Chapter Text
The smell of the 118 locker room was, objectively speaking, terrible. It was a potent, never ending cocktail of damp cotton, industrial disinfectant, stale boots, and whatever body wash Chimney had bought in bulk from Costco.
To Buck, standing in front of his open locker with his uniform shirt unbuttoned, it smelled like resurrection.
"I’m just saying," Chimney’s voice echoed from the bench behind him, loud and animated as he yanked a navy sock over his heel, "if a guy shows up to a first date with a live parrot on his shoulder, you don’t wait until dessert to ask if it’s service animal certified. You ask before the breadsticks arrive. That is basic survival."
"Maybe the parrot had great conversational skills," Hen offered from two lockers down, her back turned as she adjusted her collar. Her voice was dripping with dry, affectionate irony. "Some of us appreciate a man who doesn't monologue about his crypto portfolio for two hours, Chim."
"The bird bit the waiter’s earlobe off, Hen! That’s not a conversation starter, that’s a liability claim!"
Buck let out a low, helpless laugh, his chest shaking as he reached for his LAFD shirt. He pulled it over his head, the familiar weight of the dark blue cotton settling over his shoulders like an old skin he’d thought he might never get to wear again. Across from him, Eddie was leaning against the door of his own locker, arms crossed over his chest, watching Buck with a faint, warm curve at the corner of his mouth.
There was no edge in Eddie’s posture anymore. The sharp, bruising tension that had hung between them for so long, the grocery store fight, the silence that felt like swallowing glass, the agonizing distance of the lawsuit, had evaporated into the damp locker room air two shifts ago. They had spent forty five minutes after a shift sitting on the bench in an empty locker room, both red eyed and hoarse, dragging every ugly, terrifying piece of truth out into the open until there was nothing left to cry over.
I had just been so angry, Eddie had admitted, his voice cracking in a way that still made Buck’s ribs ache when he thought about it. I was angry because you left me behind with a whole team, but it’s not a team if you’re not here.
I just wanted my family back, Buck had whispered into his hands. I didn't know how else to make them let me back.
They had hugged until Eddie’s ribs creaked, and then Eddie had shoved him playfully in the shoulder, called him an idiot, and shared his half cold breakroom coffee. Everything was normal again. Better than normal, there was a softer, more protective gravity to the way Eddie hovered in Buck’s orbit now, catching his eye across the engines, bumping their knees together under the table upstairs during dinner.
"Buck," a deep, calm voice called from the doorway.
Buck turned. Bobby was standing at the entrance of the locker room, holding two coffees. He looked older than he had, there were deeper lines etched around his eyes, but his gaze was clear, warm, and entirely devoid of the defensive wall he’d put up during the legal arbitration.
"Bobby," Buck said, standing up a little straighter out of instinct.
"Got a minute? Got you a coffee." Bobby gestured toward the stairs leading up to the office.
Eddie gave Buck a quick, reassuring kick to the ankle with the toe of his boot. "Go on. If Chimney starts explaining his bird theory again, I'm throwing a boot at him."
"I heard that, Diaz!" Chimney yelled.
Bobby’s office was quiet, Bobby handed Buck a mug of coffee, real coffee, not the sludge from the kitchen pot, and leaned back against the edge of his desk, crossing his ankles.
"How’s the leg feeling after yesterday?" Bobby asked, his eyes tracking Buck’s stance.
"Good," Buck said honestly, curling his hands around the warm coffee. "Really good."
Bobby nodded slowly. He looked down into his own coffee for a long second, his thumb tracing the lid, before he looked back up at Buck. "Good. Because I need to say something to you, Buck."
Buck’s stomach did a brief, involuntary flutter, the lingering muscle memory spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. "Bobby, we talked about the,”
"I know," Bobby interrupted gently. "We talked about the light duty, and we talked about the department protocols. But I didn't say what I needed to say to you. As your captain, and as someone who cares about you." Bobby set his coffee down on the desk. "I let my own fear get the steering wheel, Buck. I watched you get crushed under that truck, and I was so terrified of watching you die on my watch that I stopped looking at what you were capable of doing. I blocked you because I thought I was protecting you, but all I did was take away your livelihood and your family when you needed us most."
Buck swallowed hard, his throat tightening. "Bobby,"
"I was wrong," Bobby said firmly, his eyes locking onto Buck’s with an intensity that brooked no argument. "I was wrong, and I'm sorry. You earned your spot in this house repeatedly. You belong here, Buck. And I’m glad you’re home. I am really sorry I did that to you."
The warmth that spread through Buck’s chest started somewhere behind his sternum and radiated all the way out to his fingertips. It was the final, clean stitch in a wound that had been gaping since the day the bombing truck had fallen on his leg.
"Thank you, Bobby," Buck managed, his voice a little rough around the edges. "You... you don't know how much that means to me."
"I think I have an idea," Bobby smiled softly, clapping a heavy, fatherly hand onto Buck’s shoulder. "Now go make sure Eddie doesn't actually throw a boot at Chimney."
Buck walked out of the office feeling lighter than he had in so long. His family was intact. His leg was solid. He was back on the heavy rescue engine, sitting across from the people he loved most in the world.
Everything was completely, beautifully, one hundred percent solid.
Which only made it about fifty times more awkward that Buck was currently harboring two massive, borderline ridiculous secrets from the entire 118, and he had no earthly idea how to explain either of them without sounding like a crazy person.
The problem had started exactly eighty two days ago, during the absolute depths of Buck’s administrative exile.
He had been sitting at the kitchen island of his loft, his leg propped up on a stack of throw pillows, staring at a spreadsheet on his laptop that was rapidly turning from Oh God into Oh Fuck.
People who hadn't ever been through a major orthopedic trauma and a subsequent legal battle rarely understood the suffocating math of it. Sure, the LAFD health plan was excellent, but excellent didn't mean it covered the secondary specialist who had consulted. It didn't cover the specialized hydrotherapy sessions his physical therapist had recommended to keep his scar tissue from binding. And worker’s compensation, while steady was a fraction of his normal take home pay, stripped of the overtime hours, hazard pay, and shift differentials that Buck usually relied on to pad his checking account.
Add the initial retainer fee for the lawyer he had hired during his lowest moment of panic, and then the cost when he dropped the lawsuit, not to mentioned Buck’s savings account was looking like a deflated balloon.
And then, because the universe apparently had a twisted sense of comedic timing, his Gmail inbox had pinged with a notification from his landlord’s management company.
Subject: Notice of Lease Termination / Ownership Transfer - Unit 4B
To: Evan Buckley
From: Apex Downtown Properties
Dear Tenant, Please be advised that your building located at 4th Street has been sold to a private development group. As your current tenancy is operating on a monthly agreement, the new ownership has elected not to renew residential leases for Phase II renovations... You have thirty (30) days from the first of the month to vacate the premises.
Buck had reread the email four times, waiting for his brain to process the English language.
"Thirty days," he had said to the empty loft, his voice echoing off the concrete ceilings. "I’m on crutches and I have thirty days to move."
What had followed was a three week descent into the ninth circle of hell, the Los Angeles rental market.
He couldn't afford another downtown loft, not with rent prices spiking twenty percent since he’d originally moved in, not to mention his loft was just a great deal, and certainly not with his reduced worker’s comp checks. Apartments closer to the 118 had no parking, places in North Hollywood required a longer commute in traffic that would make his healing leg throb, and everything in West Hollywood was the size of a shoebox and cost as much as a small island.
It was on a rainy afternoon, while scrolling through a rental site on page fourteen, that he had found it.
It was a little 1940s Spanish revival bungalow. It had three small bedrooms, a terracotta tiled front porch, a driveway shaded by an overgrown lemon tree, and original hardwood floors that had been refinished sometime during the Reagan administration. The kitchen had yellow ceramic tiles and cabinets that didn't quite shut all the way, but it had a fenced backyard, an in unit washer/dryer, and the landlord, an elderly retired high school principal named Mr. Henderson, was asking a price that was somehow only four hundred dollars more a month than Buck’s old loft.
Buck had driven out to see it thirty minutes after calling. He had shaken Mr. Henderson’s hand, walked through the sunlit, slightly dusty living room, and signed the lease on the hood of his Jeep with a ballpoint pen.
It wasn't until he had loaded his first carload of cardboard boxes into the driveway and opened Google Maps to check the nearest grocery store that the geographic reality of his new address had landed on him like a dropped anvil.
He was on Cedar Terrace.
Buck had stood on his new terracotta porch, staring at the blue dot on his phone screen, his thumb slowly zooming in on the map. He zoomed in past the corner gas station. He zoomed in past the neighborhood park. He zoomed in until the individual street grids were legible.
Eddie Diaz lived on Bedford Street.
Bedford Street was exactly one block west of Cedar Terrace. If Buck walked out his back gate, crossed the narrow residential alleyway, and stood on his toes to look over a six foot wooden privacy fence, he would technically be looking into Eddie’s backyard.
He was 0.2 miles away from Eddie’s front door. A sixty second walk. A forty second jog if it was raining.
At the time, right in the middle of the lawsuit freeze out, a cold sweat had broken out across the back of Buck’s neck. If Eddie found out that Buck, the guy who had just slapped the department with a lawsuit, had quietly moved into a rental house one single street over from him, Eddie would think he was a psychotic stalker. He would think Buck was staging some kind of unhinged, Single White Female perimeter watch around him and his son.
So, Buck had kept his mouth shut. He had moved his couch, his bed, and his endless crates of miscellaneous things in the dead of night, using a rented U Haul van, praying to every god in the sky that Eddie’s truck wouldn't turn the corner while he was wrestling a box spring up the porch steps.
And then, three weeks later, they had made up. The lawsuit was dropped. The locker room tears were shed. Eddie had squeezed his shoulder and told him he missed him.
And Buck... had just never found the right second to mention it.
How were you supposed to drop that into casual conversation over dinner? “Hey man, pass the garlic bread, also I live behind your backyard now, don't look out your window too hard.” Every day he waited, it felt weirder to say. After two weeks back at work, it had crossed the event horizon of social awkwardness. Now, if he admitted he’d been living a block away for two months without saying a word, Eddie would look at him like he’d lost his goddamn mind.
But the house, as charming and sunlit as it was, still came with that four hundred dollar rent increase. And Buck, still recovering from the financial crater of his time off, had needed a way to bridge the gap.
Which brought him to Secret Number Two.
Two weeks before his reinstatement at the 118, Buck had been unpacking the last of his storage tubs the heavy, taped up plastic bins he’d lugged around from his nomad days before Los Angeles, full of mementos from Montana, Peru, and his stint on a ranch in Wyoming.
At the bottom of a blue tub, wedged between a worn out flannel coat and a box of old unused postcards, he’d found a thick manila envelope. Inside was a crisp, heavy cardstock certificate with a gold foil seal.
STATE OF OREGON - BOARD OF MASSAGE THERAPY
CERTIFIED LICENSED MASSAGE THERAPIST (LMT)
Awarded to: EVAN BUCKLEY
In recognition of the satisfactory completion of 1,000 hours of instruction in Anatomy, Physiology, Kinesiology, Holistic Myofascial Release, and Deep Tissue Bodywork.
Buck had sat on the floor of his new, empty third bedroom, holding the paper in both hands.
People always forgot about his travel years, or they assumed he’d just spent them bartending and washing dishes. But when he was twenty one, living out of a duffel bag in a misty coastal town in Oregon, he’d spent seven months enrolled in a rigorous, full time bodywork institute. He’d done it initially because the tuition was cheap and the dorms were included, but within two weeks, he’d fallen completely in love with the work.
There was something simple about massage therapy. In firefighting, you arrived when the world was already burning, you dragged people out of crushed steel or smoking ruins, you pumped adrenaline into their veins, and then you handed them off to a surgeon and never saw them again. It was loud, terrifying, and chaotic.
Massage was the exact opposite. It was quiet. It required listening with your fingers, feeling the subtle, tough resistance of a tight muscles, understanding the chain reaction between a stiff hip flexor and a chronic lumbar spasm, applying just enough steady, patient pressure to convince a frightened human nervous system that it was safe to let go.
He had been good at it. Really good at it. His instructors had praised his intuitive grounding and the broad, warm strength of his hands.
Why not? Buck had thought, looking around the small bedroom with its pale hardwood floors and window looking out over the lemon tree. Why the hell not?
He had spent the next forty eight hours on a mission. He painted the bedroom walls a soft, matte sage green that he’d bought on sale at Home Depot. He scoured high end estate sales and Craigslist until he found a professional grade, extra wide oak massage table with thick memory foam padding and a face cradle, which he hauled home in the Jeep and scrubbed down with organic cleaner.
He ordered crisp white flannel sheets, a heavy woven blanket, and a bolster pillow. He bought a small, tasteful bamboo shelving unit and stocked it with amber glass bottles of organic jojoba oil, arnica muscle salve, and eucalyptus essential oils. He set up a subtle floor lamp that cast a warm, golden glow across the room, and placed a small Bluetooth speaker in the corner that played a twenty four hour loop of Pacific Northwest rain and low frequency forest sounds.
When he stood in the doorway and turned the lights low, the room looked like a four hundred dollar an hour holistic spa in Santa Monica.
"Okay," Buck had whispered to himself, nodding with satisfaction. "Now I just need people whose body hurt."
His marketing strategy had been, in hindsight, entirely unbalanced.
He didn't want to use his personal social media, half the 118 followed him on Instagram, and he could already hear the relentless jokes Chimney would make if he posted a story advertising.
Instead, he’d spent two evenings at his laptop using a free graphic design website to build a website. www.BuckleyBodyworkLA.com. It was slightly clunky, he’d used three different shades of green for the fonts and hadn't quite figured out how to align the margins on the mobile version, but it had a clear, easy to use online booking calendar, a professional breakdown of his LMT credentials, and a straightforward pricing list that was thirty percent cheaper than the luxury studios downtown.
Then, he’d gone to Staples and spent forty two dollars printing eight hundred double sided, soothing teal pamphlets on heavy gloss paper.
CHRONIC PAIN? WORK RELATED STRESS? ATHLETIC RECOVERY?
BUCKLEY HOLISTIC & DEEP TISSUE BODYWORK
Certified Licensed Massage Therapist (1,000+ Hour Clinical Certification
Specializing in Myofascial Release, Deep Tissue Trigger Point Therapy, and Lumbar/Cervical Decompression.
Private, professional residential studio located in LA.
Scan the QR Code below for 20% off your first 60 minute therapeutic session!
For four days straight, while his leg finished its final week of PT clearance, Buck had turned into a 1990s suburban paperboy.
He had put on his running sneakers, a pair of dark sunglasses, and a wide brimmed khaki bucket hat that he prayed made him unrecognizable from more than ten feet away. He had stuffed a canvas messenger bag with pamphlets and walked for miles around.
He pinned them to the corkboards at local community centers. He left stacks of them on the tables of organic juice bars and independent coffee shops (after asking the baristas very politely). And, for three memorable afternoons, he had walked up and down residential sidewalks, sliding the glossy teal squares into postal boxes and fence clips.
He’d almost had a heart attack on Thursday afternoon when a red LAFD paramedic ambulance had rattled down York Boulevard while he was stuffing a flyer into a mailbox outside a yoga studio. Buck had literally dived behind a large, decorative terracotta planter of bougainvillea, crouching in the dirt with his bucket hat pulled down over his ears until the siren faded into the distance.
If Hen sees me in this hat, he had thought, his heart pounding against his ribs as he brushed garden mulch off his shins, I will never hear the end of it.
But the humiliation had paid off.
Oh man, had it paid off.
Within seventy two hours of the pamphlet drop, his website’s booking calendar had started pinging.
His first client had been Mrs. Gable, a seventy one year old retired librarian from three streets over who had severe osteoarthritis in her hips and shoulders. Buck had spent ninety minutes working with gentle, rhythmic myofascial stretching and warm arnica oil, listening patiently while she talked about her granddaughter’s cello recitals. When she got off the table, she had literally teared up, pressed an extra twenty dollar bill into his palm, and immediately booked a standing morning slot.
By the end of the week, Mrs. Gable had apparently told her entire Wednesday morning bridge club.
Then came David, a forty year old high school calculus teacher who was training for the LA Marathon and had hamstrings like over tightened steel cables. Buck had dug his elbows into David’s iliotibial bands until the man had groaned into the face cradle like he was dying, only to stand up afterward and declare that Buck was a wizard who had cured his knee pain.
By the time Buck’s first official 24 hour shift back at the 118 rolled around, he had ten regular clients on his weekly calendar. He was working three afternoons a week on his off days, clearing enough cash to easily cover the four hundred dollar a month rent increase, his monthly car payment, and had extra leftover.
More than that, he loved it.
There was a strange, deep peace that settled over him when he was in the sage green room. When he was standing over the table, his forearms slick with jojoba oil, his breathing naturally slowed to match the rhythmic rainfall from the speaker. He didn't have to be funny. He didn't have to prove he was useful or brave or worthy of a spot on a truck. He just had to find the physical knot where someone was carrying their fear or their exhaustion, and use his hands to make it go away.
It felt like a safe, quiet little garden that belonged entirely to him.
And as Buck sat on the bench in the 118 locker room, pulling his heavy boots on and listening to Eddie and Chimney argue about the last call, he just decided.
He wasn't going to tell them.
Not yet. Not when everything was finally so peaceful. Firefighter Buck would be the loud, energetic guy who took risks and threw out random facts.
And Therapist Buck, the guy who lived in a little house with a lemon tree one street away from Eddie, wearing soft joggers and smelling like eucalyptus, would remain his own private secret.
What was the worst that could possibly happen?
"Earth to Buckley!"
Buck blinked, his head snapping up. Eddie was standing directly in front of him, leaning over with his hands braced on his knees, his dark eyes sparkling with amusement.
"You in there?" Eddie asked, waving a hand in front of Buck’s face. "You've been staring at your left boot lace for three minutes. Bobby's already by the engines."
"Right! Sorry," Buck scrambled up, his knees popping slightly as he grabbed his belt. "Just... thinking about my schedule this week."
Eddie straightened up, his gaze softening into that warm, familiar expression that always made Buck’s collar feel a tiny bit too tight. "Don't overdo it on your first week back, okay? You don't have to prove anything to anyone here. We got your back."
"I know," Buck smiled, feeling a genuine, heavy ache of affection for the man standing in front of him. He reached out and lightly cuffed Eddie’s shoulder. "I'm good, Eddie. Really. Everything’s great."
"Good," Eddie said, turning to walk toward the engines. Then he paused, glancing over his shoulder with a slight, puzzled frown. "Hey, did you change your shampoo or something?"
Buck froze, his hand hovering over the handle of his locker. "Uh. Why?"
"I don't know," Eddie sniffed the air casually as he headed out the door. "You smell like a fancy forest. Like... eucalyptus or something. It’s nice."
Buck stared at the empty doorway for three full seconds, his heart doing a single, hard thump against his ribs.
You're fine, he told himself fiercely, jogging toward the engines. He lives on Bedford. You live on Cedar. He works forty hours a week and spends every other waking minute with Christopher. There is literally zero chance our worlds ever cross.
He was, of course, completely and utterly wrong.