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So far, it had been a pleasant shift on a very pleasant day. The sun was shining brightly, a cooler gust of wind was coming from the ocean to bring some refreshment. It had been nice like that for several days now, and, as often, it showed in the types of calls the 118 got. People weren’t strung out and moody due to the heat that would surely follow later in the summer or fall, and there were none of the typical accidents and malfunctions a heatwave could cause. So far, they had only had to respond to minor accidents and a moderately severe medical call earlier today, so the entire team was in a good mood as they headed to one of the wealthier neighbourhoods in Hollywood.
They were responding to a call of a man trapped in his own panic room. The wife had called 9-1-1 as there was no cell phone reception from inside the room, and the team already had various theories on how exactly it had happened and why the internal alert system wasn’t working either. While Eddie would bet his money on a simple failure of technology Chim had, with grim sensationalism, theorized that the wife had meddled with the system to punish the husband for something he surely didn’t deserve. To which Hen had countered that he probably had.
As they were driving up the road past mansions of the more or less rich and famous, Chim had also opened an app that told them exactly whose houses they were passing, though, so far, there weren’t any A-listers among the names he had listed, or any Eddie even recognized at all.
“Chuck Warrington lives here,” Chimney read from his phone before he looked out of the window.
As far as Eddie could see from his side of the engine, there were only high hedges and fences to be seen.
“Isn’t that the douchebag producer we saved from his car crash last year?” Buck asked, and now Eddie knew why the name had sounded familiar.
“You mean the one known to be a racist, misogynist pig?” Hen added.
“Ah, yes. I read his network fired him because he sexually harassed the only female cast member of his show a few months ago. Well, the only in the main cast,” Eddie provided which prompted Hen and Chim to look at him with slightly raised eyebrows.
Eddie was definitely not someone who followed or even cared about celebrity gossip, and this dude wasn’t exactly someone of the caliber of a Harvey Weinstein, so it probably wasn’t a topic that you absolutely couldn’t escape if you were only watching the news and reading respectable newspapers. But, whenever Eddie had a doctor’s appointment either for himself or with Christopher, he did like to browse those gossip magazines and reading about those people’s issues or shaking his head about ridiculous new trends. Which wasn’t something he’d ever admit out loud.
“My sister told me,” he quickly added.
Buck, of course, saw right through him and looked at him with a small grin on his lips, lightly kicking against his calf with his right boot.
“Ohh,” Chim mumbled with a somewhat dark chuckle as he kept reading something on his phone. “Says here he had another car accident. Broke a leg and both his arms.”
“Aww, that’s sad,” Hen replied with mock empathy, to which Buck added, “Alexa, play Despacito .”
Even though this made no sense to Eddie whatsoever, Hen immediately let out a loud laugh, leaning forward and smacking her thigh before she brought one hand up and first-bumped Buck. Chim, across from them, laughed softly too.
“Is that… some kind of reference?” Eddie asked.
He could instantly see Hen’s grinning expression morph into her signature look of disbelief, while Buck’s brows furrowed and he studied Eddie, likely trying to figure out if Eddie was being serious. When Eddie just shrugged helplessly, Buck huffed.
“Oh my God, you really don’t know this? ‘Aww, that’s so sad. Alexa, play Despacito ’?”
“Repeating what you just said doesn’t exactly explain it,” Eddie countered.
“It’s that… from that post!” Buck said in mild agitation. “I sent you a screenshot a while ago, and you responded with the laughing-tears emoji.”
Eddie only half pretended to ponder this. The truth was, he had a pretty good idea what must have happened. Buck frequently sent him stuff he found on the internet that he considered funny without Eddie having enough context to understand it. Especially in the first few months after they got together, however, Eddie hadn’t…well, he hadn’t wanted to look stupid, or start a discussion over text on whether something was actually amusing or not. And so, instead, he sometimes simply replied with a laughing emoji which allowed him to keep up appearances while Buck thought he’d achieved the desired result and amused his then-boyfriend, now fiancé.
“I…don’t remember.”
“Oh my God,” Buck just repeated, rolling his eyes and shaking his head as if the topic had any kind of significance. It was both annoying and kind of adorable.
“So why Despacito ?” he asked, not fully feigning the interest.
“Well, it’s—” Hen started, but Buck cut her off.
“Because it’s funny! Someone said something that was supposed to read as sad, hoping for some sympathy, and then that’s the reply.”
Eddie tried to wrap his head around it, still not getting it. “But…why Despacito? Did they think ‘despacito’ means sad? Did they think it has something to do with despair or…or displeasure or something?”
“Like ‘mi dispiace’ in Italian, which means I’m sorry,” Chim said, and now both Hen and Buck were staring at him in disbelief.
“Oh no, Chim. Don’t tell me you thought that,” Hen asked with an almost sincere sounding hint of disappointment.
“No!” he replied a little too quickly. “I knew that despacito means…It means…” He was snapping his fingers with one hand, quickly typing something on his phone with the other, but Eddie didn’t let him have that out.
“Slowly. It means slowly. And there’s nothing sad about the song except for the fact that it was apparently the only song released in all of twenty-seventeen. And eighteen.”
“Hey, I like that song. And it’s not about it!” Buck retorted with a quite ridiculous vehemence. “That it’s not a sad song is the whole point. It’s supposed to be ironic.”
“Don’t you mean sarcastic?” Chimney asked, and while Buck glared at him now, Hen huffed out a small chuckle and rolled her eyes.
“I think it’s not supposed to make any sense. It was just a popular song back then.”
“Exactly,” Buck replied with exasperation. “It’s just a me-me.”
Instantly, Hen barked out a laugh that was so loud they could all easily hear it even without the headphones.
“Did you just say ‘ mimi’ ?” Chim giggled, and Eddie couldn’t help laughing softly either. He may not know much about internet phenomenons and viral posts and all that, but he did know how to pronounce that word.
“It’s ‘ meem’ , Buck. Meeeem ,” Hen explained, not without a benignly taunting undertone.
“And not meh-meh either,” Chim added.
At least, now, Buck was aiming all his outrage at them instead of Eddie, looking something between affronted and a little embarrassed. “How was I supposed to know that if I’ve only ever seen the word written? I’ve never heard anybody say it.”
“Seriously, Buck. Mimi ,” Hen chuckled softly, just as Chim turned his head and grinned at Buck.
“Hey Buck. How do you pronounce the word for those moving pictures you can insert into messages as a reaction?”
Buck frowned at him, and Eddie had to bite his tongue. Although he was pretty sure Buck would get that one right.
“Well that’s easy,” Buck replied. “It’s ‘jif’ .”
“Oh my God!”
“No!”
“God, Buck, it’s—”
“GIF!” all three of them shouted at him, and Eddie couldn’t quite prevent lightly smacking his palm against his forehead.
“No it’s not! It’s ‘jif’. The creator even said so! How can you all be so wrong?!?”
Chimney was already searching something on his phone again and shook his head at Buck with mock sympathy. “Nope, Buck. It’s ‘gif’ with a hard ‘g’. Look, even Obama and Gizmodo say so. Or is that…”
“ Jizmodo ?” Eddie finished, which had all three of them burst into laughter again, Hen leaning forward across Buck’s legs and bracing herself on Eddie’s knee.
“I hate you guys,” Buck sulked. “Cap? Back me up here?”
Finally, Bobby turned around and looked at them, though Eddie couldn’t see his face from where he was sitting, back to back with their captain.
“It’s definitely not ‘Jizmodo’.”
Hen and Chim snorted again, but Buck heaved a sigh. “I know that. But it’s ‘jif’, right?”
There was a short pause in which all four of them seemed to hold their breath. Often, when they were disagreeing on things, Bobby liked to take a neutral position, but Eddie wasn’t quite sure if that was possible in this situation. Especially considering just how wrong Buck was about this.
“The acronym stands for ‘graphics interchange format’,” Bobby then replied. “So, since it is ‘graphics’, not ‘jraphics’…”
“Oh my God!” Buck groaned and threw his hands up in the air.
“Hey Buck, how do you pronounce the things you give people for Christmas?” Chim asked, and Buck briefly frowned, brows heavily furrowed and lips pulled into a grimace.
“Presents?”
And no, there was no way the three of them didn’t entirely lose it then. Even Bobby could be heard snorting with laughter through the intercom.
“Oh ha-ha, very funny,” Buck grumbled, finally realizing his error. “Gifts, alright? But it’s also ‘giraffe’ and ‘giant’, so why is ‘jif’ wrong?” Buck asked. Then he glared at Eddie.
“And you’re my partner, you’re supposed to back me up, not stab me in the back!”
“Hey, you started making fun of me for not getting that stupid Despacito meme.”
“Oh oh, do I smell a divorce?” Chimney teased.
“We’re not even married yet,” Buck mumbled as he folded his arms in front of his chest and sank down his seat a little.
It was all in good humor; nobody was seriously offended here, not even Buck. Still Eddie leaned forward a little, his lower arms resting on his knees as he brought one hand to the side of Buck’s knee and rubbed it consolingly. Buck still glared when he focused his eyes on Eddie, but the corner of his mouth twitched upwards suspiciously.
Eddie gave him an earnest, soft smile before he leaned back again and shrugged a little exaggeratedly. “Well, you can all laugh about me now because I still don’t get what’s so funny about the Despacito thing.”
There was no time for any comebacks, however, as the engine now stopped in front of the mansion where someone was probably dying to be freed from his temporary prison.
It turned out that neither of the theories had been entirely correct, but all of them had gotten some things right.
There had been a system failure, preventing the guy from locking himself back out of the room and from contacting anyone through the internal communication system. He was , however, in there because he had fled from his wife who had started shouting and throwing things at him after she found out “the bastard” was cheating on her with her very own personal assistant. They didn’t have to communicate to all non-verbally agree that he had deserved his punishment.
“Oh, Christ, no. Please no!” the guy whimpered as soon as he was released and found himself in what looked like his personal man cave—slash—hobby room with collections of miniature cars and vintage issues of porn and erotica magazines. Most of the contents of the room lay scattered across the expensive carpet, miniatures broken and bent, and magazine pages torn.
“My…my babies!” he cried, clutching the remains of what looked like a vintage IndyCar or F1 model and a 50s edition of Playboy to his chest. “How could you, Susan? Do you have any idea how much my collection meant to me? And how much it’s worth?!”
As the couple continued shouting at each other — him storming off theatrically into one room, while she yelled at him from the next, the first responders completely forgotten and ignored — Buck muttered, “Oh no, that’s so sad.”
Just one second later, Chimney lifted his phone as the Spanish guitar intro of Despacito started playing.
As Eddie laughed harder than he could remember having laughed on a call in a long time, he finally got it.