Chapter Text
Buck had always had an obsession with soul marks.
Most people were born with at least one soul mark, the love of a parent strong enough to appear on their newborn's skin almost instantly. Throughout someone’s life, their skin would be decorated with the marks of those they loved deeply enough that it intertwined with their soul, whether that be platonic or romantic.
The endless void inside of Buck that yearned for belonging clung to the way the marks served as permanent proof of someone's love.
When Evan was four he had asked Maddie what the marks on his skin meant.
"Those are your soulmarks, Evan" Maddie had said, smiling as she knelt by his side. He had been so young, poking at the marks on his skin with unbridled fascination.
"Why's it w-white?" he asked, looking up at her with clueless blue eyes.
Her eyes clouded over, a small smile on her face. "Our marks can come in different colours."
"Really??"
"Yeah Evs. Black is when you love someone just as much as they love you -"
"Like this one!" Evan had pointed to the black flying bird on his arm, giving Maddie a gummy grin as she nodded, turning her arm to show the black dog on her skin with a giggle. He grabbed her arm gently, tracing over his mark with a hum.
"Yes, exactly like that! Then blue ones appear when someone loves you but you don't love them back."
Evan had tilted his head at that, not understanding how that would be possible. Maddie's expression wilted slightly, not meeting his eyes as she continued to speak. "The rest are slightly sadder. Grey marks appear when you love someone that doesn't love you."
"Oh." Evan stared at the two marks on his ankle. The unspoken truth hung heavy over the pair of them, his parent's disdain for him forever stamped on his skin.
Maddie held his hand.
"White -" She broke off, swallowing the lump in her throat, "white is for when someone that loves you dies."
Evan frowned, the white bird next to Maddie's mark staring up at him. When he looked up at his sister, at the tears in her eyes and the white heart beside the black dog, he thought it better not to ask.
By the time Evan went to school, he had learned that most people's soulmarks were black.
It wasn't surprising really, the thought that children's love would be reciprocated - that the majority of them had been born into a family that loved them.
Evan was very perceptive for a five year old, quickly figuring out that he should keep his marks hidden. Kids could be mean, but the pitying looks of his teachers were worse.
The first time he had ever voluntarily shown someone his soulmarks he was ten. The act itself was intimate, letting someone in and showing them a literal part of your soul - the people you love and those that love you.
Of course, some marks couldn't be hidden. Jenny in the year above had a black paper airplane on the side of her neck; Mrs Lloyd had a white dove on the back of her left hand. Commenting on them was still not encouraged, especially if you didn't know the person. Common decency and all.
His best friend Henry had just finished showing him his marks, seven of them scattered across his limbs, all of them a dark black.
"Your turn!"
Evan had faltered for just a moment, before taking a deep breath and showing the birds on his arm. The boy had gasped, shuffling closer.
"A white one?"
"Yeah... well there it is."
"Sorry. That was rude. What others do you have?"
"Just - just promise not to be weird about it."
Henry had nodded solemnly, interlacing their pinkies.
At that, Evan lifted the cuff of his jeans, revealing the two grey marks on his ankle. He hated looking at them, so he instead kept his eyes on Henry's face.
It was almost worse, seeing the excitement in the boy's eyes fade as he realised what the grey meant. "Are they..."
"My parents."
Henry frowned, arms crossed. "Well, I already didn't like them, but now I know they suck."
Evan shrugged, uncomfortable. "Those are all of them."
His friend had pulled him into a tight hug, squeezing him in a way that felt reassuring. "Thank you for showing me. Best friends forever?"
"Best friends forever."
Henry had moved schools the next year; Evan never saw him again. He wouldn't show anyone else his soulmarks until he was 20.
High school was not a good experience for Evan.
After figuring out that the only time his parents would look at him was if he was injured, he made it his personal mission to be as reckless as possible. To push his limits, and in turn see how far he could push his parents.
So his late childhood and early teens were a haze of broken bones, academic misfortune and athletic prowess.
The one thing he excelled in was football, his bull-headed attitude perfect for pushing through and scoring his team points. His teammates weren’t his biggest fans though, finding him too unpredictable, especially with his proclivity for injury.
Maddie continued to be his best friend, his confidant. She patched him up after his tumbles, and held him when he had cried about the loneliness that threatened to eat him up. Until she left, following Doug to another city and leaving Evan alone once more.
Her absence made him even more reckless, if that was possible.
A deep seated rage bubbled under the surface of his skin for months after she left. His attitude at school worsened, eventually getting him kicked out after a particularly bad fight between him and one of the other boys. (No one believed him when he said the boy had called him a slur for looking at another boy ‘with gay eyes’ - that or they just didn’t care.)
His parents wouldn’t look at him for weeks, leaving the room every time he entered, dinner placed on the floor outside of his room. It was moments like those that Buck would swear the grey marks on his ankles burned, as if he could physically feel their hatred for him eating away at his skin.
His stutter worsened around the same time. He blamed the stress.
"Evan" became "Buck" the second he got in the Jeep and drove, leaving his home town in the rear view mirror.
He was self-aware enough to know that severing the entire beginning of his life probably wasn't healthy, but without Maddie there was no one left that loved him.
He had begged her as a child to not marry Doug, and had begged her again at 18 to run away with him and escape. Both times she had said no, and both times Buck had checked his mark when he was alone, desperate to make sure that her mark had not faded to grey - or worse, white.
So, he severed that part of his life, running away with two duffle bags that held his life’s possessions and a rage that would only simmer down with time and distance.
Buck spent a long time running.
He travelled the length of the American coast, searching for connection.
He first arrived in Maryland, still hurt and overwhelmed by everything that had happened with Maddie, and bumped into Lila. She was a gorgeous blonde, who seemed to see the hurt in his soul and attempted to soothe it. She was big into crystals and reiki healing, and once their short affair had run its course she sent him onwards with black tourmaline and the courage to send Maddie a postcard.
In bartending school he met a girl named Hannah, with long dark hair and startling green eyes. She was bubbly, and taught Buck how to surf the waves of Virginia Beach. He had worked with her in a bar for two months, dated her for one of them, before her ex-boyfriend showed up and asked her to marry him, the black rose on his leg paired with the black vine on her arm. She had apologised to him for the abrupt end, but gestured to her soulmark as if it explained everything - and it did.
So, Buck moved on to San Diego, picking up a job in construction. There he met Jaime, a Latina with muscles and a smile that made him stutter. She was a beast at karaoke, and was the first person Buck had ever met to outdrink him on a night out. As much as he enjoyed his time there, she could tell he was still unsettled. Jaime had encouraged him to move on, promising that they would stay in touch, but that his mission to find purpose would not be solved on a building site.
Flagstaff Arizona was where he had met fraternal twins Rachel and Rowan who could climb up the side of a vertical ledge like it was easy as breathing. They had seen his enthusiasm for climbing and showed him some tricks, teaching him how to put on a harness in thirty seconds flat. Their time together had been brief, but the three of them had celebrated Buck’s nineteenth birthday sitting just outside of the Grand Canyon, with cupcakes and the cheapest bottle of booze they could find.
Eventually, he had continued west to California, where he had been drawn in by the Navy SEALS. The recruiter had talked about brotherhood, about finding his place in the world, doing something with purpose.
To Buck that sounded like everything he had wanted and more, so he was all too eager to sign up for training. The physical training was easy after working in construction for so long, and Buck found himself falling into an easy camaraderie with those he was in a group with. It was there that he met Elijah.
Elijah was tall, bulky and ever so gorgeous, with dark hair and darker eyes. Their relationship had bloomed in the midst of the most rigorous training Buck would ever experience in his life, born from mutual respect, laughter and pure sexual tension. It was easily the most healthy relationship he had ever been in, though he still had to make a conscious effort to hold back - to avoid being too much.
On one of their sparse days off from training, after some particularly intense sex in a hotel room, Buck had mentioned his soulmarks. It was one of the rare times that Buck was completely naked, with no socks to cover his ankles.
"You can ask about them... i-if you want."
Elijah turned to him then, pulling him in for a bruising kiss. "Are we doing this?"
"Yeah. I - I trust you."
This time, he didn't feel as ashamed when showing Elijah the marks his parents had left on him, having had time to come to terms with the fact that they didn't love him.
"They're idiots," Elijah had said, tightening his grip on Buck's hips as if he was willing him to believe it.
"Yeah, well. We don't talk anymore."
"Good riddance to them."
Buck then showed him the marks on his arm.
"Maddie?"
"Yeah, she's the black bird."
"... And this one?" he asked, finger trailing over the white bird below it.
Buck dipped his eyes down. "I... I don't know who that was. My parents pretended to never see it, and Maddie refused to tell me. I learned pretty early on to not mention it."
The dark-haired man frowned, placing a kiss on Buck's forehead. "Well, whoever it was, it's clear that they loved you."
Like all good things in Buck's life, it wasn't built to last. He washed out of the SEALs, unable to switch off his emotions, whilst Elijah carried forwards. Their budding romance was cut off, left with a tenuous promise to stay in touch and a fast-fading hickey on his neck.
The lack of purpose that came with drifting was really getting under Buck's skin. After so long having a routine, a direction, a goal, he felt aimless. But with that came a feeling of freedom, a chance to make mistakes.
Buck made his way to Billings. He knew that he needed some sense of community. The ranch had been a perfect fit, Buck all too excited to learn how to be a proper cowboy. Mrs Layton ran the place, and was motherly in every way that his mum hadn’t been, handing out affection and warm smiles as if it was easy - as if Buck was easy to love. It had healed something within him, lessening the aching hole in his heart that only grew with every unanswered postcard that he sent to Maddie. It had been a lovely spring, swapping travel stories with the people that passed through the ranch, but as summer drew near Buck knew he had to return to the ocean.
Oregon was a place where Buck tested his ability to be alone, just to remind himself that he still could. He found solace in the towering trees, swam in the lakes, and made wishes for his future on the stars. He only stayed for five days, hiking up different trails and finding a sense of achievement in every peak he surmounted. On his last night, he had sat on the hood of his Jeep and raised a fizzy drink in honour of Maddie, wondering if she was looking up at the moon too.
Going to Peru was the next logical thing to do. He had overheard a group of hikers talking about how lovely their trip had been, and before he knew it he was crossing the border. When he was out there he found a job at a resort bar, puka shell necklace round his neck and an eagerness to absorb as much Spanish as he could. There he met Andrea, an aspiring hairdresser who had taken him home for a night of passion, and sent him away with dyed frosted tips in his hair. His love of learning had only grown across his travels, and talking to patrons of the bar satisfied his endless curiosity, but something still felt like it was missing. The day he met Connor he knew it was his time to leave, the man inviting him to join a group of them in a house in LA.
Buck knew that he could be impulsive, and moving to LA had been his most recent crazy idea in a string of crazy ideas, but for once in his life joining the LAFD just felt right.
He excelled in every facet of the training, and where his empathy had failed him in the SEALs, it pushed him further in the academy. He had succeeded, graduating top of his class, a passion burning so brightly within him that he was sure he'd burst.
He had found his purpose, and that purpose led him to the 118.