It's a beautiful day, Los Angeles at it's finest, which feels strange to think when you're seeing a boy off to the hospital because his mother's been poisoning him. But it's something you'll remember even years later. The sun beating down on your face, the sky a clear crystalline blue outline around him, the sunshine making the cherry red paint of the trucks positively gleam. It's the kind of day that usually makes you glad that this is where you ended up landing and calling home.

Or maybe it's just him that makes this place home.

You think about it sometimes, the years spent wandering, zig-zagging the globe, and marvel at how perfectly the circumstances lined up, like dominoes poised to fall, bringing you to the place where you'd be directly in his path. You don't think about it a lot, you're a live in the moment and worry about the details later kind of guy after all. But occasionally you wonder what would have happened if you'd missed that bus, stepped off the curb a second later, seen college out to the end of the semester, stayed in Peru just a week longer, a day longer, would it have changed everything? Would it have meant never meeting him? You wonder sometimes how much of your meeting was simply down to chance and how much of it was the universe bringing you together.

He blanches as the mother calls out to her son, shaking his head even as the ambulance doors close, cutting off her voice. You can tell he's beating himself up, always beating himself up for not being able to do more, move quicker, predict the future and step in before anything goes wrong. You don't know how he can't see the impact he has on people.

Something inside you aches to go to him, say to hell with the woman who gets to call him hers and take him in your arms, ease his worry with your hands and your lips, erase the line in his brow and the downturn of his mouth. But you don't. You hold yourself back as you always do, because you'd never truly known self-restraint until you met him, and settle for soothing him with your words instead.

He's going to ride with the boy to the hospital and you're not surprised, you'd expect nothing less. He'll stay with the boy, and fight with everything he has to make sure he's safe, and think about him long after he's gone because that's just the way he is. That's the kind of man he is, caring about the people close to him with every inch of that heart you love so much. You just consider yourself lucky to be one of those people.

You're thinking about that, thinking about how it's getting harder and harder to watch him walk away, even if it's only temporary, when you hear the gunshot.

Gunfire is loud, shockingly so, something that has surprised you each of the handful of times you've witnessed it firsthand. But despite that, despite your experience with it, limited as it might be, the sound doesn't register at first. Maybe it's the beautiful day, it's hard to imagine something so terrible happening on a day where the sun shines so brightly. Maybe it's that the patient is loaded up and ready to go, you're supposed to be done, the danger's supposed to be over. Maybe it's just that you're looking right at him, how could anything go wrong when you're looking at him?

Whatever the reason, it takes you a long moment to realise that something's wrong.

Then he staggers, then something wet splatters across your face, then his mouth parts in surprise, then you watch as his uniform grows damp from the spreading blood. Then all sound fades away as you realise he's been shot.

There's this great deafening silence in your ears like the first time you saw the ocean, when you ignored the cries of warning and ran headfirst into the water and were instantly sucked under its surface.

A deafening silence in your ears like you're a young boy all over again, on the precipice of doing something reckless just to get someone to notice you.

A deafening silence in your ears like you're standing in the middle of a five-alarm fire with no way out.

But through that silence there's him. Eyes, the exact same shade of brown as the hot chocolate your sister used to make, lift slowly and find yours, a question in them like he's waiting for you to explain what just happened. Lips, that you've imagined the taste of a hundred times before, come together, half-forming words that you can't hear. Hands, rough and calloused and sure that you often long to fold between your own, twitch and reach for you as though he's hoping you'll steady him.

But you're frozen.

You're frozen, and he's falling, and you can't catch him.

The silence crests as he hits the ground and a body slams into you, crushing you up against the side of the firetruck. Sound rushes back in, the captain yelling, people screaming, and your fingers spasm against the hot metal, even as you're yanked down to the road, someone's hand pressing your face to the tarmac.

You can hear the crackle of the radio, taste the terror in the air, and some distant part of you screams to get up, to help, to do something. But you can't. All you can do is lie there and watch as his chest rises and falls with laboured breaths, life draining from him with every passing second.

The blood that runs across the road and pools isn't the bright red splash like in the action movies you used to watch but a dark, deep crimson, and the smell of it - the sharp, metallic scent enters the space between you, invades your nose and wrenches a noise of despair from you. He shifts at the sound, hands twitching and reaching towards you despite what might as well be an ocean of distance separating you. Your own hand moves of its own accord, scraping across the road, wishing you could touch him, run your hands over his face, pull him to safety, or cover his body with your own.

Those warm eyes are dark with pain but find yours regardless, and there's an intensity there, like he wants to tell you something. But you don't know what it is, you can't read what's in his eyes, what words his lips are trying to form, you're too consumed with the burning need to claw your way across the road. The only thing holding you back is the hand still clenched around the collar of your shirt.

You hope he can see the love in your eyes, hope he knows how you feel. Regret battles the fear thrumming through you and you wish you'd said, just said it one time. You wish you'd told him everything. And now you might lose him and he doesn't even know.

You can't.

You can't lose him.

His hand moves one final time, one final attempt to reach you and the sound that emerges from you is closer to a sob. He finally blinks, his gaze going hazy and unfocused, and you beg your throat to work. You have to tell him. But it's too late, and his eyes flicker shut, his name finally coming to your lips.

"Eddie."

I was about to say ta-da the first of my hiatus fics but technically 9-1-1 isn't even on hiatus yet. Either way, ta-da I actually managed to finish a fic within a couple of days rather than procrastinating it for months like I usually do.

I'm hoping most of you stuck with me to the end, I know 2nd person can be a bit of a weird POV to get into. I don't know what it was about this fic, I've experimented with 2nd person like this only once before, but something about this fic demanded it be written in Buck's 2nd person. Every time I tried to start it in 3rd it just didn't work. I know it might not be everyone's thing but I'm hoping most of you enjoyed it anyway.

I kind of have a follow up planned in the same style but from Eddie's POV? But I'm not sure when I'll get that out because I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need to rewatch Eddie Begins to get it exactly how I want it. So it might be a couple of weeks before life slows down enough for me to get around to it. I also have a BuckTaylor coda planned for this episode as well in case anyone likes that ship as well.

As always, I feel like there's more to say but I really can't think of anything else. I hope you liked the fic, please please please drop a comment below if you did, or even if you didn't leave me some constructive criticism I'd love to hear it!