Chapter Text
Buck is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
It starts off innocently enough, the same way most of his days start out: waking up, going through the motions of his morning routine, getting ready for work. However, as he gets in his Jeep, his phone slips out of his pocket. It hits the pavement with a sharp noise, and Buck can already tell that his screen is shattered. As he picks it up, he tries to turn it on—to no avail.
Goddamnit.
He doesn’t have time to deal with that right now, so he decides that the phone is a problem for future Buck. He can ponder the implications of not having a cellphone later, when he isn’t actively going in for a shift. He turns his keys in the Jeep, only to realize that the needle on his gas gauge is dangerously close to empty.
He’s going to be late for work. There’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t even call Eddie or Bobby or anyone to let them know why. Buck frowns as he pulls out of his driveway to get to the nearest gas station.
The tank of his Jeep does not fill quickly—occupational hazard of owning a Jeep, he guesses—so Buck goes inside to pay while he waits. The cashier is friendly enough, and even tries to cheer him up by offering him a free cup of coffee.
Okay. Maybe she was flirting, but Buck didn’t particularly care. Buck 1.0 may have taken her up on the offer, but this Buck? This Buck tips her and nearly jogs back to his car, eager to get to work and complain about his morning. However, when his hands are on the door handle, he stops dead.
He feels the cool press of metal against his temple before he sees it. There’s a man—no, two men—one has an arm around his neck and a gun against his skull and the other is opening the door to Buck’s passenger seat, his face unreadable.
“Don’t fucking move.” Yeah, Buck got that part. “I’m going to explain to you what’s going to happen here, and you’re going to listen, or else you’re getting a bullet in your fucking skull.”
“Hurry up,” the man’s partner hisses, “the cashier will see.”
“Get in the backseat. I’m driving. If you don’t cooperate, my partner here is going to blow your brains out.”
Buck hurries to comply with the orders. Stay calm, Buck. Give them what they want, and you might live. He doesn’t even have his phone. He has no way of contacting the police, no way of sharing his location (no way to leave a voicemail for Eddie and Chris and Bobby and Athena and Chimney and Hen and Maddie and everyone else at the 118 if they plan on killing him).
The driver’s side door closes with a click, and the man turns out of the gas station. Soon enough, they’re on the highway, and Buck is desperately trying to find a way out of this situation. He can’t reach the steering wheel to throw the vehicle off course, and he can’t find a way out that wouldn’t involve him throwing himself into moving traffic (which would almost certainly result in his death) and suddenly, he’s not thinking about how to get out anymore.
He’s thinking about the letters in his locker, addressed to everyone he cares about just in case. He thinks about his letter to Eddie—how he’d written it approximately a week after meeting him, how he’d known that Eddie was going to be his best friend—and laments the fact that he hasn’t updated it.
See, here’s the thing. Buck loves Eddie. When that well collapsed on top of him, when all Buck could do was try to dig Eddie out with his bare hands, he knew. He knew that Eddie dying would destroy him. He knew that he’d loved him for far, far longer than he’d known. He knew because when Chimney had a piece of rebar clean through his brain, Buck had kept his cool. Chimney was one of his best friends at the time. Eddie was more.
The road ahead of him comes back into focus. The man in the driver’s seat is focused on the road, and the man in the passenger’s has his gun pointed squarely at Buck’s face. A shot point-blank from this distance would surely kill him.
Then, he sees it. Someone’s bumper has fallen off in the middle of the road and the truck in front of them swerves to avoid it and Buck’s Jeep is totaled and he probably has a minor rib fracture from the force of the collision but he can’t bring himself to care as he throws himself out of the right side of the car and slams the door shut behind him. He hits the road hard and he hears the gun fire and he feels the bullet tear through the flesh of his side as he drags himself away from the oncoming pileup.
Distantly, he thinks, so this is what it feels like. He hears the telltale screeches of cars hitting their brakes—too little, too late. The car Buck had been in mere seconds ago explodes into flames.
As he rolls off the road and into the grass, Buck’s side screams in pain. He tears chunks of dirt out of the ground as he struggles, pulling himself towards the hill, and suddenly, he’s in freefall. Buck isn’t a particularly religious man, but he prays to every god he knows of in that moment to please, please, let him survive this. His body hits the ground with a sickening thud, and everything goes dark.
—
The alarm goes off and Buck’s still not at work, but Bobby brushes it off.
“We need to go. He probably slept in—the kid needs some rest after that awful scene yesterday.”
Eddie nods in agreement. He piles into the truck with everyone else as the incident is relayed to them.
“It’s not good. There’s a 6-car-1-truck pileup on the freeway. Victim in a silver Toyota Camry called 911, also mentioned hearing a gunshot, but dispatch couldn’t get more info out of her before she passed out.” Eddie sees Chimney grimace. Car collisions never bring back good memories.
“A gunshot?” Eddie questions. “Do you think there was also a hostage situation happening at the scene? Could that have caused the collision?”
“I dunno, but I suspect we’re about to find out.” Eddie steps out of the truck and preemptively grabs the jaws of life—he suspects he’s going to need them. They start with the cars that seem to be recoverable; there’s a young couple with a wailing child in their backseat, and Eddie gets to work, prying the doors open and unbuckling the child’s booster seat before passing him off to the paramedics. He manages to pull both parents out of the car safely, assuring the panicking mother (whose name, he learns, is Margot) that her wife and child are both going to be perfectly fine. He learns that the unconscious woman, Alana, is the one who called 911, but before he manages to ask about the gunshot, his captain’s voice comes through on the radio.
“Diaz, once you’re done over there, we’re going to need the hose.” Eddie glances over to see where Bobby is standing in front of a massive blaze which he assumes is engulfing the first car involved in the collision. He stands up quickly and moves to get the hose.
They put out the fire in record time, careful to prevent it from destroying any of the other cars involved in the crash. Eddie smells the burnt flesh before he sees it—there are two corpses in the car, charred beyond all recognition. It will probably take a while to get a positive ID on them. The number plate on the car is obstructed, as the car had been rear-ended, but the glove box seems to be intact, so he makes his way around the car. The passenger’s side window is open, and there’s a pool of blood on the ground. This must be where the gunshot came from.
Eddie reaches inside and, sure enough, there’s a revolver missing a bullet. He can’t tell from the state of the bodies, but it’s a safe assumption that the passenger was being held at gunpoint and the driver had shot him for trying to escape during the crash. He wishes Buck were here to formulate his own story about what had happened. Cringing again at the acrid smell, he unlocks the glove box and pulls out the car’s registration.
“Found it!” Eddie shouts at Bobby. “The car is registered to–”
Eddie’s heart drops from its place in his chest to his feet, leaving a trail of scorching hot terror behind it. Evan Buckley. The car is registered to Evan Buckley. Eddie desperately wipes the soot off of the address line in hopes that this is somehow a different Evan than
his
Evan but it’s not. This is Buck’s car and it’s Buck who’s been carjacked and it’s Buck’s body burnt beyond all recognition in the seat in front of him. Eddie’s knees buckle under him.