Eddie sees ghosts you say 👀
EDDIE SEES GHOSTS! my little exploration of thinking about ghost daniel too hard and making myself cough up blood (word vomit the skeleton of a fic).
the premise is just little vignettes of eddie encountering daniel and other 118 ghosts through the seasons, and piecing together who they were :’) it’s mostly about ghost daniel tho
a longer excerpt bc i love the world i built in this one…
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What Eddie does know is that first responders tend to get shadows pretty frequently, doctors too. Souls who have imprinted on someone who tried to save them, or save their loved ones, or sometimes just the last face they saw before they met their end.
All that to say, Buck’s shadow was never a surprise.
Even if Eddie was open and forthcoming about what he… sees—which he’s not—he wouldn’t go around telling people they’ve got the echo of a dead person following them around, or asking if they know who it might be. In this line of work, he can only imagine the pain it could revive. Calls with kids are even worse.
So, no, Eddie doesn’t know who the little boy is, just that he seems particularly fond of Buck. And he’s not the only one.
The only soul. Obviously.
There have been others on occasion. The older couple they lost—one to the crush injury and the other to heartbreak—stuck with Buck for the rest of the day. Eddie thinks maybe they wouldn’t have lingered at all if it weren’t for Buck. They seemed happy, fulfilled. The kind of souls that wouldn’t float at all, but made a choice to stay for a bit. For Buck’s sake. Eddie knows the feeling.
The others will catch shadows every once in a while. After bad calls, inevitable losses. Someone holding on to Hen or Chim, usually. Grateful to them for saving someone else, for trying, sometimes upset, scared. Not that they can do much harm—besides distract Eddie—but they usually make themselves scarce after a while.
Aside from the ones who only hang around for a day or two, there are a few lurkers that Eddie had come to recognize over his first few months at the 118 too. Not constant presences, but repeats. Flashes that he’s grown familiar with.
Bobby has a duo, two kids who will bound by every few weeks. Eddie’s never seen them head on, but he knows the flickers of their blonde hair. There’s an older man who shows up sometimes to stand with Bobby on calls, arms crossed in the same way, pupil-less eyes observing alongside the captain. Sometimes he’s in turnouts too, sometimes not. He doesn’t do much, just stands sentinel almost like he’s keeping Bobby safe, maybe backing him up—or at least giving him some company. He’s never very defined, his form and features hard to get a look at.
Chim also has a shadow in turnouts. The coat is more clear and familiar to Eddie’s eye, enough so that he’s been able to catch the name LEE printed on the back. Lee doesn’t come by too often, but Eddie will catch him running closely behind Chim on more difficult scenes, so close it’s like he’s seeing double. Once, Lee even pointed Eddie in the right direction to find Chimney after they got split up on one of their more chaotic rescues, for which Eddie is deeply grateful.
But none of them are around quite as often as Buck’s.
Eddie has gotten good at telling when he’s seeing a soul and not just another body in a crowd. The first few years he couldn’t always tell without focusing, but it’s like his eyes just needed time to adjust. Now he knows at a glance. Which is good, because a seven-or-eight-year-old climbing into the back of an ambulance with him and Buck and an explosive in a man’s leg his first week on the job would have probably tripped him up a little otherwise.
(At first he wasn’t sure if the kid was Charlie’s, Buck’s, or the ambulance’s. Could have even been the parking lot they stopped in if he really felt like speculating. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen the kid perch with his chin resting on Buck’s shoulder, and he’d known.)
(This is Buck’s shadow.)
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