Chapter Text
The door to his lawyer’s office closes behind Buck with a soft clicking sound. He feels dizzy. The world is spinning a little, the soft whites and beiges of the law firm’s interior blending together and impeding his vision, while his other senses are being attacked. Sounds seem to be coming from everywhere, both loud and whispered conversations from people he can’t see, the coffee machine from the waiting area that makes truly terrible coffee which he knows from experience is spitting out dark brown, viscous liquid. Telephones are ringing and copying machines whirring. Footsteps, so many footsteps, even though he doesn’t notice that many people close by.
And the smells, the smells are suddenly overwhelming. The smell of the terrible coffee, of bodies in different states of stress (someone’s stress seems to be causing them a not insignificant amount of flatulence, but in most cases it’s mostly just sweating). He can smell the earth from the potted plants in the lobby, they must have recently been watered because it smells damp. The receptionist looks up at him when he passes by her desk, but she doesn’t say anything. He can smell her perfume, youthful, something like vanilla and jasmine. He remembers thinking that it smelled nice when she showed him into Mackey’s office the first time, now the strong scent makes him want to puke. He sneezes and stumbles out the door and into the stairwell.
He can’t make himself take the elevator. Walking down seven flights of stairs seems more manageable.
The steps seem to merge before his very eyes, though, and he only gets down two flights of stairs before he stumbles and has to grab onto the rail in order to stay on his feet. Grabbing the metal rail is surprisingly difficult, but he manages to not topple over. Instead, he leaps over the final four steps of the current stair and lands on the little platform between the flights, feeling a lot steadier again as he makes it the rest of the way down to the ground floor, more often than not taking several steps at the same time.
But then, the strangest thing happens. When he reaches the entrance, the handle of the door is suddenly out of reach. It’s like his perspective has been altered, distorted. The handle, which should be chest height for him, is impossibly high up, and he can’t seem to lift his hand far enough to reach it. Weird.
Is he sick? A sudden bout of vertigo brought on by panic and guilt? Because he does feel guilty. He brought all of this on them. Forbidding his friends and family from talking to him for weeks, not that they would want to after his lawyer threw some of their most deeply rooted traumas in their faces. Making them choose sides between him and Bobby (of course everyone would choose their captain, why wouldn’t they?) and causing a rift between their tight knit group.
And it was all for nothing. Sure, he could have taken the settlement, never worked another day in his life and hoped that with time they would still forgive him. But that was never the point, the point was always to get back to work. To them.
Now he’s not so sure that he ever can.
And the door handle is still so very far out of reach.
He is saved by a red-haired woman in a flowy linen pantsuit and a frilly blouse, who opens the door from the outside, and Buck thanks her before slipping out, still reeling. Her eyes widen and she lets out a small sound of surprise as he passes her and he stops to look up into her face, confused by her reaction.
“Oh, where did you come from?” she says, still surprised but also with a voice laced with kindness.
“Me?” he says, but there is no one else around so she must mean him. Though he still can’t understand why she might be interested in him. Do they know each other somehow? He doesn’t think so, but he still answers her, “Just from upstairs, the law office.” Saying it out loud makes him cringe.
“Are you here with someone, sweet boy?”
“Uhm,” Buck says, a bit uncomfortable at the way she just addressed him. He’s pretty sure that if they do know each other, it’s not well enough for her to call him ‘sweet boy’. “I think I need to get going,” he says and hurries out the door, ignoring how she calls after him and breaks into a brisk jog down the sunny LA street.
He knows that it’s sunny mostly because of the heat, and the light, but he can’t really see it because something has happened to his vision. To the colors that are usually flooding the streets on nice days when people tend to venture outside in beachwear, sundresses and patterned shirts. The people are there, and the patterns, but the colors really aren’t. The world is noticeably greyer, but the sky is a brilliant blue like he has never seen it before.
After a few blocks, he feels a slight limp in his left hind leg. Which is how he notices that he has hind legs. And is walking on all fours. When he tries to get up on two feet, the pressure it puts on his left leg makes bolts of pain shoot through his bones and he can’t seem to keep his balance well enough so he stays on all fours. No one around him seems to think it strange or notice that anything is out of place. Some people look at him, sure, but not in a way that you look at a mentally unstable person walking on their hands and feet with a wagging tail …
Wait, a tail? He has a tail? Since when does he have a tail?
Without really thinking about what he’s doing, Buck tries to turn around to get a look at his tail, which is nearing closer to crazy behavior than anything he’s done so far, because logically, he knows he can’t see his own back by turning around, but it seems like the only thing to do.
“Awwww, mom, look at the cute doggie! He’s chasing his tail!” a light voice next to him shouts, just as he actually manages to catch the furry thing between his teeth, and he freezes. Doggie?
“Oh look, he got it!” an older voice, female, responds to the first one with clear delight.
“Mom, can I pet him?”
“No, honey, we don’t pet dogs we don’t know. He’s probably a stray, I don’t see a collar. You don’t know what diseases he carries.”
Buck is a bit affronted by this, because as far as he knows, he is healthy as can be. Now that his leg healed, at least. He doesn’t know why it insists on limping, maybe he tweaked it when he jumped down the stairs?
He drops his tail from his mouth and sits down in the street, wondering who the voices belong to.
“Let’s go, sweetie, say goodbye to the doggie!”
“Bye doggie, hope you find a home soon!” the first voice calls and Buck looks around in time to see a small girl being dragged by her mom holding her hand a few yards away.
“Bye!” he calls. He doesn’t know why, but it seemed like the polite thing to do. But he hears it now, his voice doesn’t come out sounding like it usually does. It was definitely something more like a yelp. The girl looks over her shoulder at him, smiles and waves, before she follows her mom up the street.
Okay, no but really, there is no way he actually just turned into a dog, right? Just because he suddenly has a tail, it doesn’t mean that he’s a freaking dog. Right? People don’t just turn into dogs for no reason.
Except clearly, that’s what has just happened to him. For years, his co-workers have joked about him being their resident golden retriever and now, he realizes as he catches his reflection in the window of an ice cream store, he has actually become one.
What the hell is he supposed to do? There is no way he’ll be able to get into his apartment like this. And what would he do when he was there? How would he feed himself? No, he needs help.
Hen, she would help, he thinks. He remembers the small dog she took in after the earthquake. She would take him in, too, wouldn’t she? Even though she might not like human Buck much at the moment, she would never turn away a homeless dog. He doesn’t think.
Memories of that day flood his consciousness. It was just after Eddie started at the station, the day he met Christopher for the first time, got a glimpse of their little family. Of what he wishes his own future might look like at some point. And that’s when the realization hits him like a freight train.
He loves Hen like a sister, but right now she isn’t who he needs. The one he needs is Eddie.