Archive of Our Own

whoever you are, wherever you are… i’m starting to think we’re a lot alike. human beings spinning on blackness. all wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to. my loved ones are everything to me here. in the last year or 3 i’ve screamed at my creator. screamed at clouds in the sky. for some explanation. mercy maybe.  

- Frank Ocean

☆

With irony often reserved for high school productions of Shakespearean tragedies where the teenage cast members are embroiled in interpersonal drama, the first person that Eddie loves dies in his arms.

There is nothing spectacular or extraordinary about it. It doesn’t happen in slow motion. There’s no orchestral accompaniment, no introspective monologue for Eddie to read over-top as the cameras pull back to reveal the LA skyline. The screen doesn’t fade to black. The credits don’t roll.

Rather, life goes on.

The first person that Eddie ever loves dies in his arms on the tarmac of a city he’s barely lived in long enough to call home, and life just…goes on.

Eddie has been through enough to be familiar with life’s strange tendency to do that. To persevere and carry him along until he can put his feet back on the ground and move with it all on his own.

It was inevitable then, perhaps, that his undoing wouldn’t be anything special.

That it would be a series of phone calls on a Sunday evening, alone in his room. Inevitable, perhaps, that a dead phone line—such a small death, comparatively—would bring time to a paralyzing halt.

Eddie has known time to hesitate, before. He knew it when he held his tiny son in his arms for the first time. Knew it when he was buried under the covers in his childhood bedroom at eleven years old, reeling from the wrath of his father. Knew it again when the ground came down on top of him twenty years later.

And he knew it when the bullet hit. Sharp and precise. Neat and tidy.

Right in the chest. Right where his heart should be.

His heart, however, had been halfway across town, sat patiently in homeroom. It had, also, been three feet in front of him, wearing a clean white shirt that Eddie hasn’t seen since, blood-spattered and horrified.

The gunman had unknowingly missed his heart not by the few millimetres suggested by the cardiothoracic surgeon. But rather by the three feet that had separated Eddie from the man who was presently in the next room, tucking another chamber of Eddie’s heart into bed while time shattered silently around him.

He could hear the soft murmuring of his best friend and his son from where he was spread out, collapsed pathetically against his bed. His chest rising unevenly, erratically, and nonsensically against the steady ticking sound that was reverberating all around him.

The clock on the bedside table was mocking him, he was sure of it.

It was the only thing in his room he hadn’t had the forethought to take the bat to, to split and destroy. Time had stopped—he was certain—but the clock ticked. It was a dissonance that made Eddie want to scream and cry all over again because, surely, no more.

He had endured a lot, he knows, but there couldn’t be more to it, now. It can’t possibly persist.

How life and time was extending beyond the death of the phone line—the death of everyone—was incomprehensible to him.

Eddie could hear the ticking of the clock and it made no fucking sense at all because how was life still going when everyone was dead.

He stands up and looks out the window, and he feels Buck approaching the door before he sees him. His footsteps falling into place with the rhythm of Eddie’s chest, and he feels himself begin to settle.

Buck walks in, and the clock keeps ticking.

☆

It’s three months after the incident with the bat and the clock and crying—and Eddie is okay. Comparatively, at least.

He’s still working at dispatch, and if it weren’t for the several holes in his bedroom wall or the god-awful way his son and his best friend keep looking at him, no one would ever know that anything had happened.

Except for Eddie, of course.

He hasn’t bothered to fix the wall. The holes are there, it happened. It’s happening.

It’s nice, almost. He gets home from work, he pretends to take care of his son when he knows it’s really the other way around, and then, when he finally gets to go to bed again, he gets to sit and stare at something familiar—something battered and scarred.

He presses his forefinger against the scar on his chest and it hurts. He pressed the bat against the wall, and it hurt.

A room can have a way of talking back to you like that.

It’s ridiculous, really. Because Eddie had been doing well—he has a son who he loves more than life, a job that he loved, friends who made all the bad things better. And he had Buck.

It had taken four years, but every one of those things had gathered up the broken pieces of a kid too young to be veteran or a widower and built him into man.

He was a father, a friend, a firefighter.

But then the gunman had pulled his trigger, and all their hard work went to shit.

He knew he was back to square one when he’d lay there, bleeding, unable to do anything but will his eyes to convey the word sorry while Buck had scrambled to pick the pieces of him off the pavement and pull him into the fire truck.

Buck had tried, but Eddie’s blood had run and crusted into the tarmac too quickly to be undone—the shards of him too small to gather up and stick together.

The knowledge that his son walks roads that have seen so much of his parents’ blood makes Eddie want to drop to his knees.

You see, Eddie had known before the shooting. Hell, he’d known before Ana. He knew that what he felt for Buck was something far worse than he was allowed. Or at least he knew a little bit. In a quiet and unnameable way, foreign enough that he could squash it into something inconsequential and squeeze it into a tiny box in his head. He knows some things are better left unsaid. And the bullet doesn’t bust the locks off the box he’s buried his feelings in—it lodges the box deeper.

There is too much to lose, and Eddie isn’t the type of man to risk it all on a feeling that he doesn’t fully understand. So, he tells Buck that he made him his sons legal guardian and it’s enough.

He does it to protect the box. He does it to protect them both.

☆

‘You know, Eddie,’ Frank says, closing the small leather notebook on his lap and resting his pen against it as he leans forward in his chair, ‘it’s been three weeks and six sessions since you started coming back here, and you’re still talking about your relationship with Buck in the past tense.’

‘In fact,’ he continues, ‘you keep talking about everything and everyone in the past tense—even yourself.’

Eddie looks up from where he had been picking absentmindedly at a loose thread of his jeans. ‘Oh,’ he says, dumbly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ Frank smiles at him, and Eddie feels small. ‘I’m not sure you’re even aware that you’re doing it.’

Eddie’s not sure if he’s aware either. He isn’t sure of anything. Every second of the last few weeks has felt like experiencing a dissonant future, where what he sees and what he hears is always failing to align with what he’s feeling inside—which is nothing, it seems.

Except maybe the guilt of knowing what his breakdown had put his son through, and the guilt that he’s still putting his son through it. And he knows that he is, because every time his kid looks over at him, his eyes reveal that he sees straight through Eddie’s efforts to appear fine.

It angers him and frustrates him and makes him want to punch something, because this isn’t fair on his son. He needs to be better than this. He needs to pull himself together.

He doesn’t realize he’s said that last part out loud until Frank’s next words register as a response.

‘You don’t need to do anything, Eddie.’

And Eddie scoffs, because that’s bullshit. There are a million things he needs to do. Millions of them. All the time and forever.

He needs to be a better father; a better son; a better brother. He needs to be a better husband to the wife he no longer has but still feels indebted to.

He needs to be a better man. To feel more than the intermittent waves of shame and guilt and anger that batter him each day until he’s numb from it all and it takes him under.

Frank cocks his head to the side at Eddie’s lack of response, regarding him gently and Eddie hates him for it.

‘You disagree,’ Frank says, and it isn’t a question.

In the end, it’s safe to say that therapy doesn’t go swimmingly, and the disappointment that Frank tries so hard to mask behind his patient professionalism hurts right where Eddie needs it to.

☆

‘It’s like you’re not here, Eddie,’ Shannon had confessed, eyes shining. Maybe four months before Eddie re-enlisted.

The bags she’d packed to throw in the back of their friends’ pickup lined the walls in neat rows, and Eddie felt watched as he stood up from the bed to argue back a line that he had already rehearsed.

‘I’m here!’ he shouted, arms flinging open. ‘I am here!’ He accused, pointing at her nastily, any kindness that was once between them forgotten, ‘you—you are leaving.’

And that did it, really. Because Shannon should have gone on that road trip for the summer, because she was eighteen and she had no reason to wait around in El Paso for things to happen to her. But Eddie was selfish and immovable, and he couldn’t leave his family for a trip with no end-date because that just wasn’t what Diaz’s did. 

‘No!’ Shannon yelled, suddenly, throwing the sundress she’d been trying to fold throughout this latest re-enactment of the same argument onto the bed.

Looking back, it was probably the only time Eddie had ever heard her scream at him with such rage. But he remembers the sting of it far less vividly than how he recalls the whimper of frustration that followed, when the fabric had just floated and collapsed in on itself anti-climactically. How she had dropped down onto the edge of the bed in defeat beside it.

The walls of that god-awful bedroom she had shared with her cousin would probably have rattled with the force of her upset if any of her pictures were still up, but they were neatly tucked into a box marked bedroom. As they had been since the day before.

And Eddie remembers having just stood there, then. His resolve shattering at the grief on his girlfriend’s face as he waited, prayed for her to say something that might hurt them both enough to take everything else away.

‘You’re not here, Eddie,’ she whispered, picking at her manicure as tears made their silent crusade down her cheeks and onto her blouse.

‘When I first met you,’ she had said, looking up at him and huffing a laugh so small and gentle that Eddie had wanted to cry, ‘I thought—wow.’

‘Wow, this guy is so…,’ she trailed off, mouth twisting as she had sought out an adjective.

‘Complicated,’ Shannon chose, and Eddie just…started laughing.

Because the way she had said it, like it might have been a compliment before, but the affection it once contained had soured and rotted over time, was so horribly sad, that it was, more than anything else, just…funny.

It was funny and awful in that way where you can’t do anything about it. Not when all the awfulness was just another awful thing collapsing like dead weight onto the already-mountainous pile of awfulness irreparably stacked between them.

And sure, maybe to laugh in that moment was terrible and obscene and inappropriate, but everything was. So, he laughed.

‘Stop it!’ Shannon had tried, but the words dissolved into ridiculous, wet, mortified giggles of her own. And when she reached for the sundress beside her and flung it across the room at Eddie, and it wouldn’t travel even marginally far enough to hit him, they both laughed harder.

It was like it was the only thing left to do. Such that each terrible, hiccupped sound coughed up between them felt like the expulsion of water between gasps. It felt like pulling the other out of the water. It felt like relief. 

Their relationship—like him—had been complicated from the start.

But then she got pregnant, and none of that mattered anymore, until it did.

☆

Eddie first meets Shannon at twelve-years-old in a middle school cafeteria, and they’re friends in an uncomplicated kind of way until she moves four cities over to attend a different high school.

He meets her again, differently, when he’s barely nineteen. Fresh off the charter bus that delivers him from the airport after his first tour, like a sack of letters returned to sender.

The bus had pulled into the station an hour earlier than expected, and Eddie hadn’t wanted to go home. He knew what was waiting for him—Adriana and Sophia, his mother, his aunt, his grandmother.

His father.

Maybe they’d put a banner up. His Abuela had almost certainly made tamales. His Tía would have brought cookies, the double chocolate chip ones from the bakery near her house that Eddie always told her were his favourite.

And all of that would be great. Or it should have been.

Except, the last time Eddie had had chocolate cookies, it was from a foil sleeve that Harvey, a kid in his platoon, had kept neatly under his bed. A small treat nestled among handwritten letters and a sweater his sister had knit him two Christmases ago. Harvey had been so boyishly sweet at nineteen, breaking the already small cookies into bitesize pieces to share late at night with the rest of their unit. The boy never even cared that nobody else would share anything of their own.

Harvey was dead and buried by the time Eddie got back to Texas that first time. Had been since February, and the unfinished sleeve of cookies had stayed under his empty cot for six days until his replacement arrived from another camp.

Somewhere between the first gleeful bite the new kid had taken upon finding the hidden cookies, and the tears of joy he’d cried because they reminded him of home—Eddie had gone off chocolate chip.

So, instead of hauling his bag over his shoulder and taking a cab to his childhood home to surprise his family with his early arrival, Eddie had drifted like a ghost toward a diner he knew of but had never been in before.

And there was Shannon; perched on a barstool. Her head buried in an undergraduate law textbook that looked heavier than Eddie’s military-approved travel bag.

Eddie had walked up to the bar, and all Shannon did was look up and see him standing there, push her denim jacket off the stool beside her and onto the ground, making space for him to sit down when all the other seats were full.

That was all it took for Eddie to be able to look down at himself and realize his body was still there. He was real. She was making room. Eddie was still taking up space in this town, even with eight months so far removed that he had started to wonder if it had ever existed to begin with.

Shannon was relief itself, and Eddie was in love with her from the moment she gave up that seat and blushed her way through an expression which, at the time, he couldn’t remember anyone having said to him before. 

I’m sorry.

Shannon became the person with whom he could be the guy he needed to be in order to survive. She was an all-American girl, and Eddie returning home that first time and finding her made it feel like maybe he was living up to the image of the men who had stood tall and strong on the army recruitment posters he’d had thrust into his face at seventeen.

It was so easy, for those three short months, to compartmentalize. To fragment himself and pretend that the glory of war, in all its as-seen-on-TV hyperrealism, was a battle worth fighting.

A battle that could be won, even. Maybe, hell, a battle that would reap greatness for those who took it upon themselves to pursue it.

Eddie had already surrendered himself to the military. He had handed his country his youth far too long ago to undo it now. And he’d done it willingly, enchanted by a spell of false promises and misleading reassurance. So how could he admit to anyone, least of all himself, when he was so young and so sure that he was doing the right thing, that he had made a mistake?

He was a kid, and Shannon was the illusory glimmer of hope at the end of a tunnel that he knows now was a necessary mirage to the fact of his future. The fact being that the glory waiting for him at the other end of his enlistment, the one he’d once imagined, was only ever the trick of some distant politician’s flashlight against the metal plaque on the edge of a coffin. One that has been engraved with his name from the moment he had first reached out and shook the recruitment man’s hand, clean and unscarred against the callouses Eddie already at seventeen years old.

Sometimes, all these years later, once Shannon had left and left again, dying in the process, Eddie wonders if she knew any of this.

He reckons she probably did.

☆

Eddie keeps up his meetings with Frank, doesn’t miss a single appointment. He starts talking more openly with Christopher. He gets out of that god forsaken dispatch building. He goes back to work. He starts feeling better and it starts to feel real.

Buck breaks up with Taylor and starts coming over more often. Chris grows tall enough to reach the cookies on the top shelf and Buck wells up at the sight, and Eddie loves him quietly and gently without much thought to the matter. The box remains sealed and the seasons come to pass without much fanfare.

Then Buck gets struck by lightning and the box gets its shit rocked. Eddie straddles his best friends’ hips and presses the heels of his palms into his chest hard enough to crack his ribs and the box becomes a bullshit metaphor, because Eddie loves him. He loves him.

Buck survives by the grace of god and Eddie says nothing, the feeling too big for him to hold.

He puts it in a different box, labels it love, and carries on.

Abuela starts setting him up on dates and Eddie doesn’t refuse, and everything is so much better in spite of it all.

He goes to barbecues at Bobby and Athena’s, drinks wines he can’t pronounce with Karen and Hen. He laughs for hours at Chimney’s stupid jokes, and he eats dinner with women he has no business dating.

And he loves Buck in a language he cannot speak, and isn’t ready to learn.

So when Buck meets Natalia and she sees him, it isn’t hard to appreciate all the ways that Marisol is so easy to like.

She’s sharp and beautiful and the opposite of easy going in all the right ways. She reminds him of Shannon sometimes, with how unafraid she is of everything. She never treads gently with Eddie, like Ana so often did.

The first time she comes over for dinner, the two of them bicker over whether to order pizza or sushi for almost thirty minutes, and Eddie decides that Marisol is exactly what he needs right now in the instant he realizes it’s an argument that he’s going to lose. Perhaps, Eddie thinks, their dynamic would be annoying if it weren’t so refreshing.

Dating her makes him feel light and young again in a way that Eddie knows—he knows—is wrong for how old he is, or for the kind of mature relationship he should be in at this time of his life. But it’s easier not to think about that, so he doesn’t.

Instead, he revels in arguing over nothing with someone who never takes herself too seriously. He indulges in the company of someone never asks him for anything because she can handle everything for herself. It’s a weight off his shoulders, the way she never fails to be thoughtful, and how she treats Christopher with the same respect that she treats him.

Sometimes, when he looks at her, he sees it in her eyes. They aren’t too different.

He understands her and hardly knows her at the same time. Maybe he understands her because he hardly knows her—neither of them are especially forthcoming with anything meaningful about themselves. But they can sit on the couch for an hour debating who should’ve won Masterchef, and it’s so easy that Eddie thinks he could marry her.

He thinks maybe he should.

Marisol feels like a friend in all the wrong ways, and dating her makes him feel like maybe he could just do this. Except, weeks later, Buck announces he’s single again.

And Eddie plays the part of supportive best friend until he reaches the nearest gas station, then he stares at the menu until he goes cross-eyed. He orders something he knows he won’t enjoy, then he sits in silence and thinks about nothing.

When he gets home, it’s an hour later than he’d assured Marisol, but he knows she won’t mind.

She’s sat cross-legged on the couch when he opens the door, smiling over at him in her bicycle shorts and t-shirt, and in that moment Eddie feels a kinship to her that he hasn’t known since childhood. He almost wants to cry with it, when she doesn’t ask any questions.

When she just sees all the ways he’s fucked up inside and doesn’t try to fix it.

All she does is wave a DVD in his face like it’s 2004, and she looks so much like Shannon in that moment that Eddie falls into the couch, kisses her, and thinks about nothing.

☆

Eddie falls into an easy friendship with Tommy Kinard in the same way that one might take an inoffensive liking to oat milk, despite not having any aversion to dairy. That is, it isn’t as though Eddie was actively looking for a new friend, nor does he feel he particularly needs one, but it feels nice and healthy to do something different.

After a couple of weeks of casual basketball games, muy thai, and a spontaneous Vegas trip that made Eddie feel fun in a way he hardly ever does, the two of them are decidedly friends.

There’s something about the guy, who’s maybe ten years older than Eddie, and carries himself with a commanding self-assuredness that Eddie wants to dislike, but mostly just finds comforting. Like him, Tommy is a veteran, but he doesn’t seem to carry the burden of war on his shoulders, and it makes Eddie feel like maybe, someday, he too could achieve the lightness that Tommy seems to move through the world lit up by.

Maybe it’s that simmering undercurrent of envy and awe that Eddie feels toward Tommy from the start that makes running into the older man at a restaurant, smiling over a tiny dinner table at Buck, such an unsettling surprise. 

And maybe it’s that tangible reminder, right there in a pizza joint of all places, that Buck—who is so bright and shiny, so alluring and lovely—will always have someone else.

He will always find other people to share his evenings with. Others who aren’t too busy trying to make it work with a girlfriend who isn’t quite right, others who can give Buck the time and attention he deserves.

Maybe it’s the way the encounter at the restaurant alerts Eddie to just how complicated and fucked up his attachment is to Evan Buckley. A man who Eddie is at once terribly possessive of, but wants to stay a million miles away from. Who he fucking loves in ways he cannot possibly unpack.

And who is now, seemingly, forging a friendship with a guy that Eddie befriended first, which only serves to make Eddie a massive fucking hypocrite.

But it hurts anyway, like everything does. Because Tommy exists like some future self that Eddie could have been, in another life, if he weren’t so irrevocably screwed up. 

Maybe it’s all these jumbled, incongruent, and immediately repressed thoughts that cause Eddie to ask Marisol to move in with him the next day.

☆

Privately, as he drives to the station a few days later, a small voice in Eddie’s head comments that Marisol’s past life as a nun is the exact kind of outrageously on-the-nose sign that the universe would send toward a guy like Eddie.

But it’s easy to ignore the thought. He’s gotten very good at ignoring the voice in his head that sounds a little too much like the truth.

It’s a little harder to ignore the voice later on, when Eddie sits in the dim light of Buck’s apartment and his best friend tells him that he’s dating Tommy, but he manages it anyway.

He dismisses the choir of voices in his head and the way they’re clawing violently at the box in his chest as he tells Buck that he’s proud of him, and he leaves Buck’s apartment not twenty minutes later with three pieces of information:

1. Buck is bisexual.
2. Buck is going to date Tommy. Already is dating him.
3. Eddie isn’t going to move in with Marisol.

Only one of these revelations Eddie knows what to do with, so he goes home to his girlfriend and they call the move off, but she kisses him sweetly by the door before she leaves for a work thing, and Eddie knows that their strange and unnameable little camaraderie is still in tact.

It’s only in the dying hours of the night, when Christopher is asleep and all the lights are out, that Eddie lets himself think about what Buck had said.

Buck’s dating Tommy. He lets the voices say it, though the words sound foreign. He kicks back his comforter and climbs out of bed, stumbling over his laundry on his pilgrimage to the bathroom.

He flicks the light on, turns toward the mirror, and stares himself dead in the face. He tries saying it again, out loud this time, Buck’s dating Tommy, but the words don’t come out.

Instead, Eddie stands shirtless at the sink in the harsh fluorescent light, looking back at a man who’s so much older than he feels. And he’s useless to react as he sees, in realtime, as the Eddie in the mirror flinches and twitches his way through a breadth of emotions that he can’t remember ever letting himself feel before.

Eddie doesn’t blink as he watches himself experience something sharp and stupid and jealous and hopeless.

And he feels like a ghost because he knows, then, that the Eddie in the mirror is more real than he is.

Frank will tell him months later that repressing your emotions all your life might cause you to feel fragmented. That it can make you feel like you’re outside of our body, and that the life you’ve built doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to who you’re trying to be.   

Looking back, after he fucks everything up beyond repair and his son is on a plane to Texas, Eddie wonders whether he willed Kim into being, that night in the bathroom.

He wonders if he made a weapon sharp enough to destroy his life because he didn’t know what else to do.

Or maybe you can live like a ghost long enough for a real one to slip through.

☆