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There are a number of longstanding traditions in the Diaz household.
Breakfast for dinner once a week— that’s a given. Season passes to the zoo, which they still get plenty of use out of. Movie nights and the requisite accompanying popcorn. Going all-out for holidays, except for Easter which they’ve now managed to forget about entirely for three years running. Once a year since Lucas was six, they’ve taken a family trip to the Santa Monica Pier which felt a little morbid at first but was effective in getting Buck over his anxiety around carnival rides and now is mostly for fun.
And— for the past eighteen years— it has been a tradition that Buck and Eddie stay up late on the night of June fourth in their little kitchen, making Lucas a birthday cake.
Except that it’s the end of May, and Lucas is turning eighteen in less than a week, and Buck is sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, watching Lucas sweep through the kitchen with all of his usual vibrance and energy.
It’s funny, Buck muses to himself as he watches Lucas drop smoothie ingredients into the blender that lives on their countertop. He’s so grown up now, and Buck would be hard-pressed to say when it happened, exactly. Maybe it’s the sight of an old LAFD shirt with Diaz on the back, stretched across Lucas’ shoulders; or maybe it’s the looming, circled June 5 on the fridge calendar that marks the official, legal end of Lucas’ childhood. But he watches his son pour almond milk into the blender and thinks, this can’t be happening.
It really can’t, because as far as Buck remembers it Lucas was a baby just a minute ago. He feels like all he did was blink, and there was this adult standing in front of him with a full, busy schedule of his own and lots of friends and a whole life. But just a second ago, he depended on Buck and Eddie for everything— he was tiny and soft and new and fragile, a perfect little ray of light that cast summer warmth over their lives and changed everything for the better.
Not that he doesn’t, still— but it’s different, now. Buck has grown a lot from the man he was when he first moved to Los Angeles— hell, he’s grown a lot from the man he was even a few years ago, if he’s honest. But he’s come to accept that it’s just a hallmark of his personality that he doesn’t like for things to change.
He hadn’t handled this age very well with Christopher, either— though in those days they had Lucas, barely more than a toddler at the time, and he served as a very effective distraction. Their lives are a lot slower now. There’s a lot more space to reflect on all the things that are different these days.
“What are you up to today?” he asks, when Lucas has finished pulsing the smoothie he’s making and is in the process of rinsing the blades on the blender under the running tap. He glances back at Buck, shrugging his shoulders.
“Going to the gym,” he says. “And then I think there’s a thing at the community center. I told Dad I’d stop by before baseball.”
It’s all so casual— there’s nothing odd about it, just their usual routine. Eddie’s morning shift at the nonprofit is marked on the calendar in the red expo marker that they use for all work-related things, and Lucas always has community baseball practice on Saturday afternoons. Lucas’ graduation isn’t for another week after his birthday, so next month will be busier, different— but for today, it’s all the usual things.
“Food drive, right?” Buck says. His mouth has gone sort of sticky. He’s trying not to think too hard about it as Lucas offers an easy smile over his shoulder.
“They need help moving palettes of food,” Lucas says. “You’re lucky you’re on forty-eight off. Otherwise, you’d be signed up, too.”
Buck smiles. If Lucas notices anything amiss about it, he doesn’t say.
“Okay,” Buck says. “Are you having dinner with us?”
Lucas shakes his head and says, “Not tonight.”
Buck wonders when that happened— and finds that he can’t really remember. Lucas is everything any parent would hope their kid would be at very nearly eighteen— kind; responsible; respectful; social. He’s certainly more put-together than either Buck or Eddie had been at his age, with emotional intelligence that probably outranks them both at their current ages. It’s just that suddenly, Buck is very aware of how much letting go he needs to do, and how hard it’s going to be to do it.
“Alright,” he says, and watches as Lucas rounds the table into a pool of warm sunlight that filters in through the window. He’s so beautiful, Buck thinks— always has, since he was so much smaller, and still does now that he’s practically a grown man who looks so much like him, but better. Lucas has always been the best of him, and so much more than that, so many beautiful things that Buck is not. That strikes him again as Lucas grins and the dimple in his cheek is carved out, deeper on one side.
Lucas leans in— this part, Buck can anticipate, because they’re an affectionate family and always have been and thank god teenagehood never stole this particular aspect away from them— and braces one hand on Buck’s shoulder as he kisses the top of his head. He gets that from Eddie, and the mwah against his crown sends a rush of undeniable, pure warmth over Buck’s whole body.
It’s love— the deepest kind, the kind that makes him so grateful Lucas is his kid even if he’s barely a kid anymore.
“See you tonight,” Lucas says. “Love you.”
“Love you,” Buck echoes as he moves away with his smoothie in his hand and a gym bag over his shoulder. “Be safe.”
“Yeah,” Lucas calls back, and then the door shuts behind him and Buck is left alone in the otherwise empty house.
The thing is— Buck doesn’t spiral like he used to.
At least, not usually.
On June first, when Eddie finds him scrubbing the grout between the tiles of the backsplash in the kitchen with an old toothbrush and some bleach, he guesses he can admit that he might be spiraling a little.
“Jesus,” Eddie says, mildly alarmed. “What did that backsplash ever do to you?”
Buck glances at him over his shoulder— standing casually in the doorway with his arms crossed loosely over his chest; posture familiar and relaxed; looking every bit as dreamy as he always did with a little more silver threaded through his hair and his mustache and a few more lines around his eyes. Buck likes those the most.
“Last longer than our kid’s childhood?” Buck says, bitter.
Eddie nods. “Sure. I can see how that’s a punishable offense,” he says agreeably.
Buck sighs. Unfortunately, he likes Eddie so much and finds it really difficult to feel bitter or angry in his presence. With an air of resignation, he straightens up and holds the toothbrush out to Eddie, a surrender.
Dutifully, Eddie steps forward and takes it away from him; then drops it in the sink and puts both hands on Buck’s shoulders, pressing him gently into a kitchen chair.
“Okay,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Spill.”
Buck frowns. “I don’t think that’s as cool of a word anymore as you think it is.”
He doesn’t have to turn and look to know that Eddie is rolling his eyes, but the certainty of it does offer a little comfort, if he’s honest. Eddie always does: his presence, his closeness, the way they know each other.
But at the moment, even that doesn’t reach down into Buck’s chest the way it usually would. There’s too much else taking up space in there right now, spreading him too thin.
Eddie shrugs, taking the seat diagonal to him like always. It’s a strategic move, Buck knows— visible to each other, but close enough to touch. Which Eddie does, immediately pressing his own ankle against Buck’s beneath the table with an insistent tilt of his foot that says, talk to me, without a word.
Buck sighs, and Eddie tilts his head.
“This is about Lucas’ birthday, isn’t it?” he asks.
It would be annoying how well Eddie knows him, if Buck didn’t love it so much.
“Yeah,” he admits. It was bad enough a few days ago when Buck was just dwelling on it in his own mind. But last night— after dinner, Lucas leaning on the kitchen counter while Buck washed the dishes— it got worse. “I think he doesn’t want to do it with us this year.”
Eddie hesitates. “Did he tell you that?”
“Well,” Buck hedges. “He’s seventeen, Eds. I know he’s, like, the most mature kid in the world but he’s still seventeen at the end of the day.”
“For a few days,” Eddie interjects, and Buck casts him a dark look. “Sorry,” he adds. “Not the time.”
“No,” Buck agrees. He shakes his head. “What he said,” he continues, recalling it in his mind, “was that he didn’t know what he was going to do for his birthday.”
It’s easy to recall, really— because the words had felt a bit knifelike when they sliced through the leftover scent of garlic and tomatoes in the kitchen between them and carved out something in Buck’s admittedly already vulnerable heart. And Buck had thought it significant— because they always do pretty much the same thing, and he’d just been expecting Lucas to tell him what he was going to do in the morning— before their usual celebration, the one that they always have for him, the one with the homemade cake and dinner outside on the renovated patio they’d added on to the house when Lucas was eight.
“Are you sure that’s what he meant?” Eddie asks tentatively.
And Buck would like to believe that there’s a chance he’s wrong, but he— well. He just doesn’t. I don’t know had sounded pretty meaningful to him.
“I’m pretty sure, Eddie.”
“Hm,” Eddie hums, pretty unhelpfully. And then he softens, that way he has of gentling his features, and Buck knows what’s coming well before it ever does.
“Don’t,” he groans, and Eddie’s face twists sympathetically as he reaches out, pressing his thumb into the side of Buck’s wrist and flipping his hand with a long-practiced movement that still sends a little shiver of pleasure up Buck’s arm as his husband tangles their fingers.
“Baby,” he says gently. “You know Chris was about that age when he started wanting to spend his birthday with his friends.”
Buck does know that, and he hated that just as much.
“Yeah,” he says. It’s supposed to come out biting, but it doesn’t. It’s soft, softer than he means to be. Eddie’s soft in return, too, scooching his chair a little closer to Buck’s and picking up their joined hands to kiss his knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie offers. “I know it sucks being the cool parents.”
Buck huffs out a laugh, half-hearted at best. He tilts his head, studies the way Eddie’s hand wraps around his. It’s long-since familiar, and still sometimes manages to be a marvel, how their fingers slot together and Eddie’s sixth sense for rubbing his thumb into Buck’s knuckle just the right way. It’s a gift, doing this with Eddie, even when it’s hard. Even when he looks at their kid’s birthday on the calendar and feels like he’s losing his grip on his life.
Even then, he looks over and there’s Eddie.
“It’s not like you’re losing him, Buck,” Eddie says. There was a time when Buck might have bristled at being known, seen, like that. This tendency is one he has, thankfully, fully overcome. He melts beneath Eddie’s gaze now.
“I know,” Buck murmurs, looking up at him earnestly. “But sometimes—”
Eddie nods. “Sometimes it feels like we are. I know.”
And he does— that’s the beautiful part of this whole thing, always has been. That partnership, the bone deep bruiseviolet knowledge that Eddie feels this just the same way he does, that they’re in it together for all of its heartwrenching and joyful moments.
They’ve been in parenthood together for a long time— longer than they had even admitted to themselves, since Buck was pulling Chris out of tsunami waters and Eddie was handing his heart to him over and over again.
Buck lets out a breath, looks up at his husband, and focuses on the way Eddie’s dark eyes find his like a habit he hasn’t broken in decades now.
“But we’re not,” he says, repeats it again to himself in the back of his mind. We’re not losing him. “Right?”
Eddie squeezes his hand tight. “We’re not,” he repeats.
And— it’s a pattern— because Eddie says it, Buck is more sure that it’s true.
Buck tries to get it together after that.
And it’s easier, once he’s talked to Eddie about it. He resolves not to press Lucas— to give him the space and independence that he needs. Eddie is right— it doesn’t mean that they’re losing anything, just because Lucas is getting older and graduating. Christopher is a fully fledged adult, and when he’d gone away to college not even in the same state the world had not come to a stop. Buck had thought it might, for a while there, but it hadn’t. Chris always came home. And Lucas would, too.
Or so he’s been telling himself for several days when, on the day before Lucas’ birthday he realizes that he has really, really messed up.
He was overdue for it, maybe— no amount of personal growth could prevent the occasional misunderstanding on Buck’s part. The real growth is that he’s learned to accept and even kind of embrace this about himself. It’s just that this time— he realizes much too late— he might have hurt more than just himself.
Lucas is frowning at the inside of the refrigerator, while Eddie stands at the sink with a dishtowel in one hand and a damp, cowboy boot-shaped coffee mug in the other, meticulously wiping drops of water from the crevices of the ceramic as the sun sinks below the horizon.
“Dad?” he says.
Eddie and Buck, who’s leaning back in a kitchen chair far enough to put him in Eddie’s eyeline, both look up.
“Yeah, bud?” Eddie answers as Lucas half-turns, cast in shadow from the cool light of the refrigerator. There’s a look on his face, Buck notices, that crease between his eyebrows that has always been the first sign when he’s upset about something.
“Uh,” Lucas says slowly. “Are you guys— like, are you doing anything tonight?”
Buck and Eddie look at one another cautiously.
“Not— not in particular,” Eddie ventures. Buck catches him doing that dad thing he does— a full body sweep of their kid with his eyes, like he’s looking for signs of something, cataloguing potential injury or body language or both. Buck looks too, then, sweeping his own eyes over their son. He comes back with tension, the kind that’s settled into Lucas’ shoulders, which had only gotten so broad sometime in the last year or so. So— Lucas is upset. He just doesn’t know what he’s upset about.
“Okay,” Lucas says slowly. He’s talking like he’s trying to piece something together, but Buck— really, for the life of him— doesn’t know what it is.
“You okay?” he asks, maybe a little direct. Lucas glances in his direction uncertainly.
“Uh,” he says. “I guess.”
It’s quiet for a moment, and then Buck looks at Eddie, who’s already watching Lucas. And on his husband’s face— there’s something focused, that look Eddie gets when he’s right on the verge of getting something. Buck, on the other hand, still feels lost. He drifts through the late evening sun in between them, and searches his own mind for something that could make this make sense.
He comes up, of course, with Lucas’ looming birthday. He’s been tucking it safely behind his sternum and trying not to dwell on it for nearly a week now— but he brings it back into focus now, turns it over in his head and tries to remember if he’s misstepped about it.
“What about— um. What about tomorrow?” Lucas asks, drawing both of their gazes to him where he stands, the fridge now closed.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, clearing his throat. “Your dad told me you said you didn’t know what you wanted to do, but we were thinking breakfast together if you’re up for it. French toast and—”
Buck has his eyes on Lucas when it happens. He knows this kid like the back of his hand, like the face in the mirror that’s half him, like the shadow that chases him beneath the shade of a lemon tree they planted eighteen years ago next month, which showers them all in blossoms every summer now. There are three people in the world that Buck knows and loves like this— two of them are in this room, and one of them stands before his parents as his face falls like the walls of blanket forts and the crumb coating of—
Oh, Buck thinks, just a fraction of a second too late. Oh, no.
And then Lucas says—
“You’re not making my birthday cake?”
Buck knows what it feels like to break bones; for his heart to stop in his chest beneath the crack of his ribcage; for muscles to rebuild themselves around metal rods; for electricity to run through every nerve of his body and hand him gently over to death.
This feeling— the feeling he gets when the room goes quiet beneath Lucas’ splintering, soft disappointment— is, in some ways, worse than any of those things. To look at his child— who looks suddenly so, so young— and know that the hurt on his face is his fault. It’s not the first time he’s done it, but it’s been a while, and it feels a lot like being ripped in half down the center of his chest— heart on one side, bleeding out on the other. He’s dramatic, sometimes, but this isn’t one of them.
Eddie looks over at him— immediately understanding what has happened, like he always does, but Buck feels like he can’t even breathe right, let alone figure out what to say as Lucas looks between them.
“Lucas,” Eddie starts, and Lucas looks over at him with a vulnerable flicker of uncertainty on his face.
“I don’t—” he starts, then clears his throat, shaking his head a little. “You always make my birthday cake.”
Buck wants to die. There’s a version of him, a younger one, that’s kicking to the surface in this moment and he wants to inflict this hurt on him, a little. Because he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore, this— this whole accidentally making everything about himself thing.
Eddie sets the cowboy boot mug down on the counter and walks around the table, closer to Lucas, putting his hand on their son’s shoulder and ducking his head to look Lucas in the eyes. It’s a movement so familiar to Buck that it puts his heart right in his throat, pulsing at the back of his mouth, an ugly bright thing.
Lucas is beautiful and open and sweet, so he doesn’t resist. He opens up to Eddie like it’s nothing, like the blossoms on the lemon tree when he tilts his head back and looks at his dad through pale lashes over blue eyes that have held Buck in their trap since this day, tomorrow, eighteen years ago. For seventeen years and three-hundred-sixty-four days.
“Honey,” Eddie says, all soothing soft. He’s so good at this. Buck wants to cry. “Of course we will if you still want us to.”
Lucas starts looking a little wild, then. His eyes search Eddie’s face as he stammers, and then he finds Buck over Eddie’s shoulder, hurt flickering on and off and on his face.
“I don’t understand,” he says, too quiet. “Why— why would you think I didn’t want you to?”
Eddie already has his mouth open— he’s gonna take the fall for it, Buck knows he is down to his bones, because that’s who Eddie is. He’ll be three steps ahead, ready to throw himself out like the net and let Buck land softer on top of him.
Buck gets up without thinking. He’s— better than that, now. He’s better. He can take the fall for his own mistakes, and let Eddie patch him up later.
He moves until Lucas is right there, until he can reach out and put his hand on his baby’s cheek, until he can see those blue eyes up close— all seventeen almost eighteen years of looking into them, enchanted, coming to right now when Lucas looks softly back, equally soft and wounded.
“I’m sorry,” Buck murmurs. “That’s on me. I’m sorry, Lucas, really.”
Lucas looks at him, baleful and young, suddenly. It takes Buck’s breath away and brings him to life all at once, every time.
God, he thinks. Parenthood is like getting your chest cracked and stitched back together over and over every day of your life. He wants to do it all again tomorrow, even right now when his lungs close up inside his ribcage.
“I don’t understand,” Lucas says, still hesitant as he glances at Eddie again, then back to Buck. “Did I—”
“No,” Buck says, echoed by Eddie in the same breath, each of them fierce. Buck swallows hard, and then repeats: “No. You didn’t do anything at all.”
Lucas doesn’t pull away, exactly, but he sort of sinks, and in the same motion he kicks out the chair closest to him and sits down in it. He’s always been like that, a little— the kind of confidence that radiates off of him the kind that stays gentle while it fills up a room. Just like sunlight, permeating. Everyone who follows his lead does so because they want to: Buck and Eddie very much included.
Eddie sits down, leans in in that earnest way that he has. He’s always been like that, but Buck would swear it’s even more so as he gets older. He has a way of drawing someone’s attention to him that Buck might have envied once, if Eddie were not so kind and gentle alongside it. He soaks in the light and glows with it, reflecting it so delicately back on anyone in his path that it manages to never be blinding but always soft and golden. It’s how he looks at Lucas now, all warm sweet brown eyes and softened open features.
“I think maybe there was just a misunderstanding,” he says, so easy.
Lucas looks at Buck. “I don’t even— why would you ask me what I want to do for my birthday?” he asks. He’s genuinely confused, it’s written all over his face. “We always do the same thing.”
Buck’s breath catches in his chest as Eddie looks over at him.
“We thought,” he starts, looping himself into the misunderstanding like he’s starkly underlining the we’re a team of it all, “that maybe you would want to do something else. Since you’re getting older and you’re becoming an adult. That you might not want to do your birthday with your parents.”
Lucas looks at the two of them as if they might have grown new heads. At least, Buck thinks, it’s both of them now.
“What?” Lucas says eventually. “Am I— like, do you guys think I’m Chris all of a sudden? Not that— Chris’ choices are fine for him,” he rushes to add. They’re close— the defense of his brother against no true threat makes Buck feel warm for a second— but Lucas has a point.
“But,” he finishes, looking between them. “I’m not— I don’t want things to change.”
Over the course of Lucas’ eighteen years of life, Buck has seen a lot of himself in their younger son. Everything from his blonde curls to his ADHD diagnosis to a fierce desire to do anything and everything for the people he loves. The breath leaves his lungs now, looking across the table at his baby and seeing a peeled back, open-hearted reflection of his own darkest and deepest shining back at him.
Except that Lucas is—
Beautifully, Lucas is not Buck.
Buck had never wanted things to change, either. But they’d needed to, and he’d learned that the hard and brutal way, when he was a lot younger than he wants his son to be when that life lesson finds him. Buck had been afraid of change, but Lucas wants his life to stay the same because he loves it.
Because they’ve given him a life that he loves so much he wants to keep it just as it is, even if it’s for a little longer.
Buck blinks back tears and surges forward, unable to hold all of this love inside his body any longer. He wraps his arms around Lucas from behind his chair and presses a series of kisses to the top of his head as Eddie magnetizes to his side and puts his hand on his back.
“Sunshine,” Buck mumbles into the curls on Lucas’ head. “We’ll make you birthday cakes until we die if that’s what you want.”
“Buck,” Eddie says, but Lucas laughs and it takes Buck back to the night before Lucas’ third birthday when Eddie dropped an open bag of powdered sugar on the floor and it exploded in a soft cloud that had drifted and settled over the whole room. It had sparkled in late evening sun much like this, and even the air had turned sweet.
That’s how this feels, he thinks, the sound of Lucas laughing as tension drains off of all of them. Buck had been wrong; he’d misstepped, failed, come up short. Like a million other instances before this one, a universal truth of parenthood. But now— Lucas laughs, and it puts Eddie’s warmest smile on his face as he leans in and kisses the top of Lucas’ head also— and Buck thinks, there’s still time.
“Hey,” he says, soft, tapping Lucas’ cheek to get his attention and waiting for him to tilt his head back and look up. He does, willing and trusting, and Buck swallows hard again, meeting his gaze. “I’m sorry if I made you feel like I would ever want you to be anywhere but here, if that’s what you want.”
Lucas manages— miraculously, as his features go soft— to look like Eddie, a feat that Buck never tires of.
“I know,” he says, and Buck smiles and Lucas smiles back, identical.
“Alright,” Buck says then, clapping his hands together. “Get out of here, we have a cake to make.”
It is virtually a routine after eighteen years, only mildly disrupted by the last week’s detour.
Eddie stands, attentive and willing to take instruction. Buck decides on lemon cake and cream cheese frosting; they make the grocery run together in lilac summer twilight that turns ever so slowly to blue, and then Buck stands on the porch while Eddie plucks three lemons from the tree in their backyard. Inside, the kitchen glows with the redolence of citrus and Buck takes in a deep breath.
“You okay?” Eddie asks him, over the zesting of the lemons as Buck assembles eggs and flour and vanilla on the countertop.
He looks over: Eddie is poised over a bowl with a lemon in his hand and he looks so warm that Buck thinks nothing could ever be really wrong, not in the way it once was before they were a family. He smiles, knows without seeing it that it reaches his own eyes by the way it feels on his face.
“Yeah,” he answers, shrugging one shoulder. “It’s not as hard to mess up as it used to be.”
Eddie sort of beams at that, and isn’t that a beautiful thing that only gets prettier when he steps sideways to turn his head and kiss Buck’s shoulder through his shirt.
The cake comes together, and they fold themselves into bed side by side like always. It’s not until they’re lying in the dark, tangled, that Eddie says—
“He’s a good kid.”
His voice is so tender and rich that Buck could swipe his tongue through it, almost, like the creamed frosting in their refrigerator waiting for the next morning. He settles for brushing his fingers over the strip of bare skin at his husband’s hip like a comfort to them both as he says, quietly:
“He’s not a kid.”
Eddie laughs, turning in Buck’s grip to look at him in the dark.
“You feel that way about Chris?” he asks.
Admittedly, Buck still kind of thinks Christopher should be seven years old in glasses that are too big for him.
“No,” he offers. “You’re right.”
“Always am,” Eddie says smugly, and Buck shoves him a little and then velvet darkness settles over them both with comfortable quiet— and Buck thinks, for what must be the millionth time, this is it. The life he’d earned by withstanding change after change.
“I love you,” he says.
Eddie shifts closer. “I love you too, Buck.” And then, impossibly low and warm and soothing— “Go to sleep. We have a birthday cake to frost in the morning.”
And isn’t it something, that June fifth comes bright and shining, and they stand shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen while Buck spreads cream cheese over chilled lemon cake and then steps back to let Eddie carefully pipe little suns all over the outside?
Isn’t it something, the way that Buck looks back on Lucas’ first birthday seventeen years ago and the plain vanilla cake they’d made together that was all crooked and had one single wonky sun on the top, which Lucas had smashed his little hands into at the first opportunity?
And isn’t it something— that he’s there with them in the evening?
Buck beams over the glow of the lit candles on the cake as their rapidly assembled family laughs through a chorus of happy birthday, and Lucas beams back. Everyone they hold closest is there, singing to their baby as he blows out eighteen firebright birthday candles.
And then Eddie is shoving cake into his mouth, all lemon and cream that he tastes double by leaning in to kiss Eddie; and Eddie beams and Christopher rolls his eyes happily from his place next to him; and Lucas laughs loud and bright at something Jee is telling him in the corner of their dreamlike, twilit patio, and Buck—
Buck thinks maybe the things that matter the most are the things that stay.