Work Text:
Los Angeles, a few years into the 118
Maddie stood by the drinks cooler longer than she needed to, letting the excuse of restocking ice cover the fact that she'd mostly stopped moving to watch her brother across the yard.
He had Christopher up on his shoulders, both of them laughing about something Maddie hadn't caught the start of, Buck's hands locked around the boy's ankles with the kind of unthinking, absolute steadiness that made other people's kids trust him instantly and made Maddie's chest do something complicated every single time she watched it happen. Eddie was a few feet off, half-supervising, half not bothering to, the specific relaxed posture of a father who'd stopped needing to hover the moment Buck was the one holding his son. Christopher shrieked with laughter about a water balloon that had apparently just detonated somewhere behind them, and Buck spun in a slow circle to give him a better view of the wreckage, narrating the whole thing in a ridiculous sports-announcer voice that had absolutely nothing to do with anything Maddie associated with the boy she'd raised.
Nobody at that cookout had ever called him anything but Buck. It had taken her a strange, quiet while to get used to that, back when she first landed in LA with nothing but a duffel bag and a decision she'd never once doubted, not for a single day since— hearing an entire houseful of people who loved her brother use a name that wasn't the one she'd murmured to a screaming infant on a hundred three-in-the-morning walks down a hallway, back when she was eight years old and he was hers before he was anyone else's. She'd adjusted faster than she expected to, mostly because it fit him here in a way Evan never fully had, not since he was small. Buck was easy. Buck blurted things out and got his feelings hurt too visibly and needed people in a way that read, to everyone in this yard, as an endearing, slightly exhausting personality trait rather than what Maddie privately knew it actually was — nine years of not being allowed to need anyone at all, finally let off a very long leash.
She was the only one at this cookout who could still call him Evan, even just in her own head, and she used the privilege sparingly, mostly for exactly this — standing off to one side with a bag of ice sweating through her fingers, watching her little brother spin a laughing eight-year-old in slow circles in Bobby Nash's backyard, and letting herself think, just this once, about the version of this afternoon that never got to exist.
She did the math without meaning to. She'd gotten good, over the years, at doing it without meaning to.
If 2018 had gone even slightly differently — if whatever had happened that year inside Red Squadron had broken a different way, or not broken at all, or broken so much worse that there'd been no reserves to force him into, just a folded flag and a phone call she still sometimes dreamed about getting — there would have been no year of silence to climb back out of at all. No call from Connor — a friend from MMA who'd joined the Navy himself not long after, who'd known Evan back before any of it, back when they were just two kids sparring badly in a gym that smelled like feet— showing up out of nowhere with nothing but an offer to just come out to LA and see what happened. No fire academy, no cap ceremony she stood front row for with her heart in her throat, no version of her brother standing in this yard at all.
Which meant no Eddie. No Christopher.
She watched Buck set the boy down, carefully, both hands doing the small automatic safety check nobody had ever taught him to do out loud — feet solid on the grass, one steadying hand still resting on a small shoulder half a second longer than strictly necessary — and thought about how completely, structurally impossible this exact configuration of people would have been in almost any other version of the last decade. Christopher wouldn't be missing an uncle who'd never existed to lose. Eddie would have some other work friend, maybe, somebody else who covered his shifts and showed up to his kid's appointments, some version of found family that didn't happen to be occupied by a discharged Tier One operator working through a decade of silence one Fourth of July at a time. It wouldn't have been sad, exactly, in that other version. It just wouldn't have been anything. There'd have been no absence-shaped hole in it at all, because there'd have been no reason for one.
That was the part that always got her, standing at coolers, watching from doorways, thinking about Evan while everyone around her only ever thought about Buck. Not that he could have died — she'd made an uneasy peace with that possibility years ago, the way you had to, loving someone who used to do what he used to do. It was that he could have lived, in some other configuration, and simply never ended up here. Never ended up necessary to a specific eight-year-old boy who currently could not stop talking about the water balloon. The math had a hundred branches, and in most of them, whatever version of Evan Buckley survived past 2018 never crossed paths with a soldier's kid in Los Angeles at all.
"You're staring," Athena said, appearing at her elbow with the easy, unbothered directness Maddie had come to genuinely love her for. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah." Maddie picked the ice bag back up, mostly to have something to do with her hands. "Just — watching him with Chris. He's good with him."
"He's good with everybody's kids," Athena said, not quite catching the specific weight under the sentence, because there was no reason she should. "Man's basically a golden retriever who learned CPR."
Maddie laughed, because it was funny, and because it was also, in its own accidental way, exactly right — the golden retriever part had always been true, long before any of the rest of it, back when he was seven and writing her letters about a stray cat he was secretly feeding behind an equipment shed. It was the part underneath the golden retriever that nobody at this cookout had any reason to know about, the part that had learned, at nineteen, exactly how much weight a body could carry before it broke, and had apparently decided, somewhere in the long silent stretch after the reserves, to spend the rest of it carrying an entirely different kind of weight instead. A kid on his shoulders. A schedule built around somebody else's appointments. A best friend's son who called him Bucky before he could pronounce Buck properly and had never once, in years, gotten a correction for it.
Across the yard, Christopher was tugging on Buck's sleeve, already negotiating for a second round on the shoulders, and Buck was making a show of considering it, hand on his chin, milking the moment the way he milked every moment with that kid, and Eddie was laughing at both of them from his lawn chair with a beer he wasn't drinking fast enough, and none of it — not one second of it — carried any visible weight at all. That was the whole design of it, Maddie understood, watching. That was what the years of training and the years of legend-building and the whole quiet architecture of Evan Buckley's cover story had actually been for, in the end, whether the Navy had meant it this way or not: so that a boy who'd once carried more than his share of everything could stand in a backyard on the Fourth of July carrying a laughing kid on his shoulders instead, and have it look, to every single person watching except her, like the easiest thing in the world.
She didn't call him Evan out loud. She never did, here. But she watched him swing Christopher back up with a grunt of exaggerated effort that made the boy shriek all over again, watched Eddie shake his head fondly at both of them, watched Bobby flip something on the grill without once glancing over because there was nothing about this scene that needed watching, and thought, privately, the way she always let herself think it exactly once a year and no more.
Then she picked up her ice, and went to go make sure Hen hadn't run out of lemonade, and let the rest of the afternoon just be an afternoon.