Work Text:
It was a special kind of humiliation, being the man back on call over and over and over again. Whether it was because Bobby thought he was incapable or just didn’t like him right now, it didn’t matter to Buck. It was humiliating. He felt like a probie, outcasted by his entire team. Bobby wouldn’t talk to him. Chim and Hen would offer sympathetic smiles and entertain the briefest conversation. Eddie would not even look at him. It was awful. On top of his team hating him, Bobby had him doing all the probie duties he hadn’t even thought about in years. Cleaning the bathrooms. Mopping the floor. Cleaning the truck. It wasn’t that he was too bratty to do it, it was that he had done his share and now he felt like his status was being ripped away from him along with everything else he had already lost.
He missed his job. He missed his family. And he missed going through a single day of his life without his leg feeling like it was trying to kill him. Or some side effect of his leg trying to kill him. It took months of effort to PT his leg back to full strength. He pushed himself over and over, pressing through the pain to get back to doing what he loved. Then the blot clots came. And because of those the blood thinners. Then he sued his family. And now here he was.
Back in the firehouse, but instead of being out in calls, he was behind a table getting ready to hand out smoke detectors to parents of trick-or-treaters. He could see the rest of his team hanging out Buck the trucks, laughing as Eddie shined the bumper. Buck frowned. He unintentionally started slamming the boxes down on the table harder. It wasn’t fair. All he ever wanted was to be with his family and he was being punished over and over again for it. It wasn’t like he wanted any of this to happen. The explosion. The tsunami. The lawsuit. The day in the grocery store where Eddie called him “exhausting.” Why were Eddie and Bobby acting like it was all part of a grand plan to ruin their lives. Especially Eddie. Buck didn’t understand why his best friend refused to forgive him.
Buck would admit it. He messed up. He shouldn’t have filed the lawsuit and he shouldn’t have disclosed his team’s business to his lawyer. Yet, again, all he wanted was his family back and they seemed to not have a lot of empathy for the guy who had gotten his leg crushed by an entire fire truck. They didn’t know what it was like to feel your bones splintering beneath a weight like that. The agony of feeling every part of his leg destroyed in seconds. The way his leg had hung limp and useless in the moments his team got him on the gurney before he passed out. Everything about that night had been hell.
Then, as if the injury itself wasn’t enough. He had coughed up blood and almost died at his captains house at his own welcome back party. Being rushed to the hospital and fussed at like he intentionally put a blood cot in his leg. He just thought it was hurting, obviously he didn’t think he had a clot. Yet not even that was enough. He lost his best friend’s son in a tsunami trying to save people. He remembered the horror consuming every part of his body when he found Chris’s glasses lying on the floor. By some miracle, the boy was alive and Eddie didn’t hate him for what happened. Then he learned that Bobby was the one keeping him away from his family. He had blown up and sued the entire department in a desperate effort. Resultantly, everyone hated him.
He hated watching his team leave him behind over and over again. He could feel his family drifting. He didn’t want any of the other shifts pity. Or whispers. He knew how they looked at him right now. Fragile and pathetic. Trying too hard to cling onto something that was never going to work out for him. That he was just wasting his time trying to come back because he would never be good enough again.
Buck grimaced, slamming a smoke detector down hard. This was bullshit. It was all bullshit. It wasn’t fair. Part of him wanted to hit something. The other part of him just wanted to cry.
“Stop throwing a tantrum like a toddler for attention and use your big boy words if you want to say something, Buck.” Eddie’s voice was harsh. Part of it pissed Buck off. The other part of it just hurt.
Eddie was being the most of an asshole out of everyone. Yeah, it sucked that Bobby wouldn’t talk to him like they used to, and it sucked that Hen and Chim were walking on their tiptoes around him. But Eddie? He was just being a full on asshole because he was mad. It pissed him off just as much as it hurt.
Using his better judgement for once, Buck bit his tongue and kept himself from responding to the bait. He knew Eddie was just trying to piss him off and get him involved in another argument. If Eddie was going to be the immature one, then Buck would let him.
Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Hen elbow Eddie in the side and whisper harshly under her breath at him. Buck could only hope she was defending him and not egging Eddie on. He didn’t think she would, but if the past month had taught him anything, people can surprise you.
He kept his head down and focused on arranging the detectors on the table to his liking. He had them leaned up against each other in rows. It looked nice. He didn’t spare another glance at his teammates as they walked by and up towards the loft. He wasn’t going to let them see that all of this was getting to him. Eventually Bobby and Eddie would stop being so stubborn, get their heads out of their asses, and forgive him. Buck just hoped that it wouldn’t take until Christmas. That was his favorite holiday, and he didn’t want to ruin in by fighting with his family.
Buck sighed, leaning against the table heavily. The motion wobbled the skinny legs and sent his perfect tilted display slamming flat onto the table. Buck groaned under his breath. Great. There went all of his hard work- the inly hard work he had put in the whole damn day.
It was going to be a long shift.
That was the understatement of the century. When he thought earlier that this was a special kind of humiliation, that wasn’t supposed to be a tease to the world to make it worse.
“You’re not a real firefighter.”
Gee thanks kid, he’ll make sure to remember that the next time a ladder track was about to fall onto his leg.
That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that Bobby had sent him home early like some kind of fragile child. It wasn’t like he could argue with his captain and insist on staying. The team already thought he was childish enough. Last thing he needed to do was prove that they were right. So he left. He got into his Jeep, and started going hime.
Then suddenly, he saw a lady driving with a man in her windshield at a gas station. He flagged her down. And did his best to save both of them.
Buck assumed if Bobby knew the situation he was getting Buck in by sending him home, he would have never let him leave that damn firehouse.
A civilian rescue and a police call later, Buck was standing in the aftermath of the scene. Officers were moving around him.
Apparently the girl had some crazy head injury and that was the reason she had zero idea she was driving around with a man in her windshield. The paramedics on scene claimed that both patients would make a full recovery, thanks to Buck.
And it felt good. He liked having a purpose. He liked being needed. He almost felt at home again, if you ignored the four missing people he wanted.
“Buckley, are you sure you’re okay? You’re bleeding a whole lot.” One of the officers voice’s snapped him back into the present. Buck looked down at his arms. They were soaked through with blood.
“Yeah, not my blood. I have an extra shirt in my car-“
“It is your blood.” Buck followed the officers gaze the edge of his sleeve. A shallow cut was peaking out. Buck pulled his sleeves back carefully to reveal dozens of tiny glass wounds bleeding profoundly. Shit. The blood thinners.
“Um- yeah I might need something.” The officer nodded. Buck started to stumble and the man quickly caught him.
“I’ll give you a ride to the hospital. I need to get your testimony anyways.” He insisted. Buck nodded. “Try and keep pressure on those cuts until we get there.” Buck nodded again. His head felt all fuzzy and wrong. He was super tired. The officer beside him began asking questions he hardly remembered answering. There was so much blood on his arms. Liquidly, runny blood pouring off of his forearms. He felt so sick. His head was light and airy. He could hear the officer beside him calling out his last name. He couldn’t respond.
His eyes rolled back as his body gave into the darkness.
When Bobby had heard his phone ringing, the hospital was the last thing he expected. Even more surprising than the call itself was who it was about. He didn’t even know he was Buck’s emergency contact. He could have expected as much a couple months ago, but with everything going on lately, it surprised him that the boy wanted Bobby anywhere near him.
He knew he was being a dick to Buck. He knew that when he kept him from returning back to work. He knew that when the whole team had given Buck the cold shoulder during the lawsuit- not that it was much of their choice. And he also knew it when he was keeping Buck back on every single call despite the boy claiming he was ready. If Buck thought he was ready, then Bobby had no right to tell him that he wasn’t. Yet, he did anyway.
Part of Bobby knew the reason. It was something he didn’t find easy admitting to anyone, not even himself, but he knew that the team could see it. Buck held a special place in his heart. Bobby didn’t know if it was because the boy reminded him of Robert Jr. or if it was just the fact Buck was a dumb kid who cane to the firehouse looking for guidance. But he took to Bobby’s life like a hurricane and spun it up until nothing felt the same. Bobby would rather die himself than have a single thing ever happen to the kid.
Then he had watched Buck be crushed underneath a ladder truck. He'd heard the kid sob and yell as his bones fragmented inside of him. Then after months of hard recovery, he'd watch Buck choke up blood inside of his own house. The kid had almost died again. He would have died if he had been alone in his house, or anywhere that he wasn’t surrounded by licensed paramedics and doctors. Then Buck came back. Got washed up in a tsunami. Bobby had watched the kid fall to his knees in exhaustion after realizing Chris was alive. Even after that, Buck pushed himself farther to come back, and Bobby was too scared to let him. He had seen the boy almost die countless times. The only way he felt like he could protect him was to keep him away from it all as much as he could.
He knew that it wasn’t his decision to make. That it wasn’t fair to the kid who had fought so hard for this career. Then the lawsuit happened and they both dug holes deeper than Bobby knew how to get out of, let alone fix.
Bow, somehow Bobby was on the was to the hospital after they had called him relaying Buck had been admitted. That wasn’t the part that had made his blood run cold though. It was only the short couple of words after that scared him. “He cut himself.”
Bobby could only pray to God that it was just really awful wording. He begged the world around him that he hadn’t sent his, no, the kid home and he hurt himself because of it. Bobby didn’t know if he could live with himself knowing that Buck had self-harmed because of Bobby. Because he wasn’t acting mature enough to fix the situation with the second youngest member of his team.
He was surprised he wasn’t pulled over as he speed through the streets of downtown Los Angeles. He was pretty sure he had completely ran a red light at some point, but that was between him, and whatever cop would inevitably see it on security footage. Nothing mattered to him at the moment except getting to Buck and assuring the kid that everything would be okay. That everything that was going on could be fixed and that he was so sorry he ever felt bad enough to hurt himself. He would find help for Buck. Whether the kid wanted it or not.
It didn’t take him long to arrive at the hospital. He hardly recognized that he was pulling into the parking lot through the thick fog of worry in his head. He jumped out of his car, slamming the door shut without locking it. He rushed inside, making his way towards the front desk. He didn’t even give them a second to greet him before he was talking.
“Excuse me,” the lady looked up at him, “Im looking for a patient brought in, not long ago, Evan Buckley?”
“Bobby?” He instantly turned his head. Buck was standing in the weighting room. His arms weren't wrapped in gauze like Bobby had feared. The younger man was looking at him with confusion.
How did they ever get to the point where Buck was confused that Bobby cared about him?
“Hey,” Bobby began walking over to him.
“Hey…” Buck was hesitant.
“They said you were injured. That you-“ Bobby looked down at his forearms. He didn’t see the long deep lines usually associated with self harm. “cut yourself.”
Buck tilted his head before recognition flashed into his eyes. “Oh yeah, it was from the windshield, I told the-“
Buck launched into a long story about a girl with a brain bleed driving for over two days with a man through her windshield. How he had been there to stop her and help both of them. That they would both recover. Because of Buck. Bobby was so undoubtedly proud of the younger man.
When Buck had offered to buy him breakfast, Bobby found himself agreeing easily. He missed the kid. He wanted to make things right between them and that started with sitting down and talking to him.
He was so entirely relieved that Buck hadn’t been trying to hurt himself, that all the weight of the situation seemed to slip to the very back of his mind. The boy, alive and healthy, in front of him was all that mattered right now.
In typical breakfast fashion, Buck ended up taking him to waffle house. Not many places were open so early in the morning, so their options were pretty limited. Bobby would never turn down a plate of grits and sausage though.
As Buck teased him for his quote “old man food,” Bobby couldn’t help but smile. He had missed Buck. He had missed the way Buck made him feel. In a way, the young man in front of him bad giving Bobby a second chance at parenting. He had to teach him how to respect his career and himself. How to be open and honest with himself and his teammates. He could never be more proud of how the man in front of him was growing up.
Putting it into perspective, the whole situation seemed so pointless now. He knew fear was the reason he held the firefighter back, but it was also fear that pushed Buck away. Bobby wouldn’t let that happen again.
“Bobby?” The older man was ripped from his thoughts when Buck said his name through a far too large bite of chocolate chip pancakes. Bobby hummed in acknowledgement.
“Why were you so worried when you got to the hospital? You showed up like you had just seen a ghost.” The question caught him off guard. Of all the things he expected Buck to ask, that wasn’t one of them. He had hoped that he had been subtle enough that Buck wouldn’t notice the extent of his worry when he showed up, but apparently not. He didn’t give Buck enough credit for how smart he was.
Bobby sighed, contemplating on how he was going to answer. He wanted to fix things between h and Buck. He settled on the truth.
“Well, when the ER called me, they said you had been brought in because you cut yourself.” Bobby began to explain. “Which was some pretty awful wording because I thought you tried to hurt yourself.”
Bobby watched at the realization settled into Buck’s eyes. The younger man looked back up at him, opened his mouth, then closed it, seemingly trying to figure out what to say. Bobby could see the gears turning in Buck’s head.
“Bobby,” Buck started, voice softer than usual, “I didn’t do this on purpose. It was an accident.” Bobby sighed with a tight, sad smile.
“I know you didn’t,” Bobby assured, “But for a moment, I thought you did. And I thought it was because the way we had been treating you. And I don’t think I would be able to live with myself if I knew you hurt yourself because of me.” It was the bare truth. Bobby watched a hurricane of emotions blow through Buck’s eyes before the younger man sighed, beginning to rub his temples.
“I wouldn’t hurt myself-“
“Buck.”
The younger man looked back up at him. Bobby held his gaze.
“I’m sorry.” The words were long overdue. Buck wiped his eyes quickly just after Bobby said it.
“Does this mean I can have my family back?” Buck whispered so quietly Bobby almost didn’t hear. Keyword- almost.
He stood up faster than his old bones would appreciate and moved towards Buck so he could wrap the kid in a hug. He felt the way the younger man melted into his embrace as he hugged Bobby back tightly.
“Oh kid, you never lost us.”