Work Text:
If Buck still had his math superpowers, he’s sure he could’ve told everyone how statistically unlikely it is for them to be on a second call where a kid fell down a well.
Even without the powers, he has an inkling: really, really, really fucking unlikely.
And yet here they are, staring at another kid stuck in a pipe, and icy cold dread ties Buck’s stomach into knots the minute Eddie opens his mouth.
Bobby says something about Eddie not fitting, and while Eddie, Bobby, and Chim are brainstorming solutions, Buck knows he needs to get his head back in the game, needs to be here, in the moment, doing his job.
Instead, his mind is cast over four years back, his eyes watch the sky for signs of a storm, his ears ring with the memory of a deafening crack, and his heart beats desperately against the cage of his ribs, pounding and pounding like it’s looking for an escape, any way out.
“You good?” Hen murmurs to him, sliding him a solicitous glance and nudging her arm into his.
Mouth dry, he nods. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he manages, and it convinces neither of them.
Hen doesn’t call him out on it, though, just raises one brow. “He’s not going back down—he’s all right. No cut lines today.”
Buck’s still nodding, doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop. An object in motion and all that, Newton’s first law, he vaguely remembers from one of Christopher’s science assignments last year. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I know.” Nodding, nodding.
She frowns, brows drawn low in concern, before a small smile pulls at her lips. “That was the first time I suspected, you know,” she says, quiet and teasing, and it’s so unexpected, he’s finally able to force his head to stop, to tilt it her way instead.
“Suspected what?”
“That maybe you weren’t as straight as we all assumed.”
It’s even more unexpected. He gapes at her. “What? Why?”
That skeptical brow goes up again. “Really?” she asks, bone dry. “You can’t think of any reason why someone might have seen you that night and suspected that maybe, just maybe, you felt a little more than friendship for your coworker?” When he stares at her, lost, she softens, grasping his arm as if to steady him for the next blow. “Buck, you were wailing and clawing at the ground like you’d just lost the love of your life.”
Her words strum at something, buried deep down inside him, and its sonorous echoes bounce within the boundaries of his skin, making his head ring. He inhales sharply through his nose, casting his gaze away, from her, from the team, from the call. It’s not like he doesn’t remember that, remember Bobby bodily hauling him up from ground, holding Buck as he sobbed. Remember them talking to him in their gentle hysterical-victim-handling voices, assuring him that no one had given up on Eddie and they were doing what they could to get him out. Remember the heady relief of Eddie showing up on his own, cracking jokes like he hadn’t almost died, radiating cold and hardly able to stand.
It had felt like a miracle. It still did. They’d all had their share of them, before and since, but that had been the first time it’d happened for Eddie, to Eddie, since they’d met. The first time Buck had to sit with the idea of losing him, of being left behind in a very real and permanent way, one from which there was no coming back.
Fully-realized, post-therapy, semi-mature Buck can admit now that he’d never given himself the time or space to process that. Instead, he’d just put it away, on to the next thing. There had been Red, and then Abby’s return, and, in retrospect, an obvious dotted line that connected all three of these events, drawn in tears and sweat and blood and abandonment issues.
But that didn’t mean what Hen was insinuating. He shakes his head. “It was Eddie,” he says, helpless. “I didn’t—I’m not… I can’t. Hen, I can’t.” It’s the last thing he needs on top of everything going on between him and Tommy, and Christopher still being gone, and all the other ripples finally calming in the wake of last spring. He cannot afford an ill-timed revelation right now.
Her lips part as she stares at him. “Buck, I didn’t mean—” she starts, only to be cut off by Chim’s urgent call of, “Hen, need you over here.” But still she hesitates until Buck gives her a nod. “We’ll talk more later,” she promises, and there is nothing Buck wants less, so he ducks her the rest of shift, and doesn’t even change out of his uniform before he takes off the next morning.
In his loft, he struggles to keep his mind blank as he showers and changes, but as soon as he lays down, sleep eludes him and the floodgates open.
He closes his eyes against it, the childish thought that if he can’t see it, it can’t hurt him. But it’s there, and real, spilling out and touching everything, an unstoppable rising tide, and Buck curls up into a ball as it picks him up and carries him along, gasping for breath as it buffets him from every side. He wants to fight, wants to push it back, but it’s too much, years and years of moments big and small, touches, looks, words, deeds.
It’s You can have my back any day and There’s nobody in this world I trust with my son more than you and You act like you’re expendable, but you’re wrong and You don’t have to be anything for anybody.
It’s fond eye rolls and soft smiles and secrets shared and fears unburied and shoulder touches and the right kind of teasing.
It’s fear and joy and laughter and tears and friendship and grief and comfort and…love. Always love.
Hen was right; he had been acting like the love of his life had been buried alive, because he had. Because that’s what Eddie was—is—for Buck.
Fuck.