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“As far as badge and ladder joints go, this one’s pretty quiet.” Buck ushered Eddie through the door. “Unless you’re in the mood for something livelier, in which case—”
“No, this is fine,” Eddie said. “My treat.”
“I’ll get the next round,” Buck said, and made his way to his favorite booth in the back while Eddie went up to the bar. Bobby, Hen, and Chim had all passed on the offer to go out with them; Buck suspected Bobby had stage-managed the deferrals, wanting the two of them to continue “bonding.” But as far as Buck was concerned, the business with the grenade had sealed it: their animosity (okay, one-sided animosity) was officially water under the bridge.
Eddie sat down across from him and handed him a beer.
“Cheers.” Buck clinked their glasses together. “To having each other’s backs?”
Eddie laughed. “I’ll drink to that.”
They drank. Buck considered him over the rim of his glass. There was something sort of impenetrable about Eddie’s face. He was a handsome guy, obviously, he had nice eyes and a killer jawline, but his features were… unstable? One minute he looked boyish and youthful; then there would be some small shift, like a cloud passing suddenly in front of the sun, and his face dimmed to a lesser version of itself, making him look older, wearier.
“…Buck?”
“Yeah?” He blinked. Shit, he’d been staring like a weirdo. “Sorry, I was just—actually, I was trying to guess how old you are, which is probably like totally rude of me—”
“I turned thirty-one a few weeks ago,” Eddie told him. He raised an eyebrow. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.” He downed the rest of his beer. “So… what kind of music are you into?”
“Uh…”
“Or, like, what’s your favorite movie? How many languages do you speak? What teams do you follow? Do you like the Cowboys? What about the Spurs?”
Eddie seemed taken aback by the barrage of questions. “What was the first thing again?”
“Um. Music.” He was usually so good with people, but five minutes alone with Eddie—minus a ticking grenade—and he was already resorting to Chim’s bag of icebreakers. Could he be any lamer?
Eddie took pity on him. “Old-school hip hop, mostly.”
“Oh, sure. Like Kanye before he went all weird and MAGA shit?”
“I meant more like Wu-Tang and A Tribe Called—wait, Kanye West is old school to you? How old did you say you were, again?”
Buck waved that away. “Next question. What’s your—”
“You been with the 118 long?” Eddie interrupted.
“Almost a year and a half now.” Buck was on the verge of adding that he, too, had graduated first in his class and that he’d completed his probationary period in twelve months, which was the absolute minimum, most people took fifteen or even eighteen months to—
What are we measuring here, Buck?
“How are you finding LA?” he asked instead. “You’re from Texas, right?”
“El Paso, yeah. And it’s a nice change, living by the ocean. I’ve spent most of my life in one desert or another.”
“I thought Afghanistan was, like, mountains.”
“Afghanistan’s a lot of things. Where I was deployed, it was desert.”
“Oh. Cool.” Cool? What was he, ten? “You want another round?”
Eddie took out his phone. He smiled at whatever he saw on the screen and put it away. “I could do one more. But then I should head out.”
“You got it.” Buck was glad for the reprieve. He wandered up to the bar and fidgeted with his phone while he waited for the bartender to refill their glasses. Eddie made him feel off-balance. When he wasn’t rattling on about explosive ordnances or explaining the downsides of blue light, the guy was pretty tight-lipped. Stingy with his small talk. Or maybe he was just quiet? But Eddie had strolled into the firehouse like he owned it, and he was equally assertive out in the field, oozing competence and confidence at every turn. I’ve treated guys with collapsed lungs in combat. Smug fucker.
So who the hell was this taciturn stranger sitting opposite him tonight?
Maybe Buck was saying the wrong things, asking the wrong questions. Maybe Eddie didn’t like talking about Afghanistan; he certainly hadn’t wanted to tell them about his silver star.
Thoroughly impressed with his own sensitivity, Buck collected their beers and rejoined Eddie in the booth.
“So, Diaz—”
“Seriously, bro, call me Eddie.”
“No, I mean like, Diaz, is that—”
“My dad’s from Mexico.” Eddie narrowed his eyes. “Have you got some kind of problem with—”
“No! Jesus, no, of course not.” Awesome start, Buck. Killer. “I was gonna ask if that was what they called you in the Army, and if that’s why you’d rather we didn’t.”
“You don’t pull your punches, do you?”
“Huh?”
“I mean—yeah. You’re right. Bull’s eye. I don’t wanna feel like I’m in the Army here.” Eddie shrugged. “That’s not me anymore.”
“And I really respect that,” Buck said hastily. “So like, instead of us giving you a nickname, your name-name is your new identity, how ’bout that?”
Eddie smiled. “I like that.”
“Some deep shit, right there.” Buck reached across the table and smacked his arm. “We got deep, Eddie, Bobby would be so proud of us.”
Eddie just shook his head, still smiling.
Buck cast about for another subject that would keep their momentum going. “You were really going to town on that punching bag. Are you like a boxer or something?”
“MMA,” Eddie said. “I started when I was a kid. It’s a… good way to let off steam, I guess.”
“For sure. Would you wanna spar sometime?” Buck knew there was a solid chance he’d get his ass handed to him—he’d seen Eddie in action, and those were some pretty impressive combinations—but he was willing to take this one for the team.
“I think I should probably stick to fighting the bag, for now,” Eddie said, and something about his tone prevented Buck from arguing. “But I appreciate the offer. Maybe we could do something else?”
They were starting to click, Buck was sure of it. “Yeah, I’m into paintballing and rock-climbing. Or we could go hiking—there are some great trails around here, Echo Mountain, Topanga—Hen and I have a loop around Temescal Canyon that we like to do.”
“I wouldn’t wanna impose, it seems like I already came on a little strong—”
“Nah, dude, you’re in. I mean, Bobby doesn’t allow hazing or anything like that. Chim tried to make me wash his car a few times, but I get the sense he won’t try that with you.”
“I guess I’d do it if he asked,” Eddie said, though he didn’t sound too enthused at the prospect.
“He wouldn’t dare. You got lucky with the 118, Eddie, we’re a bunch of sweethearts.” He grinned. “I hear the guys at Station Six are real douchebags.”
Eddie laughed. “Yeah, well, Bobby was pretty persuasive.”
“Wait, he courted you?” Buck was outraged.
“He… made his case.” Eddie raised both eyebrows this time. “Is that—”
“You get assigned to a station, you don’t—” Scalding hot jealousy flared up again. “They must have made an exception. On account of your special skills or whatever.”
“No, it had nothing to do with that, Bobby offered me—”
“What?” Buck demanded, all goodwill forgotten. “What did he offer you?”
“My situation at home…” Eddie trailed off.
“What about it? We all have lives, dude, and you don’t see any of us singled out for preferential treatment.”
“I’ve got a—you know what, never mind.”
It was like a door slamming shut, and Eddie’s face was doing the thing again, making that uncanny shift from lively and animated to detached, impassive. His eyes took on the same deep, hollow cast that Buck associated with Abby’s mom, in those moments when she got trapped in her own mind, a black void that seemed, as Buck gazed back, to spread and widen outwards like a puddle of ink to swallow up the hospital bed, the beeping equipment, the room itself… Alone in Abby’s apartment, it came back to him sometimes, the memory of that spreading void.
And now Eddie, too. All his warmth had receded, and Buck nearly shivered in the sudden chill of his silence.
“I’m sorry, man,” he apologized. “I think I’m a little, like, jealous? ’Cause the team—well, me and Bobby and Hen and Chim—we all have different strengths, and I’m kind of the action-hero guy, you know? But now we have you, and you can do all that and more. So I guess you make me a feel a little, uh, superfluous.”
Eddie gave him a piercing look. “You know Cap’s too smart to bring on redundant personnel. Did it ever cross your mind that maybe he wants you to have a partner?”
“A partner? We’re a team, there’s no partners—"
“Hen and Chim are partners,” Eddie pointed out, and yeah, Buck had to concede that was true.
“But—”
“So why wouldn’t Cap want the same for you?” Eddie asked. “Shouldn’t someone have your back on those high-octane stunts you like to pull? Someone who can follow you up to the top of that rollercoaster, instead of watching from the ground?”
Buck almost knocked his beer over. “Wh-what? How do you know about that? The rollercoaster?”
“At the academy, they showed us footage of you rescuing those people at the fair,” Eddie told him. “You didn’t know? Well, it’s the truth. You’re immortalized on the LA Fire Academy’s greatest hits reel. And rightly so. It was one hell of a rescue operation you pulled off up there, brother.”
Buck stared at him, open-mouthed and incredulous. Greatest hits reel? “Two people died,” he rasped. “It was one of the worst days of my life.”
“Maybe if someone had gone with you—”
“You think somebody else—you think you—could have stopped that guy from letting go?” He could punch Eddie Diaz right in the middle of his pretty face. A few months had passed since he’d last dreamt of Devon; Abby had helped with that, and more time on the job meant more losses. A parade of new faces and new tragedies to haunt his sleep. It was inevitable, he knew that. But as long as he lived, he would never forget the expression on Devon’s face as he fell. Because Devon had been his first. His first loss. And Sergeant fucking GI Diaz had no goddamn right to—
“No. I’m saying if someone else had been there, you wouldn’t have had to go through it alone, whatever hell you put yourself through after you lost him.”
“Oh,” he said, eloquently. His throat felt tight and he wished Eddie would stop looking at him.
But Eddie rested his elbows on the table and leaned in closer. “I’ve lost people too,” he said, “people I served with. But I never went into combat alone. I had my brothers and sisters. What happened to me, it happened to all of us, together. And that didn’t make it better, but it made it closer to bearable.”
Nobody had ever spoken to Buck the way Eddie just did. Tough and bracing, but honest and empathetic at the same time. He realized, distantly, that Eddie was taking him seriously. More seriously than most other people took him, more seriously than he took himself.
He didn’t know how to process that.
“But this—this isn’t combat,” he croaked.
“We pulled a live grenade from a man’s leg tonight,” Eddie reminded him. “Felt like I was back in Bagram for a minute there. Besides—” and Eddie was definitely smirking now “—I seem to remember somebody telling me how stressful it is, working the mean streets of LA—”
“‘We do the same thing. I’ve just done it while people are shooting at me, is all,’” Buck parroted back at him.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Eddie acknowledged. “But you were being a jackass too.”
“Oh, I definitely was.”
“So we’re even?”
“Yeah. Even.”
They were leaning towards each other across the table. Their foreheads were nearly touching, and Buck’s breath began to come faster. Eddie raised his head, and for one dizzying second Buck wondered if Eddie was about to kiss him, or maybe he was just pulling away from such dangerous proximity—? But no, neither of those things, Eddie was looking at him again, and it was like a glass drew back and Buck saw through and behind his eyes. His stomach swooped, because what he saw there made him feel like he knew Eddie, knew him beyond any petty rivalries or stupid questions. It also made him feel very young all of a sudden, young and callow, and also like maybe he’d taken on more than he could handle, an oblivious fly flirting merrily with the swatter. His shoulders stiffened and he opened his mouth to say something, but Eddie had already straightened up and returned to his beer, sipping away like nothing had happened.
What the fuck?
*
Buck was thoroughly miffed, a few days later, when he learned that Eddie had a son. A son. They’d talked for hours, they’d fucking bonded—how had Eddie failed to mention that he had a son?
“You’ve got a kid?” he demanded, as the truck bounced and rattled over the quake-torn streets.
“Christopher,” Eddie said. “He’s seven.”
Buck held out his hand for Eddie’s phone, and Eddie passed it over reluctantly.
Buck squinted at the image on the screen. A cute blonde-haired kid in a striped shirt grinned back at him. He was on crutches—not the kind of crutches you got when you broke your leg, but the kind you used when you had trouble getting around. But Buck knew this wasn’t the time to ask, or to berate Eddie for holding out on him.
“Super adorable!” he bellowed over the siren, returning Eddie’s phone. “I love kids!”
“I love this one.” Eddie looked down at Christopher’s picture on the screen, his expression fierce and tender. “I’m all he’s got. His mother’s not in the picture.”
Buck’s mind was racing. He offered Eddie some platitude about how safe the schools were, built to withstand a helluva lot more than a measly little 7.1; Christopher would be fine, Christopher was fine.
Eddie just nodded, didn’t say anything back.
Buck knew he had to get his head in the game before they reached the hotel, so he only stewed on it for another minute. Why the fuck had Eddie kept his adorable son a secret all this time? Did it have something to do with Christopher’s mom not being in the picture, whatever that meant? Did he feel like he couldn’t trust Buck with—
Of course, Buck realized with a sinking sensation, he’d withheld things, too. The sister who’d just turned up after three years of silence, for example. He hadn’t volunteered anything about Maddie while he and Eddie were out bonding, because then he would’ve had to explain Doug, and even though the conversation had taken a somber turn when they talked about people they’d lost on the job, disclosing that his sister was on the run from an abusive marriage had felt too heavy, too fucking personal, to drop on a guy he’d only just gotten onto civil terms with.
He hadn’t thought to set Eddie straight on the Abby situation, either, even though Chim had clearly misled him about the status of their relationship—he and Abby were not broken up, okay, thanks.
So he and Eddie had had a weird moment where they stared into each other’s eyes and Buck had felt seen and known in a profound new way, so what? It was probably just an optical illusion, a trick of the light. Eddie had expressive, soulful eyes; Buck had probably just been looking for his own reflection in them, incorrigible narcissist that he was.
“Hey, Eddie?”
Eddie’s face was wary. “Yeah?”
“D’you think I could meet him sometime? Christopher? I’d really like to, if you think that’d be okay.”
Eddie gave him a searching look. “You want to meet my kid?”
The truck went over a pothole, sending him lurching into Chimney. “Yeah!”
Eddie was silent for a long time, so long that Buck began to feel awkward. Hen and Chim were picking up on it, too; Hen made a show of taking out her phone while Chim tried to start a conversation with Bobby about the San Andreas fault line.
Buck braced himself for rejection.
“…Okay,” Eddie said, finally. “Yeah. Chris would enjoy that. So would I.”
Elated, Buck beamed at him. “Cool! I can’t wait.”
Eddie offered him a tiny smile in return. “Soon,” he said.