Reading Time: 95 Minutes

Title: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Buck
Author: Sunryder
Fandom: 9-1-1
Genre: Contemporary, Episode Related, Pre-Relationship, Slash
Relationship(s): Evan “Buck” Buckley/Eddie Diaz
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: On-Screen Panic Attacks, Minor Character Death
Author Note: Spoilers for Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Monsters Inc., WALL-E, Iron Man, Brave, Tangled, and – in case you couldn’t guess – The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Word Count: 50,383
Summary: Red is dying and Buck is fucked up about it. Not just about losing a friend, but about ending up like Red: dying alone without the people who used to be his team. Buck doesn’t want to go out like that. It might take him a few panic attacks, a road trip, and a book recommendation, but Buck is going to tidy his life up.
Artist: vMures

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Chapter One

“And then,” Red paused, the table hanging on his words, “Jackie comes strollin’ around the corner, pantsless.”

They broke into laughter. Even Karen giggled as she buried her face in her hands, still embarrassed by random nudity while the rest of the table was used to this kind of shit. “Oh, Lord,” Karen groaned, “I was hoping you’d all get better with age.”

“Hey!” Hen objected, “You are married to the most reasonable person on this crew.”

Athena objected with an eyebrow. “The crew, ‘Thena.” Hen repeated.

Athena forgave her with a raise of her wine glass, but Karen still thought it was bullshit. “Really? Reasonable one? Where did we get our dog?”

“That… was just taking care of an abandoned animal.”

“That you found when a building fell on you.”

“I’ve only been ridiculous one time, and that was unavoidable in an earthquake. Last week Buck and Eddie jumped between burning buildings like Spiderman.”

“Spiderman swings, Hen. Batman is the one who jumps,” Buck said, which Hen should know after all Denny’s cartoon watching.

Eddie didn’t seem to think that was a good excuse for their perfectly reasonable building jumping. He planted a palm in Buck’s face and pushed him back. “Only one building was burning.”

Chim snorted. “I love that either of you thinks that makes it better.”

Red propped his elbow on the table and leaned over to Karen. “I would never throw my life around like that if I had you waiting for me at home.”

Karen propped and leaned right back, with the bright smile that had made Red say, ‘Well, aren’t you just the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,’ instead of ‘Hello.’ “Yes, you would. Firefighters always do.”

Athena’s patio was aglow with a mix of twilight and twinkle lights strung around the overhanging roof. The whole team, plus partners, plus Red, was too many people to fit in the kitchen, so Bobby and Buck had carried the table out back so everyone could get together for a long night of good food and Red’s stories. Now, the table was heaped with picked-clean serving plates, a few empty bottles of wine, and warmth that was more about the people than the gentle spring air.

Buck took a long look around the table and swallowed back the urge to cry for the tenth time tonight. He couldn’t have guessed that getting stood up by his team at a bar would lead here: family dinner with pretty much everyone he loved in the world.

They gave Red the place of honor – and a clear line of sight for storytelling – at one head of the table, while Bobby had the other, Athena next to him. She’d made sure to get the night off from the task force hunting that serial rapist to be here. Something in Buck settled every time her fingers intertwined with Bobby’s on top of the table, like the tectonic plates underpinning his world had slipped back into place. Karen and Maddie were both next to Red because nobody was more capable of enduring a firefighter’s rambles about nothing than the two of them. Buck shouldn’t have worried that Red would feel left out. Red was charming as hell when it came to pretty women. (Though, Buck could tell it was the bro code that kept Red from flirting with Maddie as he did with Karen. Which Chim was a little offended by and Hen thought was hilarious.)

“I don’t know why we’re even arguing about this. We all know it’s Buck.” Chim countered when Hen won the argument that rebar head was more reckless than adopting a dog.

“Hey, not reckless, I’m passionate,” Buck countered, meaning it. But… everybody laughed. Even Red.

“Hey! I’m being serious!”

“Oh, we all know you’re passionate.” Chim leered.

“I didn’t mean it that way!” They all just laughed harder. “I didn’t! And it’s not reckless when I’ve got Eddie on my rope and Bobby pulling out the airbag.”

Eddie knocked their knees together, a silent ‘damn right,’ while the rest of them smiled more than they agreed, even though they’d all done similar things, even Athena. Red just snorted. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: only an idiot would do something that reckless. But you can be as reckless as you want when it means we end up with that many lovely young ladies strolling up to hit on you.”

“What’s this?” Maddie asked, and really, Buck didn’t need the glee on Chim’s face.

Red leaned in and faux whispered, “We went to my regular bar last night. Buck was my wingman.”

Buck groaned and buried his face in his hands. They didn’t need this story.

“Wait, I thought you two went to the beach?” Maddie asked.

“That was this morning. And, well…” Red smirked as he trailed off.

“Let me guess,” Hen picked up, “Buck is a chick magnet there too.”

Karen twisted around to look wide-eyed at her wife. “Did you just say the words ‘chick magnet?’”

“He is.” Hen shrugged while Chim nodded.

“He really is. It’s disgusting.”

“Wait, wait, back it up.” Maddie insisted. “You went to your hook and ladder last night…”

“We did.” Red grinned. “And there just so happened to be plenty of fire groupies.”

Buck didn’t appreciate the smirks everyone shot him. Red had been the one to pick the bar. “Yeah, and they all thought it was great that I was out for a drink with my grandpa.”

“I’ll take it.” Red declared, unashamed despite their laughter. “Anything that gets pretty women to stick around for a drink.” He turned back to Karen, hand on his heart. “This is only because I hadn’t met you yet, dear.”

“Uh-huh.” She laughed. “And the beach trip this morning?”

“Well, put Buck in a swimsuit and what are the lovely ladies in bikinis supposed to do?”

“You pimped Buck out?”

“There was no pimping!” Buck objected.

“No. Buck just happened to be in a swimsuit and too busy reading a book to pay attention to all those pretty girls.” Karen wasn’t buying it, so Red just shrugged. “I couldn’t leave them disappointed, could I?”

Karen laughed. “Where was Buck when I was dating?”

“He’s not helpful,” Chim grumbled. “I promise.”

“And our people don’t really go for Buck.” Hen pointed out.

“Then you pick up the pieces of not-so-straight girl that Buck leaves behind.” Karen gestured to Red, who nodded in agreement.

“Wait, wait, wait, I thought the baseball game was yesterday?” Bobby got them back on track before he found out more about LGBTQ+ dating than he ever wanted to know.

“No, Cap,” Eddie said. “The baseball game was two days ago. Yesterday was rock climbing and the bar.”

“Rock climbing?” Athena didn’t snort.

Red’s put-upon sigh managed to travel down the whole table. “I made the mistake of telling Buck that ropes were my favorite part of the job, so the kid was determined to get me back up there.”

“Did he lift you up the wall in a basket?” Chim asked and Maddie smacked him.

“Damn nearly. Eddie came with us and just pulled me up the wall.”

“And where was Buck for this?”

Red had the smirk that Buck knew meant trouble. “Free climbing.”

“Evan Buckley!” Maddie snapped.

“What?”

“You were just climbing up the wall without ropes?”

“It’s climbing without someone holding your ropes, Mads. It’s still safe.”

“What if you fell?”

“Free climbing isn’t free soloing, Mads. I still have safety equipment. I’m strapped into the wall so I would only fall a few feet. The only difference is that the wall would catch me instead of Eddie.”

“It must’ve been weird leaving Buck to catch himself.” Athena smirked.

Buck rolled his eyes, but Eddie nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was.”

“Oh, he’s fine.” Red objected. “Eddie’s a good partner.”

“Yeah, he is.” Buck grinned and gave Eddie a close-fisted thump to his thigh, because Eddie truly was the best, and he’d doubled down on the awesomeness over the last week.

It had been a week since Buck met Red, and almost a week since he’d found out Red was dying and didn’t have anyone on earth but Buck to keep him company. Which meant Buck had spent every non-work hour he could taking Red to all his favorite things as a last bit of living before he shuffled off.

It took Buck’s team three shifts to get twitchy about it.

Shift four would’ve meant everyone gently implying that Buck should take a break but, in between, he told Maddie about how much it hurt to be the one always left behind. (Buck chose not to think too hard that their sudden surge of support was just because Maddie had told Chim, Chim had told Hen and Eddie, Hen had told Athena, and Athena had told Bobby.)

The team spent shift four passing around looks that said they were debating whose turn it was to give Buck the ‘we’re not going anywhere’ speech – hopefully, a more convincing version than they’d managed when they were playing pool, but probably not because Buck still didn’t believe them.

As usual, Eddie was the one who knew just what Buck needed. Instead of empty words that the team would always be there for him and passive warnings about getting too dependent on Red, Eddie volunteered to go rock climbing. “That way you can be on the wall with Red, and I’ll man the ropes.” He’d used his hand on Buck’s shoulder to drag him just a bit closer and murmur. “I can help you carry the weight.” Eddie said the words like they were no big deal. Like they didn’t slip between Buck’s ribs and make him want to slump into Eddie’s arms and sob the way he’d longed to since Red had fessed up to dying.

The team followed Eddie’s cue to shut up and support Buck through what they thought was a bad idea in the making. That support had led them here: family dinner at Bobby and Athena’s like they had forever and this was where Red belonged.

At a silent cue Buck still couldn’t discern after a dozen dinner parties, Athena slipped out of her chair and gathered up dishes in that offhand, casual way that didn’t interrupt anyone’s conversation. Buck felt like a bull faceplanting on the table in comparison, but he still got up to collect the platters while Athena got the plates. (Buck couldn’t do casual, but he could do helpful, which was why Athena always put him at the end of the table nearest the back door or the kitchen counter.) Since Buck couldn’t manage Athena’s grace, Red stopped talking and went to stand and help, but Athena waved him back down. “Don’t worry. Cleaning is Buck’s payment for all the leftovers he’s going to take home.”

Buck ‘Yes, ma’am-ed’ to the table’s smiles and followed Athena into the kitchen, a stack of dishes in his hands. The Grant-Nash house rule was that the cook didn’t clean, so when Bobby trailed after them, Buck knew what was coming. Still, he plugged up the sink and turned on the hot water to give everything a quick scrub. (Despite Buck’s lectures on water conservation and research into how the right soap pod meant no scrubbing, Bobby was still old school.)

Athena settled in next to him at the counter, accepting clean dishes from Buck to either dry and put away or tuck in the dishwasher. Athena was better at silence than anyone ever, so Buck broke three dishes in, just like Athena knew he would. “Did Bobby tell you? I’ve been thinking about taking a road trip with Red to get him pie from this place in NorCal he says is the best he’s ever had.”

“He did. But he didn’t say why you’re just thinking about it. You used to take road trips all the time.”

Buck scrubbed at some baked-on cheese. “I’m worried it might be too much time spent sitting for Red. He’s got a pain appointment tomorrow and I’m going to ask his doctor if it’ll be okay.”

“What’s wrong with sitting?”

“Blood clots.”

Athena stopped drying and Bobby snapped up from dishing leftovers into glass containers.

“Not for me, for Red. Mesothelioma can lead to a whole bunch of problems that Red already has, but right now they’re worried about him developing blood clots. I hated those enough when I was the one having them; I don’t want Red to cough up blood in my car.” Buck tried to say it like a tease, but Athena slipped a bowl from Buck’s grip and paused just long enough to take his hand before she went back to drying like there hadn’t been any panic in his voice.

“How’s he doing, really?”

“Red’s refusing any treatment that’s not palliative. He’s just trying to make the end comfortable, but not too comfortable or he’d be at the hospital on the good drugs.”

Buck held out a rinsed plate and Athena didn’t take it. “Buck.” He set the plate down on the counter and kept scrubbing.

“He’s on opioids to manage the pain, but it’s still getting worse. I tried asking him about it because I don’t want all our stuff to be hurting him, but Red said, ‘I was a firefighter for 40 years, Buckley. I’m used to pain.’”

“Is it just pain?”

Buck hesitated, but it was Athena. “No. He’s got some muscle weakness, but that’s not too bad.”

“Not when you’ve got Eddie on the ropes.”

Buck grinned, and something in him unclenched at the memory of looking down at Eddie at the bottom of the wall, all but swinging back and forth while he was on belay, relaxed like he didn’t have a care in the world about carrying Red’s entire weight. “We’ve got to watch his blood sugar because Red gets dizzy otherwise, but… he’s having trouble breathing, and he thinks I don’t notice.”

“The cancer is in his lungs?”

“No, Mesothelioma makes fluid build up around your lungs and in your abdomen. Red has gone in before to have them drain the fluid because he says he spent too much time inside burning buildings to let suffocation get him now. But he doesn’t want to get drained again. So long as it doesn’t keep him from really getting around, he wants to keep going like he has been until he goes to bed one night and doesn’t wake up.”

“That’s the best any of us can hope for.”

“Yeah. That’s what he says too. He said he doesn’t want to buy more time just to spend it in a hospital.” Buck’s hands were cold. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there with soapy water drying on his skin.

Buck rinsed himself off and didn’t say anything, but the silence dragged on long enough that it meant Athena and Bobby were worried about him. Of course, Bobby saying, “It’s good that Red seems okay with his circumstances,” wasn’t really the comfort Buck was looking for, and Athena’s expression told Bobby it was the wrong thing to say.

Athena reached out and rubbed a steady hand up and down Buck’s back. “Red is okay with it,” Buck said, like that made things all right. But Athena knew better.

“He’s okay with it, but you’re not.”

Buck made the snorty, snotty sound that happened when tears were lurking. He scrubbed the back of his wet hand over his nose. “I should get back out there.”

“Buck,” Athena leaned in to wrap her arms around him, but Buck shrugged her off.

“I can’t. Sorry. Just… not here. You know I ugly cry.”

“Yeah.” She stroked a hand through his hair, like that made things any better. “You do.” Her voice was so soft and affectionate that Buck almost broke right there. He wanted to slump into Athena’s arms so she could pet his hair and tell him it was going to be okay, that she’d be there for him; that they’d all be there.

But that wasn’t how life worked.

Instead of an Athena hug, Buck got Bobby’s hand on his shoulder. “I think I know something that can help.”

“What’s that?”

Bobby stepped to the back counter and, like a magician, yanked away a tea towel to reveal a lattice-topped pie. “It’s not from the place in NorCal, but I do make a pretty damn good pie.” Buck laughed. He didn’t give Bobby the hug he wanted, but he got a playful shove. “Buck, set the timer for 15 minutes and we’ll warm this back up.”

Athena got down the little plates and tiny bowls while Bobby dished everything up and Buck played waiter, ferrying everyone’s dishes out to the table. Red smiled at the pie announcement and was good enough to pretend that it was even better than the bakers up north.

By the time Buck sat back down next to Eddie, it was like he hadn’t almost broken down in Athena’s arms.

But when there was something up with Buck, Eddie could always see it. He met Buck’s ice cream smile with a raised eyebrow. But because Eddie was the best partner ever, he didn’t ask any more than that. He did press his knee against Buck’s though, and pretended like he didn’t love the extra crust on top so he could stick it on Buck’s plate, both pastry and knee silently bolstering him up.

Chapter Two

Being in a float pod was… weird.

Yeah, that was the best Buck could come up with. He’d done his research and read the descriptions, but words couldn’t quite explain the not-quite nothingness of being inside a float pod.

Buck had thought turnout gear would be good prep since it kept him from feeling anything but heat and sweat rolling down his spine. The helmet kept out everything but the deafening roar of fire, like the world’s worst white noise.

But this… wasn’t that.

This wasn’t middle-of-the-night-firehouse silence – because no matter how good the soundproofing was, they still lived in LA and the bunk room was full of people breathing – and it wasn’t summer-camping-trip-to-the-mountains silent, because crickets were loud little buggers. It was… alone-in-the-hospital silent. Only, not quite. Maybe stoned-out-of-his-mind-and-alone-in-the-hospital was more accurate. But even then, the float pod was more silent than that. The only sound was Buck’s breathing, and he knew he was breathing noisier than he had to just to make some sound. (He’d wriggled at the beginning to make the water splash against the sides, but that had felt intrusively loud pretty damn quick.)

And it was weird because his senses were dimmed, but there wasn’t a fire. And being dimmed like this made some part of Buck expect it to be warm. But it wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold either. It was that temperature where he couldn’t tell where the line was between him and the water, and Buck didn’t know if he liked it.

Buck was here because, on the shortlist of palliative care options that might do Red any good at this stage, his doctor had mentioned float pods. Red, being like most people, had scoffed the pods away months ago as ‘new age hokum’ and upped his opioid dose instead. But Red had reached the point where increasing his use would cause more problems than the cancer. Despite not wanting any real treatments, Red didn’t want to overdose his way out of life.

“It’s not like your doctor recommended getting into a float pod with one of the hippies down on the boardwalk, Red. It’s the preeminent pain treatment clinic on the west coast.”

Red had just rolled his eyes and gone back to his beer. (Buck didn’t think Red was supposed to be drinking alcohol on that number of painkillers, but he was picking his battles.)

“I’ve read up on them, and they have a lot of experience treating people injured in the line of duty, like vets and other firefighters. I asked around, and one of the guys from the 82nd did it and said it was great. He said that he still goes once a month and if you can get past the fact that you’re floating in a puddle of water, it really helps.”

“This doesn’t sound ‘great,’ kid. It sounds ridiculous.”

“What if I did it with you?”

“We both don’t have to look like idiots because I’m not doing it. Now pay attention to that pretty girl who keeps making eyes at you over by the bar. I haven’t gotten to flirt tonight.”

Buck didn’t. Red could give women the green light to come and flirt all on his own and Buck was trying to have a conversation here. “I’m going to do it, even if you don’t. So, you should come along.”

“You’re not going to trick me into it, Buckley.”

“I’m not trying to trick you into anything!”

Red’s glare had nothing on Athena, but Buck didn’t want the old man to yell at him again. Buck leaned in, careful because it was private and he didn’t know when Red would decide Buck was trying to interfere. “My knee still hurts sometimes.”

Red didn’t roll his eyes, but his belief was tentative.

“It does. More in the winter when it gets cold, and more after I work too hard on one of those shifts that never ends, but it does. And if floating once a month and breathing deep could make it hurt less, that’s worth it.”

“That doesn’t make it not ridiculous,” Red said instead of yes. That meant he would go, but he reserved the right to complain the entire time.

And he’d done both. Red had grumbled while Buck made the appointment: “maybe I’ll be dead before it happens!” And he protested when Buck turned up with a swimming suit: “I’m 70 years old! Nobody wants to see me in one of those!” And he complained about Buck’s choice of hoodie: “You look like a college student too stoned for class.” And he whined about taking Buck’s Jeep: “I don’t care that it’s easier to get into, it’s a hazard!” The only thing that had stopped Red’s complaining was the beautiful woman running the pain clinic’s front desk.

Buck snorted at the memory of how quickly Red’s demeanor had changed. Then he startled at the snort echoing back to him in the empty pod. Right. He was in a float pod. Breathing deeply. Floating in a puddle of water in dead silence and pitch black wasn’t weird at all.

Buck was kind of wishing that he hadn’t listened to Iris – beautiful front desk lady – about sound options. The clinic had guided meditations, meditative breathing, and ambient sounds to make you feel like you were floating someplace else. (Buck had been tempted to go with the soundscape for floating in some pond in the jungle, complete with chirping birds.)

Buck had asked Iris for her recommendation – asked, not flirted, no matter what Red’s eyebrows said – and she wanted to know if Buck planned on doing this just this once or if it was the first time of many.

“What’s the difference?”

“If you’re only going to be here once, then we recommend utilizing whatever guided technique you can best use in your regular life.” Which was why she’d automatically cued up ‘A Breath Meditation to Help Ease Pain’ for Red. “But if you’re here to get a sense for whether you might find the float pod helpful in the future, we recommend floating in silence the first time. That will give you a better sense of whether the floating itself will be beneficial, or if it’s the accompanying meditations that are helpful.”

Buck had gone with silence and he was regretting it. His deep breathing had stopped feeling like soothing white noise and more like ragged panting while he trod water. He wondered if they could hear him out there. If Iris was listening in and thinking Buck was an idiot who couldn’t stand to just take a nap for a few minutes. (Guided meditation on pain or not, Red was probably napping.)

No. Buck could do this.

It was just an hour. He could lay here for an hour. Let’s be honest: if he wasn’t with Red, he’d probably be spending his afternoon off sprawled out on his couch just like this.

Only, Netflix would’ve been playing while he napped, and apparently, that made a difference.

Buck would be fine. He could do this.

And Iris was starting to make a lot more sense to him. She’d been unexpectedly chill while she led him and Red through the process, and only a chill person could regularly subject themselves to a float pod. Buck didn’t know why he’d expected someone perky to handle the front desk. Enthusiasm probably didn’t jive when working with pain patients.

Buck remembered how much he wanted to yell at everyone after the bombing. He’d had this fury bubbling under his skin that had flared up every time someone told him things were going to be okay. Worse, they all used that same tone of voice, like they were soothing a scared, dumb kid on a call. (Like they did when things weren’t going to be okay.) Buck had wanted to curse them out every time someone said how much worse it could’ve been, that he should be grateful, or even when they were just happy in his general vicinity.

But Buck didn’t have the space to get upset at their empty words. Everyone already doubted that he’d be able to come back to work. Which meant they were losing their reason to keep supporting Buck. If he’d made things difficult, they wouldn’t keep coming around.

So no, perky wasn’t the way to go when the pained people coming through the clinic had no reason not to shout at Iris like Buck had wanted to scream every time someone opened their mouth and said, ‘it’ll be okay.’

These patients got to shriek: you don’t know that! How could it be okay? His damn leg had been crushed. Did they know what crushed meant? Had they looked up crush injuries online? Because Buck had, and they were fucking terrifying.

And no, that maybe his injury could’ve been worse didn’t make it better in the now.

Honestly, all those possibilities made Buck feel even worse about where he was. They acted like Buck was supposed to be grateful that he’d been crushed by a fucking bomber instead of joining him in the rage that no one had checked the kid after his dad died and he disappeared off the map. That none of those damn detectives hunting the bomber had put two and two together about what cases Athena, that prosecutor, and the defense attorney had all worked.

And Buck sure as hell wasn’t supposed to have the nauseated fury that someone had walked into their fucking firehouse and managed to stick a bomb under one of the trucks without anybody noticing. That no one had gotten fired for negligence. Buck and three other firefighters were hospitalized and every time Buck dared to ask how in the hell that had happened and what they were going to do to keep it from happening in the future, he’d literally had his hair petted like a good dog and told they were ‘looking into it.’ Buck was so fucking angry it made him too sick to breathe.

Buck’s eyes snapped open to the pitch black and the whole pod experience hit him like he hadn’t been paying attention. Little laps of sound from the water licking at the edges, not-quite-chlorine in his nose, water warm against his skin because he always got cold when he was stressed, and the echo of bile in his mouth, like at this very moment he was so angry he was about to vomit in a sealed pod full of water.

What the fuck?

Buck blinked, but the blackened world didn’t come into better focus.

Buck… he’d been mad about the bombing situation before. And he’d made idiotic decisions about that whole mess because he was angry.

But now he could accept that the team had been saying, ‘you’ll be fine,’ because they genuinely believed Buck was going to pull through. (And even if they didn’t, what else were they supposed to say?)

Then after, Buck had overreacted to getting benched. He’d been on blood thinners. Of course, Bobby wanted to wait. Buck should’ve trusted Bobby’s judgment.

‘But why didn’t Bobby trust me?’ popped into Buck’s head, unbidden.

‘Because we’re not trustworthy’ came right after like a gut punch. Buck wanted to curl up and hide, but there wasn’t enough room in the pod to bury his face in his knees and cry.

“Damn floaty coffins,” Red had called these. “I’m dying already and you want to pack me away?”

Buck had said they looked more like eggs than coffins, so new life instead of death. Red had rolled his eyes and grumbled about something else, and Buck owed him an apology. Here and now, he got it. His knees went up and hit the top of the pod, and his head went down to a mouthful of water, and Buck flailed like there was anything in here to grab, hands and feet colliding with the coffin’s slick interior.

Not coffin. Pod.

He was in a float pod, pressing his hands up and shoving himself down so his back could hit the pod’s bottom, water lapping at the corners of his eyes, but not into his face. Then his hands slid along the slick roof to the pod’s sides, letting himself bob up and float again. Then he slid his hands up and pressed them past his head, pushing down until his feet made contact.

Buck was inside a float pod to see if laying in silent sensory deprivation would help his knee – hard no – and more important, to see if this would help Red. Or maybe Red was over there freaking out about being in a coffin too.

No! Buck pressed his hands and feet against the pod again, arching up in a ‘good morning’ stretch. He was here, alive, present in this moment.

Now, he was going to lay here – for however much of an hour he had left – and he was going to just breathe. He wasn’t going to think about his injury, or how angry he’d been – yes been, he wasn’t mad anymore. He’d gotten his team back and that was all that mattered. He was just going to breathe. In and out.

That’s what Buck did: just focused on the breathing. Just listened to the sound of air coming through his nose and the sound as it went back out. ‘Like the ocean waves,’ a dozen yoga girlfriends had called it. Buck could lay here in here in the not-silent sound of his own waves.

Yes, he could.

In and out. Over and over.

This was fine.

In slow, out slow. It was a good soundtrack. Probably not as good if Buck had gone with the jungle pond in the first place, but not bad. He was fine.

And Red had something to listen to as he laid there, so he was fine too.

Probably.

Maybe Buck should’ve had him listen to some practice meditations before they did this.

Nope! Buck pressed his hands and feet back against the pod and focused on his breathing. Practice meditations, like he said. He could do the meditation his physical therapist had taught him to use at the end of stretching.

Buck took his hands and feet away from the pod’s walls, letting himself float back to the middle – though he drifted his hands back against the sides. The meditation started with his feet, focusing on how they felt – a little warm from pressing them so hard against the pod. Then to his calves – always tight and tense with an almost-knot in the left calf that never really went away. Buck shook them out a bit to the sound of lapping water. Then his knees – which felt fine – his thighs, his hips. His right hip was tight, which meant he hadn’t been taking good enough care of his knee and his body had to compensate. A tight hip meant a tight lower back, but Buck wasn’t sure how to stretch that out while floating in a puddle.

All the research said Buck was supposed to be able to completely relax in here, which meant no tight calves or hips or backs. The relaxation was part of the pain relief. So, was Buck floating wrong?

Wait—no, he was supposed to be meditating. The pattern went hips, then hands because they were technically at hip level. Buck drew his hands away from the walls so he could visualize the last time he’d done this. He was at the physical therapist’s office, his back releasing because he was in the chair with good spinal support. His hands were on his thighs, and he was sitting upright, not in any pain at all.

Buck opened his mind’s eye, but… he didn’t see the brightly-lit gym where he’d gone through rehab.

He was in the bulky leather chair in Red’s apartment, the one Red kept too close to the TV.

And his hands, – the ones he was supposed to be feeling before he moved up his arms – they were his for a moment, but then they weren’t. The hands were leathered like the chair but wrinkled, with bulging knuckles and spots on thin skin.

Yes, they were resting on Buck’s thighs, but the legs weren’t his any more than the hands were. They were thinner than before teenage Buck had started lifting, and they were wearing khaki.

What the fuck? Buck looked up and caught Red’s reflection in the dark TV. Only… it wasn’t. It was Buck – there was his birthmark, half lost in wrinkle folds – but he was… he was Red?

Buck tried to scramble out of the chair and figure out what in the hell was going on, but he couldn’t. He levered himself a few inches off the chair, then thumped back, like he hadn’t prepped well enough and needed something more than just him to stand. It took him two tries to rock out of the chair, and just—what the fuck?

This place could be Red’s apartment. It was small, with the same old man furniture and old man smell. Dust and generic knickknacks that he didn’t recognize covered the bookshelves.

But it wasn’t Red’s. Buck had been there enough times over the last week that he could find his way around blind and in the dark, and this wasn’t there.

Worse, Buck didn’t need to stumble over to the shelves and look at the photos up close to know them. Yes, they were blurry to his eyes, but he knew the shape of them all. They were Buck’s, from his apartment right now, pictures of himself young and happy at the 118. The photos felt like a shrine to the man Buck had been, nothing about the creaky, leathery man he was now.

Buck panicked, but the emotion was wrong and strange with old lungs that couldn’t catch a breath and aches he didn’t recognize.

That made the panic worse.

Buck clawed at his flannel button-up with fingers that hurt to uncurl and tried to draw a breath that wouldn’t come. How the fuck did he get out of here? He collapsed back into the leather chair, but no, he didn’t want to get stuck again! He tried to flail out, only made it two inches, and flailed again, right back into his own body, up and over the pod’s side and onto the cold, tile floor, retching up panic.

Iris stood beside him, towel half out but too frozen to help. Red struggled down to his knees beside Buck. “What the hell happened to you, kid?”

@@@@@

Buck had been staring at the same spot on Red’s ceiling for the last half an hour, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up here.

Not here literally. He knew that part. Red and Iris had helped him off the floor, then Iris had insisted on monitoring Buck’s blood pressure and making him drink a glass of juice before she’d let him drive home. She probably would’ve made him stick around and talk to a doctor, but Buck muttered something about the tsunami. Iris and Red chalked it up to a water-related panic attack, but both still insisted that Buck not be alone tonight. Despite Red’s nightly protests that he didn’t need Buck hanging around while he slept, Red took Buck home and made him a sad, bachelor dinner before he insisted that Buck crash on his couch.

No, metaphorically Buck didn’t know how he’d gotten here.

If he’d been at home, he would’ve had the TV on in the background while he bounced through a hundred articles on different subjects. If he’d been at work, he would’ve been up deep cleaning Bobby’s kitchen or mindlessly hunting Bokoblins through Hyrule. But alone in the dead of night, stuck in a place where he couldn’t make a lot of noise and was surprisingly exhausted after an hour floating in a puddle, Buck couldn’t make himself fall asleep on Red’s lumpy sofa. (Red hadn’t needed to care about comfort because he didn’t have people around to sit on it.)

To be honest, Buck couldn’t claim that he was actually trying to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, the afterimage of Old!Buck’s apartment overlaid with the last thing his waking eyes had seen. Considering the ‘last thing’ was Red’s old man apartment, Buck closing his eyes was worse than just staring at Red’s ceiling. Buck would close his eyes, see his nightmare of a future, and jolt back awake. Honestly, Buck didn’t know how he had any adrenaline left in his body at this point.

Eventually, Buck’s exhausted brain accepted that this wasn’t going to work and he wrenched himself off the sofa – first try – and stumbled into Red’s tiny nook of a kitchen. He made himself chamomile because popping a beer didn’t seem like the right choice tonight. (Buck had bought Red the tea, but only managed to get him to try one sip.)

Buck filled an LAFD mug and put it in the microwave, shushing the loud beeps out of an old habit from when he was a teenager trying to make something in the middle of the night. He paced around the kitchen for 60 seconds while he debated if he could put away the drying rack full of battered pots and pans without being too loud, then checked the fridge, dropped a tea bag into the empty mug, went back out to the living room for his phone – useless for anything but the timer in Red’s dead zone of an apartment – back into the kitchen again where he prepped some toast that he didn’t want, changed the paper towel roll, silently wiped every free space on the counter, put the pots and pans away like he was playing Operation, and finally ran out of things to do that weren’t sitting on Red’s counter, mug in hand, and staring out the small window at the streetlamps casting serrated streaks of light across the kitchen.

As soon as Buck stopped moving for more than ten seconds, the twisting came back. The nausea of an emotion Buck couldn’t name wrapped its way around his lungs and choked the breath out of him.

Okay.

Deep breaths. Buck wasn’t in the pod, but he also didn’t have anything at Red’s place that could soothe the twisting when it came for him in the middle of the night.

Buck took a long drink of his chamomile – refused to think of the nights he’d sit up with Abby while they’d talk about her mom – and decided to unwind.

The panic wasn’t from the pod itself. Buck wanted to write the attack off as nothing more than being trapped in a coffin, but he’d done too much research about the pods to convince Red they weren’t crazy to believe that. All the articles said they were supposed to be good for stress – like meditation, which Buck had never been good at because he could get distracted by pretty much anything. The clinic’s website had said that part of what float pods were for was “shutting out distractions so you could tune in to your inner self.”

Buck had liked that thought.

But apparently, Buck’s inner self was terrified of ending up like Red.

Red’s kitchen at 2:00 a.m. wasn’t making a convincing argument that Buck shouldn’t be terrified. The room was small, with two broken burners on the range, pans that would’ve made Bobby pull out the sad eyes, and gauzy curtains that Buck was pretty sure had originally been white. So no, Buck didn’t want this kitchen. Even traveling, twenty-year-old Buck who’d lived out of his Jeep for months at a time wouldn’t have wanted this kitchen. (The microwave managed to burn the outside and leave the inside frozen. Of everything. Buck honestly thought that some of the popcorn kernels had come out colder than they went in.)

The rest of the apartment wasn’t much better. It was clean but more cramped than it needed to be because. The place looked like Red had never gotten rid of anything in his life, but somehow, also hadn’t bought anything new in the last twenty years. Until his pod nightmare, Buck had thought it was great that Red kept out all the photos from his active duty. Now, the place felt like a memorial to the man he’d been instead of the home of a guy still here.

This… wasn’t what Buck wanted his life to look like when he was waiting to die. For all that Buck liked Red and was going to be gutted when he left, Buck didn’t want to be Red.

Buck had a half-formed thought about asking Red what he’d do differently if he could do it all again, but he squashed that before it could take shape. Everyone had regrets, but it was a shitty thing to ask a dying man about his.

Buck didn’t need to know Red’s regrets. It was enough for Buck to sit in the sad silence of Red’s stuff and know that he didn’t want to end up like this. And it wasn’t just not wanting to end up like Red at the end of his life, dying alone from a cancer that only firefighters got, alone in a sad apartment, and going to family dinner with someone else’s team.

Buck didn’t want to be like Red in the before.

If Buck didn’t want to end up in a sad, old bachelor apartment, that meant he needed someone else in it – because no woman Buck had ever met would put up with this kitchen. Buck wanted someone to do the dishes like Athena did because Bobby had cooked. He wanted dinners with his own team, even when he was 70, his wife across the table, chatting with Eddie’s wife while he and Eddie talked about last year’s joint vacation, and about Christopher’s children, not stories from their glory days at the 118.

That… was that, then. It felt anticlimactic, but if Buck didn’t want to end up this, he had to do something to keep it from happening.

Buck poured out his mug of cold tea, rinsed, and put it on the drying rack. He typed a note into his phone reminding him to scrub the microwave tomorrow before he let Red cook anything else in there, then swiped over to download all the not-hooking-up dating apps. (He’d Google a little, but setting up a relationship profile couldn’t be that different from a sex one. After all, Buck 2.0 had plenty of family photos he could upload to make it clear he was looking for a future, not sex. He’d just have to blank out Christopher’s face.)

Chapter Three

“Now, let me get this straight.” Chimney overenunciated. As much as he wanted to, Buck didn’t drop his head to the table. He’d feel the grease stain on his skin for days and it wouldn’t stop Chim from talking.

“You went on Bumble and put in your profile, and I quote: ‘not looking for a hookup, looking for a real relationship’—”

“Give me back my phone.” Buck grasped for his device but Hen smacked him off, happy to keep reading Buck’s profile over Chim’s shoulder.

“—and somehow, you saying that sex was off the table was so potent an aphrodisiac that every woman who contacted you wanted to climb into bed with you.”

“No!”

“Buck, you’ve literally gotten two messages implying sex while Chim has been holding your phone.” Hen said.

“And look at these photos!” Chim scrolled while Hen smacked down and trapped Buck’s hands against the table. “None of them are even shirtless! These are the opposite of thirst traps!”

“Seriously, guys. Give it back!”

Hen ignored him, of course, and plucked the phone out of Chim’s hands to lean out of grabbing range and coo over a picture from their station Christmas, where Buck was laughing under a pile of little kids. Despite all their faces being blanked out, Hen twisted the phone to show Eddie across the table. “Have you seen this?”

Eddie leaned in and squinted. “Which one is that?” He put his hand out to tilt the screen to the right angle and because Eddie was the best best friend, plucked it out of Hen’s grip and handed it over to Buck.

“Hey!” Chim objected.

“Yup. I’ve seen it. I think I forwarded it to Karen, but I can find it for you.”

“I’ll find it for you,” Buck said, tucking his phone into his front jeans pocket where there would be no pickpocketing. “It’s in the cloud.”

“Still can’t use for phone for anything other than a phone, Edmundo?” Hen teased, but Chim wasn’t having it.

“Excuse me, I’m still trying to figure out how that profile got Buck laid.”

“He’s got pictures on there of him being nice to cute kids and handsome old men,” Red interjected. “That’s all you really need. None of this shirtless business.” Red had spent their night at the bar mostly quiet, and happy to cackle at the young people and their ‘shenanigans.’ (Buck had tried to subtly ask if he was feeling all right and Red had retaliated against him by telling Chim about yesterday’s bar hookup. Hence the current conversation.)

“I had dating pictures where I was rescuing cats in full turnouts.” Chim objected.

“Yeah, but look at him.” Reg grabbed Buck by the chin and shook his face. “Look at that face.”

Chim mimed throwing up.

“You’re dating the female version of that face.”

“Not cool, Diaz.”

“What I want to know is how you ended up sleeping with a girl at the bar,” Hen asked. “Did she track you down or something? Are we having that problem again, Buck?”

“People can track you down on this thing?” Red demanded.

“No, someone was using my pictures to catfish women.”

Red blinked at him like none of those words made sense.

“Right. Someone used my pictures and pretended to be me on a dating app. Then he died – not related to pretending to be me – and I came across a bunch of women who thought I’d ghosted—” Red blinked, “—just stopped talking to them for no reason. Including one who turned up at the firehouse.”

“How on earth do you kids—” Red paused, then waved his own question away. “No, Henrietta, no one hunted him down. I just happen to be the world’s best wingman.”

“And how’d you manage that?”

“I am charming, as your dear wife can attest.”

“So, what?” Chim asked. “Red walked up to some girl and said, ‘this is my friend Buck, please go have sex with him in the bathroom while I wait?’”

“It wasn’t the bathroom,” Buck grumbled. It was the parking lot. And yes, he knew that wasn’t much better.

Honestly, this is what Buck got for thinking it was a good idea to ask the team how to prevent semi-drunken bar hookups from happening. They just wanted him to explain how it happened in the first place. The problem was: Buck had no idea. He’d made his profile family-friendly, stayed off Tinder, and made it explicitly clear that he was looking for a relationship, not sex. According to every article he read to make sure he did it right, switching from sex to relationships should’ve meant exchanging a bunch of texts before anyone agreed to meet someplace public. But every single one of the girls Buck matched with had offered to meet him that very night. And the one Buck did meet made it clear that she’d be happy to take him home before their drinks even arrived. The absolute opposite of what Buck had been looking for.

Buck had thought it was a glitch. Some doubletalk he’d accidentally implied in his bio, but he’d changed things around – no pictures where he was carrying Chris around that showed off his biceps – and it had happened again.

Yes, Buck could admit that the night we went out to drink with Red he’d already been a little keyed up thanks to all the sex he’d been offered but wasn’t having. Buck had sworn to himself that he wasn’t going to break. He was going to drink with Red, then go back to his apartment and play with some toys before he slept the sleep of the sated.

Of course, that meant Buck had ended up fucking someone whose name he didn’t quite remember in a parking lot around the corner.

Red was engrossed in a conversation with another firefighter there to drink away his panic about his diagnosis with Red’s same type of cancer. Buck had walked away to get another round – and maybe stayed at the counter for a while because he could only sit there listening to the two of them talk about dying for so long – and a hot brunette had dropped by.

Then… it was like he blanked out. One minute he was smirking at her and the next he was in the backseat of her car.

Buck had… panicked a little. Not full-on float pod panic attack, but he’d bailed quick. He wasn’t this guy anymore, and parking lot hookups with people he didn’t know weren’t going to get him the future he wanted.

Buck had brought it up at the next shift, trying to get some life advice from people in committed relationships, but the whole house had just grilled him about the details, leaving no space for Buck to tell them how he’d gone home afterward and gotten up every hour on the hour to shower but he still didn’t feel right. Buck was struggling, and he thought that if they understood that this was important to him, they’d get it together. So, Buck invited them out with him and Red, thinking that getting out of the house would change their tune. But when Buck tried to explain how he felt, Chim had made a joke about STDs.

Buck stopped talking.

But he was still trapped out with them at a bar, onion rings curdling in his stomach while Chim and Hen commentated on his dating profile.

Even better, Red was in on the joke now, telling them that Buck wasn’t very good at the ‘no sex, please’ body language. Like it was Buck’s fault that his ‘no’ wasn’t strong enough.

“I need to see an example of this, Red. Let’s get a girl over here and see your wingman capabilities.”

“Yeah, Red, Chim can give you pointers on how to ruin any vibe they’ve got going.”

“Stop it!” Buck snapped and everybody froze, like somehow, they hadn’t noticed that Buck wasn’t playing along.

Chim glanced at Eddie, waiting for him to know just the right thing to say to talk Buck off the ledge, but Eddie wasn’t talking. Which meant Hen was the one who spoke, but she didn’t get why he was mad. “It’s okay that you had sex on another first date, Buck. Anything where you don’t steal a firetruck for a hookup is progress.”

Red smiled like he thought that was a good pivot and said he hadn’t heard that story, but Buck didn’t want to sit there and listen to more ways they could call him a whore.

Buck shoved his chair back and everyone startled silent. They waited, expecting him to snap. Part of him wanted to, wanted to say out loud that he didn’t appreciate it, but they’d just tell him he was overreacting. All that came out was, “I’m going to get some air.”

Of course, Chim made a joke about texting before he vanished into a parking lot, but Buck just turned away. He caught Eddie and Hen’s overlaid, “Chim,” before he got out of range.

Buck put on his Athena-imitating resting bitch face and no one stopped him on his way out the door. But he only had thirty seconds of quiet in the spring chill before he felt Eddie lean against the wall next to him. He knew it would be Eddie. Eddie was the one who’d listened to Buck ramble in his post-Abby, pre-Ally stumbles. Eddie was the one who’d rolled his eyes at the shared opinion that Buck should get over it because the relationship had been over for months and said, “The day things end on the outside of a relationship isn’t the same day things end in your head.”

And that’s what it felt like now. Like the world outside of Buck and the one inside of him weren’t the same. “I feel like I’m different, but not. Like, I want to be different, but I haven’t actually changed anything. And every time I try to do better, it keeps backfiring on me.”

“I feel like if you don’t want to have sex, then don’t have sex.”

“Shannon.”

“Point. But seriously, Buck.” Eddie waited until Buck turned away from the night sky and looked at him. “What do you want?”

“I want a relationship!”

“Do you?”

“Yes!” Eddie looked like he didn’t believe it. “I mean it!”

“Do you want a relationship, or do you want to not die alone? Because those aren’t the same thing.”

The truth of that hit Buck like getting punched in the face.

“Aren’t they?” Buck’s voice cracked. “Isn’t getting married exactly how you end up not dying alone?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to get married for that because you’re not going to die alone either way.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t! You said it at the firehouse, but no one else said anything until you glared at them. That’s not the same thing as actually meaning it.”

“They didn’t say anything because sometimes those two are idiots. You’re never going to get rid of Chimney because he’s obsessed with your sister. That means you’ll never get rid of Hen because she and Chimney are tied at the hip. And you’re never going to lose Bobby because I think it might kill him to go more than 72 hours without fussing over you. That means you’ve got two ways you’re never going to lose Athena, through Hen and Bobby, and Athena is the only real adult we’ve got, so she’ll be the one scheduling dinners.”

“And you and Chris?”

Eddie looked insulted. “You’re stuck with us, Buckley. Wherever we go, whatever we do, you’ve got us.”

“Shit happens, Eds. People say they’re not going to leave, and then they do.”

Eddie stepped into Buck’s space, tilting his head into Buck’s sightline so he couldn’t hide by staring at the concrete. “Let me make something clear to you Evan: we’re not letting you go.”

“You say that, but—”

“I changed my Will.”

Buck blinked. Usually, he could follow wherever Eddie led, but this felt so far out of left field that it felt like Buck was doing the talking. “What?”

“After the well, I changed my Will so that if I die, you get Chris.”

“I’ll…” Buck straightened off the wall, some part of him offended that Eddie could fake looking so casual about this. “What the hell, Eddie?”

“No one will ever fight for my son as hard as you and that’s what I want for him. But you’re sitting here acting like you could just walk out of our lives tomorrow and none of us would miss you. But you’re wrong. Everyone at the 118 would miss you, and if that’s not enough for you, it would break Chris and me wide open to lose you, Buck. We’re keeping you. So, no, you’re not going to die surrounded by someone else’s team at a bar because the rest of us left you behind. No matter what happens, you’ll have the two of us, and whoever else is smart enough to keep you around.”

The evening was pretty much over after that. Sure, a party could come back from having someone storm out, but Buck was too shellshocked by Eddie’s declaration to smooth things over. He still would’ve tried, but in the aftermath of dropping a bomb on Buck’s head, Eddie looped an arm around Buck’s shoulders and steered him back to the table just long enough to wrap Buck’s coat around him he did when Chris was running late for school. Then he lied to the table that Chris had asked for a Bucky sleepover.

No one called him on the clear lie – it was 10:00. Chris was in bed – and Red told Eddie to thank his son for getting Buck out of his house for a night. “A man needs his privacy.”

Buck blinked far enough out of the shock to try and half-form an objection, but Red nudged him off before he could speak. “I’ll be fine, kid. Go spend time with the living.” Red leaned over and needlessly straightened Buck’s jacket, close enough to murmur, “And maybe tell him the truth?”

It took Buck the whole way back out of the bar to realize that Red still thought Buck was panicking about the tsunami.

Buck hadn’t been, but that… he couldn’t be responsible for Christopher. Not after that.

“But Eddie,” Buck said, pressed up against the side of Eddie’s truck while Eddie unlocked it to usher Buck in like a prom date. “I lost him. I know you don’t think I did,” Buck got out before Eddie could instinctually deny it, “but I did.”

“All right, Buck.” Eddie stood there like there was nothing weird about having this discussion right there in the parking lot. “Let’s say you lost him. What did you do next?”

“I didn’t find him.”

“No, but you tried. You nearly killed yourself trying. And if you’d given it literally another 60 seconds, you would’ve found him.”

“Eddie—”

“No, Buck.” Eddie snapped the door open. “And I’ll say this as many times as I need to until it sticks in your head. You didn’t lose him. He got taken by a fucking natural disaster. You didn’t do anything wrong. Sometimes things just happen.”

“If we hadn’t—”

“If I hadn’t dropped him off at your place and insisted that the two of you leave the apartment you wouldn’t have been out there. Am I to blame?”

“No!”

“Why not? I was the one who gave the two of you the idea. I was the one who was too busy to take my kid to the pier for the month he’d been asking. What makes you more responsible than me?”

Buck wanted to pace, but he just stood there, glued to the shadow of Eddie’s truck while Eddie didn’t look tense at all. “You’re just not!”

“Why? What makes you more responsible than me?”

“Because I was there!”

“Did you shove him off the truck?”

“No!”

“Were you trying to help people out of the water, just like you’d done a dozen times before without any trouble?”

“But the—”

“Answer my question, Buck.”

“Yes.” He answered, mulishly.

“So, you had no reason to expect it to be different this time.”

“There was debris, Eddie.”

“And three people in the water screaming for help. And a kid who’d been safe behind the rails of a firetruck the entire day. You couldn’t have expected him to move closer to the edge instead of stay safe.”

“I—”

“It was an accident, Buck.” Eddie stepped into Buck’s space, putting his hand at the back of Buck’s neck to keep him from running. “All of us could’ve made different choices, but none of us did something wrong. It just happened.”

Buck couldn’t talk, and he couldn’t look up into Eddie’s eyes or he might break wide open. Everyone in his life – including Eddie – had told Buck it wasn’t his fault before, but Buck was so exhausted and exposed tonight that every word hit true.

“Did I ever tell you that he was looking for you?”

“What?” Buck snapped up and met his eyes.

“The woman who handed him off to me, she said that Chris had been asking for Buck.”

At this point, Buck didn’t even care about the tears he could feel welling up in his eyes.

“When Chris was scared out of his mind, he wanted you. And don’t tell me it’s just because you were the only person he knew was out there. It wasn’t about convenience. It was about you. So whatever doubt you’ve got running around inside your head, and however long it’s going to take me to get you to believe that we’re not like Abby, or Ally, or even Maddie, you just remember that the thought of you made Chris feel safe. And we’re not giving that up.”

With that, Eddie nudged Buck into the truck. The trip to Eddie’s place was like moving through a fog. Buck’s brain was too preoccupied with trying to decide if it believed Eddie or not that he couldn’t track the journey. One minute it was all Buck could do not to cry in relief that Eddie meant it, but then the next, his brain pointed out that he couldn’t mean it, not really. Not after what Buck had done.

Somehow Buck ended up drinking a glass of water on his way to being wrapped in spare clothes he’d left in Eddie’s laundry and tucked into Eddie’s bed instead of Eddie’s sofa. The second Buck’s head hit the pillow, some part of his brain logged off, ready to sleep with a depth he hadn’t managed in the last two weeks.

Probably because Eddie’s bed meant safety. While Buck usually stuck to the couch, he and Eddie had both suffered through nightmare nights that needed the person they trusted most watching their back. It wasn’t cuddling – they were both too accustomed to being alone in bed – but it was the comfort that came with warmth and reliability. Eddie’s presence was enough to have Buck ready to sleep in a heartbeat.

But… he hovered.

Instead of sleep, Buck skimmed along the edge of unconsciousness. He felt like every time he opened his eyes it was an hour later, but he couldn’t quite let go.

Worse, every time Buck blinked back awake, the train of thought he was trying not to have picked back up where he’d had left it off. Only, the thoughts morphed from why Buck shouldn’t be trusted with Chris, to why Eddie would figure that out and take him back. Take them back.

But Eddie promised they were going to keep him.

But Maddie had promised too, and Maddie had left. But she’d come back.

…had she? She was there, but she was Chim’s now, not Buck’s.

And what if Maddie and Chim broke up? Would she come back to Buck, or would she leave? And would Eddie be like Maddie, just Buck’s, like he promised, until he wasn’t anymore?

Buck closed his eyes in the black of 3:00 a.m. in Eddie’s bedroom and opened them to warm midafternoon coming through Abby’s windows.

But… not.

In the erratic way of dreams, Buck went from sprawled on a woman’s bed – flowers on the bedspread and a wood placard of “Live, Laugh, Love” on the wall – to emptying the quarter of the closet his stuff was confined to, then to the living room where Chim was assigned to carry boxes while Eddie helped Buck with the TV. Chim would make a joke about dropping things, then trip and drop them anyway, but it wouldn’t be a problem because none of Buck’s good breakables made it out of storage this time – his pictures were all on his phone, none of them up on the walls of what was entirely, despite them living together, her apartment. (Buck hadn’t fought her about that because from the day he agreed to move in he knew the relationship wasn’t going to stick. But he was bored and lonely, and if you wanted to keep a woman when you were in your 40s you had to move things along.)

Buck closed his eyes on Chim’s faux offense at being stuck with boxes, closed his eyes on Eddie’s laughter, and opened them to the soft glow of morning in Eddie’s bedroom.

Maybe?

Buck’s brain struggled out of the fog to accept that he wasn’t actually moving out of some woman’s apartment. His sightline was no longer to a pink bathroom decorated with seashells purchased in a pack from IKEA, but pictures that Buck had hung for Eddie because the barren walls made him sad. And Buck wasn’t sprawled on an embroidered bedspread while he took a packing break, but tucked under a duvet that Buck had ordered because Eddie needed something washable and man shouldn’t sleep on scratchy, low thread count sheets.

But Buck’s wires were still a little crossed because his first thought was confusion about why he had team photos up on the wall when his girlfriend didn’t like them, and why in the hell he could hear Chris out there helping Eddie pack since Buck didn’t want his girlfriend around Chris.

…what the fuck?

Buck’s brain snapped into focus like the fire alarm had started blaring.

First: yes, in Eddie’s bedroom, pictures Buck had hung, and a green duvet because Eddie looked good in green and his room needed the color.

Second: Christopher wasn’t packing, he was in the kitchen trying to be ‘quiet’ in a way that would wake Buck up.

Third: What. The. Fuck?

With that strange clarity that came when you were inhabiting dreams, Buck knew that Dream!him had been dating whoever owned the apartment because she was pretty and available, and 40-something him didn’t like living alone.

Just in case Buck’s brain didn’t get to the next point itself, out in the kitchen Chris smacked his crutch into something and Buck didn’t even need to be out there to know the sweet, ‘Really, kid?’ look Eddie was giving Chris.

Dream!Buck hadn’t been alone. He had good enough relationships with Chim and Eddie that they were there to help him pack.

But in that cold clarity of a quiet morning that only came after a good night’s sleep, the part of Buck’s brain still running on horrified adrenaline pointed out that their friendships clearly weren’t enough if Buck was willing to live with a woman he didn’t want around Christopher. Dream!Buck had settled with someone so awful that she didn’t like Christopher, human ray of sunshine Christopher, just so he wouldn’t feel alone.

Oh.

Buck’s brain stalled as that thought echoed around his head in the ringing silence that only happened after he stumbled across something world-alteringly truthful and Buck’s perception of the universe needed a moment to adjust.

Dream!Buck was so desperate not to be alone that he was willing to sacrifice time with his favorite human on the planet.

Being that scared of being alone… wasn’t good.

Worse, like Buck could see the path down a cliff to reach their victim, he could see the steps that would take him from the man he was right now – stiff as a board and horrified at himself in the safety of Eddie’s bed – to the man who’d be willing to live with someone that he wouldn’t want around Christopher. He couldn’t see it perfectly, not laid out like Lego instructions, but becoming that guy didn’t seem laughably impossible. And five minutes ago, Buck would’ve bet his life that it was.

Worst of all, as Buck lay there nauseous at the thought, becoming that guy didn’t just seem not impossible, it seemed probable. Like, if Buck didn’t change directions, he was barreling down the road to becoming that guy.

Buck scrambled out of bed, half slamming into the wall as he slipped on stocking feet into the kitchen. Christopher was at the table, kicking his legs against the chair in a rhythmic thud – like Buck didn’t regularly sleep through LA traffic. But Chris was there. And he whipped around to grin at Buck, mouth full of scrambled eggs drowned in cheese and salsa like that would fix how much Eddie overcooked them.

“Buck!”

The last of the nightmare drifted away, the part of Real!Buck that was Dream!Buck was breathlessly relieved that it wasn’t real. That he hadn’t woken up in a parallel universe where it was true, and that it wasn’t too late to not become the person who would risk Chris like that.

“Bucky?”

Buck hated causing a furrow behind those glasses and swept Chris off his chair and into his arms. Chris laughed – the best sound in the world – and wrapped his arms around Buck’s neck. Then with that sixth sense that kids seemed to have, Chris knew Buck wasn’t ready to let go yet and gave him shoulder pats instead of complaining about how tight Buck was clinging. Buck was a little busy trying to sniffle back tears against Christopher’s shoulder, so he didn’t hear Eddie come over to press a steady hand to Buck’s hip.

They stayed there for a long minute, but honestly, with Chris in his arms and the warmth of Eddie at his back, Buck could’ve stayed there all damn day. Eddie probably would’ve let him if they didn’t have a shift to get to. Eventually, Buck set Chris back down in his chair, only to have Chris keep a grip on Buck’s shirt and tug him down. Not to the chair next to him, but onto his knees so Chris could look him in the eyes. “You okay?”

“Just a bad dream, buddy.”

Chris ‘hmm-ed’ with way more knowledge than a nine-year-old should have. “Was I hurt?”

Ah, squeezing Chris this tight and refusing to let him go had been Buck’s staple after the tsunami. “No, buddy. You were…” Buck didn’t have the words to explain.

“Was I lost?”

“No. I was.”

“We should have Buck over more if he’s having nightmares about not being able to find us, Dad.”

Buck snorted out a laugh, but Eddie dropped down next to Buck, arm around his shoulders and hand wrapped around Chris’ forearm, Buck tucked into their little circle. “Yeah, buddy, I think we should. What do you say I bring Buck with me tomorrow after our shift so he’ll be here when you get home from school?”

“Yes!” Chris tapped his forehead against Buck. “Say yes, Bucky.”

Last night, Buck would’ve said something about not wanting to impose, or about how he had something scheduled with Red, even though all their activities were a little impromptu. This morning, Buck was still sick with the thought of what might be, determined never to become Dream!Him.

“Buck?”

Buck scrubbed a hand through Christopher’s curls and tried to put his yes into words. Tried to figure out how to say that he’d just realized that there was no relationship in the world that was worth not having Chris. “I don’t—I mean—I didn’t have you guys. That was the nightmare.”

Eddie rand his fingers through Buck’s hair like Buck had done for Chris, thinking the nightmare was some variation on their conversation from last night. “It’s a good thing we’re not going anyplace then,” Eddie said. “We’re keeping you.”

“Yup. You’re our Buck.”

For the first time ever, Buck recognized that his being theirs wasn’t the problem. The Diaz boys could hold Buck as tight as they promised, but Buck would still feel alone. It was a horrible time to realize he believed them. Without his say-so, Buck’s eyes started to leak.

“Bucky?” Chris pressed his hands to Buck’s cheeks, tiny thumbs wiping away tears.

“Buck?” Eddie murmured.

“Good tears, Eds,” Buck said, not quite the truth, but not quite a lie, and Eddie believed him. Eddie wrapped them both up in his arms, Buck’s head on one shoulder and Christopher on the other, both of them letting Buck cry.

Chapter Four

Somehow, Buck didn’t have any spare uniforms at Eddie’s place, which meant that, despite Eddie’s clear worry about putting Buck in a car alone after all those tears, Buck had to leave. Before he agreed to go to school, Chris required a pinky promise that Buck would come back after their shift. Eddie could’ve called them in a little late to work and taken Buck to the drop-off and then his own place, but Eddie remained the world’s best best friend and let Buck go with only minimal fuss. He could tell that Buck needed some time alone to put himself back together before their shift.

Though, really, after the exhaustion of the last few weeks and crying all over the Diazes this morning, what Buck could’ve used was a nap. Or at least, the chance to sit alone and stare at his ceiling for a while he tried to parse through his certainty that the Diazes weren’t going to let him go, and the new understanding that believing they wanted him to stay didn’t suddenly make everything better.

As it was, Buck spent the car ride back to his place swinging between riding the high of their affection and asking, ‘what the fuck is wrong with me?’ The debate lasted through his front door while he tossed his keys onto the table and stepped into his pristine, modern apartment. Then Buck froze at an autonomic flood of loneliness that hit him so sharp and hard he stopped breathing.

Buck had spent the drive home so wrapped up in thinking about the Diazes being his and why the fuck that might not be enough that he’d forgotten about the rest of the dream that had led him to that realization in the first place. Stuck in his entryway, Buck could see his sleek table and chairs, the trio of candles as a centerpiece, the barstools, the four-pack of generic California art on the wall next to his front door, the industrial shelf in his kitchen full of more candles that he’d never lit and art he hadn’t picked.

Buck hadn’t chosen any of it.

It was his house, but it didn’t feel any more his than the apartment Dream!Buck had been running away from.

Dream!Eddie had been carrying out Buck’s big screen while Chim had the boxes of clothes and cookware Bobby had given him. And somehow, despite all the time between Real!Buck and Dream!Buck – and Real!Buck currently living alone – those were still the only things in Buck’s apartment that he counted as his. Red!Buck’s apartment might have been a sad, bachelor mausoleum, but at least it was full of his own things. Dream!Buck couldn’t even manage that.

It was like Red!Buck had tried to soothe the ache by filling his place with memories from times when he hadn’t been lonely, while Dream!Buck was so scared of lonely that he sacrificed everything that was his, including Chris. Looking around his own sad, bachelor loft, Buck could see the seeds of both those Bucks that he didn’t want to become. (At least Dream!Buck’s stuff had belonged to his actual girlfriend. Everything taking up space in Buck’s place had been picked by Ally before she left him brokenhearted at the bottom of stairs he couldn’t climb.)

Sure, the loft was objectively awesome. Exposed brick and industrial modern were cool, and everyone who’d stepped inside Buck’s place had said so. But standing there with fresh eyes, Buck couldn’t remember if he’d ever loved it, or if he’d just loved how excited Ally got about the place, like her excitement would make her stay.

Ally had picked the sofa, which was sleek, but small. Definitely not right for naps or big enough for Chris to use when he slept over. And his exercise equipment was tucked beneath the stairs, so Buck was stuck working out in the middle of his kitchen. (Ally had said he did most of his workouts in the firehouse anyway, so it shouldn’t matter, and Buck had let it go.) And those fucking stairs: yes, they were cool, but Buck had never paid attention to the feeling he had at the bottom of them. His stomach skipped a beat in muscle memory of all the times he’d had to drag himself up them when he was so exhausted that he just wanted to collapse in a puddle and sob.

Thank fuck Buck’s phone beeped with his ‘five minutes before you need to be out the door’ reminder or he might’ve spent the day putting everything up on Craigslist and looking for a new place.

As it was, Buck careened into the locker room just in time and found Eddie waiting, shoulders loose in the way that meant he was tense but trying not to show it. Buck coming in furrowed and almost late shot up the tension Eddie had been carrying around since he sent Buck off on his own ten minutes after his puddle of tears.

As usual, the sight of Eddie there worrying about him was enough to change the direction of Buck’s tailspin. An hour ago, Eddie had said, “you’re our Buck,” and meant it, and Buck believed him. Yes, Red!Buck and Dream!Buck devoted their sad apartments to not being lonely, and yes, Real!Buck had been doing the same thing, but Buck didn’t need to worry about that anymore. The Diazes were staying. Buck wasn’t going to be alone, which meant he could figure out how to not feel alone. Buck wasn’t going to become the kind of man who’d prioritize a girlfriend over Chris, and when he was old, he was going to have pictures of grown-up Chris from last Christmas right next to the ones he had now. And just the thought of thirty-something Chris chasing around his own curly-haired kids made Buck break into a smile that made Eddie’s tension drop. Though, his smile back was confused. “You good?”

“Yup. But we have to go shopping.”

“We what?”

“Ally picked everything in my apartment.” Buck popped open his locker and started changing. Eddie was so befuddled he didn’t bother pretending to give Buck privacy.

“And now you’re…” Eddie trailed off before he switched to the same mildly horrified look he got when Buck ate avocado toast. “Are you, like, in love with her?”

“No, Eds.” Buck laughed. “I just want it to be my stuff, you know?”

“…yes?” Eddie probably only kind of understood since all his non-Christopher stuff had been from Shannon for the house in Texas, bequeathed by Abuela and Pepa to fill in furniture gaps, or bought by Buck because Eddie deserved nice things too.

Buck buttoned his trousers and straddled the bench to look Eddie in the eye while he explained. “It’s like, those gold and glass shelves in your dining room. You got those from Abuela, right?”

“How could you tell?” Eddie said dryly.

“Because I’ve seen them in a bunch of grandma apartments since I moved to California. They’re like, grandma chic.”

“I’m telling her you said that.”

“She’d take it as a compliment from me.” Eddie rolled his eyes, but it was true. “So those shelves, they do the job, but they’re not your shelves. You never would’ve picked them.”

“No.”

“I want stuff that I picked.” Buck reached into his locker and pulled on his t-shirt. He paused halfway through, this morning’s realizations making sensitive the part of him that had endured weeks of button-up shirts because his body had been too sore for a t-shirt. “Yeah, I might need to move.”

“What? I thought you loved the loft?”

“I did. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Poor Eddie was obviously confused. Buck felt a little bad about the emotional whiplash he’d put the man through already today and it was barely 9:00 a.m. “I got home this morning and I realized that Ally picked everything in my place. Not everything everything – I picked the TV, and the consoles, and my sheets, and my clothes, and I went out with Bobby for my pots and pans – but like, my table, and chairs, and the sofa, and the bed frame. And when I was moving in, I piled all my books on the shelf in my bedroom, and Ally said that didn’t look good, so she rearranged stuff, and put some of my books in the closet, and she picked all the pictures on the walls, and where stuff should go. So, like, half of the stuff, all the big stuff, Ally picked.”

“Okay?”

“I want it all to be mine, you know? My shelves, with my stuff, and my pictures, and my place that doesn’t—”

Buck froze, and Eddie leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Doesn’t what, Buck?”

“Doesn’t remind me of being in pain all the time.”

“I get that.” Eddie hesitated and Buck didn’t ask what it was that Eddie didn’t get that made him pause. Buck stood and finished straightening his uniform, tucking things away into his locker while Eddie mulled. “Buck?”

“Yeah, Eds?”

“What does this realization have to do with before you went home this morning?”

Meaning: did Chris and I telling you we want to keep you make you want to blow up your life and run away? But Buck couldn’t just call Eddie an idiot. He had to back it up a little to properly explain.

“I let Ally pick the stuff for my place because part of me thought it would…”

“Make her stay.”

“Yeah.” Buck sighed, relieved that Eddie understood. For all that it was the truth and Buck accepted what he’d been doing, he wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud. “Even though I knew she was going to be traveling for work most of the time, I wanted it to be the place she came back to.” He wanted to be the person she came back to. “But now, I don’t need to worry about making someone stay.” Buck closed his locker with a snap and put all his focus on Eddie.

Eddie, who didn’t say, ‘because we’re keeping you’ but he knew it anyway. Eddie just tossed his arm around Buck’s shoulders and dragged him out the door. “So, we’re going shopping.”

“Yup.”

“I feel like we might need help for that.”

Buck stumbled to a stop.

“Buck?”

He was going to say, ‘sure.’ It was on the tip of his tongue. But he wanted to say ‘no.’ For some reason, Buck felt like he’d stepped back into his apartment and been hit by the loneliness again, but it wasn’t loneliness he was feeling. Buck didn’t know what the hell it was.

Before he could figure it out or Eddie could ask any of the questions on his face, Bobby stuck his head over the railing and called down, “You boys bothering to join us for breakfast?”

“Yeah, we’re coming!” Buck hollered back, donning a fake smile. Bobby furrowed at him, obviously wondering what was up with Buck that Eddie was already having to bolster him up. Buck held onto the smile until Bobby stepped back. Then he shook his head ‘no,’ at Eddie, not wanting him to ask the questions when Buck couldn’t name his own emotions.

Though, standing there and letting Eddie grill him would’ve been less awkward than the hesitance hovering over their breakfast table. Honestly, Buck had forgotten that he’d stormed out of the bar last night, but Chim and Hen clearly hadn’t, and they’d passed the word on to Bobby. Bobby, who opened his mouth to ask Buck if he was okay without saying the words, ‘You okay, kid?’

Buck headed them all off at the pass. “Hey, how do you guys know when you like stuff?”

Of course, before anyone could ask what Buck was talking about, Chim said, “If you haven’t figured out what you like after all that sex, I don’t think we can help you, Buck.”

Hen glared at him with a look that said, ‘this was the opposite of what we talked about.’

Oh.

That was the feeling behind Buck’s automatic no to getting help shopping.

Asking Maddie meant asking Chim, meant Hen, meant Athena, meant everyone on a group trip to IKEA, in a competition about what décor screamed bachelor, repeating that Buck’s folding couch for Christopher was really because he was too desperate for sex to make it upstairs, and harping on why he was moving at all when the new place wasn’t as cool as the loft. Buck would end up with a new apartment full of a bunch of stuff that everyone else had picked, but his home just as empty.

Buck knew exactly how the shopping trip would go, just like he knew he was supposed to roll his eyes at Chim’s joke or make a dirty joke of his own, but he didn’t want to. Buck was trying to have a real conversation here. So instead, Buck did exactly what he felt and let his face be as annoyed as the rest of him. “I was talking about furniture.” Buck held up a hand to stop Chim, who was clearly about to plow through Buck’s expression and say something about the optimum sex height for kitchen tables. “Not that kind of furniture.”

“What brought this on?” Hen stopped them both before the conversation devolved.

Buck hesitated, not wanting to open himself up by giving them the same explanation he’d given Eddie, and absolutely not ready to tell them about his dream. “I just realized that Ally picked a lot of the stuff at my place, and it’s nice, but it’s not me, you know? But I’ve never really picked anything other than my TV, and my mattress, and my pots and pans,” he nodded at Bobby, “But those have objective criteria for picking. But how do you pick a kitchen table? Or a sofa, other than making sure it’s big enough for Chris to sleepover?”

Hen gave him the smile that said he was adorable. “I can’t help you, babe. I went shopping with Karen for our house, but she did all the picking.”

Eddie said, “Abuela,” while he reached for a frittata slice.

“Athena.” Bobby shrugged.

Chim cracked his knuckles and declared, “I know the answer.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Hen said.

“Yes, I do. You ask yourself: does this spark joy?”

That… was not what anyone at the table had been expecting. “You what?”

“You ask yourself if it sparks joy.”

“Oh no,” Hen groaned. “Not this again.”

“It is a valuable way of looking at the world, Henrietta.”

“What are we talking about?” Buck asked, sitting down to his Bobby-prepared plate full of frittata and fruit.

“Remember the cleaning binge Chim went on after he got stabbed? That was him asking if his clothes sparked joy.”

“What?” Eddie laughed.

“I didn’t just throw out my clothes. It’s more than that.” Chim actually sounded a little hurt.

“Tell me, Chimney.” Hen set down her fork to belittle him at full force. “What else did you get rid of?”

“It’s not about ‘getting rid of,’ Hen. It’s about finding the stuff in your life that makes you happy and treating it well. If it doesn’t make you happy, then when you thank it for what it’s done for you and let it go.”

“And what else in your house, other than old clothes, didn’t ‘spark joy?’”

Chimney hesitated and Hen smirked, which meant Chim hadn’t done that part. “I don’t have to answer that.”

Somehow, Hen managed to flip him off with her fork and went back to eating

“Wait, wait. So, you ask if your stuff makes you happy, then you get rid of it if it doesn’t?” Buck asked.

Ever practical, Bobby said, “I wouldn’t recommend just throwing out all your furniture, joyful or not.”

“Well, how’d you pick your stuff for your apartment when you moved here, Bobby?”

Bobby tried to pretend he couldn’t answer through a mouthful of fruit, but they all waited. “It came pre-furnished.”

“So, what you’re all telling me is that I need to ask Athena and Karen about how to pick stuff.”

“Hey!” Chim snapped. “I picked all the stuff in my apartment.”

“I’ve slept on your couch, Chim. If that’s what makes you happy, I don’t know if I trust you.”

“That’s a great couch!”

Buck couldn’t help himself. “If you haven’t figured out that it’s not good for sex, I don’t think we can help you, Chim.” The team laughed because it wasn’t often anyone other than Hen got one over on him.

But Chim wasn’t at all concerned with being one-upped. “Buckley, did you have sex on my couch?” He squeaked.

The bell went off, saving Buck from any explanation that wasn’t his smirk.

“Seriously, Buck. Did you? Buck!”

 

— CAR CRASH #3 —

“You really didn’t explain this well, Chim.”

“What?” A woman driving an arborist truck into a power line had interrupted their breakfast. They all knew they’d spend the rest of the day cleaning it up. Not the original accident, which hadn’t been bad, but all the car accidents that came from people who couldn’t handle broken stoplights.

“The ‘spark joy’ stuff. The author says the ‘whole point in both discarding and keeping things is to be happy.’ It’s not about getting rid of stuff, but about figuring out what you want around you.”

Eddie shrugged like he was following Buck perfectly and they hadn’t stopped having this conversation three hours ago. “That doesn’t sound crazy.”

“Buck.” Chim straightened in his seat. “Are you reading The Magical Art of Tidying Up right now?”

“The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Chim. Come on.”

“Did Buck stop by a library when the rest of us were taking someone to the hospital?” Hen complained over the radio. When Bobby had patched the ambulance in, Buck didn’t know.

“Reading the e-book on my phone.”

“Of course, you are.”

“Really, Hen. It doesn’t sound nearly as crazy when Chim isn’t the one doing the explaining. See, the author says you do go through all your stuff—”

“Not just your clothes,” Hen added.

“Yup. And you pick it up and ‘your body reacts.’”

“And what does that mean, other than the dirty way I know Chim is thinking?” Hen asked.

(Chim squawked, “I’m not Buck!” but they all ignored him.)

“In another spot she says that the stuff should, ‘speak to your heart.’ So, I figure it’s like how I feel when I use those fancy Japanese knives Bobby got me for graduation.”

“Oh, so Buck gets presents and we don’t?” Chim interjected. “You’re rewarding bad behavior, Bobby.”

“My present to the two of you was not firing you the first day when I caught you betting on me being incompetent.”

“What?” Buck bookmarked the page and pocketed his phone. He hadn’t heard this story before.

 

— CAR CRASH #4 —

“Explain to me how this isn’t ridiculous.”

Chimney was driving the ambulance while Hen and Eddie half-monitored vitals on the patient who was moaning about a sprained ankle. That left Buck tucked into the back corner and along for the ride while Bobby and the rest of the crew stopped back at the station to stock up. The ambulance would probably have to meet them at the next crash instead of making it back to the station and Buck was trying not to be irritated that their patient had probably caused the car accident to get out of his divorce mediation.

Hen couldn’t be asking Buck about their idiot patient which meant, “I… have more room over here?”

“Not the ambulance, Buck. The book.”

Ah. She was talking about Buck reading on his phone while the actual paramedics did their actual jobs. “Did you want me to hold something?”

“Can he give me morphine?” The patient asked.

Eddie nudged the guy back to the gurney while Hen ignored them both. “No, Buck. I mean, touching all your stuff to figure out if it makes you happy. Do you just tap your hand on everything and see if it gives that zing you were talking about with the knives?”

“Oh! No, but yes.”

“Great argument there, Buckaroo!” Chimney called from the front.

“You do, but you be smart about it. So, you start with your clothes, which is the part you saw Chim doing and he never got past.”

“I did too!”

They all ignored him. Even the patient.

“So, to start with, you get all your clothes out of your closet and put them in a big pile. Then you go through them one at a time, holding them in your hands to see if they give you that spark of joy. Then you go through that same process with everything else you own, but you do it categories instead of, like, tapping stuff while you walk through your house.”

“Seriously. If I have to listen to this, I’m going to need the morphine.”

“So, you didn’t before?” Eddie asked, dry as desert.

 

— CAR CRASH #6 —

Eddie slung the Halligan over his shoulder and handed Buck the crowbar. The last two accidents hadn’t been bad, just time-consuming since so many people had needed to get popped out of their cars. “Categories?”

Buck’s brain ticked for a moment, then it lit up when Eddie asked without the tone everybody else had been using. “So, you start with clothes, because those are easiest to figure out what makes you happy.”

“Really?”

“Think about your high school football jersey. You hold it and you feel happy.”

“Okay.” Eddie nodded, pretending like he didn’t have a faint blush that Buck had picked up on the way he smiled every time he folded the jersey into Chris’ pajama drawer. “I’m supposed to feel about all my clothes the way I feel about that shirt?”

“I don’t think it’s the same feeling. I mean, you couldn’t wear the jersey around since high school you was a twink.”

The poor teenage girl they were breaking out of her car blushed so hard that, if Buck hadn’t been there for the conversation, he would’ve thought they had her neck brace on too tight.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She squeaked.

Buck slammed the crowbar into the door seam and pressed to give Eddie and the Halligan more room to work. That caused their teenager to blush for an entirely different set of reasons. “Clothes, then what else?”

“Then you do your books; your paperwork; everything that’s not emotional, it’s just stuff; then you do your sentimental stuff, like pictures.” They popped off the door. “For all of it, you’re looking for that same kind of feeling as the jersey.”

“You do that part, Chim?” Hen asked as she crouched down next to their patient. Chim just rolled his eyes.

“You really love this book, don’t you?” Eddie asked.

“I’ve already bought a hard copy that I can put my notes in.”

“Are you guys talking about Marie Kondo?” Their teenage patient asked. Buck confirmed and wasn’t even a tiny bit smug that Chim being all up in the girl’s face didn’t make her blush like Eddie and Buck did.

“I really liked the Netflix series.”

“There’s a show?”

 

— CAR CRASH #8 —

“I’ve gotta say, that clip you showed me looked like the lady was shivering, not like she was happy,” Eddie complained as they wheeled another patient to the ambulance.

“She was translating it, Eds. That makes a difference.”

The rest of the team didn’t groan, but Buck knew it was damn close. “You know, Buck.” Bobby interjected, “Michael has some interior designer friends who should be able to help.”

“Help?”

“With figuring out what new furniture you like.”

“It would be easier than just folding your clothes a new way and stopping halfway through.” Hen teased, which was exactly what happened every time Buck talked about this, and exactly what Bobby was trying to avoid.

“I didn’t stop,” Chim objected. “I just love all my stuff!”

Buck didn’t know what Chim had done to irritate Hen, but she was taking vicious pleasure in winding him up over and over again. Eddie took one for Bobby’s blood pressure and asked how he’d met Michael’s interior design friends.

“You want an awkward housewarming party? Have it with your wife’s, ex-husband’s, gay friends.”

Everybody winced, including the guy on the gurney. Though, that might have had more to do with him tugging a card out of his pocket. “If I may: most interior designers like to come in and tell you what looks good, not help you figure out what you like.”

Eddie all but rested his chin on Buck’s shoulder to look at the card the guy had managed to put in Buck’s hand while trailing two fingers over his palm.

“And you don’t?” Eddie asked.

“Sure, I do.” The patient grinned. “But I can do a favor for the handsome man who just pulled me out of my crushed car. And, this sounds interesting. Also, it will be less weird than calling someone that your boss,’ wife’s, ex-husband has probably been on a date with.”

Buck grinned. “Nice. You got it right.”

Eddie tossed his arm around Buck’s shoulder and called, “We’ll be in the truck, Cap!”

Buck let himself be dragged off. “Well, that was convenient.”

Eddie snorted. “I thought part of the goal here was to not have stuff picked out by your girlfriend.”

“It is.”

“Then maybe don’t set yourself up to get stuff picked out by your new boyfriend.”

Buck stumbled. “Shit, was he hitting on me?”

“Yup.”

“But he was on a gurney.”

“That’s never stopped anybody before.”

“Wait.” Buck blinked. “Really?”

“At least once a week,” Eddie said, then kept walking – arm no longer around Buck, which he didn’t appreciate.

“Seriously, Eds. How do I miss this stuff?” Buck scrambled to catch up.

“No clue about how you’re so blind to men hitting on you, but the rest of us appreciate it. You missing it when that married couple hit on you is one of Bobby’s favorite stories.”

“They weren’t hitting on me. I pulled a tapeworm out of the guy. That bonds people.”

“Tell me, Buckley, how many other people have turned up at the firehouse the week after a call to bring you, and only you, sushi?”

“It was a joke. See, the guy had been—”

Eddie waved his hands, cutting Buck off. “I know, I know. The point is: you want to get help from the pretty interior designer who liked you enough to hit on you immediately after he was in a car crash, then do that, but keep your plan in mind.”

“He’s not going to hit on me, it would just—”

“Boys, we’ve got another call!”

 

— TRAPPED IN A FREEZER #1 —

Eddie waited until they got some privacy after they jumped open an industrial freezer. On their way back to the rig he bumped up against Buck and murmured, “It would just what?”

“Nothing.” Buck tried to walk faster, but that didn’t do him any good because Eddie just wrapped an arm around Buck’s shoulders, halfway to a headlock, and asked again.

“Just what, Buck?”

“Just… Maddie’s been texting me.”

“Ah. I wondered why you’d been frowning at your book.”

“Yeah. Chim went straight from me wanting to redecorate to me wanting to move and she’s worried that I’m blowing my life up because of Red.”

Eddie was decent enough not to point out that it kind of was because of Red. “You explain it to her?”

“No. I tried. She gets wanting it to be my own stuff, but she just keeps promising that she’s not going to leave again, and I don’t know how to explain to her that it’s not about that.” Eddie’s eyebrow went up. “It’s not. I mean, it kind of is, in that messed up way that Maddie leaving me affects everything, but it’s not about that. You know?”

“Yeah.” Because of all people, Eddie and his history with Shannon were maybe the closest anybody would ever get to figuring out how Buck felt about Maddie leaving.

“Now, she’s looped around to scheduling a time to go out and pick stuff with me, but…”

“Maddie would be doing the picking.”

“Yes. It would easier to tell her I’ve got an interior designer helping me with it than it would be to tell her no.”

“You try telling her that it’s something you want to do on your own?”

“Yes, but she’s like, ‘you would be on your own, I’d just be there for moral support.’ Then I say, ‘no, you wouldn’t,’ and we circle right back to, ‘I’m not going to leave you again.’”

Eddie hmm-ed, quiet and contemplative. “You explain that she’s not going to be able to convince you that she’s not leaving again, it’s just going to take time?”

Buck didn’t appreciate it when Eddie quoted Buck back at himself. He’d given Eddie the, ‘it’s going to take time’ speech whenever the man complained that Abuela and Pepa weren’t chill when Shannon turned back up.

“Have you?” Eddie prodded.

“You made your point.”

“Have you?” Eddie repeated like he’d ever said such a thing to Shannon. Which… now that Buck thought about it, was probably why Eddie was pushing so hard.

“No,” Buck grumbled. He didn’t need to look at Eddie to see the eyebrow raise. “No. I haven’t. But it’s like, how much time am I supposed to need? It’s Maddie, and I know she means it, but—”

“But?” Eddie poked.

“But I also know she meant it when she said she’d always be there for me when she moved to Boston with Doug. And she meant it when they got married. And… yeah. And I know, it’s messed up to be mad at her—”

“Her circumstances being shitty doesn’t change that your circumstances were shitty too.”

“Yeah.” Buck sighed, more of his own words repeated back to him. It was hard to say they were wrong when he’d believed every word as he said them to Eddie.

“Did Maddie explain what she thinks is so wrong with Red making you want to move?”

“She thinks it’s a step towards running away like I used to.”

“You weren’t running way.” Eddie scoffed.

Buck hated being the one to break this to Eddie, but he couldn’t let his best friend go around thinking Buck was a better guy than he was. Believing that Eddie and Chris were going to stick around was too new for him to undercut it with lies. “Yeah, I was.”

“No, you were running to, you just didn’t know where that ‘to’ was. But you found it.”

Eddie said it with so much confidence that Buck kind of wanted to punch him to make the overwhelmed feeling go away. “Yeah, I did.”

“And you know better than to run, because Chris isn’t very fast, and he’d make you feel bad about having to chase you.”

“Eddie, if I was running, I’d take Chris with me.”

At that, something in Eddie released. Buck didn’t know what he’d missed that had made Eddie tense in the first place. “Good. Am I invited on this trip?”

Because he was a little shit, Buck put a hand on Eddie’s breastbone, closed his eyes, and did the ‘spark joy’ shiver. Eddie only got out a single bark of laughter before all their radios clicked on and Maddie’s contained panic came over. “Officer on an open mic in distress. Needs assistance. 727-L30 at Studio Self-Storage.”

Chapter Five

Hospitals always had that smell. It wasn’t bleach. And it wasn’t death, no matter what some of the more dramatic firefighters liked to say. And it didn’t cling to you, because Maddie had never come home smelling like it. But sometimes, when Buck was having nightmares about getting crushed, he didn’t smell summer tar or leftover explosives, he smelt hospital. That antiseptic scent that didn’t actually smell clean.

Yeah, this… this was going to be a new nightmare. Buck could tell.

As Bobby’s second, Chim had to head back to the station to handle the handover and take the 118 offline. Hen had gone with him for support, and both of them were supposed to be back to check on Athena as soon as Maddie and Karen made it home from work. Eddie was stuck with text message updates since no one could take Chris tonight – though Buck was supposed to go home to their place when everything was in the clear.

Buck had been appointed the official group texter. He’d gone straight from their truncated shift to a hospital hallway, updating the team and Athena’s unit while he waited for Bobby, Michael, May, and Harry to figure out their plan for the night so Buck could handle the driving. (Michael and Bobby both wanted to stay the night? Buck was ready to crash on the Grant-Nash couch so May and Harry could sleep in their own beds. Bobby needed to change out of his uniform? Buck was here to take home and tackle him before he fell off the wagon. The family was camping out in the hospital? Buck was better than DoorDash.)

Though, if Bobby didn’t come out of that room and call him up to do something other than sit in these white halls, Buck was going to claw off his skin.

A small hand wrapped around his, tugging Buck’s fingers out of his mouth, cuticles bleeding from where he’d been gnawing like a damn dog. Buck’s brain was too busy fritzing from channel to channel to realize who had him until Athena sighed.

“‘Thena!” Buck half-stumbled up, but Athena tugged him back down to the plastic chair.

Well, ‘tug.’ Battered, bruised, and probably not supposed to be in the wheelchair next to him meant there wasn’t much force behind her pull, but she didn’t need it.

“Athena, what are you doing out here? Should you be out of bed?”

“I’m fine where I am, Buck.”

“Wait, Bobby! Did he call? I told the desk to tell him to call me—” Buck scrambled for his phone, and Athena put a shaky hand over his.

“Breathe, Buck. The nurses told us that you were talking a walk and were waiting for Bobby’s call, just like you wanted, but I’m not on enough pain medication to miss the way she hesitated before she said it.”

Well shit. That meant Athena knew everything. “You’ve got bigger problems right now, ‘Thena.”

Athena’s eyebrow of doom really shouldn’t be that impressive when it was above a black eye, but she managed it. “My problem is skin deep, Evan.”

“Your arm is broken, Athena.”

“Cracked, not broken.”

“Still deeper than skin.”

“Shush, you. Now,” Athena nudged Buck back into his chair instead of perched on the edge, half-ready to hop up and go get help. “Michael took the kids home and I tricked Bobby into getting me something to eat from the cafeteria before he called you. That gave me plenty of time to grill the nurse about where you were.”

Buck sighed and sank back like Athena was shooting for. He’d have to tell Bobby at some point, but he didn’t know if he could take Bobby trying to be supportive right now. “Is he going to freak out that you’re not there?”

“Probably, but the nurses have me covered.”

“Yeah, but you said they’re bad liars.”

“They’ll be better now that you’re not up here alone staring at a wall.”

Buck leaned like it was a secret he couldn’t say out loud. “Not a wall.”

Athena’s face softened. “No, baby. Not a wall.”

No. Buck was ‘on a walk’ three floors up from Athena’s room, sitting in a quiet corner of the hospital, staring at the closed door where Red’s body was waiting. Waiting behind a laminate door so pale it almost matched the white walls. Waiting for strangers to come and take him away, behind a door that Buck wasn’t allowed to cross because he wasn’t family. Because Buck wasn’t supposed to be here at all.

Red had collapsed out there on the street, leaving some random stranger to call 9-1-1. Red had come back to the hospital, just like he hadn’t wanted. He hadn’t put Buck down as his emergency contact, so no one had called to tell him Red got checked in, to tell him that Red wasn’t going to get back up this time so he should come and sit with him. Should come and say goodbye.

Instead, Red had died in some nameless corner of a bleach-white hospital, all alone in his bed, no Buck to hold his hand.

Athena wound her fingers through Buck’s, so warm he almost wanted to curl his freezing fingers against her palm. That must’ve been what Red felt like, but Buck would never know.

“I couldn’t touch him,” spilled out.

Athena didn’t speak, just rubbed her thumb over his frigid skin.

“The nurse who called and told me that he was gone, she wasn’t even supposed to notify me because I wasn’t on any of his paperwork, but she thought I should know. She wasn’t supposed to let me in either, but I was already here at the hospital. She said she could give me room to say goodbye because I wouldn’t get to… they’re going to take him away and I would never have gotten to see him again if it wasn’t here.

“She broke the rules so I could say goodbye, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself touch him. I deal with dead people all the time, and I… couldn’t.”

Buck had been sitting in the hallway outside Athena’s room, thrumming with anxiety while he waited for whatever the Grant-Nash family needed. Then the call came. Everything after that was a blur and Buck had only come back into focus next to Red’s body.

Red… hadn’t been sleeping.

But he hadn’t looked dead either.

The dead Buck usually saw, they died in pain: burned, crushed, or bleeding out. Red had been in the hospital, tucked under sheets, and probably doped up on painkillers. The nurse murmured to him that Red had gone quickly and quietly, no struggle. So, he hadn’t looked dead, he just looked… something more than asleep. Face too relaxed because the thing that made him Red wasn’t there anymore.

Gone before Buck had the chance to say goodbye.

“I’ll give you all the time you need,” the nurse had said. And Buck had thought he’d stay there all day. Thought he’d sit there with Red’s hand in his, rambling about the last great story that he hadn’t gotten to tell, like some part of Red would be able to hear him wherever he’d gone. But Buck hadn’t gotten past sliding back the sheet to take Red’s hand.

There was something wrong with Red’s skin. Something Buck couldn’t name. Like Red’s face was too relaxed for Buck to pretend, somehow his skin was too. Whatever Buck thought he would do, however Buck thought he would say goodbye, at the sight of Red’s hand he stumbled out of the room, leaving Red’s body behind.

He tried to explain it to Athena, tried to explain how he’d let Red down again, but Athena said, “It’s not the same, baby.”

Buck sniffed, gross and snotty with tears he didn’t even realize he was crying. “He probably wouldn’t have wanted me to touch him anyway. He didn’t call me.”

“You were on shift in a blackout, Buck.”

“He still should’ve called. And he didn’t. And he didn’t have me down anyplace. The nurse who told me wasn’t supposed to. Would anybody have even told me he was gone?”

Athena slipped her hand free, but before Buck could panic at the lack of contact, the backs of her fingers brushed away his tears. “Yes, Buck. He loved you so much that a nurse who only saw you with him a handful of times broke the rules to let you know he’d gone.”

“But Red didn’t.”

“He was proud, baby. All the way to the end. He might not have thought about the paperwork, or maybe he didn’t want you to see him stuck in bed when he lost.”

Buck couldn’t take his eyes off that door and its tiny window, a pastel pink curtain drawn on the other side, another thing between him and what was left of Red. “He didn’t want to die in a hospital. He was supposed to go at home.”

“And I wasn’t supposed to almost lose to a gutless bastard, and you weren’t supposed to get blown up. Life is just a bunch of things that aren’t supposed to happen.”

Buck bit his lip, the taste of tears on his tongue. “I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

“What did he say to you the last time you spoke?”

“It was at the bar.”

“Baby.” Athena pressed two fingers to Buck’s chin and twisted him back to look at her. “Red knew he was dying. He knew that every time he said goodbye to you, it might be the last. So, what did he say to you at that bar?”

Buck couldn’t quite catch his breath, trying to hold back the tears before they turned into sobs. “Go spend time with the living.”

“Sounds to me like he got to say goodbye.”

“But I didn’t. I left him there because I panicked about Eddie and the Will, and dying alone, and—”

Athena took him by the cheek and put herself in Buck’s sightline so he couldn’t hide. “You know how you say goodbye?” Buck couldn’t get words out and shook his head. “You go spend time with the living.”

Something in Buck broke. Some dam that had been leaking tears ruptured into sobs. With a soft, “Oh, baby,” Athena pressed Buck’s head to her shoulder and let him collapse into the hollow of her throat, wrapping her one good arm around his broad shoulders. It must’ve hurt to bear his weight, but Athena dragged her hand through Buck’s hair and let him break.

Chapter Six

Buck’s plan for his three days off was to binge tidy according to the laws of Marie Kondo and make it a whole 24 hours without crying. (“Crying is healthy,” Athena kept saying, but Buck was getting sick of it.)

He’d spent the few post-Red, post-Athena-hospitalization days watching the entire Tidying series on the big firehouse TV and ignoring the team’s commentary – which was halfhearted because no one wanted to poke Buck too hard when he was grieving. He’d transferred all his e-book notes to the hard copy because Buck had a whole lecture about how you didn’t really own e-books and technically Amazon could take them back at any time.

(“What, you think Amazon is going to go under, Buck?”

(That’s not the point, Chim.”)

Buck had flagged the important bits of the process, made a game plan, gotten a decent night’s sleep at the station, and was ready to walk into his apartment to pile every piece of his clothing onto his bed and start asking about joy.

So, of course, Buck only made it half a pile into his plan before his cell rang with the name of Red’s law firm on the caller ID. “Hello?”

“Is this Mr. Buckley?”

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Buckley, this is Ms. Glade.”

“Oh. Uh, hi?” Ms. Nora Glade was Red’s attorney and the most casually put-together lady Buck had ever seen. She both intimidated and turned him on at the same time, which was impressive because usually only one of those parts of Buck’s brain worked at a time.

On one of his bar trips with Red, Buck had gotten two beers in and panicked about how he was supposed to handle Red’s stuff after he left. Red had patted Buck’s head, switched him to water for a round and explained that Ms. Glade’s whole practice was estate law, with a specialty in clients who didn’t have anyone left. For Red, that meant Ms. Glade had instructions to sell the stuff in Red’s apartment and then donate the proceeds to the Widows, Orphans & Disabled Firefighter’s Fund.

Buck hadn’t expected to ever have a conversation with Red’s lawyer, but then Red had gone and died in the middle of a shift, forcing Buck to call her for permission to get back into Red’s apartment for the stuff he’d left behind. The woman had been dead silent for a solid twenty seconds after Buck’s rambled explanation, then she’d agreed to a time when her cleaning crew would be there. After the wretchedness of the last day, Buck hadn’t cared that she thought he needed supervision.

(Considering that the second time they spoke, Buck had been yelling at one of her employees for throwing Red’s stuff in the garbage, she might’ve had a point.)

Two days after Red’s death and a few hours before Buck’s shift, he’d arrived at Red’s place to pick up his backpack and chamomile tea. He’s gotten there at his scheduled time but ended up being late because he’d sat in the car, psyching himself up to go inside an apartment that managed to look the same, yet so much smaller without Red there.

Eddie had sat in Buck’s passenger seat, silent for several long minutes until Buck was about to be impolitely late. “You want me to handle it?”

“No. I can do this.”

“No one’s saying you can’t. Just, maybe, you shouldn’t.”

“I’m fine.” Buck forced himself out of the car and ignored Eddie’s grumbled, ‘sure you are.’

The cleaners had left Red’s door wide open, so Buck stepped into the living room. Red’s furniture was exactly as it had been the last night Buck was there: Red’s creaky leather chair in front of the TV, Buck’s backpack next to the battered, plaid sofa, but missing the half-folded blanket Buck had left for his next stay over. The sight made Buck ache, like Red was just in the other room, ready to stomp in and complain about Buck babying him but leaving laundry for the sick, old man to do.

A clatter yanked Buck out of a spiral that was about to turn into tears. Buck realized that in his staring he had missed the girl by the corner bookshelves. The girl dropping Red’s pictures into a box like they didn’t matter. “Hey!” He stormed over and yanked a frame out of her hands, snapping at her to be careful. These were important. Eddie had to step in, apologize to the picture breaker, and get the cleaners to call Ms. Glade instead of the cops.

Ms. Glade had arrived in a three-piece suit; vest and skinny tie included. She wore heeled boots that only got her braided black hair up to Buck’s collar bones. Eddie had tried to handle things by using the same smile he used on Pepa, but Ms. Glade didn’t take her expressionless eyes off Buck.

She’d said, “Explain,” instead of ‘hello,’ and Buck had. More a ramble than an explanation, and they’d ended up in Red’s kitchen, Eddie making them both mugs of Buck’s tea. Buck felt like he was all over the place, but he managed to be clear enough that Ms. Glade had reached across the tiny table and set one delicate hand on his while she told him, “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Buckley.” It felt right to twist his wrist and press his palm to hers. Right enough that she’d asked, “Is there anything of Mr. Delacroix’s that you’d like to take with you?”

Now she was calling him barely a 24-hour shift later and Buck couldn’t think of a good reason why. “Is…”

“Mr. Buckley?”

“Sorry. I was, uh, I was about to ask you if Red was okay. But he’s…” Dead. Red was dead and Buck still couldn’t quite say it out loud. Buck cleared his throat, hoping he didn’t sound as messy as he felt. “What can I do for you, Ms. Glade?” he asked, steeling himself for what had to be coming next.

The small shelf in Buck’s kitchen was still full of candles and bottles of wine that Buck didn’t intend to drink. (Stuff like that fell under step four of tidying.) But the random piece of Ally-chosen art from the top shelf had been stuck in a ‘donate’ box and replaced by the three things Buck took from Red’s place under Ms. Glade’s penetrating eye.

First, was a photo of Red with his team in their glory days, everyone in dress uniforms in front of their rig. Second, was a snap Red had stuck in the back of a book and forgotten about until it slipped into Buck’s hands while he snooped through Red’s shelves. Picture!Red was ashy-faced but smiling, wearing turnout pants and suspenders, fresh after a rescue. Last, and right in the middle, was the shadow box with Red’s LAFD 134 helmet shield that his last probie’s wife had made for him when he retired.

The only reason Ms. Glade would be calling Buck was to take something back.

(Buck would’ve taken everything from Red’s place that couldn’t turn a profit or be donated, but Eddie had given him the soft smile he gave Chris when he was being ridiculous and asked, “Does it spark joy?” It hurt like a motherfucker to admit that Buck didn’t want all those photo albums and ticket stubs because they made him happy, but because he felt guilty that there was no one left to love them.)

“Actually, Mr. Buckley,” Ms. Glade interrupted his rumination. “I was wondering if you could do something for me.”

“Oh? I mean—I’d be happy to.”

Buck could almost hear her small quirk of a smile, the unimpressed but ‘aren’t you adorable for trying’ one that she’d used on Eddie when he tried to charm her. “As I’m sure you recall, Mr. Delacroix requested that he not have a funeral.”

“Yeah.” Buck sighed. He was still ticked about that.

Red considered funerals a dumb waste of time, and Buck hadn’t picked a fight about it since he’d planned on doing something to commemorate Red anyway. If some part of Red was still around, he could be pissed at Buck for the memorial from the afterlife. Red choosing cremation had kind of put a damper on Buck’s intentions, but Hen had bought cake and the 118 were wearing black stripes over their shields. (Abuela had invited him over for pollo en mole and a late mass, where she taught Buck how to light a candle. There had been some frantic Googling and interrogating of Eddie on the car ride from Abuela’s to the church so he didn’t mess it up, but Abuela was right: lighting that candle was a less painful goodbye than breaking down on Athena’s shoulder.)

“I’m also sure you’re aware that, despite wanting neither a funeral nor a burial, Mr. Delacroix had instructions for his ashes.”

“Uh, no actually. Red made it sound like he didn’t care if someone dumped him in the trash. I said that maybe we could scatter him around the ashes of a burned building, but he called me morbid.”

Ms. Glade’s ‘hmm’ was pretty much an agreement. “Mr. Delacroix’s Will requested that he be thrown in the ocean.”

“Where?” Buck perked up. She must have been calling to tell him the place so Buck could turn up.

“Mr. Delacroix wasn’t specific about that, I’m afraid. He simply wanted ‘the ocean.’”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.” Buck trailed off, waiting for her to casually and deniably mention a time and place. But instead, he got a long silence. “Ms. Glade?”

“You see, Mr. Buckley… ethically, someone in my employ is required to carry out the terms of our contract with Mr. Delacroix, meaning that we are to follow the terms of his Will to the best of our ability.”

“Okay?”

“We will do that, of course. But, considering your… attachment, I was wondering if you might accept my offer to be an independent contractor on this matter.”

Buck’s brain clicked over, catching up to the explanation. “Are you… is this you giving me Red’s ashes?”

“No.” She was firm about that. “You will have to come in and sign a contract so we’re within the letter of the law on my agreement with Mr. Delacroix, part of which is taking his ashes to the ocean in a timely manner. This is me giving you the opportunity to be the person to take those ashes to said ocean in said timely manner. Be aware that if it were ever discovered that you had violated the terms of this contract you would be open to a lawsuit.”

The contract didn’t worry Buck. He could drop Red in the ocean. “But I’d still get to say goodbye.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckley,” her voice softened after the legalese. “You would get to say goodbye.”

“When can I come in? Can I do it today?”

Ms. Glade laughed, but she said yes anyway. Buck was out the door and at her high-rise office within half an hour. Ms. Glade was waiting for him, pale pantsuit, paperwork ready on her desk, and Red’s simple, silver urn waiting next to the pen.

“Do you need some kind of proof that I’ve dropped Red off?”

“No, Mr. Buckley. I trust you.” Her eyes said she meant it.

“Awesome. Because I will, I promise. I’m gonna gas up and take him straight to the ocean.”

“It’s not that far, Mr. Buckley.” She gestured over her shoulder, out the windows that made up the office’s back wall. They were high enough up that on a clear day she could probably see clear to the ocean. (Buck wondered if her clients were supposed to find that soothing. Or if they were supposed to have confidence in her skills because of all that money.)

“Not there.”

“Where are you going?”

Buck checked the seal on Red’s lid then tucked Red against his hip like he was carrying Chris. “For pie.”

“Pie.”

“He wanted some but we didn’t get to it before… he left.”

“Right.” Ms. Glade didn’t ask for the plan or remind Buck that ‘timely manner’ was still a requirement here. She just plucked a card from the holder at the corner of her desk. “This I do want to see.”

@@@@@

Buck made it all the way to Oxnard, radio blaring, Red belted in the passenger seat, before he got a call from Eddie. He figured that 10:00 a.m. on the dot was as late as Eddie could bargain with Chris. Buck tapped on the speakerphone and before he could even say hello, there was, “Based on the number of movies my kid has listed off, you’re being invited for a movie afternoon, not a movie night.”

“Ask him about Zelda, Dad!” Chris shouted from the background.

“No video games until you get your homework done!”

“But Buck won’t know to come if you don’t ask him!”

“I’m asking him!”

“You only told him about the movies, Dad!”

“Please, Buck, tell me if you can come over before my kid riots and refuses to do his homework.”

“Don’t lie about my best friend like that, Eddie.” Buck laughed.

“Did you ask him, Dad?”

“Yeah, he sounds like a kid really dedicated to his homework right now!” Eddie faux-complained into the background, making Chris giggle. “He’ll probably get all his stuff done before lunch. You want to come over then? I was thinking we could have Abuela leftovers for lunch then skip a snack so we’d have plenty of room to go out for dinner.”

“Pizza!”

“Homework!”

Buck could almost see Eddie turning his attention back to the phone, waiting for Buck’s automatic, ‘absolutely.’ When he didn’t, Eddie said, “Buck? I lose you?”

“I can’t come over tonight, Eds.”

Eddie didn’t answer, but Buck could hear the shuffling that meant Eddie was going into his bedroom and shutting the door. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” It was hard to be anything else with the ocean laid out below him, windows down while he drove along the coast on SR-1.

“Because your plan for the day was to clean your apartment.”

“Tidy, Eds. Not clean.”

“Right. But that’s not your ‘okay’ voice.”

Wind in his hair, ocean highway, and ashes in the passenger seat. “Yeah. I’m not. But I will be.”

“Because you’re going to spend all day and night tidying your apartment?”

“No, I’m, uh, actually not there.”

“Buck.” That was Eddie’s dad voice. “Are you moving and didn’t tell me?”

Buck snorted. “No, Eds. I’d never pick a new place without Chris’ approval. Red’s lawyer called and asked me if I wanted to scatter Red’s ashes.”

“This is the lady I had to talk into letting you take some photos?”

“Yup. You’re apparently more charming than you think, Eds.”

“And I’m sure your sad, blue eyes had nothing to do with it.” Eddie snorted.

Buck laughed at the thought of Ms. Glade charmed by Buck’s anything. “Sure, she did. Either way, she let me have his ashes, but I had to sign a contract promising that I’d scatter them ‘in a timely manner.’”

There was a long beat of silence. “You’re not just on your way up a mountain, are you?”

“Red asked to be scattered in the ocean.”

“That doesn’t make you sound less suspicious, Buck.”

“I’m just taking him to the beach!”

“A beach that takes all day to get to?”

“Well, when I put it in Google Maps to check, it was more like two days.”

“Buck.” Eddie sighed.

“We’re going for pie, Eds. And then I’m taking him up to my favorite beach in Oregon to be scattered.”

“Of course, you are.”

“Eddie—”

“No, I get it.”

“Really?” Buck kneaded his steering wheel a little.

“Yeah, I do. I wish you weren’t alone and had told me about it without me having to grill you, but I get it.” Buck felt the bite of Eddie’s justified disappointment. He’d be hurt too if Eddie had taken off without checking in.

“You’re right.”

Eddie’s grunt was the, ‘thanks for admitting it,’ one he used whenever someone deferred to his judgment on a call.

“You’ll apologize to Chris for me?”

“On, no. That’s on you, Buck. And your apology better be in the form of pie.”

“You got it.”

“And I want text messages every time you stop, including when you have the common sense to stop for the night instead of driving all the way through.”

“I promise, Eds.”

“And stopping for the night both ways, which means you need to get a day off of work because you’ll still be driving home.”

Buck rolled his eyes. “Yes, Dad.”

“Just for that, I’m telling everyone you took off on a spontaneous road trip.”

“Don’t you dare!” He shouted at the phone.

“Too late, already texted.”

“You don’t know how to talk and text and the same time.”

“I’ve got this friend who’s been teaching me new skills.”

“He sounds like an idiot.”

“Nah, he’s pretty great.” Eddie didn’t even hesitate. “He should know that.” Buck swallowed, unable to find the right joke. He just sat in the thrumming silence of his Jeep cruising along at 60 mph and didn’t speak. “You gonna repeat it for me, Evan?”

“I’m trying.”

Eddie hmm-ed. “You’ll get there. Chris and I will be here all weekend if you want someone to talk to while you’re driving.”

“Thanks, Eds.”

Eddie left Buck to his radio, but the ride to San Francisco was full of follow-up calls from Chris where he rambled about homework, Eddie’s inability to microwave Abuela’s leftovers properly, and a review of every movie they watched over the afternoon. Chris probably would’ve put Buck on Facetime and never hung up if Eddie wasn’t the one in charge of the phone. As Chris deserved, every time Buck stopped, he found the nearest overlook to send a picture of the ocean. Then to be a shit, he sent Eddie the same picture with Red’s urn sitting in the foreground.

(He sent the first Eddie picture to Ms. Glade with the note, “We’re on our way to the right beach.” She texted back the emoji raising its eyebrow and, “There’s an ocean right there.” “Not the *right* one” Buck texted back. Ms. Glade was a minimalist texter, but she snarked back at him every time Buck sent a new photo of Red’s urn overlooking the ocean, on the counter at the gas station, or next to Buck’s Big Gulp of caffeine, so it was worth the extra effort.)

Since Eddie hadn’t been joking about ratting Buck out, Chris’ regular phone calls and Ms. Glade’s dry replies were interrupted by a whole series of calls from the team. No one outright asked if Buck was okay, but there was a hell of a lot of implication and Buck pretending like he was losing the signal.

But as Eddie demanded – and Bobby tried not to freak out about on their one call – Buck stopped over in San Francisco. (He roamed into Chinatown for dim sum – photo of his food to Chris, a subsequent phone call about the pizza Eddie had ordered – then went to the wharf to eat – photo of the boats to Chris, photo of Red with the dim sum, boats in the background to Ms. Glade and Eddie.)

Buck crashed in a nicer hotel than his usual – because Red would’ve complained about Buck spending that kind of money even though he would’ve loved every minute of it, and not because Bobby and Maddie had texted wanting to know where he was sleeping without actually asking the question.

Despite his honest effort, Buck only got a few hours of sleep in the fancy bed. That was all he could manage before laying alone in that hotel room, staring at his ceiling, and Red lurking on the nightstand just out of his line of sight made him start thinking float pod thoughts. Buck raided the hotel’s coffee supply and was on the road by 5:00 a.m.

It was still dark out when Buck left, the world getting darker with every mile as he got further away from the city proper. The only light out there was the moon, a long, bright line over wine-dark waves – which Buck still didn’t understand, but seemed right when you were alone on the road with nothing but the dead and classic rock turned down low for company. (He could’ve called Eddie to break up the silence, but somehow Eddie’s steady voice in the smothering night seemed worse.)

When the sun had gone down the night before, Buck had been surrounded by the pistachio brown-green of mostly dead plants on the right and deep blue ocean on his left. By the time the sun rose over the earth, the landscape had changed around him, rockier and tree-ier as he drove through long stretches where the road pulled away from the ocean and into what Buck would’ve called forest if he hadn’t grown up in Pennsylvania.

Buck hit Red’s pie place in that sweet spot after lunch but before the early bird dinner rush. And in this town, Buck expected that rush. The place was one of those beach towns that existed on tourists, but the slightly beaten historical hodgepodge of the town’s main street suggested the place wasn’t doing great.

According to Red, he had only ended up here because his crew wanted to breathe some clean, coastal air after handling a wildfire. Red didn’t have any stories about the town itself, just the best pie he’d ever had in his life, a walk out to the beach where half the team had gone skinny dipping, and a walk back to their rig so they could drive back to the middle of the state and take the I-5 down to LA. (Fire trucks weren’t really designed to take SR-1 down the winding coast, even now.) Red said they’d slogged back to the diner in their turnouts, where the cook had prepped burgers and whole pies for each of them to take on the drive. (Honestly, Buck thought the ‘whole free pie’ thing was more why Red had decided this was the best pie than the actual taste.)

Buck didn’t know why, but when Red had told the story, he’d imagined one of those 1950s diners: red plastic booths, black and white tile. Instead, the place was firmly in the 1970s: wood panels, big wallpaper print, and paint that might have once been seafoam green. At least Buck couldn’t feel the inevitable layer of grease coating his skin that usually came with places like this, so that was something.

Buck’s eyes roamed off the décor and back to the front counter, where a woman was waiting who hadn’t been there before. Her chin was propped in her hand while she staring at him with one finely-plucked blonde eyebrow raised in question. “You ready?” She asked, dry and sarcastic.

“Yes, ma’am.” He said automatically. The woman straightened up and so did both eyebrows in an, ‘Excuse me?’ that would’ve put Athena to shame. “Just yes. No, ma’am.”

“That’s better. I’m Jill. I’ll be your server today. You call me ma’am again, I’ll serve you decaf.” Usually, Buck would’ve guessed that decaf would come with spit, but despite jeans and a perfectly fit white t-shirt, Buck got the sense that spitting was beneath her. Jill had a blunt blonde bob and was thinner than any person Buck expected to be working with pie, which wasn’t a good sign. She led him to a table that looked like it just might have been around since Red was here, which was something.

She handed over a menu – covered in waterproof plastic film, but not covered in grease – pulled out her order book, and asked what he wanted to drink.

“Coffee, please. Full caf.”

“Long drive ahead of you?”

“Only another four hours or so.”

She ‘hmm-ed’ and tapped her pen against the book. “‘Only four’ means you’ve been driving a while already.”

“Yes, ma… not-ma’am.”

Jill bopped him on the head with the book and headed off toward the kitchen. “I’ll get the coffee started.”

Jill had seated him in by the front window, where Buck could prop his elbow on the sill and look out on main street. It was too early in the season for proper tourists, but enough people were roaming around in the sunshine to make it look occupied. The buildings were a hodgepodge of clapboard and brick, all with big windows and everything looking a little bit out of time.

Buck reached into his backpack and took out Red, setting him next to the window to look out at what seemed like the kind of place where everybody knew everybody. Buck had the passing thought that Red might’ve been happier retiring here than staying in the city. If he’d come up north, Red could’ve told a whole new audience the stories of his time firefighting in the big city, and had the whole town at his funeral instead of a road trip with Buck.

“Boy, is that an urn on my table?”

Buck jumped at Jill’s voice. Despite her heels, he hadn’t heard her approach. “Uh, yeah?”

She set the coffee mug with a pointed clatter. Buck opened his mouth to explain, but Jill just raised a finger and pulled out her pad. “Order first.”

“Oh, uh…” Buck hadn’t looked at the menu yet.

Jill just sighed. “You like your eggs fried or poached?”

“Uh, poached?”

“Meat and veg?”

“Just veg, please.”

“Allergies?”

“No.” Buck shook his head.

“Carl!” She shouted, not even looking over her shoulder at the kitchen. “Garden skillet, poached!” Jill narrowed her eyes at him. “Big side of fruit!”

Jill crossed the small diner back to her counter and reached behind for her jug of a water bottle before she sat down across from Buck. “Tell me.”

“Oh, I don’t—”

“Sweetheart, you’re never going to see me again, and the grey-hair brigade isn’t going to be in here to bother me for another hour. Tell me.”

Buck wasn’t going to say anything. He didn’t want to.

But… as Jill just kept sitting there, sucking on her straw, not breaking an entirely different kind of intimate eye contact than Buck was used to, Buck could admit to himself that didn’t want want to.

Or was that he didn’t not want to?

Buck had never been great with silence. Worse so now that he attached it to float pod panic attacks about dying alone, and Jill was going to sit there in silence until Buck broke. (Even then, she might’ve followed him out of the restaurant still waiting, just to be stubborn. He could tell that about people.)

“It’s complicated.”

“The good stories always are, honey. Now, talk.”

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