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20 hours into a 24-hour shift, they get sent out to a five-alarm fire in Brentwood along with three other engines. The 105 has a probie driving the truck—he takes a turn too fast trying to get off the freeway and flips and blocks the exit for the 211 and the 99, which means by the time the 118 roars up, the first ladder on scene, it’s been ten plus minutes that the fire’s been burning unchecked.
Buck feels heavy before the rig even stops, and not from the weight of his turnout gear—there are people staggering around outside the building, looking lost and charred and wordlessly, guttingly terrified; he has to take a second after everyone else piles out onto the pavement to squeeze the bridge of his nose hard under his helmet, digging his nails in, and get rid of the urge to cry. Normally he can handle it, normally he can just make himself not look, but earlier tonight they’d responded to a crushed minivan on the 101 and he’d spent two minutes checking a screaming three-year-old for injuries before he realized why she was so pristine, why no one else was rushing to help him—why the minivan Eddie was prying open with the jaws of life was eerily silent—because they were all already dead.
He’d straightened up out of his crouch to find Bobby watching him across the red-lit chaos of the scene with a drawn, knowing look on his face, and now he jumps down out of the rig to find Bobby looking at him with a question—one he looks like he hates to ask, but always asks anyways.
“The official count is fifteen,” he tells Buck, voice low enough that the others can’t hear, and sort of gentle, too. “We’re going in either way, just—tell me what I’m looking at, Buck.”
Buck swallows. He looks at the people milling around outside the building, the ones whose clothes are melted to their bodies, holding themselves like they’re cold, eyes roving wildly and not really seeing anything. They’re moving but they’re not moving enough that he can’t count them, and—“Fifteen,” he tells Bobby. “I count fifteen.”
Bobby gets grim, but he doesn’t look sick the way Buck knows he must. Their captain carries the weight, he feels every death—of course he does, he’s a firefighter and a good, compassionate man—but he doesn’t suffer it the same way Buck does: acutely, like a slap to the face, like someone he loves yelling and crying in his kitchen.
How could he? He doesn’t have to look them in the eyes.
***
Buck’s twelve the first time he sees Daniel.
Daniel’s not the first dead person he’s seen—over the summer he came home to find a familiar old woman in the rocking chair on their porch and ran excitedly inside to tell Maddie that grandma was here for a visit, only for Maddie to give him an alarmed, worried look and tell him gently that grandma was dead, Remember, we went to the funeral?
Maddie’s away at college now, which means Buck can’t check with her if the blond boy in his room who looks like them is dead too, but in September at school his friend Ricky sneezed and accidentally teleported to the library, so he knows about mutants. He knows that if you’re a mutant the school nurse and the counselor come and take you out of class and test you and then when the test results come back they decide whether to take you away from your parents.
Buck wouldn’t really mind leaving his parents, but he’s worried if he got disappeared by some shady government agency like in an action movie or something, Maddie wouldn’t be able to find him. Plus, his parents probably wouldn’t be too happy about having a mutant kid—mutants are trouble, everybody knows that—so if they tested him and they didn’t decide to take him away, it would be just as bad. Worse, even.
No—Buck decides to keep the dead boy to himself.
Most dead people don’t talk, Buck will learn later, but he figures out a way to talk to Daniel. Some of the girls at school have a sleepover and spend the whole week leading up to it giggling about séances and Ouija boards; Buck pulls some pigtails and gets them to tell him what a Ouija board is, then pulls some more pigtails and gets them to let him borrow it. D-A-N-I-E-L, is the first thing Daniel spells out, and then B-R-O-T-H-E-R.
“Brother?” Buck frowns, cross-legged on the floor. “Whose brother?”
Daniel rolls his eyes and jabs a finger in Buck’s chest.
Buck’s smart enough to know all the reasons it’s extremely stupid to ask his parents, but he’s also smart enough that he can’t stand not knowing, can’t tamp down the curiosity. He waits until mom’s had her nightly glass of wine and his parents have both eaten and he’s done their dishes—but makes sure to get into the living room before his dad cracks open his first beer of the night—and asks, “Did I have a brother?”
The TV’s on, so it doesn’t get silent, but it feels like it does. Both his parents are looking at him, and it’s awful. Most of the time when they look at him, their eyes just sort of slide past, like he’s a blank wall instead of a person, and Buck’s always hated it but right now he thinks this is worse. “What did you say?” his dad asks, with a tone like Buck really shouldn’t ask it again. His mom is crying, the knuckle of her pointer finger pressed hard to her mouth.
Buck knows he should shut up and go to his room, or run out the front door and make himself scarce for a few days, maybe crash that sleepover. But even at twelve, limbs too long and face spotty and voice cracking every other word, he’s never been one to half-ass his stupid stunts.
“Did I have a brother?” he asks again.
His dad gets up out of his recliner, coming at him so fast that Buck trips over his own feet backpedaling into the hall, and then Buck’s back slams up against the wall and his dad has one hand in the front of his t-shirt, holding hip up so his sneakers can’t even touch the carpet, and he smacks him so hard across the face that Buck tastes copper. “Don’t you ever ask that again,” he snarls, shoving Buck towards the door. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about—don’t you ever bring this up again—get the hell out of my house.”
It’s December. Buck runs out into the cold air, down the porch steps, down the driveway, his legs bare under basketball shorts; he grabs his bike and rides halfway to Ricky’s house before he remembers that Ricky’s a Class-B mutant and doesn’t live there anymore. Ricky’s parents had to register their teleporting kid with a state agency and move to Pittsburgh so Ricky could go to a special mutant school.
He stops on the side of a dark road in the middle of nowhere, breath fogging in front of his face, fingers starting to go numb. Far in the distance, in the blue blackness of the hills around Hershey, he can see lights on in people’s houses. Orange squares of warmth, where people live and sleep and love each other and don’t see dead people and don’t have blood in their mouths.
There’s a hand on his shoulder. Buck looks over and sees Daniel, hair a curly mess around his head, cheeks flushed bright red like he’s cold too. They don’t have the Ouija board, but Buck’s wearing a sweatshirt Maddie sent him from college—Bucknell University—and Daniel traces out the letters like he’s writing them, B-U-C-K.
It’s the first time anyone’s ever called him Buck, instead of Evan.
Daniel stands on the back of Buck’s bike the whole ride home, a reassuring weight against his shoulders. And when Buck sneaks back into his room, climbing up the side of the dark house and clenching his teeth as he tiptoes across the floor so it doesn’t creak, so he doesn’t wake his parents with his helpless, frozen chattering, Daniel drags a heap of extra blankets onto the bed and curls up underneath them with his brother, even though he can’t get cold—even though he can’t offer any warmth. Buck falls asleep curled up with him face-to-face, listening to the lonely sound of his own breathing in the dark.
***
Official stats say there are about 10,000 registered mutants in the United States, most of them Class-C, about 500 Class-B, and a couple dozen or so Class-A. Conventional wisdom holds that there are probably three times as many Class-C unregistered and undetected, with harmless mutations like being able to talk to fish or knowing when the phone’s going to ring a split second before it actually does. Class-A mutants are the stuff of nightmares, the reason parents are reluctant to take their kids to official testers; Class-A mutants don’t just have to go to special schools and meet up with their Bureau of Mutant Relations officer once a week until they die, like Ricky—they’re the ones that get locked up underground, that get dissected in labs, that get shipped overseas on mandatory black-ops missions and never heard from again.
The guy who floated an entire football stadium in DC in the seventies was a Class-A mutant; so’s the old man in upstate New York who they say can read your mind from the other side of the planet. Buck’s never thought he’d be Class-A if he got tested, since all he can do is see dead people, but he’s never really felt comfortable taking the chance, either. He got himself counterfeit papers back when he was in Peru, since any blood test would turn up his activated X-gene and there’s a lot of shit that requires blood testing nowadays, and got himself listed as a Class-C mutant.
Bobby’s the only one at the 118 who knows, because he’s seen Buck’s LAFD paperwork. If he knows that Buck’s classification is counterfeit—which he probably does, because he’s Bobby—he’s never said anything. Not that he would. The Registration Act is almost universally regarded as inhumane; there aren’t many decent human beings who’d turn a mutant over to the BMR.
Besides, it comes in helpful sometimes—and it’s not like Buck’s the only mutant firefighter. There’s a woman in Austin with a crazy following on Instagram who calls herself Fire Fox and can literally walk through flames, like fucking Daenerys; Mutant and proud, she always declares, in her videos.
Buck’s not proud. Buck lives in a horror movie. He drives home at night and sees girls staggering in torn bloody clothes on the side of the road and has to slow down and pull over to see if they can talk or if they’re past talking, and he wants to be able to help so bad that every time it’s like someone’s cutting a piece out of him with dull, useless little scissors. He sits in the ER getting a gash on his arm sewn up and watches the man in the bay across from him stand in dumb blinking confusion over his own body, dead from a massive coronary; he has to stop eating his pancakes because out the window there’s a woman on the street walking around with her head smashed open and facing the wrong way, a jumper who’s found the energy in the afterlife to get up and stagger around on shattered legs—Christopher still going on and on about gentoo penguins, unbothered by Buck’s sudden shift in mood, but Eddie watching him over the table with a crease between his eyebrows, worried because for a second there Buck let his mask crack.
“You okay?” Eddie asks, quiet enough that his son can’t hear.
Buck clears his throat, turning so he can’t see the woman anymore. “Fine,” he says, pasting his smile back on, “just ate too fast,” and picks up his coffee to make it look believable.
Eddie still doesn’t look like he believes it, but he lets the subject drop.
The thing is, Buck’s thought about telling him a million times. He knows Eddie wouldn’t judge him for it—not for being a mutant and not for hiding it from everyone, not even for what his mutation is—but he just can’t bear the thought of Eddie looking at him the way Bobby looked at him when he found out. Trying to be accepting, determined to support Buck no matter what, but more than a little freaked out by it anyways. There’s no good way to say, I see dead people. And if Eddie didn’t want him around Christopher after that—Buck wouldn’t blame him, he could never blame Eddie for doing what’s best for his son, but he’s not sure he’d come back from it.
Eddie and Christopher are Buck’s safe place. They’re the one good, golden thing he has in the world, and he loves them so much that sometimes just looking at them feels like enough to bowl him over. If he ever lost that—lost them, lost his family—it would be like turning out the lights, everywhere, at once, forever.
So he can’t tell Eddie he’s a mutant. And he can’t tell Eddie he’s in love with him.
***
Buck decides to become a firefighter because he can’t look them in the eyes anymore and feel like he didn’t do enough. He has to help somehow, to know he at least tried, that he didn’t just sit by and watch them all die—so he starts running into burning buldings and leaping off unstable roofs and carrying three men on his back even though regulations say he’s only supposed to take one at a time, for his own safety, daring the universe to turn him into a ghost, too.
It doesn’t solve everything. He still never feels like he did enough, when he staggers out of a burning building and sees the teenager he was looking for sitting sullenly—silently, covered in third-degree burns—on the curb across the street. But at least he knows he didn’t just sit around with his thumb up his ass, and feeling like an active participant in the relentless shitshow he calls his life helps him sleep at night.
Well. Most nights.
Buck wakes up shivering in his bunk. The 118 is quiet the way buildings are supposed to be in the middle of the night. Eddie’s snoring on the other side of the wall, a familiar sound like Hen’s white noise machine down at the far end of the room, and Buck’s hands are shaking with the urge to get up and rip the curtain away and grab Eddie to make sure he’s okay; instead he makes himself turn the other way, into the bathroom, into a shower.
He doesn’t realize until he’s standing with his head bowed under the spray that he didn’t take his clothes off. The amount of shit he’s going to get from Chim about nocturnal emissions truly cannot be understated, but right now all Buck can think about is how Eddie was in his dream—his sad, regretful eyes, not talking even when Buck broke down yelling at him, not hitting back even when Buck shook him and slammed him against the fridge, Christopher crutching in frowning to ask Buck who he was talking to; wrong, wrong, all of it wrong, and Buck had curled up on the floor of the Diazes’ kitchen with his back jammed into the corner of the cabinets sobbing so hard it was an ache in his chest, involuntary, he couldn’t breathe—“Hey,” Eddie says, and Buck hears him say it.
Eddie’s standing on the edge of the shower stall, in his sweats and the t-shirt Buck helped Christopher pick out for him at the zoo, the one with a panda on it that says Papa Bear. His hair’s mussed up around his head, he’s squinting a little in the light, still bleary, and Buck wants to hold him so bad that repressing the urge makes him literally vibrate.
“I think you forgot a step, there,” Eddie says, amused. “Most of us like to take our showers naked.”
“It’s a new method,” Buck says, spluttering water. “Good for the skin.”
“Sure.” Eddie huffs, turning away. “Finish it up. I’ll grab you some dry clothes.”
Buck doesn’t even think about it—he just follows Eddie’s instructions. He turns the shower off and stands shivering in the stall, trying to towel himself off ineffectually, not wanting to strip fully naked when Eddie’s going to be back with clothes any second. It’s not that they haven’t seen each other naked before, but it feels…different, somehow. And Eddie must get it, because there are no more snide remarks when he comes back—he just sets the clothes on the bench, folded, and gives Buck the room while he changes. The shirt is Eddie’s, Buck realizes as he pulls it on—it’s a little bit too small, a little tight across the chest, and there’s probably an innocent platonic explanation, like Eddie couldn’t find another shirt in Buck’s bag so he just grabbed one of his own, but Buck tugs the collar up over his nose and hides in Eddie’s smell for a second and lets himself believe different.
There’s coffee waiting for him in the kitchen, and Eddie’s drinking some even though it’s three in the morning and he can’t metabolize caffeine for shit. He grumbles at Buck while he pours himself a cup and then bullies him over to huddle down on the couch and watch whatever shitty action movie is running on TNT at an hour when all sane and regular people are asleep—something with Shia LaBeouf, Buck thinks, but that’s all he really knows. What’s important is the comfort of that blue light, the familiar cadence of voices and soundtrack and commercial breaks, and Eddie pressing his shoulder against Buck’s, murmuring, “You wanna talk about it?”
Buck really, really doesn’t.
“You were dead,” he says anyway—because sometimes Eddie knows how to make him feel better when Buck doesn’t even know himself. “You wouldn’t talk to me.”
Eddie’s watching him. Buck can feel his eyes on his face, but he doesn’t turn. He can’t move.
Eddie moves for him. He takes the coffee out of Buck’s hands—half-drunk—and sets it on the table. Then he nudges and manhandles Buck around until he’s lying with his head in Eddie’s lap, his face tucked against his stomach. Eddie’s fingers are in his hair, soothing him like he’s a child. “I’m not dead,” he promises. Buck knows—he knows. He can feel the warmth of his body, the motion of his breath, his stomach lifting and lowering the weight of Buck’s head like the tide. “I’m talking to you. I’m okay, you’re okay, Chris is safe at home with Carla. Everything’s good. You can go to sleep.”
“You just fed me coffee,” Buck protests. His lips catch on Eddie’s Papa Bear shirt.
Eddie rubs his thumb over Buck’s eyebrow, his strawberry mark. “Like that’s ever stopped you before,” he says, a smile in his voice that Buck can hear. “Sleep, terco. I’ll keep watch out here.”
Buck’s a big guy—has been since he was seventeen or eighteen years old. He loves getting hugs from his sister, even though they do tend to come attached with noogies, and he’s been the little spoon for a girlfriend once or twice—but there’s never really been anyone in his life who was big enough to hold him. Never really been anyone who would want to. Not like this.
He wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist, burying his face in Eddie’s stomach until no light gets in—and he half-expects Eddie to move away, to rearrange him, to say No, but the truth is that Buck and Eddie never say No to each other. About the little stuff, yeah, but not the stuff that matters.
Eddie just holds him and sips his coffee and watches the shitty movie, and Buck falls asleep to the steady motion of his lungs.
***
The official LAPD code for a mutant-involved incident is 10-99M, which is a secret to exactly no one after that TV series in the nineties starring Edward James Olmos and Pamela Anderson in a bright green wig. The fire department responds to their share of 10-99Ms as well, though they don’t generally bother with the code—they just say, Some motherfucker turned into plutonium and irradiated an entire subway station.
The mutant in question is the only one in the station at the time, and turns out she didn’t mean to go radioactive at all—she was just bummed out about getting rejected by her crush—so the most disturbing discovery on that call is that Los Angeles actually does have a subway, unfinished and pointless though it may be. In the end, unfortunately, the kid did morph into a highly dangerous nuclear element, so there’s a three ring circus, shutting down subway lines and rerouting trains and stomping around in sweaty hazmat suits. The police have to get involved, and then Athena has to call in the BMR, looking regretful while she does it but doing it anyways—and Buck just sits next to the girl in his hazmat suit, letting her cry into his shoulder about some snot-nosed asshole named Kyle, who’s taking her friend Lily-Ann to the prom instead of her, and tries not to think about what Athena would do if she ever found out about him. It’s not fair—she’s not like that, she wouldn’t do that to him unless she had to—but this is a fear Buck’s known longer than he’s known her.
“Do you think I’ll make it back in time for prom?” the girl asks, watching a couple of G-Men dismount from their shiny black SUVs on the other side of the containment barrier.
Buck’s heart breaks a little. He squeezes her radioactive hand through six layers of industrial-grade rubber. “I’m sure you will, kid,” he lies.
A whole apartment building goes dark even though the power grid’s intact and they spend an hour combing the place looking for a woman who’s epileptic and also a Class-B mutant with electricity powers; they find her abandoned on the upper bunk in an apartment that’s clearly packed way past capacity with migrant workers and undocumented immigrants, and once they get her awake in the ambulance she tells them sobbing that she tried to follow the same rules she did in Mexico, to keep safe and keep under the radar, but she couldn’t afford her epilepsy drugs.
Eddie slips a bottle of levetiracetam into her pocket, not even a moment of hesitation, holding her hands as she dissolves into tears again, and Buck loves him so much he feels like he could combust.
There’s a building collapse in El Segundo, eight stories pancaked by a gas explosion, and Buck follows a woman Eddie can’t see to a couple of trapped kids in a car in the parking garage, their mother dead in the front seat. They get the kids out, and while the paramedics swarm them and lift the kids out of their arms Buck can feel Eddie’s eyes on the side of his face, wanting to ask. Buck has a lie ready to go—he heard crying, he followed the sound until they found the car, sheer dumb luck—but they get pulled into another foray into the building before Eddie can say anything, and it’s a relief, because Buck hates lying to him. It makes him feel like the biggest piece of shit on earth, lying to him.
Daniel shows up sometimes, which helps. His brother left Pennsylvania the same time Buck did, like he’s tethered to Buck and not to the place he died, and every once in a while he shows up in Buck’s loft, loitering in his kitchen, sprawled out on the couch watching whatever garbage Buck forgot to turn off when he stumbled to work after a sleepless night in front of the television. Fresh Prince reruns, normally. Buck always gets two beers out of the fridge, puts one in front of Daniel even though he still looks as young as the day he died, taps them together and ends up drinking both of them in the end.
“You better not be here when I have girls over,” he tells Daniel, reclining in front of a Chargers game. Buck’s a Steelers fan all the way, but he’s not really watching—he just has the game on to have something on. “You’re too young to be seeing that sort of stuff.”
O-R B-O-Y-S, Daniel spells out with Scrabble tiles.
“Or boys,” Buck agrees. “The point stands.”
L-I-V-I-N-G V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y, Daniel spells, with a shit-eating grin.
“Where the hell’d you learn the word vicariously,” Buck grumbles. “You’re in, like, sixth grade.”
S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G B-E-E.
Back in Hershey, Buck told Daniel everything—literally everything, because it wasn’t like he could tell his douchey skate park friends that he hung out with ghosts. After Daniel—after grandma on the front porch rocking with her lemonade, after Ricky moved to Pittsburgh and their friendship got whittled down to fewer and fewer phone calls, fewer and fewer post cards—there was always this gap between Buck and everyone else that he didn’t know how to bridge, that he didn’t think he was allowed to want to bridge. His parents’ interest in his life began and ended at whether or not he was currently alive, and sometimes not even that; anything he disclosed to his friends at school ran the risk of getting back to the counselor, and eventually to the BMR. Being possessive and paranoid with his mutation turned into being possessive and paranoid with everything else, too, with dreams and fears and books he liked; for a long time Daniel was the only one he really talked to. And then he came out here, landed in LA with the sense of finally arriving somewhere he’d been trying to go all along, and he has his sister back, has Eddie, and it sort of feels like a betrayal.
“Danny,” he says, while Daniel gets fed up with the Chargers halftime show and starts clicking around looking for 3rd Rock, “you don’t feel like I’m—ignoring you, now that I have more friends.”
Daniel gives him a supremely unimpressed look. It’s disconcerting partially because it’s on the face of a pre-teen and partially because Buck’s seen it on the face of another kid plenty of times before.
D-U-M-B-A-S-S, Daniel spells.
“Hey,” Buck protests. “I just don’t want you to feel like I’m forgetting about you. You’re not any less important to me now that I’ve got a bigger support system.”
T-E-L-L H-I-M, the Scrabble tiles order. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
“Tell who what?” Buck asks, playing dumb.
His brother rolls his eyes and doesn’t even grace that with a reply.
***
Buck and Christopher are on the pier watching a mutant float balloon animals in a lively rendition of The Lion King when the tsunami hits.
Buck has his phone out; Chris demanded he take a video so they can show Eddie later, and it’s on the phone’s tiny screen that he first notices the seagulls hauling ass inland, the stampede of people coming towards them. Oh fuck, he thinks, but doesn’t say—it’s more like a lurch in his soul, sudden nausea, running down stairs and missing the last step. The next few decisions he makes on blind, stupid instinct: he drops the phone, picks up Christopher, and starts running.
He makes it off the pier and onto pavement, but the wave is roaring behind them—literally roaring, a sound he’s not ever likely to forget—and he knows he’s not going to be fast enough, that they’re not going to make it. His eyes are so wide he feels like they’re going to bulge out of his head; he scans frantically for stairs on the side of a building, a fire escape, anything that can get them above the waterline, and Chris is clinging to his shirt hard enough to strangle him with the collar, terrified and confused, silent the way kids get when they know their adults are scared too—but there’s nothing, there’s nowhere to go. People jostle past them, all around them, and there are cars on the side of the street and open food trucks and restaurants with tables and chairs on the sidewalk—a million fucking things that are going to turn into deadly debris as soon as the water slams down the street—and it’s been a long time since Buck wanted to yell out for help but he wants to yell now.
Then the wave reaches them. Only it doesn’t really reach them at all.
Buck squeezes his eyes shut, takes a deep breath, holds onto Christopher as tight as he can—and the water splits around them, raging past over their heads, leaving them in a protected, impossible bubble of oxygen.
It takes Buck a second to realize what’s happened, curled around Christopher with his eyes closed, holding his curly head close against his chest to protect it. His heart’s pounding, lungs burning for oxygen—and after a second he realizes he’s not underwater and gasps in a breath, looking up. It’s like something out of The Ten Commandments, Moses parting the Red Sea—outside their bubble, the water’s moving past faster than a river, carrying beach chairs and trash and what Buck knows are bodies, some of them still alive and flailing, most of them not.
“Buck,” Christopher cries, trying to raise his head.
Buck holds him down, still bundled in his arms. “Don’t look, buddy.”
Christopher’s fists tighten at his shoulders. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Buck admits, standing on shaky legs. “I think there was a tsunami. You just—don’t look, okay? Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Because that has to be what this is—Christopher’s a mutant. He’s got water powers or something, telekinesis, and right now it’s the only thing keeping them both from getting swept away. So Buck holds him in his arms, heart still racing even though in their bubble it’s eerily silent and still, and walks out of the wave—the air pocket following them. Eventually the water gets too shallow and the ceiling crashes over Buck’s head, but it’s okay because the flow’s weak enough that he can wade; he splutters and spits and tries not to think about how much bacteria they just got doused in and still doesn’t let Christopher lift his head while he carries him through carnage that looks like it belongs on a news screen, halfway around the world, not here in sunny California.
There are people screaming and people silent, bloody and wet and disoriented, staggering in shock, and Buck stops to help three of the dead before he realizes he can’t tell. There are too many of them—he can’t tell. But he knows that Chris is alive, and that somewhere out there Eddie must be scared out of his mind for his son, torn in half with worry while he tries to push himself to do the job, so he does the one thing he can do—he walks to the nearest field hospital and borrows a phone.
He puts in the number and then lets Chris have it. His arms are starting to ache but he refuses to put Christopher down even for a second; he’s got nightmarish, illogical visions of the BMR showing up as soon as he does. So he hears Eddie answer on the other end of the line, cautious at the weird number, “Hello?”
“Dad!” Christopher exclaims, shouting in Buck’s ear.
“Christopher?” Eddie sounds like he just sat down hard wherever he was standing—kneecapped by relief. “Are you okay? You’re okay? Where are you? Is Buck with you?”
“Obviously Buck’s with me,” Chris scoffs. “He wouldn’t leave me in a tsunami.”
Eddie laughs, and it sounds like crying. “You’re right, cariño, he wouldn’t.”
Buck presses their cheeks together so he’s close enough to talk into the phone. “We’re okay,” he tells Eddie. “We’re at the VA hospital.”
“Buck?” Eddie says. “Buck, Jesus, I was so scared—” and suddenly there’s nothing on earth Buck wants more than to have Eddie in front of him, solid and wide-eyed and here, so that he can touch him and hold onto him and Christopher at the same time and know that they’re all okay.
“Chris is okay,” Buck tells him again, blinking fast to keep back tears. He can tell from how Eddie’s breathing, tight and sharp, that he’s crying too. “I promise you, everything’s fine.”
“I’m okay, Dad,” Christopher says, like it’s ridiculous he might not be.
“Gracias a dios,” Eddie says in a rush, almost to himself, “I love you so much, miho—”
“I know, Dad.” Christopher pushes away from Buck to roll his head dramatically, and it’s so like Daniel that Buck can’t help the tears anymore. “I love you too.”
Eddie’s laughing and crying some more, shaky with relief, so Buck clears his throat, “Listen, Eds, there’s a bunch of people waiting to use the phone—I’m going to try and find a car heading toward the 118, we can wait until you get a break and go home together—”
“No,” Eddie says, abruptly serious again, “no, Bobby’s letting me go—you stay right where you are, I’m coming to you.”
And Buck doesn’t know what it is about today—he didn’t really do anything, didn’t save anyone, not even himself, and he’s been in harrowing situations before—but he’s exhausted and vulnerable and freezing cold, and so overwhelmingly grateful that Eddie’s riding in like a knight in shining armor to take care of them that he doesn’t even argue. There are people out there who need Eddie more, people who are still in danger, dying people who Buck couldn’t help, but he just says, “Yeah, okay.”
He sits with his head on Chris’ chin on a low wall off to one side, out of the way—they’ve both been checked for concussions and bruises that might indicate internal bleeding and Buck got halfway to telling the paramedics not to bother before he realized he couldn’t explain, not unless he wanted them to call the BMR. There’s a good chance he’s got a Class-A mutant in his lap, and all he can think about is a dark SUV rolling up and men in suits taking Chris from him, and it’s—it’s bigger and more terrifying than the wave.
There are lots of the dead around. Now that Buck’s not operating in a blind panic, he can pick them out—the woman in a sundress kneeling over her own body, where they’re laid out in black bags, the elderly man who hasn’t figured out yet why he can’t hold his injured wife’s hand.
Buck makes sure Christopher is focused on other things, not looking at the triage; one of the nurses who works in the VA hospital brings some yarn from her car and teaches all the crying kids to play cat’s cradle. Buck vaguely remembers Maddie teaching him when he was a kid, young enough that the memory’s fuzzy—he tries to help Chris and is afraid for a second that he’s going to forget, and then Daniel’s there and he’s guiding Buck’s hands where he’s guiding Chris, helping them both.
That’s where Eddie finds them—hands tangled together in yarn, sitting on the curb.
For a second Buck’s worried Eddie’s going to scoop Christopher out of his arms, and he braces for it. But Eddie just collapses on the ground and drags them both into a hard, desperate hug, burying his face in Buck’s shoulder. And for a second everything is okay.
***
Buck showers and takes his antibiotics and goes to sit numbly at the Diazes’ kitchen table while Eddie tries to convince Christopher to go to bed. There are crayon drawings he and Chris did the last time he babysat stuck with magnets to the fridge, dishes from the pancakes he made this morning soaking in the sink. He sleeps here so much he’s got a spare drawer in Eddie’s bedroom, and he keeps a toothbrush Chris picked out for him (the one with Batman on it) in the toothbrush holder by the bathroom sink. He never thought anyone would be willing to give him something as enormous and important as a family, as this family—he never thought he’d have a friend like Eddie, a man who he trusts to carry his weight and who trusts him right back, a man who makes the word friend feel so starkly, painfully inadequate. Buck might not live here, officially, but this is his home. This is a house that’s warm and safe and full of love, and Buck can’t—he can’t stand that he might not be welcome here after he says what he has to say tonight. But he can’t keep what happened today from Eddie. He can’t.
There are footsteps in the hallway. He looks up, and it’s not who he expects.
Buck doesn’t say anything—he doesn’t want Eddie or Christopher to hear. He just swallows thickly and watches while Shannon pulls out a chair and joins him at the table.
Buck can count on one hand the number of ghosts he’s met who can talk, but Shannon reaches out and squeezes his hands and says, “Buck.”
It’s as strange as it always is, like hearing a gust of wind in the other room, even though he’s sitting right in front of her watching her lips move—and Shannon seems to know it, because she gives him a twisty, apologetic little smile while she brushes a curl out of his face.
“You’re what they need,” she says, haltingly, like it takes a lot of effort. “You take care of them. You love them better than I ever could. Just—remember to let them love you back.”
There are tears gushing hotly down Buck’s face. He’s not sure when that started.
“Hey,” Eddie says, frowning, coming across the kitchen to kneel in front of him. Buck blinks and looks over his shoulder, and Shannon is gone. “Hey, Buck,” Eddie wipes tears away from his cheeks with his thumbs. “What is it? Adrenaline wearing off? Everything catching up with you at once?”
“Yeah,” Buck croaks. He grabs onto Eddie’s wrists to steady himself. “Look, Eddie, I—there’s something I need to tell you. You should probably sit down.”
Eddie drags over a chair and puts his butt in it without letting go of Buck’s face. His thumb is rubbing back and forth over Buck’s cheekbone, under his eye, like the way you touch someone when you’re brainless and still half-asleep in bed, and Buck thinks hysterically that he just had to go and fall in love with the one man in the whole LAFD secure enough in his masculinity to get this handsy with his strictly platonic male best friend.
“What is it?” Eddie asks, that worried little crease back between his eyebrows. “Did something happen I don’t know about? Something with Chris?”
Buck’s so miserable he feels insensate with it, sick and far away, but Eddie’s Christopher’s father and he needs to know, so he dredges up the words, and he tells him. Eddie listens, and that crease gets darker and darker, the atmosphere in the kitchen thicker and heavier and closer, as if by saying all this aloud Buck has pulled a blanket over both their heads.
By the time he’s done Eddie’s thumb has stopped. He’s staring down at their knees, fitted together like puzzle pieces, and he says—brokenly—“Fuck. They’re gonna take him away.”
“No,” Buck says, fast, shaking him by the shoulders. “No they’re not. We won’t let them.”
Eddie looks up, eyes wet and shining. He looks so lost that Buck just keeps talking without bothering to stop and consider what he’s saying, that maybe there’s a better way to say it—“We’ll get him fake papers. I know someone. We don’t have to take him to the official testers; we register him quietly as a Class-C. When the activated X-gene shows up in his blood tests everything will check out, but it won't raise any red flags. All under the radar.”
“Buck,” Eddie’s shaking his head, dragging a hand over his face. He’s not touching Buck anymore. “I’m not a criminal, I don’t know how to just—go around the law like that. We’ll get caught.”
“We won’t get caught,” Buck says. “I never got caught.”
Eddie blinks at him, and Buck can see it registering, finally—the implications of what he’s saying. “You,” he starts, not frowning, not disapproving, but slightly stunned. “Buck. You’re a mutant?”
“Yeah.” Buck’s voice breaks, like he’s fucking twelve. “Yeah, I’m—I know what I’m doing here, Eds.”
Eddie stares at him for another minute, eyes locked; not like he’s trying to see into him, not like he’s studying him, but like he already knows everything there is to know and he just wants to look for a minute to reassure himself. To bring himself back down to earth. And Buck stares back, their knees still fitted together, their kid asleep down the hall, and waits for Eddie to come to him.
Finally—“Okay,” Eddie says, decided. “Okay, Buck. I trust you.”
***
Christopher is less confused about everything than he could be, because he’s been playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops lately and he understands the importance of a deep-cover mission.
After he throws a tantrum and makes it rain in the living room they figure out pretty quick that his powers are weather-related, which actually seems worse than what Buck had assumed, in terms of showing up on the government’s radar—which the unregistered tester they take him to in the back room of a pediatrician’s office in Pasadena confirms.
“Obviously, I don’t know how strong he is,” she tells them, conferring outside the play room while Christopher participates in a very serious summit of other second-graders to address issues facing the Minecraft community. “But there’s only one other mutant with atmokinesis, and she’s right up there with the major players. If I had to guess I’d say Christopher is definitely Class-A.”
Eddie looks like he’s going to be sick, staring at his son through the glass.
Buck squeezes his shoulder and asks the doctor, “You do papers here too, right?”
It’s kind of like getting a fake passport in the movies—lots of standing in front of blank white backdrops and smiling for the camera, fingerprinting and signatures and repeating their social security numbers over and over for people they just met. Buck knows Eddie well enough that he can tell he’s quietly freaking out the whole time, and also knows him well enough to know that no amount of reassurance is going to help—that he just has to let him work through it. So Buck corrals Chris and answers his questions as clearly as he can, trying to make it all sound a lot less scary than it is, and soon enough they’ve got papers officially declaring Christopher Diaz a registered Class-C mutant with a stamp from the Bureau of Mutant Relations.
“It’s good he’s got a mutant dad,” the pediatrician tells them, on their way out the door. “It’s a lot harder to get in and change the computer records, when the kid has to meet with a Bureau officer once a week.”
“Uh,” Eddie says, stopping. “What do you mean?”
Turns out even Class-C kids—if they don’t have at least one mutant parent to teach them how to control their powers—have to meet weekly with a representative from the BMR. The number they get quoted to hack the records and add Chris’ name makes Buck’s head spin—and Eddie’s too, from the look on his face. Buck can see him trying to do that vital, excruciating math, thinking about his mortgage and what he can borrow from his parents and how many shifts he can pick up and maybe selling his house, and obviously Buck would give up his apartment to help out, but there’s an easier and much more obvious solution.
He pulls Eddie out into the hall, and says, “Marry me.”
Eddie stares at him blankly.
Buck does, because he’s a sap and sort of pathetic, have a ring. He’s a self-diagnosed impulse shopper and he has a lot of disposable income, and about twenty-four hours after he realized he was in love with his best friend he got knockout drunk with his older sister and wandered into a Kay Jewelers—sue him.
Whenever he imagined it—whenever he let himself imagine it—he thought it would be a lot more romantic than this. There’d be a lot of crying and candlelight and maybe some wine, and Eddie would get down on his knees with him and laugh into his mouth and Buck would get to kiss the wide hinge of his jaw, the spot he can’t help but stare at whenever he’s standing behind him—they’d fuck in the backseat of Eddie’s car because they couldn’t wait until they got home and anyway Christopher was there with Pepa, and Buck’s silver ring would be on Eddie’s finger, and he’d be on fire with it.
This isn’t quite that. They’re standing in the back hall of a noisy pediatrician’s office where they just spent upwards of a year’s pay on counterfeit government documents. Eddie’s hair is greasy, and unbrushed, and Buck’s wearing a pair of his shoes with his heels hanging out the back because he lost his sneakers somewhere in the tsunami. Eddie has dark circles under his eyes and Buck feels like living shit because neither of them slept a wink last night, jolting awake what felt like every fifteen minutes to thunder splitting the sky outside and Christopher screaming out of a nightmare—but when they finally did get him to sleep, Buck assuring him over and over, Christopher bundled against his chest while Eddie’s hand dragged through his hair, that they were home, they were safe, the worst was over, neither of them were going to let anything happen to him, it was piled together in one bed, like they really were two dads whose kid had come crying into their bedroom, instead of one dad and his best friend who’d made the journey from the couch.
And it might not be romantic, proposing like this, but it’s not fake. It’s real. Buck would marry this man over, and over, and over. It doesn’t really matter why. The answer’s always going to be yes.
“Marry me,” he says again, when Eddie’s been quiet a long time. “I’m a lot cheaper than hacking the database, Eds. I’m so fucking cheap you’ve got no idea.”
“Buck,” Eddie huffs, and then, like he can’t believe he’s saying it—“Fuck, yeah, okay.”
***
They get a marriage license by the end of the day and a timeslot at the courthouse the following morning. Buck runs back to his apartment to grab some clothes and the ring box he keeps in his bedside table and comes through the front door to find that Daniel has somehow gotten hold of a can of spray paint and tagged pretty much everything Buck owns with the word DUMBASS.
“Real mature!” he shouts, while he takes the steps two at a time up to the loft. The decorative pillows Maddie made him buy when she helped him pick out a duvet all have one letter on them, arranged to spell—you guessed it—DUMBASS. Daniel ran out of material and had to put the last S on the lamp. “You know what!” Buck calls to his empty place. “You’re acting like a poltergeist.”
It’s just about the biggest insult you can deliver to a ghost, and it makes Daniel appear suddenly at the top of the stairs, fuming. He stomps down into the living room, gets out the Scrabble tiles, and by the time Buck’s coming back down with a duffel bag and the ring in his pocket, he’s spelled out M-A-R-T-Y-R C-O-M-P-L-E-X.
Buck gapes. “Excuse me?”
H-E L-O-V-E-S Y-O-U, Daniel arranges. D-U-M-B-A-S-S.
Buck suddenly doesn’t feel like playing this game. “Yeah,” he says, miserably. In all the excitement and panic of the last couple days, he hasn’t had time to slow down and realize he’s getting everything he wants—except he’s only getting it because Eddie’s backed into a corner, and he’s the only way out. “Yeah, Danny, I know he does. But it’s not like that.”
Y-E-S L-I-K-E T-H-A-T, Daniel insists.
Buck’s self-aware enough to admit he’s sometimes a glutton for punishment, that he gets so down on himself he gets more comfortable being miserable than being happy, but he’s got people waiting for him, so he’s not about to stick around and get the entire ocean of his unrequited love splashed back in his face by a ghost—especially not when that ghost is his insolent, older baby brother. "I never should've got you Scrabble," he tells Daniel, and leaves.
By the time their appointment at the courthouse rolls around, everyone at the 118 knows they’re getting married. Once you tell something to one of them there’s not really a good way to keep a lid on it—they’re like high schoolers that way. Buck calls Maddie to come meet them as a witness, and Maddie can’t keep anything from Chim, who can’t keep anything from anybody. He has to borrow a suit from Bobby, too, because Eddie only has the one, which means that Athena knows—by the time they rock up to the courthouse with Christopher in tow, the entire 118 is waiting for them on the front steps with Pepa and Carla and Eddie’s Abuela. Hen’s already crying. Someone got them balloons. When Buck gets close enough, Maddie punches him in the shoulder, then drags him into a hug. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you got together,” she accuses.
Buck looks at Eddie over her shoulder. They’ve agreed that, for the sake of simplicity, it’s easier for two people to keep a secret than almost a dozen. Not even Christopher knows this is a sham.
“Sorry, Mads,” he says, burying his face in her shoulder. She smells like his big sister, so familiar it aches, and he crushes her into a tighter hug than he intends. “I couldn’t really believe it was real.”
Maddie pulls back to hold his face in her hands, her chin dimpling like it does when she’s trying not to cry.
Buck thought he said that last part quiet enough that only Maddie could hear, but when she moves away he realizes that Eddie’s watching him, looking at Buck like he’s been clocked over the head.
“Buck,” he says, in a tone Buck’s never heard before.
“Dad!” Christopher complains, tugging at Eddie’s suit sleeve. “We’re going to be late. You and Buck can’t be late for your own wedding.”
The word wedding catches Buck straight in the chest.
Eddie still hasn’t looked away from his eyes, and Buck watches in helpless horror as realization clicks into place—as Eddie sees the word hit him, sees it all, as clear and obvious and mortifying as if Buck had torn off Bobby’s suit and stood there naked in the bright midday sun. But Christopher is right—they’re going to be late, and their friends herd them inside before either of them can say anything, before Eddie can demand answers or Buck can beg him to forget what he saw. They check in; they get put in a queue in the austere marble hall outside the courtroom, with brides in white tulle and giggling, lovestruck teenagers. Buck’s collar is too tight; he tugs it like a nervous tic. Chris is telling Hen and Karen all about poison dart frogs, and Eddie’s still staring straight at Buck like a man in a trance, and suddenly, like breaking out in a hot sweat, Buck can’t take it anymore.
He grabs Eddie and steers him towards the men’s room. “I need to talk to you,” he mutters, and when the others protest he calls over his shoulder, “We’ll be back in a minute!”
Chimney wolf-whistles, because he’s awful, but before Buck can flip him off, they’re through the door and into the cool, echoey stillness of the tiled bathroom, and they’re alone.
Buck lets go of Eddie, but Eddie doesn’t go anywhere.
Last night, when they told Chris why they were going to the courthouse in the morning, he just said About time. Everyone else’s gay dads are already married, which was about par for the course. Now, Buck looks at Eddie in the awful, harsh fluorescents—the stubble he forgot to shave this morning, his thick neck, his pouty mouth and his gentle brown eyes Buck wants to just—rest in, always. He has glitter in his hair he hasn’t noticed, and it’s probably from the card they both know Christopher made them in secret last night, the one that’s going to turn Buck into a blubbering mess later while he’s sleeping on the couch for what’s technically his wedding night. Eddie deserves so much better than Buck. At the very least, Buck can give him the truth.
Eddie beats him to it.
“Buck,” he breathes, “querido,” still close enough that Buck can feel the warmth of his body—then puts his hands on Buck’s neck and drags him into a kiss.
Eddie kisses like it’s the main event. Like it means something. Buck sucks in a breath—sucks in Eddie’s breath, wet and humid and so intimate it takes him out at the knees—and for a second he can’t do anything but cling to Eddie’s shoulders and give himself over to it, to him. Eddie backs him up into the sinks and gets up in his space, chest to chest, budging in between Buck’s legs, mauling his mouth, and there is no way in hell that their friends aren’t going to know what they were doing. The thought goes straight to Buck’s dick. He shivers, and Eddie mutters, “fuck.”
“Wait,” Buck says. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’s remembering that he dragged Eddie in here for a reason. “Wait, Eds, hold on a second.”
Eddie backs off, just barely. His lips are bright red and wet with Buck’s saliva. It’s the hottest thing Buck’s ever seen, but he manages to knuckle through the lust.
“My mutation,” he says, swallowing hard. “I, um. I see dead people.”
He knows what he’s expecting. None of it’s fair to Eddie—he knows his best friend better than to think Eddie would be disgusted with him for something he can’t control, but Buck’s been working up these worst-case scenarios over thousands of sleepless nights since he was in the sixth grade. So he’s expecting to feel that slap of cold air, for Eddie to step away, for him to storm out—because if there is one thing Buck has always known about himself, it’s that he’s hard to love and easy to leave.
But Eddie doesn’t leave. Eddie rubs his thumb over Buck’s strawberry mark, then leans up and kisses it, kisses his closed eye, the acne scars at the corner of his nose.
“Terco,” he says, affectionately. Buck doesn’t know what it means, but it sounds like dumbass. “If I could choose anyone on the planet to marry, to take care of my son with me, to sleep in my bed, it would be you.”
Buck blinks fast, vision blurred. “Eddie.”
“Shh, Buck.” Eddie kisses his mouth, carefully, soft. Buck wants to curl up inside him and never leave. “I’ve been in love with you for so long I don’t remember what it’s like to be any other way. I want you to be Christopher’s father. I want you as part of our family forever. Please will you come next door and marry me.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, smiling so hard it hurts his face. “Yeah, I can do that.”
***
It’s not until it’s time for the vows that Buck realizes he didn’t actually say it back.
He’s up first, Maddie already sobbing at his shoulder even though the only person who’s spoken so far is the judge, and he fumbles the ring out of his pocket so fast he almost drops it.
Eddie’s watching him with a quiet smile, amused. Buck knows what that mouth feels like on his. He’s not sure how he’s ever going to be able to sleep another night in the station knowing Eddie’s right on the other side of the bunk partition, sleepy and stretched out and waiting to be kissed.
The judge clears her throat.
“Right,” Buck says, “sorry.” He laughs a little, shaky and nervous, turning the ring in his fingers so that Eddie can see the engraving on the inside—I have your back. “I, um, well. I bought this a couple years ago.”
Eddie’s eyes snap to his face, wide open and vulnerable.
Buck slips the ring on his finger. It feels like maybe the most important thing he’s ever done. “You and your son are the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he tells Eddie, forgetting for a second that they’re not the only two people in the room. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I’m going to try to keep doing it for the rest of our lives.”
The second he’s done talking he remembers that everyone’s watching him—Bobby, Maddie, Hen and Chim and Eddie’s family—and abruptly he’s mortified. He’s loud about his feelings, but never about the ones that matter. His love for Eddie has always been something he had to feel alone in the dark; it’s too enormous, too personal a thing to admit in the daylight.
Except Eddie’s squeezing his hands, cupping his face. “Evan,” he says, “hey, look at me,” and Buck does, because Eddie’s never called him that before. Eddie rests their foreheads together, propping up the weight of Buck’s skull. He holds Buck’s eyes, like he’s getting him through something hard, something scary, and in a way Buck guesses he is. “You deserve everything, and you don’t have to do anything to get it—it’s not about checks and balances. And I don’t know who taught you that love is something you have to earn, but I’m going to be the one to teach you different, okay?”
Buck can’t breathe. He feels like—flying. Like he’s flying.
“Okay?” Eddie presses, jostling him with his grip on the nape of his neck.
“Okay,” Buck caves. He’s crying and laughing at the same time, a complete mess. “Okay, Eds.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, “yeah, baby,” and kisses him.
Chimney wolf-whistles. Hen elbows him hard enough to elicit an ow.
The judge cuts in, “If you two gentlemen don’t mind, we’ll move on to the I dos—this courtroom has a schedule to keep,” but she looks a bit misty herself, so Buck doesn’t mind the interruption.
They say their I dos, still wrapped up with their foreheads pressed together, attacking each other in a kiss the second the judge says, “You may now—well, you could’ve at least let me finish.” Chris bowls into both of them, grinning his million-watt smile, and the courtroom manager herds them into a room next door for photos while the next couple comes in. Hen and Maddie set about trying to get the balloons to form an arch, Christopher demanding that Bobby lift him up so he can help, and Eddie whips to face Buck with a horrified expression. “Shit,” he mutters, “shit, I can’t believe I forgot,” and takes a ring out of his pocket.
Buck recognizes it, because it’s Eddie’s ring. It’s silver, tarnished, it’s got a little piece of medical tape around it to make it stay on Eddie’s finger. “Eddie,” Buck says thickly, overcome.
Eddie slides it on his finger, forcing it past his knuckle. “Sorry if this is weird,” he says, “I just like the idea of you wearing something that’s mine”—and after that Pepa and Abuela get all the photos they could ever want, because Buck can’t keep his hands off his husband for another second.
***
It pours down rain for forty-eight straight hours the next time Christopher doesn’t want to go to school, and the 118 spends their whole shift cleaning up fender benders on the 405 bitching about how Californians don’t know how to handle a little precipitation. Sun breaks through the clouds around three p.m. on the second day, Friday, which bodes ill for Monday if Chris is just happy to have finally made it to the weekend. Buck meets Eddie’s eyes over the roof of a car that somehow managed to hydroplane in less than an inch of water, and they both burst into laughter.
“Hey!” complains the driver, who’s fine except for that his seatbelt is jammed. “It’s not funny!”
“Don’t worry, sir,” Eddie assures him. “We’re not laughing at you.”
Buck’s been trying to teach Christopher control his powers, like parents of Class-C mutants are supposed to, but it doesn’t really help that no one ever taught him. There was one girl in Peru who could run 500 miles per hour but also sometimes ran normal speed—she told him it was sort of like flexing a muscle, The muscle’s always there, but you’re not always using it. Barring that soupçon of advice Buck’s got nothing, so he checks out every Mutant Parenting 101 book at the library and pores over articles online about the other atmokinetic woman in Harlem and comes up with what he thinks is a pretty solid training regimen, until Christopher starts a minor tornado in the back yard and Buck has to dive to catch the neighbor’s dog. There are frustrated tears and kisses from Toto and by the end of it all Christopher’s so exhausted that he goes to bed at eight on the dot without a single word of complaint.
Buck feels like hot garbage, and a sorry excuse for a father, and he’s sitting on the couch staring forlornly at his hands when Eddie finishes putting Chris down to sleep. “I’m no good at this,” he apologizes, as soon as Eddie’s there. “You picked a really shitty mutant to take care of your son.”
“Shut up,” Eddie sighs, dropping a kiss on Buck’s head on his way into the kitchen. “I picked the man I love to take care of my son—we can figure out the mutant stuff together.”
Buck still can’t go anywhere near Santa Monica Pier—there are too many dead from the tsunami haunting the place, as if months later they still haven’t been able to figure out what happened to them, why they died. Christopher’s been sleeping through the night for a while now, he only ever had a few bad dreams about the tsunami, and Buck’s so astonishingly grateful that his kid’s not permanently scarred from the experience that his own nightmares seem like a paltry price to pay. And it’s not like he pays it alone, anymore—he still wakes up silently, covered in sweat, his muscles so tense he’s curled up in a ball, but he’s never alone. Eddie’s there, hands on Buck’s shoulders, coaxing him back to reality with his touch and his body and a steady stream of words, always words, because he understands now what Buck meant when he said You wouldn’t talk to me.
Eddie has his demons too, because they’re nothing if not a matched pair. Some nights he thrashes in his sleep thinking he’s back in Afghanistan, and Buck can’t do anything but use his body weight to pin him down until he wakes up; some nights he sobs with such raw, awful loss that Buck knows without even asking that he’s dreaming about his son, about the tsunami or the BMR or something worse—a million ways that they could lose him.
Those nights they don’t go back to sleep. They make a pot of coffee and sit on the floor in the hall outside Christopher’s room, watching him sleep through the cracked door like total fucking creeps.
“Is it always gonna be like this?” Eddie asks him, one of those nights.
His face is still creased from his pillow, limned in blue from Chris’ nightlight. He’s wearing his Papa Bear shirt, the one Buck drooled on that night at the station, and they’re sitting with their legs all tangled up; Buck rubs his hand around the barrel of Eddie’s side and says, “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie says, scrubbing his eyes, frustrated. His feet are bare on the carpet, knobby ankles and hair on his toes, and in his wildest dreams Buck never thought he’d love someone’s feet, but—well. Here he is. “I’m just so fucking scared for him all the time, Buck. All the fucking time.”
Buck’s heard people say that being a parent is like having your heart walking around outside your body. He always thought it was annoyingly trite, the one-size-fits-all sort of saying that people wrote in valentines and birthday cards, too general to really mean anything. But now he has Christopher, and he thinks what that statement really means is this: your heart is how you get killed. Usually you have to go through your ribcage to get to it, usually it’s safe inside your body, but when you have a kid it’s like walking around with your heart in a plastic bag, dangling from a string, like letting your heart go out in the world without you. It’s a kind of vulnerability that doesn’t have any comparison. And Eddie’s right—it’s fucking terrifying.
Buck kisses the side of Eddie’s head, his shoulder. “I think that might just be being a dad,” he says, apologetic. “I don’t know—we should probably ask Bobby.”
Eddie leans into him, nursing his coffee, and doesn’t say anything at all.
***
Buck lines the perimeter of the Diaz house with rock salt from the garden store the second they get home from the courthouse—not because he doesn’t want Daniel in the house but because he hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this “living vicariously” thing yet and he’s about to make love to his husband and probably cry about it, and he doesn’t want anyone but Eddie to see.
They’ve been told in no uncertain terms that they will be having a wedding reception, but not even Maddie can pull a whole party together that last minute, and Christopher went home with Abuela, so when Eddie pushes him down on the bed, still in his wedding suit, palms the big handful of him through his pants, and says, “I want to hear you, baby—” well. They’re all alone. Not even the ghosts are listening.
It doesn’t really feel like sex. For Buck, sex has always been something separate from love, a physical thing you just do and then come back and say I love you later—but this is different, like love with their bodies. And Buck feels like a sap just for thinking it, like he should quit the 118 and go work at fucking Hallmark, but Eddie is giving him everything he wants without even having to ask, big enough to manhandle him and close enough to know that Buck wants him to do it, and he keeps stopping to kiss Buck’s ring—to kiss his own ring on Buck’s finger—and Buck’s chest is so full it feels like someone’s inflating a balloon in there, trying to burst him open. “Eddie,” he says, half-mad with it, “Eddie, Eds, come here,” and captures him long enough to draw him into a low, heavy kiss—Eddie stretched out between his legs in his shirtsleeves, warm weight and the smell of his aftershave and hands that have saved Buck a million times skating up his sides, around his back, gathering him up. “Is this weird?” Buck asks, mumbling, still with Eddie’s lower lip in his mouth, because distantly he thinks this should probably be weird. This morning he was Eddie’s best friend, sleeping on his couch, and now they’re grinding together in Eddie’s bed in a way that’s liable to make Buck’s brain melt out his ears and they’re married.
But Eddie just smiles—his drowsy, just woke up smile—and murmurs, “Only thing weird is that you’re wearing Bobby’s clothes instead of mine.”
“You know,” Buck laughs brightly, “I wasn’t expecting this caveman thing outta you, but it’s really doing it for me.”
“Good,” Eddie says, then strips Buck naked and puts him in his Papa Bear shirt and fucks him so thoroughly and sweetly that it’s all Buck can do to grapple his limbs around him and hold on. Buck makes a ton of noise and begs and begs, but the truth is that he doesn’t really want to come—not really, not urgently, not like normal. He’s never been more content to just exist in a moment than he is right now, plastered to Eddie with sweat and lube and tears, not an inch of space between them. Eddie mouths at the side of his neck, sleepy and wordless and reassuring, his hips barely moving where they’re sealed to Buck’s ass, just slow, steady, rocking inside him without ever leaving, and at some point he reaches down to find the sheet and pulls it up over them, so that the light is softer and every sound is louder, trapped in here, only for them.
And Buck thinks maybe it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have the words to tell Eddie how much he loves him—it doesn’t matter that he could talk for a thousand years and not say anything even remotely equal to how he feels when Eddie tells him Christopher misses his Buck. Because maybe Eddie feels exactly the same way.
Later, while Eddie’s drooling on the pillows, Buck eases out from under his arm and goes to make himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. He’s too keyed up to nap—he’s got this strange sense that if he closes his eyes he’s going to wake up and everything will have been a dream—so instead he goes to wander around in the orange afternoon sunlight, the rarefied peace of a quiet house. While the coffee maker’s guzzling he spots something out the window, and goes sheepishly onto the front porch, down the steps onto the driveway, to break the salt line with his foot.
“Sorry,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “We were just—I didn’t want my brother to—”
Shannon takes his hand away from his neck and holds it in hers, looking at the ring. Buck goes quiet. There’s something wistful on her face he doesn’t know her well enough to interpret, and he feels like if he talks he’s going to break some sort of spell.
But Shannon doesn’t say anything either. Maybe she used up all her energy the last time, talking to Buck in the kitchen—whatever it is, she’s silent while she smiles, blinking back tears, and presses Buck’s open hand to his own chest, ring digging in. Like This is yours now. They’re yours now.
“Thank you,” Buck says, choked up. But Shannon is already gone.
“Who are you talking to?” Eddie asks from the porch, sleepy and squinting. “Come on, come back to bed.”
Buck will tell him later. For now, though, he turns to his husband, and goes back to bed.