Archive of Our Own ^beta

Buck is…

Buck is. He thinks. Blinks. Buck is staring at his ceiling, flickering city lights breathing through the window above his bed; the darkness in his room is continuously interrupted in snippets, like wispy ghosts tugging their film-grainy limbs from his walls. He feels sad in an unreachable kind of way; something like day-sleeping, blood-losing, eyes-rolling quietly sitting in the back of his chest where it’s too far away to touch, leaving him a type of empty. Something asking, Do you? Blink? Are you sure that you’re not just sitting like porcelain doll in the dark, lifeless? There would be dust accumulated in his heart valves, he thinks, if he chose to grab a kitchen knife and open himself up, like an autopsy. 

He’d be quiet about it. Sit down with his blade, his serrated edge, and try his best to be methodical for once in his life, and no one would know in that moment that he was taking himself apart. Find something inside himself, or maybe nothing at all, but he’d know, at least, what exactly he’s made of under the skin. It wouldn’t hurt as much as he’d expect it to. He’d be gentle, or try, when he took all his insides out, held them in his hands as if he could trick himself into believing they were someone else’s; his mother’s, or his father’s, or a person’s whose face he can’t place but loves him anyway, and those same hands would shake, because you can’t control that kind of thing when there’s a hole in your chest. Liver. Kidneys. Gallbladder. Pancreas. Stomach. Like hothouse flowers, soft and warm and cloying. When people found him, they’d remark on how neatly he did it, how he was careful not to make a mess. 

This is the part where Buck realises, quite matter-of-factly, that he’s probably going to try to kill himself—and the reason he knows is this:

Buck has been crying a lot lately. Over wet dishes, over sunlight hitting his furniture at pretty angles, over nothing at all. He’s always cried a lot, has always been familiar with the swelling in his throat like anaphylaxis as his vision blurred, but he’s been doing it more than usual, and he knows why. It’s how it always starts. 

He gets emotional; then he gets numb. He never manages to settle on which one is worse. 

The idea of his oncoming suicide, though, doesn’t weigh on him the way it should. It passes like a comet, like a car, like here it comes, no point in running. Buck just feels as if he’s marked something down on a calendar, the kind Eddie has stuck to his fridge. Lunch with Maddie on Friday, aquarium trip with Christopher on Saturday, overdosing on my meds on Sunday. Black ballpoint pen. Tastes like tar. He doesn’t feel scared. 

It’s pointless, lying here. He has a shift tomorrow—today? Twenty-four hours, and it’s late. He should sleep. Close his eyes and try to bury the way this thing inside him aches, the way your heart aches when you realise how endless the sky above you seems and you’ll never be able to see most of it; how it paints over the hollows of his ribcage, paints in an empty church, shades of grey and greyer and black-bruised blue. He can’t sleep. He’s strangely cold, goosebumps like rough terrain. He doesn’t feel—

Awake. Buck is; supposedly. Blinking. 

He certainly looks like a person on the outside, and everyone else seems to think so too. Buck is waiting in line at the grocery store, and he wishes it would go faster. He doesn’t think he got everything on his list—by the end, some of the aisles just seemed too far away to be worth the effort, so he’s pretty sure he’s missing one or two essentials but he can’t find the energy to give a shit. The lights buzz, count his steps with spark-eyes. Haven’t seen you in a while. Have you been looking for angels in the light? Futile effort, you know. There are no angels. They draw shadows between the shelves. Buck’s eyes itch, like he’s been awake for too long. Listen, are you sure you’re not lifeless?

He pays, and packs his groceries into bags, and unloads them into his car, and sits down behind the wheel, and he really wants to cry. I should’ve stayed home, he thinks, even though he knows his fridge is empty and his cabinets are incredibly close behind, and then, I should've stayed in bed, and then, he can’t help but feel like he should never have woken up in the first place. 

Everything is dull, truthfully, colour bleached out. Sickly yellow, corpse-white. Bad veins. He feels like he’s wearing gauze over his eyes. Maybe it’s all in his organs somewhere, pinks and yellows and greens, a kind of internal bleeding, a kind of dissonance; he takes things, see, everything he can from everyone around him. Buck grew up begging, apologising for the air he needed to breathe. He doesn’t think he’s ever really let go of anything at all. He is everything he’s ever seen and everything he’s ever felt, and he grips it all so tight that it goes limp. 

Colours can be relative. Colours can make you overthink.

A thought enters, grim: maybe if he just broke his windshield and stuck a glass shard into his stomach, he’d find something, some small thing inside himself, just to keep him going for a little while longer. Phototherapy, amateur. Body arranged in artfully strewn pieces on the parking lot ground. Warmer, please? like begging summer to stay before she leaves through the front door, suitcase and lipstick in orange-peel hands. Maybe he’d manage to save himself. A little light, a little warmth, a little stay alive for just a while longer, that’s all I need like an organ-whisperer. Is it really living, though, if you’re just recycling parts of yourself until it’s not enough anymore? Is it really living if you’re walking in a self-desecrated corpse? Organs don’t last long in heat. 

Buck drives home, and he doesn’t hit any cars, and leaves his groceries in their bags on the kitchen island. He doesn’t eat any of the food he bought. Buck is— 

“Buck,” Maddie says, “do you remember that one winter, when we had that huge blizzard? It got us out of school. We watched it from my bedroom window and Mom and Dad were arguing downstairs.” 

Buck is: nine. Maddie is seventeen. Hershey is snowed under. Buck isn’t sure how he got here. 

“I remember,” he says. Jee-Yun has fallen asleep, head resting on his thigh, squashed between him and Maddie. A cartoon flashes on the TV screen, pink and yellow and green on her dark hair. She looks peaceful. She looks loved. 

Do you—

Were you ever loved? Do you remember that? Were you—

“You asked me if I thought we’d ever get out of there,” Maddie says, whispering, “and I—I told you yes, but part of me kind of thought we wouldn’t, you know? Felt like the snow wouldn’t ever stop and we’d just be… stuck there.”

Buck looks at her, sees her grown, sees a shadow of her at sixteen, at eighteen, at the side of a man who holds her hand just a little too tight. It still feels impossible that she’s really here sometimes, but she made it. She brushes some of Jee-Yun’s hair out of her closed eyes, runs a finger over her cheek, soft like time passing. Looking up one day and thinking, Oh. I lived. 

“But we did. We got out," Maddie continues. It feels like the whole world could be enclosed here, in this one little room some time past sunset, him and his sister and his niece, two pieces of his heart grown into people. Pump once, breathe twice. Not so bloody, see? 

Pennsylvania, though, seems to stretch from coast to coast. “Yeah,” Buck agrees, but he remembers looking at the snow, so cold you could freeze on the spot, swirling behind the glass. Hearing the wind roar, the entire room dim because the sun was blocked out, and thinking, I am always going to feel this hurt, and he was right. Sometimes, he still hears the wind, howling like oncoming apocalypse, and—

He can’t, he can’t, he—

He wakes up with tears in his eyes. He thinks, I really have to do this again? How long until I can stop? 

He thinks, You could make it stop. You could make it stop, and all it takes is a little loss. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to be saved? 

Pick up the—

Buck is at work, and he has a towel in his hands, washing the ladder tuck. Buck is: bored. The soap suds are bright white against the shining red, his fingers damp, and Buck wonders when exactly this morning his bones followed him out of his body. While he was grabbing coffee on the way here, A-shift’s orders stored in the notes on his phone? While he was changing out of his civvies, the same shirt he slept in last night? Hen is next to him and she asks him a question, and Buck presumably says something back, but he bends down to wet the towel in the water bucket, and when he tries to imagine ever doing this again, he thinks, God, I don't want to. 

It comes in a surge, this aversion, like a deep gasp in blistering summer heat after she came back, frying the stomach lining until it dries. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t care—if the truck gets dirty, if there’s no one around to clean it. It’s all the same to him. His head feels like it’s shutting down. 

They haven’t had many calls today. Slow shift. For at least a little while, L.A. seems to have got some of its shit together. Part of him really hates it here. He can’t imagine where else he’d go, though, and he’s pretty sure that part of him would hate it anywhere. 

“Dinner!” Bobby suddenly calls, jarring in the way it takes up space, and Buck hears it through a fog, the kind that descends when you’re sick. It takes him a second to blink himself back into the real world. By the time he does, everyone else is already climbing the stairs. He drops the towel and follows, takes his regular seat at the table as Bobby hands out plates. The smell of food makes him feel vaguely ill. He takes a plate from Eddie without really registering it, almost on autopilot, and tries not to puke into the spaghetti. 

It kills you inside, apathy. It’s poisonous. You have to care about things. You have to. There's no other way. 

Buck has the end of the road in sight. Closing the distance. Give it a few more weeks. You’re done.

And, truthfully, it’s—it’s fucking hard. He keeps sleeping in later and later after his alarm, and it’s taking more and more convincing to force himself out of bed. No, Buck, you can’t stay here forever. No, Buck, you can’t just quit your job so you can sleep. Come on, Buck, you have to get up. 

Buck picks at his food, conversation around the table flying over his head. You have to eat, Buck, he thinks. You can’t function otherwise. 

Quietly, Buck pushes his plate away. It feels like blowing a candle out, snuffing whatever small spark he still had in his chest. Who the hell gives a shit anymore? 

It’s funny, too, because—

He still has these moments sometimes, right? 

Buck is at the Grant-Nash house on a sunny afternoon, with everyone gathered for their regular family barbecue, and he’s playing with the kids, a game with too many convoluted rules to understand; some kind of tag-soccer-hopscotch monstrosity with a point system that changes every time someone scores. Truth be told, Buck doesn’t think the kids know what they’re doing anymore than he does. He's pretty sure they’re all just making shit up as they go along. That's part of the fun, though. He's out of breath and his legs ache a little, but it’s all the good kind; the kind that feels fulfilling, that feels like you’re putting your body to good use. The kids are practically giddy, upbeat in the way that comes from spending all day in the sun, and they have grass stains on their clothes that their parents are probably going to spend forever trying to wash out later, but in the moment no one cares. There's music faintly playing from the patio and the smell of food in the air and the sky is warm and wide and so, so blue. Jee-Yun comes barrelling into his leg with all her baby strength, giggling bright and high-pitched, and Buck's heart finally feels more than half-full. 

Buck is at the firehouse in the kitchen, Bobby at his side as Buck spoons some soup that Bobby has spent the past few hours teaching him how to make into a bowl—hovering over his shoulder as he cut up vegetables on the chopping board, directing him on exactly how much of this and that spice to put into the huge pot on the stove. Everyone else is downstairs washing the trucks, and their chatter floats upwards, a mix of voices and laughter and snatches of gossip shouted too loudly. Athena dropped by earlier on her lunch break, bringing with her pastries, just to check in. The edges of the world seem softer, somehow, like pastel colours you could swim in, where you could wind the hours around your finger like a lock of hair. Bobby tastes the soup and smiles, says, “You’ve gotten good at this,” and Buck says, “Careful, or I might take your place,” and Bobby says, “Not until you can perfect my chocolate-raspberry cheesecake,” and Buck thinks, I hope I never learn to make it right just so you can keep trying to teach me. 

Buck is at a bar, with Hen and Chimney squashed into the booth either side of him. The place is loud, chatter pulsing like a heartbeat. He feels the vibrations in his bones, rippling through his ribs. They went from tipsy to drunk somewhere between their last round of beers and their last round of shots, courtesy of Hen. It’s so warm that Buck almost feels like he’s on the edge of melting, and if his head was clearer it’d probably be uncomfortable, but all his neurons are fizzy and bright and the three of them are laughing at—something. He doesn’t even know anymore, except for the fact that it’s really fucking funny. His forehead is practically resting on the table as he keels over, cackling so hard he can’t breathe, Hen and Chim shrieking just as loud into his ears. Hen’s trying to say something, blubbering syllables, but she can’t get through more than one at a time and it just makes Buck and Chim laugh harder, which makes Hen laugh harder, and Buck is so fucking happy he dragged himself out of the loft tonight, even if they’re being undoubtedly annoying to everyone else. Screw everyone else. He wants to stay in this little piece of time forever. He never wants this ache in his chest to leave. 

He has those moments, and suddenly, this life that he’s trying to escape? It really doesn’t seem so bad. It seems like—if he just put in a little more effort to take care of himself, if he just paid some more attention to the pink of sunset clouds and the yellow glow of car headlights in the dark, if he just talked to his family a bit more—the kind of life where he could be happy. Where he could make something worthwhile, rest comfortably. It all feels so simple. 

Then, he goes back to the loft. He sits down on his couch, gets into bed, steps into the shower, and it wasn’t worth anything. Jee-Yun will be grown before any of them even stop to realise. Bobby will eventually run out of recipes to teach. The ache in his chest had already subsided in the time it took for the cab to pull onto his street. He’s still fucking sad. All of those thoughts, those ideas, could be true, maybe, but it’d take time, at the least.

And he just doesn’t think he has it in him to last that long. 

He starts to think about suicide in earnest. He wakes up and the first thought in his head is, I want to fucking die. He wonders what a knife would feel like once he made it past the skin of his wrist, how much blood there’d be, where he might do it—bathroom, probably, because of the tile floor. Easiest clean-up. He pictures himself going downstairs and taking one from the kitchen drawer, pictures himself sitting down in his shower and counting one, two, three, pictures himself finally fucking doing it, and then it goes black. 

He locks his front door, and he thinks, I want to die. He drives to work, and when he gets stopped at a red light he thinks, I want to die. He talks to Eddie, and chats with Hen, and jokes around with Chimney, and the wind gets louder and louder, and he smiles at every person that needs saving and then he saves them—

Except that they lose someone on a call. A kid. Not much younger than Buck was when he set out on his own. Injuries too extensive. Too much blood lost. He couldn’t save him. He tried, but he couldn’t save him, and—

And he waits for the next call and throughout it all he thinks, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, I want—

He thinks, I want to go home. I miss it there. The funny part is that he doesn’t know what home he supposedly misses.

But the thought never goes away. He shifts in his chair. Acid behind his eyes. Tries to focus. 

“Hey, Buck?” 

Chris pauses in the middle of writing, the two of them sitting at the Diaz kitchen table, going through his science worksheets; something about space, something about physics. Buck remembers liking it in school, remembers going home and telling Maddie a million different things about planets and stars and Did you know Halley’s comet enters our solar system every seventy-five years? 

He wishes he could care half as much about comets now as he did then. It all seemed like the best thing in the world. 

“Yeah, buddy?” 

Chris, for a few more seconds, doesn’t say anything, just sits there fidgeting with his pen. It hovers over his handwriting, black and slanted. When he speaks, it’s quiet, like he’s reluctant to broach the topic. 

“Why are you so sad lately?” he asks. Suddenly, Buck hates himself a lot. 

“I… I don't know what you mean, kid. I love it here, you know that.” He nudges Chris in the ribs, tries to plaster on that easy-going grin.

“Yeah,” Chris says, carefully exposing a nerve in Buck’s forearm. He told Buck once that he’d like to be a doctor. “—but you don’t look happy.” 

I’m not, he thinks. Air whistles through the vertical wound. I don’t want to be here, he thinks, which is especially horrible because he likes being here more than he does anywhere else; but god, he just wants to sleep. Something is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

He opens his mouth, tries to find a few words to reassure Chris that he’s all good, but he realises his throat feels thick, wound all tight until it burns. Something inside him is splintering, and Chris is looking at him with worried eyes, and all he wants is to break down on this kitchen floor, to fucking feel it, to have someone notice it—I’m dying, see? I need you, see? I need help, see? I need help, please?—but. 

He hears Eddie come home from the convenience store, a quick trip he took to grab a few missing ingredients so that Buck could make all three of them dinner, and it’s like that thing inside him snaps back into place. All is well. Normal. See?

“I'm fine, Chris,” he says, ruffling his hair as Eddie walks into the room, plastic bag hanging off of his fingers. “Come on, we’ve still got tides to cover.” 

“Sounds exciting,” Eddie teases, smiling, but it’s an effort for Buck to smile back and he’s almost certain that Chris knows he’s lying and Buck can’t fucking—

Breathe. Eating is too much effort. He cries when he hears his alarm. He often forgets to lock his front door. Or maybe it’s a decision. He isn’t sure. Breathe. You have to breathe, Buck. 

Slowly, breathe. They got called to a jumper. 

Buck is: terrified. Buck is with Eddie, on the windy roof of an apartment building, and Bobby is trying to talk down a teenage boy over the phone. They’re hovering by the stairwell door, knowing that they have to get closer but also hesitant to do so in case the boy hears and panics—more than he already is, anyway.

Whatever Bobby's saying doesn’t seem to be working. There's no good angle for them to approach him from. He's shaking so hard it’s a miracle he hasn’t toppled over yet. Buck doesn’t know his name, but he looks so young. 

Buck should try to say something. I get it or You have to keep going or Please come down, because I can't watch someone like me end it. Buck says nothing. Every snippet of the boy’s voice that they manage to catch is a hook latching onto his brain; things like I’m tired, things like I'm hopeless, things like I tried, and Buck feels sick.

In the end, “I can't. I’m sorry,” the boy sobs, and Buck knows that that is the exact moment they lose him. “I'm really sorry. But I just can’t.” 

They don’t get to him in time. He goes over the edge. 

All Buck can think on the ride back to the firehouse is, You should have gone with him. The world moves outside the window like a set piece, and Buck doesn't—

Show up. He should have been at Chimney’s house fifteen minutes ago. Buck is: late. Exhausted. Flickering in and out of existence like a lisp muffling words. He’s supposed to be having family dinner with them, Chimney and Maddie and Jee. He hasn’t really seen his sister or niece in a while. This was meant to be their chance to catch up.

Instead of listening to Jee explain all the new, intricate background lore she’s given her dolls since Buck last visited, though, or getting in on the recent gossip at the dispatch centre, Buck is laying in bed. It’s five in the afternoon. He’s too warm under his covers. He hasn’t moved in a while. It’s familiar. 

Next to his head, his phone buzzes. Somehow, he finds it in himself to pick it up and glance at the screen. Hey, where are you?—from Maddie. She’s probably worrying. Buck tries to feel guilty for bailing; that one saying, about squeezing blood from stones. He decides he’s too tired and gives up. 

Sorry, fell asleep, he types back. It takes an unreasonable amount of effort. Think I’m getting sick. Don’t want to pass it onto Jee. 

Oh no, Maddie texts back with a couple of frowny faces. I’ll let you sleep, but I’m coming over tomorrow before work with soup. Get better soon. Kisses! 

Buck doesn’t send a message back, just heart-reacts to Maddie’s. Enough to let her know he read it. The moment it goes through, he throws his phone back somewhere out of reach on his bed and closes his eyes, though not to fall asleep; just to exist in his own head, for a bit, a desolate little void.

The sun turns slowly over his bed. Buck does absolutely nothing all day.

He’s—

It’s Tuesday. Maybe. He used to like fall, but it hasn't really been making an impression on him lately. It's just harder to predict the weather. He’s not sure if he has a shift tomorrow or not. He doesn’t think it matters. 

His phone pings. Buck is—

“—being weird,” Eddie says, as they change back into their civvies in the locker room, the end of a long shift.

“I don't know what you’re talking about, man,” Buck deflects, tying his laces. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why his hands are shaking. Today was normal; easy, even. Nothing happened. So why does he feel like he’s reached the end of his rope?

“Yeah, you do. All day you’ve been… quiet.” His face twists like Buck being quiet is the first sign of the end times. “What’s going on?” 

I want to—

“Nothing. Stop worrying,” he answers, before he can even consciously settle on the words. In recent months, Buck's become a bigger liar than he’s ever wanted to. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, like something burnt. I'm going to die. 

There's a part of his brain that’s screaming at him to just tell Eddie the goddamn truth. Human survival instinct, maybe, or just something that’s smarter than the rest of him. His last little scrap of self-preservation. You know what’ll happen if you don’t, it says. You know what’s coming. You can still save yourself. Tell him the truth. 

It almost comes out. Buck finds the words right on the tip of his tongue, ready to be spoken. I'm not okay. I haven't been in months. I’m going to kill myself if you leave me on my own. Stay. 

Buck’s asked so many people to stay. It never seems to work. 

He can’t find the force to say anything. It's like looking at a messy room, or dishes in the sink, and deciding you’ll deal with it later—that small resignation. You can’t be bothered. It’s not worth the effort. Buck is: tired. 

He slaps on a smile for the rest of Eddie’s third degree and lies straight through his teeth. Man, seriously, I’m all good. Eventually, he manages to shake Eddie off, though Buck can tell Eddie isn’t happy about it. 

But it works. He leaves to drive himself home, back to Christopher and drawings on the fridge, homemade art gallery cataloguing all twelve months, and a family-built house. Buck feels like he’s failed at something. He closes his locker. Grabs his keys. Leaves the firehouse.

He doesn’t remember why, of all the housing options in L.A., he chose this fucking loft.

It seems like a nice place when you first see it, he supposes—all bright and airy, white walls and open space. It looks like somewhere to wipe a slate clean. 

That's until you actually start living in it. Until all of that empty room gives you the impression that there’s something missing, until the unrelenting blankness makes it feel like any slight scratch will mar the place forever. Until you start spending all of your time at a certain two-bedroom, kid-drawing-fridge, popcorn-buttered-sofa house with living, breathing people inside it, and the loft you supposedly call a home feels more like a tomb. 

It takes two hours after getting back for Buck to give up.

He writes letters first. They’re shorter than he’d like, because there’s a lot of them to get through, but he doesn’t feel right about leaving everyone with nothing. By the third one, though—For Maddie, this one. The second was for Chris, one he might read when he’s a little older. The first was Eddie. Obviously, Eddie—it feels like he’s repeating a lot of the same stuff. I love you. I’m sorry. I wish I could have been more. You were the best sister, kid, friend I could have asked for. It all makes him feel like a bit of a fraud, like he’s just scribbling other people’s words that he’s heard over the years. He wishes there was a way to twist his heart into the paper instead. A little ribbon for them to wrap around their fingers, for Maddie to curl into her hair, all red and bloody and arterial matter.

But this’ll have to do.

Gently, he slips each sheet of paper into an envelope, writes out the names of his family, one after the other, on each. Midway through, he realises his handwriting is godawful. Part of him wishes he’d tried harder to make it look nice when he was a kid and still learning; part of him thinks it fits. He leaves the envelopes spread out on his bed. He enters his bathroom, and closes the door. 

Buck talked to a psychiatrist once, a few years ago. It was a last-resort kind of thing. She was nice—listened, spoke softly but not condescendingly, suggested a few easy changes he could try to implement into his lifestyle. Prescribed him antidepressants. He took them for a while. He doesn’t really know why he stopped. Maybe because they never seemed to do anything. 

Either way, it means that he still has the bottle, because he never remembers to throw these sorts of things away. It’s in the very back of his medicine cabinet. Buck only hesitates for a second before taking it out.

Briefly, he considers looking up how many he needs to take to properly overdose. Then he decides he doesn’t care. The whole bottle should be enough. His hand shakes around the orange plastic, just slightly. It glints in the light of the bathroom like teeth, almost unnaturally bright. Go on. The spit in his mouth feels too thick.

In the other room, he hears his phone ding. 

The tension spoils for a moment, but not enough. He’s ready to ignore it, already starting to twist the cap off, when his notification tone sounds a second time. Then a third, and a fourth. That’s when he remembers something: Karen took Chris and Denny out to the aquarium today, because they hadn’t gotten to hang out in a while and the boys were getting restless. It’s got to be a group chat. Either the big One-Eighteen one, or the private one he’s in with Chris and Eddie. 

Something tugs at him sharply; like a kid yanking on his arm. Or his rib. He stares down at the bottle, willing himself to just open it, to be done with this already, but the thing resists. Check, it tells him. He probably had fun.

His phone buzzes again, as if it’s actively vying for his attention. Buck remembers how excited Chris was when he was telling him about the trip, his face all lit up. It’ll only take a minute, he tells himself, and leaves the bathroom to check his phone. He doesn’t put the bottle down. His knuckles are clenched tight around the plastic. 

He ends up on the floor, phone in one hand against his drawn-up knees, pills in the other. It’s dark. Violet-black gloom, inconsistent in its depth. His stomach hurts. He doesn’t think he’s eaten much today.

It turned out to be the Eddie-Chris group chat. He looks through a bunch of photos Chris has sent, intently looking at every tiny detail and gritting his teeth. If he stares any harder, he’s pretty sure the pixels will get actually imprinted on his pupils. He must have seen at least ten close-ups of clownfish already. Christopher really likes those. He’s such a sweet kid. So curious, like the world still has everything to offer. It’s a gut-punch, fills Buck with a kind of devastation that he thought he’d gotten over. The photos blur until they’re just colours. Just water. His eyes are glassy. 

Fuck. He feels like he’s bleeding. 

His loft seems like a haunted place, all of the sudden. Like there's someone hiding in his walls. His chest heaves as if there’s something trapped there. Maybe there is. Maybe that's why he hasn't been able to breathe right in months. 

Funny—these strings he has attached to his heart like an organic-matter harp. Pluck one, send a few vibrations, and he’ll come undone, easy as. Crushed under the weight of his own tethers. All he can think of is the two of them—him and Chris—in the summer-evening warmth of Eddie's dining room, sitting over their plates of lasagne. Buck remembers, I’ll take you out for ice-cream if you can find a fun fact about sharks I don't already know. Buck remembers, You'd take me out for ice-cream if I asked you, anyway. Buck remembers, Yeah, you're right, but don't let your dad hear that.

He did, too. Find a fun fact. Buck sees it in the group chat, can just barely make it out in the blur. Right between you can tell a shark’s age by counting the growth rings on its vertebrae, like on a tree and sharks can move both their upper and lower jaws, there’s: sharks don’t have a swim bladder, so they rely on a large liver filled with low-density oil to control their position in the water instead. He didn't know that. 

But Buck's not going to make it to ice-cream. He can't take the idea of seeing it through to yet another morning. Not again. 

Still. It's so quiet here. Shadows lurking. His family is streets and city blocks away. He's alone. Buck has never enjoyed being alone. 

The pills call to him like a siren on the rocks, clutched in his hand. He runs his thumb up and down, up and down the bottle. Tries to breathe through the squeeze in his chest. It'd be so easy to swallow them all. To let go. To finally be finished. God, he wants easy.

Just… There's something stopping him. Strings. The impression that he's leaving something unfinished, threads untied, conversation incomplete; that feeling you get when you know there's something you're forgetting and it won't leave you alone. 

He stares and stares at the photos until his heart feels like it's on the brink of popping, a balloon with too much air. 

And then he goes to Eddie's contact and presses Call. It only rings twice before he picks up. 

“Hey, man,” he says, voice crackly from the phone line, scratchy from the late hour, halfway around a yawn. It hits a tender place in Buck's chest. Leaves marks. "What’s up?” 

He has to make an effort to unstick his voice from the back of his throat. When he speaks, it sounds alien, and it feels like it echoes off every inch of his loft. “Hey, Eddie. What, uh—what are you doing right now?” 

Eddie doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss, thankfully. “Eh, y’know,” he says, shuffling around, “just settling in for the evening. Movies and beer. Chris wanted to sleep over with Denny so I got him packed and sent him on his way. Some peace and quiet.”

Oh. Buck swallows against his own saliva. Against the sting in his chest. “He's not home, then?”

“You just missed him, actually. Why, what were you thinking?”

“Nothing, just… Nothing.”

A second of silence. Two. And then: “You okay, Buck? You sound kinda’ stressed.”

Ha. Buck wants to cry.

“Buck?” Eddie calls again, and fuck, now he sounds worried. He didn’t mean this. He just wanted to hear Eddie’s voice one more time, maybe Christopher’s if he was there, to reassure himself that they’d be okay in whatever aftermath came next. 

Stupid. He should’ve known this would hurt. Hell, maybe this is what he was looking for, without even knowing it as he reached for his phone: a reason to stay. Anything to just stay.

Buck doesn’t want to die. Not really. He just wants life to stop being so goddamn hard.

It hits him like a kick to the teeth; this hostility, this desperation. The world whites out, like when he stands up a bit too fast. He wants to rest without it being something he can’t come back from, that’s all. He wants to rest without having to be violent first. He wants to stop ignoring his friends’ texts. The future hangs like a noose around his neck, and everything feels so hopeless. All he does is fight; fight to breathe, fight to eat, fight to talk. He wants to stop. And life only gives you one way out.

But he’s hearing Eddie’s voice, still calling his name, and he’s thinking of every late night and early morning and too-long phone call and he wants those. He wants the good things. Because they exist, they exist. Just like he does, no matter how much he tries to forget it. 

There was this day. They’d just come off a twenty-four-shift, both drained and a little out of their minds. Buck had ended up at Eddie’s place again. He’d already changed into one of the mostly-clean sweaters he’d left behind the last time he slept over, and plugged his phone into the extra charger Eddie kept around just for him. They were shuffling around the house like zombies, pale sunlight soaking through the curtains and blinds. Everything had that feeling of unreality, of smoke and mirrors, that you get from skipping a night’s rest and seeing the sun come up again—am I still real or just dreaming?

Comfortable, though. The good kind of dream. Buck was gathering up blankets for his stay on the Diaz couch as Eddie woke Chris up for school. The kid’s groan was loud enough to be heard through the walls. In Buck’s head, as he propped up the big blue pillow he always used against the armrest, he could imagine Chris burying his head under the covers, imagine Eddie’s little smile, his Come on, buddy. Back to the land of the living. And for a second, just a second, he didn’t feel so heavy. He didn’t feel so numb, so dead to the world around him. Land of the living, Eddie said, and Buck thought, Yeah, that’s me, and actually managed to smile without it taking so much of his energy when Chris came out with the worst bedhead in the neighbourhood. Only a moment, but it was there.

So, that—that’s got to mean something. Right? It has to. It has to. 

Eddie’s still on the line. He’s probably starting to freak out. Buck would feel bad, if he wasn’t too overwhelmed with his own emotions to think about that too. He considers what he’s about to do, and then stops himself before he goes too far, because he knows that he’ll scare himself out of it if he does. “Eddie?” he rasps finally, cutting off Eddie’s attempts at getting his attention. He falls silent immediately. The waiting kind. “C-Can you come over?” Buck asks.

Still, quiet. After a few seconds: "...Sure," Eddie says slowly. “Will you tell me what’s going on?” 

God, he doesn’t want to. But he does. Buck feels idiotic, stumbling through an explanation. 

“I’m… I’m, uh, having a... a really bad night. And I think I’ll do something really stupid if there’s no one here to stop me.” 

The truth does not feel like a relief, or a weight lifted. The truth feels like throwing up. Eddie doesn’t speak for a moment, breathing static over the line; they’ve both heard enough people being talked down off a ledge to know what suicide sounds like. And then he says, “I'm on my way. Don’t move.” 

Buck finds he’s glad that Christopher isn’t home as Eddie slams his front door shut and tears out of his driveway. When he hears Eddie curse at a red light, he almost tells him, Don’t bother. Just turn back. He can’t find the strength. Time passes, somehow. Time always passes. Buck knows that well. 

Someone is opening his front door. 

Suddenly, he feels a bit like a cornered animal as he hears Eddie call for him, run through the apartment trying to find him. Like bacteria under a microscope, like someone hiding under the bed from an intruder as Eddie comes rushing up the stairs. He shouldn't have called. He should have just taken the fucking pills.

There’s a shadow standing at the top of his staircase. Its edges are murky in the dark, unclear. Like something Buck might have dreamed of, trying to recall details the next morning. “Buck?” it says, with a voice that he knows. Hushed, a library tone. Scared, even though it’s trying not to be. 

“Eddie,” he says. He tries to. It’s barely a whisper, closer to escaped air, like mechanical failure in his throat. 

As if he’s been shocked into motion, Eddie rushes forwards, crouching in front of him. He makes an aborted motion with his arm in the direction of Buck’s shoulder, like he’s not sure if he should touch him or not. Buck isn’t sure either. He can just barely make out the movement of Eddie’s throat as he swallows, trying to find something to say.

They do this often—too often—at work, but it’s different, somehow, when it’s someone you know.

Buck takes pity on him and decides to make the first move. After all, he’s the one who called. “Sorry,” he says, looking down at his knees. “Pretty sure this isn’t what you were planning on doing tonight.”

That’s enough to shake Eddie out of it, apparently. “Don’t apologise,” he chokes out, shaking his head. “Not to me. I’d rather you dragged me out of the house in the middle of the damn night than…” He falls silent here. The than is left unsaid, but they both hear it loud and clear. “I’d rather be here,” he continues, just a little bit quieter. “My plans don’t matter.” 

Right. Because Buck decided he was going to go and kill himself. It doesn’t quite feel real. Like something he made up just to shock people—but no; here he is. He lifts up the bottle, holding it at both ends with his hands, elbows against his thighs. His head thumps against the wall as he lets his neck go slack. Eddie can’t seem to take his eyes off of the pills.

“Talk to me,” he says finally. “Tell me why. Don’t leave anything out.”

And that’s… Well, there’s a lot of ways that Buck could answer. I feel like I’m surrounded by ghosts. All I want to do is sleep. I don’t really think I recognise myself anymore; do you?

But what it comes down to is simple. “It’s just so hard,” he says. His voice breaks a bit. The confession comes with tears in his throat. “Everything takes so much effort. Eddie, I’m tired.”

He takes a breath. Takes two, because the first one gets caught. They’re shaky, and pathetic, and they make him start to panic, the feeling of having air in his lungs, but he takes them. His face is wet.

“I just… I don't know how to do this anymore,” he admits in a whisper. And that’s the crux of it all. 

Eddie looks at him, eyes glassy but face straight. “With me,” he says like it’s simple, like it’s always been simple, and grips Buck's arms tight. “You do it with me. Let me help. Please.”

His eyes are dark as Buck looks into them, but wide open. Desperate. There’s no way to keep up the first-responder mask here. There is just Eddie, on his floor at night, trying to pull him backwards. 

Buck, suddenly, is reminded of their first shift together, when he climbed into the back of an ambulance with a live grenade in a man’s leg and a new partner he didn’t like—then later, when he came out the other side without a scratch and a friend for life. This, now, the two of them huddled in the dark, imminent suicide breathing between them like an animal, goes deeper, but it resonates in the same spot. You do it with me sounds a lot like a resurrected form of You can have my back any day. The first stone that the rest of their relationship has been built on, the unfailing surety of we’re in this together. 

It strikes Buck, then, how clearly he can see fear in Eddie's eyes; a very specific, very intimate type of fear he's only seen a few times before. When he couldn't reach Chris during the earthquake, because service all over the city was down. When he was crouched over Shannon in the middle of the sun-baked street, trying to see past her paleness. Buck’s felt it, too. He remembers Maddie going missing, remembers running through snow up to his knees. The cold didn’t go away for days. He called her every morning and evening for weeks, because—

The thing about loving someone is that you will lose them. Fear is just as much anatomy as the heart is. It could be on any diagram: sticky and venous and thick. Because you know it’ll happen someday, this grief. But you don’t know when.

So this is how it goes:

There is a person, and there is you, and that’s it, at first. Then there’s more. You learn that they only ever drink tea when they’re sick, and that they laugh on rollercoasters, that they can’t stop giggling under their breath for minutes after they come off. You learn that they clap when they get excited. You learn how often they wash their towels, and how to ease their headaches. You learn that they love coffee flavours but they don’t drink it, because then they can’t fall asleep that night. Impossibly, you watch them settle at your side, and you start to care, more—so much more—than you thought you would, despite knowing that this will eventually hurt. You choose them. You make space for someone, and then there’s nothing to fill it when they’re gone. And it’s unendurable. 

That’s fear. That’s what Eddie’s looking at him with. That’s Eddie, afraid that Buck’s going to throw himself off the long, dark edge. And it puts everything into very clear focus.

Buck doesn’t trust himself—but he trusts Eddie. Unrelentingly. With everything. Eddie says, Let me help like he already knows how to do it, and Buck thinks, I believe you.

It’s either his biggest pitfall or his saving grace. He can’t decide, not right now. This way or that, it hurts. But it works.

His fingers, despite the wounded yawning crater inside him, loosen their hold on the pills. They slip out of his hand and into Eddie’s, and he’s left with nothing but air on his palm. He feels like he’s cut off a limb. Like he's suddenly missing something crucial to his existence. He very nearly asks for them back, nearly begs; but he doesn't think he'd be able to take hearing Eddie's no.

Eddie’s shoulders drop as he exhales all the air in his lungs, fingers wrapping tight around the bottle. “Okay,” he whispers, tucking it into his back pocket, out of reach. “Hey, look at me. You’re not doing this on your own anymore, alright? We’re gonna' figure it out. Promise.”

Promise. I promise, like something children whisper to each other when life still feels as if it’ll never reach its end, as if it has no end; promise, like sitting half-asleep on the tail end of a long trip, seeing lights blink somewhere in the distance through the window in the past-midnight dark and a radio humming lullabies, knowing you’ll make it home eventually because you always do; promise, like shooting stars, like eyelashes, like dripping wax into water, like birthday candles. Teeth, liver, breastbone. All the quiet things. Everything that sticks.

Buck nods. His breaths are shallow, his eyes are wet. He wants to sob like a child. “Okay,” he whispers back, through the thickness and the throw-up. A blood pact, made over medication instead. He doesn’t think it gets much holier than that. Eddie smiles at him—a crooked thing, small, taut, but safe all the way through—and sits down, crossing his legs. Squeezes Buck’s hand with a warm palm like the soft fuzz on a peach. Two of them in apocalyptic lands. He feels ravaged, run through. Too exhausted to see straight. Most of him still wishes he wasn’t here.

He also, for the first time in a very, very long while, feels a pulsing in the shape of hope. Barely a sliver, as if it’s just coming around to say hi. The tiniest bit of warmth like heat haze, like revival. Wandering thoughts saying in passing, Hey. There might be something here.

It’s not enough to keep him going for long. 

But it’s enough to make him hold out just a little bit longer. To start small. He'll take Chris out for ice-cream tomorrow.