Chapter Text
After the tsunami, what had once been a place of joy was scattered with debris. Broken shards of wood littered the shore. Unrecognizable scraps of metal were thrown about. Plant life that hadn’t seen the sun in its lifetime lay tangled in the destruction. And yet the wave that had washed away Christopher had also brought him back. Buck had rebuilt his relationship with Chris, with Eddie, with Bobby. Somehow the waves had swept them closer together, instead of wrenching them apart.
This wave was different. Grief was a wave that kept coming, dashing him against a reef until all that was left were shredded remnants of what had once been a life he’d only just begun to cherish. This wave drove everyone further away. Eddie had gone back to Chris, a few days after the funeral. And Bobby was dead.
Buck kept having to remind himself, over and over. Sometimes he said it out loud. Sometimes he couldn’t form the words.
Grief washed over him when he woke up, when the bell rang, when he cooked.
Buck was adrift.
Hen and Chim had taken time off of work to recover. Athena had thrown herself into her own work, picking up whatever overtime she could. Ravi and Buck had graciously been offered a week off, but there was no official bereavement allowance for “only father figure I’ve ever known”. So, a week later, they’d been temporarily assigned to B and C shifts until the others were back and a captain could be found. Ravi couldn’t afford to take off too much time. Buck couldn’t decide what was worse; being alone at home, or being alone at the station where so many memories kept him awake at night.
So Buck drifted, wave after wave washing him deeper underwater. He ate. He slept. He woke up. He went to work. Two shifts in and after ten days of dinners consisting mostly of beer, he got rid of all the alcohol in Eddie’s apartment. Buck was drowning; in the memories of the apartment he refused to call his own, in the memories of the firehouse he used to call home.
Every day that passed, he sank further and further, a ghost in the shipwreck of the life he once shared with a family that was now floating apart. Bobby had held them together. Without him…
Buck lay on the couch each night. If he didn’t go to bed, he would fall asleep later, sleep lighter, wake earlier. Less chance of dreaming that way.
—
Thirty feet under ground, walls and water closing in around him, Eddie had finally understood what it meant to breathe. In the weeks and months and years before, he’d felt like he was suffocating, drowning, rocks on his chest and water in his lungs. In that moment, surrounded by earth and water actually encroaching, he finally found the clarity he needed, found the will to fight not himself, but for the right to have a self at all.
The first breath as he surfaced was a revelation, a release. The water had washed away a heaviness he hadn’t known how to let go after Shannon’s death. After that, things became, if not easier, then at least more bearable.
The years had their challenges, and their mistakes, but it wasn’t until Ana, then Marisol, then Kim, that the pressure started to build again. Slowly but surely, each of them added a layer to the cairn, heat and pressure metamorphosing into stone, embedded in his skin until he felt it in his bones. It didn’t escape him that the problem was women. It didn’t escape him that the solution was Buck. But that was the heaviest stone of all to bear.
In Texas, the earth and water and stone of his failures seeped into his very veins. He thought going back would help him chisel away at the damage he’d done; face his fears, own up to his mistakes. Instead the walls closed in, the trickling water became a river, and he’d left his lungs at home.
Bobby’s death was an earthquake.
Going home for the funeral was a landslide.
Buck couldn’t dig him out this time. Bobby was dead. His family was scattered, fault lines deepening, water rushing in.
Chris was lost. Bobby was gone. Buck was unobtainable. For the first time in years, Eddie found himself alone. The stones were stacked; his chest cracked open. The water rushed in. There was no one left to show him which way was up, and nowhere left to run.