My most prolific fandom was not MCU, it was Stargate. But my SGA days were on LJ and I had a personal website for the longer things. I moved a lot of it to ao3 once that became a thing, but not all of it. Not the OC-heavy stuff (because I was under the 'made sense to me at the time' impression that that wasn't what ao3 was for) and not the gazillion little drabbles and vignettes and bits that I felt were too short for individual ao3 posts. So a lot has been missing from my canon over the last eighteen years as both LJ was abandoned and the website died. Open Doors offered repeatedly to help me out and I... just never did it. I also knew that while I could give them my HTML files, I was still going to have to be the one to scrape LJ.
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DMZ_SGA
The way to backfill on ao3 without sending out a gazillion notifications is to put everything in an unrevealed collection and then keep adding until you're done and then ta-dah! So that's what this is. It's 20+ stories plus one ginormous catch-all full of the vignettes and drabbles (it's a drabble if I want to call it a drabble) and bits in one document.
Additionally, I added POV shifts or postscripts to already-there stories:
Eat Your Heart Out, Peggy Fleming
Entaillen
The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero's Alice in Wonderland
There are still gaps; it's hard to scrape LJ when you can't log in and need to go back twenty years via loaded tags. But a lot less is missing now.
Taylor’s in the newsroom working late because it’s Santa Ana season and everyone’s working late. Buck once told her that first responders hate the Santa Anas because the wind makes people do weird shit, but weird shit is good business for her. She has already filed a story about a woman out in Brentwood going around pouring yellow paint on cars to protest a proposed rideshare law and now she’s working on the dry lightning story because it’s too big for just Jose and he might be better at investigative work but she’s the one with camera presence.
The big screen on the wall is showing a building fire and once upon a time she’d have been paying close attention, offering to take it even though she’s high enough up on the food chain now that if someone from the mayor’s office isn’t there than neither is she. Once upon a time, she’d joked about hot firefighters but it had always ever been about knowing what was happening before she got an awkward phone call from Bobby Nash because she wasn’t Buck’s next-of-kin. (She’d never cared that Buck hadn’t changed it from Maddie; his reasons weren’t about his lack of commitment.)
But it’s not once upon a time just like it’s not happily ever after and so she turns away and back to her own screen because Jose’s notes read like he’s cramming for a midterm and not a three minute hit before the weather report.
(She knows the 118 is there because nobody in this newsroom will ever stop telling her when the 118 is there. It’s only partially mean-spirited.)
“Holy fuck!” someone yells and she looks up. The cameras on the scene are running B-roll that someone not-her will be narrating later and, without needing to focus on a reporter, the camera is pulled in for a tight shot of a firefighter dangling limply at the end of an extended ladder like bait at the end of a fishing line. Or a sacrifice to an unholy god.
“Lightning strike on the ladder. Blew one guy clean off, other one’s just hanging there.”
She gives up pretending she doesn’t care and stands to watch.
The camera pulls back to another firefighter scrambling up the ladder and while it’s pouring rain and the floodlights are making the reflective strips spark like flares as the man moves, she can make out the name on the back: Diaz.
Eddie’s not the only Diaz in the LAFD and any Diaz would be running for whoever it was at the end of the tether. But she knows it’s him, even in the pouring rain, even in the dark cut by floodlights; he gets illuminated in profile and she can see enough. And she knows that he would be the closest man for precisely one firefighter and Taylor reaches blindly for her desk because she needs something that will stand still while her world is suddenly spinning.
***
The rest of the night is a haze. She texts her friend Olivia that she thinks she just watched Buck die on TV and then tries to focus on Jose’s notes like they will make more sense now that they are the only thing that might keep her together. She gets sent home at eleven by her editor because everyone is going home now that the rain is down to a drizzle. She doesn’t look at her phone until she’s got a glass of wine in her hand and there is a long string of increasingly concerned texts from Liv and two voicemails and she just can’t right now.
In the morning there’s a post on the station website about the fire, the footage of the lightning strike in prime position on the page and autoplaying. Inez did the news story because she gets stuck on overnights and she doesn’t say who it was or which hospital the ten injuries got sent to and Taylor has to decide whether to ask her. Inez is young and pretty and would shank her own grandmother for a scoop and Taylor respects that about her – game recognizes game. Inez isn’t giving her the time of day unless there’s something in it for her and Taylor hesitates on paying that price. Right now, the fire story is clickbait because of the video, but the video will be all over socials by nine-thirty and the story link will be down by the hockey scores and horoscopes by lunch. Inez finding out about Buck will have that story on the top of the site all day because then she’ll have an exclusive – the names that the LAFD has thus far refused to release. Taylor’s not ready to give Inez anything that will get her off of the graveyard shift.
The problem is that she’s got no other options right now. The Jonah Greenway story didn’t just end her relationship with Buck, it also burned all of her other sources. There isn’t anyone at the LAFD who will talk to her on or off the record; the brass hate that she exposed their shitty due diligence in hiring Greenway and the rank-and-file all think she nearly got Hen Wilson and Chimney Han killed. She lets everyone think she doesn’t do fire stories anymore because of a bad breakup, but the truth is that she can’t get anything out of anyone anymore. The entire station has trouble now.
She has no other options and so that’s why she’s knocking on Eddie Diaz’s door that afternoon. Eddie didn’t like her when she was with Buck and she’s sure he likes her even less now, but he’s the member of the 118 least likely to slam the door in her face and that’s enough right now.
Eddie doesn’t answer the door; Carla does. Carla tells her what and where, but also tells her not to go. It’s kindly said, but Carla’s do-not-bullshit-me tone is clear. Everyone from the 118 is there, none of them want to see her, and she no longer has the right to intrude on their privacy.
Taylor wants to say that she doesn’t have to make herself hurt more to make them feel better, but there’s a sudden, desperate, awful wail from the back of the house and it has to be Christopher and Carla gives her a meaningful look before telling her to be well and closing the door.
She can hear Christopher still, crying out for Buck and for his father and it makes her shudder and turn to go.
Back in her car, she calls Buck’s phone and it goes straight to voicemail and she isn’t even sure what she says but she’s glad she got to say something, that the inbox isn’t full. That in case this is ‘goodbye’ she gets to do it pretending he will hear it and not to his coffin.
It’s not to his coffin. LAFD announces that one firefighter has been released from the hospital and, a week later, the second one.
Two weeks later, she gets a text from Buck’s number: “Thanks” and a blue heart and it makes her laugh despite herself because they had once had a protracted and somewhat drunken debate over what non-red hearts in texts meant and Buck had decided that blue was for nice things and green was insincere for reasons that had made no sense at the time and are lost to her now. Despite everything, she misses him sometimes and right now, she wishes she still had the right to turn up at his apartment and give him a hug.
I get distracted by set design and costume quirks -- or, why I can’t rewatch Captain America: the Winter Solder without staring at the hanger bumps on Sam’s green shirt. And so while everyone else was enjoying the big scene with Buck and Eddie, I was staring at the grill in the background wondering how a firefighter could think that was an acceptable situation. And then half a season later noticing that the grill had been moved when I should have been noting the significance and meaning of the Buckley Siblings’ conversation.
Anyone who has followed me since my days of trying to make SGA make sense will be utterly shocked to know that my one-off joke that was supposed to accompany a tumblr picture post went 2k words.
Medium Rare
2100 words | Buck, Eddie, etc.
---
When Buck signs the lease on the loft, Ali is there with him and so he doesn’t really count her as the first guest when she shows up the next day with cinnamon coffee and chocolate croissants because she knows he spent the night in the loft on an air mattress.
Maddie is the second person he invited – counting the 118 as a collective first – and she might’ve gotten upset about that, but she is the first one to actually turn up, so what she doesn’t know won’t get brought up for the next twenty years. Maddie brings champagne – actual champagne from France, not sparkling wine from up the coast – and bread and salt because she read about it somewhere. They sit at the kitchen island and she congratulates him on moving on from Abby and admires the big windows with lots of light and asks him if he needs blackout curtains for the loft and if those would even darken the place enough to sleep firefighter hours. He doesn’t know – he hasn’t had to sleep here during the day yet – and didn’t think about that at all before he signed the lease. He gives himself bonus points for not asking if she did think about it because of Chimney because that would be deflecting and Buck 2.0 is a better man.
“I’m proud of you,” she tells him as he hugs him goodbye. “I hope this place makes you happy.”
Eddie turns up with beer and Christopher and makes a crack about his girlfriends picking out his living spaces, but thinks the place is nice until they go out onto the balcony.
“You are going to have to cut back those leaves before you use the grill,” Eddie says, gesturing to the far end of the balcony with his beer bottle while steering Christopher and his cup of grapes to the nearest chair. “Even with propane, one flare-up and your home life is going to become your work life.”
Buck honestly forgot about the grill. It came with the place, conveying with the kitchen island chairs and the balcony furniture, and he hasn’t given it a thought since he first realized it was there. When he says as much to Eddie, it’s like he’s just confessed to eating his breakfast cereal with tequila instead of milk.
“Even Dad grills,” Christopher says between grapes and that’s just a straight-up homicide.
Eddie is pretty open about his lack of cooking expertise. He can cook the basics and Chris doesn’t live on chicken nuggets and fries, but Eddie buys salad in bags and microwaveable Minute Rice when he’s not reheating the food his grandmother and aunt drop off a couple of times a week. Which Buck really shouldn’t feel superior about because three years ago he wasn’t able to feed himself, let alone provide for a child’s nutritional needs, but that was eons ago and now he thinks iceberg lettuce is the last resort of the desperate. Still, for all of Eddie’s reliance on semi-homemade culinary hacks and the kindness of more competent family, he can somehow work a grill to the point that Bobby gave him a turn with the tongs at the last Grant-Nash barbecue.
Neither Diaz considers grilling to count as cooking, however, and so Chris is really calling him an idiot.
(“I’m from West Texas,” had been Eddie’s explanation the first time he’d been asked about the contradiction between being unable to stir-fry but being able to gauge meat doneness by touch and without a thermometer. “We’re supposed to know good mesquite from bad before the match ignites. If a guy can’t work a grill by the time he finishes high school, they geld him so he doesn’t pass on defective genes.” And he’d mimicked a scissor with his fingers to emphasize the point.)
The trees from the neighbor’s balcony are just starting to peek over the divider and, yeah, he would need to cut those back if he had any plans to use the grill. But he really doesn’t. He spends an awkward few minutes explaining to both Diazes that he’s never been expected to learn how to grill and so he doesn’t. Which is a lie, but it’s easier than explaining the truth. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic don’t have the barbecue tradition that Texas does, no, but families with backyards have grills and that’s how families spend their summers cooking dinner. At least normal families. If the Buckleys had been any kind of normal, Buck would have learned how to use a grill because it would have been part of his informal training in how to be a man and then a husband. But the Buckleys weren’t any kind of normal and so his father had created an island of solitude around his Weber and Buck doesn’t even know how to start a propane grill, let alone make a cooking fire from charcoal. He likes grilled food – anything that came off a parilla during his bartending days down in South America was amazing – but he treats it like he treats patisserie, something that requires skills he will never possess.
Neither Eddie nor Christopher are quite willing to buy what he’s selling, but neither of them have any idea where to start to pick holes in his story, so when Chris gets distracted by the view of the city it’s easy enough to shove the grill into the background where it belongs.
Eddie leaves an introduction-to-grilling book in Buck’s locker a month later. It has post-its on some of the pages which means Eddie’s read it and has notes.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Buck says, holding up the book. “I’ll buy the meat and the beer, you teach.”
Eddie makes a face. “I’ll buy the meat because I don’t trust you. You will get better beer than your usual swill.”
Eddie isn’t so much a beer snob as someone with a paranoid suspicion of IPAs. Which Buck thinks is ridiculous and he’s secure enough in his masculinity to like things extra-hoppy.
They don’t set a date, secure in the knowledge that it will happen at some point. Eddie is still technically a probie, but he’s become such an integral part of the 118 in general and in Buck’s life in particular that Buck considers his presence a given and a constant and forgets that he wasn’t around for things like Buck 1.0.
Except their barbecue date doesn’t happen.
First it’s just complicated with Ali’s schedule and then Shannon’s back in the picture and then Shannon’s dead and then Buck’s under a truck and then there’s a tsunami and a blood clot and a lawsuit and Fight Club and... and.
And then there’s a plague.
And then there’s an Ana and then there’s a bullet and then there’s a chasm between them that an afternoon of flank steak and beer can’t gap. And somewhere in there is a Taylor and it’s not that Buck is unaware that she is not who he needs, but she’s what he needs as his world falls apart and that counts more than anyone else seems to understand. Maddie leaves and then Chimney follows and then Eddie... Eddie doesn’t just leave. Eddie shrinks his life down to a tiny pebble and it nearly destroys him, which Buck needs his own therapist to convince him wasn’t Eddie’s actual intent from the start.
He betrays Taylor first by kissing Lucy and then by over-correcting without giving her any context for what he was doing until it was too late. He tells himself he’s willing to put in the work to make amends, to give Taylor what she needs and what she deserves, but he knows he’s doing it for the wrong reasons and he isn’t brave enough to do anything about it. He’s afraid and he’s acting out of fear because it’s the sniper all over again and he’ll still take the bullet to keep from losing anyone else.
He helps Eddie put himself back together, keeps Chris from falling apart, gives Taylor enough to make the hurt dim in her eyes. Maddie and Chim and Jee come home and, after the last couple of years, Buck is willing to take “everyone is safe” over “happily ever after” because that’s just a fairy tale.
Taylor’s betrayal isn’t less personal because it’s not cheating. He’d have been able to forgive her if she’d kissed someone else, even if she’d slept with someone else. But this is a betrayal of his family, the one he’d die to protect, and he can’t forgive her for that. But he also can’t break up with her for the same reasons he hasn’t been able to break up with her any of the previous times. Instead, he wants her to see why he’s so upset, waits for the recognition if not the recognizance he knows she can’t give him. If she could just see how much this hurt him... he could live with that. It would not be sufficient, but it would be enough.
And then Eddie listens to him worry about Bobby and his inability to fix this mess when he feels like he’s the reason it happened, jokes about holes in his walls, and then goes and fixes it for him. Neither Bobby nor Eddie will say that anything happened, let alone what happened. But Buck knows that Eddie went to go talk to Bobby “about stuff” and he knows Bobby turns up at work the next day looking like himself for the first time since he was told about Jonah and Buck can do the math.
(Knowing that Eddie has gone from being unable to escape his despair to helping Bobby deal with his own... Buck forgets that Eddie wasn’t around when Bobby was still holding them all at arm’s length, when he kept that notebook, when he fell off the wagon so hard it left bruises on them all. Eddie never knew that Bobby and couldn’t know how much the reappearance of him scared the crap out of Buck and Hen and Chim and Athena most of all. Eddie can’t understand how many people he comforted by being able to give whatever it was to Bobby that he needed, any more than he can’t see how the act of reaching out at all is a sign of so much progress from that dark night.)
Redoing the balcony isn’t on Buck’s to-do list, isn’t on the list of home improvement projects he has that got re-arranged when Taylor’s stuff became their stuff. But he can’t spend all of his off-duty time away from home, even if it doesn’t feel anything like home right now, and Taylor’s working in the loft to ‘give him some space’ because she can’t run all the time, either.
He doesn’t own a hedge clipper because it would be stupid to have with what little greenery is out there and so he can’t actually cut back the neighbor’s trees. Which have grown from a few leaves over the divider when he signed the lease to hiding the divider completely. He can, however, move the grill. Fire Marshal Buck knows that you aren’t supposed to have a grill within three feet of the walls, but Actual Klutz Buck knows that putting it up against the balcony railing is asking for terminal velocity damage down below. It’s still never going to get used, but if it ever is then they’ll just close the window and call it good.
It doesn’t dawn on him until after he’s re-arranged the entire balcony what he has actually done. Moving the grill so that it could, in theory, be used is... Eddie hasn’t been over since Taylor moved in. Eddie won’t admit that he doesn’t like Taylor, will in fact protest vehemently if that is so much as suggested and that’s why they were over at Casa Diaz for dinner the other month. But Buck knows that Eddie, at best, tolerates Taylor because Buck says he loves her. And Eddie hasn’t been over since Taylor moved in even as he’s been to everyone else’s place since he left.
“Grill as a metaphor,” is what he says out loud to himself, but finally accepting that ‘enough’ isn’t good enough anymore, that he's willing to be alone to be happy, feels like a freaking revelation. Doctor Copeland has been telling him for years that he needs to learn to like himself and treat himself with the kindness he wants for others and he has never not understood the importance of that, but he has also never been willing to commit to doing it before because the process seemed terrifying. Moving the grill is maybe the scariest thing he’s ever done.
The grill does get shifted over to the balcony railing before Eddie will light it because “I don’t want to have to tell Metro Dispatch that I set a building on fire two days after I went back to the 118. Maddie or Linda would catch the call and Josh would make it his ringtone and Bobby would have the both of us swabbing floors until Christmas.”
Chris thinks this is the funniest thing ever, knocking over his crutches in his explosion of glee, and Buck holds up his hands in defeat. He puts down his beer bottle and grabs the other side of the grill as Eddie tells him “On three.”
Why yes I am writing a story in a fandom my readers don’t want me to write in and a character the fandom’s readers don’t want to read!
Heart on a Plate
11k words of fooding | Chimney Han and his families
Chim and his love/hate/love relationship with Korean food and how that draws him close and pulls him away and pulls him right back toward the people he loves and who love him. From tofu stews to Buff-Fridays to a Juk-O-Matic that travels cross-country twice. Comfort food and who it comforts. Kevin Lee and Jee-Yun Buckley Han, Anne Lee and Bobby Nash, and getting perp-walked out of that teppanyaki place with Hen.
The month in (unread) fic for the first time in forever. New fandom, who dis?
But It Often Rhymes
Eddie Diaz | 2k words, pre-series
He doesn’t have to get invalided out; he could have fought it if he’d wanted to and rehabbed in a billet that wouldn’t have asked much of him until he had full use of his arm again. But Shannon’s pretty clear that she’s had enough of this, that being a milspouse is bad enough without having to worry about a Casualty Assistance Officer showing up at the door. It was something like eighteen hours between the FRG finding out that there’d been an incident and finding out who was injured and who was KIA and the waiting had been hell on her, on his whole family.
But he doesn’t have the energy to tell them all it’ll be fine; he’s crushed by the weight and the cost of his failure and he’s in a lot of physical pain and he’s fucked in the head in ways he should probably be able to recognize from his professional training but don’t look the same from the inside. It’s better for everyone if he gets out and so he takes his honorable discharge and his DD-214 with its documentation of his participation trophies (how to explain to anyone who hasn’t served that Silver Stars and Purple Hearts sometimes don’t mean shit), swaps out his CAC card for a blue ID card in his wallet, and learns to answer to “Eddie” instead of “Diaz.”
He has no idea how to be a civilian anymore.
Paterfamilias
Bobby, Buck, Eddie | 2300 words, 5x13-5x14
“Eddie isn’t someone we can save like we do when the alarm rings and we ride out,” he goes on. “He’s not someone we can decide isn’t making clear decisions and override them.”
“He’s not making clear decisions,” Buck bites out.
“He’s not,” Bobby agrees. “But we still can’t force better ones on him because they wouldn’t stick. He’s not ready to acknowledge the problem – he's still looking at the symptoms and not seeing the disease. And until he’s ready to do that... We have to wait. And be ready to catch him when he falls.”
Buck fights his own frustration, shifting around violently in his chair as he tries to swallow down the futility.
“I fell so many times,” Bobby says softly and Buck stills. “I still dream of falling. But I know – really know – that if I do fall again, I have so many hands who will help me up and hold me until I can stand. Yours among them.”
Buck gives him a ghost of a smile.
“If Eddie falls, we’ll catch him and we won’t let him go.”
Eddie Diaz doing the ‘right’ thing for the wrong reasons well before he quit the 118 for Christopher...
__
He doesn’t have to get invalided out; he could have fought it if he’d wanted to and rehabbed in a billet that wouldn’t have asked much of him until he had full use of his arm again. But Shannon’s pretty clear that she’s had enough of this, that being a milspouse is bad enough without having to worry about a Casualty Assistance Officer showing up at the door. It was something like eighteen hours between the FRG finding out that there’d been an incident and finding out who was injured and who was KIA and the waiting had been hell on her, on his whole family.
But he doesn’t have the energy to tell them all it’ll be fine; he’s crushed by the weight and the cost of his failure and he’s in a lot of physical pain and he’s fucked in the head in ways he should probably be able to recognize from his professional training but don’t look the same from the inside. It’s better for everyone if he gets out and so he takes his honorable discharge and his DD-214 with its documentation of his participation trophies (how to explain to anyone who hasn’t served that Silver Stars and Purple Hearts sometimes don’t mean shit), swaps out his CAC card for a blue ID card in his wallet, and learns to answer to “Eddie” instead of “Diaz.”
He has no idea how to be a civilian anymore.
It’s trying to get used to being responsible for his own plans and actions – getting used to a life without a routine outside of PT appointments three times a week. He doesn’t have a work purpose anymore, a set of professional expectations, and it’s not freeing at all. He doesn’t see “possibilities” (his mom’s word) or “opportunities” (his dad’s), he sees a void where his sense of accomplishment used to be and no way to fill it.
First fictional words in a year... in a fandom I’m not in... doing the only part I can sing from memory. And it still wound up 2k words. Judge me kindly.
But It Often Rhymes
2k words | 9-1-1 | Eddie Diaz
Pre-series, pre-118, Eddie Diaz making choices because he thinks it’s what other people want.
He doesn’t have to get invalided out; he could have fought it if he’d wanted to and rehabbed in a billet that wouldn’t have asked much of him until he had full use of his arm again. But Shannon’s pretty clear that she’s had enough of this, that being a milspouse is bad enough without having to worry about a Casualty Assistance Officer showing up at the door. It was something like eighteen hours between the FRG finding out that there’d been an incident and finding out who was injured and who was KIA and the waiting had been hell on her, on his whole family.
Within the Army ecosystem, Eddie’s considered a solid family man for reasons that don’t necessarily correspond to how his actual family would judge his performance. He’s never found at the strip clubs but is seen at the BX buying something other than beer. He doesn’t drive a tricked-out late-model car he can’t afford and he’s never been anywhere near the payday loan places. He’s married to the mother of his child and the shotgun hovering over their wedding doesn’t really factor when half the guys he went through BCT with got married to get out of the barracks. Shannon gets points among his current unit-mates for not having been someone he picked up at one of the near-the-base bars that specialize in women looking to marry into DoD benefits and for not being a stripper. But she’s not very popular within the FRG because she has a job she’s passionate about and her own friends and because she looks down on the wives who came from those bars or those strip clubs. Eddie maybe wishes she was more of a team player there, but mostly because it impacts his off-duty social life and less because it might impact his career. There are guys he’d totally be up for barbecues and football-watching with on the weekends but who are sometimes wary of extending the offer because their wives don’t like his.
It’s a distance that doesn’t close once Chris is a toddler and his special needs become things to accommodate and plan around and Shannon’s not above using him to avoid FRG commitments. She doesn’t want to be a milspouse; that she is anyway is somewhere between ‘a source of friction’ and the reason Eddie knows that he’s not gonna do twenty despite enjoying Army life. He’s already been responsible for most of the other changes in Shannon’s identity – mother, wife – and he doesn’t like feeling like he’s always turning her into someone she doesn’t want to be.
But he really does like being in the Army. It wasn’t a choice he made out of desire, but like ‘father’ (if sometimes less like ‘husband’) Eddie has come to love being a soldier.
He hates plenty about being in the service; you don’t get out of Basic without realizing exactly what you’ve signed up for and how fucking stupid most of it is. He doesn’t like the 15-month deployments and the way that they’re heading out for a month of training the minute they get off block leave once they’re home. He doesn’t like power-mad SNCOs or dumbass officers or being voluntold for schools and TDYs or how even the simplest administrative task is like doing your taxes because the government only knows one way to do things and it’s never the way that makes sense.
But the rest? The rest he kinda loves.
He jokes about loving not having to worry about what he’s going to wear to work, but what he really loves is the camaraderie and being on a team and what kind of bonds are formed when you’re all in the suck together. And he’s come to appreciate that while he gripes about the Same Old Shit the way everyone else does, he really does love the routine and with it the understanding of his role within his unit and within the larger body of the Army. He loves knowing what’s expected of him both in garrison and on the battlefield and he maybe surprises himself by how well he can not only meet those expectations but exceed them. His image of himself has long been framed by his mistakes – he's in the Army in the first place because of that. But somehow here he’s not only not a fuck-up, he’s instead really fucking squared away. He’s good at his job: good at being a soldier, good at being a medic, good at being an NCO who can mold and shape the next generation of junior enlisteds into something useful and keep the current ones alive and productive.
He’s not a great father, no matter what the USO volunteers at the Storytime Station say, and he’s probably a worse husband. But being a good soldier sometimes lets him forget that his competence is restricted to being in uniform.
But there comes a point when his competence in uniform is not enough, when he could not do what he was supposed to do, what he was needed to do, and there are downturned bayonets with dogtags dangling from them because of that. And so the Army sends him to hospitals in three different countries on three different continents and then they send him home.
He doesn’t have to get invalided out; he could have fought it if he’d wanted to and rehabbed in a billet that wouldn’t have asked much of him until he had full use of his arm again. But Shannon’s pretty clear that she’s had enough of this, that being a milspouse is bad enough without having to worry about a Casualty Assistance Officer showing up at the door. It was something like eighteen hours between the FRG finding out that there’d been an incident and finding out who was injured and who was KIA and the waiting had been hell on her, on his whole family.
But he doesn’t have the energy to tell them all it’ll be fine; he’s crushed by the weight and the cost of his failure and he’s in a lot of physical pain and he’s fucked in the head in ways he should probably be able to recognize from his professional training but don’t look the same from the inside. It’s better for everyone if he gets out and so he takes his honorable discharge and his DD-214 with its documentation of his participation trophies (how to explain to anyone who hasn’t served that Silver Stars and Purple Hearts sometimes don’t mean shit), swaps out his CAC card for a blue ID card in his wallet, and learns to answer to “Eddie” instead of “Diaz.”
He has no idea how to be a civilian anymore.
During the day it’s trying to get used to being responsible for his own plans and actions – getting used to a life without a routine outside of PT appointments three times a week. He doesn’t have a work purpose anymore, a set of professional expectations, and it’s not freeing at all. He doesn’t see “possibilities” (his mom’s word) or “opportunities” (his dad’s), he sees a void where his sense of accomplishment used to be and no way to fill it. Trying to find jobs that don’t require a college degree or vocational training but that somehow still pay a living wage...
It would be hard if it was just him and his failures, but it’s not. Everyone wanted him to get out, but now that he’s out the goalposts have moved and he’s letting them down all over again. He’s around but he’s not “present” according to Shannon and his parents. He’s out all the time for a patchwork quilt of jobs, but he’s still missing while he’s actually in the room. He’s not a father to his son even if he’s no longer a stranger to him. He’s not a partner to Shannon, whose frustration is no longer something she bothers to hide. She’s kind to him in the darkness of night, when his nightmares and flashbacks wake them both and he can’t hide what has been done to him by war, but her patience fades with the dawn.
He can see the man she wants him to be, that his parents expect him to be. He wants to be that man, too. It’s not that he wants to be a selfish husband or a shitty father; it’s that he isn’t any more whole during the day than he is in the dark and he needs some time to get himself back in one piece. He’ll get there, he will, but it’s not fast enough for anyone including him.
(He misses being around people who understand what slithers beneath his skin because they feel it, too. Who get that the bullets that hit him were merely an exclamation point on a statement that began with the first time he’d breathed in the talcum dust of Afghanistan. But despite El Paso crawling with guys who’d once had Property of the Department of Defense stamped on their asses, he’s cut off from the communion of faith. He’s out now.)
There comes a dawn when Shannon’s patience doesn’t just fade – it disappears.
He forces himself to swallow his inadequacies and step up for his son: he gets another job to cover her missing income and he spends all his time at home attending to Chris. Whose generosity of heart is breathtaking to behold and he feels almost guilty for basking in this unconditional love that feels like sunshine. Chris needs more than adoration and attention, though. He needs treatments and aids that Tricare sometimes balks at and Eddie can’t always afford on his own. His parents will cover everything, they offer and sometimes insist, but what they want from him in return is increasingly something he cannot bear to pay. He swallows the sharpness of their barbed words like bad medicine; their disappointment and their frustration with him is just another level on a foundation first laid down when he told them Shannon was pregnant – or maybe before then, when he finished high school without a plan for either college or a profession. He hasn’t been the son they wanted in a long time and he’s gotten used to wearing that hairshirt, willing to suffer to prove himself worthy someday. He hasn’t been the son they wanted, but it’s the moment that he realizes that they see Chris as the make-good, the son they will get right this time, that he decides to leave.
Chris makes him pack every single book from the United Through Reading program, despite them being well below his reading level now, because watching the videos of Eddie reading them to him was how he got over missing his dad. That dad might need to go get a tissue to blow his nose and wipe his own tears before he gets a box for them.
Los Angeles is less about Shannon than he tells his parents; he doesn’t know what they’d do or not do to keep Chris with them, but they will fight him less if he’s trying to fix his marriage no matter what they think of his wife. Los Angeles has Shannon, but it also has Abuela and Tia Pepa and nice weather and a well-timed civil service exam with results that let him apply to the Fire Department. He’s wanted a civil service job for a while because he knows the benefits and pay would make things better for himself and for Chris, but most of them require college or skills he doesn’t have and the wait list for things like garbageman is years long. His parents would have probably filed for legal custody of Chris if he’d gone for firefighting in El Paso, but LA needs firefighters and they like firefighters who already have medical training and he is too far away from his parents now for them to do more than shout into the phone.
The Fire Academy is awful, but he’s back in the suck with a new team and it feels familiar like breathing should be. He has specific tasks to complete, he has explicit expectations – and even the implicit ones are easy enough to figure out. He’s not the only vet in his class and they can all recognize each other by the matching grins. This is hard work in ways they understand and it feels good.
His success isn’t a surprise to him, but it might be a little of a relief. He hadn’t forgotten what being good at something was like, except maybe he had.
A tale in which Sam suspects he should be used to this by now, for values of 'this' that involve certain folks he hangs out with and situations he finds himself in, Team Cap becomes Team Ex-Cap becomes TBD, and nobody but Clint really wants to know what happened to Scott Lang's GI Joes.
(Sam Wilson from the final scene to the mid-credits scene.)
Five year anniversary of what was essentially my response to Civil War featuring Sam, who is always the best narrator for wackiness. It’s copacetic with what came later in Black Panther and Infinity War, although there’s no Shuri. I was tempted to go back and retcon her into this story but was advised not to and instead wound up writing Buratino.
