Chapter Text
PROLOGUE.
The Proposition.
If he’s completely honest, thinking about moving is making Buck want to kill himself.
Not in the real way. Not in the finding the highest roof he can access kind of way. He’s been there. He knows what that’s like. But rather, the sort of cold-veined, hot bile in the back of the throat, crescent pink half moons in his palms kind of a way. He doesn’t think the words lightly, but he doesn’t properly mean them either. He wakes up with his eyes already open - body desperate to be up and out.
Eddie likes to have a few hours up before work, so Buck’s trained himself to get up even earlier. He’ll be out the door before the school run, blanket neatly folded on the couch.
Once upon a time, he’d start the coffee. The Diaz boys would wake to the smell of bacon, of eggs and paprika. But they’ve got enough going on now without his interruption to their morning routine. They’re finding their own rhythm once more. He won’t be an arrhythmic beat they’ll adjust to, only to have to start again once he finally leaves.
This is not permanent. The crick in his back from the couch, comfy as it is, warns him he’s been here too long. It’s not outstaying a welcome, per say, but not wanting to push. He’s done that before. It hasn’t ended well.
He’s looking for a house, of course he is. Everybody in his life seems to be looking for one too. Maddie sends him links to websites on her lunch break. Karen chats to him about good neighbourhoods. Ravi laments the fact he sold his property, and won’t get to be Buck’s landlord. Everyone, that is, except Eddie, who placates him with reassurances that there’s no rush, man, really. Stay as long as you need.
And although Eddie’s is good, Eddie’s is perfect, he craves the feeling of solid ground.
This kind of impermanence hadn’t always felt so unstable. He used to love it. Breathed in aimlessness like oxygen. Antsy if he stayed in one place for too long. Transience had been natural. Little to stay for, little to leave.
There were places to go; none of them his. People who would let him stay as long as he needed - with the caveat that it was a need rather than a want. A spare sofa, a guest room. They were kindnesses offered to him. They were not places he was supposed to stay.
The loft hadn’t been very him. It was industrial, cold and open. It had perhaps suited the style of a bachelor with a girlfriend who lived across the country half the time. It had suited the boyfriend of the reporter, the boyfriend of the pilot.
Filling it with his things had only served to make it feel cluttered. Put things on the fridge, bought novelty magnets that looked out of place. Chosen plants for the balcony, and then spent so much time at other people’s houses that he’d forgotten all about them. Green turning further to brown every night he slept at Eddie’s. Every it’s late, just stay. Every can Buck make pancakes in the morning? And the state of his greenery had felt inconsiderable next to the want of waking up to the click of crutches on the floor.
His apartment had been good to sleep in. It had felt safe - to have a place he was always allowed to return to. No roommates thoughtlessly deadbolting the door, no motel staff yelling that they needed the room. He didn’t run out of money anymore in the way he used to. The rent was costly, but he didn’t fear it. He did his taxes at a kitchen island with underfloor heating.
He likes to think back on his travelling days with fondness, until he really remembers it, and then he doesn’t think about it at all. He doesn’t think he’d enjoy a long journey anymore. Road trips are aching knees and cramp, now. He used to drive just to drive. Now, he’d rather have an end destination in mind.
Now, forearms leaning on the wheel, his destination is new.
The church looms large through his windscreen. He’s seen it before, surely, but it looks different right now.
The days since the lab all seem to have some kind of filter on them. A grey-blue wash, off-kilter and off putting. Buck keeps waking up to a clear, unfiltered day. Then, he’ll spot his phone or his uniform or anything at all, and the shade of the air will change. It’s a little like trying to make out shapes in the dark. Eyes adjust, and you can see, but you’re looking in greyscale.
He knows the red of the engine.
For his first few years in LA, it had been his favourite colour in the world. Knows what it looks like in the reflection of puddles. Know what it looks like with the sun glinting off of it. Knows the contrast between uniform and door, knows what each member of his team looks like leaning against it. Hen, arms crossed. Chim, looking down the bridge of his nose with his head tilted like he’s tall. Ravi, smirking at his own job well done. Eddie.
He knows the shade so completely he sees it behind his eyelids, and so he knows assuredly that since the funeral procession, it hasn’t been as vivid as it used to be.
It’s not something he’s mentioned to anyone. He knows why it is. He’s sad. Sad, and so everything looks grey. It’s normal - he’s read about it. It hasn’t been long enough that it’s anything he needs to worry about.
He and Eddie - they’re not exactly talking like nothing’s happened, but more like it’s a temporary thing. A temporary sadness they’re going to sit in until they get over it. When the bad things happen, the things like this, they don’t ever talk immediately. They sit for a few days, they stir, and then they speak. It’s been weeks, and he doesn’t feel like talking.
They’re almost back in the routine. Chris is home, Eddie is working.
Before he and Eddie talk it out, Buck’s usually thinking. He’ll consider all outcomes. He’ll talk himself into spirals and then out of them again.
He’s decided he won’t think this time - won’t do anything but bring food over for Maddie. Iron shirts. Talk Chim down from a roof or two. He does everything behind the grey filter.
The walk from the car to the confessional is quick. The church is completely empty.
When he makes the deal, he’s not completely sure what it is that he’s agreeing to. All he knows is there was a voice in the other side of the confession booth – and then it left – and then it came back. Different. Deeper, maybe, or just more room in the throat for echo. He had attributed it to the hollowness in his own chest.
The voice had spoken quietly. Not quiet the way everybody was speaking to him nowadays, concerned for his fragility, but low as if it was speaking directly into his ear. “You were looking for a sign.”
He knows it isn’t the priest, because the priest said he would give him some time, and he’s pretty sure priests aren’t supposed to lie. Still, whatever it is, he doesn’t want to leave the voice hanging, and so his own is steady when he replies, “Anything.”
“And what would you do?”
The steadiness fractures. He repeats, crackling, “Anything.”
There’s a hum, reverberates through the panel between the two, and he tilts his head back. Eyes squeeze shut, trying to force tears out like pus from a wound. Like if he can just get all of it out, something will start to heal. They won’t come, though. They haven’t at all yet.
“You’re not a man of the faith, are you?”
He shakes his head, hidden behind his screen. The website pulled up on his phone is dim, like it’s about to go off. They must take his silence as a no, for they continue.
“But your lost one – he is?”
“Was.” Buck corrects. Chokes. He’s recently become insistent on tenses. Denial is not the stage he’s stuck in.
“Is.” The voice corrects, with such authority he doesn’t have it in him to question it. He just drops his head, one weak nod. “Do you think of yourself as a strong-willed man, Evan?”
No. Absolutely not. Maybe at work he is – pushing and pushing and trying endlessly. You never give up. Athena had said that to him once. But he can’t think about Athena without thinking about all the things he’s not doing right now, and so he doesn’t. Instead, he thinks about how easily he caves. A kind word. A nudge. A thumb on his collarbone. He’ll do anything anybody wants. It doesn’t feel like strength.
He says as much out loud, simplifies it to a no.
The – whatever it is – calling it a voice feels wrong now. He never gave it his name. He swallows this thought. Whatever it is, it asks him, “Could you be? For what you lost?”
“I’m trying."
“Not for them. Not the people your lost left behind. For him. If it meant-“
“If it meant what?” The words snap out of him, more rude than he intended to be, and less rude than he wishes he could be.
“If it meant you could have him back.”
A low noise escapes him. It’s an incredibly cruel what-if. It isn’t like he hasn’t entertained it before. What he’d give up if it meant he could have him back. The jeep, easily. His house – loft, yes. Already did, for less. Eddie’s house, apart from where his heart beats beneath the floorboards, hasn’t ever been his to give away. Any and all of his worldly possessions, of course. Being a firefighter, his sense of self, it’d be more difficult, but he’d do it.
Not just things he already has, either, but things he could. He thinks of being a father – of what that might mean, now and in the future, when the closest thing to a chance he’d ever had had moved away, and moved back so much taller. He thinks of a baby, both his and not his, and thinks of Bobby never having grandchildren. He thinks of him holding them. He doesn’t think about it.
“Anything.”
“Okay.” The voice – the thing – it isn’t unkind. That’s probably what it is. It says okay and he swallows. He says it back. He doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to – but it doesn’t really matter, does it? The point isn’t what Buck knows, it’s what Buck wants.
Between the booths, there is quiet. An anticipatory quiet, each waiting for the other to speak first. Buck’s lips are parted, words stuck in his throat as he considers whether he wants to say anything at all. The voice doesn’t put him out of his misery, and the silence continues. Buck breathes.
“Now what?”
They hum, and the sound seems to emanate from Buck’s own chest. Rumbles, and rumbles, and seems to trickle into every part of his body before it fades.
“Now, you wait.”
Blue eyes blink with frustrated salt, and Buck tilts his head back far enough it hits the back of the box with a dull thud. “What am I waiting for?”
“Your next trial, Evan. The next thing that becomes all that you are. The next time that you want to make a trade.”
“And what then?”
Then, Evan.
And the words had sounded different, suddenly. Embedded.
Then, I will ask you again.