Chapter Text
Evan Buckley is five years old when he realizes that he doesn’t feel pain.
It’s the day Maddie teaches him how to ride a bike without training wheels. He soars down the hill, his fear vanishing as he picks up speed, then turns around, triumphant, before crashing into the curb when he veers suddenly to avoid a car.
“Evan!” Maddie’s shriek pierces the air as she races toward him, falling to her knees on the pavement beside the crashed bike. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she repeats, pulling him into her arms.
And really, he does feel okay — he feels fine, actually. But when he looks down at his knee, he sees the blood through his torn jeans.
That’s weird, Evan thinks. He’s seen kids cry over skinned knees at the playground, so he’d always imagined they must hurt really bad. He holds his breath, waiting for the pain to hit him, but nothing happens.
Then his parents run outside, angry and yelling, and the mystery is quickly forgotten.
***
Evan is five and a half when he learns how to pretend.
As the scab on his knee fades to a faint scar and his parents return to their usual cool indifference, memories of a brand new bike followed by a giant banana split linger in Evan’s mind. He can’t help but wonder if his bike accident and the treats he’d gotten afterward were connected somehow. Maddie had told him that Mom and Dad’s yelling was just because they were worried. Maybe the attention they’d given him was for the same reason?
Evan decides to test his theory. But the thing about hurting himself to get his parents’ attention is that he actually has to seem hurt for it to work.
This time, when his new bike careens over the makeshift ramp and he crashes onto his side in the driveway, he’s not surprised when the pain doesn’t come. He examines his bloody elbow, poking calmly at the torn skin.
Maybe I’m a superhero, Evan thinks. He’ll have to test for some other abilities later.
For now, he stumbles into the house, holding his arm and sniffling. “Mom?” he calls. “Dad?”
“Evan?” His dad looks up from his chair in the living room, jumping to his feet when he spots Evan’s elbow. “What did you do?”
Evan juts out his lower lip, trying to muster up some tears. “I fell off my bike.”
“Ah, son,” his dad sighs, examining his arm for a moment before turning to call up the stairs. “Maddie! Get down here!”
Maddie appears around the corner at once, her eyes wide and worried. “What’s wrong?”
“Help your brother clean this.” Dad lets go of Evan and turns away, pushing his hands into his pockets as Maddie brushes past them to get the first aid kit.
Evan’s heart sinks. Maybe it didn’t work this time. Maybe his dad had just wanted ice cream himself that other day and it didn’t have anything to do with Evan getting hurt.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he says, not having to fake the wobble in his voice.
His dad turns back to him. “Oh Evan, it’s okay. You just need to be more careful.” He sets his hand on Evan’s shoulder and smiles. “How about pizza for dinner tonight, huh? How does that sound?”
Evan grins back, relief washing over him. “Hawaiian?”
“Coming right up,” Dad says, squeezing his shoulder once before heading out the front door.
Maddie gives Evan a knowing look as she starts to clean his elbow, but she doesn’t say anything.
***
Over the years, Buck gets really, really good at pretending.
Through every scrape and bloody nose and broken bone, no one suspects a thing — not his parents, or his football teammates and coaches, or even the nurses the handful of times he has to go to the ER. Buck hisses at the right times and winces and jerks his limbs when his reflexes are tested, and no one is ever any the wiser about his inability to actually feel his injuries.
Well, sometimes he thinks Maddie might be a little suspicious. But she never calls him on it, and eventually she leaves him behind too.
By the time Buck is in his early twenties, his parents no longer reward his accident-prone behavior with ice cream and pizza. Now they yell at him instead of each other, and as soon as the yelling is over, they act like he’s not even there.
Buck doesn’t know why he still bothers pretending to feel hurt in front of them when they obviously don’t care anymore. He thinks he’s just been pretending for so long, he’s forgotten how not to. It’s a habit he doesn’t know how to break at this point.
He keeps it up all throughout his travels around the country once he finally leaves home — with Maddie’s Jeep, but without her. When he drops a pipe on his foot at a construction site in Florida, he jumps up and down, holding his leg up like a fool. When he falls off a horse in Montana, he limps back to the stable, only noticing that his shoulder is dislocated when he struggles to remove his shirt a couple of hours later. When he slices his thumb while cutting a lime in Peru, he swears loudly enough to draw the attention of several of the bar’s patrons even though he wouldn’t have noticed the cut at all if he hadn’t watched it happen.
His efforts pay off at last when he joins the fire academy in Los Angeles.
He knows almost immediately that he’s finally found his calling, the thing that will give his life a sense of meaning and purpose. It’s the closest he could ever come to realizing his childhood dream of being a superhero.
He also knows the LAFD never would have accepted him if they were aware of his condition. He’d be considered a liability — too much risk that he could get hurt on a call and not realize anything was wrong until it was too late.
So when Buck is twenty-six, he learns how to be careful. He might seem reckless to Bobby, Hen, and Chimney, but he checks himself over at the end of every call, and again at the end of each shift just to make sure he didn’t miss any injuries. In between, when the others limp and stretch and groan after particularly rough scenes, Buck mimics them, only overacting slightly a few times.
For a while, everything goes great. Maddie comes back into his life after years of unrequited estrangement, and instantly it’s like she was never gone. Eddie joins the 118 and becomes the first best friend Buck’s ever really had, him and his son Christopher filling a gap in Buck’s found family that he hadn’t even realized was there. Despite the lingering pain of losing Abby that’s not quite erased by the start of his relationship with Ali — not being able to feel physical pain does nothing to prevent heartbreak, unfortunately — Buck thinks he might just be the happiest he’s ever been.
It's hard not to feel like he's jinxed himself when Maddie gets kidnapped and Chimney’s almost killed by her ex-husband, Bobby gets suspended, and then Eddie loses his wife in a car accident that they’re called to the scene of, all in rapid succession.
But they get through it. Buck does his best to be there for everyone, and against all odds, things start to look up again.
Then the ladder truck bombing happens.
***
Suffering a crush injury when you can’t feel pain is weird.
Buck can still feel the pressure on his leg, a cold blanket of shock settling over him, and it’s certainly not comfortable even though his brain is incapable of registering the sensations as painful. The screams ripped from his throat as Eddie and Hen pull him out from under the truck are a completely involuntary bodily response, driven by fear and adrenaline more than anything else. His body clearly knows it’s in trouble, whether Buck can feel it or not.
But the injury itself isn’t the worst part. Nor is it the moment he wakes up in the hospital and thinks for a second that the absence of feeling in his leg means it’s gone before Carla reassures him otherwise. It’s also not the way everyone fusses over him for weeks — although the effort he has to put into acting like his leg is bothering him makes the recovery process even more exhausting. It’s not even when Ali decides his life is too much for her and leaves him.
No, the worst part is the blood clots. Or rather, Maddie’s reaction to the blood clots.
As soon as the doctor finishes explaining what caused Buck’s collapse at Bobby and Athena’s and Chimney leaves to tell everyone that he’s okay, Maddie turns away from him, shaking her head.
“When did your leg start bothering you?” she asks in a tight voice.
“It wasn’t,” Buck says honestly. “I mean, I noticed I had a limp a day or two ago, but I thought I just pulled a muscle —”
“You noticed you had a limp?” Maddie repeats, incredulous, and Buck cringes. Yeah, that wasn’t a normal way to phrase that, was it?
“I — I mean —”
“You didn’t realize anything was wrong with your leg,” Maddie cuts him off, “because you can’t feel it.” She spins back around to face him with tears in her eyes. “Can you?”
Stunned, Buck takes a second too long to respond.
“I knew it,” Maddie gasps. “I knew it. As a kid, you only ever acted hurt in front of Mom and Dad, and as soon as they left the room, you’d be fine. But I convinced myself I was imagining it, and then I thought there’s no way you would’ve been able to join the LAFD if it were true —”
Buck finds his voice again. “You can’t tell them!”
Maddie shoots him a look like he’s lost his mind. “Buck, we have to. This is — so dangerous.”
“I’m careful,” Buck insists.
“You can never be careful enough!” Maddie argues, gesturing at him in the hospital bed. “This proves that!”
“Please, Maddie,” Buck begs, tears springing to his own eyes. “Firefighting…it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. It’s the only thing that’s ever felt right. I’ve worked so hard to get back to it, you can’t take it away from me now, please.”
Maddie sigh wearily. It’s basically the same argument they had months ago, right after he’d first gotten injured and elected to have another surgery to try to accelerate his healing, just with added context.
“And what if you get a third degree burn on a call and don’t realize it?” she demands. “What if you suffer an injury that causes internal bleeding and you have no idea until it’s too late?”
“That — that won’t happen,” Buck stammers.
“It could!” Maddie explodes. “Just because you can’t feel the pain, that doesn’t make you indestructible, Evan!”
“I know that,” Buck grits out, glaring up at her. “And you sound like Mom.”
Maddie sucks in a breath, her eyes widening. “Ouch.”
Guilt twists in Buck’s stomach; that was a low blow. He knows that, unlike their parents, Maddie’s only saying all of this because she cares. Case in point, she’s here and they haven’t visited even once since the bombing.
And deep down, he also knows she’s probably right.
But he’s not ready to give up on being a firefighter. There has to be a reason he was born like this, and being able to rush into dangerous situations to save others without the fear of pain holding him back — what better reason could there be?
He tries a different tactic. “I could get hurt at any job, doing anything,” he says. “At least with this one, I’ll have two paramedics right there if something happens.”
Maddie shakes her head again, but Buck can tell this point has finally landed a little.
“Come on, Maddie. If I have to have this condition, wouldn’t you feel better knowing I’m at least around other first responders almost every day?” He waits a moment, and then adds softly, “I can’t do anything about the cards I’ve been dealt. All I can do is try to make them count.”
Closing her eyes, Maddie sits on the edge of Buck’s bed near his knees. “I don’t like this,” she says, but there’s resignation in her voice that lets Buck know he’s won.
Buck leans forward. “I’ll be so careful, Maddie. I won’t take any unnecessary risks…I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.” He holds out his pinkie toward her. “I promise.”
Maddie studies him for a moment, her eyebrows knitted together in concern, before sighing and linking their pinkies together. “You better. But if anything does happen — any close calls, anything — I’m telling Bobby. I mean it, Buck.”
Buck swallows and nods. “Deal.”
***
Buck really means to keep his promise to Maddie and mostly he does, with the exception of a few hiccups.
The first is just a few weeks later, when he drives himself to the point of collapse looking for Christopher after the tsunami. But he doesn’t think anyone, even Maddie, can fault him for that, and he certainly doesn’t regret it. He would have searched the entire state on foot if he had to before accepting that Christopher was lost forever.
He suspects it does have something to do with her not-so-subtle hints that he should take the settlement money when he foolishly sues the department though.
Once he’s back at work, he’s determined to be as responsible as possible — not just to keep his word to his sister, but also to prove to Bobby, Eddie, and the others that he deserves his place on the team. When he cuts his arm on windshield glass during an off-duty rescue, he’s honest with the paramedics about his blood thinners and goes straight to the emergency room for stitches. He follows Bobby’s orders to evacuate a radioactive tunnel even though every cell in his body riots against leaving his captain behind. He doesn’t run headfirst into a hostage situation to save Maddie when dispatch is taken over by art thieves, of all things. Even when a well collapses on top of Eddie, the worst injuries Buck suffers are some bruises to his hands from hitting a few rocks during his frantic digging through the mud.
All in all, Buck is feeling pretty good about his efforts. He’s gained back the trust of his team, he’s upheld his promise to Maddie not to do anything unnecessarily reckless, and most importantly, he’s kept his condition a secret from everyone else. Everything’s more or less gone back to normal — as normal as it ever can be for them, anyway — and Buck’s really starting to believe he might just be able to pull this off.
So naturally that’s when he almost gets caught again.
Buck is changing in the locker room with his uniform shirt halfway over his head when he hears the door open behind him, followed by Eddie swearing loudly.
“Jesus, Buck. Your back.”
Buck hurriedly yanks the shirt all the way off and cranes his neck to look. He can just barely see mottled purple and blue bruises creeping along the edge of his shoulder blade, undoubtedly from falling several stories onto an airbag during a rope rescue a few days before. “Oh, uh, does it look bad?”
“Bad?” Eddie echoes. “It looks like someone took a sledgehammer to your spine. I don’t know how you’re even lifting your arms over your head right now.”
Buck shrugs a little, reaching into his locker for a clean shirt. “I guess it must just look worse than it is.”
“I hope so,” Eddie says, and Buck can sense that he’s moved closer even though he’s still refusing to look at him, not trusting what his face might do. “You should let me put some arnica on it before you leave though. Here, sit on the bench, I’ll get it.”
There’s no way to refuse without arousing more suspicion, so Buck moves to the bench, holding his civilian shirt in his hands. Eddie rustles around in his own locker for a moment, then steps up behind him.
Buck hears Eddie squeeze the gel into his palm, and then a second later, he begins to run gentle hands up and down Buck’s back. Buck hisses involuntarily, barely suppressing a shudder.
“Sorry,” Eddie murmurs, and for once Buck is grateful his physical reaction to Eddie’s proximity can be mistaken for pain when it is, in fact, the exact opposite. Buck might not be able to feel any tenderness from his bruises, but he can still feel every pass of Eddie’s fingertips over his skin. His eyes fall shut, and he has to resist the urge to lean fully back into Eddie’s hands, to rest his head against Eddie’s stomach.
Buck had realized during the well collapse that his feelings about Eddie might be a little intense to be strictly platonic. But Eddie’s never given any indication that he’s anything other than straight — just recently started a flirtation with one of Christopher’s teachers, in fact — and he’s also the best friend Buck’s ever had, so Buck buries those feelings down as far as they can possibly go. He would rather pine quietly for the rest of his life than do anything that might jeopardize his friendship with Eddie.
And he has a lot of practice pretending.
Eddie finishes rubbing in the gel and then squeezes Buck’s shoulder gently. “All done. If it flares up again at home, alternate ice packs and a heating pad, okay?”
Buck quickly pulls on his shirt and finally turns to look at Eddie. “Thank you, Dr. Diaz,” he teases.
Eddie shakes his head, grinning. “Alright, alright. My official medical advice is to be more careful on the ropes next time.” His expression sobers a little. “Seriously, Buck. That was a pretty close call.”
Buck’s throat tightens. “I-I will, Eddie. I promise.”
And even though Buck knows Eddie doesn’t realize the full weight of what he’s asking, he’s just as determined to keep his promise to him as the one to Maddie.
***
Of course, despite Buck’s best intentions, he still slips up a couple more times.
The surprise reappearance of Abby at the scene of a train derailment leads to Buck volunteering to do something not just reckless, but borderline insane — right in front of Eddie, no less, who is very obviously not pleased. Neither is Bobby, for that matter, but the rescue goes off without a hitch and leaves Buck no more worse for wear, at least physically.
Emotionally is another story.
Unfortunately, it’s just a few months later when his parents finally come to town and Maddie reveals the truth about their brother Daniel, as well as Buck’s own origins. Buck…does not take it well, to put it lightly. The five-alarm fire at the hand sanitizer factory the next day just ends up being really bad timing.
Even though Buck thinks his entire existence getting called into question is the very definition of extenuating circumstances, it’s a close enough call to scare the self-destructive tendencies right back out of him. For months afterward, he’s cautious again, always hyper-aware of his body on calls, seeking with his eyes for what he can’t rely on his nerve endings to tell him. He’s especially careful around Eddie, remembering the anger in Eddie’s voice in the train car and his obvious relief when Buck was medically cleared after the factory fire. He’s determined not to put Eddie through anything like that again.
That is, until the day Eddie gets shot right in front of him.
***
In the eternity between the crack of the gunshot and Eddie falling to the pavement, Buck realizes that he’s never known true terror.
He’s known fear, of course — pulse-racing, adrenaline-spiking fear, when his leg was crushed, when Maddie was kidnapped, when he lost Christopher during the tsunami. He’s even known the fear of losing Eddie specifically, when the well collapsed on top of him. But fear has always been something that compelled Buck instantly to action before. He’s never known the kind of all-consuming terror that stops your heart and turns your blood to ice and leaves you utterly paralyzed, not until this moment.
Buck stands frozen, staring at Eddie’s fallen form and the rapidly expanding pool of blood around it, until Captain Mehta tackles him to the ground just as a second shot ricochets off the front of the engine less than a foot away. From his new position on the pavement, he can make eye contact with Eddie — although he’s not certain Eddie really sees him. He stares back vacantly, like he’s looking right through him.
Then his eyes roll up into his head, and Buck’s body snaps back to life.
Buck rolls under the engine and begins to crawl forward, a tugging sensation low in his gut seeming to pull him toward Eddie. Vaguely, he’s aware of chaos erupting around him, more shots ringing out, puddles of gasoline bursting into flames, panicked voices shouting. Buck shouts too, more noises than actual words, but Eddie must understand him somehow because he flops onto his back to make it easier for Buck to grab his outstretched arm and yank him under the truck.
Eddie screams in agony as Buck pulls him out the other side, but Buck can’t feel guilty about that now. A couple of firefighters from the 133 manage to haul Eddie onto his feet and Buck hoists his limp body over his shoulder, the tugging feeling in his stomach intensifying as he hands Eddie off to someone in the cabin, then jumps in behind him just as another gunshot shatters the window of the open door. The door rips off completely as they race away, but Buck hardly notices, all of his attention fixed solely on Eddie.
“Here, we got you. We got you,” he repeats as he lays Eddie down on the bench in front of him and rips his shirt open. The entire right half of his chest is covered in blood, all from a gaping starburst-shaped hole in his shoulder. Buck presses a pad of gauze over it, tasting blood in the back of his throat as he does, undoubtedly also Eddie’s. He can still feel it drying all over his face.
Eddie blinks very deliberately at the ceiling, his face ashen from blood loss, all the color leeched from his skin and lips. “Hey, just — you just stay with me, okay?” Buck begs.
Eddie seems to notice the blood on Buck’s face too, his eyes going wide. “Are you hurt?” he asks hoarsely.
Buck spares a quick glance down at himself, the most cursory of checks, before shaking his head. “No. No, no, I’m good. Hey…you just hang on.”
Eddie’s head lolls, his gaze going unfocused, visibly fading. Every inch of Buck’s body goes cold.
“Hey, come on! Come on!” he shouts at the person driving the engine. Captain Mehta sits in the front beside him, speaking continuously into his radio, giving updates about Eddie’s condition to dispatch to pass along to the hospital. Saying everything except the truth all of them in the truck know.
That Eddie doesn’t have much time.
Eddie’s hand twitches upward twice like he’s reaching for something before falling limp over the edge of the bench. His eyes are barely open now, and Buck’s not sure he can even hear him anymore, but he keeps talking anyway.
“Just hang on. Hey…three minutes away. You’re so close.” Buck reaches forward, not quite cupping Eddie’s face, something holding him back even now. One of the paramedics in the cabin presses an oxygen mask over Eddie’s nose and mouth and he blinks, rousing slightly. “We’re so close, I just —,” Buck sniffs, his eyes burning with tears he can’t let fall, not yet. “I need you to hang…I need you to hang on.”
They pull up in front of the hospital and Buck looks out the window, a wave of relief crashing over him, so forceful it leaves him dizzy. But when he looks back down at Eddie, he goes cold with dread again.
Eddie’s eyes are closed completely, his chest barely moving with shallow breaths. Buck grabs his uninjured shoulder and shakes it a little. “Eddie, we’re here. Come on, wake up, we made it.”
Eddie doesn’t wake. Buck swallows down more blood and bile. It doesn’t matter. They’re at the hospital; Eddie doesn’t need to be awake for them to help him now.
He jumps out of the cabin the second the engine comes to a stop and waves over the trauma team already rushing toward them. “Come on! Come on, come on!”
“Through-and-through, upper torso, large caliber,” Mehta recites as Buck reaches back for Eddie’s legs to help load him onto the gurney. He’s so limp, like there’s not an ounce of life left in him.
Buck shakes his head, his ears ringing. He can’t think that way.
“We’ve got a transfusion ready. Did you say large caliber?” one of the doctors asks.
“It was a sniper,” Mehta confirms, his voice grim.
“Pulse is weak!” another doctor says, his fingers pressed to Eddie’s neck.
Buck doesn’t make out any more words after that. Numb with shock, he watches the team rush Eddie away, his head bouncing a little on the gurney as they disappear through the double doors into the hospital. Buck watches until he can’t see them anymore and he doesn’t let himself think about why.
Doesn’t let himself admit that it’s just in case that’s the last time he ever sees his best friend alive.
“You okay, Buckley?” Captain Mehta’s voice drifts over to him, distorted like he’s underwater. Buck’s vision swims as he turns in his direction, everything going fuzzy and dark around the edges, but he sees Mehta’s eyes go wide with horror as his gaze drops down Buck’s torso. “Jesus. Were you hit too?”
Buck starts to shake his head, but he can’t make his mouth cooperate enough to respond, his tongue oddly heavy. He looks down at himself, and only then does he notice the red stain near the bottom of his shirt, so much darker than the blood spatter around his collar, almost black. With clumsy, fumbling fingers, he lifts the fabric to examine his skin beneath.
There’s an unmistakable starburst-shaped hole on the left side of his abdomen, an inch or so above his waistband, blood smeared on the skin all around it and soaking into the top of his pants.
Buck sways on his feet. Oh, fuck. He is hurt. He lied to Eddie.
He didn’t mean to.
Mehta turns toward the hospital entrance, shouting, “We need another trauma team out here now! There was a second firefighter shot!”
But no…this isn’t right. Buck was supposed to tell Christopher what happened. He…he was supposed to stay with him, to help both Chris and Eddie get through this.
He was supposed to keep his promise.
Mehta lunges for Buck as his knees buckle and he starts to fall. He’s not close enough to catch him, but it makes no difference. Buck doesn’t even feel himself hit the ground.
I’m sorry, Maddie. I’m sorry, Eddie.
It’s the last thing he thinks before everything goes black.