Ready Made Relationship

Maybe I'm Not As Happy As I Thought I Was

If there was one thing Buck was good at, it was acting fine. Buck had learned young how to cake over bruises with makeup, how to paint on a plastic smile because his parents were having friends over for a dinner he apparently already ate, how to silence his anxiety until he was alone.

So, there Buck was, in a random layby, sobbing with his arms twined tightly around his waist.

He'd volunteered to follow Hen and Eddie in his own vehicle to help out with the wildfires in Texas. He didn't feel comfortable being so far away from his jeep. His jeep was his safe space, not the 118 Firehouse where he still felt the near constant need to apologise for past mistakes, or Eddie's where he had once felt so loved and accepted. He didn't even have his loft to fall back on now that Albert was constantly sticking it in Veronica on their shared couch. Sure, maybe he could go to Bobby and Athena's but the older man had begun to overwhelm Buck with his overprotective nature, almost barring him from helping out in Texas just because he himself couldn't go, and it had scared Buck off.

So, there Buck was, gasping for breath and shaking in his jeep.

Buck was panicking because, for the first time in a long time, someone was excited to see him.

TK and Owen had been texting him almost non-stop ever since he'd let them know he was coming to Texas to help out.

He'd met the pair years ago in New York. TK had been thirteen at the time, and Buck had been seventeen.

He'd gone to New York specifically to end his life, but Owen had spotted his intentions from a mile away. The old man hadn't even been on shift that night. He'd simply seen a boy crushed under the weight of the world climbing up a fire escape. Buck had chosen a 20-storey hotel figuring, at the time, that he wouldn't survive a fall of that magnitude. He hadn't been aware of his shadow until it wrapped its arms around him tight and held on for grim death when Buck tried to make a run for the edge of the building.

For two months after that, Owen and TK had taken care of Buck. He'd been unresponsive for the first couple of days, but once he started responding to their kind treatment with soft smiles and warm cheeks, they only lavished him with more.

Buck was something of an older brother to TK and quite like a son to Owen. To the point where the pair had, not irregularly, holiday-ed wherever Buck was living at the time so that they could lavish him with that same sugary sweet attention once more. They'd understood that he had to leave when he'd told them, but Buck knew that it hurt them. It hurt him, too.

He knew that they were waiting to lavish him with more of their love and affection than he could possibly accept, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it. He'd been protecting them from the things that had happened in his life as of late, of course they knew that he'd been crushed by a ladder truck, they knew about the pulmonary embolism and the tsunami. They even knew about the lawsuit.

However.

Buck had always excelled in the art of brushing of his own traumas as though they hadn't happened. He pretended religiously until he almost forgot about them. Which brought him to what they didn't know.

They didn't know that he had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. They didn't know about the severe PTSD. They didn't know that he was passively suicidal.

And.

They definitely didn't know about the panic attacks or the nightmares that woke him up and forced screams out of him that were nearly inhuman. They didn't know about his new tendency of finding ledges and just sitting on them, wondering what the asphalt below would feel like if he fell.

"They don't have to know." Buck muttered. He wiped at his cheeks aggressively to remove all traces of tears that lingered. His sight was still a little misty but not bad enough to keep him from driving safely. His breathing was considerably slower, and his posture straight, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel as he put the jeep in gear.