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Buck sat in his truck outside his house for eleven minutes before he hit the FaceTime button next to Eddie's name.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Six months ago, a we need to talk text would have been just a text, met with diner food and video games. Now, it was a fire alarm. Now, Eddie would read those four little words and his brain would go straight to relapse, to a locked door, to all of the places it had learned to go, and Buck was not going to do that to him.
Eddie picked up on the second ring. His face filled the screen, kitchen behind him, dish towel over one shoulder, and Buck watched himself be scanned. Eyes, pupils, skin. A whole inventory in three seconds. He wasn't sure if Eddie was aware he even did it anymore. Buck wasn't going to point it out.
"Hey, everything's all good. That's why I called, so you could see for yourself."
Eddie's shoulders came down half an inch. "That obvious?"
"I've gotten predictable in my recovery era." Buck shifted in his seat. He knew that Eddie knew his therapy schedule. He knew that Eddie got worried. He didn't know how he felt about that. Or maybe he did and just didn't want to look at it too long. "I just got with therapy. Nothing's wrong. I'm good. I just have some homework from her and I need to talk but I didn't want to freak you out. Nothing to worry about, just kind of want to do it befoer I lose my nerve. Any chance Chris could hang with his friends for a few hours?"
He was getting better at asking for what he needed, but he still felt like an inconvenience. He waited for Eddie to decide what level of panic he was going to settle in. Yes, Buck said he was fine, but Buck said a lot of things.
"Yeah, I'll figure it out. Come over whenever." His voice shifted into quiet control.
"Eddie."
"Hm."
"It's not bad, just heavy. Those are different."
"I know." Eddie said, in a voice that meant he'd believe it when Buck was in front of him not on a phone screen. "Drive safe."
Christopher was already by the door when Buck got there, phone in hand.
"Karen's grabbing me on her way home from work. She's like two minutes out. I'm sleeping over at Denny's."
"On a school night?"
"It's summer, Buck."
"I knew that."
Chris chuckled as he moved past, then paused in the doorway and looked at him a beat longer than really necessary.
"You good?"
"Getting there." Buck said, and it came out honest. Chris had been there through the worst of it. They weren't keeping secrets, not really.
Chris nodded in acceptance, and then a horn tapped twice out front and he was gone, and it was just Buck standing in Eddie's living room with his keys still in his hand.
Eddie was in the kitchen. There were two glasses of water on the counter, and Eddie was leaning against the sink with his arms loose at his sides, not crossed, and Buck could guess that Eddie had spent the last twenty minutes deciding exactly how to stand.
"Hey," Eddie said.
"Hey," Buck set his keys down. Tapped his fingers on the counter top a couple times. "So, therapy homework."
"You said that." Eddie slid one of the waters across the counter.
"It's not—" Buck paused. "Well, I don't think it's necessarily bad. Just… a lot. Maybe? I don't know. Maybe you'll have to tell me. Or ask me tomorrow."
They took the conversation to the couch, but everything about it was different from their normal. Buck sat foward with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded like he was preparing for something, and Eddie sat angled toward him with one knee up on the cushion. The TV stayed off. The house was quiet.
"Okay," Buck said, to the coffee table. "So Dr. Copeland wants me to be honest with somebody about some stuff I've— some stuff." He rubbed his palms together slowly. "She gave me options. There are hotlines, there's a peer thing through the union, there's, you know, ways to do this that are bit more removed."
"You called me."
"I called you." Buck glanced over. "She said I should pick whoever I wanted to talk to on my own. She didn't say it, but I think she knew I would pick you. I think she thinks that's the hardest option."
"Is it?"
"It's the only one that really counts for me," Buck said, and then he had to look back at the coffee table, because admitting that out loud had cost more than he had budgeted.
Eddie didn't fill the silence. Buck was grateful. Eddie could sit in silence like it was the best furniture.
"Okay, first thing. When I was still taking the painkillers, when I was really in the worst part of it." His voice was even. He'd said this part over and over in his head. It came out even. "I wasn't just messed up about the pain stuff. I was…I was thinking about dying. Like, actively. Considering it, I guess. As an option."
He took a breath, but quickly surged forward before Eddie could have a chance to speak.
"And the reason I didn't, the only reason, really…it wasn't the job or people or any of the stuff you're supposed to hold onto. It was that I kept thinking, if I do this, and there's anything after, then I'm going to have to stand in front of Bobby." He folded his hands tighter together, his knuckles going white. "And he's going to look at me. And I couldn't. I couldn't handle being dead. I couldn't handle him looking at me like that. It wasn't wanting to live, it was not wanting to be a fucking disappointment to the only parental figure I had who's ever really treated me like I wasn't one. Dr. Copeland called it a tether, and that shame is a bad one, load-bearing wise, but it held, so." He shrugged, feeling a little broken. "I let it hold."
He risked a look at Eddie.
There was this thing that Eddie's face did on certain calls where he knew whatever was coming next was going to absolutely suck. It wasn't calm, just… contained. His jaw was tight and his eyes were wet at the edges and his hands were flat and still on his own knees like he was holding them down.
"Thank you for telling me," Eddie said. His voice was rough, but level.
Buck blinked. "That's it?"
"It's just the start." Eddie shifted, just slightly, closer. "I hate that you were carrying that. I hate tha shame was the thing that held. I have about forty other things that are in my head right now nad I'll say all of them if you want."
"But?"
"But you rehearsed that one," he responded quietly. "I could hear it. You've explained this part before, probably to Dr. Copeland, probably more than once. It is really heavy, but it came out soft." He held Buck's gaze, steady and kind. "You didn't clear Christopher out of the house for soft. So I'm going to sit here, and drink my water, and wait for whatever is next."
Buck stared at him.
"You're not," he stared, then lost the thread. "You're taking this really well."
"I'm not taking it well," Eddie said gently. "I'm taking it quietly. Very different. But keep going, Buck."
One down, Buck thought.
"It's about New Mexico."
Buck watched Eddie go still.
"I asked about you. First thing, before I even really understood where I was, I asked, and Eddie, she looked at me like the word didn't mean anything. Lik ethere had never been anybody else. You weren't dead to her, you weren't anything to her, she just erased you, and the way she talked about Derek, the way they operated the whole thing, it was smooth. Practiced. It was clear very quickly that this wasn't the first time they had done something like this, and people who have done this before do not leave a live witness on the side of the road." He swallowed. "And if they did leave you… deserted highway, middle of the night, pinned in a rollover. We're firefighters, Eddie. We know those numbers. We've seen those statistics in real time. With those backwoods response times, exposure, blood loss, I ran it every way I could and every way I could figure it, you died in that car, and Chris was goign to grow up with no one, and so I fought. Everything l did in that place, everything I got through, I got through because Chris needed somebody, and I was the somebody who was left."
"Buck."
"I'm not done. That part sucked, but this…" He trailed off. This was going to be the part he didn't like. "I had no idea you were alive till I heard your voice. They didn't slip, not once. They had me in that shed, they're armed, openly discussing whether or not they're going to kill me, too, and I'm trying like hell to talk my way into surviving this for that kid, when I hear it. Your voice. You don't even know I'm there and they start talking about what happens if you found me, if you figured them out. The first thing out of my mouth was a trade. I said keep me. Keep 'Derek' for good, whatever they wanted from me. Just let him go. That's what I said, Eddie, let him go, his kid needs his dad, he's all he has. That's what's not in the statements or interviews. I offered to stay."
For one breath, Eddie's face flooded with something Buck could only describe as awful proud grief. Hero-of-the-hour. Because, of course, Buck offered himself, that's who Buck is, that's what Buck does, and Eddie's mouth was already opening to say it.
"Don't," Buck stopped him. "Don't make it about me being brave… or sacrificial… or some hero. I can see you doing it. It'd be easier to just leave it at that, but I need you to see the reality. It wasn't brave, Eddie. It was permission. You were alive, which meant Chris had his dad, which meant my job was done, which meant I could stop. That's what it was. The fight went out of me the second I heard your voice, but then she left to deal with you and he followed, and I heard that gun shot and—" His voice broke. "That's when I escaped. I picked up the cattle prod and I followed, and everyone tells that part of the story like a rescue. I've been letting them. But I walked out of that shed already spent. I just wanted the guns pointed at the right person."
Eddie didn't say anything for a long time.
When he finally moved, it wasn't towards Buck. He got up, walked around the couch, stood with his back to the room and both hands braced on the top of his head.
"You didn't count yourself," Eddie said, tot he window.
"What?"
"You said Chris would grow up with no one. If I was dead." Eddie turned to face him, his eyes were bloodshot now, no hiding it. "Buck, if they'd taken you up on it, if you had died out there, Christopher doesn't lose 'the somebody that was left.' He loses another parent. He loses you. AQnd you sat in that place and did the math and you didn't put yourself in the equation at all."
Buck's mouth opened, but any response he could think of fell flat. He closed it.
"That's the part I can't," Eddie stopped, breathing through his thoughts, considering something Buck didn't understand. "Okay. Okayh. My turn for a minute. Is that allowed? Copeland's rules?"
"There aren't rules. It's not," Buck gestured vaguely, "it's not a deposition."
"Good. Then let's go back a bit." Eddie came back to the couch. Sat closer than before. "I never told you about the car."
Eddie hadn't planned on talking about the car.
He had a policy about the car, which was that it lived in a box, and that box lived in a room, and that room didn't have a door. Frank would have opinions about that architecture. Frank could get in line. He was sure Fire Marshal Buck would beat him to it here in a minute, anyway.
He had to bring it up. Buck was sitting there having just handed Eddie the ugliest true thing Eddie has ever been given, and the box came open all on it's own.
"I don't really remember the crash itself," Eddie started. He heard his own voice go flat, his report-giving voice, and he allowed it because his report-giving voice was the only one he really trusted right now. "I remember the headlights in the mirror, and then I remember being upside down, and it was dark, and my legs were pinned, and I couldn't turn my head more than a couple inches. And you weren't answering me."
Buck had gone very still beside him.
"I couldn't see your seat. I couldn't reach it. I couldn't move, and I kept going in and out of consciousness, but I couldn't keep track. But I know that every time I came to, I'd call for you again. I didn't know if you'd been thrown, or if you were right next to me but too quiet for me to hear, or maybe those guys, the ones from the diner, had taken you and —" His jaw worked as his eyes closed, just for a moment to gather himself. "I ran out of new things to say eventually. After that, it wasn't really words with thoughts behind them anymore. It was just asking, begging really. I just needed you to say something. Anything."
Buck's head came up, slow. Eddie saw him process all of the things Eddie wasn't saying out loud, saw him decide not to chase it.
"They found me a little after sunrise. And when the staff kept telling me I was in the car alone, I decided on my own timeline. Whoever ran us off the road pulled you out before I even woke up. You were never there through any of it. So all those hours I spent begging you to make a sound, I was begging an empty seat, and I didn't know it, and honestly I still don't know which version would have been worse."
"Eddie."
"Let me get through it, kay? There's a reason I'm telling you this." He made himself breathe. "Somewhere in the middle of those hours, I stopped being scared you were dead and I got sure of it. The paramedic side of my brain knew what no answer meant. And Buck, when I was sure, it wasn't panic. It wasn't needing to be out of that damn car. I did the precise math. Years. I remember hanging upside down running the years without you in them, and every version just came back so empty. I remember thinking, very calmly, that the people who I knew would come eventually didn't need to hurry."
The words settled in the room. Buck felt sick.
"Eddie." He repeated, desperate this time. "Chris."
"I know," Eddie rushed. "That's what makes it so fucked. I know. Chris is the reason I've gotten off the floor every single time my life has gone up in flames, and I lay in that car and I thought about my son and the pull was still there anyway. Both things at once. That's when I knew it was more than—"
He stopped. Buck was looking at him with his face just ruined and Eddie heard, one beat too late, everything he'd just said. His last sentence just hung there, not unlike Eddie had in that godforsaken rental car.
"Oh," Eddie said. It wasn't much of anything, but it was all his brain could offer.
"Yeah," Buck agreed, very quietly.
"I was going to do that better."
"Were you going to do it at all?" Buck managed, his words coming out choked.
"Honestly? Probably not." Eddie laughed, unsteady. "That particular box of feelings was supposed to stay shut. Figured I could take it up with Frank somewhere around 2031."
Buck cracked a small smile, before his face morphed into something sadder.
"It's not the same though, Eddie. What you're describing. You were trapped, you were concussed, you thought I was dead. One bad night is not the same as—"
"As what?"
Buck shut his mouth.
"You're right, it's not the same," Eddie didn't want to push. He wanted to understand. "So let me finish mine, and then you can tell me how yours is different. Deal?"
Buck nodded, wary.
"It didn't end when they got me out. I lied about it at the time, to myself." He added the last part quickly, as Buck's face grew tense. If Buck thought for a second that Maddie or Chim or Athena actually knew what he was dealing with he'd lose his shit. They only ever knew of his physical state, and that was only in pieces, the way Eddie wanted it. "Everyone acknowledged how hard I was fighting to find you. The Sheriff saw me as a suspect, the staff saw me as a pain in the ass, everyone back here saw me as the only option, so I did what I needed to do, but part of me hadn't told them what I had already understood." His hands curled loosely on his knees. "A big part of me understood it was a recovery. It hadn't even been a year, Buck. We couldn't handle another closed casket funeral. It was up to me to find you and bring you home to us. That was the last thing I had to do. That was the last thing on my list. You understand what I'm telling you, right?"
Tears were streaming down Buck's face now, no drama in it. Just tears.
"And then you were coming out of that shed, swinging a cattle prod like an absolute lunatic, and I have never in my life…the pull just went quiet. Right there in the dirt when the gun was still in my hand, ready to fucking murder someone because they took you from me. And it's stayed pretty quiet since. Mine lasted, all in all, less than 24 hours, and a lot of it involved me lying to myself, but it had edges. I can draw a line all the way around it." He turned, fully, to face Buck on the couch, and his voice came out careful, almost light, the way you do when you hand out an easy answer begging for them to please just take it. "So draw me yours. Tell me it stopped when the pills did."
The room changed. Buck felt it. He knew this moment was coming all night and he still wasn't ready for it.
"I can't."
Buck had watched Eddie move through his story, watched we survived become we're still in this and Buck hated that he had to take that ending from him.
"More words." Eddie said carefully.
"Okay, first, breathe., because I can see where your head just went, and it's not that." Buck's hands finally came unfolded. "The wanting to die, actively, that's over. It ended with the pills, yes. Copeland and I have been through it a hundred ways, it's done. I really need you to actually believe me here, because if you don't, you're not going to be able to hear the rest of this."
"I believe you," Eddie said with zero hesitation.
"This, I think, was the actual homework." Buck breathed. "You've been building this timeline all night. I watched you do it. The car. The shed. The pain. The pills. And it's wrong, because the thing underneath all of it is odler than that and it doesn't start in New Mexico. It starts in a lab."
Eddie nodded once. Buck saw his quiet containment.
"Since Bobby died," Buck ignored the way his voice broke on his name. "there's been this— Dr. Copeland calls it passive ideationl. I don't have a plan. I don't want you to start thinking that, because it doesn't exist. I'm not a danger to myself or anybody on shift, I have been really, really clear with her about that and she agrees or I wouldn't be working. It's not that." He searched the air for the right way to put it into words. "It's more like, you know when you're driving somewhere you don't want to go, and it's not like you'd ever crash the car to get out of it, but some part of you is kind of hoping for traffic, road closures, an act of God. Something that just kind of takes it out of your hands."
"Buck."
"I don't want to die, Eddie." Steady. Truth. Eddie heard it. "I need you to believe me. I don't. I don't wanna die, I just know I don't really feel alive, either. And nobody tells you there's this whole gray area between the two and I've been trapped there for over a year."
"Okay." Eddie said quietly. "I hear you."
"I miss him so much." There it was, finally. The whole ugly center to all of this. "And for a while, missing him had this door in it. Like, the worst thing that ever happened to me had a loophole, because Bobby's somewhere, right, he has to be somewhere, and there's exactly one way to get there. And I was never going to take it. But I'd catch myself being like, glad it existed, I guess. Comforted by the existance of an exit sign. And once he was gone I didn't really have a direction anymore, anyway. He was the one who always pointed me where to go and with him gone, it's just static in every direction except that door.
He forced himself to look at Eddie.
"It's been like that ever since. It got tangled up with New Mexico and the drugs and I guess it's quieter now, but quieter isn't gone, and Dr. Copeland said the difference between managing it and being managed by it is whether or not I can say it out loud to someone whose face I have to watch take it in…so this is that, I guess."
Eddie's eyes hadn't left him once.
"Okay," Eddie heard the shake in his voiced and cleared his throat. "Okay, first, thank you. I know what it took for you to do this. I understand, and I just…thank you." He wiped his face quickly. "Second, a question. The team finding out about the pills, everyone circling up here, all of that. Did it help? Like, honestly?"
Buck sagged back into the couch, exhausted, but seriously considering the answer. "Honestly? Yeah, I guess it has been easier. I mean, I stopped doing the whole 'Buck's fine' act which has helped. That took so much out of me, you have no idea, and I don't think I realized it till just now, but it's definitely been easier once I stopped having to hide everything." He picked at the seam of the cushion. "But there's this thing underneath that support doesn't touch."
"Tell me?" Eddie asked gently. Buck stayed quiet for so long after that, Eddie thought he had made some sort of mistake.
"Bobby told me they'd need me." He said, just as Eddie was opening his mouth to apologize. "Like, that was the last direction he ever pointed me in. 'They're going to need you' Just like that. And he told me he loved me. He said 'I love you, kid' like it was a normal thing we just say to each other, but I didn't say it back, Eddie. He gave me that and I just stood there and the last thing I ever gave Bobby Nash was silence. And there's gotta be some sort of sick joke in there about how I never gave that man a moment of silence until the end but I hated myself for it and the only thing that kept me going was that I had a job to do. Be needed. And everyone just—everyone was just okay. No one needed me. Athena had May and Harry, they were still standing. Hen and Chim were fine. You came home and you're the steadiest you've ever been, and Chris is thriving, and nobody needed me. I kept waiting for the moment I was for, and it never came. And the one time I felt like maybe it had, it was in a shed in New Mexico but it only existed because I thought you were dead, and then the shape it took was me trying to sacrifice myself. So even the being-needed, I know I screwed up, and I know he'd just be so disappointed in me and mostly I just feel like I'm failing at the last thing he ever asked, and I never told him I loved him and he knew, I know he knew, but I didn't say it."
Eddie was quiet for a moment, while Buck caught his breath. Buck braced for a speech. He could feel it coming, but he was so tired, and he didn't think he could hold still through a speech about his own worth.
Eddie must have been able to tell, because the speech never came.
"He didn't mean save us," Eddie finally said softly, before reaching over to take Buck's nearest hand in his own, like that was just a thing they did.
"Then what did he mean?" Buck asked, still staring at their hands locked together.
"You've been eating dinner at this table for eight years, Buck. Chris checks whether you're coming before he checks the menu, did you know that? When Mara starts spiraling, Hen calls you, not because you're available, but because you're the one who spirals in the same shape she does, and you help." Eddie's thumb moved across Buck's knuckles absently. "You watch garbage TV with May and Harry every week. You think that's about the TV? You're the closest thing to their dad still walking around. Nobody needed you to save them. We need you at the table. That's it. He should have known you'd go looking for a burning building to carry us out of, but there isn't one, and that was never it."
"That can't be it. That's too small."
"It's not small. It's just not loud." Eddie's hand tightened. "The door you keep being comforted by, it doesn't go to Bobby, Buck. It goes to a table with your chair empty at it. Forever. With all of us still checking anyway."
And that was what broke Buck. It wasn't loud, and Eddie moved seamlessly until Buck was against his shoulder and Eddie's hand was on the back of his neck and neither of them said anything for a while.
"It's not just going to go away," Buck said eventually, into Eddie's shoulder. "That's what Dr. Copeland keeps saying, that it's not a switch. It's going to be hard work, and some days the doors still going to be there."
"Okay," Eddie said. "So we work."
"We?"
"That box I was saving for Frank is already opened. So yeah, we." He sighed. "There's a much longer conversation attached to that, and I want to have it, but I don't want to have it tonight, because tonight is yours. But like hell am I going to let you sit here in the static thinking any of that was an accident or untrue. It wasn't."
Buck pulled back enough to look at him. Eddie's face was wrecked and calm and completely certain, and Buck felt something that wasn't static and wasn't the door. It wasn't fixed. He knew better. One conversation does not fix a chemical imbalance in your brain. The work was still out there, and some weeks he knew the door would still hum at him from down the hall.
But for the first time since the lab, he could imagine wanting to do the work. Not to get back to some old version of Buck, but towards something. Maybe it was as simple as a seat at the table. Maybe it was as complex as that conversation Eddie had pinned for later. Maybe it was anything and everything in between.
"Okay. We work."
They asked for the office before line-up the next shift, and Chim had said sure without really thinking, then visably recalculated when they came in together and closed the door.
He was still refusing to sit at Bobby's desk, opting to prop himself against the corner of it. It had been fourteen months and he had refused to even move the lamp. Buck kind of admired the dedication. Bobby would probably think he was an idiot, but he'd be all soft about it.
Buck said everything the way he'd practiced in the truck, which was mostly the way he'd said it to Eddie, sanded smoother by one telling but not filed down completely. He even had Dr. Copeland's official sign-off printed out if his captain wanted it. All-in-all, it took about 90 seconds, which felt insane, given the size of it.
Eddie held his hand through the whole thing, because apparently, as it turns out, that was a thing they just did now. They'd always been touchy, but this in particular was very new and Buck watched Chim clock it in the first five seconds and say nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
When Buck finished, Chim was quiet for a moment. He looked between them like he was trying to parce together something more.
"Procedurally, there's nothing for me to do here. Copeland cleared you, I trust her, and I trust you. So as your Captain, thank you for the disclosure, noted, done." He leaned back. "As your brother, I'm really glad you're not carrying this by yourself anymore, Buck."
It had been an easy decision once he had told Eddie. Realistically, he would have trusted Bobby with this as his father/captain, so trusting his brother/captain with it wasn't all that different.
"I would have told Bobby." Buck offered, letting Chim draw the parallel on his own. He watched it land and smiled softly.
"Okay," He said. "Yeah, okay." Before his eyes could get too misty, they pointedly dropped to the armrest. To their hands clasped together. "Is there a second form I should be expecting on this desk today, or…"
"Not yet," Eddie answered easily.
"We're taking it slow," Buck offered as an explanation. "The on-purpose kind, not the blind-idiot kind."
"Oh, so you're aware this has been going on for eight years?"
"We're aware."
Chim laughed, and then the laugh changed into something else half way through, and he sat with whatever it was for half a second before he spoke again.
"I was going to save this," He walked around the desk. "The plan was to hold onto this until you two idiots finally got hitched, and I maintain that this is a wedding present, but. "He gestured vaguely to the room. "Given everything you've just told me, I think he'd understand."
He opened up the deep drawer of Bobby's desk, and took out a frame. He sat it on the desk, leaning against the lamp that had never been moved.
It was a relationship disclosure form. Standard LAFD, the same one that lived in a sad stack in the copy room. Except every field was already filled out in Bobby's small careful handwriting. Buckley, Evan. Diaz, Edmundo. Station 118. A-Shift. Chain of command reviewed, no supervisory conflict. Signed at the bottom with Captain's approval, Bobby Nash.
Dated.
Buck heard Eddie stop breathing next to him, and realized a second later that he had stopped, too.
I found it when I had to go through the desk. It was in a folder with your annual reviews, both of yours, together, which, when you think of the filing decision alone," He shook his head. "Obviously, it's unusable. It never was, really. He can't approve of a relationship that didn't exist yet, and now it'd need my signature, either way. I thought you'd want it, anyway."
"Chim, the date…"
"Yeah, I noticed that, too."
Eddie leaned in. Buck watched him do the math. "That was the week of the well."
"Day after. I checked the logs." Chim's voice stayed even, but only just. "I wasn't surprised when we found it, is the thing. I watched him hold you back that day," His eyes were on Buck now. "You were digging at forty feet of mud with your bare hands and it took everything in him to pull you back. Everyone on that farm knew."
Buck felt his face flush as Eddie looked over at him.
Eddie made a sound that could be interpreted as a laugh. "So everyone figured it out before we did?"
"Speak for yourself, I figured it out about the same time tsunami sirens registered." Buck said faintly, and Eddie squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt, which was fair.
Buck reached out to pick up the frame.
It had been six years since Bobby filled this out and signed it and tucked it away for safe keeping. He waited through everything. Buck had spent fourteen months wondering about what that conversation could have looked like had things worked out differently. Would he have had questions? Would he have approved? Would he have treated him like a son bringing a boyfriend over for dinner or would it have been different because it was Eddie and he was already family?
But Buck didn't have to wonder. Bobby had done the paperwork. Bobby had been ready. Buck had been seen the whole time, completely, and Bobby had approved, in advance, in writing, in triplicate, probably, because the man didn't do anything halfway when it mattered.
Buck had told Eddie he felt directionless without Bobby telling him where to go, but here it was. One more direction.
Buck ran his thumb over the glass, over the signature, before he sat it gently back on the desk.
"It stays here," Chim said, sliding it a little further onto the desk. "Until the real one lands on my desk. Consider it collateral."
The tones went off overhead. All three of them looked up at the speaker with the smae trained tilt, and then Chim was the captain again, and Eddie was pulling Buck out of his chair by the hand he'd never let go of.
Chim grabbed his radio. "Let's get to work."