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Buck’s transition back onto the team had been almost seamless after Halloween. Hen and Chimney had never held anything against him, but Eddie and Bobby were a different story altogether.
Fortunately, he was able to talk to both of them not long after his official return, and the air had been cleared. By his second week back, it was almost as if he hadn’t left— as if he hadn’t been away from his team for nearly half a year.
Being back was fun and exhilarating and made him feel complete.
But it also meant that he hadn’t experienced working with the new guy, Jeffrey Arnold, who had joined during summer. Eddie described the man as an acquired taste while Hen had simply shaken her head when Buck tried to ask about the probie.
When even Chimney frowned at the mention of the new guy, Buck knew there had to be something off about him, but he wasn’t about to ask Bobby about him, too.
It isn’t that Jeff can’t do the job or that he doesn’t seem nice, either. It’s just that Buck gets really weird vibes from him. He speaks and Buck finds himself gritting his teeth. His very presence rubs him the wrong way.
So, he ignores the strange jokes— ‘cause the guy has a really skewed sense of humor— and he ignores Jeff’s need to treat him like the new guy when Buck is a veteran compared to him. He’s always trying to offer tips on things that Buck has been doing since before Jeff likely ever even thought of joining the academy.
In fact, he ignores Jeff a lot except for when it’s necessary for the job.
That’s probably why the man has a sudden need to get his attention all the time.
“Hey, Buck!” Jeff calls from a distance, barely audible from where he and Eddie are organizing medical supplies.
Buck groans under his breath and Eddie lets out a bark of laughter. Right now, just Hen and Chim are out on a medical call. Bobby is in his office, and Jeff had been placed on lunch duty while Buck, Eddie, and a few others tended to chores.
“Yo, Buckley!” he hears again.
“Be right back,” Buck mutters, leaving the room.
When he finally steps out from under the ledge of the loft and peers up at Jeff, he finds the man leaning over the railing with hands clasped behind his back. He actually looks a second from falling over, but he’s wearing a huge grin on his face to say that it’s exactly where he wants to be.
“What’s up?” Buck asks him.
“Catch!”
It’s the only warning he gets before Jeff brings a hand out from behind his back and drops something. On instinct, Buck reaches out for the white object, and his brain only realizes a millisecond before he catches it that it’s an egg. He lets his hand drop with the catch to slow the momentum and avoid it breaking. He shoots a glare at the guy before he can even process what the heck just happened.
“What the hell, man?” Buck asks, loud enough to grab the attention of a few of his crew members.
“Jeffrey, stop playing with food,” one of the women calls.
“And another!” Jeff shouts gleefully, letting another egg drop.
This time, multiple people call out to Jeff, all with varying levels of annoyance, and Buck catches it all the same.
“Dude,” Buck calls. “Not cool. Come take these so we can both get back to our jobs.” He raises the eggs in the air with a little wave and Jeffrey sighs and nods his head.
The man backs away from the railing out of sight to head for the stairs, or at least Buck hopes that’s what he’s doing.
He looks around the bay and spies Kate on the center truck doing a detail. She pauses her work, raising an eyebrow with a jerk of her chin toward the loft as if to ask him what that was about, but Buck throws his hands up with his mouth agape as if to say I have no fucking clue.
He can’t tell if Jeff thought this would actually be funny or if he was hoping the eggs would break. Either way, he’s already fed up with the man for the day.
“Buck,” he hears Jeff call again. “Catch!”
This time he drops a mug, one of the ceramic ones that Bobby got as part of a kitchen set for the station when he first became captain. Buck has to jerk his body forward to catch it, and he fumbles with it for a second, trying not to drop the eggs in his other hand, before wrapping his fingers firmly around it and bringing it to his chest.
This time he hears multiple people yell at Jeff, all thoroughly angry now. He hears Eddie’s voice amongst them, apparently having left the stock room they were in, and he actually sees Eddie heading straight for the stairs with a look that can’t mean anything good.
Buck slides the eggs into the mug, grumbling in annoyance.
A moment later, a sharp, low whistle rings out from Tanner, their current oldest in the station, as his eyes catch Bobby marching across the bay from his office.
“He’s so getting fired,” Tanner says as their captain passes Buck.
Then multiple things happen at once. Buck registers Eddie yelling at Jeffrey to put something down, Bobby asks the station as a whole what’s going on, and Jeffrey calls Buck’s name again.
“Buckley!” Jeff shouts. Buck peels his eyes away from Bobby and glares up at the annoying probie again.
He releases something that Buck can’t quite see.
“Try to dodge this one!”
But Buck’s already catching it when the words echo off the walls of the station. His fingers wrap around the object on instinct, and everyone in the bay yells.
It happens so fast that Buck doesn’t even notice what he’s holding until he sees the handle. Everyone stills.
A single red drop hits the floor and Buck looks down at it.
“Ow.”
He loosens his grip and feels the blade pull away from his skin with a disgusting squelch that echoes in his ears. The bloody knife clatters to the floor, and it breaks the silence. Eddie’s cursing out Jeff and rushing back down the stairs. Bobby’s yelling something, too, and he flinches away from the sound as he stares down at his own hand.
A thin line, cutting into the flesh of his palm is quickly oozing blood and flowing down his wrist. And that’s… that’s a lot of blood.
“I told him to dodge it!” Jeffery yells, indignantly.
“Not until after you let go of it,” Eddie yells back. “ ¡Pinche pendejo! You literally could have killed him if that had actually hit him somewhere else!”
“Language!” Bobby shouts. “Arnold, go sit in my office and do not move if you ever want to work for the LAFD again! Someone get me some towels, we need to apply pressure!”
“Is it actually that bad?” Jeffrey asks, a hint of concern mixed with guilt lacing his voice.
“Yes, it is,” Eddie hisses. “Buck is on blood thinners in case you missed the fucking memo!”
Bobby doesn’t comment on Eddie’s language again, too concerned with Buck’s bleeding hand.
“Towels!” The captain yells again. Buck hears someone yell back with an affirmative, but he’s too shocked to pay attention to much else.
“Let’s get him sitting,” Bobby mutters, and the next thing Buck knows, he’s being guided to the locker room benches.
Kate rushes in with towels then and Bobby takes them. He first soaks up some excess blood, wiping at Buck’s hand and trying to get a clear look at the wound.
Buck flinches when the towel rubs harshly across his palm and he can barely stomach the sight of his hand, but when he looks away, his eyes meet Eddie’s frantic gaze. The worry he sees makes him feel worse. He ends up with his eyes trained on the locker in front of him instead.
“Okay, good,” Bobby mutters. “It doesn’t seem to have nicked anything major.” He presses a new towel down on the cut without any warning and Buck hisses, his eyes beginning to water as the pain settles in. He grips the edge of the bench to focus on something other than the cut.
“No nerve damage?” Buck asks nervously.
“I honestly can’t answer that,” Bobby supplies. “But it doesn’t look very deep.”
Buck nods and takes in a sharp breath. All that air in his lungs makes him feel lighter.
“Then why is it bleeding so much?”
“Oh, c’mon, Buck,” Bobby teases playfully, “you know how many smaller vessels there are in a hand. Not to mention those blood thinners. And even if it’s not deep you’ll definitely need some stitches, so we’re going to need to take you to the hospital.”
Buck throws his head back with a groan, and Bobby honestly can’t tell if it’s about going to the hospital or from the pain.
“Eddie,” Bobby calls his friend. “Can you drive him? You can take one of the pick-ups.”
Eddie nods. “I’ll get the truck ready. Cap. Kate. You guys have Buck?” The two in question nod in return and Eddie takes off, not wanting to waste a single second.
“How are you doing, Buckley?” Kate asks. “Any lightheadedness?”
“Mhmm,” Buck groans. “A little, yeah. Probably mostly due to—”
“Anxiety?” Bobby questions.
Buck lets out a breathy, “Yeah,” with a small chuckle that dies on his lips.
It’s not until Bobby gives a particularly hard tug that Buck realizes a fresh towel has been secured to his hand. The captain raises Buck’s arm above his head and holds it there as one of the trucks sparks to life in the bay, its engine echoing through the station.
“Can you walk?” Kate asks then.
“Don’t trust m’self to,” he admits.
“Okay, we’ll help,” Bobby says, standing in front of Buck. “Think you can at least keep your hand above your head?”
“Yeah,” Buck responds, though, to be honest, he’s not entirely sure he can.
The ride to the hospital is a haze of his heartbeat in his hand and Eddie checking up on him every few minutes. The headrest and reclining seat makes it easy to keep his hand elevated, and he’s extra grateful that the bleeding has managed to slow— or at least not seep through the towel just yet.
This truck is better equipped for getting places that a fire truck has a hard time getting to, like the beach or certain hillside areas but is definitely not meant for transporting patients. The last thing he needs to do is get blood all over the seats.
“How are you doing?” Eddie asks for a third time. Someone else might have been annoyed, but Buck is comforted by the check-in. It helps ease the anxiety in his chest. Logically, Buck knows he’ll be fine. A cut on his hand is not going to be what kills him, but it’s thinking about the aftermath that gets to him.
Bobby said the cut wasn’t very deep, but that didn’t automatically mean there wasn’t nerve damage. And even if there wasn’t nerve damage, there would be the physical therapy that comes with a hand wound like this.
There was also so much he wouldn’t be able to do for himself.
Oh God, Buck realizes, he's going to have to wipe his ass with his other hand.
Buck groans and stomps his foot a little— the most he can do to express his current frustrations— and he absolutely doesn’t care that he sounds like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie questions immediately.
“I won’t even be able to wipe my ass!”
If the wide-eye look on his friend’s face is anything to go by, Eddie had not been expecting that.
“Just use your left hand?” Eddie tries suggesting.
“And showering !” Buck finds himself shouting. “Wrapping my leg and not standing was one thing but—”
“Buck!” Eddie shouts, cutting him off. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself and you’re just going to stress out over things you don’t have to deal with yet. Let’s take it step by step, yeah?”
Buck doesn’t respond, choosing to press his foot into the floor of the truck a little harder. He’s not going to go around stomping again, but he is getting antsy— this is the next best thing he can do since he can’t stretch out to relax.
Buck had not seen his day going like this at all.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” Buck asks.
“Well, let’s see what the doc—”
“Not about that,” Buck sighs. “I’m going to be out of work until this thing heals. That’s what? One, two weeks? And that doesn’t account for possible physical therapy.”
“You could probably do light duty during your PT,” Eddie says, ever the optimist.
The thought of that alone is enough to exhaust Buck, and he finds himself sinking into his chair impossibly more. He brings his good hand up to his face and rubs at his eyes.
“I hope that Arnold gets suspended.”
“I hope he gets fired,” Eddie quips.
Buck smiles at the anger his friend holds on his behalf. It’s almost comforting to know he’s not the only one upset.
“It was kind of my fault for catching the damn knife,” Buck mutters next. “Who even does that?”
Eddie snorts. “If someone drops something and tells you to catch it, your first instinct is going to be to catch everything they drop.”
“I have some pretty idiotic instincts then,” Buck says. “He said to dodge it.”
Eddie’s face turns into a scowl as he checks the traffic before making a left.
“You’re kidding right?” he asks, eyes never leaving the road. “It’s not your fault you didn’t process what he said fast enough. I know you’ve had your moments of dumbassery, but you’re not dumb, Buck. Not to mention, you saw Bobby. He didn’t look mad at you, did he?”
Buck sighs again. He knows Eddie is making valid points, but he still can’t help but feel like this could have all been avoided.
The two are in silence for a few more minutes. It’s not until they’re pulling into the hospital lot that Buck voices what he’d been thinking for the past couple of weeks.
“Why do you think he was so obsessed with getting my attention anyway? Was it ‘cause I ignored him?”
Eddie laughs loudly this time, turning into the Emergency Room drop-off zone.
“What?” Buck asks, sitting up quickly. He tries to ignore the funky feeling in his head— probably the blood loss making itself known again.
“There are some bets—”
“Oh, for fucks sake,” Buck groans. It was worse than he thought.
“Chim is like ninety percent—”
“Don’t say—”
“—sure that Jeff—”
“Don’t,” Buck begs.
“—has a crush,” Eddie finishes.
Buck’s mouth snaps shut as Eddie pulls to a stop outside along the curb. There’s already a doctor approaching with a look on her face as if to say this is not a parking lot, so Eddie jumps out with placating hands and gestures toward Buck.
Meanwhile, Buck takes to opening his door and trying to help himself out of the truck.
He’d be falling flat on his ass if not for Eddie coming to catch him two seconds later.
“Need a hand?” Eddie asks.
The fucking audacity—
“Bite me, Diaz.”
“That was dumb,” Eddie says, ignoring Buck’s remark. “You couldn’t walk on your own at the station. What made you think you could do it here?”
Buck hums as the doctor from before comes rushing over to them with a wheelchair. “I didn’t feel faint anymore.”
“Because you weren’t mov— never mind.” Eddie shakes his head and helps Buck get situated in the seat. “I’m going to go park the truck, then I’ll meet you inside. Try not to die, yeah?”
“I don’t know,” Buck drawls. “If Jeffrey has a crush on me, I might vomit to death.”
Eddie bursts into laughter again and rounds the truck to get back into the driver’s seat. He rolls down the passenger window and shouts out of it, “I’ll see you in a minute, Buckley!”
“Take longer!” Buck shouts back. “I could use the break!” The doctor turns Buck toward the ER, but he can still hear Eddie laughing behind him.
It’s not until the truck has pulled away and that Buck is being rolled into the ER that he turns to his doctor.
“How much do I gotta give you to tell him I died when he comes back? Just for kicks.”