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The first thing Eddie feels is the impact.
It's sharp enough to steal the air out of him. A brutal crack of pain against the outside of his thigh as something heavy slams against it hard enough to make his knees buckle.
He goes down, gloved hands slamming against the cracked tile to catch himself, and through the roar of shifting metal and shouts over the radio he hears Buck call his name.
"Eddie!"
"I'm good," Eddie grinds out immediately, because panic is useless and they are standing inside a half-collapsed parking garage with fire eating through the back wall and a ceiling that keeps dropping splintered plaster around them .
Buck is crouching infront of him in less than a second, turnout coat dark with soot, with his helmet lamp slicing through the smoke as his eyes flick down to Eddie's thigh.
There is no open wound, which Eddie appreciates for about two seconds before he tries to move and his leg gives him a white-hot answer, spreading from his hip to his knee.
The pain makes him take a sharp breath to which Buck immediately asks him
"What happened?"
"Something hit me," Eddie answeres, forcing his boot under him anyway, because the walls are making sounds they shouldnt make. "Probably just bruised the hell out of it."
Buck's hand closes around his elbow.
"Can you walk?"
Eddie pushes himself up, gets one foot under him, and immediately folds, but Buck catches him so fast he doesn't even come close to hitting the Ground again.
They are chest to chest in the filthy gold-grey light, both of them breathing hard through their masks. Buck's arm locked around Eddie's side ridiculously gentle for the situation they're in.
Eddie stares at the exit hallway through the smoke.
It looks far... no scratch that, It looks really far.
…
The building shudders again, and somewhere overhead there is a deep metallic scream that Eddie feels in his bones.
"Buck, go get help!"
"What?!"
"You can move faster without me," Eddie clarifies, keeping his voice even, because Buck might actually listen then, and if he listens, he lives, and Eddie can deal with a bad leg and a few minutes alone if it means Buck gets out of this damn death trap. "Go. Bring someone back. I can wait!"
Buck stares at him through the smoke-dark visor.
"Not happening."
Eddie's jaw tightens.
"Buck, don't argue with me on this!"
"Forget it."
"The place is coming down!"
"Yeah, I noticed."
"I'm slowing you down."
"Then stop talking."
Eddie blinks at him.
"What the hell does that even mean?"
Buck doesn't answer with words. He just shifts his grip, gets one arm behind Eddie's back and the other under his knees, and lifts.
Eddie's stomach drops, because his body suddenly isn't on the ground anymore.
For one impossible, humiliating, completely derailing second, alld he can think about is himself, Eddie Diaz, full-grown man, Army Veteran and firefighter, and person currently wearing a smoke heavy turnout gear, is in Evan Buckley's arms.
…
Being lifted clean off the floor.
Effortlessly.
His bad leg screams at the sudden movement, which is very concerning, and yet somehow the louder thing in his head is the deeply unhelpful thought that Buck lifts him like he weighs absolutely nothing.
Which makes absolutely no sense.
None.
Eddie knows what he, plus the gear weigh and exactly what that particular setup does to a body after twenty minutes in heat and smoke and chaos.
"What the hell, Buck?!"
Buck starts moving.
"You're welcome."
"I told you to get help."
"I'm getting help."
"You are carrying me."
"That is generally how I'm getting help. Well... getting you Closer to it, you know."
Eddie grabs at the front of Buck's coat as another chunk of ceiling comes down behind them and Buck ducks his head, adjusting Eddie higher against his chest with a grunt that sounds way too small for the amount of weight involved.
"Buck, put me down!"
"No."
"That was an order."
"Pretty sure we're the same rank."
"I outrank you in common sense."
Buck gives a breathless laugh, and Eddie hates him a little for having enough air to laugh while carrying him through a dying building.
"You also tried to bench yourself in a collapse zone, so your common sense is currently not trustworthy."
Rude.
A beam cracks somewhere behind them, the sound rolling through the hallway like thunder trapped indoors, to which Buck's arms tighten once more.
Eddie feels it through the layers of gear and the suffocating heat, the hard line of Buck's forearm under his shoulders and knees.
Oh my god, Eddie thinks, staring at the side of Buck's helmet as he turns them sideways to squeeze through a partially blocked doorway.
This dude is a menace.
It's such a stupid thought that Eddie almost laughs.
"Are you even struggling?"
Buck sounds offended.
"Would you like me to pretend?"
"Are you serious right now?"
"I can do a dramatic stagger if it makes you feel better."
"I hate you."
"No, you don't."
…
Eddie has no answer to that. Instead, he has smoke in his lungs, pain in his leg, and Buck's voice too close to him.
They burst through the last stretch of hallway as Hen and Chimney come running toward them, both of them reaching for Eddie as Buck finally slows near the exit line.
"Leg injury," Buck says, voice snapping back into work mode as he lowers him onto the waiting stretcher with more care than Eddie knows what to do with. "Something fell on him. He tried to stay behind like an idiot."
"I did no such thing," Eddie defends, because he has dignity… Maybe.
Even through the mask, Eddie can feel every single one of their expressions.
"Okay," Chimney says carefully, "so you very heroically suggested a bad plan."
Buck points at him.
"Exactly."
Eddie leans back against the stretcher as Hen starts checking him over, and the building gives another violent groan behind them, sending firefighters farther back across the lot.
Buck stays beside him, shoulders rising and falling hard now that he stopped moving.
Eddie means to glare at him, because that's the normal thing to do. Buck did something reckless, stubborn and completely infuriating.
But his gaze catches at the sweat running down Buck's temple, the tension in his jaw, and the way his chest is still working from the sprint.
Eddie's mouth goes dry... from the smoke.
Obviously.
—————
By the time they get back to the station, Eddie's leg has been iced, evaluated, and declared ugly but manageable, which Bobby translates into "desk and couch for the rest of the shift".
Buck is unbearable about it.
He brings him water, steals the good pillow from the upstairs couch and puts it under Eddie's leg, asks if he needs painkillers in a voice so deliberately innocent that Eddie threatens to throw one of his boots at him.
…
The second problem arrives later, when Eddie limps toward the locker room after his shower because he left his clean shirt in his locker and refuses to ask Buck to retrieve it for him like he's some Victorian widow.
The room is quiet when he pushes the door open... quiet, except for the slam of a locker.
Dammit
Buck's there.
He's standing near his own locker with his back half-turned, towel slung low over his hips while he digs through his bag for a shirt, and Eddie's first thought is that he should look away.
And he does... for about half a second, before his eyes betray him completely.
Buck's shoulders are bare, the muscles moving under warm skin as he reaches into the locker. There is a faint red mark near his collarbone from where he must have rubbed during the call, and a drop of water slides from the back of his neck down between his shoulder blades before disappearing beneath the towel.
Eddie's hand tightens around the clean shirt he is holding.
The room feels too goddamn hot.
Which is insane, because the air conditioning in the station has been aggressive all afternoon.
Buck glances over his shoulder.
"Eddie?"
Eddie's eyes snap up to his face.
A safe place, usually.
…
Except Buck's mouth is there, and his hair is still damp, and his brain supplies, very helpfully, the image of Buck's arms under him… chest close to his shoulder while carrying him out of a collapsing Building.
Eddie clears his throat.
"Yeah."
"You okay? Is it your leg?"
Yes, Eddie thinks wildly.
My leg.
Great idea.
Let us talk about the leg.
"My leg's fine," He says, which technically isn't a lie, "I just came to get my shirt."
Buck looks down at Eddie's hand.
"You're holding it."
Eddie looks down too.
He is, in fact, holding it.
Amazing.
Wonderful.
He has survived war zones, earthquakes, shootings, his parents, and years of complicated Feelings... and now Evan Buckley standing shirtless in the changing room is apparently where his higher brain function decides to resign.
"Right,"
Buck's mouth twitches.
"Did you hit your head too?"
"No."
"Because you look kind of..."
Buck trails off, eyes narrowing with a soft searching focus that ruined Eddie's ability to lie on more than one occasion.
He lifts a hand.
"Finish that sentence very carefully."
Buck raises both hands, still shirtless and standing there like he has no idea he's currently destroying Eddie's grasp on reality.
"I was going to say warm."
"Warm?"
"Flushed."
"I was in a fire."
"That was hours ago."
"Residual fire."
Buck blinks.
Then he laughs, surprised and delighted and Eddie feels it somewhere low in his stomach, which is a development he plans to ignore until death.
"Residual fire?" Buck repeats as he finally pulls on his shirt, before deciding to step closer, but his eyes drop to Eddie's leg then and the amusement slips.
Eddie lifts his chin.
"What?"
Buck glances once toward the door, like he's checking that no one else is close enough to hear, before looking back at him.
"I know I was joking, but..." He breathes out, and the sound is uneven enough that Eddie's stomach drops. "You scared me today."
Eddie's throat tightens as the heat in the room turns into something else.
"Buck."
"No, just..." Buck shakes his head. "I need you to hear me, okay? When you told me to go, I hated that."
Eddie's fingers curl tighter into the fabric of his shirt.
"There wasn't time."
"There was time for me to pick you up," Buck says, almost too soft. "So don't ask me to leave you behind again."
...
There are a lot of things he could say to that. He could explain the tactical logic or point out that Buck could have gotten hurt. He could say that one of them making it out is better than both of them dying in the same hallway, except Buck would hate that sentence and he would too.
So Eddie stands there with his bad leg aching and his heart behaving strangely in his chest, looking at the man who carried him out because going without him could never even make the list of possible choices, and says
"I won't,"
"Good," Buck says, relief lacing his tone, "Because next time I might have to throw you over my shoulder if you decide not to cooperate."
Eddie's brain gives him that Image immediately, and with way too much detail.
"Get out,"
Buck laughs again, and steps back toward his locker.
Eddie limps to his own, and spends the next ten seconds pretending the pain in his thigh is the reason his legs feel so weak beneath him.
He catches the reflection of Buck smiling in the little mirror inside his locker and realizes, with a kind of horrified wonder, that he's smiling too.
Oh, this is bad, he thinks.
This is very, very bad.
Buck bends to pick up his bag, the shirt pulling tight across his back, and Eddie closes his locker with enough force to make him look over again.
"Still good?" Buck asks.
Eddie nods, because speaking feels risky.
"Residual fire," Buck says again, delighted.
Eddie points at the door again.
"Out."
The room stays hot long after Buck is gone.