just to sit outside your door

It’s just a door. Eddie knows that; it’s just a door. A door he’s opened a hundred thousand times; a door he’s slammed; a door he’d closed.

He rests his hand on the door knob. Despite the late season, the metal is warm from the Texas sun. Eddie drops his hand, lifts it. He makes a fist, and knocks one, twice, thrice on the frame of the door.

He’s never felt like he needed to knock before.

He hears footsteps down the hall, the creaks of the aging floorboards echoing to Eddie’s cautious senses. He inhales through tight lungs, lifting his chin. Square shoulders, straight back. He can do this.

“Edmundo?” It’s his father at the door, head tilted in slight confusion, looking the same as ever despite the increasing grey at his temples.

Eddie swallows, his mouth dry. “Hey, Dad. Buenos días.”

“I thought you arrived….”

“Today,” Eddie confirms. “But Mom, she uh…she organised the visit for this weekend. I just…I couldn’t wait, you know?”

Ramon frowns in that way which means he’s hesitant to go against anything Helena has said or done, and Eddie can see his chance slipping through his fingers like sand in the heel of his shoe.

“I just want to see him,” Eddie adds hastily. “Just to say hello.”

“It’s getting pretty late, Edmundo…”

“Please,” Eddie cuts in. His voice cracks, a lump rising in his throat. “I need to see him, Dad. Please.”

“Vale, vale,” Ramon agrees, stepping back. “It’s fine. Just…you can just say hello.”

Eddie steps through the door, wiping his feet on the mat and then taking off his shoes anyway. He tries not to think about how he’s gotten here - an intruder in his own family home, having to bargain to see his own son.

He doesn’t argue, though. Just follows Ramon through the halls, one step behind as if he doesn’t know every creaking floorboard, every mark on the walls.

As they enter the kitchen, he hears it. A laugh. Christopher’s laugh. It’s short, but still there, still the best sound he’s heard in months. Maybe ever.

In that moment, Eddie forgets about following behind his father. He pushes through the door into the living room, heart in his mouth, or maybe right there open and bleeding in his bare hands, all hesitance forgotten. And then Chris is there, he’s right there, standing up from where he’d been sitting on the sofa with Helena.

“Hey, bud,” Eddie says, Eddie whispers over the tears building in his throat.

Chris takes a step forward, and stops. Helena’s stood up, one hand on Chris’ shoulder, holding him in place.

“Edmundo,” she says sternly. “We’d agreed-”

“I know, Ma,” Eddie cuts in impatiently. He can’t read Chris’ expression; he needs to know what his son is thinking.. “But it’s Chris. It’s my kid. I couldn’t wait…”

“What are you doing here, Dad?” Chris asks, and Eddie’s heart is just pulp in his hands.

Chris is frowning, not in the way he does when he’s mad but in the way he does when things aren’t going his way - like when the bus to school is late, or his favourite toys aren’t free at break time.

And, oh. Oh.

That feeling, that’s the feeling of Eddie’s heart, finally breaking. It’s not like he’d expected Chris to throw himself into Eddie’s waiting arms, but…he’d expected, he’d hoped for, something more than this.

He doesn’t quite understand the question. Helena insisted on being the one to tell Chris about the move, and Chris didn’t reply to Eddie’s texts, so Eddie was forced to listen whenever Helena insisted Chris was too busy to call. Eddie expected the distance, the rift he still had to cross to reach his kid. But Helena had told Chris - he knows this, because he insisted on giving Chris a choice. Either Chris comes back home for Christmas, or Eddie moves.

(And dios, if that choice wasn’t just the last ditch effort of Eddie’s shattered heart trying to cling to the one person who’d always glued him back together…)

Helena, after a fair amount of protest, gave him Chris’ answer. And so Eddie packed up his life and came back to this place, this place that seems to stick to him like mud in a marsh.

“Chris,” Eddie starts. His throat hurts. His lungs hurt. His heart hurts. “Chris, I don’t know how much your Abuela already spoke to you about this…And I know, I know you're still mad at me. That’s okay, I understand. But I…I can’t spend my whole life in L.A. if your whole life is here. I can’t do that, buddy, I just can’t. I love you too much. So I…”

Eddie inhales, exhales. He just needs a single moment to breathe, to get the words out, because he never manages to have the right words when he needs them.

“I’m moving to El Paso.”

Silence follows his declaration, and Eddie listens to it echo.

“Chris-” Eddie begins, desperate to wipe the frown off his son's perfect face. There’s something unreadable in Chris’ eyes. Eddie's lungs don’t work.

“No, Dad!” Chris yells, storming past him. 

He’s gotten so much bigger, his voice so much deeper already. Eddie barely has time to marvel at it before his son’s left the room, before the sound of a door slamming rings out.

Eddie can’t help it, can’t stop it. Tears are forming behind his eyes, the world blurring before them. He knows that things are broken but he’d thought, he’d hoped that it was fixable. What if it isn’t? What if he’s ruined the best thing he’d ever created?

What if his son never loves him again?

“You should go,” Helena chastises. “He doesn’t need this on a school night.”

“I don’t understand, Ma,” Eddie says, letting anger lend force to the words. It hurts less, anger. Even when it means breaking his knuckles and bruising his jaw - it hurts so much less. “You told him I was moving. He chose for me to move.”

“Of course.” Helena brushes him aside. “But he is still hurting, no? You need to give him more time. More space.”

The look in her eyes…Eddie’s seen it so many times. When he tried to cook his sister's breakfast and ended up burning all the eggs. When he got a bad mark in school, or came home with the smell of beer on his breath. When he got Shannon pregnant. 

The disappointment.

Shame wells up within him, thick and cloying.

“You should go,” Helena repeats, and what else is there for him to do? This is all his fault, after all.

Eddie goes.

He slams the door behind him, he jumps in his car, and he drives all the way to the building he’s rented. It’s not home, because home is two separate places now, and neither one of them has a place for Eddie left.

Eddie calls Buck.

And it isn’t until he hears his best friend on the other end of the line, until Buck asks “How’d it go, Eds?” with such care in his voice, that Eddie lets himself cry. 

***

Buck stares at his phone, tuning out the quiet chaos of the 118 around him. If he lets his vision blur enough, he can still imagine Eddie beside him, the texts not texts but words whispered right next to his ear.

I miss you too, Eddie wrote, that first afternoon.

And then later, after that awful phone call that filled Buck with a rage so deep he thought it might be bottomless, Eddie whispered quietly, We’ll talk soon.

The words, the mirage of Eddie’s voice - they’re like a sewing needle, ripping him open even as they hold him together.

“Hey Buck,” Hen calls, and Buck looks up. “Cards?” 

Buck shakes his head. “I’ve gotta finish this….” he trails off. He’s got nothing to do, no way to avoid the inevitable conversations about Eddie. “Project,” he says lamely.

That’s what he needs. He needs more work, needs a project. To keep himself busy. Because he’s fine, but it's a lot easier to sleep in the deafening silence of his apartment when he’s too tired from work to sit around and reminisce.

Buck goes to Bobby’s office, and volunteers for more shifts. The 118 is a man short, after all, which means a steady rotation of replacements from the B-shift, which means extra shifts to cover until a replacement is found. Or until Eddie comes back.

Although from the sounds of it, that might be a while.

Soon, Buck’s busy working every shift he can convince Bobby to give him. And LA has always been a disaster of a city, an emergency in motion - there’s always something for Buck to do. There’s always a hand to grasp in the wreckage of buildings, blood to mop up from the floor. Always families to reunite, jumpers to talk back from the ledge.

Buck doesn’t avoid Maddie, or his coworkers, or social plans or conversations about Eddie’s move. He’s just busy. Working.

The days blur together, and his body aches from running and jumping and climbing the ladder, but that’s not quite enough so he signs up to some fitness challenges online, starts training whenever shift is quiet or he’s got a day off. He runs the same route over and over, through parks and beside the ocean even though he can’t look at the sea, and a few blocks away from the house that he doesn’t go to anymore, because it's not his anymore. He stops sleeping early, stays out late at the gym or running or at the club instead. He pulls 24 hour shifts, sleeps like the dead, then signs up for the next shift he can.

It’s not enough. He’s not tired enough to sleep through the night; he deep cleans his apartment at 3 in the morning, does it again a few days later. He listens to music loud enough to drown out his thoughts, uses that as an excuse to not hear Hen asking after him, or Chimney gossip about Eddie from across the firehouse.

His apartment is still too quiet, and he doesn’t want to bother the neighbours with music. He tidies it and reorders it and leaves it entirely, goes running early in the morning, at lunch time, at night. The park is loud loud loud in the middle of the weekend, filled with laughing screaming children that sound everything and nothing like Chris.

Autumn bleeds into winter with slow, reluctant fingers that grasp at the grey sky, that drag trails of orange across the world. The leaves die slowly, so painfully slowly, and crunch underfoot with a sound like breaking glass. November becomes December, and Buck runs into fires, out of collapsing buildings, into flooded water and rubble and blood. He showers after every call, trying and never quite managing to wash the stench of ash from his skin. He eats meals with the rest of the 118, because Bobby insists upon it, smiling too wide and laughing too loud, wolfing down food like a starving man so he can leave the table minutes after everyone has sat down.

He keeps busy.

In early December, Athena and Bobby invite him over for dinner, and Buck finds a B-shift that needs covering. He sends them his apologies.

As Christmas gets closer, Maddie tries to call him to invite him for coffee. Buck’s phone is on silent and he doesn’t hear the vibration over the sound of the power drill in his apartment. He puts up paintings and bookshelves in his time away from work.

When he’s at the apartment, he’s running. When he’s not running, he’s working. When he isn’t working he finds a project, something to do, something to fill his mind and busy his hands and push any unproductive thoughts away away away.

Sometimes, if Buck runs fast enough towards the danger, there’s enough adrenaline pulsing through him that he can’t think at all. Sometimes, the moment before he finds out if he lives or dies is the only time he can breathe.

Bobby knows him too well, though, and it isn’t long before Buck starts getting relegated to safer tasks. He wants to yell at Cap - it’s a waste of resources, to have him on the winch while Chimney scales a building. Especially now that Eddie is gone.

He doesn't say anything, though, because he knows that Bobby would want to talk. Buck doesn’t want to talk. He’s tired of talking, tired of feeling, tired of every breath being smothered by another overwhelming emotion. It’s surely too much for the people around him to hear - God knows it’s too much for him to feel.

Buck needs something else to occupy the quiet moments on calls. He starts paying attention to things he’s never bothered to look at before now: not just the danger he’s saving people from, but everything around them. He collates information like a magpie with shimmering trinkets: certain types of calls correlated with certain demographics of victim; certain calls tended to come from certain places. He starts counting car accidents and trying to line them up with other factors: the weather, the traffic, the days of the week. Its not his job to predict disasters, and most of the information he stores is probably useless, but it means he spends drives chanting facts and figures and numbers under his breath instead of trying not to scream into the silence.

Besides, he thinks it would be nice, for once, to prevent a disaster. To stop it from happening at all, instead of being the one left behind to pick up the pieces.

He starts listening to true crime podcasts at night, or in quiet moments when the music isn't loud enough to make his brain fall silent. He tracks the patterns in every episode: the way killers can lurk in the most everyday of places, the way secondary locations are where people get hurt, the times and places and behaviours that begin to symbolise danger.

And maybe Buck’s an overthinker, but he figures it can’t exactly hurt to, well…keep track. After all, he’s in a pretty good position to keep up to date with crime in L.A., working as a first responder. And he’s not trying to find a true crime drama to get involved in in real life. That would be reckless. He’s just…keeping an eye out. Keeping busy. Keeping his head above the dirt and shit that life is currently shovelling over him.

Buck starts bringing a notebook with him on calls. He can hold a lot of information in his head, but he’s always been a visual person. The notebook is plain red, bound with a single elastic strap that has a little holder for his ballpoint pen. He makes a tracker: orange for fire, red for violent crime, blue for natural disaster, green for accidents. He fills page after page with patterns of emergencies, bright colours juxtaposed against their impersonal descriptions.

He counts casualties, survivors. It feels callous, and he finds himself spending however long it takes trawling records to find their names. He doesn’t want them to be just a number on the page, a statistic.

Buck has no doubt Maddie - and probably Bobby as well - might be a little concerned by his new project. It probably isn’t making him feel better…but it is distracting. It keeps him busy. It means he goes back to his apartment and checks records for the B-shift, or radio channels for other stations, or even the 9-1-1 call logs using Maddie’s ID. He’s going a little overboard, maybe, but it isn’t driving to Eddie’s house and sitting alone in the driveway staring out at an empty house that was the closest feeling he could find to home.

It scares him a little, looking at how many ways there are to die in this city. But that fear - that’s a feeling other than missing Eddie, missing Chris, feeling anger and rage and frustration on their behalf.

It’s just supposed to be for his own interest, anyway. Buck’s not expecting to find anything - let alone have to show the notebook to anyone. No one needs to know, so he can do what he wants. He’s not abusing his position, he’s just doing…research.

Buck has always liked being thorough about research.

He fills up almost all of his red notebook - and he’s almost resolved to give up the tracking once he runs out of empty pages. Hen’s given him so many strange looks, watching him writing in it in the common room. Buck’s sure either she or Chim will try and steal it at some point.

And it’s just a curiosity. No big deal. Just research. Data collection. Information which doesn’t matter to anyone. It doesn't matter to Buck; he can stop anytime.

But then, well.

Then Buck finds a pattern.