Chapter Text
The thing nobody told you about being the youngest guy on a team of SEALs was how much of the job was getting told to sit down.
Buck was only twenty. He'd been out of training a little over two months. He was, by every metric the Navy used, extremely good at the thing he'd been built to do, and he was also, in the eyes of five men who'd been doing this since before he could drive, a child, and both of those things were true at once, and neither canceled the other. So he got coffees sometimes. He got told to sit down a lot. He got called kid, and probie, and once, memorably, by Sam Hanna, fetus, which had stuck for an unfortunate week.
They still call him Buckley, mostly. He'd noticed that. Not everyone on the team had a nickname, but some did. The kind you earned. Steve McGarrett was Smooth Dog most days, Billy Harrington was lovingly referred to as Big Kahuna, and Nick Taylor, for reasons Buck still wasn't sure of, was called Bullfrog. The way you earned it was you screwed up, spectacularly, in your first couple of weeks, and the team pinned the screwup to you forever like a medal for surviving your own stupidity. It was practically a rite. And Buck, two months in, just hadn't. Hadn't given them the occasion. Hadn't done the dumb thing at the wrong moment that turned into a name. He was still Buckley because he hadn't given them a reason to call him anything else, and he'd caught Freddie Hart looking at him sideways about it more than once, like the absence of a callsign was itself becoming the thing worth noting.
Buck didn't mind being Buckley. He didn't mind the coffee orders, or the sit down, kid, or any of it. When he joined up, he had expected this team to be like everywhere else he'd ever been, somewhere you earned your keep, or you were gone. Instead, it was a bunch of terrifying, competent men who gave him hell constantly, and also, he was slowly noticing, watching his back with a thoroughness he didn't know what to do with, so he mostly ignored it.
He just did the job. And the job, it turned out, he was very good at.
"He's gonna get himself killed," Buck heard Harrington say once, not knowing Buck was around the corner.
"Nah," Hart said. "He knows exactly what he's doing. That's the scary part. Kid's not lucky. He's just good."
"That's what I said. He's gonna get himself killed being good."
Buck had walked away before he heard the rest. He knows exactly what he's doing. It was the nicest thing anyone had said about him in longer than he could remember, and it had been said when they didn't know he could hear, which was the only way Buck knew how to believe a thing like that.
What he didn't tell them, what he didn't tell anybody, was that Harrington had the shape of it right and the reason wrong. It wasn't that Buck was going to get himself killed. It was that Buck didn't especially care if he did.
Not in a dramatic way. He didn't want to die; that would've required feeling strongly about it in one direction, and Buck didn't feel strongly about his own continued existence in either. He'd left home, and nobody had come looking. His next-of-kin paperwork listed a sister he hadn't spoken to since he left Pennsylvania outside of his unanswered postcards, which he'd only listed so she could receive his life insurance policy, because it seemed like a waste otherwise, and Maddie could use it, probably. One name, listed for logistics more than anything else. If the worst happened, the Navy would make a phone call to a woman who didn't know he was even enlisted, and it would be sad for a minute in the abstract way a stranger's death is sad, and that would be that.
So no, Buck wasn't afraid of the job going sideways. There was nothing on his side of the equation to be afraid of. And that made him very useful, because a man who isn't protecting anything, including himself, can put himself anywhere.
The op was supposed to be clean. They almost always were on paper.
A compound with a bad man and worse friends, intelligence that turned out to be about seventy percent right, which in this line of work was a C-minus that got people killed. They went in the way they'd gone in a dozen times, the choreography automatic, Steve's voice low and even in Buck's ear, the team flowing through the structure like water finding low ground.
And then the missing thirty percent of the intel showed up, a secondary structure nobody had flagged, and a quantity of explosives nobody had accounted for, and the op went from clean to catastrophic in about eight seconds.
The concussion of the first charge changed everything. Steve's tone shifted, still even, but faster, calling the exit. The building decided, structurally, that it was done being a building. And the problem presented itself to Buck with total clarity in the half-second he had to solve it: the team's exit ran through a corridor the collapse was about to close, and somebody had to hold that point, had to stand in the worst place and buy the seconds, or the whole team ended up on the wrong side of a hundred tons of concrete.
It wasn't a decision, exactly. There was no weighing it. There was a problem, and the solution was simple, because five of these men had people. Real people who would receive a folded flag and feel that loss deeply for the rest of their lives.
Buck had a life insurance policy and a sister who didn't know his address.
He was the one the equation could afford to spend. Not because the Navy said so. The Navy would've told him his life was worth exactly as much as any operator's. Don't be a hero; everybody comes home. The Navy was working on just as much bad intel as he currently was. Five of his team members coming home mattered to somebody, and he was just a body that happened to be very good at his job. And this very-good-at-its-job body was, conveniently, positioned closest to the corridor.
"Go," he said into the comm, already moving, already shoving Taylor bodily towards the closing gap. "Go, I've got it. GO—"
"Buckley, what the hell—"
"I've got the corridor, get them out, I'm right behind you—"
He was not, and everyone on the comm knew he was not. He wasn't right behind anybody. He was going to hold a collapsing structure open with his body and a rifle and about four seconds of borrowed time, so that five men who had somebody could get back to their somebodies, and then he was going to be on the wrong side of it, alone. And the part that he'd never be able to explain to anyone was how completely fine he was with that in that moment. How clean it felt. How correct. Get the ones who matter out. He'd never had a clearer sense of purpose in his life.
He heard Steve say his name once. Not attached to an order, just his name, in a tone Buck hadn't heard him use, and Buck didn't have time to figure out what was in it, because the corridor was closing and the team was moving and he was doing the part that mattered, watching his team one by one pour through the gap toward the light, and then Steve, last, the way a commander goes last, Steve's eyes finding his through the dust for one half-second on the way through—
And then the gap was gone. And Buck was alone in the dark with the building coming down, entirely unafraid.
Okay, he thought. New problem.
He spent about four minutes reading a collapsing structure the way you'd read a current, finding the voids, moving through the parts that hadn't come down, trusting the part of him that always seemed to know which way a building wanted to fall. He came out through a collapsed section on the far side, filthy, bleeding from somewhere he hadn't clocked yet, ears ringing, alive.
He keyed his comms. "I'm out, north side, I'm good." Casual, out of pure habit.
The team had come around the structure at a dead run the second the collapse settled, and they'd been looking at the pile, at the place the corridor used to be, at the hundred tons of concrete that Buck had last been standing under. And they had been doing the thing you do in the first seconds of knowing you're going to have to fly home without somebody who was supposed to be there.
Hart was the one who made a noise he didn't have a category for.
Buck had known all of them for a total of two months, but Freddie was closest to him in age, twenty-six to his twenty, close enough that he treated Buck like a peer where the others treated him like a kid, close enough they'd stayed up too late a dozen nights arguing about nothing. And the sound Freddie made when Buck walked out of that building was not one Buck had ever heard a grown man make about him, a raw, cracked, there-he-is sound, and then Freddie was crossing the distance and grabbing him by the front of his gear, both hands, hard, shaking him once.
"You said you were right behind us." Freddie's voice wasn't working right. "You said— you held the whole thing so we could get through and then you didn't come, and we were standing here, we were standing here looking at that pile—" He stopped himself.
"I'm okay," Buck said, thrown. "Freddie, I'm good. I got out—"
"You're just a kid. We were gonna have to fly home and tell—" Freddie's voice caught on it. "Tell who, Buckley? Huh? Who do we even—"
And Buck watched Freddie hit the wall Buck already lived behind. Watched him arrive, mid-sentence, at the fact that there was no good end to that question, that the kid he was shaking by his vest didn't have a who, and watched it horrify him.
But it was Steve that Buck's eyes went to. Because Steve had gone still, off to the side, and Buck knew it was because Steve knew. He had read the paperwork, all of it, the way a good CO does, and Steve was the one man on the team that knew exactly what the answer to Freddie's question was. Steve knew because Buck had mentioned it once, offhand, easy, nah, we don't talk. It's fine. It's just for the insurance, not understanding at the time that he was handing his commanding officer something that would sit in the man like a stone.
And Steve was looking at Buck now like he'd just watched that offhand fact turn into a nearly-real thing, a kid volunteering for the worst place in a collapsing building because in the kid's own accounting he was the one worth the least, and being right, and that being the worst part about it.
"Buckley," Steve said. Quiet. And then he didn't seem to have the rest of it.
Buck stood there in the dust, in Freddie's grip, surrounded, and something started to go wrong with his understanding of the situation.
Because they weren't relieved that the mission was successful. He kept waiting for it to resolve into that, into the professional part, good work, target down, but it wasn't transitioning into that at all. Hanna was standing there with his jaw locked and his eyes bright, looking at Buck like he'd almost had to carry a loss he wasn't prepared for. Harrington, who had been the one to predict Buck getting himself killed being good at the job, had his hands on top of his head at a loss for words. Taylor, the one Buck had physically shoved through the gap, was staring at him like he was watching a ghost decline the job.
They weren't relieved about the target or the mission. They were undone about him. And Buck didn't know what to do with that. His whole life he'd thought of himself as the spare, the one who could be spent because nobody was saving him, and that mentality didn't survive contact with the way these five men were looking at him.
He'd only ever been working with the reality he left behind in Hershey. He never allowed himself to edit it, or he hadn't noticed he needed to. People were waiting for him. These people. They'd have flown home with a hole in them that was Buck-shaped.
Steve let them all react, let it run its course. The grabbing and the profanity, and then he cleared his throat and the team pulled itself together the way they always had, and he walked up to Buck and looked at him for a long moment.
Buck braced for the reprimand. He'd ben thte shape of an order, made himself a near-casualty, scared a team of professionals half to death. This was the part where his CO told him he was reckless and unacceptable and never to let it happen again.
"That corridor, how'd you know the north side would still be open?" Steve asked instead.
Buck blinked. "Uh, the way the secondary charge sat. It was gonna pancake the south and east, but the north wall had the load path to fall away insetad of down. So if there was going to be a void, it'd be north. So I went north."
Steve looked at him. "You worked that out in the middle of a collapse, under fire, in about two seconds?"
"…yeah?"
And Steve laughed, disbelieving.
"Two months I've been trying to figure you out, kid. Whole team has. You keep walking into things that eat people and walking back out, and half of us figured it had to be luck, figured you were just a kid running hot." He shook his head, gesturing at the building's north side, Buck standing there filthy but alive. "It was never luck. You read it. Every time. You read your way out of things you shouldn't be able to come out of, and you come back, every single time, like you're on a line." Something in his face had shifted from command to something warmer, prouder. An officer landing on a truth about one of his men. "You're a goddamn boomerang, Buckley. That's what you are. We chuck you at the impossible, and you just come back.
Hanna huffed a laugh.
"Boomerang is perfect." Taylor agreed.
The whole team seized it with glee. And Buck stood there and let them. He understood this was gonna stick. A callsign, a joke, a rite of passage, but most importantly, it was the team's way of saying you're one of us now.
"Damn right." Freddie threw an arm around his neck, still too close, still not fully recovered.
Underneath it, they were telling him the other thing, the thing that Freddie had shouted that the rest likely never would. Come back. We want you to come back. Not need. He was learning the difference in real time. Want. We want you back, specifically. Boomerang was a rule now. Always come back.
He had chosen to hold that corridor without a flicker, because there'd been nothing to come back for, and now, somehow, there was, and that changed the whole shape of the job, of himself. He'd always been able to survive the impossible, but now he was learning there was a reason to want to.