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Buck can handle some amount of hovering. That’s what they do now, the 118, when one of them is hurt. They hover. Maybe that’s his fault, a little, how he handled Hen’s illness after Bobby’s death. Maybe it’s Maddie’s, how she handled his death. He likes doing it for other people more than having it done to him, but he gets it. Gets that even though Eddie was in that car crash too, even though Eddie was missing and maybe dead for Buck as much as Buck was missing and maybe dead for Eddie, Eddie was talking to the others, so they’re not as scared for him.
If that’s not the only reason, he’s not ready to tackle that head-on yet.
But he’s grateful, so grateful, that he’s alone for the first time since getting back to LA when the call comes through from the county sheriff’s department in New Mexico—not from the sheriff in Los Nietos himself, but some local administrator, a desk cop awkwardly doing his duty. Didn’t want you to hear this on the news, he says, and three bodies, he says, and might not even have to fly down here to testify like we thought, Mr. Buckley, he says.
And Buck says “Yeah, uh-huh, thank you, sir,” and he hangs up the phone and throws up in his kitchen sink and then scrubs it for twenty minutes.
His feelings are hurt, is the stupidest thing. Of course he figured he might not be the only one. You don’t put bars on windows, bars on doors, when you’re having a mental break because of one random resemblance. You don’t buy a cattle prod when you don’t have cattle. You don’t buy cowboy pajamas in a grown man’s size.
But Buck was only the last in a line of replacement Dereks. How long did they live, out there? Did they die from whatever Bonnie did to catch them, or die when they failed to be enough like Derek? Was Buck better or worse at it than the rest of them?
He makes it to the toilet this time.
“Got a call from Los Nietos today,” says Eddie when he barges in late that afternoon, claiming Chris is hanging out with a friend just down the street.
Maybe it’s true. Buck doesn’t really know where Chris’s high school friends live like he knew his middle school ones, his elementary school ones. He tries not to think about that much. He’s not going to call Eddie on it, though, because of that itch in his palms when he goes more than twenty-four hours without seeing Eddie’s face. It’s not as new an itch as he likes to pretend it is, but now that he has the excuse to indulge it, he was thinking of his own excuses to go to Bedford Street. Eddie just got there first. One of these days they’ll cross each other in transit.
“Oh?” Buck says. He figured that. And Eddie didn’t get kidnapped, but the accident happened to him too. He’s still banged up, squinting against headaches he denies while Hen teases him that if he’s sure his concussion is totally gone maybe he needs glasses.
“They said they’d called you first.”
“I guess. I’m alphabetically first.”
“You got anything to say about that?”
“Not really.”
“You got kidnapped by serial killers, Buck! I’d sure as hell have some things to say.”
“Sounds like you already have an idea what you think I should be saying, Eddie, maybe you should have this conversation with yourself.”
Eddie rolls his eyes so hard it looks like it hurts. “Should I be hiding the forks? I don’t want to fight with you right now, I want to—I don’t know, remind you that it’s not your fault they did this to you. You didn’t make some totally normal woman go crazy. You were just another target.”
Buck is fully aware that he’s going to sound insane if he says that’s part of the problem. The one time someone wants him to actually play the role he’s pretty sure he was born for, and he was the fourth choice for the casting. “I know I was,” he says. “I know it’s not on me.” He can’t tell the truth, not when Eddie already thinks he’s a selfish dick more often than not. He tells a different awful truth instead, the kind that’s going to deflect Eddie from the heart of it. “I feel kind of bad for them. For her. If I got a choice about it, and there weren’t, you know, bodies, I don’t know if I would have pressed charges.”
Eddie makes one of his legion of expressive unhappy faces, the kind that’s pitying and annoyed and also maybe a little impressed if Buck is willing to delude himself a little, and herds Buck to the couch. “Respectfully, you know that’s insane, right? She—that’s insane.”
Normally Eddie names things, pushes on them hard. She hit you with a cattle prod. She locked you in a room. She rammed into your car and would rather have had you die in the accident than get away from her. He’s been skirting around this, though, since they got home. Buck has no idea which one of them he’s trying to be kind to. Probably Buck. “I know it’s insane. But you wanted me to say how I’m feeling. That’s how I’m feeling.”
Eddie leans back against the couch at his side. His hand drifts, like it’s an accident, to Buck’s forearm. His fingers drift, like it’s an accident, to Buck’s pulse. “What’s the over-under,” he finally says, “on how many therapy sessions Chim makes us go to before we come back to work?”
It’s the easy way out. Buck has been taking those for months, with Eddie. What’s one more?
The heart of it is this: there’s always some dead boy Buck should be living up to, and he never even knows until it’s too late to succeed.
When he found out about Daniel, it didn’t make sense. Not that his parents were lying to him, not even that Maddie was lying to him, except in the ways where he kind of thought his parents didn’t care enough about him to lie. It was more that his parents never even tried to make Buck like him. Buck wasn’t born as a replacement, he was born to save him, but after he failed, didn’t they want to try? Buck knows how he was as a kid. If they told him who they wanted him to be, and told him they loved him when he succeeded, he would have been Daniel all over again. Maybe a knockoff version, a shitty version, but maybe if he’d tried, they would have loved him more. He’s ashamed of how much he wants to have tried, even if he got a glimpse of what that could have looked like during his coma and things weren’t that great there either. And that was with Daniel alive.
It’s probably good that he was always Evan with them. They never called him by the wrong name or stopped short like they might have. Maddie never treated him like that either, maybe because Daniel was too close to her in age for her to have taken care of him like she did Buck. He wouldn’t have wanted Maddie treating him like Daniel, but sometimes, for his parents, he wishes he could have been more like Daniel, because then maybe they would have loved him more.
Then there’s Bobby, or more to the point there’s Bobby Jr., who Buck doesn’t like to think about when he can help it. It’s selfish to wish Bobby saw him as a son, even if Buck treated him like a father more than a captain. Back in his probie year, lonely and desperate for someone to pay attention to him, if Bobby had talked about his son early on, Buck might have tried to be him. Instead, he piled fuckup on fuckup, and ruined any chances of Bobby drawing that line between them. If there’s one thing he knows is true, it’s that dead sons are never fuckups.
And now Bobby is dead and Harry is carrying on his legacy, and that’s good, that’s the right thing, but Buck saw the picture of Bobby’s headstone that Athena sent to all of them with no commentary, saw him right next to Marcy, next to his first kids, and it was a kick in his stomach.
People think Buck isn’t self-aware, when he says stupid things or sad things or things that are too much. None of them seem to get that he keeps the most fucked-up things inside. Like how he’d happily pretend to be somebody else, if it meant someone he loves would love him the way he needs them to. It’s manipulative, and selfish, and maybe monstrous, capitalizing on people who have lost things he couldn’t imagine, but he’d do it.
The problem with being Derek wasn’t the pretending, not really, not in the end. The problem was that he didn’t have any reason to want Bonnie’s love.
And still, somehow, he’s hurt that he wasn’t the first.
“You had quite an ordeal,” Athena tells him when she stops by the next day. She didn’t ask to come in, just barged by him and started unpacking grocery bags. Buck is hovering awkwardly in his own kitchen. He doesn’t have a rhythm with her, not like he did with—he doesn’t have a rhythm with her.
“I guess. Thanks. For helping Eddie.”
“Funny, he thanked me for helping you. How are your ribs?”
“Hairline. I’ll be fine in a few weeks. Can I help you?”
Athena opens her mouth to say no and then sighs at him. “Sit there. Start grating this cheese.”
Buck does. That was never his job with Bobby, but maybe it’s better that way. He and Athena don’t know how to be around each other these days. Maybe they never did. His ambiguous place in Bobby’s life meant she never knew what he was to her, and it’s worse now. It’s like a really shitty joke with a punchline he hasn’t figured out yet. What do you call the man who saw your dead husband as a father but couldn’t ever replace any of his real children? “If you’re here about the serial killer thing,” he blurts, “I already know.”
“I’m here because we both need to eat. But while you mention it, I can’t say I think much of that local police force! Three missing young men in fifteen years who disappeared within fifty miles of Los Nietos? I would have been looking close, if I were them.”
“Could be a fun retirement career for you.”
“Could be, but I think I’ll leave it for others. I’ll have plenty to do keeping an eye on my babies and my friends.”
He isn’t either of those things. He wishes he were both. “Did Eddie tell you I was sympathizing with them too much? Is that why you’re here?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. You’ve got a big heart, these days. I can wish they spend the rest of their lives in jail enough for both of us.” They work in silence for a few minutes. Her mac ‘n’ cheese recipe is different from Bobby’s. Bobby said one night while Buck was cooking with him that it was one of the few small fights they couldn’t stop having consistently, which one of them should get to make their mac ‘n’ cheese whenever they had a cookout.
Athena’s is better. Buck never told Bobby that, and now he never will, and that’s so much worse than biting his tongue through a lifetime of cookouts.
“I just wanted to check on you. You’ve been through a lot, over the years, but none of that has been my area of expertise. Natural disasters, medical events, freak accidents, a cop doesn’t know much about those. Serial killers? Now you’re speaking my language. And I understand that it hurts a different way, knowing someone did it to you on purpose.”
“How long do people usually take to give in?” Buck blurts, and hates himself for it. Athena’s trying to be kind. She doesn’t need a peek at his worst impulses.
“You’re going to have to explain. Physically, emotionally?”
“She hit me with a cattle prod once and I said I was him. I was lying, obviously, and I tried to play along so I could get out, but she—when Eddie came. She was going to shoot him, and I just said I’d do it. Be Derek. Do people normally give in that fast? I feel like I’d have just believed it in a week.”
“You wouldn’t have. You would have done a good job of pretending, because you’re very good at doing what you have to do to survive, but you would have known that even if Eddie left, even if she put him on the wrong track, we would still be looking for you. Maddie was about to get in a car.”
Maddie has been around too many killers. “I kind of wanted to be him,” he admits, which is the worst of it. “It would have been easier.”
“Maybe. But that’s just another kind of surviving. And I’m not about to pretend that being Evan Buckley has been easy. But we’ve got you back now. Nobody is going to let you slip away.”
Derek could have made Bonnie happy. Maybe not Earl, not when he didn’t buy into it, but Bonnie. Buck can make Maddie and everybody else happy, but not as much, not in the same way. He doesn’t really know what he is to them these days. It would have been so easy, being hers. He feels like he hasn’t known who he is in more than a year now, and it just keeps getting worse. “I know,” he says, and Athena’s smart. She knows he’s not really talking like that’s a good thing.
She makes the mac ‘n’ cheese anyway, and does his dishes while it’s baking.
Taylor calls him, when the news out of Los Nietos starts getting national play. She called him the day after the lab too, and left him an awkward condolence voicemail with an offer to talk that switched into her professional tone. She doesn’t leave a voicemail this time.
It would be easy to call her back. He thinks she’d get this one in a way everyone else who cares about him doesn’t, or at least she’d call him stupid in a tone he could listen to.
Buck is the one who follows the tether back to Eddie this time. It’s been a little more than a day, stretching the limits. He parks in the driveway behind the shitty junker Eddie for some reason hasn’t sold for parts yet and goes in with a box of ice cream and a transparent excuse.
If seeing Eddie is a relief every time, banishing the afterimage of Eddie dead in a car wreck, Eddie shot in Bonnie’s yard, all the things that could have gone wrong, seeing Eddie with Chris is better. If Eddie and Chris are together, nothing can be that bad. They’re both in the kitchen when he comes in, and Eddie’s shoulders drop when he sees Buck, like he was getting wound up too or like the keys in the door scared him the way Maddie’s keys in Buck’s door scared him a few days ago.
“Heard from the Nashville boys,” Eddie says when the greetings are over and Buck is serving up the ice cream. It’s before dinner, but he got kidnapped a week and a half ago, Buck is happy to break Eddie’s draconian dessert rules to make Chris smile. “They saw the article about Los Nietos.”
“May says we should work out appearance fees for true crime podcasts.”
Eddie wrinkles his nose. “I don’t want to be on a podcast. Especially not for ambulance chasers.”
“I looked it up after she said it anyway, mostly podcast guests don’t get paid. Too bad. We could use some vacation money.”
“The last vacation went great,” says Christopher, which is a good point, actually. “I didn’t even get to go.”
Buck’s windpipe locks up, and so does his brain, while Eddie patiently points out with his hands clasped tight under the table that it’s probably for the best that Christopher wasn’t run off the road. Christopher says that they would have just waited at the airport or driven to the nearest airport if he were there, and Eddie cedes the point, and Buck sits there frozen and feeling like he’s been hit by the cattle prod or maybe struck by lightning again.
“Buck,” says Chris eventually, brows knit, looking so much like his dad. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, buddy, just a headache,” Buck says, which is a mistake, because it gets him fussed onto the couch with a soothing documentary playing instead of an action movie with lots of explosions, which he was hoping for, because the documentary makes him fall asleep, and falling asleep makes him wake up gasping, which hurts his ribs and alarms Eddie, sitting in the half-dark of the living room with the TV playing one of the fighting video games that Buck always teases him for, always says it’s the fight club instincts coming out.
Eddie almost killed her.
“Buck, you good?” Eddie says, maybe for the second time, because he’s already out of his chair and coming Buck’s way.
Buck braces his hand on his ribs and sits up. He needs to be upright for this. “Just a nightmare. Nothing new or exciting.”
“I’d say a week is still pretty new. Unless it was one of the old ones?”
It was about being in his old room in Hershey with bars on the door, his mother sweetly calling for Daniel, bringing him ice chips and jello to soothe the sore throat he didn’t have, after not throwing up from the chemo he wasn’t getting. “New,” he decides, even if that nightmare is split evenly down the middle. “You been getting them too?”
“Most nights. Last night Pepa made me take melatonin. Shit actually works, I hate that. You want some?”
No, Buck definitely doesn’t want to stay asleep. He likes that his nightmares wake him up. Eddie’s never been in a coma. Buck would take insomnia any day. “What part is getting to you?”
“Too new to see the patterns. Usually I find you dead. Sometimes it’s not her, it’s the people I thought had you.”
They’ve been avoiding that, the assumptions in Los Nietos, the way it almost got Eddie arrested for his murder. People assume it in LA too, but that’s because it’s a liberal city and they’re walking around together a lot, often with a kid. It would be weirder if they didn’t assume it. If they assumed it where it’s not the default assumption, that might say something, and Buck doesn’t want to be the one to say it. He doesn’t want to add the first time people were homophobic to him since he figured out he’s bi to the lists of traumas New Mexico gave him. “Sometimes mine are about you, too.”
“But not tonight?”
“No. Getting locked in a room, being someone’s son.”
“Someone’s.”
Buck scrubs a hand across his face. “If I promise to call the department therapist in the morning, can we not talk about it?”
“I know you don’t trust me anymore, man, but how am I supposed to fix that if you won’t even try?”
That startles Buck into looking at him. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I left for Texas, and you stopped telling me anything real. I can connect the damn dots, Buck, and I’ve been trying, but I can’t be the only one.”
He wants to fight, wants to shout. If he does, it’s only going to hurt his ribs, and he’s going to have to storm out, and he doesn’t want to drive across the city tonight. He wants to say Obviously I trust you, I always trusted you, but that’s half a lie. He wants to say Of course I trust you less, didn’t you trust me less after I left you with the stupid lawsuit that took weeks and weeks with Bobby away from me? but that’s only half true. You left, and I was so upset, and then you weren’t here to almost die too and I was so relieved is maybe the biggest truth he can imagine, but he can’t force that out of his mouth. “It’s not just you,” he says, which is feeble in comparison but definitely true.
“Trying? Sure as hell feels like it.”
“That I can’t talk to anymore. I don’t know how to talk to anyone. You can’t take it personally.”
“Like hell I can’t. I’m your best friend. You’re supposed to be able to come to me when you can’t talk to anybody else. Just start with something. Before shit went wrong, that road trip is the best I’ve felt since—in a long time. I miss my partner. Even if we’re not work partners anymore, we’re still something.”
There’s one more person Buck would act like a replacement for, if it were something two people wanted. Not a dead boy, but a dead wife, a dead mother. Sometimes it feels like Eddie does want him to. It’s the most intoxicating feeling, and the scariest. “I’m really fucked up right now,” he says. “My parents didn’t even try to let me live up to Daniel, I was fourth in a list of Derek failures, fifth if you count him, and Bobby—”
His voice breaks, which is probably good. Eddie comes all the way over, sits down next to him. Hand on his arm, fingers on his wrist. Buck can barely remember being on the ground with Eddie’s fingers on a different pulse point, head cradled and safe in Eddie’s palm. “Bobby never wanted you to be anybody else.” Buck snorts, wet and awful and hurting his still-healing face. “He didn’t. You weren’t a replacement for his son, but he didn’t treat you like the rest of us. He loved you.”
I love you, kid. “I’m so fucking selfish. I just want them to love me like they love the kids they lost.”
“Okay.” Eddie takes a few breaths, squeezes his own thigh with his free hand, grounds himself. Buck knows what it looks like when Eddie is putting calm on for someone else. “Selfish isn’t the word I’d use.”
“Making it about me, right? That’s what I do?”
“Okay, maybe I get grumpy when I’m hungry. This is about you, Buck. Your parents hiding a brother from you and treating you worse because you weren’t some magic cure is about you. You getting kidnapped is about you.”
“And you.”
“And me, but I was okay.” Concussed and investigating for the police because they didn’t care about gay strangers isn’t exactly Buck’s definition of okay, but he doesn’t interrupt Eddie’s flow. “Bobby … that’s about all of us, but all of us includes you. If you miss him, or you’re mad at him because he never said outright who you are to him, you miss him, or you be mad. But Buck, I don’t give a shit about Bonnie, and I don’t give a shit about your parents, but I give a shit about Bobby. He didn’t want you to be some dead kid who never got to grow up and make mistakes. He wanted you to make your own.”
“I make a lot.”
“Yeah, clearly I have no idea what that’s like.” He shakes Buck’s arm a little, chases eye contact. “Nobody who loves you wants you to be anyone but you. Bobby, Maddie, Hen and Chim. Me and Christopher. No matter who all of us are missing, we’d miss you if you stopped being you to be them. If Bonnie had kidnapped you because you’re Buck, that would make a lot more sense. She was short-sighted, wanting you to be someone else.”
“She was grieving,” says Buck, the only thing he can get out past the lump in his throat. He doesn’t know if it’s true. It’s a lot easier to believe in Eddie’s voice, though.
“Yeah,” says Eddie. “Aren’t we all?”
Buck sleeps (in Eddie’s bed, wall of pillows between them, because they can’t be too far but God knows they can’t be too close), and dreams he’s barred into the same room. Eddie’s on the other side of the bars, calls him baby, calls him Shannon, and smiles so sweet with one hand cupped around Buck’s face and the other one holding the cattle prod, and Buck is so, so happy.
“Hey, Buck, it’s okay,” Eddie is saying when he wakes up crying. “You’re safe, okay? You’re free. Nobody’s keeping you anywhere.”
“I wish someone were,” he says into the pillow, face hot with tears and embarrassment and pain.
There’s a long silence from the other side of the bed, and then Eddie’s hand, and Eddie’s fingers. Always searching for his pulse. “Okay, Buck. I’ve got you. I’m not going to lock you in a room, but you want to be kept for a while, that’s fine. I don’t want you going anywhere anyway. Or, you can go anywhere, but you have to take me with you. Understand? Next time you take me with you.”
Buck turns until he can see Eddie over the hump of pillows, his wide bright worried eyes. It’s not quite what he wants, maybe, but it’s as close to it as is good for him. He can work with that. “Okay, Eddie. Promise,” he says, voice rasping as sleep pulls him down again.
Eddie’s hand around his wrist feels like a handcuff, and Buck sleeps without dreaming.