but when i tried to love him i loved at the wrong time
this is a two for one spec inspired by this post and my long lost love trapped dads
any complaints about this fic can and should be directed to @evankinard who bullied me into writing this for her after i ruined her day with a single dm. love you bby <3
Eddie breaks apart a little the moment Buck disappears from view, lets himself feel the wound in his side as an excuse not to feel the big unwieldy thing unfolding in his chest like a colonising panic. He hadn't wanted to leave him, not after half an hour trapped in that smoky room clinging to each other to ground themselves in the reality they were trapped in, but Buck had made several stubborn and convincing arguments about Christopher before announcing he wouldn't move if Eddie didn't. Eddie had tried, had tried to get Buck out first, Buck who had just found happiness with—with Tommy, Buck who has always deserved to live. But Hen and Chim had come in with the clinical wisdom of paramedics and said a rebar through the abdomen was always going to take priority over a fractured leg.
Now, Eddie is rolled out of a collapsing building, leaving behind Buck—a bird with a broken wing, incapable of moving.
God, the noises Buck had made when he'd dragged himself over to Eddie's side. They'll be haunting him for years, for whatever lifetime he has left. Worse somehow than the first time with an entire engine on top of him. Except this time, Eddie couldn't hold his hand. Not now, but not before either because... Because that was someone else's job now. And like a laugh from the universe, Tommy appears just as Eddie reaches down to put the brakes on the gurney before Hen and Chim can get him into the ambulance.
"Kinard?" Bobby greets him with a grim-faced nod. "What are you doing here?"
"Heard you might need an assist from air support." He shrugs, but the breathlessness in the voice and the way his eyes keep jumping around the gathered 118 like he's only counting the one man not there reveals his nonchalance as the act it is. "Thought I'd swing by."
"Isn't that a conflict of interest?" Chimney asks.
"Fine, so I stole a helicopter again. Sue me for wanting to offer a hand." Tommy's face draws as soon as he stops speaking, and he glances back at the building waiting to swallow Eddie's heart whole. "How is he?"
"Holding in there," Eddie answers, voice tight enough to have Tommy really seeing him for the first time. "Think his bad leg is fractured."
"Shit," Tommy hisses, clenching his fists at his side.
"Yeah," Eddie breathes out. "Can't get himself out because of it. I wouldn't have left him, but—"
"He insisted," Tommy says, something entirely too knowing in his voice and his eyes. Eddie swallows thickly.
"And, well..." He gestures weakly to the rebar in his side, Buck's undershirt, now soaked through with Eddie's blood, wrapped around it as a makeshift bandage.
"Shit, Diaz." Tommy grimaces. "Shouldn't you be getting to the hospital?"
"He's refusing care until Buck is out too," Hen deadpans, pressing a new pad of gauze to his wound a little too firmly for it not to be intentional. Eddie just grits his teeth.
"Of course he is," Tommy murmurs. Eddie is too much of a coward to face up to whatever expression is on Tommy's face when he says it, so instead he focuses on the Incident Commander approaching Bobby.
"Site's been deemed too unstable," he announces. "No more personnel are to enter until we've found a way to stabilise it."
"My..." Bobby calms himself when his voice comes out in a growl. "My man is in there."
"And sending another man in there would be a suicide mission." The Incident Commander grimaces apologetically. "Sorry, Captain. That's an order."
Bobby turns his gaze back to the building, something so tightly drawn in him that it makes Eddie hurt all the worse. He knows without a shadow of a doubt what Bobby's thinking. He can't lose another son to a burning building.
And here, maybe this would be where Eddie runs back into the building and drags Buck out all on his own, maybe this would be where he finally gets to repay the favour for the gravel burn on his back, maybe this is where he'd get to redeem himself from the helplessness he'd felt just lowering Buck down to the ground. Except. There's a rebar in his side. Even with the adrenaline, even with the love... Eddie doesn't think he'd make it three steps before falling to his knees—a prayer in and of itself.
Instead, Eddie turns to look at Tommy. Tommy who is already looking at him, something determined and understanding and loving trapped behind the wildness of his eyes. A beat passes between them, silence saying more than they ever could.
"Bring him back to—" Me. But. Not to me.
Because that's not Eddie's place anymore. Eddie doesn't get to ask that of Buck's boyfriend. Eddie doesn't get to ask that at all. He's no longer the person that will be shaking Buck's pain pills into his hand and fetching him a bottle of water. He's no longer the person that will be wrapping Buck's cast in a bin bag for a shower and listening to him lament about the indignity of it. He's no longer the person that will be pulling Buck out of bed on his worst days to remind him that he's real and valued and loved. No, that's not his job anymore. But, fuck, Tommy's the only better man for the job.
"Bring him back to us," Eddie tells him then, and it feels like he's finally let go of the baton in the relay race, sure Tommy's got a hold of it now. And Tommy looks as wrongfooted by this as Eddie feels, but he nods anyway and grabs Eddie's discarded helmet from his lap, strapping it on.
"Kinard, no one goes in," Bobby warns him. "That's an order."
"You're not my captain anymore." Tommy only smiles and shrugs before sprinting towards the doors.
Bobby curses, but there's relief in it. Hen and Chim just watch him go with something hopeful on their faces. And Eddie. Eddie's eyes start to droop.
"Hey, hey, Eddie." Chim snaps his fingers in front of his face, jolting Eddie back into semi-consciousness.
"Eddie, we need to get you to a hospital," Hen says calmly, reaching for the brakes.
"Move me an inch and I rip this rebar out of my side," he says lowly.
"Jesus, anyone ever tell you you're a drama queen?" Chim huffs.
"Yeah." Eddie chokes on his next breath a little. "The man trapped in that building."
A solemn silence settles over them then. They redirect their attention to the doors Tommy had disappeared into, and Hen lays a grounding hand on his shoulder as they wait.
It's not long before Tommy comes stumbling out of the building, looking every bit the action hero Eddie has never gotten to be for Buck what with his soot-stained face and Buck himself slung over his shoulder, splinted leg bouncing against his sternum. Hen and Bobby spring into action immediately, racing to meet them. Chim just unlocks Eddie's gurney and loads him into the ambulance, raising him up just enough to catch a perfect view of Tommy lowering Buck onto his own stretcher with a kiss to his forehead. The ambulance doors close, Chim knocks twice, the sirens begin to whine, and they lurch into motion.
"Did you draw the drama queen straw?" Eddie asks to distract himself from the tenderness of Tommy's kiss.
"Higher ups are a little more serious about conflicts of interest now Buck is officially my brother-in-law," Chim mumbles as he works on getting Eddie's IV in. "But also I'm better acquainted with rebars than Hen, so..."
Eddie huffs a weak laugh as his eyes drift to the ceiling, the clean white of it stinging his eyes.
"Chim?"
"Yeah?"
"Tomorrow isn't promised to anyone, right?" he chokes out. He doesn't take his eyes off the ceiling, but the sudden silence in the ambulance is as deafening as the siren overhead.
"No," Chim says eventually. "No, it's not."
"But what happens if the person you love..." Here, his voice breaks. An almighty crack right through the middle. It sounds like the building behind them just came crumbling down in his throat. "What happens if someone told them first?" He turns to face Chim's wide eyes. "Should you still tell them?"
"I-I don't know..." Chim opens his mouth a few times, a fish out of water, before he makes a decision. He takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. "But what I do know is." He clears his throat. "If you let a wound like that fester... It'll kill you, Eddie."
"Yeah." Eddie lets his eyes fall shut.
I can feel it already.
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Just finished the trials of Apollo and I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT
These books were so different to me because they directly revolved around a topic Rick clearly wanted to touch - abuse. Specifically, familial abuse. Personally I think he’d done it gracefully in a way that really sinks in for me now, but I’m not a victim of abuse and don’t pretend to understand the subject.
Regardless, I think the way Rick wrote Apollo, Lester, was absolute perfection. There’s an art to writing a literal god in first person perspective, and have him be one of the most human characters in the entire franchise.
Lester STRUGGLES. And he’s not perfect at all, he doesn’t even begin to understand everything at the start - not the world, not consequences, not the stakes and not the people around him. But fuck he learns, he learns the hard way, the only way, by doing. And it’s not a linear journey either - between book 1 and his more or less lucid identity in book 5, he goes back and forth between learning, and relapsing to his old ways, and learning again, and trusting and understand and rising victorious in all the confusion. He doesn’t shy away from his emotions - he cries a lot, and gets frustrated, and laughs. He learns to feel for other people. But he also learns to heal himself. And he does it by helping others heal, too.
To me, this red thread tying the books together by a common serious subject, made the reading somehow more whole. I can’t explain it, but Apollo slowly verbalising (well, thinking), realising there are similarities between his relationship with Zeus to Meg’s relationship with Nero, was so satisfying. Although I feel like “satisfying” might be a bit of a harsh word. Mostly I felt proud of him. I /felt/ for him, so very much, for so long. He’s likeable because he’s so human, and that includes both his silly and tragic sides, because these coexist within all of us. And I think he as a character encompassed that beautifully.
Reading that last book, expecting a showdown of sorts between Apollo and his father, and receiving a short conversation, an understanding, instead, was amazing. Because that’s Rick’s way of showing us what’s important. No use trying to fix what we can’t, what isn’t our responsibility to fix, what makes us miserable. Humans have this natural ability to rise from their own disasters and forge out of them their own paths in life. And Apollo did just that. It took him time, but that’s how it goes for all of us. And instead of fighting Zeus, he chose happiness. He chose focusing on what’s important, his old hobbies, his friends.
In a way, I’m bittersweet- I wish he didn’t have to stay at Olympus. I wish he could spend as much time as he’d like on earth. But the thing is, a god is what he /is/. But now, he understands for the first time that he gets to pick what kind of god he should be.
And he chose the human kind.
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Tease Tidbit Tuesday!
tagged by the lovely @panbuckley, @devirnis, @prince-buck-diaz, @spotsandsocks, @911onabc, @folk-fae, @wikiangela, @wolfnprey mwah!
have a lil snippet from the sequel to on the tip of my tongue (the lutalia fic) that was inspired by @prince-buck-diaz's comment on it <333
“So, you got a fruit basket,” Hen said, stating the obvious.
Buck gave her a look. “Yes, yes I did.”
“Who’s it from?” Ravi asked, trying to get a closer look to what kinds of fruits were in it. “Also is this like a you present or is this for the whole team or…?”
“Yes, I’ll share it with you, Ravi,” Buck rolled his eyes fondly. “Just give me a second to see who it’s from.”
Buck opened the envelope and flipped open the card. The last thing he was expecting to see was a little Polaroid of Natalia and Lucy, who were clearly on a date, with Lucy pressing a kiss to Natalia’s cheek while Natalia laughed. Buck could practically feel the joy radiating off the picture and he found himself smiling. Good, at least someone people were finding love. He, however, was stuck pining away for his best friend.
Holding the picture in one hand, Buck read the note that was written on the card.
Buckley!
You have fantastic taste in women— at least this time.
Xoxo, Lucy
no pressure tagging: @bigfootsmom, @lovebuck, @princessfbi, @moonlightbuckleys, @alyxmastershipper, @transbuck, @housewifebuck, @translasso, @userdisaster, @useramor, @oliverstaark, @heartbeatdiaz, @monsterrae1, @firemedicdiaz, and @fleurdebeton !!
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