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The only way Eddie has found to get through a horror is to think about what’s waiting on the other side of it.
It’s Christopher, always. Eddie’s childhood in El Paso was boring enough that he never had to grit his teeth and think about home to get through the day, not in the same way that Afghanistan taught him to, and while there was Afghanistan, there was Christopher. He hadn’t realized how often being a firefighter would make him wish he could wear metal jewelry on calls, to have the reminder of the medallion tapping at his chest on the bad days.
Today is a bad day.
Los Angeles isn’t a war zone, Eddie knows those too well to compare, but it’s a cataclysm that feels more biblical than war ever did. Every priest in the city is going to be preaching about Noah and the flood this Sunday, if they have churches left to preach in.
“Bobby thinks B shift is going to relieve us in an hour and a half or so,” Hen says from behind him. Eddie’s been fading and sluggish since the rest of the team found him and Lena at the VA twenty minutes ago. They’ll get sent out at least once more, Eddie’s sure, but there are more bodies on the ground now, first responders and National Guard from outside the city arriving by the dozens, there to ease the strain of a city mid-disaster. “Any word from Christopher?”
“Phone lines are chancy.” Eddie keeps checking. Buck knows that Eddie worries about Christopher even when he knows he’s safe. It’s the first thing he knew about Eddie and Christopher together, that Eddie worries when he can’t get in touch with him. Surely Buck’s been sending messages and they’re not just coming through. “I left him with Buck,” he says. “He’s safe with Buck.”
Hen is kind enough not to mention Buck’s proverbial bad luck. “I know he is, Eddie.”
“I think they were going to the movies.” Are there movie theaters in the radius of the destruction? How far does it go? Eddie doesn’t know parts of LA as well as he should, just the parts the 118 responds to and the parts where his family lives. He doesn’t know Santa Monica. Does Buck? If he and Christopher were going to the movies, surely they would have gone to the one nearest Buck’s apartment. Buck’s turned into a homebody, since the bombing. That’s why Christopher is with him in the first place.
“You know Buck,” says Hen, who knows how long movies are even in the age of Marvel movies twice as long as a nine-year-old’s attention span. “Once he found out there was a disaster, he would have wanted to help. He’s probably passing out water bottles somewhere.”
Eddie is selfish enough to admit that it’s not as good an image as Buck and Christopher asleep on Buck’s couch in a way that will put cricks in both their necks, but it’s good nonetheless, something to hold onto. They both get so bossy when they’re left in charge of anything, whatever place they’ve landed to help people will be running like clockwork. Buck takes orders like shit, but when he’s got people who will listen to him, he gives ones that are obnoxious but keep things organized and steady. This is the kind of situation where he thrives.
“Is a text so much to ask?”
“You could text him,” Hen points out, and Eddie wakes his phone enough to show her the screen, three unanswered texts on it.
“I’m not convinced Buck has ever charged his phone himself,” Chim says, stopping mid-jog with an arm full of supplies. Eddie’s lost track of whether he’s restocking theirs or moving them around the field hospital. “Want me to ask Maddie to swing by? She texted me a while back. She’s on shift, but they have to let her out sometime.”
Eddie shakes his head. “If she’s working, we could get out sooner than her, Hen was just saying Bobby’s getting B-shift to relieve us.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Christopher’s schedule is going to be a nightmare, Carla’s out of town and they’ll have to switch up shift patterns.”
“At least you have a built-in babysitter, seems like, even if he did kidnap your kid,” Chim says, gives him a cheerful slap on the back, and trots off to wherever he was going.
“Diaz, Bosko,” Bobby calls from across the triage yard. He’s more soft-spoken than any officer Eddie ever had, but his voice carries when he means it. “With me.”
Eddie stows his phone back in its watertight case and takes off at a jog with a grimace for Hen, who grimaces back and then goes after Chimney. Bosko, who’s been propping up a wall, drinking a bottle of water and staring into space with an unfriendly enough expression that nobody’s tried to walk up to her, strides over too, tossing the bottle in a pile of trash while she goes. They can care about the environment later.
There’s a woman standing with Bobby, hand clutched to her side in a way that says her ribs are in worse shape than Bosko’s. “Mira here saw someone who needs help a few streets away,” says Bobby when they get close enough. “Are you two up for one more run? It’s a man and his kid.”
“The kid is strapped to his back,” says Mira. “They were walking in this direction, but I think his arms are hurt, and they were moving slow. He wouldn’t let me take the kid, but I thought if emergency services came—”
“I’ve got my best people on it,” says Bobby.
Bosko bristles, and Eddie winces for her, knows she doesn’t want to be one of Bobby’s people tonight or ever, but she’s too professional to go off about it. “Just point us in the right direction,” she says.
Civilians in disaster zones give shitty directions, but they get enough out of her to start moving. It’s too far to roll a gurney the whole way and too close to deploy one of their few available vehicles, so Eddie and Bosko take off at a fast walk. Eddie would jog, most times, but she’s still wincing over her ribs and he doesn’t want to jar them. It’s the only compromise he’s got short of tattling to Bobby that she should be taken off duty.
People see the uniforms and stop and call out, asking for help or confirmation of directions. The city is strange and disorienting tonight, nothing in its right place, like all the streets have been mixed up and shaken around. It felt like that after the bombing, too, while they drove Buck to the hospital. Eddie confirms directions, triages injures with a glance, sends people on with an explanation that they’re going to find a man with a kid.
Not a lot of kids, among the survivors so far. Eddie’s not sure whether to be grateful or horrified by that. Depends how many kids there are in this area usually.
It wasn’t a school day, and it was a beautiful September day. How many kids were on that pier? Eddie itches to check his phone again, to see proof of Chris safe and well.
“How do we want to split it when we get there?” he asks Bosko, mostly to distract himself. He’s worked without Buck almost as long as he worked with him, but he still frames partnerships the way he learned to with Buck, divvying up the work based on their strengths automatically. “If the man is mobile, you escort him and I carry the kid, if he’s not I get him and you get the kid?”
Bosko rolls her eyes. “My ribs aren’t that bad, I can handle whatever needs handling.”
“Noted,” says Eddie. If she doesn’t want to talk, he’s not going to force her.
The two of them walk in silence except for the interruptions down two more intersections and then left, just like the woman told them, and they walk around a corner and into a nightmare.
The worst part is that for thirty seconds, moving automatically toward the problem, Eddie doesn’t realize it’s a nightmare. He just sees two filthy, exhausted people, one of them stumbling along, leaning his weight against the buildings he’s skirting against, both arms in improvised slings, the other person lashed in piggyback position by what looks like a car seat belt.
Eddie realizes in stages: the man’s slings look professional even if they’re made out of cast-off fabric from God knows where. The boy is wearing a striped shirt. The man’s leg is stiff, like Buck always denies his still gets sometimes and his brain gets caught on the word Buck, plays it over and over, and if he thinks the word and after that name he’s going to have to fall to his knees and never get up again.
“LAFD, sir, we’ve been sent to bring you to the field hospital,” Bosko is saying, not even noticing the way Eddie has frozen up.
“Oh, thank—you’re a firefighter? What station? Did your radio short out? I need to contact station 118 right now,” says Buck, rousing out of his stupor, and the kid on his back raises his head with a sleepy sound, Christopher raises his head, and he’s wet and muddy and alive.
“Christopher,” says Eddie, and Christopher snaps up, almost unbalances Buck before Bosko lunges and steadies him, makes Buck let out a strangled noise. “Christopher?”
“Dad,” says Chris, and unlatches one arm from its stranglehold on Buck’s neck, holds it out while Bosko turns over her shoulder with the kind of horrified pity he would get angry about any other time.
Buck sees him then, and his face creases with misery. “Eddie, I’m sorry,” he says, but Eddie doesn’t care about the apology. He cares that his son is alive.
He starts running.
The story comes out in bits and pieces at the field hospital.
Eddie barely remembers the creeping walk back with the familiar weight of Christopher in his arms, Christopher’s chin hooked over his shoulder so he could watch Buck following behind them with Bosko’s arm around his waist. He knows Bosko must have radioed Bobby, because Hen and Chim meet them with a backboard and force Buck onto it, but that’s not important. Chris’s soaked-through shirt and missing glasses and the scrape on his arm are important. Buck’s dislocated shoulder and fractured ulna are important.
“Buck kept me from falling off the fire truck,” Chris says when Buck is getting fussed over by Bobby, Hen, Chim, and two nurses who have to keep elbowing them out of the way, and that’s how Eddie finds out that they were on a fire truck and that Christopher almost fell off it.
“I almost lost him so many times, we were—we were right on the pier,” Buck mumbles when Hen and Chim finish reducing his shoulder, and that’s how Eddie finds out that there was a miracle, for both of them to be alive.
It’s Bobby who drags the story out of Buck in stumbling bursts. Eddie can’t do much but cling to Chris and stare at Buck, so he sits there in silence while Buck, with shockingly chipper interjections from Chris, explains it. The day at the pier, the wave coming in, the way they almost lost each other, the fire truck. Buck saving other people, in between playing games with Christopher.
The water receding, and Buck distracted, Buck helping someone else. Chris unbalancing, tipping, falling, and Buck moving like lightning to snatch at his ankle, the only part of him he could reach, slamming his arm hard with debris as it went by, feeling something give and wrenching his other shoulder reaching to get better purchase and hold on against the sucking tide.
Eddie is almost dizzy thinking about it, how Buck tried to outrun the ocean, failed, and then essentially arm wrestled it and won, for Christopher.
And somehow, he’s still looking up at Eddie with his eyes all red, miserable and apologizing, while the nurses put an inflatable cast on him and tell him to get to an inland ER as soon as he can.
“Buck, is your car underwater?” Chim asks when the story ends and Buck is as examined as field triage, two concerned paramedics, and two EMTs can manage. Bosko’s gone now, found her captain, and Eddie didn’t say goodbye or wish her well. Hopefully she doesn’t mind. He can’t concentrate on anything over the ringing in his ears.
Buck tips his head back and groans, which is the most Buck-like thing he’s done since Eddie found him. “Sh—crap. Probably. I didn’t exactly walk past the parking garage. At least we were at the top, Chris wanted to look out up there. Maybe they’ll be able to get it out.”
“I’ll call Maddie,” says Chim. “She’ll come pick you and Chris up. Unless you want to call someone, Eddie? Your aunt?”
Aunt Pepa will be frantic. Abuela too. He doesn’t know if he wants to hear what they’ll say. He looks at Bobby instead. “Cap, you said we were getting off shift. Do we need to take the truck back to the 118 to meet B-shift? We could take them along, then I can drive them in for a check-up.”
“I just want to sleep,” says Buck, like that’s going to happen. “They’re running shuttles out of the civilian exclusion zone, right? I’ll take one to my neighborhood, get home, go to the hospital tomorrow.”
“Try again,” says Bobby, with the tone only Buck can bring out in him.
Buck heaves a sigh. “I’ll take the shuttle to whatever hospital it’s closest to and then I’ll call an Uber home.”
“What are you going to do at home with zero working arms?” Eddie asks. “How are you supposed to make food, or do laundry, or get dressed?”
“None of it’s that bad, Eddie, come on.”
“He’s coming home with me,” Eddie tells Bobby. “Are we going to the 118?”
At the end of this long, horrible day that’s a lot more horrible in retrospect knowing what Christopher was going through without him knowing about it, it’s still comforting to see Bobby’s mouth twitch into a smile. “Yes. The truck and the ambulance both need to be restocked, they’re not doing any good just sitting around. We can take you back, Buck, and then Eddie has to go to the hospital anyway, I’m sure he wants to get Christopher cleared.”
It’s not easy. Buck whines about being babied but almost collapses when he tries to stand. Then he whines about riding in the back of the ambulance on the way to the 118 so Hen and Chim can get fluids into him and only stops whining when Eddie and Chris climb in with him. At the 118, he whines about getting into Eddie’s car and going to the hospital, swearing he needs sleep before a cast.
Eddie puts him in the passenger seat of his truck, puts Christopher in the back, and raises his eyebrows at Buck when just putting on his seat belt makes him go pale and sweaty with effort. “Hey,” he says, and waits for Buck’s attention. “You saved my kid today. Let me take care of you for the night, okay? We can talk longer-term plans tomorrow.”
“You can have some of my Froot Loops in the morning, Buck,” Christopher says from the back seat, voice full of painful hope. There’s a world, maybe, where Eddie could let himself be mad that Buck walked his son into Armageddon, but it’s not this one. Chris doesn’t blame him, wants him close, so Eddie’s going to follow his lead. He rarely goes wrong following Christopher’s lead.
Buck tips his head back against the headrest. “I mean, how am I supposed to turn down Froot Loops?” He makes a face. “Especially when I can’t flip pancakes for a few weeks. Sorry about that, buddy.”
“That’s okay, Buck. You said you could teach me and Dad anyway.”
“I was not part of that discussion,” says Eddie, waving at the rest of A-shift as he pulls out. Chim’s been on the phone with Maddie pretty much since they confirmed Buck was stable, and he hasn’t hung up yet, still talking, probably explaining more of Buck’s condition now that Buck isn’t nearby to hear it. “Maybe we use the wafflemaker for a few weeks, huh? I think I can handle that.”
“You say that now, and then you’ll end up with a crusted mess in your waffle iron because you didn’t put anything in to make it release the batter.”
“You can spray some cooking spray into the wafflemaker if you think I can’t be trusted to do it, I think you can handle lifting that.”
Buck groans. “I was just gearing up to try to make another push to get back to work, and now I’m on light duty at most for another six weeks.”
“Gives you more chance to come off the blood thinners,” Eddie offers, but he doesn’t expect it to help. It wouldn’t help him. “And gives me a chance to make you babysit,” he adds, which he does expect to help. Instead, it makes Buck flinch.
Christopher isn’t asleep in the backseat yet. Eddie can try to drill down into that later. For now, he lets Buck deflect and turns on the radio, since his ancient truck doesn’t have any way of playing music, and searches around until he finds a station that’s still playing music in defiance of every other’s stations sober tsunami coverage. It’s playing some 80s song he’s pretty sure his mother used to have on in the kitchen while making dinner.
“We’ll get it figured out,” says Eddie, hardly knowing what he’s talking to, and keeps driving to the nearest hospital.
The hospital disgorges them around four in the morning. It feels like it should take longer, like every bed in the city should be taken up and there shouldn’t be a doctor free to deal with a simple non-displaced fracture and an already-reduced dislocation. The hospital is swarming with staff, though, doctors and nurses in on their days off to deal with the disaster and national guard medics running around acting as orderlies and doing triage, and they seem relieved to have the opportunity to get three people out of their waiting room. A check of Christopher’s lungs, a cast and a sling and a lot of instructions for Buck, and they’re out in the world again.
Even this late, or this early, the drive is a nightmare. Half the city has been rerouted, and nobody outside the radius of the tsunami took the shelter in place order seriously. Eddie drives with his hands clenched on the wheel to the accompaniment of the worst of the 80s, Christopher’s soft sleeping breaths in the back, and the pained grunts Buck can’t help but let out despite the Vicodin whenever they hit a pothole.
There’s no light on at home. Eddie wasn’t supposed to get home until tomorrow. Buck was supposed to watch him overnight and Eddie would have gone back to the loft after his 24, treated Buck to breakfast as thanks for watching Chris without notice, something he would never have done if he weren’t so determined to drag Buck out of bed.
Eddie sits in his driveway for longer than he wants to admit. Buck doesn’t start moving either, and when Eddie finally looks over at him, Buck is staring at the release for the seat belt like it’s a door he’s going to have to open with the jaws. Eddie swallows and reaches over and hits the release. “Stay there. Don’t try the car door.”
“Eddie—”
“Can you let me take care of you tonight? We can argue about it tomorrow, but I’m too tired tonight and you look like shit.”
Buck looks automatically at the back seat. Chris is drooling into his own shoulder. He looks so young, without his glasses. “Fine,” he says, in a way that means there’s going to be a fight about it later.
Eddie jogs around the car and lets Buck out before he can change his mind, tells him to stand there and not do anything while he extracts Chris, hitches him up in his arms until he can hold a key at the same time. Buck tries to take the key and glares when Eddie glares, but he also doesn’t have the grip strength to take it from Eddie yet, so he lets Eddie precede him to the front door, lets Eddie let them in.
Normally, Eddie is a stickler for bedtime routine. It’s one of the few things Shannon got the chance to drill into his head before she left El Paso, that kids need routines. Christopher never gets to skip flossing or brushing or washing his face, never gets to skip a story and a glass of water at his bedside, no matter who’s the one putting him to bed. On the road to LA, on the day his mother died, on the day of her funeral, Chris gets his routine.
Eddie skips it. The next fifteen minutes fuzz into static, except a few sharp words he exchanges with Buck, every time Buck tries to do something stupid, like climb onto the couch. Eddie needs Christopher close and he only wants to change one set of sheets in the morning when they’re all too tired to shower without drowning (fuck, fuck, they both could have, Chris could have), so he all but throws Christopher in the middle of the bed, drags Buck onto the side with nothing in the nightstand with just his t-shirt and boxers on, and strips down that far himself.
“Get some sleep,” Eddie says, the kind of mindless thing that would make him feel embarrassed if it didn’t make Chris tuck himself against Eddie’s side. Buck just looks over at him, eyes wide. There are scratches across his face. Eddie doesn’t know how he got them. Somehow, the only injury Christopher has is a bruise around his ankle from where Buck grabbed him while he was dislocating his shoulder, but Buck is a tapestry of bruises and cuts all neatly sealed up with surgical glue because the hospital didn’t want to take him off the blood thinners.
“Don’t know if I can,” Buck says, low and half-slurred with exhaustion.
“Try anyway.”
Eddie can’t avoid the pull of it, the exhaustion that comes from a shift with no downtime, that comes from fear and hard physical labor. He slips off to sleep to the sound of them breathing, though Buck’s breathing doesn’t slow, doesn’t deepen, before Eddie falls asleep.
Bobby calls about the same time that Maddie arrives with a to-do list and takeout that afternoon, and Eddie makes an apologetic face and slips into the bedroom with its stripped-bare mattress to take the call.
Mostly, it’s an update about the new shift schedule and the slightly changed response radius the 118 is going to deal with until the 136 can get back up and running, but Bobby stays on the line once Eddie has written down all the information he needs to transfer to his calendar. “You worked well with Lena Bosko yesterday, it seems like.”
“She’s a good worker. Any word about her captain?”
“He’ll live, though it will be a long road to recovery, and whether he can be employed in the field is going to be an even longer road to figure out. I’m asking about Bosko, though, because she’s one of the best heavy rescue assets they have, and I thought about asking for her to be our semi-permanent floater, since Buck’s in recovery again.”
Eddie is tired, and like his son when he’s tired, he wants to throw a temper tantrum. He’s tired of not having Buck, of being the odd man out, trying to find his way into dynamics with floaters or people who have been on A-shift for most of a decade. He doesn’t know how Buck handled it for a whole year before Eddie came along. “I liked Bosko. Weren’t her ribs messed up?”
“Bruised, not broken, according to the message I just got. She’ll be out for two or three shifts to make sure, but then I can put her on rotation with you.”
“Sounds good, Cap.”
“And Buck? Is he still with you?”
And that, Eddie guesses, is the real point of this call. Bobby is intense caring about Buck, but doesn’t like Buck to know it, and that’s only been worse since the embolism and whatever argument they had about it in the hospital. “Yeah,” says Eddie, because he doesn’t need to be fighting with Bobby too. “I’m hoping I can keep him for at least a week, my home health aide is out of town and Chris would way rather have him than my aunt even when Buck can’t pick him up. I’ll just make sure they have a pizza budget.”
“He’ll recover?”
“Textbook break, textbook dislocation. Antibiotics for how scraped up he got and how much dirty water he swam through. He’s supposed to see his PCP soon to figure out how to step down from the blood thinners, so give him another six weeks and he’ll be ready to go.”
“We’ll hope so. I know we’ll have a busy time at work, but let me know if there’s anything I can do while he’s recovering at your house.”
That’s well above Eddie’s pay grade to deal with. “All he’s going to want is to not be bored out of his mind and to know we’re keeping his spot warm for him. Maybe some leftovers from the station if you make one of his favorites.”
“I can make lasagna our first regular shift,” Bobby assures him, even if it sounds like he’d like to say more, and Eddie ends the call as fast as he can.
Buck and Maddie are the kitchen table when Eddie finds them, talking about the logistics that always attend a tragedy. It’s not enough for the bad thing to happen. There has to be bureaucracy, paperwork, problems. Eddie needed to jump through a thousand hoops to shut down the fucking Netflix account his estranged wife had inherited from her dead mother, needed to get death certificates and clear out Shannon’s place and get her personal items from her office, needed to tell the police he wasn’t pressing charges for a tragic accident and didn’t want to testify if the state pressed them.
Buck’s logistics are smaller, but they’re just as annoying: he needs a new phone, keys, driver’s license, credit card. He needs to figure out if the parking garage he was in has been condemned or if he can get his car back. He needs to inform the LAFD about his latest injuries.
When Eddie finds them, Buck is on Maddie’s phone (easily distinguished by the pretty pastel case) with his bank, humming tunelessly to the hold music. “Everything okay with Bobby?” he asks, hand over the mic, because as weird as Bobby is about Buck, Buck is just as weird and does a worse job of hiding it.
“Just talking shift schedules and making sure you’re okay,” says Eddie, and then in a fit of optimism adds “I think he knew you didn’t have a phone and knew you’d be with me.”
Buck and Maddie don’t look that much alike, the way Eddie and Christopher don’t, but their resemblance comes out in the expressions they make. Now, they catch each other’s eyes, both make some kind of face with a twisted-up mouth that communicates some story Eddie hasn’t heard yet. “I’ll text him when I have a phone,” says Buck, and that seems to be that, since he goes back to listening really intensely to the hold music.
“How’s Chris?” Maddie asks, brow wrinkling with concern.
Eddie checks over his shoulder automatically. Chris is watching a movie in the living room. Eddie will have to tell him to do something besides stare at a screen at some point, get him moving back into their regular routine, but he doesn’t want to. Chris is exhausted and sore and frustrated with both of those things, and the movie is probably staving off the inevitable breakdown. “Doing okay,” says Eddie, and sits at the table, kicks gently at Buck’s ankle. “Alive, thanks to your brother.”
Buck makes another face, mouth open to say something, but he comes off hold then, and the conversation dies, and Eddie pulls over Maddie’s to-do list to see if there’s anything he can do.
“I’m not taking your bed, Eddie, you’ve got to work tomorrow.”
Eddie crosses his arms. If Buck thinks he can out-stubborn a man with two younger sisters and a son under the age of ten he has another think coming. “Has the bed suddenly shrunk since last night? Did you remember I have cooties? Both of your arms are screwed up, there’s no way you can safely get off the couch if you need to piss in the night.”
“I manage my hydration schedule really well, actually—”
“Yeah, I don’t need to know that. You need a bed, Buck, you slept less than six hours after a major injury, you need to crash, and you need a bed to do it in.”
“I toss and turn.”
“My kid kneed me in the kidney this morning, you can’t beat that.”
“What if Chris needs you?”
“Then he’ll wake both of us.” Eddie shrugs. “Odds are he’ll want to see you too, if he wakes up.”
Buck ducks his head, brow furrowed. Getting closer to the core of it, maybe. “What if I have a nightmare? I could wake you up. I could wake him up. Maddie said I screamed sometimes, after the truck, and so did—Ali couldn’t—”
Eddie wakes for the sputtering sentence to get the rest of the way out but isn’t totally surprised when it doesn’t. Ali went from thinking she couldn’t handle Buck’s job to knowing she couldn’t handle it within the space of maybe a week and a half after the bombing. Waking up to Buck having a trauma flashback could have been the cause, and it might explain why Buck never ranted about the death knell. “I’ve been woken up by other people’s nightmares before. His, yeah, but also people in Afghanistan. Do you want to be alone?”
“I don’t want to keep you guys up, you’re already doing too much to take care of me.”
“Not what I asked. Do you want to be alone?”
Buck slumps, and then winces when the slump pulls at his bad shoulder. “No.”
“Then you’re coming to bed. End of story.” Buck opens and closes his mouth on at least three more arguments, none of which he bothers to say out loud, and then looks at Eddie with the kind of mute resentment Christopher gives him when it’s one of the days of the week he has to ask for extra reps of his PT exercises. Eddie tries not to let his smile turn into a smirk and probably fails. “Say ‘Thank you, Eddie.’”
“You’re such a dick.”
“Good enough,” Eddie decides, and drags Buck through all the tasks of the evening, all the things Buck needs help to do with both of his arms compromised. Buck is quiet and resentful the whole time, but he starts snoring almost as soon as Eddie tucks him into bed.
Nobody sleeps well that night, not for long. Chris and Buck trade off nightmares that wake the whole house up, both in tears of fear and embarrassment and apology. Eddie tries to be there for them both. Chris clings to him but demands Buck’s presence too. Buck tries to huddle down into himself and stay alone, but he wakes up loud, so Christopher comes to find him every time anyway, give some comfort. Eddie doesn’t know how he raised a kid this good.
Morning is somehow harder. Eddie has to go to work, but the school is shut down, something about a basement utility closet flooding with the backwash through the storm drains and knocking out the electricity. It’s more annoying bullshit to deal with in the wake of something bad, but at least he’s got Buck, or he thinks he does until Eddie tries to start leaving in the morning and Buck all but drags him into the kitchen.
“Eddie, are you crazy? I thought you would have Pepa coming! You can’t leave me alone with him!”
Eddie blinks, thrown. “There are meals to microwave in the fridge and the cereal is stored where you don’t have to reach up, you should be fine. Call Pepa or Maddie if you need to go somewhere, or if there’s an emergency, but I don’t expect there to be. Watch movies, try to teach him how to make actual shapes out of Lego, call an Uber and go on a trip if you want. Just maybe pick somewhere inland this time.”
Buck is still staring at Eddie like they’re having two totally different conversations. “I walked him into a tsunami,” he says, very slow like he thinks Eddie is stupid. “Why would you trust me in the same house as him?”
Eddie tries and fails to figure out what led Buck there. “You didn’t know, Buck. And then you saved him. That matters more.” He’d love to impress this on Buck, but Christopher is just down the hall and Eddie is going to be late as it is. He does the best in the limited time he has, and clasps Buck’s good shoulder, makes sure he’s looking at him so he doesn’t waste words. “There is no one in this world I trust with my son more than you.”
“Eddie—”
“Text me if you go anywhere, okay? I’ve got to go, Bobby’s going to kill me if I’m late.”
Buck doesn’t look happy, but Eddie doesn’t have time for that. He squeezes Buck’s shoulder one more time, releases him, jogs down the hallway to smack a kiss on Chris’s hair, and jogs right out of the house again. Buck can’t complain if Buck can’t catch him.
Buck does have Maddie’s old phone, though, which means when Eddie gets to the 118, there’s a text waiting for him, saying thanks, even though you’re crazy it means a lot.
Eddie doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he doesn’t bother. But the whole shift, his phone vibrates at least once an hour, pictures and updates on Chris, even though they don’t go anywhere all day. Christopher’s always grinning, trusting and loving and looking past the camera, not at it. Eddie made the right choice, and Buck is going to have to accept that.
It’s a long shift, full of the calls that come from infrastructure that fails slowly instead of quickly after an emergency: rotted foundations finally cracking, trees with their root systems coming up, wiring shorting out. Eddie comes home exhausted, two hours after Buck dropped Chris off at school (two more pictures of the two of them in Pepa’s backseat, and much smaller smiles), to find Buck sitting at the kitchen table looking about as tired as Eddie feels.
Eddie could nap. He kicks out the chair opposite Buck instead. “Nightmares again? Or are you trying to wean off your pain meds too soon?”
“I don’t know,” says Buck, which means yes, both, and then he looks up at Eddie, shaking off the sullenness when he realizes Christopher has to be part of his answer. “Only one for him. Way better than the night before. And I didn’t wake him up this time.”
“Was he nervous about school?” Easier to talk about Chris, to start.
“Kind of yes, kind of no. He said he wanted to tell all of his friends we were in the tsunami so, uh, expect a phone call asking if they should be calling CPS on me, I guess?”
Eddie glares at him. “You think every parent or aunt or babysitter who took their kids to the pier that day deserves a call from CPS? Sounds like a pretty bad use of their time if you ask me. Especially when a lot of those families are probably grieving. Which I’m not. Because you saved him twice. How are your arms?”
Buck ducks his head, but he doesn’t complain out loud. Progress of some kind, maybe. Eddie will just make sure they keep making progress, slow and steady. Emotional PT to go with the physical kind Buck will complain he can’t do yet and then complain more about when he can do it. “The shoulder’s feeling mostly fine at this point, just a little sore. And this is only the third worst broken arm I’ve had.”
“Do I want to ask how many you’ve had?”
Buck’s face scrunches up. “Probably not? But the broken elbow the summer I turned ten was the worst, I couldn’t go the pool the whole time it was really warm enough.”
“I’m amazed Maddie hasn’t sewn bubble wrap to the inside of your turnouts.” Eddie has some questions about Buck’s parents and the amount of broken bones Buck talks about getting way too casually for a mandated reporter, but he doesn’t have the energy to get pissed off right now. Instead, he makes a show out of stretching and yawning. “Seems like we’re both worn out. Want to get a couple hours of a nap?”
“You take one.”
Eddie should. It doesn’t matter if Buck is with him, Eddie needs the sleep and Buck’s a grown man and not really his responsibility. “What’s your plan for the day, if I’m asleep and you can’t lift anything heavier than the remote?”
“Getting a lot of remote reps in, probably. Chris says I’m really behind on my Pixar, and I haven’t seen any Spongebob at all.”
“Lucky you.” Eddie kicks him under the table. “You sure? Might be easier to sleep when it’s just us and I’m here to protect you from any big bad waves.”
Buck laughs an obligatory laugh, which is fair. It wasn’t a very good joke. “No, Eddie, I’m good. I haven’t seen a single Cars movie and apparently I really need to.”
“Rough. Maybe we can watch a better car-themed movie tonight after he goes to bed.” Eddie can’t reasonably fight more than that, and surprises himself with the desire to do it. Too used to being a dad, maybe, not used to being a friend. He lets that side of him have one last indulgence. “If you do decide to get some sleep, don’t worry about waking me up, come into the bedroom.”
“It’s just me and Lightning McQueen out here,” says Buck in obvious refusal, and pushing further would be weird, so Eddie gives up on the battle and decides he can figure out what the war is some other time.
It’s harder to fall asleep than he thinks it should be, with the movie playing in the living room, too quiet to make out the dialogue, just loud enough that Eddie knows something is playing at all. When he falls asleep, it’s because he hears Buck starts snoring, probably asleep sitting up like a dumbass.
Buck doesn’t raise any real objections to anything Eddie offers for the next week. Some combination of people and time seems to ease his guilt off enough that he stops complaining when Eddie leaves him with Chris, and the weaning off the pain meds leaves him quiet and grimacing. He puts up a token protest every night Eddie is home about sharing the bed, but the pain is Eddie’s ally on that one: the protests are only ever a token.
Eddie’s first 48 after the tsunami, when Maddie and Carla swap off coming to check in on Buck and Christopher, is the next time Buck tries to change anything.
“Carla’s back,” he says when Eddie’s slept off his shift, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table.
“She is. Glad she can check in on you guys.”
“She could take over, Eddie. Better than I can, since she can feed him and drive him to school and all the other things that people with two working arms can do.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “And she can also feed you and drive you to appointments and all the other things you can’t right now. You help enough with Chris that she’s doing the same amount of work, so she can keep us on her schedule and not be underpaid.”
“So you’re just planning to keep me here for six weeks?”
“You make it sound like I’m kidnapping you. What is this, Beauty and the Beast?”
Buck just stares at him. Seriously, not even that one? Eddie would have bet that Maddie would have at least shown him. “Sure,” he finally says, waving that off, and dives right back into being annoying. “Come on, you must want to get back to normal.”
Eddie thinks that over. Historically, he’s liked having space, liked having time. He loves Chris, wants to spend all the time with him he can, but he can’t say he minds the days he’s off shift and Chris is at school, time most parents don’t get. He and Shannon were both like that, and it’s one of the reasons they rubbed each other raw. By all rights, he should be sick of Buck by now. According to most of the 118, no matter how much they love him, Buck is notoriously annoying. “Nah,” he decides eventually.
“What?”
“I like having you around, Chris likes having you around. You need the help, we need the help. Why not stay until you’re healed up?”
Buck makes an aborted movement and winces. His arm isn’t quite up to gesticulating yet. “How am I helping? I can’t do anything.”
Except wake up when Christopher has a nightmare and sit with him and help more than Eddie does because he knows what Chris went through, even if the most recent one about a woman drowning baffled him. Except have snacks ready for Chris after school and Eddie after shift, nothing he has to cook or slice, but carefully set out plates. Except help with homework and figuring out why the forms for extracurriculars are written so only lawyers can do them. Eddie frowns at him. “You’re being here. That matters to me, to Chris. I don’t care if you can’t make pancakes right now, and he only does because he’s a third grader.” Buck saved Eddie’s kid. He could sleep in Eddie’s bed for the rest of his life and snore and steal the blankets and it would be a small price to pay in return, especially because it somehow doesn’t feel like a price at all.
“Just … tell me when I piss you off, okay? I can go back to the loft, Maddie can check on me. I’ll even sleep on the couch so you don’t have to worry about me on the stairs.”
It’s not Eddie’s job to make Buck think he’s not annoying. If nothing else, Chim would probably not thank him for the effort. “Sure, I’ll tell you if you do. I don’t expect it to happen, but maybe you’ll start leaving wet towels on the floor.”
“Chris does that.”
Eddie stands up. “And yet somehow I haven’t kicked him out yet. Weird. Want to go sit out back and watch me try to fight with the weeds and tell me I should plant a pollinator garden so my landlord will decide it’s curb appeal and up my rent?”
“Nobody can even see your backyard from the curb,” Buck objects, but he trails Eddie out to the yard, and he smiles the whole time, even when his meds start wearing off.
Eddie hangs up from a late-night call with Buck in the middle of shift and heads down from the roof to the loft, where Bobby is making tea. Bobby always seems to be awake when one of them is awake. Eddie has no idea how he does it, because firehouses are full of insomniacs.
“Everything okay at home?” Bobby asks without turning around. He’s got two mugs out on the counter, two teabags waiting in them, some herbal blend Hen swears by that tastes like something Abuela forced on him as a kid when he was sad.
“Christopher had a nightmare.” They were better for a while but they’re bad again all of a sudden, bad enough that Carla brought up therapy when he brought them up to her. That’s bad enough, especially when Eddie isn’t home for it, but tonight the worst thing is remembering Buck’s broken-up, exhausted voice saying Eddie, I can’t even hug him right, I don’t know what to do. “It upset Buck.”
“How’s living with him?”
“Fine for me. Seems to be stressing him out that he can’t do more, but Chris and I don’t mind. He’s supposed to start stepping up mobilization exercises for his shoulder soon, I’m hoping that will help.” Eddie comes up to lean against the counter where he can see Bobby’s profile, because as far as he can tell, all of Bobby’s news about Buck is secondhand right now, when he was a steady presence during that first recovery. “You could ask him that. He might tell you something I can’t.”
“Maybe.”
Maybe. That’s not like Bobby. He saves his maybes for managing the expectations of people they’re trying to help, for thinking of possibilities to help them better. He doesn’t maybe his team. “Are you and Buck good, Cap? I keep figuring you’d bring a meal over, something like that. Hen and the family came over the other day, Maddie and Chim are in and out.”
“We’re fine, Eddie. I can send a casserole with you if you think he’d like that.” Eddie doesn’t respond. Bobby’s smart enough to know the food isn’t the point. “He’s going to want to talk about coming back, and he needs more time than he thinks he does.”
Rehabbing both arms is no joke, Eddie knows that from bullet wounds, but that’s not what Bobby is saying. Buck’s already complaining about how long it’s going to take to build his strength up. “He’s had a rough year,” he offers. “Wouldn’t be out of bounds for you to send him to a counselor. Might give him something to do so he doesn’t wind himself up that he’s being a bad housewife.”
“Surely you mean houseguest,” Bobby says, smile tucked at the corner of his mouth.
“You’d think, but given how upset he is that he can’t lift up a laundry basket or a vacuum, you’d be wrong.” Bobby huffs out something like a laugh, but it doesn’t last long. “Cap, there something up with you and Buck? Because there doesn’t seem to be from his side. He talks about you just the same.” Except with a lost kind of tone, these days, with the lack of contact stacking up. Buck doesn’t mention it, but he’s not subtle.
“I worry about him. That he’s hurt, of course, but more how fast he’s going to want to come back. His injuries haven’t been his fault, but it’s easy for that many survivals against the odds to give anyone a God complex, and Buck was reckless to begin with. I don’t want to risk him out in the field thinking nothing can kill him.”
“His recklessness helped him save my kid,” Eddie says, way more sharp than he should be with a superior officer, and he takes a breath to dial it back as much as he can. “He’s always going to throw himself in to save people. Hell, you hired me because you knew I would keep him safe while he did. Maybe I’m not enough to keep him safe, but that’s my fault, not his.”
That shakes Bobby into looking at him. “Eddie, none of that was your fault.”
“I could argue that I’m the reason he and Christopher ended up in that tsunami, but that’s not the point. Wasn’t his fault, wasn’t mine either. Sure wasn’t yours, Cap. You want him to get a psych eval? That’s fair. I do too. He’s got nightmares and he won’t talk about them. You think this is some kind of sign from something out there that he’s not supposed to be a firefighter?” Eddie shakes his head. “He’ll find a way to save people anyway, and he won’t have turnouts or a team to protect him. It’s a miracle he survived the tsunami without either. I don’t want to trust in a second one.”
“My priest would probably say there are always miracles for people with faith, but Buck’s already had more than his fair share.” Bobby slumps and then collects himself to pour boiling water into the mugs. “I’d argue that he did have a team on the pier, though. He had Christopher. The three of you make a pretty good team.”
“We do.” Eddie takes the tea, blows on it even though it’s still steeping. “You gonna give him a call, tell him what he needs to do to get back to this station once he’s got his strength back?”
Bobby sighs. “Sometime this week, once I’ve decided what that is.”
That’s not tomorrow, or today, since it’s past one in the morning now, but it’s not never either. Bobby keeps his promises. “Thanks, Cap. He’ll start climbing the walls otherwise. He’s already alphabetized all my file folders because they’re pretty much all he can lift to organize.”
“I’ll definitely save you before he finds a clipboard,” Bobby assures him, and the two of them stay in the loft in silence, mostly not drinking their tea, until the tones go off at two.
Buck grumbles enough about the trauma therapy Bobby tells him he has to do that Eddie finally moves on putting Christopher in therapy just so Buck can pretend that by attending his he’s setting a good example for Chris when in reality it’s the other way around.
Their first appointments are on the same day, the afternoon of the first day of Eddie’s 48 off, and he drives them both to their appointments. Chris first, dragging Buck into the waiting room where he leafs listlessly through old issues of Highlights, which is somehow still in print. Eddie goes in for half of that appointment and watches, nervous, for the rest of it.
The part that sticks out most is Dr. Lim asking about Buck when Chris mentions him for the third time, glancing between them so either of them can answer. “He seems important in your life, especially if he saved you. Can I ask what place he holds in your life?”
“He’s my best friend,” says Chris, easy as breathing. “He takes care of me, and he’s living with us right now so we can take care of him, because he got hurt saving me.”
“Definitely important.” And then, with a look at Eddie, “A family friend?”
An easy category. Buck tends to transcend those. “My work partner. We’re firefighters, and that means you get close with your partners. But Chris is definitely his favorite.”
“I’m glad you both have someone so close to you,” says Dr. Lim, and transitions smoothly into asking Christopher about the tsunami, and Eddie can hold his hand and try not to shake thinking about how wrong it almost went.
Eddie doesn’t stay for Buck’s appointment, even though Buck is twitching and fidgeting in the passenger seat the whole way to the office. It’s some guy who works for the department, a new hire replacing a woman who took a job up in the Bay Area, apparently, and he’s not a known quantity, so Buck is jumping out of his skin. Or maybe he just doesn’t like therapy. Eddie can’t blame him. Every mandated session he’s ever had has been miserable.
He takes Chris to the grocery store, because he’s at that perfect age where getting trusted with the grocery list feels like an honor and Eddie can spend time with his son and get something done at the same time. Buck will shake his head over the frozen foods, the pastas and jarred sauces, the vegetables and fruit they can cut up and eat plain, but Buck can feed them all he wants in a few weeks. Eddie’s not as helpless as he used to be, Carla keeps leaving out beginner recipes for him, but taking care of Chris and Buck is distracting. He doesn’t need to worry about dry chicken on top of it. A few weeks of chicken nuggets won’t kill any of them.
When Buck comes out to the grocery-filled car where Chris is pretending not to doze off and periodically demanding Eddie change the music, he’s limping, which is a sure sign that he’s upset. His leg doesn’t bother him much these days unless he’s freaking out about something, like he needed another tell.
“Have fun in there?” Eddie asks when Buck gets into the car. He’s got the strength and mobility to open a car door and buckle himself in these days, something that’s definitely a relief to Buck and is mostly a relief to Eddie because Buck was such a dick about it.
Buck groans and tips his head back against his seat. “This guy’s brutal.”
“You going back?”
“I have to, don’t I?” And then, when Eddie just turns to face him fully and raises his eyebrows, “Still better than my last therapist, anyway.”
Christopher is in the back, perking up now that Buck is here. Eddie decides not to ask any more questions. He knows the outline of the story, and he doesn’t have the time to get pissed off right now.
It’s Chris’s therapist, at their next appointment, who figures out what he’s been dreaming about, why his tsunami dreams keep focusing on a woman, why he won’t tell Eddie or even Buck details, why they’ve been getting worse while Buck’s are slowly improving.
Shannon. He’s dreaming about Shannon. Eddie kept him away from her dead body, kept the casket closed, but Chris knows what bodies look like, now, thanks to the tsunami. Of course he’d put her in their place, especially with her birthday coming up.
Eddie says the right things to the therapist, or hopes he does. He says the right things to Chris, or really fucking hopes he does. The whole time, his ears ring like he’s been in an explosion, and it’s still going when he gets home and Buck anxiously asks what’s going on and Eddie sidesteps because he can’t handle Buck’s guilt or his sympathy right now, and it’s still going when they fall asleep next to each other, and it’s still going the next day when Eddie is dropping Chris off at a party, and it’s still going when a man confronts him about parking in the handicapped spot, and it’s still going when Eddie punches him in the face, and it finally stops when the beat cop asks him who he wants to call since he’s being let off with a warning.
Buck can’t drive, but he wants to call him anyway. Buck is his first call, these days. Probably will be until Eddie gives in to Christopher’s pleas for his own phone. But Buck is hurt, and he doesn’t need Eddie’s problems, Eddie’s mess. He needs Eddie strong and taking care of him.
Pepa would come, and would scold him the whole time, and somehow it would end up getting back to his parents, which he can’t allow. Bobby would come, and would give him one of those tired, disappointed looks Buck usually gets after leaping before he looks. Chim would come, and he’d tell Maddie, who would tell Buck. Hen would come, but she’s a good parent who would never get thrown in holding for punching an asshole and risk losing custody of her son.
“Didn’t figure I’d be your first call, Diaz,” Lena Bosko says when she comes to pick him up.
“My usual first call is out of commission.”
“So I’m his replacement in and out of the field?”
Eddie swallows all the awful things he wants to snap at that. It’s not her fault he misses Buck at work even if he’s arguably spending more time with him at home. “I’m sorry. I’ll give you gas money if you want.”
She waves him off. “Don’t worry about it. I got to see the 118’s golden boy in holding.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t gossip about it.”
“Not my plan,” she says, but she doesn’t say what her plan is, and Eddie is too tired and too embarrassed to ask. They listen to bad country while she drops him back at his truck, and Eddie thanks her and makes a vague promise about buying her coffee before their shift the next day and goes home.
“Did you stop by the store or something?” Buck asks when Eddie comes in, lazily looking up from watching something on the couch. Another movie Christopher recommended, looks like.
“Wanted to go for a drive,” says Eddie, who’s never wanted to drive recreationally in LA. And he did go for a drive, technically, in the back of a black-and-white. “Sorry, I should have texted.” He would have if he’d had access to his phone. “Everything good here? If you need me to go to the store I can.”
Buck shakes his head and moves to give more real estate on the couch. “Nah, come sit down, watch Monsters Inc with me. I hear it’s way better than the Cars franchise.”
Eddie wants to scrub the feeling of holding cell and judgment and shame off of him more than anything else. “I need a shower, the AC on my truck is on the fritz again.”
Buck pauses the movie. “Okay. I can wait.”
“Thanks, man,” says Eddie, and it’s not half of what he wants to say, not a quarter of it, but it’s all he can get out of his mouth before he heads down the hall to change his clothes and shower.
The first fight feels good until it doesn’t.
This isn’t some weedy dick in a parking lot, this is someone who’s here to fight, here to bleed, here for the same reasons Bosko brought Eddie to this mess of a place. Eddie can fight without holding back, fight like he did on boring nights overseas, learning fighting styles from guys who took karate or taekwondo or wrestled and kept his history of ballroom dance competitions as quiet as he could. It’s messy, but it feels clean, and he finishes exhilarated, already planning his next one, until the adrenaline starts leaching away.
Eddie is bruised, and he can explain bruises away to Christopher, even to Pepa and Carla, as injuries from firefighting, but Buck will recognize what bruises from punches and strikes and kicks look like, and he’ll know that Hen or Chim would have texted him if someone had hit Eddie on shift. Buck will know, and Buck will worry, and Buck will try to take care of him, and that ruins the fun. That’s maybe good. He maybe shouldn’t think of it as fun.
“You look like you’re thinking too hard,” Bosko says when she finishes her fight, grinning and rolling her shoulders. She hits mean and hard. “Need to go out there again?”
“I think this was really stupid for me,” he blurts, and raises his hands when she scowls. “Glad you enjoy it, thanks for hanging out, but I can’t go home with bruises.”
She raises her eyebrows. “To your son? The kid’s that observant?”
“Buck’s still there. He sure is. And I don’t want to lie to Christopher if he does ask.”
“Buck might get that you have some energy to work out, if you tell him. I tell a friend when I’m going out, so they know to check in on me if they don’t hear from me by morning.”
Eddie tries to imagine Buck’s response to that. Hey, I’m going out to an illegal fighting ring that could lose me my job and my son, back by one, Eddie might say, and Buck would call Bobby so fast Eddie’s head would be spinning. Or Buck would threaten him with his scary therapist. “I’m glad it works for you,” he says.
“But not for you.” She shrugs at him. “No skin off my nose, even if you clearly have some shit to work out. As long as your inevitable explosion doesn’t catch me in the blast radius, I can wash my hands of it.”
“Thanks for trying. I’ll try not to let my shit splash on you again.” He starts backing off, heading back for his shitty truck. “I need to get home, but in case you didn’t text your friend because you had company tonight—let me know when you get home yourself, okay? I’ll start calling hospitals if I don’t hear from you by morning.”
“Such a dad, Diaz,” she says, already turning away, but it sounds like she’s smiling.
Buck is asleep when Eddie gets home, and Eddie, whose ribs are starting to complain from the hits he took, sets up the couch. He doesn’t want to wake Buck up, doesn’t want to answer questions about where he was when his excuse about going out for drinks with some of the team was flimsy.
Christopher wakes up with a nightmare before Eddie can lie down, let alone pull the blankets up. Immediately, there’s muffled swearing in the bedroom and then the door opens just as Eddie moves through. “Oh hey, you’re back,” says Buck, and gets ahead of Eddie to get through Christopher’s door first, to fall into the chair they’ve started leaving by the bed.
This is enough of a habit now, Buck comforting Chris after nightmares while his arms are messed up, that they have a routine. Buck leans in and rests his forehead against Chris’s, puts a hand on his arm, and makes hushing noises while his breathing evens out. Eddie stands in the doorway, feeling useless, feeling like the evidence of the night is all over him.
“Was it the wave again? Your mom?” Buck asks when Chris can speak.
“No.” Chris moves until he can rest his head on Buck’s shoulder. “It was—you saved me but then you drowned. I saw you.”
“No, hey, I’m right here, Chris. You’ve got me.”
“You’re going to leave,” Chris says, not accusatory but too shaky and sad to be matter-of-fact, and Eddie’s heart twists in his chest. “When you feel better. What if I have nightmares again?”
“Then you’re going to ask your dad or Carla to call me, and if I’m not out at a call or in the bathroom, I will pick up. Anytime, forever, if I can pick up for you I will, okay?”
Eddie is failing, failing, failing, except that somehow he lucked into bringing Buck into their lives. In the past few days, Eddie’s been arrested and almost charged with battery and then went out to an illegal fighting ring and committed what’s legally even more assault and battery. Buck, on the other hand, has watched a movie so he could discuss it with Eddie’s son and reassured him after a nightmare.
“Dad,” Christopher sobs, and for a heart-stopping moment Eddie is sure he means Buck, but he’s looking up from Buck’s shoulder and reaching out an imploring hand, so Eddie comes in, wraps Chris up in his arms. Right now it’s about the only thing he can offer that Buck can’t.
“Everybody here is okay,” says Eddie, and hopes Chris is too young still to realize it’s a lie. “You and Buck both survived the tsunami, mijo. I’m okay too. I know it’s not enough, but we three are okay, buddy, okay?”
“I wish it didn’t happen,” Chris says, stumbling out the words. “I wish none of it happened.”
“Me too, buddy,” says Buck, voice thick in a way that makes Eddie suddenly unable to look at him. “But your dad’s right. We’re all okay right now. We can work with that.”
There’s only so much reassurances can do for a kid who’s spent this whole year learning that the world isn’t safe and nobody is safe in it. Christopher cries himself back to sleep, and Eddie sits there and holds him and leans into Buck and feels every one of the hits he took tonight throb into life as a bruise.
“Were you on a date with Bosko last night?” Buck asks over breakfast. He’s dishing them all up yogurt and granola, because he’s got a weird thing where it bothers him way more to let Eddie make him breakfast than any other meal, but he’s still not supposed to be flipping pancakes or lifting cast iron or doing precision knife work. Chris is having a slow start to the morning. Eddie called him out of the first hour of school, and blesses Carla for having the right words to get flexible scheduling and attendance policies on Chris’s 504.
Eddie, who feels like he went rounds with a wood chipper instead of a guy who’s got the yearning but not the charisma to be a professional MMA fighter, startles and almost spills his coffee. “With Bosko? No, Jesus. Nothing happening there.”
“It would be fine, you know? I know it’s a little soon after Shannon, maybe, but you deserve to be happy.”
“I’ve got you and Chris,” says Eddie, and must sound as unsure as he feels, because Buck turns away from the blueberries he’s adding to their bowls to frown at him. “Seriously, it wasn’t a date. What, I have to date any woman I spend time with?”
“So you were with Bosko. It’s just … you don’t have to lie to me if you’re going to be friends with her, man. You said you were going out with the team, but Maddie said she and Chim were on a double date with Hen and Karen last night.”
Fuck. Of course she did. Eddie tries not to groan. He knows he has to talk with Buck about this, but he thought he could wait for it to be less raw. “Look, I like her—as a friend, not to date, shut up about that, but this wasn’t some kind of friend bonding session. You’re still my partner. This was … I did something stupid. A few stupid things, actually.”
Buck listens, while Chris sleeps in the next room. Eddie says as little as he can: the punch, Bosko, the fight. Bosko telling him to keep her out of whatever breakdown he’s careening towards. Buck nods along, mouth pinched up with the effort of not speaking, yogurt-covered spoon dripping the occasional drop onto the counter because he’s somehow still holding it.
“You’re right,” Buck says when Eddie stumbles his way into silence. “Those were some pretty stupid things to do.”
“I’m just so fucking angry, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Yeah.” Buck finally puts the spoon down and brings Eddie his bowl. Eddie misses Buck’s omelets. “What are you angry at? Me? I know I’m around all the time, no wonder you didn’t want to call me when you were locked up—”
“Jesus, Buck, I didn’t call you because you still can’t drive, shut up about leaving,” Eddie snaps, and immediately regrets that he’s illustrating his anger issues in the worst way. “No. It’s not about you, or I guess it’s about how shit keeps happening to you, and me, and Chris, and I don’t have any way of preventing it, or controlling it, or anything.”
Buck gives him a look so full of sympathy and pity that Eddie wants to snap at him. “So you’re scared,” he summarizes.
“No, I’m pissed off,” Eddie grits out. “I should be able to fix it when the people I care about are hurt or in danger. What kind of father am I if I can’t? We already know I was a shitty husband. I couldn’t make her stay.”
“Eddie, she died. You did everything you could.”
Eddie shakes his head, thinks of the tube he told Chim not to put in, thinks of the fact that if Chim made the offer at all there was no way she was making it out of that hospital alive anyway. “She was leaving again. Me, not him. I hope not him. She asked me for a divorce. So yeah, I think I can safely say I was a shitty husband, because good husbands don’t get left twice.”
Buck gapes at him for a second and Eddie feels stupidly pleased by that. Not a lot can stump Buck into silence when he’s trying to convince someone of something. “Okay,” he finally says. “So Shannon was a shitty wife?”
Eddie flinches back. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Because you left her twice too. So was it because she was a shitty wife?”
“No, that’s the shitty dad thing.”
Buck shakes his head, frowning. “Everything that goes wrong can’t always be you being the one who’s being shitty. That’s not how it works.”
“It is when you leave your kid twice and chase your wife away twice and—and fight people for money.”
“Hey, you only did that one once, so look at you, breaking the—what do you mean, for money?”
Eddie ducks his head, embarrassed. “Couple hundred bucks. My take of people betting against the new guy, I guess. I didn’t know I’d get paid before I went in the ring.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Buck glances over his shoulder. His ears are better than Eddie’s, less years of gunfire, so that probably means Christopher’s up and they should shut this conversation down. Couldn’t be better timing. Eddie’s not up for being convinced he’s a good person today. “Look, man,” Buck continues, a lot quieter. Definitely awake, then. “That was stupid. Like, really stupid in the you-don’t-get-to-scold-me-for-rescues-anymore kind of way, that’s the level of stupid we’re talking. But are you going back?”
“I kind of want to,” Eddie admits, mostly because Buck won’t let him.
“Yeah, because you’re stupid. But you won’t?” Eddie shakes his head. “So okay. Problem solved. We find you somewhere legal to punch people, like a boxing gym, or a movie set where you can play—uh, who’s the one who punches people a lot? The superhero? Chim was talking about a season of it coming out last year, I’m pretty sure.”
“I don’t know, man, I can barely keep up with superhero movies. But okay, point taken. No more illegal fighting.”
“Good.” Buck goes back to the counter, to finish up the bowls for himself and Chris. Eddie can hear him now, the clatter of his crutches as he goes to the bathroom that mean he’s sore after his rough night, since usually in the house he just walks. “And Eddie, you’re not a bad dad. You came home, and you helped him when he had a nightmare, and you love him so much. That’s what he needs.”
Eddie looks away, and it’s only then he realizes just how long he was looking at Buck. “I guess,” he says, only capitulating that much because Chris tunes into conversations long before he joins them, and starts talking about anything else.
Living with Buck is good, is the thing. Even when he can’t do the chores he’s obviously itching to do, the routine feels easy.
Eddie wakes up earlier, but he wakes up slower, so he’s the one to go to the kitchen, to get the coffee going, and when Buck wakes up, he gets Chris up, so Eddie’s half-caffeinated and human, ready for PT stretches with his kid while Buck puts together breakfast. Buck makes sure Chris’s backpack is full of the things it needs for a day at school, and Eddie makes sure Chris doesn’t spend ten minutes brushing his teeth badly.
With Buck’s arms out of commission, the bigger chores and the cooking fall on Eddie, but from the patterns of Buck’s complaints and nitpicks, he figures out pretty fast that both of them hate dusting, but the chores they don’t mind are shared out pretty equally—Eddie’s sweeping to Buck’s mopping, Buck’s cooking to Eddie’s dishes.
“I don’t know why more people don’t live with their best friends,” Eddie tells Chim honestly when they’re on the rig on the way back from a scene and Chim has ribbed him for the third time about Buck being a shelter dog who’s finally found his forever home. “Sure, I’m doing extra work now because his arms are messed up, but once he’s better, my work and my bills would pretty much be cut in half.”
“If he didn’t have a home of his own to go back to,” Hen says, half a reminder and half clearly trying really hard not to laugh. “Is he paying bills at yours and at his loft at the same time? He can not afford that, unless the Buckleys have been hiding trust funds from us.”
Everyone turns expectantly to Chim. Eddie is unquestionably the Buck expert, but just as unquestionably Chimney’s the Buckley expert. Buck’s life, as far as he’ll talk about, started at age nineteen, except for the stories with Maddie in them, his parents basically the parents from a Snoopy cartoon, nothing but sound effects.
“Money, but not trust fund money,” Chim pronounces after a moment of thought, and all of them nod. “But seriously, you’ve got Buck house-trained? Maddie’s going to be impressed.”
“He’s not paying bills,” Eddie says instead of getting annoyed about that. He feels the annoyance building up into anger like it does so easily right now, feels Bosko’s eyes on him across the rig, and tries to defuse it. He’s not going to prove her right. “I’d happily have him, though.”
“Too bad you’re not going to get the benefits of fully-functional Buck,” says Hen, still watching him like she’s waiting something, trying to figure him out. That makes the annoyance worse again. “He should be starting to be cleared for lifting small weights and things like that now soon, shouldn’t he? It’s been a month, right?”
Just about. The neighborhood is decked out for Halloween now, and Eddie and Chris have been planning their costumes and making a big comedy of suggesting them for Buck and his mostly-armless state. Eddie’s favorite was the Black Knight from Monty Python, because then he got to make Buck watch it and see his disbelieving expression throughout the whole movie. “I think the PT and OT are still fighting over exactly how much he should be lifting, but with the shoulder and elbow mobility, driving is going to be one of the last things to come back, so I’d rather just keep him with me until he’s mobile.”
“Does he know that?” Bosko asks, which makes him clench his jaw. Mostly she stays out of conversations about Buck, and Eddie wants to know why but really doesn’t want to ask.
“I’ve told him he can stay as long as he wants.” Eddie knows he’s going to have to keep fighting Buck into that, when every day he hits his milestones in PT he gets a little more stiff when they climb into bed together, but those fights are nobody’s business.
“I’m glad it’s working out for the two of you,” Bobby says from the captain’s seat, in the tone of voice he uses when he’s trying to end a conversation, though whether that’s to protect Eddie or step him down Eddie isn’t sure and doesn’t really want to know. “If you want it to be longer-term, though, you should talk to him. I’m not sure how long his lease is for, but he might like to have the information.”
“In his two-bedroom house!” says Chimney, more to the ceiling than expecting an answer. It’s not a surprise that Hen kicks him in the shin to shut him up. It’s more of a surprise that Bosko does the same, and he doesn’t like that she looks like she’s figured something out that he’s not privy to.
Buck comes out of his next therapy session, two days before Halloween, in a thoughtful frame of mind. Chris is in the car, fresh off his own therapy, since they schedule for the same days as often as they can, so Eddie doesn’t press, just keeps an eye on him while he mulls things over. It’s Buck’s first night cooking all of dinner for them since the tsunami, everything except carrying the pasta pot full of water, and normally he narrates while he cooks, but tonight he listens to Christopher narrating his homework instead.
This is one of the surprising things about living with Buck that maybe shouldn’t be surprising, the way he gets quiet while he thinks things over. Nobody can be high-energy all the time, but Buck does a good job of pretending he is. Eddie still finds it disconcerting, but Chris seems to like it, tends to snuggle into Buck’s side when he gets like this and take his own turn talking.
Eddie fills the silence in himself, once they’ve eaten and the dishes are done and Chris has had his screen time and his story and gone to bed. Before Shannon died, he was starting to want to read to himself at night, but they’ve been doing readalouds most nights Eddie is home since, and Chris demands Buck’s help now that Buck is around. It’s not like Eddie tracks it, but he thinks Chris has fewer nightmares on the nights Buck reads to him.
“You want me to stay out here tonight?” Buck eventually asks, like he does most nights. Eddie’s got his suspicions that some nights when he’s alone with Chris he sleeps on the couch as some kind of gotcha. Joke’s on Buck, it only makes Eddie more determined to keep him in the bed.
“No, I don’t. I want you to rest in a real bed so you don’t screw up your recovery,” Eddie says, like he does most nights. And then, for variety, “If you want privacy I can sleep out here.”
Buck slumps. “No. I’m just sick of interrupting everybody’s lives. Always some kind of problem. It’s got to be exhausting.”
Kind of. Worry is always exhausting. But if Eddie says that, it’s just going to make Buck shrink into himself, try to argue about bed again. “Don’t be a dumbass,” he says, which isn’t exactly nice but is at least semi-effective in getting Buck to stand up when Eddie does and start the long and annoying routine of dressing for bed. He’s taken to wearing button-up pajama shirts like somebody’s grandpa or seven-year-old. Even Chris has outgrown them, but they don’t make Buck reach over his head or wrestle into them, so he has a bunch of them now. One of them, a gift from Maddie, even has an elaborate embroidered B on the pocket. Eddie took a picture of him in it for the first time, scowling magnificently, and sent it to the 118, which makes up for any inconvenience Buck is giving him on its own.
They climb into bed on their opposite sides, plug in their phones, set their alarms, turn off their bedside lamps. Maddie brought one for Buck that he can turn off and on without moving in any ways the doctors have told him not to. It’s all domestic, all good, all exactly what Eddie wants, so he’s not prepared when Buck, on his back in the darkness, asks “Is it a Shannon thing? Wanting me to share the bed with you?”
“What the hell are you talking about in therapy?” Eddie asks, immediately switching his lamp back on, washing them both in gold-toned light that makes Buck squint. “Don’t you have a tsunami to process? Why is my ex-wife coming up?”
“That was a bad way to put it,” Buck acknowledges.
“Wow, you think?”
“And yeah, of course I talk about the guy I’m living with and causing problems for, who keeps letting me into his private space. And I guess I thought—do you just miss having someone to share the bed with? Is that why you keep saying I should stay even though I’d be fine on the couch, or back at the loft?”
Eddie regrets the lamp, abruptly. He doesn’t want Buck seeing his face for this. He doesn’t want to admit his mistake by turning the lamp off, but he does turn onto his back so at least Buck only gets his profile. “You would eat nothing but protein shakes for three weeks and your jaw muscles would atrophy from lack of use at the loft,” he says, buying himself time, and then shifts, tries to find the words. “No.” Easy start, and a true one. “This isn’t about Shannon.”
“It’s okay if it is. I know you and Chris miss her.”
“Every day,” Eddie agrees. It feels unfair, that he’d started to stop missing her and then she came back, filled his life up again so the missing would be fresh when she died. “But we actually didn’t share a bed that often, you know?”
He doesn’t turn to face Buck, but he can almost hear the way his expression wrinkles up at that. “No, I don’t know. You were married.”
“You think we were living out Leave It To Beaver?”
“Leave what to—sorry, beavers?”
Any other night Eddie would make fun of Buck for that one. It’s not like Eddie’s ever watched that one, but he’s at least heard of it. “Like a sitcom,” he clarifies, because otherwise Buck’s going to get his phone and go to Wikipedia and Eddie’s always going to be wondering what he’s wondering, why he asked the question. “But we weren’t. You know we weren’t. I was gone, and then she was gone, and in between we shared a bed, but not enough that I got used to it. We were never really partners with a routine. We were kids when we got together. We didn’t know how to do that.”
“I thought when you reconnected you were trying to, I don’t know. Do the adult relationship thing.”
Looking back on it, starting with a month of sneaking around behind Christopher’s back and fucking to keep from talking wasn’t a great basis for an adult relationship. “Yeah, we did it so well she decided she didn’t know how to be a wife. I sure as shit don’t know how to be a husband. If anything, bullying you into staying in my bed is more because I got used to the snoring in an army barracks.”
And he knows how to be Buck’s partner, in ways he didn’t know how to be Shannon’s. He learned it from work first, and Buck’s easy. What he wants and needs is obvious, and it’s nothing Eddie can’t give. Support, someone to get him out of his head, someone to listen when he gets serious and make fun of him when he gets too serious and to know the difference. Even now, looking back, he doesn’t know what Shannon needed, other than the obvious: not being left. Someone who would support her as much as she supported him.
Eddie doesn’t know why it’s so easy with Buck, and why it wasn’t easy with Shannon, even when she came back.
“Shannon was missing out,” Buck says softly after a long silence. “From where I’m sitting, you’re a pretty good partner. I’ve never shared a bed with someone this much either. Even Abby.”
Eddie reaches over and turns his light back off. He has to. “You’re a pretty good partner too.”
“I’m not. I’m making you do too much and I almost got Chris killed. But when I’m feeling better I’m going to try, Eddie, I swear.”
“You saved him. And even if you hadn’t, even if he’d fallen off that truck, you tried, and you love him. I don’t need you to vacuum my floors or drive us to the grocery store. You’re a good partner just by being Buck.”
Eddie cuts himself off. Buck makes a soft noise Eddie can’t decode. “You’re a good partner just by being Eddie, you know? Even if you’d kicked me back out to my loft after a week. Nobody else I’d rather have at my back. At work, you know? When I’m back? But also at—outside of work.”
“Thanks, Buck,” Eddie chokes out, and Buck lets a contented hum and falls into silence. His voice has been getting sleepier while they’ve talked, and Eddie recognizes, now, how he sounds when he’s about to drift into sleep. Still awake enough to keep himself from calling Eddie’s house home, but not awake enough, Eddie hopes, to feel the way Eddie can’t help tensing beside him.
Eddie waits for Buck’s breathing to deepen before he lets himself think it, lets himself even approach the edges of it.
Buck thought of work first. That’s normal. That’s their official relationship to each other. Friends are nebulous, even best friends could mean anything, but a work partner in a fire station, that’s a position of trust, that means something. Any other first responder would know that means they care about each other, that of course they work together well.
But it’s been six months since Eddie worked with Buck, and he didn’t think about work first. Buck’s his partner, sure, in a way that’s less ambiguous than friendship, but Eddie wasn’t thinking about work.
Fuck. Fuck.
“Is Buck staying?” Christopher asks one night when Buck’s over at Maddie’s and the two of them are rattling around in a house that didn’t used to feel this cavernous with just them in it.
“At Maddie’s? I don’t know, bud. Depends on how late it gets, she might not want to drive too late, but he’ll be back tomorrow before you get home from school at least.”
“No, with us. He said something about visiting his apartment again, but I thought he didn’t have that anymore.”
Eddie tries to keep his expression way more calm than he feels. Chris is attached, Eddie already knew that. It was a done deal long before the tsunami, but it’s gotten a lot more intense since then. They’re both attached, and Buck is still fighting Eddie every step of the way when Eddie tries to care for him. There’s no way he’s going to stay. With how well he’s doing at PT, every day is borrowed time now.
It shouldn’t feel like that. It should feel good, that Buck is healing, one step closer to being back at the 118 where he belongs. Eddie shouldn’t be missing him in advance, getting annoyed at the way Buck seems so excited about all the things that are going to take him away.
“He couldn’t stay there while he was hurt,” Eddie says, careful as he can. “But he’ll go back, I think. He knows he can stay as long as he wants, but he might want his own space.”
“Why?”
It’s like having a talk with his own damn subconscious. “Because usually people only share beds when they’re dating or married, so he probably wants his own bedroom again. Are you worried you won’t see him as much?”
Chris snuggles into Eddie’s side. “What if I have a nightmare and he’s not here?”
“Then we’ll call him, okay? Just like you call me if I’m at work and you want me.”
That doesn’t seem to satisfy Chris. It doesn’t satisfy Eddie either, to be fair. “Do you mind sharing a bed even though you’re not dating? If you don’t maybe Buck doesn’t either.”
After his revelation the other night, Eddie is mostly finding that he minds that they’re not dating, but he’s not talking about that with his son who hasn’t even hit double digits yet. He doesn’t know who he can talk to about it. “I don’t, but I think more importantly, he’s really excited to prove that he’s independent. Like you, when you do things without me for the first time. Sometimes adults have to be alone to prove things like that to themselves.”
“That’s stupid,” Chris pronounces after a moment’s thought, but he sighs like maybe something in that convinced him. Great. Eddie wishes he knew what. Parenting is so much about taking stabs in the dark. “But he’ll come back sometimes, right?”
“Mijo, of course he will. Whenever we ask and he’s not busy. And if he turns us down too many times, we’ll just go to his place. You like his apartment.”
“Not as much as here.” It’s a rebellious mutter, and for a second Eddie thinks he’ll have to dive in and try to explain things even more, but Christopher must want to mull his thoughts over, because he starts asking about when Buck will be able to play video games again, and then when he can get a new video game, and Eddie takes the change of subject with probably too much relief.
“The PT says I should be clear for basically normal life after our next session, and for driving as soon as my cast comes off next week,” Buck says, grin on his face, when Eddie picks him up from his appointment.
It feels kind of like he thinks being the parent of a teenager will, ferrying Buck around. He’s got physical therapy and brain therapy today, and Eddie’s around to drive him to both of those things while Chris is at school. It also feels like he thinks being the parent of a teenager will because the person he’s driving around is excited to leave his house and he wants to keep him there as long as he can. “That’s good news,” he says, and knows he’s doing a bad job of sounding happy.
Buck’s smile shrinks. Fuck. Eddie’s really good at that, removing joy from people he should be giving it to. “You’ve taken really good care of me, Eddie, but you’re probably sick of me by now, right?”
Eddie regrets telling Buck about that stupid fight club, abruptly. He’s angry again, ears ringing like before he punched that asshole in the parking lot. Maybe he needs it, like Bosko said. Maybe he’s going to explode without it. “No, I’m not,” he grits out.
“Yeah, your mouth is saying that, but your face is saying ‘hey, Buck, I’m really getting the urge to strangle you right now.’ And I’m concerned, because I don’t think I’m cleared to physically fight you and I kind of think Lars would be mad at me if I tried and Eddie, he is by far the scariest PT I have ever had.”
Normally, when Buck spins his words out like that, Eddie finds it soothing. He likes having background chatter to his life, and Buck is better than talk radio or podcasts by a big margin. Today, it makes him clench his fists around the steering wheel. “I’m not going to fight you, Buck. Let’s get you to therapy.”
“Super excited to talk about whether I’m mad at Bobby for fifty minutes.”
“Is that what this guy asks about?”
“Frank,” Buck supplies, like he has at least a dozen times before. “And sometimes. He’s from the department, it makes sense. Team dynamics or whatever.”
“Are you? Mad at Bobby?”
“Why would I be? He wasn’t the one going around blowing up fire engines. Plus he’s texting me again, so that’s cool.”
Eddie has been staying out of the Buck-and-Bobby of it all as much as he can. He knows guilt when he sees it, and knows desperation for approval when he sees that, too, and the combination means the two of them are a powder keg that it’s going to take a miracle not to blow before Buck comes back to work. Right now they mostly seem to be dealing with it by texting about recipes that are calorie-dense but physically light so Buck can cook them alone. “Good,” he says, a mindless non-response.
“Yeah, good.”
Eddie pulls out into traffic.
“You still didn’t say why you’re mad at me,” Buck points out, and Eddie almost hits the brakes at a really stupid time. “Is this still about me doing the dishes while you were on shift? I had a trash bag over my hand, the cast was fine, the cast will keep being fine, and you’re going to get fruit flies if I don’t do the dishes.”
“You can tell the therapist about the fruit flies, man, just soak the dishes.”
“I’m pretty much back to normal,” says Buck, and Eddie tries not to have a reaction and apparently fails. “You are mad at me! Come on, if you tell me what it is I can apologize. I know having me around is a lot, that’s why I’m trying—”
“It’s not!” Eddie bursts out, and wishes he could unsay it. He makes a turn instead. It says something, maybe, that he doesn’t need directions to get to any of Buck’s doctors or therapists anymore, the same way he doesn’t need directions for Chris’s. Eddie sighs. “Look, I don’t know who you’ve been living with, but they’re clearly the wrong people, if they’re getting sick of you this fast. I’m not sick of you. Christopher isn’t sick of you. Could you maybe stop acting like it’s some sort of treat to have you gone?”
Buck, when Eddie checks out of the corner of his eye, is staring at him with gape-mouthed surprise that Eddie would find satisfying if he weren’t so mortified. “Uh, my sister is one of those people,” he finally says, which doesn’t address the point at all. “I’d say that sister is a category of person who’s supposed to be able to stand to live with you.”
“Tell my sisters that, they were both sick of my shit by age four, and I was the annoying big brother, not the annoying younger one.”
“Sure. So you’re mad at me because I’m not annoying you to death?”
“Sue me, I like having you around and I don’t want you to go. I’m not mad at you. Just not as excited as you are about getting away from us.” And then because he’s stinging and defensive and they’re on their way to therapy so if this is shitty at least Buck’s going to have someone to complain to, “Christopher’s upset too. Neither of us wants you to go.”
“I’m not even helping out,” Buck says, and Eddie would get mad at him for avoiding except he sounds nothing but baffled, so Eddie gets mad at him for thinking that’s all he’s good for instead.
They’re close to the office. It’s a convenient trip, for once in LA and its sprawl and its traffic jams. Eddie waits until they’re only a few lights away before he speaks, even though Buck keeps fidgeting and starting to say things in the passenger seat. “You don’t have to help out. You could sit on my couch for the rest of your life and watch me do chores without lifting a finger and you’d still be welcome to sit there.”
Buck’s leg bounces a few times, and his fingers curl around the door handle like he wants to jump out of the car at the next red light. “Because I saved Christopher when he almost fell off the truck.”
“No, dumbass. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, but I’m also grateful to the doctor who kept both him and Shannon from dying during labor, and I don’t give a shit about that guy. Might buy him a drink if I ran into him at a bar, if I recognized him, but I’m not sure I would.” One light away, and they keep hitting greens. “Because you’re Buck. You’re my partner.”
“Will be again soon, I guess.”
“No, now.” The last light turns yellow and Eddie stops even if he could squeak through. He does that, and LA drivers hate it. He hates them right back. “Look. I didn’t figure it out with Shannon, the partner thing. You know that. But partners means you don’t need to do anything but be you, and I’ll still want you around.”
“Eddie—”
“Look, if you leave, you leave. I get that it’s a hard sell. But do it because you want to, not because you think we want you to go, is all I’m saying. We don’t want you to, and we’re not changing our minds about that any time soon.” The light changes, and Eddie hits the accelerator. “That’s it.”
“You were trying to convince me to move in with you without talking about it?” Buck asks, slow and baffled and like he’s sure he’s getting it wrong. “And—Shannon—Eddie, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh good, we’re here,” says Eddie, which is way easier than answering any of those questions. It sounds stupid, when Buck says it, the silent hope that maybe Buck would realize that there’s something good in the three of them being together and just stay without asking the way they were trying to keep without asking. Eddie’s always trying to hope people into staying with him, and it never works. “Have a good session.”
“We’re still parking,” Buck points out. “Man, you’ve got to give me something, here.”
“I’ve been trying to,” says Eddie, and pulls with relief into the nearest spot. “Just … go inside, Buck, okay?”
Buck jogs his leg up and down, eyes Eddie like he’s the unpredictable kind of patient who might try to get up off the gurney even when he’s bleeding out. “You gonna be here when I get out?”
It would be so easy to come up with some kind of excuse, to call Maddie or Bobby or even Hen and ask them to be here. Buck would let him, and then he wouldn’t come back. He’d go back to the loft, or someone else’s house if they wouldn’t take him to the loft. And anyway, Eddie might not know how to make people stay, but he learned this lesson the first time anyway: he’s going to try his hardest not to be the one who leaves first. “Yeah. I’ll be here.”
A few more jogs of Buck’s leg. “Want me to see if they can squeeze you in while I’m in there?” he asks, a little mean and a lot confused beneath that.
Eddie flinches, but Buck’s not wrong to ask, maybe. Not given the choices Eddie’s made recently, about fight clubs and saying too much and not enough at the same time. “Go inside. We’ll talk about that later.”
“Sure, I’ll add it to the agenda right after you trying to stealth cancel my lease and comparing me to Shannon after saying the word ‘partner,’” says Buck, and his arm is healed enough that he can give the door a pretty good slam as he scrambles his way out of the truck.
Eddie rests his forehead on the steering wheel. It’s a therapist’s parking lot. One more person losing his mind isn’t going to look out of place.
“Frank agrees that you should definitely be in therapy but he says he treats way too many people who all know each other and you should go to a different therapist,” Buck says more than an hour later, when Eddie is trying and failing to do a crossword puzzle on an app he downloaded twenty minutes ago, when his brain wouldn’t stop looping the slam of the truck door and the way he has no idea how to answer Buck’s very reasonable questions.
“Fuck, he’s a department therapist, is he going to report me for the fight club?” Eddie asks, and then winces, because that should not be one of his top five questions.
Buck snorts at him and buckles up. It’s still a slow move, not easy, but it’s so much better than it is a month ago. He could be back at the loft. He could have been a week ago, probably, as long as he was willing to eat microwave meals and takeout. “He asked if you were still going and then he decided it was hearsay. But that’s when he said you should be in therapy.”
“Maybe he’s right. I don’t know.”
“Can we just …” Buck tips his head against the window. “He let me run ten minutes over because I was freaking out and it was really exhausting and I’m tired. So can we go home, and talk about it there?”
“Home” is a good sign. Eddie can cling to it for now, anyway, for the forty-minute drive back to his place. “Yeah, Buck, of course. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, either.”
“We kind of have to, and if we wait until tomorrow we’re going to wait until next week, or next month, or never, and it’s going to drive me crazy. So, when we get home.”
“When we get home,” says Eddie, just so he can say it the way Buck does, and puts them in gear to go there.
The silence stretches out until Buck turns on the radio, and they listen to radio stations half a song at a time while Buck moves between them, never stopping long enough to settle into a genre even when Eddie knows he likes the song.
They both avoid it when they get back to the house in a way that makes Eddie admit to himself that Buck was right. If they don’t have the conversation today, they won’t. Or at least they won’t until the next emergency, the next injury, pushes them into it. Eddie doesn’t want to wait for that. He wants to know what to prepare himself for, what to prepare Christopher for. He doesn’t want to keep hoping for something if he’s not going to get it.
Still, for the first ten minutes it’s legitimate avoidance: they have to settle in, have to get Buck’s phone plugged in and use the bathroom and get some protein shakes going to make up for the calories Buck spent during PT, especially when he’s going to need to start rebuilding muscle soon.
For the next ten minutes, they talk about anything else. Christopher’s schoolwork, Carla’s schedule, Buck’s latest check-in with his doctor and how it looks like he’ll be starting to step down his doses of blood thinners since the biointegration on all the metal in his leg is looking a lot better on the latest scans. The conversation has the uncomfortable feeling that all conversations with Shannon did right before she left El Paso, like even when they weren’t fighting out loud they couldn’t stop remembering that the fights between them were only ever paused, never fully stopped.
“I don’t know where to start,” Buck admits when they lapse into an awkward silence. That feels worse than the stilted conversation. They don’t do awkward silence, the two of them, not really. “You want me to move in?”
“I don’t want you to leave,” says Eddie. It’s the important part, even if it amounts to the same thing.
“The last person who moved me in immediately moved out.”
Eddie hates Abby Clark more every time he thinks about her, so he thinks about her as little as possible. “You think I’m going to move out of this place? With rent in LA the way it is? No way.”
“Eddie.”
“You’ve already lived with me longer than you lived with her, and I’m not changing my mind.”
“Yet,” says Buck, and stumbles into continuing before Eddie can do more than scowl in response to that. “Look, you’ve got to tell me something, Eddie, I can’t—if this isn’t what I think it is, it’s going to really suck to get that taken away so I just want you to do it now, okay? Because as far as I was aware before the whole thing where I almost died three times in a calendar year, we’re both straight dudes, and the partner thing is, uh, ambiguous? Someone I slept with a couple years ago talked about queerplatonic relationships and that’s cool, but I really need some definitions?”
Eddie opens his mouth and shuts it again, because at no point during figuring out that he thinks he maybe wants to spend the rest of his life with Buck sleeping in his bed did he consider reevaluating his sexuality. “I have no idea what queerplatonic means and it feels like a word I shouldn’t say,” he says. Buck’s angry huff in response is probably fair, that was a hell of a non-answer. And then, just as unhelpful, “Oh, shit, you’re straight? I guess that’s … we can figure something else out, if you want to.”
“Else from what, Eddie? I don’t know if I’m straight, I’ve been stuck at home for six months and I’ve watched like every episode of Bill Nye with Chris while you’ve been on shift because they don’t show kids the classics these days and then ended up on someone’s Reddit post about how he’s kind of a dilf, so I’m willing to give whatever a shot if you just tell me what you’re thinking.”
Eddie has a lot of questions, mostly about why Bill Nye is the only cultural touchstone of their generation Buck seems to have heard of and about why he of all people was the one to make Buck think maybe he’s not straight, but that’s deflecting, and Buck asked him to tell him what he’s thinking. That’s easier, maybe, than the other questions he’s got every right to be asking. “I’m thinking that I like having you at my house, and in my bed, and taking care of my son. I’m thinking you and I work well together at work and at home, and that I know how to take care of you and I know not to take that for granted, because I never figured out how to take care of Shannon.”
“And?”
The other parts of it are harder to say. Eddie’s watched enough telenovelas that he finds it easier to talk about romance in Spanish. It’s embarrassing to say that he wants his hands on Buck all the time, that he likes the thought of tipping his face up into a kiss, that he wants to touch in their bed by more than accident, wants to find out if he’s going to wake up with Buck curled in his arms or if they’ll drift apart in the night. “And I don’t—I don’t know how to do any of it, but I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t trust you to try with me, if that’s what you want too.”
Buck closes his eyes. “I need you to tell me that you’re not offering to kiss me just because it might make me stay.”
Eddie would, is the thing. If he didn’t want to kiss Buck but thought Buck wanted to kiss him, thought doing it might get him Buck safe and sound in his house every night, reading stories to his son, he would probably do it anyway. Luckily, though, he lives in a world where just the thought of kissing Buck after this miserable dragged-out conversation makes him shiver, and he wishes Buck’s eyes were open so he could see it. “I’m trying not to freak you out by asking for too much,” he says instead. “But I want to kiss you. When your arms aren’t messed up, I want to do more than kiss you.”
I love you, he wants to add, but those are hard words to say, hard words to trust. For now, I want us both to stay is going to have to be enough.
“Eddie,” says Buck, voice catching in his throat, eyes still closed like he’s bracing for this to be a dream, and Eddie gives up on words and moves forward, catches Buck’s face in his hands, and barely waits to note the catch of his breath and the flutter of his eyelashes before he leans in and kisses him.
There’s a moment where Eddie is desperately afraid that it isn’t going to align, that he’s straight after all or Buck is straight and whatever he’s got going on about Bill Nye was a fluke. Eddie hasn’t kissed anyone since Shannon, doesn’t know what to do with Buck’s stubble and the low hum of a noise he lets out into Eddie’s mouth, doesn’t know what to do with the sheer breadth and presence of him. After a terrified and breathless second, though, instinct takes over. He wants Buck, the stunned slackness of his lips that turns into sweetness and then into more, wants to press himself into his body and know Buck will press back, which, actually—
“Stop that,” he murmurs, unwilling to get more than an inch from Buck’s mouth but having to express his disapproval of Buck trying to wrap his arms around Eddie’s waist.
“Oh,” says Buck, with a sudden awful backpedal, and Eddie drops his hands to take Buck’s and hold on, not too tight, not pulling, just enough to stop the retreat. “Uh, stop what?”
“Using your hands, dumbass,” says Eddie, and steps in again. Buck’s got a disbelieving smile breaking out on his face, and Eddie’s so glad at the smile that he decides to worry about the disbelief later. “Just let me take care of you, okay?”
Buck leans in, brushes his nose against Eddie’s cheek in a way that somehow feels more intimate than another case. “When’s it my turn, huh? You keep looking out for me, but I want to do it for you too, Eddie. I want to make you dinners, and vacuum your house, and—I know you’ll tell me I don’t have to pay you back, because of the tsunami or whatever, but it still has to be my turn sometimes.”
The tsunami or whatever, like Buck saving Eddie’s son is something small, something he can dismiss easily. Like Buck wouldn’t deserve the care if it weren’t for the tsunami, like he didn’t deserve it all summer when Eddie was too overwhelmed with his own and his son’s grief from losing Shannon, like he doesn’t deserve it every day. “It’s your turn when you’re healed,” he says, close enough that he may be whispering in Buck’s ear. “Guess you’ll have to stay that long.”
“We’ll see,” says Buck, but he kisses Eddie again, finally, and lets Eddie hold his hands, in their kitchen in the quiet hours before they pick Chris up from school. They’ll pick him up later, after they’ve decided whether to tell him now or tell him in a week or two, and they’ll have a movie night, because it’s the night before Eddie’s shift and it’s a therapy day and Christopher insists on movie nights for both of those things.
Soon, Buck will get his cast off, and he’ll start doing PT in earnest, building his strength back up like he does every time, and Eddie will help him go as fast as he can, to get him safe back to work, where Bobby admitted at their last shift that he missed his sous chef. They’ll tell people there too, when Buck is ready. They’ll make a home together, and Buck’s presence in it will be one of the things he can remember to get himself through the worst days.
“I’m not moving in with you yet, though,” Buck says between kisses, insistent but hard to believe when he doesn’t draw away, doesn’t insist on Eddie opening his eyes. “It’s way too soon, and you’ve got a kid, and Chris probably isn’t ready for you to date anyone new.”
“Chris loves you,” says Eddie, much easier than saying it on his own behalf. “I already told you, he wants you to stay. But it’s okay if you’re not ready.” He leans in and kisses Buck again, already addicted to it, already knowing how hard it’s going to be to forget the way Buck’s palms fit against his. He doesn’t have to forget. “I can’t promise not to convince you, though.”
Buck smiles against his mouth, all that brightness there where Eddie can feel it. “I think I can live with that.”
Eddie thinks he can, too.