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"It's a day hike," Danno said, holding up a coil of static line like evidence at trial. "Four miles. There's a gift shop at the bottom, Steven. What part of gift shop says to you, pack 200 feet of rope?"
"The part where I've met all of you," Steve said, and kept loading his pack. Buck grinned.
"Webbing, carabiners, a med kit with a — is this a chest seal? Who is getting a chest wound? Gracie, you planning on getting a chest wound?"
"I'm staying so far out of this." She said with her hands raised, but the second her father's back was turned, she locked eyes with Buck and grinned back.
"It's four miles, on a groomed trail, with signage."
"Then it'll be a light carry," Steve said, and shouldered the pack. "Besides, you could blame Buck for having all of this at the house. It's not like I packed it in my carry-on."
Danno looked at Buck like he had done him a great injustice.
"Leave me alone; it's been a while since I've seen him in SEAL mode."
"The Army would have just walked around whatever the rope is for." Eddie offered with an amused shrug.
"The Army," Steve said, without turning around, "would still be requesting permission to walk around it when my flight lands in Hawaii. Three days from now."
Buck laughed, bright and unguarded, and Eddie would normally look properly offended at the jab, but he couldn't find it in him.
The thing Eddie noticed first was that nobody was managing Buck.
It took him a mile to name it, because it was an absence and absences were harder to clock than the things that filled them. But it kept catching. At the firehouse, there was always a low constant hum of tending that went on around Buck, so steady that Eddie had stopped hearing it years ago, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. Chim needled him, which was love in his own way. Hen mothered him, love that came as a hand on the back of his neck, steering him toward a decision he'd have gotten to eventually anyway. Bobby had parented him, for sure, but it was past tense now. A thing Eddie's chest still tripped over.
Even Eddie did it; he could admit that out here, even if only in his mind to himself. After all, it had only been nearly a year since he had chosen actively to jump off a damn bridge so Buck wouldn't be the one to do it. That particular protective choice seemed extremely silly considering the recent developments. That was close enough to a Tuesday for a SEAL. Buck would have been fine.
Out here, nobody was braced.
Steve set the pace at the front and never once looked back to check on Buck, because it plainly did not occur to him that Buck needed checking in on. Danno insulted him at the exact register he insulted Steve, peer-to-peer, no softening, no baby-of-the-family lilt underneath it. When Buck said something, they answered the thing he said instead of the thing they were worried he meant. And Buck, walking loose and easy in the middle of all of it, wasn't doing the thing he normally did. The self-deprecating thing. The guarded thing. The preemptive I know, I know, I'm an idiot that Eddie had watched him deploy a thousand times at the firehouse, always half a beat before anyone could say it to him, getting there first so it would hurt less. It wasn't like he was letting it land now; there was just nothing to get ahead of.
Eddie had known this man for eight years, and he was walking behind a version of him he had never once met.
It wasn't that these people were kinder. Chim's needling and Hen's mothering were made of love, and Eddie knew that. He knew Buck knew that, more importantly. It was that all of it, even the affection, was a frame, and that frame just so happened to be slightly smaller than the man currently out-arguing Steve McGarrett about trail conditions. The 118 loved Buck the way you love someone you're a little afraid for. These three had met him as a person you'd be a fool to be afraid for, a dangerous and well-trained, competent adult, and they'd simply never revised the narrative. And so Buck got to be the whole size he truly was around them, and Eddie stood there on a muddy switchback realizing he'd spent eight years loving a Buck who was slightly folded down to fit the room, and that he'd been one of the people doing the folding, and that he hadn't known he was doing it until right this second, watching what Buck unfolded into when he had the opportunity.
"You're making that face," Grace said.
She'd fallen in line next to him without his noticing, matching his pace like she'd been assigned to him, and it occurred to Eddie briefly that given his company, she probably had been. He didn't really mind. It felt like the 118 had felt at the beginning, that specific sensation of a family with its arms already open, deciding the new guy had always been there.
"What face?"
"The same one Steve does when he reads the room but doesn't like the answer." She kicked a clot of mud off of her boot. "You wanna talk about what's got you so worried?"
"I'm not worried."
"You're a little worried. It's cute. Danno's way worse. The first time he watched Steve do something completely unhinged, he didn't sleep for a week. Granted, that was like the first week they met, but still." She said it fondly. "This trail's a mess, by the way. I thought it wasn't supposed to rain here?"
"We had a huge storm on Tuesday; flash flood watch had us up half the night," Eddie said, grateful for the change of subject. "Chim wouldn't shut up about his gutters."
Ahead of them, Danno was also mentioning that the trailhead vaguely resembled a chocolate cake, but that it shouldn't count against him since the hike was his idea. The state of the trail did not, in fact, make it a bad idea. Buck was laughing at him, that full laugh again, the one Eddie was realizing he'd only ever seen at about eighty percent volume before this week. The sun was out. It was, Eddie would think later, exactly the kind of morning you'd be especially careful not to call the q-word. Unfortunately, no one ever applied that kind of logic when they weren't at the station.
They made it another mile before the group stretched out again, the way groups do. Steve set a pace at the front that Danno narrated animatedly, Grace drifting ahead to walk with them, and Buck dropped back to walk with Eddie without making it look like anything.
Eddie knew something was up. Buck didn't drift. He was good at making it look like he did it often, but if you looked close enough, the man rarely did anything without purpose. He'd watched him do it for eight years. Buck would engineer a two-person pocket in a crowded room when he had something to say, make it look like a coincidence, like they just ended up next to each other, when really he'd been maneuvering toward it for ten minutes. He'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way to lose whatever Buck was working up to was to acknowledge the maneuver.
They walked for a while. The creek ran somewhere below them, out of sight, loud with runoff. A pair of day-hikers passed them going down, nodded, gone. Buck waited till the trail was theirs again.
"I didn't wash out," he said, finally.
Eddie kept walking, kept his eyes on the trail. He gave Buck his space to explain.
"I know what it looked like when they showed up. I did talk to Bobby about my time. I don't want — I didn't lie. I left because I couldn't cut it with the way they needed me to compartmentalize my feelings. That's what I told Bobby. Everyone just assumed. Big soft guy, couldn't hack it. Washed out of BUD/S. I just never corrected it. My reputation did the work for me."
"And Bobby never second-guessed it."
"Nope." Buck was quiet for a second. "I think it's cause I'm a lot. Loud. Too much. If I was quieter, it would have gotten clocked. But a guy like me slips up and volunteers for a live grenade call or, I don't know, every rope rescue opportunity ever, and it's just Buck being Buck. They move on quickly. Compartmentalizing quietly, with the kinds of things we had to do? That was never gonna be my thing. I'd have imploded had I stayed any longer. I'm better at being loud. No one notices when you're compartmentalizing if there's enough noise."
Eddie thought about that, the eight years of noise, all of it, as it turns out, was just a wall with a man behind it.
"Always come back, though. That's the one thing that seeped through. You say it all the time, and I guess I never really thought about it till it got pointed out to me. You say it running into burning buildings, rope rescues, the dangerous stuff. It kind of made sense. Just a thing. But you say it to Chris, too. You said it to him the day you moved out. I thought it was a joke about Saturday morning pancakes."
Buck was quiet for a few steps. When he spoke, it was lower.
"That was on purpose." The rush of creek water filled the pause. "It's just the only way I could ever really say what I needed to. Especially with Chris, you know I'd do anything for that kid. And when you decide to stop saying a very specific phrase at 19, it's really hard to flip that switch back on. Grace was the same way when she was little. I was younger, but I'd steal her from school early on math test days, and we'd go for shaved ice and surf lessons. Chris always lets me just be. He's never questioned any of it. Grace pushed the second she noticed I didn't say it." He laughed softly. "Like, hard. Challenged me. She was half my age and about the size of one of my biceps, but she just gave me this look, and I told her — well, I told her a very age-appropriate version of why. Always come back has held for 15 years, and outside of that team, anyone who's ever heard it brushed it off as a firefighter being dramatic."
Eddie walked a while with that, trying to find somewhere to safely pack away what Buck had just handed him, re-sorting eight years of behavior in the space of thirty feet of trail. The way he muttered to himself at breaches, in his home, at hospitals, all that time Eddie had been standing in the blast radius of a love confession every single shift and called it a verbal tic.
"I never thought you were being dramatic," he said finally.
"No," Buck said, looking over at him carefully. "I didn't think you did."
They walked. The creek was louder now, and neither of them commented on it. It didn't occur to them to notice it.
"You know what's actually funny," Buck said after a few minutes. "Not funny, I guess. Whatever the word is. I left the team because I couldn't compartmentalize. I could never put the shit we did in little boxes the way they wanted me to. So I got out and reinvented myself so completely that I spent the next decade building my entire life out of boxes. Two families, two names, a whole city that didn't know a damn thing about an island." He shook his head. "The guy who dipped for not compartmentalizing went and built nothing but compartments. I think they were pretty good, for the most part. No one ever found them. Nothing ever slipped out. But you noticed. I can tell now; I can see you putting it together. You had the puzzle pieces, but you didn't know what it was supposed to look like because I didn't want you to. I always made sure there was plenty of noise."
Eddie thought about all the things he could say. You were never too much, sat locked and loaded the way it always did, but he set it aside. Buck would leave it right on the trail anyway. He said something else true, instead.
"Thank you for telling me."
Buck looked over at him, relaxing, and he knocked their shoulders together once, and that was the whole conversation. Up ahead, Danno warned that the overlook had better be worth it.
The overlook was not what was waiting for them.
Eddie heard it before he saw it. They all did. He watched it move through the group front to back, Steve's head coming up first, fast reorientation to a potential threat, and then Grace slowing next to her father. Then the sound reached Eddie too, and it felt wrong.
The creek that had been steady for the last two miles sounded very different now.
It wasn't the cheerful runoff noise that had been built into all of their conversations. It was lower, heavier, a freight sound with a growl under it, and when they came around the switchback and the canyon opened up below the trail, Eddie saw why. The storm was still coming downhill two days late, brown and fast and full of debris, and it had turned a wide lazy creek into something with a strong current and an even stronger opinion on the local geography. On a rock shelf a third of the way across, where a gravel bar had probably been dry and walkable before, were two hikers, a couple, by the looks of it. The man was down, holding his ankle, face gray. The woman was on her feet, waving both arms in the enormous unmistakable arc that means help. Between the shelf and the near bank ran a channel of water that was visibly, actively, higher than it had been when the two of them had wandered out there.
For a second, the whole group just stopped and took it in.
"How fast is it rising?" Grace asked
"Fast," Steve said.
"I'll call it in." Danno already had his phone out, thumb moving.
Buck had moved wordlessly closer to the edge.
"Steve, you doing this math?"
Eddie had heard Buck's fireground voice for nearly a decade. Loud, warm, bulletproof, pitched to carry over engine noise and civilian panic, the voice that made scared people believe him. This was not that voice. This was quieter, faster, and completely stripped of decoration. Every word was straight to the point, and it went down Eddie's spine the exact way Steve's walk had gone down it two days ago in the bay. Recognition of an old language he used to be fluent in.
Danno had given the gist of the situation to dispatch, but was now holding the phone out to the middle of the group, call on speaker.
"Hey, this is Firefighter Evan Buckley with the 118. I'm with Firefighter Eddie Diaz. Nearest apparatus access is the trailhead. But we've got nearly three miles of switchbacks behind us, and it's a foot rescue from here. No one's going to be able to get a vehicle up this. A swiftwater team will take too long to get up here on foot carrying all of that. Best case, they're standing where we are in about an hour." He was already reading the far shelf, the waterline, the trees, his eyes moving in a pattern Eddie recognized as assessment. "Eds, look at that shelf. The wet line on the rock above where she's standing. Tell me they have an hour."
Eddie looked. He could read a waterline; you didn't work a flood season in LA without learning. The dark band on the rock was a foot above the woman's boots, and the water was coming up to meet it visibly, inch by inch, while they stood there and watched.
"They don't have an hour." He said.
"They don't. So we do it ourselves."
Danno looked like he just lost a bet. Begrudgingly, he nodded, taking the phone back off speaker, preparing himself to keep dispatch updated on their status as they went. And then Eddie got to watch something he had no name for, and would spend a long time afterward trying to find one.
It was not that they moved fast, although that was certainly true. It was that they moved like one animal with two bodies. Steve had the rope out of Danno's much-maligned pack and was walking the bank reading the trees before Buck had finished saying his name, and Buck answered a question Steve hadn't asked out loud yet.
"Upstream oak, the fat one. Gives us the ferry angle onto the shelf,"
Steve was already at the oak, and then they started working together without a sound. Eddie wondered if this was how the rest of the team felt when they were in the middle of a complicated rescue and communicated without words. It had to be, right? He followed their thought process, even if he was a second or two behind wherever they seemed to be in the plan.
"Assignments," Buck spoke again only when the rope was in place, and he was happy with its security. Eddie noted that while Steve very much outranked Buck in any capacities from a military standpoint, he was happy to let Buck take the lead here. More of the equal mindset he had noticed earlier. "Danno, stay on comms. Help dispatch with whatever they need. You know the drill. I don't know if it'll be worth it for them to trek up to meet us, but keep them updated. In between, crowd control. Send any new hikers that come up behind us back down. Two is enough in this mess, and we don't need the distraction. Grace, gear. Everything out of both packs, laid out on that flat rock over there. Nothing touches the mud, kay? Eddie."
Buck paused, straightening to look directly at him, and for just that second, SEAL Buck flickered, and his familiar Buck showed through it, and his face was wearing an apology, filed in advance, for the thing he was about to say.
"You're my medic. Anchor-side, with Grace. I can't tell what state that guy's ankle is in, and she's likely going to be hypothermic inside four minutes of hitting that water, and when they're across, they're yours. I need you here."
Not in the water. Not with Buck. Here.
Eddie heard the whole of it. It was the right call, no question. He was the only medic they had access to, and putting the medic on the patients was the obvious choice. It was exactly what Eddie would have ordered if it was his scene. And heard, underneath that, in the flicker of apology Buck hadn't quite managed to hide, was that it was also the assignment that kept Eddie from being able to properly have Buck's back. Both things were true. Buck had specifically worded it so that both things were true so that Eddie couldn't argue with the half he'd hate without arguing against the half that made sense.
"Copy," he said.
The corner of Buck's mouth moved, barely a millimeter, surprise and warmth and something that might, in a calmer hour, have been gratitude, that Eddie had given him the word back clean rather than fighting him on a flooding riverbank. Then it was gone, sealed over, and Buck was buckling into a harness Eddie hadn't even seen come out of the pack, cinching straps with the unconscious speed of a man who had done it ten thousand times in the dark.
At the water's edge, clipped in, one hand on the line, Buck paused for a single breath. And Eddie was there, at his shoulder, without any memory of deciding to cross the distance, and the words came up out of him before he could weigh what they'd mean.
"Always come back?" He had phrased it in a way that needed confirmation. The way Grace had when he first heard her say it.
"Always," Buck said without hesitation seconds before he went into the water.
What followed took eleven minutes, and Eddie lived it as one continuous impossibility. The highline went up between the oak and a horn of boulder on the far side like the trees had been planted there for this exact purpose, tensioned and anchored and backed up faster than Eddie could track. Buck went into the current on the tether, and the water hit him like traffic, shoved at his chest, tried to take his feet, and he simply, calmly, refused it, ferrying across on the angle, using the river's own push to walk himself sideways over it, and the whole time he was talking. That was the part that reached into Eddie's chest and closed a fist.
Normally on calls, they all had a job to do. Eddie's job was rarely just to wait, and when it was, it was even rarer that he'd end up with a front row seat to what the rest of his team was doing.
It wasn't Buck's strength, which, if there was ever to be a showcase of Buck's strength, this should definitely be a feature. It was the way he spoke. Completely unhurried, like he didn't have a care in the world. There was a point in time where Eddie would have joked that the only time Buck truly didn't have a care in the world was when he was unconscious, but the retelling of his coma dream killed that thought process pretty quickly. But here he was, level and warm to a stranger, having the worst afternoon of her life: "Ma'am, I need you to look at me, just me, not the water. There you go. You're doing great. I'm gonna hand you something, and you're gonna put it on exactly like a backpack." And the woman slowed her anxious movements, because that's just the effect Buck's voice had on people.
He got to the shelf. He splinted and packaged the injured man with fast hands and clipped him to the line and sent him back across into Eddie's waiting grip, and Eddie caught a stranger out of a flood and got to work and did not let himself look at Buck still out on that rock. He tackled the woman across next, coaching her through every foot of it, and she came off the line shaking and weeping and safe, and Eddie wrapped her and worked and kept his hands moving.
And somewhere in there, working over a stranger's blue lips while an endless stream of brown water tried to take the man he cared about more than nearly anyone else, some traitor province of Eddie's brain stood entirely apart from the emergency and did the math it had apparently been building towards all day.
Because it wasn't the rope work. That was old news, realistically. It wasn't the way Buck was standing braced in whitewater, coiling slack one-handed without looking at it that was its own small crisis. It was the whole of it. It was the last four hours. It was the voice that had dropped into that stripped register on the trail and never once climbed back out, the voice that had the whole group assigned to tasks with no room to argue. It was the way five capable adults had all leaned towards him at the same instant without being told to do so. It was that Buck, hater of all things chain of command, pulled one right out of thin air and everyone had just… trusted it. He read a river like a paragraph in his favorite book, walked into the worst of it talking someone else down the whole way, and ran the entire scene as the calmest person on it.
Eddie has known this man for eight years. Eddie had spent that entire eight years being the steady one. The competent one. The one who read Buck across a scene and stepped in and took the weight and made sure his best friend didn't do the reckless thing. And it occurred to him now, with the specific clarity of a thing you should have known forever, watching Buck command a life-or-death scene with a voice that could've put Eddie himself on his knees:
I have never once, in eight years, actually been in charge of this man. He just let me think I was.
Huh, said the traitor province, with great interest, and doesn't that just do something to you?
Nope. Not the time, Diaz. Absolutely not the fucking time. God help me.
Buck sent the last of the gear back across the line and set himself up for his own return crossing, the last man to safety, the way Eddie knew Buck preferred it. And before he committed his weight to the water, he looked up. Across forty feet of flood, over the brown chop and the freight-train noise, he found Eddie at the anchor point. They didn't need words. They rarely did anymore. Eight years of reading each other across fire and noise and the width of a scene had built something that didn't require air to carry it. Buck nodded once, and Eddie understood it. He nodded back.
Buck went into the water.
He was a third of the way back when the river arrived.
That was how Eddie would describe it afterward, when EMS would ask what happened, and he stood by his phrasing. It wasn't a wave. The river arrived, all at once, a brown surge off the upper canyon a full foot higher than the water it landed on, and it was not just water. It was loaded. It came down carrying half a dead tree, root ball first, a black tangle the size of a car rolling in the current, and it took the shortest line across the channel, which was exactly the line Buck was standing in.
Eddie saw it coming and had time to scream but no time for the scream to matter.
The root ball hit Buck across the back and shoulders and drove him under, and in the same second the whole system took the load of it, the tree and the surge and Buck's weight all at once, and the redirect on the anchor side, the carabiner Steve had rigged around a horn of shelf rock to angle the line, sheared. Eddie heard it, a flat metal crack that came clean through the flood noise, wrong the way a snapping bone is wrong. The main highline held. It was the connection between Buck and the bank that let go, the system failing the way the good ones are built to fail, toward releasing the swimmer instead of pinning him under a strainer to drown on the leash.
Which meant that when the water cleared, the line was still strung tight between its two anchors, humming, intact, and useless, and Buck was gone.
The place where he'd been was just water. Downstream was just a canyon.
Evan Buckley was gone, and the rope that was supposed to hold him went with him, and now it was one more thing in the river capable of killing him.
The first thing Buck noticed was that the temperature was wrong.
Before the surface, before air, it was quickly followed by a part of his brain pointing out that it was a stupid thought. That a flood off a July storm is warm, but the cold was coming from somewhere seven years prior. The roar was pitched wrong, too. It wasn't pitched like a canyon creek bed; it was pitched like a city coming apart at the seams.
He surfaced, and he was already attempting to count heads he couldn't see.
There was nothing in view, but muddy water and canyon rock, the bank a bend behind him, and the count ran anyway, on ritual: two hikers on the shoreline, Steve, Danno, Grace, Eddie. Six. All upstream. All accounted for. All safe. But his body kept counting anyway, kept scanning the water for a seventh, smaller shape. Red glasses, light curls not unlike his own. The name was out of his mouth before any part of him signed off on it.
"CHRIS!"
The canyon ate it. Nobody was there to hear it, anyway. The sound of his own voice was what snapped the year back into place. Chris is at school. It's a Friday. He's fifteen. He's in third period. They were closer to the Santa Monica Mountains than the Santa Monica Pier.
He felt the way one of his neat little compartmentalized boxes cracked. A hairline fracture down one side of it letting 2019 in like water, and he did the thing they had built him to do. He put his hand against the crack and gave it a schedule. Later. There's a job. The job is coming back to them.
He maneuvered his own body strategically. Feet downstream. Breathe in the troughs. Manage the leash first because that was the biggest problem. Forty feet of severed tether dragging off his harness, alive in the current, hunting for something to snag on and pin him to. He kept one hand tracking it by feel, kept it downstream of his own body where it couldn't wrap him, because a trailing rope in moving water is a noose looking for a post, and he was not going to survive a flood to be hanged by his own safety line.
He read the water, picked his seam, took the hit off a boulder with his shoulder instead of his skull, and when the strainer loomed up, a dead cottonwood combing the current, he understood in one cold flash that this was the post the leash had been hunting for. If the tether caught in that tree while the water had him, it was over; he'd be held under it and combed through it and drowned on the tension. So he did the two things at once that there was no time to do one at a time or carefully: he hauled the trailing line in against his chest with the arm that still worked, and he went over the top of the tree the way you're taught, aggressive & chest first, because the alternative is being sucked through it and there is no alternative.
The tree cost him in his already injured shoulder and ribs. He caught sight of the bright line down one forearm. He inventoried it clinically from somewhere just left of his own body. Ambulatory. Functional. Superficial plus maybe not so superficial. It'll keep. Again, there was no alternative.
The canyon widened. The current spread and slowed and let go of him almost politely, and Buck got his feet under him in the shallows and stood up in water that was suddenly only water, and stood there one second longer than required, breathing hard.
He pressed his hand once more against the cracked compartmentalized box.
Later, he promised it, before starting the walk upstream.
"BUCK!"
It was out of Eddie at full combat volume before any part of him consulted the medic, and the canyon took it the same way it would take everything else he had, and it gave nothing back.
And then his medic brain kicked on, and that was the whole tragedy of the training: you didn't get to fall apart when there was a job to do. The two hypothermic patients on the bank did not stop being his patients because his heart had gone downstream.
"Steve's got it," Grace said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
Eddie looked up. She was right. Steve had a coil of line over his shoulder and was already 50 yards down the bank, moving quickly and methodically, reading the water as he went. His face was set, but Eddie knew. It was the same face Bobby made countless times. Danno was still on the phone with dispatch, updating the incident to include one of their own in the water, and his voice was level, but his free hand opened and closed at his side.
Eddie taped a splint and monitored a rewarming stranger the best he could with what he had and stared at the treeline downstream between every task, and beside him Grace stood watching.
"He's fine," she said.
Eddie looked at her.
"Haven't you been paying attention?" Her voice was steady. Her knuckles around the bag she was holding were white. "He's a god damn boomerang. You throw him at the worst thing you can find," she recited it like scripture, because it was hers; she'd written it at ten and had been living inside of it ever since. "But he always comes back. Just give him a minute."
Her eyes cut to the water once, when she thought Eddie was looking at the patient. He reached over and put his hand flat between her shoulder blades, and she leaned into it about half a pound, and neither of them said anything, and the creek roared, and it was the longest five minutes of Eddie's life, and he had once spent the better part of a day fifty feet underground.
Buck stumbled out of the treeline downstream. Soaked, listing slightly to one side, one arm dark with blood diluted pink in some spots by the river water, moving under his own power. Steve appeared on the bank above him a moment later, and Grace made a sound like a laugh and jumped up and down, making his female patient giggle.
"Told you," she said, and her voice broke in the middle of it.
Eddie was moving. He had a distant awareness of handing his patient over to Grace, saying words that were probably clinical, and then the next thing he knew, his hands were on Buck, and if anyone asked, it was triage, which was his assigned job. His hands found the back of Buck's neck because triage.
"I'm okay," Buck said, but his voice sounded wrong. His eyes were sweeping the scene over Eddie's shoulder. "Eds, I'm sorry. I lost—"
He froze. Buffered.
Eddie watched him reset in real time. "Everybody's out?"
"Everybody's out," Eddie assured him.
His grip. Eddie filled in. The line. The shelf. His footing. All obvious ends to the sentence he had started. The buffer still didn't make sense, but that was probably adrenaline. Probably.
By the time they got the whole procession back down to the trailhead, moving at ankle-splint pace, LAFD had two ambulances staged, and the day hikers Danno had turned around were standing at the tape line being nosy. He spotted the detective first, leaning against her vehicle with her arms crossed, watching two men stow a rescue's worth of gear with the unhurried precision of a pit crew.
"Buck," Athena said.
"Hey, Athena."
"Mm." She looked at him. Wet, bloody down one arm, wearing a space blanket some paramedic had insisted on. Then she looked past him, at Steve pulling the now muddy rope line into a perfect coil. Grace walked past them towards the truck, and hip-checked Buck gently on her way.
"You did good, Boomerang." Buck gave her a tired smile, and Eddie stood back and watched Athena Grant recalculate.
He knew her face. This was the face that had originally expected reckless Buck being reckless Buck; he could only imagine what had been said over the radio. Now, she was left to read the scene the way she read every scene, and found the evidence didn't match the charge. This wasn't the standard level of chaos. This was organized, prepared, and, outside of eleven minutes, a well-structured rescue. Her eyes came back to Buck slower than they'd left.
"You know, one of these days, you and I are going to have a conversation about all the things I apparently don't know."
"Athena—"
"Not today." She held up a hand, but then her face softened, and her hand reached out and gripped his jaw, turning his face slightly, inspecting him the way she'd inspect one of her own, which, Eddie thought, was exactly what she was doing. Whatever she found made her exhale through her nose. "Come here."
She hugged him hard, blanket and river water and all, one hand cradled around the back of his head, the rest taking care to avoid his clearly injured arm. Eddie watched Buck allow his eyes to close for just a second.
"You aren't allowed to scare us like that," she said into his shoulder, quiet enough that Eddie barely caught it.
"I came back."
"Mm." She pulled back and patted his cheek once, in a way that was somehow both soft and dangerous. "That's the bar now, is it?" she asked, causing Buck to smile shyly.
Eddie shrugged from where he stood behind Buck. Apparently it was.
They collected the boys and made their way to Buck's house. Chris took one look at the sling the ER had forced upon Buck, listened to approximately one-third of the heavily sanitized version, narrowed his eyes at the exact spot where the story had obviously been sanitized, and announced they were staying over. It was not a question. Eddie, who had been building toward the same conclusion since the treeline and had simply lacked the nerve to say it out loud, let his fifteen-year-old take the credit.
So there was dinner, one-handed on Buck's part and disastrous for it, Buck refusing help on principle and losing a fight with a jar of pasta sauce so comprehensively that had Grace witnessed it, he never would have lived down. Eddie took the jar out of his hands without a single word, opened it, and handed it back along with Buck's wounded dignity.
There was Theo's bath, which Eddie ran the way he'd run them before, sleeves shoved up, negotiating the great nightly treaties: no, you cannot bring the truck in the water, yes, the duck can come with us, while Buck heckled from the doorway with his bad arm in its sling and, at one critical jucture, took a full cup of bathwater down his front for a comment he'd fully earned. There was the task of getting one clean, damp four-year-old into pajamas. Chris was commandeering the living room to build a cushion fortress to updated engineering specifications, and Theo installed inside it as its warlord. Chris had also wordlessly started a very specific movie about a little orange fish, and there was, finally, the holy quiet that comes down over a house when small kids go still at the end of a long day.
Theo went first, mid-fortress, mid-fish movie. Buck carried him to bed one-armed against Eddie's wishes. Eddie followed with the trailing blanket, and they stood in his doorway for a second longer than they needed to, the two of them, watching him breathe, and Eddie thought about the shape of the day, the water, the waiting, the fear, and how none of it touched this, and how that was the entire point.
Chris held out slightly longer than Theo, and then declared with dignity that he was going to bed because he chose to, and not because he was tired. He told them both goodnight, and there was a beat where his face did something adult and knowing, and he very kindly said nothing about it before heading down the hall to the room that had become his room without anyone ever having to name it.
And then it was just the two of them.
The dishwasher ticked through its cycle. Theo's noise machine shushed faintly from down the hall. Buck's bad arm was propped up on the one pillow that didn't meet the fort's standards, and Eddie sat at the other end of the couch with a glass of water he wasn't drinking, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was the good kind of quiet, the kind they'd been fluent in for years.
"Can I say something?" Buck said.
Eddie put down the water and raised his eyebrows as a response. He watched Buck line it up, and that was the thing that undid him. That was the thing that Eddie would think about later: that he had watched this man walk into a flooding river eight hours ago with his heart rate visibly unchanged, and now this same man was staring down at his own coffee table like it was somehow the real threat. Eddie watched his hand flex against his bad knee, the one he knew was hurting after the day they had. He watched his jaw work, spooling up the nerve to say whatever he was planning. The river had never been the hard thing. Eddie understood that now, watching him. The river was easy. The river was a job with a known shape and a known answer. This was the hard thing. It always had been.
"I told you on the trail that you had noticed all of the little puzzle pieces." He took a breath. "That you just didn't know what to do with them because I made it that way. I don't want to be a puzzle anymore. I want, for once in my life, to just say the thing out loud. First. To your face. And I've been trying to work up to it a lot longer than just now; I need you to know that. I think that part's important. This isn't the river talking. It's not about a blown cover. Since New Mexico, for sure. Honestly, since Texas, maybe before that, I stopped trying to track it because tracking it hurt." His voice was being held steady by force. "And the river didn't make me finally say it. It just reminded me of the thing I keep forgetting on purpose, which is that it's never the big stuff. You ever notice that? Nobody in this family has ever had a close call doing the bold heroic thing. It's always routine. Monotony. It's a street corner. A normal Tuesday. A day at the pier." He paused. "A lab fire. A hike. There's no version of waiting for the right safe moment, because there is no safe moment; there are just moments, and I've wasted so many years keeping three words inside a box because I decided saying them out loud was what killed people—"
He stopped.
Eddie watched him hit the wall he'd been hitting for years, watched the old superstition put its hands up one final time with everyone it had ever taken standing in a line behind it, Buck's parents and every person who had ever left and Bobby behind glass who had maybe left in his own way, but different where it counts, and Eddie wanted nothing more than to reach across the couch and finish the sentence for him, to make it easy, to just say I know, Buck, I know, you don't have to — but he didn't. He sat still and kept his mouth shut, and he let Buck get there on his own because this was something Buck needed.
"I love you," Buck said.
Whole. Out loud. First. His voice cracked clean down the middle of the middle word, and he pushed through the break and landed the whole thing anyway, eyes up, on Eddie's face, not even looking for a place to hide.
"I'm in love with you. I have been for so long; the math is genuinely embarrassing, don't ask me to do it. And I kept shoving it down for years, because you were straight; that was the whole, that was the wall. Every time someone would poke at it, I'd just say, he's straight, case closed, because it was safer to file you under impossible than to risk you over three words. So that's where you lived. In the impossible box." He dragged in a breath. "And then last night you stood in my doorway, and you said it first. In my language. You learned my whole stupid language, and you realized what I had been doing, and you didn't even hesitate a little bit, and you used it knowing its weight. You left, and I stood there in my hallway thinking maybe, maybe Maddie was right. Maybe it was never actually as impossible as I made it out to be." He swallowed hard. "And I'm not saying any of this because I almost died today. I'm saying it because I didn't. I came back. I'm always going to come back. But you deserve to hear the actual words, out loud, while I'm sitting right here in front of you, instead of having to go digging for them hidden in the walls of everything I say."
Eddie reached across the couch and took Buck's good hand and laced their fingers together, and felt Buck's whole body relax. "You may have just explained what that phrase meant for you this week, but Buck, I already knew. I maybe didn't have a name for it, but I've known the shape of it for years. I just didn't think I was allowed to know, so I never really looked too closely."
Buck bit back a small smile.
"So since you went ahead and said the real words first," Eddie went on, and his own voice wasn't as steady as he'd have liked, but he found he didn't care. "I love you too. Out loud. Sitting right in front of you. Because you deserve to hear it, too. And for the record, you have never once, in all the time I've known you, been too much. Not out there today. Not in here right now. Not ever. Not to me."
Buck laughed then, finally, wet and honest and real, and he leaned in, and Eddie met him halfway across the middle cushion, careful of the sling, because Eddie simply refused to have their first kiss cause Buck any pain whatsoever.
When they broke apart, Buck kept his forehead against Eddie's, breathing, and Eddie mirrored him.
The river was still in the house somewhere; Eddie knew that, could feel it. His son saw it first, tipping him off silently with the movie and the looks, and Eddie decided that all of it would keep until Buck was ready to hand it over.
It was for another night. Tonight was theirs.