Chapter Text
Part 1: The Disappearance and Subsequent Return of Christopher Diaz
“He never got on the bus,” the driver shouts over the sound of the still-running bus engine. His kind face is marred by evident concern, and Eddie knows it has everything to do with the way his eyes have widened in panic at the words, the way his breath is already stuttering unevenly in his chest.
It’s not even a conscious decision to pull out his phone. One second, Eddie is waving off the bus driver as he departs, numb to what it means, and the next, he hears Buck’s tinny voice through his speaker.
“Eds, hey - oops, hold on, dropped my fork!”
There's some shuffling on the other line, and under any other circumstance it would have Eddie snorting in amusement as he pictures Buck scrambling to pick up his cutlery within the socially acceptable 5-second window. Now, though, he stands stock-still in the middle of the street, staring at nothing, his mind both blank and a tornado of thoughts all at once.
“Buck,” he croaks, and the rustling immediately stops.
On the other end of the line, Buck’s voice comes through loud and clear. “Woah, what’s wrong? You okay?”
Eddie shakes his head even though Buck can’t see him. “Chris-”
“Chris? What - is he okay? Is he with you? Where are you?” and Buck sounds concerned now, properly concerned. There’s more rustling, louder this time, the sound of dishes hitting the sink and the jingle of car keys, a door opening and closing. “Eddie?”
“I’m - uh, at the bus stop. Joe, the - the bus driver, Joe, he says Chris never got on the bus,” he trips over the words, still staring down the deserted street where the bus turned around a corner a moment ago.
Buck inhales sharply, and Eddie can hear the rumble of his engine over the line.
His voice comes back, but it sounds more distant, like Eddie’s been put on speaker. “Okay - okay, no, maybe he missed the bus or something? He was supposed to turn in that robotics project proposal, right? Maybe it ran late,” he reasons.
“No, he called me from the bus lot. He - it was a minute before pickup. He was supposed to be on that bus, Buck,” and, wow, Eddie’s hand is shaking so hard that it’s getting kind of hard to hold the phone up to his ear. His tongue feels too big for his mouth, and there’s a buzzing in his ears that he’s not sure anyone else would be able to hear.
Buck swears under his breath, “Okay. I’m gonna - here’s what we’re gonna do. You go home, wait for him in case he got a ride with a friend or something, okay?”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, but it sounds more like an exhale than anything. His chest still feels tight, but that theory does actually make sense. “Yeah, maybe Caleb’s mom, or - or Noelle? She lives two streets over.”
“Yeah, exactly! I’m sure that’s what happened. But - uh, just in case, I’m a few minutes away from the school, so-”
“How the fuck are you-”
“I’m breaking several traffic laws. Like, all of the traffic laws, probably,” Buck admits, shameless and sounding more like himself.
Eddie’s lips twitch up in response, though he can’t seem to shake the strange, heavy feeling in his stomach, like the one you get right before the fall on a rollercoaster. He starts walking back to their porch, eyes fixed on the street and scanning for any sign of an approaching car. Any second now, he’ll see Chris’s unruly curls emerge from behind a corner, and this will all have been a quick misunderstanding best solved with takeout pizza and beers with Buck on their couch, Chris tucked safely into his bed where he belongs. He sits down on the top porch step, phone still clutched in one hand while the other focuses on pulling at a loose thread on his jeans where they’ve worn thin at the knees from yardwork.
“Okay, I’m at the school,” Buck tells him over the sound of his car door opening and slamming shut, and Eddie can just barely make out the sound of his feet hitting the gravel of the school’s parking lot in quick, steady steps. “I’ll call you back in a minute, okay?”
“Okay,” he says numbly. The street remains barren and silent.
On the other end of the line, Buck makes a small, wounded noise. “We’ll find him, Eds.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call you in a minute,” Buck assures him, followed by the sound of a heavy door creaking open, and then more rapid footsteps on the tiled floor of the school’s front office.
“Okay.”
The call ends with a soft click, and Eddie lets his phone drop onto the wooden porch steps beneath his feet without a second glance. It’s been fifteen minutes since the bus left their stop. Fifteen minutes since Christopher was supposed to come home, and didn’t. He remembers listening to a true crime podcast in Buck’s car the other day on their way home from work - in it, the host had talked about missing person’s cases, and how the first 24 hours were crucial. After that -
Eddie swallows past the lump in his throat. He doesn’t think about what comes after that. Everyone knows what comes after that.
Buck paces the parking lot exactly 25 times, fifteen steps each way, before he sees the familiar police cruiser pull up a few spaces down. Athena doesn’t even manage to get her window rolled all the way down before he’s yanking the passenger’s side door open and launching himself in without so much as a hello.
“Last known whereabouts?” she asks, in lieu of a hello herself.
“Bus lot, east side of the building, right next to the parent pickup lane,” he parrots back what the receptionist at the front office had told him. “Black waterproof jacket, navy blue backpack, red glasses.”
Athena nods and types all of the information into her phone, her fingers moving rapidly across the screen without a moment’s pause. Buck swallows thickly.
“‘Thena, it was her - Abigail, I mean. She’s the one in the security footage,” he mutters, “I watched it three times at least. She comes over, they talk for a few seconds, and then they leave the bus lot together.”
More typing, loud in the otherwise silent car, the abandoned parking lot.
“Did they give you the parking lot footage?” she asks once the message has been relayed.
“No, they - Sammy at the front desk said they can’t give that out to civilians.”
Now, that’s the condensed version of the story he’s prepared to give Athena. But what really happened was that Buck had come charging into the front office, sweaty and out of breath, and asked to see their security footage from the past half hour. And when Sammy had said no, because apparently that’s confidential information not available to the general public, Buck had assured her that his name was on Chris’s list of contacts, right underneath Eddie’s, right above Carla’s. And when she’d still said no, Buck may or may not have threatened to call his ‘close personal friend Sergeant Grant with the LAPD’ to ‘look into why the school would allow an unaccompanied minor to leave school property without approval’, and he may or may not have thrown a few choice words in there about liability and irresponsibility, et cetera. That had at least gotten him access to the bus lot footage, but the camera angle was such that he couldn’t see the parking lot Abigail had led Chris to, and Sammy would not budge on allowing him further access. Not even when he physically leapt over the counter and tried to click his way through the different camera folders. That had earned him a smack to the hand with a rolled up magazine, and a security guard had escorted him to the front door shortly thereafter.
Athena huffs, like she knows he’s hiding something, because of course she does, and she’s already reaching for the door handle anyway, “Well, good thing you called me, then.”
Inside, Sammy is less than thrilled to see him, but she relents once Athena flashes her badge and approaches the front desk with long, confident strides. Bobby always used to say that success is 50% confidence and 50% actual skill. He never really understood what that meant, but he does now.
They’re huddled over an ancient computer screen minutes later, scanning the parking lot footage for any trace of Abigail and Chris. Buck is jittery in the squeaky swivel chair, his knee jerking up and down without much input from his brain, and he gnaws at a hangnail as his eyes fly across the screen, straining against the harsh blue light for just a glimpse of Chris’s familiar curls.
And then, he sees it, in the top-right corner, right at the very edge of the parking lot. Chris’s pixelated body making its way over to an unfamiliar car, and then Abigail comes into frame on the driver’s side, her head darting around wildly for a few moments before she gets into the car, too.
“There,” his pointer finger presses against the warm surface of the screen.
Athena taps away on her phone, presumably providing the license plate number, and then she steps away to radio in all of the information they’ve gathered. Buck trails after her after shooting Sammy a tight-lipped smile, and his legs feel wobbly and unstable as they make their way back through the front door and parking lot back towards the police cruiser.
The thing is - there is a deep, dark pit in Buck’s chest that has been laying dormant for a long time now, ever since they lowered Bobby’s glossy casket into the ground. That particular, cold darkness likes to make itself known when Buck is at his very lowest, afraid and lost. When he’s on the brink of losing someone, or has already lost them. It was there throughout his childhood, in one way or another, with every little loss he’d had to face with parents who never really learned how to know him, or care. It was there when Maddie left, and then again when she let him leave without her. And it was there, stronger, darker, when Abby left and never looked back. And he thought at the time that that was the worst of it, that the well of darkness in his heart could only extend so deep before reaching critical mass, but no. No, that moment came during the long, painful hours after the tsunami receded, when he’d walked around, bleeding and limping, screaming himself hoarse with Chris’s name in his mouth like ashes and bile, so sure that he’d lost him for good. This precious creature gifted to him by the universe, by Eddie, to take care of, for just an afternoon, lost to the indifferent ocean that had already claimed so much that day.
This feels a lot like that.
“We’ve gotta find him, Athena,” he whispers, gaze fixed on a spot somewhere on the horizon, at the sun setting over the hills, orange and lovely even during a day as horrible as this one. How can the sky look pretty, when Christopher Diaz is missing?
Athena starts the car and places a hand on his knee, squeezing once, twice, before retreating back to the steering wheel.
Eddie can hear a distant ringing, and it takes him so long to react that the call drops and another one comes through immediately afterwards. Buck and Chris’s grinning faces light up his phone screen, their cheeks smushed together in the middle and smearing cotton candy all over each other. It’s a few years old now, the day they went to a fun fair together. Eddie had wiped their faces down with a wet wipe and made fun of Buck for being messier than an eleven year old, and Buck had smeared his still sticky cheek over Eddie’s in retaliation, rubbing the sweetness into his stubble and catching on the corner of his mouth in an approximation of a kiss, but not quite. Not really. Eddie’s tongue had swiped out to taste the sweetness of it anyway.
“Yeah?” he croaks, voice sore from disuse and the tears still drying on his cheek. The sun is setting, and Chris is still not home. He’d hoped, with every passing car and a mirage of curly hair in the back seats, that he would be.
“Eddie!” Buck exhales through the phone, relieved, “Athena and I are on the way. He’s - Abigail took him, they went somewhere together.”
“What the fuck-”
“I know! Athena put out an APB on the license plate, we’re gonna find him.”
Eddie closes his eyes and takes the first full breath he’s gotten since Joe told him about Christopher not being on the bus. It’s not great, not even close - but at least he knows who Chris is with. And Abigail is just a kid, just a couple of years older than Chris himself.
He remembers last night, and how she’d shown up at his front door. How she’d alluded to wanting to stay the night. It makes him shudder just to think about it, the deep feeling of wrong during the entire ordeal, and how he’d tried to tread carefully on the line between parental care and detached professionalism. How he’d wondered, in the fitful hours before sleep finally claimed him, where she’d even found his address, and what in the world possessed her to show up unannounced and behave like that.
“She came over for dinner last night,” he blurts out to Buck. He hadn’t wanted to tell him, because the situation had been uncomfortable enough already without Buck’s concern, the worried crease between his brows.
“She what?”
“Yeah,” and it’s like a dam breaking, because he can’t help but tell Buck everything now that he’s opened that door, because they always tell each other everything, ever since - well. The point is, they agreed not to keep shit to themselves. “She just came over, I have no idea how she knew where we lived. And I felt bad, so I invited her to eat with me and Chris, and then there was this really weird moment where she mentioned Alex -”
“LAPD therapist Alex?”
“Yeah, and - and she said something about Alex being pretty?”, which, like, what the fuck was that about? He’d seen the woman twice, at work, and never under pleasant circumstances. “It was so weird, man. And then she followed me into the kitchen! Tried to get me to let her sleep over, or something, I don’t really know what-”
“Eddie,” Buck exhales. “What the fuck-”
“I know! I know, okay, it was so weird. But I kinda- kicked her out, nicely? Told her to drive back to that home Alex signed her up for. And she left,” he explains, “It didn’t seem like a big deal.”
“Didn’t seem like a - Eddie.”
Athena’s voice interrupts them, “Vehicle matching her license plate spotted heading onto South Bedford, less than two minutes ago.”
Eddie’s jumping up and crossing the front yard without realizing it, already craning his neck to look as far down the street as possible. And it doesn’t take long at all for him to see it - in the distance, the car from last night approaches at a cruising speed. The sun is still shining on South Bedford street, so Eddie doesn’t have to strain his eyes too much to see it, though he’d recognize it even with his eyes closed, asleep, blind - Christopher’s smiling face through the glass of the windshield.
“I see him,” he whispers, “I can see Chris.”
Buck’s shaky voice comes through like a warm caress, “God, okay, that’s - Fuck. We’re coming, just get Chris inside and wait for us, okay? Fuck.”
Eddie watches as the car comes to a stop just a few yards away, Chris’s long legs emerging from the passenger’s side door and his curls catching on the car roof as he maneuvers out of it. His feet propel him towards his son on autopilot, one arm already stretched out towards him even though he’s still not within touching distance, eyes caught on the smile Chris sends his way once their gazes meet across the distance.
“Thank you,” Eddie sniffs into the phone, “Just - thank you.”
“‘Course, Eds. Anything, you know that, right?”
“Yeah - yeah. I know. I’ve got him, I’ll see you soon.”
He brings his arms around Chris in a way he hasn’t been allowed to do in at least a couple of years, since Chris became a teenager and therefore too nonchalant and cool for things such as public displays of affection with his father, one hand in his curls and the other clutching at the fabric of his backpack where it’s slung over his shoulder. He stays there, breathing in the familiar scent of Chris’s shampoo - the same one Buck uses, peach and mango - hands patting him down as if they’ve gotten back from a difficult call at work, like he and Buck do for each other every day before splitting off to the locker room.
“You scared the hell out of me, bud,” he mutters into the fabric of Chris’s jacket, face tucked into the warm space between his shoulder and neck where he smells like a kid, like Eddie’s kid. His baby.
“Da-ad,” Chris whines, in that teenage way of his, embarrassed. “Abigail took me out for ice cream, relax.”
At the sound of her name, Eddie’s head whips around. She stands there, still stuck as though frozen getting out of the driver’s side door, staring at them with a small smile. Eddie shudders, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up at the misplaced fondness in her eyes, but he swallows down any harshness that may have once been instinctive to him. She’s just a kid, too. A scared, lonely, traumatized kid. She’s barely a year younger than he was when Christopher was born. God.
“You head on inside, bud. I need to talk to Abigail for a sec,” he says, one hand already guiding Chris towards their house.
Chris grumbles but doesn’t argue, and Eddie watches him the entire way up their porch steps, as he unlocks the front door, as it shuts behind him. A second later, the living room light flickers on, and Eddie breathes out for the first time in what feels like forever.
“Eddie-”
“No. Look, I know - I know I helped you that day. I’m so glad that I helped you that day, because you’re a kid, and you were my patient,” a brief flicker of hurt flashes in her eyes, but he continues. “And I’m happy to give you any support you may need - any professional help I can offer. But we’re not friends. You can’t come to my house. I don’t even know how you found out where I live. You can’t go to my kid’s school and - and take him, without telling anyone.”
“I had to,” she mutters.
And that gives Eddie pause. Because - what? She looks small, curled into herself in a way she wasn’t last night, all misplaced confidence in his kitchen, barreling her way in without asking. Eddie knows a thing or two about faking it ‘til you make it. He knows more about giving up, and this is what he sees in her now. Giving up the pretenses.
“What does that mean, kid?”
She sniffs, “They said - they said you needed to be punished. You and the other paramedic, the woman.”
Jesus fuck, not Hen, too. “Uh - right. Who said that?”
“Mother and father. They called me last night, after I went back to the home.”
“Okay,” he puffs out a big breath of air, nodding. “Okay, that makes sense. They were pretty upset that day in the courthouse. So they asked you to, what, scare me a little? Take Chris for an hour or two and make me freak out?”
She looks at Eddie like he slapped her. “No. I didn’t take Chris to punish you, I took him so that I could - to save him. From being punished with you.”
Great. Great, great, great. “Right. Well - thank you. For… helping Chris, or trying to help him, at least. Why don’t we - uh, I’ll make us some tea, and we’ll wait for my friends to get here. They can help us figure out what to do next.”
That finally gets her to smile, and Eddie tries to force a smile back. They walk to the house in silence, and Eddie’s just about to step onto the path leading up to their porch when his eyes catch on something glinting in his peripheral vision.
A knife - stabbed through the front tire of his truck. The other tires are deflated, too, long slashes through each and every one of them. His stomach swoops uncomfortably at the sight of it, sharp and glinting in the fading sunlight. As he leans down to grab it to show Athena later, a tell-tale click sounds to his right, just behind the front bumper.
Abigail’s mother stands there, a gun in her hand, aimed straight towards his chest.
She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her cold eyes. “Let’s talk inside, shall we?”
Part 2: Always You Two
Buck is nearly vibrating out of his seat as Athena stops at yet another red light, having long since given up on trying to will the color back to green with the power of his mind because it’s just not working today. He swears it always works when Eddie does it on their way to work in the morning, especially when they’re running late.
Just as he’s imagining hugging Chris once they get to the Diaz house, Athena’s police radio erupts with sudden noise.
“10-52 on Fairfax and Melrose, vehicle collision,” a voice calls over, and Athena tuts but doesn’t otherwise react. “Fairfax and Melrose, 10-32, white male, looks to be around 40 years old, wielding a handgun. Copy that, dispatching units.”
“Busy intersection,” Buck comments, his knee still bouncing up and down.
Athena hums, but her finger presses just shy of the call button on her radio, a frown settled deep into her browbone. Just as it looks like she’s about to move her hand back to the steering wheel, another voice chimes in.
“Fairfax and Melrose, 10-32, suspect has been apprehended in a citizen’s arrest, awaiting assistance from dispatched units. Paramedic on scene is providing medical care, 10-52, dispatched to the scene.”
Athena presses the button and speaks into the radio, “1275, Sargent Grant. Identity of the suspect?”
A brief moment of silence, and then the radio chimes back, “1275, suspect has been identified as Ken Evans, 43.”
Buck’s eyes snap up to her own, “That’s - Abigail’s last name is Evans.”
“Common last name, Buckaroo,” Athena says, but she’s frowning down at the steering wheel. She clicks the button again, “1275, Sargent Grant. 10-29, requesting identity check on suspect Ken Evans. I need the name of his next of kin, please.”
Another crackling silence. Buck blinks up at Athena, and she blinks back at the radio, lips pressed together in a frown.
“1275, suspect is married to a Lydia Evans, maiden name Clark, age 39. Father to an Abigail Clark, age 18.”
Athena’s eyes slide to his, and Buck swallows past the lump in his throat. His leg bounces up and down so hard that it feels like the car is shaking right along with it. “Do we know if the wife is on scene at Fairfax and Melrose?”
“Negative, 1275. Suspect was alone in the vehicle at the time of the collision.”
She nods, “10-4. Do we have information on the paramedic assisting on scene?”
The silence that ensues after that question is different. Heavy, like the dispatcher on the other line is considering their words for just a beat longer than before.
“Paramedic Wilson, LAFD station 118. Involved in the collision as well.”
Now, the thing is that Buck’s known Athena for almost a decade. He’s seen her majorly pissed off (most of the time at him, at least in the early days), and a host of other things in that time - good and bad, and very, very bad. And barring a few exceptions, she has always seemed to him like a pillar of stability, deadpan in a comforting kind of way that’s always made him feel like things would be resolved, no matter how fucked up they may get before that. Throughout Maddie’s kidnapping and Bobby’s death, he’s leaned on her like a child would on a mother, loved in a begrudging but warm kind of way.
He has never, however, heard her curse quite so colorfully as she does now.
“Athena,” he gasps, equal parts delighted and shocked.
There is a lump in his throat at hearing Hen’s name over the radio, but he tries to tell himself that her administering medical attention means that she can’t be that badly hurt. He hopes. God, this day just keeps getting shittier, doesn’t it? What else could go wrong?
“You go see Chris and Eddie, I’ll go make sure Hen and Karen are okay. Do not go looking for trouble, I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Athena tells him, as they pull onto the familiar treelined path of South Bedford street.
“I never go looking for trouble,” he whines.
“And yet, it always finds you anyway.”
He grins, and opens the car door, eyes already locked on the lit porchlight above Eddie’s front door. God, he can’t wait to hug Chris. Just as he’s about to step out, a thought strikes him.
“Hey, what are the odds that Hen gets in a car accident with Abigail’s dad the same day his kid takes Chris?”
The look Athena gives him is so sour, it could curdle milk. “Low, Buck. The chances are very, very low. Do not open the door to anyone until I get there.”
He waves at her from the driveway until the car is just a dot in the distance, and then makes his way up the porch steps to Eddie’s front door. He’s just stepped in, about to open his mouth to yell out for Chris, when he hears a distinct click that he’s only heard once before - that day in front of their stolen ambulance, when he and Eddie had been held at gunpoint.
“Oh, f-”
The gun collides with the side of his head, and the last thing Buck thinks is Ow, followed by Athena’s gonna kill me, and concludes with a dull thud as he collapses, unconscious, onto Eddie’s hardwood floor.
Eddie comes to slowly, like waking up in the bunk room to the sound of the alarm blaring in his ears, except so much worse because his head fucking hurts, and he can feel a thick trail of warm blood sliding down the side of his face. He groans, blinking against the harsh brightness of the overhead light in the kitchen, the one Buck refuses to turn on because he says it reminds him of a hospital room. Cold, blue, too bright. He prefers the warm lamp in the corner by the dining table, even though it means he has to squint a bit when cooking at night.
He tries to lift a hand to his eyes to rub at them, but that proves impossible. Because his fucking hands are tied behind his back, a thick line of rope connecting his wrists and binding them to the back of his dining room chair.
“God, fuck,” he struggles to get free, squirming around in the chair uselessly.
The thin skin of his wrists is sore and blistering from rope burn even after just a few moments of struggling against his bindings, and upon further investigation, he realizes that his legs are similarly bound to the legs of the chair. Awesome. He blinks up at the ceiling, eyes welling up with frustration.
“Chris?” he calls, throat so sore that it comes out as more of a croak.
There is a shuffling sound to his right, in the doorway that leads to their living room. Abigail’s mother stands there with her arms crossed defensively over her chest, the same smile playing about her mouth as before. She watches him struggle against his restraints for a long moment, smile never wavering even as she steps into the room fully, as though he’s a particularly amusing zoo exhibit.
Eddie’s not an angry person. He’s tried really, really hard to not be an angry person, not anymore. But seeing that smile, tied to his dining room chair in his own damn house, not knowing where his son is… Eddie feels the old tendril of rage curl around his heart, the hungry thing in him that came alive during those fight club days when he’d hurt strangers just to feel something besides the absolute numbness that came from losing his best friend to a pointless lawsuit. In retrospect, Eddie knows that what he’d been feeling was hurt himself - but feeling it wasn’t allowed, and the only way to feel it was to inflict it upon others. He talked to Buck about it, long after everything was resolved. About his parents, and how they taught him that feelings made you weak, and a man can’t be weak. How he grew up swallowing so much of what he’d been feeling, gorging himself on his own emotions until he could taste only the bile that rose in his throat as a response to feeling anything at all.
He looks up at Abigail’s mother, and he feels the kind of anger that makes you calm. It scares him, a little, how calm he feels with it in him. Like pulling on an old shirt you’ve outgrown and finding that it still fits you perfectly.
“Tell me that my son’s okay,” he says. His voice does not shake, but his hands do. That old, familiar itch.
She hums, looking down at Eddie with her lips curled into a grimace, “He’s on the couch.”
“You won’t hurt him,” it’s not a question, but she nods anyway.
“He’s innocent. Untouched by the corruption of his father, for now.”
Ah, she sounds just like his mother. They should start a book club or something.
“She’ll be here soon. Then we can begin the long process of fixing you.”
He sees the hit coming this time, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. At least being tied up in the chair affords him the relative dignity of not collapsing face-first on the floor this time, though.
“-ddie! Eddie!” a voice hisses to his left, as Eddie fades in and out of consciousness.
He frowns, trying to latch onto the familiar warmth of it, because he knows that voice. It’s in every mumbled good morning across a gear shift as a warm cup of coffee is placed into his waiting hand on the way to work, and it’s in every whispered goodnight across the dark expanse of his living room as Buck settles down on the couch for the night. He likes that voice. Loves it. Loves how it shapes itself around his name like the touch of a thumb across his cheek, reverent and kind, always kind.
“Eds- baby. Wake! Up!”
He groans, eyes still closed against the light shining through the shutter of his eyelids, the sound of his own heart beating in his ears, “Hurts- my head. Fucking hurts. Think I… have a concussion.”
“Me too,” Buck mumbles, though it sounds like he’s far away, or under water, and Eddie cracks his eyes open in time to see him spit a glob of bloody spit onto the dining room carpet.
“‘S gonna stain,” he complains.
“I’ll get it dry cleaned.”
Eddie laughs, but it makes his head hurt even more, so he ends up wincing away from the sensation instead. Buck cringes and spits again. His nose is bleeding, and his bottom lip is split. The truly, deeply depraved part of Eddie’s brain chimes in - he looks kinda hot - but he learned long ago to tune that part of himself out. It’s just difficult to do when his head feels like it was put through a woodchipper and then reassembled incorrectly. He wants to reach over and wipe the blood off of Buck’s chin for him, but his arms are still tied to the back of the chair. Fuck.
“You look like shit,” Eddie tells him instead.
Buck snorts, and it sounds wet and gross, so much so that he leans forward like he’s about to puke. In the end, he just spits pathetically onto the floor again.
“You look hot,” Buck licks his bottom lip, cringing as his tongue makes contact with the wound, “Very Rocky Balboa, John McClane, Jason Bourne, et cetera.”
Eddie groans through another laugh, “Why does this shit always happen to us?”
“God gives his toughest battles to his prettiest soldiers.”
“Strongest,” Eddie corrects.
Buck grins. His teeth are red with blood. “Nah, I’m pretty sure it’s prettiest.”
“I’ll show you pretty.”
“You already did, I’m looking right at you-”
Another wheezing laugh escapes him, head pounding in time with his heart, “I hate you.”
“You love me,” Buck teases. For a long moment, his confused gaze darts around the room, searching, searching, before landing back on Eddie. His eyes are very, very wide, and very, very blue. “Chris? Is he-”
“He’s okay,” Eddie assures him, “Apparently he’s innocent, and it’s me who needs fixing.”
“Sounds like your mom. They should start a book club or something.”
I love you, Eddie thinks. It comes to him unbidden and fully-formed, ricocheting around his throbbing head like a marble bouncing from wall to wall. He looks at Buck, half his face covered in blood and spit, dried tear tracks on his rosy cheeks. His birthmark is darker than usual because he’s upset, and it always gets darker when he’s upset, or flustered, or happy. And Eddie knows this because he knows everything about Buck, everything there is to know about him, even the stuff Buck doesn’t want him to know. Like the way he snorts right before he wakes up, as though he’s been startled out of a dream, but he doesn’t ever snore. Like how he pretends to hate pickles on his burgers just so he could give them to Chris, because Chris loves pickles and Buck wants to make him happy, even if it’s just in the little, everyday ways.
And it’s not like that’s a new thought. Eddie has loved Buck since the moment he met him, even when Buck was being an asshole during that first shift. Because their eyes had met in the changing room on Eddie’s first day, and as he’d felt Buck’s hand in his for the first time all he could think was “Well, fuck” in a kind of vague way that he didn’t entertain for too long. Because there’d been a bomb, and then a ladder truck, and an embolism, and 30 feet of mud had fallen on top of Eddie, and also the tsunami, and the shooting, and - the point is, horrible shit kept happening to them, all of the time, and it was easy to just not think about it, because nothing could come of it anyway.
But evidently, horrible shit will continue to happen to them, ad nauseam, even in the safety of Eddie’s goddamn dining room. And that’s proving to be the kick in the ass he’s needed, more so than years of Frank’s patient guidance on Thursdays at 7pm, more so than Sunday Mass and a priest telling him to choose joy, and definitely more so than his parents’ misguided attempts at steering him towards the right path, whatever that means.
It figures, really. That he’d have this revelation while they’re both strapped to his dining room chairs, bleeding and concussed, and Buck looks like he went a couple of rounds in a cage match.
Which, come to think of it-
“Why do you look like you mashed your face into a boxing glove?”
Buck chuckles, then winces, curling in on himself like his ribs hurt. “Woke up a couple of times, asked to see Chris. They wouldn’t let me, so I busted out of the rope-”
“You busted out of the rope?” Eddie cranes his neck and, yep, Buck has an actual chain around his wrists instead of rope. Sweet Jesus. Why did he have to have his gay awakening now? Why, God, why.
Buck shrugs, like it’s no big deal. “Made it all the way to the doorway before they-” he makes a noise and motions with his head, the pistol-whip Eddie is now all too familiar with.
“Wait,” Eddie frowns, “You said they? Did Abigail-”
“No, God, no, she’s a kid. She’s with Chris on the couch, I think. But lemme tell ya, those LAPD standard issue pistols sure do get the job done.”
“LAPD - wait. No,” he groans, “Alex?”
“Yep. Did not see that one coming.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. It’s like we’re in a telenovela. A really, really shitty telenovela.”
“Without the kissing in five different camera angles,” Buck agrees.
In Eddie’s head, the marble bounces off a wall and gives a resounding click.
“Ha, yeah,” he cringes at himself. Smooth, Diaz. Super smooth. Time to pivot. Back to the crisis at hand. “Any chance you could bust out of those chains?”
Buck’s mouth twists like he’s considering it, and he gives an experimental tug at the chain before - mother of God - flexing his arms so hard that the veins in his biceps bulge out. Unsuccessful pivot. Wildly, insanely unsuccessful pivot. Jesus Christ. He does not whimper, thank you very much. And if he does, it can be blamed on the migraine. Because he’s concussed. Clearly.
“Nope. I’ll need to start lifting heavier, I guess.”
Please, God, no. “Yeah,” Eddie croaks, “Looks like it.”
“You know,” Buck blinks up at the ceiling, “It was kinda weird how she let you handle that guy at the grocery store. Like, yeah, you’re a veteran and you have personal experience, but - she’s supposed to be a hostage negotiator, and she didn’t, like, hostage negotiate, at all.”
Eddie snorts, “Pretty sure she actually made it worse at one point.”
“Yeah! And also, at the intervention for Hen-”
“No, yeah, that was-”
“Unethical and possibly illegal?” Buck prompts.
“Yeah, that.”
Buck narrows his eyes at him, the corner of his mouth trembling into a smile. “You were just there for the finger food and wine, admit it.”
“Never,” he sniffs, “I was also there to mess with you.”
“You’ve been messing with me for nearly a decade, Eds.”
Eddie looks at him, then, and Buck’s already looking back at him with a smile playing on his lips. His pretty, pretty eyes are red-rimmed with exhaustion, and the blood has dried in thick streaks on his top lip and chin.
“Gonna mess with you forever,” he whispers.
Buck’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and he whispers back. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
They startle at the sound of the front door banging open, Athena’s voice ringing out in the tense quiet. “LAPD, drop your weapon and put your hands behind your head!”, followed by the distinct sounds of an intense scuffle just beyond the dining room door. A clatter of metal against hardwood, a yelp, more indistinct yelling and muttering, and the sound of footsteps approaching them.
Hen stands in the doorway, a tissue stuffed up her nose and her eyebrows climbing so far up her forehead that they peek over her cracked glasses. “You guys look like shit,” she says, already making her way over to them with a first aid kit.
“Thank you, Henrietta, you look lovely,” Buck snips back, wincing as she moves around him to work on the chain with a pair of bolt cutters.
“Call me Henrietta again and I’ll forget how to use these,” she waves the bolt cutters around for emphasis, even as she starts cutting the chain. “Only you two idiots, I swear.”
“Chris?” Eddie asks from where he’s slumped back in his own chair, waiting patiently for his turn to be liberated.
She smiles at him, small and kind, “He’s okay, Athena’s with him.”
He blows out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, and relaxes into the chair like a puppet with its strings cut. When Hen cuts his wrists free, Buck reaches over and starts rubbing at them with his thumbs, trying to get the circulation going. For a long moment, Eddie watches him - almost definitely concussed, grimacing against the feeling of blood and snot undoubtedly sliding down his throat, if the way his throat is working is anything to go by, his blue eyes clear and warm on Eddie’s own. His thumbs are gentle where they rub against the sore skin of Eddie’s forearms.
Eddie tries very hard not to think about what it all means. Tries to ignore the fluttering in his stomach, and the way his heart is ramming against his ribcage. And most of all, he tries to ignore the look Hen is shooting him from over Buck’s head.
Part 3: The Sudden Unraveling of One Edmundo Diaz
Three days later, Eddie walks into the station and spends ten minutes staring into his open locker. He sits on the bench, shirtless and lost in thought, though his brain feels more like a beehive than anything - thoughts buzzing around, trying and failing to land.
“I usually do shoes, then shirt, then pants,” Hen’s voice makes him jolt, and he scowls at her responding snort. She trails into the room as though afraid of spooking a wild animal, settling on the bench next to him with a smile. “How are you?”
Eddie opens his mouth to say I’m fine, but she narrows her eyes before he’s even started speaking. Damn. The thing is, he is. Fine, that is. Chris is okay - as far as he knows, he got to get ice cream with Abigail and then sat on the couch with his headphones on while his dad and Buck had a productive conversation in the dining room with her mom and Alex, and then Hen took him to Denny’s for an entire weekend of video games and ignoring homework until the last second. And Buck’s okay, too. He got patched up in the emergency room, and they’d given him the good stuff for that first night. He and Eddie had laid half-awake on top of the covers in Eddie’s bed for hours after being dropped off by Athena, and Buck had mumbled his way through a detailed retelling of the literature podcast he’d been listening to earlier that day, before Eddie called him about Chris.
And Eddie is okay, too, because he got to fall asleep to the sound of Buck’s voice telling him about Oscar Wilde, their hands almost touching on top of the covers in the liminal space between asleep and awake. And then Buck spent Saturday night there as well, so they could monitor each other for post-concussion complications. That night, Eddie laid awake for a long, long time, staring at the way Buck’s chest rose and fell with deep, sleep-heavy breaths, and his hand had inched across the great distance between them until the very tips of his fingers just barely brushed against the delicate skin of Buck’s wrist. He could make out the fluttering pulse underneath it, strong and even, and the feeling of it had followed Eddie into a dreamless sleep.
Last night, he fell asleep alone in a bed that felt too big, in a silent house with the dining room carpet stripped off. He stared up at the popcorn ceiling until night bled into early morning, trying not to think about what he had to think about. His parents, and his shitty childhood interspersed with wonderful moments of warmth with Sophia and Adriana, eating tres leches at Abuela’s house until his stomach felt full to bursting, learning how to ride his bike on Pepa’s front lawn. The way his shirt collar at Sunday Mass would feel too tight, and how Mama would force him into the confessional at twelve years old. And how he always knew what she wanted him to say but never knew how to say it, because it didn’t feel wrong until she taught him that it had to. The feeling of Ramon’s open palm on his cheek at dinner, when Eddie, no older than fourteen, asked to sleep over at a friend’s house so they could read his new comic books. The impossible pressure of choosing a girl to like, and the relief of it being Shannon, who was kind and funny and understood him, at least before everything went to shit between them when they grew out of understanding each other. Running away to a war zone, where the constant threat of death was a welcome respite from the immeasurable weight of their disappointment in him, because at least he was good for something over there, at least he could be someone else, someone who wasn’t a fuck up.
He sits on the bench and thinks about Abigail’s mother, the way she was so sure that there was something rotten in him. Something that could only be fixed with more pain, more blood spilt. And it would be so easy to believe that, to keep believing it like he has since the day he was born. But Buck had bled right with him, and if there’s one thing Eddie knows, it’s that there is nothing rotten within Evan Buckley. So maybe, maybe, they’ve all been wrong about him. Maybe he’s not a fuck up, even though he’s messed up more times than can count. Maybe he wasn’t born wrong, and it was their own fault for not seeing it, not his.
He looks at Hen, now. Her eyes flit across his face as though assessing him for damage after a call, knowing and too observant for his own good. She’s always the first one to figure things out.
“I think I’m gay,” he croaks.
Hen slides across the bench to him, and her arms wrap around his shoulders before he even registers the heaving of them, the way he trembles like a child in her warm embrace.
“Okay,” she whispers, “That’s so okay, Eddie. Thank you for telling me.”
They stay like that for a long time, only breaking apart when Chim busts into the locker room to call them over for breakfast. He’s just glad that Buck’s off for another day, because there’d be no hiding from his knowing eyes now.
“Diaz, Buckley, Panikkar, be ready to leave for the auction at 6 sharp,” Chimney’s voice bellows from his office, a few days after Buck comes back to work following the incident with Abigail and Chris.
He catches Eddie’s eye across the loft couch, and gets a confused frown in return.
“What auction?”
“No idea.”
Ravi squirms in the armchair across from them, pretending that he’s not watching them over the edge of the book he hasn’t flipped once in the last five minutes. Eddie narrows his eyes at him.
“What did you do?”
Ravi cringes and pretends to turn a page. “Nothing.”
“Probie,” Buck warns. “What did you do?”
Predictably, Ravi implodes under the pressure. “Don’t be mad! It was before you guys got-” he motions to their still-bruised faces. Buck has a black eye, and his lip is still healing. Eddie had to get three stitches on his forehead. “Anyway, I didn’t wanna do the auction by myself! I thought it would be funny, like a - a bonding experience!”
“A bonding experience,” Eddie repeats, his voice already flat and resigned.
Ravi perks up, “Like the time we went clubbing, when Buck hooked up with the two siblings.”
“God, they were not siblings, we’ve been over this!”
Eddie closes his eyes, and counts, very slowly, to ten. “What kind of auction is it?”
“The-” Ravi squeaks, sinking further into his armchair and still pretending to read, Jesus fucking Christ, “The sexy firefighter auction. Y’know, where people bid on you.”
Buck sputters, his long limbs flailing on the couch and nearly smacking Eddie upside the head. He puts a hand on Buck’s knee to steady him, and tries to ignore the jolt it causes in his stomach at the warmth of Buck’s skin through the material of his work slacks.
People bidding on him, like cattle. No, that’s great. Perfect, actually. What could possibly go wrong?
Well - everything, apparently. Because the universe does not scream, but apparently it does hate Eddie Diaz.
“Firefighter Panikkar with the 118!” the announcer bellows, followed by a round of applause and wolf whistles from the enthusiastic crowd.
Eddie shifts from foot to foot backstage, his shoulders squared and back so tense you’d think he was standing in line at the gallows, not a kitschy hotel ballroom stage with twenty other shirtless firefighters. He tries not to let his eyes wander, a skill he’s more or less perfected over the three decades of jaw-gritting repression, fueled by religious guilt and his mother’s thin-lipped disappointment, but Buck comes into view in his peripheral and Eddie has to close his eyes and take a few deep breaths in order to avoid embarrassment. Or spontaneous combustion.
“Hey,” Buck nudges their elbows together, “You good?”
“Yep. Never better,” he grits out, still staring at the inside of his eyelids.
Buck shifts next to him, taking the warmth radiating off his bare torso away for just a moment during which he clenches his jaw and does not whimper at the loss, before settling a warm palm on Eddie’s bare shoulder. Good lord. Eddie counts backwards from ten, and tries not to notice the way Buck’s breath fans across his skin as he leans into his space.
“It’s supposed to be fun,” Buck reminds him.
“Ha, yeah,” he huffs, “Easy for you to say, you got the gaggle of old ladies.”
Buck grins, wide and pleased. “Dolores, Felicia, Lisa and I are gonna have a blast at tipsy bingo tomorrow night.”
That pulls a real laugh out of him at last. He leans into Buck’s space just a bit, as though pulled in by an invisible force, swaying towards him and back like a piece of string in the wind. Maybe it won’t be so bad. If Buck could get adopted by three retirees who’d hooted and hollered so loud that the presenter’s mic had crackled in response, then maybe Eddie will have a similarly pleasant fate today. Maybe there’s a lovely old lady in the audience who’s ready to spend her retirement check on dinner with him, too.
“I’m gonna go sit down with Hen and Karen, okay? Don’t puke on stage.”
Eddie groans, and then he watches helplessly as Buck’s hand slides off his shoulder and he disappears behind the curtain dividing their makeshift backstage area and the main ballroom. The muscles of his bare back ripple with every step, and Eddie feels like he might actually dry heave right then and there, but he can’t look away even after Buck’s long gone.
All too soon, the presenter calls his name into the staticky mic, and Eddie walks out in a daze. As soon as he emerges from behind the curtain, there is a loud clap of applause from the audience, accompanied by the distinct sound of Buck wolf whistling from the back. Eddie’s eyes scan the audience for him, unseeing for a moment before - yep, he’s standing up in the back row, Hen and Karen snickering right next to him, and his hands are cupped around his mouth as he gives another loud hoot. He’s still fucking shirtless.
“Firefighter Diaz with the 118! We will start the bid at $10.00. And remember, folks, this is all for charity. All proceeds go towards funding the LAFD’s wildfire prevention program!” the presenter pauses for applause, ushering Eddie to stand next to him. “Do we have $10.00?”
A hand shoots up from the audience, and Eddie wants the floor to swallow him up whole. Because it’s not a sweet, old lady he can go to dinner with and endure her flirting with a pleasant yet internally detached demeanor. And it’s not even a woman around his age, who would ogle him across the table as he recounts the 118’s greatest hits before bidding her a good night with the familiar pit in his stomach that comes from performing, always performing, but always good at it. No, it’s a man. A man who looks a bit older than him, but a man nonetheless. And he’s attractive, and he grins up at Eddie even as several other hands shoot up to outbid him.
Eddie swallows past the lump in his throat, and his eyes scan the audience again before landing on Buck’s stunned expression. But Buck’s not looking back at him, he’s staring at a spot somewhere in the front of the audience that Eddie can’t make out from this angle, and then he’s leaning down to whisper furiously at Hen and Karen. Eddie can’t hear their responding cackles, but he can see the way their faces shape around them, anyway, even from a distance.
“We have $120.00, can we get $125.00?”
The man’s hand shoots up again, this time followed by considerably less competition as the figure goes into the triple digits. Buck had gotten $150.00 on his turn. Eddie’s throat works to swallow past the lump lodged in there, dry and uncomfortable, even as a little thrill of excitement lights up in his stomach at the idea of sitting across from the man at a fancy restaurant. He can practically feel his mother’s disappointment from all the way in El Paso, his father’s palm, the stuffiness of the confessional. Would he pull Eddie’s chair out for him? Would they share desert?
“$140.00!” a voice bellows from the audience, and Eddie’s jaw drops. Because it’s Buck - Buck’s voice, and Buck’s hand shooting up with one of those auction paddle things clutched in his long fingers, and Hen’s smacking him on the leg but he doesn’t so much as flinch as he stares Eddie down.
The man frowns, but he levels Eddie with another smile and raises his own paddle. “$150.00!” he offers, just as enthusiastically. His voice is very deep.
A round of applause and whistling, and the presenter grins into the mic. “We have $150.00, for the gentleman in the third row. Do I hear $155.00? $150.00 going once, going twice-”
“$200.00!” Buck cuts in, waving his paddle around so frantically that it looks like he’s trying to swat at a fly. And, wow, now Karen’s smacking him, too, they’re really going to town with those auction paddles. He winces in sympathy, even as Buck looks up at him without so much as a blink. Jesus.
A moment of silence, and then the audience erupts in more applause. Eddie watches as the man’s hand lowers, shrugging in response to the sheepish smile sent his way even as a wave of relief washes over him.
“We have $200.00! Can I get $205.00? $200.00 going once, going twice,” he pauses for dramatic effect, waiting for someone else to cut in. But no one does. “$200.00, sold to the shirtless gentleman in the back!”
“Ha!” Buck chirps triumphantly, pumping his fists, and he’s immediately pulled back down by a Hen who looks mortified and delighted in equal measure.
Eddie stands up straighter and smiles politely as the presenter explains the donation process one more time before ushering him off the stage. He walks in a bit of a daze to the very back of the room, mind carefully blank even as he’s pushed into the empty chair next to Karen, shifting a bit so his bare arm isn’t rubbing against the woman sitting to his left.
He tries not to look towards the three of them, resolute in his refusal to engage further in this foolishness, and it works… for all of two seconds. Against his better judgement, his eyes slide first to Karen, who looks like she’s fighting back actual tears with how hard her lips are pressed together. Her shoulders are trembling slightly, as if she’s vibrating in her seat with barely suppressed laughter. And then he looks at Hen, whose eyebrow is arched so dramatically that he wants to tell her it’ll get stuck that way. Her top lip trembles where she’s fighting hard against a smirk. And then, finally, his eyes land on Buck. And Buck is looking right back at him, his smile more of a grimace, and his blue eyes sparkling in the fluorescent light of the ballroom.
“You looked like you needed saving!” he explains. Eddie wants to laugh. God, how is this his life?
“My hero,” he quips, and it’s worth it for the way Buck’s smile widens into something real and pleased. “You’d better take me somewhere real nice.”
Buck laughs, full-bellied and warm. “Only the best for you, snookums. I’ll even pull out your chair! We can share the desert.”
God help him.
Buck insists on picking him up for the dinner, even though they spent the afternoon together at Eddie’s house anyway.
Eddie did two loads of laundry in the morning, and then they settled on the couch and folded it all while an episode of Hell’s Kitchen played in the background. Buck had folded all of the socks, and Eddie had done the shirts because they both prefer his military-precision folding technique on those, guaranteed to not wrinkle. He tried very hard not to think about their laundry mixing even after Buck moved out all those months ago, and he tried even harder not to think about the six months they’d spent living together before that.
But Buck had met his gaze across the couch, his hands stuck mid-air with a sock clutched in each, mismatched and waiting for their companion, and his pink lips had stretched into a smile. A small, warm uptick of the mouth, just for Eddie. And Eddie had sat there, halfway through folding a t-shirt with ‘BUCKLEY’ stamped on the back in bold, yellow font that had long ago started peeling off from too many washes, and he’d wondered. For just a second, he’d looked at Buck and sent a thought across the distance between them - Is it just me? Or do you feel it, too? But Buck’s eyes slid back to the TV as Gordon Ramsay started screaming at someone about a raw filet mignon, and his question was left unanswered, floating around the untouchable space between his knee and Buck’s own, just a few inches away on the middle cushion of Eddie’s couch.
“How was tipsy bingo with the ladies?” Eddie asks as soon as the door slides open to reveal Buck, and he’s glad that he asked, because it takes him a second to get control of his higher motor function at the sight of him.
Because Buck’s wearing a black button-up, and the sleeves are rolled up to his elbows to reveal the tattoos covering his forearms, and Eddie’s breath catches like a Victorian man seeing ankles for the first time. Jesus Christ. His curls are tight and gelled up, and Eddie’s nostrils flare as his nose registers the smell of his cologne. His fancy cologne. His fancy date cologne, because they’re going on a fancy date. Except not really.
The universe will never be done laughing at Eddie Diaz.
Buck grins as Eddie closes the door and fishes his keys out of his pocket. He doesn’t respond, though, and Eddie tries not to squirm as Buck gives him a thorough once-over, one hand spasming where it rests at his side like he’s in pain.
“You good?”
Buck shakes his head, the grin slipping back to a smaller thing, just a little smile. “Yeah, Eds. I’m good. You look really nice.”
And his voice is so soft that Eddie almost drops his keys.
“You - uh, yeah. Thanks. You too - I like the shirt.” Ha, wow. Stupendous work, Diaz. Super smooth. There is a dictionary somewhere in the world with the definition for “disaster”, and his photo is plastered on there in full color, no words needed.
Buck looks at him for a long moment, his bright, blue eyes flitting over Eddie’s face like he’s trying to figure him out. And that’s not good, no matter what the hungry thing in his chest says, the one that has been gorging itself on Buck’s attention like a five-star buffet ever since they met, endlessly satisfied with every warm smile, every time Buck’s mouth shapes itself around the two syllables of Eddie’s name in that way of his, every time he presses their shoulders together. You have to feel it, too, he thinks, as he blinks up at Buck, at a loss. But if you feel it, too, how come you can look at me like that without choking on your own spit?
“C’mon,” Buck whispers, and his voice does not crack, but he clears his throat anyway. Maybe, Eddie thinks. “There’s a piece of tres leches with my name on it.”
Buck makes a show of pulling his chair out at the restaurant, to the amusement of their hostess and the embarrassment of Eddie himself, even as he swallows the delight threatening to overcome him as they sit across from each other. And the thing is, it feels normal. If he takes away the fancy shirts and cologne, and ignores the little candle on their table, plastic with artificial light but glowing softly all the same, just like the real thing, Eddie can almost pretend that this is something they’ve always done. He thinks about sitting across from a total stranger and having to perform, even if just a little bit, even if just for a little while, and feels a fresh wave of helpless appreciation for Buck.
“Thanks for bidding on me,” he says, too soft, too obvious.
But all Buck does is smile over the rim of his wine glass. His eyes look darker in the dim light, shadows dancing across the lovely shape of his face, pupils blown a bit wide as he tries to adjust to the candlelight. He’s bathed in its warm glow, and he’s beautiful.
“‘Course,” he murmurs back.
Eddie looks at him, and thinks maybe. They eat their food, and then they get the tres leches to split, and Buck insists on feeding it to him “to really sell the experience”, and he looks at Buck over the desert spoon and thinks maybe. They talk, and Eddie drinks wine while Buck chokes on his mineral water when he says something funny, and Buck’s foot nudges against his own in the small space underneath their table, and then a waitress approaches them for the check because it’s nearing 11:30 and they close at midnight. And Eddie thinks maybe.
Buck drives him home. South Bedford street is dark and quiet in the moonlight, and the radio is playing something slow and soft. And as Eddie closes the door behind himself, Buck leans across Eddie’s abandoned seat, his head poking through the open window as Eddie walks backwards towards his front door.
He smiles and whispers “Night, Eddie.”
“Night, Buck,” Eddie whispers back, and thinks maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe, all the way to his empty bed, warmed from the inside with the impossible weight of possibility.