Work Text:
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
The line came from a poem Bobby had had to learn in school, that year. He didn’t remember much of it anymore, but that part had always stuck with him. There was more, something about anarchy loose in the world, bloody tides and drowned innocence, but that one line was the one he thought of the most.
When his father had died, because of Bobby, he thought of that line. He’d been trying so hard, but it had fallen apart anyway. TV dinners weren’t what his dad deserved. He was a hero. He saved lives. He should have a good dinner at night, but only Bobby was there.
So he tried. Tried to learn how to cook. Tried to be everything he could be, for his dad. Tried to be good, like him. But Bobby wasn’t good. He didn’t know how to cook. Instead of making a good dinner, he burned the kitchen down.
And called 9-1-1.
He hadn’t known that was the wrong thing to do. That his dad might lose his job because of it. It was what his mom had always taught him, it was what his dad responded to! When there’s an emergency, you call 9-1-1 and help comes.
So Bobby had.
His father had struck him for it.
It was the first time – and the last time he’d ever done that, because the next morning he was dead.
And it was Bobby’s fault.
He didn’t throw up the whisky that day. Sipped it, after the firefighters left, instead of gulping it all down like he had at the award party. He’d watched his father since then. Had learned the right way to drink it.
It burnt his throat and tasted like smoke.
It reminded him of his dad.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
His mom came back, Charlie with her. They were happy.
They were like strangers. Their dad was dead, her husband. How could they be happy?
Bobby had hidden his father’s stash of whisky in his room before they came home. He knew his mother would take it away. That, and a burnt album of painstakingly xeroxed, carefully cut and pasted newspaper clippings were all he had left of his father.
He never scrapbooked again.
Later, he had all the awards his father had earned for his bravery, too. He found them in the trash the day of his father’s funeral and took them all out, one by one, as tears slid down his cheeks and dripped onto his best shirt. The neck was uncomfortably tight where he’d buttoned it all the way up but he wanted to look his best, for his dad.
He barely spoke to his mother or brother after that. They lived together for years in civil politeness. His mother tried but just as Charlie was her son, Bobby was his father’s. He didn’t know how to make enough room in his grief to love her, too.
She was the one who got him into figure skating. One last attempt to find common ground between them, teaching him her own childhood passion. It was the only time Bobby didn’t drink, when they skated together, his mother and he. Then he got good enough to compete, and so he drank even less. Before a competition, he’d stop completely. Long enough to win.
Until the pressure to make his mother proud because he couldn’t make his father proud ever again got too much during finals after he and Heidi had won the last three years and Bobby picked up a bottle again.
He was drunk. Should never have gotten on the ice that day.
Heidi broke her left leg when he dropped her. It destroyed her career.
Bobby never skated again.
The moment he was old enough Bobby took his first job, delivering newspapers on his bike, then a second, bussing tables at a diner.
It paid for the whisky that homeless people would buy for him, if he had enough to buy theirs as well.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
Junior year, Bobby met Marcy. They dated, until she broke up with him because he wouldn’t stop drinking.
He nearly flunked out of school.
One day his father’s captain and crew found him. Found him and dragged him out the park where he’d been drinking, took him to the station and sobered him up by shoving him under a cold shower.
After that, it seemed like every time Bobby turned around, there was a firefighter standing between him and the alcohol he needed just to get through each day. Someone would be there, waiting for him after school. They’d take him back to the fire house and make him roll hose, or clean trucks, or polish boots and buttons and brass until it was time for dinner.
It felt like punishment for a long, long time.
Captain Collins taught him how to cook. They ate together every meal that the crew was in station and Bobby ate with them when he was there.
They made him study. Made him do his homework and his assessments. Taught him how to get fit and stay fit. Showed up at his home at the crack of dawn every day to take him jogging unless it was snowing or raining. Then they took him to the station gym and worked out there instead.
On Sunday’s, they took him to church, where Bobby learned about forgiveness.
The Hadley fire department made him sober up by relentlessly being there for him even when he didn’t want them to be.
He and Marcy reconnected in senior year and this time when they started dating, he was sober.
Every single firefighter from all three shifts attended his high school graduation, dressed in full formal uniform. And again when Bobby finished at the fire academy top of his class.
When Bobby told the 118 he was a fourth generation legacy, he hadn’t meant his blood family. He still loved and honored his father, he always would, even after he’d grown up and realized the depths of the man’s addiction. And he was proud of the work his father had done for the department, of the hero he was and the lives he’d saved.
But the legacy he carried on was that of the family he’d found in the Hadley fire department.
He hoped that one day to have a son that would continue the proud tradition.
One day, he did have a son. Then a daughter, too, with a wife he loved very much.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
Bobby thought his firefighting career was over, the day he fell through an unstable floor and broke his back.
He'd been made captain a few months before. A captain, but not like his father. He was sober, like his father never had been. He was going to be different.
His doctors wouldn’t give him an answer, either one way or the other. That uncertainty lingered during the months of recovery. Months of excruciating pain, of being unable to sit or lie in one position for more than half an hour before he had to move. Moving caused entirely new pain until it seemed like he felt nothing else. Medication alone didn’t help.
Bobby fell back into his alcohol addiction but this time, he added opioids to it as well. Turned out he was different from his father after all.
Blessed numbness took away the pain even as it reminded him of the day his father died and made him want to drink even more. As did his fear of not being able to work as a firefighter again.
The Saint Paul fire station he was at by then weren’t aware of his past. His crew there didn’t know his father, didn’t know of his addiction like the Hadley crew had.
They were a team, but they weren’t his family.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
Memories of the years after that were hazy at the best of times; he’d been so out of his mind for most of them.
The exception was the night he lost Marcy, Robert Jr and Brook. Seared into his memory like a brand, Bobby remembered every single detail. He’d been the one who chose to drink and use drugs but he’d never thought that it would be his family who bore the consequences of that choice.
Bobby would never forget their deaths. Would never forget that the death of every person who suffered and cried, or who screamed and fought or who slipped quietly away in their sleep that night was his fault.
One hundred and forty-eight souls lost that night, because of him.
He never thought of those left behind who’d also been affected by the tragedy he’d caused. Was too focused on the lives he’d taken to think of those whom they’d been ripped away from.
There was no salvation to be found in the church for Bobby. He had sinned, he had murdered, he had lied and there was no place before God’s eye for him anymore.
The investigation exonerated him. Shoddy safety practices. He’d been spared punishment for his sins, for his crimes and Bobby didn’t know how to deal with that.
He fell apart, worse than he ever had before.
Somehow, he put himself back together. It took months, then years, but Bobby clawed his way back to sobriety with a willpower that would have made his Hadley fire family proud, had he told them.
If they could bear to look at him after his failures. He wouldn’t blame them if they couldn’t.
Most days, he couldn’t even look at himself.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
Rehab got him sober again.
But he couldn’t work in Saint Paul anymore. Word had got out about his addiction and no sane firefighter would trust him as captain there.
He transferred to LA and somehow, instead of falling apart, things began to knit back together. People began surrounding him, and Bobby held them off for as long as he could. He wasn’t fit to be the center of anything.
Two people in particular chipped away at his walls. When Bobby saw that they weren’t going to stop, he listened to his priests advice and began lowering them himself, with family dinners like the ones he used to have in Hadley. Howard Han and Henrietta Wilson began worming their ways into his heart and for the first time in a long time, Bobby let that happen.
Then Buck began working at the 118 and all unknowingly, he became the center of them all.
He held them all together with a love that flowed out of him effortlessly. Bobby was fairly sure that Buck had no idea what he was doing, or how. It was a purely unconscious side effect of the type of person he was.
It didn’t start that way. Bobby was still passively suicidal, then. He couldn’t be actively suicidal, he had to atone for his sins. The little book he chose to mark them was as different from the cheerful, sticker covered scrapbook album he’d made for his dad as he could make it. Black, like his sins, and completely unadorned.
Small enough to list the names of the one hundred and forty-eight lives he’d taken and another one hundred and forty-eight names he’d vowed to himself to save in atonement and then he’d finally be done.
When Buck touched that book and Bobby slammed him against the wall, he saw the same fear in Buck’s eyes that he’d felt all those years before when his father had struck him.
The urge to drink slammed into him as hard as he’d thrown Buck against the wall and Bobby wanted to. God, he wanted to drink so badly. That was how his father had coped with things though and Bobby didn’t want to be his father anymore. He didn’t want to put that fear in anyone’s eyes ever, let alone some as unbroken as Evan Buckley was, and yet he had.
He wouldn’t allow himself to hurt that boy like he’d been hurt.
Bobby relapsed, as he had so many times before. This time, though, he had a new fire family that was there for him when he needed them, when he finally allowed himself to be honest with them. He had Chimney, and Hen – and Buck.
Buck… well Buck made a lot of mistakes, just like Bobby had. But he was young, still finding his way, so Bobby tried to give him the space to do that safely. Like he hadn’t been able to do for Robert Jr.
Robert Jr, who would never continue his father’s legacy.
Either of them. Not fire-fighting – and not addiction.
It crept up on Bobby unexpectedly, his love for Buck. He could never quite put a finger on when it had started, though he thought that perhaps it was when Buck had asked for his help in tying his tie for a date.
A fierce ache of grief for Robert Jr had hit Bobby hard in that moment. He’d had to blink tears away before he could agree.
Robert Jr could never be replaced. Bobby didn’t want that, and he knew Buck wouldn’t either, if they ever talked about their growing relationship. It was a struggle, accepting that he had to make space in his heart for someone who evoked, all unknowingly, bittersweet dreams of everything he’d never be able to do with his son.
The guilt he felt for loving Buck overwhelmed Bobby sometimes. It felt like he was betraying the memory of his son, his family. He’d fought against that love for a long time. Then Buck had been seriously injured on the job.
Because someone wanted to hurt Bobby. And hurt him, it did. It hurt him seeing Buck lying there all alone. Looking so lost and confused. In so much pain.
It hurt him hearing Buck’s raw screams of agony as they fought to get him free.
It hurt him when Buck coded in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
And when he saw the fear in Buck’s eyes after surgery. Fear that he wouldn’t work as a firefighter again. A fear that Bobby knew all too well from his own experience of being seriously injured on the job.
It was worse than experiencing it himself, watching someone he loved go through the same thing. Bobby tried to help. Did all he could do. He cooked meals for Buck, filling his fridge and freezer with Tupperware containers. Took him to as many of his appointments as he could: medical checkups; physical therapy; LAFD mandated therapy, even massage therapy. When Bobby couldn’t take him, he made sure that someone else was available that could.
He tried to be there the way Buck needed, the way his Hadley fire family had been there for him. All the while terrified that Buck was going to make the same mistakes he had and fall into addiction.
Buck, though, didn’t, and Bobby thanked God in his prayers every day for that.
But the obsession Buck had with getting back to active duty as a firefighter began to worry Bobby that he was an addict of another kind – one addicted to the risk. The adrenalin. And worse than that, Bobby feared that Buck didn’t care about himself enough to make a choice between getting out when it was too dangerous or risking death on the chance he could save one more person.
So Bobby held him back and nearly lost him in the process.
He should have known. If a pulmonary embolism and a tsunami hadn’t stopped Buck from being Buck, from saving lives, from being a hero, Bobby holding him back wouldn’t either.
The ghosts of his past haunted Bobby and influenced his decisions in a most unprofessional way. Captain Tim Nash had been awarded the Honor of Bravery award for his bravery in and out of uniform. It was the last award he earned before his death. Buck deserved the same award for his bravery during the tsunami – and Bobby was terrified that if he let him return to firefighting he would lose Buck to death just like he’d lost his father.
He'd barely survived losing his father. Had fallen into darkness that had taken years to recover from and only then was it due to his fire family.
He’d fallen again after his own serious injury and that time had lost his wife, his daughter, and his son. A different fire family had helped him claw his way back to a new life after that, a family that included Buck.
Bobby knew it was wrong of him. Buck wasn’t him, and he wasn’t his father, either.
But he couldn’t lose another son.