Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time Buck saw Chris after ‘The Baby Box Incident,’ his every nerve surged with the desire to shrink him down to walnut-sized.

He ached to tuck him away into a padded box – and to stow it close, against his bosom. He promptly turned and left with a shoddy excuse about laundry. Laundry Eddie had watched him do that very morning.

Introspection, he finds, is easier in hindsight. Obviously.

As a toddler, he’d always argue with Maddie’s toys.

Never in front of her, even then there was a shame about it. She was a lonely child, they both were. Evan, her toys, they were about the extent of it when it came to company for her to keep. For Evan that still wasn’t enough.

He’d yell and hit and throw about the small hoard of plushies and dolls with a mix of jealousy at the place they held in his sister’s life, and envy that they weren’t his to keep, too.

He grew out of it. Mostly.

Or maybe he just grew into it. The cloying, filthy, sticky feeling of jealousy just another bug in his stomach. A friend to be made and kept. He only had so many of those.

Maybe he coveted. A little boy always so fixated on his big sister. Clung to her calf, feeding off her, so deeply and comfortably in her shadow even she would struggle to separate the seams where she was a person and he’d attached himself as a malignant growth.

He loved his sister so dearly he wished he was her – but then he started public schooling, where such devotion to big sisters was not at all acceptable for little boys like him.

He grew out of it. Eventually.

Freshly escaped from the Buckley-Hans’ new house; Buck wretched into the kitchen sink.

Red clouded his vision and head and he hates himself for blaming Maddie after all he’d done to her. After all she’d done for him. Even when she was more a victim than he and he knows that – but he blames her and he doesn’t even know what for.

Except that he does. He hates her with a ferocity he’s only ever hated himself with, and thoughts of how, what, and why he would have handled Daniel better in her shoes flood him. His superego fights to correct him; ‘you are not her, you have never been her’, and he knows that, he knows, yet the reminder somehow only hurts more.

It takes a moment, but his legs stabilize enough to carry him from his kitchen sink to the bathroom one. He regrets it when he remembers it’s host to a mirror, but by then it was too late anyway.

He looks so much like his mother. He cannot look away.

It’s been well over a decade since he could consider himself ‘blond’ with any authenticity, but even before then he didn’t much like referring to himself as such anyway. He always preferred the spelling of ‘blonde’, and that just wasn’t correct for him, or so his teacher parents assured him.

Either way, the hot beatdown of the overhead lights catch his curly hair to turn it a honey shade in his reflection.

Consciously, he knows this – Evan looks like Margret, Maddie looks like Philip, he grew up hearing this. He’d never really understood it until now though. He sees himself in his cowered posture, ready to be attacked at any moment from any direction. He sees the red of his eyes, the absolute misery so thinly veiled it was more akin to a second skin. He looks tired, hollow.

He looks like his mother.

The satisfaction that knowledge spurs makes him dizzy with nausea.
However, hazily as though a dream he remembers being as big as a bag of flour and attempting to burrow into his mother’s navel. She looked just like he did now, defeated and so so disdainful. Not of him necessarily, just – in general. To a flour-sack–sized Evan though, all that he understood was that his mama was sad, and that just couldn’t stand.

He pauses in his worming to reach his tiny hands up as high as they could go, and cup her face with them;
“Mama don’t be sad mama. Mama good job,” he insisted while patting her cheek, because nothing made Evan feel better than knowing he was doing a good job, even then.

Her breath stuttered as her eyes caught his, and she quickly pressed his face into her nape. Faintly he heard her say something like;
“Thank you Evan. I swear I’ll be better. I’ll try. I won’t be like my parents. I promise,” and she might have continued but the soft rocking of her body had lulled him off to sleep.

The satisfaction of knowing she failed was much less reckoning than any alternatives, so he stuck with it.

Trashy radio blasted so loud out the Jeep speakers the entire car shook. Buck assures himself this is the reason he’d missed half a dozen calls from Eddie while he took the long way home.

By the time he reached his loft he’d explored a number of avenues, including but not limited to:

Which is to say, frankly, anything other than facing his best friend again. Having to look him in the eyes – being even tangentially proximate to Christopher-

A difficult feat considering Eddie was leaned against his front door. Knitted brows and light frown underlit by the cast of his phone screen as he typed into it. Buck has nary a moment to react, much less run away before he looks up. His face melt with relief.

Buck is slack jawed, but not surprised. Still, he has to forcibly swallow back the confession of:’God I wish I was Shannon.’

Instead he asks, “Where’s Chris?” As that was the more pressing concern on his heart.

“Inside. Come on, we don’t have any alternate dinner plans, man. You’re cooking,” Eddie was mostly inside before he finished his sentence, ending the discussion then and there.

Buck obeyed dutifully, making a conceited effort to not confront what he wished that ‘duty’ was.

Dr. Copeland had been a dream to work with, truly. She was professional and kind in a way he only understood of therapists in the abstract.

She made him feel logical. In the sense that he was no longer just a tangled mess of feelings and anger and hurt and passion and love, but rather a formulaic maze of them. There was a method to him, he just had to solve for it. Not that he was particularly good at maths. At all.

He liked her in a way he struggled to articulate at first. Not at all like Dr. Wells. Thankfully. She felt like a confidant, an older woman he could relish the wisdom and advice of, like Abby, before he made that complicated. She was educated and stern when needed, like Maddie without the contextual baggage. She was qualified, yet didn’t demean him; she was off-limits in every way their mutual boundaries assures, and so was he.

So he honored that trust she granted him with honesty in turn. All things considered, his days in LA were good. He was happy more than he wasn’t, but the joy, like all things in his life, felt impermanent.

Insecurities, concerns and pains he otherwise would have kept close to himself, he shared with her. Prior, he may have scoffed at the suggestion they were worth the effort of addressing, but he respected Dr. Copeland and her profession more than he was apathetic to himself so he did it.

Eventually, he liked her enough to bring it up.

He eyed the clock on the upper corner of his screen; 4:54 ticked to 4:55.

He’d just been enthusing about Chris and the motivation to live well that came with knowing him. The segue would be easy.

“I really do love that kid,” he floundered for a second. 4:56

“Hey doc? What does it mean if you really really wished you were your widowed best friend’s dead wife?”

Dr. Copeland, to her credit, barely flinches at the question, only blinking deeply, taking a moment to think.

“Well,” she starts. 4:57

“That depends, Evan. Do you mean in a ‘dead’ way, ‘a married to him’ way, a ‘parent’ way, a ‘woman’ way?”

He’s sure there are more possible reasons, but he also thinks she knows him enough by now to not need to pose them.

“Well, um, yep! Anyways, oops- it’s time. I don’t want to keep you Dr. Copeland, thank you! Have a good evening– bye, bye, b-,” the exit call sound finally rung from his end, what felt like an eternity after he pressed the disconnect button.

4:59, damn. His timing was off.