Chapter Text
His coffee had gone cold again.
He wrapped both hands around the mug anyway, more out of habit than hope, and stared at the laptop screen in front of him.
The Continuum dashboard was simple. Clean. That was one of the things he'd liked about it when he first found the service two years ago, buried in a Reddit thread about estate planning for people in high-risk occupations. No dark interfaces, no skull-and-crossbones aesthetics, no clinical language about death and beneficiaries. Just a white screen, a small logo — a continuous line that looped back into itself, elegant and unbroken — and a single prompt:
Hello, Buck. Please confirm you're here.
He typed his passphrase. Hit enter. The screen refreshed.
Thank you. Your next check-in window opens in 7 days.
That was it. Thirty seconds, once a week. The smallest possible proof of life.
Buck closed the laptop and finally took a sip of his cold coffee.
He'd tried to explain it to himself, once, why he'd set it up. Not to anyone else — no one knew about Continuum or that he used it. And that was intentional. But to himself, alone in his apartment, trying to understand the specific shape of the thing he was afraid of. What had led him to this...logging in once a week to confirm to the universe that he was still alive?
It wasn't death. He'd made his peace with death, or something close to it, after the ladder truck. After the tsunami. After the lightning bolt that had stopped his heart for a moment that felt both eternal and instantaneous. After the blood clot that had moved through his body like a slow and patient assassin.
He was thirty-two years old and he had already run out of fingers to count his near-misses. That was just the job. You signed up knowing that. You suited up every shift understanding that any given call could be the one, and you went anyway, because the alternative— a life where you didn't go, where you let someone else run into the building— was worse than the risk. Buck had known that about himself since before he could articulate it. Danger wasn't something he sought. He was just constitutionally unable to look the other way.
It wasn't death he was afraid of. It was the gap.
The gap between when something happened to him and when the people he loved would find out. The gap between the last normal moment— him on a call, doing his job, completely fine— and the next moment, which might not be fine at all.
And in that gap was everything. Not what he hadn't done with his own life— he'd made his peace with who he was, mostly, the long and winding way. But what the people he loved most might never know if the gap swallowed him before he had a chance to say it. All the feelings he hadn't shared yet, living in that gap forever if he didn't do something about them.
So that was the thing that kept him up sometimes. Not the dying. The leaving without them knowing. The leaving without saying all the things he would say if he were braver.
He thought about Bobby, who had given him structure and a father's quiet steadiness without ever making a production of it. About Athena, who had seen through every deflection Buck had ever tried and chose to stay anyway. About Hen and Chimney, who had accumulated years of his company and somehow, inexplicably, seemed glad they had. About Maddie, complicated and beloved in ways that still ached when he pressed on them too long. About his parents, who had given him everything material and nothing essential— who had handed him money when he needed to be held, and handed him money again when he needed to be seen, and handed him money every time love would have been the right answer. He had spent years quietly converting those dollars into something that actually felt like love. Not saving it for himself. Routing it toward people who deserved it.
And then he thought about Eddie. And Chris.
Even a hint of anything he felt for Eddie or Chris falling into the gap… was unimaginable to Buck. They deserved to feel loved forever.
To be fair, Buck had never had trouble expressing love. That wasn't the problem. He was fluent in every available love language: words, actions, showing up uninvited at exactly the right moment, remembering the small things no one thought he'd noticed, making arrangements quietly and never asking for acknowledgment. He said it out loud. He said it quietly. He said it with words and with touch. He cooked. He gave things. He built things.
That was his brand. He was the openly emotive guy; unafraid of his feelings or expressing them. Showing the world that real men do cry, and it’s okay.
But for all of that— for all the loud, open, unashamed ways Buck had learned to love and express that love— there was a threshold he never quite crossed. Exposing the full breadth and width of his feelings. The unfiltered version, that didn't get quietly trimmed somewhere between feeling it and saying it… made a little smaller right at the moment it threatened to become too heavy to hand to someone else.
He always pulled back. A joke, a pivot, something that kept the complete weight of it just out of reach. And the people who knew him best knew. He was almost certain of it. Eddie knew. Bobby knew. They never said anything... but Buck could feel it sometimes, the way they waited after he spoke, like they were listening for the rest of his sentence.
He also saw something in their eyes. He desperately wanted to believe what he saw was encouragement. He wanted to believe they wanted to hear the rest of his feelings. But that hurt little boy, who grew up in a house learning he didn’t deserve love, was always there to remind him that what he was seeing in their eyes wasn't that they wanted more… It was that they wanted less. And that was easier to believe.
He'd spent years trying to find that version of himself- the one who could stand fully in his feelings and let them out, unedited. But the words and the feelings and the want just stayed jumbled up inside him, unable to escape.
Turned out, it lived on the other side of his own worst fear.
He'd thought about all these pieces for a long time before he found Continuum. He'd thought about a lawyer, but lawyers felt cold, transactional, like something you did for assets and property lines. He'd thought about scheduled emails, but that felt like a party trick — one that might misfire, might send too early, might fail to send at all. He wanted something in between. Something with real accountability built into it, real human oversight... but that also felt personal. Something that felt like him.
Continuum was described, on its website, as a continuity-of-care concierge service for people in high-risk professions. First responders, military personnel, offshore workers, journalists in conflict zones. The premise was simple: you checked in on a schedule you defined. If you missed your window, the service sent an alert — a text, direct to him, no one else. If he didn't respond within 48 hours, a second alert followed. Twelve hours after that, a third. And if that one went unanswered, the calls began: automated attempts to reach him directly, his number cycling through until the silence became undeniable. Three escalating chances to say I'm here, I'm fine, this isn't the moment — and if all of them closed without a response, Continuum activated whatever instructions he'd left in his account.
Letters. Legal notifications. Removing nightstand contraband. Access codes. Shredding arrangements. Whatever you needed to happen, wherever and whenever you needed it to happen. Deliveries with care and discretion to the people who needed to receive them.
He had noted, the first time he'd read about the escalating pings, the particular dark irony of it: the system he'd found to solve his fear of the gap was itself just a gap. A shrinking one. Forty-eight hours becoming twelve becoming eight — a window of opportunity closing, tighter and tighter, until it was either answered or it wasn't. Fighting a gap with a gap. He'd laughed at that, alone in his apartment at two in the morning, which probably said something about him that he didn't want to examine too closely.
That robust and thoughtful system was what had sold him though. It meant accidental triggering was almost impossible. It meant if he lost his phone on a camping trip or worked a brutal back-to-back stretch with no cell service, his people wouldn't be blindsided by a letter from an alive dead man. Three windows. Three missed silences, each one tighter than the last. That was the threshold. That was the line between I haven't checked in and something has happened.
Buck’s Continuum account held seven letters.
A letter didn't have his problem of undersharing. A letter couldn't feel the other person tense, couldn't read the room either correctly or incorrectly. Couldn't lose its nerve. It just said what he felt. What he meant fully, start to finish, with nothing held back.
He'd written them slowly, over the course of a year, and revised them more times than he could count. He never once thought of them as goodbye letters — that felt artificially sad, too focused on his absence, and that wasn't the point.
They were more like everything he'd been wanting to say…everything he meant to say if he could have stood fully in his truth… The version of himself that existed when he had no reason to perform or deflect or make a joke to cut the tension.
Some of them came with other things enclosed — arrangements he'd made quietly, over years, that had never found the right moment to come up in conversation. That was fine. He hadn't needed credit for any of it. He'd just needed to know it was done.
Bobby's letter thanked him for being the first person who had ever made Buck feel like he deserved to take up space. Not because Bobby had ever said it in so many words, but because Bobby showed it — in the way he pushed back when Buck was reckless, in the way he'd stood between Buck and consequences when Buck couldn't protect himself, in the way he looked at him sometimes across a dinner table like he was already family whether or not anyone had said it out loud yet. Bobby's letter also came with paperwork. A fund, already established, already funded, earmarked for his kids' education. Bobby would probably argue about it. Buck had written, in the letter, that he wasn't allowed to. He imagined Bobby’s smile upon reading that Buck included that admonition.
Athena's letter was shorter and funnier and she was going to roll her eyes at it, which was fine, because he'd written it that way on purpose. But underneath the jokes was the real thing: she had terrified him and seen through him from day one, and becoming someone Athena Grant respected was one of the things he was most quietly proud of in his life.
For Hen and Chimney he'd written a joint letter, because trying to separate what he wanted to say to each of them felt artificial. They were the daily texture of his life. The people he laughed with and complained to about inconsequential things. They knew him in the sideways, accumulated way that came from thousands of hours together in the small domestic rhythms of a firehouse — the kind of knowing that didn't require big declarations or major moments, just time. He loved them the way you love something that has quietly become essential to your daily life without you ever deciding it would. Hen had something else addressed to her too — tuition, already paid, for the next chapter of school she'd been quietly putting off because of the cost. Time to finally become a great doctor, Henrietta. He hoped she'd be annoyed. He hoped she'd cry first. He knew Karen would.
Maddie's letter was the hardest one. He'd rewritten it ten times and it still wasn't entirely right, and maybe it never would be. How do you write, with love, to someone who was your whole world and also the person who kept secrets that rewrote your history? He'd gotten there, eventually. Not to anger — Buck had worked through enough of that. But to something more honest than anger. Grief. Gratitude. The specific, complicated love you have for someone who was both your lifeline- lifting you up… and your anchor- holding you down. Sometimes at the same time.
His parents' letter was the one he was calmest about. He'd spent most of his life trying to earn something from Margaret and Philip Buckley that they simply did not have the capacity to give. He wasn't angry anymore. He'd moved past angry into something quieter: a clear-eyed sorrow, for them and for the boy he'd been. The letter said what it needed to say. It said it without cruelty and without apology. It said: I needed more than you knew how to give, and I spent a long time thinking that was my fault, and I know now that it wasn't.
And then there were the last two letters.
The ones that had taken him the longest. The ones he'd stared at for entire evenings without writing a single word, because the words felt too important to get wrong… and too large to fit in any reasonable letter. And yet he'd written them anyway, because leaving those two people in the dark, in the gap forever, was unthinkable.
Eddie's letter.
And Christopher's letter.
He didn't let himself think too long about that tonight. He did what he sat down to do; he had checked in…and went down a few short wikipedia holes.
He stood up, rinsed his mug in the sink, and looked out the window at the ordinary Los Angeles evening. Somewhere across the city, Eddie and Chris were probably finishing dinner… or watching something on TV… or arguing wryly about homework, with Christopher winning. Somewhere Bobby and Athena's house smelled like something delicious cooked with love. Somewhere Hen was laughing so hard at her own joke she couldn't finish it, and Chimney was doing that thing where he pretended to be annoyed but was clearly delighted.
The people he loved were all just out there, living their lives, completely unaware that somewhere in the quiet digital infrastructure of a company called Continuum, Evan “Buck” Buckley had made absolutely certain that they would always, one way or another, know exactly how he felt about them.
He thought: That's enough.
He thought: They'll never need to read those letters.
He thought: Next check-in, seven days.
He didn't think about the call that would come just a few days later, on a clear Tuesday morning when the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at. He didn't think about the intersection. He didn't think about the sound metal makes when it meets metal in a fraction of a second that rearranges everything.
He turned off the kitchen light and headed to the couch to finish his book. He always felt strangely lighter for having checked in.
Everything that mattered had been said. Or, at least, captured to be said.
Everything important was handled.
He drifted off when reading without worrying about the gap.
END OF CHAPTER