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California was three hours behind Massachusetts, so Maddie supposed she shouldn’t have been shocked that Howie was wide awake when she called. He was still in his uniform, likely still at work if the background of what Maddie thought was the bunkroom was any indication, and he had a small line of soot on his forehead. It was seven in Los Angeles, ten in her hotel room in Boston but she had to admit that it felt much longer than the almost three thousand miles between them. “How have things been?” He asked after the call time showed twenty eight minutes and he had caught her up quickly on his day. Maddie knew Howie had the habit of keeping her away from the more… serious calls the team attended to but he told her most and, besides, Maddie liked hearing his voice. It was a balm to her skin. A reminder to her nerves at being back on the east coast that she had a home, a heart, to return to soon enough.
As Howie kept the more difficult things from her, Maddie had to admit she was tempted to do the same. He would always listen, happily even, to whatever it was she had to say, but Howie was a helper. He was a paramedic (one of the very best, even). He asked questions and offered solutions and Maddie didn’t know how to explain to him that she was pretty sure none of his offered solutions would work. Howie hated that Bobby couldn’t spare him for the week so that he could be with her (with them , Maddie reminded herself, it wasn’t just her that Howie was concerned about) and Maddie hated it just a little bit more when she climbed into her bed that night and missed his arm around her waist. But it had to be worse for him, she thought. Both of his girls were missing from their home. “Jee’s been good. She’s really excited about the snow.” She had face planted into it, actually, when Maddie brought her outside earlier that day. She had grabbed two fistfulls in her little mitten covered hands and slapped them together and laughed like sunshine breaking through a layer of clouds when snow splattered from her palms and hit her in the face. “Did you see the pictures I sent?”
“My favorite,” Howie said with a handsome smile, his thumb brushing against the soot on his forehead and wiping it away. “Is the one where you two are building a snowman.”
Maddie tilted her head with a gentle smile. “I didn’t send you that one.” Maddie didn’t have that one.
Howie simply smiled back and said nothing more on it. “Have you… met the rest of them yet?”
Maddie sucked in a deep breath with a small shrug, the sheets creasing over her hips as she moved. Their parents had met them at the airport, they had climbed into two rental cars (because Maddie had insisted despite her parents complaints about a waste of money. Jee-Yun needed a car seat and they needed a way to… have a moment to breathe without Margaret and Philip at their backs) and they had made a quick stop at Quincy Market to fill up on baked goods and played in the Common with Jee. Maddie was pretty sure her parents had met up with the rest of them even if they hadn’t yet. They wouldn’t be able to avoid it forever, she knew. If they wanted to do that , they probably should have just stayed home. “No,” Maddie shook her head. “We grabbed dinner at the waterfront and showed Jee the aquarium.” They hadn’t had time to go inside - they were all tired but Jee-Yun had slept on the flight over and had been more than excited to press her little nose up against the tank housing the seal outside of the building. She had made a note to bring her later in the week, and they had agreed that the Science Museum would also be an adventure for their favorite toddler.
She was determined to make this… event a good one. Maddie had so many bad memories tied to Boston, but she had made good ones too and she wasn’t willing to condemn the entire place because of her past. “Are you ready to see them again?” Howie asked nervously, attentive but prodding.
“I think I am.” Maddie didn’t think it really mattered if she was ready for it or not, if she were being honest. She had arrived in Boston to do as she was asked to and she supposed it was a good thing to do it.
“It’s been almost thirty years.” Howie reminded her. “You don’t have to be ready.”
And she didn’t have to go through with it. Maddie wasn’t that concerned, honestly. She wasn’t all that willing to have a deep relationship with the people that had made it seem so easy to forget about her after Daniel had passed, but she was… curious. She had a grandmother, a grandfather, aunts and uncles and cousins that she hadn’t seen since Daniel’s funeral. “It’s been twenty-nine years.” She corrected. Twenty-nine because Evan had been two and Daniel had been nine. Evan was thirty-one, now, and Daniel would have been thirty-nine and Maddie was forty-one and… well, she was a grown woman. She had a child of her own. She didn’t want to raise Jee-Yun the way she had been. “I’m curious.”
Howie nodded. “Curiosity brought you to Boston?”
“ Closure brought me to Boston.” Maddie corrected. Closure always brought her to Boston, it seemed. After Doug, closure was really the only reason she had to come back. Only this time she hadn’t just brought herself - she wasn’t just responsible for herself. Maddie shifted and glanced towards the twin bed in her room - Jee looked so small sleeping on it, her little arm wrapped around her stuffed pig and her hair a mess against the cotton bedsheets. She had fallen asleep against the pillow but now it was pressed up, scrunched against the wall. She was snoring, soft little sniffles in and out. “I know it was mostly my parents fault for leaving everything we had and moving us to a different state,” Maddie tried to explain. “But they let us leave.” She shrugged again. “It’s their fault as much as it’s our parents.”
Her fault, Maddie thought distantly, as much as it was Margaret and Philip’s. “You were a child.” Howie reminded her softly, the way he always did when she brought up something about her past and childhood that she hadn’t really been able to control. “You were eleven, Maddie. And you had just lost your brother.” And then had, by default, ended up a parent to her other brother. Maddie wouldn’t blame either of them for it, both Daniel and Evan had been too young to understand what was going on, and Evan especially couldn’t be responsible for himself at two .
“And the rest of them?” Maddie gestured towards the hallway. They were all in the hotel somewhere, commuting in from cities and towns away. Maddie had spent the first eleven years of her life in Cambridge, the next seven in Hershey, and then moved back to Boston to work in Massachusetts General Hospital until she ran from Doug and landed in Los Angeles. “They just let them take us and hide us away.” Maddie had spoken with Frank about it for hours before even deciding to make the trip. They want to see you , Margaret had said over the phone. Begging. In a way that her mother so rarely begged. It’s been years. It had been years, and there had been more than one way to reach out to her specifically if they wanted to talk to her again and none of them had. “I want to know why.”
“You might not get a why.” Howie cautioned, the same way Frank had in his office.
“I know that.” Maddie had lived her life in disappointment, especially when it came to her parents. “I think we’re going to visit Daniel sometime this week.” Or at least she was. She hadn’t visited his grave since she had last landed in Boston a little under two years ago.
“Maddie…” Howie sighed and dropped his chin into his hand. “I think this is going to be good for you.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t…” Know if it would be good for both of them.
“He agreed to come, Howie.” Maddie had barely even asked. She had simply relayed the message the same as her mother - they want to see you - and he had booked the plane tickets for the three of them and entertained Jee-Yun throughout the entire flight. “I didn’t make him.”
“I’m not saying you did.” Howie agreed placatingly and scratched at his smile with a contemplative frown. “So you’re meeting them all for breakfast tomorrow?” He side-stepped. Sauntered back to the original topic of conversation and allowed Maddie to handle things with Evan the way she had always been allowed to handle things with Evan.
“Yeah,” Maddie said with a long sigh. “Unless we get room service or something, but I don’t know how long mom and dad are going to let us get away with avoiding everyone.”
She knew how long they would let them get away with it and they had already used up all of their time. Their parents were on the same hotel floor as them, they had requested it upon checking in. They were lucky, Maddie knew, that their parents had let them even have the day. The five of them were the last to arrive and the thought of everyone waiting on them , specifically, made Maddie’s stomach curdle. “It’ll go fine.” Howie advised. “I don’t like the idea of you being there alone,” he joked with a small little smile. “But it’ll be okay.”
“I’m not alone.” Maddie teased with a matching smile of her own.
“You’re right.” Howie conceded. “You have our scary baby girl to hold everyone off.”
Maddie snorted. “I meant -.”
“I know what you meant.” Howie sobered. “I like the idea of him being there even less.”
Maddie’s stomach jolted. “Do you think I made a mistake?” She asked cautiously. “Should I have told him not to come?”
Howie waved a hand to the side. “Nah,” he shrugged. “We both know Buck’s going to Buck.”
“But if it’s not a good idea -.”
“He’s a grown man, Maddie.” Howie argued. “If Buck didn’t want to go he could have said no when you asked. He’s probably curious too.”
He didn’t seem curious. Evan didn’t seem like he wanted anything to do with the family reunion aspect of the trip, even. Maddie had a distinct feeling that he was there because she was there and she… didn’t know how to feel about that. He shouldn’t be so willing to throw himself to the wolves for her. Her baby brother shouldn’t need to protect her. She was ten years older with a kid . He might be almost a foot taller but that didn’t make him any less someone Maddie had sworn to protect when he was smaller than Jee.
Howie didn’t know him, Maddie reminded herself. No one really knew Evan - Buck - the way she did. They didn’t patch up his skinned knees and teach him how to time thunderstorms. They didn’t sit outside of his bedroom when he was sent there by their parents, punished for being too loud, too energetic, too much and sing him songs through the door until he stopped crying. They didn’t teach him how to read or video chat with him when he was struggling through math problems while Maddie was supposed to be doing her own work at college. They didn’t get postcards as he figured himself out or go with him to physical therapy for his leg or… or any number of things Maddie did with and for him that made her as close to an expert on Evan Buckley as anyone could be. Just like he was an expert on her. Just like Howie would always know Albert better than Maddie could ever pretend to. Evan wasn’t curious about their extended family, not in the way Maddie was. He was curious about her . He would throw himself onto any chopping block to stay by Maddie’s side (to protect her. To keep her from leaving again). “Anyway,” Howie continued when Maddie was too lost in her worry to vocalize anything else. “I’ll be there on Friday.” At eleven thirty at night, Maddie remembered. “And then we’ll be back home on Monday.” At three forty-five in the morning. “Just another five days without me.”
And what a long five days it would be. Maddie smiled back at him and relaxed back against her pillows. “We can’t wait to show you around.” They would save the science museum for him, Maddie decided. They could wander the Common, go to a broadway show, the waterfront, some breweries. Maybe they would even visit Daniel without Howie accompanying. Even if she wanted him to see every part of her, she didn’t know if Buck wanted Howie to have that part of him too. It would be unfair to him for her to make that decision for him. Daniel was as much a part of him as he was as part of her.
“We can stop by and say hi to Eli.”
She had forgotten about Eli, Howie’s old partner from the 118. The man who had let Howie and Jee live in his basement while Howie searched the city for her and waited for her to be ready to leave. He had been nice, kind and understanding in a way Maddie hadn’t expected when they had met. A good friend for Howie to have. Level, in a way that Hen was. “I’d like that.” Maddie realized it was true as she said it. Maybe she’d thank him, even, for all that he had done to help keep Howie’s head on straight.
A light knock rhythmically jolted on her door. A quick little one, two, three and then a backwards three, two, three . Maddie’s lips twitched into a fond little smile. “One minute, Howie.” She whispered and swiftly stood, slipping her feet into her hotel issue slippers and flicking the lock on the hotel door. “Well, well,” Maddie chided softly, leaning her body against the doorframe with her arms crossed and squinting into the bright yellow light of the hallway. “Are you sneaking into my room?”
Evan shushed her and pushed her gently back inside, even as the two of them snickered like little children. “Shh,” he cautioned with a glance over his shoulder. “I somehow managed to avoid mom and dad but they’re just coming up from the bar.” He had disappeared into his own room after they had arrived back from dinner, kissed Jee goodnight and locked his door. Maddie hadn’t bothered him, even if she wanted to. They had a tradition , after all. One that she had thought he had forgotten until he was knocking on her door.
“Quiet,” she scolded jokingly and nodded towards Jee-Yun in the bed.
Jee would be fine, really. She slept like Howie and that was like the dead. The two of them could sleep through an earthquake once they really knocked out. Still, Buck glanced at her and his face softened the way it always did when he was looking at Jee. “Sorry.” He mumbled but dutifully dropped his bounty of vending machine snacks on Maddie’s tiny dining room table by the window.
“Let me finish up with Howie,” he wrinkled his nose and she wordlessly hit at his bicep. “And we can get started.”
“Get started?” Howie chimed in curiously from where she had thrown the phone on the sheets when got up to answer the door. Maddie flicked the lock again and perched him on the table, leaning up against a half drunk water bottle. He flicked his gaze around the room and Maddie caught, even if she wasn’t sure she was supposed to, the way his eyes stayed a little longer on Buck’s tall frame as he settled back against her pillows, long legs stretched out in front of him.
Maddie set him a crooked smile. “It’s a tradition.” She provided with a wink.
“A super secret Buckley tradition?” Howie echoed with the note of teasing in his voice he always used when either her or Buck gave something about their childhood away to him. “Indoctrinating our daughter into it?”
“It’s a sibling tradition only.” Maddie corrected. “Jee’s still sleeping.” He wanted to know more, she knew he did, but she didn’t particularly want to give it to him. Not that there was anything to hide. It was a simple, silly tradition anyway. Evan would sneak into her room on their first night with vending machine snacks and drinks they usually weren’t allowed to have and they’d stay up until late with pay-per-view black and white movies. He always spent the first night with her, the two of them falling asleep in the same bed, and they hadn’t done it since Evan’s high school graduation. Maddie had thought he had forgotten, but she supposed Buck held onto memories the same way she did. “I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay? Be safe if you get called out again.”
“Always will.” Howie reassured. “I love you.”
Maddie blushed, but only because of the absent way Buck responded without looking up from his phone, a small little annoying grin on his face. “I love you too, Chim.”
“Fuck off, Buckley.”
“Love you too, Howie.” Maddie said with a laugh and she waited until he smiled back at her before pressing the little red phone.
She tossed herself next to Buck on the bed, a bag of chips between them and her head dropping quickly onto his shoulder. He wiggled in closer, a whole person bigger than he had been when they started this tradition at two and twelve but still just as eager to pull his safety from her warmth. Maddie sat up and grabbed for the remote. “All About Eve?” She asked as she flicked on the television.
“The Petrified Forest.” He argued and sank down a little farther, his left leg hanging half off the bed in a way that had Maddie curious but she didn’t know how to ask. She nodded and clicked on the movie, still as his head settled on her hip and her hand landed in his hair.
Maddie had come here for herself, for closure. Buck had come for her.
She would do her best to keep the both of them safe, just as she always had.
--
“This is weird.” Buck muttered from the side of his mouth, his eyes stuck on their parents as Philip greeted an elderly man - their grandfather, Maddie noted in surprise - with a hug. Their father didn’t do hugs. Not typically. Not without cause. He had hugged Maddie the last time they had come to Los Angeles when she dropped him off at the airport but it had been quick and unfeeling. He used to hug Daniel all the time.
It was a bit weird. So far no one had come up to them aside from their parents. She had filled up a plate of goodies for herself and Jee to split but Jee had bypassed everything Maddie had chosen and decided to steal Buck’s fruit off his plate instead with a cheeky little giggle. It reminded her of Howie but the twist of her lips was all Daniel. Maddie saw him in Jee more than she saw him in Buck. “It’s a little weird.” She agreed and nudged his shoulder with her own, wordlessly offering him a piece of toast when Jee stole the strawberry he was planning on eating with a full body, snorting laugh that sent her careening backwards into his chest. “Jee,” Maddie scolded although she had a feeling it fell a little short by the way she couldn’t help smiling. “Let your uncle eat.”
“Share?” Jee-Yun offered as a compromise, holding out a drool covered half eaten strawberry towards her uncle’s face. Buck wrinkled his nose and gently pushed it back towards her.
“No, thank you, Jee.” Jee shrugged and plopped it back into her mouth, happily chewing with her mouth open. “So, who is…” He gestured towards the dining room the family reunion had basically taken up residence in. “All of this?”
“Well,” Maddie squinted. “Dad’s talking to our grandfather. Joseph. And sitting next to him is our grandmother, Natalie.” She looked much older, now, Maddie noticed, than she did in her memory. The Natalie Buckley that Maddie remembered had hair dyed a light orange and leathery skin with the brightest blue eyes. The Natalie holding Joseph’s hand had a head of gray hair and pale blue eyes. Maddie wondered where the brightness had disappeared to and realized Buck had possibly stolen it for his own when he was born. Natalie had sat with the two of them when Daniel had died, held Maddie to her side as she sat Evan in her lap and cried into his little toddler shoulder as he patted her hand, attempting to console even as he didn’t understand what the long beeping line and bowed heads meant. Maddie swallowed and shook off the memories of grief. “That’s our aunt, dad’s little sister, Julianna. I think those are her kids?” She gestured to the table to the left - Aunt Julianna had been twenty-three when Maddie had moved, fresh from art school with a baby on the way. She had held her hand all through Daniel’s funeral and when she had shown up with a paper bag full of coloring books and colored pencils for Evan to entertain himself Margaret had nearly thrown her out.
Aunt Julianna had been Maddie’s favorite person in the world. Now, she sat with her arm around a man with bright orange hair with laugh lines around her eyes and a boy with chestnut hair reading a book on her other side. “That’s her husband, I think,” Maddie pointed. “I think his name is Brandon?” She had met him exactly three times. Philip never really liked him and he had liked him even less when Julianna had gotten pregnant and he hadn’t immediately proposed.
“And that,” Maddie pointed at the third table, the one Margaret hovered over with a glass of champagne spiked orange juice in her hand that housed a man older than both of their parents but younger than their grandparents, his wife, and their adult children and grandchildren. “Is dad’s older brother Gregory, his wife Paula and their kids, Kristin and Randal.”
Buck hummed but his eyes had barely strayed from the banana slice in Jee-Yun’s little fist. She wondered if he had even been interested, or if he simply was asking because he was uncomfortable. Maddie wondered if no one had come over to talk to them because they simply didn’t recognize them. It had been twenty-eight years since Maddie had seen any of this family. Twenty-eight years and a funeral. Buck wouldn’t even remember them. “Somehow dad being a middle child explains a lot .” Buck said with raised brows.
Maddie nearly choked on her toast. “I guess it does.” She conceded around a laugh. “Gregory and Paula’s kids are both older than us.” Maddie supplied. “I’m assuming the little kids are theirs.” There were five of them, at their own table playing either on their phones or with a handful of action figures.
“So the nickname thing isn’t just a mom and dad issue.” Buck mumbled.
Maddie snorted. “No, it’s a whole Buckley thing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Language.” She chided and gently wiped at Jee’s cheeks with a napkin.
Buck narrowed his eyes on her. “Tontería.” He challenged.
Maddie blinked. “What?”
He smirked and mimed, locking his lips shut and tossing the key carelessly to the side. Maddie almost leaned into it, she almost reached out to catch it and unlocked his mouth so he could explain himself but Maddie was pretty sure she had just gotten sworn at in Spanish. “How do you even know how to say that?” She asked around a laugh.
Buck shrugged happily. “I lived in Peru, Maddie.”
Right. She narrowed her eyes at him, that wasn’t how and they both knew it. “Eddie shouldn’t be teaching you swears.”
“Eddie can teach me whatever he wants.” Buck muttered even as his cheeks colored, just a bit, at what his words were implying.
They hadn’t talked about it, Maddie knew. Not beyond the surface. Buck’s best friend wasn’t exactly only his best friend, not the way Howie thought anyway. Maddie was pretty sure, actually, that no one (aside from her) really knew how close the two of them were . If Maddie wrote the book on Evan Buckley then Eddie Diaz had taken it and added annotations. She was pretty sure nothing between them had shifted into the romantic category (aside from feelings) yet - Maddie was fairly confident that Buck would have told her the moment they did - but it had been inching towards it ever since Eddie’s name had first left her brother’s lips.
That being said, her brother did know an impressive amount of Peruvian Spanish from the few years he had spent living there. His accent had been impressive when Maddie had first heard it, not quite that of a native speaker but much closer than her own, clearly learned in a classroom one. He could hold a conversation, even if he preferred not to. But somewhere along the way Buck’s Spanish had taken on a very… Mexican dialect over Peruvian, a bastardized version somewhere in the middle.
It was Maddie’s job as his older sister to tease him about his crush on his best friend. She refused to ever stop even when they had decided to bridge that gap between them. She’d even tease him about it at their wedding one day. “Is that how it is?” Maddie teased and Buck ducked his head, his cheeks only managing to get more red the longer she looked. He smiled, though, when she nudged his shoulder with her own and stretched his arm around the back of her chair.
He opened his mouth to say something but their mother interrupted, carefully placing her glass on the table in front of them and surveying the two of them with that vaguely unapproving look on her face. Maddie had grown used to it over the years but Evan bristled still like he was thirteen. Their mother had a very specific way of getting under his skin. Maddie had never been able to understand why. “Why haven’t you two said hello to anyone yet?” Margaret scolded behind an easy, joyless smile. “Are you planning on sitting in this corner the whole time?”
Buck rolled his eyes but wisely kept his mouth shut, ducking down more fully to whisper something that had Jee-Yun giggling in his ear, shaking her arm and happily taking the banana slice she offered him. Maddie sighed. “Mom,” she scolded as gently as she could. “We’re just eating our breakfast. Everyone is more than welcome to say hi.”
Margaret settled herself down on the other side of the table, her eyes studying Jee-Yun carefully. She looked at Maddie like she disapproved of her letting Evan feed her, or like she disapproved of her letting Jee feed herself, or like she disapproved of her and Maddie in general. She had seemed happy to see her, though, when they had stepped off the plane. Happier than Maddie had seen her react to any child in a long time. Jee-Yun had pressed her body closer to Maddie’s chest, though, when Margaret had reached for a hug, and she hadn’t smiled until she had caught sight of Buck with their luggage again. Maddie was sure that had to have stung, but Jee didn’t really know her parents. Not the way she knew the family they had in LA. “They’re here to see you .” Margaret insisted, her fingers twirling the glass between her hands. It was eerily similar to how Buck twirled his coffee mug earlier. Maddie decided she wouldn’t point that similarity out to either of them. “You should at least say hello to your grandparents.”
Maddie pretended she couldn’t see the way Evan’s eyebrows angled down, or the way he was very visibly chewing on his cheek to keep from saying something he probably shouldn’t at the implication of what they should do. It was all about image, Maddie knew. Margaret needed the family to think that she hadn’t completely screwed her kids up by separating them from their extended family after Daniel. Them refusing to move from their little oasis of a table was just confirming what Maddie was sure the rest of the family had feared. “And we will,” Maddie reassured her even if it felt like a minefield of a promise to make. “After Jee’s finished eating.”
Margaret gave her a significant look as Jee-Yun stuffed another piece of fruit in her mouth and giggled when she pushed one into Buck’s. He was great with her, Maddie wanted to scream at their mother. She couldn’t have asked for him to be better. “Maddie, honestly,” Margaret huffed as Jee smooshed an apple slice with her fist. “She should be using a fork.” She grabbed for a napkin and Jee’s hand, leaning across the table to grab it with her own. Sticken, Margaret froze when Jee jerked back into Evan’s chest and he pushed the chair, just a few inches, out of her reach with a warning look. Her lips twisted into a thin white line. “She’s making a mess.”
“She’s two .” Evan countered, a very familiar challenge on his face.
Maddie sucked in a deep, calming breath and swiped a napkin of her own over her lips. “Okay,” she took Jee-Yun out of Buck’s lap, swung her up on her hip and tickled her neck to get her to smile. “Let’s go clean up and meet your great-grandma, hey?”
“I don’t wanna .” Jee-Yun protested, but she held still long enough for Buck to clean off her hands with a napkin he wet with his water bottle. “We go see fishies!”
“Maybe after, baby.” Maddie bounced her on her hip and flicked Buck’s shoulder. “Do you want to come with us?” Maddie was torn, if she were to be honest. She didn’t want to leave him with their mother on his own but she also didn’t really want him to come. She suddenly wished he hadn’t so readily agreed to come with her, so happy to sacrifice his own well being to protect hers. She wasn’t shocked, then, when he shook his head with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Okay,” she had been trying not to push him, especially since he was already very clearly somewhere he didn’t want to be. “I’ll see you back here?”
He glanced at his watch and Margaret glanced between them with a narrowed gaze. “Uh, maybe not? Text me when you want to grab lunch or something.”
Maddie wasn’t surprised he wasn’t planning on sticking around. “Going to wander the city some?”
“Eh,” He shrugged. “I have a call I have to make.”
Maddie smirked and his cheeks pinked again. “Tell Eddie I said hi .”
“Shut up.” He mumbled.
Margaret cleared her throat. “Go with your sister.” She nodded to where Maddie was standing. “Say hello to your grandparents.”
“I’m good, mom.” Evan said dryly, clearing both his and Maddie’s plates, stacking them easily on top of one another and standing just a bit more carefully than he would at home. Maddie wondered if his leg was bothering him. He had mentioned, once, how cold water made his joints ache, she was sure cold weather would do the same.
“Evan.” She scolded. “They came all this way to see you.”
“They came all this way to see Maddie .” He corrected.
Maddie winced. “I’m sure that’s not…” Buck shot her a look, a cross between betrayed and warning. She squeezed her lips shut with an apologetic look.
“You can’t say you want people to try, Evan, and then not try yourself.” Margaret frowned at him like she always had. Passive aggressiveness was her second nature.
It had always managed to make Evan more tense than it needed to. He either didn’t have the skin for it to roll off of or he never bothered growing it. It struck him and stayed there like it always did. “I wanted you to try.” He muttered with a roll of his eyes. “Not people I never even met.” It was said lowly enough that Margaret didn’t hear it, though, if the scoff she sent at his back was any indication. Maddie wanted to chase after him, to bundle him up like she would when he was younger and let him hide from the world in her shadow. But Evan was almost a whole foot taller than her now, and he was a lot bigger than he had been when he was two and Maddie could never really protect him as well as he had learned to protect himself. So she watched him walk away and squared her shoulders when their mother turned a disapproving look on her instead.
“Did he have to bring that attitude?” Margaret asked lightly. “It’s like he’s sixteen again.”
Maddie scoffed softly under her breath. Their mother was probably referring to the time Buck had stormed out of family dinner, or maybe the time he had run away to Maddie and Doug’s apartment, or maybe even a time she didn’t actually know about. “He’s thirty, mom.” She defended. “If he doesn’t want to see any of them he doesn’t have to.”
“They want to meet him.”
“And who’s fault is it that they didn’t ?”
Margaret pursed her lips, although she looked like she swallowed a lemon at the reminder. Maddie wasn’t proud of it (okay, maybe she was a little), but she was more than a little happy that she could throw Daniel and her parents’ choices of how to handle his death in their face now. It wasn’t a secret anymore, and it wasn’t one that she ever should have been expected to keep, but it was the fault of her parents and every other adult in that room that she had been forced to keep it in the first place. The secret had harmed everyone, but it had harmed her and Evan the most. She couldn’t imagine finding out like he had, only because Maddie had finally been wracked with guilt enough to spill and not because anyone ever actually wanted to tell him. She had talked it over herself in therapy, she was more than sure he had spoken about it during his own sessions (at least, he had spoken about it at work with his friends and Maddie was so incredibly grateful he had all of them to have his back where she failed). “Don’t push him, mom.” Maddie advised. They were lucky he had even bothered to show up.
Still, she made her way over to the table Natalie and Joseph sat, both in their eighties and looking every year of it. Natalie caught sight of her first and she sat up straighter in her wooden chair and squeezed Joseph’s hand with all of her might to pull his attention away from her father. Philip looked at her and smiled. For the first time in almost thirty years, Maddie thought it reached his eyes. She hadn’t realized how long it had been since she had seen him actually smile until she was looking it in the face. Philip smiled like Buck, with his whole face. The comparison made her uncomfortable. “Maddie!” Philip reeled her in with an arm around her back. “You remember your grandparents.”
It wasn’t a question, merely a statement. Standing in front of them, Maddie wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or run away. It had been so long. She had been twenty-one and so sure they’d die before she could see them again. She had been thirty and so angry that none of them had tried to find her. “I do.” She said instead of trying to explain the way her stomach was swirling. She bounced Jee as she sunk into her shoulder, always uneasy around strangers. “This is my daughter,” she introduced with an easy smile. “Jee-Yun Buckley Han.”
Natalie’s eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “Oh.” She stood on surprisingly solid legs and rounded the table, even as Joseph still held on tightly to her hand and stared up at Maddie like he was looking at a ghost. Natalie’s hands fluttered at her side. “Oh Maddie .”
She had forgotten what her grandmother's hugs had felt like until she was wrapped back in it, a weathered hand patting back her hair like Maddie pat back Evan’s when he was little. It was like she was seven again and her parents had just explained to her what cancer was, Daniel’s little body hooked up to machines at six. Her eyes welled up with tears and Maddie didn’t really know who it was she was crying for - the her at forty or the her at twelve who had to mourn while learning how to parent. “Philip,” Joseph said with his gruff voice breaking with emotion down the middle. “Your baby girl has a baby now.”
Philip laughed and Maddie sank into Natalie’s chest, her arms wrapping up and around her shoulders even as anger curled around her heart in an echo of their embrace. “It’s a little unbelievable.” He reached out and shook Jee-Yun’s arm. “But she’s a little miracle, isn’t she?”
Maddie didn’t know which of them he was talking about. Natalie pulled back after a moment and caught her tears with her fingers and a wide, beatific smile. The spark was back in her blue eyes (Maddie wondered if that meant it was gone from Buck’s). “You are such a beautiful woman.” Natalie enthused with a sniffle. “I missed you so much, my girl.”
“I missed you too.” Maddie admitted and bounced Jee when she whined against Maddie’s neck. “Jee, this is your great-grandma.”
Natalie ducked to look at her but Jee avoided her gaze like a professional. “Want Appa.” She said against the skin of Maddie’s neck.
“Oh,” Natalie held a hand against her chest. “Isn’t she precious .”
Maddie smiled wetly. “Hi, Grandad.”
“Hey, peanut.” Joseph stood too, wrapped her in a tight, encompassing hug, and squeezed tight. Buck had gotten his height from him. “And peanut junior .” He teased at Jee-Yun’s cheek. She shuffled farther away, more firmly hiding herself in Maddie’s chest.
“She’s just being shy, right Jee?”
Jee-Yun shook her head. “Uncle Buck?” She asked Maddie with big, pleading brown eyes.
Maddie frowned and looked for him even though she knew he hadn’t been staying. She didn’t think he would have gone far, and she realized she was right - he was just outside, woolen peacoat on, sweatpants tucked into the tops of his boots, curls loose around his head and his phone pressed up against his cheek. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t saying anything either. “He’s right outside, baby.” Maddie pointed and Jee followed her finger with a wobble in her lips. “He’s on the phone.”
Jee-Yun wiggled, probably determined to join him outside regardless of the cold. They were like kindred spirits, honestly. Maddie thought it was adorable, Howie bemoaned it constantly. Maddie shifted Jee-Yun to her other hip and held on tight. “How old is she?” Natalie asked.
“How old are you, Jee?” Maddie parroted.
Jee-Yun frowned. Clearly, she wanted to join her uncle and not answer this question but she still mumbled out a response, holding up the corresponding fingers as she said it. “Two.”
“ Two ?” Natalie gasped theatrically. “Oh, wow . You’re such a big girl.”
“Where’s her father?” Joseph asked, curiously glancing out the window too. Maddie wondered what he thought when he looked at Evan - was it of the years that had passed so much more obviously between two and thirty, or was it of something else entirely? “Is that Daddy?”
Maddie reeled back and sputtered. “What?” She laughed incredulously. “No, grandad. That’s Buck.” Joseph furrowed his brow.
“Evan.” Philip corrected.
Right, Maddie thought. Nicknames. They didn’t like nicknames. Daniel had thrown a fit or ten when they refused to call him Danny but Buck hadn’t been able to say Daniel when he was two and so Daniel had won, in the end, with at least the two of them. Dan’y , Evan had called him. Danny , Maddie had said when she curled her body around his on a hospital bed. Natalie gasped and her hand wobbled as she held it up to her lips, her eyes wide as she looked out the window with the rest of them. Maddie was closer to her height, but she had inherited the look of their mother in most things. “Oh,” Natalie gasped again. “ Evan .” She sniffled. “He’s gotten so big.”
“He’s thirty now.” Maddie supplied, cautious of what information she handed out despite herself. “He’s… he’s a firefighter.”
“That’s such a dangerous job.” Natalie bemoaned.
“He loves it.” Maddie said with a shake of her head. It had taken her a while to get on board with it too, if she were being honest with herself. But Buck really did love his job, and he loved his team, and he was good at it. She had the reassurance of everyone he saved every single day, of Howie and Athena and Josh , even.
As if sensing their gaze, he turned to glance at them, whatever smile that had been on his face fading just a little when he caught them watching him. It was a microexpression, but Maddie had been trained in his expressions since he was born. He watched them, searched her out with his eyes and managed something softer and more real when Jee waved at him, waving back automatically just to get her to smile. And then Eddie said something on the other end of the phone that had that spark returning, that had his smile shifting from show to charmingly real and he was turning back around, showing them his back as he moved farther from the entrance and down the sidewalk. “Who is he talking to?” Philip asked her lowly.
Maddie didn’t know how to explain Eddie to her parents. They had met him, but she had it on good authority that Eddie had been frostily professional with them and not anything more. “A friend.” She provided instead of trying to explain the complicated everything that was Buck and Eddie. “Howard, Jee’s father,” Maddie answered her grandfather’s question from earlier with a shake of her head. “He’s back in LA. He actually works with Buck - Evan. He’ll be joining us for the weekend.” That was going to take some getting used to, Maddie realized with a frown. It hadn’t been all that difficult to transition from Evan to Buck when everyone else was calling him the nickname, but it was going to be a pain to switch back for the sake of her parents.
“He’s a firefighter too?” Joseph asked eagerly.
“A paramedic, yes.”
“Julianna, Gregory.” Natalie pitched her voice louder and gestured with both hands at her two other children. “Come meet your great niece!”
Maddie sucked in a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
She so owed Jee-Yun a trip to the aquarium after this.
--
“Chris has to do this science project,” Eddie was telling him, his voice a little tin-like on the other side of the phone even as Buck kicked at the pavement with every other step. He hadn’t really been contributing much to the conversation but, oddly enough, Eddie was more than willing to fill the silence himself. It wasn’t like he needed to, really. Buck was more than happy to just listen to him breathe on the other side of the phone. It was the illusion of company that he needed. If Buck actually wanted company he would have stayed inside, pressed his shoulder against Maddie’s and stuck by her like a centennial. But he hadn’t, and he was trying to not feel bad about leaving her there by herself. “It involves making a motor with Legos?” Eddie scoffed. “I don’t understand it at all but the kid seems excited.”
“Oh, yeah.” Buck remembered him mentioning it, now that he thought about it. During the last dinner they had had together before Buck got on a plane and avoided a panic attack by playing with Jee-Yun. “They do it all the time on that Lego show we watch.”
“The one with Will Arnet?”
“Who?”
Eddie laughed, a soft, fond sound that he had been doing a lot more as of late. It was usually accompanied by a shake of his head and a smile that had Buck’s heart pounding. This… thing between them wasn’t new. They had always been close, boarding on living out of each other’s pockets, even if no one else really knew about it. But something had shifted after Eddie’s breakdown and Buck’s death related breakdown and… well, things were different even if Buck was pretty sure neither of them was willing to put a label on what it was that was different between them. Maddie teased about it, Buck wasn’t avoiding talking about it, and Eddie was just… he was just Eddie . “The guy that voices Batman in that Lego movie Chris made you watch.”
“Oh.” Buck scratched at his ear. “Yeah, that one.” He shivered, stuffed his free hand even farther into the pocket of his sweatpants and shuffled forward a bit more.
“Anyway,” Eddie continued as he did… whatever he was doing back in California. Where it was sunny and warm and home and not Boston with the creeping chill of expectations prickling at the back of Buck’s neck. He supposed the time off was nice, and Buck did have quite a few good memories that were spent between Maddie’s old apartment and the train station. She had taught him how to drive on the narrow streets (well, her and Doug), Maddie had taken him for weeks at a time during summers and they had spent night after night wandering the city, mornings had been spent watching cartoons their parents wouldn’t let him watch on her couch once Doug went to work, afternoons he had spent in the park or at the big public library or science museum. His parents had stopped allowing him to go when Maddie and Doug had gotten married, or maybe Doug had stopped inviting him around, but Buck had taken the train in more times than he could count anyway, hours spent in one chair watching the world go by just to have lunch with Maddie at the hospital in the nurse’s breakroom. “He asked me for help but decided that YouTube was a better teacher after like ten minutes.”
“He could probably ask Karen.” Buck said absentmindedly, tracing his fingertips over the prickly needles on a short pine tree at the end of the sidewalk. He should really have turned around by now but whenever he thought about it or turned his body halfway to start the trek back to the hotel he remembered the way they all clustered around the window to look at him. Jee-Yun had waved, Maddie had smiled with that concern so clearly written on her face. His father had always looked old but he somehow looked even older standing next to the man Maddie told him was his grandfather. Buck was the same height as him, Maddie had the same face of the woman she had been holding on to. They all made a wonderful looking family, really. It was in their smiles and the warm way they embraced her. Buck had had to do a family tree project when he was eleven and Maddie had sat down next to him at the kitchen table as he worked on it. Their parents hadn’t mentioned anything about grandparents or aunts and uncles and cousins. One of them, the youngest of his father’s brother’s (his Uncle's ) children, had popped up on Facebook as a suggested friend. Nathaniel Buckley . He had just assumed they had the same last name, not that they were related.
“Hey,” Eddie said softly, firmly, pulled him out of his head as he was so good at doing. Buck blinked and he was in front of a boutique bakery, the heat wafting out through the door as a customer left, a paper coffee cup cradled in their hand. “You can just come home.”
Buck hastily grabbed the door before it could swing shut and ducked inside. “I can’t leave Maddie here by herself.”
“Maddie’s her own person.” Eddie argued, pragmatic as always. “Just because she wants this… big family reunion doesn’t mean you have to be there with her.”
Except he sort of did, didn’t he? “She wouldn’t leave me to deal with it alone.” Except she had … in a roundabout way. There was a dichotomy in understanding the things he did now that he was thirty - Maddie had every right to leave him behind and she probably should have sooner. Staying with their parents after everything they had tossed on her wasn’t fair to her, she had been hurt just as much as he had been, but the fact remained that there would always be a small, illogical, little boy in him that had watched his big sister drive away and leave him behind. “And it’s not like she’s making me spend time with them.”
Maddie hadn’t even asked. They both knew that Buck was there for one reason and one reason alone - to make sure Maddie got through it all okay. The reunion wasn’t for him, after all. Buck hadn’t even known these people existed until about a month ago, he had never missed them the way Maddie had. It also meant that Buck wasn’t likely to make the excuses for them that she was. “You can’t actually think that they’re not going to try and force a conversation with you?” Eddie asked wryly.
Eddie was even less generous than Buck was when it came to his… extended family. It wasn’t that Eddie didn’t understand where his parents had come from with Daniel - I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost Chris , Eddie had muttered years ago, when Buck had turned up at his doorstep absolutely ripped to pieces after finding out. But I don’t think I would be able to go about pretending he didn’t exist. But this wasn’t the case of his parents. This wasn’t a little bit of sympathy for the people who had tried everything to save one son and accidentally lost two. This was… these were grandparents and aunts and uncles who had let their nephew be swept under the rug. This was a group of people who allowed themselves to be carefully cut out of two lives that needed them and then never tried to reach out again. It was so incredibly complicated and, really, thinking about it all just made Buck exhausted . But Boston had its own charm, and it wasn’t Pennsylvania and it sucked that he didn’t have Eddie or Chris with him to show bits of his past to but he had Maddie and Jee-Yun and, really, Buck had survived off of less. “They can try .” Buck conceded after pausing to order a coffee he didn’t need (“A medium lavender honey latte, please. Hot.” Eddie had laughed in his ear, sounded a bit offended by the flavor and repeated it in an echo all the way in California like he couldn’t believe how pretentious Buck sounded when he ordered it.) and a delicious looking homemade muffin the size of Jee-Yun’s face to go with it. He shuffled down to the pick-up area, and took a plastic stirrer in hand, toying with it between restless fingers and glancing at his watch to check the time.
He had told Maddie they would meet for lunch, which still gave him a good… hour to sit in this coffee shop and ponder his life’s decisions or… something. “You’re all staying at the same hotel, Buck.”
He wrinkled his nose at the reminder. “But if I avoid the elevator…”
“Aren’t you on the fifth floor?”
“The place has stairs , Eddie.”
“You have chronic pain, Buck .”
Okay, listen, it was his own fault for calling Eddie here. If he had wanted someone to just listen to him whine he would have called Bobby and begged him not to put the phone on speaker so Athena couldn’t yell at him for not thinking straight. If he had wanted logic and a way to fix the situation, rally the troops or something, he would have called Hen. If he had wanted someone who would tell Maddie every single thing he was thinking and feeling so that she could fix the problem, he would have called Chim. But Buck had wanted someone to knock his head back on straight. Someone to listen to him whine and gripe and read the fine print to see that, even if he was joking about it, he wasn’t entirely… okay with it. I’m not sure we should be congratulating him . Eddie had said wryly when Buck had told all of them the sperm donation had taken. I understand wanting you to be their kid’s biological dad, Buck, but you know that doesn’t make you their… actual dad, right? He had asked when Buck was mid-breakdown on his kitchen floor. No he hadn’t known, thank-you-very-much. Or he had but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. Hen would call him out but Eddie would call him out, fill him with water and squeeze him so tight that every single emotion and thought would be wrung out of him whether he liked it or not.
“My mom looked like she was ready to chew my head off when I told Maddie I’d see her at lunch.” Buck mumbled instead, thanking the barista as they passed over his paper cup and porcelain plate. He balanced the muffin on his arm, found a table with a big, overstuffed armchair in the corner, and carefully lowered himself down onto it. The pain in his leg wasn’t all that bad, really. He had ibuprofen in his locker at work and in his hotel room for if it got too bad, a cream his doctor prescribed for after long, hard shifts. It was the cold that was doing him in, if he were to be honest about it. It was eating into his scars and reigniting where the screws had been placed in his bones. He shifted, stretched out his leg in front of him and rubbed at his knee absently. “I feel kind of bad leaving her there to deal with it all herself.”
Eddie hummed and Buck could imagine what he was doing with his face. His eyebrows were probably pulled up, his lips pressed tightly together like he was carefully avoiding saying something he knew Buck wasn’t going to like. Eddie had worn that look the entire time Buck was dating Taylor, it was his I don’t like the choice you’re making but it’s your choice to make look. “What are you guys doing for lunch?” Eddie asked instead of digging into the wound that was Buck’s complicated relationship with his parents.
“Have you even eaten breakfast yet?”
“You’re the one that brought up lunch.”
Buck laughed, a softer one than what he usually let out in deference to the stressed out college student at the table beside him. “I don’t know,” he admitted with a tiny shrug. “We might just let Jee pick.”
“She’ll just choose McDonalds.”
“There are worse choices.”
“McDonalds is trash, Buck.” Eddie argued like he always did.
“You’re only saying that because it was your first job.”
“No, it was my second job and it was trash.”
“Just because you only like their nuggets -.”
“It’s the smell .”
“It’s not like there’s In-and-Out here.”
“You can do better than McDonalds.”
“You know how I feel about seafood.”
“Doesn’t Boston have a bustling restaurant scene?”
“Yeah, it’s all seafood.”
“That sounds like a lie.”
Buck huffed and draped a hand over his mouth to hide his beaming smile from view. This was it, he knew, the thing he had been searching the world for. No wonder he hadn’t found it until California. He thought about it sometimes, when he was lying on Eddie’s couch or watching him with Chris at his own kitchen table, a word game between them that Chris only pretended to like because Eddie did. He had left Pennsylvania in search of who he was, in search of a purpose. He had found that in the 118, in firefighting. But he had found all of himself scattered in the Diaz household. And no wonder it had taken so long - Eddie hadn’t even been in the country when Buck had started looking. Buck had avoided Texas and stopped in almost every other state altogether. What were the odds, what were the chances. Right place, right time. There was never going to be anyone else, even if things never progressed further than where they were now. “I really want to take her to the aquarium.” Buck admitted, although it wasn’t a surprise. “This one’s really small but I think she’ll love the penguins.”
He knew she’d love the penguins. “Steal one and bring it home for me in your luggage.” Eddie commanded absently. It was… nine in Los Angeles. He was probably on his way into work, if Buck was remembering his schedule correctly. “It can be our child.”
“You want to split custody of a penguin with me?”
“Why not?”
They would do this thing , sometimes, where their playful arguments would take a turn into flirting territory. Eddie used to shy away from it, he’d shake his head and hide his smile and change the topic and Buck had learned not to push after the first few times. He liked Eddie a whole lot more romantically than Eddie liked him, and that was fine . Buck could cope. Only then Eddie had gotten shot and Buck had broken down the door to his bedroom and suddenly Eddie was getting better and flirting back and Buck was the one scrambling, trying to keep up with this new, tentative side that was certainly much more bold than he had ever taken Eddie to be. It was nice. It was exhilarating. It never failed to make his blood pump hot through his veins. “We should bring her to the aquarium out here.” Eddie said like they were a unit. They did babysit as a unit, sometimes. When Maddie and Chim needed a date night. Buck wasn’t sure if Chim knew they were watching her together but Maddie certainly did. “I think she’d get a kick out of the sea otters.”
“Who doesn’t like the sea otters?” Buck countered. “They hold hands when they’re sleeping.”
“To not get separated.” Eddie finished. “I know, you and Chris have both told me.”
“Well.” Buck blushed, suddenly happy Eddie couldn’t see him. “It’s important information.”
“I think they have a few new pups.” Eddie continued. “We should go when you get back. Make it a family thing.”
“A family thing?”
“The three of us?” Eddie balked at Buck’s question, like the wording he had used had caught himself off guard. “Me, you, Chris.”
A family thing. Buck smiled into his coffee lid. “I’d like that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Buck cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “And then… maybe we could… I don’t know. Do something that’s n-.”
“Is that Buck?” Hen’s voice yelled through the speaker. Abruptly, he cut himself off, his cheeks flaming so hot that the college student beside him raised their brow when their eyes accidentally caught. Her lips twitched and she pointedly turned back down to her… statistics book.
“Hen!” Eddie yelped.
“Hey, Buck!” Hen must have grabbed his phone from his hand. “How are things going in Boston?”
He smiled, shook his head, and sat back in his chair, pulling his phone away from his ear to snap a quick picture of his muffin and send it her way. “I’m having this muffin that’s, like, the size of your face.”
Hen clicked her tongue. “Do I make better muffins?”
“Hen,” Buck told her as seriously as he could. “Your muffins are heaven sent and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
--
Maddie met him outside of his hotel room, her teeth digging nervously into her lower lip and Jee-Yun loosely holding onto her hand while humming. Buck had this thing when it came to Maddie, it was a finely tuned something is wrong meter that had never failed him in all of his thirty years of life. He knew she had one for him too, but Maddie’s wasn’t quite as good at telling when things were wrong as his was. So Buck knew something was wrong before he even opened the door, it was in the way she knocked her knuckles against the wood, in the way she called his name, in the way she had texted first to let him know she had arrived. “I’m so sorry.” She said in a rush when he pulled the door closed behind him, more than happy to accept Jee-Yun as an apology and swinging her up into his arms to rest against his hip. She didn’t wiggle to get down, instead leaning forward to rest her little head against his shoulder and hug him as tightly as her little arms would allow her.
“For what?” Buck asked even as his nerves warned him that he probably already knew what she was apologizing for. Maddie was good at telling most people no . She wasn’t good at telling their parents it - he assumed that applied to the rest of… their family too. Jee-Yun’s feet kicked at his stomach and her fingers toyed over the edge of a scar on his shoulder.
Maddie twisted her fingers. “They insisted on coming.” She admitted as they stepped into the elevator. “It’s just our grandparents. They… they really want to meet you.”
And he didn’t want to meet them. He almost handed Maddie Jee-Yun back. He almost shoved her into her arms and he almost pushed the button to stop the elevator at the floor under theirs but instead he held her closer and watched Maddie press the button to the ground floor and counted to ten in his head. You’re not going to be able to avoid them , Eddie had warned him. “Maddie this…” He licked his lips and swallowed passed the gravel in his throat. “This doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“I know you don’t want to see them.” She mumbled. “And I know… I don’t want to force you or anything like that.”
“But you are.”
“No,” She pleaded, her eyes wide as she begged for him to understand. “Mom and dad -.”
“Maddie.” Buck groaned and tossed back his head. “Can’t we just… grab lunch together or something? Why does it have to be a whole family event?”
“They want to meet you.”
“They had thirty years to meet me.” Buck pointed out. “I don’t want to meet them .”
Maddie chewed on her lip and whined low in her throat. It was a complicated position for her, Buck knew that. She had just as much anger towards these people as he did, if not more. But Maddie… Maddie had always been the peacekeeper. And she deserved the family that their parents had taken away from her. But Buck didn’t want it . Not like this. Not with people who were going to sit across from him at a table and ask him about his life like they were entitled to it just because they all had the same DNA. “I know.” Maddie said after a moment, reaching out with her fingers to briefly trail them over his wrist. He was wearing a string bracelet, one that Hen had jokingly made him a few days before he got on a plane - red, white, black. Denny had gotten a friendship bracelet kit for his birthday and he had grown tired of it within ten minutes. Hen and Karen had spent all night making them, apparently. I know your favorite color is yellow, Hen had said with a teasing glint in her eye before her expression shifted into something more serious. But these are to remind you of home while you’re gone . Maddie tapped on the red and then on his skin, her touch grounding and gentle as always. “I tried to tell mom and dad to let you do this on your own time.”
“But they wouldn’t listen.” He finished with a scoff.
Maddie winced, the same way she always did when Buck said something frank about their parents. “I’m sorry.” She apologized again.
He didn’t know how to tell her it was falling a bit flat so he shrugged again, hitched up Jee-Yun higher and let Maddie step out of the elevator first. “It’s not like I can avoid it forever.” He muttered in an echo of Eddie just earlier that day. He hadn’t heard from him since they got off the phone, but Eddie was at work and Bobby had promised to tell him if anything serious happened while he was away. He would check in when he had some down time, Buck was sure. He couldn’t wait to tell him that he was right. He was pretty sure Eddie had a running tally somewhere that he was hiding - times Eddie was right and Buck refused to listen . They had to be up to at least a hundred by now. “Let’s just get it over with.”
“They’re really nice.” Maddie enthused with a squeeze of his arm in her hand. “And you can leave whenever you want to.”
He knew that, not that he would . He wasn’t about to ditch Maddie and Jee-Yun and leave them to the wolves the entire week, no matter how much he found he wanted to. It wasn’t in his nature to run away and leave Maddie behind, anyway. “Are, uhm…”
“At least they’re going to insist on paying?” Maddie offered him her pinky with another apologetic wince.
Buck wanted to jump out the window. He squeezed Maddie’s pinky with his own - we’re in this together . Pinky promise. “It’s not too soon to ditch them.” He mumbled to Jee-Yun when Maddie turned her back. “What do you say, Jee? Let’s just let Mommy have fun with all the boring adults and go see the fishies!”
Jee-Yun perked up with a big, beaming, beautiful smile. “Yeah!”
He laughed, tickled her side and pulled her pink hat down more firmly over her ears. “We have to steal Eddie a penguin, okay?”
“Okay!”
Maddie looked back at him, amused even as she seemed a bit confused by the statement. He shrugged off her look with an easy smile of his own and opened his mouth to continue planning their escape with Jee-Yun when his father’s hand clapped over his shoulder. Bobby did that too, reached out and clapped his shoulder. It always felt more reaffirming with Bobby than it felt looming. Like Bobby was pushing him back into his body, holding him steady. Like if Buck lost his balance and collapsed into the pavement, Bobby would reach down and pull him back up with ease and grace. Philip Buckley didn’t have the strength to hold the two of them up, he didn’t exude the same patience with Buck that Bobby did. But Bobby wasn’t his father, Buck had to remind himself, he was his boss . It was Bobby’s job to be there to catch him if he fell. That was just what the 118 did for each other. “Evan.” Philip sounded happy to see him, but he had sounded that way during the six therapy sessions they had gone to together before Buck had just… stopped scheduling them. Doctor Copeland hadn’t thought they were helping much, his anxiety had been spiking through the roof, and Hen had told him that there wasn’t much point in trying so hard to resuscitate someone when they were already gone. “We had half a thought you wouldn’t join us.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He wouldn’t have joined them if Maddie had given him more of a heads up, and they all knew it. Just like Margaret and Philip knew that Buck was only in Boston because Maddie had asked. If either of them had mentioned the whole… get together to him he wouldn’t have bothered coming. He would have been on shift, right now. Hell, he probably would have actually asked Eddie out without Hen interrupting. Margaret was standing by the door, slipping her fingers deftly into a pair of leather driving gloves with a dark blue hat pulled down softly over the curls Buck had inherited and chatting amicably to an older woman - a sneak peek into how Maddie would probably look when she was older. Deliriously, Buck wondered which side of the family Daniel had looked more like - had he taken after the Buckley’s or after the Harris’s? Did he look more like Maddie or like Buck? Would have been tall too or would he have been somewhere in between the two of them? Buck had one picture and that was just a copy of Maddie’s. Daniel posing beside the bike Maddie had used to teach Buck how to ride.
“Buck,” Maddie reached out a hand for him and wordlessly he let her pull him forward, happy that she didn’t let go even when he was standing next to her. Maybe it was pathetic, he was thirty and she was forty and holding her two year old on his hip but Buck was pretty sure he’d take Jee-Yun and start walking and just… never stop if she let go. “This is our granddad, Joseph.” The man was standing by reception, twisting a light gray beanie nervously in his hands. It struck Buck as odd, that toying with things was something they all did when they were nervous. Like they had too much energy and they didn’t know how to expend it.
Joseph cleared his throat. “Evan.” He didn’t falter, didn’t stumble over a nickname like Buck would have imagined he would. He steamrolled ahead like Philip would, like Maddie hadn’t called him anything different. She winced with an apologetic shrug. Joseph didn’t reach out to pull him into an embrace, but his eyes flicked over his face like he was trying to reconcile the man Buck had become with the two year old he had last seen. Buck was sure it was a shock, he was at least five times as tall. “I hope you don’t mind us crashing your lunch.”
He minded. He minded a lot . But Buck didn’t say that, only smiled when Maddie squeezed his hand and Jee-Yun patted his cheek consolingly with a mittened fist. “It’s okay.” He mumbled instead and wished the entire awkward interaction was over.
“I was just telling Natalie,” Margaret said eagerly, tugging Maddie over by her forearm and, because Buck was refusing to let go of her hand, tugging him forward too. His left hip twinged but he shook it out as he walked. Natalie was an old, classic beauty. She was wearing a purple hat that matched her coat and gloves and when she looked at him, she looked like she was seeing a ghost. She reached out with trembling fingers to touch and he shifted, just enough that he was out of her reach, Maddie’s shoulder to his front. It was more than a little pathetic, he noted, that he was such a tall man hiding behind his big sister. “About what you do for work, Maddie.”
Not about him, Buck thought absently, biting his cheek to keep from saying anything inappropriate. He wasn’t all that hungry anymore. “Oh,” Maddie glanced back at him and switched his hand around so that she could hold it with the one she had managed to pull a mitten onto as she slid on her other one. Margaret watched their tether of contact with a silent gaze but when Buck looked up at her she significantly shook her head. He flushed but turned his cheek closer to Jee-Yun, holding onto Maddie just a bit tighter in response. “Well, Buck got me the job.”
He wondered if she was doing it on purpose. Their parents and everyone else it seemed would insist on calling him Evan but Maddie was still purposely calling him Buck. It was what she deferred to most of the time when they were home, but he figured that was more because everyone else deferred to it. If anyone in LA had permission to call him by his given name it was Maddie, he had never corrected her when she slipped up and did it but she didn’t really do it all that often anyway. Bobby had called him Evan exactly once and then never again and Hen only did it when she was teasing him. Chim never had, although that was probably because Buck had never called him anything other than Chimney or Chim (Howard or Howie just… felt like it didn’t fit). Eddie called him Evan sometimes, when he needed his attention or when Buck was drifting too much. Because, Evan. It always made him shiver, made something like arousal stir in his gut. When anyone else said it, it felt like a condemnation. “Maddie…” Natalie started and stopped, clearing her throat and blinking until the haze around her blue eyes disappeared. “Maddie told us you’re a firefighter?”
“Y… yeah.” He shrugged. “I’m… I’m with the 118.”
“Is that a specification?”
No, it was just how Buck introduced his job to people. I’m Buck, he would say. I’m a firefighter. I work with the 118. My captain is Bobby Nash, my partner is Eddie Diaz. “It’s his firehouse.” Maddie explained quickly. “They’re distributed around the city with numbers to designate the house and response area.” She squeezed his hand comfortingly. “And the 118 is a fantastic house to work with.”
Natalie smiled, although it looked tense around the edges. “You work with Maddie’s husband, right?”
“Uhm…”
“Howie and I aren’t married, Gran.” Maddie explained with an air of barely concealed annoyance. “Remember?”
Natalie flushed. “Right, right, right.” She chuckled. “I’m sorry, dear. I must have forgotten.”
Or had wishful thinking. Buck knew their parents didn’t like that Chim hadn’t proposed the moment they found out Maddie was pregnant. He knew they had lectured her about it for six months before she had snapped and told them why she wasn’t all that into the idea of getting married again so soon after Doug. “How about lunch?” Philip said with a clap of his hands. “There’s that seafood place on the harbor we’ve been meaning to try out, right, Margaret?”
Buck hated seafood. It was something Maddie had teased him relentlessly about when he was younger - he frequented Boston, one of the best ports for New England seafood and Buck couldn’t stand it. His stomach lurched at the thought but he shrugged when Maddie shot him a concerned glance over her shoulder. “Evan,” Margaret said sharply as Philip herded his parents out of the hotel’s front doors. “Stop holding onto your sister. Honestly,” she clicked her tongue at them. “You’re thirty years old.”
“Mom.” Maddie cautioned, standing up a bit straighter with a warning in her gaze. “Leave him alone.”
“You’re coddling him.”
“We go see the fishies?” Jee-Yun whispered the question in his ear. Well, more like… spoke the question close to his ear in her normal voice. She didn’t quite understand whispering yet.
Buck sighed. “After lunch, Jee.” He promised.
“Pen… guin?”
“We’ll get you and Eddie both a penguin.”
“You will not steal her a penguin.” Maddie teased, sliding up next to him and dropping his hand to slide her arm through his instead. Margaret huffed but walked just a bit in front of them. His parents never held hands when they walked, Buck remembered. Not like Maddie and Chim did. He wondered if Eddie was a hand-holder. He thought he would be, Eddie was the type of person who liked a tether even if he wasn’t always big on the public displays of affection. “It won’t fit in our luggage.”
“A baby penguin, Maddie.” He widened his eyes in emphasis. “They’re furry when they’re babies.”
“A baby!” Jee-Yun punctuated excitedly.
Maddie laughed at the two of them. “Where would we even keep a penguin? They wouldn’t survive in California.”
“Penguins don’t just live in the cold, Mads.” Buck told her conversationally. “The macaroni penguin lives in Africa.”
“Macaroni!” Jee-Yun said with a nod.
“They have yellow hair.” He teased Jee-Yun’s and she giggled, covering her face with her mittened hands and leaning back far enough that he was scared, for a moment, that he’d drop her. “And they’re as tall as you!”
“Did Eddie ask you to steal one for him?” Maddie asked, amused and teasing with her glance.
Buck hunched his shoulders and fought down the childish urge to blush. “They’re his favorite.” He defended lamely.
Maddie laughed and squeezed his arm tighter. They said nothing more on the walk except to trade Jee-Yun between them when she reached for Maddie, her little cheeks turning red the longer they were out in the cold. “Didn’t you bring gloves?” Philip asked when he passed Buck who was holding open the door, eyeing the red of his fingers like they confused him.
Buck had brought gloves he just… hadn’t expected to be dragged on a walk down to the harbor for lunch. “I didn’t think we’d be going hiking for lunch.” He quipped with a roll of his eyes that Maddie matched with a mumbled thank you as she stepped into the restaurant.
“We’ll grab a cab on our way back to the hotel after.” She promised, setting Jee-Yun down on the restaurant floor carefully.
Buck shrugged, it wasn’t like it mattered all that much anyway. His jacket had pockets and if it really bothered him he would have said something. He rubbed his hands together anyway and blew a breath of hot air between them, bouncing on his heels and trying to shake out the way his leg had tensed up in the cold. His skin tingled, the heat from the restaurant blowing on his cheeks felt like tiny pinpricks sticking into his skin until he could feel them again. “Right this way,” the hostess said to them with a smile, gesturing with her head towards the back of the restaurant and leading the way up a flight of stairs. Buck stared up at them warily. He could do it, he had done more in worse conditions, but just because he could didn’t mean he really wanted to all that much.
He took them slow, letting everyone else go in front of him, happy to follow behind at the pace Jee-Yun was sticking to with her little legs, determined to make it up the steps on her own. He stumbled at the top, Maddie catching him with flex of her bicep, her eyes flickering from his face to his leg and back as he shook it out with a small rueful smile. “I can ask for a table downstairs?” She muttered under her breath.
“The view up here is incredible,” Margaret enthused over Maddie’s comment, imploring them with her eyes until they sat down, Jee-Yun sitting in a booster between the two of them. “Look at the ocean , Jee-Yun.”
Jee-Yun could very well see the ocean whenever she wanted to in California, Buck wanted to say. He rolled his lips and thanked the hostess as she passed him a menu instead. Maddie took the children’s one and set Jee-Yun up with the waxy crayons with the restaurant’s name in big bold letters on the box. “We should have gotten you one too.” Philip said with a laugh when Buck started coloring with her, carefully inside the lines as she scribbled.
He pursed his lips and said nothing at all, switching out the crayon when Jee indicated for him to, taking the blue for herself and leaving him with the red. The conversation was light, like his parents always liked to keep it, and Buck didn’t bother contributing much at all even if he knew it was horrible of him to not try and stay focused for Maddie’s sake. He kept Jee-Yun entertained, switching to a game of tic-tac-toe while they waited, flushing only a bit when he ordered the only not-fish item on the menu (chicken fingers and fries) when his father looked at him like he was making a joke until he ordered a side of barbeque and a water. “You two must go to the ocean every day,” Natalie enthused, reaching out to brush her fingers lightly over the skin on the back of his hand. He didn’t jump, but Buck did find that he froze, as though her touch was a bucket of ice water pouring down his spine.
He swallowed and shook it off, grabbing his cup and sipping from it for some way to move himself out of her range of motion. He was sitting beside Jee-Yun, Maddie was only a chair away, and on his other side was his mother, watching him like she was waiting for him to make a mistake. Buck suddenly felt more nervous than he had in a long time when it came to eating his meal, a memory of choking on bread clawing at the back of his mind. He swallowed thickly and glanced out the window, the ocean water glittering in the sunlight and bouncing against the side of a boat. “You’d be surprised,” Maddie said when Buck said nothing at all. “We’re both quite busy. I think Buck goes more than me.”
He did go more than her. “C… Chris has surfing lessons.” He tore his eyes away from the water and over to her.
Maddie smiled at him, gentle and understanding. Christopher had surfing lessons, Buck brought him sometimes (sometimes he crashed the surfing lessons to sit next to Eddie on the sand and sometimes he went for a long walk on the beach and remembered when all the water disappeared only to come smashing into him a moment later). The lessons served two distinct purposes - to help Christopher’s CP and to help his PTSD. He was a strong swimmer now, stronger than he had been during the tsunami, but Buck didn’t ever really go in the water himself unless he had to. “He’s taking them with your friend, right?” Technically, Justin was an ex-hook-up-turned-maybe-friend but Maddie didn’t need to know that.
“Yeah.” Buck confirmed and mustered up a smile for her.
A bit of her worry disappeared from around her eyes. Their food arrived, several dishes of chowder and fish and a bowl of macaroni and cheese for Jee-Yun. Buck ate two fries and shared one with Jee-Yun before Joseph said anything. “Were you two out there during that tsunami a few years ago?” He breathed in and out, deliberately slow and steady even as his hand shook. Buck could talk about the tsunami if it came down to it - he talked about it with his therapist and Eddie and Christopher, Hen and Chim and Bobby, even with Athena twice and once with Michael. But the last time his parents had seen him they hadn’t asked where he was during it and Buck hadn’t realized he was waiting for them to ask until they were leaving.
Maddie reached over Jee-Yun’s lap to squeeze his forearm with her cold fingers. “I was working.” She confirmed.
Natalie gasped softly. “Oh, that must have been so hard to deal with.” She reached across the table to pat at his hand but Buck’s were already both in his lap, fumbling uselessly with his phone. His background was Chris and Jee-Yun, taken at the zoo, Jee’s face pressed close to his as he leaned forward to tell her about the elephants they were looking at. Eddie had rested his hand on the small of Buck’s back and had taken Buck’s weight when he leaned against his shoulder for a moment and he wanted him there now . To lean into him now , instead of looking at a picture and glancing at a contact. “I couldn’t imagine living somewhere with so many natural disasters. Were you working too, Evan?”
“All hands on deck for something like that.” Joseph guffawed.
He could feel his father’s eyes on him.
The ocean was too close. The water here would be freezing if it crashed into him. Unrelenting. He would probably die of hypothermia before he drowned. “Evan.” Margaret snapped her fingers. “Your granddad was asking you a question.”
He coughed and blinked until he was looking at the Boston coast, half turning his body to look at Jee-Yun instead. “No, uhm…” He reached out and brushed at the corner of her mouth with his napkin, wiping away a smear of cheese gently. Buck mustered a shaky smile when she beamed at him, humming happily to herself in her chair. Maddie squeezed his forearm again. “No, I wasn’t working.”
“Hmm.” Joseph hummed and sat back in his chair, resting his hands on his stomach as he contemplated Buck’s face. “It seems like something like a tsunami would have had everyone called in.”
“Buck…”
“I was on medical leave.” Buck explained. “Uhm… I was watching a friend’s kid.”
“Medical leave?” Natalie cocked her head curiously, her eyes worried as she asked. “Was it anything serious?”
“Oh, Evan was always accident prone.” Philip said breezily with a laugh around his sip of water. “Wasn’t he Margaret?”
“Oh, yes.” Margaret agreed readily with a laugh of her own. “He spent half his childhood in and out of the emergency room.”
Maddie looked between them in disbelief. “That’s…”
“I was recovering from a crush injury.” Buck said boldly, instead. “One of the engine’s was bombed. I was trapped under it.”
Philip choked on his water.
He held Margaret’s gaze with his own. He wasn’t sure why he was angry with her, whether it was the implication that Buck had ever purposely hurt himself or whether the fact that he spent so much time in the hospital when he was younger wasn’t at least partially her fault. She looked away first, her top lip trembling the way it always did when she was about to start a guilt trip cry. What did you want us to do, Evan? “I was on the pier when the tsunami hit.” Buck continued hollowly.
And it wasn’t silent after the confession, conversation was still bustling around them. They were sitting rather close to the kitchen, music was pumping out the speakers above them. But everyone was staring at him like he had done something incredibly wrong by telling the truth. He cleared his throat, glanced over at Maddie and saw her breathe in deep and slow, deliberate even as she held on tight. He copied her breathing when he realized it was for him. “Oh.” Natalie said faintly. “That… that must have been…” She trailed off.
She didn’t try to reach for him again.
He thanked his lucky stars when his phone vibrated, a facetime request from Hen lighting up the screen. The timing of his team was fantastic sometimes. “I’m going to…” He waved it at Maddie and she nodded, squeezing his arm one last time before he stood up and disappeared into a corner, far enough away that he didn’t have to hear anything else.
“Buckaroo!” Hen cheered when he answered, her face beaming in the California sunlight. “You wouldn’t believe the call we just had.”
--
Maddie couldn’t sleep.
Well, okay, Maddie was tired enough that she was pretty sure she could sleep the next ten hours away but she hadn’t actually tried to sleep. Beyond waiting up for Howie to call at the end of his shift, she was teamed with a restless energy that had been choking her ever since lunch. After his brief phone call with Hen, Buck had seemed better, more animated, more Buck . But she knew he put on a good act, even if he had everyone else fooled. Their grandmother had asked about it when he was gone from the table - “The truck was blown up ?” She had asked with wide fearful eyes. And Maddie had killed her husband, another thing she was pretty sure her parents hadn't deemed important enough to inform the family of before reintroducing them all. The worst part was that Maddie wasn’t sure whether they had meant to not mention their traumas or if they had simply forgotten. She didn’t know which she preferred. Maddie had done her best to give them a very quick, very brief rundown. Yes, the truck was blown up. Yes, there was news footage online that Maddie had only once accidentally stumbled upon and immediately backed away from when she realized what it was. Yes, Buck was, for the most part, fine now but his leg acted up sometimes, especially when it was cold. Yes, he had been in the tsunami. Yes, both him and Christopher were physically okay. No, he didn’t really go in the water anymore unless he absolutely had to if it hit above his knees. She didn’t mention the embolism or the lawsuit or the months and months of recovery. She didn’t mention the nightmares or the therapy or… anything else really but she had, instead, circled the conversation around to their cousins, a safer topic as Gregory’s son Nathaniel was an accountant and his daughter Kara was a tax lawyer. Julie’s daughter was still in college but she was going to be a veterinarian and her son was a senior in high school aiming for a baseball scholarship to go to college in the spring.
He had seemed fine afterwards, his smile had been real when he sat back down. But Buck had barely touched his lunch and his dinner had consisted of a salad at the aquarium and he had disappeared somewhere when they were there too, with Jee-Yun holding his hand with a determination to go see the penguins. Their parents had crashed that little outing too, no matter how much Maddie had tried to insist that they return back to the hotel. They had said exactly twice that Buck was being rude when he seemed to horde Jee-Yun for himself but he had ignored them like it was a game. “He’s not stealing her away, mom.” Maddie had reassured with a roll of her eyes. “She wants to spend time with him.”
Children picked up on energy and the energy between her parents, grandparents and Buck was… palpable to say the least. She had found them after dinner on facetime with Eddie, Jee-Yun eagerly pointing at the penguins as they plotted the best ones to steal. Maddie hadn’t said anything, but she had watched for a long time, categorized the way Buck held Jee-Yun like she was something incredibly precious and the way Eddie watched him, like he was carefully picking apart the pieces of what had gone wrong in such a short period of time without Buck even needing to say anything. When they got back to the hotel Maddie was exhausted, she had made her excuses to decline a dessert invitation to the bar to meet up with the rest of the family, bundled Jee-Yun to her chest and slumped into the elevator after Buck, leaning her body against his for a moment that was much longer than necessary. She had almost invited him to her room, but Buck had merely kissed Jee-Yun’s head, squeezed her arm and disappeared into his own, the deadbolt sliding into place behind him.
So Maddie hadn’t gotten any sort of sleep and she didn’t think she was going to get any sort of sleep until she could… stop worrying some. But at least Jee-Yun was sleeping. At least… at least she could hope Buck was sleeping three doors down and not having nightmares.
Jee snuffled in her sleep and pulled the stuffed penguin Buck had gotten her closer to her chest. He had grabbed two, she knew, one for Jee-Yun that was the same size as her and a smaller, fuzzier one she had a feeling was for Eddie. The problem wasn’t, Maddie thought as she stared at her daughter, that Buck had said anything at lunch. No, the problem was the look on his face before he had said it.
Maddie was well versed in her brother. She was well versed in trauma responses, especially his . There had been a large distance in his gaze before their parents had brought up the emergency room visits. It had been creeping closer and closer as they spent more time in the group. He was closing off, removing himself altogether. Dissociating.
She wanted to talk to him about it. She wanted to… to… apologize at least. Maddie had never wanted this to be forced on him. Not the way their parents were forcing the issue. If Buck didn’t want to meet this family then he shouldn’t have to, no matter how much their parents wanted to play the picture perfect little family unit. This was a family that had left them behind, Buck didn’t have memories of them the way Maddie did. He wasn’t connected to them the way she was. They couldn’t just… keep expecting him to act like he was. To act like he was… like he owed them anything.
Maddie never should have asked him to come.
Howie called her from a bar. “Maddie!” He cheered, the same way Hen had cheered at the restaurant when Buck had answered his phone as he walked away from the table (he had been limping, though it was slight. Maddie wondered if anyone other than her had noticed). She knew every single one of the people they had left in Los Angeles would have. “I miss you.” He was on the verge of drunk, she could tell by his inability to control his volume and the way he was swinging his camera back and forth. Maddie smiled despite herself, his voice managing to thaw some of the ice that had settled over her skin.
“We miss you too.” She said as lovingly as she could manage, reaching out to brush Jee-Yun’s hair away from her forehead.
“Hen said I shouldn’t call you,” Howie continued with a pointed look off the side of the camera. “She said it’s too late .”
It was nearing one in the morning, Maddie realized with a frown. “Well lucky for you,” Maddie said with a teasing smile. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Howie frowned. “Why is that lucky for me?” He sobered with a shake of his head. “Why can’t you sleep? Is everything okay?”
Her lips twitched into a fond smile. “Everything’s fine.” Everything wasn’t fine. Not really. “I’m just… starting to think this wasn’t a good idea.”
Howie frowned and the camera caught the sight of a glass nearly falling over as he stood up and made his way outside, the noise dimmer and the streetlight catching shadows across his face. “What’s going on, Maddie?”
“I just… I shouldn’t have come.” She blinked away the tears that were starting to blur her vision. “This was a horrible decision. For all of us.”
“What…” Howie swallowed. “What happened?”
“Buck doesn’t want to talk to them.”
“That’s his right, Maddie.”
“No, I know that, really I do.” She shook her head vigorously. “I’m not trying to force it or anything. They just… our grandparents crashed lunch and then they all crashed our visit to the aquarium and…” She shuddered. “I don’t know if I want to be around them, Howie.” She admitted, running a hand through her hair. “It’s just so… complicated .”
Howie chewed on his lip. “You guys could come home? I know it’s early but… you could.”
“I want Jee to have a family.” Maddie emphasized and brushed her hands over her cheeks. “I just… I want this to be easy, Howie. And it’s not.”
“Of course it’s not.” He agreed. “Your parents… they all cut you two off. They were the adults, not you. And now they’re back and they want to act like nothing changed.”
“I’m so worried about him.” She admitted softly.
“Eddie said he’s doing fine.”
“Would Eddie even tell you guys if he wasn’t ?”
Howie said nothing in response for a moment. “I think he knows better than any of us do, really.” He had a point, Maddie could admit he had a point. “Look, Buck is better at dealing with this stuff than you tend to think he is.”
“If I’m having a hard time,” Maddie pressed. “How hard do you think he’s having it?” She groaned. “Mom and dad… they want us to spend more time with everyone. It’s like they… it’s like they’re showing us off.”
“They probably are.” Howie conceded with a shrug. “I mean, you’re pretty impressive, Maddie. You know I show you off.”
“You’re allowed to show me off.”
He smiled, a charming, handsomely crooked one. The one that made her fall for him in the first place. She wished he was with her, that she could lay her head on his chest and listen to his heart beat as he soothed her worries. “Why don’t you three go do your own thing tomorrow?” Howie offered. “Wake up early and just explore the city or something. If you get out of the hotel quick enough you won’t have to stop and see anyone.”
And he was right, of course he was right. Howie was a jokester but he was right a good majority of the time, especially when it came to ways Maddie could fix a problem. There was nothing that said they had to stick around the hotel and wait for their parents to delegate what they did. Buck had mentioned the cafe he had ended up in earlier in the day - they could have breakfast there, get Jee-Yun a muffin the size of her face and wander the city. Maybe hop on the ferry and go out to Salem or the islands. They could come back and watch a movie as Jee-Yun slept between them and she could make sure for her own eyes that he was still solid and whole and together .
But it was hopeful thinking, something in her was telling her that it was potentially too good of a plan to be true.
But she drifted off to it anyway, bidding Howie a soft goodnight and curling her body around Jee-Yun’s, the wrappers from the night before still laying on the pillow of the other bed.
--
They did, in fact, manage to avoid their extended family for an entire day. Tuesday had been a bust but Wednesday had been a blast . Maddie had truly never had as much fun in Boston in all of her years spent there. They had gone to the cafe Buck had found the day before for breakfast, and then stumbled upon a child friendly Shakespeare in the Park. She had convinced Buck to go on a Duck Tour with them, and they had ended the day at the Boston’s Children’s Museum. Between the two of them, Jee-Yun had definitely ended the day spoiled, but Maddie couldn’t find it in herself to care. If anyone deserved to be spoiled it was her daughter. But Wednesday wasn’t the problem. Wednesday was a great day full of laughter and two of Maddie’s favorite people in the entire world.
Thursday morning was when things went downhill. Specifically, two in the morning on Thursday when a loud, clipped knock pounded on her door and she jerked out of her first restful sleep all vacation. She jerked awake, blurrily located Jee-Yun as she slept peacefully in the bed next to her, still cuddled up on her stuffed penguin’s chest like she could hear its heartbeat despite the stuffing. Maddie glanced at her phone, read the time and the text thread from the dispatch group chat and squinted.
They knocked again and Maddie’s heart jumped into her throat.
What if something had happened? Evan was three doors down but they had shit luck even combined and it would just go to figure that something would happen when they were in another state and -. Maddie stumbled to her feet and over to the door, quickly disengaging the lock and squinting into the low lighting of the hallway. Margaret held a hand over her heart, her eyes wide behind the rims of her glasses. “Maddie, thank god .”
Maddie shook herself, glanced down at Buck’s still closed hotel room door and back at her mother. “Mom? What’s… it’s two in the morning.”
Margaret’s hand clawed at her wrist and she pulled , confused for all of a moment when Maddie didn’t immediately move to follow. “Your uncle… he’s… something’s wrong with his heart.”
She tried to shake the cobwebs from her head. “With his heart ?”
“Maddie, please.” Margaret begged. “You’re a nurse.”
“Not anymore.” Maddie would help, though, they both knew it. She wasn’t practicing anymore but that didn’t mean she didn’t still know what to do. That she hadn’t gone through all of that training and work in an emergency room for years after. “I can’t leave Jee.” She ducked back into the room, picked up her sleeping daughter in her arms with an apology quickly falling from her mouth at the way Jee-Yun whined and curled her little body into her chest, gripping at Maddie’s hair harshly before falling back asleep. “Mom, wake up Buck.”
Margaret recoiled. “What? Why? He’s not… you’re a nurse.”
“Mom,” Maddie scolded as gently as she could. People didn’t think right during emergencies, she told herself. Margaret didn’t mean for it to sound the way it did. Probably. Maybe. “He’s an EMT. He’ll probably know what to do better than I do.”
Sure he wasn’t as up to par in treating medical conditions as Howie was, but Maddie had seen her brother in action before. He was good at his job, he was great at what he did. And she wasn’t lying - if there was indeed something wrong with their uncle’s heart his best bet was probably Buck and what he could coach them into doing. Margaret didn’t move, though, and so Maddie moved for her with her eyes rolling quickly up to the heavens and then back down. She wrapped twice, quick and sharp in succession. “Has anyone called 911?”
“No,” Margaret followed, quick on her heels. “We thought you could help first.”
“ Mom .” Maddie groaned and then cut herself off as Buck’s door opened. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he had thought to throw on an unzipped hoodie (and wasn’t that suspicious, Maddie absently noticed that it wasn’t one that she recognized him owning but, instead, that it had the name of the boxing gym she was pretty sure Buck didn’t go to stitched on the breast) and their mother’s eyes dropped quickly to the tattoo on his chest and the scar angling up his shoulder before she dropped her gaze completely. “Something’s going on with Gregory, apparently.” She informed him as quickly as she could.
The thing about firefighters, Maddie had learned after dating Howie for as long as she had and getting to know this new side of Buck over the years, was that they never quite shut off the way everyone else had the luxury of doing. Be it because of long shifts where the bell could go off at any moment or the anxiety the job pumped through their veins, Buck looked tired for only a quick moment before snapping himself into action. He shook it off quicker than she did, shoved his phone and keycard in his pocket and didn’t even bother pulling the door shut behind him. “What room is he in?”
Maddie turned towards their mother for an answer. Margaret flushed. “434.” She fumbled for the doorknob and shut Buck’s hotel room door for him.
“What’s the situation?”
Maddie looked at Margaret for explanation again. “Your father and I woke up when he started coughing.” Margaret explained, they hurried into the elevator, although Maddie could see Buck’s mind doing the quick math on whether the stairs would be quicker or not. Uncomfortably, she shifted Jee-Yun’s weight. “Your aunt says he just woke up like that and he couldn’t stop.”
“And no one’s called 911.” Maddie tossed in helpfully.
The doors dinged open, their collective family apparently all having gathered in the hallway to stare into Gregory’s bedroom, a half circle of unhelpful spectators. Maddie handed Jee-Yun to Philip as Buck shouldered through the crowd. “Why hasn’t anyone called 911?” He muttered frustratingly. “Mom, call 911.”
Margaret flinched. “If Maddie could take a look at him first -.”
“Mom,” Maddie snapped, a lot harsher than Buck had done moments before. Gently, she nudged Julianna out of the way from where she was crouched in front of Gregory, her hand gripping tightly onto her brother’s neck. Julianna didn’t go easily, but perhaps that had more to do with coming face-to-face after so long ( again , Maddie reminded herself. This was the second time in a few days that Julianna was seeing her after so long apart) with her niece and nephew than it was any stubbornness on her part. She fell back on her heels and Maddie slid forward to take her place. “Call 911.”
“What’s his name?” Buck mumbled under his breath, lowering himself down next to her without a wince, even as she heard his knee pop uncomfortably. No wonder Howie didn’t know when his leg was bothering him. If Buck acted like this at work Maddie was lucky she had learned how to read him before LA hardened him.
“Gregory.” Maddie supplied and grabbed for his wrist. “Pulse is thin and thready.”
“My… my heart…” Gregory said between gasps. “It’s… it’s…”
“Racing?” Maddie chewed on her lip.
He nodded and slumped forward. “Gregory, hey.” Buck snapped his fingers in front of his face and Gregory startled, sitting up faster than necessary and nearly falling off the foot of the bed altogether. “Are you allergic to anything?”
“Anaphylaxis?” Maddie asked with a blink, although she had to admit that it would make a certain amount of sense.
“Just… almonds.” Paula said in a rush from where she knelt behind him, the blankets pooled around her waist and her hair a mess around her head. “But he hasn’t had any almonds! We avoid them like the plague.”
“Are you sure?” Because now that Maddie was looking for the symptoms it made sense. Gregory had a thin line of rash crawling up the side of his neck, his esophagus was swelling, his lungs were starting to wheeze.…
“Yes we are sure .” Paula snapped with a glare. “We’re careful about this. It’s fatal .”
“Does he have an epi-pen?” Buck asked instead of arguing with her even as Maddie glared back in frustration. “If it’s fatal he should have an epi.”
“Yeah,” Kristen, Maddie noted, was the one to answer, rushing forward and grabbed a packed suitcase. “Dad, you keep it in your suitcase, right?” Daniel had loved Kristen when he was younger. He had followed her around like he was her shadow, they had only been a few years apart and Kristen had called him kiddo and Maddie sweetie even if Maddie was all of a year younger.
Gregory nodded. “In the front pocket.” Paula advised. “Gregory, you have to breathe .”
“Ma’am, you need to get back and let me do my job.” Buck was operating as a firefighter, Maddie realized, not as a concerned member of the family. She wasn’t acting like a concerned member of the family. Somewhere along the way Gregory had shifted from her Uncle to someone that just needed help, Paula had switched from her Aunt that got her her first eyeshadow palette and to the family member they had to look out for that would potentially get in the way of treating the patient. “How far out is the response?” Buck directed back at their mother.
She fumbled. “A few minutes.”
“Okay.” He sucked in a deep breath.
“Mom -.” Maddie began.
“Tell them we’re administering epi.” Buck took the orange vial without a second thought, grabbed it from the middle, removed the blue cap and paused only to explain what was happening to Gregory in his best, patient, treating voice. “Gregory, this is going to pinch, okay?” He waited until Gregory nodded to continue.
“No -!” Paula began but it was too late - it was one of the newer Epi-pens. The kind that automatically distributed the medication the moment the orange was pressed to Gregory’s thigh. It was immediately discarded, placed by Buck’s thigh even as he rubbed at the injection site vigorously. “Those are expensive!”
“How are you feeling, Greg?”
It was easier for him to breathe, Maddie could tell. His heart rate was calming down as his lungs cleared. The room let out a collective breath of relief. “Gregory.” Their uncle corrected, shoulders slumping forward as the adrenaline slowly left his body. He sucked in a full, deep breath and coughed a few more times. “I don’t… I didn’t have any almonds.”
“Amaretto.” Buck pointed to the open bottle on the minibar with a rueful smile. “Its main ingredient is almonds.”
Maddie could have bashed her head on the wall. Paula flushed. “It’s… it doesn’t say that anywhere on the bottle.” She gushed in a high-pitched whine. “We wouldn’t have….”
“It was a mistake.” Maddie rushed to soothe, reaching out from where she had her hand on Gregory’s shoulder to hold him steady. “We all make them sometimes. It’s fine.”
Paula blinked big, wet eyes at her. “I’m so sorry, Gregory.” She enthused with a wobbly voice.
The elevator dinged, the noise unmistakably familiar as a paramedic crew stepped out of the lift. The family parted down the middle, Jee-Yun, half asleep still and much too little to understand what was happening, remarking loudly, “Appa!” in recognition of the uniform. Only it wasn’t exactly the same, after all their shiny silver shields had BFD printed on the front and not LAFD. None of them had Han stitched into the breast or 118 on their sleeve. Maddie stood up to make room, trailing her fingers lightly over Buck’s neck as she did so.
It was rare that she got to see him work, even rarer when she got to see the firefighter come out and her little brother step back. Even in the uniform Buck acted like her little brother whenever she was around. It was nice, interesting even, to see him rattle off statistics and information to paramedics that weren’t his team like they were. Dare she say it but Maddie was proud . “You’re lucky he was here, huh, Mister Buckley?” A paramedic said with ease, her hands working in quick and professional motions to take his vitals herself.
“Lucky.” Gregory echoed.
Lucky , Maddie agreed and helped Buck stand with a sure grip on his forearm. Wordlessly she tugged on the end of his sweatshirt and significantly glanced down. He followed her gaze with his and flushed, grabbed onto the zipper and tugged all the way up. “You don’t go to that gym.” She mumbled wryly.
“Oh my god, shut up .” He threw his arm over her shoulder, though, rested the side of his forehead gently against hers as Gregory was helped onto the stretcher and strapped in.
“This is so embarrassing,” Gregory gruffly said. “Paula, can you grab my jacket?”
“Better embarrassed than dead.” The female paramedic said with a beaming smile. “The doctors are just going to have to check you out and make sure everything’s okay. You’ll be back to your family reunion in no time.”
“Hey,” Maddie nudged at his waist and squeezed him tighter until he glanced down at her with a question on his face. “I’m proud of you, you know?”
Buck flushed, his cheeks growing pink even as he smiled. “I’m just doing my job.”
“And I’m proud of you for it.”
He shuffled his feet, his smile staying firm on his face. Maddie hoped he knew how honest she was being.
--
“Well,” Margaret said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her ankles, staring at Buck over the rim of her steaming coffee mug. “That was certainly an entertaining start of the day, wasn’t it?” They had ended up back in their parent’s large hotel room, somehow, the whole of them. Maddie with Jee-Yun cuddled tight to her chest, Philip talking in a low voice by the door to his parents, a younger woman, Buck thought her name was Julianna, was standing with her husband’s arm over her shoulder, leaning into him as she watched the group of them with an unreadable look on her face.
Buck was exhausted , really. Once the adrenaline had worn off he had wanted nothing more than to collapse back into bed. But Margaret had started a pot of coffee and Buck was hopeless to not follow Maddie like a lost puppy on the best of days and had shuffled after her, roughly scratching at the stubble on his chin and muffling a yawn in his sleeve. Eddie’s sleeve. The sleeve of the sweatshirt he may or may not have accidentally stolen from Eddie’s house the last time he slept over. He wasn’t sure what they were all waiting for, be it the first person to announce they were going back to bed or a call from one of the people that had gone with Gregory and Paula to the hospital on an update of his condition. Either way, it was late and Buck had made the mistake of sitting down and the mere idea of getting up and wandering back down to his own hotel room was appealing but more than his tired bones could handle. “You certainly held yourself well.” Margaret meant it to be a compliment, Buck knew she did, but it still had him bristling. Compliment or not, Margaret didn’t usually toss them in his direction without also offering a condemnation.
“Buck’s pretty impressive.” Maddie agreed readily, smiling gently in his direction and nudging his leg with her toes. He smiled back, matched it with his own and crossed his arms firmly over his chest and sunk down further into the chair. “This is what he does every day.”
Margaret hummed and blew at her coffee. Was it just him imagining things or did she look proud too? Buck couldn’t be sure, he had been waiting for thirty years for her to look at him in anything other than contempt. “You’ve done such a good job with them, Margaret.” Natalie said from where she stood next to Philip. “The two of you raised two incredible children.”
The problem with Buck was… well there were quite a few problems, actually, but the biggest one was that he was terrible at keeping his mouth shut when he was tired. He snorted, shifted his leg so that it rested more firmly against Maddie’s foot. “Yeah, good job, Maddie.” He mumbled with a scratch to the side of his nose.
She kicked at his leg, smirking when he yelped. Her eyes were soft, though, gentle in the way Maddie had always looked at him. And he wasn't wrong . Maddie had done a lot more to raise him than either Margarent or Philip Buckley and it didn't seem quite right of his mother to preen like she had been complimented. Like her taking the two of them and running away from their family after Daniel had died was the right choice. "Maddie," Juliana teased with a familiar click of her tongue (that click had followed him all through his childhood. Buck had been able to tell when he was in trouble whenever Philip had clicked his tongue. He hadn't always been able to tell why he was in trouble, but he had gotten pretty good at narrowing down when he was.). Maddie, though, didn't have the same reaction as him (she never did). He slumped further into his seat and crossed his arms tighter around his chest and Maddie smiled gently at their aunt. "Don't kick your brother."
Maddie’s foot tilted to the side, resting firmly against his and their mother pointedly looked at the press of contact between them like it personally insulted her. “He’s falling asleep.” Maddie lied effortlessly, like she had that one time Buck had been sixteen and she had caught him smoking with his friends behind the Shaws grocery store. He just doesn’t feel good, Maddie had told their parents and hustled him up the stairs and into his bedroom. “Want to take Jee?”
Relieved, Buck was more than happy to have something to finally do. He perked up, “Want her in your room?” They probably should have just gotten one, really. At least until Chimney arrived on Friday and maybe even then. It wasn’t like Buck wasn’t used to sharing a room (even sharing a room with Howard Han was familiar at that point). His body protested as he moved but Buck had long since grown used to ignoring the way it whined after little sleep. Maddie sat up too, Jee-Yun’s little face carefully pressed against her shoulder, her tiny chest rising up and down as she peacefully slept on, oblivious to what she had just barely missed.
Natalie startled and fumbled with herself as Maddie and Buck did the well-practiced handoff of sleeping toddler so that she was resting against his shoulder and Maddie was brushing gentle fingers through her dark hair. “You don’t have to rush off!” Natalie insisted. “We-Margaret,” she continued, flustered. “Surely, Jee-Yun can sleep on your bed?”
Jee-Yun , Buck wanted to correct the pronunciation. It wasn’t even like it was a hard name, two syllables and six letters. And, if they couldn’t pronounce it right, she had a perfectly easy to say nickname. Some people just don’t want to try , Hen would have said and pat his shoulder as he straightened.
“Or she can go to mine.” Buck continued as though his… genetic grandmother had said nothing at all. Maddie stared at him and he stared back. She’s trying , her eyes apologized.
I don’t want her to try , Buck had been trying to tell her that in all of the time leading up to the trip. He knew that she understood it, just like he knew that she didn’t quite know how she felt about the entire situation either.
It wasn’t just him they had let their parents hide away.
“You can take her,” Maddie decided with a swallow. “I don’t actually know where I put my key.” She admitted with a sheepish laugh, patting her pocketless yoga pants with a light, pretty flush to her cheeks.
Natalie made a noise in the back of her throat. “You don’t have to rush out.” She pleaded.
Buck had a lot of practice ignoring conversations around him. “Just knock when you come up.” He told her. “We can go to the front desk when you wake up to make you a new key.”
Maddie smiled at him in soft agreement. “Evan,” their mother snapped. “Your grandmother is talking to you.”
His grandmother.
Buck tensed despite himself and Maddie’s smile slowly faded from her cheeks. “Mom,” Maddie said in the same tone their mother had just thrown his way. “Just let it go.”
Margaret opened her mouth to say something, to admonish more than she had before and it was, once again, like he was ten years old again, stuck between his parents and Maddie, watching his big sister fight his battles for him. He bristled and Margaret bristled and Natalie’s hand touched his forearm, briefly, just above where he was holding onto Jee-Yun’s body. He jerked back, obvious enough that everyone had seen it and, not for the first time over the entirety of this trip did he miss Eddie and the way he would have seamlessly stepped in front of them (just like he did with handsy patients on calls) and bodily nudged Buck on his way out of the room. “Can I walk with you to your room?” Natalie asked quietly. “I would love if we… had a moment alone.”
A moment alone.
Buck didn’t want a moment alone with her. He didn’t want a moment alone with any of them. Please , Maddie’s eyes begged, it’ll mean the world to her.
Or maybe Buck was being unfair to her again. This family hadn’t just left him behind but Maddie too. She wanted a relationship with them, he wanted to make sure they weren’t going to leave her behind again, and at least Natalie was trying , whatever the hell that meant after thirty-some years. “Fine.” He muttered and Maddie’s eyes dropped from his face and to the floor.
I’m sorry , he imagined her saying. Thank you.
Hen said they were co-dependant. Doctor Copeland said the same thing, but in a much nicer way - of course you’re dependant on her and of course she is of you, the woman had said, dependance isn’t always a bad thing. It helped the two of you out of some very bad, very unfair situations.
The walk to the elevator was awkward, but as soon as the doors closed behind them Natalie turned to gaze at him. Buck had always liked the color of his eyes, his first high school girlfriend had told him the color was stunning, Abby had said they suited him, and, one time, when they were both drunk off of the exhaustion of a long shift, Eddie had told him that they were beautiful. No one else, when Buck was growing up, had the same color eyes as him. He had sat through the same biology classes as everyone else, he knew it was most likely just that he had a recessive gene, but there had a been a time, when Maddie had moved away and Buck had been feeling like a ghost in his own house, that he had made up a story in his own head that he wasn’t a Buckley at all. That he belonged to some family out there that missed him so much and couldn’t wait for him to find them again. Buck had only ever told two people about that little fantasy. Doctor Copeland had only smiled sadly at the story and jotted something down in her notebook - Eddie had asked him the lore attached to it.
Buck didn’t know how he felt, now that his own eyes were staring back at him in a face that wasn’t his. He had made up a story where he wasn’t a Buckley at all, and yet, in a hotel full of them, Buck was rapidly becoming aware that he was perhaps mostly Buckley. It wasn’t just a fluke - he saw his own smile on the face of the man that called himself his grandfather, he had the same eyes as Natalie, he had Gregory’s height and Juliana’s hair and Buck didn’t know what to make of how that made him feel. He had wanted, for so long, to belong somewhere. When he was a child, he would have given anything to know that he had a family that wanted him. As an adult, he knew he did.
They just weren’t… they weren’t the people who were hosting the week.
“You’re good with her.” Natalie said as Buck reached around her and pushed the button of the floor he and Maddie were staying on. They had been lucky (lucky, as in Maddie had requested it) to get rooms so close together. She looked at Jee-Yun like she wanted to reach out and touch her, but she never did, only maybe that was because Buck had pulled her closer into his chest with a glance at her peacefully sleeping face.
He shrugged. “It’s not like she’s a hard kid.” It wasn’t like any kids were all that hard, really. They were just little humans, they were learning the world around them like everyone else, doing the best with what they had the skills to manage.
“From what Philip tells me,” Natalie said with a soft laugh. “You were a bit of a handful.”
Buck hadn’t… when he was younger, he would have agreed with that assessment. Buck had been a handful and he hadn’t made anything easy on his parents that didn’t even want kids in the first place. Only that hadn’t really been the case - the more time he spent around children like Denny, Harry, Jee-Yun, Chris, the more Buck realized he had acted like any normal child. He had pushed boundaries, climbed trees, chased fireflies, did stupid stunts and made stupid jokes. His parents hadn’t had any patience for Buck when he was growing up and Buck had assumed that their short tempers were simply normal. Except Bobby never snapped at him the way his Philip did, and Buck had learned more about healthy parenting from a single father than he had from anyone else. If Chris could lie to his father and have his punishment be a grounding for a week and a frank, vulnerable discussion, Buck didn’t know why his punishment - if he had been Christopher’s age - would have been something much more brutal. The punishment has to fit the crime , Eddie had said with a groan. It’s not like Chris got in a fight or something. He kept a secret, he broke the rules, but he made sure he was safe when he was doing it.
I wasn’t that bad , Buck wanted to argue (Maddie had told him that he wasn’t and Bobby had told him that he still wasn’t and when Eddie and Hen said it too Buck figured it had to be true). “I was a kid.” He said in explanation, resting his cheek on Jee-Yun’s soft, thick hair as the elevator moved upwards.
“Of course,” Natalie exclaimed. She watched the two of them for a moment more. “Do you have any of your own?” She asked quietly. “Your parents said… well, they said that you technically don’t.”
And he didn’t. Technically. Connor and Kameron had a sweet, healthy baby boy that he got to see once every few months that was half his DNA, but that baby boy wasn’t his . But he also sort of… did . Carla jokingly called him Christopher’s co-parent, citing the fact that Buck was listed as his second emergency contact on all of his school, afterschool, and medical paperwork (and that, sometimes, Chris was more afraid of how Buck would react to a situation than how Eddie would). His parents could be talking about either of them, but Buck had a feeling they didn’t actually know how much he took part in Christopher’s life (he was pretty sure no one really did, but the majority of their team had just… grown to accept it. Eddie had needed help and Buck had needed the two of them as much as they had needed him.). “I don’t.” Buck didn’t know why she was asking, really, but it wasn’t like Natalie was pushing anymore than a patient did. “My, uh… my partner has a kid.”
Natalie reeled back. “Your partner?” She echoed.
The doors dinged open and Buck instinctively placed his body with one foot in the elevator and one in the hallway, his back to the sliding metal door so that Natalie had the time to usher her way out.
The older woman’s mind didn’t immediately go towards the station, Buck knew. Most people didn't. Buck would say my partner and Eddie had written down partner on Christopher’s emergency paperwork, and most people just assumed that they meant romantically (and they did , sort of… only they hadn’t… done more than halfway reference that with one another). It was telling, Buck knew, that neither of them bothered to correct the assumption, even after a few months of knowing each other. “Yeah.” He could have expanded further, cleared up the assumption but it wasn’t like it was wrong , per say. They loved each other, they both knew it (they had both said it), they just hadn’t… taken their relationship to the next step yet (Buck had a feeling they were both a little afraid of it, really.).
“How, uhm,” Natalie scrambled after him, struggling to keep up with his longer strides. “How old is their child?”
“Chris?” Of course it was Chris, Buck hadn’t mentioned any other child. “He’s thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” Natalie echoed in disbelief. “Aren’t you a little young?”
“No?” Buck screwed up his face in her direction. “It’s not like I was the one pushing him out or anything.”
Natalie balked, “That’s a little crude -.”
“Besides, I’m thirty-one now. I’ve known Chris since he was, like, eight.” He had been eight, Buck remembered, because he had sat next to Eddie on the floor in front of his couch and helped him wrap his birthday presents the night before. Eddie had gotten tipsy and cried about how this was three birthdays, now, that Shannon had missed and… and how she would have no chance of seeing any others.
Natalie Buckley, a woman Buck had never even known existed for the majority of his life, didn’t need to know that part of his story. “He’s a great kid,” Buck continued, just as enthusiastically as he did whenever he talked about Chris. “He’s super smart. Last I heard he wants to be an architect.”
Natalie’s eyes sparked. “What do his parents do?”
“Well, uhm, Eddie, he’s a firefighter too. Used to be a medic in the army and he’s still technically certified to do that too, so every now and then he’ll float over and help Hen and Chim on busy or difficult cases.” But, mostly, Eddie was his partner. They worked together unless there was reason for them to not work together and, so far, there hadn’t ever been a reason for them to not work together (aside from… injuries and… time off).
“Maddie said her… boyfriend is a paramedic with you?”
“Oh!” Buck rounded the corner to his room and stopped outside of it, shifting back and forth and digging in his pocket with one hand while holding Jee-Yun still with the other. It was a skill he hadn’t quite mastered yet, but he had always been surprisingly good at balancing children. “Yeah, that’s Chim. Chimney - Howie… Howard.” He cut himself off with a flush to his cheeks.
“Nicknames,” Natalie smiled at the wall. “Your brother, Daniel, he used to pitch a fit .” Buck froze - Maddie mentioned Daniel very little, in passing if much at all, and their parents had only brought up his death in the two therapy sessions they had attended. He didn’t know anything about Daniel, except that Buck apparently looked like him and laughed like him and had been born to save him. He was so excited to be a big brother, Maddie had said, once, when Jee-Yun had just been born. I thought about naming her Danielle, did you know that? “He always hated being called Daniel. He’d beg us to call him Danny. He even got Maddie into it,” Natalie laughed with a shake of her head. “It was so cute. He’d be sitting there and getting all riled up and your father would have to explain to him over and over again that his name meant something and he should be proud of it.”
Buck could sympathize. He remembered being ten years old and wanting to be given a nickname like everyone else in his friend group. “Oh, uhm…” He cleared his throat - he didn’t know if, in all of his experience with children, watching them get riled up was ever something he considered cute . He didn’t like seeing Christopher or Denny or Jee-Yun, Harry or May or any number of children he had even passing relation to, upset. He would try his hardest to help them work through that emotion, how to figure out how to present it to the adults around them to get the best amount of help they could need…. “I -.”
“You won him that argument in the end,” Natalie tapped her fingers on the skin of his wrist. “You had the hardest time saying Daniel and him and Maddie worked together to teach you Danny instead. You were such a stubborn baby.”
It still stuck to his skin like he was hearing it for the first time from his mother’s lips. It stuck like our miracle baby, a phraseology that his parents had picked up after quitting therapy and choosing to, instead, invest in self-help books that never actually fixed anything. You might have to get used to the idea that your relationship is never going to be anything but what it’s become, Doctor Copeland had cautioned. “I, uhm… I don’t see how a baby can be stubborn.”
“Oh no,” Natalie flapped her hand in his direction. “It wasn’t always a bad thing.”
Always .
“Right.” Buck’s fingers closed over his keycard and he nearly sighed in relief. “I have to get her to bed.” The door beeped when he slid the card in the reader, the lock disengaging and the door knob turning easily as he pushed the door in.
“Oh!” Natalie caught the door before it could close. “Let me help.”
“I know how to put my niece to bed.”
“I’m not…” Natalie floundered but, notably, did not move away from Buck’s doorway. He glanced at the ground - he was strong enough, if he needed to, to wrestle the door away from her. He wasn’t in any way going to attack an old woman for no reason, but he could. If it turned into a situation where he would need to.
Which was actually rather sad, wasn’t it? That he was thinking, now, about how he might have to force a woman that was part of his genetics out of his room… that would be something to go over with Doctor Copeland when he had his session at the end of the next week. He had a feeling they’d… have a lot more than that to cover, though. “Listen, ma’am -.”
“Please,” Natalie’s eyes begged. “Call me Gran.”
“ Ma’am .” Buck reiterated. “If I don’t put her to bed she’s going to wake up super cranky. And you don’t know this, but her father is a pain in the ass when he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep and Jee’s inherited all of those traits.”
“At least call me Natalie,” She insisted, her eyes sparkling.
His aggravation spiked. “ Natalie ,” Buck said with gritted teeth. “Please, let me put my niece to bed. I don’t need help. You’ll find I’m just as stubborn now as I was when you last saw me at my brother’s funeral.”
Cruel, cruel, cruel. It had her reeling back and the Bobby in his mind sighing with a small, fond shake of his head. Always so quick, Bobby would say. She’s trying Buck. Give her a chance.
She’s not the one you’re angry with. Doctor Copeland would remind him.
Is there a better way for you to say it? Eddie would pose with a shrug. Maybe. But maybe she needs to hear it too.
Natalie pushed a laugh past her lips, her hand hovering over her mouth. “Julianna always had a temper like that too.” Natalie said, although her voice wavered on hurt.
“Please get out of my room.”
“We shouldn’t have left you and your sister.” Natalie, though, was apparently just as stubborn. Buck wondered if it was an inherited trait or a learned one. Had he been stubborn because of genetics or because, if he wasn’t he never would have been able to do anything at all? Was he stubborn because of a grandmother that he had no memories of, or was he stubborn because Maddie had given in so easily and he had grown tired of watching her get hurt every single time? “I know that. But what were we supposed to do?”
What were we supposed to do?
Buck had tried counseling his parents through their bad decisions. He had tried working with them to figure out a better way forward, but they had stopped to take in the view and Buck had kept walking and somewhere in the middle they had lost sight of each other.
Natalie wasn’t going to leave . Not as easily as Buck wanted her to do so and his arm was starting to ache from holding Jee-Yun’s dead weight against it (and it wasn’t like she was heavy , but Jee’s little elbow was digging right into the edge of his scar from the lightning strike and it didn’t really bother him so much as it… sort of bothered him). He rolled his eyes and stepped further into the room, kicking his still open suitcase on the floor closed and crossing over the king sized bed. He gently placed Jee against his pillow on the right, pulled back the covers on the left, and put her there, bending down only for a quick second to grab the small stuffed penguin he had picked up at the aquarium and handing it to her for something to hold onto while she slept (it wasn’t like Eddie would care. He’d make a stink about having to share but so long as Buck got a picture for him to see he wouldn’t do anything other than complain). Jee-Yun settled quickly, huffing her sweet little snore when he kissed her forehead and smoothed over her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
The door closed softly behind Natalie and Buck almost pitched himself forward onto the side of the bed Jee-Yun wasn’t on and pretended to pass out. Hid himself under his hotel issue, too soft pillow and pulled the blankets up to his ears and hid until she couldn’t see him anymore.
It wasn’t like he had been allowed to get much sleep, either. And it was nearing six in the morning, the sun was already starting to glitter off the snow and reflect back against the windows. “Daniel… he was such a sweet boy.” Natalie said with a twist of her fingers. “And he loved you so much.”
It somehow felt cheapened when Natalie said it. He loved you so much . Maddie said it and Buck was inclined to believe her, his parents never said anything at all about Daniel and… and that was it really. If Buck wanted to know more about him - and he did . Daniel had been a living, breathing part of his family that Buck had literally given parts of himself to that he would never get back. He had been a child and he had had dreams and aspirations just like everyone else and he had never gotten to see them to fruition. But that wasn’t Buck’s fault. He had been a baby! What was he supposed to do? - he was going to have to ask the family he hadn’t even known existed.
But this? This conversation and ambushing him in his hotel room? That was for Natalie’s sake, not for his. “You have to understand,” Natalie pleaded. “We didn’t know why you were born until it was too late for us to do anything to stop it.”
Buck was running on entirely too little sleep to have this conversation. He didn’t have his back up with him, he couldn’t prepare for it and everything that it could potentially entail. Doctor Copeland and him had come up with some vague script of what to do in case things got dicey, but Buck hadn’t expected to be followed up to his hotel room and locked inside with a grandmother he had never known and his niece. He couldn’t just leave and pretend he had an important phone call and have Natalie be granted unsupervised access to Jee-Yun.
They had left him and Maddie so easily. What was stopping them from doing the same to her? And if Maddie wasn’t going to protect her from that possibility, then Buck was going to have to. “I don’t really think…”
It didn’t really matter anyway (it mattered a lot ). It had been thirty-one years ago (it had been all of two years ago that Buck had even found out). “Daniel was so sick ,” Natalie blinked until her eyes stopped watering. “It was like he lost all of his joy. And then you were here and Philip was telling me about this experimental treatment, and how your cells were an exact match because they had made you that way. A medical miracle.” She even snorted in the right place, like the phrasing had driven her insane even at the time. How dare the Buckley’s do whatever they could do to save the child they wanted, including having another child? “I didn’t even understand it.”
When Buck had been in high school they had read a whole dystopian novel about designer babies. They had talked about it in his biology class, about the ethical and moral implications of such a thing. GATTACA had been his hyperfixation for over six months and he hadn’t even known that he was the one that had been created in a lab. He wasn’t like the other kids in his class, he hadn’t been conceived out of love or passion or anger. He had been carefully calculated and tested to give the best chance science could to a sick little boy. “You used to come home with all of these bruises and aches. Maddie was so protective.” Natalie said with a small, fond laugh. “And Daniel started getting better. It was working! He was home from the hospital and everything.”
“And then he died.” Buck didn’t want to hear it anymore. He had heard the story over and over again in the last two years - Daniel had been getting better, he had been growing his hair back and his strength back and then, one day, he had collapsed playing in the backyard and Maddie had had to call 911 because he hadn’t been able to get back up and a week later Daniel had been dead. The cancer had spread quick and quiet and their parents had buried him much the same and moved them from Boston to Pennsylvania and never looked back. It wasn’t his fault, Buck knew it wasn’t his fault, but there was still an instinctual guilt that clawed up his spine every single time someone told him what had happened. “Why are you telling me this?”
He sat back on the bed, his body blocking Jee-Yun’s from view, and rubbed at his birthmark. “We were grieving ,” Natalie insisted. “And that’s not an excuse -.”
“Then why are you using it like it is?”
“I’m just trying to explain to you why we weren’t there.”
“You weren’t there for the same reason why my parents weren’t there.” Buck shrugged. “No parent should have to bury their kid, okay. And no grandparent should outlive their grandchild, I get it .”
“It was so hard -.”
“You think it wasn’t hard for us too?” Buck gestured in frustration, his voice straining to keep a normal, level tone so as not to wake Jee. “Not even me, but Maddie ? She just lost her brother and then her entire family in, like, two minutes.”
“Your parents wanted to raise you without telling you anything at all.” Natalie cried. “I couldn’t live with pretending Daniel never existed.”
“So you just pretended we didn’t?”
“That’s not what happened -.”
“Maybe not to you.” Buck tossed his hands up in a frustrated shrug. “Maybe you, I don’t know… bought us a Christmas present every year and still got our school pictures or something. But I didn’t have grandparents. I didn’t have aunts and uncles and cousins.”
“That wasn’t our fault , Evan.”
“Then who’s fault was it? Because Maddie and I were kids .”
“It was a bad situation.”
“A bad situation that leads to a few dozen bad choices and we’re supposed to… what? Just act like nothing happened almost thirty years later?”
“I don’t know .” Natalie swiped at her cheek. “But I’m trying. Isn’t that good enough?”
“I don’t know if I even want you to try.”
“Evan.”
“No, listen, I’m… I’m here because I didn’t want Maddie coming here alone, okay? Because as far as I’ve been around, she hasn’t had anyone else to have her back. I’m here to make sure that Jee doesn’t get dragged into any more of our fucked up family shit -.”
“Language.”
“English.” Buck rolled his eyes. “I’m here so that she doesn’t get dragged into anything else because the rest of the Buckley’s are too chicken shit to do the hard thing and stop each other from making monumentally stupid decisions.”
Natalie flushed and dropped her eyes down to her hands. “I know what we did was terrible. We shouldn’t have let them leave with you two.”
“I don’t really care what you should have done. I don’t really care what you do now . I’m here for my sister, and I’m here for my niece, and when this week is over I’m going to go back home with my family and you guys can all go back to pretending that we never existed.”
“We never forgot you,” Natalie insisted. “Not ever .”
“Then why wait thirty years?” He asked with a shrug. “This excuse doesn’t work when you look at it through the context of today. The internet exists. Social media exists. Hell, you could type my name into Google and see the exact firehouse I work at, my badge number, who my union rep is.”
“Would you have answered? If we had tried to go about it that way?”
“We’ll never know, will we?” Buck gestured towards the door. “I don’t know what you want for me, really -.”
“I want to know you.”
“Okay, well,” he shrugged. “Good to know?”
“We all want to know you two. If you’ll just give us a chance,” Natalie begged. “I’d love to hear more about your step-son.”
“He’s…” Chris wasn’t even his , not really. Except he also sort of was, where it mattered. Maddie always joked that Chris acted more like him than he did Eddie half the time.
“And more about his mother.”
“His mother?” Buck didn’t even know much about Shannon. He supposed he knew more than anyone else on the team, and maybe more than Carla, but he didn’t really know anything about her. They had met only once, when Shannon had been on her way out of the house and Buck had been on his way in to pick up Chris to go to an exhibit at the science museum. Chris talked about her more than Eddie did, but a lot of Christopher’s memories were tinged with an air of not quite real. He had been so young when she had left, and then she hadn’t been around for longer than a few months before she had died. Shannon and Eddie… they had been tumultuous and a whirlwind. They probably never would have ended up together, even if Shannon hadn’t died. But Buck’s own feelings towards Shannon didn’t matter when Chris still loved her and Eddie didn’t know how to hate her. “Why do you want to know about his mother?”
“Well, do you love her?”
“I… I don’t know?” It was an odd question to ask. Did Buck love Shannon? No? She was half the reason why he had Christopher in his life and he didn’t hate her but he didn’t really… feel anything towards her except resentment and confusion. Shannon had had something Buck had literally died to find, and she had let them both go so easily… she probably sounded a bit like Natalie, actually, when it came to defending her actions. What was I supposed to do? He could, maybe, forgive leaving Eddie behind. Christopher hadn’t deserved anything that Shannon had done. “She’s Christopher’s mom.”
Natalie frowned and that was a very clear look of disapproval on her face. It rivaled his father’s. That must have been where Philip picked it up. “If you don’t love her, how can you think about starting a family with her?”
“She’s dead.” Buck wrinkled his nose at her. “I don’t think I’m going to have to start thinking about starting a family with her unless my life really is a telenovela.”
“She’s dead?” Natalie’s expression wilted into a much more pitying one which was… mildly hilarious considering Buck barely even knew Shannon. “And you’re still part of her son’s life? That speaks so much to your character, Evan.”
“I don’t…” Was he having a stroke? He was pretty sure these weren’t the symptoms of one but he had also been stuck in a coma dream for a few days so… wait was he still in a coma? Had he texted Bobby? He grabbed for his phone, his heart starting to rapidly beat in his chest, a panic starting to pull at the back of his throat and…. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.” He admitted and navigated to the text screen with sweaty hands.
He hadn’t texted Bobby. He had been so thrown off when Maddie woke him up that he hadn’t thought about checking in and… sticking with his routine that was probably an unhealthy attachment. Morning! He sent with a little smiley face and watched as the timestamp switched from delivered to read and Bobby's own answering, three little dots appeared moments later. Quicker than usual, considering the time difference, but Bobby had known about Buck’s little… text routine since he had started it (if he knew why he didn’t say anything about it) and even though the frequency had dwindled, he seemed to enjoy getting them as much as Buck felt peace after sending them. “I’m sorry you’ve lost another person so important in your life, Evan.” Natalie soothed and reached forward, holding onto his hand and jolting him out of his thoughts.
“Shannon didn’t really mean anything to me.” Buck told her. “But thanks, I guess?”
Natalie reeled back, as though stricken. “You were dating her, and yet she meant nothing to you?”
“I wasn’t dating Shannon.” Buck laughed, finding the whole thought a little… ridiculous. No, Buck was pretty sure him and Shannon only had two things in common - loving Chris and loving Eddie. They didn’t like the same books, the same movies, the same anything . Three things, maybe, since apparently Eddie went for people with dark, curly hair and light eyes.
“But you said…”
“The default isn’t straight .” It was like telling Bobby all over again, only Bobby had been red faced and stuttering out a laugh during his probationary year before apologizing for assuming (and then had gone with him and Hen to Pride, something that Buck hadn’t ever expected him to do that first year, let alone every year that they weren’t working since). Natalie’s cheeks colored, her jaw dropped open and her hands smoothed over her legs.
“O… oh.” Natalie flushed. “You’re homosexual.”
“I’m bisexual ,” Buck corrected. “If you need a word for it.” Probably closer to pansexual, actually, because gender didn’t matter in the least - Buck had been with plenty of women, men and people who identified as neither. It didn’t matter in the long run. But explaining that term to people that weren’t already familiar with the community was… a toss up he didn’t feel like trying to catch just then.
Good morning, Buck! Bobby’s text answered back. What’s on the agenda for today?
His tension eased.
Uncomfortable family conversations. 😀
“Wonderful,” Natalie hastened. “Well, uhm… I should probably let you get to bed, huh? It’s been an eventful morning for all of us.”
Buck hadn’t wanted her in his life anyway, so he didn’t know why her passive attitude was causing his heart to leap into his throat. It was the part of him that had always wanted to be accepted, the part of him that had always taken note of every single time his parents said something like… I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home but why do we have to see it? “Right.” Buck said hollowly and stood up, opening the door for her and seeing her out.
Natalie stopped, her hand hovering over his chest and then reaching out to pat gently it.
He shut the door after her and flicked the lock into place, pulling the hood up over his head and tugging it closed around his nose in frustration. He groaned, dropped himself as gently as he could onto the bed beside a still sleeping peacefully Jee-Yun and grabbed his phone when it vibrated.
It’s been a slow shift.
Want to talk about what’s going on?
Buck was pressing the call button before he could convince himself not to.
--
“I just don’t understand,” Margaret hammered on, tapping her fingers around the rim of her porcelain mug. “Where did he get that attitude ?”
It was a familiar lament. Maddie had to admit that it had lost its potential of being something she cared to explain when she was forty and Buck was thirty-one. “I don’t know,” Maddie said dryly, twirling her own liquid around in her mug and wishing that it was something stronger. “Maybe it comes from lying to him his entire childhood.”
“Maddie.” Philip scolded as he sat down in the chair next to her. “We shouldn’t have to keep apologizing for that.”
“It’s in the past,” Margaret agreed. “We can’t change what happened.”
They had just forced Maddie to pretend she hadn’t lost one brother to the point that her other brother forgot Daniel had even existed. She rolled her lips together and leveled her face next to Jee-Yun’s, tickling at her chin and laughing with her as she triumphantly stuffed a pickle in her mouth. Maybe it was the night before getting to Maddie as much as it had Buck grumpy - he had more experience with odd sleep schedules, but whatever Natalie had said to him on the walk back to his hotel room had clearly set him on edge. And Maddie hadn’t been able to get him alone to figure out what exactly it was to try and smooth things over (or to potentially tell them all to just leave him alone already).
Howie was due in that night, at least. A small mercy of another person to offset attention - of another person who cared about Buck at least a fraction of the amount Maddie did that would be willing to distract from him if it was needed. Everything always felt so much easier to deal with when Howie was around. “What are we up to today?” Julianna asked, sitting down in the seat Buck had left unoccupied only because he had gotten up to grab Maddie a few more napkins.
He raised his brow from where he stood at the buffet counter and they shared an eye roll that failed to go unnoticed by either of their parents. Margaret clicked her tongue at her and Philip gave the two of them his disappointed Dad look that never failed to make Maddie feel like she was still a teenager in an adult woman’s body.
She would never make Jee-Yun feel like that if she could help it.
“Howie’s coming in today.” Maddie explained and bounced Jee-Yun on her knee. “Right, baby?”
“Yeah!” She happily agreed.
“What are we going to show daddy when he gets here?”
“Fishies!”
Maddie snorted - try as she might, Jee-Yun was a shadow of her uncle. She tended to latch onto certain things until she grew tired of them and apparently Jee-Yun’s newest love was the aquarium. Oh well, she figured Howie would like it too, as well as the science museum trip they had planned for the next day. “I was thinking, actually,” Maddie began slowly, tracking Buck from the corner of her eye as he seemed to make up his own mind, skirting around the table their grandparents and uncle sat at and heading towards what he viewed the lesser of two evils. “That Evan and I might go see Daniel.”
Buck’s steps stuttered, Margaret stopped breathing altogether and Philip’s hand twitched, spilling tea over the edge. Maddie held her own breath - in fact, Julianna was the only one of them to be acting any sort of normal over the announcement, smiling softly and sadly at the idea of it. “That sounds lovely.” She enthused softly. Sympathetically.
Did she know that Maddie hadn’t been to Daniel’s grave since they buried him? That Buck hadn’t even known they had a brother until two years before? Did she know that Maddie missed Daniel with her entire being, that part of her had been buried with him, but that Maddie had learned to breathe around the hole he had left in her chest partially because Buck had needed her to? Did any of them know ?
What would it change if they did? Maddie wouldn’t get anything more than the surface apology Buck had gotten out of their parents. She had stopped expecting one a long time ago. Besides, wasn’t it Daniel that deserved the biggest one from all of them? For being forgotten? For being left behind? “I think it would be.” Maddie agreed with a sad little smile of her own.
Buck started walking again - he wanted to know more about Daniel, Maddie knew that. He had told her that. Asked her questions and for stories. She had tried her hardest, but Maddie’s memory of him was tinged with the misery of losing him and her stories felt like they were of someone she never actually knew. There was something about keeping silent about things in the past, something about hiding Daniel’s memory away that made everything about him seem like a fever dream. Maddie didn’t know why the idea of seeing his grave had settled something in her mind, but maybe it was like Doug and Big Bear. Maybe if Maddie went, and she talked to him and she saw where he was buried, that last, concrete part of him, maybe then she’d know for sure that he had been real, and not a painful figment of her imagination. “You’re not going.” Margaret said in a strong, shaking voice.
Julianna blinked at her, her expression stricken and taken aback. “Pardon?”
“Mom,” Maddie set her jaw. “We’re going.”
“No,” Margaret set her jaw. “You are not.”
“Maddie,” Philip soothed. “What your mother means, is that we think it’s best if Daniel was… left to rest.”
“It’s not like we can raise the dead, dad.” Maddie rolled her eyes. “I think I deserve to be able to see my brother’s grave.”
Jee-Yun, always so perceptive of Maddie’s emotions just like she had been when she was inside of her, nestled herself back against Maddie’s chest with a small whine of protest. “What good will it do to see it?” Margaret cried, that same way she always used to whenever Maddie would challenge her. Like she couldn’t believe she had been responsible for creating such rebellious children.
“Well, I haven’t seen it,” Buck said slowly, dropping a pile of napkins on the table and settling himself into the chair next to Julianna, his foot reaching out under the table to nudge at Maddie’s.
Us against the world. Maddie remembered the promise just as much as he did. She smiled softly at him and he shot one back in her direction, reaching across the table to steal a potato off of Jee-Yun’s plate just to make her giggle. “You’re not going.” Margaret repeated.
“Why are you so against this?” Maddie asked desperately, turning to face her mother’s familiar face with her own. “It’s a grave , mom. He already knows what happened.”
Buck frowned the same way he always had whenever Maddie got into an argument on his behalf. Only this wasn’t just about him this time, it was about Daniel. And Daniel had never deserved to be forgotten the way he had been. “This is just too hard.” Margaret declared. “Why do you two always have to make this so hard ?”
Julianna looked, wide-eyed, over at where her children sat, engrossed in their phones and paying their table no mind. Buck rolled his eyes at the table cloth. “No one’s even asking you to come.” Maddie pointed out with an eye roll of her own. “We just thought -.”
“Maddie, why do you have to keep putting us through this?”
“Oh, come on ,” Buck groaned. “Maddie’s not putting you through anything.”
“You’re not going, that’s final.”
“We’re adults,” Buck said slowly, in that voice he always used that managed to piss their mother off. Magaret bristled and Maddie could see an explosion imminent in the future. She braced Jee-Yun to her chest as if to protect her from the blast radius. “No one’s asking for your permission.”
“Evan,” Philip scolded, “This is between Maddie and your mother.”
Buck laughed incredulously and shook his head. “This is so dumb.” He muttered petulantly.
“Mom,” Maddie said before Margaret could turn more of her scorn onto him. “Our plan is to visit Daniel’s grave today. I don’t expect you and dad to come, okay? This is something for the two of us.”
She could have sympathy for her mother and father, really she could. She couldn’t imagine what they had gone through, losing their son the way that they had. But sympathy… that didn’t equate to understanding. What was it that Buck had said? I understand mourning your child. But I couldn’t… I can’t imagine forgetting they ever existed, you know? Just because it’s easier. Daniel was a person. He had been her brother. He didn’t deserve to be swept under the rug.
Margaret’s bottom lip trembled. “Why don’t you go visit Doug while you’re at it?” She threw in Maddie’s way. Her words were tipped with poison and they found their home in Maddie’s heart. “If you’re so determined to poke at our wounds.”
Maddie flinched back.
“What the fuck .” Buck whispered in barely restrained horror. “Mom, what the fuck .”
“Watch your language.”
“What the fuck .” Buck just repeated, only this time his words rang louder.
Maddie’s cheeks colored, although she wasn’t sure if it was from hurt, anger or embarrassment. “Why would you say that?” She asked in a small voice.
“Why would you insist on hurting us?” Margaret asked her in her own, high pitched desperation. “If you’re going to hurt us, you might as well do it all the way.”
“What happened with Doug had nothing to do with you.”
“I am your mother ,” Margaret insisted. “Do you really think that your husband hurting you didn’t also hurt me?”
Maddie glanced at Julianna. At her grandparents and cousins and all of the people she never wanted to know about Doug Kendall and the scars he had left on her soul. “These two things don’t equate .” Buck snapped angrily. “Why the fuck are you acting like they’re the same thing?”
“Evan, you don’t understand -.”
“Oh my god, shut up about yourself.”
“You do not get to talk to us this way.”
“But you get to talk to us like that?” Buck snorted and shook his head. “Maddie, you don’t have to listen to this, okay? Take Jee and go for a walk or something.”
She pushed her chair back from the table and stood on shaky legs.
Philip’s hand curled around her wrist and she wrenched it away, hating how much even the way his fingers tried to tighten around her skin made her heart jump in her chest. Her father wasn’t Doug, but that look on his face looked awfully familiar in the lighting of the hotel. “You two never try to understand.” Philip said sadly, his disappointment like paint on her skin. “Can’t you see what this is doing to us? What this has always done to us?”
“We were children !” Buck yelled back at them. “We didn’t have to understand, okay? You need to back off and stop… just stop .”
“Don’t raise your voice, Evan Michael,” their mother scolded, always so quick to anger whenever Buck so much as existed in the same room as her. Maddie wondered, briefly, if it was because of how much Buck’s presence reminded her of the son she had lost; if he reminded her of the countless nights their parents had spent curled around each other in a hospital room, watching as Daniel slowly declined. She wondered when it stopped mattering to her - Buck was his own person, he wasn’t just a shadow of what Daniel could have been stuffed in a tall, lean body. He had never deserved their parents disdain for being the one who survived. “The two of you aren’t acting rationally.”
“ We’re not acting rationally?” When he was younger, Buck had never raised his voice to his parents. He had only started arguing back when Maddie had moved out, when arguing had become a survival tactic. Maddie would always hate herself, a little, for just how quickly Buck had had to learn how to take care of himself without her there. “You somehow equated us visiting Daniel’s grave to visiting Doug . How the hell does that even make sense?” He hadn’t even wanted to come . Maddie owed him so much - Buck had accepted her back in his life without any explanation about why she had left in the first place, and he had fought so hard to protect her every single step of the way. He never brought up Doug, he never brought up the trauma that her trauma had caused, he never asked her why she had left the second time, never threw any of it in her face.
He was a better man than she could ever claim to be responsible for raising.
No, Buck had done a lot of that on his own.
“It’s like you two don’t even love us.” Margaret said slowly, sniffling tears in the back of her throat.
An old and tired argument.
Maddie didn’t hear the response, her steps were determined in an effort to get herself and Jee-Yun out of that environment.
She shouldn’t have left him. Maddie knew it, even as she stuffed her lips against Jee-Yun’s forehead and ushered herself from the room, her breath tight in her chest. But she couldn’t stay in that room and she couldn’t make Jee-Yun suffer her parents callous remarks and… and she shouldn’t have come . Neither of them should have come . They should have stayed in Los Angeles with the people that actually cared about them.
They would hole up in her bedroom. Hide from the people that claimed to be their family until Howie arrived at the hotel and then they’d… spend the rest of the weekend doing whatever it was he wanted to do. They’d visit Eli, have dinner with him and his wife, bring Jee-Yun to the aquarium, the Children’s Museum, the Science Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts… maybe they’d catch a show at the Opera House - she was pretty sure they were doing Frozen.
There’s courage in confronting your past, Frank had said when Maddie had mentioned the trip to him, the same slow way he always prepared her for information that she probably didn’t want to hear. But there’s also courage in knowing when to let it go.
(Maddie wondered if Frank actually had a whole, entire and complete picture of their family. If he actually understood more than he was allowed to say. She knew what had come up in her own sessions with him and she knew, from running into him twice as they sat in the same waiting room, that Frank, at least once a month, also had Eddie Diaz as a client. Maddie knew Buck talked about his relationships - all of them, friends, family, romantic - with his own therapist, she knew she did the same. She figured Eddie did too. She was curious, in a way that was probably incredibly selfish, if he had talked to Frank about them. If he had sat across from Frank and said I don’t get their whole… thing the same way Howie mentioned doing with Hen one night. What image must Frank have of her, if he had the picture Maddie presented and the one Eddie painted? What image must Eddie have of her, to only really see her from the outside? It was intimidating to think about. Maddie tried not to think about it a lot at all.)
“Maddie!” Julianna peaked out from the banquet hall doors, her hand gripping tight onto the wood until her eyes landed on where Maddie hadn’t made it much further than the hallway, bouncing Jee-Yun restlessly in her arms and chewing restlessly on her lip. “Oh, Maddie. ” She sighed and stepped out to join her.
Hesitatingly, she reached for her shoulder but stopped herself, her hand landing lightly on her thigh. “Julianna.” Maddie blinked in her direction and smoothed a hand up Jee-Yun’s back as she leaned forward, hiding her little face in the crook of Maddie’s neck. How pathetic was she? To need comfort from a two-year-old because her parents had said something mean? “Wh… what’s up?” She glanced back at the door, half expecting her father to have followed his sister out of the room, half expecting Buck to push through with the whirlwind of his protective instincts knocking her on her heels. No one came, though. Maddie tried not to feel disappointed because of it (she had long ago stopped expecting a real apology from her parents, and it wasn’t Buck’s job to keep her safe. He might be a foot taller than her and twice as wide, but he was still her baby brother. Maddie was the older sister.).
Julianna watched her for a long moment. “Are you okay?”
For the first few years after they moved to Pennsylvania, Julianna had still sent them Christmas and birthday presents, odd gifts here and there as the years progressed, knick knacks and toys that reminded her of them. But she had stopped when Maddie had turned fifteen and Buck had turned five. Maddie had wanted to invite her to her wedding, but she hadn’t had her address to do so and, by the time she had gotten married to Doug, Julianna had changed her last name and had children of her own.
She had forgotten about them.
Just like everyone else in that room.
For the first time the entire trip, Maddie felt a surge of anger digging into her throat. Jee-Yun was the same age Buck had been when Daniel had died, if Maddie closed her eyes she could imagine that it was him , even, curled in her arms when she was twelve, hiding his face in her throat because he didn’t know what was going on at a funeral for their brother who he would be forced to forget. No one had tried to help her with him, not when they were too concerned with her parents who were so devastatingly distraught by the whole thing. She imagined looking at Jee-Yun, so innocent and unaware of anything that was happening, and leaving her. Just… handing her to someone else and leaving her behind for good.
She couldn’t do that.
Maddie remembered her guilt over doing it a year earlier, even if it was for her own good, because Maddie knew how much she couldn’t be trusted to keep her safe in that moment. That guilt had torn her apart, eaten her alive, pushed her to get better so that she could come back as quickly as she could.
Maddie understood grief. She knew what it could do to a person. She supported doing what you could do to make sure that you were the best version of yourself in case your children needed you. She could have forgiven her parents for getting lost in their pain for a bit, for mourning their son so much that they forgot how to be human for a little while.
She couldn’t forgive this .
The years that had passed between then and now.
Maddie wasn’t a twelve year old girl anymore. She was forty, with a daughter of her own. She… “No.” Maddie shrugged helplessly. “No, Julianna, I’m not okay .”
Julianna’s stare was directed down at her feet. “What your parents said…”
“I’m used to my parents,” Maddie rolled her eyes with a huff.
“Please,” Julianna begged. “Don’t tell me they were always like that -.”
“Please,” Maddie scoffed. “Don’t pretend to be sympathetic. You knew what they were like when you all decided to leave us alone with them.”
Julianna flinched. “It’s not like that -.”
“Of course, it isn’t.” What was it Buck had said once? They’re just… incapable of admitting when they’re wrong. Granted, at the time, he had been sixteen and talking about their parents but Maddie was pretty sure the same sentiment currently applied. Why waste her breath trying to get Julianna or anyone else to see her side of things? Maddie steeled herself and, with her hand still steady on Jee-Yun’s back, stalked towards the elevators. She pressed the button to go up and tapped her foot as she waited.
“Maddie,” Julianna followed after her. “I know we messed up, okay? But… But what were we supposed to do ?”
“What was I supposed to do?” Maddie countered. “I was twelve . My brother just died and my parents were so lost in their own grief that I had to learn how to take care of a baby so that he didn’t… so that he didn’t grow up thinking he wasn’t loved.” And he still had. In a roundabout way.
They didn’t talk about their childhood.
Maybe that was another problem.
Maddie knew her own place in Buck’s trauma (to a point) and she knew that he knew about his place in hers (to a point) but… but they didn’t talk about it. It was too awkward, too painful, too…. “Maddie, please, if you could just… give us another chance.”
“I’m going to go up to my room,” Maddie told the elevator as it dinged and the doors slid open. “I’m going to… find some way to spend the rest of my afternoon with my daughter and, hopefully, my brother. We’re going to wait until my partner comes in, and then we’re going to make the most of this shit show of a trip.” Maddie concluded. “We’re leaving on Sunday. We all don’t have to keep pretending to like each other.”
Besides, she didn’t know why she always had to be the one to try. They want to see you, and why hadn’t any of them tried to see her sooner? The internet existed, Maddie wasn’t hiding in some corner of the world where social media didn’t exist. Buck had been on the news so many times - she knew for a fact that there was footage of him under that truck somewhere, that there were clips from interviews at scenes, footage from Taylor Kelly’s… puff piece or whatever, that there was even footage of him during the whole sniper incident - climbing up that crane, throwing Eddie Diaz’s body over his shoulder under a hail storm of bullets. They lived in Los Angeles, not in Cabo or something. It wouldn’t be that hard to get in contact with them if any of these people really wanted to.
They could afford to try a little harder.
Maddie was too old to keep rolling over and making their lives easier. “Maddie,” Julianna sniffed. “Your parents just… they made things so hard -.”
Viciously, she poked at the number for her floor and watched as the doors closed.
Julianna didn’t bother trying to chase after her.
Good, she thought. Maddie had nothing more to say to any of them. “Mama,” Jee-Yun mumbled, pulling her face out of Maddie’s neck and pressing her little palm to Maddie’s cheek. “Mama okay?”
She smiled at her and reached out to poke the tip of her nose with her pointer finger. Jee-Yun giggled and swiped at it, the same way Buck used to when he was little. “Mama’s okay.” She assured. “I love you.”
“I love you!” Jee-Yun parotted.
--
They had spent the entire day in between Maddie’s hotel room and Buck’s, which was probably not the greatest plan they had ever had but, well, it had started snowing and neither of them really wanted to go out in it unless they absolutely had to. Maddie had forgotten just how unaccustomed to the cold she had gotten until she had felt the cool, biting breeze on her skin and it seemed that Buck had gotten even worse at managing his own temperature ever since living in mostly warm climates. Jee-Yun had been chilly too, all too happy to wear the plush, fuzzy blanket Maddie had brought with her as a cape to press her nose to the hotel window and look outside at the falling snow with big, wide eyes.
The three of them played games, watched movies, ordered room service and charged it to their parents room (or Buck had charged it to their parents room, anyway. Maddie had pursed her lips tightly together and tried not to find it funny. She didn’t want to encourage him, but, really, Buck would do whatever it was he wanted to do. And if he wanted to make their parents' lives more difficult and annoying then… well, Maddie didn’t blame him for it.). Currently, it was ten at night and Jee-Yun was wide awake, even though she probably should have put her to bed hours ago (but Jee had taken a much needed, much too long nap at three and Maddie didn’t have the heart to put her to sleep before Howie got to say goodnight). Currently, Maddie was lying on her bed and Jee-Yun was humming to herself as the live action Little Mermaid played on the television. Buck had begged off to his own room a few minutes before with an excuse of wanting to take a shower (and, Maddie suspected, it meant that he was going to do his own nightly check in with either Eddie or Bobby) and Maddie wasn’t bored but she was… bored .
She was also annoyed.
Maddie didn’t know why she kept expecting differently, really. The rest of the Buckley’s were doing what they did best and waiting for her to make the first move towards reconciliation. None of them had bothered knocking on their doors, not even their parents, to talk or to… to even pretend like nothing had happened. They had all stayed firmly away and Maddie had stayed firmly away and… and they would want to meet Howie tomorrow and Maddie didn’t want them to meet him. Just break the glass, honey, Howie would say. Tell me you want to go and we’ll go .
What had she done to be so lucky to have gotten him out of the entire mess that was her life? Maddie wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t willing to let Howie go under threat of death. A knock startled her out of her thoughts - it was much too clipped to be Buck’s strong, rhythmic one, much too purposeful to be the hesitant one her mother had done a few days before. Maddie stood up, brushed her hand gently over Jee-Yun’s soft, dark hair, and peaked through the peephole.
Maddie had thought the whole… steal your breath away concept had been stupid before. With Doug, falling in love had been fast and tumultuous and something that Maddie didn’t even remember consciously doing. Everything with Howie had felt so natural . He had been her friend before he had been anything else, her brother’s friend before he had been anything like Maddie’s. Falling in love with him hadn’t been purposeful, either, but it had… falling in love with Doug had been like falling from a skyscraper and never hitting the ground. Falling in love with Howie had been like stepping off a rollercoaster to find steady ground beneath your feet.
Maddie threw open the door. “You’re early! ” He also looked just about as tired as a flight in from Los Angeles could make someone.
He looked like home.
Howie shoved his suitcase to the side and opened his arms. “Caught an early flight.” He explained and wrapped her in a strong, loving embrace. It was like everything that had gone wrong the entire week was gone the moment he held onto her. It was like all of her pieces were being pressed back into the shape that was much more comfortable for her to live in. Suddenly, she was no longer Maddie Buckley, twelve years old and unsure of where she stood with her family - she was Maddie Buckley, cool headed 911 dispatcher, stronger than she gave herself credit for, forty years old and looking forward to spending the rest of her life with the man in front of her. “It’s incredible,” Howie continued. “The perks you get from being a vet.”
Maddie blinked, opened her mouth to ask him about it but Howie was pushing past her to kneel in front of Jee-Yun as she scrambled to her feet, a triumphant and excited squeal of “Appa!” pulling from her lips. She threw her entire body into Howie’s arms and his muscles contracted to catch her, picking her up to swing her in a circle and settle her on his hip.
“My baby girl!” He exclaimed happily, kissing her cheek and holding onto her just as tightly as she held onto him. “I missed you so much!”
Maddie sunk back into his side, cradled her little family close to her chest, and allowed herself to relax against him. “We’re so happy you’re here.” Maddie spoke into the fabric of his shoulder. He smelled like home - firewood and lemon and cardamom. He smelled a little like the stale air, the winter breeze outside, but when his arm settled strong around her waist Maddie was pretty sure they could conquer just about anything together.
“So am I,” Howie told her just as seriously as he had argued about her going alone (so to speak) in the first place. Over Jee-Yun’s head, he pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Did anyone bother you guys tonight?” They had had enough time, after the disastrous brunch earlier that day, for Maddie to catch him up on how she was feeling.
“No,” Maddie reassured him, although the sting of no one bothering them at all still had yet to go away. She didn’t know if she was happy to have been left alone or hurt to be ignored again. “But that’s okay, right, Jee? We had a good time!”
“Yeah!” Jee agreed and pulled back from Howie’s neck to grab his cheeks with both of her hands. “Appa, it snowing!”
“ Snowing?” Howie echoed in amazement, as though he hadn’t just been stuck outside in it. “Is Elsa here too?”
Jee-Yun giggled and nodded frantically.
“I mean,” Maddie laughed too. “She sort of is.” She shrugged. “Frozen’s touring in Boston right now.”
Howie blinked at her. “Huh.” He tilted his head and Jee followed suit. “Ironic.”
“Ronic.” Jee echoed.
Maddie snorted and leaned in to kiss both of their cheeks. She held on for a moment that was probably too long for Jee-Yun (who had just started wiggling again to be let down); she wanted to bury herself in the feeling of them. Her family that had left her behind were all in the same hotel, oblivious to the fact that the family that kept showing up for her had arrived at just the perfect time (again. Howie always found her just at the right time). She felt herself relax, her shoulders drop from her chin, her jaw unclench, her eyes sting with bitter, relieved tears and…. Howie dropped Jee to the floor, gently like he always did, and frowned at the way her eyes shined. “What’s up?” He asked softly and brushed the pad of his thumb under her eye. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Maddie brushed at her cheek. “I’m just… so happy you’re here.”
“ Honey .” He tugged her in close, tucked her head under his chin, and held her. Just the way Maddie always held everyone else.
She had started to forget who she was. Her and Buck had… fallen into some old methods that probably didn’t serve them well at all, both so determined to protect each other from harm that they’d allow themselves to get destroyed in the process. “No, I’m,” Maddie pulled back and pulled herself together. “I’m fine. I just wish we didn’t come , you know? This whole thing was pointless .”
Howie frowned at her. “It wasn’t pointless .”
Maddie’s brain clocked the open door before her eyes did. “Jee?” She called out and frantically pulled back from him, a panic starting to coil in her chest. “ Jee ?”
She scrambled to the door, Howie hot on her heels and….
Stopped.
Jee-Yun was fine. She hadn’t gotten far at all, stopped just inches from her doorway by a familiar smile and brown eyes. What was it that Howie had said - the perks you get as a vet . Maddie blinked, thought of all of the reasons she was thankful for the man knelt in front of her giggling, escape artist daughter. “Eddie?” She questioned as though she needed confirmation of who it was standing in front of her hotel door.
“Hey,” Eddie waved at her but didn’t move from where Jee-Yun was currently slapping playfully at his hands. “I caught this one,” he poked at her stomach. Jee laughed brightly and shimmied away. “Trying to escape.”
“The baby whisperer.” Howie whispered.
“No, man,” Eddie rolled his eyes at him. “You just left the door open around a two year old and thought she wouldn’t run away.”
Howie flushed, Maddie flushed, but she laughed either way. “Not that I’m upset that you’re here,” Maddie assured him. “But why are you here?”
Maddie knew why he was here. But did he know why he had hopped on a plane for an unscheduled, surprise, three day trip to Boston? What are you? Maddie had asked Buck after… everything . Dying and coming back to life, dating Natalia and moving out of his loft, going on antidepressants and scaring the shit out of her by going radio silent for about a week (that was Maddie’s move, not his). She had gone around to his apartment to find Eddie already there, he had organized the loft kitchen, done Buck’s laundry, brought Christopher around to help him cook some meals under the guise of a food science class.
It was like… it was like they had acknowledged something without ever really acknowledging it. Buck’s cheeks had colored and he had looked away with the softest smile on his face. Maddie had watched him shrug, listened to the way he said, I don’t know, Maddie. We’re… we just are . It reminded her of when her and Howie had started, so tentative but so full of potential. They had taken the long way around to where they were now, but Buck deserved someone who would get on a plane to make sure he wasn’t facing their mess of a family by himself.
Eddie gave her a look that told her that he knew that she knew why he was there and opened his mouth to respond but halted when a door to the left swung open.
Buck hadn’t noticed him yet. He hadn’t even looked up from his phone yet. Maddie bit her lip in an effort to keep her smile carefully contained. “It’s quiet hours,” Buck told the hallway with a smile still carefully directed downwards. “You’re going to get the hotel staff yelling at us.”
Howie’s hand landed soft on her back. “Evan.” She softly tugged Jee-Yun back against her legs and jerked her chin upwards.
She didn’t know why she was saying anything at all, really, because the two of them clearly didn’t need her direction. Howie had joked once that the two of them seemed to have a sixth sense for one another - Eddie stood up and Buck looked up from the floor and his lips parted, a little, in shock before he caught himself with a silent shaping of Eddie’s name. Maddie had been on the receiving end of plenty of Buck’s patented bear hugs - they all had - but he never quite threw himself at her the same way he threw himself at Eddie. Maybe it was because she wouldn’t have been able to catch him, or maybe something had happened in the time he had grown up and she hadn’t been there because Maddie was suddenly sure that she wanted to try to see if she could because Eddie caught him and made it look so effortless in the process.
This wasn’t hugging like friends hugged.
Their bodies collided, Howie dipped his smile into the back of Maddie’s neck with a quiet, “ Oh ,” and Maddie should have let them have their moment without watching but…. Maddie stayed watching, almost curious as to what would happen next.
Buck had always been ridiculously good at making himself seem smaller than he was, he would curl his body around whoever he was standing with and sink into them. Maddie had always wondered if it was uncomfortable - the only person she had ever seen that had been big enough to make it look natural had been Bobby Nash. But she had to admit, she had only seen Buck and Eddie come together once, and that had been before they were… whatever they were now. Eddie had to tilt up his chin, a bit, to rest it on Buck’s shoulder, but he did it without looking even the slightest bit uncomfortable doing it. His hands were splayed in line with one another - one on his back and the other on the back of his neck. If he slid his palms either up or down they would have met in the middle. Buck was hiding his face, the way he used to do in Maddie’s shoulder when he was little, and she knew the way his eyelashes felt against skin, long and fluttering and soft.
“Come on,” Howie tugged her back. “We’ll bother them about it tomorrow.”
No, Maddie thought with a soft little smile.
They wouldn’t.
--
“Not that I’m not happy you’re here.” Buck said from the bed, one leg crossed under the other, his knee hanging uselessly off the bed and eyes very firmly not staring at the half closed bathroom door (he wasn’t staring , not necessarily, but he wasn’t not staring either. He kept glancing at it, expecting Eddie to be a figment of his imagination because he could, very suddenly, sympathize with the way Taylor had looked at him when he had followed her all the way to her father’s parole hearing just because he didn’t want her to go through it all alone). Eddie was leaning towards the bathroom mirror, a finger dangerously close to his eye and Buck always hated watching him take out his contacts (they had attended one too many eye related scenes for him to not cringe every single time) but he couldn’t bring himself to fully look away. “But why are you here?”
“Your sister asked me the same thing.” Eddie replied lightly and shot him an easy, crooked smile.
“Well,” Buck mumbled and picked at a piece of lint, flicking it off his fingertip and to the floor. “It’s a good question.”
If he had known Eddie was coming he… he would have booked a bigger room or something. Not that they hadn’t shared a bed before - notably, during quarantine Eddie had slept in his bed and Hen had shared an air mattress with Chimney - but it was… it was different now. Sort of. Kind of. Not all that different at all, actually. Just because they were in Boston instead of Los Angeles didn’t mean that anything between them had changed from this something that they both knew existed in that space.
It was just that, if Buck wasn’t already in love with him, then he would have been the moment he saw him in the hallway. “Chris is very excited to be spending the weekend with his friend for that… horror movie marathon thing they had planned.” Eddie explained slowly, closing his contacts case with a click and brushing his hand down his face with a shake of his head as his eyes got acclimated to existing without a layer between them and the world. Soon, the glasses would go on and Buck would forget how to breathe for all of five seconds, like he always did whenever he saw them. “And I really didn’t want to do yard work this weekend.”
Buck huffed a laugh. “So you decided to get on a plane and spend the weekend in the snow ?” Eddie hated snow. Well, Eddie had only seen snow once in his entire life but he had made it abundantly clear to Buck that he hadn’t enjoyed it. It’s cold and wet and heavy, Eddie had complained. And I got the worst cold in my life because of it.
“It was snow or yard work,” Eddie argued passively, gesturing with his forearm towards the window. “And the idea of weeding my garden makes me want to cry.”
“That’s because you only do it, like, twice a year.”
“That’s because it sucks. ” Eddie said it the way he always did, with his nose wrinkled and his eyes glittering as he turned off the lightswitch in the bathroom and slipped on his glasses.
Yep, Buck thought to himself, there was the moment he forgot to breathe.
Sometimes, as Christopher got older, Buck could see just how much of Eddie he had inherited. It was in the way they carried themselves, the color of his hair, the brown of his eyes, the slope of his smile. Where Christopher favored big, dark lenses of his glasses, Eddie tended to for a more subtle, wire-framed and golden look. Not that Buck was going to complain about it, he had it on good authority that aside from his family, Buck was the only person that had ever gotten to see him in them. Bad eyesight ran in the Diaz family, each of his sisters had them, his father had them, his grandparents had them. Eddie had lasted the longest without needing them, but Buck was pretty sure that was just because he had refused to go to the eye doctor until the station had forced him to after a piece of glass had gotten very close to cutting his retina. “Shoveling isn’t much better.” Buck answered wryly, the bed shifting when Eddie sat down on it, scooching his body backwards until they were sitting pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee.
“Thankfully,” Eddie responded in kind. “This is a hotel and the cost of the room means that some poor person who makes barely above minimum wage will be shoveling for us.”
Buck ducked his head and smiled at his knees.
Almost tentatively, Eddie’s pointer finger reached out and brushed against the back of his knuckles. The touch was so light that it sent gooseflesh up his arm. “You seemed like you needed some back up.” Eddie explained in a much more serious tone. Because, Evan. You are the only person I trust him with. I love you, you know that right? It never failed to make Buck simultaneously want to sink into a puddle on the ground and press Eddie hard into the mattress. But they weren’t quite there yet, so Buck would have to settle for sinking down further into the sheets, curling his fingers around the angle of Eddie’s knee, and dropping his head heavy onto his shoulder. In kind, Eddie rested his cheek on top of his loose curls, his fingers trailing a light, barely there line up and down the inside of his wrist. “It was either me or Bobby,” he joked without joking. “I got the ticket first.”
Buck smiled despite himself. He could imagine it, Eddie and Bobby both planning the same thing in the station kitchen, Eddie being slightly quicker with technology even though he hated just how savvy he was with it. “You were saving your miles to go to Texas in the summer.”
Eddie shrugged. “We’ll just use yours.”
Like it was a given, like Eddie would plan whatever vacation he was going to take to visit his extended family with Buck in mind.
Like he knew that Buck would give him anything and he didn’t even have to ask for it. “Maybe I don’t want to go to Texas.” Buck would follow him anywhere, though, and they both knew it.
Eddie snorted in response and sunk further down himself, wiggling his shoulders until he was more comfortable against the pillows. He kicked out his legs, the knee that Buck had been holding onto straightening out until he was holding onto his thigh instead. Dangerous territory, in a way, but nothing they hadn’t done before.
Buck was beginning to understand what Doctor Copeland had been telling him for so long - it was okay to be selfish, every now and then. To ask for things and be happy when they happened. He hadn’t asked Eddie to come, because he was lucky that Bobby had been able to move the schedule around for him to come in the first place. He hadn’t really wanted Eddie to come either, the idea of him running into Buck’s parents and grandparents and the extended Buckley family that he had never known had even existed was more than a bit terrifying. But Eddie had come anyway, and Buck was allowed to be thankful that he had come. We’re a team, Buck had told Eddie in the midst of his breakdown a few years earlier, let me have your back.
With what? Eddie had asked with red, swollen and puffy eyes.
Everything.
And Eddie had responded in kind, without Buck even needing to hope for it.
Buck had thought he had been in love before.
He had been woefully unprepared for how wrong he was.
“We should get some sleep.” Buck mumbled after a moment, reaching up to scratch at his cheek. Below him, he could feel the hum Eddie let out in response and, when he glanced up, it was to find that his eyes had already shut, his dark lashes fluttered over his cheeks. He huffed a tiny laugh, reaching up to pluck his glasses from his face and fold them with a soft click. He reached over Eddie’s body to place them on the side table next to where his phone was charging and, when he moved back, it was into the warmth of Eddie’s hand on his spine. He was squinting up at him, a little smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You’ve had a long day.”
“You’ve had a long week.” Eddie countered, like it was something Buck needed spelled out for him.
So good at taking care of other people, the two of them, that they sometimes forgot how to take care of themselves.
“Not a competition,” Buck argued quietly and settled more firmly onto his side, his arm resting heavy along the curve of Eddie’s waist.
“Well, yeah,” Eddie agreed just as softly. “I used my vacation miles on you.” He was teasing, and Buck wanted to know what his teasing tasted like and he wanted to trace the bow of his lips with his tongue and…. He turned his face into Eddie’s shoulder and kissed at the spot where he knew Eddie’s scar from the army sat and pressed his cheek into his pillow, almost afraid to put too much pressure on the limb that had never fully healed right. “I win .” Eddie cheered softly for himself.
“Hey,” Buck tapped his fingers up to rest against his chest. Eddie blinked at him, turning more fully to face him head on, his stubble painting his jaw with a dark contrast. The skin underneath it was soft, he had a scar just behind his ear from shrapnel that Buck had, obscenely, always wanted to press his tongue against. “Thank you.” He told him, his teeth tugging his bottom lip into his mouth. “For being here.”
Eddie could have said a thousand things and none of them would have mattered. You’re welcome, anytime, you don’t have to thank me for that, I love you, I love you, I love you . He didn’t answer with words at all, instead his hand landed on the nape of Buck’s neck, his fingers toying with the ends of his hair for just a moment, and his body rolled them until Buck was on his back and he kissed him, slow, languid, soft . It wasn’t anything they had ever done before and Buck’s heart pounded a rhythm in his chest, hard and fast like he had just woken up from another coma (or like he had never woken up at all) but it was, perhaps, the realest thing he had ever felt in his entire life. The nerve endings in his fingers spiked, a frankly embarrassing noise pulled from the back of his throat, and his fist curled into the fabric of the old t-shirt Eddie hadn’t bothered to change out of. He probably should have taken a shower, his hair was a bit greasy, and they absolutely should have been sleeping but Buck was afraid that, once they had started, they were never going to stop until they reached the natural conclusion.
It was like… it was like standing in front of that wave again, only this time he was succumbing to the pressure of it as it rushed over him, the exhilaration of pulling off the perfect rescue that shouldn’t have ever worked. Eddie’s kiss was better than anything Buck could have ever imagined, his touch was just as familiar as it had always been, and it sent a rapid rush of pheromones down his body.
I love you, I love you, I love you .
He didn’t have to say it for Eddie to know.
Buck traced it into his skin with his teeth and Eddie scratched his response into his back and, amidst what had arguably been one of the most complicated weeks of his life, was the most uncomplicated thing Buck had ever experienced.
--
Unsurprising to Maddie, they were the first ones down to breakfast.
Well, first ones in a relative term, because her parents had picked a table close to the middle of the room and her grandparents had picked the one next to them but Jee-Yun had excitedly run over to the window with her little snow boots on and Howie had followed Maddie’s lead on ignoring the older Buckley’s presence in favor of following after her. Nine in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to wander down from the hotel room for breakfast, really, a good two hours later than when Jee-Yun usually woke them up. Howie cast his gaze around the room and Jee-Yun pressed her nose against the window with wide eyed amazement pulling at her jaw at the white, fluffy and sparkling snow outside. “Uh-oh,” Howie muttered. “I made eye contact.”
Maddie furrowed her brow at him, pulling her eyes away from their daughter to follow the direction of his gaze. Natalie perked up from where she sat with Joseph, her grandfather hastily wiping his face and lifting his hand to wave in greeting. Maddie frowned, a sick uneasy feeling cloying in the pit of her stomach and swallowed even as she waved back. Buck still hadn’t told her what had happened between him and Natalie, and, at this rate, she figured he probably never would.
Buck was, very obviously, absent from breakfast again. A fact that their mother had no doubt already taken note of from the tilt of her frown. Just how would she feel, Maddie wondered, when she realized that it wasn’t just Howie who had visited them? Just what would she do ? The last few times her parents had interacted with Eddie, he had been frostily professional towards them. He supported Buck wanting to grow a relationship with them, but he didn’t support them .
Her father hadn’t been a fan of him the last he had told Maddie, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about it when Eddie was always so… respectfully disrespectful. Maddie wished she knew how to be so petty. The last time Philip had said anything about Eddie in front of Howie, though, he had frowned so hard that her father had simply figured out not to talk about him at all - Eddie was Howie’s friend, he was most likely going to be a part of their family with the way Buck looked at him and talked about him. “Those are our grandparents,” Maddie explained out of the corner of her mouth. “Natalie and Joseph Buckley.”
“Christ,” Howie muttered back. “I see what side of the family Buck takes after.”
Maddie snorted with a shake of her head. While it was true that Buck had inherited Joseph’s height and Natalie’s coloring, Maddie failed to find him any of them now that she remembered who she was. “George is walking in now,” she explained, jerking her chin towards where the man they had saved from the world’s dumbest allergic reaction walked in with his wife. “He’s my dad’s older brother.”
“He’s the one that didn’t know amaretto had almonds.” Howie hummed in recognition.
Maddie laughed. “That’s the one.”
“Dumbass.” He crouched down beside Jee-Yun and tickled at her cheek. “Princess,” he pulled her attention away from the glittering snow. “Want to pick where we sit?”
Natalie and Joseph were gesturing to the seats beside them, but Jee-Yun had caught sight of the lit fireplace and zoomed her little legs over to it as quickly as they could carry her. Maddie shrugged apologetically and followed, half afraid that Jee-Yun wouldn’t stop before running head first into the flames regardless of the gate the hotel had up around it. Jee-Yun was much more devious than any of them really gave her credit for. “Wonder what’s taking them so long.” Howie stated with a crack of his neck.
He pulled out Maddie’s chair for her, leaning down to press a lingering kiss to her cheek before he did the same to Jee, sitting down himself with his back to the fire. Immediately, he reached across to hold her hand in his own, his thumb smoothing over the back of her knuckles, a sense of calm floating over her despite the eyes that she knew were lingering on where they sat. “Really?” Maddie countered with a raised brow and a twitch of her lips. “You wonder what’s taking them so long?”
Howie blinked, long and slow in her direction. “Yeah?” He shrugged. “Breakfast is only until eleven. If they don’t hurry they’ll miss it.”
“I have a feeling they were up much longer than we were.” Maddie snorted and poured herself a glass of water. It’s not like she knew, really - not like she wanted to know - what her brother and Eddie had gotten up to the night before, but if they hadn’t done anything before Eddie got on a plane for him, there was no way that they hadn’t done anything after .
Maddie knew how she had responded to Howie’s devotion landing him in Boston before. She knew Buck well enough to know he probably responded the same. “I mean,” Howie shrugged again. “They were probably catching up.”
“Yeah,” Maddie agreed. “If by catching up you mean…” She fixed him with a look and Howie’s cheeks flushed once he realized what she was implying.
“That is not what I mean.”
“Howie.” Maddie rolled her lips together with a laugh. “You can’t tell me that you don’t know just why Eddie got on that plane with you.”
“I’d get on a plane for Hen!”
“Yeah, but I haven’t caught Hen staring at your ass.”
Howie flushed and fixed her with a pointed look, glancing towards their daughter where she was bouncing in her seat and reciting a rhyme that had been on Bluey that morning. “My… Hen… this isn’t the same thing.”
“No,” Maddie agreed. “It’s not the same thing.” She patted the back of his hand with her own. “Trust me,” she leaned closer, pressing a lingering kiss to the corner of his mouth and sitting back with a smile. “My brother is in love with that man.”
Howie would have argued, fruitlessly of course, but Maddie didn’t give him the time to, pushing back her chair, instead, to make her way over to the buffet line and fix herself and Jee a plate. She grabbed their typical plethora of things - a few pancakes, a bowl of fruit they would share between the two of them, a good heaping of eggs and sausage. “Maddie,” Natalie and Joseph had migrated to a table closer to theirs, her grandfather grabbing a plate from where she had balanced it on her arm before she could drop it. “Is this Howard?” Like she couldn’t have just introduced herself without waiting for Maddie to do it for her. “Your husband?”
Maddie wanted to frisbee her plate at the window. “My partner.” She corrected. “We’re not married.” Yet, Maddie finished with a pointed little frown. If it happened one day, then it happened, but so far they hadn’t taken that step and Maddie… wasn’t in any rush to get married again. Not after the first one had ended so terribly.
“And why not?” Joseph asked with a loud, booming laugh. Slowly, Maddie slid into her seat, apologetically nudging Howie’s foot under the table with her own. He trapped it between his and sent her a smile. Her worry settled into a fizzing pop in her stomach. “You’re not as young as you once were. Sooner or later, you won’t look as pretty in a white dress as you once could!”
He meant it as a joke but it didn’t land as one. “I think Maddie would look beautiful in a paper bag.” Howie countered lightly, although his eyes had taken a rather dangerous tint. “And we’re not in any rush, sir.”
“Considering my first marriage didn’t end well,” Maddie said with a stern look between her grandparents and the fruit bowl. “I’m not exactly keen to rush into another one.”
Natalie frowned and Joseph’s next laugh was awkward, unsure of how the conversation had progressed to the level of awkward that it was. “Would you three like to sit closer to the rest of us?” Natalie asked after a moment of uncomfortable silence. “Your mother and father are over there. And I know your uncle would love to meet your… Howard.”
She was trying. Maddie knew she should be grateful for it, but she couldn’t help but feel as though the trying was too little too late. And what had she said to Buck to make him so steadfastly avoid her the day before? “We’re good where we are.” Maddie reassured with a tentative smile. She speared a strawberry on a fork for Jee and passed it over to her.
“But…” Natalie cut herself off and pointed her eyes back at her mug of tea. “Where’s your brother?” She said instead. Howie’s shoulders jumped but he masked the movement by popping a grape into his mouth.
“Uncle Buck !” Jee-Yun cheered as though he were in the room with them. Maddie melted, just like she always did whenever Jee said his name.
“He’s still sleeping,” Maddie assured her daughter with a hand down her hair. “We’re going with Uncle Buck and Appa to the fishies today, aren’t we?”
Jee’s face lit up in excitement. “Fishies!” She waved her half eaten strawberry triumphantly.
“Again?” Natalie asked with a laugh. “She’s a big fan of the aquarium, isn’t she?”
Maddie shrugged, “She loves all animals.”
“Still sleeping?” Joseph asked gruffly. “What, did he have a big night?”
Probably.
Not that Maddie wanted to think about such things. Maddie was well aware that her brother wasn’t a virgin, but he was still her brother . Her baby brother. She didn’t exactly want to keep thinking about what he got up to in his spare time. “He’s had a long week.” Maddie deflected the same way she always deflected for him.
Natalie’s frown grew more pronounced. “Did you know,” she pitched her voice softly. “Your parents never told us.”
“Never told you what?” Maddie brushed a napkin over Jee-Yun’s chin as she grabbed another strawberry.
Natalie glanced around her nervously, like she was going to be sharing a big, world ending secret. “That Evan’s part of the LGBT.”
Maddie’s eyebrows shot up and Howie coughed on the sip of water he had just taken, the glass landing heavily back onto the tabletop. “I’m sorry,” Maddie blinked at her grandmother. “What?”
“Oh,” Natalie flushed. “You didn’t know.” Maddie had known. Maddie had known since Buck was eight and declared he was going to marry Aladdin and Jasmine, depending on the day and which episode of the cartoon he had just watched. “We were surprised too.”
“Did he tell you?” Because if he hadn’t, and Natalie had just seen something… Maddie didn’t know if Buck had ever told their parents. She was pretty sure they knew, but they were in the stern pretending-not-to-know category of things.
He deserved to be able to decide who he wanted to know and who he didn’t. Their grandmother who hadn’t even watched him grow up didn’t get to decide that for him. “Yes,” Natalie enthused. “The other day, when I went up with him to his room. He mentioned his partner and their son.”
“Oh my god.” Howie moaned softly to himself. “Hen isn’t going to believe this.”
Still, he sat back and squared his shoulders, jaw set and prepared to fight if he had to.
Maddie loved him.
She loved that her family was just as much his family.
That even if they weren’t together, Howie would have fought tooth and nail for her brother. “Bisexual,” Joseph scoffed. “Should just pick one. He’s a grown man.”
Technically, he had picked one. Would it have been more comfortable for them if he had picked a woman?
“That’s not how bisexuality works.” Howie stated with a roll of his eyes.
“Oh,” Natalie blinked. “We have no problem with the homosexuals.” Maddie felt a little part of her dying with every passing moment of their conversation. She wanted to reach over and cover Jee’s ears in case anything she was hearing was cementing itself into her little brain. “We just… why do they always have to show us, you know? They can do what they want in the privacy of their own home,” Natalie said as though saying that made any difference to the hatred in her words. “I just don’t know why we all have to see it.”
See what? Buck hadn’t done anything more than tell her that he was also into men. That he was helping Eddie raise his son. Maddie suddenly understood why Buck had been avoiding her so strongly the day before. “What is wrong with you?” Maddie asked bluntly. Loudly.
Natalie flinched at her tone, taken aback by it. “We love him -.”
“You just want him to change who he is to make you more comfortable.” Maddie rolled her eyes. “You don’t get to -.”
“Oh no.” Howie stood up abruptly and cleared his throat. “Jee, look who’s here!” He pointed with an enthusiasm that he was very much not actually feeling coating his words.
Jee squeaked. “I go?” She asked as she wiggled down from her seat.
Wordlessly, Maddie grabbed her fork before she could run off with it and nodded. “Go on, baby.”
Jee took off like a shot and, like he had done the night before, Maddie watched as Eddie clocked her before she could get further than an inch away from their table. Howie waved and Eddie nodded and caught her before Buck could bend down to it, swinging her up on his hip with all the natural talent of someone used to do so to a child twice her size. Jee laughed and Buck gave Eddie a look that was full of thanks (his leg, Maddie thought with a glance towards the snow outside, it always acted up in the cold) and took her from him. Jee hugged the two of them around the neck, got twin kisses on each of her cheeks and wiggled to be let down, her little hand wrapping around one of Buck’s fingers and pulling him forward. Maddie watched him stumble with a wince, Eddie caught him with a steadying hand on his hip, and she hissed, “That’s Eddie, his partner. Don’t you dare say anything like that around any of us again,” in the direction of their grandparents.
“Good morning! ” Howie shouted in greeting.
Buck’s eyebrows did that thing they always did when he was well aware that Howie was acting strange. “Morning.” He greeted slowly, clearing his throat and helping Jee back up into her chair.
“Did you two sleep well ?” Howie asked pointedly.
Eddie rolled his eyes, even despite the pink on his cheeks. “Better than you.” Buck asked cheekily, pointedly avoiding the free table next to their grandparents and choosing, instead, to drag a chair over to the empty spot by Maddie’s elbow. He stole a piece of Maddie’s pancake and… he looked better. More peaceful. More centered than he had all week.
“Do you want your own food?” Eddie asked him dryly and dragged over a chair himself, although he didn’t sit in it, merely, framing his hands on the back of it with a suspicious little squint of his eyes in Natalie and Joseph’s direction.
Her mother was watching them with her lips in a firm, thin line.
Maddie didn’t know if they had heard her earlier.
She didn’t really care.
“Maddie doesn’t mind sharing.” Buck answered with a nudge against her shoulder.
Maddie pushed him back. “Maddie does.”
“Does Maddie want a coffee too?” Eddie asked with a crinkle of his eyes.
“You’re my favorite.” Maddie blew him a kiss that had him snorting and shaking her head. She chuckled.
“I’ll go with you.” Howie said a little desperately.
Eddie made a face at him, “Okay?” Still, he waved him forward and Madde plopped her fist on her hand and fixed Buck with a look .
“So.”
He gave her one too. “So.”
Her lips twitched. “Pretty romantic, huh?”
His cheeks colored but his eyes stayed firmly fixed on her own. “Eddie getting you coffee?” He popped another piece of pancake into his mouth and chewed around it thoughtfully. “Maddie, do you think Eddie has a crush on you?”
Maddie rolled her lips, “Eddie flying out here to make sure you’re okay.” She squinted at him. “Did something happen last night?”
Something definitely happened last night.
Buck didn’t have to say anything for her to know. Maddie had been able to read him since he was born. He blushed, and he rubbed at the back of his neck, but he was smiling, the sort of twitching one that she knew he was trying and failing to keep from spreading across his face. “Shut up.” He mumbled.
Maddie mimed locking her lips and darted forward to kiss just under his eye. “You’re allowed to be happy.” She whispered into his ear, reaching under the table to squeeze his knee before sitting back.
“Eddie.” Natalie said with a cough. Buck’s head snapped up, his blue eyes apprehensive. Maddie was thankful she was sitting between them, a lot less thankful that Jee was there too. “Is that short for something?”
“Uhm…” Buck frowned.
“Yes.” Eddie pointedly placed a mug of coffee in front of each of them, Howie placed a plate piled full of food in between the one he was sharing with Maddie, and the two of them sat down almost at the same time. Maddie rested her foot against Howie’s under the table again, thankful to have him near and Eddie… wrapped his arm around the back of Buck’s chair and took a measured sip at the coffee he had gotten for him.
Natalie floundered. “What…” She began and trailed off.
“Edward?” Joseph asked curiously and Maddie noticed the way his eyes were very firmly stuck on the arm Eddie had rested behind her brother’s back. She wanted to throw her own coffee across the table and into his lap. Anything to get him to stop looking.
“No.” And in a move so bold that Maddie wanted to have it on film so that she could watch it over and over again, Eddie sat up, turned to whisper something softly into Buck’s ear that had her brother choking on a laugh into his napkin, and changed the topic completely by appealing to Jee’s new favorite thing, “Jee, I heard that you saw some penguins this week.”
Jee perked up. “Yeah!”
“So, we’re going to steal one, right?” Eddie asked her seriously.
“Eddie!” Howie gasped. “You are not dragging my daughter into a life of crime.”
“Was I asking him?” Eddie asked Jee with a scrunch of his face.
Jee shook her head with a laugh. “No!”
“Right? Gosh, Chim mind your own business.”
“Yeah!”
Howie gasped with a hand held to his chest. “Ah!”
“I’m thinking,” Eddie laughed, and Maddie could see, easily, just how her brother had fallen so hard for him. “That if we dress a penguin up in a pair of Jee’s pajamas… we’d be able to get them on the plane.”
“Oh my god,” Howie groaned. “We are not planning a penguin kidnapping.”
“Oh my god,” Eddie mocked. “Stop butting in.”
“We’ll buy them a hat,” Buck said with a snicker. He knocked his knuckles against Maddie’s wrist and nodded towards the jug of water at the end of the table. Wordlessly she poured him a glass and nudged it over to him. She watched him grab a little white pill from his pocket and toss it back, his throat working as he swallowed it in one quick motion. She wasn’t the only one watching. She dared them to say anything more about any of it. “No one will even notice.”
“You are not ,” Howie argued uselessly. “Dragging your niece into a penguin kidnapping!”
“We’ll steal you a penguin too.”
“Penguin baby!” Jee cheered.
“Penguin baby!” Buck echoed in agreement.
Over their heads, Eddie winked at her and she pursed her lips and smiled back. She’d steal a thousand penguins for both of them if it kept them smiling too.
--
Daniel Buckley’s grave was, oddly, bigger than Buck had expected it to be. Technically, it was just outside of the city limits, overlooking a lake on the top of a hill. He was situated in the children’s section of the graveyard, the one with the little stuffed animals and flower wreaths, between a grave of a little girl of three years with big, rosy cheeks in the picture her parents had printed on her grave, and one of a little boy of twelve with a fresh teddy bear in a top hat sitting against it. Their parents had never given them the address to visit, but Chim had looked it up the moment Maddie mentioned wanting to visit and typed it into his rental car’s GPS before either of them could think of a good enough reason not to visit.
He had driven them there, him and Maddie up front and Buck, Eddie and Jee-Yun in the back, and they had all piled out of the car, although Chim, Eddie and Jee had stayed by the road and Buck had stuffed his hands in his pockets, linked his arm with Maddie’s and let her drag him forward. She seemed to know where she was going, which Buck supposed was a good thing because he didn’t. “I remember,” Maddie said softly, like a secret that could carry itself across the wind. “You were so confused during the funeral. I let you play on that tree,” she nodded towards where it stood only a few feet away. “And mom got so mad that we didn’t stand in the procession line.”
Of course she had, Buck thought, because it had always been about the image of a united family they could present, instead of the mourning children they had had. He squeezed her arm tighter and glanced behind them. Eddie and Chim were deep in conversation, the two of them knelt down beside where Jee-Yun was rolling a rudimentary snowman on the hood of the car. Eddie looked up, though, like he could feel Buck’s eyes on him. He smiled and Buck smiled back and when he turned around Maddie pulled them to a stop and slowly dropped to her knees. He watched her brush her hand over the deep layer of snow that sat on top of the stone, her crimson gloves oddly striking against the sparkling snow.
Slower, Buck lowered himself down with her, careful to keep his wince off his face and shifting the majority of his weight onto his right leg instead of his left. The snow was biting cold when he brushed his own hand against it, but between the two of them they managed to clean it off and Buck shivered before stuffing his hands back deep in his pockets.
Maddie traced the letters in the stone with her pointer finger.
Her hand was shaking.
Daniel Philip Buckley
March 24, 1985 - January 18, 1994
Not even nine years old.
Buck breathed in and Maddie breathed out.
“He was really into Transformers.” Maddie said when Buck shifted to straighten out his leg with a wince. “Like really into it. He had a whole collection of books, toys and games .” She laughed and swiped at her cheek. “He begged mom to dress you up as Bumblebee for your first Halloween.” Maddie glanced over at him. “You were so cute . Whenever you crawled, you looked just like the car, but when you stood up…” She clapped her hands. “You were the robot.”
Somehow it… made him want to cry to think about it. Maddie had this whole life - he had this whole life that had Daniel in it too. Maddie had gone so long without saying anything about him, and Buck had gone so long without him in it that he had forgotten about him completely. Christopher had been eight when Shannon had died, but Eddie kept her memory alive by telling him the same stories about her over and over and over again until they were burned into his mind and he could recite them himself. He swallowed, “You don’t… you don’t talk about him.”
Maddie sucked in a deep, trembling breath. “Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s weird, you know? Mom and dad made me promise not to talk about him and it’s just… it’s been so long.” She brushed a hand down the back of her beanie matching, maroon beanie. “I don’t know how to talk about him anymore.”
Buck ducked his head, reaching out his own, gloveless finger to brush over the cold stone. Absurdly, he wished he had brought a blanket with them to leave at the gravesite. Daniel wasn’t alive, he hadn’t been alive for a long time, and the chance of him feeling any sort of cold at all when his body had all but decomposed below the surface was… it didn’t make sense. But Daniel wasn’t much older than Christopher had been during the tsunami and Buck… Buck thought about him, and he thought about the little boy in that picture Maddie had, and the little boy that Buck used to read stories to at night, and he wondered if he ever got cold the same way Buck did when it dropped below seventy out. “Maddie,” Buck traced the letters of his name - D, A, N . “Why did you want to come here?”
Maddie hummed, “I miss him.”
“No, I…” Buck cleared his throat. “I mean here . Boston. To this… reunion thing.”
Maddie bit her lip, “I don’t… I don’t know.” She watched as his fingers stalled and backed up, went back to the D and the A and the N. “I think I wanted… I wanted them to apologize, you know? I wanted to know why they left us behind.”
“Closure.” He echoed in the cold quiet.
“Closure.” Maddie agreed. Her hands reached out and closed over his wrist, tugging his hand until it was between both of hers and blew, her breath hot on his skin. “It means a lot that you came. I know you didn’t want to.”
“You’re my sister.” Buck replied because that was really all it was to it. He would do anything for her, even if Maddie never got around to asking him for it.
“I’m sorry our family is full of such assholes.” Maddie said bluntly.
It caught Buck off guard enough that he laughed, lost his balance and landed on his bottom in the cold, wet, fluffy snow. Maddie caught his forearm and Chim, from down below, yelled loudly up, “Jee just did the same thing! It’s much cuter when she does it, though.” Buck looked upside down at him, just in time to catch the handful of snow Eddie dumped down his back. Chimney yelped, and Jee rolled in the snow, loudly laughing at the two of them.
“I think we did pretty good for ourselves.” Buck said slowly.
Maddie looked over her shoulder with him, clearing off a spot so that she could sit too, curling her legs underneath her bottom and tugging him into her side. Buck was marginally bigger than she was, now, but he dropped his head onto her shoulder anyway, the soft velvet of her scarf warming the skin of his cheek. “When Daniel was eight, he got sent home from the hospital,” Maddie began. “And the first thing we did was go to the water park.”
“The first thing?”
“Seriously,” Maddie’s cheek landed on his head. “We didn’t even actually go home first. Dad just set us in the car and drove all three of us out to Six Flags. You were too little for any of the rides, but the attendants saw Daniel’s remission badge and let him hold you in his lap for the water slides.”
It was so cold out that Buck could see his own breath forming in the air, the snow was seeping into the seat of his pants and freezing them to his skin, but it was like Daniel was there with them, the top of their little triangle, listening as Maddie recounted details of what seemed like a different life.
They didn’t move for a long time and, when they did, it was only because Jee-Yun had started loudly asking if they could get something to eat. Maddie leaned forward until her nose brushed the stone and she paused, her eyes shut and Buck imagined her breath warming Daniel’s forehead the same way it had warmed Buck’s cold fingers. “Miss you, Danny.” She whispered and pressed her lips to the marble. She stood up, brushed off the back of her legs like it would make any difference on the wet spot pooled there and swiped at her cheeks.
Maddie turned to offer him a hand up and it was pathetic, really, but Buck didn’t think he could support himself enough for her to actually help . “No, uhm… you go ahead.” He waved her away. “Just… give me a minute.”
She cocked her head at him before she nodded, reaching out to pat his shoulder as she walked by, yelling out to Jee-Yun and catching her with tickling fingers on her sides from behind. Chimney wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled her in close and Maddie sunk into him, the same way she had that one time after dispatch had been collectively kidnapped. And Buck… Buck couldn’t really pull himself to stand on his own with the way the cold made his leg feel about twenty pounds heavier, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave either. To go to another coast, where it was almost always warm, with a family that loved him and wanted him around, and leave Daniel behind. Again.
Wasn’t it supposed to be them against the world?
He wished he had brought something to leave behind.
How sad was it, Buck thought, that his best memory of Daniel was always going to be this one? He supposed it beat out the memory of finding out he had existed. “I wish I knew you.” Buck whispered, just in case the words traveled too far and hit Maddie’s ears. “I’m sorry I don’t.”
He stayed for a moment longer and he only realized he had started crying when Eddie’s warm breath brushed against his ear. “Ready to go?” He asked softly, although he didn’t push Buck to move much at all. Eddie stayed where he was, crouched behind where Buck was still sitting in wet, cold snow, and stared at the stone himself.
Daniel Philip Buckley .
How long had it been since anyone had last visited him?
“I wish…” Buck started and stopped, sniffled and rubbed his wrist under his nose. “Sorry, it’s stupid.”
“You’re at your brother’s grave, Buck.” Eddie’s hands rubbed at his arms through the wool of his peacoat. “Pretty sure whatever you’re going to say isn’t stupid.”
Buck was pretty sure he was wrong. He nibbled at the inside of his lip and shrugged. “What if he gets cold?” He asked in a small, small voice. He felt very much like the two-year-old he had been when he had last visited. Lost and so very… very human.
Eddie breathed in and then out, shifting his weight so that he was a bit more comfortable, a boot on either side of Buck’s hips. “What if…” Buck started and stopped. “What if he gets lonely, you know? He’s stuck here and… and we’re going home in a few days and just leaving him again.”
“What makes you think he hasn’t come with you?” Eddie asked lowly, Buck’s helpless, immature questions a secret between the two of them. He felt Eddie’s lips brush against his cheek. “What if he’s been with you, every single step of the way?”
“You don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I think… you survived a truck being blown up, a couple of blood clots, a tsunami, getting struck by literal lightning.” Eddie shrugged. “It’s not that hard to believe that you had a big brother looking out for you your entire life.”
For some reason, it struck Buck as funny. The laugh bubbled up out of him, mixed with a sob on the way out, and pulled something painfully full of love out of his chest. He slapped a hand over his mouth and shut his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“I’m still sorry.” Buck argued. “I’m alive. He’s dead. I’m… I’m sorry I forgot him in the first place.”
“I don’t think you’re to blame for that.”
“Someone has to be.”
“There’s a whole hotel full of people who are actually responsible.” Eddie stood up and his knees cracked. “Come on,” He came around to the front of him, held out his hands for Buck to grab onto and slid his grip up to his elbows once he had. “I think you’ve had enough for today.”
“I don’t…” Still, Buck helped as much as he could as Eddie leveraged him upwards, his left leg stiff from the cold and his hip screaming as he shifted to shake it out. “I don’t want to abandon him.”
“We’ll come back,” Eddie held on until Buck was steady on his own two feet, and, even then, he let go only to grab him again, linking their fingers together and stuffing Buck’s cold ones into the warmth of his pocket. “Chris hasn’t ever seen snow.”
Buck balked. “Never?”
Eddie smiled crookedly at him and began to slowly move the two of them back towards the idling car. “Never.”
--
Her mother caught them at the hotel bar. Them, being Maddie and Eddie - Howie, Jee-Yun, and Buck still in their respective hotel rooms. Howie was giving Maddie a well deserved break, helping Jee with a bath while he made a quick check in call to Hen, and Buck was… Maddie didn’t know where Buck was but Eddie didn’t really look in the least bit worried. For a while, it had only been Maddie, even, but Eddie had found her at the bar, stuffed his phone in his back pocket and ordered for the both of them. “Checking in with Chris?” Maddie had asked right around the same time she had, unfortunately, noticed her parents sitting in a dimly lit corner.
“Yeah,” Eddie had smiled sideways at her. “He watched a movie that freaked him out a little too much last night, but apparently he can’t wait to watch it again.” Eddie rolled his eyes like he couldn’t quite understand the urge.
Maddie had always been a fan of horror movies. Buck had hated them but had kept watching them, anyway, tucked into a corner with his face alternating between hiding in the hood of his sweatshirt and watching the television with big, wide, scared eyes. “Buck used to do the same thing.”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he told her and thanked the bartender when she slid over their drinks. “He still does that.”
“It’s where Chris learned it.” Maddie teased.
“It’s where he’s learned a lot of things.” Not that Eddie sounded upset about it.
Maddie almost pointed it out to him - she hadn’t had many conversations with Eddie Diaz, at least not many private conversations, but she had a feeling they would get along just fine. Eddie was full of sarcasm and dry wit, according to Howie he had a heart of gold, and, most importantly, he loved her brother enough to… to share his life with him. “So,” Maddie sipped her own drink appreciatively. “This is your first trip to Boston, right?”
“Oh, I mean…” Eddie shrugged. “Technically?” He narrowed his eyes behind the frames of his glasses (Maddie hadn’t even known he wore glasses until she was seeing him in them but they looked natural against his face and, quick enough, Maddie was forgetting that they had caught her off guard in the first place). “I stopped over here on my way out to Afghanistan.”
Her mother popped up on Maddie’s left, Eddie to her right, and Maddie watched as he clocked her out of the corner of his eye and glanced at his watch with a notable frown. It was just past five. The five of them had dinner reservations at seven. “Maddie,” Margaret’s fingers brushed over her elbow and they felt about as cold as the snow Maddie had sat in earlier that day. “What have you and your brother been up to today?” She sounded interested, like she was genuinely curious as to how they had spent their time.
Maddie shared a sidelong glance with Eddie. He shrugged as though to say they’re your parents and swallowed a sip of his beer. “We were… showing Howie and Eddie around the city.” Maddie gestured to him to pull him into the conversation.
Eddie scowled for all of a moment. “Oh, that sounds lovely!” Her mother enthused and, when she looked away, Eddie mouthed a sarcastic thank you in her direction.
Maddie snickered into her cocktail. “Philip!” Margaret pitched her voice towards Maddie’s father. “The kids are over here.”
The kids . As though they didn’t both already have children of their own. “Sorry.” Maddie apologized from the corner of her mouth.
“It’s fine.” Eddie muttered back. “It’s not like my parents don’t do the same shit.”
His parents, though, Maddie knew were just a whole other beast from her own. “Where’s your brother hiding?” Margaret asked the same way she always did - like Buck not being exactly where Maddie was at all times of the day meant that he was up to something nefarious. Like she wouldn’t complain about him being clingy if he had stayed with her like a shadow the entire trip. “Your grandmother was looking for him earlier. George wanted to thank you two for helping him out the other day.”
“That the almond guy?” Eddie asked out of the side of his mouth.
Margaret didn’t miss it. Her left eye twitched. “Yeah,” Maddie answered his question anyway.
Eddie snorted, “Tonto.”
Her father had finally made his way close enough to them, though, and his hand closed warm over Maddie’s shoulder, but it didn’t feel nearly as welcoming as Maddie had always remembered it being. “Maddie!” He greeted happily. “We missed you today.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Where did you and Jee-Yun wander off to?”
Eddie breathed out in a carefully controlled manner.
“The five of us were just wandering the city.” Maddie provided helplessly. “Jee wanted to see the aquarium again and Eddie is obsessed with penguins.”
He really had been obsessed with them. Maddie didn’t think she had ever seen Eddie look so young - when he was, objectively, only two years older than Buck. He had bounced on his heels and grabbed onto Buck’s sleeve like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He hadn’t pushed his way to the front, and Maddie was pretty sure she caught Buck chatting up one of the attendants to get them to let Eddie help feed them. He had looked about ten seconds away from coaxing one of them into his jacket to try and bring home.
It had probably been one of the cutest things Maddie had ever seen and Jee-Yun was her daughter. “The aquarium.” Margaret scoffed with a laugh. “You should really do more educational museums with her, Maddie. Jee-Yun isn’t going to learn by staring at fish swimming in a tank all day.”
“What if she wants to be a marine biologist?” Eddie asked lightly, his fingers picking at the label on his beer bottle. “Nowhere better to learn that than with people that do that job.”
“A marine biologist.” Philip laughed as though Eddie had been joking. “Evan used to say things like that too, but he could never pick one thing and just stick with it long enough to actually learn about it.”
Maddie watched as Eddie’s shoulders tensed. “We’re going to the science museum tomorrow.” She explained quickly. “Karen, one of our friends back home, she has a friend that runs the planetarium. She’s got us all of this really cool behind the scenes stuff that we’re excited to do.”
“Hen mentioned that.” Eddie tossed in with a slightly more excited tint to his face. “Buck has no idea that you guys managed to set that up.”
“Yeah,” Maddie shared a small smile with him. “He’s going to be so excited.”
Eddie opened his mouth to respond but Margaret cut him off, “We’re having one big, last family dinner tomorrow.” She explained with a look between the two of them. “It starts at four.”
“Oh,” Maddie swallowed. “Howie and I are going to meet up with one of his old friends for dinner tomorrow, mom.”
“This is family, Maddie.”
“He’s family to Howie, mom.”
Philip’s hand fell from her shoulder. “Maddie,” he sighed. “I know this whole thing hasn’t been what you wanted, but this may be the last time you get to see your grandparents. You can visit Howard’s friend another time.”
An instinctual guilt clawed at her stomach. “That’s not exactly fair.” Eddie, rather subtly, stepped forward, his body a shield between Maddie and her parents. He reached forward until his hand was grabbing onto the bar, his arm a bracket in front of where Maddie had been sitting. He was an older brother too, Maddie remembered Buck mentioning, smack in the middle between two sisters. “If Maddie didn’t know about the plan until now you can’t really be mad at her for making other plans.”
“This is between family, son.” Philip scolded.
“I am family, sir.”
It was quick and to the point and Maddie wanted to bottle the twisted confusion on her father’s face and carry with her forever. As it was, she would never really know if Buck finally showing up helped the situation or harmed it. “Evan,” her mother directed towards where he had appeared behind Maddie. “Your sister is apparently not going to be able to make it to the family dinner tomorrow. It starts at four. You can bring Jee-Yun.”
Buck blinked, clearly startled by the turn of events. “Oh, uhm…” He furrowed his brow.
“Mom,” Maddie groaned. “Jee’s coming with us to Eli’s tomorrow.”
“Maddie,” Margaret sighed. “Be reasonable.”
“I’m confused.” Buck admitted slowly. “Why would I be taking Jee to a dinner I’m not even going to tomorrow?”
Softly, Maddie heard Eddie choke on a laugh. He turned to rest both of his elbows on the bar again, shaking his head with a rueful smile in Buck’s direction. “Evan,” their mother scolded. “ One of you is going to that dinner tomorrow.”
“I’m pretty sure none of us are going to that dinner tomorrow.” Buck responded, purposely obtuse.
Maddie was glad that Eddie, at least, found it entertaining. Her? She could only feel the tension that had been growing between the group of them thickening. “Come now,” Philip clicked his tongue. “This is a family event. We didn’t bring you here for you two to run off instead of spending time with the rest of your family.”
“ You didn’t bring us.” Maddie pointed out unhelpfully.
“You mean the same family that pretended we didn’t exist for over twenty years?” Buck snorted and grabbed the beer bottle Eddie offered him.
“They’re trying to make an effort.” Margaret implored. “The least you two could do is try to make an effort back.”
“We’ve made an effort.” Maddie argued. “We showed up. We’ve played nice -.”
“Don’t think your grandmother hasn’t told us what you’ve said to her.” Philip countered with his chin pointed down at them like Maddie was eighteen and Buck was trying to hide behind her again. “You two never understood how difficult losing a child could be on an entire family.”
“I think we understood plenty.” Maddie scowled. “ We were part of that family too.”
“You were children ,” Margaret said. “It was like you two just wanted to forget about him.”
Maddie reeled back as though stricken. “You forbid me from talking about him!”
“You never challenged us.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to.”
“And you ,” Margaret pointed at where Buck had merely slumped his shoulders over on the bar. “It was like… like you’re punishing us.”
“ How ?” Buck’s cheeks had spots of red in them, his expression a mixture of angry and hurt.
Their mother always knew just where to cut to cause the most pain. “I don’t know how many times you want us to apologize. It’s like you want to hate us. Was what we did really so bad?”
“Yes?” Buck answered with a hesitating glance towards where Maddie was frozen solid, her jaw aching from how tightly she was clenching it in her mouth.
“You don’t understand ,” Philip nearly wailed. “You two never made things easy on us.”
“It’s like you were always working against us.” Margaret agreed. “And you’re still doing it now.”
“I was two .” Buck repeated slowly. “I don’t know how you wanted me to make things easy .”
“The least you could do is try to make things work.”
“With people that couldn’t even look us up on Facebook?”
“You can’t expect people to try and not put in the effort yourself.”
“Why do we have to be the ones put in the effort?”
“You’re so convinced that everyone has done you wrong,” Margaret shook her head. “Evan, not everything is about you .”
“Okay,” Abruptly, Eddie straightened up and clapped his hands on the bar. “We’re not doing this anymore.”
Philip straightened his shoulders. “I told you before to stay out of this, son.”
“I’m not your son.” Eddie rolled his eyes. “Maddie, why don’t you go check on Chim? Make sure he’s handling bath time alright.”
Maddie… Maddie understood an exit when she was being handed one. She also understood that she had a habit of running away, of letting Buck settle her fights for her and never wondering just what that did to him in the long run. “We have reservations.” Maddie said instead. “Maybe we should head out early,” she told Buck earnestly. “In case there’s traffic.”
Margaret sighed and threw her hands in the air, tears glittering in her eyes. “We want to fix this.” Her words hit Maddie’s spine.
Maddie wasn’t sure what happened, really, except Buck had waited for her walk past him and gone to follow. One moment she was near the exit with two shadows, and the next she was by herself. She turned around, and cast her gaze in a circle until she found them, only footsteps from where she had left them. Her father’s hand was wrapped around Buck’s wrist, holding tight. Maddie frowned and stumbled her way forward again. “Stop acting like this,” Philip was saying. “You’re acting like a child.”
“Please let go.” Buck asked him in a small, familiar voice.
“Evan, if you walk out of this door… none of these people will want to see you again and it will only be your fault.”
Cruel.
How could their parents be so cruel ?
Maddie opened her mouth to argue with them about it some more, to push herself into their space and bodily move them back . Maybe she could even make them take their words and eat them but… “What happens next if you don’t let him go will be your fault.” Eddie said in a carefully measured voice and their father, the great Philip Buckley who never backed down from anything… let go.
Maddie was torn, because Buck was pushing his way through the bar to stand an inch behind her and Maddie’s longest living job was making sure that he was okay but their father was standing up to his full height and fixing Eddie with a look that Maddie knew, from a lifetime of experience, meant that he was about to get a lecture of a lifetime. Their father wasn’t a violent man, he would never do anything to physically harm another person and Maddie was well aware that if anyone could handle themselves in a fight it was Eddie Diaz but…. “Listen here,” Philip began and Maddie brushed her fingertips ever so lightly over Buck’s forearm until he was pulling his gaze away from wherever he had gotten lost in to blink down at her in question. “If you don’t learn to stay out of this…”
“You’ll what ?” Eddie asked almost lazily, his brows creeping up in a purposeful challenge.
Are you okay? Maddie wanted to ask. It’s not your fault that our family is so fractured. Please, don’t believe him when he says that. She was well versed in Buck’s microexpressions, Maddie liked to think that she knew how to read him better than he knew how to read himself. She knew what that blank look held in his eyes, she knew that it was a mask for the sadness hiding within, an expression that he had long ago mastered to not give their parents the satisfaction of their barbed words hitting their target.
“I’ll -.” Philip began and Buck’s expression turned from blank to worried to thunderous in less than a second.
“Eddie,” he called. “No vale la pena.”
Eddie waited a moment more, brows raised and eyes flicking down their father’s form and back up before he rolled his eyes and joined the two of them. Maddie had never given him more than a brief hug in greeting, but when his arm brushed against her back and he expertly herded her and Buck out of the bar she felt… oddly protected. She wasn’t Eddie’s priority, she knew that for a fact and she was happy that Buck had someone looking out for him when she couldn’t, but she was something for him if he had decided to get involved in the first place. “You two okay?” He asked with a drag of his eyebrows.
Maddie mustered up a smile for him. “Fine.” She fished her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen, quickly sending Josh an answer back to the question he had sent her earlier. “I’m sorry you had to get involved.” Maddie said it robotically and, when she looked up, Eddie wasn’t really paying her a whole lot of attention.
“I’m going to go for a walk.” Buck declared with a shake of his head.
“Buck -.” They said it at the same time but Buck waved them both off and stalked away.
Maddie glanced towards the frosted windows - she hoped he didn’t get it into his head that he was going to go outside . He hadn’t brought down a coat and Maddie had plenty of experience in just how likely Buck was to punish himself to pull his thoughts out of his own head. Beside her, Eddie groaned and gripped at the hair on the back of his head. Maddie opened her mouth to say something , anything - an apology, gratitude, a joke even but all of it felt so tumultuous. “Please don’t apologize for your parents being assholes.” Eddie told the floor by her feet. “I’m going to go… make sure he doesn’t go outside and freeze.”
She wanted to cry. Or-or to storm back into the bar and demand her parents stop punishing Buck for things that were completely out of his control. She wanted them to apologize, she wanted them to be on their hands and knees begging him to forgive them. They had practically done it once before, everything had seemed… normal after Buck’s coma but, as usual, they left and it seemed that without a life or death situation, and without their big family secret on the line, their parents seemed less than inclined to smooth things over with him.
No wonder why he felt like the son they never wanted.
Maddie nodded even though Eddie hadn’t waited around for her to acknowledge his quick getaway. She squared her shoulders and slowly made her way over to the elevators.
Buck didn’t need her to chase after him too.
Not this time.
--
It was snowing again and Buck, like an idiot , had left his coat back in his hotel room. Granted, he hadn’t actually known that things would go the way that they had, although he supposed that he should have at least predicted the way things would turn out the moment he saw Maddie and Eddie slumped shoulder to shoulder at the bar. He knew Maddie well enough to know that she had been on the defensive, knew Eddie well enough to understand what the way he was frowning meant, knew his parents well enough to know that the things they were saying were… probably the things he had heard his entire life. But the point remained that they kept surprising him.
Usually they were more apt to keep up appearances.
Buck shoved his hands further into his pockets, thankful he was at least wearing a sweater, and stopped just outside of the door. He traced the way the snow as it fell in light clumps from the sky - it seemed to dance in the streetlights, spiraling down and adding more volume to the mounds of white that had already been plowed over, the treatment from tires and mud painting the perfect white into a muddy brown. “I know you’re a sucker for punishment,” Buck jumped at as a heavy fabric draped over his shoulders and, sheepishly, Eddie shrugged and shuffled his feet on the wet pavement. “But fuck it’s cold outside.”
Slowly, he smiled, ducking his chin down to his chest and watching the world through the fan of his eyelashes. “You could go inside .”
Eddie hummed and nodded in agreement. “You could come with me.”
He probably should. Buck was bound to catch a cold, what with sitting in the snow earlier that day and now standing in the air that was so sharp it was like it was trying to take pieces out of his cheeks. He wiggled his shoulders more firmly into the coat Eddie had brought out for him. “Yeah,” Buck agreed. “I probably should.”
Still, he didn’t move. And still, Eddie didn’t really try to make him move. He merely sighed and leaned himself back against the side of the building, a shiver wracking his frame from head to toe. “You know they’re wrong, right?” Eddie asked with a casual squint of his eyes.
The lenses on his glasses were fogging. The tip of his nose turning a rosy red. He looked much cuter in the cold than Buck did. “That it’s my fault if none of them want to talk to me again?” Buck shrugged. “I mean… they’re sort of not.”
“Buck, you were two years old.”
“I’m almost thirty-five now.” He mumbled.
“You’re thirty- one .” Eddie corrected with a scoff.
“And it’s not… it’s not like I wanted to talk to them anyway.” Which only made it more aggravating that, after a week of seeing the family that he was meant to have, a part of him was screaming out for them to love him. He sighed harshly, a sharp puff of warm, white air pushing from his lips. “It’s so stupid .”
“It’s not stupid ,” Eddie argued. “Look, Buck, for all of your life you… you probably watched people talk about their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and all you had was Maddie and two, frankly, shitty parents.” He shrugged.
“They were only mildly shitty.”
“They’re emotionally abusive narcissists that don’t know how to see beyond their own nose.”
Sharply, Buck laughed. “I’m sorry, what happened to mister… if they want to make an effort, you should let them?”
“I was talking to Chim,” Eddie argued. “Not to you .”
A true enough fact. Eddie was probably the only person on the entire planet that actually knew how Buck had reacted to finding out about Daniel. He hadn’t gone to anyone else about it - the team had seen the anger laced with hurt, but Eddie had seen the raw, painful emotions surrounding it. “I don’t know.” Buck said helplessly. “I just… where were they, right? All of those years and… I don’t know. I can’t imagine leaving someone behind like that.”
“It’s… good, right?” Eddie asked slowly. “That they want to make an effort now.”
“I guess.”
“But just because they want to make an effort now… doesn’t mean that you have to make an effort too.”
“I can’t expect them to make an effort and not put in the work myself.”
“Buck, what effort have they made?” Eddie asked with a tiny, incredulous laugh. “No, seriously, what effort? They invite you out to Boston? They… rent out a hotel, they crash the lunch you have planned with Maddie, they ambush you in the elevator to not even try and apologize, they throw a fit over you wanting to visit your brother’s grave…” Eddie shook his head. “If they wanted to make an effort there’s a thousand other things they could do instead…” He gestured towards the hotel with his forearm. “Of all of this.”
“Is it bad that… they’re trying just… makes it worse?”
“Buck, you didn’t know they existed two months ago.” Eddie countered with a raise of his brow. “You’re allowed to take your time to figure out how you feel about everything.”
“You sound like my therapist.” Buck grumbled and rubbed at the side of his nose.
“Maybe you should listen to her more.”
“Maybe you should stop going to therapy,” he argued lightly. “You were less… before therapy.”
“Less?” Eddie smiled, though, his top row of teeth peeking out from between his lips. “I was also less into you .”
“No,” Buck scoffed. “You were just as into me.” He would say, though, if anyone were to ask, that the pink of his cheeks was only because of the cold, not because of the way his mind was flashing back to just how into him Eddie had proven to be the night before. “You just didn’t want to admit it.”
Eddie squinted at him. “You’re awfully cocky.”
“No less gay,” Buck said with a shrug. “Just a lot more repressed.”
“I mean,” Eddie hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I could just go take my repressed self back to LA -.” His face was warm in the cradle of Buck’s hand’s though, his mouth responsive under Buck’s lips and he laughed into his mouth like they had done this a thousand times over again, and not like it had only been a day. Eddie’s hands closed over his wrists, strong enough to push him away if he really wanted to and, unsurprisingly, Buck’s jacket slowly inched its way down his shoulders and over his back, pooling on the pavement and collecting small, crystal snow drops on the wool. It was bound to be ruined after all this trip, but it was fine. Buck didn’t see himself visiting during the winter again anytime soon and, if he did, he would probably be better off buying a puffer coat instead of relying on an old wool one that he had gotten when he was eighteen.
Eddie kissed him back, just like he had the night before, a tad bit possessive but with an ease that told Buck to relax. That reminded him that he didn’t have to rush this. That he could just exist, at whatever pace the two of them decided to keep things moving forward at. And Buck was so thankful for him that he didn’t even have the words to say it. So in love that he didn’t know what to do with himself. He held onto Eddie’s face, and Eddie held onto his wrists, his thumbs drawing a pattern into the skin. The tips of their noses brushed, and Eddie, violently, shivered.
Buck pulled back with a snorting laugh. “You good?”
“No,” Eddie grumbled, dropped his hands from Buck’s wrists and stuffed them in his armpits. “It’s fucking cold out, Buck.”
“A little too cold for the Texan in you?” Still, Buck didn’t want him to suffer . He bent down, picked up his jacket with a wrinkle of his nose at just how heavy the fabric felt, and draped it over his arm.
“I’m going to shove you into a snowbank.” Still, Eddie held the door open for him and crowded his front into Buck’s back to push him into the heat of the hotel faster.
“What would Chris say?”
“He’d laugh .” One more, full body shiver, wracked Eddie’s entire frame before he squared his hands on Buck’s hips and pushed him more fully towards the elevator.
“Were you going to fight my dad?”
“I was thinking about it.” Eddie wasn’t all that much shorter than him, and he didn’t exactly fit under Buck’s chin like any of his previous girlfriends had, but he pressed into him for warmth anyway. He still allowed Buck’s hands to rub warmth back into his arms, even though Buck was chilled to the bone himself. “We have a few more hours until the dinner reservations.” Eddie gave him a pointed look. “What do you want to do?”
Buck quirked a brow at him with a slowly spreading smile. “What do you want to do?”
“I kind of want to punch your dad.” Eddie said with a careless shrug, stepping to the side to let the family that had been in the elevator file out before filing in. “But I’ll settle for whatever you want to do instead.”
“I kind of just want to go home.” Buck admitted with a roll of his neck.
“I mean we could ,” Eddie agreed, his arms crossed over his chest. “But we have the science museum tomorrow and I know how much you’ve been looking forward to that.”
“Yeah, but… we have museums at home too.” Eddie gave him that look, the same one he always gave Buck that asked what’s really going on without even asking it. Buck rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s just… what’s stopping anyone from crashing that too, you know?”
“Well, we only have tickets for five people so…” Eddie trailed off.
Buck snorted with a shake of his head. “You can buy tickets at the entry.”
“Buck, so… so what if they do crash it?” Eddie asked with a shrug. “We can always just… leave them there. Just because they might… go to a museum too doesn’t mean that you have to spend any time with them that you don’t want to spend with them.”
Buck said nothing else until they were in their room, pausing only for a moment to listen to Maddie’s loud laughter echoing in the room she had with Chim and Jee-Yun just a few doors down. She wouldn’t have minded if he interrupted their time together - Maddie had always found time for him, even when Buck couldn’t find time for himself. But he didn’t stop, happy enough to hear that she was happy, and, instead, kicked off his shoes in the general direction of his luggage and flopped back onto the bed with a loud, overwhelmed sigh. “You make it sound so easy .” He muttered into the elbow he tossed over his eyes.
“The fun thing about being an adult,” Eddie said and the bed dipped as he sat down next to him. “Is that you don’t have to stay with the people that made you feel like shit when you were a kid anymore.”
“I thought the fun part of being an adult was… getting fun money or whatever.”
“You’ve always had fun money.”
It was true, Buck had always had fun money. Clearly, or he wouldn’t have been able to travel the world in his Jeep doing odd jobs for most of his twenties. “I know what they’re like, Eddie. And I… I know I’m catastrophizing or whatever, it’s just… I’m here, right? And they’re pushing all of these buttons and it’s like I’m twelve again, trying to stop any of them from deciding I’m not worth sticking around for anymore.” His anger mingled with his hurt, caught in the edges of his throat and spilled out with a frustrated laugh. “And I fucking hate winter, okay? I hate the cold. Nothing good happens in winter.”
“You’re worth sticking around for.”
“Yeah but you have to say that.”
“Why?” Eddie asked with a scoff. “Because I love you?”
It wasn’t the first time he had said it and still, it had Buck blushing like it was his first time hearing it all over again. “Yeah.” He mumbled.
“I don’t have to say anything like that.” Eddie nudged his knee. “Mírame.” Blurily, Buck did so, dropping his elbow from his eyes and warily looking up at him. “It wasn’t your fault that your parents lied to you for twenty-something years. It wasn’t your fault that you forgot about Daniel. It wasn’t your fault that the rest of your family let things happen to you that shouldn’t have happened, or that they decided it was easier to let you all go then it was to fight for you to stay.”
Buck swallowed. “It was a little bit my fault.”
“None of it was your fault.”
And when he said it? Buck could almost believe it.
Eddie had never lied to him. He had never told him anything that wasn’t the exact, honest truth. He was brutally honest if he had to be, but he was, most importantly, the only person that had never tried to make Buck into something he wasn’t. “You know that I… I love you, right?”
Slowly, Eddie’s face creased with a pleased, flattered smile that had him smiling down towards his knees, his cheeks pinking deliciously. “Yeah, I know you do.” Eddie stared at him for a moment longer before he dropped down beside him, his feet flexing as he kicked off his own boots to join Buck’s on the floor. “Want to watch a movie or something?” He asked lightly.
Buck snorted, “Or something.”
“Or something.” Eddie echoed, and caught him again when he closed the space between them with an easy, welcoming smile and a rapidly warming grip on the side of his face.
--
California was three hours behind Massachusetts and twice as warm. Jee-Yun, miraculously, slept through the majority of the flight, passed out drooling on Howie’s shirt. Their parents hadn’t seen them off to the airport, but Maddie supposed that was more because they had left so early in the morning that the morning front desk worker at the hotel had just clocked in. Maddie hadn’t realized how peaceful a home could feel until she was stepping back into hers, Jee-Yun huddled in Buck’s helpful arms as Eddie helped her unload the stroller and Howie grabbed their carry ons.
Bobby Nash met them at the gate, his hands clasped together and smiling wide, Athena only a step behind him with her sunglasses resting on top of her head. Unsurprisingly, Bobby greeted her brother first, waiting patiently for Buck to hand Jee-Yun back to Howie before clapping him in a tight, familiar bear hug. “Welcome home, kid.” Bobby said in a gruff, gentle voice.
“Hey, Maddie.” Athena’s hand was gentle when it guided her into a hug of her own, her arms tight and strong, comforting in a way that Maddie hadn’t felt in over a week. She wanted to melt into it and so she did, for a moment, soaking up all of the feeling of belonging as she could get. “Welcome home.” She mumbled into her ear as she pulled back, her hand carefully brushing a strand of hair behind Maddie’s ear.
Home.
Maddie cast her gaze about and relaxed into the hand Howie wrapped around her own - there was something about building it for yourself that made it mean so much more.