Archive of Our Own

Bobby transfers Buck to the fire academy for a two-week stint after he’s cleared for duty. Getting buried alive’s far from fun, and isn’t it just Buck’s life that he can’t even say it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

“I am valid,” he says to the mirror. “I am wanted. I am—” His phone beeps. It’s Eddie. Reminder to leave now or you’re going to be late. “I am going to show up at the fire academy on time and try not to believe my brain when it says Bobby doesn’t want me.”

Saying stuff out loud had been Frank’s idea. “I can’t convince you that something you want to believe is untrue, Evan, but I want you to speak the things you’re thinking out loud and hear them.”

Buck kinda hates how he’s always right. It is stupid, when he says it out loud. Bobby would fight for every one of them, every time. Logically, Buck knows Bobby sending him off to the academy is more for Bobby’s own peace of mind than Buck’s inability to perform.

Not everything’s about him. It is, ironically, part of his speak-out-loud positive affirmations.

Unfortunately, knowing something is untrue doesn’t stop him from believing it.

There’s a reason why he’s in therapy.

Instructor Buckley is an ill-fitting coat borrowed from someone else for the foreseeable future. The difference wouldn’t be as obvious if it was the only thing he’s ever tried on, but he’s too aware, uncomfortably so, how it’ll never be a second skin the way Firefighter Buck is.

He consults his clipboard. “Austin. Caldwell. Ngo,” he calls, then points to the equipment before him. “Your turn.”

They’re down two trainees after lunch, but Buck doesn’t blame those kids. The LAFD’s really not for everyone.

His phone buzzes again on the drive back home with another message from Eddie. Hope your first day went well.

The car before him inches forward. He follows.

“Has anyone from your group ever managed to rescue the baby in the building exercise?” Buck asks another instructor, three days in.

“Nah, man,” the instructor—Parrish—says. “Besides, point’s not to rescue the baby, right? It’s to see how the trainees deal with everything else happening in that situation.”

Buck gets that, he does, but. There has to be a way, or someone who’s done it before.

“I had a guy, who did yeah,” Chimney says, when Buck is over at his and Maddie’s for dinner that night.

“How’d he do it?” Buck asks, distracting Jee Yeun with a toy as Chimney chops broccoli into minute pieces and hides them in her food best as he can.

Chimney scratches his head. “Not sure. But he dropped out shortly after that. Fear of heights. He works as a dispatcher now. The trainees who graduated had a hundred percent fail rate on that exercise, so maybe it’s not meant for firefighters to pass, you know?”

“So, it’s like that test from Star Trek?” Buck waves an ugly plush—not his doing, he has better taste in toys than that—to Jee Yeun’s right. “The—”

“Kobayashi Maru,” they say simultaneously.

“Yeah, that one.”

“Why all the questions?” Chimney asks. “Is one of your recruits bugging you about the ‘proper’—” Buck’s not sure how he manages to speak air quotes out loud, “—way to get it done?”

“It’s not that,” Buck says, although, yes, there have been recruits bugging him. Jameson’s been particularly annoying about it. “I just—we’ve seen plenty of impossible situations in our line of work and managed to make a lot of the tricker ones work. Why not this?”

Chimney shrugs. “That’s the entire point of designing a no-win scenario. It’s not to win, it’s to show the recruits how stuff might go wrong out there so they can learn to think on their feet.”

He turns to Buck and Jee Yeun, holding out her bowl. “Dinner time!” he sings.

She takes one look at it and shouts, “Don’t want vegetables!”

“There aren’t any vegetables in there, Jee,” Buck tries.

“Don’t want vegetables!” she shouts again, turning away. “I can smell it!”

“Speaking of no-win scenarios,” Chimney says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I blame her being half-Buckley for this. Never had this problem as a kid. Loved my vegetables.”

“I didn’t,” Buck says.

“See?”

Connor left behind approximately fifty gajillion protein bars when he moved out, which Buck would normally be fine with. Groceries are getting more expensive, he’s not saying no to free food.

Buck grabs one every morning and eats it on the drive to work. He estimates that if he keeps this up, he’ll be done sometime after three months.

Problem is, they’re expiring in less than a month.

“Expiration dates are a suggestion,” Albert says, when Buck’s over at his salon for a cut.

“Come finish them for me, then,” Buck counters.

“Hell no,” Albert scoffs. “I hate that brand. Your ex had bad taste in everything.”

Buck looks at him, offended.

“Everything but ex-boyfriends!” he corrects hastily. “And see? He dumped you anyway! Bad taste!”

“Thanks,” Buck says drily.

“You’re welcome.”

hey do you want protein bars, Buck types out into his chat with Eddie. His finger hovers over the send button before he deletes the entire thing.

i’m free today if you wanna come over to play video games, he sends to Christopher instead.

The reply comes in almost immediately.

dad’s making me finish my homework first
then Carla’s driving me over

Buck’s almost guilty at how relieved he feels about that.

He fills an entire shopping bag with as many protein bars as he can and hands it to Carla when she picks Christopher up later that night.

“Talk to him,” she says gently, the moment they’re sure Christopher’s out of earshot.

Buck swallows. Carla hugs him and leaves.

New probie would benefit from your chainsaw boot camp, Eddie sends. Buck looks at it, then scrolls up and re-reads the other messages Eddie’s sent, all of them unreplied.

He presses on the message about the chainsaw, and the options to react appear above it.

His thumb hovers over the heart, then ‘haha’.

He doesn’t click on either of them.

Hen and Karen are subscribed to almost all the streaming services, and Buck has a profile on every one of them.

“We’re paying more than enough,” Karen said. “Having you on helps with trying to justify that cost.”

The Kobayashi Maru test hasn’t featured in the Star Trek universes as much as Buck expects it to. He watches The Wrath of Khan, then the 2009 Star Trek, then an episode of the kids’ cartoon show.

Buck’s no Captain Kirk, he knows that much. He’s no genius, there’s no way to reprogram reality, and he can’t write code to change stuff that isn’t going his way, let alone save his life. It’s not the Sims, where you can hook people up if you try hard enough, neither are they in the Matrix.

Or are they? He frowns, looking up at his ceiling.

Help a dude if you’re out there, he thinks.

‘Kobayashi Maru’ translates to ‘little wooden boat’. Buck reads about traditional fishing vessels, then loses the rest of his night to Wikipedia-ing old-timey waterproofing methods.

He goes to the crafter’s market on the weekend in search of a birthday present for Kameron and finds himself drifting towards the woodworkers. The little boat he buys from a guy who’s too tall, his eyes the wrong shade of brown and his smile a little too interested —“call me Eduardo”—sits on his shelf next to a picture of him and Eddie and Christopher.

“I’d like to revisit the apprehension you brought up about returning to the firehouse in our previous session,” Frank says. “Why do you feel that way?”

“I’m not sure.” Buck takes a deep breath. “After my leg was crushed, I did everything I could to return as soon as I could. This time, when Bobby sent me to the academy, I was disappointed, but I was also…”

Buck trails off. Frank waits.

“I was relieved,” Buck admits. “I was relieved, and the longer I was away, the easier it was to stay away.” His laugh is disbelieving. “Can’t believe I’m saying that.”

“Why might that be?” Frank asks.

“It’s definitely not about the job,” Buck says immediately. “My soul, it’s itching to go back out there, and if I was anywhere else, I would already have.”

He turns, staring out of the window.

It’s a nice afternoon. When Christopher was younger, Eddie would’ve brought him to the park on such a day. They haven’t done that in a while.

Frank doesn’t push. He waits, letting Buck take his time.

“It’s the 118,” Buck admits, eventually.

Frank’s silence is a vacuum. It nags at Buck enough that he’s helpless to talk, equal parts desperation to fill the space and relief at being able get everything out.

“It’s not the people. Well, it is, in a way, because something happened, but I’m—I’m fine, I am, but if I go back, they’re gonna treat me like I’m not, and I can’t stand that.” His hands fly around, frantic. “Even if they don’t, I’m gonna know that they’re faking it and it’ll always be this thing hanging over us.” He gestures to his head, then his chest. “The thought of it, it’s suffocating, and if I stay away at least I’ll never have to deal with it.”

Frank’s eyes never leave Buck.

Buck takes a deep breath. He drinks from the glass of water Frank always sets out at the beginning of the session.

Frank speaks, this time. “Is that feeling specific to the people within the context of the station itself, then?”

Buck thinks about the meals he’s shared with Chim and Maddie since the accident. The house calls Bobby and Hen have made.

He nods. “Yeah,” he says.

Buck is buried alive on a Wednesday. Connor moves out on Friday. Maddie catches Buck up on everything that happened when he’s lucid enough on Friday night.

He’s enough of a coward to pretend to be asleep whenever Eddie visits after that.

“Running away from the problem or ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, as you already know,” Frank told Buck once, a few years back. “It’ll always be there. If you don’t deal with it now, it’ll continue to influence and shape the rest of your interactions until something triggers it again.”

Buck thought about his parents. He thought about the brother he never knew. He thought about the way he always messed things up when he tried to take things into his own hands.

“Running towards my problems never worked out the way I wanted it to, either,” he’d said.

Saw your car outside of Frank’s office. Proud of you, Eddie’s latest text reads. Got something for you, I know how you get after your sessions.

There’s a paper bag on the hood of Buck’s jeep when he leaves the building, his name scrawled on it in familiar blocky letters. Inside is a still-warm cup of chamomile tea and a raspberry tart, predictably stale in the way baked goods at four pm are.

The chamomile tea Eddie got him goes in the cup holder; the raspberry tart in his stomach. The paper bag with its message is carefully folded and placed under the Los Angeles and Orange Counties street guide in his glove compartment, another gift from Eddie.

The unofficial LGBTQ+ coalition of LAFD firefighters meets at Ruby Fruit for brunch once a month. Evenings are reserved for crises: the last time they were here, Lucy’s girlfriend was threatening to break up with her over the job. The time before that, Dylan’s fiancé had left them for their sister.

“How was therapy?” Lucy greets him.

“More talking.” Buck gently thunks his head on the table. “What else?”

“Well, it must’ve been something,” Tommy says from somewhere above him. A warm hand squeezes Buck’s nape. “Hey, Evan. Luce.”

Buck replies with a long, drawn out sigh.

“So,” Tommy says, when Buck finally looks up. “Wanna talk about it?”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him. “He’s done enough talking today, apparently.”

Tommy winces. “Rough session with Frank?”

Buck drags a hand down his face. “That,” he says. “Then, um.”

Lucy looks at him as she takes a long sip of her drink, waiting. Tommy cuts to the chase.

“Eddie told me he saw your car there,” he says. Buck immediately tenses. They stare at each other, both not wanting to be the one to break the silence.

“Okay, something’s going on here that I definitely know nothing about,” Lucy says.

Tommy’s jaw works. “Evan here hasn’t spoken to Eddie since the accident.”

There’s a pause as Lucy takes that in. “Buckley,” she says.

Buck looks away. “Did he,” he starts, then shakes his head. Eddie wouldn’t—

“Eddie didn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to,” Tommy finishes. “Your friends aren’t idiots, Evan. There’s a reason why you didn’t invite Hen along, only us.”

Buck doesn’t reply.

“Buck,” Tommy says, which is when Buck knows he really fucked up. Tommy doesn’t use his nickname the way everyone else does.

Buck slumps back in his seat.

“Something… happened,” he starts, and recounts, for the first time since the accident, everything that happened after that.

“I never liked Connor,” Tommy says, an hour of the Evan Buckley Feelings™ special and a few glasses of wine later.

Buck makes a face. “Yeah, but we used to date! You have to say these things!”

“Most people don’t remain friends with the people they used to date. I don’t think those rules have to apply to us,” Tommy points out. “I’m fishing buddies with my ex’s husband.”

“Of course you are.” Lucy rolls her eyes. “Wish girls were that uncomplicated. I might date a guy next.” She looks at Buck consideringly.

He shrinks away.

“Ugh, forget it. One ill-advised makeout with you was more than enough.”

“A-fucking-men,” Buck says, nodding fervently.

“When you had a girlfriend, too,” she continues. “Fucking Taylor. You know what? Never mind. People suck. Fuck dating.”

“Anyway,” Tommy says, raising his voice. “None of us said anything because you were happy with him and he treated you well.”

“Until he didn’t,” Lucy says, even more loudly. Lucy-five-wines doesn’t care about who overhears the details of Buck’s tragic dating life.

“He was entirely justified,” Buck tries, but he’s somewhat mollified. He was dumped while in the hospital, after all. At least Ali waited until after he was discharged.

“Still asshole behavior.” Lucy makes a face. “Another round!”

“Eddie’s still so… Eddie.” Buck mumbles drunkenly into his arm. “Even though he must think I must him or blame him for the Connor thing.”

“Buck, you know he doesn’t.” Lucy’s tipsy enough that she’s slurring her words, but Buck appreciates the sentiment all the same.

Buck shakes his head. “No, I don’t.”

“Evan.” Tommy’s voice is serious. “You need to talk to him.”

“I know,” Buck says. He sounds even more pathetic than he feels, even to his own ears. “It’s been a lot.” He digs his fingers into his palms. “As you can see, I’ve not been coping. At all.”

“Fuck.” Buck presses the heel of his palms to his eyes.

“I’m afraid,” he confesses, his voice small.

He shows up at Bobby and Athena’s and asks Bobby if he can be put on B-shift when he’s back at the firehouse.

Bobby looks at him with a quiet, inscrutable expression, then invites him to stay for dinner.

Buck follows Bobby to the kitchen. “Connor wants to meet up and talk. He’s been hounding me for the past week, and I only have so many excuses. Like, I want to, but I’m not ready.”

Bobby takes all of it in stride. He’s used to Buck’s babbling. “If you’re on B-shift, you’ll be at work when he’s not. Convenient.”

“Yep.”

“I’m almost done,” Bobby says, grabbing two plates. “Can you set the table?”

Buck does as he’s told.

“Now that you’ve brought it up, I think it’ll be good for you to be on B-shift,” Bobby says. “You should take the opportunity to work with the guys and see how you can lead them.”

Buck looks at him in surprise. “But you said—”

Bobby smiles. “That was a long time ago, Buck. What version of Buck were you at? Four point something? There’s definitely been a few upgrades since then.”

“I—Yeah.” Buck laughs shakily. “Thank you, Bobby.”

“We’ll miss you, though,” Bobby says, casual and oh-so-easily. “A-shift is always here when you finally clear things up with Connor. Myself, Hen, Chim, Ravi.” He pauses, and adds, meaningfully, “Eddie.”

Recruit Jameson turns out to be a legacy whose run with trying to keep under the radar only lasts until there’s something he doesn’t immediately excel at and runs to daddy.

He insists the baby test is unfair, and trainees should not be assessed on something specifically designed for them to fail. To challenge the complaint he’s made, Senior Instructor Harper is making every other instructor who’s physically capable of doing so take it.

Buck exchanges a look with Parrish as they change into their gear.

“Nepo babies, man,” Parrish says. “I failed this when I was a rookie, too. Not sure how failing again’s gonna convince him that the point isn’t to do well.”

Buck scoffs. “Pretty sure he’s gonna say that if working firefighters can’t save the baby, then there’s no point to the entire exercise.” He grins. “So I’m gonna.”

Parrish laughs. “Good luck with that, Buckley.” He doesn’t sound like he believes him.

That’s fine. Buck rolls his neck. Show, not tell.

“Baby’s not dead.” The doll dangles from Harper’s hand, her expression hidden behind the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses. She points a finger at Buck. “But you are. They called it at the hospital. You couldn’t be resuscitated. Captain Nash cried.”

Buck shrugs, speaking loud enough for the cadets gathered behind her to hear. “I’ve died before. Wouldn’t recommend it. Recertification was easier than that time a fire engine crushed my leg, though.”

The corner of Harper’s mouth, an ever-present stiff line, twitches. “You and your nine lives, Evan Buckley. Aren’t you here because you got buried alive, too?”

Buck smiles back at her, spreading his arms. “They got me out. As you can see.”

Jameson’s jaw is clenched. Buck sighs. “I’ll leave them to you,” he says to Harper. “Gonna go get changed out of my gear.”

Heard you passed the baby test, Eddie texts him. Way to show the kid.

Buck stares at the grey text bubbles. Three dots pop up; Eddie’s typing something.

Don’t go dying on us again to prove a point, though, he’s written, and Buck’s heart feels like it’s being torn clean out of his chest.

His fingers hover over the keyboard.

i won’t, he types, but doesn’t press send.

Jameson apologizes to Buck on Buck’s last day. He practically ambushes Buck at the parking lot, all six feet something of lanky guy waiting by Buck’s usual parking spot.

“Jameson,” Buck says, surprised.

“Instructor Buckley,” he says. Buck fights back the urge to make a face at the title. A few more hours, and he won’t need to. “Uh, I need to be back in a bit, so I’ll make this quick.”

“Go ahead,” Buck says.

“I don’t deal well with losing—” he stops mid-sentence, visibly collecting himself. “If I’m to be a firefighter, it’s going to be my job to save people. I guess that exercise kind of made me realize that I wouldn’t be able to sometimes, and it scared me. I’m sorry if that created any trouble for you.”

“Hey,” Buck tries to sound as reassuring as possible. “Things happen, yeah? And the trouble wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”

“Thanks,” Jameson says. “I guess I kinda got it. Losing people is part of the job, but we’re still human, too. We can do our best, but there’s just so much that’s out of our control that all we can do is learn from what happened.”

“And stay alive,” Buck reminds him.

Jameson smiles. “That, too.”

From: Eddie

05:16
Happy last day of being an instructor!

20:43
You go show those B shift guys what us A shift people are made of, okay?

B-shift has their own dynamic that Buck doesn’t quite fit into, but they work together fine enough. They take direction well, even if Piper talks about her mother’s health issues a little too much and Jake’s a bit too enthusiastic. But they’re fine.

Okay, Jake is more eager than Buck is used to. But Buck’s used to bringing the chainsaws to people, not having them brought to him. Until Jake.

He kind of gets why Ravi always looked so frightened, now. Bit of a shock to be ambushed by a chainsaw wielded by some dude with the widest smile you shouldn’t be seeing anywhere near heavy machinery. Like, that’s some Texas Chainsaw Massacre shit.

You can’t really put Leatherface to work polishing the fire trucks, and he probably wouldn’t have done as good a job as Jake. Buck knows he’s supposed to be growing as a person and leader and stuff, but damn, does he love having a minion.

Most importantly: Firefighter Buck is back, baby.

Jee Yeun, inexplicably, has taken to radish kimchi, specifically the one Mrs. Kim three floors up from Buck makes on a seasonal basis. She gives him some to bring to Chimney and Maddie, and Chim calls him two days later, almost hysterical.

“How do I get more,” he begs. “Jee doesn’t like any other type of kimchi. We tried. But she finished an entire bowl of Mrs. Kim’s. We’re willing to pay.”

“Oh,” Buck says. “I don’t know, but I can ask? She’s got more than usual left over because her daughter’s family moved to Korea.”

“Thank you,” Chim says, sounding so relieved he could cry.

“What’s up?” Buck asks, when Chim doesn’t say bye immediately after that.

“Yeah.” His voice is hesitant. “So uh, the others have been wondering when you’re returning to A-shift.”

“Listen, I—uh. I don’t know. Not sure if Bobby told you—”

“Connor, yeah.” Chim laughs awkwardly. “That’s tricky.”

Buck hums.

“Hope that fixes itself soon. We all miss you. Like, seriously. That probie’s killing us. I swear, Eddie’s murder plans are getting more creative the longer you’re gone.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“If you’re ready for it, I’d like to talk about your accident and what happened after it.”

“You’ve probably read the report.”

“I'd like to hear about it from you.”

Buck slumps on Frank's couch. “It was supposed to be an easy call. One of those TikTok tunneling guys got trapped in his little backyard project and called 9-1-1. We got him out, shit happened, I was there at the wrong time, and.” He mimes the motion of something dropping. “Fwoosh. I don’t remember much of what happened after, which must’ve been the shock, I guess. But I remember choking, I remember the panic, I, uh, remember struggling to get out from all that weight.

“You know how they talk about your entire life flashing before your eyes before you die? I got none of that before. Not when I choked on bread during my first date with a girl I really liked and she had to perform an emergency tracheotomy on me. With the fire truck, I was just in so much pain I couldn’t think of anything else. During the tsunami, all of my attention was on making sure Christopher was fine. When I got struck by lightning—”

Mentioning his weird alternate dream life probably isn’t the best idea.

“It was too sudden,” Buck continues. “But when I went under, I kept thinking about all these things. How I would never see Jee or Christopher grow up. How I would never see Maddie or Bobby or my parents again. How I wanted to tell Eddie I was so proud of him, that I loved him and I was sorry for leaving, but he would be okay.

“It’s such a cliche, isn’t it?” Buck rubs at his face. “Nothing like your third near-death experience to make you realize you’re in love with your best friend.”

“About the situation you mentioned happening after—is it related to this revelation?”

“I, uh.” Buck drags a hand down his face. “I told him I loved him. In front of everyone.”

Buck’s thought it through, okay. There’s no way that this entire thing will end well for him.

He doesn’t talk to Eddie about accidentally confessing his love and everything goes back to normal. Everyone pretends like nothing’s happened and they play at being one big happy family until Buck messes up with his feelings because he always does, and the entire thing crashes and burns around them.

He talks to Eddie about it and Eddie tries to be understanding, but he treats Buck differently after that because he’s afraid of hurting Buck’s feelings. Nothing goes back to normal. Buck breaks first. He loses everything anyway.

He talks to Eddie about it and Eddie doesn’t treat him any differently. They go back to normal, except Buck can’t deal with it and regresses, getting into one of his shit-tacular self-destructive spirals and taking everything down with him. He still loses everything.

He—

He finishes recounting the entire incident in its entirety, then spews all his too-big, overwhelming feelings about it and waits for Frank to not-judge and therapize him.

“They could all be eventualities,” Frank says, slowly. “But running is not the answer.”

“I haven’t been running,” Buck says, ignoring Frank’s skeptical eyebrow. “I just…” he takes a deep breath, “needed space to process everything. ‘Stalling’ would be a more accurate descriptor here.”

“Right now, your actions are directly influenced by a fear of what might happen. But there is no way to truly know what will happen if you refuse to confront it.”

Buck looks down at his shoes. “What if Eddie hates me for it?”

“Has Mr. Diaz given you any indicator as to being put off by your actions?”

“No, ah. I don’t think so. We haven’t really, ah, spoken. Like, he texts me and wishes me a happy first day back at work and stuff, but I just don’t know how too… Ah, fuck.” Buck clutches his head between his hands. “Oh my god. I’ve been running. I am the asshole. Reddit would be calling me an asshole. I stopped talking to him for over a month over something that isn’t even his fault. Christ. Like, he must’ve felt like crap after he found out that Connor broke up with me. Knowing him, he definitely thought it was his fault, and there I was avoiding him because I was a coward, which definitely made him feel worse—

“I’ve been so unfair to Connor, too,” Buck moans. “And everyone at the 118 who’s had to see Eddie at work and deal with my bullshit. Maddie. They’ve all been trying so hard to take care of me and make things not weird for Eddie, even though it is. I’ve been the one making things that way.”

Buck averts his gaze from Frank’s. He can’t—he’s unable to handle the pity he thinks he’s seeing there. “Everyone’s been going through it because I’m making things about me again, aren’t I?”

“On the contrary, I’d argue that this is one of the things you should be making about you,” Frank says, which surprises a laugh out of Buck. “You were thrust into a situation you inadvertently caused while not in control of your faculties, immediately after experiencing yet another traumatic event. It would be concerning if you were dealing with it in an entirely rational manner.”

“So…” Buck says. “You’re going to say something like, it’s not about how I responded while under extreme duress, it’s how I fix all of that now.”

Frank smiles.

Step one in the Evan Buckley 6.0 Apology World Tour is texting Eddie. It shouldn’t be difficult. Buck created an entire list. He has customized apologies.

Chim and Maddie are a combo deal, two favors for the price of none; they’re getting a date night, and babysitting his favorite (only) niece isn’t a hardship. Bobby, he knows, won’t accept anything less than him returning to A-shift, or maybe marrying a nice girl or boy and giving him pseudo-grandchildren.

Jury’s still out on which might come first. Right now, the second option’s looking more likely, so Buck picks out a nice bottle of wine and tells Bobby and Athena he’s cooking dinner for the three of them.

Like the coward he is, he skips Eddie’s name and grovels by helping Hen with her yard. Baby steps.

Buck stares up at the sun, then at Hen, who’s sitting in the shade with Karen. They sip their drinks, watching as he tries to get the lawnmower working.

“You couldn’t have gotten this fixed first?” he calls out.

“We’re not paying for that when you can do it,” Hen says, then takes another sip of her violently orange drink. There’s ice and an umbrella and everything. “Plus, you went to Ruby Fruit without me!”

Karen shakes her head. “That’s unforgivable, Buck.”

“I’m sorry,” Buck says, beseechingly. “I was dealing with stuff! I avoided everyone!”

“Not everyone, apparently!” Hen leans back in her chair. “By the way, genius, you forgot to turn the lawnmower on.”

Buck groans as Karen laughs.

Hen makes him a blindingly yellow drink with a matching umbrella and serves it with a hug later, though, so he knows he’s forgiven.

It takes him three more days and the threat of being accountable to Frank at his next therapy session to finally text Eddie.

He’ll start with something inane. Low stakes. Something that signals to Eddie that he’s been keeping up with Eddie as much as he has with him.

i’ll trade the probie for Jake, he sends, heart pounding, then puts his phone on Do Not Disturb and doesn’t look at it for the next two hours.

Don’t go making promises you can’t keep, Eddie’s replied, when he finally checks it.

i’m so serious rn. Buck looks at Jake, who’s updating his personal excel spreadsheet of tasks to do. He kinda gets how Chimney and Hen feel about his clipboard now. tell Bobby to make it happen.

Eddie replies two hours into A-shift with, :( He said no. Also he said something about stepping up?

godspeed to the both of us then, Buck texts back, when he wakes up.

Once they start texting again, it’s like they never stopped. Eddie links him to a documentary clip about albatross migration patterns. Buck replies with a Wikipedia article about people killed by their own inventions. Eddie bitches about the probie. Buck tries to talk him out of murder.

It almost feels like they’re back to normal again, except Buck’s still on B-shift and hasn’t seen Eddie in person for over a month.

He’s pretty sure Tommy and Hen have been conspiring to do something about it if he doesn’t fix it fast enough, and that he’s not going to like it.

“You saved a baby from a burning building,” Maddie says, Buck’s head in her lap as she carefully smears mud on his face. “Surely you can talk to Eddie about what happened.”

“A fake baby. And it’s not like he doesn’t already know, he was there for it,” Buck says. “How many people know about the baby thing, anyway?”

Maddie tuts. “Stop moving your mouth so much. And stop trying to change the topic too, while you’re at it.”

“If I talk to him about it, then it’ll make everything… more real,” Buck mumbles. “It doesn’t make sense, I know. He already knows, it’s out there. It’s real enough. I won’t lose him over this now, but who knows what I’ll do? Like, if he dates someone and I get weird about it. It might change everything. I might lose him anyway.”

“Oh, Evan,” Maddie says. “You know that’s not true.”

“I don’t,” Buck says. “Like, I get why people who fall in love with their best friend don’t want to tell them, but experiencing it firsthand sucks. Add falling for a straight guy into the mix and it gets even more cliched and complicated, which is just my life, really.”

Maddie strokes his hair. This is why he loves his sister the best.

“Some things can be as easy as you make them.” Maddie’s doing some scritching thing with her nails and it feels really good, calms Buck down a little. “You keep comparing it to that no-win situation—”

“Kobayashi Maru.”

“But you don’t actually believe that.”

Buck frowns. Well, he would, if his face wasn’t immobilized by all that drying mud.

“You’re not hearing yourself. I won’t lose him. It might change everything. I might lose him. All the negative, future stuff is hypothetical and untrue, Evan. You’re just scared right now. But the way you talk about Eddie is always the opposite of that. You’re always so sure about him, and I just wish you had that much faith in yourself.”

Buck stares up at the ceiling in disbelief.

“Huh,” he says, eventually.

It was Eddie, with the help of Hen, who threw him his totally on the down-low, extremely not a very big deal coming out party. There was cake. Josh hugged Buck and cried. Hen hugged Buck, and he cried. Eddie posted the photo he took of that moment and put a rainbow flag in his bio the next time Pride rolled around.

After the party, he’d hugged Buck and said, “It bears repeating, but this changes nothing between us, yeah? Nothing you do will ever change anything between us.”

Buck hugged him back just as tightly, then said, “Not even if I sued you guys again?”

“If you do, I trust you’ll have a reason to. If that reason’s a stupid one, I’ll send Christopher over with a very strongly worded message.”

“Not everything is about me,” Buck says to his reflection.

It doesn’t look like it believes him.

“Sometimes I unknowingly make stuff about me and that’s normal because I am unconsciously overcompensating for how much stuff was not about me as a kid, but we live in a society,” he tries. Better.

“Hey,” Connor says. “Thanks for agreeing to see me.“

“Hey,” Buck says, smiling at him. “Good to see you, too.”

Connor looks the same, as if their breakup hasn’t affected him the same way it hasn’t affected Buck. Like it carried none of the weight six months of dating and another six of cohabiting was supposed to, merely a blip on both their radars.

“Look,” Connor starts. “How I broke up with you was terrible, and I wanted to apologize in person.”

Buck nods. “Apology accepted. Besides, it’s not the worst way someone’s broken up with me.” They both laugh; Connor’s heard the stories. “You moved in with Cora, right? How’d she take it?”

“Oh, you know,” Connor says. “Cussed me out and put me to work as a live-in babysitter, then got so used to it she and Kendra converted the shed into a home office for me. I think I’ll continue to stay with them for now, they need all the extra help they can get with the twins on the way.”

“Congratulations on being an uncle again.”

“Yeah.”

They laugh awkwardly. Buck doesn’t know what he should say.

“Can we… talk about what happened?” Connor says.

“I guess, yeah. I owe you that much.”

“Yeah, you do.” Connor leans back in his seat. “I... It was fun while it lasted. I liked you, and I saw a future for us as partners, but it wasn’t fair to me to be used as a replacement for what you couldn’t have.”

Buck bites down on his lip, but he doesn’t look away. He has responses to that—I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know. He knows they don’t matter.

Connor’s jaw clenches. “Did you know how it felt in that room with all your friends there? When I held your hand and called you baby and you called me Eddie and said you were in love with me?” His voice falters on Eddie’s name. Buck ducks his head.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You better be,” Connor replies. “It was quite literally the most humiliating experience of my life. I don’t doubt it’ll be a funny story in a few years, one or two relationships later, but.”

“You weren’t a replacement, but you deserve better than me,” Buck says. “Uh. I just didn’t realize I loved Eddie in that way until—yeah. I wasn’t in the right state of mind, but it doesn’t justify what I did to you.”

“Here’s the thing, though.” Connor nudges one of the pieces of fried broccolini they got to share—he doesn’t do fries—on Buck’s plate. “I deserved someone like you up until that point. Buck, you’re… You’re kind of the perfect boyfriend, did you know that? You have a good heart, you save lives for a living, you make time for me even with how crazy your schedule is sometimes, the sex was fantastic,” at this, Buck blushes, “you have baggage, but you deal with it. I was like, there’s no way he’s real. There must be a catch. But I guess even you didn’t know about it. You’re right about whatever you went through not justifying what you did to me, though. But you almost died. It wasn’t just not being in the right state of mind.”

Buck blinks. “I guess I never really saw it that way.”

Connor shakes his head, but gives him a small smile. “I’m not angry, Buck. I’m just disappointed things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.”

“I’ll bet you’re still a bit angry about the hospital thing.”

Connor pauses. “Ok, yeah. But I don’t blame you for it. I just wish you had your near-death realization another way.”

Buck sighs. “It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it.”

“Kinda, yeah. That helps.”

“Nothing sadder than falling for a straight guy who’s also your best friend,” Buck continues, then shoves a gigantic piece of fried broccolini in his mouth so he can stop talking. His ex-boyfriend doesn’t need to hear about his sad gay angst.

Connor looks at him strangely, opens his mouth as if to reply, then seemingly changes his mind and helps himself to the fried broccolini as well.

“By the way, your protein bars are still at mine. D’you want to come get them? Or I can have them sent to Cora’s.”

Connor makes a face. “God, no,” he says. “Christ, that was me being petty when I moved out, those are terrible. Wait, have you been eating them?”

Buck carefully avoids his gaze. He drinks his coffee.

“Oh my god, you have.”

“They were just there!” Buck says defensively. “It’s convenient! I have one in my car on the way to work!”

Connor looks at him pityingly. “Somehow, I think that’s the perfect metaphor for this entire situation. You settle for something that you don’t really like and convince yourself that you do because it’s convenient.” His tone is light, but Buck hears the resignation in it.

“Look, those were left over because Kendra’s sister-in-law got into some MLM bullshit. Let me give you the address of a youth center where you can drop them off. Those teenagers will eat anything.”

The cereal Buck has the morning after he finally rids himself of the protein bars is the best he’s ever tasted.

Albert was right. They were terrible.

can we meet? he messages Eddie.

Time and place?, Eddie sends back almost immediately.

you choose. whatever’s good for you.

Eddie replies with the park he and Christopher always go to. After your shift ends?

i’ll be there.

Eddie reacts with a heart. Buck tries not to read too much into it.

A fucking heart. Eddie never heart-reacts anything. Even when Buck says he’ll watch Christopher, the most he’ll get is a “Great! Owe you :D” and, if Eddie was in the mood, maybe a gif.

Buck hasn’t stopped looking at the heart. He doesn’t know what to do with it.

He was never this embarrassing as a teenager.

(Fine, he was, but in a totally different way.)

“Hey,” Eddie says. The smile he directs at Buck does something to Buck’s heart, beating in his chest almost painfully.

Buck smiles hesitantly at him, then decides against being stupid and reaches out for a hug. Fuck. It’s been too long. Eddie goes easily, wrapping his arms around Buck. He squeezes Buck, and Buck hugs back just as tightly.

It goes on for longer than their usual hugs, but Buck doesn’t care. He hasn’t seen his best friend in almost two months. He’s fucking missed him. As they stand there, silent and hugging each other still, the tight knot of anxiety in his chest finally starts to unravel.

For the first time since the accident, Buck feels like he’s going to be okay.