Chapter Text
BUCK
NOVEMBER 14th
Buck loved almost everything about being a firefighter. Even the bad days at least meant he was out doing something he loved, trying his best to help with people he trusted by his side. But the one thing he hated was the constant trainings. The ones that involved physical work weren’t too bad, but the classroom based ones? Those were a nightmare. There was always something requiring recertification or reassessment to keep his qualifications current, which inevitably meant sitting in some stuffy conference room for hours or even days, listening to the driest presentations known to man, presentations he’d already heard before. It made his skin crawl having to sit in there, sit still for so long.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to learn. He loved to learn. He just hated learning like that. His therapist had suggested, a few times, that maybe he should be assessed for ADHD and Buck honestly didn’t disagree with him. He’d done a deep dive on ADHD after his therapist first suggested it and a lot about it seemed to fit. But he was also wary of a formal diagnosis, of the ways it might end up weaponized against him. Bobby was great and wouldn’t have an issue with it, Buck knew that. Neither would any of his friends, or Maddie, but even just a few months under Gerard, and dealing with Ortiz, had been more than enough to prove to him he needed to be careful if he wanted to continue in this career for the rest of his life.
Formal diagnosis or not, sitting in the recertification class on chainsaw use in structural firefighting all day had made him fidgety, and not in the way running it out would fix. He needed to actually do something. Something that took his whole body and occupied his whole mind.
“Want to go to a rage room?” Buck asked when Eddie picked up.
Eddie snickered. “Class that bad, huh?”
“Would it kill them to liven it up a little? Would it?” Buck returned. “It’s chainsaws. Chainsaws are fun. But those presentations sound like they’re about fucking dental work or something.”
He grabbed a shopping basket from the front of the store he’d stopped at on the way home and put his phone between his shoulder and ear, wandering through the first aisle and tossing things in mostly at random.
“You sound like you’re already at a rage room,” Eddie commented.
“Hollows,” Buck explained. “Figured if I was going to be on this end of town I may as well stop in so no one kills me on shift tomorrow.”
Hollows was a small grocery store run by a woman of indeterminate age—possibly several centuries. Everything inside had a strange coating of somewhat sticky dust, and the products in the store did not seem to exist anywhere else on earth. The 118 had answered a call for a different store a few doors down from Hollows years ago and when they’d gotten back to the trucks, they’d found a Hollows bag full of the most delicious chocolates and other candies any of them had ever had (all professionally packaged, they weren’t making that mistake again), and a note thanking them for their work. It was now a required stop whenever someone was in the area, and whoever went had to stock the station snack cupboard with what they found. The selection was different every time, so it was a total crapshoot what you’d get, but it would always be good.
“See if you can find that orange peel chocolate stuff again,” Eddie requested.
“Already got you two bars. So, rage room?” Buck went back and got a couple more bars too, just because. Eddie deserved something nice, and he’d rather sucked at doing that for himself ever since Chris had left. He’d usually accept a treat if Buck got it for him, though. He just wouldn’t get one on his own. Buck almost grabbed several strawberry chocolate bars too—they’d been Tommy’s favorite—before he remembered that he’d been broken up with three days earlier. Now he wanted to go to a rage room for multiple reasons.
He still couldn’t quite figure out what had gone wrong that evening with Tommy. But after spending the night drinking with Eddie—and ignoring the problem by watching dumb B-grade firefighter movies and pointing out everything they got wrong—and a couple days of turning it over in his head, he was starting to at least see the basic shape of the issue. Specifically, he was starting to see that when he got some sort of shock in a relationship, he tended to overcompensate in trying to fix it. He clung too hard and it inevitably scared people off. He was just, apparently, hard to love. That was something he’d known his whole life, but it still stung every time he realized it had cost him another relationship. At this point, he kind of felt like he was done trying. It just hurt too much to be rejected time and time again.
“Traffic’s shit right now. It’ll take you two hours to get back across the city,” Eddie said, cutting into Buck’s thoughts. “We’ve got a shift in the morning.”
Buck huffed. “There’s that.”
“Hang in there for the night,” Eddie said, voice kind. “Go for a run when you get home, we’ll do some hard training in the morning, then hopefully get a good call or two.”
Buck felt himself relaxing, despite the rage room invitation being shot down. Eddie was good at that, helping him unwind the mess in his head. “Yeah, alright. You want anything else from Hollows before I leave?”
“I trust your judgment,” Eddie answered.
Buck picked up something from a box that had a sharpied sign declaring them bags of gummy worms, but he kind of suspected they were actual worms that had been candied in some manner, just based on looks. “That’s brave.”
Eddie chuckled. “See you in the morning.”
He hung up and Buck slid his phone into his back pocket, grabbing a few more things before heading up to the register. The college kid working the evening shift had about ten different textbooks spread out on the counter, but she got him checked out and on his way quickly. Thanking her, he headed for his Jeep towards the back of the parking lot. He had a specific spot he liked here, given the layout of the lot was a little wonky, so he tried to always get it even though it was a bit more of a walk. Made it easier to get in and out.
There weren’t a lot of people at the small shopping center this time of the evening on a Thursday—it was nearly eight and long past dark—but there was one other vehicle parked about five spaces away from his, even farther away from the shops and under a dead streetlight. Buck figured they must be visiting someone in the apartments across the street, though that was a risky idea. There were signs all over declaring that there was no apartment parking in this lot and that violators would be towed.
He reached the Jeep and pulled out his keys to unlock it, setting his groceries on the se—
“Help!”
The shout made him go still, one hand on his bag of goodies, keys dangling in his other hand as he tried to place where the shout had come from. It had sound like a woman, but despite having the tone of a shout, it had lacked volume in a way that made it hard to tell if it had been far away or just from someone who was being quiet for some other reason. Were they stuck somewhere? Just a quiet person? Scared?
“Help! I think my father’s having a heart attack!”
The van.
Buck bolted over, going around the far side, pulling his phone out of his pocket as he went. He found the side door of the nondescript gray work van open, a man in a white button-up and tie lying halfway in with his legs dangling out. His eyes were clenched shut and he was clutching at his left arm, breathing raggedly. A young blond woman, maybe early twenties, was standing next to the door hyperventilating.
“LAFD, I can help. What’s his name?” Buck asked, leaning in to take the man’s pulse. It seemed normal, just a little fast, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t wrong. Buck didn’t have nearly as much medical experience as Hen and Chim, or even Eddie, couldn’t always spot a heart problem from a manual pulse check the way they could from years of experience. At least he did have a pulse, though. That was something.
“Te—Terry,” the woman sobbed.
“Does he have any known heart problems?” Buck asked. It was only then that he finally looked back down at his phone and realized it wasn’t dialing. He’d punched in 911 and hit the call button, but nothing was happening. The corner of his phone declared he didn’t have service, which didn’t make sense. He always had service here. He’d just been on the phone with Eddie. But there wasn’t time to figure it out right now. He shoved the phone back in his pocket.
“I don’t know,” the woman said, voice less shaky than before.
“Okay, I need you to go inside and find someone with a working phone to call 911, alright?” Maybe the towers were down for some reason. But they would’ve had to go down in just the time since he’d hung up with Eddie, which seemed strange. It had only been a few minutes. “Hollows has a landline behind the counter. Go.”
Buck turned his attention to the man, climbing halfway into the van to get a better look at him in the dark interior. The empty interior, Buck realized. There was literally nothing else in there. Weird. The man was groaning a bit, still clutching his arm, but Buck realized he wasn’t sweating, wasn’t gulping for air. And his breathing didn’t seem as ragged as before. Was he coming out of it, maybe? Had it been a minor heart attack that he was recovering from—at least somewhat—without medical intervention?
“Terry, my name is Buck, I’m with the Los Angeles Fire Department. I’m going to help while your daughter calls for more help, okay?” Buck said, loosening the man’s tie and undoing the top couple buttons of his shirt. “When did the pain start?”
“LAFD, huh?” The man said, opening his eyes just slightly. His breathing suddenly seemed perfect. Something wasn’t adding up, the whole situation starting to pluck at Buck’s intuition in a bad way.
“Yep,” Buck said, smiling despite his unease. He needed to handle this carefully. “When did the pain—”
The man cut his eyes to Buck’s side where the daughter had been standing and gave a very small nod. Confused, Buck turned to look, shocked to see her still standing there. Didn’t she want to get help for her dad? Or maybe…was this her dad at all? Before he could open his mouth to say anything, before he could move out of the van and put some space between himself and these people, she’d grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back and to the side, swinging something towards him in her other hand. It all happened too fast for Buck to do anything before a needle pierced his neck, sharp and uncomfortable and right at his jugular.
Twisting away, he tried to shove out at her, but lifting his arms felt like trying to move two bricks of lead. He collapsed into the van, Terry moving out of the way just in time. Buck couldn’t move at all as Terry and the woman pulled his phone and wallet out of his pockets, examining the contents of the wallet.
Buck couldn’t have fought back if he wanted to. Couldn’t even twitch his fingers. Whatever sedative they’d given him was working fast, his whole body paralyzed and vision narrowing.
“Evan Buckley,” Terry read out from his driver’s license. “Early thirties, organ donor. Emergency contact card only lists his sister and a coworker, no spouse or parents.” He then scanned his eyes over Buck once, eyes lingering on the LAFD logo on his shirt. He gave one curt nod. “He’ll do perfectly.”
The woman reached down and gently grabbed Buck’s chin, pulling his face out of the floor of the van until it was visible enough for her to hold his phone up in front of him. The little faceID lock twirled, opening the phone right up for her. Buck cursed himself for not turning that feature off. Athena always scolded him about it, but it was just so damn convenient.
“Location sharing’s off,” the woman declared.
Fuck.
Terry nodded again. “Let’s go.”
Buck’s phone and wallet were tossed onto the ground, as were his keys, his legs shoved into the van, and the door closed. The last thing he was aware of before the world went completely black was seeing a small white box under the seat in front of him, several lights blinking on the side. One light glowed next to the words, “Jamming Activated.” A cell phone jammer.
Fuck.