she used to take care of--if they had talked more when things didn’t feel so high stakes and fraught--then maybe she wouldn’t be so upset now. But he’d been so happy for Maddie to be back at all that he’d let things go that maybe he shouldn’t have, and she thought things between them were OK, when they really weren’t. Maybe it’s his fault that she doesn’t understand the boundaries he’s setting, when they’ve never had anything between them before. How can he punish her for that?
“I can’t.” He looks down. “I can’t have Maddie arrested.”
“Can I tell you something?” Karen asks. She’s almost always got a comforting kind of softness about her, but in this moment Buck can hear a sorrow on top of that, and he wonders what would have caused it. When he agrees to listen to her, she takes the place Eddie had previously been occupying, crouching in front of where he’s sitting. “I have an older sister. She’s five years older than me, so we were never super close, but I looked up to her and I loved her. She got pregnant right before graduating high school, and she changed all of her plans to be a mom and be with the father. My parents were disappointed that she wouldn’t be going on to college, but they never stopped loving or supporting her for going down a different path. No one in the family did. But then I was school valedictorian when I graduated, and I went off to school and started getting internships and things, and everyone was…vocally proud of me. And my sister got jealous. Maybe because of the attention, or maybe because I was doing things that she was starting to feel like she had missed out on, I don’t know.
“She started trying to make me look bad. At family dinners she’d bring up stupid things I had done when I was a kid, or when I talked about a paper or project that wasn’t a perfect score, she’d try to get my parents to say that they were disappointed I wasn’t meeting my potential. A lot of passive aggressive comments and things like that. When that didn’t work, she started snooping through my things. I was living at home instead of on campus to save money so it wasn’t exactly hard for her to get in my room. Every little thing she found that she thought proved I wasn’t the ‘golden child’ my parents saw me as, like going to parties and drinking on occasion, or my vibrator, she ran and told them about. I started carrying my most personal things, like my journal, with me wherever I went, but she just kept digging.
“I tried to talk to her multiple times, and when that didn’t work, with my parents’ permission, I put a lock on the door. At that point, I thought things were safe, so I started leaving my journal behind again. And it should have been fine tucked in my desk and behind a locked door. But at the next family dinner, she disappeared upstairs for a little bit, and when she came back down, she pulled out my journal and read it to the whole table. She outed me, thinking that would push me out of my parents' good graces. Only instead of being mad at me, they got upset with her for breaking into my room and violating my privacy, and when she doubled down and started saying some…very hateful things…they kicked her out, saying that her son and partner were welcome, but until she recognized that she was wrong and apologized, she wouldn’t be. I also told her to give me some space for a while, because I was upset and didn’t want to say anything that I would regret. I talked things out with my parents, who were thankfully very supportive, and thought that would be the end of it.
“But, a couple days later, she approached me when I was picking up a few things at the store, confronted me about ruining her relationship with our parents, and told me that I needed to tell them that she and I had made up and things were fine. She didn’t say anything approaching an apology, and I was really hurt by what she’d done, so I refused. She kept pushing things, drawing more and more attention, and wouldn’t let me leave when I tried to disengage. When I finally snapped and told her that she’d gotten herself in this position by being jealous and vindictive, and that her life was what she made of it, she hit me. Hard enough to fracture my cheekbone, and when I fell, I broke my wrist. In addition to an ambulance, the store manager called the police, and she was arrested.
“I didn’t want to press charges. This was my sister, and she was obviously going through something, and I didn’t want my nephew to lose his mother for any amount of time, even if she ended up just getting some form of probation or community service. My friends and girlfriend at the time all thought that I should, because I’d tried to reason with her, and given her a bunch of chances, and her behavior kept escalating, but her partner and my parents were more torn about it, and I honestly thought that if I pressed charges, I’d be tearing the family apart and actually ruining her life.
“I actually went down to the station to withdraw the complaint, but in doing so, I ended up having a very long conversation with the arresting officer; she told me that it was my choice, but that my sister wasn’t going to change or learn anything if she didn’t face consequences, and that she’d probably only get worse. She also explained that if I was the one complaining, I could talk with the prosecutors about the full circumstances of the assault, and push for counseling and leniency rather than throwing the book at her, which would give her a chance to change and get better, but that if I let this go, my sister would decide that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and the next person she hurt might not be family. And they wouldn’t be as inclined to give her any grace or opportunities towards rehabilitation.
“Pressing charges and bringing things to a trial was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And for a while it did make things with the rest of my family harder. But, as part of the deal she eventually took to avoid jail time, my sister did start going to counseling and ended up getting help for a few issues that she had been trying to push through on her own. And with time, it really started to make a difference for her. She grew a lot, eventually apologized to the whole family, went back to school, and really turned things around. Things aren’t perfect, but we’re able to be a family.
“Now, I can’t say for sure that’s what would happen with Maddie. I don’t know what’s motivating her behavior or why she’s acting like this. But I think what that officer told me back then is true regardless. If Maddie thinks that she’s gotten away with hurting you this time, she’s only going to do it again. And her behavior could change focus to other parts of her life, and then she’ll really be out of chances. I know that you love your sister and think filing a complaint would be betraying her, but from what I know about the situation, she’s already been betraying you. She’s not respecting you or your boundaries, she’s trying to control you, and when she doesn’t get her way, she’s throwing physical tantrums. Holding her accountable for that isn’t the easy thing to do, but it’s not wrong or unfair of you to do it. And it might be the best chance you have at repairing things.”
Buck reaches into his pocket and pulls out his fidget cube.
At least Karen isn’t trying to tell him that this should be painless.
And there is something…hopeful about her story with her sister. Even if they aren’t super close. At least it hadn’t totally ruined things with everyone, and it sounds like the sister has a happy life now, with a family of her own.
But Buck can’t help but be terrified. If he does this, it won’t just be Maddie’s life he’s disrupting. Not anymore. This will affect Chimney and his future niece or nephew too. And if it doesn’t work--if somehow things don’t click for Maddie in the same way that they did for Karen’s sister, or even just if there’s nothing driving Maddie’s behavior beyond just running out of patience with him the way their parents did and being unable to handle him with kid gloves anymore--then he might be out of all of their lives forever. He might never meet Maddie’s kid. If things go really wrong and she were to somehow go to jail for this (and he doesn’t really think the courts would send someone with no past record to prison over a single slap, but crazier things have happened before) he’d be keeping a mother away from her child, and he knows how much Maddie has always wanted to be a mom. It would be a punishment far worse than the crime. Maddie would hate him, and Chimney probably would too. They wouldn’t be able to work together anymore.
And that’s not even accounting for whether or not Bobby or Hen or anyone else would understand.
There’s so much that he could lose, and for why? Because his sister isn’t hugging him anymore? It’s not like he really deserves that anyways.
Almost as if he can read Buck’s thoughts, Eddie speaks again. “Take away the Buck and Maddie of it all.” He instructs softly. “If this were happening to someone else…if it were happening to me, what would you be telling me to do?”
“This would never happen to you.” Buck mutters, fidgeting with the cube more roughly than he really needs to. He’s too on edge for this. The day has been too long, with too many eyes on him and expectations that people want him to fill. He doesn’t want to think about how much he’s disappointed Maddie, or how many people he’ll be hurting or letting down no matter what decision he makes moving forward. He wants to go home, scrub all of his skin off, and find a way to curl up into a tiny ball, fall asleep and never wake up.
Jules probably wouldn’t appreciate it if that was the thing he decided to do for himself, possible or not.
“Yes it could. If this were me and Adri, if she agreed with my parents and had come here to try and interfere with how I’m raising Chris, insulted and belittled me, ignored every boundary I tried to set and hit me when she couldn’t get her way, what would you be telling me to do?”
“That’s different.”
Eddie quirks an eyebrow. “Is it?”
“There’s nothing wrong with how you’re raising Chris! She’d be hurting you to try and change something that doesn’t need changing, and you don’t deserve that!”
“And you do?” Athena asks archly. “Buck. I may not know everything that’s happening in your life right now, but I know you. Even when we’ve disagreed about things, you were still approaching with the intent to protect, help, and care for people. You are a good person, and I know you always try to do the right thing. I don’t think it’s possible that you’re doing anything so bad that you deserve to be assaulted and treated like a misbehaving child. There is nothing about you that needs changing.”
Tears spring, unbidden to Buck’s eyes. If there’s one thing he knows about Athena, is that she doesn’t lie to spare feelings; if she says something, she believes it. Somehow, for some reason, she believes in him.
While he tries not to cry--he’s done enough of that lately and he knows it won’t do his headache any favors--Buck makes an attempt at piecing everything together in his head. He’s not sure he’s all that good or what he deserves from the world, but people that he trusts and knows don’t lie, are. And they’re telling him that Maddie is wrong. That she’s crossed too many lines and gone too far and they don’t think she’ll change if she isn’t given a reason to.
Pressing charges and having her arrested, even if it wouldn’t end up with her in jail…that could give her a reason. If not to fix things with him, than at least to make sure that she gets to raise her child with Chimney. It might kill him to lose her entirely, but if everyone else is right and things don't change Maddie could get into more trouble and that could be even worse…
Is it really better for him to let things go and keep a tiny chance of fixing things with her if it might end up in her ruining her entire life and losing everything?
Could he live with himself if that happened?
Buck closes his eyes, swallowing around the tears he’s choked back. “OK.” He whispers when he looks at the room again. “I’ll do it. I’ll--I’ll press charges.”
Nothing happens that afternoon. Not at the party. Even if Athena could act as the arresting officer (which she won’t in a situation like this where she knows everyone involved in the incident) by the time she goes back out to the party, Maddie and Chimney are gone, having offered, according to everyone else outside, a hurried and vague excuse to leave. Instead, once Buck makes his decision, Athena tells him that she’ll connect with an officer she trusts, brief them on the situation, and have them approach Maddie at her home either that night or the next morning, to keep things as quiet and discreet as possible.
As far as everyone else at the party is concerned, Buck resurfaces from inside after a lengthy disappearance, with a fresh pitcher of lemonade and a small bandage on his cheek that no one knows the origins of (between Eddie, Karen, and Athena, the story will be spread eventually, but everyone agrees that it will wait until the party is over). He’s a lot more subdued, and unlike before, Eddie is pretty glued to his side, but he does return to the party and cuts the cake for everyone and lets everyone else enjoy the afternoon.
Then eventually things die down, and people start to leave, having other things to do for the night. Eddie, Steve, Buck, and Chris stay a little bit longer, helping Abuela and Pepa clean up, although Buck isn’t allowed to help and is pretty much relegated to sitting in the living room with Chris while he plays a game on Eddie’s phone. When that finally wraps up, they head back to Eddie’s, where Buck is left to anxiously await the fallout of his decision.
Buck can’t fall asleep.
It’s not that he’s not tired (he’s exhausted), or comfortable (he’s never more comfortable than when he’s in bed, being held by Eddie), or even just practicing good sleep hygiene (he hasn’t been on his phone for most of the day and had in fact, turned his phone over to Eddie again when it became clear that Maddie had actually been arrested and the angry texts started to roll in, and he’d followed the same pre-sleep routine he’s been following pretty much the entire time that he’s been staying with Eddie), he just can’t get his mind to turn off.
Earlier in the afternoon, after leaving the party, Buck hadn’t been able to contain his anxiety about what was going to happen with the Maddie situation. He’d been fidgety and on the edge of a panic attack despite everyone’s best efforts at distraction, and it had taken the combined efforts and calm reasoning of Eddie and Steve to convince him not to go back on his decision to press charges. Not knowing when exactly Maddie would be arrested had been a complete nightmare. Then Athena’s friend who was handling the situation stopped by to take his statement, which had opened a whole other can of worms.
Describing the full conversation, the context of his relationship with Maddie and how they’d gotten into the discussion that led to the slap to a stranger…it painted a picture of his sister that he hadn’t quite put together before. And that picture made him sick to his stomach. Because she’s only like this with him, as far as he can tell. So it has to be something about him that brings out the worst in people.
Her life would probably be perfectly fine right now, if he’d taken the truck bombing as a sign that he wasn’t meant to be a firefighter, wasn’t meant to be in LA and had started traveling again (an option he’d entertained pretty regularly when it felt like his leg was never going to heal quite right and his doctors kept proposing different surgeries and treatments that made it feel like recovery and rehab was never going to end) or killed himself (an option he hadn’t entertained all that much initially after the bombing except for on his lowest, loneliest days, and it had never gotten to the point where he felt like he was actually going to do anything). She’d still be with Chimney, still be pregnant, but wouldn’t have to deal with any of his bullshit and wouldn’t be facing criminal charges or potentially losing her job because of that.
The thought that he could kill himself now and instantly improve her life, and a bunch of other people’s lives too, has been circling in his head ever since, amongst a lot of other negative thoughts and feelings about how difficult he is, how many things he messes up, how he’s selfish and exhausting and stupid, and…
And his brain won’t shut up.
And he can’t sleep.
Eventually he gets out of bed, because he can feel himself tensing with building energy that has nowhere to go and he knows that even if he doesn’t actually start to toss and turn he’ll still likely wake Eddie up because he’ll notice the difference and start to worry, even in his sleep. Buck carefully disengages from Eddie’s arms, reassuring him that he’s just going to get a quick drink of water and to go back to sleep when he starts to stir at the movement.
He goes out to the living room and starts to pace in the dark.
He feels a little less anxious once he’s moving, but it doesn’t actually quiet his thoughts.
Freak. Selfish, stupid, freak.
He’s destroyed his entire family. He was born with one purpose. One job. To save Daniel. And he doesn’t really remember all the times that he’d been ‘put to work’ to do that with different procedures, since they’d all failed and Daniel had died by the time he was three and who remembers that time of their life, but he does occasionally get vague feelings or impressions that feel familiar. Like things had almost been OK back then because even though he wasn’t totally wanted, he still was a beacon of hope for his parents to save the son they had planned on. Sentiments that totally disappeared when nothing worked and Daniel died and Buck was nothing but an unwanted reminder of what they had lost. He’d never measure up to Daniel’s potential, in brains or looks or relationships or careers…in anything. Daniel was going to be everything, and Buck failed to save him which meant that Buck was nothing.
And even though Maddie hadn’t blamed him for that, at least not in the outward, visible way that their parents did, and they’d been close for years and rekindled their sibling-hood once things with Doug were over and done with, he still ruined things with her too. No good brother drives their sibling to physical violence and then responds by pressing charges. Something that could actually cost her her job, or even her future child (he’d adamantly told the officer taking his statement that if there are options for for mandated counseling and/or probation over any sort of punitive sentence that he wanted that for Maddie, but they’d made no promises) he’d destroyed her too.
There’s no going back. With any of the Buckleys. With the people he’s supposed to be connected to and take care of no matter what. He’s failed them, and hurt them and he’ll never be what they want or need. There is no fixing it.
You never should have been born.
Buck rationalizes not going back to the bedroom and waking Eddie up by telling himself that those aren’t actively suicidal thoughts. He continues to pace, trying to work his brain around the words.
He needed to have been born. At a minimum, his existence gave Maddie a safe place to run to from Doug. He could still be alive, and she could still be with him, or worse, dead herself, if he hadn’t been alive in Los Angeles to give her somewhere to land. And even though he’d failed saving Daniel, he has saved lives. As a SEAL and a firefighter. He did have at least some value when he was working for someone else and following their instructions.
Buck tries to tell himself that, pulling at his hair a little so that the sting will keep him close to the ground, but the problem is, he hasn’t been working for most of the year, and things have been fine. It’s not like he’s the only firefighter in LA after all. There’s always going to be someone to fill the gap. Just because he’s had some successes, doesn’t mean he’s special.
Maybe he’s served his purpose.
Maddie is safe, starting a new family. Now he’s the one endangering that.
He can maybe go back to work once his arm finishes healing but he’ll be surrounded by coworkers who hate and/or don’t trust him. And he knows from the earthquake a couple days ago and his response to treating the victim on the hiking trail that mentally…he’s not there. He can’t be an effective firefighter if he sees himself in every call, or has panic attacks at the drop of a hat.
He can’t be an effective firefighter, or an effective person really, if he can’t trust himself.
You should just kill yourself.
The knives are in the cupboard under the sink, behind Eddie’s plastic grocery bag filled with other plastic grocery bags. He wasn’t supposed to see it, but he’d been coming into the kitchen to refill his water while Steve had been wrapping up dinner prep and putting them away, and if the man had noticed Buck’s presence or thought he’d seen the knife placement, he hadn’t commented or made any indication that he’d move them later when Buck was out of the room again.
The pills are somewhere in the kitchen too. At least, all of the medication that they couldn’t get rid of when Buck’s issues became apparent is. Some of the more heavy-hitting drugs, like the hospital strength painkillers leftover from various surgeries, and sleeping pills that Eddie had never used after one trauma or another, are long gone, but Buck knows enough to know that medication doesn’t have to be prescription strength to kill you if you can manage to take enough of it.
Those would be easiest.
Buck can’t do either of them. He doesn’t want to. He knows he doesn’t. Just because he keeps thinking that he should be dead--keeps thinking of all the different ways he could achieve that--doesn’t mean he actually wants to be dead. He wouldn’t have asked for help or started therapy if he did. But the thoughts are persistent and loud and the only way he knows how to make them go away…
Well, technically he’s not supposed to do that.
Kill yourself.
Walk right out the door and take the truck up into the hills until you can drive it off of a cliff.
Kill yourself.
Pick up a bottle of tequila and go to the beach and walk out into the ocean.
Kill yourself.
Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself.
Buck doesn’t realize that he’s moved or done anything at all until the first hiss of pain--just a featherlight drag across the skin of his wrist--blossoms and drags him back into the present.
He looks down. He’s sitting on the kitchen floor. The cupboard under the sink is open. The plastic bag of bags has been tossed to one side and the knife block is sitting on the floor next to him. One of the knives is in one hand and the other wrist has a thin red cut close to the joint where hand meets arm. Dots of blood, growing in size, slowly, but growing nevertheless, pepper the length of the cut.
Buck drops the knife.
He hadn’t meant to do that. He hadn’t wanted to do that. Just like he hadn’t wanted to gather all the pills the night he called Steve, and he hadn’t really wanted to grab on to the hot stove. He just…never seems to be able to stop himself.
He thinks one thing, and doesn’t want to follow through but he can’t just do nothing so instead he does the next, slightly less bad thing on the list and hurts himself.
Buck is just that broken and fucked up.
Do it again.
A little deeper this time.
You can do it.
Down the road instead of across the street.
Do it.
Instead of cutting himself again, Buck stabs the knife back into the empty slot of the knife block. He grabs the block with one hand and scrambles to his feet. It’s barely even a second later that he steps over to the refrigerator, wrenches the freezer open so he can shove the knives inside, and slam the door shut again. For a moment he stares at the door, breathing heavily and tears running down his face.
He can’t do this. He’s broken and stupid and alone and a terrible person who had his sister arrested and now he’s fighting with himself over whether or not--
Wait.
He’s not alone.
He’s used to being alone, but he’s at Eddie’s house. Eddie is right down the hall (so is Chris, but that’s not a path Buck is willing to think about right now). Eddie is right down the hall, and he knows that Buck’s been struggling and he’s asked Buck to come to him if he needs help. Technically he made him promise to do it.
And Buck doesn’t want to be selfish and wake Eddie up when he’s been so good and dealing with Buck’s drama and histrionics for weeks, but he doesn’t want to break another promise and hurt himself again. And he doesn’t want to let Eddie down. Eddie somehow still cares for him despite all of the mess and baggage that he drags along behind him and letting him down might mean that changes, so Buck debates with himself for several more moments, trying to decide which choice would make Eddie more upset. Eventually he lands on going back down the hall to the master bedroom.
He sits on the edge of the bed next to Eddie’s stretched out form; his partner has fallen back asleep in his absence, and has sort of curled himself around Buck’s pillow.
It takes all of Buck’s strength to break the silence in the room.
“Eds?” He speaks just above a whisper and doesn’t dare reach out and touch his partner; he doesn’t want to startle him. “Eddie?”
Eddie stirs and groans a little. “Mm…Buck?” He asks as stretches and rolls, turning from facing the interior of the room towards Buck.
“I’m sorry.” He apologizes as Eddie scrubs a hand over his face. He can feel himself starting to cry again despite his best efforts to control himself. “I didn’t want to wake you up but--but I’m having a bad night and you and Steve made me promise to ask for help only I don’t know where my phone is to call Steve so that leaves you, and I would have probably just figured something else out and waited but I saw Steve put the knives away earlier and I can’t stop thinking, and I was trying to make it stop before I even realized what I was doing, but I didn’t want to do that so now the knives are in the freezer and--,”
“Hey, hey, slow down, Ev. It’s OK. Take a couple breaths for me.” Eddie scoots into a sitting position and places his hands on Buck’s shoulders. He angles his head, searching to meet Buck’s eyes. “You did exactly the right thing, hermoso, and we’ll figure this out, OK? You’re doing good.”
“I’m sorry.” Buck repeats with a slight hiccup. His heart wants to lean into Eddie’s acceptance and comfort, but his mind is still racing, telling him that he’s wrong and messing things up more, and he can’t quite reconcile the two and just settle.
“You don’t need to apologize. I wanted you to wake me up when you felt like this, remember?”
Buck lets several beats pass as he tries to calm himself down again. He knows that, even though he hasn’t really talked about it with Jules yet or done any sort of real evaluation, that anxiety has been controlling the majority of his thoughts for most of the night. He knows he hasn’t been all that rational, and even though he doesn’t disagree with all of the things he’s thought about himself he knows he should be writing pretty much all of them in the tracking notebook he’d bought, which means Jules is probably going to be trying to convince him that they aren’t accurate either. So he’s anxious, and he’s wrong, and he’s wasted a whole night and woken Eddie up over it, among other things. “I feel so stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.” Eddie says. He drops his grip on Buck’s shoulders, reaching for his hands instead. Buck hisses as Eddie’s thumb brushes against the cut on his wrist, and Eddie frowns, turning it over in his lap. “Is this what you meant by trying to make it stop?” He asks, voice gentle.
Buck looks down. He doesn’t need to see the disappointment in Eddie’s face about this. He nods. “Pain helps. Like a hard reset. But I know it’s not good and when I realized I had started I threw the knives in the freezer and came in here.”
“And I am so proud of you for that, Ev.”
Buck can’t help himself, and he scoffs a little. There’s nothing to be proud of. He completely freaked out and hurt himself, and only tried to get help after the fact. Nothing about that is good.
“Hey, look at me.” Eddie squeezes the non-injured wrist once alongside his gentle command. He waits for Buck to look up before he speaks again. “I mean it, Buck. I’m proud of you. I know you’re having a hard time feeling like you can interrupt or come to us to ask for help when you need it, and it wasn’t all that long ago that you had a bad night that you suffered through entirely on your own and didn’t tell any of us about until your therapist made it a homework assignment. And no one expects you to just turn things around and change the habits you’ve had for years right away, but the fact that you’re trying at all is a big deal.
“I hate that you’re feeling so horribly, but the fact that you realized you were struggling and trusted yourself, and me, enough to ask for help... Of course I’m proud of that.” Eddie pauses, probably waiting for Buck to respond, but Buck doesn’t know what to say and he still not all that sure that he’s done anything to be proud of so he stays quiet, and Eddie eventually speaks again, looking down at the cut on Buck’s wrist. The blood is mostly clotted and dry, but a little smeared from where Eddie had touched it. “This doesn’t look too bad at all. Not deep, it’s already clotted…We should put a bandage over it just to keep it clean, but for something you did with a kitchen knife…it could be worse.”
“I--the moment it started to sting and I realized what I was doing I stopped.”
Eddie nods. “Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you tonight? Or we can put a pin in that and just figure out what will help you feel more comfortable and safe right now?”
“I think--I mean--,” Buck cuts himself off twice. He still feels a little bit scattered and needs to take an extra moment to put a coherent thought together. “No, I don’t feel great right now but…you’re here, so I know I’m safe. I’m always safe with you.” He pulls one hand out of Eddie’s to wipe at his face again. Now that his tears have slowed, his face is starting to feel tacky and gross. “I just…I know I was super anxious about the whole Maddie thing and what’s going to happen and I don’t think--I mean, I’m pretty sure that if I said exactly what I was thinking to you or Steve or Jules, you’d tell me all the ways it’s not true. And I don’t really know how to feel about that but I don’t really want to talk about it right now either.”
“OK.” Eddie accepts the answer without protest, and Buck is a little surprised. Even though he’d been given the option of talking or not, he kind of would have thought Eddie (or anyone else he might have woken up in the middle of the night) would have tried harder to get answers. “I’m going to go grab something from the first aid kit to clean and cover that cut.” The thumb of the hand that’s still holding Buck’s sweeps gently back and forth. “It should only take me a minute. Do you want to come with me or are you OK here?”
Again with the options. Buck can’t quite figure out why he’s being so accommodating and gentle when he’s being disturbed and put upon. “I can wait here.” He answers; he feels mostly steady now. HIs thoughts aren’t buzzing so loudly or frenetically, and he kind of feels pathetic for getting so worked up in the first place. He’s 28 years old. A firefighter. A former Navy SEAL for fuck’s sake. He should be able to manage some anxiety.
Eddie squeezes his hand. “OK. I’ll be right back then. Think about what else might help you feel a bit better while I’m gone.” He edges around Buck to slide off the bed and pads out of the room near silently.
In his absence, Buck looks down at his hands in his lap, trying to do what Eddie asked of him and think of something that might help him feel at least the smallest bit better. He can’t think of anything. Much like with Jules’ suggestion to do things solely for himself, Buck doesnt really know where to begin. It seems somehow ridiculous (surely other, normal people don’t have a hard time in knowing what might soothe them or improve their mood, and don’t struggle to come up with self-care activities) but he just…has spent so much more time trying to keep up with and keep his place in other people’s lives that he doesn’t really think about his needs or wants on that level all that much. The reference point for him is missing.
He mindlessly starts to pick at his nails and cuticles, but almost immediately catches himself. It’s mild, compared to taking a knife to his wrist, but he’s not supposed to do that either.
Buck shifts to sit on his hands.
Self-care, he prompts himself. He needs to think about treating himself well, not let himself fall into his bad habits.
Jules had said he could choose small things. A long shower. A cupcake. Only, the only time a shower feels particularly satisfying or special is when he’s coming off of a long shift and he gets to scrub down and wash it all down the drain, and he hasn’t had much of an appetite for his regular meals, let alone something extra and rich or sugary like a cupcake. Jules had also said he could try a new activity or go see a movie or something else a bit bigger but… His last trip to the movies had been a disaster of near-epic proportions, and the activities and hobbies he usually enjoys have been physical, and until he actually starts recovering from his injuries instead of accumulating more… it feels like that’s pretty much out too.
“All right. Back.” Eddie’s voice cuts through his pathetic attempt at brainstorming and Buck looks up. His partner walks back into the room with a couple of things in his hand (definitely more than just the bandaid Buck would have slapped over the cut) and sits back down next to him. He drops his supplies down onto the mattress, and almost instantly picks one of the small square packages up again, tearing it at the corner with his teeth. “Can I see your wrist again?”
Buck pulls that hand out from under his thigh and holds it out for Eddie to take gently in one hand while he pulls a small white wipe from the packet.
“Slight sting.” With his other hand, Eddie swipes the alcohol pad over the cut. Buck watches as he works; the sting Eddie warned for barely registers, but he watches the majority of the blood get wiped away with a couple sweeps over the surface. Eddie then discards the wipe on the bedside table, and grabs the bandage he’d brought. He places the square, much larger than the size of the cut, with care, then lifts Buck’s hand up. He presses a gentle kiss to the covered wound and then meets Buck’s gaze again. “There you go. All set.”
“Thanks.” Buck doesn’t smile--this doesn’t feel like the type of scenario where he can--but he does his best to show Eddie that he appreciates the care. Eddie doesn’t have to be so soft and understanding with him, but for some reason he is, and it’s helping Buck resettle into his skin and feel like he can breathe again.
“Anytime, hermoso.” Eddie puts the rest of his trash for later onto the nightstand and turns back. “So what are you thinking now? What do you need?”
“I don’t know.” Buck admits. “I was trying to think about my homework from Jules, about doing things for me but…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Which is dumb right? What kind of idiot can’t find something fun that they want to do?”
“First of all, it’s not dumb.” Eddie says. “Where’s your notebook?”
Buck winces. “That wasn’t even really about me.” He protests halfheartedly. The notebook is his homework, sure, and he’d asked Eddie and Steve for help keeping him on track with it, but since he’s started doing it, he’s found it challenging. Not the writing necessarily, but having to see everything in one place. Every time he has to go into the book he sees every negative thing about himself in bold, black and white print, staring back up at him, and it’s hard to look at.
“Yes it was.” Eddie gives him a pointed look. “And even if it wasn’t, you’ve said some other things that should go in there.”
Buck sighs; it’s not a fight he’s going to win, and he doesn’t even really want to try. It wouldn’t be worth it and he’s not against putting in the work that Jules’ has asked of him, he just…doesn’t totally get what it’s going to accomplish or what the point is going to be. “I think I left it out in the living room.”
“OK. We’ll take care of that later.” Eddie assents. “But it’s not dumb to not know what to do. I had to do something pretty similar back when I was first getting help, back in El Paso. I was so focused on providing for Chris and trying to ignore everything that was going wrong, and proving to my parents that I wasn’t a complete failure, that I never did anything to take care of myself, and the counselor I ended up seeing told me that I had to. But I had pretty much stopped doing things for me the minute the pregnancy test turned positive and I had no idea where to start.”
Eddie had told him about getting help after being discharged, and how it had led to him moving to LA and becoming a firefighter, but he doesn’t talk about the details of it much, so this is news to Buck. “What did you end up doing?”
Eddie’s lips quirk up in a wry smirk. “I quit all my jobs, moved to LA, and joined the fire department.”
Buck snorts. “That…might be a little extreme.”
“Well, I started by joining an MMA gym and starting to read books that didn’t feature talking animals as protagonists.” Eddie admits. “But doing smaller things like that for me, and doing the work with the counselor led to me realizing that I wasn’t stuck where I was and could make some real changes without the world falling apart.”
“What if I can’t think of something small?”
“I mean…you like to research, right?” Eddie waits for Buck to nod, even though it’s really a rhetorical question. Everyone who’s known Buck for more than a day knows he loves to do random deep dives and searches online. “So maybe we can just start searching for things online? Make a list of the things that stick out to you and start making plans to try some of them out?”
It’s not a bad idea. It’s actually a pretty good one. He might need a little help, considering his screen issues,currently, but it could be a good thing to have a second person brainstorming with him, just to talk things out with a little bit more. “Yeah. That’d be good.”
“Then we’ll do that.”
“Look! That stand has waffles with ice cream!” Chris crows, pointing a few stands ahead of them. “We should do that for breakfast.” He starts to walk down the market aisle, not bothering to check if Buck and Eddie are behind him.
Eddie immediately starts after him so he doesn’t get swallowed up in the crowd of market-goers, and because he’s holding Buck’s hand, Buck has no choice but to follow. “Chris, mijo, I said we’d get breakfast here. Ice cream is not breakfast.”
“Waffles are.” Chris pauses his steps and looks back over his shoulder, eyes mostly full of sass.
When Eddie presses his lips together, Buck decides to keep his own mouth shut about all the diners he’s come across over his travels that serve waffles with a choice of ice cream on their breakfast menu. They’d decided to come to the farmers market after stumbling across it in their initial search of things to do around LA that Buck might want to try; the market itself isn’t the activity of choice but the website had listed a couple of vendors that will have ingredients or products that he’s interested in trying, and he’d reasoned that if treating himself to a cupcake would have counted for his therapy homework, then so would buying himself some artisanally flavored honeys. With the weather set to be nice, they’d decided that walking around the market as a family would be a relatively relaxing way to spend the morning. Especially now that they’ve put Buck’s phone on do-not-disturb mode.
“If you’re hungry by the time we’re leaving the market we can maybe come back around and get a waffle with some ice cream.” Eddie reasons. “But you have to have something that’s not totally made of sugar first. Maybe that even has a fruit or a vegetable in it.”
Chris groans and rolls his eyes. “Da-ad.”
“Chr-is.” Eddie echoes. “Don’t worry, there are plenty of places to choose from around here. I’m sure you’ll be able to find something.”
“Yeah.” Buck nods. “I think I read something about a place that makes breakfast sandwiches on doughnuts instead of bagels or English muffins. Maybe you and I could split one of those.”
Chris thinks over this suggestion for a moment before agreeing. “Yeah, that could be good. Let’s find those.” He turns around and starts walking again, initial destination forgotten, but clearly on the hunt.
Buck and Eddie share a look and before following close behind. “Stick with us please, mijo.” Eddie instructs.
The trio walks through the market at a comfortably slow pace. They’re early enough that the crowds aren’t too bad yet, and it’s easy enough for them to stop and get to the front of a stall if something catches anyone’s attention. As they walk they accumulate a few purchases--a few heads of lettuce and other fresh vegetables they can use throughout the week for dinners, a couple bars of soap and some lotion made from goat’s milk, and several types of the honey that had initially caught Buck’s eye online. They also find the breakfast sandwich place Buck had mentioned, and although Eddie initially balks when he sees that it’s not just plain doughnuts being used for the sandwiches, but glazed, and chocolate frosted, and even sprinkled, and he decides to be very boring and order his sandwich on a bagel instead, he does take a bite off of the one that Buck and Chris share built on a glazed doughnut, and is pleasantly surprised on how the flavors come together.
After they eat, they keep meandering and shopping. The market is large, and they’re in no particular rush. That said, Chris’ energy is starting to flag a little by mid-morning, and Buck is considering making an offer to carry him for a little bit to give him a break for a while, when the boy freezes mid-step and his eyes widen with excitement. “Dad, Buck, look!” He shouts and points ahead towards a large lawn. There’s a big awning set up and several short temporarily fenced in areas. The makeshift enclosures are filled with animals--mostly dogs--but even at a distance Buck can see some cats and possibly some hutches that hold rabbits and other smaller animals. A banner staked into the ground announces that it’s a local animal shelter’s annual adoption event.
That had not been something he and Eddie had spotted when browsing the market’s website. If they had, Buck thinks wryly, Eddie would have definitely printed off a map of the market so they could avoid bringing Chris anywhere near it. The almost-nine-year-old has been angling for a pet (preferably a dog) since a little before Shannon had passed, Eddie has been resisting because their work hours make animal care a bit of a challenge, and they’ve been at a stalemate. Coming across this is sure to kickstart the begging. And probably the puppy-dog eyes.
From Christopher, not the dogs.
Sure enough… “Can we go over and see the animals? Please, please, please?”
Buck watches Eddie closely, and while Chris probably can’t see the consternation in his dad’s eyes, it’s not hard for Buck to see that he’s conflicted. He doesn’t want to say no. The problem is, if they go over, Chris is going to want to leave with a pet, and Buck can’t really imagine Eddie’s resolve breaking down enough to say yes to that, which means they’ll have to upset him when they leave. “Chris, mijo, we’ve talked about this, yeah? How it wouldn’t be fair for us to get a dog because of how often we’re out of the house?”
“We don't have to get one, I just want to say hi and pet them.” Chris counters.
“Don’t you think it might be hard to say goodbye to them if we go over, buddy?” Buck asks. Personally, he’s on Chris’ side and would love to go over and get some animal cuddles, but even as an adult he knows he’ll struggle to walk away without adopting one of the animals. And he won’t immediately get attached the way that Chris might. But even wanting to go over, he wants to help support Eddie so he doesn’t have to be the bad guy with his son more, so he tries to reason with Christopher, hoping that the empathetic boy might understand what he’s getting at.
Christopher shakes his head. “I think it’s hard and lonely for them to live in a shelter. And they need lots of pets to be happy and get adopted by the other people here. And that we could at least do that and help make some of them happy.”
And damn if it isn’t hard to dispute such an earnest argument.
Eddie sighs. “You cannot start begging and asking to take any of them home.” He instructs firmly. “And you need to listen to all the volunteers about what animals it’s OK to say hi to, OK? Don’t pet anyone without permission.”
Chris cheers and thanks them before turning and rushing towards the lawn, energy entirely rejuvenated. Buck and Eddie follow at a more sedate pace, since this area of the market doesn’t have the same thick crowds as the stalls do, and Eddie grabs Buck’s hand again as they walk.
“This is gonna end in tears, isn’t it?”
“Probably.” Buck agrees.
To Buck’s (and probably Eddie’s) surprise, Chris doesn’t immediately end up trying to gain access to one of the fenced areas that is housing puppies or even any of the older dogs, and instead goes a little bit further on the lawn to an area under the awning that isn’t being crowded by other people quite as much. Instead there’s just a shelter volunteer, sitting on the ground amidst a veritable kindle of kittens of several different colors, breeds, and levels of fluffiness. Some are crawling across the volunteer’s lap, but most are just exploring their makeshift kennel and playing with each other, rolling around and pouncing in the grass.
“Hi folks!” The shelter volunteer greets with a smile. “How can I help you today?”
“Can we say hi to your kittens please?” Chris asks. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and rebalances on his crutches.
“You sure can.” The volunteer starts to gently pluck the kittens off of her lap and rehome them onto other spaces on the ground nearby. Once her legs are clear she moves to stand. “Do you want to come in? They’re very friendly.”
Chris appears awed. “Can I?”
“Of course! Your dads can come in too if they want.”
The volunteer opens a small gate in the fencing, allowing Chris entrance. She then holds it open a few moments longer, waiting to see if Buck or Eddie will join him. Buck is a little caught up in the flush of warmth that courses through him at being called Christopher’s dad, even if it’s not the first time he’s heard it before, so he doesn’t move right away, but after a beat passes Eddie nudges him softly. “Go on, Ev. I know you want to say hi too.”
Buck doesn’t have to be told twice. As much as he doesn’t want to put himself through the heartache of meeting a potential fluffy friend and having to say goodbye to them when it’s time to leave, the kittens that Chris was drawn to are…adorable. And kind of impossible to resist. He follows Christopher in, watching while Chris takes a seat in an empty space on the ground, setting his crutches to the side.
For a moment Buck simply stands and watches. Behind him Eddie steps in and the volunteer shuts the gate again. Chris is patient, and lets the kittens come to him. He’s almost immediately accosted by a tortoise-colored shorthair, and he giggles as he lets the cat sniff his hand, tickled by its whiskers. The kitten bumps its head against Chris’ hand, encouraging him to start petting, which he does with gusto. Buck is close to pulling out his phone to take pictures (it’s far too cute not to document, especially when the cat stretches its paws up Chris’ chest to nudge its head against his chin) when he starts to feel a soft tugging on his pants, accompanied by tiny little pinpricks. The sensation is on his left leg, climbing upwards. When Buck looks down, he sees two fluffy orange kittens making their ascent by digging little claws through his jeans.
Buck’s smile grows exponentially. He’s not sure if he should reach down to stop them from climbing his leg like a tree trunk--they could fall and cats are good at landing but they’re tiny and he’s all leg so that could be a long way down--or just wait and see where they’re trying to go, but they’re moving at a good enough speed that he doesn’t really have to decide. The first one reaches his torso, and immediately starts to inch its way Mission Impossible style up and over his forearm in its sling; the second one, only a few seconds behind, follows suit. With the two cats resting in the crook of his arm, at least for the time being, Buck relaxes in the knowledge that they won’t fall, and he’s able to take a better look at them.
They’re practically identical, covered in fluffy orange fur, with little nubs where their tails should be. The main difference he can see between the two is that one has vibrant green eyes, and one has eyes that are maybe green, but clouded over.
“Hey there, little guys.” He coos. “What made you want to come and see me?” He lowers himself to the ground, just in case. If they want to get down, a shorter distance would definitely be better. The kitten with the cloudy eyes mewls in a squeaky tone at him. Buck chuckles, holding a single finger to the kitten’s nose, figuring that his whole hand might be overwhelming. They’re so tiny. “You got a lot to say there, buddy? You wanted someone to talk to?” It squeaks again, and its partner in crime echoes the sentiment.
The shelter volunteer laughs, crouching down next to him. “I see you’ve met Beans and Toast.”
“They’re littermates?” Buck asks, not taking his eyes off the kittens. Well, one of them. The one with cloudy eyes starts to nuzzle aggressively with his hand, while the other, seemingly satisfied that their sibling is happy, proceeds to start exploring again, stretching up his chest and digging their claws in to pull themselves up onto his shoulders. Buck has to hunch his posture a little to give them a platform to stand on.
“Yep. Brother and sister. Beans is the one making herself at home in your arm there; Toast is…exploring the rest of you.”
“How come they don’t have tails?” Chris asks from across the way. He’s still petting the kitten in his lap, but looking over to see what’s happening with Buck.
“That’s one of the traits of their breed.” The volunteer answers. “They came from a litter of American Bobtails. Bobtails tend not to have long tails like a lot of other cats do. But they’re very friendly and playful.”
Toast’s head butts into Buck’s cheek. “I’m sensing that.” He briefly pulls his hand away from Beans to reach up and scratch under Toast’s chin for a moment.
“The rest of their litter’s been adopted, but it’s been a little bit harder to find a placement for them, since they’re a bonded pair.”
Buck tries not to let his reaction show on his face. To hear that the two little kittens who for some reason saw him and thought he was a tree worth climbing, and are purring happily nestled in his arm and rubbing around his neck, are having a hard time getting placed is a little devastating. They’re sweet and adorable and deserve to have the best home with loving people and lots of cozy nooks to sleep in. The loft wouldn’t be all that good for them, but Eddie’s house with its--
He has to stop himself from thinking about that.
They aren’t here to adopt a single pet, let alone two. They’d warned Chris not to get attached and as an adult he needs to be setting an example, not falling down the rabbit hole of imagining sitting on the couch for a movie night, squished under a blanket with Chris and Eddie with two orange fluff balls curled up and snuggling on their laps.
“What’s a bonded pair?” The cat on Chris’ lap has climbed off, so the boy starts making his way across the grass to get a closer look at these other kittens.
“It means they’re very close to each other, and love each other a lot.” Buck explains. “So they don’t spend a lot of time apart, and need to go to the same home instead of being separated.”
“That’s right.” The volunteer nods, and then continues to speak, mostly aiming her words towards Chris, who is now reaching out to gently pet Beans. “Beans here was born blind, that’s why her eyes are a little cloudy, and ever since they were little babies, Toast has stuck by her side, helping her get around and making sure she stays safe.”
As if this wasn’t pulling at his heartstrings enough. Of course one of the kittens is blind. Leaving is going to suck.
Buck tries to remind himself that he’s not in a good place to adopt a cat. Or two. Even if things were different and he were healthy and living at home, he still doesn’t lead a life that’s all that pet-friendly. Sure, cats are much more independent than dogs and house-trained so they can be left alone for longer periods of time and with things like an automatic feeder would be OK during a longer shift but…it’s still not really fair to an animal to leave them alone for a full day or longer. Pets need and deserve companionship.
Besides, things aren’t different and he’s not healthy and living at home. He can’t just adopt some pets while he’s a guest in Eddie’s house and expect him to accommodate them and be OK with that. He’s already having to accommodate and take care of Buck.
And it’s not like he’s all that good at taking care of things. Or like his life is stable. He’s got one, maybe two trials to think about now, and he’s not exactly mentally solid at the moment; he spends most of his time either trying to manage incredible moments of anxiety, or drowning under crushing waves of worthlessness and sadness. He’s not even really taking care of himself right now, he can’t put other living creatures under his care.
Even if--especially if--he might also have a baby on the way.
No. He’s not in the place to adopt these cats and he can’t let himself think otherwise. Even if it is crushing his heart a little to think about putting them back down onto the grass and letting them go.
“Were you folks looking to find a pet today?” The volunteer’s question isn’t loaded or searching, or even hopeful really, but it hits Buck in the gut anyways that they’re going to be saying no and letting her down.
“No, Chris here just wanted to--,”
“We could be convinced.” Eddie speaks at the same time that Buck starts to deny her, and it takes Buck a moment to realize what his partner has said, and then it’s only the kitten that’s still balancing delicately on his neck that keeps him from whirling around to look at him and share his confusion. “You said these two are available?” Buck feels Eddie crouch down behind him and realizes he’s introducing himself to Toast.
“They are. There’s a small application for you to fill out, but the shelter runners are reviewing everything today on the spot so families can bring their new furry friends straight home, and as part of this event the adoption fees are being halved.”
“And they’re as up-to-date as they can be on all of their shots and things?” Eddie asks, surprising Buck even further. Eddie had been clear--more than clear--before they’d come over to the adoption fair that they weren’t walking away with a pet. Now he’s talking like they might adopt two? Buck doesn’t understand where the sudden change of mind has come from.
“They’ve been spayed and neutered, respectively, and have taken all of their shots like champs so far. They’re also microchipped, just in case.” The volunteer answers. “Would you like me to get you some of our paperwork and an application to look over?”
“That would be great, thanks.” Buck can hear the smile in Eddie’s voice and his confusion only grows more. He’s just…changed his mind and is totally happy about it? Buck can’t remember him ever even talking about cats.
“I’ll be right back.” The volunteer gets to her feet and exits the enclosure, leaving the trio behind.
Chris seems happy and enthralled to keep giving affection to the two cats, splitting his attention pretty evenly between Beans and Toast now that he’s close enough, and barely a moment passes between the volunteer leaving and Eddie coming around from behind Buck to sit next to him. He too starts to play with the kittens.
“Eds, what’s going on?” Buck asks, just above a whisper. He knows he can’t keep Chris from hearing the conversation at this point, but he doesn’t want to scare the kittens, or draw the attention of anyone around--especially the volunteers and people from the shelter. “I’m pretty sure ten minutes ago you were saying we weren’t leaving here with any pets.”
Eddie smiles at Toast who meows at him in a high squeak, directly in Buck’s ear, and tickles at his head with a finger. “A guy can’t change his mind?”
“A guy can.” Buck agrees. “You though? Your mind is usually pretty made up.”
“That was before we met these little adventurers.” Eddie glances over his shoulder at Christopher. “What do you say, bud? I know you’ve kind of been angling for a dog, but would a couple of cats be OK instead?”
Chris does not control his volume in his excitement, and he bounces a little where he sits. “Really?!”
Eddie nods. “Really. I think these two would fit right in at our house.”
“Eddie, what are you talking about?” Buck is not reassured by Eddie’s resolute discussion with Christopher. He mostly just feels lost. Eddie hasn’t wanted pets before today, Chris isn’t exactly old enough to take care of them on his own or anything, and Buck…as much as he wants to take them home and snuggle them forever, it’s not his home and he won’t be any good for them.
He’s not any good for anybody.
“You’ve never said anything about wanting a cat, let alone two.” Buck continues. “You’ve had an argument for pretty much every pet that Chris has proposed. How do you--Why do you suddenly want two kittens?”
And Eddie shrugs, like it’s something simple. “Because you want them.”
“What?”
“Are you really going to tell me that you didn’t fall in love with these little guys the second they started climbing up your leg?” Eddie raises an eyebrow.
“Of course I did, but…you don’t want pets. And--and I don’t actually live with you. You can’t just adopt cats because your temporary house guest wants them.”
“One, I’m an adult and I can pretty much do whatever I want in regards to bringing pets into the house.” Eddie begins. “Two, you’re not a guest. And there’s nothing temporary about you living with us.”
“But--,”
Eddie cuts his protest off quickly. “I know I first asked you to stay because of your arm, but do you really think I’m going to let you move back to that stupid loft when everything is said and done? You’re my partner. You’re raising Christopher with me. You’re a part of our family, and our household, and I have no reason to think any of that’s going to change. Do you?”
“Well, no, but--,”
“Good.” Eddie cuts him off again, leaning forward and pressing a quick kiss on Buck’s lips. “Now three. These two little kittens climbed up into your arms, and I got to see a smile on your face that was so big and genuine…I haven’t seen you light up like that or so happy in weeks. If taking in some cats is going to help bring a little happiness back into your life, I’ll adopt the whole damn shelter.”
Buck feels himself start to tear up. It’s not fair. He wants to just accept it all and say yes but he can’t. He doesn’t deserve it, and he’ll just fuck it up somehow. “It’s not a good idea, Eds. I’d love if we could do it but they’re so small, and--and delicate and good, and I’m not…I can’t take care of anything like that.”
“Buck. Evan. Think about what you just said. You’re the kindest, gentlest person I know. You are on a pretty short list of people that I trust to take care of my son. You are more than qualified and capable to be a cat-dad.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say, but he knows his consternation is still written across his face because Eddie’s gaze seems to soften a little further and he keeps talking.
“I know with how you’ve been feeling lately, and with everything that you’re going through, it’s easy to doubt yourself, but I promise, I wouldn’t suggest this if I thought for a second that you couldn’t handle it. And I really think it could be good for you. Didn’t you tell me once that the frequency of cat’s purring does something to accelerate bone healing? I mean…that alone makes them seem like an ideal pet for us.”
“That’s just a theory.” Buck sniffs and wipes at his face to get rid of the couple of tears that have slipped out.
“Even so…I bet that little motor feels pretty good rattling against your arm.” He scratches at Beans, who is still purring, laid out in the crook of Buck’s sling and falling asleep. “Look, if you’re really against it, we won’t adopt them, but just take a moment and think about it. Forget about what you think you should say and just think about what you want. Do you want to bring Beans and Toast home?”
Buck looks down at the content kitten in his arm, and then does his best to turn and look at the one sitting on his shoulder without disturbing him. He does want them. So, so much. They’re adorable and for some reason they like him, and he can kind of imagine being able to run his fingers through their fur when things aren’t feeling quite right and the idea of that seems so comforting… If Eddie is really on board, and Chris is OK with it…if they’re really going to do it together… “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Eddie smiles, leans forward and kisses him again. “Then we’re bringing them home.
Chapter 28
Notes:
Hey everyone, thanks for your kudos and comments, as well as your patience while waiting for this update. I'm participating in a big bang for the fandom so I'm splitting my writing time between that fic and this one to make sure that I meet all the deadlines.
This chapter features a therapy session that focuses a lot on Buck's encounters with Dr. Wells, so if that is a subject that triggers you please be aware of that.
Additionally, there is a traffic stop that takes place in this chapter and goes beyond the 'license and registration' routine. I don't believe anything depicted is that far outside of the scope of what we've seen on the show or beyond what I've already tagged for, including the abuses of power, but if you read and feel like there's anything additional I should tag for in light of this scene, please let me know.
Chapter Text
“So I got your message in the practice’s patient portal.” Jules begins after their initial greetings are dispensed with at the start of the appointment. “You’ve had an eventful couple of days. Do you want to address some of that, or would you rather we start by talking about something else?”
Even though Jules has told him a few times now that therapy is for him, and they’ll focus on what he wants to, Buck is still surprised that they give him a choice. He can’t really imagine sitting in their place, finding out a client had their sister arrested and not demanding the whole story. But, he supposes, that’s why Jules is the therapist, and he’s the firefighter. Or, will be the firefighter, if he ever actually heals enough without earning another injury in the process. In any case, Jules has offered him the choice and now he has to think about what he’s actually ready to talk about. Not that he actually knows.
He’d only sent a message to the patient portal the day before with the intention of confirming that they’d be having their Monday morning appointment virtually instead of in the office, but Eddie had been nearby and lightly suggested that updating Jules about what had been happening with Maddie and everything would be easier over text and that would let them have better conversations during the appointment, and Buck hadn’t really been able to argue with that.
That doesn’t mean he actually wants to talk about it. But he also doesn’t know what he’d feel good talking about, or at least a topic that feels approachable on his laundry list of issues, and he knows that after Saturday night, and then a fairly significant panic attack yesterday afternoon after they’d gotten home from adopting Beans and Toast (and stopping by the pet store to pick up all sorts of necessary, and perhaps some unnecessary but very cute, supplies for the two kittens) and Buck had taken his phone off of do-not-disturb mode to find a histrionic voicemail from Maddie, and an angry one from his parents that was supplemented by a lot of angry text messages, that Eddie is worried about him. Or, more worried. It’s not like he’s been the picture of a healthy partner lately.
“We, uh, we can start with that I guess.” Buck glances down at the fidget cube he’s fiddling with in his hand. He’s barely been without it since Jules had given it to him at their last appointment. “It’s basically just what I said in the message. Maddie hit me, and everyone thought I should press charges, so I did.”
“She hit you out of the blue?” Jules prompts. There’s no judgment on their face, no assumptions about what he is or is not saying, but it still feels like he’s been caught out in something. He’s not sure why or what that means.
“Not--not exactly. We were talking. Fighting, I guess. After things at the station last week and her…non-apology breakfast basket, she was supposed to be giving me space until I decided I was ready to try and talk to her again, but she was at my Medal of Valor ceremony on Saturday and then at the party Eddie and his Abuela were throwing me afterwards, and she took the opportunity to try and talk to me and at first I was too anxious to respond, which she didn’t take well.”
He clocks what is becoming a familiar motion of Jules jotting down a note. “I don’t want us to go on too far of a tangent, but I know anxiety is one of the overarching things that you’re struggling with. Would you say that it regularly impacts your ability to talk with people or do the things you want to do?”
Buck briefly abandons his fidget toy to reach up and scratch behind his ear. Talking about his anxiety tends to make him more anxious; he’s supposed to be able to manage these things, and he knows he’s failing at it, and that’s just another way he’s not good enough, but he tries to swallow back those feelings and force them down so he can just answer, because that’s why he’s here. To get better at it. “Lately, yeah. I-I freeze a lot. I’ve always stuttered a bit when I’m trying to find the right words but it-it’s maybe getting worse? And I’ve had a few panic attacks.” More than a few, but who’s counting?
“OK. I want to circle back to that later in our appointment,” Jules says, “but for now let’s get back to what happened with Maddie. What did she want to say to you?”
“Mostly the same things that she wanted to say at the station. That I haven’t been making good choices, and that people are trying to turn me against her.”
“Do you think there’s any truth to what she’s saying?”
“I-I think the only reason she thinks my choices aren’t good is because they aren’t the ones she wants me to be making.”
“OK. Can you tell me more about that?”
Buck sighs. “We first started fighting after the bombing that injured my leg. She didn’t want me to go back to being a firefighter, but it’s one of two jobs I’ve ever had that made me feel like I have a purpose, so I wasn’t willing to back down on that. By the time I was actually back at work we had an unspoken truce to just not bring any of it up, but then she got pregnant and my parents came to visit and she…she didn’t realize that my parents and I don’t get along or have a relationship to speak of, and she thinks that I should be trying to apologize to them and do whatever they want so we can all be one big happy family. As if we ever were one to begin with.”
“Why does she think you should apologize to your parents?”
“That’s…complicated.” Buck hedges. It’s not that he doesn’t think he can go into it--talking about stuff with his parents is a lot easier than things with Maddie given how long it’s been going on and how expected their behavior is--but it feels so unfocused. He talks about one thing and it brings up another, which brings up another, which brings up another. But Jules doesn’t dissuade him or tell him to go back and focus on things with Maddie, so he charges ahead and starts to explain. “I’m a savior sibling. My parents only had me because my brother had leukemia. They couldn’t find a match for the donations he needed, so they engineered one in a lab. After I was born, they used me in a bunch of different procedures, but…they didn’t work. Daniel died. My parents blame me.”
“And your sister thinks you should apologize because your brother succumbed to his illness?”
“She didn’t say that exactly. More that…She thinks I don’t make enough effort to please or get along with them. And because I decided that I don’t want to see them anymore, even though they also said that they don’t want to see me, that I’m the one not trying and I’m the one making things hard.”
Jules takes more notes. “That’s a lot of responsibility to lay on one person’s shoulders. Especially when there’s a complex history.”
“It’s…what it is.” Buck shrugs. He grabs the fidget toy off of the bed where he’d dropped it. “If I’m not doing what people want or expect, I’m wrong. The problem.”
“And in this argument on Saturday, is that what Maddie was saying?”
“Sort of. She was--She was mostly focused on me pressing charges against Dr. Wells.”
Jules nods. “You mentioned at your last appointment that she doesn’t believe you were assaulted?”
Buck shakes his head. “She--she thinks that I want attention. And that I’m lying now because I got caught and didn’t want to get into trouble. She keeps telling me that I need to drop the charges and let everything go because I’m going to ruin people’s lives and make it harder for real victims to get justice.”
“OK, well…that’s a lot to unpack.” Jules frowns; Buck mostly notices because they’ve had a very good poker face up until now. “Do you know why she thinks you’d be lying?”
“I--I used to have a lot of sex. A lot. I was always safe, but I didn’t really care about who my partner was as long as they wanted to be with me, and I…I wasn’t always discreet. I gave it all up during my probie year at the fire department, when it almost cost me my job and--and some…experiences made me grow up a bit, but I…I have a reputation. Even though I’ve changed, to a lot of people I’m still the station slut, and--and there’s no way I wouldn’t want to sleep with someone like Wells.”
“OK. There are few things I’d like to address there. First, and I’m sure that you have heard this from others, but I want to reiterate it to you, is that your past sexual behavior does not negate your ability to consent in future encounters. You are always allowed to say no, regardless of past interest, or even past encounters. Past sexual behavior is also not something that other people can use to justify or invalidate your experience with your assault. The behavior you just described to me was all consensual, the encounter with Dr. Wells was not.
“Second, and I believe this is also something that you’ve been told but that bears repeating, is that Dr. Wells was not allowed to sleep with you. Full stop. You were her patient and that makes what she did against the law.”
“I--I do know all of that. But…all Maddie and my coworkers and--and probably most of the public see is that--that I’m this big strong guy. This--this big strong guy who loves sex and had a beautiful, interested woman in front of him. And-and they think that even if somehow I didn’t want to sleep with her, that I could have just said no or--or pushed her off of me or something. So--so because we did have sex, I must have wanted it.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I…don’t know.” Buck’s eyes burn and well with tears and he closes them, trying to stave them off. It doesn’t work very well, and when he opens them again a few tears fall anyways. “Sometimes, I guess. Both times it happened I pretty much just…shut down. Let her do whatever she wanted. I don’t know if I--I don’t know if I even said no.”
“Both times?” Jules prompts.
“It--it happened twice. In my probie year, after my first big loss on a call I wasn’t handling it well and my captain made an appointment for me to go to her. She--she had friended me on Facebook and then during the appointment I was trying to talk to her about the loss so I was upset and she just… she came onto me. Physically. I wasn’t into it. It--it felt weird and I knew that it wasn’t right but…but back then sex was a…it was something I was good at that wasn’t hurting people and if I was having sex then I didn’t have to deal with anything else. So--So I slept with her and didn’t say anything to anyone.” He sniffs. “Looking back on it now, the whole thing was probably one of the reasons I stopped sleeping around, even though I let everyone think I was just falling for this dispatcher that called me.”
“What was different about your next encounter with her that made you decide to come forward and report her?”
“She was…pretty clear that if I didn’t have sex with her, she wouldn’t sign off on my return to duty. And I froze, like I said. Kind of…blanked out the whole thing. I didn’t even know for sure that I’d slept with her until I got the notice from the department that I had been cleared for duty and would be put back on the active roster.” He shrugs, keeping his eyes averted from the webcam and continuing to fidget with the toy in his hands. “I sort of figured it was just the price I had to pay. Something I deserved. But on my first shift back the team had a really bad call and my captain was talking about sending people to therapy and…I couldn’t let her hurt anyone else.”
Several moments pass and it’s hard for Buck not to start worrying what Jules is thinking. Maybe he’s said the wrong thing, or he’s been too honest and now they’re realizing this stuff is his fault.
“I want to go over a few of the things you’ve said, if that’s OK.” Jules says after a moment. “Is that all right with you?”
Buck agrees without much thought. They’re already talking about it; stopping now just seems like it would be putting things off for no reason. At least if they keep going, and Jules does want to tell him that Maddie and the others are right, or that they agree and all of this was something he deserved, they’d be ripping the bandaid off and he’ll know.
“What do you mean when you say this assault was something you deserved?”
“I went along with it the first time. So of course she thought it was gonna happen again. And--and I've let a lot of people down. Fucked a lot of things up. Those things come back around, right? The bombing, the tsunami, this… sometimes it feels like the universe’s way of…evening things out.”
“A past sexual encounter is not tacit consent for a future one. Even if we take out the fact that this woman was your therapist and was taking advantage of her position and your vulnerability, if she had just been a person you met at a bar one night, had sex with, and then ran into again a couple years later, she would not be able to assume that you were willing to have sex with her again. Every individual encounter requires consent, regardless of history or relationship status.”
Buck doesn’t know what to say to that. Realistically, he knows that’s how consent works. It’s just not quite how things have gone for him. Not with the way he acted. But he has a feeling that Jules would argue that, if that was the case, it wasn’t right, and…he’s not up for processing that right now; he’s barely processing this.
“As to your second comment, nobody earns or deserves to have bad things happen to them in the way that you’re describing. If someone breaks a law, they deserve to face the legal consequences of that law and that’s where that ends. If you lie to someone or do something to break their trust, the consequence is that you might lose your relationship with that person. But no matter what you do, and to be clear, you haven’t described anything to me that makes me think that you've deliberately hurt anyone, but even if you had, that doesn’t mean you deserve to have bad things happen to you. Losing relationships or experiencing legal punitive action are consequences for behavior. Natural disasters and being victimized in crimes are not. Nobody deserves to go through bad experiences, just because of who they are.”
“That’s…not what other people think.”
“One of the things we’re going to be working on is unpacking how other people’s expectations affect you, and how you can decide if they are opinions that you want to be listening to or if you’re OK dismissing and letting go of them, and how to do that.”
Buck doesn’t see how you can just…let go of what other people think. Not when they’re telling you all the time and they’re people that you’re supposed to care about and respect, like your boss or your family. But, he reasons, it sounds like that’s a reason people go to therapy, and if he’s going to trust in Jules and trust the process, then he has to trust that there must be a way to do it.
“Something else you said just now when you were discussing the assaults,” Jules begins, “is that you shut down and let her do whatever she wanted. Now, correct me if I’m misinterpreting you, but it sounded like you think that because you didn’t fight her off, or run away from the situation before the assault occurred, and aren’t sure if you vocalized your protests, that that means you wanted the encounter in some way. Is that accurate?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re familiar with the phrase ‘fight or flight’ as responses to conflict?”
Buck nods.
“Those are only two of the potential responses. In reality, a person might fight, flee, freeze, fawn, or flop. People tend to focus on fight and flight because they’re very common, but when it comes down to it, things are not that simple. We don’t live on a binary, and sometimes fighting and fleeing aren’t actually options. Think about someone working a customer service job. A barista. A disgruntled customer comes up to them, loudly complaining and causing a big scene. They say that they made their order wrong, and the barista is incompetent along with several other insults. In that situation, it’s not realistic or responsible for the barista to rise to the same level that the customer is at and yell back at them or throw punches, so fighting is out. And the odds are good that they can’t just retreat to the storeroom. What do they do?”
Having been that barista, Buck is very familiar with the routine. “They apologize, offer to make the coffee again, probably offer a complimentary pastry…whatever they can do to deescalate the situation.”
“Right. That’s an example of fawning, where a person does whatever they can to please someone and avoid the budding conflict altogether.”
Buck’s mind flashes through a few moments: agreeing to dinner with his parents to avoid fighting with Maddie, letting go of the fact that no one on A-shift except for Eddie thought he’d even been in the tsunami let alone saved people to make sure that nobody started a fight about the whole thing, talking about the shooting with people so they don’t raise a fuss in the middle of a party, letting Bobby think that his apology was sufficient so they could hopefully be close again, going to the station at all while he’s on leave just to keep Bobby happy… It’s something he does a lot. He’s a people-pleaser. He wants people to like him, and he doesn’t want people to fight either with him, or about him, so he’ll do whatever he can to avoid that.
“Flopping is when someone goes completely unresponsive when confronted with a conflict. They maybe even pass out or faint. And then there’s freezing. That’s when a person is unable to move or fight when faced with a threat. They are quite literally stuck in place. Now, based on how you’ve described the assaults to me, it sounds as though your responses are a combination of fawning, freezing, and flopping. And that doesn’t mean that you wanted what happened to you to occur. It means that you were presented with an impossible decision, to either go along with what someone in a position with power wanted, or potentially lose your job. And your brain and body responded to that trauma and conflict, maybe not in ways that the outside world seems as typical responses, but in ways that are valid and natural.”
“But…” Buck feels more tears rising in his throat because it still doesn’t make sense. “If that’s how my brain responded…I was frozen. I don’t think I even tried to say no. If that was all my brain, how is that not me wanting it?”
“When the barista gives the unruly customer free pastries, do they actually want to do that?”
Buck certainly hadn’t. “No…”
“No. But they do it because there’s potential for the other responses to lead to less desirable outcomes. Our brains are not perfect, but they make certain decisions because they are trying to protect us in their own ways. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out, and bad things can still happen. That does not mean that there is any part of you that wanted to have sex with that therapist. It means your brain didn’t know how best to respond, and it went with the only options that seemed to make sense at the time.”
“That’s…” Buck hears what Jules is saying, and it does kind of make sense. He knows that people have base, animal instincts or whatever that they fall back on when they panic so this could all fall under that, but… “That’s not fucking fair.”
“It’s not.” Jules agrees. “We unfortunately do not live in a very fair world.”
Buck rubs at his face. He’s so sick of crying and feeling emotional and vulnerable and gross. “Aren’t you supposed to be making me feel better?”
“That’s…another one of those unfair things. Only you can actually make you feel better. I’m not going to be able to say anything that magically wipes away your feelings. What I can do is give you tools to process the things that you’re thinking and feeling, help you decide what you want to accept and what you want to change, and help you figure out how to make those changes.”
That…well…that actually makes sense. He’d known from the start that therapy wasn’t going to be a magic fix. Even if it sucks that it’s not. “Right.”
A beat passes before Jules speaks again. “I’d like to circle back to the fight you were having with Maddie at your party. You said that she doesn’t agree with your choices, and that she thinks people are trying to turn you against her.”
“I don’t know if she actually thinks that.” Buck jumps in to correct. It feels important to clarify, to explain some of how he’s been viewing Maddie’s actions, since that’s what led to him pressing charges for the slap. “It’s just what she was saying.”
“Why do you think she would say it if she doesn’t believe it?” Jules asks.
“I think she’s trying to make me feel bad. Because she practically raised me when we were kids, so we were super close back then, and she knows how much I want to have family and be close to them and--and she knows that if I’m worried about losing someone I’ll cave and do things that maybe I was against in order to keep them close. So she wants me to think that I’m going to lose my relationship with her if I don’t start going along with her point of view again.”
“Do you think she tries to manipulate people often?”
“I don’t know about people but…I’ve started noticing that she maybe has been…with me.” He doesn’t want to use the word manipulate. That seems so calculated and deliberate and there’s still a big hope sitting inside of him that there’s something else going on with Maddie--that if she takes being arrested as a final warning and opportunity to change and maybe seek help for herself, things might have a chance of being fixed and going back to normal. “It’s part of the reason we were fighting. And why she slapped me. After she sent that gift basket, I asked Athena, my Captain’s wife who’s a police sergeant, to look at the note, and she agreed that there were some red flags and went to talk to Maddie. She’s the one who reiterated to her that I wanted to keep some distance between us for a little bit, and she was going to try and talk to her about how the things she was saying and the way she was acting were…very similar to how Maddie’s abusive ex-husband had been.”
“Maddie experienced intimate partner violence?”
Buck nods and confirms. “For a long time. When she learned I was here in LA she left him and moved here, but it took a while and a lot more trauma for things to actually be over with.”
“Do you know if she sought any counseling after her experiences?”
“Not as far as I know. I--I think that was going to be one of Athena’s suggestions when she talked with her. Only…Maddie didn’t take the talk very well. She didn’t like that people were pointing out that the things she was doing were a lot like what her ex had done to her. At the party, when we were fighting, she said that there was no way she would ever try to do the things that Doug had done to her to me, and when I said that was exactly what she was doing…that’s when she slapped me.”
“Did the fight end there?”
“Pretty much. Karen, a coworker’s wife, and her son Denny saw it happen, and she stepped in and sent Denny to go get Eddie and Athena. Maddie said it was no big deal and just a sibling disagreement, but Karen had heard enough of the argument to not believe that, and when she tried to make Maddie apologize, Maddie left instead.”
“How were you feeling at that point?”
“I…didn’t know what to think.” Buck admits. “We were obviously having problems and I…what she was saying was hurting me, but I never really thought that she’d hit me. I was kind of…in shock I guess. Eddie checked my head to make sure my concussion wasn’t worse, and then the three of them talked to me about pressing charges.”
Jules glances down at their notes. “Earlier in the appointment you said that everyone thought you should press charges, so you did. Does that mean that you didn’t want to?”
It takes Buck a long time to answer. He still feels so twisted up about all of this, and everyone else’s responses haven’t helped. It’s hard to pick out what feelings are actually his, and what are things that everyone else thinks he should be feeling or doing. “I--I didn’t want to. And I feel like a horrible person for doing it but…I also think it was probably the right thing to do. Does that make…any sense?”
“Feeling conflicted about these sorts of decisions, particularly when they involve family, is very natural. Is there something in particular that convinced you that pressing charges was the right course to take?”
“Everyone pointed out that things keep getting worse from her. First she was just making comments, then we were fighting…the past couple of times it’s gotten physical…And they pointed out that right now, she's focused on me, but if things keep growing, she could have problems with someone else. And if she hurts them, they probably won't hesitate to have her arrested and won’t really care what kind of consequences she sees. At least if--if I’m the one pressing charges, I can ask that they show her leniency. And--and I thought…or I’m hoping I guess, that it will be a wake up call for her to get help. But…” He trails off.
“But?” Jules prompts when he doesn’t continue his thought.
“So far all she’s done since making bail is send me texts and leave me voicemails calling me stupid and selfish and saying that if I don’t drop the charges and apologize I’ll never get to meet her kid once they’re born.”
“Have you considered blocking her number? At least temporarily while this is an ongoing issue?”
“I know I should.” Buck admits. Eddie and Steve had been quietly encouraging him to do so, ever since the messages started coming in, and when he refused, they insisted on documenting everything, just in case anything else happens. Buck is mostly trying not to think about that possibility. “And I did block my parents’ numbers when they started in on me again. But I’m worried if I block her or her partner and there’s some kind of emergency…I know they’re mad and blaming me for everything but if they need something that I could help with and weren’t able to reach me…”
“Do they know that you’re living with Eddie?”
“Yeah…” Buck doesn’t see where that question is going. Neither Maddie or Chimney had said anything that indicated they were looking to see him face-to-face to try and change his mind or anything like that; they were just berating him and in Maddie’s case, pulling out all the stops to make him feel guilty.
“Then if there were a legitimate emergency that they needed you for, they know that he would be able to get in touch with you. And I imagine, the rest of your coworkers and friends, many of whom you share with your sister and her partner, are also still able to get in touch with you, which they also know.”
Buck doesn’t say anything.
“Buck, it’s not healthy for you to expose yourself to things that you know are coming from people that are deliberately trying to hurt you. You’ve already acknowledged that Maddie is using emotional manipulation techniques, and that they’ve been getting more intense and severe as the conflict between you has grown. If you continue to listen to her words, even when you know she’s saying them to lash out and be hurtful, you’re giving them some level of credence and power. They will influence how you think and feel about yourself.”
He still doesn’t say anything. It’s not like he thinks Jules is wrong. Not necessarily. He understands that hearing the voicemails and reading the texts isn’t going to make him feel any better, and he knows that in reality, neither Maddie nor Chimney are going to be reaching out to him for anything other than expressing their own negative feelings unless he decides to drop the charges and even then…it’d probably still take a lot of groveling and ass-kissing on his part to get things anywhere close to normal again. He knows that even if there is some kind of emergency with Maddie or the baby…they aren’t going to be reaching out to him unless it’s to blame him. But he also feels like if he blocks them--if he cuts off this avenue of communication--that’s going to be another sign to them that he doesn’t want to find a resolution where things go back to whatever might pass for normal. They’ll think he’s totally writing them off, so they won’t try either.
“Think of it this way. Did you do what I asked you to at your last appointment and keep a log of the negative thoughts and things you say about yourself?”
Buck nods, glancing at the nightstand where the small black notebook sits next to his hydroflask.
“Think about everything that you wrote down. How many of those things do you think are things that your mind just pulled out of thin air? How many of those things are things that you think and repeat because you’ve heard other people say them about you?”
“Probably a lot of them.” Buck admits, mumbling. He knows it’s true. How do you not start to believe it when the people you’re surrounded by tell you everything that’s wrong with you? Parents, teachers, friends, coworkers…At a certain point it stops feeling like someone’s opinion and starts feeling like definite fact.
“I can’t make you block their numbers or ignore their messages. No one can. But I do want you to think about why you’re keeping that line open to them when they aren’t using it respectfully. Is it because you think they’re going to change their minds and apologize and you want to make sure they have that opportunity? Or is it because you feel guilty and are trying to punish yourself?” Jules pauses, leaving a moment for the question to sink in.
Buck immediately feels a pit in his stomach form at their words. He wouldn’t have thought about his choices like that--it’s so easy to tell everyone that he can’t give up on his sister, and it’s not like it’s a total lie or anything--but there’s something about what Jules is suggesting that hits him in the chest. It’s not unlike other things he does to himself. Things that he’s supposed to be trying to stop. “I do…I have been having a hard time with…hurting myself.” He whispers the last two words; it feels too shameful to say out loud to someone that doesn’t really know him. It’s hard to admit to the people he trusts unconditionally.
“Thank you for trusting me with that.” Jules says. “Is that something you want to discuss today, or are you letting me know so we can address it some time in the future?”
“Maybe not yet?” He nearly cringes asking, because he knows it’s not the correct answer. Not the answer someone wants to hear. “I know it’s not good or anything, and I am trying not to do it. And Eddie knows.” He tacks on quickly. “I just…it feels like a lot right now.”
“That’s all right. There’s no pressure.” Jules reassures. “You never have to talk about something before you’re ready. I’ll check back in with you about it in a few appointments, unless you decide you’re ready to talk about it before then.”
That’s…easier than he expected. “OK.”
“We have a few minutes left for today’s appointment. Do you have anything else specific that you want to discuss today?” They wait, but Buck doesn’t know what to say. He knows he’s got plenty of issues, but how is he supposed to just pluck one of them out and start talking about it? Eventually he shakes his head. “OK then. I have a couple things I want to go over with you, if that’s OK. The first is just an overall check-in on how your homework assignments went. I know you kept the log of negative thoughts I asked you to keep. How did doing things for yourself go?”
“Actually, pretty good I think.” Buck smiles a little, thinking of the two fluffy kittens that are currently confined to the living room as they acclimate to the Diaz household. They’ve been very actively exploring everything they can find, and when they aren’t, they are very happy to snuggle up on whoever might be available to them, with a specific preference for Buck. “I had a hard time thinking of things at first, but Eddie told me about how he had to do the same thing back when he was getting help for his PTSD, and he helped me search online for activities I might want to try. We ended up going to a farmer’s market. I, uh, like to cook and I thought maybe I could treat myself to some specialty ingredients.”
“That sounds like a great idea. Were you able to find the ingredients you wanted?”
“Yeah. I did. And…it turned out that the market was hosting an event for an animal shelter, and…we ended up adopting two kittens. Or…they kind of adopted me? They climbed right up the leg of my jeans and sat on me and I…it’s probably too long of a story to get into right now but the short of it is Eddie convinced me that if I wanted to bring them home it would be OK to bring them home. So we adopted them.”
Jules’ eyes light up a little at the mention of the cats. “Well, first, I’ll congratulate you on engaging with your assignment. It’s good that you’re putting in the work and making an effort to do things that will help keep you active and involved with your hobbies. And pets can have a lot of benefits on our mental health, so that is a positive as well. I’m not going to give you a set number of things to do or anything like that, but moving forward, I want you to keep trying to do things specifically because you want to do them, not because they will please anyone else.”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
“Second, and this is me taking off the therapist hat for just a moment, congratulations on becoming a cat dad! They sound adorable. I hope I’ll be able to see them sometime.”
“We’re still getting them acclimated to the house but whenever I’m in their space they tend to follow me around and climb all over me so the odds might be in your favor.”
“I love it. It sounds like they’ll be good for you.”
“I’m…I’m really happy to have them.”
“Good. The last thing I wanted to bring up and ask you about was how you feel about exploring your options for treatment via medication.”
“For…depression?” Buck asks to clarify.
“Potentially. And anxiety.” Jules nods. “Our practice has a clinical psychiatrist who would meet with and evaluate you. Depending on what you tell them and the results of those evaluations, they might feel that chemical intervention would be a helpful tool in your treatment plan and recovery.”
Buck isn’t against medication entirely. He’s probably willing to meet with this psychiatrist and see what they say. But it’s not something he’s ever looked into before, and most of what he knows about it comes from commercials he’s seen on TV, which he’s fairly certain aren’t the best source. “And you think it’s something I should consider?”
“Medication is not a magic wand. It won’t erase what you’re feeling. But it can make the symptoms of your depression and anxiety manageable, so working through the root causes and leading a comfortable, fulfilling life is more approachable and potentially more attainable.”
And Buck definitely can’t argue with something that might do that. Not when every day has felt like running an uphill marathon. “OK, yeah. I can meet with them.”
“Then we will schedule that appointment in addition to our next couple appointments when we wrap things up in a minute. You’ll get some additional paperwork delivered to you in the patient portal. Some of that will be forms that will aid Dr. McHolland in his evaluations and guide your discussion with him, and one will be a consent form that gives him and me permission to talk to each other about your treatment and what you share with us so we are working together and don’t make any decisions or recommendations that contradict each other. You don’t have to sign that if it makes you uncomfortable, but it will be beneficial.”
“No, I’m--I’m sure it will be fine. I’ll take care of everything when I get it.”
“Great. Then our last order of business for today before we do that scheduling is to talk about homework.”
“Didn’t you already tell me to keep doing things for myself?”
“I did. And I also want you to keep logging your negative thoughts. We’ll do something with that during one of your next appointments. But I have one additional thing that I want you to keep in mind and try doing in between now and the next time we meet. I want you to make a conscious effort to correct and redirect your thoughts about the assaults you experienced with your past therapist.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you described the assaults to me, you were blaming yourself, and worrying that in some way you did want to sleep with this person so it didn’t really count as an assault. Now, we went over some of the reasons why it wasn’t your fault and those things aren’t true, so what I want you to do moving forward is that if you find yourself thinking in that way, I want you to pause, think about why that thought isn’t accurate, and then correct yourself with a relevant statement that’s actually true. As an example, you said that one of the reasons the second assault happened is because you went along with things during your first assault, and the therapist took that as a sign that you would be willing to sleep with her again. Tell me why that’s not true.”
Even though they’ve just had the discussion, it’s hard for Buck to draw up the words to answer them. Not because he doesn’t remember, he does, but because it’s hard to feel like it’s true. A lot of people know him for or because of sex; it’s seems like a fairly reasonable assumption to think that he’d be down for a hookup in almost any circumstance, given that reputation, especially when they have a past together. It’s more than a little difficult to disengage from that thought and reroute to the things that Jules had gone over with him earlier, even though they’re things that he would apply to other people. “Be-because there’s no such thing as automatic consent. Even though I’d had sex with her before, that doesn’t mean I’d want to again. And…and because the first time, I was…I didn’t really want to have sex with her then either.”
“So instead of thinking that your reputation or previous interactions led to this assault, what would be more accurate?”
Tears burn as they well up in his eyes and Buck takes a shaky breath. It doesn’t really feel like it reaches his lungs. He makes himself answer anyways. “D-Dr. Wells didn’t care about what I wanted. She-she cared about what she wanted. And--and she raped me. Both times.”
“That’s exactly correct.” Jules nods. “I know this is not an easy exercise, Buck. Confronting these feelings and these events is going to be hard. But it will help you moving forward. Making these corrections will help you define the assaults as something that happened to you, not because of you, and when you start to believe that, it’s going to change how you feel about what happened, and about yourself. It will get easier with time.”
“I hope you’re right.” Buck admits, choking off a half-formed sob. “‘Cause it feels like shit right now.”
“It will.” Jules pauses, giving him a moment. “I know that you’re upset right now. We talked about a lot of heavy things today. If we end the call, do you feel safe?”
“Yeah. I’ll be OK. Eddie’s on shift, but Steve is here. I can…I can talk to him if I need to.”
“That’s good. Keep your support system in mind over the next couple of days, and remember you can always reach out to the practice if you think you need to meet sooner than when we schedule.”
Buck receives the onslaught of messages from Bobby only a few minutes after his therapy appointment ends. He’s back out in the living room, zoning out in front of SportsCenter with Steve while Beans and Toast crawl all over him trying to decide where the most comfortable spot on his body might be, and feeling fairly raw and emotionally wrung out overall, and to have messages from his Captain come through send a spike of anxiety straight through his system. He opts not to respond to Bobby right away, entirely unsure of what he’s supposed to say to that anyways, and instead drafts a quick message to Eddie.
Bobby says things with Chimney are tense on shift??
He starts to chew on his lip, waiting for a response, and Steve clocks the action immediately. “What’s going on?” He asks.
Buck scrolls back to the text chain with Bobby, and hands the phone over. “Bobby has…opinions about me pressing charges against Maddie I guess.”
Steve reads and mutters a curse under his breath. He hands the phone back. “How is any of this his business?”
“If he’s worried about stuff bleeding over to the firehouse…” Buck trails off, scratching at Toast’s chin as the kitten headbutts his hand.
“Even if he is, it’s not your problem.”
“But if--,”
“But nothing.” Steve cuts him off gently. “This is not a conflict between you and a coworker. And even if it was, it happened off shift. You’re handling the situation appropriately for how it occurred. If your sister’s partner isn’t handling the situation maturely and he’s bringing things into work, that is not your fault, and it’s not your problem.”
“He’s not wrong about this impacting Maddie’s life.”
“He may not be wrong, but he’s trying to guilt you about it. And you have nothing to feel guilty about.”
Buck doesn’t say anything.
“Maddie is an adult. Older than you, as she loves to point out. If kids can understand that their actions have consequences and that hitting people isn’t OK, then she can understand that.”
This time Buck doesn’t get a chance to respond--to argue the thought that’s circled around his brain more than once about consequences not having to necessarily equal criminal charges--because his phone starts buzzing in his hand with a call from Eddie. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Hey.”
“Why is Bobby texting you about how things are at the station right now?” His partner asks; he sounds more than a little annoyed, which Buck takes as a sign that he has been reining in his temper for the better part of the morning since he’d gone on what is meant to be a 24-hour shift. It’s not a great sign, or one that indicates that maybe Bobby had been exaggerating.
“Are things really that bad?” Buck matches Eddie’s question with a question of his own, knowing that, like Steve, Eddie isn’t going to be happy about the messages that Bobby has sent.
Eddie sighs. “Chimney is bitching a lot about everything that went down this weekend. Making a lot of snarky comments under his breath. And then more than a few directly at me.”
“Why would he target you?”
“I think he wants me to lose my temper.” Eddie admits. “Some things he’s saying are pretty… they’re toeing the line. I think he wants me to lose control so he can push back and report me or press charges. No one except for Hen maybe knows that we’re dating, but as they all know we’re close so I’m the next best thing to a partner I guess.”
“That’s…insane.” Buck rubs his free hand across his face. He can’t even begin to understand how much this has spun out of control. Things have barely even started (Maddie’s out on bail and it’ll probably be at least a few weeks before there’s any indication about how far the district attorney’s office wants to take the charges and when they’ll start asking Buck about what he wants as the complainant) and everything is so far away from what he’d intended when he agreed to have her arrested… “Maybe Bobby is right. I should just drop the charges and we can do some kind of mediated conversation or--,”
“What?” Eddie cuts him off sharply. “That’s what Bobby messaged you? To tell you to drop the charges?”
“I mean, not in so many words…” Buck hedges. “He just asked me if I was sure and if I had thought about the kind of effects this would have on Maddie. And told me that things are tense at the station. And it sounds like he’s right.” He tacks on quickly. “If Chim is really being that shitty to you and making things hard that’s not--,”
“That’s not your problem. I know he’s trying to bait me and it’s not gonna work. Bobby has us on separate chores anyways so unless we’re on a call I don’t even really have to see him.”
“My issues with Maddie shouldn’t be screwing things up for you at work. That’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not fair that your sister isn’t willing to listen to you and support you. And that your Captain, who isn’t even actually your Captain right now, is trying to guilt you into doing something that actually has nothing to do with your work.”
“It does if Chimney is going to bring it into the station every day and make problems with the rest of the team.”
“No it doesn’t. Chimney is being completely immature. Bobby knows that. He’s just doing what he always does and sacrifices the people he thinks will put up with it in order not to make waves.”
“Bobby doesn’t…” Except yeah, he kind of does. At the very least, ever since the bombing, Buck knows that his needs and wants have been at the bottom of Bobby’s lists. Hell, Bobby had pretty much been forced to take him back onto shift in the first place, and he hasn’t seemed particularly concerned with what having him back on the roster this time around is going to look like. And this isn’t exactly the first time that he’s inserted himself into the Buckley family drama since his parents first came to town. Bobby has opinions, and when he thinks he’s right, he’ll find a way to make them known. “Fuck.” Buck sighs. “We’ll deal with that later I guess.” He has no desire to get into it right now, that’s for sure. He’s way too exhausted for that. “Are you sure you’re OK? I know you can handle yourself but I don’t want anything to happen that’s going to get you into trouble…”
“I’m not always great with my temper, I’ll admit, but just knowing that me losing it is what he wants? That fills me with the kind of patience and zen that would make a Buddhist monk jealous. And honestly? Some of his comments are practically HR violations. If he keeps this up, I might not even be the one to complain. Hen is not all that happy with how he’s acting either.”
“OK. Just…please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. I really don’t want all of my drama and bullshit fucking things up for you.”
“Talking to you is more than enough right now.” Eddie reassures. “Now, enough about Chim and Bobby and all of that bullshit. How are you doing? How did therapy go?”
Buck goes back to petting the kittens on his lap, more than a little soothed when they start purring. “Um…OK, I guess. Jules is gonna set me up with the psychiatrist at their practice so we can start the process of maybe trying some medication. So, that’s a thing I guess.”
“Did they say what the meds might be for?”
“Probably anxiety, maybe depression. They’re gonna send a bunch of paperwork and evaluations for me to fill out to get the ball rolling and see what seems like a good path to go down.”
“That’s good.” Eddie says. “I know it’s another appointment to deal with and more people to talk to but sometimes medication is really helpful.”
“I know. It’s just…a lot. On top of my appointment. Which was also…a lot.”
“You do sound pretty wiped out. What are you guys doing for the rest of the day?”
“I don’t think we have anything planned. Unless Steve has something in mind I kind of just want to crash until it’s time to go pick up Chris at school.”
“That’s not for a few hours.” Buck can hear the frown in his partner’s voice. “You’re not kidding when you’re saying it was a lot.”
“We spent a lot of time on the whole thing with Dr. Wells. A lot of talking about what was and wasn’t my fault and--,”
“None of it was your fault.”
“I know.” Buck closes his eyes, giving himself a moment to let Eddie’s words sink in. He sort of believes Jules when they give their assurances during their discussions, and he’s willing to put the requested work in to try and close the gap and get himself to believe it all the way because enough people that he trusts are saying it so there probably is some truth to it all, but there’s something about hearing things from Eddie that just…hits differently. Means a tiny bit more, even if it probably shouldn’t. “Sort of, anyways. And that’s kind of my homework. It was just…going over all those details and the way things have been and why people think it is my fault and all of that… It’s hard. I feel kind of…flayed open.”
“That’s one of the joys of therapy. It’s gonna suck for a while. But with the right therapist…it’ll be worth it. And you have me and Steve, and a bunch of other people in your corner until it comes together.”
“Promise?”
“Prometo, hermoso.” Before Eddie can say anything else, Buck can hear the bell going off overhead in the station. “I’ve gotta--,”
“I know. Stay safe. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“I still think you should let me send the info to my guy on 5-0.” Steve comments as he turns Buck’s jeep onto the street that will take them to Durand. Steve has been on this particular subject ever since the anonymous texts had come through Buck’s phone about half an hour ago. “We’d have all we need to know in about twenty minutes.”
Buck isn’t completely against the idea; it’s unnerving to be on the receiving end of text messages from someone he doesn’t know--or at least someone deliberately using a number he doesn’t have--where the messages are so clearly aimed at upsetting him. It’s a tiny bit easier overall to dismiss the messages when they don’t come from someone he can put a face on (it’s a little bit easier to decide that an opinion doesn’t matter when you don’t know who it comes from), but that doesn’t mean he wants to receive a constant stream of vitriol from someone. That said, using the resources of the police for a few texts that basically amount to middle school bullying, seems a bit on the extreme side. “They didn’t exactly threaten me. And I blocked the number. If I get anything else, I’ll let your guy do their thing, but it seems a little overkill right now.”
“You won’t hide any messages?” Steve casts a slightly suspicious glance over in Buck’s direction which…fair. Buck has definitely been known to keep problems to himself before if he thought it would make things easier for everyone else.
Buck sighs as they pull into the Durand Elementary driveway and slide into the pickup line. “I won’t. It’s not like I actually want messages like that. I just…there’s been enough drama lately. I don’t feel like we need to make more when someone was probably just blowing off a little steam.”
“Maybe.” Steve concedes. “But if anything else comes through or you change your mind….”
“I’ll hand over my phone and you can send whatever you want to your guy.” Buck nods. They fall into a (mostly) comfortable silence as they wait their turn in the line. After his call with Eddie, Buck had made true on his initial outline of the afternoon to him, and caught a nap on the couch with the cats. At least after Steve had forced him to eat something. He hadn’t napped nearly as long as the hours he had aimed for, but after waking up he and Steve had been able to go for a walk around the neighborhood and the sun and fresh air had also helped in making him feel a bit more even-keeled and restored after an emotionally fraught morning. Then he’d gotten the anonymous texts, and his semi-good mood had all but vanished. Now at the school pickup, he’s hoping that he's regained enough of his calm that Chris won’t catch on that anything else is happening and they can have a mostly normal rest of the day.
After a couple of minutes they make it to the front of the line and Buck unbuckles his seat belt and hops out of the jeep to greet Christopher; the boy all but bounds over from the sidewalk where he was waiting with his teachers. “Buck! You’ll never guess where my class is going on a field trip.”
Buck waves back at the teachers, who nod with familiarity, and leans down to accept Chris’ brief hug. Afterwards he helps the boy shed his backpack. “Oh yeah? Where are you guys headed?”
“The aquarium!”
For a brief moment, Buck is back in a topsy-turvy current of ocean water, being battered against wreckage and debris. Just as quickly, Chris’ enthusiastic voice cuts through the fog.
“Not the one that we went to though. This one’s in Long Beach.”
Buck laughs a little nervously, and opens up the back of the jeep to help Chris up to his usual seat. “Yeah I think the one we went to is still getting all fixed up.” As Chris buckles himself in, he stows Chris' backpack in the seat next to him. “But you’re excited about going to another one?”
“Definitely.” Chris says. “Hi Steve.”
“Hey Chris.” Steve glances in the rearview mirror to greet Chris while Buck gets back in the passenger seat. “You have a good day at school?”
“Yeah.” Chris nods. “We’re going to the aquarium for my science class. Since we’ve been studying the ocean a lot.”
“That’s pretty cool.” Steve waits for Buck to close the door and buckle his own seatbelt before shifting the jeep into drive and maneuvering out of the pickup line. “Do you have a favorite thing that you’ve been studying?”
“Chris thinks for a brief moment, but ultimately shrugs. “I like most of it. There are some really cool animals in the ocean. Like stingrays. The aquarium Buck took me to before the tsunami had touch tanks and I got to pet a stingray there. That was really cool.”
“That is pretty cool.”
They chat for another minute about the aquarium and things that Chris has been studying before Chris’ attention shifts. “How come you’re not wearing your sling, Buck?”
“I wasn’t wearing it around the house since we weren’t doing much of anything, and I forgot to grab it before we left to come get you.” Buck explains. It’s not totally in line with what his doctor had told him (he’d been instructed that brief bouts without wearing it were fine, but until he got another x-ray at his next appointment in a week, he was still supposed to keep it on most of the time to prevent accidentally using his arm before the bone has completely healed. Buck’s been letting that go a little more than he should around the house, mostly because its just so inconvenient to not have an arm to use, and he figures one outing where he’s pretty much exclusively riding in the jeep isn’t going to hurt anything, but he’ll need to remember to put it back on when they get home.
“Oh.” Chris accepts this easily enough, and bounces on to the next topic. “How are Beans and Toast? Did you give them lots of cuddles today?”
Buck grins, glancing back and giving Chris a detailed rundown of every interaction he’d had with the two kittens and their explorations he’d observed, noting that he’s sure they’ll be excited to see Chris when they get home as well. “They are definite snugglebugs, so I’m sure one or both of them will grab your lap while you do your reading for school if you sit on the couch.”
“Dad doesn’t like me doing my schoolwork in the living room.” Chris points out as Buck turns back around. “He says it’s distracting.”
“He means it’s distracting to try and do it with the TV on.” Buck corrects. “If we keep all the screens turned off, you can sit out there and work. Steve and I will keep you on track, won’t we?”
“Of course we will.” Steve agrees. “And Buck was saying he taught you how to play one of the card games I taught him back when we were working together, so I was thinking that once everything’s done you and I can team up against him and--,” Steve drops off as a marked LAPD SUV behind them turns on its lights and trills its siren a few times.
Buck glances behind them but the car doesn’t make any moves to speed off around them. It trills the siren a few more times, clearly indicating that they should pull over. “Did you blow through a stop sign or something?” He asks with a frown. He’s pretty confident they weren’t speeding. Steve can be a wild driver when he’s on his own, but he’s been nothing but careful and responsible anytime they’ve been driving with Chris in the car.
“I don’t think so.” Steve answers. He flips on his turn signal and merges off the road, pulling to a stop. The SUV pulls off directly behind them, stopping a short distance back.
“Is everything OK?” Chris asks. He tries to twist around in his seat to see what’s happening, but is mostly unsuccessful.
“Yeah, bud.” Buck reassures him, although when he looks in his own mirror and doesn’t see the police officer exiting their vehicle or approaching, he gets a little more confused. “We’ll talk to the officer who pulled us over and see what they need. It’ll be fine.” Only in the first few moments after he finishes his sentence, two more police vehicles, both with lights and sirens going, approach from the other direction. They cut across the road and pull to a stop diagonally in front of the jeep.
Steve’s worried expression deepens significantly, but Buck knows he’s mindful of the nine-year-old in the backseat when he keeps his voice low, murmuring out the side of his mouth. “Something doesn’t feel right. Set your phone to record audio and then lock it, turn the screen off, and stick it in your pocket. Then just cooperate with what they want. Let me do the talking, OK?”
Buck nods, pulling out his phone and starting the recording as instructed.
Steve raises his voice again. “Chris, buddy, just stay in your seat unless the officers ask you to get out OK? Buck and I will handle this. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Buck really hopes Steve is right about that, but he can’t exactly ignore the dread that’s building in the pit of his stomach. Especially when one of the officers speaks over the bullhorn of their vehicle.
“Driver and front seat passenger, remove your seatbelts and lower your windows.” Buck casts his eyes over to Steve, double checking that they should comply, and when he receives a nod, does as instructed. The voice over the bullhorn continues soon after. “Reach one hand out of the window to open your doors from the outside. Then slowly exit the vehicle with both hands in the air.”
“Buck, what’s going on?” Chris’ voice has a distinct note of uncertainty and fear now. Buck wishes he knew exactly what to say to help ease that worry, but he’s completely in the dark as to what’s happening. The best he can offer is the advice Steve has already given.
“I’m not sure, Bud. Steve and I need to go talk to these officers. You just stay in your seat like Steve said, and if one of the officers comes to talk to you, listen and do what they ask, OK?”
He waits for Chris to agree, before joining Steve in complying with the police’s orders. It’s a bit of a challenge to undo his door from the outside with what’s technically his injured arm and hand, but he’s more than aware of the fact that there are now two officers who have exited their own vehicles standing in front of the jeep with their weapons drawn, and that any movement that looks strange to them might only make them nervous and potentially trigger happy. Compliance to the letter is more than important, especially with Chris in the car. After a bit of maneuvering, Buck gets the door open and steps out of the car, careful to keep his hands up and visible.
“Face the hood of the vehicle, and put your hands on your head.” The voice over the bullhorn, now identifiable as the officer in the vehicle directly in front of the jeep orders. Buck turns, and does as instructed. He’s able to see Steve across the hood of the jeep, and he looks just as concerned and confused, if not more so than when they had been pulled over and boxed in by police.
Almost immediately, the two officers with their weapons drawn, rush forward, holster their guns, and in a near simultaneous motion grab onto Buck and Steve’s wrists. Buck barely suppresses a pained groan as the officer who’d come to him wrenches one arm down, then the other, and pushes him face down onto the hood, holding him there while he secures his hands behind his back with a set of cuffs. The moment his hands are secure, the officer hoists Buck back up and growls in his ear. “We’re gonna go over there and have a little chat. Put up any fight and you will not like the results.”
Buck almost immediately loses track of what’s happening with Steve, while he’s frogmarched away from the jeep to the closest police SUV, where he’s pushed back down, bent over the hood.
“Where’s your wallet, pretty boy?” The officer asks.
A part of Buck doesn’t want to answer, knows that without any indication of what the actual problem is and why the police are pursuing him, that interacting with them at all is potentially feeding a fire that’s already out of his control, but the part of him that knows he hasn’t done anything, whether or not there’s been a traffic violation that Steve needs to answer for (which he definitely doubts because no blown stop sign or minor speeding offense gets a response quite this strong that he’s aware of, especially for a couple of privileged white guys) tells him that the sooner he cooperates, the sooner they realize that he and Steve probably aren’t who they’re actually looking for, and the whole thing goes away. “Rear left pocket.” He answers flatly. He’ll cooperate, but he’s not about to be friendly with someone who’s handcuffing him and shoving him onto cars in front of a kid when he’s done nothing to earn it. He turns his head to the side to face back towards the jeep, and is even more confused when he sees a female officer lifting Christopher out of the back seat and rushing him back towards the furthest police vehicle.
The officer, who’s still exercising far more of his strength than he needs to to press Buck against the car, doesn't reach for the wallet right away. “You got anything sharp on you? Any needles that’ll stick me when I grab for it?”
“It’s just the wallet, man.” Buck nearly clenches his teeth. “I’ve got my wallet in that pocket and my phone in my front right pocket. That’s it.”
“We’ll see about that.” He lifts one hand off of Buck’s wrists, leaving the other pushing down on his back between his shoulder blades, and plucks the wallet out of the aforementioned pocket. “Oh…Evan Buckley, huh?” A smirk grows in the officer’s voice. “You’re that firefighter. The one that’s always in the news for one thing or another. Well, it looks like another headline’s gonna come your way pretty quick. Is that what this is about? Couldn’t figure out how to get your name in the news again so you decided to snatch a kid?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Buck snaps, his mouth moving ahead of his common sense the moment he realizes what the officer’s implying. “I didn’t snatch anyone.”
“Yeah?” He gets shoved down a little harder, not that there’s anywhere for him to actually go. “That kid just magicked himself into your backseat?”
“That kid is my partner’s son. I just picked him up from school.”
“Yeah, we’ve heard it all before, pretty boy.” The officer tosses the wallet onto the hood of his car; it lands next to Buck’s face. “Now, I’ll ask again. Any sharps, any weapons I need to be aware of on your person?”
Now Buck does clench his teeth, determined that he’s not going to make things any worse. This is a situation that will be straightened out with a couple of fast phone calls, and he is not going to make trouble for himself in the interim. He’s not going to do anything that could end up making this more traumatizing for Christopher. “No. Just my phone in the front right pocket.”
“You understand I do have to check for myself. Procedure.” With those smarmy words, the officer in question eases up his grip on Buck, only to start patting him down. He starts at the sides of his torso, even though there’s obviously no pockets or anywhere to hide anything. He then pulls the phone out of Buck’s pocket, quickly tossing it next to the wallet before returning to his…search. He works down Buck’s left leg, gripping with a little more enthusiasm than Buck imagines is strictly necessary, then back up, repeating the process on the right leg.
Following that there’s a pat-down on his ass, that if Buck were going to describe to an outside observer, is far more of a combination of a groping and some form of spanking than it is a proper search for any sort of weapons or contraband. Buck forces himself not to react, but his resolve is quickly tested when the officer presses his body tightly against Buck’s, sandwiching Buck between himself and the car. Buck can feel something hard, that’s definitely not in position to be any of the officer’s weapons, nudging against the seam of his pants. It’s all Buck can do to swallow any instinctive reactions.
“You know,” the officer leans in, close enough to Buck’s ear that his lips brush against the lobe and speaks in a rough undertone, “I heard that you have quite the reputation for sleeping your way into--and out of--problems.” One hand slides between the vehicle and Buck, none-too-subtle in it’s groping. “I’ll be able to get us some alone time on our way to the station. If you make it worth my while I imagine I might be able to--,”
The exact benefit the officer is proposing is cut off by a squawk from his radio. “Dispatch to 727 L-16.”
“Go ahead dispatch.” A female officer, probably the one with Chris since that’s the only woman Buck has seen, answers quickly.
“Be advised that officers dispatched to the scene at Durand Elementary have determined that the minor, Christopher Diaz, was picked up by one of his approved guardians, the owner of the jeep, Evan Buckley. They have confirmed that no abduction took place. It appears that this was a prank report.”
“Copy that dispatch. We’ll release the…former suspects.”
The officer holding Buck rubs and squeezes his hand one last time before pulling away and easing his grip entirely. “Guess we’ll have to take a rain check on that date, pretty boy.” He starts to undo the cuffs from around Buck’s wrists. “Unless you want to meet up after my shift.”
Buck is torn between vomiting and hitting the guy, but because he just wants this whole mess over with and to go away, settles for glaring at him over his shoulder. “I’ll pass. Am I free to go get Christopher?”
“Seems like it.” The officer smirks. “Take your things and go.”
Buck doesn’t waste any time, snatching his phone and wallet off of the hood of the car and moving as fast as his shaky legs will take him. He bypasses the jeep entirely, trusting that Steve will take care of that and maybe get a better idea of exactly what it is that’s going on, and heads to the farthest police vehicle, where he can see Chris with the uniformed female officer. The closer he gets, he can see that behind his glasses, Christopher’s face is streaked with tears.
“Buck!” Chris shouts when he notices his approach. He starts to move forward, but he’s entirely unsteady; the officer hadn’t grabbed his crutches when she’d removed him from the jeep.
Buck rushes ahead at a jog, closing the gap quickly and falling to his knees, wrapping Christopher into a tight embrace. “Christopher! Are you OK?”
“They scared me.” Chris sobs. “They kept saying you and Steve were gonna hurt me and that I didn’t have to protect you.”
“They were confused.” Buck holds Chris close. “But they’ve got it all straightened out now, and we’re OK.” He hopes. He’ll keep his fingers crossed that being scared is all that’s happened to Christopher and that Steve will have kept his cool and be no worse for the wear. Or that at least he'll have been taken by a better officer than the one that grabbed Buck. Not that Buck is going to think about that. Definitely not now, and maybe not ever if he can help it. He quickly returns to doing his best to soothe Chris, cradling his head into his neck while the boy cries. “I’ve got you, and I’m not gonna let you go until you tell me to, OK? I’ve got you."
Chapter Text
“Christopher! Buck!” Eddie’s shout cuts through the busy noise of the precinct floor and Buck jumps out of his seat when he hears him, turning automatically towards the door. Christopher’s in his arms, where he’s been clinging like a spider monkey every moment since the whole debacle on the side of the road that he’s been able to; the only break had come when they were driving to the precinct to be interviewed to try and figure out what exactly had happened, how it happened, and why, and even then, Buck had been forced to sit in the back seat of the jeep next to Chris while Steve drove them, so Chris could hold onto his hand and take his reassurance however he could get it. They haven’t been in the precinct very long--mostly long enough for Steve to start pacing with frustration at the total lack of communication from anyone in charge (they’d essentially been dropped at a desk to wait for someone to come and interview them and abandoned)--and it hadn’t even occurred to Buck to try and reach Eddie on shift with his brain so preoccupied on comforting Christopher and pushing the actual interactions with the police to the back of his mind, so he’s a little surprised, but incredibly grateful, to hear Eddie arrive. His voice catches Chris’ attention as well, and the boy lifts his head and turns in Buck’s arms to try and catch a glimpse of the source.
“Dad!” He nearly shrieks. He releases his grip on Buck with one arm and stretches out towards Eddie.
Eddie, who’s in his turnout pants, weaves quickly through the sea of desks to reach them. “Chris!” He takes his son from Buck’s arms, cradling him close, but Buck only has a split second to contemplate the loss before Eddie’s pulling him into the embrace with his other arm. “Are you guys OK? Athena came and pulled me from a scene but she couldn’t tell me much. Just that something had happened and we needed to meet you here.”
“They tried to take me from Buck and Steve!” Chris sniffs around half-hiccupped sobs. His initial tears had tapered off on the drive to the police station, but Buck isn’t surprised to see them start again in full force when he’s reunited with his dad.
“Who did, mijo?” Eddie pulls back a little, trying to survey Chris for injuries. There’s a small level of noticeable relief when he doesn’t find any--Chris is barely even disheveled all things considered--but that just seems to make Eddie’s concern and confusion grow deeper.
“The police!” Chris buries his face back in his dad’s neck.
Eddie frowns over his son’s shoulder at Buck, and then beyond him Steve. Behind Eddie, Buck can see a uniformed Athena talking with someone in a suit that he vaguely recognizes but can’t name. “What does he mean, the police tried to take him?” Eddie asks.
Buck doesn’t know how to explain what happened. He’s not sure he even understands what happened. One minute he and Steve are driving Chris home from school, the next…he’s being handcuffed, searched, and groped by the police. As best as he can tell, he was accused of snatching Christopher from the school pick-up line, although who would have made a report like that is beyond him--he’d seen a few of Chris' teachers that knew him and they’d waved at him. They knew Chris was with someone safe. So why would someone say otherwise?
“Someone called the police and reported that someone matching Buck’s description had grabbed Chris from the Durand pick-up line and driven off. They described his jeep and gave a partial plate.” Athena informs, walking up with the suited man. “This is Detective Rick Romero, he’s going to be investigating.”
Steve steps forward to shake the Detective’s hand and introduce himself. “Commander Steve McGarrett, 5-0 Task Force.”
Romero raises an eyebrow. “You here for business or pleasure Commander?”
“Mostly just visiting Buck here. He served in my unit in the SEALS.”
Athena is very good at schooling her expressions overall, but it would be hard to miss her reaction to hearing that Buck was in the navy. They have been generally keeping that from everyone at the station, and he knows he doesn’t act like the typical former military man, let alone a SEAL, so her surprise isn’t exactly unfounded.
“That said, I’m happy to lend my resources to help figure out what exactly is going on.” Steve continues.
“We’ll see what comes from our initial conversations.” Romero says, incredibly non-committal. “First I want to do one final talk with Christopher here, just to make sure we cross all the ‘T’s and dot all the ‘I’s on the official report. Mr. Diaz, you are welcome to join us and supervise. We have a kid-friendly family room that we can use.”
“Of course.” Eddie nods. He bounces Christopher in his arms a little, shifting his weight. “How about that Chris? Can we go talk with the Detective for a couple of minutes? So you can tell him what happened?”
Chris sniffs and nods, lifting his head. “Can Buck come too?”
Romero and Athena share a look, something else that’s hard for the adults in the room to miss. Athena reaches forward and places a gentle hand on Chris’ shoulder. “I need Buck and Steve to help me with something out here while you’re talking to my friend Rick. Can I borrow him for a couple minutes while you do that?”
“He’ll still be here when we’re done?”
“I promise, baby.” Athena nods.
“OK.” Chris finally agrees after another moment’s contemplation. “We can go talk.”
“We’ll be back out in a few minutes.” Romero nods. “Sergeant Grant, I don’t have to remind you that you can only be involved as an observer for this case?”
“Of course not Rick. I’ll only check that the boys are all right. I won't start going down any rabbit holes as to why someone would make a report like this and target them.”
“See that you don’t.” Romero winks as he turns away. “Mr. Diaz, you and Christopher can follow me please.”
As that trio walks away, Athena turns her focus to Buck and Steve. “Why don’t the three of us move to the break room so we can talk? I don’t recommend the coffee, but we have some hot water and decent enough cocoa mixes if you need a little pick-me-up after the afternoon you’ve had.”
“I’m fine without the hot chocolate, but I’m happy to move somewhere with a few less ears.” Steve comments, stepping to follow Athena. “I’m sure you have plenty of really great colleagues Sergeant Grant, and that the officers who detained us were just following the information that they had, but it wasn’t exactly the best introduction to LAPD’s finest.”
“No, I’m sure that it wasn’t, all things considered.” Athena agrees. She starts to step away, but seems to think better of it, stopping in her tracks and casting her gaze over to Buck. “Are you coming, Buckaroo?”
Buck wants to. He doesn’t really want to be away from other people right now, certainly not in a station full of uniformed officers, but he also doesn’t want to worry Chris. Chris had been so clearly scared by being torn out of the car and seeing Buck and Steve held at gunpoint, then handcuffed and detained, and the fact that he was actually seeking comfort from Buck even though whatever had happened was so clearly Buck’s fault, and is worried that Buck won’t be where he left him when he comes back…Buck doesn’t want to contribute to any of that fear or worry. So he can’t leave. “I’m OK, ‘Thena.” The words don’t come out with much confidence or enthusiasm; he’ll have to figure out a way to work that out before Eddie comes back. He needs to be able to focus on his son, not worry about Buck. “I’ll just wait here.”
Athena knows him well enough to know exactly what he’s not saying, and her next comment comes out just as gently as if she were still speaking to Christopher. “Rick knows where I’m bringing you two. He’ll bring Chris and Eddie there when they’re finished.”
Buck still hesitates, but there’s no hint of anything other than care and concern in Athena’s eyes. “OK.” He concedes. “Let’s go.”
They leave the main office space of the precinct, Athena leading him and Steve through a couple turning hallways to a small break room. The space is a little rundown, mostly tidy except for a half a box of bakery cookies in the center of the round table. There’s a single uniformed officer sitting at there, sipping on a coffee and reading a paper, but that officer seems to have a healthy fear of, or at least respect for, Athena because all she has to do is quirk an eyebrow in his direction and he gathers his things and leaves the room. She closes the door behind him, and draws a shade down across the door’s window. “Make yourselves comfortable.” She encourages. “Do either of you want anything to drink?”
Buck shakes his head, and notes Steve doing the same as they both sit at the recently vacated table, but watches as Athena pulls three bottles of water out of the fridge anyways, placing one in front of each of them before taking her own seat.
“So. How are you both doing? Really.” Buck doesn’t know if she doesn’t realize that they hadn’t answered Eddie when he’d first entered the precinct, or if she’s just reminding them in her own way to be honest.
“Pissed.” Steve answers first. “Not specifically about the police reaction or anything. I know potential child abductions are a red alert situation where law enforcement needs to move fast, and I don’t blame the officers who pulled us over for doing that when the only information they had at the time labeled us as a threat. But the fact that someone is targeting Buck like this? Giving his description and reporting his vehicle? The officers on scene dismissed the whole thing as a prank but you and I both know that accusing someone of kidnapping and putting that kind of target on them gets people killed. This was a deliberate attack.”
“Oh we know.” Athena nods grimly. “And Los Angeles has some very strict laws regarding swatting attacks and false reports. When we identify who made the report they are in for a world of trouble.” She pauses and looks over at Buck. “What about you Buck? You’ve been awful quiet.”
Buck shrugs, looking away. He knows it’s not the best way to allay Athena’s concerns and keep her from probing into the situation further, but he really isn’t sure how he’s doing at this point. He hasn’t really been able to think about his experiences in the past hour and a half, he’d needed to put his focus with Chris. And now that he’s alone (sort of) and having to think about it…it’s a lot to sort through. “Don’t have much to say.”
It’s very obvious that Athena doesn’t believe that for a second, given the sharp glint in her eye, but she doesn’t challenge the claim. She leans back, shifting in her seat. “The only good news is that the two of you kept your heads and let the police do their jobs. It’s arguing and raising tempers that gets people hurt in these scenarios. Keeping cool heads kept everyone safe until the situation got straightened out.”
They may have been afforded a level of privilege being white men that others put into the same scenario would not have had, and they hadn’t argued with the detaining officers at all or given them any reason to escalate the situation, but Buck would hardly say that left him feeling safe. He’d still been handcuffed, isolated from everyone else by the officer who had grabbed him and then been unable to do anything but stand there while…the officer had all the power.
Buck briefly closes his eyes, fighting to keep a reflexive shiver of revulsion from running through him. It had been hard to believe it was happening to him in the moment-- even with the officer’s body pressed against his and his hands making their less than gentle advances while he proposed…whatever the hell kind of exchange he was aiming for it had felt more surreal than anything else considering the circumstances it was all a part of--but here in the aftermath, it’s all too easy to parse out what happened. To remember the officer's words and realize that, once again, his reputation had preceded him. To realize exactly what the officer had decided to do, knowing that Buck had no recourse in the moment, if at all.
“Right.” Steve agrees. He nudges at Buck with the back of his hand. “You can probably delete that recording.”
“Recording?” Athena asks.
“When we first got pulled over and then got surrounded by police before anyone approached the vehicle my gut was telling me something wasn’t quite right.” Steve explains. “I had Buck turn his phone on to record audio, just in case. But, while none of it was fun, the whole thing was pretty by the book, so there’s no need to hang on to it.”
Buck is torn between being relieved that Steve didn’t experience anything untoward with the police officer who had handcuffed and detained him and disappointed because that means the onus is on him to speak up. And he knows that he has to. Because the next person the officer tries to pull anything like this with might not be as lucky to get away after only some suggestive comments and aggressive hands, or have someone that they know will take the complaint seriously. Buck has to at least try to make sure that people moving forward have a chance at being protected, even though the thought of revealing the experience and having to go over it in detail makes him want to curl up into a ball and shrink far away into the background where no one will even think him noticeable enough to try and deal with.
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “Actually, uh…we should probably listen to it.” He admits, looking at his hands on the table and picking at his cuticles.
Almost immediately, two sets of eyes are on him, searching for answers. “Why would we need to do that?”
“The, uh, officer who cuffed and--and searched me…I didn’t catch his name but it’ll be somewhere in the reports right?”
“All of the officers involved will be filing reports that will be compiled in the official case file.” Athena nods.
“I-I don’t know if what he said will be on the recording. The phone was in my pocket, and then on the hood of the car and he was pretty quiet. But it’s probably worth listening to try and see. So it might be more than just my word against his.”
“What do you mean?”
“What did he do?”
Athena and Steve’s questions come in quick succession, and if it were anyone else, their intensity would probably make Buck recoil in his seat. As it is, he doesn’t exactly want to continue the discussion or look at them while he does. He makes the effort anyway. “The officer who was taking me into custody, before everything got straightened out…he wasn’t as by the book as the one Steve was dealing with.”
“OK. So the best theory we have at this point is that you were the actual target, Mr. Buckley, since the caller described you specifically. That said this incident did also affect you, Commander McGarrett, and obviously has a significant impact on your life, Mr. Diaz.” Detective Romero says as the group (Buck, Steve, Eddie, and Athena) settle into a larger conference room to dive deeper into the investigation of the swatting incident, now that Adriana and Abuela have picked up Christopher to bring him back to Eddie’s. It hadn’t been easy to convince Chris to leave Buck and his dad--he is very much feeling clingy after everything and Buck has a feeling that there may be nightmares tonight, and quite possibly a day off of school tomorrow depending on how things go--but eventually he had agreed to go with his tia and bisabuela on the condition that he could call them if he needed to, and now that he’s been picked up (and Abuela and Adri have been at least somewhat brought into the loop of what’s going on and reassured that things will be OK (probably)) Romero is bringing them back into the conversation about what had happened and why and all of the things that may help him investigate. “So can any of you think of people who might be willing to make a false report like this to cause problems for you?”
“It’s not about me.” Steve shakes his head. “I have my fair share of enemies, but if they were gonna come after me…they would be a bit more aggressive than a swatting call. This is about Buck or Eddie.”
“Probably me.” Buck sighs, more than a little miserable. At this point, almost nothing about this day has been good. Well, therapy wasn’t bad per se, just tiring, but other than napping on the couch with Beans and Toast, he’s either been stuck rehashing previous traumas or experiencing and then having to talk about new ones. He’d reluctantly explained the actions of his detaining officer to Athena and Steve and they’d listened to the recording on his phone which, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, was pretty clear to the point where you could hear the officer making his proposition. He’d then had to talk Athena and Steve out of marching onto the precinct floor to confront (and in Steve’s case most likely punch out) the officer in question, since that was more likely to get them in trouble than it was to fix the situation for anyone. Once they’d regained control of their tempers, Athena had promised him that she’d bring the complaint to her Captain, who would be certain to handle the situation with discretion, and it wasn’t long after that that Romero had brought Eddie and Chris back to them and the conversation had been tabled. He knows that at some point, he’s going to have to go over it again with Eddie, because they’re partners and they talk about things and it’s not the sort of thing that he can expect Steve and Athena to keep to themselves (plus if the report goes anywhere he probably will have to be interviewed again by other officers or detectives who he isn’t as close with as Athena and he won’t be able to keep that from Eddie) but god he doesn’t want to do it. Then again, to be fair, there isn’t much these days that he does want to do, so it’s just another thing for him to suck up and push through. With that thought, Buck shakes his head, trying to refocus on the issue at hand. “I haven’t exactly been making very many people happy lately.”
Romero looks up from the notebook where he’s been jotting things down. “What do you mean by that?”
“Buck is the primary complainant in the city’s sexual assault case against former LAFD therapist, Dr. Hannah Wells.” Athena explains, and it’s kind of a relief that he doesn’t have to explain that. “He has a no contact order with her and there’s already been one incident where she violated that. The judge ruled it incidental so her bail wasn’t revoked but she’s smart enough to realize that it probably put her on thin ice. If she was interested in retaliation or intimidation, she could have changed to a more indirect approach.”
“That’s someone we’ll look into then. Is there anyone else?”
Buck picks at his cuticles and stares at them. He knows that there’s one potential suspect that would be very reasonable to suggest, he just really doesn’t want it to be her. He doesn’t want to think that she’s capable of being quite so vindictive or reckless with his safety, and the safety of a child. But…he has to admit that she’s been different lately. Or at least, much more intense. And she certainly would know how to make the kind of call that would garner attention and people would take seriously. “I, uh, recently pressed charges against my sister, Maddie, for assault. She’s…very unhappy about it.”
“She’s a 9-1-1 dispatcher.” Eddie adds quietly; Buck appreciates that he too sounds upset that this is a possibility they’re having to suggest. “So she knows how to work that system.”
“Did you end up removing her permissions from that location sharing app?” Steve asks. “The one she used to find out you were at the 118 last week.
Buck nods. That had been an easier decision to make overall after their first real fight in the station. They were both adults and didn’t actually need to be able to check on and find each other 24/7. Adding in that Maddie had been using the system to find where he was when he didn’t really want to see or talk to her…removing her permissions from the app had been one of the first things he’d done when he’d really started to consider that they had a problem.
“So she wouldn’t have been able to know exactly when you picked up Christopher to make the call.” Athena muses.
“Not without tailing us.” Steve confirms. “And I didn’t clock anyone following us. Familiar or not.”
“Is there anyone else who can access your location with these apps?” Romero steps back in.
“Just Eddie.” Buck shakes his head.
“Even ruling out this app as a potential method of following you, there are other digital ways to keep track of someone’s location.” Romero says. “So that doesn’t necessarily rule your sister out. We’ll look into that. Anyone else?”
Eddie leans forward in his seat. “Maddie is dating our co-worker, Howard Han. They’re having a baby together and he’s pretty invested in clearing her name, which has so far meant threatening Buck regarding access to his future niece or nephew, and generally insulting and harassing him over text messages. I was on shift with him today and he’s very unhappy about how things are going. I’m pretty sure he was trying to get a reaction out of me that he’d be able to either file a complaint with the department or press charges of his own about. He doesn’t actually know that Buck and I are dating, as far as he knows we’re both single, but he thinks that as Buck’s work partner and best friend, being able to press charges against me is the next best thing to being able to retaliate with Buck’s romantic partner. When he couldn’t provoke me he maybe could have decided to take more direct action.”
“Did he step away at any point around 3:10 this afternoon? That’s when the call was made to dispatch.”
Eddie thinks for a moment. “We were at the house then. But honestly you’d have to ask some of the other people on shift. Our Captain was keeping us apart because of the hostility.”
“OK. We’ll get someone on that.”
“There’s also that unknown number.” Steve says, tapping Buck’s arm with the back of his hand.
Eddie and Athena both frown and speak in unison. “What unknown number?”
Buck sighs. “I got a couple of text messages from an unknown number earlier today. Pretty much just basic cyberbully stuff. I figured it was probably just someone blowing off steam and blocked the number, but I guess now that this other stuff has happened it could be something more.”
Romero definitely looks like he agrees. “Would you be willing to let our techs look at your phone for a few minutes to try and pull the number off so they can do some research on it?”
“Sure.” Buck doesn’t love the idea of handing his phone over to the police really, but he isn’t sure he has that much of a choice if he wants to find out who’s behind the false report. He pulls the phone out of his pocket and places it on the table, sliding it over for the detective.
“They can also pull that recording and send it to Captain Maynard.” Athena comments smoothly, even though it definitely makes Romero and, to a certain extent, Eddie look at her curiously.
“Recording?”
“One of the officers involved in the stop and detainment before all of the details were straightened out crossed a few boundaries and will need to be investigated.” Her response comes out very matter-of-factly, and it seems to be enough to satisfy Romero, whose focus is more on who had caused the stop in the first place, not what happened at the scene at this point in time. On the other hand, Buck can tell that Eddie is just barely keeping himself from asking more about what had happened.
“Do you think that represents the last of the potential suspects?” Romero returns to the conversation at hand after a beat passes.
“Yeah, I think so.” For a brief moment, Buck considers bringing up Taylor Kelly, but he hasn’t heard from her beyond the single angry text chain not long after the backlash towards her story began, and he doesn’t really think this is her style of revenge from what he knows about her. Other than her and the people they’ve already discussed, he can’t think of anyone that would be so invested in making his life difficult.
“OK, we’ll look into these people as we investigate. Our techs are already working on identifying the cell phone used to make the initial call to 9-1-1 so we’ll hopefully have more information regarding that by tomorrow. Before we let you go, I did want to ask you all to listen to the recording of the call from dispatch, to see if the voice sounds at all familiar to you.”
They all agree, and Romero pulls out his own phone, laying it on the table and playing an audio recording.
“9-1-1, what is your emergency?”
“I’m a teacher at Durand Elementary School. We just had a student, Christopher Diaz, taken from the school pick-up by an unauthorized adult.”
“Do you know the identity of the person who took Christopher?”
“None of us recognized him, but he was a really tall, blond guy. He looked crazy strong and scary. He just came up, grabbed Chris and ran. Oh! And he had this big pink spot on his face. Like a weird bruise or something.”
“Did this individual leave with Christopher on foot or in a vehicle?”
“In a jeep. It was silver, and I think the license plate started with 2-D-4. But he wasn’t the one driving. He got into the passenger seat and it peeled out of the parking lot. I couldn’t see which way they went.”
“That’s all right ma’am. You’re giving the police a lot to work with. Do you know if the individual was armed?”
“I don’t know…he didn’t threaten us with a gun or anything, but I might have seen something in his waistband when he grabbed Chris?! I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
“That’s OK. I’m alerting all officers to be on the lookout for the vehicle and suspect you described and I’m dispatching officers to your location to come and take statements.”
Romero reaches out and pauses the recording. “It keeps going, but it’s just response protocols at that point. Do any of you recognize the voice?”
Both speakers on the recording, the caller and the dispatcher, had been female, and honestly, the dispatcher sounded more familiar to Buck than the caller. He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. It could have been anyone.”
Both Steve and Eddie agree.
Romero makes a few more notes. “It’s possible that the caller was someone you know using a vocal modifier, but that also could mean it’s a stranger or someone you haven’t thought of.”
“So…basically we know nothing.” Eddie glowers.
“For now.” Romero concedes. “But we have a lot of leads to work with. And now that we know that you are potential swatting targets there are protocols in place to respond to the potential calls in a manner that keeps all parties as safe as possible.”
“That’s not as comforting as you think it is.”
“We know.” Athena presses her lips together. “But until we know more, it’s really the best we can do.” She moves to stand. “Give us 20 minutes or so to get your phone squared away with the techs, and then you’ll be free to head home.”
Romero follows suit, grabbing both of the phones, his own and Buck’s, off of the conference table. He trades them for a few business cards from his pocket. “If you think of anything else, or anything else happens that you think might be connected, give me a call.”
The trio agree and after a moment are left alone in the conference room. It only takes a moment or two for Eddie to look over, an inquisitive and concerned look on his face. “Why is Athena talking about investigating one of the officer’s that detained you?”
Buck is almost positive that he shouldn’t really answer this question while they’re still in the police station and Eddie potentially has easy access to the officer in question--if Athena and Steve were angry, then Eddie will most likely be furious--but he also doesn’t think he has a good reason to put off answering. So with a near-shuddering breath, he steels himself and starts to respond.
Buck frowns, looking down at the mixing bowl he’s been stirring. He isn’t entirely sure where he went wrong--he’s made this pancake recipe dozens of times--but the batter is not coming together. Frustrated with his failure, he tosses the bowl into the sink and turns the water on, flooding the bowl.
Technically, it’s not the end of the world. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Chris had a nightmare and crawled into bed with him and Eddie; he’d originally moved out to the living room so he wouldn’t disturb the Diazes with his tossing and turning, but when he still couldn’t settle down, and couldn’t turn his brain off from thinking about all the ways the day had gone horribly, and how it’s his fault that Chris is having nightmares again, he’d started baking any recipe he could think of that he wouldn’t need knives for (they’d been moved again after his problems the other night and once again he doesn’t know where they are). He’d completed a batch of cinnamon rolls, and there’s a french toast bake in the oven. As time moved closer to when Eddie and Chris might wake up, he’d thought to complete the breakfast spread with some pancakes, but he’d also started feeling the fatigue from not sleeping more and more and maybe he hadn’t been as focused on making the recipe properly as he had thought. Or maybe he’d messed up the buttermilk substitution he’d made since they were out…
Whatever the problem, something had gone wrong with the batter, and now he has to decide if he wants to try again. He normally wouldn’t, especially since he was already making ingredient substitutions, but Chris had had an awful day yesterday, followed by a rough night, and pancakes are pretty much his favorite. It kind of feels like he should be making things up to him by making them.
With a sigh, Buck reaches for the yellow rubber dishwashing gloves on the edge of the kitchen sink and starts to slip them on so he can scrub out the mixing bowl to start fresh. He’s about to dive into the work when he hears a set of familiar footsteps enter the kitchen, followed soon after by a sleep-rough voice.
“Buck, baby? How long have you been out here?”
Buck doesn’t bother turning around to answer Eddie’s question. He’s almost certain he looks like shit since he only slept for a couple of hours, and Eddie will only worry more when he sees that. “Depends. What time is it?”
“Yeah, you know that’s not a great answer, right?” Eddie moves again, coming up behind him. “I mean I can tell by the state of the kitchen that it’s been at least a few hours.” He slips his arms around Buck’s waist and tuck’s his chin on Buck’s shoulder. Buck tenses when he first feels the hands, and hates himself for it immediately. He knows it’s Eddie. He knows Eddie would never do anything to hurt him. There’s no reason to get all nervous and worried around Eddie.
“I couldn’t really sleep.” Buck says. He reaches to shut off the sink, knowing that he’s not going to get around to cleaning the bowl right now. “I didn’t want to disturb you or Chris so I came out here, and started baking when I couldn’t settle.”
“You know I don’t mind if you wake me up.”
“Chris needed you.” Now, Buck does turn, spinning to face Eddie while still wrapped in his embrace and stripping off his dish gloves. “I was safe. I texted Steve for a little bit and then did this.”
Eddie surveys his face with a slight frown. “Chris wanted you there too. You’re the one he almost got taken from. You’re the one he’s worried about losing right now. If he had woken up again and you weren’t there…”
“I would have been right out here and would get back in there in a heartbeat.” Buck finishes. “But I did want to talk to you.”
“What about?” Eddie’s frown deepens.
“It’s my fault Chris is so upset.” Buck steps to the side, out of Eddie’s arms. When Eddie starts to protest, he holds up a hand to cut him off. “I know I didn’t make the report or make anyone else do it, but it was made to target me. And to target me specifically when I had Chris. It’s not right that he’s getting hurt because I’ve got such fucked up life right now.”
“It’s not right that you’re getting hurt because of it either.” Eddie counters. “None of this is intentional, Buck. We’re not blaming you for the things that stupid assholes are doing.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“What are you talking about?” When Buck doesn’t give him an answer right away, Eddie sighs and gestures to the kitchen table. “Can we sit down?” Buck doesn’t have a reason to say no, and they both end up sitting. “Now, what are you talking about? Why would we be blaming you for any of this?”
“Because ever since we got together, all that I’ve done is complicate your life. And now Chris is getting dragged into it. And--and maybe Detective Romero and Athena figure out what’s going on and this will be the end of it and somehow things miraculously start getting easier, but what if they don’t?” Buck asks. He can feel himself starting to get upset as he speaks but he can’t really help it; he’s exhausted and he’s been emotionally wrung out since the day before and there’s no pretending that this conversation and what he’s saying doesn’t matter to him. “You need to think about protecting Chris and what’s best for him. This time he just got scared but if somehow things get worse? It would kill me if he actually got hurt because of someone trying to get to me.”
Eddie leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He looks upset, and Buck doesn’t quite understand why. If anything, he should be relieved. All Buck is doing is trying to think of his son. “So what? Your solution is to pull back and run away? You think that won’t hurt Chris? Or me?”
“I’m not running. I’m just trying to--,”
“Just trying to push me into telling you to leave.” Eddie finishes for him. “Except I’m not gonna do that. Things have been a little complicated lately, but I don’t think you’re the problem.”
“You’re not upset about what happened with Chris yesterday?”
Eddie slaps his hand down on the table, though he’s mindful of his volume and doesn’t shout, still taking care not to wake Chris. “Of course I’m upset about that! But not at you! You were just as affected and scared by what happened as he was. Maybe even more so. He was confused, but he didn’t know what might happen if someone said the wrong thing or was a little trigger happy like you did. He didn’t have to worry about how some cop was going to use their power against him. At the end of the day, however misguided the situation was, they were trying to protect him. He’s upset, but he thinks it’s just some dumb mistake. Because you and Steve and everyone else have been so careful about protecting him and making sure he’s OK.
“Buck, you give us so much. You’re my best friend, and my partner, and honestly? The days that I get to wake up with you are better than the days that I don’t. I love you so much and even when you’re struggling, I can feel how much you love me, and that means so much to me, that you can look at me and see past the mistakes I’ve made in the past with Shannon, and Chris to see someone that’s worth taking a chance on and loving. And for how much I love you, I’m almost positive that Chris loves you more. You’ve been his best friend and someone he can count on ever since you met, and I know he looks at you like a second dad, and I couldn’t be happier that he has that with you. The fact that you’re even considering leaving to try and protect him, tells me all I need to know about how good you are.
“But you don’t need to leave, OK? Our lives would be worse without you in them, not better.”
Buck blinks furiously, trying and failing to stop the tears that come at Eddie’s heartfelt speech. He’d known, of course, that he had a place in Eddie and Chris’ lives and that they loved him, but to hear it spelled out in such stark, passionate terms, and to have Eddie make it more than clear that he doesn’t want Buck to leave, hits Buck in a way that he wasn’t really expecting. It feels like he's at the culmination of the emotional rollercoaster that the past couple of weeks have been, and it’s fairly difficult to not let his feelings get the better of him, even when the feelings are so warm and positive. “OK.” He agrees, wiping at his face. “I won’t go anywhere.”
“Good.” Eddie nods. “That said, if you want a bit of a break from everything that’s happening around here, maybe we could take a couple of days away?”
Buck blinks again, this time because he’s a little stunned, and a little confused. He’s not sure that Eddie has really taken time off that wasn’t forced by illness or injury since he’s known him; he’d barely taken the minimum time off when Shannon died, so it’s hard to imagine him suggesting a vacation. Especially since they aren’t near any holidays or breaks in Christopher’s school schedule. Getting away from the city and all of the chaos he’s been dealing with lately sounds appealing, for sure, but it also doesn’t seem all that feasible. “Doesn’t Chris have school?”
“I know I shouldn’t encourage him to miss classes or anything but third grade isn’t exactly high stakes.” Eddie shrugs. “He can miss a few days and we’ll keep him on track. Or he could stay with Abuela or Pepa and Carla can bring him to school and keep him on schedule and it will just be us. There are options.”
“What about Beans and Toast? We can hardly leave them behind in a strange new home. We just got them.”
“I mean…Athena’s been talking about giving May more responsibility and treating her like an adult since it’s her senior year. Maybe we could talk to them about having her house and cat sit for a few days?”
Buck raises an eyebrow. “You really think Athena would go for that? Having May stay in a strange house unsupervised for several days?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “It’s hardly a strange house. And it’s not exactly far from their house either. She wouldn’t exactly be unsupervised or stranded or anything.”
“I’m not saying no,” Buck begins after thinking for another moment. He really would like to take some time away from everything and maybe have a chance to heal and breathe away from the constant expectations of everyone outside of his closest circle, he just doesn’t see how it can work, all things considered. “But even if we can work things out with Chris, and the cats, and all of that, am I even allowed to leave town right now? With all the potential court stuff happening?”
“There’s no reason we can’t ask. I don’t think they’ll say no. We’re only talking about a couple of days, and it’s not like you’re a suspect or anything. Nothing is coming up immediately that you’ll have to be a part of.”
Eddie has a point. Not once, in all of his dealings with the various lawyers and police and all of that, has anyone said that he shouldn’t leave town. If he lets them know and they’ll still be able to get in touch with him if something were to come up, theoretically it shouldn’t be a problem. “What would we do?”
“Adri is planning on heading back home soon. She’s gonna go via El Paso, so she can stop at our parents and let them know about the pregnancy, and then head back to Austin. I thought, maybe we could go with her. I can back her up with our parents, and then we can split the drive to Austin with her and spend a few days hanging out and exploring down there before flying back.”
“You’re volunteering to spend time with your parents?”
“I’m volunteering to back up my sister while she tells them news that they’re going to be…difficult about. And technically I’m volunteering you to do it too. Or at least to distract Christopher while we do that.”
“You’re also volunteering Christopher to distract them from being too mad at Adriana.” Buck snorts.
“Potentially.” Eddie admits. “They’re going to be on their best behavior with a guest and Christopher around.”
“So you’re thinking a day in El Paso and then a few days in Austin?”
“Thereabouts. Maybe less in El Paso to be honest. Depends on Adri’s schedule and how things go.”
Buck considers the proposition a bit. Austin isn’t a city he’d ever been to during his travels and he knows it’s supposed to be great. He’d certainly enjoy getting to check out a few things down there, see a few tourist attractions and eat some good food, and otherwise spend time in a city that doesn’t appear to be actively hostile against him. And if he has to put up with some time in El Paso with the elder Diazes to do that? Well…he’s only met them the one time, and granted he’d been a bit high on painkillers at the time, but they’d seemed pleasant enough. He knows Eddie and his sisters have their issues with them being a bit overbearing and very much of the opinion that their way is the right way, but he also knows that they usually come around with a bit of time and prodding. Eddie’s said that his more recent conversations with his mom have been a bit better than how they left things at Shannon’s memorial, and that they can grate on each other at times because she and Ramon still want to set the rules for their children like they still under their roof, but that ultimately it all comes from a place of love and caring and that when push comes to shove, they’ll all be there for each other. So he can handle a day or so in El Paso if that’s what Eddie and Chris want.
“I think that all sounds pretty good. If you really think it will work.”
“I think it should.” Eddie nods. “We can start looking at the logistics today?”
Buck agrees easily. It’s not like they have anything else planned, aside from waiting for news on all the investigations.
“Great. Now is whatever smells amazing in the oven ready to come out?”
Buck glances towards the stove and realizes that in his distraction he never set a timer. But, Eddie is right, it smells great, which is usually a sign that things are at least close. “Yeah, probably.”
“I’ll get that out of the oven and start plating things up if you want to go wake up Chris? See how he feels about going to school today? I’m OK if he’d rather stay home with us, but we should leave it up to him.”
“Sure, that sounds good.” They both move to stand from the table, but before Buck can get very far, Eddie rests a hand on his bicep and leans forward, drawing him in for a brief kiss. “What was that for?” He asks as they pull back from each other, the corners of his mouth upticking in a soft smile.
“Hadn’t kissed you yet today. Seemed like something I should fix.”
Buck leans back in to return the favor, feeling lighter than he has in quite some time. “Now we’re even.” He heads down the hallway to the bedroom, content in the feeling that no matter what comes up today, he’ll be dealing with it with his family.
Chapter 30
Notes:
This chapter features investigations and legal proceedings that move at a speed that is very accelerated and unrealistic to how they would really happen. But...it's my fic and I decided I can indulge in a little Law & Order fantasy...as a treat.
Chapter Text
Buck spent most of the morning making phone calls. Or he had after a hearty breakfast and a family trip to Durand to drop Christopher off for his classes, a little later than normal. Chris had waffled back and forth on whether or not he felt up to going--he wasn’t happy in the slightest about being separated from Buck right now--but ultimately he had determined that he wanted to draw on some of the things that he had talked about with his therapist about how it’s OK to be scared of things, and even to avoid some things that make you scared but you can’t avoid everything that makes you scared. Apparently, they’d also talked about how sometimes if you put doing something off, it starts to feel bigger and harder to do the longer you wait, because once Chris had decided that he he would have to go back to school and spend time apart from his dads eventually, he’d insisted that it needed to be that day.
So Buck and Eddie had brought him to school, spoken with both the principal and Chris’ teacher to ensure they knew about the previous day’s events and to contact them if Chris needed anything, and then returned home to start trying to see if their plan for a mini-vacation was feasible. Eddie reached out to his sister to see if she was interested in having some backup with their parents, and when she had given an unequivocal ‘absolutely yes’, he’d started some preliminary research on flights, car rentals, and then hotels in Austin. And while he did that, Buck made phone calls.
He called ADA Davis, who assured him that they weren’t close enough to the trial to need him nearby, and just asked that he answer the phone if he noticed them calling; they were also able to check and see that nothing in regards to his sister’s assault trial had been set, so he should be all set on that front as well. He called Kathryn Belfort, the lawyer handling the paternity action against Dr. Wells for him, who said that she’d call when the DNA results came through, and that they could discuss what would come next if the results indicated he was the father. He called the orthopedic specialist for his arm, who through some divine miracle, was able to move up his scheduled appointment--that would determine if he could officially stop feeling slightly guilty for not wearing his sling-- to the next morning due to a cancellation. He called Jules' practice to confirm that all of his scheduled appointments, both with Jules and the psychiatrist who would be evaluating him, could still be done virtually, even if he was out of state. And then he called Athena to see if, as a complainant and witness in yesterday’s swatting incident (and additional probe into officer conduct) he needed to be available in person, or if being accessible by phone was enough. She’d confirmed that that should be fine, and then had invited him, Eddie, and Steve (if he so desired) over for lunch with her and Bobby.
Figuring it would be the perfect opportunity to see about May’s potential cat-sitting availability and for Eddie to ask Bobby about using some of his PTO, they’d agreed.
Which is how after a morning of phone calls and planning, the trio of Buck, Eddie, and Steve had ended up at the Grant-Nash household sitting in an awkward silence with Bobby in the living room while Athena finished up preparing lunch (apparently on days she and Bobby had off together, she made lunch and he made dinner). Buck knows the awkwardness is his fault. Things between Bobby and him have been off for a very long time.
Between Buck having the knowledge that his captain was making him jump through hoops to get back to the job he had already re-qualified for, and Bobby feeling guilty for the truck bombing and then what had happened with Dr. Wells, neither man really seemed to know what to say to one another. Then things with Maddie started going wrong and Bobby had opinions about that. Buck is, of course, conflicted about how he’s handling things with his sister, but he’s not sure how he feels about his captain inserting himself into and trying to mediate the conflict, no matter how much the whole shift tries to act like a family. Worse is knowing that Bobby disapproves of how Buck is handling things. Bobby hasn’t said anything about it since their arrival at the house, but Buck has a feeling that it’s coming. He hadn’t been shy or subtle about trying to get Buck to change his mind yesterday, and Buck can’t imagine that he’s had a change in perspective.
“So, Commander McGarrett,” Bobby begins, a little while after they all sit and no one else takes charge of the conversation, “my wife told me about your explanation to Detective Romero about how you know Buck. I have to admit I’m a little confused.”
“What exactly is confusing you, Captain?”
Buck knows that Steve is thoroughly unimpressed with the impression that Bobby has made over the course of his LA visit, because he doesn’t make any effort to ask the man to call him Steve like he almost always does when he’s not at work.
“You said that Buck served in your unit in the SEALS. I was under the impression that Buck had started the try-outs and training in Coronado but ended up ringing out.”
“It sounds like your question is for Buck, not me.” Steve says, he glances over at Buck. There’s a slight apology in his eyes, since Buck has been keeping his service separate from his work with LAFD, but it’s only slight. Buck knows his commander is of the opinion that Buck shouldn’t be bothering hiding his accomplishments. “What he chose to disclose about his service is his business, not mine.”
Bobby looks over, raising his eyebrows. “Buck?” He prompts.
“I wasn’t very far removed from my service when I joined the LAFD.” Buck struggles not to squirm in his seat. He doesn’t necessarily mind talking about things now, compared to how he felt a couple of years ago, but there’s a big part of himself that doesn’t feel like that person anymore. He’s not sure he could be that person again if he needed to be, and he doesn’t think anyone would look at who he is now, or who he’s been since he became a firefighter and think he was someone that served at all, let alone as someone who served in an elite unit. And somehow he can’t help but feel ashamed and uncomfortable about that. “The things that happened on my last call up really shook me and I was trying to put distance between myself and the person I had to be to get through that. I figured if people knew I had actually served they’d want me to talk about it, and I wasn’t ready to do that, so I lied and said I was a ringer.”
“And you never got comfortable enough to come clean?” Bobby probes.
“Would I have been believed?” The comment is out of Buck’s mouth before he can even consider that it might not be the time or place to go there. He still remembers the sting of learning his teammates hadn’t believed that he’d been in and saved people during the tsunami. “Sorry, I just…” He shakes his head. “It’s never been important to me that people know. I’m proud of what I accomplished to become a part of Steve’s unit and the lives I saved when I was a part of it. I don’t need other people to know that I did it for that to be true.”
Eddie places a hand briefly on Buck’s knee, shaking it reassuringly before moving it back. “With all respect, Cap, a lot of folks around the station aren’t very tactful when it comes to talking to people about their past service. They tend to think about the heroism and not what sacrifices and trauma are attached to it.”
Bobby looks conflicted, but ultimately concedes the point, and after another awkward beat passes he changes the subject. “Buck, I was hoping you and I could talk today about this business with Maddie.”
Buck stiffens in his seat. He doesn’t have to look to know that Eddie and Steve have as well.
“I’m not sure if you got my messages yesterday, but I do think a conversation in a neutral location might be a better route than pressing charges. You’re burning a lot of bridges right now.”
“I got your messages…” Buck begins. A part of him wonders if coming out about dating Eddie now would be worth being able to hold his hand and draw a little bit of strength and resolve from him. He wants to--needs to--be able to have this conversation with Bobby on his own. His upcoming appointment to get his arm checked out is probably going to clear him for the small amount of physical therapy he’ll have to do to get back to active duty, which means the countdown to his return to work is on. If that return is going to be back with Eddie at the 118, he doesn’t want to be constantly dealing with judgements and second guesses about his personal life from his boss. It’s hard enough to feel like he’s making the right choices without any additional pressure.
“Really?” Bobby asks. “I didn’t see any response come through.”
“I think he got a little distracted being accused of kidnapping Christopher.” Eddie comments. He doesn’t make much effort at hiding his displeasure on the subject change.
Bobby does look the slightest bit chastened. “Of course.” He concedes. “But we could talk about it now…?”
“What exactly is there to discuss?” Steve probes. “Buck has repeatedly tried talking to Maddie, and she has repeatedly crossed his boundaries in order to talk at him, insult him, and demand things she has no right to demand. At the party on Saturday, she assaulted him.”
“It was my understanding that it was a slap, when things were getting a little heated.” Bobby points out. “I’m not sure I would consider that to be an assault. And it’s hardly worth putting a permanent mark on Maddie’s records that will affect her employment and future.”
Buck has, of course, gone over the same arguments in his head. Over and over. He doesn’t want to be doing anything that could actually ruin Maddie’s life. He’s hurt by how she’s acting, and heartbroken that this is apparently what she thinks of him, but he hardly hates her. But at the same time, as guilty and torn as he feels over holding firm and pressing charges, he can see how Bobby isn’t making that great of an argument. A slap is an assault. “Would you be saying it wasn’t an assault if someone at a scene was argumentative and combative and slapped Hen? Or if May went on a date with someone and they didn’t like something she said and slapped her?”
“Of course not, but those are hardly--,”
“Then what about Buck’s situation makes it not assault?” Eddie cuts him off. “Because it was his sister doing the slapping? Because he’s a man? Because it’s Buck?”
Again, Bobby does at least look guilty here. But he also holds his position. “A family argument is a different set of circumstances. There’s history there. You know how to push each other’s buttons. This didn’t happen unprovoked.”
“So he was asking for it?” From the space housing the dining table, Athena cuts into the conversation. Buck turns and looks to find her standing there, arms crossed over her chest, looking less than impressed with her husband.
“That’s not what I said.” Bobby tries to placate. “What I’m trying to say is that this was an emotional, heated situation with tempers flaring. It’s not surprising that things boiled over and someone got hurt.”
“OK, but why are you pushing so hard to defend the person that did the hurting?”
Bobby sighs. “Look. Buck. I’m not saying that Maddie was right to slap you. I don’t think anyone should be hitting anyone else ever, unless there are lives in danger. She very clearly owes you an apology. I’m just concerned that if you go through with pressing charges, that’s going to cause a rift that you can’t walk back from. This could destroy your relationship with Maddie, and by extension, Chimney.”
“My relationship with Maddie is my business.” Buck remarks. His voice is a little quieter and more worn than he would have liked it to be. He’s tired. There was a time when Bobby’s opinion and advice was something that he’d actively seek out and take into account; as his boss and mentor and someone that had seemed to be on his way to stepping into a fatherly role (no matter how jokingly that had all started) it had just seemed right that Buck respect him and do what he could to learn from him. But in talking with Eddie and Steve, he’s starting to notice that lately more often than not, Bobby’s advice and instructions have been putting his needs and well-being behind everyone else’s.
“Of course.” Bobby concedes. “But I don’t think you actually want to cut ties with her, do you? And as long as there is this continued tension between the two of you, things are going to be difficult with Chimney. He’s trying to protect the mother of his child and you’re putting him in a difficult position.”
“Buck’s still on medical leave.” Eddie points out. “Any tension with Chimney is not happening in the firehouse, so that’s also not your business.”
“He’ll be back to work soon, and he’ll need to be able to work with Chimney. And the tension is happening in the firehouse. I had to keep you separate from him for the entire shift yesterday.” Bobby argues. “As captain, I have to try and mediate these things before they become issues.”
Buck watches Eddie clench his jaw. He just barely restrains himself from reaching out to offer some comfort of his own. “Chimney was the one making constant comments, bringing personal business into the workplace. That is not Buck’s fault. And yes, you separated us to try and mitigate the tension, as was your job as captain. But before you did that, I had not responded inappropriately or retaliated. So if you have a problem with anyone, it’s with Chimney, not me or Buck.”
Bobby presses his lips together. He doesn’t respond to Eddie, and after a moment, turns his focus back directly to Buck. “What I’m trying to get you to understand is that your actions have consequences beyond yourself. You feel like you’re teaching Maddie some kind of a lesson for not respecting your boundaries, but there is a ripple effect happening that’s causing problems for everyone and destroying your relationships with your family.”
Buck exhales and scoots forward in his seat a little. “Bobby, I respect you as my captain, but everything that we’re talking about is about my personal life, and it’s not something that I’ve asked for your guidance on. I came here for lunch because Athena invited us for a quiet afternoon after everything that happened yesterday, not to be treated like a kid who’s broken the rules. I haven’t done anything wrong.” By the time he finishes, Bobby looks conflicted and Buck almost wonders if he’s overstepped somehow. What he’d just said isn’t anything that he hasn’t been told by other people, but maybe he didn’t say it right. He doesn’t think he’s been rude, but sometimes you can say things and people just totally misinterpret them. Maybe Bobby is hurt that Buck only mentioned respecting him as a captain? But it’s not like he’s been there for him as anything beyond that over the past nine months so it doesn’t really seem like he’d have room to complain. Buck just doesn’t understand…
“You’re right.” Bobby admits after several long moments. “All of you are right. It’s just…hard for me to see my firefighters having these kinds of problems and not try and do something about it.”
“From one leader to another, if I may offer some advice?” Steve interjects. He waits for Bobby to nod. “As a captain, you obviously have to manage issues as they arise in the firehouse and on duty. If someone behaves inappropriately there, you discipline them. And you let all of your people know that you are willing to be an open ear if they have anything they want to discuss. But you can’t step into their personal lives if they aren’t asking you to. And you can’t expect any one person to be the one to sacrifice their own feelings and rights to make things more comfortable or easier for everyone else.”
Bobby accepts the advice and offers an apology to the group, after which Athena tells them that lunch is ready, if they want to move to the table. The group stands and moves, taking seats at the dining table where Athena pours out glasses of iced tea or water depending on everyone’s preference and they start to pass around a bowl of colorful crisp looking salad and a serving plate of braised chicken. As everyone starts to settle in, conversation restarts with Athena asking if Steve has any stories about a young Buck that he’d be willing to share.
Buck makes a token protest, but he doesn’t really care when Steve waves him off and starts to answer. It feels nice that there’s someone who wants to know more about him beyond the ongoing drama, and he knows that in this particular venue, Steve will pick stories that paint him in a mostly good light.
That kicks off a much more relaxed atmosphere as they eat, that carries on as Bobby follows up by asking Steve more about the work his task force in Hawaii does, and then Eddie shares about the new furry residents of his house and starts to lay the groundwork that he might ask May to do a little cat sitting if Athena were comfortable with it. Everything is going great, and Buck is genuinely starting to relax and enjoy himself when Athena’s phone rings, and she excuses herself to the patio outside after checking the caller ID, noting that it was from work. This puts a bit of a damper on things, because everyone knows she’s either getting called in because something major is happening, in which case Eddie and Bobby might very well get their own calls soon, or she’s being given an update on one of the active cases she’s attached to in one way or another. And many of those involve Buck.
Buck tries not to think too much of it, but his anxiety starts to spike the first time that Athena glances back into the house towards him with a serious look on her face, and it only gets worse as the call goes on and she continues to look his way. Each time, her face seems to get a little more worried. By the time she’s hanging up the phone and coming back into the house, he’s long stopped eating due to the pit forming in his stomach, and he has to take a drink of iced tea because his mouth has gone dry.
“That was Rick.” Athena announces as she closes the patio door behind her. She then clarifies, “Detective Romero.”
Eddie immediately sits at attention. “Did they find out who made the call yesterday?”
“They did.”
Bobby studies his wife’s face. “Isn’t that good news? If they know who made the call, they can arrest them and there won’t be any more trouble for Buck or Eddie.”
“They are…moving to arrest this individual now.” Athena says slowly. “But I’m afraid, even if they confess, it’s not going to make things much easier for anyone.”
“I’ve already advised my clients not to speak with you.” The high-priced, well-suited lawyer sitting across the conference table from Buck says. Buck has never actually met Nicholas Sharp before, but the man is everything he would have imagined, knowing that he’s one of Phillip Buckley’s fraternity brothers from Penn State. He’s got slick backed hair, that’s just starting to gray and show his actual age, a slimy, overconfident look on his face, and a watch that Buck is fairly certain is worth more than his jeep wrapped around his wrist. Maddie and Chimney are sitting next to him. Buck would say that they’re stone-faced, but that wouldn’t be giving any credit for the anger burning in their eyes.
“We know.” The Assistant District Attorney handling this new case, Owen Ellis, sounds particularly bored and unimpressed as he responds to the defense attorney. “This is not going to be a conversation, just a sharing of information and a presentation of options.”
Underneath the table, Buck works a switch on his fidget cube with one hand. Anxiety and guilt (and a few other emotions that he’s not doing as well at placing) are lingering beneath the surface of his skin, itching and burning and keying him up with restless energy. If he doesn’t have something to keep his hands busy, he’s almost positive that he’ll start scratching at whatever skin he can find, or picking at the healing burn on his hand. Ever since Jules had pointed the behavior out to him at their in-person appointment, he’s noticed himself start doing it unconsciously several times when he gets overwhelmed, and he’s trying to make a concerted effort to stop.
Eddie, sitting next to him, is holding his other hand, also out of sight, letting it rest on his thigh.
Buck still can’t believe that this is where they are. Even knowing that it was technically a possibility, Buck honestly can’t believe Chimney of all people was behind the swatting call that led to the detainment on the side of the road and the mess that followed. Even hearing some of the details of how it had been pulled off, he just can’t quite connect the dots as to how someone he works with, someone who he essentially considers to be his brother-in-law, could be so upset with him as to make him the target of a police investigation. Yes, they’ve been having their disagreements, and of course the man isn’t happy about Maddie having been arrested and Buck’s role in that, but he had never seen Chimney as the type of person to exact revenge. Especially revenge so…extreme.
He doesn’t even know how it would have occurred to him to do something like this.
“Go ahead and waste your time if you want to.” Sharp waves his hand dismissively. “My clients are eager for their days in court. Your so-called victim is hardly a perfect witness.”
Buck swallows thickly around his dry mouth. Eddie squeezes his hand.
“Well, let’s start with Mr. Han.” ADA Ellis says, leaning back in his seat. Buck doesn’t like him as much as he likes the attorney handling his case against Dr. Wells, but he gets the feeling that he’s well-suited to go toe-to-toe with the shark his parents had brought in to try and defend Maddie and Chim. Ellis isn’t a warm, personable lawyer, but he is confident and smooth. When they’d first been introduced Captain Maynard’s office, he’d been brusque, but once he announced that he wanted Buck in the room when he presented the facts of the case to Maddie, Chimney, and their attorney (and conceded that Eddie could join as a matter of providing support) he’d guided them through the hallways of the precinct with killer efficiency and briefed them with all of the precision of someone out of a fast-paced Sorkin drama. He didn’t mince words or give platitudes, but he’d been quite certain that they would be walking out of the room that day having at least put a healthy dose of fear of what’s to come in his prosecutorial targets. “We’re charging him with a felony violation of California penal codes 148.3, 148.5, and 148.9.”
“With what evidence?” Sharp scoffs.
“To start, the 9-1-1 call that was dialed from your client’s phone.”
It’s impossible to miss the way that Chimney’s eyebrows raise in surprise. Sharp still remains nonplussed. “It was my understanding that the call logs reflected an out of state cell phone number.” He makes a show of glancing down at some of his paperwork. “Nevada, was it? My client has never lived in Nevada, nor has he bought or registered a phone number there.”
“TARU technicians with the LAPD were able to determine that that number was merely the projection of a rudimentary spoofing app. The creators of said app were more than happy to comply with our subpoena requesting the account information and data on the cell phone that used the app to make the call. Not only did that information reveal that the actual number of the phone used to make the call belongs to the cell phone registered to Mr. Han, but the account required to use the spoofing app was created using Mr. Han’s Facebook account.” Ellis counters, completely unaffected by the attorney’s protest. In contrast, Chimney starts to blanche as the district attorney speaks, while Maddie angles a sharp look at her partner.
For people who tend to rib Buck for his inability to bluff when he joins in on poker games, at this moment, their poker faces are practically non-existent. He’s not entirely sure what to make of that. Did Chimney, who was tech savvy in that he’d taken a few computer courses over the years and made a point of staying up-to-date on what the ‘cool’ apps were, really think he’d be able to outsmart the technical divisions of one of the country’s largest police forces?
ADA Ellis continues before anyone else can jump in. “Additionally, once we were able to confirm the cell phone that was used, we were able to use the call records from area cell towers to triangulate the location of the caller when the 9-1-1 report was made. Those coordinates place the caller directly in Firehouse 118, where Mr. Han was on duty at the time in question. His Captain has already confirmed that the squad was in the firehouse at that time, and the LAFD has handed over footage from all of the house’s security cameras so our technicians can review it to confirm Mr. Han’s exact location at the time of the call and what he was doing.” He pauses, ever-so-briefly. “I believe your next argument is going to be that the 9-1-1 caller who made the report was female, and that neither the targeted victims of the call, nor the allegedly abducted minor’s father recognized her voice, is that correct?”
Sharp presses his lips firmly together. “And what do you think you have that contradicts that?”
“Well, it just so happens that the company that made the cell phone spoofing app that Mr. Han used also made the app that he used to disguise his voice. And, as before, they were very eager to comply with our subpoenas.”
“Proving that he has used a vocal disguise application is not proof that he used it in this particular instance.”
“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” Ellis cocks his head to the side. He hadn’t actually briefed Buck and Eddie and everyone else on all of the evidence they had that made him certain that this conversation was going to go their way, but Buck is starting to understand his confidence. Even with only his layman’s knowledge of law ripped from binging procedurals on sick days, he’s getting the picture that while Chimney had thought he was covering his tracks, he hadn’t done that thorough of a job. And that whatever Ellis is about to reveal, it’s quite possibly going to be a nail in Chimney’s coffin. “Only…you know that little terms and conditions page you have to agree to when you make an account and use an app for the first time? The one that no one ever reads because gosh darn it, who has the time to look at all that tiny, complicated text? In this particular app, the terms of privacy were quite clear that every time the app is used to process audio, a recording of that original audio is submitted to the app servers, kept there for a minimum of ten years, and will be submitted to law enforcement when requested. A CYA clause from the app creators if you will.”
“CYA?” Maddie pipes up from her side of the table, frowning. Almost immediately, her lawyer is glaring at her. Buck imagines she and Chimney had been given a similar lecture to the one he and Eddie had received regarding remaining silent during the proceedings unless prompted by their attorney, and although the question is a harmless one that doesn’t incriminate anyone, Sharp doesn’t look happy that she’s forgotten the instructions.
Ellis’ mouth curves up in a shark-like grin. “Cover Your Ass. These app creators were making a project that was meant to be used for fun, but they understood that people might use it to break the law, so they included terms that protected themselves from legal action should that occur. And in this particular instance, that means we have undoctored audio of Mr. Han making the 9-1-1 call that led to the police pursuit and detainment of Mr. Buckley and Lieutenant Commander McGarrett.
“Our TARU technicians have also been able to confirm that the same spoofing app was used to mask Mr. Han’s phone in sending Mr. Buckley harassing text messages, that, when Mr. Buckley responded to try and determine the identity of the sender, gave Mr. Han a backdoor into Mr. Buckley’s cell phone data, allowing him to track the phone’s location and give him the information required to know when exactly to make the call. I think I’ve painted a clear enough picture, Mr. Sharp, for you to see that we have your client dead to rights.”
Sharp holds up a hand to keep Chimney, who is now leaning forward in his seat, face turning red, from saying anything. “Even so, you can’t possibly think you’ll be able to sell a jury on felony charges. Buckley doesn’t have a scratch on him.”
“The letter of the law doesn’t require grievous bodily injury or death to occur, just that the individual filing the false report does so knowing that bodily injury or death is a likely outcome. He indicated that Mr. Buckley had kidnapped a child through force and potentially had a weapon. Any officers approaching suspects under those conditions would consider them armed and dangerous until confirmed otherwise, a situation which can quickly escalate even when the suspects aren’t armed, as we have all seen before.”
“That’s a stretch.”
“Is it?” Ellis arches an eyebrow. “Every report filed by the responding officers indicates that when they pulled Mr. Buckley’s vehicle over, they approached with their weapons drawn. This is corroborated by dash-cam footage. Had Mr. Buckley and Lieutenant Commander McGarrett not kept their heads enough to calmly comply with instructions, we could be having a very different conversation right now. And if the dash-cam footage isn’t enough proof of the seriousness of the situation, the responding officers and the three occupants of the car are all ready and willing to testify. I’m sure the jury will be particularly moved by young Christopher’s description of events.”
Buck knows that Eddie would only let Christopher testify in a last-ditch effort to save the case, hoping to spare him any additional trauma, but the other occupants of the table probably aren’t so sure. And Eddie actually has a poker face, so looking at him tells them nothing.
It is, however, the first time Buck can spot discomfort on Sharp’s face. “What are you offering?”
Chimney’s head snaps in his lawyer’s direction, a look of disbelief on his face.
“Who says I’m offering anything?” ADA Ellis asks. “Like I said, we have Mr. Han dead to rights. Prosecution will be a slam dunk.”
“Cut the crap, Ellis. You wouldn’t have called the meeting if you weren’t interested in playing ball somehow.”
“Believe me, I’m not interested. If I had my way I’d be crafting a prosecution plan that would convince any jury that your client deserves nothing more than the maximum punishment available for his extreme retaliatory measures. However…By some divine miracle for your clients, Mr. Buckley doesn’t believe in eye for an eye retribution, and he has made enough of a compelling case that I am willing to make some concessions so that your clients will both eventually be able to raise their future child.”
Buck had indeed had to argue his position. Not just with ADA Ellis but with Steve and to some extent Eddie. They all wanted a full-steam-ahead prosecution, and for Chimney to be punished under the full extent of the law. And he does understand that. Chimney’s decision to file a false report and accuse Buck of kidnapping had terrified Christopher, put himself and Steve in harm’s way, and led to more things Buck will have to process both on his own and in therapy that he wishes he could just wipe from his memory. Buck feels sick to his stomach that someone he knows and has trusted with his life time and time again is willing to betray him in such a way, and he’s not entirely sure that he’ll lose much sleep if he never sees Howard Han again knowing that, but the problem is that punishing Chimney won’t just affect him at this point.
Because Chimney and Maddie had tied their lots together, and are expecting a baby.
And Buck doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to repair things with his sister, or that he’ll get to know the niece or nephew that will be born in several months time, but he’s certain that if punishing Chimney and Maddie to the full extent of the law means that that baby doesn’t get a chance at knowing parents who love them (and he’s certain that despite all of this, Maddie and Chimney will love their child--after all, he’s the only one they’ve ever seemed to take an issue with) he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. So he had argued for some level of leniency, and eventually convinced the others that it would be the right thing to do.
Now he can only hope that the high-priced attorney his parents are funding will do the right thing and convince Maddie and Chimney of it too.
“Mr. Han pleads guilty to his felony violation of falsely reporting a crime with the intent--,”
“Like hell I will.” Chimney interrupts before ADA Ellis can continue. “I didn’t do anything that wasn’t--,”
“Shut. Up. Mr. Han.” Mr. Sharp cuts him off piercingly. He redirects his attention back across the table. “Continue.”
“Mr. Han pleads guilty to his felony violation of falsely reporting a crime with the intent of causing grievous harm to occur to Mr. Buckley.” Ellis repeats himself and completes his initial thought. “He will serve 18 months in a minimum security facility, with the possibility of parole after one year, and pay a fine of $5,000.”
“And how exactly is that a deal for my clients?” Sharp asks. “If a jury were to convict him, they would still be far more likely to assign a penalty like that, if not lower, rather than the maximum. Why shouldn’t he see what his peers have to say?”
“Because if Mr. Han takes the deal, Mr. Buckley is willing to drop the charges against Ms. Buckley.”
While his previous responses have always been quick and acerbic, this seems to give Sharp some pause. Maddie’s expression loses some of its fire, and even Chimney, rankled as he is, seems to falter. “Ms. Buckley is only facing a single misdemeanor assault charge.” Sharp begins slowly. “Even if she were convicted, she would only be responsible for a small, symbolic fine or a few hours of community service. I fail to see how that is an incentive for Mr. Han to lose 18 months of his life.”
“Any conviction for a crime involving bodily harm to another individual, even a misdemeanor, would preclude Ms. Buckley from retaining her position as a 9-1-1 dispatcher. The morals clause she agreed to on signing her employment contract reflects that.” ADA Ellis informs. “If Mr. Buckley drops the charges, she retains her position and her health insurance, allowing her to provide for herself and any future children.”
“So we can just be beholden to him for the rest of our lives?” Chimney almost looks ready to spit. “He just wants something to hold over our heads. He doesn’t care what happens to me or Maddie, he just wants everyone to think he’s the bigger person.”
“And you were caring about what happened to him when you reported him for kidnapping a child he was well within his rights to pick up?” Ellis challenges.
“Don’t answer that.” Sharp snaps. “Are there any other conditions of this deal that we should be aware of before I discuss it with my clients?” He addresses the ADA.
Ellis shakes his head. “No conditions from me. I believe Mr. Buckley has something he wants to say to his sister, but she is not required to respond, and this statement has no bearing on the deal I’ve put on the table. He’ll say his piece, and then we’ll leave you to discuss options with your clients. You’ll have until end of day tomorrow before the deal is off the table.” He pauses for a moment, and then nods at Buck. “Go ahead, Mr. Buckley.”
Buck takes a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves. Eddie still has a hold of his hand underneath the table, which helps in many ways, but it doesn’t take away the cold reality that this might be one of the last times he gets a chance to see and speak to his sister. There are just too many ways that the whole mess could shake out that will end with her refusing to deal with him ever again; even if she and Chimney take the deal it doesn’t seem like they see it as an olive branch, and it’s just as likely that they’ll continue to hate and blame him for everything. If that’s the case and they cut him out, or if they continue to harass him and he has to enforce the distance himself, there won’t be any way back. Not that he can think of. It’s hard to imagine that after today he might not have anyone else with the Buckley name that cares what happens to him.
“M-Maddie, I don’t know what happened to us. I-I don’t know when you lost all faith in me and stopped trusting me to run my own life, or when you decided to believe that I was the kind of person to lie to get ahead or who had no respect for myself or other people…I don’t know if you blame me for Daniel like mom and dad do or if there’s something else that I don’t know about but…I know that for whatever reason, you don’t like me anymore. I’m not sure if you even love me. It really doesn’t feel like it.” He takes another deep breath, looking down at the table and taking the opportunity to blink back tears. He’s determined to not cry right now, lest any perceived weakness make anyone think they’d be better off taking their chances in court. He looks back up when he’s ready to speak. “Even with all of that, and with everything that’s happened lately… I still love you. I don’t want all of this to ruin your life, or take away your child’s chance at a good life with you, and eventually their father. They don’t deserve that, and…and you deserve better too. You had your childhood taken away from you by our parents’ neglect and their insistence on pretending the past never happened. And then you had so many years taken away from you by Doug. You’ve survived so much, and I’m scared that you’re going to lose all the opportunities you have for a great life now because you’ve decided to let whatever feelings you’re having about me take over your life.
“Take this deal. If you want to hate me and cut me out of your life, fine. I’m done trying to get you to see my side. But take this deal, and get some help. Talk to someone about whatever it is you’re feeling and let them help you deal with it instead of getting so angry…Take the deal. Take this opportunity to put this mess behind you and raise a happy, healthy child. Build the life you deserve instead of trying to tear down mine.”
I don’t deserve this.
Buck thinks it when he leaves the conference room in a full panic attack, because he’s just sentenced his sister’s partner to 18 months in prison, and she’ll have to give birth and raise her baby for almost a year on her own, but he still has his partner by his side. Chimney had agreed to the deal and Maddie had sobbed and screamed across the table that she’ll never speak to him again and he’ll never know her child, but for whatever reason, Eddie still stays by his side and guides him to some other private space in the police precinct and he and Steve sit on the floor with him, buffeting him on either side and talking him through his distress. They get him calm and treat him so softly even though he ruins everything he touches, and when he can finally breathe and function again, they give him water and help him out to the jeep and Steve drives so Eddie can sit out back with Buck and hold him as close as the seat-belts will allow and promise that it none of this is his fault and that he still has so much family who loves him.
Even though Buck doesn’t deserve it.
The thought echoes in his head when they pick Christopher up from school and Chris greets him before greeting his dad. When Chris takes Eddie’s place in the backseat with Buck, takes one, real look at Buck’s face and tells him, “It’s OK if you’re having a tired or a sad day, Buck. As soon as we get home, Dad and I can hug it better.”
He does indeed get a slightly bone-crushing Diaz hug when they get back to the house, and Buck hates himself for getting comfort out of it because he’s taken away the person who could give that to Maddie.
That afternoon they build the biggest blanket fort imaginable in the living room, much to the kittens’ wide-eyed enjoyment. They co-opt almost every bed sheet in the house and move kitchen chairs in to act as stabilizers and prop up their makeshift tent. Eddie and Steve make sure that the structure includes a view of the TV for movie watching and, for some reason that Buck isn’t clear on, string up some Christmas lights throughout the fort to give it all a soft, warm glow. At the same time, Chris and Buck collect every fluffy, soft blanket, pillow, and couch cushion they can find to create the ultimate, cozy nest. Everyone changes into sweats or pajamas, they make breakfast for dinner and spend the whole night cuddling close and cycling through everyone’s favorite feel-good movies. Everyone, even Steve, ends up falling asleep in the fort.
It’s the kind of comfortable, love-filled family activity that Buck has dreamed about being a part of since he was a kid, and even as he tries to enjoy it and soak it all in, he has a singular echoing thought in the back of his head.
I don’t deserve this.
When Buck has a nightmare sometime past midnight and wakes up Eddie trying to wriggle out of his arms because all he can feel is unwanted hands crawling across his body, Eddie doesn’t get upset or complain. He gets Buck some water and patiently waits for him to tell him what he needs. Eventually after Buck gives him the OK and they lay back down, he bundles Buck close to his chest and runs his fingers soothingly through Buck’s curls.
Buck is safe and secure and surrounded by the people he trusts most, but somehow he can’t trust in it.
Because these are not things that are meant for him. Not for Evan Buckley.
Buck is too worried about it all disappearing to fall back asleep, even long after Eddie drifts off and Beans sidles up to purr under his hands.
He doesn’t realize that the early morning hours have come (they are under the blanket fort and can’t see the glow of sunrise seep in through the windows) until Steve wakes up. Steve is always an early riser--he’s never been able to leave his military experience behind--but today he’s up even earlier than normal; his team back in Hawaii had contacted him and he’s catching the first flight out to get home and help them with a case. Steve clocks that he’s awake almost immediately and gestures with a small flick of his head for Buck to join him outside of the fort.
For the second time, Buck disengages from Eddie’s embrace, although much more carefully this time. He presses a kiss to his partner’s temple and murmurs a brief explanation that he’s just talking to Steve when Eddie stirs the tiniest bit, and then follows Steve outside of the fort. They make coffee in silence and take their mugs outside to the back yard, sitting on the steps of the house. Buck knows this will be their goodbye conversation--that even though it will be a little while yet before Steve calls the rideshare to bring him to LAX, when they do go back inside it will be to wake up Eddie and Chris so Steve can say goodbye to them and promise to host if they ever make it to Hawaii and Buck will need to step back so Christopher can get his time with the new Uncle he’s adopted into their family--and he’s not quite brave enough to be the one to start that or smart enough to know what to say at this point, so he sips his coffee and waits for Steve to step up and start.
“Did you sleep at all after that nightmare?” He asks.
Buck glances over, momentarily surprised that Steve knew about the bad dream since he hadn’t noticed him waking, but quickly remembers that he hadn’t exactly been totally present and Steve was a very light sleeper--more than used to snapping awake at small disturbances. Of course he would have noticed. “Not really.” He admits. “I couldn’t…I ruined Maddie’s life yesterday. Ended any chance at fixing our relationship and made everything so much harder for her…but somehow I got to come home and have the people I care about most take care of me even though all I do is make things harder…It just doesn’t seem right. I don’t deserve all this.”
“First of all,” Steve begins as he sets his coffee mug down onto the step next to him, “if anything, considering the shit storm that Maddie and Han put themselves into, you made her life easier. You dropped the assault charges against her, which means she gets to keep her job and health insurance. She still has the means to provide for herself and her future child.”
“Without a partner by her side. Chimney’s going to spend at least a year in prison. He’s going to miss the birth and the first months of his kid’s life and Maddie will have to do it all alone.”
“Chimney made his decisions. He could have gotten the both of us killed. He did get you assaulted and Christopher traumatized. Because he and Maddie couldn’t admit that maybe they were wrong and just learn to let things go. Nothing that’s happening to him as a result of this deal is something that he didn’t know could happen if he got caught, he was just stupid enough to think he wouldn’t get caught. And, even if he doesn’t get early parole, he’ll still be out before that kid will be old enough to know he wasn’t there. He’ll miss some things, sure, but he’ll be able to be there for them when it counts. Both he and Maddie are getting second chances, if they’re willing to see it.”
It’s not that Buck thinks Steve is wrong; intellectually, he knows he’s not. But what his brain knows and what his heart feels are two very different things, and right now, his heart is set on calling him a piece of shit for making the only person who truly cared about him for at least the first decade of his life (if not longer) hate him. “I don’t know that they are.”
“And that’s not your fault.” Steve nudges Buck’s knee with his. “Is it fair that this is the way things are going down? Of course not. In a perfect world, you and Maddie would have had a couple of calm discussions and everything would have been right as rain. But you know as well as I do that the world we live in is far from perfect. And both Maddie and Chimney decided to go the path of scorched earth. They have to deal with the consequences of that. They might blame you for it, but you are not responsible for their decisions. You’re responsible for yours. And as far as I know, for your entire life you’ve done everything you can to love and support Maddie. Even when you lost contact. You can’t do anything more than that.”
The words slam into Buck’s chest and he closes his eyes. He’s not sure if he can really say that Steve’s words are true for his entire life, but he knows that they are for most of it. From the time he was old enough to realize what Maddie gave to him--what she’d given up to give to him--he’d done what little he could to return the favor.
When Maddie became the target of Katie Johnson (who also happened to be their next door neighbor) because Katie’s crush deigned to like Maddie instead of her, and she’d spread enough horrible rumors that said crush dumped Maddie right before prom? Buck maybe…accidentally-on-purpose came to a sliding stop on his bike. Straight through a muddy puddle. Sending the mucky spray all over Katie and her prom date who were taking pre-prom pictures on the front lawn. Honestly, it was their fault for standing so close to the street when the rain had only stopped a couple of hours ago.
When Philip and Margaret refused to attend her wedding to Doug or provide any funds for it, Buck mowed and raked every lawn, shoveled every sidewalk, and took any odd job he could that was accessible with either his bike or the bus, and saved every penny he could for well over a year. He bought his own bus ticket up to Boston for the event, a cheap but presentable suit on sale at JCPenney, and put every remaining dime into an envelope for Maddie to put towards her dress, since she wouldn’t get to wear their grandmother’s like she had once hoped. He walked her down the aisle, and danced with her when she would normally dance with her dad at the reception, and did everything he possibly could that their parents were meant to, even though he hated Doug and was sure he was bad news, because this was what Maddie wanted, and Buck was certain that she deserved to be happy.
Although she ended up declining to run away with him when she gave her jeep to the cause of Buck fleeing their parents and her communications with him pretty much ceased, Buck did what he could to let her know he was still thinking of her. That he’d still be there for her if she ever decided she needed him. And it worked. He ended up as a safe place for her to land when she decided to leave Doug, at which point he made every effort to be the best in-person brother he could be for her once again.
Buck has always tried to do right by Maddie, even when he didn’t understand what she was doing or why.
And increasingly in the months since the bombing….Maddie has not.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not Buck’s fault.
He’s just not sure what to do with that realization.
Eventually, Buck sighs. “OK. So I did everything I could.” The words come out soft and a little flat. He’s still not totally sure if he believes them, even if they’re starting to resonate a bit more. “Where does that leave me?”
“With an overprotective former Commander that’s willing to knock some sense into that skull of yours whenever you need it. And some friends who are willing to step up and be the family you deserve. And a kid that looks at you like you hung the moon and all the stars just for him. And a partner who loves you who just wants to stand by you and keep loving you.” Steve nudges at him again, this time with his whole body instead of just his knee. “Seems like a pretty good crowd, all things considered.”
“More than I deserve.” Buck murmurs, looking down at his hands. He wishes he had his fidget cube or something to channel his building energy into.
“Bullshit.” Steve snaps. “Why shouldn’t you have people in your corner, huh? What’s so bad about you that you should have to handle everything alone?”
“I’m not--,”
“Buck, you have spent your entire life trying to make up for something that wasn’t your fault. What happened to Daniel was completely out of your control. Your parents couldn’t handle their loss so they decided to blame you but the truth of the matter is is that you were just a kid. A baby. You had no control over what happened to Daniel. No one did. But you’ve done everything you can to make up for it anyways, because that’s the kind of person you are. If you ask me, you’d done it more than a hundred times over by the time you left the unit for how many times you saved our asses, and you’ve probably done it a hundred times more since joining the fire department. You are worth so much more than what the Buckleys see when they look at you. So much more than what strangers who don’t know you assume on first glance. And you know what else?”
Buck swallows around the growing lump in his throat. Steve McGarrett isn’t a bullshitter. If lives aren’t on the line and he says something, you can be damn sure that he means it. But even knowing that, even feeling his heart swell around the knowledge that someone he respects so much thinks so highly of him, and knowing that this is hardly the first time that Steve or someone else has tried to say something along these lines to him, it’s hard to simply take it in and accept it. He wants to. He wants nothing more than to be able to believe Steve’s words and take them in and get some kind of strength from them, the way he could when they were backed into a corner on some mission and Steve was rallying the unit to try something crazy to get out of it. He really wants to be able to. But it’s like there’s a brick wall between the part of his brain that knows Steve and Eddie and plenty of other people wouldn’t lie to him, and the part of his brain that’s willing to process and accept that and start actually recognizing it as true. And he’s trying to break the wall down, but it feels like instead of a wrecking ball or even a sledge hammer, all he has to work with is a tiny, basic ice pick, and it’s all he can do to chip away at the surface.
It makes him feel stupid and helpless and he has to force himself to push all of that back and ask Steve what else it is he wants to tell him. “What?”
“Life has thrown a lot of shit your way. More than your fair share. You don’t deserve any of it, but you’re dealing with it anyway. Even when you want to give up, you’re gritting your teeth and pushing yourself back to your feet, and doing what you can to fight back and find the life you deserve, and I know it’s hard, kid, but I am so fucking proud of you for doing it. Your brain is working against you right now and I know it’s trying to tell you that you’re weak and worthless but you’re not. It takes strength to get back up, and it takes strength to do the right thing and help other people when you’re still hurting, and it takes strength to ask for help when you can’t do it on your own anymore. You’re so fucking strong, Buck. And I promise you, that if you keep trying and keep fighting, you’ll come out on the other side of this.”
Buck is so sick of crying. It feels like every other conversation leads to tears lately, and even though he’s always been a fairly emotional person and he’s never been especially ashamed of that fact, he wishes that he could go at least one day without having to feel quite so exposed and vulnerable right now. And yet, he finds himself sniffing and swiping at tears spilling down his cheeks. “I wish I had your confidence about that. Right now I don’t feel all that strong. I feel…exhausted.”
“One doesn’t preclude the other.” Steve says. “You can be tired and upset and angry and everything else that you need to be. As long as you keep fighting, and keep coming to me or to Eddie or your therapist or someone when you need a little extra help or reassurance, you can feel all of those things and still be one of the strongest, kindest, most badass motherfuckers that I get to call my brother.” He slings his arm around Buck’s shoulders, pulling him into his side. “You’re gonna get through all of this, Buck. Things may look a little different for you when all is said and done, but you’re gonna do it.”
Buck tries to take it all in. The conviction of Steve’s words. The steadiness that emanates from his very presence. The unassailable knowledge that even though he doesn’t have all that much faith in himself right now, people that matter to him and that he trusts above anyone else do. It doesn’t break the brick wall down, but for a few brief moments it feels like there’s a chance that it could fall.
He huffs, pushing past the watery feeling in his throat. “You’re sure you have to go back to Hawaii?”
Steve disengages from the embrace, removing his arm. “Based on the call I got from Danny last night…yeah. They’ve got an all hands on deck situation. But I’m still just a text or a phone call away. I mean it. Day or night, you need me, I’ll answer.” He pauses, ever-so-briefly, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. “Just because I can’t stay here next to you, doesn’t mean I won’t be here for you, Buck. I made you a promise when you left the unit, and there’s no limits or expiration date on it. As long as you want my help, you’ve got it.”
Buck hasn’t felt much like a SEAL lately, probably not since pushing through everything he could to get Chris through the tsunami, but there’s something about this moment, sharing the early morning quiet with Steve and being reminded, at least in small, tangential ways of what they’d gone through together and the bonds they’d forged in those particular fires, that kindles that old spark within him. The smallest bit of resolve, attached to familiar, war-forged spirit warms in his heart. “Well, as long as you’re offering, I’ll keep up my end of the deal too. I promise. I’ll keep taking things one day at a time, and…if I feel like I can’t do it anymore you or Eddie’ll be my first call.”
“Good man.” They engage in a handshake, one that Buck hasn’t done since leaving the Navy but that’s still familiar muscle memory in the same way that rolling the hoses has become since joining the LAFD. Steve then glances down at his watch, grabs his forgotten coffee, and starts to push himself to his feet. “I’ve only got about twenty minutes before I’ll need to call my ride and head to the airport. What do you say we go wake your Superman up and make him a hot chocolate before I’ve got to say goodbye?”
Buck follows Steve’s lead, standing, with a small smile forming on his face as he pictures the proposed scene. “Sounds great.”
Chapter 31
Notes:
I'm so sorry about the delay in this update. Things with work have really sucked lately and my mental health is taking a nose dive so I'm needing to rediscover my passion for fandom and writing, and then nothing about this chapter was coming out the way I was planning so I had to reconcile that and re-plan a little.
Please rest assured that while updates might come a little slower than in the past, I am not abandoning this story. Thanks for sticking with me.
Chapter Text
It all starts, Buck thinks, because he never falls into a solid sleep the night before they’re set to fly to El Paso. All of the anxieties and thoughts he’s been putting off dealing with in regards to traveling to Texas and formally meeting Eddie’s family in favor of dealing with all the practicalities of arranging the trip and going to all of the appointments and tending to tasks that he can’t put off regarding checking the healing of his physical injuries, focusing on all of his mental brain things, and making sure things are on track the various legal concerns he’s embroiled in, hit Buck right around the time that he and Eddie finally get settled into bed that night, and no manner of thought or breathing exercise from Jules helped him get past the feelings of uneasy anticipation and outright concern.
The nerves don’t stem from meeting Eddie’s parents. Not exactly. Technically speaking, he has met them before. But that was in the aftermath of Shannon’s death and Eddie finishing his probationary year, before they were anything more than best friends and work partners, so no one in the Diaz family was particularly interested in meeting or getting to know him. If they were introduced at all, it was as Eddie’s coworker, and Buck had been more than a little out of it on pain medication at the time so if they’d had conversations beyond those perfunctory introductions, and it was something worth remembering, nobody has told Buck about it. This time, the meeting is potentially more official, with more ways to fail or disappoint.
That’s where the main problem is.
Buck doesn’t know if he’s going to be arriving at the Diaz house as Eddie’s coworker and friend, merely joining him on the trip because he’s off work anyways and it’s always good to have an extra set of hands when you travel with a kid under the age of ten, or if he’s going to be arriving as Eddie’s partner. And if he is going to be introduced as Eddie’s partner, he doesn’t know if there are any extra layers to that conversation with Eddie’s parents; Eddie is out with his sisters and Abuela and Tia Pepa. That doesn’t mean he’s out with Ramon and Helena. Buck has been wracking his brain over every conversation and he can’t remember Eddie mentioning anything one way or the other.
Buck doesn’t know what kind of conversations, if any, he needs to be preparing himself for.
So the night before their trip is set to begin, he gets into bed, but any sleep he gets is brief, intermittent, and restless.
That’s where the problem starts.
He’s already awake when Eddie’s alarm goes off and, quite frankly, one of the last things he feels like doing is going through LAX, getting on a plane and flying to Texas to deal with a fair amount of potential Diaz family drama (after all, regardless of how Eddie plans on defining their relationship to his parents, they are going to El Paso to support Adriana’s pregnancy announcement). Buck doesn’t even particularly feel like getting out of bed. He feels tired and off-balance and like a general mess of a person and the weight of all of that is sitting heavily across his chest.
Basically, Buck feels like a miserable, sad-sack and on any other day he probably would give into the feeling and just stay in bed.
But he can’t. If he stays in bed today, he’ll mess up the trip. The trip that Eddie and Christopher (especially Christopher) are looking forward to, and that’s supposed to make things easier for Adriana. Buck potentially could admit that he doesn’t feel up to going anymore, but he knows with everything that’s happened lately--everything he’s admitted to Eddie and asked for help with and all of that--Eddie will cancel the trip altogether rather than leave him to stay alone in LA, and that wouldn’t be a fair outcome for anyone. Especially as there is a part of himself that knows if he can get through the travel and maybe the stuff with Eddie’s parents, the trip probably will be good for him.
So Buck forces himself to get out of bed and get himself dressed for the day when Eddie slips out of the room to go wake and help Chris. And when they have a brief moment to themselves while Chris uses the bathroom and gets dressed and Eddie shares that his son is being an absolute grump about getting up before the sun in spite of his general excitement for the trip, Buck decides to keep his misgivings about what’s to come and his overall feelings to himself and put on a good face. It’s going to be hard enough to navigate traveling with a cranky nine-year-old, Eddie doesn’t need to be worried about him too.
That’s probably where the problem gets a little worse.
But Buck makes it through the process of getting Chris ready and out of the house, securing Beans and Toast in the living room (May will be coming after school and spending the days they’ll be gone house-sitting and caring for the kittens with some very strict check-in guidelines set by Athena), swinging by Abuela’s to pick up Adriana, and getting to the airport. Without anyone seeming to realize that he’s feeling off-kilter. It takes a lot of effort and energy, but it feels like everything lately has been drama and difficulties that he’s caused or been at the center of, and Buck wants the trip to be as much of a break for Eddie as it’s meant to be for him, so although it’s not actually helping him feel any better, there is some level of satisfaction that comes from gritting his teeth and powering through the morning.
At least until they get past check-in and have to go through airport security.
There, Adriana is kind of off in her own world, eager to get through the checkpoint so she can get some ginger ale and something bland to settle a slightly morning sickness-ridden stomach, and Eddie is thoroughly engrossed in assisting Chris and dealing with that semi-convoluted trip through the security line. That means nobody notices when Buck is randomly selected for enhanced screening. And normally the extra wanding and pat-down wouldn’t bother him at all, but he’s been feeling…weird about touch lately. It’s been an on and off thing since everything with Dr. Wells, but ever since the swatting incident and that whole mess earlier in the week, it’s been completely on, disruptive, and frustrating. It makes getting a security pat-down, however routine and inoffensive it actually ends up being, something that sends Buck’s skin crawling.
By the time Buck is meeting up with everyone else again on the other side of the checkpoint, they’re all so preoccupied with their own feelings about the inconveniences of airport security and wanting to get things situated at the terminal and getting drinks and snacks and everything else that Buck feels…self-conscious bringing up what’s happened. Not that he thinks he can’t tell Eddie when he’s feeling triggered or off-balance by something, especially when it’s something so easily linked to the initial incident, but it’s not like they’re alone either. Chris and Adriana are with them, and there are crowds of people in the terminal…
Logically Buck knows everyone else in the airport is completely preoccupied with their travels and managing their own families this early in the morning. That said, he’s been in the news enough and had enough conversations centered around himself in larger groups lately that it’s hard not to feel like people have their eyes on him or are otherwise taking notice of things. And yes, he knows that anxiety talking and not remotely true--hell, everyone he can see while scanning the terminal near their gate is either glued to their phone or mostly asleep--but the feeling is there, sitting just under the surface of his skin.
So Buck keeps his mouth shut.
And the problem continues to grow.
He’s tired and on edge and his skin is crawling, but he doesn’t want to keep being a source of problems for Eddie and everyone else to have to fix. It feels like all he’s done lately is complain and ask for help and lean on people without doing anything in return. He feels like a complete leech, and that’s something he’s spent most of his life doing everything he can to try and avoid and/or counteract; he’s built his existence around being useful and right now he just isn’t and he hates it.
Drawing any attention is just going to make that feeling worse. Especially since they’re kicking off the trip that’s meant to be for everyone to get away, relax, and stop thinking about all of the drama and bullshit that’s been circling them (re: him) in Los Angeles and it’s that reasoning that keeps Buck quiet.
He trails behind the group as they get drinks and things to eat on the plane. When they find some seats near the correct gate he tries to scroll on his phone to distract himself (between his healing concussion and the general harassment he’s been facing from certain parties, Buck hasn’t done much online lately and he figures he’s usually pretty good at finding a rabbithole to go down), but all he manages to do is find things that make him feel every bit of discomfort (physical, mental, and in-between) all the more. Between his overall anxiety and the lingering sensation of wandering hands from the security pat-down, Buck is already fidgety and can’t sit still once the group claims some seats. He’s jiggling a knee when he starts to scroll, and things get worse the longer he looks.
Everything on his feed seems to circle around things he’s been doing his best to avoid thinking about.
General articles about major rescues performed by fire departments across the country that feed into his doubts about his ability (and perhaps even desire) to return to work. Summaries of Reddit posts talking about various family and relationship dramas. Messages from people asking if he’s the Evan Buckley that’s been on the news lately and trying to dig for any details about what’s going on with all of that.
Instead of giving himself something else to think about and focus on and generally soothing his nerves, Buck starts to feel even more keyed up. The bouncing in his knee gets faster and he starts to clench his hand tightly around his phone.
He sees a message from Josh--it doesn’t look rude or accusing in the few words of the preview he takes in but it’s clearly about everything happening with Maddie and his breath catches ever-so-slightly as the vise on his chest continues to tighten. He doesn’t think Eddie notices, he’s looking at some sort of puzzle book with Christopher who is perking up now that he’s got a pastry in hand, but Buck is also aware that if he continues down the path he’s on, someone, whether it’s Eddie or Adriana or some random bystander, is going to take note of the fact that something’s not right with him. And he doesn’t want that.
He mutters a quick excuse and retreats to the bathroom, in the hopes that being alone will actually ease some of the festering paranoia and self-hatred itching underneath his skin, and allow him to breathe a little easier. The walls of the stall that he finds himself in leave him feeling more claustrophobic. Buck worries about his ability to handle getting on the plane at all if he tries to ride that feeling out so he moves to the sinks and tries to get the water ice cold to splash on his face. The tap refuses to budge any farther than lukewarm.
He’s physically uncomfortable, getting thrown around by a violent surge of anxiety, but he can hardly process the feeling or how to get himself out of it. All he can really think about is everything that he’s dealt with since he got out of bed this morning. The feeling of failure, of being an annoying fuck-up hammers against his ribs, over and over again. The world tunnels out around him, shrinking in closer and closer until it shrinkwraps him in a feeling of cheap uselessness.
Buck twists the fingers of one hand in the other. The sensation barely registers so he grips harder, curling his fingers so his nails dig in and scrape across his skin. Within moments, his fingertips catch on the edge of the semi-healed burn on his palm.The pain is sharp as the flesh is wrenched back and it starts to throb almost immediately. At the same time the weight eases off of his chest and he can breathe again. He doesn’t feel good by any stretch of the imagination, or even better really, but he’s pulled back away from feeling like he’s pinned to a slide underneath the bright, hot lamp of a microscope.
The relief only lasts a brief second as his anxiety and discomfort melts into self-hatred.
This isn’t who he’s supposed to be. Who he wants to be.
Stupid.
Idiotic, overreactive, worthless waste of space.
Buck pushes the tap closed abruptly. He grabs a couple of paper towels, balling them up in his fist over the now weeping wound in his hand, so he can get back to the gate and Eddie (and Eddie’s travel-sized, TSA approved first aid kit) without exposing it to who knows how many germs that might be floating around the LAX terminal, and rushes out of the bathroom, practically power walking back to where he’d left everyone. He’d wanted space and privacy to push through his feelings and screw a smile back on so he could give everyone the trip they deserve, but, of course, he’d done the wrong thing.
He always does the wrong thing.
Everyone would be better off without you.
Buck clenches his jaw and pushes past the thought, trying to remind himself, as Jules had instructed in their last appointment before this trip, that there are plenty of people that want him around, regardless of how much of a fuck-up he feels like. That he’s not actually a fuck-up. The corrections don’t really stick or sit well in his stomach, but he doesn’t have time to linger on them or the negative intrusive ones that seem to be chasing after him. He’s barely made it back to the assigned gate when the initial announcement for boarding goes over the loudspeaker. It takes him another few seconds to weave among the rows of seats to get to the chairs that Eddie, Adriana, and Chris are occupying.
They’ll be boarding in the first group, to make it easier for Christopher to navigate the aisle and store his crutches so by the time Buck reaches them, everyone is already on their feet.
He immediately feels a slight sense of relief, just seeing his partner again. If nothing else, he knows Eddie won’t let him do anything else stupid.
“Just in time.” Eddie greets him with a slight, warm smile; he’s holding Chris’s backpack out for his son to slip into. It’s just a simple greeting, that should get a simple response but any words feel caught in Buck’s throat. He tries to match Eddie’s smile, even without saying anything, just so that if he catches on that something is wrong with Buck he won’t think it has anything to do with him, but Buck knows he fails. He knows because some of the light immediately leaves Eddie’s eyes and the smile shifts to a puzzled half-frown. “Are you--,”
“Buck, you’re back!” Chris cuts his dad off, a little too loud in his enthusiasm. At least for the early hour and the public location. He hurries forward, head colliding with Buck’s stomach as he wraps him into a brief, but tight, hug. His separation anxiety from the swatting incident has been manageable, mostly because he’s been determined to face his fears head on, but has by no means resolved.
It’s a little easier to put his best foot forward with Chris and match his earnestness. Chris is highly perceptive but is less likely to notice something’s wrong anyways, but he approaches things with such openness and honesty that it can genuinely be difficult not to do the same. So the fact that he’s happy and excited to see Buck and so easily lets him know that, lifts some of the weight and turmoil off of Buck’s shoulders. “Of course I’m back, Superman. I can’t let you and your dad go to Texas without me.”
Chris pulls back from the embrace. “You didn’t tell anyone you were leaving.” He chastises.
Buck mentally scrambles to find an acceptable excuse to appease the nine-year-old. He still doesn’t want to let anyone know that he’s feeling weighed down with skin three sizes too small, but he especially doesn’t want to worry Chris. Even if he’s already apparently screwed that up royally by making his initial retreat. After a couple of seconds of frantic thought, he comes up empty, so simply apologizes. “I’m sorry, bud. I should have said something.”
A secondary boarding announcement goes up, calling for the Pre-Boarding Group.
“That’s us.” Eddie places his hand between Chris’ shoulder blades. “Let’s go board and find our seats and then you can spend the whole flight making sure Buck knows the Diaz family rules about traveling together, OK?” Chris seems enthused by the suggestion, nodding and starting towards the gate where a few other passengers are starting to congregate. Eddie follows close behind, although not before shooting Buck a meaningful look making it clear, even without words, that he’s noticed something is off and they’ll be talking about it eventually.
Buck swallows down his unease and guilt at the thought, grabs his own backpack from the seat he’d left it on, and joins them and Adriana in the boarding process. The relief he’d felt in getting back to the gate and Eddie after his near panic attack in the bathroom is gone just as quickly as it had arrived. He’s worried Chris, Eddie wants to talk and despite once again logically knowing that nobody else in the airport recognizes and/or cares about who he is, with every glance from someone, every interaction, Buck notices a gleam in their eye, something that might be judgment or in the case of the flight crew at the gate who checks his boarding pass an appraising interest and it’s hard to escape the feeling that everyone sees things in him that he doesn’t want them to see. He absentmindedly squeezes his hand around the paper towels he’d grabbed in the bathroom as he follows the group down the boarding bridge and onto the plane. The pressure pushes against his irritated wound and provides a fierce ache that keeps him present in the moment.
When they find their row of seats, three on one side of the aisle for him, Chris and Eddie and one across the way for Adriana, Buck is pre-occupied again, trying to swallow all of his anxieties about the trip and how people see him and feeling disgusted with himself for the ways he’s managing to do it.
Weak, broken, stupid failure.
“Chris, do you want the window or to be between me and Buck?” Eddie asks, taking Christopher’s crutches to store in the overhead compartment.
“The window, please.” Chris answers without hesitation as he sheds his backpack. He carries it in front of himself as he slides into their row to claim the desired seat. He sits on the edge of the cushion and flips up the window shade almost instantly, eyes glued to the tarmac and activity outside.
Eddie glances over his shoulder towards Buck. “I’ll take the middle. It won’t be much but the aisle should give you a little extra leg room. Thankfully it’s not that long of a flight.”
Normally Buck wouldn’t hesitate to take an aisle seat when offered--even business class or other premium seats don’t have the best legroom for someone of his height and it can get quite cramped in a full row, but instead of the relief at the thought of a little extra space, a spike of dread shoots through his gut. They’re some of the first passengers on the plane, so if he takes the aisle seat, there will be practically a whole plane’s worth of people walking past. Their bodies will brush against his, however unintentionally, and many will look down on him in his seat and who knows what they’ll be thinking…
He knows it’s irrational and probably codependent and even a little childish maybe, but right now he’d rather be crammed into the middle seat and dealing with that physical discomfort while having Eddie as a barrier between himself and the rest of the world then have a little extra room to stretch one foot.
“You can have the aisle.” He counters; he realizes a moment too late, that he’s probably too quick in doing so.
“Ev?” Eddie stops his movement, lowering his hands down slowly from the overhead compartment.
Guilt roils in Buck’s stomach. Not only because he’s drawn more attention to himself and his issues when he’d really just wanted to be invisible for at least the next several hours, but it’s obvious from Eddie’s voice, even in saying just the single first syllable of Buck’s name, that his partner is concerned. And the thing is, at this point he knows he shouldn’t lie. And probably can’t. Eddie knows him well enough that now he’s worried and looking, he’ll notice a lie. “I’m…”He trails off and casts his eyes down to look at the floor. “It’s not a good morning.” To add to his inner turmoil and shame, Buck knows that this admission is enough to make Eddie want to offer some sort of physical comfort, but that his partner is holding himself back in deference to the aversions Buck has started to develop. In his peripheral vision, Buck can see Eddie reach out and just as quickly stop himself. The moment that it takes for Eddie to speak again feels like an eternity.
“OK.” Eddie pauses for the briefest of moments. “Ev, hermoso, can you look at me please?”
It shouldn’t be hard to do, but it is. There’s no judgment on Eddie’s face, but Buck would almost feel better if there was. At least if Eddie were upset, Buck wouldn’t feel ridiculous for feeling so guilty and trying to hide everything. On top of still feeling guilty for making things about him. But Eddie’s eyes are still soft and warm and loving, if worried.
“You know that’s OK, right? It’s OK if you’re struggling today.”
“But the trip--,”
“Is still happening.” Eddie cuts off the protest gently. As more boarding passengers start to file down the aisle, he guides Buck to step into their row of seats, hand hovering just over his elbow without touching him, and steps in after him to clear the path. They stay standing as Eddie continues. “I’m sure you want this to be a good day and good trip for me and Christopher, probably more than you want it for yourself, but that doesn’t mean you need to hide if you aren’t feeling 100% or if something is bothering you. You and I both know that holding things back like that is more likely to make you feel worse, and I’d rather know that something is going on to be able to be there for you instead of having a good time somewhere and finding out later that you were hurting on your own when I was right there.”
“Right.” Buck swallows around the lump that seems to form lately anytime Eddie or someone else is so needlessly kind and caring with him.
“I know it’s not easy. I hate asking for help. I know you do too, and I know it’s even harder when you’re not feeling your best. Can you tell me why you don’t want to sit on the aisle? I know you usually like that seat.”
Buck opens his mouth to answer, to try and explain that he feels trapped and tied up underneath his own skin and the thought of having so many strangers brush past, even with just the incidental contact of passing by, is making that feeling even worse, but the words won’t move past his tongue. He knows he’s being stupid. Instead his mouth closes and he shakes his head, looking down at the floor again. “I want to. I just…”
“Hey, that’s OK. You don’t have to sit there, and we don’t have to talk about it right now.”
Buck very much tries not to think about the unspoken second sentence (‘but we will talk about it eventually”) and instead forces what he’s sure is a pathetic, tiny smile to show his gratitude.
“What else would help make the flight better for you? What do you need?”
Buck forces himself to not give his instinctive response (a lie) and to think about Eddie’s question. What does he need? He doesn’t really know--so much that’s bothering him is just…what’s in his head and there’s nothing anyone can do about that right now--but he does know that a few minutes ago when he was completely caught up in his panic and shame spiral over how handling things himself had gone, Eddie had at least made him feel safe again. So he knows what he wants, even if it also makes him feel selfish and small to ask.
“You?”
Eddie’s response comes in Spanish (he’d realized at the start of Buck’s medal of valor celebration party that he hadn’t been surprised at all and he’s started slipping more than the occasional pet name in Buck’s direction) and with a serious glint in his gaze. “You always have me, hermoso.”
Something loosens in Buck’s chest at the reassurance. It’s another thing to feel stupid over--there’s certainly a large part of him that had known that letting Eddie in on the fact that he was having a tough time would be helpful, and he’d let his brain convince him that it was better to fade into the background and suffer on his own than to just ask for help--but he tries not to give into the feeling. He’s talked a little bit about his concerns of being a burden on his support system with Jules since he started seeing them, and they’d been firm in their assertion that depression, anxiety, and trauma thrive in isolation and that it’s going to take effort to work past those instincts, especially after a childhood of being told that his very existence was a problem for his family. According to his therapist, it’s more important for him to be kind to and celebrate himself when he does break past his normal patterns to let someone in and ask for help than it is to bully himself for not doing it sooner. So instead of giving into the urge to punish and otherwise ground himself by picking at his nails or one of his injuries, Buck leans into the feeling of support and love his partner is exuding and reaches out with his free hand to grab one of Eddie’s.
He can’t find the words to thank Eddie, but he hopes Eddie can understand what he’s not verbalizing when he squeezes his hand and sweeps his thumb in soft circles.
They stand together in the moment for a few beats, until a family with a loud and demanding kid, probably a couple of years older than Chris, shuffles past with the boy begging for his mom to buy in-flight wifi so he can play some game, completely breaking the moment. Both Buck and Eddie snort and laugh, a lot of the gravitas of the moment shifting away, at least momentarily.
At Eddie’s subsequent urging, Buck takes his seat in the middle of the row. He tucks his bag under the seat, unable to think of anything he needs to pull out right now, deals with his seatbelt and then tries to just settle into his seat and let go of the lingering nervous unsteadiness that feels like it’s been driving him all morning. Eddie also sits, though he doesn’t stash his bag right away. First, he pulls out the family tablet and Chris’ headphones.
“Chris, mijo, I downloaded some episodes of that podcast you like for the flight.” He offers the device out across Buck’s lap. Chris, although fairly engrossed in watching the activity on the tarmac, thanks his dad and takes the tablet, slipping his headphones on and opening up the right app; as soon as he finds the downloaded episode and gets one playing, he turns his focus right back to the window. When he’s effectively settled and distracted Eddie turns his focus back to Buck. He pulls something small from an outer pocket of his bag and holds it out in an open palm for Buck to take. It’s a fidget toy, though not the cube that Buck had gotten from Jules. Buck blinks in surprise. “I wanted to have a couple of backups for you.” Eddie says. “I know it’s been helping, and thought it was worth having some extras around.”
“I couldn’t find mine when we were packing last night.” Buck offers. He’d thought it wouldn’t be too big of a deal, since they were going on a trip away from almost everything that’s been directly stressing him out, but from the time they’d gotten into bed until now, his brain had pretty much been working against him to prove him wrong about that. He grabs the fidget toy with one hand--the one not still wrapped around a bunch of paper towels-- and starts to fiddle with it. “I…Thanks for thinking of that.”
“We’ve got each other’s backs, right?” It’s hard to miss that his eyes cast towards Buck’s other hand, even for just the split second that they look away.
He wants to shrink back in his seat. Eddie knows.
Buck bows his head. Eddie’s always been nice about these things when he’s helped before, but that doesn’t mean he wants to watch and risk seeing if this is the time that he’s gone a step too far and disappointed him. He chews the inner corner of his lip and crosses the injured hand, his right, in front of his body for Eddie to take a look at. When he unclenches his fist, the crumpled paper towels unbunch from the broken burn, showing spots of red from where he’d started to bleed, but don’t quite fall away. Buck waits until he feels the calluses on Eddie’s fingers brush against his palm and gently tug the paper away to speak.
“I had a hard time sleeping last night.” He admits. “And I woke up and…it’s not a good day.” He repeats his sentiment from earlier, for lack of a more detailed explanation he feels like he can give right now. “I’m not sure I would have even gotten out of bed if we didn’t have the trip.”
“Is the trip the only reason you didn’t say anything?” Eddie asks. He probes around the edges of Buck’s burn, careful not to touch the injury itself. He glances up towards Buck.
It’s kind of a moot question, since Eddie surely would have noticed if Buck didn’t get out of bed. Buck shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“OK.” Eddie nods. He unzips the smaller front pocket of his backpack and pulls out his travel first-aid kit, opening up the small pack before grabbing Buck’s hand again. “What was keeping you up last night?”
“We’re going to El Paso.” Buck answers. He doesn’t see much point in holding things back at this point. Eddie already knows he’s having a rough time, and holding back now won’t make that knowledge go away and put the trip back on track. There are some things he doesn’t want to get into while they’re in public, surrounded by people, and especially so close to Christopher, distracted though he may be, but they can maybe have a conversation about some of the other things. “To your parents’.”
“You’ve met them before.” Eddie comments. He bites the corner of a packaged alcohol wipe to tear it open with his mouth.
“As your coworker. While you were at a work event. Unless I did something stupid because of the pain meds I doubt they even remember me.”
“And you’re worried about meeting them now?”
“I mean…” Buck drops off. He needs to keep talking--Jules had mentioned in their most recent session that a good way to stop feeling overwhelmed by his worries is to share them with someone and get their perspective--but even knowing that and knowing that Eddie wants to be having this conversation, it’s hard to push past the barriers in his brain that tell him talking about his anxieties or feelings or asking for help is too needy and exhausting. Even though Eddie has never done or said anything to indicate that he needs Buck to be less than who he is (if anything, he’s usually encouraging Buck to share and speak up) , Buck can’t help but worry that the next time will be the time that pushes things over the edge and is a bridge too far. And even if now isn’t that time, he’s potentially building himself up into being more work and effort, so it’ll be more likely that he’s too much in the future. “I don’t know if I’m meeting them as your coworker again or as your partner. And…” He trails off again, this time trying to find the right words. “I don’t know exactly what they want in a partner for you or someone else to be there for Chris but I know that I’m probably not it.”
Eddie pauses his work on treating Buck’s hand and looks up again, a tiny wrinkle of confusion forming between his eyebrows. “Why would you say that?”
“Because…I’m not what anyone wants for their family?” Buck echoes the frown. He knows that Eddie looks at him with rose colored glasses sometimes but this has to be obvious to him; he’s not even what his family wants, so why would some other random family want him? “I’m pretty sure the only reason I even met Abby’s mom was because she was never going to remember who I was.”
“Abby was a---,” Eddie cuts himself off, seemingly thinking better of what he wants to say. “She wasn’t a good partner. I wouldn’t use that as a yardstick. And I’m sorry we haven’t talked about this. I was just assuming that…of course when we get there I’d be introducing you as my partner. You’re living with us, you're Chris’ second parent…I’m not going to minimize that with my parents by saying you’re just a friend or a coworker.”
Buck is torn between the feeling of being appreciated and supported, and the knowledge of all the ways that what Eddie’s saying is wrong or misguided. And ultimately the latter wins out, because he doesn’t want to make things harder for his partner. “OK, but…I’m living with you because I’m a disaster magnet. Disasters that I’ve drawn Chris into several times. I don’t think that’s going to win me any points with your parents. They disliked Shannon for leaving the two of you, but at least that didn’t nearly get Christopher killed. And I’m…an exhausting mess on the best of days right now. I’m not working. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go back to work or if I even want to, but I have no idea what I’ll do if I can’t go back to work because I’m only good at two things and I can’t do either of them right now. I can barely even handle being out in public. Definitely not alone. I’m a burden, not someone that anyone wants around their family.”
“OK. First, my parents’ issues with Shannon are…more complicated than just her leaving, and they have a lot to do with the expectations that they had for me that had to be set aside when she got pregnant. I don’t think that’s a problem that they can recreate with you.”
“I doubt you dating and taking care of a washed-up firefighter surrounded by legal drama fits their expectations either.”
“Buck. Evan.” Eddie finishes pressing a new bandage down over Buck’s hand, but readjusts his grip so he’s holding it properly instead of dropping it. “If telling my parents that we’re dating right now is going to make your anxiety and these other feelings worse, then we can wait and come up with some other reason that you came on the trip with us. But no matter what you decide about that, I need you to know that the people who matter do not see the person you’re describing when they look at you.That’s not who I see, it’s not who Steve sees, or Chris, or Abuela, or Athena…You are more than what you’re going through.”
Buck doesn’t answer. It’s not that he doesn’t want to--he wants to somehow thank Eddie for being so much nicer and gentler than he needs to be, and also maybe explain how he’s wrong, because he is wrong--but his emotions are getting the better of him. Eddie’s being caring and it’s tugging at everything that Buck has been fighting to control, and because he doesn’t really want to start crying on an airplane before their two hour flight has even started, and he can’t and shouldn’t do the things he’s been falling back on to control himself lately, he has to force himself to take deep breaths and find something different to focus on. He inhales shakily and wipes at his face with the hand Eddie’s not holding before starting to fiddle with the toy had provided him in earnest.
“And when it comes to work,” Eddie continues after a few moments have passed, “you’re not working right now because you’re recovering from injuries and trauma. Those are perfectly reasonable reasons to take a break.”
“What if…?” Buck trails off, sniffling slightly. This isn’t something he’s mentioned to Eddie before. Or anyone else. He hasn’t even brought it up with Jules yet. It’s just a doubt that’s been circling and growing in his head over the past several weeks. “What if I don’t come back?”
“Because you don’t want to or…?”
“Because. At the 118, everyone who looks at me is going to see the guy who ruined Chimney’s life and got him sent to prison. The guy who took away his pregnant sister’s support system. And--and I think a lot of other people in the department are gonna feel that way too. Because we’re all first responders and we’re supposed to look out for each other.”
A flight attendant stops by their row, asking them to buckle their seatbelts and finish stowing their bags in preparation for takeoff. They both comply and Buck checks that Chris has buckled in as well before Eddie continues.
“Chimney and Maddie’s choices got them where they are, not anything you did.”
“But--,”
“But nothing.” Eddie cuts him off firmly. “I know this is something you’re working on with Jules and it might take a while for you to accept, so I am happy to keep repeating it whenever you need to hear it. You are not responsible for the actions they took when they decided they weren’t happy with you. They made choices that had legal consequences. They have to live with those. And any first responder who blames you for that is a dinosaur. We look out for each other and help out during hardship; we don’t shield each other when someone breaks the law.”
“I--I don’t think that’s how people see it.” In fact, Buck knows it’s not based on the messages he’s gotten from coworkers at the 118 and people who he went through the academy with, not to mention from the firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders he doesn’t even know personally on his socials, but he hasn’t shared any of that with Eddie yet, and he doesn’t really want to get into that can of worms now. “Not with me. But even if it is…there’s also everything with…I’m also…I--I don’t think people are going to trust me as a firefighter anymore anyways. Not after Taylor’s story.” Buck looks down at his lap. He has to force himself not to start chewing on the inner corner of his lip again. “I just…I-I don’t think there’s much point in coming back if--if my coworkers are going to hate me and--and the public thinks…I mean…you’ve seen what they’ve been saying.”
Eddie sighs and Buck’s heart jumps up into his throat. It falls back as Eddie speaks. “Ev, if you don’t want to come back to being a firefighter because of everything that’s happened or you just don’t think it’s what you want anymore I’ll support you. We can figure out something else that you can do. But I don’t think you need to decide right now. You’re still on medical leave, and only just got cleared yesterday to start every day activities with your arm. It’s still going to be a while before the doctor approves you to train for a return to duty, so you have time to figure out what you want to do. And whatever that is, it’s not going to change how I see you.”
Buck appreciates the support. He knows Eddie is being genuine and really believes what he’s saying and wants to be supportive. But it’s also not where he was really trying to get the conversation to go. They probably do need to talk about his doubts about work and what’s going to happen when he no longer has the excuse of his injuries to keep him from returning, but right now, Buck thinks if he’s going to get through the trip to El Paso he needs Eddie to understand his worries about dealing with his family. Work can wait. Even if he is the one who sort of brought it up. “I--I know that you mean what you’re saying. All of it. And--and I appreciate that. But…as much as I believe that you see someone good and--and worthy when you look at me, I don’t think that most people do. And…if your parents fall into that other group, I don’t want to make things harder on you or on Chris by being something they can take issue with. You guys shouldn’t have to deal with that.”
“If--If my parents take issue with you--that is them making things hard. Not you. And like I said, I really don’t think they will. But I am happy to follow your lead here. What do you want to do?”
Buck swallows thickly around his nerves. He bounces his knee in addition to continuing to play with the fidget toy but it doesn’t do much to take the edge off of everything. He knows what he wants when it comes to telling people about their relationship; he also knows everything that he’s scared of, and it’s hard not to worry that if he gives into what he wants, he’ll manifest everything on the latter list. He’s going to judge and hate himself if he hides behind excuses and isn’t honest, and he’ll judge and hate himself if he’s honest and it causes trouble for everyone else. There’s no good answer.
That said, he’s so damn tired of feeling like a coward over things he knows he wouldn’t have hesitated over a few months ago. At least…not nearly so much.
“I--I want you to introduce me as your partner.”
It’s just around lunch when they arrive at Eddie’s childhood home, and only Helena is there, but from the moment that they have Chris ring the doorbell and she answers, things are a whirlwind of chaos.
Helena’s face is an indelicate blend of some happiness with a lot of shock and a hint of concern. Buck isn’t surprised at all that her eyes gloss right over him in favor of darting between her two present children as she starts in on a rapid-fire interrogation. If anything, he’s relieved. Talking to Eddie before their flight had helped his nerves some, especially reaching a decision on how they’d be introducing him, but even so, alleviating some concerns hadn’t erased the fact that overall, he’s not having what he would call a good mental health day. And talking a little about his concerns about re-meeting Helena and Ramon, and sort of talking about his worries about work had sapped up almost all of Buck’s energy reserves, so instead of confiding anything that had happened at the airport itself, Buck had simply decided to lean into the security Eddie’s presence provided and attempted to sleep for the duration of the flight. The result was feeling a tiny bit more rested, and maybe a little less on edge overall, but no more prepared to actually face the rest of the day. Now that they’re actually at the Diaz house, a lot of his nerves are coming back full force, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that until they get around to introducing him, he can’t necessarily seek Eddie’s support. Or shouldn’t anyways.
“Eddie, Adri, what are you doing here? And together? You live across the country from each other but you manage to show up at the same time? What’s going on?”
“Is Dad home?” Adriana takes the lead, per the agreement she’d made with Eddie when they’d landed on joining her for some added support. She’d slept off the worst of her morning sickness during the flight from Los Angeles and had then taken a few minutes in an airport bathroom to change from her leggings and hoodie into a sundress and coordinating light sweater; Buck, Eddie, and Chris had taken care of picking up the rental car while she did that and Eddie had explained that while his parents only really put stock into appearances when someone was at church or a major event as long as nothing being worn was indecent otherwise, Adri usually dresses up a little more proper and nice when she’s trying to impress them or make them see her side of things, and since today’s news and discussion would be a big one, she’s pulling out all the stops with what amounts to her Easter best.
“In the middle of the day?” Helena tuts, stepping aside so they can all enter the home, closing the door behind them. “You know very well that the only place other than the office to find your father this time of day is in his truck on the way to one of the satellite sites.”
“I was hoping to talk to the both of you.” Adri says, turning around. Buck has to admire her. If she’s nervous, and he thinks based on a number of conversations that he’s both heard and been a part of that she probably is, she doesn’t show it. She stands tall and looks her mother in the eye. If he were in her shoes he’s not sure he’d even be able to share the news in person. “I have some news.”
“News that brought you and your brother here at the same time?” Helena arches an eyebrow.
“I visited LA for a few days to get Eddie’s advice. He offered to come back with me for moral support.”
Buck is happy to be fading into the background when Helena’s gaze turns to Eddie, a slightly suspicious glint in her eye. “And the fact that your moral support happens to come alongside a visit from my favorite grandson? Who should be in school right now?”
“I wanted to see you and Abuelo.” Chris grins toothily at his grandmother.
Buck knows that the gesture is completely earnest--everyone had been careful not to mention the hope that his presence in El Paso would keep the elder Diaz’ reactions on the tamer side around the boy--and he can see that it tugs at Helena’s heartstrings (enough at least that she hugs her grandson and tells him that she’s very excited to see him) but it’s not enough to distract her from her suspicions entirely. She still looks between Adriana and Eddie skeptically above Christopher’s head.
“Chris is doing great in school, mom.” Eddie comments, more to appease her than anything if Buck had to guess. “He can afford to miss a couple of days. Besides, he’s nine. We could hardly leave him alone in Los Angeles, could we?”
“You’re the one constantly reminding me and your father that Abuela and Pepa are there and you aren’t without family.” Helena counters, her voice betraying her distaste for the statement.
Adriana sighs. “Mom, Eddie wanted to support me and he thought you might also want to see your grandson. That’s it.”
Helena doesn’t seem convinced, certainly not to Buck anyways, but she doesn’t comment or question things further. “If you say so. I suppose I’ll call your father; he might come home early if he doesn’t have any meetings this afternoon. If nothing else the mystery might intrigue him.” There’s more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice. It seems to go over Chris’ head, but Buck watches Eddie and Adriana share a look as Helena turns to walk somewhere, presumably towards her phone. She barely takes three steps before turning back around, at which point any comfort Buck has taken at being seemingly invisible to Eddie’s mother promptly vanishes. She’s looking right at him. “You’re the firefighter who had the broken leg when Eddie graduated last spring.” She says. “The one who had Christopher during that awful tsunami.”
“Buck saved me, remember Grandma?” Chris chimes in, buying Buck a slight reprieve from figuring out the best way to respond. “And a bunch of other people. The city gave him a medal.”
“Yes, Pepa sent me a video of the speech you gave at the ceremony.” Helena smiles at her grandson. “You did a wonderful job. Very grown-up and handsome.” She looks back up, her smile not entirely faded, but showing a certain level of puzzlement all the same. “We’re of course, very grateful to you for taking care of Christopher, Mr….”
“Buckley.” He fills in, swallowing around a very dry mouth. “Evan Buckley.”
“Right, of course.” She nods. “We very much appreciate what you did for Chris, Mr. Buckley, but I’m not sure as to the reasoning behind your presence here? It’s my understanding that you’re just one of Eddie’s coworkers. A friend, who happened to be watching him that day because his regular carer was on vacation.”
Eddie’s hand slips into Buck’s, and he has his mouth open to answer his mother. Christopher speaks up before he gets a chance.
“Buck’s been living with us since he got shot.” He announces. Buck doesn’t know everything that Eddie talks about with his parents, but he’s fairly certain based on the slight surprise and concern that crosses his partner’s expression that one thing he hasn’t brought up is the shooting and his role as one of the victims. And neither of them get a chance to explain anything about it, since Chris goes on to say, with a broad smile and matter-of-factness, “he and dad love each other.”
Helena’s face goes slack with shock.
Buck can’t read her emotions or response beyond that. As such, he tries not to follow his mind that’s racing to the worst possible conclusions. That said, it’s hard not to. She hardly seemed impressed to have him there before she knew he and Eddie were dating.
Adriana barely hides a snorting giggle behind her hand. Eddie shoots a glare at his sister and squeezes Buck’s hand, but doesn’t say anything immediately. Instead they all wait for Helena to respond.
When she does, it’s in Swedish, a language that Buck doesn’t speak and only just barely recognizes, but between her souring expression and what he can only describe as the universal tone of motherly disapproval, he’s able to tell it’s not a positive response.
Eddie does seem to understand, but he merely sighs before giving his own reply, thankfully, in English. “I think you were the one who taught us how rude it is to use a language that you know your company doesn’t speak in front of them, mom.” He comments. “If you have something that you want to say about me dating Buck in front of him, you can say it in English.”
A second response comes in Swedish, although this time Buck can pick out the singular word of ‘Christopher’. Whether that means Helena’s displeasure is stemming from whatever influence he might be having on Chris, or that she doesn’t want to speak freely in front of him, he has no idea, and that does send a spike of fear down his spine. At least, the idea that she’d disapprove of him being around Christopher does. Eddie’s usually a pretty independent guy who doesn’t put much stock into what other people think, but if someone--if his mother--thinks that having Buck around Christopher is a bad idea, he can’t imagine Eddie not at least starting to consider it. Especially after how things have gone lately; Eddie and Chris have had to put up with a lot of chaos and disruption and just…extra work to have him in their lives, pretty much since the bombing, and Buck figures that eventually, Eddie at least is going to clue in on him not being worth it. On him not being the kind of person people invest time in or want around their kids.
For a brief moment, Buck almost has himself convinced that Helena is going to be the one to work past Eddie’s blinders and get him to see that and he can feel himself stop breathing . A split second later, Eddie responds, also in Swedish, and this time Buck can also pick out the name ‘Shannon’. The extra context clue helps him push back the worst case scenario trying to take over his brain.
Helena huffs. “That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it was probably much more confusing and hurtful for him.” Eddie counters. He squeezes Buck’s hand once more before dropping it to clap his hand gently on Christopher’s shoulder. “Chris, buddy, could you take Adri to Rosco’s to pick up some food for all of us to have for lunch when Abuelo gets here. Grandma wasn’t expecting us, so we should help her out with food.”
The thing is, Buck knows, is that Chris is about as perceptive as a nine-year-old can get, if not more. He can clearly sense the tension in the room that’s mounted since he made his initial proud comment, and he’s smart enough to recognize that his dad is trying to get him away from that. He frowns, glancing back and forth between his dad and grandmother. “Did I say something I wasn’t supposed to?”
“Absolutely not.” Eddie crouches down to look him in the eye. “Remember how I said we were coming because Tia Adri had to do something hard and she shouldn’t have to do it alone?” He waits for Chris to nod before he continues. “She can’t do the hard thing until Abuelo gets home from work, so she’s going to go pick out some lunch for us, but she needs someone to go with her, and Buck and I are going to stay here and help grandma get everything else ready.”
“If you’re sure…” Chris doesn’t seem particularly convinced by Eddie’s quickly crafted cover story, so Buck steps up to crouch next to Eddie and add his own two cents in. As many doubts as he’s feeling right now about his place with Chris and Eddie and particularly in this house in this moment, Buck knows what it’s like to be the kid who just wants to talk about something that makes them happy and to get a less than thrilled response from the adults around them. He knows the uncertainty and insecurity they can start to feel the moment the person they were trying to engage with dismisses them or even just seems unhappy and no kid deserves to feel like that, but he definitely can’t bear to watch Christopher grapple with those feelings.
“We tell each other the truth, right Superman?” He asks softly. When Helena huffs from down the hallway, it pushes pretty much whatever worries Buck has left about pleasing her out the window and he risks a glancing scowl in her direction over the top of Christopher’s head; whatever feelings she might have about him and his place in Eddie and Christopher’s life, she should at least have the decency to try and contain them in front of her grandson, especially when he’s already worried about making a mistake. When Buck looks back at Chris, he’s agreeing with Buck that they don’t lie to each other, so Buck continues. “Your dad and I decided earlier today that we were going to tell your grandparents about us dating, you were just a little bit faster than we were to say something. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“But…” Chris leans in, whispering his next comment near Buck’s ear, “Grandma only speaks Swedish when she’s mad and doesn’t want me or Abuelo to know about it.”
Almost all of his nerves are taken over by annoyance at this point and Buck has to resist the urge to roll his eyes or glare again; based on what Eddie has told him, it’s fairly typical of Helena to make these kind of decisions and choices, to think she’s being sneaky because Chris is young, disregarding the fact that he is smart and insightful, especially after being raised around tension the way he had for several years. “She’s not mad at you.” Buck says, making every effort to stay focused on Chris and not let his own emotions bleed into his voice. “Your dad dating and bringing me here is a surprise for her, and sometimes grownups don’t react very politely to being surprised. It’s not your fault, OK? You just shared something you were happy about.”
“OK…” Chris pulls back, still eyeing Eddie and him with some level of worry. “If you’re sure.”
“We’re positive.” Eddie nods firmly. “Now, are you OK to go help Tia Adri?”
“You and Buck will be here when we get back?”
“We’re not going anywhere without you.”
With that reassurance, Chris agrees to his dad’s plan of going with Adriana to pick up lunch somewhere. Adriana makes a solid effort to push things past the awkward, tense atmosphere that’s been created, smiling and joking with her nephew as she takes the keys to the rental vehicle from Eddie, but overall things remain uncomfortable. Eddie and Buck get back to their feet, but even after Adriana and Chris make their exit, they and Helena seem stuck in an uneasy silence, frozen in the hallway between the house’s entryway and the kitchen. This lasts a few moments, until the front door closes behind Adri and Chris, at which point Eddie turns on his mother with a fair bit less restraint than he had shown in his son’s presence.
“OK mom. Chris is gone now. Nothing else to hide behind. Do you want to tell Buck how you feel about us dating?”
Helena presses her lips together into a tight, white line but stays silent.
“Don’t be shy now. He was right in front of you three minutes ago when you said it in Swedish, you should be just fine to say it to his face in a language he does speak.” Eddie goads. When his mom still doesn’t respond, he sighs again. “I’m going to explain it to him if you don’t, but our visit is going to be a lot shorter, because I’ll be doing it on our drive out of town.”
Helena straightens at the threat. “You wouldn’t leave before your father and I have time with Christopher.”
“My priority is Christopher.” Eddie says.”Your attitude just convinced him he had done something wrong by talking about our relationship. If we can’t discuss this now and come to an agreement about the sorts of things you say and the way you act around him, it’ll be a good long while before you get to spend any time of significance with him again.”
“Christopher is sensitive.” Helena counters. “Which is exactly why I cannot believe you are doing something so thoughtless and stupid as to rushing into a relationship with this---this man.” She practically spits out the word, leading Buck to think that it’s not anywhere close to the word she’s thinking.
His suspicion is confirmed when Eddie snorts derisively and glances towards him. “Hey Buck, you’ve been upgraded. A few minutes ago she was calling you immature dead weight.”
It should sting. Ultimately, Buck had wanted Helena and Ramon to like him, if for no other reason than he didn’t want to be the source of any more problems for Eddie and Chris, and if that’s truly how Helena is already viewing him, then having them like him is out the window. And it does hurt in some ways, on the level that it echos some of the worst things he thinks about himself. But the moment it became clear that Helena wasn’t even going to concern herself with protecting Chris from her attitudes with anything but an empty gesture, Buck had decided that he was going to do his very best to not take anything she said about him to heart. Overall, it just makes him tired. It’s just another person to add to the list of the people who he’s not good enough for.
“I just meant that dating another firefighter is hardly going to help you build a proper life for Christopher.” Helena argues. “He deserves to have at least one parental figure to stay at home and raise him properly. If you are going to insist on continuing with this irresponsible fantasy of working a dangerous job for public servant’s wages, you should at least be trying to find a partner who works a well-paying, regular nine-to-five job that can be home every night for Christopher.”
Buck blinks, a little surprised at her argument. It’s not at all what he’d expected, enough so that it shocks him into responding. “So it’s not that I’m a man,” he begins, “ it’s that my job doesn’t have the right color collar.”
“Of course it’s not that you’re a man.” Helena snaps. “I’m not a bigot.”
“No, just judgmental, petty, controlling…”
“It is not any of those things to want what is best for my son and grandson.” Helena cuts Eddie off, her eyes flashing.
Eddie crosses his arms over his chest. “And to hell with our happiness, right? I know you aren’t happy with the choices I’ve made over the years mom, but just because you think that something is better for us doesn’t mean that you’re right. I’m an adult. You don’t get a say in what I do for a living, where I live, or who I date.”
“But you’re making mistakes.” Helena protests. “Ever since Shannon left, everything you’ve done--,”
“Has been for Christopher.”
“More like it’s been to spite me and your father.” Helena counters, starting to lean into histrionics. Buck watches as her eyes start to shine lightly, even as frustration and anger cloud her features. “We took care of Christopher when Shannon couldn’t handle things and while you worked all those dead end jobs and because you didn’t like the advice we gave you, you decided to thank us by running away to California and keeping Christopher from us entirely.”
Buck is fairly certain that if Eddie rolls his eyes any harder, they’ll legitimately be in the back of his head. He’s occasionally seen his partner angry, although it’s rarely directed towards a specific person and he knows Eddie makes a pretty concerted effort to control his negative emotions in general; Buck also knows that when it comes to his parents, Eddie’s tolerance and patience reserves have shrunken significantly in the past few years. Between his therapy and both witnessing and experiencing healthier familial relationships, he’s decided what he’s willing to put up with and the boundaries he wants to set. “You and I both know that you interfered with Shannon’s parenting because you blamed her for everything and wanted to control things. You didn’t help out of the kindness of your heart. And yes, you watched him while I was working three jobs to keep things afloat. But your so-called advice was repeatedly telling me every way you thought I was failing Christopher, how it all started because of everything Shannon had done wrong, and your only solution was that I should sign custody over to you. And you said all of this, repeatedly, in front of him. It wasn’t fair to me, it wasn’t fair to Shannon, and it certainly wasn’t fair to Chris.”
“And how was moving across the country fair to us?” Helena cries. “You can’t handle the truth about your job and prospects so you tear Christopher away from the only family he knows. And for what? So you can leave him with strangers for hours, days at a time? For you both to nearly be killed?”
Buck steps in before Eddie can respond this time, hoping to give his partner a moment to gather his thoughts and keep his cool. The last thing either of them needs or wants is for this to devolve into a complete blowout; although he knows everyone except for maybe Christopher would be happy to keep the visit as short as possible and get on the road to Austin just as quickly as Adriana can share news of her pregnancy with her family, Buck is also confident that Eddie doesn’t actually want to cut things short because his parents can’t keep their opinions to themselves, he’s just willing to if it’s what’s necessary to protect Chris. “Eddie and Chris have plenty of family in Los Angeles, Mrs. Diaz. You said so yourself.”
“I don’t believe anyone asked for your opinion.”
As much as he’s making an effort to not be affected by the conversation, Buck can’t keep himself from flinching at the icy glare she shoots in his direction. He takes a breath to recenter before he responds. “With all respect, Mrs. Diaz, I don’t believe Eddie or I asked for your opinion on our relationship but you were more than happy to share that.”
“Because he is throwing away any chance at a good life for himself and Christopher by--by playing house with a--a dum slyna.”
Whatever name Helena calls him in Swedish this time (and Buck can guess from the general sounds that one of the words means stupid but he doesn’t have enough context to figure out the other word) it causes Eddie’s expression to go from general frustration and annoyance to actual outrage. He speaks through clenched teeth. “You have no right to--,”
“What? You think your father and I are stupid, Edmundo?” Helena snaps. “That we don’t know about the people you’re working with? That we can’t read? It’s bad enough that you decided to stay in California and play hero to a bunch of strangers--”
“You and dad were perfectly fine with me ‘playing hero’ for perfect strangers when I was in the army. All the two of you would talk about when I got back was that damn medal.”
“But now you are disrespecting everything that your father and I have done for you, everything that we’ve taught you about being a provider and building a normal, respectable life for your family. If you insist on ruining your own life with these ridiculous flights of fancy that’s one thing, but now you are jeopardizing Christopher by exposing him to--to--,”
“That is enough!” Eddie barks, slamming his palm against the wall behind him with a loud thud and putting an end to their overlapping chatter. “If you want to be hateful and judgemental, fine. But don’t expect us to stand around and listen to that garbage. We’re leaving.” He reaches out, grabbing Buck’s hand in his and turns, starting to storm towards the door.
Given the growing pressure and weight falling down onto his chest and shoulders from once again being at the center of a conflict, Buck is hardly unhappy to essentially be given permission to leave the fraught scene, and lets himself be led. He’s been mostly preoccupied just with following the fast-paced argument, enough so that he’s only just registering the mounting anxiety, but the sudden change in direction does make the sensation echo and grow. When they had discussed his worries on the flight, Eddie had assured him that if his parents took enough offense about their relationship to start a fight, that it wouldn’t really have anything to do with him and that it’s a fight that Eddie would be willing to fight regardless, but that doesn’t make the rush of guilt of it playing out in reality magically go away.
As he follows Eddie, Buck casts one last glance in Helena’s direction. Eddie’s mother is pale, and her expression is torn halfway between tearful and irate. She reaches out, fingertips brushing at Eddie’s elbow. “But Christopher--,”
“Christopher is happy, healthy, and safe.” Eddie cuts her off, spinning on his heels to face her once more. “He is thriving in school, and surrounded by friends and family who love and support him and want nothing but for him to succeed at the things that he wants. Christopher and I are living ten times the life that we ever would have gotten sticking around here, and I am not going to let you ruin that for him by undermining his feelings with your snide, petty, ill-informed comments.
“You go ahead and call dad. Buck and I will be waiting outside for Chris and Adri to get back. Adri still has her news to share, and I will let Chris decide if he wants to have lunch with you. But you can forget about any sort of extended visit, and until you can find a way to start acting like a polite, decent, non-judgemental human being who cares more about the happiness of her family than her idea of what that should look like, you can forget about any unsupervised calls or visits. I warned you when I left El Paso, I warned you at Shannon’s wake and I’m warning you now. And this is the last one you’re going to get.”
“You’d really throw your family away for some--,”
“Buck is family. Mine and Christopher’s. The only person throwing anything away is you.”
Following that resigned, exhausted statement, Eddie turns and once again starts to leave the house. Buck follows, holding tight onto Eddie’s hand and squeezing his other hand into a fist. It’s all he can do to keep the maelstrom of emotions threatening to storm to the surface at bay.
As soon as the front door closes behind him, Eddie stops on the front steps, standing still. For a moment he closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths. When he opens them again, some of the tension has bled from his form and he turns to Buck. “Are you OK? I’m so sorry…”
Although the entire encounter is already weighing heavy on his shoulders--hell, the entire day save for the flight itself has been one giant cluster--his partner’s concern keeps the worst of Buck’s anxiety under control; at least he’s not outright blaming him for what just happened. That said, Buck is fairly sure that Eddie should be blaming him, so the anxiety is just replaced with confusion. “Why are you apologizing?” He asks. “I’m the one she has a problem with.”
Eddie shakes his head. “It has nothing to do with you, Hermoso. I convinced you that we should be honest and open because I thought after last spring she was changing…but she’s the same as she ever was. She won’t accept anyone that doesn’t fit into the life she and dad want for me. I was stupid to think otherwise, and it put you in a terrible position.”
“I don’t know everything that she said about me, but I know that you stood up for me.” Buck counters. “I know you don’t believe or agree with her. That’s what matters.”
“I just…after I shut my parents down about moving back here at Shannon’s wake, we had a talk and…it really seemed like they understood that I meant what I said. That things were good and Chris was happy and that they needed to accept that. They haven’t been making comments during our calls for months now, and I thought…” Eddie sighs. He steps forward off the steps and sits down. He’s still holding Buck’s hand, and therefore gently pulls him down as well. “I thought that meant they’d be more open minded with you. They never actually cared when I went on dates with guys in high school and you’re so good for me and Chris… I should have known that mom was never going to be satisfied as long as I’m not doing what she wants, and I never should have put you in the position to be the one she was attacking…”
“It’s not your fault.” Buck shakes his head.
“Buck, I--,”
“Chris’ separation anxiety has been acting up since Chimney filed the false report and we got swatted.” Buck cuts him off softly. “And Chimney did that because I filed charges against Maddie. But even knowing that, you’ve told me multiple times that Chris having some extra therapy appointments to deal with that isn’t my fault. Do you believe that?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then it’s not your fault that your mother doesn’t like me. I’d be a hypocrite to blame you for wanting to believe the best of your family. And as soon as things went wrong, you stood up to her. That’s all you can do.”
“I just don’t feel good about putting you in that position. Or Chris. He’s caught in the middle now no matter how things turn out.” Eddie leans into Buck’s side, and eventually his head falls gently to rest on his shoulder. It takes several moments for him to speak again. “They didn’t always hate Shannon.”
The thing is, Buck knows Eddie hasn’t gotten totally comfortable with talking about Shannon. He’d had some hangups about it when she was alive and they were sort of reconciling, and then when she’d passed his feelings about her got even more complicated. He’ll make himself work past it to speak about her whenever Chris wants to, but when it comes to his own feelings and thoughts about her, Eddie tends to keep things to himself. Mostly, Buck thinks, because everything is still too fresh and painful. He can’t imagine why Eddie would want to start picking at the wounds now, when things have just blown up with his mom. “Eds, you don’t have to--,”
“It’s OK. I…I want you to understand why I thought it would be OK to introduce you.”
And if that’s how Eddie feels and what he wants to do, Buck is more than willing to listen. It’s literally the least he can do, considering how much Eddie listens to him. And in addition to that, listening to Eddie and focusing on helping him is pretty much the only thing keeping his own brain from going in the same disastrous circles that it had been moving in that morning. “Whatever you want to share then.”
“They didn’t always hate Shannon.” Eddie repeats after a moment. “We went to the same high school, but it was pretty big, so we didn’t really know each other until the summer before our senior year, when we were both counselors at the same day camp. We started dating pretty quick into the summer, and my parents liked her when they met. Told me how sweet and pretty she was, and that it seemed like she had a good head on her shoulders. They wanted me to include her in family things if I wanted to. They loved her. Right up until the test turned out to be positive.
“From that point on, conversations in front of her were about how we both had to do the right thing. We’d have to get married and I would have to find work and a way to support a family. That they were disappointed, but that it would work out. When she wasn’t around, all I ever heard were comments about how they never should have encouraged the relationship, because she had stepped in and ruined my life, and how I was never going to meet my potential now.”
“I mean, I know parents are never happy about teen pregnancy but that seems like a pretty big change.”
Eddie snorts half-heartedly. “I was supposed to go to college. First in my family and all that. We didn’t really have the money for it but I was what a bunch of recruiters called the perfect package. Solid grades and an even better athlete. I had ‘prospects’,” he flourishes the word with finger quotes, “and my only job was to do well enough to keep them. Go to school and become something special like a doctor or a lawyer. But then…I had to do the right thing and all of that was out. And for whatever reason, even though I was…definitely an active participant in everything that led to that, my parents pretty much laid the blame for my ruined future at Shannon’s feet.
“From what I know, they were subtle about it for a while, but once Chris was born and I was gone and it was…it became clear that the birth complications had led to CP and he wasn’t even going to be the perfect grandchild they had dreamed of--their words.” Once again, Eddie glowers. “When we were working things out after Christmas, Shannon told me how when things got harder and I was overseas, they made sure she knew how much they blamed her for everything. Me, Chris…You name it, they gave her shit for it. She left for a lot of reasons, and a lot of those were on me but…a lot were also because of them.”
Buck doesn’t really know what to say. Everything he can think of doesn’t really seem like enough. Eddie’s relationship with Shannon was complicated, he knows that much, but he’s certain that ultimately it was based in love, and had to have eaten him up that his parents helped drive her--the mother of his child--away, and had then done their best to break him down too. “That…really fucking sucks, Eds.” Is what ends up coming out. “Neither of you deserved that.”
Eddie shrugs without saying anything.
Buck can still guess at what he’s thinking though. He knows that even though Eddie and Shannon had been in the process of talking through things, and that maybe Eddie has even had similar conversations with his therapist, Eddie still carries all sorts of guilt for leaving Shannon behind in Texas while he served, even if it was the right choice when it came to providing for Christopher. Guilt that’s probably only made worse knowing his parents' involvement in the problems and stress that they all faced. And in Buck’s experience, guilt is one of the tricky emotions that puts up a hell of a fight when you try to get rid of it, even rightfully.
“You know I’m right.” Eddie’s head is still on Buck’s shoulder, so he’s very gentle when he nudges in that direction. ‘You and Shannon were in a tough place. Young, scared, facing huge life changes… You both made the choices that you thought were going to be the best for getting your family through it. Maybe they were right, and maybe they weren’t, but I know from talking with you, and from hearing about Shannon, that you both did everything with the best of intentions to make sure that, if nothing else, Christopher was properly taken care of and knew he was loved. It wasn’t fair of your parents to judge or jeopardize that.”
Eddie sniffs a little, and lifts a hand to wipe at his eyes. He takes a couple of breaths, presumably to steady himself, and Buck waits it out, because Eddie never makes him feel rushed or like he’s not important when he’s upset, and it’s a simple thing, but it makes talking easier and Buck wants that for Eddie too.
“Anyway,” Eddie begins after a moment, “like I said, things have seemed better lately, and I thought they finally were starting to understand that just because I wasn’t on the path that they had set me on since grade school, didn’t mean I had a bad life. And like I said, they knew I was bi. I only dated guys a couple of times before everything happened with Shannon, but they never had a problem with it, so I figured…I figured they had no reason to dislike or judge you. You haven’t done anything to ‘ruin my life’ like they thought Shannon did. All you’ve ever done is made things better for me and Chris. I thought they’d see that. Turns out I was very, very wrong.”
“I’m not gonna blame you for hoping for the best with your family. Eds.” Buck comments. “Especially when they’ve been pretty good with you lately.”
“She hurt you.”
“I don’t know everything she said,” Buck repeats himself from the start of the conversation, “but I know you didn’t stand by and let her think it was OK. You did the right thing.”
“What about Chris?” Eddie asks. He lifts his head off of Buck’s shoulder and looks carefully at him. “I just told her I would leave it up to him about lunch. And he gets frustrated with them sometimes because they don’t let him be as independent as he likes but…he loves his grandma and abuelo. He wants to see them.
“But you saw things just now. He could tell that she was unhappy and she and my dad only ever made the bare minimum to keep their criticisms more subtle or private once he got old enough to understand. He’s asked me about whether or not Shannon loved him because of things he heard them say. I can pretty much guarantee that if this is how my mom feels, it’s how my dad feels and it’s only gonna be a matter of time before they hurt him too…”
At first, Buck doesn’t think he has a good response to that. Eddie’s a good dad and he doesn’t want to see Chris upset but Chris could be hurt by going in either direction. On the one hand, he loves his grandparents and being forced to cut off that relationship because of grown-up arguments that only sort of involve him is going to be confusing and probably harmful. Especially after the sudden losses and trauma he’s already experienced this year. On the other hand, it could be even worse to let him keep seeing his grandparents and have him continuously exposed to their judgment and not-so-subtle commentary.
There’s not a good or easy solution here.
But then Buck thinks about the fact that Eddie is a good dad, and how he’s handled so many difficult conversations with his son lately. And he thinks that maybe there is a way to work it out.
“Do you remember when I first let you know how messed up I am, and asked Steve and you for help?” Buck asks. “I was really worried that I would scare or upset Chris because I couldn’t pretend to be OK anymore.” Eddie blinks, like maybe he can’t figure out where Buck is going with this. “But you told me--and you were right--that Chris is smart, and mature, and that if we find the right way to tell him about things, he’ll understand.
“And like…you’re a great dad.” Buck continues. “The best. And I think you’re right that he’s old enough that he should have a say in whether or not he spends time with them, and also that that shouldn’t be time alone since they maybe can’t be trusted, but I also think that if you want to be fair to him you need to let him make that choice with all the information. And this isn’t me telling you what to do because that’s not my place, and you definitely don’t have to tell him details of things that’ll upset him, but…You could probably tell him that you aren’t getting along with your parents because they don’t respect your choices and said some really shitty--er…mean things that they aren’t going to apologize for. And that, you won’t let them be mean around him, but they still might say some things that are confusing or won’t feel good. And maybe he hears that and decides he doesn’t want to spend time with them either, or maybe he still wants to give them a shot, but…but at least if you talk with him first, if they do say or do something to hurt him, he knows that you’ll have his back and he can talk to you about it.”
Eddie nods, wiping at his face again. He offers Buck a watery smile; Buck can see the weight of the past hour or so, perhaps the past several years, sitting behind the expression, but there’s also something else that he can’t quite figure out. Something…collected. Maybe understanding. “That’s pretty good advice for someone who thinks he shouldn’t be offering it.”
Buck doesn’t know how he’s supposed to respond to that, so he doesn’t say anything.
“You’re a great dad too.” Eddie says. “And a great partner. I don’t want this shit to scare you off.”
Buck nearly scoffs. He does shake his head. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed over the past couple of months but your shit’s got nothing on my shit. If anything, I’m lucky you like me enough to put up with it.”
“Maybe we’re both just lucky that we found each other.” Eddie pauses. He leans forward, resting his forehead gently against Buck’s. “Bad day or not, shitty parents or not, nothing’s changed, OK? I love you.”
Instead of the overwhelming discomfort and worry that’s been flooding his system for most of the day, Buck finds himself feeling a rush of warm tenderness and acceptance, and it settles something in him that he hadn’t quite noticed was leaving him on edge. He sighs and relaxes into Eddie’s gesture. “I love you too.”
That’s how they stay until Adriana and Chris return.
Buck ends the day the way he started it. With his mind stuck on things he knows he should tell Eddie, or at least someone, but doesn’t want to, for fear of making things worse. For fear of it being the tipping point.
As nice as his moment with Eddie on the steps of the Diaz house had ended up being, the rest of the afternoon had been a total shitshow, and the tension had lingered long after they’d decided to just hit the road and get the hell out of El Paso. Chris had been upset to hear that his grandmother had been mean to his dad and to Buck, and even though they’d both reassured him that they knew Helena still loved and wanted to see him and they’d support him no matter what and make sure she and/or Ramon didn’t do anything to make him uncomfortable, when given the option to decide whether or not he wanted to have lunch with her and Ramon, Chris had been quick to assert that he didn’t want to spend time with people who couldn’t be nice to the his family.
It was a decision that hadn’t sat well with Helena, or with Ramon once he finally arrived and learned about it.
Buck and Chris had ended up staying outside, having a sort of picnic while Adriana and Eddie (who despite his own decision to cut his parents off for the time being refused to let his sister have to face them by herself knowing the mood that he’d essentially put them in) went in to share Adri’s news. Buck hasn’t gotten a blow by blow of how the conversation went but he’s aware that the Diaz’ weren’t happy with how their daughter has decided to handle her pregnancy. There had been a lot of arguments, raised voices, and nasty comments sent in most directions by the time they were able to pile into the rental and set off towards Austin. Adri was in tears but trying to put on a brave face, Eddie was driving and back to doing everything he could to rein in his own emotions, Chris was upset, partially because everyone else was, but also because even though they’d all done everything they could to shield him from the worst of everything, he’d certainly had a few thoughts about his grandparents shattered over the course of the afternoon, and was now retreating into himself as he tried to understand what it all meant, and Buck… Buck was just fiddling with the fidget toy Eddie had provided earlier like his life depended on it and trying to think about anything other than the mess he’d played a part in. Everyone seemed to calm down and settle the longer they were on the road, though Buck thinks that has more to do with exhaustion than it does with feeling better. At least it does for him.
Eventually, when they’re about halfway to Austin, they decide to find a place to eat and to stay for the night. Chris perks up at the meal, which seems to do something to liven up Eddie and Adriana. Buck tries, mostly to make sure that Chris is able to bounce back from the nightmare that was the afternoon in El Paso, but the effort feels hollow. He has a hard time making himself eat a meal, even though he hasn’t had all that much at all throughout the day. The further into the meal and the night they get, the harder it is for him to even speak.
Buck starts to feel outside of himself. He knows he’s there, sitting in a booth at the old-fashioned diner they’d found, and then later, sitting on the edge of one of the beds in the hotel room he, Chris, and Eddie are sharing, but his head simultaneously feels miles away and too deep inside himself. The day has been long and hard and everything he thought he’d moved past from the morning circles back around into his thoughts, making every other horrible feeling and self-judgment that’s sprung up across the day an impossible-to-ignore cacophony of negative impulses.
He doesn’t say anything when he and Eddie watch a movie with Chris, or when the credits start rolling and Buck realizes he doesn’t have any real memory of Chris sandwiching himself between them on their bed, let alone the actual film. And he doesn’t say anything as they get Chris to go through a slightly modified night time routine, turn most of the lights off, and tuck him into bed.
He still doesn’t say anything when he and Eddie settle onto their bed next to each other, not to sleep, but to spend some quiet time reading or otherwise scrolling on their phones with some soft music playing. Buck doesn’t scroll (he’d learned his lesson earlier that morning and to be honest, he’s relatively confident that his brain isn’t going to do much to help him process anything on a screen anyways) but Eddie holds his phone with his left hand so he can hold Buck’s hand with his right, so Buck holds onto his phone and fakes it just to be able to keep the comfort. His brain continues to spin out beyond any semblance of his control, but Eddie keeps him tethered there.
After a fair amount of time passes, Eddie puts his phone down, leans over to kiss Buck on the cheek, and murmurs something about getting ready for bed himself. He rolls off the bed, crosses into the room’s bathroom, and closes the door behind him.
And it should be fine, Buck thinks.
It’s not like Eddie’s actually gone. He’s behind a door maybe five feet away. And Chris is asleep in the room’s other bed. He’s not alone, and as generally awful as the day had been, it had pretty much all worked out.
He should be fine.
Only he’s not.
His brain keeps running in circles, echoing all of the shitty things he thinks about himself, mixed in with the things he keeps hearing from other people. Things that, despite everyone’s best efforts to keep them apart, he’d heard from Helena. Buck can’t unhear or stop thinking them.
It’s all your fault.
That thought is at the start of it all and it’s one of the hardest ones to ignore. He’s only been hearing it his whole life, about one thing or another. Sure, there are some things that he’s come to accept weren’t really his responsibility and people are blaming on him because of problems he has nothing to do with, and there are others that he knows people he cares about and believes in don’t really think happened because of anything he did so he’s trying to believe them about that, but at the end of the day, Buck knows he’s a fuck up. Even without meaning to, he’s messed a lot of things up. It’s not hard to believe that he’s a problem. The common denominator or whatever.
It’s the thought that leads to all the others.
Stupid.
Broken.
Worthless.
There’s 500 other negative impressions swirling around in his brain. They’ve been there all night, getting louder and louder, and Buck’s only been able to keep himself from panicking or getting totally lost because Eddie’s been right there with him, even without knowing that he needed to be.
Now Buck’s alone (even though he’s not) and he wants to stay calm and do the right thing without bothering Eddie--he tries to, he really does--but as he casts his glance somewhat frantically around the room to try and keep himself grounded, his eyes get caught on the door to the room’s tiny excuse for a balcony. And they stay there. He fidgets with the toy Eddie provided and squeezes his fist and even punches at himself (first his thigh and then his just barely healed bicep) but none of the sensations distract him from the impulse Buck has when he sees that stupid glass sliding door.
You could do everyone a favor.
You could just walk out that door and over the edge.
You could solve a lot of problems.
Buck doesn’t know how long he sits and stares at the weird reflection of the room’s dim lights and shadows in the glass, but he only just barely snaps out of the trance when Christopher mumbles something softly in his sleep and curls tightly around one of the extra pillows on his bed. The noise washes over him like a bucket of ice water, and he waits for a moment to see if Chris will show that he’s having a bad dream or wake up. Only just as quickly as he makes the noise, the nine-year-old seems to settle again, and Buck is left with the realization that once again, he’s not OK. Once again, he needs help.
From there he doesn’t let himself think about it, he just gets to his feet and hurries over to the bathroom door. He raps his knuckles against it gently three times, and it doesn’t take long at all for Eddie’s voice to call out a soft response.
“Yeah?”
Buck does his best to be mindful of his volume--there’s no need to disturb Chris--but in trying to control that he’s pretty sure he loses all ability to plan out and think over what he’s saying because it all comes out a rambling, stammering mess.
“Can--can you--...I know this is stupid and--and you’re probably almost done but I--I can’t--” The door swings open, flooding the room with more light. Eddie is there, brow furrowed as he takes Buck in and it just makes him feel worse. He looks down at the floor, unable to finish his thought.
“Buck? What’s--come here…” Eddie’s hand palms at his shoulder and pulls him into the tiny bathroom, closing the door again behind them. “What happened?”
Buck shakes his head, still looking at the floor. “Shouldn’t be alone.”
“You don’t have to be.” Eddie answers.
Buck doesn’t really agree. Not at the moment. He knows everyone wants him to ask for help when he needs it but he also knows that he’s needy and stupid and selfish and not being fair to Eddie. Eddie, who between travel and his son and Buck and his sister, hasn't had a moment to himself all day. The day was a shit show and even though it’s definitely sucked for him too, he’s prioritized taking care of everyone else. He deserves a moment to breathe and take care of himself, not deal with Buck’s bullshit. Only Buck doesn’t say that, because he’s fairly certain Eddie won’t agree with him. “It’s stupid.” He shrugs. “You’re only gonna be another couple of minutes. I should be able to handle it.”
“I don’t want you to just handle it.” Eddie says. He maneuvers him throughout the small space and eases him down to sit on the closed toilet seat. “I want you to feel safe. If that means sticking closer on rough days…” He trails off and turns to the sink.
“Today…wasn’t good.” Buck agrees after a moment. Eddie’s assurance makes him feel the tiniest bit better about seeking him out, a little bit less ashamed and more like he’s doing the right thing even though it doesn’t sit right in his gut. “I can’t get out of my own head.”
Eddie turns back, offering Buck one of the bathroom’s small plastic cups filled with water from the sink. “Do you want to talk about it?” When Buck takes the cup, Eddie sits on the edge of the bathtub. It puts them roughly on the same level.
Talking will probably help. As much as he doesn’t want to be a burden, and as much as he didn’t share everything with Eddie on the plane that morning, what he did share and talk through lifted enough weight off his shoulders that he was able to get through the rest of the day, and he needs to find a way now to get through the night and start tomorrow off better. And he still wouldn’t have to get into everything. With how much bullshit his brain is tossing his way, Buck can be selective and avoid some of the thoughts and things that would probably make Eddie feel worse and he thinks he probably should do that if only to find a way to let some of the intrusive thoughts bouncing around his head go, only he opens his mouth and it feels a little bit like the connection between his brain and his vocal chords has been severed. Buck takes a sip of water and tries a second time, hoping to just say the bare minimum, the things that Eddie already knows he deals with and won’t be shocked or scared to hear again, but the words still won’t come.
It’s like there’s a wall around the desire to say something and the words he’s picked that he just…doesn’t have the energy or wherewithal left to try and get over it or break through.
After a moment he shakes his head, blinking back his frustration. “Tomorrow? Maybe?”
“Whenever you’re ready.” Eddie claps his hand on Buck’s knee, squeezing gently. He’s there for Buck, even when Buck is being ridiculous and unhelpful, and Buck just can’t imagine why he deserves it right now. “Do you need anything specific? Or do you just not want to be alone?”
“The second.”
“OK.” Eddie leans forward and presses his lips against Buck’s forehead. “I just need to brush my teeth and then I’ll be ready. You can just sit there if you want, or you can start going through your routine. But I’ll stay in the room with you until you tell me not to, OK?”
Buck nods his agreement. He takes another sip of water while Eddie pulls back and gets to his feet, and then he watches his partner turn back to the sink, pull a toothbrush and travel toothpaste out of a small leather satchel and set to work. It feels a little stupid, but watching the basic domesticity does something to ease the turmoil that’s been bubbling in his chest. Today has sucked, no question, but they’re still just going through their regular pre-bed routines, at least as much as they can away from home. So maybe as bad as things are feeling, they aren’t that bad. Or at least, they won’t stay that bad.
“Hey Eds?” He interrupts Eddie, just before he sticks his prepared toothbrush in his mouth. Eddie turns back around. “Do you think tomorrow will be better?”
Eddie nods, regarding him softly. “Yeah, Ev. Tomorrow will be better.”
Chapter 32
Notes:
Hey all! Thanks for bearing with me, and all of the kind words you've given in your comments (and for all the lovely kudos!). It truly means so much to me to receive those and lifts me in ways that not a lot of things do right now. I deeply appreciate all of you.
This chapter does feature some conversation about the sexual assault Buck has experienced and how he's processing that right now, and then what I would consider to be a slightly heavier than canon-typical incident involving stunt planes in the final scene, so please be kind to yourself when reading. If anyone feels like I need to tag anything in addition to what's already tagged, please let me know and I'll add that.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“On the plane yesterday, I couldn’t sit on the aisle because I couldn’t deal with so many people touching me.” Buck says, his voice barely above a whisper. “Even though they would have just been brushing past.”
It’s early in the morning. There’s just a tiny bit of sunlight peeking in through the balcony--the balcony that Buck doing his very level best to ignore, to be honest--and five minutes or so ago Buck had woken up, less because it was actually time to get up and more because he’d had a lot of water right before bed for lack of anything else to do with his hands while he was waiting for Eddie to finish his routine and he'd desperately needed to use the restroom. He’d thought he’d just get up, take care of things, and fall back asleep since somehow, despite how horribly yesterday had gone and how terribly he’d felt at the end of the day he’d managed to get a good night’s sleep and he’s not about to say no to a little bit of a lie in, but when he’d crept back out of the hotel’s bathroom, Eddie had been a little bleary-eyed but awake and sort of propped up on his pillows and he’d opened up his arms in a gesture for Buck to join him. Buck, feeling noticeably more comfortable in his own skin than he had been at any point yesterday, wasn’t about to refuse an opportunity to properly cuddle with his partner when doing so had been a battle lately. Eddie had checked that he was OK, and when Buck had confirmed that he was, they’d just laid together in silence. The only reason Buck knows Eddie isn’t sleeping is that he’s running his fingers through Buck’s hair while Buck rests pressed against his chest.
He feels so much better than he had yesterday, but he can still feel the shadows of every ugly worry and thought that had tormented him. Buck doesn’t want to think about any of them--he’d much rather just sit in the warm pleasant feeling of being able to actually enjoy a comfortable, casual morning with Eddie--but he also thinks it’s all close enough that if he ignores it, it’ll just come back. That’s what it does.
And when they did talk yesterday--- what little Buck had been able to manage when he’d been too close to the end of his tether--Eddie had been insistent that he wants to know what’s bothering Buck to be able to help. So Buck tries to remind himself of that and convince himself that it’s true and tries to find a way to open up the conversation and explain why he’d been so…useless the day before.
He’s not sure how exactly he lands on talking about his physical discomfort.
“You’re OK now?” Eddie asks, just as softly. He doesn’t stiffen or move away, which Buck is grateful for. He’d hated keeping his distance yesterday, no matter how necessary it had felt, and he wants to enjoy things while it feels comfortable.
“Better.” Buck doesn’t quite shrug. “When I woke up yesterday I just felt…shitty. Really low.” He clarifies. He waits a moment, but Eddie appears ready to just let him talk, another thing to be grateful for. “And I have a harder time letting go of things when I feel like that, I think. And you know I’ve been…having a harder time in general with people touching me.” Eddie hums his acknowledgement. “When we went through security yesterday, and you were helping Chris, I got pulled for enhanced screening. And the pat-down was perfectly routine and normal and nothing actually happened but…”
“But it triggered you.” Eddie fills in when the silence extends a little bit longer than the others because Buck can’t figure out what to say. “Pretty understandable. Especially after that asshole cop. Is there a reason you didn’t want to say anything?”
Buck takes a moment to think about it and to choose his words. Now that he’s got some distance between himself and the event, he can explain it a bit more clearly than he ever would have been able to yesterday, and can suss out the more complex parts of what he’d been feeling outside of his base anxieties. “I mean…you needed to be where you were with Chris when it happened, so I didn’t want you to feel bad about that. And there were just…so many people around us. I know I wasn’t being all that rational but I couldn’t stop thinking that I already had too many people paying attention to me and I didn’t want to draw more.” He stops to take another breath. Eddie continues to be patient. “I really got trapped in my head. That’s how I ended up…” He gestures in a small wave with his bandaged hand. “And it was still bad when we were boarding, so when you tried to give me the aisle seat, I just…I couldn’t bear the thought of being that exposed. And I should have been able to explain all of that when you asked but I was….”
“Really overwhelmed?”
“Yeah.” Buck sighs. He feels even more ridiculous explaining it all now than he’d felt when he’d been unable to explain it at the time. Now he knows with certainty he was being at least somewhat irrational and ridiculous.
Eddie stops running his hand through Buck’s curls, and rests his arm instead across Buck’s chest, holding him in a light embrace. “First, thanks for sharing that with me now. I know it’s really hard to explain this stuff, and can make you nervous all on its own.” He squeezes Buck’s elbow once. “Did you just want to let me know now that it feels a bit easier, or do you want to talk about it?”
“I…” Buck doesn’t really have to consider the choice. This is an issue that’s bothering him a lot right now, exacerbating his anxiety and making most things feel so much harder or at least more uncomfortable than they used to be, and he does think that talking about it and getting Eddie’s perspective while Eddie is offering it is the right thing to do. It’s only figuring out how to explain his various thoughts that keeps him from diving straight into the discussion. “Ever since I was…ever since Wells raped me, there have been times where I’ve felt like--like sex is all people think about when they look at me. And I know that’s not really true, at least not in the way my brain is saying it, but…Wells looked at me and she didn’t see a patient or even someone worth respecting. And then with Taylor’s report coming out and everyone finding out that I reported Wells to begin with, everything has been about my past and how much I liked sex back then, and judging me based on that. That cop from the swatting stop was an asshole, but I don’t know if he would have done what he did if it hadn’t been me. I feel like lately people look at me and they know every little thing about me and my past and they’re either judging me for it or they like it for some reason and I’m just some fantasy or toy for them.
“I just…I constantly feel exposed and crowded and judged. And a part of me knows that’s not true but I can’t stop thinking about it and worrying about it and…and hating myself for ever earning this reputation in the first place.”
Buck feels Eddie press his lips briefly to the crown of his head. “OK, there’s a few things to unpack there. Can I go through them and tell you what I think, or did you just want to let it out and vent?” Buck quietly gives his agreement for Eddie to continue. “First of all, what happened with Wells…a person like that takes advantage of people that they think are vulnerable and won’t speak up. Most of the men she assaulted were early in their careers, like you were the first time you had an appointment with her, because she figured no one who can booted from the program without much cause would want to risk any sort of misunderstandings by reporting her. She targeted you because you were a probie, not because of your reputation. And she coerced you at this second appointment because you were in a vulnerable position, needing clearance to come back to work. I won’t lie and say she wasn’t physically attracted to you, but she was also looking at you differently than anyone healthy does.”
Buck shakes his head. It’s not that he doesn’t believe Eddie, not entirely, but he’s almost positive there was more to it than that. “She friended me on socials, before she even knew I’d be a patient. Because she saw me on the news and…liked what she saw I guess.”
“Ev, baby, I’ve seen that report online. You were in shock when you gave that interview. Bobby and whatever other brass that sent you over to that reporter never should have done it. You were probably at least as vulnerable then as you were when you went to that appointment, you just weren’t across a room. Whether as her patient or just as someone she thought she could hook up with, she was targeting you.”
Buck takes several moments. He’s not sure what to think. Something to unpack during his therapy appointment later that afternoon he guesses. Unless another crazy thing happens that has to be dealt with instead. Eventually, when he speaks again, his voice is even softer, even though he doesn’t really make the choice to lower his volume. “That’s when Abby reached out to me too.”
Eddie tenses behind him momentarily, but his hands and arms stay gentle. Still, there’s no missing the slight edge to his reply. “I…still think that says a lot more about the kind of person Abby is than it does about you.” He pauses, very briefly. “As for the way things have been lately…I’m not going to say there aren’t people out there who saw Taylor’s report and decided to believe it, or who look at you and see a really attractive guy and don’t think about the fact that there’s an actual person behind all that, but I think that number is probably a lot smaller than what it’s been feeling like for you lately. We’ve talked a little about how much anxiety you’ve been having since Wells attacked you, and how it’s gotten worse since Taylor launched that report…
“I know from my PTSD that anxiety can really amplify worries and negative thoughts and depression, which can amplify negative thoughts and anxiety…it’s a really vicious, shitty, self-feeding circle.”
“I know I can’t keep…I can’t keep getting lost in my head or--or hurting myself to stop it. But I don’t know what else to do.”
“Well, you’re going to be talking to that psychiatrist soon about potentially starting some meds, and when you find the right ones, those could have a big impact. But in the meantime, I think you can talk with Jules about different anxiety management things. Or I can share some of the ones that really helped me when I was struggling. And I personally didn’t like them but I know there are a lot of apps and videos and things that work for a lot of people. You have a lot of options, and you don’t have to do any of them alone.”
Buck nods, thanking Eddie for his understanding (even though he mostly knows he doesn’t have to) and turning and tilting his head so he can stretch up and kiss his partner. Regardless of how heavy the conversation is, it feels like it’s been forever since they’ve had the chance to cuddle together in bed, and it’s relaxing him in ways that he’s almost forgotten were possible; there’s something especially gratifying about having woken up from a night without nightmares, and actually feeling comfortable enough to not just have to grit his teeth in order to get past the initial discomfort of physical contact to enjoy it. He doesn’t know that they’ve found any solutions through this discussion, but he does feel more relaxed and like there’s less of a weight sitting across his shoulders.
The morning feels nice, and several moments go by where they both are just basking in it. Eventually, however, Eddie speaks up again and his question does let a little bit of the wind out of Buck’s sails.
“Do you feel up to talking a bit more about last night?” Eddie asks. “It’s OK if you’re not.”
“It was a really long, shitty day.” Buck half shrugs. He feels a bit smaller and more unsure of himself, trying to explain why he’d sought Eddie out last night, but he does want to try. “I felt a bit better after sleeping on the flight, but then your mom hated me for…for things that…they’re bothering me a lot right now. So I really couldn’t let any of that go and there was really nothing else to think about because everyone else was upset too. And you had every right to be.” He’s quick to add on, craning his neck to check Eddie’s expression; he doesn’t want him to feel like he’s blaming him for anything because he’s absolutely not. “Everything at your parents’ was terrible for everyone. But I just…I get stuck in my head and overwhelmed and I either think about things that I don’t want to or shouldn’t do or I just start doing them without thinking and…When I realize that it--it can be really fucking scary? And the only thing I know that will make me feel safer is to…to not be alone.”
Eddie’s grip tightens the slightest bit. Buck knows it’s because he understands what Buck means, even if he’s not quite saying the words. “I’m real proud of you, you know that?”
“I don’t…What’s to be proud of?” Buck asks. “I’m a mess.”
“Because you’re trying.” Eddie says it like it’s simple. Buck doesn’t even have to be looking to know that even if there’s not a smile on his partner’s face right now, there’s at least a hint of one in his eyes; he’s not sure why he deserves that. “You’ve been putting in so much work the past couple of weeks, trying everything your therapist is asking you to do and being more open about what you need. I know you worry that when you ask for help you’re being too much, and that you’re pushing past that to get what you need. That’s a big deal, and I’m proud of you for doing it.”
“I couldn’t even explain myself though. I was just…making demands.”
“First of all, from where I was, you weren’t demanding anything. On the plane, I offered you one seat, and you offered it to me instead. And last night all you did was knock on the bathroom door and ask not to be alone. Neither of those things were unreasonable, and the way you asked wasn’t either. And second, if something is going to keep you comfortable and safe and…here with me and Christopher, I’m much more concerned that you feel like you can ask for it, not that you feel like you can or have to explain why. The reasons can wait until you’re ready.”
They talk about it a little bit more, mostly just Buck trying to process and accept what Eddie is telling him and Eddie being more patient than Buck can really understand, but eventually things taper off, with Buck reasoning that this might be something that he needs to just trust in Eddie and accept from him and then parse out with Jules a bit more at his next appointment (although per usual, it feels like the list of things he should bring up with them grows longer and longer by the hour), and they settle into another comfortable pause, enjoying each other’s steady presence.
It’s how they stay until Eddie’s alarm goes off, stirring Christopher awake.
“I’m going to go ahead to the armadillos.” Chris announces, tearing his gaze from the family of tamarins perched and playing in their enclosure to look back towards Buck and Eddie and check that moving on is OK.
“Go ahead.” Eddie encourages. “We’ll be right behind you.”
“Thanks!” Chris takes off, ducking down the short path towards an adjacent enclosure. Buck sighs, leaning against Eddie’s shoulder as they follow at a more sedate pace hand in hand, feeling as though he can truly relax and breathe for the first time in several days.
It’s their second day in Austin, although the first full day, having arrived a little after lunchtime the day before. Adriana had been fairly quick to retreat back to her own place on their arrival to take some quiet time to recover from her travels before she needs to return to work, and Buck had spent a little bit of time alone in the master bedroom of the VRBO he and Eddie had landed on renting that afternoon so he could do both a virtual therapy appointment and his first consultation with the practice’s psychiatrist, while Chris and Eddie had taken the time to really dig in to what they wanted to do while exploring the area. Buck’s appointments had gone about as well as he might have expected them to (Jules is happy with the progress he’s making in letting Eddie in and they started talking about correcting his negative self-talk, and after discussing his pre-appointment assessments with the clinic psychiatrist and going over things in more detail, they had landed on a plan to try out an antidepressant that the psychiatrist thinks will help with both his mood and anxiety once he gets back home). Buck had needed a long talk with Steve, reaffirming the path he was on and unpacking some of the toxic mindsets that had been drilled into them by the Navy and perpetuated by their work afterwards to be fully on board with the meds plan, but when he finally emerged from the bedroom some hours later for dinner, he was wrung out and tired but feeling OK and Chris and Eddie had assembled a loose itinerary of things they wanted to do that they all discussed over dinner, so the day was ultimately a success.
And that led them here, to the Austin Zoo. It’s definitely not as big as the zoo in LA, and doesn’t have quite the same extensive amount of exhibits and animals, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Chris, who’s carefully reading over every bit of signage and spending some time observing each animal with joy. It’s a relief to see him shake off the tension he’s been holding onto since the swatting incident and the fight with his grandparents, and helps Buck shed some of the worries he’s been holding onto about traumatizing him. The activity balms Buck’s soul as well, the quiet, familiar routine of walking through a zoo alongside Eddie and Chris feeling a bit like home, even though it’s not the zoo they normally frequent. The longer they go with just having a pleasant morning, with no incidents or bad news to speak of, the more Buck’s brain seems to quiet down and let him just stay in the moment and enjoy things.
The contentment is almost a strange feeling.
“You doing OK?” Eddie asks softly as they walk.
And Buck doesn’t really have to think, and he doesn’t have to lie, and it feels good. “Yeah. Today…I think today is a good day.”
He feels Eddie press his lips to the crown of his head. “That’s great. I’m happy for you.”
They close the distance between themselves and Chris. Buck is only moderately surprised to find the boy sharing an armadillo fact with another pair of zoo-goers.
“Actually only two types of armadillos can roll into a ball.” He’s saying. “The rest aren’t flexible enough.”
One zoo-goer, a tall and tanned, muscular man with wavy black hair leans over to his companion, a slightly shorter, lanky man with short and styled brown hair, and makes a comment out of the corner of his mouth without much effort to quiet his voice; there’s no annoyance or malice in his tone, though he does seem a little chastened. “Did you know there was more than one type of armadillo?”
“More than one?” The man fires back. “You’re lucky I didn’t think they were made up for that El Dorado movie.”
Christopher snorts in amusement looking up at the two men. “There are twenty species of armadillos. But only one lives here in the US. The rest are in South America.”
“You know an awful lot about armadillos.” The second man says. “Do you work here at the zoo?”
“No!” Chris giggles. “Buck taught me. He knows all the good animal facts.” He turns in his spot, peering over his shoulder, grinning when he spots Buck and his dad. “Buck, come tell these two about armadillos. They thought they all could roll into balls.”
Buck smiles, but finds himself surveying the two men carefully before he responds; technically speaking, Chris shouldn’t be talking to them--he knows better than to talk to strangers--but he’s also very excitable when he knows something that someone else doesn’t, especially an adult. If he’d heard one of them say something wrong, he probably hadn’t been able to control himself. So now Buck and Eddie need to step in and make sure he’s just approached a couple of average guys. He doesn’t spot anything that raises any immediate red flags. If anything, there’s something familiar about the way the men are carrying themselves that sort of makes him feel at ease, but he doesn't understand why he'd feel that way and he doesn't trust at all that he should lean into that feeling. Eddie speaks up before he can say anything, and he seems fairly comfortable, so Buck decides to try and not be too suspicious of the duo, as much as his brain is telling him he has to be.
“Go easy on them, mijo.” He chides, resting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Not everyone has a monthly standing date at the LA Zoo with their own walking wikipedia.”
“You have a walking wikipedia?”The brunette’s eyebrows raise and he taps the back of his hand casually against his companion’s chest. “You hear that ‘Los? Maybe we just found someone who can finally give Paul a run for his money at trivia.”
His partner rolls his eyes. “You’re never gonna win that bet, TK.”
“If that’s the way you feel then I guess I’ll have to find some other handsome Austin PD officer to keep me company at that cozy lakeside resort Paul’s going to make reservations at for me when I win.” The man, TK Buck mentally corrects even though he’ll probably never see him again, taunts with a cocky grin.
Buck feels Eddie’s posture relax a little at the casual mention that the taller man is a police officer; he wishes he could feel that same confidence, and he knows it’s not being fair to this person who by all rights seems to be perfectly nice, but he feels his own instincts telling him to be wary. He can only hope it’s a reaction that goes away with time, since in their line of work it’s not exactly convenient to not trust the police. Then again, hadn’t he just been saying he wasn’t sure about going back to work? In any case, Buck can’t help but still field a bit of suspicion, though he tries to ignore it and just cling to the feelings of peace and safety he’d been basking in a few moments ago to participate in the encounter. He straightens off of Eddie’s shoulder, but his attempts at relaxing don’t quite work and he doesn’t manage to convince himself to say anything since if he doesn’t talk, it can’t say the wrong thing.
“Not to disappoint you but we’re only in town for a couple of days.” Eddie comments. “ I doubt we’ll be around to help you settle any bets.”
“Then we’d better let you get back to your day.” The partner slips his arm around TK’s shoulder. “It’s not as big as LA’s zoo, but it’ll still take you some time. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, you too.”
The men make their leave and Chris wastes little time in pressing up against the barrier of the exhibit to watch some armadillo pups roughhouse with each other in the sand. Buck stares as well, though he’s more preoccupied at wondering if he’s crazy for not being able to relax and trust the two men the way Chris--and even Eddie--had seemed to be able to. On the one hand, he thinks it's mostly normal to not have let his guard down. Stranger danger is a thing, and they’re with Chris, who is vulnerable on top of his age and size, and they know all too well how it only takes a split second for things to go from perfectly fine to a massive crisis, so it doesn’t feel so out of pocket to have been unable regard the two men with anything but suspicion. But at the same time he knows it wasn’t rational for him to be so on guard.
Eddie was there too. They’d both had eyes on Chris--Eddie’d even had Chris within reach so if anything had happened they could have handled it between the two of them. And Eddie had been wary, but the more into the interaction they’d gotten and the more they’d learned, he’d been able to let go of that and just trust that things were fine.
And Buck isn’t clueless. He understands that he’s been through trauma, even if he’s not all that comfortable talking about it most of the time, and knows that trauma changes the way a person looks at things, but that’s never been him. He’d come back from his tours overseas plenty messed up, but he’d never just looked at every stranger like they’d pounce and attack with a single false move.
But these two guys, who by all accounts were normal and decent, had interacted with Chris (however harmlessly it had ended up being) and then one turned out to be a cop and he can’t even pretend to be OK around them for thirty seconds.
Buck is almost positive that isn’t normal.
He feels Eddie’s hand squeeze his. “You OK?” His partner asks for the second time in only a few minutes.
“Sure.” Buck swallows around his thoughts and questions. He doesn’t want to turn this into a thing and ruin what had been such a good morning. Things are fine. He’s fine.
“Ev…” Eddie chides softly.
“I want to be.” Buck sighs and corrects himself. He glances down towards Chris, who’s still enthralled with the armadillo pups. He hopes the boy will stay distracted. “I just…I couldn’t look at those two guys like they were normal.”
Eddie angles towards him a little, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…as far as we know those two were two perfectly average guys. Chris shouldn’t have just started talking to them,” and Buck whispers this part, so Chris doesn’t think he’s getting in trouble in the middle of their outing, “but there was nothing actually dangerous about them. They weren’t criminals or threats or…” Buck drops off, casting his eyes to the grown briefly while he trees to find his words. “They were normal--just some guys enjoying a day out like we are. But I couldn’t--I couldn’t not look at them like they were a danger. To Chris or--or to you or--,” he drops off, leaving the ‘to me’ unspoken.
“Buck…” Eddie drops his hand, but is quick to turn so he’s facing Buck directly and plants his hands on Buck’s biceps, holding onto him gently. “It’s not a bad thing that you are worried about our son’s safety.”
In another moment, Buck would be feeling all sorts of things at Eddie calling Chris theirs. Here, all he can really think about is how he’s ruining their day because they had one interaction he hadn’t accounted for and he couldn’t relax for it. He sighs. “You weren’t.”
“Not once you and I were both there, no.” Eddie pauses briefly. “Is this because I joked with them a little?”
Buck nods, nearly biting his lip. “You relaxed. You looked at the big picture, and realized there wasn’t any danger and everything was fine for you but I--I couldn’t do that. I was overreacting but I couldn’t stop myself or let it go and…”
“And?” Eddie prompts. “It was a couple of strangers at a zoo we don’t even live near. We’ll probably never see them again. And even if we did, you weren’t exactly rude to them. You were quiet. That’s all. Chris didn’t notice, and if they thought anything, it was probably just that you were introverted.”
“I never used to have this problem.” Buck admits. It feels like something shameful, a weakness that he shouldn’t have, even if it is something that people with trauma go through and technically, he is one of those people. As great as Eddie has been with all of his faults and issues and problems,and as much as he knows it’s theoretically OK to have those and share them with his partner, there’s still a part of him that wants to be stronger and better and less…broken.
“So now you do.” Eddie shrugs. “You’ve gone through more and this is how your brain wants to deal with that right now. It’s not wrong. You’re not wrong or bad or ruining things or anything else that’s running through your head right now, hermoso. You’ve been hurt. By people you should have been able to trust and it’s normal that that’s changed how you’re looking at strangers right now. You’ll work through it.”
Eddie’s resolute confidence could shatter Buck. It’s like he knows something about him that Buck doesn’t even believe in right now. And it feels good to hold someone so important to him’s faith like that but it’s also terrifying. Because Buck could let him down. “I just…” He blinks back his tears and looks down. “I just want to be better. The person that you and Chris need.”
Eddie’s hand leaves Buck’s arm and his fingers come up under his chin, coaxing his view back up. “The person that Chris and I need is you. In whatever package you come in, OK? I know you don’t like the way your emotions and responses are making you feel right now, and I really believe that you’ll figure out a way to work through those things and feel a bit more on-balance again, but whether that takes one day or 1000 days doesn’t matter to us, OK? We love you for who you are, and your trauma isn’t who you are.”
This time Eddie’s words settle over Buck’s shoulders like a comfortable, warm blanket. He doesn’t really think about his response, just wraps his partner in the closest hug he can manage; it's the only way he knows to help him feel even a fraction as loved as he does right now. “I love you too. Both of you.” Eddie returns the embrace and they stand in the moment for a little bit. Buck isn’t really sure how long, since he’s not great at keeping track of time when he’s at his best, but he doesn’t think it’s all that long before Christopher’s voice, a touch too loud in the way that only kids seem to manage with a hint of put-upon petulance, cuts through the scene they’ve carved out.
“You know, you guys can hug all the time. We don’t get to see armadillos every day.”
They pull apart, sharing a soft laugh. Only Christopher would think that monthly zoo trips aren’t regular enough exposure to exotic animals. In spite of his amusement, Eddie does give his son a pointed look. “Chris, what’d we talk about?”
Chris looks immediately chastened. “If someone needs a hug and you’re comfortable, you hug them for as long as they want.” Wide eyes dart towards Buck. “Are you OK, Buck? Do you need a hug?”
“I got a little upset for a second,” Buck admits. He doesn’t think Eddie would approve of him lying to Chris, even if his instincts are telling him to keep things light and happy for him. “But your dad talked me through it. And his hug helped too.”
“His hugs are really good.” Chris nods sagely. Buck doesn’t have to glance back to know that Eddie’s preening a little at the praise from his son, even if just inwardly.
“They are.” Buck agrees. “And you know, I think you inherited his magic touch.” He fully disengages from Eddie’s arms and crouches down. He’s not confident in a lot these days, but he’s almost entirely positive what Chris’ answer to his next question will be. “What do you think? Can I get a hug from you to chase the last of the bad feelings away so we can enjoy the rest of the day?”
Chris doesn’t hesitate to close the distance between them and throw his arms around Buck. His crutches thud gently in contact too, but Buck doesn’t mind. Not with Chris happy and close and Eddie just behind. His worries fall back and the comfort and contentment from earlier takes their place, and Buck…settles. He’s back in his own skin again, in a warm, happy moment with his partner and their kid and somehow, in spite of everything, things are good.
Buck can do this.
It’s not completely the first time he thinks it, but it’s one of the first times he thinks he might actually believe it.
He lets himself enjoy Chris’ embrace for a moment before pulling back. “Thanks Superman. I always feel better after one of your hugs. Now. Are you done with the armadillos or do you want to keep watching them for a little longer?”
“I’m done.” Chris answers quickly, smiling broadly at Buck’s praise. “Next is the zebras. Do you think they’ll look the same as the one’s back home?”
“They might be pretty close. But actually no two zebras look the same because their stripes are like our fingerprints.” Buck explains as he pushes himself back up to standing. He continues to explain as they all start walking as a family towards the next exhibit, Christopher hanging on his words and Eddie listening with a warm smile on his face, and in that moment Buck decides that, yeah. He can do this.
Buck cannot do this.
Wait. That’s not true.
He forces himself to breathe and to push past that initial, instinctual thought that had forced itself through as the chaos had sprung up around him. Or crashed. The chaos had crashed around him.
They were at an air show, of all things. Why they thought going to a stunt flying exhibition when they have the kind of luck they have, Buck doesn’t know, but there had been flyers about it at a diner they’d gone to after the zoo, advertising the event for the next day, and Christopher had been interested, and the ticket fees were going towards supporting families of fallen service-people, so who were he and Eddie to say no? And the grandstands had been packed to the brim--much more crowded than Buck had really been comfortable with--and they’d ended up squished together in a space that wasn’t quite big enough halfway up the stands with Christopher pretty much just sitting on Buck’s lap, but he’d been thrilled watching the painted planes fly in complicated formations and performing stunts. They’d all been having fun enough, watching in awe and discussing whether hot dogs or pizza would be the more nutritious options of what was available from the snack stands for lunch when something--Buck still doesn’t know what--had gone wrong. Planes that had been swooping and twisting around each other in a complicated pattern had somehow missed their trajectories and collided in a sudden, fiery explosion. Some of the other planes managed to divert their path and swerve away, but a couple others didn't.
The next explosion was possibly bigger, and before anyone could even totally register what was happening, wreckage was falling from the sky. Some down to the airfield a hundred yards or so away, but some careening away from the flightpath, straight into the packed grandstand. It was only a few feet away from their seats and Buck had been able to feel the heat from the burning wreckage as it had crashed down; he could hear people’s screams get choked off as they were obliterated by the debris, even as everyone else continued to wail around him.
Buck had barely tightened his hold on Chris and was starting to stand, ready to haul him off to somehow get the boy through the panicking crowd to safety before the grandstand crumbled out from beneath him. They plummeted down.
Thankfully it wasn’t pavement below, and all told they were probably only fifteen or twenty feet up, but the impact still knocked everything out of Buck and blinded him momentarily with a shock of agony. He’d done everything he could to wrap himself around Chris to protect him as best as he could, and he knows now, as he blinks and breathes and tries to push past the cacophony of noise and all of the receptors in his body telling him that once again he’s done something to fuck it up, that he’d at least mostly succeeded because Chris is still bundled in his arms and he sounds terrified as he cries but he doesn’t have any visible injuries and he doesn’t even really seem to be in pain. Just shock.
For a split second all Buck can do is squeeze Chris a little bit tighter.
But the moment can’t last and the chaos springs back to life around them just as quickly as it had disappeared in the shock of the impact. Buck tentatively rolls left, off of his side and onto his back, and when his body doesn’t do anything to protest that movement, he turns his head, first right, then left to survey the scene. There’s carnage, bodies and wreckage and tons of people screaming, crying, and running, but there’s no Eddie.
Eddie.
The thought registers and all notion of his own shock, pain, and fear completely vanishes from Buck’s system. He has to find Eddie. He has to keep Christopher safe and find Eddie.
“Chris, buddy, I’m going to sit up.” He gives a warning, nearly shouts it just to make sure he’s heard, and another small fragment of relief slides into place when he feels the small movement of Chris’ head nodding against his chest.
Buck sits up, still cradling Chris as best as he can manage. He can tell from the pull of things that his body isn’t happy with the movement but he doesn’t really feel the pain he’s sure is really there; now that the reality of the situation is setting in, there’s too much going on for him to notice something as trivial as pain. Upright he can survey the scene much better. The surrounding screams are mostly subsiding to sobs and the roar of fire still burning nearby. Buck can narrow his focus, scanning each form for a fraction of a second before he determines that it’s not Eddie and moves on. The part of him that’s a first responder regardless of the situation crying out at the obviously dead and those that could maybe still use some help pulls at his instincts but he pushes back harder, searching for his partner. He’s not a firefighter right now. He wouldn’t even be one if they weren’t on vacation. He’s just a guy, caught up in another fucking disaster, this time with his partner and son. He’ll feel guilty about being selfish later, right now Eddie and Chris are all that matters.
There’s no one on the ground, upright or otherwise that could be Eddie, and for a moment he panics. Eddie couldn’t have actually just disappeared. They weren’t actually hit by the destroyed plane so he couldn’t be…gone, but he’s not anywhere to be seen. Then he hears the shout.
“Buck!”
The voice is Eddie’s and the relief it brings is only second to knowing that Chris is OK. It draws his attention up, back to where the grandstand had given out from beneath him. Plenty of it is still standing, with some shellshocked bystanders lingering while others continue the scramble to evacuate, but what really catches Buck’s eye is Eddie. Eddie who’s on his knees at the edge of the broken grandstand, leaning over and balanced while cradling the form of a little blonde girl. It takes Buck a second to catch on that the reason Eddie isn’t straightening and bringing her to a more stable location is that there’s a piece of metal support, ripped and warped from the collapse piercing up through her stomach and impaling her.
Fuck.
“Buck, are you and Chris--,”
“We’re OK!” Buck shouts back, cutting off his question. Eddie’s safe and Chris is safe. Knowing that and seeing the girl forces his first responder hat firmly back into place and his last remaining bits of anxiety disappear. He scrambles to his feet, ignoring the way his body wants to argue against the movement. He can deal with pain later. There’s no time for that now. “What do you need?!”
“More hands!” Eddie replies. “I can keep her up so things don’t get worse, but we need to cut this support to move and get her more help!”
“Copy!”
Buck turns on his heels, looking for resources. He’s positive people will have called 9-1-1, so help is on the way, but Eddie can’t hold that girl balanced like that forever. They don’t have time to wait.
In one direction he sees a determined Afro-Latina woman running towards the scene, a bag slung over her shoulder. In another there’s a singular fire engine (probably the one the facility has to keep on site during events just in case of emergencies like these) pulling up to the edge of the chaos. He ignores the woman, and shouts once more up to his partner.
“I’ve got a line on help! Hang on!”
And, still carrying Chris, Buck sprints to the engine. It’s just rolling to a stop as he reaches it. “Chris, I’m gonna put you down, OK?” Chris gives his assent, and Buck gets him to the ground as gently and efficiently as possible and then starts opening the storage compartments he has access to. Things aren’t organized the way they are back in LA, but there’s only so many places to put things on a truck. He’ll find what he needs.
One of the firefighters exiting the vehicle barks at him. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
Buck doesn’t look over, just keeps searching. “There’s a girl, impaled on part of the grandstand.” He gestures vaguely behind him towards the scene. “My partner’s holding her up but it’s not stable. I need a sawzall, some rope, a backboard, medical supplies, whatever you’ve got.”
“Cap!” The firefighter calls over his shoulder.
“Scott, I told you to start tagging and triaging!” Another firefighter shouts as he approaches. Something in his voice shifts when he notices Buck. “Hey! Buddy, I know it’s chaos out here but you can’t just start going through---,”
“There’s a girl.” Buck cuts him off, this time turning to face the men. They’re both middle-aged, and a little heavier set--since he’s not in the headspace to be all that charitable he reasons that Austin probably doesn’t send out their A-Squad to babysit events just in case of a catastrophic event. It’s just their luck that one actually happened. Both men seem a little bit taken aback by the carnage in front of them, and he can tell they’re going to turn that nervous adrenaline towards something that they think they can control: the civilians. Something else they don’t have time for. He repeats his spiel, requesting supplies and help, then watches as the second man, with the captain’s helmet, catches sight of Eddie and the girl in the distance and his already pale face goes paler.
“Incident response is ten minutes out.” He stammers. “They’ll have the hands and equipment and--,”
“They do not have ten minutes.” Buck interrupts again, just barely keeping control of his temper that wants to flare out with the urgency of the situation. This is an unnecessary conversation, eating up time that the girl and Eddie don’t have. “We need to provide support and get her down now.”
The captain cranes his neck, looking at the situation again, wincing as he turns back. “We don’t have everything needed. Or the training. We’re not heavy rescue. The best we can do is triage and put fires out until Incident Response gets here.”
“OK, well, that’s not the best we can do. My partner up there and I are LAFD. Heavy rescue certified. Just give me the sawzall and someone to pass up a backboard and we’ll do the rest.”
He still hesitates, but eventually nods. “Scott, get the man what he needs.”
The second firefighter nods and heads down the engine to more storage compartments. Figuring the guy at least knows what to get and they have 30 seconds or so, Buck turns his attention to Chris. The boy is standing almost listlessly next to him, staring wide-eyed at the chaos of everything with tears streaking down his face behind his glasses.
Fuck.
Buck had been so focused, he hadn’t even thought about shielding him from everything. He falls to his knees, sending another shock of pain through his body that’s a little bit sharper, but just grimaces past it and grabs onto Christopher’s shoulders, turning him to refocus his attention. “Chris, Chris, buddy, Superman, I need you to look at me, OK? Can you look at me?”
“Buck?” Chris whimpers before he fully registers his change in view. “Buck it’s so bad!”
“I know, Chris. I know.” Buck pulls him into another hug. “I’m so sorry this is happening and you have to see it and I know it’s terrible and scary but you’re OK, and I’m OK, and your dad’s OK so that means we’re going to get through it, OK? It’ll probably still be scary for a while, but it’s gonna be OK.”
Chris searches his face for a moment as he pulls away, trying to spot the lie, but when he doesn’t he sniffs and wipes at his face. “Like the tsunami.”
“Exactly. And we’re gonna do the same thing we did back then. We’re gonna make a goal and just focus on that, and that’s gonna get us through.”
“What--,” Chris drops off, sniffling again. “What do I need to do?” There’s a sturdy, grim determination in his eyes. Buck is immensely proud. He also desperately wishes he’d never had to see that look in the face of his eight-year-old.
“Your dad is helping someone, and I need to go help him. We need to do what we can until the other firefighters get here. So I need you to stay right next to this truck, OK? I want you to just sit right up against the truck--”
“He can sit in the cabin.” The Captain interjects. “So he’s away from everything.”
Buck hopes his gratitude shows on his face. “Thank you.” He refocuses on Chris. “The Captain here is gonna help you sit in the truck, and your dad and I need you to stay there until one of us comes and gets you OK? If the Captain tells you to do something, you need to do it, but otherwise you stay safe in the truck.”
Chris nods and agrees and almost starts to move but then his eyes widen and he turns back to Buck in a panic. “What if something else happens? What if you and dad get hurt?”
Buck just manages to stop himself from making the potentially false promise that nothing else is going to happen. Instead, he thinks for a beat until a solution comes to him. He reaches into his jeans pocket, thankfully not on the side that had collided forcefully with the earth, and pulls out his phone. “You’re gonna take my phone. The code is your birthday, right? So if anything happens, if the truck needs to move, or it’s been a really long time and you’re worried about us, you call your dad. You call your dad, or Tia Adri, and if you can’t get them, Steve and Athena are in there too, OK?”
“OK. I’ll sit in the truck and if anything happens I call dad. Then Tia Adri.”
“Exactly.” Buck stands, pressing a kiss to the crown of Chris’ head before he straightens. “I am so proud of you, Superman.” The other firefighter, Scott or something, returns, with the requested sawzall and a couple of other bags. Buck starts to take some of it off his hands, tucking the sawzall in the waistband of his jeans. He feels terrible leaving, like he’s ripping a piece of his heart straight out of his chest, but the clock is ticking. Eddie and the girl need help and they need it fast. He makes one last turn to Chris, focusing all of his attention on him. “I love you, Superman. Your dad and I will come get you as soon as we can.”
“I love you too. Be careful!”
“I promise.”
Buck steels himself, and cocks his head back towards the grandstand at the firefighter the Captain had allocated him. “Let’s go. Clock’s ticking.”
And he sprints back into the chaos, fervently hoping that everything is going to turn out all right.
Notes:
So...that's happening? Sorry for the cliffhanger of sorts. I'll do my best to get an update out on the fast side. And hey, sly little Lone Star Cameos!
Thanks for reading <3
Chapter 33
Notes:
The opening scene of this chapter continues at the air show disaster, and does contain some semi-graphic descriptions of injuries.
Chapter Text
There’s someone else crowded over the little girl, squeezed in close next to Eddie, when Buck makes it back underneath the grandstand seconds later. Thick curly hair spills out over their face but he’s pretty sure it’s the woman he’d seen rushing up to the scene earlier. He has no idea how she’d gotten up to them so quickly, or what she thinks she’s doing. He doesn’t particularly care. He has his own climb to make.
With the sawzall in his waistband and a bag that has a blanket, some rope, and a few meager first aid supplies in it over his shoulder, Buck surveys the scaffold supports beneath the remains of the grandstand. He tests how sturdy it is with one hand and when the metal doesn’t quiver or groan he figures it’s as good as he’s going to get. He starts to free climb, and his body screams in protest but he pays the sensation no mind.
“Eds, I’m on my way up! I’ve got some tools!” He calls up as his climb starts, figuring that Eddie won’t see him coming and startling him is the last thing he needs. He doesn’t get a response, but he doesn’t really expect one, and after that he focuses on the climb, zeroing in to be as quick--but careful--as he can manage. With the one engine at the scene not being outfitted for heavy rescue they didn’t have any helmets or harnesses or other real climbing gear. And even if they had, there’s not really anywhere secure enough to set as an anchor point.
He just has to be careful.
And hope that the structure holds long enough to get the girl, and everyone else, down.
No big deal.
Buck doesn’t think about much while he climbs. He narrows his focus in on getting up to Eddie, and double checking that each step and handhold he uses is secure. He doesn’t know how long it actually takes him to get up to where he’s holding on to the bleacher structure just underneath the girl and his chest is level with her and he can actually see the damage (she’s four or five at most and awake and terrified, even as Eddie and the woman who Buck can now see is packing around the wound with stark white gauze with precision are doing their very best to soothe her and Buck is positive that whether or not she survives that wailing face is going to haunt his dreams) but he’s certain it takes him far too long. He’s out of shape, and not on top of his game and he’s terrified that it’s not going to be good enough.
But he doesn’t let himself think about that. His only thoughts can be on what he can do to help this girl. That’s the goal.
“Hey Eds.” He greets. There’s a calmness in his voice that he doesn’t feel. It’s the same voice they all put on some times at scenes when they don’t want civilians to panic. It slips on like an old sweatshirt. “Who do we have here?”
“Well, my friend here is Emily, and helping us out to make sure Emily is doing all right is Tommy. She’s a paramedic.”
Any potential complaints about the woman Buck might have had fade away. She’s clearly not on duty, but she’d jumped right into action anyways, which is more than he can say for the firefighters on scene. And somehow she’d had a good first aid kit with her. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s much more than they’d scrounged off of the engine. Still, Buck just lets her work and focuses his attention on little Emily. “Hi Emily, my name is Buck. I’m a firefighter like Eddie. I know this is really hard and scary, but we’re all gonna take good care of you, OK? I’m here to help you get unstuck.”
“Buck’s a silly name.” The little girl whimpers around her tears; she’s so clearly trying to be brave and the need to do everything he can to protect and help her claws at Buck’s chest.
He smiles a little, hoping it somehow helps her. “I know, right? But no one else has it either. So it makes me special. And I bet there’s something really special about you too. Can you try and think of something while I talk to my friend Eddie for a second about how we’re gonna help?”
She nods.
“That’s great, sweetheart. You’re doing great.” Buck’s gaze lingers on her eyes for a moment before he looks up to meet Eddie’s eyes. “I’ve got a sawzall. That should cut through this metal no problem and we’ll be able to stabilize her and get her down to the ground. You good to hold on that long or do we need to figure out a switch?”
Eddie shakes his head. “I’ve got her. The structure’s gonna hold?”
Buck doesn’t really want to think too hard about what their makeshift construction might do. It seems sturdy enough right now. “It’s as good as it’s gonna be. Heavy rescue’s still a few minutes out, so what we’ve got is…what we’ve got.”
“You need to help me stabilize the pole on the other side before you start cutting.” Tommy interjects, casting her eyes over towards him. “It’s not near her spine but that doesn’t mean any extra movement is good. We need things to be as steady as possible.”
“Walk me through what I need to do.”
Buck does everything Tommy instructs him to do while Eddie turns back to Emily, starting to softly tell her a story about how they’d met and adopted Beans and Toast. It’s a little challenging since he does most of it one-handed to stay secure on the little perch he’s made; he’ll have to let go and just balance while he’s using the sawzall, and he’s not going to risk anything happening before then. So he packs everything with gauze and tape as best he can to make sure that when he cuts the warped pipe it doesn’t do anything more than vibrate, and when he’s done and Tommy agrees it’s all they’re going to manage, Buck carefully swings the bag he’s carrying forward. He’d left it unzipped, so all he has to do is pull the folded wool blanket out.
“Emily, sweetheart, did you think of something that makes you special?” He asks, interrupting Eddie’s description of how Beans and Toast have a tendency to fall asleep straight into their food dishes.
“I--I have two different color eyes.” She sniffs. Buck looks a little closer and indeed, she’s got one blue eye and one green eye.
“Wow, that is really special! That’s a great job. And you know something else that makes you special?”
“No…”
“You are exceptionally brave and strong, even when things are really hard and scary. Not everyone can do that.” He pauses briefly. “Tommy and I are gonna put a blanket over you, OK baby? I have to use a special tool to make it so we can move you and it’s gonna make some sparks. I don’t think any are gonna come up near you, but I want you covered just in case so you’re safe.” Tommy does most of the work unfolding and spreading the blanket, but Buck assists and keeps talking. “Now the tool is gonna be really loud, and it’s gonna shake things a little. I’m gonna do everything I can to be careful but it might still hurt, so you scream and cry if you need to OK?”
“OK…”Emily sounds very uncertain, and Buck wishes there was just a way to fast forward to her being safe on the ground, in an ambulance or already with the doctors who could actually save her life.
“You’re doing amazing, sweetheart. I have to take a step down to do what I need to, so you’re not gonna see me, but I’m right beneath you.”
“And I’m still holding on, and nothing is gonna make me let go.” Eddie reassures.
Her voice is the tiniest bit less wobbly the second time. “OK.”
It’s the best they’re going to get.
Buck shares a look with Eddie and their newfound emergency temporary coworker in Tommy, but when no one says anything he just nods and makes the careful effort to take himself back down a step so he has eyes on what he’ll actually be cutting. Then he pulls out the sawzall.
He does as much of the prep as he can one-handed, but there honestly isn’t much. Just checking that the blade is ready and eyeing and noting the best place on the metal to cut. They didn’t think to grab gloves or goggles--if the ill-equipped engine even had any to spare--so Buck mentally steels himself. Sparks are going to fly, and they’re going to hit him and he cannot spare the reaction. He lines the tool up, gripping the pipe where his hand is flush against Emily’s back; just in case anything goes wrong, the tool will hit him, not her.
He hits the power switch and starts to work.
Cutting goes as smoothly as he can hope. It shakes the scaffolding he’s balanced on much more than he’s comfortable, and it casts off sparks that land on his arms with singeing stings, but everything holds just like they hoped it would. It takes a little under a minute for the blade to cut all the way through and dislodge the pipe. There’s a slight jerk as it happens and both Emily and Tommy cry out, but Eddie’s grip stays tight and steady, and before Buck can even turn the sawzall off, his partner is pulling Emily back over the edge. They still need to get her down from the bleachers, but the immediate risk of her plummeting to the ground is done with.
Buck turns off the saw, then tucks it into the borrowed bag. “Engine didn’t have a spare backboard, so you’ll either have to wait for the paramedics or carry--,” He’s interrupted by the grandstand creaking and wavering, enough that he scrambles to tighten his grip and everyone remaining there fights to stay balanced.
“We’ll get her down.” Eddie finishes for him. “You get down safely too.”
“Will do.”
They nod at each other, Buck soaking in the heavy emotions behind his partner’s eyes, and when the beat passes he starts to climb back down. The structure is a lot wobblier on the way down, its integrity not really up to the task it had been given of supporting people running in a panic without all of its supports in place, and more than once Buck has to catch himself from falling at a sudden waver beneath his feet.
He's about three feet above the ground, close enough that if he hadn't already taken a bad fall today he'd probably consider just jumping down, when everything tilts and shifts and crashes down around him. For the second time that day his body hits the ground and if the first time had been a white hot flash of pain the second is complete blinding agony. It starts in the arm he lands on—the same one he'd only just gotten the all clear on—and radiates out in a violent wave as his head bounces off the ground and debris rains down on him.
"Jesus kid! Don't move."
Buck wasn't planning on it, not right away anyways. He tries to breathe through the rush of nausea that accompanies the pain emanating from his almost certainly re-broken arm, and blinks as the firefighter who'd been acting as his "backup" on his Captain's orders (Buck has no recollection of his name in the moment) starts to shift debris off of him. It's mostly splintered planks from the grandstand, but there's also some metal structure and somewhere in the distance of his brain, Buck knows he's lucky none of it had pierced his body the way it had poor little Emily's. "I'm OK." He groans. A broken arm is nothing, not compared to what so many others at the scene are dealing with; he doesn't need to take up anyone's attention or resources. He just needs to catch his breath, and then when Eddie has gotten Emily safe into an ambulance, they can go get Chris and go and find an urgent care or something. No big deal.
"No one who takes a fall like that is OK."
Buck huffs. It's almost a laugh. Because on the scale of things that he's been through this year, falling off of a collapsing grandstand is only like, number five on the list. If not lower. "Yeah, no. I'm good. Evan Buckley doesn't get taken down by falling a couple feet." Evan Buckley also doesn't ever refer to himself in the third person, but the oddity of his choice doesn't completely register. "Just…help me sit up. I don't think I can use my right arm for leverage."
"Why not?" The firefighter frowns down at him.
"It only just healed from when I broke it getting shot." He doesn't know why he's telling this to a complete stranger. "And I'm pretty sure I just broke it again."
"You were shot?"
"Oh, I'm like…cursed." Now Buck does giggle a little, though he's not sure why it's funny. "Pretty sure all this only happened because I'm here."
The pain in his arm has ebbed back to a violent throbbing, and he's almost positive he's not going to throw up anymore. He's still on his side, so he crosses the arm that doesn't feel like it's been someone might have run it over, and starts to push himself up and off of the ground. Nothing in his body likes the movement, every muscle seems to scream in fact, but he doesn't want to be down on the ground for anyone to think he's more hurt than he is and take resources away from someone who actually needs them, especially now that he can hear sirens approaching. Sirens mean more firefighters and paramedics to run triage and contain the chaos, and that Eddie will have someone to hand off Emily to and Buck can't be on the ground when Eddie gets back.
He can't worry Eddie.
"Woah, kid, take it easy." The firefighter grabs onto his shoulders. He helps him sit up but he doesn't seem any less concerned. "Are you sure you should be moving?"
"If I stop moving forward, I'll give up, and if I give up, I'll fade away."
"I…don't know what that means kid."
"It's nothing." Buck shakes his head, trying to clear away the odd crowded feeling in his brain. His head doesn't hurt, at least not in comparison to everything else. He just doesn't feel right, but the feeling is coming and going. He thinks it's probably just his body confused by the adrenaline. Looking around, his eyes catch on the pile of burning, crashed wreckage several feet behind the firefighter. He knows there are several bodies, or whatever is left of them, under there. Whatever he's feeling doesn't compare to that. "I'm good." He holds out his good arm, the right one hanging pretty uselessly at his side. "Help me up, and then you can take your stuff and head back to—to dealing with things that aren't me."
With the firefighter's help, he gets his feet underneath himself and stands. There's a split second where they don't really want to support his weight and he wavers but he catches himself just as quickly, so he figures there's not really a problem.
"Are you sure you're OK, kid?" The man asks, taking the bag that Buck gingerly removes from his shoulder. "I can help you back to the truck so you can at least sit with your kid."
Buck's body is starting to throb and ache in ways he can't ignore, but he doesn't feel totally unsteady so he denies the help. "I'm just gonna wait here for my partner to get back. I'm good." When the firefighter still doesn't move, Buck reaches out and pats him on the shoulder. "Seriously man, go help some of the folks that really need it. I'll be fine."
The man still hesitates, but he does eventually leave, taking off to find his Captain and probably get new orders.
Buck takes a moment to make sure he's steady on his feet before he risks taking a step. When his knees don't buckle and world doesn't start swimming, he feels better about moving and walks a couple of steps. He surveys the scene around him, noting that most of the people who were unharmed but panicking have fully fled and now the only people left are the dead, the wounded, and their families. He eyes the spot near the engine he left Chris in is parked. The arriving emergency services—ambulances and fire engines and police are all parking in the same area, and it's tempting to just head there; it's where Chris is, and he can see Eddie and that Tommy person carrying Emily there to hand her off to someone who rush her and her parents to the hospital, so it would make sense for him to go there as well, but the part of him that had come back to life when he'd realized Eddie needed help and a little girl's life was in the balance won't let him abandon all these other people that are desperate for comfort and assistance until Austin's responders are actually fully dispersed through out the scene and helping.
He doesn't know where to start. As is always the case with major disasters there's a wealth of victims who need something, but Buck knows he lacks both the training and supplies to do more than the most basic of evaluations and some of the people are in dire straights. He's about to walk over to a man, sitting on the ground with a bleeding head wound just staring ahead and looking lost to try and see if he can figure out how serious the injury is when something weakly grabs at his ankle. The hand doesn't have enough strength to actually stop his foot from moving, but it gets his attention enough that Buck looks down.
His heart stutters.
He's seen burn victims before. He's a firefighter, of course he has. He's pulled people out of fires with burns that even with grafts and all the best medical treatment in the world will leave lifetime scars. But the woman on the ground…She had to have been right next to where the wreckage had come down. Her entire side is bloodied and blackened and raw, her clothing sitting in charred and melted tatters, her hair all but gone. Beyond that there's a bloody gouge, so deep and jagged and wide that he thinks he might see organs.
"H-help p-please." The plea comes out in a choked, hoarse whisper. Blood gurgles past her lips as she speaks.
Buck knows—knows, that if anyone triaging comes and sees her she's going to be black tagged. She won't survive, and their time and resources are better spent on the people who will.
He kneels down anyways.
"Hey, I'm Buck." He softens his face as best he can. Pushes past his shock and fear. He grabs the hand closest to him and notes that it's slick with blood but somehow not burnt. He hopes that holding it doesn't cause her any additional pain. Then thinks she might be in enough shock that she's not feeling anything. Prays that's the case. "I'm gonna stay here with you, OK? You're not alone."
"S-scared."
"I know. But you're safe now. You don't have to worry about anything."
She coughs. There's more blood. "My s-sister…"
Buck glances around, but doesn't see anyone searching. There are a few bodies, already dead, but they belong to men. Given the severity of her injuries, he thinks it's possible that whatever remains of the woman's sister is trapped beneath the burning wreckage of the plane. He focuses back on her. "There are a lot of emergency crews arriving to help. Someone will find her."
"T-tired…cold."
It was cool enough that morning for Buck to have worn a denim jacket. He bites through his lip to keep his pain to himself as he maneuvers his broken arm out of the sleeve and gets the damn thing off to spread clumsily across her chest. He has to take a moment to breathe through the nausea and dizziness the agony brings before he can pick up her hand and speak again. "That's all I have right now, but it should help. You can close your eyes and rest, OK?"
"Not alone?" Her already weak voice cracks.
"No, I'm gonna stay with you. You won't be alone."
She seems to search his face for a moment, but eventually gives a fraction of a nod. "Thank y-you." Another moment passes and her eyes slip closed. Buck watches her chest rise and fall, but with each breath, the movement grows more shallow. Eventually it stops. Not long after that, the finger Buck had extended to rest on her pulse point stops feeling anything.
Buck bows his head, closing his eyes. He can't stop the tears that start falling. The world falls away around him to an empty, solemn silence. This could have easily been Chris, or Eddie, or even him, and by some miracle it wasn't, and he's unbelievably relieved that it wasn't, but with that relief comes such heavy sadness and guilt. Because for it to not be them, it ended up being this woman, who certainly didn't deserve such a painful, terrifying death at such a young age. Who is he—who only a couple of days ago wanted to throw himself off his hotel room balcony—to be happy to have survived at the expense of someone else?
Logically, he knows it's not his fault. It was random happenstance and timing that everyone was seated where they were when the crash happened. Pure shit luck. And as complicated as everything feels, he thinks it's probably not wrong to feel relieved to be (mostly) OK despite how depressed he's been. He's been trying to get better and this feeling is just proof that his instincts are right and he doesn't actually want to die.
It's just so…unfair. Unfair and tragic that it had to happen at all.
"Buck?"
The silence tunnels away at Eddie's voice. Buck tries to gather himself and respond, but the first time he tries, a choked sob comes out instead.
"Ev, baby?" A soft, familiar hand rests on his shoulder.
Buck sniffs, and coughs to clear his throat. "I'm OK. I just…She was scared and alone and I needed to…"
Eddie's hand squeezes. "I know."
Buck takes another beat, squeezing the now passed woman's hand once and hoping that she's at peace before he allows himself to let go. He pushes himself off the ground with his good hand, feeling every ache as he rises and turns to face his partner. Everything feels slightly off-balance as he lets Eddie pull him into an embrace—one that he does his best to return, even if he can only manage one arm—but being in the whirlwind chaos of a major disaster will do that. For a moment he presses his face into Eddie's shoulder, inhaling deep to find traces of the heady bourbon and oak body wash he'd used that morning, but eventually brings himself back up to face reality. "How's Emily?"
"On her way to a hospital with her parents. She was still awake and stable when the paramedics took over."
"Good. That's good." Buck says. It's the best outcome they could hope for. "And you're OK? Did anything hit you or—,"
"No, no. I'm OK." Eddie shakes his head, and other than the blood on his hands and shirt from helping Emily, Buck can't see anything to suggest the contrary. "What about you? And Chris? God, where is Chris?" He pulls partially away, though his hands stay on Buck's shoulders as he starts to frantically scan the crowds.
Buck rushes to reassure his partner. "Chris is OK. He might be a little sore tomorrow but I think I kept him from hitting the ground when we fell. I left him sitting in the cabin of the engine I got the gear from. He has my phone and the fire captain was watching him. I wouldn't have left him—I didn't want to leave him—but you needed help and everything was awful and I was afraid that something else would go wrong or he might—,"
Eddie cuts off his frantic, guilty rambling. "Buck, you did the right thing. He doesn't need to be caught up in all this."
"He already saw some of it." Shame courses through him, remembering the shattered look in Chris' eyes.
"And I wish he hadn't been here to do that, but he was here and that made it unavoidable. We'll get him in with his therapist as soon as we get home and we'll be there for him if he wants to talk about it, and we'll help him be OK. The important thing is that he's safe. You kept him safe."
"I know, but I could have—,"
"No, none of that." Eddie shakes his head again, voice resolute. "This was an unpredictable disaster and all any of us could do was our best. We'll all get through it. With time and each other we'll get through it." He pauses and Buck feels a little like he's staring into his soul. "Now, let's go hug our son, yeah? I think we all need a little extra love right now."
Buck's vision is bleary when he blinks awake. He's lying on his back, his mouth is uncomfortably dry, and there's a haziness in his brain. His entire body aches and throbs. The pillow his head is resting on is too thin, and when he turns his head to try and look around the room and figure out where he is, the pillowcase is rough and scratchy against his cheek. He's almost positive he's in a hospital room, but he can't remember what happened to put him there, although his right arm feels bulky and heavy and he can't really move it so he supposes that's a clue. When he turns his head towards the IV pole and heart monitor and everything else, there's a petite brunette checking on all the machines. His visions still fuzzy enough that he can't really tell who it is, but there's only one person that really makes sense.
It's typical of his sister, to not trust the hospital staff to monitor him themselves.
"Mad—Maddie?" His question comes out as more of a croak. "What happened?"
"Mr. Buckley!" The brunette spins to face him; he can't quite make out her features. "You're waking up early. Do you usually react to anesthesia?"
It doesn't make sense. Maddie wouldn't not call him by his name. But that's the only person who would be at his bedside. He blinks furiously, trying to clear his vision and to think. "I don't…I don't…Maddie?"
Her features, starting to become clearer, sharpen. She's probably around Maddie's age, but looking at her more closely, she has green eyes and a more angular nose. Definitely not his sister. "I'm Jenna, Mr. Buckley. I'm a nurse here at the hospital. You just had a break in your arm repaired. Do you remember coming in for that?"
The moment she mentions his broken arm, reality crashes back into Buck, jarring him completely from the post-surgery haze. He remembers that he was in Austin with Eddie and Chris, and that everything had gone horribly wrong at the air show, and he'd rescued someone but as a result he'd fallen and landed badly on an arm that had just barely been healed. He remembers sitting with a victim while she passed on, so she wouldn't be alone, and then reuniting with Eddie and Chris, and finding a way to sit close with both of them while waiting in an overcrowded and chaotic emergency room to have his arm seen to. And then he remembers all of the chaos waiting for him back in Los Angeles, and how Maddie isn't speaking to him at all, let alone rushing to sit by his bedside.
To his embarrassment, tears spring to his eyes. "Uh, yeah." He tries to think of something, anything else to stave off the emotions that are bubbling up at the thought of another setback, and not having his sister there with him, but it's not very successful. Anesthesia and pain medication always put him off balance, and putting that on top of where he's been mentally the past several weeks…it's just a recipe for being overly sensitive and emotional. "Yeah, I remember."
"Can you tell me how your feeling?"
"Pretty foggy." He sniffs. "But that's normal for me after surgery."
"And how about your pain levels?"
Buck takes a moment to evaluate. His arm itself feels fairly numb, but he can feel sharp pangs up and down his body, particularly around his chest. Thinking on it some, he remembers being told that while he had somehow miraculously avoided getting another concussion, he had managed to crack several ribs when he fell, in addition to re-injuring his arm. Lying in bed now, he is definitely feeling it. "Could be better." He admits when taking a deep breath makes the tears he's fighting fall anyways.
"OK, well I will go check-in with the doctor and see if there's anything we can do about that. Your partner is also out in the waiting room if you want to see him?"
"Please." Buck nods.
"Great." Jenna smiles. "Would you like me to help you orient the bed so you're more upright now that you're awake before I go, or are you comfortable lying down right now?"
He wipes at his face with his free hand. Or rather, his mostly free hand. It does have his IV port in the back of it. "Sitting up as much as I can would be great, thank you."
She helps maneuver the bed and overall the movement is extremely uncomfortable, however once he's upright, Buck can feel some of the pressure ease off his ribs, and it's a little easier to breathe. "All right, if you are all set I will go get your partner and speak to the doctor. You just hang tight and relax."
"Thanks." Buck smiles thinly—it's not this nurse's fault that he's having a shitty time lately and his brain had decided to make it worse by tricking him after anesthesia—and tries not to let his mind wander back to Maddie and everything that's not going right right now. Instead he thinks about Chris' hugs when he and Eddie had gotten when they'd reached him at the fire engine, and the news that had been brought to them by off-duty paramedic Tommy shortly before he'd gone in for surgery that little Emily had made it through hers with flying colors and is expected to make a full recovery.
He's not sure how much time passes in total, but eventually a thoroughly exhausted looking Eddie pops through the doorway. "Hey, hermoso. How are you feeling?" He asks, smiling warmly and perking up as he comes to Buck's bedside.
"Been better. Been worse." Buck shrugs, and quickly realizes Eddie doesn't have Chris, who had been infinitely more clingy since they'd come together again at the airfield, with him. "Where's Christopher?"
"Adri is midway through her first shift back. She took him to go get something to eat." Eddie pulls a free-standing chair close to Buck's bedside, and reaches over to grab his hand. "Are you in pain? You look like you've been crying."
"I…" The easy thing for Buck to do would be to just say yes, he is in pain. It wouldn't even be a lie. But he doesn't really think it's the kind of pain that would make him cry if he hadn't already been started because of his stupid brain. "I got confused, coming out of the anesthesia. I couldn't really see or remember what had happened and…I thought the nurse was Maddie."
"Oh, Ev…"
"It's stupid. It was only for a few seconds but realizing and remembering…"
"Still hurts." Eddie fills in for him. "That's not stupid, Ev."
"She hates me. I can't keep hoping she's going to change her mind and apologize."
Eddie can't really stroke the back of Buck's hand the way he might if there weren't an IV in the way, and he settles for brushing his fingertips on the underside of Buck's wrist in a soft, circular motion. "Maybe not, but that doesn't erase the fact that for a really long time, she was one of the only people you could count on, and that she's someone you really love. Even though going no contact with her is the right thing for your mental health, that doesn't mean you can't be upset about it. Have you brought it up with Jules?"
Buck sighs. he appreciates that Eddie is being honest with him, and isn't trying to tell him that Maddie doesn't hate him or that things might turn back around, but as he'd just said, that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. And while he does think Jules and therapy are helping in many ways, he's sick and tired of every single aspect of his life being something that needs to be discussed there. He'd love to have one area of his life where he feels normal and not completely broken or freakish. "It's on the list."
"We can talk about it too. Whenever you want."
"I know." Buck offers his partner a wan smile. It's not that he doesn't relish in Eddie being so open and supportive he just…as much as Eddie reassures him that he's getting something out of their relationship too, and that he wants to be there for Buck and go through all of this with him, it never stops feeling like he's piling everything on to him and taking advantage. He quickly decides to change the subject, figuring the less that they linger on these maudlin topics the better. His brain is foggy, and he's feeling all the aches in his body, and he doesn't really want to spend time or energy on emotional pain on top of that. "Any idea when they might discharge me?" He asks hopefully.
The laugh that huffs out of Eddie is short, soft, and warm. "Have you even seen your actual doctor yet?"
"Well…no, but this wasn't a very big surgery."
"Big enough that they didn't make you wait until tomorrow to have it." Eddie points out. And yeah, technically his x-rays had shown that the hardware they'd installed when he'd gotten shot had been fully dislodged and it had very nearly been a messy compound fracture, but that doesn't mean it was actually a big surgery. Not like the repairs on his leg had been. Besides, Buck doesn't know what Christopher is feeling up to at this point after what had turned into an exciting but traumatic day, but he doesn't want to ruin whatever is left of his vacation by making him hang around a hospital. If he's discharged and able to go back to their VRBO, he can crash in one of the bedrooms and Eddie and Chris can get up to something at least entertaining. But really, the longer he's awake, the more aware he is of the fact that he is exhausted and just generally feeling unwell. Stupid anesthesia.
"I just want to sleep. In a real bed."
"Soon." Eddie promises. "My guess is if the doctor is happy with how everything went and how it looks now, they'll give us some care instructions and send you on your way."
"I could give the care instructions to them." Buck pouts. "Ice in intervals on my ribs, I can use the opioid painkillers if things are really bad, but it's best to save them for when I'm trying to sleep and stick to acetaminophen or ibuprofen when I'm awake. Stay in the sling except for showering. Absolutely no lifting of any kind. Follow up with my actual orthopedic surgeon back in LA in two weeks to check that everything's healing correctly in my arm and my PCP about the ribs."
"Spoken like someone with an extensive medical history, Mr. Buckley." An amused voice cuts in from the doorway. Buck glances up, while Eddie turns in his chair, to find an older man in garish green scrubs white coat and a scrub cap decorated in pictures of dogs wearing glasses. He can't remember the man's name, but Buck recognizes him as the surgeon who'd evaluated his arm and done the repair work.
"It's been…quite the year." Buck says. "Pretty sure I've spent more time in a cast or sling of some sort than outside of one."
The doctor enters the room, cutting to Buck's bedside and starting to check his vitals. "Well, hopefully this will be the last trip under the knife for you for quite some time. How are you feeling? Nurse Jenna mentioned some confusion and pain in your ribs."
"Just post-surgery brain fog." Buck shrugs. "I get it every time." He rattles off the date, and a few other pertinent facts, just to make sure there's no questions about concussion or anything else that might keep him admitted longer. "The broken ribs are definitely noticeable, but it's better now that I'm sitting up."
"Scale of one to ten?" The doctor prompts.
"Sitting here now, probably a five. When I was laying down it was more like a six or seven."
"And what about your arm and the surgery site?"
"Still pretty numb."
"That probably won't go away for a couple more hours. And it sounds like you already know this, but the pain at the incision site will be at it's height for the first 24 hours. After that, as long as you maintain immobility it should taper off." The doctor continues to talk for a few more minutes, showing Buck his post-surgery x-rays to show the exact repair he'd made, and then going over the antibiotics and which painkillers he'd be prescribing. "I'll go ahead and have Nurse Jenna start your discharge paperwork. Your clothes are in the bag tucked underneath your bed and you can go ahead and start getting dressed, but don't push yourself, and please let her handle the IVs and monitors when she comes in."
Buck and Eddie both agree and the doctor wraps things up, wishing them both well. Eddie ducks down to pull out the plastic bag the hospital had given Buck to tuck all of his clothes in. He places the bag on the bed next to Buck's leg.
"Let me text Adri to ask her to bring Chris back down, and then I'll help you get dressed, OK?" Eddie says.
Buck nods.
Eddie starts to type on his phone, but pauses and looks back up, a soft but serious look on his face. "Hey, I didn't get a chance to say this earlier, but I wanted to thank you."
"What do you need to thank me for?" Buck frowns.
"You kept Chris safe. Again."
"I didn't—,"
"Buck, the grandstand collapsed beneath you two and you somehow kept him from hitting the ground at all. I don't think he even has a scratch on him. That's down to you. And…I know a lot of today was horrible. I'm probably gonna have some nightmares, and you ended up hurt again and I hate that for you because I know you're tired of not feeling your best and needing help, but I'm so glad you were there with us, and that…even though you aren't sure about coming back to work or not, you really pulled through today and proved that you can do it if you decide you want to. That's huge."
Buck almost starts to protest because it doesn't really feel like he did all that much at first glance, but then he remembers that the crew on site hadn't been trained for the type of rescue needed, and hadn't been prepared to try. Climbing the grandstand to use the Sawzall isn't much compared to some of the ropes rescues he's had to do back in LA, but no one else there save for Eddie had been able to do it, and Eddie had needed to be exactly where he was. And looking back on it getting up and doing something to help had felt…good in ways that he hasn't felt in a really long time. It's almost like one of the weights he's been carrying was lifted off his shoulders. Or maybe it fell off when he hit the ground.
Either way, there is a part of him that feels lighter, in spite of all the terrible parts of the accident.
"I think…maybe when this heals up I do want to come back." He's still not sure about the 118 specifically. Not after being the reason Chimney is headed to a prison sentence, and everything with Dr. Wells going public…Plus things with Bobby still haven't really gotten anywhere near where they'd been before the bombing. But going back to firefighting? Buck hasn't felt sure about a lot lately, but that feels right.
"I look forward to it." Eddie smiles. "It felt good having you at my side again."
"Felt good being there, too."
"OK Superman, what do you want for breakfast?" Buck asks as he cracks open the menu of the cafe they'd found for breakfast the next day. Thanks to the medication his doctor had prescribed and some liberal use of arnica gel, Buck had managed to get a fairly solid night of sleep in spite of how awful the day had been, and he'd woken up feeling about as human as he was going to with a body full of bruises and broken bones. Chris and Eddie had also been tired enough to sleep through the night without nightmares (which also may have been assisted by the fact that they'd all decided to bundle into the same bed) and no one is naive enough to think that means they escaped the air show unscathed, but the brief reprieve at least makes it feel like they might be able to salvage the last couple of days of their trip and deal with the consequences of everything once they're back home.
Chris, sitting across the table next to Eddie, examines the children's menu he'd been give very thoroughly. "Can I get the french toast sticks, please?"
"If you have a glass of milk instead of juice." Eddie concedes. "And maybe the egg as your side instead of the fruit salad?"
"OK." Chris shrugs, fairly easy to please. Other than wanting to be close to his dad (and Buck), and shedding a few more tears when he realized Buck had ended up getting hurt and having to go back for surgery, he's been almost the same kid. Buck and Eddie are sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but they aren't totally sure it will come; he'd had some nightmares after the tsunami but had otherwise bounced back almost immediately. It's hard to say if this will be the same or not.
Buck hopes it will.
"What about you, Buck?" Chris asks. Beneath the table, his foot knocks gently into Buck's shin. "What are you having?"
Buck's not feeling particularly hungry. Even if he wasn't in pain from his ribs (and pain almost always kills his appetite), it smells like one of the people back in the kitchen has burnt a batch of bacon and the scent of the charred breakfast food is too reminiscent of the scene yesterday. But he can't say that, and he knows that not eating isn't an option. He has to be an example for Chris, and even if he weren't here, Eddie doesn't usually let him get away without eating. Nor should he, really. With the realization yesterday that he does want to find a way back to work once he heals, Buck is feeling a bit more motivation to make healthy choices, even when he doesn't feel like it; the last thing he needs is to lose more weight or slow down the rate his body heals or anything else. So he's going to eat, it's just not going to be anything with meat. Probably for a day or two at least. "I think I'm gonna have them make me a spinach and mushroom omelette."
Chris wrinkles his nose at the thought of putting vegetables in his breakfast.
Eddie chuckles at his son's distaste. "That sounds pretty good. I think I'll do that too."
"Grown-ups are boring." Chris states emphatically.
"And what do you think we should be having?"
At his dad's teasing challenge, Chris begins to list off every sugary breakfast item he can think of, which goes on for about a minute, until their server comes back to the table and takes their order. After they depart to put it in with the kitchen and get their drinks, conversation shifts to their plans for the day. Eddie and Chris had volunteered to have a lazy day around their rented home to allow for Buck to rest and recover from his injuries, but Buck refused to be the reason they wasted a day of their vacation, especially after the air show ended so disastrously. He'd taken a look at the list of potential activities Chris and Eddie had assembled while he'd been in his therapy appointment, and picked out a couple of indoor options that they'd be able to take at a slow pace and would have plenty of spots and opportunities for him to sit and take a break if need be.
They'd landed on the Thinkery, a highly interactive children's museum.
Chris is telling him excitedly about one of the exhibits he's looking forward to, when Buck feels his phone buzzing in his pocket with a phone call. It's a bit of a struggle to pull the device out with his one hand, but he manages and flips it over to check the caller ID.
"Who is it?" Eddie asks.
"Unknown number." Buck frowns. "But it's an Austin area code." It's not like he knows anyone in Austin who would be calling him.
Eddie mirrors his frown. "Maybe the hospital following up about something."
"Maybe." Buck starts to push his chair away from the table. "I'll just…" He moves to step to at least the entryway of the cafe, if not go all the way outside as he thumbs at his screen to answer the call. "Hello?"
"Good morning!" The voice on the other end of the line is male, and noticeably cheerful. "This is Captain Owen Strand with Austin Fire Department. Am I speaking with Evan Buckley?"
This introduction does nothing to assuage Buck's confusion. He hadn't gotten many names of the first responders he'd encountered yesterday, but he's almost positive none of them had been named Owen. And even if they had, he can't imagine why they'd be reaching out to him now. "Uh…yeah. This is Buck."
"Oh, you go by Buck. My apologies."
"No, uh…it's OK." Buck steps outside of the cafe. There's a small bench next to the door, and he gingerly lowers himself down to sit, uninterested in standing if there's any possibility of this call leading to something surprising or upsetting. "How can I help you, Captain?"
"Well, I'm sure you might be aware by now that your efforts to help rescue that little girl yesterday, Emily Paige, have been making a splash on the internet and on the news." Captain strand begins.
Buck doesn't say anything, unsure of what he can contribute. He'd known, thanks to May, Karen, and Hen that the air show had gone viral, and still isn't sure how he feels about that, but he hadn't realized the video has also gone on to television as well.
"I got your phone number from your department back in Los Angeles." That explains one thing. "You and your partner worked with the paramedic Captain who operates out of my firehouse, Tommy Vega, and she spoke very highly of the two of you. I was equally impressed when I saw the footage of your work, and then when I called him, Chief Alonzo had nothing but praise for you and your partner, Eddie Diaz. A medal of valor within your first three years of service is quite extraordinary."
"That was just…being in the right place at the right time." Buck rebuffs, still uncomfortable with all of the praise his work in the tsunami had gotten him. He'd only been doing what he was trained to do. Nothing special. "So was yesterday."
"I don't have quite the same perspective, but I understand it can be difficult to appreciate the magnitude of certain acts when you're the one performing them." Captain Strand concedes. "In any case, the specific reason I'm calling is because Austin doesn't have enough Heavy Rescue Squads, and the city's need for them has increased significantly over the past decade, I've been asked to put one together for my house, and given cart blanche to put together an all-star squad of firefighters, the same way I did when I was rebuilding the station I'm in charge of now. Based on what I saw yesterday, what Chief Alonzo told me, and the resumes and files he sent over on my request, I want you and Eddie to be the anchors of my new squad."
Chapter 34
Notes:
I'm playing pretty fast and loose with the timeline for Lone Star, but I've done that with everything else for this fic too so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Chapter Text
"So what was that phone call at breakfast?" Eddie asks as he and Buck sit down on a bench at the children's museum after Chris goes ahead to sit with a crowd of kids for a presentation being made by a few different museum employees. They're both looking ahead and watching him, but Chris seems thoroughly engaged with the show, and he'd been ready for a break from walking after a morning exploring the museum.
"A captain with the Austin Fire Department." Buck had put off answering the same question when he'd reentered the restaurant a few minutes after ending the…surprising call with Captain Owen Strand. He'd wanted to talk about the offer that had been extended with Eddie, but he knew bringing up a new job—in a new city—around Chris would get the boy worked up, and possibly upset. Buck is still adjusting to the parenting role Eddie and Chris are allowing him, and he doesn't know a lot, but his instincts told him to only cross the bridge of getting Chris involved in this conversation when he and Eddie had a good idea about what they wanted to do, and at the time Buck was still just trying to process the fact that someone was willing to offer them both a job based on one rescue and a talk with Chief Alonzo; he'd gotten nowhere near figuring out how he actually felt about the idea of potentially taking the job, and what it would mean to pick up their lives and move. Now, a meal and a couple hours later, Buck still isn't sure how he feels about the idea of leaving LA and moving to Austin, but he feels like he's worked out enough of his thoughts to talk about it with Eddie and see what he thinks about it. "That off-duty paramedic that jumped into help yesterday? Tommy? She works out of his house and I guess she was telling him about us? Or at least talked about us when he saw that video that went viral."
Eddie nods. "So he called to thank you?"
"Sort of, but not exactly."
"Then…what did he want?"
Buck thinks about giving the full explanation that the Captain had given with him, but figures that Eddie has been patient enough, waiting to hear about the call, and rips off the band-aid instead. "To offer both of us jobs."
If it weren't a conversation that could potentially lead to serious and major life changes, the speed at which Eddie's eyebrows rise up and practically disappear into his hairline would be comical. "I'm sorry, what?"
"He wants us to come work for him." Buck repeats, and then clarifies. "I guess Austin doesn't have a lot of fully equipped heavy rescue squads, and only a handful of firefighters outside of the squads that exist that are fully certified. According to Captain Strand, there have been a number of incidents over the past few years, including the accident yesterday, that have convinced the city that they need to fix that, and they've asked him to assemble a new squad to operate out of his firehouse. And I guess…after seeing us rescue Emily yesterday and talking to Chief Alonzo—,"
"He spoke to the Chief?" Eddie interrupts, still sounding a little shocked.
Buck nods. "And got our personnel files from him. And according to what he told me, everything he heard and read and saw impressed him. He said he wants us to anchor his new team." Buck waits patiently while Eddie takes a few moments to process. He can't really tell what his partner is thinking—when he's not in a high emotion situation Eddie has a hell of a poker face—and he's trying not to be impatient or read too much into that. It's not like he's set on an outcome and what Eddie thinks could start a disagreement or anything like that. Buck is feeling uncertain about the LAFD given everything that's happening, but a lot of that is centered specifically on the 118. He's not totally ready to write off the whole department or city, and it's not like he and Eddie have talked about even transferring stations, let alone something that would constitute picking up their lives and moving. And even if they had, he doesn't even know enough about Austin or Captain Strand to know what to think about Strand's offer other than that accepting would mean a lot of really big changes. He can't even begin to process what those changes would look like, or if they'd be the sort of things that he and Eddie and (of course) Chris would be OK with.
"That's…that's a big offer." Eddie exhales after several beats. He's still unreadable.
"I mean, we didn't talk about money or anything like that so I'm not sure if—,"
"I'm pretty sure dedicated heavy rescue squads are usually paid more than your average rank and file, just because of the additional risk." Eddie explains. "Even back at the 118, you and I get a pay bump because of our extra certifications and the risks we take when we step in on those situations. Even though Hen has her full paramedic certification and a lot of years of experience over the both of us, our paychecks aren't that different. I doubt the unions here in Austin would let them get away with anything different, so moving to be a full time squad would probably be an increase in salary."
"Oh." Buck had been so caught up in the what-ifs of what taking the job might mean for his and Eddie's lives, that he hadn't actually considered the financial implications at all. He feels kind of stupid for that now, even if he knows he shouldn't.
"What did you say?"
Buck shrugs. "That I—we—couldn't make any sort of decision like that without talking. He…seemed to expect that. Offered to host us, and Chris, for dinner at the firehouse tonight so we could see the place and talk things over in more detail."
Eddie nods. "And what are you thinking?"
Buck turns, taking his full focus away from watching Chris at the presentation to really look at Eddie. "What do you mean?"
"Are you interested?" Eddie asks. "Do you want to go meet with him tonight? See exactly what it is he's offering?"
"I…" Buck starts to answer but almost immediately realizes that he's not sure what to say. For all of his thinking and processing, he hasn't really thought about what he wants, just what the change would actually mean and how much work it would be. "What do you think?"
"That I asked you first." Eddie looks at him pointedly, and when Buck doesn't give him an answer because he still doesn't know what to say, he rests his hand gently on his knee. "Look, no wrong answers, and no judgment. I just want to know where your head is at on this. I know you have concerns about what LA is going to be like for you when you're ready to come back."
That's true enough. Buck thinks that maybe if all that was happening was him pressing charges against Dr. Wells and people gossiping and judging him about that, his popularity might take a bit of a temporary hit and he'd have to put up with a lot of comments and looks but it would be…manageable. Probably. Especially with the overall safety and camaraderie offered by the 118; there are some bad eggs in the house, like the ever-judgemental Jenkins, but on the whole Bobby runs a tight ship and if dealing with Wells' assault was the only thing Buck had going on, he thinks Bobby would have his back and he'd be able to go back to work there once he finishes healing and things would go back to normal.
But that's not the only thing he's dealing with.
There's the weird distance that Bobby's put between them ever since the bombing, which he'd sort of explained with his apology when Taylor's story about Dr. Wells dropped and revealed Buck's role in it, but he hadn't actually made any real effort to change. And there's his Captain's insistence on Buck doing everything he can to preserve his family and appease them, even when doing so goes against Buck's best interest, or even just what's actually the right thing to do.
And then building off of that, there's just the Maddie and Chimney situation in general, and how that's going to impact how other members of the LAFD see him.
Chimney is—or technically was—a longstanding, respected member of the LAFD. And yes, he'd broken the law to the point where pressing charges against him wasn't even a decision that was in Buck's hands, but Buck has a feeling that in the eyes of a lot of their colleagues, Buck is the one who put him in that position and drove him to do it. And he's pretty sure that a lot of the veterans of the department won't be willing to let that go.
When all of those things come together, Buck isn't sure that the firefighters, or citizens, of LA are going to be willing to put their trust in him. And he's almost positive that the work environment isn't going to be all that welcoming or comfortable.
But that doesn't mean they can just up and move.
Buck says as much.
"Maybe not automatically, but if it's something you're interested in, I don't think there's any harm in seeing exactly what it is this Captain is offering." Eddie answers evenly.
"I don't…I'm not…"It takes Buck a couple of tries to find the right words, something he's gotten used to over the past couple of months but that he finds no less frustrating. "I was really surprised to even hear the offer at all, considering how little I've worked lately, but…but I wasn't not interested."
"OK." Eddie nods. He lets a single beat pass before he asks his next question. "Interested enough to want to go to this dinner tonight?"
Buck thinks about what Eddie's really asking, and what he wants to make sure he's clear about, before responding. "If the offer were only for me, or only something that would effect me, than probably, yeah. But if you're not in on this with me, and I mean, interested in what it would mean for you and not just thinking that you're OK with going along with something that I might want, then I don't care what he's offering."
"Then I think we should go." Eddie squeezes Buck's knee.
"Really?"
"Why not?"
"Because…we don't know what it's actually like to work on a dedicated heavy rescue squad instead of an engine that goes on almost any call. And other than seeing how unprepared that one specific engine was last night, we don't know what kind of department Austin has, or what kind of Captain Owen Strand is. I don't know if he knows about the stuff with Dr. Wells, or how he feels about that kind of stuff. I'm sure he doesn't know that we're dating, and that could be all kinds of complicated if we want to stay working on the same team, and that's assuming he even accepts us."
Eddie patiently waits the ramble out. "All of those are things that we could find out if we go talk to him. It sounds like a no pressure thing. If we don't like what we hear or see, we can just politely decline, thank him for the offer and leave."
It's not unreasonable. Buck thinks they probably could do that. Especially if they're going in together. He always does better at these sorts of things lately with Eddie by his side. But his anxiety doesn't totally ebb back. "What about Chris?"
"What about him?" Eddie looks back towards the presentation, which has transitioned to some sort of interactive activity. They can both spot Chris' brightly colored striped shirt fairly easily, and he still seems comfortable and thoroughly engrossed in the museum's offerings. "He looks pretty happy over there."
"Won't he get upset if he thinks we're moving?"
"I don't know how he'd feel about it." Eddie admits after thinking for a moment. "But I don't think that's a hurdle we have to jump over when we're just trying to find out more about the offer. He doesn't have to know that's why we're going to this dinner. As far as he's concerned it could just be a thank you from the locals for helping out yesterday. I doubt the Captain is going to talk business in front of a third-grader."
"But if he does—,"
"Then we'd know something that would probably be a strike against him in the 'do we want to work for this guy' category." Eddie turns to face him, and Buck can see how relaxed his partner is. Buck can't really imagine how, since thinking about all of this sends his system into overdrive, but reminds himself it's part of what makes him and Eddie work well together; they don't usually freak out about the same things. "If you're really worried about stressing Chris out, I don't think Adri is working tonight. She could hang out with him while we go meet this Captain."
It's not a bad thought, but a part of Buck thinks that if they're at all serious about this idea, if they think there's a chance that they'll accept if the offer is right and the team looks good, that Chris should be there. Not so he can find out there's a chance that they'd be moving, but so Captain Strand knows exactly who he's inviting to Austin. That they're a family, and that as much as they love their jobs and are good at them, their priority is going to be getting back to Chris after every shift. Plus, Chris loves getting to visit the fire station back home, and he'd probably be thrilled to see a different one. "No, I think he should come. I just…This trip has been more stressful on all of us than we were planning on and I don't want to bring him to anything that might freak him out or get him worked up or anything."
Eddie leans over, pressing a kiss to Buck's temple. "That is very thoughtful. But I don't think we'll have to talk about any potential changes with him unless we're sure it's a change we want to make."
"Then…yeah. If you're really on board, I want to go see what this guy is offering."
The building Captain Strand had sent Buck the address for when he'd called back to confirm their attendance for dinner is fairly sleek and modern looking, and though the doors to the station's truck bays are all up and open, showing off a perfectly spotless fire engine and equally polished ambulance, Buck is fairly certain they don't have quite as much glass as the doors at the 118. The entire effect is impressive and imposing, which isn't great for the nerves he's feeling.
His qualms about upsetting Chris or giving Captain Strand the impression that he and Eddie were totally on board with the job offers had mostly ebbed back after their discussion at the museum. But in the time since, Buck had had time to do a little research into Captain Strand, the Austin Fire Department, and the specific station they were being invited to, the 126, and what he had found was…intimidating. The 126 had been decimated by a horrific tragedy, and Captain Strand had been invited in to rebuild it from the ground up. Because he had experience doing that. Because he'd had to do it after his house in New York had been killed in 9/11.
So not only was Captain Strand a long-serving, decorated firefighter, but he'd participated in one of the most infamous events and rescues in history, and he'd created a legacy when he'd survived and rebuilt.
Then everything Buck had read about the 126 since it had reopened, indicated that Strand had personally sought out all of the firefighters on his crew because they had reputations for being exceptional. They're essentially the best of the best—one of them is verified on Instagram.
Now Buck is less worried about making Strand think he and Eddie want the job, and more concerned that he isn't going to measure up. That he'll fall in love with the job and/or really like the people but they'll realize that he's not nearly as skilled or acclaimed as they are, or that once Strand learns about all of his ongoing legal cases and the attached drama he'll decide that Buck's not worth the time and effort it would take to bring him on and rescind the offer. He's worried about what everyone will see when they look at him—what they'll think and whether or not they'll question Strand's judgement (and whether or not that will make Strand question his own judgement).
Standing and taking in the apparatus floor, the only thing keeping Buck from retreating back to their rental car is Eddie's hand resting lightly on the small of his back.
"Woah, how come their trucks are so much shinier than your guys' back home?" Chris asks in breathy awe. Because yeah. The trucks are practically sparkling, and from what Buck can tell, the paint is metallic or anything. They're just that clean.
"That's because our probie has a special wax he likes to use when he's on truck duty." A female voice answers, speaking from the tail end of one of the engines. She walks towards them, in a crisp uniform, coordinated hijab and bold lipstick. Buck recognizes her as the Insta-famous Firefox, but can't remember what her actual name is. "He says it's good to make the engines feel special every once in a while."
Chris turns and looks back at his dad. "Bobby doesn't make you do that when you're at work?"
"No, we just wash the trucks, mijo." Eddie chuckles. "No wax."
"You should do the wax." Chris says seriously. "It looks really good."
Firefox smiles broadly. "I'll pass the compliment on to Mateo. He'll be thrilled." She pauses briefly. "Can I help you folks find something?"
Buck has to resist the urge to wipe his suddenly sweaty hand on his pants. "Uh, yeah. I'm Buck. This is Eddie and Chris. Captain Strand invited us to join your station for dinner and meet the team…?" It comes out as more of a question, another result of his anxiety that he'd love to get rid of. He gets a slight sense of relief when her eyes light up in recognition.
"Right! You're the guys from LA who helped out yesterday. Cap and Tommy were telling us all about you, and of course we saw the footage. Pretty slick, climbing up there without any safety gear."
"You weren't safe?" Chris' head snaps towards Buck and Eddie, eyes wide, and Buck winces. Although they obviously hadn't been able to hide his injuries from Chris, they'd pretty much just let him think they happened in the initial fall when the crash had occurred; they didn't want him to develop anxiety over his and Eddie's safety when they're actually working, even though he knows there can be dangers. They'd navigated that conversation with the help of his therapist when he'd developed some anxiety surrounding his dad following Shannon's death. They also don't want him to start thinking that doing things without proper safety equipment or following training and rules is a good idea, and with everything happening after a long and traumatic day, nobody had really had the energy or bandwidth to explain the nuances of exceptions in the case of emergency.
"Of course I was safe, buddy."
Chris keeps frowning at Buck's somewhat lackluster reassurance. "But she just said you didn't have your gear."
"Right. But…" Buck trails off, unsure of what to say. Over Chris' shoulder, Firefox mouths a silent apology, clearly recognizing that she'd stepped in it.
"Chris, remember how you and Buck got through the tsunami because Buck has done a bunch of special training with Steve for his job before he was a firefighter?" Eddie asks. He waits for Chris to nod before he continues. "So for the types of rescues Buck is allowed to do when he's healthy and working, he had to do a bunch of special climbing training and he knows a lot about it. So he doesn't like to climb without all of his gear, because it's not as safe, just like he didn't like swimming you through the tsunami because that was scary and dangerous, but because he has all that training, he can do it safely if he needs to, and yesterday he needed to."
"Oh." Chris' brow furrows as he considers his dad's words. "So he was still being careful, he just didn't have everything he needed… Why didn't he have his stuff?"
This Buck has an answer for. Sort of. He at least has a path to go down because of Eddie's response. "Well, I'm not working right now, right? All of my climbing gear? That belongs to the fire department back home, so they hang on to it when I'm not working. The fire department here also has a bunch of gear, but it and the firefighters trained to use it hadn't gotten to where we were yet, and that little girl your dad caught when the bleachers fell couldn't wait the time it would take for more help to get there. So I helped out without the gear, because I had the training that taught me how to do that."
Chris still takes a moment to consider everything, but eventually he nods. "OK. But I think you should probably wait next time for all your gear and stuff. Dad and Carla and my teachers never let me do anything without all the safety stuff."
"Well, hopefully," Eddie begins, gently clapping his hands down on Chris' shoulders, "the excitement yesterday marks the end of our off duty emergencies. What do you say? We all get bubble suits and live inside those for a while?"
"Da-ad." Chris giggles.
"No? You don't like that option?" With the tension officially broken, Eddie straightens back up, standing tall. "I think it sounds pretty great."
"How would I go to school? Or PT?"
Eddie pretends to think for a moment, exaggeratedly tapping his finger on his chin. "Hmm…you know, you're right. I hadn't thought about that. I guess we can't wear the suits, and we'll just all have to be careful and follow all of our safety rules whenever we can. OK?" Chris agrees, though he ropes both Buck and Eddie into pinkie promising that they'll follow their rules too before he fully lets things go, and Eddie turns back to Firefox. "Sorry, you were going to…"
"No worries." She waves off the apology. She turns and starts to guide them further into the firehouse. "I think I kicked off that little sidebar. But I can bring you back to meet everyone now. Cap was just wrangling everyone into setting the table. Dinner prep fell a little behind because of a call."
"Understandable."
"I'm Marjan, by the way." She introduces herself. "You said Buck, Eddie, and Chris?" She points to each of them as she names them off. "It's great to meet you all."
"Likewise." Eddie says. "Although I think we all wish it were under better circumstances."
"Oh, yeah. Yesterday was crazy, and we were just called in for the clean-up efforts since we were off-shift. I can't imagine what it was like, being there right when it happened."
Buck can't help but wince at the reminder. Marjan sounds more enthusiastic than horrified and he kind of gets it; based on what he'd seen on her Instagram, she's a bit of thrill-seeker, much as he'd been a few years ago, and while he's pretty sure she's been a firefighter for about as long as he has, he reasons that even with his experiences in the navy, he'd still viewed fires and natural disasters and everything they responded to as firefighters as opportunities to be a hero and do some pretty cool things when he'd first graduated from the academy, and it wasn't until he start experiencing losses at scenes that felt preventable, and saw the loss of life caused by the plane crash and witnessed Bobby's subsequent fall off the wagon that he really started to recognize that every call is a potential tragedy, not a potential story for him to tell later. Marjan talks about the crash and fall-out from yesterday and probably imagines how she'd have felt in his place, climbing the bleachers unassisted and making a rescue, and to her it seems like a positive thing.
Buck remembers being there and all he can think about is the terror as he'd plummeted towards the ground, trying to wrap himself around Chris and maneuver his body so he wouldn't be hurt, and all he can see is the burn victim's face as she plead for help and closed her eyes for the last time. He hears everyone's screams.
There's very little positive about having been there.
Eddie seems to notice his discomfort, and his hand finds the small of Buck's back again as they walk. "It was…chaotic." He says, hedging his answer a little. Buck knows he probably feels similarly about Marjan's eager energy, and doesn't want to be rude. If they were back home, or in a different situation, he has a feeling his partner would shut the conversation down and tell her exactly how not fun it is to be a part of a mass casualty event, but since they're there as guests in her firehouse, and kind of on a job interview, Eddie's chosen the route of diplomacy. "Certainly not how any of us wanted to spend our vacation."
"Right." And to her credit, Marjan again seems to realize that she's made a misstep. Thankfully, they round a corner and are faced with a kitchen and dining area bustling with uniformed firefighters and paramedics, so they don't have to navigate another potentially awkward subject. "Hey everyone!" She calls out and claps her hands once, grabbing the rooms attention. Everyone pauses what they're doing and glances over. "Cap's guests are here."
Buck vaguely recognizes a few faces in the room from his research earlier. He can spot Captain Strand, and he recognizes the paramedic who'd stepped up the day before, Tommy Vega. He's a little surprised to see one of the men they'd encountered at the Austin Zoo earlier in the week—the one whose name had just been initials that Buck can't pull to the front of his brain right now—in a paramedic uniform as well. He can't begin to calculate the odds on that.
"This is Buck, Eddie, and Chris." Marjan finishes introductions. She gestures to them, and then to each person in turn as she announces their names. "And this is Paul, Judd, Mateo, Nancy, TK, and I think you already know Tommy and Cap." Buck does his best to try and commit the names to memory to be able to match them to people later, but he's not sure how much luck he'll have, meeting them all at once like this.
"Sort of." Captain Strand puts the casserole dish he's carrying onto a trivet towards the middle of the table where a lot of other food is sitting already and discards the potholders he was using. "They met Tommy in person yesterday at the scene, but I've only spoken on the phone with Buck. It's great to meet you all in person. We're always happy to open up our table to fellow firefighters." He shakes their hands (including Chris', Buck notices, his respect for the Captain going up a little further) and doesn't even hesitate to swap hands when he gets to Buck to navigate Buck's other hand being in a sling. "We are just about ready to sit down and dig in so make yourselves comfortable. Can we get you anything to drink? There's water on the table but we also have a few different milks and juices in the fridge. I actually just picked up a new blend—carrot, ginger and turmeric. I highly recommend it."
Buck is not surprised at all when Eddie and Chris politely decline and stick with water, but feeling a little adventurous, and maybe a little concerned that the invitation to try his specialty health juice is some sort of a test, Buck opts in for a glass. As Captain Strand goes to get that, everyone starts to find seats.
Chris ends up sandwiched between Buck and Eddie, but across from TK, and when he has the chance to get a better look at the man, Buck watches his eyes light up in recognition. "You were at the zoo!"
TK smiles. "And you are the little zookeeper in training."
Chris giggles.
"Y'all two know each other?" The tallest man, Judd, drawls from his place one far end of the table.
"Chris schooled me and Carlos on armadillo facts the other day when we went to the zoo." TK explains.
The conversation evolves from there, and slowly but surely Buck finds himself beginning to relax as they pass around the food and start to eat. The subjects drift a bit, but mostly revolve around everyone's path to becoming a firefighter and then what life is like in Los Angeles (Mateo apparently has a cousin or some other relative out there that to Buck sounds like someone Athena might have crossed paths with), with some detours for Chris to talk about himself and his experiences as well. A few eyebrows raise when he lets it slip that he was also at the air show yesterday (the viral footage only showed Buck and Eddie clearly) and a few more raise and get higher when he declares that yesterday was probably scarier, but being in the tsunami was harder. That leads to everyone sharing war stories, so to speak, although it's fairly obvious that things are being tamed and censored in deference to the younger ears present.
Overall, it's a comfortable and pleasant environment. The food is good, with a lot of different options and dietary considerations available, which is a little surprising given the hectic nature of cooking in a firehouse, but certainly not unwelcome. Everyone seems pretty friendly, and it's clear the respect they have for one another. It speaks well of Captain Strand, Buck thinks, that he'd been able to assemble a group of talented individuals from all over the country with varied backgrounds and probably egos, and shaped them into a team with great camaraderie when they'd most likely faced an uphill battle in being welcomed and accepted to the city after the tragedy the original 126 had experienced.
Somehow the bell doesn't even go off while they eat, which Buck knows is a miracle in and of itself.
As the meal wraps up, Mateo, Nancy and Marjan take charge of clean-up, citing the station's chore chart and the fact that they hadn't participated at all in the prep. Shortly after that, Captain Strand asks if Buck and Eddie would be willing to move things to his office to talk for a few minutes and TK and Paul swiftly swoop in to offer Chris a tour of the station while his dads do 'boring adult stuff'. Which is how Buck finds himself sitting on one side of a desk with Eddie, with Captain Strand on the other side, in an office as sleek and modern as every other space in the station seems to be.
"So," Captain Strand begins as they all settle into their seats, "first of all, I wanted to thank you both again for stepping in and helping yesterday. While I know being there and witnessing the crash firsthand, being a part of all of the aftermath of that had to have been very difficult, and isn't at all what you wanted for your vacation, that you were there and able to save Emily Paige was very fortunate, and we owe you a debt of gratitude for stepping up."
"We were just following our training." Buck feels himself shrink back a little under the praise. He doesn't know how to make himself comfortable receiving recognition in general, let alone for doing things that just feel like part of his job.
"We're just glad we were able to help." Eddie follows up, resting his hand on Buck's knee.
"Second," the Captain continues after that moment settles, "I don't know what Buck shared with you about our conversation this morning, Eddie, but I wanted to use this as an opportunity for all of us to talk about the specific offer, talk about what it would look like for you to join the department here, and just give you both a chance to ask any questions you might have for me."
Eddie nods. "Well, Buck mentioned that you've been asked to help AFD fill in some gaps they have when it comes to heavy rescue, and that you've spoken with Chief Alonzo back in LA."
"Yes! AFD has a really strong, solidly staffed department, but over the past ten years or so, they've had a decline in firefighters holding interest in acquiring further certifications, so between that and some funding issues that have been rectified, their number of heavy rescue squads shrunk down, and it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to coverage for a city the size of Austin, as you saw yesterday." Captain Strand. "Chief Radford has asked me to build up a squad the same way I built my team when I first moved down here, to help provide that coverage and kickstart the program back into running order."
"And, how exactly did you build your team?" Buck asks. After the pleasantness of the meal, he's not feeling quite as nervous or intimidated about this portion of things. Everyone had been welcoming and down-to-earth and genuinely likeable. It's comfortable, at least at the moment, to speak up and participate in the conversation. "I know you were brought in after an explosion killed most of the firefighters at this station because of your experience in rebuilding after tragedy, but how did you find who you wanted working for you?"
Captain Strand's eyes seem to twinkle a little. It's not excitement, Buck doesn't think, but he can't quite place the mixture of emotions he's seeing. "You've done your research."
Buck feels his cheeks heat a little. "Uh, yeah. I guess. I like to plan ahead when I can."
"Excellent. Well, to answer your question, I cast a wide net. When they brought me in, Austin was not only looking to rebuild and recover from that tragedy, which meant they were hoping for folks with experience and empathy who could jump into a tough situation, but they were also hoping that I could build a diverse group of firefighters, and…how do I put this tactfully? Help drag their department into the 21st century." They all share a brief laugh. "So I just spent some time scouting and looking for talent. Interviewed people that caught my attention. A lot of people have the physical skills and capabilities to be a firefighter, but not everyone has the spark and drive that makes them a great firefighter, and I like to think I'm pretty good at spotting people who have that spark. Which, is what led me to the two of you.
"As I already mentioned, how you handled yourselves yesterday, when you were in the middle of a mass casualty event as civilians was noteworthy in and of itself. And when I spoke to Chief Alonzo about you and he provided me with more information about your qualifications and your background, it told me more of what I could already sense—the two of you are exactly who I need to found this new rescue squad."
Buck has pretty much already heard this, and it doesn't really tell him what he needs to know. What he's hearing is that he and Eddie tick off the boxes on paper, but he knows that's true of a lot of people. What he can't quite make the connection for in his brain (and there's a small voice in his head saying that this is his low self-esteem keeping a death grip on the wheel for control) is what makes them, and more specifically him, special enough that anyone would want to move them across the country to work for them. "I hear what you're saying about our qualifications," he says once it seems Captain Strand has hit a pause in his response, "but I'm not sure what Chief Alonzo would have told you about me that would be so great as to convince you that you want me here."
Here the Captain frowns a little. "Well, the both of you had exemplary scores throughout your training at the academy. You were each the top of your respective class. And Chief Alonzo noted that your partnership at the 118 was fast-formed and that you were able to grow your reputation as a rescue team quickly. He highlighted your tandem work in a high-rise after an earthquake that occurred in Eddie's second week of his probationary year, and confided in me that after word of your successes and ingenuity with those rescues got out, the 118 gained priority status for certain types of calls and was even requested by incident commanders outside of your area of response because they were confident in what the two of you would bring to each scenario."
This is news to Buck. If Bobby knows about it, it's nothing that he's ever brought up to the team, or even just to him in his annual review or any other private conversations. He's not sure how to feel about that.
"The both of you are also decorated veterans," Captain Strand continues, "and while I don't have the details of how you earned those awards and I would never ask you to share them unless you were comfortable doing so, I know that they are not simply handed out as participation trophies. You're both clearly very dedicated to excelling at your work, whatever that work may be at a given time." He pauses and directs his gaze to Buck on his own. "If you're asking about yourself specifically, the first thing that stood out to me is your resilience. The injury from the ladder truck would have put most people into early retirement, and you set records as part of your fight to return. Additionally, your file with the LAFD has a number of commendations from civilians regarding your compassion and from incident commanders regarding your expertise. And, earning a medal of valor is no small feat, particularly before you've even hit the five year mark on your career. The work that you've already done is what tells me that you're going to go on to do great things, and why I'm hoping to snag you for myself. I, selfishly, want those great things to happen here in Austin."
"I…didn't know about most of that." Buck is stunned. He'd truly been sure that his reputation in the department was almost entirely that of the persona he'd thrown himself into when he'd first started and was trying to ignore how hard loneliness was hitting him. Nobody had ever told him that there were people in leadership that he'd impressed, or that civilians were contacting the department because he'd made some sort of impact on them. He hadn't known that his work with Eddie and their certifications had granted the 118 a certain status that it hadn't had before, or that anyone saw any potential in him beyond what he had already accomplished.
"Well, hopefully, whether you come to work here, stay in Los Angeles, or even go elsewhere, people will start sharing more of that with you. You've earned praise and you deserve to hear it."
Buck turns to Eddie, silently pleading with him to continue the conversation. He has a lot of questions still, but he doesn't think he can ask them just yet, too busy wrestling with the idea that people don't just see him as another body on the truck or a screw up.
Eddie, thankfully and as always, catches on pretty quickly to what Buck is hoping for. "So LA doesn't typically have separate heavy rescue squads except for the folks on the actual Search and Rescue team. Firefighters tend to just certify in the areas that interest them most and they get allocated to shifts and stations based on where there's need to balance things out. They'll take the lead at the pertinent scenes. Can you tell us a bit about how the structure would be work here with the different teams? Particularly if we're working out of the same physical station?"
"Absolutely. Heavy rescue squads obviously have specialized training. In Austin the department dictates a certain subset of trainings and certifications that firefighters have to complete to be considered for service on a rescue squad. Both of you already have most of those and they would just transfer over. The goal of having dedicated heavy rescue squads is both to reduce workload for all firefighters, and reduce overall risk, so the firefighters responding to the most potentially dangerous scenes have all of the skills and training to handle those risks with the least amount of risk to themselves and any victims. Operating out of the same station, the rescue squad would be deployed to certain types of calls, where we know for sure that there's going to be harness and winch work, or water rescues for example, while the truck team would be deployed for the more 'run-of-the-mill' incidents; one or two vehicle accidents, normal house fires, carbon monoxide calls…Then in cases where it's all hands on deck like yesterday, both teams would go and divide up duties based on what's most appropriate."
"And how would that work if both teams are deployed to different scenes at the same time?" Eddie probes. "You're the captain of the station, but you can't be in two places at once."
"Judd on the truck squad is in the process of becoming a Lieutenant. The plan is that the rescue squad will have one as well, and that person would be in charge at scenes where I'm not present. That would also provide both teams with a better chain of command overall, in case of sick days or injury."
Eddie and the Captain run over a few more logistical items that give Buck time to regain some of his equilibrium and have him impressed and kind of excited. It's clear that a lot of thought has been put into what it is that Austin is looking to establish and how Captain Strand can make that happen. And Buck would be lying if he said that the thought of such a drastic change doesn't appeal to him. He likes the idea of the job being presented. And he kind of thinks that a move would even be good for him, given how things have gone lately. But he's not going anywhere without Eddie. And there are so many things that would make a move difficult, things that they can't just overlook.
"I'm not gonna pretend that what you're talking about doesn't sound interesting to me, Captain Strand, but the fact is we'd have to pick up our lives and move over 1300 miles to come here. Since you made a similar move to come here last year, I'm sure you know how complicated that is." He dives back into the conversation when Eddie and Strand seem to hit a lull.
"Austin FD is prepared to offer each of you a moving stipend equal to 17% of your proposed annual salaries, which, according to the numbers Chief Alonzo was willing to provide me, would be a $10,000 per year increase for each of you. Potentially more, if one of you were interested in rising to the rank of Lieutenant." Captain Strand gives them a moment for the financial details to sink in. "I'll also point out, as someone who moved from a city with a significant cost of living not dissimilar to Los Angeles, that your dollar will stretch a lot farther here when it comes to most living expenses."
Buck doesn't even have to look over at Eddie to know that any semblance of a poker face has slid off at the mention of what would be a very significant raise; Eddie puts a lot of work in to make sure that Chris never knows how stressed he might be, and he even makes a pretty significant effort not to let Buck or his family or anyone else in either, but Buck knows that with Chris' care expenses and the cost of Los Angeles living, there are months where money is tighter than others for Eddie, although it's lessened some now that Buck has essentially moved in and can slip Eddie money for certain expenses without him protesting too much. The idea of a raise combined with a return to a city with a better cost of living situation is going to make him think and process for a moment.
He steps in to take over the conversation, just as Eddie had done for him. "And what kind of timeline did you have in mind for the transition? Would we be expected to pack up and get down here in the next couple of weeks? A month?"
"Nothing that rushed." Captain Strand shakes his head. "The two of you would be our first hires, and it will take some time to conduct interviews and assemble a team that will work well together. Our current target is to have the squad fully hired and completing any necessary trainings three months from now, with a goal of having the team operational and out on their first shift in four months. That would give the two of you time to wrap things up gracefully with LAFD, to find appropriate accommodations and a good school for Chris here in Austin, and time for your injuries to heal, Buck, so you can start at the same time as the rest of the squad."
"That seems…reasonable." Buck draws out, feeling a little out of his depth with these details. He's never moved with a job already in place to know what's actually normal or anything like that. He's been more of a move when it's time for change and figure things out when he decides he ready to stay put, kind of guy.
"Chief Alonzo also mentioned that you are currently involved in a prosecutorial case against a therapist that had been contracted by the city to work with first responders." Buck feels himself shrink back at Captain Strand's mention of Dr. Wells; he'd sort of started convincing himself that somehow it wasn't going to get brought up when it didn't get mentioned early on in the conversation, and it's jarring to have it brought back to the forefront of things. "Obviously we can't predict where things stand in the timeline of how that case will be dealt with, so it may still be ongoing in four months time, but if it is, we would work with you to make sure you would be able to participate in the trial as needed, and that you had any support you needed to be able to do so."
Buck blinks. "You would?"
"Absolutely. You were wronged, by someone that you and your fellow first responders should have been able to trust. Coming forward, speaking up when something like that happens is an act of bravery, and I'm sure it's coming at a cost for you. It deserves respect and support."
Crying in what amounts to a job interview is not something Buck ever wanted or needed to cross of his bucket list, but he finds himself fighting to hold back tears anyways. A handful of people have told him that reporting Dr. Wells and testifying is doing the right thing, and even that they're proud of him, but so many more people have doubted or flat out vilified him and…there's something about hearing someone acknowledge that doing the right thing in this case is hard and that it's making so many things worse that just…crashes into his chest and makes his emotions flood to the surface.
Eddie seems to realize the impact Captain Strand's words have had, and his hand finds Buck's knee again, squeezing gently. "You've put together a very enticing offer, Captain Strand. I know that both of us appreciate the effort you've put into getting to know us, even before we spoke, and it's clear how much you value the people you work with and that you serve. That said, We would need to discuss everything with each other, and with Chris before we could give you a final answer one way or the other."
"Oh, of course. With the timeline being what it is, you can easily take a few days to think things over and talk and decide what would be best for you."
From there things mostly wrap up. Captain Strand gives them some department material to look over, including the official compensation packages the HR team had apparently put together for them, and Buck regathers his emotions, proud that he didn't completely break down and embarrass himself. It gets even easier when they return to the Firehouse proper and reunite with Chris, who is excited to introduce them to Buttercup, Strand's dog that apparently comes to the Firehouse with him on most days and had been sleeping in the bunk room while they had been eating, and tell them all about the firehouse features that TK and Paul had shown him.
Not long after that, the bell rings, calling the 126 out to a house fire, so Buck, Eddie, and Chris wish them well and leave to get back to their rental house.
In the car, Buck closes his eyes while Eddie drives and Chris chatters with him about how cool TK and a few of the others had been. He knows there are a few serious conversations to be had in the near future, and he's trying to remember that they might lead to the conclusion that a move just wouldn't be right for them right now, but he can't help but feel excited at the prospect of the jobs they've been offered, now that he knows more about them. There's a feeling of optimism growing in him that he hasn't felt in quite some time, as though maybe, just maybe, there's actually an end to the trauma tunnel he's been driving through.
It's practically an unfamiliar feeling, but Buck has some hope.
Chapter 35
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"OK. Pros and cons." Eddie says as he exits the master bath, ready for bed in a ratty pair of sweatpants and one of the most worn, stretched out tank tops Buck thinks he's ever seen. He sets their tub of arnica gel and a washcloth onto the nightstand, and silently gestures towards Buck where he's sitting on the edge of the bed, asking permission to help him get out of the sling protecting his arm and start the process of helping him change. Buck can normally handle it all himself, even with only one functional arm, but between the arm, his ribs, and the extensive bruising all down the right side of his body, he's so sore that any movement he can manage on his own is extremely restricted, and he's been pushing himself all day so he's well beyond his limit.
Buck nods in response to Eddie's silent question, and his partner starts by undoing the clips on the sling to gently maneuver his arm out. Then Buck considers the actual statement Eddie had made on his entrance, and he realizes he doesn't know what the man was talking about. "What do you mean?" He asks.
"Pros and cons." Eddie repeats as he works. "We haven't actually talked about it, but I'm pretty sure we were both pretty interested in what Captain Strand was offering. So…let's talk it out. Reasons we should accept, reasons we should stay put. What are you thinking?"
They'd kept things away from their discussion with Captain Strand on the ride back to their VRBO, all through getting Chris ready for and tucked into bed, and then through their brief discussion that led to them deciding to get changed and relax in the bedroom, rather than hang out in the living room before they're ready for sleep themselves. Which didn't mean the job offer and what it might mean for them hadn't been at the forefront of Buck's mind, but it had given him a little bit of time to really remember all of the complications that might make a move challenging, if not impossible, and it had dulled a bit of his initial hope and excitement. "Well, first of all, there's Chris." Buck winces as Eddie has him lift his arm to get it out of the sleeve of his shirt. The movement pulls harshly at his ribs.
"What about him?"
"He's really happy in LA, isn't he? He's got a great school, friends, Carla…I know you like his doctor there much better than the one he was seeing in El Paso."
Eddie considers his answer as he finishes removing Buck's shirt. "He's happy. And thriving in ways I wasn't sure was possible when we first moved. I think he'd probably be sad to leave most of the things you just listed. Except for maybe the doctor." He shoots him a small, wry smile. "But at the same time, all of those things are things I think we could find here, or close to. Austin's a big city. They'll have a lot of options for schools and doctors."
"It won't have a Carla." Buck points out.
"Carla's one of a kind." Eddie agrees. "But if we decide to go, we'll have time to plan, so I think she'd be able to help us figure out what kind of resources Austin has to offer for Chris and maybe even start getting things set up."
"You're not worried about what Chris will think or if he'll make friends?"
Eddie helps Buck rise to his feet so they can deal with his pants. "Well, everything I've seen tells me that Chris makes friends wherever he goes. I think when we first moved to LA it was the second or maybe third day at his first school that he came home with an invitation to join a kid at his sister's birthday party so he would have a friend there too." He helps Buck step out of his pants, first one leg, then the other, then tosses them over towards their bags, leaving Buck in just his boxer briefs. "And, I'm not going to lie and say Chris' opinion about this isn't important, but at the end of the day, he's the kid. We're the parents. If this move is what we want, it's going to be good for us, and it won't be detrimental to him, then we can deal with him being a little upset about leaving LA. I love that you're thinking about him, but the changes he'd have are not reasons to say no."
Buck eases himself back down onto the bed; he still needs to get into sweats for the night, but he knows they'll follow the same routine they did the night before, and Eddie is going to rub the arnica gel over his bruises before he gets him dressed. It'll only bring a small amount of relief but pairing it with his pain meds and careful positioning with pillows, it'll help him be able to sleep. "I hear you but…"
"No buts." Eddie leans over, kissing him briefly. "I hear you, that the impact on Chris is a potential con to a move. I won't dismiss that, but it's not the only consideration. There are also a few pros. Like the $10,000 a year raise. For each of us."
The money would have a huge impact. There's medical and lately legal expenses…It's not like existing in general has gotten any cheaper lately. Buck is well aware that the increase in salary is not insignificant. But he also knows that money can't take the place of a lot of things they have in Los Angeles. Like friends and family. His own circle may have shrunk a lot lately, and he's not certain where he stands with some other people, but…Eddie and Chris have people that they'll miss, and who will miss them if they leave. "What about Abuela? And Tia Pepa?" He asks. "Aren't they part of the reason you chose to move to LA in the first place?"
"Partially." Eddie admits. He sighs, sitting down next to Buck. "Leaving them would be hard. I've loved getting closer with Tia and reconnecting with Abuela…I love that Chris gets to know them and see some older family members that…aren't like my parents."
"So that's a con."
"Yeah, it's a con. But, we'd also be with Adri and her new baby."
Buck finds himself smiling a little. He'd forgotten about that. He likes Adriana. She's strong and smart and seems to know exactly who she is and what she wants. She's always been welcoming to him, and in the time he'd been able to observe them in the past couple of weeks he'd seen how well she and Eddie get along, and how much she loves Christopher. Being close to her would be nice, and it would at least give Eddie and Chris some family nearby. Plus, he knows Eddie would love to be around to see his niece or nephew born and be able to be a part of his sister's support system as she begins life as a single parent. "That's a pretty good pro."
Eddie smiles too. "It is."
"And…"Buck begins, thinking back to one of the things that really stood out to him during their talk with Captain Strand, something he hadn't even realized he had been missing, "I really felt…respected? By Captain Strand, I mean. Like…he'd clearly taken the time to get to know as much as he could about us from our files and Chief Alonzo, and it felt like…It felt like he saw potential in us. In me." He finishes softly.
"I think he did." Eddie agrees.
"I didn't know half the stuff he was saying. About the commendations or us being requested for certain types of calls or anything like that."
Eddie sighs, his smile fading back noticeably. He leans over, grabbing the tub of arnica gel and unscrewing the lid as he sits back up. "I know you really respect Bobby. I do too. He knows the job well, has done a lot of good things at the 118…on a personal level he really turned his life around after going through something unimaginable. All of those things are deserving of respect."
Buck can read between the lines of Eddie's tone and expression enough to know that he's leading up to saying something else, probably something that he thinks Buck won't like. "But…?" He prompts.
"But, I think he gets blinders on with certain people in his crew, and gets stuck seeing them in one way, or decides he knows best and won't guide them to grow past what he envisions for them." Eddie finishes. He dips his fingers to grab some arnica gel and starts to smooth it across Buck's shoulder. He doesn't press too hard (the bruising is still far too sensitive to try and dig into the muscle) and he's careful not to get close to the still covered surgical site from his break, but he starts to work the gel into the skin of Buck's arm. "I think he knows that you're a good firefighter, but he's never gotten past seeing you as a young probie. Especially with how things happened and what you told him during those first few months. He cares about you, but those feelings get in the way of doing his job as your captain, because he's more concerned with protecting you than in seeing you grow."
"I…how is not telling me that victims appreciate how I treat them protecting me?" Buck tries to think through what Eddie is telling him, and look at things from an outside perspective—from Bobby's perspective—to understand how keeping someone in the dark about their successes is somehow doing the right thing but he just can't make sense of it. He's experienced a few types of leaders in his life, and he's always thought that he's seen people grow the most under the leaders that are honest with the people beneath them. That are up front about their screw-ups and how to fix them, but also let them know what they're doing right and why those are good things. The only time he'd seen someone withhold praise entirely had been during SEAL training, and that had been with the express goal of weeding out people who weren't capable of making it to the end, and it had been combined with every harsh criticism and insult his training officers could think of.
But that's not how Bobby operates.
He'd corrected Buck's behavior plenty during his probationary year, but he'd also let him know when he was succeeding. He still gets corrected, when he's on duty anyways, and it doesn't feel like he hasn't been pleasing Bobby (he can easily remember getting smiles from him at scenes or pats on the back afterwards that let him know his captain was happy with the work he was doing) but he also doesn't remember getting specific feedback. He knows he'd never heard about any of the things Captain Strand had mentioned, even though he also knows Bobby brings those kinds of commendations and things up when they pass over his desk for Hen or Daniels or Rosen, often in front of the rest of the crew.
What's different about him?
"I think he sees you as a bit younger and cockier than you really are, because that's how you were acting when you first started with him." Eddie begins, continuing his slow rubdown of Buck's arm, and moving eventually down to his torso, where the worst of the bruising is. "And I think he worries that if you grow in confidence, you'll take more risks or maybe move somewhere else where he can't have a say in what risks you take and how safe you are."
"That's not…that's not how a leader is supposed to treat his team." Buck says, feeling echoes of the shock he'd felt in Captain Strand's office, this time tinged with sadness, and maybe a little anger. "If he has concerns about my attitude or my decisions he needs to talk to me. Not hide things from me or hold me back." And putting all of this information together with what he knows about how Bobby had tried to interfere with his return to duty, Buck is fairly sure that Bobby probably is holding him back on at least some level.
"I mean, that's just speculation on my part." Eddie reminds him. "To know his reasons for sure, you'd need to talk to Bobby. But either way, you're right. As Captain, he should have been sharing those things with you. And," He continues after a brief pause, "I think it says something positive about Captain Strand that he did, even though he was unaware that you didn't know."
"What do you mean?"
"You were doubting yourself. About why someone with Strand's background, and the backing of a whole department would want you to work for him. Strand heard that, and gave you concrete examples about how he knew you were more than how you were seeing yourself, even without having met you in person yet."
Buck considers what Eddie's telling him, along with everything he'd found about Captain Strand in his research and observed that night at the station. All signs point to the man being an impressive, considerate leader, with the professional expertise and credentials to bring the knowledge to match that. "I think…taking in all of that, that the opportunity to work with him goes in the pro column."
"I agree." Eddie grabs the washcloth, wiping the excess arnica gel off of his hands before recapping the tub, and setting his supplies back onto the night stand. "Do you want the same hoodie and sweats as last night?" He asks as he stands.
"Yeah." The hoodie being a zip-up meant it was probably the easiest thing Buck had with him to put on at this point. "What else are you thinking about?"
All things being considered, at Buck's count, they have three pros against maybe one and a half cons (the half being one that may or may not come to fruition depending on how Chris feels). It's not a big enough difference to make him feel sure what direction they're leaning towards. He's heard Eddie say that he's interested in the move, but he hasn't flat out said that he wants to do it either.
"I think…" It only takes Eddie a moment to grab the sweats from the night before. He answers Buck as he comes back to the bed. "I think a fresh start could be nice."
Buck can't help but give Eddie a confused look as his partner helps him stand again to step into his sweatpants. "Why do you need a fresh start? Has something been going on at work that you haven't told me about?"
Eddie doesn't move to get him into the pants right away. Instead he looks at Buck with the kind of soft sadness that sometimes makes him feel so seen and loved, and sometimes makes him feel pitied and disgusting depending on who it's coming from. From Eddie, it's almost always loved, and that's true tonight, but it's weighed down with a feeling of guilt. "I mean a fresh start for you, Ev."
"I don't need—,"
"You told me the other day that you're worried about what'll happen when you come back to work. That you're not sure if you can trust other people to have your back." Eddie says. "That alone is a reason to think about taking this job. If the trust isn't there, or even if you just doubt it and you hesitate for a split second, that can be the difference between life and death in our job."
The feeling of guilt grows. This is exactly what Buck doesn't want. For Eddie to be going along with something because he thinks it's what Buck wants or needs, not because it's what he wants for himself. "I'm worried about things at the 118 because of what happened with Chimney, and because of all this Bobby stuff. I could transfer to another station in LA when I heal up. If Captain Strand is right, it sounds like I'd have options."
"But would you actually feel good about those?" Eddie challenges gently. "You said it yourself. With Taylor's story out there and everyone being such big gossips, you don't have all that much privacy left in the LAFD. And for every good person like Hen or Rosen, there are the Jenkins' and the Chimneys' and the people that, for lack of a better word, suck. Do you think you'd be able to put up with what they might throw at you and trust in those people?"
Buck bows his head. He thinks maybe before the bombing he probably could (put up with it anyways) but he knows if he's being honest about where his head is at right now, the answer is no. But thinking about that specifically makes leaving feel like running away, and dragging Eddie and Chris along with him instead of facing his problems. "I don't want to quit." He murmurs.
Eddie's hand, still a little tacky from dealing with the arnica gel, rests warmly on junction of his neck and shoulder. "Leaving a job for a better offer isn't quitting."
And he knows Eddie's right, and it's not, but it's also not just the job. "I can't just run from all my problems. I have to deal with the trial and with whatever stuff is left with Maddie and Chimney…And Athena seems to think that my complaint is probably going to go somewhere with that cop since it wasn't his first incident…I can't run from all of that."
"You wouldn't be running from anything." Eddie starts moving again, helping to guide Buck gingerly into his sweatpants. "We won't be leaving right away, and even if we were, Captain Strand knew about the trial, and he said Austin was prepared to make sure you were available for everything that came up for it. I'm sure the same would apply to everything else."
Again, Buck knows Eddie's telling the truth. Everything he knows about Strand tells him that the Captain would do what he could to support him while he handled that stuff. Everything Eddie is saying is accurate.
Then again, Buck had pretty much known it would be. He's not putting up the protests because these are the feelings that would keep him up at night if he moved to Austin; he was just sort of hoping they'd be ones that Eddie would accept, and he's not sure what to say now that Eddie has countered them all. He just can't let Eddie put the job being a fresh start for him in their shared pro column.
After nearly half a minute passes, Eddie helps Buck sit back down onto the bed, sitting next to him instead of moving on to getting him into his hoodie. "Buck, a minute ago it seemed like you were really interested in this job. What was it about me saying that it would be a fresh start for you that's making you want to run in the opposite direction?"
"I can't…I said it earlier today. I can't be the reason you're making a big life change that effects you and Chris. You can't name a pro that only effects me. It has to be something you want too."
"OK, but I do want a fresh start for you." Eddie says. He's not upset, but Buck can feel the passion in his voice just the same. "You've been putting a lot of work in to get better from how you've been feeling and I think a move like this would make that work a lot easier for you. I've told you how much you mean to me and Chris. If moving here and taking this job is what keeps you in our lives and helps you get to a place where you are happy and healthy? That is absolutely something I want."
Buck feels his guilt and frustration rise. There's a part of him that practically swoons to know how much Eddie loves him, but the way he just framed it is exactly what he's worried about. "Eddie, you can't say you'll take the job and move if the only reason you want to do it is because you're worried about losing me if you don't. I know I—," Buck cuts himself off, trying to stop the swell of emotions threatening to overtake him. He starts again, voice softer, though he knows Eddie will notice the slight edge of tears against his tone. "I know that I've scared you the past couple of months with my…with how I've handled my depression and everything that's happened." And Buck has to force himself to keep going after just that sentence, since he hasn't done much admitting out loud that what he's been going through is depression, at least on some level. "But I asked for help, and I'm doing everything I can to get better because I want to stay with you and Chris. I'm doing everything I can to stay with you, and that won't change if you think you and Chris would be happier staying in LA.
"I would feel so, so much worse if we decided to move and it was all because of me, not because you wanted the opportunities Captain Strand is offering too. I know I'm struggling right now, but I can be happy anywhere, if you and Christopher are there."
Eddie smiles. "Well, then I'm not sure what we're debating because so can I."
Buck knows Eddie would never say that he's stupid, but he kind of feels it, since Eddie's face and tone make it seem like he thinks everything is suddenly easy and fixed but Buck can't imagine how that is. "I don't…I don't understand."
"Buck. Evan. This job offer is something that I'm interested in. If it were only for me, and taking it meant leaving you behind in LA I wouldn't take it, and if you weren't interested in it as well I wouldn't take it, because one thing I'm sure of is that Chris and I both owe so many of the improvements our lives have seen since coming to LA to you and your place in our lives specifically and I'm not about to leave you behind for a job. But what I'm hearing you say," and here Eddie's hand finds Buck's uninjured one, interweaving their fingers together, "is that you're interested in the job too, but you wouldn't take it if the offer were only for you or if I weren't interested. So if we're both interested, but willing to say no to stay together, then why can't we just say yes?"
OK. Maybe it is actually easy.
Buck has a feeling that his determination to find reasons that something good shouldn't happen for him is just another thing to unpack in therapy. Especially when he can see the reasons that it should. And maybe he'll think about that more later, but right now, he kind of just wants to sit with the feeling of relief that's washing over him with the thought that he won't have to push himself to make things work out in LA. That he and Eddie can get a new start, together, in a city where the only expectations from the people around them are that they do their jobs. Where maybe he doesn't feel like he and Eddie need to hide their relationship in order to avoid Eddie being painted with the same brush people use for him.
"I guess we can."
"How come you guys don't have a dog at the firehouse back home?" Chris asks the next morning. It's still fairly early in the day; they'd woken up a little earlier than they normally would during vacation and had quickly decided that because of the generally cloudy day and the fact that they're getting to the tail end of their vacation and all starting to feel a little wiped out that they'd order breakfast in instead of finding another restaurant to go to and getting dressed right away. They're midway through the meal, and Chris is entering the phase of the morning where he's feeling human enough to give more than one or two word responses to their prompts.
Buck and Eddie share a mildly amused look, not very surprised that Buttercup's presence in the 126 firehouse is what Chris had taken away from dinner the night before. "Well, dogs in firehouses are more of a thing from back before we had actual fire engines to bring us to calls." Buck explains. This is one of the research binges he'd first gone on when at the fire academy, a little disappointed to learn that his childhood belief of a dalmatian in every station didn't come close to being accurate. "Back then, firefighters had to have horses pull carts with all of the supplies, and dogs were fast enough to run ahead and make sure people knew the fire department was coming and to clear a path. They also might have helped keep the horses calm. But now that we have trucks with sirens, we don't need dogs to do that job, and most stations either have people with allergies, or just don't have the time to take care of a dog."
"Oh." Chris looks a little disappointed as he processes that information. Buck is fairly certain that it's because as happy as he is with them adopting Beans and Toast and having pets at all, he still has a soft spot for dogs, and meeting Buttercup had reopened up that particular interest. "Then why did they have Buttercup?"
"Some stations still like to have a dog as a mascot, or to honor the tradition." Eddie shrugs. "What did TK and Paul tell you?"
"They said Captain Strand got Buttercup when they were both sick and that now that they were better Buttercup helps the whole station out."
"So it sounds like Buttercup is really Captain Strand's, but they're well-trained enough to spend time at the station when he's working." Eddie muses.
Chris nods enthusiastically. "Buttercup was really smart. TK had taught him loads of tricks."
Buck's not going to question that Buttercup is apparently a male dog. He's heard stranger names for pets before.
"And…" Eddie drags the word out as he takes a sip of his coffee, continuing when he lowers the mug back to the kitchen table. "What did you think of TK and everyone else we met last night?"
Buck feels his eyebrows rise in surprise that Eddie's already broaching the subject of the firehouse with Christopher. Sure, they'd decided the night before that they'd talk to Christopher before they actually connected with Captain Strand to tell him that they wanted to accept and figure out what they could do to get the ball rolling with the day and half they were still in town, and obviously, a conversation about what things had been like at the 126 was a solid opening for that conversation, but he hadn't really thought Eddie would just dive right in. As big of a game Eddie had talked about being the parents and handling it if Chris wasn't interested in the move, Buck knows it's more complicated than that; he wants Christopher to be happy—they both do—and putting his foot down and dictating a move that Chris doesn't want could easily interfere with that. He's certain that Eddie has at least some nerves about Chris' response to the idea. And even if he doesn't, Buck has more than enough for the both of them.
"TK was really cool!" Chris' first answer is excited, a little louder than his typical indoor voice. Just like his interest in Buttercup, it's not entirely surprising. Chris had been excited to recognize TK from the zoo as an adult who hadn't dismissed him as another kid, and from what Buck had seen at the dinner and what Chris had shared about the tour that had been given to him afterwards, TK didn't treat Chris any differently for his CP, and apparently had a lot of really good stories to share from his childhood in New York and what it had been like for him growing up around a firehouse. "He said he and Carlos, that was his boyfriend we met at the zoo, are thinking about getting a pet so I told him all about Beans and Toast and he said they sounded like really good cats and that we should help him and Carlos figure out who they should adopt.
"And everyone else was really nice too." Chris continues with enthusiasm. "They asked me all sorts of questions about being in earthquakes and the tsunami and stuff, and they didn't act like it was weird that even though those things were scary at the time, I'm not always scared about them now, the way other adults do sometimes."
Buck had noticed that when the conversation around the dinner table had centered around everyone's various 'adventures' over the years, and had chalked it up to it being a table full of first responders, who almost always had some form adrenaline junkie streak in them. He knew it had helped Chris feel more included in the gathering as the only kid, but he hadn't realized it had made him feel more normal too. Or that other people weren't. "So you liked them?" He asks, mostly just to not feel useless. He can tell the answer is yes, but he doesn't know exactly how Eddie wants to handle the conversation and he's not confident in his ability to steer things in the right direction, or even a good one.
"Yeah, they were good." Chris nods.
"So you would be interested in getting to know them more?" Eddie probes. And at this question Chris gets a puzzled look on his face. He's not frowning or upset, but definitely confused.
"Do we have time? I thought we were going home tomorrow, and we still have to see Tia Adri again."
"Well, it might not be right away but…" Eddie trails off, glancing over at Buck briefly. Just long enough for him to see that his partner still looks excited about what he's bringing up, even if there is a tiny undercurrent of nerves. "You know how Captain Strand wanted to talk to me and Buck last night?" He waits for Chris to answer in the affirmative. "So, he saw me and Buck help out at the air show the other day, and he thought we were really good at our jobs. He learned a little bit more about us, and last night he asked if Buck and I might want to come here to Austin to work for him."
Chris, much like his father, is an internal processor, so they sit and wait for him to think about what's just been shared and for him to reach his own conclusions or questions. It's difficult. Buck doesn't want Chris to be upset or against the move; he knows Eddie is right and they can't let Chris dictate what moves they make for their lives if the change is really what's best for them overall, but he'd also really rather Chris be happy and OK with, and hopefully even excited for, the changes they're talking about. He's not sure how he'd handle Chris starting to resent or dislike him, and he really doesn't want to find out. So Buck waits for Chris to think and figure out what he might want to say or ask. It takes several long moments.
"We'd have to move again?"
"Not right away. We'd be in LA probably through the holidays." Eddie answers; that was something he and Buck had talked about the night before after reaching the conclusion that accepting and moving to Austin was something they were both really interested in. "So we could still celebrate everything with Abuela and Tia Pepa. We would move here around New Years."
Chris thinks again. "Would you still be firefighters?"
Buck tackles this question, feeling a little more in his depth to talk about what the move would mean for the adults in the equation. "We would. They actually want us to come because we have more training than a lot of the firefighters here do, and we can help with tricky emergencies and help keep people safer."
"And Beans and Toast would come?"
"Of course." Eddie reassures. "They're a part of our family now."
"So are Abuela and Tia Pepa, but they wouldn't come." Chris points out.
Eddie winces at having his logic called out. "Probably not, no. But they're human, and adults. Tia Pepa still has a job of her own that will keep her in California. And both she and Abuela have friends and other family there too that they like to be near."
"So do we."
"We do…" Buck begins carefully. He tries not to think about how the statement feels more true for Eddie and Chris than it does for him, and to focus more on how important it is that he's being included as a part of the 'we' in question to begin with. "But sometimes we have to make choices to move apart from people because the opportunity in the new place is better for us."
"It doesn't mean we don't love them or have to stop talking to them or seeing them when we can." Eddie takes over for him. "If we move here, we would still make sure that you get to talk to all of your friends, and spend time with family as much as possible. You'd just also get to make new friends, and spend time with other family, like Tia Adri."
Chris looks down at his empty plate briefly. "I like new friends." He says as he looks up, though he isn't quite smiling or happy. It's better, Buck thinks, than him complete protesting or shouting about how he doesn't want to move. "And Tia Adri. What else would happen?"
"Well…we'd find a house to live in here, all together." Eddie reaches over, taking Buck's hand as he'd answer. "And we'd find you a school here, one as good for you as Durand has been, that has all the clubs and classes like you've been enjoying."
"Who would watch me while you work?"
"Sometimes Tia Adri. But I think we'd also find someone like Carla."
Chris takes all of this in. He still doesn't seem upset, but it's clear that he's also still putting all of the pieces together and forming a bigger picture. Beneath the table, Buck's knee starts to bounce; he has to let his nervous energy out somehow. "How is Austin better?" He finally asks.
"What do you mean, mijo?"
"Buck just said that sometimes we move apart from people because the new place is better for us. Why would Austin be better?"
Eddie looks at Buck, tilting his head slightly and silently asking if he wants to answer Chris' question. Buck isn't sure how Eddie will explain things if he doesn't step up, but he does think it's fair that Chris understands their reasoning, as much as they can explain it to him, and they've done as much as they can to keep all of the court stuff, and his problems with Maddie and work and everything away from him, so to know why putting distance between them and that is good, Buck knows he has to figure out a way tell him about it. He sighs, resolving himself to the tricky conversation. "You know how I'm having a hard time lately, bud?"
"Yeah. You need extra hugs and cuddles."
"Right." Buck smiles at his earnestness, and Eddie squeezes his hand. "So…some of that is because my brain doesn't work the same way other people's brains do, and it tells me that I feel bad, even when things are OK."
"That's why you started talking to someone. Like I did after mom died." Chris nods sagely. "Dad talks to someone sometimes too."
"Yeah. Talking to people can help." Buck agrees. "But another reason that I'm not always happy right now is because back home…a lot of people found out things about me that are making them upset with me and they…they aren't…" He trails off. He doesn't know the right words to say. He doesn't know how to explain everything to a kid when he doesn't understand it himself.
Eddie squeezes his hand again and takes over when he notices Buck floundering. "There are a lot of people in LA who aren't being very nice to Buck right now." It sounds incredibly simple when he puts it like that, and even though he experiences it regularly, Buck still marvels at how gentle his partner can be. "He didn't do anything wrong, but sometimes people are mean or do bad things because it's easier than being nice or admitting that they did something wrong. And when people are mean to you all the time, it's hard to be happy or feel like you can trust them. So we think moving to Austin would be better because the people here are happy with Buck the way he is. Does that make sense?"
And at this question, Chris doesn't hesitate. "It's like a couple of years ago, when we left El Paso. Grandma and Abuelo were mean to you all the time and we left so they wouldn't be around all the time to make us feel bad."
Buck sees Eddie go still at Christopher's use of 'us' in his explanation, and it's not hard to picture the storm of guilt that immediately would have started brewing in his head. He returns Eddie's frequent gesture of comfort and squeezes his hand.
"Yeah." Eddie chokes out, swallowing thickly. "It's a lot like that."
"Then… I think we should do it."
"Are you sure, Superman?" Buck just barely keeps himself from frowning in surprise. "It would be a really big change."
"Change is OK." Chris shrugs. "If we hadn't moved before, we wouldn't have met you, and that was a really good thing. So maybe there's someone else important waiting for us here. Or something. We'll find out when we move I guess."
Buck lets go of Eddie's hand and pushes out of his seat to stand and walk around the table so he can envelope Chris in one armed hug, resting his forehead against his. "You're something else, kid, you know that?"
"That's what dad says." Chris agrees.
Eddie leaves his seat and turns the embrace into a Diaz family hug for a few moments, although eventually he pulls away. "OK. Big family discussions and decisions mean we get to do something fun. Let's finish up breakfast and get dressed. Then Buck and I should call Captain Strand and tell him the good news. Any ideas on what we can do after to celebrate?"
Buck leaves the response up to Chris. He thinks right now, with the final weight (at least for right now) of the job offer decision off his shoulders, he'll be happy doing just about anything if his family is there.
He's not all that surprised when Chris gets a sly grin on his face and mentions that they haven't been to the Austin Aquarium yet.
"You're doing great, man."
The words, spoken softly, barely register beneath the fog coating Buck's brain. He feels simultaneously weighed down, like he's being pulled down into the earth by a massive anchor and like his head isn't a part of his body and he's floating entirely away.
Buck blinks.
He has no idea where he is.
The world in front of him is blurry. For a moment he thinks he's hurt his head again, but he blinks again and it's starts to clear and he realizes the blur is from tears. Tears that he can feel, streaming cool down hot cheeks. It's another contradiction in sensation. His head feels hot but his body feels unbelievably cold.
"Just keep breathing with clicks." The voice, Buck realizes now it's a male, encourages.
He starts to hear a faint, rhythmic clicking noise. Much slower than a clock, but just as steady and even.
His chest hurts with each breath, and each breath feels like a struggle, ragged, wet and gasping. Buck remembers now, breaking his ribs and his arm in a fall, but he also knows (though he doesn't know how) that that's not why breathing is hard. It comes to him, as fighting to listen to the man kneeling on the ground in front of him and coaching him, who's starting to look and sound familiar, that he's having a panic attack. Maybe one of the worst ones he's ever had. Certainly one of the worst he's had in a long time.
Buck feels lost and confused, even as he comes back to himself. There's a hand around his wrist, fingers pressed gently but firm against his pulse point, and all he can register is that it's not Eddie's.
He wants Eddie.
"Where's—," His choking breaths cut off his question, and Buck might break into a sob at not being able to finish and find out the information he wants but he's just so exhausted and confused and scared and all of that comes together to paralyze him.
"Eddie's back inside with my dad and Chris." The man answers, soft and patient. Buck doesn't know how the guy could possibly know what he wanted to know from just a single word, but it hits him that he maybe had asked before. He's done a lot more, when dissociated from things before. "We'll go see him soon. Just keep focusing on the sound and your breathing for a couple more minutes."
Buck remembers more.
They're in Austin. Him, Eddie, and Chris. They'd talked that morning about moving there, and told Captain Strand, who was now telling them to call him Owen, that they were interested in working for him. He'd invited them over to his place that afternoon to go over some things and continue to get to know each other (along with his son), so they'd spent the morning at the aquarium and had lunch and then they'd gone to visit.
But none of that tells him why they're inside and he's outside on the front steps with TK. Why he'd panicked and why he's having such a hard time calming down and figuring things out now.
Buck tries to do as TK instructs, focusing on the slow ticking noise and matching his breathing to it. Panic attacks are scary, that's in the definition, but he's had them before and things usually come back to him when he's calm again and his brain isn't trying to do so much. It takes longer than he likes to feel steady and like his body is coming back together again. As it does, he starts to remember TK leaving the semi-impromptu gathering to go to the store so Chris wouldn't have to be subjected to 'the crimes against taste that his father calls healthy snacks and desserts', and then himself stepping outside sometime after that. Because he'd needed to make a phone call. Because the paternity results had come in.
"Fuck." His breath stops again.
"Nope, stay here with me." TK squeezes around his wrist gently, just enough to make Buck inhale again. "Your pulse is only just getting down to an acceptable rate, you need to drink some water and keep it there OK?"
Buck nods. Watches TK reach into a discarded grocery bag on the ground next to him intently so he doesn't have to think about the phone call and what he'd learned.
TK produces a bottle of mineral water and lets go of Buck's wrist to unscrew the cap. He presses the bottle into his hand. "Slow, small sips." He coaches.
Buck does as he's told. His hand is shaking as he lifts the bottle to his lips, but not enough that TK doesn't seem to not trust him about potentially dropping it. He takes three small drinks, realizing only afterwards how dry his mouth had gotten. He lowers the bottle back down. "How…how long was I…panicking?" He finishes the question slowly, feeling his already warm cheeks burn.
"I found you when I got back from the store about ten minutes ago." TK answers. He reaches over to a phone on the ground and taps the screen, stopping the ticking noise. "I'm not sure how long you had been out here before that."
"Shit." Buck bows his head. He can't believe…he's at his future boss' home—the boss who is providing what's supposed to be a fresh start—and he's already fucking things up. His mouth moves before his brain does. "Guess I'm making a great impression as a future coworker. Totally not a 100% broken and completely pathetic fuck-up. Definitely someone you want having your back."
"I don't have a metronome app on my phone to do breathing exercises with because I'm the picture of mental stability, man." TK's voice is soft, his expression entirely understanding. Not at all judgmental. "We've all got shit here. Panic attacks won't even make you stand out."
"Yeah?"
"The only reason I'm down here in Austin instead of back in the city I grew up in is because instead of processing a bad break-up with stupid movies and junk food like my mom taught me, the addiction I always told myself I was past reared it's ugly head and I overdosed. And even moving here with my dad, having regularly scheduled meetings and therapy and all of that, I still pressed the self-destruct button way longer than I needed to and nearly fucked up what is turning out to be the best relationship I've ever been in before it even got started. Oh! And I switched to being a paramedic instead of staying a firefighter after I got shot on a call because it was easier to avoid all the anxiety that sprung up from that trauma and to fix my issues with my dad if we weren't around each other 24/7 than it would have been to face it and have some real conversations with him. The team pretty much knows all of that, and they're fine with me."
Buck blinks at the series of revelations. TK seems incredibly open as he speaks, not at all hesitant to be telling all of this to essentially a stranger, but it still feels so intimate and personal to know about someone he barely even really got introduced to yesterday. "Really?"
"Really." TK nods. "Whatever's going on, unless you killed someone, people around here aren't going to judge you for it." He pauses a beat. "And even then, they'd probably cut you some slack if you had a good enough reason. They're pretty supportive."
Buck swallows. Thinks about taking another sip of water. Then thinks if he does before he lets some of what he's thinking out, he might throw up. He needs to process, to calm down more, and feels like if TK was willing to trust him with all of that, then he can try and trust TK. They're going to be working together after all. He takes a deep breath. "When I was a probie my first loss was rough and my Captain sent me to a department therapist. She, uh…instead of talking me through what I was thinking or whatever she raped me. And I was in a shitty place before that so I convinced myself that I had been into it and never reported her. Fast forward like…two years and I'd just re-certified after a long medical leave when my leg got crushed under the fire engine, and my Captain was making me jump through hoops before he'd approve me coming back. The department gave me the choice of just transferring to another house, but I figured, the house was my family and the extra work would be worth it to get back to them instead of losing everyone and having to start over. One of the hoops was a psych eval and…because my last name is Buckley and that name is pretty much a curse, my appointment ended up being with the same therapist. She…wanted a repeat performance. Said she wouldn't clear me if I didn't and I…" Buck breaks off, to put the bottle of water down onto the stoop next to him and wipe at his face to try and feel a little cleaner and give himself a moment. "The therapist I'm seeing now and Eddie would yell at me if I said I chose to go along with it, but that's what it feels like a lot of the time since I barely said no, let alone tried to get away or anything…" He sniffs, avoiding looking at TK just in case he's misjudged things and he's disgusted or something like that. "Anyway….
"A bunch of other stuff happened and it lead to me reporting her. I wasn't her only….I wasn't the only person she took advantage of and she's been arrested and they're prosecuting her, and not too long after she was arraigned the DA handling the case let me know that she's was pregnant. She couldn't be sure who the father was but my…assault fell into the window of conception, so I've been waiting on paternity testing.
"And I don't know how, but somehow I forgot about that when Eddie and I were talking about taking your dad's offer. It didn't even occur to me that it might not just be me, him, and Chris but…I just heard from my lawyer because the results came back and…the baby's mine."
TK lets out a low whistle. "That is…a lot to unpack, man." He pauses, just a beat. "You know I didn't tell you my shit as a way to make you tell me that right? I was just trying to—,"
Buck waves him off. "I know. I, uh, kinda just… need to process for a minute while not in a total panic attack before I tell Eddie."
Here, TK's already serious expression turns to a frown. "You're not worried about him supporting you, are you? Because I know I don't know you two super well or anything but you only have to see him look at you for about ten seconds to know he's stupid in love with you and would probably cut off his own leg if he thought it would help you out."
"No, I know." Buck nods. "Eddie is…all in. More supportive than I probably deserve. He'll be with me, whether I fight to keep the baby or—," He cuts himself off, knowing the alternative isn't an option; he's known forever that he wants kids and as terrified as he is, he can't imagine letting someone who is a part of him go because of how they were conceived. "He'll be with me." He repeats. "It's just…like you said. A lot to unpack."
"I don't blame you for being overwhelmed." TK says. "No one would. Not that I'll tell anyone." He rushes to add and reassure, eyes a touch wider. "I'm really good with secrets and stuff. Benefit of being in the program."
Buck takes another sip of water. He's exhausted, worn paper-thin, and between the harsh breathing from his panic attack and sitting on the ground his body is aching. He wants Eddie. "I know. Or I guess I don't really, since we just met, but…I believe you. And your dad already knows. Some of it anyways. He knows about the therapist and that I'm involved in prosecuting her, and a bunch of the other stuff that's happened to me. And I'm sure we'll tell him about the baby before we go since that could effect…pretty much everything…" Another realization slams into him, and Buck closes his eyes and tightens his grip around the glass bottle of water to force himself to not give into the anxiety it causes. "Shit. Chris doesn't even know…"
"About what?" TK asks. He stays steady, which Buck appreciates. "Any of it?"
"No. He knows some. Not like the specifics, but he knows that someone hurt me and that's part of the reason I'm having a hard time and why we think moving here would be a good idea, but Eddie and I decided we wouldn't tell him about the baby until we knew more so he wouldn't get worked up over something that maybe wouldn't end up being anything. And…I knew if the kid was mine I'd keep them but everyone kept telling me to just cross that bridge when we came to it and not borrow trouble, and I think maybe because so much else has been going on I kind of convinced myself that even though it was a possibility there was no way the kid was actually going to be mine just so I could convince myself to let it go and not stress more but… now they are.
"And Chris is used to it being just him and his dad, and he's already accepted me, but we just told him we're gonna uproot his life to move here and what if…what if a baby coming in is too much for him? He has to come first—definitely for Eddie and as much for me as I can, and if he's not OK me bringing in a baby then—,"
For the first time since he'd handed Buck the water, TK touches him again, resting a hand softly on his knee. "What was that about not borrowing trouble?" He prompts, and waits for Buck to look at him before he continues. "Again, I don't know all of you super well yet or anything, but one thing I heard a lot of from Chris last night is how much he idolizes you. You and Eddie are both his heroes. From what I can tell his dad hung the moon and you're holding up the sun. I'm pretty sure he'd love any kid of yours because they're part you."
"I…don't know if he even knows enough about where babies come from to know that."
Here, TK rolls his eyes. "Not exactly what I was getting at, but OK."
"I just…don't think I can lose either of them."
"I don't think you will, man. But Eddie can probably reassure you about that better than I can."
"Probably." Buck agrees. "No offense."
"None taken. Are you feeling OK now? Steady enough to move inside to the couch?"
Buck takes a moment to assess himself, knowing that if he just agrees and gets up before he's truly ready, he's already injured enough for that to end up being a major regret. He's shaky, tired, and his broken bones and bruises are making themselves known, but he's not lightheaded or dizzy anymore. He knows where he is and what happened. He's pretty sure that getting up won't result in him falling back down on his ass. "As long as you can help me up off the ground."
"Easy." TK smiles. He takes the bottle of water from Buck, and sets it aside next to the reusable tote holding his groceries. He then picks up his phone, tucking it into the rear pocket of his jeans, then Buck's own discarded phone which he hands over to him. Buck slides it into his sling, since that's easier than reaching one of his own pockets. TK helps hoist him to his feet, mindful of his speed and all of Buck's injuries; it's only a little excruciating. When he's sure Buck is upright and steady enough,
TK lets go to bend down and pick up the water and the groceries.
They go inside without speaking, and Buck is simultaneously relieved that his family and future Captain aren't in the living room to see how wrecked he is, and disappointed because he just needs Eddie.
"All right, let's get you on the couch." TK helps him sit, even though he probably doesn't really need to, and gives Buck his water again. "Have a bit more of that, yeah? After a panic attack like that you're gonna get a killer emotional hangover if you don't rehydrate. I'll go get Eddie, send him in to you, and my dad and I will keep Chris occupied until you two are ready for him, OK?"
Buck isn't sure how the people he and Eddie have just met are so welcoming and kind and helpful, and he'll probably find the energy to be embarrassed or ashamed about needing it later but right now he's tired enough that all he feels is grateful. "Thanks."
"Anytime. You're gonna be family, right?" TK makes his exit.
Buck picks at the label on the bottle of water to avoid thinking about how Eddie is going to react. He stares at the label, dark blue with flashes of yellow and hopes he doesn't panic again. He's not sure how much time passes, though he doesn't think it's all that long, before Eddie appears in the entryway to the living room.
"Hey." He greets, worry evident in his tone as he crosses the room to sit next to Buck on the couch. "TK said you needed me?"
Buck clears his throat, still staring at the label as he picks at it. "That call I stepped out to make? It was to Katherine Belfort. The lawyer handling all the…all the paternity stuff." Somehow he finds it in him to turn and look at Eddie. "The results came in. I'm gonna be a dad."
Notes:
So...that was a lot? I know Buck was obviously very overwhelmed there in the last scene, but this news is not indicative of things getting bad for him again. Healing isn't linear and this news is big and attached to a lot of complicated emotions so it's not going to be the easiest for him to process, but he's putting in the work and things are moving in a positive direction for him. Things that could have been major setback ten or so chapters ago are starting to be a bit more manageable for him overall. He's upset and processing, and it will take time, but I've said from the very beginning (or at least known in my head) that this fic is going to end in a good, happy place for Buck and the people who make up his family by the end of it.
The next chapter might take a little longer than the past few have since I'm starting a new job on Monday and I don't know what my schedule will be like as I learn the ropes for that and adjust but I'll do my best to keep writing and working on it when I can.
As always, thank you for reading, kudos-ing, and commenting!
Chapter 36
Notes:
As is often the case, this chapter did not go where I thought it was going to go, but I think it's a worthwhile detour.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
"I'm gonna be a dad."
Eddie doesn't look shocked, or scared, or upset at Buck's words, and that settles something in Buck's stomach that he didn't even realize he was unsteady about. He's feeling too many things to pick out that many specifics right now, but he does get an immediate sense of guilt for having any doubt in Eddie and his reaction, even subconsciously. Eddie has only ever been supportive every step of the way, and even when the baby had been just a far off possibility, he'd assured Buck that he was on board and in for however Buck decided he wanted to handle it. But it still comes as a relief when all he can see in Eddie's eyes is a warm and gentle concern.
"OK." Eddie nods. His hand reaches out, going to Buck's knee, although the backs of their hands brush together since Buck is resting his water there as well. "How are you feeling?"
"Scared." Buck blinks and a tear falls with his admission. He'd stopped crying sometime when TK had been talking to him after the worst of his panic attack, but he's not surprised that he has tears left, even though he hates how it makes him feel. He's emotional at the best of times, and worn out and paper-thin as he is, his walls feel even more fragile. Maybe even non-existent. "I managed to talk to the lawyer and I know the plan we made with her back when we first met and were doing the 'what-if' stuff is the right one and what I want but I'm…I guess it took TK a really long time to coach me back when he found me panicking." He explains, since that feels more informative than him trying to find the words to describe everything. (He also makes a mental note to try and remember to ask TK about the app he had used to help him calm him down and bring him back since it had felt pretty useful when he realized it was there, although he's not sure a mental note on its own will be all that effective at this stage of the day he's had).
"Is there something specific scaring you? Or is it the whole situation?" Eddie probes.
It takes Buck a moment to process the question through the fog of his exhaustion, even though it's one he's mostly expecting. It takes him longer to reach a conclusion about what his honest answer is. "I think…I think the situation itself is overwhelming and that's probably what made me actually lose it, but I keep thinking…the only things my parents ever made me feel were negative. It was terrible when they made me feel invisible but in some ways that was better than when they were noticing me. Because most of the time when they noticed me it was clear how exhausting they found it to even put up with me. I don't know that they ever tried to actually care for me beyond the minimum that would keep up appearances and people out of their business, let alone love me. I can't really remember a time where I didn't just…know that my parents didn't really want me. That I was just…gum on their shoe that they couldn't scrape off. They made me feel small, and unloved, and that it was something about me, about who I was that made it impossible for anyone to—," He cuts himself off. "I think they broke me." He admits. "And…And I've always told myself, that—that even though there are so many things about me that are wrong, that need to be fixed or changed or that I need to find some way to bury—,"
"Buck, there is nothing about you that needs to be changed or hidden or anything else." Eddie interrupts him, voice soft, but fierce. "There is nothing wrong, about you or with you."
Buck can't process the sentiment right now, so he ignores it and keeps talking. "I've always told myself that even though I mess most things up, that one thing I would never do is make any child feel the way my parents made me feel. And…I want kids. And—and I don't want this kid to be put into the system or punished because of how they were conceived. I want to give them a home, and love them, and give them everything I never had but…"
"But?" Eddie prompts when a couple beats pass and Buck doesn't continue.
"But I'm terrified that I won't be able to love them." Buck's voice cracks as the confession tumbles out in a near whisper. He bows his head. "I'm scared that I'll look at them and only be able to see this terrible thing that happened—this horrible part of my life—and that I'll resent them the way my parents resented me, and I won't be able to…I'm scared that I'll raise a kid as fucked up as I am. I don't want to do that to someone."
They sit in silence for a moment. Buck is scared to look up and see the expression on Eddie's face. He can't help but worry, however irrationally (though he's not sure he can truly parse out what is and isn't a rational worry right now) that Eddie isn't going to tell him anything reassuring. He could theoretically decide that screwing up a kid is exactly the sort of fuck-up Buck could manage, and Buck can't risk seeing the moment of truth where he learns that's the case.
Eventually, Eddie speaks.
"Do you really think that's something you're capable of? Of making anyone you love feel small? Of treating anyone you love the way your parents treated you?"
Buck starts to protest. "If I can't love this kid—,"
"Buck. Evan. Look at me."
Buck doesn't move. He can't.
"Please?" Eddie tries again, voice a little softer. "I need you to look at me, so you can see that I believe what I'm about to tell you."
Deep down, he knows that Eddie isn't going to say or do anything that will make him feel worse. At least not intentionally. It's still an internal fight to convince himself to look up and meet Eddie's eyes, where he finds a kind of confusing blend of sadness and a fierce loving indignation.
"Buck, I will not begin to pretend I can understand how you feel about what happened to you." He begins. His voice matches his expression and it cuts straight to Buck's core. "That's not a position I've ever been put in. But I know you. And I don't think I've met anyone with a bigger heart, or a greater capacity for love than you have. I do not for even a second, believe that you are capable of making anyone, let alone an innocent child, feel anywhere close to the way your parents made you feel."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because. For as long as I've known you, I've watched you put the needs of everyone around you at least ten miles before your own. I'm pretty sure that six months ago, if someone had given you the option of cutting your leg off after the bombing instead of repairing it, and doing so meant that Chris would have been kept out of the tsunami and the air show the other day, you wouldn't have even hesitated. You don't think about yourself, you think about how the people around you feel.
"Buck, you love people. You love them deeply, and care for them, and sacrifice for them. It's what you do. I don't think there's a universe that exists where you meet a kid—any kid, let alone one that's a part of you—and don't immediately fall in love with them.
"If you end up with this kid, I have no doubt you'll hold them in your arms the first time and forget all about these worries. All you'll be able to think about is that there's so much love in your heart for them that there's no way you'll ever be able to show it all to them."
Buck sniffs and wipes at his face. He knows he doesn't believe in himself the way that Eddie seems to believe in him, and he thinks he's probably going to be scared about this and so many other things that will come with fighting for custody of and then raising this baby until…well if Eddie and Athena and all the other parents he knows and actually admires are to be believed, he'll be scared until the kid turns eighteen, if not longer. But it is meaningful to him to know that Eddie believes in him, and there is a reassurance that comes in hearing it. "I…I hope you're right."
Eddie slips his arm around Buck's shoulders, pulling him closer into his side. "We'll figure it out, OK hermoso? We've got time. For you to talk about this with me, with Jules… If you want to raise this baby, then we have the time to make sure you feel ready for it. Well," he pauses, his mouth twisting into a wry smirk, "as ready as a first time parent of an infant can feel. I don't know that there's such a thing as feeling totally ready for that."
Buck twists and tilts his head to give Eddie a brief kiss. Their positioning and his limited mobility leaves it landing at the corner of his partner's mouth. "I love you." He murmurs against Eddie's skin.
"I love you too." Eddie's response gets pressed into Buck's curls, and they sit in the silence for several moments. "What else has you worried?"
"I mean…we completely forgot to account for this when we were deciding to move here."
"Does it change anything?" Eddie asks. He's got that tone again, the one that makes it seem as though he thinks that things are fairly simple, but that he's willing to talk them out as much as Buck needs to.
"I mean…It feels like it should." Admittedly, Buck can't think of too many concrete examples right now about how this complicates things further. There's the legal battle, but they already have a few legal cases going that they'll have to deal with before and potentially after the move, so one more is maybe not as big of a deal as it could be. And obviously, there would be childcare stuff to think of down the line when the baby is born, but Buck knows they could factor that into the hiring and planning they do for Chris when they determine his care in Austin as well.
Eddie doesn't remove his arm from around Buck, but he pulls back a little so they're looking at each other a bit more again instead of just leaning against each other. "I think we'll look for a place to live with another bedroom than we were planning on, and maybe by the time we move we'll have some more stuff to send with ours. But I don't know that this would much change our decision." He waits again, for Buck to say something else, but Buck can't think of any reason to argue with him. He knows one of the reasons they make such good partners is because they panic and worry about different things and Eddie is able to make things Buck can't let go of seem easy and manageable, and today is no different. Sure, he'll probably end up overthinking it all over again at some point, but right now, the conversation and Eddie's reassurances feel like enough.
"Anything else?" Eddie prompts.
A lot of what had gotten Buck panicking feels hazy and blurred now, but there's one last thing that stands out in his brain. "What about Chris?"
"What about him?"
"He just agreed to one big life change. Is he going to be OK with a second? Does he even want a sibling?" Buck's eyes widen a little when he realizes what he's implied. As much as Eddie is his partner and they've been doing everything together, he can't remember if they'd really talked about what it would mean for them if Wells' baby ended up being his, or if Eddie was completely on board to raise them together they way they've started doing with Chris. Asking about Chris' opinion is pretty much just assuming that he is, and Buck doesn't feel right about doing that. "I mean..do you even want another kid?" He corrects and continues, voice much smaller.
"OK, well, that's two separate questions." Eddie says. "Can I start with the second?"
"Whatever you want." Buck mutters, pulling his eyes away to look back at the tattered label on the bottle of water again. He doesn't really think this is going to be Eddie drawing his line in the sand and pulling away from him and their relationship, but on the off chance it is, he doesn't think he can look at him when it happens.
Eddie does pull his arm away this time, but as he does, he plucks the water out of Buck's hand with his other hand and leans forward to stick it onto the coffee table so they can actually hold hands when his arm comes back around. "I won't lie to you and say that I"ve thought a lot about having kids beyond Chris." He weaves their fingers together. "But I've never been against the idea. And…you have always loved me and taken Chris as part of that package deal. If there's a kid coming into your life then that is just a new part of your deal that I want to embrace with you." He leans forward and they share another brief kiss. "As for Christopher, I honestly don't know how he'd feel about being an older brother, or how he'll do with so much change in a fairly short amount of time, but… he has the both of us. And he has his friends, and Carla, Abuela…His therapist. He's resilient, with a great support system. He can roll with the things being thrown at him."
"I don't want him to feel like he's losing anything, or being pushed to the side."
"We can be sure to check in with him as things develop." Eddie shrugs. "And we can schedule things for just him and me, just you and him, even just all three of us if he wants it. The good thing about working as a team is that we can work together to make sure everyone is taken care of."
"How do you make these things sound so simple?" Buck asks, voice barely above a murmur.
Eddie squeezes his hand. "Sorting someone else's worries out is always easier than sorting out your own. You've made plenty of my shit seem simple before too."
"I don't think you have nearly as much shit as me."
"Only because abuela and my sisters made me start sorting it out before they'd let me even move to LA." Eddie rolls his eyes. "And because shit storms come and go. You're in the middle of one right now. By this time next year, things'll probably look really different. For all of us."
Buck sighs, feeling simultaneously reassured by the thought that Eddie thinks they'll be together and things'll be different (hopefully better) some months from now and intimidated at the thought of what he'll have to go through and the work he'll have to put in to get to that point. "Right."
Eddie lets them sit in the moment for a few beats. "How are you feeling now?" He asks.
Buck considers the question. He's not panicked or scared in the same way he had been when he'd first gotten the news or before he and Eddie had started talking things through, but he can't say he feels good; he also doesn't really think he has it in him to keep discussing things right now. "Pretty wiped out." He admits.
"I'm not surprised." Eddie nods. "You're still recovering from surgery, and it sounds like you had a really rough panic attack just now. Either one of those is exhausting on it's own. We can get you back to the house for an early night? Maybe pick up some takeout on the way back so we don't have to think about anything for the rest of the night?" He suggests.
"No, we should finish things here." Leaving is tempting, since he's not sure how active a participant he can be in further conversations at this point, but hearing from his lawyer had made things about leaving Los Angeles more complicated, not less. They need to continue talking out logistics with Owen, and get as much advice and insight as he can provide.
"Owen will understand you needing to pause."
Buck shakes his head. "We won't have time to talk with him again before we leave."
"We can call him when we're back in LA."
"I'd rather just fill in the blanks now." Buck reiterates. "As much as we can anyways. The more details we have, the less I'll overthink later."
Eddie considers his words, but eventually sighs and agrees. "OK. But you let me know if we need to call it a night OK?"
"Will do." Buck leans over and gives Eddie one last brief kiss. "I love you."
"Love you too."
Buck goes to bed early that night, well before Chris (who is milking it being the last night of vacation for all that it's worth and insisting it's OK if he stays up and watches another movie because all they're doing the next day is breakfast with Adriana and flying home and he can totally take a nap on the plane) is even in his pajamas. He's too wiped out between general recovery, his panic attack, and then fighting through the exhaustion to talk to Eddie and then finish making preliminary plans with Captain Strand, to even pretend that he's able to stay up longer than it takes for him to force down an acceptable amount of take-out and let Eddie help him change. He pretty much falls asleep during what's becoming the routine arnica rubdown.
His first nightmare wakes him before Eddie has joined him for the night. He can still hear the mumbles of the TV down the hall, and he can just make out the melody of the theme for the Disney movie Chris has been obsessed with lately thanks to some of his friends at school, so he figures that Chris was successful in convincing Eddie to watch a whole other movie instead of maybe one half-hour TV show like his partner had been trying to bargain down to. Buck can't really remember what the dream was about, just knows that he wakes up on edge and uncomfortable, so he doesn't bother getting up to rejoin his family in the living room to seek their comfort, or even just in getting up off of the pillow nest Eddie had built him to splash some water on his face and get a drink to resettle himself. Buck just downloads a metronome app like TK had used to help him that afternoon, and times his breathing to the slow beats until it lulls him back to sleep.
He doesn't stay asleep much longer the second time, jerking awake from his second nightmare violently enough that it sends a stabbing from his ribs that seems travel straight to his head. He just barely manages to swallow back his nausea.
Eddie's there that time, or at least, by his side in moments, since he'd been in the adjoining bathroom brushing his teeth. He tries to get Buck to talk, and Buck does remember more of this dream, but he doesn't really want to explain it to his partner. Eddie doesn't need to have images of Christopher lying broken on the ground or being swept away in the tsunami or any of the other remixes of violent trauma his brain had decided to show him put into his own head, so instead Buck lies and says that he doesn't really remember, and tries to ignore how guilty the lie, however well-intentioned it may be, makes him feel. He waits for Eddie to join him in bed before he tries to sleep for a third time, and eventually manages to drift off when Eddie helps him get settled against his chest and he can use the steady beat of his partner's heart to lull him under.
Buck doesn't really know how long he stays asleep that time. He just knows that one minute Christopher is falling out of his grasp and they're both falling in what feels like an endless free fall towards the ground, and the next he's snapping to awareness in Eddie's arms, his stomach falling out from under him.
The third time is just as sudden and painful as the second and this time he does have to scramble up and into the bathroom, where he loses the contents of his stomach. He falls to his knees partway through, unable to use the bathroom counter to maintain balance the way he might if his arm weren't strapped to his chest in a sling. His ribs scream so much in protest at the whole ordeal that even though the dream wasn't nearly bad enough to send him into another panic attack, he finds himself gasping and fighting to control his breathing anyways.
"Oh Ev…" Eddie's soft, sleep-heavy voice registers from the door frame, and Buck doesn't have to turn around to know that he's coming into the room with him. Even so, he appreciates when Eddie keeps talking and telling him what he's doing. "I'm coming up behind you, OK?"
Buck nods. "Sorry for waking you up." His voice comes out rough, and he swallows around the bitter taste lingering in his mouth.
"You know you don't need to apologize for that." Eddie sighs. "Let me know when you're ready to move, OK?" Buck takes a few more moments to breathe and let some of the agony in the side of his chest fade back before he thinks moving probably won't make anything worse and he grants Eddie permission to help him back to his feet. Eddie reaches around him to flush the sick away and close the lid of the toilet, before giving Buck another quick warning and laying hands on him to help pull him back to his feet. "Is it gonna be easier to sit or stand while taking care of your teeth?"
Buck is tired enough that he'd rather sit, but he's not sure his body will tolerate sitting down and getting back up again. "Stand, I guess."
From the way Eddie's brow furrows together, he knows this isn't Buck's first choice, but he doesn't comment. "Do you want to talk about it?" He asks as he lets Buck go; he turns to the counter and starts to prep Buck's toothbrush for him.
"Just another nightmare." Buck shrugs as much as his body will allow; he doesn't really want to get into it, but he still feels bad for lying to Eddie after the earlier bad dream, and he is aware enough to know that if he doesn't say something to his partner after getting caught in a nightmare for the second time that night, he'll only worry him more. "Chris and I were falling."
"Not surprising." Eddie says. He's pretty matter-of-fact about it; Buck appreciates that he's not trying to reassure him or tell him that he kept Chris uninjured so he shouldn't spend time thinking about it anymore. "I've had a few dreams about that since it happened too."
Hearing that is surprising, but probably more helpful than any reassurance Eddie could offer anyways, to be honest. Logically, Buck realizes that Eddie would have been at least as scared seeing Chris fall from the bleachers as Buck had felt trying to hold on to him while falling, if not moreso, but there is something encouraging about actually having him admit that to some degree. Eddie's more open with him about his past struggles and current emotions than he is with most everyone else except for the therapist he still sees on occasion (and maybe Chris when it's appropriate), but he's still so collected and together most of the time that it can be easy for Buck to forget that he gets effected by things as well. Even so, helpful as it is, it also stings to know that Eddie hasn't been sharing this with him.
"You haven't said anything." Buck comments, too tired to hide his slight hurt.
"My nightmares don't always wake me up the way yours get you." Eddie explains. He rinses Buck's toothbrush briefly in the sink before holding it out for him.
Buck takes it with his free hand, but doesn't start brushing right away. "Even if it doesn't wake you up, I'd rather hear about it at some point." He offers, his negative emotions gaining a little bit of steam. He's been put through too much of a wringer over the past few days to control his reaction better and just let this be a calm conversation.
"I don't need to bother you with—,"
"If I'm not bothering you with my shit, I don't see how you could bother me with yours." Buck cuts him off, raising his eyebrow in slightly nervous challenge. "Unless you haven't been telling me the truth about that?"
"Nothing you need bothers me." Eddie shakes his head, then sighs. "I just…you're dealing with a lot right now and this is something I can deal with on my own."
Buck doesn't answer; he has a few responses sitting on the tip of his tongue, but he has a feeling if says any of them, this will turn into an actual fight, and he doesn't want that. He doesn't want to start anything he'll regret, so he settles for glaring and turning around to face the sink and brush his teeth.
Eddie doesn't let the silence last long. "Buck, it's not that I'm keeping it from you or not trusting you or anything like that. I just don't want to put any more on your plate. You're dealing with injuries and court cases and stuff with your sister and now this paternity stuff…not to mention your overall mental health. Just because some of the stuff is starting to get to me, doesn't mean you should have to start worrying about me."
OK well…Eddie has missed Buck's point so badly that he might as well be in a completely different conversation. And any restraint Buck was feeling seems to vanish in favor of feeling shrunken down, hurt, and well on his way to worthless. But it's easier to be angry about it than to lean into those feelings.
He leans down slightly to spit into the sink. "Fuck you."
"Buck, hermos—,"
"Don't." Buck cuts him off. Eddie usually knows him so well, and almost always just…says the right thing, but he's so off the mark right now, in a way that feels belittling or insulting and maybe it's because on some level Eddie is right and he has so much on his plate, but it's making Buck mad to the point where he doesn't even want to hear Eddie try and sweet talk or explain his way out of it. "I can't believe you would actually….Do you honestly think that keeping—I can't believe you!" He drops his toothbrush into the sink. He should rinse it off—needs to rinse out his mouth—but right now he just wants to get out and away from Eddie.
Maybe they can talk it out later. Right now, he doesn't want to be around someone who is making him feel so small.
"What is there to believe?" Eddie asks incredulously as Buck turns around. "Buck, it's a couple of bad dreams, not some big secret. I was just trying to protect you."
"I don't need to be protected!" It's only the knowledge that Chris is sleeping down the hall that keeps Buck's voice below a full shout, but he's well past calm and quiet. Eddie is his partner. His confidant. One of two people he's felt like he can trust unconditionally, and he's just found out he's been lying to him. At least by omission for the last few days. And that little seed of doubt is enough to creep under his skin and bury into the insecurities he's been working so hard to grow past. In a few seconds it feels like they spring back into place just as big, if not bigger than before.
Eddie's incredulity morphs into a frown, and he seems to realize now that he's made a misstep of some fashion. "Obviously that was a poor choice of words. I didn't mean it like that."
"I don't really care right now how you meant it Eddie." Buck sighs. Already, his bluster is fading; he doesn't have the energy for a fight. But that doesn't mean he wants to pretend that things are fine or just let it go either. "I'm going to go find some tea or some ginger ale or something." They haven't explored their VRBO's kitchen all that thoroughly, but they have one of the fancier Hildy automatic coffee maker models, and Buck has to think they probably have a tea option for their guests to use as well, just playing to the odds. "And then I'm gonna find a space documentary or something and sleep out in the living room." He moves to step around Eddie and leave, but Eddie moves to stay directly in his path, his face folding into sad concern.
"No, we need to talk about this."
"I don't want to talk right now, Eds. Just go back to bed."
Eddie's hand closes gently around Buck's wrist as he once again tries to step out a second time. "OK, we don't have to talk. But you're upset after a long, hard day. I don't want you to be alone right now."
"Yeah, well, that's one of the things you've missed I guess." Buck pulls his wrist right back out of Eddie's grip. "I'm an adult and you don't get to decide that." He manages to get past Eddie this time, but is only a step out of the bathroom back into the bedroom before Eddie's voice stops him. For how little they've actually fought, he sounds defeated.
"At least let me sleep out on the couch. You're hurt. You should take the bed."
A part of Buck thinks that he might actually sleep better in the upright structure of one of the armchairs in the living room, but as upset as he is with Eddie, he thinks they're probably both going to spend most, if not all, of the remainder of the night awake and stewing, and Eddie will only feel guilty on top of whatever else he's feeling if he thinks that he's put Buck in a position of being in more pain. Buck's not happy, but he doesn't want that. "Fine." He concedes. "I'll get my tea and then come back here."
Eddie sighs. "I'll take a pillow and blanket out to the couch."
Buck starts walking again, sinking into the feelings of hurt and inadequacy that Eddie's choices and words have stirred up. He just barely hears his partner speak again as he makes it out to the hall.
"Lo siento, Evan. Te amo."
Buck wakes up the next morning to a small form gently but clumsily working its way between his uninjured arm and his chest. He blinks, feeling a mildly hungover despite it being months since his last drink. It takes a few attempts to clear his vision without being able to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but when Buck can see, he finds his new companion to be Christopher. The boy's curls are wild atop his head and he doesn't have his glasses with him; a glance towards the clock on the bedside table tells Buck that it's just barely six in the morning.
"Christopher?" His question comes out in a rough whisper.
Buck hadn't slept much the night before. After getting some water to finish rinsing his mouth and a mug of tea to settle his stomach. he'd retreated back to the master bedroom as Eddie had insisted, and spent a good amount of time on a Facetime call with Steve. Talking with his former commander, as usual, had been helpful; he'd understood what had made Buck upset about Eddie's choices without needing to have it explained, but he'd also been able to give some perspective (based on his own feelings about wanting to help and protect Buck) as to why Eddie had most likely decided to keep things to himself—and he'd done so without making Buck feel stupid or wrong for being upset, or telling him that it was something he should just let go (which Buck's own brain had almost immediately started trying to convince him of). After they'd talked themselves out on the fight, Buck still hadn't felt ready to try and sleep again and with it being so much earlier in the evening in Hawaii, had opted to share all of the developments regarding deciding to move to Austin and now the paternity results with Steve, which had given them plenty of things to talk about until Buck finally felt that he couldn't fight off his exhaustion anymore and had wrapped up the call.
That had been a couple of hours ago, and while his last attempt at sleep hadn't been interrupted by nightmares that woke him up or that he can remember, he hardly feels rested.
And as he comes to more awareness, things just feel wrong. Eddie's not in bed with him. And Christopher is not an early riser. He knows from Eddie that even on Christmas, when Chris is at his most excited, that he's never had quite the same struggle of other parents of convincing his son that the celebration can't start until the sun is at least visible. If Chris is crawling into bed this early in the morning, something probably woke him up, and Buck has his doubts that it would be anything good.
"Buck?" Chris startles at his voice, and his head snaps up in Buck's direction. Buck notices immediately that his face looks a splotchy and tacky; it's fairly obvious that he's been crying.
Already, it's definitely not a good morning.
"Hey, superman." Buck shifts so his arm is actually wrapping around Christopher and drawing him close. Chris is tactile, especially if he is unwell or upset, and even without knowing what's wrong that had brought Chris to him, Buck can't help but start to offer the comfort he knows should usually work. "It's pretty early, bud. What's got you in here?"
Christopher burrows into Buck's side. "I had a bad dream." He turns his face into Buck's chest after giving his first answer, and his second sentence comes out muffled. "I was just gonna come see that you were still here but then I wanted a hug. I didn't mean to wake you up."
"You can always wake me up if you need something Chris." Buck reassures. "I don't mind." One thing he and Eddie had decided on the day before was that they didn't want to tell Chris about the baby until things were a little more certain on that front; even knowing now for sure that Buck is the father, given everything that might happen with a potential custody fight (and their lawyer is going to be filing a formal paternity declaration and a motion for full custody that won't be tied to the outcome of Wells' criminal trial) they don't want to get Chris excited and/or worried about a new sibling until they know for sure that Buck actually will have custody. Even so, the concerns Buck has about Chris feeling set to the side or in any way off-kilter about all of the changes happening that he does and doesn't know about are at the front of Buck's mind, and he wants to do what he can to get out in front of those feelings and make sure Chris knows that both he and his dad are available and open to talking, no matter the time or situation. He doesn't get a direct response, not that he really expects one, and then decides to wait a few extra moments to see if Chris will say anything further once he gets settled in, but the boy stays quiet. "Do you want to talk about it? Or just hang out for now?"
"It was the air show." Chris begins after a few beats. He turns his head again, so his cheek is still resting against Buck's chest, but his mouth is facing out. Buck doesn't have to fight to figure out what he's saying anymore. "Before the crash. We were on the bleachers. But things weren't the same. 'Cause I was sitting with dad. And you were sitting with us but you seemed really sad and tired like you are some days now, and not OK like you were that day."
Buck only nods and hums in understanding, not wanting to interrupt.
"Then when the planes crashed, it didn't really happen the same. I was safe with dad, but the part of the bleachers you were on broke and you started to fall. You caught yourself on the edge, and were kinda hanging there, and dad kept telling you that as soon as he got me safe he'd come get you, but you said you weren't strong enough. He put me down and started going to you, but he had to go slow, and he kept telling you to hang on, but you said you were too tired, and let go and fell." Chris sniffs again, but it quickly turns into a choked sob. "You didn't even try! Or say goodbye! It was worse than mom…"
Buck swallows around the thick lump in his throat. He has to resist the urge to close his eyes and just wallow in guilt. It's bad enough that Chris has experienced so many traumatic events that can feed his nightmares, but now just being around Buck is giving his subconscious more things to worry about and be scared of. He thought they'd been careful, giving Chris reasonable, age-appropriate explanations that let him know he wasn't well, but not exactly how serious it was, but either they'd failed miserably and Chris was smart enough for his subconscious to fill in the blanks, or he'd noticed a bunch of stuff despite their care and attempts at discretion.
Either way, it's exactly what Buck had wanted to avoid when all of this had started.
Chris shouldn't be worried about him. Not like this. Partially because it's not his job as the kid, but mostly because as much as Buck is still struggling more often than not, he doesn't think he's nearly as bad off as he'd been when he'd first sought help, or even a week or two ago.
Buck can't begin to pretend to understand exactly how the brain works to process trauma and difficult emotions or why it crafts the dreams that it does to do that, but he doesn't think that his depression and mental health should be factoring into everything else that Chris is trying to deal with. And he knows that he doesn't want Chris to worry that he's at risk of losing every adult in his life the way he'd lost his mom.
"That's a really awful dream, Chris." He struggles to find anything that feels close to the right words to say, and eventually just talks for the sake of not leaving them in silence. He holds Chris as close as is comfortable, sweeping his thumb in slow circles across his shoulders, hoping it might somehow be soothing. "Seeing everything at the air show was really scary. I've been having nightmares about it too." A tiny, petty part of him wants to mention that Eddie is as well, since he now knows about that, but Buck would never actually do that; Eddie gets to decide what he shares with his son. (Technically, one of the things that had come out of his conversation with Steve is the acknowledgment that Eddie gets to decide what he shares with everyone, and Buck does believe that since he doesn't want to be forced to share everything with everybody either, but that doesn't stop him from feeling hurt by Eddie's reasoning for not sharing this particular detail with him.)
Chris twists and turns a little in his embrace so he's looking up towards Buck directly with slightly narrowed eyes. "You didn't seem scared."
"Part of being a firefighter is staying calm and managing our fear. Your dad and I still get scared by a lot of things, but we've learned how to keep moving and work when we need to. A lot of the time, I don't realize something scares me until after it's over and I can really think about what happened." He gives Chris a few moments to process, and only decides to keep talking when it seems like Chris isn't sure what to say next. "When things like the air show or the tsunami happen, I can usually do what I need to do to keep the people around me safe and to help other people, but afterwards I'll have nightmares, and my brain doesn't just show me the things that actually happened that scared me, but it kind of twists things around and shows me other things that could have happened that maybe would have made it worse. It kind of sounds like your dream was like that too."
Chris nods. "You fell and—and I don't think you made it. I could see you on the ground but you weren't moving and there was a lot of blood….And—and it kind of seemed like you chose to fall. Like you wanted to or something."
Shit.
They definitely haven't done a good enough job at protecting Chris if this is what his subconscious is coming up with.
Chris' fears drive into Buck's chest like an icy knife, and his body feels weighed down by guilt and shame. Sure, Chris comes by some of his fear of abandonment and being left from his early childhood with Eddie being gone (even if it was for work) and then everything that happened with Shannon when she first decided to leave and then when she came back only to pass away, and that given those events and the knowledge he's building about the world and emergencies from hearing what he does about his dad's work now it's fairly natural that he would fear people he cares about dying, especially in traumatic events that he's witness to and a part of, but Buck can hear the other piece of things. The piece where Chris isn't just afraid that an accident or something might kill him, but that Buck might choose to give up or leave or die.
Buck doubts that Chris would worry specifically about that if he weren't being constantly exposed to his mental health struggles.
And a part of him feels even worse because he'd only asked for help and convinced himself to be more open because he was determined not to give up or leave. He'd stopped pretending that things were OK so he could focus on actually being OK, and doing so appears to have unlocked a new fear for Chris.
His mind races as he searches for the right way to assure Chris that he doesn't need to worry about losing him that way.
"I'm sorry," Buck presses a kiss down into Chris' sleep-wild curls. "I didn't realize that the way I've been feeling lately and how I've been acting was making you worry like that. If I had, I would have tried to talk to you a bit more about it."
"What would we talk about?" Chris frowns. "You and dad already told me how how you might need extra hugs or help with stuff right now while you're sad."
"Well…I think we kept that talk pretty vague because feelings are pretty complicated and we didn't want to overwhelm or scare you." Buck begins slowly. It feels a little like he's overstepping, but he tries to tell himself that Eddie has told him multiple times that he's family and like a second dad to Chris, and that part of that should mean he can step in and have these harder conversations with Chris on his own—especially if they're related to his own feelings. "But I think that maybe we didn't explain enough, because when someone is sad the way I've been lately, it can change the way they act and if you don't know that, seeing those changes can be confusing and hard to think about or deal with. I think maybe by not explaining more, especially after you saw me have a panic attack and maybe saw your dad or Steve taking care of me some times, we left you not knowing things that maybe would have made it easier for you to understand what was going on or make things less scary." He pauses for a beat, mostly because he's not sure exactly where to go from there. "It sounds like you're scared that I'm going to go away because of how I've been feeling and acting lately."
Chris takes a moment to answer, brow furrowed in thought. "Maybe?" His answer comes out as more of a question. "Things have been kinda weird lately. I know things change when you don't feel good, and it's not anybody's fault or anything like that, but things have been really different and quiet and stuff lately. And dad's been really worried. I don't think he wants anyone to know, but sometimes he gets a funny look on his face like he used to before we left El Paso. And one time, when you were in an appointment or taking a nap or something, I heard him talking to Steve about being scared that someday he'll have to go to work or bring me somewhere and you won't be around or OK when he gets back. Did…Are you thinking about leaving?"
"Absolutely not." This, Buck doesn't need to pause or hesitate before answering; he squeezes Chris in their embrace carefully. "Sometimes when we get sad the way I've been…our brains tell us really mean things. Things that aren't true, but can feel really real, and can sometimes convince us to do things that we don't really want to do. That's part of what I've been dealing with and why I've been upset lately. Your dad and Steve know about it, because I asked for their help to find ways that would help me feel better, and that's why your dad has been worried. I've talked to him about how I've been feeling, and he knows that my brain is trying to convince me to do something that could make me go away."
"But you don't really want to?" Chris asks.
"I don't." Buck confirms. "I asked for Steve and your dad's help because even though I'm really sad and tired and scared sometimes, I have a lot of things and people in my life that I would never want to leave behind or hurt. Like you."
"Me?"
Buck nods. "Yeah, you. You and your dad are some of best people to ever come into my life, Superman. You're my family, and I love you so, so much."
"I love you too."
"Thanks, bud."
"So…you're really not going anywhere?"
Buck considers this answer; he doesn't want to lie or make any promises that he can't hope to keep, but he wants to make sure Chris knows that he has every intention of sticking around. That if anything does happen, it won't be because Buck doesn't want to be there with them. "I can't promise that nothing will ever happen, Chris. Sometimes there are accidents or bad things that we can't avoid or change. But what I can promise you is that I'm never going to intentionally leave you behind. And if something does happen, I'm going to do everything I can to get through it, and to fight to get back to you and your dad. OK?"
"OK."
He figures he's done an OK job of navigating the whole conversation when Chris resettles, snuggling back against his chest once more. Buck is happy to just let him get comfortable and hopefully fall asleep until a little bit later in the morning, and let the contentment of spending quality time with Chris balm and soothe away at least some of the previous night's difficulties, but the moment doesn't quite last. Buck is thinking about the lightly accomplished feeling of helping Chris deal with some of his worries and wondering how long they might be able to get away with 'sleeping in' when they definitely have actual plans for the morning before they need to get to the airport to return their rental car and head back to Los Angeles, when Eddie, looking about as sleep-rumpled but even less rested than his son appears in the doorway of the bedroom.
"Buck, Christopher's not in his—," Eddie cuts himself off. "Never mind." He flushes lightly. "Chris, mijo, what are you doing in here?"
"I had a bad dream." Chris shrugs. "But I'm OK now. Buck and I talked about it."
Buck isn't sure if he imagines the hurt look that appears for the quickest of flashes across Eddie's face at his son's answer.
"You didn't want to come find me?"
He knows he doesn't imagine the touch of sass in Chris' reply. "I thought you'd be in here too."
"Right." Eddie's slight tinge of blush darkens a little. If Buck has to guess, he'd think Eddie had maybe had a bad dream himself (since it seems to be going around) and had wanted to check on Chris; on not finding him in his own room, he'd started to panic and then even with finding him and knowing he's safe, he'd maybe for just a moment forgotten that Chris wouldn't have known to go to the living room if he'd needed him in the night, since their fight had happened after he'd been put to bed.
Neither Eddie nor Buck get to attempt to offer an explanation or ask anything else before Chris is talking again and asking in a very point-blank manner, "Did you guys have a fight?"
"What makes you ask that?" Buck finds his voice to answer before Eddie does; Eddie still seems to be processing the bulk of the conversation and then potentially getting caught out by his child.
"It's too early to be up." Chris answers. "And back when mom was still here sometimes she and dad would fight and one of them would sleep on the couch." Buck and Eddie share a look; they've definitely been caught out.
It is perhaps a little cowardly of him, but Buck decides to let Eddie handle answering the question and whether or not to come clean. He's already dealt with one challenging conversation and the sun is just barely peeking through the curtains.
"I made a mistake and hurt Buck's feelings last night." Eddie admits, sounding either embarassed or contrite. Buck can't tell which. Maybe it's both. "And we decided that we both wanted some time on our own to calm down so we wouldn't fight."
"Oh." Chris takes a moment to think and process his dad's answer. "They make us take breaks from people we disagree with at school sometimes too. And then when we're ready they make us talk about what happened to apologize and fix it. Are you two going to talk?"
"We are." Eddie fully enters the room, and crosses over to the bed. He sits on the edge, careful not to get into Buck's space even as he reaches across his injured arm to take Chris' hand. "I owe Buck an apology, and I want to make sure if he has anything he wants to say about how he's feeling he gets a chance to tell me. And then we'll make sure we understand each other better so we don't have the same problem again."
"Good."
Eddie's explanation lets Buck release a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. He hadn't truly thought the fight had been anything that would lead to them breaking up—he thinks Eddie's description of him hurting Buck's feelings by mistake is probably accurate—and that with a calm discussion where he can make Eddie understand why his choice hurt him they'd be fine, if not stronger, but there was a small, worried voice (the kind of voice that he'd been trying to explain to Chris) telling him that letting Eddie know he was upset and not OK with things was the fast track to convincing his partner that he was too much work and not worth the effort. Hearing Eddie say that he wants to talk and thinks things will be fine after they do is a relief. Enough so that Buck is willing to offer an olive branch to hopefully help Eddie relax some until they can find the time to have that conversation.
"Since it is so early, what do you say we all get in here and try to get another little bit of sleep in?" He suggests, flashing what he hopes is a welcoming and reassuring smile. "Get a Diaz snuggle session in."
"Yeah, dad." Chris nods enthusiastically. "You should get back in bed with us."
Eddie smiles softly, and the last bit of concern bleeds from Buck. "Let me go grab my pillow."
Notes:
Buck and Eddie will definitely finish talking things out next chapter, and then unless something completely out of left field happens, they'll also get back to LA and see some of what's been happening since they've been gone.
As always, thank you for reading, commenting, giving kudos, and everything else that you do!
Chapter Text
"I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure at our last session you told me you were done with the sling." Jules frowns a little at their camera after greeting Buck. Technically speaking, his appointment with them wasn't supposed to be until the next day, but not long after Buck, Eddie, and Chris had determined that they could no longer waste the morning in bed if they were going to meet Adriana as planned for a farewell brunch, Jules had reached out because their sister was going into an unexpected surgery the next day when they were meant to be having their appointment, and while they'd given Buck the option of squeezing some time in this morning or just waiting until their next appointment (scheduled to take place in a few days time) and a part of Buck did want to go to the breakfast with Adriana to join in sharing the news that they'd be moving to join her in Austin around the new year, he'd ultimately decided that because so much had happened where having a neutral party to talk things through with would be helpful, if he wanted to keep his progress moving in a forward direction he should sacrifice going to the breakfast in favor of taking the time at therapy, so he'd stayed at the VRBO while Chris and Eddie went to go meet Adri.
"Uh, yeah." Buck nods, not entirely sure the best way to jump in or explain everything that's happened in the few days since their last appointment. "I was, but…a lot has happened…?" It's not a question at all, but he trails off as though it is, scratching awkwardly behind his ear.
Jules rolls with it. "OK. Tell me a bit about that."
"Well…Did you see anything on the news about the big accident at an exhibition air show in Austin?" He waits for Jules to nod. "Well…Eddie, Chris, and I were there. Eddie and Chris are fine, and I wasn't hurt at first, but Eddie and I stepped in to help someone because the first responders on site didn't have the training that we did to do it, and after that I took a fall and re-broke my arm and some ribs. Had another surgery and am pretty much starting over on the physical recovery front."
"I'm sure all of that has brought up a lot of emotions." Jules comments. They leave it there for Buck to elaborate on his own.
Buck shrugs. He wouldn't have said it in the hours afterwards (at least partially because by the time he was in a place to process he was on painkillers), but he's self aware enough now to know that he'd smothered a lot of feelings in the moment on scene as he'd discussed a little with Chris, and that the reality is he'd been scared by what he'd experienced, and otherwise affected by what he'd witnessed at the scene and that even when he's not thinking about it constantly throughout the day, he's still trying to think through it; otherwise, he wouldn't be having nightmares. At the same time, he's not sure those feelings are the most important thing going on in his world right now, but he doesn't want to shut down a path of discussion that Jules, the professional, thinks might be worthwhile. "It was a rough day." He admits. "There are a few things that could have gone way worse than they did, and I think we're all pretty scared by the close calls. And at any mass casualty event you see some pretty horrific things that I wish we could have at least spared Chris from."
Jules makes a note on their notebook out of frame. "How are you feeling about resetting the clock on your injuries?" They inquire. "At our last appointment we talked a bit about your doubts for returning to the LAFD and that you were starting to feel the pressure of needing to decide what you wanted to do because you were healed enough for physical therapy and all of the steps you'd need to take to get back in the field. Does this change how you're feeling about work at all?"
"I mean…it does, but probably not the way you're talking about."
"Can you elaborate?"
"Before I fell and got hurt, when I was helping Eddie save a little girl, everything kind of…fell back into place. Everything I've been worried about didn't seem to matter. There were people who needed help and being someone who had the knowledge and skills to step up and help, being able to do so…that was a big reminder about why I became a firefighter in the first place. And it made me want to find a way back."
"That's great, Buck. I know having those doubts about something you loved was frustrating for you. It sounds like even though the circumstances weren't ideal, going through that experience reaffirmed the skills that you weren't sure you could trust in anymore."
Buck nods. "Yeah, I think it did."
"And…and it's OK if you don't have an answer for this yet, but does knowing that you can still do the job make you feel differently about the concerns you were having about your current firehouse and the LAFD?"
"Not exactly, but…" Buck reaches for the fidget toy he had set at the side of his tablet when setting up or the appointment in the VRBO living room. He has a feeling that this topic is going to lead into a few of the other developments he's had since his last appointment, and those are definitely the things that he's still unsure about and are putting him on edge. Especially after fighting with Eddie the night before. As much as he (mostly) thinks they're going to be fine once they have a chance to talk to each other, Buck can't help but worry that he's thrown himself all in with Eddie while everything is changing and/or falling apart in big ways, and there's now a fracture, however small, in their relationship where there hadn't been one before. "It did lead to a job offer."
He explains the offer they'd been made by Austin FD and Captain Strand, and how the conversations they'd had with him and with each other had led to the decision that they were accepting and planning on moving to Austin. He and Jules discuss some of his feelings about this turn in events, on how the job being offered is better suited overall for his training and interests and will be a big (and likely needed) pay bump, and how he's starting to realize that between everything that's happened in his personal life that's been exposed to his coworkers in Los Angeles and their reactions to it, and the things he's learned about how Bobby is (or isn't) managing and teaching him, that he may not be able to rebuild the trust he needs or wants in the department there. Then they start to delve into his nerves on how, even though he thinks accepting and moving is the right choice based on how things are going for him, that Buck is nervous to start over in a new city without a very big support system in place, and this leads into his concerns about how things are going with Eddie and the fight they'd had once he'd learned that Eddie had been keeping his nightmares from him and why. How he hopes they'll be be just fine once they have a chance to talk, since things haven't been tense or awkward between them while they've navigated the logistics of the rest of the trip, but that there is a part of him that worries Eddie won't understand why he's upset or will think he's being ridiculous about Eddie's perfectly reasonable choice not to share everything with Buck.
"OK." Jules begins when Buck reaches the end point of his explanation of his anxieties over his pending conversation with Eddie. "So what I'm hearing is that you understand that Eddie gets to decide what he shares with you about himself, but that this particular decision to not share his nightmares and reaction to the air show triggered an emotional reaction from you that overrode that understanding. I'm also hearing you assign judgments to those feelings, and your concerns that Eddie is going to assign those same judgments and it will put a more permanent wedge between you." They pause, ever-so-briefly. "What I didn't hear, is a specific explanation of why him not telling you about the nightmares was a triggering thing for you, or a name for any of the feelings that finding out about them brought up for you and caused you to lash out. Is that something you think you can elaborate on for me?"
"I—," Buck stops himself after a single word because he realizes he doesn't have an answer at the ready. He knows how finding out Eddie had been keeping his nightmares from him had burrowed into every insecurity from his past that he's been working to let go of, and feeling so suddenly small because of someone who he usually never has to doubt himself with had been why he'd lashed out and tried to create the distance that he hasn't wanted in so long, but Jules is asking about more than that. They want the why. And Buck has been so busy feeling upset, and then worrying about how he and Eddie will navigate talking to each other and making things better now that they have fought, that he hasn't spent all that much time exploring why exactly being left out of this, even though it's not something that effects him directly, made him react so strongly. He knows the gist—he's done his fair share of reflecting on a number of subjects since starting to work with Jules so he isn't completely oblivious to how a lot of his feelings are tied to past relationships and traumas—but he hasn't thought about this specifically to put words to it. His mouth opens and closes once or twice as he considers how to explain things now. "I feel like for most of my life, people have only cared about what I can give or do for them. They'd only pay attention if I had something they needed or wanted, or when I was causing too much of a hassle for them to ignore. It was the worst when I was a kid, but it's…always been a thing. If I've wanted to have people around, I've always felt like I need to put them first no matter what."
Jules nods, but doesn't say anything.
"My CO in the SEALS was the first person who really stepped up and said that wasn't true." Buck continues. "He really tried to drill it into my head that I was on his team because of what I could do, but that he and the other guys wanted me around outside of missions because of who I was, so I couldn't act like I was expendable or always put everyone else's needs ahead of mine. And I've tried to keep that in mind since I left the service, but…I'm not very good at it most of the time. It still feels like to a lot of people I'm invisible unless I can be at work with them, or that they're only going to support me if I'm fitting in with exactly what they want." He pauses, resting his fidget toy in his lap so he can grab his glass of water.
"Does Eddie make you feel like that?" Jules asks as Buck drinks.
Buck shakes his head as he puts the glass back down. "No. He's…Eddie's one of the only people I know who sees me. Not the skills that I have and my strength or the faces I'll put on sometimes to feel like I belong with everyone else or what I can do for him but the actual person that's behind all of those pieces."
"Buck, everything you've told me, both just now and from the discussions we've had about your relationship with your parents and how they treated you while you were growing up and even the nature of your conception, paints me the picture that you were habituated to believe that love, and even attention, are both conditional and transactional. You've learned to present yourself as what people want instead of who you actually are, to hide your feelings unless they're positive, and to be the easiest, most useful version of yourself for a given situation in the hopes that it gains you positive attention and keeps people in your life."
Buck exhales heavily. As normal as all of that feels to him, he's aware enough to know that it's not healthy, or normal, or any number of other labels he can think of, to do constantly. "Well when you put it like that, I sound pretty fucked up."
"You're not fucked up." Jules says, voice blunt. "This isn't a direct comparison, but think of dogs who get raised by owners who train them to be aggressive. Who withhold most sorts of positive reinforcement or even companionship outside of very specific circumstances, and then put them in situations where the only thing the animal knows how to do is react with violence, hurting another animal or person. Which party is the problem in that scenario? The dog, or the owners that taught them to behave that way?"
"The owners."
"Exactly. And the dog, once removed from the abusive situation and put in a more supportive, caring environment with a person who is willing to work with and help them, can unlearn the less-ideal behaviors they've come to rely on to survive and adapt to live comfortably in an environment that better suits their actual needs and learn to interact with and build relationships with other animals and people."
Buck blinks, trying to process the metaphor Jules has presented. "So…in this scenario, I'm the dog, my parents are the shitty original owners and you're that Cesar Milan guy coming in to teach me how to be normal?"
"It's not a direct comparison." Jules repeats; their eyes glint behind their glasses with a slight smile. "I use the dog metaphor because most people can look at that scenario and see that it's the person responsible for teaching the dog that caused the negative outcomes, not the dog that was reliant on the person's care. In the real world, and your scenario specifically, you were a child, relying on the adults around you to care for and teach you, and to prepare you for the world around you as you grew older and gained independence. However, your parents emotionally abused and neglected you, warping how you see, understand, and form relationships.
"You survived living with your parents, and eventually were able to leave. Now, several years later, you've realized that the lessons they taught you through their treatment weren't accurate to the average experience and you're seeking understanding and putting the work in for yourself to better understand how what you were taught is harming you, and to figure out what changes you want to make moving forward."
"So…I'm the dog and the Cesar Milan?"
Now Jules does smile. "Pretty much. I'm just someone who can help you navigate through the experience."
"OK." Buck stops to think for a moment. He's pretty sure he's understood Jules' larger point here, especially when they agreed with his assessment, but he can't quite figure out why they've gone down this exact path to begin with. He'd brought up always feeling like people want something from him because he knows that's somehow part of why Eddie not sharing with him or asking for help bothered him, but the full picture isn't coming into place for him, and hearing Jules' thoughts on how he'd been raised to hide and put himself last doesn't make the image any clearer. After thinking about it for a few moments and not being able to make the two points connect, he says as much.
"Well, all of the metaphors and therapy-speak aside, you were telling me that the majority of your connections with people have been transactional, and that building relationships that aren't has been something that you're working on. You also said that Eddie has always made you feel valued for who you are, not what you can contribute." Jules' waits for Buck to agree. "That's a positive relationship to be in, but it's a sharp contrast from what you've experienced in the past." They point out. "Experiencing the positive version of something doesn't make the negative versions you've experienced before or the instincts you've learned from those experiences disappear. I have a guess as to what drove your reaction, but I may not be right. You'll need to tell me if what I'm saying resonates with you."
"OK."
"You've been working on forming relationships that aren't transactional, and your relationship with Eddie is a big success in that direction. Based on what you've told me, I would say that things between the two of you were very balanced prior to the past couple of months. However at the moment, you have physical injuries and mental health needs that are lessening what you feel like you can contribute, and either consciously or subconsciously, you're worried that you're taking too much or aren't doing enough for Eddie to want to stay in your life."
"Consciously." Buck admits. "Definitely consciously."
Jules makes another note. "I also think that, even with those feelings, you've been able to put a level in trust in Eddie and the relationship because things were so balanced before. Before last night, you believed that if Eddie started to need help with something, he would come to you because that was the relationship you'd already established, and the two of you would navigate the concern together. But finding out that he's been having nightmares and struggling and actively choosing not to include you in that hurts because it's taking away what you feel is an opportunity to reciprocate all of the care he's been providing you, and those feelings were amplified because of your insecurities around feeling needed."
Buck picks up his fidget toy again. Of all of his options to start getting out the nervous energy that always seems to pour out of being emotionally flayed open during therapy right now, it's the only one that won't cause any additional physical pain given his bruises and broken bones, and while there's a part of him that would rather self-soothe and control everything (and perhaps punish himself) with physical hurt, he also doesn't want to actively take that step back either. "Yeah." He says, starting to fiddle with the toy. "I think that sounds right."
"Let's talk about that some more."
"About last night…" Eddie says in a hushed tone.
Their flight back to California is leveling out at altitude, and Chris is sandwiched between them in their row with headphones on and tablet out (he'd insisted on being between them for this flight and Buck had opted to be squished into the window seat rather than risk having injuries jostled in any way by the flight crew or other passengers) when they finally get a chance to talk and broach the subject of their fight. Before that they'd needed to spend some time packing up their things, giving the VRBO a cursory cleaning, and then catching a brief nap to give them the energy to get through dealing with the airport (which had been complicated because of mobility issues but less stressful overall than the trip to Texas had been), and both Buck and Eddie had mutually agreed in the brief moments they had had alone that while they wanted to resolve things before they were back in Los Angeles, they didn't want to do it while they were preoccupied with and diverting energy to other tasks, so they'd needed to wait until they were on the plane.
Even knowing that the conversation was coming, feeling like he's in a good place when it comes to understanding and explaining his own perspective and reactions, and mostly feeling like he has a decent idea of where Eddie was coming from when he made his decisions and likely what he's thinking now, Buck tenses at Eddie's words.
There's still the tiniest bit of anxiety that he can't assuage or get rid of, telling him that things can only get worse.
"I'm…I've been trying to understand why you were upset." Eddie begins. "I know it bothers you that I didn't tell you I've been having nightmares, and I know trying to explain myself last night made it worse but…I've gotta admit that I don't really get it. To me it's…I chose not to tell you because they aren't a big deal to me. I'm used to bad dreams and most of the time I just need to breathe for a few minutes and ground myself and I can get back to sleep. That's not big enough to me to make anyone else's problem. Especially when the person I would think about going to is dealing with their own stuff that make a few nightmares seem pretty small."
"OK, but…that's not what you said last night." Buck points out. He's trying to stay calm and open-minded because he wants to understand Eddie's perspective the way he'd come to understand his own while talking to Jules and thinks that will help iron out the wrinkles that had started to form with the fight, but the explanation Eddie has just given isn't any clearer or understandable than what he'd said last night; in situations like this Buck prefers bluntness rather than the delicate approach Eddie seems to be trying to take; at least then he knows exactly what someone means.
Eddie's brow furrows. "Sure it is. I said I didn't want to put anymore on your plate. That I was trying to protect you."
"Yeah." Buck nods, trying not to bristle at the reminder of the feeling that Eddie didn't trust him. "And that's not the same as what you just said."
"I'm pretty sure it is." Eddie blinks.
"No. What you just told me is that the nightmares you're having are something you're comfortable handling on your own and that you most likely wouldn't ask anyone for help with them. What you said last night—or at least what I heard you say," Buck corrects himself, remembering his conversation with Jules about how his feelings and reactions had colored his perspective on what he was hearing and that he might not be hearing exactly what Eddie had intended to say, "is that you think I've got too many problems of my own to be any help to you, and you were worried that if you let me know about the dreams or anything else you might be dealing with, that I wouldn't be able to handle it. You don't trust that I won't break down or do something stupid."
Eddie's face falls in a way that almost hurts. "Buck…Ev…no. That's not what I meant at all." He reaches his arm across Chris' lap (behind the tablet so as not to disrupt the very important Power Rangers marathon he had decided to download for the flight) and grabs Buck's hand.
"It's OK if it is." Buck says. Eddie looks like he doesn't believe him which, given his reaction last night is fair. "It is." This is just another thing that talking to Steve and then Jules had helped him figure out. "I know after everything I've told you and…done to myself, that you are worried about me. I'd have to be…super self-centered and oblivious not to know that."
Eddie averts his gaze, but leaves his hand in place. "I didn't want you to know about that. Or feel guilty. Asking for help was the brave thing to do—the right thing to do. I don't want you to feel bad for doing it."
"I feel worse that Chris is worrying about the same things." Buck admits. He realizes, a split second too late when Eddie's attention is snapping back directly to him with breakneck speed, that he could have approached the subject of Chris' nightmares and their early morning conversation with more tact. "His nightmare this morning was that I gave up at the air show and fell. I asked him about it and he's…noticed way more than we thought he would about how I'm dealing with things. And I guess he heard you talking to Steve once that you were scared that you'd leave me at home some day and I wouldn't be around when you got back."
"Mierda." Eddie whispers. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the seat. "He wasn't…Obviously he wasn't supposed to hear that."
"I don't think he really knew you were talking about me being…" Buck's reassurance trails off, since he doesn't really like to put words to that sort of thing most of the time. Between the SEALS and LAFD, he's experienced enough to know that sometimes speaking things wills them into existence, and usually that's just with jinxes and having the opposite of what you want to happen come to fruition, but Buck is in a decent enough place now that he doesn't want to tempt fate in any way and is too ashamed about those feelings and the mindset he keeps falling into to be direct anyways. "I think he mostly was thinking you were worried about me leaving like Shannon left you in El Paso, but between what we've told him and what he's seen and heard…he's smart enough for his brain to put the pieces together, even if he doesn't totally understand them.
"I talked to him about it. Explained how my brain is sick and it's making me tired and sad and feel scary things but that I'm getting help to figure out how to handle it because I don't want to go anywhere." He finishes his explanation. The conversation is barely twelve hours ago at this point, but it feels miles away. Even without doing a lot the day feels long; their vacation that had started out so relaxing had turned out to be anything but and he really can't wait to cuddle with his kittens and sleep in his own bed for what's possibly an irresponsible amount of time. But he and Eddie have to get through this conversation first. "He seemed like he understood and when we've been around each other today I haven't seen him watching me or looking like he's worried or anything, but fuck if I didn't feel like a selfish asshole for creating the whole situation for making him worried about losing another parent in the first place."
"That's exactly why I didn't want to bring any of this up!" Eddie doesn't raise his voice, but it's clear from the way he tries to pull his hand away from Buck's (and Buck twists his hand and grabs at his fingers gently to prevent this) that his emotions are rising up. "You don't need to feel bad about either of us when all you did was ask for help."
Since their grips are now reversed, Buck squeezes at Eddie's hand. "Eds, that's why I'm in therapy. So when my brain tells me stupid shit like I'm a selfish asshole for stressing you out, I can tell Jules and they can tell me that you're stressed out and worried because you love me, and that you'd feel worse if I'd never come to you in the first place and something happened. I don't need you to protect me from your feelings. I need you to trust me with them. Even if you don't need help and there's nothing I can do about them."
The furrow in Eddie's brow returns, possibly forming deeper than before. "Why would you want to know about something you can't do anything about that might make you feel worse?"
"Because." Buck has to pause here, to find the words he'd practiced with Jules. "My parents fucked me up. A lot of other people and shitty relationships and friendships played a part too but it started with them. They didn't care about me if I wasn't being or doing exactly what they wanted, and even then, dealing with me was always made out to be hardship. I've always felt like I need to be useful, to keep people around interested, and that I need to be…smaller. Less needy. And I know that's not how you feel," he hurries to clarify when he sees Eddie open his mouth to protest, "but Jules was explaining to me this morning how experiencing a positive version of something that you've usually experienced in a bad way doesn't erase everything that the bad versions teach you. So even though logically I know that you don't care that I've been physically close to helpless for most of the last year because I keep getting hurt, or that I've been needing to lean on you a lot while I try and figure out my mental health stuff, most of the time, I have to remind myself about that. And I worry a lot about the fact that lately you've been helping me pretty much all the time and there's not all that much I can do in return. I can't even make you dinner because I keep breaking my goddamn arm."
"Buck, I don't need you to do anything for me."
"I know you don't. But it's important to me to be able to do it anyways. Or at least know that I can."
Eddie takes a moment, considering Buck's words. "So to you this wasn't me trying to make things easier for you."
Buck nods. "It felt like you don't want me involved in your life the same way you're involved in mine. Like you don't trust that I can handle it. And my brain kind of took those feelings a step further and I rapid-spiraled about it and…I didn't feel like your partner. I felt like your obligation."
"I really didn't mean it like that." Eddie says after a moment. "It really was mostly just because nightmares are almost always something I can handle on my own."
"Mostly?" Buck gets caught up on the word; anxiety makes it so he usually can't help but be on the look out for hints that things aren't what they seem or someone doesn't actually mean what they say, and the word pings up against his mental radar.
They've been looking at each other over the top of Chris' bent head, but Eddie looks away before he answers so Buck gets the idea that he's not going to feel good about what he was to say. "I mean, I also wasn't lying when I said I didn't want to put any more on your plate. Not because I don't think you can handle it," he hurries to clarify, seeking Buck's gaze once more, "but more like…I don't think you should have to. You've spent so much of your life taking on everyone else's stuff. You're in the space now where you need someone to take on some of yours. You deserve a strong partner who puts you first."
Buck is right. He doesn't feel good about that. It's similar to something Eddie had said the night before, and last night it fueled Buck's fire and made him angry, but now with some distance from the initial shock and discovery of Eddie's omission that had put him on edge and led to the fight, it just sinks in as hurt, with some confusion thrown in for good measure. He frowns. "OK, that's twice now."
"What's twice?" Eddie mirrors him.
"It's twice that you've said something about yourself that you swear doesn't apply to me." Buck explains. He doesn't feel all that patient or calm about it, but he's mindful that they're still next to Chris and on an airplane, and can't cause a scene. "Last night it was that if you were telling me about things you were struggling with, it would somehow be bothering me even though you've told me so many times that me coming to you if I need something or want to talk something through is never a bother, and just now you said that I deserve a strong partner. Like if you admitted to me that you were having nightmares or need help sometimes too that would make you weak. But you keep insisting that me asking for help is one of the strongest things I've done. So either you're lying to me about what you actually think about those things or—"
"No, Ev, That's not…" Eddie rushes to interrupt but trails off just as quickly. "You are not a burden or a bother or weak for sharing what you need to and asking for help."
It should be reassuring, but if anything it makes Buck sad. He can't reconcile how Eddie can make him feel so loved and give him so much comfort—can think he is somehow worthy of his support and devotion—but either not want or think he deserves the same in return. "Then why would you be?" He watches something seem to click behind Eddie's eyes at the question, and waits for him to say something but realizes after a few moments that this is maybe something is partner will need time to think over. Buck sighs. Decides that they probably aren't going to get much further in the conversation given the turns it's taken and thinks about returning to the script he'd devised with Jules that they'd diverged from. He's not mad at Eddie anymore; despite how last night made him feel, and how it had triggered his insecurities in a massive way, he thinks now he understands better than before what had made Eddie keep things to himself, and he can't really blame him for doing the same thing that not all that long ago Buck would opt to do himself.
"Look." Buck begins when the silence gets to drag on a little too long. He waits for Eddie's attention to fully turn back to him. "Neither of us has to tell each other everything. We're both allowed privacy and to decide what we want to share with each other, for whatever reason. And—and I can be hurt by you not telling me something, but it wasn't fair of me to take that hurt out on you. Not when you weren't actually trying to hurt me."
"You were right to be upset though." Eddie says. And when Buck opens his mouth to try and protest his partner cuts him off. "I didn't think about how not talking to you would make you feel, I only thought about what felt easier for me. And that's not what a good partner does."
Buck doesn't want Chris not to be there, but he wishes he wasn't between them right now. He wants to lean up against Eddie; full body contact is so much more reassuring—much more comforting—than just holding a hand. "I know you didn't do it on purpose. And…honestly I don't know for sure that I could have told you before last night that that was something that bothers me. I told that to Jules and they think I kind of…trained myself not to have reactions to that kind of stuff because experience told me that people didn't really care anyways, but now that I'm in a place where I have people who do care about my feelings and I'm starting to trust that, I'm kind of…feeling things again? But I don't always know what's going to hurt until it does."
"That makes sense." Eddie nods. He licks at his lips before speaking again. "I think…I still go to my therapist every once in a while but…it's probably been longer than it should have been. I think once we're back in LA, I'll try and make a few appointments."
Buck feels some of the same kinship he'd felt with his partner the night before, only this time it's not smothered or tempered by the hurt of the blindside. For a while, things have been a bit like they're traveling through a storm with their life-rafts tethered together, and while last night had felt a bit like Eddie was cutting the rope between them and letting him loose, this feels more like they're climbing into the same boat. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. I mean…last night might have happened anyways because no matter what we're going to fight sometimes, but clearly I have some stuff that I still need to work on that played a role." Eddie admits. "And—and honestly, I should have made an appointment after the shooting happened. That stirred some things up for me from Afghanistan that I've pretty much just been ignoring because we have a lot of other stuff going on."
Buck opens his mouth to apologize but Eddie doesn't even let him get a syllable out.
"That is not me blaming you or saying things are too much." He reassures. "I'm an adult and I've done enough therapy to know that not keeping up with it when there's a lot going on isn't the best idea. This is me saying that if I'm going to be encouraging you and Chris to talk to your therapists and put the work in then I need to do the same with mine."
His words don't entirely replace Buck's instinctive guilt and thought that a lot of the things that Eddie is dealing with are his fault (he still spends more time than not when reminded about the shooting and how Eddie had gotten hurt during it sinking into the feeling that Eddie would never have been there if her weren't supporting him) but he tries not to let it consume him. Instead he thinks about how well the conversation has gone, how he thinks he and Eddie maybe understand each other a bit better and that misunderstandings like last night's are maybe a few steps further away. Even so, the positivity still muddles with the insecurities he hasn't been able to shake, and the doubts he can't help but entertain. Even knowing that Eddie isn't blaming him, and being pretty sure that he sees himself as equally at fault for their fight now that they've been able to each explain where they were coming from, Buck is still used to people leaving when things start being less than easy or perfect.
"We"re OK?" He asks; it's a bit of a fight to not bite his lip and fully demonstrate his lingering nerves.
Eddie pulls his hand towards him a bit, so he can lean down and press his lips to Buck's hand behind Chris' back. "Always, hermoso. Always."
Arriving at Athena and Bobby's is a mixture of awkward and tense. Mostly tense. When their plane had landed in Los Angeles and Buck and Eddie had turned their phones off airplane mode to find Athena's messages, it had been a bit of a challenge not to panic, even with her reassurance that everyone is OK. How do you not worry with a vague warning that there was an incident and you're not going to want to spend the night at your own house? Buck had tried calling Athena while Eddie and Chris went to retrieve the shared family suitcase from baggage claim, but even when she'd answered, all he'd managed to get out of her was another repetition that no one was hurt, that she'd gotten May and the kittens home to theirs, and that the explanation would be better given in person. Her words had made the sinking feeling in Buck's stomach worse, but he couldn't exactly argue with her, so he'd just waited for Eddie and Chris to get the bag and then they'd called an Uber to bring them to Bobby and Athena's. They hadn't been able to come up with a lie when Chris asked why they were going there instead of home, so between the tension and everyone's fatigue and uncertainty, it had been a quiet, subdued ride from the airport to the house.
When they'd gotten there, Bobby had been the one to greet them on the front steps alongside Harry. Hence the awkwardness. Things had still been off with him before they had left for Texas and while he seems to know enough about the incident at Eddie's house to be worried, Athena had declined to share the details with him until she could speak to Buck and Eddie directly, citing their right as the victims to know first, so he couldn't actually answer their questions about why they were there. Athena wasn't immediately available, having stepped out to the backyard to take a call from the detective who was providing assistance with the incident, so once Bobby had greeted them and invited them into the living room, sending Chris with Harry to entertain each other in his room, they'd all mostly been stuck in a bumbling, stiff cycle of seeking information from each other that they either didn't have (Bobby and the knowledge of what had happened at Eddie's) or weren't particularly interested in sharing (Buck and Eddie and the nature of Buck's injuries). Buck feels an added layer of self-consciousness as they navigate the stilted conversation, knowing that a lot of what's driving Bobby's inquiries about his injuries and recovery time is him thinking as Buck's Captain and how much longer he'll need to be filling Buck's spot on A-Shift, and he and Eddie are going to have to tell him sometime soon that they've made the decision to transfer to Austin under Captain Strand, but he has no plans to address that tonight (or anytime before he gets a chance to talk with Jules again) so instead he tries to stick to vague answers and lets Eddie guide the conversation otherwise.
They sit in the living room and talk in circles for several minutes and Buck is feeling his frustration and anxiety build when the door to the backyard opens and Athena reenters, a serious look on her face.
"I'm glad you guys made it home OK." She greets them both, her stance softening the further into the room she gets. "I wish I had better news to welcome you with." She hugs Eddie when he rises to greet her, and waves Buck off when he tries but noticeably struggles (the flight has left him completely achy and stiff) and bends down to his level instead.
"What happened?" Eddie asks. He cuts right to the chase the moment they're all sitting.
Athena still checks with them that they're OK with Bobby's presence before answering; Buck is too tired and too on edge to navigate saying no, even though he'd kind of really like to, so he just gives his assent and waits for Athena to explain. "May was hanging out with the cats at your house this afternoon when there was a disturbance in the driveway." She begins. "She checked out the window, and when she saw what was happening, she initiated a call to 9-1-1. It took the first police unit approximately 13 minutes to respond, during which time Dr. Hannah Wells vandalized Buck's jeep and broke a couple of windows to your house, Eddie."
Buck blanches and feels sweat spring to his palms. He's not entirely sure how he doesn't fall into a panic attack, considering how he's handled every other encounter with and piece of information about Wells, but he's too stunned to think about it too much. Somehow, despite the no-contact orders and Eddie's house not even being his listed residence on record anywhere, she'd found him. It's only through some random happenstance that he wasn't home at the time. He doesn't know the full extent of what she'd done even, but even knowing that she'd been violent enough to attack their property is enough to make him thankful they'd still been outside of the city. A split second later it registers that May had been there, and even with the knowledge Athena has already given that she's alright, Buck's heart rate spikes for the second time in about as many seconds. "May's OK?"
"She's fine." Athena nods. Her eyes soften a little at Buck's concern and she briefly rests a hand on his knee from the seat she'd taken adjacent to him and Eddie on the couch "Even before Wells turned her attention directly to the house, she grabbed the cats and barricaded herself and them into the master bathroom. I doubt Wells ever even realized she was there."
"Good." Eddie nods. "I'm glad she stayed safe." He grabs for Buck's hand, glancing over at him before focusing on Athena again. "Was Wells arrested?"
Athena's answer comes easily. "She was. She was still on scene when officers arrived and they were able to safely subdue and arrest her. The initial charges were with regards to aggravated vandalism, property damage, and attempted breaking and entering, but I just spoke with the assisting Detective and they informed me that the District Attorney intends to throw the book at her with any charge that might stick, and because this was very clearly an attempt to violate the no-contact order and could also be construed as an attempt at witness intimidation they plan on arguing to have her bail revoked entirely. They believe that even if she isn't put into lock-up, she will be put on house arrest and this will be the only incident of this kind."
Somehow, none of that is all that comforting to Buck, although he's not sure anything would be right now. Everything surrounding Dr. Wells had already been a tangled mess of emotions that always leaves him off-kilter and a little shattered when he has to think about it too much, and now she's gone and attacked him again. Or at least, his property and home. He's vaguely aware that with only a couple minutes of knowledge of the attack under his belt that he's probably in shock and not processing everything Athena's telling him, but he can't imagine that some time sitting with it and thinking more about it is going to make him feel all that much better. He lets himself drift and lean against Eddie and leach off of his steadiness; Eddie seems upset, but he's not in total shock or panic. Buck is certain he'll ask the right questions and know what to do with this development, at least enough for now.
"How bad was the damage?"
"A couple of your front windows were broken but there didn't appear to be any structural damage. I made sure those were getting boarded up before I left. I'm afraid your jeep took the brunt of the damage, Buckaroo." Athena informs apologetically. "She went after it with a field hockey stick and a lot of rage. Your insurance company and a mechanic can tell you more than I can about whether or not it'll be worth it to pursue the repairs, but I have some pictures if you'd like."
Buck shakes his head. He absolutely thinks that seeing the actual damage caused will make it harder to contain his reaction, and he wants to maintain the control he's kept thus far if at all possible.
"Why would she choose to go after Buck now?" Bobby interjects, a deep frown across his brow. "She hasn't threatened him beyond the initial assault has she?"
"There was a…confrontation when the charges were initially filed, although it wasn't violent." Athena chooses her words carefully. "I can't speak to the details of today's incident until Buck and Eddie can be interviewed—and the detective assigned to the case is on her way over—but I think it can safely be said that there have been developments over the past few days that have changed the chances of her avoiding prosecution and that has her…reacting."
And Buck may not be totally processing this development, but he's certainly aware enough that he can put two and two together and come up with a reasonable guess as to why Wells would no longer be content to follow the terms of the no-contact order and leave him alone. Why she would be more angry with him today than she would have been a few days ago. He shivers as fear passes through him—not for himself, or even for Eddie and Christopher, but for the baby she's carrying. The baby inexorably tied to him, that has legal actions attached to it that were supposed to be served to her lawyer yesterday. The baby that she she could do any measure of harm against should she choose to, and that he can do nothing to protect.
"How did she even know where to find Buck?" Eddie's question snaps him back to the present. Buck feels like he's been spiraling for ages, although it's likely only been a few seconds at most. "I know he's been staying with me since the no-contact order was filed but I don't think my address was included since it's not his legal residence."
Athena presses her lips together. She glances ever-so-briefly towards Buck. "That is still a matter being investigated. I believe the detective has a lead on the answer, but she'll only share once it's been confirmed. She was on her way here when I spoke to her and should be here soon to speak to the two of you, and then tomorrow you'll get an update from the prosecuting attorney on what this means for the trial moving forward. It's also my understanding that the prosecutor's office is keeping your lawyer in the loop so they'll likely be in touch with tomorrow as well."
Bobby's head snaps towards his wife. "Why does Buck have a lawyer?"
In other circumstances, Buck thinks he might register this as another strike against Bobby--that he isn't even asking his Buck directly even though he's sitting right there. At the moment, all he can really think is that he doesn't have it in him to explain that Wells is pregnant and he's suing for custody. His emotions might show on his face, because Athena's answer is smooth and mindful of Buck's privacy, and although it's not even really a lie, it gives Bobby no details to operate off of.
"It's a matter of victim advocacy." She says, before turning her focus back to Buck and Eddie. "Now, there's not much else I can tell you until you give your statements, and you've been traveling most of the day. Do either of you need something to eat? Or drink? I've already got a warm pot of coffee but you two know you're welcome to anything in the cupboards or fridge in this house."
Buck shakes his head. They'd grabbed some takeaway food at the Austin airport that they'd eaten on the plane and he's not entirely sure that, nerves reeling as they are, his stomach will tolerate any additions. Eddie on the other hand, requests a coffee for himself and, in a move that doesn't totally surprise Buck, a tea for him.
Bobby volunteers to go and get the drinks and when he's in the kitchen, Athena takes the opportunity to let them know that May has the kittens corralled in the guest room so they'll be able to spend the night with them while Chris and Harry will bunk together, and then that Michael has some construction contacts that owe him a favor and will be able to help get the windows at Eddie's replaced quickly so they can be back in their own home by the time Eddie returns to work in two days.
Buck is still content to let Eddie take control of their half of the conversation, but he tries to focus on listening instead of letting himself think about the worst case scenarios of what might have happened if May hadn't kept her head or if they'd already gotten home from their trip, or even what still could happen if Wells is truly that upset about the baby being his and the implications that apparently has for her future freedom and the custody suit he'd filed. If he gets caught up in all of those thoughts, he's almost certain he'll fall into a panic attack. He doesn't want to navigate that—either getting through it or the emotional and physical aftermath, especially in a home that's not actually his; he's already done that once this week and although the Strands had both been incredibly understanding and helpful, it's not an experience he wants to repeat.
Athena is just at the tail end of reassuring Eddie that this is exactly the type of circumstance that Michael is happy to call in a favor for and that even if the repairs do take more than a day it won't be a problem for them to host everyone when the doorbell rings. "That will be Detective Crosby." She says, rising to her feet. "I'll go let her in."
Buck recognizes the name as that of a Detective he'd met with once when the LAFD had decided to send their findings to the police to determine if criminal charges would be filed against Wells, and remembers, despite all of his discomfort about having to discuss the assault with yet another stranger, that Crosby had a calm but down-to-business demeanor that had kept him mostly at ease. He hopes that the same will be true tonight.
"You doing OK, Ev?" Eddie asks in a hushed voice. They're already been fairly pressed together on the couch, closer than they've been able to be together all day, and that alone is comforting and helping to ground Buck, but now his partner also adjusts the way they're holding hands, shifting his hand further up Buck's wrist and helping him mirror that on his. Having done this with Eddie before, Buck knows that if he concentrates now he'll be able to feel Eddie's pulse pass beneath his fingers, and the thought alone shakes something loose in his chest. He's still shaken and on edge from the news of what Wells had done, but he doesn't feel untethered or on the brink of losing himself to those emotions. Just uncertain in general.
"I'm…I don't know." He admits. "I'm not sure it's all totally sinking in."
"That's OK." Eddie presses a quick kiss to his temple. "You don't have to know right now. As soon as we're done with the detective we can make sure Chris is settled for the night and hole up in the guest room with the cats and we can figure more out in the morning when we aren't running on fumes."
"That sounds nice." Buck returns the kiss a few moments before Athena makes her return with Detective Crosby. He steels himself for the conversation, knowing he has to be more of an active participant than he'd been with Athena and, thankfully, mostly feels ready to do so. With Eddie steady by his side, things between them feeling comfortable again, and his rational instincts (bolstered by Athena's report from Crosby and the prosecuting attorney) telling him that regardless of all of the specifics of what had happened earlier in the evening (and all of the uncertainty that does create for him) that Wells' actions had almost certainly made it more likely that she will face consequences for what she's done and strengthen his custody case against her, Buck mostly feels like he can make it through the conversation.
He's not looking forward to it, but he can do it. "Detective Crosby." He greets. He doesn't try to stand, pretty sure that Eddie would stop him anyways.
"Firefighter Buckley." Crosby, a woman probably a year or two older than Athena at most returns the greeting with professionalism, seemingly not fazed that neither he nor Eddie are getting up. He reasons Athena might have warned her. "I'm sorry these are the circumstances we're meeting each other again under." She takes a seat, while Athena excuses herself to the kitchen to retrieve the drinks Bobby has been preparing.
"This is my partner, Eddie Diaz." Buck introduces.
"Of course."
Eddie briefly lets go of Buck's hand to shake the detective's, but as soon as the interaction is done with he finds Buck again.
"I asked Athena to fill you in on the basics of what happened at 4495 South Bedford Street earlier this evening. I have some questions for each of you, just to hopefully clarify some information, and then I'll be able to provide you with more details." Detective Crosby says, diving into business right away. "Do either of you mind if I record this conversation?" They both give their consent, and Crosby produces her cellphone, starting a recording with some identifying information before asking her first question. "Mr. Buckley, I understand that once Dr. Hannah Wells has violated the protection order in place and confronted you once before several weeks ago. This incident was non-violent, although she did attempt to coerce you to drop the charges against her. Have you had any contact with her since then?"
Chapter 38
Notes:
I honestly thought I'd have this done a lot sooner, but this chapter fought me every step of the way (this is the sixth version). The characters wouldn't do what I wanted them to do, and things just weren't going in directions I was happy with and overall the words just wouldn't word. But I've gotten it to a place now where I'm at least...tolerant of where things are and I feel like I'll be able to get the rest sorted moving forward (likely after the holidays). In other words, please feel free to insert the James Acaster bake-off meme here.
Chapter Text
"I'm glad you were able to make it in on such short notice."
Buck does his best not to fidget or otherwise show his nerves, but he's exhausted and doesn't have much restraint left. Eddie is sitting next to him, holding his hand underneath the conference room table, which helps, but it doesn't erase where they are or what they're there for. The ADA wants to update them on what's happening with Wells.
The updates are welcome enough—Buck hates all of the unknowns that are hanging over his head like a massive sword of Damocles—but he's struggling to be present and focused on the moment he's in, let alone to not imagine all of the worst case scenarios ADA Davis might need to tell them about.
The night before had been filled with anxiety and interrupted sleep—at least for Buck and Eddie. After wrapping up their discussion with Detective Crosby, Buck had been unable to stop imagining the things that could have happened. What might have been if May hadn't been calm under pressure, or if Wells had decided to demonstrate her rage at a different time when they were actually home. When he wasn't having nightmares, he was trying to puzzle over how she had known to find him (or at least his car) at Eddie's house in the first place. Detective Crosby hadn't been able to tell them much more than Athena had, both because the investigation was still ongoing and because it wasn't clear yet if this set of charges would be leading to another trial where they might have to testify; if that were the case, nobody wanted to be accused of feeding them information and giving Wells and her attorney cause to protest. So they'd been mostly left in the dark and even with Eddie there to keep him from spiraling completely, and the opportunity to reunite and snuggle with Beans and Toast had been a soothing balm towards some of his stress, Buck had struggled with that lack of information through the night and has continued to do so.
That morning, they'd gotten Chris to school (though it will be very hit or miss as to whether he actually learns anything since his routine is very off between vacation recovery and not getting to spend the night in his own bed) . After that, they'd gone back to Eddie's to meet with Michael and his carpenter friend to assess the damage Wells had done and get a repair timeline,which is where they'd been when the District Attorney's office had called to ask him to meet so they could give him an update on the Wells situation as it stands now. He'd felt capable and focused enough while running errands but having an actual task to get through while anxious is different from having to sit and listen to news that has the potential to be terrible. It's shifted Buck's anxiety from the back burner to the forefront of his mind, spinning circles around what might be happening with Wells' bail hearing and prosecution. Even knowing that the point of meeting is to be giving him explanations and answers on that front doesn't do anything to settle the unease and discomfort that's been burrowed beneath Buck's skin, trying to force its way out for the past 18 hours.
Eddie is pretty much what's keeping him tethered at the moment.
"What can you tell us?" His partner asks as soon as the pleasantries are exchanged. "Has Wells' bail been revoked?"
"In a way."
"What does that mean?" The confusion ADA Davis' comment brings up is enough to snap Buck into focus and he frowns. He's not a legal expert, of course, but he's done his time watching daytime marathons of Law & Order reruns; he has no idea how someone's bail can be revoked 'in a way'.
"The explanation will be easier to understand if I start from the beginning." The ADA says. She's not smiling so Buck doesn't feel all that encouraged. "Some of this you already know, but I want to give you the big picture for context. A few days ago now, the DNA results from the paternity test you and a few of Hannah Wells' other victims came back, identifying you as the father of the child she's carrying. Theoretically, this does not effect her case. It does confirm without question that she engaged in sexual intercourse with you, but she's been pursuing an affirmative defense. She's never denied that sex occurred, only that it was non-consensual, so confirmation that there was at least one encounter with you does not necessarily affect that."
"Something must have changed for her though or she wouldn't have decided to suddenly go after Buck." Eddie comments. "She hasn't been in contact with him for weeks."
"The court of public opinion has not been siding with her." ADA Davis informs. "While Taylor Kelly's story was a problem in that it eliminated your privacy as a victim, Buck, what it has done is opened up a conversation as to what happened. There were some follow-up stories done by more reputable news sources that provided accurate details with statements from the LAFD and our office. These made it clear that yourself and the other firefighters who Wells assaulted were in no way enthusiastic or even interested participants. Since those stories went live, while there's still some ongoing debate amongst the general public about whether or not what happened constitutes felony rape, they are generally in agreement that it should not have happened and that Wells is in the wrong."
Buck doesn't know how to feel about that. He supposes it's a good thing if people think that Wells was wrong to do what she did, but what does it mean, they're debating whether or not it was rape? He doesn't get to think too much about that though, as ADA Davis continues to speak.
"Because of this, Dr. Wells' attorney recently filed a motion to have the trial moved out of LA County where the media coverage has been much more minimal."
"They can do that?" Eddie asks.
ADA Davis shrugs. "It's not an uncommon motion, however it's unusual for a judge to rule in favor of the petitioner. Wells' attorney argued that the coverage and debate have poisoned a potential jury pool against her, however the judge ruled that they cannot prove they would be unable to draw an impartial and balanced jury during selection here, so the trial will remain in Los Angeles. Losing this motion, alongside a few others regarding evidence that will be permitted at trial and the paternity results coming back, caused her attorney to…lose confidence in their defense strategy, and with the events essentially public knowledge at this point, there aren't many directions he can pivot in. He approached me first thing yesterday morning offering a deal."
Buck immediately tenses in his seat and he feels Eddie's hand tighten around his. Unusually, it's not a comforting squeeze; this is Eddie becoming just as on edge as he is. "Why didn't you contact us about that?" His partner questions, tone probably a bit harsher than he really intends it to be.
"His proposed deal was that Dr. Wells would plead no contest to the charges, and in exchange she would lose her license to practice, receive a suspended sentence and perform some community service." ADA Davis doesn't give either of them time to comment before she continues. "Based on the strength of our case and the severity of the charges she's facing, we were never going to accept that offer. If we go to trial and she is found guilty, she'll be facing up to 48 years in prison; there's no deal we'd entertain where she doesn't do a decent portion of that time, so we countered that if she was willing to plead guilty to all counts we would agree to a sentence of eighteen years in prison, where she would eligible for parole after thirteen and a half. We gave them 48 hours to discuss and decide if they would accept, during which time Hannah Wells attacked your property."
OK.
OK. If yesterday was a manifestation of Wells not being able to handle the realization that she's likely not getting out of this without spending time in prison, Buck can handle that. It's not thrilling, by any stretch of the imagination, and he still doesn't like thinking about what could have happened or might still happen in the future, but her losing control after being faced with the reality of the consequences of her actions is better than the thought that she's been festering in anger towards him and it was a calculated choice on her part.
"And what does all of that have to do with her bail being 'sort of' revoked?" Eddie presses. "You still haven't explained what that means."
Once again, Buck is thankful that he and Eddie tend not to panic or spiral about the same things. Eddie knows what information they actually need—both what they need to know and what might actually help settle his thoughts and make him feel better—and is more than capable of taking the lead and asking while Buck feels too stunned and off-kilter to even try.
"I'm getting there." ADA Davis reassures. This time she does sort of smile, although Buck's not sure what they're supposed to take away from that. "Now, when Wells was arrested last night, it was done completely by the book. The moment the officers could safely handcuff her, they did so and they properly Mirandized her, advising her of her rights to an attorney and to remain silent. She declined."
"She declined being arrested?" This question Buck manages to ask himself. Mostly because he can't quite wrap his head around what is being said. He's fairly certain that you can't just refuse to be arrested; surely prison overcrowding wouldn't be a thing if you could.
"No. She didn't actually put up much of a fight over being arrested. But she did decline to remain silent. Or call her attorney. This means that all of the ranting she did after the fact will be admissible in both prosecutions she's now facing. Her attorney briefly tried to argue that at the time of her arrest she didn't have the capacity to understand her Miranda rights, but there was enough evidence to rule that out as well. At arraignment this morning, when it was clear which way the wind was blowing and that she was about to lose her bail, Hannah Wells and her attorney opted to take our deal and plead guilty. We spent the morning negotiating some additional terms based on what happened last night, and we reached an agreement. Tomorrow morning, she'll be pleading guilty to six counts of rape, as well as several counts of destruction of property, to account for her actions last night. She'll allocute to the crimes, and because of the additional charges and the decisions she made that led to those actions, we'll be recommending she serve a prison sentence of twenty-three years, with the potential for parole after eighteen."
Buck hasn't ever totally processed how much stress Wells being out in the world—in the same city as him—has laid across his shoulders. But suddenly that weight is being pulled away and even though it's a massive relief, it hits him like a punch to the chest.
Wells is going to prison.
She's pleading guilty and going to prison tomorrow.
Buck isn't even sure if he knows exactly what that means. "Do I—does that mean I won't have to testify?"
"You will not." ADA Davis nods. "This plea eliminates the need for any trial. You're welcome to be present at allocution—all of her victims are—and the judge will ask if anyone wants to make an impact statement before they issue official sentencing, but you don't have to speak, or even be present, if you don't want to. It's entirely up to you."
They talk for a few more minutes, with Ms. Davis supplying the details for tomorrow's hearing so they can attend if they so choose, and going over a few more logistical pieces before leaving the conference room to allow them some privacy to talk and process while she goes to contact Wells' other victims.
"What are you thinking?" Eddie asks after they sit together in silence for a few moments. He's turned some since the attorney left, angled so he's facing Buck directly.
"That I can't believe it's over." Buck half-shrugs, half-laughs. He can't help but feel a little punch-drunk. He's spent months trying to wrap his head around all of this, first to just admitting that he'd even been raped to begin with, to coming to terms with needing to find a way to report her and then navigating that mess. to all of the aftermath of trying to accept and process while dealing with everyone else passing judgment and telling him what must have really happened, and figuring out how on earth he'll ever feel ready to talk about what happened in a courtroom in front of so many strangers…It's hard to believe that just like that, he can focus on how he's feeling and forget about everything else. Or, almost everything else. "I mean, obviously there's still the custody thing. I don't really know what her pleading guilty means for that since we didn't really think she would but…it's mostly over. No trial, no more public scrutiny…I can just…I know I still have to deal with what happened and that how I feel isn't going to go away just because she's going to prison but…I get to deal with it at my pace." He murmurs, glancing down at his lap briefly. "I kind of felt like I needed to just…find a way to put it behind me and be OK if I didn't want her to get away with what she did and now I can…I can take my time and do it right."
"I am so happy for you." Eddie says, a soft smile on his face, when Buck looks up to meet his gaze again. "You've put so much pressure on yourself to do what was needed to put her away and keep other people safe…I think things will feel a lot different going at a speed you're more comfortable with."
Buck isn't sure what to say after that. He's still processing what this all means, and he has so many questions. He still can't figure out how Wells had known to find him (or at least his jeep) at Eddie's house; Eddie's had been listed as one of his most frequented locations on the no-contact order they'd issued to Wells, one of the places she was advised to stay away from, but they hadn't listed it as a place of residence. Buck wasn't completely sure if Wells was the kind of person who might stalk or otherwise try and come after him, but the very idea that she might had left him worried about something happening to Eddie or Chris if she thought their house was the place that she'd find him, so he'd made the decision to leave the loft as his primary address. So Wells shouldn't have known that she'd have the best chance of finding him at Eddie's, but according to their conversation with Detective Crosby the night before, there'd been no indication that anyone had tried to access his building or parking garage, let alone the actual loft, or any of the other locations that had been listed on the protection order, so either she was the luckiest guesser in the world, or someone had somehow let it slip.
It doesn't sit well in Buck's gut that someone in his life, intentionally or nor, had given a person who was so angry with him that she'd destroyed his car and spray-painted messages telling him to 'burn in hell' what she'd needed to target him.
His mind is also running in circles to try and figure out what this might mean for the custody lawsuit. Buck knows his lawyer had plans for all sorts of variations on the way things might go now that they'd started the process of suing for custody so it would hopefully be in place by the time the baby is born, but he'd lost track of a lot of those details when they'd been discussing them; he'd just been too overwhelmed by the basics of the situation and what it might mean to take in the specifics of different possibilities, and now he's regretting it. Because this could mean something important. For him, for Eddie (and technically Chris), for his unborn child…and Buck has no idea what that might be.
And now he has this choice about watching the allocution tomorrow—about giving some sort of statement before sentencing—and Buck can't even begin to figure out what the right thing to do for that is.
As much good news has come out of the past twenty four hours, Buck still feels off-balance and overwhelmed. And he doesn't know where to begin when it comes to explaining it to his partner.
So he doesn't.
"Can we go home?" He eventually asks. A moment later he remembers that the house isn't going to be livable for another day or two while Michael's friend replaces the front windows. "Or…somewhere that's not here?" He doesn't really want to go back to Bobby and Athena's. At least not until Bobby leaves for his scheduled shift starting that evening (technically the last before Eddie is scheduled to go back on the roster); it's not that Buck isn't grateful for his captain opening up his home to both of them (and Chris. And the cats) while all of this is going on but things around Bobby are just so awkward. Bobby wants to know more than Buck is ready to share about what's going on, and there's the additional need to tiptoe around their decision to leave LA. Buck knows they won't be able to avoid telling him for very long—they'd started some of the transfer paperwork with Captain Strand back in Austin so that will be moving forward and they also hadn't asked Chris to keep anything a secret so it's likely that he'll talk to Harry and Denny and word will easily start to travel—but he wants to fully wrap his head around how he's feeling about what he'd learned about how Bobby has been Captaining him before trying to navigate the conversation, and he had other priorities to talk about with Jules at his last appointment. So he's kind of interested in just…avoiding spending a ton of time around Bobby until he can figure things out on that front.
Eddie glances down at his watch. "How about we find out where that mac and cheese food truck you like is parked today and go grab a late lunch to celebrate? By the time we wrap up, Bobby will be at his weekly Captain's meeting and Athena will still be on shift so the house will be quiet for a while."
As he always does, Buck thanks his lucky stars to have somehow found a partner who understands him as well as Eddie does. "That sounds perfect."
Eddie's plan for a quiet afternoon is solid. They have a really great lunch, and a (mostly) quiet afternoon tucked away at Bobby and Athena's playing and cuddling with Beans and Toast until it's time to pick Chris up after school. The rest of the afternoon and evening is pleasant family time, even with Christopher being a little overly tired and grumpy, given his week of disrupted schedules, excitement, and now not being in his own house. He gives in to Eddie and Buck's gentle encouragement to go to bed early without too much of an argument.
Things gets a bit more uncomfortable after that. With the kids either in bed or elsewhere in the house working on homework, Bobby and Athena are plenty interested in hearing what sort of updates Buck and Eddie had been given by the District Attorney's office and it is…challenging for Buck to navigate that conversation without sharing every piece of the story that he's been keeping from Bobby. Like the baby. He's still feeling wracked with nerves over the whole situation, and too uncertain about his ability to be a good dad to open up the can of worms that will be Bobby's opinion on the matter, so he doesn't want to share anything that might indicate that Wells' decision to vandalize his jeep was anything more than an eruption of frustration, even though he and Eddie (and probably Athena, if he's being honest) know that's not the case. He also still doesn't know how to approach Bobby with the news that he and Eddie are going to be moving (sure, it's a topic of conversation they're going to have to broach sooner rather than later, especially because there's paperwork they're going to have to take care of at headquarters to help Owen facilitate the transfer and make sure their certifications carry over, but he and Eddie still haven't really talked about that since everything has been taken over by the Wells situation) and even though theoretically a conversation about Hannah Wells choosing to plead guilty shouldn't get anywhere near the subject of where Buck will be working when he finally clears medical clearance again, he can't help but stress about everything he says, wondering if it's going to hint to Bobby that there are changes in the works.
Then, of course, there's the fact that Bobby has opinions about whether or not Buck should give an impact statement at the allocution the next day. And it's not that he hasn't been seeking out advice about what to do since he's feeling so conflicted, what with wanting to find closure and do something that makes him feel strong and not so broken but full of doubt that flaying himself open in a courtroom full of strangers is going to be the way for him to do that—he's asked Eddie, and Steve, and a few other people whose opinions he values, it's more that…they'd all said roughly the same thing. Comments along the lines about how they can't make the decision for him, and every person is different and what might make one person feel empowered and give them closure might send someone else into a panic attack, so there isn't actually a right or a wrong choice to make and they'd support him no matter where he landed. Comments that he hadn't found particularly helpful when all he'd wanted was for someone to tell him what to do in a way that would just make sense to him, but that looking back on them in the face of Bobby's opinion feel so much more valuable.
Because Bobby not only thinks that he should give a statement—in full detail because he thinks that people like Maddie and Chimney just don't understand what had happened and if they hear the actual details they'll realize they're wrong and apologize and that will somehow magically erase everything else they've said and done (or something like that. Buck is a little fuzzy on the details of how this part of the plan is meant to work because he's too busy trying not to sink into the panic that comes with the thought of laying things out in court the way he had for the police with the added inclusion of his actual feelings), but he also thinks that Buck's statement should end with him forgiving Wells. Because apparently Buck will never actually heal or get over any of this if he can't let go of the root of the problem, which, according to Bobby, are his feelings about what Wells had done. Bobby thinks Buck is so caught up in the vulnerability of being assaulted and his feelings of shame and hurt (his words, though Buck won't necessarily disagree on that one point) that he's taking everything else with his sister too much to heart, and that if he can let go of some of that and start healing, his problems with Maddie won't seem quite so bad or something and they can start having real conversations again and the whole family can start healing.
Buck kind of gets the feeling that the family Bobby's referring to is more him and Maddie and the 118 and likely Chimney, and not really the elder Buckleys, but, again…his comprehension skills are a little dimmed and preoccupied with trying not to reveal things he doesn't want to share or lose the tenuous control he has over his emotions.
He only really gets through the conversation at all because neither Eddie nor Athena seem all that impressed with Bobby's advice and are willing to jump in and tell him that, and Eddie takes things a step further to make their excuses about needing to get more sleep after a long day and end the conversation all together.
As they've gotten ready for bed, Eddie has done his best to convince Buck that the responsibilities Bobby was assigning him weren't actually his to bear. And Buck mostly believes him. Or…he thinks he does. He wants to. He's had enough serious conversations with people that he knows are smarter and wiser than him (or who are just actual neutral parties) lately that he's starting to absorb the reality that he can control his intentions and his words and actions, not how people react to them or what they say or do. He is not responsible for what other people do or think, even if he'd been raised to believe otherwise. Buck can't quite shake the guilt-laden instinct that he should try to fix things, ingrained as it is after decades of being told if he'd just tried a little harder or done something differently or just been less…Buck things would be better, but he tries to listen to Eddie and keep the focus as he weighs his options on what he wants, not anybody else.
He tries, but he's keyed up—worried and uncertain about what he can do that might feel right for him and not disappoint people (even if he shouldn't be putting stock in their opinions) but till lead to a good outcome—and the anxiety leaves him tense and on a mental roller coaster. Buck struggles to relax and fall asleep, even with the comforts of being in a bed with Eddie. The on-edge energy makes him fidget and shift, and every change in position as he tries to find some way to get settled is more just a new angle to feel pain from (with broken ribs and the bruises he's earned from two substantial falls it takes a lot of precision positioning to get his body into a framework that doesn't elicit white-out agony alongside his pulse), and it doesn't take very long for all of his restlessness to draw Eddie out of the sleep he'd managed to find.
"Mm, Buck?" Buck can't see a clock to know exactly how long he's been struggling while Eddie's been sleeping, but he knows it's long enough for Eddie's voice to be rough and low and his words to have a hint of sleepy slur attached to them. "Hermoso?"
"I'm OK." Buck reassures quickly, without even really thinking.
It doesn't feel like a lie. Not totally. He's spiraling, sure. Anxious in a way that's maybe on the border of panic, but he's still so far from some of the mental places that he's been in recent months that it would feel more like a lie to try and admit to being anything but fine. He's certainly not upset enough to be in a place where other people need to be worried about him. He just doesn't think he'll be able to fall asleep anytime soon, and for that reason, in this moment, decides he needs to get up. If he's going to be awake, overthinking, and in some level of pain, he might as well do it out in the living room where he can pace about it, or at least sit in a chair and squirm and fidget to his anxiety's content. But he's OK. Really.
"I'm just gonna go get a drink."
Eddie's arm tightens slightly around his torso as he starts to shift beneath him to sit up a bit more. "Did you have a nightmare?"
"No, no." Buck reassures. "Just can't fall asleep. Brain's moving a little too fast." He almost doesn't answer honestly, thinks about lying and saying he's just thirsty, but knows he'd feel too guilty if he did that. He doesn't want to disturb Eddie—thinks at least one of them should get a good night's sleep after the turmoil of the past couple of nights—but he doesn't want to be a hypocrite and keep things from him after they'd just had a fight over Eddie doing that to him.
"I'll come with you." Eddie volunteers quickly. "We can talk about it, if you want?"
Buck bites his lip; it's pretty much exactly what he doesn't want to have happen. Not that he doesn't want to talk things out with his partner, because he does (Eddie is one of the only people outside of Jules who he feels comfortable explaining how he's feeling to, and he's pretty confident that he'll understand) he just…he's pretty sure Eddie is just going to echo the things he's already said and there's a part of Buck that just wants to figure it all out for himself at this point. He sort of thinks that no matter where he lands, whether he gives a statement or not, it won't feel like the right choice if he doesn't decide on it independently. "Maybe in the morning?" He offers as a compromise.
Eddie agrees without complaint. "Do you want me to come sit with you anyways, or do you want to be alone?"
Bless Eddie for understanding without him needing to explain. "Alone." He carefully cranes his neck, just enough so he can briefly kiss his partner. "I'm OK. I just need to think for a little bit and I don't want to keep disturbing you while I can't get comfortable."
"I don't mind." Eddie frowns.
"I know. But at least one of us should get some rest."
Eddie, thankfully, doesn't argue beyond that. He lets Buck know to come and get him if he changes his mind o needs anything, then helps Buck maneuver towards sitting up. It's a slow and arduous affair, moving in what feels like centimeters to avoid too any sudden changes or sharp pains, but they get there. After that, Buck kisses Eddie once more, thanking him for understanding and pads out to the living room, closing the guest room door behind him.
The living room is cast in a soft glow of moonlight, streaming in from the glass windows and doors that lead to the backyard. Bobby and Athena don't live so far from the city that he could go outside and see a beautiful starscape or anything like that, but they are distant enough that they can enjoy some natural light, and it's peaceful. Buck takes a moment near the glass to look outside. The calm in the yard is such a contrast to how he's feeling overall that it's almost hypnotizing and it keeps him stuck in place.
Buck wishes it were easier to make his thoughts match that kind of peace.
He doesn't know how long he stands and stares, but he knows he gets lost in the moment because he doesn't expect it at all when a soft voice speaks from behind him.
"You can't sleep either, Buck?"
He gasps and starts. The rate at which Buck turns to try and see who snuck up on him (even though it's less than a split second after the words register that he recognizes the voice as Bobby's) sends a lightning bolt of pain through his side, to the point where he nearly stumbles and his knees start to buckle. For an instant he thinks he might actually fall, only Bobby practically jumps forward, placing a hand on each elbow to keep him up and help him find his balance.
"Woah, you OK there?"
"Fine." Buck chokes out. He presses his lips together, forcing himself to take deep breaths through his nose to resteady himself. The last thing he wants in this particular moment is to fall into an actual panic in front of Bobby. Things are awkward enough, what with Buck having several secrets he's keeping from the man who had almost fallen into the role of father figure at one point, not to mention all of the ways he's noticing lately where Bobby makes him feel judged or less than, and he's just not confident that he knows how to read Bobby at all anymore in a way that makes him feel secure about opening up and showing him anything that might be perceived as a weakness. "I didn't wake you up, did I?"
"No, some good old fashioned insomnia got me." Bobby shakes his head. He frowns at Buck. "Are you sure you're OK?"
"I just need a second." Buck nods, annoyed that he can't just breathe through the pain and magically make his heart rate go down again. He'd managed to keep the anxiety his mind had been generating to a persistent thrum beneath the surface of his skin with some of the thought exercises he'd been working on with Jules in their sessions, but now that he's been startled, it feels a little like his system has been given a jolt from a car batter and kicked into overdrive. It makes him completely uneasy and on edge, worried that something else is going to happen, even though he's well aware that anything else jumping out and surprising him—or happening in general—at Bobby and Athena's house in the dead of night is incredibly unlikely. He tries to focus on the practical realities to logic himself out of the feeling. He was startled into making a sudden movement which caused pain, and pain is elevating his vitals in the same way that anxiety and panic can. That's all. "My ribs aren't great with sudden movements right now."
Bobby's frown deepens. "Let's get you over to the couch. You should be resting." He doesn't release his grip, just changes it slightly to have a bit more actual control as he guides Buck around the dining table back to the living room proper and helps ease him down onto the sofa. His coddling version of manhandling would bother Buck a lot more if there wasn't a part of him that really does want to be sitting while his body resettles once again, but it does rankle a little to be vaguely chastised and managed when he knows he hasn't actually done anything wrong.
As such, he offers a brief, only slightly-halfhearted thank you.
Bobby sits in the straight-backed armchair adjacent to the sofa, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. "You didn't mention that you'd also hurt your ribs when we talked about your injuries yesterday." His tone makes it sound like he's scolding Buck. Actually, Buck's not entirely sure that he's not. It sounds an awful lot like some of the lectures he's gotten from Bobby before at the firehouse, when Bobby realized hat Buck had a habit of taking knocks early on in calls and deciding to push through instead of reporting in and asking someone to switch jobs with him (and a bunch of other ways Buck has managed to disappoint him over the past couple of years working together) so it's not hard to imagine that this is just…Bobby making up for some of the opportunities he's missed lately since Buck hasn't been around the firehouse.
"Because they're gonna heal way before my arm does and I'm ready to be back on duty." Buck shrugs. It's a very true answer, even if there's more to it at as well. Like the fact that by the time Buck is ready to be in the field again, he and Eddie are going to be living in Austin. But he is absolutely not crossing that bridge with Bobby tonight if he can help it. He wants to talk to Eddie and quite possibly Jules about how they're going to navigate that conversation, and even though Bobby and the LAFD brass are towards the top of the list he and Eddie have started to make about who they need to discuss their impending life changes with, they aren't at the very top and Buck is happy to put breaking that news off for as long as possible. Especially when he just doesn't know how Bobby is going to react. He kind of thinks there are a lot of ways that could go that will hurt and mess with him, even though things have been weird and off between them lately. He'd rather avoid that as much as he can. "It's not a big deal."
"Broken ribs are a big deal whether you have other injuries or not, Buck." Lecture Bobby continues, sounding a little exasperated. Maybe put upon. In the set of mental columns Buck has started to run about what Bobby might think of him leaving once he eventually finds out, he adds a tally to the 'relieved' one. "We can't help or take care of you if we don't know what's going on."
The comment strikes a sour note in Buck's stomach. A nervous laugh bubbles out. "I, uh, I don't remember asking for help, Bobby."
"I know." Bobby admits. He looks a bit conflicted—or maybe something else? Buck can't quite read his expression. Ever since the bombing he feels like he never quite knows what to expect from his captain "But you have to admit you need a hand from someone, Buck. No matter where you turn lately, you've just been getting into more trouble, and I know that has to be taking its toll on you. Sometimes, I think you've been in the hospital more than you've been in your own apartment this year."
It's probably true, but only because he's been living with Eddie and hasn't officially given up his apartment yet. He hasn't been that bad. And it's not like any of the actual hospitalizations were his fault. He'd either been doing his job or been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes both. "I didn't—I didn't get into trouble in Texas." Buck says. A wave of shame cascades down over him for letting his anxiety so much get the better of him that his stammer comes back. He'd love to be stronger and prove, both to himself and to Bobby, that he's not some broken kid but there's something about being reprimanded by someone in authority, who you know already doesn't think you're good enough that makes standing tall and proving that you are feel next to impossible. "There was a major accident, and I re-injured myself making a rescue."
"A rescue you should have left to the firefighters there." Bobby counters.
"But I had the training. No one else on scene did." It's a bit easier to argue this point. Because this wasn't him diving in head first to a situation he knew nothing about, or disregarding a Captain's orders. It wasn't even an uncalculated risk. And everything had gone exactly to plan. Buck had the training to do the job, he did it, and everything had gone right. Buck doubts himself over a lot of things but he can't bring himself to doubt a success at a scene. "The victim—a child was impaled and the best they thought they could do was triage everyone else until support arrived. Someone had to do something."
Bobby shakes his head. "It didn't have to be you. You've been off duty for a couple of months. You weren't cleared for light duty, let alone heavy rescue. Especially without proper equipment."
"You can't pretend like you'd have just stood by and risked the girl dying if you were in my shoes, Bobby."
"It's not about what I would do, Buck. It's about what you did. What you always do. You rush into situations headfirst without thinking about your safety, or you provoke confrontations. You only think about what you want to do, not what the best choices actually are, and over the past several months it's really been catching up with you. If you don't start taking a step back and listening to what everyone else is telling you, you're going to run out of luck and chances. Something is going to happen that you can't come back from."
Buck doesn't know what to say. He really doesn't.
He doesn't understand what it is that Bobby sees when he looks at him. What he now knows, thanks to Captain Strand, that others don't see. He can acknowledge that he did some stupid shit when he first joined the fire department; he was struggling after leaving the SEALS—being thrown back into civilian life after such specific brand of rigidity and leadership and spending a few years shutting off pieces of himself to get through his tours and survive had significantly messed with his head—but he thinks he's done a real good job of shaping up and proving himself to be a good person and firefighter.
For whatever reason, Bobby doesn't see that. Or doesn't take it into account or something.
He talks to him like he's still a reckless probie. Often like he's not just a clueless firefighter, but a clueless person. Like he sometimes wonders why he ever gave Buck a second chance to begin with.
Buck doesn't get it.
And he doesn't get much of a chance to think about it now, since before he can even think of formulating a response, Bobby is speaking again. "Anyway, we can talk more about this later." He waves dismissively. "I didn't think I'd find you up, but since you're here, I think there are some things we should talk about."
For a brief moment, a moment that Buck will look back on and consider to be recklessly and idiotically hopeful, he thinks that something Athena and Eddie said when reprimanding Bobby earlier for the pressure he'd been putting on him to forgive and forget everyone maybe got through to him. That maybe Bobby has realized he's putting expectations on Buck that shouldn't be his to bear, and he wants to apologize for it or talk it through or something. But, of course, that's not what happens.
"There's something I think I should tell you." Bobby says. "Or…warn you about, I guess."
Buck huffs out a nervous laugh, trying to ignore the way his heart clenches at Bobby's words. Questions of what might be coming around the corner now to throw his life for another loop flood his system. "What—what would you need to warn me about?"
"I overheard Chris and Harry talking yesterday." Bobby begins, clearly choosing his words carefully.
Buck's mind moves so quickly he has a hard time picking out an individual concern. What could Chris have said? Is he still scared after the air show? Worried about Buck or his dad? Or maybe their fight? Buck still can't believe he picked up on it so quickly when it hadn't even happened around him.
"I know you and Eddie have always been close, and with how much you've been going through lately, you've really been relying on him." Bobby continues. "I've seen you leaning on him a lot these past couple of days."
"He's my best friend." Buck draws out. He's not going to say anything about them also being together—not because they're actively keeping it a secret at this point (he and Eddie haven't told anyone in the 118 circle that they're together, but that had largely been a facility of not being actively working together and in a position where such a disclosure would be required and feeling like having something for themselves was nice and fun, not because they weren't prepared to be out) but because he doesn't know where Bobby is going with this and he doesn't want to open up a second line of conversation—potentially another line of judgement—without having an idea of where the first one is going.
"I know." Bobby nods. "And I know how much you love Christopher as well. Which is why this is so important. You've been having such a hard time and I don't want you to be blindsided and have that throw things off for you even more."
"What would I be blindsided by?" Buck pushes a little harder; it's difficult to not get frustrated when it feels like Bobby has spent the entire conversation flipping between coddling him and talking down to him about his choices and is now dancing around saying something that might actually be important.
Bobby hesitates for a moment, but eventually he speaks, leaning forward so his elbows are resting on his knees, hands clasped together. "Buck, Chris was telling Harry that his dad got offered a job by the fire department in Austin, and that they're going to be moving back to Texas next year."
Oh.
Oh shit.
This is…well…less than ideal. Some might even say not good at all.
He and Eddie hadn't thought to ask Chris not to talk about the move. They hadn't really talked about it with him in detail again once they'd gotten his thumbs up overall, except to answer his occasional questions as they came up. It never even occurred to Buck that they might need to tell him they're keeping it all a secret for now, since they hadn't really anticipated seeing anyone they would need to keep it a secret from right away. Before getting called to Athena and Bobby's because Wells had turned Eddie's place into a crime scene, Buck and Eddie had been working on the assumption that they'd pretty much be able to keep those who they were informing separate from those they had not yet spoken to. Once they'd gotten Athena's messages and voicemails, they'd been so preoccupied by trying to figure out what had happened and if everyone was alright, they'd forgotten they were headed straight towards someone who they needed a specific plan to talk about the move with.
Buck can hardly be mad at Chris for sharing something he's excited about with his friend, especially since he hadn't been told it was in any way a secret, but he's also far from prepared to have this conversation with Bobby.
He has no idea what to say beyond the fact that they'd been made an offer and decided to accept. What will happen if Bobby asks why? Is he supposed to be honest? Lie? Not say anything?
Buck has worked and left a lot of jobs over the years, and realistically speaking, he knows he doesn't have to explain anything, especially when he's giving a polite notice of appropriate length, but there is a part of him that thinks he might not have gotten out of his downward, post-SEALS spiral if it hadn't been for Bobby's guidance and leadership. And even if that had left a lot to be desired lately, it kind of makes him think he owes Bobby some kind of real conversation or explanation so he understands why things are changing (and maybe a part of him wants to have that conversation so he can try and get a real explanation from Bobby as to why his treatment of him has changed so much to the point where it is driving him out, but if Buck doesn't know how to have the conversation in general, he definitely doesn't know how to ask for that).
Buck had really wanted time to prepare to approach this topic with Bobby. And he really wanted to be doing it with Eddie by his side.
He doesn't realize how deep into his thoughts he's sinking, questions starting to tornado as he wonders how this is going to go and trying to figure out if Bobby is mad or relieved that he'll no longer be under his command (and also trying to figure out which reaction would feel worse) until an unsteady inhale catches and sends a sharp twinge straight through his ribs. The pain snaps him right back into the moment and he does his best to refocus and resettle. He was getting ahead of himself again. As he does so, he realizes Bobby is still talking. He tunes back in, drumming his fingers against his knee as an outlet towards the overflowing nervous energy and to hopefully keep himself present in the conversation.
"I know it will be a big change," Bobby is saying, "but since you're on medical leave anyways and it will be at least a few months before you can start training to recertify, that gives me plenty of time to scope out the academy and the other firefighters who might be looking for a transfer to find someone who will be just as good a fit to be your rescue partner as Eddie was."
Buck realizes very quickly that if Bobby is talking about finding him a new partner, he must have missed something else while he was starting to spiral. "Wait, why would you be trying to find a new partner for me?" He asks.
"Because." Bobby frowns. "It's like I just told you. Eddie is moving back to Texas. And you really improved a lot when you had someone consistent by your side in the field to have your back and temper your impulses so I think it's important to fill that gap as soon as possible so you can start building a partnership with someone else as soon as you're back to work."
Then it hits Buck. If all Bobby is going by is whatever he overheard Chris saying, and not an actual conversation with anyone, that he might not actually have the full story. Probably doesn't, in fact, since it seems like he has no idea that it's not only Eddie and Chris who will be moving and is trying to get ahead of Buck having some kind of meltdown about it.
It makes the conversation even more of a minefield, since now he'll have to own up to his own pending resignation. And unpack all the other implications of what Bobby is saying. But that seems less important in the current moment than making sure he has his information straight to begin with, before he gets too far down a path of action that no one actually needs.
Buck still really wishes he were doing this with Eddie. And with Eddie just down the hall, and in a position where he realistically should be involved since he's leaving too, Buck only feels moderately guilty when he suggests, "Maybe…Maybe I should go and get Eddie before we talk about this."
"Eddie and I will have a formal conversation once he actually submits notice to the department." Bobby shakes his head. "There's no need to wake him up in the middle of the night to confirm what we already know."
"But you don't know." Buck replies. "Not everything."
"And you do?"
"Of course I do. I was there when the offer was made."
And here Bobby looks…disappointed? Maybe? Concerned? Buck can't quite tell. "The department made him an offer in front of you? That's hardly professional…"
Buck sighs. Takes a moment to try and pull together the right words to explain the actual situation in a way that's professional and leaves all of the complications of Bobby's leadership decisions lately out of it; he thinks he can handle the conversation if they stick to the cold facts. "They didn't just make him an offer, Bobby. They made us both one. We decided together to take the jobs and move. We're both leaving."
"What?" Bobby's jaw falls slack. Like it had never once occurred to him that this could be a possibility. A small part of Buck, the part that heard Captain Strand and believed him when he said that Buck was a talented firefighter that a lot of captains and departments would want to have, wonders if Chris really only mentioned his dad, or if Bobby just has that big of blinders on when it comes to him, and didn't possibly think that Buck could have been included.
"I mean…you were talking about the rescue Eddie and I made at the air show. You saw the video." Buck pauses here, but not long enough for Bobby to interject. "So did a Captain with AFD. He's building a new heavy rescue squad for the city, and he asked Eddie and I to be the first members." Here, he waits for Bobby's response; it takes several long beats for the man to process before he says anything.
"You don't think that's a bad idea?"
It's…not the question Buck is expecting, that's for sure. "Why would it be a bad idea?"
"You'd be leaving your family behind. Following a friend halfway across the country to model your career after his instead of staying and building on what you've started here."
Buck blinks, trying to make sense of the words. Because not one bit of them tracks with what he knows and understands. "OK. Well, first of all, I had most of my heavy rescue certifications before you ever hired Eddie, and he only got them to better partner with me, so I'm pretty sure if anyone's modeling their career after anyone else's, it's him after mine. Not to mention, two seconds ago you thought I was going to fall apart because you were telling me that Eddie and Chris are leaving, but somehow it's a bad idea for me to go with them? That doesn't even begin to make sense. Besides which, they are my family."
Bobby's brow furrows further. "What about Maddie? I know things are a little rough right now but—,"
"A little rough?" Buck cuts him off, a huff of an incredulous laugh escaping before he can stop it. His anxiety is rapidly being replaced by mounting frustration. He's not sure why Bobby is so set on him and Maddie somehow fixing things—why it's the only outcome that Bobby seems willing to try and coach him towards; he'd love to be able to wave a magic wand and get along with his sister again, but the facts are what they are. Maddie hasn't been able to accept his choices or show him any level of respect. She keeps trying to manipulate him and in doing so has torn him down mentally. She has physically hurt him, and is continually siding with other people who have or are hurting him. He has every right to not be treated that way. "Bobby, she hit me. She won't apologize for it, and because I'm not living the exact life she thinks I should be living, she's decided she couldn't possibly need to. And that other people are right to attack and belittle me. That's more than a little rough."
"You know how much she's been through. The toll that can take on a person."
"And if she wants to get help for that, I will support her." Buck says. "I will listen to an apology if it ever comes. But you know, better than I do probably, that if you force someone to get help before they're actually ready that it's not gonna do much of anything. I love her, but I can't just let her constantly hurt me while I wait for her to meet me where I am and love me back. I'm not going to put my life on hold just so I can be nearby if she decides to change her mind."
"Staying in Los Angeles wouldn't be putting your life on hold, Buck."
"I disagree."
"Why? You have friends here, a great job…Sure you're injured and off work right now but you're not going to be magically healed in Austin. You just need to wait things out and things will be back to normal."
Buck huffs again. "Normal, huh?" And he doesn't intend to say anything about what he'd learned in Austin, really he doesn't, but he also can't help getting angry that Bobby's reaction to learning he also got a job opportunity alongside Eddie seems to be 'try and convince Buck this is a bad idea' instead of being happy for him, or even just some kind of normal level of disappointed that he'll need to hire two firefighters at the same time to avoid dealing with a constant rotation of floaters at the station, and anger has always been an emotion that jumbles Buck up. He's never been all that good about thinking before he speaks when he gets angry, and the words are spilling past his lips before he even quite realizes it. "So that's…what exactly? You managing me like I'm the station probie and not one your most highly certified rescue specialists most days? Constantly talking down to me or about me like I'm a reckless kid? Not telling me or Eddie that other stations request us for certain situations because they know how well we'll handle it? Keeping civilian and department commendations filed in my name secret from me? Is that the normal you're talking about?" Buck may not have been intending to say any of that, but can't deny the slight satisfaction that occurs when he sees the realization of what he's saying hit Bobby, whose eyes widen, even if that satisfaction is immediately followed by a wave of guilt swimming with a bunch of other feelings.
"How…" Bobby trails off, swallowing around his words. "How do you know I haven't been telling you those things?"
"Because. When Captain Strand was offering me and Eddie jobs and asking us to be the foundation for his new rescue squad, I couldn't wrap my head around why the hell he'd want me in his house, when most everyone here acts like I can barely put my turnouts on the right way around half the time. And when he saw that, he explained to us that after seeing the video of our air show rescue, he'd called Chief Alonzo and spoken to him, and that he'd explained all of the commendations in our files and how the 118's reputation and standing for heavy rescue went up when Eddie and I stared working together. He wasn't even actually my captain, but he wanted to be sure that I understood that I was a good firefighter. That people actively wanted to work with me."
"Buck, I—,"
"I felt more supported by him in five minutes than I've felt from you in…probably over a a year, Bobby. All I've gotten from you lately is judgment and criticism and—and advice that I either haven't asked for or has nothing to do with what I'm telling you I might actually need." This sentence almost seems to suck the air out of the room. "I know I screw up a lot and as my boss you have to tell me that, but I don't know why you've decided not to tell me any of the good things too. Especially when you always make sure to tell Hen and Rosen and everyone else we work with. I can tell you it hurt to find out."
Bobby seems a bit shellshocked. Which is a relief in a twisted kind of way because Buck can feel everything starting to come to a head inside of him. All of his usual feelings—his exhaustion and anxiety and sadness (but mostly the anxiety—are taking over for the anger, and wants to, or really needs to wrap things up. To get up and get back to the guest room and Eddie before he completely loses it.
He starts to maneuver off of the couch. When he manages to stand, he looks down at Bobby. "I'm gonna leave LA and go to Austin with Eddie. I don't know how it will all work out yet, but I think I have a better chance of being happy there, with my partner and family, and a captain who respects me enough to trust that I can do the job I've trained for. I think I'll be able to prove to myself that I'm worth a lot more than what you and this city have convinced me I am."
And if Buck retreats to the guest room at as close to breakneck speed as he can manage after that, clumsily collapsing onto the edge of the bed and waking Eddie up to be with him through the panic that follows being more up front and honest with Bobby than he'd ever intended on being, well…that's between him, Eddie, and the cats.
The first time Buck wakes up the next morning, it's to Eddie ever so carefully trying to disengage from the position they'd eventually fallen asleep in, and reassuring him in hushed tones that he just needs to make sure Chris gets ready for when Carla picks him up for school, and that he'll be back soon and Buck should keep sleeping. And Buck trusts Eddie, so he does.
The second time he wakes up, it's to muffled voices just outside the bedroom door. He's alone in bed, the second pillow long gone cold. His eyes feel swollen and achy, remnants of his midnight near-breakdown, and his head and throat don't feel much better. At first, his mind is deep enough in a foggy, just-woken up haze that he can't tell much about who's outside in the hallway other than each voice being male, but it only takes a moment or two for their volume to rise and for their identities to register to Buck.
The first is Eddie. "No, you don't get to do this right now." He's tense and Buck can picture his partner choking back anger to keep his response measured, the same way he'd done with his parents in Texas.
"I just need him to understand—,"
"No. You need to understand." Eddie cuts off the second speaker, a fraught, maybe desperate sounding Bobby. "This isn't about you and what you're feeling, Bobby. You have been making every interaction with Buck since that goddamn bombing about what you're feeling. I'm honestly not sure if there's any part of your relationship with him, professional or personal, that hasn't been shaped by your feelings and perceptions. And what Buck said last night isn't half of what you deserve for your decision, conscious or not, to hold him back and keep him small."
Buck tries to sit up as he listens; it's a struggle with only one arm, and he has to pull his bottom lip into his mouth, biting down hard to smother the instinctive cry as the pain of the movement flashes through his ribs.
"That's not what I was doing."
"Isn't it?" Eddie challenges. "He was done with his probie year long before you hired me. He has more experience, both as a firefighter and in the military than I do, but you have always deferred to me, like he's the probie I'm training and not the other way around. You reprimand him for things that we all do—that the department praises him for. We didn't even leave my shield ceremony before you were talking to me about shadowing Chimney and the other 118 lieutenants to get a feel for their duties and asking me to consider prepping to take the exam. Is that a conversation that you've ever had with Buck?"
"No."
"And you don't think any of that counts as holding him back?"
Bobby's sigh is so heavy that it carries past the door. "Eddie, you and Buck are very different people. Experience is only a single piece of the puzzle. Nobody would ever doubt his enthusiasm or energy for the job, but he's also impulsive. Reckless. He gets tunnel vision to the point where nothing, not even his own well-being, matters to him as much as whatever he decides to work towards. I don't have the same conversations with him as I do with you because if he doesn't slow down and mature before he advances, he's going to think the job is the only thing that matters, and he's going to end up burnt out with nobody to help and no skills to cope with that."
"Do you even hear yourself, Bobby?" Eddie scoffs. "If Buck and I are different people, so are Buck and you. If, and this is a very big if, if he's making the same mistakes you did, it's only because you keep giving him unsolicited advice and making decisions that make it clear that you only value him when he fits into the box you've decided he belongs in. That his well-being and feelings are less important than everybody else's, and what he wants only matters if it doesn't interfere with what everyone else wants from him."
"I'm just trying to make sure he gets a full, happy and healthy life. That he doesn't do anything he can't take back."
"But you don't get to decide what that looks like, Bobby. Buck does."
A long silence follows. For a moment Buck thinks Bobby might have given up and abandoned the conversation, but he also thinks if that were the case, Eddie would come back into the guest room like he promised, so he reasons they both must still be there. And eventually, Bobby speaks again. "I just want to talk to him, Eddie. To explain my perspective about why I've made these choices."
"And I already told you, no."
"Eddie—,"
"Buck is right to be upset with you for how you've been treating him. He didn't say anything that wasn't true, and he wasn't even half as harsh as I would have been if I were in his shoes. So no. You don't get to talk to him right now. I'm not going to let you guilt him into an apology you don't deserve by giving him a half-assed explanation about how your past makes it impossible for you to see and treat him as his own person. If you need to talk about it with someone, you have Athena, your priest, your sponsor…or hell, you could try actual therapy. But unless Buck reaches out to you and says he wants to talk, the only thing you get to do right now is respect that choice and keep your distance."
The door pops open after that and Eddie slides into the room, carrying a tray laden with toast, fruit and a few different drink options that Buck can see. The second thing Buck notices is the stormy expression that's taken over Eddie's face. He's clearly trying to rein in his emotion's after arguing with Bobby, and the whole thing sends pangs of guilt through Buck's stomach. Eddie wouldn't be fighting with Bobby if it weren't for him, nor would he be unable to return to his own house or trying to navigate legal dealings, or even just putting together a separate breakfast (and when was the last time Buck had done something so caring and thoughtful for Eddie, who deserves it so much more than he does?)…Buck has done nothing but cause complication after complication for his partner and he's still putting together breakfasts and trying to take care of him and Buck just doesn't—can't—understand why he's worth the effort.
"I'm sorry." The words comes out before he even really thinks about saying them.
Almost instantly, the anger in Eddie's eyes melts and morphs into confusion. "Why are you apologizing?"
Buck could list any number of the reasons circling his brain, and he does gesture vaguely in the universal sign for "all of this shit", but what comes out of his mouth is, "You're fighting with Bobby because of me."
"I don't know how much you heard," Eddie begins, crossing the room with door now closed behind him, "but I'm not fighting with Bobby. Or anyone. I'm just making sure he understands that the days of everyone ignoring your feelings and boundaries are over, and that you don't need to talk with him again until you're ready."
"We're living in his house until Michael's friend finishes with the windows at your place. I can't hide out in the guest room forever." Buck points out.
Eddie sets the breakfast tray down onto the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed. "No, you can't. But he forced a conversation last night that you didn't want to have until you were able to talk to Jules and prepare for it, and that doesn't need to happen again. Bobby should be mature enough to respect that outside of when you are working, he doesn't get to decide when the two of you talk."
And it's not that it's untrue (Buck is well aware that even though the boundaries between professionalism and friendship and family have long been blurry at the 118 that Bobby doesn't actually have any authority over him outside of the professional setting) it's more that there's a part of Buck that feels like all he's done lately is ruin relationships and burn bridges, and as hurt as he's felt these past few days, learning about how Bobby captains him and realizing that he maybe doesn't deserve to be seen and treated so differently, he's spent so much longer looking up to and respecting Bobby. Feeling like they aren't just a captain and firefighter, but friends too. Family even. He has a lot of feelings he can't quite untangle right now when it comes to Bobby, and all he can really parse out is that he feels like a mixture of a failure for most likely destroying yet another relationship and an idiot for ever thinking that he and Bobby had something as meaningful as he'd thought to begin with.
"We—you—have to work under him for another two months." Is what he says. It's easier to focus on the additional feelings of discomfort and shame over being the reason Eddie is throwing out his relationship with Bobby—one that has always seemed particularly solid to Buck and like something Eddie values and tries to cultivate—than it is to focus on everything else he'd panicked about the night before. Eddie had spent a lot of the night talking through those anxieties with him ad nauseum anyways and Buck is sure the last thing he wants to do is repeat the same reassurances that Buck hasn't ruined anything or done anything wrong for the hundredth (because as much as Buck trusts Eddie he sometimes can't quite believe that the things his partner thinks to be true and what the world at large thinks to be true are the same thing). "You've never had any problems with him before. You shouldn't ruin that to make a point about me. I don't want you to."
"It's not just about you, Ev." Eddie rests his hand on top of Buck's. "Sure, that's a big part of it, and I probably wouldn't have noticed some of the problems Bobby is creating so quickly if you and I weren't as close as we are, but the fact is that as a leader, he is biased. He treats the people in his command differently based on personal feelings, and that can not only hurt their careers but it can hurt them. I don't need to be best friends with my boss, especially when I'm not going to be working for him in a few months, but he needs to figure out that doing things the way he has been isn't OK. If me letting him know that and enforcing your boundaries means that we only have a professional relationship for the rest of our time in LA, I am fine with that."
It still doesn't feel right, but Buck can't think of any good reason to press the issue and keep trying to convince Eddie otherwise, and even though he hasn't really had enough therapy to untangle all of his feelings on his own, he has had enough to recognize that he is maybe not viewing these things with Bobby the same way he might if he were an outsider looking at someone else having the same problems, so instead of continuing that line of conversation, he sighs, makes a mental note of yet another topic to bring up with Jules at their next appointment, and waits a beat before changing subjects. "Did Chris get off to school OK?"
"He did." Eddie nods, his expression softening some. "He gave me a hug to pass on to you when you want one."
Of all the things in his life that Buck is grateful for, Christopher Diaz is at the very top of the list. "I got his text messages too." He confirms. "I hope you know you've got a really great kid."
"So do you."
It's another one of those things Buck isn't totally sure he always believes, Eddie saying that Chris is just as much his. But it's the sort of thing he wants to believe, even if he's not sure he's worthy of it. And it's the sort of thing that, when he lets himself believe it, makes everything else feel a little bit easier. Because even if things are hard, and he's having a terrible day, having a kid like Chris, and a partner like Eddie (a family, who seem to love him for being him and don't expect anything else) to call his own is a spot of light that he hasn't always had. And that light makes a difference.
So in the face of his complicated relationship with Bobby, and all of the impending changes in his life that are scaring the shit out of him, all of the doubts he has about making those changes, and what he knows will be a fraught and complicated day with Wells' allocution and the choice he still has to make in regards to giving his own impact statement, Buck decides that he wants to believe. He'll do his best to accept the family Eddie is granting him, and all of the encouragement and reassurances he's offered over the past twelve hours (if not even further back), and take whatever comfort all of that provides.
If for no other reason than because Chris and Eddie think he deserves it.
Chapter 39
Summary:
I don't know how great a job I did at proof-reading this, tbh. Please excuse any typos/errors.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"And you understand that you are pleading guilty to six counts of rape, two counts of felony destruction of property, and one count of witness intimidation, and that by doing so you are subjecting yourself to the punishment that this court sees fit to assign you?"
"I do, your honor."
There's enough people scattered throughout the courtroom that it feels more than a little like a spectacle, and Buck had been careful to choose a seat at the back of the room to hopefully avoid being noticed when he and Eddie had arrived. He's well aware that there's a coalition of reporters off in one section, there to see the conclusion of the scandal Taylor Kelly had whipped up with her initial report, and that the retinue of LAFD higher-ups, notable due to their dress uniforms, are seated prominently near said crowd of reporters, and Buck hadn't wanted to be anywhere that would draw either group's attention. It had been a big enough fight with himself to come to the conclusion that actually seeing Wells get sentenced would most likely help him resolve some of his current anxieties and to actually get himself out of the house and downtown to the hearing, he hadn't been able to take a seat anywhere where there was a chance that someone would see him. He doesn't want people monitoring his reactions, judging him based on their own expectations, nor does he want anyone asking him any questions. And he especially doesn't want the handful of Wells' other victims who had chosen to attend to realize that he's there.
So he watches from the back row, with Eddie by his side and holding his hand. On his decision to attend, and again on their arrival in the courtroom, his partner had promised that all Buck had to do was squeeze his hand if he wanted to leave and he'd get him out. Buck is hoping that he'll feel strong enough to stay and see the hearing through, but it's an escape hatch he's thankful to have nonetheless.
"And what is the prosecution's recommendation for sentencing as a part of this agreement, Ms. Davis?"
ADA Davis responds quickly to the judge's question. "We're recommending a sentence of twenty-three years, with parole eligibility after eighteen, your honor."
The judge asks Wells another series of questions that she answers briefly that Buck barely follows, though they seem to be assessing further that she understands what taking a plea means. Eventually the questions end. "Hannah Wells, this court accepts your plea of guilty, and hereby sentences you to a period of thirty years in prison. You will be eligible for potential release after no fewer than twenty years."
"That's not what I agreed to!" Wells squawks in protest. "She just said eighteen years!"
"The District Attorney's office makes sentencing recommendations, not promises." The judge says, voice firm and almost imperious. "Final sentencing in these matters is at my discretion, which you already acknowledged during these proceedings. Further disruptions will not be met kindly, is that understood?"
Wells' affirmative response isn't quite as loud, but still drips with ire.
"Thank you. The court will now take a brief, fifteen minute recess. We'll reconvene at 10:30, at which time the court will hear any statements from those impacted by the crimes."
Buck doesn't squeeze Eddie's hand, but it's a close thing.
The gavel pounds once, and the courtroom fills with the chattering of hushed voices, the gallery coming to life as the proceedings pause.
"Can we get out of here?" Buck asks, the moment he feels like speaking won't draw any attention. He's been anxious all morning, and while it brought some manner of relief to hear the judge's ruling that Wells is going to prison for long enough that he likely won't have to deal with her again as long as the custody issue goes the way his lawyer believes it will, that relief had been quickly destroyed by the judge closing the first part of the proceedings. He'd seen what he needed to see, and everything else…he doesn't think he can be involved.
Eddie nods, but doesn't say anything. He just rises, helping Buck to his feet at the same time, and guides them both quietly out of the courtroom and into the hall. In the comparative quiet of the hall, and a few steps away from their assigned room, he stops walking and faces Buck, resting his hand on his shoulder. "Are you just needing a break or do you want to get out of here entirely?"
"I don't…I can't…" It should be a relatively easy question to answer. Buck doesn't want to be anywhere near the courtroom anymore. But it's still a struggle to find the words to explain himself. Not that Eddie is even looking for a detailed explanation, but Buck is trying to lean into being more open with his support system, or at least with Eddie, as part of his therapy homework, and this feels like exactly the sort of thing Jules had been talking about when broaching the subject with him. It's good to let people know when he's triggered and/or needs a break; it's better to let them know why so they can help him navigate the situation in the future. "I want to leave," is where he settles.
"OK."
Buck lets Eddie "drive" so to speak, losing focus a little as he walks while Eddie takes the lead. The spike in his anxiety is making him vaguely nauseous, and there are waves of prickly heat assaulting his system and causing a clammy sweat. He feels unsteady and uncomfortable, not quite on the verge of panic but with his mind racing in such a way that everything else starts to take a back seat. It's only when he's sitting down that Buck realizes that he's outside, on a hard park bench with the mid-morning sun settling warmly across his skin, and not in the front seat of Eddie's truck with wonky air conditioning being blown on him as he'd been expecting. He jolts back into himself and glances around. He quickly recognizes that Eddie is still with him, and that they're in the park across the street from the courthouse, on a bench near a small fountain, he's just not sure why. "What are we doing out here?"
"You started zoning out back inside." Eddie explains, squeezing his hand. "I was worried you were getting unsteady and this was closer than the garage we parked in."
"I'm OK." Buck assures, swallowing around his cotton mouth.
Eddie shoots him a pointed look, clearly not believing him.
"Really." He flashes half a weak smile and squeezes Eddie's hand back. "The fresh air is helping. I just…" He tries again to find the words he couldn't when they were inside. "I started to get really nervous when the judge mentioned the impact statements." It's not the whole of the problem, but it's a start.
"The DA said you wouldn't have to speak if you didn't want to." Eddie says. He's frowning, and Buck knows he'll have to explain more for his partner to understand.
"I know. It's—it's not so much about being worried about speaking or not speaking. It's more…Because of Taylor's story, everyone in that courtroom knows who I am. And I-I know that they'll be watching me to see how I'm reacting to everything, so that's part of it. I don't want to be more than a footnote of whatever stories come out of today. But it's also…" Buck trails off, taking a deep, somewhat shaky breath. He doesn't really think this is something Eddie is going to judge him about, not with everything else he's been so accepting and understanding of, but it's hard to convince himself of that when it's something he's been judging himself for for so long.
How can he explain how guilty he feels that there were other firefighters—other victims—in the courtroom?
Buck sighs. "Everyone else…the other firefighters who pressed charges and might speak…They were all assaulted after I had my first appointment with Wells."
Some level of understanding crosses Eddie's face. "Buck…Ev. You aren't responsible for anything that woman did. To you or anyone else."
"I should have reported her after the first time."
"You couldn't have known that—,"
"I was so stupid." Buck cuts his partner off. "Back then, I convinced myself that sleeping with her was fine because sex is one of the only things I'm good for and doing that was easier than thinking about the call that sent me there in the first place. If I had actually questioned things and thought about it then maybe…" He trails off, fairly certain that if he continues he might start to cry; he's too wrung out and exhausted from the past several days to have a very good rein on his emotions.
Eddie sighs. "You can't play the 'what if' game like that, hermoso. No one can possibly know what might have changed if things had happened differently, or if things would change at all. What I do know, is that you were not, and are not, stupid." Buck opens his mouth to argue, but stops himself when Eddie shakes his head. "You're not. You're someone who has experienced a lot of trauma, ever since you were a kid, and you were never really given the help you needed to deal with it, so you found any way to cope that you could. And some of those choices weren't the healthiest, but that doesn't make them, or you, stupid."
Buck looks down at his lap, and pulls his hand out of Eddie's grip. "But I knew it wasn't right. At least…a part of me did. I had to keep telling myself that it was fine and that it helped and push away how off it all made me feel. I didn't sleep with anyone else after that appointment until things with Abby were more serious because I couldn't stand the thought of it. I ignored every sign that it shouldn't have happened so I could keep going about my life, and at least three other firefighters were raped because of it."
"You were protecting yourself, Ev. You didn't have a support system nearby that you could count on and you were doing the best you could on your own. It is OK that you did what you needed to get through something horrible when you were hurt and didn't know who to trust. You are not responsible for the things Wells chose to do."
"She wouldn't have even had a chance if I had just told someone and gotten an investigation started."
"OK." Eddie says. "So putting that logic on the others. They didn't report her either until after the investigation started. Is what happened to you when you were getting re-certified their fault? Or Bobby's for sending you there?"
Buck looks up, and finds himself meeting Eddie's pointed gaze. "I know what you're doing."
Eddie nods. "Of course you do. Because you're not stupid." He reaches over, taking Buck's hand once again. "I know you don't blame anyone else for what happened to you. And I know it's hard to give yourself the same grace or credit that you can give to other people, but it's worth trying. Because it's not your fault either."
"I'll try." Buck agrees after a few long moments, even though he doesn't think it's something he's going to make much progress on today. He'll probably need a few more therapy sessions with Jules and many more homework assignments to really make a dent in how he sees himself. "I still don't think I can go back and listen to what the others went through."
"You don't have to. We have the rest of the day until Chris is out of school to do whatever we want."
"Can we just…stay here for a little bit?" The temperatures are a touch on the cooler side , given that it's late in October, but the sun is warm and the slight breeze on the air is sending mist from the park fountain in their direction and it's all a pleasant change of pace from spending the morning in a formal, sort of dark and depressing courtroom while dealing with really uncomfortable, anxiety-ridden business. It feels good to be able to sit in the sun and just enjoy a few moments with his boyfriend, especially with a fairly significant weight recently lifted off of his shoulders.
"Absolutely." Eddie leans closer, pressing a brief kiss to Buck's temple. After he pulls back, he lets a beat pass before he speaks again. "Now, can I explain all the ways I know that sex is absolutely not one of the only things that you're good for, or was that a slip of the tongue made out of habit that you already know isn't true?"
Buck is proud of the way he's managing his nerves as he enters Chief Alonzo's office with Eddie. The Chief had scheduled the meeting, meant to serve as a preliminary discussion about their transition to Austin, to take place in the week after Wells' sentencing, which had been helpful in that the extra time had given him the space to mentally prepare for the conversation. Less helpful was the knowledge that Bobby was being included in the discussion, but between the repairs being completed at Eddie's house allowing them to move back to their actual home and get genuine distance from their Captain, and being able to have a therapy session with Jules where they focused on strategies to keep future conversations with Bobby civil while still allowing Buck to say what he feels he needs to say, Buck is almost feeling like he's ready to face Bobby's disapproval again.
Almost.
He still can't help but anticipate Bobby's potential comments. He hasn't been able to disengage from his feelings that Bobby is someone to respect and look up to, and he's fairly certain that despite his work with Jules to ignore negative thoughts and comments, if Bobby expresses his… concerns and reticence over the job offer and Buck's intention to accept it and move, it's going to hurt and set him back, and even though a number of his external stressors have been resolved lately, Buck is definitely still finding himself to be a bit of an emotional mess.
And even though Chief Alonzo is only technically his chief for a couple of months (and Buck will be off work the entire time) he doesn't want to get emotional or panic and make a fool out of himself in the meeting. And he doesn't want Eddie to get upset on his behalf and argue with Bobby. Not when he still will be on duty for the near future and need to be in the good graces of his captain and chief.
So Buck has his nerves about the meeting, but with Eddie at his side and a small fidget toy concealed in the hand of the arm currently wrapped in a sling, he feels like he's doing a fairly decent job of appearing to be at ease. Even with Bobby taking a seat next to them.
"I'm glad you all were able to make it." Chief Alonzo says once greetings are exchanged and everyone is in their chairs. "I know it's a bit unusual for us to start a transition process so many months before the scheduled end date with the LAFD, but given the full picture of the circumstances of these transfers, I wanted to be sure that we had a chance to have a full conversation and essentially debrief as it were. Starting now will allow us the opportunity for follow-up meetings if necessary. So," the chief claps his hands together once, "let's get started. I first want to thank Firefighters Buckley and Diaz for representing the department so well while they were visiting Austin. The circumstances at the air show were tragic, but the reports I received from Captain Strand and his superiors with AFD indicated that had the two of you not been there and able to act with such calm professionalism and skill, things could have been far worse. You both handled yourselves well, as evidenced by the immediate job offers you received."
"Thank you, sir." Buck ducks his head, hoping to avoid showcasing the light blush coloring his cheeks as he and Eddie accept the praise from Alonzo.
"As for the job offers themselves, I believe that represents the meat of our conversation this afternoon." Alonzo continues. "Austin's offers for you are excellent, and well deserved. The LAFD understands the professional reasons you have for accepting and making the move. We just want to be sure that there aren't any reasons you have that lie with the department here that are causing you to leave that we could potentially fix, and to otherwise ensure that there's no way we can convince you to stay with us. With all respect to Austin, we believe we have a lot to offer here in Los Angeles, and we would hate to lose two promising firefighters such as yourselves. Do you have anything to add, Captain Nash?"
Bobby coughs awkwardly into his hand, and seems to avoid Alonzo's gaze directly. "I think it would be best to allow you to lead the conversation Chief. I'll jump in only if necessary."
Huh.
Bobby's never hesitated to speak up before. Buck can't help but be confused at his reluctance to pipe up now.
"All right, then." Chief Alonzo nods. "I'll jump right in. LAFD believes that the two of you represent some of our best assets. You're both highly competent, highly qualified firefighters in your own right, and when you work as a team you set the standard that everyone else aims for. This was something you were achieving before you were both even out of your probationary years. While recognizing that the Austin Fire Department has made you very generous salary offers, I would be remiss, and the commissioner would be quite upset, if I didn't ask if there were anything we could do to convince you to stay in the city. While we couldn't immediately match Austin's proposed salaries, we could offer you both raises that would place you on a compensation track much more aligned with the skills that you're bringing to the department and the risks that you're taking."
Eddie speaks first, after glancing over at Buck briefly. "With all respect to the department, Chief, the increase in salaries are only a small part of why we decided to take the jobs Captain Strand is offering us. I also have family in Austin. My younger sister lives there, and she's about to have her first child. Being able to offer her support and raise our families together was a major selling point."
"And that's certainly not something we could replicate." The Chief admits ruefully. "But I know you do also both have family here."
Buck barely contains his wince. He can't help but feel guilty that Eddie is going to be distanced from his Abuela and Tia Pepa (although both women had taken the news well), and he still hasn't quite made peace with the thought that he'll be leaving behind the remainder of his chosen family and making it harder for Maddie to get in touch should she decide that she wants to reconcile. Having the Chief bring them up isn't exactly a welcome reminder, and Buck finds himself grateful when Eddie makes a quick rebuttal, refocusing the conversation.
"We do…" He admits. "But Austin is also offering us the opportunity to work exclusively in heavy rescue, and, I think more importantly, a clean slate. I won't speak for Buck, but it's not a secret that over the past couple of years there have been a lot of…difficult events that we've been through."
"Working heavy rescue in a city like Austin will pose just as many risks to your well being." Alonzo points out.
Buck fidgets with the toy hidden in his hand. He knows this is where he needs to step in and speak up; this part is not really Eddie's to explain. "It's not so much the risk of further trauma as it is…" He pauses, taking a breath to refocus; this is part of what he'd taken the time with Jules to find the right way to speak about it, he just needs to make sure he's choosing the words they'd landed on. "All of those things, the truck bombing, the tsunami, my…experiences with Dr. Wells…They've impacted the way that people look at us. And how they treat us. Or, me, at least. I don't think I'll be able to return to the 118 and be seen as just another member of the house."
Here, Alonzo frowns. "Can you elaborate, Firefighter Buckley?"
"My file reflects the…growing pains I had during my probationary year, I'm sure." Buck waits for the nod of acknowledgement before he continues. "There are a few people at the house who have decided that's all I am. There are comments, inquiries, judgements…They got more intense when the story broke about the charges I filed against Dr. Wells, and again when they learned I wasn't straight, even though I was on leave at the time."
"Captain Nash, is this something you're aware of?"
"Probably not the full extent." Bobby admits. He shifts in his seat. "I have overheard those comments before and reprimanded those responsible, but if I'm not present when something occurs the only way I can intervene is if someone files a complaint."
Chief Alonzo looks back to Buck here. "Is there a reason you chose not to report these incidents to your captain?"
This isn't a topic that Buck had specifically prepared with Jules the way they had some others, since he wasn't sure how deep the conversation would go, so it takes him a moment to formulate an answer that feels honest, but fair to everyone involved. "The atmosphere at the 118 is very familial, and in my experience family often crosses the line without realizing it or facing consequences. And it's harder to recognize when your lines are crossed by your family, because you're willing to accept more from them. It's only in my time off that I've really started to recognize that things weren't right."
"And you don't think that Captain Nash might be able to make changes at the 118 that would make the work atmosphere more amenable to you in the time while your injuries are healing?"
"When Captain Nash says he reprimanded people," Eddie interjects, "what he means is that he said someone's name and gave them a look if he overheard a comment that he personally found to be over the line. At most he'd remind them that they were at work. There haven't been any write-ups or even formal warnings. Everyone knows that there's a lot they can get away with, and I don't think a few speeches from the captain that allowed it will change much for them."
Alonzo's lips press together in a firm line. "Something for us to discuss at a later time then, Captain Nash."
Another rush of guilt floods through Buck's system. As unhappy as he is with how Bobby has treated him, he doesn't want to get him in trouble. Especially at work. He just wants to leave this job and mess behind him in LA and start over in Austin. "I'm not saying this because I think there's anyone to blame, Chief Alonzo, I just don't think that I'm going to be able to work at the 118 when I'm healthy again. There's too much negative history and built up mistrust on both sides. And while I understand that there are a number of captains in the city who appreciate what Eddie and I bring to the table when we work together, who might welcome us to their firehouses, getting to start fresh in a new city where the other firefighters look at me and don't see the reputation that I've grown beyond, or just the bad things that have happened to me…I'm not just considering the job the move is providing but the impact the move will have on my mental well-being as well."
"Well, I can hardly blame you for that. Or for wanting to support your sister." Alonzo nods in Eddie's direction. "I won't lie and say we're not disappointed to be losing the two of you but it's hard to argue against the opportunity Austin has presented you. And as much as I wish I could replicate the offered promotion for you, Firefighter Buckley—,"
"Promotion?" Bobby chokes out in a slightly strangled voice.
Chief Alonzo continues as if he hasn't just been interrupted. "Unfortunately at the LAFD, the process of promoting someone to Lieutenant can only be initiated by that firefighter's captain, and we make a point of trying not to exert influence on those decisions."
"Of course." Buck nods. It's not like he would want a position that was only offered to him because someone else had forced it upon his captain, and he knows he'd constantly doubt whether or not he deserved it if he knew that was the case. As it was, it had taken a fairly lengthy conversation with Captain Strand and then Eddie for Buck to accept that his future captain was requesting that Buck complete the extra training and certifications because he felt he was the best fit for the role, not solely because he had a year more of firefighting experience on Eddie.
"We both appreciate that you value our contributions, Chief." Eddie says. "If circumstances were different, we would likely be staying. This is just the right offer at exactly the—,"
"Can someone please explain what promotion you're talking about?" Bobby interrupts again.
Despite the promotion being his, Buck doesn't step up to respond; he's almost positive that Bobby won't respond well to the news that he's been asked to complete the additional training to be able to start as the lieutenant for Captain Strand's rescue squad. Not when Bobby seemingly doesn't think that he's even ready to be a firefighter anywhere other than under his command.
Eddie has no compunction about speaking up, reaching over and grabbing Buck's free hand before turning to face Bobby more directly. "Since our squad will be operating under one captain in the same station as a regular engine crew, each crew has a lieutenant to allow for a clear chain of command when the captain can't be present at a call. Our future captain in Austin asked Buck to be the rescue squad's lieutenant when we start next year."
"He doesn't want someone with more experience?'
Here, Chief Alonzo's frown returns. "Captain Nash, as best as I can tell, the only person with concern's about Firefighter Buckley's experience, maturity, and skills is you. Every report I have from incident commanders across the city praise him for his quick thinking, calm under pressure, and general skills. And the tenure of his experience meets or exceeds the requirements for lieutenancy in most major metropolitan fire departments, including ours. Not to mention his past work experience, and the fact that his scores on every certification test are in the top percentile. He'll have no trouble taking command of his squad when the time comes."
Buck is careful to keep his gaze forward and on the chief; he's not sure he wants to see Bobby's reaction to another dressing down from his chief in front of them. Especially when what he's being told is so contrary to his own opinions.
"Buck's going to be the heavy rescue lieutenant, and the captain has asked me to dual certify as a full paramedic." Eddie tacks on. Buck's not entirely sure why other than maybe to emphasize the fact that Bobby hadn't exactly encouraged Eddie to pursue his paramedic certification here, despite being more than halfway there with his army experience and certifications. "Paramedics have their own captains in Austin and run independently from the firefighters, but they make it a point to have someone who is paramedic certified on each heavy rescue squad to stabilize patients who are in tenuous positions."
"That's…very forward thinking of them." Bobby says. His voice is tight and sounds a little bit like he's swallowed a lemon.
"Talking with my counterpart in Austin as we begin to facilitate the transfer has been enlightening." Chief Alonzo jumps in as if he hasn't noticed the struggle Bobby seems to be experiencing. "I've already recommended some potential changes to our structures to Commissioner Matthews based on how they operate there. I think good things will come out of strengthening the relationship between our two departments. Which reminds me," he angles to face Buck and Eddie directly, "I've confirmed with the academy that they will be able to proctor any testing you need to complete prior to your move. You'll just need to schedule a time with Michelle Andrews in the front office and she'll coordinate everything."
Buck and Eddie both offer their thanks. That will be a major convenience as they prepare to move, what with Captain Strand now hoping that they can hit the ground running come January. It will be a lot less stressful to be able to complete their certifications before they move at the end of the year, instead of having to cram everything in as soon as they arrive in Austin.
"Now, with the major logistics out of the way, I would like to—,"
"Chief Alonzo?" The Chief's administrative assistant opens the door and ducks his head into the office. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a certified delivery that only you can sign for."
"Of course. Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen."
The chief is barely out of the office before Bobby is turning to face them. "I owe you both several apologies. Especially you, Buck."
Buck is so shocked, he almost doesn't remember to look at Bobby. He finds the captain with drawn, almost defeated features. The man looks sad and tired. It's far from what Buck has grown to expect and he's not sure exactly what's caused the change. The explanations Chief Alonzo had given about Buck's skills are no different from what anyone else has said to counter Bobby's arguments, so he can't imagine why they might impact him differently. Is it really all that more meaningful to the man to hear the words from his boss?
"I know I can't take back the decisions I've made regarding how I've treated you professionally, and there's no way I can make things better now." Bobby begins. "I've screwed up again, letting personal feelings cloud my professional judgement and in doing so, I've clearly been a detriment to your professional development."
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all." Buck admits. This is another conversation he'd prepared for some with Jules, although he hadn't really anticipated having it today. "But it's about way more than the work stuff, Bobby. Sure, you blocked my growth with the department, and that sucks, but what really gets me is the personal things you've said about me, and how you've treated me overall. I don't know that you've ever trusted or even respected me, and for how much I respect you," because he still can't disconnect those feelings in his head, "that's what really hurts."
Bobby closes his eyes. A couple beats pass and he sighs and reopens them. "I can't fix that, can I?"
Buck figured an apology or question like this would come if he ever got around to diving into this with Bobby and really talking to him. He just hadn't figured out how he felt or what he was going to say. "I don't know." He admits. "Maybe not."
The door to the office opens, and Chief Alonzo reenters, apologizing for the interruption once more. He sits behind his desk. "OK. Now that we've gotten the main logistics out of the way, I'd like to have an informal exit conversation. I know it's a little unusual when you still have a couple months with us, however it seems like there might be some things that would be better addressed sooner rather than later. So…let's dive in, shall we?"
"Dinner was incredible, as always, mamá." Tia Pepa compliments, leaning back in her seat as she wipes her hands with a napkin.
"Absolutely." Eddie agrees. "I'm not sure I even have room for an after dinner coffee."
Isabel Diaz arches an eyebrow, an amused smile gracing her features. "Oh? So you don't want any of the pay de queso I made this morning?"
Buck nearly snorts at the way Eddie perks up in his seat like a puppy that just heard the word 'walk'.
"Con fresas?"
"Por supuesto."
"I've never actually made a cheesecake." Buck comments, taking in the youthful joy Eddie is displaying at the thought of getting a slice of his abuela's. He misses cooking and baking—it feels like it's been ages since he's had the use of both arms at this point since the handful of days at the start of their trip to Austin barely count—and even though talking about it isn't really the same, it's the best way he has to live vicariously through others until he's allowed to use his right arm again. "Is it hard?"
"Not at all." Abuela answers with a smile. "But pay de queso is a little different from your American cheesecake."
Pepa smirks over the rim of her drink before she takes a sip. "It's better."
"At least, abuela's is." Eddie confirms.
Buck grins. "I can't wait to try it then."
"You'll love it, Buckito." Abuela says. "And when your arm is better and we start cooking together again, I can teach you to make it."
Just like that, the air is sucked out of the room. For Buck and Eddie at least. They share an uneasy look. Now that they've started sharing the news of their impending move with people, they'd decided to use the standing Diaz family dinner as an opportunity to tell Abuela and Tia Pepa, a choice that felt all the more opportune when Chris had begged to spend the night with Denny to play some new racing game the boys were excited for, leaving the adults alone to discuss the more serious reasons for the move if necessary. And they've been at Abuela's home for close to two hours now, but they've yet to broach the subject. Buck's letting Eddie take the lead since it's his family they're talking with, but Eddie has yet to identify the right moment.
Buck is fairly certain that the moment has just presented itself.
Eddie agrees, and after a few moments of silence that grow increasingly awkward, he speaks up. "Actually, we have some news. That…might make cooking lessons a little difficult."
"What kind of news?"
"Well, as you know we had an…eventful time while we were in Austin." Eddie begins. He goes on to explain the story that's now becoming old hat—getting the extraordinary job offer from Captain Strand, visiting the station and loving what they found there, and talking with Chris and deciding that they were going to accept and move at the start of the new year.
Buck watches everyone carefully as Eddie explains, tracking both Isabel and Pepa's reactions and Eddie's as well. He wants to be sure that his partner still seems OK with the idea of moving away from some of the family member's he's closest to, and that those family members aren't too upset at the thought of them leaving. His observations leave him a little confused. He doesn't have the most confidence in his people reading skills when it comes to the Diaz women (Pepa in particular can be fairly inscrutable when she wants to be) but he doesn't see any glaring signs that they're even shaken by the news. If anything, Pepa and Isabel are close to…smiling?
Buck nearly shakes his head. Not that he wants anyone to be upset but that can't be right.
"Oh felicidades, nieto!" Isabel springs up from her seat as Eddie finishes. She leans across the table, grabbing his his head with a hand on either side of his face and planting a kiss right in the middle of his forehead. "This is wonderful news!" She moves from Eddie to Buck, repeating her gesture. "I'm so happy for the both of you."
"Really?" Eddie quirks an eyebrow, clearly also at least a little surprised for his news to be met by such obvious joy. Buck imagines that he didn't want his grandmother to be sad either, but that it probably feels a little strange to see her excited at the thought of them being so far away again.
Isabel sits back down, still smiling, but with her expression softening. "You needed to come to California to find your joy again, a career you love, your Buckito…" She explains. "Los Angeles is where you learned how to live again after hitting so many road blocks. That doesn't mean it had to be the last step on your journey. If this opportunity in Austin is the right fit for you, of course I'm happy for you. For both of you." She looks pointedly between the two of them; it warms something in Buck's chest to be included.
Pepa also looks pleased, but is a little more reserved in her reaction. She asks if they've thought through what it will mean to be leaving so much closer to Helena and Ramon. At first, Eddie just tries to dismiss the concern, with a glib answer about Austin and El Paso being eight hours apart and therefore still not a quick day trip, but when the elder Diazes press a little, worried that the pressure his parents might put on Eddie could bring him back to the more negative space he'd been in before he'd moved to California to begin with, he admits that the visit they'd made with Adriana had been a complete disaster and that he's no longer in contact with either of his parents and has no plans to tell them about the move to begin with. That derails the conversation a bit, with Isabel in particular wanting to know what had caused that decision, and they spend a few minutes rehashing the beginning of their trip to Texas and how even Chris had wanted to limit contact for the time being, but eventually the topic shifts back to what specifically makes the move to Austin the right choice for Eddie, Chris, and Buck.
They talk about the specific opportunities being offered, the seniority and growth paths for their careers, but also the chance to be around to help Adri with her little one when they're born a few months down the line, and then the fresh start that leaving LA will afford Buck in particular.
"Plus," Buck begins, licking at his lips to try and keep them moist in the face of making his own contributions to the talk and sharing his own news, "I think I'll feel much more comfortable raising my kid a few states away from their mother. Even if she will be in prison until well after they're an adult."
That's the newest development in his world.
In the wake of Wells pleading guilty and being sentenced to a twenty-year minimum in prison, the state of California had intervened in his paternity case. Given that the DNA test confirming his impending fatherhood was already on record, and Hannah Wells would be unable to raise a child in the women's correctional facility she'd been assigned to, the Department of Children and Family Services had conducted a couple of brief interviews with Buck and Eddie and issued the declaration that upon the child's birth, he was to be notified and granted sole full and permanent custody. Buck is now in the position of needing to wrap his head around becoming a father and actually determining how he feels about that prospect given the full circumstances of the abstract concept becoming a reality, and part of that (on the advice of Jules at their latest session) is to start sharing the news with people. Supposedly, talking about it more is going to help him uncover his feelings beyond being scared that he won't be able to love the kid properly because of the nature of their conception (something that Eddie continues to reassure him won't happen).
So far outside of Eddie and Steve, he's told Hen and Karen and he's determined that in spite of his fears, he also is feeling fiercely protective of his future child, and he doesn't want their mother anywhere near a position where she'd be able to cause trouble or hurt them.
It's an excellent positive to moving.
"The…woman," Tia Pepa spits out the word, "is pregnant?"
"Uh, yeah." Buck looks down at his lap. It's his automatic response when talking about becoming a father, too nervous to look up and potentially see the judgement or scorn on someone's face.
A beat passes before Isabel smiles and starts to speak. "Well, the circumstances aren't the happiest, but you'll make a wonderful papá when the little one arrives, Buckito. How are you feeling about it?"
Another bit of warmth spreads through Buck's chest at her encouragement. It really does mean something whenever someone he considers family is so accepting of him. Especially about the things he holds so much doubt about. "I'm terrified." He admits, looking up again. "Outside of the very basics I don't know anything about taking care of babies or being a parent. And until a few days ago we didn't know what would happen with the custody or anything like that so I haven't been letting myself think about it. There's so much to do and learn and prepare for…So many things I'll need to get." He turns to Eddie with a sudden realization of, "We need to make sure that when we call the realtor tomorrow we ask for at least three bedrooms."
"I know, hermoso." Eddie leans over, kissing his cheek. "We landed on four to have a guest room as well when we were making our list the other night, remember?"
Buck flushes. With all of the developments lately and things he now has to anticipate, his anxiety (and therefore anxiety-driven memory issues) has gone right into overdrive; Eddie's been incredibly patient, but it's embarrassing. Particularly making little mistakes in front of other people. "Right. We did. See, I'm all over the place. I don't know how I'm gonna get organized enough to figure out everything the baby needs."
"Thankfully, you'll have family to help with that." Pepa says. "Mamá and I throw an incredible baby shower. You leave that to us and we'll have you sorted in no time."
"I don't think we'll be here by the time it's time for a shower." Eddie admits. Buck thinks he looks a little sad at the thought of missing the baby shower, and wonders it's something he didn't get to participate in when Shannon was pregnant with Chris, or if he's just interested in a gathering of friends and family. He makes a mental note to try and remember to ask, so either way he can try and make something happen for his partner. It's the least he can do in light of everything Eddie has done for him. "We'll be leaving for Austin right after New Years, and she's only just entering her second trimester now."
Pepa grabs her drink. "Well, we don't necessarily have to wait for a certain month. Especially since that…woman won't be anywhere near the party anyways, and…there is a possibility that Mamá and I are also relocating in the spring."
Twin 'really's echo out of Buck and Eddie's mouths.
"My work wants to promote me to a division manager, however that position isn't open here in LA. So I'll have to move if I want to accept the job, and Mamá has said that she'll move with me in order to stay near family."
"Where's the job?"
Here, Pepa smiles over the top of her glass. "Well, there are two division manger roles open. One in Chicago, and one in Austin. And as we all know, the Diaz blood doesn't tolerate the cold so…"
The news is such a welcome relief to Buck as he realizes he maybe doesn't have to regret that the move is taking Eddie away from some of his own support system, that he almost doesn't catch the blend of tentative excitement and confusion that passes over Eddie's face right away.
"You could move to Austin too?"
"I think it's safe to say that we will be." Pepa corrects. "I think with two new family members on the way and everyone starting to congregate in Austin, it will be the natural place for Mamá and I to start the next chapter of our lives as well."
"Absolutely." Abuela raises her glass in a 'cheers' motion. "Perhaps you should start talking to Sophia now. See if you can't convince her to start her job search a little further west when she graduates in the spring."
The family laughs but Buck thinks there's more than a little earnestness in Abuela's joking request; he also thinks that Sophia, earning a marketing degree at a school in Miami, might entertain the notion fairly seriously once she learns about all of the developments happening with her siblings. The way Eddie describes it, the trio of Diaz siblings had united tightly in the absence of their father and heavy-handedness of their mother and, while age and distance had tempered the intensity of that bond, the sibling group chat has been revived in recent months and things are returning more to status quo. Buck would like that for Eddie.
Well, he wants everything for Eddie, but he'll start with his partner having the family he cares most about close by.
They continue to talk well into the evening since they have no obligation to go and get Chris, about anything and everything related to the various life changes heading everyone's ways. There's something about talking with the two Diaz women that leaves Buck feeling more balanced. It's not that they have anything particularly profound to say on any of the subjects that have been causing him stress and anxiety, but the fact that they simply seem happy for him and Eddie, with no further expectations or judgements attached to the reaction, and that they also seem to understand why he has mixed feelings about it all, the baby in particular, without really needing the explanation. It's just…easy to talk to them, and after a long and pleasant evening, he finds himself relaxing into Eddie's touch as he helps him change and rubs down his bruises in ways that he hasn't been able to manage for god knows how long.
They even trade a few lazy kisses as they settle next to each other in bed.
Buck can't really explain it, other than to say that he just feels…settled. With so many things resolved over the past few days and being able to move towards planning for the future and sharing those plans with people instead of just fretting about anything and everything, things are lighter. There's still so many things to consider and plan for, and those things worry him if he dwells too long on any of them, but…here? Right now?
Buck feels like things will probably be OK.
Notes:
Just one more bit after this I think. Unless my brain goes rogue again.
Chapter 40: Epilogue
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Several Months Later
Stay focused on the goal. Things always get better when you reach the goal.
Buck mentally repeats the mantra as he paces the hospital waiting room and tries to will himself not to give into the panic looming over his head.
It would be easier, he thinks, if he knew what his goal was beyond 'be present and ready at the hospital when Hannah Wells gives birth to his child'. That and if Eddie were here. Technically he is—he's just taking Chris to the hospital cafeteria to find food that doesn't come under the banner of a couple of golden arches since they'd gotten the call that Wells was in labor only a few hours before and had been in a rush to confirm their time off with Captain Strand and navigate last minute flights ever since and Christopher is definitely a kid that can get hangry when he doesn't have food of actual substance in his stomach—but he's not there right now, and Buck doesn't really know what's going to happen when the baby is born. Not in great detail anyways.
He knows that he won't ever see Dr. Wells. That she'll give birth in a secure room, and at some point the baby will be brought to him in a family room the hospital provides. He knows that his lawyer and the social worker will be present to officially oversee everything and complete the custodial paperwork for him.
Beyond that?
Well, Buck has gone over it enough times with his lawyer and the social worker to know that logistically, there isn't much at all beyond that, but his brain isn't caught up on the logistics as much as it is worried about…everything else.
Like will the baby be healthy? He can't possibly know. Wells had the right to manage all of her prenatal care and wasn't obligated to share anything with him. So he has no idea if she'd taken the right prenatal vitamins or followed the dietary rules for a safe pregnancy. He doesn't know if she put any care at all into keeping the baby healthy, and he kind of thinks given the vitriol she'd shown for him when her case had fallen apart and she'd had to plead guilty to the charges against her that she might have chosen not to care, just as the only way she has left to spite him. And he won't know until the baby is born, and the only thing he'll be able to do is react and hope for the best in the aftermath.
His worry that something will be wrong has been his main anxiety spiral the closer they came to the birth, and it's mostly what his brain is stuck on now.
It's not that he doesn't think he and Eddie can raise a child with different needs or abilities. They're already doing that with Chris, and he doesn't have anything to compare it to really, but loving Chris is easy. He's a wonderful kid and yeah, there are challenges sometimes when he wants to feel like his friends and they have to think creatively about how to make that happen, or on the days when his body just doesn't cooperate and he's miserable and there isn't anything they can do other than let him feel that and try and comfort him, but Buck can't imagine trading any of that for someone that isn't Chris. He just…
He feels so unprepared.
He's great at work, when he's in charge at a scene and the unexpected happens. He's had so much training that he feels prepared for just about any scenario, and working with Owen over the past several months has done a lot to build up the trust he has in himself. Buck rarely feels out of his depth at work, even when something he doesn't expect to happen, happens.
But here, there are too many unknowns, and too many potential outcomes that he couldn't possibly study and feel ready for all of them. Everyone around him has advised that he not borrow trouble, and just focus on preparing for a healthy baby, since that would be the most likely outcome, and Buck has tried to do that, really he has, but it's not a worry he can erase.
He's scared that something will happen with the baby that can't be handled or managed period.
And in a way, that worry lends itself to relieving his other main concern about being able to love the baby to begin with. Buck knows he wouldn't worry this much if he didn't care. There's just a question in his mind about whether or not he worries because he cares about all kids, or because the child in question is his.
He's gone back and forth on his thought that he'll somehow only be able to connect the baby with what their mother had done to him, and not be able to care for them, let alone love them. Most days, thanks to the constant love and reassurances from Eddie and the rest of the Diazes, and the work he's put in at therapy, first with Jules and now with his new, Texas based (though still virtual) therapist, Will, Buck is fairly certain that he'll be OK and be able to look at the baby and see a completely innocent child, one that needs him. Most days lately, he's excited to meet his kid, and can't wait for the moment to come. But there are still times, like right now, when his self-doubt gets the better of him. When he can't understand why anyone would trust him with any kid, never mind one of his own, and he worries that all of the negative feelings he has for himself will transfer right over to the baby and he'll fail them.
He doesn't want to raise a kid as messed up as he is.
Then, if he can convince himself that the baby will be healthy and he won't completely psychologically damage them before they're out of diapers, he's stressed about the logistics of getting them back to Austin. He and Eddie aren't married yet, so while Buck is able to take full paternity leave, Eddie is only able to take the PTO he has accrued in the months they've been working in Austin, and Buck doesn't want to spend the eight weeks of leave AFD is able to grant him, alone with a baby in a rented house in LA while they age enough to travel safely. And even if he did, they won't be old enough or vaccinated enough to go home via plane either way.
No, they're going to turn a road trip that normally takes two days, three if they're really pacing themselves, into a ten-day turtle-paced extravaganza. They'll show Chris all sorts of tourist traps and museums and eat way too much diner food and drive two hours a day at most because Buck has done a lot of research and everything he's looked up has said that's the most time a little newborn should spend in a car on a given day.
Buck is used to road trips, driving long distances, living out of motels and even his car sometimes, but doing it with an almost ten-year-old, a newborn, and a partner who prefers not to drive but will likely be forced into it sounds a bit like the stuff of nightmares to him.
And that's assuming that Chris even handles the arrival of the baby well. Sure, when they had eventually shared the news of the upcoming family addition, he'd been excited, declaring that he'll be the absolute best big brother, but Buck remembers being a kid and not being the best at conceptualizing what things in the future might actually be like. It's possible that Chris doesn't realize the reality of having a newborn in the house, and that when push comes to shove he'll hate the whole thing. If that's the case, Buck has every expectation that Eddie will be putting Chris' needs first and it's entirely possible that it would be the beginning of the end.
All of this to say, there's not a single part of what's to come in the next few hours that doesn't leave him pacing and working down the list of every coping strategy he's been working on in therapy.
He's in the middle of one such distraction technique, trying to force himself to think of something else by running through the presidents in chronological order. He gets stuck in the same place he always does—getting tangled up in the order of things post Civil War and Abraham Lincoln—and instead of being a solid distraction, he just starts to feel worse. And stupid. How bad of a parent is he going to be if he can't even learn the presidents? There are so many things you need to know to take care of a baby; there's no way he knows even half of them, or that he'll be able to figure out the rest.
And what if someday the kid is in an American history class and asks for help with the presidents? What kind of dad will he be if he can't help his kid with their history homework?
Buck doesn't realize quite how badly he's spiraling until a familiar pair of calloused hands gently land on top of his, stopping him in his tracks. They pull his hands away from where they were tightly gripping at his forearms wrapped around his midsection, and he feels stinging pinpricks as his fingers disengage, telling him that he'd been digging his fingernails deep into his skin without even thinking about it.
His cheeks heat up with shame as he glances down to look. Sure enough there are angry red crescents dotting his skin. There's no blood, but that's more of a sign that he'd been caught and stopped before he'd had a chance to do too much damage to himself, than it is a sign that he hadn't been trying to.
Stupid, worthless, attention-seeking—
"Hey, none of that hermoso." Eddie murmurs softly, cutting Buck's thoughts off at the pass. He's gotten good at knowing when Buck is too deep in his head over the months, and although Buck has also gotten much better at communicating when he needs support from his partner, he often finds he doesn't need to. "Have you taken anything since your meds this morning?"
Buck shakes his head. The psychiatrist he's been working with in Austin has him taking two medications every morning—an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication. After some trial and error they think they've found the right combination that is starting to make a real difference as to where his base mood and energy levels sit, but between his PTSD and the tension and sense of dread that he often just can't shake, he still finds himself caught in the occasional spiral of panic, and as such he also has a prescription for a supplemental low-dose sedative he can take as needed. He just doesn't love taking it, and does his best to manage his anxiety through non-chemical means. He's also not entirely sure why Eddie is asking, since he holds onto Buck's meds (not because Buck still feels like he can't be trusted with them but because he prefers having the extra little bit of security, just in case) and Buck hasn't asked him for any.
Eddie guides him over to a row of chairs up against the nearby wall, and sits him in one next to an end table adjacent to the chair Christopher has laid claim to and is sitting in with headphones on and a book in hand. Eddie glances at him, but his focus returns quickly to Buck. "Do you want to take a Valium?"
Buck tries to think on it, instead of giving his instinctive answer, which is a no; he knows Eddie is asking because he thinks Buck should, and Buck knows he's right—the medication will slow down his racing thoughts and make it easier to counter them with more rational responses—he just always worries about the warnings he'd been given about growing a tolerance for the medication or becoming dependent on it. It's another reason he likes Eddie to be in charge of the pills, because he'll know if Buck is taking them too often. Ultimately, he decides that this is one of the times where he needs to ignore that worry, and take the pill. "Yeah, I should…I don't want to be having a panic attack when the baby gets here."
Eddie retrieves the medication from a pocket of the bag of things they'd brought in to the waiting room, and after a moment provides Buck with a small pill and a bottle of ginger ale. He waits for Buck to take the pill before also handing him a fidget toy, also procured from the bag, and then tucks everything else back inside and slides it under a chair next to Buck that he sits in. "Do you want to talk about what's running through your head, or do you just want a distraction while we wait?"
"I'm…I'm worried I won't be a good dad." Buck admits, starting to click at the fidget toy. It's always easier to admit to the things he's so embarrassed about when his hands are busy and he has something else he can turn his focus to if he needs to. He still catches when Eddie's frown softens to what is now a recognizable reassuring half-smile.
"Ev, you know how Chris and I feel about that. You are already an amazing father."
Buck can't exactly argue the point. He knows he's officially in Eddie's will to take custody should the worst happen, and is listed as Chris' secondary emergency contact at his school and just about everywhere else. He knows how much he loves Chris, and how much he's trusted with Chris' care. Hell, he's even started being the one to hand out punishments (however infrequently) when Chris acts out, and Chris had recently taken to calling him Vati, after a family tree project for school had led to him learning about the Buckley's German roots and deciding that he was more than just Buck but determining that the more common words like 'Papa' didn't quite feel right, so a little bit of research was in order.
So he knows that Eddie does view him as another father to Chris, and that in at least some ways, Chris does too. But that doesn't mean he feels like he deserves that title or is good at it. Or feels remotely prepared to be the primary parent for an infant.
"I don't know enough about babies."
"No parent knows everything about babies when they first have one." Eddie counters. "I've had a baby and I don't know everything about them."
"I can't memorize all the presidents." Buck admits. He knows how ridiculous it sounds as soon the words come out of his mouth, but he also can't stop himself from elaborating. "I always forget the ones that come after Lincoln and I get them all twisted and someday Chris or this kid is gonna have to do some worksheet or project or whatever and I'm not going to be able to help them."
Eddie's smile grows a little more and he nudges at Buck's knee with his own. "Aren't you the one who's always trying to sell me on the wonders of the internet and wikipedia? If they need help and we don't know we're allowed to google it. Or bring them to the library. There are options."
The thing that makes it so easy to talk to Eddie is that he never tells Buck how stupid his worries are, even when Buck knows he's being absolutely nonsensical or over-the-top. "I'm sorry. I know I'm catastrophizing and worrying about things that most likely won't ever actually matter, I just…you know me. My brain gets going and works itself up to 1000 miles an hour and I just can't stop…I know I'm not being rational."
"Buck, it's normal to be anxious about all of this." Eddie lays his hand on top of his. "No one becomes a parent without worrying if they'll be good enough. And I could tell you it goes away with time but there are definitely still days where I worry if I'm making the right calls for Chris. But you want to know something about parenting? Something that I learned from you?"
Buck blinks. What could he have taught Eddie about parenting?
Eddie squeezes his hand. "You don't have to do it alone. There are people around who are ready and able to help. All you have to do is ask."
They continue to talk quietly, working through some of the worries even though they've talked about them myriad times over the past several months, moving to sit as close together as their chairs will allow. Buck's medication starts to kick in, leaving him feeling a bit more in control of his brain and thoughts. Breathing comes a bit easier, and although he's still nervous over what's to come, those nerves are more manageable. He can actually remember all of the work he's put in, both in therapy and just in general preparation, and trust in most of it.
The waiting room starts to fill as the morning goes on. Chris eventually abandons his book and music, getting impatient and launching into a series of questions, many of which have been on his mind since he learned about the baby. How much longer until the baby gets here? Are they going to be a boy or a girl? What's their name going to be? Is he going to be allowed to hold them? He's not going to have to change diapers, is he?
He's so excited that it's easy to feed on his enthusiastic anticipation as they talk with him, even if they don't have answers to a lot of his questions.
Buck finds himself more at ease as the hours pass, though not entirely calm or without nerves. They've just transformed into something more positive and eager, not filled with dread, by the time a pink scrub clad nurse appears in the waiting room entryway.
"Evan Buckley?"
Just like that, the trepidation returns. Not to the extent of the near panic attack he'd been in on arrival at the hospital, but enough so that his mouth goes dry and it takes Eddie squeezing his hand to prompt him into standing. They gather their things, and alongside Chris, walk over to the nurse together.
"I'm Evan. Buckley. Buck." He stumbles through his introduction.
The nurse smiles, unfazed. "I'm Grace, the nurse assigned to you and your little one for this shift." She glances at both Eddie and Chris. "Is this your family?"
"I'm his partner, Eddie." Eddie shakes her hand. "And this is our son, Chris."
"It's nice to meet all of you. We're just gonna go right through these doors and then I can give you an update." Grace leads them through a set of double doors, and stops just to the side, leaving the pathway clear for anyone else who might need to get by. "So I will dive right in to let you know that your little one was born about five minutes ago. They appeared healthy overall post-birth, and they're with the doctor right now getting a more thorough check-up, just in case. We're going to get you settled in a family room that will be yours until discharge, and as soon as they wrap up with the check-up, the doctor will bring little one in to meet you. Do you want to know any details regarding gender or would you like to wait until you can meet them?"
There's a rush of relief to hear that at least at first glance, the baby is healthy, and for a moment, that's all that Buck can process. But he does eventually register the rest of Grace's report and her question. "We'll wait, please."
"Of course." Grace agrees. "I'll bring you back to that family room then." She leads them through the halls, stopping at a security desk outside of another set of double doors where they're all given badges and barcoded bracelets, before being buzzed through. A few moments later and they're entering a room equipped with a bed, sofa, and a couple of chairs, including one rocking chair. She explains a few features of the room, including how to page her if they need anything, and then she turns to Chris. "Now, if your dads are OK with it, we have a stash of of gifts for big siblings to give their new family members, and I would be happy to bring you to pick something out."
Chris looks excited at the prospect of having another gift to give his new sibling (he'd been very proud of the collection of pictures he'd created to hang in the baby's nursery) and Eddie is quick to give his permission for them to go. Buck feels guilty about it, but there's a little more relief when Chris leaves; he's quick to realize that the sibling gift is probably at least partially a ploy so the parents get a moment alone with their new baby and the doctor, in case there's anything serious to discuss, and he's grateful that if there is, he won't have to immediately school his reaction to avoid worrying Chris.
"How are you doing?" Eddie asks, checking in once they're alone.
"I'm OK." Buck answers, and he's proud to say it's not a lie. Between his extra dose of anti-anxiety meds and spending time with Eddie and Chris talking about what's to come, his nerves and worries are tempered some by anticipation, and he feels fairly steady at the moment. Even the small bit of information that Grace had given them is a shot of adrenaline. He's about to meet his kid.
Eddie smiles and steps forward, wrapping his arms around Buck. "Yeah?"
Buck nods. "Yeah." He confirms. They stand together, swaying in a slightly giddy dance without music. "I'm still scared, but you're here with me. I trust you, and I trust us together, so…that means I should trust that it'll be OK."
"I am so proud of you, hermoso." Eddie places a soft kiss on his lips. "I love you."
"I love you too." Buck kisses him back. They continue to dance and several moments pass, only interrupted by a gentle knock. The door to the room swings open. They disengage from their embrace, though keep holding hands, as a doctor pushes a mobile bassinet into the room. When they're a couple steps in, Buck can see a tiny wriggling form tucked into what sort of looks like a giant pink, blue, and white pastel striped sock and wearing a teeny little matching cap. His heart clenches, tears spring to his eyes, and he can't help but gasp.
That's his baby.
Just like that, all he can think about is hearing what the doctor has to say and meeting his kid.
Even so, he does his best to be patient as the doctor runs through verifying their identities and that she's come to the correct room, before introducing herself and fully presenting the baby in the bassinet to them. "Mr. Buckley, Mr. Diaz, I'm Dr. Hall, your daughter's physician."
Daughter.
Buck has a daughter.
"Baby Buckley was born at 2:09 PM. She weighs in at 5 pounds, 4 ounces, and measures 19 inches long. This puts her as a bit below average for height and weight for full-term newborn girls, however based on my initial physical exam I don't believe there is reason for immediate concern. She is presenting as healthy, just small."
Buck feels the weight physically lift off his shoulders. Eddie squeezes his hand and smiles softly at him, though he only sees this out of his periphery; he can't take his eyes off of his baby girl. "Can I—Can I hold her?" He's sure there's probably more that the doctor wants to tell them, but he can hardly focus. She's right there, and he kind of needs to prove to himself that she's real.
"Of course." Dr. Hall walks them through proper handwashing to protect the baby's new immune system from germs (which they both know, but Buck appreciates the refresher anyways so he doesn't screw anything up) and then talks about how skin on skin contact will be helpful with bonding as well as be beneficial in a few different ways for her health, while Buck and Eddie get situated on the sofa. She eventually transfers the tiny bundle into Buck's arms.
Buck is immediately transfixed by his daughter's scrunchy pink face. She's so tiny…Her eyes aren't open but he can see the softest wisps of honey blonde fuzz peeking out from beneath her cap. There's a temptation to touch it, but he doesn't dare undo one of his arms from the gentle cradle he has her in, lest his grip become less steady. He only has half an ear on Dr. Hall as she continues to speak about the exams she'd already performed and what they would do over the course of the next twenty-four hours to ensure she is healthy and ready to go home. He trusts that Eddie knows his focus will have shifted entirely, and is keeping track of the important details to pass onto him later. That said, he does tune back in when he hears one of Eddie's questions.
"You may not know the answer to this, but is everything squared away with the custodial paperwork? Buck's her sole legal guardian?"
"There will be some additional paperwork to complete once you establish her name, but yes. The social worker is working with another family at the moment but they will be stopping in to go over those details with you in the next hour or so."
"Great, thank you"
"Of course. That takes care of all of my notes on her current medical care. When Nurse Grace comes back in, she'll walk you through your first feed. Is there anything else I can do for you right now? Any other questions I can answer?"
Buck shakes his head, looking back down at his daughter. He hears Eddie issue his own refusal and thank her for her time. Feeling a bit more engaged, even as he stares down, Buck echoes his partner.
"You're more than welcome." Dr. Hall says. "I'll check back in with you prior to the end of my shift to make sure you meet the care team assigned to you both for the night shift, but if you need anything in the interim, please don't hesitate to use the call button and someone will come in to assist."
Dr. Hall leaves, closing the door behind her, and for a moment, all Buck can hear is his and Eddie's breathing, and then one little murmuring whimper that springs forth from his daughter as she shifts in his arms.
After a few beats pass, Eddie breaks the silence. "How are you feeling?"
"Like someone carved a piece of my heart right out of my chest and put it inside this tiny little girl." Buck answers. The happy, if more than a little overwhelmed, tears that have been threatening to fall spill over the edge of his eyes.
"That sounds about right." Eddie chuckles, his own voice a little wet. "She's beautiful, Ev."
"She's perfect."
"Yeah, I think she is." Eddie agrees. After a pause, the continues. "Now that you've met her, do you have any names in mind?"
They'd talked about names a bit in the time since Pepa and Abuela had thrown them a baby shower and every thing felt much more real, but without knowing the gender, and feeling like he needed to meet someone in order to give them a name, Buck hadn't really gotten beyond narrowing things down to a shortlist of a handful of names.
Looking at his daughter now, only one of those names springs forward for him.
"Yeah." He nods. "I think she's a—,"
He's interrupted by Chris and Grace returning. Chris is obviously excited, lumbering in at what for him is a fast pace, and carrying a small stuffed penguin that looks undeniably soft. "Are they here? Are they here?"
"Inside voice, mijo." Eddie corrects gently with a soft laugh. "But yeah. Your sister is here."
"I have a sister?"
The happy energy in Chris' voice is an extra flood of warmth in Buck's chest. "You do." He answers. "Do you want to come meet her?"
"I got her this penguin." Chris says as he crosses the room. "His name is Percy. Grace says it'll be a while before she can sleep with him or play with him or anything, but that every older brother should give their new sibling a stuffed animal."
"Definitely." Eddie agrees. "When she's old enough she'll love that she has a special one from you."
There's a sharp inhale of air when Chris gets close enough to get a good look at her. "She's so little." He whispers.
"Babies usually are." Eddie agrees. "That's why we have to be extra gentle with her."
"I promise." Chris nods solemnly. He quickly turns his attention to Buck. "What's her name?"
"You know I was just about to tell your dad that. This," Buck angles her slightly so both Eddie and Chris can get a slightly better look, and her eyes pop open to reveal bright blue irises. He knows that with babies, a lot are born blond with blue eyes and their coloring changes as they get a bit older, but there is some level of comfort that he feels knowing that she looks like him, and doesn't appear to share many immediately noticeable characteristics with her mother. "This is Eleanor. Eleanor Barrett Buckley."
Eddie's arm wraps around his shoulder, squeezing lightly. "That's a great name, Buck. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl."
"Can we call her Ellie?"
The nickname clicks in Buck's head the moment it's suggested, feeling completely natural. "That's a great idea, Superman. She'll be Ellie for short."
"We can go over some of the paperwork like her birth certificate to get all of that officially filed after we take care of her first feed." Grace cuts in. "But before we do that, I can take an official first family portrait, if you'd like."
Buck and Eddie agree in unison. "Absolutely."
Eddie pulls out his phone, opening up the camera and stretching out to hand it to their nurse. He then scoots in closer to Buck, readjusting the grip he has on Buck's shoulder with his other hand, and beckoning Chris to turn around and lean on his lap, so all four of them will be in the frame of the photo and facing the camera. Or at least pointed in the right direction in Ellie's case.
"All right, on the count of three…"
And as Grace counts down and Buck prepares for the picture, every last bit of the stress he's been dealing with—all of the self-doubt, and guilt, and negative feelings—all of the worries that he's not meant to have a happy life or good things…all of that melts away. At least for the moment.
A year ago, he wasn't even sure that recovering fully from the bombing was even going to be possible, let alone that he'd land in an even better job, in a leadership role, where he feels respected and like he has a community he belongs in again. He's got the job, a great house in a neighborhood close to Eddie's family—family that insists he's theirs as well.
And most importantly, he has Eddie. He has Eddie, and Chris, and now Ellie.
For all of the emptiness he's been dealing with throughout his life, all of the pieces he'd felt were missing, he's not alone. Not anymore. Probably not ever again.
Things aren't perfect, and he still has a lot of work to do on himself to keep building his coping skills and strategies and continue to process and actually deal with his traumas, but here? In this moment?
Buck feels happy.
Notes:
And here we are, 40 chapters later, at the end of this story. This is the longest fic I've ever completed by far, and I want to extend my deepest gratitude to each and every one of you who read and commented, shared, and gave kudos.
I have so many headcanons about things that couldn't fit into the story naturally, so there could one day be follow-ups or deleted scenes or other additions of some fashion. I make no promises, because I have a lot of ideas for other stories I want to tell, but I'll never say never to returning to this universe.
Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you at my next fic <3
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