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"Uh, Cap?" Bobby looks over at her inquisitively, and Hen raises an eyebrow at him. "I think you lost the probie."
Hen watches the expressions flit over his face: shock, confusion, irritation, resignation. What she has internally dubbed the Buckley shuffle.
"Can you go grab him, Hen?" Bobby asks, looking exhausted. "And, just...make sure that he doesn't do anything stupid."
Hen snorts. "No promises, that kid has some long-ass legs."
It takes surprisingly little to find Buck, tucked in the shadow of an ambulance and making some slow gestures with his hands. Hen squints at him as she walks closer, and he whirls around, eyes comically wide.
"Hen!" he squeaks. "I was just--"
She puts up a palm. "Save it."
Looking into the ambulance, she furrows her brows. It's the woman from earlier, who couldn't tell them how she was feeling. She looks at Buck again, and Buck stumbles over his words as they spill out of him.
"I wasn't doing anything weird, I swear. I was just asking Janine if, uh, if something was wrong."
Hen looks at the woman, who looks back at her blankly. Buck, behind her, continues: "She said that, um, that her back feels kind of weird. And, um--"
He pauses, and Hen frowns when he doesn't start again. She turns around to look at him, but he's squinting at something behind her, shaping something out carefully with the shape of his mouth, like a little kid sounding out a new word.
"It feels, uh, tight....?" he sounds weirdly hesitant about it. Hen frowns.
"She said that?"
"She told me that," Buck corrects, for some reason. Hen tilts her head at him, then turns to the woman again, who's looking at the both of them with a tight edge to her eyes. Hen reaches forward, and she flinches a bit, eyes darting to Buck for a second, before allowing her to gently pull up her shirt, prodding at the back. Ah, there it is.
"Just some road rash," Hen hums, she turns to the woman. "I'll get that disinfected and bandaged for you-- it should be fine, as long as you don't irritate it too much."
The woman doesn't respond, and Hen waits for her, hoping that the shock isn't too bad for her to understand. She's spoken to Buck, apparently, so Hen has high hopes. Thankfully, after a few moments of looking behind Hen, the woman nods, slow and careful.
Hen smiles and shifts behind her to grab the bandages, disinfecting her back and bandaging it carefully. She catches the hint of movement at the edge of her eyes, and looks up as she's finishing to catch Buck's right hand twisting around his sternum, fingers making a lopsided, sideways sort of peace sign. She raises an eyebrow at him, and he flushes, shrugs back.
She tucks the gesture away at the back of her mind, hopping off the ambulance. The woman looks more relaxed than before, smiling at them. Her gaze sweeps over both of them, and she lifts a palm to her chin, tapping it with her fingers before lowering her hand halfway. Hen blinks, turns to Buck. Buck, who smiles at her, and brings his own arm in a slow sweep to his stomach, like he's about to bow.
Huh.
Before Hen can comment, Bobby's voice crackles over her comms: "Wilson, Buckley, everything clear? We're gonna wrap things up and go back to the station."
Hen hesitates, but replies: "Copy, Cap. Everything's clear here, just taking care of a patient. Nothing too serious."
Buck bounces on his toes, all station puppy, as she turns to him, the two of them beginning to return to the engine. "Was that..." she begins. He tilts his head at her. "...sign language?"
"A little," Buck says it easily, like it wasn't any sort of secret at all. "Mostly fingerspelling, so, like, only a little."
Fingerspelling, Hen mouths to herself, extrapolating the meaning from context. "And where did you--"
"Cap!" Hen's head turns to see Bobby waving them into the engine, his face still slightly disapproving.
"I see Hen found you after you wandered off," he says, with the mild tone of voice that she's learned is Minnesotan for pissed off.
Buck winces, catching the same thing. "I was just--"
"-- helping a patient," Hen interrupts, drawing both their gazes to her. "He noticed that she had a little bit of road rash that we hadn't bandaged yet. I took care of it."
Wide blue eyes turning to her. Hen is not, historically speaking, particularly moved by white boys giving her puppy dog eyes, but she's kind of fond of this one, so she gives him a little smile back.
He beams in response, sunshine-bright, and Bobby turns to her too, gives her a little eyebrow raise. She shrugs back, nods.
Bobby sighs. "Fine," he says. "Just-- make sure you don't disappear without informing the team in the future, alright?"
"Yeah, Cap!" nodding so vigorous that Hen wonders if it'll defeat the lock of his hair gel. Maybe that's why he uses so much of it. "Understood, totally, one-hundred-percent, absolutely understood."
Hen can see the stern expression melt from Bobby like ice cream in the LA summer, and she resists the urge to snicker about it. They all climb in the back of the engine, where Chimney raises an eyebrow at her. Hen shrugs back, a silent later.
Back at the station, Hen manages to catch Buck as he's putting his turnouts away, before he bounces into the loft. Probably to either pester Bobby into some sort of Hallmark mentorship moment or wind Chimney up until they get into a tussle, based on precedent.
"So," she says, and Buck stills in his tracks, staring at her with big, innocent eyes. "Signing?"
"Just a little," Buck says. "It's really cool, you know? Like-- they can do grammar with their face, isn't that awesome?"
Hen scrunches her face up, trying very hard not to be terribly endeared by him. She isn't especially successful. "I didn't know you knew sign language," she comments, keeping her voice mild.
A shrug. "I mean, I kind of don't?"
"You talked - er, signed - to that woman fine."
Buck makes a furrowed little expression. "I mean, I had to spell a lot of stuff out? I feel really bad, I'm super out of practice. I bet she thought I was so slow."
"But you got the job done," Hen says. Buck lights up, just a little, even though it was barely praise at all.
"Yeah!" Buck says. "She was super nice about it, I'm glad I could help."
He puts his jacket back, then bounces off. Hen watches him go, frowning, realizing that she's come away from this conversation with more or less net zero new information.
The new probie. What a strange guy.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Buck whips his head up at her, expression startled, fingers hovering over the open circuit breaker, the frame hanging loose to reveal the wires beneath. "Uh..."
"Our orders are to evacuate, Buck," Hen points out, as if Buck hadn't been there when Bobby had told them, hadn't been the first to nod and rush into the building like something was chasing him.
"I know!" Buck says now, all earnestness. "I just-- it would be easier, right? If everyone could see where they were going?"
Hen frowns. "Obviously," she says. "But the electricians aren't gonna be here in another fifteen, and we need to get everyone out to check the alarm in the meantime."
"Yeah, but--" before Hen can stop him, he pushes his hands into the mess of wires, brows furrowed.
"Buck!" her hand darts forward, but stops just short of touching his arm, wary of pulling him and making him knock into anything that'll give him a nasty shock.
"-- it just needs a little--" his face ducks closer to the breaker, frowning, muttering to himself. "-- just need to splice a wire here, and..."
Hen winces as she hears a snip, expecting the probie to-- get an electric shock, or something. But then a moment passes, two, and nothing happens, just Buck continuing to rummage around in the wires of this building like he's the maintenance guy or something.
It makes something twinge at the back of her mind, a half-formed memory not quite surfacing. Before she can dig for it, though, she startles as the lights flicker around her, dimming, then going bright.
"There," Buck grins, all self-satisfaction.
Hen's mouth gapes open, staring at the probie. "Wha--"
But Buck is already rushing down the corridor. "C'mon!" he waves back at her. "We need to evacuate everyone!"
Hen feels herself make an involuntary sound of offense, taking off after him. That absolute brat, she thinks, not sure if she's more annoyed or amused.
Or, no. She's pretty sure that the surprise beats both of those.
When they catch up with the others again, Chimney gives her a questioning look, and she shrugs back. It is much easier, she'll admit, to get everyone out with the lights on.
Afterwards, in the engine, Chimney grins at them. "Lucky the power came back on," he says, oblivious to the look Hen throws towards Buck, which Buck neatly ignores.
Hen watches as Buck shrugs, looking innocent as anything. "Yeah," he says. "Everyone looked a lot calmer, I'm glad none of them were seriously hurt. I mean, didn't one of yours nearly fall down that staircase, Chim?"
Chimney's smile ticks up a notch, always pleased to be telling a story. Hen realizes, as Buck listens intently to Chimney's probably exaggerated tale, how often he coaxes little tangents out of them, all of them.
How many times, she wonders, did she tell Buck something about herself, as an unintentional way of allowing him to obfuscate something of his own?
Hen loves her job, she really does. Insane hours, the ever-present smell of soot, the boys club mentality, the heart-wrenching calls and all. It's what she was meant to do, and Hen knows, knows, that she will spend the rest of her life doing it.
That being said, sometimes, there's no better way to be reminded about the dumbest parts of humanity than by being a first responder.
"Sir, sir-- sir!" Hen yelps, gripping the grab handle on the passenger's side window as the vehicle suddenly lurches to life beneath her. "Sir, I'm going to ask you to shut down the car so I can check you over, it is not safe for you to--"
A rumble, and Hen barely registers the swoosh of air around her as they begin to move before the car lurches to the side, a weight slamming in from the suddenly open back side door. Hen absolutely does not scream even a little, which is what she'll say when she's laughing with her beautiful wife after shift today, as her eyes dart to the rear-view mirror.
"Buck?"
"Hen!" Buck twists up. In the driver's seat, the patient stares at him.
"What the hell are you doing?" Hen snaps, feeling a rush of deja-vu.
Buck squints at her as the car keeps speeding. Hen's pretty sure she can hear Bobby's voice faintly shouting behind them. At least that's something. "Me or this guy?"
"I have to-- I have to make this interview. You don't understand. This is life or death."
"And now it's all of our lives or deaths," Hen informs the panting driver, voice only slightly more hysterical than normal. She takes a deep breath. Forces herself to calm down. Buck, in the back seat, barely looks concerned at all. Idiot adrenaline junkie or not, Hen refuses to have the fucking probie be more put together than her in an emergency situation. The concept was not to be borne. "Sir, you have a head injury. You cannot be driving right now."
"You can't stop me!" the patient's voice is shrill, a little slurred. Shit, shit.
"Dude," Buck says, ever the little shit. "I'm pretty sure that your job is over, man."
The patient stares blankly at him for a moment, then, to Hen's horror, passes out directly over the steering wheel.
"FUCK," Hen says, grabbing the steering wheel on instinct. The car swerves sharply for a moment, barely missing curb, before wobbling back on the road, still horrifically fast and now down the-- yep, that was not their lane. Hen glances down, swears again when she sees the limp foot still wedged against the gas. By the time she looks back up, Buck is already in motion, halfway wedged into the driver's seat.
"Get the seatbelt off and pull him over, Hen, gimme some room--"
Automatically, Hen's fingers click off the seatbelt and tugs the patient closer to herself, less because of Buck's actual words and more because of the muscle memory of reacting to a teammate speaking in that steady, urgent tone of voice. She's almost impressed, actually, at how well Buck has it down already. Or, she would be, if it doesn't catch up with her almost immediately what he's doing.
"Buck, do not--"
But Buck does, as Buck tends to do. Hen isn't sure whether to curse or be thankful for whatever part of his genes that has given him his ridiculously long limbs when he is able to reach the gas and brake pedals and steering wheel before he's even in the driver's seat.
On one hand, it means they don't immediately swerve off the road and into a fiery, stupid death.
On the other hand, Buck is in the driver's seat.
Hen, instinctively, braces the patient's body with her own, closes her eyes in preparation of whatever disaster is coming. A moment passes. Two. She opens one of her eyes.
Buck is spinning the steering wheel, a slight furrow to his brows as he weaves through a crowd of oncoming cars, somehow navigating them to the correct lane without missing a beat. Hen stares at him as he frowns at the road ahead of them.
"We should go back on-site," he says, half to himself. Hen's fingers clench as he speeds up, smooth and easy, and swings into an U-turn mid-road, merging seamlessly onto the other side of the road and ducking between cars like he's on a motorcycle instead of a half-crashed car that he's never been in before.
"Where the fuck did you learn to drive like that?" Hen gasps, trying to take account of all her faculties, as she sees the crash site ahead of them again. Chimney's eyes go wide as they meet her's, and he taps Bobby's shoulder as he's climbing into the engine. Bobby's finger loosens from the radio as he stares at them too, and Hen would wince at his expression, except--
Buck grins from the driver's seat, devil's may care and absolutely infuriating as he slows to a stop. "Have you ever driven in LA?"
Hen glares at him. A second later, a second glare echos her from right outside the driver's window. A tap on the glass.
"That's Bobby, isn't it," Buck says, grin still on his face even as dread fills his eyes.
"Yup," Hen informs him, and takes vindinctive satisfaction at the lecture that immediately fills the car as the door snaps open.
"Do we have any idea where the vic is?"
Bobby shakes his head. "Dispatch says that they were unable to triangulate their location," he says, voice grim. "These general woods is as close as they've got."
"No reception, either," Chimney adds, looking as troubled as Hen feels. "Damn, if only we could--"
"Hey, I think I've got it!"
Hen turns alongside the rest of them at the sound of Buck's voice, deeper in the woods where he'd disappeared while none of them were paying attention.
"For god's sake, Buck--" Bobby strides forward towards him, Hen and Chimney following, glancing at each other warily. "-- get back here!"
"But she's this way?" Buck, when they can see him again, is peering at them with puzzled eyes, head tilted. He's off the path, feet touching the edge of one of the many piles of litter that people have left in the woods over the years.
Bobby pinches the bridge of his nose. "And how do you know that," he asks, dully.
Buck makes a little face, twisted-up and kidlike. "I mean, her student card's here, so."
All of them startle at his casual comment, and Hen walks forward, peering at the card. "That…" she blinks at him, mouth opening in a question.
Buck's eyes, darting along the treelines, is moving before she can put the words together.
"Wha- Buck, where are you--" Bobby starts after him, and Hen looks at Chimney, who raises an eyebrow in return.
Tracking dog, she mouths at him as they follow, and Chimney raises a hand to his mouth to muffle his snicker. Ahead of them, Bobby looks far more impressed, only following Buck because he can't quite get close enough to grab his shoulder.
Which-- actually, Hen notices how easily Buck is shifting through the woods, his lanky limbs and single-minded focus not seeming to impede him at all as he all but dances through the trees. Hen expects a branch to hit his face or for him to trip over his bambi-ass legs on a rock any second, but, no, he moves like…like he's been wandering through woods all his life.
Maybe he has, Hen considers. It twinges like something wrong, that she can't say for sure.
The rest of them follow more sedately, up until they hear his voice through the thicket, tone raised and sharper: "Guys, over here!"
Bobby lets them push past him as they both start jogging, a beat behind them as they walk into a patch of disturbed dirt, Buck kneeling beside a collapsed figure in a pale blue athleisure set.
Hen waves away a branch threatening to take away her glasses. Chimney hisses slightly as he drops beside their victim and a rock cuts across his ankle. As they look Samantha over, Hen glances over at Buck, who's still holding the student card in his gloves, and wonders.
The station is dark, the bunks around her empty, when Hen wakes up with a quiet gasp.
The world sharpens into focus as she balances her glasses on her face, heartbeat slowing as she centers herself to the low hum of the firehouse. There's something about this that's always been comforting, the act of slotting yourself into the mechanics of a well-oiled machine, knowing that you are a part of something bigger. It allows Hen to sculpt herself into what she wants to be, what she needs to be.
Still, that doesn't make her any less human, as Karen loves to remind her. Blinking around her, she catches Chimney under another set of blankets, shoulders lifting and falling slowly, deep in sleep. She looks in the other direction, expecting to see a figure rumbling where Buck usually tries to curl his limbs into obedience in a too-small bed, strangely small in sleep.
Instead, she sees an empty bed.
Swinging her legs out of the bed, Hen stands up, muscles twinging slightly beneath her. It's been a busy eight hours on shift, and her body is sore in the pleasant way that speaks of a life well-spent. She slips on her shoes quietly, padding out of the bunk room.
She wanders towards the loft, pausing for a moment as she catches a sliver of light peeking out from under the door of Bobby's office. It's closed, which is rare, reserved only for when Bobby is reasonably sure that everybody is asleep and won't need a listening air, and when his paperwork backlog has gotten several degrees out of hand. Usually both.
The soft sound of pen scratching over paper makes her smile, just a little, a little more tension loosening from her body. She keeps walking into the loft, not realizing the residual tightness in her shoulders until she catches the lanky shadow on the couch, until her muscles unwind completely.
She decides to walk up behind him instead of calling out, looking over his shoulder to see what he's so focused on. When the mass in his hands comes into focus, she can't quite stop the words from slipping out.
"Are those your work pants?"
Buck sits up, yelping slightly as his fingers scrabble over fabric. His hands close, open again with a hiss, and Hen darts over to grab his hand before he can hide it, frowning at the crimson droplet forming over the meat of his finger.
"Jesus, Buck," Hen says, tender and worried, a little teasing. Buck brings that out in her, some quality of gentleness that feels strange and new, not the maternal clench she feels around Denny, nor the everlonging ache that Karen brings out in her. Nor is it the quiet, sharp concern that twinges at the back of her mind whenever she and Chimney work a call together, always alert to her partner, her best friend.
It is, instead, perhaps something like what having a little brother would've felt like, affectionate and exasperated and childish all at once.
"Ow," Buck says, pouting as though he doesn't brush off far larger hurts regularly.
Hen snorts at him. "Stay still," she tells him. "I'm gonna grab you a bandaid, you big baby."
"You were the one who surprised me!" he calls after her, the little snot. Hen rolls her eyes as she grabs the bandaids from the cabinets, returning to the couch and gently wrapping one over his finger.
"Woah," Buck says, eyes big.
"What?"
"You're really good at that."
Hen resists the urge to laugh. "At…putting on bandaids?"
Buck puffs out a cheek at her. "Yeah," he says. "I always do it all messy, your ends are like, perfectly aligned. That's super cool!"
Hen laughs, startled and pleased. It's such a little thing, but it's very Buck, to notice. To be so unselfconscious about the act of noticing.
"We all have our talents," she says. Then, because he knows that she's an unrepentant snooper anyways: "I didn't know sewing was one of yours, though."
It's subtle, but she catches it this time: the slight shift in his expression, something being tucked away inside of him. "It's whatever," he says.
"It's very impressive, Buck," Hen says, keeping her voice easy. "I mean, Karen used to make fun of me for how quickly my LAFD tees became pajamas -- If I'd known how to sew up holes, then maybe I could've let them last a bit longer."
Something hesitant passes over Buck's face. "I could…" he pauses. "If you want, I can try to fix some up for you? I'm not, like, super good or anything, but I'm, you know, decent. I can sew a button or something-- if you need something hemmed, though, it might take a while, I don't have a sewing machine right now--"
Hen blinks. "You know how to use a sewing machine?" she asks.
The suddenness must hit something in Buck that Hen doesn't mean for it to, and Hen almost flinches at the brittle look that crosses Buck's face, a second before it's tucked away again. "What does it matter?" he asks, loose-limbed and cheerful except for the tightness around his eyes.
It makes Hen choose her next words carefully. The truth coming out instead of gentle placation. "I just realized that…we don't know you all that well, Buck." She notes the minute flinch in his bearing, the small, guilty curve of his lips. It makes her feel bad, but not bad enough not to push. "I mean, we knew about Chimney's relationship, we found out about Bobby, and--" a bitter little smile. Hurt that still tastes like smoke and bitter pills on her tongue. "-- well. You all know my dirty laundry now, too. I just…it feels like we don't know much about you, in comparison."
Buck looks confused and exasperated. "You do know me, though," he insists, earnest and childlike. "I mean-- you were there when Bobby fired me, and you knew about Abby. I'm not, like, being cagey or anything."
Hen wasn't sure that was true, actually, but she takes another route instead. "Sure," she agrees carefully. "I'm not saying you're a liar, Buck. You're a part of the team. That's why I want to know-- you're my friend. Don't you always want to know more about your friends?"
That seems to startle Buck, his eyes blinking owlishly at her. Stupidly, foolishly, it makes Hen feel a little self-conscious, a little like a kid on a playground, trying to make friends for the first time. She folds the slight embarrassment into confidence instead, tucking certainty in the cracks of vulnerability so that it all looks deliberate. She raises an eyebrow at him, expectant.
Buck ducks his head, something trembling and vulnerable tucked at the edge of his lip for a brief moment. "…I guess," he says, a little lilt to his voice like he doesn't quite understand, still. He fiddles with his fingers. Hen waits him out.
"…a theatre."
"What?"
Buck picks up the needle again, examines it instead of looking at Hen. "I worked in a theatre troupe, for a bit. Helping out with, you know, props and stuff. Picked up some things." His words are casual, their meanings pedestrian. Hen wonders, still, why it still feels like he's revealing something vulnerable.
Hen nudges him in the side gently, and bright blue eyes dart to her, a little startled. "Not under the spotlight yourself?" she asks, deliberately light. Buck laughs, a little startled.
"N-- nah, I'd be terrible at memorizing lines." he picks up the crumpled pants from the ground, running a finger over the small tear in the fabric. "…I did work the lights sometimes, though," he says, a little awkwardly. "I liked it."
"The theatre?"
A soft exhale. "Being useful."
And Hen smiles, because she knows how that goes. She remembers the rush that comes with saving a life, the realization that you're doing something that is of use, palpably making the world a better place. After that, there's no going back.
"Good thing you're here, then." she tells him.
Buck's eyes are bright, a little shy, so happy it makes something ache inside of her to see. He's right, she realizes. Hen does know him, in many of the ways that matter. The part of him that's kind enough to translate for a woman without feeling self-conscious at his limited vocabulary. The part of him that's clever enough to figure out the quickest way to smooth the jagged edges of a tricky rescue. The part of him reckless and brave enough to jump into a moving car so she wouldn't have to face something scary alone. The part of him that's shy about his past, but offers to mend her clothes anyways, just because. The part of him that looks startled when someone calls him a friend.
"Thank you for telling me, Buck," she says to him, quiet in the dim loft. "And thanks, for making your way here."
Buck ducks his head, smiles.
"There's nowhere I'd rather be."