you know what’s crazy is that this be the verse was originally a very different fic! maybe i won’t give too much away because there’s a chance i could come back to the original idea, but: tommy was the ghost whisperer, and the breakup happened the night he found out his father died, and the reason he left the loft was his father’s ghost and patricia’s ghost ganging up on him after the abby reveal making everything Too Noisy in his head. and then bobby died in canon and the idea did a 180, and then i sort of lost all motivation on it entirely and it turned into melted ice cream soup. i was driving home from the airport in june and the scene where buck wakes up to the phone call from donna came to me fully formed, and i scooped the mommy issues and the dead dad stuff out of the cauldron and dried them on a rack and then put them in a blender and here we are. i do think the original idea had legs! maybe too many legs, though.

if buck in TBTV was real and not controlled by me he probably would have spent the rest of the night after the wake and the handwashing incident researching OCD on his phone and then reading the FAA guide to pilot mental health and then grimacing and closing all those tabs and vowing to never speak of it again, haha.

🔮Have you imagined what happens to [character(s)] in the future? Or does the story only exist to you as a moment in time?

oh this is easy. i think about this all the time. Tommy’s career gets slightly derailed as a result of the knee surgery and Melton has had this vacation to Tahiti planned for six years, so when he comes back onto light duty it’s as Harbor’s Interim Captain. It’s been around three months since the end of the fic, and Buck is settled in his role at the 122 and Chim is very unsettled in his role at the 118 and Eddie, who hasn’t talked to Buck since he left, is on a righteous tear about people who promise you things such as friendship and camaraderie and childcare and then leave and abandon you and stop answering your phone calls. There’s a five-alarm one night and several stations are responding and once everything’s sort of been doused Buck and Eddie literally run into each other while sorting out hoses and start getting into it, and then their captains start getting into it, and then ohhhhh shit here comes Incident Command everybody watch out. And up rolls Tommy with his dumb hat and his little sheriff’s badge and he’s like is there a problem :) and Sal cuts in like this ingrate at the 118 is using foul language to my lieutenant in training, and Buck is like :’) i’m your lieutenant in training? and Chimney’s like excuse me, this is a fight between friends, a friendly fight, everyone is friends here and we don’t need to involve the higher ups, and Eddie’s like excuse YOU i’m the lead paramedic and Chimney’s like no you’re not we’ve talked about this and Sal is like you can’t even control your own firefighters let alone firefighters outside your command and Tommy’s like everyone shut the fuck up i’m getting a migraine. Let’s all go down to HQ on Wednesday and have an actual meeting with a union rep and HR. Coincidentally that’s the day i’m relieved of this heinous duty.

And then Ravi volunteers to be Eddie’s peer advocate only because he thinks it’ll be funny, and Eddie’s pissed because they can solve all of this mano-a-mano, and Chimney’s pissed because his wife is going to be mad at him and also why can’t anything be simple and go right for once in this whole captaincy deal. And Sal gets Buck a little sheriff’s badge of his own because he did actually want to get Buck on the lieutenant track and he may as well do it now. And then Buck rails Tommy into next week because that was sooooooo sexy of him to deal with a fraught situation like that and Tommy’s like i was just doing my job (being the person at the scene with the longest tenure with the LAFD) but he does admit afterwards that it was fun to use his bossy voice when the situation called for it :)

And then Buck gets promoted legitimately and then Tommy buys him a lemon tree as a reward. At some point they get a cat. Tommy goes back to being lead pilot and is fully off ground duty forever and ever until the next time Melton needs to go on vacation. The end!

edited to add the fic in question