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For a second, when he hears her voice ring through the firehouse, Buck wonders if he’s lost his mind.
His hand, chopping carrots for dinner, slips on the knife and the sharp edge of the blade nicks his finger. If Buck wasn’t already looking down, seeing the dark red bloom from his skin, he doesn’t think he would have even noticed.
“Buck, you okay?” Bobby asks next to him, but he’s not—
He’s not really here anymore, he doesn’t think. All of the sudden, he finds himself thrown three years back to Boston, staring at her in the dark, watching her recoil at the mention of her husband, saying Hey, what if you came with me, thinking Please, I need you.
He hasn’t heard her voice since then. Where it used to be the one thing he could rely on, it’s become an aching absence, some kind of cold, empty vacuum in the back of his brain.
Still, Buck is certain that he’d never be able to forget it, the way it sounded sticking Band-Aids over his knees, the way it crackled over phone lines. They used to pull the covers over their heads, whispering in the middle of the night. Even as Bobby shakes his arm, trying to bring him out of his daze, Buck holds his breath, ears straining.
“Yeah, hi,” she says, and it’s—that’s her. There’s no way that isn’t her. “I’m—I’m looking for Evan Buckley?”
Downstairs, he hears Hen begin to reply, something like “Can I ask why?” but his mind is going in circles; It can’t be her, please let it be her as he scrambles to drop the knife and tears himself away from the kitchen island, barely managing to stop himself from tripping over his own feet as he sprints. Bobby makes some kind of surprised noise behind him, a few guys turn to stare at him from the couches, but he makes it to the railing, grabbing onto the bars with his hands shaking. He looks down, past the trucks, to the wide space by the entrance, and—
“Maddie?”
She looks away from Hen, startled, and her eyes find his immediately, like she could rattle off his precise coordinates at any given moment, the two of them connected by cardiac muscle tied in a shoe-lace double knot, the way she taught him on their front steps in May.
“Evan,” she says, voice all choked up, and Buck knows she’s already on the edge of tears because he is too. A Buckley sibling thing, they said, the way their eyes well up, and it feels like the strangest kind of coming home—strange because she hasn’t contacted him in years, home because she’s here.
Buck doesn’t waste another second. He races for the stairs, and tries not to choke on his heart in his throat.
See, despite appearances, there’s actually a lot that Buck doesn’t say.
The team has him down as a completely open book. Bobby especially seems to think that he’s got Buck all figured out. That’s fine. It’s exactly what Buck wants.
He talks, yeah. He talks near constantly. He just doesn’t speak all that often. Buck’s real good at not letting people notice the difference. Throw in some random, shallow story from that time he lived in Peru, mention that girl he slept with last week, ramble on and on about whatever obscure internet rabbit hole he found himself falling down at one a.m. the night before, and people generally don’t realise they don’t actually know that much about him. After all, he never shuts up. What is there he hasn’t told them about?
Well. His parents, for one. Hershey, Pennsylvania, for two. The scrapes he gave himself on purpose, the bones he bent until they broke. The motorcycle, the subsequent crash, for another few.
Maddie, his big sister, the one he hasn’t spoken to in three years, underlining it all. She’s the rough current, the common thread, colouring his life like taking permanent marker to a city skyline, drawing on stars and bright-burning office lights, and he hasn’t mentioned a word of her.
It’s not—look, it’s not like he’s forgotten about her, or moved on. It's not like he hates her, either. Her leaving—or rather, letting him leave on his own—ripped open a gigantic bloody hole in his life, one that he’s felt every day since like a chopped off limb, and he loves her so much it hurts. He doesn’t fault her for staying in Boston, and he’s long since stopped being angry about it. He’s figured by now that it was probably more complicated than she let on. Just…
It’s still painful to think about, is all. If he started talking about it, if he said one day over dinner I have a sister. She’s eight years older than me. She’s an ER nurse in Boston. She’s the kindest person I know, then he’d have to add Yeah, we’re close. No, I haven’t heard from her in three years. Yeah, I miss her, and then he’d start crying because yeah, he really fucking misses her. So why’d she leave? someone would ask, and Buck would have to say Because she married a guy, and then Why does that matter? and Because I don’t think he’s a good one. If he started talking about it, he’d end up tracing his life like the veins in his wrist, from Boston back to Pennsylvania back to Hershey back to Maddie? Why don’t Mom and Dad ever tuck me in? It’s always you; and then everyone would know that Evan Buckley has always been the type of person to be left behind.
He puts up a front, see—big, brash firefighter who’s been all over the Americas with his penchant for one-night-stands. The truth is that he leaves a little piece of himself in every person he sleeps with, every foreign bed he blinks awake in, one more It didn’t work out on his mile-long list. No one ever stops to think that all of his flings might be to his own detriment, something like self-inflicted wounds. He’s been bleeding for a while.
Now, though, it doesn’t even occur to him what anyone else may or may not be thinking as he practically flies down the stairs. He half-feels like he’s dreaming—any moment, the steps will fall away underneath him, or he’ll round the ladder truck only to find that there’s no one in the station, or he’ll see Doug standing there instead with that sharp grin that always set Buck on edge.
But he makes it without falling, landing on solid ground, and Maddie’s already running towards him when he turns the corner around the truck. He’s always been fast, and they reach each other within seconds that feel like they’re cutting out, white flickers on a black screen, and when Buck closes his arms around her shoulders, it’s—
He can’t—
He starts crying. So does Maddie. Her nails dig into his back, she’s holding him so tight. The top of her head just reaches his chin, and her hair still smells like the strawberry shampoo she’s always used, the one that sat next to the shower gel when they still shared a bathroom, and Buck thinks, You're really back. It feels like some frail part of his heart is clawing its way back to life, colour diffusing back into the deadened-grey tissue in a warm wave. He’s not sure how long they stay just like that. Buck doesn’t count. It’s been far too long since he last hugged his sister for him to care.
There's been a weight on his chest since that night in Boston, always reaching for his phone to call before remembering she wasn't going to pick—I wonder if Maddie’s working a graveyard shift, I wonder if it rained for her today, I wonder if she's watched that new TV show yet, and never getting an answer. All he had to go off was hope—that life was treating her well, that she found what she was looking for in nursing, that she was happy—but it usually felt like he was lying to himself. It was that weight that made him send the postcards as he jumped between states, desperate to cling.
But he can ask, now. He can ask, straight to her face. He doesn't have to guess. Tell me about the last three years.
She pulls away, eventually, just enough to bring her hand up to his cheek, and that’s when Buck finally actually looks at her. Immediately, that newly-revived part of his heart breaks open a little. He knew when he left her with Doug that he was right to be worried.
There’s a bruise over her cheekbone, purpling like blackberries under someone’s boot. It looks like it hurts. Her lip is cut. There are bags under her eyes like she hasn’t been sleeping. Buck takes it all in and it suddenly feels a little hard to breathe, heart pumping out of rhythm, as he tries hard not to imagine how exactly the injuries might have gotten there, what other ones exist that he can’t see. What did he do to her that he doesn’t know about?
“God, you’re grown,” she breathes.
Buck doesn’t think his appearance has changed all that much since the last time they saw each other, but lost years have a way of bending memories like that; or maybe she means the job, the uniform, the fact that he’s been in L.A. for over a year and still hasn’t ran off to another state. He sniffles, trying to keep his words coherent as he forces them through his throat. “You’re hurt.”
She gives him a small, sad smile. “Later,” she whispers, and Buck nearly protests, but she says, “Right now, just—give me a real hug,” and it’s almost like she never left at all.
Six foot two, and Buck still folds himself smaller easy as breathing, head on her shoulder as she pushes herself up as high as she can on her tip-toes, one hand in his hair. Buck has been to a lot of places—made half of a life in a good amount of them too—but this is where he’s always felt safest. His tense muscles relax as if on instinct.
“I’ve missed you,” she sighs.
“Missed you more,” he says into the space over her collarbone, like he could make the words a part of her if he spoke them closely enough.
“Sorry, but that’s literally impossible.”
“I can beat impossible.”
She laughs, short but her shoulders shake with it, and Buck can’t help but grin, face still hidden in the crook of her neck. “Yeah, you probably could.”
Her voice seems quieter than it used to be, but it sounds the same. Buck hears it in a thousand different memories—Time for bed and You're not in trouble and Let's get the hell out of here—and now he prints the rise and fall of it into this new one, the dips in the syllables and the spaces between the words. Yeah, you probably could.
“I’m so happy you're here,” he says. Understatement of the year.
There are questions he wants to ask. Why she's here, namely, seeing as he hasn't heard a thing from her ever since he left him to go his own way, but—he can just be glad that she is, for now.
“Me too. I was worried you wouldn't be on shift.”
Buck laughs. “I’m, like, always on shift.”
“Well, you'll have to tell me all about it. I want to hear the crazy firefighter stories.”
“I’ll trade you for the crazy ER ones.”
“Deal.”
There are bigger things they need to talk about first, obviously. How are you and How's your heart and A little sore, what about yours, but they slip into banter, into comfortable conversation like there was never any gap between them to begin with, like they only talked last yesterday. It's so easy to snap onto the same old wavelength, back together on one side. Their side. Buck feels like he's got his sister back.
“So,” he suddenly hears Bobby say from somewhere to the left of them, and it finally occurs to Buck that the two of them have been crying and hugging in the middle of the firehouse for longer than what is probably socially acceptable. He thinks they have a good reason, but still. “Are we ever going to be introduced?”
If possible, Buck grins wider, and leans away from Maddie, eyes opening back up to the bright daylight of the firehouse. Honestly, he’d almost entirely forgotten there was anyone else around. Bobby, Hen, and Chimney are bunched up next to the engine, watching with confused smiles.
“Maddie,” he says as she turns to face them, moving to stand next to him instead of in front, “meet my team. That’s Bobby, our captain, and Hen, and Chimney. Don’t ask.” He points to everyone as he names them. They all come closer to shake hands, though in Chim’s case, Hen has to kick him in the ankle to get him to move because he looks like he’s just seen the secrets of the universe revealed in front of him, which—Buck's not going to think about those implications.
“Team, meet Maddie,” he continues, looking back at Maddie, as if he has to double-check she’s really here. She meets his eyes, and smiles, and his chest feels warm, like the yellow glow-in-the-dark stars she got him when he was eight. “My sister.”
“Hi,” she says, all bright despite the bruises, and the others look genuinely happy to meet her, and—she came back to him, in the end. Buck thinks she’s going to stay this time.