AN: Sorry that this one is shorter, but I hope you all enjoy anyway, and please review :)
Everyone at the firehouse seemed nice and cool, especially Captain Bobby Nash. They even went to a Bruce Springsteen concert together.
However, he's only been a firefighter for four months and Buck still felt an emptiness and a desire to feel validated. And his colleagues were slowly starting to lose patience with his hot-headedness.
As a kid, he would have accomplished that by constantly getting hurt, but instead, he shifted to different methods…a method that made him appear to be a dick.
He constantly took advantage of his job as a firefighter in order to impress women. Every time he slept with someone, he felt complete…but then he would feel incomplete again after it was all over.
Sex was gratifying…and he kind of enjoyed being an attention whore, even doing it stupidly on the job and with the firetruck.
Seriously, Buck, he thought to himself. What the hell are you doing?
Eventually, Bobby finally had his last straw with him and fired him when he caught him having sex on the rooftop with Snake Girl.
Did he cry when he finally got back to his home? Yes, he did because he lost one thing that helped him feel satisfied. But he knew that he kind of deserved it, and he knew better than that because he was told at orientation that behavior like that was completely inappropriate.
He wanted to call Maddie and ask her what he should do, but she never answered his calls (stupid Doug). He couldn't tell his parents because he knew that they'd be super pissed.
He was definitely on his own now, and he knew that he needed to get his act together pronto if he was going to keep his next job.
Later, Bobby gave him a second chance when he helped Sergeant Grant with a home invasion. However, he had to promise to never do his shenanigans ever again because Bobby firing him was exactly what motivated him to take it down a notch…in a professional workplace that is…because he still had one-night stands outside of work.
At work, he acted like a tough firefighter, but at home, he was a dissatisfied 20-something who slept around.
After his reinstatement, he learned about the tougher part of being a firefighter, which was dealing with the people you weren't able to save, and his first moment was that poor man who let go while he was dangling from a roller coaster.
Bobby recommended a therapist for him, but he eventually ruined the relationship with her by sleeping with her, a habit that he used to help cope with the stress of being a firefighter. Classic Buck.
He loved his job, he really did, and it wasn't just because he got to be the tough guy, but also because he could actually help people and do some good for the world.
All he needed was a healthier coping mechanism that wasn't meaningless sex.
He did start to grow tired of just sleeping around and wanted to see if he could be in a committed romantic relationship again…and that feeling started popping up when he met 9-1-1 dispatcher Abby Clark.
Abby did help him with the home invasion and then they started communicating with each other more often.
Although they had a large age gap, an age difference that was bigger than the one he and Maddie had, he did kind of catch some romantic feelings for this woman.
It started off with regular phone calls, and then it became more and more face-to-face communication when he helped her look after her ailing mother with Alzheimer's. They officially became a couple after the disastrous Valentine's Day date that ended in a tracheotomy.
For awhile, being in a committed relationship with Abby did help him heal some of his emptiness…until her mother died and she decided to travel the world.
Even after Abby went off to Europe, he never stopped loving her, but then he realized that he eventually had to let things go with her when they started to grow apart.
Seeing Maddie again after she finally left Doug the Douchebag did help heal some of his emptiness, but he did worry for her safety and his own (and especially Chimney's) since she was in hiding.
After his break-up with Abby, he decided that he was no longer going to be the man who sought after sex for gratification (becoming Buck 2.0); he just didn't know how he was going to do that. Hanging out with Christopher, Denny, Harry, and some of his friend's kids (he really loved playing with children) did help him feel better at times (especially with Christopher, the new guy's son), but even that made him still feel incomplete and unsatisfied with his life.
Being a firefighter was his life, but he still wanted more even though on the outside, he seemed to have all of his shit figured out.
He eventually got into a new committed relationship with earthquake girl, or Ali, which was what her name was, and he thought she was going to become "the one".
For the next few months following, things seemed to be going fine and easy for him despite the difficulties his friends and sister were going through: Maddie and Chimney's trauma from Doug and Chimney's stabbing, Eddie losing his wife, and Bobby's suspension. Those issues were eventually resolved, but his world would come crashing down later.
But still, for him, he thought being a firefighter and all the time he spent with his friends and their adorable children was keeping him happy and he seemed to forget about dissatisfaction…until that fateful day in May of 2019.
To be continued...
And the next chapter is when shit is really going to start getting real.