Still Water
Series Metadata
Listing Series
-
Tags
Summary
Coronado, 2008.
Instructor Reyes doesn't clock the name at first, just another eighteen-year-old on a roster of a hundred and eighty, too young-looking, too polished to last the week. He's wrong about that part.
By the time the rest of the cadre figures out exactly whose grandson is running BUD/S with Class 271, Evan Buckley has already decided he isn't going to make it easy on anyone to define him by it. He never says the name once. Reyes never asks him to.
Series
- Part 1 of Still Water
-
Tags
Summary
Los Angeles, 2018
Three days before his cap ceremony, Evan Buckley can't stop counting. Not out loud, not on paper — just a quiet running number in the back of his head that ticks up every time he pulls someone out of something they wouldn't have survived without him. It isn't pride. It's closer to a debt he already knows he'll never fully pay off, but keeps making payments toward anyway.
(Or: a man who used to be the one deciding who stopped living, learning what it means to spend his life trying to stop death instead.)
Series
- Part 2 of Still Water
-
Tags
Summary
Somewhere outside Ramadi, 2012
Evan's already the best shooter Team 4 ever had, he just never had a war to prove it in. Team 3 gives him one, along with a dead man's locker, a dead man's favorite rooftop, and a team that hasn't decided yet whether he's a replacement or just the next thing that happened to them. He doesn't try to become the man he's replacing. He just tries to be good enough that, eventually, they stop needing him to be anyone else.
Series
- Part 3 of Still Water
-
Tags
Summary
Hershey, 2017
Phillip finds out his son was forced into reserves the way he finds out most hard things now, secondhand, from an old Navy friend, before Evan ever says a word himself. Alone in his study that night, he sits with something harder than grief: the realization that he raised Evan exactly the way his own father raised him, and that there was never really anyone else to carry it. Daniel might have shared the weight, once. Instead there was only ever going to be Evan.
Series
- Part 4 of Still Water
-
Tags
Summary
For seven years, Madeline was the one who knew what baby Evan's cries meant, the one who raised him while their parents were too buried in grief and work to notice either child closely. Then he became exceptional, and the house rearranged itself around him so completely that the sister who'd built him barely got a mention in the story of how he became who he was. Linden Hall isn't punishment or neglect, it's an unwatched life, and it turns out unwatched can mean freedom to choose nursing, choose Boston College, choose wrong with Doug, and survive all of it entirely on her own terms. She's never sure, in the end, whether that's a better deal than the one her little brother got.
Series
- Part 5 of Still Water
-
Tags
Summary
Los Angeles, a few years into the 118
Buck's got Christopher on his shoulders at Bobby and Athena's Fourth of July cookout, and it's the easiest thing in the world to watch, for everyone except Maddie, who's the only one standing there who knows exactly how many ways this afternoon almost didn't exist.
Series
- Part 6 of Still Water
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 1,439
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Kudos:
- 51
- Hits:
- 588
-
Tags
Summary
Hershey, Thanksgiving 2004
Doug Kendall has been reading rooms his whole life, and the Buckley family is an easy one, a household so thoroughly organized around one golden son that nobody has any attention left over for the daughter he's about to marry. He's careful anyway, because caution costs him nothing. He just isn't careful enough about the thirteen-year-old at the far end of the table.
Series
- Part 7 of Still Water
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 1,450
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Hits:
- 0