Work Text:
Post-Lawsuit AU. This was written at 3 in the morning so it probably reads really badly but I did my best.
Evan was a runner. It was something he began to do when he was younger and couldn’t stand to be in the house with his parents anymore. He learned it after one too many glares from his parents for being reckless, one too many arguments about him not being safe, after Maddie came home one too many times and wouldn’t look him in the eye.
The first time was when he was eight. Maddie was somewhere out of the house and Evan had just pulled one of his many attention grabbing stunts, only to be yelled at like normal. His chest hurt over his heart but he bore it painfully as he soaked up as much attention from his parents he could grab before they ignored him again. When the yelling stopped he was sent to his room, body heavy and elbows and knees throbbing painfully from the scrapes and bruises he gained that day. It didn’t last long before he couldn’t stand the sound of his parents fighting, so he crawled out of his window and ran. He didn’t know how far he went or how long, but by the end of it Evan was gasping for breath and a new feeling entered his chest.
For the first time ever, Evan felt free.
After that it was a natural progression to running more and more. By the time he was 18 and trying to convince his sister to go away with him somewhere far, far away from Hershey, running was an instinct. It was normal to have a fluttery feeling in his chest and his skin would crawl if he was in one place too long. When he was kicked out of college his travels took him everywhere from Europe, across the rest of the US, and even the military at one point, landing him in Peru. It was fun, but it wasn’t enough. It’s in Peru that he hears news of Los Angeles and pursues a career as a firefighter. It’s there that Evan finds the family he was so desperate for.
It’s in Los Angeles that Evan Buckley becomes Buck Buckley only to lose it all once more.
~~~~~
Time blurred together after the truck bombing that nearly cost him his leg, so some things are more blurry than others. He remembers acing his recertification tests, his pulmonary embolism set back, the tsunami (he couldn’t forget the tsunami if he tried) and he remembers the greatest mistake he has ever made. That stupid lawsuit.
Buck is man enough to admit that he made a rash decision during a time of great emotional turmoil. He had been so angry and so scared at the thought of never being a firefighter again, of never being with his family again that he threw logic and common sense out the window. Finding out that Bobby had stonewalled him had cut Buck deeply making his heart ache. Everything after that had rapidly rolled down hill, like a landslide on a collision course with a housing district. It was fast, it was messy, and it left destruction in its wake.
It had now been nearly five months since the lawsuit was closed and Buck had returned to the 118, and yet it wasn’t the same. Buck knew it wouldn’t immediately be like it was with everyone. He had betrayed his team’s trust because he was selfish (“exhausting” a little voice in his whispered) but he had tried to fix it, to make it better. It wasn’t working.
Buck closed his apartment door with a sigh, leaning his back against it. He stood there for a few minutes with his eyes closed, silently breathing in through his nose and out of his mouth. Despite the fact that he was man behind again at the station it seemed like today was particularly long and exhausting. Buck breathed in a few more times before pushing himself off the door to lazily make his way farther into the loft. He dropped his duffle on the floor beside the couch before dropping like a stone onto it and turning on the tv. A news station played in the background and Buck got lost in his head.
Like every shift for the past couple months Buck spent it cleaning the 118 top to bottom, resting as needed, and being ignored by basically everyone. Hen and Chimney would occasionally smile at him (it wasn’t a true smile, their eyes weren’t in it) but that was it. Bobby kept an eye on him, but he wasn’t acting the way he used to. There was only a cold hardness in his eyes when he looked at Buck and not the fatherly warmth that used to be there. Eddie didn’t bother giving him any form of attention. The rest of the station was a mixed response of the last two emotions. His chest hurt just thinking about it.
The news was still playing in the background but now they were showing rerun footage of a house fire from several hours ago. Buck recognized it. The 118 had responded to that scene along with the 136 after the fire got out of control and began to spread to the neighboring house. Everything turned out fine it seems, but this is the first time Buck is actually hearing the details about what happened. Someone really needs to start making sure kids aren't playing with fire and flammable objects unsupervised. The camera zoomed in to show Eddie and a firefighter from the 136 working together on the hoses. Buck recognized her as Lena Bosko, the firefighter who took over for him temporarily. They worked really well together, Buck mused silently. His chest burst with new pain as he watched them work. In a few minutes the teams had managed to control the fire, extinguishing the blaze.
The news switched over to other topics but Buck turned his tv off. He sat in silence for a few seconds as he let the pain in his chest ache away. In a split second of doubt he began to wonder if it would’ve been better to never have returned to the 118 after all and instead found a new career somewhere else. An itch began under his skin that felt familiar and the pains in his chest began to throb over his heart. Buck rubbed a hand over his chest to try and make it go away. The itch under his skin stayed and it felt like his stomach was tied to a cord that was being pulled away from him. Buck recognized these feelings, had since he was a child, but he hadn’t felt them in years and had thought they were gone. Buck shook it all off. He wasn’t gonna run just because things were a little frosty at work. Everything was fine. (Buck ignored the self doubt that began to creep in and sprout in the back of his mind.)
That small little doubt had begun to grow over the next few days without his notice. It wasn’t until the end of a very rough shift that Buck gave it another thought. Since he first began to doubt his place at the 118 it seemed like nothing had changed. In fact it seemed just a little worse than before. What little attention he had gotten from Hen and Chimney began to slowly disappear and Buck was being left behind more and more often. He had to find out via Instagram that there was a gathering for the team at the Grant-Nash house the other day. He hadn’t been invited and no one apologized for forgetting him.
Buck felt like he was a child again, trying to gain any form of attention from people he thought was family. (It hurt and he was so tired.) His skin itched with the need to run, run, run.
The idea of going far away was so tempting. It was getting harder and harder to ignore it, and Buck knew it was a losing battle. His heart thumped and jumped and pounded in his ears. His stomach swooped and fell and pulled in a million directions. Buck finally caved to the need to leave.
In less than an hour, Buck had a couple of bags filled with clothes, pictures, small keepsakes, and other things he couldn’t bear to leave behind. The rest of his loft was practically untouched and Buck looked over it with a hollow feeling. There was nothing else he wanted to grab and was about to leave with his hands full of bags and blankets when he stopped. There was one more thing he had to do. Grabbing a pen and a piece of paper from somewhere, he began to write a short note to the one person he would be sorry for leaving without saying goodbye too. Once finished he folded it over and wrote a name on the front flap of the letter.
Christopher Diaz.
With that done Buck grabbed everything from the floor, left everything else behind, and locked his loft for one final time. With his jeep packed full and a feeling of calm stillness finally falling over him, Buck left Los Angeles with only the wind as his navigator.
It took four days for anyone to finally check on Buck after he never made it to work. By then he was long gone with only a note to a child to explain why he had to go. (Maddie suddenly remembered all the times when Buck would leave for longer and longer periods of time until one day she gave him her jeep and he disappeared with only postcards in his wake. It takes her nearly a month to talk to Chimney and longer to talk to the team again after she finds out that he had taken off because of them.)