before those hands pulled me from the earth
Buck drives Eddie to the airport. His truck is filled with luggage, and it should feel full, but it doesn’t seem like enough. Eddie Diaz is larger than life; there is no possible way his whole life can fit in three suitcases, five boxes he’s mailed ahead, and a single carry on. Well, that and some frying pans he's ordered online, but still.
This whole thing feels...insufficient.
“Thanks, Buck,” Eddie says when they arrive, brown eyes distant and voice low.
“Wasn’t gonna make you uber,” Buck replies. He’s going for lighthearted, but his ears are too full of a strange ringing to know if he’s pulled it off. Fun fact: Uber has a 76% market share of the US ride share market, as of March 2024. 'Uber' has been a colloquial verb for 'ride share' since 2015, when Uber's market share peaked at 91% of the US market.
“No, Buck,” Eddie repeats, stressing his name like a plea, like a prayer.
His tone is serious enough that Buck meets his eyes in the rear view mirror. He feels like he’s been caught red handed in the wrong parking spot.
“Thank you,” Eddie says again. “For helping me with all of this. I know-“ Eddie inhales, like his chest is as tight as Buck’s is. “I know it probably wasn’t easy. I know it’s a lot - I’ve been a lot. But you’ve always put Chris first. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Buck has to look away then, because his vision is entirely blurred with tears. He stares without seeing at the airport car park, at the endless rows of cars and the oversized building that waits beyond. He hates that Eddie is leaving. But he maybe hates the self-deprecating tone Eddie's using right now even more.
He doesn’t know how to respond to any of it. Well, that's not quite true. Buck has plenty of things he wants to say, but if he knows if he starts talking he'll never stop, will become a waterfall cascading down a mountain or a dam flooding through its banks. Eddie doesn't need that from him right now.
Instead, Buck unloads the car, putting all of Eddie’s things in a careful line - ascending in size - on the sidewalk, and then looks back at his best friend.
The glass airport doors, even from metres away, are a physical presence at his back.
“I’m going to miss you,” he chokes out. The words feel like sharp glass tearing at his throat, and it isn’t enough. Buck just hopes Eddie will understand what he means - that helping Eddie can never be a burden, that Buck will do anything for him.
Eddie looks at him with eyes so wide Buck can feel his heart beginning to splinter down the middle. “I’m gonna miss you too, Buck," he whispers.
The words make their gentle home holding together the new crack in Buck’s heart, crochet stitches for a life-threatening wound.
Buck forces the tears away, looks at Eddie as Eddie looks at him. And then Eddie is hugging him, and Buck feels simultaneously like he’s safer than he’d ever been and like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff. Eddie is warm, and strong, and holds him so close Buck can’t really breathe. It isn’t enough. He wants to crawl inside Eddie’s ribs and stay there; maybe if he can get closer to the strong beat of Eddie’s heart, it will be enough to heal the breaking in Buck’s own. When Eddie steps back, Buck feels colder than he can ever remember being.
He helps Eddie take his luggage up to the airport doors, the cold wind whistling straight through to his bones. It’s almost enough to freeze away the horrible sense of deja vu he feels staring up at the building before him.
“Are you helping me take all this shit to check in?” Eddie asks, his wry tone breaking Buck out of his spiral. “Or does the Buck Concierge Experience not extend past the airport doors?”
Buck blushes a bit. “Right. Yes. Sorry. Follow me, then, sir.”
Eddie snorts softly, and Buck feels a warm feeling in his chest spread.
Inside the airport, a whirlwind of people bustle past. Buck feels like he needs a clipboard to navigate the crowds - surely there’s a better system than this? For a brief moment, he’s so focused on spotting the quickest path from the door to the right check in station that he forgets to procrastinate the time they have left. Then he has to make sure that the airline stewardess who checks in Eddie’s bag does so with the right tags, and the right care befitting such valuable things. Fun fact: the odds of having a bag mishandled by Frontier Airlines, based on on 2024 statistics, are one in 246. It's not the worst airline - that's American Airlines, Buch had checked - but it's not the best, either.
Then it’s all done, and Buck is standing empty handed in the departure hall, looking Eddie Diaz dead in the eye.
He's waiting, waiting, waiting for the most horrible word he can imagine - goodbye.
“I’m not her,” Eddie says instead, gaze assessing and warm and calm, and Buck is so surprised he nearly flinches.
“Not who?” he asks, because he wants to pretend he doesn’t already know.
“You know who,” Eddie says, because they both know Buck already knows. “Abby,” Eddie clarifies anyway, like Buck needs that name fired like a bullet into the cavernous room.
Buck gives a non committal hum of agreement. He stuffs his hands into his jean pockets, rocks back on his heels. The linoleum floor looks freshly mopped - he can almost see his own face in it.
It doesn’t seem to matter much who Eddie is, in the end. Buck still ends up here, watching facetimes dwindle to calls which dwindle to texts until Buck is just somebody people used to know.
“Buck,” Eddie repeats.
Buck keeps staring at the ground. The sounds of suitcases and voices and shoes on the linoleum floor is so loud, too loud. The intercom voice is deafening, chilling, cold. He can’t do it. He lied; he’s a horrible, selfish, greedy liar and he absolutely cannot say goodbye to his best friend. He stands there, in the middle of the fucking airport, clenching his hands into fists and wishing he could somehow stop time right here and now so he never has to live a moment without Eddie right there.
“Evan.”
Buck looks up. Eddie’s hair is unsettled, hanging almost into the brown pools of his eyes as he stares flatly at Buck. He says Buck's first name differently than anyone else does, with a kind of savour, with a kind of intent that makes the vowels longer than his parents ever bothered to pronounce. Because Eddie, unlike Buck's parents, actually cares about him.
Buck looks at Eddie, looks into him, feels a hot prickle of shame at his own dramatics.
Eddie has to go. Eddie and Chris deserve to be happy. Even if that means…
“I’m coming back, Buck,” Eddie says, and Buck mouths the words back as an echo, as a prayer. Please come back.
“And I will never, ever leave you alone on the other end of the line.” Eddie’s stare is flint, his hands wrapped so tight around his bag straps his knuckles are growing white.
Buck wants to take the bag from him. He wants to smooth away the tension from Eddie’s hands. He wants Eddie to hug him, again, wants to cling to those hands like they’re pulling him from the grave.
“I know,” Buck says, because he does know. As much as it hurts, as scared as he is, he knows Eddie is nothing like Abby. Eddie is the person Buck trusts most in the entire world.
And Eddie says he's coming back. Buck knows he will.
Buck still hugs Eddie again, because knowing doesn’t stop him feeling like he’s losing the thing that lets him breathe.
Fun fact, his mind supplies. Broken heart syndrome is a real thing. Though often a temporary condition, death estimates range from 0-8% of cases.
Eddie doesn’t seem to mind Buck’s crushing embrace. If anything, he holds Buck even tighter this time, something Buck hadn’t thought possible. He doesn't think either of them can breathe - but then again, maybe that's the tears clogging up Buck's throat.
It still isn’t enough, but that doesn’t matter, because a cold unfeeling announcement arrives seconds later over the intercom to declare Eddie’s flight boarding and all but rips him from Buck’s arms.
Once Eddie’s gone, left, walked away, Buck stands there for several minutes, alone.
His skin prickles, his arms cold. He left his jumper in the car. His hands feel far too light as he walks back to the garage, nothing to carry but the heavy weight of his heart.
***
Eddie Diaz has never much liked planes. Despite everything he’s been through, everything he's done, he hasn't managed to get over the wrongness of being airborne in some metal box, the whole world spanning out beneath him. Helicopters he doesn't mind so much - it seems much more plausible that they could fly, even if Buck always said they're statistically more dangerous. Even though Eddie's been in one when it crashed.
But planes? They’re too big to cover so much ground, to make the world look so small beneath them.
This plane is the worst one yet. It’s tugging Eddie towards everything he's ever thought he wanted; his son, and a picture-perfect white picket fence behind which to raise him. Yet somehow, knowing Buck is on the ground, knowing the rest of his 118 family has been left behind, makes Eddie feel like he’s being torn in two.
Eddie's seated towards the back of the plane, but when it lands, he can still feel the instant the doors open. There's a particular smell, a certain humidity that seeps through the air. It feels familiar. It feels nothing like home.
Eddie leaves the plane with a horrible sense of deja vu; like he’s being deployed, like he’s coming back to this same place, like he can never leave this point in time. But it doesn’t matter; Chris is in this state.
He repeats that over and over as he hires a rental car and hits the road; the heat is suffocating in the warm clothes Eddie wore for LA's November cold, but Chris is feeling it too. He hates this county, but Chris lives in this county. He passes the signs for El Paso, and it feels like he’s never managed to escape the same haunts of his childhood - the school where he always felt like a fake, the orchard filled with the ghost of Shannon, the ranch that wears Eddie’s old aches like paint from when he stole away there to drink. There, a spilled bottle that could be his from fifteen years ago. There, the broken fence that could be from that time Eddie fell from a horse. It feels like a wax museum; it feels like a graveyard.
But now this place is Chris’ childhood too, and all Eddie has to do is make sure it’s a better one for his son than it was for him.
He drives to the air BnB to drop his stuff off, and then he gets back in the car. He sits behind the steering wheel, keys in the ignition but the car off.
His parents will hate it if he shows up unannounced. They agreed he can come by and see Chris on the weekend, but that’s three days away. Eddie’s first shift isn’t even until next week - there’s no way he's sitting in El Paso with nothing to do when his son is a fifteen minute drive from him.
Eddie checks the time. He drove slowly, and his flight was delayed- it’s already late afternoon.
Eddie turns the key, and starts the car.
He has Maps open on his phone, but doesn’t need to look at it once. He knows this town like the back of his hand.
A block away from his parents house, he slows without quite intending to. Outside their drive, he parks the car on the side of the road. There’s plenty of room to park in their driveway, but Eddie can’t quite bring himself to do it.
He doesn’t know how to do this. How do you show up and greet your son after so long apart? When he hasn’t even forgiven you? When the last time you’d seen him in person, he hadn’t returned an ‘I love you’ for the first time in his life?
Eddie drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe he should wait until the weekend.
His phone buzzes.
A message from Buck <3 lights up his screen. Buck set the contact name three or so years ago, complaining that Eddie’s perfectly functional system of using people’s actual names as contacts was ‘boring’ and ‘unoriginal’ and ‘needlessly conforming to social niceties'. Eddie pointed out that ‘Buck’ was already a nickname, and Buck stole his phone.
Eddie flat out refused to change Buck’s contact to firehose ;), so Buck with an emoticon had been a compromise.
Eddie wishes he hated it, he really does. But seeing that name on the screen always makes him smile.
He unlocks his phone, switching off the car.
Hope you had a good flight btw, the first message reads. Buck always texts like they’re in the middle of a conversation, like they never stop talking.
And then more messages buzz through, because Buck is a firm believer in sending every separate thought as a new text.
Tell Chris hi from me!
I miss him
I miss both my Diaz boys, but Chris knows he’s my favourite
A pause. Eddie wants to make a joke - to point out he’s been gone less than a day. But he already feels like there’s a Buck sized hole in his heart, and he’s trying to be less of a hypocrite these days.
Another message arrives.
The 118 isn’t the same without you
And then barely a second later:
But Chris is more important obvi. Hope everything goes well
There’s a lump in Eddie’s throat. He closes his eyes for a second, scrubbing his hand over his face. Get yourself together, Diaz. He’s being ridiculous. What is he doing, sitting in the car crying over texts? His son is just inside. Buck is right, like always - nothing is more important than Chris.
Another message:
Fuck your parents if they’re dicks to you again.
Eddie can’t stop a laugh at that. He’s told Buck a thousand times why his parents acted like they did, made them a hundred excuses. Buck is adamant that they’re in the wrong, and honestly it’s kind of nice to have someone completely on his side.
Eddie hovers his thumbs over the keypad, thinking out a response.
About to see him now - I’ll let him know. I can call you when your shift ends to let you know how it goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to talk to you soon as well
Buck likes the message, and Eddie hesitates with a finger over his phone’s power button.
It’s just a text. Why does it feel like such a big deal?
He types another message, deletes it, types it. Inhales, exhales. His chest hurts. He presses send.
Buck likes it immediately, and Eddie feels himself smile as he turns off his phone. As he gets out of the car to go see his son, the message floats before his eyes.
I miss you too.