Chapter Text
Eddie can hear the sirens from where he sits on his front porch. If he had to hazard a guess, somewhere west of 8th Street. An engine and a squad by the sound of it; he can hear them doubling on themselves as they fade away. His body does that thing it still hasn't unlearned: weight shifting to the balls of his feet, head tilting, cataloguing distance and direction like any second he'll hear the tones go off, the radio telling him what to do next.
Man, he could really use some direction on what to do next.
Of course, the direction he so desperately needs doesn't come. His radio is back in L.A., hanging in a locker with someone else's name on it.
In L.A., sirens meant something specific. If they were on separate shifts for whatever reason, and Eddie heard the sirens, he'd catch himself doing the math. Right district, close enough. That's Buck. That's the 118. Headed towards the 10. Every siren in that city had been a coin flip that might come up Buck if he wasn't physically in front of him. It was like it was wired into his brain.
Here, the sirens belong to strangers. They wail out west, past the interstate, and nobody Eddie loves is being carried by them. He sits on his porch in the dark wondering, stupidly, if eight hundred miles away some other engine is screaming down some other street, close enough for Buck to hear it. He knows it's ridiculous to believe in some version of physics where they're both listening to the same sound, but he does it anyway.
Eddie's house in El Paso has too many rooms and not enough noise. Which is equally as ridiculous of a thought as the siren thing, because he bought the most basic ass house he could find. He didn't need fancy. He barely needed functional. He wasn't here to make a home. Nothing would compare to Bedford St. anyway, and if he tried, he'd only torture himself.
He'd braced himself for the big stuff, missing the job, missing the team, the guilt of leaving L.A. and the guilt of coming here and how those two somehow occupied the same little spot in his chest. But what he wasn't prepared for was the quiet. In L.A., there was always something. Buck in his kitchen unannounced. Chris's video games bleeding through the walls.
Here, at 11:47 on a Tuesday night, there's a ceiling fan, the ghost of a siren, and the hum of a refrigerator he hasn't finished paying for in a house that he's fixing up so he can see a kid who barely looks at him.
His phone buzzes in his pocket, where he'd left it like it would keep him from checking it.
Buck: you up
Eddie doesn't even pretend to hesitate. He hits the little video icon in the corner.
"That was fast," Buck says, a beaming smile on his screen.
"You texted you up like it's 2am and you're nineteen," he snorts.
"It's 9:47 and I'm a respectable adult."
"A respectable adult that eats his cereal over the sink."
Buck looks down and Eddie can hear the distinct clink of a spoon against ceramic.
"It's a bowl. I have standards," he defends, but he's clearly pouting at being called out, which makes Eddie smile even more.
He gets up and heads inside, mostly so Buck isn't looking at a pitch black screen. The porch light had gone out last weekend but Eddie hadn't bothered to fix it yet. He settles onto the couch in the living room, well lit now.
"What'd you do today?"
And Buck tells him. That's the routine now, three or four nights a week, and neither of them have ever once acknowledged it. Buck narrates a kitchen fire that turned out to be a smoke machine, a floater who threw up in the engine, Chimney's ongoing war with the station's new coffee maker. Eddie gives him El Paso in return: the plumbing that fights back, the neighbors recruiting him for church softball, the fact that his mother has opinions about his grout.
"Your grout," Buck repeats.
"She said it looks like I gave up."
"On grout?"
"On life, Buck. Via the grout. It's a whole metaphor at Casa Diaz," he explains with a roll of his eyes.
Buck laughs, big and unguarded. Eddie closes his eyes and lets it sit in the mostly empty room like furniture.
Here's the thing Eddie has never said out loud, to Buck or anyone: he envies him. Not his hair, not the muscles, not even the way strangers hand Buck their trust like exact change. The looseness of him. Buck walked out of Pennsylvania at nineteen and never once looked back over his shoulder. He cut the lines to Philip and Margaret Buckley with about as much thought as Eddie gave to cutting his line that day in the well. Eddie knows it wasn't painless. He was there for the wreckage when they resurfaced, and if he ever had a chance, he'd have more than a few choice words for the pair, but Buck did it. Buck has never belonged to anyone he didn't choose. There was no leash on him, never has been. You can't fence in a guy like Evan Buckley; the whole shape of him is built for open ground. Whether it be SEAL training on Coronado, bartending in South America, or any of the other half dozen lives he tried on and left folded on the floor.
Eddie, meanwhile, is in his thirties, sitting in his hometown like he never left it, renovating a house to his mother's expectations. He came back to the fence voluntarily. Some nights, this night, the envy is so specific it tastes like copper.
What Eddie doesn't know, because eight hundred miles is a lot of miles, is what Buck is thinking on the other end of the line. Buck is thinking that everyone has always gotten it backwards. People look at his life, the trail of cities and jobs and versions of Buck that he kind of sugarcoats to make more palatable for his audiences, and they see a free spirit, untethered by choice, a guy who can't be kept. Maddie used to say it with worry and Taylor would mention it with admiration and his parents acted annoyed if not apathetic. Every one of them was wrong. Buck was never running towards freedom. He was checking rooms. His whole life has been a search pattern, door to door, looking for the place where somebody finally says you can stop now, and he never belonged anywhere, not really, not once, until a fire captain in Los Angeles had handed him a man with a chip on his shoulder and the bravest little boy he's ever known. Then every restless thing in Buck went quiet.
He doesn't belong to anyone. That part's true. He belongs with two specific people, and one of them is barely a teenager and the other is fighting a losing battle with his eyelids, and they're both in Texas. Buck wonders sometimes if either of them realizes they are the only two human beings on the planet Buck would fold his entire life up for. Would have. Would still.
The conversation slows the way it always does around midnight, Eddie's answers going soft at the edges.
"You're falling asleep," Buck says, quiet now.
"'M not."
"You're mumbling and I can literally see you."
"Did not." Now it's Eddie's turn to pout for being seen. "I'm just… bored. This place is boring, Buck. Everything closes at nine. I know all my parents' opinions already. I've seen it all before."
"Tragic." He can hear the hint of amusement in his voice.
"You should just come over." It slips out on the exhale, sleep-loose, too easy. A soft smile plays on his lips. "Come hang out. Bring the cereal, though."
There's a beat, where Buck just smiles and shakes his head. It's just a second longer than it should be.
"Yeah," Buck says. "Sure. I'm not too far."
It's eight hundred miles. Eddie knows it's eight hundred miles because he drove it, because he counted every one of them like he was pulling stitches. He huffs something that's almost a laugh, dragging a hand down his face.
"Man, I wish it were that simple. Night, Buck."
"Night, Eddie. Tell Chris I said hey."
Eddie nods and hangs up, dropping his phone onto his chest, and stares at the ceiling fan until he falls asleep on the couch. His back will definitely have more opinions than his mother come morning.
Eight hundred miles away, Buck sets his bowl in the sink, opens his laptop, and pulls up flights to El Paso.
It's not a decision. That's what he'll never quite manage to explain later, that there was no moment where he weighed it. Eddie said come hang out the way people say things they don't let themselves mean, and something in Buck's chest simply stood up and started packing. If he was really honest with himself, that was all the permission he ever really needed on Texas.
He texts Bobby at midnight. Bobby responds 4 minutes later.
Buck: Hey, can I take some personal time for next shift? Everythings fine, just some stuff came up.
Pops: Approved. Give Eddie and Christopher hugs for us. - Bobby Nash
Buck: Will do
He almost lied. Almost. But Bobby has known him for too long now; lying to him via text would be both pointless and disrespectful, not to mention when Athena inevitably checks Life360, he'll end up getting a lecture, too.
Somewhere a few blocks from Bedford Street, a siren starts up and heads deeper into the city. Buck doesn't clock it. Eddie would have.