Chapter Text
The Los Angeles beach was practically empty at that hour of the night. Only a few distant and dim lights remained coming from the pier, accompanied by the constant, rhythmic, and almost hypnotic sound of waves crashing hard against the wet sand. The wind blowing from the ocean was cold; it didn't quite become uncomfortable, but it was chilly enough to remind them that it was already extremely late.
Buck sat directly on the sand with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms resting heavily upon them. Eddie was right beside him, maintaining a prudent distance: not too close to overwhelm him, nor too far to leave him helpless. Just enough to accompany him in silence without invading his personal space. For several minutes, neither of them uttered a single word. They simply dedicated themselves to observing the vastness of the ocean, the ebb and flow of the waves, the blanket of stars covering the sky, and the completely dark horizon.
Buck kept his gaze lost in nothingness. Eddie knew him well enough to know his mind was very far from that beach; probably trapped in some painful memory of the past, probably with Jack, or perhaps thinking about every single way that destructive legal process could go wrong.
"You shouldn't be alone tonight, Buck," Eddie's voice finally broke the long silence.
Buck let out a short, tired laugh, keeping his eyes fixed on the sea.
"I think you already said that a few hours ago."
"And I'm still entirely right."
"That is completely debatable."
Eddie sketched a faint smile. It was the first time in several days he had heard a retort from Buck that sounded remotely similar to the witty man he knew. However, the relief lasted barely an instant. Buck's smile disappeared as fast as it had appeared, being immediately replaced by the weight of exhaustion, emotional fatigue, and that deep sadness that seemed to have permanently settled behind his blue eyes.
"How is he?" Eddie asked in a low voice.
Buck didn't need him to clarify who he was talking about.
"Angry."
"That... definitely sounds like Jack."
"Very angry, Eddie."
Eddie nodded, looking straight ahead. He could imagine the scene to perfection, knowing the teenager's defensive temper.
"Did he call you after they took him?"
Buck shook his head in silence. That immediately caught Eddie's attention, and he looked at him sideways, surprised.
"No?"
"No."
"I figured you two would talk on the phone every five minutes, no matter the circumstances."
Buck turned his gaze back to the water.
"Normally we do."
"Then... why the silence?"
"He's punishing me."
Eddie blinked a couple of times, genuinely baffled by the statement.
"What? Why would he do that?"
"He's furious with me because he feels I didn't fight harder inside that courtroom," Buck explained with a thread of voice. "He feels I gave up when the judge ordered provisional cohabitation."
"Buck..." Eddie adjusted himself on the sand. "I know, and you should know it too: you couldn't do absolutely anything at that moment. It was a direct court order."
"I know."
"Then stop acting and carrying things as if all of this is your fault."
Buck let out a dry, bitter laugh, turning his face for the first time to look him in the eyes.
"Do you really know me that little, Eddie?"
That question struck deep and forced Eddie into absolute silence. Because maybe it was true. Maybe, despite the years shared at the firehouse, he really knew very little about the true background of his best friend's life.
The waves continued crashing hard against the shore, one after another, marking the passage of time in the darkness, until Buck decided to speak again, softening his tone.
"He never told me that Christopher still talks to him frequently."
Eddie frowned, confused by the change of subject.
"What?"
"Jack," Buck smiled faintly, a nostalgic grimace. "I found out recently that Christopher still texts him and they talk about their things."
Eddie also smiled genuinely, relaxing his shoulders.
"Yeah, he does it all the time."
"I had no idea."
"Because Chris assumed you already knew, Buck. To him it's the most normal thing in the world."
Buck shook his head softly, lowering his gaze back to his hands.
"Jack never told me."
"He probably did it because he didn't want you to feel uncomfortable with the situation, or because Jack himself didn't want to look vulnerable."
"Yeah... that sounds exactly like something Christopher would do for us."
"It is."
Silence returned to the beach, but this time it felt considerably more comfortable, less loaded with the hostile tension of previous days. They stayed like that until Eddie decided to muster the courage to ask what had been bouncing around his head since he discovered the truth in court.
"Why did you never tell me, Buck?"
Buck didn't need him to specify the nature of the doubt.
"About Jack's existence?"
"Yes. About your brother, about your life with him. About everything."
"Because he was mine," Buck's response was immediate, instinctive, and painfully honest.
Eddie remained completely still in his spot, absorbing the impact of those words. Buck closed his eyes tightly, rubbing the bridge of his nose with frustration.
"It sounds horrible and extremely selfish when I say it out loud, right?"
"A bit, I won't deny it," Eddie admitted softly.
"I know," Buck breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the freezing night air. "But you have to understand... after everything I went through in my childhood, after the way my parents treated me, after my time in the military and seeing so many people die... he was the only truly pure and mine thing I had left in this world."
Buck's voice began to break noticeably, revealing the fragility he tried so hard to mask.
"And I had a constant fear, Eddie. A fear that suffocated me."
Eddie watched him closely, moved by his partner's vulnerability.
"Fear of what, Buck?"
Buck took several seconds to answer, swallowing the lump forming in his throat.
"That someone would come and take him away from me. That they would prove I wasn't good enough to raise him either. And the worst part of all... is that right now they've already done it."
The wind blew a little harder, slightly moving the grains of sand around them. Buck raised his head to observe the stars; thousands of bright, silver dots twinkling over the dark blanket. And for a brief moment, under that dim light, he seemed to look much younger than he really was. It was as if Eddie, instead of looking at the rough 118 firefighter or the mature man who rescued people daily, was looking directly at the helpless teenager he once was. At the wounded child who never healed.
"When Jack was born... my parents didn't even want to hold him in their arms when the nurse brought him into the room," Buck confessed in a whisper loaded with old pain.
Eddie felt something unpleasant churn violently inside his stomach upon hearing that.
"Buck..."
"The first person in the whole world who held him and swaddled him was me," he continued, displaying an extremely sad smile. "I was fourteen years old back then. Fourteen. Can you even imagine what it's like to be that age and hold your newborn brother's life because your parents don't care if he breathes or not?"
Eddie shook his head slowly. Because, as a father, he was incapable of conceiving such a level of detachment and cruelty.
"No, Buck. I can't imagine it."
Buck let out a small, humorless laugh.
"I couldn't either at the time. And then... it just happened."
"What happened exactly?"
"He completely became my responsibility," Buck's voice took on a strangely calm tone, almost casual, as if he were talking about a change in the weather and not describing a traumatic event that had reconfigured his entire existence. "At first, when he was a tot, I thought it would be temporary. I genuinely thought my parents would change at some point, that the pain over Daniel would lessen, that they would start loving Jack and would try to be better parents to him."
The sad smile completely disappeared from his face.
"But that never happened."
Eddie pondered it a moment before launching the next question:
"And what about the SEALs? Your military unit."
The question caught Buck by surprise, and he blinked confusedly.
"What about them?"
"You never talked about them with us at the station. You never mentioned them."
Buck fixed his gaze back on the ocean's ebb and flow, and immediately his body language changed. A complex mix of old pain, deep nostalgia, and persistent guilt reflected simultaneously in his features.
"Because they... they were our real family during the hardest years."
"More than your own biological parents?"
Buck let out an ironic chuckle.
"Surpassing my parents is not precisely a difficult task, Eddie. Any stranger on the street would have done a better job."
Eddie remained silent, feeling that each of those answers hid many more wounds than he could even glimpse in his mind.
"James taught me everything I know about surviving in the worst conditions," Buck recalled, eyes fixed on the horizon. "Matthew sat for hours at the base to teach Jack elementary math when he was a kid. Adam was the one who gave him his first surfboard and spent a whole summer teaching him how to use it. Joshua showed up on every damn birthday of Jack's with ridiculously expensive and huge gifts that barely fit in the Jeep. Peter was the one who first taught him how to properly throw a baseball. Every single member of my unit helped me raise him while we were on active duty."
Buck's smile returned, but this time it felt considerably warmer, real, and full of genuine affection.
"For the first time in our lives, thanks to them, I felt like Jack and I had something resembling a normal family."
"And what happened next?" Eddie inquired in a whisper, dreading the answer.
Buck stayed quiet for a long while, while the waves kept crashing hard against the shore.
"They all died on the spot during a damn extraction operation gone wrong," the sentence fell with the crushing weight of a stone. "No one from that circle was left."
"Buck... I'm so sorry."
"Well, technically not everyone died that day," Buck corrected bitterly, "but enough to destroy what we had built. Adam, Joshua, Cameron... and many others."
Eddie lowered his gaze to the sand, keeping a respectful silence. He knew that pain firsthand; losing comrades in combat was a scar that never stopped stinging.
"Jack was barely eleven years old when he started to understand the crude reality of things," Buck continued, his voice growing softer and quieter.
"What do you mean?"
"He understood all at once that the people you love can disappear overnight and never come back home. And as a result of that, he developed a severe fear of abandonment. But not normal fear or common tantrums that small children usually have; I'm talking about something real, something clinical and deeply destructive that required years of intense psychological therapy to be able to control it."
Eddie tensed noticeably in his spot, astonished.
"Was the situation really that serious?"
Buck let out a dry laugh, devoid of any trace of grace.
"For entire months after the unit tragedy, Jack slept sitting on the floor, leaning directly against my bedroom door."
Eddie felt his heart shrink painfully in his chest.
"What? Why would he do that?"
"Because in his head he was absolutely convinced that, if he closed his eyes to sleep in his own bed, I would also disappear in the middle of the night and leave him alone."
The beach fell once more into a sepulchral silence, where only the wind seemed to have a voice.
"Good grief, Buck..."
"He would wake up startled every single time I made the slightest movement inside the house," Buck recounted, swallowing hard to hold back tears. "If I got up at dawn to grab a glass of water, I'd hear his footsteps right behind me. If I went to work in my early days as a firefighter, he'd call the station every two hours just to hear my voice. If I was five minutes late getting home because of traffic, he'd go into a severe panic attack. And the worst part of all this, Eddie... is that I couldn't blame him for acting like that. Because I was also fucking terrified of losing him."
Several minutes of reflective silence passed before Eddie spoke again, raising the doubt that troubled him most about the current case.
"Why do you think your parents want to regain his custody all of a sudden after so many years? Why now?"
Buck tensed immediately upon hearing the question. Eddie noticed it instantly: the rigidity in his shoulders, the way he clenched his jaw, and the deliberate manner he avoided maintaining eye contact.
"Buck, talk to me."
"Because they don't love him, Eddie. It's that simple," the answer spilled from his lips too quickly, with a blunt certainty that admitted no replies.
"That doesn't really answer the question, Buck. There has to be a legal reason or a motive behind this whole circus."
"The reason doesn't matter."
"Yes it does, and a lot. If we want to win this trial, we need to understand what we're facing."
"You don't understand..."
"Buck, please."
Buck closed his eyes tightly, letting out a deep sigh loaded with frustration that made him look truly exhausted.
"Do you have the faintest idea how much money Jack has in his personal accounts right now?"
Eddie frowned, completely baffled by the turn of the conversation.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Answer me, Eddie. Do you have any idea of his net worth?"
"No, of course not. He's a minor."
"I don't know the exact figure to the cent either, but I know with total certainty that it's a lot of money. Too much for a fourteen-year-old boy."
Eddie remained motionless, waiting for the explanation.
"Where the hell did so much money come from, Buck?"
"From the SEALs life insurance policies that left him as a beneficiary, from military settlements, from the funds I opened for him myself... Jack is genuinely an extremely smart kid, so much so that every damn school he has attended has granted him full excellence scholarships to study without spending a single dollar. Plus, he dedicates himself to selling complex homework and advanced research papers to his classmates to generate his own income. Even the house we currently live in is legally registered in his name. All that capital accumulated and generated interest over the years."
Eddie felt an unpleasant, cold sensation run down his spine as he connected the dots.
"And you think your parents are aware of all that fortune?"
Buck let out a bitter laugh that echoed across the beach.
"Of course they know, Eddie. I have no doubt."
"How could they find out about something like that if you guys had no contact with them?"
"Because they hired top-tier private investigators as soon as they knew I was in Los Angeles. Because they meticulously reviewed every available financial record and discovered Jack's assets. That's why they appeared out of nowhere after eight long years of total absence. Because they never, not once, asked about his well-being or if he was still alive until they saw the numbers on paper."
Long-contained rage and indignation surfaced for the first time with total clarity in his voice.
"Eight years, Eddie. We're talking about us fleeing that damn house with absolutely nothing other than the clothes on our backs. They never called to find out if we had anything to eat. They never looked for us. They never asked if the boy needed medical attention. And now, overnight, they show up before a judge arguing they want to exercise their role as loving parents."
Eddie was left completely speechless by the revelation. He found no moral sense in the Buckleys' actions, and the revelation confirmed his worst suspicions: Philip and Margaret wanted Jack back to use him for their own benefit in some specific, twisted way.
Buck raised his gaze back to the firmament, letting the vastness of the night and the stars reflect in the frustration of his eyes.
"When I was fifteen..." he began in a barely audible whisper.
Eddie remained in absolute silence, holding his breath, waiting for him to continue the painful confession.
"I seriously thought that if I simply disappeared from this world or took my own life, nobody in that house would realize it or notice," the declaration left his mouth with such staggering calmness that it proved truly devastating to whoever was listening. "I genuinely thought that if I left forever... nobody would care the slightest bit."
The cold wind slightly moved his blonde curls.
"And right that very night, when I was at my worst and ready to give up, I found Jack in the hallway. He was crying uncontrollably because he had had a terrible nightmare about the darkness."
A small, soft, genuine smile appeared on Buck's lips as he remembered the exact moment that saved his life.
"And at that precise instant I realized something fundamental, Eddie."
"What did you realize?"
Buck observed the vastness of the starry sky.
"I realized that, at least, there was one person on this whole damn planet who would notice my absence if I wasn't there the next day."
Eddie felt an oppressive lump in his throat preventing him from speaking normally. He cleared his throat before replying.
"That person was Jack."
"Yes. He saved my life that night without even knowing it."
"And you have to understand that you are also exactly that same person to him, Buck. You are his beacon."
Buck closed his eyes tightly, because that was precisely what terrified him most about the entire legal process. He knew perfectly well that if he lost final custody in court, Jack would fall back into that deep pit of feeling completely abandoned and forsaken by the world. And Buck was not at all sure he had the mental or emotional strength required to survive seeing his brother destroyed in that way.
"I am not going to allow under any circumstances for him to go through the same hell I had to go through in my childhood," Buck stated. His voice sounded firm, unshakeable, laden with a military determination that admitted no doubts or fears. "I don't care what I have to do, nor the limits I have to cross to prevent it. I am not going to lose him."
Eddie looked closely at his best friend under the starlight. He truly looked at him, stripping away all his past prejudices, and in that second of absolute clarity, he understood a fundamental truth. Buck wasn't fighting a simple legal battle in court for a minor's custody; it wasn't about technicalities or lawyers. He was fighting tooth and nail against more than fifteen years of accumulated trauma, against the memory of a childhood broken by family contempt, and against the terrifying possibility of the child he had raised with so much love ending up going through the exact same atrocities he experienced and was forced to do to survive on the streets.
And while the stars continued shining brightly over their heads and waves kept tirelessly crashing against the beach shore, Eddie knew with absolute internal certainty that he would do everything in his power to support him and prevent the Buckleys from destroying his life. Because for the first time in all that time, he perfectly understood something Jack had been trying to implicitly shout at them since the very first day they met: Buck hadn't saved Jack just once by pulling him out of that house; Buck had spent fifteen long years saving himself every single day through love for his brother.