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The call is a two-alarm at a furniture warehouse off Alameda, big enough that dispatch pulled mutual aid, and that is the only reason Eddie Diaz hears his own name shouted across a parking lot in the middle of overhaul.
He is coiling a line, ears still ringing a bit from the interior, when it comes.
"Diaz? Eddie Diaz?"
He turns. A firefighter is jogging over from the other company, helmet off, soot in the creases of his face, and for a second Eddie's brain does the thing it does with a fire scene, sorts the man into a category, threat or not, patient or not, one of ours or one of theirs. And then the man grins, and the sorting stops working altogether, because the grin belongs to a fifteen-year-old from a different life.
"Leo?"
"Holy hell." Leo pulls up in front of him, hands on his hips, looking Eddie over like he's checking for damage. "It is you. I thought I was seeing things. Man, you got old."
"You started it." Eddie laughs, and the old rhythm is right there, easy to pick right back up as if no time had passed at all. "El Paso to LA. That is a long way to run into somebody."
"Right? Small world, big city. You look good, though. El Paso didn't do too much damage then?"
Something moves through Eddie at that, warm and uncomplicated, the simple pleasure of being recognized by someone who knew him before any of it. He does not examine it. There is a fire dwindling behind him and an overhaul to finish.
"You riding with the 133 now?" Eddie nods at the patch on Leo's shoulder.
"Two years. Transferred up from San Diego." Leo shakes his head, still grinning. "God, I can't believe it's been so long."
They trade the shorthand of two firefighters on an active scene, which is to say almost nothing, just enough. Numbers into phones. A promise of coffee. Leo claps him on the shoulder and jogs back to his crew, and Eddie stands there a second longer than he should, holding a coil of hose and a feeling he can't really name.
When he turns around, Buck is watching him.
"Who was that?" Buck asks once they are back at the 118. Eddie is drinking water at the kitchen island. Buck is across from him, feigning whatever level of casual includes being aggressive to lunch meat.
"Guy I knew back home. Leo. We were pretty close in high school. Grew up on the same street. Haven't seen him in like twenty years." Eddie shrugs. "Wild, running into him like that."
"Yeah. Wild." Buck takes a bite of the sandwich he had finished pummeling. "He seemed really happy to see you."
"He's just like that. Real friendly."
"Sure." Buck nods too much. "Real friendly."
And normally, Eddie would push because Buck is being weird and he can't figure out why and he doesn't like not understanding why Buck is doing a thing, but he's exhausted, and the water's just right, and Leo is in L.A., so he lets it go.
Across the kitchen, Hen has stopped pretending to read her book.
She is not looking at Buck. She is looking at Eddie with a small line between her eyebrows, the one she gets when a patient's story doesn't match their vitals. She has known Eddie a long time. She watched him with Leo on scene, and there was something about the ease of Eddie doing anything related to El Paso that snagged something she couldn't quite figure out.
"What?" Eddie asks.
"Nothing." Hen goes back to her book. She immediately puts it back down and looks at him. "You seem happy."
"I am happy. I ran into an old friend."
"Mm," Hen says, which from Hen is more like an entire monologue.
Eddie doesn't know what is wrong with either of them. He finishes his water. He texts Leo a thumbs up about coffee on Thursday.
Thursday, the coffee place is one of those bright ones near Leo's station. All reclaimed wood and plants that are definitely fake. Leo is already there when Eddie walks in, waving him over, two cups on the table.
"I guessed," Leo says, sliding one across. "Tell me if I ruined it."
"You did not ruin it." Eddie sits. It is genuinely good, and he's honestly just happy to be here. He had forgotten how much of El Paso he keeps in a locked drawer, and it turns out some of it is not the bad kind; some of it is just this, a boy he used to know, grown into a man with laugh lines, a full history, and a nice watch.
They catch up naturally. Leo transferred cities chasing a promotion and then chasing a person. Eddie tells him about how he joined the Army before the 118. Leo asks about a family, and Eddie tells him about Christopher, pulls up a picture, and Leo goes soft the way good people do at any kid picture.
"He's beautiful, man." Leo hands the phone back. "You do this on your own?"
"Mostly. His mom passed when he was eight." Eddie says evenly. He has had practice. "I've got people. The 118 shows up like family."
"Yeah, I saw that." Leo's grin turns knowing. "That guy at the scene. Blond, built, looked like he wanted to fight me for standing too close to you."
Eddie laughs. "That's Buck. He's my best friend. He's kind of like that with everybody."
"Uh huh." Leo sips his coffee, eyes bright over the rim. "How long have you two been together?"
"We're not," Eddie says automatically, and then hears how fast he said it. "It's not—we're just partners at work. Friends."
"Okay, okay." Leo lifts his hands, laughing. "My bad. I've got a radar, and clearly it needs recalibrating. My partner would tell you the same thing. I read into everything." He says it with the easy warmth of someone who is more settled than Eddie has ever been. "Quinn. They keep me honest. Fifteen years next spring."
"Fifteen years. That's a long time."
"Lucked out and found the right one early." Leo shrugs, and then he smiles at Eddie, and there is nothing in it but affection and a little bit of old history, and that's what makes what he says next so quiet, so unarmed. "I always figured you'd end up with a guy, honestly. After us. I used to wonder if you got that back, after everything with your folks."
Everything around Eddie keeps moving. Everyone keeps living. All of it just keeps happening, and Eddie sits in the middle of it with a paper cup in his hand and hears the words after us the way you hear a sound underwater, distorted, delayed.
"After," Eddie starts, finding his throat the texture of sandpaper. "After us."
Leo's smile falters, just a little, trying to read Eddie's face. "Yeah. You good?"
Eddie wishes he could answer him. Mentally, however, he is unpacking boxes. And this one doesn't open so much as it explodes, because the thing about the story he has been telling himself of friendship and growing up together, it wasn't exactly dishonest. Just missing some finer details. Enough details to change the story. Enough detail to make the story he had been operating an outright lie. Underneath it, flashes of memory make themselves known. Leo's hand in his behind the equipment shed. Leo's mouth on his at fifteen. The specific mixture of terror and joy. His mother's face in the doorway. The words his father used. The silence. The distance. Coming home to Leo erased, as if he had never been there in the first place.
"Yeah," Eddie hears himself say. His hands are cold. He is very, very good at this, at the fake, at the fine. "Yeah, sorry. I just— long shift, I guess. It's good to see you, man. It's really good."
He finishes his coffee. He doesn't even taste it. He asks Leo about Quinn and nods and answers and laughs in all the right places, and the whole time there is a scream somewhere very far down in him, muffled by twenty years of soundproofing, getting louder.
He makes it to his truck before his hands stop working.
He does not make it far.
He gets maybe six blocks before the shaking climbs from his hands to his arms and his chest goes so tight it feels like a fist closing and the edges of the road start to swim, and some cold professional part of his brain, the medic, screams at him to pull over because he's having a fucking panic attack and he shouldn't be driving. He listens, wrenching the truck to the curb on a residential street, throwing it into park, gripping the wheel like the truck is the thing falling and not him.
He cannot breathe. He knows he can breathe, but he cannot breathe. He closes his eyes, and he's fifteen again with his mother in the doorway. He opens them, and he's on a strange street in L.A. He closes them again, testing out his sanity, and he's in a room in the desert with a man telling him so gently that this thing is a wound, and they are going to help him heal it. He opens them again, and he is coming apart at the seams.
He doesn't exactly decide to call Buck. He doesn't consider Hen or his sisters or Frank. His thumb finds Buck's name automatically. The phone is ringing before his brain has formed a sentence.
"Eddie." Buck picks up on half a ring, like he was already holding his phone. "Hey, what's up?"
Eddie tries to say something, and what comes out is air. Everything on Buck's end changes. Eddie can hear it, the shift where Buck goes from zero to total in the space of one breath. "Okay. Okay, hey. I've got you. Where are you? Are you driving?"
"Pulled," Eddie manages. "Pulled over. I'm— Buck."
"I know. I know, bud. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. You hear me?" There is more noise on Buck's end. Keys and a door. "I'm coming to you. Just stay on the line, don't hang up. Just breathe with me. In for four. Come on, Eddie. In for four. I'm counting."
Eddie breathes for four because Buck tells him to. He breathes out because Buck tells him to. On the other end of a phone, in a car, desperately following a little blue dot in an app, Buck counts, and Eddie holds onto the sound of it like a line thrown into water, and slowly, slowly, the fist in his chest loosens enough to let a little of the light back in.
Buck tracks him down quickly, pulls in behind him, and is at the passenger door in seconds. Eddie unlocks it without looking. Buck climbs in and does not touch him, just fills the cab with his enormous, worried presence.
"Hey," Buck says softly. "You're safe." A reminder when he knows it's the hardest to remember.
Eddie nods vaguely. He is wrung out, hollowed. The panic has receded and left wreckage behind, everything he'd spent years keeping down on the surface.
"I need to tell you something, and I don't— I don't know how to."
"Okay," Buck angles toward him. "Okay, Eddie, you know you don't have to tell me anything you don't feel comfor—"
"No, Buck. I need to." Eddie cuts him off quickly, breathless.
"Okay, then. However you can. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
So Eddie tells him. Not smoothly. In pieces and out of order, the way it comes back to him. Leo. El Paso. The way they were not just friends. What they were. His mother in the doorway and his father's face and the place his parents drove him to that summer, a place with a nice name and a mission statement, where people prayed over him and talked to him about brokenness and taught him, patiently, thoroughly, to fold himself up small and call it faith. That he walked out of there and did what he was supposed to do. That he built a whole life on top of it. That he never even told himself the truth. Not really. Just filed it away under a different label, filed a boy he kind of maybe loved under friend, filed himself under fixed and quietly moved on, and it had worked. It worked for twenty years until he was sitting in a coffee shop sipping a vanilla latte with a stupid name across from a man named Leo Alvarez who way too casually mentioned us and the entire architecture came crashing down.
Buck listens to all of it, and by the end he is shaking too, but not the way Eddie was. Buck is shaking with rage.
"They sent you to a—" Buck cannot even say it. His hands are in fists on his thighs. "Your parents, they took a kid, Eddie. You were just a kid. You were Chris's age. You were a baby." He stops. "I have met your parents, Eddie. I have watched them judge you for how you parent Christopher, and this whole time they— Those people, Eddie, those people do not get to, I swear to God, the next time they open their mouths, I'm going to have so many things to say."
"Buck."
"No, I'm serious. They don't get to just, after what they did. This explains, this explains so much. It explains everything. You flinch, Eddie, and they just walk around like—"
"Buck," Eddie says it harder, and Buck stops.
Eddie watches as Buck vibrates with a fury that is entirely on Eddie's behalf, watches his best friend get so wrapped up in protecting him, and he understands. Buck is missing it.
Buck is so busy having Eddie's back, so busy standing between Eddie and the people who hurt him, so busy being the thing Buck has always been, the guy who shows up, who fights for you, who would put his whole body between you and the world without being asked. Hell, this is the exact kind of fight that made Eddie list Buck as Chris's legal guardian. But he is so wrapped up in it that he has sailed clean past the other thing Eddie had said. The thing that Eddie almost didn't say at all. The thing that clicked into place right around the time Eddie had found Buck's name in his phone.
And Eddie could let it go. He could let Buck rage on his behalf and take the comfort of it and leave the other thing folded up where it had always lived, safe, unsaid, because saying it out loud is the most terrifying thing he can imagine and if he says it wrong, if it comes out of him the way everything came out today, spilled and shaking and out of his control, then it is one more thing that happened to him instead of a thing he chose.
He does not want one more thing to happen to him. He has had enough happen to him.
So Eddie takes a breath. And he does the bravest thing he's done all day. He waits until his voice is his own and he finds it in himself to be steady.
"Buck, I'm not telling you this so you'll be mad at my parents."
Buck blinks. "I— okay."
"I called you." Eddie holds his gaze. "I was falling apart on the side of the road, and I didn't even think about it for one second. I called you. My hands knew who to call before I did."
"Eddie," Buck's voice goes gentle. He talks to Chris like this sometimes when he's upset. "I'm your best friend, you know I'll always—"
"Because it's you," Eddie says it plainly, cutting him off. "Leo asked how long you and I had been together, and I said we weren't, and I— it didn't even occur to me until an hour ago that I hated that answer. It's you, Buck. It's been you for a long time. It's you."
The rage has gone out of Buck entirely. What is left in his face is something Eddie has seen there before, aimed at him, and never once let himself read correctly.
"Say it again," Buck whispers.
"It's you," Eddie says, still fighting to keep his voice steady.
Buck reaches across the console and takes Eddie's hand in both of his, the way he probably wanted to the second he climbed into the truck, and holds on.
"I've got you. You know that, right? Whatever comes with this, whatever we have to do, all of it. I've got you. I've had you the whole time."
Eddie laughs, startled but not really, at how all in Buck always is. There is a lot ahead of him. The camp is not a thing you tell someone about once and put back down. His parents are still his parents. There is a version of this that will take years and a good therapist and more than one bad night to get through. Buck's fury has also not gone anywhere; it's just gone quiet in the backseat, and Eddie knows it will be there the next time it needs to be, standing between him and the doorway.
Eddie feels Buck squeeze his hand, and brings his eyes up to meet the bright blue ones across the cab.
"Come here?" Buck asks softly, and Eddie leans in, allowing Buck to wrap his arms around him. "I'm so proud of you. You have no idea," he whispers at Eddie's temple. "And I love you so much." He leaves a gentle kiss there.
"I love you, too, Buck."