in some sad way i already know
Eddie doesn’t know how he makes it from November to Christmas, but somewhere in between the shifts and the breaking ice between him and Chris and the constant, insufficient lifeline of Buck on facetime, the days slip away from him.
It’s a small mercies kind of situation, but his time with Chris is never as awful as it was that first time. After his third shift at work, he gets to pick up Chris from school. Chris sits in silence the whole way home, but when he turns to leave (without Eddie’s help, and Eddie has to keep reminding himself that his little boy’s all grown up now), he says goodbye. Eddie’s grateful that when he phoned Buck immediately after, Buck was as enthusiastic about that tiny concession as Eddie was, because it makes him feel marginally less pathetic.
And from there, the wall between him and Chris crumbles, brick by painful brick. At first, Chris seems to answer Eddie’s questions about school, his friends, and his classwork with a kind of begrudging tolerance, born of manners more than anything else. And, well, at least Eddie did an okay job teaching him those. But then Chris’ excitement becomes too much for the bored disinterested tone to last - he tells Eddie about chess tournaments that he only does to hang out with his friends, and the way he knew lots of extra facts in science class last week, and how he doesn’t like english but he’s coming to really enjoy maths. Eddie listens, and if he makes a few detours to make the drive last longer, well, nobody but him and Buck need to know. Sometimes, Chris is curious enough to ask Eddie questions, about the firehouse and about LA and about Buck, and every time Eddie feels like each word is an opportunity he can’t afford to squander.
They still haven’t talked about…that night. But Eddie doesn’t want to push - he still feels like he’s made of glass, sometimes. Perfectly transparent, fragile and brittle, dangerously sharp when broken. And he’s so sick of being stained by the blood of everyone who tries to pick him back up again - he’s not letting it happen again. He’ll wait till he and Chris have more solid foundations; he’ll make sure his son is ready for the hard conversations before they happen.
In the meantime, he makes stops at his rental on what becomes his every-other-day pick up run. He makes Chris an afterschool snack, shows him the room in the rental with all his stuff there in case he ever wants to crash there overnight. Once or twice, Chris even accepts some help with his homework. And it’s that that does it: Eddie doesn’t know all the answers, or more frequently, he knows the answers but doesn’t know how to explain the answers. So, without stopping to think about it, he calls Buck. He knows Buck won’t mind, and he’s pretty sure Chris won’t either. The two of them have always had an unbreakable bond, something special no tragedy, distance or time can seem to touch. And Eddie’s permanently fucking grateful that his mistakes haven’t quite managed to stop Buck and Chris texting fun facts back and forth, even if he knows it was touch and go there for a moment.
Anyway. He calls Buck one afternoon when Chris is at the rental, and Buck picks up and they both spend over an hour discussing plant biology. Apparently, Buck’s experience with the bee-nado isn’t enough to stop him from rambling delightedly about the importance of bees to the global ecosystem, and Eddie for one is more than content to sip a beer from across the dining room table and listen to the sound of his son and his best friend. It’s that 5:00pm, golden hour time of day, sunbeams alighting in his son’s hair and making him look like the spitting image of Buck, genetics be damned. Or maybe it’s not his hair, but the little squint smile he does when he knows he’s about to learn something cool, or the smirk he gets just before he shows off something he’s done. Maybe it’s the way they both laugh, the two of them making a strange kind of synched up harmony that Eddie wants to record and play over and over whenever he’s alone.
He lets his eyes flutter shut for as moment; the sun is warm on his skin through the closed window, and Buck’s voice fills the room, rumbling and slow and sweet:
Did you know many plants can use asexual reproduction? That's what makes strawberry offshoots identical to their parent plants, because they weren’t actually pollinated by another organism…
It’s like Eddie never left, never ruined things, like they’re all at home in LA and moving through their days in perfect sync. Eddie has never wanted to keep his eyes shut more, never quite hated the impersona minimalist decor of the rental so much.
“Dad?” Chris’ voice draws him out of his reverie, and Eddie puts a hand to the back of his neck as if that would allow him to stop the blush creeping there.
“Yeah, mijo?”
Chris doesn’t roll his eyes or glare when Eddie looks at him, and maybe it is pathetic but that’s a fucking victory, after everything.
Chris toys with one of the pencils he’d been using to label plant diagrams. “I want to do this again.”
Eddie shoves down his hope the minute it bubbles up; get a grip, Diaz. “Which part, bud? The plant diagrams, or…”
Chris snorts, and it makes something warm slide between Eddie’s ribs. This afternoon has been so normal normal normal, and Eddie is afraid to breathe too forcefully in case he chases the moment away.
“The phone call,” Chris says, and oh, that’s not what Eddie was expecting him to say.
“I want Buck to keep helping me. With my homework,” Chris admits slowly, as though the admission costs him something, as though he’d been mulling it over for a while.
“Of course,” Eddie says, too quickly. “Of course, I’m sure he’d love to. We can make it a regular thing, just say the word and he’s there, you know that.”
Chris nods, still toying with the pencils, still not meeting Eddie’s eyes. “How regular?”
Eddie bits his bottom lip, splays his hand against the underside of the table. “As often as you like.”
Chris snorts, and this time it's a cold sound, not happy at all. “Abuela and Abuelo won’t like that,” he says, and Eddie can’t tell if he’s joking.
“I don’t give a -,” he bites his tongue, hard. His tone is far too vitriolic; Chris loves his grandparents. Eddie breathes in deep, speaks more quietly. “Chris, when it comes to this, I don’t care if they like it or not. You - and you getting to spend time with your Buck - are more important.”
Maybe it’s thinking about his parents like this; maybe it's being all the way out here in Texas where Eddie can’t feel the magnetic pull of Buck’s lodestone to his own (Buck had told him about lodestones years ago, about minerals that are created already calling out to one another)…But Eddie can’t help but fixate on the pronoun that slipped out before he had time to think it through. Your Buck, because Buck belongs to Christopher, and has since the first day they met. Hell, Christopher belongs to Buck, too. As much as he does to Eddie.
Eddie can’t think about the implications of this right now. He gentles his tone, waits for his son to look him in the eye. “Lots of people right now are trying to do what’s best for you, Chris,” he explains. “But you’re starting to figure out for yourself what that is. Sometimes you need to trust that more than you need to listen to someone else tell it to you.”
Chris gives him a long look, a strange look, and Eddie spends an awful moment trying to figure out what he said wrong. But Chris simply nods, slipping from the table and packing away his things. “I’m tired,” he announces, and Eddie takes that for the cue that it is, and drives Chris back to his grandparents’ house.
Helena glares at him through the living room curtains as he stays in the car, letting Chris get himself out of the car and up to the front door. She’s always hated letting Chris do things for himself, wanting to baby him and wrap him in cotton wool. It’s Eddie’s least favourite kind of irony - after all, it’s the exact opposite mistake to how they raised him.
Eddie does his best to ignore her. He drives home with the music turned up loud: Taylor Swift’s Guilty as Sin is playing, and it’s one of his favourite songs.
---
“I don’t understand. I thought you were literally trying to convince him you know what’s best for him,” Perry says, brow furrowed.
They're in the rig, swaying awkwardly at Murray’s less-than confidence-inspiring driving, on the way back from a call. Unsurprisingly, El Paso’s emergencies are pretty tame compared to LA, and Eddie feels jittery in the way that means he’s been idle far too long.
Or maybe that’s just the admissions he’s made to his new house about why he transferred back here.
“Not at all,” he protests, but like always he doesn’t have the words to properly explain himself.
How does he explain to Perry, who’s got no kids or even younger relatives of his own, the messy tangle of trying to fix your mistakes and help your kid grow up?
Chris needs to exercise his agency or he’ll resent Eddie forever; Eddie can’t admit weakness and demand Chris trust him at the same time; and there are too many people trying to tell Chris things that aren't necessarily accurate. Case in point: Helena seems to think he should be wrapped in bubble wrap because of his CP, and Eddie doesn’t know who it grates on more: him or Chris. He won’t let his mother undo the years of hard work he, Buck and even Carla had put into teaching Chris he’s capable enough to try things for himself.
Obviously, he doesn’t say any of that to Perry. All he says is, “It’s complicated,” and then shrugs for good measure.
Diana snorts from her seat in the far corner of the truck. She still hasn’t warmed to Eddie, even though it’s been weeks, but Eddie’s starting to think it’s not personal. Diana has a quietness to her that he recognises; she doesn’t seek people out, seemingly content to spend time on her own. It reminds him of himself after he got back from the Army, although he’s choosing to believe her isolationism is less driven by intense emotional repression than his was. Hard to tell, though.
“Is it?” she asks quietly, then proceeds to not elaborate.
Helpful, as always.
Evie hums thoughtfully from opposite Diana. Their knees are knocking against each other - Eddie’s noticed the two women are always touching, always circling each other’s orbit like gravity has nothing on the pull they feel towards each other.
“I think it makes sense,” she says plainly. “Eddie’s got to teach Chris independence.”
Eddie nods. “Right, exactly, thank you, Evie.”
She tilts her bright blue eyes to the roof, humming again. “Well, that and you’re too afraid of making another mistake to actually back any of your own parenting decisions, so you’re excusing that under the guise of his independence.”
Eddie splutters. “Excuse me?” What would Evie know? She doesn’t have kids; she doesn’t know anything about him.
He’s not…He trusts his own…Well, okay, but he’s trying to make amends here!
Diana chuckles, and it's somehow not an unkind sound despite the situation. “Give the poor man a break, Evie. You can’t just undo years of repression with one sentence.”
Eddie flips her the middle finger, because really, what else is he supposed to do? “Oh, do share your repression expertise,” he snarks before he’s realised what he’s asking.
Great. He’s crossed another line now.
But maybe he should’ve expected that there be few limits to the shit talking firefighters do, because Diana laughs. “May I submit to the court for consideration: being a queer woman of colour in Texas and only learning what that meant at the age of what? Twenty three?”
Evie hums, knocking their knees together. “Twenty two and a half, Di. Remember how we celebrated your half birthday?” A dreamy smile alights her face, then, and somehow Eddie can’t look away from the women as they rock closer together with the swing of the truck. Diana’s hand is on Evie’s knee, their ankles hooked around each other - but Eddie’s sure that if he brought it up, both of them would simply claim it was for balance.
Diana looks out the window of the truck; they’re only about a block away from the fire station by now. She purses her lips, looks like she’s on the verge of saying something but is holding her tongue.
“That was a fun night,” Evie muses.
Diana turns her attention to her again, and even from across the cabin Eddie can feel the force of her gaze. “We have fun,” she said, in an awkward kind of way that almost sounded like a question.
Evie blushes, though, like Diana’s just declared her undying love for her. “We do,” she agrees.
Diana smiles the tiniest fraction; if Eddie blinks he thinks he would’ve missed it.
And…damn. Maybe undying love isn’t quite so wrong after all.
Eddie’s pulled out of his reverie by the sound of his phone ringing; it’s Buck, checking in to see if he’s done with his shift. Eddie takes the call without stopping to think (Buck has his own ringtone, after all, and that’s not for nothing), stepping away from the rest of his new house.
He doesn’t notice the way his colleagues watch him as he goes, doesn’t realise Perry is cataloguing his expression the exact way he was cataloguing Evie and Diana’s just moments before.
No, Eddie’s calling Buck, and Buck is telling him about the Habsburg monarchy, the great rulers of Austria-Hungary who thought they’d conquer the world before it all fell apart. Eddie’s shift is all but over, so he doesn’t bother to feel guilty as he finds a quiet couch in the corner of the firehouse, picking at the fraying fabric beneath him as he listens to his best friend’s voice. He’s picking Chris up later; maybe he’ll take his son to get ice cream, just because. Hell, maybe he can let himself believe things are looking up again; maybe Eddie can hope he’ll get to go home again. That home is something he still has, just around the corner, waiting for him to return.
***
Buck hasn’t gone home to the loft in days.
And, well, that’s the point, isn’t it? The loft isn’t home; it never was.
He works a forty eight, filling every spare minute doing every kind of research and verification he can on Thursdays, and building collapses, and serial killers. The last one of these research topics might be him being a tad overdramatic, and he’s well aware there is absolutely no logical connection between any of these things…
But he can’t go back to the loft right now, regardless of whether he’s found a pattern or not. It’s too clean, too empty, too echoing and loud and listless and lonely. It’s too little, in the kind of way that makes Buck feel like too much. Their shift ends and everyone else goes back to their homes, texting their partners and planning errands for their kids and making it painfully obvious that Buck is the only one left without his own family unit outside of the 118 house.
So he can’t go back to the loft.
Buck goes to Eddie’s house instead.
It's under the guise of watering the plants; after all, there’ll be open homes held here in just a few weeks if Eddie isn’t back in the new year. The thought fills Buck with disgust - he can’t fathom strangers in Eddie and Chris’ home - but he nonetheless takes advantage of it when he needs an excuse to go over there. When it all becomes too much, Buck waters plants, dusts the shelves, packs and repacks the last few boxes Eddie left behind. He moves paintings from one wall to another, and then he moves them back again; he potters. It’s nice, being there. He rations out the time he can spend there before it becomes ridiculous; he savours it.
Buck never meant to stay longer than an hour, this time. He certainly never meant to fall asleep on Eddie’s sofa, but it turns out that barely sleeping for weeks on end makes a too-comfortable couch a pretty dangerous place to be. He closes his eyes for a moment, allowing his tense muscles a single moment of ease…
When he wakes, dark has fallen like a shawl across the room, soft and clinging and smelling of winter frost. Buck left his jacket in the car that afternoon; he’s wearing little more than a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. There is no way he’s braving the freezing night outside when all that waits for him beyond it is a minimalist loft that never quite manages to shut out the cold.
Besides, he reasons with himself… if he stays, he can tidy up after himself in the morning. He can close up the windows again, can maybe put some seeds in the bird feeder Eddie’s kept in the garden ever since Buck and Chris went on a bird watching kick a few years back. The finches stay in L.A all year round, and Buck likes to trace the bright pigment of their wings against the hoarse grey-white that seeps across the rest of the world every winter. Fun fact: house finches have a bright red or orange-yellow colour, which is partially created by three naturally occurring carotenoid pigments that finches ingest via seeds and other natural foods.
Buck likes to think about it - the finches. He likes to think about them soaking up the colour from their surroundings, about pigment spreading from the earth to the open skies via finch wings. About how they reflect back the love that the world provides them.
So he can’t really let the bird feeder empty out - and it’s been so long since anyone spent more than a few hours here. The finches will leave and never return if he doesn’t top up their seeds. They’ll fade away.
Buck settles back down on the couch, limbs feeling heavier than when he first arrived. He’ll stay one night, and no one will be any the wiser. What difference does it make to anyone else where he sleeps? His limbs ache, the soft cushions of the couch warm beneath him.
Besides, it's not even about where he sleeps regularly. It’s one nap, right? Buck’s been working so hard, no one could begrudge him that. Buck doesn’t think about the many arguments a discerning colleague like Hen or Chim could raise to this - and he definitely doesn’t think about why he feels like he needs to have an internal argument at all.
Buck sighs instead, tucking his legs back under him so he’s curled up on his usual side of the couch, half-draped over the armrest. His muscles ache from his shift. Or maybe it’s from his morning run…or just from being cooped up awkwardly on the couch, perhaps. Normally, he rests his feet against Eddie’s lap - or on the floor so Chris can sit between them. Now, he’s tucked into his usual corner, somehow unwilling to touch the far side now that he’s awake to notice the intrusion.
Buck closes his eyes, watching tiny light dots dance against his lids. He shifts position again; the air is cold and the blanket too small to cover him completely.
A few restless minutes later, Buck groans, and reaches for the tv remote. Despite everything, he’s probably not getting any more sleep tonight.
The remote is where it always is, in the little wicker basket Buck got Eddie when his best friend kept complaining about losing things off the top of the coffee table. Eddie hates wicker, and Buck found this out pretty much instantly because Eddie couldn’t stop grimacing every time he saw the basket on the table. But then Buck offered to move it, and Eddie refused.
‘I’m not returning a gift,’ he’d muttered, along with a few choice curse words in Spanish. ‘You keep those.’
It had lived in pride of place in the middle of their living room ever since.
Buck flicks through the channels idly; there’s not much on live TV he wants to see normally, and even less at 11pm on a Tuesday night. He can’t bring himself to pick a movie, though, not until he’s organised a movie-night time to watch in sync with Eddie and Chris again. After a few stations, he’s momentarily startled by a familiar face: Brad Torrence. The actor’s stupid grin leers at him in a lopsided captain’s helmet, as he waves around a chainsaw prop in a decidedly dangerous way.
Buck considers changing channels immediately, just as a matter of principle…but this season has been going pretty much viral. Buck’s a little curious, despite himself.
What the hell, he thinks. He may as well make himself feel better about his own fire fighting abilities, if nothing else.
It takes him a few minutes into the episode to recognise it as a replay - Hotshots airs on a Thursday, after all. This episode is just a few episodes after the one Buck and Eddie starred in (ok, ‘featured in’ might be a better term for it) (ok, ‘made a brief appearance in the final scene’).
It’s not a bad episode, Buck has to admit. He’s almost a tiny bit…invested? Captain Banner is ridiculous, of course, and the amount of firefighting and medical inaccuracies is almost offensive, but Buck has to admit it’s fun watching people run around to emergencies that aren’t real, that aren’t genuinely a cause for concern, that aren’t his problem to fix. It’s strange, honestly, watching people panic over emergencies that make up Buck’s every day, while for once he gets to sit back and relax.
Then it gets just a little bit stranger.
Right at the end of the episode, Buck can tell they’re building up to something. The calls are increasing in frequency; Banner is making increasingly broody and dramatic stares towards the camera. At about forty minutes into the episode they get a call for a mass-casualty event: a building collapse.
Buck blinks, swallows, mouth suddenly dry. A building collapse - of-fucking-course it is.
And it’s probably just a frequency illusion, that he’s seeing them everywhere, right? The Baader-Meinhof effect, he thinks it’s called. Fun fact: when we learn something new, we feel as though we begin to encounter it everywhere because of a combination of confirmation bias and selective attention, our brains seeking out the new and interesting information.
Buck was thinking about building collapses; the fact that this Hotshots episode is about a building collapse is a coincidence, nothing more.
But Buck doesn’t believe in coincidences. And unless the universe is just mocking him….
He watches the end of the episode, taking in the cliff-hanger ending delivered via a way-too-close shot of Brad Torrence’s face. (God, Buck hates that guy. And his weird-as fake accent - Buck is waiting for the day it’s revealed Brad is faking his voice. It sounds wrong. Plus the guy is just generally untrustworthy, Buck’s certain of it.)
And then much to Buck’s chagrin, he finds himself grabbing his laptop from the dining room table, where he’d been playing music out of the tinny speakers after forgetting Eddie’s UE boom was in Texas, just like Eddie was. Buck searches up the next episode, carefully scanning the episode descriptions so he doesn’t give himself spoilers, clicking on the next one with only a small amount of embarrassment. He nestles further under the blankets, like he can disappear into the corner of the couch. The ridiculous theme music starts up….
It’s a good episode. Actually, it’s a great episode, and Buck clicks on the next one after it without remembering to be embarrassed by his own interest. Brad Torrence’s kinda bad acting has dropped its over-the-top veneer for something more real, more raw - and the plot is quite frankly a little insane. Buck’s found himself in the midst of a three-part episode sequence in which a massive apartment complex collapses with many of its residents still inside, trapping them under rubble for days at a time.
Buck’s all-too familiar with how that usually goes, has never forgotten the earthquake on Maddie’s first shift that absolutely destroyed that hotel. The combination of crush injuries and how hard it is to find people in an unstable collapsed building make death tolls climb horrifically high; it’s why Buck has spent hours and hours researching earthquake safety regulations in LA.
By the final ten minutes of the episode, Buck is watching hunched over his laptop, knuckles white as he grips the corner of the blanket. He’s been waiting for two hours for someone to succumb to their injuries, or fall to their death. Somehow, though (probably because it’s fictional), Captain Banner and his team get everyone out alive. Like some kind of miracle.
Buck thinks back to how the real building collapses in the last few weeks, and wishes they’d been so lucky.
Actually though, as he thinks back, their survival rates had been pretty good, all things considered. The first had been awful - five dead and eight saved - but the second had seen no casualties. The next…
Buck’s bringing up the LAFD report without stopping to think, fingers flying over his laptop keys. He didn’t work this one, B-shift did, so he doesn’t know for sure…
No one died. He reads the report twice over, just to be sure. No one died.
The most recent collapse had one casualty. OAne casualty Buck is trying not to think they could have saved, if given a few more minutes. He brings up this incident report as well, a little slower this time. One death - and one death that feels like it should’ve been none, at that.
Buck sits on the couch for a while longer, his laptop shutting off as he stares past it into space in the corner of the living room. The room is lightning around him; dawn is beginning to poke fingers through the curtains, sneaking up on him and cloaking them with sun. He’s been awake nearly all night, but he doesn’t feel tired.
Maybe it’s the thought of the building collapses; maybe the Hotshots show is more intense than Buck gave it credit for. Hell, maybe it’s just sitting here in Eddie’s house, knowing the clock is ticking down the moments until he has to leave. But Buck feels like there’s some sort of pattern here…like his body won’t relax until he finds out what it is.
Buck gets up slowly, getting a glass of water from the kitchen before beginning to tidy everything away. He needs to get ready to go, needs to go back to his apartment and his real life real responsibilities. He knows he’s just an overthinker. These patterns, the show, the death toll, all of it dancing around in his brain…
It could mean nothing. It could mean absolutely nothing at all.