Chapter Text
Buck wasn’t certain what brought him so far outside of the city. Or, no, that wasn’t quite right. He knew how he’d ended up outside of Los Angeles. He knew exactly what had driven him out of the city. He just wasn’t certain how he’d ended up here, precisely: on the side of a deserted crossroads, miles and miles and miles from home.
Twelve hours ago, during Bobby and Athena’s impromptu Christmas party for everyone from the red-tagged apartment building, Eddie had gathered them all up and announced that he was leaving. Twelve hours ago, Buck had dropped his Santa hat to the ground, turned, and got into his jeep. Twelve hours ago, he had started driving without a destination in mind, no thoughts beyond “no” and “leaving” and “why.”
His phone had been ringing constantly the first few hours, taunting him from its spot in the passenger seat, where he’d thrown it before starting the engine. Taylor, Bobby, Hen, Ravi, and of course Eddie. He never answered, didn’t even bother to reach over and deny the calls, and eventually his phone suffered the same fate as his Christmas spirit. His jeep had died too, eventually. It turns out that unlike him, it couldn’t continue running on anxiety alone.
So, there Evan Buckley was: stranded on the side of the road, a long walk away from a gas station, in the middle of the night on Christmas.
Alone.
Or, as the case may be, not alone.
He’d gotten out to start the trek for gas when he spotted the other man. He was tall and skinny and looming, with a wide brim hat and a long black coat. The light of the waning moon was enough to see how the man smiled pleasantly at him from across the intersection, to see how thin his face was. His eyes were set deep into their sockets, and his cheekbones jutted out. Buck couldn’t help but think of skulls.
“Howdy, stranger,” the stranger said, walking across the pavement. His footsteps made no sound in the near silence. “What's got you out here at this hour?”
“My, uh, my jeep died,” Buck answered, awkwardly gesturing at it over his shoulder. “It’s out of gas.”
“Well I can see that,” he said. “But why are you here?”
“Just out for a drive, I guess. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You were just out for a drive? Alone? On Christmas?”
“My friend’s leaving,” Buck told him, and even just speaking the words out loud sent a pang of loss through his heart. “My sister and her boyfriend left with my niece months ago, and now my best friend is leaving, and I- I just wanted to clear my head.”
“Did you? Clear your head, I mean.”
“No. I just got myself stuck.” He let out a humorless laugh. “Eddie told us he was leaving the station and I just couldn’t stand to be there anymore. I wasn’t thinking ahead. I never think ahead.”
“The station?”
“I’m a firefighter, in LA. And I know leaving the station isn’t the same as leaving me, but- Why am I telling you this?”
“Sounds like you needed a friendly ear,” the stranger said, holding out his hand. “Name’s Ichabod.”
“Uh, Buck,” he answered, shaking it awkwardly, uncomfortable about giving his name to a total stranger in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. “Listen, uh, can I borrow your phone?”
“Don't have one on me,” Ichabod told him. “Tell me, what is it that you want?”
“What?”
“What do you want, Buck?” he repeated, the words carrying an almost physical weight.
“I- I don’t- To fix things,” Buck blurted out, the words clawing their way out of his throat of their own volition. “I want to fix whatever broke my family but I don’t even know what that was. I don’t even know when it was.”
“Well, I guess I can work with that,” the man said, smiling broadly. He had never let go of Buck’s hand, fingers keeping it in an iron grip.
Had his eyes always been black?
Buck woke up in his bed with a headache worse than the time he tried to outdrink a Russian tourist in Peru. It didn’t help that Felix was in the kitchen blasting Britney Spears at top volume while he cooked. Normally that would be okay - top volume was the only acceptable volume for listening to Toxic, after all - but not when his brain was doing its best impression of a conga-line in his skull. There was nausea to go with it, too, and all of this would be perfectly normal for a hangover if he’d been drinking at all the night before.
He hadn’t. Been drinking, that was. It was his first day as a probationary firefighter, after months and months of going through the academy, and Buck needed-
Wait.
What?
He blinked his eyes open, took in his surroundings with pained confusion.
“What the fuck?” It was whispered, but it was still akin to poking his own eye with an icepick.
The problem wasn’t that he didn’t know where he was, oh no. He recognized his room in the apartment he had shared with the guys he’d followed from Peru. The apartment he hadn’t lived in since Abby. The apartment he hasn’t stepped foot in for literal years now.
Why was he suffering the worst hangover ever in his old room?
Why did he wake up thinking it was his first day at the station?
Why did it sound like Felix was strangling a cat as he sang along to the music?
There were two options here. Option one: he got really, really, really drunk after Eddie’s bombshell of an announcement and for some reason texted Felix or one of the others, who then brought him back and laid him out in his old room. Or option two: the last four years or so of his life were nothing but an extremely vivid, detailed, and realistic dream. For some reason, Buck was simultaneously relieved and disappointed when he checked his phone for the date to find that it was, indeed, 2017.
The second option, then.
What the hell, brain.
He couldn’t shake the utter feeling of loss that settled over him, though. Some of the things his subconscious had come up with had been awful - his leg, the tsunami, the well, the sniper - but he’d had a family. Even if it was splintering at the end. Chimney and Hen and Ravi and Eddie and Chris, they probably didn’t even exist outside of his imagination. Maddie was - hopefully - perfectly safe in Hershey. And Bobby was probably nothing at all like the real Captain Nash.
Was it normal, to grieve over a life that was never even real? He’d have to ask Dr. Copeland when- No. She wasn’t real, either. Shoot.
The alarm on his phone chose that moment to start blaring as a warning that he needed to be getting up. He hurried to dress and grab his work bag and rush out the door, dry swallowing a couple of ibuprofen and waving awkwardly to Felix as he went. He could not wait to start his actual first day, he could not wait to tell Maddie all about it in the next postcard.
Buck paused as he got out of his jeep, because… The outside looked the same. It looked exactly the same. But that was to be expected, he’d driven by it once, just so he knew where it was and how to get there. His subconscious must have grabbed onto that memory and milked it for all it was worth.
What wasn’t to be expected was how the inside wasn’t any different from his dream, either. What wasn’t to be expected was how he followed the smell of Bobby’s familiar cooking up the stairs to a loft he knew like the back of his hand. What wasn’t to be expected was to find Hen and Chimney and Bobby sitting there eating, exactly like that first day. Hen and Chimney and Bobby, all of them perfectly real and not a dream.
“Hi, uh- Evan Buckley, new recruit,” Buck said, while on the inside he was screaming. “I was- I was told to report to uh, Captain Nash?”
He watched as they all feigned confusion and looked at each other, as Bobby asked them if they knew Captain Nash, and Buck-
Buck had no clue what was going on, anymore.
Not option one.
Not option two.
What the fuck was option three, then?