Chapter Text
Ravi's phone had been buzzing against the table for a full minute before he picked it up, and Eddie watched his face change from mild annoyance to something more tired as he listened.
"Okay. Okay, Mrs. Ferrante, slow down. They're in the unit above you?" A pause. "No, don't go up there. Don't — please don't knock on their door. Just stay in your apartment. I'm gonna come deal with it." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yeah. Twenty minutes. Lock your door."
He hung up and looked at the beer he'd just opened as if it had betrayed him.
"Problems?" Eddie asked.
"Tenant. Upstairs unit's an Airbnb, technically not supposed to be, and whoever rented it is throwing a party that's gotten out of hand. She's seventy-one, and strangers are throwing up in the stairwell and cars parked where they shouldn't be, and she couldn't get out if she needed to." He was already standing, grabbing his keys. "It's up in the canyon. I gotta go handle it before someone trashes the place or she calls the actual cops, and it becomes a whole thing."
"You're going up to a house full of wasted strangers by yourself?"
"I was gonna, yeah."
"No, you're not." Eddie set his own beer down and stood. "That's a shit idea, and you know it. I'll come.. I'm not doing anything except drinking your beer anyway."
Ravi didn't argue, which told Eddie he'd been hoping for exactly that. "For the record, I'm not trying to be a hero. I just wanna find whoever's name is on the rental, tell them to shut it down, and get the cars off the driveway so Mrs. Ferrante can sleep."
"Sure, simple." Eddie shrugged.
It was not going to be simple. He could feel it, the same way he could before they arrived on a call. But he told himself it was just a party. Just some idiots in a rental in the canyon blowing off some steam. In and out.
The place was worse than either of them expected. It was one of those glass-and-steel jobs cantilevered off the hillside, and it seemed like every window was pulsing with light, and the bass reached them from a block away. Eddie was surprised Mrs. Ferrante was the only call he had received. Cars were nosed in at every angle, one of them straddling what he was sure was, until recently, a very well-groomed flowerbed. People spilled out onto the deck and the front steps, drinks in hand.
"Great," Ravi muttered, easing his truck as close as he could get. "Okay. Find the renter, kill the music, clear the driveway. Stay close, don't get roped into anything, and if it gets stupid, we bail, and I can call the cops myself."
"Copy."
Inside was a wall of heat and sound. Eddie did what he always did without thinking about it, mapping exits and chokepoints and the density of bodies, that part of him that never really left the sandbox and honestly had benefited him on calls. Ravi was scanning, too, less controlled and for a different reason, looking for anyone who seemed like they might be in charge, which, in a place like this, meant nobody.
That was probably why Eddie saw him first.
Across the open floor, past an island crowded with cups and an objectively impressive variety of substances, there was a knot of people moving to the music, and at the center of it was a man with his shirt half-unbuttoned, and his head tipped back, and his arms moving only to keep the rest of his crowd close. He was beautiful under the party lights. He was the most alive thing in the room.
It took Eddie a full three seconds, and then the man laughed, and the floor dropped out.
"Ravi."
"Yeah, I don't see anyone who looks like a host, we might just have to pull the breaker and —"
"Ravi."
Something in his voice made Ravi follow his eyeline, and Eddie felt more than saw the younger man go still beside him.
"Is that—" Ravi started.
"Yeah."
Buck.
He looked good. That was the first horrible thing about it. He looked golden and easy and happy, and Eddie's chest did something stupid and painful the way it had gotten in the habit of doing when Buck came up. For half a second, he let himself believe the image in front of him. That would have been easier. But then Buck turned his head, and Eddie saw his face properly, and the whole picture reassembled into something else. Something worse.
Buck's jaw was working, the constant grind of tension. His pupils were blown so wide there was almost no blue left. The sheen of sweat on him that had nothing to do with dancing. A girl he clearly didn't know had just weaved her way through the crowd to him, placed her hand flat on his chest, and Buck was covering it with his own, gazing at her as if she'd personally invented kindness.
"He's high," Ravi said. Not a question. The party, Mrs. Ferrante, and the crowded driveway just dropped several rungs down the list of priorities.
Eddie's eyes darted around the room. Honestly, throwing a dart at a DEA substance use board would have been more helpful in narrowing it down than their surroundings were.
"Jesus Christ," Eddie muttered before crossing the floor.
Up close, it was worse. Buck was hot to the touch when Edie caught his arm, damp through the shirt, and the smile he turned on Eddie was so open and so undefended it made something in Eddie want to break the nearest window.
"Eddie!" Buck said his name like it was the best news he heard all year. His hands came up and gripped Eddie's shoulders, and he leaned in until their foreheads nearly knocked. "Eddie. Eddie, oh my god, you're here, you're actually here."
"Hey. Hey, look at me."
"I am looking at you. I'm looking at you so hard." Buck's eyes kept sliding out of focus and hauling themselves back. "This is the best. Is that Ravi? He's here, too? Ravi! Come here, man."
Ravi came, and Buck folded him into the same too-warm, too-close orbit, and the two of them leaned around Buck and looked at each other and had an entire conversation in about a second and a half.
"We're gonna go, okay?" Ravi said, easy, hand on Buck's back, already steering. "It's loud in here. Let's go where it's not so loud."
"I don't wanna leave, the music's—"
"We're not leaving the party," Ravi lied smoothly. "Just gonna get some air. You're really warm, buddy."
"I feel amazing," Buck said with the total sincerity of a man whose brain was currently drowning in all of the wrong chemicals. "I feel so amazing."
Getting him out took both of them. Buck wanted to hug the girl he had just met goodbye, and then a guy covered in tattoos he called Deacon that Eddie had never seen in his life, and then he wanted to tell the DJ he loved him, and every few feet he stopped to marvel at the fact that Eddie and Ravi were real. By the time they got him down the ridiculous floating staircase and out into the cold canyon dark, Eddie's hands were shaking, and he was pretty sure it wasn't the temperature.
They poured Buck into the back seat, and Eddie climbed in after him, and Buck immediately sprawled sideways into him, boneless, still grinning at the roof.
"I think I have a case of water in the back. One sec." Eddie could hear Ravi digging around in the covered bed of his truck and indeed came back with a bottle of water. And they called Eddie a Boy Scout.
Ravi stayed standing in the open door for a second, taking the temperature of the cab in one glance, reading Eddie's face.
"I gotta call this in, the party, not — " He vaguely gestured to his own truck. "We said if it got stupid, we'd let the cops deal with it, and, uh, I think this certainly qualifies. Shouldn't take but a couple of minutes." He was already stepping away and shutting the door before Eddie could really respond, and he understood the thing Ravi was refusing to name out loud. He was giving them some space.
Eddie turned to Buck, handing him the now-opened water bottle. "Small sips," Eddie said, tipping the bottle to Buck's mouth. Water ran down Buck's chin, and he laughed at himself for it. Eddie found his wrist without making a show of it, two fingers on the pulse, counting. Fast, but not scary. His skin was hot, but not dangerous. He'd be miserable in a few hours, when he was coming down, fine in a day, physically anyway. "What'd you take tonight?"
"Molly," Buck answered absently, watching him take his pulse like it was the most tender thing that had ever happened to him. "I don't do the other stuff. The other stuff's bad. This just makes everything —" He spread his free hand, searching. "Soft. Makes everything soft. Everything stops."
"Everything stops. What needs to stop, Buck?"
And Buck, loose and stripped of every filter he'd ever owned, turned those enormous crystal blue eyes on him and said, simply, "Everything hurts all the time. All the time, Eddie. This is the only thing that makes it stop."
Eddie made himself breathe. "Okay. You're okay. Heart's going pretty fast, right? That's normal for what you took. We're just gonna sit here and let you come down slow. I've got you."
"You've got me," Buck echoed, wondering, like it was the strangest thing he'd ever heard. Then his face shifted emotions, as if it just occurred to him who he was sitting with. "You stopped talking to me."
"You sued, Buck. I couldn't talk to you." Eddie tried his best to keep his voice even.
"I had to." It came out fast and cracked. Buck pushed himself half upright, gripping Eddie's forearm, the shine in his eyes getting brighter. "Eddie, I had to. He wouldn't clear me. Everyone said I was good, said I was ready, and Bobby just— he wouldn't sign off. He kept saying I was being reckless, but I wasn't. I was good, but he just kept saying it. I couldn't fight that. How do you fight your own captain saying you're not good enough? There was no number to hit. Nothing I could do to be ready enough. The only option I had was to force his hand. It was the only way to get back home."
Eddie was stuck somewhere around Buck's third sentence. That was not the story. At least it hadn't been the story that had gone around the station in tight, furious little pieces, the one Eddie had let harden into a reason to stay angry. Buck sued because Buck was reckless and stubborn. He was impatient and impulsive. Nobody had ever said he had been cleared by medical. Nobody had ever said it was Bobby's choice.
"Bobby kept you off the truck?" Eddie said slowly.
"After I got cleared, yeah. It didn't matter, though. I lost. Lost everything anyway. The loft. Disability stops once you're medically cleared, so I lost the loft early. Then I lost the job I sued to get back, which is funny, right? That's actually funny. All of you." His breath hitched. "They offered me five million to make it go away. To sign and never come back. And I said no, because I never wanted the money. If I took it, then it was about a payout, and it was never that. I just wanted my family back; that was the only thing I—"
The front door of the cab opened. Cold air, a wash of bass, and Ravi dropped into the driver's seat, pulling it shut behind him, catching the shape of it immediately and going quiet.
Buck barely registered him. He was somewhere deeper now, the drug pulling him wide open, and when he spoke again it wasn't defense anymore. It was confession.
"But I didn't think about how hard it'd be on you guys." His face crumpled. "Oh, Chris. God, on Chris. You told me that in the store. I remember. You called me exhausting. Selfish. You said Chris needed me, and I — you were right." He was crying now, openly, no shame left anywhere in him. "I know I'm exhausting. I know I am. I'm so much all the time, and I just kept going, I made everything about me and my stupid fight and I didn't stop, even after you told me th—"
"Buck." Eddie's voice came out breathless and broken.
"I'm sorry." Buck's fingers twisted in Eddie's sleeve. "I'm sorry I'm like this. I'd take it back. Not wanting to come home, I can't take that back, but the way I did it. What it cost you. What it did to Chris. I'd take all of it back."
Nobody said anything. The engine turned over low, and Ravi let it idle, not pulling away yet. In the rearview, he found Eddie's eyes and held them. He didn't have to say a word.
Then Buck lifted his head, and the searching came back into his face, dreamy and desperate, and he looked at Eddie like he had all the answers.
"How'd you do it? You go to work. You have your life. You're fine. You're not like this. How do you move on? How do you get to the part where it doesn't hurt? I can do it. I swear I'll do anything, just tell me what the trick is cause I don't know how."
In the mirror, Ravi's look changed. It went flat and knowing. Eddie looked away at first, out the window and into the darkness of the evening.
"There's no trick, I don't think anybody's gotten there yet. I think some of us are just better liars." He offered quietly.
Buck considered this with the grave seriousness of the profoundly high. Then he tipped over into Eddie, his face against Eddie's shoulder, and mumbled, "Don't tell them, kay? The 118. Don't tell anyone what happened. Promise me."
Eddie's arm came around him easily. He knew neither of them was willing to promise anything right now, so he stayed quiet, letting Buck relax against him, hoping he wouldn't notice.
Even before the memories or the shame kicked in, Buck knew he woke up wrong. That was the only word he had for it. The comedown had come for him in his sleep the way it always did, and it had taken everything worth taking. His whole body felt scooped out and rinsed. His jaw ached. There was a low grey sitting behind his eyes that wouldn't lift for another day or so; he had gotten used to that part. It was the tax paid on borrowing joy you didn't have. Serotonin debt. He'd looked it up once, in a better month, when he was still the Evan Buckley who liked to know things just to know them.
The ceiling above him was one he couldn't place. Popcorn texture, a smoke detector with a blinking green light. Not his. Nowhere he knew.
Then it all arrived at once.
The party. The hands. Eddie's face. The truck. The water. His own voice going and going and going, spilling everything, all of it, Bobby and the 5 million and Chris and being exhausting, and oh god, he'd said that. He said the exhausting thing right to Eddie's face like a gift, like, look what I did with the terrible thing you told me, I kept it.
He was going to be sick.
Buck sat up too fast, and the room tilted, and then his stomach really did turn over.
He was on a couch, worn and soft, in a small living room that was carefully decorated. There was a game controller on the coffee table and a stack of mail and a plant that was hanging on despite clear neglect and a framed photo on a shelf of a big, loud-looking family Buck didn't recognize. Ravi's, some part of him supplied. This was Ravi's place. They'd brought him here. Somebody had pulled a blanket over him, a good one, thick, and left a glass of water and two Advil on the table by his head, lined up neat within reach.
Across the room, slumped sideways in an armchair with his boots still on, Eddie was asleep. Head tipped, one hand hanging off the armrest. He'd stayed. He saw the state Buck was in last night, and he'd chosen to fold himself into a chair too small for him and slept in his clothes rather than leave and go home to his son.
Buck couldn't do this.
He couldn't be here when Eddie woke up. Not because he thought Eddie would be cruel. That would most definitely be easier. It was the other thing he couldn't survive, and it was already obvious by the boots and the chair and the neat placement of Advil. Eddie was going to try. Eddie was going to look at the wreck that was Evan Buckley and try to fix it, the way Eddie tried to fix everything: all at once and all the way. But Eddie had a son at home who needed his father whole and steady. Not one who spent his nights folded into chairs guarding a guy who couldn't be guarded, not really. Eddie had clawed his whole life back into shape. Buck was not going to be the crack that ran back through it.
He got up as quietly as his wrung-out body would let him. His shoes were by the door, set together; somebody had lined those up, too. His shirt was still half-unbuttoned from last night, and he didn't bother fixing it, just moved on muscle memory of a hundred quiet early morning exits, easing his weight across the floor, watching the sleeping shape of Eddie the whole way.
He was three feet from the door when Eddie spoke, his eyes still closed. "You're up.""
Buck froze.
Eddie was pushing himself upright in the chair, scrubbing a hand down his face, and no matter how much he found himself wishing for the anger and the accusations, the thing that he knew in his soul to be true came out instead.
Eddie's eyes swept over him, fast and assessing. Buck had seen him do it hundreds of times on patients at scenes. He knew what this was. When Eddie spoke again, his voice came out rough and openly scared.
"How do you feel? You keep the water down?" He was up now, crossing the room, not touching, but close enough, if he changed his mind. "You look grey, Buck. You slept like four hours. Did you eat anything yesterday, before? Do you even remember the last time you—" He stopped himself and sighed. Started over, then, quieter than before. "I'm not mad. Okay? Whatever I can see your brain doing right now, it's not — I'm not mad. I'm just really glad you're breathing."
Confirmation of the thing Buck couldn't stand for.
An angry Eddie could have walked away from this clean. He would have made it easy, would have handed Buck the perfect exit, gone back to the firehouse and confirmed to them all what a major fuck up Buck always had been and always will be. But this Eddie was standing too close, and he had honest pain in his eyes and fear on his face, and he was never going to let go. This Eddie would burn himself down to the studs trying to haul Buck back up, and he'd do it gladly; he'd tell himself it was fine, and Christopher would be the one to pay the price. Buck had already watched himself nearly cost Eddie his world once. He wasn't about to do it again.
"I'm okay. I'm good, Eddie. I just need —"
He didn't know how to finish that sentence. Air. Space. For you to not do this. For you to go home to your kid and forget you found me. Even better, forget you ever knew me.
From the kitchen doorway, Ravi watched the whole thing with his arms crossed and read it in about four seconds flat. He saw Buck flinch back from being cared for. He saw the way the wall went up higher the closer Eddie got. And he understood very quickly that nothing was going to happen for Buck as long as Eddie was standing in the room being unbearably kind.
"Eddie," Ravi's voice was easy, unhurried. "Do me a favor. There's a place like two blocks down that does real coffee, not the shit I've got here. Grab three, and get him something he can actually keep down: eggs, toast, whatever. He needs to eat, and so do you; you look like that chair kicked your ass."
Eddie didn't move. He was still looking at Buck.
"It should only take like ten minutes," Ravi added, gentler. It wasn't about the coffee, and all three of them knew it. "I've got him. Go."
Eddie held Buck's gaze a second longer, but he went. He went because Ravi had asked him to and Buck hadn't asked him to stay. The only thing Eddie wanted less than to leave was to be the wall cornering Buck in, and staying would have made him exactly that. He grabbed his keys and wallet off the coffee table, threw one more look back from the door, and then he was gone.
The apartment went quiet.
Buck let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding since he opened his eyes.
"Sit down before you fall down," Ravi said as he crossed to the kitchen counter, picking up a pad of paper and a pen. He was already writing as he returned to the living room, unbothered, as if this was just a normal day for him. "You're not gonna let him help you. I clocked that about a minute ago. And I'm not going to waste both our time pretending you'll still be on this couch when he gets back with breakfast, because you won't."
Buck opened his mouth and closed it. This was not what he had expected.
"So here," Ravi tore the sheet off and held it out. On it was an address, a four-digit code, and a phone number. "That's a unit I've got sitting empty in my other building. Not a lot going on over there; the hot water's slow as shit and the light in the front room doesn't work, but there's a couch and a bed. New tenant takes it at the end of the week, so I need it cleaned and clear by Thursday, which gives you four days. But it's four days in a place that's yours. The code will get you in. The numbers mine. If you need it, it's yours."
Buck stared at the paper like it might be a trick. "Why?"
"Because you don't want or need to be rescued. What you need is a safe place to land, and I'm guessing what you want is to not have an audience." Ravi said it plainly. "Listen, man, I wasn't here for the lawsuit. I didn't get lied to or dragged through the mud. I don't have all this history sitting on my chest when I look at you. I see what you're dealing with, and what I don't want to see is your name on a call sheet one morning. That's it."
It made sense to Buck. Eddie's help would have cost him something he couldn't pay. Ravi's help cost nothing and carried nothing and meant nothing except security, at least for a minute. He could take that from a guy who barely knew him. He'd been taking less from more for months.
He took the paper.
"There are a couple things, but none of them are required. Just…asks." He paused, making sure Buck was open to listening. When he got the idea that Buck was open to it, he counted them off. "One, text me once a day. A period, a thumbs up, a god damn emoji for all I care. Something to let me know you're alive. Two, I'm not going to tell you to get sober. I'm not interested in making you white-knuckle your life; that wouldn't be fair. But not in my unit, okay? I need to know that I'm not going to have to bust down that door on a call. Safe for now and sober forever are different things; I only need the first one. And I'll come by later with some groceries. Real food, stuff you can work with. Don't fight me on it. It's happening. I can bring some other stuff, too. Books, a couple of puzzles, a deck of cards, even. It's nothing fancy, but it'll give you something for your hands to do at 4 am when you start spiraling and can't sleep."
Buck nodded slowly, then hesitated. "And Eddie…when he asks where I am?"
"I'm not going to lead with it, I won't volunteer it. But if he looks me in the eye and asks directly where you're sleeping, I'll give it to him. I'm not going to lie to him. I didn't promise to keep secrets last night, and I'm not going to promise it this morning, either. But if he doesn't think to ask, then it stays between us."
Buck's throat tightened as he turned the paper over in his fingers.
"Eddie's gonna be pissed at you. When he comes back, and I'm gone, and you're the one that gave me the out. I don't want to put you in the middle of this. That's not— you didn't sign up to take the heat for me."
"You're right, he's probably gonna be furious. He'll walk in with three coffees and figure out real fast exactly what happened, and he's probably gonna wanna take my head off, but I can handle Eddie. It's fine. Seriously." Ravi held Buck's eyes; he was steady, but he could tell Buck wasn't buying it. "Buck, from what I can tell, every single piece of this got decided for you. Trace it back all the way to the bomb. None of it was your choice. You didn't do anything wrong; you just got dealt a shit hand. And every chance you got to control it, someone stepped in and chose for you. I get that. So if I can help give you some control back by giving you a choice on where you go this morning, I'm gonna do it, and I'm not gonna let Eddie stressing out stop me from doing it. If he's mad, he's mad. He'll get over it. I'd rather eat that than be one more person who took a choice out of your hands." He nodded at the door. "Trust me. It's all good. Go, before he gets back."
Buck stood there one more second, taking in the chair with the dent Eddie had left in it and the water glass with the two Advil lined up neat by where his head had been.
Then he went.
Ravi didn't try to stop him. He picked up the blanket off the floor, folded it, set it on the arm of the couch, and flipped through the stack of mail on the coffee table just for something to do with his hands. He was still standing in the living room when he heard, a few minutes later, the front door open and Eddie's voice call out, easy and unsuspecting, balancing three coffees and a paper bag.
"Okay, they were out of the good pastries, so I got—" The bag rustled as it was set down. The quality of the silence shifted. "Ravi. Where is he?"
Ravi turned to face him slowly. Resigned.
"Ravi." Eddie was already scanning the empty couch, the folded blanket. He looked back at the door he had just come through. Ravi had done the math; he may have missed him on the street by thirty seconds. "Where's Buck?"
"He's safe." Ravi figured that may be the most important piece to start with. "He's gone, but he's okay. I gave him somewhere to go. He's safe." It felt like it needed repeating.
Eddie set the coffees down carefully, which was the thing Ravi noticed. A man who slams things down is a man letting the pressure out, and a man who sets things down gently is a man with nowhere for it all to go.
"You gave him somewhere to go?"
"I did."
"You waited till I left. You sent me for coffee, and the second I was out the door you handed him a way to disappear?"
"Yeah."
Eddie laughed, short and disbelieving. Buck would have understood it as Ravi being in danger. Ravi still didn't know Eddie that well. "I sat in that chair all night, Ravi. Making sure he didn't stop breathing. And you, what, decided while I was standing right there that the move was to get rid of me so you could help him vanish?"
"I decided that he was leaving whether I helped him or not, and that the only question was whether he was heading in a safe direction, or back to the people he was with last night. You want to be mad at me for giving him an exit strategy that came with some trust and my phone number, fine. Okay. Be mad. But be mad about the right thing.
"Don't." Eddie's voice dropped. "Don't act like you were just being reasonable right now, Rav. This was fucked, and you know it."
"I'm not disagreeing, man. But come on." Ravi had a flatness to him now that hadn't been there a minute ago; the easy warmth that he had sent Eddie for coffee with was gone. "He was gone the second he opened his eyes and saw you asleep in that chair. Before I ever said a word. You want to know why?"
"Because he's ashamed. Because he thinks we hate him, because—"
"Because you were being kind." It stopped Eddie dead in his tracks. "You woke up, and you didn't yell at him, you checked his vitals, and you told him you weren't mad at him, and you looked at him like he was something you were scared of losing, and I'm not saying that's a problem, but I am saying it was a lot for him to be in the room with right now. It would have made sense had we been pissed. He thinks he's well-earned yelling and anger. He doesn't think he deserves to be dragged out of it. It freaked him out. And with your history? He's not going to want you and Chris anywhere near this. You have to know that."
"That's not his call to make."
"It's completely his call to make. Hell, it's the only call he's been allowed to make since a bomb went off underneath him. I shouldn't have to spell that out for you. Everybody has spent all this time making choices for him without ever asking him, even worse, deciding that he wasn't even capable enough to be in the damn room half the time, and I'll be damned if I was gonna take one more choice away from him just so that you could feel better about where he sleeps tonight." Ravi shook his head. "I'm not doing that. I'd rather you be pissed at me."
Eddie turned away, both hands on the back of the armchair he had slept in, gripping it, and for a long moment he didn't say anything at all. His shoulders were rigid. When he spoke, it was quieter, and there was something raw underneath it that anger had just been sitting on top of.
"He's using, Ravi. He's out there right now going wherever he's going, and in a couple hours he's going to hit the floor, and the only thing that's going to make that stop right now is the exact thing that could kill him, and I can't—" His voice cracked, and he stopped, breathed, forced it back down. "I can't fix that. I don't even know where he is. I can't make him let me in. There's nothing I can do."
Ravi's face changed, softened at Eddie's admission, because that was the part that mattered underneath the fury he had directed at Ravi. It wasn't that Ravi helped Buck leave. It was that Eddie had spent the night proving he'd do anything, and it turned out anything wasn't enough, that the one person he'd move the earth for had looked at him moving the earth and run from it.
"There isn't." Ravi agreed, albeit gentler now. "The drugs aren't the part that needs fixing. The drugs are a band-aid right now, and what would you say on a call if someone had a dirty kitchen rag to a knife wound cause there's no other option? It's not ideal, but it's not nothing. They'd bleed out with nothing, right?" Eddie nodded halfheartedly, already seeing where this is going. "You take away his Band-Aids right now, and he's going to burn the place down. The one thing that's going to help here is fixing the thing that put him in this position, and you aren't expected to fix it because you aren't the one who broke it. Neither of us made that call."
Ravi watched the thoughts line up inside Eddie's brain like a neon arrow pointed in a direction he hadn't quite meant to go in. Nonetheless, Ravi had made a very solid point. It wasn't Eddie or Ravi who made the call. Buck hadn't made the call. The lawyers, the city, they were faceless; there was nobody in them to hate.
But somebody had made that call. Somebody had looked at a stack of medical clearances and said no. Somebody had been so scared of losing him that he'd rather Buck lose everything. Somebody had let the 118, Buck's family, believe Buck was the villain and never once said I'm the reason he sued; I locked him out first. Someone had let that sit and calcify while Buck dissolved in the dark. Someone had let them grieve a man who'd done nothing but ask to come home.
"Bobby knew. The whole time."
"Okay," Ravi took a step forward, both hands out like he was trying to calm a wild animal. "Okay, slow down. Yeah, that's all true. And also, Buck asked for privacy. I know we didn't promise, but he asked. He begged." He said it carefully, laying it out like a wire he didn't want Eddie to trip.
Eddie was already reaching for his keys.
"Eddie. If you walk out of here right now and throw this in Bobby's face —"
"I know. " He wasn't looking at Ravi. "I hear you."
"Then don't do this. Buck finds out the first thing you did was take it directly to the one man who— you know this is going to hurt him. I'm not saying never, just…just not like this, Eddie. Give it a week. See how this plays out."
"I can't. It's gone on too long, Ravi. I've been so mad at the wrong person. I yelled at him in the middle of a damn grocery store. He's carried that this whole time. He was drowning, and Bobby let him. I can't sit on that. I can't walk into shift and pretend like I trust my Captain."
Ravi knew he had lost this one. "As long as you know what you're choosing, I guess."
"I know," Eddie said, already at the stairs, not turning around again. Knowing what he'd be facing if he did. He went down to the truck and got in and sat there a second with his hands on the wheel. Buck was somewhere in the city waiting for a crash they all knew was coming, and it wouldn't be like this if one man hadn't been too afraid to sign his name.
Eddie turned the key in the ignition.
He knew the way to Bobby and Athena's without thinking about it. He'd driven it a hundred times for casual. It wasn't a long drive, but it was long enough for him to stop and think about what he was doing.
He didn't stop.