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Chimney’s at the kitchen sink when he can just tell.
“Tough day at work,” he hears from behind him, in that solid voice, quiet and always holding so much more.
He turns off the faucet. “Had to step up as captain,” he says, tired all over again, blood all over his hands, feeling the failure press down on his lungs. “I couldn’t—“ he admits here again, voice breaking. “I couldn’t figure a way out.”
“You saved a life,” Bobby offers, because Chimney knows who that is, but he’s afraid he’ll turn around and that’ll be the end of it.
“Maybe. But I’m not you,” Chimney says, and it feels so good to unload it as anger, even though it’s really a jagged wound that feels like it’ll never stop bleeding.
“Being me isn’t in the job description,” Bobby points out, even as ever, and Chimney’s tears spill over.
“I think I’m failing, Bobby,” he admits. “You didn’t prepare me for this. You left, and now I’m supposed to pick up the pieces. Everyone is relying on me to make the calls, except I can’t fill your shoes, and I don’t want to. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Fill your own,” Bobby replies, like it’s obvious, and Chimney has to grip the towel hard to stop himself from turning.
“I’m not meant to be captain,” he insists. “I didn’t want this.”
“I didn’t want the 118 to be my family,” Bobby points out, and it’s so Bobby, and so unexpected that it defuses Chimney’s anger, just like that. “I didn’t want anyone to care when I died. I didn’t want to get married again. I didn’t think I deserved it, any of it.”
“But you did,” Chimney says, sure of that more than anything. “You were the best captain I could have ever asked for. One of my best friends too,” he adds almost as an afterthought, but then it hits him hard what that means and it’s harder to breathe. “I don’t know how to mourn you when everyone looks to me to keep them steady. How can they trust me when I can’t make the calls without second guessing myself? How can they trust me if I don’t trust myself to make those decisions? You were always there, always, and I don’t know what to do now that you’re not.”
“You keep going,” Bobby says, just like Chimney expects, and it really feels like he’s standing there, like he’s steadying him, and Chimney thinks it feels a bit like the earth has stopped tilting under his feet, just for a moment. He knows Bobby isn’t there, not really, but he can feel him, and he can hear him, and he can think clearly, place the fear where it belongs, maybe for the first time since Bobby died.
“But what if I don’t deserve it?” and that’s the heart of it, really. It’s that he doesn’t know how he could be worthy of it the same way Bobby was, he doesn’t know if he can be relied on and trusted and whether he can hold them up when he’s barely holding himself together.
“Why wouldn’t you, Chim?” Bobby asks, but he says it like he already knows.
“What if I let them down?” Chimney asks, blinking wet eyes, staring at his trembling fists.
“I don’t know everything,” Bobby says, and Chimney is half tempted to laugh because of course he does, of course this Bobby does when he’s Chimney’s own figment, “but I’d be willing to bet you’d do anything for the people you love.”
And Chimney wants to protest, except when he thinks of people he loves, he thinks of Maddie, and he thinks of going after her, of never giving up, and of the tender thing they’ve built together, and how it never seemed fragile in the face of the steady flicker buried in his chest. He thinks he might understand, because that was all him, and Maddie whispered to him late at night once that she’ll love him for it forever, and he remembers the way warmth ballooned within him, and he felt like he understood everything he was and everything he could give in that one single moment.
“Appa?”
Chimney turns to see Jee-Yun standing by the doorway, holding her stuffed bear in one hand, rubbing her eyes with her other hand. “Jee,” he says, like a sigh of relief, opening his arms, and there’s the soft patter of her feet as she runs to him, and he kneels down just in time to get an armful of her, warm and loving and his and alive.
“Why are you crying?” she asks, wriggling in his grip to get an arm free so she can wipe his face clumsily.
He almost gets a thumb in his eye, but he lets her do it, touched at the tenderness of the gesture. “I was missing Uncle Bobby,” he tells her, and then he can’t stop himself from crying, really crying in front of her.
She hugs him tight through it, petting his hair, and rubbing his back the way he rubs hers when she cries. “I’m here, Appa. It’s okay,” she says, a perfect mimic of him. “I love you.”
“I love you so much,” he chokes out, pressing a kiss to her head, and when he finally gains some semblance of control, she doesn’t look at him any differently than before. She wipes his tears again as he carries her to bed, trusting him to carry her, to take care of her. He tucks her in, and she yawns and Chimney understands what Bobby was saying, and he understands why they trust him to be captain, and he’s going to mess up but he’s got them. He’s got them.
-
“I’ve been taking care of them like you asked me to,” Buck confesses, barely a murmur over the sound of the city drifting in through the open doors. No one else is awake to see him swinging his legs over the edge of the engine, to tell him to get off the engine. Not the way Bobby would. He’s been trying to see him everywhere, and finding him nowhere, and it still hurts, even though it’s been months. “I don’t know if I’m that great at it yet,” he admits, “but I’m trying.”
“Couldn’t ask more from you, kid,” he hears, and his breathing stops. He’s wanted to hear that voice more than anything ever since—but more than that, he just wants to turn and see him, one last time, to know he’s there and that maybe he hasn’t been hoping for nothing all along.
“Don’t look,” Bobby says, and Buck freezes halfway, already hurt. “I’m not going to be there if you look.”
It takes everything in him not to. He swallows hard, forcing himself to face the empty station, and he hates that it feels like a metaphor. He hates the feelings building within him, the desperation and anger and grief, and—
“You weren’t there,” he says bluntly. He realizes dimly he’s trembling, and he can’t get himself to stop. “I needed you, and you weren’t there. I’ve been searching for you,” slips out of his mouth. “And I can’t find you. Everywhere I look I remember you but I can’t see you, and I keep thinking you’re going to be there, but you’re not, you’re not ever there where I need you.”
“Where do you need me, Buck?” Bobby says, and it’s him, Buck thinks, crying, it’s him because his voice can’t be that full and alive and close if he wasn’t there.
“I need you here,” Buck says, voice weak, and he puts a hand over his heart, because that’s where it hurts. That’s where he can’t get to stop hurting. “I—I keep trying to be okay, but I’m not, and I don’t know what to do.”
“You do,” Bobby says softly.
“I can’t stop,” Buck says wildly, because he can’t. He knows he’s looking for a ghost, but he doesn’t want to believe that’s the end of it, because that would mean Bobby isn’t coming back. That would mean Bobby died, and Buck will never see him again. That would mean Buck has to let go of him, has to say goodbye to the man who gave him a chance when no one else would, who believed in him, who guided him, and who loved him. He would have to say goodbye to the one person he loved most in the world besides Maddie, and Buck may love easily, but there are only a few people he considers his in some indescribable way. And Maddie was his, flesh and blood and something else, and Bobby was his made of something stronger, and that’s what Buck realized mattered more than anything. “Because then you’d be—then I’d be—”
“Alone?” Bobby finishes, and Buck feels ashamed of it, selfish, but he can’t stop, he can’t stop feeling like everything’s slipping out of his fingers when he tries to grab onto it.
“We’re supposed to be a family,” Buck says, voice cracking. “But we haven’t had dinner together, all of us, in months. And I—I’m trying, but Chim’s busy with being captain, and Hen just got back from space so she’s been spending time with family. Athena hasn’t been around much, and May and Harry canceled move night on me last week, so what if— and Ravi’s not—he’s not Eddie,” and Buck has to swallow hard at that, can’t put words to whatever the ache is there. “And it feels like—” He struggles for a long time with articulating it, but he knows Bobby would ask him about it. Would want him to name it. “It feels like they’re leaving me behind.”
“Ah,” is all Bobby offers.
Buck continues, miserably, “It feels like no one misses you like I do.”
“Like they’re all moving on?” Bobby says.
“Yes,” Buck says with some relief, glad Bobby understands. “And how can they do that? How can they leave you behind like that?”
“You never really leave people you love behind,” Bobby offers. “I didn’t leave Marcy and my kids behind, did I?”
“Yeah, but—” Buck starts, then stops, because he knows Bobby loved his family like he loved Bobby, and Bobby never stopped for one day, never for years and years, and Buck realizes he already knows how to love someone forever. He’s known how to do that forever, and that never depended on the other person, on whether they were there or not. It only depends on Buck, and how much he’s willing to give, which is everything every time, no question.
“One foot in front of the other, kid,” Bobby says, and Buck misses him terribly.
“I’ll miss you forever,” is all he can say, voice thick, a promise.
“I’m counting on it,” Bobby says, fond as anything, and Buck has to laugh through his tears though he knows that’s it. That’s it, but it isn’t, not really, not while Buck lives and breathes, not while Bobby lives someplace in his chest, somewhere guarded and cared for, and ever undying.
-
Sometimes when he can’t sleep, Ravi will walk the couple of minutes to the nearby playground, when no one’s there to watch him squeeze himself on the slides, climb the little bit up the net, slide down the poles like he’s a little kid.
Then, when he’s had his fill, he lays in the sandpit, even though it always gets everywhere after. He likes the mess of it, truthfully, likes the realness of it compared to all that time spent in sterile hospitals staring out windows, wanting.
That’s where he’s laying, eyes closed, when Bobby says, “You come here often?”
Ravi doesn’t open his eyes, but he does stop breathing for a moment. There are a million things he could say, he thinks. He could apologize, beg for forgiveness, could confess that he thinks it was his fault, but he knows Bobby. He knows Bobby wouldn’t blame him the way Ravi wants to blame himself. So what he says instead, his voice only wavering once, “When I was sick, I wasn’t allowed to go outside some days. I used to cry about it when I thought no one was looking.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Bobby asks, and that stops Ravi in his tracks, as he swallows once, then twice.
“Yeah,” he admits, hoarse. And because it’s Bobby, because he wasn’t sure then, and still isn’t sure now, he says, “I still don’t know if I can handle it. Everyone thinks being a survivor made me strong, but I don’t feel strong. Everything hurts me, and I—I messed up, and you—” He can’t bring himself to go on.
“You can be strong and still get hurt,” Bobby says gently, calm as ever. “It doesn’t mean you’re not afraid.”
“I’m afraid all the time,” Ravi finally says, and he has to bring his hands up to cover his face. “I just keep thinking—what if I’m not meant for this job? What if I can’t save everyone?”
“Then you’d be exactly like everyone else,” Bobby tells him, contemplative. “We can’t save everyone, no matter how hard we try.” He lapses into silence for a moment in which Ravi can hear his own heart beating in his chest, reminding him he’s still alive. Bobby adds on, “Just because you couldn’t save me, doesn’t mean you can’t save anyone else.”
“If I make a mistake,” Ravi says, and this is what it really is, “someone could lose their life.” His bottom lip trembles. “How am I supposed to live with that? How am I supposed to go on and save the next person and think that makes up for it? It doesn’t.”
“Do you think it doesn’t mean anything to the next person you save?” Bobby asks, and it hurts when he says it like that because Ravi remembers his parents crying when he was finally released from the hospital for the last time. He remembers his mom hugging all the doctors and nurses, and he remembers that some of them were crying too, and laughing, and he remembers the flurry of hugs and the determination on their faces, even then.
They saved him, and he’ll never forget that, but he didn’t think back then about all the people they lost too. He didn’t think about trudging through failure, and the strength it took to throw themselves into the next person, just because they wanted more than anything to save people, and maybe they can’t really know how much that mattered to him. Maybe they’ll never know how much that changed his life, but Ravi knows. He’s been there. He’s been the next patient.
“It means everything,” Ravi says, hoarse, and he knows that.
“It does,” Bobby says, pride in his voice, and Ravi remembers when Bobby chose him for the 118. He told him he didn’t just choose anyone. That Ravi had the makings of a great firefighter. And he’d promised Ravi that they were there for him, all of them, because they were all there for the same reason. That’s what made them a team, more than just a number, more than the job, and Ravi realizes he does think of the 118 as his team, and that he’s not alone. He has a team that’s his, that will catch his mistakes, that wants to save people more than anything, just like him. He knows they all doubt themselves in different ways, and he knows in which ways, has talked to Hen and Chim and Buck and Eddie about it, and more than they doubt themselves, they all keep showing up to work, to save the next person and it always, always matters.
That’s why they never stop. That’s why they continue. “I’m going to do it for you,” he chokes out, promising and he can practically see the way Bobby would shake his head, tell him there’s no need, but there is, there is. “And for me,” Ravi adds on, the night sky blurry through his tears, but he means the him in the hospital who used to stare out the window at the stars and dream of being one, free and bright, out in the big wide world. That little kid was scared he’d never make it out sometimes, and that he might be alone and scared and dying. His favorite nurse used to find him on those nights, tuck him back into bed, and wipe his tears away. She’d read him a bedtime story, and sit with him until he fell asleep, and that’s what he remembers. He remembers her being there.
Ravi knows, maybe more than anyone, how important it is to be there.
-
Hen likes to sit in the backyard under the apple tree when she can’t get herself to sleep, so as not to disturb Karen. She watches a ladybug land on her knee in the dark, holds a finger out, pleased when it decides to crawl up.
“Has anyone checked up on you?” he asks, and she stills, eyes fixed on the ladybug to keep her there, in the backyard, and not back there with a tube sticking out of her, under the blueish light, trying to remember Bobby’s face before she knew it would be the last time she’d see him.
“Karen does,” Hen says quietly, turning her finger as the ladybug crawls.
“And everyone else?” Bobby asks, and Hen has to swallow hard at the answer.
“I don’t know if I want to talk about it yet,” she says when she finds her voice again, because she’s still processing it, all these months later, and she’s still punishing herself for it, somewhat. But.
But, she thinks again, and she knows he can hear it. She says, her voice breaking a little, “I can’t talk to Athena about it, because she’s taken it so hard. Eddie’s guilty he wasn’t there, Chim’s still trying to figure out how to be captain, and Buck’s—well, you know how he is.” She can’t help a weak smile at it, because maybe some things never change, and that’s reassuring. “Ravi knows death better than the rest of us, but he’s young, Bobby. He’s so young. I keep thinking of going into the captain’s office to talk to you before I remember you’re not there.”
The ladybug sits still as if it can sense the depth of her sorrow, as if it can tell she doesn’t want this moment to end. She wants to beg him not to go, because he’s the only one she can really talk to, who’ll understand what she means when she says she misses him.
“You once told me to ask for help,” Bobby says, and she still remembers it, how easy it was to tell him that, even if she hasn’t figured out how to articulate it for herself. “You can ask,” he prompts softly.
“Is it selfish if I want them to ask?” Hen says, because she feels like she can voice that here. “If I want them to know that I’m not okay?”
Bobby shifts next to her, and it sounds so real, so like him, that Hen’s breath catches with it, in something like a hitched sob. “I don’t think that’s selfish,” he reasons, just like he always did. “You want them to keep an eye out for you too.”
“They have been,” Hen admits, “in their own way. But—”
“It’s not what you want?” Bobby asks. The ladybug finally moves, but it feels like the lump in her throat won’t.
“I want them to see me,” Hen says, squeezing her eyes shut now. “I want them to see how much I’m hurting.” And what’s making it worse, “You would’ve seen me.”
They’re both quiet for a second.
“I want them to see me how you saw me,” Hen says, and that’s the thing she can’t ever get back. That’s the thing she mourns. She doesn’t know how to say what Bobby seeing her meant, how having a captain like that gave her so much more than she ever knew she needed. She doesn’t know how to say so much of her life changed with Bobby, and she still doesn’t know how to thank him for it. And, “I don’t want you to be gone.”
“But I am,” Bobby tells her, and it feels like the silence after could swallow her up. She struggles against it, against how she wants to explode out, how she wants to smother herself under it.
“You’re gone,” she tests out loud, and it hurts more than she expected but also feels a bit like taking a pin to the pressure of it within her. She takes in a shuddering breath. “But they’re not,” she says, and she knows that’s what he was here to say because when she turns around he isn’t there, not where she expects him to be sitting with that soft, familiar smile on his face. She turns back and lets her tears flow, watches through blurry vision as the ladybug rests tentative legs on her fingernail before it lifts its wings, pauses as if to say goodbye, and then flies off.
“Bye, Bobby,” she whispers.
-
Eddie’s parents came for the funeral, and Eddie will admit to Abuela’s grave that he’s visiting her to escape the house for a bit in the following week. He tells her some light gossip, shows her the flowers he brought her, and then he sits there for a long time, quiet. She’d understand, he thinks. She always understood his silences.
“I’m sorry. I know how much she meant to you,” he hears from behind him, quiet and sincere, condolences he’s been hearing for the past week, except—
Eddie doesn’t dare turn around. He knows that voice, has imagined that voice every day since he wasn’t there.
“I wasn’t there,” Eddie whispers, heavy with guilt. That’s the thing he told Buck, and it felt good to finally tell someone, except the dread won’t go away, lingering there over everything else, all the layers of regret and grief and all the things he should’ve been and wasn’t.
He thinks fleetingly of going to church, feels his stomach clench, and thinks wildly that this is punishment. He’s only glad that it wasn’t his kid. Christopher saw Abuela one last time and her spirit was gentle with him and loving, and that means Eddie’s succeeded with him where he’s failed with himself. It means Christopher is good where Eddie is rotten to the core, and something about that makes Eddie want to weep.
He manages to find his voice again. “I know I wasn’t there for you,” he says, trying not to shake, trying not to drown under fear, “and I’m sorry.” He’s sorrier than he could ever articulate, and he has to hold his chest to gasp out, “I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m sorry.”
“You were where you needed to be,” Bobby says.
“I needed to be here,” Eddie says forcefully. “I needed to be here to save you.”
“And not with your son?” which stumps Eddie momentarily.
“I—I needed to be better,” Eddie tries, not sure if he’s begging, or explaining, “so that he never left. So that I would’ve been here when—”
“Is that what you’re going to church for?” Bobby asks, and Eddie has to answer him, because he owes Bobby that much.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he confesses, and it strikes him that all that time he’s been in confession, he’s never admitted this the way he’s going to admit it now. “And I think that I deserve to be punished. Every time I think I’m going to be better, I make things worse. Every time I want something, I mess things up for everyone else. I feel like I’m trying so hard, and—” His voice breaks. “And no matter what I do—I deserve what I get. I deserve worse than what I get.”
“Do you think I deserved worse?” Bobby asks, serious and contemplative as ever.
“No,” Eddie says, and it’s not even a question. “You were a good person.”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Bobby replies, and Eddie can practically hear him sitting down behind him, though he knows there’s nowhere to sit, and that Bobby can’t really be there, and that Eddie is alone as ever, as he seems doomed to be. “I got my family killed. My mistakes led to people dying.”
“But you didn’t want that,” Eddie says, and Bobby doesn’t even have to say anything for Eddie to understand what he’s saying. “But it’s not—that’s not me,” he says, pleading. “That’s not allowed for me. I—I keep looking for you in church,” he confesses out of nowhere, listening to the words slipping out of him from somewhere hidden deep within him. “I keep looking, and I can’t find you, and I think you’d understand me. I think you’d think I—” He can’t go on.
“I’d think you were a good person?” Bobby prompts, and Eddie nods, swallowing hard.
“You believed in me,” Eddie says, hoarse. “And I wasn’t there for you.”
“You know,” Bobby says, and Eddie can hear his smile in his voice, “I believed in you even when you let me down,” and Eddie thinks of going back for Christopher, of Texas, and his kid so angry he left and still asking him to be his dad again. He thinks of what he told Buck all that time ago, of how he never gives up, and Eddie might never be perfect, but he trusts himself to never stop trying, even after everything.
Abuela knew that about him. She loved him despite it all. Maybe Bobby isn’t here, but Eddie knows him too well to think that Bobby would be upset about him not being there, even if a little part of Eddie will always blame himself for it.
He laughs wetly, quietly to himself. “You’ve got a hell of a lot more patience than me,” he tells Bobby, and he knows he’s gone, but he thinks Bobby might be able to hear him anyway.
-
“Hey, beautiful,” he says, and Athena’s eyes open. She dreams of his voice most nights, the warm timbre of it right in her ear, the way he’d say her name sometimes just to say it.
“Hey, handsome,” she says back, quiet. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
“Pretty good dream if you ask me,” he says, that little slant of humor in his voice.
“Mhm,” she replies, unimpressed. “You went to bed early without me.”
He’d brush a curl of hair behind her ear, if he were here, and then wrap an arm around her and pull her close, and her body longs to be held suddenly, held safe and sound and with him. She wishes she could kiss him again, tell him that he was so easy to love, and he was difficult sometimes, and that she loved him for it anyway.
“You went to space without me,” he teases, but there’s just pride in his voice.
“I was floating there,” she finally admits, because she wanted to admit it to him, more than anyone, “and I thought it would be easy.”
He knows, because he’s from somewhere safe within her, somewhere broken and hurt but permanent. “To let go?” he asks quietly.
“I wanted to,” Athena says, her voice breaking just a little. “I thought about Emmett, and McCluskey, and a million other people. And you.”
“Thena,” he says, not a chastisement but something gentler.
“I miss the way you used to say that,” she says, laughing a little. Her eyes are dry, but she feels like she’s crying. She’s been feeling that since he died, for months now, and she doesn’t know how to talk about it to anyone except the her that lived as a ghost after Emmett died. That Athena would understand, would cry where she can’t.
“After Emmett died,” she says, and her throat aches, “I never thought of giving up on him, did you know that? I kept my ring for years, under my uniform, against code, if you can believe that,” and the laugh is a little easier this time. “And even with Michael, even with you, I never gave up on him, not really.”
“Is this an admission of guilt?” he asks, not at all hurt, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“I don’t know,” Athena says, her voice unsteady. “I just keep wishing you were here. I keep wondering how I’m supposed to make the world a better place for the people that I love if they’re not here to live in it.”
“I’m not the only person you love,” Bobby points out, ever reasonable, and Athena hates him and loves him fiercely in that moment.
“I’m angry with you,” she says, sharp, the weight in her chest so heavy it’s almost painful, “because you left me. You chose that over me and left me behind.”
She has to breathe, for a long second. Then, the more painful thing, but it’s a good kind of pain this time, “And if that were me? I would’ve done the same damn thing.”
“I know,” he says. He knew that in life too, and Athena doesn’t know how she knows but she knows between one second and the next that it’s Bobby now, the real one, not the one she keeps seeing out of the corner of her eye.
“And I almost did it to my kids,” she continues, closing her eyes, and it hurts but she feels such deep relief at the tears dripping out now. “I almost did it to Hen, and the people I still have, and I wondered if they’d forgive me.” They’re both quiet for a long time. “I think maybe they could,” she whispers finally, “because I forgave you the moment I saw you. But I’m still angry, and I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being angry, but I love you. And I’ll never stop loving you,” she says, fiercely this time. “Ever, Bobby. I miss you so much, baby, but I’m still needed.”
And he’s not there anymore to say it, but she can imagine him saying, with just a hint of pride, “Sounds like you’ve figured it out.”