Work Text:
No. 3: “Like crying out in empty rooms; with no-one there except the moon.”
Journal | Solitary Confinement | “Make it stop.”
The thing is, he didn’t mean to look. Not really. Eddie is not a snooper by nature. Even when he has to look through Christopher’s room to find missing homework, or the gym shirt his son is convinced is in his locker at school, Eddie always feels guilty. Like he’s violating his son’s privacy.
So he certainly wouldn’t do it to Buck purposefully.
He had just needed a piece of paper and the journal was right there. It’s not until he flicks through the pages of scribbled notes, old grocery lists, and workout routines, looking for a blank page when a large, capitalized title catches his eye.
REASONS TO LIVE
Eddie’s heart pounds in his chest as he turns and looks up toward the loft where Buck is finishing getting ready for their night out. The sounds of him moving about in the bathroom and water running drift down to him and Eddie guesses he has maybe a few more minutes until Buck appears.
He shouldn’t read it. He absolutely shouldn’t read it. It’s a journal, and as much as Eddie never pictured Buck as the journaling type, it’s private and he should respect that.
But then his eyes are drawn back to the title again and he just can’t help himself. He reads the list.
REASONS TO LIVE
- Maddie
- Bobby and Athena
- The 118
- Christopher
- Movie nights with the Diazes
- I got my job back
- Eddie forgave me
That last one, it’s only a couple of weeks on from Buck’s first shift back with the 118, after they finally talked and cleared the air. After Eddie forgave him for the lawsuit. But this list, this list is new and Buck had written it for a reason. A list of reasons to live.
He knew Buck had been struggling after the truck bombing, the endless months of surgeries and rehab, and then desk duty, but Eddie had been so stuck in his own problems that he hadn’t realized just how much Buck had been struggling.
God, had Buck really gotten to the point where he needed to list reasons to live and Eddie had completely missed it? He is the worst friend in the world.
Eddie’s just about to run up the stairs and confront Buck when the man hollers down that he’s almost ready, and Eddie looks back at the journal still clutched in his hand, the need for a piece of paper completely forgotten, let alone what it was he needed to write down.
And then Buck is thundering down the stairs above him and Eddie tosses the journal back onto the coffee table, schooling his features. He can’t confront Buck about this, he can’t. How would Buck ever trust him again?
“Sorry, man, I meant to be ready but I got caught up in some stuff earlier.” Buck looks…he looks fine. he’s smiling, his shoulders are back and his posture is relaxed. He has that usual bubbling energy that Eddie has come to associate with his friend. He slips past Eddie, moving towards the coffee table, and sets about gathering the scattered items on it, including the journal, stuffing them into one of the drawers underneath. Eddie watches him push it closed, the journal out of sight but Eddie can’t move his eyes away from its hiding place. “You okay, man?” Buck asks and Eddie looks up to find his friend squinting at him.
“Y—yeah,” Eddie stammers, trying not to let his eyes flick back to the draw. “Just, uh, you ready?”
“Totally.” Buck grins, and Eddie can’t marry up the Buck in front of him now, practically vibrating with excitement for the team drinks they’re about to head out to, with the Buck that had written that list.
Eddie watches him subtly all night, watches his interactions and the way his face lights up whenever one of the 118 speaks to him and it starts to dawn on Eddie just how much this means to Buck, to be back with them, everybody on speaking terms and past the whole debacle that was the lawsuit.
Buck is glowing. Eddie can only assume, and hope, that now things are back to normal, the list was a one-off thing.
---
It’s a while before he sees the journal again. Months, in fact, and Eddie has entirely forgotten its existence, and then Buck meets Red. He watches as Buck gets swept away in trying to fix Red’s life, get him back with his sweetheart, and cure the old man’s loneliness.
It’s Maddie who calls him to say that Red passed away.
“I saw him this morning and he just…” She sighs deeply, the woosh of air crackling through the speaker pressed to his ear. “Would you just check in on him? He was so sad.”
After three messages to Buck go unread Eddie drops Chris with his aunt and makes the drive across town to the loft, letting himself in with his copy of Buck’s key.
“Buck, you home?” Eddie calls. As he peers round the stairs to the couch he finds Buck curled up on it, his long legs tucked up to his chest and the journal clutched in his hands and scribbling furiously across a page.
Instantly, Eddie this thrown back to the day so many months ago when he first saw the brown leathered notebook and discovered The List. “H-hey,” He stutters, heart thumping behind his ribs. Buck looks up at him like a rabbit caught in headlights and it’s clear he wasn’t expecting visitors. The blinds on the tall loft windows are drawn down, the lights are low and he looks like he’s still wearing the clothes he slept in.
“Eddie, what, uh, what are you doing here?” Buck sits up in a flash and snaps the journal closed.
“You didn’t answer my texts,” Eddie says, eyes still fixed on the journal. “I was worried.”
Buck pulls open the drawer in the coffee table and, just like last time, shoves the journal inside. “Oh, I turned my phone off.”
“Right.” Eddie nods for lack of anything else to say.
Neither of them moves for a moment, as though each of them is waiting for the other to make to next move, and Eddie wonders for a moment if Buck knows that Eddie knows about The List. He doesn’t think so, he’s pretty sure Buck didn’t see him snooping at it all those months ago, but Buck is certainly acting shifty. He’s avoiding looking at Eddie, still seated on the couch and twisting his fingers together.
“I’m okay, Eds,” Buck says, finally breaking the stalemate. “I know Maddie probably asked you to check on me. But I’m okay.”
Eddie shuffles forward, sinking onto the couch next to him and studying his profile. “Your friend died, Buck. You’re allowed to not be.”
“I didn’t know him that long.” He shrugs.
“Doesn’t matter, you were there for him when nobody else was,” Eddie watches as Buck nods slowly, still avoiding looking at him. “What’s going on in that head of yours, hm?” He pushes, needing to get Buck to talk to him.
Buck doesn’t answer straight away but when he does it’s with a voice so small and sad that Eddie just wants to bundle him in his arms and hug the pain away. “I guess…I looked at Red and I saw…I saw me. My future.”
“That’s not your future, Buck—”
“Isn’t it?” Buck finally turns his eyes to Eddie. They’re wet and red-rimmed. “It wasn’t that long ago that I lost everything I cared about. My job, my friends. Fuck, I nearly lost Chris!”
“But you got us all back,” Eddie stresses, turning to face Buck fully. “We’re all past that, and we always will be. Your family isn’t going anywhere, Buck. None of us. You’re not Red.”
“That’s what Maddie said.”
“Well, that just means she’s right. Look, come home with me, we’ll pick Chris up from Pepa’s and we’ll have a movie night.” Eddie knows he’s made the right suggestion when there’s a small uptick in one corner of Buck’s mouth.
“Pizza?” He asks hopefully in the same way Christopher does when Eddie tells him Buck is coming around.
“If you take a shower, I’m not subjecting my son to your stink.” The joke lands the way Eddie hopes it will, eliciting a huff of laughter from Buck as he takes a whiff of his sleep shirt.
“Deal,” He agrees, and then he’s up and racing up the stairs with more energy than Eddie’s seen him possess since he arrived.
The second Buck is out of sight Eddie’s eyes fall straight back to the draw in front of him. It’s like there’s an invisible neon light hovering above it. A luminous arrow pointing toward the journal and screaming at him to read it. to check if Buck has added more to The List.
He shouldn’t, Eddie tells himself. He really, really shouldn’t.
But as soon as he hears the shower start upstairs Eddie pulls the draw open and grabs it, flicking through the pages until he finds what he’s looking for.
REASONS TO LIVE
It’s longer than last time. Much longer and Buck’s handwriting changes subtly every few lines, as though the additions have been made on different days.
- Christopher’s jokes
- Christmas day at Bobby and Athena’s
- Maddie
- I make a difference
- I am loved
- I need to teach Eddie to cook
That last one has Eddie rolling his eyes, but that’s where the list ends. That was the last one Buck wrote and looking back through the list he finds his name several more times along with Christopher’s. It makes something swirl deep within him, to see him and Chris featuring so many times, to be counted as reasons for Buck to keep fighting.
Eddie needs to talk to him about this, he needs to pay more attention to how his friend is feeling. He needs to do more to help him.
But then just like the last time, Buck bounds down the stairs after his shower, freshly dressed in a comfy pair of sweats and his LAFD hoodie, and Eddie can’t see the sad Buck who was sat next to him just 10 minutes ago.
Not now, he thinks. He doesn’t want to bring Buck down.
He’ll ask him another time.
---
Another time doesn’t come, at least another time to ask Buck about the journal doesn’t come. But he does see the journal again and he realizes there’s a pattern to its presence.
Whenever Buck’s world crumbles the journal is there. Whenever Buck crumbles.
Whether it’s a bad shift and they lose a victim, or they get there too late to help, or when Buck is let down by yet another girlfriend, the journal comes back. Sometimes it’s in Buck’s duffle bag, peeking out from where the bag is crammed into his locker, sometimes it’s left on the passenger seat of his jeep. Sometimes he catches Buck writing in it in the small hours of the night when everyone else is asleep in the bunks. Sometimes it’s just sat inconspicuously on his coffee table at the loft, so innocent but as dangerous as a loaded weapon.
But he doesn’t always get a chance to peek at it.
---
Eddie should have known if anything would have caused the journal's reappearance it would have been the Buckley parent's visit. He’s heard a few stories about Buck’s childhood, nothing in detail and always vague from both him and Maddie, but he can read between the lines enough to understand that this visit isn’t going to go well.
And then Buck tells them all about Daniel.
Jesus fucking Christ. What kind of person keeps something like that from their own child for thirty years?
It explains so much about Buck’s deep-rooted lack of self-worth and savior complex, all his life he’s been trying to make up for something he had no knowledge of and wasn’t his fault.
When Phillip and Margaret Buckley turn up at the station Eddie loathes them on sight just in principle. He doesn’t even have to have a conversation with them to know that he has nothing pleasant to say to either of them.
“Do you realize that you fucked up so bad that Buck was going to burn to death in that damn factory trying to save the life of a man he had only just met because he feels like that’s the only reason he was put on this earth?”
Yeah, best not to say anything at all.
He waits for all of a minute after Buck disappears upstairs to speak to them, so as not to look too suspicious, before heading up himself under the guise of getting himself a coffee. He sneaks surreptitious looks while he waits for the kettle to boil. There’s a tension in Buck’s shoulders that would be visible from a mile away, and his jaw is set even though there’s a small smile on his face. but Eddie knows all of Buck’s smiles and this one is as fake as they come.
He's humoring them. Or at least he’s hearing them out because he feels like he owes it to them.
He owes them nothing.
They don’t leave until the shift is over and Eddie waits for Buck in the locker room, eager to check on him, but Buck never shows.
“He left already,” A B shift probie tells him when he asks around. “Looked like he didn’t bother to change.”
Eddie makes it to Buck’s apartment in record time, abandoning his truck haphazardly in the first space he sees and taking the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator. Buck can only have been home for all of fifteen minutes but when Eddie lets himself in the journal is already lying open on the dining table, a pen lying abandoned next to it and the shower running upstairs.
The very sight of the journal has Eddie feeling sick. He doesn’t want to look, but he has to know. He has to know if Buck has added more to the list or if he’s given up this time.
He approaches the open book cautiously, simultaneously anxious to read it and anxious about reading what Buck has potentially added. The list is now in the nineties, the last page of which is almost illegible. Buck’s handwriting is messy at best but the last two pages have been written in a way that screams breakdown, and Eddie can only assume the spots of dampness that have smudged a few of the lines are teardrops. He supposes it’s a good thing, that there are almost 100 reasons on the list. 100 reasons to keep going, and keep fighting day after day, although he knows that some have been repeated here and there. His lack of cooking skills, for example, he knows has been mentioned at least 3 times.
- The 118
- Eddie
- Maddie
- Bobby and Athena
- I can’t let Daniel have died for nothing
- I’m worth more than this
- Eddie and Chris
- My sister
- My unborn niece
- I have to have Eddie’s back
- My REAL family
- Because I love my job
- Zoo trips with Chris
Eddie’s terrible foodEddie- I promised Chris I’d help him with his project
- The 118
- Eddie
- Because it wasn’t my fault
- Because I can’t let my parents win
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
Startled, Eddie drops the journal. He hadn’t heard the shower turn off, let alone Buck descending the stairs, but there he was, frozen in place staring at the journal like it personally had betrayed him rather than Eddie and his incessant snooping.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie mutters, because what else can he say? He’s been caught red-handed violating Buck’s trust. “But I’m only sorry because I’m not sorry.”
Buck squints at that, stuffing his hands in the pocket of his hoodie and descending the last few stairs until he and Eddie are on the same level, albeit still separated by the wide expanse of Buck’s dining table. “What do you mean?”
He lifts the journal in a needless move to indicate what object he is speaking of. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen this. This list.” Buck’s face does something that physically pains Eddie, it morphs from embarrassment and confusion into hurt and humiliation.
“You’ve read it before? When?” Buck demands indignantly, which he has every right to be.
“It was not long after you came back to work.” He watches as Buck does the math in his head.
“Eddie, that…that was a year ago. I’d only started it becau—” Buck’s mouth snaps closed and Eddie swears he can hear his teeth clack together.
“Because what?”
Buck shakes his head and reaches for the journal. “Doesn’t matter.” Eddie moves it out of his reach.
“Of course it matters, you wrote this list for a reason, Buck, and then you kept adding to it. It matters.” He steps backward and Buck makes a surprise lunge for the journal, his fingers brushing the spine.
“Give it back!” He lunges again. “Eddie!”
“No, Buck, just tell me!”
“I swear to God, Eddie, give it back or I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Hit me?”
“No, that’s your way of handling things! Now give it!”
In the blink of an eye, Eddie is engaged in what can only be described as a schoolyard tussle, Buck scrambling at Eddie’s limbs as though he’s trying to climb him to retrieve the journal. He bats Buck’s hands away, managing to turn his body to shield the journal against his chest, but Buck simply resorts to jabbing his obnoxiously long finders into Eddie’s sides.
“Agh!” Eddie jerks one way then the other, trying to anticipate which side Buck will jab next. “Stop it!”
“Then give me my journal!”
“No!”
“Fine!” Buck increases the force of his fingers, digging them into Eddie’s flesh and tickling him in the way Buck knows he hates. Their fight can only be described as messy, vicious, and downright childish and Eddie realizes he needs to put a stop to it before one of them gets hurt.
“Okay, okay. Quit it. QUIT IT!” He holds up his hands in surrender and Buck snatches the journal from him, grabs the pen he had abandoned on the table earlier, and tucks it into the pages, then turns sharply on his heel and marches toward the living room to no doubt stash the journal back in the coffee table. “Wait!”
Buck does stop in his tracks but he keeps his back to Eddie. His shoulders are hunched, his head almost disappearing into the depths of his hoodie. But Eddie can’t let the opportunity slide, not now it’s here. He told himself over and over again that he would ask Buck about the list but, if he’s being honest with himself, he was too scared to. He was too scared to hear what Buck might say.
“Just…please. Why did you make that list, Buck?”
Like a balloon with a leak Buck deflates, his shoulders dropping until he looks like he’s about to sink through the floor entirely.
“Because,” He speaks so quietly that Eddie almost misses it. “A year ago I had lost everything I cared about.” He turns red and wet eyes on Eddie and right in that moment he looks as young as his years.
It clicks. “The lawsuit.”
“Yeah,” Buck nods. “Can we…?” He gestures to the couch and Eddie nods in agreement, shuffling toward it, and his side twinges from the effect of Buck’s fingers. Once he’s settled Buck doesn’t put the journal away however, instead he seems to cradle it in his hands reverently, like it’s something to be protected at all costs. He takes a breath deeper than any Eddie has ever heard and begins to speak. “Filing that lawsuit was the biggest mistake I ever made, but at the time I thought it was the only option I had left. I’d been cleared to come back but Bobby wouldn’t let me, and it felt like everyone was moving on without me. You guys had Bosko and everyone was saying how amazing she was and how well she fit in.”
“She was only ever temporary, Buck.”
“No, I know, or at least, I know that now. I think I did know that then but in my head I just, it was like out of sight out of mind, you know? And then Mackey used everything I told him at the deposition and then you guys hated me, and I lost everything. My job, my friends. My family. And then I got it all back and I didn’t want to take it for granted ever again. So, I just started writing it all down. The things I had to lose if I fucked up again, or if I…if I gave in.”
It takes Eddie several seconds to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth and be able to formulate what he wants to say.
“You’re not going to fuck up. We won’t let you,” He taps a finger twice on Buck’s knee and it’s enough for the man to raise his eyes to meet Eddie’s. “And we’re not going anywhere. I can promise you that, Buck. You don’t need this list,” He slowly reaches for the journal, surprised when Buck relinquishes it without a fight, and opens it to the last page of the list. “Because all your reasons to live are right in front of you every day. Maddie, Bobby, Athena, Hen, Chim, Christopher, me.”
“You promise?” Buck asks, sounding more uncertain than Eddie’s ever heard him.
“I promise, besides, I can’t help but notice that I’m in here an awful lot,” He takes hold of the pen that Buck had tucked there, looking up teasingly at the man to find his cheeks have flushed considerably. Eddie clicks the top of the pen to reveal the nib and sets it on the page. “But you’ve missed out one of the most important reasons, and I feel it’s pretty fitting for this to be reason one hundred.”
He tilts the page away so Buck can’t read what he writes until it’s finished, and he draws two block lines under the list signalling its end before turning the journal around and handing it back to Buck for him to read.
REASONS TO LIVE
100. Because Eddie has my back.