Chapter Text
Adriana Diaz isn’t an idiot.
Far from it, actually—she’s young, yes, and perhaps a little too willing to see the best in people when it comes to most things, but that’s a hard won trait. She’s protected her optimism viciously—refused to let herself be soured or stunted in the ways that life is wont to make anyone.
It’s something that Eddie used to do for her, back before she knew she had something worth protecting, something that needed to be protected.
It’s something she knows, now, that he never could afford to do for himself.
—
The thing is, so much of what Adriana understands about Eddie comes down to the fact that he’s always taken care of her.
She knows the beginning of their story well:
It begins with Eddie, just eight years-old, side-swiping the garage in their dad’s truck. He did as much damage to one as he did the other.
But Eddie, just eight years-old, had been told that his mother needed to go to the hospital. He found the keys to his father’s truck, set his jaw, and done what he figured he had to. It didn’t occur to him to ask someone for help—maybe, it didn’t occur to him that he could.
A hard lesson to have learned by eight years-old.
Among the things she also knows: It was Eddie who taught her how to drive when she was fifteen, terrified of the concept and the practice, but he’d promised her there was nothing she could do to his already pretty beaten-up car that she wouldn’t be forgiven for, sight unseen. He’d just returned from his second tour, and looked more like the ghost at the end of a war movie than someone who’d made it home.
He’d needed half a dozen surgeries to pull all the bullets and debris out of his body, and he’d had all but one of them overseas—one in Kandahar, at the Canadian medical unit, one in Bagram, and then three more in Germany. All of that, and the thing that confused Adriana the most was the fact that they’d left one of the bullets behind—buried in his thigh, where it would stay for the foreseeable future.
She’d overheard their parents, muttering what Adriana has to believe were genuine, if somewhat insensitive and largely unfounded, concerns—PTSD, and we know that war changes people, and what if he snaps?
The facts are these: she had driven his car into a parking barrier, pretty much directly. He hadn’t so much as raised his voice.
Didn't flinch, either.
The first and only time he visited her in Austin, he showed up with a change of batteries for her smoke detector—and made her watch while he switched them out.
Eddie is and always has been good at taking care of other people, and absolutely shit at doing the same for himself.
So, when their parents explain on their once-a-week-ish call that they’ve got Christopher in El Paso for the foreseeable future, for reasons that they will not explain further, Adriana has her email open before she even hangs up.
Her program coordinator has always been pretty laid back—she has no problem with Adriana spending a few weeks in LA, as long as she stays on top of her reading, her writing. As long as she’s back by the end of August.
Jamie is gone until at least mid-June, anyway—back to Michigan to see her family, with her youngest brother’s twenty-first birthday in the middle of it all—and Adriana has already been finding that their apartment feels a little haunted in her absence.
She calls Jamie only after she’s already most of the way through buying a one way ticket to Los Angeles, watching the checkout timer tick down and chewing her thumbnail.
“Is this crazy? Am I being crazy?”
“Nah,” Jamie says. “Besides, if your brother is really going through it, maybe what he needs right now is some of your crazy—it’ll make everything else seem more normal.”
“Shut up,” Adriana says.
“Never.”
—
Jamie Gray-Robinson.
Graduate student, biomedical engineering, twenty-six years-old. Bombshell, redhead, nearsighted. Three brothers—two younger and one older—all of them born and raised in Michigan.
Beautiful, and braver than Adriana—better, maybe, than Adriana deserves.
—
Adriana doesn’t tell their parents that she’s going to LA.
She doesn’t tell Eddie, either—or ask, for that matter.
She does tell Sophia, and she does ask Chris.
She calls them one after the other. Sophia, in San Francisco, is thrilled. She says she’ll drive down on a weekend—maybe drive down for two and leave Diego and the girls at home for one of them—says something about a Diaz Sibling Reunion, which they’ve… never done.
"First annual?" Adriana suggests, instead of naming the uglier aspect of it all: that they’ve never done this—haven’t even tried. It earns her a laugh like a bell, bright and true, from her big sister.
Sophia sounds just as surprised as Adriana feels when her sister realizes in real time that she hasn’t seen Eddie in more than a year. The drive between Sophia and Eddie is something like six hours. Not the most convenient, but not the least convenient, either.
Christopher thinks it’s a good idea—says as much, on the phone, and doesn’t say much else.
“Buck will probably be hovering,” is what Chris does volunteer, unprompted, but sullen enough to sound it on the phone.
“What makes you say that?”
“He was hovering when I left.”
Well.
It still surprises her when the man who opens the door is not Eddie.
It’s—Captain America, is the thing that actually comes to mind—he’s close to a foot taller than she is, if not more than that, with blond curls and broad shoulders, and he’s got a question in his very blue eyes that’s probably less friendly than the one he actually asks her.
“Uh,” he says. “Can I help you?”
“Uh,” she echoes him without meaning to, unprepared as she was to see anyone but Eddie answering the door to his own house, “maybe? I’m Adriana, Eddie’s—”
“—sister? Oh my god,” Captain America says, now grinning and ushering her in, before he asks in something like a stage whisper: “… is this a surprise?”
“… yes?” Adriana says, because, quite frankly, she is surprised.
“That’s great—and, sorry, I just, I’ve heard lots about you, but I still didn’t expect you to be so…”
“… short?” She tries.
“Young,” he corrects, emphatically. “I’m Buck, by the way.” He shoulders her duffel bag and gives her another smile, something less polite and more earnest—a smile that gives a new meaning to the concept of beaming.
It’s like a spotlight.
Adriana, promptly, gets stage fright.
“You’re Buck!” she exclaims, loud and somewhat nonsensically. She’s still mentally calling him Captain America. She thinks he might be the tallest person she’s ever stood this close to. She’s planning a text to Christopher in her mind, tbf to Buck, it must be hard to do anything but hover when you’re seven fucking feet tall, and—
“What’s going on?” Adriana hears Eddie before she sees him, and she sees him before he sees her.
He is, first of all, shirtless.
Which, it’s his house. That’s fine.
He’s also dishevelled from sleep precisely in the way he’d always been on weekdays during summer vacation—it makes her feel like a kid again, briefly—but he wears his exhaustion plainly. Knuckling his eyes, he looks older than he ever has before, and just… tired.
And.
She’s only ever seen the scar that's on his arm from Afghanistan—has always known it to be one of three, but it’s an injury that she remembers as more of a cast than a wound.
A broken wrist, at the end of the day, is a broken wrist.
It’s something that the passing years have flattened, polished smooth like a river stone.
She sees other scars now—bullet wounds, some more recent than others, some more familiar—and finds herself stuck on a thought, or maybe a riddle without an answer worth giving:
When is a broken wrist not a broken wrist?
When it’s a bullet wound. When your brother and his only son are signing their names to paper, over and over, shoulder to shoulder, one learning and the other learning again, leaning together, learning together. When the shattered hand cannot remember familiar motions, something so simple as the name of the soldier to whom it belongs. When you forget.
Her brother also has a moustache, which is. Um. It’s new.
Less challenging, maybe, than the scars she hadn’t really seen before now, but only just.
“Breakfast is almost ready—and your sister is here!” Buck says, reminding Adriana that he is also here.
Eddie’s eyes go from bleary, narrowed against the morning light to… comically wide. Finally finding her.
“What?”
“Shirt,” Buck says mildly as he turns and walks into the house—taking her bag with him as he goes, which seems to be as much of a formal invitation to stay as she should expect, maybe.
In the meantime, Eddie scrambles to pull the well-worn LAFD t-shirt he had been holding in one hand over his head, and closes the distance between them.
Eddie gives her a hug that feels like coming home—a hug that she feels across each of the twenty-four years of her life, in every bruised knee and scraped palm. She hugs him back and gives over her weight, trying to fold herself into the shape of the child she knows they’re both remembering, right now—even if it’s only just for a moment.
They pull apart, but he doesn’t loosen his grip on her—his hands settle on her shoulders.
“Well, come on,” he says with a squeeze, tilting his head toward the back of the house. “I heard that breakfast is almost ready.”
Eddie gives her a small but honest smile, both of them a little glassy-eyed, before he turns.
She sees the name Buckley printed across his shoulders.
—
It was the second writing instructor she’d ever had who taught Adriana the trick, to make strange, to ask:
When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.
A riddle, sure, but:
When is a door not a door?
When it’s a jar. When it’s meant to keep something contained instead of allowing it to leave. When it’s a window, less appropriate than something like a door to step through, but serving that purpose just as well.
When walking through the door will change everything, when tracking backwards into the room from which you came could not give you back the person you were before you’d passed through it, only a moment or perhaps now a lifetime ago.
When you see the pencil-scratch signs of life that a young family has left on the doorposts, read their faded and unfamiliar names, and wonder what it means that someone used this place as a record of something that mattered a great deal, knowing always that the door could not come with you, knowing that the record of a life lived on either side of it would remain, always, here.
—
Breakfast smells really fucking good, and that’s not even just because she’s been eating exclusively non-perishables for the past couple days in an effort to completely empty her fridge in Austin.
Buck sets a glass of water in front of her as soon as she sits down at the table in the dining room, offering her a grin, a shrug, and then an explanation:
“I always feel dehydrated after flying.”
“Wait, are you actually, like, cooking?” Adriana says instead of thank you, like a normal person would.
She sips the water, because she does feel a little dehydrated, actually.
“Yep,” Buck says, popping the p at the end of the word. “Don’t tell me you’re as bad in the kitchen as Eddie used to be.”
“What—”
“—worse, actually,” Eddie interrupts, smirking.
Adriana sticks her tongue out at him and takes his coffee. Might as well get more dehydrated, while she’s at it—less hydrated, maybe? Re-dehydrated?
Whatever.
She drinks some coffee.
Eddie sticks his tongue out at her in return. The expression looks especially funny with the moustache.
She looks at him for a minute—really looks at him.
Her big brother, thirty-two years-old, a war veteran and a father and a firefighter, whatever—he’s been her hero for as long as she’s known how to say his name.
Steady Eddie, Sophia used to call him, almost always insincere and while arguing.
Steady Eddie, because the two of them were barely a year apart in age and used to fight like street cats, spitting and vicious.
Steady Eddie, because Eddie has always felt so deeply, deeply enough that it confused him, sometimes, and Sophia had always known better than anyone how to pull those feelings up—get them too close to the skin, too soon, too loud—right to the surface.
It seems like life has left Eddie a little unsteady—that all those feelings are all still there, and all still too close to the surface, only—maybe they've surfaced too late instead of too soon, were too buried, too deep before being dragged out. They've soured, like fermentation gone badly, and Eddie looks spent, exhausted—like something has caught up to him while he’s been failing to catch up on sleep. He looks a little wild in the eyes. A little bit hunted, maybe haunted. Maybe like he’s the one doing the haunting.
The ghost at the end of a war movie.
“Eddie…”
“Breakfast, first,” he says, insistent.
“Eddie,” she repeats, equally as insistent.
“Please.”
“You don’t have any allergies, do you?” Buck asks, a well-timed interruption coming in the form of a perfectly sensible—maybe defensible—question.
“Nope,” Adriana answers, and she pops the p like Buck had earlier, which earns her the recognition she wanted. He delivers it to her alongside a fresh cup of coffee for Eddie, replacing the one she had stolen from him earlier. Eddie doesn't say a word, just wraps both hands around the mug and quietly preens.
“Great,” Buck says, giving her that spotlight-bright smile again. This time, she doesn’t freeze.
“The service here is incredible,” she mutters to Eddie out of the corner of her mouth, loud enough that she knows she’ll be heard by every party in the kitchen.
Eddie snorts. Sips his new coffee. Preens less noticeably, but still preens.
It’s like he agrees, and that he’s glad that she’s recognized it: Yes, the service here is incredible.
Buck shoots them both a withering look, but continues to put food in front of them, so clearly hasn’t taken it too personally. Maybe the opposite, actually, because as he sets down the last of it, he finishes with an unexpectedly dorky flourish.
“Well. Breakfast is served.”
Adriana and Eddie both laugh, and she is struck, again, by the fact that they share their laugh—the sound as they laugh together is complimentary, almost choral. She wonders if Eddie is the reason she learned to laugh, or if this is another of the many inheritances they share.
While they eat, making idle conversation about school and work and weather and blueberry pancakes, she studies Buck in his contrasts—an old habit, one she practiced through long days in libraries, filling journal after journal with person after person, capturing them in the only way she has ever been capable of, capturing them in words.
When Buck is smiling, his laugh lines make it harder to see the scars—she can pick out a set of faint lines that cut, parallel with one another, across his face, the most prominent of them starting above his right eyebrow, crossing the bridge of his nose, and ending somewhere close to his left earlobe.
She can see the shallow, barely-there craters of acne scars on either side of his jaw, the kind you get from the nervous habit of running your fingernails down the side of your face as a teenager—an oddly youthful scar to retain. They compliment the tiny, pock-mark scars on his ears that show they were once pierced. Benign scars, the scars of youth.
She sees the divot that sits at the hollow of his throat, barely visible above his collar, and she wonders how he choked.
When he’s smiling, the rise of his shoulders almost reads like good posture. She’s sure that in a firefighter’s uniform, that same marionette-string anxiety that lifts his shoulders toward his ears and has his hands half-raised in front of him like someone expecting to be kicked reads as vigilance.
When he’s smiling, he seems… more himself, or perhaps less scared, or maybe less scarred, in some way that she doesn’t know him well enough to place. Not quite young, and not quite happy, but something close.
Inevitably, it’s Eddie who asks:
“Why are you here, Adriana?”
“My roommate ditched me to hang out with her brothers in Michigan,” Adriana spits the word Michigan like a curse—which is to say nothing of the spin she puts on the word roommate. “Got me thinking that LA is much cooler than Ann Arbor—though, still undecided on how the brothers rank—and besides….”
She shrugs, sips her coffee, and bites the bullet.
“Chris and I both thought you could use some company,” she says.
At the mention of Chris, Bucks softens, and Eddie wilts.
“Company?” Eddie asks.
Adriana nods.
“Well... could always use some more,” Eddie says as his eyes travel to Buck, and she watches Buck lift an eyebrow, a question of some kind that Eddie answers with pursed lips and a nod. Buck smiles—and Eddie smiles back, a smaller, more fragile smile, but a smile nonetheless.
Some wordless conversation that she has no resource to translate.
“Did you know that Michigan once went to war with Ohio?” Buck asks, shoving what she thinks is probably about half of a pancake into his mouth as he does.
—
After breakfast, Adriana texts Chris.
buck is here.
She’s pleased—maybe thrilled, definitely relieved, almost grateful—to see that Chris texts her back almost immediately.
called it
he made us pancakes?
jealous wtf
—
Buck announces that he was thinking about visiting Bobby today, anyway, and leaves them with the dishes, a lazy salute, and the promise that he’ll be back before Eddie has therapy.
Adriana doesn’t know if she’s supposed to have a reaction to hearing that Eddie’s in therapy, but if anything shows on her face, she’s sure it’s relief. Eddie’s a firefighter, a medic, a veteran. Eddie’s a single father, became a dad at nineteen, became a widower before thirty. Eddie’s been shot at least four times.
Therapy seems like the right idea.
Adriana goes to wash the dishes, Eddie to dry—mostly because he actually knows where things go, Adriana assumes, at least. She gives him about… twelve seconds of peaceful silence before she cracks.
“So… that’s Buck.”
“That’s Buck,” Eddie replies, voice bland.
“Seriously, where did you find him, Eddie?”
“Buck? We met at work,” Eddie says, brow furrowing. Which is—Adriana’s had friends from work before.
“It cannot be that simple. Why does he look like that, and have fun facts about Michigan, and remember your therapy schedule, and show up to cook you breakfast? I think I experienced an involuntary neurochemical response to his smile, he’s like... a personification of Vyvanse, or something. He was clearly grown in a lab somewhere—”
Eddie winces at that, hard.
“—okay, weird. That was weird. Why did you just get so weird?”
“It’s—he has a complicated relationship with… medical genetics.”
“… is it more or less complicated than the relationship he has with you?”
“Adriana—”
“—you know, Chris said he’d probably be here. Hovering.”
“Well,” Eddie swallows. “I’ve given him some reasons to hover, recently.”
“Eddie,” Adriana says, and stops the running tap before she turns to really look at him. “What’s going on? What the fuck happened?”
She’s expecting to be told that, whatever it was, it’s between Eddie and their parents—or, between Eddie and his son.
She’s expecting that Eddie might try to downplay things, try to take it on the chin and promise her it’s his burden to carry—the stoicism of a soldier, their father’s only son.
She doesn’t really know what she’s expecting.
She’s not expecting Eddie to tell her everything, but that’s what he does.
It’s a story that starts with the characters that matter most—advice she’d offer a student, advice she’s been offered as a student.
Interior. Los Angeles, Home. Night.
Marisol, DIY expert, previous emergency-haver, former nun? A woman that briefly lived in Eddie’s house, a woman that Chris had adored for a somewhat less brief period of time, a woman that Adriana has never even heard the name of before.
Kim, salesperson and failed actress who looked almost just like Shannon, who started to fall for Eddie because she didn’t know, who had shown up at the station when Eddie wasn’t there. Who wasn’t impressed when Eddie was honest with her, who did return either despite that or because of it. Who gave a harrowing performance that no one had requested, starring as the ghost of Eddie’s dead wife.
The moment it all fell apart.
By the end of the story, Eddie is looking at the ceiling in his kitchen, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the sink, clearing his throat to choke the words out, skin flushed with shame.
“Eddie… ” She starts, baffled.
“I know, I know, Adri. I just—”
“Hey, hey,” she says, and she’s moving without thinking, just reaching for him.
This is her big brother, her hero, the one who used to put a hand on one of her shoulders and pull her in when her words started to fail her. The one who used to soothe her, speak softly, promise that there was always something to be done, and mean it. The one who used to comfort her when she cried—frustrated tears, embarrassed tears, disappointed tears, heartbroken tears.
For the first time in their lives, she returns the favour.
—
Adriana is about ten years older than Chris.
Eddie is almost ten years older than Adriana.
She remembers turning nineteen, her nineteenth birthday, in fact—getting a little too drunk, getting a little too melancholy, and thinking without meaning to that she was now as old as Eddie had been when Chris was born.
Adriana was nineteen, and Shannon had been dead for three months, and when Shannon was nineteen, Chris had just been born.
She’s pretty sure that she threw up.
—
Eddie is in the process of offering to skip therapy on Adriana’s behalf when Buck, inevitably, returns.
He lets himself in—hangs his keys on one of the bare hooks behind the door and kicks his boots into an empty space on the rack at the back of the coat closet. It’s a set of gestures rehearsed to the point of seeming simpler than they are, like street magic. It’s a kind of effortlessness that only comes of habit.
“Don’t skip therapy,” Adriana says to Eddie, followed by: “You clearly need it.”
“Rude,” Eddie replies.
“Buck, tell Eddie he needs to go to therapy.”
“Eddie, you’ve gotta go to therapy, man.”
“Okay, firstly, the two of you met this morning, you are not allowed to gang up on me—and secondly, I was just offering—” Eddie frowns and looks to her. “What are you going to get up to?”
“Oh, you know... I might check my email. Maybe take a nap. Big plans, as always.”
“I just don’t want you to be stuck here,” Eddie says, which, while considerate, isn’t necessary—and doesn’t need to become an addition to the long list of things he’s beating himself up over.
“I’m the one who decided to show up uninvited, Eddie—and I’m a big girl. If the urge to get bubble tea or see the Hollywood sign gets too extreme, I can call myself an Uber.”
“I can leave the keys for the jeep, if you want,” Buck says. Adriana blinks.
“You’d let me take your car?” She asks, genuinely surprised. Buck shrugs.
“Sure—Eddie taught you how to drive, right? It’s his ass if you crash.”
“What? No, it’s not—” Eddie cuts in, offended.
“—no, it totally is, that’s what Athena told me when I taught May—”
“—Athena did not tell you it would be your ass—”
“—okay, so, maybe not in those words exactly—”
“—so it’s not what she told you?” Eddie grins. “You admit you’re just speaking recreationally?”
Buck replies with a scoff and an eye roll that Adriana’s confident he had to have picked up from Eddie himself, considering that her brother perfected the expression by the time she was born, as he shoos Eddie from the room.
“Get your shit together, Eddie, or we’ll be late.”
“God forbid,” Eddie mutters, excusing himself.
“Do you two practice that?” Adriana asks lightly.
Buck looks, in a word, caught—then laughs and shrugs. It’s the kind of response that takes as much conviction as a sneeze to deliver and tells her just as little as a sneeze might.
Adriana’s still stuck on how—or maybe why?—Buck knew that it was Eddie who taught her how to drive.
—
When Eddie reappears just a handful of minutes later, he is wearing jeans and a near identical, though slightly better fitting LAFD t-shirt.
This one has the name Diaz on the back.
No one has anything to say about that, Adriana included.
—
Evening comes, and Adriana goes to set herself up in Chris’s room—which she fully intends to either gloat or complain to him about, come morning.
She’s breathless, for a second, walking in. The room has so much of Chris in it, even in his absence—it’s so truly, completely his room. She thinks of the near-bare walls of her childhood bedroom, the sheets and curtains that her mother had selected, all the things that Adriana cared enough to keep stowed carefully out of sight.
She sees books—an encyclopedia about penguins, the history of Superman, and a collection of battered hand-me-down Artemis Fowl paperbacks.
She sees two framed photos, upright on Chris’s desk. The first is a photo of Shannon, in which she can’t be that much older than Adriana is now, smiling. Alive. Chris in her arms.
The other photo is clearly from some kind of barbecue, or maybe a family reunion? Her parents have similar photos on the walls at home in El Paso—only, when it comes to Diaz family photos, it’s all pressed clothes, borderline starched, the kind only ever worn to and from churches. There’s a distance to them—the photos—with everyone precisely spaced out, everyone a little different than themselves for the sake of stillness.
So, maybe not just in the photos—meaning the distance. Meaning that she rarely sees her family outside of photographs.
In this photo, everyone is wrapped up in one another, tangled together, taking on weight as some laugh harder than others at some joke Adriana will never know. Eddie is grinning down at Chris with a hand on his shoulder—Chris, his smile almost completely obscured by the angle of his face, is looking up at his dad. Buck and Eddie each have an arm around the other, shoulder to shoulder as Buck laughs with his whole body, pitched forward.
There’s an older man next to him, who himself has a hand resting on Buck’s shoulder. Under the older man’s other arm, a woman looks almost directly at the camera, smirking with a single eyebrow raised. Next to her, there are two black women who seem to be sharing the joke with each other more than anyone else, the boy in front of them beaming with his eyes closed.
Adriana sees a woman who shares Buck’s profile smiling down at the roundest baby Adriana has ever seen, held in the arms of a man who looks at her like she’s a revelation, like he missed the joke and could not care any less.
They look like a family.
Adriana catches something like a sob before it can escape her. She clears her throat instead—she will not mourn what she has never had herself, she will not mourn what Eddie and Chris have now.
She thinks it very deliberately: Have now, not had once.
Maybe this is Buck’s family, she reasons, seeing Eddie’s sunflower tendency to turn to face his son echoed in the man at Buck’s other side. A step-mother, then, and maybe a pair of aunts? Someone who could be an older sister, and a brother-in-law, a niece and a nephew. Eddie and Chris, a pair of puzzle pieces she’s seen fit into countless other family photos, who seem more at home in this composition.
Chris has been in El Paso for something like three weeks—maybe more—but it’s clear, sitting in his room, sitting in his home, that someone has kept any dust from gathering.
Have now, because Chris will come back, and there will be more family photos.
It isn’t until she’s turned off the lights that she sees the stars—a sea of stars, really. Dozens, if not hundreds, of glow in the dark stars pressed to the ceiling and the highest points on the walls, enough to cast a dim glow across the whole room.
Adriana blinks at them, takes in their irregular placement and size.
Then she spots the Big Dipper.
—
how did you convince your dad to let you glue so many stars to your ceiling
I thought this place was a rental
didn’t
buck’s idea
Christopher sends her a link to a star map: Los Angeles, the second day of May, the year 2019.
Four days before Shannon died.
—
In the morning, Adriana wakes up on central time—which is to say, two hours earlier than she wants to start her day. Nonetheless, she groans, rolls out of bed, and tries to shake off the poor sleep that she always gets in unfamiliar rooms.
She’s still rubbing sleep from her eyes when—for the second time in as many days—she’s surprised to see Buck on the other side of a door.
She startles, badly, but he’s not facing her—he’s just around the corner, pulling the door at the end of the hall closed behind him. Which is. Eddie’s room.
Buck is leaving Eddie’s room.
When he does turn, he startles just as badly as she did. Maybe worse.
“Oh, hey—um. You’re up early.”
“Yeah,” Adriana says. She can only imagine the facial expression she must be making. She knows it is not neutral, so she hopes that it is kind.
“I guess, with, um. Time zones,” Buck says, trailing off. “This is—I’m gonna go get coffee started.”
He all but dances past her, fleeing to the kitchen.
She stays where she is for a minute, blinking around the corner at Eddie’s now-closed door, and then she follows.
“Cream? Sugar?” Buck asks, deliberately casual—though, perhaps more deliberate than casual, if she’s being honest.
“Just sugar,” she replies.
“Eddie takes his coffee the same way.”
“I know.”
“So,” Buck says, setting a mug of coffee in front of her. “Grad school, right? You’re a writer?”
“Trying to be,” Adriana says while she nods. Apparently, they were not going to be talking about the sleepover situation—which, fair enough. It’s probably too early for that.
“I mean, you must be good—like, really good. I was doing some research about it, when Eddie first mentioned you got in? I read that less than one percent of fiction writers who apply to your program get accepted.”
“Impressive,” Adriana says.
“I think that’s supposed to be my line,” Buck says, eyebrow raised.
“No, I meant—that you remember that? I was hearing back from grad schools, like, two years ago.”
Buck just shrugs.
“I feel like you know so much more about me than I do about you,” she says, frank and honest and not quite as caffeinated as she wants to be.
“I mean, Eddie’s proud of you—and I’m just usually around to hear him when he brags.”
“Still,” Adriana says, fully aware that her face has gone completely pink. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Buck says, looking far less open to questions than he’s trying to sound. Adriana knows that any questions that don’t regard sleeping arrangements will probably be more welcome than those that do.
“How did you get the scars on your face?” she asks. “If that’s not too personal.”
“Oh! It’s a birthmark, actually,” he says, offering her a placid, maybe even grateful, smile—though, he reaches for his eyebrow, thumbing at the birthmark. It’s less of a self-conscious gesture and more like the muscle memory of one, like the afterthought of an anxiety that’s long since lost its teeth.
“No,” Adriana corrects—gestures across her face with three fingers, raking them from above her right brow down to her left ear. Obvious. “The scars. ”
“Oh,” he says, and the smile falls off his face. Adriana feels bad about that before she feels interested in what Buck’s going to say next, but she does feel both in equal measure. “Uh, that was actually—I don’t really remember? But. It was during the tsunami.”
“That’s—” Adriana pauses, mortified. “I knew that Eddie was working during that, it must’ve been… intense.”
“Oh, I—uh, actually, I wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Working. I was on the pier that afternoon.”
“Oh my god?”
“Do you…” Buck starts, but seems to think better of it, nervous in the face of continuing. Which is weird, because he didn’t seem too bothered to be talking about a near death experience, not at first, but now he’s looking at her like whatever comes next in this conversation is more frightening.
“We don’t have to get into it,” Adriana says, unsure of her misstep. “It was probably, um. Traumatic.”
Buck laughs outright at her fumbled sympathy, which. Isn’t unwarranted.
“Sorry, just—yeah, you’re not wrong.”
—
She texts Jamie. Obviously.
… I think my brother’s best friend might… live here
like, he might LIVE HERE live here
dee. be so srs w me rn
like. in a fruity way?
DEE
this changes everything
—
Buck, apparently, has a niece—possibly two?—in desperate need of babysitting, so Adriana and Eddie have the day entirely to themselves. Buck departs with a smile, a recommendation for a bookstore in North Hollywood if they get bored, and a lazy salute that she’s starting to recognize as something like a sign-off—something he does instead of saying goodbye.
Eddie drives them to Hermosa Beach, where they walk, talk—he asks her about school earnestly, asks her about home carefully. They talk about Eddie signing up for a support group at the VA, about visiting Shannon’s grave sometime over the weekend, about how sunflowers are finally back in season. They talk about tourist traps, and which ones are worth it, and which ones Eddie himself hasn’t had the chance to form his own opinion on. Eddie tells her a story about a ransomware—which, Jesus Christ?—attack that resulted in much of the zoo’s population wandering down Hollywood Boulevard.
They stop for expensive sorbet stuffed into cheap cones, and find a spot to sit on the low wall that separates the pavement from the sand. Close enough to the ocean that the air is a little cooler, here.
Yesterday, Adriana had asked Eddie what happened.
“How are you doing?” Adriana asks, today.
“Me?” Eddie asks in return, like this is a complicated enough question that further clarification is necessary.
“Yes, you, Eddie,” she says, simply, but trying to give it enough weight to satisfy.
“It’s… fine. Badly. I don’t know.”
It’s interesting to watch Eddie as he decides not to lie—decides to choose something more true, at the very least, than whatever he might’ve offered someone else asking the same question, what he might’ve offered on instinct. She waits—because he’s started, and she knows that because she has her own version of this. The moment where she doesn’t know the right thing to say, but she lands on a first thing to say—and if she doesn’t say the first thing, she likely won’t speak at all—but she does need the pause—
“I guess it’s like drowning,” Eddie says, finally.
“Is it?” Adriana asks. She has never drowned. She has never been drowning—not really. She’s felt like it, maybe, but it's abstract. She does not have the reality of drowning to compare it to.
She gets the distinct impression that when Eddie says it's like he's drowning, he means it differently.
“It is,” Eddie says, letting his sunglasses bury the better part of whatever expression he would be wearing if—well. If.
“I had a close call, a few years back—five years back, almost. A well. This kid got stuck down there, and it was pouring rain—when it rains here, if it rains here, it’s barely anything at all, or it comes in sheets. The sky gets pitch dark except for the—” Eddie stumbles, pauses. Clears his throat. Continues.
“The lightning here gets crazy—but without it, you can’t see your own hands if you put them too far away from your face. It was raining, really raining, and this kid was in trouble—real trouble. The kind of trouble that a good captain will ask for someone on duty to step into, a volunteers-only kind of trouble, and I—I went down after him. I volunteered. I only had thirty minutes. We knew we were gonna lose the radio, but—but I tried to call it in, anyway, and I got him. I had him—or, I almost did, but thirty minutes was up, so I, uh. Cut my line.”
“Eddie—”
“It worked. I got him out, the kid—Hayden, is his name—we got him out. They sent Chimney—a friend of mine, a paramedic on my shift—down after me. He got Hayden out, and then the lightning just. It knocked out the rig they had in place before they could send another line down for me, too. Shook everything loose, too—I lost some time.
“All I could think of in that moment was something mom’d said to me, before—before I took Christopher, before we moved to LA. She said… don’t drag him down with you, is what she said. I figured, I guess, I don’t know—that if I drowned, the last thing I’d have ever done was prove her right.”
“Mom actually fucking said that to you?” Adriana bites out, stunned into the opposite of silence, and Eddie’s responding laugh has no joy in it—it shakes out of him, more like a sob.
“She did, yeah—word for word,” he nods. Finally gives up on the sunglasses—pulls them off to knuckle at his eyes.
“What did you do?”
“I stormed out on them—invited Chris to come with me to LA. He—uh, he told me that he missed me all the time. I told him that I missed him all the time, too, and I thought, I guess, that it was fucking embarrassing just how long it took me to realize that was true—but it’s been true. It’s been true the whole time. I—I did miss him all the time. I do. I do, and I told him I was never gonna leave him again, and, maybe to his detriment, I did keep that promise.”
“… and you didn’t drown.”
“… and I didn’t drown there. I didn’t drown then.”
“Eddie,” she says. “Eddie—Eddie. ”
She hears herself and realizes that she’s calling for him like she used to when she was a child, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. She’s calling out, look at me, look at me—but then, they’ve always been mirrors to each other, more than anything else.
Stay with me. I’m with you. I have you. I am made of what you are made of, in most of the ways that matter.
“Sometimes,” Eddie says, voice candid and flat. “I feel like the harder I fight it, the worse things get.”
“It’s like a riptide,” she says.
“Is it?”
“Yeah,” Adriana says, trying to balance speaking, caution, and care, all with the increasingly pressing task of managing her melting lemon sorbet. “If you try to swim against it, you’ll probably drown, and if you let it sweep you away, you’ll probably drown, so you’ve gotta get your eye on the shoreline—swim parallel to the shore. You can wait until it kicks you out, see if nature saves you, but you can’t fight the ocean. If you’re looking to save yourself, it’s not about the water at all—it’s about finding the shore.”
“Good metaphor.”
“It better be a good fucking metaphor—I’m halfway through a second degree in metaphors.”
Eddie laughs.
Adriana concedes to licking her hand, now, where melted lemon sorbet trails. Eddie laughs harder.
Eventually—
“Thanks for coming, Chickadee,” Eddie says, his voice tempered and warm. He sounds like himself again, and he heard it, too—Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.
He smiles, and she smiles back, and it feels like things are already better than they were the day before.
Of course, this doesn’t stay true for long.
—
When she was small—too small to have any memories of it that are strictly her own—Adriana’s favourite thing in the world was Eddie. She’d call for him constantly, for more or less any reason: a scraped knee, a finished puzzle, an afternoon snack she wanted to share, a bad dream that lingered, a favourite scene from a straight-to-VHS movie. Anything, and she’d call—often too excited to manage even the entirety of Eddie’s already shortened name, her emphasis would stumble across that second, more manageable syllable.
Their Abuela was the one who gave her the nickname—after a birdcall, just like a chickadee.
Eddie. Eddie. Eddie.
—
The first stories Adriana ever wrote were horror—and she remembers a comment from her first fiction course: often, in our writing, anguish does not feel real because anguish does not feel felt.
Adriana feels the sound that wakes her up as much as she hears it.
Shouting—wordless, winded, wounded. Just a shout, really, a single cry for something like help, a cut-off noise that has her sitting up before she understands whether she’s supposed to run to or from the sound.
She knows that the sound came from Eddie’s room, which decides for her. She leaves Christopher’s door ajar, walking on the balls of her feet down the hall. The lava lamp nightlight outside of the bathroom door casts her first in indigo light, and then in acid green—she arrives at her brother’s bedroom door in a halo of fuchsia, and she listens before she does anything else, hears it—
Anguish. Her brother’s. Quieter, but no less felt.
—
When is a dream not a dream?
When it’s a broken dam. When it’s a broken mirror. When it’s a broken promise. When it catches you between waking and sleeping and steals the air from your lungs like a sudden fall. When the hand-shadow animals of the years you don’t remember start to follow you into daylight, sleep under your eyes, nip at your heels. When it’s real. When it’s a nightmare. When it’s real. When it’s a memory. When it’s real.
—
Understandably, at least she thinks, Adriana struggles to fall back to sleep.
Instead, she stands in the kitchen and waits, arms crossed, jaw set.
It’s another fifteen, almost twenty minutes before Buck appears. Earlier even than yesterday morning. She guesses that he couldn’t get back to sleep either.
“Nightmare,” Buck says.
“I’d guessed as much,” Adriana replies, expectant, both eyebrows raised, making her thoughts obvious: That’s not enough information.
“He’s asleep again, I think.”
“What was it about? ”
“… I don’t want to tell you anything Eddie wouldn’t tell you himself,” Buck sighs, voice tempered and quiet.
“Buck,” she says. “I want to help.”
“Yeah, well. You and me both,” Buck mutters.
“I’m here to help,” Adriana says. “Chris agreed that it was a good idea for me to come.”
“—and I think you and Chris were both right—”
“—then you should give me an idea of what’s going on, at least,” Adriana says, decidedly not pleading, but earnest. “Christopher wouldn’t have told me to come if he didn’t want me to know what was actually happening.”
This, finally, is when she figures Buck out.
He cracks.
Buck’s priority is Christopher. He’ll do what he thinks is right for—right by—Christopher.
“It’s just…” Buck starts, pauses for a deep breath. “It’s hard to go through this shit alone, but it’s also hard not to feel… coddled, or watched when someone tries to sit with you while you're in it, and it’s just as hard to ask for help.”
“Yeah.”
“Eddie’s never been the best at admitting he needs it—help.”
“Eddie’s never been the best at admitting he needs anything,” Adriana provides as a counterpoint.
Buck laughs, humourlessly.
“You’re probably the expert, but… what Eddie needs—at least right now, I think—is to sleep. If his sleep gets worse, he’ll probably have to stop working, and if he has to stop working,” Buck says, before he takes a shuddering breath. “It didn’t end well, last time.”
Adriana’s limbs go cold. There’s some impossible echo of her parents, all those years ago, siren sharp in her mind: it’s PTSD, and we know that war changes people—what if he snaps?
Adriana has never legitimately considered that Eddie might be a danger to her, and she doesn’t consider it now.
She has never legitimately considered that he might be a danger to himself.
“I need you to be more specific,” she says, instead of if I don’t sit down right now I might throw up, which is equally as true.
She does, however, take a seat.
In the cool, pre-dawn light, in the wake of knowing this, it feels like she is standing in a different kitchen.
“It’s—how much do you know about why they gave Eddie a silver star?”
“I know that he got shot three times on another continent when I was fifteen years-old, and that he hates talking about it.”
“So… not that much,” Buck says.
“No, that's all of it,” Adriana replies. “That’s all I know about it.”
“Oh. Okay,” Buck nods. “Right—um, a couple of years back, Eddie was… struggling, a bit. He’d… left the 118, our station, kinda abruptly?—and he moved to a role at dispatch, still a firefighter but, like, not… fighting fires anymore. He was in therapy, and he was trying to get better—feel better. Anyway. His therapist told him to reach out to the folks he’d… saved, that day, and…”
Buck pauses to run a hand over his face roughly before he continues.
“It went… badly.”
“How badly? Badly in what way?”
“They’re—um, Eddie found out that they’re all… gone. One killed in action, one in a car accident, one to an overdose, and one—um. Gunshot wound. Self-inflicted.”
“Oh my god,” Adriana says, in absence of anything that means more.
Buck just nods, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Adriana can see clearly, now, that Buck is tired, too—exhausted, even.
“Eddie had group today—yesterday? It’s—his group at the VA. He told me he mentioned it to you, but they—um, they lost someone over the weekend. Gunshot wound. Self-inflicted.”
She doesn’t have anything to say after that.
Neither, it seems, does Buck.
—
The last time she had been in LA was for Shannon’s funeral.
It’s been five years since then, and by this time next year, Shannon will have been dead for almost as much of Chris’s life as she was alive.
She’s already been gone for more of it than she was there for.
This isn’t a cruel thought—it’s just math. It’s just true.
Adriana never took it personally, but Shannon wasn’t the only person Eddie left behind in Texas.
Adriana never took it personally, but Eddie and Chris weren’t the only people Shannon left behind in Texas.
She knows: it was never about her.
—
The offer to spend the next few days at Buck’s apartment is made stranger by the fact that it’s Eddie who offers.
“We’re on shift for Friday and Sunday anyway.”
Eddie’s explained it before—they start at 8:00 a.m. and work twenty-four hour shifts, in a predictable, repeating cycle: a shift on, then twenty-four hours off, another shift on, then two days off—repeat the pair of shifts with the day long break, then four days off. Repeat the whole cycle.
Buck explains, now, that it’s standard practice to show up at least an hour ahead of time, to make face-to-face relief by 6:30 a.m.
“Better to start early than stay late,” he says.
“Unless you want the overtime,” Eddie adds.
“There’s always overtime if you ask for it,” Buck disagrees, “and some of us like to make plans—”
“—oh, right, because the documentary you started on Netflix can’t wait another two business days—”
“—Boeing puts sales over safety, Eddie, it’s important—”
“—I’m not saying anything about Boeing, I’m just saying that as far as plans go—”
“—and I’ve literally responded to a plane crash, so. I’m definitely the expert here—”
“—then why do you need to watch a documentary about it in the first place—”
“—you’re probably both right,” Adriana interrupts. “Boeing is pretty evil, but then again, so is Netflix.”
“… you’re not wrong,” Buck says.
“In which case, we’re all right,” Adriana grins.
“What exactly is Eddie right about, again?” Buck asks.
“You should take Buck’s place for the weekend, at least,” Eddie says, which was not the point she was trying to make, actually. “I’ll be at work for more than half of the next four days, anyway—48 on, and sleep is the priority for the other 48.”
“Besides,” Buck says. “We’ve got Hen as Captain for this set of shifts, and Gerard is out—so she can approve some PTO for you.”
“I should—” Eddie starts.
“—spend some of the many hours of paid time off you are owed thanks to our wonderful union? Yes, you should,” Buck replies, then:
“I can’t—” Adriana starts.
“—choose to stay in an apartment that currently houses no one and I will be paying for regardless of your presence? Yes, you can,” Buck replies.
Adriana and Eddie, speaking at the same time:
“Buck—”
“—oh my god, you two are impossible—Adriana can go the loft so that Eddie can actually function at work and make sure that nobody, especially me, has a tragic accident, and Eddie can take next week off to spend time with Adriana. You’ll both sleep better in the meantime. Face it: it’s mutually beneficial.”
“Not for you,” Eddie points out, almost belligerent. “You won’t sleep better.”
“Yeah, well, I won't sleep worse,” Buck says, “and besides: you have to actually fall asleep to have a nightmare, so I’ll wait to count those birds when I have them in hand.”
—
She texts Jamie.
can now confirm that the best friend does actually have his own place.
okay...
that doesnt actually make it any less true that Best Friend was sleeping in ur brothers bed?
you may have a point
—
The first thing Adriana does when they get to the loft is ask how much firefighters in LA actually make, because holy shit.
Buck laughs, shrugs.
“It’s the hazard pay,” Buck volunteers, at the same time as Eddie says:
“It’s the overtime.”
Adriana doesn’t like either answer as the truth, to be quite honest, but she likes it as something they share—the two of them smile at each other like it’s an inside joke, and she lets it go.
Instead, she takes in the high ceilings, stacked windows, exposed brick, and furniture that seems to be more comfortable than it is stylish—though, not by a significant margin.
“I’ve got a few things to grab, but Eddie can show you where the… um, everything? Where everything is,” Buck excuses himself—less than smoothly, Adriana notes—before taking the wide steps up to the second level two at a time.
“Why are his legs that long?” Adriana asks under her breath.
“I have no idea,” Eddie mutters back, sounding troubled in a way that does suggest he’s contemplated this question at some length.
Adriana surveys the spotless apartment and can’t help but think that it seems as though no one lives here.
“Is there laundry?”
“Not in the unit—you can head to mine, though, if you need it.”
Which reminds her that Buck had gotten keys copied—his and Eddie’s—on her behalf. He’d found a fob for the building in a kitchen drawer, on a keychain that used to belong to someone named Taylor, apparently. Eddie hadn’t quite been able to hide the sour expression that the name brought to his face.
“I feel like I should be offering Buck a gift basket or something, this is… I mean, let’s just say that I did not see anything this nice on Airbnb that was even in the realm of sane pricing.”
“Why would you book an Airbnb?” Eddie asks, blinking at her.
“I just—didn’t want to assume. Necessarily.”
“Adriana, you're always welcome—”
“—but I should’ve reached out before I came. I didn’t want to put anyone out, or—or make things worse,” Adriana says, and giving the anxiety that’s been coiling around her sternum a name does not make it easier to swallow past, no—in fact, her eyes start to water—
“Dee, no—you haven’t. You make everything better,” Eddie cuts in, intervenes, the words falling out of him as his hands find her shoulders, squeeze. “You make me better, and—and Chris knows that.”
Adriana ducks in, looping her arms around Eddie’s waist and hiding her face against his shoulder. Apparently, it’s her turn to cry while they hug in a kitchen.
“I’ve told him a thousand times that you’re all the best parts of me, and a bunch of other stuff that’s so much better,” Eddie says. “I—he knows that you make me better.”
—
Adriana doesn’t examine the loft once she’s alone there, not really… but she does take it in with an essayist’s eye. She looks for the details that could paint a fuller portrait of Buck, even in his absence.
A framed drawing, signed by Chris, of an anatomically correct heart—a match, she assumes, to the smiling heart framed in the kitchen at her brother’s house. In the middle of his record collection, a shelf hewn out for children’s books—Dr. Seuss, Goodnight Moon. A full set of cherry red enamelled cast iron cookware. In a drawer filled mostly with pens and old receipts, a stack of notes in different hands—Jee loves you, good luck at physio, made your favourite! enjoy, reminded me of you.
There’s a writer’s desk tucked into the farthest corner of the loft, a little cluttered, a little dusty from lack of use. Tucked between two journals, she finds a photo of a young boy—bright blue eyes just visible under the brim of his hat, seated on a silver bicycle with red handles, smiling. Scrawled on the back: Daniel Buckley, 4 August 1988.
She sleeps well, and imagines a world where Eddie does, too.
—
Adriana calls Sophia first thing in the morning—still on central time, still earlier than she has any excuse to start her day, but Sophia has three kids to look out for, a nine-to-five job, and has always been the closest thing to a morning person out of the three of them, so Adriana tries her luck.
Sophia answers on the fourth ring.
“Adri?”
“Have you met Buck?”
“I—yes, why?”
“Because I had not met Buck before.”
“Okay,” Sophia says, slowly, like Adriana is an idiot.
“When did you meet Buck?”
“At Abuela’s—New Year’s Eve, I think? Diego and I drove down with the girls, it might’ve been the first time we’d seen Eddie and Chris after that first couple of weeks they lived here.”
“In 2018?” Adriana balks. “Wait, Abuela knows Buck?”
“Abuela loves Buck,” Sophia corrects.
“I am going to need so much more information than that,” Adriana says. “I feel like I’m starting in the middle of the movie—like I’ve missed something.”
“You haven’t, really—Buck is just… around? I don’t know, it’s not like Eddie and I have ever really talked about him, not specifically. They’re best friends or whatever—partners at work, and Chris adores him, and they crash on each other’s couches when they get injured trying to be superheroes. I think he might’ve been Eddie’s first friend in LA, and Eddie didn’t seem super interested in making any other ones, after that. You remember what he was like with Shannon when they met at school.”
“… Sophia, I am begging you to listen to yourself when you speak.”
“Don’t be rude, it’s stupidly fucking early—what’s the problem, Adriana?”
“I’m just asking—”
“You cannot sleep with Buck, Adriana,” Sophia announces, suddenly grave. “Eddie would have, like, a Chernobyl-scale meltdown.”
“Firstly,” Adriana says, before retching hard enough that it captures her disgust more succinctly than language ever could.
“Secondly,” she continues, “Eddie is already having a Chernobyl-scale meltdown.”
“Yeah,” Sophia sighs.
“Yeah,” Adriana parrots. “So, thirdly, I was thinking… we should probably change our plans, just a little—could you leave the girls at home and come down by yourself next weekend?”
—
When is a child not a child?
When it’s an accident. When it’s a regret. When it’s a promise. When it’s a patient response to a part of life you haven’t quite got around to considering fully. When that’s never what they were meant to be in the first place. When a mother needs a friend, needs someone they can trust. When it was always meant to be the guest room. When the room, once intended for guests, remains so in all the ways that matter. When they’re a memory. When they’re an excuse. When they’re an afterthought. When they never get the chance to be anything else.
When they raise another.
—
Adriana should be less surprised when she arrives at Firehouse 118 to find that they’ve been called to a fire.
She wanders in to the mostly-empty parking bay, taking it in: the broad, steel stairs and platforms, the glass partitions and full lockers, mats and hoses and perfectly polished concrete floors. A friendly voice calls from the loft above her:
“Can I help you?”
She looks up to see a man, probably her age or just older, leaning over the railing.
“Probably,” she says. “My brother told me I could swing by the station today—Eddie Diaz?” He makes a noise that’s half-recognition, half-surprise.
“They’re out on a call, but they shouldn’t be too much longer,” he says, waving toward the stairs at the side of the building. “Come on up.”
The firefighter introduces himself as Ravi and offers her a choice between coffee, water, and a juicebox.
“You offer juiceboxes? Really?”
“Hey—I wouldn’t judge you for taking it, so don’t judge me for offering,” Ravi says, his delivery dry and unselfconscious. “Besides. It’s easy glucose.”
“Fair enough,” she says, taking a seat at the island. “I will go for a coffee, though—black is fine, but I’ll take some table glucose on the side, if you've got it.”
The loft area is sort of beautiful—and not really what she expected. The kitchen is stylish and tidy, spacious enough to accommodate more than one cook at a time. There are a handful of cafe-style high tops, but the dining area is dominated by a broad table, large enough to seat at least a dozen. The couches are adorned with decorative cushions that match the season—almost certainly Eddie’s doing—and are pushed together, nearly arm-to-arm.
“So, Eddie’s sister—”
“—Adriana,” she corrects, accepting the coffee with a nod of thanks.
“Adriana,” Ravi repeats, seeming happy to stand and lean on the kitchen counter between them. “Engine 118 was packing up, last I heard from them—assuming they don’t get diverted, they should be back in the next ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks,” she says, then: “As long as it’s not, like, a sensitive issue? Can I ask why you aren’t out there?”
“Man behind,” he says, gesturing to himself, “here in case someone shows up at the station,” he adds as he gestures to her.
“Makes sense.”
“What brings you to LA?”
“Eddie, mostly. Visiting.”
They go back and forth like that for a while, chatting idly. It turns out that Ravi is LA, born and raised. He has a handful of recommendations, mostly on what isn’t worth seeing or doing. She asks him how long he’s been a firefighter, and he tells her that he started at the 118 about three years ago, a probie—
“Buck’s probie, kind of,” Ravi says, “he kind of made it his, like, unspoken mission to teach me—which was great, even though he was kind of scary at first.”
“Do you mean, like, intimidating?”
“I mean, sure,” he says with a shrug. “Although, there was a thing with a chainsaw that was actually just scary.”
—and because the universe hates giving Adriana information when she wants it the most, Engine 118 chooses this moment to return.
It’s impossible to miss the truck itself, and even then, the voices of the firefighters below carry, wide and bright, all the way to the trussed ceilings.
Ravi flattens his hands on the countertop, offers her a nod, and heads back over to the railing.
“Diaz,” he calls. “You’ve got company.”
An unfamiliar voice shouts back:
“You didn’t pull the wife card again, did you Panikkar?”
She can hear some sputtering and back-and-forth, not so loud as to be distinct—but picks out Buck’s voice, easily the loudest in the mix. Ravi turns back to face her, and at a volume only she can hear, responds:
“Trust me, I would never make that mistake again.”
Before she can ask even one follow-up question, the bickering has reached the loft. First Buck, who offers her a wave, followed closely by Eddie, who crosses the room to pull her into a one-armed hug. Another pair follow: she recognizes them from the photo on Chris’s desk.
“Buck, you want to get dinner started?” The woman with wire-frame glasses and a warm smile calls to Buck, who is already nodding and loping into the kitchen. Adriana stands as they approach, steps forward to shake the woman’s extended hand. “Henrietta Wilson—you can call me Hen.”
“Or Captain!” the man beside her does not extend a hand, what with both of his fists shoved into his pockets, but he does nod at her and snap his gum, which seems to be his equivalent of pleasantries. “Acting Captain, I guess, but still—and I’m Chimney, Chim is fine.”
“Adriana,” she introduces herself, knowing it’s likely redundant, while shaking Hen’s hand and returning Chim’s nod. “A firefighter named Chimney, huh? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Chim gets visibly excited, launching into the story.
“Worse—”
“Do not tell her this story,” Eddie calls from where he’s getting himself a coffee.
“But she’s a grown-up!” Chimney responds, gesturing to Adriana with an open hand.
“She is,” Eddie concedes, “but she’s also my baby sister—do you really want to do that to me? Do you really want to do that to both of us?”
“It will change your relationship with your brother irrevocably,” Buck adds, conspicuously—melodramatically—solemn.
“Well, Buck would be the expert on the ways that a sibling relationship can change when you know about—”
“Ya párale, Chimney,” Eddie interrupts. Chimney moves to bicker with Eddie in closer proximity, which results in Buck trying to shoo them both out of the kitchen with a dish towel. At Adriana’s elbow, Hen laughs.
“Chimney is married to Buck’s sister, Maddie,” she explains, voice fond.
“That’s helpful context.”
“We don’t always get around to providing it, I know,” Hen says. “Ravi took good care of you?”
“Just because Buck has threatened to kill me, doesn’t mean I missed the fact that Eddie actually could,” Ravi speaks up.
The consequences are immediate: more squabbling breaks out. Adriana doesn’t fully understand how they’re half-shouting at each other and picking up on another conversation simultaneously, but something about the fact that all of them seem to be doing it has her thinking that it might be a first responder thing. Something to do with divided attention, or vigilance, or simply knowing the people around you well enough to anticipate when they’ll step into and out of conversations.
“Are you enjoying LA so far?” Hen asks her, taking a seat at the head of the largest table, just far enough away from the squawking in the kitchen that a conversation might be tenable. She lifts a hand to the seat at her right, inviting Adriana to sit, and as she does Adriana is struck by how… regal the gesture is.
“Definitely,” Adriana says, taking a seat. “It’s been a long time since I was in LA last.”
“It’s been about five years, right?” Hen asks gently, and Adriana becomes aware of the fact that this woman knows, at least, that it had been for Shannon’s funeral. Adriana wonders if she was there—the accident, the funeral. Still inscrutable, but still soft, Adriana can’t read anything but kindness in Hen’s features.
“Yeah,” Adriana says, voice a little quieter than she means it to be.
“Well,” Hen says. “Hopefully you and Eddie have the chance to make the list of things you remember about LA a little bit longer, right?”
“That’s the plan,” she says.
“He mentioned that you’re a graduate student—my wife, Karen, is a scientist, in aerospace engineering…” Hen begins a story about her rocket scientist wife’s current post-doc accidentally pulling a fire alarm as the direct result of an unfortunate stumble in an arbitrary stairwell, and Adriana… wonders.
She sits with Hen, chatting, Eddie coming to join them after not too long. It turns out that Eddie and Hen’s rocket scientist wife, Karen, have a semi-regular wine night. It turns out that Hen and Karen have a son, Denny, and a daughter, Mara—Denny just older than Christopher, Mara just younger. It turns out that, on wine nights, Hen and Buck take turns with the kids.
Eddie is either completely unselfaware about the connotations of this, or his immediate proximity to Hollywood has made him a much better actor than he used to be.
Adriana looks at Hen, who has her lips pursed.
“So, Adriana,” Hen asks. “How long are you planning to be in LA?”
“Not sure, yet—with summer break, I’ve got an outside limit of about three months.”
“So, maybe you’ll be in town for Pride?” Hen says, guilelessly and without breaking eye contact. “Karen and I were thinking about making bigger plans than usual this year—”
Saved by the bell.
The alarm blares, startling Adriana badly enough that she knocks over her now-empty coffee mug. Nobody else in the station really flinches, or maybe they’re just used to turning that momentum into action, because Eddie and Hen are both all but gone from the table by the time Adriana has righted her coffee mug. A voice echoes, station 118, rattling off a few acronyms that mean very little to Adriana, but seem to convey a great deal to those around her.
“Buck?” Hen asks, without really stopping, one of her perfect eyebrows arched.
“Go,” Buck waves at Hen with a wooden spoon. “I can probably do more here than on a BLS call.”
The other four firefighters are all but gone with Hen’s nod of assent, though Adriana and Buck are left with Chim’s parting comments, mostly directed at Eddie, but loud enough to carry.
“You know, that man slept on my couch for weeks. Weeks. Several sets of weeks, even. How come he’s only ever staying on yours now that Bobby’s turned him into Masterchef Junior—” she hears Chimney say to Eddie on their way down, up until the point that she loses their voices to the alarm.
She watches the truck pull away from the station, jumping a little as the sirens kick on, unused to the volume.
The bell stops.
Adriana turns back to Buck, where he is studiously continuing to make dinner. She returns to her seat at the kitchen island, and props her chin up on one of her own hands.
“… So.”
“So?”
“Couch?” she asks. “Not really the situation I’ve been getting a sense of at Eddie’s, if I’m being honest.”
“Believe it or not, I haven’t gotten into it with my brother-in-law about my sleeping arrangements—not,” he pauses and points at her with a wooden spoon for emphasis, “that there is anything… you know, indecent, to be… gotten into.”
Buck pauses in his kitchen ministrations, as though hearing himself speak on a slight delay.
“… indecent? ” Adriana all but cackles.
“You know what I mean—” Buck starts to defend himself.
“—oh, stall your passions, Elizabeth Bennet—”
“—okay, firstly, I’m pretty sure that’s a gross mischaracterization of Lizzy Bennet—”
“—I have a degree in English—”
“—which you are using for evil, right now—”
“—and I’m just saying…” Adriana says. “You’re right. Heaven forbid your brother-in-law discover your lascivious habits.”
“Oh my god—” Buck is laughing. Adriana is also laughing, her eyes watering profusely with it. “—just for that: go wash your hands.”
“Why?” Adriana asks, not moving.
“Because you’re helping.”
“You have to know that Eddie wasn’t kidding when he said that I’m worse than him in the kitchen.”
“Worse than he used to be, maybe, but definitely worse than he is now—he’s living proof that you Diaz’s are learning creatures,” Buck says. “Besides, the noble taxpayers of Los Angeles covered these groceries, so you’ve gotta earn your keep.”
Buck directs her to a stack of potatoes, and hands her a vegetable peeler, which she looks at, skeptically.
“If I maim myself with this thing, the consequences are all yours to deal with.”
“It’s your lucky day,” Buck smirks. “I just so happen to be a certified EMT.”
—
In 2021, a sniper shoots a firefighter in the middle of the street. Broad daylight, downtown Los Angeles. The first in a series of targeted attacks against first responders in the city.
Now, there are only a few things that she cannot forgive her parents for.
Finding out that her brother had been shot from KTLA’s Breaking News section is one of them.
To this day, they claim they were just doing right by her—protecting her peace through final exams. To this day, they have never apologized.
—
She, despite her better judgement, googles sniper targeting firefighters los angeles 2021.
Adriana is sitting cross-legged on the—quite frankly, enormous—bed in Buck’s loft, scrolling past the articles and newscasts she’s already seen, that she’s already read. She scrolls until she sees something she hasn’t seen before, until she sees something that isn’t just another bland news piece quoting the bland news pieces that came before it. She scrolls until she sees a post on reddit, about a year old on an obscure subreddit for locals, that has a promising title: LA sniper incident caught on camera.
She reads:
there’d been a fair share of 911 calls made from my building, but usually we only saw cops (acab)—which was why it was weird to see firetrucks and ambulances show up twice in the same week. first thing was when a lady fell through her balcony, and idk what happened the second time. I was trying to take a snapchat from my balcony to send to my girlfriend to prove that we needed to move (we have now) when one of the firefighters got shot—some sniper that the lapd canned who was targeting first responders (srsly, acab)—and I caught the whole thing on video. crazy shit.
tw obvs because a guy gets straight up shot, but my apartment is on the 8th floor, and I googled it and he didn’t die.
The video is blurry.
“Here they are again—I’m starting to think there might be a gas leak or something,” the voice behind the camera narrates, zooms in on the flashing lights of one of the ambulances, brings the street into better focus. The video is low enough quality that she struggles to place Eddie amongst the half-dozen navy uniforms, masks and sunglasses on top of that hiding people’s features.
The gunshot startles her—
—and just like that, she can pick Eddie out of the crowd.
He falls, and there’s a pool of blood underneath his shoulder before people have even started to scream. Another firefighter starts to call out commands, telling everyone to get down, as he himself tackles a man in a white shirt out of the way.
Adriana’s ears are ringing, a bit. Her eyes stay with Eddie, unmoving, in the middle of the street. More gunfire—more screaming.
A voice, underneath it—
Come on, Eddie.
A fire ignites on the pavement, gunfire cutting gas lines and casting sparks.
The man in white rolls under the fire truck that separates her brother from everyone else—more shouting that she can almost make out, muffled and dull but easier to make out as the screaming crowd flees.
Eddie, I’m going to—I’ve got you—hang on, Eddie.
The man in white grabs her brother by the wrist, drags him under the truck.
The man in white picks Eddie up, covered in blood, now, both of them—a fireman’s carry, she thinks distantly.
The man in white heaves them both into the firetruck, half-falling on top of Eddie, which saves them both—a bullet shatters the window above them, a shot that must miss the man in white’s spine by mere inches, if it misses at all. She can’t tell. The firetruck is already driving away.
The video ends with a curse from the person filming it, likely as they realize that their balcony isn’t an especially safe place to be when someone is opening fire on the street below.
She reads the comments underneath the video.
why didn’t u call 911
↳ 911 was already there, dude
Does anyone know who the man in the white shirt is?
↳ off-duty firefighter, apparently.
↳ ↳ firefighter named Evan Buckley, who you might remember from this shitshow a few
years back. insane that he went under that truck. and that he still has his both his legs,
tbh.
Firefighter Evan Buckley.
Of course.
On some level, she feels like she knew—recognized his voice, maybe, when he called out for Eddie. She wonders why she didn’t actually know, wonders why Buck wasn’t a part of the story that their parents told, wonders if he was ever a part of the story that Eddie told their parents.
Wonders why it’s insane for him to have gone under that truck.
Adriana, despite her (still unaccounted for) better judgement, clicks the second link, too.
This clip is a news report, five years old—
“If you’re just joining us, witnesses are reporting that this LAFD ladder truck, belonging to Station House 118, was hit by some kind of an explosive as it was making it’s way to a call. Now, you can see there’s a firefighter pinned under that truck…”
Another firefighter appears, hands raised, tries to engage the bomber—Chimney, she recognizes, after a moment.
“This is unexpected! A civilian now, confronting the young man with that vest. We’ve got no details on this man’s identity…”
A man in a black shirt walks through the barrier, and there’s some back and forth, some negotiations that the aerial shot can’t pick up—then the civilian lunges, grabs the bomber, and—
She sees her brother break into view, sees him run to Buck.
“That firefighter really appears to have taken the brunt of all of this. That’s an entire ladder truck you can see there. We can only hope for the best at this point.”
They’re trying to lift the truck, failing—Eddie is kneeling, almost prostrate on the ground, with one hand holding Buck’s and another under his arm, ready to pull him out. She can’t hear Buck scream in the video, but she can see it.
Feel it, even.
“Bystanders… stepping in, they’re gonna help out…”
—
Other things she finds in the loft:
A freezer populated by ice packs. In the medicine cabinet, a mostly-empty bottle of Tylenol, alongside a mostly full bottle of codeine, extended release—taken as needed, she assumes.
Then, tucked into a bedside table drawer filled with knick-knacks and photo strips, an unfinished bottle of heparin, a few years out-of-date. Not in the medicine cabinet, so not medicine, not anymore—a reminder, she assumes.
A fireproof safe at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets—just in case, she assumes.
—
“Hey,” Jamie says, and her voice when she answers the phone is musical and bright.
“Hey,” Adriana replies—decidedly less musical, but just as fond. She’s got terrible pitch anyway, and a half-finished glass of wine in one hand, and a pit in her stomach.
“Just give me, like, two seconds,” Jamie says. Adriana listens to the sound of movement, a screen door that squeals open and slams closed. Then: “Okay, hey.”
“Well, hey again,” Adriana says.
“Seems like you’ve had an exciting first few days in LA,” Jamie says. “Give it to me straight, baby—is Hollywood changing you?”
“Believe it or not, struggling to write at a café in the Arts District? Almost distressingly familiar to struggling to write at a café in Red River. Slightly more expensive.”
“Brutal.”
“A little,” Adriana says. “I went to the fire station where my brother works today and his interim captain outright asked me if I was going to be in LA for Pride—and she bookended it with a couple of stories about her wife, who is an actual rocket scientist?”
“Whoa?”
“I know—I mean, I wasn’t aware that I had lesbian written on my forehead, but.”
“I mean, to be fair, you basically do,” Jamie contributes, helpful as always.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Adriana says. “Speaking of—I still don’t know exactly what Buck’s deal is, but he did mention a recent ex that has decidedly male pronouns today.”
“The plot continues to thicken.”
“—and my sister actually told me on the phone this morning that I’m not allowed to sleep with Buck, specifically because it would make Eddie have a nuclear meltdown.”
“Wow,” Jamie says. “Sounds like a real will-they, why-won’t-they situation.”
“Will-they, why-don’t-they, have-they-already, more like.”
“Whatever the fuck their deal is, it bodes well, right? The plan is still to tell him?”
“Of course it is.”
“You’re still not worried?”
“I’m really not,” Adriana says. “I mean… it’s Eddie. He’s always been—he’s. I could tell him anything.”
“Aww,” Jamie says.
“Whatever.”
“It’s not whatever,” Jamie says. “It’s important.”
“I know, it’s good,” Adriana says, and she does know that it’s good. Jamie has been out to her parents since she was a kid, more or less, having announced at her seventh birthday party that she was going to marry Mulan. When her mother had reminded her, gently, that Mulan was a girl, actually, Jamie had answered with a decisive I already know that.
Suffice it to say that they were unsurprised by the time she took another girl to homecoming.
Meanwhile, Adriana’s mother had made sure to remind her on her twenty-fourth birthday that she’d been pregnant with Sophia by the time she was twenty-four.
“How’s he doing otherwise?”
“… definitely less good, I think, but I also think he’s getting better. He’s in so much therapy.”
“I mean, based on everything you’ve told me about him, ridiculous amounts of therapy sounds like a solid ongoing plan. Maybe the only solid ongoing plan.”
“That’s the thing, Jamie—I don’t think Eddie’s been telling us everything.”
“I’d buy that. I mean, for starters, Captain America is running a bed and breakfast for wayward Texans out of his kitchen.”
“—which is not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Buck.”
Adriana doesn’t have to tell Jamie what happened after Eddie got shot three years ago—Jamie was there when Adriana found out. Jamie was there when Adriana’s parents told her that they’d known for almost twenty-four hours, that Eddie was expected to make a full recovery after a long but successful surgery, that he was awake after a longer-than-expected period coming up from anesthesia.
Adriana tells Jamie what she knows now: Buck was there. Right there. Buck, wearing a shirt that must’ve needed to be burned in the aftermath, the shock of Eddie’s blood colouring him in a way that could never be washed off—not for her, and maybe not for him either. She can tell as much, now. She can see it on him now, still, and she knows that Buck can see it, too—that he can taste it, maybe, too close, right there.
All of this to say that Buck wasn’t wearing a firefighter’s uniform, and he didn’t get shot, but Buck crawled—under the fire engine, across broken glass and burning pavement, onto a street sustaining open gunfire—all to pull her brother to safety.
“I hate that I don’t know if Eddie didn’t tell my parents the whole story, or if this is another thing they decided it would be better for me not to know?”
“Well,” Jamie says, after considering it for a moment. “I think your answer might be hiding in your question—does Eddie know the whole story? And, if he does, why would Eddie decide that it would be better for your parents not to know it?”
Which… is a good question. The kind of question worth asking.
Adriana says as much.
“I know,” Jamie says, smug. “That’s why I asked it.”
“I love you,” Adriana says, and she means it—her hands and heart aching, just a little—and she can’t help but do anything but miss Jamie. Alone in the loft, austere and stunning as it might be, like living in a page from a magazine, she is sitting on the kitchen counter, curled around a glass of wine with little else for comfort, at least in this moment.
She knows, and she gets it: they’re both where they need to be right now.
It does help that Jamie replies as she always does, as she always has, an admission that has never gone unanswered—and she makes it sound like it’s the easiest thing in the world to say:
“I love you, too.”