Archive of Our Own

1. The Truck

Grace knew it was bad before he said a word, because he'd waited for a FaceTime.

Buck didn't really FaceTime with Grace. He texted, he called, he sent Grace 40-second videos of Los Angeles surf and 7-minute voice memos rambling about the latest zoo exhibit. FaceTimes were for occasions, and there was only one kind of occasion that made Buck want her to see his face while he talked, which was the kind where he needed her to see it so she'd believe the face and not the facts.

He was in a hospital bed. He'd angled the phone so it was harder to tell, propped it high and tight on his face, but she was seventeen, and she'd been raised by a detective, and she could see the exact blue of a hospital blanket in the bottom corner of the frame.

"Hey, Gracie."

"Where are you?"

"So there was a little thing at work," Buck said, in his bright voice, the one that was already three steps ahead of her worry and heading it off at every pass. "Truck thing. Totally freak accident, nobody could have called it, and I'm completely fine. They're just keeping me for observation because they're thorough, which is good, you want thorough—"

"Evan. What kind of truck thing?"

"The kind where I'm fine and talking to you." He smiled. It was a great smile. Some of his best work. "A couple stitches, some bruising. I've had worse."

Behind her, Danno had drifted into the kitchen for coffee and stopped because he'd caught on to the theme of this conversation, the way parents do. He didn't come over. He stood at the counter and pretended to make coffee and listened to every word, and Grace watched his shoulders while Buck talked, and Danno's shoulders were doing the thing where they climbed.

"Send me a picture of the stitches," Grace said.

"That's gross, why would you—"

"Send me a picture or I'm telling Steve you won't."

A pause. That got him; it always got him. The threat of Steve McGarrett. He sighed; there was a shuffle, and a text came through, and it was his forearm. It was fine. Genuinely just a few stitches, and Grace let herself breathe out.

She found out the rest three days later, from a news article she went looking for because Buck had said "truck thing" and her gut hadn't settled. Ladder truck. Bombing. Buck pinned underneath it. There was footage from the standoff. The article used the word crush injury.

Danno found her on the lanai with the laptop.

"He said stitches."

"Yeah, Monkey, he did." Danno sat down next to her. He'd clearly already read it; of course he had. "He's gonna do that. You're gonna have to get used to that. He tells you the size of the thing he thinks you can carry, and he carries the rest by himself, because that's the only way anybody ever taught him it was allowed to work." He put an arm around her. "Doesn't mean you let him. But you're gonna have to pick your battles, cause there's gonna be a lot of trucks."

She didn't understand yet how right he was. She was seventeen. SHe thought a lot of trucks was a figure of speech.

2. The Wave

The text came in before she caught the news, which was the tell.

🪃Boomerang
hey so you're gonna see something about a tsunami in LA. all good here. no worries. ACB.

Grace read it four times before she turned on the news.

She sat on the floor of her dorm room with her laptop and watched the Santa Monica pier go under, watched the wall of it, watched the number of the missing climb across the bottom of the screen in a red bar, and she thought about all good here and she started, quietly, to cry, because you did not send a preemptive text that aggressively chill about a thing there was nothing to worry about. you sent that text about something you couldn't talk about.

She didn't call him. She'd learned that from the truck. If she called him, he'd perform for her, and she couldn't take the performance today, not while the red number kept climbing. So she watched the coverage instead, all of it, for hours, and she let herself imagine the version of the day that would make Buck send that exact text, and every version she imagined was worse than the last, and she was prety sure not one of them was as bad as the truth, because the truth was the one thing Buck was always downplaying.

Her phone buzzed.

Uncle Steve
You talk to him?

Grace
just a text. he's "fine"

The three dots came and went a few times. Steve was clearly choosing his words carefully. Steve was rarely careful about his words. Finally, her phone buzzed again.

Uncle Steve
He called me. He's not fine. He's alive and unhurt. But not fine. Give him a few days before you push.

Grace put her phone down and looked at the screen, at the water, and understood for the first time that there was a whole ocean of things that happened to her Buck that she was only ever going to see the postcard version of. Little suns drawn in the corner. Everything's great. Wish you were here.

She cried for a while, then she went down to the dining hall and texted him a photo of the ugliest dorm-cafeteria muffin she'd ever seen. Captioned it: this is what i'm surviving out here, pray for me because if he was going to give his favorite college freshman the size of the thing she could carry, she could give him the size of the thing she thought he could laugh at. It was the only thing she had to hand him from two thousand miles away.

He sent back a laughing emoji within minutes. Called her so brave. She could feel the gratitude through the phone.

Neither of them said the real thing. That was how it worked. She was learning that.

3. The Blood

Grace was home for the summer before her junior year of college when she came into the kitchen at midnight for water and found Steve sitting at the table in the dark.

Steve didn't sit in the dark. Steve didn't live here. Steve never once, in all of Grace's memory, had been caught sitting still. He had his phone face-up on the table in front of him, and he was looking at it like it might go off again, and his face, when the fridge light hit it, was a face she didn't have a category for. She's seen Steve angry and Steve grim, and Steve running-toward-gunfire calm. She had never seen Steve shaken.

"Uncle Steve?"

"He's okay," Steve said immediately, reflexively, the way you say the important thing first when you know where someone's mind is about to go. Just as she was about to ask for clarification, her father came in from the garage, two beers in his hand. He looked worse than Steve. Grace's heart sank as Steve spoke again, "Buck's okay. It wasn't him."

"What wasn't him?" Danno sighed as he sank into the chair next to Steve, motioning for her to sit. She ignored it. "Steve. What wasn't Buck?"

Steve rubbed a hand down his face. "There was a shooting. They were helping a kid. Eddie got hit." He paused. "Buck's partner, the one he—" Steve stopped, and something passed over his face, some private recalibration. "Buck got him out. Kept him alive till they could get him to the hospital. Eddie's out of surgery; they think he'll make it."

"Then why do you look like that?"

Because Grace knew these two, and neither of them looked like they were worried about someone they didn't know. They were worried about Buck. There had to be more than what he was saying.

"He called me," Steve said, slowly. "After. And I've known that kid a long time, Gracie. I've seen him handle a lot, things I can't tell you about, and I have never—" He turned the phone over and over in his hands. "He wasn't crying about being scared. He kept saying it wasn't about him; he was fine, he just needed to hear a friendly voice. And the whole time he's telling me it's not about him, he's telling me he can still taste it." Grace thought for a minute that Steve was going to be sick. "He crawled under a ladder truck in active gunfire to pull his partner to safety as he bled out on the street, and he can still taste his blood, and he called me to tell me he's fine."

Grace sat down slowly across from them. She didn't say anything because there wasn't anything to say. She was nineteen now, and she'd learned that, too.

"That's not a friend," Steve said, finally, mostly to himself. "The way he sounded, that's not how you sound about a friend."

And Grace, who had heard the way Buck's voice went every time he mentioned Eddie hundreds of times now, said, "No. It's not."

Steve looked at her.

"He hasn't figured it out yet. At least I don't think he has." She reached across the table and put her hand over Steve's. "How's Chris?"

"He's doing okay. Buck said the kid was doing better than he was." Danno said with a soft, tired smile.

"He's going to keep telling us he's fine, isn't he?"

"Yeah." Steve and Danno spoke at the same time.

No one really slept that night.

4. The Hostage

Six months later, Danno was on a normal call with Buck doing their usual thing, which was Danno complaining and Buck egging him on, and Grace was half listening from the couch when Buck said, easy, mid-laugh, "Okay, but that's still not as bad as when Eddie and I got taken at the —" and then stopped. Hard.

Grace and Danno both bristled.

"Got taken at the what?" Danno said. His voice had changed completely. "Evan. Taken at the what?"

"It's old news. Months ago. Everybody's—"

"You got taken? As in hostage? As in—" Danno was up off the couch now, pacing, the phone clamped to his ear. "And this is the first we're hearing of it because you got comfortable and slipped? How many of these are there, huh? How many things have you filed under old news that you were just never gonna—"

"Danno—"

"No, you know what, don't Danno me. Put it in a number. Right now. Since you've been gone, how many times have you almost died and decided it wasn't worth a phone call? Ballpark. I'll wait."

There was a long pause.

"That's not a fair question," Buck said, quiet, and it was the quiet that did it, because the quiet was defeat. The quiet meant that the number was big enough that saying it out loud would end the conversation.

Grace watched her father hear that. Watched him hear that there was obviously a running tally, that it had been running for years, that they'd been getting the FaceTimes and preemptive texts and the postcards with the little suns in the corner, and there had been a number underneath all of it the whole time, climbing, that Buck kept and they didn't.

Danno sat back down. When he spoke again, his voice had gone from furious to something tired and afraid.

"Kid, you gotta stop deciding for us how scared we get to be about you. You don't get to run the numbers on our behalf. That's not a thing you get to protect us from. We want the number."

"No, you don't," Buck said gently, like he was the one comforting Danno. "Trust me. You really don't."

After he hung up, Danno sat on the couch for a long time with the dead phone in his hand. Grace watched him closely.

"He's keeping a tally. He's got a number in his head."

"He thinks it's kindness." She said softly. She was twenty now, and she'd started keeping her own tally, quietly, from the news articles, the ones she went and found every time a text was suspiciously chill. She was up to more than Danno would have guessed. She didn't tell him that, though.

She was starting to understand it might be a family trait, this deciding-what-people-can-carry thing. She was starting to worry it had rubbed off.

5. The Lightning

He told Grace, and swore her to secrecy, which was his first mistake, and telling her at all was his second, because by then Grace was twenty-two and she had developed a policy.

"You cannot tell your dad," Buck said. "Or Steve. Especially not Steve. Gracie, I mean it. This stays with you."

"What stays with me?"

"I need the promise first."

"I'm not promising blind. I'm not an idiot."

"Gracie."

"Fine. What."

"I got struck by lightning," Buck said, "and my heart stopped for a bit, but it's totally—"

"WHAT?"

"—it's totally fine now, see, this is exactly why I needed the promise. Look at you—"

"Your heart stopped? Evan Buckley. Your heart—"

"Just for a few minutes. Ish! And they restarted it. That's a thing they can do now. Yay, technology."

Grace hung up on him. She called him back four seconds later.

"I'm not promising," she said.

"You already promised!"

"I promised before I knew it was your heart, and that voids it. That's, like, coercion or something—" Grace was already up, already moving toward where she could hear Steve and her father arguing about something on the grill. "You don't get to tell me your heart stopped and swear me to secrecy. That's not a secret. That's a hostage situation—"

"Grace, do NOT—"

She walked into the backyard, held up the phone, and said, "Buck got struck by lightning, and his heart stopped, and he wanted me to not tell you," and watched two grown men drop what they were holding. Everyone else froze.

The chaos that followed was, honestly, a relief. Steve nearly booked a flight on the spot. Danno delivered a twenty-minute oration on the subject of Buck's decision-making that Buck, on speaker now, absorbed with the patience of a man who'd expected exactly this and had decided the yelling was the price of Grace knowing. Kono asked, to no one in particular, "Did we hit 10 yet?" in the tired way that also sounded heartbroken. Grace wasn't quite sure how to respond to that, because it meant she wasn't the only one keeping a secret tally.

"You knew what you were doing," Buck said to her later, not mad, just tired.

"I have a policy. It's called Evan Buckley's heart stops beating, and I stop keeping secrets. We get to be scared. You've been deciding it for years. I'm done letting you."

"When'd you get so grown up?" He said, finally, his voice even softer.

"Somewhere around the fourth almost-funeral." She said it lightly, but it landed like lead. "You can't keep protecting me, Evan. I grew up doing the math on how close I came to losing you, over and over, with news stories and comment sections. So," She swallowed. "I'm not a kid. And I can't promise."

There was a silence.

"Okay, okay. No more promises."

It was, she'd think later, the closest he ever came to actually letting her in. He'd hold to it, mostly. For almost three years.

+1 : The Landslide

It started, like it usually did, with Buck deciding how scared they got to be.

The kidnapping made the news before Grace even heard his voice. That was the difference, that was the thing that broke the pattern he'd run for seven years, this time she didn't get a FaceTime or a text, she got a headline, she got Buck's face on a news site under a word that stopped her heart, and by the time he called it was to a family that had already learned it without his say so.

"Okay, before you say anything," Buck opened, and the voice was there, the bright one with years of practice, "I'm completely fine, I'm home, it's over, it looks so much worse than—"

"It's been three days, Buck." Grace's voice came out flat. "You've been unreachable for three days. I called you forty times."

"I know, Gracie. I didn't have my phone. They had my— it's a whole thing. I just got a new one an hour ago. There's like a thousand missed calls. My stupid phone wouldn't stop vibrating. I called as soon as I—"

"Is that supposed to make it better? That there were so many notifications it takes you an hour?"

"Gracie." And there was a pivot. She could hear him reach for it the way she always could. "Okay, listen. I hear you. You're right. This one was— it was bad. I've been shit at keeping you in the loop, and I don't want to do that anymore. So here's the deal. Give me a bit to get back on my feet, and then you can come out. For real, a whole trip. I'll take you to the zoo, we'll do some surfing, you'll get the grand tour. A real visit. I'll be all put together by then, I promise."

And Grace, twenty-five and exhausted and so relieved to hear him breathing that it overrode the years of knowing better, let the promise work. Let him paint the beautiful postcard picture, complete with a doodled sun in the corner because she wanted it so badly.

"A real trip?"

"Pinky promise. You can come out and see how well I'm doing in person."

"Okay, but I can't promise I won't have a couple stowaways."

"We'll find something for Danno to do while we surf." He laughed easily.

"Always come back, Boom."

"Always come back, Gracie."

She should have known better. A part of her did. She had been braver in calling him out when she was younger and naive, before she knew to be afraid of what the truth could hold.

The trip never got planned.

At first there were reasons, good ones. He was busy, work was heavy, they kept missing each other's windows with the time difference. Normal things. Grace let a couple of weeks go by without leaning on it because he'd asked for a couple of weeks.

Then the texts started coming in slower. Then shorter. Then they stopped having Buck in them, really, the way a text can technically be from someone and still not have any of them in it. The conversational equivalent of a wave from very far away.

Then nothing.

Grace had spent years learning to read Buck's deliveries. She was fluent in every way he had of telling her a thing while pretending not to. What she had never learned to read was silence. Buck didn't go quiet. Buck's whole thing was noise. Grace sat there and considered that this was the loudest thing he had ever not-said. That Buck going dark didn't mean nothing was wrong. It meant something was so wrong he couldn't even sugarcoat it. There was no bright version to send, so he sent nothing.

She almost flew out. She had the flights open a dozen times over those weeks, her thumb over the button, and every time she stopped, because some instinct she couldn't name told her that showing up on him uninvited was the wrong move. One thing Grace knew how to do was to trust her gut. So she held. She texted, kept it light. Thinking about you. ACB. 🪃 Giving him back the language he'd taught her. Everything's fine. Wish you were here. She kept the channel open from her side, and she waited, and it was the hardest waiting she'd ever had to do, and her father caught her staring at flights at 2 am more than once and sat with her and didn't push either, because Danno had learned it too.

"He'll come back," Danno said, once, quiet, the two of them on the lanai in the dark. "He always comes back. That's his whole thing." He didn't sound like he believed it as much as he wanted to.

"That's why I'm scared, Danno," Grace said. "What if he doesn't know how to anymore?"

Buck FaceTimed her in June, right around her birthday.

She almost didn't pick up. She was so braced for another soon, I promise, but when she realized it was a FaceTime, her stomach dropped. FaceTimes were bad. They were always bad.

His face came up, and it wasn't a hospital. It was a backyard. It looked warm and bright. He looked thinner, tired. Older around the eyes in a way he shouldn't. But he looked and sounded steady. Present. Him.

"Hey, Gracie, I owe you a really big apology, and a really long explanation, and if you still wanna kill me when I'm done, I think I can call that fair, okay?"

Grace's eyes were already stinging. "Okay."

And Buck told her. All of it. Not the bright version, not the size he thought she could carry, but the actual past three months, laid out in order, in a voice that kept going even when it shook.

He told her about the weeks after New Mexico when he wasn't okay, when he hadn't been able to be a person, when he'd reached for things he shouldn't have to get through the nights he didn't know how to get through, and about the day he'd finally admitted out loud to his captain, which had been the hardest and the first real thing. He told her about Connor and Cameron, and Grace pressed her hand over her mouth and let him say it. He told her about a stretch where he'd almost lost Athena and almost lost Eddie inside the same handful of terrible hours, the two people, he said, and then didn't finish the sentence, but Grace heard the shape of it, the two people he'd have followed into the ground. And he told her about Theo, about a little boy who looked just like him, who needed him, and about Buck standing up in the worst season of both of their lives, because it turns out, Theo was the only person on earth who could really get him to do it.

It all came out. All of it. The three months he'd gone dark rather than sugarcoat, because for the first time in his life, there had been no sunny version available, so he did the only other thing he knew how to do, which was disappear until he could look back at it instead of live inside of it.

"That's why I couldn't call. I couldn't do that to you guys while it was happening. I just couldn't, so I went quiet. I know that's worse. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Grace. I know what the quiet did because had you gone quiet on me, I would have lost my damn mind, and I did it to you for months."

Grace was crying now, openly, not for the first time at the hell he had been through, but it had been the first time she had allowed him to see it.

"Why now? After all of it, why are you finally telling me the real thing?"

And Buck was quiet for a second, and then he stood, walking into the home, and Grace could see as the rooms shifted; then he turned, and there was a little boy asleep on the couch behind him, and Buck looked back at the camera with an expression Grace had never once seen on him.

"Because I've got him now," Buck said, soft, so as not to wake him. He was moving back through the house, back to the yard. "And I think I can be a little brave for him. You were right. It's not fair that I keep trying to decide how much you can carry. I figured that wasn't working so well, anyway. So this is me letting you in. All the way in."

Grace looked at her Buck, and she saw how heavy this all was for him.

"Okay, yeah. Thank you."

"It'll be good. A new policy. Full disclosure, going forward."

"It's a good policy."

"It's a really annoying policy," Buck said, laughing as his eyes shined. "And I'm gonna hate it, and I'm gonna do it anyway."

They talked a little while longer, softer now, the worst of it set down between them. And near the end Buck did the thing, because he couldn't not, because it was pathological, like every other hard thing he tried so hard to wrap up; he reached for the bow.

"But, hey, listen, the point is I'm actually okay now," he said. "For real this time, not the fake version. I've got Theo, I've got the 118, I'm doing the work. So you don't have to worry, and you definitely don't have to come charging out here to save me, I promise. I've got it handled. I really do this time."

And the thing was, this time it was almost true. He was on the other side of it. That was the difference between this bow and every bow before it: that he'd earned this one.

So Grace let him have it. Not the way she used to, not because she was being managed, but because he'd finally said the real part first, and a person who does that had earned the right to end the call believing he's okay.

"Yeah, Buck. You handled it. Go put your kid to bed."

"Always come back, right?"

"Always."

She hung up. She sat with it for a while, the whole three months of it. Theo and the version of Buck who'd finally let her all the way in. And then she looked at the flights, the tab she hadn't closed since March.

Because here was the thing Buck didn't know, the one piece she wasn't going to hand him. He told her the truth to keep her from flying out.

It was going to do the opposite.

She opened the group chat, the one with her dad and Steve, and she typed the thing she'd been not-typing for way too long.

Grace
Ok. It's time. I finally got the whole story from Boom. It's so much worse and so much better all at the same time. Safe now, but our boy's been through the wringer since NM. He's got a kid. His name's Theo. We're going. I'll pick a weekend he's on shift so he can't say no or turn it into a whole production.

Danno
finally

Uncle Steve
say when.

And Grace booked three seats to Los Angeles a few weeks out, with enough time for all of them to get the time off work to go.

Buck had been a little bit wrong. He'd told her the truth to keep them home, and instead the truth was the thing that finally brought them running.

But that was okay. That was the whole point of telling people the real thing. It's how they know when to come.