Chapter Text
It’s not that Buck doesn’t want a new partner at work. It’s just– After years and years of new people coming and going, each one replaced by a worse one, he doesn’t hold the highest expectations for the new hire.
In his time at the one-eighteen – coming up seven years now, he’s had 16 different partners. At this point, the turnover is as high as for a Barista position at a downtown coffee shop.
And it makes him wonder, of course, if he’s the problem. Firefighter Padeleci, the guy who’d submitted his transfer papers last month, made sure to let it be known that Buck, in fact, was the reason for his resignation from the one-eighteen and therefore his place as Buck’s partner.
But that’s just Padeleci being a bigot who revealed his cards too late. He was never meant to last at the one-eighteen anyway.
The right person will inevitably come, is what Buck tells himself before each new hire. It’s practically a mantra at this point, but one that is no longer making him believe its truth. He lost that belief sometime between Hire Ten and Twelve.
And today, Hire Seventeen is supposed to be starting. Even though Bobby’s leaving for his honeymoon cruise with Athena later in the afternoon, he’s spared enough time to introduce them to the team during the morning briefing.
Buck arrives at the station unhurriedly. The one time he rushed to meet a new hire – he thinks it might’ve been Hire Thirteen, he’d scared the poor woman off with his overtly enthusiasm.
He has, however, gone so far as to dry clean his turnouts and uniform. He hasn’t forgotten the time he, fresh from a rescue at a pond connected to a sewer, got sniffed and winced at by Hire Eight.
So, in his cleanly rubbed turnout pants and an LAFD shirt in his last name, he waits by the stairs to the station loft for a new face to turn up. He scans the small crowd forming for the briefing, but so far, nothing.
If Hire Seventeen is late, that’s already a bad omen in his books. Bobby doesn’t tolerate late, and Hen, who will be Interim Captain while Bobby’s on the cruise, is even more particular about punctuality.
“Five dollars they’ve gone to the wrong station,” Ravi, in a hushed tone, offers Chim.
“Ten dollars if it’s station one-oh-eight,” Hen mutters.
Buck ignores their usual betting. This is his own future his teammates are betting on. He’s not going to get involved. (Though he does silently agree that if Hire Seventeen had gone to the wrong station, it would be the close-by one-oh-eight that people always mix their station up with.)
“Are we allowed to bet on whether they’ll be hot?” Ravi carries on. “You know, just wondering, since the firefighter calendar photo shoots are coming up.”
Such a probie thing to say, thinks Buck. He’d thought Ravi had learned better by now.
And he can’t help but include himself in the conversation this time.
“Don’t worry, they’re not stealing your spot,” Buck tells him, his voice slightly cracking from lack of usage. He tends to get pretty quiet before a new hire. “Bobby is trying to hire people based on team compatibility, not looks. We work at the LAFD, not a fashion magazine.”
“Are you just scared they’re gonna be bulkier than you?” teases Ravi.
“Don’t forget six-pack Jim,” Hen reminds.
“From what I hear, the nickname’s eight-pack,” says a familiar voice from behind them.
Buck looks up at Bobby, halfway down the stairs from the loft. He’s already dressed in his civvies, a Hawaiian shirt appropriate for his later occasion. He wants to tease his Captain for the uncharacteristic bright colors, when his stare is caught by the man in Bobby’s shadow.
Buck squints his eyes, trying to get a good look at him, but he’s nearly hiding behind the Captain, trying not to draw too much attention to himself.
Which he fails to, when the next thing Bobby instructs the team to do, is pay attention.
“Let’s warmly welcome our new hire to the team,” he announces, once he reaches the bottom of the stairs. “Eddie, this is everyone on the A-shift. A-shift, this is Firefighter-Paramedic Eddie Diaz.”
A shiver travels down Buck’s spine. He feels something come alive in his gut, something long buried and nearly forgotten.
And when Eddie Diaz finally comes out of Bobby’s shadow, straightening up and awkwardly waving to the team gawking at him, Buck can finally fully take him in. The muscular build, the smooth, tan skin, the envyingly long eyelashes enclosing his mahogany eyes, the mole beneath his left one.
A mole Buck, once upon a time, would pepper soft kisses onto.
But he can’t think about that now. Not ever. Not if Eddie is going to be–
Oh God. Eddie is going to be his partner.
Right on cue, Bobby points out Buck in the crowd. “That’s the one I told you about, Eddie. Firefighter Evan Buckley. We call him Buck.”
Eddie’s gaze meets his, causing Buck to shiver in dread again. Eddie takes him in, eyes squinting, and Buck waits and waits for it to click for him, too–
But his eyes never spark in recognition. He simply offers him a small, unknowing smile one would offer a complete stranger.
Buck’s not religious but he thanks a higher power for that.
He watches as Eddie greets respective members of the team, exchanging introductions. Closer up now, Buck sees that he looks older than when he’d seen him last, flashing more prominent smile wrinkles now.
But that makes sense. It’s been ten, eleven years since he’d seen him in person. He’s refused to look him up online, find out what he’s been up to and how the hell he’s ended up here in Los Angeles, hired at the very station Buck has spent the majority of their years apart at.
It’s nearly ironic how great of a coincidence it is. But there’s no denying it. It’s the same Eddie, only a decade or so matured.
The same Eddie, currently approaching him.
“Hey, Buck, is it?” His voice is low, melodic. “I hear you’ve been having a tough time finding a partner.”
“Y-yeah,” Buck manages. “Um, we can’t seem to find a good fit.”
Eddie steps slightly closer, and Buck’s nose is suddenly hit by the smell of an expensive, enchanting cologne. “I’m the same. I’ve been transferred from one station to another the past few years, but I can’t seem to land somewhere I’d fit.”
Eddie makes a pause, waiting on Buck to step in with a comment, but he doesn’t. With his anxiety at an all time high, he can’t seem to form a coherent thought.
“Well, anyway,” Eddie carries on, clearing his throat. “I hope we end up being good partners. You know,” he lets out a little laugh. “I actually used to know someone with the same last name as yours, and we were a great match in personalities.”
Buck’s laugh in response is achingly awkward. Yeah, he knows.
Eddie stares at him a moment longer, waiting on Buck to budge. He’s really not making the greatest first impression from Eddie’s perspective, but he can’t deal with the tension of knowing something Eddie doesn’t seem to be privy to.
He gets distracted by Ravi approaching Eddie, slapping him lightly on the back.
“So, have you heard of the LAFD calendar?”
Bobby leaves for his honeymoon cruise quickly after. For the first few hours of the shift, no calls come in. Hen is writing paperwork already somehow, and Buck lounges on the couch opposite her, watching Eddie interact with Chim and Ravi in the loft’s kitchen.
He can’t quite fully hear their conversation, but they’re laughing a lot. Like they’re already good friends, not people who just met.
“Why don’t you just join them?” asks Hen, noticing of course. Nothing slips past her.
“I can’t,” is Buck’s weak answer.
“Why not? Eddie seems nice. Way nicer than the last few hires.”
This is the perfect opportunity to tell Hen the truth. But the words are stuck at the back of his throat. It would be embarrassing to reveal that Buck knows Eddie, or rather knew him, once upon a time, when he hasn’t been recognized in turn.
It’s not that Buck particularly wants to be recognized by him. Just… It’s complicated.
Thankfully, he’s saved by the bell from answering her.
All of them rush downstairs to the fire engine. They have yet to formally discuss their seat arrangements inside, but Eddie claims the seat opposite Buck, their knees slightly brushing during bumps on the drive over.
They find themselves at the scene of– A fighter jet crashed into a suburban house.
“Bobby sure picked the right day to leave for his honeymoon,” Hen mutters.
They head inside the wrecked house, surprisingly running into a very alive, barely bruised, woman. “My husband– He’s stuck in his chair…which is not unusual,” she adds snidely.
Eddie immediately approaches her to investigate any potential injuries. “Ma’am, let me take a look at you.” At the same time, Chimney assesses her husband, Abe, indeed stuck in his chair, but with the additional element of the plane pinning him in place.
Chimney calls for Buck, who jumps into action immediately, trying to pull the part of the plane off Abe. It doesn’t budge, and Buck’s immediate idea doesn’t work either, so Chimney decides to cut him out of the chair.
Buck notices Eddie taking a sniff of the liquid running down the plane’s wing, resulting in him coughing. “I don’t think that’s fuel. Might be hydrazine.”
Which is obviously not great news. “All right,” says Hen. “Either way, we start cutting this chair, I worry about sparks. We just need to clear a space so that we can slide him out.” She pauses, crouching down to take a look at a strange part of the plane Eddie’s staring at apprehensively, the part pinning Abe to the chair. “What do we suppose this is?”
“Exactly what you think it is,” Eddie muses.
A dummy bomb, Buck also realizes upon taking a closer look.
Upon calling Joe, the pilot of the crashed fighter jet who’s hanging outside by the ambulance, they figure out that they’re the ones who have to diffuse it. The National Guard is an hour away, which is time Abe doesn’t have.
Hen assigns the task to Buck and Eddie. A sorta trial for their partnership.
For the first time, getting in position beside Eddie, Buck isn’t distracted. His brain is working sharply, focused on the high stakes at hand.
“Okay, Joe, we’re ready,” Eddie announces through the radio, giving Buck a slight nod.
“First, carefully remove the trigger housing from the nose,” answers the pilot.
Buck passes him the tool, and Eddie does as told. The panel comes off and Buck gently lies it aside, revealing a compartment full of muti-colored wires. “Trigger cap is removed,” says Eddie. “What now?”
“Go ahead and snip that red wire,” says Joe. Buck passes Eddie the snips, and he confidently gets into position. Except, Joe’s voice comes through the radio again. “But first, disconnect the white low-voltage coupling.”
Eddie retracts his hand at once, widening his eyes at Buck.
“Close call,” mutters Buck.
Eddie doesn’t grant a response to that, zeroed in on the next task. When done, Buck pushes the radio on, sensing Eddie wants to speak again. And he does. “Okay, Joe. Voltage coupling disconnected.”
“Okay. Go ahead and cut that green wire.”
Eddie’s head snaps to Buck. They seem to be on the same page.
“Uh, green?” Buck asks. “You– You said red.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah, you said red,” Eddie confirms. So do Maddie and Josh through the joint frequency, having been listening in the whole time.
“Okay, okay. Uh,” Joe struggles. “Let’s go with red.”
Buck switches the radio off for a second, seeking out Hen. “What the hell is wrong with this guy?”
“He just fell ten thousand feet,” Hen reminds him. “It’s possible he’s not thinking that clearly.”
Great. What is it Joe said before? Even if it’s a dummy bomb, it’s still an explosive. This house and the one next door could explode if they cut the wrong wire.
It’s at that exact time Abe starts struggling to breathe and Chim asks them to hurry up.
Buck and Eddie share another glance, before Eddie hones in on Hen.
“What are we gonna do here, Cap?”
A broken part of the jet starts spitting out sparks.
“Cut the red one,” Hen decides, her voice shaky but certain. She really is nailing this interim captain business. “His disorientation is just now presenting. Let’s go with his first instinct. Cut the red one,” she repeats for good measure.
Slowly, Buck and Eddie shift their gazes back onto the wires.
Buck trusts Hen’s judgment. But it doesn’t make it any less terrifying to watch Eddie near the red wire with the snips. His heart is drumming against his ribcage for an entirely different reason than earlier. Eddie is so, so close to snipping it–
A soft thud sounds from behind the dummy bomb, where neither of them can see, but Chimney voice comes through immediately, “Guys. Hey, guys. Guys!”
Eddie jumps back from the wires, and they all look at Chim and–
Abe’s legs are freed now. Turns out, he’s been sitting in a reclining armchair, which Chim reclined.
Eddie lets out a breath in relief, followed by Buck and Hen.
“Thank God,” he mouths to Buck. “Close call indeed.”
“Close call,” Buck reiterates. It seems he can’t say more than the same two words to Eddie.
Once the imminent danger is somewhat disposed of – the firefighters aren’t the ones who need to detonate a freaking explosive anymore, they team up to carry Abe out to the ambulance, still in the armchair.
For the rest of the day, the calls aren’t quite so extreme. After the sun goes down, their work day also comes to an end and they’re replaced by the B-shift.
Buck dresses quickly, cursing the size of the locker room, for it’s hard to hide his bare chest from Eddie. Eddie, who’s taking his time, hanging around shirtless as he unhurriedly types a text to someone on his phone.
Until, he speaks up. To Buck.
“I overheard a bit of something Hen and Chimney talked about up at the loft,” Eddie starts, finally picking up his civvies from his brand new locker. “Did I understand correctly that Chimney is getting married soon?”
Great. Small talk. Buck can ace it.
“He is. To my sister, actually.”
Eddie stills with his hand half into the locker. Buck can’t see his face, but he doesn’t understand what about the few words he’s managed to mutter could’ve caused a reaction like that.
“You, uh, must all be very close with each other, if that’s the case,” Eddie carries on eventually, getting back to dressing. “I mean, if your blood families and work families are so intertwined.”
Buck shrugs. “At the end of the day, it’s just family.”
Eddie finishes buttoning up his shirt. He shuts the locker with a thud, pulling the duffel strap over his shoulder. Buck feels cornered now that his full attention is on him, small as he sits on the locker room bench.
“It was a pretty good first day, considering some others I’ve had,” Eddie reveals softly. “Even if we did almost explode.”
Buck lets out a small chuckle. “Hen mentioned the National Guard confirmed red would’ve been the right wire to cut.”
“Well,” starts Eddie, offering him a friendly smile. “I just wanted to stress the point that, despite the high stakes, I felt– I don’t know, safe with you guys. I have worked at plenty of stations, as a sort of substitute. But I’ve never seen the level of trust that you have in each other.”
Buck chews on his lip, feeling like an idiot.
It’s obvious that Eddie’s trying to connect with him, like he somehow already has in the matter of a day with the rest of the A-shift. But he’s finding it hard to get Buck to let him in, clearly not having realized the truth.
What if Eddie assumes Buck dislikes him? He’s been pretty cold to him all day, afraid of being noticed and investigated too thoroughly.
“The one-eighteen is special,” is all he can muster, hoping it’s enough.
Eddie nods slowly, backing away from him. He starts heading out, only to stop by the door.
“Bye, Buck. It’s been nice meeting you,” he mutters, before leaving Buck behind.
Just like that, he finally releases a breath he’s been holding since the morning.
Buck never kept many belongings in his travels across the Americas before landing in LA.
But he did take a small box around with him.
He locates it at the back of his closet once home, showered off the grime of the shift and slipped into his pajamas. It’s a wooden box with the engraved initials EB on the bottom right corner of its cover.
Inside are several receipts and tickets he kept as mementos, partly for budgeting purposes, but mostly to remember every place he’d visited. But movie theater tickets aren't what he’s searching for.
At the very bottom of the box is a stack of envelopes, with only the recipient’s address on them, no return one. He never intended it to be a communication – and in the end, never even sent them out, too cowardly for it.
Addressed To:
Eddie Diaz
Apt 317, Bexar Hall
Texas State University
TX 78666, United States
Buck picks up the letters, organizing them from oldest to newest.
It’s not a crazy amount of letters, but the crazy part is that they exist in the first place.
That he’s kept them this whole time, even if stacked at the back of his closet.
He carefully extracts the oldest letter, unfolding it under the dimmed lamp in his loft. The writing’s nearly intelligible, but he’s read enough of his own writing to be able to decipher it. The paper is slightly faded and wrinkled, like the letter’s been handled one too many times.
He starts reading, exhaling a stuttering breath.
April 4th, 2013
Dear Eddie,
You probably have a lot of questions. I’ll get to answering them later. But first, let me paint you a picture.
Imagine a little child, growing up in the depths of suburban Pennsylvania. They have no real friends, only their older sister. They have plenty of toys that were once said sister’s, including a collection of Barbies.
Among these Barbies is a singular Ken. The child pays special attention to him. While their parents are wondering why the child isn’t obsessed with changing the Barbies into a thousand and one dresses, they take a pink marker and draw a birthmark on the side of Ken’s left eye. They keep Ken hidden from everyone else and only bring him out when no one’s around, to look at him long and hard, mesmerized.
If you haven’t guessed yet, I am that child.
This is the only way I can vocalize why I left. I wasn’t ready to tell you in person, and now I’ve fucked off to– I can’t say where, as I don’t want you to find me. Remember that time you drove around checking all bars in San Marcos, looking for me, because I didn’t respond to your call? I don’t want history to repeat.
The point is, yes, I dropped out and left without telling anyone. I can no longer stand being forced into roles I have never succeeded at playing. And while it hurts to leave you behind, I have to start anew.
I’m going to end it here for now. Don’t be spooked by the signature.
Missing you,
Buck