the rest is confetti

call me dot! // come say hello or come read a thing or two:

i do please!!! the way this fic was half abandoned and now i've written a chunk more of it hooray :((

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"Would you mind— giving me a ride?" Maddie asks in fits and starts. Shannon dutifully does not send a glance out the front window towards where Maddie's car is parked, the most damning sign that Maddie successfully drove herself here in the first place.

Successfully, after all, is a strong word, when Maddie's disheveled appearance is taken into account.

"A ride?" Shannon asks carefully. "To where?"

"The airport," Maddie clears her throat, pulls out her phone, and starts tapping away frantically. "I have a flight— I need to catch a flight."

"I didn't know you had a trip planned," Shannon tries to tilt her head into Maddie's line of vision. "Maddie."

"I just need a ride to get there, um, I was going to drive myself, but—"

"Maddie. What's going on?"

"I dropped Jee-Yun off at the station. She's safe. She'll be safe," Maddie nods harriedly to herself.

"Hey, c'mon, what is happening right now?" Shannon reaches out and pushes Maddie's phone down so she's forced to look away from it, Maddie's grip giving little to no resistance.

If Shannon has learned anything about Maddie over the years, through the traumas and tribulations which have befallen them and theirs, it's that she doesn't waver. Not like this. Although, the same could have been said for a young single mother relying on her absent father's parents and with no support network of her own to speak of.

That Home // Buck S9

hooray more maddieshannon!!! mwah for you (: <3

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"I left him alone," Maddie goes on, although something in her tone feels pointed inwards rather than at Shannon specifically. "For too long, I think. And now he's just— gotten so used to doing it alone."

"Maybe," Shannon says, forcefully dragging her eyes away from Eddie's hand, landing definitively on Buck's shoulder as he starts to finally speak in response to all that fucking listening. "Or maybe healing is just hard and— and being taken care of can eventually start to feel suffocating when you didn't used to need it."

Maddie softens, but it doesn't come across as pity thankfully. Shannon actually bristles in expectation that it will, but Maddie lets out this breath and it just— doesn't. It feels like a woman caught in a difficult situation, one which Shannon has heard all about but which she isn't sure Maddie would want her to have quite so many details on. It feels like understanding from the opposite side of her own situation and it's easier to feel that with a practical stranger than with her own husband. Her ex-husband. Her Eddie.

i have only just begun, but i'm certainly trying beloved!! and no redacted for you today even (:

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He has to use both hands and the grit of his teeth to get his prosthesis up and stretched out on the bench, tools laid out alongside it in the space left vacant by his good leg hanging off and planting on the metal-grated flooring.

Of the options available to him— which don't quite cover what he'll need in order to calm down the angry red flare-up where metal meets flesh— Buck knows he won't be back in working order by the time they're back on the Engine and pointed across the stars towards home, but he knows how to get the damn thing into a moderately more comfortable position.

He could almost laugh at the sentiment. Comfort. She had looked at him, squirming in pain and gritting his teeth in some feeble attempt to not show just how much she was affecting him, and she had gone soft.

Here, she had promised, this will make it better, honey. This will make the pain go away. This will make you comfortable while Mommy fixes you, makes you big and strong.

Buck swallows a swell of bile at the back of his throat and wraps a firm grip around the nearest wrench, albeit the wrong one for the job, and—

hello!!!! this one is labeled 'ambiguous' because i started two different versions of it and couldn't decide which i was more inclined to continue but i think perhaps i have chosen now (:

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Shannon doesn't know how close she is to losing him, and she likely would continue not knowing until Eddie was cleared at the hospital, if it weren't for the fact that Maddie Buckley still, against all odds, has her phone number.

"Are you sure we don't need to go?"

"Eddie said—"

"I don't really care what Eddie said," Shannon sighs, grateful that Christopher has been in bed long enough that her conversation in the living room likely won't wake him. "I care what the paramedics on scene said."