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The concept of a good day fits Bobby just about as well as a shroud made only for one of the hundred and forty eight souls he cheated out of their lives. It’s a familiar, fleeting feeling; he’s working on it. He’s letting people in, building a new life, and finally accepting that his penance can’t be selfish; it can’t be the end.
(He’s heard the phrase ‘Catholic guilt’ thrown around quite a few times in his life, and that? Well. That fits.
It fits as a cinder-block chained around his ankle—or perhaps a microwave cemented to the head. Either way, it’s an obtrusive but necessary reminder of his potential, and it keeps him reined in.
Which is probably giving too much credit to the whole microwave stunt. Perhaps it fits more like a hand-me-down rosary with the beads dulled out by restless time. Like the one engraved with initials of a dead lineage that never leaves his pocket: always on his mind, and always out of sight.)
He thinks it’s the arid air, or the incessant bake of the sun, or the non-stop honking that spills in from just beyond the station’s grounds. Bobby breathes in, and he feels good. Does he deserve it? No, but he’s far from Minnesota and farther still from the cling of winter, and he’s working on it, so he just accepts that maybe, it’s alright for today to be good.
“What’s the ETA on lunch, Cap?” Chim calls out distantly, followed by the clang of the ambulance door snapping shut.
Bobby huffs, giving the pot of mashed potatoes a final stir. “It’s half-past seven, Chim. I think it’s fair to say that this is dinner.”
“Doesn’t answer the question,” Hen points out from her sprawl on the couch.
“Two minutes,” Bobby concedes. “Maybe three. And can someone—”
“Table is set and ready. As it has been since…” Eddie flops against the counter, pulling his eyebrows up as he sorts through the day’s calls. “Damn. Noon? Have we really been out on calls all day?”
Chim’s boots slap onto the loft floor, followed by the loud clap of his hands. “Which is why I was asking when lunch is. You, my fine Captain, are getting pedantic in your old age.”
“Pot, kettle,” Bobby mutters. “Alright, lunch is ready.” He waits for a chorus of cheers, and when he gets it, he turns with the steaming pot. “For everyone but Chimney.”
And his team laughs—minus Chim’s shrieks of terrible workplace environments and HR complaints—but it’s not right, not quite. It’s not whole.
“Where’s Buck?”
“Said he wasn’t hungry,” Chim says. “Which means there’s more than enough for me.”
Chim’s grin is beatific and overdrawn, but it doesn’t budge the frown that’s found itself on Bobby’s lips.
“Buck said he wasn’t hungry?”
He’s drowned out by the lovely sound of his firefighters attempting to drown themselves in pot roast and gravy, sullenly picking up his own fork and eyeing Buck’s empty seat.
It’s unusual, unheard of, really, for Buck to miss out on a home-cooked meal. Any meal, for that matter. But then, Buck is rather unusual. The day can still be good. Bobby isn’t worried.
He’s not.
He should definitely fix that pipe. Bobby is no longer a man on the edge, but the plip-plop-plip-plop of water in the restroom next door might just rappel him back up on it. Honestly, he should call someone else to fix that pipe. He probably won’t.
Other than the pitter-patter of the faulty plumbing, he should be relatively content to hunker down in the bunkroom and try for rest. Instead, he finds himself waiting for the alarm to call against all reason. No one said the q-word, the Santa Ana’s are well behind them, and the full moon lapsed last week. He’s been a firefighter for three damn decades and he knows to grab his sleep when he can get it. He knows. But…
A dull, aching echo strikes through the stubborn snores of the room, followed by a groan, and a grunt, and the rustle of coarse blankets. Again. Again. Again.
And Bobby could get up, tiptoe across the cold floor on socked feet. He could find his way to Buck’s bunk with his eyes closed—because who else would it be if not Buck? The kid sleep-kicks like a newborn donkey, his restless legs leading him nowhere halfway-decent in the world of dreams. He could tip his head towards the kitchen and cajole Buck out of the darkness with promises of hot chocolate and a plate of gingersnaps to clear his head and rescue him from whatever storm has been building behind those too-bright eyes in recent days.
He could.
But what is Captain Robert Nash if not a man ruled by fear? What is he if not a coward? He doesn’t want to overstep, push Buck away again with selfish fretting. He doesn’t want to impose the poison of his care, not like last time, when a mis-placed feeling led to a scapegoat, then to a lawsuit, finally ending with the exposure of the very fragile threads of this little family.
He clenches his fists, unfocusing his eyes and tuning in to the radio static of blood in his ears.
Buck kicks out again, hissing in what Bobby tells himself isn’t pain.
He says nothing.
The alarm goes off.
(The rest of the night passes in a haze of red and white lights, screams and cries and the grind of halligans on metal. They don’t lose any patients; none of his team gets hurt. There’s no real reason to check in on Buck as he trudges out of the doors, the same way that there’s no cause for concern in the rest of Bobby’s crew as they stumble into the blinding sunbeams of a new day.
Except…Chim shoots him a questioning glance before he scarpers home. Bobby barely has the chance to shrug helplessly before Chimney rolls his eyes, gesticulating vaguely towards Buck’s Jeep. Shaking his head sagely, Bobby swallows down his hot-headed and ingrained need to do something. He’s proud to call Buck his firefighter. That is the only thing he’s entitled to, and the only part of the man that he can truly claim as his own. Going by Chim’s blank look back, he doesn’t agree. Bobby doesn’t really agree with himself either.
Buck spins out of the lot with a screech of tires and the blare of a heavy metal song that Bobby knows will swap over to Taylor Swift as soon as Buck deems himself out of earshot. Bobby sighs, and he thinks Chim does, too.)
The hastily thumbed message awaits the press of a single pixelated button. If Bobby was brave, Chimney would wake up in a few hours to ‘Did you have something you wanted to talk to me about?’ He’d probably respond with incomprehensible strings of letters that apparently represented the English language these days, or an equally frustrating assortment of emoticons. Bobby knows the message would be the same: ask Buck what’s wrong. It’s clear that something is, but the eggshells they all walk on around Buck feel more like twisted shards of their own ladder truck ready to bore deep into their soles and souls. Bobby is the captain; his responsibility is to monitor his team, intervene when needed.
The problem is, he hasn’t quite figured out the difference between what Buck needs and what he needs.
He deletes the message.
(If Bobby was brave, he’d find that Chimney’s actual reply would have been more along the lines of: did you know that Maddie has nightmares just like that? Did you know that she’s too afraid to scream herself awake, but she cries when she’s hurt? Did you know that I’ve never once heard her call out for her parents?
Except it would have looked more like: did yk maddie has ntmrs 2
thr prnts r rlly fckd up :(
And Bobby wouldn’t have understood much of what that meant, but he would’ve understood enough.)
It’s fairly unfortunate to catch Eddie’s eye as they both attempt not to watch Buck eat a banana. Bobby hopes they’re watching for the same reasons—the kid is nigh on gumming the thing, wincing with every half-bite and flinching with every swallow. Eddie seems to notice the discomfort, and true to form, he does look concerned. Bobby just doesn’t particularly appreciate any aspect of the show, nor is he thrilled by Eddie’s thousand-yard stare directed at it.
(And, okay. Bobby can admit to himself that he’s as much of a gossip as the rest of his crew. He can pretend all he wants that he’s never placed any bets on anyone in the house, and he can hide behind his wife by handing her the money to do so in his stead. He’s trying to be hands off this time and not recreate any past mistakes by imposing.
He’s just not oblivious. He knows what’s happening there, even if they haven’t figured it out themselves. Patience is a virtue, and Bobby is a man of God. He’s sure he can dredge some up for this.)
But it’s not only him and Eddie: Hen’s eyes are shrewd as she scrunches up her lips, her analytical mind already honed in on their youngest firefighter. She looks at Bobby, shaking her head slightly. He raises his brow, nudging his head in her direction. Hen scowls, pointedly thrusting her nose back in her textbook. Eddie still stares at that damn banana. Buck mewls.
Bobby sighs. “Out with it, kid. What’s going on?”
Buck requires a fair amount of balance in handling. He’s not nearly as caustic as his insubordinate heroics would suggest, but there’s a part of him, no matter how small, that flickers like a pilot light ready to rear up into an inferno. All it takes is a spark in just the right place, then: boom. Calling him out in front of everyone is a risk; gambling like this is the last vice that Bobby allows himself.
“S’nothin’,” Buck mumbles through a mouthful, looking a bit green around the gills.
“Sure, chipmunk-cheeks,” Chim says. “We all know what a herculean task it is to eat a banana, right guys?”
Buck’s sneer catches on his teeth, jaw working too hard and too slow. “I’m all good,” he says with a gasp, rising to wage his retreat. A cloud of disbelieving silence follows him, leading to: “Seriously. Don’t worry about me. I’m handling it.”
Silence turns to scoffing, the already dull energy of the day falling leaden to the floor.
“That was weird, yeah?” Chim asks, before grabbing Buck’s discarded fruit off of the side table and finishing it with a flourish.
“Definitely weird,” Hen hums.
Eddie’s glassy-eyed agreement doesn’t go unnoticed, but unminded. “He’s been like that for a few days, though. I thought it would pass, but…”
“It’s Buck,” Chim says. “Either it passes like a breeze, or it consumes him.”
(Buck was alright when he woke up after the bombing. He was alright; in abhorrent amounts of pain, frustrated by his newfound limitations, but he was alright.
And then…
And then.
None of them can forget that, least of all Bobby, who did his best to stomach the memory of Buck’s blood soaking his shirt and his patio until he found his own ‘and then.’)
“I think it’s been more than a few days,” Bobby says quietly. “He hasn’t been himself in weeks.”
Contemplation comes in waves, gathering into a whip-force realization of every oddity that exceeds Buck’s norm, going back about a month.
“Huh,” Eddie breathes. “Y’know, you’re right.”
“How did we miss that?” Chim whispers to himself, grabbing his phone to type out a text at a speed that Bobby can only dream of.
“Cap didn’t,” Hen says, and she sounds almost smug.
“I—” am saved by the bell, Bobby thinks, as the alarm blares out its urgency in a pattern that has more or less become the song of his life.
The team runs for their gear, fronted by Buck who had the head start by virtue of following his own alarm bell minutes earlier. He’s the first to load onto the truck as always; why does it feel wrong?
“Guys, we’re looking at a two-alarm fire in a block of condos,” Bobby shouts to the station. "IC has already staged in the lot but they're having trouble managing the evacs." Nods and confirmations bounce back to him from the white-washed walls, the sound not dissimilar to that of wailing in a mausoleum. Every single time they head out to a call, Bobby is struck by that image. Every single time they head out to a call, he hopes, he prays, that this won’t be the time that it comes true.
A hand grasps his elbow, tugging him out of sight for a single second.
“You’ll talk to him, right?” Hen says as she closes the ambulance door.
Bobby grits his jaw and tries for a smile. “Yeah, ‘course.”
“I’m not going to talk to him,” Bobby tells Athena the next time they’re both home, and if she’s at all displeased that their precious ‘us time’ has been taken up by the subject of Buck as of late, then she hides it well.
“Why not?” she says. “You’re his captain, and you’re worried about him. You'd be well within your rights to—”
“I won’t push him,” Bobby cuts in, inclining his head in apology at Athena’s frosty glare for his interruption.
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say that you’re well within your rights to check on him. It’s been a long few years, Bobby. If there’s something up with him, you need to know.”
Bobby pauses, shoulders drooping, hands falling flat on the countertop. Hands that just held raw chicken. “You don’t think this has anything to do with…”
“With his injuries?” Athena narrows her eyes, finally shaking her head. “No, I don’t think so. But,”—flicking the tap on, she holds a bottle of dish soap up to pour on his hands—“Hen or Chimney would know that better than I would. Buck would know that better than I would.”
“I’m just…worried about him. He’s barely eating, and he seems like he’s in pain.”
“Well—” The creak of the front door cuts off Athena yet again, and she shakes her head with a tut.
“I’m home!” May calls out. “Whatever you’re cooking smells amazing.”
“That’s because you don’t have to pay for it,” Athena mutters.
“Hey, I thought you loved my cooking,” Bobby says.
“More like I love you for your cooking,” Athena says, tone sharp but gaze soft. “May, stay away from the kitchen. Bobby is cooking up a biohazard.”
“I’ll grab the wipes,” he says defensively, hurrying to scrub the counter clean. “How was your day, kid?”
(It doesn’t escape his attention that he calls May and Harry the same things he calls Buck. He just ignores it. Easier for everyone, that way.
But he can’t forget the way that Buck used to call him ‘Pops,’ and while he knows it was a joke, he can’t help but imagine that his heart would swell up with the same unearned pride if his step-children called him that, too.)
“Boring,” May says. In their lines of work, that’s a good thing. “How about you guys? Is Buck still being weird?”
Athena holds her hands up at Bobby’s pointed expression, the is there no sanctity in our marriage? that he knows must be sparkling in his eyes.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” she says.
May snorts. “Maddie did. She said that Chim said that Buck has been off, and that Bobby said it’s been going on for longer than any of them realized.”
“Do you work at Dispatch or a high school gossip outlet?” Bobby shakes his head, nearly tossing the chicken into the oven. He can’t help but return the laughter that follows him. “And what does Maddie think is going on?”
“She thinks that you’re all being ridiculous. She also thinks that there’s no way she can diagnose him through the grapevine, and that if you’re going to live in each other’s pockets, you should probably learn how to communicate better.”
And Bobby ducks his head in shame at that, because yes, that is the crux of the matter.
“It’s not like I didn’t ask him. He claims that he’s fine.”
“That boy is always fine,” Athena drawls as she pulls a wine glass down from the shelf, “until he isn’t. There’s a lot of that going around, wouldn’t you say so, honey?”
Narrowing his eyes at his wife, Bobby brushes it off. “I can’t help him if he doesn’t want to be helped. We all know how that goes.”
The thump of the baking sheet warping in the heat of the oven makes May jump, breaking the rhythm of her fingertips tapping against the still cloyingly lemon-scented counter. “What’s even wrong with him? I could always try talking to him if that would help. We haven’t caught up in a while.”
“That’s very kind of you, baby,” Athena says. “But, I think this is Bobby’s battle.”
“You just don’t want us having another Mamma Mia! sing-along at the house,” May mutters. “He’s much more fun than Harry, you know. And his advice is better than Harry’s go-to suggestion of vague-tweeting about my enemies.”
(That’s another thing that Bobby ignores, and he knows it’s to May’s chagrin. She is neither quiet nor subtle about lumping Buck in with Harry, ever accompanied by a certain try me tone inherited equally from both of her parents.
Bobby has never once tried her, not about this. He wonders what that says, and he ignores the conclusions he inevitably comes to, too.)
“Buck isn’t eating,” Bobby says, and he bites down the impulse to tack on ‘and it’s killing me that he won’t tell me why.’ “Plus, he’s just…tired. He doesn’t sleep well when he’s on shift. Something is bothering him.”
May seems as surprised as Athena that he’s willing to even broach the topic of Buck’s health. Their extended found-family exists on blurred boundaries, but they try not to disappear into the wavering lines.
“Alright,” May says slowly, “well. Have you—wait, how old is Buck? Late twenties, yeah?”
Bobby blinks, looking to his wife only to be met with a dismissively waved hand. “Yes, he is.”
“Bobby, you know I love you, right?” May says gently, reaching over to grasp Bobby’s still damp hand. At his misty-eyed nod, she smiles, and she makes sure to show every tooth. “Have you considered that his wisdom teeth might just be coming in?”
“Oh, good Lord,” Athena intones, cackling into her glass. Bobby isn’t thrilled by the slant of her smirk as she says, “Looks like your boy is all grown up.”
It isn’t inappropriate to scour Buck’s medical history. It isn’t a breach of trust—as captain, Bobby needs to know about the stories of his crew. He finds no record of any wisdom teeth extraction, or any other major dental or orthodontic procedures. The wealth of medical records from Buck’s childhood is troubling, but not unexpected. The Daniel Buckley ship has sailed, and with it, Buck’s dangerous grasps for parental attention were tugged out into the open. It never fails to fill Bobby with a certain measure of grief; it never fails to remind him of the sheer awe he feels when he thinks of all that Buck has done to build his life anew.
(For some reason, one that Bobby refuses to examine too closely, it also fills him with regret. He knows that there was nothing he could have done for a young and hurting Evan Buckley. The only thing he can do now for that fiery boy is to support a slightly older, and still hurting, Buck.
He imagines it sometimes, though: what their lives would look like if they learned how to heal together in the days when they were flat on their backs and looking up at a sky that only knew how to look down on them.
Buck isn’t a repository for his pain; he is not a vessel for his redemption. Theirs are lives better left in the past. The future awaits.)
While the kid could have gotten his teeth removed on any of his escapades up and down and across the continent, the paper trail is Buck-levels of fastidious. It’s unlikely he would have gotten surgery in Peru without requesting documentation. Could he ask Buck directly? Sure. But Bobby thinks back to his wife’s words, whispered at the fuzzy point between wakefulness and sleep:
‘This isn’t about his fitness for duty, Bobby. This is about a boy who doesn’t know how to ask for help, and doesn’t know what it’s like to be held.’
Eddie would likely be a better substitute to fill the gaping, child-sized wound that throttles Buck’s ability to even acknowledge that he’s in pain. Bobby told Athena, and her laugh was kind, but it was firm.
‘Just help your kid with his damn teeth and let me get some sleep.’
(Then he thinks about the conversation that they had at dawn the next day:
‘He’s not my kid, Athena. He’s really not.
‘You know, most of the time that those words are spoken, they don’t sound so sad.’
He thinks about wiping the fog off of the bathroom mirror later, after his shower, and trying to have the very same conversation with his subconscious. His subconscious sounds a lot like Marcy, and it looks like Robert Jr.
‘He’s not my kid. He’s my employee and he doesn’t need me to…’
‘He doesn’t need you to see him? To know him? What are you afraid of?’
And Bobby realizes three very important things that day.
One: he realizes that he’s afraid that by naming this unnameable thing, he’ll lose it.
Two: he realizes that when his subconscious laughs, it twinkles like Brook.
Three: he realizes that the worst has already happened, and that the worst is, as always, out of his control. This? This is in his control.)
Bright and early the next Thursday morning, day one of four days off, Bobby knocks on the door to Buck’s loft.
Knocks might be generous. The circulation in his left hand is entirely cut off by two reusable grocery bags slung in the crook of his elbow, his right hand mostly occupied by a small but surprisingly heavy cardboard box. It’s a juggle to try and keep everything in his grasp, so his shoulder bears the brunt of Buck’s reassuringly sturdy door. He buries the indignity of thumping against the wood until it slides open, and will claim to his dying day that he doesn’t nearly fall straight onto the floor.
“Bobby?” Buck says, blearily scrubbing his knuckle over his eye. “What are you—not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you doing here?”
“Don’t do that,” Bobby chides. “You’ll scratch your cornea.”
Buck mutters something that sounds a lot like, “It’s too goddamn early for this,” which Bobby chooses to hear as ‘Yes, sir.’
Very few silences between them are awkward anymore, and Bobby decides to not let this become one. “For someone who spends a significant portion of his life telling me I’m no spring chicken, you sure seem happy to let me stand here with all of these bags.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Buck says, relieving Bobby of his burdens.
(They aren’t burdens. He was the first patron in the grocery store this morning, and he was one wandering thought away from whistling his contentment to the whole shop. His subconscious laughed, and called him an old fool once or twice. Bobby had to agree. He doesn’t have a lot of ease in his days; he’s finding that this decision is easier than breathing.)
Buck tosses the groceries on the counter, studiously avoiding the lure of his coffee maker. “Are you planning on explaining yourself? Really, you know I’m always thrilled to have you here, but I have some plans in a bit that I can’t move around.”
“That’s what I’m here about, actually.”
He keeps his tone intentionally light, swinging to Buck’s side to unpack the perishables. Tread carefully, not as though Buck is a lit fuse, but flailing on the middle of a see-saw. He isn’t hovering over pits of hellfire set alight by Bobby’s hand as he once thought; he’s still his own person, and he doesn’t have to accept the change that Bobby has spread before him.
“Did you hire a private detective or something?”
“Don’t forget that my wife is a sergeant, and a brilliant one. Anyway, it was May who figured it out.”
“May? How did she even know?”
“It’s, um…well. She—she just got her wisdom teeth out a few months ago.” Sheepishly, Bobby rubs his hand over the back of his neck. How many nights did he lose sleep agonizing over Buck’s own? “I probably should have realized what this was, but…”
“Bobby, were you worried about me?”
“He says like I ever stop,” Bobby mutters under his breath; he’s nearly positive that Buck hears him, but Bobby believes in God for a reason: mercifully, Buck lets it go. “So, I brought stuff for soup, and Athena made sure that I stocked up on ice cream. I’m not sure how much of an appetite you'll have—May’s recovery was a bit more bumpy than we expected—but I wanted to make sure that you have what you’ll need.”
“I—this is very nice, don’t get me wrong. Don’t you think it’s a little overboard, though?”
Bobby scans the kitchen and finds it covered in food along with a care package from May and a jaw-specific ice pack. No, he thinks, this is only half of what I originally bought.
“I don’t want to be an imposition, Cap.” Buck snarls at himself as soon as the title leaves his mouth, clutching the side of his cheek gingerly as action meets consequence. “And, hey,” he tries, failing to conceal his strange and patented combination of gracious discontent, “I’m an adult. I don’t need to be coddled.”
“Of course you don’t. But you do need to be driven; I distinctly remember instructions not to drive or make any important legal decisions.”
“I’m just going to call an Uber, and I wasn’t planning on changing my will today.”
Privately, Bobby thinks that getting in a stranger’s car while drugged up is just about the last place that Buck should ever be. He also recalls that most clinics don’t allow that plan for this exact reason. Out loud, he says, “I’ll be your Uber, and I won’t even charge you. How’s that?”
“Bobby—”
“Just, let me do this for you, Buck. Please. You don’t have to be alone.”
‘This is about a boy who doesn’t know how to ask for help, and doesn’t know what it’s like to be held.’ A damn brilliant sargeant.
They’ve hugged before, of course. Usually it comes at the end of a long and fraught rescue, or one of their increasingly more common weeks from hell where the team can’t go home and can’t let go of one another in the face of the unknown. When Bobby tugs Buck in for a hug now, he feels Buck stiffen for a long minute, muscles horribly tense under Bobby’s arms. And then he relaxes, just like that.
“I don’t want to be a bother,” Buck mumbles into his shoulder. “Why don’t you go be with your family?”
(Bobby has ignored; he has buried his pain for so long that he’s started to wonder if he wasn’t trying to cover up a hole but dig his own grave. He sees enough of himself in Buck that he wants to guide him away from the mistakes that haunt him; he sees enough of Buck in Buck to know that he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.
He sees May in the set of Buck’s shoulders and he sees Harry in the glint in Buck’s eyes. He sees Athena in Buck’s hell-bent stance—hell, he sees Michael in Buck’s dogged determination to be, and most of all, be better.
He sees himself in four days at the start of their shift, blushing from the loft as money joyously changes hands below, because Bobby is ready, and he also knows exactly what his team thinks of this will-they-won’t-they dance of nebulous familial bonds. He’s ready.)
(He just hopes that Buck is.)
In the end, all it takes is the hand once suffocated by evidence of Bobby’s feelings toted up three flights of stairs to chuff against Buck’s chin and lift his face. “That’s what I’m doing, Buck. I’m with my family.”
The waiting room isn’t particularly busy at this time of the day; the only other person in there is a woman around Bobby’s age waiting for her child that looked much younger than Buck. It isn’t uncommon for wisdom teeth to crop up past the typical age of eighteen—Hen was happy to point out that they can, in fact, present as a problem long-past middle age. She was also quite thrilled to hear that the root of Buck’s weirdness was something so mundane and not concerning, but not before gleefully and dramatically exclaiming how much that explained about Buck’s maturity.
Bobby put up a good fight defending the kid; he stood no chance against Hen’s insistence that her little Buckaroo was now truly enlightened. Wise. She vehemently protested Bobby’s order to keep the situation under wraps. That one Bobby was able to win in the end.
“Father of Evan Buckley? Can you come with me to the back?” a tech says, hardly popping her head out from the door to the surgical suite.
It rankles, just a bit, but Bobby dutifully dog-ears his novel and heaves up to his feet. He did say that he was Buck’s family when they were checking in. He supposes this is the natural course for that statement to have run. So maybe it doesn’t rankle as much as it does rub up against a raw and exposed nerve that lights up Bobby’s past failures. Or maybe he’s just overthinking taking Buck to the oral surgeon. He finds, not at all suddenly, that he’s nervous.
“How is he?” he asks. The door clips him on the heel as he slips through to the hallway on the other side, though it doesn’t draw his ire. Antiseptic fumes greet him, and he uses the pinching pain to escape from too many memories of being on the wrong side of these doors. It isn’t a hospital. Buck is fine. Probably. “He didn’t have any reactions to the anesthesia, did he? No issues with clotting or anything?”
“No, no, not at all,” the tech reassures. “He did just fine. He was a model patient, too, but…”—rounding a corner, she stops Bobby just out of Buck’s flailing eyeline—“then he woke up.”
“Yes. Yes, it appears that he did.”
A tray of stainless steel dental tools has found its new home cast across the floor; sodden gauze litters the chair and Buck’s crisp shirt; the doctor stands, bemused and hopefully amused, in the corner.
The tech giggles, trying to hide it behind a professional hand raised to her lips. “He didn’t do anything, per se, he’s just…he’s huge. We couldn’t get him into the wheelchair, and I don’t think he wanted to cooperate very much.”
“Buck,” Bobby sighs, in the voice that earned him his position. ‘Act confident,’ his father used to tell him, ‘and the rest of you will catch up.’ Privately, Bobby never really thought that his father ever struggled with confidence. That advice still serves him well.
“Capt'n Dad!” Buck rasps with a sunny and somewhat sopping smile, slightly dulled by the first hints of swelling.
“C’mon, kid. It’s time to get you out of here.”
“They w’re the ones who would’n’ let me leave! And,”—pointing an accusatory finger wildly around the room and nowhere near any of its occupants, Buck faux-whispers—“they stole m’ teeth.”
Chuckling, Bobby finally breaches the war zone. “I’m sure if you ask them nicely then they’ll give them back to you.”
It's nice, actually, to see Buck’s face under blinding medical light without alarming amounts of blood flecked over it, or soot lining the stress lines of his forehead, or desperate members of their mis-fit puzzle of connections grabbing onto his lank hands as a lifeline. Buck is happy. It won’t last long, it never really does with the kid, but—
“Really?!”
—maybe Bobby can work on that with him. Maybe they’ll decide together that a day can be okay.
“Why don’t you get in the wheelchair and then you can ask them.” Bobby mouths sorry to the staff, grabbing Buck under the arms and trying to support six feet of stumbling sedation onto the seat of the wheelchair.
“Mr. Buckley here was telling us all about being a firefighter,” the doctor says through a smile, finally breaking their silence. “You should be proud of him. He’s a hero.”
He’s a heavy hero, Bobby thinks, but it fades to a solid rumble of something he can now name as love.
(On this morning, he realizes two more important things.
One: it hasn’t been love the whole time, but it became it, because they made their family.
Two: he isn’t any less scared of losing this. He just doesn’t think that’s a good enough excuse anymore to run from it.)
“Y’should change yer name to Capt'n Dad,” Buck slurs on the car ride back to his loft. “Could put it on the back of yer turn-outs ‘nd everythin’.”
“No legal decisions today, kiddo.”
“For me. You can do whatever y’want today, Bobby.”
“Yeah?”
“Yesh.”
“Then I think I’ll make us some soup, and after that, we can video call the rest of the family so you can tell them all about your idea.”
“Pops,” Buck gasps, shooting upright. He wobbles before collapsing back into his seat, head lolling towards the driver’s seat. “That is an ex’lent plan.”
Bobby laughs, deep enough that Buck catches onto the tail end of it and joins in. “I think you’ll regret that when the drugs wear off.”
Buck falls into a somber and hopefully not too contemplative silence. “Yer not gonna tell ‘Thena I did drugs, right?”
And it’s so incredibly out of left field and so endlessly Buck, that Bobby hears himself agreeing, and he feels his hand being tugged off of the gear stick for the single most serious pinkie promise that Bobby has given in his adult life. Impossibly, or perhaps not, he finds himself whispering: “I love you, kid.”
Impossibly, or perhaps not, Buck whispers back: “Love you, too.”
(Bobby doesn’t tell Athena about the drugs. Somehow, to Buck’s surprise, she seems to know anyway.
And eventually, when the pain sets in and the clouds part from his eyes, Buck whines and moans about the screenshots of him with cheeks filled with cotton sent to the newly-minted ‘Grant-Nash-Buck’ groupchat, but he doesn’t ask anyone to delete them.
He does, however, ask who Marlon Brando is, and why everyone insists on comparing his swollen cheeks to the man’s. When Bobby offers to show him the Godfather, Buck agrees. He passes out on the couch immediately. Bobby takes a picture of that, too, but he doesn’t mind keeping this one for himself.)