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Despite what Buck’s pretty sure a lot of people think – if only based on the whole “cowboy in Montana” and “deployed to Afghanistan” things – neither he nor Eddie are exactly what anyone would call rugged outdoors-men. The only hiking they really do is up in the Hollywood Hills, on ready-built trails, and the one time they took Chris camping, they had their first big fight trying to put up the tent, then got lost in the woods looking for the lake the next day.
They never even found the lake, in the end.
The end result of which is that, for all that they’re both perfectly competent at firefighting outside the city – even at finding lost hikers, which is bizarrely easier than finding large bodies of water – they’re generally more likely to be found exploring nature when it’s well signposted and has pre-existing trails.
They’ve got 48 hours off, seven in the morning on Wednesday to seven in the morning Friday. Chris, obviously, is in school, but the heatwave that’s been terrorizing the city for the last week and a half has finally broken, and the lure of being outdoors without feeling like he’s going to melt into the tarmac was too much for Buck to resist.
“I don’t know why we can’t just go to the beach,” Eddie grumbles when Buck swings by to pick him up, like he wasn’t the one to suggest the Griffith Park trail when Buck suggested a hike in the first place. He’s dressed for hiking: soft khakis, lightweight T-shirt, the floppy sunhat Chris brought back for him from Texas, and the pack he swings into the back of the Jeep has the weight of several water bottles to it.
“Everyone’s going to be at the beach.” Buck hands over the coffee he picked up for Eddie on the way and swings back onto the road.
“Everyone’s going to be out on the trails,” Eddie says. He’s wrong – Angelinos know not to hit the beach in a heatwave, even if tourists never learn, but they all pile down there as soon as the heat breaks, especially as the year heads into fall. It’s not worth arguing though, not when the sun is shining and Buck’s driving out of LA with the radio on and his best friend sipping coffee next to him like none of the events of the spring and summer ever happened.
The parking lot at the start of the trail is about half-full when they arrive, and Buck immediately gets distracted by a floppy eared spaniel that comes bounding over to say hello, quickly followed by the owner, a man about his own age, dressed for running in short-shorts and a tank top that shows off his abs. “Sorry,” he says, catching the dog’s collar and clipping on the leash. “I should really put the leash on in the car, but he always manages to get tangled up when I’m on the freeway and it’s a whole -” He cuts himself off, laughing a little. “This is Discus.”
“Hi, Discus.” Buck ruffles the dog’s ears, lets Discus lick his hand and snuffle at his pockets, which only contain trail mix. “That’s not for dogs.”
“Buck?” Eddie’s out of the Jeep, pack settled on his shoulders, holding Buck’s out to him.
“Right, thanks.” Discus’ owner turns his smile onto Eddie, ups the wattage of it a little when he gets a good look at him. Eddie gives back his professional firefighter smile in return, nudging Buck’s pack towards him again. “We should let you go. Nice to meet you, Discus.”
“You, too,” Discus’ owner says, mostly to Eddie, before he heads off at a slow jog.
“He was checking you out,” Buck tells Eddie, settling his pack and checking he locked the Jeep.
Eddie shrugs. “Not my type.”
He says that every time Buck points out that a guy’s checking him out or hitting on him, which Buck has taken to doing since Eddie, slumped exhausted in the passenger seat of the Jeep after a therapy session, said, “I think I might be gay. Or bisexual. Or maybe Shannon’s the only woman I could ever have fallen in love with,” and then wouldn’t say anything else about it until after Chris was back from Texas.
“He had a cute dog though.” Buck hasn’t tried dating again since things with Tommy ended; it got so hard with their shifts, too hard, in the end, and they’ve stayed friends, sort of, but Tommy was Eddie’s friend first, and it’s kind of awkward, now, especially when Buck, at least, really liked Tommy and still kind of wishes they could have made it work.
He doesn’t let himself think too hard about whether it’s Tommy he misses, or just being in a relationship that felt right in a way that nothing has since Abby.
Nothing except Eddie, anyway, and for all the intensity of their relationship, it’s a friendship, not… anything else. Which is fine.
Obviously.
“Discus is a weird name for a dog,” Eddie says, like that settles things, and just shakes his head when Buck points out that the dog could have been called that when the guy got him.
They walk the start of the trail in comfortable silence. Despite the number of cars in the lot, the trail isn’t too busy, mostly joggers and dog walkers going faster than Eddie and Buck’s gentle stroll. He can hear birds in the trees around them, but he can’t be bothered to dig out the app on his phone to try to identify them.
“You know there was a mountain lion sighting a couple of weeks ago?” Buck asks when the quiet starts to get to him.
“I did not know that,” Eddie says. “And I was more comfortable not knowing that, as well.”
“I’ve never seen one.”
“Good for you.”
“Don’t you kind of want to, though?” Buck likes cats, would definitely get one if his landlord wasn’t so adamantly opposed. “Not up close or anything.”
When he glances over, Eddie’s giving him a very judgmental look. “Do you know how many people are attacked by mountain lions?”
“About one a year in North America,” Buck says. “And only 29 have been fatal in the last hundred years.”
“I’m not sure that’s as comforting as you think it is,” Eddie says dryly. “I -”
Whatever he was going to say gets lost when they round a bend in the trail and hear something rustling in the undergrowth. They both freeze.
“If that’s a mountain lion,” Eddie says, very quietly, “I’m going to push you down and run for my life.”
“It’s not a mountain lion,” Buck says, even though with their luck it definitely could be. “They don’t rustle.”
He’s proved right a second later – a squirrel emerges from the undergrowth, running straight towards them. Buck manages to say, “See?” before the squirrel, instead of going around them like he was expecting it to, runs straight up Buck’s leg.
It stops at Buck’s hip, head tipped to one side as it contemplates him, expression suggesting it’s thinking much the same thing as Buck is: Nothing in my life thus far has prepared me for this moment.
Instinctively, he lifts his hands away from the squirrel. “Um, Eddie?”
“It probably thinks you’re a tree,” Eddie says, closer than he was a second ago. “Either that, or it can smell your trail mix.”
Buck’s already gotten that far. “Can you get him off me?”
“Are you scared of the squirrel?” Eddie’s laughing, a bit, but gently, like he knows Buck’s going to laugh about this later as well.
“No,” Buck says, even though he is, a little bit. Whatever, Maddie’s scared of mice, and they’re much smaller than squirrels. And less bite-y. “Can you, like, lure him down or something?”
Buck’s not exactly sure what happens next – he’s mostly focused on the squirrel, only sees Eddie crouch down in his peripheral vision, maybe going for some snack he’s got in his pack. The squirrel jumps, like the movement scared it, and then Eddie shouts, “Fuck!” and the squirrel runs for the undergrowth.
“Eddie?”
Eddie’s clutching his right wrist in his left hand, holding it close to his chest, his expression twisted up in pain. “It bit me.”
Buck guessed that one. He crouches next to Eddie, nudging him to sit on his butt at the side of the trail, under the meager shade available. “Let me see.”
Eddie shakes his head, biting his lip.
“I need to see if it’s bleeding.” Buck reaches out to touch the back of Eddie’s left hand, gentle as he can. “It won’t hurt, come on.”
Eddie shakes his head again, but he lets Buck peel his fingers away, one at a time until Buck can take Eddie’s wrist in his own hand. It is bleeding, not heavily, but steadily, blood welling from a set of teeth marks in the side of Eddie’s wrist. As Buck looks, a drop of blood lands on the knee of Buck’s pants.
Something in his head goes still and sharp, the way it does on bad calls, everything narrowing down to just his EMT training. “We need to wash that out,” he says, his voice coming from very far away. “And bandage it, and then get you to the ER.”
“I don’t need an ER, Buck, come on. It’s not that deep, what are they going to do that you can’t?”
“You’re bleeding,” Buck says, like Eddie might not have noticed. “You were bitten by a wild animal, it could…”
The possibilities all pile into his head at once, every disease he’s ever heard of someone getting from an animal bite, every worst outcome, rabies and infections and amputations and -
“Buck!” Eddie says sharply. It takes Buck a second to remember he should look at Eddie’s face, instead of his still bleeding wrist. Eddie doesn’t look like he’s in as much pain as before, but Buck can’t remember if that’s a good thing or not. “Get the water bottle from my pack and wash it out,” Eddie says. He sounds the way he does on calls, when he’s stepping in for Hen or Chim and giving Buck instructions as a paramedic.
Just like on calls, Buck does as he’s told, holding Eddie’s arm away from his body so they don’t get more blood on their clothes. The water makes the bleeding look worse, diluting it and spreading it around.
“That’s good,” Eddie says. “You’ve got a first aid kit, right? You remember how to bandage an injury?”
Buck does, and he does, wiping away the water and blood, spraying on antiseptic, getting Eddie to hold one end of the bandage as he wraps it criss-cross over the wound, around Eddie’s wrist, knotting it away from the bite. Blood doesn’t leak through, even when Buck counts off thirty seconds.
“Do you need a sling?” he asks.
Eddie lowers his hand into his lap, wriggles his fingers. “It’s fine.”
“Should you, um, shouldn’t you keep it elevated?” Or maybe that’s only necessary before the bandage goes on? Buck’s thoughts are all fuzzy, skittering away from him. He can see the textbook page on treating bleeds in his head, but all the words are jumbled up, and the picture is of a crush injury to the leg.
“Not now it’s bandaged.” Eddie touches Buck’s hand, the one he used to bandage Eddie up, then wraps his own hand around it.
“You’re really warm,” Buck says, snatching his hand back so he can put it to Eddie’s forehead, his cheek. “Like, really warm, it can’t be infected already, right?”
Eddie takes his hand again, says his name softly. “Look at me.” Buck does, sees Eddie looking back at him, expression as soft as his voice. “I’m not warm, your hands are cold. I think you’re having a mild panic attack.”
Buck’s first instinct is to repeat what Eddie told the cardiologist when he was having panic attacks: I don’t panic. Except he definitely does, and, now Eddie’s said it, the shift from sharp competence to fuzzy confusion is one he’s felt before.
Eddie smiles gently when Buck doesn’t say anything. “Drink some water,” he suggests.
Buck does, glad for it when Eddie looks over his head and says, “No, we’re fine. He’s taking care of me, don’t worry,” to someone Buck didn’t even realize was there, let alone was speaking to them.
“Have you got something sweet in your pack?” Eddie asks. “Maybe not trail mix.”
It makes Buck laugh, shaky and high pitched, but he can feel calm settling back over him. Eddie’s fine, no longer bleeding. Even though it took a second, Buck’s brain is finally registering that.
He offers Eddie the rest of the bottle of water, then shares the small bag of peanut M&Ms that he always brings on hikes.
They wind up sitting next to each other, leaning into each other, nodding at the hikers who pass them by like they’re not being weird at all. It’s comforting, even more so when Eddie takes Buck’s hand in his again.
“When was your last tetanus shot?” Buck asks after a while. They get them regularly as a requirement on the job, but even so.
“Six months, maybe?” Eddie frowns like he’s counting. “Or, no, a bit longer. Valentine’s Day, with the roses, remember?”
Buck does, very clearly – some kid forgot to buy his girlfriend roses, tried to climb the fence into a neighbor’s garden to steal them, got stuck, panicked when Eddie was trying to get him down, and ended up knocking Eddie straight into the neighbor’s prize rose bushes. No-one came out of that one happy, including the girlfriend, who turned up while the kid was being put into an ambulance and reminded him that she’d already told him, twice, that she was allergic to roses.
“Right,” Buck says. “You’re probably good, then.”
Eddie hums. “If you’re worried, you could kiss it better.”
Chris was nine when he told Eddie he was too old to have his bumps and bruises kissed better. Buck’s pretty sure Eddie doesn’t mean it like that anyway.
He takes Eddie’s injured wrist gently in his free hand, lifts it slowly enough that Eddie can tell him it was just a joke. Thinks about all the times Eddie said some guy wasn’t his type. All the times Buck never quite dared to ask what Eddie thought his type might be.
Presses a gentle kiss over the bite through the bandage, feeling Eddie’s pulse beat against his thumb. “Better?” His voice comes out embarrassingly soft, like they’re not sat on the edge of a popular LA trail in the late morning on a Thursday where anyone could see them.
“I bit my lip too,” Eddie says, just as soft, making no move to lift his wrist from Buck’s hand. Like this, their other hands still folded together, they’re a closed loop.
“Do you need me to kiss that better too?”
“I do,” Eddie says, very softly, and it sounds like he’s saying yes to so much more than just a kiss.
Buck gives him the kiss, gentle in case his lip really does hurt, barely more than a press. “Better?”
Eddie tips his head to one side, looking alarmingly like the squirrel for a second, before his eyes brighten and his lips curl up into a smile. Buck already knows what he’s going to say, is already leaning in, close enough to kiss the words off Eddie’s lips when he says, “Maybe you should do it again to be sure.”