Chapter Text
He had won; but he was gathering by the second that, in a much more real sense, he had lost. That first day back after the agreement had been reached in court, and contracts had been signed. After Buck had refused to accept the LAFD’s initial offer, hedging his bets (and, he thought nauseously-- most of his life) that they would lower the settlement in exchange for a change of contract. When they breathlessly accepted the proposed changes and subsequent millions of dollars difference argued by J. Mackey, esquire, he had practically bounded home, wrenching open his laptop and waited all afternoon until the promised email of confirmation arrived from the 126-118-6-191-377 Human Resources Management email, providing him with his updated, if probationary, assignment for the next week, reinstating his portal access for scheduling the rest of the quarter. Buck could have cried tears of joy as he watched the spinning wheel of death nearly crash his computer trying to access the calendar, just as it did every time, the seemingly Soviet-era software fighting for its life as Buck confirmed! and confirmed! and confirmed! every shift he could access.
His first day back, he was able to chalk it up to the long time away and the slightly adjusted schedule and the new parameters of probation, which Buck hadn’t walked through in years. He had to start the morning with an hour-long meeting with Bobby in his office, for one thing. Closing the door behind him, he had been quick to mirror his captain’s cool reserve, resolving to see the paperwork through, be reprimanded or reminded or refamiliarized with everything he already knew. Much to Buck’s surprise, however, Bobby’s icy reception quickly revealed itself to be genuine.
“Listen-- you won the case. You obviously proved whatever it was you thought you had to prove. Congratulations.”
“Uh, thank--”
“But we’re not in court anymore. Take a look around. We’ve got no lawyers, no judges. Technically, the book is sitting on that shelf over there, but no one’s going to be rifling through it looking for loopholes.”
Buck blinked across the desk at him.
“Oh… okay?”
“And as far as everyone here is concerned? You have a much tougher case ahead of you. Now I signed you back on because I had to; because otherwise they threatened to dissolve the entire 118. Which I know you know. So you’re here.”
“I know, Bobby, and I--”
“It’s Captain Nash.”
Buck gamely tried to ignore the chill that ran down the back of his neck. He had prepared for this.
“Sorry, Captain Nash, yes.”
“So you got what you wanted. And, I’ve got to say, I underestimated you, Buckley. I didn’t think you would go that far; wasn’t even aware it was something you were capable of.”
“I… it wasn’t my intention to--”
“No. No, here’s the thing: we’re done with that. With intention. It doesn’t matter what you intended. What matters is that you’re here now, again. And we have to figure out how that’s going to work.”
“You won’t regret it, Captain. I’m gonna make it up to you, you’ll see--”
“Oh, forget about that. I don’t doubt you’d give it a good try, but I wouldn’t make it my first concern if I were you. You have to make it up to all of them. Each and every one of whom, I should tell you, begged me to fight your reinstatement with the department. That’s whom you have to make it up to.”
“Right.”
“I don’t have to tell you how much your little legal excursion disrupted the team: you orchestrated it. Their personal lives were pulled apart; Hen and Karen had to fight an attempt to revoke their foster care license, Chim was investigated by HR, Eddie questioned by the fitness battery board. Not to mention I was put on temporary leave for potential negligence of duty. Don’t get me started on the case that was built against the firehouse as a whole. You’re gonna be doing the refiling of the years of call reports we had to provide and go through, so I’m sure you’ll realize if you haven’t already.”
“Of course, Bob-- Captain Nash. And it wasn’t, I never-”
“You’ll be on probation for two weeks, which is mandatory for onboarding, I know you know that. No one volunteered to be your supervisory partner, and given that we’re understaffed for the rest of the summer, it’s technically going to be me. Don’t expect to have your hand held.”
“I wouldn’t exp--”
“Hannah Garrison is the new recruit. She’s been here the past two months, toggling back and forth between A and B shift: if she needs anything covered, anything switched, you’re going to be the one to do it. So I hope you don’t have too much on your schedule.”
“I am completely flexible, sir.”
“Good. You’ll be the man behind for five calls off, one call on for the probationary period.”
“Wait, I thought--”
“As per the minimum field hours dictated in that contract you signed.”
Buck couldn’t miss the way Bobby’s nostrils flared as he raised his eyebrows at him, the vitriol dripping from his words, the challenge at the end of every line. Though his hands were folded on the desk in front of him in a facsimile of ease, the tension in his shoulders betrayed him, the unnatural stillness setting Buck’s teeth on edge.
“Right.”
“Ravi’s been assigned with Diaz, so if Garrison’s on, you’ll be with her, otherwise you’re flying solo.”
“Okay.”
“Any questions?”
“Uh, no. No, sir.”
“Good. I’ve outlined the station duties you’re responsible for the next 73 hours here; it doesn’t matter how or in which order they get done, but it all needs to happen before the end of your shift on Thursday. Got it?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Buck stood and reached across the desk, taking the clipboard from Bobby, flipping through the multiple sheets of grunt work outlined before him. He nodded to himself, looked back up. Bobby was staring at him, the same stony look as before, heavy and immoveable.
“Anything else?”
“Uh, no. No sir, I just… I’m just really glad to be back.”
Buck flashed him a close-lipped grin, pulling the clipboard tight to his chest. Bobby just looked at him. Something hot and tight wound its way around Buck’s chest, pulling at the nexus behind his sternum, catching his breath. Eventually, Bobby turned to pull something out of the filing cabinet to his right.
“Close the door on your way out.”
Buck did.
The calm and certain optimism with which Buck had walked into work that morning had all but faded by noon. He had spent the morning mostly trying to get his head around the long list Bobby had given him, trying to organize it all in his mind in a way that made sense. The two calls of the morning had been medical and non-urgent. Buck had watched them pull away, mentally notching away two of the five calls he would have to stay behind for.
Over the course of the week, he inventoried and restocked, sanitized the gyms and then the showers and then the bathrooms. He performed maintenance checks on all their alarm systems, scheduled and oversaw the inspection and certification of each engine and ambulance, dutifully completed the grocery shopping that Bobby had requested. He deep-cleaned the kitchen, polished the firepole, waxed the floor in the bunk room and the hallway and polished it by hand in the kitchen. He replaced two carbon monoxide alarms and finally got rid of those wasps nests up on the roof, taking a few stings in the process. He organized the shed of holiday decorations in the back corner of the parking lot, organizing them by month and further by size. He fixed the slight wobble in the turnout racks that had been there for as long as Buck had. He dusted the rafters. He oiled the hinges on the front door. And after the first day or two, he was breathlessly grateful for the distraction. Because he was also: ignoring the way conversation paused when he entered the room, trying not to let Chim’s stare burn a hole in his back as the latter pushed weight around while the former was polishing the glass. He was continuing to ask Hen how Denny and Karen were doing, every day, though he had yet to get an answer beyond the one-word, ‘Fine’. He stood by the turnout rack as they headed out for call after call after call after call after call-- after which time Buck finally got to join them on the next ring. He asked Bobby if there was anything else he could do, every day, every night, every shift; and he did it all, each and every time Bobby pointed him in some new and minute direction. He steadfastly ignored the way that Eddie had refused to meet his eye since he got back. He looked straight through him like a ghost, attention always seeming to glance off him, shooting over past his shoulder somewhere. If Buck wanted his attention, he always had to ask twice, biting his tongue through the inevitable huff and eye roll and ‘what?’ before fighting his way to his-- always professional, always impersonal-- question. Thrice he had asked about Christopher. And thrice Eddie had looked him dead in the eyes, eyebrows raised in incredulous amusement, before letting his mouth drop into a mean snarl and throwing back some acerbic retort.
That’s a funny question-- you want to go read about it in the fitness board’s review? They had to interrogate him and everything.
He’s never been better; you know I think the new routine is working for him, just family and Carla on the schedule, consistent hours.
Fine.
By the end of his first week back, Buck was exhausted. Physically, his back ached from the abnormal amount of time he had spent on the floor and bent up in weird, mechanic positions. And his leg kept cramping from either a lack of strenuous activity or a lack of rest; Buck couldn’t tell, but assumed it was some perverse combination of the two. In his mind, he had upheld what he could now clearly see what a delusion. He had expected to scrub the floors and sit back on active calls; but with the long fall days, plied into submission with abnormal amounts of rain, five calls off could mean going two or sometimes even three shifts without stepping foot in a vehicle. He had expected to have to work his way back into the good graces of the 118. He had visualized holding a sort of court in the kitchen and at the dining table: he wanted to explain to them his side of things, how sorry he was everything got out of hand the way it did, how he had nothing to do with the bureaucratic dominoes that started to fall out from beneath all the people he cared about, how he had advocated for them and their family and their work. He wanted to earn their forgiveness.
When Hen dropped a singular cupcake in front of him on her way to the stairs, a little over two weeks after his return, a lit candle at the top, Buck had startled. Gazed on in bewilderment, the candlelight flickering. When his head had caught up with his eyes, he stood and looked over at the staircase to Hen. She caught his eye, gave him a small, closed-lip grin and proceeded on her way. The pain eased up for a second then. Buck went back to that moment over and over again in the weeks that followed, recognizing it as one of the final moments of mercy he remembers. He’s not sure what exactly happened, though he suspects it had something to do with the intense whisper-conversation he almost walked in on Eddie and Hen having in the gym some time later. After that, while never overtly corrosive in the way everyone else seemed intent on being, she took their side, every time.
⛯
Buck had lost-- he was sure of this now. His resolve had only lasted a few weeks before his exterior began to crack; he was never a very good actor. He couldn’t keep up the greetings and the asking questions and the easy stroll. He let his shoulders creep up to his ears, let his foot tap incessantly. He did what the Captain told him, but stopped asking for anything more. Stopped following the conversation in the back of the engine on the way to the call; he just stared out the window, thinking about the case to come, preparing for it. When he woke up, there was no big recovery milestone to strive for, no big fight for the soul of his career to win. Not even the happy swell of being back on shift-- something so easy to dismiss, that had dominated so much of his life, that he had taken for granted-- that had catalyzed him each morning of his first week back. He took up running if only because it took up so much time, running through the night or early in the morning, putting in an hour or sometimes two or sometimes three. He had always avoided such endurance cardio, paranoid in a vain sort of way that it would make him lose muscle. And he was partly right, he realized, as the weeks went on and his shirtsleeves got looser and he notched his belt one and then two holes tighter. It made him feel strong, though, so he wasn’t going to stop, made sure to keep up his strength requirements, getting a cheap plan for a gym he could walk to from the loft, not wanting to linger in the station gym. The days were getting shorter, if only incrementally. Buck kept waking up before the sunrise, giving up after tossing and turning all night and staring at the ceiling in defeat. Sometimes it took him upwards of twenty minutes to physically get out of bed. He had cut down on his coffee habit, only able to stomach a mug or two, otherwise he would be shaking like a leaf and breathlessly anxious for the entirety of shift-- which he didn’t need on top of everything else. He dreaded the start of shift. He didn’t want to be there, didn’t want drive there, didn’t want to park the Jeep in the farthest spot from the door to try and appease everyone on B shift, or put his stuff in the locker he still, improbably, shared with Diaz, or walk through the kitchen as it inevitably fell silent until he disappeared back down the stairs, or sheepishly pick up the clipboard of his shift’s tasks from the Captain’s office door. He didn’t want any of it.
You got what you wanted.
He could still hear Captain Nash’s voice echoing in his head. What he wanted. He wanted so much. Always had. Had spent so much of his life holding back and buckling down and moving on. Had come to accept the feeling of isolation and unbelonging that seemed to begin in his childhood bedroom and had persisted through his twenties. It was familiar, well-known. Like a child’s well-loved blanket. But one that Buck forgot was in the drawer, hidden under so many new shirts, the detritus collected from the past years. Because Buck had comfortably come to believe-- foolishly, he now thought-- that once he arrived at the 118, things would be different. Things were supposed to be different, here. And for so long, they had been. He had a leader whom he respected and admired, and one who believed in him. His sister had come back to town, released from the shackles of her abusive husband, into a dazzling new relationship, a marriage. He had a niece. And Eddie. Oh, Eddie. Eddie and Christopher and everything wonderful and new and exciting that the Diazes had brought into his life. Things and feelings that were so beautiful, so bewildering, so precious that it struck a fear into a corner of his heart so deep Buck hadn’t known it existed. He had run from those feelings, leaning into both of them even as he lurched away from himself, until those feelings had found him in the middle of their quiet street, on a bright and sunny day. He and the Diazes were kicking a slightly-deflated soccer ball around, Chris trying to balance on his crutches while kicking it with both feet, which Eddie argued was illegal but Buck just found impressive. They were moving in a vague triangle, talking about going to the zoo the following weekend. And Buck had thought: I don’t want to run anymore. And so he had let the searing blister of his love for Eddie, and by extension, Christopher, that had threatened the edges of his consciousness for so long overwhelm him like the sharp crest of a long-building wave. And he didn’t die. And he didn’t implode. And he didn’t lose his grip on his untouchable, airtight performance, didn’t lose his mind, or break his own heart. He just continued as he always had, maddeningly in love. Contentedly quiet. He was the only person he was running from; at that moment, he had been convinced Eddie had no idea and never would-- and that certainty was about as much consolation as Buck needed.
But that was last year. And months and months and so much animosity had come between them. During the lawsuit, Buck hadn’t been allowed to speak to either one of them. Since he had won, however, his text thread with Eddie was a thread of blue, unanswered messages. He hadn’t felt right texting Christopher without hearing from him first, so he hadn’t. A part of him was quietly devastated that the boy hadn’t reached out himself, but it was a part he ignored and then mentally pummelled into submission. He was trying to do the same to himself, though the rest of the 118 seems determined to do it for him.
If it wasn’t so psychologically cutting, Buck would frankly be impressed by their resolve. The weeks unwound with the alacrity of molasses, each day bringing new humiliations and further clarification on Buck’s place in the firehouse-- or rather, lack thereof. He was in the bunks one day, a hand behind his head, reading an interior design magazine on the Kindle Maddie had gotten him for Christmas the previous year. A few members of B-shift were sleep around him. Han had swung the door open, sat on a bottom bunk a few beds away from Buck.
“You know-- if you’re not actually sleeping, go sit in the living room or something. It’s not the place for that, the light is distracting.”
Buck just blinked at him. Ravi in a top bunk a few beds away propped himself up on an elbow to look down at Buck. His brow furrowed.
“Wait, Chim, what--”
“No, no. I’ll go. That’s fine,” Buck interrupted.
He ducked under the bunk bed, hitting the power button on his-- for the record, barely lit-- Kindle and slipped past him to the door, shutting it with a soft click behind him. He crossed the bay, wondering if it wasn’t worth it to start on cleaning the glass doors of the locker room, or maybe try and hit the bathroom sinks in the men’s shower room. The previous week he had finally figured out how to polish the porcelain so that it gleamed. But his inertia won over his initiative and he kept walking toward the stairs. He could hear laughter coming from the couch in the common space. Han and Diaz were on the couch, elbows dug hard into each other as they fought over what Buck assumed to be Mario Kart, two empty bowls already on the coffee table in front of them, Captain Nash at the dining room table behind, eating something that looked like chili. The gentle ribbing and encouragement died as Buck rounded the top of the stairs, though the ebullient physicality continued. He didn’t bother to stop, but kept walking through the kitchen to the smaller table beyond it that stood between the kitchen and the Captain’s office.
It was always a little dark back there, but mostly out of sight of the living room. Buck slid into one of the chairs, powered his Kindle back up. He had been planning on actually sleeping, he remembered a few minutes later, as his eyelids dragged ever-downward. He had spent the better part of last night continuing in his day’s fashion, manically cleaning the loft until the floor was almost dangerously slippery. He reorganized the kitchen. Then stared at his ceiling until dawn. He swiped his finger to flip the page. The living room on the screen was in black and white, the minimalist design a series of edges and empty spaces, a dark plant blooming in the corner, an exterior wall standing sentinel off the side. Through the far windows, open sky. Buck twitched as he felt himself succumbing to an tiredness he couldn’t fully categorize. He flipped another page. A dazzling set of Italian-made knives, cork-handled, Damascus steel rippling poetically across the blade. They were the same set, albeit a larger, more-extended set, that Buck had gotten himself as an early birthday present the year before. They looked like the kinds of knives real adults had in their kitchen, real cooks. Bobby’s lessons were going well, he had been preparing steadily more advanced dishes for the Diaz boys. He was going to be making Thanksgiving dinner for them all, so. He had gotten a set-- and used them often, he reckons, though he can’t remember the last time he might have had them out. But before his thought can travel much further, Buck still floating distantly in the Diaz kitchen, knives in tow, he had laid his head on the table from where it had been sitting in his palm, and fell into a light, fitful sleep.
Twenty minutes later, when Bobby had sent Chim and Eddie downstairs to inventory one of the ambulances that had been out for the last check, and he had headed back to his office to keep filing away the field paperwork he was just barely keeping on top of, he spotted Buckley asleep at the table. One arm flung out in front of him, the other bent uncomfortably up against his chest. His brow was furrowed lightly, even in sleep, his breathing shallow. That soft and sentimental something that curled in Bobby’s chest whenever he saw Buck whined in protest. Their casual cruelty and mockery and exclusion of him in the past weeks had been exhausting him. Buck was nothing if not an open book-- and Bobby saw it all, everything. The wounded look, the eyes trained on the floor during conversation. The pivot into another room as Buck realized it was occupied and they had made it clear enough he wouldn’t be welcomed. The dark circles under his eyes and cloudy distraction that overcame them during calls. The uncharacteristic silence. But it was like being on a moving train: there was something exhilarating about it, dangerous, a cathartic and senseless answer to some wounded and vagabond impulse… but he didn’t dare jump off. And it was everyone else’s anger he was really embodying, he had been rationalizing to himself. And the wants and needs and spirit of the entire firehouse trumped whatever he might want or feel from a singular member. That was the argument he kept returning to in his more guilty moments. But as it was, Bobby looked over at him on the table, and let him sleep on, quieting his steps as he passed, and reaching over to click the off button on the Kindle lit up before him, before slipping past and into his office. Mercy.