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"Hey Buck, what's this I hear about the Union looking for Chimney?" Hen asked, sliding into the seat across the table from him. A few seats down, Eddie perked up, and out of the corner of his eye, Buck saw Bobby turn to look at them too. He had no doubts that the rest of the crew were doing their best to listen in.
"I have no idea what you heard," Buck said evenly. "I wasn't there."
"They said they're looking for Chimney," Hen huffed. "Something about a complaint that you filed."
"I didn't file anything with the Union," Buck said. And it was true; he hadn't. The officer assigned to his case, on the other hand, had done plenty. Not that he would be telling Hen that anytime soon, not with how she'd talked about Chim's pursuit of Maddie over the past few days.
"Somehow, I don't believe you," Hen said, frowning. "This better not affect his ability to come back on the job; I miss him."
Buck took a breath and held it, counting to 10 in his head. He was not going to let anyone here press his buttons anymore.
Unfortunately, Hen continued. "You better hope that, whatever you did, Chim forgives you when he gets back."
"Forgives me?" Buck bit out before he could stop himself.
"Yes, Buck," she said as though she was talking to a toddler. "Forgives you. For lying to him about Maddie, and for trying to stop him from looking for her, and for whatever this is. Haven't you done enough, already?"
Buck snapped. Deep inside him, a switch flipped. A switch he'd hoped not to have to flip again.
Evan looked coldly at Wilson. "Let's look at what Chimney and I have done to each other and see how it adds up, shall we? Let's start with Daniel. I found out something horrifying, and traumatic, and I asked for a week. One fucking week to wrap my head around it. And the next fucking day Chimney cornered me at work and insisted that I needed to forgive Maddie because she was pregnant. I wasn't allowed to be numb, or be mad, or even grieve because fucking Maddie wanted me to support her instead, and sent her fucking boyfriend to ambush me at work, because there's no boundary of mine that she doesn't view as a goddamned invitation. Kind of like you're doing right now.
"And when I tried to enforce my own boundaries like my therapist is always telling me to do, he goes and tells me more of my family secrets that were perfectly alright to tell a man she's known for two years, but that have been withheld from me for over a decade, and again, I'm supposed to just take it, and have no reaction, because Maddie was pregnant, and because Maddie was beaten by her husband, like I didn't have bruises of my own under my shirt that day, like I hadn't been living that same nightmare since I was fucking five.
"But no, let's all believe Maddie when she says that they're good people, but just not great parents. Like all good people constantly berate and beat their spare parts baby because he couldn't save the child they actually wanted. And then surprise surprise, the shoe ended up on the other foot, and suddenly Chimney's the one getting the short end of the Maddie Buckley toxic secrets game, accusing me of hiding something I didn't fucking know, and cold cocking me in my own house, but sure, I'm supposed to hope that he forgives me, like that's not the story of my goddamn life. 'Beg for forgiveness from the people who hurt you, Buck. You don't know what they've been through.'
"Fucking right.
"I should have learned, you know, after the lawsuit. Which, it has since been made clear to me, that some people don't seem to understand the part where I fucking won. The Chief and the union and the lawyers looked at the evidence, and found that Bobby did break procedure, and did ignore regulations, and did illegally deny my return to work even after I'd been medically cleared, so I wasn't getting disability anymore, and was almost evicted. And they looked at the part where I was on blood thinners, and yet he still insisted I take a desk job that could have literally killed me and still wasn't enough to cover my expenses, and expected me to thank him for his benevolence. And they looked at all that and decided that I was in the right, and tried to award me seven million dollars, and I turned that down because all I wanted was to come back to my family, who proceeded to make it very clear that I was the one who needed to earn their forgiveness, instead of Bobby needing to earn mine.
"Which I guess I should have expected, because why would my new family be any different from my old one? And if I'd had another year of therapy under my belt I probably would have turned right back around and asked the Chief to send me to one of the other dozen stations that wanted me despite the lawsuit, but at the time I was still convinced that I could fix things. Instead of being told I needed to suck it up and consider how Bobby felt, and pander to Bobby's feelings about me almost dying, because it was a fucking picnic to be on this side of the equation.
"So no, I'm not waiting on Chimney's forgiveness. I'm waiting on his apology, to put right next to the ones from poor Maddie and the poor Buckleys and poor poor Bobby, once hell freezes over enough for them to get their heads out of their asses enough to give them. But sure, Hen, let's ignore the part where my sister abandoned me for the third fucking time in as many decades and talk about Chimney choosing to ignore Maddie's boundaries for fucking once instead of her constantly ignoring mine, and how his leaving affects you. Poor you. Validated feelings and shit. There there."
His piece said, Evan got up and walked past Bobby towards the stairs. "My face hurts, Captain Nash, and I'm done pretending it doesn't, or that I'm willing to risk damaging it further on the job. You can call in a replacement for me; I'm taking the PTO my doctor wanted me to take."
Without bothering to wait for an answer, — Buck might have cared, but Evan decidedly didn't — Evan grabbed his bag and keys from his locker and strode out of the station.