Chapter Text
When his life changes, Buck is standing in the kitchen thinking about Eddie Diaz.
It’s not much of a surprise, considering. If you rolled the dice and pressed pause on a rewound tape of Buck’s life, chances were you would land on a moment where Eddie was, in some shape or form, on Buck’s mind. If you put a hand into the sea of every thought that had ever passed through and grabbed a handful, you would come away with more slips of paper that included Eddie’s name than anything else. The truth is Buck might just always be thinking about Eddie, subconsciously if not consciously, because somewhere between a you’re a badass under pressure, brother and a you think you’re expendable but you’re wrong, Eddie had unknowingly burrowed his way into the folds of Buck’s brain and refused to dig himself out. Now he just lives there, humming under the surface even when the thought of him isn’t directly touched, in the same way that Buck’s breath continues to enter and exit his lungs without the need of any guidance. Buck doesn’t mind the intrusion, if it can even be called that—he likes the feeling of always carrying Eddie around with him.
It just so happens that when he gets the phone call, he’s cleaning up around the kitchen, placing the one-too-many dinner plates that have begun to clog up the sink into the dishwasher because Eddie’s coming over after his shift tonight. They’ve been working opposite shifts for a week now, ever since Buck charitably offered to switch with his acquaintance from B-shift, and Buck misses Eddie like an ache in his chest. He knows deep down that Eddie won’t mind the mess—he’s waded through many of Buck’s without complaint—but still, Buck likes to offer him his best when he can, to polish up the edges of his heart before he hands it to him on a platter, to make the world as spotless as Eddie deserves. He wants to dust off the marble counters until they're bright enough to reflect Eddie’s smile.
He’s attempting to do so, scrubbing at a little piece of dried rice that has crusted to the surface with the blunt edge of his fingernail, when his phone starts ringing in his back pocket. He pulls it out absently and tucks it in between his shoulder and ear.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” says a female voice on the other end of the line, “Is this Evan Buckley?”
Buck frowns. The piece of rice unsticks. “That’s me.”
“This is Cedars-Sinai Hospital,” she says. Her voice is carefully composed. “There’s been an accident.”
Buck’s heart drops. Grabbing the phone with his hand, he pushes it back into his ear with force, feeling his fingers shake around the metal, pivoting around in his kitchen while he tries to remember where the fuck his keys are. “Who?” he demands.
It could be anyone. The entire 118 is on shift. Ravi. Chim. Hen. Bobby. But—there’s only one who he’s the emergency contact for. Only one who the hospital would call if they got hurt.
Eddie.
His mind is already flashing with a thousand possibilities; snapshots of every work-related accident he’s encountered in his seven years on the job, the all-too-familiar of image of Eddie’s body unnaturally lifeless in the hospital bed, breathless in a way that never fails to make Buck want to claw out his own lungs and transplant them into Eddie’s chest. Already scrambling for his keys, heart alight in terror, he frantically chokes out, “What happened? Is he okay?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Actually,” a rustle of files, “We were calling about a girl by the name of June Foster.”
Buck’s mind blanks.
“We believe her to be your daughter.”
-
Buck thinks that perhaps he was born with the desire to make a family of his own.
Deposited straight onto the hard ground rather into the arms of a caring mother, standing in the aftermath of what happened when grief severed the connection between love and blood, Buck never learned what it was like to subsist on love itself rather than the desire to earn it. Maddie did her best to shelter him—to build bridges for him to cross over the raging seas—but she was just a kid herself, and her only tool was two hands not much bigger than his own. So while other kids were being wrapped gingerly in their baby blankets, he was building his own armor. When other parents were holding their children’s hands as they learned to walk step by step, he was teaching himself how to survive falls, how to breathe underwater, how to run over the hot coals, how to exist in a life not padded by the cushions of love.
But still, he never stopped yearning for that love. Never stopped tracing the edges of the empty cavity of his chest where he knew it was supposed to lie. But he knew he wasn’t going to find it in the distant line of his father’s shoulders or his mother’s eyes, which turned away from him more than they sought him out. He knew the only way to change the cruel hand he was dealt with was to draw a new one, to build something from the ground with his own hands and hope a heart that was never nurtured could learn to give an impressionable soul everything it needed, everything he lacked.
He knew the only way he could have a taste of the love he so desired was to give it to someone else.
And so the dream snuck its way down his throat and transplanted into his heart, carving its initials into his future. Nearly every night he spent inside the walls of that barren home, he closed his eyes to it—the vision of a kid who was half made up of all the good parts of him and half made up of someone Buck loved. A kid who he could pour and pour the overflowing basin of love that swooshed around in his chest into. A kid whose hand Buck could hold and lead them through the thicket to ensure that they would never, never turn out like him.
Looking through the glass, Buck feels a little bit like he’s staring into a distorted version of that dream.
She’s so big. He’s sitting outside a hospital room in a creaky chair, breathing in the stale, sanitized air with nothing but a single glass pane between him and her, this girl they said was his daughter , and all he can think is she’s so big.
Behind the doctor’s scrubs he can make out her body lying horizontal in the cot, and he thinks that if he were to pick her up and put her on her feet she would reach all the way up to his belly button. The woman who had talked to him from CPS had told him she was six, and deep down he knows she’s probably a normal height for that age, except she’s just so big.
Maybe it’s because Buck’s always imagined that the first time he would hold his kid, they would fit inside the crook of his arm. Maybe it’s because every inch of her is an inch that grew without him.
Six fucking years. He can’t believe this piece of his heart has existed unknowingly to him for six fucking years.
All this time, she’s been here. When he was twenty six, wallowing in Abby’s bare apartment thinking there was nothing in this world left for him—nothing that could possibly fill that new, aching hole in his chest—she was alive, a newborn baby being clutched in her mother’s arms. When he was twenty seven, pinned under a fire engine, bones crushed as the lights flashed blue and red on the side of his face, she was putting her tiny feet to the ground and learning how to walk one clumsy step at a time. When he was twenty eight and straight out of a pulmonary embolism, unable to get out of bed because what did it all matter if he wasn’t getting up to lace up his work boots, her mother was tucking her into her Disney princess comforter and placing a kiss on her forehead. When he was twenty nine, scaling up a ladder in broad daylight at the risk of being shot out of the sky; when he was thirty and Maddie and Chimney and Eddie left him, and it felt like everyone else was going to follow along; when he was thirty one and holding Connor and Kameron’s newborn in his arms and thinking that it might be close as he was ever going to get to holding his own. Through all of that, she was here. She was alive. His daughter.
You think you’re expendable, Eddie had said, all those years ago, sitting on a hospital bed not unlike the one she’s in now. But you’re wrong.
But you’re wrong.
His fingers are clammy where they’re clutched around his denim-clad thighs, and he can hear a ringing in his ears, and it might just be feedback over the hospital intercoms, but it also sounds like Eddie’s voice saying you’re wrong you’re wrong you’re wrong you’re wrong. Eddie was more right than he could’ve known, because what would’ve happened if Buck had died during the emergency tracheotomy, or the ladder truck, or the pulmonary embolism, or the tsunami, or the shooter, or the lightning strike and he couldn’t be here now, when his daughter needs him? He feels like a ghost, a little bit, sitting in this chair playing father to a girl he’s never met, but what would happen if he really was one, and there were no solid arms left to take her in? What would happen if he failed at being a father before he even got the chance to try, simply by not living long enough to make it here?
But is it even better that he is here? If he had died, succumbed to one of the world’s thousands of attempts to bury him six feet under, would she have been better off? She would’ve ended up in the arms of some licensed and background-checked foster parents who actually had a bed for her to sleep in, instead of him, a thirty-two year old who wore Garfield socks and still sometimes left the house with his shirt on backwards.
It feels like some cosmic mistake. Like the universe got its papers jumbled, and that’s the only reason Buck’s hands are going to be allowed near something so delicate, his blood or not.
He doesn’t know what to fucking do. The only thing he can do—
He’s pulling his phone out of his pocket before he can think it through, and Eddie’s name appears on the screen like a path carving his way back to solid ground.
“Buck,” Eddie says, a smile clear in his voice. One word, and Buck can already tell it's the kind that’s stretching all the way across his face, scrunching the corners of his eyes up. Buck wonders if he caused it. He wonders how long it’ll take for him to make it fall. “We’re actually still cleaning up over here; just got off a rough call.” He laughs into the phone with a lightness Buck almost feels bad for touching. “You’ll never fucking guess. I’ll be headed over there in ten.”
Buck stares forward through the glass, eyes blurring. “Come to the hospital,” he says. His voice comes out weak, near a whisper.
There’s a pause. “What?”
“I’m at the hospital,” he closes his eyes, feels his heart beating feebly inside his chest. “Can you come?” I need you, he doesn’t say. I need you right now.
“Buck,” Eddie says, somewhere in between angry and alarmed, “why the fuck are you at the hospital?”
Buck sighs and leans his head back numbly, letting it thump against the concrete wall behind him.
On the other side of the line he can hear a locker being slammed closed and a distant voice he thinks may belong to Chim asking what’s going on and then Eddie’s feet stomping across the floor like a funeral march. Buck can imagine it—the tense line of his body, the tight press of his lips, the posture of a man who had long learned that anger was easier to hold than fear. He wishes that he could help, reach through the circuitry of his cellphone and out into the miles between them and land his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. He wishes he could disband the strain winding its way through his blood with the firm press of his thumb, push into the softness near Eddie’s pulse point, except his voice is stuck inside his throat and his hands are locked on top of his thighs, and Eddie is miles away, unreachable because he’s still stuck in Buck’s old life. In the before.
“Are you hurt?” Eddie asks—demands, really.
Buck doesn’t reply for a long second, instead listening to the sound of Eddie’s huffing breaths, short and panicked through the phone. He must take too long to answer because after a moment, Eddie breaks the near silence with a pained, pleading noise.
Buck feels a crack lace its way down the ice of his frozen prison at that, thawing some of the daze off and leaving only rawness. “I’m fine,” he manages to say. He’s not. “Just come, okay? Please.”
Eddie sucks in a breath. “Buck—”
Buck hangs up. He doesn’t remember pulling his phone down from his ear and sliding it into his pocket, but it ends up there, another weight to pull him down. He sits and stares forward, watching everything but seeing nothing.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, motionless, nursing something in his stomach that feels a little bit like guilt, but he blinks once and then there’s footsteps echoing down the long, empty hallway.
Buck wonders what it says about him that he knows exactly who it is just by the sound. The gravitational pull is enough for him to finally unstick his head from against the wall and look towards him, ever the sunflower.
“Buck,” Eddie calls, practically yells, feet speeding up as he spots him. He’s a little bit of a wreck—like the eight minute drive to the hospital alone was enough for the worry to embed itself deep inside of him—with frantic eyes and loose hair, as if he had been running nervous fingers through them as he waited at red lights. Buck must’ve called while he was in the middle of changing, too, because he’s wearing his Rangers t-shirt on top and his uniform pants on the bottom, and there’s even a little bit of soot on his face leftover from some call, a black smudge right above his right eyebrow.
His movements are forceful, tense, as he storms down the hallway, but something softens in him when he nears Buck, a fire winking out in his eyes and leaving a few golden embers in the brown. His movements don’t stop, though; as soon as he reaches Buck, he’s instantly lowering himself onto his knees on the hard marble floors right in front of him, broad hands landing gently on the meat of Buck’s thighs.
Under the pressing weight bearing down on his shoulders, Buck feels his heart flutter weakly.
“Are you okay?” Eddie asks, voice low but urgent. His hands slide back to cup his waist, thumbs rubbing circles on his hip bones as his eyes roam over his body like he’s searching for injuries. Even in the shitty florescent hospital lighting, Eddie could be mistaken for an angel, but like this it almost feels like Buck’s the one he’s praying to, kneeling at an altar to a false god where sacrifices are only met with more suffering. Buck doesn’t know whether he should worship it or condemn it—the fact that Eddie always, without fail, comes for him.
That Eddie would search for the shape of Buck’s footsteps and trace their path to find him, even if they were leading into the depths of Hell.
Eddie looks up and meets his eyes. “Buck,” he says, and Buck realizes yet again he’s taken too long to respond.
He swallows. “I’m not—injured,” he settles on finally, because that’s the closest truth he can find.
Eddie frowns at him. His thumb is still tracing circles and Buck feels each one like a faded jolt of electricity through the radio static in his head. “You’re in the hospital, Buck.”
“Not for me.”
Eddie leans back, face dipping further into confusion, and Buck gets it, because he had just been with Bobby, Hen, Chim, and Ravi, so he knew Buck couldn’t be here for any of them, and if it had been Maddie, Chim would’ve been called, and if it had been Christopher, he would’ve been called, so if it’s not Buck, then who could it possibly be?
“Her,” Buck says, answering Eddie’s unspoken question with a dip of his head towards the glass.
Eddie turns slowly, lifting himself back on his feet as he goes. He takes a step closer, brow wrinkling, taking in the small body in the hospital bed, the head of fine dirty blonde hair and the gentle slope of her nose. “Whose kid is that?”
“Mine,” Buck answers, and immediately wonders at the veracity of the statement. Was she his? By blood, yes. But beyond that? He hadn’t been there for any of it, and he knew perhaps better than anyone else—a father who is not there is not much of a father at all.
Eddie turns to him with uncomprehending eyes. “Yours?” He stares at Buck. “You mean—”
“She’s my daughter,” Buck confirms with a nod. “Apparently.”
Eddie leans his head back in a slow shock, like he’s restraining himself from showing the full range of his surprise for Buck’s sake, if anything. “...How?”
Buck gathers that Eddie isn’t asking for an anatomy lesson. “I mean—it makes sense.” He stares forward. His voice sounds monotone to his own ears. “When you spend your twenties having that much sex, accidents are bound to happen. I just—” he shakes his head, “figured that if they did, I wouldn’t be learning about them this late.”
Eddie watches him carefully. “So the mother…?”
Hannah Foster, a doctor had told him absently, looking over his clipboard. It had been a shock, not because he didn’t remember her—which was his expectation—but because he does . He hasn’t heard that name or even thought it in what must be seven years, but he remembers her, can even sort of recall what her face looked like. Buck met Hannah at a small concert Connor had dragged him to, some alternative rock band he had never heard of, and they had hooked up in the venue’s dingy bathrooms during the opening act. For a month or two afterwards, they had very very very casually dated, which had essentially consisted of him buying her dinner before their hookups and getting to tell his mother that yeah, I actually have a girlfriend during the one time she called that entire year and not feel like he was completely lying between his teeth. It was a good arrangement, the perfect bandaid fix for two people starving for connection but scared of what could come with anything too deep or too real. She had broken up with him—if it could even be called that—when he had finally made it through the academy, because apparently, as she had put it, the sex wasn’t good enough to make up for the bad hours.
And then he hadn’t thought about her again.
Until now.
He shakes his head. “Didn’t want me to know about her, I guess,” he fills in.
He can’t blame her anyways. The version of him she knew during their brief stint was reckless, arrogant, irresponsible; the kind of guy who was willing to risk losing the best job he would ever have just because he craved sex like an itch. He wouldn’t want him to be part of his daughter's life either.
Eddie tilts his head. “So what changed?”
Buck laughs without humor and runs a hand over his exhausted face. “A head-on collision on the 405, probably.”
Eddie pulls back in shock, eyes widening.
“They were both in the car,” Buck continues. “Got hit pretty bad apparently. She,” he nudges his head towards the hospital bed, “got away with a minor head injury and some scrapes. Her mom?” He takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “Not so lucky.”
Eddie's eyes flash between his, searching. “And so now…”
“She’s in my custody,” Buck finishes with a curt nod, his stomach curling in dread. “At least until her mother wakes up.”
Eddie’s eyes had strayed to the glass, but he jerks his head back to Buck at that. “Wakes up? You mean—” his brow wrinkles, “she’s not dead?”
Buck shakes his head, slow. “No. She’s just in critical condition. They said it’s not looking very good for her, and I guess… she doesn’t have anyone else. It was either me, or sending her into the system.”
Eddie looks at him for a long moment. “So you’re going to take her?”
“Yeah,” Buck says, barely more than a whisper. When has he ever said no when the universe came knocking on his door and dropped more weight for him to carry at his feet? Why would he say no, when what the world is asking from him is also everything that he’s ever wanted to give, even if he’s not quite sure how to?
Eddie doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just watching him with his bottom lip caught in between his teeth like he’s quietly contemplating something. Then, finally, he moves to take the seat next to Buck, landing a gentle hand on Buck’s thigh as he sits next to him. His voice is so dangerously soft as he asks, “What’s her name, Buck?”
“June,” he answers. It’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud, and it tastes like summer on his frozen tongue. Like bare feet running over hot cement and water balloons popping over tan skin and cherry popsicles staining lips red, pure youth and fragrant vibrance destined to be crushed by the inevitable passage of seasons. It’s pure lightness on his lips, the kind that he thinks could only emerge in his absence, like a garden of blues and purples and pinks unaware of the darkening clouds in the horizon soon to infiltrate the generous indigo sky it’s long thrived under. He wonders if by letting the wind push her into his arms he’s pinching off the edges of her bright future and dooming her to a life inside his own, if his rotting hands will slowly dismantle one by one all of the building blocks of happiness her mother had carefully planted for her. If just by being touched by Evan Buckley, she would become something worse. “Her name is June.”
Eddie’s mouth tips into something that could almost be a smile, and he opens his mouth to say something, and Buck leans in, ready to drink up whatever antidote lies on Eddie’s tongue for the shakiness inside of him—but then the hospital room door is swinging open.
“She’s ready for you, Mr. Buckley,” the doctor says.
Buck feels something drop his stomach and settle deep inside of him like stones sinking to the bottom of a pond. He looks to Eddie immediately to find him looking back, eyes brown and assuring. His hand is still warm against his thigh, and he squeezes once. “Do you want me to stay?” he asks, voice low.
Yes, he wants to say. Stay with me and hold my hand and crawl your way into my heart so I can carry you wherever I go, so that with every heartbeat a piece of you is flowing through me.
But the path ahead of him is so uncertain, and he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to push away the fog enough for both of them to pass through. So instead he shakes his head. “I should do this alone.”
Eddie searches his eyes for a lingering moment, and then he nods in easy acceptance and pulls back his hand from Buck’s thigh. Buck feels its absence like a little piece of the ground that was holding him up falling away, but he steels himself against the feeling and pushes onto his feet, flashing a smile towards the doctor that comes off a bit pained as he approaches the door.
He reaches for the door handle and pauses as his fingers wrap around the cold metal, closing his eyes against the sensation. He takes a deep breath, trying to dispel the distinct feeling that he’s strapping himself into a roller coaster he’ll never be able to step off of, and pushes the door open.
It feels a bit like opening a door to a new life.
He’s been inside the rooms in this very hospital more times than he can count, to the point where he could probably draw their layout from memory, but there’s something distinct about this one, something almost otherworldly. Like fate has turned her head towards them and is watching from above as he takes a careful step inside, the heavy weight of this is going to matter for the rest of my life falling over the room. It’s the same sort of feeling he had that day when Eddie had told him about the will, as if for a brief second his fingers were made of something other than flesh and his life had some other purpose rather than being a shield to collect other people’s blows.
It’s the first time he’s seen her up close, and Buck’s first thought is she looks a lot like him.
It’s startling, really.
She’s sitting up now, the back of the hospital bed pushed up to support her. Her knees are clutched to her chest, and she seems almost curled into herself, her dirty blonde hair spilling over her kneecaps. She looks towards Buck nervously for one brief second, and he gets a single flash of the brightest blue eyes he’s ever seen before she goes back to staring at the wall ahead of her, something all-too-complex for a six-year-old swimming in her eyes.
Buck’s heart clenches in his chest.
“H-hey,” he tries, and immediately chokes on the words, his throat constricting. “Hey, June,” he says again, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I’m—” your dad, he almost says, but the words already taste like a lie before they even slip off his tongue. He has no claim on that title, and no right to try to win something from June by using it.
June is probably already disoriented; he doesn’t want to make it worse by introducing himself as the father she didn’t think she had. And if everything works out alright, he’s only going to be taking care of her for a couple of weeks at most. After that, her mother might choose to go back to how things were, where Buck didn’t exist even on the fringes of their family unit. What if he just made things worse for June by giving her something she couldn’t keep?
“I’m Buck,” he settles on instead, flashing her an awkward smile that she probably doesn’t see, not with eyes so single-mindedly focused on the glass panes in front of her. “Can I, uh, come sit with you?”
She doesn’t answer.
Buck shifts on his feet, unsure of what to do. He decides, finally, to take June’s lack of response as an acquiescence and slides carefully into the seat next to her bed, sending her hesitant looks out of the corner of his eye the entire time. She stares forward like he’s not there.
“I used to be friends with your mom,” he says once he’s settled in his seat, hoping that it’s a forgivable bluff. He places his forearms on his thighs and leans towards her. “They called me from the hospital.”
Nothing.
Buck bites his lip as he watches her, his uncertainty on how to handle this growing. He wants to pull her hands away from where they’re clutching her shins white-knuckled, unravel the tight ball of fear he can see in her eyes. Tell her that she’s safe, that he’ll protect her, that she doesn’t have to worry about the pouring rain or the ominous whisper of wind or the fire lapping out in the distance because if she’ll just let him wrap around her and meld himself to her skin, his body is big enough to shield her from all of it.
But even though Buck has only known her for a minute, he knows what it’s like to know the type of pain that furrows its way into the heart before you’re even tall enough to reach the bag of chips on the third pantry shelf. He can see she already has her own fortress of fear and trauma and mistrust, and Buck thinks it might be to block him out as much as it is to protect herself. And Buck knows that what he sees in her eyes may simply be mistrust in the ability of the world to keep her mom safe from the grasp of death, but that sick, aching part of him whispers that she won’t look at him for other reasons. That she somehow already knows to mistrust him, mistrust that he’ll be able to hold her without his fingerprints leaving dark stains, bruises on top of newly scarred skin.
“And I know we’re not friends yet,” he continues with a smile and a tilt of his head, pushing down his insecurities. It’s just like talking to any other kid , he tells himself. You love kids; you can do it. “But the doctors and everyone else that’s been taking care of you, they, uh—they thought we’d get along really great. So we’re gonna be hanging out for a few days, having some sleepovers, just until your mom wakes back up.” He flashes her with his most convincing smile. “How does that sound?”
Finally, finally , her face changes, and Buck would celebrate—except he’s pretty sure he’s just made something worse, fear hardening to resentment, the kind of look tipping on anger a kid always gets when they think they’ve been lied to. “The doctors said that she might not wake up,” she says.
Buck feels a lump rise to his throat. “Uh,” he winces, “they told you that, huh?”
She nods, her face sour.
God. What is he supposed to say to that? “Well, uh, that is true, but—” he fumbles, foot in his mouth, “Um, that doesn’t mean, you know — she has a chance to wake up,” he finally makes out. “And that’s what we should focus on, yeah?”
She doesn’t say anything, but he makes out the way her eyes are glistening, wetness clinging to her waterline. She tugs at her hospital gown, bunching up the papery fabric in her hands. “I don’t want to go with you,” she says. Her words are soft, but they carry, bruising Buck’s heart like bullets fired from a toy gun. She doesn’t say it like she’s trying to be mean; only like it’s a truth that’s been dredged out of her.
Buck tries to not let it hurt as much as it does. “Okay,” he says, swallowing. “What do you want?”
She looks at him then, shockingly blue eyes brimming with sadness. “I want to see my mom.”
-
Buck—trying to fulfill at least one of June’s wishes before she’s stuck with him for the time being—doesn’t really stop to think whether letting a six-year-old see her critically injured mother is a good idea until they’re in the doorway of her hospital room.
Buck doesn’t remember much about Hannah, only brief flashes of her sly grin and sweat-coated face from the time they spent together in the backseat of his jeep, and he’s definitely no stranger to seeing loved ones on ventilators, but even he’s a little bit startled to see her like this. He can’t imagine how June must be feeling.
If he had been as young as June and seen his mother like this, bandaged and broken and teetering at the edge of death, he doesn’t think he would ever be able to forget it.
He watches from the doorway as June approaches her quietly, heart in his throat. She looks so small as she does so, her hand hovering hesitantly over her mother’s body like a kid at the zoo too scared to reach out and pet the snake.
Buck wants to tell her that she doesn’t have to do this, that they can leave right now if it’s too much for her, but as soon as he opens his mouth, she finally breaches the distance, her hands coming to gently rest over her mom’s motionless face.
She doesn’t try to shake her mother awake or beg her to say something. Instead, she leans in, face obscured from Buck’s vantage point, and presses a very soft kiss to Hannah’s bandaged cheek.
Buck blinks back the wetness in his eyes as June whispers something into her mom’s ear. He can’t make out the words, but the love held in them is clear. The cheek kiss is a familiar action too, practiced and drenched with the ease that six years of love brings. Buck wonders if maybe she’s mimicking something Hannah’s often done to her, before bed every night and when June isn’t feeling well and after school is out and she sees her daughter for the first time in hours. Either way, it’s tangible—the connection June has with her mother, strong and sturdy and irreplaceable. And now, all at once, she’s being ripped away from that. Buck can’t help the feeling that somehow it’s his fault.
It’s not until he’s shepherding June out of the room five minutes later, though, that he fully realizes why the sight made his heart ache so intensely.
It looked a lot like a goodbye.
-
Buck has always hated silence. When he was young, it used to cling to the walls of his childhood home like an inverse version of one of the family sitcoms he used to watch enviously in the living room after church on Sunday mornings. There was no laughter over the dinner table, no knocking over mom’s favorite vase during a rowdy game of indoor tag, no dad’s obnoxious snoring carrying through the walls as he tried to sleep, no jingling keys by the door signaling the start of a ritual after=work reunion. Only thick, rotting silence, the kind that seemed to hollow out the space more than it filled it. It was a stark reminder of the twisted family portrait they all made together—two parents whose hearts belonged to the past and two kids struggling to survive in a haunted house. His parents had nothing left to give, so silence spread where love couldn’t.
Buck has spent the better part of his life trying to chase away that silence. Firstly with crashes and scrapes and the sound of his parents yelling his name across the yard. Then with do you want to get outta here’s and labored breathing and pitchy moans breaching the space of his bedroom. And to this day, with the screech of sirens and the crackle of a hungry fire.
It’s only in recent years that he’s learned there can be value in silence—specifically the type that’s shaped like nursing a good cup of coffee as Eddie does the crossword next to him—but even then, he still thinks he prefers when their voices fill the space, Buck rambling on his newest podcast and Christopher detailing his science project and Eddie chiming in to tease them both. Even now, when he goes on a hike and forgets to bring his airpods or he makes breakfast for himself in the morning with not even the chirping of birds to keep him company, he still feels like that little kid, crying in bed over a nightmare knowing that parents weren’t coming to cuddle him back to sleep.
He’s always hated silence, but he doesn’t think it’s ever felt so stifling.
June doesn’t make a single sound the entire ride back to the loft. Buck has to keep looking back in the rearview mirror to make sure she’s even still breathing. Every time he does, he finds her in the same position, forehead against the glass as she stares out, arms wrapped protectively around her chest.
Buck tears his eyes away from the sight of her and refocuses on the road. He had been surprised when the clock inside his car revealed he had spent nearly five hours at the hospital, but it made sense—there had been so much paperwork to sign before he could take June home. It’s late now, so late that even the plethora of city lights that line the street can’t win against the relentless pitch black sky behind them. With that and the way the roads are almost impossibly empty for LA, the drive seems almost timeless, like they’re stuck in some vacuum that exists on the edge of reality, in the space between cause and effect. It’s fitting, Buck thinks. He doesn’t want to think about what happens when he puts the Jeep into park or when the sun rises and time restarts.
He doesn’t think he’s ever been less prepared for something in his life. And coming from a guy who’s been known to jump in headfirst—that’s saying something.
He has no place for her to sleep. His loft is absolutely not made to be occupied by a six-year-old. He didn’t even have a fucking booster seat for her to sit in, so he’s already putting her life at risk five hours into being a father.
He doesn’t fucking know what he’s doing.
When the loft driveway finally greets him, he pulls in feeling ten times more exhausted than he had when he had pulled out five hours prior, like a miniature lifetime had played itself out in that little pocket of time, sinking Buck’s shoulders down with its weight. Tilting his head back against the leather headrest, he stares out the windshield and sends a silent prayer to the universe that somehow he’ll figure out what to do with the literal child in his backseat and—wait, is that Eddie’s truck?
Frowning, he pushes out of the jeep and squints at where it's parked, to the left where Eddie always leaves it. He thinks he can make out the little tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror along with the half-finished cup of coffee Buck had left on the dash the other day. Definitely Eddie’s truck.
Huh.
He shuts his own door and reaches back to open June’s, holding out a hand to help her get down that she ignores, keeping her own hands tucked tightly under her elbows. Buck pulls away his hand, shoves it in his pocket, and begins walking to the door, trying to dismantle the distinctively fatherly urge to place his palm on June’s back and lead her there himself. Instead, he lets her trail behind, following him reluctantly like a puppy who knows better than to pull on its leash.
The door is already unlocked and cracked open just the slightest bit, and it reminds Buck of the way Eddie sometimes leaves the door to his place a smidge open when he thinks Buck might be stopping by, just to let him know that he doesn’t have to use his keys, that he’s always welcome, that there’s always somebody waiting in the kitchen with an open heart and an open six pack ready for him. It’s become a bit of a habit for Eddie, and Buck is often reduced to questioning his predictability when he thinks he’s popping in completely out of the blue only to find that Eddie has left the door cracked, like Eddie has some sort of sixth sense that picks up on when Buck’s missing him.
But maybe it’s not that he’s predictable. Maybe Eddie just knows him.
Buck pushes the door open. Closing the door behind him once June passes through, he steps further into the room and frowns at what the kitchen light he knows he turned off on the way out reveals.
“Eddie?”
Eddie looks up from where he’s sitting in front of the kitchen table, sprawled out on the floor with one foot tucked under his thigh. “Hey,” he says, surprised, pulling his hands away from what he's working on, “didn’t expect you guys to be back so soon.”
Buck blinks at him because he’s not sure how getting home at two in the morning counts as so soon. “What are you doing here?”
Eddie pushes himself up to his feet, hands sliding into his pockets. Ignoring Buck’s question entirely, he stops himself in front of where June’s standing and crouches down to be on her level, flashing her a grin that transforms his whole face. Buck’s heart stutters like it’s a record with a scratch in the shape of that smile.
“Hi, June,” he says, with the enthusiasm Buck’s only really ever heard him direct towards Christopher. “I’m Eddie.” He smiles, tilting his head at her. “I’m Buck’s…” His eyes flash towards Buck and stick there, and Buck watches as the words visibly die on his tongue. “Yeah,” he finishes lamely as he looks back to June with a smile that seems at least ten percent less bright.
Buck stares at the back of Eddie’s neck, where the skin has grown noticeably red, and swallows around the urge to ask Eddie to complete his sentence. My what? he wants to scream. In what way will you allow me to have you today?
June just blinks at Eddie with uninterested eyes, like she could be seeing right through him. Her arms are still crossed over her chest, so tight that Buck can see the definition of her tiny muscles.
At the lack of response, Eddie turns his face towards Buck with a sad, knowing look and then stands back up, easily accepting June’s silence for what it is. It amazes Buck, a little bit, that Eddie manages that, to know the difference in leading someone in the right direction and pushing them. Buck has always been the guy who wants to fix things but ends up only creating new bruises. Because he helps the way he does everything in life—headfirst. An end goal in mind but no safe idea on how to get there, running through rose thorns because he never thought to look for a path. And when a guy like Buck sees someone like June hurting? He wants to crawl into her chest himself and rip out that pain violently, severing the strings it has attached to her heart. Eddie, on the other hand, chooses his actions carefully and his words even more so. Where Buck thinks everything is about him until he knows otherwise, Eddie assumes that nothing is as personal as it might seem. When Buck wants to untie knots with his own bloody fingers, Eddie has learned that it is better to let them unravel through his guidance rather than his force.
Buck thinks maybe that’s what makes Eddie such a good father. And why he could never be a good one himself.
“I have something for you,” Eddie says. He’s still smiling, but clearly trying to tone it down a bit to not overwhelm June. He pulls out a little lollipop from his back pocket and holds it out to her. Buck recognizes it—it’s a leftover from Eddie’s bag of Halloween candy he never got to give out last year because of work.
June doesn’t take it from Eddie’s hands. Eddie just nods, smiling gently. “I’m going to set it on the counter for you if you change your mind,” he says, and does just that. “But let me give you some advice.” He leans in closer to June and drops his voice into a whisper. “You better eat it real soon if you want it, because Buck over there gets antsy about sweets and gives in way too easily. He will try to steal it from you.”
“Hey,” Buck protests, trying to sneak into the familiarity of the teasing despite the pit in his stomach. “Don’t think I don’t see you sneaking into Christopher’s candy stash every other night.”
He makes a face like so what? “No kid needs that much candy.” He looks down at June and gives her a look, raised eyebrows and all, like they’re conspiring against Buck together. “Don’t listen to him. He puts all of the healthy stuff in the front of his fridge so that he looks like he’s all whole food and plant based, but in reality, the back is full of half-eaten chocolate cakes and whipped cream and leftovers from McDonalds.”
“Eddie could eat a whole sleeve of oreos—“
“Okay, so what, I’m not exactly the poster boy for a health magazine. But at least I’m not a liar.”
“I’m not a liar,” Buck counters. “I only have that stuff in front to motivate others to have a healthier lifestyle. It’s called being a good role model.”
“Practice what you preach, Buckley.”
He’s about to come up with the witty comeback of his dreams when his eyes flash to June, like maybe he momentarily forgets the situation and expects her to be smiling or laughing along to their teasing, but instead he finds her as closed in as ever, not even a sliver of their playful banner infiltrating between the bricks of her walls.
The playfulness fizzles out of him at once. “Eddie,” he says, with a sudden dose of seriousness, turning his head to stare at his side profile. Eddie looks at him questionably, eyebrows raised. “Why are you here? I told you not to stay.”
To anyone else, Buck knows those words would be taken with hurt and hardening eyes. But Eddie knows better; knows Buck better. He knows that Buck always wants him around. It’s just that sometimes Buck holds onto insecurity so tightly that it’s hard to reach for anything else. Want turns into resistance. Vulnerability turns into mistrust. Begging hands turn into closed fists.
Eddie gives him a look like did you really think I wasn’t going to show up for you? “I didn’t stay,” Eddie says. “I left the hospital. Then,” he shrugs, “I came here.”
“Eddie.”
Eddie looks at him carefully. “I knew you would be busy at the hospital, and I figured our June here” —he smiles down at her as Buck’s head helpfully repeats our our our — “would appreciate coming home to a bed of her own, so…” He shrugs and nudges his head towards the trash bag left stranded by the kitchen table. “I brought some stuff.”
Buck stares at him.
Eddie must take his silence as a question, so he continues. “Just some of Christopher’s old things I found in the attic. His old booster seat. Some toys. The bed he used to sleep in before he got too tall.” He shoves his hands into the pocket of his pants, looking a little sheepish. “You know, just a little something to get started.”
Buck looks at the nearly full trash bag and then to the half-built bed frame Eddie had been working on when he came in, and thinks this is a lot more than a little something. This is hundreds of dollars of Christopher’s stuff that he knew Eddie—ever the hoarder—had planned to keep forever. Nevermind the effort it must’ve taken to search through his mess of an attic to find it all, dodging cobwebs and old photo albums and broken down workout equipment he was too lazy to get rid of. To pack it in the back of his truck and bring it here and then have the audacity to look at Buck like it’s no big deal?
“Eddie,” Buck says. His voice comes out hoarse. “You didn’t have to.”
Eddie just shrugs. “Christopher’s with Pepa. The house is empty. I didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Still—“
“Buck,” Eddie says, the slightest bit exasperated. “I wanted to.”
“What about Christopher’s stuff?” Buck asks. “You never wanted to give it away.”
Eddie tilts his head at him. “Well, it’s not really giving it away if it’s still in the family, is it?”
Buck’s breath is stolen straight out of his lungs.
The thing is, every day Buck thinks he loves Eddie as much as humanly possible, that he’s finally finally hit his peak, that he’ll be living at this already impossible level of devotion for the rest of his life. But then every day Eddie does something like this—showing up for him even when Buck pushed him away, bringing him all the things Buck had been freaking out about not having, and then casually implying that Buck was a part of the family, that all objects that belong to one of them also belong to the other. Every day, Eddie proves him wrong. His love just continues to grow and grow until Buck’s not sure he could separate himself from it, until it’s integral to his life as much as his heart is, until he’s not sure if it’s safe for a single person to hold so much of it inside of them.
Buck loves Eddie Diaz. If he’s ever had another feeling, he doesn’t remember it.
“What?” Eddie says. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Buck shakes his head, snapping himself out of it. “Nothing,” he says quickly. “It’s, uh, nothing.” He takes a step back, cheeks pink, and gestures vaguely towards the kitchen. “I’m, um, gonna get June an ice pack,” he says, already scrambling away. “For her head. You know, doctor’s orders.”
He’s turned away before he can see Eddie’s response.
He fills up a bag with ice and gives it to June, and when he turns back around, Eddie is back where he found him, leaned over slabs of wood as he assembles Christopher’s old bed frame. His face is one of pure concentration, tongue peeking out of his lips as he tightens a screw, and the wave of adoration that surges through Buck is so overwhelming that he has to look away for a second.
He joins Eddie once the all-consuming feeling finally recedes and sits down next to him on the floor, knees knocking as they quietly work together. They don’t even speak; just hand each other parts and coordinate mindlessly, the kind of thing they do during a call that always makes Hen and Chim exchange knowing looks. Buck throws up glances every once in a while (read: every ten seconds) to make sure June’s alright, only to find her right where he left her each time, completely unmoved. She just stays frozen where she’s sat on the lowest stair of the staircase with her chin placed into her open palms, refusing to look at them, refusing to relax, as if doing so would be a betrayal.
They push the finished bed frame against the wall where Buck’s couch used to sit in order to give June as much privacy as possible in a loft that advertised itself as being a ‘completely open floor plan’. The white bedsheets speckled with rainbow t-rex’s from Christopher’s dinosaur phase get draped over a stained mattress along with a suspiciously brand-new looking comforter Buck’s not convinced Eddie didn’t go to the store to buy just for this. Eddie elbows Buck in the forearm as they step away from it, the same motion he makes after they pull someone out of a dangling car together, and then leads him out of the living room.
June walks in as soon as they are a good distance away from the bed, and they watch as she crawls in and pulls the covers of her head instantly, the outline of her body small and curled in on itself even under the pink comforter. Distantly, he registers Eddie flicking off the living room light, but it’s all just white noise around the way Buck’s heart aches for her. He wishes he was the type of father she trusted to kiss things better, because he would devote his life to pressing his lips to the scars and the bruises and the pain until it was enough to breathe around. But she doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want him .
And he can only watch as she suffers alone inside a fortress he isn't even allowed to step into.
Eddie’s hand lands on his shoulder. Buck startles and looks towards him, and the sad understanding he finds in them is almost too much. “C’mon,” Eddie whispers, so painfully soft, before pulling him into the kitchen.
Eddie opens the refrigerator, its pale white glow the only light in the entire loft, and pulls out two beers by the necks. The glass clinks gently together as he holds one out to Buck expectantly.
Buck hesitates. “Should we be drinking with a kid in the house?”
Eddie rolls his eyes fondly and shoves it into Buck’s hand. “We drink with my kid in the house all the time.”
Shrugging, Buck takes the bottle more firmly into his grasp. He pops off the cap and takes a long sip, closing his eyes as he leans his head back. When he reopens them he finds Eddie in front of him, bottle still unopened, carefully watching him.
“How are you doing?” he asks, gently.
Buck takes another sip. “I’m fine,” he says around the rim of the bottle.
Eddie gives him a look.
Buck doesn’t know if he’s a terrible liar, or if Eddie’s just terribly good at reading him. Either way, he crumbles instantly under Eddie’s gaze. The facade he’s kept up since walking into June’s hospital room slips off and shatters at his feet, leaving nothing but rawness lining his skin, and he feels every inch of the uncertainty inside him like another crack lacing through already unsteady ground.
He leans his back against the counter and sets his beer down heavily, head tilting back as he takes a breath. “I don’t know, Eddie.” He meets Eddie’s eyes and knows he’s probably seeing right down into the brokenness. “I just—I’m exhausted,” he says, “and—,” he scrunches his face together tightly, “And I’m so fucking scared.”
Buck’s not sure if he’s ever heard Eddie speak so carefully. “Scared of what?”
Buck’s shoulders drop. “Fucking things up.”
Inexplicably, a corner of Eddie’s lips ticks up at that. “Well,” he says, “that is the general experience.”
Buck doesn’t think any of this is the general experience.
When Buck’s expression doesn’t change, Eddie gives him a sympathetic look and adds, “I’m serious. Ask Maddie or Chim or anyone with a kid. When you hold that baby in your arms for the first time, the first thing you think is they’re the most beautiful thing in the world. The second is why the fuck would anyone entrust them to me?”
“I’m not exactly holding a baby in my arms, Eddie.”
Eddie shrugs. “Same feeling.”
Buck shakes his head. There’s a difference, Buck thinks, in shaping a life from the beginning and taking over when the path has already been built by someone else. There’s a difference in struggling around being a parent when your kid is a baby who won’t even remember your mistakes and making them when they’re just old enough to have the scars forever. “It’s different.”
“Is it?” Eddie asks, tilting his head. “How did you feel the first time you babysat Christopher for me?”
Buck remembers that day. Eddie had been only at the station for two months at that time and had asked Buck to watch over Christopher as Eddie went out with Shannon to work some things out with her. It was like being handed someone’s still beating heart and being asked not to drop it. Like he was holding the most precious gold in his palms and walking step by step across the jagged edge of a mountain, where it could all easily fall away with just one slip. Buck showed up with a backpack full of every game and activity he thought a seven year old could possibly enjoy, and spent the three hours trying to be the most involved, enthusiastic friend Christopher ever had. It seemed like the most important thing in the world—to take care of him, to make him have fun.
This feeling is similar, except way more pressing, because then, he knew that at the end of the day, Eddie would be back, and any little mistakes Buck made could easily be corrected, wiped off the chalkboard like they had never been there in the first place. But now, Buck could be with June for just enough time that any lessons he taught her—right or wrong—could implant, and he didn’t exactly have her true parent on speed dial to call when he was unsure about a decision to make.
But still, he kind of gets Eddie’s point.
Eddie must see that on his face because he continues, “Straight out of the womb or six years old, there’s not a single parent in the world who feels like they know exactly what they’re doing on their first time around.” He leans back against a counter across from him, finally taking a sip of his beer. “A single good parent anyways.” He looks at Buck meaningfully. “We both know bad parents. They’re not bad because they make mistakes; they’re bad because they don’t care enough to fix them. I know you, Buck. I know you, and I know that you care more than anyone I’ve ever fucking met, and you’re not capable of anything but giving your best. And that’s how I know,” he points towards the living room, “you’re gonna be exactly what that kid needs.”
But what if my best is not enough? Buck wants to ask.
“You don’t understand, Eddie,” he says, voice rough and desperate. “I can barely even get her to look at me.”
“She got in a traumatic accident and her mom’s life is at stake, Buck. That’s bad circumstances, not bad parenting,” Eddie says firmly. “It hasn’t even been a full day yet. Give it some time.”
Buck wants to say that he doesn’t have time to give or time to let her warm up to him, because this is all just temporary. If all goes well, she’ll be going back to her mom in a couple of weeks at most.
Buck covers his eyes with his hands and drags his fingers down, pulling on the thin skin of his under eyes. “I just—I’m scared that I’m gonna ruin everything, and that her mother is going to wake up and—and wish my name had never been connected to her at all.” He looks at Eddie with wide, desperate eyes. “What if I’m just not cut out to be a father?”
Eddie gives him a long look as he takes a swing of his beer. “Buck,” he says, setting his bottle down firmly on the counter behind him. “You already are one.”
Buck’s breath gets caught, because he knows exactly what Eddie is implying. It’s the same thing he implies when he has Buck tag along to parent teacher conferences and to Christopher’s doctor appointments and when he scribbles in his number everytime someone asks for an emergency contact for Christopher. He does it all the time, and Buck scrapes it up like a dog begging under the table for anything he can get because he’s always starving for more pieces of Eddie and Christopher, but he’s never said it. He’s never said it out loud, so direct that Buck couldn’t misconstrue his meaning even if he tried, and he almost doesn’t know what to do with it—this easy confirmation of one of his biggest, most delicately kept dreams.
“That’s—that’s not the same,” he stutters out weakly. He feels desperate, for some reason, for Eddie to take it back, to say he didn’t mean it like that. He doesn’t know why. “You’re the one who files the taxes and schedules his appointments and takes away his xbox when he’s in trouble. I just,” he waves a hand, “make him pancakes and take him to the zoo sometimes.”
Eddie shakes his head. Buck’s heart is clawing at the inside of his rib cage because Eddie seems so fucking firm about this. “There’s a reason I put you in the will,” he says, “and it’s not because Christopher likes your pancakes.”
Buck swallows, his heart pounding in his ears. “Because no one will fight as hard for him as I do, right?” he asks, echoing Eddie’s words from that day.
“Because no one else will ever love him as hard as you do,” Eddie says. “There’s no one in this world with more love to give than you, Buck.”
Buck bites his lip. “And if that’s not enough?”
“It will be.” Buck doesn’t know how he can sound so sure. “That girl is going through hell right now. She doesn’t need some superstar parent who has it all figured out; she just needs someone to love her with everything they got until she makes it through.” He picks up his beer bottle and points the rim towards Buck. “And there’s not a better person to do that than you.”
Eddie looks out into the living room area, and Buck follows his eyes. From this angle, they can’t see June, but something about just knowing that she’s there—small chest rising and falling as she breathes the same air as them—has Buck’s heart doing something odd inside his chest.
Looking back towards Buck, Eddie shrugs. “Plus, you’re her dad. That has to count for something, right?”
Buck looks away. He feels suddenly—guilty. “She doesn’t know that,” he mumbles.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the space in between Eddie’s eyebrows wrinkle. “What?”
Buck sighs and turns towards him. “I, uh, never told June that I was her dad.”
Eddie leans his head back slowly, tongued pressed up against the rough of his mouth. “What did you tell her then?”
Buck shrugs limply. “I introduced myself as Buck,” he says. Eddie keeps looking at him oddly, so after a second, he tries to explain, “It just—it felt like it would’ve been a lie. Because I haven’t been there, you know? She doesn’t even know me.”
“But that’s not your fault,” Eddie protests. “You would’ve been there if you knew.”
“Maybe so, but,” Buck shakes his head, “I can’t really expect her to see me as her father when she just met me. I mean—what kid is gonna love a dad who wasn’t around at all for the first six years?”
Eddie raises his eyebrow. “I was hardly there for the first six years of my son’s life, and that kid still tells me he loves me everyday,” he challenges.
Buck’s heart stops. God, why did I say that? “I didn’t mean—,” he stutters uncomfortably, “I wasn’t trying to—“
“I know , Buck,” Eddie cuts him off fondly. “I just think you’re making a lot of assumptions here.”
Buck is still reeling a little bit, because he just realized how much Eddie really is speaking from experience. Eddie had been around for bits and pieces of Christopher’s childhood, but his main contributions to those first few years were pixelated video calls and the money from his paychecks. And then when Shannon left, he too had to raise a child without the help of the person who had done most of the early leg work. Buck wonders when Eddie felt the most scared: when he held Christopher for the first time, or when he woke up that day to Christopher in his bed and not his wife. Buck wonders if Eddie knows exactly how Buck feels.
Because Eddie’s been Buck. And yet, the relationship Eddie has with his son is one of the most beautiful ones Buck has ever gotten to witness.
Maybe Buck has more of a chance than he thought.
“Yeah,” Buck says, releasing his lip from the grasp of his teeth. “You’re probably right.”
Eddie, in the middle of taking a sip, pulls the rim away from his lips with a surprised look. “Oh?”
Buck nods, a little bit frantically, like he’s trying to convince himself. “Yeah,” he says again. “I need to just —” he spins the neck of his bottle in a circle in a gesturing motion, “leave my worries behind and focus on taking care of June. Right?”
Eddie nods with his lips pushed outwards, looking pleasantly surprised. “Yeah,” he says, “and just a word of advice Buck?” He pauses and looks at Buck like maybe he knows it all. Like maybe he knows that Buck has never felt so overwhelmed before in his life, torn in between the desire to reach out for what he’s always wanted and the fear that if he does it’ll hurt more than never having it at all. Like maybe he knows his heart has never felt so heavy, watching the pain in his daughter’s eyes, as blue as his own, and knowing that he can’t do anything about it. That Buck wants nothing more to untangle her pain and free her from the net like a caught butterfly, and tell her to fly, fly, fly , and the only thing that’s stopping him is the terror of accidentally crushing her wings in the process. “Don’t try to knock her door down,” Eddie says. “Just show her that it’s safe on the other side if she wants to open it herself.”
Eddie says it like this is some monumental task because he knows Buck, so he knows that it is. He said it himself—Buck is the guy who fixes things. When he was young, his parents opened their palms for him to drink out of, and the water was made of pain instead of love, so Buck has spent his entire life trying to do the opposite. Erase the pain instead of giving it. His love pours in first and then his fingers follow, patching up holes and bandaging wounds and smoothing over stone. He breathes out love, and he breathes in the pain, removing it from the air and keeping it trapped inside his lungs so he’s the only one who has to feel it. What Eddie is telling him is to cut off that part of himself and keep his hands tied behind his back, where they’ve never stayed. He thinks it's the hardest thing he’s ever been asked to do, but he’ll do it. It’s the least that he can do for June.
Buck takes a breath and nods, sagging against the counter behind him. He almost can’t think about it—about everything that he’s going to have to do from now on, this new boulder of responsibility that got strapped onto his back overnight—because it’s enough to collapse under. He’s never felt so fucking tired in his life, and as soon as Eddie heads home, he’s going to crawl into bed and snooze at least five times and maybe never wake up—
“Shit,” he says suddenly, scrambling upwards with wide eyes, panic lacing a path of ice down his throat, “I have a shift tomorrow.”
He runs a hand over his face, because he had completely forgotten. Of course he had. Preparing breakfast for himself in the morning, a single serving of eggs and bacon, parking the jeep at the station lot next to Eddie’s truck, making his coffee and then sliding on the couch to do the crossword, putting on his turnouts and running into a fire? That was his old life, and for a couple of hours, it had seemed to fade in the wake of the new one. Buck, like an idiot, forgot that one didn’t stop when the other started, that its remnants would still stretch into this new reality that he had portaled into. Of course he was still going to have work in the morning, because part of taking care of a kid is finding a way to afford it, but he had forgotten, and now—what the fuck is he going to do?
It’s a twenty-four-hour shift, and though June is going to be at school for eight hours of it, the hours overlap poorly and he doesn’t have any way to get her there or take her home, nor does he have anyone to watch her overnight while he’s still at work. He’s going to have to bring her with him, which is the last thing he wants to do. The firehouse, especially their firehouse, was one of the loudest places on earth, full of ping-pong competitions and Mario-kart face-offs and some of the most liveliest people Buck had ever met. They would love June, would take her in easily, probably even let her ride the engine trucks, but Buck knows it will probably take a long time for her to be ready for that, as timid and overwhelmed as she already is. But it’s probably the best he can do with less than six hours of notice—there’s no way any daycare is going to have open spots for her, and it’s just his fucking luck that Maddie’s working. At least he knows Bobby will probably be okay with—
Eddie shakes his head and offers him a small smile, cutting off his panic before it spreads too far to be reigned back in. “Actually, you don’t. I called Bobby. He said to take as much time off as you need.”
“But—”
Eddie gives him a stern look. “He also said you’re mandated to take at least one week.”
Of course he did. Buck can’t even bring himself to be offended that he’s thirty-two years old and Bobby still thinks he has to strong-hand him into taking leave.
It occurs to him distantly that if Eddie filled in Bobby on the situation, that means Athena definitely knows, which means Hen probably knows, which means everybody knows. Buck wonders what they’re saying—if they’re as shocked as he is that someone like him managed to breathe life into something, even if it was by accident.
He breathes a sigh of relief and relaxes back against the counter, casting a silent thank you to Bobby. He doesn’t think there’s any world where he would be able to function normally at work when he now knows he has a living breathing daughter out there and anything could be happening to her while he’s away. Actually, he doesn’t know how Eddie has been doing it for all these years.
He looks at Eddie, then, and tries to channel every ounce of gratefulness into his eyes. Not just for this, but for—everything. Buck thinks the man in front of him might be the only reason he’s still standing after the last few hours, let alone after these last six years. “Thank you,” he says.
He doesn’t think he’s ever meant those words so much.