Archive of Our Own

“KILLER CUPID” REACHES LOS ANGELES COUNTY: Slaying of South Pasadena couple latest victims in killing spree

The news ticker crawls across the bottom of the screen like an afterthought, and every eye in the loft jumps from the TV to each other.

Chimney, just having come up from the bay, drops himself on the couch at Hen’s side with a grunt. He has his phone out, and Eddie can see from his spot in the armchair that he has the same headline pulled up. The words flash bold and foreboding from his hand. He waves his phone.

“He’s getting close-er,” he sing-songs, and Hen smacks the back of his head.

“What’s the matter with you?” she says. “You have a new baby at home. I’d think you’d be a little more scared about a damn serial killer running around.”

Chimney grins, and it’s so out of place in the moment that Ravi laughs from the other armchair. Hen flashes him a severe eyebrow, and the tension breaks, just a little, when he withers guiltily. The whole thing is so absurd.

“My new baby is my ticket, Hen,” Chimney says proudly, maybe smugly. “Maddie and I haven’t been out on a date since before she was born. We’re fine!”

“Right,” Hen says, unconvinced. “Because that’s all it takes.”

“Uh, I think it is,” Ravi says, having recovered. “KC only goes after couples that are out on dates, right? So—” He shrugs. “Don’t go out on dates. Stay in, at least until they catch him.”

Chimney snaps and points a finger at him. “Exactly. Just stay in and we’ll all be copacetic. Hey, where was he last?”

“San Bernardino, I think,” Eddie offers, gripping the crossword book in his lap until the glossy cover creaks. “Killed four couples up in Big Bear.”

“Right, and didn’t they put Big Bear and Redlands on lockdown?”

Hen snorts. Finally, she picks up the remote and switches the TV off. Taylor Kelly’s face winks out of existence. “After he killed those couples.”

“Hen.” Chimney pulls his knees up under him and turns to her on the cushion. “Don’t go out. Easy as that!”

Hen raises her eyebrows. “It’s October. Do you know how much Karen has planned for us this month? Halloween is like her whole thing.”

“It's also a serial killer’s whole thing, “ Ravi mutters.

Chimney looks between the two of them, then—

“Ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah.”

Hen shoves him to the end of the couch, and they laugh.

Eddie, though, is still uneasy, because two of those couples in Big Bear weren’t even on a date. They were killed right in their cabin on the lake. And before that, a few weeks ago in Anaheim, two of the victims were an elderly couple sound asleep in their retirement community. The closest thing to a date that they’d been on was their weekly Bridge games with the neighbors.

Ravi is wrong— There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the way this Killer Cupid is moving.

Eddie keeps this to himself.

“Knock it off, you guys.” Bobby joins them in the living area, hands on his hips. “No in-fighting until we’re at least halfway through this 48.”

Hen stands from the couch and brushes herself off. “He started it,” she says, flicking her chin in Chimney’s direction. “Tell him not to joke about Killer Cupid. It’s distasteful.”

Bobby looks at her sharply. “Hey— Quiet, Wilson. There’s power in a name, you know.”

Three heads snap in the direction of their captain, and just as realization dawns over his face—

The tones sound.

Chimney claps Bobby on the shoulder on their way past. “I think there’s more power in the Q-word, Cap.”

“Yeah,” Bobby sighs. “I guess there is.”

Luckily, Eddie’s first Q-word incident with the 118 isn’t too bad, just a tripped fire alarm and a smoke-filled kitchen. The loft apartment they respond to is bright and spacious, and the occupant, a tall 30-something beefcake that hasn’t stopped talking since they got there, spends the time they take airing the place out batting Hen’s hands away as she tries to wipe soot from under his nose.

“It’s a good thing I’ll be teaching Earth Science and not Home Ec, huh?” the guy says from his spot at the dining table. Hen flicks him on the forehead the way a big sister might.

“Buck,” Bobby says from the kitchen. He sets the fire extinguisher on the counter. “Did you fall asleep cooking again?”

Buck looks embarrassed. His face flushes the color of the red mark above his left eyebrow, and he scratches the back of his neck. “I was up late studying,” he says sheepishly.

“Oh, Buckaroo,” Chimney sighs. “At least we can rest easy knowing you’ll never be a target for Killer Cupid; your own stupidity will be the death of you.”

“Hey!” Buck whines. “Bobby, come on.”

Bobby, smiling, holds his hands up. “You know what I’m gonna tell you, kid.”

Eddie has been watching the scene unfold from Buck’s mezzanine bedroom the way someone might watch a play from up in the opera box: A polite, safe distance away. He ran up the stairs under the guise of wanting to get the windows open as the smoke rose, but really, he needed to get away from Buck.

His smile was too bright and his eyes were too blue and his running shorts are way too short to be appropriate, even in the comfort of his own home. Eddie had to get away from him, and the only way to go was up. He followed the smoke.

“Eddie, how you doing up there?” Bobby calls suddenly.

Eddie looks over the railing and raises a hand. “Everything looks good, Cap.”

“Well, come on down. We should be getting back.”

“Aw, man,” Eddie hears Buck say when he retreats. “What if I inhaled smoke and need to go to the hospital?”

“What if we 5150 you?” Hen says, flat.

Eddie is psyching himself up to go back down and be a functioning member of the LAFD when his eye catches a framed photograph on Buck’s bookshelf. Usually he wouldn’t snoop through patients’ personal belongings, but he can’t help himself. It’s a photo of Chimney.

This Buck guy isn’t just just a charmer, he’s friends with Eddie’s team.

“Hey,” he says, flashing the picture frame as he descends the metal staircase. “You guys know each other?”

Buck looks at Eddie as if he’s just noticing there’s a fourth body in his apartment, and his face goes that red color again. He stands from the dining table so fast he bangs his knee on the underside. He doesn’t even wince.

“Hey,” he says, breathy.

Chimney takes the picture frame from Eddie’s hand and laughs. “Oh, man, this was at May’s graduation party. I still have the scar on my forehead here.”

“Hey,” Buck says to Eddie again, wiping his hands on his pants.

“Hey,” Eddie says. “Eddie Diaz.”

He holds out a hand and Buck takes it. His palm is huge and warm and sweaty. “I’m Buck,” he says with a crooked smile. “But you can call me Buck.”

Eddie laughs, and Buck’s eyes light up at the sound. “Right.”

Somewhere far away, Hen is saying, “We’ve known Buck forever. What is it now, almost five years?”

Chimney says, “Yep, almost five years since he broke his leg at a Bruce Springsteen concert and Cap took him in like a stray dog.”

Even farther away, Bobby laughs again. “Hey, if I wasn’t at that concert, you never would’ve met Maddie.”

Maddie. Chimney’s wife and the mother of his baby. She knows Buck too. Everyone here knows Buck. And now Eddie will too.

The prospect is both thrilling and sickening.

Eddie is still staring at him, and Buck is staring right back. He’s not sure why. He can’t help it. His eyes are a bright, bright blue, and the stubble littering his jaw is almost red, strawberry blonde. He smells like smoke, and sweat, and he has a big nose and bad acne scarring on his cheeks, and he’s puffing his chest out like a gorilla to make himself seem bigger than he already is, and—

Thrilling and sickening.

Eddie remembers, suddenly, the headline: “KILLER CUPID” REACHES LOS ANGELES COUNTY.

He takes a step back, out of Buck’s orbit.

It’s no use, though; Buck takes one forward.

Eddie scratches the back of his neck and finds that it’s warm. “Uh, you broke your leg at a Springsteen concert?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, plunging his fists into the pockets of his running shorts. Instead of pulling them down, as one might when their hands are deep in their pockets, he tugs them up. Eddie doesn’t think he’s seen such huge thighs in his life. It’s like the guy is walking around on two tree trunks. “Bobby came to my rescue. We watched the encore from the first aid tent.”

“Huh.”

“How-how’d you meet?”

Eddie looks back at his team. Bobby is busying himself cleaning up Buck’s kitchen, Chimney is staring a little too intently at the photograph in his hands with his eyebrows raised in a way that tells Eddie he’s very much eavesdropping, and Hen is openly watching the interaction. There’s a knowing smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, and Eddie has the sudden urge to abscond to the engine, but he can’t seem to escape Buck’s orbit.

“I, uh, joined the 118 a couple weeks ago. From another station.”

“Cool,” Buck grins that crooked grin. His hands have been freed from his pockets and he wipes them on his pants again like it’s a nervous habit. “Bobby’s great. Everyone— They’re all great, super great. You’re not gonna regret it.”

Eddie hums, ignoring the clenching in his stomach.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Eddie is regretting joining Station 118. Maybe even the LAFD as a whole. Hell, he never should have left Texas, because he can’t stop thinking about Buck.

Buck. What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway? He’s fixated on a man he met once, on a call, that goes by a name that makes him sound like a scrappy soldier in some old war movie.

“I’m just saying,” Hen says while Eddie helps her clean the ambulance after her last puke-heavy transport. Chimney is nowhere to be found, and Eddie is silently cursing him for it. “With all the precautions the city has put in place, you know, the curfew and all the extra security, and stuff, I think it’ll be safe if you asked him out.”

“You changed your tune quick,” Eddie mutters.

Hen shrugs. “Gotta do whatever it takes when it comes to matchmaking, I learned that from Chim. He told Karen that I died to get us together.”

“That won’t work if one of us is actually dead.”

“God, just— Serial killer aside.”

“Hen—” Eddie lets out a frustrated breath. “Fine, serial killer aside. Does he even like guys?”

Hen quirks an eyebrow as if to say, What, you couldn’t tell? “He’s been openly bisexual since we’ve known him.”

Right, of course. “Okay, what about kids? Not a lot of people want to date someone with a kid.”

“He’s going to be teaching middle schoolers for a reason, Eddie.”

“Shit,” Eddie says. “My kid is a middle schooler.”

Bobby crosses in front of the open ambulance doors on his way to his office and throws out over his shoulder, “I don’t know, Eddie, you seem like Buck's type.”

Eddie tosses a rag in his direction. “Don’t encourage her, Cap!”

A hand finds its way to Eddie’s arm, and Hen is looking at him so earnestly from behind her black-rimmed glasses that he has the urge to look away.

"What are you afraid of?” she asks softly.

“Mostly?” Eddie huffs. “The serial killer.”

She takes her hand back, and an eyeroll takes its place. “I mean with Buck. He’s a good guy! One of the best guys. A little impulsive, but he’s mellowed out a lot over the years. Especially since he started working with kids.”

Eddie pulls off his gloves and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Hen. Don’t tell me that.”

“And why not? Seriously, Eddie, there’s police all over the city, we’re not allowed outside after dark. Just seeing him again can’t hurt.”

“It could.”

“Eddie.”

“Henrietta.”

“Hey, skittle squad, you done in there yet?” Chimney appears with his hands on his hips, smacking at the ever-present wad of gum between his molars.

Hen throws her arm out in Eddie’s direction. “Chimney, please tell Eddie he should ask Buck out.”

Chimney frowns and stops chewing for half a second. “What, like, on a date?”

“No,” Eddie says, and hops out from the back of the ambulance. “No date.”

Chimney looks between the two of them. “You like Buck? Since when? You met him once! Most people don’t like Buck the first time they meet him.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hen says. “He weaseled his little way right into my heart.”

“Yeah, like a parasite.”

“Wait, you don’t like Buck?” Eddie asks him. “What’s wrong with him?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Hen says, looking pointedly at Chimney. “They’re just brothers-in-law.”

Chimney shrugs and sighs. “Yeah, he’s a good kid. It’s just my brotherly duty to rag on him.”

Brothers-in-law. Buck is Maddie’s brother, AKA the little brother that she practically raised and who she has never had a bad thing to say about.

Things are looking worse and worse for Eddie.

Chimney crosses his arms and cocks his head. “You know what?” he says, sucking in a minty breath between his teeth. “You’re kind of his type.”

“Aha!”

Eddie slaps his hands down on his thighs. “Seriously! I should transfer back to Station 6!”

Chimney frowns. “Am I missing something here? You don’t like Buck?”

“He hasn’t been able to shut up about him since he almost burned his loft down. Again.”

“Aw.” Chimney pokes at Eddie’s stomach and Eddie bats him away. “Meet-cute! I learned that from Karen’s girlish romance books.”

“I—!” Eddie feels like a wild animal backed into a corner. The guys at Station 6 were never this pushy, nor this interested in his love life, or his personal life, or anything he had to say, really. Maybe that was for the best. “Fine. You want me to be honest?”

Hen and Chimney glance at each other, and they both say, “Yeah.”

Eddie takes a steadying breath and says as evenly as possible, “I haven’t dated since I transitioned, okay? Happy?”

Something complicated passes over Chimney’s face, like he forgot entirely that Eddie was trans, which, it wouldn’t be the first time, but Hen’s softens with understanding. She reaches for Eddie’s hand and he lets her take it.

“Eddie…” she says in that soft motherly tone of hers.

“And I really don’t think now is the best time to get back out there. You know, with the serial killer that’s on the loose,” he says.

“I mean, it wouldn’t hurt just to see him again,” Chimney says, and Hen lets go of Eddie to hold her hand out for a silent high-five. “Go get drinks after shift with him, or something. That bar down the street has seriously beefed up their security. It’s probably a fire hazard by now.”

“And speaking of fire hazards,” Hen says, “Buck could use a night out.”

“You could too, Diaz.”

Eddie looks between the two of them, grinning like Siamese cats. He throws his head back and groans. “You two are like the twins from The Shining. Fine, I’ll ask him to drinks.”

Hen and Chimney high-five again.

Hey, it’s Eddie.
From your loft haha.
Or from the LAFD. I guess that sounds better.
Anyways, this is Firefighter Diaz from the LAFD. Would you like to get drinks with me tomorrow tonight? Before the curfew, obviously.
I got your number from Hen BTW.

wow lol double texting final boss. i like that :) yeah i’ll get drinks w you! just give me a time and a place and i’ll be there :)

Buck is waiting outside the bar when Eddie gets there. He’s leaning against the brick siding twirling his keys around his finger, and when he spots Eddie, they go flying. Eddie catches them, barely, and tosses them back.

“H-hey,” Buck says, stuffing the keys in his pocket. “Get here okay?”

Eddie thumbs behind him. “Yeah, I came straight from work.” He looks down at himself, at his shirt that’s still wrinkled from spending the day in his locker. “But I, uh, I showered. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worried.” Buck grins, and the back of Eddie’s neck goes warm and prickling. He is so out of practice here. “Come on,” he says, looking at his watch. “We have T-minus two hours before they kick us out.”

Buck pulls the door open and waves Eddie through. Eddie blushes and ducks under his arm. It’s been a long time since someone held a door for him. It feels a lot better now than it used to.

There’s a guy perched on a stool just inside the doors, and he stamps their hands and checks their IDs and waves a metal detecting wand around them. It whines when it passes over Buck’s left leg.

Buck lets out an embarrassed breath and reaches for the hem of his pants. Eddie is afraid he’s about to reveal an ankle monitor, or something, but there’s nothing there. Just his sock and pale, hairy skin.

“I’ve got some hardware from an injury,” he explains a little sheepishly.

The guy grunts and waves them along, having never even gotten up from his stool. Buck drops his pant leg and puts a hand on Eddie’s back as they step over piles of peanut shells on their way to the bar.

“The break was that bad?” Eddie asks, raising his voice over the music and conversation.

Buck shrugs. “Pretty bad, I guess. It still gives me problems sometimes.”

That’s when Eddie notices the limp. It’s faint, but as a former medic and current first responder, these are things he notices. “Are you gonna be okay? Because if you want to reschedule—”

Buck whirls on him. His eyes are that bright electric blue, and Eddie can feel himself being sucked back into his orbit. Like there are magnets in his gaze, or his entire presence is a tractor beam.

“Eddie, there’s nowhere I’d rather be tonight.”

“But if your leg hurts—”

Buck kisses him. It’s hard and fleeting and very forward, and when Eddie peels his eyes open and comes back from his brief trip to cloud nine, there’s a drink held up to his face.

“As long as we’re not running anywhere, I’m fine,” Buck says, sipping his own drink with a small smirk.

Eddie licks his lips. They taste better than whatever is in either of their glasses. “That didn’t count,” he says, taking his drink.

“What didn’t count?”

“Exactly.”

They find a table at the back and Buck immediately tosses his phone down and queues up a song on the TouchTunes. Then he leans back, stretching his legs out into Eddie’s, and smiles. Eddie, on the other hand, has both hands around his drink and is bouncing his foot out of time with the music.

“So,” he says.

“So,” Buck says. “Come here often?”

That loosens something in Eddie’s chest, just a little, and he laughs.

“Once or twice. What song did you choose?”

Buck looks at his phone. “Uh, “Angry White Boy Polka” by Weird Al. It should play in, like, fifteen minutes.”

Another laugh, this one louder, looser.

“Why?”

A shrug. “I play it everywhere I go.”

Eddie knocks back half of his drink and leans over the table towards Buck. Buck follows, like Eddie has his own sticky orbit. Maybe this won’t be so bad. Maybe dating men as a man isn’t so different as long as he’s with the right person. Shannon might not have been the right person, considering the divorce, but it did feel a lot like this in the beginning.

“Maybe if you saw Weird Al, you wouldn’t have broken your leg.”

“If I saw Weird Al in concert, I’d break way more than just my leg. His shows go pretty hard.”

Eddie lifts his half-empty glass. “Touché.”

Buck buries his face in his drink when he says, “And I probably wouldn’t have met you.”

“Hm.”

The eyebrow that’s shadowed by that pink smudge of a birthmark goes up. “Hm?”

“We might have,” Eddie says. “If you burn down your apartment as often as Hen says you do.”

A gentle kick beneath the table. “I was studying!”

Buck’s leg stays, a warm, solid weight against Eddie’s. It’s nice. This whole thing is nice, easy. He could almost pretend that he, too, has known Buck for five years.

“I have a kid,” Eddie finds himself blurting.

Buck’s eyes go wide, and he sits up like Eddie is about to produce said kid. “I love kids!”

“I love this one,” Eddie says, automatic, and takes his phone from his pocket. He has to scroll back into the depths of his camera roll, but he finds what he’s looking for, and he passes it to Buck. “But I mean…I had a kid.”

Buck hunches over the phone like he doesn’t want to touch it, like touching another person’s phone on a first date is disrespectful, or some unspoken rule. His finger hovers over the photo, outlining Eddie’s shoulder-length hair, Christopher’s fat little newborn face in the crook of his arm. His eyes never dim.

“Oh,” he says.

Eddie takes his phone back. “Yeah. So.”

When Buck looks at him, nothing has changed in his face. He doesn’t look at him any differently than he had a moment ago, before Eddie dropped this in his lap. If anything, his eyes goes softer, and he says again:

“I love kids.”

And that’s it for Eddie. That’s all it takes, really.

“This is kind of new for me,” he admits, and Buck shrugs again and drinks the rest of his drink. He spits an ice cube back into the glass.

“It’s new for me too,” he says. “We just met.”

Eddie laughs, and it feels like an exhale. He pockets his phone.

Buck gets up and collects their empty glasses between two fingers. “I mean, you could be the Killer Cupid, for all I know. Want another one of these?”

Buck is back before Eddie can answer, navigating the bar like he was raised in one. He sets their fresh drinks on the wet table with a heavy thunk and sits, pulling his chair a fraction closer to Eddie at the last second.

“You could be, too,” Eddie says. “You’ve got the build.”

“I’ve got the build of a serial killer?”

Eddie just shrugs, and Buck laughs again. Before they know it, their second drinks are gone, and their third, and Eddie has unbuttoned his shirt enough that Buck’s eyes are fixated on the sparse patch of hair between his collarbones.

“So. Teaching?”

Buck swipes up some of the condensation from the tabletop and wipes it on the back of his neck. Eddie might be disgusted if it was anyone else, but now he follows suit, sticking his own damp hand down the front of his shirt and over his head. Buck watches with his tongue pressing at his bottom lip.

“Uh, what?”

Oh, yeah, Eddie doesn’t know what he was ever worried about. Where the hell has this guy been in all the years he’s been in LA? Right around the corner, that’s where. Friends with a neighboring station. Six degrees of separation.

“Teaching.”

Buck jolts. “Yeah! Teaching. Got my, uh, Bachelor’s online, then I did this prep program where I co-subbed at the high school, and now I’m, uh, studying for my CSETs. It’s brutal, but hopefully I’ll have kids of my own for the next school year. Maybe even sooner, who knows.”

The wording makes Eddie smile. “But why teaching?” A bowl of peanuts has found its way to their table, and he finds himself piercing one with his thumbnail. Buck watches this, too.

Easy.

“Is this an interview?”

Eddie shrugs. “Could be. You haven’t convinced me yet that you’re not Killer Cupid.”

A passing patron gives them a look over their shoulder, and they both wave.

Buck mimics the shrug. Laughing and shrugging, the epitome of casual. “Teachers are there when your parents aren’t.” He drinks. “I dunno. After I flunked out of college back home—uh, Pennsylvania, for your background check—I traveled the country for a while, and then when I was about to take a bartending gig down in Peru, my flight got canceled.”

“Texas. Your flight was canceled so you…decided to become a teacher?”

Buck looks around the bar, tapping his fingers to the music, eyes jumping from one person to the next like he’s gathering up his answer. “I slept there for a few nights. The—the airport. Like that Tom Hanks movie. And just seeing all these kids with their parents made me think about— made me think about how every time I went on a family vacation as a kid, I couldn’t wait to get back to school.” He drinks again, then looks at Eddie, his eyes spiderwebbed but present. “That’s who I want to be.”

“Someone that people look forward to seeing.”

“A safe place.”

“A safe place.”

“Mhm. You probably get that, being a firefighter. A—a first responder. Right?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He splits another peanut shell and it shoots across the table and into Buck’s lap, who picks it up and shakes it into his mouth. He tosses the shell over his shoulder. “I guess I never really thought about it like that. Becoming a firefighter seemed like the next logical step after the army, I guess.”

Buck sits forward a little. “Woah, you were in the army?”

Eddie nods, slow, eyes on the bowl of peanuts. “Medic. Two tours in Afghanistan.”

Buck is quiet for a moment, then he says, “You could totally be the Killer Cupid. You know how to fire a gun.”

Eddie snorts and shoves the bowl of peanuts to him. He drains his third drink. “You must not have been watching the news. He uses a knife, bud.”

“Oh, and you never used a knife in Afghanistan, Mr. Field Surgeon?”

Maybe it’s the drink in his system, maybe it’s how cool Buck has been all night, but Eddie finds himself taking his utility knife from his pocket and setting it on the table between them like he’s throwing an offering into the pile of winnings at a poker game.

“Sure,” he says.

Buck’s eyebrows flick. He drops his own knife into the pot, and they laugh again. Eddie doesn’t think he’s laughed so much since leaving El Paso.

They split the bowl of peanuts, leaving little piles of salty shell on the sticky table and even stickier floor. Eddie is about to get up and order them some real food—nachos or loaded fries, or something equally heavy that he’ll regret more than the liquor in the morning—when Buck starts to choke.

“Hey, you okay?”

He hacks into his fist, nodding. “Wrong pipe.”

Eddie gets up. “Well, you’re inhaling those things like they’re going out of style.”

He puts a hand on Buck’s shoulder and Buck waves him off. “I’m fine, I’m—” He stops coughing and swallows roughly, wincing. “I’m good, see?”

“You sure?”

Buck nods again and takes a sip of his drink. “You can still give me the Heimlich, if you want.”

Eddie rolls his eyes and sits back down. The coughing starts up again, and he says, “Buck—”

“That’s not me!”

They both look around and find the source. A guy at the bar is stumbling from his stool, coughing into his fist like how Buck had, but this time, his face is turning red.

“That’s worse than the wrong pipe,” Buck says.

“That’s a clogged pipe.”

Buck laughs, but when Eddie leaves their table, he stops short and gets up to follow.

The guy collapses when they reach the bar, and the crowd steps back, like the downburst of him hitting the ground blows them away. It leaves room for Eddie and Buck, and they kneel at his side.

“Sir?” Eddie says into the guy’s ear. He rubs his knuckles into his sternum but gets no response. “Sir.”

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” Buck says. “Should—”

“Call 9-1-1.”

Buck calls 9-1-1. Eddie starts CPR.

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

“Maddie?”

A pause. “Buck? You know, when I said to call me if your date goes sideways, I didn’t mean at work.”

“No, Maddie, he’s choking.”

“Your date?”

“Some guy at the bar. I think he’s choking on a peanut. Eddie’s fine.”

Eddie comes up from a rescue breath. “Hi, Maddie.”

“Eddie. What’s the status?”

“Foreign body not visible in mouth. Compressions are doing nothing to dislodge it.” He presses two fingers to the side of the guy’s throat. “Still no pulse.”

From Buck’s phone comes the sound of typing. “Okay, just keep doing what you’re doing. An ambulance should be there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes? The station is right down the street!”

“And they’re responding to a four-alarm fire on the other side of town,” Maddie says steadily, ever the professional. Eddie has been responding to her calls since before he joined Chimney’s station, and he’s always appreciated when it was her voice on the other end of the line. “I’m surprised you couldn’t hear the sirens.”

“We were a little preoccupied,” Eddie mutters. He stops compressions and peers inside the man’s mouth again, then checks his pulse. Nothing has changed. He curses. “We gotta do something. He’s turning blue here.”

Buck rubs the back of his neck as he looks around. No one steps up, no one offers to do anything. Even the owner has come out from the back and is just watching. They’re on their own.

“Should we bring him to your firehouse?” Buck says, on the verge of frantic. “I mean— There’s usually someone left behind, right?”

Another sternal rub goes unanswered. “Not if they were called to a four-alarmer,” Eddie says. “There’s nothing there that we couldn’t do here, though. I could probably use my medkit, but we’ve both got knives on us, right?”

Buck blanches for half a second. “Our— You’re gonna—”

“Eddie, what are you thinking?” Maddie asks.

“I’m thinking we help him breathe until EMS get here.”

Eddie gets up and snatches their knives from their table. Buck’s is sharper.

He stares. “Maddie, what is he doing?”

“He’s going to cric him,” Maddie tells her brother in a no-nonsense way that has his eyes bugging out of his head. “Sterilize it good, Eddie. 190-proof if you have it.”

“Hey.” Eddie points the knife at the owner of the bar, who holds his hands up as if Eddie were pointing a gun. “Everclear. You have it?”

“No,” the owner says simply, a little bewildered.

“Then bring me your strongest shit, and a clean rag. Quick.”

The guy is indeed turning blue, and Buck is properly panicking now.

“You’re seriously going to slash his throat?”

Eddie refrains from rolling his eyes at his date, which is probably more disrespectful than handling his phone. Instead, he shifts a little closer until their knees bump. “It’s a small incision. I’ve done this before.”

“Where?” Buck says.

A bottle of whiskey with an unfamiliar label is passed to him, three-quarters empty, along with a pink microfiber cloth. He sanitizes Buck’s utility knife. “140-proof is gonna have to do, Maddie.” He grins at Buck. “Afghanistan.”

Buck rocks back onto his haunches and says, “I’m so glad I never went through with the SEALs.”

The cricothyrotomy is fairly straight forward. Eddie makes a vertical two-inch cut into the soft tissue just below the guy’s Adam’s apple, then sticks his finger into the incision, making more than one person cringe and wander away. He holds his other hand out.

“Straw.”

The owner places a straw in Eddie’s hand. It’s the fattest straw he’s ever seen.

“What the hell is this?”

He shrugs. “Boba. Better for breathing, I don’t know!”

“Eddie, be careful,” Maddie instructs over the phone. “Ambulance is five minutes out.”

“They did this shit on Grey’s Anatomy,” someone in the crowd says, hushed.

The boba straw is nearly the same size as a large-bore tube, and Eddie inserts it easily into the opening he’d made. It works; the man starts breathing, wet and rattling, after only a few seconds. A cheer goes up in the bar around them.

A woman shoves her way through, stopping short just over Eddie’s shoulder with a gasping cry.

“Oh my God!” she says, hands going to her mouth. “I told him to stop sucking the salt off those stupid peanut shells and just eat the freaking things!”

The ambulance arrives and takes the guy and his girlfriend away, and though Eddie doesn’t recognize the paramedics, they clap him on the back when they see the boba straw and congratulate him on his quick thinking. Somewhere in the confusion, Maddie hangs up.

The crowd finally disperses, and the owner disappears into the back again, leaving Eddie and Buck on the floor by the bar. The knees of their pants are sticky with whiskey, and there’s blood beneath Eddie’s nails.

“So much for that shower,” Eddie says, reaching for his own, cleaner, knife. He flicks it open and shoves the tip of the blade under his thumbnail.

Buck grabs the bottle of whiskey and swallows the finger that’s left, then pulls Eddie in for a kiss by the front of his wrinkled shirt. Behind them, from the speakers, “Angry White Boy Polka” starts up.

“That was so hot,” Buck says when he manages to extricate his sour-tasting tongue from Eddie’s mouth. “I don’t even care if you’re the killer.”

The owner reappears, this time with a corded phone pressed to his ear. “You two, out,” he says, sweeping his hand towards the exit. “I’m closing early. Paperwork.”

Eddie pulls Buck to his feet by the elbows, and they file out into the budding night with the rest of the bar’s patrons. Some begin to walk, some get into Ubers, some sit on the sidewalk where they stand. Eddie guides Buck to an unoccupied patch of wall on the outside of the building.

“Well,” Buck says, rubbing his left knee with one hand and checking his watch on the other wrist. “We have a little more than an hour before the Purge sirens go off. Why don’t we—”

Eddie’s phone chimes loudly from his pocket, and he pulls it out to a text from Pepa.

So sorry to interrupt your date Eddito, but Chris is not feeling well. He says his lunch at school made him sick and would like to go home. I am in for the night and cannot drive him.

Eddie sighs and types out a quick On My Way. “Duty calls.”

Buck is still rubbing his knee. “Work?”

“My tía, she’s watching my kid.” He pockets his phone. “I think he got food poisoning.”

Buck frowns, not for the abrupt end to their date, but for Eddie’s sick son, a kid he hasn’t even met. That same feeling of rightness washes over him, and he can’t help but lean in and kiss him again.

“That one counted. And the one inside.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm.” Eddie gestures at the mess that makes up the two of them. “This date didn’t, though.”

Buck looks out at the people on the sidewalk and laughs. “Guess we’ll just have to schedule a do-over.”

“Guess so.”

“Tomorrow? During the day? I could use a study break.”

Eddie hisses through his teeth. “I’m helping my abuela with some housework she’s been putting off.”

Buck nods, mulling this over. There’s a mischievous glint in his eye, and Eddie is starting to get the sense that it’s just always there. “I’ll text you, then.”

“Yeah. Text me.”

“I’ll double text you.”

Eddie snorts. “Looking forward to it. Can you get home okay?”

Buck waves him off. “Maddie said she’d pick me up after her shift if I promised to put the baby to bed. My Jeep can stay where it’s parked.”

“Sounds like a good deal,” Eddie says. He pulls himself out of Buck’s orbit. "I'm gonna go take advantage of the station shower again, before the curfew.”

“Have fun,” Buck says, his grin widening with every backwards step that Eddie takes.

Eddie doesn’t answer, can’t. He just waves like a lovestruck teenager and turns around, leaving Buck leaning on the wall outside the bar.

He can feel his eyes on him all the way to the station, and it makes him feel safer than any curfew.

Despite the Halloween season being a serial killer’s whole thing, as according to Ravi, the Killer Cupid continues laying low even as Los Angeles adorns itself for the spookiest time of the year. More than one call sees Eddie and the 118 having to differentiate corn syrup from real blood, and he’s seen enough replicas of the Killer Cupid’s signature burlap sack mask to last him the rest of his life.

But among it all, there isn’t another attack, and frankly, it’s more unnerving than reassuring.

I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Like he’s planning his next move, or something.
Do you know what I mean?

Buck
or maybe they finally left la. or california. i heard it’s been a while since the pnw had a serial killer

They?

Buck
the killer could be anyone!! haven’t u ever watched scream

Not willingly. Love Halloween, hate horror movies.
More of an action guy myself.

Buck
yea? you like action?
wanna see some?

Buck
eddie??

Sorry haha. That was good.

Buck
:) so i’ve been told
anywayss
redo soon ? i’m thinking open heart surgery this time. maybe at that new italian place by my apt??
i can protect you

How about tonight? Only working a 12-hour and my kid is spending the night with friends. I think a new Call Of Duty game came out.

Buck
oh man i used to love cod. maybe i’ll go hang out with them instead lol

And leave me to go out alone? Haven’t you ever heard of safety in numbers?

Buck
i guess ur right. i don’t feel like getting harassed by a bunch of 12yos anyway. i’ll save that for after i pass my exams
when do u get off??

Geez, Buck, take me out to dinner first.

Buck
I’M TRYING!!!
:)

Slacks and button-downs, cologne, hair gel. Eddie went home before meeting up with Buck this time, and he actually took his time in getting ready. It seems like Buck did, too.

“You look good,” Eddie says, trying and failing not to stare at the sliver of tattoo peaking out from his low-cut shirt. He wipes sweat from his temple and hides it by fixing his hair.

He’s been sweating since the end of shift, hot and uncomfortable despite the decent autumn weather. After his second shirt change, Eddie figured it was just nerves.

Buck shrugs with a dopey smile. “Y-yeah, you too. I thought, you know, if we did this right, then maybe it’ll go right.”

“Sure,” Eddie agrees. They start off down the block to the restaurant. “We’re getting a little too old to go out drinking, anyway.”

“Oh, yeah. We’re grown men! We should be sitting down at a nice, very crowded Italian restaurant with wine and— buttered rolls.”

Eddie wipes more sweat from his temple, and this time, Buck glances at him but doesn’t say anything. Eddie just hopes he isn’t sweating through his shirt again. It wouldn’t be as bad as cutting into a stranger’s throat on the floor of a bar, but as far as date mishaps go, it’s definitely up there.

The evening is cool and still, quiet from the impending curfew. There’s a light breeze that draws goosebumps along their arms, a reminder that they’re well into autumn, and they find themselves pressing against each other as they walk. Once or twice Buck fingers at Eddie’s swinging hand, but he never actually takes it. Eddie will save that for after dinner, a sort of prize for a successful first date.

Well, first-slash-second.

They pass a coffee shop with a giant mural of Michael Myers painted onto the window, and Buck mimes bringing a knife down. It’s not funny, but Eddie finds himself laughing anyway. It’s worth it, for the way Buck lights up and bumps their shoulders together.

The laugh dies in Eddie’s chest, and it leaves behind a tightness, a shortness of breath. He clears his throat once, twice. Wipes more sweat from the back of his neck. He feels warm, too. Is he burning up?

“Not to, you know, sound like a douche, or anything,” Buck eventually says, “but are you okay?”

Eddie looks at Buck. Buck looks at Eddie.

He swallows around the growing lump in his throat. This is definitely more than just nerves. “Do I not seem okay?”

Buck opens his mouth, then closes it. Then, without an ounce of decorum, says, “You seem like you need a higher dose of Lexapro, man.”

Eddie screws his face up. “How did you know I’m on Lexapro?” He stops short on the sidewalk. “Oh, shit, I forgot my Lexapro.”

Buck pulls Eddie in by the elbow, beaming despite the fact that Eddie is clearly and suddenly going through SSRI withdrawal. “You say safety in numbers, I say two heads are better than one. Looks like we should stick together.”

The restaurant has finally appeared in their line of sight, but Eddie says, “Want to stick with me all the way back to my truck?”

“Absolutely. Vamos!”

Eddie stays where he is and raises his eyebrows. Buck visibly blushes.

“Me and the Duolingo owl became pretty well-acquainted before my Peru trip,” he says.

When they get to the truck, Eddie roots around in the center console for his spare meds, but when he gets his shaking hands on the half-empty blister pack, he stops.

“What’s the matter?” Buck asks from behind him, peeking over his shoulder.

Eddie looks at the white pills, then picks up the bottle that was sitting next to them. He shakes it.

“Huh,” he says. He’s definitely burning up.

“What, Eddie?”

Eddie turns, leaning the backs of his thighs against the passenger seat. He holds up the bottle of Kyzatrex.

“I think I took these—” He holds up the blister pack of Lexapro next. “Instead of these.”

Buck points at the bottle. “What’s that?”

“Testosterone. I usually do injections, but a couple months ago there was a mix-up at my pharmacy and they didn’t get my prescription in in time, so they gave me pills.”

Buck blinks. “So why did you take them now if you…do injections? It’s not even the same form of testosterone.”

Eddie tosses the bottle back into the center console. The lump in his throat brings with it a sick, swirling feeling in his gut. This isn’t withdrawal, nor is it his run-of-the-mill anxiety. It is a far more sinister third thing. An accidental overdose. “Because my house Lexapro—” He holds up the blister pack again. “Comes in a bottle just like it.”

“Your house Lexapro.”

“Yes, the Lexapro I keep in the house.” The blister pack gets tossed in next, and he smacks the console shut. He leaves a smudged handprint behind on the leather. “I must have been very confused this morning. And now I am going to get…very sick.”

“Well— Wait. Isn’t testosterone, like, a once-a-week thing?”

Eddie pats his thigh where he’d stuck himself before leaving for work. “And you’ll never guess what today is.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit.”

“Okay, well, this is fine! When I, uh, OD on my Vyvanse, I get really shaky and, like, really sick to my stomach? Like super sick, and my heart gets all weird. It kind of just feels like a bad flu, or—or COVID. You’re probably fine.”

Eddie does not feel like he has the flu. Eddie feels like he’s on the verge of a panic attack, and a migraine to boot. He’s definitely not fine. And this is only his first-slash-second date with Buck.

Hand pressed to the center of his chest like he can physically slow his heart rate, he says, “Is this a regular occurrence for you?”

Buck shrugs. “I’m on it for a reason.”

Just then, two teenagers dressed in black robes with the hoods pulled over their heads run past hollering, and Buck steps off the edge of the sidewalk and into Eddie, bracing his hands on the passenger seat at his sides. The sudden pain in Eddie’s head spikes, and he winces.

Buck watches the teenagers and huffs. “They must be going to a stupid party. Hey, you okay?”

Eddie shakes his head, eyes squeezed shut.

“Okay, uh, do you wanna go in? To—to the restaurant? Get some food and stuff in you?”

“Spaghetti bolognese is not going to make me feel better,” Eddie says steadily through the worsening shortness of breath. “Wine might, though.”

“And wine is definitely not a good idea. Should I call 9-1-1? Your face is getting really red.”

Eddie puts the back of his hand to his cheek, then presses his fingers to the side of his throat. “This is so embarrassing."

Buck lets out a startled laugh. He hasn’t moved from where he’s pressed against Eddie against the truck seat, and Eddie gets the sense he’s half-shielding, half-comforting him.

“I just told you that I’ve overdosed on my ADHD meds more than once. And I watched you stick your fingers in another guy’s neck. I think we’re past embarrassed here.”

“And yet we don’t even have a single full date under our belts.” Eddie leans his head on Buck’s collarbone, and after a beat, Buck puts his hand on the back of his neck.

“Unusual circumstances,” he says, quiet, voice lowering as he recognizes the burgeoning migraine. “You know, with the serial killer.”

Eddie hums. “Love in the time of hysteria.”

Buck hums back. “Something like that.”

Maddie is once again the one that answers her brother’s call, and she dispatches an RA unit in a fraction of the time it took for one to be sent to the bar the other night.

The ambulance that pulls up next to Eddie’s truck is emblazoned with the numbers 136, and out hops Lena Bosko and a paramedic that Eddie has seen once or twice around.

“Diaz?” Bosko says as she steps up onto the sidewalk with a red med bag.

Eddie tips his head back and sighs. Buck backs away, giving them space. “Now it’s embarrassing."

“What the hell is going on? Dispatch said you were overdosing.”

“Yeah, on my testosterone.”

“You can do that?” says her partner.

“Yeah,” Buck says, almost defensively. Bosko wrinkles her nose at him.

“Since when did you become a paramedic?” Eddie asks.

Bosko feels Eddie’s pulse for herself and frowns at what she finds. “I’m filling in for the night. I’m taking you to the ER. You’re pretty damn tachycardic, man.”

Eddie sighs again when she shoves the naloxone back into her pocket.

Buck raises his hand. “Uh, is he going to be okay?”

Bosko looks at him, eyebrow quirked. “And who are you?”

Just like when Eddie met him, Buck puffs his chest out. “I’m his date. Who are you?”

“Okay—” Eddie pushes off from the truck and lets Bosko and her partner grab onto his elbows. “Buck, I’ll text you—”

“Wait, no, I’m coming with you.”

“To the hospital?”

He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Well, yeah. Date’s not over.”

“Romantic,” Bosko says dryly.

“You have a reservation at Dino’s, not Cedars. Go take advantage of it before the curfew.”

Buck shuts Eddie’s passenger door for him and grabs his elbow out of Bosko’s grip. “I have a reservation with you. What I need to take advantage of is my time with you. You know, ‘cause of the unusual circumstances.”

Eddie’s heart flip-flops in his chest, and it has nothing to do with the palpations.

“Fine. Come on.”

Buck grins and climbs into the back of the ambulance after him.

After an EKG, urinalysis, CBC and CMP panels, and enough fluids to drown an elephant, Eddie is sent home with the simple instructions to rest.

“You know, I’m really bad at taking it easy,” he says as Buck cuts the hospital bracelet off his wrist. They took an Uber from the hospital to Eddie’s house, leaving both of their cars parked down the street from Dino’s, and that’s where they’ll stay until the curfew lifts. “I have a pretty awful track record with it.”

Buck sets the scissors on the sink and rubs Eddie’s wrist with his thumbs. His curls have started wilt, and he smells more like antiseptic than his cologne now, but, God, if he doesn’t look good under the yellow lights of Eddie’s bathroom. He would get up on his toes and kiss him for the first time all night if his mouth didn’t taste like the vomiting spell he’d had in triage.

“Well, there’s something else we have in common,” Buck says. He brings Eddie’s knuckles to his lips and Eddie has to sit on the closed toilet lid before his knees give out. Buck follows, crouching before him and putting his huge bear paws on his thighs. He’s smiling at Eddie like they actually managed to get through both dinner and dessert, like he didn’t just spend the last four hours in a hard hospital chair instead. “I’d suggest we be bad at taking it easy together, but I can’t stay.”

Screw the vomiting spell. Eddie, still slightly shaky, takes Buck by his scruffy chin and kisses him. It’s slow and warm and feels very much like a successful night.

“Are you inviting yourself over?” he says, bumping their noses together in a poor imitation of an Eskimo kiss.

With another sweet kiss, Buck pushes himself back to his feet. “No, I’m not inviting myself over.” Voice tinged with regret, he explains, “I’m subbing on my own all week at the middle school, so I have a few early days ahead of me, and I’m already pretty bad at getting enough sleep.”

Eddie nods. “And you should get an Uber back to your Jeep before they go offline.”

“Mm, yeah.”

Eddie leans against the cold toilet tank and folds his hands in his lap, looking up at Buck. There’s a flush crawling up Buck’s neck, and his fists clench once, twice, at his sides.

“Thanks,” Eddie says. “You know, for coming with me. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Sure, I did,” Buck says easily. “And besides, it’s a good bonding activity. We’re getting a lot of the hard and weird stuff out of the way.”

“Hard and weird,” Eddie echoes, mouth twisting. “Thanks anyway. For sitting around with me.”

Buck kisses him again, this time on the corner of his mouth. He lingers, a promise that he’ll be back, that there will be more kisses.

“I like spending time with you.” He backs towards the door. “You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

Eddie waves him off, and he gets déjà vu from the other night when they were leaving the bar, like they’re stuck in an endless loop of failed dates that end up feeling good anyway.

“I’m fine. We’ll try spending some time together another night.”

“Yeah,” Buck says, and Eddie can’t help but think how good he looks filling up his doorway, too. He kind of really wishes he could stay. “Third time’s the charm.”

“Third time’s the charm,” Eddie agrees, and sits on his toilet and listens as Buck leaves.

As it turns out, third time is not the charm.

Once Eddie is back on his feet after the trip to the ER, and a stressful yet gratifying week of substituting for the eighth grade Environmental Science class at Christopher’s school is under Buck’s belt, they decide to shoot for a more low stakes night out: a matinee showing of the new Fast and Furious movie.

“How are you feeling?” Buck asks the second they find their seats.

“Good,” Eddie says with a nod. “You? Those middle schoolers didn’t give you the plague?”

“Nope. Wore a mask all week just in case.”

Eddie more falls into his seat than sits. Buck settles himself in, taking off his jacket, totally unaware of what that just did to Eddie. He wore a mask. So he wouldn’t get sick. It’s the barest of minimums but, still, that creeping, swelling feeling takes up home in Eddie’s chest the way it did when he showed Buck the picture of him and Christopher.

He takes Buck’s hand over their shared armrest.

Buck shakes his hand free absently and roots around in the many pockets of his jacket that he’d dropped into the empty seat next to him, eventually coming up with a ball of tinfoil stuffed into an oversized Ziploc baggie. He looks delighted.

“What the hell is that?” Eddie asks.

Buck unzips the baggie and takes out the ball of tinfoil, dropping it into Eddie’s lap. It’s surprisingly heavy.

“It’s— Just open it. I gotta get—”

He turns back to his jacket. Eddie unwraps the tinfoil to find three warm dinner rolls and a sweating tub of Texas Roadhouse butter.

Eddie laughs. “I mean, I’m usually a candy at the movies sort of a guy…”

Buck turns back with a mini carton of wine, the kind with a screw-top lid, and shakes it. Eddie grabs it and hides it under the crinkled tinfoil.

“Buck.”

He just smiles, dopey and carefree. “What? You never got your wine.”

Eddie looks at the rolls, then peeks at the wine. He blinks.

“I would’ve snuck in a whole bottle, but last time I did that I got in trouble—”

Eddie kisses him. When he pulls back, the lights begin to dim, and he whispers into the growing dark, “You’re so interesting.”

“Thanks,” Buck says. “I think?”

“You brought me buttered rolls and wine—"

“Well, we have to butter them ourselves.”

“Into an action movie that I know you have no interest in seeing.”

“Hey, Bruce Willis was one of my childhood crushes.”

Eddie hands him a roll. “You mean Vin Diesel.”

Buck scrunches his nose. “The guy from The Pacifier?”

Eddie laughs, and a group of guys three rows down turns around to shush them.

They demolish the rolls and half of the tub of honey butter barely fifteen minutes into the movie, and it only takes Eddie another ten to finish his wine mini. Once their trash is stuffed back into the Ziploc baggie and stowed safely away in Buck’s jacket, Eddie gets up and tugs on Buck’s hand to follow.

“Where are we going?” Buck says, hushed, as they traipse down the steps to the exit.

“I have to piss, come on.”

They push out into the lit lobby, and Buck says, “I thought only girls go to the bathroom together.”

Fingers securely intertwined, Eddie pulls Buck around a corner into an abandoned stretch of hall and shoves him up against a digital poster for some horror movie re-release.

“Let’s make out.”

Buck’s eyebrows flick on his forehead, tugging his pink birthmark out of shape. There’s a smudge of butter on the corner of his mouth and Eddie pushes up on his toes to kiss it away.

“I thought— I thought you had to pee.” Even as he says it, he’s putting his big hand on the small of Eddie’s back and holding him close.

“I wanted to get you out.”

“I would’ve made out with you in there. Isn’t that what people do at the movies? I got my first handjob during Norbit—"

“Buck, oh my God.”

Buck laughs into Eddie’s mouth. “You know, I paid a whole $7 for those tickets. Each.”

Eddie grabs him by the ears to keep him from getting far. Anticipation twists his belly into pleasant shapes. “I’ll pay you back. Handsomely.”

“Handsomely?” Buck mutters. “Yeah, you are.”

He tastes like cinnamon and the fruitiness of the wine he brought Eddie, and this definitely counts. The kiss, the date, all of it.

“We never get to this part,” Eddie explains, already fast on his way to out of breath, and Buck squeezes his waist with both of his hands.

“I thought I’m the one who talks too much,” he says.

“I just chugged three glasses of wine,” Eddie says.

“Is that it?”

“Mm. And I like you. I don’t know what I ever had reservations about.”

Buck pulls back, bumping his head against the digital poster and causing a halo of color to flash like a firework behind him. His lips are swollen and a bright pink, and wet with their mingled spit. Eddie feels like a teenager looking at him, like he’s fourteen again and actually excited about dating. It’s been a while since he’s felt this way about anyone other than Shannon.

“You had reservations?” Buck says, and Eddie smacks him lightly on the chest.

They’re barely lip-to-lip again when a blood-curdling scream slips from the crack in the door to the theater next to them. Eddie startles away from Buck, but Buck holds him tighter.

“What the hell?”

“Horror movie, I think,” Buck says, looking at the poster behind him. “I hope.”

The doors fly open and out runs a girl. “HE HAS A KNIFE!” she yells as she books it down the carpeted hallway toward the lobby. A security guard appears around the corner after her, hand already on his hip. He points at Eddie and Buck.

“Stay right there!”

They put their hands up, and Eddie is about to call out their uninvolvement when the doors to the theater open again and a group of teenagers stumbles out. Held up between them is the bleeding, moaning form of a young boy.

“Help!” one of them calls towards the security guard. “He got him in the fuckin’ gut!”

Eddie freezes at the sight of the blood dotting the patterned carpet behind the group.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” Buck grabs Eddie’s hand tight in his and they hurry towards the security guard, who isn’t doing much but yelling into his walkie-talkie. Before they can get far, the doors open a third time, banging against the walls with a deafening crack, and a blur of black rushes past.

Eddie barely notices the blur crouching low as he passes them until Buck is crying out and dropping to one knee.

“Buck?!”

Buck falls back onto his ass and wraps his hands around his thigh. His face is twisted in pained confusion. “I think he got me!”

The blur, just another teenager dressed in a Spirit Halloween robe and mask, runs straight into the security guard’s potbelly and falls to the floor. His very real knife goes skittering.

The group of friends, standing behind the security guard now, let go of the kid that’s bleeding, who stumbles in place with his hands pressed to his side and says, “Is it the Cupid Killer?”

The security guard flips the teenager in the costume onto his stomach and handcuffs his arms behind his back. With his other hand he rips off the rubber ghoul’s mask.

“No, it’s fucking Mikey!” says one of the other friends. “What the hell, dude?”

“Fuck you!” Mikey spits, and promptly gets his face shoved into the dirty movie theater carpet.

The kid with the stab wound laughs incredulously and says, “Someone go tell Amber what her freaky-ass ex is up to. She’s gonna flip!”

“No way, she’s probably halfway across the parking lot by now.”

“Fuck you,” Mikey says again, this time without much venom. “She still loves me. We’ve been Snapping! We have a streak!”

Another one of the friends goes and picks up the knife, and the security guard points at her and says, “Hey, drop that! It’s evidence!”

She drops it.

“Oh, man,” Buck hisses. “What the hell is going on?”

He’s bleeding from a tear in the back of his pant leg, just above his knee. Eddie half-shoves him over so he can get a better look at it.

“I think we’re in one of your Scream movies,” he says. “You’re okay, he didn’t get your femoral or anything.”

“Are you sure?” Buck says between his teeth, leaning on his elbow. “Shit, it really hurts.”

“Yeah, Buck, I’m sure. I am a medic.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Hey!” the security guard calls, pointing at Eddie. “Come on over here and help me patch this kid up so he doesn’t bleed out before the cops get here, huh?”

Eddie looks at Buck. Buck shrugs. “Duty calls.”

Eddie sighs. “Even when I’m not on call, I’m on call.”

To add insult to injury—quite literally—the 118 is the responding station. And not only that, but Athena Grant, Bobby’s police sergeant wife, is the first officer on scene.

She comes to see them while they’re in the ambulance being tended to by Hen. Buck is on his stomach on the gurney, knuckles brushing the metal floor like he’s on a massage table, while she disinfects the shallow laceration across the back of his thigh. Eddie is sitting on the tailboard with Buck’s pants balled in his lap.

“Well,” Athena says when she saunters over. Eddie can’t help the way his spine straightens in her presence. He almost has the urge to salute, but doesn’t. He’s too tired to. “Chimney says that boy’s gonna be okay. Just a surface wound.”

“Yeah, this one too,” Hen says as she tapes a piece of gauze over Buck’s leg. She readjusts one of the strips just to make him yelp. “You don’t even need stitches, Buckaroo. How about that?”

“Wonderful,” Buck mutters into the sheets. “Can you put a blanket over me now?”

She ignores him. “So what’s the story on Ghostface Junior over there? Copycat?”

Athena sighs and slaps her hands down at her sides. In the glow of the old sodium lights, she looks just as tired. The grim press of her mouth is rigid with stress. “Not even that. Just dumbass kids being dumbass kids. KC is still off our radar.”

“Well, with Halloween being tomorrow…”

“He might not be off the radar for long, right.”

The heavy rumble of multiple large engines and the distant wail of more police sirens fills the sudden, uneasy silence. Eddie grips the bundle of Buck’s ruined pants tighter and leans over to say to Hen, “I think we’re going to have to cancel on trick-or-treating.”

She snorts.

Sergeant Grant puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie, right?”

He nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

She squeezes and takes her hand back. Some of the lines around her mouth smooth away in favor of a reassuring smile. “Bobby’s told me a lot about you. He says you’ve been a perfect fit for his firehouse.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s fitting riiight in,” Hen says, smacking Buck on the ass. He yelps again.

“Listen,” Sergeant Grant says to Eddie. “If anyone’s going to catch this bastard before he even thinks about leaving LA, it’ll be me and my guys. I can assure you that.”

“She’s serious,” Hen says. “Right, ‘Thena?”

“Deadly,” she nods. Her walkie-talkie crackles from her chest and she grabs it. “I’m gonna go talk to security. You two get home safe, okay? Curfew’s soon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eddie says again.

“Athena, please.” Athena leans over his head to call into the back of the ambulance, “Quit getting into trouble, Buckley.”

“Hey!” Buck says. “This wasn’t my fault!”

Athena lets out a fond breath, one that’s reminiscent of Bobby, takes Hen’s hand for a moment when she offers it, then leaves.

Not even a second later, Maddie takes her place, still in her Metro Dispatch polo.

“Evan!” she cries, voice warbling. Her hair looks like she was running her fingers through it the whole drive over.

“My dignity,” Buck moans.

Eddie waves. “Hi, Maddie.”

Maddie looks at him still sitting on the tailboard and frowns so deep that her whole face is pulled out of shape. Her eyebrows do a thing Eddie has only seen happen to the faces of award-winning actresses.

“Eddie, what the hell happened? The girl that called it in said there was a massacre.”

“Woah, definitely not a massacre,” Hen says, and offers a hand to help Maddie up into the ambulance. “Just a jilted high schooler with a utility knife.”

On the verge of terrified tears, Maddie helps Buck turn over on the gurney. His face is red with embarrassment.

“I would like to go home, please,” he says to the ambulance ceiling. “Too many people have seen me in my underwear. Eddie?”

Eddie stands. “Yeah, bud. I’ll drive.”

“Oh, no,” Maddie says, and snatches Buck’s pants from him. She sniffs. “You’re staying with us. Evan, you got stabbed.”

“Okay, I did not get stabbed, Mads. I got, uh—”

“Slashed,” Eddie offers, and Buck points.

“Yeah, slashed! And it wasn’t even deep. Right, Hen?”

Hen looks between the two of them, blinking open-mouthed like she’s watching a mating ritual on the Discovery Channel. “My God, they’re soulmates.”

Maddie swallows a moan of her own and tugs Buck from the ambulance. She helps him into his ripped pants right there in the parking lot. All Eddie can do is watch as she slips his jacket on for him too. She finds the Ziploc baggie bulging from one of the pockets and tosses it to Eddie without a glance, who catches, barely.

“You know,” she says, “if this was—” She flaps her hand. “Fifteen years ago, I would say that Eddie was a bad influence and that you shouldn’t see him anymore.”

Something sours in Eddie’s gut, something that feels more like déjà vu and less like the too-much wine he drank in too-little time. For a brief moment, Maddie sounds a lot like his mother. Swap Eddie’s name for Shannon’s and it really could be fifteen years ago.

Buck ducks his head, his eyebrows doing something similar to his sister’s, and waves a little like a scolded teenager.

“Sorry,” he says, and follows Maddie to her car.

Eddie watches him go, holding the Ziploc baggie to his chest. An arm finds its way across his shoulders, and Hen pulls him in.

“Did you know that when I graduated from the academy, Bobby tried to recruit me?” he says.

“To the 118?”

He looks at her, corner of his mouth twitching. “Station 6 is closer to my house.”

Chimney waves from the second rig as he peels out from the movie theater parking lot, and they catch Bobby and Athena sharing a sneaky kiss before he’s hopping into the engine. Maddie and Buck are long gone.

“I’m just wondering what it would’ve been like if we met before all this,” Eddie says eventually. “How am I supposed to try and have a relationship with the guy while also dealing with a serial killer?”

Hen makes a quiet noise. “Well, you would’ve had to deal with losing Shannon.”

He looks at her. “What?”

“If you joined the 118 instead,” she explains. “Shannon died around that time, right? And that 7.1 earthquake happened, too, and the mail bombing with that crazy kid. And then there was the tsunami that took out the Santa Monica Pier, and the ransomware thing, and the LAFD sniper attacks—”

“Okay—”

“And Jonah.”

“Jonah?”

“Greenway. The serial killer that infiltrated the department.”

Eddie’s breath catches in his throat.

Hen tightens her arm around his shoulders and moves her mouth closer to his ear. “All I’m saying is that there’s always some shit going on in this city, and with us. So what would be the difference if you met Buck a few years ago? I mean, really.”

She slams the ambulance doors shut with her free hand and steers Eddie around to the passenger side. Yet another night of him and Buck abandoning their cars somewhere. It’s almost comical.

“You know, I used to wonder the same thing about me and Karen,” Hen goes on. “What it would be like if we met sooner. But then we wouldn’t have Denny.”

Eddie climbs up into the passenger seat of the ambulance. “Are you about to tell me that everything happens for a reason? Because I never took you for a cliché, Wilson.”

Hen quirks an eyebrow and slams the door on him. A moment later she’s hopping in behind the wheel.

“And our very own captain is married to a woman that has a target on her back every other Tuesday. Hell, Chim and Maddie were attacked on their first date! They both almost died!”

“Hen!” Eddie laughs. “I get the picture.”

“I’m just trying to put things into perspective for you,” she says, and they buckle up. “And you’re wrong, Diaz. I am a cliché. If you and Buck are meant to be—”

“Then it will be?”

She shrugs. The ambulance comes to life under their feet, and they pull away from the flashing hoard of police cruisers with Athena Grant at the helm and the criss-crossed caution tape barriers surrounding the movie theater.

“You said it, not me.”

Bobby gives Eddie his next shift off, telling him to sleep off everything that happened, and Christopher gets a long weekend since his school finally realized that having all the kids together under one roof on Halloween might not be the smartest idea, despite all of the Killer Cupid’s reported attacks since kicking off his train of terror across California being on grown romantic partners.

Christopher asks to hang out with Denny on Halloween anyway, claiming that playing video games together with store-bought candy is just as good as trick-or-treating. Eddie figures his kid being in the care of a rocket scientist is just as good as his own, and drives him over.

Karen offers him a handful of Hershey’s kisses and a mug of tea once Christopher is situated, and in lieu of a greeting, says, “Well?”

Eddie doesn’t know her very well yet, despite their sons having become attached at the hip, but apparently Karen knows him perfectly.

Or maybe she’s just Hen’s wife. The eyebrow that’s inched its way halfway up her forehead is very reminiscent of his coworker’s.

“Have you talked to Buck yet?”

Eddie sips his tea and slips the chocolate into his pocket. “I did,” he says. “Last night.”

Karen clicks her tongue. “Eddie, come on. When are you going to see him again?”

He pretends to think about it, because in reality he thought about it all night, and all morning, and during the drive over here. The answer that he’s sure Karen doesn’t want to hear is that he doesn’t know. He wants to see Buck again, of course he does, but—

“I think we should take a break from the dating thing for a while,” he says, and Karen’s shoulders slump. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re— disappointed.”

“Well, I am!” Karen throws her hands up. “Didn’t Hen give you a pep talk last night after the movie theater?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a pep talk,” Eddie says. “More like a…reality check. A good one, but. Karen, he’s— he’s injured. He needs to heal. Last night was scary.”

She flaps a hand. “Buck is always getting hurt. Don’t make excuses.”

“I’m not—”

“And stop waiting for the perfect opportunity to see him! Just go.”

“What, right now?”

She shrugs, and the gleam in her eye is contagious. “Why not?”

Eddie squints at her. “I’m starting to understand that I’ve fallen in with a bunch of meddlers.”

Karen reaches into Eddie’s pocket and steals back a Hershey’s kiss for herself. “Oh, yeah. That’s why you better do something before we do.”

Eddie spends the day typing and deleting a million different messages to Buck, and his finger hovers over the FaceTime button more than once. But in the end, it’s Buck who reaches out first, calling him while Eddie is in the middle of washing his dinner dishes.

“Oh, uh, hey! Hey—” He fumbles the phone in his soapy hands, and gets it pressed to his ear just in time to hear Buck’s bright, bodied laugh. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

“Pretty sore, but I think I’m gonna live.”

“Well, that’s—” Eddie traps the phone between his ear and shoulder and wipes his hands on his pants, then shuts the sink off. “In pretty poor taste, but that’s good.”

“Yeah.” Buck’s voice is low, not like he’s trying not to disturb his baby niece, but in a way that has Eddie’s belly quivering delicately. Shivering, almost. He almost sounds sultry. “How— How are you? After last night?”

Eddie has no idea what’s happening, or what’s about to happen. He stands in the middle of the kitchen holding the phone to his ear staring at the blue paint of his oven like it’ll spell it out for him.

“Fine.” The house is empty but Eddie speaks quietly anyway, like whatever is hovering on the line between them is a decibel away from falling, like the call will drop entirely.

“Maddie took Jee to the Lee’s for dinner,” Buck says. “And I’m thinking I need someone to drive me home.”

“Your Jeep is still at the movies?”

“Yeah, but it can stay there, I’m not worried about it. I just wanna sleep in my own bed tonight.”

“It looked like a nice bed.” Eddie puts his free hand to his forehead, then puts his forehead to the fridge, knocking a photo and two magnets to the floor. “You know, when we were over there for your…kitchen fire. Your almost-kitchen fire. I liked the pattern on your—” He sighs. “Comforter.”

Buck laughs again. “Come pick me up? I’ll even let you change the dressing on my leg, field surgeon.”

Eddie laughs back. They’re good at that, laughing. It seems to be their preferred form of communication.

“Hell yeah, I’m on my way.”

He hangs up and grabs his keys, and forgets all about the half-finished dishes piled in the sink.

Buck is waiting on the front stoop when Eddie pulls up to the Han residence, and he gets up and limps down the walk with a smile splitting his face.

Eddie puts the passenger window down and calls out, “Hey. Need a ride?”

“That depends,” Buck says. “You’re not a serial killer, are you?”

“Jesus, one close call with a copycat and you’re full of all sorts of jokes.”

Buck climbs in and immediately slides back in the seat and puts his foot up on the airbag so as not to put pressure on his wound. He’s wearing shorts, the same ones he was in when Eddie first met him, and they’re just as short now as they were then. The white square of gauze that Hen had taped to the underside of his thigh the night before is stained and curling at the edges.

“Not a copycat,” he says. “But, hey. Coping mechanism.”

“Coping mechanism,” Eddie snorts. “Ready?”

Buck’s eyes are blue and sparkling, and his shorts are so short, and Eddie wouldn’t mind a million more failed dates with him.

But, really, he thinks he’s ready to skip all that.

“As I’ll ever be.”

It’s been a long damn time since Eddie’s had hands on him other than his own, but somehow Buck’s feel just as familiar, like they’ve been there all along. Like they belong to him, too.

Buck touches Eddie like he’s going to break him, fingers scaling featherlight up his sides and down his arms, and he kisses just as gently when most of their kisses before this have been hard and biting and excited.

“Buck—” Eddie breathes into his mouth. They’ve both shed most of their clothes on the stairs up to Buck’s bedroom, left now in just their socks and underwear, and Eddie really wishes Buck would touch him, really touch him.

Buck interrupts him with a nervous giggle and says, “You know, I love getting marked up with my partners, but not— Not like this.”

“What?”

“My leg.”

Eddie pulls back and looks at his leg. “Oh. You need the dressing changed, don’t you?”

Buck shakes his head. “No, it’s okay. It barely even hurts anymore.”

“Good.” Carefully, Eddie shoves Buck back onto his bed, onto the comforter that’s a completely different pattern than what he thought it was, and gets up on top of him. “You like getting marked up, huh?”

Buck visibly swallows. His hands hover an inch over the peach fuzz coating Eddie’s thighs.

Eddie clicks his tongue and settles onto his lap with a deflated sag of his bones. “Buck. Why are you so nervous? I thought this was what you were insinuating on the phone.”

“It was!” Buck clamps his hands down on Eddie’s thighs, and the sudden squeezing pressure has his muscles tightening all the way down to his toes. “It was, seriously, but— Do you think— Are we moving too fast? I don’t— I really don’t want to mess this up with you.”

“Hate to break it to you, bud, but it’s been messed up from the start.”

“Yeah, so I thought…”

“Let’s skip the dating stage and go right to bed?”

Buck slides his hands up until the tips of his fingers touch the hem of Eddie’s briefs. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Eddie leans over and puts his mouth to Buck’s jugular. Against his rabbiting pulse, he says, “So did I. It’s been a while, but I’ve always been better at sex than dating, anyway.”

“Me too. E-except we’ll still date. We’re just— Doing things backwards. For now.”

Eddie sinks his teeth into Buck’s neck once, a love-bite, testing the waters, and pulls back. He finds him flushed from his cheeks to his chest. “Desperate times, and all that,” he says.

Buck finally moves his hands from Eddie’s thighs, sliding them up the stretchmarks on his sides until they find a home over his pecs.

“God, you’re so hot,” he babbles. “I love your scars. They’re so hot.”

“Yeah? Well thanks, they cost a good chunk of my savings.”

Eddie covers Buck’s hands with his own and presses the balls of his palms into his nipples. Buck is the one to moan.

“I think scars are so hot, especially when you give them to yourself.” His eyes go wide. “I mean, like. I-I think it’s hot that you chose to do that for yourself, you know? That you—”

“Oh my God.” In a move he hasn’t done since basic training for the Army, Eddie flips them around so that Buck is the one on top. Definitely not out of breath, he says, “I love when you talk, but please stop talking.”

Buck grins and grabs a handful of Eddie’s briefs. “Gladly.”

“Holy shit.”

Eddie is vaguely aware of Buck stretching across him to rummage around in his bedside table, eventually taking his hand from between his legs and saying, “Shit. Hold on.”

He gets off the bed, noticeably hard already, and goes halfway down the stairs to where he’d abandoned his shorts. He comes back with his wallet, which he brandishes like found treasure. He pulls out a wrapped condom and tosses his wallet to the floor, then crawls back onto the bed on his knees.

Eddie takes the condom and squints at the wrinkled foil wrapper. Then he squints at Buck.

Buck takes it back, embarrassed. “It’s been a while for me too.”

Eddie settles against the pillows and shucks his briefs off. “If you get me pregnant, I’m never talking to you again.”

Buck frees the ancient condom from its ancient wrapper and holds up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Eddie makes him put those two fingers to good use.

Head on Buck’s sweaty chest, Buck’s arms heavy and pliant around him, Eddie is nearly asleep when both of their phones start to ring. Their overlapping, contrasting ringtones bounce off the brick of Buck’s loft like—

“Jesus,” Eddie groans. “It sounds like the station alarm.”

Like the station alarm.

He freezes and looks at Buck, whose eyes go wide with his own delayed realization. They scramble for their phones, almost going ass-first down the stairs where they’d abandoned them on their way up to bed.

Bobby is calling Eddie’s, and Chimney Buck’s. They put them both on speaker.

“Eddie?” Bobby says, and in response from Buck’s phone, Chimney says, “…Cap?”

There’s a pause, and the call drops from Buck’s phone. After a few shuffling moments, Chimney’s voice reappears at the other end of Eddie’s line.

“Eddie, Buck’s with you?”

Buck looks at him, eyes still wide. They’re both naked, both covered in more than just sweat, standing at the top of Buck’s stairs overlooking his open-concept loft, and Eddie is pretty sure they forgot to lock the front door behind them.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “What’s going on? Cap?”

“Karen was attacked,” Bobby says without preamble. “She’s okay, we’re on our way there now—“

“What?” Eddie’s knees quiver, and he throws a hand out and grabs ahold of the staircase railing. “Christopher’s over there.”

“What?” Chimney says. “I thought he and Denny were trick-or-treating!”

Eddie’s already moving, grabbing his clothes on his way downstairs and pulling them on one-handed. Behind him, Buck is doing the same.

“Bobby, are they okay?”

“I—” Bobby Nash, good Catholic man that he is, swears a blue streak. “Eddie, I don’t know, no one said anything about the boys. Chim and I are heading there now—“

“So are me and Buck.”

Eddie hangs up and calls Karen’s phone, then Hen’s, slipping his bare feet into his shoes by the door. Neither answer. Buck tries from his phone and gets the same result. Eddie feels like he’s going to puke.

“Hey,” Buck says, putting his hands on Eddie’s face. “It’s— it’s gonna be okay.”

Eddie lets out a breath that drags a half-swallowed noise with it. He doesn’t say anything. Buck doesn’t know shit, neither do Bobby and Chimney. Eddie doesn’t either, all Eddie knows is that he dropped his kid off with Karen, and Karen was attacked.

Buck stays dutifully silent while Eddie pushes his truck well past the speed limit, white-knuckling the bar above his head. Eddie doesn’t look at him once.

The Wilson residence is teeming with police when they pull up behind the Station 120 engine, and an ambulance sits open and empty on the front lawn. Bobby and Chimney come to a squealing stop in the 118 SUV as Eddie and Buck are half-falling from the truck.

“CHRISTOPHER!” Eddie shouts over the commotion of a new and active crime scene. A man beginning to unravel a roll of caution tape tries to hold him back, but Eddie shoves his way through to the house. “CHRISTOPHER! DENNY!"

Hen appears in the open door in her work uniform, pale and shaking. “Eddie?”

Buck, right there at Eddie’s heel, says, “Hen, you’re okay.”

“I’m— I’m fine, it’s Karen who— Why are you calling for the boys? They’re out trick-or-treating, I’ve got ‘Thena out looking for them.”

Eddie swallows a hot pulse of vomit. If his heart beats any harder in his chest it’s going to force his dinner up and out of his mouth.

Hen doesn’t know that he was serious about canceling.

“No, they— They’re not trick-or-treating, Hen, they’re here.”

The blood drains from her face. “What?”

She turns and disappears back into the house, and Eddie follows, along with Buck and Bobby and Chimney. In the living room, surrounded by police and paramedics, is Karen on a raised gurney. She’s swaddled and buckled in, half-dozing from a near-lethal cocktail of adrenaline, bloodloss, and an emergency dose of Morphine. There’s a large white swatch of gauze taped to her hairline, and a butterfly bandage is working doubletime to keep the laceration across the bridge of her nose together. Blood, more than Eddie would like to see on any of his friends, has dried in black-red rivulets down the side of her face.

“I left work early to surprise— I got in and found her—” Hen rubs her hand over her head and bends over her wife. “Karen, sweetheart, I need you to open your eyes for me.”

They open, barely. She looks awful, and the sight has Eddie’s chest swelling with both anger and fear.

“Eddie,” Karen croaks. “Chim? Wha…” She swallows, and it looks painful. “Who’s watching the station?”

“We’re offline,” Bobby assures.

“Ravi’s there,” Chimney says.

“Karen, where’s Denny and—” Buck glances at Eddie. “And Christopher?”

Karen’s face pinches, then her eyes open fully. They’re bloodshot and glassy, but wide with understanding.

“They were playing out back. Oh God, Hen—”

Hen kisses her on her browbone and she and Eddie make a break for the backyard. Having overheard their conversation, a police officer is hot on their heels with his walkie held to his mouth.

“Denny! Denny, baby, are you—”

“CHRISTOPHER!”

The backyard, at first glance, is empty. On his second wild-eyed pass, Eddie spots the red gleam of Christopher’s crutches sitting abandoned in the grass. He half-stumbles to them.

Just then, the door to the shed opens, and two faces peer out.

“Mama?” Denny says, hushed. Sitting on the ground at his feet is Christopher.

“Dad!”

Eddie and Hen break into a run, crutches forgotten, the police officer over their shoulders, the sirens, everything. They pick up their boys and cry with relief into their necks.

“Why didn’t you or Mom tell me—”

“Oh, mijo, I’m so glad—”

“We were playing cops and robbers—” Christopher starts once Eddie sets him gently on his feet. Buck is already there, crutches held out. Eddie doesn’t even think to introduce them, doesn’t stop and think about how this is the first time the guy he’s been seeing is meeting his kid as he takes the crutches.

What fucking circumstances. Par for the course, really.

Hen sets Denny down. Chimney immediately puts a hand on her shoulder. “And then we heard glass breaking inside and I was like ‘Chris, did you invite Tyler over to be the robber?’ But he was like—”

“I didn’t!” Chris says, eyes sparkling. “Dad, it was the killer.”

Bobby steps up. “Did you boys see them?”

The boys shake their heads in excited tandem. Denny says, “We looked through the window and saw him and Mom fighting.”

“Mrs. Wilson is so cool,” Christopher says, and damn his age and Eddie’s frayed nerves that are making his arms and legs feel like overcooked spaghetti, he picks his kid back up and starts for the house.

Behind him, he hears Hen tell Denny, “Baby, your Mom is hurt bad…”

Karen has been wheeled outside, leaving behind overturned furniture and glittering glass. Eddie has to step over a smudge of blood that he hadn’t noticed before.

“I’m proud of you boys for hiding,” he tells Christopher through a fear-clenched jaw. He doesn’t do a very good job at keeping his voice steady, but Christopher doesn’t seem to notice, too caught up in the excitement of it all. “But we’re going home.”

Athena is seeing Karen into the ambulance, and when she spots Eddie coming out with Christopher safe on his hip, she sags with relief.

“You don’t know how damn worried I was when I couldn’t find them in a three-block radius,” she says. “I was sure they couldn’t have gone even that far!”

“Is Mrs. Wilson going to be okay?” Christopher asks. “She punched the killer so hard. Me and Denny saw it through the window before we hid in the shed.”

Athena glances into the ambulance, hands on her hips. “Mrs. Wilson is a fighter, that’s for sure. She’s the first person to go up against KC and live.”

The taste of bile reappears in Eddie’s mouth, stronger than before, and he swallows down a gag. He grips Christopher tighter, and backs up until his heels hit the curb. An almost unshakeable urge to get in his truck and drive out of state overcomes him, maybe down to Texas, back to El Paso where there’s no serial killers or friends that can be targeted by serial killers. No Buck. No one to worry about like he’s worried about here. He’s sure Christopher would love to see his tías, anyway.

Everyone else spills from the house. Hen guides Denny into the ambulance and Chimney shuts the doors on them, promising that he’ll be right behind in the SUV. Bobby asks Athena if she could drop him back off at the station.

Buck lingers, as Buck does. He’s twisting his hands, looking pale and unsure. Eddie finds that he can barely look at him. Tonight at his loft seems so far away suddenly, or like it happened to someone else entirely.

“Um,” is all Buck says, and Eddie finds himself shaking his head so he doesn’t say more.

“Can you—”

“I’ll get an Uber.”

That’s not safe, not when the Killer Cupid is somewhere in the neighborhood, now apparently only targeting half of couples, but Eddie finds himself agreeing, nodding at the idea. Yes, Buck should get an Uber back to his loft, or to his Jeep that’s been sitting, abandoned, at the movie theater across town since last night, because they’re not two halves of a couple. They can’t be. Eddie needs to cut this off at the legs.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Buck nods, visibly chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“Yeah, me too.”

“But I—” He shifts Christopher in his arms, who’s been watching the interaction in silence. Buck glances at his kid again, and he gets it, he does, and it hurts worse than if he didn’t. “I can’t, Buck. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“It’s okay.”

“This is too close.”

“Eddie.” Buck smiles, and it wobbles at the edges. “You don’t have to explain. I’m— We’re in the same boat, and now we— We have to get into our own boats. Because it’s— it’s not safe, right?”

“Right. It’s not safe.”

“But we can meet back up when we reach the shore. You know, when the storm is over.”

Christopher looks at Eddie, then at Buck, nose wrinkled. “Huh?” he says.

The metaphor, ridiculous as it may be, makes Eddie think of the tsunami, the one that destroyed the Santa Monica Pier a few years ago. Hen had told him just last night that if he’d met Buck back then that they’d have to deal with it together, and he wishes more than anything that they were dealing with a natural disaster right now. Eddie knows natural disasters. He doesn’t know this.

“I’ll text you,” he tells Buck, who’s standing a polite distance away. “When the storm’s over.”

“Yeah, okay. Be— Stay safe. Be careful.”

“You too.”

Buck watches from the curb while Eddie puts Christopher in the truck, and watches still as they pull away from the Wilsons’. Eddie, in turn, watches him disappear in the rearview mirror, reminding himself that this isn’t forever. Athena will catch this bastard like she’d promised and Buck will be back in their lives like he never left, and they’ll move on from the dating and the sex to whatever comes next.

Because he’s pretty sure this is meant to be. And if it’s meant to be, well…

Eddie’s never been a fan of clichés.

Karen is fine. Her concussion, two fractured ribs, and six-inch knife wound down her left arm that nearly flayed her muscle from her bone heal up in about two weeks, and she’s back to normal in three. Back to work in four. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, the whole thing has been forgotten about in favor of the holiday season and all the crazy it brings.

Thanksgiving happens at the station, as does Christmas, and although Eddie has quickly come to love this new family of his, he spends both holidays with his abuela and Tía Pepa. No one questions this, and he and Christopher get double the leftovers. The Killer Cupid, thankfully, spends this time under his rock, and winter comes and goes without incident.

Buck is not mentioned once, and it’s a courtesy Eddie wasn’t expecting. Even though not much happened between the two of them, it was enough to know that it was fast turning into something more, and he guesses everyone could see that too.

The news is on constantly at the station, and Athena makes it a point to keep Eddie abreast of the situation from her end. Everyone wants the Killer Cupid caught for the safety of their neighbors, sure, but also for the clear skies. It’s the closest anyone gets to talking about what happened between him and Buck.

Eddie has always been good at waiting, but by the new year, he’s ready for the storm to be over, for the clear skies. He’s sure this is how Shannon felt when he was overseas.

Athena makes good on her promise by Valentine’s Day. On Valentine’s Day, actually. An anonymous tip to the Crime Stoppers hotline turns into a sting operation at the Griffith Observatory that sees the Killer Cupid, with his brand-new quiver of steel-reinforced arrows, taken into custody. Taylor Kelly is the one to do the unmasking, and she does it live on air backdropped by hundreds of couples that were a hairsbreadth away from being hunted for sport at LA’s most iconic date spot.

The killer, who’s had LA in a chokehold for nearly four months and California as a whole for the better part of a year, turns out to be just some guy, neither recognizable nor remarkable, and he practices his right to remain silent all the way to Athena’s police cruiser. All-in-all, it’s a pretty anticlimactic end.

Eddie has his phone in his hand before Taylor Kelly even signs off, and despite it being nearly midnight, he finds a text from Buck already waiting in his inbox. When he opens it, it’s a Spotify link to a 1930 recording of “Happy Days Are Here Again”.

A million versions of this song and you choose one that’s almost a hundred years old?

Buck
seemed fitting :) ☀

You’re funny.
Wanna know what I just realized?

Buck
what!!

I definitely could’ve been texting you all this time.
Or calling.
What was KC going to do, check the phone records?

Buck
i def thought about that but i didnt wanna say anything
hence why i didnt call or text either lol
it’s better to be safe than sorry you know

I know. Thank you.

Buck
nothing to thank me for eddie. i’m just glad we’re all safe

Well, how about we pickup where we left off? Now that happy days are here again…

Buck
ominous use of ellipses but yea i would like that a lot :) hahaha . not yet tho i have a lot going on re: school and teacher stuff. Is that okay??

More than okay.
It’s been pretty hectic at the station too.
Keep me posted? You know, over the phone?

Buck
☀

It ends up working out like a long-distance relationship, despite the fact that they share a friend group and only live about twenty minutes from each other, and Eddie knows he shouldn’t be bringing up Shannon so often (despite him only doing so in the confines of his own brain), but he’s sure this is also how Shannon had felt when he was deployed. The constant stream of communication—the texts, the FaceTime calls—makes the waiting almost unbearable. Eddie doesn’t think he’s yearned for the company of another human being since Shannon. After two weeks of good morning texts and semi-awkward phone sex, he almost wishes they weren’t talking still.

A real, in-person date finally gets circled with a heart on Eddie’s calendar for mid-March, a second attempt at a Dino’s reservation, but it all goes to shit when Christopher comes home from school on his first day back after spring break.

“Our new sub in science is so cool,” he babbles excitedly when Eddie takes his backpack and crutches from him at the door.

“Oh yeah? What happened to Mrs. Joyce?”

Christopher shrugs and starts for the kitchen, where Eddie already has the oven preheated for his after-school pizza rolls. He follows close behind, nervously wringing his hands. He catches a glimpse of his watch and realizes Buck will be here to pick him up in less than an hour.

Less than an hour and Buck will be coming to his house for the first time, where Eddie will finally be able to properly introduce him to his kid. The first time they’ll be seeing each other since October. It all feels more real than it had before.

“She’s having a baby,” Christopher says as he carefully lifts the pan onto the middle rack. Eddie vaguely recalls reading about this in a school email sometime before break. “I don’t think she’s coming back until next year, though.”

“Well, if I was having a baby this late in the school year, I wouldn’t want to come back either,” Eddie says. “I don’t think senioritis and sleep deprivation are a good combo.”

Christopher wrinkles his nose. “I’m only in sixth grade.”

“Senioritis transcends grades, mijo.”

“Okay… Anyway, the sub is cool. Part of his ice breaker thing was what our parents do for work and I got to talk about Dad a bunch.”

Eddie’s stomach clenches, and he can’t help but reach out and grab a handful of his kid’s curls. Easter is just around the corner, which means so is the anniversary of Shannon’s accident, which means he’s on Christopher’s mind. And here Eddie is, waiting to be picked up for a date.

“Pepa should be here soon,” he broaches, and Christopher just shrugs again, as easy-going as ever.

“Okay,” he says, slipping past Eddie to get his homework from his backpack. “We’ll probably be watching American Idol when you get back.”

Eddie snorts, and he helps Christopher with his homework until Pepa gets there, breezing through the house like a gust of colorful, fretting wind. She tries and fails to get a lock of his hair to stay in place, and untucks his dress shirt just so she can tuck it in herself.

“Look at you,” she says with a proud smile, alternately patting and pinching his cheeks like he’s Christopher’s age again. “So handsome. You’re glowing!”

Eddie bats her hands away. “Okay, alright.”

“I can’t wait to meet this gentleman of yours,” she goes on, whirling around to start putting the dishes away that have only been sitting in the drain since that morning. “What did you say his name was again?”

“Buck— Uh, Evan, actually. Evan Buckley. Buck’s just a nickname.”

Pepa glances at him over her shoulder, eyebrows raised. “That’s what you said about Eddie, too. Just a nickname, Tía, you don’t actually have to call me that.”

Eddie feels his cheeks heat, and it has nothing to do with Pepa’s pinching.

She turns back to the dishes. “You are Eddie, and Buck is Buck. Names are important. I haven’t been Josephina since my school days. You wouldn’t call me Tía Josephina, would you?”

“No, Pepa, I wouldn’t.”

“And you wouldn’t call your friend Chimney Howard, even though I think Chimney is a silly thing to go by.”

Eddie laughs and kisses her on the temple. “Alright, I get it. Thank you.”

She whacks him across the stomach with a towel. “No need to thank me. Just go have a good night with Buck so you can tell me and Christopher all about it.”

He glances at his watch again. “Well, he should be here in a few, so. I’m gonna get my shoes on.”

“Wear the nice ones! Not the ones that are scuffed!” she calls behind him.

Buck should be there by the time Eddie comes back out from the bedroom, but there’s no Jeep in the drive, and when he checks his phone, no waiting texts either.

He sits on the couch and stares at the television while Christopher plays some multiplayer shooter with his headphones on. Pepa starts on dinner, raiding Eddie’s cabinets and humming to herself, unaware that everything is beginning to unravel.

Eddie is humming too, his nervous system, that is, because it’s now twenty minutes past the time they agreed on, and if Buck is any later, they’re going to miss their reservation. Again.

His apartment almost caught fire again, or he got a flat tire, or Dino’s caught fire and he’s scrambling to find another restaurant for them last-minute. All things they can deal with. All very reasonable explanations for Buck to be twenty minutes late.

At thirty past, though, Eddie starts spiraling.

“Should I call him?”

“You haven’t already?” Pepa says, surprised. “I would have been calling him when he was only five minutes late.”

Eddie huffs. “No, that’s— No. I’m gonna call him now.”

It goes to voicemail. And the proceeding texts go unanswered.

There’s no more serial killer terrorizing their city that could have gotten to him, so the next logical explanation is that Buck flaked. Because despite the numerous failed dates under their belts, there was always communication.

“Should I go to his house? Just to make sure he’s okay?”

Pepa eyes him warily. She’s beginning to believe that Buck flaked too, and is quickly starting to dislike this man she never met.

“If you want to make sure he’s okay, I would call a friend. Didn’t you say he has a sister?”

Maddie, right. If anyone will know what Buck is up to and if he’s okay, it would be her.

She picks up on the second ring, but doesn’t speak right away.

“Maddie?” Eddie says.

“I’m afraid to ask.” She’s long since gotten over the whole Buck-getting-slashed-while-on-a-date-with-Eddie thing, but he doesn’t blame the hesitancy. He’s sure she also knows that they were supposed to go out tonight. What could possibly have gone wrong now? she doesn’t say.

“Have you heard from Buck?”

Another pause, this one more pregnant than the last.

“Not since lunch… Why?”

At this, Eddie falters. He catches Pepa’s eye and stammers, “Well, I— Uh, I think he stood me up?”

“What? What do you mean, he stood you up?”

“I mean we had a date tonight and he’s—” He looks at his watch again. “Thirty-eight minutes late. And he’s not answering me.”

“Hold on.” Maddie hangs up. Eddie and Pepa stand in the kitchen with bated breath. Finally, she calls back.

“Well?”

“He said something came up.” She makes a sad little noise into the phone. “I’m sorry, Eddie, he’s been so stressed lately with school stuff. Maybe try texting him in the morning?”

Eddie shuts his eyes briefly, half-turning from Pepa. He doesn’t mention how not-stressed Buck has seemed lately, how excited he’s been for this date, how he’s told Eddie that everything has been working out great with his teaching thing.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks for checking in with him.”

“Of course. KC might have been caught, but that doesn’t mean we stop worrying about each other.”

“Right. Thanks again.”

Another sad noise. Maddie Han, the epitome of empathy. “It’ll work out, Eddie. He really likes you.”

With that, he hangs up.

Buck likes Eddie so much that he left him to get all dressed up with nowhere to go.

“Oh, Eddito,” Pepa sighs. “Go put something comfortable on. We’ll watch American Idol together.”

Eddie does as he’s told, and it’s as he’s slipping off his shoes—the scuffed ones, as it turns out, since he was too nervously excited to realize—that he starts to wonder if maybe Hen was wrong after all.

Buck never calls Eddie back. No explanation, no apology, nothing. Every text Eddie sends in the following days goes similarly unanswered.

Maddie reassures him that Buck is fine, just busy. Hen reports the same. Even Bobby lets Eddie know that Buck seems normal to him.

Normal, except for the fact that he’s ignoring Eddie, and Eddie can’t figure out why. He seems to be the only one that Buck is too busy to talk to.

Chimney tries telling him that this is just what Buck does sometimes, when he’s busy, when he’s overwhelmed. He self-isolates. Shitty, but it’s true, and Eddie just needs to give him time. He’ll come back around when he’s ready.

Time. Eddie feels like he’s given him enough time, what with the four months they just spent apart, but who is he to say? These people know Buck better than he does—considering the two of them were only seeing each other for a few weeks before Karen was attacked, and only a few more weeks after the fact. Maybe Eddie never really knew him at all.

March quickly turns into April, and yet another holiday goes by spent with Pepa and his Abuela instead of at the firehouse. Double the leftovers, and still no word from Buck. Eddie is once again assured that he seems normal. Just busy. Call him paranoid, call him an asshole, but Eddie is having a hard time believing this. Who self-isolates from just one person, unless that person did something totally unforgivable? And Eddie is pretty sure he never did anything.

By May, he stops trying. He accepts the radio silence, and everyone goes back to not bringing Buck up around Eddie.

The Killer Cupid may as well have never been caught. A terrible thought, he knows, but it’s like nothing has changed, and yet somehow everything has.

Eddie eventually starts seeing someone from Dispatch, a guy with a broad chest and curly blond hair that doesn’t mind letting Eddie use him to get his mind off the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve. Maddie’s best friend Josh sets them up, and Eddie says nothing about how much he looks like her brother.

Brian is nice, but with their hours, the best they can do is casual. Which is totally fine with Eddie. Maybe he needs casual. Maybe that’s what went wrong with Buck. Maybe they were moving too fast after all.

Summer is in full swing when Eddie sees him again. End of May, steady sun, the beginning trickles of tourist season. There’s a blanket of anxiety over the city different from that of the rest of the year before the Killer Cupid was caught, students waiting with bated breath for school to let out, nine-to-fivers for their paid vacations, and first and second responders gearing up for the wave of stupidity that the mild weather seems to always bring.

The first wave sees the 118 back at Buck’s loft. Well, the complex that houses Buck’s loft, but it’s close enough that Eddie’s own personal anxiety has him riddled with nausea from the moment he recognizes the address over the radio.

Apartment fire. Not bad, but bad enough to cause a building-wide evacuation. That’s all they were given. Everyone very pointedly does not look at Eddie on the ride over.

The fire is a kitchen fire, a real one this time, not just some smoke and a tripped alarm, but it’s on the opposite side of the building from where Eddie remembers Buck’s loft being. Far enough away that there should be no reason for them to run into him.

Naturally, Buck is the first person Eddie sees when he jumps down from the engine.

The eye contact is brief but wild-eyed, like a deer in headlights, until Buck is waving them over and it’s broken. Eddie stares at him a second longer before his stomach is jumping into his throat and he’s turning and vomiting onto the back tire of the engine.

Ravi passes him, cringing. “Geez, man,” he says.

Bobby’s gloved hand lands heavily on Eddie’s shoulder as he’s spitting the sour taste from his mouth.

“Why don’t you stay back?” he offers. “We don’t need all hands for this one.”

Eddie swallows around the burning in his throat with a nod. He doesn’t object.

He sits in the back of the engine while his team does their job without him, phone in hand, scrolling through his and Buck’s message thread. It went from double- and triple-texting to silence, then back to normal when Athena caught the Killer Cupid, and now silence again. He flicks through his pathetic one-sided conversation after Buck stood him up with a churning stomach. Everything is right here in the palm of his hand, and yet Eddie still can’t figure out what went wrong.

“If there’s one thing you should know about Buck, it’s that he’s avoidant as all hell.”

Hen drops herself into the seat across from Eddie, smelling like smoke and sweat. Soot is smudged down her cheekbone. Eddie pockets his phone.

“I thought he was just busy.”

He doesn’t mean to sound bitter, but he knows he does. Hen purses her lips, then she says, “Second thing you should know about Buck: He’s a chronic overthinker. Even worse than you.”

Eddie leans back in his seat, stretching his legs as far as they can go, which isn’t far. His stomach clenches once, dangerously so, but nothing comes of it.

“So I did do something,” he says.

Hen shrugs. “He’s definitely busy, the teaching thing is a big adjustment, but he should’ve come around by now. I can’t seem to get anything out of him, though.”

Eddie frowns. “He started teaching?”

Hen frowns back. “Your kid didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That Buck is Denny and Chris’s science teacher since Mrs. Joyce went on maternity leave. You didn’t know that?”

Eddie grabs his stomach through his layers of uniform and moans as a thought suddenly comes to him. “Jesus, Hen, do you think it’s Chris? Do you think he hates my kid and that’s why he ghosted me? I know Chris likes to talk in class, but—”

Hen stomps on his foot. Eddie barely feels it through his boot, but it shuts him up.

“I have dealt with enough stupidity today with those kids upstairs who thought making a molotov cocktail in their bedroom was a good idea.”

“What? That’s how the fire started?”

“They wanted to throw it out the window to see if it would land in the pool.”

“That’s stupid.”

“You might be stupider.”

“Hen.”

“Eddie.” She rolls her eyes. “Chris is not the reason Buck ghosted you. He loves every child equally.”

“Then what could have possibly happened?” he says. “Why are you telling me all this?”

They see the rest of the 118 returning to the engine, and Hen gets up to join Chimney in the ambulance.

“Because Buck is planning on going down to Peru for the summer, and I don’t think either of you can handle any more time apart.”

Ravi sits in the seat that Hen just vacated. “The guilt is eating away at you, man. You kind of look like shit.”

He reaches out and puts the back of his gloved hand to Eddie’s forehead. Eddie slaps him away. “I have no idea what I did, though!”

“You must’ve done something. Buck loves to hold a grudge.”

Hen holds up three fingers. “Three things you should know about Buck.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing? No— No dances, no fundraisers, parent-teacher conferences?”

Christopher stares at Eddie like he’s grown a second head. “Dad, I’m in middle school now. There are no parent-teacher nights.”

Eddie sits down at the dining table and puts his head in his hands. “How else am I supposed to force him to talk to me before he leaves?”

“You should’ve talked to him at that fire at his house.”

“And you should’ve told me that Buck was your teacher.”

“I forgot what he looked like! Sorry for almost dying.”

Eddie reaches out and squeezes Christopher’s wrist. “I forgive you.”

Christopher eats his dinner one-handed while Eddie weighs his other to the table. With a full mouth, he says, “Well, there is the field trip.”

Eddie looks at him. “What field trip?”

“The one to the aquarium. You signed the permission slip like a week ago. We’re going to that place under the pier.”

“You’re going on a field trip with two weeks left of school?”

Christopher shrugs. “Buck’s a cool teacher.”

So cool, in fact, that he apparently lets any of his kids’ parents tag along as chaperones without checking who.

The aquarium is only open on weekends, and Eddie hasn’t gotten a weekend off in months, but Bobby gives him that Saturday anyway. Because he agrees with Ravi; Eddie looks like shit.

Feels like shit, too, but he’s determined to fix whatever went wrong between them before Buck goes off to Peru for the summer. Eddie hates clichés, and he does not feel like chasing the guy through the airport. His extent of big romantic gestures is cornering him while the kids are distracted with the touch tanks.

“How did you manage to put this together?” is how he breaks the ice.

Buck, who somehow hasn’t noticed Eddie the entire hour-and-a-half that they’ve been here in the small aquarium, nor when they were getting lunch on the pier beforehand, looks at Eddie the way he had at the apartment fire. Wild-eyed, mouth open slightly. Caught.

“Eddie,” he breathes. “What— Uh. What are you doing here?”

Eddie nods his head to where Christopher and Denny are splashing water at each other. “My son is one of your students. Did you know that?”

Buck looks suddenly guilty. He clears his throat, shifting from foot to foot. “Uh, yeah. I did.”

Eddie hums. He’s queasy again, suddenly, has been off and on for days now, and he really hopes he doesn’t puke. He’s done enough of that in front of Buck to last a lifetime.

“And your first day teaching him was the day we were supposed to have dinner. Interesting coincidence.”

The guilt leaves as quick as it settled in, and Buck huffs. His chest inches outward, and Eddie swallows the urge to tell him to stand down. It’s just him. “Coincidence, right. Yeah.”

Eddie squints at the side of his face through the dim lighting. “Did Christopher do something to piss you off, man? He’s twelve. Whatever it was—”

“Chris is great,” Buck interrupts, loud enough that the kid in question looks over at them with his eyebrow quirked. When he sees that Eddie and Buck are finally talking, he nudges Denny and the two of them move away to another tank.

“Chris is great,” Buck goes on, quieter. “He’s one of my favorite students. He’s smart, and funny, and nice to his classmates. He hasn’t done anything except talk about how much he loves his parents.”

That feels like it’s it, the reason for everything, but it doesn’t compute in Eddie’s brain. He continues to stare.

“What?”

Another huff. Buck half-turns and hisses, “Why didn’t you tell me you were married?”

Eddie’s stomach drops in one fell swoop, and then it shoots up his throat like a pinball, and suddenly his feet are propelling him towards the nearest bathroom.

He ends up on his knees in the women’s room, and heaves everything he’s eaten for what seems like the last month into the toilet. A second later, the door opens slowly and Buck is squeezing into the stall behind him. He puts a hand on Eddie’s back, rubbing the way he had all those months ago when their first-slash-second date was spent in the emergency room. The date that was supposed to be at Dino’s, funnily enough. Maybe the restaurant is haunted.

“Uh, this is the women’s room,” Buck says. “I—I know the signs are confusing. Octopi and squid aren’t—”

Eddie reaches up and flushes the toilet, effectively cutting him off. He gags and spits into the swirling water, and says with his head still in the bowl, “I’m not married, you idiot. I’m widowed.”

Buck’s hand leaves his back as if Eddie’s skin erupted into flames. He makes a distressed noise. Eddie would turn around to look at him if he didn’t think any sudden movements would set his stomach off again.

“What? I— Don’t firefighters cheat on their spouses?”

Hell of a thing to say when someone just told you their spouse was dead. Screw it. Eddie sits with his back against the wall and wrinkles his nose up at him. “That’s a myth,” he says, flat.

Buck’s face turns fire engine red. “I misunderstood.”

“And you didn’t think to corroborate it with anyone?”

“Well, no. I— Eddie, you know I’m—”

“Avoidant?” Eddie says. “An overthinker? You hold grudges and self-isolate?”

Buck blinks. The red in his face persists. Eddie would feel bad if he didn’t already feel so bad.

He sighs, shutting his eyes briefly. “You could’ve talked to me, Buck. Instead of, you know, ghosting me like we’re two twenty-somethings in a situationship and not grown men.”

“You could’ve talked to me too,” Buck says defensively.

“You ignored all of my calls and texts. For months.”

“You could’ve come to my loft! Or— done something!”

“I am doing something!” Eddie’s voice rings off the tile of the bathroom floors. “I’m here! Now! After giving you space. I thought that’s what you needed.”

Buck drops into a crouch with his face in his hands. “I’m so stupid. Oh my God, Eddie, I’m—”

Eddie turns and vomits again.

“Sorry,” he says, sniffing.

“Don’t be sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Not about that, about throwing up.”

“Oh.” Buck’s mouth moves like his brain is sifting through a dozen different responses and can’t seem to settle on one. “Are you sick?”

“It’s just stress. You were stressing me out.”

“Oh,” Buck says again. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

The door to the bathroom inches open and Buck stands. The destroyed cartilage in his bad knee crunches disgustingly close to Eddie’s face, and he swallows another hot pulse of vomit that threatens to breach his esophagus.

“Occupied!” Buck says, holding the door shut.

“Mr. Buck?” a girl’s voice says on the other side. “We’re ready to move on from the touch tanks. Also, I kind of have to pee.”

“Go get Dylan’s mom to bring you guys to the microscope safari, she used to volunteer here. And I give you permission to use the boys’ room.”

The girl makes a sound similar to eugh, but doesn’t try to come in again.

Buck turns back to Eddie. He looks frazzled, curls jutting from his head in erratic shapes despite not having touched them, like his hair can tell his nervous system is out of whack. He’s clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides, unsure, unmoored. Out of whack.

Eddie shouldn’t forgive him so easily, but he really wants Buck to come to him, to rub his back some more, to kiss him despite the vomit. He wants to pick things up where they left them off. How the hell did they even get here?

“Are you really going to Peru?” he says, and Buck does that fish-mouth thing again.

“Well, I was. I just— I thought you were married,” he says with a pathetic shrug. Eddie opens his mouth, but Buck beats him to it. “You’re not, I know. I know that now.”

“I am seeing someone, though.” Eddie rolls his head against the cool wall. He thinks there’s a mural of a shark behind him, but he’s not sure. “Brian. He works with Maddie.”

“So… Why are you here?”

He shrugs. “It’s not serious. But you… That was serious. What we had going, that was real for me.”

“It was for me too,” Buck says, quiet. “Eddie, I really am sorry. I was just— I think I got scared. And fear makes me stupid.”

“Scared of what, Buck? It was just a date. We had about a million of those already.”

“Yeah, and they all went wrong.” He begins to unravel again. “I started spiraling and thinking, well, if all of our dates go wrong, then maybe a relationship will too, so I just— I wanted to cut it off before that could happen, and I used the fact that I thought you were married as the excuse.” He slaps his hands down on his thighs with an embarrassed laugh. “See? Overthinker.”

“You don’t know if you don’t try,” Eddie says. He flushes the toilet again and pushes to his feet. “A very wise woman once told me that there’s always some shit going on.”

Buck lets out another laugh, this one surprised. “That’s pretty true.”

He washes his hands, rinses his mouth, and when Eddie turns to finally face Buck head-on, he finds him holding out a tin of Altoids like a peace offering.

“Was never so aware of my breath until I was surrounded by a bunch of opinionated tweens all day,” Buck says with a sheepish grin.

Eddie plucks two mints from the tin and pops them in his mouth. “I think,” he starts, shifting the mints around with his tongue to get rid of the taste of vomit, “that we’re capable of dealing with a lot more than we think. What’s some relationship trouble when we survived a serial killer?”

“Well, we didn’t really survive a serial killer,” Buck says. “Karen survived a serial killer. We just…dealt with him lurking in the background.”

“And now he’s no longer lurking, so we should be able to date without worrying about—” Eddie waves a hand. “Outside forces.”

“What about Brian?”

Eddie wants to smack that quirked eyebrow right off his face.

“I’m pretty sure Brian has been seeing a different firefighter on the side. Which is fine, because it’s just been casual between us. I haven’t even slept with him yet.”

Eddie has no idea why he says this. Maybe he vomited his brains up alongside his lunch. Or maybe he just forgot how stupid Buck makes him. They’re both pretty stupid, it seems.

“Well that’s— that’s good.”

“Is it?”

Buck pops his own mint into his mouth and returns the tin to his pocket. “I haven’t slept with anyone either. I’ve been too busy.”

Eddie hums. “Glad we’re on the same page. Just—“ He looks at every inch of Buck’s face, keeping his eyes on him long enough to ensure he has his full attention. He does. “Your shortcomings are not my responsibility, Buck. It’s not my fault that you misunderstood something you heard.”

Buck nods, serious. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ghosted you. You had every right to cut things off when Karen was, uh, attacked, but— but I didn’t.”

“Well, you did,” Eddie points out. “But I at least deserved an explanation.”

“Just like you gave me one.”

Eddie grabs his shoulder and squeezes. He feels lighter than he has in months, despite the ever-present ball sitting heavy in his gut. “See? Two grown men.”

Buck grabs Eddie’s hand and moves it up until it’s cradling the side of his face. His beard is starting to grow out, and the scruff feels good against Eddie’s sweating palm.

“Will you let me make it up to you?”

Eddie reaches up and brushes his thumb along the petal-soft skin of his birthmark. Buck melts into it, preening like a cat being pet. “Before or after your trip to Peru?”

Buck’s eyes brighten. “Come with me! Don’t— Don’t you have some vacation time saved up? I remember you telling me—”

“Sure.”

He falters, still smiling. “Sure?”

Eddie lifts a shoulder. “Yeah, why not? I was saving my vacation for an emergency, but…”

“This is an emergency,” Buck says, and Eddie laughs.

“Yeah, I guess it is. Maybe we need to get out of here. Out of California. No outside forces, just me, you, the sun, and the sand.”

“Which we famously can’t get here in California.”

“Right. And Chris, if that’s okay.”

The smile brightens, if that’s even possible. “More than okay. That kid is great.”

“You’re telling me,” Eddie says. “I birthed him.”

“You did a great job at birthing him.”

That’s maybe not the most romantic thing to say before you kiss someone that you’ve been yearning to kiss going on nine months now, but they’re far from a romcom, so Eddie accepts the kiss that Buck presses into his mouth.

“When do you leave?”

“Uh, the tenth. Last day of school. I kind of wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.”

Eddie nods, thinking. “That should be enough notice for Bobby. Besides, he’d probably let me go if I told him we were leaving tomorrow.”

There’s an open-handed pound on the door, and a familiar voice calls out, “Dad, come on.”

“Yeah, come on, Mr. Diaz,” says Denny. “You and Buck have been in there making out for, like, ever.”

Buck goes red again, and Eddie says, “You let your students call you Buck?”

“Okay, to be fair, I’m practically Denny’s uncle—”

“Okay, so am I—”

“Yeah, well, cool teachers let their kids call them whatever they want.”

“I’m surprised they’re not calling you something worse.”

“Why would they? I’m a cool teacher.”

Eddie puts both of his hands on Buck’s face, thumbs rubbing under his eyes. “I’ve missed you, Mr. Cool Teacher.”

“Yeah,” Buck says, grabbing Eddie’s wrists loosely. “Me too. I’m sorry again. Like, really sorry.”

He kisses him. “You can show me how sorry you are this summer.”

“Mm. It’s a date.”

“Dad!” Christopher says again from the other side of the bathroom door. “Come on! Lexie needs to pee!”

“Eddie, why don’t you just go home?”

“I can make it.”

“You look like a Victorian maiden on her fainting chair.”

Eddie lifts his arm from over his eyes to find Hen and Chimney standing over him with similar expressions. The expression says If you die in the station, Bobby won’t let you be pronounced dead until you’re at the hospital. Like Disney World.

“There’s—” He looks at his watch. “Two hours left in the shift. I can make it.”

“Yeah, two hours until you need to pick Chris up from school, and Buck, and then cook dinner, and get to the airport—” Hen huffs. “Go home, so you can relax for a while, at least.”

“I’m relaxing here.”

That same expression, except this time Eddie can clearly see the names they’re calling him in their head.

He flicks his hand at them. “Shoo. Stop para-medically assessing me. I’m fine.”

Chimney stops chomping on his gum to look down his nose at him. “You’ve spent the last two? three? weeks puking your guts out—”

“I haven’t puked in days!”

“And now you have back pain.”

“Lower back pain,” Hen points out.

“Exactly. Sounds like it’s something with your kidneys.”

“It’s nothing with my kidneys,” Eddie says. “It’s fluctuating hormones and a strained muscle. A summer in South America with my kid and my— my Buck, will fix me.”

“You definitely shouldn’t be flying like this,” Hen says.

Chimney nods. “Yeah, man. Altitude is a killer.”

Eddie pulls himself up. The deep, radiating pain at the base of his spine that decided to crop up out of nowhere before the start of shift flares, and he winces. The hot water bottle he’s been sitting on for the last hour has done nothing but make him sweat in the June heat. “Fine. Paramedic me, then.”

They glance at each other, and start talking at once.

“Well, the nausea is concerning—”

“You’ve been pretty fatigued lately—”

“Any digestive changes? Blood in your urine?”

“Headache? Fever?”

“Swelling?”

“You've definitely put on some weight.”

Eddie looks at Chimney sharply. “What?”

“What?” he shrugs. “Just an observation.”

Eddie looks down at himself. He’s noticed that his work slacks haven’t been fitting as well lately, but…

He tugs his shirt away from his stomach. “I’m in a stable relationship. Sue me.”

Hen is unconvinced. “I wouldn’t call what you and Buck have stable,” she says. “You pick each other up from work and eat dinner together sometimes. You haven’t even gone out again!”

What Eddie doesn’t tell them is that Buck has been paranoid since they reconnected at the aquarium, that he’s been so afraid of jinxing things that, yes, they haven’t been out on any more dates, nor have they slept together again. They share meals and car rides and have simply been existing in each other’s orbit, and it’s fine! Eddie is fine with this. He’s just happy that they’ve worked things out. And besides, Buck promised to make it up to him in Peru.

He gets up from the couch, hand supporting his lower back.

“Okay, figure it out amongst yourselves. I’ll be in the bunk room when you have a diagnosis.”

He’s halfway across the loft when Bobby calls out from the kitchen, “Go home, Diaz. I don’t want you out in the field like this.”

Eddie says over his shoulder, “Maybe the next call will be here, then, Cap.”

Two short blares of a horn echo from down in the bay, stopping him in his tracks, and everyone hurries over to the glass barrier with confused glances. Down below, a car has squeezed its way into the station between the engines. They watch as the driver-side door opens and a woman pokes her head out.

“Uh, can someone help me?”

Hen turns her confused glance onto Eddie. “Lottery numbers next,” she says.

The woman is sitting on the edge of the car seat when they reach her, hands braced on her knees and sandaled feet planted firmly on the cement floor. Eddie is the first one to notice that she’s pregnant. Like, very pregnant.

“Ma’am,” he says, crouching before her. He tucks her hair behind her ears to get a look at her face. She’s flushed and sweating, and Eddie knows it has nothing to do with the heat. “Can you tell us what’s going on?”

She lets out a huff of a laugh. “I’m in labor. Active labor. You guys were closer than the hospital.”

“O-okay,” Hen says from behind Eddie. She squeezes her way through and together they help the woman to her feet.

Fluid trickles from beneath her long skirt onto the floor and she huffs again. “Sorry. And sorry for showing up like this.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Bobby says from his observational distance away.

“Yeah,” Chimney says, already heading for the ambulance. “Open-door policy.”

“Can you tell us what you were doing when you went into labor?” Eddie asks as they help her shuffle to the ambulance.

“I was on my way to pick up my kid from school. My husband was supposed to get him, but he got stuck at work, and then I got stuck in traffic, and then my water broke. Before any contractions.” She groans. “We just got new upholstery, too.”

“LA traffic is no joke,” Eddie muses. They get her into the ambulance and up onto the gurney. “Especially when you add the school lines into the mix.”

“Okay, well, water breaking doesn’t necessarily mean active labor,” Hen says. “So let’s all take a breath.”

“Oh no,” the woman shakes her head. “This is my fifth kid, I know how it goes by now. We had to move closer to the hospital because of how quick my labors are.”

Chimney whistles. “Fifth.”

Eddie and Hen share a look, then together they peek under the woman’s skirt.

“Okay!” Hen says, pulling back. “You’re getting the lights-and-siren treatment, honey.”

The woman, no doubt a professional at this five kids in, scoots herself back onto the gurney and relaxes with her hands on her belly. “I should invest in some for the car. Obviously the hospital still isn’t close enough.”

“Definitely not,” Eddie agrees, pulling off his gloves with a snap.

“I’m just glad it’s not back labor,” she goes on, rambling. “I had back labor with my last baby and it was the pits. This is nothing.”

He rubs at his own back. “I didn’t have back labor with mine, but it sure feels like it now."

Hen and Chimney flick their eyebrows at each other. Eddie chooses to ignore this.

Buck’s poorly-timed jokes must be rubbing off on him.

The woman is taken to the hospital by Hen and Chimney, Ravi is tasked with cleaning and moving her car as a courtesy, and Bobby goes up to his office to get in touch with Athena in the hopes that she can spring the husband from work and give him a police escort so he doesn’t miss the birth of his fifth child.

Eddie goes to take a nap, and hopes that by the time he wakes up the pain in his back will be gone. He really doesn’t feel like spending eight hours on a plane like this.

The pain is the first thing he notices when he wakes up, and he groans before he’s fully conscious.

“You good, man?”

Ravi is folding up a blanket that he’d brought from home, and he’s looking at Eddie with furrowed brows.

Instead of answering, Eddie looks at his watch. Shift is over, and so is school. He groans again.

“You didn’t OD on your T again, did you?”

Eddie rolls himself off his bunk. The pain spikes into his tailbone when he’s on his feet, and he throws a hand out to steady himself against the wall before his legs do something stupid and give out entirely.

“How do you know about that?” he grunts.

Ravi continues folding his blanket. “Bosko took me to Pride last weekend. She loves to gossip.”

“Fucking Bosko.”

“Who’s fucking Bosko?” Hen appears in the door to the bunk room, dressed in her civvies and ready to leave.

“Donato, I think.”

“Oh my God.” Eddie shoves his feet into his untied boots. “Our flight leaves in three hours. Goodbye.”

“Bye, Eddie! Enjoy South America!” Ravi calls as he shoves his way out to the loft.

Hen follows, because of course she does. Her hand jabs at his side and he flinches.

“Hen— Come on, it’s not my kidneys, quit it.”

“So, what is it?” she presses, trailing him downstairs. “You’re walking like a cowboy.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. If you don’t have a diagnosis, then stop talking about it.”

She leans up against the lockers while Eddie retrieves his things. “You’re cranky.”

“My back hurts. I have a right to be cranky.”

“Could be an ovarian cyst,” she points out. “I had one of those and it burst when I was flying to Florida.”

Eddie grabs his duffle bag and slams his locker shut. “It’s not a cyst.”

“Hm. Aortic aneurysm, then. Could also burst on a plane.”

“Hen.” Eddie stops. “Are you trying to get me to stay home?”

Her gaze is as unwavering as ever. “I’m worried about you, Eddie. I’ve been worried about you since the nausea thing started. If you’re sick, you shouldn’t be going on vacation.”

He swipes his hand over his eyes. His cat nap did nothing for his energy levels, and the prospect of rushing home, rushing through dinner, then rushing to the airport to sit in a cramped airplane seat doesn’t exactly sound thrilling at the moment, but—

“I need this. Okay? Me and Buck need this after the year we’ve had.” He starts for the parking lot. “I’m not sick!”

“Oh no, Eddie, you’re not sick, are you?”

Missy, who’s been a school secretary since before California became a state, Eddie swears, puts a hand to his forehead with a concerned frown. He laughs lightly and backs away from her touch.

“I’m fine, just a long shift. Do you know where Buck is? Uh, Mr. Buckley?”

The concern falls from her face and she says with a wide smile, “Oh, he has been talking non-stop about his trip. He’s so excited!”

He chuckles. “Don’t worry, I’ll post plenty of Facebook pictures for you.”

She pats him on the chest and shuts the office lights off as they go out. “Please do. And he’s still packing up his classroom.”

“Thanks,” he says, starting off down the hall to the Science wing. “I’ll see you next year.”

“See you next year, Eddie! And tell Christopher I hope he has a wonderful summer. I didn’t get to see him before he caught the bus.”

Her words don’t hit him until he’s pushing into Buck’s classroom on the second floor.

“Chris took the bus?” he says in lieu of a greeting.

Buck looks up from where he was stuffing papers into his messenger bag. He’s taken his polo off and is now in a white undershirt, which is quickly becoming stained under the arms due to the AC having already been shut off for the summer. The sight has Eddie stopping in his tracks.

“Hey, yeah. He should be home finishing his packing.”

Buck looks up, bright and golden in the afternoon light streaming in through the windows. He frowns slightly at the sight of Eddie, and comes out from behind his desk.

“Hey, you okay?”

Eddie wipes sweat from his temples. The short journey up the stairwell took what little energy he had left, and he remembers, belatedly, the service elevators dotted around the school.

“Yeah, yeah, just— hot. It’s like a sauna in here.”

Buck blows out a breath, smiling again. He resumes collecting his things.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” he says, concern forgotten. “The sun hits this wing head-on after lunch, and it is no match for the air conditioning. My second-period class hates the box fan, though, so I think I’m gonna try to get a window unit next—"

Instead of saying I don’t feel good and the heat is making it worse, Eddie says, “We should get going.” It’s starting to feel less like a sauna and more like an oven the longer he stands still. Like a five-alarm fire in sixty pounds of gear. “Traffic is not going to be fun.”

Buck takes being interrupted in stride. He reaches out and takes one of Eddie’s hands. If they’re clammy, he says nothing.

“Hold on, we have time.”

Eddie looks at his watch and lifts an eyebrow. God, does he want to get home. He wants to take advantage of his couch as much as possible before they need to leave. Or Buck’s couch. They’re both good couches.

“Not much,” he says, and picks up Buck’s bag.

Buck trades Eddie’s hand for his bag, and sets it back down gently on his desk, next to the box of knickknacks and other supplies that he’d collected since taking the classroom over back in March. He keeps his sparkling eyes on Eddie as he grabs a shirt that was draped over his desk chair. It’s a nice shirt, black and silky and not what he usually changes into after school, and he buttons it up with slow fingers.

“Time crunch,” he says, his voice a deep rumble in his chest. “Just like our first date.”

“Just like our—” Eddie puts a hand to his back and winces. The back of his shirt is wet with sweat. “What are you talking about?”

Buck reaches for Eddie’s hand again and entwines their fingers. “I’m saying that you should follow me.”

“To Peru?” Eddie knows he’s being dense, but the pain that started out in his lower spine and tailbone is beginning to creep around into his hips, quickly turning into an unrelenting ache that feels nothing like a pulled muscle.

Buck doesn’t answer, instead leaving his things in his classroom and pulling Eddie out into the hall. Pulling him past the elevator and back to the stairwell, down to the first level, past the main office, and to the auditorium at the far end of the building. Eddie’s fingers are trembling by the time they stop.

Buck is nonethewiser. “I just want to— to apologize for how I’ve been lately. You know— with the paranoid thing.”

Eddie gives a tight smile. “It’s—”

Buck squeezes his fingers. “No, no it’s not okay, Eddie. We’re— we’re safe now, right? Everything’s fine, so I shouldn’t have been acting like that. You shouldn’t have to wait until we get to Peru, or— or for us to get back to pick things up where we left off. You know?”

“Buck,” Eddie says as gently as possible. “I’ve been totally okay with how things have been. I’m just happy that we—”

“No.” Buck shakes his head. “No, you deserve more than what we’ve been doing. You deserve way more, considering how bad I fucked things up.”

He begins to pull Eddie along again, this time up yet another flight of stairs, these ones hidden behind a door just outside the auditorium. They come out into what Eddie assumes is the tech booth, which isn’t much more than a closet full of equipment and a single ratty couch. On the couch is Buck’s insulated lunch tote and a bouquet of cut sunflowers. The box fan from his classroom is chugging along in the corner.

Eddie’s legs go a little weak at the display, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the pain or not.

Buck picks up the tote and the flowers and sits down, patting the cushion beside him. Eddie wastes no time in joining him, and bites back a moan as his aching hips sink pleasantly into the unsupported couch. He suddenly couldn’t care less about Peru.

Buck dumps the flowers into his lap. “I’m making it up to you right now,” he says, and he seems more nervous now than during any of their previous attempts at dates.

Eddie sets the flowers on the floor next to the couch and leans over the tote to capture Buck’s mouth in a kiss. It’s probably the best kiss they’ve had since the field trip, and he has no idea how he was ever okay with waiting until this trip, or after the trip, for them to pick things back up. Hell, Eddie isn’t sure how he got through the last nine months without Buck.

“Okay,” he says, and leans back. “We’re fine.”

“Yeah,” Buck agrees with a nod. “Yeah, we’re fine.”

“We’re just…having our date in an abandoned school.”

Buck’s cheeks flare pink and he unzips the lunch tote, revealing two carefully-wrapped sandwiches and a bottle of sparkling juice. “I tried to rent out the aquarium, but it was too last minute.”

“Right.”

A sandwich is passed over. “Sorry, I’m trying here.”

Eddie forgoes the sandwich and reaches for Buck’s hand, squeezing once. “Hey, no. You gave me grace when I was scared after Karen got hurt. This is nice, Buck. No outside forces, just us.”

Buck beams at that. “Yeah, exactly! Just us.”

“A little caution is always healthy. They taught us that at the academy.”

They unwrap their sandwiches and pop open the juice, each taking a swig from the bottle like they’re two teenagers passing contraband liquor back and forth beneath the bleachers on prom night. Eddie can almost pretend like it doesn’t feel as if his spine is tearing away from his body. At least they’re out of the heat, kind of. There’s only so much a plastic box fan can do when you’re practically inside an attic.

After they finish eating, slumped into the ancient couch with their legs pulled up beneath them, Buck wipes his hands together and says with his mouth full, “Oh, uh— Chris ordered food for himself. By the way. I forgot to mention.”

Eddie forgot to ask, but he nods along as if he didn’t. This is how he knows something is wrong; he never forgets about his kid.

Garbage stuffed back into the lunch tote in a vague parallel of their movie date, Eddie pushes himself to his feet. He very suddenly can’t stand the pain anymore. It’s migrated its way around to his front now, squeezing his lower abdomen like the worst of his worst period cramps before going on hormones, and the stuffy, rising heat in this tiny cramped crow’s nest above the auditorium is making everything worse.

“Uh—” He tries not to grab onto his stomach, but he can’t help it. Buck looks at him in concern around a swig of juice. “You know, it’s, uh, not really fair that you got to dress up and I—” A punch of air escapes between his teeth. He waves vaguely at himself. “Work uniform.”

Buck laughs, easy, distracted already. Eddie takes this chance to back towards the door.

“You look handsome!” Buck says. “I love your work uniform. My blue-collar b—”

He cuts himself off, and color rises in his cheeks. He takes another sip of juice.

Eddie can’t even entertain the almost-slip. He smiles, flaps his hand again, and makes his escape.

He takes the narrow stairs carefully, hand pressed hard and flat against his cramping stomach, then stumbles to the bathroom across the hall.

Appendix, it has to be. His appendix is about to burst. The pain is less localized to his right side and more all-consuming, but what else could it be?

He fumbles for his phone, intending to call Hen and ask her what the hell her and Chimney’s diagnosis is before he keels over right here, but he finds he doesn’t have service, not a single bar, and the school Wi-Fi is locked, too.

“What the fuck.”

The pain crests into an excruciating peak, and Eddie is brought nearly to his knees with the force of it. He doubles over, dropping his phone to the tiled floor and gripping the edge of the sink with both hands.

At that same moment, he catches a flash of black under one of the far stalls, but he can’t look properly until the pain dissipates. And it does, receding like a tidal wave and leaving the deep ache in his lower back in its place.

He lets out a breath and another quiet swear, and kneels for his phone, looking under the stalls at the same time. He finds nothing, just an empty bathroom, and figures as he pulls himself back to his full trembling height, that all it was, was his vision fading out.

A signal hasn’t magically appeared in the upper righthand corner of his phone screen, so he pockets it and leaves after making sure he isn’t about to lose his dinner from either end, or his abdominal cavity isn’t about to fill with blood and send him into septic shock. He still isn’t quite sure of the latter, but he takes the chance.

Buck is fiddling with the bouquet of wilting sunflowers in his lap when Eddie drags himself back up to the tech booth, and he must not be doing a very good job at schooling his face anymore, because Buck is on his feet in a second.

“What’s the matter? What happened?”

Eddie wants to save him from thinking that they’re jinxed, he does, but he just can’t ignore it. He feels bad. Worse than when he overdosed on his testosterone.

He opens his mouth, not sure what’s about to tumble out, when a noise reaches their ears over the hush of the box fan, an echoing thump from somewhere out in the auditorium. It’s quiet and far away, but it grabs their attention.

One hand again supporting his back and the other pressed to his stomach like he’s trying to stabilize his insides, Eddie says, “Uh, about those outside forces…”

Buck shrugs. “Probably just the school settling.”

Eddie can feel another wave of pain ramping up, slowly creeping around his middle like a ratchet strap, and he swallows an incoherent noise of his own.

“Can we go?” he manages, bending slightly at the waist. “I’m sorry, but my stomach is killing me, what the hell.”

Buck looks at him, strange noise forgotten. “What? Why?”

Eddie huffs. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Okay, yeah.” He spins in place, hands out. He grabs his lunch tote and the flowers. “I didn’t think food poisoning came on that fast…”

“It’s not food poisoning,” Eddie says. “My back hurts too.”

“Your back?” Buck wrinkles his nose. “That’s weird. Did you hurt yourself at work?”

“No, Buck. I didn’t want to say anything, but—"

There’s another echoing thump that’s closer than the last, and this time it has them both jumping and not just turning.

And like they’re in an episode of The Twilight Zone, the box fan chooses that moment to short out, plunging them into a sudden, ringing silence.

The thump is followed by the unmistakable sound of footsteps, heavy and slow. A pair of boots on an old wooden stage. The hair on the back of Eddie’s neck stands on end.

Buck’s mouth works, unsure. Finally, he whispers, “Definitely not the school settling.”

“Janitor?”

He shakes his head. “Missy promised me we’d be alone.”

Pain and fear are not a good mix, Eddie knows this from his years as a first responder and his preceding ones in the army. One usually tends to make the other worse.

“I think we should go.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s get out of here.”

They’re about to leave when a flash of black catches Eddie’s eye, just like in the bathroom.

He skirts around Buck and tiptoes to the square hole in the wall that acts as a crude viewing window. Half-hiding behind the lighting rig, he peeks out at the stage.

There’s a man.

Dressed in head-to-toe black, combat boots included, and a burlap sack mask that Eddie hasn’t seen since the Valentine’s Day sting, he’s just standing there, watching. Looking up at the tech booth.

Directly at them.

And in the man’s hand is a knife.

Eddie backs up and presses himself against the wall beside the window. Buck is still standing, staring out at the man in total, unobstructed view. Eddie grabs his arm and tugs.

“Get down.”

Buck drops into a crouch at Eddie’s feet and looks wildly up at him. “Who the hell is that?”

Eddie grabs his stomach and sucks in a hiss between his teeth. “You’re the one who works here, you tell me!”

Buck springs to his feet for another quick look. When he comes back down, he says, “It’s him.”

“Who?”

“The—” He glances up at the window. The tote and the flowers lay forgotten on the floor between them, the whole date forgotten. The déjà vu is whiplash-inducing. “The Killer Cupid.”

Eddie’s knees go weak. He grabs Buck’s shoulders to steady himself. “What? He’s— But he’s in jail.”

“You should really start watching more horror movies.”

“I really shouldn’t.”

“But there’s— There’s rules, Eddie. A formula. Of course the Killer Cupid escaped prison! It makes sense!”

Eddie slides down the wall, cringing as his shirt rasps along the old plaster. He slaps a hand over Buck’s mouth. “It doesn’t fucking make sense, Buck. Lower your damn voice.”

It’s not a copycat, nor a jilted teenager in a Party City costume. What Buck is saying sounds ridiculous, but the man out there on the auditorium stage is the Killer Cupid. Eddie knows this as much as he knows he doesn’t have food poisoning.

The pain peaks, and he bites back a whine, curling slightly in on himself. Eyes shut tight, he says, “Your phone.”

Buck fumbles for his phone, but he just holds it. “I don’t have a signal,” he says lamely. “The whole school is a dead zone.”

Eddie hits his head lightly against the wall. He really hates clichés.

“Except the library.”

He opens his eyes. The pain has faded back down to its baseline. “Then let’s go to the library.”

“I think we should go to the office, actually,” Buck says. “It’s closer.”

“Who cares if it’s closer, Buck. Are you talking about using the landlines?”

“No, the phones are shut off for the summer.”

“Then why would we go to the office?”

Buck flashes his teeth, nervous and guilty all at once. “I left my keys there. We’re locked in.”

And they somehow locked the killer in with them. Actually, Missy must have. Fucking Missy. Eddie never really liked her anyway.

“I think— I think we should try and get outside first,” Buck goes on. “And then we call for help.”

Eddie nods, a quick jerk of his head. He doesn’t mention that once they get outside they won’t need to call for help, because he’s going to floor it all the way to Athena’s station without looking back.

“Okay. Yeah, okay. We stand on three.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“One, two, three—"

They shoot to their feet, almost knocking their heads together in the process, and stay pressed to the wall just beside the window. Together, they peek around the lighting rig to find the stage empty.

Eddie swears and shoves lightly at Buck’s chest. “You seriously had to bring me all the way up here.”

Buck flounders. “The couch in the teachers’ lounge sucks!”

Eddie goes for the door, wrapping his hand lightly around the ancient, loose nob. “Whatever, just— Stay behind me.”

“At least we’re on the first floor,” Buck mutters, and holds the back of Eddie’s shirt as they go single-file down the stairs. “You wanted to go up to the library.”

“You suggested it.”

“I didn’t suggest it!”

“Buck, shut up. This is how people get killed in horror movies.”

The hall is empty and deathly quiet. They pause just outside of the auditorium, listening. Eddie can barely hear over the pounding of his own heart in his ears, but Buck gives him a nod. The coast is clear.

For now.

The main office has been left unlocked and the door cracked slightly, and they push in and shut it quickly behind them. Buck flicks the lights on. Eddie flicks them back off.

He rests his head in his arms on the counter of Missy’s desk as his intestines begin twisting themselves into pretzel-like shapes again. Eddie has been working adjacent to the medical field since he was fresh out of high school, and there isn’t a single injury or ailment that he can think of that would cause pain to come in waves like this.

Nothing, except—

“Damnit, damnit.”

Eddie lifts his head to find Buck with his hands in his hair, looking around the darkened office with wide, panicked eyes.

“They’re not here.”

Eddie pushes off from the counter. “What do you mean, they’re not here?”

He throws his hands out. “I mean he took them!”

There’s a sharp smack on the wooden door, and Buck grabs Eddie and pulls him onto the floor and behind the desk.

Sweat is quickly making Eddie’s shirt stick uncomfortably to his overheated skin, and he uses Buck’s clean, dry shoulder to wipe his forehead.

Buck lets him, barely noticing. He has an iron-like grip on Eddie’s biceps. Hushed, he says, “This feels like a school shooter drill.”

“That’s why— That’s why there should be a phone signal. And phones.”

“Shh.”

“I hope you didn’t enjoy having Chris as a student too much because I’m definitely transferring him next year—ah.”

Buck slaps a hand over Eddie’s mouth the way Eddie had done to him upstairs. A second later, there’s the unmistakable jingle of keys, just outside the closed office door.

“He’s taunting us,” Buck says, eyes on the door, though that much is obvious. “I have a spare set up in my classroom because I always lose them. Can you stand?”

Eddie shakes his head, then changes direction and nods instead. Buck removes his hand.

“Something is really wrong,” Eddie breathes. He wants to tell Buck that he feels a lot like that guy in Alien, but figures they’ve both made enough horror movie references to last them the rest of the year.

Buck helps him to his feet. “There’s a lot of somethings wrong right now. Come on, let’s go.”

He peeks through the tempered glass window on the door, and after a moment, crooks his finger behind him for Eddie to follow.

They look both ways before leaving the office, left, right, and left again, then tiptoe to the stairwell. Eddie doesn’t feel good about going deeper into the school, but he doesn’t feel good period right now.

He pauses halfway up the stairs to catch his breath. Buck braces himself on the step behind him, one leg up beside Eddie’s in a protective stance. It’s more romantic than the makeshift picnic and flowers.

“Is it because of me?”

Eddie looks over his shoulder at him. “What?”

“The— the stomachache. And the backache, I guess. Do you think I gave you stress ulcers?”

That almost makes Eddie laugh. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Buck flushes and picks his hand up from the railing. “You told me I made you throw up. From stress.”

“Buck, you did not do this to me,” Eddie says. “You didn’t give me stress ulcers, and you didn’t give me food poisoning, okay? Maybe it’s— a kidney stone, or something. That would be the best case scenario. I’ve pushed one of those out before.”

The door at the bottom of the stairwell screeches open.

“Oh, shit, go!”

Eddie pulls himself up the rest of the way by the railing at Buck’s insistent shove, and they race to the end of the Science wing. When they reach Buck’s classroom, they find it locked.

“No, no, no.” Buck pulls at the doorknob with both hands, then rams his shoulder into the door.

Eddie puts his hands on his knees. “The library,” he says raggedly to the floor. “Where’s the library?”

Buck points over Eddie’s head back the way they came. “Down at the other end of the hall.”

Eddie looks in that direction, and as he does, the black-clad Killer Cupid appears at the top of the stairs, glinting butcher knife gripped tightly in one hand. His burlap sack mask has no mouth, and his eyes are nothing but jagged black rips. He looks like a nightmare come to life.

“Eddie, go.”

He looks at Buck. “What? No, not without you, are you crazy?”

“Just—”

“Isn’t the first rule of horror movies don’t split up?!”

Buck flashes Eddie a grin and pulls out his pocketknife. “Unusual circumstances. Now go!”

And then he’s off, running past Eddie towards the Killer Cupid like a banshee. Buck barrels his body into his like a linebacker, pushing him back towards the stairwell.

Eddie listens as blow after blow lands, listens to the grunting, the sounds of a fight between two opponents that are easily matched, and he slowly sinks to the floor. Buck wants him to go, but he finds that he can’t.

The pain is spreading like a wildfire, up into his diaphragm and down his legs, an all-consuming agony that is quickly rendering him immobile. Buck is just out of sight, fistfighting a serial killer, and here Eddie is, dying.

His insides constrict like a tightening fist, a deepseated pressure somewhere below his stomach but behind his bowels. It doesn’t feel like food poisoning, or stress ulcers, or a kidney stone. And it’s definitely not a pulled muscle. It almost feels like

(contractions)

Someone falls down the stairs, and tumbles all the way to the bottom, by the sounds of it, and Eddie holds his breath against more than the pain as he waits to see who emerges victorious.

After a heartstopping second, Buck appears with a bloody tear in his shirt and a fresh shiner. He’s no longer smiling, and it looks like he’s lost his knife.

“Eddie, Eddie, we gotta go, come on, come on.”

He yanks Eddie to his feet like a ragdoll, and begins dragging him down the hall towards the library.

“Buck, stop—"

Buck doesn’t stop. He continues pulling Eddie, even as his feet are tripping over themselves.

“Buck!”

Eddie yanks himself from Buck’s grip and backs up with his hands pressed to his stomach until his back hits a set of lockers. The metallic crash reverberates down the empty hall, and Buck glues himself to Eddie’s front like that’ll hide them from view.

“Buck, I know what’s wrong,” he says, strained. “I’m—”

“Wait.” Buck turns his ear back to the stairwell, listening for a beat, then another. When he doesn’t hear anything, he says, “Do you have your knife on you? I— He got mine. I lost it.”

“No.” Eddie whines into Buck’s collarbone. “Buck—”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. Jesus, Eds, it’s like we’re cursed. Like—” Blood begins dribbling from his nose, and he swipes it away with his knuckles. “At least it can’t get any worse than this.”

A bowling ball is dropped into Eddie’s guts, and he pitches forward into Buck’s chest as something deep within him pops. At the same moment, a gush of fluid rushes out of him, warm and uncontrollable.

Buck pushes back and looks down. He can’t see anything through the black fabric of Eddie’s work slacks, but he can feel it, and he says, “Are you— are you bleeding? Did he get you? I didn’t see—!”

Eddie moans and tips his head against the lockers. The flickering fluorescent lights suddenly seem too bright, and the air is so stuffy. He’s overcome with the urge to run, to get somewhere safe and not so exposed, but his legs won’t cooperate.

“Buck. My water broke. I’m in labor.”

That’s what it is. That’s what it was, what it has been. Eddie’s pregnant, and he’s been slowly becoming unpregnant all day. Maybe even longer, considering the nausea; he threw up more when he was in labor with Christopher than he did during the entire first trimester.

Buck shakes his head. His face drains of color like someone flipped a switch inside of him. “What?” he breathes. “You’re— What? But you’re—”

Another overwhelming contraction tears a groan from his throat, and Buck suddenly looks like he has no idea what to do, or like he doesn’t know Eddie at all.

“Cryptic pregnancy. It’s a— I didn’t know. I didn’t—”

The door to the stairwell opens again, and before either of them realize what’s happening, the Killer Cupid is there, grabbing the back of Buck’s shirt and dragging him away.

Eddie can’t speak. Can barely even breathe through the pain and the pressure. All he can do is watch as Buck is dragged kicking and screaming back to the stairs.

“Get to the library! Call for h—!”

A single punch to the mouth has Buck shutting up, and a steady stream of blood begins flowing in earnest down his mouth and chin.

Eddie moans again, and this time, he forces himself to run.

The library is an inky well of black, a darkness so thick with all the shades drawn that it feels almost palpable. Eddie shuts and locks the door behind him and drops himself at the nearest table. He takes his phone from his pocket, and the screen is already lighting up with notifications as his network stabilizes.

The first ones he sees are texts from Hen, having come through not five minutes before:

Hen
Eddie, I figured it out!!!

Hen
I think you’re PREGNANT!!!

Shifting on the hard chair in his wet pants, Eddie texts her back first, not trusting his voice to call anyone just yet.

Help
At the middle school

Hen
???

KC IS HERE CALL 911

She calls and he declines it, and he drops his phone onto the table. He didn’t mention the fact that he is quite literally about to give birth, and he’s paying for it now, because all at once he can feel the baby in question sitting so heavy and obvious in his pelvis after being completely unaware of its existence for the last nine months. It’s a strange feeling, when there’s no belly to go along with the symptoms. Disorienting. If the stakes were lower, Eddie thinks he would probably have a panic attack over it.

There’s a frantic knock at the door, and Buck’s face appears in the small rectangle of light that makes up the window. Eddie pulls himself to his feet to let him in.

Buck has a small cardboard box in his arms when he shoves his way in, and dumps it onto the table next to Eddie’s phone.

“Okay, I knocked him out.”

“W-with what?”

Buck picks up a dented speaker from the box. “Got him in the temple. Went down like a-a burlap sack of bricks.”

Eddie whimpers low in his throat and goes to sit back down. He misses the chair entirely and lands on the carpet.

“I texted Hen,” he says from the floor. “She’s getting help.”

Buck is sifting through the box, not looking at him. Most of the blood has been wiped away onto his shirtsleeve, leaving the scruff along his jaw stained and rusty. “Okay, okay, that’s good. We should go downstairs to wait.”

He grabs Eddie’s hand to pull him back to his feet, but Eddie shakes him off.

“Buck, I can’t,” he says. “I can’t— I can’t walk. The baby’s coming.”

Buck blanches, like he’d already forgotten. Eddie doesn’t blame him. He wishes he still didn’t know. He wishes Hen figured it out sooner.

“How… How long until help gets here?”

Eddie is shaking his head before he finishes the question. “Too long. I think— I think you’re going to have to help me deliver.”

“Oh.”

He’s white as a ghost, and frozen in place, hands clenched around the box in his arms. Eddie kicks him gently in the shin.

“It’s yours,” he says, and Buck blinks.

“What?”

“The baby. It’s yours.”

“Well— Yeah, Eddie, I figured that. It’s just—” He hesitates, and Eddie kicks him again.

“What?”

Buck swallows. “I definitely didn’t learn about this in my first aid classes.”

Eddie lays back on the floor, unable to hold himself up any longer, and the supine position on the hard library floor conflates the pressure, causing the baby to sit heavily on his already aching spine.

“Fuck— Well, I did. I’ve seen this before.”

“Where? Afghanistan?”

“No, Buck, out on the field!” He scrambles for his belt with shaking hands. It’s been a while since he’s done this, about twelve years now, but the urge remains the same, that primal reflex to push. “Help me get— please.”

It must be the desperation in his voice, because Buck drops the box of random shit to the floor and drops to his knees.

“What can I do?”

“My pants.”

Buck swallows audibly and gets Eddie out of his pants, his hands shaking even worse. “Eddie, I’ve never done this before. I— I know science, not anatomy. Maybe if you were a star, I’d know what to do.”

Eddie throws his head back onto the floor and screams into his teeth and the worst contraction yet overtakes him. “What do you mean I’m not a star?!”

“Oh, God, okay, w-wrong horror movie.” Buck grips his briefs, and a wave of embarrassment washes over Eddie, almost as strong as his urge to push.

“Wait, wait— You’re going to see me.”

“Eddie, I’ve already seen you! That’s how we got into this!”

“No, we got into this because of the condom that was in your wallet since college."

Buck's hands still. “You don’t think I’ve had sex since college?”

The doorknob jiggles. Buck shoves Eddie under the table and tells him to be quiet, then stands. The jiggling stops, and a moment later there’s the sound of a lock being picked.

“Oh, shit,” Buck says, and ducks under the table to look at Eddie. “Can you walk?”

Eddie shakes his head, unable to answer. Buck drags him back out and picks him up bridal-style, letting his shoes and pants fall to the floor. He grabs the box at the last second. They make it to the opposite corner of the library just as the door is kicked open in an explosion of wood and hardware. Buck sets him down as gently as he can between two towering shelves of books. On Eddie’s right is Science Fiction, and on his left is a wall of James Patterson.

The low-pile carpet muffles the killer’s boots. He could be anywhere in the room with them.

This time, Eddie gives in to the urge to push when it comes over him, putting his chin to his chest and bearing down without even a second to think about it. Buck takes his dress shirt off and drapes it over Eddie’s lap, covering him as best he can before he gets his underwear off.

“Ooh, fuck. I’m sorry. ‘M sorry you’re missing your flight again.”

Buck shakes his head frantically, shifting on his knees. He can see the way his left leg is trembling, but Buck doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t mention his eye that’s rapidly swelling shut or the shallow wound near his collarbone or the fact that his nose is most definitely broken. His pain means nothing, which means everything to Eddie.

“Stop,” Buck says gently, hands white-knuckling Eddie’s knees through his shirt. “I would say that there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, but that would be a lie.”

The contraction comes to a shuddering end and he relaxes into the wall as he stops pushing. "God, I love you.”

A new voice tears through the heavy quiet.

“How romantic.”

Neither of them know where it’s coming from, and that’s the scariest part.

“Buck,” Eddie whispers.

“It’s okay, just keep— Just keep going. I gotcha.”

The voice continues. It sounds young, and it sounds male, and it sounds nothing like the guy that was apprehended at the Griffith Observatory all those months ago, who spent the following weeks on the stand and in front of cameras. There’s two killers.

“There’s a lot of theories floating around online,” this new Killer Cupid says, raising his voice. “Has been, since we started this up last year.”

The shades go up one by one, flooding the library with late afternoon sunlight.

Eddie’s phone begins to ring again from where he’d left it on the table, and the device goes flying past their hiding spot, colliding with one of the windows. The glass spiderwebs, and the phone goes quiet as it hits the floor.

“Some people say the Killer Cupid went after couples because of trauma. A jilted lover, looking for revenge. Others say he was the Texarkana Phantom back for round two, because apparently only one serial killer at a time can wear a fucking burlap sack over their head.”

A droning keen tears itself from Eddie’s throat, and Buck covers his mouth. Eddie bites the ball of his sweating palm.

A chair gets tipped over, then another.

“Or maybe it’s a kink!” The killer laughs after this one, loud and obnoxious. “But really, couples are just more fun. Two for the price of one, you know? That’s the only thing we agreed on. Me and Vic.”

The giant Xerox machine near the front door goes crashing to the floor, shaking the shelves around them and causing more than one book to fall.

“Fucking Vic.” The Xerox machine is kicked. “Stupid motherfucker ruined everything. Everything! We had a whole plan! A whole—” The crinkle of a plastic book cover, an angry growl. The book hits a wall, or maybe another window. “All he cared about was the fame of it all. He wanted to get caught. Isn’t that bullshit?”

More books go flying, followed by a computer monitor. If he doesn’t gut them like a fish, then they’ll surely get caught in the crosshairs as he turns the library into a rage room.

The baby descends lower, and Eddie sees stars. He slumps further against the wall, opening his legs wider around Buck’s knees. They’re getting close, and so is the killer.

“I want the hunt,” he goes on, his voice fraying and stretched thin. “I want the chase. To— to back people into a corner and leave them with nowhere to run. Yeah! I want to watch the life leave their eyes after they’ve been reduced to cowering prey—”

Buck rolls his eyes and mouths villain monologue. Eddie almost laughs, but it turns into a guttural moan that Buck can’t smother fast enough.

There’s a strained grunt, and suddenly the bookshelves are falling like dominoes, crashing into each other like claps of thunder, one after the other.

Eddie suddenly remembers one of his first calls with Station 6, a house fire that had spread to the end of the block and was blazing too large and too fast for their hoses. The IC had arranged for an airtanker to drop water and retardant over the residential street, and Eddie was stuck in one of the houses with his captain and another member of his team when the plane flew over. The impact came hard and fast, and sounded similar to the avalanche of books tumbling from the tipping library shelves.

Buck pulls Eddie flat against the floor and braces his entire body over him, covering him from head to foot, and as they get caught in the deluge, Eddie is glad he doesn’t have a pregnant belly getting in the way. Small miracles.

The shelving that tips over onto them gets wedged against the wall on their other side, leaving them caught in a tiny triangle of space. It lands only inches from Buck’s back.

“Are you okay?” he breathes into Eddie’s face once the books stop falling around them.

Eddie nods. The contraction that was in the middle of splitting his body in two when the shelves got tipped over stops abruptly, like it was scared away, shocked into submission. He wouldn’t mind labor stopping until help arrived if he didn’t know for a fact that it would put his baby in danger.

His baby. Jesus.

Buck shifts and winces. A book slides from his back and onto the floor.

“Are you?”

He nods. “Bruised, but I’ll live. I need to— I need to get the keys.”

They stop and listen. The second Killer Cupid, whatever this one’s name is, has gone back to being silent, stalking through the library like a ghost. Again, he could be anywhere. Eddie would take the villain monologue over the unnerving quiet.

“Buck, no. I need you here. Please.”

“I need to unlock the doors so that help can get in.”

Eddie raises a leg to accommodate the pressure, almost kneeing Buck in the crotch. Buck sits back on his haunches, shoulders curled in to keep himself small. “They’re firefighters. They could break into Fort Knox.”

Buck shakes his head. “Fine, I lied. I’m going to lure him away from you.”

Eddie grabs the front of his stained undershirt. “No. Safety in numbers.”

At that moment, they hear the tip of a knife being dragged along something, the wall or one of the tables. Taunting them, letting them know that he’s still there.

Waiting.

Predators always like to play with their food.

“Well, the number needs to go down by one,” Buck says, and begins shimmying his way out from under the tipped shelf.

The pain returns all at once, and Eddie scrambles onto his elbows. He bends his legs at the knee, kicking Buck’s shirt away, and forgets about everything but the task at hand as he gets his briefs over his hips.

Well, the other task. Buck is taking care of the first one.

He pushes through the next few contractions the way he remembers doing when he had Christopher, chin to his chest, fingers gripping the backs of his thighs hard enough to bruise. Hold your breath and count to ten. It’s been so long, and this body of his is so different now, but when it comes down to it, the process is the same. It doesn’t even matter that there were no symptoms, no bump, that he was wholly unprepared. He knows what to do in the same way that he’s sure he’ll never forget his firefighter training long after he’s retired.

Though his hearing has tunneled around his own rhythmic breathing, Eddie can hear Buck calling the Killer Cupid names so filthy he’s sure he’s been spending his lunch breaks in the cafeteria with the twelve-year-olds he teaches, and he laughs. He can’t help it, because what the hell have they gotten themselves into? Buck is engaging in hand-to-knife combat with a psychopath, and Eddie is in the throes of transitional labor.

Eddie Diaz, two-for-two on bringing a child into the world during the worst, most inconvenient times in his life.

There’s a crash just out of view, somebody being thrown bodily into the wall, and Eddie cowers further into the corner, feeling like an animal in a foxhole or a burrow, feeling like prey. He doesn’t feel like he’s making progress, and the baby’s head, having previously been wedged against his sacrum, which is what was most definitely causing the pain earlier, is compressing his pelvic nerves, so he can’t even get up. He’s totally incapacitated. Useless.

Buck yowls like a wounded dog and falls to his knees just outside the tent-like opening to Eddie’s hiding spot. His lip is split, and the bridge of his nose is bruised and bleeding. He makes eye contact with Eddie for just a second, and then the killer is grabbing him by the hair and yanking him out of view. He’s unarmed and losing.

Eddie yanks his briefs back up over his hips and drags the cardboard box to him. The dented speaker, a pair of headphones, three different vapes, a comic book. Confiscated items. Buck must have snagged them from the main office in the hopes of there being something to use as a weapon. He had the speaker, but Eddie doesn’t think he can get close enough to the guy to brain him with it in the other temple, and his arms are too weak and trembling to throw it far.

He keeps looking, sifting through a handful of Tech Decks, until he finds the handle of a switchblade. It’s black and shiny, and when Eddie presses the release—

It’s a comb.

“Fuck.”

He tosses it back in, and that’s when he sees it: a fishing slingshot, metal dart included. His grandfather used to bowfish back in El Paso, and Eddie hasn’t seen one of these since. Luckily, he remembers how to use it.

He army-crawls out from beneath the bookshelves, slingshot gripped tight in one hand. The killer, face still hidden by that stupid Phantom Killer ripoff mask, has his knife held under Buck’s chin like he was waiting for Eddie to, quite literally, come crawling.

“Buck,” Eddie breathes, then says to the killer, “Why the hell are you doing this, huh? Why us?”

He shrugs with one shoulder. “You two looked like you’d be fun for my first kill.”

A contraction seizes Eddie’s middle as quick and as violent as a gunshot, and he half-curls in on himself with a whine. He presses his forehead to the carpet, not wanting to take his eyes off Buck but not being able to help it. His body pushes without him even trying, his muscles working doubletime to get this baby out of him, and squeezes his eyes shut.

The killer hums and says, “A little on the easy side, but I’m not picky.”

Buck lets out a strangled gasp, and Eddie reaches for the slingshot before the contraction lets up, before he’s able to fully pry his eyes open. He presses the switch on the fishing reel.

“Looks like there’s nowhere to go,” he says between his teeth, and launches the metal dart from the slingshot's rubber band.

The size of a knitting needle, the miniature harpoon-like dart flies past Buck’s head and embeds itself in the killer’s throat, right in the hollow below his Adam’s apple. He stumbles back with the force of it, arms pinwheeling, and hits the cracked window. It shatters against his weight, and Eddie watches in horror as he falls out.

The impact is swallowed by Athena bursting into the library gun-first.

“LAPD!” she yells, but when she sees the broken window behind Buck and no suspect, she holsters her weapon.

Eddie tosses the slingshot at her feet, and she looks at it like it’s a bomb that’s about to blow.

“Is that the weapon?”

“No,” Eddie says. “It’s mine. I don’t— I don’t know where the knife went.”

“Um,” Buck says, frozen in place. He glances at the window, then to Athena. His face is sickly white, and Eddie wants nothing more than to go to him, or for Buck to come to him, but neither of them can move.

Two more police officers and the whole of the 118 enter the library after Athena. Bobby touches her shoulder as he surveys the scene. When he sees that neither of them are actively bleeding out, he lets out a relieved breath.

“Chimney, Ravi, head back downstairs. I'll radio for an additional RA unit.” He crouches beside Eddie, putting a heavy, comforting hand on his shoulder not unlike Buck’s. “Eddie, where are you hurt?”

Eddie turns onto his side and brings his knees up, and no one knows the irony of him twisting himself into the fetal position.

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m in labor.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Hen comes over, her boots lending her a heavy tread, and looks down at Eddie with wide eyes. “You’re what?”

“Pregnant!” Eddie shouts through fear-compressed vocal cords. “I’m pregnant, okay? You were right. Fuck, you were right.”

She lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Okay, I definitely wasn’t right. Is—”

“Yes, it’s Buck’s. Halloween. We had— Oh, God. Before Karen was attacked.”

“Halloween?” Bobby says, his voice hitching up in alarm. “And you said you’re in labor?”

“Yes, yes, it’s cryptic. I didn’t— I didn’t know, Bobby. My water broke twenty— thirty minutes ago.”

He rubs Eddie’s shoulder. “No, I believe you. It’s just—”

“He’s early,” Athena says quietly.

“About 34 weeks,” Hen confirms. “Not too early, but we need to get you to a hospital, Eddie.”

Eddie puts his face to the carpet and sobs. “My parents are going to be so mad at me.”

Buck makes a small noise in the back of his throat, and the room finally looks to him.

“Huh,” he says. “I thought you said you’ve never seen Scream.”

His left leg buckles beneath him and he goes down hard on his bad knee. Before anyone can catch him, he’s flopping forward onto the floor.

Sticking up straight from his spine is the Killer Cupid’s knife.

The baby comes before the gurneys do, arriving into Bobby’s waiting hands after just a few pushes like they were waiting for the coast to be clear to make their appearance. It’s a boy, and despite not receiving an ounce of prenatal care—the opposite of prenatal care, when Eddie recalls the caffeine and the alcohol and his extensive job description—he’s okay. Definitely premature, but Hen and Chimney give him an APGAR score of 6, and they announce with a high five that he’s graduated from middle school to the NICU and send him off in his own ambulance.

Buck is okay too, surprisingly. He’s awake and alert while the baby is being born, and even manages to help Bobby cut the cord as Hen stabilizes the knife in his back. It doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital, as far as anyone can tell, but there’s definite evidence of nerve damage. He’s wheeled to his ambulance laying on his stomach, except this time Eddie is the one without pants, and Maddie is yelling at them over the phone instead of in person.

The Killer Cupid, or Eliot, as his driver’s license says, landed not in the front lawn of the school, but on the digital sign that still declares a city-wide curfew from his partner’s reign of terror months prior. He was impaled through the gut as much as through the neck, and was dead before Chimney and Ravi could make it back downstairs. At the end, he never got what he wanted. He died without a single successful hunt under his belt.

“I was right,” Buck says as Chimney lays a line in the back of his hand. His eyes are fluttering and clouded, but he refuses to give in. Eddie loves him almost as much as the surprise baby that he’s already aching to be reunited with.

Hen is between Eddie’s legs, cleaning him up with gentle, professional hands. She looks at Buck with her eyebrows raised. “Didn’t I tell you to be quiet?” she says.

Buck ignores her. He shifts around on the gurney, jostling the C-collar, and everyone is so relieved that he wasn’t immediately paralyzed that they don’t say anything. There’s obvious weakness in his legs, but he can still move, and that’s the only reason why he hasn’t been rushed off with the lights-and-sirens treatment yet.

“I was right,” he says again, gaze fixed on Eddie laying on his own gurney. “You’re not a star. You’re the sun.”

Eddie, trembling all over from the rush of adrenaline and hormones still coursing through him, says though an emotion-thick throat, “You’re such a cliché.”

Buck smiles, eyes closing as the morphine begins to drag him under. They’re both on the edge of delirium. Hen tucks Eddie in and kicks the brakes on his gurney, and Chimney does the same to Buck’s. Buck’s eyes fly open, and he grabs Eddie’s wrist.

“Wait!”

“Buck,” Bobby warns, but Buck ignores him too.

“Wait, Eddie—”

Eddie presses the pad of his thumb into Buck’s pulsepoint. “Buck… Tell me at the hospital. I think I’m in shock.”

Bobby takes Eddie’s hand from Buck and rests it at his side. He stands between their gurneys. “Well, yeah, kid. A cryptic pregnancy, a precipitous labor, and a serial killer? I would be concerned if you weren’t in shock. You two have had a traumatic day.”

“Eddie,” Buck tries again, reaching out and whacking Bobby weakly.

“My therapist is going to diagnose me with super PTSD,” Eddie says to the bright blue summer sky above them

“That’s not a thing, pal,” Chimney says, snapping his gum.

Eddie’s nose tingles, and hot tears well in his eyes. Whatever Chimney pushed into his IV is not mixing well with the shock. “They’ll invent it just for me,” he says mournfully.

“Does this mean you’re never going to talk to me again?”

Four eyes turn to Buck. “Now, what the hell are you talking about?” Hen says, and his cheeks color.

Half-hiding in his C-collar, Buck says to Eddie, “When we slept together, you said that if I got you pregnant you’d never speak to me again. I— I’m just— I’m just wondering.”

A frown tugs the corners of Eddie’s mouth down, and he says through his chattering teeth, “You remember that?”

Buck does his best to shrug. “It was worth remembering.”

Eddie begins crying in earnest, and their respective paramedics make their second attempt at loading them in, but Eddie stops them again.

“Wait, wait—”

Hen tamps her foot. “Eddie— Buck has a knife literally sticking out of his back.”

“I can’t even feel it,” Buck says, and Chimney throws his hands up and heads for the cab of his rig.

“Buck,” Eddie says. “I’m sorry. I don’t think this— you know, this dating thing is working out. We’ve given it enough chances, but I think we should move on.”

Bobby’s eyebrows fly up into his hairline. “Now, Eddie—”

“Will you be my boyfriend?”

“Oh my God,” Chimney says, out of view. “Like true middle schoolers!”

“Aw, man,” Buck says. “I was going to propose at the hospital. You beat me to it.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “What? Buck, you don’t have to marry me just because you knocked me up. I did that the first time around and it did not work out.”

A news van tears onto the scene and Taylor Kelly hops out with her cameraman in tow. They situate themselves in front of the gore-streaked school sign, already filming and undoubtedly live.

“Today, a nearly year-long mystery comes to an unexpected conclusion,” she announces with her microphone held firmly below her mouth. She doesn’t spare anyone but her camera a glance, not even Athena, who’s stalking her way back over from the coroner’s van looking downright murderous. “And it’s all because of this brave couple right here, who almost died keeping our city safe—”

Athena shoves the camera away before it can pan to Eddie and Buck. “Alright, that’s enough. You’ll get your piece soon enough, little girl.”

Taylor and her henchman are coralled away, both sputtering and indignant.

A look of pure bliss softens Buck’s face. “Huh. Looks like staying together is what saved the day, after all. Not staying apart.”

“Huh,” Eddie echoes. “Guess you’re stuck with me, then.”

“Guess so. Hey, Eddie?”

“Yeah, Buck.”

“Wanna take it easy with me?”

Eddie snorts. “Not sure how easy it’ll be, but, yeah. I’d love to.”