#pre-buddie

[ilkao3]

9-1-1

Prompt: Adult Chris finds himself waking up after his Dad’s funeral to their old house in LA, with his father worrying over breakfast as he preps for his first day at the 118.

He plans to be the ultimate troll, but only after ensuring none of his loved ones die now preventable deaths.

And maybe getting his dads to confess before one of them is on their deathbed.

[onthewaytosomewhere]

🎁 17th: Food - you know what that present means another creation day - so i ventured into a 911 crossover for this one - it was supposed to be alex/buck but they had different ideas - but we did get the stranded in the airport meet-cute(ish) just not romantic lolz

this is actually possible firstprince and pre-buddie so yeah there we are

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[fireburningonthedancefloor]

And 17 Seconds

@911fanworksfestival

This is for the Fanworks Festival and is a gift for @pinoruno.

Pre-Buddie | Eddie Diaz POV

Rated: Teen and Up

Summary: 7.5k words

The harness pulled at Buck’s sternum, his head and arms dropped back as water sluiced off his listless body.

It could have looked beautiful, reverential – had there been the golden light of the sun instead of the dark shadows of the rainy night – with his body positioned for a resurrection the way it was.

But Buck was too still. His bright, living energy and mannerisms were missing. He was empty. He was a marionette with cut strings, limp and swaying lightly in the stormy wind.

A cold band locked around Eddie’s heart like a zip tie, forever tightening and impossible to reverse. HIs breath punched out of him for the second time in under a minute.

A desperate guttural scream ripped through the night. “BUCK!”

“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Captain Nash, one-eighteen,” Bobby’s voice crackled over the radio. “We have a firefighter down at the MacArthur Park apartment fire. Need additional task force and rescue immediately.”

READ IT HERE ON AO3

[alidravana]

Another drabble!

Really enjoyed the other drabble that I wrote, so was inspired to do this one for a short missing scene from last night's episode (different fandom). Main restriction being only 100 words!

Buck almost ran into Eddie, who had been standing outside of Chris’s door, looking equally devastated as Buck felt.   “Hey,” Buck said softly, placing a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, squeezing gently in some poor attempt to offer comfort.  “Let’s go talk,” he added, letting his hand trail down Eddie’s arm, his fingers interlacing in Eddie’s as he pulled him towards the living room.   Buck didn’t think twice about Eddie’s hand in his, and neither did Eddie obviously, neither letting go as they sat on the couch, silent as they contemplated Chris’s startling confessions.   But they would figure it out, together.

[ashwinmeird]

Making Food, Making Families Buck's past was something that he largely left where it belonged, in the past. Not for any reason other than that he had grown since then. Only, that left him in a predicament when he let slip that once upon a time, he competed on MasterChef. A predicament that Eddie, with his coconspirator Chris, felt was most aptly handled by finding where to stream the whole season for the three of them to watch. On what would become their family TV night.

The side of Eddie’s truck above the passenger window was almost cold to the touch, the first bit of relief Buck had had from the heat in what felt like hours. The station itself had decent enough air conditioning but they’d had back to back calls all day and it was hot enough that Buck was pretty sure half the water in his water bottle he kept in the firetruck evaporated.

Or Eddie got to it first, either possibility was equally likely and equally indicative of the atrocious warmth because Eddie was rarely bothered by temperature changes. He could wear a tank top on the coldest day of the year without hesitation, but this heat got him to admit he was a little warm.

And on top of that, Buck was tired. Exhausted. Ready to turn in despite it not even being dark out yet. About to fall asleep against the gloriously cool metal his forehead was pressed against if Eddie didn’t hurry up and drive them home.

No.

Not home. To Eddie’s house, where Buck has spent most of his time off for the past couple weeks to the point where he’s pretty sure his Jeep has not moved in at least four days. But Buck does not live there, he’s just a perpetual nightly feature of the Diaz couch.

Except for that one time he and Eddie shared a bed.

Well, two times. But it was only because the couch was either occupied or they didn’t have the heart to pull apart the fort they’d made.

He was almost asleep, almost, even while standing up, when he finally heard movement behind him.

“-gotten through the last of all that steak yet?”

Hen. She was talking, asking a question, but Chimney already left and Bobby was deep into paperwork so that meant.

“Almost all of it,” Eddie said as if implying that the dozen pieces of meat they still had left was no biggie. “But some of the cuts we won are really expensive and I grew up on good barbecue, but these aren’t just toss ‘em on a grill with some seasoning kinds of meat. I think we might have to hold out on cooking those until we can do it right. It’s not like we’re ever going to go out and buy a filet mignon to cook ourselves so we might as well make it worth our while.”

“And you cannot cook something like that,” Hen accused with her usual amount of snark, “and I definitely don’t think Bobby has reached the point of teaching Buck something like that because Bobby doesn’t know how to cook something like that, so are you planning to just wait until you stumble upon some great chef who’s cooked a good filet mignon?”

Buck pulled his head away from the truck. Either Hen and Eddie decided to spontaneously start standing at an angle or his head was tilted to the side. He didn’t know, that shift turned his brain into hot soup over seasoned with exhaustion and stiff muscles. “I’ve made filet mignon before.”

“Not from the steaks we’ve been making lately, those’ve mostly been strips,” Eddie countered.

Buck knew steak cuts like the back of his hand, he was the one that told Eddie that they only had really high price ones left once they opened the final styrofoam case. “I know.”

“When?” Hen asked while watching him like she knew something. Buck hated when she would look at him like that.

“Most recently? When I was on MasterChef.” He paused to think back, time and his current state leaving such old memories and details fuzzy. “Before that was when I worked at a cattle farm in South Carolina. The guy who owned the place was super big on farming being a craft rather than a job and insisted that anyone who worked there and helped butcher the cows needed to be able to treat the meat properly. Most of his products went to local grocery stores and markets so he’d have us keep a couple tenderloins or filets out of the product to sell and he’d have us cook it with him.

“Mind you he was really old fashioned, so we weren’t doing anything super fancy with it. One time Richard even had us grill them over a bonfire because he insisted that was a necessary life skill. I’m not actually sure he realized the twenty-first century was happening, come to think of it, there wasn’t a single computer on the farm.” Buck wasn’t even sure what he was saying at this point, thoughts weren’t forming in his head where he had a chance to catch them, they just simply popped into existence as he kept opening his mouth. No one was stopping him so he didn’t bother to try either. “I didn’t stay there too long, it was the first place I really worked at after I dropped out of university and I might not have kept up with traveling around like I did if it hadn’t been for my experience there.”

It took Buck a second after he finally finished talking to realize that he was met with dead silence. He looked down at his hands to count his fingers and intentionally played the last couple minutes back in his head to confirm that he was neither having an abnormally vivid dream or that he just said all of that in his head and obviously would not get a response.

But no. He was both awake and definitely said all of that out loud to Hen and Eddie who were staring at him like he was the one acting weirdly.

Buck looked at them for another moment. Eddie had pulled out his phone and was typing on it with an abnormal amount of dexterity for him but Hen hadn’t looked away, hadn’t even blinked. “Are you guys okay?”

“‘Are you okay?’ he asks,” Hen parrotted, she was wide eyed despite having looked fairly tired before Buck interrupted her conversation with Eddie. “Do I look okay to you?” Based on her deadpan tone alone, Buck knew better than to answer that. “You cannot just up and drop a bunch of information I didn’t know about you like that when I’m tired and just want to go home to my wife and children.”

Buck’s exhaustion hadn’t really faded even while he was talking, but he knew that something wasn’t clicking in his head that really should have. “I’m sorry?”

“You should be.” Hen shook her head. “I’m going home, I’m sure the two of you have lots to talk about and I expect a full explanation at Bobby and Athena’s tomorrow.” She started to walk to her car but shot one last look at Buck before she did so, muttering, “MasterChef? Why does that not surprise me.”

That was when Buck’s brain soup finally returned to its natural mostly solid state with a minimally smaller amount of seasoning.

He had never told anyone about being on MasterChef, not Hen and Chimney, not Bobby, not even Eddie. Maddie knew, at least, he was pretty sure that was something he’d tacked on to the end of a postcard or two around that time. They never really discussed it somehow, there really wasn’t a natural way for something like that to come up in conversation and after a certain point, they mostly stopped talking about what happened during those years for either of them.

Buck didn’t make it far enough to reach the point when family members are brought in for his season’s family episode, but he’d never know if Maddie would have come to see him then or if he would have been left alone had he stayed in the competition long enough.

Eddie was watching him when Buck pulled himself from his reverie. “You need to sleep,” he said, “we can talk about this tomorrow morning.”

“Really?” Buck was tired, he knew Eddie could tell, but he still hadn’t expected him to give him this much leeway in lieu of his accidental reveal.

Eddie nodded while pocketing his phone. “Yep,” he unlocked his truck and waved Buck in, “you need some sleep and Christopher and I have a season of MasterChef to watch.”

Buck froze halfway into the truck, his foot hovering ominously in the air, neither in nor out of the truck.

Neither sure nor unsure he heard what Eddie said correctly.

“What?”

“Just get in the truck, Buck.” Eddie was seated now, turning the truck on like nothing out of the normal was happening right then. “Carla found your season, took her a bit of extra sleuthing because you didn’t go by Evan or Buck then.”

MasterChef had happened at a point in his life between him leaving ‘Evan’ back in Pennsylvania and not yet finding ‘Buck’. He had still been finding out who he was, hoping that maybe cooking was where he belonged. He’d gone by EB around that time, not the first one on the show to exclusively use initials, but still not the most common thing. Lucia had been the one to dub him that after she decided that his name was dumb simply because he didn’t like it and she refused to call him it.

“But she found me?”

“Yep.”

Buck blinked as Eddie reached across him to grab his seatbelt after he had been sitting for at least a minute and only managed to get the door shut. Eddie’s arm was very close to him. He didn’t know what to do with that. “You and Chris are going to watch it.” It wasn’t a question, mostly because Buck was eighty percent sure that’s what Eddie said they were going to do.

“We are.”

“Do you know how long it takes to watch a whole season of MasterChef?” It was after suppertime, but there were still a couple hours of the day left before Christopher would have to go to bed. Precious hours Buck was disappointed to be missing out on, but they had the day off tomorrow so he would get to make up for it then.

Eddie chuckled as he shifted into drive. “Get some rest, Buck, or you won’t be able to walk inside when we get home and I’m not going to help you.”

Liar.

Eddie would so help him.

Has done so in the past and Buck knew nothing would change that.

But, then again, sleep did seem pretty nice and Eddie had weirdly comfortable seats in his truck. Or maybe it was just that Buck felt so comfortable being in the passenger seat of Eddie’s truck after spending so much time there that he just naturally grew to associate the truck and therefore that seat with comfort.

Or maybe he just needed sleep.

Sleep sounded nice. Sleep meant not having to think about the fact that Eddie and Christopher were going to be watching him on a televised cooking competition from nearly a decade ago.

Rest of fic

[ailelie]

Eddie's Will

Revised lightly and on AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55176097

Eddie's relationship with Marisol is getting serious again. She's even moved in and this time they both feel excited and confident in the decision. She isn't Shannon and the relationship isn't quite like what he'd had with Shannon, but Eddie has realized that he cannot keep comparing his relationships to Shannon. Things with Marisol are good. They can be good enough.

But then Chimney and Maddie are in a car accident and, when they're both out of surgery and okay, Buck gently hugs his sister and says he is so glad they're both okay. He says he isn't ready to be a single dad.

And it reminds Eddie of his will. The will he has not changed since adding Buck to it. If anything happens to him, Christopher goes to Buck.

His heart begins to beat a loud question: What about Marisol?

He should change his will, right? His son should go to his partner, right?

But every time Eddie thinks to call his lawyer, he distracts himself. He'll call after the dishes are clean, after this shift is over, after Marisol goes to work. Later. He'll call later.

But he never does and the question never stops echoing.

And then it is 2am at the fire station and he cannot sleep. He's upstairs, at the table, staring down at his hands. He needs to make this phone call. He has no idea why he can't.

Chimney is the one who finds him.

"Practicing waiting up for Chris?" Chimney asks, yawning through the joke.

"Couldn't sleep. Why are you up?"

Chimney slumps into the chair opposite of him. "Jee's been having nightmares for the past week or so. Every night, between 2 and 3 she wakes up screaming. So now I'm waking up even without a distraught toddler."

Eddie frowned. "The car accident?"

"We think so. She saw it on TV. We've talked with a therapist, but Jee's still having a hard time. So why are you up?"

"I need to change my will," Eddie says, too tired to come up another reason. Chimney is the worst person to confide in, but he already suspects what Bobby will say and the idea of talking with Hen makes his stomach curl inward. Hen is too perceptive; Eddie doesn't really want to be seen.

"Why?" Chimney asks.

Eddie explains his current arrangements for Chris and asks, "But it should be Marisol now, right?"

Chimney gives him a long look and then holds out both of his hands palms up. "This--" he says, raising his right hand, "is Buck. And this is Marisol." He raises the left. "Right now you have both in your life."

Eddie nods. "Yes?"

"Right. You only get to keep one. One stays and the other leaves your life forever. You may see each other in passing, but you stop spending time together entirely."

A hint of panic bubbles up through Eddie's chest. This ridiculous dilemma is speaking to a fear he's been refusing to face.

Chimney leans forward, his elbows planted on the table between them. He nods to each hand in turn, "Buck or Marisol: who do you keep?"

"Buck." The answer shoots out of Eddie without a single moment for thought.

Chimney reaches over with his right hand and pats Eddie's forearm. "Don't change your will."

With another yawn and a screech of his chair, Chimney heads back down to the bunks, leaving Eddie in the middle of an epiphany.

He likes Marisol, but he could live without her.

He can't live without Buck. And he doesn't think that's going to change.

So, now 2:30 in the morning and alone in the half-lit room, Eddie does something he hasn't before. He compares his relationship with Buck to his relationship with Shannon. Before everything fell apart, he and Shannon had been a team. They'd felt invincible together, which is one of the reasons Shannon decided against an abortion. Everything fell apart only when they stopped talking, when they stopped having each other's back.

Buck gives him that same feeling of security and possibility.

He and Shannon had also had amazing sex, the kind you only get when you know someone inside and out. He and Buck-- he stops the thought there. Then another treacherous part of him points out that Buck is bi now, he might be interested if he knew Eddie was interested.

If Eddie were--images, fantasies of him and Buck in bed, in the back of an ambulance, in his kitchen, outside under the stars, stream flicker-fast through Eddie's mind until he shuts them down with a damned casserole recipe. Eddie drops his forehead to the table and covers his head with his hands.

He has to break up with Marisol.

[hmslusitania]

4 or 26 + Buddie please 🖤

4. I'm here, aren't I? + 26. Please, I need you to believe me. Also for @starry-eyed-guttersnipe who requested 26. this was supposed to be angsty and instead is a season one divergence (??) whoops. also spoilers for Casablanca

Eddie is just trying to mind his own business in the café, just drink his coffee, read the paper -- it's a new routine he's trying now that he lives in a town where people do things like that on week days -- but the breakup at the table behind him is going...

Well, it's rough.

"Please," the guy says and he sounds close to tears. "I need you to believe me."

"It's pretty clear that you're still exactly the same kid you were when we met," the woman says. "Goodbye, Buck."

There's the sound of chairs scraping, and of this Buck character pleading no, Abby, wait-- and then Eddie sees a flash of strawberry blonde hair disappear outside the café doors and the dejected slump of the guy leaning forward onto his own table.

Eddie manages to mind his own business for a few more sips of coffee, and then he hears Buck sniffle and all of his dad instincts kick in.

From the timbre of the conversation, Eddie's expecting Buck to be eighteen at the outside when he turns around. But Buck is within a rounding margin of Eddie's age, as it turns out, even if the red tipped stuffy nose and the red rims around his blue eyes make him seem younger.

When Eddie turns around, he makes a valiant effort to clean himself up and look like he's not crying in a café, but it doesn't quite work.

"Sorry to disturb your coffee," he says.

"You didn't," Eddie assures him. "You okay?"

The almost-laugh Buck replies with sounds kind of like a joint dislocating.

"What didn't she believe?" Eddie asks instead.

After a moment of hesitation, Buck launches into a tawdry tale about a string of girls insisting he'd been sending them love letters, including one who'd apparently come to his place of work and slapped him over it, despite the fact Buck hasn't sent a single person love letters including his still-bloodily-recent ex.

"Which is about the point in the explanation where everyone stops believing me and ditches," Buck says. He looks between Eddie's still mostly full ceramic for-here mug and the door like he's expecting Eddie to drop his coffee and run. "And so no one apparently trusts me enough to help me figure out what the hell is going on."

Eddie did not know Buck fifteen minutes ago, but he's always been good at quick reads of a situation. And Buck, he's pretty sure, has zero understanding of how to lie convincingly.

"I'm here, aren't I?" he says. "Maybe I can help."

"R-really?" Buck asks. "Don't you have, like, I dunno, a life?"

Eddie shrugs. "Kid's already at school, and I don't have class today."

"You've got a kid?" Buck asks. "That's so cool. I love kids."

"I love this one," Eddie says. "I'm all he's got."

"I bet you're an awesome dad," Buck says. Eddie shrugs and he must look a little uncomfortable because Buck pivots. "What's your class in?"

"Fire academy," Eddie says. "I'm training to be a firefighter."

To his surprise, Buck's entire face lights up. "Seriously? I'm a firefighter, too!"

Eddie can't help but smile. "Well, then I think I'm like extra obligated to help out."

"Yeah?" Buck asks, and smiles back. "I'd like that."

It takes them the better part of a day and they do eventually convince one of Buck's shiftmates to help out, and in the end, after Chimney's gone home to shower extensively, Eddie offers to let Buck use his shower so he doesn't have to go back to his ex's apartment.

"You sure that's okay?" Buck asks.

"Yeah," Eddie says, steering Buck into his truck. "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

He smiles a little at his own reference and then catches sight of Buck's head tipped sideways in confusion.

"That's from something, isn't it?" Buck asks.

Eddie blinks at him. "Casablanca? The two guys walking away after Bogie's lost the girl?"

Buck stays confused. "That's in Morocco, right?"

"Okay," Eddie says. "You can use my shower, and then we're having movie night."

It is the first of many.

[911ficrecs]

i read a fic a bit back where it was told through like performance reviews. so bobby giving buck performance reviews, about 5 maybe but i’m not sure? it spanned several seasons from when buck started working to i think post lawsuit and now i just can’t find it

thank you!!

i'm thinking it could be this fic?

piece by piece, you filled the holes that were burned in me by Polish_Amber - 21,520, general

Summary: “Great,” Buck groaned, the image of Bobby standing on the rooftop and telling him ‘you’re done’ in that firm, no-nonsense tone filling his mind. He smacked his forehead against the table and groaned again.

A performance review.

Great. Just great.

(He didn’t see Hen and Chimney exchanging knowing smirks and he was still muffling his groans against the table when they went over to the kitchen to refill their coffee mugs and had a hushed conversation:

“Should we tell him that Bobby also asks for feedback?”

“Nah,” Hen replied mischievously. “I kind of want to hear what he’ll come up with on the spot.”)

--

5 times Bobby has feedback for Buck during his annual review, and the one time Buck gets a perfect score and has some feedback of his own.

(Or, the progression of Buck and Bobby's relationship as told by annual performance reviews.)