Chapter 1: The Gamble
Summary:
Buck slips comfortably from one mess into another, more familiar one. Hen and Chim do what they always do: Their best. Some things reach a breaking point.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Buck knew they loved him. He knew they cared about him, he did (had to know it, had to believe it, or else the stunt that had completely upended his life had all been for nothing), but.
He also knew that the 118 didn’t particularly like him at the moment.
And this? This was about money.
This would be him begging for money he no longer had because he spent it all suing the department, and had won, but then had refused any percentage of the payout to prove to them that he was serious about this. It was never supposed to be about money. So he’d shut the settlement down.
(Including the portion intended to cover his lawyer fees.
And medical expenses.
And the month-long break in his wages between filing the lawsuit and officially being reinstated as a firefighter.)
What savings he had were drained into meeting minimum payments to keep from being sent to collections, and any money that started coming in soon would be devoured by autopays and late fees. And even if everything he owed was suddenly paid off, leaving him at net zero?
LA was a very expensive city to live in.
And he couldn’t, just couldn’t, ask for help.
Not from his parents, ever. They’d cut him off when he was nineteen for a reason.
Not from his coworkers and friends, either. Not with the way things were right now.
He just needed to give them time, time to respect him again, time for everyone to become friends again.
The last thing he needed was to rub this weakness, this neediness, in their faces. To fix things, he needed to remind them about what made him useful: That he was capable, he was helpful, he was strong.
No one needed to know.
It would only be for a couple of months.
All this to say:
About a week after starting back at the 118, and about three weeks before he was supposed to start getting a steady check again, Buck quietly moved out of his loft—
—and into his jeep.
He said nothing, and no one noticed.
It was easier than he’d thought it would be. Buck had never been the type to get bogged down by belongings.
You couldn’t survive living on the road for a few years if you were liable to get your heart broken over every house plant or hope chest you had to leave behind.
Conversely, that reality, that ease, left a complicated ache in his chest that he hadn’t known to prepare himself for. These things he had unwittingly come to view as emblematic of the life he had built for himself in LA, reduced to, well, what they were. Things. Objects with weight and mass that he no longer had room for. The furniture and electronics and decorations that he’d filled his life with ceasing to matter to him the moment he sold them or lent them out or pawned them or, with no other option, donated them. All the care, all the pride, evaporated the moment whatever it was left his sight.
Selling his old stuff gave him a comfortable budget of gas money for the next few months, at least. He knew that he would be grateful for the financial cushion once winter rolled in, even if he was staying in LA.
Which he was. Of course he was.
It wasn’t the first time he’d ever lived out of his jeep, obviously, but it was the first time he was doing it while also having health insurance. (Or it would be, once they got his paperwork sorted out.)
He was luckier than most.
His job, for one. For every 24-hour shift he worked, he had a place to sleep, access to a shower, and a fridge full of food paid for by the city. Being man behind on every call sucked, but it gave him time to wash his clothes and sneak extra food without drawing attention to himself.
He started arriving early for his shifts, to grab some food, take a shower, and change before anyone from his shift could catch a glimpse of how hungry or rumpled he was. He didn’t know what he’d say if anyone asked about his newfound punctuality, hadn’t really come up with a believable excuse, but luckily no one bothered.
So that had him covered every one out of three days; it was more support than he’d had when he was nineteen.
He tried reaching out to B and C, hinting that if anyone needed coverage, he wouldn't mind a back-to-back, but—apparently Bobby had warned off the other crews in advance, predicting that Buck would do exactly that, even if his motivations were probably different from whatever Bobby had envisioned.
It smarted, how little anyone seemed to trust him anymore.
But things would change. They just needed a little more time.
And Buck could give them time.
As much as they needed.
Genuinely, though?
It felt good to be back.
The months of watching the world move on without him, months of not knowing, of feeling like an outsider in the only real family he’s ever had—it had felt like trying to breathe through mud.
Being back, even in the limited capacity where he was barely allowed to do anything at all? It was really, really good.
He knew this house. Touching every inch of the station as he scrubbed the place top to bottom, checking and rechecking supplies, confirming everything worked and was where it needed to be, and fixing it when it wasn’t? It settled him. It felt real in the way nothing had felt real since the accident. He was accomplishing something tangible, with his hands.
He dove headfirst into the chores with, if not uncharacteristic, then exaggerated vigor. Seeing all his tools again, handling them, remembering the weight and heft and upkeep made him feel more ready for when he would need to use them again.
Most of his tools, anyway.
When he tried to get anywhere close to the engines, Bobby would appear out of nowhere, armed with some complaint or criticism that always seemed to result in Buck being sent to a different part of the house to work, a tactic so transparent that it would have made Buck laugh if Bobby’s secondary goal wasn't so blatantly to make Buck miserable.
Did Bobby think Buck was so desperate to go on a call that he’d, what, sneak into the ambulance and hide until they left?
Bobby’s distrust itched against his skin worse than the rest, even if. Even if Buck understood why he was still angry.
So, when the engines were out, the time he spent in the house was great. Time to eat, cook, stretch his legs, do all the interior upkeep work that he knew how to do better than he could do his own dishes. The checks, the confirmation that everything would be safe for everyone else.
It was when everyone came back, when he’d run out of chores, when the people actually on duty were lounging around casually discussing a recent call that Buck didn’t know a thing about.
It wasn’t just the conversations he couldn’t join, the looks were starting to drive him crazy. The staring. The way people would watch him whenever he moved something heavy, or jumped, or climbed, or jogged across the station, but conspicuously glance away whenever he actually tried to meet anyone's eyes.
They were probably thinking he was getting what he deserved. Which, he, well, he probably was, but Buck had never excelled at being a good sport about that sort of thing.
But whatever. Sure, the looks made his shoulders tighten and his ears burn, but they had nothing on the looks he was waiting for and conspicuously not getting.
Eddie was avoiding him with the kind of single-minded determination he always put toward anything more complicated than brushing his teeth, which. Sure, if Eddie was going to be mad at someone, that’s how he would do it, but why was he still mad at Buck?
Buck had tried to casually start the conversation a few times, each instance with a carefully rehearsed script that he never got to use because Eddie would take off without even saying hi back.
It got to the point where, two weeks in, Buck got fed up and tried to force the issue.
He dropped into the chair next to Eddie at the dinner table (ignoring how conspicuously everyone wasn’t looking at him) and demanded to know. “What's your problem, man?”
Eddie looked up from his meal with deliberately infuriating slowness. “What.”
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
“Maybe I just don’t feel like talking to you.”
“Sure. Just like you didn’t yesterday, and just like you won’t tomorrow. What’s your problem with me?” Buck demanded.
“Not everything is about you.”
“Cut the bullshit.” He snapped, “You don't think I should be here, do you? You’re pissed they let me come back.”
Eddie looked at him, finally looked at him, but his expression was unreadable. “You don't want to know what I think.”
It was cold, and it stung enough to stun Buck into silence as Eddie abruptly grabbed his plate and stood, stalking over to the sinks without looking at anybody.
“Hey,” Buck's voice cracked humiliatingly, so he tried again. “Hey!” Eddie didn’t look back.
Without even thinking about it, Buck stood to follow.
A familiar, muscular arm wrapped itself around his shoulders and steered him away from the kitchen and over to one of the plush red couches scattered around the upper floor.
They plopped down onto the couch as a unit: Hen smoothly removing her arm from around his shoulder and picking up a book she’d clearly set down to go collect him before he made a fool of himself, Buck trying to seem less affected by the not-conversation with Eddie than he really was. Not that he’d ever been able to fool her. After a moment, he sighed and gave up. “Heya Hen.”
“Hi, Buck,” she said, a little warm, a little wry. Like they were sharing an inside joke.
He looked over at her, and for a moment was gripped by the sudden, nonsensical fear that he might start crying. It was only for a second, but was definitely still visible on his face because Hen stopped reading. She put her book in her lap, holding her place with a finger between the pages, and gave Buck her full attention. Tilting her head to the side, she considered him in a way that felt painfully familiar. “You doing okay?”
When Buck had first started at the 118, he’d been young and desperate to succeed and anxious to make up for both, and she’d been way nicer than she should have been to a wild-eyed kid who spent the first four months of their working relationship feeling like a wild animal someone had let into the firehouse on accident.
Buck had walked into the 118 station with a half-decade of life experience that didn’t do him a bit of good in the real world. He could pick locks, scale a sheer cliff face without gear, and make friends in three languages. He could identify Rohypnol by flavor and viscosity. He could hold a handstand on the saddle of a moving horse for almost 14 seconds.
But.
There were things everyone else in the world knew about being an adult that he’d never learned; simple, boring, obvious sorts of things he had still been too embarrassed to admit to Bobby he needed help with. He knows Bobby now, knows that Bobby wouldn’t have thought less of him, but back then he had been so desperate to impress him. So terrified to disappoint a man who looked at Buck like he might be headed somewhere worthwhile.
Those early days, Hen had been a lifeline.
Right now, it felt like that raw edge from his first few months was back somehow, but instead of making him sharp, it just left him susceptible to further fraying.
“Yeah, Hen. I’m okay.” Buck rubbed his neck. “How are you? Are Denny and Karen doing good?”
She smiled at him.
And they talked.
Not the distant, impersonal chatter of firefighter and civilian, not the hushed check-ins when Bobby wasn’t looking, but really, actually talking, as though the last six months hadn’t even happened.
In following shifts, he found himself seeking her out, trotting along at her heels, basking in the sheer relief of having someone to talk to. Someone who knew him. Hen filled him in on the calls they’d been on when he asked, her retellings perhaps more math-centric and anatomically specific than Buck’s own would have been, but whatever. It was nice.
His planned diet of alternating eating nothing but pilfered snacks for two days and then stuffing himself with heavy carbs and protein on the third was, admittedly, not his finest work.
He was hungry, hungry in a way he couldn’t remember being since he was a kid. Hungry in a way that made him feel sick and dizzy. Unfortunately, he was also eating in a way that made him feel sick and dizzy.
Someone smarter than him probably could’ve guessed what was going to happen.
Hen caught him stumbling out of the bathroom after a solid minute of vomiting (a waste of Bobby’s cooking, waste of calories that Buck could not afford to give up right now) embarrassingly early into a 24 hour shift. Like a little kid, he had eaten so much that he’d made himself sick.
She watched patiently as he settled himself against the wall of the locker room and began taking slow measured sips from his water bottle. She waited until Buck, exhausted, dragged his eyes over to her and croaked, “What.”
“If you’re coming down with something, you don’t need to be here.” Hen told him calmly. “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone.”
“I swear I’m not sick Hen. I think I…I ate something bad.”
“How did you manage to find bad food here?” She asked, taking a seat on the bench in front of him.
“I don’t know,” Buck sighed, then scowled. “Maybe it was sabotage.”
“Sabotage?”
“I mean, maybe someone around here poisoned me. I wasn’t sick this morning.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her, trying to make her laugh.
Hen wasn’t impressed. “No one would do that to the food,” she said flatly.
“Yeah,” Buck huffed bitterly. “The food.”
Hen leaned over and flicked him on the forehead. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Buckley. They wouldn’t do it to you, either.”
Buck stared at his hands, stomach an uneasy balance between roiling and famished. “Was it a mistake to come back?” he whispered. Right now, it felt...not hopeless, but. Stationary. Locked in place, just like every stupid decision he’d made to get here in the first place. “Should I request a transfer?”
Hen flicked him again, damn, that was starting to hurt. “No, no you should not, and you know it.”
Buck’s expression twisted. “Everyone hates me now.”
“No one hates you, Buck. At least, no one who didn’t hate you before this whole mess.”
He winced. Good old Hen. Brutally honest.
“There’s a word for this. Catastrophizing?” She tried, and he looked at her blankly. “You might have heard it in therapy.”
Buck grimaced. “No, I was, um. Bad at therapy. Never made it to a second session.”
Hen raised an eyebrow, but thankfully didn’t comment. “It means you're daisy-chaining worst case scenarios until you've convinced yourself the world is ending. Sound familiar?"
Buck cocked his head to the side curiously. "Maybe." he thought about for a second. “So...what you’re saying is I’m worrying too much?" he schooled his face into something carefully earnest. "I'm being too careful?”
“No. No, no, no. Buck. Stop. Look at me.” Hen actually held his face between her hands so he couldn’t look away as she stared him down. Her hands were warm and soft, but not too soft. Strong, too. It felt nice.
“I know what you think you just heard.”
Buck’s lips twitched.
“And what do I think I just heard?”
She didn’t look amused. “We are discussing social interaction, not work. Do not. Apply this. To firefighting.”
“Well, Hen, if you think I’m living too cautiously—" Buck tried to keep a straight face.
“You’re not cautious. You’ve never been cautious a day in your life. You’re sullen and anxious, and you’re driving yourself up a wall.”
“I don’t know...what I’m hearing is I need to be braver.” His grin broke out. “Maybe take more risks—”
She dropped his face to throw her hands up. “Any fear you feel while working is a logical response to danger, and you have the training to react appropriately under those circumstances. Whether or not you use it.” Hen interjected firmly, starting to laugh despite herself. “Do not let my advice be the thing that kills you. I swear, Buck, if you were half as scared of fire as you are of getting your heart broken—”
“—I probably wouldn’t be a firefighter.” Buck grinned, shrugging one shoulder.
“Stay with me, Buckley. This advice is social. You get it? Social.”
He nodded.
“So. Listen to me.” Hen patted him on the shoulder. “Stop trying to read everyone’s minds. Because you can’t read minds,” She paused, and Buck shook his head, “so the only thing you’ll get out of it is a stomach ulcer and this harebrained conclusion that the pack has exiled you.”
She said it with enough contempt that Buck felt the door closing on any potential pack/exile centric arguments. It probably wouldn’t have worked out for him anyway.
“Then how am I supposed to know what they’re thinking?” Buck said instead, only half joking. “They won’t talk to me.”
“I’ll talk to you, and I’ll tell you: Everyone doesn’t hate you. There are,” Hen said, “some of our coworkers who are still mad at you and have every right to be. You hurt some feelings out here.”
Buck hunched his shoulders self-consciously. “I...I know I did.”
“You do.” Hen nodded. “And the resulting tension from some people being mad at you is making everyone else feel awkward.” She tilted her head to one side, better to meet his eyes. “You know, people aren’t exactly lining up to talk to Eddie, either. Which you would have noticed if you could get out from under your own spotlight for a minute.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So it’s one of those...social-animal situations.”
“I know you can have a hard time sensing that sort of thing, Buck,” Hen said, nicer than she should have been, “but I promise: No one is out to get you.”
It helped, a little. That night, lying on the hood of his jeep, he thought about what she’d said, because Hen was a lot smarter than him, and listening to her was generally a pretty good idea.
So.
He was no longer panicking because Rick hadn’t spoken to him since he got back, because without the haze of rejection clouding his thoughts it occurred to him that he and Rick had never really talked in the first place.
So that was better.
Except.
He could never admit this to Hen, but the knowledge that somebody, somewhere, was mad at him made him feel raw and embarrassed in a way he couldn’t explain.
It was a pitiful, childish instinct. He had always been overly sensitive as a kid. God knew his parents could never stand it. He hated to think of that flinching, clingy misery following him into adulthood and wrecking things here, too.
It was like he could feel sharp awareness boiling underneath his skin, not just anger at whatever he had done, but an accompanying judgment passed on every single thing about him. They probably thought his voice was annoying, his brain told him. And that his ideas were stupid, and that he wasn’t any good at his job, and that he was too immature and too impulsive and too emotional and too Buck to be worth keeping around.
But even that, he could take. For better or for worse, Buck had been himself his entire life. He’d have to learn to live with himself sooner or later, and those kinds of thoughts, while not pleasant, were at least a reliable kind of familiar.
The real thing that was bothering him?
The very, very worst part about all of this?
What was killing him was the fact that it was Bobby and Eddie who were still mad at him.
He loved Hen and Chim.
But he also knew, more or less, where he stood with them.
Hen was someone he could ask the “real adult” questions that other people would make him feel stupid for not knowing, or someone to talk him down when a full morning of anxiety-fueled research had him convinced he had a brain tumor, but not someone he could call up for a beer if he got lonely in the early hours of the morning.
(Not when Hen had a family to take care of.)
Chimney was someone who would pick him up from anywhere, at any time if he called him for help, someone he could speak frankly to about his love life without being judged, but not someone he could ever talk to about his parents.
(Not when Chimney'd had it so much worse.)
He knew them.
With Bobby and Eddie, there was always that something more he could never stop craving. Not just the aching curiosity of Would you still love me if I told you or Would you help me if I asked, but more, too. That thrum of Look at me, Look at me, Look at me he couldn’t seem to shut off in his brain. He wanted them to think about him when he wasn’t around, the way he did with them. It was a craving that often showed itself when he met new people, that urge to impress, to matter, but with Bobby and Eddie that want had stuck around way longer than normal.
The only other times he’d felt it that way, that strongly—
—his stomach dropped when he realized—
—was probably with Abby. Or before that, maybe his parents.
Buck pressed his palms against his eyes and groaned, trying to will away the embarrassment simmering in his veins.
Jesus Christ, he was pathetic. Wasn’t that just the perfectly on-brand level of melodramatic that made him so fucking annoying, the kind of self-absorbed stupidity that drove everyone away in the first place—
His leg, propped where it was on the roof, was seized by such a powerful cramp that he lurched half-way into a seated position and had to cover his mouth to keep from audibly yelping.
He ended up limping a few slow laps around his jeep until he could flex his ankle and knee without pain. He checked his watch: it was just past two in the morning.
He was torn between staying up and trying to get some rest. The choice felt utterly inconsequential, since he wasn’t working tomorrow. And not working meant he wouldn’t be doing anything else either, except hiding out in his car or charging his phone at the library.
In the end, a slowly worsening headache made the decision for him, he crawled into his backseat to try and get some sleep.
It wasn’t comfortable, but it was familiar.
This wasn’t the first time he’d ever lived out of his jeep, but Buck was starting to discover that living out of his jeep and living in his jeep weren’t quite the same thing.
Before, there had always been a goal to work toward, a new horizon, an interesting job, an unfamiliar stretch of stars to sleep under. Here, he was where he needed to be, already doing what he was supposed to be doing. And it was nearly impossible to see the stars in LA at any time of year.
His first time around, if he found himself wanting a real bed for the night, it hadn’t exactly been a hardship for him to find one. On a cold enough night, he would find the closest dive and play pool for a few hours, scanning the room for interest first, pleasure second. He’d accept the first local or put-up offer he got and enjoy a bed, a shower, and if he was lucky, breakfast, all at no financial cost to himself.
Thinking back on it, the process made the Buck of right now feel...scummy.
But he wasn’t that guy anymore.
He had new aches that came from everything from catastrophic life-altering injury to simply not being nineteen anymore.
Buck also hadn’t had the nightmares, before.
The imagined sound, the knowledge, of rushing water heading toward him, ready to consume him and Christopher, where was Christopher—
Other nights would find him shaking, nauseous, because his leg, oh god his leg, is this what dying feels like? He at least thought it would be faster—
But he always woke up and it was only raining, or it was just a cramp.
And Buck breathed, and waited, and breathed. Checked the time on his phone. Massaged his leg. Tried to fall back asleep. Some nights, he even succeeded.
No matter what. Being back at the 118 was worth it.
It had to be.
“Hey, buddy.” Buck whirled around to find Chimney leaning against the doorframe of the laundry room, eyeing the cheerily thudding machines with a put-upon air of gentlemanly distaste. “What's up? You trying to make the rest of us slouches look bad?”
It took Buck a moment to find his voice. “No! No, I, Uh…It's mine, actually. From home. My water's out.” Water being out was something that happened to people, right? Buck was mostly guessing.
It looked like he guessed right, because Chimney's expression twisted in sympathy. “Man, that sucks. Hope they fix it soon.” He trotted further into the room, coming to stand beside Buck. “Also. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Am I in trouble?” was Buck's first thought, and also unfortunately his first question.
Chimney gave him a weird look. “What? No. Why would you be—? No.”
Chimney pulled two rickety chairs from the corner, gesturing gallantly for Buck to sit first. He did, although he had been standing in the first place because the chairs in here were kind of shitty.
Chimney took a seat himself and clapped his hands once. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I'm just gonna ask: Are you on another one of your cleanses? Because you've been losing a lot of weight, and I know you care about physical fitness almost as much as I do—”
That surprised a short bark of a laugh from Buck, and Chimney acknowledged his victory with a nod before continuing.
“—but Buck, whatever new thing you're trying. I'm not sure it's doing you any favors.”
“Oh. Um.” Buck said, because he couldn't exactly tell Chimney his new thing was living in his car.
“A job like ours, people don't have any business fasting, and you really don't need to lose any weight.” Chimney told him gently. So, so gently.
Oh no.
Oh no.
“It's not what you think,” Buck protested, cheeks pinking. How vain did Chimney think he was? “I…I just—”
“Buck, listen to me. If you're going to be skipping meals, well. You’re an adult. I can’t stop you. But you can't be skimping out on water on top of that. You get a lot of your daily hydration from fresh fruits and vegetables, so if you're not eating those things, you'll actually need to drink more water to make up for it.”
Carefully, Buck said, “I'm probably not getting enough water. And I'm not eating nothing, it's just…”
Chimney crossed his arms. “Let me guess. Nothing but protein?”
Jerky and peanuts, Buck thought, but said, “How'd you know?”
Chimney poked him in the chest, “Because I know you.”
Buck smiled at him, just a little. “Yeah. You do, don't you.” he swallowed. “Thanks.”
Chimney waved him off. “Don't worry about it, sweetie. If you're gonna drink, I’d rather you do it in the house.”
Buck snorted.
“Listen Buck. You screw up sometimes. Everybody does.” Chim clapped a hand on his shoulder. “But don’t beat yourself up too much. Nobody wants you sick, okay? And, uh...” He gave Buck a few awkward pats before stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back onto his heels. “I’m sure Eddie and Cap’ll come around. Eventually. They missed you a lot.” He coughed. “We all did. It’s good to have you back.”
Buck grinned. “Ah, what was that last part? Didn’t quite hear you.”
“I said you’re a cheeky brat.” Chim grinned at him. “And you’re coming over for dinner. Clear your plans and mourn your diet.”
The next time he had 48 off, Buck really did try to consciously drink more water. He also did a little research while he was charging stuff at the public library, trying to look busy and serious so no one would ask him what he was doing here.
But it was a library. Do they even kick people out of libraries? He’d ask Athena, except that would definitely make her suspicious. And there was also the fact that she maybe, possibly hated him now. What with him suing her husband and all.
But.
With context backed up by research, what Chim had said was making a lot more sense. As far as Buck could tell, the main difference between intermittent starving and intermittent fasting was control. Fasting made people feel in control. Not having food made Buck feel wildly out of control. But maybe having guidelines would help.
If he could pick up some fresh fruit and a pack of Gatorade, maybe—
But when he checked his bank account info on his phone, his first check still hadn’t come in.
Forget the groceries, then.
He’d just...try to drink more water.
Buck didn’t feel safe, sleeping in his jeep.
That had to be it. That was why the nightmares were getting worse.
In the end, his solution was pretty simple.
There's an equipment closet that's been locked since he started at the 118. It's near the laundry room, tucked away behind an alcove, around a corner that wasn't well lit. It was absolutely perfect.
Buck spent three separate shifts hunting for that key.
In the end, he had to pick the lock to get in. The closet was dusty, the air was stale, but it was dry and insulated and very nearly empty.
He couldn’t, couldn’t sleep in the Jeep every night he had off. Surviving two out of every three nights on no food and bad sleep was just...starting to wear on him in a way that was becoming noticeable.
He had bedding from his old apartment that he was able to sneak in during his shift when the engines were gone on a call.
It wasn’t going to be every night. Maybe it wouldn’t even be every week. When he was on call, he could sleep in the bunk room.
But when he felt overwhelmed by how visible he was, how exposed he was all the time? Having a door, without windows, that he could shut and lock behind himself might be the thing that could hold him together. At least until he could get his money problems sorted out for good.
It was a small, out-of-the-way space, with no one else even using it. Why couldn’t it be Buck’s?
Under seasoned burritos on whole wheat tortillas with Chim and Maddie should not have been as delicious as they were, but the dinner did happen in the middle of a 48 off.
If she was mad at him, she didn’t show it. They had always been good at setting that sort of thing aside, ending arguments in the same conversation that started them or, failing that, dropping the topic entirely. It had never been worth risking the stability of Maddie & Buck to stay mad at each other for long.
Even now, over a decade later, Buck didn’t know if he would have it in him to get properly angry at Maddie for anything.
He had thought about telling Maddie about his apartment, his money problems, but...seeing her now, he knew he’d made the right call.
Maddie was beautiful, happy, smiling. Happy with Chim, safe from Doug, without their parents to pick apart her every decision. Without Buck’s problems to drag her down and break her heart.
He didn’t know if she even knew their parents had cut him off. It had been years ago. Buck had made his peace with it.
If she didn’t know, telling her would hurt her. It would be their parents letting Maddie down, again, hurting her again, thousands of miles away and seven years later.
He had failed to protect Maddie from enough, this past year.
He wouldn’t let this hurt her too.
So, when he casually asked if she wouldn’t mind picking up his prescription from the pharmacy for him, citing an almost empty bottle and plans that couldn’t be changed, he knew she’d accept.
And when she picked it up, and found herself paying full price for blood thinners (only thirty bucks, give or take, but that was still thirty bucks that he just didn’t have), insurance deducting nothing, he would explain that there was a delay getting his new card on file, but that he could pay her back the difference once his paperwork got sorted out.
And she would smile and say, “You’re my baby brother! Don’t even think about it. Pay me back by coming over for dinner again next week.”
The two of them against the world, back-to-back, trying to protect each other.
That’s how it always was.
Sequestered in his back closet during C shift, escaping from an astonishingly loud thunderstorm that had woken him with a start (sounded like bombs going off under his feet again and again—no. Don’t get started), Buck...well.
Buck couldn’t figure out why Eddie was still mad at him.
The first thing Buck had loved about Eddie was the way he was with Christopher. It was such a stark contrast from Buck’s own experiences that at first it didn’t seem possible. This concept of Eddie’s son, Christopher, who was perfect because Eddie thought he was perfect. Now, Christopher was an amazing kid. He just deserved good things, in a way Buck never had even when he was small. Everyone who met Chris understood that. Chris was the best. But...a few times, Buck thought about that house in Pennsylvania, the quiet, cold desperation seeping into every corner, every wall. He thought about Chris. He thought about what it would have been like in that house for a kid as bright and fearless as Chris, a kid who needed other people the way Chris did, and the thought hurts him. It stings. He can’t hold it in his brain for too long because it makes his chest ache.
Eddie loved Christopher like it was easy. And loving Christopher was easy, the easiest thing in the world, but...A different kind of parent might have gotten it wrong, and thought that it wasn’t.
All this to say: The way Eddie loves Chris was the first thing Buck loved about Eddie.
Being friends with Eddie, it almost made him feel like a little of that perfect was for him, too. How bad could he be, if this man with everything would allow Buck to integrate himself so completely, leaving fingerprints on his most precious things? Letting him meet, and more than that, trusting him with Chris?
Having Eddie mad at him, still mad at him, felt like an indictment of everything his parents had ever thought about him. Buck was just fundamentally not enough. Or too much. Always one or the other, and sometimes both.
He just—he just wanted to know why. Why Eddie still wasn’t talking to him.
He knew why Bobby was still mad, at least—Buck had taken Bobby’s private, personal struggles and thrown them in his face for professional gain.
Bobby hating him right now made sense.
It wasn’t something he could just make up for, with Bobby.
But with Eddie? It didn’t make any sense for him to still be mad. If he was pissed Buck wasn’t able to babysit during the legal proceedings, shutting Buck out for a month afterwards and not letting him even see Christopher didn’t make any sense at all.
Unless.
Maybe Eddie had finally noticed the way Buck...the way Buck looked at him.
That would be an excellent reason to keep avoiding him.
Buck was clumsily, coltishly greedy when it came to Eddie. The way he was always trying to get his attention, weasel into his life, his conversations, his home. His tiny, perfect family.
Maybe the time spent not talking had clued Eddie in on how weird and clingy Buck was.
Buck didn’t even know what an apology for something like that would look like.
He missed Christopher.
He missed Eddie.
And he didn’t know how to fix this.
Hunger clawed at his stomach, screamed in his chest.
He breathed through it until it burned less brightly.
In, out. In out.
Blinked moisture from his eyes.
“I think something's wrong with me.” He told the ceiling of this tiny, cramped closet. Whispered, like it was a secret.
The rain died down eventually. Buck waited for the engines to go out on a call and snuck back out to his jeep.
He wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight.
Buck, hair still damp from his shower, made it a point to catch eyes as people drifted in for A-Shift, handing out cheery greetings with a vengeance.
It was stupid for people to avoid him, he’d decided at some point.
He worked here. They were the ones acting weird.
Bleary, sleepy hellos drifted his way, slightly more of them than he’d gotten on his last shift. He considered it a victory that apparently some people were getting tired of mustering the energy to be kind of rude to a coworker first thing in the morning.
As he strolled through the station, a muttered stream of colorful swears filled the air. The origin was a pair of boots sticking out from beneath what must be the new ladder truck (not that Bobby would let Buck anywhere near it).
Buck gave one of the boots a friendly kick. “All good down there?”
Rick rolled out, squinting at the bright lights and scrubbing sweat from his brow with a filthy sleeve. Buck let out a low whistle.
“Oh, hey Buckley.” Rick yawned. “How’s your grip strength?”
People tell me I have a hard time letting go. “Strong enough, usually. Why?”
"Do you think you could get down here and take a look at this? I was taking care of the oil, but I couldn’t get the panel to retighten.”
“Retighten?” Buck asked, confused. “What were you doing down there?”
“Taking care of the oil.”
“Why don’t you,” Buck glanced around, but Bobby was nowhere in sight, “let me take a look.”
“You sure?” Rick asked , but he was already climbing to his feet and handing Buck his toolbelt. “You’re a lifesaver, Buckley.”
“That’s the dream. What else have I got to do around here?”
“More laundry?”
The smile dropped from Buck’s face like a stone as he turned to scowl at Rick. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Whoa, sorry, didn’t mean anything by it.” Rick threw his hands up. “You’ve just been doing a lot of it lately, which makes sense. I heard your water was out? Chimney said—"
“Yeah, I bet he did.” Buck muttered. That’s what he gets for telling Chimney anything. “Don’t worry about it.”
Rick put his hands on his hips. “You a little jumpy there, Buckley? I’d say I don’t bite but—”
“If you were trying to tighten bolts down here with your teeth, I think I’ve found your problem.” Buck was already on his back, sliding under the truck. Rick’s surprised laughter followed him under.
Buck used to find himself crawling under the trucks a couple of times a month, easy. More of his useless life experience making itself handy.
“I think you’ve got the wrong tools for this,” Buck said, baffled at the wrench he’d found abandoned under the truck.
He searched instinctively for the oil pan Rick had been using, but couldn’t find one.
“Where’s your old oil?” He called.
“There isn’t any. I wasn’t changing, just checking the levels.”
Wait. What?
“You were checking the oil levels from underneath?” Buck asked incredulously.
“Am I not supposed to?” Rick called back.
Is this what passed for vehicle maintenance while Bobby refused to let Buck do his job?
“You can check next to the engine block.” Buck sighed. “Best practice is to keep track of your mileage and get it changed on a schedule. Second best is to take a sample and send it to an oil lab. I’ll show you where—"
At that moment, a tremendous CRASH shook the station.
Buck took a sharp breath, surprised by the sudden tremor—had there been an earthquake?—and the smell, the taste of oil and gasoline consumed his senses, the hot, muggy air under the truck, the yells of alarm, voices were rising in confusion and anger all around him, and, and his leg seized in a sudden, vicious cramp—
—Buck was going to die. The truck was collapsing on top of him, not again, not again, his face was wet, wet with blood, where was it coming from—
—he was gasping fast and shallow. Was there smoke coming from somewhere? There had to be, because it didn't feel like he was getting any air—
His hands were plastered to the underside of the truck in a desperate bid to protect himself, muscles straining, shoulders screaming, but If I let go it’ll come down—
“Buck, let go! Drop your hands!”
Was someone here? Who was—
“Firefighter Buckley! GET DOWN!”
Training had him slamming his hands down and flattening himself to the ground, muscles quivering with coiled tension, as though anything would help what was about to happen, thousands of pounds of machinery on top of him in an instant, no amount of training or preparation or knowing would ever be enough to—
Hands wrapped around his ankles and he was dragged out from under the truck and into bright, artificial lights.
And he.
He was.
He.
Buck tried to get his breathing under control, first. Tried to crane his head back, to get a look at the wreckage behind him, because if it wasn’t me then who was down there—
But.
The engine looked fine. He couldn’t see the fire. He...where were they?
Buck’s ankles were released and two sets of hands seized his arms, hauling him unceremoniously to his feet.
His left leg buckled underneath him and it was only the powerful grip on his arms that kept him from crumpling to the ground.
“Thanks,” he tried to say, but didn’t know if he’d succeeded.
Being upright was a serious improvement to being on the ground, that was for sure.
He could take stock, this way. He could feel his legs. They weren’t broken. They weren’t broken. He raised his head from where he had been staring intently at his own body, searching for damage, to find a familiar face.
Chimney had one of his arms in a tight grip at the bicep and was staring at Buck with an intent, unreadable expression.
“I don’t know where the blood is coming from,” he mumbled, slurring a little, because if Chimney was treating him, he needed to know Buck was hurt, “I don’t know where I’m bleeding.”
Chimney’s lips moved, but Buck, but Buck couldn’t hear anything over the blood roaring in his ears. Chimney must have noticed, because he instead touched Buck’s slick, wet face and showed him the black staining his fingertips. Not blood. Oil.
Chimney was trying to talk to him again, and Buck struggled to interpret movement without sound. When just watching didn’t work, he followed along with the motion, forming the shapes with his own mouth, and only then could he understand.
You’re safe, Chimney was telling him, over and over again, You’re safe.
Two guys had him. Chimney and Rick, who looked white as a sheet when Buck tried to meet his eyes. They propped him up between the two of them as he slowly regained his bearings. His feet found the ground and supported him. His senses started taking in the world around him as it was.
The ringing in his ears had softened enough that he could just register Rick saying something to him, something like “—Buckley, man, I wasn’t fucking thinking, I’m so sorry—” When Buck regains his bearings enough to finally look around.
Buck was.
He was at the firehouse.
And when he had the thought, it was like a bubble popped. Of course he was at the station. He’d never left. Why had his body seemed to think he was somewhere else?
There were some guys in the gym next to some toppled exercise equipment, one of the big machines (the source of that big crash, had to be), but they made no move to right it, or clean up the weights that had rolled everywhere, or do anything at all.
Because they, like every other firefighter within his current field of vision, were all staring directly at Buck.
He scans the room slowly, drowsily cataloging every person he can see. Two legs, two arms, conscious, out of danger. And the next, and the next. He doesn’t look at their faces, doesn’t want to see what kind expressions he’s earned himself with whatever the hell had just happened.
Movement from the corner of his eye has his head turning sluggishly to see Bobby approaching them from across the station.
He looked...he looked furious.
Cold dread dripped down Buck’s spine. The last thing he wanted was to be yelled at right now.
Not in front of everyone, when he was still blinking tears of panic from his eyes and his clothes were soaked in fear-sweat. He squirmed out of Chim and Rick's grip, mumbling, “Don’t tell Bobby what happened,” as he slipped free.
Maybe they tried to stop him. He wasn’t sure.
Muscles aching and nerves thrumming with a jittery misery, Buck took a few stumbling steps to confirm his balance, and then took off toward the locker room, toward some semblance of privacy.
He had just crossed the threshold when Bobby caught up to him, got close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice for Buck to hear and obey when he said, “Buck, stop.”
Buck stopped.
He felt his nerves drop into his boots and took a shaky breath, not turning around. “Why?” he asked.
“I need to talk to you.”
Buck’s lip curled. “They bust up your equipment, but I’m the one in trouble? That tracks.”
“This isn’t about who’s in trouble, Buck. We need to talk about what just happened in there.” Bobby was doing something with his voice, trying to sound a certain way, authoritative or something, but it meant that Buck had no idea how Bobby really felt.
Not that it mattered. Buck had already seen his face. He already knew Bobby was mad at him.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Buck said stiffly, looking away. “Nothing happened. It’s fine.” The proof was outside the glass walls: The engine was fine, the station was fine. Chim and Rick were fine. Buck was the only casualty, and he hadn’t even gotten hurt. Not really.
“Fine?” Bobby snorted. An unfriendly sound. “Give me one good reason not to send you home for the rest of this shift.”
Something in Buck snapped and he spun around to face Bobby, barely keeping his balance at the ferocity of the motion.
How dare he.
Buck had spent the last two days waiting to come back here, and Bobby wanted to just send him away like it didn’t matter? He hadn’t even had time to eat anything yet.
“You think being alone is going to help me?” His voice sounded rough and watery, but Bobby was listening, so he had to keep going. “You want to cut me off from everybody so I can come back when I’m not a problem anymore, is that it?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do, kid, I just think you need—"
“Don’t call me kid,” Buck snapped, “I’m not a kid, and you don’t know what I need better than I do.” He took a step toward Bobby, fuming. “What I need, what I’ve needed this whole time, is to be back with the 118.”
Bobby was still looking at Buck like he didn’t know anything, and Buck hated, hated that look. “You want to be at work. You need to be safe. You shouldn’t be here!”
“I don’t feel safe anywhere else!” Buck exploded, trying to drown out the You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here that wouldn’t stop ringing in his ears.
Adrenaline that had only just begun to fade surged back up with a vengeance, throwing him into that wild animal kind of panic from his probie days, from his days on the road, from when he was a teenager. The kind of panic that left him feeling unsteady and dangerous and vulnerable, like any minute someone was going to try to drag him out of here by the scruff of his neck. You shouldn’t be here.
Buck pushed it away, tried to keep the tears clogging his throat out of his voice as he seethed, “Why does this disqualify me? Everyone’s traumatized. Everyone gets scared. They all get to stay with—they get to be here.” He swallowed. “But when it’s me, I can’t work anymore. Why is it only me who can’t take it? Why is it only me,” he demanded, “who can’t ever be good enough for you? Why don’t you trust me?”
Buck’s voice broke and went raspy, the way it always did when he yelled. He didn’t want to be yelling at Bobby, but now that he’d started he didn’t know how to stop.
“Your situation was different and you know it.”
“Do I? Because from where I’m standing,” Buck’s chest was heaving, “you kept telling me to slow down. And stop trying. You didn’t care—”
“Don’t say that.” Bobby sounded seriously angry now. Buck doesn’t know if he’d ever heard Bobby talk to him with that tone of voice before. “You don’t get to say that. All you thought about was getting back out. But you’re never cautious. Something could have gone wrong! You need to learn to be more careful with yourself—”
“This didn’t happen to me because I wasn’t careful!” Buck’s voice shook. “I was doing my job, and someone hurt me because of it! There’s no amount of careful that could have protected me!”
“That isn’t an excuse to tear yourself apart in the aftermath. You were already recovering just fine, better than expected, you didn’t need to—"
“But I did. You don’t understand. It wasn’t happening to you. When I fought to get this back, and succeeded,” Buck gestured to his healthy legs first, but in his agitated state, his hands jerked as he spoke and spread to indicate the rest of him, too. The whole station. The whole world, “you called it a, a miracle. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was months, it was my surgeons and my physical therapists, it was me killing myself to get back what I lost. What was taken from me.”
If Buck had been able to see through the furious tears blurring his vision, he might have seen how violently Bobby flinched at those words. But he couldn't, so nothing stopped his furious tirade as it barreled toward its conclusion.
“You,” he snarled, “wanted me to give up. You didn’t think I could do it! You didn’t want me to come back!” The accusations Buck was hurling at Bobby weren’t true. But they felt a little true, when Buck immersed himself in the misery and dread of the past month, of the past six months of his life. More than that, though? They felt mean. And right now, Buck was targeting with intent to harm. “Stop pretending to care about me. If you want me gone so badly, just,” His breath hitched, but maybe no one noticed, “just pretend you have an ounce of actual respect for me and tell me to my face.”
The words were roiling inside of him like magma, as if they’d been painfully trapped somewhere deep and dark for years and years, waiting, bubbling up out of him now only because Buck had finally, finally opened his mouth to scream. “Stop lying to me,” He demanded, but not of Bobby. Not really.
Bobby’s mouth moved, but no words came out. Finally, he said “...Kid, I—”
“I’m not your kid.” Buck’s voice cracked.
Buck and Bobby stared at each other. The station was utterly silent. Buck wished he could take it back, snatch the words out of the air where they hung between the two of them, heavy like a broken promise.
The silence was broken by the bell.
Conversation over, then.
The 118 was needed elsewhere.
“Sounds like you need to get going,” Buck muttered, shouldering past Bobby to head to the showers. Trying to put as much distance between himself and everything. anything. as was possible. Tears blurred his vision.
He wedged the doorstop into place behind him and stumbled to the vanity. He bent over the sinks, leaning on his elbows and scrubbing his face until his skin hurt. Deep, slow breaths.
He didn’t hear if anyone had tried to follow him into the bathroom, but he did hear the engines leave, sirens kicking up and then trailing off into the distance.
Distantly, he hoped someone had finished fixing the ladder truck.
Buck rested his face in his hands, hunched over the sink as he was, and locked his knees to prevent his legs from giving out.
He was so, so fired.
Notes:
CW for this chapter:
Discussed: eating disorders (mistaken), exchanging sex for housing (reference to past behaviors)
Portrayed: RSD symptoms, PTSD symptoms including a flashback, unreliable narrator suffering from the effects of lack of sleep and lack of food over a period of weeks/months.Please leave a comment if you're interested in seeing more! This is my first time writing for 911 and I'd love to know how I did.
You can find me on Tumblr at eggmacguffin
Chapter 2: The Fall
Summary:
Bobby treats Buck with professional respect and courtesy at the worst possible time; leaps are taken by Eddie, including, potentially, one of faith.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Buck waited until the sounds of the engines faded completely before he straightened up. He didn’t look at his reflection in the mirror as he stepped back, instead letting his eyes trace the pattern of the tile between his shoes over and over again. Just for something to focus on.
He shambled, limbs heavy and unfamiliar, out of the locker room to be met by the thunderous silence of a completely empty station.
The dissonance very nearly made him flinch.
Buck didn’t pause his gait even as he blinked into the natural light of the station. He moved with hard-learned purpose. You didn’t have to be smart to be a quick study. Skipping meals really wasn’t an option for him anymore.
So Buck stumbled up the stairs despite the numb horror licking at his edges. Despite the ache in his stomach that didn’t feel a thing like hunger.
Quiche for breakfast—Bobby had outdone himself and foregone a simple breakfast casserole in favor of a loving spread of different savory breakfast pies.
Stiffly, Buck snagged a pie tin that was still one-third full and headed back downstairs, clutching his prize with half-numb fingers.
He was still—he was still at work. He couldn’t go hide in the bunkroom when he was the only man here. What if someone—what if someone came in needing help, and couldn’t find him?
So it was with civil responsibility in mind that he grabbed a metal folding chair, spun it to face the open bay doors, and sat. From this position, he couldn’t miss someone entering the station if he tried.
He’d forgotten to grab any utensils and lacked the energy to hike back upstairs. It didn’t matter. Buck settled for scooping lukewarm quiche out of the tin with his hands and shoveling it into his mouth. Messily, robotically. Eating because he knew he had to. He wouldn’t last if he didn’t eat.
His energy slowly returned to him. The tension keeping his muscles taught and trembling eased out of him, leaving him loose-limbed and sore. The panic, the terror, the fury that had gripped him cracked apart, thawing instead into a tender, aching sort of shame.
Soft, hiccupping sobs, intercut occasionally by sniffling and chewing, accompanied Buck as he slowly began to feel human again.
The first thing that made itself known to him was the ache. All over his body, but concentrated most brightly in his shoulders and upper back, which felt like...well, like he’d tried to lift a firetruck with his bare hands. He stretched a little, craning his neck this way and that to try to relieve some of the burn.
Awareness drifted in lazily, after that.
Buck could feel the metal of the folding chair, cold and unyielding against his back and thighs. He pressed back against it, to feel the resistance for himself. The chair held.
Dry sweat and grease and oil clung to his skin, grimy and itchy and real. He stretched out his legs in front of him, just to prove he could. He wiggled his toes, trying to warm them up. His shirt was wet from the bathroom sink.
The soft hum of the lights joined the sounds of his own breathing, his own heartbeat. Then, the tick of a nearby wall clock. The metallic crumple of the tin in his hands.
The rest of the world, not waking or restarting, but letting Buck back in. Letting him be a part of it again.
The thought came to Buck that if he stood up, walked over, and touched one of the walls of the station, he knew how it would feel beneath his fingers. He knew the gentle scratch of the exposed brick, the tacky smoothness of the plaster. He knew that if he leaned on it, it would hold solid. He knew it so completely that he didn’t need to check.
Carefully, Buck scooped up the last remaining slice of his stolen quiche and brought it to his mouth.
There were red peppers and some kind of fancy cheese in it, he noticed. It was good.
His arm dropped to his side, the empty tin slipping from his slack fingers and falling to the floor with a soft, papery tink.
He breathed deeply.
Somewhere between an eternity and his last blink, the familiar rumble of the returning cavalry greeted him.
Buck waited until they were just close enough to see him, to see he hadn’t abandoned his post, before throwing a concerned looking Chimney a lazy salute. Then he stood, turned on his heel, and headed for the showers.
Buck’s second shower of the morning was efficient and methodical. He scrubbed himself down to his nailbeds and cranked the water temperature as high as it could go, filling the room with steam. No one else came in while he was there, not even the guys like Rick who liked to rinse off after every single call. Maybe thoughtfulness, maybe distaste.
Whichever it was, Buck resented how much he appreciated it.
After his shower, he shrugged into a warm, clean set of sweats, almost crisp in their newness. He kept his head down, making a beeline for the bunkrooms.
See, Bobby had unofficial rules about how to treat people professionally in a work environment where boundaries were easy to blur. In practice, this meant that in the entire time Buck had worked at the 118, he had never seen Bobby wake up a sleeping firefighter to yell at them.
It seemed like a good place to hunker down.
Out of habit, he'd left the bunkroom door propped open and dropped into the bed just inside, putting him as close to the sounds of the station as possible. The laughter trickling in, the sounds of work and exercise and comradery settling over him like a blanket.
He hadn’t been lying before. He felt safer at the 118 than maybe anywhere else on the planet.
He was out for the count within minutes.
It was the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep he’d gotten in months. Long spans of deep, uneventful quiet, broken by soft moments of drowsy cognizance that brought him close to the surface of wakefulness and let him float there, content, before sinking back down again.
It was during one of these in-between periods when he dimly registered someone entering the bunkroom. He didn’t open his eyes or call out a greeting; his body felt heavy in a way that promised soreness when he finally moved, and he wanted to put off the inevitable as long as possible.
Buck hoped distantly that whoever it was chose a bed on the other side of the room. His hair had curled as it dried, fluffy and clean and ruffled to all hell from having been slept on. People around here had a hard enough time taking him seriously as it was.
But the delicate footfalls stopped at the foot of Buck’s bed and went no further. After a moment of shared hesitation, the bottom edge of Buck’s blanket was peeled up and pushed back.
The action prompted groggy curiosity from Buck rather than alarm. He was at the station; no one was going to hurt him.
It was probably just Chimney, he thought, come to check on him but not wanting to wake him up.
There were hands on Buck, then, feeling along his left leg: one cupping the swell of his calf, one gently cradling his socked heel. Gently pressing, squeezing, feeling for damage and carefully manipulating the joint this way and that. Like they were confirming for themselves that muscle and bone and full articulation were still there, solid and dependable and in one piece.
The attention felt vaguely medical in nature, but his heart still twinged the way it always did whenever someone touched him with care.
There was a ragged sigh above him. A familiar one.
“You,” Eddie breathed, soft as a secret, “scare the living hell out of me, you know that?”
Before Buck could wake up enough to react, the blanket was carefully tucked back over his foot, and Eddie left, leaving the door cracked behind him. Because he knew Buck slept better that way.
Well. Buck was wide-awake now. He sat up with a groan, blinking sleep from his eyes, and took in the room.
He was more surprised than he should have been, maybe, to discover that his bedside table had been loaded down with food while he rested. Chicken and potatoes and bread and broccoli and green beans and parsnips, enough to feed him for at least two meals. His eyes stung as he took in the tall glass of orange juice with a sticky note that simply said HYDRATE, DUMMY in Chimney’s familiar scrawl.
After eating his fill, he must have drifted off to sleep again, because the next thing he knew Hen was shaking him gently awake.
“Buck,” she said, with the air of someone trying to deliver a terminal diagnosis delicately. “Bobby wants to talk to you.”
“Shit.” Buck climbed out of bed and winced at the tight, aching pull of his muscles. He stretched, hoping to ease some of the soreness and finish waking up before facing his firing squad. “Well, it’s been fun, Hen. If I don’t make it back in one piece, you can have my Xbox.” No wait, shit, had he already sold his Xbox? He couldn’t remember.
“Maybe it’ll go well?” She didn’t look like she believed the words coming out of her mouth, but he appreciated the effort.
It had been good while it lasted. He blew Hen a kiss on his way out the door and did an admirable job of walking like a normal person as he crossed the station, trying to flatten his unruly hair with just his fingers.
He felt more grounded than he had this morning, a product of having some actual rest and a real meal under his belt. The prospect of talking to Bobby had ceased to be terrifying and had resigned itself to grimly inevitable.
Bobby, looking uncharacteristically nervous, actually jumped when Buck opened the door to his office. Hadn’t he sent for Buck in the first place? What did he have to be jumpy about?
“Have a seat, Buck.” Bobby hesitated. “Or. Do you want to sit down? You can stand, if that’s better.”
Buck squinted at Bobby, baffled. “Is this some kind of test?” he asked.
“No,” Bobby shook his head. “I just want you to be comfortable.”
“You should get better chairs, then,” Buck joked as he sunk into one, but it looked like Bobby was actually considering it, so he changed the subject. “What did you want to talk to me about?” As if he didn’t know.
“Buck,” Bobby started, then stopped. Pulled his shoulders in as if bracing for something. “How are you feeling?”
“...I’m fine.” Buck offered flatly. “How are you?”
“No, that’s not—” Bobby seemed flustered. It was unusual, which was probably for the best, because it really didn’t suit him. “I’m sorry about this morning, Buck.”
What?
“...because I’m fired?” Buck guessed warily.
“Fired?” Bobby’s eyebrows jumped up to meet his hairline. “Who told you you were fired?” More delicately, he continued, “You’re not in trouble, Buck.”
That can’t be right. Buck must have misheard. “Bobby, I...I yelled at you in front of everyone.I was way out of line. I know that.” Also, I spent the whole shift either sleeping or pretending to, but if Bobby didn’t know about that, Buck wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.
“It’s a little more complicated than that. Buck, you experienced something medical, and instead of listening or giving you space, I pushed. You needed help, and I let myself get pulled into an argument.” Bobby shook his head. “It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t what you needed.”
“You can’t let me get away with stuff just because I’m crazy.” Buck pointed out, feeling oddly defensive. “That’s not fair to the firefighters who aren’t crazy.”
Bobby rubbed his temples. “You’re not crazy. No one here is crazy.”
Then stop looking at me like that.
“How come you get to be the one who decides whether I’m crazy or not? That’s kinda messed up, Cap.”
Bobby jerked back in his seat. Then, as though trying to disguise the motion, he shuffled a pamphlet out of his bag and tossed it onto the desk between them like it was sharkbait and he was scared to lose a hand.
PTSD: Understanding Wounds of the Soul
Jesus Christ.
(Literally. It looked extremely Catholic.)
“You,” Bobby said tenderly, as though this conversation wasn’t going horribly, “went through a bad experience. Sometimes, if you’re suddenly reminded of that experience, your brain tries to use what it learned last time to protect you.”
“I know what a flashback is.” Buck glowered. “I’m not stupid.”
Bobby threw his hands up. “I know you’re not stupid. I’m just trying to—” He cut himself off. “Buck, please. I just need to know if you're okay.”
“I already said I was fine,” Buck crossed his arms, heart pounding.
Bobby stared at him, visibly out of his depth.
Because what could he say?
The singular victory Buck could claim was that Bobby couldn’t make him leave because of any complications resulting from his accident six months ago. This absolutely qualified.
The HVAC hummed. Buck’s hair drooped onto his forehead, and he scraped it back with one hand.
They stared at each other, not breaking eye-contact.
Neither of them said therapy.
[Buck had screwed up therapy in the same way he screwed up a lot of things. Therapy was like a weird combination of a hospital and a church: sacred in a way that he had utterly failed to comprehend from the soft side of twenty-five, confused and grieving and so, so stupid.
The regret had filtered in slowly after the session had ended. The skin-to-skin warmth of basking in another person’s heartbeat for a little while had faded, only to be replaced with a dull, prickling shame.
He’d done it again.
The unprofessional, idiotic behavior that had nearly cost him the first real purpose he’d ever found in his life. The fact that it hadn’t technically happened while he was at work didn’t help with the nauseous panic that had chased his heels, scratching like fingernails around his neck, against the skin of his inner thighs. God, this...this could ruin everything.
Only four months into probation and he was past his last chance at the 118. He knew that, and he’d still gone and fucked it up. Bobby was going to fire him for good this time. Cut him loose. Set adrift, again, except this time he’d bring Devon with him on the road.
The last thing he would ever do as a firefighter was let someone die.
Bobby had been trying to help him. Buck had failed Devon, and then turned around and failed Bobby, too.
His appointment had been at 11am and he’d gotten out before noon. There was still plenty of daylight left to burn.
On his way back home, Buck had picked up a bottle of cheap, strong tequila. He locked himself in his room and drank until he couldn’t think about it anymore.
He’d woken up the next morning, guilt and tequila churning together in his stomach, to three texts from Bobby:
At around 3pm:
How was your appointment?
Then, hours later:
You’re not fired.
Meet me at my office at 3pm.
Buck fumbled his phone to his call history to find a series of calls to Bobby’s number, each with a call length of 0:00.
He’d blacked out and called his boss no less than five times: The first at 7pm and the last just after two in the morning.
Thank god he hadn’t picked up.
(In Buck’s groggy, half-drunk state, the reason Bobby knew about what had happened was because Bobby always seemed to know everything; Buck rarely ever talked on the phone and didn’t consider the fact that missed calls tended to go to voicemail.)
Fuck.
He went to the damn meeting. He didn’t know what else to do.
He’d shuffled into the station wearing ratty sweatpants and a T-shirt with a hole in it, because what else did he have to lose? His dignity?
“Buck.” Bobby had said, calm and composed in a way that could only be completely forced, “You know that’s assault, right?”
Turns out, Buck’s last hurrah as a total slut had been an actual crime. The fact that it hadn’t technically been a crime on his part didn’t help the guilt gnawing at his stomach.
“Technically, yeah.” Buck had stared at his shoes, arms wrapped around himself. Unwilling to meet Bobby’s gaze. Nervous of what he might see there. “I know...I know I screwed up. I’m sorry. I promised you I’d do better.”
“Look at me, Buck,” Bobby’s voice was strained. Buck kept his eyes on his shoes. “Do you hear what I’m saying? You’ve been assaulted.”
Buck’s head jerked up to stare at Bobby disbelievingly. “It wasn’t like that. You know what I’m like. And I didn’t say no! I—I liked it. I consented, is that what you want to hear?”
“You weren’t in a position to legally consent.”
“It was stupid, I know it was stupid, I just want to move on.” Buck said desperately. “You said you weren’t going to fire me. It sounds like you don’t even blame me. Fine! Are we done? Can I go?”
Bobby looked at him for a long, long moment before he said, “Firefighters are mandatory reporters, Buck.”
Stunned silence, then: “There’s nothing to report!” Christ. She’d told him, hadn’t she? She’d said to keep this to himself. “There’s people out there who, who hurt people. There’s victims who need actual support, and you really wanna waste everyone’s time reporting—"
“—therapists who have sex with people I send to them for help? Who take advantage of emotionally vulnerable patients during sessions and then convince them they’ll be fired if they tell anyone?” Bobby was a large man, but he did a good job of hiding it behind midwestern manners and a gentle approach to his own authority. But right now, with his shoulders thrown back and his eyes flashing? He towered over Buck. “Yeah. I really do.”
The callous, logical way Bobby laid it all out made Buck flinch. It took him a moment to find his voice. “She didn’t—” he swallowed, throat dry, “no one took advantage of anyone.” And it wasn’t people, it was just me, but he couldn’t explain with words why it was true. It just felt true. “I can’t stop you, can I?”
“No.”
“Can you just...keep my name out of it? I don’t want this to hurt my chances of going full time. I don’t consent t-to details from my session being shared with my name attached. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. To anyone.” Buck really, really couldn’t afford to have something like this on his record. “Can I say that?”
“Yeah, kid,” Bobby had looked at him, expression something close to sad. Disappointed, maybe. “You can say that.”
“Is there something else?”
“...Buck. About the messages you left—”
“Really? Messages? Cap...” Buck scrubbed a hand over his face, exhausted. It had been almost three days since he’d last shaved, and the scrape of stubble against his palm was oddly grounding. “If I sent you something last night...listen, I was drunk as a skunk. I don’t even want to know what I said.” He snorted a grim laugh. “Do whatever you want. Just leave me out of it. Can I please go now?”
“Before you leave, I’m...” Bobby sighed. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls, kid. I’m going to start keeping my phone on when we’re not working, so. Call if you need to.” A clearing of the throat. “Sober, drunk, high, whatever. I’ll pick up.”
Buck blinked at him. Why would you do that? he wanted to ask, but wasn’t sure he’d like the answer. Instead, he asked, “Are we...can we be done here?”
“We can be done here.”
Bobby kept his word. He didn’t try to talk to Buck about that appointment again.
If there was an investigation, Buck never caught wind of it.
A few months later, he heard through the grapevine that Dr. Welles had been permanently suspended from practicing within the state of California.
He didn’t dwell on it.
And Bobby?
Bobby never suggested Buck try therapy again.]
But two years later, here they were. Buck was crazy and Bobby couldn’t even send him to a shrink.
It’s not like Buck didn’t know how this would end anyway. He’d proven himself utterly incompetent, but in a way that meant Bobby couldn’t fire him. Long story short, Buck could kiss his chances of going on a call any time soon goodbye and should prepare instead to field even more concerned glances from the rest of A-shift whenever he did anything more dangerous than wash the fucking dishes.
But Bobby surprised him. He muttered what sounded like bad advice and stupid idea under his breath, swept aside the forlorn pamphlet, and put his elbows on the desk, leaning forward to look Buck in the eye. “Forget the science stuff. I know you well enough to know you’ll research the mechanics behind it yourself, if you haven’t already. You don’t need me for that.”
Bobby waited until Buck met his gaze, then said, “What do you need, Buck?”
“What?” The question threw him off. Buck’s arms uncrossed and he scooted forward in his seat unconsciously.
“What do you need from me?” Bobby asked it like he wanted a real answer. “What can I do to support you right now?”
Buck couldn’t have said what he needed before walking into this room. He didn’t know for sure that there even was something he needed until Bobby asked.
“You need to let me go back under the truck.” Buck blurted out. “And in it, and on it. The other engines, too.”
Maybe crazy was new to Buck, but pain wasn’t. His go-to method was to press on the bruise until it stopped making him flinch. Maybe that could work with this, too.
“The last time I was that close to the engines, I was in bad shape. Now that I’m back, you won’t let me anywhere close. I need to see for myself that nothing’s changed, that I still know what I’m doing. But when you act like you don’t trust me around them…it kind of makes it hard to trust myself.”
“You want to try working with the engines in a controlled, safe situation.” Bobby looked…stricken for some reason. “Getting used to the equipment again when there isn’t an emergency.”
Buck wasn’t that picky; he’d take when he wasn’t trapped under it like a bug, even.
“That could be a good idea.” Bobby looked at him consideringly. “There’s a few hours left of the shift. Do you want to head there now?”
“Now?”
“Only if you’re up for it. We don’t have to—”
“No, we do.” Buck said. “We really do.” It was better than he could have hoped. If he’d left this alone, the morning’s events would have stewed in the back of his mind for days. “Lead the way, Cap.”
That was how Buck found himself eye-to-eye with the belly of the engine for the second time in a day.
He took slow, shallow breaths: in through his nose, out through his mouth. He raised a hand and it shook, slightly, before jerking toward the underside of the truck without any input from Buck. Trying to press up.
Before contact was made, a hand curled around his wrist and halted the motion. Buck flinched and looked over.
“You good?” Bobby had apparently run out of patience in the forty seconds Buck had been down here alone and decided to observe up close.
It was a little embarrassing how much better Buck felt, having him down there with him.
Buck flexed his fingers and pulled back. “I’m good.”
Bobby nodded once. Taking him at his word. “Why don’t you tell me what I’m looking at?”
“Well, that’s a fire engine, Cap.” Helpfully, Buck pointed up, indicating the fifteen ton hunk of machinery suspended a few inches above their heads.
“Not what I meant.” Buck could hear the laugh in Bobby’s voice. “You said Rick screwed it up, and that you know better.” It was Bobby’s turn to gesture upward. “Show me.”
The hint of a challenge caught Buck’s attention, but it was the soft confidence with which Bobby made his request that settled his heartbeat.
Bobby thought he could do it. More than that, Bobby wanted to see him succeed.
Buck flourished under the attention. His confidence grew, knowledge bubbling up from him as he explained the underside of Bobby’s truck to him.
He knew cars decently well, enough to own one and perform his own maintenance when needed, but he didn’t love cars the way some guys did.
A car was a car; it got you where you needed to go if you could keep it running. His jeep was special because of Maddie, not because of the year or the model or the horsepower.
But firetrucks?
Buck could get behind the hype for firetrucks.
He usually tried to keep cool about it, because he would never hear the end of it if he started acting like an actual seven year old, but his enthusiasm for the topic was either shared or infectious, because Bobby looked like he was having a blast. Buck dragged him out from under the truck and took him to the face next, popping it open to break down the most common engine problems experienced by rigs like these and what the effect looked like from the outside.
As Buck spoke, it was like he could feel the final parts of himself clicking back into place. He knew how to do this. He knew how to fix things, how to use them and stock them.The truck was finally starting to feel like it was his again.
After he was done with the ladder, he hauled Bobby over to the ambulance next, expounding a wordy, well-sourced explanation of the differences in in-house maintenance between the two vehicles. It was the most he’d spoken to Bobby in...gosh, he didn’t know how long.
He was clucking over the supplies in the ambulance, energetically lecturing,“— and Hen likes her needles stocked by type, not size. If you leave it like this she’ll rearrange it later when she notices, but what if there’s a call before that? Every second counts, you know?”
When Bobby didn’t answer, Buck glanced up from his task to find him just...watching, a tiny smile on his face. “Cap?” he prompted.
“We’re done here. You’ve shown me everything you need to.” He sounded...fuck, if Buck didn’t know better, he’d say Bobby sounded proud.
Buck climbed out of the ambulance and carefully closed the doors behind him before spinning to face Bobby. “So how did I do?”
Bobby laughed at his obvious enthusiasm. “You want a grade?”
“I mean, if you’re offering...”
Bobby smiled. “Very impressive work, Buck. You really know your stuff. I’m wondering if you’re not ready to take a more active role in mentoring new recruits.”
Buck beamed at the praise.
Bobby patted him on the back. “Head on home. I’ll see you in two days, all right?”
Willpower kept Buck’s smile from dropping, but just barely.
The next two days were surprisingly busy for him, because Chim and Hen had at some point gotten really into brunch? Like as a concept? So he found himself dragged to two separate very insistent breakfast parties over the next two days.
It was nice. Maybe they could sense how little he wanted to be alone right now.
Two days of meals, along with a nap on Chimney’s couch that had lasted about five hours longer than intended, had put Buck in a pretty good mood when he rolled in for his next shift.
So when Bobby called him back into his office at start-of-shift, Buck was hardly nervous at all. Really.
But then:
“Buck, you're cleared to go in the field again. I'm officially putting you back in rotation.”
A bolt of energy down his spine sent Buck to his feet before he could reign himself in.
He did it. He knew he could. He was patient, he was useful, he wasn't weak, and everything was his again. (Mostly.)
But most importantly: he could save lives again. He could matter again.
“You mean it?” Buck was grinning ear to ear. “I'm not letting you take that back.”
“I'm not going to. It's yours, Buck. You've earned it. But there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”
“What's up?” Buck asked, trepidation easing him back into his seat.
Bobby sighed, folding his hands. “You know my philosophy pretty well by now. I’ve always believed that the closer a crew became, the better they would perform. We’re putting our lives in each other’s hands every day. Trust and communication are necessary. I’ve never questioned that. But...”
“But what?” Buck didn’t like this at all. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re not in trouble for what happened last shift because it wasn’t your fault.” Bobby said. “But also...you were right, Buck. I’ve been crossing lines with you that I don’t with other firefighters. You’re an adult and I wasn’t treating you like one.” He paused. “I made my decisions based on what I wanted rather than what was best for you.”
“Cap—” Buck started, but Bobby wasn’t finished.
“And,” Bobby said, “I've been doing it again. I started doing it again the moment I got you back. And it’s wrong.” Bobby met his gaze steadily. “I want to do right by you, Buck.”
I don’t want anything to change, Buck didn’t say. But that wasn’t his call, was it? Why did this feel so much like—? No. Stop right there. Buck tried to push any thought of his parents from his mind. He did not need to be thinking about what a dumb, shitty kid he’d been when trying to manage the consequences of also being a dumb, shitty adult.
“I’m sorry, Cap. If I hadn't listened to that stupid lawyer, if I'd, I don't know.” Buck trailed off, desperate to fix this but not knowing how. “I could have come up with something better. I know I shouldn't have told him all that stuff. I didn't think he was gonna do what he did. Say what he did.” Great job, Buck. Remind him of everything he’s mad at you for. “I’m really, really sorry. Please don’t transfer me. Please, just—"
“I’m not transferring you.”
“Oh. Um,” then what was happening?
“I want you to take this.”
Bobby was offering him a business card. Better than a pamphlet, at least. Buck took it, peered at it, then looked at Bobby in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
Bobby gave a little half smile. “Listen to me. That’s the number of your union representative. The lawyer you worked with? He was a personal injury lawyer. His strategy was always going to be big money and scorched earth.” He tapped the card. “If you find yourself in trouble again and don’t feel like you can come to me, reach out. They’re a good resource. And if you ever do need a lawyer, they can connect you to an employment lawyer. That’s the kind who specializes in negotiations between employees and employers with a focus on mediation.”
“Negotiations,” Buck said, numb. “Not lawsuits.” Was he stupid for not knowing this? Maybe. Did Bobby think he was stupid for not knowing this?
—stop thinking about your parents—
“I care about you, Buck, but I over-invested myself in your reinstatement when I should have stepped back. You deserve space to deal with your problems without me trying to make your decisions for you. From now on, I’m going to do better.” Bobby’s voice was strained, almost as though the words hurt to say.
They felt worse to hear. “Are you saying we’re too close?” Buck whispered, stomach swooping with sudden nerves.
“I’m saying I’ve been unprofessional with you.” Bobby told him. “In a way that’s maybe done you more harm than good.”
“That’s not true! You taught me everything I know. If I’m any good at this at all, it’s because of you.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Bobby’s smile was small and sad. “You’re a good man, Buck.”
“I learned that from you, too.” Buck pleaded. “Bobby, I know you don’t want to do this.”
“This isn’t about what I want.” Bobby said.
“What do you want?” Fuck, Buck didn’t mean to ask that.
Gently, Bobby told him, “What I want is for you to expand your support network, Buck. Try to make some friends outside of the 118. Build some relationships outside the job. We all love you, but I want you to have people you can go to that aren’t—”
“Stop.” Buck rasped. When had he stood up? He didn’t remember standing up. “That’s—a line. You’re crossing one. Stop.”
“I’ll stop.” Bobby had his hands up, like Buck was a dog with a bite history. “I’m sorry. We can be done here whenever you’re ready. I just want to do right by you, Buck.”
Buck couldn’t listen to any more of this. Couldn’t take a single more word. “I’m done. Thanks for reinstating me.” I won’t let you down, Buck didn’t say, because even he wasn’t that stupid.
And Bobby just...let him leave.
This was what he had wanted, right? What he had fought for. He’d wanted to be treated like everyone else.
This still felt very Buck, though. Hey, I forgive you! I know you only fucked everything up because you’re stupid and lonely. In return, please don’t bother me anymore.
Buck kept his eyes down as he crossed the station to go check on his gear. After all, he was going to be using it again soon. Finally.
They didn’t usually fight in the Captain’s office. Most of the time when Bobby didn’t-yell at Buck, he did it right out there in the open.
Buck preferred it, really. When Bobby was mad at him, he didn’t pretend he wasn’t, and he always told him why. Actionable criticism of things he’d done wrong, information Buck could work with to improve himself. Arguments between the two of them served to fill out Buck’s understanding of how to do his job: he didn’t stop taking risks, but he learned to radio in his position first; he learned that asking questions when he didn’t know something was an asset, not a nuisance; he stopped hiding injuries in the field because it wasn’t about attention and whether or not he deserved it, but about the shift leader knowing what tools they had at their disposal during an emergency.
He didn’t know how to handle this Bobby who chose his words so carefully that it didn’t feel meaningfully distinct from lying.
Buck had no idea how to fix this because he still didn’t know what he’d done wrong.
Did this mean they couldn’t cook together anymore?
The nebulous threat of space and respect made Buck’s skin itch (he didn’t need Bobby to respect him; he needed Bobby to trust him), so he did the mature thing and avoided Bobby as much as he could.
Buck would have skipped meals entirely and scavenged leftovers after, but Chimney and Hen had become weirdly invested in trapping him between them at the table while the food was still hot. They kept him distracted enough, piling food onto his plate and trying a little too hard to make him laugh, that avoiding eye-contact with Bobby was awkward rather than excruciating.
He and Bobby spoke during calls, of course, but he kept his usual friendly chatter to a minimum.
The worst part was that Bobby didn’t even push him about it. This avoidance was petty, it was unprofessional, but Bobby was letting him get away with it with seemingly no end in sight. Someone else would have been reprimanded by now, so he was still being treated different.
Except instead of hovering, it looked like Bobby had chosen to wash his hands of Buck entirely.
Buck’s third shift of being allowed back on calls had started normal, or as normal as these things ever went.
A panicking teenager with a hatchet had felled a tree on top of his dad in a “man of the woods” bonding adventure gone south—Pops ended the trip with a cracked pelvic bone and Junior was now armed with enough I told you so’s to last a lifetime.
One of those actor types with an LA-white smile had gotten his hand stuck in the bathroom drain. He’d proceeded to strike up a very interesting conversation with Chimney after recognizing him as last year’s Mr. April. Hen and Buck struggled to contain their giggles as an oblivious Chimney failed to clock the truly inspiring degree of flirtation the guy was putting down, even after offering to swap out his towel for some actual clothes and being refused twice—in the end, all fingers were accounted for post-unsticking; nothing broken, although the wedding ring (Buck and Hen had both gasped) he had been searching for when his hand got stuck was nowhere to be found.
An evacuation of a magician themed bar had been more fun than a gas leak had any right to be, with the less ill members of the staff driving the sick ones bonkers with tricks they’d seen a hundred times, but that the 118 had the pleasure of seeing for the first time—There were several headaches, but no fainters, and the building was declared safe for re-entry after only two hours. The entertainment derived from the impromptu performances had nothing on the slowly unravelling drama between two factions of magicians working out of the same venue.
A college student had lost control of her bike when a steep section of the trail crumbled away and had actually gone off the side of a cliff. She had called 911 from a half-formed ledge that provided less than a foot of standing space, staring wide-eyed at the crumpled remains of her orange bike frame hundreds of feet below. Eddie was in the harness with Chimney on the winch. Buck hung back, trying not to take the choice personally.
The rescue went off flawlessly, Eddie securing and lifting the victim from her perch as Hen prepped supplies to treat what miraculously appeared to only be a fractured ankle and a twisted knee. They got her to the top with no trouble, and the minute she was on solid ground again the girl burst into loud, messy tears. Buck didn’t exactly blame her. Eddie pulled off his harness, turning to laugh at some joke Chimney was making, when—
—when Buck saw, before Eddie could even feel it, the silt begin to shift beneath his feet. Eddie, no longer wearing his harness, still too close to the edge. Completely unaware of the danger. There wasn’t time to shout a warning.
Buck was moving before he could think.
The next series of moments collapsed into one another.
In a second, Buck seized Eddie by the back of his shirt and used his own body as a counterweight to hurl Eddie behind him
then—
Eddie was stumbling onto safer ground, and Buck had half-risen, prepared to scramble back after him
then—
The ground dropped out beneath Buck before he could even finish turning around
then—
Shouts of alarm followed him as he slipped away, five feet, ten feet, clawing at the crumbling earth to slow his descent
then—
Buck slid free of the cliffside and found himself suspended in free air, breath stolen by the sickening openness, the emptiness of the world laid out below him
then—
An awful, wrenching pain in his shoulder, jarring him to a sudden halt and ripping a scream of pain from his mouth, his other arm clawing to grab on and take some of the weight
then—
Buck wasn’t falling.
It took him a moment to notice, gritting his teeth through the I’m being pulled apart panic-pain that was demanding his every thought.
Gradually, Buck regained his bearings. Didn’t move a muscle. Took one impossibly still breath, then another.
Below him stretched a sixty-yard drop, and Buck still wasn’t falling.
Slowly, disbelievingly, he craned his neck up to see the sky above him.
The sky and, impossibly, Eddie.
Hanging in the open air above him, Eddie was working from two points of contact. He had his harness clutched in his fist and the cord wound tightly around one of his arms, not having the time to put it back on before he, apparently, dove off the cliff after Buck. His other hand was crushing Buck’s forearm in a bruising grip.
How fast must he have moved, when he had seen Buck start to fall?
Eddie was staring down at him, terror and relief and determination warring on his beautiful face. It was like all the looking at Buck he hadn’t done in the past several weeks was suddenly concentrated into this single stare, all the attention Buck could ever want from Eddie as he hung there in the sky, his hand outstretched and his hold true, the sun behind him making him glow.
Angel, Buck thought, and promptly forbid himself from thinking it again.
Instead, he found himself just...looking. Looking as he hadn’t been allowed to, hadn’t had permission for, in what felt like forever. Arm muscles flexing, hair falling into his eyes, somehow holding himself and Buck up with the strength of a single hand...Eddie looked like a goddamn superhero. It was starting to make Buck feel a little dizzy.
Then the hand gripping Buck’s arm (you know, the one attached to Buck’s shoulder, the shoulder that fucking hurt) began to lift him higher and. Yowch. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t Eddie making him dizzy.
He let out a hoarse scream of pain that turned into sharp panting as he was slowly tugged up, higher and higher. Not by the winch, he realized, but by Eddie, who was correcting their orientation with nothing but the power in his arms. Gently, carefully maneuvering Buck until he was close enough to hear Eddie gently murmuring a litany of, “C’mon, you’re doing good, I’ve got you, you’re almost there,”
he really was like an angel
before a pair of muscular legs wrapped around his chest from behind and squeezed him tightly, blessedly taking the weight off his screaming shoulder. Eddie peeled his fingers from Buck’s arm and, for some reason, softly pressed his knuckles against Buck’s right cheek. His fingers were trembling.
The moment passed. Eddie drew his hand back and smoothly reached up to wrap a second hand around his tangled harness, adjusting for a sturdier grip, better to support the both of them.
They hung in the air together without saying a word to each other, completely exposed and utterly alone. He squeezed his legs around Buck more tightly for a moment, as though to reassure him. It was, perhaps, the safest Buck had ever felt.
Eddie turned his face skyward and called, “I’ve got him! Haul us up!”
His voice, when he spoke, sounded utterly wrecked.
When they were pulled up over the side, Buck expected something to be different. But the ambulance was still here, Chim still at the winch, Hen surrounded by dropped medical supplies, both staring at them in alarm.
The whole ordeal, from Eddie unbuckling his harness to Buck finding himself on stable ground again, had lasted no longer than ninety seconds.
“I’ve got him,” Eddie rasped, tucking himself under Buck’s good shoulder to haul him further onto stable ground. “You guys don’t have to...I got him.”
Coughing from the dust kicked up by the crumbling ground, Buck tried to bear some of his own weight, but his legs were shaking so badly he wasn’t sure they would hold him up. He let himself be dragged several yards from the cliff’s edge. Only when they’d reached a safe enough distance for Eddie’s tastes did he unfold himself from under Buck and lower them both to the ground.
Buck found himself flat on his back, Eddie’s hand cupping the back of his head for just a moment, as though a light thump to the head was going to be the thing that finally killed him.
Except suddenly Eddie was straddling Buck at the waist, tearing open Buck’s jacket and cutting through his T-shirt, and correction: that was going to be the thing that finally killed him.
“Woah there handsome, at least buy me dinner first,” Buck croaked, because if he couldn’t stop a situation from spiraling wildly out of his control he could at least make it worse for everyone else.
Eddie didn’t seem to hear the comment, attention arrested by the unnatural crook of Buck’s shoulder.
His lips were close, so close to Buck's skin, but he didn't think he was meant to hear when Eddie closed his eyes for a moment and whispered, “You scare the living hell out of me,” to the rapidly forming bruises.
Careful fingers were prodding along his bare chest, skirting the injury line, feeling along where Buck’s shoulder was screaming at him. Why did that still hurt so bad. He failed to bite back a groan of pain.
“Partial dislocation,” Eddie murmured, “Not severe, but unstable. We’re going to have to relocate it before we try to travel.” He directed the last sentence at Buck, who nodded his acquiescence. Eddie leaned up, pulling away, looking over his shoulder at something that wasn’t Buck. “Hen and Chim are—"
“You do it,” Buck wheezed, panting. “You can, right? I want you to do it.”
“It’s going to hurt.”
“I don’t want to wait.” Lying on the ground while his shoulder slowly went numb while Eddie ignored him sounded like absolute hell. “I don’t care if it hurts. You know I can take it. The longer I wait, the worse it might get, right? Just give me meds after.” Don’t leave me here. “Eddie, help me. Please.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t—don’t apologize.”
Buck didn’t know what else to say, so he just stayed quiet. Eddie returned to his position leaning over Buck, filling his vision and blocking him from view. He carefully lifted the offending limb and rotated it, feeling along Buck’s back and chest in sharp, staccato bolts of pain before nodding to himself. He looked at Buck. “Are you sure?”
“Do it,” Buck murmured. There was a controlled push, a flash of agony, and then relief. A deep ache set in immediately after, but it didn’t hold a candle to the wrongness of the pain from before.
Eddie carefully helped Buck to his feet before seizing him by his good shoulder and the opposite hip and tugging him close.
“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” Eddie said tightly. “But don't you ever do something like that again.”
“You don’t take off your fucking harness before you’re clear, then,” Buck snapped. “You know better!”
They were very nearly nose to nose, breathing each other’s air. After so long, the proximity was intoxicating.
“You two can wait to kill each other,” a hand grabbed Eddie by the scruff of his t-shirt, roughly turning him to examine the red lines snaking around his left forearm, “until after you get cleared by medical professionals.” A second hand gently cradled the back of Buck’s bare neck, pressing lightly to feel for swelling. “Do I make myself clear?”
“Hey Cap. Can you believe this guy?” Buck greeted shakily. It was the first thing Bobby had said to him outside of work-talk since that disastrous meeting. His skin was buzzing with that familiar look at me, look at me feeling. Maybe he should jump off cliffs more often.
Bobby’s friendly, professional smile had petrified into a furious grimace. “I can’t believe either of you,” he gritted out. “Go sit by the engine and wait to get checked out. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. Stay where I can see you.”
Bobby’s hand on the back of Buck’s neck was trembling.
“Cap—”
“Buck,” Bobby said, “shut up.”
Buck shut up.
“Eddie, be sure to thank Chimney. He realized what you were doing and held the tension of your line in a series of stalled releases, which is the only reason both of you didn’t get your arms ripped off.”
“Yes, Cap.” Eddie replied dutifully, chagrined.
They stomped off toward the engine, with Buck (embarrassingly) still leaning on Eddie for support.
Chimney met them at the truck and proceeded to stick his entire foot in his mouth by saying, “Next time you guys decide to pull death-defying stunts, leave me out of it. I’ve got a girlfriend at home,” only to immediately grimace in horror as he remembered his audience.
Buck snickered. “Is that my problem? I’m a mess because I got dumped twice within eight months during the worst year of my life?”
But he had nothing on Eddie’s deadpan, solemn huff of, “I don’t even remember the last time I went on a date.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Chimney croaked, horrified, until a smirk started to twitch on Eddie’s lips, giving the game away. “Oh, fuck you. You guys are assholes.” Chimney kicked the side of Buck’s boot fondly. “You don’t have a monopoly on suffering, you know. I once had a proposal go so badly I almost died.”
“How could I not know?” Buck asked innocently. “You never shut up about it.”
Chimney laughed, professional hands carefully maneuvering Buck so he could better access his injury.
Buck reached up with his good arm and punched him on the hip. “Thanks for the save, man.”
Chimney popped his gum and grinned. “What can I say? I’m starting to get attached to you two.”
Buck had been set up with a sling by the time Chimney stepped away to fetch some sterilized gauze, leaving him and Eddie alone. He found he couldn’t stop tracing the spiraling burns that stretched from Eddie’s bicep to his wrist with guilty eyes.
“Is your arm okay?” he blurted.
“Hurts.” Eddie grunted. “I’ll live.” And then, almost reluctantly, “You?”
Hurts.” Buck responded flatly. “I’ll live.”
Eddie glared at him.
Buck sighed. “Will you cut the macho bullshit already and just talk to me? Please?”
Eddie’s shoulders began to creep up to his ears. “We’ll talk. But not now.”
Buck rolled his eyes. “Oh, Really? Because—”
“We’ll talk.” Eddie cut in firmly. “I promise. Later, in private. Please,” he added.
Buck didn’t push, but only because of the please.
The ride back to the 118 was tense.
Eddie wouldn’t look at Buck, Bobby wouldn’t look at Buck or Eddie, Hen was looking back and forth between all three of them like it was a tennis match, and Chimney was making comments about the scenery outside that slowly increased in loudness and forced enthusiasm, trying to fill the miserable silence.
When they reached the station, Buck steeled his nerves and marched up to Bobby. “My shoulder hurts and I need to get it checked out.”
Bobby’s eyebrows jumped and his shoulders seemed to slump slightly in what almost looked like relief. “Okay. You can—”
“Eddie’s driving me.” Buck interrupted.
Eddie perked at the sound of his name and stared at Buck like he’d grown a second head.
Bobby, oblivious, nodded his acquiescence. “Good. He can get looked at too. Let me know how—” He stopped. Cleared his throat. “Keep me posted if they recommend time off.”
“Yes, sir.” Buck responded curtly, because he was still feeling a little petty.
“Hey—" Eddie started, then oof’d as Buck elbowed him in the ribs.
“Grab your keys, big guy. You un-socketed my shoulder, the least you could do is give me a ride.”
Truly, nothing offset the flash-flare of adrenaline like the dull monotony of driving to an urgent care.
Fact: Eddie hated driving in LA.
This wasn’t his I-hate-driving silence, though.
Buck sat through it for ten excruciating minutes of downtown traffic before he broke.
“So, do you just straight-up hate me now?”
“I don’t—” Eddie grimaced, “I’ve never hated you, Buck.”
And then he turned his attention back to the road like they were done talking, dropping them back into that vague, undefined silence. It was frustrating. It was infuriating. Buck had had it. “I’ve tried to apologize. You won’t hear me out. I’m sick of this. I miss you. I miss Chris and you won’t let me see him.”
“That’s not—"
“Just tell me what I did and I’ll be sorry for it, whatever it is.” Buck stared at his lap. “I’ll be sorry, and then you can forgive me, and we can be friends again.”
“It’s not that simple. I—”
“Seems pretty simple to me. You don’t like me anymore.” Buck tried to keep his tone even.
“You don’t understand. I’m not—”
“Explain it to me then! Or are you too good to actually talk with me? You know, it’s been months and you still won’t even look me in the eye. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” Buck was fuming by this point. “What’s your fucking damage, Eddie?”
“You almost died in front of me.” Eddie spat, suddenly thunderously angry.
Buck’s jaw clicked shut in shock. Eddie’s sudden show of emotion drained Buck of his own anger in an instant, leaving confusion in its wake.
Wait.
Was Eddie allowed to be mad at him for that?
That didn’t seem fair.
“Uh. Which time?” Buck asked, hoping to narrow it down.
“Every time, Buck!” Eddie exploded. “It’s like we’re all constantly on the verge of losing you over and over again. And—we’ve learned to live with that. It’s a dangerous job, I get that it's a possibility.” Eddie heaved a breath. “But you almost died in front of me,” he wrapped his fingers so tightly around the steering wheel that his knuckles turned white. “again and again, but you pulled through every time.”
Buck stared, uncomprehending.
“And then...you left.”
Left? “I didn’t—"
“Chris needed you. And when I—when we—after the tsunami, we couldn’t even see you.”
Six months ago, Buck wouldn’t have picked up on what Eddie wasn’t saying here.
Six months ago, they were work friends. Close, but professional. Help your sister move close. Take your kid Christmas shopping close. Confidently offering questionable life advice close.
They were almost unrecognizable now. Or had been, before this falling out.
Buck privately suspected he knew the cause of the extreme, almost desperate growth of their friendship. They had both shattered at just around the same time: Eddie’s family; Buck’s future. They had both lost stability and crumpled inward, into each other, rather than face it alone.
There was a comfort in not being the only person whose life didn’t feel real anymore.
Eddie was untouchable, but Eddie was known, too. Buck might know Eddie better than he’d ever known another human being, except maybe his sister.
Buck had taken over canceling Shannon’s subscriptions and credit cards when the process had overwhelmed Eddie to the point of tears. And then he just…kept helping. He was familiar with the process after Abby’s mom, so he just took over things like selling Shannon’s car. Breaking her lease. Packing up her apartment. Donating her clothes. Reaching out to her friends. Things that weren’t necessarily easy for Buck to do, but that would have been nearly impossible for Eddie to bear on top of everything else.
Eddie had, without Buck having to ask, stopped by the loft four times a week every week to help Buck shower, starting from the time Ali had dumped him up until he’d switched his plaster cast for a removable one that allowed him to wash without help.
Buck had hosted no end of impromptu Diaz family sleepovers at his loft when grief and bad dreams had made their own home hard to bear. Air mattresses and the very limits of his breakfast-making abilities and Buck himself putting in the heavy lifting to make things easier on his boys, if only for a few hours.
Eddie was the only one who hadn’t pushed him to reconsider the second operation because he understood more than anybody how badly Buck needed someone’s unwavering support.
Buck knew that...
Buck knew that Shannon leaving, and then leaving again, had hurt Eddie far worse than her dying ever could have.
“Chris has nightmares,” Eddie admitted now, eyes forward. “He won’t talk to me about them.” But he might have talked to you went unsaid. Someone in front of them braked suddenly. Eddie muttered a minced oath, instinctively pressing his right arm across Buck’s chest. Holding him in place as the truck rocked to a sudden stop before slowly starting to move again.
The gentle, secure pressure on Buck’s chest was enough to push the words out of him.
“Eddie,” Buck whispered, “that’s not fair.”
“I know It’s not.” Eddie agreed wretchedly, pulling his arm back. He hesitated for a moment, the back of his hand lingering just over Buck’s heartbeat, before placing it back on the wheel. “I'm sorry. I know it’s not fair. I know you’re not, that you’re not…”
“Stop.” Buck wasn’t going to make him say it.
Eddie stopped.
They didn’t look at each other.
Just two guys in a car trying and failing to not make each other miserable.
No wonder Eddie had avoided him for so long. Buck would avoid himself too, if he could.
But then, suddenly,
“I can’t protect him from anything.” Eddie whispered. “The only thing I ever do is drive people out of his life. Even...” you, he didn’t say. “I can’t let anyone else leave him behind. I know what that’s like.” He confessed. “I never want him to feel like that. Like no one wants him, or like no one cares.”
“You want him,” Buck said softly, “you care.”
“What if I’m not enough, Buck?” Eddie sounded...tiny. Raw.
Buck rapped his knuckles lightly against Eddie’s rightmost collarbone. It was the closest Eddie’s heart that his good arm could reach. ”Then you’ll keep trying anyway.”
Eddie dragged his eyes from the road to glance at Buck with a miserable sort of hope in his eyes.
“You can’t change the whole world to protect him, Eddie. You can’t stop anyone from ever leaving him or hurting him. The only thing you can do is be his dad. And you’re good at that.”
In his peripheral vision, he thought he saw Eddie nod. It was such a small motion, but it pushed something in him to keep going.
Buck kept talking, the words pouring out of him. “You have to, to listen, and apologize when you fuck up. You have to be there for him when he needs you. You can’t give up on him when he disappoints you. You have to tell him you love him even when you’re angry. Don’t treat him like he’s a burden, even if he is. Especially if he is. You have to...” ask him what he needs from you, Buck almost said, but remembered his talk with Bobby earlier this week and shied away from the thought. “...care.” He said instead. “You have to care. And Eddie, you care more than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Eddie was looking over at him now with a soft, pained expression. “...Buck."
“And me— me too.” Buck interrupted hastily. “If you ever think you’re not enough, I’ll help, okay? You’ve always got me. I’m sorry I made you think you didn’t.”
Eddie went utterly still for a moment, and Buck had half a second to fear he’d overstepped, before Eddie shook off his surprise and blinded him with a wobbly grin. It was one of those rare, toothy ones that made Buck feel a little bit like crying if he looked at it too long. Eddie’s tone was light and warm as he murmured, “You’re impossible, you know that?” Except he said it less like it was a hassle and more like it was a miracle.
Angel, Buck thought again.
“Chris...he’s a good kid. Better than I ever was. I’m always gonna worry whether I’m doing right by him. You, you get it.” Eddie shook his head. “He just—you get it. He doesn’t deserve to get walked out on like that. He deserves better than that.”
That didn’t sound right. That didn’t feel right, because— “Eddie,” Buck said quietly, “you deserve better than that, too.”
And Eddie...froze. His knuckles were white around the steering wheel. He held his mouth in a firm straight line, utterly unwavering, but his eyes gave him away, just like they always did. They were huge, and wide, and wet. Eddie’s eyes looked terrified.
And Buck understood. Because he understood Eddie, and he understood himself, too.
And he knew what to say next because he knew intimately how it felt to need to hear it.
“Eddie,” Buck said calmly, firmly, “you’re worth sticking around for. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me.”
Eddie shuddered, heaving out a ragged breath. “Buck, you...” he started, then trailed off.
He doesn’t want to cry, Buck thought, because he knew Eddie. So he picked up the rest of the sentence himself. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” Buck glanced out the passenger side window, smiling to himself. “I’m impossible.” Because that’s what he and Eddie did: They covered for each other.
Eddie laughed, sounding a little choked.
The office at the urgent care didn’t accept cash.
Fucking Los Angeles.
“It’s money.” Buck argued desperately, trying to keep his voice down, “real money. There’s the seal and everything. What’s wrong with it?”
“We’re paperless, Mr. Buckley. We’re going to need either a debit card or a credit card.”
Embarrassment made his eyes sting. “I don’t have one with me.” He admitted, almost in a whisper. Like it was a secret.
A muscular, tanned arm reached around him and slapped a card on the desk, making him jump. “Put it on mine.” Eddie smiled at the receptionist insincerely, placing his hand on Buck’s back to steer him gently away from the desk.
They took their seats, Buck curling in on himself, Eddie an extremely forced kind of casual. “You didn’t have to do that.” Buck said eventually, although he had no idea what the fuck he would have done if Eddie hadn’t.
Cried, maybe.
“Oh, I did.” Eddie countered. “Or don’t you remember? You saved my life. What's a measly copay compared to that?”
“It’s our job to save lives.”
“Sure. It’s not your job to try and die for me.”
You almost died in front of me, Eddie had said. Buck winced.
“Listen. I wasn’t trying to...do something risky. I should have been able to pull you back without sending me in the opposite direction. Six months ago, I could have. But I’ve lost some muscle mass in the meantime. And I didn’t have my gear. And I didn’t account for the difference in weight.” Buck swallowed. “Don’t tell Bobby. He doesn’t need another reason to think I’m incompetent.”
“You promise?” Eddie’s voice was hoarse.
The question came as a surprise. “What do you mean, promise?”
“This wasn’t some better you than me bullshit?” Eddie demanded. “It was just an accident? You swear?”
Buck gave a jerky nod, alarmed by Eddie’s sudden seriousness.
Eddie’s relief was evident as he breathed, “Good. That’s good.” He shook off his momentary intensity and shrunk into himself a little, seemingly making up his mind about something. “Buck.” He said suddenly, “You know I’m sorry, right?”
“For what?”
“These past months, you needed me, too. And I wasn’t there.”
“I never gave you a chance to be,” Buck protested, but Eddie wasn’t done.
“I want you to know that I didn’t know about what was going down with Bobby until the hearing. If I did, I would have told you, okay? I would have fought him.”
Buck’s eyes burned, just a little. “And you’re sorry for that?”
“I’m not gonna beg for forgiveness.” That’s what made the two of them different. “But you were going through something rough. I knew that. I got scared,” and there was contempt in the word as he said it, because Eddie hated admitting to fear even more than he hated crying, “and instead of being honest about that, I pushed you away. I acted like it was your fault. I hurt you. That’s what I’m sorry for.”
“Eddie, I’m okay. Seriously.”
“I don’t want to be that kind of guy. I don’t want something like this to happen again. I hate fighting with you. Chris, we—” Eddie swallowed. “I missed you.”
“So we, what? Just agree to never fight again?” Buck asked dubiously. “Because I’m really good at pissing people off. Your head’s gonna pop if you commit to never getting mad at me again.”
“Listen to me, Buck.” Eddie said softly, seriously. “Next time, if you get scared, if you get in over your head, promise me that you'll talk to me before doing something crazy.”
Mouth dry, Buck tried to joke, “I feel like that’s just gonna piss you off even faster,” but he said it a little too soft, a little too hesitantly, for it to be very funny.
Eddie’s expression was pained. “Buck, please.” He let out a shaking breath. “When you feel alone, before you do something you might regret, call me. I can't promise to have all the answers, or even to agree with you every time, but I promise I'll stick with you until it's better.”
“Will you tell me when you're scared?” Buck asked, feeling oddly breathless. That hungry curiosity that showed itself every time Eddie gave up any ground between the two of them.
That giddy want that gripped him every time Eddie cried or laughed or whispered or yawned or smiled and let Buck see it happen. Brown eyes, bigger and warmer and lovelier than any Buck had ever seen, on him.
Eddie looked taken aback, “You'd want that?” he tried to smile, but didn’t quite make it. “I get scared more than you'd think. I'm worried you'll lose respect for me if I told you everything.”
But I want everything, Buck didn't say. Instead, “I feel alone more than you'd think.” He said it so, so softly. Scared that Eddie would hear him. Terrified that he wouldn't. “Are you going to stop caring if I told you every time?”
Something in Eddie's lovely eyes sparked, bright and close. When did he get so close? His voice cracked savagely when he said, “Buck, I—”
“Evan Buckley?”
They jumped apart.
A nurse leaned against the door frame, staring at them because they were the only two people in the waiting room. Probably no other reason. “We’re ready for Evan Buckley.”
Buck bid his doctor goodbye with a numb sort of misery, trying to process the information he’d just been given.
Seven days. One week. That’s how long the doctor told him to take off work.
Eddie was right where Buck had left him, frowning slightly with his arms crossed. His expression warmed, however, when he spotted Buck. “How bad is it?”
Buck wordlessly shoved the paper into Eddie’s hands.
“Hey, not too bad. That’s about what I expected.”
Buck didn’t say anything.
“I’ve been thinking. You know, we don’t actually have to go back to the station.”
Yes I do. Buck thought. My jeep is there. The jeep I’m going to be trapped in for a week.
“What are you talking about?” Buck asked hoarsely.
“I can call Bobby, take the rest of the day off. You tell me where you want to go, and I’ll take you there.”
What was he going to do about food? “The station. I need to go to the station.”
“C’mon, Buck. At least consider it. Please.”
I thought you weren’t gonna beg, Buck didn’t say. “Why?” he asked dully.
“You don’t have to...seriously, anywhere. I mean it.” Eddie sounded...almost desperate. “We could swing by your place, you could pack a bag and—”
“No!” Buck spat, surprising himself with his own ferocity. “No. I don’t want to.”
Eddie leaned away slightly, expression placid, but his eyes gave him away just like always. Wide. Hurt. Concerned.
He thinks I’m not ready, Buck realized. And he hated, hated lying to Eddie, but. “I just need a minute. This isn’t...it’s not because of anything you did, Eddie.”
They drove back to the station in silence.
This one wasn’t Eddie’s I-hate-driving silence either.
It ate at him, the guilt of lying to Eddie, pretending Eddie had done something wrong, after spending the ride over from the station trying to convince him that Buck wasn’t going to abandon him.
Buck leapt from the truck as it rolled to a stop, moving quickly, flustered at the way he could feel Eddie’s eyes on him as moved through the station. He stuffed the doctor’s note into Bobby’s hands before grabbing his stuff and leaving. He didn’t want to see the expression on Eddie's face.
He couldn’t be here one more minute.
It’s a bad week.
Buck had miscalculated; he should have showered at the station before he left, because now he couldn’t go visit anyone. They’d see the dirt still in his hair and ask questions.
It sucked. He’d never craved brunch so badly in his life.
Eddie was making up for lost time by absolutely blowing up Buck’s phone, and he wasn’t alone. It was so, so good to hear from Chris again.
They talked at least once every single day, with Chris catching him up on the flash and drama of being seven years old. Chris was so funny, but also a little bit too clever for his age. When he asked Buck to come visit, he asked…searchingly, like he was trying to get information on what Buck was doing instead. He had to be careful with his answers, not wanting to lie but also not wanting Chris and Eddie to know what was really going on.
On day three, Buck tried heading into a gas station bathroom to wash himself and his clothes as best he could, but the cashier had eyed him with guarded suspicion the moment he’d stepped through the door. He felt the eyes on him as he tried to drift inconspicuously between shelves. A hushed diatribe reached his ears, one that included the word “drugs”, “disturbance”, and “police”. Buck glanced up to see the cashier holding a phone to her ear staring at him with a mixture of contempt and fear.
He tried not to take it personally. Really. He was a big guy, and he knew he wasn’t exactly at his best. It left him anxious, though. The last thing he needed right now was someone calling the police on him. Police meant Athena, and Buck didn’t know if he’d ever wanted to see Athena less in his life. Or rather, have her see him.
He dropped his eyes to the ground, left, and didn’t try again.
That night, he pulled up by the seaside after the sun had already set and scrubbed himself off in one of the public beach showers. It was better than nothing. He didn’t have any soap, and mostly ended up trading dirt for sand. He came away feeling greasy, gritty. Still no good for company. Someone would notice something.
He tried to ration the food he had in his car, but it wasn’t like he’d planned for this to happen. He hadn’t exactly stocked up. And running out of the station like that had been stupid. He’d talked to Eddie since, and they were fine. He’d over-reacted and fucked himself over in the process.
He found himself pacing around his car at night, too wired to sleep. Scared the twinges in his leg might hint at something worse, even though he’d been taking his medicine exactly as prescribed. If he had an embolism any time within this week, he would die.
Don’t think about that. Stop thinking about it.
On the evening of day five, Buck broke.
He checked his bank statement, again, and couldn’t see any sign that a paycheck had come in, again. How long had it been? Shouldn’t something have come through by now? He didn’t know how pay periods worked, but nearly seven weeks (he’d thought it was seven, had he counted wrong?) should have been enough time. Right?
He tried to access his insurance next. His login information wouldn’t even let him into the system, flashing INVALID no matter how many times he retyped his password.
What was happening? Had he fucked something up?
His shoulder hurt. He must have slept on it, unconsciously rolled onto it while sleeping, and now it fucking hurt. His leg was cramping something fierce.
He was tired, he'd been not-sleeping crumpled up in the back seat of his jeep for four nights in a row, and he was at the point where he couldn't get to sleep at all.
His skin felt dirty, dirty in a permanent kind of way that was honestly starting to scare him. It was like there was an underlying layer of grit he couldn't get off. He stunk of pain-sweat and fear-sweat and dirty clothes and—
—and he couldn't get warm.
He was the kind of hungry that was past feeling hungry, past feeling sick, and approaching just feeling dead.
He needed rest. He needed to eat.
Pulling into the parking lot of station 118 still felt like admitting defeat, somehow.
He waited for a call to get the trucks moving, waited until the man behind for C-Shift wandered off to take a leak.
He stole away into the firehouse, crept toward the laundry room without making a sound. It was just going to be for a few hours. Just long enough for him to get warm, to ward off the jittery, achy chill that had been haunting him for the past week.
Maybe he could even grab a bite to eat on his way out, before the trucks get back.
He turned the corner by the laundry room and—
The closet door was ajar.
He bolted the last few steps, wrenched the door completely open to see…nothing.
Everything was gone.
His knees buckled.
“No, no, no…” Where was it? Someone had found him out? Someone had found his belongings, thought they were trash, thrown them out?
“Buckley? A-Shift Buckley? Is that you?”
Buck spun around so fast he almost lost his balance, gripping the door frame for support.
C-Shifter Jamie Witt was staring at him with surprise and not a little concern.
Buck lurched toward him, growling, “What did you do?” only stopping when Jamie jerked his radio from his belt and raised it, an instinct borne of alarm.
Buck flinched back nonsensically as Jamie stared. Buck looked awful. He looked desperate. Jamie had already seen too much. The wail of approaching engines broke the stillness and poured much needed energy into his muscles, breath into his lungs.
Buck had to get out of here, now.
He ran out of the firehouse, making a beeline for his jeep. Throwing himself into the driver’s seat, he sped out into the night, adrenaline making his fingertips tingle. He pulled onto the interstate, not sure where he wanted to go but knowing he needed to go fast. He needed to get out of the city.
He needed to see the stars.
That’s what was missing, right? He’d survived this kind of loneliness before. He had his purpose, he had his people.
If he’d survived this at nineteen, he could do it now.
He took an exit at random and drove until the roads didn’t have lines anymore. Past lights of the city, beyond the residential areas. He drove until the pavement gave way to dirt and the last streetlamp wasn’t visible in his rearview mirror anymore.
The tightness in his chest began to loosen as the world around him settled into something flat and dark and silent.
He pulled over to the side of the road and stumbled out into the crisp, dry nighttime air. Buck shivered, goosebumps prickling over his skin.
He really wasn’t built for cold.
Not that a lot of people would call LA winter cold, but as a kid in Pennsylvania Buck had been known to layer up with long sleeves and hoodies well into June.
When he’d finally escaped his childhood home by the skin of his teeth, Buck had immediately set his sights on the equator for a reason. He could have thrived in the damp, lively heat of the southern hemisphere forever if wanderlust hadn’t nipped at his heels, chasing him back up into the continental US.
Even in LA, anything under 70°F had him throwing on a sweater. Under 50°F, it felt like the air would freeze in his lungs if he breathed in too deeply.
Tonight, he was in a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans because it was the cleanest stuff he owned right now. He kicked off his shoes and stepped off the road with bare feet, his toes curling in the damp, cool grass. He took one slow, stumbling step, then another, more confident, more urgent. In just a few steps, he found himself running.
He ran until his muscles felt a little warmer, until he could just barely see the road, the black body of the jeep glinting in the low moonlight. He slowed, limbs trembling, to a stop.
He turned in a slow, lazy circle, taking in the miles of nothing all around him. Grassy plains for miles, no mountains. Not even any trees. Letting the monotony soothe his racing heart.
Buck heaved a sigh and collapsed flat on his back in the grass. After a moment of deliberation, he unclipped his sling and ripped it off over his head, tossing it to the side.He stretched his injured arm out beside him, reveling in the sleepy ache of the motion. The cold, damp grass ticking the back of his neck, the dew starting to soak into his clothes. He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, tasting stillness of the air around him.
Grass. Dew. Sky. Buck. That was all that mattered out here.
When he couldn’t put it off any longer, Buck opened his eyes and turned his gaze up.
And looked at the stars.
The constellations spread out above him, immense and dizzying.
As a teenager, his first taste of freedom had thrummed like wonder in his veins. He’d laid out in fields just like this one on clear nights and the universe had felt alive with endless possibility. Those stars had felt close enough to touch. Like if he’d started up his sister’s car right then and just kept on driving, he could reach them.
Now, though?
Now, Buck saw the night sky laid out before him, so impossibly immense that looking at it like this used to burn him through to his bones with awe, his first errant thought, his only thought, was, Chris would love this view.
All at once, Buck was crying and he couldn't stop. Gasping, heaving sobs that punched out of him with so much force that it hurt.
Tears clogged his throat, leaving him retching. Wretched. It was ugly, uncontrolled, juvenile. He hadn’t cried like this since he was a little kid, back when he’d believed crying made a difference. When expressing a need had seemed like a logical step in seeing it met.
Need. Had really it been a need, when he couldn't put even into words what he was begging for? It had felt like a need then. Vital. Like he'd die without it.
It felt like a need now.
The night blurred around him as he curled in on himself, rolling onto his uninjured side but nonetheless painfully exposed. Lit by starlight, alone and with nothing and every single bit of it completely Buck’s own fault.
No one to hear him.
Nothing but grass, dew, sky, Buck.
Three things that went on forever and one that could vanish in an instant.
The slow, agonizing squeeze of dread and grief held him, shook him, wrung him out until there wasn't a drop of feeling left in him.
The world around him, either mocking or merciful, remained unchanging over the course of the age it took for Buck to come back to himself enough to stagger to his feet.
As the first hints of sunrise began to tease the horizon, he stumbled barefoot in the direction of his jeep. Numb. He didn’t know what the hell he should do. He didn’t know where he was going.
That didn’t matter. He moved with hard-learned purpose. You didn’t have to be smart to be a quick study. He couldn’t stay here. That was all that mattered.
Buck heaved himself into the jeep, wet shirt sticking to the back of his seat. With shaking hands, he turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Click.
The cabin stayed dark and quiet. The engine didn’t even turn over.
Buck scrambled out of the car, heart in his throat. He wrenched the hood open and pawed desperately over the engine, the battery, the alternator but nothing jumped out. Something was wrong, and he couldn't see it. He knew this jeep better than he knew his father. Why couldn't he see it?
He couldn’t…he just couldn’t think. He was dizzy, nauseous. His vision was blurring. His knees were shaking; he had to hold on to the edge of the car to keep himself upright.
Tears of humiliation, frustration burned in his eyes. What was wrong with him? This was one of the things he was supposed to be good at. One of the things he was still good for.
Buck was already irresponsible, crazy, and a liar. Was he useless now, too?
Buck shut the hood and turned his back to the jeep, furious with himself. That’s when he spotted them, ten yards ahead of him on the dirt road. A set of train tracks. He hadn’t even seen them when he’d pulled over last night because it had been so dark.
He'd never seen a railroad intersection with a dirt road before.
They weren't raised, but level with the grass and the road. There wasn't any kind of gate or traffic control lights that he could see, just old-fashioned crossbuck signs positioned on either side.
Buck looked at those tracks.
Something dangerous hummed in his gut.
Whenever things in his life reached an explosive breaking point, Buck had a tendency to react with a sort of resignation. To steel himself for the fallout before it reached him.
He was used to fighting past his breaking point, hunkering down under impossible weight. Keeping secrets that made his heart feel like it would burst. Letting bad things pass over and through him before picking up whatever he had left and continuing to trudge forward.
What he was experiencing right now felt nothing like that at all.
He’d held the torrent of shame and hopelessness off for months; when the dam finally did break, all that effort only meant the water pooled even faster around his feet. Rising around him. Trapping him with no way out.
An itch, a scream was welling up within him, telling him to run. Run or die.
Running had never been his vice of choice, but maybe he'd just never fully appreciated having two working legs before.
And wasn't he still a Buckley, even if he’d never amounted to much of one?
It wouldn’t be hard to put his car in neutral. He could put his good shoulder into it, push it the rest of the way until it straddled the tracks. He didn’t know how old the tracks were. Maybe the line had been out of service for years. He didn’t know enough about railroads to tell.
There wasn't a bell to tell him when a train might come. All he'd have to do is curl up in the back seat and sleep.
The flare in his chest that would rather implode like a dying star right this second than risk fading into obscurity wanted.
And Buck was so, so tired.
Except.
He’d made a promise, hadn’t he?
The morning of the sixth day of Buck’s leave for his dislocated shoulder, three phone calls were made within minutes of each other.
Laura Cartmill, returning from a traffic collision to find C-Shift buzzing with rumors, called her friend Henrietta Wilson to see if she had any idea why a guy from her shift would be in the firehouse crying in front of an empty closet in the middle of the night.
Maddie Buckley, having planned a secret visit to check on her brother (privacy be damned because he was avoiding her, she knew he was, and she was going to find out why), called Howie Han in a panic when the evidence that Buck had not been anywhere near this building in weeks grew insurmountable.
And the third?
With numb fingers, Buck pulled his dying cellphone out of his pocket.
“I’m scared, and I’m alone, and I’m about to do something stupid.” He said in lieu of a greeting. His voice was hoarse and crackling.
“Where are you?” Eddie responded immediately. “Send me your location. I’m on my way.”
Notes:
Discussed:
canon sexual assault (referenced)Portrayed:
Disassociation
Negative self-talk in regards to intelligence (n general) and sanity (following a trauma response)
Self-destructive behavior
Brief contemplation of suicide
Hi! Thanks for reading!
Eddie and Bobby are such complex characters to write. They drove me insane this chapter.This is the longest chapter of anything I've ever written. I feel like I lost my mind a little bit somewhere in this process. I've also never written anything even close to romance before in my life.
If you liked this, leave a comment! Let me know if you're having fun!
Chapter 3: The Extent
Summary:
Christopher holds the line, Athena holds a grudge, and Buck holds on with everything he’s got.
Notes:
This was originally planned to end in 3 chapters, but you know how it goes. The next one really will be the last, though.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
By the time the familiar rumble of Eddie’s truck could be heard, only a hint of the final colors of sunrise still whispered in the sky overhead.
There had not yet been enough sunlight to cast the chill of nighttime away, where it bit at his toes, tickled the hair on his arms, rang in his ears, but there was now at least enough light to see by.
If Buck had looked around, he might have glimpsed the fuzzy, dark object in the distance and grown wise to its determined approach even sooner.
He didn’t look around.
(No one would ever accuse him of being wise to anything anyway.)
Buck didn’t know how long it had been since he’d called Eddie; the battery of his phone had died some time after he’d hung up. He’d dropped it on the road next to his feet, resting against where the cuff of his jeans had started to fray and pick up mud. Everything about Buck felt grimy and dirty, cold and raw, and dead, dead, dead.
He was sitting on his butt in the dirt with his knees to his chest and his shoulders pressed against the back bumper of the jeep. He had his arms wrapped around himself to conserve warmth. Stillness had settled over him like a shroud, his limbs feeling heavier and colder the longer sunrise trudged on. It seeped into his muscles and bones, petrifying him.
It might have been smarter, more sensible, to wait in the jeep.
(No one would ever accuse Buck of being smart, either.)
Buck didn’t want to…
He didn’t want to.
He didn’t want to sit where he could risk glancing up and seeing the train tracks again.
So instead, he faced the road that had brought him here and kept his gaze fixed on a patch of dusty, damp earth that lay just a little ways in front of him.
Not looking. Not listening. Not thinking.
Still breathing.
That was enough for now.
He blinked slowly, languidly, splitting one moment from the next, and was faintly surprised to discover a familiar pair of boots planted on his patch of earth. Work boots, long-stained with a grayer, silkier dirt than the stuff they had in California. Boots that had been bought for one purpose but never discarded when that purpose had ended; instead, they had been added to a rotation of not-quite-casual footwear because their owner was practical, frugal, and had a habit of getting quietly attached.
Buck realized, distantly, that he couldn’t hear Eddie’s truck anymore.
A hand that seared his skin like a living thing curled against the side of his neck, cupping his cheek.
The paper-thin sheet of ice that had solidified around him cracked, finally, and Buck shivered. He blinked, running his tongue over his cracked lips. Breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. He slowly tilted his face up, letting the hand guide him, squinting through the sunlight to see Eddie in front of him. He was still in sleep clothes, looking for all the world like he’d rolled out of bed at Buck’s call and thrown on the first jacket and shoes within reach before charging out into the street. His hair was a mess, his face was pinched with worry, and his hand on Buck’s skin burned.
“Buck,” he demanded, possibly not for the first time, “what’s going on? Are you okay?”
The full effect of Eddie, all of it together, made Buck feel the tiniest bit human again.
“Jeep won’t start.” The words crackled from his lips like a fire that couldn't quite catch. The stark relief in the line of Eddie’s shoulders, the evidence of care there, bolstered him. Lent him strength enough to draw in a lungful of brisk morning air and rasp, “Can you believe it gets this cold in LA? What a scam, right?”
Eddie laughed, just a little helplessly. The act didn’t free the wrinkle of worry creasing his forehead, but it did soften the ones around his mouth. “It’s not even that cold, you big baby,” he scoffed, even as he swung his own coat (duck canvas, thin but insulated, no longer useful in the way it was meant to be but still kept, still worn) around Buck’s shoulders.
Greedily, Buck curled his stiff fingers around the edges and pulled it more tightly around him, soaking in the warmth of residual body heat. He wanted to joke back, say something like And what would you know about cold, Texas? but his teeth had started chattering too forcefully to talk.
Eddie reached for him, then, hauling him to his feet as gently as he could, supporting Buck when a wave of dizziness sent him pitching into Eddie’s side. “Easy there, tiger,” Eddie murmured, impossibly fond.
What had Buck ever done in his life to deserve something like this?
Sliding an arm around Buck’s waist to steady him, Eddie shuffled them both over to the waiting truck; he pulled down the step he carried for Christopher and settled Buck safely onto it before leaning over him to crank the engine.
The sudden blast of hot air swirling out from the cabin as the engine rumbled to life was so jarring that it made his breath hitch.
Exiting the truck with a first aid kit in tow, Eddie stepped back to give Buck a once-over. “Where’s your sling?” he asked, then did a double-take. “Buck, where are your shoes?”
Buck tilted his head in the direction of the jeep before vaguely shrugging his good shoulder. Eddie was shaking his head in disbelief even as he checked over icy fingers and toes, pinching the tips and testing for movement and blood flow. It hurt like the fucking dickens, but didn’t stop Buck from saying, a hint of amusement coloring his tone, “Oh? I thought it wasn’t that cold, Mr. Firefighter?”
“I don’t know how you managed to get this cold in this weather.” Eddie snorted. When he was satisfied with the state of Buck’s extremities, Eddie changed course, pulling a cloth from the kit and working to scrub the worst of the dirt from Buck’s bare feet. Not usually an especially pressing concern when it came to treating the shortest of short-term exposure, but whatever. “And why are your clothes damp? What did you do, lay in a puddle all night?”
Buck ignored the question, wholly distracted. “What are you doing?” He demanded, alarmed as Eddie started pulling off his own shoes and socks. “Eddie, do not—"
“You need them more than I do.” Eddie asserted, rolling a still-warm sock over Buck’s freezing ankle, tugging carefully on the heel and toe to make sure it was sitting comfortably. Force of habit, probably, when the only other person you’ve put socks on was someone you loved more than breathing. Buck blinked, eyes bright, as Eddie continued lightly, “What kind of trouble are you even getting into out here? There’s nothing around here for…” Suddenly, Eddie’s hands on his leg stilled and tightened. “...miles.”
“I, uh—” Buck started, then faltered. Eddie wasn’t looking at him anymore, all signs of humor gone. He had turned completely away from Buck, his profile frozen into a tight-lipped, hard-eyed stare.
Buck turned his head to follow his gaze, along the road, past the jeep. When he saw where Eddie was looking, he jerked so violently in his rush to tear his eyes away that the motion sent his head swimming.
The railroad crossing.
He’d almost forgotten.
Buck’s shoulders curled in as he struggled to get his racing heart under control, slow the frantic rate of his breathing, conceal whatever must be happening on his face—
—he needed to look anywhere else, to lock his eyes onto something safe—
—and Buck found Eddie staring at him.
For just a second, a flash of something bigger than words eclipsed Eddie’s face before his expression went carefully, forcefully blank.
I’m scared, and I’m alone, and I’m about to do something stupid, he’d said on the phone. The jeep wouldn’t start, not broke down. He’d said too much. Confessed too much.
Buck stared at his own hands in his lap and willed them not to shake.
And Eddie…
After a moment, Eddie lowered his gaze again, seemingly pouring all his concentration into carefully tightening the laces of his own boots on Buck’s feet.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t press, because that’s who Eddie was. If he could be counted on for anything, it was giving Buck more grace than he’d ever done anything to deserve.
Eddie surprised Buck again when they both stood, hand raising to grip Buck firmly at the junction of his neck and uninjured shoulder. A second, errant hand fell to his hip as he swayed closer, to steady him. To steady them both.
And then they simply…didn’t move.
It wasn’t quite a hug. Eddie left enough distance between the two of them that he could look up into Buck’s face. To see him, consider him. In that thorough, knowing, Eddie way of his.
Rather than a hug, the goal of this seemed to be to just...keep Buck in place for a moment. To know where he was, and have Eddie’s hands keeping him there.
Hand on his shoulder, hand on his hip, close enough to breathe each other’s air. It was an ironic reflection of how Eddie had held onto him right after setting his shoulder at the cliffside.
Or maybe, Buck thought, it wasn’t ironic at all. Maybe it was the exact same grip, on the exact same Buck, for the exact same reason.
“You did good,” Eddie said, voice low, “reaching out. I’m proud of you.” The hands on him flexed, squeezing unconsciously, two burning points of contact. “Thank you for calling me.”
“Thanks for coming,” Buck whispered. He hadn’t had to beg. Hadn’t even had to say the words, I need you, or I’m sorry, or even please. Eddie had come anyway. Left his soft bed and his warm house and his tiny, perfect family to trudge out here in the mud for Buck.
Eddie cocked his head slightly to one side, those sweet eyes taking him in with careful, even intensity. Eddie’s grip on his shoulder curled inward. His thumb brushed gently against Buck’s neck with the motion. It very nearly ached.
“Always,” Eddie told him, giving Buck a little shake for emphasis. “Any time. Every time. Got it?”
Shyly, Buck nodded.
Eddie let him go, then, stepping back. He herded Buck into the passenger seat, doing up his coat where Buck’s own stiff fingers fumbled, and even buckled his seatbelt for him. Like he thought Buck was gonna take off if Eddie didn’t strap him down and shut the door.
“I’m gonna go take a look at your jeep. You wait here.” Eddie propped his elbows on the lowered window. “If I can’t figure out what’s wrong, I’ll call a tow, get it taken to a shop.” He held up a hand to silence Buck before he could even open his mouth to argue. “I’ll worry about the details. You focus on warming up.”
Unwilling to fight, Buck squirmed the keyring out of his jeans pocket and offered it before he could second guess himself.
Eddie took it and flipped through Buck’s keys one by one, thumbing each with an unreadable look on his face. Finally, he worked the jeep’s key free from the ring and handed the rest back to Buck, who tucked it into the pocket of the borrowed coat.
He tried to keep his eyes on Eddie as he started toward the jeep, but Buck must have blinked for a little too long. The next thing he knew, a tow truck was rattling past him.
That didn’t seem right. How had they gotten here so fast? Wasn’t he in the middle of nowhere?
Probably that patented Eddie charm, Buck decided; the one Eddie could never muster on purpose but wore like a second skin when he wasn’t trying.
As if to prove Buck’s point, the short, hairy man who hopped down from the truck when it rolled to a stop greeted Eddie like an old friend.
Buck blinked again, and Eddie was jogging back over with his phone pressed to his ear.
“...yeah, Buck’s jeep. If I give you the address of the garage, could you meet him there to take care of things?”
“Are you sure this is what he wants?” Buck heard clearly, because Eddie took his calls at max volume like an old man.
But why did he have Bobby on the phone?
Eddie furrowed his brow, confused at the question. “...well, I think it’s pretty safe to assume so. We can’t just leave him by himself.”
“Eddie...The last thing I want to do is overstep.”
“I know the guy pretty well.” Eddie said, starting to sound a little frustrated. “And Buck trusts you. It’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure he wouldn’t rather it be someone else? I don’t know if he’ll want to see me right now.”
“It doesn’t matter who it is,” Eddie explained, faint annoyance lacing his tone, “The important thing is for someone to show up and physically be there. If you show up, he’ll be thrilled. I promise.” A sigh. “I just don’t want him to be stuck there alone with a busted jeep and no one to talk to.”
A beat, then: “I’ll go. Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can. And...” Bobby hesitated. “...tell him I’m looking forward to speaking with him.”
“...Sure?” Eddie, looking a little perplexed, rattled off an address before hanging up. He shakes his head before throwing a thumbs up to the guy still waiting by the tow truck.
“Hey, Mike! I got a guy headed to the garage. And he’s, uh...” Eddie paused, “...looking forward to meeting you, I guess?”
Mike returned the thumbs up and hopped into his truck. Eddie pulled himself into the driver’s seat, tossing Buck’s flip-flops into the well at his feet and dropping the discarded sling in Buck’s lap.
“We’re not following him to the shop?” Buck said, instead of something normal like thank you.
“We, Eddie said firmly, “are going home. You look terrible.” He cast a glance sideways. “Do you want anything? I brought some chocolate milk for Chris, but he—"
“Chris?” Buck interrupted, louder than he’d intended.
“Yeah? It’s Saturday morning, and I didn’t have a sitter lined up, so...”
—but Buck barely heard a word Eddie was saying, because—
“...Buck?” came a sleepy mumble from behind him.
Heart on his throat, Buck threw off his seatbelt and twisted his whole body around to stare into the backseat.
Uncurling from under a butter yellow blanket, glasses askew from where he’d been rubbing sleep from his eyes, was Christopher Diaz. He looked warm and clean and dry. He looked happy and comfortable. When he straightened his glasses and fixed his eyes on Buck, a sweet grin split his face.
At the sight, something that had begun to come apart in his chest, something frighteningly vital, started to stitch itself back together.
Unconsciously, Buck reached for him.
Wait, my hands are filthy, came the thought, but only after Chris had seized Buck’s outstretched hand in both of his own.
Warm. Tiny. Living. Real.
Buck’s heart trembled in his chest. “Hey buddy,” he croaked. “I missed you.”
Chris’s glasses slipped, and he pulled back one of his hands to fix them. “Daddy said you were in trouble. And that you weren't allowed to talk to anybody."
Buck closed his eyes, speechlessly grateful that Eddie, even angry, had covered for him. Hadn’t let Chris think he didn’t want to see him, or didn’t care.
"Trouble," Chris pressed on with sleepy flourish, "with the law." He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Did you get arrested?” He wiggled his eyebrows in a move he’d definitely learned from Buck. “You can tell me. I'm cool.”
He seemed almost excited at the prospect, as though already prepping Buck's sudden, unexpected disappearance from his life to be another wild story to alarm his classmates with.
A rusty, warming laugh bubbled up from Buck’s chest. “The very coolest.” He agreed, grinning so hard it made the cracked corners of his mouth sting. “If I got arrested, you’re the first guy I’d call.”
“That’s not a good idea.” Chris shook his head seriously. “I don’t have a car, Buck. How would I break you out?”
God. Chris was the funniest kid on the planet. Buck had missed him so much.
Eddie made a weird choking sound from the driver's seat. "No one’s getting arrested." He cleared his throat. "I said—legal trouble, bud, that's different from trouble with the law."
"Legal means law," Christopher insisted with an air of suspicion.
"Legal does mean law." Buck wiggled his own eyebrows to make Chris laugh.
"Buck wasn't arrested," Eddie said conclusively. "Somebody tried to get him in trouble, okay, and it took a while to sort things out. It put him in a complicated place, where he wasn’t allowed to talk to his friends. But everything's fine now."
Buck swallowed, tearing his eyes from Chris to stare at Eddie from the passenger seat. Was he really going to make it that easy?
"Jail," Chris cut in primly, "is a complicated place."
Buck snorted, and that sent Chris giggling, which tugged a reluctant grin out of Eddie.
Eddie groaned. “What am I gonna do with you two?”
Keep me, Buck didn’t say.
Eddie glanced in his direction anyway. “Seatbelt,” he chided, and Buck obliged, settling in for the drive home.
Honestly, Buck spent most of the trip watching Chris through the passenger-side mirror. Taking in every detail as methodically as he could. Listening carefully to a slow, meandering story that appeared to be about Chris narrowly failing to win a school-wide spelling bee. “I didn’t need to study for it,” he was saying, even as Eddie shook his head with a smile, “because you either can already spell or you can’t. Studying is basically cheating. You know, English is the only language that has spelling bees?”
“No kidding?” Buck asked, still scanning for the scrapes and bruises seared into his brain from months ago, reassuring himself. Chris is healed. Chris is safe.
Buck loved kids. Everybody knew how much Buck loved kids. He cooed over pictures of babies in Halloween costumes. He’d watch Denny for Hen and Karen so they could have date night. Hanging out with kids always sparked that small warmth inside of Buck, the one that thought he might make a pretty good dad someday.
But Chris was different.
Something else. More immediate.
Something more personal, even, than just Chris being Eddie’s.
Not the ever-present longing for family that always dogged at Buck’s heels; a different longing entirely. A longing for—
(Chris, squeezing his way between Eddie and Buck on the couch to watch a movie and hiding his face in Buck’s sleeve during the scary parts. Trusting Buck to tell him when it was safe to come out.
Buck helping Chris with his homework at the kitchen table, watching him pick up times tables faster than Buck ever could at that age. Pride making Buck’s chest warm and his eyes sting.
The way Chris had insisted on “teaching” him how to use his new crutches after he’d gotten out of the hospital. The way that day gave him his first genuine laugh after the scary, painful, lonely nightmare of the truck bombing.
The dog-eared chapter book left on Buck’s old coffee table, now tucked carefully into the glovebox of the jeep for safekeeping. The crayon drawing currently folded up in Buck’s wallet.
Chris eating food Buck cooked for him. Chris singing songs Buck taught him. Chris looking for Buck after a bad dream.
The earth-shattering terror of losing him. The all-encompassing relief of finding him safe.)
Spending time with Chris didn’t make Buck want kids of his own. Didn’t make him dream of a family he might have, someday.
Something pathetic in Buck that looked at Eddie and Chris across the dinner table and thought, I could have this. I could keep this.
Something greedy, unforgivably greedy, within Buck that looked at Chris thought, mine.
Chris didn’t need another dad. He had Eddie, who was as close to perfect as anyone could be.
But they wanted him around. Eddie had said as much, hadn’t he?
Not having Buck around had hurt. At least now, they wanted him. They thought they needed him.
And Buck had promised.
He never, ever wanted to hurt them again.
He was theirs. He was Chris’s, he was Eddie’s. Regardless of whether they were his.
He’d sustained so many interpersonal relationships in his life solely through his own attachment.
And in a funny way, maybe all that had been preparing him for this one.
After all, wasn’t parenthood supposed to be selfless?
Too soon, they rumbled to a stop in the familiar driveway of the Diaz house.
Buck tried not to stare too closely at anything as he walked up the path, stepped across the threshold.
He worried, suddenly, that he might do something to embarrass himself if he existed too fully in this moment.
He made his way to the hallway bathroom and kicked the door shut behind himself without looking around much. Eddie said something to him through the door, and Buck shouted…something back as he peeled off his clothes and dumped them on the floor, eager to rid his skin of the grainy scrape of dirty fabric.
Buck cranked the water on and settled himself on the small bench built into the wall of the shower. He grabbed a random bottle and popped it open, giving it a cautious sniff. It was some kind of soap, probably. Smelled a little like Eddie.
That was good enough for Buck. He lathered up a fresh washcloth and went to town.
The bathroom was too steamy and the water, no matter how hot he turned it, still couldn’t seem to get him warm.
[Any temperature below scorching still made his breath hitch if he wasn't ready for it.
On one of those lonely nights during the litigation, so soon after the tsunami that he could still taste salt in the back of his throat, his shower had run out of hot water. The shock of the chilly spray pounding against his back combined with the steamy air to recreate a very particular sensation of blistering sun and icy water and had sent him leaping from his shower in a panic.
He'd found himself gasping on the floor with his hair still dripping. The only relief was that his phone had been downstairs at the time, so he hadn’t been at risk of trying to call someone. Trying to call Eddie.
It had rattled him. Made him wonder if, on top of everything else, he was actually starting to go crazy. He’d barely slept that night.
That seemed melodramatic now, to be scared of being scared of his own shower. It was laughable, compared with the misery creeping in at every other corner of his life.
But still; when he forgot and tried to crank the knob higher, burn the water hotter, it. It still made anxiety prickle at the base of his spine for a second when the handle didn’t budge.
A nasty zap of powerlessness where he thought he had some.
It was stupid. It didn’t matter.]
Buck tried to focus on the task in front of him. Started with his fingernails, then his hands and wrists. His forearms, his sides, his shoulders, his neck. Behind his ears. He scoured his face until the skin ached, a woozy, tumultuous comfort.
Still, he pressed on, scrubbing the soles of his feet and between his toes. He didn’t want to be dirty. He didn’t want to be dirty in Eddie’s house.
He levered himself into a standing position so he could shut off the water, but something happened.
Something swoopy and incorporeal within him kept going, swaying loosely past the arc of standing up and continuing on, hazy, dizzy, down.
His vision went black.
Uh-oh.
A few seconds later, he could see again. He was on the ground lying halfway out of the tub, not-warm water still pounding down on parts of his body. The shower curtain had been partially ripped down and there were soap and shampoo bottles littering the tiled floor.
His elbow hurt like hell. He must have hit it on the way down.
Eddie threw the door open and tore into the bathroom. “Buck!” He had an armful of freshly folded towels. It was cute, in a domestic kind of way. “Are you okay?” He dropped the towels in a heap on the ground as he slid to his knees at Buck’s side. Shame.
His harried expression tightened as he honed in on Buck’s crumpled form, not caring that his head and shoulders were getting soaked as he pressed inquisitive fingers along Buck’s neck and skull. “Did you hit your head?”
“Turn off the water,” Buck groaned. The last thing he needed right now was to see Eddie with his hair wet. His heart couldn’t take it. He seriously needed to invest in some uglier friends. “My head is fine. And my neck and spine are fine too.”
Buck rolled part of the way over, flopping the rest of the way out of the shower and tipping onto his back with a wheeze. “I feel fine. In fact, let me just—” A hand pressed to the center of Buck’s chest kept him pinned to the floor.
“Stop moving.” The shower curtain that still partially obscured his body was swept back, and Eddie’s face went white.
“Buck..." Eddie whispered, "Jesus."
The subdermal bruising from the ligament damage of his dislocation had splashed across his back and chest like spilled ink.
“I'm okay," Buck mumbled, “It’s just worse because of the blood thinners.”
Eddie almost looked like he believed him, so that was of course the moment a vicious cramp speared through his bad leg.
Buck jerked upright with a muffled scream, yanking himself clear out of Eddie’s grip, and fear muddled with the fogginess in his brain. It was another clot creeping toward his lungs, his brain, his heart; it had to be. He was going to die. Right here, on Eddie’s bathroom floor, in Eddie’s arms.
Eddie shoved a paper cup of water into his hands with a pointed, “Sip this,” and seized Buck’s trembling calf in his hands, forcefully manipulating it. He straightened Buck’s knee against the tiled floor and pressed the heel of his hand to the ball of Buck's foot, forcing his hamstring into a stretch.
The relief was immediate, the seizing pain promptly dulling to a tingle before vanishing completely.
Buck tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. “How did you do that?” He panted.
“A dehydration cramp is just a series of involuntary muscle contractions.” Eddie explained. “I stretched the muscle out completely so it couldn’t contract anymore.” He pointed to the cup in Buck’s hands. “Now, sip.”
Meekly, Buck sipped.
“Breathe with me, Buck,” Eddie said, and then, too knowing, “You can’t stretch a clot. That feels different from this. You know it does.”
Buck focused on his water.
Eddie grabbed one of the towels he’d dropped and began toweling Buck dry by hand like he was a gigantic housepet. He had shifted completely into professional mode: he was gentle, thorough, and utterly unphased by Buck’s state of undress.
Eddie had made his way across most of Buck's torso before he heaved a sigh and said, “I think you need to go to the hospital.”
“You’re kidding,” Buck told the Eddie-shaped blob that was carefully patting the backs of his knees dry. Buck swatted at him. “Stop that. You want me to go to the hospital for swooning?” Buck draped one of Eddie’s towels politely over his own lap. If no one was going to look, there was no point in showing off. “I’m fine. Just dizzy.” He paused. “And my elbow hurts.”
“You blacked out in my shower. You could have been seriously hurt.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“That’s not—”
Eddie was interrupted by a voice outside the door. “Dad? Buck? Is everything okay?”
A spark of panic lit Buck’s gut. “Fine! Everything’s fine.” A crutch poked its way around the doorframe. “Hey buddy, hold on—”
Chris looked startled when he saw them, but not scared. Thank god, he didn’t look scared. “Buck,” he said, eyes wide, “what’s wrong with your shoulder?”
The damn bruising. “What, this old thing?” Buck raised his arm and waved blearily. “I lost an arm wrestling match with your dad. This guy’s a beast.”
Chris’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates as he leveled an accusatory stare at his father.
Eddie gave Buck a nudge. “Don’t tell him that.” To Chris, he said, “It was a work accident. It looks pretty bad, with all that bruising. But it’s like…you remember when I sprained my ankle last year, and had green bruises all up my leg even though I didn’t hit it on anything? That was internal bruising from torn ligaments on the inside of the body. It swells up to stabilize the injury and protect it. What happened to Buck’s shoulder is similar to that.”
Chris, clever little guy, looked extremely interested. “Does it still hurt if the bruises aren’t on the outside?”
“Well, it probably won’t feel very good if you touch it. We’ll both need to be gentle with Buck today.”
“I’m completely fine.” Buck insisted. He demonstrated his supreme wellness by giving Chris two thumbs up.
“You need to go to the hospital.” Eddie insisted.
Christopher readjusted his stance, scooting closer to Buck and leaning forward on his crutches. “Buck, can you tie my shoes for me?”
“Absolutely, my dude. Let me just…” Buck fumbled for a sneaker and squinted blearily at the haphazard laces. The attempt to focus made a wave of dizziness smack into the back of his head, and he closed his eyes and tilted his head up before he did something awful like throw up Chris’s most fashionable pair of child-sized skechers.
Christopher turned to Eddie and announced, “He needs to go to the hospital.”
Huh?
“Hey, hey, I’m all right,” Buck protested, patting the ground in front of him. “Put your foot here and I’ll—” Buck’s hand found one of Chris’s sneakers and grabbed for the laces only to discover that they were already securely tied.
What the…
“You had your shoes on in the car.” Buck realized, appalled. “You tricked me.”
Eddie laughed. “That’s a tie breaker, I think. Hospital it is.”
“For the love of god, just put me on the couch.” Buck groaned.
“Buck, please.” Eddie said, and something in his tone gave Buck pause. “Let me take you to get checked out for my own peace of mind. Then I’ll bring you right back home. I promise.”
These tenderhearted Diazes were turning him into a real pushover.
“Sure,” Buck admitted defeat. “Yeah, okay.”
Eddie helped him get dressed in some borrowed clothes, even though he could have done it himself. Eddie seemed unwilling to leave him alone, hovering close with his hands outstretched as though he half-expected Buck to collapse at any moment.
Which was ridiculous. He was fine. Who didn’t pass out in the shower every once in a while?
They all trekked back out to the truck. Buck, admittedly, didn’t remember very much about the trip to the hospital. He kept blinking and ending up in a new part of LA everytime he opened his eyes again.
Upon arrival, he was shuffled from the car into a borrowed wheelchair, which seemed unnecessarily dramatic.
Eddie was talking to people over his head. Buck wasn’t really listening. He didn’t feel like it.
He was being helped into some kind of hospital bed. It was surprisingly comfy.
He was cold.
He wished he had a blanket.
Buck was so sleepy.
People wearing scrubs came left, taking samples and asking Eddie questions. “I’m on blood thinners,” Buck told anyone who approached him with a needle.
Christopher had found his way up onto the hospital bed next to Buck and was flipping through the holiday issue of a cooking magazine he’d snagged from the waiting room on the way in.
And...
Whatever they were doing to him seemed to be working. He slowly started to feel more alert. More awake. Like the world was sharpening itself around him.
Someone had brought him some apple juice in a styrofoam cup with a straw. He sipped idly on it, tuning into the conversation happening around him just in time to hear:
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call Tia Pepa to come get you?” Eddie was whispering.
Chris shook his head vehemently. “I want to stay.”
“I don’t know how long we’ll be here, Chris. I just want you to know that you don’t have to spend your Saturday in a hospital room.”
“Buck has to spend his Saturday in a hospital room.”
A little hint of tension sparked between them, Eddie softly confused, Christopher uncharacteristically stalwart.
“About that, Eddie.” Buck groused, interrupting their stare-off. “I can’t believe you actually brought me in for swooning.” Successfully catching both their attention, he continued. “You don’t need a hospital to treat a swoon. Did you ever consider that I might’ve been kissed too sternly? Or I’ve been reading too many novels?”
“Well,” Eddie asked, smiling slightly, “have you?”
“A gentleman never tells.” Buck admonished. “No, wait, I got it! It’s been too long since I’ve seen the sea. You should have taken me to the sea, Eddie.” He tried to flop his hand dramatically over his forehead, missed, and accidentally slapped himself on the nose. “Ow.”
Christopher dissolved into a fit of giggles.
“You’re cute,” Eddie told him flatly, taking hold of Buck’s wrist and carefully putting his arm to the side where it couldn't hurt anybody, “but you’re kind of making my point for me.”
A doctor arrived with a clipboard and asked for a moment alone with Buck.
Eddie glanced over, placing a hand on Chris’s back. “We can step out. You need to go to the bathroom, mijo?”
“I don’t.”
Eddie’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “How about we try anyway?”
“Have you guys had breakfast yet?” Buck asked brightly. “Why don’t you go out and grab yourself something to eat?”
Chris frowned thoughtfully before turning to his dad. “Can we bring a treat back for Buck?”
Eddie ruffled Chris’s hair. “That’s a really good idea.” The smile stayed on his face when he met Buck’s eyes. “We’ll see you soon.”
Buck missed them when they were gone, but in the end, he was grateful the conversation with his doctor happened in private.
As she removed the IV from his arm, she told him what the tests had found:
Nothing. A concerning lack of things, actually.
Severe dehydration. Chronic malnourishment. Acute exhaustion.
Which would have left him unable to get warm, made him feel dizzy and sick constantly, and severely compromised his mental state, in order. The overall result left him prone to blackouts and had slowed the healing of his shoulder significantly.
A myriad of conflicting feelings bubbled up within him: Fear at how bad things had gotten without him realizing. The guilty urge to insist that he wasn’t really sick. Relief that it wasn’t anything worse. Embarrassment that it wasn’t something worse.
The doctor stepped away after discussing the first few steps of implementing a long-term treatment plan.
He hoped she’d write it down for him to look at later. There was too much to process right now.
He didn’t even know exhausted was something you could be officially diagnosed with.
He was pensively sipping his apple juice when his next visitor made her presence known.
“Hello there, Buck.”
Athena Grant was standing at the foot of his bed.
“What are you doing here?”
"Bobby and I were out. The hospital called, said you were here." She spread her arms. "So now I'm here."
"Oh." Buck said weakly.
“Let’s talk.” She said, unsmiling. “Just you and me.” It wasn’t a suggestion.
The first time Buck had stood close to Athena, he’d been astounded to discover how tall she actually wasn’t.
She had a presence about her that made her seem about ten feet tall; or, at the very least, even with Chimney.
That confident strength had propped him up, held his seams shut long enough for them to find Maddie last Christmas; she’d conducted an unauthorized manhunt and kept Buck moving and breathing through the worst day of his life. That immutable steadiness made Athena’s threats sound like promises and her promises sound like facts. It made it hard to lie to her.
Right now, it made it hard for Buck to look at her, too.
“Hi,” he muttered, picking at his blanket.
“Been a minute.” Athena raised an eyebrow. “Mind telling me why that is?”
“Um.” Buck peeked up at her from under his eyelashes. “Are you mad at me?”
“A little.”She said frankly. She sat on the edge of his mattress near his knees. “Want to hear about my morning?”
Well. He definitely didn’t want to talk about his morning. “Uh, What happened?”
“My husband got a call at the crack of dawn telling him that you were stranded at some mechanic shop and needed his help. I tagged along because I hadn’t seen you since early fall. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I, uh, wasn’t.” Buck told her. “At the shop.”
“You know, we figured that out.” She said. “But I’m still glad I went. You want to know why?”
Buck wasn’t sure he did.
Athena didn’t mince words. “Funny thing: While Bobby was arguing with Eddie’s mechanic, I stayed in the lot. Saw your car. Took a good long look.”
No.
“I saw what you’ve got in your car.”
Buck’s heart trembled.
Athena leaned in, voice taking on a softer note. “Talk to me, Buck.”
Buck steeled his nerves. He prepared himself for judgement, for annoyance. He braced for that unyielding cleverness and subtle scorn she wielded with just as much precision as her weapon. He couldn’t afford to care what she thought of him. One more person who’d maybe, possibly seen something valuable in him, only to be let down in the end by the Buck of it all. What she thought didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. Not if he was going to survive this conversation with his heart intact.
He fisted his hands in the sheets and finally looked up at her, meeting her gaze dead on.
He wasn’t ready.
She was looking at him—
She was looking at him like they were friends.
“Did you tell Bobby?” he whispered.
“I did not.” She leaned forward, tone business-like. “Who else knows?”
He shook his head mutely.
She nodded, as though that made perfect sense. Like it wasn’t insane of him to hide this from everyone.
Still, he felt a need to explain himself. “I can‘t think of a way to talk about this that doesn’t make me sound stupid.”
“This doesn’t happen to someone because they're stupid.” She was speaking so gently.
“That’s not what I meant. I mean because. Because it’s me, not just anyone else. I don’t want them to...” he trailed off with a shrug.
Athena surprised him then, putting a hand on his wrist and squeezing. Silently urging him to continue. As though whatever dumb thing Buck might be about to say was vitally important information to her.
She wanted the truth. And it felt a little like he owed it to her.
Because she honestly seemed worried.
It went something like this:
The scraps of pity he had managed to steal from his parents as a kid had petered out as he’d gotten older, even as his injuries grew more severe. They started to catch on earlier than he’d like, the pinched, sad face of his mother conveying without words, You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Near the end, it was like they could tell he was cheating for love. They could tell that he didn’t need it, just wanted it.
He didn’t know which had been worse: the way he could feel the begrudging condescension with which those final scraps were given, or that he’d kept begging anyway.
It left him with this instinctive sort of. Clench of emotion in his stomach at the idea of asking for, or even wanting, help. Guilt, or embarrassment, or maybe dread.
It made him feel selfish, tiresome. Unwanted. That had followed him, that urge to never take more than he gave, to never be more trouble than he was worth, to never ask for more than he deserved. Even when he wasn’t hurt on purpose, it always felt a little like it was on purpose, just because of how badly he still, still, wanted.
That was what he meant.
What he actually said was: “What if they think I’m just doing this for attention?”
She dropped his wrist in surprise. A moment later, she reached out and held onto it again with a firmer grip. “What?” she said disbelievingly.
Buck shrugged. “C’mon, Athena, you know what I’m like.”
“I do know what you’re like. I’m starting to wonder if you don’t.”
“I was kind of a rotten kid, Athena. You know,” he shrugged his good shoulder, “needy.”
“No. I don’t know.” She retorted, tone severe. “Children have needs.”
“I thought I could fix all my problems by getting hurt badly enough,” Buck waved a hand, missing the steel that had stolen over Athena’s expression.
“What do you mean?” She said it slowly, deadly. “You…” She shook her head. “What does that have to do with your team, Buck.” Her tone was dangerous.
“I don’t know. I probably thought...Well.” He tried to laugh. Failed.
Athena didn’t laugh.
“Maybe I thought if it was bad enough they'd all. Just. Forgive me,” he blurted out. The worst, most selfish, most pitiful instinct Buck had. He regretted voicing it the moment the words left his mouth. “Sorry, that’s. That’s stupid.”
No, not Buck. This was all Evan. Shrink yourself small. Crush yourself up. Hope someone loves you. Fail. Rinse. Repeat.
He couldn’t look at Athena, even as he waited breathlessly for her response.
He didn’t know why he felt this absolution had to come from her. Maybe because he knew she wouldn’t lie to him. Maybe because he hadn’t discussed that stupid lawsuit with her at all yet. If she was going to be mad at him, he wanted her to make it hurt. Press on the bruise until it stops making him flinch.
Finally, she said, “Okay. I’ll play. Let’s say this whole thing is a ruse to trick me into worrying about you.” She leveled him with a stern look. “Well, you win. I’m worried.”
Buck hadn’t meant it like that, like this was some kind of calculated ploy for sympathy. “Hey, I’m not saying this is some kind of cry for help, or—”
Athena silenced him with a glare. “There is nothing wrong,” she said fiercely, so fiercely it startled him. “with a cry for help. The only thing that matters is making sure someone hears it.”
May, Buck thought suddenly, feeling awful. “Athena, it isn’t like that. I wasn’t…” but hadn’t he? Hadn’t he thought about it, for just a moment? Last night, before he’d shaken himself free from that nightmarish stupor and thought to call Eddie?
It wasn’t the same. He wasn’t precious to anyone, not the way an only daughter was.
“If you were doing this for attention, you would have told somebody before now.” Athena asserted, "But you haven’t. So, that begs the question: why are you putting yourself through all this, Buck? For forgiveness, you said?”
“That’s not—"
“You’re not Catholic,” she said frankly. “You can't suffer your way to goodness.”
Shame burned behind his eyelids. “I...I—"
“Buck,” she said, like it was obvious, like it was a fact, “you're already good.” She cupped his face in her hands, tilting his head up to look him over, “And,” she told him, “you’re already forgiven.”
He tried not to lean into the touch.
“You’re really nice,” He said weakly.
She laughed at him a little. “Everybody in this town who loves you is on their way here,” Athena told him, “and they are scared out of their minds.”
“Everybody?” Buck asked softly. “How?”
“Word travels fast when you’re in trouble, Buck.”
“When you say everybody…Bobby too?”
She smiled a little. “Bobby hasn’t stopped worrying about you since the day he met you.”
“Makes sense. I’m a lot of trouble,” he offered.
“Caring about others is good for you.” She told him. “Caring about you specifically did that man a world of good at a time when he really needed it.”
“It did me a lot of good, too.” Buck confessed.
She dropped her hand from his face to drum her fingers on the mattress.
“Now be honest with me. Why haven’t you come over?” She said it with a lilt in her voice.
“I didn’t want to get your house dirty.” he joked.
Athena snorted. “I raised two babies in that house. I got divorced in that house. I can handle your mess, Evan Buckley.”
“Be honest with me, Buck,” she said, again, but it sounded different this time. More gentle, more tentative. “How long,” she asked him, “have you been living in that jeep?”
He could still deny it. He hadn't said the words out loud to anyone, yet.
He steeled himself. “It’s been a couple months,” he told her. He blew out a shuddering breath, and said it again. “I’ve been living in my car for a couple of months.”
Saying it, the relief of saying it, collided with the ache of dread trapped in his chest and catalyzed it into something part giddy and part terrified.
He had said it. He had said it out loud to someone who mattered.
For better or for worse, something was going to change.
The coffee Bobby had been holding hit the floor with an unremarkable splat. The cheap styrofoam split on impact, soaking his shoes and the hems of his jeans. It dripped lazily into the gap in the linoleum that separated the recovery bay from the hallway.
Bobby didn’t even look down. He was frozen where he stood, staring at Buck with a horrified expression on his face.
And behind him stood—
—everyone.
It would be a lie to say he hadn’t thought about it. How his friends would react.
He knew they loved him.
They’d have to know, eventually.
But when he’d thought about it, it had always been with that safety net of after.
After things had gone back to normal. After Buck had figured out a place to stay, and gotten a handle on his money problems, and convinced everyone to like him again.
He was supposed to be able to point back and say, but see? I handled it myself! The shocked concern would be tempered with relief, familiarity, fondness.
“You should have told me,” “We’re here for you,” “If anything like this ever happens again,” and so on. The sorts of platitudes he collected carefully and tucked into his chest next to his heart.
Care. Care. Care.
Just…when he felt human enough to appreciate it.
All of the affection, and none of the crumpled, embarrassed resentment of turning him down. Of being too busy with real problems to waste all their time digging Buck out of his own mess. Again.
It was a win-win. He’d get love, and he’d be easy to love.
Those half-formed daydreams of easy affection and solving his own troubles went up in smoke in an instant.
Athena had said they were scared; Buck hadn’t really understood what she’d meant until this moment.
The looks on their faces sent guilt punching through his chest. They loved him. They were scared for him. It didn’t feel good. It felt awful.
Bobby unglued his feet from the ground and drifted toward Buck, eyes never leaving his face.
Hen spoke first. “Buck?” The word bubbled with anger, simmered with fear. She said it like she wasn’t sure. Her shoulders were pulled back like she was steeling herself for something.
The line of Maddie’s mouth wobbled, eyes shining with unshed tears. Her back was ramrod straight, unyielding in the way that never came naturally to her but that survival had forced her to learn.
Chimney was at her side. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and his face was white. His eyes looked older than Buck was used to, his face more deeply lined.
Maybe worst of all, was the familiar click-cla-click from the back of the pack. The way it stuttered out of rhythm and then stopped entirely.
Eddie wore that cavernous sadness that Buck hated, the one that threatened to swallow him up if someone took their eyes off him. His eyes were wide, wide and wet as they took in Buck. “We ran into them. O-on our way back,” he said helplessly. “They wanted to see you.”
Buck didn’t look at Chris. He couldn’t bear to.
He wasn’t ready.
There was a collective intake of breath as Buck’s carefully constructed nightmare prepared to come crashing down on his head.
Except.
[A few months ago, as he adjusted the straps of Christopher’s backpack, Eddie had said, “You know your friend Buck? He's been pretty down in the dumps recently. Do you think you could look after him for me today?”
It hadn’t been an especially serious request; if asked, Eddie might not even remember saying it, after everything else that happened that day. Nonetheless, Chris had solemnly promised to do his best.
And Chris had tried his best.
It had just been a bad day to try.
Buck had lost Chris; Chris, from his perspective, had lost Buck. It had forged an odd sort of bond between them, these two boys who felt that they had let the other down.
Buck was extremely protective of Christopher, that was obvious to anyone who saw them interact. Less obvious was that Christopher was also rather protective of Buck.
That instinct may fade, in time, as their relationship changed and grew; but at this moment? It was foundational.
There wasn’t a lot someone like Chris could do to protect someone like Buck.
But he’d learned something from those awful weeks after Mom died, when Abuela and Abuelo had come to help out but seemed to just make everyone sadder. When they said mean things about Chris’s parents when they thought he couldn’t hear.
Those weeks, he’d learned that adults didn’t like yelling at other adults in front of kids.
Chris had done his best to keep an eye out for closed doors with hushed, angry tones. He’d clatter in noisily, interrupting whatever they were saying to make his dad look so pinched and scared. He’d hoist himself onto the chair or couch Dad was hunched in, or even onto his legs when there wasn’t enough room for them both.
Dad definitely knew he was too big to be sitting in people’s laps for no reason; Chris certainly told him so often enough. But those times, Dad wouldn’t even comment on it. He would just curl quivering hands around his shoulders, rest his cheek against the top of Chris’s head.
Faintly shuddering breaths ruffled the curls on top of his head. His dad’s heartbeat thundered frantically against his back.
Chris would peer at his now-silent grandparents imperiously over his glasses. Well, go on, he’d say with his eyebrows. I’m listening.
Whatever they were talking about suddenly wasn’t important anymore.
Because adults didn’t like yelling at other adults in front of kids.
Bucky, right now, looked like someone who was very, very scared of being yelled at.]
“Excuse me,” he said. When the feet still didn’t move, he tapped his crutch lightly against one of the legs blocking his way.
Bobby tore his eyes away from Buck, expression strained. Still, he managed a shaky smile and said, “Buddy, I’m not sure—”
Chris used the opportunity to squirm past Bobby to Buck’s side, sidling up to the side of the sickbed opposite Athena.
He set his crutches aside and placed one hand on the mattress, stretching the other hand out toward her in askance. “Help me up, please.”
“Chris, “Said Eddie, looking faintly horrified. “That was rude.”
“I said please,” Christopher told him, before turning his attention back to Athena.
Chris was a kid who was rarely impolite, and when he was rude, Eddie tended to agree with him. This meant that Eddie was completely unprepared for the parenting challenge of watching Christopher snub his boss.
Athena looked at Buck, eyebrows raised.
Buck looked at Eddie.
Eddie shrugged helplessly.
If it was up to Buck, having Chris nearby was never a bad thing. Despite the situation, he found a smile. “Come on up here, buddy. I missed you.”
Chris grinned. It was a group effort, but the three of them got Chris settled comfortably against Buck’s side, an arm curled around his thin shoulders.
“You took my spot,” Chris told Athena, “But that’s okay. I can sit over here.”
Eddie made a slightly agonized sound.
Chris smiled up. “There you go, Bucky,” a soft hand patted his cheek. “Don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be fine.” His little fist wound itself into Buck’s borrowed shirt.
“Thanks, little man.” Buck tried to keep his voice steady.
“I’m not that little.” Chris said reprovingly. "I’ve grown two inches since March.”
“That’s” Buck’s breath hitched. “That’s awesome. You’re gonna be taller than me soon.”
“Yeah, right. Oh!” Chris reached into the front pocket of his hoodie. “Here. We got you something.”
He pulled out a pre-packaged slice of mortally squashed banana bread, the kind you might get from a cheap coffee shop or a fancy vending machine, and pressed it into Buck’s hands.
Best kid in the world.
He carefully peeled back the plastic and broke the slice into two pieces, wordlessly passing one to Chris.
Buck took tentative, nibbling bites of his half, not wanting to upset his stomach.
Chris held his in both hands and tore into it with his teeth like a carnivore, spraying a healthy layer of crumbs in every direction.
Buck took a sip of his apple juice, soaking in the warm little heartbeat tucked against his side, the bony elbows digging into his ribs.
Athena, at his other side, knocked her knuckles twice against the side of his knee. A promise. Telling him without words that she wasn’t going anywhere.
The panic that threatened him a moment ago began to recede.
Everyone in this town who loves you, she’d said. This was just. Everyone who loved him. Here, because they loved him.
He squared his shoulders, looking at each person in the room in turn until at last his eyes met Bobby’s. “I’m okay.” he said firmly. “I’m not sick, not really. There isn’t anything wrong with my blood, or my leg, or anything like that. I’m just a little worn down. This was a…failure of regular maintenance, that’s all.” Buck tried to smile. “I appreciate you guys being here. But I’m not, like, dying.”
Bobby’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Buck,” he asked, “months?”
As though hoping he’d somehow misheard.
Buck popped the final bite of his banana bread in his mouth and chewed slowly.
He swallowed. Took a drink. “I’m, um. I’ve been having some financial trouble lately.” He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “I had to give up the loft, and I didn’t have...anything else lined up. That’s all.”
Maddie stepped forward. She looked between Chris and Athena, as though debating which of Buck’s guard dogs she stood a better chance of negotiating with.
In the end, she made the same choice Buck would have.
“Hi Chris.” She smiled warmly. “Could I borrow your seat for a moment?”
Chris tilted his face up so he could peer at her through his glasses. “Hi.” He took a bite of his bread and didn't do anything else.
“This is Maddie.” Buck offered helpfully. “She’s my sister.”
“I remember.” Chris told him crumbily. “She’s been in my house.” He swallowed his mouthful and peered up even more intently. “Are you mad?” he asked flatly. “Are you gonna yell?”
“She’s not.” Buck hastily said, throwing a confused look Eddie’s way, who looked just as baffled as Buck felt. “She’s not like that.”
Chris considered them seriously before nodding to himself. “Okay.” To Athena and Buck, he said, “Please excuse me,” before he scooted down to the foot of the mattress and got to work spilling plenty of crumbs there, too.
It resembled nothing so much as a man taking watch, the way he surveyed the room from his mew perch with inexplicable suspicion. Chimney offered him a surreptitious wave. Chris gave an imperious nod in return.
Maddie took his seat and immediately threw her arms around Buck’s neck.
“Buck,” Maddie whispered. That was all she said. The guilt clawing at his chest increased tenfold at the sound.
“Maddie, I—”
“I know they’re awful, and I don’t blame you for not wanting anything to do with them, okay?” Maddie said softly, pulling back to look at him. “But. The money from mom and dad—”
“There isn’t any.” He bit out. Sick of pretending. Sick of covering for them.
“What?” The single word rang like a dropped plate.
”They cut me off when I was a teenager.” He shook his head, leaning into her side. ”We haven’t spoken in years, Maddie.” He tried to keep his voice down in the hopes that Chris might not overhear.
Her hand curled around his opposite shoulder, pulling him close like she could protect him from this, somehow. From the rotten news he himself was telling her.
The thing was, he’d actually been surprised that they’d bothered to empty his bank account at all, instead of just pretending he’d never existed the moment his shadow cleared their doorstep. “Trust me, Maddie.” He said. “This is better.” Better to have a clean break, with a crystal-clear message of Don’t bother. Stay away. Just in case he ever got it into his head to reach out.
The fact that his parents didn’t love him wasn’t tragic; now that he was an adult, it was mostly just embarrassing.
“You haven’t heard anything from them?” She asked tightly. ”Not even—”
“No,” he said. “The last I heard from them was a text two weeks after I left home telling me they were taking me off their phone bill.” He paused. “Sorry.”
She was silent for a long, long moment, before she whispered, “I hate them, I think.”
Buck hummed in response, leaning his head against hers.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? I know I was,” she swallowed, “out of touch for a while. But after I moved to LA. Why not then?”
Because I hate them too. We were both finally free. I couldn’t let them make you cry again.
Instead, Buck told her, “You weren’t talking to them either. And you had way bigger problems to deal with. I was doing fine.”
“You’re not fine now!” She said hotly. “We had dinner together. We—I filled your prescription for you. Why didn’t you say something?” There were tears pulling at the edges of her voice. She’d always been an easy crier. That didn’t ever make it any easier to see his sister cry because of him.
“Things are good for you right now.” He told her, willing her to understand. “I didn’t want to ruin it. You’re so happy, Maddie.”
“I’m not happy if you’re not happy. I was so worried about you this week. I tried to give you space, because you kept asking for it, but,” she hiccupped, “I went to see you this morning and you were. You were just gone. I didn’t know a thing until Eddie texted me.”
“Sorry,” Buck whispered.
Maddie shook her head furiously. “Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything.” Buck insisted. “This is my mess.”
“You’re my mess.” She said, fond, wiping tears from her face brusquely. She put her hand to his forehead, like she was taking his temperature, before smoothing his hair back. He leaned into the touch despite himself, fighting back tears of his own.
It wasn’t...It wasn’t fair.
Part of him wished she’d just get mad. Wished she’d yell at him, call him an idiot, and stop quietly shouldering every stupid thing he ever did like it was her fault. As if her influence, her shortcomings, were the reason he’d grown up so crooked. She was always trying to take responsibility for their shitty family as if she wasn’t the very best part of it.
“Listen,” she asked briskly. “ I know my place is small, but I can take the couch—”
“Maddie,” Buck said, aghast, “You are not sleeping on that awful couch.”
“You’re not either.” She insisted, then sighed. “Where are you staying, then?”
“You’re not going anywhere near that jeep.” Athena said from his other side, a note of warning in her tone.
“I. Um.” Oh yeah. The jeep was dead. Fuck, where was he gonna go? “I hadn’t gotten that far.”
“If you need—” Bobby started.
But Eddie interrupted him. “He's coming home with us.” He said resolutely.
Like it was a fact.
Everyone turned to stare at him.
Eddie faltered a little. “It makes the most sense. I, uh, have some of his stuff at my house already.”
Buck’s dead cellphone was currently sitting on the counter in Eddie’s bathroom. Did that really count?
Eddie pressed on, “A-and I can lend him clothes, we're the closest in size—"
“Don't you only have two beds?” Bobby asked tersely, gesturing to him and Chris.
Eddie didn’t back down. “He'll sleep in mine. I'm sleeping on the couch.” He glanced at Maddie and added, “My very comfortable couch.”
“I don't think—"
“I said,” Eddie narrowed his eyes, “he’s coming home with us.”
Athena turned to Buck, ignoring Eddie and Bobby not-arguing over both their heads. “It’s your choice, but you’ve got a place at ours if you need it.” Like they weren’t even in the same room.
“Thanks,” he told her sincerely.
Maddie wasn’t looking at Buck at all. Instead, she was staring intently at Eddie.
“Why was he with you?” Her voice was soft, quiet, and steely, and it brought the room to a halt. Buck didn’t know if he’d ever heard his sister sound like that before. “Did you…know something about this?”
“Hey now,” Buck said, mildly affronted. There was no need to talk to Eddie like that.
Eddie’s mouth moved for a moment without sound. Eventually, he said, “I haven’t seen him in a week, either. I didn’t know a thing until I picked him up this morning.”
“Picked him up?” Maddie asked faintly. “From where? Where were you?”
“On the side of the road. The jeep broke down. He called me. I brought him to my place.”
“So,” Maddie frowned, eyes flashing. “You knew something.”
“I wasn’t sure, but...” He glanced apologetically at Buck. “The key to your loft. I noticed you didn’t have it on you.”
Eddie had known.
“You couldn’t have texted me that, instead of ‘Buck’s at the hospital, but it’s probably fine’?”
Eddie had known?
“He was pretty out of it. I wanted to spare you a scary call from the hospital. And,” Eddie hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, the way he did when he got defensive, “if he wanted you to know, he would have told you.”
“Hey,” Buck protested, because that was kind of mean.
The rest of his brain was still processing the fact that Eddie had known for hours and hadn’t pressed.
He hadn’t pressed because Buck hadn’t been ready to be pressed.
The Buck of this morning would have cracked, would have shattered, under the slightest bit of pressure and confessed to everything. Eddie had to have known that, but still hadn’t taken the choice from Buck.
And just like that, his decision was made. “I’m staying with Eddie and Chris,” he declared.
Bobby frowned a little.
Athena nodded to Eddie. “Sounds like you’d better get moving.”
“Huh?”
“All his stuff is sitting in that jeep at Mike’s.” She raised her eyebrows. “Unless you're planning on just leaving it there?”
Maddie lifted her chin. “She's right. Actually, you know what?” She seemed to make her mind up about something. “I’m going, too.”
“No.” Buck said, catching her hand when she went to stand.
“I want to go,” she said, steel in her voice. “I want to see.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You didn’t have to do this, either.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Maddie had said Buck didn’t need to be sorry, but he knew the truth.
She had already forgiven him. They weren’t the kind of family that could afford to stay mad at each other.
He’d seen her blood on the snow. He’d seen Doug’s lifeless, worthless body. Hell, he’d given her away at the damn wedding, the one their parents had refused to attend.
He had seen her through, put her through so much.
If it was what she wanted, she could be allowed to see.
He owed her that much.
And there was still part of him, older than any of that, that said, you know you can’t tell your big sister what to do.
She took a few steps toward the door before stopping, turning around to throw her arms around his neck again. “I love you,” she told him, and pressed a kiss to the corner of his eyebrow. “Me and you. No matter what.”
“No matter what,” he whispered into her hair. It hung down in a curtain, temporarily hiding him from the rest of the room.
She ruffles Chris’s hair before turning not to Chimney, but to Athena to say, “Please let me know if anything changes.”
On her way out, she tangled her fingers with Chimney’s for a moment, placing a kiss on the back of his hand, before striding out of the room.
Eddie looked panicked at the abrupt issuance of his new marching orders. “Chris, I guess we'd better...go?”
Chris, who had already scrambled half-way up the bed to reclaim his place at Bucks side, glared.
“I’m not leaving,” he insisted, just as Chim offered, “He can hang here with us, if you need the backseat for space.”
Eddie looked stunned, caught out the way he always was whenever one of them did something nice for him without asking for anything in return.
“You sure it’s okay?” Eddie asked, just a little vulnerable.
“I’m not giving him back,” Buck told him, only mostly joking as Chris tucked himself securely under Buck’s arm.
Eddie looked from Buck, to Chris, then back to Buck. He opened his mouth, then shut it without saying anything.
“Stay safe,” he said finally, “until I get back.”
He turned on his heel to follow Maddie into the hallway.
Hen elbowed her way next to the bed, then.
She shared a look with Athena, who after a silent conversation made space for her.
He shouldn’t have been surprised when the first thing she did was perform a field check up. Checking him over thoroughly as if she didn’t trust Eddie, or the doctor, or God himself to have done it to her satisfaction. Like none of them could possibly know better than her.
Maybe they couldn’t.
“You guys guessed too, right?" Buck asked. "That’s why you kept inviting me to eat?”
Chimney let out an uncomfortable little laugh. “Buck. If I thought you were living in your car, I would have done a whole lot more than make you come over to my apartment and cook me eggs.”
Hen sold him out, her mouth curving into a frown. “He thought you were showing signs of an eating disorder.”
“Don’t just—” Chimney threw his hands up, abandoning pretense. “You thought so too!”
Hen’s hands on Buck were gentle, and she shot a glare in Chimney’s direction before continuing her check up. Chimney was probably telling the truth, if she was reacting like that, a little embarrassed and annoyed at being wrong. It was probably worse, when you were smart. You weren’t used to being wrong about stuff. Buck had been wrong about so many things in his life that it genuinely didn’t even phase him anymore.
“Why?” Buck said, lost. “Because I threw up? That kinda thing’s not really my style, Chim.”
“Not that. There was some stuff Maddie said—” he paused, as though remembering they had an audience, “it just made sense at the time, I guess.”
What in the world was Maddie telling people about him?
“By the way. I didn’t want to get into the middle of,” Chim coughed, glancing at the door through which Eddie had left, “that, but my couch is always open.”
“Sorry for not throwing down the gauntlet during the battle, but same here.” Hen added, peering into his eyes with a penlight. “You know Karen loves you.”
“I know Denny loves me,” Buck corrected her. “Karen thinks I’m weird.”
“She thinks you’re funny,” Hen argued. “What did the doctor say?”
“It really isn’t that dramatic. I swooned in the middle of a hot shower. Eddie got spooked and dragged me here. I’m just tired and hungry.”
Hen had snatched up his chart and was flipping through it, something she was almost definitely not allowed to do. “Buck, this looks pretty serious.” Her eyes widened as she skimmed his intake information. “Honey, that’s. That’s a lot of weight loss.”
She called him Honey. Never a good sign.
“Maybe I’m just getting ready for next year’s calendar,” Buck joked.
Chim gestured dramatically at him, like See? See?
Buck scowled. “Not like that.”
“They want me to keep a food journal.” He said. Would he need to get a physical notebook, or would it be okay to use his phone? He hoped his phone would be good enough. He didn't have the money for—
Fuck.
Buck was so stupid.
"Oh no." He was in the ER. Even as a walk in, the price was going to be—
"Buck?" Bobby said, alarmed.
Buck buried his hands in his hair, momentarily horrified into silence.
Everything had just gotten so, so much worse.
The sick feeling in his stomach returning for an entirely different reason.
Hen frowned. “What’s wrong?”
"I just—” A room full of real grownups who had been doing this all so much longer than him.
“I just don’t know how I’m gonna pay for this.” He hadn’t thought of it when he’d been near delirious, most of his fumbled, mumbled arguments centered around not wanting to leave Eddie’s house because it smelled so nice.
Idiot.
“I’m up to my chin in medical bills right now. And my insurance still hasn't been reinstated. From when I quit. So.”
The room dropped ten degrees.
“Buck.” Bobby said, paling. “You didn't quit.”
What?
“Pretty sure I did.” He pointed at Athena. “I have a witness.”
“You yelled the words ‘I quit’ at me in my foyer, yes. But I usually wait for at least a letter of resignation before taking official action.” Bobby took a step forward. “Buck, I never processed your termination.”
Fear gripped him then. “Then why haven’t I been getting paid?” he whispered. God, he was stupid. “Is it because—” he froze. “I won the suit.” he confessed in a rush. Had he ever told them that? “Technically. My lawyer told them I wanted money, at first. They must’ve. They.”
He couldn’t say the words.
Bobby could.
“They terminated you automatically.”
“They should’ve rehired me automatically, then! When the terms changed!”
“That’s not their job.” Bobby said, hollow. “It’s mine. And I. I didn’t know.” He looked hollow and sick.
The city had terminated him without alerting Bobby. Bobby hadn't known. Bobby should have known. They should have told him.
They aren’t allowed to do that.
Then his mind went to the waivers that he’d signed, that he’d barely read before signing in his desperation to claw his life back.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, pressing past Hen to hide his face from the room.
Trying to hide the way he was shaking.
Hen followed him, hands going to his shoulders.
“I need to—” Bobby said suddenly, then stopped. Buck spun to look, catching the barest glimpse of his face before he all but ran from the room.
A pregnant silence held the room for a moment. “Bobby’ll call. He'll get this sorted out for you.” Chim said, concerned but trying to hide it.
“This can’t be legal.” Hen shook her head.
“You’d be surprised.” Athena scowled, getting to her feet. “I think I’m going to make a few calls myself.” She shot him a look. “I’ll see you soon, Buck.” With that, she left too.
Hen squeezed Buck’s shoulders, guiding him carefully back to a seated position on his sickbed.
Buck held his arms out, and after Chris nodded, pulled him into a tight, desperate hug. Breath heaving.
Chim pulled out his phone and started fiddling with it. “I’ll tell Bobby Athena’s working on it, too. That might make him feel a little better.”
A few seconds later, there was a soft beep-beep, and the room turned as one to find Bobby’s phone sitting innocuously in one of the visitors chairs.
Hen, Buck, and Chim all looked at each other.
“I’m calling Athena,” Hen said.
Buck was back on his feet. A small hand on sleeve gave just the slightest pressure, but learned gentleness had him stopping in his tracks. He looked back.
Christopher was looking at him.
“Buddy, I need to go.” He pressed a kiss to Chris's hair. “I need to go check on something important, and then I’ll come back.”
Christopher released his sleeve. “Be safe, okay?”
“I will” Buck said sincerely. He turned to Chim and Hen. “Athena will have the best luck finding him. Can I ask you guys to stay here? There’s something I need to do.”
Hen took a half-step forward. “Do you want one of us to come with you?”
Buck shook his head. “Alone is better. And…” he sighed. “If I’m right? This conversation has been a long time coming.”
Buck took a few steps, marveling at the steadiness in his legs, in his head. He didn’t feel good, per se, but the absence of the overwhelming bad was a welcome change.
He didn’t have time to savor the change, though. Already, his feet were carrying him out of recovery, toward the elevators.
Athena was almost guaranteed to find Bobby first. There were certain, logical places to check. Bobby's truck in the parking lot. One of the chapels.
But a moment from years ago had risen to the forefront of Buck's mind: Bobby, when he’d missed his family most, loathed himself the most, didn’t pray. Buck had seen, Hen had seen, after the plane crash. Even if they hadn’t quite understood yet.
The dining table set for four places with a full, lavish meal, all of it hours cold. Buck and Hen hadn’t had context for the odd sight until a week later.
Whenever Buck thought back to that morning, that dining table stood out in his mind.
Buck had seen people try to destroy themselves with substances, before. He’d tended bar up and down the continent, after all, and crashed in seedy houses filled with people even more broke and lost and desperate than him.
That spread of empty chairs and untouched food, huddled innocuously in Bobby’s alarmingly empty apartment, was the first time he’d ever seen someone try to kill themself with memories.
He wasn’t going to pretend that Bobby loved Buck like that. That Buck’s problems would send Bobby spiraling. But he couldn’t shake the thought from his mind.
The way Bobby, not ready to be forgiven, had cooked dinner for his lost family, set the table, and waited. Knowing they wouldn’t come and torturing himself with that knowledge. Marinating in his own guilt, his own failure, his own grief.
That was the look Buck had seen on Bobby’s face before he’d walked out, the one that had given way an instant later to a miserable, tight-jawed resignation.
The face of a man who didn’t want to be forgiven.
That look had scared Buck.
The elevator beeped, and the doors opened. Buck stepped out, rounded the corner, and.
There was the waiting area his friends and family had haunted during Buck’s second leg surgery.
There was Bobby.
Returning to the site of his failure.
Waiting for someone who wasn’t coming.
Bobby was staring at his hands where they rested in his lap, fingers knitted together.
“Hey,” Buck started.
Bobby didn’t look up. He heaved a heavy sigh and closed his eyes.
Buck started forward, “Bobby—”
“Do you blame me?” his voice was gravelly, as though he’d been smoking. Or screaming.
Buck stopped in his tracks. “What?”
“Do you blame me,” Bobby enunciated slowly, without emotion, “for the bomb on the truck?”
“Bobby, that's…” Buck shook his head disbelievingly. “No. Of course not.”
“You should.”
“Well, too bad.” Buck crossed his arms.
“It should have been me.” Bobby continued with a cold, grim certainty. “I failed to protect you. And everything I’ve done after has just made it worse.”
“Bobby.” Buck took a few steps closer. “C’mon.”
Bobby dropped his head into his hands. “Back in your probationary year, you called me for help. I didn’t pick up. And you left me a voicemail.”
That didn’t sound right. Bobby always answered the phone when someone called. Always.
“Buck, you thought you were in danger of being fired. You asked me not to give up on you. You,” Bobby’s swallowed, “You told me you couldn’t survive being alone again.”
“Really? Buck asked, faintly horrified. “I said that? In a voicemail?” Probie Buck had been a needy, greedy little moron, but that was a lot. “Was I drunk? Please tell me I was drunk.”
“You needed help.” Bobby said, sounding almost protective. “You needed someone, and you reached out, and I didn’t pick up. And this...it feels like I’ve done the same damn thing again.”
“You’re here.” Buck said. The enormity of what that meant to Buck couldn’t really be put into words, so he just repeated, “You’re here.”
“Yeah. I’m here.” Bobby scoffed. “Too late.”
There wasn’t a way to tell him that Buck was the sort of sad sack who would wait forever. That too late had never been a problem for him before. So Buck stayed quiet.
“The last thing I wanted...It was never my intention to make you think you were alone. I was selfish. I wanted you alive and safe, even if it meant you were miserable.”
That familiar grief-anger, that he doesn’t think you’re good enough, reared itself, but. Buck stopped. He thought back to what Eddie had said. How scared he had sounded, a week ago, a lifetime ago. “I almost died in front of you.” Buck said slowly.
Bobby sighed. “It’s not you who wasn’t strong enough, Buck. It was me. You’re just the one who suffered for it.”
Buck plopped himself into the seat beside Bobby, letting their shoulders brush.
“My reaction was...big.” Buck allowed. “Probably too big. I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. I just wanted...” He trailed off. “Sometimes it feels like I'm nothing if I'm not a firefighter.”
Bobby wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “You matter. Even if no one loved you, you would still matter.”
Buck picked at his nails. “And I'm sorry. About what I said. Back at the station. I…I like it when you call me kid.” It probably should have been a harder confession than it was. Buck had never been particularly good at the kind of shame that would have required.
But the honesty earned him a small smile. A real one. “You do?”
“Yeah.” Buck gave a crinkly little smile back. “Even if I’m, uh, not so good at it.”
“At what?”
Buck’s eyes burned. “Being somebody’s kid.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Bobby squeezed Buck’s shoulder tightly. Buck leaned into him.
“I don’t blame you. Not even a little.” Buck asserted, not looking at Bobby’s face. “But…would it help if I forgave you?”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Well, then I extra-forgive you. I don’t blame you. This isn’t your fault.”
Buck hopped to his feet and only swayed a little. “You know, I'm gonna be on a specialized diet for a while. I could use some help with meal prep. You know anybody who might be interested?”
Bobby smiled a little. “I will plant myself in Eddie’s kitchen and cook for you myself, if you think he’ll let me get away with it.”
Buck stood in front of Bobby’s chair and held out a hand. “Alright, Pops. Get on up.”
It had been a long time since he’d called him that.
Bobby looked at him, expression warm, and took the proffered hand.
They stood, face to face. Man to man.
“Can I try this from the beginning?” Buck took a deep breath. “Bobby, I'm a lot of trouble."
Bobby’s expression was steady, open, and dependable. “What do you need?”
"Help me, Bobby?” Buck’s voice wavered. “I don't have anybody else. Everyone who's ever loved me like I was worth something is in this building.”
Bobby didn’t interrupt, but took Buck’s hand in his own and squeezed it tight.
“No one's tried to protect me from anything since I was twelve years old.” Buck’s voice shook. “Maddie's my big sister. She's also...kinda my mom? She's my whole family. She's everything I had, growing up.” Buck blinked rapidly. “And when I came to LA, I hadn't heard from her in years.”
“Like, now I know it was because of Doug. But before, I had no idea. She wasn’t in my life anymore.”
Buck swallowed. “My parents never wanted me to be anything except gone.”
Something in Bobby’s jaw tightened.
“You guys saved me, you know? You gave me a place to belong. A family. The 118…it’s what I have. There were points in my life where it was all I had. That’s why I was so scared. That’s why...”
“Buck,” Bobby said softly, “ I’m so sorry.”
“No, listen. That’s why I...I signed some waivers, in order to work again. A contract. I looked over it before signing, and it seemed okay then, but now? Now I’m second guessing everything. I have no idea what they’re allowed to do to me and get away with.” Fear curled around his ribs, squeezing his lungs. “But the one thing I do know is that I’m not allowed to fight back. No exceptions.”
Fear made his knees wobble. Bobby took him by the elbows, keeping him upright.
“I literally, legally, can’t do this by myself. This is too big, it’s too much to handle. I’m scared. I need help.” Buck finally said what he should have said when all this started. What he should have said that night on Bobby’s porch. “Bobby, help me.”
Bobby pulled him into a fierce hug. “I will.”
Then,
“The LAFD and the Labor Board of California?” a voice called, “Oh, is that all? You should have just said so.”
Surprise pulled them apart, but Bobby kept his hands on Buck’s shoulders.
“Chim!” Bobby admonished, and the man himself rounded the corner, grinning, followed by an equally unrepentant Hen.
They had very definitely been eavesdropping.
Nosy jerks, Buck thought fondly.
“Where’s Chris?” Buck asked, peering around them.
“Eddie’s back. I’m here on reconnaissance, actually. You took too long.”
There was a moment of silence, where they should have brought up the awful thing Buck had just dropped in all their laps. Instead, they looked at one another. Not needing words. Them, knowing. Buck, knowing they knew. And that was that.
Hen put a hand on his arm. “You know we’re gonna help you too, right? Don’t underestimate us.”
“I'd never.” Buck told her seriously.
Chim slung an arm around his shoulder, nearly dislodging Bobby. “You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?”
"Sorry I’m so much trouble.” Buck said, a little too small and earnest to be a joke.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Chimney leaned in conspiratorially. “It doesn’t make a difference. We still like you just as much.”
“Don’t you know?” Hen smiled at him then, sweet and fond. She poked his cheek with a finger. “We knew you were trouble when we decided to keep you.”
It seemed ridiculous that that was the thing, after this train wreck of a day, that made his breath catch too deep in his chest. That made the tears finally, finally spill over.
The moment the first sob left his lips, Buck was swamped in a clumsy group hug. Hen was making the comforting, slightly patronizing shh-ing sounds only the mother of a six year old was capable of, and Chimney was apologizing while slapping him a little too heartily on the back, and Bobby was.
Bobby was there, present, with his arms wrapped firmly around Buck. Buck sagged against him, exhaustion sweeping over him as a bone-deep fear released its chokehold around his heart..
It didn’t matter if he was unsteady. He was being held up on all sides by his friends.
He loved them. He loved them so much.
Bobby chuckled a little, and then Buck was laughing, too.
Not amused. Relieved.
They were going to help him.
Together, they could figure this out.
The family that fished him out of the loneliest years of his life and decided to keep him.
No matter how much trouble he was in.
No matter how much trouble he was.
Notes:
Content Warnings:
Discussions of parental rejection and grief.
Medical debt.
Self doubt, negative self talk, unreliable narrator.
I really adore the way the character of Christopher Diaz is written in the show. Chris as a younger kid is well-loved and well-adjusted, and this is clear in the way he acts and the way his dialogue is written. Like a lot of kids, he talks to other people the way his parents, or in this case Eddie, talk to him: he is polite, empathetic, and reassuring. Because this is the way he knows to interact with the world, because it’s what’s been modeled for him. BUT. He also feels responsible for the people around him, especially his dad. And in later seasons, when Eddie is really mentally unwell, Chris as a teenage character is already primed to take that upon himself. Love that kid. I tried to do him justice and keep with what I consider to be the core tenets of his character at this age.
He kind of took over this chapter; I was really worried about doing his character justice because he is such an important part of the Eddie and Buck story. I feel like he often gets pushed to the side for the sake of romantic development.I wanted to include him in the journey. It's his family too, after all. (Please let me know if he came out okay.)
Athena is also extremely tricky to write.Also: I (like a lot of folks) hate the way the Dr. Wells subplot was handled in the show and I wanted to address it within my own little world here. Instead of focusing on it as a point of angst for Buck, I thought it might be interesting to use it as an offscreen focal point for Buck and Bobby’s changing relationship in S1. I really like the concept proposed in the show that Bobby spent so much time trying to keep Buck safe and alive in S1 that he didn’t have time to think about killing himself; I wanted to put that idea to the test. It also didn’t seem in character to me for Bobby to know about what happened and not do anything.
Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you liked this!
I’m on tumblr at eggmacguffin <3Next time on Habitual Damage:
Maddie and Eddie have a somewhat combative heart to heart about their favorite boy, we take a delightful dip into whatever weird, lopsided version of California law is canon to the 9-1-1 universe, and a truly absurd amount of money changes hands.
Also Buck and Eddie talk about their bullshit. Finally.
Chapter 4: The Answer
Summary:
Featuring: the futility in trying to guess what Buck is thinking, ever, and people who love him enough to never stop trying.
Notes:
This chapter is…really late.
My life was thrown off balance by crazy stuff happening at work, including insane amounts of overtime, that basically eliminated any free time I had for writing at all for a couple of months.
But still. Pretty late.
I can only hope the end result is worth the wait. <3…and , uh, I hope you guys like Eddie.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The hike from recovery to the parking garage to the truck was accompanied by the kind of heavy quiet Eddie had only ever had the pleasure of encountering at funerals. Or maybe after sticking his foot in his mouth in a spectacular fashion.
Maddie’s eyes were locked forward and her expression was tight at the corners of her mouth. Despite the differences in their height, Eddie found himself having to lengthen his own stride in order to keep pace with her.
There was something squirming and childish in Eddie’s gut that was quietly convinced he was about to be yelled at.
Ridiculous.
He knew Maddie better than that, for all that he barely knew Maddie at all.
No, that wasn’t quite true.
Sure, the two of them had never really talked, but…
In a weird way, he did know her, or at least parts of her. She had the same gentleness, the same bashfulness and good humor he recognized in Buck.
Quick to laugh and quick to cry. Not to mention the Buckley style people-pleasing. Buckley brand unpredictability. The same underlying current of quiet, unspoken desperation.
[Maddie had been split open. Bared, unfairly. Eddie knew horrific details about her life that she had hidden from her own brother for over half a year.
Eddie had felt deeply inadequate sitting on the bench next to Buck that night at the hospital.
The kinds of grief Eddie had lived through up til then had always felt…borrowed. That nothing-grief, that un-grief for the death of a soldier he hadn’t known, the absence of a wife who hadn’t died, and betrayal from parents he’d never trusted.
But this kind of fear, this kind of grief? It was overwhelming, uncontrollable. It was the kind that changes your brain chemistry.
Eddie had sat there, helpless, armed with nothing but a naked, aching care he could only express fumblingly, watching Buck’s world shake apart. Feeling like nothing less than a liar, he watched as his friend was weighed down, helplessly, with the newfound certainty that nothing was sacred.
Buck had spent some nights on Eddie’s couch afterward, when Maddie and Buck had both been unwilling to return to an apartment where they’d have to step over pinkish stains of Chimney’s blood just to get inside.
Maddie herself had stayed with Chimney for a week or so. He’d given her the master bedroom as well as the key and slept on his own couch for the period of time it had taken her to transition from recovering from stabbing her husband to death on a mountain to ready to hunt for a new apartment.
Maddie found a new place and Eddie helped her move again. He’d hung back, avoided being alone in the room with her, terrified of making her feel uncomfortable. Terrifically uncomfortable himself.
Buck started making it through the night without dreaming and moved into a downtown apartment his pretty little girlfriend had picked out for him.
Moving on. Moving forward.
Soon after that, Eddie learned for himself what that real grief felt like: heavy, silent, and smothering. Frightening and paralyzing and threaded with endless, selfish guilt.
And then he learned it again.
And again.]
Still. The two of them had never really talked.
It made the distance between the two of them actively awkward. She was a driving force behind the axis supporting one quadrant of his universe that he exchanged polite small talk with before retreating into a separate block of their social circle.
They reached the truck, and Eddie patted down his pockets for his keys.
Abruptly, Maddie asked, “Do you want me to drive?”
It was the first thing she had said to him since leaving the hospital room. The question was at once surprising and just a touch disquieting.
He stared at her for a moment, feeling almost as though he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to, before clearing his throat and gruffly intoning, “No, that’s fine.”
Before leaving the garage, they stored Chris’s booster seat in Maddie’s car to make more room in Eddie’s truck for Buck’s things.
They had been unprepared for too much of this.
They pulled onto the highway and drove for a blissful three minutes before being enveloped in the throng of LA midday traffic.
“Why did he call you?” Maddie asked suddenly.
Eddie didn’t flinch.
“You’ve been fighting for weeks.” There was quiet steel in her tone. “Why did he call you, Eddie? Why did he think you’d pick up?”
“I told him he could.” Eddie lips pulled back slightly, baring his gritted teeth in an unfriendly smile. “You know, this doesn’t feel like it’s any of your business. This is between me and Buck.”
“You yelled at him in public,” she countered. “In front of your entire shift.”
“Buck…” Eddie cleared his throat. “Buck told you about that?”
“Chimney. Actually.”
Eddie drummed his fingers in a quick staccato on the steering wheel, once, then again, before he got a hold of himself.
“Buck can’t hold a grudge, you know.” Maddie stared straight ahead, eyes watching the road. “He'll forgive you before you're sorry.”
“I know.”
“It's not a virtue.”
“I know.” Eddie pursed his lips. “I know, alright?”
Any performance of aggression that Buck offered was brief and charmingly toothless. Now that Eddie knew him, he could spot when Buck was playing angry because he thought he was supposed to.
Buck really didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He just wanted people to be nice to him.
(Eddie wasn’t a very nice guy.)
“You weren’t acting like it,” she snapped, with a ferocity that, despite everything, still managed to surprise him.
When you knew what to look for, Buck was easy to defuse.
Maddie’s anger wasn’t like that at all.
Eddie balked at the implicit accusation. “Oh, so you don’t trust me to take care of him?”
“How could I?” She said coldly. “I listened to him cry over you, Eddie. I’ve been looking after him his whole life, and you couldn't even manage a year.”
The admission made Eddie burn. It made him sick.
It made him mean.
“If you’re the only important person allowed in his life, why didn’t the hospital call you?” He asked snidely.
Maddie seemed to lose a little of that fire at the question, which in turn made Eddie feel a little bad for asking it.
“I’m his power of attorney. But…” she huffed a small sigh before confirming, “I’m not his emergency contact.”
The straightforwardness of her answer surprised him, softened him a little bit.
Eddie flicked on his turn signal and glanced over his shoulder before changing lanes. Not certain of his conclusion until he said it out loud. “Bobby, then?” That would explain how he and Athena had managed to reach the hospital before anyone else.
Maddie gave a short, sharp nod. “It’s been Bobby since he started at the 118.”
Eddie blinked at the realization. He felt a stab of gratitude that his tía lived in LA, or he might have found himself doing the same thing. And what was an affectionate, practical gesture coming from Buck would have felt utterly pathetic coming from Eddie. Another nail in the coffin of how little he had his life together.
“He never changed it?” Eddie asked, genuinely curious.
“At first,” She said haltingly, “I think he didn’t believe I was staying in town long enough for it to matter.” Her lips quivered. “He’d have seen asking as pressuring me to stay.”
“You seem pretty settled now.“
“My best guess?” she propped her elbow on the window seal and rested her chin in her hand, “He didn’t change it because he already knows I'll be here. He already knows I love him.”
Luckily, they had just reached a red light, because it meant Eddie was free to stare at her instead of the road.
She was exactly right.
That was what Buck would do. That was what Buck would think.
She was in fact so exactingly correct that he realized, with an uncomfortable twinge in his chest, that he was talking to someone else who knew Buck, really knew him. Who understood the awkward, needy, selfless way that Buck loved, and didn’t even judge him for it.
Someone who knew him like Eddie knew him.
The possessiveness, the presumptiveness of the thought surprised him.
An odd sense of camaraderie, the unexpected realization that someone else got it, loosened the defensive hunch of his shoulders enough for a prickle of shame to find its way through.
What the hell was he doing? Picking a fight with Maddie when she had every right to be pissed at him? He squeezed his eyes shut for just a moment.
“Hey,” he said before he lost his nerve, “I—I’m sorry. Sorry about…” The awful shit she’s been through? What he’s let happen to her brother? This absolute trainwreck of a conversation? “...you know.”
The light turned green. The truck rolled forward.
“Eddie…” Maddie shook her head and slumped back in her seat, a tension he hadn’t noticed before leaving her frame in a wave. She glanced over at him before her eyes flicked down to stare in her lap. “I shouldn’t have…this isn’t your fault.”
Eddie may not know Maddie that well, but he definitely knew that tone. He glanced at her. “It’s not your fault either.”
She shook her head. “No, I knew something was wrong. But I…I misunderstood. I thought I knew what was going on, but I didn’t.”
Eddie tilted his head questioningly.
“I…I thought he’d stopped eating.” She glanced at Eddie. “Voluntarily.”
It was like a punch to the gut.
“Stopped eating?” he croaked. “What…why would he…?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Eddie didn’t slam on the breaks. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t look away from the road. He couldn’t even be sure he breathed. “You told Hen and Chimney.”
“They know a little. They know enough.” She glanced over. “You guys were fighting.” She repeated, and she was right.
“We’re not fighting now.” He said. “Maddie. What happened?”
“He was little. When I was in high school. Our mother would…well, you know how teenage boys eat a lot, right?”
“Children in general eat a lot.” Eddie said blankly.
“Yeah. It’s like our mother was almost…trying to get ahead of him. He was still little. She would criticize him for his table manners, at first. Then she started snapping at him for getting snacks between meals.”
“He’s always been sensitive.” she said, then: “No, that doesn’t sound right. That’s not what I mean.”
“No, I get what you mean,” Eddie said, because he did. “He’ll deny himself of anything the moment someone can convince him he doesn’t deserve it.”
Maddie nodded sharply. “That’s right. He’d eat when I was around. Only,” she said tightly, “when I was around. Or when he was at school. I don’t know when it started. He refused to tell me, but I know it was…a while. I know he lost weight.” She tugged on a lock of her hair.
“It was fall break of my senior year. I went on a marching band trip that lasted…maybe five days? When I got back, he was home alone. Lying in his bedroom. He couldn’t sit up without shaking. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me,” she swallowed, “he hadn't eaten since Monday.”
Eddie bit down savagely on the inside of his cheek.
“I asked him why. He said—He said he wasn’t eating unless he was asked or told to. He wasn't eating unless he deserved it. He told me he wanted to see how long it took Mom and Dad to notice.”
“Jesus.” Eddie breathed. It made a horrible sort of sense, in rudimentary Buck-logic.
“They didn’t, of course. He wasn’t bothering them about anything, so why should they care what he was doing?” The words poured out of her like a storm. “They only ever looked at him when they thought ignoring him would make them look like bad parents. To other people. There wasn’t anyone there to see, to judge them for it, so why would it matter?”
“I told him. I told him I would always, always want him to eat enough, that he deserved to eat, whether I was with him or not. If he was willing to starve himself for our parents,” she said with contempt, “it stood to reason that he would be willing to eat for me.” Her voice trembled. “I spent the rest of the break eating every meal with him in his room. And—and my mom stopped me and asked me exactly once if something was wrong. If Evan was sick, or hurt. I told her no.”
Eddie made a surprised noise. Maddie flinched.
“I hate,” She said, then stopped. “She would only ever look at him when he was hurt. He noticed. He’s not stupid,” she said, with a certain kind of heat. “They’d complain about how reckless he was, as if the only reason he was constantly hurling himself into traffic wasn’t—” She cut herself off. “If I had told her that something was wrong, and let her reward him for starving himself, he’d keep doing it.” Maddie’s tone grew frantic. “You have to understand, he would have kept doing it. I had to stop it. Because Buck, he’s, he’s—”
Eddie looked at her in his passenger seat, wringing her hands and stuttering, and thought that he perhaps hadn’t understood Maddie Buckley at all, not really, until this conversation.
“—he’s my responsibility. He always has been, because no one else—” She stopped, her hands twitching nervously for an explanation.
“—because no one else could be trusted to take care of him.” Eddie finished for her. “For a long time, he only had you. Right?”
Maddie closed her eyes. ”It scared me more than any other rotten thing they ever did. I’ve just been so scared of it happening again. Which doesn’t make sense. They’re not even here, and…” She chewed her lip, an unkind smile twisting her mouth. “Honestly, saying it out loud, it doesn’t even sound that bad.”
A more cynical, judgemental version of Eddie, the one that he'd smothered the moment he realized just how much it would impede his ability to be a parent, might not have understood.
Maddie hadn’t said an age, but still, his mind went to Chris. The way it always did. He thought of his son in a position of gambling his needs for affection. He forced himself to think about it, to confront the idea.
And he understood. Not only why it was awful, but why it had affected Maddie so deeply.
The stress and terror of being forced to both defend and protect, all at once.
“Maddie,” Eddie said frankly, “It sounds really fucking horrible.”
Maddie looked at him then, flushed with a stark kind of relief that she didn’t have to explain to him why it mattered. Why it was still important, why she was telling him a story about a kid from twenty years ago skipping meals just to see if anyone cared. Because it was a kid. Because it was Buck. Because then, no one had cared but Maddie. The problem wasn’t just a lack of sustenance to the body, but a poison to the mind, as well. The kind that could leave you chewed up and twisted all around if it got to you too early.
“When he started losing weight, I just assumed it was the same thing again.” She shook her head. “He’s not a kid. But I missed so much time with him. I can’t read him like that anymore.” There was an odd sort of grief coloring her tone. “I had no idea what was wrong these past weeks, or how to help him.” She hiccupped. “I…I almost miss when the worst thing I had to protect him from was our parents.” Her breath hitched, and she burst into tears.
She really was so, so much like Buck.
Eddie never knew how to deal with tears in a social setting. It made him feel like a fraud, like they were going to look at him and see that he wasn’t crying about whatever they were crying about and know it was because he was some kind of asshole robot.
You’d think time with Buck would have taught him how to handle it, but in reality that had mostly only taught him how to handle Buck crying.
“Napkins in the glove box,” he said awkwardly, “If you need them.” He listened to her noisily blow her nose with a vague sense of guilt. The tissues he usually carried were in Chris’s backpack. Napkins were bad for your skin, right? What if she got raw skin because of him?
“Thank you,” she said wetly, but professionally.
The truck trundled to a stop on the reliable gravel outside Mike’s. Eddie turned the engine off, put his hand on the door handle to get out, and. Stopped. Itching with anger, suspicion, and curiosity. “Am I allowed to ask what the hell is wrong with your parents?” Eddie asked, keeping his tone carefully light.
Maddie snorted and gave him a look. “What the hell is wrong with your parents?”
Her retort was so comically unprompted that it broke the tension.
For the first time on this miserable day, Eddie felt laughter bubbling in his chest like fresh water.
Maddie was funny.
He’d known her for almost two years; how had he never learned she was funny?
After exchanging a few words with Mike (Bobby had somehow left a phenomenally bad impression), they headed for the jeep.
Eddie took the front seat while Maddie got to work on the back. Buck was usually kind of a neat freak, so it was disconcerting to see any space of his cluttered.
By the time he made it to the glovebox, he had extracted an umbrella, a stack of documents containing both a social security card and a birth certificate, and a too-small high school letterman jacket.
Inside the glovebox, he found car information, medicine, an envelope stuffed with photographs, and.
A chapter book.
He recognized it. Paperback, one corner of the cover bent. Slight water damage to the first few pages.
It was a chapter book that he had caught Buck reading to Christopher a few times. Months ago.
Buck wasn’t much for fiction in general (“Why should I care?” he’d say blankly. “It’s not even real.”) and Christopher was independent in the way smart kids tended to be, but the book had been recommended by Karen as a quality selection and they had both gotten pretty into it.
It had talking mice, or maybe rats? Involved in some kind of mystery. It was science-fiction or fantasy, which he supposed made sense, if the mice were talking. Internal consistency in logic.
But they hadn’t gotten the chance to finish it. There was a bookmark holding a place maybe three quarters of the way through.
After losing nearly everything else, Buck had considered this precious enough to keep.
Bedding. Waterproof food storage. Medication. Clothing. Bills. Pictures of his friends.
A children’s book.
Eddie felt his breath catch in his throat. He tightened his fingers around the cheap binding. Feeling as though if he moved in this moment, took a single step, breathed wrong, he—
—he didn’t know what.
“Eddie?” Maddie came around the car and startled at whatever expression was on Eddie’s face. “What’s up?” Her eyes dropped to the book. “What’s that?”
“It’s…” He whispered. “It’s Chris’s.” As though that explained everything.
By the way Maddie’s eyes softened, maybe it did.
“I’m going to do one final sweep, so you’re good to go get in the truck.” She patted his shoulder before sticking her hand out. “Mind if I drive?”
Wordlessly, he dropped the keys into her outstretched palm.
It felt like he owed her.
Some kind of explanation.
“I don’t have a lot of guy friends my age.” Eddie started falteringly. “Never have. Guys like me don’t have friends like Buck.” He winced. That made it sound like it was some distinction he was making, some pickiness on his part.
Most guys dislike him on sight. Like something about the way he moved or talked tipped them off somehow. Told them on some instinctual level that Eddie was wrong. Faking.
“What kind of guy are you, Eddie?” It was such a Buck question that Eddie almost laughed.
The same patient curiosity. Like whatever he was about to say both mattered dearly and changed nothing.
“I got along better with my tía and abuela than cousins my own age,” he told her. “My sisters used to say that I acted more like an old lady than a teenage boy.”
Maddie hummed. “And what do you think?”
Eddie snorted. “I told them if they said that shit in front of our parents all three of us would get in trouble.”
He wasn’t good at talking about himself. But it only seemed fair, to say just a little. Just…wanting her to understand. The same way she had given him the opportunity to understand.
And maybe she did, because the next thing she said was, “What is it you like about Buck?”
“Christopher.” Eddie said immediately. “The way he is with Christopher,” and stopped, as if that was a complete thought on its own.
Eddie was allowed to be a father. It was the best, most important thing about him. His rattling, crooked heart was allowed to stumble out into the world as long as it was trailing after his son. Chris needed to come first. In everything.
Buck could be found in that axis of his life, too. Eddie wasn’t lying, or even exaggerating.
After all, the way Buck loved Chris was the first thing Eddie had loved about Buck.
When strangers met Christopher for the first time, Eddie was used to having armor up against a certain kind of pity. A certain kind of contempt.
The way some adults would take one look at Chris and talk down to him, talk over his head to Eddie.
It made Eddie want to snap, “Don’t look at him like that. Don’t talk to him like that. You don’t know a damn thing about him. He’s smarter than you are.”
Just don’t walk so fast down the sidewalk. Wait a second to let him finish speaking. All it took was a little patience. A little bit of effort.
It wasn’t courtesy. It was decency. But the thought of having to beg for either made Eddie want to scream.
Things had been better after starting at Chris’s new school. The adults there gave him a chance, took him seriously. Slowly, Eddie’s hackles had lowered.
But fresh from Texas, fresh out of the academy, he’d had his guard up. Already gritting his teeth at the prospect of having to handhold even one more adult through not treating his child like he was some kind of embarrassing mistake or shameful inconvenience.
But Buck had been…perfect.
This singular thing had been so effortlessly easy.
Christopher and Buck had connected so instantly. Like they’d known each other for years. It might have made Eddie envious if seeing the both of them so easily happy didn't thoroughly settle two of his most prevalent anxieties.
“It’s special.” he insisted, because Maddie looked…he chose to interpret her expression as skeptical. ”It’s important.”
“Oh I know. I hear more updates about Christopher than I do about you.”
The implication, that Buck apparently spent an inordinate amount of time talking to Maddie about Eddie as well, went very tactfully ignored.
Maddie pressed. “What do you like about Buck for you?”
Eddie swallowed.
There was a long pause.
“Buck, he’s good. He’s wonderful. There isn’t anyone like him.” He said finally. “I don’t know where he finds so much of himself to give. It’s a little…” he shook his head. “Honestly? It’s a little scary, sometimes.”
Eddie was always so neck deep in his own problems it was a miracle if anyone besides Chris even made it onto his radar. Just look at Lena Bosco.
“If I ask, he’ll give. No matter what.”
Maddie tilted her head to one side. “Scary,” she echoed. “For him, or for you?”
Buck always called himself dumb, but he’d always had a certain kind of social intelligence about him. Not for himself, but for others. Buck didn’t know a damn thing about himself, but there were times he was so insightful about someone else, so easily able to connect and empathize and beguile, that Eddie didn’t know what to call it if not intelligence.
This was Eddie discovering who, exactly, Buck had learned that from.
“He…”
He scares the hell out of me.
“He’s gonna find somebody.” Eddie said instead. “Fall in love. Start his own family.” It was obvious to anyone who really looked how badly Buck wanted a family of his own.
“And you won’t,” Maddie guessed, a little too knowingly.
“I’m just a distraction.” Eddie said instead of acknowledging…whatever she was implying. “And…”
“And?”
“And If I ask,” Eddie repeated, “he’ll give.”
The silence between them felt loaded, charged, solid and extant with the breadth and breath of a living thing.
“Buck has had a lot of people making decisions for him, lately.” Maddie said at last. “You get to choose what he is to you. He should get to choose what you are to him.”
Eddie ducked his head and found his gaze caught on the book in his hands. He spent the rest of the ride to his home gently stroking along the spine with his thumb and neither talking to nor looking at Maddie.
They swung by the house to unload their spoils. Maddie’s phone pinged just as they got the last load inside. “Chim?” she murmured, opening her messages. Her expression dropped horrifically quickly. Her eyes snapped up to meet Eddie’s as her voice dwindled to a whisper. “It's worse. Worse than we thought.”
Eddie’s breath caught in his chest. As long as he’s alive, he told himself. We can come back from anything as long as he’s alive.
“He doesn’t have any money. They haven’t been paying him.” Her voice hitched and took on a franic note. “Not his worker’s comp, not his salary, not his benefits…” She trailed off. One of her hands snapped up to cover her mouth and her shoulders began to curl inward.
The familiarity of the gesture washed some of the dawning horror from Eddie’s own mind.
This, right here, was another thing she must have in common with her brother.
Buck was extremely proficient under pressure at work, just like the rest of them. They had the training to adapt to adversity faced in other people’s emergencies promptly and correctly. But for Buck outside of work? The wrong sort of shock at the exact wrong moment could trigger a total short term collapse if no one cut him off.
A lot of it was borne of helplessness. With Buck, the best thing to snap him out of a panic spiral was to give him something productive to do.
So Eddie shoved his own feelings down and said loudly, “He’ll be okay, since he’s got us to help him.”
Maddie uncovered her face and blinked at him owlishly. “What?” she croaked.
“I’ve got money. You’ve got money. We can handle the short term, and Bobby can fix the long term. And…” Eddie flushed a little. “He’s not alone anymore. And it’s not just you who cares. I—They all care. They’ll all help.” He hesitated. “Um. Would you like a glass of water?”
Maddie stared at him, blinking. She straightened her posture, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Then she took another.
When her eyes flashed open, they looked clear and determined. “You’re right. Yes, you’re right. Sorry about that.” She wiped at her eyes. “No, I don’t need water. We need to go.” She grabbed his keys from their spot on the counter and stalked towards the front door. “Let's head back. I’ll drive.”
Eddie inclined his head in agreement and followed her out to the truck.
When they made it back to Buck’s hospital room, Eddie didn’t find quite the warzone he expected. He also, notably, didn’t find Buck.
Instead, what he found was Chimney and Christopher sitting cross-legged on the empty hospital bed and playing what appeared to be poker, gambling their pooled funds of $2.17 in change back and forth and having an absolute blast doing it.
He laughed, drawing their attention.
“Eddie! Great. I’ve got to—wait. First,” he turned to Chris. “I fold.” Chris saluted him and raked in his winnings.
“Hen! Have you,” Chim wiggled his fingers vaguely, “triangulated their coordinates, or whatever?”
“I have a vague idea of where they went, if that’s what you mean,” Hen said, but she looked amused. Chris snickered from the bed, and he could see Maddie hiding a smile behind her hand out of the corner of his vision. Eddie, last man standing, took a hard stance against corny jokes and pointedly rolled his eyes.
Chimney had one foot out the door when he spun on his heel to face them again. “Wait.” He stepped back into the room and trotted in front of Maddie, taking her hand. “Are you doing okay?” All the urgency and energy from a moment before was gone. If Eddie didn’t know better, he’d think the man before him didn’t have a place to be in the world.
Maddie smiled at him, clear and bright and blinding for just a second. “I’m okay.” she said. “Go on.” Chim took a step back and saluted her, not dissimilar to the way Chris had saluted him a moment ago, and took off out the door.
“Wait!” Eddie called, but it was no use. They had already scampered off down the hall. “...where’s Buck?” he finished anyway. Uselessly.
“Buck will be back,” said a soft, meandering voice from the bed. Chris jingled his winnings at them. “He promised.”
Eddie melted a little. His world re-balanced itself the way it always was when he saw his son. He walked the few steps over to the bed and pulled Chris into a light hug, taking care to release him before he started to squirm. “I see you’ve been hard at work.”
“Chimney said I have a ‘heck of a poker face’.”
“Don't let your Abuela hear you say that.” Eddie sat down next to him. ”Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure.”
“I know I invited Buck to live with us, but I shouldn’t have done that without talking to you first.” Because his first responsibility would always, always be to Christopher. “If you’re not comfortable with that, he can stay somewhere else. He won’t stop being our friend even if he isn’t staying with us, okay?”
Chris tilted his chin up and said, “Thanks. But Buck already asked me if it was okay. He can stay with us.”
“He—” Eddie shook his head. “—of course he did.”
From the hallway, there was the muffled commotion of gently jostling bodies, and a soft chuckle, and a clatter of footsteps, and—
—and there was Buck.
The first thing that struck Eddie were the sweet pink undertones of his skin, such a contrast to the sallow, pale Buck he’d checked into the hospital that the cold what-if terror from this morning momentarily gripped him by the scruff of his neck and shook him like a dog.
But Buck was here.
He was missing a slight roundedness, a faint plushness built of stacked, hydrated muscle and healthy skin that Eddie had gotten used to. Instead, his cheeks and his hips were contained in muted angles and his muscular frame had waned into something slightly more compact.
It was a very slight change, one that someone else might not have spotted even if they were looking for it, but the contrast screamed at Eddie in this moment, with guilt making his throat itch. It reminded him too much of the way Buck had wilted, shedding muscle and as he’d slowly recovered from his crush injury and fought his way back, step by step, into a himself that he recognized.
But Buck was here.
Standing between Chimney and Hen, with his friends lightly supporting him on either side. Eddie felt a familiar, unpleasant pang.
That day in the firehouse, when he had seen Buck trembling and unsteady, all muffled wheezing screams and unfocused eyes, propped up between Chimney and fucking Rick? Eddie had felt that same shot of greedy, shameful envy. At the time and after, he was horrified that he had somehow found time for it through his horror and concern.
It was grounding to find that he wasn’t any better of a person than he’d been then.
(Because it should have been Eddie’s hands.)
But Buck was here.
He was steady on his feet. It was such a stark relief to see him moving again.
The unnatural stillness from this morning was gone. He was pink. He was smiling, eyes roving the room, and when that gaze met Eddie’s, the smile widened.
“Hey,” he said. “Still on for a sleepover at your place?”
“You planning a party?” Eddie joked weakly. It wasn’t funny, but Buck laughed anyway.
“I hope you’re up for hosting this afternoon,” Hen said, a little wry, a little apologetic. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Everyone’s coming to our house?” Chris piped up. “Can I ride with Chimney?”
Behind him, Maddie said, “We’ve already got his carseat. I’m fine with it if you are. Can you handle getting Buck home by yourself?”
When Eddie looked at her, she offered him a small, real smile and a slight tilt of her head.
His gaze slid helplessly to Buck and lingered for a moment before flicking back to Maddie.
Her expression didn’t change.
[Whatever his face may or may not have done when Buck walked in, Maddie had seen all of it.]
Eddie swallowed. “Sounds good.”
Eddie couldn’t help but be reminded of their last solo trip in the truck together, just under a week ago.
The circumstances were wildly different, but it all still seemed to boil down to Eddie fumbling his way though trying to help and fucking everything up.
Although, recent revelations made Buck shooting down his haphazard offer to spend last weekend at the Diaz house make even less sense.
What was different? Why would he refuse one night but now be willing to essentially move in? Eddie knew he wasn’t the only choice available—
(There were a million things Eddie couldn't say, emotions that he didn't have the practice needed to put them into words.
All he could say was, “Buck's coming home with us.”
And all Eddie could think was, my family needs to be under one roof tonight, or I might—
and he stopped, because he didn't know.)
—so why had he agreed so readily this time?
“So…how’s work?”
Eddie suppressed a wince. Buck had asked that question a lot over the past months with a strained smile and poorly masked envy. An unspoken, but fully heard -without me? tacked on to the end. “Not much to say.”
“That can’t be true. There’s always something on a call worth talking about.”
“I, uh, haven’t been on any calls this week.”
“Wha—Why?” Buck asked indignantly, already working up some defense in Eddie’s favor. Because that’s what Buck always did.
“Bobby and I had a disagreement.” That sounded better than We had a screaming match in the kitchen that made him doubt my willingness to follow orders in the field, didn’t it? “It was probably for the best.” Eddie said, instead of He's handled this thing with you almost as badly as I have and I can’t exactly yell at myself, “I needed time to cool off.”
“A whole week?” said Buck incredulously, who’d never stayed mad at a friend longer than the length of a conversation.
“How about you?” Eddie said, hoping to change the subject.
Buck perked up. “Me and Bobby? We’re good now. We talked it out.” He seemed light, chipper, such an improvement on the state of him from when he’d first arrived at the hospital that Eddie was having a hard time keeping his eyes on the road.
“That’s…good.” The stiff new-leather of the steering wheel creaked under his grip.
Of course. Buck forgives Bobby like it’s nothing. Buck forgives Eddie like it’s nothing. Buck throws himself off a cliff to save Eddie when they haven’t spoken in weeks, Buck lives out of his car without telling anyone, Buck sits on the side of the road shivering with that awful blank look on his face—
“Buck,” Eddie blurted out involuntarily.
“What’s up?”
“Can we...uh, talk?” Great job idiot. Be vague, that’ll help. But if they never talk about this, he’ll pop. He’ll scream. Fuck, he just needs to know that Buck’s doing okay.
Buck seemed to hear something in Eddie’s question that he hadn’t actually said, and stiffened in his seat for no good reason. “Yeah,” he said tightly. “Listen. I want you to know this doesn’t have to be long term, all right?”
“If that’s supposed to be a joke.” Eddie responded calmly, “I’m not laughing.” His mind was stinging, sterilized by an icy jet of an emotion he didn’t have a name for.
Buck didn’t respond.
“I,” Eddie continued patiently, if a little tightly, “want you to stay with us for as long as you need.”
“Yeah.” Buck drummed his nails on the middle console. "Only if you’re sure.”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“I know I can be a lot, sometimes.” Buck leaned his face against the window, not looking at Eddie. “Selfish.”
Eddie snorted. “If you think what you’ve been doing these past few months is unselfish, I’d rather you just be selfish.” Eddie would rather sleep on his own couch for the rest of his life than see Buck like that again.
“Oh,” Buck said, tone challenging, “You’re so sure about that?”
“Where is this coming from all of a sudden?” Eddie demanded.
Buck pushed through without answering Eddie’s question, like he had prepared a script and was refusing to deviate from it. “I’m not the best at, at boundaries and stuff.” Buck said stiffly. “It bothers you.”
“I don’t think—”
“Yes.” Buck said with alarming sharpness. “You do.”
Buck took everything personally. Every loss on the job.
Every stupid thing some asshole said.
He’ll deny himself of anything the moment someone can convince him he doesn’t deserve it.
…
Eddie barely remembered the conversation at the grocery store, honestly. He remembered standing there, fuming, fueled by the vicious satisfaction of watching Buck’s expression crumple, feeling alive in a way he hadn’t in weeks; or at least, not without his knuckles splitting on bone and the taste of another man’s blood in his mouth.
The actual words said, though? Vague. Said thoughtlessly, with intent to harm.
“To me, the worst part about the lawsuit was how much I missed you.” Eddie said bitterly. “How’s that for selfish?”
He’d lie awake at night, miserable and filled with that lonely panic that hadn't gripped him since he'd first really settled into the 118, the how am I going to do this alone feeling.
With that came the anger at himself, for getting attached, for becoming reliant on someone who wasn't even tied to him. His wife had left without a word, so why would he expect any different from—
—but he’d gotten used to it, the trust, the support, because Buck gave it all so freely, so easily—
And then he lost it. Because he’d let himself become dependent.
That was what had worn him down.
Not Buck himself.
“But,” Buck protested, “but you said—”
"Things were shitty. I was overwhelmed. But that's not your fault. I let it be your fault because I—" Eddie's voice cracked, "I feel like part of me knew you'd take it. You’d put up with it, and you’d forgive me.” He resisted the urge to rub his eyes. “I’m sorry. It was a shitty thing to say. It wasn’t true, and I didn’t mean it.”
“...Oh.” Eddie risked a glance over at Buck and was surprised to find him with an open, confused expression and a slight pinkness clinging to his cheeks.“Now I feel kind of dumb.”
“No, this is better.” Eddie said. “It’s better for us to talk it out. Especially if we’re going to be living together.”
“So I guess that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about.”
Unbidden, Eddie’s mind stole back to the early hours of the morning: Buck’s bleak tone over the phone. The complete lack of expression on his face when Eddie first tried to talk to him.
He couldn’t take it anymore. “Buck, about this morning. Before you called me.”
Buck flinched. Eddie pressed on.
“Just…if you want to talk. I’ll listen.”
Buck always wanted to talk about his feelings. This seemed like it should be an easy win.
But Buck wasn’t saying anything.
Eddie waited, until—
“What about you?” Buck asked finally.
Who, me? What feelings? “What about me?”
“You don’t have a monopoly on worry.” Buck said, surprisingly firm. “Coming to work covered in bruises, new bruises, every week for months.”
It shouldn't have been a surprise. Just because they hadn’t been speaking didn’t mean Buck would stop noticing things about him.
Eddie focused very carefully on executing a perfect left turn (blinker on, blinker off) and did not answer. The air between them took on a suspicious weight.
Because Buck really, really wasn’t stupid.
“I may have gotten into street fighting.” Eddie admitted flatly. “But I’m not doing it anymore.”
“You what?”
“Your turn.”
“Eddie!”
“I asked you first. It is beyond your turn.” Turned out, living a life where more than half of your social interaction consisted of negotiating with an eight year old could make you one pedantic bastard. Who knew?
Buck faltered. “You really want to know?”
“I do if you wanna tell me.”
“Okay,” Buck said, steeling himself. “Okay.”
“I…I was doing bad, last week. Like, physically, obviously, but. I was doing bad in my brain. It was…It was like I couldn’t relate to myself as a person anymore. I was just…a thing, taking up space.”
Eddie held his tongue.
“And I guess I got sick of taking up space.”
Good lord, Buck needed to talk to someone. But therapy had always been kind of a touchy topic with Buck.
“When I was actually out there, I felt lonely. And, um, empty. And—and it was like, my brain had convinced itself that there was nothing good coming ever again. Like, no hope, you know?” Buck swallowed. “It was awful.” He sniffled, just a little. “The doc said that, um, being as hungry and tired as I was probably messed with my head. Chemicals and hormones and stuff. You know.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Not like that,” Buck said immediately. “I don’t feel that anymore.”
“It’s okay if you do.” Eddie said carefully.
“Nope!” Buck knocked on the side of his head with his knuckles. “Nothing but the good chemicals in here.”
God, he was cute.
“I’m really glad you called me.” Eddie said. “If you ever feel like that ever again, you call me again, okay?” He felt a stab of guilt and added, “Or, uh, Maddie. If you want.”
“You mean that?”
“Not really,” Eddie replied honestly. “I’d rather you call me every time.”
Buck reached over with his good arm and shoved Eddie in the shoulder. Eddie rocked with the motion, and when he looked over, Buck was smiling at him.
There. Feelings: Talked About. Mark that off the post-trauma to do list. Now they could go home, and—
“Eddie,” Buck started, then stopped.
Eddie hummed questioningly.
Buck seemed to struggle for words for a moment before giving up and just blurting out, “Street fighting? Seriously?”
Damn.
“That sounds,” Buck paused, “and this is me saying this: That sounds stupid dangerous.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Eddie insisted, a little guiltily.
“Were you doing this with like, random people?”
Did Buck think he was a mugger or something? “No. I—There was an organized group.”
“An organized group…of street fighters.”
“Yep.” Eddie said, popping the P.
Buck groaned. “I can’t believe you were so mad at me you snuck out at night and let people beat the shit out of you. Like reverse Batman.”
“Hey. No one was beating the shit out of me, okay, I won. And I’m not mad at you.” Eddie paused. “And I won.”
“Sure.”
“I did! I even got some money out of it.”
“Money? People were betting on you like—like a dog?”
“People were betting on me like a person.” Eddie said, a little affronted.
“Betting blood money.”
“I know you know that’s not what that means.” Eddie argued, before he realized—
Wait.
Buck was teasing him.
The fight left him as an easy exhale, and he could feel nothing for a moment beyond sheer gratitude. There were several points through the last few months where he didn’t know if he’d get this back. Until this morning, he hadn't realised how truly close he’d come to losing it completely.
“Hey,” he said, cutting Buck off, “do you want it?”
Thrown for a loop, Buck repeated, “Do I want…what?”
“Do you want,” Eddie smiled, “some of my blood money? You can have it.”
Now that he’d said it out loud, the idea was oddly appealing. “Seriously. I’ll give it to you. As much as you want.” Someone should benefit from all this. It just seemed right, to take what he hadn’t used on the truck, what he hadn’t set aside for Chris, and just…give it to Buck. He heard Buck’s protest before the first syllable could leave his mouth, and asked, “Do I even need your permission to pay bills for you?”
Buck didn’t answer, because despite their wildly different walks in life, the one topic neither of them knew a damn thing about was finances.
“How good can street fighting possibly pay, anyway?” Buck said, a smile tugging at his lips despite himself.
But the note of curiosity in his voice told Eddie he had won.
Out of everyone, Buck would get that yeah, it was dangerous, yeah, it was stupid, but…it was also kinda badass. Buck was the one person he could count on to get it. The one person who, after the worry, after the anger, would have room at the end to be a little impressed. Eddie glanced at Buck out of the corner of his eye and, after confirming Buck was looking his way, affected a nonchalant shrug and hummed, “You’d be surprised.”
Sure enough, Buck took the bait. ”So…” his tone was mischievous and just a little dazzled. Just the way Eddie liked him. “...how much are we talking here?”
“How much do you need?” Eddie countered with a sly grin.
“Eddie!” Buck was equal parts scandalized and delighted. His bright laugh was sweet and refreshing. Eddie drank it in, resisting the urge to close his eyes. In a moment, he found himself laughing too.
Cutting up like nothing important had changed.
Even when the laughter subsided, the mood stayed light.
“You don’t need to do that,” Buck said earnestly. “You’re already giving me a place to stay. That’s more than enough.”
“You’d do it for me.” Eddie told him firmly, evenly. ”Why can’t I do it for you?”
And that was that.
Eddie had Buck in a fresh change of warm clothes and snoozing away in the master bedroom by the time the second car in their cavalcade pulled into the driveway.
He opened the front door and was a little relieved to see Chris, Maddie, Chimney, and Hen making their way to the porch.
“He’s asleep,” Eddie whispered. “I’ve got the door propped open so he’ll be able to hear us. He sleeps better when he knows there are people around.”
“Then why are we whispering?” whispered Chimney.
“We’re not,” Eddie said in a normal voice, ushering them inside.
Chimney stood with his hands on his hips, looking at the meager spread of Buck’s belongings with a furrow in his brow. “This is it?”
“That's all that was in his truck.” Eddie said defensively.
Chimney shook his head. “There’s too much missing.” He tapped his fingers against his chin, before turning to them with fresh determination. “And I’m going to get it back.”
“It’s been months.” Eddie frowned. “Where would you even start?”
“You got his tablet?” Chim asked, and Eddie indicated where it lay charging on the dining table. “He’s no Sherlock Holmes, okay, I think I can find at least some of it using his social media accounts and his search history.” With that, Chimney was sitting on the arm of the couch, balancing the open tablet on his lap and scribbling into a spare notebook Chris had left laying out.
Maddie stepped forward and extracted the stack of paper bills from Buck’s belongings. She separated out the ones with medical charges and tucked them under her arm. “I can call the hospital billing department about these. I bet I can get them pared down by asking for them to be itemized invoices.”
Hen gave a sharp nod. “I’ll get in contact with the union, start building his case for back pay and reimbursement. Whatever he signed, not paying him is profoundly illegal.”
“Does that mean I should hold off on contacting the brass?” Eddie turned to find his boss and a police sergeant letting themselves into his house, and meditated for a moment on what his life had become.
Hen smiled at him, sweet and sly. “That’s exactly what it means.”
Bobby nodded firmly. “All right. Where’s Buck?”
“Asleep,” Eddie told them, “but feel free to make noise. He likes knowing he’s not by himself.”
“His release papers say we’ll need to wake him up to eat something in two hours’ time.” Bobby inclined his head in the direction of Eddie’s kitchen. “Mind if I whip something up?”
“Feel free.” Eddie replied emphatically.
“Chimney, once you get through with that tablet, I’d like to take a look.” Athena said.
Chim rocked to his feet. “All yours.” He ripped the sheet of “And anything important I can’t find…well, I’ll replace it.”
“You good to handle that by yourself?” Eddie asked.
“What?” He squared his shoulders. “I helped that guy move no less than four times last year. Including into and out of my apartment. I’ll know what’s missing.” He handed the tablet to Athena and moved toward the door. “I know what’s important to him.”
“Take my card,” Bobby and Eddie said at the exact same time, both reaching for their wallets. They glanced at each other.
“I’ll handle it, boys, but thanks for the consideration.” Chimney said dryly.
“I’ll take a look at any correspondence with his or the department’s legal team, as well as any contracts he may have signed.” Athena said, flicking the tablet open to peruse Buck’s email with single-minded focus.
That was everyone except—
“Okay,” Eddie said, “Okay. I should—I should—”
“Eddie,” Maddie interrupted kindly, “Maybe you should rest.” Her eyes dragged pointedly downward. “Or at the very least, change.”
Eddie followed her gaze down and, with a hot flush of self-consciousness, realized he was in fact still wearing the damp, rumpled pajamas he’d had on when he’d rushed out the door this morning. With the chaos of this whole day, he hadn't even noticed.
Oh god.
What must his hair look like?
His expression must be transparent, because Chimney smirked a little and clapped him on the shoulder as he walked by. “Maybe tag out for an hour, Eddie. I expect you to be presentable when I get back.”
Finding himself thoroughly outvoted, Eddie wandered into the bedroom, checked on Buck (status: asleep), grabbed a change of clothes, and headed into the hall bathroom.
Which was, of course, a wreck.
Half-folded wet towels littered the floor along with Buck’s old clothes. Puddles of standing water presented a slipping hazard.
With nothing else to do, Eddie took a quick shower himself and changed into clothes he wasn’t embarrassed to be seen in by his boss. He refolded any towels that hadn't gotten dirty or wet and put them away properly. He mopped up the water with unsalvageable towels, sequestered the mess into the bathroom hamper, and got to work wiping down the mirrors and sinks.
He was on minute three of scrubbing at a stain on the counter that had been there since before he moved in when he finally acknowledged that he was, in fact, stalling. Which meant he wasn’t allowed to do it anymore.
He couldn’t spend the afternoon hiding from people in his own house. It wasn’t like he had family over or something.
One his way out of the now pristine bathroom, he pocketed Buck’s phone so he could put it on to charge.
After starting a load of laundry that was part everything Buck owned and part one specific set of Eddie’s sleepwear, Eddie gave into the antsiness nipping at his heels. He wandered from room to room, peeking in on folks to see if they needed anything. He’d always been something of a nervous host.
Hen and Athena were pressed knee to shoulder on the couch in the living room, heads bent over the tablet as Athena typed on it, Hen with a phone held to her ear.
Bobby was in the kitchen, working with whatever he’d managed to find in Eddie’s cabinets. Chris was planted at the kitchen table, an array of color pencils spread around him as he talked Bobby’s ear off about his foolproof technique for drawing a perfect circle.
And Maddie…
He shouldn’t have been surprised.
She was sitting on the bed next to Buck’s sleeping form, her back against the headrest. She looked up to see Eddie hovering in the doorway and waved a sheaf of medical bills at him in greeting
They smiled at each other a little awkwardly. A familiarity paired with slight discomfort. Two almost-friends who had spent the morning crying about their feelings together and had come out a little more tender as a result.
Well, Maddie had cried. Eddie had done the Eddie-equivalent of crying, which was not crying.
“Everything going well?” he asked.
“Yes!” Maddie nodded. “Actually, since he hasn’t been getting paid, there’s a chance I might be able to get a lot of these dismissed entirely based on his income level.”
Eddie let out a low whistle.
Maddie smiled. “I used to be a nurse. I know how these bureaucracies work, and how confusing they can be.”
“Makes sense,” Eddie hummed. He inclined his head in Buck’s direction. “How’s he holding up?”
She turned her head to look at him and her smile melted into something tender and private. “He’s resting.” She laughed a little. “He’s here. He’s fine.” Her eyes flicked up to Eddie, then back down to Buck. “...earlier. I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t be,” Eddie interrupted. “I—I get it. This whole thing has been…” he sighed. “Honestly, nothing’s felt right since he first got injured, you know?” He scratched the back of his neck. Looked up at the ceiling. “It’s—weird, but I feel better just. Knowing where he is. And knowing that I can check on him whenever I want.”
“It’s not weird.” her smile scrunched up in one corner, like she was remembering something. “Buck’s…like that.”
Eddie smiled.
There was a thud as the front door closed a little more loudly than usual.
Chimney was back.
“Hello, all!” He was holding a large cardboard box with both hands, slightly off-balance from closing the door with his foot. “My pilgrimage was modestly successful.”
Eddie moved to relieve him of his burden and peered under the flap curiously. It was unreasonably heavy and filled to the brim with vaguely familiar board games and books. Vaguely familiar from seeing them in passing on Buck’s bookshelves. Eddie couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Not all of them are the original Buck classics, especially not the books. But his taste in boardgames is weird enough that I suspected his local thrift shop hadn’t managed to pawn them off on anyone else yet.”
“No..I…” Eddie stammered. “How?”
Chimney puffed out his chest for a moment before deflating slightly. “Okay, okay. I didn’t remember absolutely everything. But! I was able to get a view of his bookshelf in the background of some of those awful selfies he posts. What I lose in sentimentality, I make up for in practicality.”
“This is incredible,” Maddie said, peering over Eddie’s shoulder to see the contents.
“Thanks.” Chim jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve got his xbox and his bike in my car. And…” His expression went somber as he trailed off.
“And?” Athena pressed.
“Some, uh. Blankets, pillows. A few changes of clothes. Did…” His face took on a troubled pallor as he looked around the room, “did any of you guys know he was sleeping at the station?”
The room went cold.
Slowly, Bobby said, “Someone from another shift would have flagged it if he was staying in the bunkroom, Chim.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “They found his stash in a closet. That C-shift probie, Hartley? He found the key to the closet behind the laundry room. There was bedding, stale snacks. Expired gatorade.” Chimney tilted his face skyward, hiding his expression. ”Something must've sprung a leak this past week, I guess. Kid said the blankets were mildewed. They threw out the food and put the bedding in the wash.” He huffed. “Yesterday afternoon.”
“He went looking for his stuff.” Hen realized, “That’s what happened last night. He was looking for it, and he couldn’t find it.”
Eddie stalked out the front door to go unload Chimney’s car, moving with the careful grace and easy athleticism of someone trying desperately to not think about anything at all.
He re-entered with the mountain bike swung across his shoulders just in time to hear the tense words being spoken in his living room.
Athena had lowered her voice carefully. This was something she didn’t want Buck to hear.
“There’s something that’s been bothering me since this whole mess started.” She was saying. “He won. We know he won, because we know that’s why they fired him. Now, I spent all afternoon pouring over those waivers,” she said, “And they don’t say a thing about him being forced to cover his own legal fees.”
“What do you mean?” Chimney asked.
“When you win, or they settle,” she told him, “the losing side pays for legal fees. They don’t send you money to pay them yourself unless you negotiate that specifically. They pay directly. In a case like this, Buck shouldn’t have even heard about those fees.”
“So why,” she said sharply, “would Buck receive a paper bill from that damned law office?”
Hen swore viciously.
Eddie turned to find her reading from the tablet in Athena’s hands. Her expression was thunderous and the next words out of her mouth were like ice. “This is vile.”
The look on Athena’s face was, in a word, unforgiving.
Bobby accepted the tablet from his wife and held the device so Chimney could see the screen. Whatever they saw on the screen made them both go utterly rigid.
Wordlessly, Eddie held a hand out.
Representative of Mr. Buckley:
Thank you for your email.
Upon reviewing our missives, it does indeed appear that Mr. Buckley had initially been billed directly for legal services rendered. However, upon failing to receive payment, the error was noticed and a second invoice was issued to the correct party. We considered the matter closed.
Please pardon our lack of urgency in correcting the error of the initial bill; if any money had been sent, we of course would have reversed the errant credit and explained the situation to Mr. Buckley in full.
As no attempt was made to contact our office or actually submit payment, we believed that Mr. Buckley had either discarded the invoice unintentionally or correctly surmised that he was not the intended recipient.
I do hope this mix-up has not caused any undue stress. During our brief association, I was not given the impression that Mr. Buckley is especially concerned with the state of his finances.
Red began to lick at the corners of Eddie’s vision.
Best of luck, the message concluded, fighting all those fires.
“Buck can never see this,” were the first words out of his mouth.
“His mistake,” Athena said slowly, “was putting this in writing. We could report him.”
“No.” Hen snarled.
“Hen?”
”Forget reporting him. We could salt the earth with this.” Her tone was harsh. She pulled the tablet from Eddie’s hands and skimmed it over again and again as she spoke, as though dissecting it, picking it apart. “This wouldn’t be the first complaint he’s received. Sending an invoice to the wrong recipient isn’t a legal issue. But, in this case, it could be a moral one.” Hen tapped the screen as she spoke, tone slow, even, and damning. “Hero firefighter, injured in the line of duty, left destitute through the machinations of an ambulance chaser with a grudge. Mackie missed a big payout due to the civic-minded dedication of his client and financially harassed him, driving him to poverty. We could get the brass on our side with this, too. With Mackie as the villain. Maybe,” she traced the line of her glasses, “he withheld the news of Buck’s unlawful firing from him.”
“Wait, you’re saying he knew Buck would get fired?” Chim said, appalled. “What’s the matter with this guy?”
“He could have known. We can say,” Hen’s eyes flicked from person to person, “that he absolutely did.”
Hen was one of the kindest, most empathetic people he had ever met. He had seen her cry over the fates of strangers, forgive loved ones like it was easy, and take new firefighters under her proverbial wing with the sort of friendly, warm mentorship that went completely against the insular boys club Eddie had detested in the army.
It was easy to forget that Hen had fought every step of the way for her right to be sweet.
Because she was sweet.
She was also ruthless, driven, and unyieldingly clever.
Her brain clicked along at alarming speed. She tried to keep her tone low and even, but hints of anger, hints of the helplessness that had been clawing at all of them, rang through anyway. “We already have connections with the media. Buck was in the news more than the rest of us combined last year. They love interviewing him.” She looked at Eddie. “I have Taylor Kelly’s number. This is a story that could sell. If we can’t guarantee that we crush Mackie through legal channels, we could drag his reputation through the mud. Play this right, and we could destroy him professionally. He operates by word of mouth. All we have to do,” she drummed her fingers on the surface of the tablet, “is add poison.”
It was so tempting. A real opportunity for revenge. God, it was the next best option past getting his hands around the man’s throat himself.
One singular thing stopped him: The expression on Maddie’s face this morning.
What was it she had said?
Buck has had a lot of people making decisions for him, lately.
“It’s not our call.” Eddie said quietly.
“What do you mean, it’s not our call?” Hen spun to face him. “He’s one of us! He needed us then, and he needs us now. Us leaving him to flounder is what let this guy get to him in the first place.” Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t excuse this, do you?”
“—I know what he deserves, okay, and I’d do anything to see him get it.” Eddie pushed back. “You don't think I’d do anything to protect Buck? But that doesn’t give us the right to—”
“Anything?” Hen retorted. “ When’s the last time you had a conversation with him? If there’s anything he needs protection from, it’s—”
“He doesn’t need our protection.” Bobby interjected firmly. “He needs our support.”
“Yes.” Eddie said gratefully. “Exactly.”
Hen stared at him. Eddie had no idea what was running through her mind. After a few seconds, her shoulders dropped and her expression wobbled.
“I just wish I could do something.”
“You are doing something.” Eddie said simply. “You’re here. You don’t have to tell me,” he told her, “that Buck is special. I get it. And you’re right about him needing us, then and now. You’re probably the only one of us that didn’t screw this up.”
She smiled a little with one corner of her mouth.
"Thank god you’re a paramedic, Hen.” Chimney said lightly. “That was terrifying. If you were a lawyer, I’m not sure LA would still be standing.”
“I try to use my powers for good,” Hen said wryly, eyes still wet.
Bobby’s phone let out an annoying racket from the kitchen. He wiped his hands on an apron Eddie did not recognize from his own kitchen. Did he carry one with him everywhere or something? “It’s time for Buck’s meal. Does anyone want to take a break and sit with him?”
It wasn’t even a question.
They all crowded into Eddie’s thankfully clean, if austere bedroom and surrounded the bed as Buck was shaken awake and presented with a small bowl of protein-enriched ‘super oatmeal’.
Buck didn’t take his eyes off them even as he ate. He looked so, so happy to see them all there.
He chattered, listed, and took slow, careful bites under Bobby’s watchful supervision. He ooh’d over Chris’s artwork and accepted orange slices from a fruit being carefully peeled for him by Hen.
And then.
When he looked at Eddie, his eyes crinkled and his smile widened. He said, “I see you finally got dressed.”
“I see you already spilled oatmeal all over my bedsheets,” Eddie retorted.
Buc squawked in alarm and began searching for the nonexistent spill before glaring at Eddie in accusation.
Eddie grinned back.
It was good to have a reminder of what they were doing all this for.
It was well after dinner by the time everyone had headed home.
That night, Eddie rested his head on the arm of the couch, eyes unwilling to shut.
It felt like every time he started to drift off, his heart rate would spike and he’d flinch back into full wakefulness.
Buck didn’t like being alone.
It was all he could think about.
Eddie stood from the couch and, trying valiantly not to feel like a creep, silently moved down the hall in the direction of the master bedroom.
He just needed to check. Just to make sure he was okay. Make sure Buck was still there. What if he got cold? Buck was always cold, Eddie thought, conveniently forgetting that Buck had been practically mummified in warm sleep clothes by Eddie the moment they reached the house.
He stepped into the hallway to find Christopher nudging his rolled up sleeping bag down the hall with his crutches. His destination was obvious.
Not looking remotely guilty at being caught, Chris raised a finger to his lips. Shh-ing Eddie without sound.
Eddie gestured at the clock on the wall behind Chris pointedly. Chris mimicked the action with a disgruntled expression, and Eddie followed the gesture and actually looked at the clock to find that it was only 8pm.
Damn. Eddie was certain he himself hadn’t learned how to read analog clocks until he was nine.
Sleepover, Chris mouthed, pointing at himself, then at his sleeping bag, and then finally at the still cracked door of the master bedroom.
Eddie sighed, tucked the sleeping bag under his arm, and pushed the door open.
Buck was there. Asleep, unbothered, warm. Eddie let out a relieved breath.
Chris put one arm on the bed frame for balance and used the other to tug his sleeping bag free and toss it on top of the comforter.
Eddie conceded defeat. He straightened out the sleeping bag and helped Chris get himself zipped in, tactfully ignoring the suspiciously heavy bottom corner of the thing that absolutely contained the Nintendo Switch that was supposed to stay in the living room.
This was a sleepover, after all.
Eddie gingerly sat down on top of the blankets on Buck’s other side, the way he had rolled to face at some point in the evening. He looked out over the two of them: Buck bundled in neutral colors like he was made of glass, Chris a crinkly neon green rectangle loaded down with contraband.
The tight muscles in his chest relaxed. It felt like he could take in a full breath for the first time all day.
Carefully, he lowered himself down to lay on top of the comforter and found that Buck was facing him. Eddie reached out and took hold of one of Buck’s wrists, finding his pulse instinctively. Counting along with it. Finding comfort in it.
He fell asleep between one heartbeat and the next.
Buck was here, bracketed in between Chris and Eddie. Safe with this tiny open wound of a family that had pulled Evan Buckley in and healed around him like scar tissue.
Buck woke up feeling dry, crooked, and ancient.
If felt like he was simultaneously recovering from both a marathon and a bad hangover, except where a hangover felt like too much, this felt like not enough.
It was as if his body had cut him off from whatever reserves of energy had been driving him the moment it became clear that he was no longer depending on it to survive.
His shoulder was throbbing in time with his heartbeat and his ankle was so stiff he had to reach down and bend the joint with his hands first to get it moving.
He heard soft beeps and chirps from his left, and turned to find Chris leaning against the headboard with his switch balanced on his knees.
What was he doing in here?
Maybe that was a dumb question. Buck could see perfectly well what Chris was doing.
“You winning?” Buck rasped.
“Yep.” Chris replied. “Dad’s in the kitchen making breakfast.” He gave Buck a meaningful glance. “Someone should probably go stop him.”
Eddie was puttering around the kitchen when Buck limped in. “I’ve been sent to scout ahead.” he greeted.
Eddie pointed him to the table, where an unpeeled banana and a bottle of gatorade was waiting for him.
Buck winced.
“Could I, uh, have something else? I kind of hate gatorade now.” Eddie snagged it as he walked past and traded it out for a weird metal cup. Buck peered inside to find a smoothie. Or rather, most of a smoothie.
This was very possibly Eddie’s breakfast.
Curiosity winning out over manners, Buck took a sip and carefully didn’t make a face. This wasn’t very good either, but it was definitely better than gatorade.
Buck would have to teach him a better recipe.
He put the cup down and started peeling the banana.
“About your money stuff, Buck.” Eddie said awkwardly. “They sorted out a lot of it yesterday.”
“Wait, really?” Buck choked down the mouthful of banana he’d been chewing and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He stared at Eddie searchingly. “How?”
“Your medical debt has been argued down quite a lot, thanks to Maddie,” Eddie told him, “and there’s a union representative coming by this afternoon. She and Hen think you have a really good shot of getting your workers comp reinstated to retroactively cover at least some of this, and you’re all but guaranteed salary backpay.”
Buck’s eyes stung.
How had he ever thought, even for a second, that they would leave him behind?
“Wow,” he said thickly. “I don’t…thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, I didn’t do much. And…”Eddie continued awkwardly, “your lawyer fees. They’re not a problem anymore.”
“So I don’t owe them anything?” Buck could hardly believe it. “What did you guys do?”
“You were never supposed to pay for that in the first place.” Eddie said, voice just a little cold. “There was a…mistake.”
Buck barely heard him. His heart was pounding ferociously in his chest. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes so he wouldn’t cry. That crushing feeling of time running out that had stalked him for months, the one that had made him think maybe it would be better to just die than keep trying to claw his way out, was…fading.
He wasn’t quite sure how to let it go. When he’d asked for help, he’d thought they ‘d make the station start paying him again. He’d have been grateful for that much.
But they’d fought against every harsh thing pressing at him. Every harsh angle they’d determined was unfair. All for him.
“What if it wasn’t an accident?” Eddie said suddenly. “What if it was on purpose?”
“What are you talking about?” Buck asked, a little dazed.
“What if he sent it on purpose to scare you? Would you want to go after him?”
Buck stared. “Go…after him?” Eddie had maybe gotten a little too comfortable beating up strangers. Buck seriously couldn’t leave him alone for ten minutes.
“Hen thought we should talk to that reporter friend of yours.” Eddie clarified, “That him pulling this, and hurting you in the process, might be enough to do some real social damage.”
“Really.”
“If that’s what you wanted,” Eddie said, “We’d back you up.”
Buck peered into the smoothie cup pensively. “It would be easier to just blame him for everything,” Buck said, tone wry, “wouldn’t it?”
“It’s not about blame,” Eddie tried valiantly.
“Yes it is. Listen, if he did something wrong, we report him to that—that lawyer thing. The bar.”
“That might take time.” Eddie told him, less like he was trying to convince him and more like he was trying to make sure Buck understood all his options. “He’s a bastard. He’d deserve it.”
“I’m not going to let someone else speak for me again.” Buck said after a moment. “If this goes to the news, it won't end with him. There’s nothing to stop them from trashing the department just like he did. I don’t want anyone else saying stuff about Bobby, or Chimney,” Buck insisted, “or you.”
Eddie had his back to Buck, so his expression wasn’t visible. But he said, “Oh,” in a way that made it seem like he was hanging onto Buck’s every word.
“I don’t care about Mackie, but I care about you guys.” Buck went on, “you spent the whole day yesterday trying to help me. Of course I’ll do what I can to protect you.”
Eddie turned to face him.“Buck—”
“If we’re quantifying, it's more my fault than it is his. And it's more his fault than it is yours.”
Eddie scowled, a I know what you’re trying to do scowl, but not a It’s not working scowl, so Buck would count this as a win.
“I’m sick of reliving this over and over. I don’t want any more narratives. I just want to be a firefighter.” He shrugged. “Plus, I’m not really cut out for revenge.” The corner of Buck’s mouth twitched up. “Doesn’t protector suit me better?”
Eddie didn’t answer for a second, his face conflicted.
“He said something to you guys, didn’t he?” Buck’s eyes slid from the metal cup in his hands over to Eddie. “Something you’re not telling me.”
Eddie cringed. “Do you want to see it?”
And part of Buck really, really did.
“You know what it says,” he said instead. “You tell me. Do I?”
“No.” Eddie said immediately.
Buck shrugged. “Then I don’t.”
Because maybe he was trying to trust the people close to him a little more.
“Hey, um…” On the topic of trust and closeness, his mouth started running before his brain could stop it. “Did you sleep in the bed? Last night. With me.”
“Probably should have asked first.” Eddie rubbed at the blush spreading over the back of his neck.
“No, I—I mean, thanks.” Thanks? “I mean, sorry. I—I mean…” What did he mean? What was he even trying to say? Why the hell had he even started talking?
Eddie gave him a long look. Eddie, who never treated Buck getting hurt with pity, or misery, or avoidance. Eddie, whose first instinct was to jump after him.
He looked away, focusing intently on the countertop. “You know, when I first got back from,” His fingers twitched as he hunted for the words, stilling as he finally settled on, “serving, I had a lot of trouble sleeping.”
“Yeah?”
“Part of it was the bed. Too soft, you know.”
Makes sense.”
“The other part,” Eddie continued, “ was the quiet.”
“I slept on the floor of Chris’s nursery for months. Kept it a secret from my parents. My mom would have torn me to shreds for it. She would have seen it as…instability. But it wasn’t. It was grounding. I felt safer knowing he was safe.”
Eddie rocked back on his heels. “So. I get it.” His ears pinked. “Not wanting to sleep alone.”
That admission reached into Buck’s chest and squeezed his heart.
Before he knew how to be a dad. When the only thing he knew how to do for Chris was love him.
It crystalized everything he knew about Eddie into stark, glimmering clarity.
Now, in that moment, what Buck thought was, if I left LA and spent the whole rest of my life traveling, I don’t think I would ever meet another person like you.
That was what he thought.
What Buck actually said, soft in the unsteady air of the kitchen, was:
“I love you."
Eddie’s head snapped up to stare at Buck with a wild expression.
Buck’s heart began to pound like thunder in his chest.
From across the kitchen, they lunged at each other.
Buck’s good sense was caught fluttering in his throat. He hadn’t thought much beyond Don’t let him run before he was moving.
Buck grabbed a fistful of Eddie's shirt and gripped it desperately, crumpling and stretching the fabric in his hold. Eddie seized Buck’s wrist in an iron grip that seemed to pull him infinitesimally closer.
And they both froze.
The expression on Eddie’s face could only be identical to the one on Buck’s own.
With that thought, Eddie’s sturdy grip on his arm recontextualized itself.
Not stopping him. Keeping him.
Eddie wasn’t going to let Buck do any of this on his own. Not for a single second.
“The reason I asked you to stay with me is because I couldn’t stand the thought of you somewhere else.” Eddie said quietly.
Eddie, who was very privately, very defensively a romantic. Another secret just for Buck.
It was as though Eddie had ripped his still-beating heart out of his chest and tucked it into Buck’s ribcage alongside his own.
They stared at one another, frozen stiff and tangled in each other’s grasps.
The stillness went on so long that a smile began to play at Buck's lips.
Eddie’s eyes flickered at the sight of it.
Then, with a glacial, electric inevitably, he curled a hand around the back of Buck’s neck and kissed him.
Eddie smelled really good. Damn it, Buck probably still smelled like a hospital.
His free hand reached up to curl around Eddie’s face and was greeted by the scratch of stubble. He traced the shape of it with his fingers, relearning by touch a jawline he had long ago memorized by sight.
Buck, personally, had experienced quite a few first kisses with quite a few people in his life. A lot of strangers. Some almost-friends. He had always loved kissing for kissing’s sake, the warmth and closeness and breath of another person.
He was struck by how unbelievable the difference was. The sense of wonder that came with knowing someone so intimately before getting to have them.
You don’t know enough to be grateful that their life brought them here to stand in front of you. You don’t know all they survived to make it there.
His hand loosened its grip on Eddie’s shirt and drifted down, down to his abdomen. Finding by memory alone one of the still-healing bruises from Eddie letting another man put his hands on him. From when Eddie threw himself into danger without Buck around. Buck rested his hand over it. Covering the tender spot with his hand protectively because, for this one moment, it felt like he was allowed to.
Buck felt wetness against his own cheeks and realized that Eddie was crying.
“Hey, no, it’s okay,” he pulled back, framing Eddie’s face in his hands and swiping his thumbs over the reddened skin of his cheeks.
He stared at Buck with something close to wonder. “I…I—” he whispered,
“I know.” Buck interrupted him with a kiss, soft and sweet, just because he could.
A grin stretched across his face and he felt Eddie’s answering laughter against his mouth.
Like the endless, dizzying orbit they had been locked in since they met had finally stabilized.
It was absolutely perfect up until Buck’s stiff ankle twinged and then locked up, making him stumble.
“Hey careful! Careful.” Eddie’s hands flew to his hips, trying to steady him. And the power in those hands. It was like a closed circuit with the muscles of Eddie’s upper back activated, sturdy and stabilizing.
Which introduced ‘the muscles of Eddie’s upper back’ into Buck's train of thought, which was supremely distracting. They must look awesome right now. What were the odds Eddie would agree to turn around and take his shirt off so that Buck could see, if he asked really nicely?
Probably not good. Buck took a different strategy and grinned, leaning into the hold a little. “That’s hot. Do you think you could like, pick me up?” He rolled his shoulders forward and let his smile sink into a smirk, lowering his eyelashes in a way that he knew looked good.
Eddie's hands promptly spasmed on Bucks hips, eyes widening and mouth falling slightly open. A moment later, he jerked his gaze away to scan the kitchen with more focus than the action required, cheeks still burning a bright ruddy pink.
Yep. Still got it.
Eddie avoided eye contact as he steered them toward a dining chair, which gave Buck a lovely opportunity to confirm that the blush continued down the back of his neck.
When he finally caught sight of the beaming smile being sent his way, Eddie scowled. “Cut that out.”
“No way,” Buck grinned, “you think I’m hot and funny and you want to kiss me.”
Eddie crouched in front of Buck’s chair and took Buck's ankle in hand. and lifted it off the ground, inspecting it carefully. “Have you been stretching?”
“Who says I need to?” Buck asked with a smarmy grin. “Most people say I’m plenty—ow!”
Eddie put his ankle through another punishing rotation, unsympathetic to Buck’s suffering. “Have you been doing your ankle stretches?”
“Not much this week,” Buck replied honestly, “but I was really good before that.” He winced at another sharp stretch. “Yeesh. Could I at least have some ibuprofen first?”
“Not before you’ve eaten something substantial.” Eddie told him. “We need to get you caught up. We’ll take care of your shoulder after breakfast.” Eddie’s eyes narrowed. “...where’s your sling?”
Busted.
The honest answer was that it was difficult to eat with it on. Buck fluttered his eyelashes, “Don’t you think it spoils my looks?”
Eddie snorted, grinning despite himself.
Buck nudged him in the thigh with the toes of his good foot triumphantly. “You do think I’m funny.”
“And,” Eddie said, ears going pink, “I want to kiss you.” he cleared his throat. “Sling or not. So there’s no reason not to wear it.”
He’s really cute. Buck thought delightedly, and because there was nothing stopping him from doing so, said, “You’re really cute.”
Eddie pursed his lips slightly and focused his attention very keenly on Buck’s ankle. His brow furrowed as he tested mobility, his lips parting as he felt for any errant swelling.
Cute.
Eventually, he straightened. “You,” he pointed at Buck, “start doing ankle pumps. I’ve got some compression socks in the laundry room you can wear.“ He moved to walk past Buck’s chair.
Bucked hooked his good foot around Eddie’s calf to halt his momentum. “Hey,” he waited until Eddie looked back at him. “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”
Eddie smiled. “You’re right,” he agreed, pressing his hand to Buck’s cheek for a long second, “You’re not.”
Buck nervously smoothed down his already-flat tie with the arm that wasn’t currently in a sling.
“You’re going to be fine.” Bobby said from the chair next to him. He had picked Buck up from Eddie’s house early this morning and driven him out to the LAFD offices. They had met up with the union representative in the lobby and headed to the conference room as a group.
The head of HR walked in, spotted Buck, and glowered.
Buck flinched.
The chief, close behind, seemed marginally more cheered to see him. “Buckley!” He said in a friendly way. “You trying to get yourself in more trouble, son?”
“Trying to get out of it, sir.” Buck tilted his head toward Bobby. “I brought a character witness this time.”
The chief chuckled. “Nash,” he nodded, “Ms. Green, always a pleasure.” She gave him a sharp, short handshake and was the last person at the table to sit back down.
Green had stopped by in the afternoon of Buck’s first full day at the Diaz residence. She had spoken with Hen, Athena, Bobby, and Buck extensively about what had happened the past few weeks, taking copious notes. A few days later, she and Buck had poured over her prepared statements together so he wouldn’t be blindsided by anything.
She argued that the case for reporting his former representation to the bar for disingenuous retaliation might be stronger coming from an institution, such as the LAFD, rather than an individual. “You’re not special, Mr. Buckley. If he’ll do it to you,” she’d said frankly, “he’ll do it to someone else.”
“Only official channels,” Buck had insisted. “No reporters, no outside council, just…my boss and his boss. Can we do that?”
“This is your story, Mr. Buckley. No one will be hearing it without your express approval.”
Today, at the LAFD office, he had complete faith in her. “I am here primarily as a formality,” Green started, “to help Mr. Buckley present the full scope of a complicated situation. His previous legal counsel mishandled negotiations and transitions related to his case, leaving Mr. Buckley financially and medically vulnerable to an actively life-threatening degree. It also,” she said delicately, “put the LAFD on the hook for quite a few severe labor law violations.”
At the words life-threatening, the Chief's smile dropped and glanced over Buck, eyebrows twitching up in confusion. At the words severe labor law violations, he leaned forward, brow crinkling in concern. “Go on,” he told her.
Buck let out a shaky exhale. Bobby put a hand on his arm and, when he looked over, offered him a reassuring smile.
Because everything was going to be all right.
He had Bobby with him, sitting on the same side of the table this time.
No matter what happened, after this was over, he’d go home to Eddie and Chris.
He’d have a place at the 118 waiting for him when he recovered, for real this time.
He’d have his sister.
He’d have his friends.
Bobby had made overly casual noises about whipping something up once the meeting was over, which meant Buck could expect to be greeted at the Diaz house by a crowd of scheming busybodies and more food than any of them could eat.
A classic 118 surprise party.
It sounded like the best possible way to spend an afternoon.
He’d make sure to act like he wasn’t expecting it when he walked through the door.
Notes:
I had a blast writing this fic and deeply appreciate everyone who stuck with it through to the end.
I do hope the POV switch didn’t break any hearts. A lot of Buck’s growth had been resolved by the end of Ch 3. This chapter was about checking in on the people who love him and exploring how they see him.
If you noticed marginally fewer grammar and spelling errors than usual: wordlessness2470 on tumblr is to thank for selflessly volunteering to beta this monster of a chapter.
I didn’t include a lot of dry legal discussions and dissection of california contract law in the final version for two reasons:
It’s boring. I have a personal rule where if I find myself writing a scene that I would skim or skip in someone else’s fic, I get rid of it and find something interesting to say instead.
The fictional version of US employment laws, medical privacy laws, labor unions, and the like that exist in the 9-1-1 universe are removed enough from reality that trying to write a coherent narrative that effectively married the two was extremely difficult.Character notes:
Buck and Maddie in S3 utterly lack any personal crisis resilience whatsoever for a variety of reasons and it is something I truly adore about both of them. I spent a lot of this fic trying to look at their relationship from Maddie’s perspective, and how the way they were raised fucked her up too, and for the most part I think I succeeded.
I love Hen so much, I think she is so interesting and nuanced and I feel so grateful I get to see someone like her on television. I love it when an extremely intelligent character is also extremely compassionate, and Hen strikes a perfect balance that makes her make so much sense as a character.
Chimney is a goddamn treasure. America’s Next Top Best Friend. Also, early series Chimney and Chris were tight. Remember when he was stabbed in the hospital?
Athena, I will never forget that you were once studying to be a lawyer, and it forever breaks my heart that you decided to become a cop instead.
Eddie. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. He is SO hard to write; but I needed to get him and Maddie alone in a room together so they could FINALLY hash things out. It was the only way to get this story to end the way I needed it to. I truly didn’t expect how much his POV would take over this chapter.ankle pumps are a fantastic low impact post-op exercise that benefit every part of a recovering leg.
I hope you liked the ending.
I hope you liked my story!
You can find me on tumblr at eggmacguffin. <3
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