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For once, Buck's not having full-on emergency surgery after some kind of terrifying near-death experience. She has appendicitis, which - thanks in part to being surrounded by family and friends with medical experience - is caught quickly. She's bundled off to the hospital and scheduled for a laparoscopic appendectomy before it can get worse.

After a successful procedure, she's brought to a quiet room to recover and finish sleeping off the anesthesia. There's a couple false starts where she opens her eyes for a few seconds without really registering anything and then falls back asleep, but after a bit, she finally opens them and keeps them open, blinking as she takes in the room.

It's slow-going. She doesn't really remember why she's here, though she knows she's been in hospital beds plenty of times. She can guess the general area of what's hurt based on the dull ache she can still feel underneath the drugs, but that's okay. She's pretty sure she knows the general idea of what happens in situations like this, and someone will stop by eventually to tell her what happened. In the meantime, her gaze has snagged on an absolutely gorgeous guy sitting near her hospital bed, frowning down at his phone. He has an amazing five o'clock shadow happening, and her fingers twitch against the bedcovers with the urge to reach out and feel his jaw.

"Wow," she says - and she really did mean to say hi, but her voice comes out scratchy and dry anyway so maybe he won't understand what she said.

When the first guy walks into station 118 convinced that he's in a relationship with Evan Buckley, she's willing to believe it's a misunderstanding. Yeah, she doesn't recognize him, but she's not sure she could pick out every hook-up she's had out of a line-up. Maybe she slept with him when she was tipsier than usual, and he had some kind of delusion after that they continued to talk. After all, he seems harmless enough, just - confused. When he gets a little too close while she's trying to explain that they're not in a relationship and she doesn't know who he is, Bobby steps in and forces him to leave. And she spends the rest of the day feeling unsettled, sure, but it's fine. What are the chances of it happening again?

Pretty damn good, as it turns out, since another stranger approaches her while she and Chim are picking up coffees for the crew. This guy is way more aggressive, outright accusing her of fucking with him and then dropping him for some kind of sick game, and the next thing she knows, she's wearing his iced coffee and he's storming out the door.

They've barely settled back into the station when some asshole starts throwing rocks at the ambulance. She happens to reach the doors the quickest to shout at him to knock it off and is treated to a borderline incoherent rant about how she's a bitch, she needs to pay for breaking his heart and the hearts of guys like him, and this time when he throws a rock, he's aiming for her. It just scrapes her arm before Hen is pulling her back behind cover and Bobby announces that there are police inbound. He runs rather than stay and wait to be arrested, but they get a good look at his car, so it's not like he can get too far.

It's been a terrible day, basically. It's even worse after reporting everything to Athena (first on the scene), being advised to look into her social media accounts, and finding a MySpace page in her name with her picture that she never created. By evening, Athena's assured her that they've started the process of asking the website for access to the account so they can see who created it and who else has been talking to the fake her. Which means there's not much more they can do about it tonight.

She's released from her shift early, but she ends up hanging around the firehouse for another couple hours because as much as she hates the idea that yet another stranger could walk in at any time, absolutely convinced that she'd wronged him, she hates the idea of going home to her apartment alone because what if one of these guys found her address, too? It's bad enough they're showing up at her place of work. That's what she tells Bobby when he approaches her to ask why she's not leaving, and when he asks her if she'd feel safer if he slept over on her couch just in case, she finds herself saying yes.

So that's how she finds herself pacing her apartment while waiting for him to show, stupidly stressed out by pretty much every noise - of which there are too many because her walls are not as soundproof as she'd like. And feeling stupid for being so stressed out by this because what are the chances someone would be able to track her home address and try to break in? She'd like to think it's low, but before the past couple of days, she thought the likelihood of someone using her pictures and personal information to catfish the men of LA was very low, too.

Even expecting Bobby, she still flinches at the sound of someone knocking on her door, and she takes a second to force herself to look less freaked out before she peers through the peephole and opens the door to her Captain. "Hey. Um. Thanks."

Buck thought she was doing a good job of arguing she didn't need to go to the hospital for smoke inhalation; she'd barely breathed in any smoke since the victim she'd given her mask to had only gone down wheezing and gasping for breath about half a minute away from the exit. Her oxygen levels weren't too bad, even before Hen had sat her down with the oxygen mask for a bit. And Chim listened to her lungs and admitted they sound pretty good, too. Absolutely no reason for an ER visit instead of having Bobby put her on light duty for the rest of the shift while two paramedics and an ex-army medic monitored her.

Then she had to go basically swoon directly into Eddie's arms when she stood up to make a point about how okay she was, and the next thing she knows, she's being transferred from his arms to the gurney in the back of the ambulance, oxygen mask re-settled over her face, all her hard work completely ruined by a momentary sense of vertigo.

(She was not actually winning that fight, but it was easier to let her believe she was.)

Eddie follows her into the hospital while the rest of the team wishes her well and extracts a promise they'll receive updates before heading back to the station. Inside, it's mostly a waiting game. Her mask is traded for a nasal cannula, and they take some blood for a couple tests before leaving her to entertain herself watching Eddie field homework questions from Christopher over FaceTime.

They just ended the call when a nurse comes in with updates. Since she hasn't been experiencing wheezing or much coughing, they don't think a chest x-ray will be necessary, though she's going to stay where she is until she's been off the cannula a couple hours without her O2 levels dropping. The doctor thinks her brief fainting spell was due to mild anemia exacerbating the effects from the smoke inhalation, so they're giving her a supplement at the hospital for that. "Of course, what we give you here is only going to help so much on its own," the nurse adds seriously. "Even if your prenatal vitamins already have iron in them, it's clearly not enough, so you're going to want to add a supplement, too. We can give you a list of brands and dosages we'd recommend."

The way she says it is so natural and normal that Buck's brain almost skips over the key word in that sentence. Almost. "My prenatal what...?"

"Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about it," the nurse says, apparently mistaking her confusion for concern. "Your obstetrician will want to check your levels again in a couple weeks, but iron deficiencies aren't uncommon. Sometimes Baby just needs more than Mom has to give without some help."

( trigger warnings for kidnapping, assault, sexual assault, drugging, dissociation )

Even though there's a very present possibility of being shot looming over both her and Eddie the entire time they're being held hostage, Buck's never really that worried about her getting hurt. She knows she's in danger the whole time, but what actually terrifies her is the possibility of Eddie being shot again, of standing useless while his blood splatters over her and not being able to drag him to safety this time. Of Mitchell and Dom following through on their threat to hunt down Chris and take away everything that's most important to her with their bullets. It's the only thing, realistically, that forced her to walk out of that ambulance with Dom - not the gun to her head, but the gun to her family.

So maybe it makes sense that her body starts to go haywire inside the hospital, when she doesn't have Eddie's scent or the evidence of her own eyes reassuring her that he's alive. When an alpha police officer slams her against the ground with his full weight pressing her down and a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. When Athena has to physically hold her back from running back out to the ambulance, to her alpha, to Eddie, and her legs crumple underneath her.

Stress heats aren't like normal heats. They're not even really about procreation, though plenty of babies can trace their conception to one. It's about experiencing an imbalance so dangerous that your body's willing to put itself through the not-inconsiderable strain of a sudden-onset heat to ensure it gets an alpha's care fixing it. Buck's never had one before, but she's seen them happened, answered emergency calls about them. She's seen omegas burn through a pre-heat in less than half an hour and seize in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

She's going into one now.

Once the staff recognizes what's happening, she's rushed to a heat room. They give her meds to prolong the pre-heat phase, a banana bag and a patch on one of her scent glands with synthetic alpha hormones to stabilize her. She's stripped out of her uniform that smells like fear and Dom and Mitchell and the alpha officer and given a neutral-scented gown to wear, and she's bundled into a bed that's designed to be nested in but none of it actually feels safe or right because it smells like a hospital and Eddie is right outside the building and he could be hurt, he could be bleeding out and she can't get to him. Athena has to stay in the room with her, doing her best to calm her with pack scent and physically stopping her from trying to rip out her IV and run to where she knows Eddie is when the scent isn't enough.

It feels like hours before Athena gets the call that Eddie's safe, he's in the building and being rushed to her room as soon as possible. A nurse pulls off the synthetic hormone patch and swipes at her gland with an alcohol wipe to clear off the foreign scent, and then he and Athena both clear out of the room. She's curled into herself, trying to breathe through an especially vicious cramp in her abdomen when he finally bursts through the door, and she forces her eyes open so she can look at him, see for herself that he's alive and he's okay.

The LSD is kind of fun at first. Seeing the pollen particles in the air, marveling at the tiny beauty queens with Eddie – obviously she’s responsible and wouldn’t take drugs like that on purpose, and definitely not on shift, but there’s a reason people take LSD, right? It’s fun, under the right circumstances. It’s not til the handcuffs click around her wrists (for their own safety, Athena reassures them) that it’s like something taps her on the shoulder and says, firmly, time to go.

(It’s been happening more and more lately, typically when she’s out looking for a hook-up, and she hates it. Hates it because it’s shitty, because it makes her feel out of control and like her body isn’t even hers until it’s over. Hates it because even though she knows it might happen again, she still goes out to bars and puts herself in situations where it will happen again. There’s something deeply wrong with her that goes deeper than when she pulled shit like stealing the firetruck to have sex in, and she doesn’t know what to do about it.)

The rest of her LSD experience passes in occasional flashes of awareness. Hen pulling her into a hug as they’re separated. Maddie taking her pulse, having just arrived from her newly-acquired apartment to trip-sit with her baby sister. Lying on her couch with a blanket tucked around her, a Disney flick on the tv to keep her calm and occupied. Even during her longer stretches of awareness, she still never feels quite present and she hates it, wants to crawl back into her body but it’s like there’s an invisible force field blocking her every time she tries.

They all get the next day off to recover, and Buck vaguely remembers being told that everyone else came out of their trip safe and sound. Is Buck safe and sound? She’s ready for this to be over. Someone puts a bowl of soup in front of her, and her hand brings the spoon to her mouth. They watch more movies that Buck mostly perceives as a series of tableaus, unable to put together anything like story or dialogue. Eventually, it’s the next morning and her phone’s in her hand, Bobby’s voice in her ear accepting her call-out for the day and telling her that she should take the day to get herself checked out by her doctor. She’s sitting on the couch with a blanket again, Maddie with her keys in hand and worried eyes, telling her she only has to work the first few hours of her scheduled shift before her replacement comes in and call her if Buck needs anything.

So she doesn’t know why the next time she feels like she and her body are in the same place, she’s at the firehouse. She doesn’t know why she’s stepping out of her Jeep, without her uniform or her bag of stuff for a shift. She’s wearing sweatpants and a tank top, and it’s so unprofessional, Bobby’s going to be mad at her for showing up looking like this but was she even supposed to work? Didn’t she call out? Her feet are leading her upstairs, not to the locker room to get changed but that’s fine, she guesses, she didn’t bring anything to get changed into. She ends up sitting on one of the couches because she remembers Maddie kept guiding her to the couch, where it’s safe and her body is cushioned with softness she can only barely feel against her skin.