Chapter Text
Buck pressed his forehead against the cool tile of his bathroom wall, willing the cramping in his stomach to ease. The lawsuit paperwork sat scattered across his coffee table, a constant reminder of everything he was fighting for, everything he was losing. This was just stress. Had to be stress.
Another wave of pain twisted through his abdomen and he pressed his palm flat against his stomach, breathing through it like he’d learned to do during his physical therapy. The blood thinners made everything weird anyway – his doctor had warned him about stomach issues. This was fine. This was manageable.
His phone buzzed from the counter, probably his lawyer again. The screen showed an incoming text from Maddie, but he couldn’t bring himself to read it. Their last conversation still burned in his memory: “You’re being selfish, Evan. They’re your family, and you’re trying to hurt them.” He’d tried to explain that he just wanted his job back, that he was drowning without it, but she’d already made up her mind.
Six months earlier, before the bombing, before everything fell apart, it hadn’t been stress he’d blamed.
The memory rose unbidden: Engine 118 had just returned from a brutal apartment fire, the taste of smoke still coating his tongue. He’d felt the first warning cramp as they’d pulled into the station, but they’d been on back-to-back calls for hours. No time to deal with it. Besides, that food truck they’d grabbed lunch from had seemed a little sketchy.
“You good?” Hen had asked, noticing him pause by the truck.
“Yeah, just need to hit the head.” He’d kept his voice casual, already calculating the fastest route to the station bathroom. “Think that food truck was a mistake.”
He’d barely made it, cursing under his breath as he shed his turnout gear. Bobby had caught up to him just as he reached the bathroom door.
“Buck—”
“Food poisoning,” he’d called over his shoulder, slamming the door shut. “I’m fine!”
He hadn’t been fine. But between calls, who had time to worry about a bad stomach? And then the truck bombing happened, and now...
Present-day Buck pushed himself away from the bathroom wall, grimacing at his reflection. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, his skin pale and clammy. The cramps were getting worse, not better. Coming more frequently. But he couldn’t focus on that now. He had a meeting with his lawyer in two hours.
“Just stress,” he muttered to his reflection, but the words sounded hollow even to his own ears.
Another memory surfaced, this one from a month before the bombing. They’d been on a call at a construction site, evacuation nearly complete, when the first cramp had hit. He’d been helping guide workers down from unstable scaffolding when pain twisted through his gut like a knife.
“Almost there,” he’d assured the terrified worker in front of him, gritting his teeth against the wave of nausea. Bobby’s voice had crackled over the radio, ordering final sweeps. Buck had swallowed hard, trying to keep his focus.
“Copy that, Cap,” he’d managed, voice steady despite the cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. Eddie had been waiting at the bottom of the scaffolding, ready to help with triage.
“You’re looking a little green there, buddy,” Eddie had said, concerned eyes scanning Buck’s face.
“Must’ve been something I ate.” The excuse had become his standard response, so automatic he almost believed it himself. “I’ll grab some Pepto when we get back to the station.”
Now, staring at his reflection, Buck couldn’t ignore how many times he’d used that excuse. How many times he’d blamed bad food, stress, lack of sleep – anything but admit something might really be wrong. The blood thinners had just given him another convenient excuse.
His stomach cramped again, more intensely this time, and he found himself sliding down to sit on the cold bathroom floor. The tile felt good against his overheated skin. He pulled his knees to his chest, trying to find a position that offered some relief.
Three months before the bombing, after a particularly rough shift, he’d caught Bobby watching him with concern in the locker room.
“You’ve been in and out of the bathroom all shift,” Bobby had said quietly, ensuring their privacy. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, Cap.” Buck had forced a smile, shrugging into his civilian clothes. “Just picked up a stomach bug or something. Nothing serious.”
“Maybe you should get checked out. You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”
Buck had laughed it off, made some joke about his iron stomach finally meeting its match. But Bobby’s words had stuck with him, nagging at the back of his mind. How many times had he blamed a stomach bug? How many shifts had he spent counting the minutes between bathroom breaks, popping antacids like candy?
A sharp pain jolted him back to the present, worse than before. Buck curled tighter around himself, pressing his face against his knees as he waited for it to pass. The lawsuit meeting loomed in his mind – he couldn’t miss it, couldn’t show weakness. He just needed to get through today.
His phone buzzed again. This time it was his lawyer: “Meeting pushed to 4pm. Client emergency.”
Relief flooded through him, followed immediately by guilt. He shouldn’t be grateful for more time to pull himself together. He should be ready to fight, ready to prove he deserved his job back. Instead, he was curled up on his bathroom floor, trying not to throw up.
The memory of his last grocery store trip flashed through his mind – standing in the aisle, staring at the shelf of antacids and digestive aids. He’d already tried most of them. Tums, Pepto, Imodium – his medicine cabinet looked like the stomach relief aisle. The elderly woman sharing the aisle had given him a knowing look.
“Stress does terrible things to the stomach, dear,” she’d said kindly. “My Harold had terrible ulcers from his job.”
Buck had managed a weak smile, adding another bottle to his basket. “Yeah, just stress,” he’d agreed. It was easier than admitting he’d been having symptoms long before the stress of the lawsuit, easier than acknowledging the growing fear that something was really wrong.
A new pain ripped through him, different from the others. Buck bit back a groan, pressing his hand against his stomach. When he pulled it away, he noticed his hands were shaking. He needed to get up, needed to review his notes for the meeting, needed to be stronger than this.
The image of Eddie’s face flashed through his mind – the hurt and anger when Buck had told him about the lawsuit. Would he look at Buck with that same betrayal if he knew how long these symptoms had been going on? How many times Buck had brushed off his concern with casual excuses?
“Just get through today,” Buck muttered to himself, using the counter to pull himself to his feet. His legs felt unsteady, his stomach still churning. “Just get through the meeting.”
He splashed cold water on his face, trying to restore some color to his pale cheeks. The man in the mirror looked like a stranger – drawn, tired, shadows under his eyes that no amount of sleep seemed to fix. When had he started looking so sick?
His gut cramped again, and this time when he looked down, he saw what he’d been dreading most: blood. Not much, but enough to send ice through his veins. Enough to make the excuses stick in his throat.
Buck stared at the evidence he couldn’t explain away, couldn’t blame on stress or blood thinners or bad food. His hands gripped the counter until his knuckles turned white.
“Shit,” he whispered, the word barely audible. The room seemed to tilt slightly, reality shifting beneath his feet. This wasn’t stress. This wasn’t the blood thinners. This was something else, something he’d been ignoring for far too long.
His phone buzzed again on the counter. The lawyer’s number flashed on the screen, but Buck couldn’t bring himself to answer. How was he supposed to fight for his job when he could barely stand? How was he supposed to prove he was ready to return to work when he couldn’t even make it through a day without these episodes?
The truth he’d been avoiding for months settled heavy in his stomach: something was very wrong, and no amount of denial was going to make it go away.
Three days later, Buck hadn’t left his apartment. The meeting with his lawyer had been rescheduled twice, his excuses becoming flimsier each time. The blood had appeared again, more than before, and the pain had become a constant companion. He’d stopped eating anything substantial, surviving on water and bland crackers that his stomach sometimes allowed him to keep down.
His phone had stopped ringing as frequently. Maddie had given up trying to contact him after her last voicemail: “You can’t avoid everyone forever, Evan. This isn’t helping anything.” The 118 had stopped reaching out weeks ago. The silence in his apartment pressed against him like a physical weight.
He was curled up on his couch, trying to focus on the TV without really seeing it, when the worst pain yet tore through his abdomen. It doubled him over, stealing his breath, different from all the cramps before. This wasn’t just pain – this was wrong. Fundamentally, terrifyingly wrong.
Buck tried to stand, to make it to his phone on the kitchen counter, but his legs gave out. The room spun around him as he collapsed to his knees, cold sweat breaking out across his skin. The pain came in waves now, each one worse than the last, and he could feel heat radiating from his body – fever, he realized distantly.
“Help,” he tried to call out, but his voice came out as barely a whisper. No one would hear him anyway. No one was coming to check on him.
He started crawling toward the kitchen, each movement sending new spikes of agony through his gut. The floor seemed to tilt and shift beneath him, his vision blurring at the edges. The distance to his phone looked impossible – it might as well have been miles away instead of feet.
Halfway there, his stomach heaved. He barely managed to turn his head before he was vomiting, panic rising when he saw blood mixed with bile. This wasn’t something he could ignore anymore. This wasn’t something he could push through.
The next wave of pain dropped him fully to the floor, his cheek pressing against the cool hardwood. He could see his phone on the counter above him, just out of reach. Black spots danced in his vision as he forced himself to move, dragging himself the last few feet through sheer determination.
His fingers brushed the counter’s edge once, twice, before he managed to pull himself up enough to grab his phone. It slipped from his trembling hands, clattering to the floor beside him. When he finally managed to unlock it, his vision was so blurred he could barely make out the numbers.
9-1-1. The irony wasn’t lost on him as he pressed the digits. How many times had he been on the other end of these calls? How many times had he reassured people that help was coming?
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
Buck tried to speak, but another wave of pain stole his breath. He curled tighter around himself, phone pressed to his ear.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Help,” he finally managed, his voice weak and strained. “I need... something’s wrong. I can’t...”
“Sir, can you tell me your location?”
He forced out his address, the words slurring together. The dispatcher’s voice seemed to come from very far away now, asking questions he couldn’t focus enough to answer. The pain was everywhere, consuming every thought, every breath.
“Sir? Stay with me. Help is on the way. Can you tell me your name?”
“Evan Buckley,” he whispered, and then, because he couldn’t help himself, “I used to be... I was a firefighter.”
The darkness at the edges of his vision was closing in now. He thought he heard the dispatcher say something else, but the words were lost in the roaring in his ears. His last coherent thought before consciousness slipped away was that he should have listened to Bobby all those months ago. Should have admitted something was wrong before it came to this.
The phone slipped from his limp fingers, the dispatcher’s voice still calling his name.
“Apartment 214,” Sarah called out, hefting the medical bag while Marcus grabbed the gurney. “Dispatcher says it’s a male with severe abdominal pain, reported blood in vomit.”
They took the stairs two at a time, the building manager already waiting with a key. The moment they stepped inside, they found their patient crumpled on the kitchen floor, one arm still stretched toward a fallen phone.
“Sir? Can you hear me?” Sarah was already kneeling beside him, fingers pressing against his neck to find a pulse. “Rapid but steady,” she reported, pulling out her penlight to check his pupils.
Buck’s eyes fluttered open at the touch, confusion clouding his features before recognition set in. He tried to push himself up but Sarah gently kept him still.
“I’m Sarah with Station 147, and that’s Marcus. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Stomach...” Buck managed, his voice weak. “Been getting worse. There was blood when I got sick.”
Sarah nodded, her experienced hands gentle but thorough as she examined his abdomen. “How long has this been happening?”
“Months,” Buck admitted quietly, wincing as she found a tender spot. “Thought it was stress, or the blood thinners...”
“Let’s get you to the hospital and figure out what’s going on,” Marcus said, helping Sarah prepare Buck for transport. They worked efficiently, carefully lifting him onto the gurney.
In the ambulance, Sarah started an IV while Marcus drove. Buck lay quietly, eyes closed against the motion of the vehicle, but remained conscious. His vital signs, while not ideal, stayed stable throughout the transport.
“Almost there,” Sarah assured him, adjusting his fluids. “The hospital will get you sorted out.”
Buck nodded slightly, then asked, “You guys don’t know anyone at the 118, do you?”
“No,” Sarah replied, understanding his concern. “And we respect patient privacy. No one has to know you’re here unless you want them to.”
Relief flickered across Buck’s face before another wave of pain made him grimace. Sarah checked his vitals again – not great, but not immediately critical either. They’d get him to the hospital in time.
As they pulled up to the emergency bay, the waiting trauma team approached. Sarah provided a concise handoff, noting the length of symptoms and recent medical history with blood thinners. Buck was quickly transferred to a hospital bed, already being wheeled toward imaging as the EMTs packed up their gear.
“Think he’ll be okay?” Marcus asked as they headed back to their rig.
Sarah nodded, stripping off her gloves. “Yeah. He got help in time. Sometimes that’s all that matters.”