Chapter Text
Everybody had always told him he was an atrocious liar. That any attempt at deception or misdirection was painfully obvious and quickly disregarded by those who knew him best and, apparently, by people he’d only just met.
“Oh,” they’d say, “that’s just Buck being Buck.”
Which, whatever. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and frankly, he was getting just a tad tired of hearing it. Of course he was being Buck. Who the hell else was he supposed to be?
He could lie, thank you very much. He could spin ’em out when he felt like it. He could obfuscate. Muddy the waters. Redirect the conversation with all the grace and subtlety of a hungry raccoon on garbage day. He just usually didn’t; okay, almost never.
The truth was, he hated lying. It always felt like a lead weight in his throat, dragging his breath down and echoing dully in his ears. It made his skin itch and his heart jump, so he avoided it as best he could. And when pushed, he knew his words rang hollow. People saw right through them, through him. Which made his skin itch in a totally different way.
He wasn’t stupid. At least, not half as much as most people seemed willing to assume. But if there was one thing his few scant, and often spectacularly chaotic, years had impressed upon him, it was that the more you talked, the less people listened. And the less they listened, the more they failed to notice what you weren’t saying.
So, there were parts of him carefully wrapped up and left in the shadows. Lies of omission. Lies of the past, which was where they needed to stay. Not because he was hiding anything. Well, not exactly. There were things he'd packed away so carefully he sometimes managed to convince himself he'd forgotten them.
Because taking those bits and pieces out for close examination took too much effort. Too many spoons. He knew all about spoon theory; the internet was a wondrous rabbit hole of all things esoterically encyclopedic, and his brain liked the way the word spoon rolled around in his head.
Every now and then, caught up in some baking extravaganza in the kitchen, he’d find himself standing there, teaspoon in hand, thinking: One day. Maybe, I’ll unpack it all, but he never did.
The present took all his energy, and then some. He preferred it that way. So far, so good. His ability to dissociate from one disaster to the next was probably something that should be studied, not that he'd ever volunteer for it. Been there, done that.
After all, you can never go home again. Never retread the same steps. And whatever he’d left in the mud on the other side of the world was getting farther and farther away with every passing year.
Until one day it turned up on his doorstep, like a recently watered sea monkey, and kissed him on the cheek.
It was Eddie that started it all, or Eddie’s words thrown in his face, or the anger and grief fighting for supremacy in his eyes, the taut body language, the finger jabbed in his face. It had been too much. Too intimate in a way that caused a thousand butterflies to take flight in his gut and made him want to disappear into his own skin.
I'm sorry, he had said, but he was pretty sure he hadn't meant it. I'm sorry you're hurting, he'd meant that.
But not sorry for the things he himself had said. Not sorry for the way he felt. Not sorry at all. He had been there when Bobby died, and for all Eddie’s regret and self-flagellation, he had not and if that made Buck selfish, then so be it.
And, yes Eddie had made amends of sorts, presented him with Christopher and mumbled something about someone being mean but the damage had been done, a small crack in the dam that was Buck’s internal safeguard had appeared, running the length of his carefully maintained foundation. And wasn’t that just all fine and dandy. Not a firetruck or a lightning strike but his grieving best friend, chipping away at things that had no business seeing the light of day.
It was after he found the note ‘Went to the airport’. It seemed so petty and final, so he had gone out, driven aimlessly for a while and ended up at his favorite coffee shop and sat in the car for longer than was probably healthy. His mind was filled with angry brown eyes and his own hurt and the nagging echo of another fight, in another place, long before he had even met Eddie. And just like that the crack widened.
“It’s not your trauma Ev, this, it’s my decision not yours. I get to choose, not you.” The words screamed at him across the small bland living room of the medical quarter’s suite. The memory of those words slammed into him so hard he could almost smell the antiseptic and pain in the warm, still air.
He had screamed back, hands fisted at his sides and almost incoherent with emotions that he could not pick apart but were overwhelming to his every sense. “Don’t you dare tell me how to feel. I was there. I was there.”
“I. Don't. Care. Get out.” The words seemed to ricochet around the room, their brutality leaving Buck breathless. He had stormed out and slammed the door behind him.
A horn blared nearby, Buck jerked, back to the present, back to the car and the coffee shop in front of him. His hands were clenched so tightly around the steering wheel his knuckles hurt.
"Fuck."
The word escaped before he could stop it. For a moment he just sat there, his chest heaving. He'd spent so long convincing himself he'd left that version of himself behind that he'd forgotten that it didn’t erase anything, whether he liked it or not. Eddie had a lot to answer for, and the real tragedy of the whole dumb mess was that Buck had absolutely no intention of ever telling him why.
But Eddie stayed, and the static crackling beneath Buck's skin waned, and whatever passed for normal in his world slowly seeped back. Bobby never showed up. Not really. For all Buck jumped at shadows and listened to the quiet creaking of the new walls, he remained stubbornly absent. He should have known that ghosts make themselves known when you least expect it.
He moved out of Eddie's house and tried not to think too hard about how he really felt about that. The whole thing was a tangle of emotions balanced too precariously to be examined. He was fine, Eddie was fine and if he found himself stuttering a little bit more around Eddie, that was fine too.
~ooOoo~
The boxes were stacked in the kitchen, Buck sighed, he didn’t have too much stuff. He had tried to be ruthless in sorting out what was essential and what could be trashed or donated when he moved, and he was steadily organizing the house and himself.
Once the kitchen was unpacked, he was going to treat himself to some new baking pans, maybe some springform cake pans. Maybe one of those ridiculous shaped novelty pans he was absolutely too old to find exciting. He got down the last few boxes and boxcutter in hand, slit the packing tape on a rather dented box, as he pulled open the flaps the glint of silverware emerged from the brown paper packing.
“Huh”. Teaspoons, mixed with a handful of large dessert spoons, a diaspora of mismatched sizes and finishes thrown haphazardly into the top of the box Buck was reasonably sure he hadn't packed himself. Probably Eddie, although he wasn’t usually so careless, and if Buck had never called him a neat freak to his face, it was the thought that counted. He pulled a small brassy looking teaspoon from the box and held it up for inspection.
“How many of you do I need today?” he asked, ‘it’s gonna be a quiet day, so not too many, I hope.” His left leg twinged suddenly, as a sharp spike of pain flared down his shin. He rolled his eyes and dropped the spoon back into the box. So it was going to be like that, was it? A coffee first, then. He was on shift the next day. He would finish unpacking the kitchen and then decompress for the rest of the afternoon, he decided.
~ooOoo~
Buck got to the 118 about half an hour early. He'd slept badly; a dull ache in his leg and a head full of looping thoughts and half-remembered dreams had seen to that. There was a sluggishness to him he couldn't quite shake, and a prickle of restlessness under his skin, a sense that he'd forgotten something important, though for the life of him he couldn't have said what.
The first call-out came just before nine. Buck was nursing a coffee, sitting alone in the loft and listening to Hen and Eddie down in the engine bay bicker about supply staging being based on their most common type of call. Hen sounded like she was winning that particular argument, but Buck could practically hear Eddie digging his heels in.
As the tones sounded, Eddie called up,"Come on, Buck, time to go." As if he needed reminding.