Chapter Text
It is the end of July when he sets foot in L.A. for the first time. With nothing but three suitcases, his backpack, and his son, Eddie Diaz walks out of LAX and into the new chapter of his life.
It is tempting to reflect on everything and everyone he left behind in Texas, but Eddie is here for a fresh start. A clean slate cannot contain traces of the past and Eddie managed to keep all the nostalgia at bay for the entire flight to Los Angeles.
Still, his mind drifts East as they wait for their luggage to arrive. The soft hum of too many people in a room with terrible acoustics serves as white noise as Eddie rethinks the last few months.
Shannon had died in a car accident roughly seven months ago as she was trying to avoid a child running onto the street to catch their ball.
The child survived, Shannon did not.
Eddie still cannot fully forgive the innocent kid yet.
It had taken him only a couple of days to realise that Shannon’s passing meant he no longer had any reason to stay in El Paso. To not upend Chris’s life further, Eddie decided to hold off on moving away until the school year had ended.
Then, last week, they celebrated Christopher’s eleventh birthday. The party had served as both a celebration of Chris and a farewell to the life they had built in Texas.
Now, as they walk through the glass sliding doors into the summer heat, Christopher asks with all his eleven-year-old innocence, “Dad?”
Eddie wordlessly looks at him in acknowledgement.
“Is our house going to be big?”
Eddie fondly smiles down at him. “No, kiddo, it’s not going to be big. I’m not some rich guy with a fancy diploma, remember?”
Chris looks a little dejected at the news, though Eddie has thoroughly prepared him for their new life on the West Coast. His son considers it for a couple of seconds until, suddenly, his face lights up and he starts grinning like a madman.
“What are you smiling about?” Eddie asks amusedly.
Instead of answering the question, Chris poses another one, “You are going to be a hero here, right? An even bigger hero than you already are.”
Eddie nods, resisting the urge to correct that small overstatement.
“Well, having a dad who is a hero is much cooler than having a dad with a diploma and a big house.”
Eddie’s smile broadens before he reassures him, “I’m glad you think that buddy, but I’m not that special.”
“To me, you are.”
Though Chris is mainly referring to the medal Eddie got from his time in the army, which is one of those pieces of history he would prefer to leave in Texas, his heart melts all the same. One of his biggest fears about moving away from El Paso was that Chris would have to miss the people he loves most, people Eddie will never be able to replace with his lone person.
A child needs their family and Eddie knows that just a father is no replacement for that. Hearing that Chris is proud to be his son makes the guilt slightly easier to bear.
He extends his hand and Chris immediately holds onto it. As they wait for an unoccupied taxi to arrive, Eddie promises Christopher, “The house is not going to be big, but it’s going to be cosy. You’re going to love it, trust me.”
That seems to settle Chris's mood, a content expression seeping into his features.
Then, Eddie finally manages to wave an empty taxi over. He drops their baggage inside the trunk and tells the driver the address of their new home.
Slightly shaking from excitement, Chris presses himself tightly against Eddie’s side. As small, sweaty palms squeeze creases into his shirt, Eddie gets his first view of L.A. as it flashes past the car window.
Pressing a soft kiss on top of Christopher’s curls, he whispers, “We are going to do just fine here, buddy.”
Eddie then rests his chin on the spot where his lips had just been. “We are going to be okay.”
He does not know whom he is promising it to.
~*~
They do end up being okay.
Eddie has applied for a job at a plethora of different places: the local grocery store, the mall, the hospital; there is not a single spot in the city of L.A. that is missing his resume.
He receives plenty of positive responses from most places but ignores them all until he gets an answer from his place of preference: the local fire station.
It is the job he had been eyeing back in Texas, the one that will make him a hero, according to Chris. Before the confirmation comes that he got the spot as a firefighter, he does not openly admit to anyone that the fire station has his preference. Consequently, Eddie has lied to six job interviewers that he is thinking about their offer.
When Eddie gets the message that he got a job after a few weeks of living in L.A., he is glad he did not succumb to the monetary pressure by agreeing to work at any of those other places willing to hire him.
He craves the adrenaline rush only a job that puts you in dangerous situations can offer, and standing behind a conveyor belt hardly ever gives rise to those. Being a firefighter, on the contrary, ticks all his boxes.
Long story short, thanks to his medic training in the army and his devotion to working out, Eddie gets to be a firefighter. The team of station 118 is waiting for him.
L.A. has given him the life he had only dared to wish for, and then some.
Life is going perfectly for Eddie Diaz.
That should have been a flashing warning sign, a hollering alarm, a telltale indicator of danger. Eddie has learnt the hard way that when things sound too good to be true, they always are. He should have questioned the apparent perfection of this new life he found himself in.
Unfortunately, he had not.
That bright August morning when he enters the spacious garage of the fire station and is accepted with open arms, he should have been weary. When he mindlessly changes into his uniform, blurring out the voices of the other firefighters, he should have been on high alert. Maybe then, seeing the face that has been haunting his dreams since he was nineteen might not have shaken him to the core. Instead, he might have managed to steady his emotions and kept his face blank, avoiding all those strangers knowing exactly how he feels.
He had just accepted his lucky fate though, no questions asked. That is why, when Eddie turns around at the sound of Henrietta saying something about being into girls, the shirt he was attempting to put on falls to the ground as his limbs freeze in shock. The blood in his veins turns to ice, fright taking over any sane reaction he could have had if only he had been more attentive.
Right there in front of him stands the one and only Evan Buckley. It might have been over eleven years since he last saw the man, but Eddie would recognize that confident stance and pink birthmark anywhere.
At the same time, he recognizes that the person in front of him is not the boy Eddie knew so well, with curly, soft hair and a smile so bright it battled the sun. Neither is this the vulnerable young man whose heart he broke at the fragile age of eighteen.
Standing before him is a full-grown man. The precise outline of his body might be unfamiliar, but Eddie knows its proportions. He knows where the skin tends to stretch and where it caves under the touch of tender fingertips.
When he looks up into Evan Buckley’s eyes, he also knows that the soul inside that body is completely undiscovered terrain.
He recognizes him, but only as you would recognize a favourite song from your childhood: the general sentiments and memories it holds, not the concrete content.
Red in the shade of embarrassment heats up Eddie’s cheeks as his reaction to seeing a virtual stranger settles in. He has dropped his shirt and now stands bare-chested in front of the guy, jaw slack, hanging open like he's waiting to catch a grape with his mouth.
Self-consciously, he rushes out of the locker room, past three open-mouthed faces and one avoiding gaze of blue sorrow.
Losing the way multiple times because he is not yet familiar with every turn and corner of the streets of L.A., Eddie runs back to his house. Yet, when he arrives at his porch, he does not walk up the stairs. Instead, he spins around and continues to run until his thighs tremble and his lungs are raw. He runs until he cannot think anymore and then he runs some more.
He says silent prayers of thanks for the scorning sun and the well-known tendency of L.A.’s citizens to run the pavement from underneath their feet. In any other city, the sight of a shirtless man running away from his demons would have made questions rise and heads turn. In the city of Los Angeles, Eddie is just another body in the mass.
After what must have been hours, he feels empty enough to return to the fire station. His feet drag behind him, only partially because of his bone-deep exhaustion. The main reason he dreads walking back between the fire engines is his shame over the fanatic escape from earlier.
As scenarios of doom begin to flood his mind, Eddie forces himself to stay positive. When they fire him, he at least won’t have to face Evan ever again.
Eddie climbs up to the loft of the fire station, begging any God willing to listen that Evan Buckley has left already. He reaches the top of the stairs and is instantly relieved to find the room deserted. Only Captain Nash seems to be lingering around.
There is no sign of Buck. Someone should call the pope; a miracle has transpired. For once in his miserable life, someone must have been listening to the begging of Eddie Diaz' poor lost soul.
Captain Nash looks up from whatever he is reading on his tablet and smiles gently when he spots him. “Eddie," he says, "welcome back.”
Eddie cuts to the chase, wishing to get past the embarrassment as soon as possible. He might have a general inclination towards torturing himself, but right now he has no patience for politeness.
“I don’t need your pity,” he tells Captain Nash curtly. “Tell me where to sign and I’ll leave.”
Captain Nash frowns at him and rises from his chair as he asks with genuine interest, “What are you talking about?”
At that, Eddie lets out a deep sigh. Since he has no desire to talk through the events that transpired that morning, he sums it up himself, “I was unprofessional and it’s only my first day working here at the station. You are obviously firing me.”
Before Captain Nash can respond to that, Eddie raises his hand in a defensive gesture. “You have every right to do so. Just tell me where to sign, and I’ll be out of your hair. It’ll be like I have never even been here at all.”
About halfway through his pathetic little speech, Captain Nash starts shaking his head. When he sees Eddie has finished, he says firmly, “Eddie, I’m not going to fire you.”
It makes Eddie look up in surprise. “Buck”, he continues, and Eddie’s breath gets stuck in his throat at hearing that nickname, “explained that you two have a complicated history, but he also assured me that it would not influence his performance on the job.”
He leaves a pause and lets his words simmer for a couple of seconds. When it becomes obvious that Eddie is not going to say anything, Captain Nash goes on, “If you can promise me the same thing, then you are free to continue your probationary period at the 118. However, if you are going to flee every time you see Buck, I will recommend you to another station. You’re the one who calls the shots on this one. For now.”
His tone is factual, leaving no doubt that Eddie will only be given one chance to choose. However, the magnitude of that opportunity gets overshadowed by the other piece of information the captain gave him: Evan Buckley believes that they can work together, truly believes that they can face each other every day without creating any major issues along the way.
Eddie would love nothing more than to blindly follow him in that ideal. However, he hesitates to immediately vow to it. Buck has always been the strongest believer out of the two of them.
In the eleven years they spent apart, there has been a hollow wound festering in Eddie's chest. He strongly doubts he will be able to ignore it when on the job. Though the infection’s source has changed over the past decade, moving from Buck’s pain to something that is inherently solely Eddie’s, seeing its original instigator will not help with the healing process.
Nonetheless, this is the job he so desperately wanted, the sole thing he truly wants to spend his time on.
In the end, Eddie thinks about Christopher and about how he always tells his son to be brave and follow his heart even if it leads you to places that appear daunting at first.
“I would like to stay here, Captain Nash,” he concludes, “and I promise you I won’t be a burden to you or your team.”
As he extends his hand to shake Eddie’s, Captain Nash replies, “Well, then you are more than welcome to stay. And it’s Bobby, by the way.”
Eddie nods. “Right. Well, thank you, Bobby. I greatly appreciate this opportunity and I swear I won’t fuck it up.”
Bobby holds onto his hand a little longer. The longer the handshake lasts, the more uncomfortable Eddie begins to feel.
Then, the friendly smile falls from Bobby’s lips and as a shiver runs down Eddie’s spine, he says, “You’re welcome, Eddie. I would just like to remind you not to mess with Buck. He has been here longer than you have and if I notice he is suffering under you being here, I will not hesitate to fire you. Is that understood, Eddie?”
It is obvious how seriously Bobby takes this threat, so he nods with all the conviction he can muster. Eddie has no idea how he will survive seeing Buck almost every day without revealing the bleeding of his heart. He will try his very best though; for Christopher, and for Buck, and mostly for himself.
L.A. is supposed to be his clean slate. This might be the closure he has been chasing for eleven years.
~*~
After finishing his shift at the 118, Eddie returns home just in time to have dinner with Chris. He orders in under the guise of it being his first day, and a heavy one at that, though the real reason is his general distaste for cooking.
Munching on his burger, Chris asks him about his first day as a firefighter, his eyes alight with pure admiration over Eddie’s job.
Eddie indulges with a smile and tells him all about the people he helped today, about the man who shot himself with a nail gun, the woman who threw shit out of a window, and the little boy whose mother had a seizure. Eddie tells him in detail about every one of his colleagues and about the different kinds of vehicles they use on emergencies.
Sitting at their small kitchen table, enjoying their overpriced but edible meal, Eddie tells Chris about everything apart from Buck.
He tells himself it is not a conscious decision to leave the man out of the conversation. At the same time, Eddie knows that that thought alone shows he is willfully ignoring Buck’s existence.
There are too many feelings to sort through before he can casually discuss that topic with his son. For some reason, even saying his name feels like too much at the moment. Eleven years of repression floating to the surface is not something he can unpack over a couple of burgers and some soda, certainly not with his eleven-year-old son who may or may not be the reason there is something to discuss in the first place.
So Eddie tells Christopher every last detail of his first day at the 118, except for the one that uprooted the delicate peace of their life in L.A.
The veil behind which Buck has been lingering all these years is thinning and their past is coming back in brighter colours than it ever has before. However, as Eddie has been doing for years, he ignores the ghostly presence and forces himself to move through the mundane routine of life; clearing the table, watching TV, and brushing his teeth.
After Chris is securely tucked in, one last firefighting story told and a night light softly glowing, Eddie heads to his fridge to grab a beer. He has to reach past the pile of dishes they left to reach for his cap opener, but those plates and glasses are something he will worry about later.
Today drained the marrow out of his bones, so Eddie feels like he deserves to relax on his couch and watch one of his telenovelas. He usually watches those with Chris, but since his eyes are already drooping, Eddie doubts he will remember much of the episode come tomorrow.
Settling into a comfortable position, he uncaps his beer and indulges in the small and insignificant worries of the people on his screen. When he begins to nod off, Eddie indulges some more and lets his eyes fall shut, allowing sleep to take him to some faraway place.
Some hours later, he wakes up with a mind foggy from flashes of wide smiles and curls, of heartbreak and tears. The persisting stabs of reminiscence in his chest make him regret taking a nap, but what’s past is past.
Using his fists to push himself up, Eddie gets off his couch. He stretches the lingering sleep from his limbs and walks to the kitchen. There, he then begins to thoughtlessly do those dishes he avoided earlier. With his mind still clouded by his dreams, Eddie goes through the motions of filling the sink with water, adding dish soap and letting the plates, glasses, and cutlery soak for a while.
After a couple minutes of nothing but staring ahead in eerie silence, he starts taking the items back out of the water, his trusty sponge at the ready.
With two plates and two glasses, one pot and a pan dripping to his right, Eddie then grabs one of the knives. His focus is elsewhere, a place he hardly ever lets himself drift off to, and he is not paying enough attention as his fingers connect with the blade of the meat knife. Blood immediately pours out of the palm of his hand, turning the lukewarm water a soft shade of pink.
At first, Eddie does nothing but gape at the blood running out of his palm as it first circles his wrist to then drop by drop darken the dirty dishwater. At long last, his medic instincts kick in and he runs to his medicine cabinet for his first aid kit.
As he takes care of his wounds, his traitorous mind takes him back to El Paso and some other wounds he carefully tended to. For the first time since seeing Buck again outside that glass locker room, Eddie does not stop the memories from washing over him. With his wound fully disinfected and protected from the air, he goes to sit on his kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets.
Then, Eddie lets the memory of how it all started flush over him.
It was twenty-one years ago, a warm June afternoon in 2004, and Eddie Diaz was nine years old. He was sitting on the swing set in the small, desolate park near his house, though his legs were not trying to make him gain height. Instead, he was staring at a boy doing the strangest things imaginable on a small bike.
As he watched the boy jump with the bike, Eddie could hear his mother’s voice in the back of his mind, saying things like ‘reckless’ and ‘stupid’. The boy was being reckless and stupid, but his tricks made Eddie smile, so he kept staring in awe.
The boy was risking his life to jump from a picnic table onto a rock that, even in Eddie’s nine-year-old opinion, looked extremely sharp and unstable.
Though it was highly unsafe, the smile on the boy’s face showed how happy it made him. Eddie could feel himself smile as well as he looked at the boy being reckless and stupid.
Of course, the fun and games could not last. The boy tried another jump, twisting his bike in ways Eddie was sure it should not be twisted. Eddie saw the disaster coming before it happened. The front wheel hit a rock. A small rock, but still big enough to disturb the boy’s balance, and he fell down.
The crash seemed to last forever and the entire time, all Eddie could think was ‘reckless’ and ‘stupid’. However, he did have to give the boy some credit, since he never once let go of the handles of his bike to break his fall.
It took the boy a few seconds to scramble to his feet. When Eddie saw that his palms were bleeding and full of small pebbles, his big brother instincts kicked in. He got up from his swing and approached the boy, who only noticed Eddie when he came to a halt right next to him.
As he looked up, Eddie could see his eyes shining with tears. He was not crying though, not yet.
Boys do not cry, Eddie knew that, but he kind of wished the boy would let go of the tears. It looked painful, holding onto them.
Cautiously, he raised his hand in a resemblance of a wave and introduced himself.
“Hello,” he said, ‘I’m Eddie.”
The boy looked a little lost and very confused. His disorientation could come from his minor crash, but something about his expression made Eddie think that perhaps he had not expected anyone to come over and offer help.
“My name is Evan,” he replied, “but only my parents call me that. I like Buck better.”
Eddie nodded in understanding because he, too, liked the name Buck better. Evan sounded too serious for a boy as reckless and stupid as Buck.
“My name is actually Edmundo, but I think that name is very ugly, so everyone just calls me Eddie.”
The boy, Buck, let out a little chuckle before composing himself and nodding just as Eddie had done before.
Because it is the polite thing to do when you meet someone new, Eddie raised his palm for a handshake. He noticed his mistake as Buck offered him his blood-stained one in return.
Buck stared at his own hand as if it did not belong to him. “Oh,” he said, “sorry, I don’t think I’m going to give you a hand.”
“Of course, that’s fine,” Eddie reassured him. “That is actually why I came over; to take care of your hands.”
Though he did not say a thing, the eyebrow Buck raised showed how surprised he was by that confession. His words only confirmed Eddie’s previous suspicion that Buck had not expected help.
“You want to take care of me?”
“Yes.” Then, mistaking Buck’s disbelief for distrust, Eddie explained, “I have two younger sisters who often have small wounds from dance or P.E. or just playing around, and since my mom and dad are always working, I usually take care of them.”
No response came, so Eddie knelt down to get eye-levelled with Buck. Gently, he took Buck’s left hand in his own. It was full of dirt and pebbles that desperately needed to be cleaned out. They were in a park though, with nothing in their vicinity to disinfect wounds.
Not seeing any other solution, Eddie proposed, “Do you want to come to my house? I need to clean your hands before putting a band-aid on them, but I can’t do that here.”
Buck nodded and cleared his throat before answering, “Yeah, sure. If you say so.”
He sheepishly looked at Eddie through his lashes and Eddie thought to himself that, even though the boy was reckless and stupid, he looked like one of the kindest person in the whole world.
“I do,” Eddie ensured him as Buck got to his feet. His jeans were ripped on one knee and there was dirt on his white sneakers, but apart from that, he seemed okay. Eddie grabbed the handles of Buck’s bike and off they went.
Now, years later, Eddie cradles his own bleeding hand as he thinks about how, in hindsight, that was the start of something bigger, something he prays to forget every single time he remembers it.
Eddie prays for it, but never in a church, never to a god. In moments like these, when the world outside has gone dark and quiet, he can admit to himself that the memories he shares with Buck are the most precious ones from his entire childhood and teenage years. He prays for them to go away, but silently wishes for them to stay.
Shaking the nostalgia off with a deep shudder, Eddie gets up from the floor to tidy his first aid kit and finish the dishes with one hand.
It is almost two in the morning by the time he manages to fall into bed, yet sleep does not come. Instead, his brain works overtime as it tries to give some meaning to his past now that he has allowed it to haunt him again.
Eddie has never believed in ghosts or in any other kind of supernatural life. However, it turns out that haunting is not solely reserved for dead people; he forgot about ghosts from the past.
Admittedly, Buck had been spooking around his brain for years. And for all those years, Eddie had let it happen. Some lovesick part of him clung to the painful memories like a child to its mother’s leg: to seek comfort, to feel grounded.
The memories he has of Buck are some of his most painful to relive, yet at the same time also some of the most real. After Buck, Eddie’s life became a haze he constantly attempted to escape. Despite his best efforts, he always ended up with the exact opposite of a getaway; he was rooted in the reality of a life he had not wanted, with no place to run to.
He has not felt anything as pure since Buck; he most likely never will.
Buck was his first love and first loves do not last. People talk about the force of first love all the time, about how it leaves an imprint on all future relationships. Because of that, Eddie always considered the persisting aches of his first love as normal, something everyone experiences.
Yet lying on his bed, hundreds of miles and more than a decade away from his first love, he is not fully convinced that his first experience with romantic love is the same as everyone else’s.
Quite the contrary, actually. All those people, with their wise words about first love, know nothing about him. They can claim whatever they want, but none of them had Buck as their first love. None of them kissed Buck on his twelfth birthday and realised that every turbulent sea can quiet down if only you find your anchor.
No one’s first love was like Eddie’s first love because no one’s first love was Evan Buckley.
It is both heartbreaking and soul-restoring to realise that Buck still means so much to him. Not Buck, the man he saw at the fire station, but Buck, the first and only boy Eddie ever allowed himself to love.
A soft knock on his door drags Eddie out of his pondering.
“Dad?” he hears Christopher’s sleepy voice ask.
Immediately, he scrambles to his feet. “Yeah bud, come on in.”
The hinges of his bedroom door creak faintly and Chris appears, his red glasses askew on his nose.
“What’s up, kiddo? Why are you awake at-” Eddie turns to check the alarm clock on his bedside table, “quarter to three?”
Chris looks at him with a frown on his lips that makes Eddie’s heart hurt. He knows what that look means.
“I had a bad dream.”
“Oh, buddy, come here,” Eddie says as he opens his arms. Chris steps into the embrace and wraps himself around Eddie. His hands cling to Eddie’s sleeping shirt so tightly that he has a slight worry it might rip under the force.
Tenderly, Eddie presses a kiss onto the crown of Chris’s head. “Do you want to talk about it? Or is cuddling enough?”
For a few seconds, only the soft sounds of their breathing fill the room.
Then, Chris murmurs, “I dreamt that you died, dad,” and Eddie’s heart breaks a little more. “You went to work and I went to school, but when I came home you weren’t there. I didn’t know where you were, until grandma and grandpa called and said that there had been an accident and that you were dead, just like-”
His voice breaks and violent sobs come out instead of words. It makes it impossible for Chris to finish his sentence, but he tries all the same. “Just like-”
Eddie shushes his anguish and holds him even closer. “I’m here, Chris. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
He loosens his grip a little so Chris can lean back enough to look him in the eye. “You can hear my heartbeat, right?”
Chris nods. He untangles one of his hands from Eddie’s shirt and places it on his chest, right above his heart. “Right here, dad,” he says with a shaky voice.
The simple sensation of feeling his father’s heart beat in his chest calms Chris’s fears down, as it always does. Eddie watches his son visibly relax and it makes tears pool in thr corners of his eyes. Eddie gently smiles through them to show his son how proud he is.
He then lets go of Chris’s head and in turn places his hand on his son’s chest, feeling the thrum of his smaller heart beneath his fingertips. “And here is yours.”
After a couple of minutes with their hands on the other’s heart, Chris has calmed down enough to let go of Eddie’s shirt.
“Are you okay to return to your own room, or do you want to stay here?” Eddie asks softly.
Chris thinks about it for a couple of seconds. In the end, he opts for his own bed over Eddie’s. With his small hand stiffly holding onto Eddie's, they walk to Chris’s room. Eddie tucks him in once more and places a soft kiss on his forehead before he whispers, “G’night, buddy. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Blinking hard to fight sleep, Chris mumbles, “Promise?”
“Promise,” Eddie says, firmly enough so his son can hear his conviction.
He leaves the door open an inch as he returns to his own room. Eddie’s sheets are cold as he crawls under the covers.
Still, sleep does not come and, as he strays back to the route he was walking before, he rethinks his previous conclusions.
Buck is not the only boy Eddie ever loved. He also loves Christopher, loves him more than anything in the world. Be that as it may, common sense says that those two kinds of love cannot be compared to one another.
So, Eddie has loved two boys in his life and somehow he managed to mess both of them up. He broke Buck’s heart first, by not loving him like he deserved and maiming him exactly where he was most vulnerable. That fracture gave birth to his other big love, his son, until Eddie ruined that as well; not by loving him wrongly, but by showing his love in ways that could only ever result in a crash.
Eddie loved two boys and he broke them both. With that thought swarming through his head like a mantra, sleep finally finds him.
~*~
It is a restless night of sleep. When he wakes up to the beeping of his alarm, Eddie feels a sense of calm in his sleep-heavy limbs. The calm lasts a good thirty seconds before he remembers his late-night pondering, and it makes room for a sense of shame.
Those thoughts were ridiculous. Eddie promised Bobby only yesterday that he would ensure his and Buck’s past would not complicate their jobs. Then he spends the night recalling their meeting and how he once loved that man.
Even Eddie, who generally speaking can be quite obtuse when it comes to properly dealing with past relationships, knows to keep memories and thoughts like those behind lock and key.
Eddie once loved Buck, but that love does not belong here in L.A. It belongs in the past, to two innocent boys stuck in a dreamworld vision of life. His love for Buck belongs to the quiet and dark of seclusion, not the warmth and comfort of daylight.
Life in L.A. and everything that comes with it had been going well until Buck became a part of it. Now, the joy Eddie has found in this new life, the life that was supposed to be easy and free of lying and stress, has become just as volatile as the joy of his previous life.
As Eddie gets dressed that morning, preparing himself for his second day as a firefighter, he relocks that box of memories shut and throws the key back into the shadows of his mind.
Knocking on the frame of his bedroom door, Eddie wakes Chris up to get them both ready for the day. The sleep-rumpled face of his son eases some of his anxiety, though it does not vanish entirely. With a lingering sense of dread in his chest, the two of them prepare to face a new day in Los Angeles.
Eddie prepares Chris’s lunch as the boy eats his breakfast. He shaves his face and packs his own bag as he waits for Chris to tie his shoes. He drops Chris off at school and takes a deep breath as he drives towards the fire station, towards Buck and everything else he is trying to ignore.
That August morning, as Eddie walks through the garage doors of the 118’s fire station, he pledges to himself to never let anyone see the pieces of Buck he still carries within himself. He buries them deeper as he puts his bag in his locker. He says goodbye to his sun-rimmed memories as he walks up the stairs to the loft. He vows to set long-foregone love free as he grabs his colleague’s hand, pulls him close and pats him on the shoulder.
Then, without a tremble in his voice, Eddie says, “Good morning, Buck.”