Chapter Text
Normality is something Buck had to get used to.
His measure of normal had been skewed long before he left for the Essempi. Though, it definitely didn’t get better there.
But it’s normal today. Something that Buck never lets himself take for granted.
He woke up around the right time. He got to work a little early and had enough time to eat a lemon poppyseed muffin. They had calls that were nothing special or standout and absolutely no losses.
It’s a good day. It’s a normal day.
Which is why something has to go wrong.
Because even though he avoiding the “q” word, he made the mistake of thinking today is normal.
Buck is having his lunch break and is enjoying a salad, an actually good salad with candied pecans and cranberries and all the things that Eddie makes fun of him for, when it happens.
Buck is laughing through his bite of mixed greens when Bobby enters.
“Hey, Buck, there’s someone here to see you,” Bobby says. “I didn’t recognize them, so I wanted to check in with you first.”
“Who is it?” Buck asks, only half paying attention.
“Said his name is Sam,” Bobby says.
Buck drops his fork. “Sam. You— you’re sure.”
“Yeah,” Bobby says slowly. “Do you not want to see him? I can send him away—”
“No,” Buck says, his breaths quickening. “No, I think I need to see him.”
Buck follows Bobby downstairs and his breath hitches when he sees the green haired man.
“Tommy,” Sam says, his voice as flat and monotonous as ever. “It was hard finding you, kid.”
“What are you doing here, Sam?”
Sam’s eyes darken.
“Sam?” he says, voice shaking.
“The prisoner has escaped.”
Tommy’s heart drops.
“And he’s coming for you.”
Tommy falls to his knees, hyperventilating hard as his vision starts to black out. Bobby is immediately hovering at his side, trying to get him to breathe.
“No, he can’t, he supposed to—” Tommy looks up at Sam. “You said I was safe! That the prison was inescapable!”
“I know—”
“Knowing isn’t enough, Sam! You let him escape!”
“Hey,” Bobby says. “Just breathe, Buck. C’mon. Breathe with me.”
But he can’t. He can’t breathe. Not when Dream isn’t locked up in an inescapable prison. Not when Dream’s been trapped there for a decade because of him and is bloodthirsty with revenge. Not when he knows he’ll never be safe again.
He must pass out because when he opens his eyes, he’s lying on the couch.
“Hey, Buckaroo,” Chimney says. “You gave us a real scare back there. How are you feeling?”
He sits up abruptly and his head spins.
Hands push at his chest, lying him back.
“Hey, careful there. Don’t get up too fast,” Hen says.
“He wasn’t supposed to escape,” he whispers. “He never— the prison was supposed to be inescapable. I’ve been in there. It was— he was never supposed to escape.”
“Buck?” Eddie says, voice small.
He looks up at them with hollow eyes. “I don’t really talk about being a teenager.”
They can tell that he needs to talk, so they don’t reply.
“After Maddie went to live with Doug, things at home didn’t get easier and I… Prime, I couldn’t stand my parents. So I… I ran away. Ended up in a micronation in the middle of nowhere called the Essempi. And when I got there I… I just wanted to be different. I wanted things to be different. So I crafted the person I could never be at home. Someone mischievous, who wasn’t afraid of consequences. Who was loud and brash and cursed all he wanted. Someone who was unabashedly himself, even though he was far from being himself. Tommy Innit, a British boy who pulls pranks and pesters everyone he meets because he’d rather you hate him on his own terms than hate who he really is.
“Things weren’t that bad when I first got there. Well, until it all got started. Those… those damn discs.” Tommy lets out a bitter laugh. “I can’t explain why the discs meant so much to me. Maybe it’s because Maddie used to have this record player that she would always blast the same 90’s boyband songs on when we were growing up and they made me think of her. Maybe it’s because they were the first things I had that were truly mine. But they mattered more than they ever should have.
“Things changed when Wilbur came. He… he was someone to follow. And back then, I was lost and I needed someone to follow. Wilbur wanted to create a country so we did. Wilbur wanted to start a revolution, so we did. Wilbur wanted to run for president, so he did, with me as his vice. Wilbur and I got exiled.” He swallows past the lump in our throat. “I went with him when he decided to live in ravine. He wanted to conspire against the government, so we did. He wanted to blow up our country and I… I didn’t know. I thought I knew him. I thought I knew all there was to know about him because I… I thought he told me. But he didn’t and then I… I had to watch as his dad stabbed him in the gut. Something went wrong during surgery and he was left a different person, something about the lack of blood to his brain or something, I don’t— I don’t know. But he was different, and I hated that I liked him more like that.
“We got our country back but not before Wilbur could get to it first and then I… I didn’t know what to do anymore. But I started to live again. Slowly, barely, I was starting to figure out who I was. But then… then a prank went wrong and I got exiled again and…” Tommy chuckles, more out of reflex to lighten the mood but mostly with discomfort. “I won’t give you the gory details, but I was abused. Emotionally and physically. For a while. And, well, my abuser and I had… a complicated relationship.
“The discs! Yes, the discs. We… we fought over them for a long time. We fought over a lot. We fought over L’Manberg, our country, being in his Essempi. We fought about him killing my pets. We fought about me not wanting to give him my things to blow up.” Tommy huffs. “Yeah. But, well, Prime, I keep getting off topic, the discs. We had wars over these discs. We ended wars with these discs. He nearly killed me for them. And for what? What was the fucking point?”
They flinch at his harsh curse.
“He got put in the prison for… for a lot of things really. Again, I won’t go into it all. You don’t need that. But… I went to visit him one last time. Just to get… I don’t even know anymore. Closure?” He bites the insides of his cheeks. “He nearly beat me to death. Actually, to death. I had to be resuscitated.” His lips twist sardonically. “And I thought… I thought that would never have to see him again. He’s supposed to be in prison. I’m supposed to be safe.” He grips his hair and tugs. “Fuck!”
Eddie holds a hand out to him. “Buck—”
“I need—” Buck stands up abruptly and shakes his head and heads to the bathroom.
He barely makes it into the bathroom before he staggers to the sinks and holds up his body weight on the sink. His head bowed down, he grabs a handful of water and splashes his face. With a shuddering breath, he looks up at his reflection.
His heart drops.
Behind him in his reflection stands a lime green hooded man with smiley face mask.
“Hi Tommy! Did you miss me?”
.-~*~-.
Eddie’s knee bounces restlessly. “He’s been in there a while. I should check on him, right? We should check on him?”
“Eddie,” Hen says. “He… he just told us more about his past than he has in the five years we’ve known him. He needs space.”
“But he shouldn’t be alone,” Eddie says. “Buck doesn’t do good alone. Someone should be with him!”
“I can go check on him,” Bobby says.
“I—”
“Eddie,” Bobby cuts him off. “I think you need to take a breath and process what Buck has told us all.”
Eddie deflates. “Understood, Cap.”
Bobby makes his way through the halls and knocks on the bathroom door. “Buck? I’m just checking on you.”
No response.
“I understand if you want some time to yourself, but just… just let me know that’s what you need, alright? And I’ll give it to you.”
No response.
Bobby pushes the handle down and sees that it’s open. He pushes open the door and his heart drops.
The mirror is shattered, shards covered in blood littering the floor.
Bobby sprints back to the team, heart pounding his chest. “Buck’s gone.”
Eddie stands. “What?”
“He’s gone.” Bobby describes what he saw.
“Well, we have to find him!” Eddie says.
They split up in pairs, letting the rest of the people in the house know what’s going on so they can get as many hands on deck. Bobby calls Athena to let her know what’s going on and to be on standby for Buck if things go wrong.
It’s Eddie and Bobby who find him, being dropped from the top of the pole, covered in bleeding scratches and being followed by a masked man in bright green.
The masked man turns around and points a sword to Eddie’s throat. “Don’t come any closer.”
Eddie hears Buck whimper in pain downstairs. “Buck!”
“Aw, that’s cute. You’ve made friends!” the man shouts down to Buck. “You were my friend too, Tommy, remember? And you know what friends always do.”
“We are nothing like you,” Eddie hisses.
“Eddie,” Bobby scolds, eyeing the sword warily.
“You know, ten years of solitary confinement is, well, it’s a lot. It gives you a lot of time to think. And you know what I realized? Every single one of my problems goes back to Tommy Innit. Your precious little Evan ‘Buck’ Buckley down there. It all comes back to him. Him and his stupid little attachments.”
The man tips Eddie’s chin up with his sword. “You realize that’s what you are to him, right? You’re one of his attachments. One of those distractions that he would die for. Because he would. Tommy would die for anyone and anything he believes in. And from what I can tell, he doesn’t just believe in you. He loves you. I didn’t even know Tommy was able to do that! But he does. Not just in the deluded way he loved Wilbur or Tubbo. No, he really loves you.”
Eddie can’t see his face, but he knows he’s grinning behind his mask. “But what Tommy will never learn is that he doesn’t deserve his attachments. And I will gladly teach him that lesson.”
The man goes to stab into Eddie’s throat when suddenly the sword is shot out of his hand by an arrow.
A dark haired man in a white headband grabs the man from behind and holds a sword to his throat. “I once said that I’d kill if you got out, but I think death is too much of a mercy for you, Dream.”
The man, Dream, laughs. “Oh Sapnap. It’s been so long since I’ve heard your voice! Why didn’t you come to visit me? You know I would’ve loved your company.”
“You aren’t going back to that prison,” a man in large white goggles says. “You’re getting a real trial with the real courts and you’re going to get a real life’s sentence.”
Eddie, holding his scratched neck, watches as a group of people emerge.
“The whole Essempi? That’s a bit of an overkill, isn’t it?” Dream asks.
“We know what you’re capable of,” a man in a crisp suit and with a jagged scar across his face says. “And we aren’t going to let you get to Tommy.”
“Yeah!” a man with an orange fox ear headband says. “He may be a pain in the ass but he’s our pain in the ass!”
Eddie sees Tubbo and Ranboo head down the fireman’s pole to Buck and Eddie rushes to join them despite Bobby’s hurried protests.
Eddie trusts that everyone can take care of Dream. All he cares about is Buck.
Tubbo and Ranboo are both alert when Eddie joins them, as if ready for a fight. Tubbo relaxes when he sees Eddie but Ranboo is still tense.
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s the fuckboi whose house we broke into,” Tubbo says to Ranboo.
“Oh, right,” Ranboo says. “Hi again.”
Buck groans.
Eddie kneels next to him, going through a mental checklist of all of the wounds he needs to tend to. He cradles Buck’s head. “Hey, I got you. I just have to check you, alright?”
“Did’you get ‘im?” Buck asks, his voice accented with a British lilt.
“They’ve got him, Toms,” Tubbo tells him. “He’s going away to a prison with an even better warden than Sam.”
Buck smiles. “Good.”
Dream gets taken away by Athena, far away from Buck to see, while Buck is tended to by three frazzled paramedics with a gaggle of eccentric looking bystanders.
“It’s weird seeing you lot all quiet and civil and shit,” Buck tells the ex-Essempiers in his thick British accent.
“Didn’t seem like the time,” the blonde man in the purple hoodie says with a shrug.
“Well, it’s weird,” Buck says. “It’s also weird seeing you all together,” he says, his British accent fading into American. “It’s not normal. It’s like, something separate.” He holds his hands out in front of him. “Like Essempi and After-Essempi. They’re not supposed to cross.”
“Well, I think it’s nice getting to know the people who know you in a way we don’t,” Eddie says.
“How’d you like to hear about the time Tommy started a drug monopoly?” Tubbo says.
The 118’s heads snap to face Buck.
A smile creeps on Chimney’s face. “As long as you’d like to hear about the time he stole a firetruck to hook up with a girl.”
Gasps and laughs all around. “Tommy, you dog!”
“It was a mistake getting you in the same room,” Buck says, though he can’t hide his grin.
He’s spent so long hiding this part of his life that he never considered that they could collide. But he’s sick of hiding and lying and he wants to move on.
And he thinks he can now. He can finally move on. Because he has people who will help him get through this.
He’s not alone. No matter how much Dream tried to drill it into him that he is, he’s not.
And he won’t be alone anymore.