Chapter Text
“It’s weird,” Harry said.
May turned to look at him from her spot on their mom’s couch and took the offered bowl of popcorn.
“What is?”
“Just, the 118. Like, okay, that first week when Chim was putting more bubble wrap around me than even mom, I didn’t really notice it. Buck kept trying to include me in stuff and show me things and I just didn’t realize that no one else was actually helping him with those things. Or even…well, paying attention to him. And Chim…he’s like constantly making comments about Buck.”
By the time he’d finished explaining, Harry had dropped into a spot on the couch.
“Like what?” May asked.
Harry didn’t even know how to describe it exactly. He and May had known everyone at the 118 in a distant kind of manner for years, though maybe May had known them a little better from her time at dispatch. Either way, Harry knew that his sister knew how Chim could be. He was the jokester. He was the guy that poked fun without being malicious. Except that, when he said things to Buck it didn’t sound like just jokes.
“Chim keeps telling me to not be like Buck,” Harry said. “And we were restocking the ambulance and took the clipboard off Buck and gave it to me and said something about Buck being a menace. He told Buck off for baking at the station.”
“Well,” May said, “Chim is in charge. He is the Captain.”
Harry shook his head. “It’s not like that. I’m not explaining it well.”
He scrambled his brain trying to find another incident and…wait, it had happened on his first day.
“He made fun of Buck’s coffee order,” Harry said.
“Okay,” May said, drawing out the word. “But does it bother Buck?”
“I mean, I think it does. He gets a look in his eye, but the next minute it’s gone and that’s that. It’s like…like he just doesn’t want to say anything in his own defense.”
May frowned at that.
Harry knew he wasn’t just seeing things, but maybe he just didn’t understand the dynamic at the firehouse just yet. It was just that, well, Chim didn’t treat Eddie or even Ravi the same way. Even him. Even especially him. Harry had been warned that no matter what house he ended up at, he’d be getting some level of hazing or just general joshing. That had not been his experience. Well, it had felt a little like that to be left behind at the station and told not to do much of anything, and yet that wasn’t it at all. Of course, the 118 having been Bobby’s did make a difference and he knew that, but it was odd for Buck to be getting the brunt of things. He said as much to May.
“Well, Buck is his brother-in-law,” May said and he could tell she was trying to be the voice of reason. “Maybe that’s why?”
Harry shrugged. He also knew that it wasn’t just the comments. It was the way that Buck acted at the firehouse. He was a bit more reserved than Harry was used to from all the time they’d spent together when Buck was training him. Quieter. He kept to himself a lot more than Harry had expected and then when he did bother to join the others there existed some distance.
Harry shook it all off. He couldn’t do anything about it…he didn’t even know if there was anything wrong. He had the next twenty-four hours off and he was going to stop thinking about work. He and May had planned to catch up on The Traitors after missing two weeks of episodes and nothing else was going to distract them from it. He joined May on the couch and she hit play.
Harry couldn’t remember when he and May had started watching reality tv shows together, but it had happened sometime after he came back to LA and then ended up moving in with her after the house fire. Harry had just been around when she was watching and they just had a way of drawing you in. The night that Buck stopped by her place with cookies and baked ziti they’d gotten him to watch The Bachelor with them and that had become a thing until the season ended. In that time when everything had felt so absolutely uncertain, it had been good to have Buck on Mondays.
Some hours later, they had watched three straight episodes and ordered and eaten most of a pizza. It was how their mom found them, just vegging on her couch.
“Well, isn’t this a pretty picture,” Athena said with an amused shake of her head.
“There’s still some pizza left if you want,” Harry offered.
He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t take them up on it, but did join them for a few minutes before she announced that what she really needed was a shower and a glass of wine before she turned in for the night.
Sometimes, it struck Harry how different things were with his mom. Losing Bobby had changed her in ways that he didn’t expect. Things had gotten a lot better since her stint in space, but some days she was just sad in a way that Harry didn’t think he would ever understand. He didn’t want to understand it fully, but he did want to be there for her.
“Let me know if you see any more weirdness,” May said before she took off when the episode was over.
Harry saluted her and he watched her roll her eyes.
Over the next few shifts, Harry tried to keep an eye on things as much as he could while still fulfilling his probie duties. Some days, things went well. They saved all the people, put out all the fires, dealt with whatever was thrown at them. It was exhilarating. It was fun. It was rewarding. It was exactly what Harry had wanted and he had no regrets about becoming a firefighter. Other days weren’t as good. No matter how hard they tried, sometimes you didn’t save everyone and that was a harder lesson to learn.
For a couple of shifts, he didn’t notice anything too obvious going on with Chim and Buck. Harry almost wrote it all off as weirdness from his first few weeks. But then, after a tough call dealing with a four car pile up, Chim dropped a hand to Harry’s shoulder.
“Good work. You think before you act, Harry, which is a lot better than what Buck was like as a probie. Well, he’s still like that most of the time. Way too impulsive for his own good.”
Harry didn’t know how that could be true, but he didn’t correct Chim then, or a few calls later when he heard Chim say to Buck: “Bucking it up again, Buckley, do I have to write you up?”
He saw Buck frown. “I didn’t—” then Buck just shook his head and he turned away.
Paying attention a bit more gave him a few more instances of Chim making comments. They were always at Buck’s expense and half the time not even when Buck had done something to deserve the comment.
The very worst one was the day that Eddie decided not to follow Chim’s order to not run back into the blazing house just because he was convinced by a screaming woman that her son was still inside. He wasn’t, as it turned out, and while they couldn’t have known that for sure, the call had been made for all of them to get out of the house. When Harry hesitated, Buck had pushed him ahead of him to head to the exit and they had heard the way the wood was creaking around them as they made it out the door.
“There was no one in that bedroom,” Buck insisted to everyone and Harry knew it was true.
He also knew from his training that the worst thing any of them could do is go searching for someone in a building that was unsafe. If Harry knew that, then surely Eddie did too.
Harry stayed where he had been put on the hose with Buck, holding it steady so the stream of water hit just where they needed it to.
Eddie still went in, ignoring them all calling him back. The mother looked like she was going to lose her mind, shaking and crying. Ravi led her to the ambulance and let her sit. Chim was yelling for Eddie over the radio, asking him to return. The sounds of the house collapsing in places made them all antsy and when they next saw Eddie he came from the back of the house, a little soot covered but fine and on his own.
Harry had expected Chim to go off on Eddie for putting himself at risk and the rest of them too if they had to go in and rescue him. Instead, Chim was shaking his head at Buck as if Buck could have stopped Eddie or as if Buck was the one that was impulsive. As if Buck hadn’t — the whole time — been saying that there was no one inside because he had searched that part of the house himself. As if Buck’s assurance was not enough. Neither Chim or Eddie had believed Buck.
Eddie barely got told off.
“Shouldn’t Eddie be getting written up for that?” Harry asked Ravi while they rolled up the hoses when it was all over. The house — what was left of it — still smoked a little but the fire was out.
“You’d think so,” Ravi said with a shake of his head.
Then, there was the day that Chim had to leave early because his and Maddie’s baby — Harry could not get himself to call that baby Bobby or, somehow worse, Nash — had a fever so high Maddie had taken him to the hospital. For one thing, Chim had barely answered Buck when he asked what was wrong even though the baby was his nephew. For another, the firefighter with the most seniority was Buck and should have been in charge and yet somehow it landed on Eddie because that was what Chim instructed. No one fought him on it. At first Harry thought it was because Buck might be distracted with his baby nephew in the hospital, but it wasn’t that.
“Not the first time either,” Ravi confirmed to him while they polished the chrome on the engine.
There were only a few hours left on the shift and they only went out for one call without Chim and the thing that truly baffled Harry was that although Eddie had been left in charge, everyone actually looked to Buck. If Eddie felt any particular way about it, he didn’t show it. Almost like it was expected for Buck to do it. Harry thought maybe it was because they were such good friends and it was just how they worked, but it was strange nevertheless.
“What was that?” Harry asked Ravi when they were on their own in the locker room.
Maybe it was that Ravi had been the last probie at the 118 before him, but Harry found a lot of camaraderie in Ravi. So when Ravi shrugged his shoulders in a ‘what can you do’ fashion Harry was sure it meant that this had happened before as well.
The next day, when he was arriving at the station, Harry overheard Chim praising Eddie for a job well done and Eddie said nothing about Buck’s part in it. Not how he’d been the one directing everyone or how his ideas had been the ones they wound up using or how Eddie had been so caught up in the person he’d chosen to help that he hadn’t even supervised any of them including Harry. How it was Buck that caught his mistakes or showed him the best approach to something and explained things in a way that made sense. He gave no credit to Buck.
Harry told Ravi about it and Ravi snorted and shook his head.
“Look, I don’t like it much either, but Buck took his transfer papers back and nothing has gone wrong on a call and Chim is our Captain. Captain’s prerogative who he leaves in charge if he has to leave. His choice is Eddie.”
Buck was going to transfer? Harry didn’t know what to do with that information except to look at Ravi hoping that Ravi would drop more information, but then Ravi just didn’t and Harry didn’t know how to ask without making it sound weird.
Despite being tired, Harry was glad he’d agreed to meet up with May for breakfast. He filled her in over coffee and waffles.
“But Buck doesn’t say anything about it?”
“Nope. That’s the weird part. But not as weird as Buck wanting to transfer at some point.”
She sipped her coffee and leaned back in her chair.
“Does anyone else say anything about it?” May asked.
Harry told her about the way Ravi and some of the others acted about it. How no one ever said anything to Chim, but that was probably more to do with how Buck never said anything. They all took their cue from him. Harry suspected that like him, they had all noticed the weirdness and decided to mind their business.
“So, Chim’s bullying him,” May said. “And worse, Buck is letting him.”
Harry was aware that his sister had a history with bullies. In school. Later when she was at dispatch. He couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but he remembered May ranting about her and about how her supervisor wouldn’t do anything about it because he was the woman’s friend. How small it had made May feel.
“Look, May, I’m the probie. I don’t think there’s anything I can do here if no one else is saying anything.”
May tutted. “What if I ask Buck about it.”
Harry shook his head. “How do you think that will go?”
May let her shoulders drop. “He won’t say anything, will he.”
“Nope,” Harry said. “And is this any of our business?”
May shot him a look. “You work there. What if…what if you were being targeted like this?”
He did work there and he was the probie, the last person that should shake anything up. Harry needed to be a little more focused on soaking everything in from everyone. The academy taught him a lot, but it was true what they said about how different it was to actually be out there on the truck helping and saving people. How inexperienced he was. Harry could rattle off all kinds of information because he’d recently learned it, but he couldn’t act immediately the way he’d seen Buck and Ravi and Eddie and Chim do. That came with experience and it was the one thing Harry lacked.
“We’ll leave it alone for now,” Harry said firmly.
He could tell that May was not going to leave it alone for long, especially when she asked, “when do you think he wanted to transfer?”
“No idea.”
Harry had given it some thought. It had to be before Harry asked him to help train, right? Because the way that he’d talked up the 118 hadn’t been like someone that resented or wanted nothing to do with the 118. And nothing had seemed amiss when Buck had him join them on the truck when his mom and Hen were stuck in space.
“Well, how about you find out,” May said.
Harry just shook his head.
The next shift started just as normal as all the rest. Harry had stopped showing up to the station earlier than he was scheduled to, but still early enough that he was the first one in. He was just finishing up in the locker room when Buck arrived.
“Hey,” Buck said. “I made muffins.”
When Harry looked at him, he was carrying a plastic container and when he opened the lid a delicious scent wafted out of it. Harry had experienced plenty of Buck’s baking. He and May had tasted so many batches of snickerdoodle cookies when Buck had been trying to replicate Bobby’s recipe that Harry might never look at a snickerdoodle the same way again. He took a muffin gladly and was just biting into it when Chim arrived followed by Ravi and Eddie.
Chim frowned at the muffins. Eddie snagged one and Ravi did too.
“What prompted this?” Chim asked, but even he reached for one.
“Just felt like baking,” Buck said.
From the way that Chim and Eddie shared a look, Harry didn’t think that they thought that was all it was.
“Anyway,” Buck said, “I’ll put these upstairs.”
“And that better be all there is,” Chim said. “I’m warning you, Buckley, I don’t want our fridge filled up with loaves again.”
“That doesn’t sound like too much of a problem,” Harry said.
One thing that Harry remembered very clearly about Bobby was his love for cooking. Not that his mom wasn’t a good cook, or that his dad and David hadn’t managed things well in the kitchen, it was just that Bobby enjoyed it more. He loved it. He’d taught Harry a few things and as sad as it had felt the first few times when he did anything in the kitchen that reminded him of Bobby, these days Harry liked that there was some connection to Bobby left over. A bit of Bobby in how he made scrambled eggs and how he got his pancakes to be extra fluffy.
Harry knew that Buck had learned most of his kitchen skills through Bobby and not just that, Buck was like Bobby with his own baking and cooking. He enjoyed it and he wanted to share with those he cared about. From what Harry had heard, Buck’s entire contribution to helping Hen through her illness revolved around food.
“Can’t encourage that, Harry,” Eddie said with a shake of his head. “You don’t have any idea how bad this could get.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, it’s just not good for him,” Eddie said. “Or us. He’s obsessive with it and then the fridge will be filled with all sort of loaves.”
Harry still didn’t see the problem. When he headed up, he found Buck placing the container on the table and when he turned he grinned at Harry.
“It was really good,” Harry said.
“Thanks. I, uh, I just wanted to make something yesterday.”
Buck didn’t elaborate on why, not even craving a sweet treat because that would have been excuse enough. And, then it didn’t really matter when the klaxon went off.
The whole shift was fine. Harry didn’t notice anything amiss with Buck or with any of the others though he thought that he saw Buck and Eddie talking at one point and Eddie shaking his head after it was done and Buck walking away a bit more hurriedly than normal.
Late that night, when they were settling in for the night, Harry got thirsty and went back up to get some water and he found Buck on one of the couches rather than the bunk room and with no one else around and his curiosity piqued, Harry approached him.
“Can’t sleep?” Buck asked, glancing up from his phone.
Harry noticed the tv was on, a reporter had a microphone in hand but Harry had no idea what she was saying because the sound was off.
“Ah. No. Was grabbing some water,” Harry said. “You?”
Buck shrugged.
Harry headed to the fridge and grabbed a water bottle out, uncapping it as he walked back towards Buck. He was looking down at his phone again.
Harry settled onto the arm of the couch as he took a few gulps of water. Buck looked at him as if surprised to still find him there. Harry took a breath.
“Hey, so Ravi let it slip the other day that you were going to transfer?”
Buck chuckled. He sat up a little. “Yeah, that was half thought out. I thought…well, I don’t know, that I wasn’t going to handle working here without Bobby.”
“Oh.”
Buck leaned back on the couch and he rubbed a hand over his face. “It was too different when we first came back and I thought maybe starting over somewhere new…but Chim wanted all of us to stay here so—”
“So you let him make the decision for you,” Harry said.
It shot a red flag right up in Harry’s mind.
Buck shook his head. “No. No. It wasn’t like that exactly. What he said made sense, this place is…well, it’s home and leaving wasn’t going to make me less sad or my grief go away. I was just going to be somewhere new and I wasn’t going to have anyone at least here I was with everyone that lost him too.”
Harry nodded slowly. “So, you don’t regret it.”
“No,” Buck said. “No. I don’t.”
“Oh. Alright.”
Buck eyed him, eyes narrowing. “What brought this on?”
“I was surprised when I heard about it,” Harry said as he stood to leave.
Buck nodded and chuckled but it sounded a bit flat. “Yeah, who would have thought that I would ever consider leaving this place, right.”
Harry stopped. Buck was looking at his phone and he was tempted to stay and keep him company, but somehow he knew it wasn’t what Buck wanted. He wasn’t down in the bunk for a reason.
“It’s okay to do things if you think it’s what will make you happy,” he said, instead.
Harry knew about that. It was why he’d left LA to be with his dad and David even if it meant not being around his mom or May all the time. It was why he dropped out of high school even though he’d known that his mom wasn’t going to like it and in retrospect he should have just graduated because he’d had a few hoops to jump through to get into the fire academy without a high school diploma. It was why he decided to join the fire department even knowing that he’d be putting himself in danger by doing the thing that had taken his stepfather from him. Sometimes, you just had to decide and do things and the opinions of everyone else — especially your family — didn’t matter.
Buck didn’t respond, but Harry knew he’d heard him, based on how he stiffened a little and how Harry felt his eyes on him as he walked away.