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Buck makes it back to the house on autopilot.
His legs barely work and his mind rushes a mile a minute, only to remind him of the evitable tragedy they’re recovering from. That they’re never recovering from.
Buck saw too many things today, too many things he never thought he’d see. He saw unstoppable, invincible Sergeant Athena Grant breaking down, crying, having to be held by the people around her, devoid of hope.
He saw Chimney devastated beyond words, bleeding in more places than Buck could count but alive, in one piece, wishing he could be anywhere but here.
He saw Hen, with a hole in her chest, crying and crying from a gurney just like the ones she expertly maneuvers every day of her life, painfully ironic as life tends to be.
He saw Ravi shaking, falling backwards against a wall, likely thinking about how he planned to leave them, to quit, and how he would’ve dodged a bullet if he had. He looked young and scared and broken and Buck realized he never stopped being the probie he once knew. It’s jarring.
Buck saw officers and sergeants and soldiers and people occupying every leadership position under the sun move on with their lives like the world didn’t just lose one of the best people to ever come into it. Like it didn’t matter.
Buck had to listen to Maddie breaking over the phone. Had to watch as people issued orders and phone calls to deliver the news to the one-eighteen extended family, partners and children and friends and everyone who loved Bobby Nash, the neverending list of people who were touched by his kindness.
At the top of the list, there’s his name. He’s greedy enough to position himself there. He’s in enough pain to know that it wouldn’t matter, either way.
Bobby Nash saved his life more times than he can count, and in more ways than one. Bobby Nash was the father he never had. The one he needed growing up. The man who was supposed to be there to take his hand when he fell, to pat him on the back when he got back up.
Bobby Nash was the man who would be there at his wedding. Bobby Nash was supposed to watch him grow up into the role model he made himself out to be. Bobby Nash was supposed to be proud of him. He was supposed to be there for Buck when things got rough. When things got quiet.
Instead, Buck had to watch.
Buck had to look Moira Blake in the face and blink as his brain told him that he wasn’t strong enough. His heart was kicking and screaming for him to do something, to kill her if he must, for being the reason Bobby was ripped from him forever, and still, he couldn’t move.
He froze.
He froze and the only thing he could think of was Bobby, Bobby saying he loves him, Bobby and the subtext of his last goodbye, asking him to take care of the team in the way he showed Buck to.
Bobby reminding him that he was the one who taught Buck how to cook, who guided him through growing up, who gave him enough advice to fill out a book, who taught him more life lessons than he’d ever be able to learn on his own.
Bobby asking him to give him a moment alone with his wife, and Buck thinking, that’s fair, but what about me? Bobby asking him to turn his back on him, to walk away as he said goodbye because he was about to die, and Buck couldn’t be there. Buck couldn’t do anything except comply, while all of it computed.
While the inevitable reality settled in, that he would never see Bobby Nash’s face ever again. That the second that he walked out that door, that would be it. The world shifted around him, it gave in beneath his feet. One moment, Buck and Bobby were there. The next, Bobby wasn’t.
The next, Buck wasn’t, either.
Now, he’s sitting on the floor of the house, staring into the empty darkness of the living room. Moonlight filters through one of the windows and the golden shadows of the past are already haunting him. The crushing weight of a simpler past settles on his shoulders.
He sees a faded silhouette of himself leaning over the couch, clanking the neck of his beer bottle against Eddie’s. The pictures on the refrigerator are radioactive and that’s why they’re glowing, burning through his retinas, pressing down on a big, new, dark bruise.
Buck closes his eyes and he hears Chris’ footsteps down the hallway and suddenly, it’s all tangible. Loss. He can feel it between his fingers, like long, silky hair.
He feels lonely and astray and broken. He hasn’t spoken to Christopher in weeks and Eddie is in Texas and Bobby… Bobby is dead. He’s dead and he’s never coming back, and that’s a reality he never wants to settle into.
He can’t go to bed and wake up tomorrow under Eddie’s ceiling in a world where Bobby isn’t also waking up, ready to start the day with a workout routine or a smoothie or a kiss to his wife’s lips.
And it’s so strange, the way it’s all mushing together in his brain, like Bobby’s death and Eddie’s departure are in any way related, but they are, aren’t they?
Because Eddie had to find out over the phone, and that’s just not right. Buck is leaning against Eddie’s front door, and sitting on the floor of Eddie’s house, while Eddie is in Texas and actually has no idea what the last few hours have been like for them, and it’s not right.
It’s not right that Buck is mourning so many things, all at once. That earlier today, they were at the fire station, eating breakfast and cracking jokes, and Buck was cooking, and he called Eddie over FaceTime, and Eddie seemed happier and better and like he could breathe, and so Buck was stupid enough to think that, maybe, he could, too.
Earlier today, Bobby was smiling at him from across the kitchen, promising to teach him another recipe when they were back from their next call, and then Bobby was dead, and then they were never back from that call, and then everything crumbled, just like that.
How could a rush of adrenaline to the head make Buck think that everything could be fixed—that he could help fix it—because he’s the guy who fixes things, and with Athena by his side, what could ever go wrong?
And then they got the antidote and then he was on Tommy’s helicopter, being snapped at, and then they were being chased by drones, and then Athena ran off, and then Chimney was okay, and the world settled, and now…
Now, today feels like a fever dream, and there’s nothing Buck can do to erase the last hour and a half from his mind and from existence to make things right again. To make Bobby be here again. So that he can see his children and his wife and Maddie’s baby and the way Buck learns to master that stupid recipe, because he can do it.
He can do it, he can fix it, he can—
“How are you?” a voice asks, and Buck looks down at his hands, startled, to find that Eddie is on the phone, and he’s not sure who called whom.
Buck turns the question around in his mind. He chews on it and tries to swallow it but the lump in his throat won’t let him. Eddie’s voice broke on the word how. He took a deep breath after finishing the question, like his lungs could barely hold enough air to help him get through it in a single breath.
Buck can understand that.
He opens his mouth but no words come out, until, “did I call you?” and it’s stupid, he feels stupid for it, but Eddie doesn’t judge him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I was gonna call, but I didn’t know—”
Eddie’s been crying. Buck can tell because Eddie almost never cries, not in front of him, and the way he sounds now reminds Buck of that time he had to break down his door and his heart almost lurched out of his chest, and his brain was an unbearable rush of is he dead? Is Eddie dead? Please, don’t let him be dead.
Now, it’s Bobby who’s dead, and Buck couldn’t have kicked the door down even if he tried. He couldn’t help put up walls around it, or hold Bobby’s hand to help him get up, or take his kids into his arms and promise them that he’d be okay, because as it turns out, death is more sudden than that.
Bobby’s death was, at least.
Which is probably why Eddie is crying.
“Eddie,” Buck says, and there’s a lot more tucked in there, carefully placed into every letter. There’s help me, but also, I got you. There’s I need you, but also, how are you? Buck blinks rapidly at the ceiling, and everything else is quiet around him.
The only thing that remains is the static coming from his phone, the everlasting, all-encompassing presence of Eddie through miles of distance.
“Who told you?” Buck asks, because he vaguely remembers anything between Bobby saying I love you, and tumbling into this house. This house that still doesn’t feel his. Tonight less than ever.
Eddie clears his throat. Buck hears him swallow. “Hen.”
Pain shoots across Buck’s chest. He thinks, it should’ve been me, and he means it in many ways. It should’ve been me telling you, and I hate that Hen had to go through that. It should’ve been me, because you shouldn’t get news like these from anyone that isn’t me.
It should’ve been me in Bobby’s place, because—
“I got out,” Buck whispers, and he feels the tears welling up in his eyes, burning in their sockets. “Did she tell you?”
Eddie is silent, and for once, Buck doesn’t know what it means.
Just in case, he continues. “Before the team got locked in, I made it out. I felt useless,” he confesses. “I thought, ‘if we’re bound to go, we should all go together’.”
Eddie, rationally, says, “that’s not a solution.” Buck doesn’t reply, because he doesn’t feel like he needs to. Eventually, Eddie adds, “but you’re right. I should’ve been there, too.”
There are words tucked in there, too. And the weight of grief becomes almost insufferable, just like that. Buck can almost hear the cord snapping, the Earth giving in. The weight of the sky falling on his shoulders, like Atlas, except that he’s too weak to bear it.
“Why?” Eddie asks, and Buck isn’t sure what he said in the past few seconds, too absent to make proper sense of things. To understand that the world keeps turning, because it shouldn’t. Bobby’s dead, so what’s the point?
Buck breathes deeply through his nose. “What?”
“You said ‘I’m glad you weren’t’,” Eddie fills in, and oh, yeah. That’s the kind of truth Buck wouldn’t have wanted to spill out, because it’s too raw, too transparent, and he’s done enough of that for a lifetime.
He drops his head against the door. “I don’t know how to keep losing people,” Buck admits, shattered, and some of the weight—the tiniest bit—eases. “How…?”
“Tell me about it,” Eddie says, and Buck wonders. He wonders, looking to the space by his side, if Eddie has also left a ghost in here. A silhouette. Leaning over the couch, fueled by grief and sadness, running into his room or hitting the walls with a baseball bat.
He wonders if there are shadows of everyone Eddie’s ever lost here, too. If he can see Shannon or his army buddies as clearly as Buck sees Bobby, smiling at him, stark against the window.
He closes his eyes, and comes to the conclusion that, one day, there won’t be enough room for them. He knows it’s not rational, that it’s not healthy, but that’s what it feels like now. One day, the shadows will take over, and this house won’t be theirs.
This house. The house.
In a way, they’re already there. Buck is.
“There’s only so many people I can—”
Eddie sniffles, cutting Buck off. Right then, Buck realizes he can’t cry. He’s dry, empty. He cried at the lab and he cried in the tent and he cried on the ride here, he thinks, but now he can’t. He can’t cry anymore, not here.
Bobby’s dead. He closes his eyes, and Eddie’s crying on the phone, and he can’t do anything to fix the fact that their captain is gone, and he’s not coming back.
“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” Eddie says, muffled through his hand on his mouth. Buck can envision it so clearly. His red-rimmed eyes and his darkened cheeks and his body, so weak, tucked against a wall, just like Buck and the words playing hide and seek in the sentences they utter.
Buck clears his throat, blinking away the few stray tears welling up in his eyes, but refusing to fall. “There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Buck says, knowing full well that it’s only half the reason Eddie is saying this, but determined to help with at least that half.
“I know,” Eddie says, because he’ll take the reassurance. “But,” because he’s stubborn, “I should’ve been there.”
Buck nods in silence. He knows it means something to Eddie, because they remain quiet after that.
Buck is, again, thinking of Athena. His mother, his brother. The kids. The one-eighteen. The void.
He thinks of Bobby, somewhere up there, with his first wife and his kids and his sponsor and his father and the souls of other people he’s lost, and thinks, how did he do it?
The weight of the Earth, how did he carry it? How did he make it seem so easy?
Then, surprisingly, he thinks, he doesn’t have it half as bad up there as we do down here, and deliriously, he smiles. He smiles and then he chuckles and then he’s laughing and the tears start rolling again and he breathes easier.
Eddie doesn’t laugh, but Buck knows he gets it. He sits in silence, and he stops sniffling, and he gets it. Buck looks to his side and he sees Bobby and he sees Eddie and he sees the combined sum of their ghosts and the house isn’t empty and it isn’t his, but for tonight, it’s just enough.
Because Bobby’s dead and he’s never coming back. So it has to be enough. It’s what Bobby would’ve wanted. For Buck to feel like, for once, things are enough. He’s enough.
“Do you remember the last thing he told you?” Buck asks, bulldozing through the walls building up around his heart in a second, despite knowing he can’t get rid of them for good. “Whenever you talked to him last, do you remember what he said to you?”
Eddie hums. “He told me I’d always have a home at the one-eighteen,” he recalls. “That you’d always be family.”
Satisfaction takes over Buck’s chest.
Bobby is—was—the kind of person who says things. Who lives like every day could be the last. Someone who would never refrain from reminding the people he loved, that he loved them.
In their field of work, everyone should be like that, Buck thinks. Not everyone is, but Bobby was. He’d lost so much that, every day, he was passively aware of the fact that he could lose some more. That he could miss his chance.
“He told me he loved me,” Buck says, not sure why. “He told me I’d be okay.” He told me you guys would need me, he doesn’t say, because that’s a promise he made to Bobby himself, and he’s going to fight tooth and claw every single day to be able to honor it.
“You will,” Eddie says, and Buck believes him, like he believed Bobby. Because they know him. Because they’ve seen the ugliest bits of him, and still choose to know, to be sure, that he’ll get back up as many times as he has to.
Bobby taught him that. Bobby taught him to not give up. To fight. To hope. To be resilient, and focus on the things that matter the most. “I miss him already,” he answers, small.
Eddie swallows. “Me, too.”
Bobby waves at him from across the living room. There’s a smile on his face, bright and white, hopeful. Buck takes a deep breath, clutching the phone close to his chest. I love you, kid.
He closes his eyes. “We’re gonna be okay.”