#because tumblr was being an asshat and wouldn't let me paste normally from ao3

[hmslusitania]

the sort of late hour that might be called early (ghost stories after dark)

happy halloweek day 2: ghosts! fun fact I initially had this tagged as "5x06 spec if you squint" but yesterday Fox decided not to let me live so! ha ha anyway

2.7k of the gang sharing ghost stories!

Also on AO3

“I just think it’d be cool to have a real encounter with a ghost,” Buck says, pulling the rag off his shoulder and going back to shining the bumper of the engine.

“What, that one call a few years ago wasn’t enough for you?” Hen asks, leaning against the engine beside him.

“Oh, not this again,” Bobby says. “Back on the ‘a ghost called 9-1-1’ thing?”

“Well how do you explain it?” Buck asks. “Maddie said it sounded exactly the same!”

“Ghost calling 9-1-1?” Eddie asks, wandering past them distracted, eyes on his phone.

“Yeah,” Buck says. “What’s up?”

Eddie hums in question and then looks up from his phone. “Oh, Chris was just texting me costume ideas.”

“Is ghost one of them?” Hen asks. “Because then Buck could have a real encounter.”

“Ha, ha,” Buck says, and doesn’t quite pout when he goes back to polishing but it’s a near thing.

They drop the subject when the bell goes, and Buck thinks it’s well and truly dropped until much later that night when one by one they all find themselves sitting around in the loft.

“No one could sleep, huh?” Bobby asks when Buck and Eddie and Hen and Ravi have all grabbed comfortable spots and accepted the cups of coffee Bobby’s offered them.

One by one, they shake their heads and no one offers an explanation. Sometimes, the station is just like that – it takes on its own energy, expends it on all of them, puts them all in sync more than they otherwise would be.

Buck sips his coffee and tries to keep his booted feet off the couch, even though what he really wants to do is extend his legs across the length of the couch, drop his feet in Eddie’s lap, or maybe snuggle up. But they’re at work and they’re not… they aren’t, no matter how comfortable they got with each other while Eddie was recovering.

“Can I ask a question?” Ravi asks a few minutes into their communal quiet.

“Besides that one?” Buck asks and gets the back of Eddie’s hand lightly to his thigh for his trouble. Buck pouts at him and Eddie shakes his head like he’s indulging some foolish whim of Buck’s. Eddie indulges him a lot, to be fair.

“You were mentioning earlier some call where you thought a ghost called 9-1-1?” Ravi says, used to Buck’s sass by now. “What was that about?”

“A couple years ago, we responded to a call from a hiker who’d fallen over a cliff in an area that was supposed to be closed off,” Bobby says.

“But the cell phone we found was by a set of bones that had been lost there for seven years,” Eddie says. Like he can feel Buck’s eyes on him, he sighs and adds, “And when we found the hiker who’d gone over, he insisted he hadn’t called us.”

“But,” Buck continues. “My sister worked dispatch and she’s the one who took the call, and when we identified the bones, she managed to pull up the call placed by that guy seven years ago, and it was the exact same call.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Hen protests.

“Yes, it was!” Buck says.

“No, it wasn’t, because when they played back the recording of the call that Maddie took that day a couple years ago, it was just static,” Hen says. “The wires got crossed somewhere, and the old recording just played on her feed.”

“And it was just a coincidence that it was the same day that guy fell off a cliff in the exact same place?” Buck demands.

Hen flounders for an answer for a second and eventually throws her hands up with an eyeroll and an, “I don’t know.”

“Cool,” Ravi says. He even sounds like he means it, which Buck doesn’t know what to do with. “What about you, Cap? Do you believe in ghosts?”

Bobby considers for a second, seemingly very aware of everyone’s eyes on him. “Well,” he says finally. “I am Catholic.”

“So?” Buck asks.

Bobby’s mouth twitches like he’s trying not to laugh. “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?”

Buck flushes and covers by prodding Eddie in the calf with his boot. “Shouldn’t that mean you believe in ghosts, too?”

Hen snorts when Eddie looks trapped, and when he says, “I’ve claimed to be a lot of things in my life, Buck, but a good Catholic has never been one of them,” she full on laughs.

“Oh, come on, someone here must’ve seen something like a ghost for real,” Buck says. “Besides the 9-1-1 call.”

Hen’s laughter, which had been picked up by Ravi and then Eddie and Bobby, fades out slowly.

“I don’t know if it counts as a ghost,” Hen says slowly. “But when I was in the hospital when I was sixteen, my mom had to work so I was there all by myself overnight, you know? And my grandma had died a few years earlier, and she’d had this phrase she’d use, ‘well, that’s close enough to Hollywood’ for whenever something worked out well enough to call it a day. And I’d never heard anyone else ever say that, but I was there alone in the hospital overnight, lonely, still scared and shaken, recovering from this surgery, and I wanted my mom or my grandma, just someone to be there with me, you know? And the night nurse came to check on my dressings and make sure everything looked okay, and she looked over at me and nodded and said, ‘well, that’s close enough to Hollywood.’ It felt like my grandma was right there in the room with me for the rest of the night.”

“Did you ask the nurse about it?” Ravi asks.

Hen shakes her head. “Never saw her again.”

“Maybe it was your grandma,” Buck says.

Hen’s answering smile is indulgent when she says, “Maybe.”

“You know,” Bobby says a moment later. “I don’t know if this was just our parents messing with us, but when I was a kid, we lived in this old apartment building, and my brother and I were out playing on the fire escape and climbing up from our level up to the next unit and the old guy who lived up there gave us the worst earful about how don’t you know it’s dangerous to be out there, not to mention we were bothering senior citizens, just really going on and on about it. And so we spooked and ran back home and told our parents about it, and apparently, the guy who’d lived upstairs had died the week before.”

“Then who were you talking to?” Buck asks.

Bobby shrugs. “No idea. Maybe it was the landlord or the guy’s brother or who knows, but my brother and I were always convinced it was our neighbour’s ghost.”

“That sounds like your parents making fun of you guys, Cap,” Hen says.

Bobby laughs. “Yeah, I know it does, but come on. It’s almost Halloween.”

“I had a ghost encounter once,” Ravi offers.

“You did?” Buck asks.

Ravi nods, seemingly unimpressed by his own happenstance. “When I was, like, I dunno, thirteen, I was over at my friend’s house and he lived in this old Victorian house, with these weird old windowpanes in the guest bedroom doorway, and anyway, we were home by ourselves and we heard someone walking up the stairs, these really heavy footsteps, and then walking down the hall, and then we heard the guest bedroom door open – because the weird windowpanes made this awful rattling noise they always made when you opened that door, right – and then heard the door close and the footsteps stop.”

“So someone broke into the house?” Eddie asks.

“No, we were looking right at the guest room door,” Ravi says. He shrugs. “It didn’t move.”

It takes them a few minutes to move past Ravi’s story, while Hen and Eddie try to poke holes in it and Ravi proves it to be as un-porous as possible.

“Alright, Eddie, your turn,” Hen says.

“I don’t have a story,” Eddie says.

Buck pokes him in the calf with the toe of his boot again and Eddie shrugs.

“I don’t!” he insists.

“You sure? Not even one?” Bobby asks. “Isn’t Texas pretty haunted?”

“I have never seen or heard or talked to a ghost,” Eddie says. Buck pokes him again and Eddie huffs. “I haven’t! I…”

He trails off, looking into the middle distance.

For a second, he looks like he might say something, might have a story, might tell it, and then he shakes his head and takes a sip of his coffee instead.

“No, no, I saw that look,” Hen scolds while Buck pokes him again.

“I—look, okay, I don’t know what I saw, but it wasn’t a ghost,” Eddie says. There’s a faint hint of pink rising along the side of his neck and up to his ears and Buck leans closer across the couch to inspect this development, pressing the backs of his fingers to the flushed skin of Eddie’s neck. Eddie bats his hand away and Buck grins.

“You’re blushing,” Buck says. “You saw something.”

“It was a high stress situation,” Eddie says. “People see all kinds of things in high stress situations like that, there’s a demonstrated history of people seeing the exact same thing I did, it’s not—”

“Wait, was this in Afghanistan?” Buck asks, because Eddie never talks about Afghanistan. Buck’s heard the story of how he got his silver star, and his honourable discharge, and his Purple Heart, but he’s never heard anything about the people he served with or the time Eddie spent there apart from the moment that ended his deployment.

“Uh, yeah,” Eddie says. He chews on his lip for a second and Buck feels like holding his breath. “It’s – we were on a medevac run, and a new round of fire opened up, and so I took cover with my patients, but there were some folks pinned down who couldn’t get to us or the extraction point, and I was going to try and get to them, but this…person…told me to stay down and next thing I knew, she’d come back with a the last two people we needed to get out, and I patched them up and went to help her, but she’d disappeared. But she wasn’t a ghost.”

Buck stares at him, as do Bobby, Hen, and Ravi, but before they can ask questions, the bell goes.

He doesn’t mean to, but Buck spends the drive to the call looking up Eddie’s battlefield not-ghost. And Eddie’s right, there are many accounts from basically every war, that sound almost exactly like his, going back to…well, Buck doesn’t find the end of the line. The accounts disappear around the start of recorded history, what with having no further back to go.

“Your battlefield ghost is famous,” Buck tells him when they’ve finished the call and everyone heads back to the bunks and get some real sleep this time.

“I know,” Eddie says. “I told you I knew it was a common story.”

“Why isn’t this cool to you? Hen talked to her grandma, Bobby saw his upstairs neighbour, who knows what Ravi heard, why don’t you…” He trails off, not entirely sure how to finish his question. He’s scolded Eddie about this before, mostly as a joke while they were trapped in the engine under an electrical pole. It’s like the universe is screaming at you and you refuse to listen. Eddie had given him an answer then, after all. The universe does not scream.

And it feels stupid and childish to finish the question the way he means – why don’t you believe in magic?

But even that isn’t really it, is it? Buck doesn’t believe in magic, he’s a grown-ass adult, who��s lived through a few too many horrible things to actually believe in things like that anymore. So it’s more of a…

“Why don’t you want to believe in magic?”

Eddie pauses, his hand on the door to the bunks. Everyone else has already disappeared, trying to get just a little bit of shut eye. So they’re alone in the app bay and that’s not new, but it’s late at night, somewhere after three and approaching four, getting on the sort of late hour that might be called early, and for whatever reason that feels like dawn and new beginnings.

Like, y’know.

Magic.

“It’s just ghost stories, Buck,” Eddie says softly.

“No, it’s not,” Buck says, getting between Eddie and the door. “It’s – you didn’t think we were jinxed and you said the universe doesn’t scream and now it’s you don’t believe in your own ghost story and—and why are you such a sceptic?”

“Why do you believe so easily?” Eddie asks.

Buck just stares at him, waiting for some explanation, but Eddie’s dodging eye contact now, and Buck is horrified to note that there’s a sheen to his eyes like Eddie’s trying not to cry.

“Because I can’t,” Eddie says after a second. “Because – because if the universe really does scream then I am a really, really bad listener.”

Buck blinks. “Maybe you’re not a bad listener?” he suggests. “Maybe it’s just telling you something you don’t want to hear.”

“You want to know what the universe is screaming at me?” Eddie asks with a scoff in his voice. “Or at least what I’m hearing?”

“Yes,” Buck says without hesitation, and then somehow, unbelievably, Eddie has grabbed him by the face and is kissing him.

Buck doesn’t even have time to kiss back, to grab him – to hold him, and hold him close like he’s been wanting to for so long – because Eddie lets go and steps back, rubbing at his eyes.

“That’s what your magic universe keeps screaming at me, which is obviously—”

Buck doesn’t let Eddie finish the comment that it has to be nonsense, has to be stupid, can’t be real, and cuts him off with another kiss. Eddie inhales sharply and after a second of Buck kissing him, he wraps his arms around Buck’s shoulders and pulls him closer.

For his part, Buck is pretty sure there’s no such thing as being close enough to Eddie and only registers he’s been moving them in the act of pressing them closer when they bump into the side of the engine.

The impact jars them apart but Buck stays where he is, forehead pressed to Eddie’s, as well as his shoulders and chest and stomach and hips and legs and frankly if they could be stuck together with superglue he’d be grateful. Eddie dips his fingers under the collar of Buck’s uniform shirt, like he needs to be touching his skin, and Buck is definitely not going to be protesting that move.

“If that’s what the universe has been screaming at you, you should’ve listened to it sooner,” Buck mumbles, pressing his lips quickly against Eddie’s cheekbone and the freckle under his eye and then going back to resting his forehead against him.

“I, um,” Eddie says, and then Eddie Diaz giggles and that might be the best sound Buck’s ever heard in his life.

“What?” Buck asks.

Eddie shakes his head, his forehead rocking against Buck’s, and then kisses him quickly again. “I’ve never kissed anyone taller than me before.”

Buck laughs as well, and leans down to kiss Eddie again. He’s never kissed anyone taller than him either, and now he’ll never have the opportunity. Because this is his last first kiss, that he’s sure of.

They stay there, pressed against the engine, making out like they’re teenagers rather than on the other side of thirty, for much longer than they should.

“You know,” Buck says eventually when his lips are a little numb from continuous pressure. “If the universe was shouting at you about this, and it was so obviously right—”

Eddie groans and Buck laughs.

“—maybe you could give it the benefit of the doubt about the other stuff too,” Buck finishes.

“I love you, but I am not believing in ghosts for you,” Eddie says and Buck’s heart skips more than a few beats in shock. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I love you too,” Buck says, “but you have seen it, you’re just stubborn.”

“I’m not stubborn,” Eddie protests.

Buck scoffs back.

They’re still bickering about it by the time the bell rings for the next call.

*

Buck wins.

#911HW2021 #911fic #the ghost ship scribbles #buddie #buddie fic #the text might be a hair different here than on ao3 #because tumblr was being an asshat and wouldn't let me paste normally from ao3 #I had to paste this from my word doc #and I don't remember if I edited anything in ao3 #so