Word Count: 4,876
Warnings/Spoilers: This chapter contains a nightmare and some references to scenes/images in the tsunami episodes.

Seeing Christopher was usually a balm to even the worst sort of horrors on the job, but Buck knew that Chris' bright grin and giggles didn't have the same impact on his smile or his anxiety. Every time he looked at Chris, he could see Lucy for a brief flash. He kept thinking about how the little girl had lost her mother and Buck hadn't even been able to go to the hospital and visit like he'd promised. By tomorrow, she'd probably be discharged and lost to the system.

He remembered Bobby's words to him, that he was meant to leave the victims at the door, but a kid like her… It reminded him of Christopher in the tsunami, and sometimes he looked at Chris and could see that giant wave coming towards them, breath stuttering in his lungs as raw terror enveloped him all over again. He could still recall how his first instinct had been to save Chris, to save Eddie's son, and to hell with his own safety or life because he didn't matter to anyone as much as Christopher mattered to Eddie.

And then when he'd lost Chris off the truck, when he'd been slammed and swirled around in the water and started wondering if he wasn't meant to just give up and die-

"Hey." Eddie's hand brushed against his shoulder as he returned to the living room with a bowl of popcorn, the click-clack of Chris' crutches in the corridor as he fetched a DVD offering a few moments to talk. The suddenness of the touch just about made Buck leap out of his skin and the furrow between Eddie's eyebrow confirmed his distance had been more obvious than he would have liked. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere special like Hawaii or Paris," he joked but Eddie was still frowning at him as he set the popcorn on the table and sat on the couch beside Buck, just enough distance between them that they weren't touching and yet he could still feel the warmth and life of Eddie's body and he wondered – not for the first time – why Eddie continued to let him come around, or look after Chris. Claims of 'trust' felt like such a fickle concept when Eddie's son had nearly died because of Buck.

"You've been through a lot the past few months-" Eddie started but Buck waved the words away, aware that Christopher was on the return trip judging by the sounds in the hall.

"Haven't we all? I'm fine. Honestly." He smiled, hoping it reached his eyes for the first time all day, but Eddie looked unconvinced and Buck decided he needed to obtain some space to derail the entire conversation before it gathered too much momentum. "I'm gonna use the toilet before we start so I don't interrupt it."

It was a lame excuse but Eddie let him go. Buck ruffled Chris' hair as he passed, making Chris giggle and protest with a "Buuuuuuck!" that usually made a smile cross his lips but now…

He shook his head, closing the door of the bathroom and pressing his head to the timber with a deep inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

"Get it together, Buckley," he muttered to himself, pressing the heel of his hands into his eyes and trying to shake off the exhaustion that felt like it had been carved into his bones, or the jumble of emotions about Lucy and Beth that he couldn't dislodge from his heart, or the suffocating feeling of water seeping into his lungs and the panic of not knowing where Christopher was. This was the hardest part about being forced to hang out with someone from the house after an emotionally gruelling day: he had no opportunity to decompress. He'd rather just go to a bar until his eyes were crossed and he couldn't stand anymore, or look at the TV with a bottle of something strong in his hand in his apartment while silent tears rolled down his cheeks. Trying to keep up the pretence that he was okay was exhausting, and he was tired enough already after another shitty night of sleep because the nightmares had been terrible since getting stuck in that elevator.

But pretences were his entire thing right now so he flushed the toilet and washed his hands, splashed some cool water on his face and avoided looking at himself in the mirror. If he did, he tended to linger too long over the stranger that stared back. At some point during the lawsuit, he'd stopped knowing who he was. He'd never seen himself as someone that would sue the LAFD, or sue anyone that he considered family. Not when the job had been a lifeline when he'd needed it the most. He hadn't expected to screw his teammates over either, abandoning them when maybe they'd needed him too.

So that guy in the mirror…

He'd first noticed that it was something about his eyes. They weren't as blue anymore, like the water had stolen the colour along with his ability to sleep. And then the lavender had started seeping in beneath his eyes, contrasting with the pallid colour of his cheeks.

When he'd realised his skin no longer fit properly, he stopped looking at himself. He knew he wasn't the same person he was when he'd started at the 118 before he'd met Abby. She'd changed him, in ways he hadn't even been able to trace until now, when he was forced to evaluate if Buck 2.0 was someone he could be satisfied with or if he needed to shed that too. After the bombing, and the clot, and the tsunami, he felt like some sort of Buck 2.5 or 3.0, someone that looked like him but no longer functioned like him. A robot or something out of some Body Snatchers film. When he looked at himself in a mirror, he saw someone that logically his brain knew was him and yet emotionally, could've been some guy on the street with blond hair and pale blue eyes and a birthmark over his left eye that he'd never seen before.

Chris was curled under Eddie's arm in the middle of the couch by the time he returned to the living room, the menu for Inside Out glowing on the screen.

"What's this one about then?" he said as he settled on Chris' other side, squashing himself against the arm of the couch and letting Chris spread his feet into Buck's lap.

"Dealing with your feelings," Chris said with his goofy grin that ordinarily rivalled the sun's power on the darkest of days.

Buck made some sort of acknowledging hum, ignoring how he could feel Eddie's eyes on him, and absently started rubbing Chris' feet and ankles so that he had a way to disguise his trembling hands.

The movie was…enjoyable, he supposed, but it occurred to Buck while he was watching it that beneath all the bright colours and sassy dialogue that his emotions were just as out of whack as the kid in the film.

As a firefighter, he had spent a lot of time suppressing fear. It was a major hazard to the job if he started second-guessing his safety or decisions when facing a wall of flames, but since the tsunami, he knew it better than his own reflection. He couldn't even think about having a bath without breaking into a cold sweat and the thought of being near a pool or the ocean made him start to hyperventilate if he wasn't more vigilant when his thoughts started to drift. In the week after the tsunami, he'd struggled with actions as basic as showering or washing his hands. He'd nearly ripped his bathroom sink apart when he'd noticed a dripping sound in the dead of night because no amount of pillows over his head had managed to block it out.

And that didn't even take into account how he'd felt after the clot, or the truck, or his inability to cope with Ali breaking up with him, or the loneliness of rehab, or the desperation to reach out to Eddie because of Shannon's death but being too selfishly trapped in his own head to pick up the phone.

He could also recognise that, though he lacked the constant tears, he empathised with Sadness in the film. He could barely remember what true joy felt like, rubbing at his chest for the echoes of emotions that had abandoned him long ago. Without joy, with the oppressive sadness and fear taking control of him lately, he'd been searching for ways to make everything numb and yet simultaneously escape the void that surrounded him. Maybe that meant he made stupid decisions, like rushing rehab steps or sending Eddie with a vic before an elevator started to flood or running towards an exploding car, but he needed to operate as normal to everyone on the outside lest he tip them off about the emotional turmoil on the inside.

"What'd you think?" Chris asked, wiggling his toes in Buck's hands.

And, of course, he couldn't voice any of his true thoughts to Chris. Not when Eddie was at the other end of the couch, staring at him like he was transparent and everything he thought and felt was on display.

"It's a good way of presenting complex psychological things to kids," he quipped, tickling Chris' feet as the kid squealed and wriggled into a ball in his father's lap and then made pleas for pizza with big, pleading eyes that Eddie succumbed to without much of a fight.

While Eddie went to get a takeaway menu for some place a few blocks away that delivered the requested dinner, Chris reached out his leg and pushed it into Buck's thigh. "Buck? Why are you so sad?"

Buck blinked, tearing his attention from the rolling credits to the kid who had become an unexpectedly important part of his world in the last twelve months. Chris' eyes were large behind his glasses, his childlike curiosity turned on Buck. And for a moment, for a fleeting flash of a moment that stabbed through him and twisted his stomach and made his heart thump painfully, he remembered finding those red glasses but Christopher was gone. He could remember putting them around his neck and feeling like they were a millstone threatening to drag him beneath the surface of the water to his death. As much as they'd been a reminder to keep going like Chris had suggested, they had also been a heady reminder of how much of a failure he was when he'd lost Chris to the second surge.

For a moment, Buck looked at him and found it hard to breathe through the deluge of memories that saturated him to the core.

"I'm not…sad," he eventually said but Christopher shook his head, pushing his foot firmer and more insistently against Buck's thigh.

"Yes, you are. You're sad like Dad was after Mom died."

Buck felt his breath catch in his lungs as he stared at Chris in disbelief because this kid was seeing straight through all his defences that either all the adults in their lives were blind to or chose to ignore. Buck wasn't sure what was worse. He wasn't sure how he'd handle being let down by his family at the 118 again because they didn't really want him working with them anymore.

"I-" Buck paused and then held open his arms to Chris, who shuffled on the couch and then willingly fell into his lap. It felt comforting to hold Chris, to nuzzle his nose into his small shoulder and inhale his warmth and life. It helped remind some part of his brain that this boy was alive, reducing the size of the monsters that existed in his head after so many nightmares where Chris had never been found…or worse.

"You know how…how sometimes you might have a bad day at school and you don't want to talk to your dad about it?" he began, tracing a hand down Christopher's back.

Chris nodded, his hand fiddling with the shirt covering Buck's chest. "Yeah. Sometimes I feel like Sadness and Anger all mixed together but then I talk to Dad and we get ice cream and I feel like Joy comes back. D'you think you just need to talk to my Dad and have some ice cream?"

Buck felt his throat tighten at the way Chris was looking at him, eyes round with hope, and he wished he had the childlike optimism to solve his problems with something as simple as talking and eating ice cream. He remembered Eddie's words the morning of the tsunami, how Chris didn't allow anything to get him down, and Buck wished he was more like that. After the tsunami, he'd tried to follow Eddie's advice. He'd tried to avoid complaining about all the feelings gathering in his chest, all the thoughts that built in his head. After the lawsuit had hit, he'd been forced to hold them inside. And after the lawsuit was over, he didn't feel like anyone really cared to listen. But when a perceptive kid like Chris saw straight through all that and was pointing out that he was sad… Well.

"Yeah, I- Maybe," he conceded quietly, pressing a kiss among Christopher's curls.

Eddie wandered back into the living room with the menu, catching the way Chris was curled into Buck's lap and smiling that small, soft smile that Buck only ever saw him use when Chris wasn't looking and – though Buck wasn't sure – he didn't think Eddie wanted him seeing either.

After a spirited discussion about which pizzas they'd order – Christopher insisted on no mushrooms and Eddie declared pineapple on pizza was a travesty, while Buck thought both of them were ridiculous and that pizza should have everything possible on it – Chris then decided they should play Monopoly for the rest of the night.

And though Buck would probably have preferred to tune everything out and watch another movie, he wasn't going to deny Christopher anything.

"I was starting to think he'd never settle for bed because you're here," Eddie said as he returned to the living room with a bottle of beer in each hand, passing one to Buck as he flopped onto the couch.

"I did offer to leave, like…" Buck checked his watch. "Two hours ago."

"And risk you having a brain bleed while you were driving home? I'm not sure who would kill me first – Hen, Bobby or your sister."

Buck rolled his eyes and twisted the cap off the beer. "If I was going to deteriorate, I would've done so by now, don't you think?"

Eddie shrugged, picking at the label on his bottle with his thumbnail. "You think I'm willing to risk it if you're wrong?"

The quietness in Eddie's question caught Buck off-guard because there was an element of warm teasing and gentle care in Eddie's tone that he hadn't heard since before the lawsuit, since before the tsunami. Maybe even before the truck had crushed his leg.

"We risk our lives every day," he pointed out instead, looking for the diversion because it was easier than reading into what Eddie had said. Even though Buck tended to read into Eddie so much he could probably declare he had started his very own Eddie Diaz Library.

"Buck," Eddie sighed and there was so much there, so much caught in that singular word, that Buck looked away from Eddie and focused instead on a spot on the wall across the room. "That's not- Yes, we do, but- If something happened to you tonight because you were alone, when you were meant to be here and I could've done something-"

"Diaz, if you keep talking like that, people will think you care about me." He tried to make it light and teasing but his heart still did an odd little jumping thing that made Buck wonder if it was attached to marionette strings.

"You're important to Christopher. Of course I care about you."

And it was said so matter-of-fact, with an implied 'duh' at the end of it, that Buck hoped the sound Eddie hadn't audibly made covered for the sound of his heart cracking. Because that's what it boiled down to, didn't it? Buck was important to Chris but to Eddie… To Eddie, their friendship was still etched with so much fragility and a degree of distance that Buck could be in his presence and still feel alone.

It hadn't always been like this, he knew that in his bones, but the lawsuit had changed everything and Eddie… Eddie was the one who remained the most aloof in their interactions lately. Eddie might say he forgave Buck, and he said he trusted Buck with Christopher, and he said he had Buck's back, but there was something missing, some sort of certainty that had once been embedded within his words and actions, and no amount of errant touches to Buck's shoulder or verbal assurances had soothed the anxiety Buck felt. At the end of the day, he knew he'd lost Chris in the water and they'd both almost died. After that, he didn't feel worthy of anything resembling certainty in Eddie's convictions towards him. Eddie said a lot of kind things but Buck was okay with the fact that Eddie didn't truly mean them anymore. He'd never felt like he'd deserved them in the first place. Who trusted someone with his history around kids, anyway?

"I think I'd like to get some sleep now," he lied, knowing he resented sleep almost as much as it resented him, and he knew Eddie was surprised because they'd only been sitting together for less than ten minutes and there was a time they'd talk for hours after tough shifts, working their way through several bottles of beer each until the feelings no longer hurt and their heads were lolling with fatigue, but his skin crawled with discomfort at all the feelings and memories and thoughts he was trying to keep buried. Saying he wanted to sleep was the best way he knew to get Eddie to leave him alone. "It's been a long day and all that."

"Yeah." Eddie peeled a section of label off his bottle. "How are you handling it?"

"It's just another call, right?" He shrugged and settled his barely-touched bottle on the table, deciding to ferret out his toothbrush from his gym bag beside the couch just to reinforce his decision to pretend to sleep. "They don't always go our way. We both know that."

"And physically? Has your back bruised?"

Buck knew his shoulders were sore but he could ignore it, parcel it into a box and shove it alongside all the other things he didn't want to feel. "I haven't looked."

"Do you want me to-"

"There's nothing you could do even if it was bruised," he interrupted and he knew from Eddie's awkward silence that he'd probably spoken too harshly. Still, he'd already had Hen fuss over him enough today and knowing he only 'mattered' to Eddie because he was important to Chris made it difficult to remember how to filter the emotions out of his words that same way that Eddie did.

"Okay, well I- You know where my room is if you start feeling unwell during the night," Eddie said, rising from the couch and padding out of the room without a backwards glance. It made Buck feel emptier than usual, realising how much he was able to push away someone that he'd once considered his best friend and was now…something he didn't even know how to label with his head or his heart.

He brushed his teeth and swapped his jeans for sweatpants. He could sleep in his LAFD t-shirt but he still pulled the neck of his shirt aside, wincing at the blossom of colour across his shoulders that no doubt swirled down his back. Hopefully he hadn't hit his head so badly that he had some sort of bleed, but he hadn't had a headache or any sort of dizziness throughout the day that he could ascribe to anything beyond his regular anxiety so he supposed that boded well.

When he returned to the Diaz living room, there was a blanket and a couple of pillows settled on the couch but no sign of Eddie. Buck reminded himself it was a mundane action, one made out of necessity rather than because Eddie really cared. Still, he held the pillow and blankets to his nose and inhaled deeply, relishing the traces of Eddie's scent in the fabric that he hadn't really had in months because Eddie didn't really come near him anymore.

And even though he didn't want to sleep, even though closing his eyes was more unpleasant than thinking about a bath or the ocean, eventually his eyes fluttered closed because he was simply too exhausted to try to stay awake.

There was so much blood and he was drowning in it.

Everywhere he looked, his vision was surrounded by red. He couldn't tell what was up or what was down, but he knew he'd lost something important in the red that pushed and pulled his body like a ragdoll. There was a high-pitched tinny sound in his ear that almost sounded like a scream, but it was so distant that he couldn't tell which direction it came from.

His hand caught on something solid and when he peered through the murky redness, he realised it was a signpost. He blinked, struggling to hold his breath because he needed to find the surface of all the blood, and then it flashed through his head – Christopher! He'd lost Christopher. He had to find-

He opened his mouth to scream the boy's name but instead blood spilled into his lips, flooding his throat and lungs and making him choke and tear at his chest, trying to get it out because he needed to find Christopher but maybe it was too hard, maybe he wasn't worthy, maybe someone else would-

"Buck."

His eyes snapped open and he heaved a bunch of spluttering breaths, clutching at his throat and his chest as the blood-red vision clouded the edge of the room which wasn't his room and he was so disoriented that he couldn't tell where he was and-

"Hey. Hey. You're okay. Look at me, c'mon."

Fingers pressed into his shoulder and his eyes gradually travelled towards a face with rumpled hair and confused brown eyes and it took a moment or two before awareness seeped into his brain, before he realised he'd been having another nightmare and this – he hoped – was reality. Seeing Eddie made him remember falling asleep on Eddie's couch, which helped him recognise Eddie's living room, which led to recalling the reason he was at Eddie's in the first place.

"Buck?" Eddie's thumb moved, firm against his collarbone, and something about the way he spoke or was looking at Buck made him feel as though he might've been crouching by the couch for a while trying to wake him up.

"I-" His voice cracked and he swallowed, realising for the first time how badly his hands were trembling against his throat and chest. He blinked several times, trying to get rid of the sensation of drowning in blood out of his head even though his mouth tasted faintly coppery. Maybe he'd bitten his lip again. "I'm okay."

"Like hell you are," Eddie said, a line forming between his brows. "I know what a nightmare looks like. I've woken Christopher enough times. What happened?"

But Buck just shook his head, sitting up and ridding Eddie's hand off his shoulder, rubbing at his face and scratching through his hair and wishing he could be anywhere else than here and facing Eddie after a nightmare that had left him feeling rattled. "It's fine."

"No, it's really, really not. Do they happen often?"

When Buck didn't immediately respond, Eddie's breath whistled through his teeth and the weight of the couch shifted as Eddie sat behind him, a hand brushing over his shoulder that Buck immediately tried to shrug away.

"Buck-"

"Don't," he said, tangling his fingers into his hair and tugging sharply so that the pain could ground him in something more concrete than the racing thoughts and racing feelings and racing breaths and racing heartbeats that he couldn't seem to ever catch up with. "I don't need-"

"I took Chris to get evaluated when he kept having nightmares after the tsunami," Eddie interrupted, his voice steadier than Buck's jumbled thought process and failed attempts to string together coherent sentences. "And I know how I changed after I returned from being deployed. I know how difficult sleeping was and-"

"I don't need the lecture," Buck finally bit out, still struggling to get enough oxygen into his lungs to stop his heart leaping through his ribcage and splattering on the floor of Eddie's living room. Which would just expose more blood. Which nearly made his stomach revolt and heave whatever remained in it from dinner.

"This isn't a lecture." Eddie's hand was light but insistent against his back, fingertips curved around Buck's tender shoulder. "This is me saying it's okay to not be okay."

But Buck was okay. Truly. People had died in that tsunami. He would know. He'd seen them float past in a raft of tangled limbs while he grasped Christopher to his chest and tried to shield him from seeing the worst of it.

"Buck, you had three near-death experiences in only a handful of months," Eddie said and even though Buck didn't want to think about any of it, when it was said so bluntly… "When I realised what Christopher's nightmares were about, I told him it's okay to be sad. He's gone through his own trauma this year, and so have you."

Trauma? Buck wouldn't view it like that. Some unfortunate experiences close together which-

"You can talk about it, you know," Eddie continued and Buck shook his head, because he couldn't. Not to Eddie, who would just go and tell Bobby. Not to his sister, because Maddie would tell Chimney who would tell Bobby. Not to Hen, who would listen and care but still tell Bobby. He had no one. And he wasn't about to find a therapist again and screw a therapist again. He had to learn to manage himself because he couldn't afford for Bobby to bench him. Again.

"I don't need to talk about it," he said, getting to his feet and letting Eddie's hand slide off his body. His skin felt heated from the touch but he refused to pay attention to it. "There's nothing to talk about so I'd appreciate it if you'd just stop trying to involve yourself in things that aren't about you."

He grabbed his bag and decided leaving was his best – and only – option. He'd go home, or he'd go for a run, or he'd have a few drinks to quell the buzzing in his brain and the hurt in his heart. He just knew he couldn't be around Eddie anymore. He knew he couldn't unravel any of his feelings because he had spent too much time wrapping them up and shoving them away until they no longer hurt.

"Buck," Eddie hissed as he followed Buck down the corridor, where Buck collected his shoes from beside the door and his keys from the small side table. "You don't have to deal with this alone."

Buck dared to glance at Eddie as he opened the front door, all his defences raised and blocking out every messy feeling he wished he could carve out of his blackened heart. "I don't know why you're so hell-bent on thinking something is wrong."

"Then why are you leaving?"

It made Buck pause on the landing, gazing into the semi-darkness of the middle of the night. His heart twisted and his stomach churned but when his lawyer had told him he'd need to stop talking to anyone from the firehouse, he'd become good at shoving down all his feelings and the desperate need to talk to his best friend about everything that was haunting him.

Once he'd seen Eddie's furious eyes at the grocery store, once he knew that whatever trust Eddie had felt towards him in regards to Chris was gone, once he knew how exhausting he was to listen to, it had been easier to extinguish the urge to reach out. He'd buried his feelings for Eddie's friendship so far down that he just felt sad when he was around Eddie now, an overwhelming sense of miserable that was easier to deal with. Eddie might say he was 'forgiven' but he'd grown sick of having his heart wrenched all over his chest when Eddie tended to avoid making eye contact and rarely smiled at him after the lawsuit.

"Because there's no reason for me to stay," Buck said resolutely, descending the steps of Eddie's porch and getting into his truck. He knew Eddie was still standing in the doorway with his arms crossed when Buck pulled away from the curb but he didn't look at him.

He wasn't sure he'd keep it together if he did.

~TBC~