Buck was lost in New Mexico, but he was lost before then too, and he’s still lost now.
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When he looks back at all that had happened, he has trouble pinpointing the precise moment where everything went horribly wrong.
Both he and Eddie were off duty for the full three weeks following their brief road trip intermission in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico—doctor's orders.
Well, technically, Eddie was cleared for light duty two weeks earlier after passing concussion protocol, alongside his arm and ankle healing up smoothly. It was Eddie's decision alone to take the additional two weeks. What he had told Buck was that he wanted to spend the extra time with Chris—the first of the two off-weeks had conveniently coincided with Spring break—but suspicion of an ulterior motive grew quickly when Buck kept receiving text after text, call after call, inviting him to join them for lunch, then dinner, then stay for a movie, then what about a drink after Chris went to bed? Why not?
Why not? It was a question he kept asking himself, a question that he couldn't answer, yet ached and ached inside of him like decaying flesh.
Buck would protest in any way he could reasonably think to do so. "Oh, I already ate dinner… I already saw that one, actually… You know, it's getting pretty late… I shouldn't drink while on my meds…"
Sometimes it would work. Sometimes Eddie would find a way around it. Sometimes Buck couldn't get the words out quite right, or at all, and so he'd be there in the Diaz kitchen rummaging through the spice cabinet looking for the smoked paprika because Chris had asked for him to make Bobby's baked mac & cheese recipe and he couldn't find the words to explain the inexplicable—the driving force behind the no that threatened to push passed his lips. So, sometimes, yes had been the easier of the two options in the moment, and later he'd go home, lay in bed, and think of new ways to say no.
He had gotten really good at it—really good at lying.
Baked mac and cheese turned into pizza delivery—"there's actually a new place that opened up near my house, how about I pick some up"—and movie nights turned into video games which turned into nothing at all, skipping over it, directly to drinks—"I drove here, so I can't."
It seemed that Eddie may have been practicing those conversations too.
"You could always just stay the night."
Good thing Buck had already prepared for that one.
"We were in a car accident less than two weeks ago, neither of us should be sleeping on the couch."
He would watch Eddie's mouth open, then close, and for a split second he felt a smug satisfaction, like he'd just won at something—just a short, zap of relief that faded nearly as quick as it had appeared, dissolving into dread as the plan he'd mapped out all on his own was going accordingly. Eddie would concede, Buck would say his quick goodbyes, and step out of the bright warm light of the south Bedford street house, and travel into the heavy darkness of his own, alone.
By the time they reached their final week off, Buck had everything going his way, leaning into the excuse of a busy schedule to throw a wrench in Eddie's plans to keep him on a short leash. Grocery shopping, babysitting, doctors appointments, whatever he could think of, true or not.
Eddie would ask him if he wanted company, and Buck's heart would swell up with something warm, and then instantly collapse, shrivel up and die as he'd spit out the word no, and follow it up with the two words he'd been practicing over and over again in his head, whispering them to himself on repeat until they stopped sounding foreign—two words that described someone else, not someone in the same room as him, most certainly not himself—until he found a way to start believing it.
I'm fine.
After saying it once, he couldn't stop saying it.
"I'm fine. Really, Eddie. You don't have to worry about me."
He had said the exact same thing to a dozen other people all asking him the same exact questions. Chimney, Hen, Athena, Ravi, Harry, May, Maddie…even Maddie believed him—or at the very least she let him think she did.
Eddie didn't. He'd squint his eyes, looking at him like maybe if he stared long enough, the truth would somehow reveal itself like words written in plain English across his forehead. He'd push and pry and ask him if he was talking to anyone about what happened to him and Buck would lie like it was second nature and tell him he did and that he would.
He actually did go, once, right after they got back.
Well, technically, that is. He made the appointment, drove to the office, checked in and sat in the waiting room listening for his name to be called…
Then they called the name Derek and Buck's head shot up and he nearly stood up as if it were his own name—I'm Derek I'm Derek I'mDerekI'm—and then he bolted. Out the glass doors, into his truck, and onto the highway, driving in circles around the city until the voice went away and his heart stopped pounding against his chest like it was a parasite. Until the Los Angeles landscape stopped looking like the Los Nietos desert. Until day faded into night and his gas light turned on and he had no choice but to turn back towards home.
Home.
There were several moments when he truly believed he would never make it back there. Never walk through that front door again. Never see Bobby's picture on his way into the kitchen again. Never live the life he was chasing by moving there in the first place, instead resigned to die in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people while wearing unfamiliar clothes being called an unfamiliar name.
All he thought about on the drive back was how good it was going to feel when he finally passed through the threshold, into his house and his room. How good it would feel to fall asleep in his bed. It was supposed to feel safe. When he got home, he would finally feel safe, and all the images and flashes of memory from inside that bedroom could finally be put to rest.
He didn't know it at the time, but that had just been wishful thinking.
There was something he said to Bonnie that rang in his head on a constant loop. It was weird, thinking about it now, how the truth came out of him as easily then as the lies that would come after. Logically, he could figure it probably had something to do with the lethal weapon in her hand.
Sometimes I don't know who I am without him.
It was a truth he hadn't admitted even to himself, let alone to anyone else, and there he was laying himself bare in front of her of all people. A person who didn't care who he was, just what she wanted him to be. So when he got home, he was hoping he'd find a sliver of that person—the Buck that everyone knew and loved. He was hoping that home would bring safety and clarity in his own identity—though, he didn't exactly have those words to describe it at the time—but when he walked inside it was so dark.
The lights were on. The blinds were open. But it was so incredibly dark.
Before he boarded that plane for Nashville, he really thought he was starting to like the person he had become. He wasn't quite where he wanted to be, but he was certain he was finally on a positive trajectory, but the darkness had him feeling like he was crashing into the floor. He felt cold—a type of cold you felt in your bones; one not easily thwarted by use of a blanket or cranking up the thermostat. It persisted with each step he took, his ears stinging as the sound of his floorboards creaking was amplified over such an enormous silence. The pain from his injuries grew more intense as he moved further inside, like the gravity had been cranked up, making each step more difficult to take, putting extra pressure on his abused limbs.
He was home. He was safe. He kept telling himself that, and yet he kept looking at the walls and they offered him no additional comfort. He was in pain, and he was tired, and he was so so cold and he was losing himself and he was terrified and he just wanted to shut it all off.
The thing is, with things like this, they just sneak up on you, and you don't realize it's happening to you until it has already been done.
In the time he wasn't spending with Eddie watching over him those first couple of weeks, Buck tried desperately to pick up the scraps of whatever was left of the person he once was. He leaned on past practices and rituals—the tried and true methods for coping and healing—the kitchen. Baking had started out for him as something of a strategy to get his mind off of the things that were bothering him, sprouting in excess after an especially upsetting breakup left him feeling in what he thought was a similar boat. That feeling of not knowing who you are anymore. While it had started out that way, it had transformed itself into something he genuinely enjoyed. Something that made him feel happy.
Whatever baking did for him before New Mexico, it didn't have that effect anymore.
It didn't work to clear his mind. It didn't work to make him feel like himself. It didn't work to bring him any semblance of joy. He stood there in the kitchen, his hands helplessly kneading dough as he stared like a dead man through his kitchen window. His eyes straining to stay open, bloodshot and watery because he was afraid to blink because the last time he let his eyes fall shut his window grew metal bars and the view outside turned arid and vacant of any sort of life. The last time he closed his eyes he was back in that room, and his name was Derek.
The dough ended up in the trash. Later baking attempts failed just the same. Buck initially wrote the whole thing off as something else. Perhaps he had just been tired, or feeling a bit off, but later he'd come to realize that Eddie might have saved his life back there, but a piece of himself still died in that room. A huge chunk of himself was carved away, and all the precious and joyous things he'd once held dear had vanished along with it, as those things belonged to the man he was before.
He hated it.
He hated her.
She took something from him, and he was letting her do it. Why was he letting her do it?
That was what was going through Buck's head when he made the conscious decision that he was going to be okay. That he had to be okay.
At least, everyone else needed to think so, because she might have been able to take away Buck's own sense of self, but she wasn't going to take that away from everyone else. Buck decided he was going to keep being Buck, however possible.
Of course, that was easier said than done. It involved a lot of lying. A lot of trips to the bakery down the road for desserts he could pass off as his own. A lot of practiced speeches and pretend-scheduled therapy appointments to paint himself the picture-perfect image of healing.
When the three weeks were up, and they were both back on duty, Buck poured himself into work, bouncing around the station from task to task ensuring his hands were busy and occupied at all times. He was single-handedly reducing Harry's probie scut by about fifty percent, and that alone seemed to clear anything up between them. Chimney was more or less concerned with his physical well-being over anything else—Buck assumed he was still pretty rattled after what went down with Hen—so he kept a close eye on him. He even kept him behind on a few calls. But after a while he too warmed up to the idea that he was fine.
Yep. He kept saying it. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.
The others were just as easy. Hen and Ravi asked him a couple times how he was doing, and he even caught some shared glances that he knew he wasn't meant to be seeing, but it didn't take long for the initial worry and doting to dissipate as they all fell hook, line, and sinker for Buck's heavy fronting. So nobody even batted an eye when Buck ordered pizza his first night on dinner duty.
Well, nobody except Eddie.
Eddie, who had been on his case from the very beginning.
Eddie, who knew more about what happened to him out there than anyone else did.
They hadn't exactly talked about it. Buck had recounted the events of what happened to him exactly once since it happened, and it was in that hospital room to the sheriff, and Eddie just so happened to have been within earshot to hear the whole thing. Well, at least as much as Buck felt was imperative to the investigation.
As far as the others knew, Buck had been taken, and Eddie had found him, and that was the extent of it. Everything else in between was territory nobody was interested in learning more about, or that there was even a something more to learn. Buck had made certain of that on the drive home. He and Eddie didn't talk about what happened to him, but Buck did make Eddie promise that he wouldn't tell the story to anyone else.
"It's not my story to tell, Buck," he had said, and he had stupidly hoped they could leave it at that.
He had been wrong.
Buck could see how it had been gnawing at him. How Eddie had questions he wanted to ask. He was constantly telling Buck how he should talk about it to someone. If not him, than to someone else. But it would be obvious to anyone that Eddie wanted Buck to choose him to be the one to burden that weight. He couldn't let him do that. Eddie didn't know what he was asking him to reveal. He knew more than anyone and still, he didn't even know the half of it.
And there were things that Buck just couldn't tell him. There were things that he could still barely let himself think about because those memories would taint every interaction between himself and Eddie. Every visit between him and Christopher would be overshadowed by a nagging, twisting inside of his gut. He'd feel the latent sensation of panic start to set in and he'd find it in himself to stave it off for as long as possible until he could find a way to excuse himself to calm himself down—rub at his eyes until he'd eventually stop seeing the tear-filled blurry image of himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
Please. He has a son. Christopher. He's fifteen years old. Eddie's all he has. I'll do anything.
I'll be Derek.
He shook the memory away every time it crept up on him. He was so terrified of what it could do to him—what it could do to them.
Several years ago, Eddie had cradled Buck's heart in his hands and given him the world on a silver platter, all in the name of reminding him how much he mattered.
"You act like you're expendable, but you're wrong."
When Buck looked in the mirror now, he could no longer see the same man that Eddie was speaking to in that moment. He only saw the man who took those words and crushed them into fine sand. This wasn't stupid recklessness. No. He was being a martyr. Doing to Eddie what Bobby did to Chimney, the thought along made him violently ill.
Eddie couldn't know. He could never know.
When it came to everyone else, sure, Buck was playing the part. Saying he was fine. I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine. But looking back, he really didn't have to lie all that much to them. The only person he was consistently lying to with almost every word out of his mouth, was Eddie.
There was a time in his life when that would've bothered him more than it did now, and just that fact alone scared him.
As the days passed, he grew more and more avoidant of Eddie, creating as reasonable a distance as he could that wouldn't be seen as suspicious. He didn't even know why he was doing it at first—at least, he couldn't identify any one singular reason of the many he so clearly had rattling around inside his head. All those conversations he knew Eddie wanted to have with him that Buck never wanted to broach. Those eyes that looked at him like they could shred off his only protective layer of skin. There was what Eddie represented. What Eddie could reveal about himself. There was that deep lingering fear that somehow, someway, Eddie had the power to both fix him and destroy him if he just opened a box, but Buck wouldn't know the outcome until he did just that, and how could he deem it worth the risk? There was the risk of losing Eddie. There were so many jumbled thoughts surrounding Eddie and they kept getting mixed up with flashes of Bonnie and Bobby and screams of the name Derek and…
And Buck would reach for the kill switch. That was new. It wasn't long-lasting, but it worked well in a pinch.
In the meantime, Buck was busying himself, and playing pretend as the Buck everyone else knew. He was doing a damn good job at it, he thought.
He had become a regular at the nearby bakery, coming in every-so-often for freshly baked bread and muffins and cookies and scones and a variety of other pastries and baked goods. He would take these items home to repackage into his own Tupperware—nuke it in the microwave for good measure—to bring over to Maddie's or Hen and Karen's or to the firehouse because the old Evan Buckley would bring dessert when invited over for dinner.
The new Evan Buckley didn't bake anymore.
It was okay, though. He quite enjoyed his trips to the bakery. When he was there, talking to the baker about lemon squares, he almost felt normal.
It was a fear that Eddie had once been able to articulate to him, but Buck for some reason hadn't been able to do the same.
"What are you afraid of?"
"That I'm never gonna feel normal again."
He'd actually thought about that conversation once before, back when Bobby died, when for a split second he let himself feel the same fear that Eddie had. But he shook it off rather easily. Bobby's loss tore him limb from limb but Buck knew that somehow, someway, he was going to find a way to put himself back together. Through each and every day that passed since his death, Buck clung tightly to that belief that he would feel normal again.
And he did. He was starting to, anyway. He saw Eddie do it so he knew he could do it. Knowing this should have given him hope now that he would get through this too. He would feel normal again. He would feel like Buck again.
But that was the thing. As he stood in that bakery, normal and Buck were two very different things. Buck didn't have to pretend to be someone else to the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter didn't know about the horrifying situation he'd been in a little bit over a month ago. Buck was just able to be the person he was at his current and present moment—a man he didn't recognize, but a man nonetheless. Normal. His new normal. He managed to find a little bit of peace in it.
Nobody noticed anything off. They even started saying that his baking was getting better, which the old Buck would've been offended by. But he couldn't be bothered, too caught up in the fact that nobody noticed. It was slowly starting to scare him just how good he was at hiding. It was like being a little kid, playing hide-and-seek and finding the best spot in the whole house. For a while you were giddy, almost shaking with excitement and having to calm yourself down as to not give yourself away because it was just so good. Laughing inside your head, internally chanting they're never gonna fine me! Then time would pass, and then even more time would pass, and you would start to get uncomfortable because you had been sitting in that same position for so long it was starting to hurt. You soon started to worry they were never going to find you, and you would call out for help, and you worried you waited too long that they already stopped looking for you.
Eddie was still looking though.
It all happened after Buck got caught in a lie about going to therapy, when he was actually spending that Tuesday night at the Han's, passing off a cheddar-jalapeño sourdough loaf as his own.
Eddie had been hovering over him a lot over the last month and a half, but he had a lot of tact when he approached him about anything pertaining to what had happened. That was the first time Eddie had met him with that little tact, and on the spot, Buck had to quickly change strategy. He got defensive.
It worked. In the moment. Eddie backed off for the rest of that shift.
Later, he went home and sunk into the couch cushions, letting the darkness consume him. He realized something then. Something sick and twisted, burning deep inside his gut. There was something comforting in all the lies he was telling Eddie. To Eddie, Buck was a person seeking help in therapy, who was trying to do better, who was moving past his trauma. To Eddie Buck was happy, and unaffected, and still loved to bake, and loved being at work and loved being touched and Buck needed that. He needed not just anyone to believe that, but he needed someone who knew what he went through to believe that he could come out on the other side alright. Maybe if Eddie could believe it, he could believe it enough for the both of them. Maybe Eddie could will the old Buck back into existence.
In the meantime, Buck just did what he had to do.
It got dark.
Suddenly there were voices outside of his house, and Buck's heart was racing a mile a minute.
Eddie and Christopher were outside and they were arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza and Buck stood there by the window with tears in his eyes and his breath caught in his throat because he should have been at the door. He should have been telling Chris he's right, that his dad is wrong and that fruit absolutely does belong on pizza, but his whole entire body had gone rigid. He watched them through the gap in the curtain debate whether or not they should leave and Buck felt his heart break, and he didn't even know he was capable of feeling that anymore. But he was. He so was, and it was killing him.
Bonnie took so much more from him than baking. She took everything. She took his whole world. How had he let her take his whole world from him?
Buck had decided that night that he was going to get better. He had to get better. She wasn't going to take anything away from him. She wasn't going to take away the man he once knew.
He invited Eddie and Chris over a few days later, apologizing for being out of the house when they came by the last time—he was still lying, of course, but he was going to be better now so it was different.
He told them he would bake them dessert. He didn't even go to the bakery. He found ingredients around his kitchen and laid them all out on his counter—flour, eggs, milk, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, brown sugar, cinnamon, etcetera. He had all the makings to create anything he could possible want to bake.
Hours passed, the time on the stove clock counted up, and up, and the ingredients on the counter remained untouched while his fingertips just bounced back and forth along the kitchen table. Every part of himself was numb. He felt a little bit like he was dying, and dread started creeping up on him, starting to worry less about what he was going to bake, and more about what might happen if he didn't open that door again. He couldn't let her take both. She couldn't have both.
Buck put everything away, and instead reached for the box of macarons from the fridge that he'd been convinced to buy on his last trip to the bakery. He set them up on a plate, and then spent the next several minutes until they showed up googling how to make them because he knew they were incredibly complicated, and he needed to have something to say to make the whole thing at least somewhat believable.
In the end, after several deep breaths, Buck managed to open the door. Bonnie managed to take away his sense of self, but she didn't take away his whole world.
The two of them walked inside, and his house was suddenly ten times lighter.
Chris got settled at the table, already staking his claim over the macarons he intended to eat, while he and Eddie moved into the kitchen to transform the food from the to-go containers into something resembling a prepared meal—tossing the salad in one of Buck's nice bowls. Maybe it was delusional thinking, but was that really any different from what Buck was doing with the macarons? Maybe it would be if Eddie had lied about it.
Buck could tell the truth. He could. He could wave his arms up in the air, shouting I'm here! I'm over here! You found me!
He could do it. It was always an option. He could start by telling him where he got the macarons from.
There was an incredibly heavy tension weighing over the whole kitchen. He could tell by Eddie's posture that he was gearing up to say something, and Buck braced for impact like he had been doing since New Mexico.
He wasn't prepared for an apology. Buck's stomach sunk to the floor. His only instinct was to keep lying.
He plastered on the fakest smile and walked towards him, "I admit it, yeah, things were weird out there. But I'm feeling like myself again. Really, Eddie, I'm-I'm doing good."
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie—
"Well you seem good," Eddie said, "I was worried the man I knew didn't make it out of New Mexico."
Buck nearly dropped the plate in his hands.
It was too late. He was too late. He'd spent too long hiding that Eddie had finally stopped looking for him. What did he do? What did he do?
Buck opened his mouth to try to speak. He could feel himself trying to say he didn't, Eddie! He didn't! I'm not so sure he even made it off the floor of that lab last year! I need help Eddie! I need help!
But he slammed his mouth shut as Eddie had already turned around. The game was already over, and Buck had won.
Now they're gone, and it's dark again, and Buck is having a really hard time feeling like a winner.
