Chapter Text
It's hard to make sense of it, sometimes.
Or maybe less sometimes and more all the time. The confusion rattles Buck's brain so much it's dizzying on a good day and downright heart stopping on a bad one.
Today, even the moon looks like it's spinning, and Buck is having a hard time deciphering if it's because he hit his head harder than he thought, if the world really is coming to its slow and steady end, or if his insides have finally caught up with his outsides and his confusion has become manifest in this blur of reality.
Or maybe it's all three.
The stars are twinkling too. For all intents and purposes, it's a beautiful night in LA, now that the rain has stopped and the clouds have settled over distant mountains to torment some other far off land.
Although maybe not so far off. Buck is coherent enough to remember that the rain only just stopped, and the 118 could be called to help with neighboring areas that are still caught in the storm. Flash flooding is no joke around here. Any department will need all the help they can get.
And on any normal night, any normal shift, Buck would be right there with them.
But tonight...
His chest constricts and Buck wheezes and coughs, a mixture of mud and rainwater and spit and blood trickles from his mouth.
Tonight he is confused and dizzy and feels like his heart could stop any minute now, for many reasons.
He wants to blame Eddie, to pin all his problems on him, this predicament, this confusion, this constriction on his heart that he's been terrified to admit has been there for years. He could blame it on his stupid hair, his stupid lips, his stupid smile, his stupid eyes that always manage to see right through Buck's bullshit.
His stupid hands and the stupid way they felt grabbing his own, desperate and longing for something Buck still isn’t sure is his to give.
But he can’t blame him, not really, not when Buck knows it’s all his fault, this twisting in his brain and in his gut, the way the moon won’t stop spinning spinning spinning all the time, even when he shuts his eyes.
Truth is, Buck fucked up. He fucked up and now he doesn’t know what he wants or what he should want or how to even get it if he knew. He doesn’t even know what’s his anymore. Is this life his own or is it just something else he co opted, forced his way into with no regard for anyone else?
It’s questionable now, has been questionable for some time, but Buck has been doing his best to push it off and off until now he’s here, at the bottom of a gulch somewhere on the edge of LA, with mud filled lungs and a spinning moon and numb feet.
He must have lost a boot somewhere during the fall. Or was it just a sneaker? Was he working before he fell? It’s hard, trying to remember. He knows he was talking to Eddie at… some point. When was that?
Buck coughs again, more mud and blood on his tongue. Sucking in air after hurts, definitely hurts more than it should, given the fact that breathing shouldn’t hurt at all. There’s not enough oxygen coming in, not enough room in his lungs for it to circulate properly. There’s pinpricks of black at the edge of his vision, and Buck squeezes his eyes to try to blink them away.
He’s truly screwed this time. He knows that much, even if his mind is fuzzy and he can’t remember how he got here.
Given the circumstances, Buck knows a lot of things, really, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.
He knows that he has a concussion, based on the way the world seems to be swimming around him and nothing is making any real sense. He knows his lungs are fucked up, probably in more ways than one. He knows he’s caked in mud and even though it’s LA and above freezing temperatures, Buck doesn’t think he’s ever been so cold.
He knows that somewhere, he’s losing blood.
Somehow, in the haze, he also knows that it is December, Christmas only a couple weeks away, and he has presents hiding in his closet for Chris that he hasn’t gotten around to wrapping yet, was hoping to do that with Eddie, was hoping to do a lot of things with Eddie.
He knows that Eddie will be so, so mad at him for dying.
Buck’s fingers, buried in mud, twitch, like he’s trying to reach for the hand of a ghost that isn’t there, reaching for a memory he can’t fully recall.
What can he remember? There was a conversation in the kitchen. Pepperoni pizza. Eddie’s eyes…
“What else do you know, Buck?”
The voice should startle him, but it doesn’t. It sounds comforting and familiar and in the back of his mind Buck wonders if it’s really even there since all he can see is the spinning moon.
Speaking of.
He knows a lot about the moon. He knows that it has a circumference of 6,786 miles. He also knows that it is the fifth largest moon in the entire solar system. He knows that it is approximately 240,000 miles from Earth, and that it is ever so slowly drifting away, almost 4 centimeters a year.
Which means, almost 50,000 years from now, the moon will be 240,001 miles away.
It’s hard to pinpoint why, but Buck tends to fixate on this fact often, repeating it over and over in his head like his brain is preparing him to answer some sort of final question on Jeopardy.
“240,00 miles away,” he whispers to himself, to the voice that isn’t there, to no one, to the stars above. They always had a habit of listening to him when no one else would.
They talk back to him, their whispers tickling his ear, “That’s good Buck, what else? Tell me, I’m here, I’m listening.”
I’m listening.
Sounds familiar.
“I’m listening, please, just talk to me,” Eddie says in the kitchen, his face finally readable after all this time, except Buck hates the story it’s telling him. His face is filled with hurt and sadness and it kills Buck knowing he put it there.
But he doesn’t stop. “I have nothing left to say.” He turns to leave, abandoning his plans of staying the night the moment the words left his mouth.
“Buck, wait.” Eddie grabs his hand gently. Eddie’s are warm and sweaty and Buck wishes he could just grab it back, wishes he could curl up and live in the palm of his hand and never let it go again. “Please, just… we can-”
Instead he leaves. “Goodnight, Eddie, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The door slam echoes behind him, follows him all the way to his Jeep, all the way to his apartment, all the way-
All the way here.
Buck closes his eyes and cries.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps. To Eddie, to Chris, to Jee and Maddie, to the 118, to Bobby, even though he’s not around to hear it. To anyone Buck has ever met.
He opens his eyes, finds the moon again, watches it spin and spin and spin. It’s blending into the horizon now, looks like it’s falling to Earth, and suddenly it feels like the whole ground is moving beneath him. Everything is spinning and crashing and Buck tries to get up but something tugs and he just falls with everything else. There’s a roaring in his ears, something loud and overwhelming and fuck Buck just wants it all to stop.
“Buck, please, I know it’s hard but I need you to stay with me.”
The stars are talking again, and all Buck wants to do is yell at them, tell them to go away, to make the roaring stop and to leave him alone.
Instead he turns on his side as much as he can and retches, the intense vertigo catching up to his stomach. But there’s no relief from the dizziness, no reprieve from the pain. The roaring intensifies and somehow he feels cold and boiling hot at the same time.
He’s bleeding, somewhere. His thigh, maybe, based on the discoloration he can just make out. He has to stop the bleeding, He has to… he told Eddie… He told him…
“That’s right, Buck, You told me you’d be okay. So you have to be, alright? No dying on me tonight.”
“M’tryin.” God, there’s so much he wants to fix. Eddie has to know that, right? Has to know how badly he wants to fix things? He was on his way, he knows he was. Buck was turning around and…
“Buck, I swear to god, please just stay this time. Please.”
He wants to, he wants to so badly. Buck regrets leaving in the first place. Buck is never the one to leave. “Why d’you sound so far away?”
“I’m trying to get to you Buck, I promise. We’re almost there. Don’t hang up, keep talking.”
Buck blinks. The phone… he’d been on his cell before it happened. Right. Okay. Don’t hang up. Easy. He’s not sure where his phone landed when he fell anyway.
Talking, however, is getting more and more difficult.
“Walk me through it one more time. We need to be prepared when we get to you.”
“Can’t.”
“You can, Buck. I know you can, please.”
Please.
And who is Buck to deny Eddie when he asks like that? Buck never wants to hear Eddie that desperate again, not like this, not like his heart is breaking around the words.
“Fell,” Buck says. “Down… down an embankment, ground gave way from the… from the rain. Muddy.” God, it was so muddy. Buck is caked with it, basically buried from the landslide. He woke up with his face half soaked in a mud puddle. How he didn’t drown he’ll never know.
“Okay, okay.” There’s a pause. “You’re still there? Haven’t moved?”
“Can’t. Got stuck.” And Buck is well and truly stuck, mud not withstanding. On what, he can’t tell; he just knows that every time he tries to move, something pulls at his thigh and he wants to throw up all over again.
Probably where the blood is coming from.
“Where are you stuck, Buck? How bad is it?”
Buck closes his eyes and tries to focus with all that he can. Each word is an effort, but for Eddie, he does his best. “It’s ah, it’s my thigh. Something’s stuck. Not a through and through, but pretty close I think. A branch, maybe? Not sure.” Buck blinks, head getting fuzzy again from concentration. “Definitely concussed, knocked my head pretty good. Inhaled some mud.” He coughs, as if to prove his point, even more mud coming up, more blood. He can taste metallic on his tongue and feel it coating his throat. “Um…”
“Tell me, Buck, please.”
God, he feels like shit. How could a simple fall be this bad? Buck groans and closes his eyes. No harm in resting them, right?
“Buck, I swear to God…”
“Sorry, sorry.” He jolts up, but immediately regrets it when his abdomen flares in more pain. “Fuck.”
“I know it hurts Buck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“S’okay.” He leans back into the mud and focuses on his breathing, tries not to drift away. Tries not to…
“Are we drifting?” Buck asks.
Eddie squints from across his pizza slice. “Do you think we’re drifting?”
He frowns. “No it’s just…” he trails off as he studies Eddie’s face. He knows him, the crease of his brow and twitch of his mouth. But he also knows Eddie can make himself unreadable when he wants to be.
And today he wants to be, Buck can tell. He just wishes he could make sense of it.
“S’just that the moon is drifting. 3.8 centimeters a year. It’s about the gravitational pull. Eventually, millions of years from now. It’ll be completely out of orbit.”
Eddie looks down at his now empty paper plate, crumples it and throws it in the garbage. “Good thing we’ll be dead by then,” he says, avoiding eye contact and walking to the sink.
Buck looks at his own plate. Pepperoni with extra cheese, just how Chris likes it. Or at least that’s what Chris says, but to be honest it’d been Chris’s favorite ever since Buck told him it was his own. He doesn’t know what to do with that information, doesn’t know what it means. Something good, maybe, something important. At least Buck wants it to be. But…
“Eddie, look at me.”
He doesn’t meet Buck’s eyes, just keeps overwashing a mug from that morning. Eddie just keeps turning it over and over and over in his hands. The water is steaming now. There’s too much soap and the water is too hot and Buck can see Eddie’s hands turning red from here and god, what’s gone so wrong that Eddie would rather inflict this on himself than look Buck in the damn eye.
They are drifting, Buck knows it like he knows the trajectory of the moon. Statistical fact, unchanging, unarguable.
But Eddie Diaz is better than the moon. Buck can touch him, can smell him, might not be able to resist tasting him if given the chance.
Forget the moon, Buck thinks another centimeter out of Eddie’s orbit just might kill him.
“Please.”
Eddie drops the mug in the sink with a clunk, grabs the edges of the counter. The water’s still running. His head is hunched, and he speaks into the rising steam when he says, “What do you want me to say, Buck?”
Buck hears his own voice waver. “Anything.” He takes a tentative step forward.
Eddie sighs, shuts off the water, and turns around. He crosses his arms and finally, finally looks at Buck.
The look he gives him is devastating, and suddenly Buck is wishing he’d turn back around if it meant Eddie never looked at him like that again.
“If we’re drifting,” Eddie says, his voice breaking along the edges, “it’s because you won’t talk to me. Bobby’s gone, Buck, and we can’t even talk about it. You won’t even talk about it. We just keep… dancing around this and I don’t… I don’t know what to do. And you keep looking for apartments and just… don’t you know? Can’t you tell? It’s like you… you’re fading away and… Why do you keep trying to leave?”
“Buck! Buck! Please, please don’t leave, not like this.”
“Eddie?”
“Yeah,” there’s some sniffling on the other line. “Yeah it’s me, bud. You still with us?”
“Sorry, yup,” Buck winces, “still here.”
“Good. That’s good. We’re five minutes from your location, Buck. Just hold on a little longer, okay?”
“Okay. Okay.” He can do that. For Eddie? He can.
“Eddie?”
“Yeah bud?”
“It hurts.”
“I know Buck, I know. It won’t forever, I promise. We’ll give you the good stuff and you won’t feel a thing, okay?”
Buck wants to say that’s not what he meant. He means that fighting hurts, being left hurts, Bobby’s death and feeling like he can’t talk about it hurts. Loving Eddie and knowing he doesn’t love him back hurts.
It hurts more than the ache in his thigh and lungs and head. God, it hurts so much.
“Why do you keep trying to leave?”
An admission, one that might as well have hit Buck straight in the chest like a bullet. It hurts just as much.
“I’m not leaving,” Buck whispers. “I’m not the one who leaves.”
Eddie inhales, sharp.
“Buck…”
“No, listen. I don’t leave. I don’t. I’m the one who’s left, remember? By you, by Bobby… and I can’t… I can’t deal with it anymore. How am I supposed to talk to you when I can’t even trust you?”
The moment Buck says the words, he regrets them. The hurt on Eddie’s face is reason enough, but the words just aren’t true. Buck trusts Eddie more than anything, more than anyone.
No, truthfully, the one he doesn’t trust is himself. His feelings have become too big, too much. He doesn’t trust himself to not break if he lets even a little bit of them spill out.
Eddie deserves better.
“Buck.” The heartbreak in Eddie’s voice breaks Buck’s own, and he knows he needs to get out.
He needs to leave.
“I’m sorry. I have to… I have to go.”
“No, Buck, listen, I know everything’s all messed up, but I promise you can trust me. Please tell me you know that.”
“I know,” Buck cries. “I know. Eddie.”
“Then why do you keep doing this?”
Buck’s resolve starts to break, but the truth? The truth can’t come out, not now. Not like this. “I can’t tell you.”
“Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
Not talking to Eddie though? Him not knowing the truth? That hurts the most.
“I love you.”
The moon, still spinning, goes dark, and the stars are finally quiet.
Buck feels his breath stutter once, twice, and then suddenly he can’t breathe at all.