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It should be a straightforward call. Yes, it’s a call to the set of a Hollywood production of a show about firefighters…but there shouldn’t be anything that different about it. Eddie doesn’t even consider the implications of the details of the call until they arrive on the scene and suddenly he wants to fall to his knees and empty the contents of his stomach.
That’s a stunt man , he tells himself. That’s someone you don’t know, someone you are meant to be helping. That’s not your best friend hanging there lifeless. That’s not your Buck who won’t wake up and talk to you no matter how hard you scream.
He tells himself this is a sunny day, not a rainy night almost a year ago now. He tells himself that Buck is standing right next to him very much alive, not dangling lifelessly above them with no way for Eddie to get him into his arms.
He tells himself all those things but his body and mind don’t believe him as he violently remembers the worst night of his life.
Buck hanging from the ladder truck. Buck struck by lightning and utterly lifeless. Buck who he cannot save.
For a moment, all Eddie can remember is a bright burst of light. He’s pretty sure he’s on a call. Doing something important. Looking out for someone important.
Eddie blinks rapidly as he finally feels the hard drops of rain hitting his skin. Feels the hard ground beneath him and the way his back aches in a way he knows is going to leave a bruise. A bruise from being thrown back several feet in the air. The daze from the impact begins to leave him as he comes back into his body and reaches for his helmet which must have bounced off when he was flung to the ground.
He was looking out for someone important.
Eddie snaps his head around, recalling exactly what he had been doing before the lightning blasted him from the ladder.
Buck.
He was spotting the controls as Buck climbed up the ladder to the fire unfolding before them.
“Go get ‘em cowboy.”
Buck, who had been at the top of a 50-foot lightning rod when the lightning had struck.
Lightning that had knocked Eddie on his ass all the way down at the bottom of the ladder.
Buck who had to be ok. He was always ok. Eddie was going to look up and see Buck at the top of that ladder, working to put the fire out with the tiniest hint of a smile on his lips. A promise of teasing to come later, once the job was done. Eddie would have to hear about how he had been knocked on his ass in front of everyone for the entire ride back to the station. Because Buck was ok, Buck was -
Buck was not at the top of the ladder and Eddie’s stomach plummets off a cliff. He almost breathes in relief as he spots Buck in his harness, hanging off the ladder. Eddie had strapped him in, the harness had worked, Buck was not laying broken on the ground somewhere.
But Buck is not moving. At all. The way his body swings is so unnatural, so haunting, it reminds Eddie of the scary movie they watched last week once Christopher was in bed.
And without stopping for even one moment to strap on a harness or give himself any sort of protection, he is running up the ladder towards Buck. Buck who hangs there so eerily still.
Looking at Buck hanging there, so completely lifeless in a way Buck should never be, Eddie feels like he is the one who just got struck by lightning. Again. Because he finds himself wishing it were him hanging from that harness instead of Buck. Wants to scream at the sky for the universe to let them switch places. He settles for just screaming Buck’s name over and over again.
It’s an irrational and terrible wish. Christopher needs him. Eddie knows this. But he needs his Buck too. Eddie suddenly understands what Buck had meant in that hospital room when he said he wished he was the one who had been shot instead of Eddie. Understands it so viscerally it makes him feel like he’s just been blasted off the ladder again. Because while Buck saying that did come from a place of not understanding how essential he was in Eddie’s life, in Christopher’s life, in the lives of everyone at the 118 and beyond, Eddie understands the underlying feeling there as it hits him like a bright red fire engine. The unsaid thing that has been between them for far too long. The thing that Buck must have felt as he watched Eddie bleed out in front of him. The thing Eddie is only now realizing as he watches Buck swing so lifelessly under the ladder.
Eddie reaches the top and shouts for Buck again. In a moment of desperation, all rational thought leaving his mind, he tries to haul Buck up towards him. But Buck is all dead weight. Not dead. Not dead. He’s not allowed to be dead. Not when he- Just unresponsive. And while Eddie’s strong, he’s not strong enough to lift Buck into his arms at this angle. It's not even the smartest or fastest strategy anyway, he realizes as some rationale returns to him. The quickest way to get Buck to the care he needs is to lower him down to his team waiting below. As much as Eddie wants to take Buck into his arms in this moment, to feel Buck’s pulse beneath his fingers and confirm the man he loves is still alive, to carry him down the ladder and into the truck below…as much as every atom in him needs to do all of those things right now, he knows that is not what Buck needs. Eddie cannot save Buck up here and so he stops fighting with physics and instead yells to his team that they need more slack.
Lowering Buck into Bobby’s waiting arms are the longest and most excruciating seconds of Eddie’s life. Followed immediately by the time it takes him to run down the ladder and be on the ground with the rest of his team. To finally be able to touch Buck and feel for a pulse. One that isn’t there. He wants to push Chimney aside and start doing compressions on Buck himself, he can restart his heart. If anyone can restart Evan Buckley’s heart it's Eddie Diaz.
“Talk to me Buck!” He’s yelling. He’s yelling and it’s helping nothing but Buck has to talk to him. Has to open his eyes and tease everyone for worrying about him. Has to share the plethora of lightning related facts he hasn’t gotten the chance to entertain them with. Buck is never quiet. Should never be quiet. Why is he so quiet, why won’t he just open his eyes and talk to Eddie?
Suddenly there are arms around him, pulling him away and distantly he hears Bobby telling him to drive. He can’t drive right now, is Bobby crazy? Doesn’t he know that Eddie can restart Buck’s heart? That if Buck hears his voice then he’ll come back? Because Buck has never once denied Eddie anything he wants and Eddie is just now realizing this. But Bobby must know.
There’s no time for an argument. Certainly he, Eddie, was not going to waste a single second more. Besides, he would break every traffic law known to man and God to get Buck to the hospital in time. Maybe Bobby does know.
Eddie hardly notices the way Bobby watches him as he drives like a maniac to the hospital. The concern on his face. The way that concern changes when Bobby glances into the back to check on Buck as the others trade off performing CPR. Eddie doesn’t notice any of this. Eddie counts.
The moment he throws the ambulance into park, he’s flinging open the door and sprinting around to the back to help lift Buck out. He realizes a part of him was still hoping to open the back of the ambulance and find a smiling Buck, sitting up and insisting he does not need to go to the hospital because can’t they all see that he’s fine and when can he get back to work? That somehow this miracle will have occurred while Eddie was not watching and the others just didn’t say anything because they didn't want him to crash the fire engine.
But when he yanks open the door he does not find a smiling Buck. He does not meet the kind blue eyes that make him feel safe in a way he has never known. He does not hear the protests of a man who always is taking care of others but god forbid they try to take care of him. Instead he finds Chimney still performing CPR on a lifeless Buck and his heart shatters all over again. Without hesitation, he shoves that aside and shouts for Chimney to switch with him. There’s no time for Eddie Diaz’s broken heart, not when he still needs to restart Evan Buckley’s.
In the span of the journey from the back of the ambulance to the bright lights of the hospital, Eddie stops being the Eddie Diaz who is being widowed for the second time in his short life and instead becomes Eddie Diaz: Medic. Eddie Diaz: Medic can save Buck. Eddie Diaz: Medic is calm and rational as he performs the life-saving skills he’s honed for his entire adult life. Eddie Diaz: Medic isn’t coming apart at the seems.
“He’s in V-tach!”
“Clear!”
He’s glad Bobby takes charge and calmly spouts out all of Buck’s medical information to the nurses as they wheel him away. All Eddie manages to yell to their backs is a desperate, “Do more!”
And now Eddie Diaz: Medic is no longer needed and he is just Eddie Diaz: Grief. Eddie Diaz: Widower.
Watching Buck be taken away, everything completely out of Eddie’s hands now, he wants to collapse. Fall to his knees and wail at the unfairness of a cruel universe. He feels arms around him and it’s the only thing keeping him standing. And they must know. They must know they are all that is keeping Eddie tethered to this world after his heart disappeared behind those wretched doors.
The joke is he thought he had hit rock bottom before, felt the worst any human being could feel. When Shannon left. When Shannon died . When he found out everyone from his squadron, everyone he had thought he saved, was dead because Eddie couldn’t save them in the way that really mattered.
He’s realizing just how wrong he had been. This is beyond rock bottom. This is falling and falling and falling with nothing to grasp, nothing to hold onto, nothing at all but the darkness rushing past and knowing that whatever awaits below will shatter you beyond repair.
He had felt like this only once before, during the worst 38 seconds of his life when he thought Christopher had been lost to a tsunami. But the universe had returned Christopher to him before he could pick up any speed on the fall. He hadn’t shattered then.
He might shatter now.
The universe had spared Eddie from shattering yet again. The universe had returned Buck to him. Buck whose dazzling smile lit up something inside Eddie he thought would be lost to the darkness forever. But Eddie’s never forgotten that feeling of falling. The vast emptiness his life had become for those wretched days when they weren’t sure if Buck would ever open those sparkling eyes of his again. When Eddie couldn't even bear to look at Buck's still form in the hospital bed, the tubes helping him to breathe, the forced rise and fall of his chest from a machine. Because Evan Buckley should never be that still or silent, it was a perversion of everything he was and Eddie could not look.
And it had scared the shit out of him. Because Eddie could not shatter. Could not break like that when he had a son who relied on him. So Eddie did what Eddie was good at, taking all the feelings from that night and the days that followed and shoving them into a box with a huge Do Not Open: Danger Inside written in red, and banished it to the furthest dredges of his heart. So he was fine when Buck met Natalia and told Eddie she was the only person who really saw him. He was fine when Buck told him he had gone on a date with Tommy and couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was fine hearing that was a door Buck was willing to open, but Eddie wasn’t. He was fine he was fine he was fine! He was less fine when a doppelgänger of his dead wife floated into his life and he allowed her to implode the one relationship that Eddie had cut off a part of himself to protect. Eddie ended up shattering a little anyway.
Now here he is, on a bright and sunny Hollywood set, and that box has burst in his chest without his permission. Without any say at all, everything rushes over him in an instant. The falling. The way Buck looked swinging lifelessly above him. The falling. The way his arms burned as he tried and failed to lift Buck into the safety of his arms. The falling. The way three minutes and seventeen seconds felt like a lifetime. The falling. The desperate way he had pumped down on Buck’s non-responsive heart and had to entrust his care to strangers. The falling the falling the falling.
The realization he had not dared to look in the face once Buck’s eyes opened and met Eddie’s across a hospital room. A different kind of falling. A different kind of shattering.
He feels a hand on his shoulder and looks up into his Captain’s understanding eyes. Of course Bobby gets it. Of course Bobby looks up at the image of a firefighter hanging from a ladder and sees what Eddie sees. They don’t talk about it, they don’t acknowledge it, but everyone knows Bobby views Buck as a son. That Bobby also spent those days in a free fall, knowing exactly what the ground would feel like when he shattered against it.
Eddie wonders what the others know about how Eddie views Buck that they don’t talk about. That they don’t acknowledge.
“I know,” is all Bobby says as he squeezes his shoulder.
Eddie hears the acknowledgement in that I know. Hears Eddie, you’re driving. Hears You don’t seem to have a problem committing to certain things. Hears what Bobby has known, what Eddie has been trying desperately to ignore.
“Do you think you can go up there? I can send Chim.”
Eddie finds himself shaking his head, forcing himself to stuff what he can manage back into the box inside his chest.
“I’ve got it, Cap. Just…just needed a moment.”
Bobby nods and snaps back into Captain mode, shouting out orders for Buck and Eddie to go up there and help the poor stunt man Brad had endangered.
Eddie feels Buck’s eyes on him the entire time he’s working. He always does. Buck isn’t nearly as good as Eddie is at hiding his emotions. Doesn’t even try. It’s one of the things Eddie loves about him.
Loves.
Yeah, that box had been messily put away, the contents spilling out into Eddie like ink on parchment and he’s helpless to stop it. Doesn’t really want to. It has been so exhausting, ignoring the truth of what he had felt that night. Pretending like every part of him wasn’t screaming to grab Buck and hold him tight whenever they were together. And for what? Ignoring those feelings hadn’t even protected him, had maybe even led to the worst mistake of his life and cost him his son for these past few months. No, Eddie’s done with compartmentalizing his emotions, even when they scare him. Maybe especially when they do.
As they wrap up at the scene, Grady the stunt man just happy they got the shot as they load him into the ambulance, Eddie meets Buck’s curious gaze. And Eddie doesn’t turn away.
He knows Buck. He knows Buck has been biting his tongue and waiting for this call to be over to ask Eddie what’s wrong. Because Buck never saw himself that night. Never had the gruesome image of his dangling corpse swinging above their heads burned into his eyes. Buck has absolutely no idea why the other four of them froze in their tracks at the sight, wouldn’t even cross his mind that his family at the 118 still carry the trauma from that night in their bones.
And another version of Eddie wouldn’t have brought it up. Wouldn’t have explained. Would have told Buck everything was fine, don’t worry about it. Would have pretended he didn’t remember. He’s done it before.
Hey what do you remember about getting shot?
There was a searing pain. It felt like I get hit by a bus. And I was still standing. I remember falling. And everything got dark. And I thought this is it. This is the last moment of my life. Then I woke up in the hospital.
And that was it?
That was it.
But Eddie is done running away and pretending not to feel anything. He’s done denying himself this. Denying him and Buck this. Buck, who is one of the most open and caring people he knows, who wears every emotion on his sleeve, deserves to hear him say it.
It’s not going to be an easy conversation. It’s going to be filled with a lot of hurt and unburying some shit from some admittedly shallow graves. But he wants to. Because he never wants to fall again without having said it. Without Buck knowing.
“Hey, do you want to come over and have a few beers after our shift?”
Eddie notes the way Buck’s face lights up. Sees it register that while here and now is clearly not the time to discuss why exactly Eddie looked like he was going to puke when they first arrived, Eddie is opening the door for Buck to ask about it. That Eddie isn’t going to run away from Buck’s questions like he did when he was having his panic attacks with Ana. Like he did when Buck wanted to talk about him leaving the 118. Like he did when Buck wanted to talk about Eddie’s own near death experience which Buck had been witness to.
“Yeah! Yeah o-of course! I would love that,” Buck smiles and bumps Eddie’s shoulder gently as they climb into the back of the engine.
Eddie smiles. He already knew the answer. Asking was a formality. Because Buck has never once denied Eddie anything.