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It seems simple enough, that Eddie is the one that will go down the well.
There’s a few factors in his favour, by account of being good with kids considering Chris—even if he’s making it up as he goes most of the time—he can fit more comfortably than Buck with his broad shoulders, he’s not claustrophobic like Archer and, well, he’s a Water Bender.
That isn’t really a deciding factor until Eddie mentions the waterline to Bobby, and the incoming rain that he actually has some control of once it touches down, and at the very least he’ll be able to push back any water that is in the bottom of the well to make the extraction easier. He doesn’t mention the healing; he’s not great at that, even if he’s been getting a lot more practice with the art now more than ever.
(It’s not even on the job most times, but with Buck, and not just because the Firestarter is so accident prone. It’s more just bumps here, bruises there; burns from fires and hot metal and scraped skin that Eddie brushes fingers over near the kitchen sink or between clinking beer glasses and nudging knees in the fire truck.
They’re doing a very good job of not talking about it.)
So it’s Eddie going down the well and not Buck.
But it’s Buck who checks his harness, and double and triple checks it, and holds Eddie by the straps making him feel much smaller than he’s felt in a while, ducking his head to catch Eddie’s gaze, like he thinks this calm collective ease is a show for Bobby and the others. That’s not to say Eddie isn’t nervous to go subterranean.
But Buck’s on the winch. He trusts him.
The decent is textbook. Eddie measures his oxygen and keeps checking in on the radio, and keeps giving single tugs to Buck. Checking in.
It takes a lot longer for him to go down the fifty-something metres, and much longer than he’d hoped to start making his way across, painfully aware of the awareness prickling on his skin at the feeling of so much water around him. It’s saturated into the earth making it more mud than rock, but that does make it a little easier to dig as Eddie uses both tools and a little bending. As much as he is able to in the confined space.
When he sees the kid, it’s less textbook. Considering Eddie takes out his knife and cuts the rope is a little indication towards that, but he trusts Buck to know what he’s done and why, and sure enough, once the kid is secured and wrapped in a foil blanket to try and keep some of his body heat in, there’s feet coming down the well. Although, surprisingly, its Chim, not Buck.
Except when Chim says Buck would cut his line just the same, Eddie figures why it’s Chim and not Buck.
Then Chim is going up with the kid in tow, and Eddie should’ve really been paying attention to the more-mud-than-rock rock slowly getting saturated with the storm water and the water level rising where all the ground water because suddenly the well is collapsing in on him and it’s only by sheer luck and sudden panic of rushing water that he sends blasting into the falling rock that stops him from getting crushed. The air pocket is small and quickly filling up with water, and Eddie’s movements are restricted in the tight space.
It’s a good thing he’s not claustrophobic.
He’s got a creeping suspicion he will be once he makes it back to the surface.
There’s no question that he won’t.
It’s just… what state he’ll be in when he gets topside.
Luckily fear hasn’t set in yet.
It doesn’t really. Not when Eddie screams through the mud because he’s still alive, not when the water rises to his chin and he’s fighting to stay afloat and the movement of his body to keep the water from stealing the last of his oxygen, and not even when he tries the trick Adriana always used to do in the summer pool where she’s able to make a mask of oxygen even as Eddie’s tank runs lower and lower.
He can guess what’s going on above, somewhere between Buck’s panic and Bobby’s level-headedness. He knows that the city have teams of dedicated Benders for precisely these sorts of incidents—or not exactly these incidents per se, but there are Earth Benders who specialise in cave rescues up in the mountains, and Air Benders who work most commonly with the helio-units and Water Benders like himself who are usually recruited by the coastguard, but the reason that Eddie went down in the well is because those teams were hours out and the storm didn’t give them enough time to wait.
Now Eddie’s down here, and without no easy access to him, it’s all the others topside can do, beyond digging through the fifty-something metres deep more-mud-than-rock to where he is.
It’s probably what Buck’s doing right now. He’s loyal like that. Predictable in his panic too.
It’s hard to push Buck from his head. Heard to push Chris and Buck and Shannon and the army out his head long enough to formulate a plan that isn’t getting crushed by several thousand tonnes of earth, and between the screams and frustration and the not giving up, Eddie finally slumps back down, half floating, half getting crushed between water and slowly dwindling air that he just sort of….
There’s water all around him.
There’s never really been this much water around him in all his life, save for the few times that his parents took them to the lake in El Paso, and now the ocean, here in LA. It’s where he learnt his bending, more so playing with his sisters and teaching them more than anything his parents offered. His dad was always gone, always travelling around the country for his stupid job, always telling Eddie he has to be the man of the house, to step up, to look after Mom in his place because he was too busy elsewhere.
And sure Eddie banged up the car trying to drive his Mom to hospital when she was in labour, but ambulances are expensive and Eddie knew that at the age of ten, between making his sisters their packed lunches and skipping out on cinema trips with friends on the weekend. And sure Eddie got frustrated and tired and sometimes just didn’t want to, except he was still a kid himself and suddenly a parent and then a parent again when Shannon got knocked up because they were kids and didn’t know what they were doing.
Then suddenly Eddie is in the army, learning how to fire a weapon and ignoring his superiors voluntelling him to join the medic branch because his Water Bending gives him an edge in healing. Fat lot of good that did him when the helicopter went down in the middle of the desert, and the only supplies Eddie had was basic med gear and drinking water that didn’t do much. Sure, he got them all out. And he got home. And now he’s here, buried fifty metres deep, gasping air and choking on the very same water that he’d been begging for back in the desert; water that seems to stretch on forever where it’s seeped into the rock and the mud and—
And there’s more, pouring in, from the could-be-North.
Eddie feels more than sees. His torch keeps casting long shadows around him, and the water is murky where it’s kicking up dirt and he’s making it muddy with his flailing.
He more crawls than swims, pushing with his hands and demanding the water push him along with the small aborted movements that force him forwards. He has to keep swapping between propulsion and being able to breathe, and he stops pushing the thoughts of Chris and Buck and Shannon from his mind. Thinks about his sisters. Abuela. Abuelo. His parents—briefly—and his squad, and his commanders and his team up topside with Hen probably already having a plan on how she’s going to treat his potential injuries once they get him up, and Chim trying to be an anchor for Buck, and Bobby doing whatever he can to get Eddie out.
Eddie keeps crawl-swimming.
He’s still fighting.
He’s not giving up.
He’s not.