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Eddie Diaz opens his eyes.
It happens, on this particular morning, in much the same way it ever does. His lashes flutter and his thoughts flicker to life, and he draws in a breath in the corner bedroom of the little house on South Bedford Street in sunny Los Angeles.
There are several immovable truths in Eddie’s life. Among them is the fact that he wakes up alert. He was a heavy sleeper once, but it was a long time ago and by virtue of necessity he had shed this habit and adopted a new one alongside the titles of father and soldier. Later, there was single dad and firefighter, and as a result Eddie never learned to sleep heavily again.
So when he’s awake, he’s awake.
This morning he’s awake only reluctantly, the memory of the night before coming back to him as he pushes up on his forearms and shakes his head, blinking sleep out of his eyes and clearing it from his throat as he orients himself.
It wasn’t a bad night, even if Buck had interrupted his joy seeking slash descending into madness— Eddie still isn’t sure which, and suspects maybe a little of both had contributed to his impromptu shave and dance party for one. It felt good, regardless.
And Buck— well, Eddie is always happy to see Buck. He didn’t mind cutting his moment short for that. He did mind that Tommy Kinard had hurt Buck enough that his eyes were red and his shoulders were tense when he crossed the threshold and dampened the lightness in the room. He minded very much, in fact, that anyone would hurt Buck.
It’s what he’d gone to bed thinking about after he’d left Buck curled up on the couch with the usual sheets and two pillows. And it’s what he wakes up thinking about, too. Not that he’d thought Tommy was going to be Buck’s boyfriend forever, or that they were particularly well-suited. In fact, he’d been surprised and a little bit annoyed by a lot of their relationship, but Buck was a grown man and Eddie had plenty of things to think about in his own life, so he let that go. He’d assumed— correctly, it seems— that the relationship would fall out eventually. He had not anticipated that it would be Buck who got hurt. That part gets under Eddie’s skin like an itch.
But it’s a new day. Outside, it’s growing slowly and steadily bright, a faint buttercup glow lighting up the walls of the bedroom. The clock on Eddie’s bedside table reads 7:13. He thinks distractedly about juicing oranges from the tree outside— Buck will have to cook, obviously, but Eddie can do the orange juice.
Preparing to get out of bed, he reaches up and scrubs his hand over his face. And then Eddie stops, blinking at his own palm where it stings with the rough scrape of facial hair. He brings it slowly up to his jaw again, and his fingers scratch over a layer of something a shade thicker than stubble.
Throwing back the blankets, he slips out of bed and pads out into the quiet hallway, then steps into the bathroom. Everything is much as it should be— the shower curtain with its happy little fishes swimming along the edge; the blue towels; the toilet brush holder he’d bought when he first moved to LA. Except that when Eddie looks up into the mirror, the version of himself that looks back is not the version he’d been when he stood in this spot last night.
The Eddie in the mirror is dark-eyed and vaguely shadowed; his hair flops lightly over his head, just shy of greasy; beneath his lashes there are swaths of grayviolet bruise against paperthin skin; and perhaps most notably, his jaw and chin are scraped with a layer of dark chestnut facial hair turning ever so faintly lighter at the temples.
Eddie blinks at himself, touching his cheek again. He’d slept well, yet he looks exhausted. And he’d shaved not even twelve hours ago— no matter how prone he is to a layer of overnight stubble, it shouldn’t be this thick or dark or unkempt. A sense of unease creeps over him, and he looks around instinctively. For what, he’s not sure, until his gaze catches on the toothbrush cup at the edge of the sink.
It’s the same light teal cup that’s always there. But when Eddie had gone to bed last night, there had been three toothbrushes in it: his own reliable blue one; the extra yellow one that he keeps on hand for Buck; and a red one that Christopher had left there presumably by accident when he went to Texas, which Eddie has not been able to stomach the idea of moving.
Now, there’s just one, a lone blue toothbrush tilted sideways against the lip of the cup. Eddie’s stomach twists uncomfortably with the undeniable feeling that something is very wrong. Without thinking, he moves out of the bathroom and goes back to the bedside table, where his phone is lying face-up on the wood. He reaches for it, and the screen lights up. His eyes flick to the date first. Saturday morning, just as it should be. But behind the time and date, there’s something else that’s wrong.
Eddie is a creature of habit. When he had gone to sleep, his lockscreen had been the same thing it’s been for years now: a familiar image of himself with Buck and Christopher that had been taken at the Los Angeles Zoo when Chris was ten. Buck’s cheek smushed up next to his son’s; Christopher laughing; the sun shining; Eddie, soft-eyed and tender. An easy day, captured forever with a camera lens and pasted onto Eddie’s phone for him to look at so often that it became rote.
He gives his phone a little shake, but nothing changes. The background is a preset swath of soulless color, the kind that a phone comes with when it’s brand new. Eddie drops it on the bed, presuming it useless since there’s clearly something wrong with it. There must be, he thinks as he makes his way out of the bedroom and down the familiar, unchanged hallway.
“Buck?” he calls out. “Are you awake?”
He pauses then, just for a second, in front of Christopher’s bedroom door. Trapped in the cage of the hallway, he hesitates. It’s been shut almost the whole time he’s been in El Paso. Eddie can’t often bring himself to go inside, knowing that it remains unchanged while Chris grows taller and his voice deepens eight hundred miles away, knowing that by the time he sees it again he will have outgrown the t-shirts in the closet and the books strewn across the desk as they’d been the day he left.
He can’t say exactly what it is that compels him to open it. An instinct, whether it be a good or bad one. An impulse that has him reaching for the door knob before he can think and pushing the door open like he’s done hundreds of times before.
Except that what’s behind it this time, on this particular morning, takes the breath out of Eddie’s lungs all at once. Because what’s behind it on this particular morning is…nothing.
The carpet is the same and there are still blinds on the window, and there’s a twin bed with blue sheets and a desk pressed against the wall. But it looks uncomfortably pristine, untouched by little hands and lacking any evidence that Christopher Diaz has ever lived in it. No corkboard on the wall; no stray socks peeking out from beneath the bed; nothing in the open closet but a few stray, empty hangers; no backpack or star-patterened sheets or silly stuffed iguanas that Buck had insisted on buying on that one trip to the new reptile exhibit.
Eddie steps back like something has forced him.
“Buck?” he calls out again, finding that his voice trembles when he does. There’s a part of him that knows there won’t be an answer, but it still hits like something to the chest when he steps into the living room and finds it entirely empty.
Not only of Buck, but of most other things, too. It’s lived-in, no doubt— not as dreary as Christopher’s room. There’s his blue couch and a rug on the floor and the TV in its place. But there are no curtains over the blinds, the sheer panels Eddie had chosen for the way they let the light in nowhere to be seen. There’s one lamp in the corner. No throw pillows anywhere. And when he looks up at the mantle, it’s almost bare, with the exception of a single framed photo tucked over to the left side.
Eddie moves closer and reaches out to pick it up; when he does, a thin layer of dust glimmers in the shafts of light let in by the blinds. His breath catches as he looks down at the picture trapped beneath dust and the glass of a dollar-store frame. In it, Christopher is at most five years old. He’s smiling big for the camera, sitting on the steps of Eddie’s parents’ place in Texas as the sun catches all the lightest strands of his blonde curls. He’s beautiful and little and Eddie aches at the sight of him.
“No,” he says, mostly to himself as he glances around the sad approximation of his own house that exists around him, empty of Buck and Christopher and any sign of a life that had been there just yesterday.
He puts the picture back on the mantle, face-down. This, Eddie tells himself sternly, is a dream. It’s a dream, obviously— because he’d fallen asleep and woken up here and the universe, as Buck would have him believe in it, clearly hates him. It must, for him to fall asleep with a renewed intention of finding joy and to wake up in this nightmare of a house that his son has never lived in with an empty couch and a singular toothbrush.
So, it’s a dream, and that means it’s not real. Eddie shakes his head once, hard, and thinks— if it’s a dream, all he has to do is wake up.
It should be simple enough. Except that twenty minutes and several attempts to splash his exhausted, strange dream-version face with ice water and one admittedly ill-advised attempt to hit his own head lightly on the wall, Eddie has not managed to do that.
He considers going back to sleep— thinking that maybe that will have a similar effect in reverse— but knows that he would just lie there awake, thinking. He also considers— briefly— further physical harm. But this must be a particularly vivid dream, because his head is throbbing from where he had banged it against the wall.
There’s a voice that sounds very much like Buck in the back of his mind, telling him that he can’t experience pain in a dream. But that must not be true, because here he is in a dream with a headache. The thought does, on the other hand, give Eddie another idea. If he can’t wake himself up, he will simply do what he usually does with any kind of problem.
He’ll take it to Buck. If the real life version of him can do it, so can dream Eddie. And presumably, if the real life version of Buck can help him— which he always does— dream Buck will follow.
The obvious first step, of course, is to call him. But when Eddie opens up his phone— the passcode remaining the same— his favorite contacts list is empty. He swipes over to the full contacts list and searches for Buck; comes up with nothing. He also tries Evan, no matter how wrong it feels, and gets nowhere with that either. So, okay— dream Eddie doesn’t have Buck’s phone number. Slightly manic, he tells himself that it’s fine. Dream Eddie knows perfectly well where Buck lives and how to get there, so he’ll simply move on to plan B— or maybe it’s plan C now, after his first instinct had been to assume Buck was already in his living room. Whatever.
He rifles through his dresser drawers and mindlessly throws on a pair of jeans and a generic t-shirt that he doesn’t exactly recognize. He might be curious, a little bit, about the differences in this house from his own, real one. Except that the emptiness of Christopher’s bedroom is really freaking him out, and he would like to wake up and call his kid as soon as possible, so he forgoes any urge to explore in favor of socks and shoes, then tucks his phone into his pocket and takes his keys off of the table by the door. Here, it’s otherwise bare, and as Eddie habitually locks the door behind him he notices that he’s missing a keychain.
It was a joke, mostly. A little dangling planet with colored liquid inside, suspending floating stars that moved aimlessly and knocked against the plastic sides when you shook it. Buck had given it to him, obviously. Some time ago on a trip to the planetarium.
“It’s Jupiter,” Buck told him that day as they trailed after Christopher and the sound of his crutches back toward the parking lot.
Eddie looked down at it, frowning. “How do you know?”
“The red spot,” Buck answers, gesturing vaguely. Eddie peered into the sphere in his hand and noticed a drifting crimson polka dot amongst the stars. “It’s a storm,” Buck continued. “An anticyclone, actually. They say it’s starting to shrink, though! So maybe someday this little guy will be a relic.”
Eddie highly doubted then that a three-dollar keychain would be a relic of anything, but now that he’s looking at his keys without it he feels a little off-centered. He shakes off the memory and gets into the truck, his keys jingling without Jupiter.
As he drives the familiar route to Buck’s with the radio playing low and mindless, he finds himself looking for differences. There are some along the way— a corner store that’s missing entirely; a restaurant that he’s sure used to do Mexican food now advertising bacon cheeseburgers on a fifties-style kitschy sign; an intersection that he’s certain had a stoplight before, relegated to just a stop sign. Little things, really, but just enough to make him feel on edge. His subconscious, Eddie figures, is cruel like that. That’s no surprise, if he’s honest.
He makes it to Buck’s building and parks where he always does. Instinctively, he looks for Buck’s Jeep, but it’s nowhere to be found. He doesn’t let that deter him; it’s another one of those little off things, probably. He goes upstairs anyway, and only realizes in the elevator that something else is missing from his keys, along with Jupiter. He counts again to be sure, as the floors light up one by one, but he’s right— he’s missing his key to Buck’s place.
This is significantly more bothersome than Jupiter. What Eddie had thought before was a phone glitch more than anything else starts to feel like a bigger problem. As the elevator climbs steadily, he thinks about the implication of not having Buck’s extra key. Does that mean that Buck is closer, in this dream, to someone else who isn’t Eddie? Does it mean that they’re fighting? Or that Eddie will get to the correct floor and knock on the correct door and find that Buck doesn’t live here at all?
He feels itchy. His head still kind of hurts. He would very much like to wake up. And still, as the elevator comes to a smooth stop, he can’t think of anything he could do except to go and knock on the door. If Buck isn’t here, he reasons, he’ll just have to find him.
The sound of Eddie’s knuckles is sharp and ringing in the otherwise quiet hallway. He listens intently, and hears a faint shuffling behind the door. There’s just enough time for a flicker of anxiety to spark up along his spine before there’s a click and the door hinges open, and there in the doorway—
Buck frowns.
Eddie sweeps his gaze over him, and comes to the immediate conclusion that something isn’t right.
“Hi,” Buck says, sounding puzzled as he glances past Eddie to the empty hallway and then back again. “Can I help you?”
Eddie blinks, taking in Buck’s slim build and the smoothed-back style of his hair. “Uh,” he says. “Buck?”
He’s met with a blank, cautious expression. “Buck…ley?” he guesses, tilting his head. “Like, Evan Buckley?” He frowns again. “Do I know you?”
Maybe Eddie should have seen this coming. No Buck on the couch; no Buck on his lockscreen or in his phone; no key to the loft; no Jupiter. But it’s difficult to imagine a world in which Buck just…doesn’t know him. Even as it’s staring him in the face from across the threshold.
Eddie’s chest tightens a little.
“Yes,” he answers. “Or— maybe not? But I know you. I might be dreaming, actually.”
Buck seems to consider this. “You’re…dreaming that you know me?” he asks.
“No,” Eddie replies, still standing in the hallway. His voice comes out a little more firm than he’d expected it to, and he points his finger for emphasis as he repeats: “No. I’m dreaming that you don’t know me.”
Buck tilts his head in that way that he does, which makes him look a bit like a dog. “I’m confused,” he admits.
Eddie sighs. This is a stumbling block, for sure. But maybe he can work around it. It’s his fucked up dream reality, after all. If he’s going to be stuck here, he’s going to be stuck here with Buck— even if it means this strange version of him.
“I’ll try to explain,” he offers. “Can I come in?”
Buck— Evan?— blinks twice, and then nods uncertainly.
“I guess so,” he says, and then pauses in the doorway. “Wait, wait! You’re not a murderer or something, right?”
Eddie can’t help the half-laugh that stumbles out of his mouth, even as something twists in his stomach.
“No,” he says. “I’m a firefighter, like you.”
Buck moves aside for him, but his frown deepens enough that it takes over his entire face, creasing his eyebrows and pulling at his cheeks.
“I’m not a firefighter,” he answers.
Eddie stops, halfway over the threshold, and looks up at him. “What?” he asks. “You’re not?”
Buck shakes his head and Eddie tries to fight off a creeping sense of dread and overwhelm.
“Well,” he says deliberately, forcing his feet to keep moving. “This is just a dream, so that’s fine. Whatever.”
Buck shuts the door carefully behind Eddie and rocks slightly on the balls of his feet as Eddie glances around at the loft. It’s mostly familiar, if not quite right. Like his own house, there are things that are different. But it looks more homey than his place, too. More lived-in. It’s odd, because in reality it’s always been a little bit the reverse. They congregate at Eddie’s most of the time, partially because of Christopher but also because Eddie’s place is— in Buck’s words, once— cozier. Buck’s loft is nice, but Eddie’s house has heart.
Not so much, here.
“So, uh,” Buck says, drifting toward the kitchen and putting the island between himself and Eddie. “What’s your name?”
These words hit Eddie square in the chest. He doesn’t think he’s ever introduced himself, in as many words, to Buck. Bobby had told them all his name before he got the chance, and Buck— being Buck— had formed his half-empty opinion based on nothing but the sound of it and the shape of Eddie’s body, before they ever met.
Even then, Eddie had liked him. Even right now, he does. It’s just hard to wrap his head around the fact that Buck doesn’t quite like him back.
“Right,” he breathes. “Um, I’m Eddie. Eddie Diaz.”
“Okay, Eddie,” Buck nods. “You, uh, you think you’re dreaming, you said?”
He’s speaking in such a way that Eddie suddenly worries he might be thinking about calling 911 on him. And wouldn’t that be ironic.
“I’m not crazy,” he says placatingly. “I just woke up this morning and everything was wrong, and therefore I must be dreaming.”
This seems to intrigue Buck. “But you came here, and you…know me? Kinda?”
The reductive nature of it makes Eddie feel irrationally furious. It’s not Buck’s fault that his subconscious mind is like this. And he hates being angry at Buck anyway, so he reins it in quickly and shakes his head.
“Not kinda,” he corrects firmly. “I do know you. You’re my best friend. Last night before I woke up, you were sleeping on my couch.”
“Okay,” Buck says. “But you called me—”
“Buck,” Eddie says firmly. “Yes. I know your name is Evan, but— I’m not gonna call you that.”
Buck frowns. “Why not?”
Eddie frowns, too. “That’s…not what anybody calls you. Except Maddie, sometimes, I guess. And Tommy, but thankfully that’s not a problem anymore.”
Buck goes quiet for long enough that Eddie looks up to see his face. It’s doing something very strange.
“What?” Eddie asks. “What is that look for?”
“Uh,” Buck says, clearing his throat. “Why do you say that? A-About Tommy?”
Eddie stares at him. “Because he’s— do you not know who Tommy is here?” he asks. “Maybe that’s a good thing, actually, because he just broke up with you. Part of why you were on my couch.” He hesitates, thinking about it. “Or— are on my couch. If I’m dreaming, then you’re still just sleeping, I guess.”
There’s a part of him that hopes Buck is awake already. That he’s in the kitchen— the real one, with the frog soap and the curtains— making coffee for them, thinking about waking Eddie up. That’s a reassuring thought.
But this Buck— dream Buck— is looking at him like he’s losing it. He looks like he hasn’t ruled out 911 yet.
“What?” he presses.
“I know who Tommy is,” Buck says eventually. He nods his head in the direction of his refrigerator and Eddie looks. When he does, the sight closes his throat up.
On Buck’s refrigerator— the real one— there are lots of pictures. Eddie knows them all by heart. They’re of Christopher, mostly, and now Jee. He’s in a few of them himself. There are ones taken at the firehouse and ones taken at the zoo and that one that Eddie particularly loves that had been taken in Christopher’s bedroom on a Sunday. He remembers that it was raining that morning, and feels wistful and longing even thinking about it.
But this refrigerator only has two things on it. One of them is a hand-drawn card that says, somewhat inexplicably, Mr. Buckley on it in messy child scrawl above a picture of what Eddie is pretty sure is supposed to be an apple with a worm coming out of it. It looks more like Jupiter’s red spot, really, but Eddie doesn’t dwell on that.
Because the other thing attached to the fridge is a picture of Buck and Tommy.
They’re standing side by side with their arms around each other, and the sight of Tommy’s hand firmly on Buck’s waist is enough to turn Eddie’s stomach for a reason he can’t entirely name. This had been his reality until just yesterday, too, but it already feels distant and wrong. He moves a little closer and notices where the picture was taken— the familiar exterior of the firehouse visible over Buck’s shoulder.
“You said you’re not a firefighter,” Eddie says.
Buck frowns. “I’m not,” he answers. “I’m a teacher. Tommy is, though.”
Eddie looks at the hand-drawn card and then back to the photo again. “Tommy is a firefighter,” he repeats flatly. “At the 118.”
Buck looks surprised. “Yeah,” he answers curiously. “How did you know that?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Because it’s my dream, Buck,” he sighs.
Buck makes a face at that. It looks like he doesn’t believe Eddie at all, which would be a truly comical role reversal if it were real.
“I’m still confused,” Buck admits. “But maybe you can just, like— start from the beginning?”
Eddie doesn’t really want to, but he’s here now and there isn’t exactly a better option that he can think of.
“Fine,” he agrees. He sits down at Buck’s countertop and briefly rests his head in his hands, pressing his fingertips against his throbbing temples as he tries to figure out where, exactly to start.
“Are you okay?” Buck interrupts. Eddie glances up and his chest does something funny at the familiar shadow of concern on Buck’s face. Dream Buck may be different, but he’s still Buck.
“Headache,” he says. “I tried banging my head on the wall earlier to wake myself up.”
Buck tilts his head, his features creased in thought. “But,” he says, “if you were dreaming, then—”
“It wouldn’t hurt?” Eddie guesses, a little amused. “Yeah, I knew you would say that.”
Buck shrugs, though he looks sort of pleased, like he likes that Eddie had been able to anticipate what he was thinking. If he likes that, Eddie thinks, it’s a trick he could do all day. He glances over at the fridge and scowls. Maybe he’ll start by telling dream-Buck about his real feelings for Tommy, and what an asshole he is.
“I’m not wrong,” Buck says rationally. As he speaks, he opens a cabinet and plucks a bottle of Tylenol off of the shelf inside, shaking two of them out into his palm. “This might help, though. If you don’t mind Tylenol over Ibuprofen. I’m—”
“Allergic,” Eddie says, nodding. “Tylenol’s fine.”
Buck freezes, looking Eddie over.
“What?” Eddie asks, raising his eyebrows. “Did that convince you? Because I could go on.”
Buck looks intrigued. He turns his hand over and dumps the pills into Eddie’s waiting palm instead, then turns around and takes a glass out of the cabinet. “You could?” he asks. He sounds curious, and Eddie smiles a little. There’s probably no version of Buck anywhere that can’t be reeled in by a good mystery, an unanswered question he can pick at.
“Sure,” Eddie says. He scrapes through his brain for immovable facts about Buck. There are a lot, but he’s not sure which of them are true in his dream, given that Buck isn’t a firefighter. “You don’t like mushrooms,” he offers. “You’re really annoying about the thread count of your sheets. Grew up in Pennsylvania. Good with kids. How am I doing?”
Buck considers. “Well, I did just tell you I’m a teacher,” he says as he hands Eddie a glass of water. “So that last one feels like cheating.”
“Hm,” Eddie says, as he swallows back the pills and chases them with a gulp of cool water from the glass. “That’s true,” he concedes, and then moves his eyes over Buck. For the first time, he notices that he’s missing some of his tattoos. For some reason, that feels acutely sad to Eddie, but he doesn’t mention it.
“I did grow up in Pennsylvania, though,” Buck allows. “And, uh— yeah, the sheets thing is true.”
“You always play as Koopa Troopa in Mario Kart,” Eddie offers. “With the baby cart.”
“Hey!” Buck says. “The baby cart has unmatched stability.”
“Right,” Eddie says, nodding. “Whatever you say, bud.”
For a moment, it feels effervescently normal. The crash when silence creeps in again is nearly debilitating. Eddie reminds himself— again— that none of it is real anyway. No matter how unnerving it feels, he’ll have to wake up at some point.
“Okay,” Buck says. “Uh— have you had breakfast?”
Eddie blinks. “I didn’t think I would need to eat in a dream,” he admits, and Buck smiles a little.
“Well,” he says slowly. “Are you hungry?”
Strangely, Eddie finds that he is, actually. “Huh,” he says. “Yeah, kinda.”
“Alright,” Buck says, smiling. “Well, here— uh, do you drink coffee?”
Eddie thinks again about his Buck— who has known exactly how Eddie likes his coffee for years now, even when everyone else buys into the belief that he takes it black. Buck always adds cream, even when Eddie doesn’t ask. Looking across the island at someone who looks and sounds like Buck, but isn’t really, Eddie misses him.
He clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “Black’s fine.”
Buck pours coffee into a mug and they pick through cut fruit and granola that Buck pulls from his cabinet. As he chews on a piece of honeydew melon, he tries to figure out where to begin.
In the end— as is so often the case— Buck is the one who breaks the silence.
“Maybe,” he suggests, “you should start with last night. If you think you’re dreaming, maybe it’s because of whatever you did before you went to sleep.”
That seems reasonable, so Eddie thinks back.
“Well,” he says. “I was dancing.” His Buck had been surprised and delighted by this information, when he’d told him yesterday evening on the couch. This Buck just kind of nods, but he does seem very willing to hear Eddie out. “It was— I saw this priest yesterday?” he continues. “And he told me to choose juice, which actually was more about choosing joy, so I decided to dance.”
Buck smiles a little at this.
“When you say dance,” he muses around half of a strawberry in his mouth, “what kind of dancing are we talking?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Does that matter?” he asks.
“It might,” Buck argues, shrugging his shoulders.
“Whatever,” Eddie says. He can feel the faint heat of pink in his cheeks. “I was doing Risky Business.”
Buck’s blue eyes light up. “Were there tighty whities?” he asks. “Please say yes.”
Eddie feels strangely warm, suddenly. “It doesn’t matter,” he answers quickly. “That’s not the point.” He pauses. “Wait. You’ve seen that movie?”
Buck grins wickedly. “So, there were,” he surmises. Leave it to Eddie’s mind to preserve Buck’s total lack of shame in any form. Then, Buck shrugs his shoulders. “I saw part of it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eddie repeats firmly. “The point is, I was choosing joy so I was dancing and I shaved off my mustache. It was a whole thing.”
Buck’s eyes roam over Eddie’s jaw. “You shaved last night?” he asks curiously.
“Yeah, and then I woke up like this,” Eddie replies, gesturing vaguely at his face. “Which is part of how I knew I was dreaming.”
Buck looks thoughtful. “Okay,” he answers. “So you were dancing. And then what?”
Eddie thinks back again. Then, of course— Buck. He remembers the way he’d looked standing on the other side of the door, red-eyed and sad. It seems to Eddie that Buck always shows up at a moment like that. He had thought so last night too, still breathless and exhilarated, as he opened the door to Buck.
“Well,” Eddie says. “Then you showed up.”
“Me,” Buck repeats, not quite a question.
“Yes. Or— my version of you.” Eddie cocks his head, trying to think. The whole thing is exacerbating his headache, honestly. “The real you,” he settles on.
Buck smiles, looking amused. “Because I’m not real.”
“Come on,” Eddie groans. “Can you get with the program here? You’re the one who believes in all this dream shit anyway, not me.”
“I don’t believe in dream shit,” Buck corrects, holding up one finger in a way that’s comfortingly Buck-like. “I do believe in some things, though. What happened next?”
Eddie exhales heavily. “We sat on the couch. You asked me why I was wearing my underwear—”
“So you were wearing just underwear,” Buck interjects.
“Not just underwear,” Eddie glares. “I was also wearing a shirt.”
“Close enough,” Buck says, grinning.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Whatever. I told you about the dancing thing. You told me Tommy broke up with you. I told you he’s a dick. We had beers like we always do and then you stayed the night.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.”
Buck is looking at him sort of strangely.
“I stay the night at your house a lot?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Eddie shrugs. “Used to be mostly for Christopher but now—”
He breaks off, remembering the empty bedroom and that sense of panic that wrapped around his lungs.
Buck frowns. “Who’s Christopher?”
Eddie is entirely unprepared for how much that hurts, the way it knocks the wind out of him with a near-physical hit to the solar plexus. He whites out with the gravity of it, the genuine confusion on Buck’s face and the ability of something he knows isn’t real to still ache, somewhere deep inside him.
Buck is waiting for an answer, but Eddie isn’t sure how to give one. Who Christopher is to Eddie is one thing, but who Christopher is to Buck— how is he supposed to explain that? Buck’s blue eyes are the same here, and his voice sounds like it always does. But he’s asking who’s Christopher, and Eddie doesn’t know how to find the words for it. He thinks about Buck, scratched and bleeding and hysterical with fear after scooping Eddie’s baby out of the grasp of a tsunami. About Buck, being the one to hold Christopher when his dad had been shot. About Buck at the zoo and Buck picking him up from school when Eddie couldn’t and Buck doing science projects and Buck being the only one who could negotiate bedtime for that one week after Chris got it in his head that he wanted to know how long a person could really stay awake at one time.
At a loss, Eddie looks away.
“He’s my kid,” he answers shortly.
Buck lights up. Eddie has seen this look on his face before, across the cab of the engine as it rumbled beneath them.
“You have a kid?” he asks brightly.
Just like before, except that it’s not at all. Because Christopher isn’t seven and sweet anymore and Eddie’s not embarking on a fresh start. Everything is different, and all the things that Eddie had been hopeful for that day are things he’s ruined now.
Except for Buck, he thinks. But it’s not helpful, because the Eddie in this dream world doesn’t even have this.
Eddie— dream and otherwise— aches.
The air in the room feels different, suddenly. For a minute, he’d thought that maybe he could entertain this dream-version of Buck. When they were joking around, when the slimmer, smaller version of Buck in front of him had seemed like a close imitation of the one he still hopes is asleep on his couch, in reality. But this is something else, something that feels much worse than Buck looking at him with no recognition or having a picture of Tommy on his fridge.
Eddie sighs. “Look,” he says, “this is stupid. I’ll just go back to my house and stay there and try to— wake up, I guess.”
It’s all he can do, he thinks. Whatever he’d hoped to find by coming to Buck obviously isn’t available to him here.
He only gets halfway out of the chair at the island before Buck stops him, holding out a hand.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he insists.
Eddie looks up at his wide eyes, a question on his face. “What?”
Something like indecision flickers over Buck’s features and then he gets that look— the one that comes with deciding how he’s going to save someone or squaring himself to tell Eddie the thing he needs to hear, even if he doesn’t want to.
“I think you should stay,” he says now.
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “You do?”
“Yeah,” Buck huffs, gathering steam. “Because— like, okay, you think you’re dreaming.”
Eddie hesitates, sitting back down slowly. “I am dreaming.”
“Ah!” Buck says, blue eyes wide. “Or— or maybe you’re not. Maybe this is just a-a different life.”
“A different life?” Eddie frowns. “What?”
“You know,” Buck insists, “like, you went to sleep and you woke up somewhere else, in a different version of your life. And— and to get back, you probably have to do something.”
“Like a— a parallel universe?”
Buck snaps his fingers, pointing at Eddie with too much enthusiasm for the situation, if you’re asking him. “Yes!” he exclaims. “Exactly! A parallel universe.”
Eddie flickers, unhelpfully, back to Christopher’s empty bedroom.
“No,” he says firmly. “I don’t believe in that.”
He can’t, he thinks— because if he does, he’ll have to acknowledge that there’s any universe in which Chris has no bedroom in the house on South Bedford Street. A universe in which he’s somewhere else, without Eddie.
Except— Eddie pauses, thinking. Except that’s true already, isn’t it? Christopher is in El Paso. His room is gathering dust. There are pictures of him on the mantlepiece, slowly growing outdated.
His heart squeezes tight like a vice.
But across the island, Buck’s face is lighting up. “Right!” he says. While he’d been cautious before, he seems to have abandoned that entirely now. He’s practically vibrating with energy, something that’s normally endearing but feels a little unsettling right now. “It makes sense!” he insists, leaning over the island toward Eddie. “I bet— I bet when you woke up, there was stuff that was the same and stuff that was different. Like— I guess this is where I live in your world, because you found me, but it’s different because for some reason, we never met in this world.”
Eddie frowns. There are parts of Buck’s logic that make sense on the surface, but the fact remains that Eddie fundamentally doesn’t believe that it’s possible. Alternate universes, bad juju, curses and hexes— all the things that Eddie knows to be impossible.
“Buck,” he says firmly. Winces. “Evan,” he tries.
Buck frowns. Eddie steels himself. Saying no to him remains as difficult in a dream as it is in real life.
“I can’t entertain that,” he says. “It’s not real. I’m just dreaming, that’s all this is.”
Buck looks at him for a moment. Then he gets that face that means he’s going to say something challenging. It’s a little uncanny. Eddie wishes dream Buck had a few less similar facial expressions, or that he were at least a little more blurred around the edges.
“Okay,” he says. “Then why are you bothering to explain yourself to me? If you’re dreaming, can’t you just get up and leave without a conversation?”
That’s a good question, actually. If Eddie is just dreaming, he can get up and leave. Maybe, if he thinks hard enough he could just materialize back into his house. It’s a dream, so all bets are off. But when he tries it, nothing happens. Buck keeps looking at him and Eddie stays firmly in Buck’s kitchen.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe I will.”
“Okay,” Buck replies, still challenging. “But what about your headache?”
It’s another good question, Eddie will give him that. Still, he shrugs. “Guess everybody was wrong about that,” he answers, hoping to sound offhand. He’s not sure he manages it.
Buck leans into one hip, raising his eyebrows.
“You tried using your phone?” he asks.
“Okay,” Eddie says, exasperated. “I know that one isn’t real.”
He and Buck have had this conversation, actually. A few months ago over a grease stained pizza box discarded on the coffee table, Buck was the one to pose the question— You know you can’t use your phone in a dream?
Eddie remembers the smudge of pizza sauce at the corner of Buck’s mouth and his own confused frown.
“What?” he’d asked. “Yes, you can.”
“No,” Buck had argued, shaking his head firmly. “You definitely can’t. Everybody knows that, Eddie.”
Eddie had been sure then, and is even more sure now, that he was right.
“Obviously,” he says now as he reaches into his pocket for his phone and holds it up to Buck. “You can. Because I am dreaming, and here is my phone.”
Buck quirks an eyebrow at him. “That’s one way to look at it.”
Eddie glares at him halfheartedly.
“Okay,” Buck relents, holding up his hands. “Even if you’re dreaming— then, you think you’re gonna wake up eventually either way, right?”
He asks like he’s leading up to something, which makes Eddie hesitant to agree, but he nods cautiously anyway.
“Okay,” Buck repeats, grinning. “Then if you’re going to wake up at the end of the dream no matter what, what do you have to lose by entertaining my idea and trying to figure out your parallel universe?”
Eddie thinks it over. He has a few options, the way he sees it.
He could go back to his empty house and try to fall asleep— likely still to no avail, given that this situation has him deeply unsettled. There’s also the possibility that he can’t sleep in a dream, anyway.
He could try banging his head on something again, or jumping off of a bridge, but the first time had made his head hurt so he’s a little scared to attempt anything like that again. Even in a dream.
He could wander around dream Los Angeles hoping to run into someone else he knows— but if his experience with Buck is any indication, he’s not sure he wants to start over with someone else.
Or, he could stay with Buck.
Against the odds, this is the most appealing option. Though Eddie doesn’t believe a word of it, there’s something strangely comforting about the thought of spending the day listening to Buck rattle on about the rules and regulations of parallel universes, which Eddie is pretty sure he can bank on even in a dream. At least this way it’ll be fun.
“So?” Buck prompts, waiting, looking like he might start vibrating at any moment.
Eddie looks up at him— familiar blue eyes set into a face that, though thinner, is the same; broad shoulders; dark blonde hair that doesn’t curl the same but looks as soft as ever. And a hopeful, warm, open expression that Eddie would recognize anywhere.
It’s hard to resist, even here.
“Okay,” Eddie agrees.
“Yes!” Buck exclaims, pumping his fist into the air and then holding it out for Eddie to bump. And isn’t that something, that Eddie’s subconscious would conjure a Buck so familiar that he’s reaching out to Eddie within minutes of knowing him?
Eddie reaches his own hand out and their knuckles brush, and for a moment— he has to admit, something about it feels very real.
“Man,” Buck says, taking in a big, satisfying breath that expands his lungs and pulls lightly at his t-shirt against his ribs. “I always wanted to guide someone through a parallel universe.”
Eddie looks over at him as they walk side by side, incredulous. “How is that something you ever thought about doing?”
Buck smiles impishly. “I don’t know,” he says. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be my best friend. You tell me.”
Buck— not surprisingly— had wasted no time at all in making what he had called a master plan. If you’re asking Eddie, it’s mostly nonsense but he’s coming around to the idea of entertaining it more and more by the minute.
His favorite part so far had been when he— still sitting at the counter as Buck paced excitedly around the loft— had asked whether Buck didn’t already have plans for his Saturday before Eddie had shown up at his door.
“Oh,” Buck said, pausing mid-step to look back at Eddie. “Wait, shit. I did, actually.”
Eddie doesn’t normally get jealous over Buck. It’s not that he’s not occasionally a jealous person— he can be, like anyone else, probably. It’s just that Buck never gives him a reason to feel like that. There’s little Eddie is more sure of than his place in Buck’s life. Regardless of anything else, they’re rock solid. He knows that Buck will always come if he calls, no matter what. There’s nothing to be jealous of.
He felt it here, though. If you can feel jealous in dreams.
It lasted just long enough for Eddie to get his mouth around the words: “I can just go back to my place.”
Because as soon as Buck heard them, he was shaking his head.
“No!” he insisted. “I’ll cancel. It’s just dinner with Tommy, anyway.”
It left Eddie feeling pretty smug about the whole thing, actually. Maybe he used to like Tommy— but after last night, he’s intending to hold a grudge forever. And it’s comforting that dream Buck is as willing to cancel anything else for Eddie’s benefit as real Buck has always been.
Now, the sun is bright overhead; it’s shaping up to be a beautiful day in early fall, still plenty warm and cloudless. Buck and Eddie fall into step side by side on their way to lunch. This is part of Buck’s plan, too. He’d laid it out for Eddie as he led them to his car— a small, practical compact sedan that’s nothing like Buck’s Jeep at all. Eddie had watched him fold himself into the front seat, and instinctively worried about his bad leg before it occurred to him that Buck probably doesn’t have a bad leg here.
He’d resisted the urge to ask.
“You know,” Eddie says in response as they walk. “I can at least tell you that you’re equally frustrating in the real world.”
Buck laughs at that. “I think you mean in your world,” he corrects. “If we’re going to spend the day trying to figure out my theory, you have to be in on it. No more dream talk.”
“What is this, a negotiation?” Eddie complains.
“No,” Buck answers simply, and holds the door open for Eddie.
It’s then that Eddie realizes where he is, and his heart gives a little jolt in his chest. Buck has chosen a restaurant for them that they frequent regularly, and in the sense that he does believe he’s dreaming, it makes sense— but if he entertains Buck’s alternate reality theory at all, it would strike a deeper chord.
Eddie follows as Buck leads them to a patio table and they settle beneath a familiar umbrella in the shade. He may not believe it’s possible, but it is a nice thought anyway— that there might be some alternate universe version of Buck who still likes this kitschy little restaurant and still wants to bring Eddie there, even if they just met. It’s charming, in a way.
Eddie, grateful for the shade since he doesn’t have sunglasses, settles in his chair and leans back to look at Buck across the table.
“Okay,” he allows as Buck scans the menu with half-interest. “Say I’m entertaining your theory—”
“Which you are,” Buck interrupts without looking up.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “In that case, why did you choose this restaurant?”
Buck does look up, then, a flicker of surprise on his face as he glances around at their surroundings and then back to Eddie. “Why?” he asks. “Have you been here before?”
“All the time,” Eddie says. “With you, specifically.”
“Huh,” Buck answers, sounding puzzled. “I’ve only been here once or twice.”
It’s probably better, Eddie figures, to lean into the insanity since he’s here either way. If he’s making the choice to spend the day with Buck, there aren’t many alternatives.
“With who?” he asks.
Buck, inexplicably, looks vaguely abashed at this.
“With nobody,” he explains. “I tried to get Tommy to come, but he wasn’t into it. I just like the food here.”
Eddie is just about to take a stab at guessing what Buck likes— because he’s absolutely sure it’s the chicken and waffles with maple syrup, since that’s what Buck always orders here— when a chirpy blonde waitress appears next to their table and greets them happily.
“What can I get you?” she asks.
Buck gestures to Eddie, graciously, and he asks for water and the same thing he always gets here— having checked to be sure it was on the menu. It’s a pasta salad with a particularly good dressing and pieces of charred corn in it. Admittedly, he’s glad Buck picked this place because he really does like it.
“And for you?” the waitress asks politely, looking at Buck.
Buck pushes his menu away and says, “I’ll take water, too, and the garden salad. Could you hold the dressing and do olive oil instead?”
Eddie frowns as the waitress nods and collects their menus, Buck thanking her as Eddie watches him. Once she’s gone, Buck glances back up at him and clocks his facial expression.
“What?” he asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Eddie hesitates.
There are a few things he’s noticed about how Buck is different here— aside from being not Buck at all, there’s also the fact that he’s a teacher and not a firefighter. He doesn’t drive the Jeep. He’s missing at least one tattoo.
But maybe most glaringly, Eddie has noticed how thin he is. Buck— as Eddie had seen him last, asleep on the couch beneath the usual soft blue blanket because it’s the thickest one Eddie owns and Buck gets cold— is a big guy. Eddie does remember a version of him who was less so: a version he’d met when he first joined the 118, who was obsessed with losing body fat and occasionally went on a health kick that Eddie privately thought was sort of ill-advised. They hadn’t been close enough then for Eddie to say anything and by the time they were, it wasn’t really like that.
After the ladder truck bombing and Buck’s subsequent injuries, after the tsunami and the lawsuit and a stupid fight in a grocery store, after a subsequent realization— Buck had set himself to the task of bulking up with his usual single-minded focus.
The result, over the course of several steady years, was the version of Buck that Eddie has come to recognize. He’s broad-shouldered and tall naturally, but the soft stomach and chest, the wideness of his thighs, the occasional glimpse that Eddie gets of silvery stretch marks along his hip when they’re in the locker room or the showers together— these are things that had come with time. Eddie thinks now about watching Jee-Yun put her head on Buck’s tummy and about the easy way Buck pulls his shirt off these days and about the deep, undeniable strength that he carries around with him everywhere.
It’s strange for Eddie to see him like this again. It’s sharper now than it had been several years ago, a contrast that makes him feel vaguely squirmy and wrong.
But this is, after all, a dream. A nightmare, maybe— Eddie is not really sure where the line is. Either way he has, as Buck had helpfully pointed out, nothing to lose. So he jumps.
“Why did you order that?” he asks.
Buck’s eyebrows go up in surprise and then back down, his face creasing with confusion. He glances in the direction that the waitress had taken his menu and then back to Eddie, looking genuinely puzzled.
“What?” he asks. “Is there something wrong with it? I think I’ve ordered it before, but—”
Eddie waves a hand. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he answers.
“Okay,” Buck says slowly. “Is it— do I not like tomatoes in your reality or something?”
Eddie can’t exactly put a name to what it is about this that’s making him feel so frustrated. He just hates the thought of sitting here in this spot across from a Buck that’s making himself small, watching him make himself even smaller. He swallows down the vitriol he feels— neither Buck nor the salad deserves it— and tries for something softer.
“It’s just—” he starts. “I don’t know. You always order the chicken and waffles.”
Buck blinks like this information is really surprising to him and Eddie wonders whether the whole thing is going to be this painful.
“I do?” Buck asks.
Eddie’s throat goes tight, a little, and he clears it. It’s not a big thing, in the grand scheme of the situation. It’s just that on top of everything else, it kind of feels that way all of a sudden.
“Yeah,” he answers. “Does that surprise you?”
Buck seems to think about it as the waitress drops off their waters, each glass sweating condensation and clinking with ice.
“Kind of,” Buck admits eventually. “I guess I’m not as much of a health nut in your world.”
The thing is, Eddie knows Buck. He’s not sure at this moment exactly what version of Buck he’s dealing with, but he knows the tilts and curves of his voice like the back of his own hand. He knows what Buck sounds like when he’s trying really hard not to laugh, and when he’s trying not to cry, and when something has set him off but he refuses to let anybody know it. He knows the way Buck’s voice gets high if he’s trying to hide something, even from himself, and the pitch of it when he’s soothing.
He knows that right now, Buck feels caught.
When someone is pointing something out that Buck thinks he’s getting away with and he’s trying— usually in vain— to defend himself, his voice does this thing. It’s like it gets smoother, even too smooth. Eddie can clock it in seconds. Right now, he kind of wishes he couldn’t. It confirms in a matter of no time at all that Buck is doing this on purpose, and the thought makes Eddie want to disappear a little bit.
“You’re a health nut?” Eddie asks flatly. “Really?”
Buck shrugs a little, looking at anything but Eddie. “Kinda. I mean— you said the version of me that you know is a firefighter, right? So I probably don’t have to be as-as careful, then. I’m already burning a lot of calories at work.”
If Eddie didn’t know him so well, it might sound like a valid point. As it is, Buck’s voice comes out smooth as butter.
“Sure,” Eddie says, carefully neutral.
There’s a lot more that he wants to say. He hadn’t known until right now that he felt so passionate about it, but now that it’s staring him in the face there’s a part of him that wants to scream.
Instead he says, “You could try the chicken and waffles.”
Buck frowns. “I already ordered.”
Eddie shakes his head, filled with renewed fervor. Maybe it’s just because he’s dreaming, but it suddenly seems like the most important thing in the world is to make sure that Buck doesn’t eat a salad without dressing for lunch.
“You could change it, you have time,” he insists, already scanning the area for the waitress. Buck is eyeing him a little bit anxiously.
“Uh, Eddie,” he hedges. “I-I’m really good with the salad, man.”
Eddie glares at him. It’s as halfhearted as ever, but he is determined to make this happen.
“Listen,” he says. “If you eat the chicken and waffles, I will call this an alternate reality for the whole entire rest of the day. No more dream shit!”
Buck hesitates. For a moment, Eddie thinks he’s still going to refuse. He’s not sure how he’ll cope if his powers of persuasion don’t work on dream Buck.
“Okay,” Buck relents. “If you tell the waitress.”
It startles a laugh out of Eddie, but it also eases off something in his chest.
“Deal,” he says.
Buck smiles awkwardly while Eddie flags down the waitress and apologetically asks to change the order. It’s not something he would probably ever do under normal circumstances, but this is still a dream, even if he’s agreed to keep his mouth shut about it against his better judgement.
“Okay,” he says, settling back into his chair once she’s walked away. “There.”
Buck is regarding him across the table, a little bemused but also more cautious than he’d been earlier.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Eddie groans.
“Like what?”
“Like—” Eddie waves his hand. “Like you’re about ready to ship me off to the asylum or something.”
Buck laughs, and Eddie watches his shoulders relax fractionally. “Honestly,” he says, “I think I’m probably the one who needs to be shipped off for letting a stranger into my house just because he says I’m his best friend in an alternate reality.”
It’s a test, and Eddie knows it. He bites back the correction that rises to his tongue and says instead,
“It’s actually a very Buck thing to do.”
“Is it?” Buck asks, looking downright pleased by this information. Maybe he’s right about the asylum, after all, but Eddie doesn’t have it in him to be anything less than fond about it. Maybe the truth is that they both need to be committed.
“Yeah,” Eddie smiles. “Are you not generous to the point of delusion in this universe?”
Buck shrugs, his cheeks faintly pink. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re here, so I guess I am.”
Something about this feels warm, when it reaches out across the table and settles over Eddie.
“I guess you are.”
The food arrives, interrupting them, and Eddie thanks the waitress again as Buck looks over his chicken and waffles. Eddie stabs a bite of pasta with his fork and watches him.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he says, gently.
Buck glances up, caught, and then picks up his fork. “Yeah,” he answers. “Usually goes the other way around.”
Eddie bites at the inside of his cheek, and Buck cuts off a bite of waffle and chicken, swiping it through a puddle of maple syrup before putting it in his mouth. The rest of it is kind of worth it for the way his eyes light up.
“Good, right?” Eddie asks, amused and soft in a way that he’s pretty sure should feel out of place— but it doesn’t.
“Actually, yeah,” Buck answers, a shimmer of surprise coloring his voice.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “I told you,” he says. Buck— being Buck— just grins and takes another bite. It’s a silver lining, a normal moment in the midst of a thing that feels otherwise all wrong and out of control. Eddie is grateful for whatever of it he can get, even if it comes in the form of the shiny smudge of maple syrup at the corner of Buck’s mouth.
“So,” Eddie says as they eat, “Tell me the plan.”
By the time they’re back in Buck’s car some time later, he thinks he pretty much understands what Buck is going for here.
“Okay,” he says as Buck pulls out of the parking lot and smoothly onto the road. “There’s just one thing I don’t really understand.”
They’ve been over what Buck is intending to do, which is to take Eddie to Chimney’s house. They’ve also covered how Buck knows Chim: through Tommy, and not nearly as well as he does in Eddie’s reality. And what Buck is intending to tell him— the truth, as he sees it, which is to say that Eddie is coming from an alternate reality. When Eddie had asked what he was planning to do if Chim thought he should be committed to an asylum immediately, Buck had been pretty confident that Chimney “has enough whimsy” not to do that. At worst, Buck said, they would run.
“Yeah?” he asks now, glancing over at Eddie as he changes lanes.
This is a question that Eddie both wants to ask, and doesn’t. Curiosity is winning out, though.
“Is there a reason you want to go to Chim?” he asks. “Like, instead of Tommy?”
Buck had explained why he thought they were better off starting with the 118— because it’s the tether point between their supposedly separate universes, the thing they have in common— but in this world, Tommy falls under that category, too. The question has been bugging Eddie for the last hour.
Now, Buck makes a face that Eddie recognizes even from the side.
“Tommy is…” he trails off.
“Useless?” Eddie supplies before he can think twice about it.
Buck glares at him over the center console and then looks back at the road, shaking his head. “No,” he defends. “I just don’t think he’d handle it very well.”
Eddie bites his tongue, but he doesn’t think it does much for his facial expression.
Buck sighs. “It’s just— I don’t know, I don’t think he likes stuff like this very much. He’s a skeptic, you know?”
Eddie frowns. He’s thinking about Halloween— about Buck getting worked up over a curse and the way he and Tommy had both laughed about it. But Eddie hadn’t been annoyed. He and Buck joke around like that— Buck a believer, Eddie a skeptic— but he didn’t mean it. If Buck wanted to pursue a curse, Eddie would go along with it in the end. He’d thought, at the time, that the same was true of Tommy. That he was just ribbing him. But now that he thinks back on it, there’s an uncomfortable prickling that he feels beneath the surface of his skin. He remembers Buck calling him in a panic over the boils on his face and wonders now, for the first time, if it was unusual for him to call Eddie, with Tommy right there in the apartment with him.
Maybe there should have been some kind of red flag in all of that. Eddie hadn’t thought anything of it beyond being there for Buck, like he always is.
“I mean,” Eddie says. “I’m skeptical, too. But I’m—”
“Ah,” Buck interrupts. “Careful, that’s pretty close to rule-breaking.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “I can’t complain now?”
“I said close,” Buck reasons, shrugging his shoulder as he flicks his turn signal on and it clicks lightly, indicating that he’s going right at a stoplight that Eddie doesn’t recognize. “I’m just saying you’re on thin ice.”
“Whatever,” Eddie sighs, leaning back. “I don’t really want to see Tommy anyway. No offense.”
Buck glances over him curiously. The light is still red, so his gaze lingers. “You seem like you feel pretty strongly about him,” he remarks.
It’s funny, because Eddie hadn’t thought he did. Up until yesterday, he’s not sure he would have said he felt much of anything about Tommy, really. He certainly wasn’t anywhere near the level that Buck holds in Eddie’s life, but they were friends. He liked the guy well enough. Other than that, he was pretty neutral on the whole thing.
Tommy breaking up with Buck changed that, though. He can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t want Buck; and anybody who doesn’t, doesn’t get him either. He’d blocked Tommy’s number before he went to sleep the night before.
“I guess I do,” he says now. “He broke up with you.”
“In your world,” Buck offers.
“In my world,” Eddie grumbles unhappily.
For many reasons, he would very much like to go back there.
When Buck pulls his car to a stop, it’s in front of a building that Eddie doesn’t recognize at all. It’s not where Chim used to live, and it’s not the house he shares with Maddie now. It’s a small renovated place, appearing from the outside like it’s been sectioned into four apartments.
“So, you and Tommy hang out with the 118 a lot?” Eddie asks as they step back into the warmth of the sun.
“Nah,” Buck answers. “Tommy does sometimes, but I keep to myself for the most part.”
That’s hard for Eddie to imagine.
He glances back at the building. “But you know where Chimney lives,” he says, not quite a question.
“I helped when he moved here,” Buck says. “We don’t spend a lot of time together, but I did that and I went to the Christmas party. I see him now and then.”
Eddie thinks about Buck and Chim swinging Jee-Yun between them as she giggles wildly; about Maddie’s soft, fond expression watching them. The whole thing leaves his chest aching in new ways every hour.
“Alright,” he says, swallowing hard. “Lead the way, then.”
Buck is still Buck in some ways, which is a comfort. Eddie reflects on his brazen confidence as he leads them up the walkway. There’s no universe in which Eddie would feel comfortable approaching his significant other’s coworker who he barely knows and making an idiot out of himself the way Buck is about to do, but Buck is— how did Christopher put that phrase a while back?
Buck knocks energetically on Chimney’s door, and Eddie remembers it.
Built different. That’s the one.
In this world— or dream, depending on who you ask— Chimney looks pretty much exactly the same as he always does. Even the expression of wary surprise he gets when he opens the door to Buck and Eddie standing on his threshold is pretty familiar.
“Uh,” he says. “Hi.”
“Hey,” Buck says. “Sorry to bother you.”
There’s a sound from inside, and then a familiar voice says— “Who is it?”
“Well,” Chim says, and then the body attached to the voice appears in the doorway alongside him.
Buck brightens. “Hen!” he says. “Even better. Good to see you.”
Hen’s dark eyes flicker between Buck and Eddie. “Okay,” she says, nodding. “That is definitely a combination of people at your door.”
Eddie has been focused on trying to look simultaneously friendly and apologetic, but at her words he feels his own expression crease into something different. Buck doesn’t seem to catch it, though, plowing ahead.
“Like I was saying, sorry to bother you,” he says. “But I have a situation. Can we come in?”
Chim glances over at Hen, and then— somewhat inexplicably— they both look back at Eddie.
“You have a situation,” Chim repeats, his eyes flickering very briefly to Buck. “With him?”
Buck seems to catch up now. Eddie thinks he was previously focused on saying all the things he’d practiced in the car on the way over here, and only now is he actually listening to what the response has been.
He looks over at Eddie, then back across the threshold.
“This is Eddie,” he says.
Hen raises her eyebrows. “Oh,” she says, “we know.”
It’s at this moment that Eddie begins to wonder if he’s bitten off more than he can chew by agreeing to Buck’s plan. In his own reality, he would be very glad to have Hen present. Hen is smart and sharp and sensible, a voice of reason. But in this reality, it appears that Hen knows who he is— and Eddie doesn’t know how, exactly, but suddenly he feels like the way she’s looking at him can’t mean anything good.
Buck looks between them, confusion written all over his face.
“Wait,” he says. “How do you know Eddie?”
“How do you know Eddie?” Chimney asks, the picture of puzzlement.
Buck hesitates, and Hen narrows her eyes.
“Let them in, Chim,” she advises, tugging on his sleeve. “At least it’ll be more interesting than what you were making me watch.”
“Hey!” Chimney objects, even as he follows her instruction and moves aside to leave space for Eddie and Buck to come inside. “That’s a masterpiece.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hen says as they all shuffle inside and Chimney secures the door behind them. She perches on a chair, cocks her head at Eddie and says, “What is this about?”
The thing is, Eddie has no idea.
“Um,” he says.
“Wait,” Chim interjects. His eyes are also on Eddie. Neither of them look particularly friendly. If anything, they both look kind of wary. It’s unnerving; Eddie can’t recall ever having seen them look at him this way before. “Evan, how do you even know him?”
Eddie tries not to cringe at the sound of Buck’s name.
“It’s a funny story, actually,” Buck says. “He kinda showed up at my door this morning. I think he’s from another universe. How do you know him?”
Eddie is beginning to learn that it’s possible to be embarrassed in a dream. The worst part is that his subconscious mind has dreamt up a version of Buck that’s very accurate, and he’s pretty sure that Buck would handle this exactly the same way if it were real.
Hen and Chim look cautiously at each other and then back at Eddie.
“I didn’t take you as the practical joke type, Diaz,” Hen says eventually.
Eddie bristles in spite of himself. Knowing that none of this is real doesn’t abate the reaction he has to her cold tone and his last name on her tongue. She doesn’t call him that. Nobody does. It stings like sand in his eyes, the memory of a brutal desert and a uniform that felt all wrong on his body.
“I— It’s not a joke,” he offers. He glances at Buck, who’s watching him carefully. Partially, Eddie thinks he’s waiting for him to slip up and call it a dream. But there’s also a flicker of something else in his face. Eddie knows this look— a cautious uncertainty, like Buck is waiting for Eddie to let him down. He finds that he can’t do it, even if this isn’t real.
And besides— if it is a dream, like he thinks it is, it’s not like he has anything to lose.
“I don’t know, um, how you guys know me,” he says to Hen and Chim. “Here. In this— reality or…whatever.”
Hen looks deeply unimpressed. Chimney’s eyebrows shoot up in disbelief. Eddie kind of wants to disappear.
Psychotically, Buck grins.
“See?” he says, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. “He’s from another universe. He knew all kinds of stuff about me.”
Hen looks over at Buck, her face softening a little. “Evan,” she says gently. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but— have you thought about getting checked out?”
Buck blinks. And then laughs a little. “No,” he says. “Listen— I know it sounds crazy. But he knew where I lived! And I’ve never even met him before.”
Chim looks thoughtful, tilting his head and looking over at Hen. “That’s true,” he says. “He was at the 118 before Kinard met Evan.”
Eddie hesitates, frowning. “Sorry,” he interrupts. “Who was? Me?”
Hen sighs heavily.
“I really should have stayed home this morning,” she says. She looks up at Chim, a resigned expression on her face. “You’re going to suggest we entertain this, aren’t you?” she asks.
Chim grins around the gum in his mouth. “Oh, yeah,” he replies, leaning in like Buck and Eddie aren’t even there. “C’mon, Hen. It’s like It’s A Wonderful Life. Evan is his Clarence. How can you turn down this kind of crazy? ”
She rolls her eyes. “Easily. But fine.” She looks over at Buck. “Is there a reason you brought this to Chim on our day off?” she asks. “Where is Tommy in all this?”
Buck ducks his head, presumably hoping to hide the guilty flush of pink on his cheeks. “Honestly,” he says, “I didn’t think Tommy would believe me.”
“But you thought I would?” Chim asks. Bizarrely, he sounds kind of delighted.
Eddie thinks about his house again. The kitchen. Buck in it, coffee and breakfast and Christopher’s room the way it should be. Eventually, he thinks, he will wake up and this will be over.
“Kinda,” Buck admits.
Chimney smiles. “Okay,” he agrees, leaning in interestedly. “Tell us everything.”
So, Buck does. Eddie chimes in where he’s needed, but mostly he’s just letting Buck ramble as he recounts the events of the morning— everything from Eddie’s knock at his door to the moment they arrived here, relaying the details Eddie had told him about the night before and summarizing all the stuff Eddie seems to know about him and his life.
“So,” Hen says when there’s an eventual lull, pointing between the two of them, “you’re telling me that you two have never met before today?”
“Well,” Eddie says, “not in this world, anyway.”
Hen looks over at him again. Her dark eyes are searching and skeptical. Eddie fights against the urge to shrink under her gaze. “And you,” she says. “You expect me to believe that you don’t even know who we are?”
Eddie is very lost.
“I mean,” he says. “I do know who you are, in— in my world.”
She blinks at him, her arms crossed over her chest. Eddie glances at Buck again, and then back.
“I— I don’t really have an explanation,” Eddie offers. “But I really do mean it when I tell you that I don’t know what you’re talking about. I woke up this morning in my usual house, except that everything was different. I have…”
He flashes back to blank walls; a dusty desk; an empty bed.
“I have a son,” he tells them. “Christopher. He— I woke up this morning and his room was empty. I don’t even know where he is.”
Everyone in the room— even Hen— softens a little at this. Hen and Chim glance at each other, looking a little squirrelly.
“What?” Eddie asks, glancing between them. “Do you— what?”
“We know about your son,” Chimney explains. “You really don’t remember any of this stuff? You— maybe you’re the one who needs to get checked out.”
Eddie is not above admitting that this may be true, but the phrase we know about your son seems a lot more important at the present moment.
“What do you mean, you know about my son?” he asks. There’s an edge of anxious desperation in his voice that even he can hear. “What do you know about Christopher?”
Hen winces sympathetically. For the first time, Eddie wonders about Karen and Denny and Mara.
“Your parents,” she says. “There was— it got messy. When you first came to the 118, you were new to Los Angeles. You had Christopher on your own. But it was too much. We met him,” she offers, a small bittersweet smile on her face. “He was a sweet kid. But our captain didn’t let you bring him to the station and there just wasn’t enough help.”
Eddie frowns.
“What do you mean about my parents?” he asks.
Hen looks away. Chim sighs. “It was a mess, man,” he says. “We don’t know everything. But there was a custody battle. Your parents fought you for the kid and won. Courts determined you didn’t have enough of a support system to meet his needs, couldn’t be a firefighter and a single dad. We, uh— we didn’t see much of you after that.”
Eddie feels cold. The words replay in his head on a sick loop. It’s just a dream, he tells himself. But it doesn’t help much. Because even when he wakes up, Christopher will be right where he apparently is now: in El Paso, with Eddie’s parents.
The room is uncomfortably quiet for a long moment.
Eddie turns the information over in his head, searching through it and trying not to dwell too much on the Christopher part. He goes back to a day in May; a crosswalk; a particular shade of yellow that’s burned into his memory forever.
“His mother,” he says, clearing his throat around the way the words stick to it. He glances up in time to catch Chim and Hen sharing a nearly-guilty, uncomfortable glance, and doesn’t need to ask anything further to know the answer. “Okay,” he says, pivoting. “She— yeah. She died in my world, too.”
If Buck were right— if this were another universe— then maybe there would be more. Where there are two, maybe there could be others. Maybe in one or two of them, Shannon makes it across the street.
He pivots, circling back to something else Hen had said. “Your captain,” he says. “You said he wouldn’t let me bring him there.”
They exchange another look. Eddie is getting sick of seeing it and not quite understanding what it means.
“Yeah,” Chim replies uncertainly.
“In my world,” Eddie explains with a half-hearted glance at Buck. “I did bring him there. Why wouldn’t Bobby have let me here?”
Hen’s dark eyes settle on him, and it’s like she’s seeing through him in a way that Eddie really doesn’t like.
“Bobby?” she repeats, the syllables slow to catch up.
“Yeah?” Eddie asks, looking between them. “Captain Nash? Bobby?”
“Bobby Nash is your fire captain?” Chim asks him, and there’s a skepticism in his voice that grates on Eddie with a sudden sharpness like the scrape of gravel against skin.
“Yes,” he answers. “What about it?”
Chim looks at Hen; this time, she doesn’t look back. Her eyes are still on Eddie, steady and dark.
“Bobby Nash is dead,” she says. “Died a few years back. That was before you even joined the 118. He was never your Captain.”
Something in Eddie goes cold.
Bobby not being their Captain— that’s already hard enough to picture, but they’ve all grappled with it in fits and starts over the years across almost-retirements and near-death experiences and medical leaves. But Bobby not being around at all? Bobby, whose guidance they all rely on and whose presence tethers them. A reality without him is impossible to brace himself for, and in this case it hits without warning.
Eddie wonders briefly about Athena— about Harry and May. He glances around at Buck and feels it deep in his chest, the knowledge that this is a version of Buck who still grew up in Pennsylvania and found his way to the West coast, but who never had Bobby to teach him, to nurture him the way that his Buck had.
And selfishly, there’s him: his own life, and Christopher’s, and how they had been changed for the better by having Bobby in their corner. There’s a part of Eddie who has always seen glimmers and pieces of himself in Bobby; in his shadows and in his light, in his ability to continue to move through life.
And if he couldn’t, if he didn’t— what does that mean for Eddie?
In a beat of awkward silence, Buck leans in. Apparently, being in a dream or an alternate reality doesn’t stop him from knowing when to intervene on Eddie’s behalf. Eddie isn’t sure he’s ever really taken note of how much he relies on that quality until now, when it’s a lump in his throat and Buck jumping in right on cue.
“Okay,” he says like a brace. “What were you saying about It’s A Wonderful Life, Chimney? You said I was his Clarence; what does that mean?”
Chim lights up, ironically Christmas-bright.
“Clarence is like— your guy’s guru. Or his guardian angel,” he adds with a wicked flash of a grin.
Eddie looks at Buck and finds him looking back. For a second, it’s like they’re both caught in the headlights; and then Buck smiles, his usual bright one that carves a dimple into his cheek, and Eddie’s heart turns something strange in his chest.
“I’m your guardian angel,” he says.
Eddie forces a roll of his eyes. “God help me,” he says dryly.
Meanwhile, Buck has already turned his full attention back to Chimney. “So how does it work out in the movie?” he asks. “Does he get back to his old life?”
“The movie was just an example,” Hen points out from her place at the counter, where she’s leaning on her hand and looking increasingly bored.
“Still,” Buck insists, though Eddie is inclined to agree with Hen. He usually is. It’s only been a day or so since he saw her— his version of her— but this is making him miss her. “It’s all we have to go on,” Buck continues, and unfortunately Eddie is inclined to agree with him on that front. “We can at least try to see where we get with that.”
Chim shrugs. “In the movie,” he says, “there was something about his life that he had to fix before he could get back. Tale as old as time.”
Eddie takes stock of what he knows about this life, this world, and all the things in it that are wrong.
When it comes to fixing something, he isn’t sure where he would even begin.
“It has to be Christopher,” Buck says, startling Eddie out of a wandering tailspin of thought.
He looks up. They’re across from each other at the table in Buck’s loft, the way they have been more times than Eddie can remember. The table is the same, even if most everything else is different. The detritus of their shared takeout dinner is scattered across the surface between them, overlapping Buck’s sage green placemats. Eddie fidgets with the fringe along the edge of the one in front of him absentmindedly. In his world, Buck owns placemats, but they’re blue and rope-braided.
“What do you mean?” Eddie asks.
“Christopher,” Buck repeats, and the sound of his name on Buck’s tongue is enough to tug at something deep inside of Eddie.
He wants to go home.
Instead, he swallows hard and keeps going. “What about Christopher?”
“He’s the thing you have to fix,” Buck answers. “Right? I mean— think about it. That’s what’s different between this world and yours. In that one, you have your kid and in this one you don’t. Simple.”
Simple, Eddie thinks bitterly. Not exactly.
He sighs, pushing back from the table and lightly scraping his chair over the floor. Freed from the space, he gets up and walks in his socks over to the window. It’s dark, and he can see the shadow of his reflection in it: a wavering, half-measured version of himself, one who doesn’t look like him any more now than it had in the mirror this morning when he woke up in this dream.
He turns away again and his gaze catches on something that sits on top of a shelf pushed against the wall. It’s almost the only thing there aside from Buck’s keys and a stack of mail.
A Ferris wheel.
Eddie moves closer to it, drawn by it, and remembers the day of the tsunami. Remembers climbing the Ferris wheel and leaping off of it: that freefall feeling, the freedom and the fear all tangled up in an instant before he hit the water.
The same day and maybe a universe away, Buck had been fighting through the water to find Christopher. And Christopher had been—
Eddie still doesn’t know. Years later, he still isn’t sure where Chris was every minute of that day and it still haunts him. The sight of any Ferris wheel still tightens his throat and scrapes something raw in him, but to see one here, like this— in Buck’s space, in this dream or whatever this is, when this Buck doesn’t even know who Christopher is.
“You must miss him.” Buck’s voice pulls Eddie back from the edges of his memory, and he leaves the Santa Monica pier behind as he finds himself back in Buck’s living room.
Even that isn’t really true. Eddie isn’t sure that anything is true anymore.
“I do miss him,” he murmurs, tracing the edge of the Ferris wheel’s little basket with his finger and making it rock lightly back and forth. “But it’s not simple.”
He’s aware of Buck’s presence behind him, and it feels real in spite of how sure Eddie is that it can’t be.
“What do you mean?” Buck asks, and Eddie sighs.
“He’s not at home in my world either,” he admits, even though it kills him to say it and leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Oh,” Buck says, his voice taking on a weight as if he has any understanding of what that really means— here, he doesn’t. He just met Eddie this morning and he’s never met Christopher at all. But that’s something that Eddie has always loved about his best friend: the way that he can summon compassion and understanding for someone and spin those things into gentleness. “Wh-where is he?” Buck asks tentatively. “Was it— your parents? Like Hen and Chimney were saying?”
Eddie breathes out. “Not exactly,” he answers, glancing over at Buck along his shoulder and then thinking better of it, turning to look at the Ferris wheel again. “It was my fault. I did something I shouldn’t have done. Lied to Christopher. Lied to you.”
“Me?” Buck asks. There’s a catch of tenderness in his voice, there and fading in a second so Eddie has to wonder if he imagined it.
But of course he did, because he’s really just imagining all of this. None of it is real. The longer he stays in it, the more he has to keep reminding himself.
“Yeah,” he answers anyway. “You were not as mad at me as you should have been.”
Buck tilts his head at him a little. “You seem like a hard guy to be mad at,” he offers.
Something in Eddie’s chest shifts. He recovers, takes a breath, and turns so that the Ferris wheel is at his back.
“What about you?” he asks, turning the subject safely away from himself.
Buck frowns, the light on his face. “What about me?”
Eddie shrugs his shoulders, casting a glance around the room where things are mostly the way he remembers them, but not entirely.
“Your job, Tommy,” he muses. “Are you—” He breaks off and thinks back: remembering the exhilarating dampness on the back of his neck in his own living room just last night or maybe a lifetime ago; the zip of something electric in his spine and the soles of his feet; the justright ache of moving his body, of joy. “Are you happy?” he asks, looking up at Buck.
Buck blinks, looking briefly taken aback before he smothers the expression and Eddie watches it go out right in front of him.
“Yeah,” Buck says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
The trouble, Eddie thinks as he watches him get up and start to clear the table, is that he’s always been able to tell when Buck was lying.
Eddie expects to wake up back in his bed, in his own house.
Instead, when he opens his eyes he finds himself still on Buck’s couch with the borrowed blankets and pillows that Buck had insistently thrust on him the night before. Eddie had mostly only agreed because he was so sure he was going to wake up back where he belonged regardless of where he fell asleep.
But here he is, with his lower back twinging slightly from a night on the couch and his head a little fuzzy, and in the light of a second day everything is starting to look a lot more real.
He blinks, clearing his eyes, and stares up at Buck’s distant lofted ceiling as something like dread settles in the center of his chest. If it had been a dream, surely he would have woken up by now. Surely something would be out of place, or— or at least dreamlike. The word exists for a reason, right?
“Oh, good,” Buck says, clapping his hands and startling Eddie. “You’re up. Come have breakfast. I have a new plan.”
Buck’s new plan, Eddie learns over pancakes that make him ache for a life that’s feeling further away by the moment, involves seizing on what he calls the Christopher Conundrum. He seems pretty proud of that little moniker, but Eddie is still just stuck on Chris’s name and Buck’s voice and this strange sense of dread that’s settling over him.
“I don’t know about all this anymore, Buck,” he sighs as he halfheartedly drags a piece of pancake through a puddle of syrup on his plate. Hearing himself, he gives his head a little shake and amends himself. “Evan. Sorry.”
Buck shrugs on the other side of the kitchen island.
“‘s okay,” he manages through a mouthful of pancake, and then swallows. “I kinda like it.”
Eddie glances up at that. “Yeah?”
Buck smiles, and there it is again: that feeling in his chest that he just doesn’t have the words for.
“Yeah,” Buck says. “It’s cool. Call me whatever you want.”
Eddie looks past him at the refrigerator, zeroing in on the photo of Tommy. Yesterday, he’d thought that it would be inevitable he would eventually have to face the guy. Now, twenty-four hours into this nightmare, he’s not so sure.
It wasn’t so long ago that Eddie was in this very room with them both, sweeping a cotton swab over a boil on Buck’s face. It seemed funny at the time, all of it. Like they were all in on the joke together. Like Tommy’s little remarks to Buck had been in good faith, part of their dynamic.
In light of what happened the night before he woke up here, Eddie isn’t so sure anymore. He wonders if Buck had felt small. The idea that he’d missed it entirely makes him feel wrong-footed and vaguely ashamed.
He thinks about Tommy and the way he called Buck Evan; how surprised Eddie had been to hear it for the first time, and how it always sounded a little off. He’d assumed that was part of their dynamic too, a thing that was just for them that he wasn’t privy to. Now, he wonders if that’s what Buck had told Tommy as well— call me whatever you want. Or if Tommy had bothered to ask at all.
Suddenly, though he’s standing right in front of him, Eddie misses Buck fiercely. His Buck. He wants to talk to him, to ask him why he was letting Tommy call him that, to watch his face for signs of vulnerability. He wants to put his hand on Buck’s shoulder and tell him something, anything, to make it better.
But for the time being, all he has is this version of Buck: and though it’s not the one Eddie knows, it’s still Buck, and Eddie isn’t sure there’s any version of Buck that he doesn’t develop a soft spot for.
He clears his throat. “You shouldn’t do that,” he says, feeling awkward and sounding it, probably.
“Do what?” Buck asks, his brows creasing.
Eddie waves a hand through the air vaguely. “Let people call you whatever they want,” he says. “You should— you know. You should be called what you want.”
Buck eyes him curiously. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
Buck probably thinks that Eddie is speaking from personal experience, the kind that’s about himself. He’s not. He’s speaking from personal experience: the kind that’s about Buck, the kind that comes from knowing him inside and out.
He shrugs. “I guess,” he says.
Buck leans over the counter. “I don’t know,” he muses. “I like Buck. It’s different from what I’m used to. Makes me stand out.”
Eddie huffs. “Are you saying you don’t stand out normally?”
“Not really,” Buck answers, which is hard to wrap his head around at all. “I mean— I do okay. But I guess my brother and sister have always been the main attraction so I’m—”
Eddie goes cold, like being doused in ice water as he looks up sharply. “Your what?” he interrupts.
Buck hesitates. “My brother and sister?” he repeats. “Why do you look like that?”
Eddie swallows hard, and it feels suddenly a little bit like he can’t breathe. He thinks back to Buck in the firehouse loft: years ago now, a thing he’s healed so much from, but raw then and visible all over his face in slivers of heartbreak and vulnerability that made him look younger than he was.
He remembers the heat of the fire, the fear that had wrapped like vines around his lungs when they were in that building searching for Buck. He remembers the dizzying sense of relief when he was pulled out afterward; and the plea in his eyes later on in the engine bay.
I had to do it, Buck had said then, words for Eddie.
I know you did. A mark of the ways that they knew each other, even then in the middle ground of their friendship as it lives now.
He remembers Buck sitting in his living room afterward, days later when his parents had already left town and left Buck shaken in their wake. He was doing a good job looking like he was holding it together, but when he came to Eddie’s and it was dark outside some of the mask dripped off like hot wax and what was left behind were pieces of Buck as he’d existed long before Eddie knew him.
Pieces of Evan, he guesses. Of a baby who had been born to be a savior and wasn’t, until he grew up and learned how to be one all by himself.
Maybe that’s the trade-off, Eddie thinks now, and the idea of it makes him feel distantly nauseous.
This Buck had saved Daniel Buckley. The other one saved Eddie and Christopher Diaz.
“Eddie?” Buck prompts, reminding Eddie that he’s been quiet for too long. “What?”
He huffs a breath. The thought of telling Buck the truth— even when he knows that he should, and even when he still believes it doesn’t matter because none of this is real— settles wrong in his stomach.
He’s also not sure there’s any other way around it.
“You don’t— I was just surprised,” he says, fumbling it already.
“By what?” Buck frowns.
“You don’t have a brother. In real— in my world,” Eddie answers.
Buck blinks. “Wh-what do you mean?” he asks.
“You did,” Eddie admits. He pushes his plate away, even though there are still a couple of bites of pancake left on it that he no longer thinks he can stomach. “He… he died. When you were a baby.”
Maybe he can at least spare Buck the pain of knowing the rest of it. Whatever his parents are like here, Eddie has to think it’s better than reality.
“Leukemia,” Buck says, his voice soft.
“Yeah.”
“But I— I was a match,” he says. His voice picks up, the way it does when he’s excited or nervous or feeling too much in any direction. “I was a bone marrow donor. That’s— I saved his life.”
Eddie looks down, nodding slowly.
“You were a match in my world, too,” he says. “Graft didn’t take. I’m sorry, Evan, I—”
“Don’t call me that,” Buck says, breaking into Eddie’s thoughts. Eddie looks up, and finds him ablaze. For the first time in twenty-four hours, there’s a grit to him that looks right, like the Buck that Eddie knows.
“Okay,” Eddie amends softly. “Buck.”
Buck seems to come back to himself a little and runs a hand over the back of his neck. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why it sounds wrong coming from you.”
Eddie does. It exists as a hollow ache in the drum of his chest, empty but for that. He hates it here more by the minute.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie repeats. “I’m sure it’s hard to hear.”
It clearly was— it had been written all over Buck’s face. But now he looks thoughtful, and Eddie can see the wheels turning in his head well before he speaks.
“No,” he says. “Maybe you’re onto something here, actually. What else?”
“What else what?” Eddie asks, spinning in his seat to watch as Buck walks past him around the island and starts rifling through the closet by the door.
“What else is—” Buck starts, then pauses again. “Aha!” he says, emerging from the closet with a whiteboard in his hands.
Eddie frowns at it. “What is that for?”
Buck carries it over to the counter and props it up in a chair. “I use it sometimes for lesson planning and stuff,” he answers. “But today it’s a…a murder board!”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Murder?” he repeats. “Who got murdered?”
“My brother, apparently,” Buck says, and only bothers to look apologetic when Eddie fixes him with a look. “No, c’mon,” he says, gesturing to it. “You know what I mean. Like in a cop show. An investigation board, if you prefer.”
Eddie does. He’s also wondering for the first time if this version of Buck has ever even met Athena. He hates everything about this.
“I do prefer,” he says firmly. “Go back to what you were saying.”
Buck thinks about it for a few seconds, and then his eyes light up as he points at Eddie. “Right!” he says. “I was asking you to tell me what else is different in your world from mine.” He moves back into the kitchen and rummages through a drawer, then comes up with a blue Expo marker. “And I,” he says, “will write it down.”
He uncaps the marker and writes: Christopher Conundrum across the top of the board. Eddie realizes with a jolt that his handwriting is exactly the same.
“What’s the point of this exercise exactly?” Eddie asks.
“Well,” Buck says. “If things are really this different, it probably means something! Maybe if we can lay out the major differences we’ll see a-a pattern or something! And then we can use the pattern to get you back to Christopher, and back where you belong.”
“I’m just dreaming,” Eddie says.
“Hey,” Buck replies. “We had a deal.”
“For the rest of the day,” Eddie answers promptly. “Day’s over, bud.”
At this, Buck looks mildly disappointed. “Fine,” he grumbles. “But we have a lot of ground to cover so no wasting time correcting everything I say. I’m trying to help you here.”
Eddie smiles a little at that. Because he really is, and even though Eddie thinks this whole thing is insane and if he ever does wake up back in his house and in his life he thinks he might need a brain scan, there is something broadly appealing about Buck in this purest form: eager to help and earnest.
There are a lot of things that are different and wrong here— wherever here is. This isn’t one of them.
“Alright,” Eddie says. “Where do you want to start?”
Slowly, they work their way through the differences and some of the similarities. They’re covering everything from the big stuff— like Buck’s job and Daniel’s existence and Bobby being dead— to the little details— the tattoo that’s missing from Buck’s arm and the restaurant from yesterday.
“Oh, I’ve got one,” Eddie says. “You drive a Jeep.”
“Really?” Buck asks, sounding both intrigued and surprised. A little delighted.
“It was weird seeing you in something else yesterday,” Eddie admits. “You’ve had your Jeep longer than I’ve known you.”
Buck leans in and writes Jeep on the board in scrawling letters. “A Jeep guy, huh?” he muses. “I sound way more fun in your world.”
Eddie smiles ruefully. “Sometimes.”
“Hey.”
Thinking about the Jeep leads Eddie’s thoughts down a wandering sidepath. “The Jeep could be because of Maddie,” he offers.
Buck looks over at him. “Maddie?” he asks. “My sister, Maddie?”
“Yeah,” Eddie replies. “Does she drive a Jeep?”
Buck hesitates. “She used to,” he answers. “It was her first car.”
“And then she gave it to you,” Eddie says.
Buck stops what he’s doing and looks at Eddie for a long moment. There’s something dark behind his blue eyes now, and parts of Eddie itch to understand. He can’t remember, he realizes, exactly how he and Buck got to know each other. They’d fallen into step so quickly and easily, and Eddie never really had a best friend before that. It happened so naturally that he never had time to pick it apart or think too hard about it, and now that he’s without it for the first time in years he isn’t sure how he ever lived without it in the first place. How he existed without all the shades of Buck.
“Why would she do that?” Buck asks.
“Well,” Eddie answers. “I don’t really know the full story, I guess. This was years before we met. But my understanding of it is that she gave it to you so you could leave Pennsylvania.”
Buck blinks at him. “So I could leave?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Eddie replies, somewhat less certainly. “Why?”
Buck shakes his head and sits down, perching on the edge of one of the stools at his countertop. “I never would have left,” he says. “Not by myself.”
“How did you end up here, then?” Eddie asks him.
Buck shrugs. “Daniel,” he says. “He’s a doctor. He went to med school here and eventually we all followed. He got Maddie a job at his hospital and…” Buck shrugs, picking lightly at the cuticle along his thumbnail. “I don’t know,” he says. “It seemed like we should all be together, you know?”
It’s so like Buck that it aches to hear it.
“And,” Buck says, a little bright. “Now Maddie has a daughter. S-so it’s nice to be close enough to see her.”
“Maddie has a daughter,” Eddie repeats slowly.
He thinks back to being in Chim’s apartment yesterday. Chim’s apartment where he clearly lived alone. Eddie had thought about it at the time, obviously, but the truth is he had been really sure he was going to wake up before he had to face any of it with Buck.
Keeping his mouth shut is slowly starting to come back to bite him.
“Yeah,” Buck says.
Eddie sighs. “I don’t know if I want to ask,” he says. “But— with who?”
Buck furrows his eyebrows. “Why are you asking me that?” he asks, and Eddie notices the way his voice goes slightly flintsharp and defensive.
“Buck,” Eddie says plaintively.
“With her husband,” Buck replies.
“Whose name is…”
Buck frowns again. “Doug. Why?”
“Damn it,” Eddie hisses, closing his eyes and pressing his fingertips against the bridge of his nose. “I really did not want to be right about that.”
Dream world or otherwise, Eddie’s skin crawls with the idea of it. He still remembers the haunted look in Buck’s bloodshot eyes in the hospital hallway; the way his fingers had shaken; the heaviness about him that had followed him home from Big Bear.
And Maddie—
That’s even worse to think about. Chim and Maddie have become such a unit that it’s hard for Eddie to extricate them even hypothetically. They’re partners in every sense of the word, the kind of thing that lasts.
Eddie is not sure that’s ever going to be in the cards for him. He likes being around it, though. He likes that Christopher sees it in Hen and Karen; Chim and Maddie; Bobby and Athena. He can’t imagine a world in which that’s not the case, and yet here he is standing in it.
Christopher is only seeing Eddie’s parents. He’s across state lines somewhere, probably in Eddie’s childhood bedroom, missing out on all the things that Eddie had brought him to Los Angeles for in the first place.
Suddenly, he’s overcome by all the things that are wrong. They’re written out in list form right in front of him in Buck’s handwriting, some of them smudged from where he accidentally keeps pressing his wrist against the board, and there are a lot of them. They’re not even halfway through this and the list is already long. How many more things have to be wrong? How many of them does Eddie have to fix, by Buck’s logic, in order to get back home or to wake up from this neverending dream?
And is he supposed to do it alone?
Is that what this life is? Just Eddie: living in a shell of a house by himself, doing god knows what to scrape by, separated from Chris by eight hundred miles and more than that, a distance he doesn’t know how to bridge. One that’s more than a long road trip could fix.
“Why?” Buck presses, pulling Eddie back to their conversation and subsequently off of the ledge where he finds himself standing.
“Doug is dead,” Eddie says flatly.
Buck is silent, and it swaddles the room in cotton, so still that you could hear a pin drop. As it is, all Eddie hears is the shallowing of Buck’s breath.
“What?” Buck says.
When Eddie looks up, something in Buck’s face is broken open. “You left Pennsylvania,” he says. “Maddie gave you the Jeep and told you to go and you did. Eventually, you ended up here and a couple of years after that, she followed you.”
Buck is studying him now, getting that look on his face like he’s trying to solve something. “She followed me?” he asks.
Eddie swallows a sudden lump in his throat. Buck— as he exists now to Eddie— has worked so hard to find himself; to become someone that he loves. Eddie sees it on him every day, the way it shines. It feels like getting the breath knocked out of his lungs to see it all stripped away again.
“Yes,” he says, with as much certainty and feeling as he can. “Because she knew that you would protect her, and you did, Buck.”
“What— what does that mean?” Buck asks, his voice small.
Eddies’ fingers itch with the urge to reach out to him, and then with a sudden flicker of clarity like flame, he remembers that he can. It doesn’t matter: whether this is an impossible alternate universe or a dream, it’s not like it is at home in his real life.
Has he been holding back from Buck?
He pushes the thought aside. He can’t do anything about it now even if he is: he’s here, and that’s there, whatever that means. What he can do, at least, is give in this time.
He reaches out until his fingers touch the tendersoft skin on Buck’s inner wrist; then he summons his bravery and scoops Buck’s fingers into his own, squeezing gently.
Buck watches their joined hands for a moment, blinking; and then he looks up and meets Eddie’s eyes, blue and wavering.
“It means you saved her, Buck,” Eddie says firmly. “I can tell by the look on your face that Doug isn’t any better here than anywhere else, but in that world— in the real world— she got herself out of there and came to you, and you gave her the safe place she needed. And when he came after her, you were there for her then, too.”
Buck’s eyes are wet.
“We’re not that close,” he whispers.
“You are,” Eddie whispers back. “Maybe not here, but—” He breaks off and sighs. “Look,” he says, ducking his head to meet Buck’s eyes again. “I may not believe in all this stuff, but you do. So— if there’s a universe out there where Maddie is safe and you two see each other every couple of days and you’re her daughter’s favorite person in the world, then that’s a good thing right? Means there’s— hope?”
Buck nods slowly.
“Yeah,” he breathes. “I guess.”
“Also,” Eddie adds. “You might like to know that in my world, she’s married to Chimney.”
Buck looks up at that. “Chimney?” he asks incredulously.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, smiling. “They’re a great match. Maybe you should try setting them up here.”
Buck, slowly coming back to himself, laughs lightly at this. “I think maybe we should focus on getting you back home first.”
“The Christopher Conundrum,” Eddie says, and Buck nods.
Their hands are still joined on the counter, so Eddie squeezes again and lets go. It’s strange, how easy that had felt: it’s not something they’ve ever done outside of the occasional life-or-death situation, but now that he’s done it here with this Buck, Eddie isn’t sure how it could ever feel any other way.
Buck moves back to the board and writes Doug dead in the column of differences.
“Good riddance,” Eddie says before he can stop himself.
“I’m jealous of the world you live in,” Buck sighs.
“It’s not all bad,” Eddie agrees.
And it’s not— not by a long shot. Though he’s had a rough year to say the least, being here is showing him how much of his life could be a lot worse. Maybe that’s the lesson, and now that he’s come to this conclusion he’s going to spontaneously wake up in his bed.
Nothing happens when he blinks, and he’s forced to come to the conclusion that he’s wrong. Again. It’s starting to feel like he’s always going to be wrong.
Buck tilts his stance into the counter and regards the board, his own handwriting scrawled lopsidedly across it. More than half of the space is taken up now, and Eddie doesn’t really think they’re any closer to a breakthrough than they had been, but Buck looks thoughtful.
“What?” Eddie prods, kicking lightly at the back of Buck’s calf with his foot, bridging the gap between them.
Buck startles a little, glancing over at him and ever so briefly Eddie watches his gaze flick down to his sock, then back to his face again. “What?” Buck asks back.
Eddie shrugs. “You look like you have an idea.”
There’s something that Eddie isn’t sure the word for on Buck’s features, flickering across the flutter of his lashes and the slope of his nose before it disappears again— like a reflection, too quick for Eddie to grasp.
“Not an idea,” Buck says, and Eddie leans back in his chair, crossing his arms loosely over his chest as he meets Buck’s gaze and raises his eyebrow. “Okay,” Buck amends. “Kind of an idea.”
“Mhm,” Eddie says.
“Well,” Buck starts, looking back at the board. “If the problem is that Christopher isn’t here—”
Eddie isn’t sure that is really the problem, but that’s a problem of its own, so he stays quiet.
“Maybe,” Buck continues, “we have to go back to the source of why.”
Eddie thinks about Daniel again.
There’s not much that he knows about Buck’s brother— not in this or any other universe. At the time, it had all felt so raw and Buck had been closed up about it in a way that Eddie hated. It hadn’t seemed right to try to force him to talk about the dead brother he had failed to save and unknowingly left forgotten in a grave somewhere across the country.
Forcing Buck into anything had never been Eddie’s way of relating to him, anyway.
Maybe if Buck hadn’t gotten better on his own: if he hadn’t wanted to see a therapist, if he hadn’t dedicated himself to the new version of Buck with a new number, he might have gotten to a point where he felt he needed to push him. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But as it was: Buck had seemed to heal. And then life had gone on, the way it always does. They had both had other things. Jee-Yun was born and Eddie got shot and everything kept shifting whether they were paying attention or not.
In a way, Eddie guesses that he’s been guilty of forgetting about Daniel, too.
For the first time in a long while, he calls to mind the memory of Buck with the faint red etching of Lichtenberg figures scrawled across the expanse of his shoulder.
There was one morning. Buck had stayed at Eddie’s— just like last night, in an increasingly distant maybe-real world— his body sprawled over Eddie’s couch. He had come into the living room that morning and found him with one leg hanging off the side, inexplicably missing the sock he’d gone to sleep in.
He tries to remember now exactly when this was. Weeks after the lightning strike— two? Three? The time is fuzzy now, going on two years later. Buck had been around a lot then, a phase of their friendship which had them even more attached than usual. In hindsight, Eddie isn’t sure anyone else knew how often Buck could be found in Eddie’s doorways. He knows that no one— not even Buck himself— had known how much it was for Eddie’s benefit, too.
Eddie had gone into the kitchen and gotten halfway through making coffee before Buck came trudging into the room, now with both socks and rubbing his knuckles against his eye.
Then, and now, and so many other times that he’s forgotten when he couldn’t, Eddie had been able to take a look at Buck and know that something was off.
He didn’t ask, but Buck told him anyway.
A dream, he had said. He had been looking at Eddie’s kitchen table, his eyes on a little notch in the wood that Eddie is pretty sure came from a bowl that Chris had slammed too hard against its surface at some point. A dream, Buck had said, about his brother.
He remembers now that he’d thought Buck was keeping something to himself. Like he said, it’s not in Eddie’s nature to push him if he doesn’t have to. And what Buck did volunteer had seemed like enough at the time. It had seemed insignificant. Just a dream.
Except that now, Eddie is wondering if he was wrong. If there was something to the things that Buck wasn’t saying then, and if he should have asked more questions. In hindsight, that whole period after Buck woke up from his coma seems hazy and distant and strange.
Eddie has regrets.
Maybe that’s the kind of thing that Buck really means— this Buck, in this world, whatever that means. Maybe it’s less of a Christopher conundrum, and more of an Eddie one.
He hadn’t pushed Buck last night, either. The night before last, now. It’s increasingly hard to keep track: the longer he stays here, the more distant he feels from his house and from Chris and from Buck as he exists to Eddie. Everything is beginning to get hazier: more dreamlike instead of less.
He focuses, though, and remembers the look on Buck’s face as he stood outside the door where he’s been a million other times. Eddie can flick through them like a photobook: Buck in every iteration and every outfit; Buck with his hair curly and shorn close to his scalp and wild and gelled back; Buck in every pair of shoes he owns, each of them planted outside of Eddie’s door.
The bottom line is, Buck shows up.
Most recently, he’d shown up while Eddie’s heart was still beating fast in his chest and now that he’s thinking about it he isn’t sure he can distinguish the exact reason why. How much of it had been physical and how much of it had not: how much was in tandem with the faint sheen of sweat on the back of his neck and how much of it was that almost-there slipping through his fingertips breakthrough feeling that had come so close and then ebbed away again.
How much of it was something else. Something that’s been with him, alongside him, watching him: there, even if he’s too afraid to look at it.
The Eddie conundrum.
Maybe Buck is right, and they have to go back to the source. And maybe the source is him, or that thing in the corner that he’s scared of looking at, or something that doesn’t have a name but lives in the cage of his ribs anyway.
Ultimately, he’s the common denominator. If Buck is right or if he is— if this is a new universe or a dream— these are still two places, and in both of them Eddie is in Los Angeles and Christopher is in El Paso and there are things that are wrong.
In both of them, maybe more importantly, Buck and Eddie are standing outside each other’s front doors.
“Okay,” Eddie says, pulling himself back into the room with Buck and out of the other one where Buck is sitting next to him on the couch or sleeping in just one sock. “Maybe you’re right.”
Buck brightens. “I am?”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” Eddie advises. “But it does happen sometimes.”
Buck smiles. “Then what’s the source?” he asks.
Eddie’s heart stumbles in his chest, wrong and still beating. “Me,” he answers.
Buck hesitates, and Eddie watches him tilt his head the way he does when he’s thinking. “That makes sense,” he says.
Eddie frowns. “I was hoping you’d have some reservations about it.”
Buck shakes his head. Eddie can see him gathering steam, picking himself up and matching the pace of his ever-quickening thoughts. It all happens behind Buck’s eyes, but Eddie has seen it so many times that he could watch it in his sleep. Maybe he is, even now.
“No,” Buck says. “That does make sense. It’s your universe.”
“Is it?” Eddie asks.
“Yeah,” Buck replies. “Even if I’m your—your— what was it?”
“Clarence.”
“Your Clarence,” Buck agrees. “It’s still your world.”
“I’m not sure I want that kind of responsibility,” Eddie says. He’s just bantering, stalling for time, because the truth is that he’s sure Buck is right. Whatever this is, it’s all his.
“You have a kid,” Buck answers. “Isn’t that, like, the biggest responsibility?”
Eddie smiles a little. “How’s that working out for me?”
“I don’t know,” Buck muses, moving from his place by the board to sit next to Eddie again. It’s late in the afternoon now, and the light through the window is turning more orange, its sharp-edged reflection painting across Buck’s face. “You seem pretty dedicated to me.”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “How do you get that from the story where my parents took my kid from their loser son and he stayed in another state for several years doing God knows what?”
Buck looks at him, his expression inscrutable but heated. “Are you always this hard on yourself?” he asks.
Eddie looks briefly inward.
“Yes,” he admits.
Buck frowns. “Really?”
Eddie shrugs one shoulder and catches himself as he scrapes his thumbnail against his cuticle, pulling back before going too deep. “I mean,” he says. “Most of the time. Not the other night, though. Maybe that’s how I ended up here.”
“What do you mean?” Buck asks, his eyebrows furrowed and carving a deep line above the bridge of his nose.
“Like a punishment,” Eddie answers.
“For what?” Buck asks, the line deepening.
“For— I don’t know, going easier on myself?” Eddie suggests.
Buck blinks at him. “That’s dark.”
“Well,” Eddie replies.
“No,” Buck says, shaking his head. “That’s not it.”
Eddie looks up at him. He recognizes this expression too: just as much as any other one that crosses Buck’s familiar features. It’s the way Buck looks when he’s got something in his head. Stubborn and sure, an immovable force. Eddie had learned early on in their relationship that when Buck gets like this, there will be no changing his mind. All Eddie has ever been able to do is to follow him and make sure he doesn’t get himself killed in the process.
At least in this case, there’s no literal fire to walk through.
“It’s not?” Eddie asks.
“No,” Buck says. “That’s bullshit. This stuff doesn’t happen as a punishment, Eddie.”
Eddie can’t help but soften. It’s a thing that happens to him in the face of Buck’s staunch certainty, and Eddie has always been helpless against the fire in him when he gets like this.
“What is it, then?”
“A— a gift,” Buck says. “Or an opportunity! Something like that.”
Eddie smiles, and this time finds that it feels less wrong on his face. It’s not surprising in the slightest that Buck would see it that way, maybe in any universe. That he would see Eddie that way.
“So what do you think I should do?” he asks, half challenge and half real question.
Buck thinks about it for a moment. “I think— maybe you were doing the right thing before you got sent here. Maybe— your dancing thing, maybe you were onto something.”
Eddie raises an eyebrow at him. “You want me to dance.”
“No!” Buck defends. “Not necessarily. But you said something about a priest, right?”
“I’m not going to a priest, Buck.”
“Stop trying to get ahead of me,” Buck complains. “I didn’t say that.”
“Okay,” Eddie bites. “Get to the point, then.”
“You said the priest told you to choose juice,” Buck says. He pauses, frowns for a moment, and then looks up at Eddie with the picture of confusion on his face. “What does that mean?”
“Joy,” Eddie answers. “He said I deny myself.”
“Right,” Buck says, and Eddie isn’t exactly a fan of how sure he sounds about it. “But— then you did, right? That’s what you were doing?”
“Yeah,” Eddie agrees. “I was trying, anyway. I—” He breaks off, remembering the way it had felt in his skin, in his fingertips. “I don’t know. Christopher is in Texas and everything has gone wrong so many times and I was—”
The words get as far as the back of his throat, close enough to his mouth that he can taste the bittersweetness of them on his tongue.
Buck’s face has gone softer. Eddie can feel it around them, doesn’t have to look to see it. “You were what?” he asks gently.
“I was tired,” Eddie says. It doesn’t taste quite as bitter as he’s expecting it to. “Of feeling like that. Of— of hiding, I guess.”
Buck is studying him. Eddie can feel the heat of his gaze the same way he can feel a fire through a closed door: an emanating warmth that seeps through all solid surfaces.
“So maybe you have to stop hiding here, too.”
Eddie looks up. Buck is looking back at him, eyes ablaze the way Eddie had known they would be.
Suddenly, he feels brave all over again.
“Do you have a razor?”
While Buck rummages through the cabinet under his bathroom sink— which Eddie is alarmed to see contains a lot of things thrown in haphazardly with no apparent rhyme or reason— Eddie sits on the edge of his bathtub. The ledge is wide and sturdy, and he curls his fingers around its edge and presses his fingertips against the cool surface of it as he watches.
Buck kneels down with no wince and no hesitation, and Eddie sees it with a sort of tug somewhere in the middle of his chest. Maybe he’s truly losing it, because he’s starting to think of this as a real place of its own, but if he entertains that idea at least there are some trade-offs. At least Buck has a brother who lived. At least Buck has never laid out on asphalt with a crushed left leg and his hand in Eddie’s and his future in shreds, and as a result at least Buck can kneel on the bathroom floor and not think about it at all.
Something about losing that memory— even with the cost that it had carried— still feels sort of wrong to Eddie.
He watches as Buck emerges with a shaving kit and shoves the rest of the items back into the cabinet with even less organization than they’d had to begin with.
“Here we go,” Buck says, sounding very pleased with himself. “I knew I had it somewhere.”
Eddie shakes his head a little. “Don’t you use it?” he asks.
“Ah,” Buck answers. “Mine is, uh— at Tommy’s, I think.”
“Right,” Eddie replies, hearing the way his voice wears weak in the middle and choosing very deliberately not to think too hard about why. Still, he has nothing to lose here. “He lets you leave your stuff at his place?” he asks.
Buck shrugs. “He tells me not to,” he admits.
“Mm,” Eddie hums. “I’m sure he does.”
Buck glances sideways at him. “I get it, you hate my boyfriend.”
“I do,” Eddie agrees, nodding.
Buck hesitates for a second in between blinks, and then grins as he drops his gaze back to the sink.
“You should break up with him,” Eddie suggests as casually as he can.
“Oh, yeah?” Buck asks, half-laughing.
Eddie tilts his head back to look up at Buck from where he’s sitting. “If you believe that these are alternate universes,” he muses, “and in mine, he broke up with you, doesn’t that mean something?”
Buck considers this. “Maybe,” he admits. “But maybe things are different here.”
Eddie watches him for a stretching moment. “Are they?” he asks.
“I wouldn’t know,” Buck reminds him, stealing a glance over and half-smiling. “You’re the one who’s been to both.”
“Like I said,” Eddie replies. “You should break up with him.”
Buck smiles again. “And do what?” he asks.
“Find someone better?” Eddie suggests.
Buck seems to think about this. He sifts through the bag in front of him, extracting the razor from it and laying it along the edge of the sink with a seemingly deliberate slowness.
“Someone better,” he repeats.
Eddie isn’t willing to look too closely at the way the words make his chest twist.
“You deserve someone who—”
Buck looks over at him. “Who what?”
“Who understands you,” Eddie answers. “Someone who wants you to leave your stuff at their house.”
Unbidden, the thought of his own bathroom sink comes back to his mind. He thinks back to yesterday morning, to waking up in this strange amalgamation of worlds, to the slow piling up of clues that everything was wrong.
He remembers looking at the toothbrush cup. Remembers noticing that Buck’s was missing. Remembers knowing that it was supposed to be there with his own.
“I’ll think about it,” Buck says. “Once you’re back in your world.”
“Hm,” Eddie hums.
For the first time, he wonders what this will mean for Buck— for this Buck, who will be left behind if his theory is correct. He can’t think about it, because the longer he sits here the more he likes this one just as much as the one who’s sleeping on his couch right now, somewhere else.
It’s entirely unsurprising, though, that any version of Buck is helping him anyway.
“Okay,” Buck says. “Ready?”
Something strange washes over Eddie. For a day and a half now, he’s been treating this like he has very little to lose and while this has been and remains true, there have been moments where he’s had to remind himself that he’s not himself— or maybe that he is, and doesn’t have to be. Everything has been getting blurrier by the hour.
Suddenly, it feels like something is shaking loose in him. If he’s supposed to choose what he wants, he’s supposed to follow it, he thinks. Or maybe he’s going to wake up in a nuthouse somewhere instead of in his own bed.
“Will you do it?” he asks, hearing himself as if he’s simultaneously far away and more present than he’s been in a long time.
Buck blinks at him, pale lashes fluttering once and then twice. “Me?” he asks.
“Somebody else here that I didn’t know about?” Eddie asks back at him, just to see him roll his eyes.
Still, he comes back and softens: a crevasse of vulnerability opens up on his face, and Eddie watches it and thinks of the documentaries that Buck used to watch with Chris, when they were both fascinated by all the things that the natural world does. Eddie used to hate them; even hearing the narrator’s voice describing all the things that could go wrong in the very fabric of the earth was scary to him.
Somehow now it feels like it matters less than it did then. Maybe because he’s felt the earth open up beneath him and still crawled out of the water or because he’s seen the sky split into two with electric light and they both came back from it or because every time he thinks the world is going to end, it doesn’t.
“Will you?” he presses, leaning forward where he’s sitting.
“Yeah,” Buck answers. “If you want me to.”
Eddie nods his head. “I do.”
Buck accepts this with ease— even here, even like this when he barely even knows Eddie at all. Is it that easy? Has it always been that easy— so easy that all Eddie has to do is ask and it’s his? Has he— the real him— been denying himself these things just because he was afraid of the way that the earth would open up?
And why?
Buck stands over him, and Eddie tilts his head back and searches the cavity of his own chest. He shines his flashlight beam into all the corners searching for that thing that keeps looking at him and finds it surprisingly empty. He’s not afraid of the way that Buck is looking at him, with his blue eyes warm and dark and affectionate. He’s not even afraid of the fact that he knows it’s the way Buck looks at him in real life, too.
“You sure about this?” Buck asks him.
Eddie nods. “I trust you,” he says.
“You just met me,” Buck answers.
Eddie smiles, tilts his head back an inch further, and closes his eyes. “You just met me, too,” he says.
The answer comes in the feeling of Buck’s fingers on his jaw; a steady hand holding his head in place; and the hot scrape of the razor against his cheek.
Eddie breathes in deeply and feels the movement of his chest beneath the t-shirt that he’s been wearing since yesterday. His lungs expand and he exhales, feeling them release again. Since he woke up here in a vague sort of panic, there’s been something about him that has felt unreal. Maybe, he thinks now, he was just convincing himself that this was the case because he didn’t want to be real, here, in this body.
Suddenly, he does.
At least, a part of him does. He’s of two minds about the whole thing now that Buck is holding his face in his fingers and scraping all the facial hair off of him, uncovering him.
“Is it different?” Buck asks him after a moment. His voice is lower than before, softer.
Eddie opens his eyes and catches the focus on Buck’s face, the steadiness in his gaze.
“Is what different?” he asks as Buck turns to rinse the razor.
“This,” Buck replies, moving back to stand close to him— close enough that Eddie can smell the combination of his laundry detergent and the faint scent of the cream that he uses in his hair, lingering on him and in the bathroom. “You know, like— this time compared to when you did it yourself?”
“Yes,” Eddie answers.
He’s not sure what else to say. It’s different in ways he doesn’t really understand yet.
Buck hums softly. “Head back,” he says, his voice softening impossibly further. Eddie tilts his head obediently, baring his neck to Buck.
One move, and Eddie could be dead. There are too many instances of his life in Buck’s hands for him to count, and they’ve all felt exactly like this.
“It’s different,” he says as Buck lifts the razor from his skin, “because I trust you more than I trust myself.”
Maybe he understood it more than he had thought he did. Maybe the trouble was more in admitting it.
“Why?” Buck asks him.
Eddie shrugs one shoulder, swallows, and then reassumes the same position again. Buck hesitates, looking for a place to put his hand, and then settles it at the back of Eddie’s head, his thumb in line with Eddie’s ear.
Eddie warms all over.
“You’re better than I am,” Eddie tells him.
“I’m not,” Buck argues.
“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, biting back a smile. “You would say that.”
Buck huffs. “Hold still,” he says, even though they both know that Eddie wasn’t moving. Eddie takes it for what it is, and quiets for a moment. Buck scrapes the razor over his jaw and Eddie notices the sudden slowness in it as he works over the other side of his face.
Subtlety has never exactly been Buck’s strong suit.
But the truth in this moment is that Eddie doesn’t want this to end, either. He likes having his life in Buck’s hands, his face in Buck’s fingertips. What that means for him if— when— he wakes up back in his own life is something he can’t face right now, but what it means for him here is that he finds that he can want something and feel no shame about it, at least for a moment.
When it does end, Eddie feels clean.
He opens his eyes again and looks up at Buck, who blinks back at him and visibly schools something on his expression.
“Well?” Eddie asks, tilting his head back in a challenge.
“W-well what?” Buck asks.
“How do I look?” Eddie replies.
“Oh,” Buck says. “Yeah, you look— uh, good. You look really— handsome.”
Eddie feels his pulse in his wrists. “Handsome?” he repeats.
“Yeah,” Buck says. “Not that you weren’t— I mean—”
Eddie grins up at him. “What?”
“Stop,” Buck admonishes, turning away. From the side, Eddie can see that the tops of his ears have turned pink.
“Okay,” he agrees as Buck packs away the razor and the pieces of the kit back into the bag. He waits, and eventually Buck turns back.
They face each other across two or so feet of space, no more than the distance between them when they’re both sitting in the back of the rig, knees touching.
“Thanks,” Eddie says, reaching up and brushing his own fingers over his freshly shaven jaw.
“No problem,” Buck replies in a way that’s probably supposed to come off light, but doesn’t quite get there. “Do you, uh— do you feel better?”
Eddie thinks about standing in the bathroom two nights ago, leaning in face-to-face with himself in the mirror. He had felt better— closer to something like freedom— but there had also been something in his own eyes that had been hard to look at.
At the time, he had thought that it was about Christopher. He’s not sure anymore.
What he does know is that here, in Buck’s bathroom, he doesn’t feel like he needs to look at himself or meet his own gaze in the glass. Here, he looks up at Buck.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do feel better.”
Buck smiles, and Eddie smiles back. For a moment, Eddie feels like things are right again.
It fades, ebbing away, and in its place there’s the reminder that many things are still wrong. As much as this feels good, and as much as he’s starting to make sense of something in him, this remains a world in which he’s in the body of a version of himself who has an empty house across the city with nothing but an empty bedroom and a picture on the mantle.
While Buck is putting his shaving kit away— or more like trying to find space under his sink to shove it in enough to close the cabinet door— Eddie wanders out of the bathroom and across the dining room to the sliding doors. In the afternoon light, Buck’s balcony is half-lit and half-shaded. He steps out over the threshold in his socks and then across to the railing, leaving the door ajar behind him as he rolls his shoulders and leans his arms on the rail in the shade. The view is familiar: all the buildings as they should be, right where they always are. The sky above Los Angeles stretches out California-big and at the distant horizon everything is hazy and blurred.
Behind him, after a moment, there are footsteps and then Buck is taking his place next to him just as Eddie had assumed he would. His elbow brushes Eddie’s and then stays there, their bodies tethered by this small point of contact.
“My son,” Eddie says after a moment.
“Yeah?” Buck asks, turning his head slightly. Eddie mirrors him and their gazes catch briefly.
“You should know that he’s important to you, too,” Eddie says. “That, uh— that you’re important to him.”
Buck pauses, and even with the sounds of the city unfolding beneath them on the street he hears the faint catch in Buck’s breath.
“I am?” he asks.
“Mhm,” Eddie hums. Now that he’s allowing himself to think about it, the memories of Buck and Chris together are overwhelming in their vividity: their color and their joy both sharp in Eddie’s mind, more than anything else is. He can recall with some clarity the minor details of the life that he’d been living up until he went to sleep two days ago: the way things have been since he stood next to Buck and watched Christopher walk out the front door to go to Texas.
But the life before that— that comes to Eddie in all shades of certainty. He can close his eyes, even here, and remember the way it had looked to stand in this apartment with Buck and watch Chris laugh: the big, childlike laugh that had followed him even into his early teens. He can remember the scent of the trees and the look on Christopher’s face as Buck had strapped him into a helmet so that he could try skateboarding. He can see as if it was yesterday the sheer trust in Christopher’s loose limbs as Buck scooped him up— back when he was small enough to do it— and hugged him so tight that Chris was breathless.
Eddie had been breathless, too. He just hadn’t known why.
“Your Ferris wheel,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at the interior of Buck’s apartment through the sliding glass door. “Why do you have that?”
Buck frowns. “What do you mean?” he asks. “I just— have it.”
“But why?” Eddie presses. “What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Buck answers.
Eddie shakes his head and looks back over the railing, taking in a breath. “I think it does,” he says.
Buck frowns. “I’m confused.”
Eddie nods a little. “I know,” he says. “There was a tsunami.”
Buck frowns. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I know. Everybody knows, it was horrible.”
Eddie’s chest tightens. “Where were you?” he asks. “That day.”
“At work,” Buck tells him. “Kids were out of school but I was doing admin stuff.”
Eddie tries to imagine this and fails. It’s tangential to the point, but he has to know. “Does that not bore you to death?” he asks.
A surprised laugh tumbles out of Buck. “Uh, yeah,” he admits on a breath as his shoulders relax and he matches Eddie’s posture. “It does. But it’s part of the job.”
Eddie hates that. “Sure,” he says.
“Why do you ask?” Buck asks. “A-about the tsunami, I mean.”
That day is also clear in Eddie’s memory. Some of it is, anyway. He can remember the way it had felt to take Chris home and watch the dirt rinse off of him in the shower and the look of the faint scratches on his little cheek and the way his own fingers had trembled when Christopher was sound asleep in his bed and Eddie was standing at the kitchen sink running soap and water over the frames of his glasses.
He can also remember looking at them— at the red band and the unharmed lenses— and thinking about them around Buck’s neck.
They were tethered then, and they still are, whether Christopher is in Texas or hasn’t met Buck at all.
“You were there,” he says, looking over at Buck. “On the pier. You and Christopher.”
Buck turns his head to look at Eddie then, his eyes wide. “What?”
“Mm,” Eddie hums. “There was— you were out of work with a medical thing at the time. I thought— we all thought— you needed something to get you out of the house so I left Chris with you for the day and you took him to the pier.”
Buck is quiet, absorbing this information. “Okay,” he says after a moment.
“The way Chris told it afterward,” Eddie says, picking at a spot of stray dirt on Buck’s railing, “you picked him up and ran when the water disappeared.”
“When the— Jesus, Eddie,” Buck says.
“I think you guys were about as close to it as you could have been,” Eddie tells him. “I’ve never asked you for the details, so everything I know is from an eight-year-old, but— that’s the impression I had, anyway.”
Buck stares at him. “You’re very calm about this.”
Eddie glances over, smiling a little. “It was a long time ago,” he says. “And you saved him.”
Buck hesitates. “H-how?” he asks.
Eddie shakes his head. “Just being Buck, I guess.”
Buck is quiet again, for a longer moment this time. “I don’t understand,” he says.
“What do you not understand?” Eddie asks.
Buck tilts his body in Eddie’s direction. “You— you said that we’re best friends. You said that I was at your house two nights ago, a-and that your kid is important to me, and all that stuff that you said.”
Eddie nods. “That’s all true.”
“Why?” Buck demands. “If— If he’s fourteen now, and when he was eight, I took him to the pier and then there was a tsunami and he— he could have died, then why—”
“Wow,” Eddie cuts in. “You’re even quicker to that than I thought you’d be. I even left out the part where he was lost for half the day.”
“He was— what?” Buck asks.
Eddie has to admit, there’s something undeniably Buck about his ability to sound wrecked over something that happened years ago, to a child that he ostensibly doesn’t even know.
“We’ve been over all this before,” Eddie tells him. “Just so you know, my speech at the time was a lot better. But the point is that you lost him and you didn’t give up until you found him again, because you love him. And he’s obsessed with you, by the way.”
Buck stares at him. “Maybe Hen was right about us getting checked out,” he says.
Eddie laughs: out loud, for real this time, and then Buck grins in a way that looks like he really can’t help it.
In Eddie’s chest, something goes warm and golden. He’s not sure if it’s because he’s here, in a place where there are no apparent consequences to wanting things and feeling things, but he can recognize it for what it is: a feeling that he largely associates with Buck.
“My point is,” Eddie tells him, “you matter. You know? To me, to— to us.”
“To Christopher,” Buck says, his voice soft.
“Yeah,” Eddie agrees.
Buck pauses, and Eddie can see the way he’s thinking by how he holds himself and the way he pulls his bottom lip between his teeth.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he asks eventually.
Eddie sighs. “Because if I do figure this out and… either wake up or get back to my world or whatever, then you’ll still be here. With a job that I don’t believe you really love and a car that’s too small for you, living in somebody’s shadow. Ordering salads with olive oil or whatever, which—” He pauses, scrunching his face. “Stop doing that, by the way.”
“Okay,” Buck huffs.
Eddie shrugs. “I don’t know, Buck. You just— you deserve a better life than this.”
“It’s not that bad,” Buck says.
Eddie turns to look at him and meets his eyes. “It could be better.”
Buck’s breath catches, and he shakes his head a little bit. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re not very subtle?”
Eddie laughs. “Honestly,” he says, “no.”
Buck smiles. “It’s kind of charming,” he says.
“Good,” Eddie answers.
Maybe there’s a world in which he’s less subtle in his own life, too. Less subtle with even himself. Maybe that’s the crux of the Eddie conundrum, or at least part of it.
“Also,” Eddie says, “It’s good that I can use my phone in this dream, because I have a call to make.”
Buck leaves him to it, and goes back inside as Eddie pulls his phone out of his pocket. He’d charged it overnight more out of habit than anything else, but other than that he hasn’t touched it since he woke up yesterday morning.
Now, he taps through the passcode and bypasses the sparse apps on the first screen to go back to the contacts page. Yesterday, he hadn’t gotten any further than searching the list for a sign of Buck.
Today, he scrolls through the admittedly sad few names in there— most of which he doesn’t recognize— until he lands on Christopher.
None of this is real, and the sight of it still makes something turn in Eddie’s stomach. He doesn’t know if Chris will even pick up a call from him or what will be waiting for him if he does. He has no idea how long it’s been since they last spoke or when he saw him last. He doesn’t know if they really speak at all.
But he knows he has to try, because there’s a slim chance that this is a parallel reality and while Eddie has an idea for how to get back to his own life if that’s the case, there’s a world he’ll be leaving behind when he does. In it, there might be a version of him who exists in that empty house on this universe’s South Bedford Street, and if this really is the Eddie conundrum, then logic would say that it’s Eddie’s job to care about that version of himself, too. To look out for him or to try to make something better here before he leaves.
Again, he also might be losing it.
More selfishly, there’s another reason.
If he does wake up back where he belongs, then there will still be a Christopher there who’s eight hundred miles away in El Paso. There will still be things that Eddie needs to say to him— to the real Christopher, who needs to hear them from his dad maybe even more than the one in this world does.
They’re things that Eddie needs to say, too. Things that he hopes— maybe foolishly, but hopes nonetheless— will help them both and bring them closer to each other. If Eddie is trying to get home, maybe in his own way Christopher is, too.
He would be stupid to pass up an opportunity to do a practice run while he’s here.
So he presses the button and listens to the phone ring as the light of his second day in this Los Angeles slowly starts to fade around him.
When Christopher does answer, Eddie’s heart leaps into his throat at the sound of his voice.
“Hello?”
Eddie swallows hard in a desperate bid to get some— any— words out around the lump in his throat.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Chris. It’s— uh, it’s your Dad.”
There’s a beat of silence and a scuffling sound on the other line that Eddie can’t identify. “I know,” Christopher says in his usual dry register. “I have caller ID.”
He doesn’t sound angry, and his voice is sort of light, which Eddie can only take as a good sign. A neutral one, anyway, which is as much of a win as he could have really hoped for.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, feeling sort of bolstered by the fact that it means Chris has his number in his phone, at least. They must talk sometimes for that to be the case. “Sorry. I’ve had a weird day.”
Chris hums noncommittally. “Weird how?” he asks.
Eddie huffs a laugh. “Uh,” he says. “It’s hard to explain. What about you? How’s your day?”
There are things he wants to say, but now that he’s got Chris on the phone he wants to listen more.
“Boring,” Christopher deadpans. “But fine, I guess.”
“Yeah?” Eddie asks. “How was school?”
“Boring,” Christopher repeats, and Eddie laughs in spite of himself.
“Okay,” he relents. “Anything not boring?”
“Um,” Chris says, hesitating. “You know how I was supposed to go to that chess tournament last month?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, even though he absolutely doesn’t. He’s stuck on last month, a marker that it’s been a while since he and Chris have spoken, and the way it hurts in his chest where it settles.
“It got cancelled,” Chris tells him, sounding for the first time sort of cheerful. “So that was not boring kind of by definition.”
Eddie breathes a half-laugh. “Can’t fault you there,” he agrees. “Chess is pretty boring to me, too.”
Chris pauses. “Really?” he asks, sounding skeptical.
Eddie feels as if he’s made some kind of misstep, but isn’t sure where.
“If I’m honest,” he says. “You— um, you sound surprised.”
Chris moves something on his end of the phone again. “Last time, you said that I should listen to my grandparents. So.”
Eddie closes his eyes. He understands— or thinks he understands— that the point of this whole situation is for him to learn to have compassion for himself. The version that lives in this world is making it a little hard right now, because he kind of hates this guy.
Still, it’s an opening.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “I probably shouldn’t have said it like that.”
There’s a long moment of silence on the phone, long enough that Eddie starts to wonder if Christopher is still there or if he’s hung up entirely.
“How weird of a day have you had?” Chris asks, breaking the quiet.
Eddie exhales. “Weirder than you think,” he admits. “But I— I think I figured out some stuff. That’s why I was calling you.”
“Okay,” Chris says slowly. “Like what?”
Eddie is not entirely sure where to begin, and thinks that maybe he should have rehearsed some of this with Buck before he did it, but it’s too late now to do anything but push through it.
“I— I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes with you, Chris,” he says.
“Well,” Christopher answers. “Yeah.”
Eddie’s heart turns in his chest, a physical sensation of something that haunts him, probably in every universe.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “There’s— there’s no excuse, but I want you to know that I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He’s not really sure what he did in this universe— what exactly drove them apart to this degree, or when exactly he gave up fighting for his child, or why. But he’s sure of this much, and he’s trying to speak to both of them at once— this Christopher, and the one he’s hoping to get back to soon.
“Are you, like— dying or something?” Christopher asks.
“What?” Eddie answers, a vague sense of panic overcoming him. “No! That’s not— no, Chris, it’s nothing like that.”
“You kinda sound like you are,” Chris replies.
Eddie is not sure what kind of world he’s woken up in, that an apology on his part is so rare and unlikely that Christopher thinks it means he’s on his deathbed, but whatever it is— he wants to change it. For himself or for this world’s Eddie, but more than that for this world’s Christopher: a child Eddie doesn’t really know for all intents and purposes, and one he’s spoken to for all of five minutes, but one that he loves anyway.
He could have a hundred of these dreams, or visit a hundred of these universes, and in every one he has to assume there would be a version of Christopher. Existing as himself— in any Eddie conundrum— isn’t something that he thinks is possible without that. He may be tethered to Buck, but he is bound to Christopher. Wherever this kid exists, Eddie wants to go; and wherever that is, he loves him this much.
“I’m not,” Eddie says firmly. “Sometimes— I think sometimes we just wake up. And we see things differently. It took me too long and I’m sorry about that, too, but I guess that’s what I mean about my weird day.”
“You…woke up,” Christopher says.
“I know it sounds dumb,” Eddie answers.
Chris hums. “Kinda.”
Eddie breathes a laugh. “I know you’re a polite kid,” he says, “but you can admit it.”
“Yeah,” Chris replies. “You sound dumb.”
“I know,” Eddie repeats. “I don’t really understand it, either.”
Christopher is quiet for a moment. “I don’t get it,” he says. “Why— why do you want to tell me any of this?”
“What do you mean?” Eddie asks softly.
Chris sighs. “You don’t tell me anything.”
Eddie closes his eyes again. It doesn’t really help: all he sees when he does is Christopher, anyway, all the iterations of him with his soft blue eyes through the lenses of his glasses and his big smile and his crooked baby teeth and the way he used to reach for Eddie with total blind faith.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “You deserve better than that. Especially from me.”
Chris hesitates. “Are you sure nothing bad is going on?” he asks. For a moment, he sounds younger— like a version of him that Eddie knows, a little bit like the one who had stood over Eddie on the floor and looked afraid of losing him.
If that version of Christopher exists— a version who loved and needed Eddie that much— then maybe pieces of that Christopher live in this one too. Maybe this one also needs Eddie that much, even if this Eddie doesn’t see it yet.
And maybe his Christopher still needs him like that, too, even if he doesn’t say it anymore.
“Nothing bad is going on,” Eddie says gently. “I promise.”
Chris sighs. “I don’t know if I believe you.”
“That’s okay,” Eddie answers. “You have the right to— to not believe me. Or to be angry. I get it.”
“I don’t get it,” Chris replies. “You’re being weird.”
Eddie flickers, back and over to that other world, the one he belongs in. Remembers Christopher on an otherwise regular morning, sleepwarm in his bed in a soft blue tshirt and looking so young without his glasses that it pulled at every piece of Eddie. You’re weird, Dad, he had said.
Somewhere, they are still reaching for each other like that.
“I know,” Eddie says. “And I— I know that things are weird between us.”
“Things are weird between us?” Christopher asks incredulously. “What does that even mean?”
Eddie takes a deep breath. The truth is that he doesn’t know: he doesn’t know enough about the version of himself that this Chris knows to answer that question. But he does know that there has to be a way out of it.
“Maybe weird is not the word,” he admits. “Um—”
He thinks back again. Far back, back to Texas and back to a dusty horizon and a little boy on a front porch with his mother’s eyes and Eddie’s nose.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks Christopher now, a version that he can’t see but can hear as he breathes over the phone.
“Okay,” Chris agrees cautiously.
Eddie tries and half-fails to steady himself, and then takes a breath and says:
“Do you ever miss me?”
Christopher goes silent, but Eddie knows his kid: and even over the phone, even across a universe, he hears the catch in the way he breathes.
“Yeah,” Chris says. “I miss you all the time.”
Eddie’s nose burns and his eyes get wet. He closes them, and remembers the weight of a five-year-old Christopher draped over his lap. It feels so long ago and so colorful and visceral that it could have been just yesterday.
“I miss you, too, kid,” he says through his tears.
“You don’t seem like you do,” Chris says.
Eddie bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to hurt. “I know,” he says, a platitude that he doesn’t really mean. He knows nothing of the ways that this version of his son has suffered because of him, or the ways that he has aided in making him feel left behind or unwanted.
But the softness in his voice, the curve of the way he speaks— the things he’s saying. It’s hard not to wonder if the Christopher in Eddie’s world feels that way, too.
“I’m sorry, Christopher,” Eddie says. “I never want you to feel like that.”
“Then— then why are we—”
“Why are we what?” Eddie asks gently.
“I don’t know,” Chris says. “Why don’t you come to Texas anymore?”
Eddie doesn’t have the answer, and it’s also dawning on him that if he’s wrong and this is more than just a dream, he’s going to be saying these things to this Christopher and then he’s going to be leaving.
There’s a version of himself that will presumably take his place; at least, Eddie thinks that’s how this would work, though maybe he should consider getting Chimney’s opinion on that. But if he’s right, then the Eddie here will still be the one that Chris knows.
Anxiety climbs through him, pervasive and creeping. What if he’s making a mistake here? A well-intentioned one like most of Eddie’s mistakes, but one that’s going to hurt more than it helps?
He turns away from the railing, searching his thoughts for something to say.
And through the glass of the door between the balcony and the apartment, there’s Buck.
He’s standing at the counter of his kitchen island with a cutting board in front of him and an expression of pure focus on his face. Even from here, Eddie can see the tip of his tongue tucked between his teeth as he concentrates on carefully slicing something that’s blocked from Eddie’s view. There’s a towel over his shoulder and it’s the wrong color and he’s too thin and his hair is wrong, but he’s still Buck.
Suddenly, everything makes sense.
The answer to the Eddie conundrum is and has been right in front of him the whole time. It had, after all, been his very first thought when he realized that something wasn’t right. And it’s the solution that comes to him now when he finds himself at a loss.
If he gets back to his own life, or if he manages to wake up from this dream, he’ll be going back to Buck. But there’s also a Buck here— one who deserves a better life, as Eddie himself had told him.
It’s not just about Eddie: not at home, and not here. It’s about all of them, and the ways in which they’re tethered.
The difference between Eddie’s universe and this one isn’t really about any of the things that they’d listed on the whiteboard. It’s not about Bobby being dead or Buck being a teacher. It’s not even really about Chris being in Texas or Eddie learning to parent him on his own.
It’s about choosing. Juice, joy.
Buck.
Himself. All of these things, Eddie sees now, are tied up in each other. In every universe, he sits on a ledge and tilts his head back and puts his life in Buck’s hands. In every universe, one of them knocks on the door.
In this one, it just happened to be him.
And when he leaves it and goes back home, he’ll be leaving this Buck in a world with his own Christopher and his own Eddie, and he isn’t sure exactly when or exactly how but he suddenly knows with absolute certainty that Buck will go knocking, one way or another.
“I think,” Eddie says slowly, “that I was scared, Chris. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
Christopher is quiet for a long, long moment. Eddie can hear him breathing, even as he doesn’t speak, and he listens to it the same way he had when he was less than one week old, committing the sound to memory so he could carry it back to the desert with him, tucked into the pocket of his fatigues.
“You didn’t, either,” Chris says eventually, his voice tendersoft.
Eddie’s breath catches in his throat. Somehow, he isn’t surprised that Chris has managed to turn out this way in spite of him. That is probably true in every universe, too.
“I want you to know,” Eddie says, clearing his throat. “That I want to be better for you, Christopher. I know that it may seem like it’s too late, but—”
“I’m only fourteen, Dad,” Chris says, cutting Eddie off before he can really get started.
A surprised half-laugh that’s more like a sob tumbles over Eddie’s lips. “I know,” he says. “You’re a good kid, Chris.”
“I know,” Chris answers, and like the sun through the clouds Eddie can hear in his voice that he’s smiling.
“Good,” Eddie says. “Um— I know that you probably are angry, and that’s okay. You— you should be angry. But I want you to know that no matter how angry you are and no matter what happens, I— I always want to be your dad, Christopher. You should know that that’s never changed, even if it seemed like I didn’t.”
Christopher takes a breath.
“I love you,” he says.
Eddie blinks and tears spill over his lashline as his breath catches in his chest, and the ache of missing his child— his, selfishly, the one in the world that he belongs to awake or asleep— feels nearly unbearable all of a sudden.
“I love you too, honey,” he says softly.
“Are you—” Christopher starts, and then stops again and sighs. “Are you sure that it’s going to get…”
“Better?” Eddie asks.
Christopher exhales. “Yeah.”
Eddie looks through the window again, watching as Buck sweeps something off of the cutting board and into a pan. Eddie still can’t see what it is, but little pieces of it spill over and scatter onto the counter, and Buck pauses for a second to look at them as if they’ve somehow offended him by not going where he wanted them to, against the laws of physics.
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I’m sure.”
When he hangs up the call with Christopher, he does so with renewed purpose.
He slips the phone into his pocket and pulls the latch on the door, sliding it open as Buck looks up at the sound. Eddie glances up at him in time to watch his face light up, and his chest aches at the sight of it.
If this Buck is looking at him like that after they’ve known each other all of thirty-six hours, it’s hard to wrap his head around how much he must have been missing in his own life.
“Hey,” Buck says, reaching for the knob on his stove and turning it down. “How did it go? Get any ideas about our next step?”
Eddie smiles at him, pausing in his tracks to look across the island at him.
“Can I ask you something, Buck?” he asks.
“Sure,” Buck says easily.
“Why’d you let me in yesterday?”
Buck frowns. “What do you mean?”
Eddie shakes his head, gesturing to the locked front door of the loft with an open palm. “A strange guy showed up at your door looking like he hadn’t slept in a week and told you that he was having a dream where he woke up in this world and that he’s actually from a place where he knows everything about you and he’s your best friend.”
Buck pouts. “You make it sound really bad when you say it like that.”
“It is bad,” Eddie laughs. “You have no self-preservation instincts.”
“You said you weren’t a murderer,” Buck points out.
“That— okay,” Eddie says, holding his hands out. “Answer my question. Why did you let me in?”
Buck, to his credit and not at all to Eddie’s surprise, pauses to really think about it. “I guess,” he says slowly. “I just— I kinda felt like it was the right thing to do for some reason.”
“For some reason,” Eddie repeats, taking a step closer to him and pointing in his direction. “What reason?”
Buck looks a little confused. “For— I don’t know, for some reason!” he says.
“The same reason you have a model Ferris wheel,” Eddie says, “and the same reason why you made me pancakes this morning even though yesterday you said that you’re a health nut. The same reason why you even know how to cook at all, or— or why you don’t like it when I call you Evan or why you live in this apartment and Chim doesn’t live in his place.”
Buck’s brow creases. “What?”
“The Eddie conundrum,” Eddie says.
“You’re Eddie,” Buck answers.
“Yep,” Eddie says, taking the few steps around the island until he’s standing right in front of Buck. “Why did you make me pancakes this morning, Buck?”
“Pancakes are good,” Buck answers. “I— you like pancakes?”
“How do you know?” Eddie presses.
At this, Buck pauses and glances around his kitchen, then looks back to Eddie.
“Uh,” he says. “I— I don’t, I guess.”
“But you thought you did,” Eddie insists. “This morning. You didn’t ask me. You thought you knew. And you wouldn’t have made them for yourself. Right?”
Buck bites his lip. “Yeah,” he admits. “I guess I wouldn’t have. But— Eddie, everybody likes pancakes.”
Eddie waves his hand dismissively. “You don’t get what I’m saying.”
“No,” Buck agrees. “I don’t.”
Eddie takes a breath, and then tilts his head back to look up and meet Buck’s eyes. Their height difference is exactly the same here as in the real world. Eddie can tell because he has— somewhere along the way— memorized the way it feels to cast his gaze up and into Buck’s.
“You’re the answer to the Eddie conundrum,” he says.
Buck blinks. “I am?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says softly. “You are.”
“Oh,” Buck answers. “Wh-what does that mean? Did you figure out how to— to get back or t-to wake up or whatever?”
Eddie smiles. “Thanks for adding that part.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I think,” Eddie says, nodding his head as he turns to Buck’s stove and turns the hot knob all the way to the off position, “I did.”
Buck follows his movement, frowning. “Why did you do that?”
“Just in case,” Eddie answers. “You’re not a firefighter here— yet— so that would have been extra bad.”
“Okay,” Buck answers, sounding puzzled as he turns his gaze back to Eddie.
For half a moment, Eddie lets himself take Buck in: this Buck, the one who had dropped everything to help him and who made him pancakes even though he didn’t know who; who had taken him to one of their favorite restaurants by accident and who— when Eddie is gone, if he’s real— will save this Eddie, too.
He had been wrong before, when he had thought that this Buck had saved Daniel and his Buck had saved him and Chris. This Buck will just get the opportunity to do both, and maybe there’s a Buck in every possible dream or universe who finds one or both of them to save, because it’s who he is all, all the way down to his bones.
Eddie hopes, as he looks up into Buck’s face feeling for the first time like he’s truly himself, that he’s also there in every one of those dreams; that every time he opens a door, there’s Buck on the other side.
And then he moves forward with all the certainty of a man who has figured out the answer: closing the gap between them closer than it’s ever been before, he takes Buck’s face into his hands, steadies his breath, and hauls him in to kiss him.
The last thing he sees before he closes his eyes and sinks into the feeling of getting it right is the flash of Buck’s blue irises and the flutter of pale lashes. And then, fireworks.
The first thing Buck sees when he opens his eyes is Eddie.
He blinks a few times, clearing the sleep from his eyes, and slowly forms the conclusion that he’s in Eddie’s living room.
The memory of last night comes back to him: Tommy, and his empty loft, and the faint sense of shame that came with crawling back to Eddie’s the way he always does. It had faded, though, also like it always does, because Eddie tends to have that effect on him and besides that, Eddie answering the door in his underwear had been a pretty well-timed distraction.
After a couple of beers and a half-confusing explanation of what Eddie was doing, Buck had told him about Tommy and even though the things his newly-ex boyfriend had said didn’t make any more sense to Buck, he did feel better after talking to Eddie.
He always does.
Eddie had patted him soundly on the shoulder before he went to his own bedroom to sleep, and Buck had sprawled out on the couch and watched the familiar shadows of South Bedford Street dance across the ceiling until his eyes got heavy, too. It’s not great for his back, but he’d never admit it, because he always sleeps better on Eddie’s couch than anywhere else. Even the firehouse bunk room— Buck’s second-favorite place to sleep— can’t quite do it like Eddie’s living room.
Admittedly, he has never woken up in it with Eddie standing over him.
Also, Eddie looks—
Buck is not sure what the word is. His hair is a mess, flattened on one side of his head and sticking up on the other, with several strands hanging over his forehead in loose, soft curls. His shirt is twisted on one shoulder with the seam caught in the sleeve, and there’s an expression on his face that Buck has never seen before, which is especially alarming because he is pretty sure he knows Eddie better than he knows himself.
“Eddie?” he asks, pushing himself up and glancing around. He’s not sure what he expects to see, but definitely something, whatever will explain the strange way that Eddie is looking at him. Maybe a camera crew. Buck is still a little bit asleep.
“Buck,” Eddie says. “You’re here. On my couch.”
Buck frowns up at him. “Where else would I be?” he asks. “I was here last night. What are you talking about?”
Something in Eddie’s face sort of clears. It’s like he’s understanding something, but Buck isn’t sure what it is.
“It was a dream,” Eddie says.
“It was?” Buck asks.
“It was!” Eddie answers.
“What— what was?” Buck asks. He looks around again, just to be sure he’s not missing anything, but Eddie’s house remains as peaceful and quiet as ever. Everything is in its place and the light of early morning is beginning to cast a yellow glow through the sheer curtains that face the street.
“Nothing,” Eddie says, waving his hand. “Nothing. I just— had a dream.”
Buck frowns. “Like a-a nightmare?” he asks, pushing himself to the edge of the couch and moving his legs over it, trying very hard to wake up enough to understand what’s happening around him.
“No,” Eddie says. “Kind of. Not really.”
Buck looks up at him again. “Are you okay?” he asks.
Eddie looks down, and his expression changes again. All the traces of the sort-of crazed look disappear, melting into something much softer and warmer.
Weirdly, Buck isn’t sure he’s ever seen this expression on Eddie’s face either.
He follows Eddie’s gaze down to the floor and— even more bizarrely— finds that Eddie seems to be looking at his feet.
“What are you looking at?” Buck asks.
“You’re only wearing one sock,” Eddie answers.
“Uh,” Buck says. “Yeah?”
At this, Eddie looks up at his face again. Something on his features is undeniably broken open, in a way that is both terrifying and compelling. Maybe only to Buck.
“Are you okay?” Buck asks again. “You’re acting really—”
“Weird,” Eddie supplies. “I know. I had a weird dream.”
“Okay,” Buck says. “Do you— can I do something? Are you feeling okay?”
Eddie’s face goes, if possible, softer.
“I’m feeling okay,” he says. “I’m— I think I figured something out.”
“Yeah?” Buck asks. Eddie might be feeling okay, but he is feeling hopelessly lost. And very confused. And a little bit concerned.
“Yeah,” Eddie breathes. “Um. Okay— you know how I told you about the juice thing?”
“Yeah,” Buck says slowly. “You said it was kinda dumb.”
“I was wrong,” Eddie answers. “I think. I’m pretty sure it was— not dumb.”
“Right,” Buck answers, unsure he’s following but trying to nonetheless. “That’s— that’s great, Eds. I think?”
“Yeah,” Eddie replies, nodding his head: slowly at first, and then with more conviction. “Yeah. It is great.”
“Is it?”
“Maybe,” Eddie amends. “Probably. I think I did it wrong yesterday.”
“The— dancing?” Buck asks. “I mean, I didn’t see it but you had the outfit so—”
“No,” Eddie replies, waving his hand again. “The dancing was fine.”
Buck frowns. “The shaving?” he asks. “You look great but I don’t think you can kinda— undo that part.”
“No,” Eddie repeats. “Not that. The juice, the joy. That’s the part I was doing wrong.”
Buck thinks about that for a moment.
“Eddie,” he says. “I’m really confused.”
Eddie’s face— still soft and warm— adopts an additional expression of resolve. This one, Buck is very familiar with. He’s seen it a million times: Eddie making up his mind about something, taking charge of what he knows he can do and more times than not saving someone’s life in the process.
Occasionally, saving Buck’s.
“What?” Buck asks.
“Do you trust me?” Eddie asks.
Buck blinks. “O-of course I trust you, Eddie, what’s—”
Eddie shakes his head and takes a small step closer to him. He’s standing in front of Buck now, more or less over him, close enough that Buck can see the faint indented lines on his cheek from where it had been smushed into his pillow while he slept.
“Buck,” Eddie says imploringly. “I’m asking— do you trust me?”
“Yes,” Buck says. There aren’t really words for how much he trusts Eddie; there’s no one else he trusts like that, with not only his life but also all the things that he keeps hidden. It’s the reason he’s here at all, the reason why Eddie’s door is the one he finds himself on the other side of every time something goes wrong and every time it doesn’t.
If Buck is being honest with himself, he knows that it’s part of why he already feels better about what happened last night. He isn’t sure what Tommy meant when he said the things he said, but not for the first time after a breakup Buck is already feeling like it matters less.
Sitting next to Eddie on the couch, listening to him, falling asleep here— even waking up in this sort of bizarre situation: all of it makes Buck feel better.
He guesses that’s also a way of trusting Eddie. The knowledge that no matter what goes wrong, there’s this, and the undeniable and unshakeable truth that at the end of the day it’s always been enough for him.
“Okay,” Eddie says, the resolve on his face strengthening. “I’m— I’m gonna show you what I mean.”
“Okay,” Buck says.
He only gets half a second of warning, and then Eddie is taking his face into his hands. They’re preternaturally warm and soft, and they cover Buck’s cheeks entirely, and before he can really process this at all, Eddie is using them to haul him in close— so, so close— and then Eddie is kissing him, and Buck’s vision whites out.
And then, fireworks.
He melts into Eddie’s shockingly fervent, sure kiss, and his hands scramble for purchase and wrap around bits of Eddie’s t-shirt: one at Eddie’s waist and the other somewhere over his ribs, and Buck is sure that his knuckles are white with the grip of his fingers around the fabric.
Eddie kisses him until they’re both breathless: until Buck feels like he’s swimming through honey; until there’s no space for anything in his brain or his lungs or the empty hollows of his body for anything but the rightness of it. And then Eddie breaks the kiss with a gasp of breath, and Buck opens his eyes without having any memory of closing them—
And suddenly, he understands what this expression is on Eddie’s newly clean shaven face.
It takes him out with the force of it, the understanding of what’s happening in Eddie’s living room at seven a.m. on a weekday.
“Eddie,” he breathes.
Eddie nods his head, dark lashes fluttering softly. His eyes are wide and glassy, and there’s pink high on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose, and he’s looking at Buck like he loves him.
“Buck,” he whispers, his voice wavering. “Tell me I didn’t—”
“You didn’t,” Buck says, shaking his head quickly. “No, no. You didn’t. It’s— we’re okay. Come here.”
Eddie folds into him and Buck remembers how to breathe again, and it’s like the sunrise outside the window is the very first one, on the very first day of his life. He takes a breath and the air all smells like Eddie, and in a matter of seconds he can’t remember how he ever lived his life any other way at all.
He exhales again, and Eddie relaxes against him.
“That was some dream,” Buck says, stupidly, instantly regretting it.
Eddie laughs into his shoulder as if it was funny, and a smile creeps onto Buck’s face at the sound of it muffled in his tshirt. He smooths his hand over Eddie’s back and Eddie nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was.”
Outside, the sun rises and rises into a brand new day.