Archive of Our Own

6:15 am

Lucas Diaz believes entirely that any day can be a good one.

It’s an optimism that runs hot all the way down to the marrow in his bones, the unshakeable core of who he would like to believe he is.

When he opens his eyes on the morning of July ninth, it’s half an hour past sunrise and the bedroom of the corner apartment he’d specifically chosen for the light is flooded in the yellow haze of an early summer morning. Five minutes later, Lucas is laced into his sneakers and slipping an old, threadbare LAFD t-shirt with the sleeves cut off over the mess of curls on his head, then standing at his bathroom mirror and smoothing moisturizing sunscreen into the terrain of his lightly stubbled jaw; along the slope of his nose and the place where his dimple digs into his cheek; over the burst of red beside his left eye that splashes over the structure of his high, broad cheekbone. Before his watch reflects six-thirty back at him, he’s out on the street in the sunlight, soaking its light and warmth into his newly stretched shoulders.

Lucas has an established, finely tuned morning routine for days like this one, when he’s set to begin a twenty-four hour shift at eight. The run comes first, the sun and the heat and the stretching burn of his muscles bringing his active mind into clearer, sharper focus. From there it’s a standard set: quick, hot shower; cream for his curls; a quick shave; his daily dose of the medication he’s taken for his ADHD since he was six; eggs and toast with blueberry jam; and then he’s standing at the kitchen counter, still vaguely damp and barefoot, looking at a shelf full of bright green matcha powders.

The matcha thing had started as a potentially passing hyperfixation after he had a particularly good one on an outing with Jee-Yun, but that was years ago and he hasn’t let up. Today, he reaches for strawberries and cream and thinks idly as he works through the steps about the way his dad makes fun of him for being so LA, light and easy and meaningless.

As Lucas has reminded him before, only one of his sons is from Texas and it’s not him. Though, speaking of Christopher—

Lucas reaches for his phone, distracted halfway through his task, and types out a quick text to his brother, if only because the train of thought has reminded him that it’s been a few days since they spoke last. It’s nothing, just a picture of the half-made matcha and the words, strawberries and cream. think dad would admit to liking this one?

Privately, Lucas thinks he’s not the only one who’s so LA. Someone might be projecting. He does think his dad means it when he says he would never drink oatmilk, though, which Lucas smiles at as he pours some in and rattles the ice against the cup in his hand.

Christopher replies in seconds, and Lucas knows that he’s up with the girls by now, smiling at the mental image of his brother and his nieces in their cozy kitchen just across the city.

Not a chance, the text says, and Lucas grins to himself as he pauses to check the numbers on his watch.

Right on time, he scans the apartment behind him, reaches for his work bag, and steps back out into the world.

7:57 am

“Diaz!”

Lucas pauses, halfway out of his Jeep in his usual parking spot outside the firehouse, and turns. Squinting into the light of the morning sun, he feels the smile that breaks out over his features, tugging at his mouth and lighting up his face.

“Hey, Cap,” he grins, the sun now blocked by familiar broad shoulders in department-issue pressed navy blue and illuminating that same smile reflected back at him on his dad’s face as Buck draws level with him.

“You’re gonna be late if you’re not careful,” he says, and Lucas smiles as they fall into step together.

“And what’s your excuse?” he throws back, glancing at his dad’s also recently vacated car over his shoulder.

Buck smiles, leaning in and bumping his shoulder lightly against Lucas. “I don’t need an excuse,” he answers. “I’m the captain.”

“Sure,” Lucas laughs, bright and easy, shaking his head.

Buck looks down at the container in his hand, turning it sideways to peer in at the muffins. “What flavor?” he asks curiously. “Did you try that apple thing I was telling you about, because—”

“No,” Lucas laughs. “Next week, I promise. They’re blueberry.”

Buck gasps theatrically. “My favorite!”

Lucas rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling and he knows that it looks as fond on his face as it feels. He turns back to his dad as he veers off toward the locker room and musters up some measure of firmness. “Don’t take those to your office,” he warns. “Cat will tell me if she doesn’t get any.”

“If she doesn’t get any what?” interjects a third voice as Buck ducks out of the door frame and disappears with Lucas’ box of muffins, much to his general concern. He turns, though, in the direction of his partner’s voice.

Catherine Carter is, for all intents and purposes, the coolest person Lucas knows. Transplanted from rural Virginia with all of her grit and determination well intact, she came to California with a desire for a new life. And then, by some grace of the universe, she became Lucas’ partner and soon after that his best friend in the world. Lucas has been surrounded by heroes for his entire life and admires them all, but Cat’s presence by his side often feels like the cherry on top.

“Muffins,” he answers as he glances up at her. “Good morning.”

Cat peers into his travel mug where it’s sitting on the bench, reaching out one tattooed arm to tilt it toward her and look inside. “What flavor?”

“Strawberries and cream,” Lucas answers, and Cat frowns, glancing back up at his face.

“The muffins?” she asks.

“What? No,” Lucas answers, gesturing to the cup in her hands. “The matcha.”

“Oh,” she says, dismissive and grinning all at once. “No, I was just trying to see if you’d moved on from this stuff yet to something I can steal. The question was about the muffins.”

“You see how that exchange made no sense, right?” Lucas huffs good-naturedly, reaching for his boots. Cat, however, is saved from answering by a presence in the doorway. When Lucas looks up at the sound, it’s to find May leaning casually against the doorframe in her uniform pants and the standard navy t-shirt bearing the LAFD emblem.

“They’re blueberry,” she says— and sure enough, there’s one in her hand, already a quarter missing from the side as the wrapper falls open over her fingers.

“Nice, Diaz,” Cat grins, a good-natured fist to his shoulder.

Lucas smiles sweetly in May’s direction. “Hi, May,” he says. “Glad you like them.”

May smiles. “Ravi, too. Buck was absolutely gonna take them to his office, by the way, but we intervened.”

“I knew you could be trusted,” Lucas answers.

It’s a fair assessment— after all, May and Ravi are more than coworkers to Lucas. He’s known them longer than he can remember, his entire life. The lines between work and family are, and always have been, very blurred. He likes it that way— likes the way the love between the 118 seeps out of the firehouse; likes that he doesn’t remember a time before these walls held the people he loves; likes that he gets to be a part of it in new and changing ways. He likes baking for them and knowing that one of his dads is always around and that the other one is just around the corner at any given time and that he’s part of a lasting legacy.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” May admits lightheartedly, and then takes a nonchalant bite of her muffin.

Lucas just smiles.

11:37 am

The alarm blares, distinct and familiar.

Lucas leaps to his feet with the rest of the team, all of them locking into work mode despite the fact that they’d just been in the middle of a very animated discussion about octopi and their nine brains. Everyone had something to contribute, at least until their captain joined them— at that point, it was as good as done anyway and they all knew it, because Buck has never not had a leg up on the rest of them when it comes to fun facts.

Lucas, as a side effect of having been raised by him, is a reigning close second.

Either way, they set it aside as they gear up and climb into the truck together. May drives and Buck takes the passenger seat while Lucas crams into the back with Ravi and Cat, the five of them moving in easy tandem together like the well-oiled machine that they are.

Over the headset as the siren blares above them, Buck runs it down for them with quick efficiency: a structure fire, multiple stations responding, concerns about the stability of the building. It all sounds pretty routine, nothing they haven’t dealt with before, and dispatch had relayed to Buck that the 133 was already on scene.

Lucas moves fluidly as the engine pulls to a halt and he hoists himself out of it, then down to the ground. He sweeps his gaze over the unfolding scene, already pulsing with energy and chaos, and feels something click in his chest as his boots hit the pavement.

It’s the feeling he almost always gets when the 118 arrives on a scene— that settled, certain shift beneath his ribs like something has locked into place. It’s belonging and confidence and that specific kind of sureness. The knowledge that he’s made for this. There’s nothing in the world that Lucas loves quite the same way that he loves this feeling.

“Diaz, Carter.”

Lucas turns toward his dad, who’s standing in the center of the chaos looking as calm and in command as he always does. The light is on him and the silver in his curls lights up with it, threaded through the blonde that’s always been a little darker than his own. There’s a glimmer of that pride-admiration-softness feeling Lucas gets from watching him, there and then gone as he focuses in on the task at hand and the instructions being doled out for them.

“I want you on search and rescue,” he tells them, nodding toward the back quadrant of the building where smoke and dust abound. “Fire’s not a concern on the south side, but there might be people in there. Evacuation started too late.”

“Got it,” Lucas answers, nodding as he switches on his radio out of sheer habit, glancing over his shoulder. “Cat?”

“Right behind you,” she answers.

Lucas leads easily— over the five years they’ve spent as partners, he and Cat have learned to trust each other wholly. There’s never any question as to who’s going to push and who’s going to pull, who leads or who follows. They move as one, an easy and familiar back and forth that makes Lucas feel safe no matter what kind of call they’re on.

And he does— feel safe, that is— as they move through the building clearing rooms. The structure was some kind of office building, an outdated one by the looks of what he can see through the haze of lingering smoke and dust. The fire is mostly out now, but parts of the roof have collapsed and it’s difficult to see.

“Anything?” Cat asks him, her familiar voice muffled through her mask.

Lucas pauses across the hall from her at the sound of something that catches his ear.

“Hold on,” he answers. “I think I heard something.”

He moves deeper into the room to his right and calls out loud, “LAFD, anybody here?”

It’s silent at first, but then there’s coughing and that familiar weak-throated sound that someone makes after inhaling smoke.

“Cat, I got somebody!” he calls back, and then he’s pulling someone out from under a desk as she explains that she was trapped because she hurt her ankle. There’s a creak overhead and Lucas glances up at the ceiling tiles, then back to the woman— Ellie, she tells him.

“Ellie,” he answers, his voice warm even to his own ears. “We are gonna get you out of here, how’s that sound?”

“Good,” she admits. “Actually, really good.”

Lucas laughs. “Alright.”

“Carter, Diaz?” Buck’s voice crackles over the radio, interrupting. “Check in.”

Lucas raises his hand to the button on his radio and tilts his head in toward it so he’ll be heard. “Diaz and Carter, Cap,” he asserts. “We found somebody. Cat’s gonna bring her out.”

“Ellie,” he says again, “you’re gonna go with my partner here and she’ll take you outside, okay?” Cat is already reaching out, slinging Ellie’s arm over her own shoulders and transferring her weight away from Lucas as he looks up, scanning the hall. By his count, there are only three more rooms to clear in this area.

“I’ll finish and follow you,” he tells Cat. “We can regroup outside.”

She nods, and then they part ways. It’s just the first hallway— so close to the exterior of the building that Lucas can still hear the muffled shouts of other first responders and the chirp of sirens. It’ll take him a matter of two minutes or less to finish up here, and he doesn’t even think twice about it as he steps deeper into the hallway, calling out LAFD like he always does.

It’s all just like that— he clears the remaining rooms like he always does; feels the relief when they’re empty like he always does; turns to head back outside feeling focused and sure.

It’s all the way it always is. Until, at the very last second, it isn’t.

11:58 am

Buck isn’t looking when it happens.

He feels it more than anything else. The way the ground beneath his feet trembles like a breath; the way the air shifts; the tension that washes over the assembled crowd. He knows this feeling— a lifetime in this job, all the disasters he’s witnessed, all the ones he’s been at the heartbeat of.

And still, it manages to be different when he turns instinctively and realizes that while he wasn’t looking the south corner of the building has collapsed. He looks back in time to see the shift of concrete and the way clouds of dust rise up and roll off of what is now essentially a mound of debris that used to be a building.

There’s half a heartbeat between the moment he looks, and the moment he realizes.

Lucas was still in there. Lucas was in there. Lucas was—

He hears, like it’s coming from someone or somewhere else, the yell that’s torn out of his own throat. It’s a primal, tangled, awful thing that gets lost in the haze of settling dust.

Lucas, Buck thinks, losing all sense of himself in a tide of total desperation.

The rest goes kind of blurry.

11:59 am

Once, when Lucas was four, he attempted to climb his cousin’s bookshelf. He doesn’t remember why, or what the goal was— maybe just to get up high, to experience something from a new angle. It wasn’t bolted to the wall; why would it be? Jee was not a toddler, not in danger of knocking her bookshelves over.

But Jee wasn’t the one whose foot slipped on a shelf not meant to hold four-year-olds, sending the whole shelf careening to the floor and the books falling in a cacophony of screaming and crashing. All the adults came running; Lucas remembers the sound of his parents calling his name and the feeling of being scooped up into his daddy’s arms, cradled against his broad chest while Dad hovered, trained hands cradling Lucas’ cheeks and inspecting his head while they both whispered soft platitudes to him.

Surprisingly, he’d escaped the incident with nothing but a shallow gash, bloody but mostly harmless. He still has the scar in the place that the edge of a book had broken skin, a little silvery nick up near his hairline.

Lucas discovers, on a sunny day in July, that being crushed beneath a slab of concrete and effectively buried in rubble is both like that, and very much not.

It happens so quickly that he can’t process it. One minute he’s in the hallway, fingers reaching for his radio to let the others know that he’s on his way out. And the next, with a spectacular crash that roars in his ears, he’s trapped on his back beneath a haze of endless gray dust and something is holding him firmly in place.

There’s a flash of panic first— adrenaline-fueled, the kind of thing that makes him think he can just move and get up. Then, there’s the realization that he can’t, and a tight descending dread that starts at the crown of his head and cascades over him with brutal force.

And lastly— shining, horrible, and new— there’s pain.

12:01 pm

Buck isn’t aware of what he’s doing until he’s aware that someone is trying to stop him.

It was like that last time too, he realizes hazily. Last time— so many years ago, before Lucas was even born, when there was someone he loved beneath endless collapsed debris, and—

Wait, Buck thinks sluggishly. No, it was mud then.

Eddie was trapped under mud that night, when it was raining and panic coursed through Buck’s chest like raging hooves, so wild and undeterred that he couldn’t begin to harness or tame it. And it’s sunny today— impossibly sunny and hot and bright blue overhead and he squints in the light and his vision blurs and that’s how he realizes that he’s crying.

The realization that he’s also screaming comes a beat later, when he hears his son’s name on his own lips and crashes forcefully back into his body to find that he’s kneeling on a rough, broken heap of concrete. He can’t remember moving or falling to his knees, but knows that he must have.

“Lucas!” he sobs, frantic. His throat is raw like he’s been yelling for longer than he thinks. He can’t stop, even now. “No,” he cries. “No, no, Lucas—”

There are hands on each of his shoulders— he realizes suddenly that it’s Ravi at his left and May at his right, and that they’re pulling him back.

Bobby had pulled him back that night at the well. It was Bobby he collapsed against, fingers and lungs aching for Eddie in a way that he didn’t understand yet. And maybe this is worse, because he does understand— knows completely the feeling of total and wild love that drives him to scrape his fingers against pieces of broken concrete shot through with rebar in a broken, useless attempt to get to Lucas.

Lucas, his baby and the light of his life, his baby who has suddenly ceased to be a capable, strong twenty-four year old firefighter and now appears in Buck’s mind as the sweet-faced, bright-eyed toddler he’d once been when he depended on his dads for everything and trusted them entirely.

That part is still true. He’s Lucas’ dad and his captain, and Lucas trusts him to be both. Buck is doubly, horrifically responsible for keeping Lucas safe.

And Lucas is buried.

“Lucas,” he cries out, voice raw and hoarse.

“Buck,” May says, urgent and close to his ear. She calls him Cap these days, almost always. Maybe that’s why it reaches him when his name tumbles out of her mouth, sounding awful and wrecked.

“I have to—” he starts, through tears. “I can’t leave him. I won’t leave him!”

“Come on, come on,” May says in an awful, soft voice. “We’re not leaving him, but you gotta move.”

Later, when he looks back on it and only half-remembers it, Buck will think: of course it was May. Of course it was May who dragged him away from the concrete and away from Lucas and to safety.

Of course it’s May who kneels down in front of him, all big brown eyes and lived determination that makes her look for all the world just like her mother, and says:

“We’re gonna get him out.”

12:16 pm

May sits next to him. She’d pushed him down with her hands on his shoulders to the hot metal ledge of the engine, and then perched next to him. She’s so gentle sometimes, reminding Buck that beneath her lifetime of strong exterior there’s also the teenage girl he’d first known her to be. Soft like spring and tough as nails all at once, and a steadying force— like someone else who’d had a hand in raising her.

Buck thinks about that now, albeit distantly. How he and May and Eddie and Lucas all carry pieces of Bobby’s leadership with them. Buck wishes that his own felt a little more in reach right now— or that Bobby were out here with them, that he was the captain again and Buck just on the job the way it used to be— as he reaches for his radio and presses inward again. It’s his third try; the first two had yielded only static in response to his hoarse, splintering call.

“Diaz,” he insists, his voice breaking as he presses his finger to the button and closes his eyes. When he does, he sees his son’s face in perfect clarity. It makes him ache all over, bone-deep, head to toe, knowing that—

Buck can’t think about it. Can’t allow himself to think about it, if he wants to remain close to upright or sane.

“Lucas,” he tries again, calling out into the static nothingness on the other end of the radio. “Come in.”

There’s a sound. Something sharper and stronger than the static, and then— like something miraculous, like daybreak—

“Diaz,” Lucas says hoarsely, his voice broken through the thin line of the radio. “Checking in, can anybody hear me?”

Buck feels suddenly, viciously nauseous. Lucas is alive under there. Alive and speaking and Buck’s heart soars and falls all in the same swooping, awful moment as his stomach turns. His baby is alive under there; buried; trapped.

“Lucas,” he says, the letters catching. “Talk to me.”

He sounds desperate— is desperate. The sound that comes through the radio next is a weak cough, and Buck wants to cry just hearing it.

“I’m stuck,” Lucas answers thinly. “Uh— I don’t know what happened.”

Buck takes a shaky breath, tilting his head back into the sun. It should be him, he thinks wildly, distantly. He doesn't know how but it should be him under there, somehow.

Lucas is only twenty-four.

When Buck was twenty-four, he would have said he had very little to live for, if anything. He was between places; out on the road; spending most of his time alone. Even when he was wrapped up in someone else’s body, he wasn’t really there; and even when he was standing in one ocean or another letting waves crash over his skin, he wasn’t feeling things the way he came to, a few years after that.

Lucas’s life is very different from what Buck’s had been. He’s not immature like Buck was at his age, but he’s still so young, with so much in front of him.

“Are you hurt?” Buck asks— needing to know for sure even though he can’t imagine how he could not be; still hating to ask; wishing he could do or say anything else.

The static on the radio crackles, and Buck holds his breath, and then Lucas says, “I think so. Yeah.”

Buck is vaguely aware that May has stepped away from him, that she’s speaking in urgent tones with the captain of the 133, who’s nodding his head at her and sporting a dark, serious expression. But he can’t think about it. Can’t think about anything except his child, who’s trapped and hurt and somewhere underneath all of that rubble where Buck can’t see him or get to him.

“Okay,” he says, trying to sound calm. Lucas needs him to be calm in both his capacity as his dad and as his captain. He has to get it together, no matter how much he wants to be back on his knees clawing at the concrete. “Can you tell me what hurts?”

The words feel sticky in his throat— he wonders how many times he’s said them to Lucas before, over playground scrapes and tumbling falls, the wonders of childhood. A lot, probably. But never like this. It was never supposed to be like this.

“I—” Lucas starts, sounding tender and pained and so young. “I don’t know. My legs? I think I— I don’t know, I can’t see. I’m sorry.”

Buck’s heart twists painfully in his chest, a physical thing.

“No,” he says, suddenly fierce. “Don’t be sorry. You’re okay. Just— hang in there. We’re gonna get you out of there.”

“Copy that, Cap,” Lucas says over the radio— and God, he sounds like Eddie. That wry lightness, layered with warm gravel. It’s all Eddie.

Eddie. Buck thinks of his husband with sudden, dawning horror. Someone has to call Eddie. He has to call Eddie.

Unfortunately, he’s no sooner thought it than been interrupted by the grave-faced captain of the 133 and May, standing next to him and looking equally so as she gestures for Buck to cut the radio feed.

His heart sinks fast and heavy in his chest, but he does it.

“What is it?” he demands, looking between them.

It’s the captain who speaks— Jones, Buck thinks, but he can’t be sure right now. Doesn’t bother to look. “Incident command is saying that the rest of the building is currently too unstable to dig,” he says.

Buck stares at him.

“What do you mean?” he asks, hearing the way his voice rises up with panic.

He glances at May, whose features are tight and shuttered.

“We have to wait, Buckley,” Jones says. Even he sounds reluctant. Does he know, Buck wonders? Did May tell him that that’s Buck’s baby under there? Or is Lucas just another firefighter, and how much does it matter?

We have to wait. They can’t wait. Lucas can’t wait.

“But—” he starts.

“Buck,” May interrupts, tugging at his elbow. “Don’t.”

He looks over at her, and feels the anger drain out of him to make way for something arguably worse. If he can be angry, he can do something. But this isn’t that— it won’t get him anywhere. That’s what May is trying to tell him. That if he fights, he’ll accomplish nothing but getting himself and maybe the rest of them pushed off the scene.

Further from Lucas.

There’s a younger version of Buck, one that’s buried deep in his chest, one who was not a husband or a dad yet. This version of him still lives beneath the beating of his heart. It thrashes now, ugly, wanting to rear its head even when Buck knows he can’t let it. Even when he wants to.

He pulls his arm out of May’s grasp and steps back.

12:38 pm

Pain is something that Lucas has always sort of liked.

He goes for long runs and overworks himself to feel the stretch and burn of his muscles, and the pain is equivalent to power. He loves nothing more than the dull ache at the end of a long shift or the electric bright scrape up his hip when he slides through the dirt playing baseball. Loves to feel it in the balls of his feet when he’s spent hours just doing something, anything. Likes the way his lungs sear when he pushes himself just that little bit further.

Now, he begins to understand that he has been afforded this relationship with pain only because he’s never really felt it. Not like this.

It overtakes him, a brand-new and awful thing that pins him in place more securely than the concrete itself ever could and leaves him gasping. He lies there in the smoky darkness and thinks— firstly— of his brother.

Christopher has lived with a baseline kind of pain his entire life. Chronic pain, pain that pulses in his ligaments and lives with him like a shadow.

Lucas’ hip aches and he thinks— home plate; safe; the fresh green scent of baseball season.

Christopher’s hip aches, and it’s a bad day; gritted teeth; the faded childhood memory of antiseptic hospitals.

Buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, cut off from the world and left alone, Lucas thinks of his brother and wishes he’d understood it all sooner; wishes he’d been softer; wishes that he hadn’t been so quick to beg Christopher to play with him or walk with him or do any of the things that must have been harder than he let on, though he did it all anyway and never complained.

On a day in July, Lucas tries to be still beneath the concrete on top of him as it presses his bones and his organs and all the little nerves that hold his body together. And he thinks of his brother, and wonders if Chris ever feels this trapped, just lying beneath his blankets in the morning.

The more still he is, the more pain he feels. At some point, in the muffled static quiet, Lucas focuses in on a feeling somewhere vaguely close to his left thigh. A hot, spreading sensation.

Blood. Somewhere beneath the concrete and the dust and the rubble of what had been a structure on fire, just a little while ago, Lucas is bleeding.

12:59 pm

Overhead, the sun is hotter than ever. Sweat beads on Buck’s neck and at his temples, and he looks at the pile of debris where he knows that his son is trapped, and feels trapped, himself.

He’s always been a run-into-danger type. He was like that well before he had the uniform that enabled him to do it. He’s still like that now, beneath the medal he’d earned and the thick protection of his turnouts and the title of Captain, everything that comes with it.

The young, reckless hotshot that he’d been once still lives in him. He sees that man in Lucas now, but only on occasion. Most of it is all Buck’s. At the moment, the full force of it thrums under his skin, urging him to abandon pretense and logic and do whatever it takes, anything that will get him under the concrete where Lucas is.

Instead, he presses a button on the radio and listens to it crackle.

“Diaz?” he calls, forcing his voice to even out.

That’s something else he wasn’t always able to do. He earned that with parenthood, the skill of hiding your own fear for the sake of your child. And then he’d honed it as the 118’s Captain. It’s not lost on him that right now, he’s using it for both.

There’s a returning burst of static and then the sound of Lucas’ voice, a balm as much as it is a scrape. “Cap?”

Buck swallows hard. He wants to tear it all down. He wants to hear Lucas call him Dad. He wants to be anything else than what he is right now.

“Hey, bud,” he says through the radio. “Uh— checking in. How are we doing?”

He hears, through the static, a shuddering breath, and then closes his eyes. “I’ve been better,” Lucas admits.

“I know,” Buck soothes. “I hear you. But we’re— they’re working to stabilize the structure now. And then— then we’re gonna get you out of there.”

There’s a beat of quiet. Buck knows his son. Knows what Lucas is thinking about, knows how scared he must be. He knows that when Lucas is scared, he reaches out. He’s always been like that— open-hearted and trusting, unafraid to lean on the people around him. He and Eddie had done that, he thinks— carefully teaching him that they would be there when he reached for them.

Now, he thinks about Lucas’ fingers: the same ones that he’d marveled over when they were so new and tiny, once; fingers he’d kissed after falls and scrapes; fingers he’d wrapped Band-Aids around when Lucas was learning to cook and sliced them. Fingers that were now reaching for nothing, coming up empty while Buck stands in the sun.

“I think I’m—” Lucas starts through the radio, and then there’s a sharp shriek of feedback that has Buck pulling it away from himself instinctively.

And then it goes silent. Buck presses the button, but it doesn’t burst with static. It doesn’t do anything. He quickly tests it on another channel, hoping that it’s his radio that’s the problem, somehow, but that one comes in clear as day. He circles back and tries it again. Still silent.

“Lucas?” he asks, his thumb pressed into the button. “Diaz? Lucas, can you hear me?”

But he knows that he can’t. The radio is dead. Buck pries it off of its strap against his chest in a flash of fury and then at the last second holds himself back from throwing it against the hot asphalt at his feet.

His chest heaves, but he holds himself in place, dropping his head and squeezing his eyes shut and searching, deep down within himself, for any thread to hold onto.

This feels familiar.

There was another sunny day, many years ago now, right here in Los Angeles. Now that Buck thinks about it, it wasn’t far from here— the streets that he walked that day, searching for Christopher, probably run parallel to this one where he stands adrift now.

And the feeling— that’s the same, too.

When he’d realized Christopher was missing in the aftermath of the tsunami, the guilt and fear and panic that rose up inside him were enough to take Buck to his knees. Losing sight of those soft blonde curls— realizing that he couldn’t see him, couldn’t get to him— it remains up there with one of the worst moments of his life.

And now there’s this one— this whole day, the whole hour that feels like it should be so much longer. Buck had been so wracked with guilt for so long after the tsunami. It didn’t matter to his conscience how many times Eddie assured him that he wasn’t at fault. He was still doing it ten years after the fact, even. Buck still felt horribly, sickeningly responsible.

And he feels that way all over again now, with Lucas buried beneath the rubble and the radio dead silent.

1:01 pm

“— bleeding.”

There’s a strange sound emitting from his radio, and then nothing. Lucas fights back against a shock of panic as it races through him.

“Dad?” he says, hearing his voice go tremulous.

There’s no answer. The radio doesn’t make any noise at all. He feels, very suddenly, like he’s drowning.

His memories of learning to swim are distant and fuzzy, backlit by summer in Los Angeles and seared with the burn of the sandy beach against his skin. He remembers that he’d liked the water right away. He remembers Christopher being there. He remembers how blue it was.

He remembers feeling invariably safe. He remembers his Dad— his dark skin under the sun, his brown hair darkened to black with the water; the way he laughed as he lifted Lucas like he weighed nothing and skimmed his feet against the force of the waves.

He remembers the pool, the bright scent of chlorine in his nose and the balm of coconut sunscreen that his parents diligently rubbed into his skin before they set him free to the water. He remembers the feeling of jumping in unaided for the very first time, the press of the water around him as his head went under; the thrill of drawing breath again as he broke the surface.

He used to exhaust himself around any body of water— jumping into the pool over and over or leaping over waves, getting knocked down and jumping up again all at once.

He can’t recall ever feeling scared at all. Can’t remember the water ever feeling like a threat. Can’t remember ever thinking of it that way— like something that could hurt him, even though he knew in a strange and distant way that it could.

But if he had thought about it, back then when he was small and fearless, he thinks that he might have imagined it would be like this. There’s no water here. It’s all dust and leftover smoke and concrete. But that split-second when the water pressed in over his head, that quick pulse of pressure. That’s what Lucas is feeling like now. Like the earth and the concrete and him— everything— might be swallowed up by water, like he might be lost to it.

All of a sudden, cut off from the world, he’s scared. Scared in a way that he doesn’t get, not really. Scared in a way that it’s hard for someone like Lucas to be, because someone like Lucas always has someone to reach for. No matter how hard things have been, there’s always been someone there. And Lucas has always known that, for longer than he can remember. There’s never been a moment— not until now— in which he’s felt truly alone.

This fear drips over him like the blood spreading over his thigh, cold and hot at once.

“Hey!” he screams. The voice that comes out of his mouth suddenly doesn’t sound like himself, a ripped sound out of his throat without thought. Reaching out, the only way he can now, his fingers trapped and his radio broken and silent. His voice breaks, and he tries it again.

“Hey!” Lucas screams at nothing, at empty spaces between broken blocks of concrete. “I’m still alive in here!” He takes a breath, goes at it again. “I’m still alive! Anybody!”

He resists, barely, the urge to call for his dad.

“I’m still alive in here!” he screams, again and again.

Until, eventually, his voice scrapes out into nothing.

1:52 pm

This time, Buck looks at the nametag.

Rivas. Buck knows him, a little. He’s the captain at station six, older than Buck but not by much, a tough guy with a lot of experience under his belt. When he walks up to where Buck is still standing by one of the rigs, the sun beating down on all of them, his face is impassive.

This can’t be a good thing. Buck has been through this too many times to think that it might be. He knows what good news looks like and what catastrophic news looks like and he knows that this look on Rivas’ face is neither of those. This is the middle of the road, the no news expression.

He steps up, willing himself to steady even though every breath is tearing through his lungs and threatening to break right now.

“Give it to me,” he says. There’s no preamble; there’s no time for it, no time to be pleasant. Lucas is still trapped, every passing minute carving new cracks in Buck’s composure and his ability to think clearly.

Rivas gives him a nod, a courtesy. Buck doesn’t even really have time for this right now.

“The building is still unstable,” he says as Buck flexes his fingers in and out of a fist at his side. “That’s the bad news.”

Buck scoffs, turning his head and then forcing it back. “Is there any other kind?” he asks.

Rivas, also a courtesy, more or less ignores him.

“The good news is that we have an estimate on how long it’s going to take to get it stable enough to go in.”

Buck braces himself. “How long?”

“Three hours,” is the answer he gets.

He’s shaking his head before he can pause to take it in, before the words have hardly made it out of his mouth. “No,” he argues. “That’s too long, he’s—”

Rivas softens, and that’s the worst thing that he could have done. Because in that softening, Buck becomes more of a father and less of a captain. The sympathy in the gaze before him lights up a rage in him that he has to tamp down, like smothering flames.

“Buckley,” Rivas says. “I know it’s your kid in there. I promise you, if we could do better than that we would.”

He knows there’s nothing for him to do here; if he tries, he’ll be benched, dragged further out from Lucas than he already is.

So he says nothing, ignoring every instinct he has to do the opposite, to do anything else. And he turns around and walks away.

Leaning against the hot bright metal of the other side of the engine, Buck thinks relentlessly of Lucas.

Once, when he was maybe three, when it was maybe around the time that Christopher had left for college and Lucas’s life was disrupted in the biggest way that his small self had ever experienced: Buck had tried to teach him to play hide-and-seek.

Later, he would grow to love this game. Now, Buck is sure that Lucas has no memory of the first time they tried to play. But Buck remembers.

Eddie had been out of the house, and Buck can’t recall now where he was, the intervening years washing the memory of it away. He does remember that it was a bright day, and sunny, though in Los Angeles that descriptor doesn’t really betray the season at all. He remembers Lucas, eager and excited to learn a new game with Daddy, and he remembers explaining it to him very carefully.

You’re going to hide. Anywhere you want! And Daddy is going to count to ten.

He remembers that Lucas had agreed. He remembers that he’d made a big show of covering his eyes, of speaking the numbers slowly, of turning his back as Lucas scampered off to somewhere in the house. He’d gotten to ten and then he’d made another big show of not being able to find Lucas; he’d looked in silly places and listened to see if he could hear Lucas laughing and he’d expected to find him hiding somewhere in plain sight.

That wasn’t how it went at all.

He’d called out Lucas’s name for a few minutes and then he’d gone deeper into the house, into Lucas’s bright yellow bedroom, and by the time he got there and opened the closet, Lucas was curled up amidst colorful sneakers and yellow rainboots, and he was crying.

At the sight of Buck, he’d leapt into his arms and buried his head in Buck’s neck and tearfully admitted that he was scared.

I thought you won’t find me, Buck remembers him saying in his tiny, trembling voice.

At the time, Buck had scooped him up and kissed him on his little face and told him he didn’t need to worry. They wouldn’t play anymore if Lucas didn’t like it. It was only a silly game. Daddy would always, always find him. I promise.

Two decades later, Buck stands on the street and tries to steady his hands and thinks about Lucas’s closet and his sunny bedroom where he doesn’t live anymore and about him buried and hurt.

And he wonders if Lucas feels like that all over again; and if it’s a promise that he’s about to break.

2:22 pm

Hen’s office is bright.

That had been her stipulation in taking the role of Fire Chief at the Los Angeles Fire Department. A bright office. The Captain’s office at the 118 had been hers for a number of years, but the windows didn’t get direct sun and the truth was that she was going to take the Chief job anyway but she hoped to get some natural light out of it.

Her office was moved to the corner of the building: a room with windows on the eastern and northern sides, and the light was perfect. It offered her a space that felt like hers, and she filled it with pictures of her family— both nuclear and extended— lined up along a shelf behind her desk. If she swiveled in her chair, she would be able to see every person that she would credit for getting her to this office in the first place. Herself included.

Today, Hen is not looking at those pictures. But she knows they’re there.

She knows they’re there as her assistant walks into the room with a look that can only be described as dread on her face; and she knows they’re there as Mari explains to her what’s happening at the site of a structure fire downtown.

“Who?” Hen asks, interrupting halfway through her measured explanation.

Mari hesitates, which can’t be anything good.

“The 118 was responding,” she says.

Hen could have guessed this much, but it still slices through her. She closes her eyes briefly and runs through their names: Buck; May; Ravi; Cat; Lucas. All of these people live in various forms in frames behind her.

“Who?” she asks again.

“All accounted for but one,” Mari answers. She drops a tablet onto Hen’s desk, and Hen doesn’t open her eyes to look at it, instead waiting for the name. Mari’s voice drips as she says: “Lucas Diaz.”

“Shit,” Hen hisses, opening her eyes immediately and reaching for the table. It’s a press briefing, slated for release, and her breath catches and she sees Lucas— Lucas, the consummate baby of the family, a child they’d all had a hand in raising. Lucas as a perfect, blue-eyed newborn; Lucas as a happy toddler; Lucas as a kid with Buck’s or Eddie’s helmet dwarfing his head.

Lucas, as she’d seen him on a drop-by to the 118 just last week: a bright, strong, easygoing grown-up firefighter who grins at her and still looks like a little baby in the back of her mind.

“Is he alive?” she asks, looking up at Mari across the desk.

“Yes,” she says, and Hen fights a breath. “But he’s trapped. IC is saying it could be hours and the news is starting to catch wind of it.”

Buck, Hen thinks.

“I have to make a call,” she says.

There are no blinds on Hen’s windows, because she had chosen this office for the light. Now, she wishes she had shades to draw as the phone rings and across town somewhere on the street Buck answers the phone.

“Hen,” he says, his voice a scrape like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Hen closes her eyes. “Buck,” she breathes.

He’s quiet, and she hears him draw in a breath and thinks about a time when he was nearly as young as Lucas is now: when he’d come to the 118 fresh out of the Academy and stupid and reckless and young.

Hen had liked him right away, in spite of herself. It was hard not to like Buck, who was as annoying as he was endearing, and who had the biggest heart of anybody she knew, even then.

Now, they’ve known each other for decades and she’s watched him become who he is— the father and grandfather he is, the Captain he is, the husband that he’s become to Eddie.

She’s watched him weather everything. Watched him die and come back to life again. Watched him reckon with learning who he is. And this— this, Lucas, if it goes wrong— this is the thing that she thinks might really break him.

All of them.

She searches for words and comes up painfully empty. What is there to say? What could she ask, what could she offer?

Suddenly, she remembers Halloween: Denny— so many years ago now, back when Bobby was still Captain of the 118 and their family was smaller than it is today— pinned between a car and a wall in his costume, looking so small as Hen’s heart stopped and all she could see was his tiny baby face; a brand-new life who’d been dependent on his parents entirely.

She swallows hard and opens her eyes, because if she keeps them closed she sees Lucas that way, too.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asks, hearing the softness in her voice and hating it, hating that she knows what the answer is before she ever asks the question.

“I don’t know,” Buck admits. “He’s— I— they’re not letting us get in at all until the building is stable.”

In the quiet, Hen remembers a version of Buck who’d had to be held back from digging through wet earth to get to Eddie. She can’t imagine what it’s taking out of him to restrain himself now, all these years later.

They’re silent for a moment.

“Does Eddie know?” Hen asks eventually.

Buck sniffs. “No,” he admits, his voice cracking.

Hen lets out a breath. “Buck, I want you to know that this is going to get out. I’m hearing from my office that it’s going to hit the news soon, and before that happens Eddie needs to know. He can’t find out like that.”

Buck lets out a helpless little sound that makes Hen feel like she shouldn’t be hearing it.

“Do you want me to call him?” Hen asks.

“No,” Buck says. “It has to be me.”

His voice is hollow, and Hen is still hearing the ring of it when she hangs up the phone.

2:24 pm

Buck’s fingers are shaking.

He’s turned numb, and he looks at the tremble of his hands and wonders if it’s been like that the whole time or if it stopped and then started again when he was listening to a familiar voice on the phone.

Eddie is at home today. Buck had kissed him goodbye this morning, just a few hours ago, in a world where this hadn’t happened yet. He had been soft and pliant and still sleepy, his cheek warm where Buck had leaned over his chair to press a kiss before leaving him at the kitchen table.

He can picture him now— in the backyard soaking in the warmth of the day, or padding through the house with Olive at his heels and winding gently around his ankles. Eddie has gotten good at enjoying his days off in a way that’s still hard for Buck to wrap his own head around, so there won’t be any urgency. Whatever he’s doing, he’s sure that Eddie’s taking it in, enjoying it.

The thought of what he’s about to do to that feeling, to Eddie, turns Buck’s stomach.

The phone rings and Buck’s fingers shake and when his husband’s voice cuts into the drone of the ringing line, he feels his breath catch.

“Hey,” Eddie says, and he sounds so light and it feels so normal and for a splintering half-second it could be any other day, the way it was before they got this call and came to this building and Buck watched Lucas disappear behind a sheen of smoke for what might be the last time.

“Eddie,” Buck says, without thinking, and then the moment is gone and slipping out of his hands, and he’s losing his chance to finesse this moment or to linger in a world where Eddie is having a peaceful day.

They know each other too well for that anyway. No matter what came out of Buck’s mouth in that moment, Eddie was always going to hear it in his voice: was always going to know, innately, immediately, that something was wrong. There’s a part of Buck that wishes— a little shamefully— that Eddie could intuit the rest of it just as easily, to spare him from having to explain it out loud, to make it sharper and realer.

“What happened?” Eddie asks, and the notes of dread in his voice are familiar to Buck like the rest of him. After everything they’ve been through together, there’s no shade of Eddie he doesn’t recognize, but this is one that he’d naively and wistfully hoped not to see again.

Buck closes his eyes. Across his darkened vision: Lucas, his turnouts disappearing, his voice a raw scared scrape across the radio channel.

“It’s—” he starts, and his throat closes up in protest.

“Buck?” Eddie asks. He sounds tremulous: scared. Buck squeezes his eyes tighter shut, and last week’s fireworks erupt across his eyelids.

“It’s Lucas,” he gets out, fighting every instinct and every nerve in his body to force the words out past his teeth.

There’s a beat of quiet. Again, Buck tumbles back in time. Remembers Eddie standing in front of him in the dark as he tripped over his words in a painful, stumbling attempt to explain why Christopher’s glasses were hung around his neck. The image of Eddie’s face in that moment has stayed with Buck through every intervening year and even now it comes to his mind with clarity: he can see it on Eddie’s older features, not in front of him like then but standing in their house, the home where they’d raised two sons together before Christopher grew up and Lucas put on a uniform and walked into fire.

“Where is he?” Eddie asks.

His voice is steady, which is the worst of the possibilities.

“He’s alive,” Buck says, helpless. He leaves out the rest. The I think, the I hope. The truth is that he doesn’t know, but last he heard this was the case and to acknowledge any other possibility would have him tearing at the concrete, at the skin on his hands, all over again.

“Where is he?” Eddie asks, his voice gaining an edge of tension.

Buck doesn’t want to tell him. He grinds his teeth just to feel the ache in his jaw and forces the words out anyway.

“He’s trapped,” he says, his voice splintering. He pushes past it, knowing if he doesn’t he’ll never get through the rest of it. “He was clearing rooms in an office building and it collapsed. It— it came out of nowhere, Eddie, the—”

“He’s trapped?” There’s sheer horror in the notes of Eddie’s voice and Buck reaches desperately into himself, searching for some kind of composure, for anything that will take away the way it stings to hear it.

Buck turns toward the truck. He’s alone here, more or less— close enough to hear everything, but sequestered and separated by the bulk of the engine standing between himself and the action. He leans into it and presses the tender skin of his palm to its blistering surface, the red hot metal sending a searing itching over his palm. It’s grounding, in its way.

“What do you mean?” Eddie asks, as Buck listens to the sound of their kitchen chairs scraping the floor through the line, faint beneath Eddie’s frantic voice.

“He’s— they’re trying to stabilize the building,” Buck says.

“Trying to?” Eddie repeats. Now, Buck is listening to the sound of Eddie’s keys, and it occurs to him through a fog that Eddie will be here soon. There’s a twist of guilt that accompanies the feeling of relief in his chest. There’s never a time, not even now, and maybe especially not now, that he doesn’t want Eddie close.

Buck opens his mouth to answer, to make some attempt to explain what he can’t even entirely make sense of himself, but Eddie speaks over him before he can.

“Where am I going?” he asks, and Buck can see him clearly: the sound of the truck door slamming conjures Eddie in the bright light of the driveway; Eddie climbing into the driver’s seat; a familiar picture that looks out of place now.

He rattles off the address, as it had been rattled off to him by dispatch, as he’d memorized it the way he always does, the way a Captain should. Not that any of it matters now, if all Buck can do is remember the address of the place where Lucas might—

He gives his head a shake.

“Eddie,” he says.

There’s quiet: a specific kind. They learned a long time ago how to exist in the silences between them, the soft ones and the heavy ones alike, but this kind is different. Like the electricity in the air before a coming storm, when the clouds are dark and full and the sky is foreboding and something bad is about to happen, something bad enough that you feel it in your bones.

Buck feels it. In the empty concave between his lungs; in the ache behind his eyes and across his molars and down in the fabric of his bad leg like pressure buried in the joints.

“I’m on my way,” Eddie answers. There are so many other things he could say: things that Buck knows must be in his mouth, in his throat, because he knows Eddie inside and out. But Eddie can’t say them, and Buck can’t hear them. Not like this, over the phone, on separate streets with their lives in sharp shards of concrete just out of Buck’s sight.

“Okay,” Buck says, barely more than a breath.

Around, noise and heat swim dizzily. In his ear, his husband takes a breath and says, “I love you.”

He’s hanging up the phone before Buck can answer.

2:58 pm

The silence in the car was worse than listening to the tight, tortured anxiety in Buck’s voice. But if he’d listened to it any longer, he was going to break and there was no time or space for that here.

Later, maybe, if—

But Eddie won’t think like that. He can’t.

Instead, he had drowned in the silence as he followed the familiar streets and stopped for stoplights and slipped back, back, back— into an old habit that he hasn’t had the use for in a very long time.

Not really at all in Lucas’s lifetime, with some minor exceptions. Most of the times that Eddie had plucked himself out of his own body, out of his own life and surroundings, had taken place before Lucas. In those days, he’d often been just trying to scrape by, to convince himself he was a worthy parent or friend or firefighter. Always feeling as if he was failing at one or the other, if not all three at one time, but trying anyway.

And then Buck, and then Lucas, and then a complete family of four and Christopher learning to be a big brother and Eddie believing that he was a good husband and Buck shining at the center of everything they did.

That’s how it’s been since. Not without its dark moments; not without fear or pain, like any ordinary life; but for the last twenty-four years since Lucas completed their family there has been a sense that things were going to work out; a sense that they were all where they belonged. Year over year, it all keeps getting better.

It’s been a long time since Eddie thought about what it might look like for that not to be true anymore. But hearing the tremor in Buck’s voice over the phone and feeling the sun on his skin and knowing that Lucas is not, it’s all he can think about now. So he tries not to think about anything at all.

Which works out right up until the moment that he slams his truck into park, haphazardly missing the lines, and looks up at the scene in front of him.

It’s been a while since Eddie rolled up in the engine with the 118, but being out of practice hasn’t dimmed his ability to take in a scene and assess how bad it is. This one, by his approximation, is bad. Really bad. His breath catches in his chest as he takes in the vehicles and the tape and the turnouts: the presence of multiple houses; scattered LAPD vehicles between ambulances and ladder trucks; too many people standing around and the uneasy stirring that reaches him even in the cocoon of his truck cab behind the windshield.

And even more than all that— the building. Even without the limited information that Buck had given him, it would be easy to see what had happened. There’s still smoke and dust in the air and the material of one whole corner of what had been an office building is collapsed.

The sight of it spins Eddie into action; without thinking, he throws open the truck door against a rush of heat and then slams it shut again behind him, not bothering to click the lock. Suddenly, nothing else matters. There’s an officer approaching him from the side, but he picks up his pace and moves closer, scanning the sides of the engines and looking for 118 to be written along the metal. Eventually, he gets close to the tape cordoning off the scene, and over the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, he hears himself calling his husband’s name.

“Sir,” the officer says— a young kid, probably close to Lcuas’s age— appearing at his side, having caught up to him. “You can’t be back there.”

Eddie glances over at him— Buck’s name still in his mouth, his hand on the caution tape. “I have to,” he says, or hears himself say as reality rushes up to meet him where he stands. The rest of it sticks in his throat like honey. My son, he wants to say.

How many other times has he said it? About either of them? My son. My sons. My boys. Our son. A dizzying kaleidoscope of it over both of their lives and so much of Eddie’s. He became a dad when he was just a teenager and he’s been saying it ever since but now he can’t bring himself to choke the words out.

“My husband,” he says instead. “He’s with the—”

“No unauthorized personnel behind the line,” the cop tells him. It’s a standard line, and even what Eddie would have expected to hear. He could have anticipated it. But hearing it said to him, out loud, to his face— it ignites something in him.

“Unauthorized,” he repeats, shaking his head and scanning past the line again. The 118 ladder truck is right there, so he doesn’t think Buck could be far. Taking his chances, he calls for him again, raising his voice. “Buck!”

“Sir—” the officer starts, raising a hand parallel to Eddie’s chest.

Luckily, he doesn’t get any further than that, because like a vision Buck appears around the front end of the engine, stripped out of his turnout jacket and down to just the t-shirt underneath and the suspenders holding his pants up on his waist.

Like always, he’s the vision of a hero. Under any other circumstances, Eddie would relish the opportunity to see him like this, something he doesn’t get to do as often these days. Today, he’s just relieved that he’s not about to end up jailed on top of everything else.

“Hey,” Buck says, hands up as he joins them by the tape. His blue eyes are on the officer, and he looks placating but Eddie can see that his gaze is hard and sharp. “He’s with me.”

The officer looks between them, cautious. “He’s not a firefighter.”

Buck’s eyes harden further at that. Now, it would be visible to anyone.

“Yes, he is,” he says, and Eddie wants to cry, but won’t. Instead, he ducks under the tape and follows Buck back to the truck, leaving the officer on the other side of the line.

Semi-alone now amongst everyone else milling about, Eddie can see the tension in Buck’s face and how red his eyes are. He moves without thinking, without hesitation, and wraps his arms over Buck’s shoulders, pressing them chest-to-chest in a puddle of too-hot sunlight.

Buck grasps him back like an instinct, and after decades of learning to be this for each other, it comes that naturally now. Even in a situation like this: maybe more so in a situation like this. It doesn’t bring the comfort and relief that it might usually, but hugging Buck still does more for Eddie than anything else could. He turns his head, blinking hard against a stinging at the backs of his eyes, and buries his nose against Buck’s neck where his skin and his shirt both smell like smoke.

Eddie’s stomach turns as he pulls back: his hands still on Buck, his eyes on his face. “Anything?”

Buck gives a tight shake of his head, his brows creased. “No,” he answers hoarsely. “Uh, I had him on the radio earlier but we lost connection. Best guess is that his is broken.”

He offers his own radio to Eddie anyway, like he thinks that Eddie’s touch to it might help somehow. Helpless, Eddie takes it and presses the button inward, listening to a faint scratch of feedback and the accompanying static.

He exchanges a dark look with Buck, then turns it back off again. Calling uselessly for Lucas would only make it worse when they inevitably got no answer.

“How long ago?” Eddie asks, both needing to know and not wanting to hear the answer.

Buck exhales. “Building went down right at noon,” he says. “The radio went out about an hour later.”

One o’clock, Eddie thinks, feeling stricken. It’s been two hours since anybody heard from Lucas. The thought of it makes him feel violently nauseous, and he has to remove his hands from Buck and step back so that he can close his eyes and try to force air into his lungs.

When they were younger, he might have been angry. Might have turned his fear into anger even if it wasn’t that really.

That isn’t him anymore. He doesn’t know that version of himself. He hopes he never has to meet him again, for this or for any reason.

Forcing himself back into the moment, he turns in a slow half-circle and surveys the scene. His eyes catch on the rubble: the cordoned off area where most of the debris is, where even to the untrained eye it’s clear how precarious the whole situation could be. There are people everywhere, but from what Eddie can see where he’s standing, it doesn’t look to him like they’re doing anything at all.

Something like dread creeps over him as he looks back at Buck.

“What are they doing?”

Buck sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Nothing,” he bites, shaking his head. “They’re— they’re stabilizing, supposedly. IC says it’s going to take three hours. Two hours now, I guess.”

Trapped, Eddie thinks. The dread is doing more than creeping now, washing up onto the shore with force. Lucas is under there, somewhere, and they’re up here doing nothing.

Trapped. All of them.

3:29 pm

Everything hurts.

Lucas blinks slowly up at the ceiling and tries to remember what it felt like to move; to breathe deep; to see the light of the sun.

Time slips by, or maybe it doesn’t. It’s hard to say, in this cramped gray space. Above him, the world is probably still turning, but Lucas can’t say for sure. He wonders about his parents; about Christopher; about his nieces and Cat and May and his grandparents. It all feels far away now, suddenly or not at all.

The bleeding has stopped, he thinks. Or maybe it hasn’t, and maybe he’s not here anymore, and maybe it’s been a lifetime since this concrete collapsed on top of him and caged him in.

Up there, presumably, everything keeps going.

Down here, Lucas is still alive.

4:01 pm

Buck does not appreciate having nothing to do.

This has been true of him as long as he can remember and probably even longer than that. He wants to be doing something. Needs to be doing something, in a case like this.

He can remember— if distantly now— being a kid and feeling itchy all over whenever he had to sit still. He remembers being very young, so young that the memory comes to him in shades of hazy gold that don’t feel real, at a church service. It must have been Christmas or Easter, because they weren’t regular-Sunday churchgoers, and he’d been little enough that he could shimmy off the pew and down into the floor on the plush carpeting, where he’d tried his best to crawl away before his dad had reached down and hauled him back by the back of his shirt.

That incident, he supposes, had set the stage for the rest of his life. Buck, trying to run and move and shift. Someone else, pulling him back into place.

Starting his life in Los Angeles had been the first time he didn’t feel like that, and many years later he has to think that it’s because Los Angeles, and firefighting, and the 118 all gave him the gift of space to move without needing to run away to get it.

In Los Angeles, in the life of the man who moved there and became Buck, there were a lot of things he suddenly had the freedom to do and to see and to feel. It’s been a long time— a really long time— since he felt like that little toddler version of himself, straining and yearning to go.

But he feels it today.

He and Eddie have been effectively banished: they’re allowed to stay and wait, as long as they stay by the truck and don’t try to get involved with the efforts to stabilize the building. The worst part of all of this is that Buck— this Buck, the one who’s been on the job for decades and in the Captain’s seat for years of that time now— understands why. He gets the intricacies of this job and of the liability at stake here in a way that a younger version of him had not.

He envies that other Buck now. Part of him wants to forget everything in between and just do that again. His fingers are still scraped up from earlier, and he’d do it all again if he could, if he thought it might get him anywhere other than sent away from the scene entirely and farther from Lucas than he already is.

Eddie sits next to him, their shoulders pressed together, and Buck sighs, watching as people move in front of them.

“What do we do if—” he starts, surprising even himself as the words tumble out of his mouth.

He feels the shake of Eddie’s head next to him, more than he sees it. “Don’t,” he answers.

Other people might mistake Eddie’s voice for sharp. Buck knows his husband inside and out and is familiar with what fear sounds like on his tongue.

He nods slowly.

“Okay,” he breathes.

He holds his hand out. It’s so hot outside and the temperature keeps creeping up as the sun moves across the blue expanse of sky above them, but he holds his hand out anyway and Eddie takes it anyway and they stay pressed up against each other because it’s what they’ve always done.

The question is still on Buck’s mind, though. He’s old enough now, has seen enough, experienced enough, that it has to be. He has to wonder. After twenty-four years and the change of a month or so since Lucas’s birthday, there is no world that exists to this family without him.

Admittedly, this would have been true from the moment he was born. It would have been true no matter what. In some ways, it was true before he was even a thought. As fulfilled as Buck had been— by his life, his family; by Eddie; by Christopher— he has to believe that there was always a place in his heart that was just Lucas’s, a place that had been empty until he took his first breath and has been filled to the brim ever since that day.

It’s true for all of them. It’s what it is to love someone: particularly, he thinks, to love your child. Imagining a world without Christopher or Lucas is so beyond his comprehension that he thinks his mind protects him from conjuring an image of it. Like when pain is so bad that your body forgets it on purpose to keep you safe: like Buck can’t remember the crush of the engine on his leg all those years ago.

This would be worse. That much he knows for sure.

But Eddie is right. Talking about it, wondering it out loud: it would only make it worse. This is better. This is all they can do.

They’re still sitting there, torturously still, when Ravi, Cat, and May walk up to them as one unit. Each of them is in full turnouts, looking sweaty and exhausted, covered in dust. Ravi’s shoulders block the sun as May pulls her helmet off and Buck is taken— just for a moment— by a feeling of deep gratitude for them.

He thinks he can understand now, how Bobby must have felt when he looked at them: at himself and Eddie, Chim and Hen, back in those earlier days when they were all a team. The team that Bobby had built, the way Buck has built this one. If it can’t be him and Eddie out there working, he’s glad it’s them.

Still, their grim faces tighten a knot in his chest.

“What?” he asks, tilting his head back to look at them.

Ravi and Cat glance over at May— May, who is not the eldest of them but might as well be as she’s inherited her mother’s presence and Bobby’s calm command seems to have seeped into her by osmosis over the course of most of her life. She is their leader in so many ways, and right now she looks it.

She nods, her jaw tight.

“We’ve done everything we can for now,” she says. “They’re assessing right now with IC and the contractors, and they’re hoping it’ll be stable enough that someone can go in.”

“May,” Eddie says, and Buck is sure he’s not the only one who can hear the peeled-back layers of pain in his voice.

May looks over at him, her brown eyes softening, and nods. “They’re hopeful,” she says. “We’re gonna be able to get him soon.”

“Do they—” Buck clears his throat, shaking his head and trying to center himself around the cotton in his mouth. “Do they have any guess on whether he’s—”

“Thermal imaging,” Cat says, interrupting.

They all look at her. Buck isn’t sure he’s ever seen her so pale, and something lurches in his chest as his head fills with images of her and Lucas huddled at the firehouse dining table or leaning into each other in the engine.

Cat had been chosen specifically as Lucas’s partner; and in the years since, she’s lived up to it in more ways than Buck could have imagined when he hired her. Now, there’s a haunted look in her eyes and Buck knows that it won’t be just him and Eddie whose lives are permanently altered by the fear that lives in the space around them on this scene, under this sun.

“What?” Eddie asks.

Cat looks up, swallowing hard. “The contractor has thermal imaging,” she explains, her voice scratchy. “If he were dead it would stop picking him up. They’re still getting a reading.”

Buck’s stomach flips. He’s not sure if it’s relief or dread, or some awful combination of both.

Next to him, Eddie squeezes his hand so hard that it hurts. Buck squeezes back, and they all just keep waiting.

4:17 pm

Eddie is counting.

He’s not sure when he started doing this. He thinks that maybe it began with Afghanistan, in a way. He was counting everything then: counting days until Shannon was supposed to have the baby; weeks that he’d been in the desert; months since his life had changed and months until it was supposed to change again. He counted men in the bunks. He counted stars over a land that didn’t feel real, that was so different that he would have felt like he was on another planet except that he was looking at the same sky as always. He counted scrapes on his skin.

He went home. He sat next to Shannon in a hospital room and counted in his head while nurses counted out loud and called her Mom and made him feel out of control. He counted the seconds between when Christopher was born and when he cried. He counted the minutes of his life as they turned into hours and then he started counting down the ones he had left before he was going to be shipped off again, back to that other planet and away from his baby.

Later, Eddie would count different things.

How many times Chris had been sick since he was under Eddie’s care exclusively. How many hours he was in surgery. How many times Eddie had to miss bedtime.

Later still— how many near-misses there had been at work. How many times Buck saved his life. How many times Chris could tell something was wrong.

How many people were dead. How long he’d spent buried beneath a collapsed well. Bullet holes in his body. Times he’d failed.

By the time he was counting up the minutes that the world had lived without Evan Buckley in it, beneath a lightning-stricken lilac sky and sheets of rain, he was used to counting. Three minutes and seventeen seconds was easy counting, but hard everything else.

This feels a lot like that.

Since he’s been here, he’s been counting. The building went down at noon, Buck said. Now, it’s 4:19 pm. Four hours and nineteen minutes and he doesn’t know the seconds and he doesn’t know if he has it exactly right, but Lucas has been trapped beneath the building for over four hours now.

Still alive down there, Eddie thinks, and is taken back like an echo of himself.

He can’t remember how long he was under the well after it collapsed. The number had ended up being not so important, in the grand scheme of things. What had mattered was the surfacing: that he’d gotten himself out and dragged himself over to Buck, who had held him up and kept him standing.

That was before they were anything that they are now, and it feels so impossibly long ago that Eddie has a hard time wrapping his head around it. No matter how much he counts, time is funny that way. Lucas or Christopher— either of them— could have been born just yesterday, the images are so vivid in Eddie’s mind. But somehow, one of them is a father to two girls of his own and the other one is a firefighter.

Or he was this morning.

Eddie knows he shouldn’t think about it like that, but there’s a deep buried part of him that can’t help it. He’s always been a little bit like that. A little brace for the worst. Not so much in recent years, but he isn’t sure it ever goes away.

Not after you’ve made your peace with death the way that Eddie did: in the desert, or on the asphalt of a street like this one with blood pouring out of his shoulder; or from his place beneath forty feet of wet, cold earth that bore down on him.

He looks at the pile of rubble. The energy around them is changing. For better or worse, something is going to shift soon. They’re going to make a decision: either it’ll be stable enough to try to get him out, or it won’t be. Buck has gotten up and started pacing, and Eddie is letting that happen because he knows if Buck tries to keep sitting still it won’t end well for anybody.

But he’s just looking. Looking at that pile of concrete and rebar and glass and seeing danger piled on top of danger. Everything in there could hurt Lucas, could hurt anybody. But somewhere underneath it all— accessible, Eddie thinks, by the back side of the southern corner if what he’s guessed at in the hours of sitting here is correct— there’s his baby.

Their baby. Definitely hurt and maybe worse than that. The urge to tear it all apart to get to him has been biting at Eddie like frost since he sat here under the hot sun and it hasn’t let up.

He knows he can’t, so he thinks about the well and wonders if that’s how Lucas feels, and then he feels like he’s going to throw up and he tries in vain to stop thinking about anything at all. He’s not that person anymore, though, not really. You don’t get to pick and choose.

So he sits and stares and thinks about Lucas— Lucas, who is brave and beautiful and full of light; who had been an easy baby and a compassionate, loving little kid; who as a man is heroic and bright and kind. A good friend and brother. The best uncle to his little nieces. A firefighter whose courage and instincts rival anything Buck or Eddie have ever had. Everything Eddie could ever have wanted for him, he is.

Somehow, right this moment, it only makes everything worse.

4:38 pm

The moment that everything shifts, it’s obvious.

Like when the barometric pressure drops or earlier today and a lifetime ago when the building went down and the ground shook and Buck just knew. It’s like that, but the tape rewinding, when they finish their checks and declare that the building is safe to enter.

This is now a search and rescue.

IC makes the announcement into the open channel and there are more words and Buck thinks that they want to stop and make a plan; he thinks they’re asking everyone to wait for orders, but really his heart is leaping hard against the inside of his chest and sending blood rushing against his eardrums and his whole body is lighting up and turning toward Eddie.

Eddie, who stands in front of him looking terrified and heroic. Eddie, who’s in civilian clothes but who has such a determined set of his features that there’s no doubt in Buck’s mind what he’s about to do.

Like always, they don’t need to speak. Like ever, it passes between them as an understanding between partners of all kinds.

“Buckley,” someone calls in a voice that’s commanding but not commanding enough.

Buck reaches for his turnout coat, hot to the touch where it’s been sitting slung over the engine bumper all day, and shrugs it over his shoulders.

“Wait for orders.”

“I can’t,” Buck says.

4:39 pm

“We can’t,” Eddie echoes, hearing the way his own voice lilts with some adrenaline-fueled combination of fear and certainty.

He turns in a circle, mission-minded. It’s been a long time for him, but it comes back

“Turnouts,” he says, and no sooner has it left his mouth is Ravi standing in front of him. He’s stripping out of his warm, used set of turnouts boots-first and without a shred of hesitation.

“Here,” Ravi says.

Eddie’s breath catches. Ravi, who had once been just a probie on a different shift. Ravi, who had become their family and kept showing up year after year, who’s known Lucas since he was just a baby, who loves him, too. Who is every bit as dedicated to this as any of them: to this family.

Who’s giving his turnouts to Eddie without a second thought, the literal shirt off his back.

His brown skin exposed to the sun, he throws his boots at Eddie and unbuckles his suspenders and with quick precision he’s already halfway out of them. Eddie tears out of his shoes, aware of Buck’s voice behind him raised in pitch, but he doesn’t have time to think about that, to stop.

Every instinct that Eddie has been suppressing all day comes roaring to the surface and before he knows it he’s in turnouts for the first time in over a decade.

For a brief, shining, flicker of a moment— everything feels strangely right. It’s nothing more than a half-second, but he’s on the street in a black, heavy turnout coat and he turns his head to the left and there’s Buck waiting for him and their shoulders brush and everything is as it was, once.

But it isn’t. Eddie isn’t a firefighter anymore and even as he clips Ravi’s radio to his coat they’re being ordered to stand down; to wait; to follow orders.

But he won’t, and he knows that Buck won’t either.

He glances up, just for a moment, and locks eyes with Ravi, whose face is split open and raw.

“Thank you,” he says.

Ravi shakes his head. “Go,” he says. “Go, now.”

Eddie turns to his husband, his shoulders warmed by the weight of the coat on his back, and finds Buck already looking at him: his blue eyes are ablaze and he’s more steady than Eddie has maybe ever seen him.

“Ready?” he asks.

Eddie nods once, and then— together— they move.

4:40 pm

With Eddie next to him, Buck’s focus narrows.

That’s always been the case. He’s never been better at this job than he was during the years that he and Eddie spent as partners. Those years— those days— had made him the firefighter he is today. Without Eddie, he would never have been Captain material in the first place. And even now, with Eddie as his partner in so many other ways for so many years, he still has his moments out in the field where he misses exactly this.

Admittedly, he had never imagined that if he and Eddie were to get another chance at this, it would be under these circumstances. Maybe that was naive of him. Maybe he should have thought about it, after all the things their family has been through over the years.

Buck doesn’t operate like that, though. At the end of the day— in spite of it all— he believes in the good stuff.

He believes in light and second chances and love. In Lucas.

Which is why, as he and Eddie ignore the cacophony around them and stride in tandem toward the building to go and get their kid out, he has to believe that this will end in good, too. That Cat was right when she mentioned the thermal imaging; that it’s still true now; that when they find him, getting him out will be doable; and that at the end of all this, they’ll take him home in one piece.

It’s not the first time that he’s had to cling to that belief. He’s been here before: with Christopher, with Eddie more times than he cares to think about too long or too hard. The weight of it never feels lighter, though. No matter how many times it presses in on him, it’s just as heavy as the first time.

There’s no need to speak. No need to check in. No are you sure’s. They just walk in together, turnouts over their shoulders, radios clicked off to avoid the sound of the commands they’re ignoring from IC and the other captains on scene.

They duck as one into the dusty tunnel that used to be a hallway, and the sound from outside grows muffled. Buck glances over at Eddie, who nods in response, and he wants to pause— fleetingly, an echo of who he’d been when he was younger, before he was a dad— he selfishly wants to live in this moment just a little bit longer.

He pictures what they might find when they make it to where he knows Lucas must have been when the building went down. The image comes to him in the sharp shards of concrete, hazed by a film of dust, and he flicks backwards over scenes that he’s watched unfold for all these years.

None of them will be as bad as this, if they’re wrong.

But there’s no time. That’s what being a parent is to Buck, much like being a partner and being a firefighter. It’s moving anyway. It’s pushing ahead. It’s never giving up, and he hears a long-ago echo of a nighttime fire and ash in his lungs and Athena’s voice. So he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t pause.

He puts his hand on Eddie’s shoulder, squeezes hard, hard enough that the turnouts won’t dim the pressure. And they keep going.

4:45 pm

Lucas is still awake.

He thinks he might have dozed off at some point, which might count as losing consciousness, and he isn’t sure if that’s good or bad. He had a dream, though.

In it, it was spring.

He was in the grass, and he was either very little or very big but he couldn’t tell which. There were flowers everywhere and the sky was so, so blue: the perfect kind of blue, California blue, the kind of blue sky that never ends.

Lucas wonders now if that’s what it will feel like to die. After this dream, he’d come to consciousness again gasping and in pain. He’s not sure how he’s going to do that again, when the grass and the blue sky and the flowers were so beautiful and it’s so dark here and everything hurts so much.

But he wants to.

There’s no part of Lucas that has ever wanted anything but to live: in this world; this life; this body. The thought of losing it, of leaving it behind, makes the backs of his eyes and the inside of his nose sting.

He closes his eyes. The cramped, disorienting place where he’s pinned down disappears and he half-expects to see the grass and the sky again, a painting on the backs of his eyelids. But it’s not there. Something else is.

A kitchen: lit by the morning sun where it pours in through citrus leaves at the side of the house that dapple the light before it comes in and coats the floor in honey. Cabinets with fingerprint smudges. A rug in front of the sink that always turns up at the corner. A refrigerator covered in little notes and pictures and a calendar littered with shifts and appointments and birthdays. Countertops; a fruit bowl; a frog-shaped soap dispenser. One chair at the table that’s always pulled out too far like an invitation to sit. Stray mugs that never make it to being put away.

It’s a picture that comes to Lucas like second nature or instinct, because it’s his kitchen. He doesn’t live there anymore, but it’s still his as much as it ever has been, because his parents had made sure that it was.

His parents.

Lucas’s chest hurts as he thinks about them, as he remembers that kitchen and their faces in it. He remembers he night he’d casually told them he was going to join the fire academy and for the very first time he regrets it.

No. It’s more complicated than regret. He’d never take back a minute of these six years, not even the one where the building collapsed over him or the one in his probie year when he watched someone slip from his grasp and die for the first time. Not one.

But he might take that moment in the kitchen back, if he could. Might be gentler to them, like they’ve always been to him. He remembers seeing their faces in that split-second when it all occurred to them; when they realized what this would mean for him. He sees now that it was a moment like this that they were imagining. What they were afraid of. A nightmare that they’re living now, because of his choices.

He’d like to take back any time he’s ever hurt them or caused them fear. He’d like to be up there; on the street; in the kitchen; in the doorway at 4995 South Bedford Street, with his brother and his nieces and his parents. He wants to hug them; pick the girls up and listen to them squeal; drape his arms over his brother’s shoulders from behind and hear his fond huff of laughter. He wants to run with Jee-Yun and ask where Jae is flying this week and he wants to be home plate safe again.

He wants to—

“Lucas!”

To live. He wants to live, so badly that his heart leaps against his ribs at the muffled sound of what sounds like a shout, his name in the dark. He still has blood left in his body, somehow, and he knows this because it’s rushing in his ears and he’s worried he’s imagining it.

Maybe dying will be like that, he thinks as he opens his eyes, the kitchen replaced by dust and concrete and blood. Maybe it’s like this: listening to his dad call for him from the other room and hoping someone is going to find him before the world is all blue sky. Maybe that hope is the last thing he ever feels.

But it isn’t, because the call comes again.

“Firefighter Diaz, sound off!”

His dad’s voice— pitched loud, his Captain voice— shakes beneath the commanding tone. Firefighter Diaz, he thinks hazily. That’s how he knows that this is real, and he rises to the surface kicking and screaming and learns that he can do it again, if he knows they’re coming for him.

He’s a firefighter. He’s more than Lucas. He’s more than his parents’ son or Christopher’s brother. He’s a firefighter.

“I’m here!” he says, his voice breaking. How long has it been since he’s used it? He couldn’t say, doesn’t know. But he tries anyway. It scratches and scrapes and joins a litany of other pains that sparkle over his body and ache in his bones, but he pushes through it. “I’m here!” he cries out again, louder this time.

There’s a clattering sound, still muffled but closer.

“Lucas!” his dad calls out.

His dad. Lucas’s eyes sting again and this time he’s powerless to hold back, because relief is rushing through him so fiercely that it takes him over and holds him in its grasp.

“I’m—” He cuts himself off, coughing and wincing against the pain that it flashes through him, so encompassing that it’s indistinguishable where it’s coming from or even how bad it is. Still. “I’m here,” he says, again, fighting to catch his breath.

When the light comes in, it’s through a cloud of gray cement dust, a beam from a flashlight that sweeps over Lucas. He chokes on it: the dust, the relief, the feeling of his heartbeat in his throat.

“I’m here,” he says again, weak and unnecessary. They see him. They came for him. They’re going to get him out. He’s not going to die after all.

He’s going to go home and he’s going to stand in the kitchen again.

4:50 pm

Eddie’s heart leaps unceremoniously into his throat at the sound of Lucas’s voice: scratchy and hoarse, pained but his, unmistakably.

He moves around Buck, who’s already shifting to one side of their son where he’s pinned awkwardly beneath a piece of concrete, and drops to his knees in Ravi’s slightly wrong-fitting turnouts, pressing himself into a pocket of space where he can turn his head and look at Lucas’s face.

His helmet is knocked back off of his head and in the dark it’s hard to tell where he’s hurt, but his face is illuminated by the light from their flashlights. His cheek is smudged and there’s dust all over his face and Eddie looks at him and wants to take his gloves off and sweep his fingers over his cheeks. He wants to be somewhere else in space and in time; wants to be back with a version of Lucas who was so small that Eddie could cradle his whole body in his hands or when he could brush one thumb over his soft cheek and wipe away all his tears at once.

Now, that same baby that Eddie had once held and marveled at every morning is lying beneath a slab of concrete, fighting for breath, in agony. His chest twists; everything else disappears; and he reaches out, brushing Lucas’s curls off of his forehead.

Lucas turns his gaze, and something breaks open in his expression.

“Dad?”

Eddie’s breath catches. “Hi, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “We’re here. We’ve got you.”

Lucas swallows hard, his throat shifting. He glances between them, but lingers on Eddie longer. His gaze is blue even in the dim shadow.

“You’re here,” he breathes. “How did you—”

Eddie shakes his head. “What?” he asks tenderly. “Like I would let your dad come get you without me?”

Lucas’s eyes fill with fresh tears that shine in the light, spilling over his pale lashes and leaving smudges in the dust on his face.

“We’ve got you,” Buck says on Lucas’s other side, an echo of what Eddie had said, what his chest is still repeating with every beat of his heart.

Eddie scans the space, taking in the scene and coming back with a sliver of hope. Glancing across at Buck, he gives a wordless shrug that Buck nods back to: in a matter of a minute, they’re slipping back into a dynamic that they haven’t touched in years. It’s as easy now as it had ever been; as easy as it was on that first night in the back of an ambulance when Buck had blindly trusted him enough to climb in after him.

“I tried to get out,” Lucas croaks. “But I— am I stuck?”

“No,” Buck says. His blue eyes are on the concrete, and Eddie can see him calculating. “No, you’re not stuck.”

“You couldn’t move because of the angle,” Eddie says, looking back at Lucas.

This is the best-case scenario, by far: Lucas is pinned, and there’s no way of knowing exactly what his injuries will be underneath the concrete that’s holding him down, but from what Eddie can see and the fact that he’s still conscious, he knows that it could be a lot worse than it is.

As a parent, half of his mind is already at the hospital: thinking about pain and surgery and recovery. He forces that half to quiet, and hones in on the other half. This half was a solider, and a firefighter, and a problem-solver. This half was Buck’s partner. It comes to life beneath the heavy weight of his turnouts.

“Okay,” he says. “We’re gonna be able to get you out, bud.”

Lucas turns his head, his blue eyes wide and damp, but alert.

“You are?”

“Of course we are,” Buck says. “Eddie, here.” He passes him a pen light, and Eddie flicks it on, leaning over Lucas to check his pupils with a quick sweep of it over his eyes. “Equal and reactive,” he says, handing it back over to Buck.

“I didn’t hit my head,” Lucas says.

“Good,” Eddie answers, smiling a little. “Means you’re gonna be out of here in no time.”

Lucas nods, a tiny fragment of movement.

Eddie looks across at Buck. “If we move that piece,” he says, gesturing. “Then—”

“Then we’ll have the space to move the other one,” Buck finishes, nodding his head. “Okay. I think I can get this one.”

“What do I do?” Lucas asks.

Eddie turns back to him, trying desperately not to feel anything. There’s a raw, bloody scrape on his temple that Eddie thinks is just from falling debris: nothing serious, nothing compared to anything that’s going on beneath the pieces of concrete holding Lucas in place. But the sight of the blood on his face makes Eddie feel sick anyway.

“You just stay right where you are, okay?” he says soothingly.

Lucas lets out a half-laugh, scraped out and humorless. “I’m good at that today.”

Buck smiles a little bit, and Eddie sees both the pain and the tenderness in it. He reaches out and puts his hand on Lucas’s chest, just for a moment.

“Not for much longer,” he says.

And they get to work.

4:55 pm

Lucas has never seen his parents work together.

Well— he has. He’s seen them tackle piles of holiday dishes and home improvement projects and that time his dad’s Jeep broke down on the side of the road and homework. He’s seen them make cakes and tag-team dinner. He’s seen them navigate lots of things within the walls of their home, and he’s always thought that they made the perfect team.

None of that, as it turns out, has anything on the way they work together like this. He’d known that they were partners for years in the field— Eddie’s whole firefighting career, actually— but to see it in action is something else entirely. They move as one unit, not needing to speak or ask questions, and the shared focus between them is so obvious that it almost sparkles.

He focuses on it, letting it sweep him up the same way that it used to, when they were teaming up for things like his bedtime routine or getting him off to school in the morning. It makes him feel small again. Held.

They warn him that it’s going to hurt, and Lucas drifts back to the baseball field and back to Christopher and back to having BandAids pressed to his knees and adorned with kisses and he nods his head.

“I’m ready,” he says.

He feels like it’s strangely true.

“Almost,” Eddie answers. He reaches up and takes his helmet off of his own head: Lucas isn’t sure whose helmet it really is, because his dad doesn’t have one, but he doesn’t have the strength to wonder about it right now, not too much.

His dad lifts his head gently and buckles the helmet onto it. Lucas, deliriously, remembers this feeling from learning to ride a bike.

“You need it,” he says, his own voice sounding far away.

“Shh,” his dad murmurs. “Gotta protect your head on the way out of here. There you go.”

After that, things go a little bit blurry. His parents count and lift, and then a strange sensation of breath is followed by fireworks of agony that glitter across his vision. He thinks he must have cried out, because then his dad is there, with his gloves off and his hand on Lucas’s head like a blessing or an anchor. Maybe both.

Before he knows what’s happening, their voices blur together into something that resembles the soundtrack of Lucas’s life. They’re speaking to him, but he can’t follow what they’re saying. This kind of pain is the kind that Lucas could only conceptualize before: too big for him to really comprehend, and so much that his mind is protecting him by keeping him from processing it.

He doesn’t know where he is, exactly, until his parents are carrying him out of the building and he’s blinded by rays of hot, bright, natural sunlight.

He thinks he may have already been crying, but when the sun touches his face, he breaks into tears that shake him and doesn’t feel the pain of the movement at all.

Only the sun, and his parents, and the noise of everything converging on him at once.

4:58 pm

“Hang in there, bud,” Eddie says.

They’re both hovering over Lucas and all around them there’s a cacophony of noise. Everything is loud and bright and Buck can’t follow anything that’s happening, can’t see anything but Lucas’s face and the bruises and the blood—

The blood, which is everywhere.

Most of it seems to be coming from a puncture wound somewhere in his leg, which had been slowly bleeding but staunched by the lucky positioning of the concrete slab that had been on top of him. But it’s hard to tell, because he’s still in turnouts and it’s impossible to see.

For Buck, everything slows down to an improbable pace. It feels like moving through honey as the sun turns everything gold around them. In the light, Lucas is pale and his lashes flutter and it takes one look at him to see that he’s fading, and quickly.

“Lucas,” Buck says, moving with them. May and Ravi have appeared out of nowhere, and their hands are covering Lucas— pulling back his turnouts, shifting Eddie’s helmet off of his curls. “Stay with us for a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” Lucas says.

Normally, though he’s never been a paramedic, Buck can follow what’s being said. After decades on the job, he’s picked up a lot of medical jargon, not to mention what he’s learned from his own injuries and Eddie’s. Today, it goes right over his head and all it takes is one look at Eddie’s face, the knit of his brow as he focuses on looking at Lucas, to know that it’s true for him, too.

Suddenly, they are just parents again.

But May and Ravi have him, and Buck trusts them with everything they do day in and day out, so he trusts them with Lucas, too. The most precious thing he has— one of them, anyway— and he would never hesitate to hand him over to them.

In the chaos, he and Eddie climb into the ambulance and then everything only seems to get louder and slower as May and Ravi work as a team and he and Eddie crowd together, squished into the back of an ambulance just the way they have been so many other times, and not like that at all, not in the slightest.

Everything flickers as it all starts to catch up to Buck, but he leans in and brushes Lucas’s hair back from his forehead and finds that he can’t bring himself to look at the clinical process happening in front of him.

That’s new for Buck. In the past, he’s always wanted to know and see everything. But something about it being Lucas, about this blood and these bruises and all of this pain belonging to the same body that Buck had held in his hands, had rocked to sleep, had kissed better for so many years. It makes it feel like he’s being ripped apart, too.

So he stays with Eddie and they talk to Lucas and later, Buck won’t remember a thing he said to him. All he’ll remember is the way Lucas looked up at them— barely conscious; a dream they’d had once; hazy and crying and alive, for now.

5:06 pm

The ambulance comes to a stop and Eddie feels as if he just keeps going, still in motion, spinning.

He’s done this too many times. Maybe it’s because he’s getting older; or because he’s so much softer now; or just because it’s been so long since the last time— but it feels somehow worse now, when they jostle each other out of the ambulance and Lucas dips in and out of consciousness and they all move into the Emergency Room, past the glass doors.

May rattles off a bunch of statistics that Eddie is only half-catching: Twenty-four year-old male; crush injury; sustained broken ribs; blood pressure dropping. These are all words Eddie knows, but his past life as a medic seems so far away now, too far and too long ago for him to put himself back there at all. He can’t even get close. Afghanistan might as well be a different world to him these days.

But even if it had been any time recently, he thinks he wouldn’t have been able to really understand what he’s hearing right now anyway.

What he hears is the sound of Lucas crying out in pain. He hears that like the ringing of the worst and loudest bell, a sound that echoes endlessly against the inside of his skull, a sound he’ll never, ever be able to forget about.

He knows that’s true. It’s not Eddie’s first time listening to his child cry in pain between hospital walls. With Christopher, at least there had been less blood.

His hands are coated in it, and it’s drying bright red and tacky. He’s unfortunately familiar enough with it to know that it won’t be long now before it starts to flake off in tiny bits of his son’s DNA.

Eddie hears someone say, “We need you to step back.”

It takes him a moment to realize that they mean him. Him and Buck, who are both being stopped from continuing onward. He should have known that that would be the case; he would have known that, if he’d had even one half of a second to think about anything but the way his brain and body have been screaming for Lucas.

As it is, it catches him by surprise.

“No,” he says, without thinking, but it’s happening anyway. His brain is too slow, struggling to catch up to what’s happening, and yet it continues on.

“Lucas,” he says, and hears his voice break like it belongs to someone else. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

“Dad,” Lucas says, his voice soft and wavering. Eddie almost wishes he were not conscious for this part.

“We’re right here,” Buck tells him, his voice more even than Eddie's had been. “We’re gonna see you soon, okay? You’re good, sunshine, we got you.”

And then he’s gone, pulled away from them again, and Eddie has nothing to do but let it happen.

Powerless, he falls back, steps faltering, as the doors swing shut and separate them from Lucas. May and Ravi are somewhere nearby too, but when Eddie turns, he’s only looking for Buck.

Buck, who looks back at him beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. All of a sudden, it’s as if Eddie is coming back into reality from some other place where time moved differently and things were blurred.

Here, everything is painfully sharp. For the first time all day, he sees everything with clarity, starting with his husband. Buck’s hair is a wreck and Eddie has no idea where his helmet is. His turnouts are bloody and ruined; there’s blood on his face and on his hands and there are bruiseviolet sweeps of color under his eyes and he’s coated in a thin layer of dust and ash.

Even more than any of that, his blue eyes are lit up with wild, raw fear.

“Eddie,” he says.

Eddie doesn’t think. He just moves. The day crashes into them and they crash into each other and he wraps Buck in a hug that’s restricted by the bulky fabric of their turnouts. It doesn’t matter. He puts his hand on Buck’s head anyway; clings to him; holds him and doesn’t think about what it means that they’re here again in a hospital like this.

He wants to say something— to tell Buck that it’s going to be okay, that Lucas is in good hands, or that they got him out in time. He wants to tell Buck that he did so well out there; that he loves him.

But his throat closes up and he finds that there are no words for any of it.

5:29 pm

“Chris?”

Christopher looks up from where he’s sitting at his dining room table in the slowly dying light of a summer evening. In front of him, there’s a plate of strawberries and bananas cut into cubes and chunks. In his lap, he has a bundle of two-year-old energy: Isabel, who has to be held and watched very closely when she’s eating if they don’t want to have cubes and chunks of banana on the floor and the walls and various other surfaces.

Next to them, her four-year-old sister Iris is a little more independent, and her pre-dinner snack of fruit is being scooped up onto a fork with almost one hundred percent success.

In the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, Christopher finds his wife standing with his phone in her hand and a concerned look on her face.

Chris is familiar, more so than many people, with this particular look. He knows it twofold: because he knows Audrey inside and out, and because he’s been on the receiving end of this look from more than just her. From a lot of people, for a long time.

His mind goes to Buck first. He’s been worrying about Buck’s safety for even longer now than he had worried about his dad’s, but it’s been a long time now since he felt really anxious about it.

Now, with the phone held out in his direction, he thinks about them both: his parents.

“Buck?” he asks.

Next to him, Iris recognizes this name and perks up, looking away from where she’d been spearing a piece of strawberry to turn excited eyes on her dad.

“Grandpa?” she asks.

Audrey shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says, her eyes still on Christopher’s face. “Your dad’s on the phone.”

There’s something in her voice: in the caution of it, the careful lilt. It comes to Chris all at once: if it’s not Buck, and it’s his dad on the phone, that only leaves one other person that this call is likely to be about.

His mouth goes dry, and he suddenly goes back six years: to a night before Iris or Isabel were born, when he’d met up with Lucas for dinner at a hole in the wall that they both like because it’s always fun to go to it and surprise a server by speaking fluent Spanish. When Lucas had told him with calm certainty that he was joining the fire academy.

Chris had been then, and is now, mostly just very proud of him.

But there is also this. Even now, grown up and steady, there are times when Chris feels like a little boy who began to live in fear of losing his dad. Losing his mom had been one thing— kids and their brains are funny like that— but the constant give and take of worry and fear over his dad had gotten to him for a while. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, even when you’re choosing to be brave.

It’s the kind of thing that, if you’re Christopher, continues to follow you in new and inventive forms. Worrying about his brother is not least of these. He was worrying about Lucas even before he became a firefighter, because they’re sixteen years apart and Lucas is his baby brother and Chris has loved him from the day they met.

Now, he braces himself.

“Can you—” he starts, but Audrey— who knows him inside and out just as well as he knows her, who can anticipate what he needs sometimes before he knows it himself— is already moving.

“Come on, girlie,” she says, holding Christopher’s phone out to him and reaching for Isabel to scoop her out of his lap.

“Noooo,” Isabel says, giggling. The sound pulls at Chris, somewhere deep in his chest. “Daddy!”

Audrey throws her over her shoulder, an expert at distraction. “Iris,” she says. “Wanna come and watch a show with us?”

This is an underhanded trick that Christopher is very grateful for. One episode of the cartoon about princesses that both girls are obsessed with, and they will be sufficiently distracted enough for him to take on whatever this is in private.

Iris hops down from her chair and Chris reaches out, brushing his hand over the top of her head as she moves past him to follow her mom and her giggling little sister.

He picks up his phone and it lights up with his dad’s name and contact as he brings it to his ear sort of reluctantly.

He doesn’t want to know. But he’s learned a long time ago that it doesn’t help not to. You just have to keep going, no matter what.

“Dad?” he asks.

“Chris.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and Christopher closes his eyes. When he does, he sees the girls. Their sweet little faces; the features that are his own made new again, and Audrey’s, and the ones that are all their own.

Is it like this for his dad, he wonders? For Buck? When they close their eyes, now that he and Lucas are both adults, do they see their faces? Do they see them as they are now, or like he sees Iris and Isabel: little and sweet and needing him in a way that they never will again?

“What happened?” Chris asks, needing to know as much as he doesn’t want to.

His dad lets out a breath, and it trembles, and Chris aches in perpetuity for all the things that have happened to him already and all the things that still keep happening. He’s always thought that was unfair, especially when it came to his dad.

“It’s Lucas,” he admits.

Knowing that it was coming doesn’t make the blow any softer. Chris closes his eyes again and this time, it’s his little brother that he sees: a brother that Chris had not known he needed until he had him, and then overnight couldn’t live without.

He still can’t.

A world without Lucas is inconceivable to him. It would be even more so to his girls, who both throw themselves at Lucas on sight and have never known a world without him; without the way he opens his arms to them and fills all the gaps that Christopher can’t: the way he throws them in the air above his head and lets them swing on his arms and turns them upside down to kiss their tummies until they’re breathlessly giggling.

Chris and Audrey are a team, and he generally believes that they can do anything together. But in this moment he realizes very suddenly and viciously that he cannot imagine how he would raise his children without his brother.

“How bad?” he asks.

“Um,” his dad starts on another exhale. “We don’t really know much yet. It was a— a building collapse. They took him back to surgery. He was trapped for a while.”

Chris’s dad has never quite gotten over his bonedeep desire to protect him. No matter how old he gets. Chris is a parent now too, though, and he knows that if his dad is saying a while, he really means too long. And that there’s so much else Chris doesn’t know.

“Where’s Buck?” Christopher asks.

“He’s here,” his dad replies. “We’re both here. We’re at, uh, Presbyterian and Ravi and May and Cat are here. Buck is calling Chim and Maddie now.”

Chris nods, then remembers his dad can’t see him.

“I’m gonna come there,” he says.

There’s a beat of hesitation, and he wonders briefly if his dad is going to tell him he doesn’t have to.

Ultimately, he must know that Chris does have to. That he would, even if he didn’t.

“Okay,” he says.

Chris wants to say more— wants to have the words to say anything that would help. But he doesn’t. He thinks of Lucas: brave, wild, strong-willed, big-hearted Lucas. Thinks of him trapped and crushed and scared and hurting.

His throat closes up and he finds that he doesn’t have the words for any of it.

5:52 pm

The hospital waiting room is cold.

Eddie seems fine, because he’s always warmer, but Buck is freezing. They’d gone together to the bathroom to try to clean up a little and it had worked for the most part. It’s not a shower, but it’ll do.

Buck is haunted by the look of the blood in the sink, pale pink streaks in the water, bits of Lucas disappearing down the drain. He’s pretty sure it’s the exact same bathroom that he’d scrubbed his hands in after Eddie got shot— renovated since then, but still. New porcelain, but the same bones. How many pieces of people Buck loves have seen the insides of these pipes? He’s not sure he wants to know.

Cat had gone to the firehouse and grabbed clothes for everyone. She’d arrived already in her own casual clothes, which made her look small and different and Buck had hugged her for as long as he could manage without bursting into tears before he went to change. Beneath Ravi’s turnouts, Eddie had already been in the clothes he was wearing at home, which amounted to shorts and a sweatshirt.

Now, as they sit and Buck shivers, Eddie reaches for the hem and takes it off.

“Here, baby,” he says, his voice low and scratchsoft.

“I’m—” Buck starts, but Eddie shakes his head.

“Here,” he says, patiently. He holds the fabric out to Buck. It’s a little big on him, which will make it a little snug over Buck’s chest, but he takes it anyway and slips it over his head. It envelops him in the warm, familiar scent of Eddie, and he manages to take a half-deep breath as he leans back in the uncomfortable waiting room chair.

“Thank you,” he says, holding his palm up. Eddie takes his hand in his and then lifts it, turns it, and kisses his knuckles.

Buck is about to open his mouth again, to tell Eddie that he loves him or to ask him what they’re going to do if Lucas doesn’t make it, but he doesn’t get that far.

“Look,” Eddie says, with a nudge of his knee against Buck’s.

Buck opens his eyes and turns his head and when he does he comes face to face with most of their family.

Maddie, Chim, and Jee-Yun; flanked by Hen and Karen and Mara; Harry whose eyes find May in a second or less. They’re all converging on them and Buck gets to his feet and opens his arms and it’s Jee who flings herself into them, so he wraps her up in a tight hug and kisses her on the top of her head as everyone else circles around them. Hen makes it to Eddie first and wraps her arms around him in a fierce hug; after that, Buck sort of loses track, but after the dust has settled and they’re occupying half of the room, he thinks it feels warmer in here, somehow.

6:03 pm

Eddie fills everyone in, keeping his voice low beneath the few stragglers in this room who are unrelated to any of them. Buck is incredibly grateful: not that they have much to say, but he really didn’t want to be the one to say any of it.

How can he say anything, he wonders? To any of them?

It was his job to keep Lucas safe. If he said this to anyone in this room, they would all object and he knows it as well as he knows his own name, but there’s a part of him— an old, forgotten part— who’s rearing his ugly head to tell Buck that they’re wrong.

From the outside, he and Eddie look heroic. Buck hates that. He knows better than to look at the news or ask Hen how the Department is going to spin it, because he already knows. He and Eddie are heroic dads and Lucas is a sympathy story: a family of firefighters saving each other.

At least, as long as Lucas lives.

The thought makes Buck’s nose burn and he sniffles against the feeling, trying to think of anything else. He tries to remember if he’d tapped the roof of the engine this morning when they all got in to go on this call. All he can remember is that they were talking about octopus. It feels like a lifetime ago now.

His thoughts are interrupted then by a sound: one that he could recognize anywhere, anytime.

Christopher’s crutches have made more or less the same scuffling scrape across the floor for as long as Buck has known him: over thirty years now. That sound has become something that Buck clings to, something he could hear in his sleep and recognize.

He turns, feeling Eddie do the same beside him, and they both get up at the sight of Chris coming into the room from the outer hallway.

He will turn forty this year, and sometimes Buck looks at him and sees the second-grader he’d first met. Other times, he sees Eddie, because the older Christopher gets the more he looks like his dad, his features darkening and sharpening and softening in shades of Diaz.

Tonight, he looks—

Like both, somehow.

“Chris,” Eddie breathes, reaching for him.

He meets them in the middle of the room and Eddie leans in to hug him.

“How is he?” Chris asks. “Anything?”

“No,” Eddie tells him. “Not yet.”

And then he’s turning to Buck. Buck wraps him up in a hug and Chris pats his shoulder soundly, like he’s always done even when he was just a little boy and something about it undoes Buck. He’s powerless against the burn behind his eyes this time, and when he pulls away from Christopher there are damp tear tracks on his cheeks.

Chris looks at him, his eyes warm and soft in a way that feels impossible, because wasn’t he just a little kid waiting for his dad to come home, and wasn’t Buck the one who was supposed to be comforting him?

But it had been like this that night, too.

Chris reaches out and hugs Buck tightly again. This time, with their bodies pressed together, Christopher leans even closer.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says. It’s not the first time, but Buck is surprised to find that it sounds so different now on this version of Chris who is so grown-up, who is a father himself, who understands so much more of the world than he had when he told Buck the same thing many years ago.

Buck nods, scrunching his nose as Eddie’s hand lands on his lower back like an anchor.

And then:

“It’s not your fault, Buck,” Chris whispers.

Buck’s breath catches.

Somehow, it shouldn’t be surprising that it was Christopher who innately understood this about Buck; that it would be Chris who told him the thing he needed to hear without ever being asked.

In response, Buck squeezes him, unable to say anything at all.

Together, they settle in again to wait.

6:43 pm

Eddie gets up, leaving Buck talking softly to Jee-Yun and goes to the emergency room desk, where he tentatively tries to ask about Lucas and is shut down with efficiency.

He had not expected anything else. Doing nothing doesn’t feel like an option, either. Helpless begins to feel like too soft of a word, with too many spaces.

7:10 pm

Chim and Maddie go to the cafeteria. The thought of eating makes Buck feel sick, but Eddie glares at him when he suggests just coffee, so he agrees to eat if it’s something light.

After they traipse down two levels and come back up, he and Eddie share a fruit cup and that’s more than he’d thought he would be able to get down.

He looks at the clock and waits.

7:54 pm

Someone comes through the door into the waiting room.

Christopher looks up through his glasses and finds that they’re smudged, and he gets one moment lit by a sliver of hope that it might be good news before the person who walked through the door keeps on walking to somewhere else entirely.

He leans back. His hip aches. He thinks of Lucas and checks his phone to find a picture of the girls asleep in the same bed sent to him by Audrey two minutes ago. He thinks more of Lucas and wonders if Lucas had been thinking of them, when he was trapped beneath a building.

8:17 pm

Eddie has stopped counting.

He isn’t sure why, but he can’t stand the thought of knowing the amount of time it’s been since he last saw Lucas. Maybe that’s because there’s a little part of his brain that knows— if he starts counting now, and it turns out that he never sees his son alive again, he’ll never be able to stop.

He’ll be counting forever, for the rest of his life, and he’ll always know how long it’s been since Lucas looked at him.

He hates that he knows that. He hates that it’s something he has to think about at all. He hates that Buck is still shaking next to him and that there’s nothing he can do about it. He taps his fingers lightly against Buck’s wrist, not in any meaningful way so much as just for something to do and a tether to keep. He thinks about this morning.

This morning, he had woken up in bed next to Buck. It was a beautiful bright sunbeam yellow kind of morning that turned the room to salted butter, and when Buck kissed him Eddie felt it all the way down to his toes.

He remembers that he’d smiled into it, because the kiss was so good and the morning was so bright.

Now, he thinks: this could be the worst day of our lives.

And what fucking sense does that make if it is? What kind of day could start with sunwarm kisses and end like this?

There’s so much that Eddie has made peace with over the years. This, he cannot wrap his head around. Most of the time, he coexists with the concept but on a day like this one it feels as if it’s all such chaos that it could never make sense.

He looks up, then. And when he does, he doesn’t really see the hospital ceiling above him even though it’s what’s there. He sees the rafters of the church that his Abuela went to when he was a little boy, and he sees them against blue sky, and he thinks— not for the first time— that he can never understand how all of that meets all of this.

The love; the spirit; the pain; the suffering.

It’s at this moment that the door to the waiting room opens and a doctor in scrubs steps out and sweeps his eyes over the room.

“Lucas Diaz?” he says.

Eddie instantly feels sick. He reaches for Buck without thinking, an old and familiar instinct, and they both get to their feet.

“We’re his parents,” Buck says.

The doctor nods, and Eddie has just enough time to feel like he’s free-falling into fear before the next words out of his mouth are:

“Lucas is going to be just fine.”

Eddie blinks.

He only really feels like he’s in his body a second later, when Buck is dropping from his place next to Eddie and back into his chair, leaning in over his knees with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes.

Without thinking, Eddie reaches for him, and gets his hands on Buck’s shaking shoulders as he looks back up at the doctor.

“He’s okay?”

The doctor nods. “He’s going to be out of commission for a while. He’s got a lot of broken bones and he’s down a piece of his spleen. Also, the puncture wound in his upper leg was pretty nasty and was complicated by a partial break there as well, but it was repairable. He was very lucky, because that wound missed his femoral artery.”

Lucky, Eddie thinks. He could almost laugh, because as ridiculous as he finds this statement he knows that Lucas is going to love it.

Lucas is going to love it. Lucas is going to be alive to love it.

Christopher leans in from his place next to Buck, keen eyes on the doctor in front of them.

“He’s a firefighter,” he says. “Will he— be able to work?”

Eddie’s breath catches. Once upon a time, it would have been the question that he was asking on Buck’s behalf. The question that would have been so important to him that it would have been on the front lines of Eddie’s thoughts. It had been, actually— more than once.

Seeing Christopher speak it out loud for Lucas puts a lump in Eddie’s throat.

The doctor smiles kindly. “Barring any complications, I don’t see why not. It’ll be a journey, but I anticipate a full recovery.”

The room breathes around them, but Buck and Eddie don’t move at all.

“Someone will come and get you shortly when he’s ready for visitors,” the doctor says.

“Thank you,” Chris answers on behalf of all of them, and then it’s over.

Eddie crumbles, dropping his head to Buck’s shoulder where he’s already shaking.

“Eddie,” Buck sobs, and Eddie reaches for him as everything else fades away slowly. It’s always been like that— the two of them, at the center of everything else.

“Hey,” Eddie whispers, through his own tears. “It’s okay. It’s okay. He’s safe.”

Buck nods, but he just keeps crying. Eddie can understand that: he’s not sure he’s ever going to stop, either, but there’s a world in which he might. That’s good enough for now if you’re asking him.

He reaches out for Buck and wraps him up in a tangle over the arm of one of the chairs in the waiting room; he lets Buck lean into him even though he’s warm and heavy and he’s getting the shoulder of his shirt damp with tears.

He turns his head and kisses Buck’s curls, which still smell like sweat and smoke.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “He’s okay.”

Buck nods against his shoulder and takes a tremulous breath. This reminds Eddie that he, too, can breathe: and for the first time since his phone rang earlier this afternoon, he fills his lungs all the way down, then releases again.

And keeps breathing.

8:43 pm

Their numbers have dwindled. It’s late, and once the relief of knowing that he’s okay has swept through the room, nobody is under the illusion that they’re going to get a chance to see Lucas tonight outside of his immediate family.

Outside of Buck, Eddie, and Christopher: only Cat remains in the waiting room. Buck had gone over to speak to her after May and Ravi had left, and after a moment crouched down in front of her he’d nodded his head, squeezed her knee, and come back to sit with Chris and Eddie.

Eddie eyes her carefully, then leans in toward Buck.

“Is she okay?” he asks softly.

Buck nods, a tender look appearing on his face as he looks between Cat and Eddie. “Yeah,” he says, shrugging one shoulder. “She’s his partner. She wants to stay.”

Eddie swallows against the lump in his throat, glancing back over at her. She’s leaning back, head tilted to the ceiling, and though part of him feels like he should be out of tears to cry, his eyes sting anyway.

He’s not surprised, not really. Lucas has always had a way with people and Cat’s loyalty to him has never been a question in Eddie’s mind. It still touches him to see it, though, to know that Lucas has that even outside of the walls of their family, their home.

He leans back and extends his arm, slinging it across the back of Chris’s chair so that he can rub his shoulder gently. Chris looks up, turning his head and catching Eddie in his soft gaze. Eddie squeezes lightly, and then settles between his boys— like so many other times, like so long ago.

Together, they wait.

9:10 pm

It’s a nurse who comes to get them. She has a warm face and long braids and she smiles at them and invites them to come back with her.

Buck starts to get nervous before they’re even out of their chairs, before Eddie is leaning over to pat Cat’s shoulder and tell her that she’s welcome to stay, to check that she’s okay out here on her own.

Buck can tell she’s grateful by the flicker of surprised and touched expression that reaches her dark eyes and soft features; but he barely processes this or anything that Eddie’s saying. He’s looking at the door the nurse had come through, the door that they’re all about to walk through, and he’s thinking about walking into that building and finding Lucas bloody and crying.

He’s thinking about his face, dirty and bruised. About his voice on the radio and the way it had died into static and the encompassing panic that had followed.

He’s thinking about Lucas in the parking lot this morning, grinning and easy with his muffins in his hand and his body unmarred.

He’s thinking about getting to the scene and about sending Lucas and Cat into the building; about watching his son’s turnouts disappear into the dark and about whether he’s ever going to be able to forgive himself for that moment.

Logically, he knows better. He should know better. His head is filled with the voices of the people who have taught him better: Bobby; Eddie; Christopher; Hen; Lucas, himself. Buck is pieces of everyone he loves, and it makes him better every passing year. But the Evan that he had been once, before.

Sometimes his voice is there, too.

He’s numb as they all follow the nurse down the hall, a collection of footsteps that seem to echo.

“He’s still asleep,” she tells them. “But doing really well. He could wake up any time in the next couple of hours, and he’s on some pretty heavy meds so he shouldn’t be in too much pain. You guys are welcome to sit with him as long as you like.”

Buck is grateful, somewhere beneath all the other feelings. But when they approach the door with its dim windows and drawn blinds, he feels himself falter.

Eddie pauses next to him, his dark eyes knowing.

“Chris,” he says gently, squeezing their son’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go in with your brother? We’ll be right behind you.”

Chris glances between them, looking like a mirror of Eddie’s expression. “Okay,” he says, and then he slips into the room and Buck and Eddie are left in the hallway.

Buck takes a breath and exhales it; the sound seems to drift like wind, like a rustling, too loud in the quiet hallway.

Leaning against the wall behind him, he raises his head and there’s Eddie.

Always, there’s Eddie. Buck has been looking up and seeing his face for so long that it’s built into him now. He doesn’t know what it would be like to raise his head, to search for Eddie’s dark eyes, and find anything else.

Eddie’s eyes are bloodshot and he looks like hell, the same way Buck is sure he does, but beneath that he’s as steady and sure as he’s ever been: dark eyes focused, hair loose over his forehead, his jaw stubbled and shadowed.

“Chris is right,” he says evenly.

Buck scoffs lightly. “I sent him in there, Eddie.”

Eddie takes a step forward, and sways into Buck’s space. All around them, there’s a hush. It’s like being in a snowglobe, a little bit. Maybe that’s just about the proximity to Eddie.

He reaches up, brushing his fingers over Buck’s birthmark and his cheekbone in a soft and tender gesture. The kind of thing he’s been doing for so many years now that Buck should be more than used to it, but he’s not.

“You did everything that I would have done,” he says steadily. “Everything that any one of us would have done. What Bobby would have done.”

Buck’s throat closes up around a thorned catch of his breath.

“He got hurt anyway,” he says thickly. “He could have died, Eds.”

“I know,” Eddie soothes. His hand is still on Buck’s face, and he turns his head instinctively, presses a kiss to Eddie’s palm and feels the warmth of it against his skin. “But he didn’t. He’s gonna be okay,” Eddie reminds him. “That’s because of you, too.”

Buck shakes his head a little and Eddie inches even closer. He leans in so close that they’re sharing breath, and kisses Buck softly on his cheek.

“I promise,” he whispers. “You did good, Buck.”

Sometimes, there’s a version of him that just still needs to hear it. The Evan in him, whose voice quiets beneath Eddie’s certainty.

Eddie has always been the one who could do that for him.

Buck reaches out then, and puts his hands on Eddie’s waist, drawing him in and kissing him: a brush of their lips to each other’s, a tender reminder. An I love you that he doesn’t have to say.

He does anyway.

“I love you,” Buck whispers.

“I love you,” Eddie answers back. “You need a minute?”

Buck shakes his head, leaning in and kissing Eddie on his cheek, too. “No,” he says. “Let’s go see him.”

Eddie squeezes his arm gently, and then releases; he eases the door open and leads Buck inside, and the light from the hallway gives way to the dimly lit room.

There’s a soft, steady beeping and the usual antiseptic smell of the hospital with all the usual accoutrements: a whiteboard with Lucas’s name on it; a little tray with a water pitcher; a collection of chairs; a side table with a plastic bag open on it, full of Lucas’s things.

Christopher is occupying the chair closest to the bed at the center of the room; and in it, there’s Lucas.

Buck thinks back to when Lucas was three and had bronchitis and they’d had to bring him to the emergency room and he’d sat in a hospital bed and looked impossibly tiny. How is it possible, he wonders, that Lucas looks just as small on a night more than twenty years later? How is it possible that Buck looks at him now and sees him just as he’d been at three?

His face has been cleaned up and the small cut on his cheek has been covered by a butterfly bandage; there’s a bruise along his temple and his curls are still dirty, but other than that he could just be sleeping on any normal day. His chest tightens at the sight of him and Eddie breathes in sharply next to him; then, they both move forward and take the chairs on the opposite side from Chris.

As they sit in the quiet and Eddie reaches for Lucas’s hand and carefully avoids the IV in it, Buck glances over and looks at the other side of him.

In his hand, where Chris’s fingers are brushing his still ones, there’s the glint of gold. The chain is broken, he realizes with a jolt, but it’s Lucas’s St. Christopher medal.

Catching him looking, Chris sighs.

“I took it out of the bag,” he says, his voice low. For the first time all night, Buck can hear in his tone that he’s been crying. “I thought he’d want it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie answers, also rough on the vowels. “He would, honey.”

He would, Buck thinks, looking at the medal and wondering where it was: how it got here in pieces, like Lucas did; if it had done its job and kept him safe.

The one that hangs against his own chest beneath his shirt and Eddie’s sweatshirt over that feels warmer, suddenly.

11:01 pm

Lucas Diaz believes entirely that any day can be a good one.

When he wakes up, it’s nighttime. He’s sure of this— somehow, curiously— even before he opens his eyes. It happens slowly, and everything feels like it comes to him through a film of soft cotton.

It’s nice, though. He’s warm and comfortable and for a brief moment it’s like waking up from a dream.

Maybe he is waking up from a dream, actually. A dream in which he was asleep in his bedroom at his parents’ house: the back corner room with the yellow walls, the room his parents had built and painted just for him, the room that he had grown up in. It was the first space that was ever really his, and even now he likes it there the most when he’s feeling off.

He thinks he was dreaming about sleeping there. About his dad coming in to wake him up for school; about fingers brushing his curls back and Apple curled up at his feet; about the way the house always smelled, a little bit like citrus and wood and something softly sweet. He thinks he was alive in this dream.

He thinks he’s alive now.

He opens his eyes. It takes him a couple of tries; it feels like his lashes are glued shut and everything about his body is heavy in the most pleasant way. But he does it, and finds that the room is dim. It’s nighttime, like he’d thought.

The next thing he becomes aware of is that someone is holding his hand. On the other side, there’s something tangled in his fingers that he can recognize immediately as his St. Christopher medal.

He wakes up a little more at that.

Why would his St. Christopher medal be in his hand?

That’s when Lucas realizes that he’s in a hospital, and with that he remembers very suddenly how he got there: the building collapsing and all those hours or minutes or however long it was that he spent trapped in the dark, and his parents—

He takes a breath, and then the hand in his moves and all at once Lucas is not alone anymore. He wasn’t at all, he realizes as his parents appear in his field of vision.

“Lucas?” they’re saying softly, reaching him through all that cotton that’s surrounding him. “Honey, can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he croaks.

He turns his head, and then there are fingers brushing his curls back. He may not be little or in his bedroom, and Apple might not be curled up at his feet, but some things are still true.

“Hi, mi sol,” his dad says softly. “You’re okay.”

“Am I—”

“You’re okay,” Eddie repeats.

“It’s okay,” Buck adds. “You’re safe.”

They’re both nodding at him, assuring him like they’ve always done. There’s a straw in front of him and he doesn’t know how it got there but he drinks from it and his mouth comes to life and some of the cotton clears.

“Are you in pain?” one of them asks him. “Anything hurt?”

“No,” he says. “No. I— Am I okay?”

“You’re okay,” Dad soothes again. “We’re right here. You’re gonna be just fine, I promise.”

He turns his head the other way, then.

Christopher. Looking at him softly, tenderly.

“Chris,” Lucas breathes.

“Hi,” his brother answers.

With some effort, Lucas lifts his hand. In it, the medal. But when Lucas moves it, he realizes that it’s broken. Suddenly, fiercely, something sharp steals through his chest and without preamble he bursts into tears.

Christopher leans in immediately, and then his brother is in his space, and his fingers are on Lucas’s cheek and his medal is broken, it’s broken and—

“I didn’t mean to,” he says, his voice coming out wobbly.

“Hey,” Chris soothes. It reminds Lucas of the way he talks to Iris and Isabel, and he can’t help but cry harder, squeezing his eyes shut. “That’s okay,” Chris whispers to him. “It’s okay. We’re gonna get you a new one. I promise.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Lucas repeats.

Christopher squeezes his arm gently. “I know,” he says.

He reaches down and closes Lucas’s fingers around the metal of the broken chain, and Lucas draws in a shaky breath. The tears seem to go as quickly as they came, and when he looks at his parents he finds that now they’re the ones whose eyes are glassy.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t want them to cry.

It’s his dad’s light curls and blue eyes that he sees react to this: a seizing, fluttering, pained expression taken immediately over by softness. He leans in, close enough to Lucas that he can see his light eyelashes, and his eyes turning sure and serious. His captain, Lucas thinks distantly.

“You did absolutely nothing wrong,” he murmurs. “You— you were so brave.” He smiles then, or attempts to, and it comes out crooked but genuine.

Like Lucas’s own face in the mirror. He brushes his fingertips tenderly over Lucas’s cheek.

“You did good, Firefighter Diaz,” he whispers.

“Okay,” Lucas whispers back. “Did everybody get out?”

“Everybody but you, kid,” his dad answers.

Lucas settles, leaning his head back and looking between them. All three of them.

“No,” he says. He’s already sleepy again; already thinking of his bedroom and its yellow walls. “You got me out.”

Dad nods, his dark eyes shifting over Lucas’s face. “We did,” he says, his voice steady but strange.

“Thanks,” Lucas breathes.

Dad smiles then, looking like Christopher, looking like summertime and comfort and days in the sun. All the things that he is to Lucas.

“Anytime, baby,” he whispers, smoothing Lucas’s curls back again. “You sleep now, okay?”

His eyes start to close. He sees the yellow of the walls. He can almost feel the weight of sleep; of a Sunday; of the house around him.

“I love you,” he says.

His eyes are already closed. The softness of the cotton envelops him. He doesn’t hear them respond to him; doesn’t need to. They will be here when he wakes up again; and he’ll get a new medal and already he can’t remember why he felt so bad that it was broken; and the yellow walls will disappear but he can always go back home to them.

He’s asleep; breathing; held and safe. He’ll wake up again. Alive.

His thoughts pull away from him as he sinks beneath the dark comfort of waiting sleep. His last thought, spiraling and drifting through his fingers like disappearing smoke:

It’s a good day.